Iron Cowboy

by Diana Palmer

  He looked shocked.

  “I thought so,” she continued. “It was easy to see that she was after you. She watched every move you made. She wore seductive clothes. She did everything except wear a sign to show you that she was willing. No man could have resisted her.”

  She made him feel less guilty. She was right. It was Sara’s fault. He’d been seduced, not the reverse. The alcohol helped him see the truth.

  She saw the wheels turning in his mind. “And now you’re worried about consequences.”

  He gave it away without knowing.

  She nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. You just attend to your current situation and leave it to me.”

  “Don’t hurt her,” he said as an afterthought.

  “That’s a joke. I won’t have to.”

  “Okay.” He went to find Tony. He felt a weight lifted from his shoulders. It would be all right. If Tony noticed that his boss was half lit, he was kind enough not to say anything about it.

  Sara was back at work on Monday morning, feeling guilty and ashamed, as if what had happened showed on her face.

  “Bad weekend?” Dee asked gently. “We all have them, from time to time.”

  “I went to the barbecue at the Parks’s place,” she replied. “The food was great.”

  Dee grinned. “Did Harley have a good time, too?”

  “Harley had to go run an errand for his boss just after the dancing started,” Sara said sadly. Harley would have saved her if Cy hadn’t separated him from Sara.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Dee murmured.

  Something in her tone disturbed Sara. She glanced at her boss. “What?”

  “Did you know that Jared and Cy Parks grew up in the same town?”

  Sara dropped the stapler she was holding and scrambled to pick it up again. “How do you know?”

  “My cousin works for Cy on his ranch. He knows all the gossip. Yes, Cy had a place in Montana, and so did Jared Cameron.” She stopped putting used books into boxes for resale. “Jared asked Cy to remove Harley from the field,” she added.

  Sara had always liked Cy Parks, until now. But he couldn’t have known what a near-tragedy he’d contributed to. He probably thought Jared was seriously interested in Sara. According to Max, Jared was never seriously interested in any woman. Especially, she recalled sickly, once he’d had her. Her eyes closed in misery.

  “Harley was topping cotton he was so mad,” Dee continued. “He almost quit his job. He said you were a babe in the woods and Jared was a wolf in disguise.”

  “Jared was a perfect gentleman,” Sara lied, and made it look convincing.

  Dee stared at her for a minute and then visibly relaxed. “Thank goodness. I was worried…silly of me. I have to run to the bank to get some change for the drawer. Want coffee from the doughnut place?”

  “Yes, please, black. No cream or sugar.”

  “That’s new. You’re sure?”

  “I’m getting back to the basics, even in coffee. I’ll hold down the fort.”

  Dee smiled gently. “Okay.”

  After Dee left, Sara felt as if the world was collapsing around her. It was a crisis that compared in intensity only to that episode in her past. She’d survived that, she reminded herself. She could survive anything, after that.

  But minutes later, Max parked one of the ranch trucks outside the bookstore and strolled in, looking smug and arrogant. “Jared sent me,” she said curtly. She took out an envelope and handed it to Sara. “It’s a check for ten thousand dollars. He said there had better not be any complications from what happened Saturday night.” She nodded toward the envelope. “There’s more than enough in there to pay for a termination. And if it’s not necessary, then you’ve still got a nest egg for the foreseeable future. Jared won’t be here much longer.”

  “Won’t…be here,” Sara stammered, shocked by the unfolding nightmare.

  “He’s been down here waiting for the authorities to get their hands on three illegal aliens who came up from South America to kidnap Jared and hold him for ransom.”

  “Ransom?”

  Max pulled a magazine from her briefcase. It was a national financial journal. There, on the front cover, was Jared Cameron. The story inside was revealed in a sentence: Oil magnate target of terrorists after firefight at South American pipeline…

  Sara gasped.

  “You can keep it,” Max said easily. “To remember him by.”

  “But why did he come here?” Sara asked blankly.

  “Because some of the team of mercenaries that helped him destroy the original terrorist cell that targeted his oil pipeline two years ago live here,” she replied. “The survivors aren’t willing to give up. They figure if they can nab Jared, they’ll recoup what they lost when they failed to hold on to his oil pipeline in South America. They demanded millions for it, and he sent in mercenaries instead. He pulled out when the oil companies were nationalized, but the terrorists still want the money. Now they want revenge as well. They were just apprehended today near Victoria.”

  “Then he’s safe,” Sara said dully.

  “He is. And he can go down to Cancún with me for a long holiday,” she added. “His headquarters is in Oklahoma, but he has another house in Billings, Montana, and vacation homes all over the world. He’s worth millions. The terrorists knew that his corporation would pay any amount of money to get him back. He’s something of a financial genius.” Her eyes narrowed as she smiled. “Hardly a match for a little bookseller in outback Texas, is he?”

  Sara just looked at her, with the anguish she couldn’t hide all over her face.

  Max’s expression hardened. “You’d better realize that he means business. If you turn up pregnant, you’d better get a termination. You don’t want to know what he could do to you and your reputation.”

  Sara didn’t answer her. She couldn’t. She just stared.

  Max shrugged. “You’ve been warned.” She stopped at the doorway. “You shouldn’t look so tragic. Women have fought their way into his bed for years.”

  “What for?” Sara asked with deliberate scorn.

  Max looked as if she’d been doused with water. “You don’t mean that you didn’t enjoy…?”

  “I’d rather stay single for the rest of my life than go through that again, ever,” Sara said with a sob in her voice.

  Something in Max that had been buried for a decade sat up and shivered. She searched for the right words. “You’ve never…?”

  Sara swallowed hard. “My grandfather said that women who give their bodies cheaply are bound for purgatory.”

  Max’s thin eyebrows pulled together. “Sara,” she began hesitantly, “how old are you?”

  “What does that have to do with…?”

  “How old are you?”

  Sara swallowed. “Nineteen.”

  Max felt the blood going out of her face. She was using a cannon to shoot a bird. She drew in a long breath. Well, at least it hadn’t been statutory rape. But she was sure Jared didn’t know how old this child was. He’d never have touched her.

  “I’m sorry,” Max told her. “I’m really sorry.”

  She turned and went out the door.

  Sara dried her tears and went back to straightening the books on their shelves. Jared was a multimillionaire who owned an oil corporation and he was only here at the ranch to set a trap for the terrorists who wanted him for ransom. Sara had thought he was here forever. When he held her close and kissed her, she thought he wanted her forever. She was wrong on both counts. He could buy as many women as he wanted. Sara wasn’t even in the running, except that he’d wanted her. Or, maybe he’d just wanted a woman and she was handy. She really did need to grow up.

  Max was solemn and quiet when she went back to the ranch. Jared noticed.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She looked up at him. “She’s nineteen, Jared.”

  He had to sit down. Nothing had ever hit him quite so hard.

  She sat down across
from him in an armchair. “I told her what was necessary…”

  “You what?” he asked, aghast.

  She held up a hand. “Being kind to her isn’t an option. What if she decided to accuse you of forcing her? You could lose millions. Your reputation would be in ashes. What sort of life would it be for a child, if she had one, living in this small town asylum with a mother who barely made minimum wage and could hardly afford to clothe her?”

  Jared wasn’t thinking about money. He was remembering the throb in Sara’s voice in the darkness. She hadn’t been leading him on. She hadn’t realized what he meant. She didn’t know that she was agreeing to have sex with him. And she was nineteen years old. He felt guilt like a rush of hot acid in his gut.

  “When are we going to Cancún?” Max asked, to divert him.

  He turned and looked at her, but he didn’t see her. “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “A few days on the beach would do you good,” she coaxed. “You can put this place behind you.”

  He was staring at her. “Why Cancún?” he asked.

  She hesitated. “It’s got lovely beaches. There are Mayan ruins nearby.”

  His eyes had narrowed. “You’d better come clean.”

  She frowned. “I’m not doing anything dishonest,” she said. “There’s a consortium that handles pharmaceuticals. They want to invest in our corporation.”

  “Name them.”

  She frowned more. “Well, I don’t really have just one name. They call themselves the Reconquistas.”

  “When did you speak with them?”

  “Last week. Why?”

  “Law enforcement just apprehended three terrorists in Victoria, heading this way,” he said furiously. “And you don’t know why?”

  She looked stunned. “You can’t mean…!”

  “They’re part of the consortium that smuggles narcotics, Max,” he told her flatly. “If you’d come to me in the first place, I would have told you. But you were seeing dollar signs, weren’t you?”

  She flushed. “It never hurts to make more money.”

  “It never hurts to fire people, either,” he said pointedly. “You’d better start looking for another job.”

  “You’re not serious,” she laughed. “You fire me all the time, but you always call me back.”

  He looked resolute. “Not this time,” he said in a cold tone. “You’ve done enough damage.”

  “Me?” She stood up, fuming. “I’ve done enough damage? What would you call seducing a nineteen-year-old virgin?”

  The last word drifted away as she noticed Tony standing fixed in the doorway, with eyes that promised mayhem.

  Jared saw him and grimaced.

  Tony marched right up to him. “Is it true?” he demanded.

  Jared couldn’t even find the words.

  “That sweet woman,” Tony said coldly, “who never hurt anybody, after the tragedy of her past almost destroyed her, and here you come to put the last nail in her coffin!”

  “What do you mean, the tragedy of her past?” Jared asked.

  Tony didn’t reply. He looked more dangerous at that moment than Jared had ever seen before. “I’ll never tell you. And the minute this standoff ends, I’m through. I won’t work for a man like you.”

  He turned on his heel and went right back to the kitchen.

  Max swallowed the hurt. She and Tony had both hit rock bottom, it seemed. “Well, it looks like you and your conscience will have a long time to get to know each other, doesn’t it?”

  She stopped by the kitchen to ask Tony to drive her to the airport. He agreed curtly. Jared went back into his study and slammed the door. He’d never felt so ashamed in his life.

  The next morning, when Sara went to work, she noticed a strange beat-up van in the parking lot. It had been there just as she drove out of the parking lot the day before. In fact, it had pulled in just after Max walked into the bookstore. Sara hadn’t seen anybody in it the day before, and she didn’t see any people in it now. Maybe it broke down there and the owner had left it until he could get a mechanic to tow it. She went into the bookstore.

  “Hi, Dee,” she called.

  Dee smiled. “Hi, yourself. I’m off to the bank. Want coffee?”

  “I’d love it.”

  “I’ll pick us up a doughnut apiece, too.” She stopped at the door. “That old van’s still there.”

  “Maybe it broke down,” Sara murmured.

  “I’m amazed anyone would risk driving it in the first place,” Dee chuckled. “I’ll be quick.”

  “Okay.”

  She’d no sooner driven away than three foreign-looking men walked into the bookstore. They glanced at Sara and nodded before they walked down the aisles, one of them peering into Dee’s open office.

  Sara didn’t usually have premonitions, but she felt something odd about the men. She remembered what Max had said about terrorists. These three were tall and swarthy and disreputable-looking. They were wearing jeans and T-shirts, and they had very prominent muscles. She was in the bookstore alone, with no weapons except the pocketknife she used to open boxes with. She wouldn’t stand a chance against even one of them, much less three, despite Chief Grier’s handy self-defense for women course. She could scream, of course, but the bookstore was temporarily the only business in the strip mall.

  They might have been arrested in Victoria, but it was obvious that they’d made bail. She knew the look of the people who lived in her area. These three were from overseas. And she didn’t need a program to know why they were in town. They were after Jared. Max had come to the bookstore in a ranch pickup and had a solemn conversation with a woman. They might have had high-tech listening devices. If they knew who Max was, and they’d overheard what she said to Sara, maybe they figured Sara was a softer target than Jared, with his bodyguard.

  She pretended not to see them, while her mind worried over possible courses of action. There was one. It was a long shot. If she stabbed herself with the pocketknife and they could see blood, and she pretended to be unconscious and tried to look dead, they might be startled into leaving. It would be risky to carry a wounded woman off for ransom, wouldn’t it? Especially if she looked as if she were dying…it would slow everything down.

  I’m probably crazy, she told herself. They’re just tourists or ranch hands searching for something to read. Right, she added, and that’s why they’re looking outside to make sure nobody’s coming and heading straight for me!

  She knew where the appendicitis incision was. It was her best hope of missing any essential organs. They came around the counter, towering over her.

  “You come with us,” one of the men said in accented English. “We see you with the lawyer. You are Cameron’s woman. He will pay for you.”

  “I am nobody’s woman. I will die before I go with you!” she said, and, giving up a silent prayer, she jabbed the pocketknife into the incision, through her blouse. “Oooh!” she cried, because it did hurt.

  She crumpled to the floor with blood on her hands and shirt. She sighed heavily and held her breath. She looked dead.

  The men hesitated. They’d planned well, and now their hostage had committed suicide right in front of them!

  While they hesitated, Harley Fowler got out of his truck and headed for the bookstore. He was wearing a sidearm, a six-gun that he carried when he was working fence lines, in case he encountered a rattler or some other dangerous animal. The men made a quick decision. They ran for it. They ran so fast that they almost knocked Harley down in the process.

  Harley didn’t understand why three men were running for the van. Then he thought about robbery. Sara and Dee were here alone. He darted into the bookstore.

  Sara was on the floor, blood pouring from her side. She looked up at Harley, gasping for breath. “It worked,” she mumbled. “I hurt myself, though. Can you call 911 please?”

  He grimaced as he saw the blood. “Yes, I can.” He flipped out his cell phone and pushed in the code, holding it to his ear wit
h his shoulder as he pulled Sara’s shirt aside and looked at the wound.

  He put pressure on it to stop the bleeding and spoke into the cell phone between his shoulder and his ear. He had an ambulance sent to the bookstore. He managed to hold one hand on her wound and close the phone with the other and slide it back into his pocket.

  “You’ll be all right, Sara,” he told her. “Any man who’d do this to a woman should be shot! I should have stopped them!”

  “They didn’t do it, Harley, I did,” she said weakly. “They were going to kidnap me. They thought Jared Cameron would pay ransom for me. What a joke!”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “His lawyer, Max, came to buy me off yesterday,” she said miserably. “They must have followed her here.”

  “You aren’t making sense.”

  The wound hurt. She moved and flinched. “Look at the magazine on the counter, Harley,” she told him. “You’ll see.”

  “When the paramedics get here, I will,” he replied, but he didn’t move his hands. He didn’t dare.

  Dee and the ambulance arrived at the same time. She ran into the store, red-faced and fearful.

  “Oh, my goodness!” she exclaimed. “Sara!”

  “Three men. They were in that old van, I think,” she told Dee. “They were going to kidnap me for ransom.”

  “Ransom? Dear, you must be feverish…”

  Harley picked up the magazine and looked at it, frowning as he handed it to Dee.

  They exchanged a worried glance.

  The paramedics loaded Sara on the gurney.

  “I’ll go with her,” Harley said. “Dee, you’d better call Cash Grier, in case they come back.”

  “I’ll do it right now.” She picked up the store phone.

  “I’ll be all right. Honest,” Sara assured Harley.

  He didn’t answer. He was too worried.

  The wound wasn’t bad. Dr. Coltrain had to sew her up. He did it, after giving her a local anesthetic, shaking his head. “Couldn’t you have dialed 911?” he asked.

  “I’d never have made it to the phone. There were three of them, heavily muscled, with accents, and not Spanish ones. I heard accents like that in Africa,” she whispered.