by Laurie Paige
“What do you see?”
He gave her a narrow-eyed scrutiny, but she refused to be daunted. “I see us working together. You have the know-how of your years in law enforcement. I have the knowledge of seven years of study of human behavior. Let me work with you on this.”
Her words painted a picture of closeness that he had never known. It stirred the old dreams he’d had as a boy—the happy family, sharing meals, warmth, love, things that would never exist for him.
“Yeah, we were really working on the case a moment ago. If McCoy hadn’t called, we’d be in my bed right now, acting like a couple of jackrabbits in heat.”
“Would that be so terrible?”
He shrugged. “I like a roll in the sack the same as the next man.”
“Don’t make it sound like a…like a…”
“A casual romp?” he suggested, his tone coldly amused. He had to get the notion that they could make it as a couple out of her mind. If he had to hurt her to do it, then that was what he had to do. “That’s all it would be.”
She held up a hand to stop him, eyes vulnerable, her mouth soft, trembly, kissable. “No.”
“Yes.” He leaned both hands on the table and looked her straight in the eye. “A quick—”
“Don’t.”
“You want it prettied up? I can give you sweet words. Tell me what you like. Endearments? Promises? I can do them. It won’t mean a thing, but I can deliver. Just tell me.”
“You’re being cruel,” Vanessa reprimanded him gently, sure that this was only another tactic to keep his distance. With the warm memory of his kiss still on her lips, she knew that wasn’t possible. “You know it isn’t like that between us.”
“No?”
He reached for her, pulling her up and sweeping her into his arms. She stared at him, confused, her usual confidence dimmed into uncertainty.
He returned her stare, his face set and angry. It wasn’t the ruthlessness she feared in him. It was the grim determination to show her that they didn’t belong together.
“You’re trying to frighten me,” she said as calmly as she could, “but I know you won’t hurt me.”
He entered a bedroom. It was as neat and uncluttered as the kitchen. As if no one really lived there. That seemed terribly sad. She wanted to weep for him and the life he’d lived that had destroyed his trust as well as his dreams.
When he tossed her on the wide bed, she lay against the dark blue comforter without moving. If he wanted to keep her there, she didn’t stand a chance of getting away.
When his hands went to his shirt buttons, her mouth went dry. He undid the first one, his eyes never leaving hers. There was no visible softening in his attitude. Standing beside the bed, with her lying down, he seemed bigger, tougher, blatantly masculine.
And in control.
She relaxed and smiled up at him. “It isn’t your nature to intimidate women and children.”
The bed bounced when he threw himself down beside her. “I’m a man. Don’t ever forget it,” he warned just before his mouth crushed down on hers.
He kissed her lips, her neck, the tingly spot under her earlobe. He left a moist trail of liquid fire along her collarbone and down the modest vee of her sundress. Her breasts beaded in longing for his complete touch.
“I won’t,” she murmured, running her hands through the thick, dark strands of his hair, delight replacing fear as passion flooded her body and warmth crept into her heart. “Kiss me some more.”
He rested on one elbow, his eyes probing every thought in her head. “You just don’t get it. I’m twelve years older than you. Do you really think I’m interested in a spoiled rich kid who’s used to getting her way?”
“Aren’t you?” she challenged.
“Only in one way.” He stood and pulled his cuffs down. “And I don’t have time for that at present. I have a meeting at my office in thirty minutes. It’s time to go.”
She followed him into the kitchen when he stalked from the room. “Why did you bring me here?”
He held the door open. “To show you my life, how it is and how it’s going to stay. I’d like you in my bed, but you don’t fit in anywhere else. Think you can get that?”
She nodded as they stepped into the heat of the August afternoon. “Yes, I get it.”
The tears pressed closer to the surface. In her heart, she wept for him and the boy who had been so terribly hurt that he’d left his hopes behind.
He drove her back to the parking lot. Like him, she remained silent on the trip. The future seemed as dark as the thunderheads gathering on the western horizon.
Dev stood in the center of the courtyard. In black jeans, shirt and sneakers, he was nearly invisible. Everyone in the Fortune house had gone to his or her room. That was good.
He had been in residence all week, long enough for the family and the ranch workers to get used to him and go about their daily activities without paying him undue attention. Exactly what he wanted. He knew their routines now and could reconstruct the day of the kidnapping with a fair idea of the accuracy of his calculations.
As silently as a shadow, he returned to the building after exploring the garages and listening outside the doors of the servants’ quarters. In the hallway that had once been open to the outside, he slipped along the flagstones and paused outside Ryan’s suite.
For a moment he listened to the man’s conversation with his fiancée. After a while he moved on. The older couple’s talk centered on the oldest Fortune son.
At that son’s door, the situation was more dynamic. Matthew and his wife were having words.
“I should never have married you,” Claudia said.
“So why did you?” her husband asked in a snarly tone.
A drawer opened, then closed loudly.
“If we were an ordinary couple…if I’d married an ordinary man, not a Fortune, this wouldn’t have happened. My son wouldn’t be gone—”
“Dammit, he’s my son, too,” Matthew said in a raised voice. “What the hell do you want me to do? Change my name? Deny who I am? Forget my family?”
“No, I only meant… This is hopeless.”
After a minute, Dev heard Matthew speak wearily, “For God’s sake, stop crying.”
“The baby… My milk has dried up.”
Another minute of silence passed. Dev started to move on, his emotions carefully sealed off from the couple’s troubles. He heard footsteps, then…
“Claudia… I’m sorry, darling. It will be okay. We’ll get the baby back. You’ll see…”
Silence.
“Don’t touch me,” the woman said.
“Honey, please—”
“No! Don’t! I can’t bear it…”
Dev ducked behind a potted shrub before the angry steps reached the door. He watched as Matthew left his quarters, headed down the walkway opposite of where he was concealed, then around the corner and out the side door. Dev figured the doctor was going for a ride.
In the short time he’d been on this job, he’d learned that was what the father, daughter and oldest son did when they needed to get away—head for the stables and a long ride on one of the horses.
After what he considered a safe period, Dev followed the doctor out the side door. He walked the half mile to the stables and arrived in time to see Matthew ride off across the pasture toward the line of trees beside the creek.
Dev checked on the Friday night activity in the bunkhouse. Four cowboys were playing a card game, four were watching television, and the rest were occupied at various tasks—writing letters, braiding belts, oiling tack or surfing the Net on laptop computers. The modern age had invaded the West.
He stood in the shadows long after Matthew Fortune had ridden out his frustrations and returned, after the few cowboys who had been off the ranch quietly entered the bunkhouse, after the lights went out at the other Fortune house where the widow, Mary Ellen, lived, and after Cruz Perez arrived from some unknown trip, checked the mares and foals in the home pastures, then went to hi
s own small cabin nestled in a clump of cottonwoods.
At midnight, all was quiet.
He waited.
It was after two before Clint Lockhart arrived. Dev checked the luminous hands on his watch and suppressed a yawn. Damn, but he was tired.
Lockhart was in his forties, but he managed to lead an active social life, it seemed. So did Perez. For that matter, so did the several Fortune sons, both Ryan’s and the deceased Cameron’s.
One of the problems with the whole Fortune operation was that it was so wide-open. People came and went freely. Neighbors dropped in. Salesmen called. Attorneys, mailmen, veterinarians, girls ga-ga over cowboys and the Fortune name, guys hankering after the Fortune daughter—there was a damn parade in and out of the place.
Sooner or later, though, someone would make a mistake.
He moved silently through the dark toward the main house. Instead of returning the way he’d left, he entered the small welcoming courtyard at the front of the house.
Standing in the shifting shadows cast by tiny spotlights hidden among the plants, he studied the windows along the front of the house. It would have been easy to hand a baby out the window from either the bedroom or the study to someone who waited below, then that person could make a quick getaway across the lawn, past the oak trees surrounding the ranch house and into a waiting vehicle.
As easily as that, the deed would be done.
He moved silently along the wall to the door that led to the back courtyard. He stopped abruptly, aware of another person when he stepped inside the short corridor.
“What are you doing?” a voice whispered in the dark.
“I was restless,” he replied to Vanessa. “I went for a walk down to the stables.”
“Liar,” she said.
He would have grinned except he was in no mood to deal with her. “Yeah. Look, it’s late. I’m going to bed.”
She followed him into his room.
“Do you mind?” he asked politely, holding the door open and hoping she would take the hint.
“Yes, I do,” she snapped. “I mind very much. You’re spying on my family. Why?”
He saw no reason to pretty up the facts. “To see who might have a reason to kidnap the Fortune heir.”
Five
Vanessa was shocked. “In the family?”
“On the ranch.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I agree with your appraisal. To take the child in broad daylight with so many people about, required someone who could cover for himself if he was seen with the baby.”
“It could have been a woman.”
“It could have,” he agreed.
She eyed his dark clothing. “So, who have you been watching tonight?”
He didn’t answer.
“Everyone,” she said. “Including my father and brother. Then you went outside. I lost sight when you went into the shadows under the oak tree near the stable.”
“That’s pretty much where I stayed. I could see who came and went from the main house as well as the bunkhouse and other buildings.”
When he sat in a chair and untied his shoes, then kicked them off, she took that as a signal that the conversation was at an end.
“Do you mind going to your room?” he asked politely. “I need some rest.”
“I thought FBI agents never slept.”
He watched her for a long minute, long enough to make her squirm, then said, “You’re in a snit—”
“I’m furious. You think you know everything, but you don’t know my family or our friends.”
“Sometimes an outsider can see more clearly.”
She sighed and changed her tactics. “I wish I could break through that wall of calm that surrounds you. I hate it when you sound so removed from it all when I’m ready to explode with frustration and worry.”
“Emotion serves only to cloud judgment.”
Tears pressed behind her eyes. “I know,” she said. “In my mind, I know that, but in my heart… I need…more, but that’s foolish. There can never be anything between us, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Thus the wise one has spoken.” She couldn’t hide the bitterness that welled inside her, adding to the pressure of the tears. “But I feel so sad.”
He stood abruptly and took her by the arm. “It’s time for all good little girls to be in bed.” He led her out his door and to her own. “Go inside,” he ordered, “before I forget I’m an honorable man.”
Her gaze flew to his. The moonlight streaming through the window at the end of the hallway illuminated his strong features, outlined his shoulders against the darker shadows behind them. “That isn’t possible,” she whispered, filled with longing so intense she ached. “Honor comes from the inner self. It can’t be put aside.”
“Even wise men can be tempted beyond control. I don’t intend to let things get that far.” His quiet laugh was sardonic and directed at himself.
“You use coldness to put distance between yourself and others,” she told him, “but that isn’t you. You deny yourself the very things you want because you were hurt in the past by those you let get too close. Your parents, I think, and maybe others.”
He turned his face from her. In the moonlight, his profile was like that of a sculpture, remote and unfeeling, a beautiful carving of stone.
“Go to bed, rich girl,” he ordered. “Maybe in your dreams you’ll find Prince Charming.” He turned away and nearly disappeared in the dark. Only the fact that he was moving, heading for his door, gave his presence away.
“I always thought the Beast was the more interesting character in the fairy tales,” she called softly after him, managing to put laughter into the retort.
Climbing into bed a short time later, she felt the odd sadness descend on her again. She prayed for her nephew, for Matthew and Claudia, and for their dark knight, sent to save them from evil. But who was going to save him?
“The missing cowboy is our link,” Dev said.
He sat in the sheriff’s office, going over the evidence once more with Grayhawk. He had taken the fingerprints of everyone at the ranch house, either directly while he questioned them, or subtly by lifting them from a glass.
“Maybe. But no one matched the fingerprint found at the hotel,” Wyatt said. “Nor did any of those we dusted at the bunkhouse right after the kidnapping.”
“That doesn’t prove it wasn’t the cowboy.”
“Doesn’t prove it was, either,” Wyatt pointed out. He picked up the telephone when it rang. “Oh, hi, Hub. How’s it going? Yeah? Interesting.”
Dev muttered an expletive. In any other case, if the family involved wasn’t as rich and well-known as the Fortunes, he would have filed a report and put the case on the back burner. His boss hadn’t once asked him to wrap it up and get on something else.
He rubbed his eyes. Staying up all day and half or more of each night, watching the comings and goings of everyone at the main ranch quarters, was wearing him down.
August sixth to August fifteenth. Nine days. That wasn’t so very long on a case. But it felt longer.
Because of Vanessa?
His body tightened. She certainly contributed to the sleepless nights. Lordy, but he wanted her…dreamed of her…fantasized about her… It was a wonder the zippers were still intact on any of his pants. He stayed hard nearly all the time.
A physical reaction. That’s all it was, no matter how she tried to pretend otherwise. No meeting of the souls. No stars spinning out of orbit. No emotional involvement, other than that caused by the tragedy of events that had brought them together. He felt sorry for her, for her whole family. No one deserved this kind of grief.
And no child deserved the kind of fear that went with being uprooted from a secure world and thrust into the unknown.
“Hell,” Wyatt said upon slamming down the telephone.
Dev observed the sheriff’s disgusted grimace. “What?”
“That was Hubcap Johnson. He just confessed to the kidnapping.”
“A chronic confessor?”
“Yeah, only this time he knew—”
Dev frowned impatiently when Wyatt paused as if hating to add the rest.
“He knew about the words cut from the newspapers.”
A chill blasted Dev’s neck. The hair stood up. “Several people saw the note.”
“He said he cut the words from the Leather Bucket Weekly…back in April, about the first week of the month, he thought.”
“So much for our confidential information,” Dev muttered. “Who else knew besides Vanessa?”
Wyatt counted the numbers up. “The deputy working on the case, his partner. The young deputy whose girlfriend told him about the strange cuts on the table at the motel. She might have known the date of the damage since her father owns the place. You. Me. That’s it.”
“And Vanessa.”
“She knows the rules. She wouldn’t tell anyone,” Wyatt assured him in a cool tone.
“Yeah, only everyone she knows and trusts.”
He stalked out of the lawman’s office three hours later, his fury not abated one bit. He’d noted the sheriff’s reactive manner when he’d added Vanessa’s name to the list of those who knew about the date on the ransom note.
Grayhawk had had the old man brought in for questioning. Dev had grilled him intensely on how he came by his insider information. The old codger was crazy as a loon and crafty as only the old and wary can be. They hadn’t gotten a thing out of him. But he had said something about the girl telling him.
Was that girl Vanessa?
Had she—in confidence, of course—told a friend about the clue they had happened upon? He gritted his teeth. He would soon find out.
At the ranch, he parked in his usual spot in the shade, which everyone now left for him, and headed into the house.
After searching through room after room, he stopped in frustration. With the place usually teeming with people, why the hell couldn’t he find a single person who could tell him where she was?
He drove the half mile to the stables.
That’s where he found her. Cruz leaned on the gate outside a large arena. Vanessa, as strong and supple as a willow stick, sat astride a big black horse. The ring was set with hurdles and walls made from haystacks. She and the horse were taking them at a fast clip. Too fast, he thought, but he was no expert.
