The Bluest Eyes in Texas

“Is there any proof?”

Logan felt the tension growing inside him. It was always there, and had been for nearly a year, but sometimes it was so strong he could feel it hum. This was one of those times. He gripped the steering wheel tighter, ground his jaws together and answered in carefully controlled words. “I left that morning to go to a doctor’s appointment. The only people at the farm were Sam, Ella and Mac. When I got back that afternoon, I found Sam’s body in front of the barn and Ella’s on the kitchen floor. The farm truck was missing, and so was Mac. Who do you think killed them?”

“He could have been a victim, too.”

“Right. Someone breaks in, kills an eighty-year-old couple and leaves them where they fall, but they dispose of the body of the young, six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound man who was staying with them.”

“Maybe he was taken hostage.”

“Okay. You’re a burglar. You break in to a place and you think you might need a hostage to ensure your escape. You have a choice between two frail little eighty-year-olds and a twenty-something, six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound soldier. Which one are you gonna choose?”

“I’m just considering the possibilities.” She laid her hand on his arm, and the muscles clenched even more. A glance at the speedometer showed the needle hovering between ninety and ninety-five. With a deep breath, he eased off on the pedal until the speed dropped back to the legal limit. Then he shrugged off her touch. She didn’t look offended or rebuffed or really much of anything but thoughtful.

“Where are we headed?” he asked to break the silence. So far she’d given him simple directions—get on the interstate and keep going west.

“To the border.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of border. Where in particular?”

“I’ll tell you when to turn.”

He didn’t like being in the dark. If he’d learned anything in the Army, it was how to lead. He’d held a hell of a lot of responsibility, especially in the war, and he’d lived up to it. It rubbed him the wrong way to now be denied even the most basic of information.

Not that she didn’t have a good reason for withholding it.

“You have any reason to believe Mac has anything to do with this brother of his?”

She propped her bare feet on the dash, wiggling her toes for a minute before letting them relax. Her skin was pale gold, her nails were painted crimson and a silver band encircled the second toe on her left foot. A matching chain around her ankle was just visible under the hem of her jeans leg.

There was something…appealing about the sight. Something that made him think of those tiny little panties he’d picked up in her room back in Pineville. That made him wonder if she was that small all over, if she was wearing a similar bit of silk and lace right now, if she wore any other jewelry he couldn’t see.

Jeez, they were feet, he berated himself. Prettier than most, more decorated than most, but utilitarian just the same. Definitely no reason to be thinking in any way about sex.

Finally she looked his way, but with sunglasses covering half her face, he couldn’t read anything in her expression. “Are you looking for an explanation for his lies regarding his family? He didn’t know about the brother and therefore he didn’t lie when he said he didn’t have one?” She gave a shake of her head. “A couple years ago MacGregor got arrested for public drunk in the town where his brother lives. You think that was just coincidence?”

Of course it wasn’t. And it stood to reason that, being in trouble with the law again—in serious trouble—Mac would turn to his brother for help.

“And how did you find that out?” he asked sourly.

“I have my sources.”

“You got a cop friend to run a criminal history, didn’t you?” He didn’t need more of an answer than the pink staining her cheeks. “That’s illegal, you know.”

“Charlie’s Rule. The ends justify the means.”

“Who’s Charlie?”

“A guy I work with.” She said it so casually that Logan knew immediately there was more to the relationship than that. A guy she was adversarial with, was jealous of or was intimate with? A guy who’d seen those same tiny panties, only with her in them?

It didn’t matter to him. He’d never cared about anyone’s sex life but his own, which had been pretty much nonexistent in recent years. She could be sleeping with half the men in Memphis and he wouldn’t give a damn. Not as long as she kept her end of the bargain and helped him find Mac.

“What else did you find out about this brother?” He was scowling, he realized. Probably because the sun was low enough in the western sky to blind a man. So what if the visor blocked the worst of the glare and his sunglasses took care of the rest? It was still there, and he knew it.

“Señor Escobar is a rancher. He’s married and has two children.”

“And you’re going to help with him how?”

This time when she looked at him, she was smiling. “Despite his married status, Señor Escobar considers himself a ladies’ man. I consider myself a lady. We should have a great deal in common.”

Logan’s chest tightened until the only breaths he could take were shallow. Escobar might be a hundred and eighty degrees opposite from his brother…or he might be just as dangerous, maybe even more so. And she was planning to toy with him? “This is your great plan—flirt with the guy in the hopes that he’ll spill his brother’s whereabouts in the heat of passion?”

“I don’t intend to sleep with him,” she said haughtily. “Look, we can’t decide on any course of action until we get to town and see what’s what. Who knows? Escobar may not have anything to do with MacGregor. He may have zero interest in protecting a brother he may not be close to.”

That was logical. How much would he risk for Brady? Nowhere near as much as Brady had once risked for him.

“What about the law in this town? Are they honest, corrupt, incompetent or just inefficient?”

“I don’t know. But they did arrest MacGregor.”

“Public drunk isn’t a big deal,” he pointed out. Escobar might not have cared that his brother was inconvenienced and out a few hundred dollars for the fine, especially if Mac was guilty. But something bigger like desertion or murder, something that carried a bigger punishment than a night in jail and a fine, that he very well might care about.

“What does it matter if the cops are corrupt?” Bailey asked. “You can turn MacGregor over to the state cops or the state bureau of investigation or the Army or someone.”

She was right about his options. There were any number of agencies who would be more than happy to make an arrest on a double homicide. But the question mattered because he didn’t want to kill any cops, not even dirty ones, along with MacGregor.

“You are intending to turn him over,” she said tentatively when he offered no response.

He scowled at her. “I told you, I’m no murderer.” He had killed a lot of people, but not one who hadn’t been trying to kill him at the same time. If he needed the rationalization, he had no doubt Mac would try to kill him, too. But he wasn’t intending to rationalize his actions. His plan was simple: Mac was going to die.

One way or another—self-defense or cold-blooded murder—Logan was going to kill him.

The sun had long since set when they finally stopped for the night. Bailey, so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open, roused when Logan pulled up to the entrance of a motel a few hundred yards off the interstate in El Paso. As he went inside, she straightened in her seat, then looked around.

Light spilled from everywhere—street lamps, neon signs, headlights—to dispel the night’s darkness. The area was typical for its location—fast-food restaurants, motels ranging from good to beyond seedy, bars, gas stations and convenience stores. This particular motel—not good, but not seedy—shared its parking lot with a two-pump station and a convenience store and its roof with an establishment identified in pink neon as Pepe’s Cantina. The vehicles on the motel side of the lot were mostly big rigs, on the cantina side, mostly pickups and nondescript sedans. Logan’s GTX stood out, while her car would have blended right in.

Logan returned with a key, hardly noticing that she was alert, and drove to the side lot away from Pepe’s. She’d passed the last two hundred miles in an exhaustion-induced fog, wanting desperately to stretch out somewhere and sleep. He’d shown no such interest, though, and damned if she was going to whine or plead for a break.

He parked in front of Room 17, hefted his duffel out of the trunk, then left her to retrieve her own bags and close the trunk. By the time she did so and made it to the sidewalk, he was already inside the room, turning on lights and lowering the temperature on the air conditioner.

The room was about as clean as she expected—she wouldn’t walk barefooted on the carpet, but crawling under the covers wouldn’t give her the willies. She dropped her bags on the bed farther from the door. Only the need for the bathroom and a slathering of moisturizer on her wind-burned skin kept her from joining them.

Feeling marginally better when she came out of the bathroom, Bailey grabbed her tote off the bed, set it on the counter next to the sink, then spun back around. Her suitcase was where she’d left it, Logan’s duffel was where he’d left it and the door was closed…but there was no sign of Logan. She reached the door in three strides and jerked it open. The GTX was still parked outside, but its owner was nowhere to be seen. Damnation! Where had he gone, what was he doing and why had she let him out of her sight?

Walking back into the room, she closed the door hard. The rush of air sent a piece of paper fluttering from the foot of the first bed onto the stained carpet. Gone to Pepe’s for a beer, it read in sharp, bold letters.

Great. Instead of crawling into bed and getting the sleep she craved, she was going to spend the next however long in a smoky, noisy bar drinking a beer she didn’t want just so she could keep an eye on the partner who didn’t want her. Wonderful.

“Lexy, I hope you appreciate this,” she muttered as she grabbed her purse and headed out the door.

Pepe’s Cantina didn’t disappoint. As bars went, she’d been in worse—Thelma’s immediately came to mind—but she’d seen plenty better. The lighting was too dim by half, the music too loud by half, the air too polluted to breathe. Before she’d gone ten feet inside the door, a niggling pain started in her forehead with the intention of becoming a full-blown headache.

After giving her eyes time to adjust to the low light, she scanned the crowd. There were a lot of men wearing cowboy hats, a lot of women with big hair. Everyone’s jeans were tight, their smiles bright, their moods cheery. They’d come out tonight with the goal of having a good time and, by God, they weren’t going to fail.

Except for the lone man standing at the bar. He leaned his elbows against the scarred wood, dangled a bottle in one hand and gazed at the couples on the dance floor with a nine-mile stare.

She made her way across the room, slid onto the stool next to him and ordered a beer before swiveling to face him and smiling brightly. “If you’d mentioned you wanted a beer, I would have walked over with you.”

“If I’d wanted you to come with me, I would have mentioned it.” He tilted the bottle to his mouth and took a healthy swallow. “I figured you’d be snoring away by now.”

“I don’t snore.”

“Of course you don’t. That was just a funny little rattle the car developed a hundred miles ago.”

She would have said she hadn’t slept in the car—tried to, wanted to, even drifted into a state of semiconsciousness, but never actually slept. But she didn’t argue the point with him. “Aren’t you tired?”

“Why would I be?”

“Because you drove over six hundred miles today.”

He glanced at her for a moment before twisting farther around to catch the bartender’s attention and order another beer. “Six hundred miles is nothing,” he said, then added, “However, six hundred miles with you…”

The bartender delivered both beers at once. Bailey took a sip of hers, cold and sour, and thought longingly about the bed awaiting her. If she offered a respite from her company in exchange for his car keys, would he agree? Maybe. Definitely, if he had a spare set of keys somewhere.

Turning the stool, she faced the dance floor, as Logan was doing, and took another small sip of beer. Without a doubt, he was the best-looking guy in the place, as well as the least approachable. Though the women gave him admiring looks, not one hit on him, asked him to dance or even did more than smile hesitantly on the way past.

She wasn’t so lucky. She’d managed to down maybe a third of her beer when a bear of a man walked right up to her, stopping a little too close and greeting her with a grin. “Hey, darlin’, wanna dance?”

He was very big, broad-shouldered and muscular. His beard was neatly trimmed, his long hair pulled into a ponytail. He wasn’t scary or even unattractive. He just roused zero interest in her. She smiled politely and said, “No, thank you.”

“Oh, come on. I’m good on the dance floor.”

“I’m not.”

He gave her a long look that started at her face and drifted its way down to her toes, and the grin widened. “Now I don’t believe that, sugar. Come on, let me show you how good you can be.”

“I appreciate the invitation, but—” He caught hold of her hand and was pulling, making her scramble to her feet to avoid falling into his arms. She caught her balance a short distance from Logan, then moved a few steps closer to him as she tugged to free her hand. “Really, my boyfriend doesn’t like for me to dance with other guys.”

The man’s gaze shifted from her to Logan, apparently sizing him up and finding him no threat—clear evidence that he’d had far too much to drink. “Aw, you don’t mind, do you, buddy?”

Logan’s smile was thin and amused. “No, not at all. Go on, sweetheart. You’ll enjoy it.”

Bailey shot him a killing look. “I wouldn’t think of leaving you here all alone, honey.”

“Nah, I don’t mind. Go ahead and take a spin around the dance floor. I’ll wait for you over there.” With his bottle, he gestured toward an empty booth along the far wall, then pushed away from the bar.

Wishing looks could kill, she watched him go, then turned her attention back to her admirer when he pulled on her hand. “What’s your name?”

Taking the question as a sign of surrender, the big guy smiled ear to ear. “Billy.”

“Well, Billy…” Stepping closer, she straightened his collar with her free hand, then brushed nonexistent lint from his shoulder. “If you don’t let go of me right now, I’m going to have to hurt you. Now, I don’t mind hurting you, but it’s just going to embarrass you in front of all your friends, and then you’re going to get pissed off with me and we’ll both go away thinking badly of each other. You don’t want that, do you?”

He gave her another of those long looks and finished it even more tickled by her words than when he’d started it. Ducking his head the necessary distance to bring his mouth close to her ear, he asked, “And just how do you think you’re gonna hurt me, sweet pea? You gonna do some kind of karate chop? Or maybe you got a nasty left hook? No, I know—you’ve got some kind of secret powers.”

Bailey sighed regretfully. “You really want to do this?”

“More than you can guess.”

Billy’s amusement grew with each moment that she considered her options. He had likely reached the conclusion that she’d merely been bluffing when she stomped her boot heel into his instep, kneed him in the groin, then kicked him across the backs of the knees, sending him crumpling to the floor in a groaning heap.

Crouching beside him, she bent to look into his face. “Satisfied, Billy?” she asked sarcastically before giving his shoulder a vigorous pat. “Don’t hold a grudge, will you?”

She ignored the curious looks as she straightened and crossed the dance floor to Logan’s booth. “Stand up,” she commanded, and to her surprise, he did. Taking a cue from his action that morning, she wriggled her fingers into the right front pocket of his jeans, searching for his keys, and he grabbed her wrist.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, applying just enough pressure to keep her hand still. “You want it that bad, sweetheart, just ask.”

“Give me your keys. And your wallet.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because I’m tired and disappointed in you and I want to go to bed.”

“Go to bed. I’m not stopping you.”

“I want your keys and your money and your weapons to make sure you’ll be here in the morning.” She was standing closer to him than she’d ever been, close enough to feel the heat and the tension coming off his body. Close enough to hear the hitch in his breathing. Close enough to see the faint surprise in his eyes as the denim of his jeans tightened across her hand.

She glanced down automatically, unable to see any sign of his arousal in the dim light but feeling it just the same. Heat warmed her face as she jerked her gaze up again. Her throat had suddenly gone dry, making it impossible for her to swallow, but she tried anyway. “L-let go, and I’ll pull m-my hand out.”

“Maybe in a minute,” he replied, his voice silky, steadier than hers had been. But he did let go, let her slide her fingers free and take a step back. A moment later he picked up her hand, laid his keys in her palm, then added the battered wallet from his hip pocket.

“Now go away,” he said quietly. Warned quietly. “Leave me alone.”

She was happy to comply.

I’m disappointed in you.

Logan hadn’t needed to ask what she’d meant by that. He’d spent fifteen years of his life with Brady, who always did the right thing, the hero thing. Brady never would have walked away and left her with the gorilla. He would have taken care of the guy for her, and she would have been grateful for the rescue. Everyone Brady rescued was supposed to be grateful.

Well, Logan wasn’t into the hero thing and never had been. She was a grown woman; if she wanted to go into a bar, she should be prepared for whatever happened. Besides, she hadn’t needed his help. The gorilla had been eight inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier, but she’d walked out the door while he’d lain on the floor, whimpering and holding his balls. It was only in the past few minutes that his buddies had finally gotten him to his feet and out of the bar.

Not that it mattered whether she thought less of him for not intervening. Once he’d taken care of Mac, he would never see her again. She was nothing more than a necessary nuisance…

…who had given him the first hint of a hard-on in months. It didn’t have anything to do with her, of course. Any woman who shoved her hand in his jeans pocket and started groping like that would have brought the same response. That was what happened when he went so damn long without. While it was nice to know that part of him was still alive, he had neither the time nor the desire for anything beyond justice. Vengeance. Once he’d gotten that, then he could think about sex.

He finished his third beer and debated a fourth, but, suddenly feeling the exhaustion of the day, decided against it. His eyes were gritty and wanted nothing more than to close and stay that way for six or eight hours, and he couldn’t take a deep breath to save himself. In his two years in Afghanistan and Iraq, he’d learned his physical limits and he knew he’d reached them.

Sliding out of the booth, he headed for the door. When he stepped out, the chill night air served to rouse him a little. Hunching his shoulders, he shoved his hands into his jeans pockets…and found the room key among the change in his left pocket. Had Bailey gone to the office and talked the clerk out of another key? Was she waiting outside the room or had she headed back to the bar to find him…and run into the gorilla and his friends on the way?

Refusing to acknowledge the sudden chill as anything close to panic, he lengthened his strides and turned the far corner of the motel. The sidewalk in front of Room 17 was empty. Of course it was, because she was inside the room, tucked in her bed in that T-shirt and those ridiculously tiny panties.

He unlocked the door and swung it open, only to find the room empty. The bathroom door was open, the light off, and there was no sound but the hum of the air conditioner.

He was about to head back to the motel office when a look at the Plymouth stopped him. She had the keys to his car. If she couldn’t get into the room and didn’t want to brave the bar again, what better place to wait?

Sure enough, she was curled up in the backseat, her head pillowed on her purse, his jean jacket tucked around her. It was proof of her exhaustion that she’d managed to doze off in the cramped space, because she damn sure couldn’t be comfortable all twisted up like that.

Logan leaned against the rear quarter panel, hands resting on the cool metal. Maybe the gorilla wasn’t the type to take public humiliation personally…but he could just as easily have wanted retribution. A lone woman against one man might not be a problem, but against three? He should have walked her to the room, not so much for her own safety but for the safety of the information she hadn’t yet given him. He wasn’t into the hero thing, but he did believe in protecting what was his.

He rubbed his hands over his eyes, then turned and rapped sharply on the window. The first three taps brought no response at all. After the second three, she finally shifted and damn near slid into the floorboard before catching herself.

“Come on, Madison, let’s go to bed,” he called through the closed window.

Innocent words to conjure up not-so-innocent images. It was her fault, for looking softer and sweeter when she was only half-awake, for the braid that had come loose and the tendrils of pale brown hair that framed her hazy expression.

It took her a moment to reach the door handle, to push the passenger seat forward and to maneuver through the narrow space. She swayed and would have stumbled out of the car if he hadn’t caught her, hands on her shoulders, deliberately keeping her at a distance. As soon as she seemed steady, he let go and locked the car door while she headed blindly for the bed visible through the open room door. She didn’t move her suitcase, didn’t bother to undress, but took a header onto the bed, pulled the denim jacket around her again and lost consciousness again.

Sleeping in her clothes wouldn’t hurt her—he’d done it for months at a time in the war. Neither would sharing half her bed with a suitcase. She’d just proven she could sleep damn near anywhere. And if she got cold, well, she’d wake up long enough to pull the covers over her.

Still, after locking the door and securing the chain, he moved the suitcase to the floor, then unzipped the clunky black boots and set them next to the bag. He pulled her purse strap from around her neck and over her shoulder—just so she wouldn’t risk choking herself in the night—and set it on the nightstand, then pulled the loose half of the bedspread up to cover her.

He wasn’t being considerate but, rather, selfish, he told himself as he stripped to his boxers and crawled into bed. She wasn’t the best of traveling companions under good circumstances; she was likely to be even worse without a good night’s sleep. He was just looking out for himself.

As he’d done since he was fifteen.

As he would always do. Just himself, and nobody else.

Logan had always been a light sleeper. Rita Marshall hadn’t liked it when her sons slept through the alarm, and the punishment for disrupting her morning routine had been severe. She’d also had a fondness for hauling them out of bed at odd hours of the night, using their disorientation at the abrupt awakening against them, so he’d learned over the years to awaken quickly and to come instantly alert.

The room’s quiet was broken only by the distant sound of traffic. Light filtered in through a crack in the drapes above his bed and sent a wedge of illumination across the floor and onto the opposite bed. That bed was empty at the moment; it must have been Bailey’s movement that roused him. He lay motionless on his left side as his gaze searched the dark room for the source of the noise. He located the shadowy form an instant before it disappeared into the bathroom. After the door closed, the bathroom light came on, seeping underneath the door to illuminate a patch of dirty brown carpet.