Louise sniffs, greedy for the barn scents, although all Maggie smells is smoke and chemicals. She moves past the truck and examines the remains of her professional life. How many hundreds of people and creatures have touched the salvaged treasures over their combined centuries of existence? Yet how meager they look postfire. She trails a few fingers over the tortured remains of a typewriter and a pencil sharpener on a blackened metal desk. Franklin is going to be sick when he comes out to process the insurance claim. Everything is ruined, whether from smoke, fire, chemicals, water, or a combination of them all. He should just call it a total loss and be done with it.
Her life in a nutshell. Ruined and a total loss.
Behind her, she hears voices and the sound of footsteps drawing near. People. More people intruding. She looks around for a place to hide. But no, that’s childish. She reaches up to her cheeks. No tears. She fills her lungs with air, turns, and walks to the door, chin up.
“There you are.” It’s Michele’s voice.
Maggie tents a hand to shield her eyes from the blinding sun overhead. Michele, Rashidi, Ava, Collin, Edward, and her mom. She’d texted Michele on her way over: Don’t worry about me. Just dropping by the house and shop. See you soon. She should have kept her whereabouts to herself.
She lifts a hand in a tepid wave.
Charlotte wraps her in her arms. “My sweet girl. We didn’t want you to face this alone.”
Maggie pats her mother and steps out of the embrace. “I’m good.”
“Let we take you for a bite,” Rashidi says in full island accent. He scratches Louise between her ears.
Ava looks like a bird-of-paradise in a coal pit, standing by the burned buildings in a bright green top and pink leggings. “Collin and I leave after lunch. It’s our treat. As a thank-you for putting up with us.”
“Come on.” Michele moves close enough that she can whisper in Maggie’s ear. “You’ve lost weight. You have to eat.”
“You’re all very kind. But I have to do this. Alone. Now.” Sounds of protest rise, and she lifts a hand to shush them. “I’ll eat. I promise.”
She allows herself to be hugged and bids Collin and Ava farewell.
“Thanks for not trying to steal my man,” Ava says, smiling at her.
“Who says I didn’t?”
Ava’s mouth makes an O for a moment.
“Just screwing with you. This one’s not a whore. Good job.”
“Why do I feel like I’ve just been insulted?” Collin says, scratching his head.
Michele kisses her sister’s cheek. “She has a special way with that. See you back at the house, Maggie.”
When it’s just the two of them again, Maggie sinks to the ground with the dog, her legs folding into a crisscross. Louise sits in front of her, dutifully stirring up dust from the dirt floor with her tail.
“Even with all of them gone, you make it impossible to be still with my thoughts.”
“You don’t do me any favors either.”
The male voice behind Maggie jolts electricity to the tips of her fingers and toes. She doesn’t turn her head, just continues to talk as if in a conversation with the dog. “My, what a deep voice you have, Louise.”
“Woof, woof,” Hank replies.
Long legs stop beside her. He dangles a brown paper grocery bag from one hand, the kind with handles. “How about you come up here instead of me down there. I’ve had more limber and pain-free days in my life.”
Maggie stands facing Hank. Six inches separate them. Close enough to be in his pheromone zone. And what pheromones they are. Oh, the smell of this man. She breathes in, trying not to let him see she’s huffing him. “How’s this?”
“Perfect. I’m almost close enough now to see what little eyebrows and eyelashes you have left. It makes you look extra surprised to see me.” He grins. “But you’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
She almost melts right back to the floor. She clears her throat and says, “What are you doing out of the hospital?” in a strangled voice.
His dimples beg to be touched. “You know why I didn’t do steer wrestling or calf roping?”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I always broke the barrier too early.”
She can’t help smiling. “How’d you get here? I found your truck.” Maggie points back at the barn.
“Hell, I Ubered. Paid the driver a big-ass tip to drive me around until I found you.”
Warmth floods her body. Upward. Outward. Downward. “You didn’t call me back.”
“You weren’t answering your damn phone.”
Maggie checks her phone, flustered. It’s dead. “Sorry. It must not be holding a charge.”
“I knew where you’d be, although I can’t say I was eager to come here again.” Hank puts a finger under her chin and lifts it, aiming her gaze exactly where he wants it. Into his eyes. “Thanks for saving me—again.”
“You’re welcome. Again.”
“I brought you something.”
Maggie shakes her head. “You didn’t have to get me anything. I got to see you naked, tied to the bedposts.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“Sorry. Too soon?”
But he laughs. “No. And I did bring you something. It’s why I came. You forgot it back in Wyoming. When you ran away. Again.” His hand disappears into the grocery bag and pulls out his belt and Cheyenne Frontier Days buckle.
She takes a step back. “I didn’t forget it.”
He takes a step closer. His step is bigger than hers. Now they’re three inches apart. He reaches around her waist with the belt, his arm brushing hers. She shivers. His other arm meets it mid-back, encircling her.
Her mouth goes dry. Her heart thrums madly. She’s afraid to breathe. “What about Sheila?”
He presses the belt into her back. Then he slides his hands apart along its length. Gently, he pulls each end around the sides of her waist. When he joins the ends in front, he tugs with just enough pressure to scoot her toward him. Now only one inch of warm air separates their faces. “What about her?”
“She said you proposed. That you’re going to be a daddy.”
“She’s not pregnant, if that’s what you thought. She was talking about her daughter Phoebe. You know, the nine-year-old secret daughter she pretended to the world was her sister?”
“Oh my God. But I thought . . .”
“You thought wrong. I never proposed.”
“Aren’t you two getting married?”
“She suggested it while I was under surgical anesthesia. When I woke up later, I said no.”
“Well, shit. That changes things.”
He smiles with those killer dimples and closes the last inch between them, first with his lips, then with the rest of his body. “Good. So you’re not running away this time?”
The barn spins around her as she sinks into his kiss. Yes, this changes everything. “Not a chance, cowboy.”
* * *
Dead Pile
A Maggie Romantic Mystery
More Maggie
Have you already finished Live Wire, Sick Puppy, and Dead Pile? Worry not — there’s more Maggie and What Doesn’t Kill You stories for you!
Buckle Bunny (Maggie Prequel 1)
The last guy to call Maggie a buckle bunny didn't make his eight seconds.
Every cowboy at the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo is hot for rising music star Maggie Killian. But Maggie is laser focused on her songs, her next show, and her future. She’s not going to be any cowboy’s buckle bunny.
Down-and-out bull rider Hank Sibley needs big money fast, so he strikes a deal with the devil to lose in Cheyenne for cash. When Hank reneges to get Maggie to go out with him, the only thing standing between him and deadly payback is a pissed-off, buckle-wearing Maggie.
Buckle Bunny is the USA Today best-selling prequel novella to the trilogy featuring sharp-tongued protagonist Maggie Killian from the addictive What Doesn’t Kill You romantic mystery series.
If you like nerve-racking suspense, electric characters and relationships, and juicy plot twists, then you’ll love USA Today best seller Pamela Fagan Hutchins’ Silver Falchion Award-winning series.
Shock Jock (Maggie Prequel 2)
Maggie's star is on the rise but she's down in the dumps. The cowboy she loves, the one who inspired her blockbuster album, is out of her life. When she lands a guest spot on the hottest radio show in the country, a DJ with the squeaky clean image shows her he's anything but. And after she's sexually harassed on air, a heartbroken girl can't be held responsible for her actions, can she?
Or circle back for Katie, Emily, Ava, Michele, and the rest of the What Doesn’t Kill You world.
One
Maggie tilts her chin, pushing up the back of the slate-colored ponytail beanie framing her black bun. All the better to lock eyes with the cowboy looking down at her. He’s leaning against the door of a red barn, looking like an ad for Marlboro cigarettes. Or sex. A hand-lettered sign on a weathered board hangs overhead. PINEY BOTTOMS RANCH, SHERIDAN, WY. She likes the one even better that’s just visible inside the barn above the window into the office. WYOMING: WYNOT?
“Nice belt buckle,” he says, using it to pull her to him with a jerk.
She catches herself with her hands around his waist. Her chest bumps a little below his, through the bulky Carhartt jackets they’re both wearing. Her legs are longer, but he’s still got a few inches on her. “Got it off a deadbeat bull rider.” In truth, the buckle was part of Hank’s haul when he won the bull riding championship at the 2002 Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo.
He displays two killer dimples. “I hope you didn’t catch anything.”
“Just him.” Her stomach flip-flops, its usual response to the damn hollows in his cheeks. “But you wouldn’t believe how long it took to reel him in.”
A single snowflake falls on the cowboy’s nose, then another on her own. The snow tickles hers. Melts on his. She sneezes.
He lifts a faded navy-blue bandana to wipe his cheek. “Nice. I think you missed some of my face with that. But not much.”
“So you don’t want to kiss me?”
The cowboy—Hank Sibley—growls deep in his throat. “Like hell I don’t.”
His lips are cushiony and warm despite the cold air, like the bed they’d heated up that morning. Maggie melts into the kiss, merging their respective ChapStick flavors—cherry for her, spearmint for him—and drops a hand to his muscular buns.
“Get a room.” A much shorter man with twinkling dark eyes and the dark skin and hair of his Mexican heritage doesn’t break stride as he heads past them into the barn. Gene Soboleski, Polish last name courtesy of his adoptive parents.
Hank and Gene have been partners in their Double S Bucking Stock business for nearly two decades. Friends longer, from their early days riding bulls for beer and gas money through their later success that seeded the purchase of Sassafrass, the original broodmare for their bucking broncos. But Gene’s only recently become Maggie’s stepbrother, thanks to the union of her mother and his birth father, after her lifetime as an only child. Not only that, the marriage came with a stepsister, too: her best friend, Michele, back in Giddings, Texas, where Maggie’s industrial and homestead salvage business, Flown the Coop, lies in tatters.
Hank talks against Maggie’s lips. “Get a life. Or a woman of your own.”
Maggie releases Hank after one more long, slow kiss. She isn’t stopping on Gene’s account. But she doesn’t want to scandalize Andy, Double S’s Amish hand, at least not this early in the morning. The top hand, Paco, she’s not so worried about. Number one, because he’s on vacation. Number two, because he’d probably yell “Let ’er buck” and slap Hank on the ass.
She murmurs into Hank’s neck. “Take me for a quick ride before it snows.”
“I thought I already did, music girl.”
Maggie has mixed emotions about the nickname. Hank had called her that when he first met her, fifteen years before, in her old life. But it’s outdated now. Junker girl, more like.
Gene walks back by carrying a bale of hay. “La la la. Don’t hear you.”
She sticks her tongue out at Hank. “Not that kind of ride. I want to ride my horse.”
“That pregnant Percheron, big as an elephant, stubborn as a mule?”
Gene rounds the corner out of the barn. His voice is tinny in the cold. “First you’ll have to catch her. Miss Houdini has done it again.”
Maggie runs to join him. There are horses everywhere in the paddocks, the ones leaving later in the week for the Prairie Rim Circuit Finals Rodeo in Duncan, Oklahoma. But the big black mare is nowhere to be seen, her solo paddock empty. “Lily’s out?”
“Yep. That damn mare’s a pain in the ass.”
Behind them, Hank says, “She’s your horse, all right, Maggie. Every time I turn around, she’s run off again.”
Maggie shoots him a slit-eye look. “Funny.”
To Gene, Hank says, “We’ll find her.”
“Better do it fast. This is supposed to be our first good storm of the season.”
As if in response, a gust of wind from the north blows in. Maggie raises the collar on her jacket. Poor Lily. She’s due in a month. Most horses gravitate toward a herd. But not her. The mare is a loner, which makes her harder to find and harder to catch. Maggie shivers. These are no conditions for Lily to be out alone in.
“It’s only October. Is this weather unusual?” She heads back for the barn, following Hank, Gene following her.
Both men guffaw.
Hank swats her on the tush as she passes him to enter the dark, cavernous interior. “What would Pretty-shield say?”
Maggie had been reading and rereading the book about the Crow medicine woman, which Hank had bought her on a trip through the Montana reservation. She’s gone her whole life not knowing she is one-eighth Crow on her father’s side, until the previous month. As a Crow-come-lately, she’s making up for lost time.
“It’s not like a Ouija board. Or an almanac. It’s a biography.”
Gene says, “The October moon has a lot of different names with the Native Americans in the region, Maggie May. The Cheyenne call it the moon of the freeze on the stream’s edge. The Shoshone link it to rutting season. The Lakota named it for the wind that shakes off leaves, the Arapaho for falling leaves, and the Sioux for changing seasons. Seems like those last three all had the same idea.”
“I’m not hearing anything about snow, though.” Maggie tosses her head and feels her bun flop.
“Ah, but we are nearly on the face of the Bighorn Mountains.”
“So will it be safe for us to ride out in this?”
Hank dimples up. “This is nothing.”
“It’s still in the nineties in Giddings.”
“That’s hellfire hot to me. Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
For a moment, Maggie lets herself remember her darling house and cute shop, then shuts it down. It hurts to think about her murderous former bandmate going on a torching spree the month before. Besides her store and house—including all the priceless original artwork painted by Maggie’s deceased birth mother—the fires killed Maggie’s tenant and an old boyfriend, country star Gary Fuller, and nearly burned up Hank to boot. The fires lit off a conflagration of publicity that has been the last thing Maggie wants. She’s glad to have Hank’s family ranch, Piney Bottoms, as a refuge while she’s waiting on the insurance payout she needs to rebuild her business. She’s even more glad that she and Hank are finally together, after their years of crossed wires and missed opportunities. His recent almost-fiancée, Sheila, doesn’t share Maggie’s gratitude. “It’s okay. I know what you meant.”
“But now you look sad.”
“I was just thinking of all Gidget’s paintings I lost in the fire.” Maggie hadn’t known her birth mother while she was alive. An image flashes in her mind of her favorite, Front Porch Pickin’, which had depicted a guitarist both melancholy and joyful. “It was all I ha
d of her. Sometimes it gets to me.”
“I know. I hate that for you.”
Maggie is lost in memories until a floppy-eared head bumps her knee. She bends to pet Louise, the short-legged union of a determined corgi and surely embarrassed border collie. But the dog’s nudge is a hit and run. Louise trots past her and up the stairs to the hayloft to hunt rats.
Suddenly Maggie realizes Hank is leading two geldings to the hitching post inside the mouth of the barn, when she hadn’t even realized he’d gone. She was more than lost in memories—she’d fallen into a mental black hole. She snaps herself out of her thoughts and moves to help him with them. The horses are lookers. A buckskin and a blue-roan with a graying muzzle. In the distance, she sees Andy in an animated conversation with another man, who she assumes is Amish because of his long beard and distinctive hat and dress.
Hank eyes her over the withers of the buckskin. “Thought I’d lost you there for a few minutes.”
He’s been worrying about her too much lately. Yes, she’s had a tough time. Is having a tough time. But inside, she chafes at herself that she’s showing weakness. Outside, she puts up a smoke screen. “Sorry. I should have had that second cup of coffee. Who’s that talking to Andy over there?”
Hank’s eyes flick to the bunkhouse then back to the buckskin. “That’s his father. Reggie Yoder.”
“They don’t look like they’re happy with each other.”
“Reggie is hard on Andy.”
Gene walks in with a brown-skinned young man whose long black hair is braided, jeans creased, and worn boots oiled. “Hank, this is Michael Short. He’s looking for a job.”
Hank strides toward Michael, arm out, and the two men shake.
Maggie Box Set Page 50
