Cowboy Christmas Rescue

by Beth Cornelison

  “No, it isn’t all right,” Nate told her, “just like it wasn’t all right that as soon as they got wind that I’d proposed, my mom and—and dad took over.”

  The conversation stopped, derailed by the mention of his father.

  But as April mulled what Nate had just said, something else sprang to the forefront of her mind. “Wait,” she said. “You mean they didn’t make you propose?”

  Nate snorted. “I might be living on the property while I run the ranch now, but make no mistake about it. Nobody tells me how to run my life. This seemed like the right thing, and we’ve always gotten on all right. Well, mostly, anyway.”

  She rolled her eyes at that, reminded of how he’d reacted when she’d first told him she was pregnant and planning to have and raise the child. Oh, that’s great, he’d said, as if it had nothing in the world to do with him. Then you’re back with, what’s his name again? That computer guy you used to see in Austin?

  Considering the trouble she’d gone to to rid herself of the lovelorn Kevin Wyatt—a nightmare that had ended up involving two changes of phone numbers, one move and a sternly worded letter from one of the attorneys in her office—April could have strangled Nate for bringing him up like that, even though he knew none of the details. Instead, she’d calmly wiped the dumb grin off his face, broadsiding him with the fact that there had been no one else for more than a year. No one except him.

  “Besides, my folks have always liked you,” Nate said with a shrug of a powerful shoulder. “Pretty sure they were relieved I at least picked a nice girl from a family they knew instead of one of those—they were none too fond of the kind of girls I used to run around with.”

  “In all fairness, Nate,” she said, remembering one of the few she’d met, “I’m pretty sure nobody from your parents’ generation wants a daughter-in-law named Bambi.”

  He chuckled at a memory, adding, “Or Chardonnay. Or Honey.”

  April bit back the reply that came to mind, the ragged scraps of her good humor evaporating at the thought of Nate with any of those bimbos.

  The wheel appeared to jerk in his hands, and Nate’s smile turned to a scowl. “What now?”

  His question was quickly answered by a rhythmic thumping, a thumping that could only be a—

  “Flat tire,” they both said at once.

  Nate groaned as he pulled to the shoulder. “I damned well knew I should’ve stayed in bed this morning.”

  But what abruptly came to April was how isolated they were out here, with nothing on the horizon but a sea of gold-brown grasses, the herd of cattle grazing in the distance...

  And a prickling instinct warning her that just maybe, coming up behind them, was the anonymous emailer who’d claimed to want her dead.

  Chapter 2

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it,” Nate said, taking some comfort in the fact the rain had dwindled to a drizzle. But icy crystals had formed in it, and according to the dashboard gauge, the temperature had dropped below freezing—a forty-degree plunge in less than three hours with the front.

  If April heard him, she gave no sign as she darted nervous glances at the road behind them. “Sitting ducks,” she murmured. “We’re sitting ducks here.”

  He shot her a glance. What the hell? “What is it?”

  She unlatched the seat belt and reached back to where the luggage had been stashed in preparation for the short honeymoon he’d planned. Coming up with the big leather tote she used as a handbag, she started digging through it. “We have to call Brady. Tell him that we’re stuck out here, so he can send help.”

  One of his groomsmen and a friend for years, Brady McCall had recently been named Trencher County’s new interim sheriff. But they’d left him back in Rusted Spur on the shooter’s trail. “You’re not making any sense. You want to call the sheriff of a county more than a hundred miles behind us to deal with a flat tire?”

  She dumped the tote’s contents in her bloodstained lap, her frantic movements setting off alarm bells in his head. In all the years he’d known her, he’d never seen her like this. Even after today’s shooting, she’d been quick, decisive, keeping her head while others shrieked or sobbed or stampeded to safety.

  “Calm down and talk to me a minute,” he said, worried that this might be some form of delayed shock.

  “My phone’s not in here.” Her voice shook. “I must have left it at your parents’. Or maybe he took it out, so we couldn’t call for help.”

  He grasped her arm until she looked at him, her eyes wide. “Or maybe who took it?” he demanded. “You mean the shooter, April?”

  At her nod, he pulled his smartphone from the inner pocket of the black jacket he was wearing. “I’ve got mine right here. Brady’s in my contacts. See?”

  She jabbed a finger at an icon showing zero bars. “There’s no signal. What if—what if this was all planned?”

  Nate cursed himself for taking them through an area so remote, cell towers were a rarity. His gut clenched as it hit him that his father could be dead already. Or his mother, who’d been so hysterical she’d had to be sedated, might have gotten worse, and he would never know it. And from the look of April’s pale face, there was more bad news to come.

  “What’s this really all about?” he asked, all too conscious of the blood soaked into her dress. There was so damned much of it. But he saw something else in her lap, too, that alarmed even more. “Wait a minute—is that a can of Mace? Why would you have that?” As far off the beaten path as Rusted Spur was, it struck him as odd that she would feel a need for personal protection.

  “Pepper spray, from Austin,” she corrected, quickly tucking it back into her bag.

  “Tell me everything,” he ordered.

  “I tried before. But all we ended up doing is arguing about the wedding.”

  “You’ve got my full attention now. I swear it.”

  She shook her head. “We should change that flat first. Get out of here in case he’s coming. I can help you—”

  “I’ve got it,” he assured her.

  “But your back, Nate.”

  “I’m no cripple.” After all the sweat and pain he’d put into fighting his way out of that wheelchair and building himself back up, he’d be damned if he’d allow a pregnant woman in her wedding dress to change a tire for him. “But I’m not loosening one lug nut until you slow down and explain this. How could the shooter possibly predict we’d have a flat, much less know where we’d—?”

  She was out of her seat belt and out of the truck, leaving him no choice except to follow and start to work on the tire as she’d demanded.

  “Come on, April. It’s freezing out here,” he said, taking the blanket she had left behind and tucking it carefully around her bare arms and shoulders. “Get back inside where it’s warm.”

  “What if he followed us from the ranch, hoping to catch us alone?” She shivered, ignoring his suggestion and pulling the blanket even tighter. “Waiting for his chance, just like he did with Martin.”

  “Villareal again,” Nate said, opening the truck’s hood to grab the tool he’d need to remove the under-bed-mounted spare tire. “Why would you think a flat has anything to do with your boss?”

  “After all the publicity last summer, we got threats at the office. Dozens of them.”

  “The Chambers case?” he guessed, remembering how quickly public opinion had turned against the Texas Justice Project when a man they’d helped to free from prison had gone after the eyewitness who’d put him on death row and beaten the thirty-six-year-old woman within an inch of her life.

  “Right,” April said, a world of regret crammed into a single syllable.

  “Sure, I remember that. Who doesn’t?” Nate headed for the rear of the truck. Even in the rehab center where he’d been at the time, the sad spectacle of the victim’s family’s distress had played out on every TV, from the husband’s anguished fury to their cute blond kids’ tearful pleas for their mama to wake up from her coma.

  “The polic
e were no help at all. They were still mad that we publicized how those two cops fouled up everything from the DNA collection to the—” Cutting herself off, she shook her head. “A person might think they’d want to fix it when they ruin someone’s life by sending the wrong man to prison. Instead, they decided we’re the enemy, trying to destroy careers and embarrass the department.”

  As he squatted down behind the truck to lower the spare, he asked her, “So when Villareal was run down, you’re saying they didn’t do anything about it?”

  “I do think they made a good-faith effort then,” she allowed, “but with no witnesses or cameras out there, they didn’t have a lot to go on. And they saw no connection to some threatening emails we’d gotten months before.”

  Their conclusion made sense to Nate, who’d long since learned that the universe could at times be cruel and random. Seventeen-hundred-pound bulls flattened champion riders a few days before Christmas. Seemingly healthy fifty-eight-year-olds like April’s mother died of undetected aneurysms, witnessed only by the disabled son she had spent decades insulating from the harshness of the world.

  But a few hours earlier, those poinsettias behind April had exploded, an instant after his father had stepped into what Nate realized could have been a line of sight from the barn. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the landmark, famous around the county for the Texas flag painted on the roof and twinkling lights hung every Christmas season. Had the hayloft door been open, the killer waiting inside?

  Distracted by the thought, he pulled himself underneath the truck bed and retrieved the spare, in spite of his back’s jabbing protest. “You said ‘threatening emails we’d gotten,’ right?” He came to his feet with a grunt. “Were you talking about the office as a whole, or just Villareal, or—”

  “I received my share, too,” she admitted, following as he rolled the tire and leaned it against the driver’s side front fender, “addressed specifically to me.”

  Alarm jolted through him. So that was why she carried a canister of personal protection. “But why you? As the public face of the organization, Villareal would naturally draw fire. But why would anyone single out one of several paralegals working in the office?”

  April’s sigh made a hazy plume in the frigid air. “Ordinarily, you’d be right, but there was that horrible Trial TV special that aired back in July.”

  “I didn’t catch that one.” At the time, Nate’s full attention had been focused on the grueling work of relearning to walk. April had visited him in rehab, offering smiles and hugs, even lame jokes like a six-pack tied carrot-fashion to a stick to encourage his progress. But she’d never said a word about what was going on with her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it was embarrassing, that’s why. I was interviewed about nailing down Chambers’s alibi and proving he couldn’t have possibly been anywhere within a hundred miles of the original crime scene. That was just one piece of the puzzle, along with the new DNA testing and the witness’s admission that her ID might’ve been influenced by those two cops breathing down her neck. Only the way the show was edited, they made it sound like I practically broke open the whole case by myself.”

  Nate retrieved his toolbox, unsurprised by her discomfort. Even back in school, April had always preferred to work behind the scenes, letting others hog the glory. It didn’t surprise him either that the TV people would keep their story—and their cameras—focused on a pretty young face like hers as much as possible.

  “The trouble was,” April continued, “by the time he was finally released, twelve years of prison had twisted Ross Allen Chambers in ways I can’t even comprehend. I mean, we knew he’d been repeatedly attacked there, but we had no idea he would—”

  “If prison was so rough on him, why would he risk going after the eyewitness in broad daylight the way he did?”

  April blew out a breath. “Who knows what set him off? Alcohol. Frustration. PTSD from the assaults. Whatever it was, he’ll never breathe free air again. And that poor woman’s life will never be the same.”

  Nate squatted down to start work on the lug nuts. And finally saw what he should have noticed earlier. What he would have, if he hadn’t been so damned distracted by the conversation.

  But when he looked up to tell her, he saw her horrified face staring down the roadway as an older pickup slowed and glided toward them, its window rolling down.

  “Back in the truck, April,” Nate warned, his instinct to protect her bringing him to his feet, the steel wrench clutched like a weapon in his hand.

  * * *

  It can’t be the shooter, not coming from that direction. Though she moved around to the passenger-side door, April was worried enough about Nate that she couldn’t force herself to climb back inside, not until she was certain that everything would be all right.

  The old brown pickup’s brakes squealed as the driver’s side window rolled down. His attention focused on Nate, an older man with a feed store cap called, “Need a hand there with that tire? Don’t look like you’re quite dressed the part, son.”

  When April stepped back into view, his gaze snapped to her gown, his amiable expression freezing.

  Nate lowered the wrench and said, “No, thanks. I’ve got it covered.”

  The man’s wide-eyed gaze latched on to the blood-spattered tuxedo shirt, the color draining from his face. An instant later, tires spun, and the old brown pickup roared off, belching a puff of smoke.

  Nate gave April a once-over, his gaze moving from her wrecked hairdo to the ruined gown. “Can’t imagine what could’ve got into that guy. Hasn’t he ever seen a zombie wedding before?”

  Despite the horror of their situation, April broke out laughing. But then, Nate’s droll delivery had always gotten to her, all the way back to those days when he’d lean forward to whisper something awful in her ear to crack her up in math class.

  Above them, the clouds parted, a patch of cold blue overhead. Sunlight illuminated the rolling prairie, its grass sparkling with the ice coating golden-brown stalks. For a fleeting moment, the beauty of it sliced through winter’s bleakness, touching off a fresh ache in her heart.

  Before she could read too much into it, Nate abruptly sobered. “And the next time I tell you to get back in the truck, you do it. No arguments, no stalling.”

  Annoyed, she made a scoffing sound.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Come over here and see why.”

  She cautiously approached, her heartbeat picking up speed as Nate pointed out the tire he had just pulled off the truck. “See this. That’s a sliced-through sidewall.”

  “So I was right, then. Someone did intentionally cut it.”

  “Nicked it, maybe, for it to leak so slowly. But it’s also possible that something from the road flew up and hit the tire just right.”

  “Sure,” she said, not buying the coincidence for a moment. “Just like that broken pipe this morning—on a night well above freezing—could’ve been an accident.”

  Nate tightened a lug nut on the spare tire and quickly started on another. “I’ve thought about sabotage at the church, too. Remind me to ask Brady about that when we reach him.”

  Frowning, April bit her lip. “If the tire was cut at the ranch, though, why wouldn’t it have gone flat right away?”

  “If the shooter was in a rush, worried he might be seen, his cut might’ve come in at too shallow of an angle.”

  She nodded. “I can see that.”

  “And the dropping temperatures would’ve slowed the leak down even more. But that would mean he’d have no way of guessing where we’d end up stopping. Besides, my bet’s that Brady’s got this guy on the run—or better yet, in custody by now.”

  Despite the queasy feeling in her stomach, April nodded, admitting to herself that Nate was likely right.

  Grimacing, he rubbed his lower back, turning his head in an attempt to hide his expression. Remembering how no one had been sure he would even make it last December, with two vertebrae, his right hip and a fe
mur broken, April knew he had to be in agony, squatting and lifting as he had been. But she fought back her impulse to offer help again, not wanting to add insult to injury by hurting his stubborn cowboy pride.

  Still, she couldn’t stop herself from laying one hand on his shoulder and giving it a squeeze. Instead of shrugging off her touch as she more than half expected, he gave an exhalation that fogged the frigid air. A moment later, he returned to the task before him, the way he had so many times before.

  Standing beside him to keep watch over the road, April wondered if he would ever get past the pain she had inflicted on him today. And if his father didn’t make it, what then would become of this fragile, temporary truce between them? Would Nate’s sense of obligation toward her give way to resentment that the sniper’s bullet hadn’t struck her down instead?

  Chapter 3

  Once they were under way again, April felt the tension in her shoulders ease when they finally turned onto the more heavily traveled road that would take them into Lubbock.

  Ten minutes later, Nate pointed out a tall steel frame in the distance. “Cell tower, dead ahead.”

  “Got it.” She snatched up his phone and called Brady’s personal cell number, then groaned in frustration. “It’s going straight to voice mail.”

  As Nate muttered a curse, she left a brief message asking Brady to get in touch as soon as possible.

  “Try the main sheriff’s department number,” Nate suggested. “We’ve got to let him know what’s really going on.”

  Once she reached one of Brady’s deputies, she hurried to fill him in about her belief that the shooter had been aiming for her. When she brought up the flat, Deputy Anderson sounded skeptical about the theory that it could be part of the shooter’s scheme to catch them on the road.

  “That part sounds a little far-fetched,” he said, “especially since you haven’t run into any other trouble yet. Or maybe the shooter got caught behind our roadblocks.”