by Nicole Helm
The sound didn’t repeat, and she slowly moved down the hallway. Just as she reached Ranger Cooper’s door, she heard it again.
It was oddly high-pitched, but not quite mechanical. Where she had originally planned to be very careful and quiet, gently waking up Ranger Cooper, the sound repeating caused Natalie to move forward clumsily and jerkily, swinging open his door with no finesse it all.
He was bolting up in the bed before the door even banged against the wall. His hand immediately closed over his weapon, which had been placed on a nightstand next to his bed.
It was the second time he’d almost pulled his weapon on her in the course of not very many hours, but she was glad he had such quick reflexes. It was oddly comforting to know he would immediately grab for his gun and try to protect them both. Considering he had never actually done anything with the gun, just placed his hand on it both times, she still felt safe in his presence.
He flung off the covers, getting out of the bed in one quick, graceful movement. He was wearing athletic shorts and a T-shirt, and perhaps a little bit later she’d have more time to appreciate just how sculpted his muscles were, but for right now she had her life to save.
“What’s happening?” he asked, his hands clutching the gun at his side, looking like a man ready to fight.
“I...heard a noise,” Natalie said, feeling foolish and scared and just damn lost.
He didn’t balk, he didn’t question her. He simply nodded.
Chapter Seven
Vaughn tried to loosen his grip on the gun. Natalie had shocked him the hell out of sleep, and the adrenaline was still pounding through him.
He glanced at Natalie’s pale face. “Tell me what you heard,” he ordered gruffly, shoving his feet into his boots.
“I...I don’t even know. It was kind of high-pitched, but... It didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before.”
He gave a sharp nod, not bothering to pull the laces tight. “Where did it come from?” He stepped out into the hall and motioned her to follow.
“I’m not sure. It was so sudden and out of nowhere. But, it’d had to have come from closer to the front of the cabin, I think, or it would have been more muffled.”
Again, he nodded. He listened for any noise aside from the sounds of their feet on the stone floor. Nothing. “I want you to stay in the hallway while I check the windows and doors.” He stopped his progress and turned to face her. “You will stay right here no matter what. Understand?”
She scrunched her nose, but she didn’t argue with him. She nodded, lips clamped together as though she didn’t trust herself to speak.
She was smart, he’d give her that. He entered the living area, starting at the window closest to him. As stealthily as possible, he raised the curtain, surveyed what he could and then moved to the next window—each time all he saw was rocks and dusk.
He made it to the kitchen window and still nothing. They’d have to go outside. He debated making her stay inside while he searched, but it would be more dangerous to separate. Especially separating the unarmed civilian from the man trained to handle a weapon.
“I’m not seeing anything,” he said gruffly, turning to find her exactly where he’d left her in the hall.
“I swear I heard something,” she said, her eyes still round, her fingers clenched into fists.
“I believe you,” he returned, barely paying attention as he tried to formulate a plan on how to investigate the perimeter without getting either one of them killed.
“You do?”
He glanced back at the note of incredulousness in her voice, focusing more on her than his plans for the first time. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
“No, I just...” She shook her head, looking completely baffled. “I’m...not used to people believing me. Especially you.”
Those last two words shouldn’t have an impact on him. What did it matter if he hadn’t believed her all this time? They were here, weren’t they? He was keeping her safe. Yet he felt that especially you like a sharp pain.
But he didn’t have time to dwell on that or figure it out. Quite frankly he wouldn’t want to even if he did.
“We’re going to have to search the perimeter together. We’re going to do the same thing we did when we got here. You’re going to follow me closely. Listen to whatever I say. And hopefully we’ll find the source of the noise and it’s nothing.”
“And if it’s something?”
“There are too many possibilities for us to sit here and go over all of them. You’re just going to have to follow my lead, and everything will be fine.”
“Is the unwavering confidence real, or do you say those sorts of things so I’ll go along with whatever you say?”
Oddly, he wanted to smile. Because it was a good question—a fair one, and the dry way she delivered it. Because he appreciated her backbone. Unfortunately, now was not the time for good or fair questions. So he simply said, “Both” and then started walking toward the door.
She followed him as she had when they’d first arrived. Though her antagonism and questioning tended to grate on his nerves, he would have to give her credit for following directions when it was required.
She wanted to fight him, it was obvious, but she didn’t. He admired both. Someone who didn’t get a little bent out of shape about being told what to do was too much of a pushover to be of any real help. But someone who could make the choice to listen even if they didn’t want to, that was a person with sense.
You’re seriously having these thoughts about that woman?
He opened the door, forcing himself to focus on the task ahead and nothing else. He used the door as a shield and scanned the front yard. Since the house was nestled into one of the swells of land that wasn’t rocky mountain, the land in front of the house stretched far and wide. There’d be no place to hide within shooting range, and as he scanned the land around them, he didn’t see anything that might be people or the evidence of them.
The problem was going to be the back of the house. There was a small yard between the desert and the building, and walking back there would prove even trickier without having any kind of cover.
A piercing howl of a coyote echoed in the quickly cooling desert air. He always liked listening to them, but his sister had said they were as creepy as hell.
Apparently Ms. Torres agreed with his sister because her hand clamped around his arm. “That’s it. That’s the sound,” she said, her voice little more than a squeaky whisper.
Vaughn immediately relaxed. Dropping his gun to his side, he turned to face her. Her long and slender fingers still curled around his forearm. He glanced at her hand momentarily, not sure why such a simple touch was dancing over him like...like anticipation.
There was nothing to anticipate here. So that feeling needed to go.
“Why’d you put your gun down? What is it?” She looked at him with those wide, scared eyes, and he couldn’t help but smile. She blinked, clearly confused.
“It’s coyotes. We have them here, and they occasionally get close to the house and do the howling. But it’s just an animal. Nothing to be afraid of.”
She looked horrified, and for a second he thought he was going to have to give a lecture about how coyotes weren’t dangerous and there were far bigger things to worry about, but her hand dropped and she closed her eyes. Not fear etching over her face, but a pink-tinged embarrassment.
“I feel like such an idiot. Coyotes. That’s it?”
“You’ve never heard a coyote before?”
She heaved a sigh. “I’ve only ever lived in Houston and Austin. In the city. Animal noises are not my expertise. It didn’t sound...howly.” She shook her head, disgusted. With herself, he imagined.
“Sometimes they’ll sound like a big group howl, sometimes it’s not quite so delineated
, but it’s definitely coyote.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, all too sincerely, all too...worked up for an honest mistake. It made him itchy and uncomfortable, and irritably needing to soothe it away.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. It was an honest mistake. Unless you’re apologizing for something else?”
Her mouth firmed. “No, I’m not apologizing for anything else. I... You...” Her eyebrows drew together, and those dark eyes studied him, some emotion he couldn’t recognize in their depths. “But it was an animal, and nothing, and... You aren’t mad that I woke you up and got you into police mode when it was nothing?”
“Of course not. You heard an unknown noise and you reacted exactly as you should have. Exactly as I told you to. Why on earth would I be mad?”
“I don’t understand you at all, Ranger Cooper. All the things I expect you to be hard on me about, you’re not, but the things I don’t expect you to be hard on me about, you are.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t expect either.”
She laughed at that. A bright, loud laugh, and it was a shock how much the sound of someone else’s laughter surprised him. When was the last time he’d heard anyone laugh? Sarcastic laughter, sure. All the time at work. But he had been so focused on getting somewhere in the cases connected to The Stallion there hadn’t been any banter at work, he hadn’t had any kind of social life and he hadn’t relaxed at all.
It was only now, here, in the middle of the desert and mountains, with this strange woman’s laughter ringing in his ears that he realized any of that. A very uncomfortable and unsettling realization prompted by a very uncomfortable and unsettling woman.
Maybe that was appropriate, all in all.
“You should call me Vaughn.” He had no idea where that instruction came from. Why on earth would she call him Vaughn? He should be nothing to her but Ranger Cooper.
And yet something about that smile and laugh made him... Well, stupid apparently. “Let’s head back inside.”
“Your name is Vaughn?”
“No, I’m lying,” he grumbled.
She laughed again as they stepped inside, and he found himself smiling. The last thing he should be feeling now was any kind of lightness, and yet that little exchange had done exactly that—lightened him. It had to be the sleep exhaustion.
“That’s a very unconventional name for a very conventional man.”
“How do you know I’m conventional?”
“Oh, please. You can’t possibly not be conventional. You showed up at that fire at three thirty in the morning all neat and unwrinkled. You don’t believe in hypnotism. You were nothing but...” She pulled her shoulders up to her ears and pretended to tense all over. “Like a tight ball of contained, by-the-book energy. Everything about you is conventional.”
“Ms. Torres, trust me when I say that you do not know everything about me.”
Her eyes met his, and he recognized that little weird energy that passed between them. He wished he didn’t, but there was no denying the flirtatious undertone to all of this. He should stop it immediately.
But she held his gaze and she smiled. “Natalie. You should call me Natalie, remember?”
That uncomfortable and unwelcome attraction dug deeper into his gut. The kind of deeper that led a man to make foolish mistakes and stupid decisions. The kind he knew better than to indulge in.
But it was also the kind that tended to override that knowledge.
* * *
NATALIE’S BREATHING BECAME shallow for a whole different reason than it had the past few days. Looking at Vaughn, because he said she should call him Vaughn, and knowing they were doing a very weird, and very nearly flirting thing, yeah, it made her body respond in unwelcome ways.
She was too warm, and a little shaky. Not the kind Vaughn could see, but the kind that was internal. The kind that messed with her equilibrium.
She should really look away from that ice-blue gaze, but she simply stared. She really should stop. Any minute now.
“You know, not believing in hypnotism isn’t exactly unconventional. It’s just common sense.”
Well, the man sure knew how to kill a moment. She walked farther into the living room and decided to take a seat on the comfy-looking couch. Men like him never could accept there might be a softer way about getting information than torture or the like.
“What exactly do you think hypnotism is, fun? Magic?”
“That’s the point. It’s not magic. It’s not real.”
“That’s because you have the wrong perception of what hypnotism is. It’s not about magic. It’s not about getting someone to do something against their will. It’s about giving the person being hypnotized a safe place to express something that’s hard for them to express. It’s about finding a center, finding calm. It’s not tricks. It’s not getting someone to bark like a dog on stage. It’s showing someone who has every reason to be afraid of talking a calmness inside themselves that can allow them to give information they, deep down, want to give.”
She knew she was lecturing, but he was always ordering her about, so maybe turnaround was fair play. “You can’t make someone do something under hypnotism that they don’t want to do. The thing is, they want to do this. They just have a mental block. Calming their breathing and giving them that safe place gives them the tools to get over that block. It’s not magic. It’s not supposed to be magic. It’s a tool.”
He was silent for a few moments, and she thought maybe she’d surprised him with her answer. When people actually sat down to listen to how she explained hypnotism and why it worked in terms of witnesses, they tended to understand. Even if they didn’t necessarily believe in it, they at least understood that no one thought this was some magical cure. Most people sneered at it a lot less once she explained. She had a sneaking suspicion that Vaughn was not one of those “most people.”
“If they want to give us the answers, then what’s the point of you? Why don’t they just, you know, give us the answers?”
“Let’s use Herman as an example,” she replied, relaxing into the couch, crossing her arms over her chest, refusing to back down to his disdain. “He knew that he was going to die. He knew that talking to you was going to get him killed. But let’s start at the beginning? How did you get Herman to come in?”
Vaughn narrowed his eyes at her and stood there for a few minutes of ticking silence. As though he wasn’t quite sure that she was worthy of the information. It made her want to smack him.
“He was pulled over. Since he had warrants, he was brought in.”
“And then you and Ranger Stevens decided to question him because...?”
“Because he was connected to a case that we believe has to do with The Stallion.”
“So, here is this man who has a family, daughters and a sick wife. He’s scared of his boss, but he also knows that his boss is doing something incredibly wrong. So his conscience is telling him to talk to the police, his common sense and survival instinct are telling him not to talk to you. When you’re in that kind of moral dilemma—where you want to save yourself, but you want to save others too—it’s hard to make a choice. It’s especially hard to make a choice that you know will put you in even more danger than you’re already in. Having something to blame your answers on is freeing. It takes the personal responsibility off you, and then you can unburden yourself the way you really want to. I would bet money that if you somehow got The Stallion into one of your interrogation rooms and I tried to hypnotize him, it wouldn’t work. It only works on people who are conflicted. A part of themselves actually does want to talk, or they don’t.”
“Did it ever occur to you to tell people this before you walk into an interrogation room?”
“Did it ever occur to you to trust the order of your superior who clearly did trust me and believed that what I was doing w
as useful?”
“The minute I start believing someone just because he’s my superior is the minute I become a subpar police officer.”
“Conventional.”
She thought for a second that he was going to smile. His surprisingly full, nearly carnal lips almost curved before he stopped them and pressed them into a line.
“Have you changed your mind about hypnotism?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to hypnotize you?”
“No.” Again that little quirk like he might smile, or even laugh.
“I bet you have some juicy secrets you’re just dying to tell me.”
“There will be no secret sharing, Ms. Torres.”
“What else are we going to entertain ourselves with for the next few days?”
“We could discuss whatever it was that you looked up on my computer.” This time he did smile, but it wasn’t a particularly nice one. It was sharp edges and a little bit of smug self-satisfaction.
Ugh. Why did he still have to be hot even when he was being smugly self-satisfied?
None of that. None. Of. That. “I just checked to see if you had Wi-Fi,” she returned, smiling as saccharine as she could manage.
“All the way out here you thought I might have Wi-Fi?”
“You never know.”
“Why don’t you be straight with me, Natalie.”
“How about I start when you start.” Some of that flirtatious ease from earlier was cooling considerably degree by degree.
“I’ve been nothing but straight with you.”
“No, you’ve been vague at best. Considering I’m mixed up in all of this, I really think that I deserve to know what all of this is.”
“I can’t put my investigation at risk,” he returned, back to the implacable Texas Ranger.
“You have me in the middle of nowhere under lock and key. What risk is being posed?”
