“Honey, I’m getting you out of here. Today. Now.”
“But—”
“I’ll do something with the fresh food. You just get the journals and stones together and pack a few clothes. We can have this whole place closed up in an hour.”
“But—”
“Don’t argue with me, princess. This whole thing stinks. There’s a time to hold your ground and a time to run like a scared coyote. This is coyote time. That’s three of them with motives, and I don’t like them knowing where you are. You’re getting the hell out of here until we know exactly what’s going on. You’re going where none of those three turkeys could find you in a blue moon—”
“Cole...” She had to pluck his sleeve to catch his attention. “I wasn’t necessarily going to argue with you. I was just trying to ask you—where?”
“Where?”
Regan asked reasonably. “Where did you plan on taking me?”
At that precise moment, he didn’t have the least idea.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Regan shielded her eyes from the sun as she watched the little white plane turn and wing straight toward them.
Cole’s brother was overdue by an hour. Sam had called Cripple Creek that morning, notifying them that he was coming—and that he was bringing results from the lab.
Neither Shepherd brother walked a block if they could fly it, but Regan suspected this impromptu visit had been encouraged by Cole. The lab results could have been communicated on the phone. It took a plane to deliver a bona fide brother-type chaperon, and slugger couldn’t wait for his brother to arrive.
The unpaved airstrip was little more than a flat stretch of ground, decorated with an orange wind sock and two lines of reflector lights. Acres of rolling land surrounded it, just beginning to turn green with new grasses. The air was redolent with the verdant, pungent smells of spring, but it was chilly. As she’d discovered over the past three days, April in the desert was considerably warmer than April in the steep hills of southern Colorado.
Noticing her quick shiver, Cole peeled off his leather jacket. “You’re going to get pneumonia, princess. Didn’t I tell you to bring some sweaters?”
“Yes, you told me. But as I remember it, you barely gave me time to throw clean underwear together before you were hustling me out of the house three days ago.”
Cole folded her into the jacket. “I can keep you warm in sweatshirts and jackets. The point is that you’re safe here.” Safety was a matter of perspective. The jacket trapped her hair in back. He freed it. The sleeves were too long. He cuffed them. And as if he suddenly realized he was creating excuses to touch her, he froze. Regan had seen the same look in his eyes a dozen times before. His pupils darkened to wet lead. The air between them charged with the same volatile barometric pressure that presaged a storm. The muscle in his cheek flexed like the little pin on a grenade.
And his hands dropped away from her. Quickly.
“Sam will be down any minute now,” he said reassuringly.
The plane was looming low now, and coming in fast. She couldn’t hardly miss it.
“It’s going to work out,” he told her. “The report from the lab will make a difference. Once you know what was in those vitamins, you’ll have real evidence to take to the Chicago cops. I know the last few days have been frustrating for you, but it won’t be for much longer.”
Regan would be the first to admit that the past few days had been frustrating—but not for the reasons Cole was implying.
After reading the journals, slugger had moved faster than a take-charge general. She’d had only two seconds to decide if she was going to be a willing ‘kidnappee’. Knowing Cole felt obligated to protect her—yet again—bit like a bullet. But ‘no’ proved impossible to say. Regan was too conscious that this would well be her last chance to be with him, to learn about him.
And she’d learned plenty.
Her first glimpse of Cripple Creek had been the first eye-opener. It was an old western town, tucked between mountains and loaded with gold-fever history. No one had paved the roads in a century. People in cowboy boots and sheepskin jackets scrambled across the mud in the streets, and the ringing clang of hammers dominated all sound in the town. The old saloon was being painted with fresh gold lettering. Rock and roll blared from the open windows where the original jail was being whitewashed. There were nails in the street and she could smell the sawdust. Cripple Creek was a town coming back to life. Renewal was in the air, excitement, the spirit of dreams being resurrected.
All this time, slugger had claimed he had no dreams. Way back, he’d also told her that he’d put a down payment on some ranch land, a place where he ‘might’ raise a few horses and planned to ‘retire’ in shameless ‘laziness’ when his brother no longer needed him.
More whoppers.
He’d claimed the down payment had been cheap as a song. Regan expected that was true. Although the land had once been a viable ranch, it had been left deserted and untended for half a century. The road in was a rough gravel wash. The three outbuildings were paint-bare and empty. The homestead was a two-story frame house with a veranda wrapped around it. On the outside, shutters hung crookedly; the steps were rickety and the wood begged paint. The inside dated back to 1920—an icebox, a huge porcelain sink with one spigot for hot and one for cold, a fat potbellied stove. Cole being Cole, leveling out an airstrip had been his first priority; then he’d planted the ground to start bringing back the soil. The house originally had no electricity; he’d wired it last spring. It had no inside plumbing; he’d tackled that in the fall. The house still didn’t have a bed in it—or a chair worth sitting on—and Cole had assumed she’d be uncomfortable without the amenities.
Regan didn’t give a horsehair for amenities. The house wasn’t a cute little bachelor pad. It was a home built to last and meant for a family. The property was going to take a killing amount of work to bring it back. A lazy wastrel would never have applied for the job. Cole, every free moment he had, had obviously been working like a dog. No man would go through it who didn’t have a committed need—a dream—to put down roots.
Slugger was supposed to be committed to nothing. He was supposed to have no dreams. It wouldn’t have bothered Regan if he’d been lying to her, but Cole simply interpreted his actions his own way. The only one he was lying to was himself.
The plane rolled to a stop and parked next to Cole’s. When Sam cut the engines, Cole jogged for the door. The instant his brother’s face appeared, the two started talking.
“Chugged more fuel than a drunken sailor.”
“Rough winds?”
“Not that bad. Hell, she’s always greedy in a head wind. Can’t get her carburation right for love or money.”
“You let Wilson loose with her?”
Regan deliberately hung back, holding Cole’s jacket tight to her neck. As anxiously as she wanted to hear the lab’s results, she was both nervous and curious about meeting Sam.
She’d seen him before, but only from a distance. Now she took a long, studying look. He was built long and lanky and easy on the eye, with Cole’s dark hair and electric dark eyes. He had a roguish smile that started slowly and kept on coming. No one would doubt they were brothers.
The differences between them were more interesting, Regan thought fleetingly. Sam was the image of the heroic good man that she used to search for. Most unfortunately, her standards had changed. He was two inches too tall. He didn’t have a tiny crescent scar on the right side of his forehead. His face was clean-cut and clean shaven, and an inherent gentleness and strength was in his eyes. Sam looked open, honest, easy to know. There was nothing in his expression to indicate that he was remotely like the complicated, perverse, difficult and impossible-to-understand devil that his brother was. And even as the two men talked, Sam’s gaze shifted to her.
He winked.
Her lips twitched. Seconds later he was loping toward her with a duffel bag under one arm and his other arm extended to reel her in with
a hug. “We don’t have to play this like strangers, do we? Hell, I’ve been dying to get a look at you, and I’ve heard so much about your life this past week that it seems we should already be on kissing-cousin terms—”
“Regan, don’t trust him an inch.”
Sam claimed his hug, then stepped back to look at her. The checkout was swift and thorough, but not unkind. In two seconds Regan realized that he hadn’t flown all this way for anyone’s agenda but his own. Sam wanted to know what his older brother had gotten himself into.
Apparently she didn’t scare him too much. He gently squeezed her shoulder and his tone sounded amazed. “God, you’re beautiful. I can’t imagine why he told me you had crooked teeth and knock knees and big purple bags under your eyes.”
“Snake, get your hands off her.”
“Did he tell you I was single? Not only unattached, but three times better looking than him and ten times smarter. You poor baby, to go through so much and then be stuck with my brother on top of it. And here, yet. He’s never taken another woman here—possibly for the excellent reason that it won’t be fit for rats for another couple of years yet. You know how lazy he is—”
“Yes.”
“Then you know this place is just one more thing he doesn’t give a holy damn about—”
“Yes.” Her eyes danced with laughter, and relief. She was going to be able to talk to Sam.
“I’m telling you, you’d be better off with me. It’s not just that I’m better looking and smarter. I also inherited the major quota of sex appeal in the family.”
Like a father removing a cookie from a toddler, Cole lifted the long arm still slung around Regan’s shoulder and replaced it with his own. “Would you cut it out? She doesn’t know you. I told her you were serious. I told her you were nice.”
Sam was nice. And Regan discovered he could be more than serious by the time they were up at the house. She poured mugs of coffee while Cole flicked a match to the logs in the living-room fireplace. Although it was only mid-afternoon, a steady wind was whistling through the cracks. The fire took the bite off the chill in the house.
Sam teased Cole about the malfunctioning furnace, but then he was through teasing. And although he glanced at Regan, he never said a word about the two separate rolled-up sleeping bags next to the hearth.
It wasn’t a formal tea party. Sam brought a chair from the kitchen and straddled it backward. Regan settled Indian-style on the floor with her back to the fire and her hands wrapped tightly around the hot coffee mug. She wasn’t drinking the coffee. Cole didn’t pretend to try.
“You both already guessed the problem was the vitamins,” Sam said. “But the reason it took the lab so long to come up with an answer is that they were looking for a drug. There wasn’t any drug. There was just an unexpected additive that they had a heck of a time identifying. Cayenne.”
“Cayenne? You mean like plain old pepper?” Regan couldn’t believe it.
“Not exactly. It’s from the same family, but you’re not going to find this particular kind of cayenne sold in a grocery store—anywhere. It’s a wild strain, native to the Far East.” Sam stretched his long legs. “Even regular cayenne is a natural stimulant. This wild kind is heavily concentrated, would probably have hit you like a megadose of caffeine—short-term, it would kill your appetite, keep you awake, give you a good case of the shakes.”
“And long-term?” Regan asked.
“If you kept taking it day after day, the symptoms would just keep multiplying. The lab guys said that anyone deprived of sleep long enough starts to see bugs on the wall. You’d have hallucinations, disorientation, mental confusion...and that would just get worse, the longer you were taking it.”
The color drained from her face. Regan knew all those symptoms. Intimately. Nothing Sam said surprised her, yet her heart felt the ache of a blow. It was just so ugly, knowing with certainty now that someone had deliberately chosen to do this to her. That kind of evil was frightening. And you can't back away from it any longer, Thorne. It had to be someone who knew you well, someone you trusted.
Cole put the grate on the fire. “What else, Sam?” He was rustling behind her one minute; in the next he’d sat down with his legs spread and tugged her back to the warm pocket of his chest. His arms folded tight around her. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“That’s the worst of it—and it isn’t all bad news. It wasn’t speed. It wasn’t a drug. It isn’t anything addictive—essentially it’s nothing more than a spice, an herb, a food. She should be okay as long as she doesn’t take any more of it.” Sam was talking only to Cole now.
“So how’d this cayenne get in there?”
“The vitamins are just off the shelf, the kind you can buy from any health food store. Unfortunately, Regan chose the kind that came in capsule form. Anybody could have opened up the capsules and doctored them. They’d never look any different.”
“Did the guy need a chemist to pull it off?”
Sam shook his head. “Not according to what the lab boys told me. He’d need to know about this Eastern cayenne—but that’s not tough to research. There’s information in bookstores about herbs and stimulants. He could have done the whole thing without help from anyone. There’s no way to pin him that way.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “You told me to lay the story on Dad’s old cronies. I did. The main suggestion they had was to look at motivation, figure out what advantage it was for this guy to have Regan doped up. Like does she have a will?”
“Would you two quit talking to each other as if I weren’t here? And what does a will have to do with anything?”
“Don’t get touchy, princess.” Cole nuzzled the top of her head, his gaze connecting straight to his brother. “After Jake died, it would have been standard procedure for your lawyer to make sure you set up a will. Did you?”
“Yes. And yes, the partners helped me set it up—but it makes no difference. I didn’t leave the gems to them. I didn’t leave anything to anyone who would have done this to me. The stones and my research library would go to a museum, and everything else to the orphanage where I volunteer time—”
“Honey, the relevance of a will isn’t what happens if you die but if you live.” Across the room, Sam nodded at him. “Who did you set up to take control of your affairs if you were sick or unconscious—or, for example, if you were temporarily locked up in a mental ward? Who did you assign power of attorney?”
Regan didn’t answer. The lump in her throat was as thick as a stone.
“Princess?” Cole’s arms tightened around her.
“The three partners.”
The pickup looked like a junkyard reject. A quarter of the bed was rusted out. The passenger door lacked an inside handle. The engine emitted ominous rattles every time they turned a corner, and the upholstery was hopelessly cracked in a dozen places.
Regan, squished between the two men on their way into town for dinner, could barely get a word in. “Cole probably told you that he keeps this old rust heap because he doesn’t need fancy transportation the few times he comes here. The real truth is that he’s always had bad taste in cars. When he was sixteen, he had this gas-guzzling tank named Bertha—”
“She was a beauty,” Cole defended.
“So was the girl you took to that drive-in. Barbara? Remember? You told Mom you were going to a Walt Disney flick, and I hid in the back seat because I wanted to see it, only you didn’t take Barbara to see any Walt Disney movie. It was a horror flick, not that either of you noticed—”
“Snake. Keep it clean.”
“The seats in the car went down flat. You nearly crushed my spine. It was a heckuva way for an eleven-year-old kid to get a sex education—”
“All the times I got you out of trouble, all the times I saved your behind, and this is what I get? And Regan is yawning, she’s so bored.”
Regan was neither yawning nor bored. The two of them were skilled comedians who had long practice delivering eac
h other straight lines. They were even better at carrying a lighthearted mood intended to keep a woman from worrying to death.
She wasn’t likely to forget Sam’s report from the lab—or its implications. Cole had been positive that the lab results would provide evidence that the law could move on. Life just wasn’t turning up those roses. Cayenne wasn’t an illegal drug. It was just an herb, and its existence in her vitamins didn’t prove that anyone other than herself chose to put it there. Thirty-year-old stories from some old journals hardly proved intent to commit a crime. There’d been no crime except for the vandalized desert house, and if the three partners described her as ‘unstable’, any suspicions she took to the police would sound foolish. In short, she couldn’t prove anyone’s intent to harm her.
Sam had suggested a solution before they left for dinner. “Get rid of the gems, sweetie. Sell ’em, hock ’em, donate ’em to some big public museum. Whether you’re dealing with one bastard or three of them, the source of trouble is those stones. If you don’t have them, the heat’s off you.”
Cole had said, “The stones were from her grandfather.”
“So what?”
“So they matter to her. So she has every right to them. And so, if she got rid of them, she’d never know the truth about who she could and couldn’t trust. That’s no good at all, not for Regan.” Cole explained it very simply to Sam. It was the first Regan knew that Cole understood how much discovering the truth emotionally meant to her.
Now, as they climbed out of the truck and started walking, he took her hand, locking fingers with her, their palms nesting together. Cole might not want to touch her, but whenever he sensed she was scared or troubled, he stuck closer than a magnet.
You’ve shown me love in a dozen ways, slugger, but I’m not supposed to believe it, right?
Her heart suddenly slammed like a hammer in her chest. She thought, This can’t go on. Living in hiding in order to protect herself—it had gone far enough. It was time for action. She was the one holding the cards. And although she knew what she was risking, Regan was terribly afraid that for his sake—for their sakes—it was time to ante up in a poker hand with Cole.
Pink Topaz Page 18
