The Wrangler and the Runaway Mom

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “Just take it easy,” she murmured. “You’ll be—”

  Her breath left in whoosh as Colt yanked her down to his chest, then with a grunt, he rolled over, pinning her beneath him.

  She could barely see over his shoulder, but now she realized Santori stood inside the pen, holding both his weapon and Colt’s and aiming one right at them.

  Maggie braced herself for the impact. She was going to die, but at least she would die in the arms of the man she loved.

  She should tell him, she thought. She couldn’t die without letting him know how she felt.

  “Colt,” she began, but stopped when she felt a strange vibration against the ear that was smashed to the ground.

  She tried to see over Colt’s shoulder again and looked up just in time to see a massive shape thunder toward Santori. Corkscrew! Peg’s bull must have been upset by the commotion around his pen!

  Santori must have finally heard the animal. He turned at the last minute and fired the gun, but the shot went wild and the bull kept coming, fury blazing from his small black eyes.

  DeMarranville’s hitman didn’t have time to squeeze off another shot. With the speed that made the brindle bull a favorite on the circuit, Corkscrew reached him just seconds later with an angry bellow, and then Maggie heard a terrible, agonized cry and then the rending of flesh and the crunch of bones as his sharp horns found their target.

  And then there was only silence, broken by the ragged sound of their breathing.

  Chapter 18

  Hours later, too keyed up to sleep despite the exhaustion that made her feel jittery and off balance, Maggie sat at the table inside her trailer and watched her son sleeping in his loft bed, safe and sound once more.

  He was so beautiful, with those little freckles dusting his nose and that blond widow’s peak. A world full of miracles wrapped up in a little bundle of energy with a gap-toothed grin and mischief in his eyes.

  She smiled gently now as he rolled over in his sleep, facing away from her. Even as her mouth twisted into a smile, she felt the tears of reaction build in her throat again, as they had done repeatedly in the hours since their ordeal had ended with Carlo Santori being gored to death by Peg’s meanest bull.

  How would she have survived if something had happened to her son? If Colt hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t risked his life for both of them?

  Colt. There was the other reason she sat here in the dark predawn hours, unable to close her eyes and succumb to the sleep her body needed so desperately.

  She had called McKay-Dee Hospital, where the paramedics had taken him, just an hour ago, and the duty nurse told her he was sleeping comfortably and would probably be released in just a few days.

  She knew from earlier phone calls to the hospital’s emergency room that the knife had miraculously missed all of his major organs, although it had nicked a rib and come dangerously close to his spleen. She hated getting the information secondhand and had wanted to go to the hospital with him to take care of his stab wound herself, but he wouldn’t let her.

  “Your boy needs you right now,” he had said, with that soft drawl. “He’s had a big scare, and right now he needs his mama to hold him and tell him everything’s going to be all right.”

  He was right. She had known it, that Nicky had to be her priority. She had stayed for her son’s sake, but also because it was obvious Colt didn’t want her at the hospital.

  Even while she worked to stop the bleeding before the paramedics arrived, he had avoided her gaze and made it a point to keep from touching her as much as he could.

  He couldn’t have made it more plain: now his job was over, he just wanted to move on, wanted them out of his life. And how could she blame him? She had made it just as plain that she preferred it that way, that she and Nicky would be just fine without him.

  She sighed softly and rubbed her fist at the sudden ache in her heart. She was such a liar. She missed him already, his laughter and his teasing gentleness with Nicholas and the vibrant, sensuous energy that infused her whenever he was around.

  What would she ever do without him?

  She would go on. That’s what she would do. She had become an expert at rebuilding her life since she had first gathered her courage and walked out on her husband six months ago. She had done it before and she could do it again.

  She would just load up this broken-down trailer and head her battered old pickup down the highway until she and Nicky found a nice little town to settle in. Somewhere out here in the rural West, a town in need of a good family doctor. She would open a practice and buy Nicky a horse and try to live with this aching hole in her heart where a blue-eyed cowboy with a teasing grin and work-worn hands used to live.

  She sighed again. It sounded abnormally loud in the otherwise quiet trailer, but not loud enough to mask the rustle of sound from outside.

  Probably just the wind, she thought, but pushed aside the curtain, anyway, to make sure. The full moon sneaked out from behind a cloud just then, and she thought she saw movement next to the big pine tree across the street.

  Someone stood there watching her trailer. And by the width of the shoulders and that long-legged stance, she knew exactly who it was. For just an instant, fierce joy spilled over her—that he was here and that he was all right—then common sense intervened.

  Was the man completely crazy? Her mouth tightened. He had just sustained a major abdominal injury and a possible concussion. He shouldn’t even be out of the hospital, let alone walking around in the middle of the night.

  Her professional instincts inflamed, she shoved open the door and hurried down the steps to confront him. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “Why aren’t you in the hospital?”

  His mouth stretched into that characteristic grin, but she saw with concern that it looked a little ragged around the edges. “Nice to see you, too, Doc. I released myself on my own recognizance. Figured I could recuperate on my own at the ranch as well as I can at any hospital.”

  “You are absolutely nuts. You need to be under the care of a qualified physician.”

  “Are you applying for the job?” He tried to grin again, but she could see the pain there.

  “Sit down,” she ordered, leading him toward the picnic table at her campsite. When he followed her docilely, she knew he must be hurting. “You’re going to tear out your stitches with this kind of nonsense. What were you thinking?”

  “Do you know that when you go into doctor mode, your voice gets all prim and crisp around the edges? It’s very sexy.”

  She flushed but refused to let him distract her. “What are you doing here, Colt?”

  “I hate hospitals. Don’t take it personally, Doc, but they give me the willies. All those nurses with their needles and their quiet voices and their sensible shoes.” He shuddered. “Makes me itchy just thinking about it.”

  Good grief. The man was a hardened FBI agent who could face down a cold-blooded killer without even blinking, but a bunch of nurses made him nervous?

  “Get over it,” she snapped. “You need to be in the hospital.”

  “I’m fine, I swear. I just stopped by to check on you and Nicky, make sure you’re both okay after what happened earlier. In a couple of hours, when it gets light, I figured I’d get somebody to help me load Scout so I can pull out.”

  She had known it, of course, that he would be moving on as soon as he could, but hearing him say the words made her feel as if she was the one who had taken a knife to the gut. “Where are you going?”

  He shrugged, a ripple of movement in the darkness. “I have some vacation coming to me. A lot of vacation, actually—Beckstead promised me two months once this investigation was done. I figure in a week or so I’ll be as good as new. That should still give me about seven weeks to help out at the Broken Spur.”

  “Will you be able to stay that long?” she asked quietly.

  He shot her a quick look, then gazed up at the night sky. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  She was sudd
enly sick to death of all the secrets between them. There were still so many things she didn’t understand.

  Like how he could make love to her with such tenderness when she was just another assignment to him. She quickly pushed the stray thought away. That wasn’t what she meant at all.

  She forced herself to concentrate on one of the mysteries she might just have a chance of solving. “Why just ‘maybe’? What keeps you away from the Broken Spur? I know you love the ranch, I could see it in your eyes when we were there.”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Your father?” It was just a guess, but she knew she was right when his gaze flashed to hers. All teasing was gone now. There was guilt there and those deep, deep shadows.

  She expected him to deny it, to offer some glib comment, but he shrugged again.

  “All he ever wanted was for me to stay on the Broken Spur and take over for him. When he was alive, I was so busy trying to prove I could be better than just some dirt-poor Montana rancher, first in college, then on the circuit. I was so afraid of turning into him, old before my time, with nothing to talk about but beef prices and feed ratios.”

  She ached to reach a hand out and comfort him. To fight it, she pressed her fingers tightly together. “And after he died?”

  He shrugged. “I tried to stay for a while, but it felt wrong. I wrestled with it for a couple of months, but then I couldn’t do it anymore. Here I was living his dream but he wasn’t there to see it. Because of me.”

  “Oh, Colt. Your father’s death wasn’t your fault.”

  “Intellectually, I know that. But in here,” he tapped his chest with his fingertips, “that’s another story. If he hadn’t come looking for me, if I hadn’t been drinking and fighting with anything that moved, he wouldn’t have had to come get me and he probably wouldn’t have died. That’s a pretty hard thing to face.”

  He paused for a moment, then looked at her. “Everything at the ranch reminds me of it. I can usually stand it for a while, but eventually I get too antsy and I have to move on.”

  They sat in silence for a while as the campground slept around them. She yearned to help him. He had given her back her son, and for that she owed him everything. If she could make him see things from a different perspective, perhaps it would repay her debt. At least a little.

  “Do you blame me or Nicky because you were stabbed tonight?” she finally asked.

  He stared at her. “Of course not.”

  “But Santori never would have stabbed you if you hadn’t come after us, if you had stayed in the arena where you were out of harm’s way.”

  “It was my job to come after you.”

  Would you have come after us if it hadn’t been your job? she wanted to ask, but knew she never could. He had made no promises, offered no false declarations of love.

  Maybe she had even imagined that soft tenderness lurking in the depths of those blue eyes when he held her and caressed her.

  This wasn’t about her, anyway, she reminded herself. This was about Colt and trying to exorcise the ghosts that haunted him in the one place where he should have been able to find peace in the hard world he lived in.

  “So why do you blame yourself because your father did what any good father would have done? He came looking for his son to protect him, because he didn’t want you to be hurt. I didn’t know him, of course, but from what you’ve said about him, I can’t believe he’s the kind of man who would ever hold you responsible for what happened or who would ever blame you for his own choices.”

  Wasn’t that just like his Maggie? If he hadn’t been aching so bad at the idea of never seeing her again—not to mention the fiery hole in his gut—he would have laughed.

  She had been through hell just a few hours before, something that would have traumatized most men he knew. In the last two months she had seen her husband murdered right in front of her, had been terrorized and hunted by a group of ruthless killers and had been duped by one of the government’s best liars.

  But here she was trying to comfort him because she didn’t want him feeling guilty over Jack McKendrick’s heart attack.

  Lord, he loved her. It was like a hot, heavy ache inside him, worse than a hundred knife wounds, especially when he knew he could never tell her how he felt.

  If he did, she might feel obligated to say things she didn’t mean, out of gratitude or some stupid sense of obligation.

  She deserved so much more than what he could offer. She deserved somebody who could be there at night instead of off on some assignment God knows where.

  Nick deserved a father he could count on, somebody who could show up at his baseball games and help him with his homework and do more at his birthday parties than show up and sit there like a mannequin.

  They sure as hell deserved better than a burned-out lawman with a whole damn semi full of baggage.

  What did it matter, anyway? He had just spent three weeks living a lie, completely deceiving her. He didn’t exactly have the best kind of track record with her when it came to the truth—what made him think she would even believe him if he told her how he felt? Why should she believe anything he said, after what he had done?

  He blew out a breath and deliberately turned the conversation away from the Broken Spur. “What about you? What are your plans?”

  With Damian in custody and the disk—and his myriad financial records—as evidence, the FBI had enough on him to see that he was put away for a long time. He doubted that her testimony would even be needed, especially with Santori dead.

  He knew he should have been elated that Damian wouldn’t see the light of day for a long, long time. But all he felt was this hollow ache.

  She gave a soft, sad smile. “I have another month left on my contract with the rodeo sponsors, but after that I’m not sure what we’ll do. I suppose I could go back to San Francisco, back to the clinic, but I’m not sure I want to do that now.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I’ll start over. I was just thinking that I would try to find a small town to settle in. Somewhere out here in the West, where I could make a difference. Wyoming, maybe. Or Idaho.”

  What about Montana? The words hovered on his tongue but, of course, he could never ask her, especially when he didn’t know how long he would even be staying.

  “I guess I can go anywhere now,” she continued. “Have trailer, will travel.”

  The clouds parted for a moment, giving him a better glimpse of her in the moonlight, and he was shocked by the shadows under her eyes and the wobble in her smile.

  She must be exhausted. And here he was keeping her up even later. “You need to rest, Doc. What were you doing awake at this hour, anyway? Especially after everything that’s happened in the last two days?”

  “I didn’t want to take my eyes off Nicky for even a moment.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s fine. Children can be amazingly resilient. He was more worried about you being hurt than anything else.” She paused. “You know, he’s really going to miss you.”

  What about you? Will you miss me, too? He cleared his throat. “Let me know where you eventually settle and I’ll come visit. Just call the Broken Spur, and Joe can give me a message if I’m not there.”

  She stood up from the picnic table. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Colt.”

  The ache in his gut intensified. Walking away from her was so hard, the hardest thing he’d ever done. “Okay. Sure. You’re probably right. If you think that’s best, I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “I lied to you. I can’t expect you to just forgive me for that, to act like it never happened. Besides, it was a job and now that it’s over, we should probably just go our separate ways.”

  If anything, her smile became even more wobbly. “That’s right. It was just a job to you, wasn’t it.”

  “Doc—”

  “I need to go back inside, Colt. Nicky might wake up.”

  He had hurt her. He could see the pain in her
eyes. “I’m sorry, Maggie. I’m so sorry.” For everything, for the lies and the betrayal and for not being the sort of man who could give her promises.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about.” She folded her hands together. “Nothing at all. You saved our lives, gave me back my son, and I can never repay you for that.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  She was silent for several moments, then she smiled that sad smile again. “Goodbye, Colt. I—Goodbye. And thank you. For everything.”

  With that, she turned around and walked to her trailer, without ever knowing that she took his heart with her.

  Notepad in hand, Maggie took inventory of the supplies she might need for the remaining two weeks of her rodeo contract. She was getting a little low on suture kits. And she could probably use another couple bottles of antiseptic.

  She studied the one remaining bottle and it brought into sharp focus a memory of the night she sat at Colt’s table and cleaned his hand after he cut it fixing her flat tire, the first time she had felt that wild, fluttery attraction toward him.

  She sighed. It had been two weeks since she walked away from him in Utah, and she couldn’t seem to go five minutes without him filling her thoughts.

  Everything seemed to remind her of him: turkey sandwiches and Wrangler jeans and a night sky overflowing with constellations. She had just about made a fool of herself earlier in the day when she had spied a dark-haired cowboy riding a buckskin horse toward her, but it had turned out to be somebody else.

  The nights were the worst, when she would lie there on her uncomfortable bed in the trailer and replay in vivid detail the time she had spent in his arms at the Broken Spur. The memories would leave her aching and restless and feeling more alone than she ever had in her life.

  She pushed the thought away. She was doing okay. Better than okay. Wasn’t she? Finally free of the fear of DeMarranville’s men that had been her constant companion for so long, she was finally able to relax and enjoy her work again. She was keeping busy, she was sending out feelers to find out what communities might be in need of a doctor with her skills, she was taking time to play with Nicky.