The Wrangler and the Runaway Mom

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She fought it as long as she could, but finally her exhaustion won out. The nightmare crept up on her, more terrible because it was all so real. Michael falling again, the blood oozing from his wound like wine trickling from a spilled bottle. Those agonizing moments when she had cowered in the washroom while the men who killed him talked casually over his body, as if they were discussing stock prices or baseball scores.

  And then running, running.

  In her dream it was as if she were stuck on an out-ofcontrol treadmill, always running and never making any progress, while Carlo with the dead eyes pursued her. He moved inexorably closer to her and, try as she might, she could do nothing to escape.

  When he had nearly reached her, he veered away, and she thought she had escaped but suddenly Nicky was there in his arms, kicking and struggling, his little fists pounding against the stranger who held him. Terror and fury and raw fear erupted inside her, and she screamed her son’s name just as Michael’s killer reached into his pocket and pulled out a wooden pistol like Nicky’s.

  Even though it looked like a toy, she knew it would be as deadly as the real thing. She cried out and grabbed for it, just as a terrible clanging noise erupted from the pistol.

  She awoke in a rush, her heart pounding and the blood rushing in her ears. It was so real! She could still hear the echoes of her cries, still taste the fear in her mouth.

  What had awakened her? For long seconds she lay in the darkness and listened to the stillness of the night, forcing her muscles to relax, her breathing to slow.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance, long and low, like a slow, steady drumroll played by ghostly hands. That was it. She must have heard the warnings of the impending storm.

  Lightning flashed outside the window, and the sky immediately growled again. This time it was joined by something much closer, a clang very much like what she’d heard in her dream, followed by muffled cursing.

  It wasn’t the storm that had awakened her, she realized as all the fear came surging back.

  Someone was out there!

  Chapter 3

  Lingering visions from her nightmare chased themselves through her mind. Could Michael’s killers have found her? Panic exploded in her chest, and she thrust the light quilt aside to scramble out of bed, consumed with a wild, frantic urge to gather Nicky and flee into the night.

  After an instant she forced herself to breathe deeply and try to think through it all rationally. How could they possibly have found her? She had been excruciatingly careful to leave no clue about her whereabouts. She hadn’t tapped into any of her bank accounts. She hadn’t told anyone at the clinic where she was going. She hadn’t even told Rosie.

  It was probably just some drunk cowboy. A bronc buster or bull rider who celebrated the rodeo’s end with one too many beers at a honky-tonk somewhere and now was simply trying to find his way back to his bed.

  Maggie stared at the ceiling. Though she dearly wanted to stay here and hide in her bed—to pretend she hadn’t heard anything but the gathering storm—she knew she had to check out the commotion.

  It was the responsible thing to do, and Margaret Elizabeth Rawlings Prescott always did the responsible thing.

  She slipped from her bed and crept through the darkness to the window at the front of the trailer, underneath the loft where Nicky slept noisily, making sweet little huffing breaths in his sleep.

  Although swollen black-edged clouds hid the moon, faroff lightning arced across the sky just long enough for her to make out a dark, hulking shape crouched by the passenger side of her pickup.

  Great. The drunk cowboy was throwing up on her truck.

  Again she had the completely childish urge to crawl into her bed and pull the covers over her head. But what if it wasn’t a drunk cowboy? What if it was somebody trying to break into her truck? She didn’t have much of value inside it, but she was damned if she would let somebody take what little they had left.

  She needed a weapon, if only to scare the intruder away. A quick scan of the trailer turned up a cast-iron frying pan in the dish drainer. A frying pan. What a cliché. She only needed a headful of curlers to look just like Alice Kramden from The Honeymooners, taking on Ralph after he stayed out too late with the boys. Still, it would probably make any drunk cowboy think twice before tangling with her.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, Maggie grabbed the pan by the handle, rummaged through a drawer for a flashlight, then opened the door quietly. She sidled along the length of the trailer until she reached the truck’s bumper.

  “If you leave right now,” she called out softly, “I won’t phone the police.” She clicked the flashlight beam on and aimed it right into the would-be thief’s eyes, then gasped when Colt McKendrick’s baby blues blinked back at her. “You!”

  “Yeah. Me.” He sounded disgruntled. “Who’d you think it was?”

  “I don’t know. A drunk cowboy, maybe, being sick on my truck.” She squinted at him. “You’re not throwing up, are you?”

  “Don’t think so. Thanks for asking, though.”

  “What are you doing, then?”

  “You mind moving the flashlight a little? You’re blinding me here.”

  She shifted the beam to the ground. “Sorry. What are you doing?” she repeated.

  She sensed, rather than saw, his shrug. “I was on my way to bed and noticed you had a flat. Figured I’d fix it so you wouldn’t have to deal with it in the morning.”

  She stared at him. “You just took it upon yourself to start fixing it without talking to me first?”

  “Um, could you move that flashlight again?”

  Maggie flushed when she realized she had instinctively aimed it into his eyes once more. She pointed the light to the ground again, where it now illuminated a jack propped next to a tire that sagged forlornly. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  “It seemed the neighborly thing to do.”

  He wasn’t breaking into her truck, he was going out of his way to fix her flat tire. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done something so genuinely kind for her. A burst of warmth flooded through her, trickling over her shoulders and down her back.

  Her opinion of Colt McKendrick suddenly seemed to shift and slide around inside her. She didn’t want to soften toward him, though. She didn’t dare.

  “You really don’t have to do this,” she mumbled. “I’m perfectly capable of changing a flat tire.”

  “I’m just saving you the trouble. Just look at it as my way of paying you back for patching up my shoulder yesterday. Nice frying pan, by the way. Odd time of the night for making pancakes, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  Embarrassed heat soaked her skin at the flash of his grin in the darkness. She dropped the frying pan to her side. “You never know what sort of riffraff you could run into in the middle of the night.”

  “True enough.”

  Lightning suddenly seared across the night again, and the air smelled of ozone and that peculiar musty smell of a summer storm about to be unleashed.

  McKendrick glanced up at the sky. “Looks like I’d better get a move on if I’m going to beat that. You know, I could probably make better time if you’d shine that flashlight over here.”

  “Oh. Of course.” She clicked it on and watched him jack up the truck and quickly, efficiently, replace the flat tire with her spare.

  When the last lug nut had been tightened, he hefted the flat into the bed of the pickup. “You’ll want to get this tire repaired before you go too much farther. I wouldn’t want you to be stranded on the road somewhere without a spare.”

  “I’ll do that.” She frowned. “I wonder what happened to it. It wasn’t flat earlier this evening.”

  He busied himself gathering up the tools. “Maybe you picked up a nail or something. Had a slow leak for a couple days that finally finished the thing off. Or you could have—Damn!”

  “What is it?” She aimed the flashlight at him and saw him cradling one hand with the other.


  “Blasted jack cut my hand.”

  “Let me see.”

  He wiggled it as if he could shake off the pain and picked up the crowbar. “It’s okay. Nothing that hasn’t happened to me dozens of times on the ranch.”

  She gazed at him, momentarily diverted. “You have a ranch?”

  He looked away as if he were too embarrassed to meet her gaze. “Uh, I used to.”

  Compassion swept through her. He must have fallen on hard times and lost his ranch, the same fate suffered by countless other ranchers during the recent run of lousy beef prices and high feed costs. Maybe that’s why he was on the circuit. For a good cowboy, a summer spent rodeoing could be a quick route to ready cash to help rebuild a ranch.

  She swallowed her words of sympathy, somehow knowing they wouldn’t be welcome. “Still,” she said quietly, “I would feel better if you allowed me to take a look at that hand.”

  Before he could argue, she dropped the frying pan into the dirt and grabbed his fingers. As her hand met his skin, hardened and rough from hard work, heat raced between them every bit as powerful as the lightning sizzling across the sky.

  Unnerved, Maggie cleared her throat and dropped his hand. “That looks deep. You should put some disinfectant and an antibiotic on it.”

  He shoved the injured hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “I’ll be all right.”

  “I insist, especially since it was my tire you were fixing. Come on. I’ve got some iodine in the trailer.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to wake up your kid. I’ve probably got something I can use at my place.”

  She frowned at him. “You might as well accept my help. I’m not going to be able to sleep until I know you’ve put something on that.”

  “Fine, Doc. Whatever you say. Since you’re so set on it, you can come and watch to make sure I stick the Band-Aid on right side up.”

  As he led the way to his camper, the skies finally opened and began to spit huge drops that plowed into the dusty ground like bullets. They made it inside just as the storm began in earnest.

  “Welcome to the McKendrick hacienda,” he said, flipping on a light above the little stove. Maggie instantly realized she had made a mistake by following him.

  A huge mistake.

  The camper was no more than eight feet wide and a dozen feet long, small and compact and intimate, especially with the storm playing a symphony on the thin aluminum skin of the roof.

  Her nerves were in entirely too much turmoil for her to be comfortable in such close quarters with Colt McKendrick. She couldn’t breathe without brushing against him, but she inched as far away as she could manage. “Um, where’s your disinfectant?”

  “It’s in here somewhere. Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll see if I can rustle it up?”

  He bent to rummage through a drawer, highlighting thin spots where his jeans had worn almost white from all the time he spent in the saddle. She caught herself staring and jerked her gaze away.

  What on earth was the matter with her, gawking at the man like she was some kind of buckle bunny on the make for a good-looking cowboy? Embarrassed, she slid onto one of the vinyl bench seats around a little gray-speckled Formica table

  To distract herself she studied the interior of the camper, looking for some clue into McKendrick’s personality. It appeared to be about the same general era as the trailer she had bought with the proceeds from selling her Volvo The decor was straight out of the 1970s, all orange, yellow and dark green tones. A well-used rope, coiled neatly, hung on the back of the door. A pair of worn boots, an older twin to the pair he was wearing, waited by the bed.

  Earlier in the day she had noticed that the pickup and horse trailer both looked fairly new and in much better condition than the camper. Wasn’t that just like a cowboy? Worry about his horse and his truck but not about where he laid his own head at night.

  The only somewhat jarring note that kept the inside of the camper from being completely stereotypical was a stack of books on the window ledge. She studied their authors. Larry McMurtry, Louis L’Amour, a couple of mysteries. Just what she might have expected. But she suddenly did a double take at the slim volume at the bottom of the stack. Descartes? A cowboy who reads philosophy?

  Before she could ask him about it, he emerged from the cupboard with a battered first aid kit lifted victoriously in his hand. “Here we go. I knew this was in here somewhere.”

  He slid into the seat across from her and thrust out his hand. “Okay, Dr. Rawlings. Do your worst.”

  She eyed his hand with trepidation. After what had happened outside when she touched him—that odd, silvery shower of sparks—she was reluctant to make contact again.

  This is ridiculous, she thought, and forced herself to take a deep breath. She was a professional. She could handle putting antiseptic on a man’s hand without getting all fluttery over it. Couldn’t she?

  Her nerves firmly in check, she picked through the first aid kit until she found a small dark bottle of iodine, then reached for his hand. The sparks threatened to return, but she sternly suppressed them and examined the injury. His hand was a testament to years of hard work, with a varied collection of nicks and scars.

  Instead of a new injury, as she had assumed, it looked as if the jack had ripped open an existing wound, a jagged, ugly cut that traced the curve of his lifeline. “What did you do here? Before tonight, I mean.”

  He looked at it for a moment and she could swear he was being evasive again. “Uh, a cowboy’s curse. I was putting up fence line and snagged it on some barbwire.”

  “Looks like it was painful.”

  He grunted in response and she managed not to smile. “Oh, I forgot. You macho cowboys don’t feel pain like the rest of us. Now if you weren’t a cowboy, I’d tell you this is going to sting a little. But since you are, I won’t waste my breath.”

  Cowboy or not, he stiffened as she poured the iodine on, and Maggie winced. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have teased you.” She instinctively blew on his palm to cool the burning.

  He grinned. “Now there’s a mother for you, thinking you can make it all better by blowing on it. My mother used to do the same thing when I was a kid.”

  She couldn’t stop her smile, intrigued by the idea of him as anything other than the completely adult, completely masculine person in front of her. “Sorry. It’s a habit I picked up with Nicky. You’re lucky I didn’t kiss it to make it feel better.”

  “Am I?” he murmured.

  Was he flirting with her? She’d been out of the manwoman scene so long she simply couldn’t tell. She shot him a glance under her lashes, but his strong, chiseled features remained impassive.

  Unsure how to respond, she cleared her throat and opted to change the subject, even though the one she picked didn’t make her any more comfortable. “Speaking of Nicky,” she began, “I wanted to apologize for this morning. About calling you a saddle bum and all. I overreacted. It’s just that I panicked when I woke up and he wasn’t there. I’m afraid you bore the brunt of that lingering fear.”

  “No harm done.”

  “No, I shouldn’t have lashed out at you like that. It’s just...I tend to be a little overprotective of Nicky.” She forced her gaze away from his to the bandage she was wrapping around his hand. “It’s too bad today was the last day of the rodeo and we’re moving on tomorrow. If we had more time, I would have let you take Nicky up on your horse. If you were serious about your offer, that is.”

  “Would I lie to a big, bad outlaw like Nicky the Kid?”

  She couldn’t help her laugh, one of the few genuine ones she’d enjoyed in quite a while, then instantly regretted it when he gave her an odd look that sent her pulse skittering.

  “Where’s your next assignment?” he finally asked. “Maybe we’ll run into each other down the road.”

  “Butte, Montana. The Butte Vigilante Rodeo.”

  “Now there’s a coincidence. I just sent in my entry fee for the same show this morning. They have a nice calf-rop
ing purse I’ve got my eye on, so I’ll be heading into Montana ’round about Wednesday. I’d be happy to take your little guy up on Scout one day next week.”

  She shouldn’t have this little hitch in her stomach at the idea of seeing him again. Darn it, she knew perfectly well she shouldn’t. “I’m sure Nicky will look forward to it.”

  “Maybe you and I could get together, too, before the show one night. I know a great steak place in town.”

  He was definitely flirting with her. Oh mercy. What was she supposed to do now? “I don’t... That is, I haven’t ..”

  “Relax, Doc. You don’t have to decide tonight.” He twisted his bandaged hand and rubbed a rough thumb over her knuckle. She felt hypnotized by his grin, like a rabbit caught in the hard, killing glare of headlights. “Just think about it.”

  She carefully gathered her composure around her and tugged her hand away. “We’ll see,” she managed to say, then slipped from the seat and headed for the door. “Thank you again for fixing my tire. It was a very nice thing to do.”

  To her confusion, he scowled. “Niceness has nothing to do with it, Doc. Not one damn thing.”

  She gave him a puzzled look, but he didn’t seem inclined to explain. If the man wanted to keep his secrets, who was she to argue? Lord knows, she had enough of her own. “Well, good night, then. I suppose I’ll see you in Butte.”

  He was still scowling when she walked out into the rain. He swore under his breath and lifted the moth eaten curtains to watch her hurry into her own trailer. A light switched on inside, but the trailer went dark again after only a few moments.

  Colt let the curtain fall. What the hell was he supposed to do now? Any degree of objectivity he might have claimed going into this assignment had just died a quick and painful death when Maggie Rawlings laughed back there, sweet and unaffected.

  Unless she was the world’s greatest actress, the woman was about as innocent as a newborn calf. No way could she be a party to the illegal activity of her husband. Nobody with that much vulnerability in her eyes could be involved in the ugliness of Michael Prescott’s world. He would be willing to bet the entire Broken Spur she didn’t know what her husband had been involved with, that she was just running scared from the men who had killed him.