License to Love Series:Trilogy (Contemporary Western Cowboy Romance)

by Rose, Amelia

  “I get it I just wasn’t prepared, that’s all,” he told her, leaning back in his seat a little more so that he was not immediately seen. The cap he was wearing was already gathering sweat at his temples and he could feel himself starting to sweat a little. After they had traveled down the road a little, he pulled the cap off and wiped the sweat from his brow before immediately replacing it.

  Glancing over at her again, he found himself marveling at how well she managed to hide her curves and her beauty behind her uniform. He’d once thought that she hadn’t done a very good job of convincing people she wasn’t pretty but he saw now that she’d downplayed it enough that no one realized she wasn’t just pretty, she was downright gorgeous.

  Looking over, she caught him staring at her. “Was there something you wanted to tell me?” she asked.

  That you’re the most confusing woman I’ve ever been around? he thought. Instead he pulled the conversation to his brother and the information he’d been able to gather this morning.

  “Yeah,” he answered as he brought himself back around. “I think we should head toward a little town about twenty miles away called Canton.”

  Melinda nodded as she eased up to the intersection and turned the car west. “Why Canton? It’s smaller than Stanhope. There’s almost nothing there.”

  “Nothing except a tiny feed store that was robbed last night. They’re reportedly missing antibiotics, bandage wraps and other items along with money. It wasn’t much, and there was also vandalism that seems to implicate some small town boys getting in trouble.”

  Melinda looked at him carefully for a moment and then turned her attention back to the road. “What does the agency think?”

  “As far as I can tell they are not planning on moving on it but my gut says it’s Charles.”

  “When in doubt, always go with the gut,” Melinda told him. “If I’d done that in the first place, Charles never would have made it over to my brother’s house to get to Clara.”

  “You can’t…”

  “Can’t what?” she cut him off. “Can’t blame myself for the actions of a clearly delusional man? Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

  When he said nothing in response, she continued, her voice slightly lowered, the anger that had flared up moments before washed away in the guilt. He knew the feeling.

  “We all have our burdens that we’ve taken on,” she stated flatly. “Mine are my brothers, just like yours is Charles.”

  Silence descended on the car, and that lingered until they made their way into Canton.

  Chapter 9

  Melinda pulled into the hotel room at dusk, physically and mentally drained. They had spent all day chasing one lead after another. The scene at the Canton Feed & Seed had been the most promising and she was sure that Charles had been the one to break in and steal the medical supplies. However, it was obvious that he was long since gone.

  When she had noticed the officers milling about, Melinda had spotted the younger, weaker link and had approached him pretending to be a concerned woman in distress. She had learned years ago that this tactic was far easier to use to gain information than by her usual commandeering presence. Besides she wanted to make sure that she stayed under the radar of the agencies in the area as well.

  The officer had told her that there was no danger and that apparently the place was broken into sometime between ten o’clock when the owner had closed up and four am when an officer cruising by had spotted the broken glass and spray painted graffiti.

  Now armed with the information they had gathered and the scouting they had done in the surrounding areas, they were settling into a lonely hotel room on the side of a highway about thirty minutes away from Canton. There was nothing out there except for interstate truckers and families who were attempting to make it from one point to another on their vacation.

  The entire building had the feeling of desolation and despair, and Melinda decided that she was going to need something to try and help her overcompensate for that. She slid the check-in notice over to the clerk with her cash as Cale filled out an identical one next to her. Watching him fill out the paperwork she noted how his muscles moved under his colored t-shirt and how the corners of his mouth always appeared to twitch when he thought of something humorous.

  Without realizing it, she had moved slightly closer to him as if drawn by some invisible thread. Backing away to the other side of the counter, she took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. There was a tightening in her lower abdomen, as if a fist had reached in and grabbed onto her insides. She had never been one to give into base emotions, and she certainly wasn’t about to now, as she struggled to push that desire away. The voice in her head was raged against the emotions of her body.

  Being attracted to him won’t do me any good, she admitted. She had to stay focused if she was going to bring Charles down, and getting entangled with his step-brother was not going to help accomplish that at all.

  “Is there a bar near here?” she asked the clerk as Cale pushed his slip back over the counter.

  The clerk looked startled when she spoke and he studied her for a moment, and then looked over at Cale, a slow smile spreading across his face. Her hand clenched itself into a fist as she itched to smack that look right off his face. Instead she just buried her fingernails into her palms in an attempt to refrain from drawing attention to herself.

  You’re trying to stay under the radar, remember? Assaulting this man will only get the cops involved. Right now he’s just content to think you’re another cheating couple sneaking away for a weekend quickie.

  “Yep. There’s one just down that way behind the park over there.” He said as he leaned around the desk and pointed to a small grassy area with one lonely picnic table in it and a worn gravel trail running through it. “If you take that trail it will lead you straight there. It’s connected to the side of Jack’s Stop & Go. Little bit of a hole in the wall though.”

  Not trusting her voice, she nodded at him, grabbed her key and made her way back to her room to drop off her luggage. Cale walked out behind her, his long stride keeping pace with her even though she felt as if she were walking so fast she was on the verge of running.

  But she couldn’t even give a name to what she was running from: the knowing smirk of the clerk, the shadow of danger that Charles Sanders had placed over her family, or her growing attraction to the man standing right beside her. Either way she felt as if her insides were so tightly wound that they were going to spring loose at any given moment.

  She unlocked her room and tossed her bags inside as Cale stood by the door and studied her.

  “I thought I would go to the local bar and hang out for a bit,” Melinda informed Cale. “That way I can sit in on some of the town gossip and maybe get a few leads on if anyone has seen anything suspicious. I can’t formally interview anyone and I’ve found that bars are usually a good source of information. Do you think you could stay here and sort out some of the computer stuff?” she asked, her gaze purposefully avoiding him as she rummaged through her duffel bag.

  He didn’t answer her for a moment and the silence in that stale room was almost deafening. She walked over to the window air conditioning unit and turned it on, the loud humming that issued forth from it, filling in some of those gaps. When she turned around to face him, she saw that he was studying her. Not with the same leer that had been on the face of the clerk but instead with a kind of softness that spoke to her and caused that warmth to once again threaten to spiral out of control.

  Grabbing her purse, she headed for the door. “Since you didn’t speak up, I’m assuming you don’t.”

  He cleared his throat briefly before answering her, “No, actually that’s a good plan. Divide and conquer. I do need to do a few things here with the computer. I think I can get a better location on where Charles might be. He’s got to be using the internet somehow, but he’s being smart enough to leave no trace for now and he hasn’t yet tried to access his credit cards or bank accounts. I
do need to get out at some point to get something to eat, so I might join you before too long.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that,” Melinda answered stopping at the door. It had been so long since she had even been forced to consider someone else’s needs that it was a foreign concept to her. “Although I do have to say that I’m not sure what kind of food a ‘hole in the wall bar attached to a quick stop’ might have.”

  “I’m going to guess the kind that we will be lucky if I don’t end up in the hospital after I eat.” Cale said, smiling at her as she headed toward the bar. Melinda walked down the path, her footsteps making soft crunching sounds as the sun set on the horizon.

  Chapter 10

  Cale leaned back in the stiff chair at the makeshift desk and stretched out his arms. He wasn’t sure how long he had been chasing Charles’ cyber trail but the room was now very dark except for the faint blue light that reached out of the laptop and enveloped him. Looking down at the computer screen, he realized that it had been a little more than two hours since Melinda had gone to the bar to gather information and he hadn’t heard back from her yet.

  Even though he knew that she could take care of herself in most situations, his brother wasn’t a normal situation. Cale felt the worry creep into him as he locked the door and headed down the same gravel path she had walked just a little while earlier. Only now it was pitch black, with nothing more than a single rusty lamppost and the moon’s rays to illuminate the way. As he walked, he kept his eyes alert for any signs of danger or Melinda.

  The one thing Cale had not mentioned to Melinda, the one secret that he held close to, was the fact that he suspected Charles had something to do with his father’s death. It was just a suspicion, nothing that could be proven since the medical examiner had ruled it as heart failure. But in his heart he knew that something wasn’t right about the whole scenario. Up until the day he collapsed his stepfather had been the model of perfect health, no warning signs of heart trouble in any of his annual doctor’s exams. They had assured Cale that sometimes it happened that way.

  But the look that Charles had when Cale had told him, the way he’d hinted a smile absentminded through the funeral, those details haunted him still.

  When he emerged from the trees on the other side of the clearing he was walking into a parking lot. There was a lone building on the other side of the lot. On the end closest to where he was, there were three gas pumps and a small little convenience store. A lonely sign hung above the pavilion that simply said “Jack’s.”

  The building was long and it appeared to be a pre-fabricated metal building that had been bricked halfway up to try and make it look more stable. On the other end there was another door. As he approached, the door opened and he could hear loud country music rolling through the air and breaking the stillness of the night.

  When he pulled open the door himself, he saw a room that was awash in low lights. Country music posters coated the walls and there was a series of red vinyl booths against a far wall opposite of where the jukebox and pool tables were. Cale stood there for a moment, scanning the room as he let his eyes adjust to the dimly lit and smoky atmosphere.

  Someone came in the door behind him, jostling him out of his trance. There was a woman sitting at the back of the bar in a booth. He couldn’t see her face but he noticed her hair was the same color as Melinda’s.

  “Hey,” he said as he rounded the table.

  When he spoke she looked up at him and he realized that it wasn’t her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away from the booth. Turning back toward the door he started to leave, worry once again creeping up in him and threatening to spill over into panic.

  Where is she?

  Just as his hand settled in on the door handle, he heard Melinda’s voice speak up behind him. “Cale?”

  Once again looking back at the room, he saw her coming out from behind the corner wall where the restrooms were. When he saw her he let out a pent-up breath that he hadn’t even known he had been holding. For the first time when he looked at her, he realized how attached he had grown to her.

  “Yeah, I just realized how much time had passed and how hungry I actually was,” he told her as she walked toward him. After a couple of steps she appeared to trip over her foot, and he reached out to steady her.

  Her smile was a little lopsided, and he realized that she was a little tipsy.

  “Here, let me help. Where were you sitting?” he asked. She pointed to a booth and he walked her back to the table. “I’m going to go get you some coffee and me some food.”

  “Okay.” She smiled at him again and leaned against the table.

  Cale went to the bar. The bartender was a slightly larger woman with thick arms and long dirty blond hair that was pulled back into a ponytail. A tattoo of a bird with a heart in its mouth was on her shoulder.

  “Can I get you something?” she asked without even looking up from the sink as she washed dishes before stacking them into the drying trays on the other side of the sink.

  “Yeah,” he responded. “I need a menu if you have it, a beer and some coffee.”

  She looked up then and smiled at him. When she smiled, crow’s feet were visible next to her eyes and he could tell that while the years hadn’t been kind to her, she was not nearly as hardened as she had appeared at first glance.

  “I got the beer and coffee, but no menu,” she said as she reached behind her to grab the coffee decanter and pour the thick black liquid into a brown mug. When she set it down in front of him she put a bowl of the individually packed creamers next to it before filling up a glass with beer from the tap. “If you want something to eat, you might run next door to the quick stop. They have some pizza pockets and burritos in their warmers.”

  “Thanks,” he told her as he left a ten on the bar and took the drinks back to Melinda.

  “Hey,” she looked up as he set the items down in front of her. “I’m going to run next door to get us something to eat. Are you okay?”

  Instead of answering out loud Melinda nodded and began opening up the creamers and pouring them into the black brew one after the other. Sure that she was going to be okay, he went next door to Jack’s and grabbed a couple of items from the rotating heater.

  Since it was later in the night, they were fried beyond knowing what they were, although he suspected that they were either burritos or egg rolls. Either way it didn’t really matter. Both of them needed something to eat, so these would have to work for now.

  When he got back to the bar he saw that Melinda had already drunk most of her coffee.

  He handed her one of the deep fried mystery objects and slid into the booth across from her before unwrapping his fried item and taking a bite of it. He winced for a moment as the lava hot insides burned his mouth, causing him to take several gulps of his beer to counteract it. ‘

  “Whew, I must have hit the jackpot, I got a burrito,” he told her, smiling, trying to come up with something to break the silence.

  Melinda finally looked up from her drink and the humor and laughter that had been in her face when he’d first walked into the bar was gone. Sombre Melinda had once again returned. For a moment he regretted giving her the coffee and mentioning anything to her about sobering up. It had been nice to see her smile so freely.

  “I’m so sorry,” she began, and when he started to interrupt she held up her hand. “I don’t drink much, so I didn’t realize how tipsy I was getting until you showed up. I shouldn’t have let myself drink so much.”

  “How many did you have?”

  “I only had three but I hadn’t eaten anything all day,” she said, placing her hand against the side of her head. “They hit me much harder than I was anticipating.”

  Cale smiled and nodded his head. He’d suspected as much when the bartender told him they didn’t have food. After all they had hardly stopped to eat all day. Instead they’d been travelling from location to location hunting down Charles. The stress and low amount of food in
her system had probably combined together to make the beer much more potent than it should have been.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said in a comforting voice, “I’m not. You’re a grown woman. Sometimes that might mean that you have a few beers. I’m not going to think less of you for it.” He was trying to reassure her while at the same time reaching across the table and laying his hand over hers. The touch was meant to reassure her, to let her know that he didn’t think less of her, but as soon as his skin came into contact with hers he could feel the electricity humming through them.

  The attraction he had been trying to suppress since he had first laid eyes on her at the jail where Charles was being detained came flooding to the surface. Melinda looked at him, her eyes widening and he knew that she felt it, too. The bar around them ceased to exist. The loud music and the boisterous game of pool were all background noise. There was so much vulnerability and openness that she tried to hide. Most of the time that he was around her, he could tell that she was wearing her mask. But right now, in this moment, the entire pretense was gone, and he found that he didn’t want to let go but he forced himself to squeeze her hand and then pull back to his side of the table.

  When he broke contact, the placid face of control once again asserted itself and he was saddened to see that the liquid pools of her eyes had iced over. Downing the rest of his beer in one large gulp, he set the cup down and went back to the bar to order another, the remainder of his burrito lingering on the table in its wax paper wrapper.

  Melinda may have been able to hide her feelings and pretend they didn’t exist, but he couldn’t.

  Chapter 11