Cowboy to the Core

by Joanna Wayne

  What looked to have been a back stoop had been closed in. A room the size of a closet. Dani’s pulse raced, though she knew none of the shops in that block were deserted. They’d checked them too carefully earlier today.

  A faded sign hung above the back door. The only letters still legible spelled out CERAM. The last letters were missing.

  “Ceramics,” Dani said out loud. “An abandoned ceramic shop would explain the pieces of broken pottery on the floor around Ella in my vision.”

  “Only that shop isn’t abandoned.”

  “The back room could be.” She walked over and peered in the window, but every inch of it had been covered in duct tape.

  Dani broke into a cold sweat, and she felt as if someone were tightening a vise around her temples. “Ella’s in this building, Marcus. I’m not having a vision, but I sense her presence. I know she’s in there.”

  “Let’s walk around front,” Marcus said, “and just see if it’s still a ceramic shop. I don’t remember one in this spot, but we’ve covered a lot of ground today.”

  They did as he suggested. The building was now an art shop, the windows filled with framed paintings. A sign in the front window proclaimed they’d all been done by local artists. A sign on the front door said closed on Tuesday. It wasn’t abandoned, but it had been closed all day today.

  “Art shop or not, I know she’s in that back room,” Dani insisted. “We have to call the police.”

  “The authorities are not going to break into a privately owned shop on nothing more than what you claim to sense, Dani. There will be lots of questions, and if they buy into your theory at all, they’ll call the shop owners and have them come down and unlock the building.”

  “That could take hours. We can’t wait that long.”

  “I’m sure I can jimmy the back door open,” Marcus said, “but first I’ll have to disconnect the alarm system. I’m sure they have one.”

  “You know how to do that?”

  “I’m a man of many talents.” They returned to the alley, and he went to work, making her stay out of the open, where he could keep his eye on her.

  The wind picked up. The cat yelped and the back door of the stoop blew open and slammed shut.

  “It’s not even locked,” Dani said, rushing toward it.

  Marcus grabbed her and held her back. “Me first.”

  She stayed behind him as he stepped inside. The floor creaked beneath his feet as he aimed the bright beam of his card-size flashlight into the dingy room.

  All she saw at first was a row of empty shelves that blocked her view of the left back quadrant of the room. A large, rusty kiln took up most of the front quadrant. She didn’t recognize the kiln or the shelves from the vision, but she still had this overwhelming sense of Ella’s presence.

  “Ella.” Dani’s voice echoed around them, but there was no answer to her call.

  The beam of light panned over the leftover food. At least a dozen roaches scattered and disappeared beneath the door that appeared to lead to the main shop. A maroon, blood-soaked robe lay in a heap beneath the taped window. The head of a ceramic frog peeked from beneath its edge.

  “This is it,” she whispered. “This is the room from my vision.”

  Marcus rounded the empty shelves and directed the light into the hidden corner. A few pieces of broken pottery edged the baseboard. There was nothing else.

  They’d found the right room, but Ella wasn’t here now. Dani shrank against the wall, bitter disappointment and fatigue settling deep inside her.

  “It galls me to think we walked right by this spot earlier today,” Marcus said. “I don’t know how we missed it. She must have crept in here after closing last evening, spent the night, then stayed through the day.”

  “I was supposed to find her. It took me too long.”

  Marcus pulled her limp body into his arms. “Don’t even think of blaming yourself for this. You had no part in getting Ella into this mess, but you’ve given up three days of your life so far to get her out of it.”

  Marcus tried the door that led to the shop. It was locked tight. “The alarm probably only goes off if that door is opened.”

  Dani walked over and stooped beside the robe. “Sometime in the few hours since the vision, Ella must have started bleeding more and realized she had to get to a hospital. I know there wasn’t this much blood on the robe when I saw it in the vision.”

  Dani jumped back as a spider crawled from the folds of the fleece. “She had to get from the car to here and had to buy food. I just can’t imagine that she walked the streets in the daylight in this robe and no one noticed her.”

  “I don’t think she did.” Marcus held up a plastic bag he’d retrieved from behind the shelves. “Macy’s. She must have stuffed the robe in the same bag where she found the jeans and sweater. She probably thought leaving the robe in the stolen car would be a dead giveaway.”

  “Let’s check the local hospitals.”

  “On our way back to the Double M,” Marcus said. “It’s three in the morning. You can’t keep going without rest. You’ll collapse. If the unearthly powers that be wanted you to find Ella they should have led you here sooner.”

  “You said you never give up.”

  “I don’t. Tomorrow’s another day, and your collapsing from exhaustion won’t help anyone.”

  She knew he was right, and Ella had her business card. All she had to do was call.

  Reaching that conclusion affected Dani like a drug. Her eyes became instantly heavy, and her muscles felt as if they were dissolving. Even the anticipation of crawling into bed next to Marcus didn’t send any titillating signals to her brain.

  But still she loved the thought of falling asleep in his strong, protective arms.

  MARCUS CAUGHT THREE HOURS of restless sleep before waking to Dani’s rhythmic breathing, matched by his own gentle stirrings of desire. Her head was on his shoulder, her silky hair tickling his chin. One bare shapely leg was thrown over his, her knee in a very arousing spot.

  She squirmed in her sleep and the knee inched higher. He glanced down and caught a glimpse of her right breast, the nipple bright pink against his tanned, hairy chest. He swallowed a groan at the intensity of his hunger for her.

  His cell phone vibrated along the surface of his bedside table and snapped him to attention. He swung his free arm and grabbed the phone to silence the clamor. Extricating his other arm and his leg without waking Dani took a bit more skill.

  She squirmed again and rearranged her gorgeous body. Regretfully, he covered her with the sheet and padded from the room to take the call.

  “Good morning, Cutter. Don’t you folks down at the main house ever sleep?”

  “We’re on ranching hours. And we weren’t up all night.”

  “We were.”

  “I know. I heard you drive by near sunup. How did the hunt for Ella Somerville go?”

  “It didn’t.” Marcus filled him in on the details, leaving nothing out, including the fact that as of 4:00 a.m. this morning, Ella had not checked into any hospitals in The Woodlands or Spring areas.

  “What do you make of the man showing up at the convenience store looking for the woman in the snapshot?”

  The woman in the snapshot. Not Ella. Marcus knew exactly what his partner was thinking because he’d considered the same possibility. “It adds a new twist.”

  “But you don’t think it’s a picture of Dani?”

  “She insists it isn’t,” Marcus said.

  “Interesting, though, that Ella and Dani look so much alike that even you would have taken the photo to be Dani. You don’t usually get that close a resemblance without some shared DNA. If not twins, they could be half sisters. Lots of men spread their seed around, sometimes without knowing themselves that they’ve sired a child.”

  “Dani’s never mentioned a father or a mother for that matter.”

  “But the possibility of her and Ella being related has surely crossed your mind, too?”

  “Not
until I saw the snapshot,” Marcus said honestly.

  “Birth records are easy to check these days. If you don’t have time to run an Internet search, Eduardo can handle it.”

  Yeah. Marcus knew that, too. He just hated to throw more curves at Dani right now if they weren’t related to the mystery at hand. The problem was they might well be.

  “I’ll keep Eduardo in mind.”

  “Regardless of who’s in the photo, I’m sure you’ve considered that the mystery man might have stabbed Ella because he mistook her for Dani,” Cutter mused.

  “Every second since I saw the photo. It raises the stakes in the game considerably if Dani is the target victim.”

  “Raises the stakes because she’s the one you’ve been paid to protect?”

  “Sure. What else?”

  “Get off it, Marcus. You’re talking to me, remember. Cutter Martin, the guy who knows you better than you know yourself. You’re falling for Dani and you know it. Not that I can lecture you about that with a clear conscience. I did the same with Linney. Just be careful. Keep the odds in your favor. Remember, if you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.”

  “Yeah, buddy. I’ll stay on top of things. Now how about you? How’d things go with Homeland Security?”

  “I’m meeting with them again today, but it looks like a done deal. They need our expertise and ability to go undercover into situations they can’t. And I heard from Hawk again. Looks like he’ll be joining up with us, maybe operating a field office. I’ll fill you in on everything when we can sit down together and talk.”

  “Works for me.”

  The temptation to crawl back in bed with Dani was almost overpowering. But once he was there, he’d never be satisfied to let her sleep, and she needed her rest. The visions took a physical as well as emotional toll on her, and he doubted they were through with her yet.

  Instead he made a pot of coffee, opened his laptop and logged onto the Internet. Birth records were indeed easy to trace. He was deep into the research an hour later when Dani walked into the kitchen wearing nothing but one of his T-shirts.

  His libido kicked in. The facts he’d discovered tamped them back down. He walked over, kissed her good morning and poured her a cup of coffee.

  “Any news?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but you might want to sit down before I lay it on you.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dani stared at the computer printout Marcus had dropped on the table near her coffee cup. She took a long sip of the brew before tackling this new bit of news. Whatever it was, she had a feeling it wasn’t good.

  A birth certificate.

  Mother’s Name: Janice Marie Alano

  Father’s Name: None provided

  Her mother. Her lack of a father. She stopped reading. She’d seen this all before, had a copy in her personal records at home. “Why would you look up my birth certificate?”

  Marcus pulled a chair next to hers and straddled it. “Keep reading.”

  He’d highlighted another entry. She scanned it quickly.

  Again it was her mother’s name. No father. Same date from thirty-three years ago. Live birth of a female. Only this time there was the notation that the baby was unnamed. “I don’t get it.”

  “Check the time of birth.”

  She did. Four minutes later for the unnamed infant than was on her certificate. Same Minden, Louisiana, hospital. Same attending physician.

  “There must be a mistake. It looks as if my mother gave birth to two babies that night.”

  Marcus waited without saying a word while the truth pushed its way past the emotional hurdles she’d erected. Two births. Twins. One was Dani, the other unnamed. Baby no-name.

  She swallowed hard. She’d taken her grandmother’s statement for the ramblings of senility. But when Dani had started talking about someone who looked just like her, Grams had merely let her mind return to the same bygone years where she spent so much time these days.

  “If this is accurate, then the second baby must have died right away,” Dani said, trying to get a handle on this. “She could have been born sickly. That’s likely why they didn’t name her.”

  “But no one ever mentioned that to you?”

  “No. Not once.” An odd fact to keep secret. She took another sip of the coffee and toyed with the mug handle while her mind grappled with the new information. Finally, it dawned on her where Marcus was going with this.

  “You think Ella could be my twin sister, don’t you? That’s why you looked up all of this.”

  “I think it’s a possibility,” Marcus said. “Ella could have been given up for adoption right after she was born. If your parents had chosen to keep it secret, you’d have had no way of knowing you were a twin.”

  She shook her head. “Why give up one baby and keep the other? If you don’t want children, give them both up.”

  “Maybe they were having a hard time financially and didn’t think they could afford to raise two children.”

  “There wasn’t a they. My father’s name isn’t listed because he was never in the picture. When I asked about him as a child, I was told he was dead. Later, Grams told me my mother had never been sure who he was. Apparently she was big into one-night stands.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be, at least not for that. I’ve long since quit caring.”

  “If your mother was alone, she may not have felt capable of caring for two babies.”

  “She wasn’t alone. We lived with Grams until…”

  No, she wasn’t going there with Marcus. She was vulnerable enough as it was. And now she had all of this to deal with. Why would Marcus even bother to research this unless he thought their being twins had something to do with the attack on Ella?

  “Ella didn’t draw me into this, Marcus. She never wanted my help. I came charging into this on my own.”

  “You didn’t exactly charge in on your own,” he reminded her. “You were pulled in by the visions.”

  Marcus’s grasp on this was better than her own right now. The visions had linked them together. The psychic connection with Ella made no sense before. But if they were related, if Ella was her twin…

  Oh, God. Ella could actually be her twin sister. She should be ecstatic—or angry at the deception, or at least disconcerted. The truth was she felt numb, as if she were slipping into a state of shock.

  Marcus slid a hand over hers. “Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned this at all.”

  “Why did you? You must have good reason for giving up much-needed sleep to dredge up my past this way.” She pulled away from him as a wave of frustration took hold. “You still don’t fully trust me, do you?”

  “Trust has nothing to do with this. I just don’t like the odds of trying to protect you when I don’t have a handle on all the facts.”

  “The facts are that Kevin Flanders wants Ella Somerville dead. Whether I’m her long-lost twin sister or the Queen of England, it won’t change that.”

  He stood and threw his arms in the air as if he were ready to throw in the towel and wash his hands of her altogether. She’d known that was inevitable. She just hadn’t expected it quite this soon. She stood to go back to the bedroom to dress.

  He grabbed her arm and tugged her to a stop. “Your vision two nights ago showed you in danger, Dani. You were the one in that green dress. You were the one being attacked. And now I find that some guy has been traveling around this part of Texas searching for a woman who looks just like you.”

  “It’s not me in the photo. I told you that.”

  “And just how is he supposed to know the difference when I couldn’t even tell it wasn’t you? We don’t know why he’s so eager to find Ella or who else might be searching for her. She could have witnessed a crime or stolen drug money from a dealer or blackmailed some politician. The man who’s looking for her could be a paid assassin.”

  “So how nice of you to find out that I’m her twin.”

  His vo
ice lowered, became gruff and edgy. “I need facts to keep you safe, Dani. I need to know what the hell I’m up against and if that means digging up your past, so be it. I’ll dig up the remains of Abraham Lincoln if that’s what it takes.”

  Emotion overtook her. She was fighting for Ella’s life. Marcus was, too, but his real fears were for her. Tears burned the back of her eyes, and she stood and stepped into his arms.

  “I’m sorry, Marcus.”

  He rocked her to him. “I should have found a better way to tell you this or not told you at all until things were back to normal.”

  “No, I needed to know. It explains so much.”

  She started to pull away. “I should get dressed.”

  His hold on her tightened. “Not yet. Let’s go back to bed, Dani. Not to make love, not unless you want to. I need to lie beside you and hold you in my arms for a few precious minutes. Then we’ll discuss our next move.”

  “If we go back to bed together, you know what our next move will be.”

  He nuzzled his lips against the curve of her neck. “Would that be so bad?”

  “No, it wouldn’t be bad at all.”

  The distinctive sound of an approaching car interrupted the moment. “Even on a ranch you can’t get any privacy,” Marcus complained as he walked to the window, opened the blinds and looked out. “It’s the deputies who questioned you the other night.”

  “Ted and Greg. I hope they’ve come to tell us Kevin’s been arrested.”

  “Unless they’ve discovered some concrete evidence against him, they couldn’t keep him over twenty-four hours anyway.”

  “That’s absurd. He’s a prime suspect.”

  “It’s called innocent until proven guilty.”

  “That’s a lousy way to run a sheriff’s department.” Dani refilled her mug with the hot brew. “I’ll be back to hear what they have to say as soon as I throw some clothes on.”

  “There goes that fantasy.”

  A fantasy probably was the very best word to describe their relationship since it had the lasting power of a snowball in south Texas.

  Her mind went back to the morning’s discovery. If by some wild chance Ella was her twin, it would explain why the visions had connected them when Ella was in danger. It would also explain the instant bond she’d felt with her, the overwhelming sense that they’d met before.