Cowboy to the Core

by Joanna Wayne

  He cursed and grabbed himself as he stumbled backward. She shoved past him and made a run for it, grabbing her skirt and holding it up to keep from tripping as she raced for the front door. She’d almost reached it when he grabbed her from behind and slung her against the wall. Something cracked and she slid to the floor, dissolving into a puddle of green velvet.

  The dagger was poised and ready to strike.

  I didn’t give up, Marcus. I just lost the war.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Marcus made the turn into the camping area on two wheels. This was all his fault, and if anything happened to Dani, he’d never forgive himself. He’d sensed the danger to her from the very beginning. He wasn’t a psychic, but he did have a sixth sense about that.

  The jagged pieces of the puzzle had never really fit. The note at the festival. The snapshot left at the convenience store. Even Dani’s trance had all pointed to the fact that she was in jeopardy.

  He’d let his emotions file the edges from his wary foreboding and keen sense of impending peril. He’d left the way clear for her to walk directly into the path of a maniac.

  He’d been trying to reach her by phone ever since he grabbed Cutter’s gun and rushed out of the main house. He wasn’t alarmed that she hadn’t taken his call. He half expected that she’d avoid talking to him.

  He’d prayed she’d read his text message: Don’t go to Ella’s trailer. It’s a trap!

  He slammed on the breaks and skidded to a stop, inches from Dani’s car. There was no other car around. Maybe she was inside by herself, safe, looking for the insurance papers she’d believe the hospital had asked for.

  Maybe not.

  Adrenaline pumping, he pulled his gun and crashed though the door. The wall in front of him was streaked with blood. Fresh blood, still wet and dripping. Whatever had happened in this room had occurred only moments before he arrived.

  The trailer was silent, but that didn’t mean that Ethan Marks wasn’t here. Marcus’s fighting instincts were in full operational mode, his senses razor sharp.

  Finger on the trigger, he skulked toward the back of the camper with his back to the wall. Drops of fresh blood lined the hallway floor. A woman’s shoe, maybe Dani’s, lay in haphazard fashion as if it had been kicked off or knocked from her foot. The matching shoe was approximately two feet away, near the bedroom at the end of the short hall.

  A slender, jagged scratch, approximately four feet long and waist high, ran along the opposite wall. His mind took all that in automatically in the few split seconds it took him to reach the closed door.

  “Stay back. It’s a trap.”

  Dani’s voice. Ella had surmised this right. Her maniac husband had mistaken Dani for her.

  Marcus surveyed his options. Open the door to a trap or risk the man’s murdering Dani while he tried to figure a new plan. Seconds mattered.

  He shoved the door open and went in low, tackling the bastard at the knees and sending him sprawling across the floor and into the closet door. The man slashed at him with a dagger as he went down. Marcus dodged the blow and the point of the blade just grazed his shoulder.

  The man backed away, but instead of coming after Marcus again, he thrust the blade beneath Dani’s chin, inches from her jugular.

  “Do you think your lover will still want you when your head is rolling across the floor, Helena?”

  The lowdown, rotten, murderous bastard. “Kill her, Ethan Marks, and you’ll never walk away from here alive.”

  “Do you think I care? Do you think I want to live without Helena?”

  “You care, Ethan. It was never about me. It was always about you and your possessions. I’m not one of those anymore.”

  Marcus was stunned by the accusations flowing from Dani’s mouth even with the blade at her throat. She wasn’t Helena, had never been Ethan’s wife. What the hell was she doing?

  “Look at Marcus, Ethan. He’s my real lover. He’s had me in and out of this green dress. He’s touched me all the places you used to touch me, and I enjoyed it much more. I’ve made love to him in ways I never made love to you.”

  Panic swelled in Marcus’s chest. “She’s not Helena. She’s not your wife. She’s not my lover.”

  “He’s lying, Ethan.”

  “Shut up, Helena,” Ethan ordered.

  “No, I won’t shut up. You used to order me around, but not anymore. Look at Marcus, Ethan. See what a real man looks like.”

  Ethan yanked the dagger from her throat and held it high above her head, ready to plunge it deep into her chest. Marcus fired twice, both bullets hitting their mark. The dagger fell from the man’s bloody fingers, and the blade impaled his right foot to the floor.

  He screamed in agony.

  The front door burst open, and Cutter came running down the hall. Marcus crossed the crowded room in an instant and pulled Dani into his arms. Nothing in his life had ever felt so good.

  “Are you all right?”

  “A little bloody and battered. Nothing serious. How did you know Ethan was here?”

  “A long story. You have Ella to thank.”

  “If you hadn’t shown up when you did, I’d be dead.”

  “I thought you were going to be anyway when you started channeling Helena.”

  “I wasn’t channeling. I just trusted the vision and those special ops skills of yours.”

  “The vision that left you dead?”

  “By a dagger in the heart, not a slashed throat. I knew when he tried to stab me you’d shoot him and it would all be over. Well, I didn’t know it, but I was sure counting on it working on that way.”

  He held her against him. “God bless the visions.”

  “I love you, Marcus.”

  He couldn’t believe his ears.

  “You guys really know how to wreck a trailer,” Cutter said. “But I’d say a dagger beats handcuffs for confining criminals, hands down.”

  “You should call for an ambulance for him,” Dani said.

  “I’ll leave that up to the sheriff. He should be walking through the front door just about…now.”

  The sheriff entered on cue. Cutter explained the little he knew of the situation to him, basically what he’d been told by Linney as he’d rushed from the house a few minutes behind Marcus.

  Marcus went back to the business at hand. He nudged a thumb under Dani’s chin and tilted it up so that he could look into her eyes. “What did you say a minute ago?”

  “About the ambulance?”

  “A sentence before that.”

  “I love you. I just thought you should know in case you’re still game to give us a chance.”

  His heart swelled to the size of a watermelon. “Smart move on your part. With your penchant for trouble, you could go broke if you had to hire me every time you needed my help.”

  “I don’t recall firing you yet. So take me home, cowboy, and show me what else you’ve got in your special ops bag of tricks.”

  He grinned from the inside out. “Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”

  Epilogue

  Two months later

  Dani adjusted her sun visor as the road curved to the west. It was three o’clock on a warm, sunny afternoon in mid-December. Marcus had insisted they go for a ride after they’d finished with Grams’s birthday celebration at the nursing home, but he’d been unusually silent for most of it.

  She’d tried to make conversation several times but gotten nowhere. Whatever was on his mind, he clearly wasn’t ready to talk about it.

  “Thanks for helping with the party,” she said, giving communication another chance.

  “All I did was dish up the chocolate mint ice cream.”

  “And charm every female in the place from ages twelve to a hundred, especially Grams.”

  “She was definitely in good spirits for a woman turning ninety-six.”

  “And has been ever since she was reunited with her long-lost no-name granddaughter,” Dani reflected. “It makes me wonder how much psychic knowledge she
had about Helena through the years.”

  “Hopefully enough to know Helena had a great childhood and graduated from Tulane at the top of her class. That is what Helena said, isn’t it?”

  “Right, a great life until the car wreck where both her adoptive parents were killed and she ended up in a lengthy fight for her life. That accident correlates with Grams’s first stroke. I think the two must be related.”

  “But the stroke left your grandmother too mentally and physically disabled to go to Helena. That makes sense,” Marcus admitted. “How long did you say Helena was in the coma?”

  “Almost six months, long enough to go through every penny of her inheritance, at least that was what Ethan had her believe. It turns out even that wasn’t true.”

  “Really? I haven’t heard this.”

  “A new development that’s come out in the prosecutor’s investigation. Ethan was not only a psychopath but a crooked attorney who hooked up with Helena when she was at her most vulnerable, swindled her out of over a million dollars and then lured her into marriage so she wouldn’t figure it all out.”

  “Maybe he loved her in his own sick way,” Marcus said.

  “Extremely sick, and I don’t think it classifies as love.”

  “Guess you’re right.” Marcus made another turn, this one heading south through beautiful hill country ranchland. “I’m just thankful it all turned out the way it did.”

  “More thanks to you. I’m alive and have a twin sister who I already love. She’s moving into her own apartment next week. It’s only a few blocks from the house, but I know I’ll miss her terribly.”

  Marcus tugged his Stetson a bit lower on his forehead. “Yeah. Missing someone can be tough.”

  The comment served to dismiss the topic. Marcus grew quiet again, and a tense uneasiness settled between them. It was the first weekend they’d had together in three weeks. She’d missed him so much she could barely stand it, and now that he was here, he was closing her out.

  Finally she could stand it no longer. “If something is wrong, Marcus, just say it.”

  “Okay. Give me another minute or two.”

  More silence to grate along her nerves.

  Finally, he pulled off the blacktop road and clattered over a cattle gap and through an open gate. “Let’s get out,” he said.

  She did and met him at the front of his truck, suddenly so nervous she could barely swallow. If this was going to be a swan dance, she didn’t think she could take it. Not now. Not after she’d given her heart so totally to him.

  He leaned his backside against the truck’s hood. “I thought I could make this work, Dani, but this long-distance relationship isn’t cutting it for me.”

  Her insides knotted. “I know we’ve both been busy, but it won’t always be like this.”

  “Yeah, Dani. It will be. My job is not a five-days-a-week operation. Your job is demanding and Celeste has school, so weekends and a few vacation days are all you have.”

  She swallowed hard. The one man she’d thought was different. The one who’d said he never gave up. “So what does this mean?”

  “Cutter planned to have Hawk open a field office when he signs on with us next week. I asked him to give that option to me, and he’s agreed.”

  Would she never learn? “So you’ll be moving away from Dobbin?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Austin, at least part of the time.”

  Her pulse revved up a notch or two. “Austin, with all its traffic and congestion?”

  “Could be. I’m not much on waiting around for things to fall into place, Dani. I’m a grab-the-bull-by-the-horns kind of guy. So here goes.”

  He stepped in front of her and took both her hands in his, then fell to his knees. “Marry me, Dani. Now. Tomorrow. I’ll even wait until next week if you like. But I don’t need time to know that I want you in my life forever, and we’re wasting precious time we could be together.”

  A million reasons why she should say no stormed her mind. One reason for saying yes claimed control. “I love you, Marcus Abbot, with all my heart.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “That would be a yes.”

  He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a simple gold ring with a dazzling, solitaire diamond. “I love you, Dani. I have since the moment I met you. I always will.”

  He slipped the ring on her finger, then stood and pulled her into his arms.

  Her heart overflowed, but still she couldn’t push back all the worries. “My house is big enough for all of us, but how will you endure the city?”

  “Because I know that time off we’ll have this, a mere forty-five minutes away.”

  “A drive in the country won’t be the same as living on the Double M.”

  “That’s why I plan to build a house on the land and a barn for the horses Celeste wants.”

  “Wait. Whose ranch is this?”

  “Soon to be ours. Cutter’s doing the financing. I sign the papers tomorrow—unless you’d said no. I was counting on your not saying no.”

  Slowly it was all sinking in. God, she loved him, just the way he was. “Cocky, aren’t you?”

  “Yep.” He flashed the devastating smile that always turned her inside out.

  “I can’t wait to explore the ranch.”

  “It’s small, but big enough. And it has this great little stream with the perfect pine-straw carpeted spot for making love.”

  “So why are we still standing here?”

  “And I thought I was the one who loved action.” He held her close and kissed her—a long, sweet wet kiss that held a lifetime of promise.

  This time there were no worries. When a woman found the perfect cowboy, it was best not to question fate but just to grab the reins and hold on. It didn’t take a psychic to know that.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-3824-8

  COWBOY TO THE CORE

  Copyright © 2009 by Jo Ann Vest

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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