Five years ago, Judd Dunn, a hard-edged Texas Ranger, put Christabel Gaines’s father behind bars—where he belonged. But Judd’s involvement in Crissy’s life was far from over. With their jointly owned ranch on the verge of bankruptcy, Judd wed her in name only, promising to save their land and vowing to ignore the sexual tension between them.

Now, just when Judd decides to release Crissy from their sham of a marriage, he is blindsided by a bloodthirsty foe who is setting the stage for unspeakable evil by preying upon Judd’s greatest weakness—his wife. No longer a starry-eyed schoolgirl, Crissy’s a smart, fearless woman with unfulfilled desires. And she will do anything in the name of love—including taking a bullet for her husband.

With their very lives at stake, Crissy and Judd must confront their darkest demons, their new rivals and their deepest desires—and face up to a mutual destiny they cannot outrun.

Praise for the novels of New York Times

and USA TODAY bestselling author

DIANA

PALMER

“Sensual and suspenseful.”

—Booklist on Lawless

“Palmer demonstrates, yet again, why she’s the queen of desperado quests for justice and true love.”

—Publishers Weekly on Dangerous

“The popular Palmer has penned another winning novel, a perfect blend of romance and suspense.”

—Booklist on Lawman

“Palmer knows how to make the sparks fly…heartwarming.”

—Publishers Weekly on Renegade

“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”

—Affaire de Coeur

Lawless

Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To the men and women of the Texas Rangers

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

1

It was a blistering hot day in south Texas, even for early September. Christabel Gaines was wearing a low-cut white top with faded blue jeans, a book bag slung casually over one shoulder. The top outlined her small, firm breasts and the jeans clung lovingly to every softly rounded line of her young body. The faint breeze caught her long blond hair in her pretty bow-shaped mouth, against her wide forehead and high cheekbones. She moved the strands away, her big, warm brown eyes amused at something one of the students with her was saying about a classmate. It was a long, dull Monday morning.

Debbie, a girl in her computer class, was suddenly staring past Christabel toward the parking lot. She whistled softly. “Well! I know what I want for Christmas,” she said in a loud whisper.

Teresa, another classmate, was also staring. “Hubba, hubba,” she said with a wicked grin, wiggling her eyebrows. “Anybody know who he is?”

Curious, Christabel turned around to see a tall, darkly handsome man walk gracefully across the lawn toward them. He was wearing a cream-colored Stetson, jerked down over his eyes. His neat long-sleeved white cotton shirt was fastened with a turquoise bola tie. His long, powerful legs were encased in gray slacks, his feet in gray hand-tooled boots. On his shirt pocket, a silver star in a circle glittered in the sunlight. Across his lean hips, a brown leather holster and gunbelt were fastened. In the gunbelt was a .45 caliber Ruger Vaquero pistol. He usually carried an automatic pistol, a .45 Colt ACP, but it was having a new custom handle and the Texas Ranger star added. Today also happened to be match day at the Jacobsville Gun Club’s Single Action Shooting Society, which he belonged to. The quick-draw-and-shoot group wore Western garb to meets. So it was convenient for him to wear the wheel gun to work just this once.

“What have you girls done?” one of the boys asked with mock surprise. “The Texas Rangers are after somebody!”

Christabel didn’t say a word. She just stared with the others, but her dark eyes twinkled as she watched him stride toward her with that single-minded determination that made him so good at his job. He was the sexiest, most wonderful man in the world. She owed him everything she had, everything she was. Sometimes she wished with all her heart that she’d been born beautiful, and maybe then he’d notice her the way she wanted him to. She smiled secretly, wondering what the other girls would say if they knew her true relationship with that dynamo Texas Ranger.

Judd Dunn was thirty-four. He’d spent most of his life in law enforcement, and he was good at it. He’d been with Company D of the Texas Rangers for five years. He’d been up for promotion to lieutenant, but he’d turned it down because that was more of an administrative job and he liked field work better. He kept that long, lean body fit by working on the ranch, ownership of which he shared with Christabel.

He’d been made responsible for Christabel when she was only sixteen. The D bar G Ranch had been run-down, flat-busted, and ready to crash and burn. Judd had pulled it out of the red and made it show a profit. Over the years, he’d put his own money into enlarging the crossbreed beef cattle herd they oversaw. With his canny business sense, and Christabel’s knowledge of computers, they’d been just beginning to show a small profit. It had allowed Christabel to work on her diploma in computer programming, and Judd even had an occasional spending spree. His last, a year ago, involved that cream-colored Stetson slanted over his dark brow. It was made of compressed beaver fur and it had cost him a paycheck. It did suit him, she had to admit. He looked rakishly handsome. Sadly, there hadn’t been any spending sprees this year. There had been a drought and cattle prices had dropped. Times were hard again, just when they’d been looking up.

Any other man would have noticed with amusement the rapt stares of Christabel’s two pretty companions. Judd paid them the same attention he’d have given pine straw. He had something on his mind, and nothing would divert him until he’d resolved it.

He walked right up to Christabel, towering over her, to the astonishment of her classmates.

“We’ve had an offer,” he said, taking her by the upper arm as impersonally as he’d have an apprehended felon. “I need to talk to you.”

“Judd, I’m only between classes,” she protested.

“This won’t take a minute,” he muttered, narrowing his black eyes as he searched for a secluded spot. He found one under a big live oak tree. “Come on.”

She was escorted forcibly to the tree while her companions watched with wide-eyed curiosity. Later, she knew, she was going to be the focus of some probing questions.

“Not that I’m not glad to see you,” she pointed out when he released her abruptly, away from prying ears, “but I only have five minutes...!”

“Then don’t waste them talking,” he cut her off abruptly. His voice was deep, dark velvet, even when he didn’t mean it to be. It sent delicious shivers down Christabel’s spine.

“Okay,” she conceded with a sigh. She held out her hand, palm-up.

He noted the signet ring—his signet ring—that she always wore on her ring finger. Although she’d had it resized, it was still too big for her slender hand. But she insisted on wearing it.

She followed his gaze and flexed her hand. “Nobody knows,” she said. “I don’t gossip.”

“That would be the day,” he agreed, and for just an instant, affectionate humor made those deep-set black eyes twinkle.

“So, what’s the problem?”

“It’s not a problem, exactly,” he said, resting his right hand lazily on the butt of the pistol. The Texas Ranger emblem was carved into the maple wood handle. The new grip for his automatic would have the same wood and custom emblem. The holster and gunbelt that held it were hand-tooled tan leather. “We’ve had an offer from a film crew. They’ve been surveying the land around here, with a representative from the state film commission, looking for a likely spot to site a fictitious ranch. They like ours.”

“A film crew.” She bit her full lower lip. “Judd, I don’t like a lot of people around,” she began.

“I know that. But we want to buy another purebred herd sire, don’t we,” he continued, “and if we get the right kind, he’s going to be expensive. They’ve offered us thirty-five thousand dollars for the use of the ranch for a few weeks’ filming. That would put us over the top. We could even enlarge our electric fencing and replace the tractor.”

She whistled. That amount of money seemed like a fortune. It was always something on a ranch, equipment breakdown or cowboys who wanted more money, or the electric pump went and there was no water. In between, the vet had to be called out to look at sick cattle, there were ear tags and butane for branding, and fencing materials... She wondered what it would be like to be rich and have anything she wanted. The ranch that had belonged jointly to his uncle and her father was still a long way from being prosperous.

“Stop daydreaming,” he said curtly. “I need an answer. I’ve got a case waiting.”

Her eyes widened. “A case? Which case?”

His eyes narrowed. “Not now.”

“It’s the homicide, isn’t it?” she asked excitedly. “The young woman in Victoria who was found with her throat cut, lying in a ditch with only a blouse on. You’ve got a lead!”

“I’m not telling you anything.”

She moved closer. “Listen, I bought fresh apples this morning. I’ve got stick cinnamon. Brown sugar.” She leaned closer. “Real butter. Pastry flour.”

“Stop it,” he groaned.

“Can’t you just see those apples, bubbling away in that crust, until it gets to be a nice, soft, beautiful, flaky...”

“All right!” he ground out, glancing around quickly to make sure nobody was close enough to hear. “She was the wife of a local rancher,” he told her. “Her husband’s story checks out and she didn’t have an enemy in the world. We think it was random.”

“No suspects at all?”

“Not yet. Not much trace evidence, either, except for one hair and a few fibers of highly colored cloth that didn’t match the blouse she was wearing,” he said. He glared at her. “And that’s all you’re getting, apple pie or no apple pie!”

“Okay,” she said, giving in with good grace. She searched his lean, handsome face. “You want us to let the movie company move in,” she added with keen perception.

He nodded. “We’re going to be short about a thousand dollars after we pay estimated taxes next week,” he told her quietly. “We’re going to have to buy more feed. The flooding wiped out most of our hay and corn crops, not to mention the alfalfa. I got the silo fixed, but not in time to help us out any this season. We’re also going to need more vitamin and mineral supplements to mix with the feed.”

“And we’ll have to buy supplemental feed or sell off stock we need,” she said, drawing in a long, wistful breath. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if we had millions, you know, like that television show they used to have that was set up around Dallas? We could buy combines and new tractors and hay balers...”

He pursed his lips and smiled at her enthusiasm. His dark eyes slid over her pretty figure, lingering involuntarily on her breasts. They looked like little apples under that clinging fabric and he got an unexpected and rather shocking ache from looking at them. He dragged his eyes back up to meet hers. “Wouldn’t you like some new jeans instead?” he asked, nodding toward the holes in hers.

She shrugged. “Nobody around here wears nice stuff. Well, Debbie does,” she amended, glancing back toward her classmate, who was dressed in a designer skirt set. “But her folks have millions.”

“What’s she doing in a vocational school?” he wanted to know.

She lifted her face. “Trying to land Henry Tesler’s son!”

He grinned. “He’s a student, I gather.”

She shook her head. “He teaches algebra.”

“One of those,” he agreed with twinkling eyes.

“He’s real brainy.” She nodded. “Real rich, too. Henry’s dad owns racehorses, but Henry doesn’t like animals, so he teaches.” She checked the wide, unfeminine watch on her wrist. “Oh, my gosh, I’ll miss my class! I have to go!”

“I’ll tell the film company they can come on down,” he said.

She turned to sprint back after her classmates, who were wandering toward the side entrance of the main building. She stopped and looked over her shoulder apprehensively. “When are they coming?”

“Two weeks from Saturday, to take some still photos and discuss the modifications they’ll need to make to set up their cameras.”

She groaned. “Well, tell them they can’t rev up their engines near the barn! Bessie’s in foal!”

“I’ll tell them everything.”

She studied him with admiration. “You do look really sexy, you know,” she said. “My classmate Debbie wants you for Christmas,” she added mischievously.

He glowered at her.

Her eyes sparkled. “It’s only three months away. Tell you what, if you buy me a see-through red nightie with lace, I’ll wear it for you,” she teased.

He refused to let himself picture her that way. “I’m 14 years older than you,” he pointed out.

She wiggled her ring finger at him.

He took four long steps and towered over her. “If you dare tell anybody...!” he threatened darkly.

“I don’t gossip,” she reminded him. “But there’s no legal or moral reason in the world why you can’t look at me in flimsy lingerie,” she pointed out, “whether or not people know we’re married.”

“I told you five years ago, and I’m telling you now,” he said firmly, “nothing of that sort is ever going to happen between you and me. In two months you’ll be twenty-one. You’ll sign a paper, and so will I, and we’ll be business partners—nothing more.”

She searched his black eyes with the familiar excitement almost choking her. “Tell me you’ve never wondered what I look like without my clothes,” she whispered. “I dare you!”

He gave her a look that would have fried bread. It was a look that was famous in south Texas. He could back down lawbreakers with it. In fact, he’d backed her own father down with it, just before he went for him with both big fists.

She glowered up at him with a wistful sigh. “What a waste,” she murmured thoughtfully. “You know more about women than I’ll ever know about men. I’ll bet you’re just sensational in bed.”

His lips became a thin line. The look was taking on heat-seeking attributes.

“All right,” she conceded finally. “I’ll find some nice young boy to teach me what to do with all these inconvenient aches I get from time to time, and I’ll tell you every sordid detail, I swear I will.”

“One,” he said.

She lifted both eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“Two.”

Her hand tightened on the book bag. “Listen here, I can’t be intimidated by a man who’s known me since I wore frilly dresses and patent leather shoes...”

“Three!”

“...and furthermore, I don’t care if you are a...”

“Four!”

She turned on her heel without finishing the sentence and made a beeline for the side entrance. The next number would result in something undignified. She remembered too many past countdowns, to her own detriment. He really was single-minded!

“I’m only humoring you to make you feel in control!” she called back to him. “Don’t think I’m running!”

He hid a smile until he was back at the black SUV he drove.

* * *

The same week, Jack Clark, a man who worked for them, was caught red-handed with an expensive pair of boots he’d charged to their account. Christabel had found it on the bill and called Judd down to show it to him. They’d fired the man outright. She didn’t tell Judd that the man had made blatant advances toward her, or that she’d had to threaten him with Judd to make him stop.

A few days after he was fired, their brand-new young Salers bull was found dead in a pasture. To Christabel, it seemed uncannily like foul play. The bull had been healthy, and she refused to believe Judd’s assertion that it was bloat-causing weeds that had killed him and left four other bulls in the same pasture alive. After all, Jack Clark had vowed revenge. But Judd brushed off her suspicions, and even told Maude he thought she was trying to get attention, because he’d ignored her while he was dickering with the film people. That had made her furious. She’d told their foreman, Nick Bates, what she thought, though, and told him to keep an eye on the cattle. Sometimes Judd treated her like a child. It hadn’t bothered her so much before, but lately it was disturbing.

* * *

Judd turned up early Saturday morning two weeks later in his big black sport utility vehicle, accompanied by a second burgundy SUV which was full of odd people. There was a representative from the Texas film commission and a director whom Christabel recognized immediately. She hadn’t realized it was going to be a famous one. There was also an assistant director, and four other men who were introduced as part of the crew, including a photographer and a sound man.

She learned that the star of the film was an A-list actor, a handsome young man who’d sadly never been on a horse.

“That’s going to limit our scenes with your livestock,” the director told Judd with a chuckle. “Of course, Tippy Moore has never been around livestock, either. You might have seen her on magazine covers. They call her the Georgia Firefly. This will be her first motion picture, but she was a hit at the audition. A real natural.”

Judd pursed his lips and his black eyes lit up. “I’ve seen her on the cover of the sports magazine’s swimsuit issue,” he confessed. “Every red-blooded man in America knows who she is.”

Christabel felt uncomfortable. She glanced at Judd, all too aware of his interest, and could have wailed. They were married, but he took no notice of her at all. He was fond of her, he indulged her, but that was as far as it went. He hadn’t even kissed her when they were married. It was sobering to realize that in two months, it would all be over. She’d tried everything to make him notice her, even teasing him about a boy at school who wanted to marry her. That had been a lie, and he’d caught her in it. Now he didn’t believe anything she said. She studied his tall, sexy physique and wondered what he’d say if she walked into the study one night while he was going over the books and took off all her clothes.

Then she remembered the terrible scars on her smooth back, the ones her drunken father had put there with a short quirt when she was sixteen. She’d tried to save her poor horse, but her father had turned on her. She could still remember the pain. Her back had been in shreds. Judd had come to see her father on business that Saturday morning, when he was working at the Texas Ranger post in San Antonio. So much of the memory was hazy, but she recalled clearly how Judd had come over the corral fence after her father, with such silent menace that her father had actually dropped the quirt and started backing away. It hadn’t saved him. Judd had gone for him with those big fists, and seconds later, the drunken man was lying in the dirt, half insensible. He’d been locked in the tack shed seconds later.

Judd had picked her up in his arms, so tenderly, murmuring endearments, yelling hoarsely for Maude, their housekeeper, to call the police and the ambulance service. He’d put her in the ambulance himself and ridden into the hospital with her, while her invalid mother wept bitterly on the porch as her husband was taken away. Judd had pressed charges, and her father had gone to jail.

Never again, Judd had said coldly, was that man going to raise his hand to Christabel.

But the damage had been done. It took weeks for the wounds to heal completely. There was no money for plastic surgery. There still wasn’t. So Christabel had white scars across her back in parallel lines, from her shoulders to her waist. She was so self-conscious about them that despite her teasing, she’d never have had the nerve to take off her clothes in front of Judd, or any other man. He only wanted to get rid of her, anyway. He didn’t want to get married. He loved his job, and his freedom. He said so constantly.

But he knew who Tippy Moore was. Most men did. She had the face of an angel, and a body that begged for caresses. Unlike poor Christabel, whose face was passable, but not really pretty, and whose body was like the poor beast’s in the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

Judd and the director, Joel Harper, were talking about using one of the saddle-broken horses for a scene, and the advisability of having their foreman, Nick Bates, around during shooting.

“We’re going to need set security, too,” Harper said thoughtfully. “I like to use local police, when I can, but you’re out of the city limits here, aren’t you?”

“You could get one of our Jacobsville policemen to work here when he’s off duty,” Judd suggested. “Our chief of police, Chet Blake, is out of town. But Cash Grier is assistant chief, and he’d be glad to help you out. We worked together for a few months out of the San Antonio Ranger office.”

“Friend of yours?” Harper asked.

Judd made a rough sound in his throat. “Grier doesn’t have friends, he has sparring partners.”

Christabel had heard a lot about Cash Grier, but she’d never met him. She’d seen him around. He was an enigma, wearing a conservative police uniform with his long thick black hair in a ponytail. He had a mustache and a little goatee just under his lower lip these days, and he looked...menacing. Crime had dropped sharply in Jacobsville since his arrival. There were some nasty rumors about his past, including one that he’d been a covert assassin in his younger days.

“He knocked Terry Barnett through a window,” Christabel recalled aloud.

Harper’s eyes opened wide.

Christabel realized that they were staring at her and she flushed. “Terry was breaking dishes in the local waffle place because his wife, who worked there, was seeing another man. He caught them together and started terrorizing the place. They say he ran at Grier with a waffle iron, and Grier just shifted his weight and Terry went through the glass.” She whistled. “Took thirty stitches, they said, and he got probation for assault on a police officer. That’s a felony,” she added helpfully.

Judd was glaring at her.

She shrugged. “When you spend time around them, it rubs off,” she explained to Harper with a sheepish grin. “I’ve known Judd a long time. He and my father were...business partners.”

“My uncle and her father were business partners,” Judd corrected easily. “I inherited my uncle’s half of the ranch, she inherited her father’s.”

“I see,” Harper said, nodding, but his thoughts were on the film he was going to make, and he was already setting up scenes in his mind for a storyboard. He was considering logistics. “We’ll need someone to cater food while we’re working,” he murmured. “We’ll need to set up meetings with city officials as well, because some of the location work will be done in Jacobsville.”

“Some of it?” Christabel asked, curious.

Harper smiled at her. “We’re shooting some of the movie in Hollywood,” he explained. “But we’d rather locate a ranch setting on a working ranch. The town is part of the atmosphere.”

“What’s the movie going to be about?” Christabel wanted to know. “Can you tell me?”

He grinned at her interest. He had two daughters about her age. “It’s a romantic comedy about a model who comes out West to shoot a commercial on a real ranch and falls in love with a rancher. He hates models,” he added helpfully.

She chuckled. “I’ll buy a ticket.”

“I hope several million other people will, too.” He turned back to Judd. “I’ll need weather information—it’s going to cost us a fortune if we start shooting at the wrong time and have to hole up for three or four weeks while the weather clears.”

Judd nodded. “I think I can find what you need.”

“And we’ll want to rent rooms at the best hotel you have, for the duration.”

“No problem there, either,” Judd said dryly. “It isn’t exactly a tourist trap.”

Harper was fanning himself with a sheaf of papers and sweating. “Not in this heat,” he agreed.

“Heat?” Christabel asked innocently. “You think it’s warm here? My goodness!”

“Cut it out,” Judd muttered darkly, because the director was beginning to turn pale.

She wrinkled her nose at him. “I was only kidding. Law enforcement types have no sense of humor, Mr. Harper,” she told him. “Their faces are painted on and they can’t smile...”

“One,” Judd said through his teeth.

“See?” she asked pertly.

“Two...!”

She threw up her hands and walked into the house.

* * *

Christabel was just taking an apple pie out of the oven when she heard doors slam and an engine rev up. Judd walked into the kitchen past Maude, who grinned at him as she went toward the back of the house to put the clothes in the dryer.

“I made you an apple pie,” Christabel told Judd, waving it under his nose. “Penance.”

He sighed as he poured himself a cup of black coffee, pulled out a chair and sat down at the small kitchen table. “When are you going to grow up, tomboy?” he asked.

She looked down at her dusty boots and stained jeans. She could imagine that her braided hair was standing out in wisps around her flushed face, and she knew without looking down that her short-sleeved yellow cotton blouse was wrinkled beyond repair. In contrast, Judd’s jeans were well-fitting and clean. His boots were so polished they reflected the tablecloth. His white shirt with the silver sergeant’s Texas Ranger star on the pocket was creaseless, his dark blue patterned tie in perfect order. His leather gunbelt creaked when he crossed his long, powerful legs, and the .45 Colt ACP pistol shifted ominously in its holster.

She recalled that his great-grandfather had been a gunfighter—not to mention a Texas Ranger—before he went to Harvard and became a famous trial lawyer in San Antonio. Judd held the record for the fastest quick-draw in northern Texas, and his friend and fellow Ranger Marc Brannon of Jacobsville held it for southern Texas in the Single Action Shooting Society. They often practiced at the local gun club as guests of their mutual friend Ted Regan. A membership at the club was hundreds of dollars that law enforcement people couldn’t usually afford. But former mercenary Eb Scott had his antiterrorism training school in Jacobsville, and he had one of the finest gun ranges around. He made it available at no cost to any law enforcement people who wanted to use it. Between Ted and Eb, they got lots of practice.

“Do you still do that quick-draw?” she asked Judd as she sliced the pie.

“Yes, and don’t mention it to Harper,” he added flatly.

She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Don’t you want to be in pictures?” she drawled.

“About as much as you do, cupcake,” he mused, absently appreciating the fit of those tight jeans and the curve of her breasts in the blouse.

She shrugged. “That would be funny. Me, in pictures.” She studied the pie, her hands stilled. “Maybe I could star in a horror movie if they put me in a bathing suit and filmed me from behind.”

There was a shocked silence behind her.

She put a slice of pie on a saucer and added a fork, sliding it in front of Judd.

He caught her hand and pulled her down onto his lap. “Listen to me,” he said in that deep, tender tone he used when little things were hurt, “everybody’s got scars. Maybe they don’t show, but they’re there. A man who loves you won’t care about a few little white lines.”

She cocked her head, trying not to let him see how it affected her to be so close to him. She liked the spicy aftershave he wore, the clean smell of his clothes, the faint whiff of leather that came up from the gunbelt.

“How do you know they’re white?” she asked.

He gave her a worldly look and loosened the tie at his collar, unbuttoning the top buttons of the shirt to disclose a darkly tanned chest with a pelt of curling black hair. She’d seen him without his shirt, but it always unsettled her.

He pulled the shirt and the spotless white undershirt under it to one side and indicated a puckered place in his shoulder, from which white lines radiated. “Twenty-two caliber handgun,” he said, drawing her hand to it. “Feel.”

Her hand was icy cold. It trembled on that warm, muscular flesh. “It’s raised,” she said, her voice sounding breathless.

“Unsightly?” he persisted.

She smiled. “Not really.”

“I don’t imagine any of yours are that bad,” he added. “Button me up.”

It was intimate, exciting, to do that simple little chore. She smiled stupidly. “This is new.”

“What is?”

“You never let me sit in your lap before,” she reminded him.

He was looking at her with an odd expression. “I don’t let anybody sit in my lap.”

She pursed her lips as she got to his collarbone. “Afraid I might try to undress you?”

His chest rippled, but when she looked up, his face was impassive. His eyes were glittery with suppressed humor.

“That wouldn’t do you much good,” he commented.

“Why not?”

One black eyebrow arched. “You wouldn’t know what to do with me when you got my clothes off.”

There was a clatter of falling potatoes on the floor.

Judd and Christabel stared toward the door where Maude was standing with both hands on the edges of her apron and potatoes still spilling out around her feet.

“What the hell is your problem?” Judd asked darkly.

Maude’s eyes were like saucers.

“Oh, I get it,” Christabel said, grinning. She had one hand on Judd’s shoulder and the other on his tie. “She thinks I’m undressing you. It’s okay, Maude,” she added, holding up her ring finger. “We’re married.”

Judd gave her a royal glare and gently dumped her out of his lap and onto the floor. She grinned at him from the linoleum. He leaned back in the chair and finished adjusting his shirt. “I was showing her one of my scars,” he told Maude.

Maude had picked up the potatoes and she was trying very hard not to say anything stupid. But that innocent remark produced a swell of helpless laughter.

“Now don’t do that,” Christabel groaned, getting up. “Maude, it was very innocent, and he really was showing me his scar.”

Maude nodded enthusiastically and went back to her potatoes. She cast a quick, amused look at Judd, who had a forkful of apple pie suspended in midair and was glaring at her.

“Sure he was,” Maude agreed.

Judd’s eyes narrowed. “I’m armed,” he pointed out.

Maude put down her knife and potato and spread out her arms. “Me, too,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.

Judd glowered at her, and at Christabel, who was grinning from ear to ear. “Now I know where she gets it from,” he told Maude.

“He’s just jealous because he can’t make jokes,” Christabel said wickedly.

Judd gave her a measuring glance and went back to his pie.

2

That night, after Judd had gone back to his apartment in Victoria where he was stationed, Christabel lay awake for hours worrying about Tippy Moore and Judd’s odd reaction to the news that she was going to be in the movie. He seemed fascinated by the woman, just from her photographs, and it was obvious enough to be painful. He might hold Christabel on his lap and reassure her about her scars, but it was impersonal. He’d never even touched her in an inappropriate way, despite her efforts.

Her mind went back to that Saturday long ago when her life had changed so drastically. She could smell the scents of blood and leather, feel the whip on her back...

* * *

Through waves of pain, she heard a deep, gravelly voice cursing steadily. It was the only sound audible, although five other cowboys were standing around her with grim faces and stiff postures where she lay. The corral was dusty, because it hadn’t rained, and there were traces of hay in her disheveled blond hair. She was lying on her stomach and her blouse was in ribbons. Blood seeped from the deep cuts in her back. There had been hard thuds and groans from somewhere nearby, followed by sounds of a door slamming. A minute later, she felt someone kneel beside her.

“Christabel, can you hear me?” Judd’s voice asked harshly at her ear.

Her dark eyes opened, just a slit. It was hard to focus, but she remembered that Judd Dunn was the only person who ever called her by her full name. Everybody else called her “Crissy.”

“Yes?” Was that her voice? It sounded weak and strained. The sun was so bright that she couldn’t get her eyes open.

“I’m going to have to pick you up, honey, and it’s going to hurt,” he said curtly. “Grit your teeth.”

She swallowed hard. Her back felt raw. Her blouse was sticking to the lacerated skin and she could feel the hot, wet blood cooling as it soaked the fabric. It had a funny smell, like metal.

Judd’s strong arms slid under her legs and around her rib cage as carefully as he could. He swung her up, trying to avoid gripping the torn flesh. Her small breasts were pressed hard against the warm muscle of his chest and she sobbed, trying to stifle the sound as pain lanced through her viciously.

“What about...Daddy?” she choked.

His black eyes flashed so violently in that lean, tanned face that two of the cowboys climbed the corral fence to avoid him. “He’s in the tack room,” he said shortly. “He’ll stay there until the sheriff’s deputies get here.”

“No,” she cried. “Judd, no! You can’t have him...arrested! Mama’s sick and she can’t run the ranch. I can’t, either...!”

“He’s already under arrest,” he bit off. “I’m a Texas Ranger,” he reminded her. “But I had your foreman radio the sheriff’s office from my car. They’re already on the way.”

“Who’ll run our part of the ranch?” she repeated, still mostly in shock from what had happened so unexpectedly. Her father had a history of violent behavior when he drank. In fact, Ellie, her mother, was now an invalid because Tom Gaines had knocked her off a ladder in a drunken rage and broken her pelvis. Emergency surgery hadn’t completely healed it, and she had weak lungs to boot.

“I’ll run the ranch, your part and my own,” he said shortly, and kept walking. “Be still, honey.”

Tears ran down her pale cheeks. Her eyes closed and she shivered. He looked down at her with his lips in a thin line. Her long blond hair had come loose from its ponytail and it was matted with her own drying blood. He cursed under his breath, only stopping when the ambulance came careening up in the driveway.

Maude, the heavyset, buxom housekeeper, was wringing her hands on the porch. She ran forward, her hair disheveled. “My poor baby,” she sobbed. “Judd, is she going to be all right?”

“She will be. I can’t say the same for Tom. If she won’t press charges, by God, I will!”

A small thin woman with gray-streaked fair hair came hobbling onto the front porch in a tattered old chenille robe, tears running down her cheeks as she saw her daughter.

“She’ll be all right. Go back to bed, Ellie,” Judd called, and for her his voice was gentle. “I’ll take care of her.”

“Where’s Tom?” she asked shakily.

His voice changed. “Locked up in the tack room.”

Her eyes closed and she leaned against the post. “Thank God...!”

“Maude, get her the hell back to bed before she passes out on the floor!” Judd yelled and kept walking straight toward the EMTs who were just getting out of the ambulance. Behind them, a sheriff’s patrol car arrived with lights flashing and a deputy got out of it to approach Judd.

“What happened?” Deputy Sheriff Hayes Carson asked, his eyes on Christabel’s back.

“Tom happened,” he replied tersely, waiting for the EMTs to get the gurney ready for Christabel. “He was beating her filly with a quirt. She tried to pull him off.”

Hayes winced. He’d been a deputy for five years and he’d seen plenty of battery cases. But this... Christabel was barely sixteen, thin and fragile, and most people around Jacobsville, Texas, loved her. She was forever baking cakes for bazaars and taking flowers to elderly shut-ins, and helping to deliver warm meals to invalids after school. She had a heart as big as Texas and to think of Tom Gaines’s big arm bringing a quirt down on her back with all his might was enough to make even a veteran law enforcement officer nauseous.

“Where is he?” Hayes asked coldly.

Judd pointed in the direction of the tack room, his eyes never leaving Christabel’s tear-drenched face. The tears were all the more poignant for the lack of even a sob. “Key’s by the door.” He met Hayes’s eyes. “You keep that son of a bitch locked up, no matter what it takes. I swear before God, if you let him loose, I’ll kill him!” he said in a tone that sent chills down even Hayes’s back.

“I’ll see that bail’s set as high as possible,” he assured the other man grimly. “I’ll go get him. Is he drunk?”

“He was,” Judd said shortly. “Now he’s crying. He’s sorry, of course. He’s always sorry...!”

He eased Christabel down onto the gurney. “I’m going with her,” he told the EMTs.

They weren’t inclined to argue. Judd Dunn was intimidating enough when he wasn’t in a temper.

He glanced back at Hayes. “How about calling the Ranger office in San Antonio and tell them I’ll probably be late in the morning, and to get someone to fill in for me.”

“Will do,” Hayes said. “I hope she’ll be all right.”

“She will,” he said somberly. He climbed into the ambulance and sat down across from Christabel, catching her soft little hand tightly in his own. “Can you give her something for pain?” he asked as the tears continued to pour from her eyes.

“I’ll ask for orders.” The EMT got the hospital on the radio and explained the patient’s condition. He was questioned briefly by Dr. Jebediah Coltrain, the physician on call.

“Give me that,” Judd said shortly, holding out his hand for the mike. The EMT didn’t argue with him. “Copper?” he asked abruptly. “Judd Dunn. Christabel’s back looks like raw meat. She’s in agony. Have them give her something. I’ll take full responsibility for her.”

“When haven’t you?” Copper murmured dryly. “Give me back to Dan.”

“Sure.” He handed the mike to the EMT, who listened, nodded, and proceeded to fill a hypodermic from a small vial.

Judd pulled off his hat and wiped off the thick sweat from his straight black hair that was dripping onto his broad forehead. He tossed the hat aside and stared at Christabel with glittery eyes.

“Judd,” she whispered hoarsely as the needle went in. “Look after Mama.”

“Of course,” he returned. His fingers tightened around hers. His face was like stone, but the deep-set black eyes in it were still blazing with fury.

She searched his eyes. “I’ll have scars.”

“They won’t matter,” he said through his teeth.

Her eyes closed wearily. It would be all right. Judd would take care of everything...

* * *

And he had. Five years later, he was still taking care of everything. Christabel had never felt guilty about that before, but suddenly she did. He had the responsibility for everything here, including herself. Her father had died of a heart attack soon after his arrest. Christabel’s mother had died the year Christabel graduated from high school, leaving just Maude in the house with her. Judd came to stay during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, and the three of them had good times together. But Judd had never wanted a physical relationship with his young wife, and went to extreme lengths to make sure they didn’t have one.

This year he’d transferred to the Victoria Texas Ranger post, when an elderly ranger working it had retired. It hadn’t been long after his friend, fellow Texas Ranger Marc Brannon and Josette Langley had married, and Cash Grier had come down here from San Antonio to become Jacobsville’s assistant police chief. Marc had worked out of the Victoria office, too, briefly, but he’d left the Rangers to become a full-time rancher when Josette had become pregnant. Judd visited them and their son Christopher often.

So he’d let her sit in his lap tonight. But it hadn’t meant anything, and it never would. His pulse hadn’t even raced, she recalled miserably. But when the director had mentioned Tippy Moore, he’d smiled, and there had been a purely masculine look in his eyes.

She knew Judd was no virgin, even if she was. He had a worldly air about him, and women seemed to sense it, as her friend Debbie had at school. Later she’d remarked that he was probably great in bed and had broken women’s hearts everywhere.

Christabel had brooded after that, because she recalled some odd remarks from her mother long ago about Judd and the company he kept in San Antonio. Apparently he was no stranger to permissive women, but he never brought any of them to the ranch. Her mother had smiled knowingly about that. He wouldn’t want to parade any of his lovers in front of Christabel, she’d remarked. Not when they were secretly married.

It had devastated her to think that Judd didn’t honor his wedding vows, even if it was a paper marriage. Realistically, he couldn’t have gone without a woman for several years, she knew that. But she hated picturing him in bed with some gorgeous companion. She’d cried for two days, hiding her tears in the henhouse while she gathered eggs, or while riding fence line with the boys.

Her tomboyish nature had disturbed her invalid mother, who said that Christabel should be learning how to dress and set proper place settings instead of throwing calves for branding and grooming the horses in the rickety stable. Christabel paid her no attention, and went right on with her chores. She felt that she had to hold up her part of the responsibility for the ranch somehow, and helping with the daily chores before and after school and on weekends was her way of doing it. Judd noticed, at first with amazement, and then with affectionate indulgence.

He did care about her, in his way. But it wasn’t the way Christabel wanted him to care. She had a terrible premonition about the change the movie company’s arrival the following month was going to make in her dreary life. Judd had already stated his intention of getting an annulment in November. What if he fell head-over-heels for the internationally famous model that most adult men drooled over? She couldn’t help thinking that the model might find him equally attractive. Judd was a dish.

She started to roll over and put the pillow over her head. Plenty of time for those worries after she got through the computer class exam at school on Monday. The exam! How could she have forgotten! She reached for her alarm clock and set it for an hour earlier than usual. A little last-minute cramming never hurt anybody.

* * *

She got through the exam and her other classes and went home to do chores. She’d just finished grooming her mare—the same one she’d managed to save from her father’s brutality when it was just a filly—when she heard a car drive up.

Maude had gone to the store, so she went to see who it was. She was surprised to find a black-and-brown Jacobsville police car sitting there. A tall, well-built man in uniform with his thick black hair in a ponytail turned at her approach and came down the steps with a hand on the butt of his .45 automatic in the holster on his well-laden duty belt, sharing space with a leather ammunition clip holder, along with leather baton, aerosol, flashlight and knife holders.

It was Cash Grier, the assistant chief. Crissy had seen him just once, but she’d heard a lot about him. He was like Judd, she supposed, all business and stone-faced.

On a wicked impulse, she put both hands high over her head. “I confess. I did it!” she called. “I robbed Jacobsville Savings and Loan, and the money’s in the barn. Go ahead, get a rope!”

He stopped and his eyebrows rose. His chiseled, very disciplined mouth in between the full mustache and the small goatee turned up at both sides and his dark eyes twinkled in a swarthy, scarred face.

“Suit yourself. Lead me to a tree,” he replied.

She grinned. It changed her face, made it radiant. She rubbed her dirty right hand on her equally dirty jeans and extended it. “Hi! I’m Christabel Gaines. Everybody calls me Crissy except Judd.”

He shook the hand. “What does Judd call you?” he asked.

“Christabel,” she said on a sigh. “No imagination, and he hasn’t got a sense of humor. If you don’t want to arrest me, why are you here? We’re not even in your jurisdiction. The city limits sign is four miles thataway.” She pointed.

He chuckled. “Actually, I’m looking for Judd. He left a message for me. I understand there’s a movie company coming out here to film and they need on-site security from some of my off-duty officers. I’d volunteer,” he added, “but they’d worry me to death trying to get me to play the lead in their movie. I’m good-looking, in case you haven’t noticed,” he added with a wicked grin.

It took her a minute to get it, then she burst out laughing.

“Are you going to be in it?” he persisted with a grin.

She nodded. “I’m going to play a lilac bush next to the porch steps. I understand the makeup will take all day.”

He chuckled. She was a real charmer, and pretty to boot. He liked her personality. It had been a long time since a woman had appealed to him so much at a first meeting.

“I’m Cash Grier, the assistant police chief,” he introduced himself. “I guess you figured that out already. What gave me away—the patrol car?”

“It does stand out,” she remarked. “Very nice.”

“We like to think we have the sexiest patrol cars in Texas,” he agreed. “I look good in a police car,” he added.

Her dark eyes gazed up into his. “Let’s see.”

“Oh, no,” he replied. “It’s too much for some women. We’ll have to work up to letting you see me in the car.” He lifted both eyebrows and his eyes twinkled. “I look pretty good over a cup of coffee, too.”

It was a hint, and she took it. “Okay. Let’s see.”

Before they got into the house, the ranch truck pulled up with Maude in it. She got out and pulled a sack of groceries out from beside her. Her green eyes went from the patrol car to the tall uniformed man. She turned to Christabel and glared. “Well, what have you done now?”

“This is Cash Grier, our new assistant police chief. He says he looks good over a cup of coffee,” she told Maude. “I’m going to let him prove it.”

She gave Grier a speaking look. “I’ve heard about you. They say you play with rattlesnakes and send wolves running.”

“Oh, I do,” Grier assured her genially. “I like a spoon to stick up in my coffee,” he added.

“Then you’ll be right at home, here. That’s how Crissy makes it.”

“Here,” he said, taking the burden out of her arms with a flair. “Women’s lib be damned, no dainty little woman should have to carry heavy packages up steps.”

Maude caught her breath and put a hand to her heart. “Chivalry lives!” she exclaimed.

He leaned down. “Chivalry is my middle name,” he informed her. “And I will do almost anything for a slice of pie. I have no pride.”

Maude chuckled, along with Crissy. “We have a nice pie left over from yesterday, if Judd didn’t eat it all. He’s a fanatic on the subject of apple pie.”

“There’s some left, because I made two,” Crissy told Maude. “Come along, Mr. Assistant Police Chief, and I’ll feed you.”

Grier stood aside to let Maude go first. “Beauty before titles,” he said with a grin. “And please don’t tell my superior that I’m susceptible to bribes.”

“Chet Blake is, too,” Maude informed him. “I hear he’s your cousin.”

He sighed as he followed the women into the house. “Nepotism rears its ugly head,” he agreed. “But he was desperate, and so was I.”

“Why?” Crissy asked curiously.

“Don’t be rude,” Maude chided. “He’s barely got in the house. Give him some coffee and pie. Then grill him!” she added with a chuckle.

Grier had two slices of pie, actually, and two cups of coffee. “You’re a good cook,” he told Crissy while he sipped at his second cup.

“I learned early,” she replied, twirling her cup around under her hands. “My mother was an invalid until her death. I learned to cook when I was ten.”

He sensed a history there, and he wondered about her relationship with Judd Dunn. He’d heard rumors of all sorts about the odd couple who shared the D bar G Ranch.

She looked up, noting the curious look in his dark eyes. “You’re curious about us, aren’t you?” she asked. “Judd’s uncle and my father were partners in this ranch for ten years. Circumstances,” she said, boiling down the tragedy of her life into one word, “left us with a half interest each. I’m good with computers and math, so I do most of the bookkeeping. Judd is good with livestock, so he takes care of buying and selling and logistics.”

“What happens if one of you gets married?”

“Oh, but we already...” She stopped dead. Her eyes held apprehension and self-condemnation in equal parts.

He glanced at her left hand with the man’s signet ring cut down to fit her finger. His eyes lifted back to hers. There was keen intelligence in them. “I never tell what I know,” he told her. “Governments would topple.” He grinned.

She smiled back at him. “You don’t know anything,” she informed him deliberately.

His gaze was speculative. “Is it real, or just on paper?”

“I was sixteen at the time,” she replied. “It’s just on paper. He...doesn’t feel like that.”

His eyebrows lifted. “But, you do?”

She averted her gaze. “What I feel doesn’t matter. He saved more than the ranch. He saved me. And that’s all I’m going to tell you,” she added when he stared at her. “In November I turn twenty-one and I’m a free woman.”

He pursed his lips and studied her face. “I’m thirty-eight. Years too old for you...” His voice trailed off, like a question.

It had never occurred to her that a man would find her attractive. Judd treated her like a sore foot. Maude ordered her around. Boys at school were interested in the pretty, feminine girls who flirted. Crissy was friendly but she didn’t flirt or dress suggestively. In fact, she was much more at home around horses and cattle and the cowboys she’d known most of her life. She was shy with most men.

She flushed. “I...I...don’t interest men,” she blurted out.

He put his coffee cup down slowly. “Excuse me?”

“Do you want some more coffee?” she asked, flustered.

He was fascinated. The women who filed through his life had been sophisticated, as worldly as he was, chic and urbane and sensuous. They thought nothing of coming on to him with all sorts of physical and verbal sensuality. This woman was untouched, uncorrupted. She had a freshness, a vibrancy, that made him wish he was young again, that he’d never had the experiences that had turned him bitter and cold inside. She was like a jonquil blooming in the snow, a stubborn flash of optimism in a cynical cold landscape.

He frowned, studying her.

The flush grew worse. “You’re intimidating when you scowl. Just like Judd,” she said uneasily.

“Blame it on a jaded past,” he said, biting off the words. He pushed his chair back, still frowning. “Tell Judd I’ve put a note on our bulletin board about the site security job. So far we’ve got over a hundred applications. We only have twenty cops,” he added on a sigh. “My own secretary signed up.”

“Your secretary?”

He nodded, pushing the chair back under the table slowly. “She says if they hire her to do security, they’ll have to give her a badge and a gun, and she can arrest me anytime she feels like it if I make her work late.”

She laughed in spite of herself. He’d gone far away for a minute there, and she’d felt uncomfortable.

“Are you a bad boss?”

“I’m temperamental.”

It showed, but she wasn’t going to say so.

“Thanks for the coffee and pie,” he said quietly.

“You’re very welcome.”

He turned and went down the hall. His back, she noted, was arrow-straight. He walked with a peculiar gait, a softness of step that was vaguely disquieting. He walked like a man who hunted.

He got to the front steps and turned so suddenly that she went off balance and had to catch one of the porch posts to save herself.

“Do you like pizza?” he asked abruptly.

She was still reeling from his sudden stop. “Uh, yes.”

“Friday night,” he persisted, dark eyes narrowed. “There’s a band. Do you dance?”

“I do,” she said.

“What will Judd do, if you go out with another man?”

She was uneasy. “I...well, I don’t really know. I don’t think he’d mind,” she added. “It isn’t that sort of relationship.”

“He may mind having you go out with me,” he said flatly. “He knows more about me than most people do around here.”

She was shocked and intrigued. “Are you a bad man?”

Something terrible flashed in his dark eyes. “I have been,” he said. “Not anymore.”

Her face softened as she looked at him. She wondered if he realized how much his eyes gave away. There were nightmares in them.

She let go of the post and moved a step closer to him. “We all have scars,” she said, understanding what Judd had been saying to her that day in the kitchen. “Some show, some don’t, but we all have them.”

His eyes narrowed. “Mine are deep.”

She began to smile. “Mine, too. But all of a sudden, I don’t mind them so much. They seem less conspicuous.”

His broad chest rose and fell. He felt light. “Funny. So do mine.” He smiled.

“The only place that serves pizza and beer and has a dance band is Shea’s Roadhouse and Bar, out on the Victoria road,” she told him. “Judd never goes there. I’m afraid he won’t like me going there.”

“I’ll take care of you,” he told her.

She sighed. “People have been taking care of me all my life, and I’ll be a grown woman in less than two months.” She studied his face. “I have to learn how to take care of myself.”

“Funny you should mention it,” he said, and his eyes softened. “I wrote the book on self-defense for women.”

“Not that kind of taking care,” she muttered.

“I’ll teach you, just the same. Ever shot a gun?”

“Judd taught me to shoot skeet,” she told him. “I’m hell on wheels with a .28 gauge. I have my own, a Browning.” She didn’t add that he hadn’t taken her shooting in years.

He smiled, surprised. Many women were afraid of shotguns. “Imagine that!”

“Do you shoot?”

He gave her a look that reduced her height by three inches.

“You’re a police officer. Of course, you shoot,” she muttered.

“Eb Scott’s got a nice firing range. He lets us use it for practice. I’ll teach you how to shoot a pistol FBI style.”

“Can you ride?” she asked.

He hesitated. “I can. I don’t like to.”

He was probably a city man, she guessed, and hadn’t had much to do with horses or ranching.

“I don’t like pistols,” she confessed.

He shrugged. “We can’t like everything.” He looked down at her with mingled emotions. “I suppose I really am too old for you.”

Cash, who was four years older than Judd, thought she was too young. Maybe Judd did, too. That would explain, as nothing else did, the hesitation he showed in getting involved with her. It hurt.

“On the other hand,” he murmured, misreading her look of disappointment, “what the hell. That movie star who’s a grandmother just married a man twenty-five.”

Her eyes brightened and she grinned. “Are you proposing? After only two slices of apple pie? Gosh, imagine if I cooked you supper!”

He burst out laughing. He hadn’t laughed like this in a long time. He felt as if all the cold, dead places inside him were warming.

“Imagine,” he agreed, nodding. “Pizza, Friday night,” he added.

“Pizza and beer,” she corrected.

“Beer for me, soft drinks for you,” he said. “You’re not legal yet. You have to be twenty-one to drink beer in Texas.”

“Okay, I’m easy—I’ll drink bourbon whisky instead,” she agreed.

He gave her a sardonic look and went down the steps. He hesitated and looked up at her. “How many people know you’re married?”

“A handful,” she said. “They also know that it’s a business arrangement. It won’t damage your reputation.”

“I don’t have a reputation to damage anymore,” he replied. “I was thinking of yours.”

Her face broke into a smile. “How nice of you!”

“Nice.” He shook his head as he opened the door of the patrol car. Static was coming from the radio. “I can think of at least a dozen people who would roll on the floor laughing if they heard me called that.”

Her dark eyes twinkled. “Hand over their numbers. I’ll phone them!”

He grinned at her. “See you Friday. About five?”

She nodded. “About five.”

He drove off with a wave of his hand and Crissy went back into the kitchen, where Maude was standing by the sink looking worried.

“What’s your problem?” Crissy asked her.

“I overheard what he said. You just agreed to go out on a date.”

“Yes. And your point is?”

“You’re married, darlin’,” Maude reminded her. “Judd is not going to like this.”

“Why should he mind?” she asked reasonably. “He’s said often enough that he doesn’t want me for keeps. It’s just a business arrangement.”

Maude didn’t say a word. She was remembering the look on Judd’s face when she’d walked into the kitchen unexpectedly and found Crissy sitting on his lap. Crissy hadn’t noticed anything different, but she had. She turned back to her chores. Judd wasn’t going to like this.

3

Judd drove up in the yard Friday afternoon in his big black SUV, just an hour before Christabel was expecting Grier to pick her up. She was nervous. Worse, she was dressed to the teeth, and Judd noticed.

She’d left her blond hair undone, and it flowed like golden silk down to her waist in back. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup, just powder and a light lipstick, but her eyes looked larger, a liquid brown that dominated her face and soft little chin. She was wearing a slinky black skirt with black high heels fastened around the ankle, displaying the sexy arch of her little feet. The black vee-necked blouse she had on was unusually tight, emphasizing her small, firm, rounded breasts in a way that made Judd ache in all the wrong places. A wide fringed black Spanish mantilla completed the outfit. It wasn’t expensive, and it was old, but it was sexy. He wasn’t used to seeing Christabel dressed like that. And suddenly he wondered why she was, and why she wouldn’t look him in the eye. He knew from long experience that she was hiding something.

He propped a big booted foot on the bottom step of the porch and his narrow eyes fixed on her face.

“All right, spill it,” he said tersely. “Why are you dressed like that, and why did you come running out the minute you heard me drive up? Are we going on a date, and you forgot to tell me?” he added.

She lifted her eyes and glared at him. The sarcasm hurt. “Wouldn’t that be the day?” she asked with equal sarcasm. “As it happens, I’m going out dancing.”

He didn’t react for several seconds. Then sudden anger hardened his lean face. “Dancing? With a man?”

She straightened. “Yes. With a man.” Her smile was provoking in the extreme. “Go ahead, Judd, tell me you haven’t touched another woman since we married. Tell me you don’t date.”

The expression on his face was impossible to read. He moved up the steps, towering over her. “Who is he? Some boy from school?”

She realized with a start that what had seemed harmless and fun was becoming shameful and embarrassing. Her face colored.

“Not a boy from school,” he guessed. His eyes narrowed again. “Are we going to play twenty questions? Tell me!” he said abruptly.

“It’s Cash Grier,” she blurted out, disconcerted by the authority in his tone.

Now he looked menacing as well as angry. “Grier is even older than I am, and he’s got a past I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy’s sister, much less you! You’re not leaving the house with a man like that!”

Her self-confidence was wilting. She clutched her small purse to her chest. “I’m not running away with him,” she began, trying to recapture lost ground. “We’re going out for pizza and beer...”

“You’re underage.”

“I know that! I’m not drinking the beer, he is,” she muttered. “We’re going to dance and eat pizza.”

His eyes slid over her very slowly. She felt as if he were stroking her bare skin and she felt wobbly on the unaccustomed high heels.

“Where did you meet Grier?” he persisted.

She threw up her hands and walked back into the house, leaving him to follow. Obviously, he wasn’t going to stop until he knew everything. She wondered what he meant about Cash’s past. Cash himself had hinted at something unpleasant.

She tossed her purse and mantilla onto the big easy chair and perched herself on its wide arm, crossing her legs at the ankles. Odd, how intent his eyes were on them for a few seconds.

“He came out here to talk to you about providing on-site security for the movie people,” she said. “You weren’t here, so I gave him coffee and pie and he asked me out.”

He leaned against the doorjamb and stared at her from under the low-angled brim of his creamy Stetson. He looked elegant like that, and so sexy that she ached just looking at him. He had powerful long legs in nice-fitting jeans that did nothing to disguise the muscles in them. The .45 automatic he usually carried was in its new holster, replacing the revolver he’d used in the cowboy club shooting match. It sported the new maple handle and the Texas Ranger logo. His white shirt was taut against a muscular chest, a dark shadow under it giving hints about the thick curling dark hair that covered those hard muscles. The Texas Ranger star was on the pocket of that spotless white shirt. Usually he wore a jacket with it this time of year, but it was hot for early October. There was a faint line of perspiration on his top lip.

“He isn’t taking you to Shea’s,” he said tautly.

Her eyebrows arched. “Why not? Judd, I’m almost twenty-one,” she reminded him. “Most of my friends have been going there on Friday nights for years. It’s not a bad place. They just sell beer.”

“They have fistfights. Once, there was a shooting out there.”

“They’ve had two bouncers since Calhoun Ballenger almost wrecked the place protecting his wife, Abby, before they were married. That was years ago, Judd!”

“The shooting was last year,” he pointed out.

She sighed. “Cash is a police officer. He carries a gun. If anybody tries to shoot me, I’m sure he’ll shoot back.”

He knew that. He also knew things about Grier that he wasn’t comfortable disclosing. The man would take care of her, certainly, but Judd didn’t like the idea of Christabel going out with another man. It bothered him that it did. “It doesn’t look right.”

Her eyes met his, and she felt the years of loneliness making a heavy place inside her. “I go to school, I do the books, I check up on the boys while they’re working, I ride fence lines and help dip and brand cattle and doctor sick ones,” she said. “I haven’t been to a dance since my sophomore year of high school, and I don’t guess I’ve had a real date yet. I’m lonely, Judd. What can it hurt to let me go out dancing? We’re only married on paper, anyway. You don’t want me. You said so.”

He knew that. It didn’t help.

She got up from the sofa and went to him. Even in high heels, he towered over her. She looked up into his turbulent dark eyes. “I’m only going out for one evening,” she pointed out. “Don’t make me feel like I’m committing adultery. You know me better than that.”

He drew in a long breath. Involuntarily, his lean hand went to her loosened hair and he gathered a thick strand of it in his fingers, testing its silky softness. “I’ve never seen you dressed like this.”

“I can’t go out with a man like Grier wearing jeans and a sweatshirt,” she said with a gamine smile.

He frowned. “What do you mean, a man like Grier?”

She lifted one shoulder, uneasy at the contact of his fingers that was making her whole body tingle, and trying to hide it. She could even feel the heat of his body this close, and smell the spicy oriental aftershave he liked to wear. “He’s a very mature, sophisticated sort of person. I didn’t want to embarrass him by showing up in my working gear.”

He frowned. “I’ve never taken you anywhere,” he recalled.

She blinked, disconcerted. “You saved my life,” she pointed out. “Saved the ranch. Kept us all going, looked out for me and Mama while she was alive. You’re still shouldering the bulk of the responsibility for running things around here. You didn’t need to start taking on responsibility for my entertainment as well, for heaven’s sake!”

He frowned at the way she put it, as if everything he did for her was a chore, an obligation. She almost glowed when she smiled. She had a pert, sexy little figure, even if she didn’t know it. She had such warmth inside her that he always felt good when he was with her. Was Grier, with his cold, dark past, reacting similarly to the brightness in Christabel? Was he looking for a place to warm his cold heart?

She’d agreed to go out with the man. Was she attracted to him? He, of all men, knew how very innocent she was. She’d considered her paper wedding vows binding. He doubted if she’d ever really kissed anyone, or been kissed, unless you could call that cool peck on the cheek he gave her in the probate judge’s office a kiss. He thought about Grier, a ladies’ man if there ever was one, kissing her passionately.

“No,” he said involuntarily. “Hell, no!”

“What?” she queried, puzzled by the look on his face.

He moved, one of those lightning-fast motions that could even intimidate their cowboys. His lean hands framed her rounded face and tugged it up so that her dark eyes were meeting his at a proximity they’d never shared.

“Not Grier,” he said huskily, his eyes falling to her parted, full lips. “Not the first time...”

While she was trying to get enough breath to ask him what he was talking about, he bent his head. She felt the slow, easy brush of his hard mouth on her lips with real intent for the first time in their turbulent relationship.

She gasped and stiffened.

He lifted his head just enough to see the shock and puzzlement in her eyes. “Just so you don’t go overboard with the first man who kisses you, Christabel,” he whispered with unusual roughness in his voice. “I’m your husband. The first time...it should be me.”

She opened her mouth to speak but he bent his head again before she could. His lips crushed down over hers with a pressure that grew more intense, more demanding, by the second. She clutched at his arms to save herself from falling as sensation piled on sensation. She felt a surge of heat in her lower body, along with a sudden heavy throb that made her shiver. She wondered if he could feel it, while she could still think.

His hands went to her waist and slid up and down, his thumbs brushing just under the soft underside of her breasts, in a lazy, arousing pattern that made her want to lift up toward them. She went up on tiptoe, pushing her mouth against his, opening her lips to his hungry demand. She felt a vibration against her lips, something like a muffled groan, just before his arms suddenly swallowed her and lifted her into the hard curve of his body.

Her arms were around his neck now, holding on for dear life, while his mouth probed at hers and she felt his tongue suddenly go right inside it. She’d heard and read about deep kisses. None of that prepared her for the sensations she felt. She was trembling. She didn’t know why, and she couldn’t stop it. He was going to feel it any minute. She moaned in frustration at her own inability to control her reactions. Inexplicably, the moan made him stiffen. One lean hand went to her hips and gathered them in fiercely to the thrust of his body. There was something alien about the feel of him, something vaguely threatening. He pushed her closer and she gasped as she realized what was happening.

He realized it at the same time and jerked away from her. He didn’t let her go at once. His eyes were blacker than usual as they pierced her own.

Her mouth was swollen. Her eyes were shocked, stunned, dazed, delighted. She was shivering just slightly. Her breath came in husky little jerks. He looked down, at the bodice of her blouse, and saw hard little points.

His eyes met hers again. His hands were almost bruising on her upper arms as he held her there. “That’s how easy it is,” he said tersely.

“How...easy?” she parroted breathlessly.

“For an experienced man to knock you off balance and make you give in to him,” he continued. “Grier knows even more than I do. Don’t let him get too close. He’s not a marrying man. In any case, you’re not free to experiment, paper marriage or not.”

She wasn’t getting any of it. She just looked at him, completely disoriented. She’d never dreamed that he’d kiss her like that. He’d sworn in the past that he was never going to touch her. She felt hot and shaky all over. She wanted to lie down with him. She wanted to touch his skin. She wanted him to kiss her breasts, the way men kissed women in those shameful late-night satellite movies that she watched secretly when Maude had gone to bed on the weekends.

“Are you listening to me?” he asked impatiently.

Her head fell back against his shoulder. She pressed one cold hand to his chest and moved it back and forth involuntarily.

“I’m listening. This dress is really hot. Could you help me take it off...?” she whispered wickedly.

He glared down at her. “Stop that,” he said curtly. “I’m trying to talk to you.”

Her eyes were half-closed, her body completely yielding. She felt as if she’d melted into him, become part of him. She wondered what it would feel like to lie under him on a bed. She reddened at the images that had flashed unexpectedly into her mind. Judd, in bed with her, stark naked and hungry for her. Heavens, she’d have died for it!

Her hunger for him was in her face. It amazed him that she was so immediately receptive to him, so hungry. He hadn’t meant to touch her in the first place. It was Grier, damn him. He was uneasy about having her go out with Grier. He didn’t trust the man. It disturbed him that this sudden relationship of hers had happened under his nose and without his knowledge. In his wildest dreams, he’d never expected that Grier could be drawn to a woman Christabel’s age. He didn’t trust Grier’s motives, and he didn’t want Christabel seduced. He was going to have to talk to Grier.

He watched her while his mind worked. She was still shivering faintly. He knew how she felt. He felt the same way. His body ached. He’d never expected such an explosive passion to flare up between them. He should never have touched her. He’d been stupid to let jealousy provoke him into it. He hoped she didn’t know enough to see how susceptible he was to her. He moved back a step, just in case.

She took a step forward. “I can rush right to town and buy a red negligee,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll borrow one. Steal one. There’s a bed only ten feet away...!”

“I told you that we were never going to have any sort of physical relationship,” he said with ice dripping from every syllable.

“You started it,” she reminded him glibly.

“I did it deliberately. I know Grier. You haven’t dated,” he said through his teeth. “You know nothing about men, and that’s my fault. You can’t go out with a man like Grier without knowing the dangers. It was a lesson, Christabel. Just a lesson!”

She was staring at him. Just staring, as all her dreams of belonging and being loved in return went up in smoke. She’d always thought of Judd as being very fastidious about women. But innocence could recognize experience, and she knew at once that she was completely out of his league. She didn’t do a thing for him. He’d only been showing her what a trap passion could be. But it felt different now when she looked at him.

“Have you heard a word I’ve said?” he asked, exasperated.

“A few, here and there,” she said, but she was looking at his mouth. “I’m not sure I understand the lesson completely. Could you do that again...?”

He took an angry breath and his lips flattened. He could taste her on them. That irritated him even more.

“No, I couldn’t do it again!” he raged, furious. “Listen to me, damn it! We are getting an annulment in November, period! I don’t want marriage and a family. I love my job, and my freedom, and I’m not giving up either one. Is that clear?”

Breaking out of her trance, she moved away from him. Yes, it was painfully clear. But she smiled deliberately, anyway. Her voice, like her breathing, was jerky. “Okay. It’s a great loss to my education, but if you feel that way, just don’t expect me to offer to take my clothes off for you ever again. I’ll fix some coffee if you’d like some,” she added. “Cash isn’t due for thirty minutes.”

“Fine.”

She went to the kitchen and made coffee. It calmed her. By the time she put a cup and saucer on the table, along with the condiments, her hands had stopped shaking.

“Do you want it in the study?” she called.

“No. I’ll drink it in here.” He moved into the room and sat down at the small kitchen table. He’d removed his hat and rolled up his sleeves. His hair was still mussed from her restless, hungry fingers, and his mouth, like hers, had a slight swell from the urgency of the kisses they’d shared.

Grier was going to notice that, he mused. Perhaps it would make him hesitate. He wondered why he felt so arrogant when he looked at her now. It felt almost like possession. He clamped down hard on those thoughts. He didn’t want to be married. He wasn’t ready for family life. Infrequent liaisons were enough for him. Love was dangerous, and he wanted no part of it. He’d seen it destroy his father, and he knew that women had no staying power. His mother had left his father. Judd’s one serious love interest had walked out on him ten years ago when he refused to give up his hazardous job for her. It was just as well to avoid tangles. Christabel was very young...

“You’re very solemn,” she pointed out.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about what just happened,” he said, pinning her with his eyes.

“I’m not dim,” she told him. She avoided looking directly at him. She was too shaken to hide her emotions. “You said it was only a lesson. I hadn’t planned to jump into the back seat with Grier and have my way with him, you know.”

He cleared his throat. “He drives a pickup. There is no back seat.”

She glared at him. “You know what I mean!”

“And it’s not you jumping on him that worries me.”

She lifted both eyebrows. “Why not? Do you think I wouldn’t know how? I do know what goes on between men and women, even if I’m not the voice of experience!”

“I know,” he murmured dryly.

“Excuse me?”

He cleared his throat again. “I pay the satellite bill.”

She was very still. That had never occurred to her before.

He cocked his head. “The titles are self-explanatory. Passionate Partners, Lust in the Sand, The Curious Virgin...shall I go on?”

She groaned and put her face in her hands.

“Just remember that what you’re watching is staged and pure fantasy,” he pointed out. “It’s not like that in real life.”

She moved two of her fingers and looked at him through them, curiously.

He leaned back, feeling his experience keenly as he met that glance. “Two kisses and a pat, and they go at it endlessly with accompanying groans and tormented expressions, in positions that even the Kama Sutra hasn’t listed,” he explained.

She was still watching, listening, waiting.

He let out a long sigh. “Christabel, a woman doesn’t accept a man’s body that quickly, or that easily, without a lot of foreplay. And most men can’t last long enough to go through the whole catalog of outrageous positions. One usually suffices.”

She was fiery red, but paying complete attention while trying not to look as if she was. And he was aching to show her, rather than tell her, how satisfying a physical coming-together could be. All at once, he felt things he didn’t want to feel. And for the one woman on earth who was off limits to him, even if she was the only wife he’d ever had.

He finished his coffee and glared at her. “I don’t mind if you go out with Grier, as long as you’re discreet,” he said, hating the words even as he spoke them with deliberate carelessness. His black eyes pinned hers. “But you don’t cross the line with him.”

She knew exactly what he meant and she was insulted. “As if I would, Judd!”

“Until it’s annulled, it’s still a marriage,” he continued. “And a few people around town know about it.”

“I understand why you’re so worried about gossip...” she began, and then bit her tongue, because it was a subject he hated.

His chin lifted and his eyes narrowed dangerously. “My father was a minister,” he said roughly. “Can you imagine how it was for him, and for me, to have all of Jacobsville talking about my mother and her blatant affair with the vice president of the local manufacturing company? They didn’t even try to hide it. She moved in with him and lived with him openly while she was still married to my father. Everybody knew. His whole congregation knew, and he had to preach every Sunday. When her lover dropped her for someone younger, after he’d had his fill of the affair, she begged to come home again and pretend that it never happened. My father even tried to let her.”

He averted his eyes to the table, cold with the memory of how those days had been for him. He’d loved his mother. But his father, despite his faith, had been unable to forget what she’d done. In his world, as in Judd’s, vows were sacred. “In the end, it was the gossip that made it impossible for him to forget. It didn’t stop, even after she left her lover. Some of his congregation refused to speak to her. It affected him, even though he tried not to let it. In the end, he asked her to leave, and she went, without an argument.”

“You were only twelve when that happened, weren’t you?” she asked gently, trying to get him to talk about it. He never had.

He nodded. “I loved her. He did, too, but he couldn’t get over what she did. It was too public for either of them to get past it, in a small town.”

Her hand itched to slide across the table to his, but she knew he’d sling it off. He was unapproachable when he talked about the past.

“Did she write to you?”

He shook his head. “He told her that she could, but she moved to Kansas where she had a cousin, and apparently never looked back.” He toyed with the handle of his coffee cup. “We heard that she married again and had a child before she died. All we had was a card announcing the funeral and a dog-eared photograph of Dad and me that she kept in her wallet.” His voice became tight and he sat up straighter.

“Was the child a boy or a girl?” she asked.

He was staring into space with blank eyes. “A girl. She died of spinal meningitis when she was six, and my mother died in a car crash a few months later.” His teeth clenched. “She was a good mother,” he added absently. “Even if she was a lousy wife.”

She studied him quietly. “Sometimes people fall in love with the wrong people,” she began. “I don’t think they can help it.”

His black eyes bore into hers. “In my book, if you make a vow before God, you keep it. Period.”

She sighed, thinking that it was highly unlikely that he’d kept the wedding vow he made to her when she was sixteen, but she didn’t say it. “I expect she was sorry for what she did to your father.”

His broad shoulders moved restlessly. “He said she wrote him a letter. He never told me what was in it, but he admitted that his own pride had killed any hope of them getting back together. He couldn’t bear having everybody know what she did to him.” He smiled sadly. “She was his first woman,” he added, with a glance at Christabel’s wide-eyed stare. “And his last. I don’t suppose some people today even think it’s possible for a man to be faithful to one woman his whole life, but it’s not so rare a thing in small towns, even in the modern world.”

“I guess you’ve thought about how it would have been, if he could have forgiven her.”

“Yes.” He turned the coffee cup in his big, lean hands. “It was a lonely life after she left. I could never talk to him the way I could to her, about things that bothered me. I guess I drew inside myself afterward.”

He’d never talked to her this way before, as if she were an adult, an equal. She studied his hard face and ached to have his mouth on hers again. She knew she’d never be able to forget how it felt.

He pushed back from the table and got to his feet. “I need to get back to Victoria.”

She got up, too, eyeing him curiously. “What did you come down here for?”

“Leo Hart phoned me about some Salers bulls that have died mysteriously. He said he’d heard that our young one was poisoned. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“Yes, I tried to tell you when it happened that I thought Jack Clark was responsible, and you wouldn’t listen...” she began.

He held up a hand. “You know you didn’t have the boys check that pasture for bloat-causing weeds,” he pointed out. “I told Leo so. I warned you about that, Christabel. You can’t accuse people of crimes without solid proof.”

“I wasn’t! Judd,” she said, exasperated, “there were four other young bulls in that pasture with him. They didn’t die.”

“I know that. They were lucky.”

She grimaced. “They were Herefords,” she said impatiently. “The only bull we lost was a Salers, and he was one of the same group that Fred Brewster bought calves from. He thinks Mr. Brewster’s bull was poisoned, and I still think ours was, too.”

He picked up his Stetson and slanted it across his brow. “Prove it,” he said.

She threw up her hands. “I don’t save dead bulls!” she exclaimed. “You wouldn’t believe me and I couldn’t afford an autopsy! We buried him with the backhoe!”

“Dig him up.”

She gave him a speaking glare. “Even if I did, where am I going to get the money to have an autopsy done?”

“Good point.” He sighed. “I’m skint. I used the last of my savings to repair that used tractor we had to have for haying.”

“I know,” she said, feeling guilty. “Listen, as soon as I graduate next year, I’ll get a job in town at one of the businesses. Computer programming pays good wages.”

“Then who’ll do the books?” he asked. “I don’t mind writing checks to pay bills, but I’m not burying myself in ten columns of figures and justifying bank statements. That’s your department.”

“I’ll justify the statements and do the printouts at night or on the weekends.”

“Poor Grier,” he said sarcastically.

“I only just met the man,” she pointed out.

“Stay out of parked cars with him,” he said with rare malice.

“He drives a truck,” she reminded him pertly, throwing his own earlier statement back at him.

“You know what I mean.” He turned and started out the front door.

She followed him, seething inside. He didn’t want her, but he didn’t want any other man around her, either.

“I’ll do what I please, Judd,” she said haughtily.

He whirled at the front porch. “You put your name on a marriage license,” he reminded her curtly.

“So did you, but that’s not stopping you from doing what you want to!”

He lifted an eyebrow and went on down the steps to his truck. “The film people are coming back Saturday to set up their equipment,” he added. “The director’s bringing Tippy Moore with him, and the guy who’s playing the cowboy—Rance Wayne.”

She couldn’t have cared less about the movie people. She hated the way Judd’s eyes twinkled when he mentioned Tippy Moore. The woman was internationally famous for her beauty. Christabel was going to look like a cactus plant by comparison, and she didn’t like it.

“I can hardly wait,” she muttered. “Do they like pet snakes? I’m thinking of adopting a black one and keeping it in the living room...”

“You be nice,” he said firmly. “We need the money. There’s no way we can fix the barn or buy new electric fencing without that grubstake.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “I’ll be nice.”

“That’ll be a change,” he remarked deliberately.

“And that’s just sour grapes because I didn’t dress up and look sexy for you,” she said, striking a pose. “You can go home and dream about me in that red negligee, because that’s the only way you’ll ever see it,” she added.

He made a rough sound in his throat, something like laughter, and kept walking.

She stared after him with flashing dark eyes, wishing that Cash would drive up before he left so that she could flaunt her date in front of him.

Daydreams so rarely come true, she thought wistfully as Judd climbed in behind the wheel, started the SUV, and drove off with a perfunctory wave of his hand.

It was a full ten minutes later that Cash Grier drove up in his black pickup truck. It was a huge, new vehicle with a spotlessly clean bed.

“Well, I can see that you don’t haul cattle,” she remarked as she went out to meet him at the bottom of the steps.

“Maybe I just keep an immaculate truck,” he chuckled.

He looked really good. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater with a casual jacket and dress slacks. His shoes were polished to a perfect shine. His dark hair was in a neat ponytail. He was easy on the eyes.

“You look nice, even out of uniform,” she pointed out.

He was doing some looking of his own, with eyes at least as experienced as Judd’s. She thought about the way Judd had kissed her and she flushed.

“You look a little uptight,” he remarked. “Second thoughts about tonight?”

“Not a single one,” she said firmly.

“Not worried about what Judd will say?” he persisted as he helped her into the truck.

“Judd said he didn’t care,” she replied. “He was here earlier.”

Which explained her flustered look and the deep swell of her lower lip, Cash thought privately and with some amusement. Apparently Judd was more jealous of his paper wife than Christabel realized, and had made sure that she had a yardstick to measure men by. He had a feeling he’d never measure up to the hero-worship she felt for her husband. But she made him feel good inside, young inside, and he wasn’t going to fall at the first fence because of a little competition.

She fastened her seat belt while he got in and fastened his own, his eyes smiling as he approved the action.

“I have to tell most people to put their belts on,” he pointed out.

“Not me,” she said. “Judd taught me early that I would not ride with him if I didn’t wear it.”

“You’ve known him for a long time.”

“Most of my life,” she agreed. She sighed. “He’s taken care of me for five years. It isn’t that he’s possessive,” she said defensively. “He just wants to make sure that I’m safe.”

He gave her a rakish grin. “You’re as safe as you want to be,” he said.

She chuckled. “Now that’s encouragement, if I ever heard it!”

4

Shea’s Roadhouse and Bar was about a mile out of Jacobsville on the road that went to Victoria. It was big and rowdy on the weekends, and despite the fact that beer and wine were served at the bar, it wasn’t the den of iniquity that Judd called it. There were two bouncers usually. One had broken an arm in a fall, so that just left Tiny to keep things orderly. It wasn’t hard. Tiny was the opposite of his name, a huge, hulking man with a sweet nature and a caring personality. But he could be insistent when people got out of hand, and nobody lasted long in an altercation with him.

She said as much to Cash when they were seated at one of the small wooden tables waiting to be served.

“Altercation,” he repeated with a slow smile. “You sound like a cop.”

“Blame Judd,” she said on a sigh. “It really does rub off when you hang out with law enforcement types.”

He chuckled, toying with his napkin. “Are you sure he didn’t mind that you came out with me?”

She pursed her lips. “I think he did, a little. He’s very conventional.”

His eyebrows arched. “Are we talking about the same Judd Dunn?” he asked pleasantly. “The one who handcuffed a prostitute to the former mayor of Jacobsville when he caught them together in a brothel, and had someone tip off the newspaper?”

She cleared her throat. “He was a policeman here at the time...”

“...and chased a speeder all the way to Houston to give him a ticket?”

She moved one hand uneasily.

“...and then padlocked the local pool parlor until the owner promised to stop serving beer to minors?”

She sighed. “Yes. I suppose he used to be more unconventional than he is now. He feels that he shouldn’t embarrass the Texas Rangers. The exact figure changes from time to time, but this year, there are only 103 of them in the world.”

He gave her an amused glance. “I know. I used to be one.”

Her dark eyes widened. “You did?”

He nodded. “In fact, I worked with Judd for a while. I taught him those martial arts moves he uses so eloquently these days.”

“You know martial arts?” She was hanging on every word.

He chuckled. “There’s a movie cowboy up the road near Fort Worth who also runs a martial arts studio. He taught me.”

She named the actor.

He nodded.

“Wow!” she exclaimed, obviously impressed.

“Now don’t look like that,” he muttered. “You’ll embarrass me.”

She cocked her head, recalling something she’d heard about him earlier. “You’re one to talk about Judd being unconventional,” she added with a wicked grin. “We heard that you used the movie camera in your police car to film a couple in the back seat of a parked car up in San Antonio...?”

He chuckled. “Not the police camera—my own. And it was two local police officers I knew that I captured on tape. I made them promise to behave with more decorum before I gave them the only copy of the tape.”

“You make a bad enemy,” she pointed out.

He nodded, and he didn’t smile.

Around them, the band was just tuning up. It consisted of two men playing guitars, one with a fiddle and one with a keyboard. They broke into “San Antonio Rose,” and couples began to move onto the big dance floor.

“They’re pretty good,” she said.

“They’re missing their bass player,” he noted.

“I wonder why?”

“Oh, he’s in jail,” he said, smiling as the waitress approached.

“Why?” she asked.

“Some other guy was dating his girl. He chased them to her house in his car and made a scene. She called us.” He shrugged. “Fortunes of war. Some women are harder to keep than others, I guess.”

“Poor guy.”

“He’ll be out Monday, wiser and more prudent.”

“Hi! What can I get you?” the waitress, an older woman, asked.

“Pizza and beer,” Grier told her.

“Pizza and coffee,” Crissy said when it was her turn.

“No beer?” she asked.

“I’m not twenty-one yet,” Crissy replied easily. “And my...guardian,” she chose her words carefully, “is a Texas Ranger.”

“You’re Crissy,” the girl said immediately, chuckling. “I had a crush on Judd when we were younger, but he was going with that Taft girl from Victoria. They broke up over his job, didn’t they?”

Crissy nodded. “Some women can’t live with the danger.”

“Doesn’t seem to bother you,” the waitress said, tongue-in-cheek, as she glanced pointedly at Grier before she went away to fill the order.

Crissy chuckled as Grier gave her a meaningful look. “No, I’m not chickenhearted,” she agreed. “I worry sometimes, but not to excess. Judd can take care of himself. So can you, I imagine.”

“Well enough,” he said, nodding.

The crowd was growing as Crissy and Grier finished their pizza and drained their respective beverages. The music was nice, she thought, watching the couples try to do Western line dances on the dance floor.

“They give courses on that at the civic center,” Crissy told Grier. “But I could never get into it. I like Latin dances, but I’ve never found anybody who could do them around here, except Matt Caldwell. He’s married now.”

Grier was grinning from ear to ear. “Modesty prevents me from telling you that I won an award in a tango contest once, down in Argentina.”

She was staring at him breathlessly. “You can do Latin dances? Then why are you just sitting there? Come on!”

She grabbed him by the hand and tugged him onto the dance floor and up to the band leader.

“Sammy, can you play Latin music of any kind at all?” she asked the young man, one of her former schoolmates.

He chuckled. “Can I!” He and the band stopped playing, conferred, and the keyboard player grinned broadly as he adjusted his instrument and a bouncing Latin rhythm began to take shape.

The floor cleared as the spectators, expecting something unusual, moved to the edges of the dance floor.

“You’d better be good,” Crissy told Grier with a grin. “This crowd is hard to please and they don’t mind booing people who only think they can dance. Matt Caldwell and his Leslie are legendary at Latin dances here.”

“They won’t boo me,” he promised, taking her by the right hand and the waist with a professional sort of expertise. He nodded to mark the rhythm, and then proceeded to whirl her around with devastating ease.

She kept up with an effort. She’d learned from a boy at school, a transfer student from New York with a Latino background. He’d said she was good. But Grier was totally out of her class. She watched his feet and followed with a natural flair. By the time they were halfway into the song, she was keeping up and adding steps and movements of her own. As the band slowly wound down, the audience was actually clapping to the beat.

Grier whirled her against him and looped her over one arm for a finish. Everybody applauded. He pulled her back up, whirled her beside him, and they both took a bow. She was breathless. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

He led her back to their seats, chuckling. “Let Caldwell top that,” he muttered.

She laughed, almost panting from the exertion. “I’m out of shape,” she murmured. “I’ll have to get out of the house more.”

“Gosh, you guys were great!” the waitress said as she paused briefly at their table. “Refills?”

“Thanks. You bet,” Grier said, handing her his empty bottle.

“Me, too,” Christabel added, pushing her cup to the edge of the table.

“Back in a jiffy,” the girl said with a grin.

“Does Judd dance?” Grier asked her.

“Only if somebody shoots at his feet,” she returned, tongue-in-cheek.

“That’ll be the day.”

“That reminds me,” she said, and leaned forward. “I need your advice. I’m almost positive that somebody poisoned one of our young bulls. Judd won’t believe me, but I’m sure I’m right.”

He was all business. “Tell me about it.”

“We bought a young Salers bull in early September. The Harts have a two-year-old Salers bull, and Leo Hart was going to buy Fred Brewster’s young Salers bull, that came from the same batch ours did up in Victoria. But they found Fred’s bull dead in a pasture just recently, because Leo Hart called Judd about ours. Ours died before Fred’s, so we dragged ours out to the pasture behind the tractor and buried him with a borrowed backhoe.”

“You didn’t have him autopsied?” he asked.

She grimaced. “Cash, we were sitting pretty last year. But we had a drought in the spring and summer and cattle prices fell. Right now, it takes all Judd can make to keep me in school and pay his rent on his apartment in Victoria. We sell off cattle to pay for incidentals, and buy feed for the cattle when we don’t have enough grass for graze. He even works extra jobs just so we can make ends meet.” Her eyes were cloudy. “We’re having hard times. Once I graduate, I’m going straight to work to help out. I was a computer whiz already and I didn’t want to go on to vo-tech school in the first place. But Judd said I needed expertise in spreadsheet programs so that we could keep better records. He was right. It’s just hard to manage, that’s all. I imagine you know how that is.”

He didn’t. Nobody knew how much money he had in foreign banks from the early days in his profession, when he was doing highly skilled black ops jobs for various governments. He didn’t advertise it. But he could have retired any time he felt like it. Holding a conventional job kept his skills honed and people in the dark about his true financial situation. And his true skills.

“Anyway,” she continued, “he says that I didn’t check the pasture before I put the bulls in it, and they binged on clover and got bloat. Since we don’t use antibiotics as a preventative—and we certainly can’t afford to use vegetable oils for that, either—Judd said the tannins in the clover caused the bloat.” She sighed impatiently. “Listen, I know pasture management as well as he does, and I’m not stupid enough to stick susceptible young bulls in a pasture without feeding them hay or grass first. And the Hereford bulls were in there at the same time, all four of them. They didn’t get bloat!”

“Didn’t you tell Judd that?”

She nodded. “I guess he thinks there’s a special Salers gene that attracts bloat,” she muttered irritably.

He tried not to laugh and failed.

“Anyway, it happened right after we fired that Clark man,” she added. “Jack Clark. He’s got a brother, John. They’re unsavory characters and they get fired a lot, I hear. We fired Jack for stealing on purchase orders. I suppose he didn’t realize we check purchase orders to make sure they’re not being abused. He bought himself a two-hundred-dollar pair of boots at the Western Shop and charged it to us with a photocopied purchase order. He gave back the boots, and we returned them, so we didn’t press charges. But we fired him, just the same.”

“He’s working for Duke Wright now,” he told her. “Driving a cattle truck.”

“Duke had better watch him” was all she said. “One of our new cowboys said that the Clark boys had been suspected of poisoning cattle someplace that one of them was fired from a couple of years ago. Our guy was working with them at the time.”

Grier was watching her closely. “This is serious. Are you sure Judd didn’t believe you?”

“I didn’t tell him all I’ve just told you, because I didn’t find out about the Clarks being suspected of poisoning cattle until a few days ago,” she said. “I didn’t tell him that we found a cut in the fence there, either.”

“You should tell him about that, and the other information. A man who’ll poison helpless bulls will poison people, given a chance.”

She nodded with a sigh. “I’ve told the boys to keep a close eye on our other stock, and I ride the fence lines myself when I get home from school.”

“Alone?”

She stared at him blankly. “Of course, alone,” she said shortly. “I’m a grown woman. I don’t need a babysitter.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he replied. “I don’t like the idea of anybody going out to distant pastures alone and unarmed. You don’t pack a gun, do you?”

She grimaced. “I guess I should, shouldn’t I?” She laughed self-consciously. “I have this crazy nightmare sometimes, that I’ve been shot and I’m trying to get to Judd and tell him, but he can’t hear me.”

“Take somebody with you next time you ride fence,” he coaxed. “Don’t take chances.”

“I won’t,” she promised, but without agreeing to take along an escort. She did have that .28 gauge shotgun that Judd had given her. She could take that with her when she rode fence, she supposed. Cash made sense. If a man wouldn’t hesitate to poison a helpless bull, he might not stop at trying to kill a young woman. Fortunately, the waitress came back with coffee and beer in time to divert him, and they waited until she left before they resumed their conversation.

“Do you want me to talk to Judd about the bull?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It won’t do any good. He makes up his mind, and that’s it.” She touched her cup and noticed that it was blazing hot. She pulled her fingers back. “He’s distracted lately, anyway. Those film people are coming this weekend, including the stars.” She glanced at him. “I guess everybody’s heard of Tippy Moore.”

“The Georgia Firefly,” he agreed. His face grew hard and his eyes were cold.

“Do you know her?” she asked, puzzled.

“I don’t like models,” he said, tossing back a swallow of beer.

She waited, not liking to pry, but his expression was disturbing.

He put the bottle down, saw the way she was looking at him, and chuckled. “You never push, do you? You just wait, and let people talk if they want to.”

She smiled self-consciously. “I guess so.”

He leaned back. “My mother died when I was about nine,” he mused. “I stayed with her in the hospital as long as they let me. My brothers were too young, and my father...” He hesitated. “My father,” he began again with loathing in his tone, “was absolutely smitten with another woman and couldn’t stay away from her. He used to taunt my mother with how young and beautiful his mistress was, how he was going to marry her the minute my mother was out of the way.

“She was ill for a long time, but after he began the affair, my mother gave up. When she died, he was too busy with his mistress to care. He only came to the hospital one time, to make arrangements for her body to be taken to the funeral home. His new woman was a minor-league model, twenty years his junior, and he was crazy for her. Three days after the funeral, he married her and brought her home with him.” He picked up the beer and took another long swallow. His eyes stared into space. “I’ve never hated a human being so much in my life, before or since.”

“It was too soon,” she guessed.

“It would always have been too soon,” he said flatly. “My stepmother threw out my mother’s things the minute she set foot in the house, all the photographs, all the handwork—she even sold my mother’s jewelry and laughed about it.” His eyes narrowed. “That same year, my father sent me off to military school. I never went back home, not even when he finally wised up, eight years too late, and tried to get me to come home again.”

Some men hated physical contact when they recounted painful episodes. But she slid her hand over Cash’s anyway, something she’d never have done with Judd. Grier glanced at her hand with a start, but after a few seconds, his fingers curled around it. They were strong fingers, short and blunt, with a grip that would have been painful if they’d contracted a centimeter more. She noticed that he wore no jewelry except for a complicated-looking silver metal watch on his left wrist. No rings.

“I lost my mother the year I graduated from high school,” she recalled. “I was older than you were, but it hurt just as much. But I had Judd, and Maude,” she added with a smile. “She came when I was just a baby, to help Mother, because she was so frail. Maude’s been like a second mama to me.”

“She’s a card,” he mused, turning her hand over to examine the tiny scars. “What do you do with your hands?” he asked curiously, noting short nails and cuts.

“Fix broken fences, mend tack, use calf pulls, get bitten by horses, climb trees...” she enumerated.

He chuckled. “Tomboy.”

“I’m not made for a mansion or a boardroom,” she said with a grin. “If women are really liberated, then I’m free to do anything I like. I like livestock and planting gardens and working around the ranch. I hate the idea of an office and a nine-to-five lifestyle. I’m a country girl. I wouldn’t mind being a cattle baroness, of course.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Of course, I’m a full partner in the ranch,” she said thoughtfully. “And I keep the books and make decisions about breeding and diet and upgrades of equipment. When I get through this computer course, I’ll be able to rewrite spreadsheet programs and keep up with my breeding program better.”

“And Judd doesn’t mind giving you that authority?” he asked, puzzled.

She smiled curiously. “Why would he? I’m good at what I do, better than he is, and he knows it. Besides, I don’t have a clue about marketing. That’s his department. Oh, and he pays bills.” She grimaced. “I don’t mind keeping bank statements reconciled and doing projection figures, but I draw the line at writing checks.”

“I don’t like that, myself,” he had to admit. He chuckled. “I had you pictured as a nice little kid who went to school and let Judd do all the hard work.”

“Fat chance,” she scoffed. “No man’s supporting me while I sit back and read magazines and paint my fingernails. I’m a hands-on partner.”

“Judd never seemed like the sort of man who’d tolerate a female partner,” he murmured dryly.

“You don’t know him well, do you?” she asked, smiling. “He fought really hard to get women into the Jacobsville police force, and he won’t put up with men who denigrate the worth of women in business or law enforcement. Besides, he can cook and clean house better than I can. If he ever gets married for real and has kids, his wife will be lucky. He loves kids,” she added absently, hating the thought that he was determined to get an annulment the second she turned twenty-one, next month, and just about the time that Tippy Moore would be on hand.

“You look worried.”

She shrugged. “Tippy Moore is world-famous and beautiful,” she said without thinking. “Judd really perked up when they mentioned she was starring in this movie. He’s never been around women like that. He’s a minister’s son and rather unworldly and conventional in some ways.”

“You think she’ll captivate him.”

She met his gaze evenly. “I’m no beauty,” she said flatly. “I’m backwoodsy and I know computers and cattle, but I can’t compete with an internationally famous model who knows how to act seductive. She’ll draw men like flies, you watch.”

“Not me,” he said easily. “I’m immune.”

“Judd won’t be,” she said worriedly.

“Judd’s a grown man. He can take care of himself.” He was remembering, and not wanting to disillusion her by admitting, that Judd had very little trouble attracting beautiful women in the old days. The man was no Romeo, but he was handsome and confident and aggressively seductive with women he wanted. He was also successful. He didn’t mention that to Crissy. It would have crushed her. He wondered if she knew how much her feelings for Judd showed when she talked about him.

“I suppose he can,” she murmured. She picked up her cup and sipped her hot coffee. “I wish we didn’t have to have film people climbing all over the ranch,” she added impatiently. “But they’re offering us a small fortune to use it for location shooting, and we need the money so badly that we can’t refuse.” She sighed. “That old saying’s right, isn’t it, that everybody has a price. I didn’t think I did, but I do want to replace that Salers bull.” She smiled doggedly. “We don’t insure against cattle losses, but at least he’ll be a tax deduction as a business loss.” She shook her head. “I paid five thousand dollars for that bull. If Clark did poison him, and I can find a way to prove it, I’m going to take him all the way to the Supreme Court. I might not get my five thousand back, but I’ll take it out in trade.”

He chuckled. “I like your style, Crissy Gaines.”

She smiled at him over her coffee cup. “If I can get proof, will you arrest him for me?”

“Of course.” He sobered. “But don’t go looking for trouble alone.”

“Not me. I’m the cautious type.”

He doubted that, but he wasn’t going to argue about it. “Are you game to get back on the dance floor?”

“You bet!”

He grinned and took her hand, leading her back out. The band leader, noticing them, immediately stopped the slow country tune they were playing and broke out with a cha-cha. Everybody laughed, including the couple of the evening out on the dance floor.

* * *

Saturday morning, bright and early, the director, the assistant director, the cameraman, the cinematographer, the sound man, two technicians and the stars of the movie came tooling up the dirt driveway to the ranch in a huge Ford Expedition.

Judd had just driven up in the yard a minute ahead of them. Christabel and Maude came out on the porch to meet them. Maude was in an old housedress, with her hair every which way. Christabel was wearing jeans and a cotton shirt, her hair in a neat braid. But when she saw the redheaded woman getting out of the big vehicle, her heart fell to her boots.

It didn’t help that Judd went straight toward the woman, without a single glance back at Christabel, to help her down out of the high back seat with his hands around her tiny waist.

She laughed, and it was the sound of silver bells. She had a perfect smile—white teeth and a red bow mouth. Her figure was perfect, too. She was wearing a long swirly green dress that clung to the long, elegant lines of her body. Judd was looking at her with intent appreciation, a way he’d never looked at plain little Christabel. Worse, the model looked back at him with abject fascination, flirting for all she was worth.

“She’s an actress,” Maude said with a comforting hand on her arm. “She’d never fit in here, or want to, so stop looking like death on a marble slab.”

Christabel laughed self-consciously. “You’re a treasure,” she whispered.

“And I’m cute, too,” Maude said with a wide grin. “I’ll go make a pot of coffee and slice some pound cake. They can come in and get it when they’re ready.”

“Christabel!” Judd called sharply.

She glanced ruefully at Maude and hopped down the steps with her usual uninhibited stride and stopped beside Judd as he made introductions.

“This is Christabel Gaines. She’s part owner of the ranch. Christabel, I’m sure you remember Joel Harper, the director,” he said, introducing the short man in glasses and a baseball cap, who smiled and nodded. “This is Rance Wayne, the leading man.” He nodded toward a handsome tall man with blond hair and a mustache.

“This is Guy Mays, the assistant director,” he continued, introducing a younger man who was openly leering at the model. “And this is Tippy Moore,” he added in a different tone, his eyes riveted to the green-eyed redhead, who gave Christabel a fleeting glance that dismissed her as no competition, and then proceeded to smile brilliantly up at Judd.

“I’m very glad to meet you,” Christabel said politely.

“Likewise. We’re ready to start shooting Monday,” Harper told Judd. “We just need to discuss a few technical details...”

“If you want to know anything about the livestock,” Christabel began.

“We’ll ask Judd,” the model said in a haughty, husky voice. “He’d surely know more than you would,” she added with deliberate rudeness.

Christabel’s dark eyes flashed. “I grew up here...” she began belligerently.

“Judd, I’d love to see that big bull you told us about,” the model cooed, taking Judd’s arm in her slender hands and tugging him along.

Christabel was left standing while Judd walked obediently toward the big barn with Tippy and Joel Harper and his entourage. She wanted to chew nails. She was, after all, a full partner in the ranch. But apparently they considered her too young to make big decisions, and Judd was too fixated on the redhead to care that she’d been dismissed as a nobody on her own place.

She glared after them until the sound of a horse approaching caught her attention. Nick Bates, their livestock foreman and ranch manager, came riding up, his tall, lithe figure slumped in the saddle.

“What’s your problem?” she asked him.

“I’ve been chasing cows,” he muttered darkly. “Some damned fool cut the fence, and five cows got out. We ran them into another pasture and I came back for the truck and some wire to fix the break.”

“Not the pregnant cows,” she said worriedly.

He nodded. “But they seem all right. I had the boys herd them into the pasture down from the barn, just in case.”

“Who left the gate open?” she wanted to know.

“None of my men,” Nick assured her, his dark eyes flashing in his lean, rugged face. “I rode up to Hob Downey’s place and talked to him. He spends his life in that rocking chair on the front porch most of the year. I figured he might have seen who cut the wire.”

“Did he?” she prodded.

“He said there was a strange pickup truck down there early this morning, one with homemade sides, like a cattle truck would have,” Nick told her. “An older truck, black with a red stripe. Two men got out and one acted like he was fixing the fence, then Hob went out on his porch and yelled at them. They hesitated, but a sheriff’s patrol car came up the road and they jumped in the truck and went away real fast. It was a small opening, just wide enough to get a cow through, and not visible except up close.”

She moved closer to the horse, worried and thoughtful. “I want you to call Duke Wright and ask him if he’s got a black truck with a red stripe, and ask who was driving it this morning.”

Nick leaned over the pommel, meeting her eyes. “You’ve got some idea who it is,” he said.

She nodded. “But I’m not mentioning names, and what I know, I’m keeping to myself. Get down from there.”

He lifted both eyebrows. “Why?”

“I don’t want to have to go to the barn to saddle Mick,” she admitted. “The film crew’s down there. They make me nervous.”

Nick swung down gracefully. “Where are you going?”

“Just out to see how that fence was cut,” she told him.

“I already told you...”

“You don’t understand,” she said, moving closer. “The fence where the bull died had been cut, too, remember? I never mentioned it to Judd, and we fixed it, but I noticed how it was cut. No two people do the same thing exactly alike. I can tell if it was Maude or Judd who opened a cola can, just by the way they leave the tab. I know what the first wire cuts looked like.”

“I’ve got to find Denny. He picked up some new salt licks. We’ll take those out when we fix the fence.”

“Good enough.” She swung gracefully into the saddle and patted the gelding’s red neck gently, smiling. “I’ll take good care of Tobe, okay?”

He shrugged. “I never doubted it. Want me and Denny to get the truck and follow you over there?”

She shook her head. “I’m no daisy.” She noted the rifle that protruded from the long scabbard beside the saddle horn. “Mind if I take this along?” she added.

“Not at all. I’d feel better if you did. Remember the safety’s on. Is Judd down there?” he asked abruptly, nodding toward the barn.

“Yes, so you’d better go straight to the equipment shed. What he doesn’t know won’t get me dressed down.”

He started to argue, but she was already trotting away.

She didn’t really need to look at the cuts to guess that Jack Clark had been around, making mischief. He might have just wanted to let the cows out, or he might have planned to steal some. But she wanted to get away from Judd and the others. If she were lucky, they’d be long gone by the time she got back. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure her theory was correct. If she could get any sort of evidence to give Cash, he could take care of Jack Clark for her.

She remembered the look in Judd’s black eyes when he’d helped Tippy Moore down from the SUV, and the way he’d let her lead him away after insulting Christabel. He hadn’t even seemed to notice that she’d been insulted, either. Her heart ached. Just as she’d dreaded, the model’s arrival marked a turning point in her life. She wished she could turn the clock back. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.

5

As Crissy suspected, the fence was cut in the same place that the other one had been, very close to the vertical brackets of the hog wire. She swung down from the saddle and examined the cuts carefully. The wire cutters that had been used both times weren’t sharp and the cuts weren’t neat and clean.

She turned, leading Tobe by the reins, and sighed angrily as she looked toward the flat horizon. Jack Clark had stolen from them, and they’d fired him with justification. But Clark had a vindictive streak a mile wide, and he wanted vengeance. Crissy was afraid that it wasn’t going to end with poisoned bulls and cut fences. She hoped that Duke Wright would have some news for Nick about the Clark brothers when he phoned him.

She spotted Hob Downey on his porch and walked up to greet the older man.

Hob was in his seventies. He’d been a cowboy all his life, until he was forcibly retired by his boss. He knew more about horses than most anybody, and he was lonely. He sat on his front porch most every day, hoping that somebody would stop and talk to him. He was a gold mine of information on everything from World War II to the early days of ranching. Crissy visited him when time permitted, but, like most young people, time was in short supply in her life.

“Hi, Hob!” she called.

“Come sit a spell, Miss Crissy,” he invited with a grin.

“Wish I had time, Hob. Nick says you saw some fellows in a pickup truck down by our fence this morning.”

He nodded. “Sure did. Skulking around like. I don’t have a telephone, or I’d have called you.”

“Was one a tall man with a bald head?” she asked carefully.

He grimaced. “One was wearing a hat pulled down low on his forehead, so I can’t say if he was bald. Couldn’t say how tall he was, either. The other fellow was wearing a shirt that could have drove a colorblind man crazy. Kept on the other side of the truck, mostly, couldn’t see him well.”

She sighed. “How about the truck?”

“Had a big rust spot on the left front fender,” he offered. “Rest of it was black with a thin red stripe. Had homemade gates, unpainted. Looked to me like they were about to collect a cow or two, Miss Crissy.”

She’d have to find out if the Clark brothers had a pickup truck, or drove one of Wright’s fitting that description, and what color it was.

“Cut that fence, didn’t they?” he persisted.

She nodded. “But don’t let that get around, okay?” she asked. “They might be dangerous, and you’re all alone out here.”

He chuckled. “I got a shotgun.”

“You can’t stay awake twenty-four hours a day,” she pointed out.

“They might come back and try again.”

She couldn’t be sure of that. “You just keep your eyes open and watch your back,” she told him.

“Somebody mad at you, is that it?” he wanted to know.

“Something like that. Thanks, Hob. You take care of yourself, and lock your doors at night.”

“You, too, Miss Crissy. Sure you won’t sit a spell?”

She smiled. “I’ll come back when I can. But I’m up to my ears in movie people right now. I have to get back home.”

“We heard they was going to make a movie at your ranch. You going to be in it?”

She laughed. “Not me! See you, Hob.”

“See you.”

She got back on Tobe and turned him toward the dirt road that led back to the ranch. It was disconcerting to think that Jack Clark and his brother John might have been responsible for two attempts on their livestock. They might try again, and they couldn’t afford many losses right now, not even with the added revenue the movie shoot would bring in. They needed a new direction or they were going to go under.

Specialization, she thought, was the only answer to their problem. They could do what Cy Parks did and raise purebred livestock—but that required a hefty bankroll up front that they didn’t have. They could do what a few other producers had done and try marketing their own brand of organic beef. But that would entail upgrading their production methods and finding a buyer who wanted quality organic beef...maybe an overseas buyer, because those profits were really high, according to Leo Hart, who sold organic beef to Japan.

If only horses could fly, she thought, and laughed at her own whimsy. Judd had tried that angle already, and failed. They were told that their cattle weren’t lean enough for the high priced markets, that they were fed too much corn and too little grass. That was why Christabel had been nudging their cattle into pastures to fatten them on grass—and had lost their prize Salers bull in the process.

But it wasn’t the grass—rather, the clover—that had killed that bull. And that cut fence was no accident, either. It was the Clark brothers. She knew it, even if Judd wouldn’t listen. Cash would. And somehow, she was going to prove it!

* * *

She walked Tobe down to the barn, noting that the big SUV was gone, and so was Judd’s truck. What a relief. At least she didn’t have to worry with company today.

But the relief was short-lived. After she’d unsaddled and brushed Tobe, and taken the rifle back to Nick, there was unwelcome news.

“Duke Wright doesn’t own a black pickup with a red stripe,” Nick told her with a sigh, pushing back the hat from his sweaty blond hair. “And he doesn’t have any cowboys who do.”

She grimaced. “I was so sure...!”

“Maybe he borrowed it,” he said.

Her eyebrows lifted. “You think?”

“Anything’s possible.” He gave her a long look. “Judd wanted to know where you were. I told him you rode over to check on the cows that got out of the pasture.” He held up a hand. “I didn’t tell him the fence was cut. I figured you’d tell him when you wanted to.”

She smiled. “Thanks, Nick. I owe you one.”

He shrugged. “No problem. I’ve already told the boys to keep their eyes open for any suspicious vehicles around here.”

“Good idea. And keep that pasture where you moved the cattle under twenty-four hour guard, even if you have to pay somebody overtime,” she added firmly, inwardly grimacing at another expense they could ill afford. “Make sure he’s carrying a rifle, too.”

He nodded gravely. “I’ll do that.”

She hesitated. “And take pictures of the way the fence is right now, and save that wire where the cuts are,” she added as an afterthought. “If anything ever comes of this, we’ll need evidence.”

“You bet! I’ll put it in the equipment shed.”

“Thanks, Nick.” She wandered back up to the house. Maude was wrapping untouched slices of cake and grumbling.

“‘Can’t eat cake,’ she said. It’s got calories.” She glared at Crissy, who was smothering a grin. “And doesn’t drink coffee, because caffeine’s bad for you. They didn’t have time for it, anyway, and she gave our house a look that I’d have liked to push her off the steps for!”

“They won’t be here long,” she said comfortingly.

“That’s what you think! I heard that director tell Judd that it would take a couple of months for them to shoot the movie, and even then, that they’d probably have to come back to reshoot some scenes after they finished.”

That meant they’d be here until Christmas. She thought about Judd being around that model all the time, and her heart sank. It was worse than she’d ever dreamed it might be.

“That model was really playing up to him,” Maude was muttering. “Hung on him like a chain the whole time, smiling up at him, laughing with him. She’s stuck on him already.”

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