Standoff at Mustang Ridge

by Delores Fossen

  “Why. Are. You. Here?” he repeated.

  Struggling and mumbling, she pushed herself to a sitting position. “Swear you aren’t going to kill me.”

  “I swear,” he snapped. He was about to chew her out for daring to ask him that, but Royce held back and just waited for her to continue.

  “After I got the phone call...I started running.” Sophie pulled in a hard breath, and by hanging on to the wall, she managed to get to her feet. “And this cabin was the first place I reached. I thought maybe I could hide until my father answered my text message.” She paused, rubbed her forehead. “My phone doesn’t work up here on the ridge.”

  That last part was the first thing she’d said that made a lick of sense. Cell service here was spotty at best. But it didn’t explain why she’d run to the cabin in the first place. “What happened?”

  Her gaze came to his, and her eyes widened. “Oh, God. We have to get out of here,” she said, her voice trembling again. Heck, Sophie started trembling again, too. Shaking from head to toe.

  Royce stepped in front of her when she tried to go toward the door.

  “We can’t stay,” she insisted. “If they find us together, they’ll try to kill him.”

  Great. Now they were back to her talking out of her head. Royce leaned in and took a whiff of her breath. No smell of booze, so maybe she had been drugged. Something was certainly off here.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” he snarled. “Who’s the him that they’ll try to kill?”

  She pushed him aside and tried to get to her feet again. “The baby they believe I’m having,” she mumbled.

  Royce stared at her. “Wait a minute.” He shook his head. “Are you pregnant?”

  Sophie didn’t answer right away. “No. But I told them I was.”

  Royce would get to the them part later, but for now he wanted more on the fake pregnancy claim. “Why the heck would you tell someone you’re pregnant when you’re not?”

  Sophie groaned, a sound that came from deep within her throat. “I didn’t have a choice. I thought it’d keep us alive.”

  Royce was sure that he blinked. “Us?”

  The tears came to her eyes again. “Us,” she verified. “I told them the baby was...yours.”

  He felt as if someone had slugged him—twice. “You what?” And that was the best he could manage. Royce just kept staring at her and probably would have continued if she hadn’t latched on to him.

  “I’m sorry, Royce. So sorry.” Her breath caught in her throat. “But I just signed your death warrant.”

  Chapter Two

  Sophie wished her teeth would stop chattering so she could hear herself think. Clearly, she’d been wrong about Royce wanting to kill her because he’d had more than ample opportunity to do that and hadn’t. Of course, he might change his mind when he learned what she had done.

  “My death warrant?” Royce snarled. He grabbed his dark brown Stetson that had fallen off during the scuffle and shoved it back on his head.

  His jaw muscles were so tight that she didn’t know how he managed to speak, but even without the words, Sophie could see his narrowed eyes. That, and every muscle in his body seemed primed for a fight. For answers, too.

  Answers that Royce expected her to give him.

  “We have to leave,” she reminded him.

  Even though her feet felt frozen to the floor, Sophie pushed her way past Royce and went to the front window so she could look out and keep watch. The bitter wind howling through the open door cut her bone-deep, but that was minor compared to everything else she was feeling.

  “How did you get here?” she asked.

  “My truck. It’s parked over the ridge because the trail here isn’t passable in winter.” And that’s all he said for several seconds. However, he did shut the door. “What did you mean about signing my death warrant?”

  “Please, can we just go now and you can ask your questions once we’re out of here?” But she stopped and realized if their positions were reversed, she would have dug in her heels. Just as Royce was doing now.

  Maybe the partial truth wouldn’t get them both killed. “I didn’t want you involved in this, but I couldn’t stop them—”

  “Who are them and what is this?” he interrupted.

  Sophie opened her mouth. Closed it. And she shook her head. Where was she to start? The beginning, maybe, but she wasn’t even sure where the beginning was.

  “About a month ago, my father arranged my marriage to his business partner, Travis Bullock—”

  He cursed. “Sophie, how the heck is that related to my so-called death warrant?”

  “It’s related,” she insisted. “I didn’t love Travis, but my father said the marriage would ease some of his financial burdens. He had some investments that didn’t pan out.” She checked out the window again. “My late mother left me the entire estate. Long story,” Sophie added in a mumble. “But I couldn’t give or loan my father any money because the terms of my mother’s will forbid it.”

  “I’d heard rumors of that.” Royce paused a moment, waiting, and made an impatient circling motion with his fingers. He stooped, retrieved his Colt and slipped it back into the leather shoulder holster beneath his coat. He also put her gun in his pocket.

  “Travis said that he’d cover my father’s debts if I married him.” Now it was Sophie’s turn to pause. “He said he was in love with me and that he was willing to pay that price to have me.”

  Royce stared at her, and Sophie wished this meeting had been under different circumstances. She owed him a huge apology. Several of them, in fact.

  “Royce,” she muttered, her voice a whisper now. “I’m sorry.”

  “So you’ve said. It’s not helping with this explanation. I still don’t know what the heck is going on.”

  He gave her a scowl, the muscles stirring in a face that was far more handsome than she wanted it to be. Not that this would have been easier with a less attractive man, but those good looks—the coffee-brown hair and sizzling green eyes—had always unnerved her.

  Attracted her, too.

  Easy to attract in those cowboy-fit jeans, boots and Stetson. And it’d been that stupid attraction that had made her involve him in this equally stupid mess. Talk about a dangerous tangled web, and now she might have trapped Royce and her both in it.

  Royce made another of those impatient sounds, and Sophie continued with what she hoped would be good enough answers to get them moving. “I started to have second thoughts about marrying Travis,” she added. “He definitely wasn’t the decent, honest man my father said he was.”

  “So, to get out of a loveless marriage,” Royce concluded, his voice flat, “you told Travis we’d had sex and that you’re pregnant with my baby?”

  She nodded. It was more than that. Much more. But she instinctively knew that telling Royce all the details wasn’t a good idea, especially since it didn’t appear he was so furious with her that he was out to kill her.

  “We didn’t really have sex, did we?” he asked.

  Sophie took a deep breath, shook her head.

  Relief went through his eyes, and it wasn’t a small amount of it, either. “Good. Because I was drunker than I’d ever been in my life, and I shouldn’t have let things get that far.”

  “We didn’t have sex,” she snapped. “Now, just leave it at that, all right?”

  “All right,” he growled. “But Travis believes otherwise and he also believes we made a baby that night. Now he wants to kill us.”

  “Maybe,” she mumbled. But again, that was just a small piece of the story. She turned back to the window and tried to assure herself that she hadn’t been followed. “The reason I was trying to get out of the marriage was because I found out some things.”

  And here’s where her explanation would have to veer off. She couldn’t implicate her father in this.

  Sophie chose her words carefully. “I believe Travis was into some illegal activity, and I was in the process of working with an FBI agent t
o uncover that activity. I was copying files and sending them to him.”

  Selective files, but that was yet something else Sophie wasn’t about to tell a lawman who could, and would, arrest her father.

  “Last night Travis confronted me and said he thought I was betraying him because I’d been acting suspicious.” She glanced at Royce, ready to ask again if they could get moving, but he just motioned for her to continue. “I thought I’d settled his mind, but then after dinner, he confronted me again. He kept pushing for the truth, and the image of you flashed through my head.”

  Specifically, the image of them half-naked at the motel.

  But she kept that to herself.

  Best not to let Royce know that it was a particular image she couldn’t get out of her mind. Or her dreams.

  “And that’s when you lied?” he asked.

  She nodded, checked the window again. “More or less. I said I was pregnant with another man’s child, and Travis told me he’d seen pictures of you and me together.”

  “Pictures?” Royce flatly repeated.

  “I don’t know if Travis had them or not, and he didn’t show them to me. Maybe someone at the party at the Outlaw Bar took them.” Or maybe they’d been a bluff.

  “But these pictures convinced him that I’d gotten you pregnant.” He paused. “Hell, I’m guessing Travis didn’t take that news too well?”

  “He didn’t. He slapped me and stormed out.”

  Royce’s jaw muscles jerked, tightening even more. “You should have had his sorry butt arrested for hitting you.”

  She’d wanted to. Heck, she’d wanted to slap Travis right back, but Sophie hadn’t. Besides in Travis’s state of mind, he might have done a lot more than slap her.

  “I thought it was over, that Travis was out of my life,” Sophie continued. “Until this morning, that is. I got the call from the FBI agent.” Just saying it required a deep breath. “He said he’d gotten word from a criminal informant that someone had hired a hit man to go after you and that someone else had been hired to kidnap me.”

  Royce stood there, staring, with his forehead bunched up. It was a lot to take in. She’d had several hours and still hadn’t managed it.

  “I told the agent I was going to call you,” she continued when Royce didn’t say anything. “I wanted to warn you, but the agent said I shouldn’t.”

  “Really?” No more bunched-up forehead. Instead, Royce rolled his eyes and cursed. “And why is that? Why wouldn’t I need to know something like that?”

  “Because he thought you might be trying to kill me, too.”

  Royce’s cursing got worse. “Why the hell would you believe I’d want to kill you?”

  “Because the agent said Travis might have convinced you to do it.”

  In hindsight, it wasn’t a good reason, but it had made some sense at the time. In her terrified mind, Sophie had figured that Travis was angry enough to convince Royce that she’d trapped him into this pregnancy. Her fears hadn’t calmed a bit when Royce had shown up at the cabin with his gun aimed at her.

  “Why didn’t the FBI send someone to the ranch to protect you?” Royce asked. “And why the hell didn’t they call me or my brother to tell us what was going on?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking straight, and maybe the FBI had someone on the way. I’m not sure. Right after the phone call, I looked out the window and saw two men dressed all in black. They both had rifles.”

  After several more moments of his intense stare, some of the skepticism left Royce’s eyes. “You should have called me then and there.”

  “Maybe. But remember, I was still of the mind-set that you might want to do me in for ruining your life and getting you in hot water with Travis.”

  “I can handle Travis,” he snarled. “And later I’ll want to know why this FBI agent put such crazy ideas in your head.”

  Sophie wanted to know the same thing. Of course, she could have misinterpreted what the agent had said since she’d never been that scared in her life.

  “Why didn’t you just hide or yell for your father when you saw those two armed gunmen?” Royce asked. “Certainly, he’s got a ton of men around the ranch?”

  “Normally. But most are still on holiday break. Plus, he let some hands go because, well, to save money. I don’t know where my father and brother are, but I realized I was in the house alone. I got dressed, grabbed the Smith & Wesson and left.”

  He glanced at her gown, silently challenging that getting dressed part.

  “I partially dressed,” Sophie amended with a huff. “And I hurried out from the other side of the house so the men wouldn’t see me. I started running and ended up here.” She’d more or less stumbled her way to the cabin.

  Royce opened his mouth to say something, but then he cursed again when his phone buzzed. He jerked it from his coat pocket as if he’d declared war on it and looked at the screen.

  “Trouble?” she asked, holding her breath.

  “My brother. He’s just checking on me.” He replied to the text, and he shoved the phone back in his pocket. “I told him I was on my way back to town and that he was to send a deputy to your father’s ranch.” Royce looked at her. “You need to come with me to the sheriff’s office so I can take your statement.”

  A statement with more questions than answers. Had Travis really sent two gunmen to kidnap her because she’d told him she was pregnant with Royce’s child?

  Or was this about something else?

  “I’ll have Travis brought in for questioning, too,” Royce added. He went to the porch, motioning for her to stay back, and he looked around the area. Not an ordinary look. The thorough kind a cop would do.

  Finally, he motioned for her to follow him. “I’ll need to speak to this FBI agent, too. What’s his name?”

  “Keith Lott.”

  Royce repeated it as if trying to figure out if he’d heard it before. “How’d you meet him?”

  “He contacted me. Lott asked me to help him look into Travis’s business files, and since I was suspicious, I agreed to help him.”

  Plus, she wanted a way out of the marriage.

  “I’ll also need to talk to your father,” Royce insisted.

  Sophie went stiff. “He didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “There had to be a reason he wasn’t at the ranch this morning.”

  “But that reason has nothing to do with those two gunmen,” she countered.

  Royce made a skeptical sound. “I’ll still be questioning him. Can you walk down the ridge?” he asked before she could respond to that.

  “I’d crawl if it means getting out of here.”

  “Crawling’s not necessary, but I don’t want you falling. Those shoes aren’t exactly meant for trekking through snow and ice.”

  She nodded, knowing he was right, but she’d grabbed the first pair she could find. Sophie caught onto the back of Royce’s jacket as he led them out of the cabin. They both continued to keep watch.

  “Why aren’t you chewing me out because of the lie I told?” she whispered.

  He lifted his shoulder. “Desperate people do desperate things.”

  Yes, she had indeed been desperate. “I honestly didn’t think it would make Travis come after you. And me.”

  Royce didn’t respond to that. He kept trudging through the ice and snow that blanketed the trail, but she figured he was chewing her out in his mind.

  She certainly was.

  Mercy, she’d been so stupid to blurt that out and even more stupid to have agreed to the marriage in the first place. Of course, her father hadn’t given her much of a choice about the marriage.

  Soon, she’d have to figure out how to handle her father’s situation, too.

  Royce stopped so quickly that Sophie plowed right into him, and he turned, caught onto her to stop her from falling. She was about to ask him why he’d stopped, but he put his finger to his mouth in a “stay quiet” gesture.

  And he reached into his jacket and dre
w his gun.

  That robbed her of her breath, and her gaze darted around so she could see what had alarmed him. But Sophie didn’t see anything other than the winter landscape. Didn’t hear anything, either, but that wasn’t surprising since the wind was starting to howl now.

  Royce lifted his head just a fraction, and without warning, he latched on to her arm and threw her to the ground. The impact nearly knocked the breath right out of her.

  Sophie didn’t have time to ask why he’d done that, because she heard something. Someone was moving in the trees behind them. And that sound barely had time to register when the shot blasted through the air.

  Chapter Three

  A dozen things went through Royce’s mind, but first and foremost was to get Sophie out of the line of fire. He dragged her behind the nearest tree. When he looked out, ready to return fire, he saw nothing.

  But someone was definitely out there.

  The shot was proof of that.

  Royce figured it was too much to hope that it was a hunter who’d fired a stray shot. No, he wasn’t that lucky. However, he wasn’t sure he believed all of Sophie’s story about hit men and kidnappers.

  That left her ex, Travis.

  Royce hardly knew the man since Travis had only moved to Mustang Ridge about a year ago, but maybe Travis was the sort who’d let his temper take him to a bad place when Sophie had told him about the fake pregnancy. If so, Travis was going to pay, and pay hard for this.

  A bullet slammed into the tree just inches from where Royce and Sophie were, and he pushed her even lower to the ground until her face was right against the snow.

  “I’m Deputy Sheriff McCall,” Royce shouted out just on the outside chance those two bullets hadn’t been meant for him.

  Another shot smacked into the tree.

  Well, that cleared up his outside chance theory that the shooter wasn’t trying to kill him or Sophie. Or both.

  “Travis?” Royce tried again. “If that’s you, we can settle this without me having to shoot you.”

  And there was no mistaking, Royce would take out whoever was doing this if he didn’t stop. Royce waited for an answer. No shot this time, but he did hear something else. Footsteps.