Winsor, Linda

by Along Came Jones

  "And where did you two go after the wedding?"

  "You mean you didn't get pictures of that as well?" Deanna shot back. Total strangers had watched her. Some of her most intimate moments had been tossed in her face on film. "C. R. took me back to my apartment. I made coffee. Then he went home to catch an early flight." After kissing her in such a way that she'd showered and was in bed before her heart resumed a normal beat.

  Detective Riordan fingered another picture. "Did he say when he'd be returning?"

  "Wednesday... today."

  "I don't think so, Miss Manetti." The detective tossed the picture on the table in front of her. "You recognize the car?"

  Surrounded by police and fire department vehicles was the burned-out frame of a Mercedes sports car. At least Deanna thought it was. "Are you saying that's C. R.'s car?" she asked, her voice straining past a pair of invisible hands that choked her.

  "Forensics is trying to find enough of the body to identify," Riordan told her. "Car bombs don't leave much to work with."

  A car bomb? Deanna had no ready reply this time. Her very breath had been kicked out of her by the vision.

  "What we did find," the man continued, "was this little love note in your desk drawer along with a plane ticket to Barbados."

  In C. R.'s familiar hand, the note read, "Darling, I await your arrival with our 'investment' to begin our life together in paradise."

  Out of context, the note might have been a dream come true. Instead, it smacked of a deception so dark, Deanna could no longer look at it.

  "Your ticket was bought by your boss the same time as his. Real cozy, eh?" the detective taunted.

  Not knowing what to say, much less what to do, she'd just stared at the detective's worn shoes, trapped in a nightmare of someone else's making. This wasn't really happening to her. It couldn't be.

  A sob worked its way out of her dry throat. As she opened her eyes, the image of the shoes faded and transformed into a pair of dusty boots. She started, brandishing her pepper spray, but before she could activate it Shep snatched it away.

  "Take it easy, Slick." He stepped back, hands raised as though to prove he meant no harm. "This way, no one will get hurt over a misunderstanding. I've had a taste of this stuff before, and once was more than enough, believe me."

  Deanna eyed him with suspicion. "What was the occasion?"

  Instead of answering, Shep chuckled. "You're jumpier than a frog on a hot rock." He extended a hand to help her to her feet. "How about some grub?"

  Food. The idea was heavenly enough to assuage her ruffled humor. Shepard Jones could laugh all he wanted, so long as he fed her. Maybe then her head would be clearer and she could make up her mind just what to do about her precarious situation. Taking his hand, she struggled to her feet only to be startled by pain shooting up from her right ankle. Her right knee gave out, throwing her off balance against Shep.

  "My ankle," she gasped, trying to explain her sprawling assault.

  "Must have landed on it wrong when you dismounted." He steadied her with one arm about her waist. After what seemed a moment of indecision, he handed her back the spray canister. "Here, hold this and keep the cap on." Without further ado, he swept her good leg out from under her and lifted her in his arms.

  "You sure you trust me?"

  "I guess we have to start somewhere." He shrugged. "Besides, where are you going to run off to?"

  Deanna kept her fallback plan of following the electric lines to civilization to herself, tucking the spray back in her purse. But after the battering she'd given her rescuer with it, her purse didn't want to close right, adding insult to injury. This was a hundred-and-fifty-dollar designer clutch ruined, even if she had found it for twenty-five in a Fifth Avenue bargain basement.

  "A good soak in some salts and you'll feel like a new person."

  "I didn't say I was staying... after I eat, that is. You said there was a Jeep—"

  The press of Shep's lips expressed his waning patience. He had every right to be annoyed with her. He was trying to be hospitable in an inhospitable place. That alone should win him an A for effort.

  "I'm sorry I should be thanking you, not asking you to do more for me."

  "It was my horse that got you into this fix and you were pretty shaken up," he answered, with a guarded grace as he climbed the step to the porch of the main house.

  "I didn't have to hit you." She touched the corner of his lip on impulse and he tensed in response.

  Their gazes locked for the time it took the screen door he'd swung open with his boot tip to bounce back. It wasn't long by any means, but then, electricity traveled light speeds faster than second thoughts. Every one of Deanna's senses heightened along its charged path, the same awareness that seized him seizing her as well.

  Beyond the dust of the trail and unshaven stubble were eyes that defied the label of brown. She watched, fascinated as a renegade come hither kindled in their gold-flecked umber only to be willfully doused by the mask of indifference claiming his face.

  Once inside, he all but dropped her. "Make yourself at home. I'll get a tub for that ankle."

  Deanna bobbed her head, still dumb from the shock, as he retreated through a narrow hallway into another room. He seemed to favor one leg. She hadn't noticed it before. Or was it just her imagination?

  Hobbling over to a pine-framed sofa with plump plaid cushions of fifties vintage, she dropped down to take off her shoes and trouser socks.

  "I figure I can start the grill and take a quick shower while you're soaking," he hollered above the sound of running water. "Then you can wash off some of the dust while I fix supper."

  Deanna scowled in the direction of his voice. Clearly Shep was a man accustomed to taking charge, but at the moment, the only fault she could find with his reasoning was that it wasn't her idea.

  She was used to being in control—at least until C. R. had come into her life. No way would she allow another man to control her life. Yet, she needed food or she wouldn't have the strength to control her next blink. She'd just play along until they reached a fork in the road of their intentions before showing him no one rode herd over her.

  Ride herd? Fork in the road of their intentions? With a groan, Deanna buried her face in her hands. Lord, puh-leeze help me find a way back East before I start chewing tobacco and taking pride in my aim back at the Hopeless Ranch in Buffalo Butte, the backside of the world! If I have to be herded by Shepard Jones, let me be herded home.

  Three

  Once Deanna was situated with a foot tub, a cartoon character jelly glass of orange juice, and bag of pretzels to stave off starvation, her grubby but obliging host abandoned her. Like him, the house was laid back, fifties retro with knotty pine paneling and cabinets in the country kitchen-family room. Rustic wooden furniture with plump, masculine plaid cushions provided cozy seating near the fireplace. A large moose head hung over the stone hearth, flanked by other furry hunting trophies and a mounted fish frozen in mid jump. With no clue regarding the nature of their demise, blank expressions seemingly fixed on Deanna while death-silenced voices called out in warning to her.

  That imagination of yours is goin' to be the death of you. Deanna could almost hear the exasperation in the observation her grandmother used to make of her. The way her heart was fluttering, maybe Grandma was right.

  Looking away with an involuntary shudder, she took comfort that the only human representations among them were in faded pictures on the mantel representing a happier time gone by. Was the snaggle-toothed kid in the oversized cowboy hat her host per chance?

  Along a sidewall, a stack of boxes—many still sealed with tape and labeled—suggested a recent move on someone's part. They reminded her of the ones in the spare bedroom of her apartment in Great Falls—before someone had torn them apart and emptied their contents from one end of the room to the other.

  Oh, Deanna, what have you gotten yourself into? She swallowed the remaining bite of a pretzel stick and chased it with juice before resti
ng her head against the back of the sofa. Nearby a voice crackled sharply amid a storm of static, startling her from her self-pity.

  On a built-in desk sat a radio or scanner of some sort that fit the rest of these rustic trappings. As the transmission cleared, Deanna listened to a conversation of a father on his way home from town—wherever that was—reminding his son to get his homework done so he could go to a church youth meeting. She imagined a long ride home on some of the isolated roads she'd been lost on the last day or so and how comforting it would have been to have someone who cared to talk to.

  Or at least someone who would talk back, she thought, remembering her furtive prayers. Maybe God just wasn't listening anymore, not that He'd ever actually spoken to her when she had been a little more regular in communication with Him.

  A sound from the hallway where Shep had disappeared drew her attention to where a different man from the one who'd rescued her emerged from the back of the house. Now this was a guy befitting those incredible brown eyes that had held her hostage earlier. Clean-shaven, square-jawed, broad shouldered—Shep could have stepped off the pages of a rugged wear catalog but for the shirt he'd thrown on without bothering with the buttons.

  It occurred to Deanna that he might be showing off his infomercial-perfect abs, but he'd tugged on his jeans without a belt as well and padded around in his bare feet. Buffed by hard work and long days in the sun, he didn't seem aware of his effect on the opposite sex. Deanna had seen enough men to know when one was putting on a show or just being himself.. . until C. R. The roller coaster of her frayed emotions took another dip.

  "You got some spare clothes in your car?" her host asked, a vexed expression claiming his angular features. "If not I might find something you can change into, but they won't fit."

  Deanna shook her head. "I hadn't planned on being gone overnight."

  She hadn't planned anything. When she came home from the police station, already frazzled by hours of fruitless interrogation, she found her apartment turned upside down and inside out. Whoever ransacked the place had left a cryptic note saying they weren't through with her yet. Deanna shivered, arms crossed over her chest to disguise her discomfiture.

  "Where's home then?" He helped himself to bottled fruit juice from the ancient round-topped fridge. Her grandmother had had a similar model. There was something oddly comforting about that and the general old-timey feel of the place.

  "Originally New York," Deanna told him, distracted as she flashed back to the nightmarish scene at her apartment in Great Falls. When she called the police to report the break in, they'd treated her like the criminal, insinuating that she'd engineered the crime scene to draw attention away from their belief that she was in cahoots with the late C. R. Majors. And so she'd bolted without so much as a toothbrush, much less a plan.

  "So what brings you to Montana?" Shep's query drew her back to the present. As he raised the drink to his lips, the late afternoon sunlight caught on a flash of gold lying against his chest. It was a plain cross, strung on a masculine weight chain.

  "Checking out a job offer in Great Falls." Although a city in its own right, Great Falls had felt like a strange place with no longtime friends or even business associates. It wasn't her fault New York's heart beat in her chest.

  He chuckled. "Well, you certainly took a wrong turn."

  "So Pocahontas I'm not. With that zoo of animal heads staring at me, I'm lucky if I can remember where I am now."

  Instead of taking offense at her stab at humor, he laughed. "You're just a bit frahoodled."

  Frahoodled. That was a new one, but it fit just right. Deanna chuckled with him grateful for his good nature. "I guess so."

  "So what brings you into these parts? You're a far cry from Great Falls. Just touring?"

  "I was checking for a place to relocate, but I seem to have gotten off course." She'd sublet a furnished apartment in the city itself for a month to give her time to search for the right place.

  Right place. It might as well be on the moon now.

  "Boy, when you take a wrong turn, you make it a doozy." Shep snatched open the freezer door. "That's four hours away."

  "I was just meandering to see what I could see and lost track of time." And she'd seen a gorgeous red stallion break in front of her car from nowhere in the middle of nowhere.

  There was no point in telling Shepard Jones any more than he had to know. All she needed was another kink in this snarl of a mess.

  The man took out two frozen steaks and slapped them on a plate. No more modern than the house itself, the plate was yellowed and cracked with age. Its pattern reminded Deanna of older, more carefree days when she'd set the table with a like design at her maternal grandmother's. Gram, who'd baby-sat Deanna while her parents worked, said the old dinnerware had come as a bonus prize in laundry powder boxes purchased long before Deanna was even born.

  "Well, like I said earlier, I don't have anything to fit you, but I put out clean towels. There's a bathrobe on the back of the bathroom door. I can toss your things in the washer and dry them while you're cleaning up, if you want."

  She sighed, grateful that Great Falls had left the discussion. Besides, to one who'd spent the last three days washing up at rest stops, the idea of a shower sounded heavenly. Dare she trust in that cross on his chest, that it represented the man? Or was she grasping at straws?

  "Are you going to take me into town after supper?" She thought she saw the Jeep when he carried her into the house, but he'd had the bulk of her attention.

  He stopped rummaging through a built-in bin of the knotty pine cabinets and let out a measured breath. "If you insist, Miss Manetti." Taking out two large potatoes, he straightened. "Miss Esther Lawson has a few guest cottages on the edge of town. If she's not booked up, you could rent one of them for the night. I can rouse her up on the radio to see, if that's what you want."

  Except that Deanna had no money. As for her credit cards, even if the woman honored them, was it worth the risk that her pursuers could trace her whereabouts? It was that way in the movies.

  She glanced at the radio and searched the jumble of wires and papers on the desk for sign of more modern communication. "What, you don't have a phone?" Everyone had a telephone.

  "Not if I can help it."

  "Not even a cell phone?"

  Shep shrugged. "Sorry Ma Bell gets on my nerves."

  Heaven spare her. "What do you do in an emergency?"

  "I have a radio. It's more reliable, 'specially in bad weather... and the telemarketers haven't figured out a way to utilize the air waves yet." He held up the potatoes. "Baked in the microwave okay with you?"

  He had a microwave but not a radio. Deanna nodded. She was at the hind end of the world and stuck with a total stranger who decorated with dead animal heads. "What about your friend, er.. . Ticker?"

  "Tick lives on the other side of town in an old travel trailer." Grinning, Shep added, "He's not much on social life unless it centers around a campfire."

  Or skinning and cutting into bits some poor, defenseless animal. "I see." Deanna started to draw her feet out of the now-cool water in the foot tub when she realized she had no towel.

  Seeing her predicament, Shep yanked off a few handfuls of paper towels and tossed them at her. "Sorry about that."

  At least it wasn't an animal hide. She dabbed her feet dry, sinking with exhaustion and despair. What on earth was she going to do?

  "Why don't you just wait till after you rinse off the trail dust and fill your belly before you decide?"

  Deanna jerked her head toward her host. Was she so obvious?

  "And if you're worried about sleeping arrangements, my aunt Sue's ghost would haunt me if I didn't give a lady my room for the night and bunk on the sofa."

  Bless Aunt Sue's ghost for answering that question. Not that Deanna believed in such things. The late woman's nephew, on the other hand, was quite real. Although, to date, he had been the epitome of a gentleman and a good host. But was he a wolf in good host's
clothing?

  "People may fail you, Deanna darlin', but the good Lord never will." Shocked by the unexpected memory of her grandmother's words, Deanna glanced from the old refrigerator to the plate where two slabs of frozen beef thawed. That did it.

  Her mind made up, she balled and tossed the damp paper towels in a thirty-gallon garbage can by the stove. She wouldn't trust the man, but how could she go wrong trusting in the Holy Spirit behind that cross, especially when it was backed by the faith of her devout grandmother and his righteous Aunt Sue?

  "Nice shot."

  Deanna managed a fatigued grin. "I've had lots of practice." Her office cohorts had given her a wastebasket with a basketball hoop to catch all the ideas that never made it past the drafting table.

  "How's the foot?"

  She tested it with her full weight and winced. "Sore, but it's better than before when I couldn't bear my weight at all. Thanks." She met his gaze from across the room.

  Deanna saw no lightning bolt pass between them, but she felt its charge and retreated in all haste toward the back of the house.

  Ahead was the open door of a bedroom—the bedroom, judging from what she'd seen of the outside of the small house.

  "Hang a right. Left takes you into a closet," Shep called after her, once again anticipating her thoughts. "Wrong right," he teased, when she turned the wrong way on impulse.

  "Why didn't you say it was the other one," she shot back.

  Once inside the small bathroom, Deanna stared at the woman in the mirror, watching a crimson tide claim her face. "Young lady" she complained to her twin as she kicked the door closed behind her. "I hope you haven't jumped from one fire smack into another."

  The way her cheeks felt to the touch of her cool fingers, she knew she had.

  Four

  Deanna had to admit, Shep was right about at least one thing: a shower. Aided by the two aspirin she found in her purse, it worked wonders for her disposition. Or maybe it was the clothes he had aired out in the dryer. Shep had nearly scared her witless when he'd knocked on the bathroom door and asked if she wanted them washed.