So Tough to Tame

by Victoria Dahl

  Yeah. This was an opportunity she couldn’t miss. She stuffed her running gear into a bag and dressed for work instead. If it was nothing, she’d still have time to run before she needed to be in her office. Heck, she could even take a nap. This having-two-apartments gig was starting to work out. She should take advantage of it before they gave her room away.

  A moment of guilt stabbed her when she quietly closed her apartment door and tiptoed down the stairs. She should’ve left at least a note for Walker, but even that assumed too much. It assumed he’d care that she was gone and why she’d left. No. Better to just pretend last night had meant nothing more to her than it did to him.

  But good Lord, that man was hot. She was starting to worry that she’d be willing to sacrifice a lot for the chance to have him whenever she wanted. Her pride, certainly. Because even when the day came that she saw another woman sneaking down these stairs, Charlie wouldn’t stop wanting him. God, maybe she actually would share him with someone else if it meant feeling his hands on her the way she had last night. Rough and needy and demanding.

  Wow. Just...

  Charlie shook her head as she stepped into the icy night air.

  That had been so good and filthy and hot. Not just what he’d said and done, but the fact that it was Walker, who’d always been so sweet to her.

  All the most sensitive nerves in her body woke to immediate arousal when she thought of tasting him. Sucking him. Pushing him so far that he’d growled filthy things at her.

  Chuckling, she got into her car and started for work.

  Oh, she was going to do that again. As many times as she could before it was over. She’d loved him in her mouth, loved the power of it getting all twisted up with the submissiveness of the act.

  Yes.

  She replayed every moment of the night on her drive to the resort. Every touch and sigh and taste. In fact, she was so turned on by the time she pulled up to the garage that she almost turned the car around and went back. She could pick up breakfast, then wake him with something even sweeter than donuts. They could have a perfect morning together before they had to part.

  But no. She wasn’t going to be one of those clingy women. How many girls had wanted everything from him? And how many of those had he walked away from? No. Charlie didn’t get walked out on if she could help it. She did the walking. Unless, of course, the relationship ended up with an arrest. Once there were handcuffs involved, the semantics of it took on a smaller significance.

  Regardless, she wasn’t going to sit on his lap and feed him breakfast. She wouldn’t fall that far. So just as the first hint of pink broke above the hills behind her, Charlie pulled into the resort garage and left that amazing night behind.

  After dropping her bag in her studio, she headed straight downstairs to the surveillance room. Every office was still dark. If the resort were up and running, she would’ve at least passed by a housekeeping supervisor or two, but the place was eerily empty at this hour. Thank God.

  She shut the door behind her and fired up the monitors. The feeds automatically drew her eye, but the rest of the hotel was dead quiet, too. Time to do what she’d come here for.

  Starting with yesterday at 8:00 p.m., she worked back through the digital video. It was tedious and took forever, even when she pulled four feeds at once.

  Once she’d made it through twelve hours of half the feeds, she started feeling stupid. There was nothing here. Keith owned the resort. He’d been making the rounds. There was nothing odd about that.

  Charlie stood and stretched with a groan of frustration; then she forced herself to sit back down. There was no point doing this half-assed.

  Thirty minutes later, she’d convinced herself she was on a wild-goose chase. She saw Keith in the videos, but he was only walking from office to office, or occasionally stopping to chat with an employee in a hallway. She made notes of each time she saw him, but the notes were about to make a quick acquaintance with the trash.

  Charlie slumped in her chair and watched yesterday’s video of an interior decorator instructing a crew on exactly where a giant statue of an eagle should be placed. Charlie would have to head down to the lobby to check it out. It was a damn impressive bird.

  A glance at the clock told her the sun would be fully up by now. If she wanted to go for a run, she’d have to head out in the next five minutes or there wouldn’t be time to shower before her shift.

  “Shit.” She ran her hands through her hair and took a deep breath. All right. She was done with all this. Her instincts were off, yet again. She should quit this job and open a cozy shop somewhere in the countryside. She could sell... Oh, hell, what did she know anything about? Dirty greeting cards, maybe?

  The monitor glared accusingly at her. She glared back. “Damn.”

  Charlie pulled up the activity logs for the computer, then waited for them to load. And suddenly—just like that—all thoughts of a run vanished from her mind.

  Keith had logged in at 9:00 p.m.

  Keith had waited for Charlie to leave and then he’d come back to the surveillance room and he’d logged in to this computer and he’d screwed around with her files.

  She wasn’t losing anything. Her instincts were just fine. She just had to learn to trust them again.

  “Motherfu...” Charlie sat forward and fired up the video feeds again. She called up every instance of Keith’s appearance and then worked forward from there. Hours went by without anything suspicious. Then she saw it. A skip in the numbers. She backed up and looked again.

  There. She backed up further. Ten minutes before the skip, Keith went into his office. Then there was a twenty-second-long skip. Fifteen minutes later, another brief skip in the time stamp.

  Someone had come to see him. Someone’s arrival and departure had been deleted from the feed. She marked the times, then started working through each camera.

  Yes. The next camera down the hallway had the same two cuts, different by only a few seconds.

  “That little shit,” she growled. He’d been thorough. Really thorough.

  She followed the logical path of video for someone proceeding from the garage to Keith’s office. There were a few missteps, but she eventually tracked down every digital cut.

  Staring at the list she’d made, she racked her brain for some detail he could have missed, but even the parking garage footage had been altered.

  Then she remembered the elevators. Those camera numbers were in a different order and the feed went to different software. “Bingo,” she breathed as she pulled up that program and opened the files.

  It took her two minutes to identify the right camera, and then she had it. A light-haired woman walked onto the elevator, head down. She pushed a button, smoothed down her skirt and then looked up as the floor numbers ticked by.

  “Holy shit,” Charlie wheezed. The person who’d come to see Keith was Nicole Fletcher. More important, the person whose presence Keith didn’t want anyone to know about was Nicole Fletcher. “Seriously?” Charlie barked. She couldn’t get away from this bitch.

  A memory from the charity party flashed over her. When she’d still been huddled with Walker, she’d glanced over to see Keith talking to Nicole. Nicole had touched his arm and he’d pulled away. Charlie had been so wrapped up in her own embarrassment that she’d overlooked that. She’d thought Keith’s self-consciousness had been something to do with his employee making out in public.

  But no...there had been that touch.

  Keith was having an affair. Dawn had been smart to be worried; she’d just been worried about the wrong trashy woman in her life. It wasn’t Charlie; it was Nicole.

  Charlie shut the program down and backed up all the files to the server.

  Keith wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. She’d never have reviewed the video if he hadn’t been so concerned about deleting it. And really, what the hell did she care who came to his office to visit?

  “You’re here early.”

  Charlie jumped in shock and spun
to see Dawn standing in the door, already dressed perfectly in a trim little yellow skirt and sweater. “Uh. Hi.”

  “Good morning,” Dawn responded.

  Charlie waited for the next words, the little swipe at Charlie’s character, but it never came.

  She looked at the monitor over Charlie’s shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  Charlie snuck a panicked glance back to be sure she’d closed everything. “Just catching up. You know. Making notes on cameras.” She scraped together all her paper and smacked it into a crooked pile. “Checking all the time stamps.”

  “The time stamps?”

  Crap. Her heart raced. “Yes. I need to be sure they all line up.”

  “Hm. Anything odd?”

  “No. Nope. Nothing at all.” Oh, man. Now she was covering up a husband’s affair. But really, this had nothing to do with her job. She didn’t owe Dawn anything. In fact, she owed Keith a lot more.

  Damn this place.

  “Be sure you let me know if you ever see anything unusual,” Dawn said softly.

  “Sure.”

  “Because you still need to train me on how to handle suspicious events.”

  “Yes. Absolutely. Later, though. Today I’m checking security features in the rooms.”

  Dawn stared her down for a moment, but she eventually sighed and walked away without a word. Charlie let out the breath she’d been holding.

  Keith hadn’t been worried that Charlie would see a woman coming to his office. He’d been worried that Dawn would see. Charlie was beginning to lose her faith in marriage.

  She laughed at the thought. Then laughed harder. She’d never had any faith in marriage, and she’d yet to see anything that would change her mind. Her own parents had been disasters, whether they were together or with other people. Working in Vegas had given her a crash course in all the ways men and women could betray each other. People married for reasons she could rarely understand, and then they stayed married for even more mysterious motives.

  As for love... God. She hoped it never happened to her. There was no motive to that at all. It was just a natural disaster that slammed over you and took you down. All she could do was dig a bunker and hoard supplies and hope she never needed to deal with that emotional apocalypse.

  How many times had she seen her mom ruined by it? How many cycles of euphoria and joy, followed by denial, then frantic despair? Then her mom would jump right back in, eager to manufacture some new happiness.

  Charlie had only come close once. With a man who’d lied about everything.

  No, love wasn’t for her. Love was the opposite of security, and security was Charlie’s specialty.

  She logged out of the system and grabbed her notes to retreat to her office. As soon as the door was closed, she popped her laptop back open and went straight to the search engine.

  Her hands hovered over the keyboard. It felt creepy to search out information on Walker’s old lover. Super creepy. He wasn’t Charlie’s boyfriend, and if he was, any insecurities she had would be a reason to talk to him about it, not snoop. But this wasn’t about Walker and the curvy, beautiful blonde he’d recently fooled around with.

  “Hmph,” she grouched to herself. No, this wasn’t about that at all.

  She typed Nicole’s name into the search field and watched the results pour in, dozens of references to Fletcher Guest Ranch. Pictures. Reviews of the ranch. A video interview with Nicole. Charlie took one look at Nicole’s perfect makeup in the still shot and skipped over the video. She wasn’t jealous. Exactly.

  Ignoring the video, she clicked on an “About Us” headline, and there was a picture of Nicole with her husband, both of them smiling as if the ranch were a dream home for a dream couple who were still dreamy in love after all these years. Charlie clicked back.

  Everything seemed to be publicity about the ranch, so she tried out the husband’s name. Nothing came up. Then she tried Nicole Fletcher and Keith Taggert together. There were no hits for that, but there was an alternative suggestion.

  She clicked on it and frowned as she leaned closer to read the legal language. Her frown deepened. And then her eyes flew wide at the sight of her brother’s name. What the hell did her brother have to do with Keith Taggert and Nicole’s husband?

  It seemed to be a land development deal, and it contained a lot of real estate language she wasn’t familiar with, but she eventually puzzled it out. Keith had bought the land for the resort from Brad for millions of dollars. And her brother had purchased it from none other than Nicole Fletcher’s husband only six months before selling it to Keith. Her brother had made quite a bit of money in a very short amount of time.

  So maybe Nicole had only been here to discuss business, but that didn’t explain why Keith had deleted the evidence.

  It was time for Charlie to make that call to her brother.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “GODDAMN IT!” Walker slapped the cow on her hindquarters and she double-stepped into the truck. He tugged off his glove and looked down at the finger the heifer had just ground into the gate latch. It was turning purple already, but he could bend it, so he tugged the glove back on and turned back to the truck with a growl.

  Before he could get back into the rhythm of the work, his phone rang for the second time in an hour, and he cursed again. He waved to one of the other hands, who nodded and moved closer to the truck. Walker backed away to get the call.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Pearce, it’s Gina from the care center again.”

  “Right.”

  “I really think you should come by. Your dad is still struggling to catch his breath, and he’s having trouble staying calm.”

  “My being there won’t help him calm down.”

  “It might. It’s hard to say when they’re in this state. He might recognize you, or he might mistake you for someone else who’s familiar. If it doesn’t work, we can try a higher dose of sedative, but we hate to start altering his medications with the heart congestion.”

  His father had been going into congestive heart failure for months. They’d said it would probably take a few more weeks to get bad, but now his dad had become agitated and out of breath.

  Walker tipped his head back and stared at the cloudless blue sky. “I’m over an hour away. Give him the sedative.”

  “I see. Okay. I’ll call later and give you an update.”

  “Just call me if it gets worse.”

  “Oh. All right. That’s fine.”

  Walker was done with this whole damn day. First, he’d woken to an inexplicably empty bed. Charlie had left without a kiss or a word or a text. Then he’d gotten the call that his dad was having problems. And then that they’d worsened.

  “Just what I fucking need,” Walker growled.

  He resumed his place by the trailer and got back to work, but his finger throbbed as his blood pressure rose. It was only five-thirty. He’d be at this for another hour, at least, and then there was the drive back to Jackson, and...

  Trying to shake off the distraction, he guided another heifer into the trailer, patting her gently to make up for shoving that other poor girl earlier. She hadn’t meant to crush his finger. She’d only been panicked.

  He tried to calm his temper. A bad mood could spook the animals. But he was pissed at Charlie. And now there was his dad....

  “Shit.”

  When the last cow was on the trailer, he closed it up and motioned to his boss. “I’m sorry. I got a call from my dad’s nurse. He’s not in good shape. I have to head back.”

  “We’re almost done here. You may as well go on.”

  He nodded as if he were relieved. The truth was that he didn’t want to go to the care center at all, but the nurse’s censuring tone had shamed him. He had to go check on the old man, even though it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to him or his dad. It might make Micah feel better, though, and Walker didn’t want to have to face his brother after behaving like an asshole.

  Turning his stereo
up loud to drown out his thoughts, Walker took off down the dirt road, enjoying the slide of his tires when he took a curve too fast. This was all he needed in his life. Hard work, a fast truck, a warm woman in his bed when he wanted it. Instead of being pissy about Charlie sneaking out, he should be thankful. A beautiful, sexy woman who didn’t want anything more than sex? Heck, that was every man’s dream, wasn’t it? “Hell yeah,” he muttered to himself. When the words rang hollow in his ears, he turned the music up higher.

  An hour later, when he pulled up at the care center, his eardrums were buzzing, but his mind had cleared. He was conscious of his dusty jeans and boots when he walked in. The floor here was shiny and white and he worried he was leaving bootprints behind him.

  He stopped thinking about his boots when he reached his father’s door and registered that the bed was empty and neatly made. Alarm flooded his body.

  “Mr. Pearce?”

  He turned to see a nurse hurrying toward him and braced himself for the words.

  “Your father’s doing better, but we moved him to the hospital for overnight observation.”

  “Oh.” He slumped a little, and she smiled.

  “I’m sorry, I would’ve called and warned you, but I didn’t think you were coming.”

  “It’s fine. He’s next door?” The small regional hospital was only a few steps away.

  “Yes. Let me get you his room number.”

  He managed to make it to the hospital without balking, but each step was heavier than the last. By the time he made it to his dad’s room, he felt as if he were toting two hundred pounds on his shoulders. But he felt a surge of relief when he stepped into the room. His dad was sleeping. And he looked all right.

  Walker took off his hat and sat in a chair next to the bed. He didn’t bother with relaxing. He’d stay for a few minutes and then leave. He’d speak to the doctor, get the latest information; then he’d leave and call Micah with the news. Obligation fulfilled. He bowed his head and counted down the seconds.

  A deep breath drew his attention, and Walker looked up to find his dad awake and watching. His face was swollen from the advancing heart failure, and with his cheeks filled out, he looked more like his younger self. Not so gaunt and sickly, despite the tubes feeding oxygen to his nose.