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“How?”
“Kyle.”
“Kyle? What about him?”
She turned back to her search for supplies, still so shaken by Kyle’s murder and the timing of Matt Guiliani’s appearance on the Bar Naught, and what the fallout would be to her own purposes, that she couldn’t think what lie to tell or how to deliver it.
She combed unnecessarily through the drawer full of syringes to cover her delay in answering, then plucked out an unused eighteen-gauge syringe.
He grabbed her other forearm. “Look at me, Fiona. What about Everly?”
She jerked her hand away, but he held tight and all she accomplished by pulling so hard was to bring his naked wrist into contact with her breast.
An intensely sexual awareness, keen, fierce and unexpected, hit her, a flash flood of mutual suspicion crashing down through canyons of barren, thwarted desire. Her mouth watered. Her nipples tightened unbearably. Another slip, Fiona? she thought, like the unintended mention of a kiss in Soldier Boy’s stall?
What was it about him that had her reacting this way?
She swallowed.
He released her wrist.
Their eyes met, and she backed away, one step.
“I want you off the Bar Naught. Now.” She knew he wasn’t any less affected by her slip than she was. Her breast still tingled. However unwitting, he stroked the part of his wrist that had touched her with the tips of the fingers on his other hand.
She couldn’t do this, couldn’t be here, be in a situation where a man made any difference to her. Or made her feel. Or made her tingle, wanting more.
He had to get off the Bar Naught and stay off it. She had made the worst mistake of her life by not betraying his presence to Dex. If she had, Dex would have hauled Matt Guiliani off to jail, and then she could try to decide what to do. What Kyle’s murder meant. How her own future would go now that her excuse for being on the Bar Naught was dead.
But Guiliani still wanted to know how she knew who he was. “I’m not leaving till you tell me what Everly said.”
The part of her that flawless composure had been drilled into responded with the necessary lie. “Kyle showed me your photo. It had come up in a conversation about bodyguards.” She joked to neutralize the tension, to defeat the stirring of attraction to this intruder into her life. “Kyle was skeptical, making fun of the possibility, but he told me that you would try to kill him one day.”
The implication that Kyle might actually need a bodyguard was the first time he came close to revealing what she already knew. He dealt with men who dispensed illegal arms, guns, bombs and rockets to half-baked causes, dangerous men—and profited hugely in doing it.
Her ears had perked up, her attention snared. He never told her in so many words what his international business dealings were about. He avoided the subject all the time. She’d asked a few questions, trying to make her curiosity seem without any particular motive behind it. Kyle had only stroked her chin between his thumb and forefinger in a way that repulsed her, and he told her not to worry her pretty little head.
He would always have things under control, and when he needed her to know more, he would tell her.
Guiliani was the last man alive to whom she would confess what she knew, and why she was really back on the Bar Naught, enduring Everly’s arrogance, fending off his mocking advances all these months. She had made her deal with the devil. She would be the necessary ears and eyes on the Bar Naught, reporting every move Kyle Everly made in exchange for the chance to regain ownership of the ranch.
He wasn’t moving anymore, but it was still faintly possible that she could prove useful enough.
Her situation was already tenuous. Matt Guiliani would make it worse if he knew what she was doing here. She’d be off the Bar Naught faster than she could pack her meager belongings—and her chance would be lost forever.
The Bar Naught was far more to her than a symbol of the pretensions to a privileged, polo-playing country-manor lifestyle of distant royalty, which was what the ranch represented to her idle parents. Much more.
She loved the work.
She loved the land, the freedom, the responsibility, the beautiful wild mustangs that she gentled. The love and respect and care of horses made people into better people. She knew that firsthand. Personally.
The Bar Naught was her safe haven, and she was willing to do whatever unsafe things she had to do to have it back.
“You didn’t believe him?” Matt asked, interrupting her thoughts. “That I’d try to kill him?”
“I don’t know what I believed. What does it matter now?”
“It matters.” His eyes fixed on hers, but she averted her gaze, searching for the alcohol swab for an excuse to look away.
She was easily as tall as Guiliani, but his male dimensions, his sheer presence, befuddled her wits, and she needed them all operating at a perfect pitch. “He’s just as dead no matter who did it.”
Matt craned his neck till he trapped her gaze. “It matters to me.”
She shrugged. She doubted very much that Matt Guiliani was the kind of man who would shoot another man in the back, but she couldn’t afford to reveal to him all that she knew. And Matt might have changed, might have turned killer.
Soldier Boy had. Anything was possible.
She decided that must be her tack. Deny everything. “I don’t really know you. How could I know if you would gun a man down?”
His eyes tracked her. “One never knows.”
“Have you killed anyone?” His expression left out any hint of excuses. “Yes.”
“What if someone betrayed you?” Because if he wouldn’t stay off the Bar Naught she would lie through her teeth to make sure he did. She would swear to Dex Hanifen that she had seen Guiliani pull the trigger.
“Is there a point to this?”
She swallowed, feeling as if he had read her mind, knew of her intention to pin the murder on him. “Yes.”
“Are you asking if I would kill you if you betray me?”
He shook his head slowly. “I wouldn’t advise it, Fiona.”
“Is that a yes?”
His brows drew close together. “Is that what stopped you from turning me over to Hanifen? The fear that I would come after you next?”
Lie, she told herself. Just do it. “Yes. All right? Yes. I was afraid I would be next.”
“Now you know better.”
“I don’t.”
“Of course you do.” He didn’t believe her, and why would he? He reached for a packet of cedar sticks from his breast pocket, broke one off and stuck it in his mouth.
The lie had been a mistake, which only made him more suspicious of her, not less. Would a woman fearful that he would kill her have turned her back on him? Would she lead him docilely into her treatment room to administer a shot before he did her in?
What made her think he could not have turned into a killer?
She watched the cedar splinter travel over his lower lip from one corner to the other, shoved by his tongue. Her mouth felt parched as bones dried in the sun, and she licked her own lips as she aimed her gaze in another direction. She couldn’t be attracted to him. Could not.
“Fiona,” he said, his voice so low its tones thrummed inside her, “what’s going on?”
Her tongue swiped again at her dry lips. “Nothing.”
“Maybe I can help—”
“I don’t need any help.” He was the last man alive whose help she needed.
“You want to change your answer?”
“No.” She busied her hands, forcing the syringe barrel through the paper.
“Fiona,” he snapped, “let’s just cut the crap, okay? You’re not stupid. If you’re telling the truth, you didn’t know who was in the barn. I could have been the one who shot Everly in the back. Why would you take that kind of risk?”
“Kyle had enemies,” she answered. “I didn’t want to get involved. I don’t want to be involved.”
She cleared her throat and clamped her lips tight. Emotions like some vicious animated kaleidoscope of feelings—jealousy, resentment, even hatred for the way he was able to strike a truce with Soldier Boy—turned inside her.
Not only a truce, either. Soldier Boy permitted this man’s touch.
She had seen him swing down into Soldier Boy’s stall. She’d seen him fall to the floor. But her reasons for leaving him there, for failing to mention his presence to Dex Hanifen, for coming at him with her rifle, had nothing to do with the murder at all.
The point was that Soldier hadn’t killed him. In a deathly still way inside her that she really didn’t understand, that was all she needed to know.
She trusted Soldier Boy’s instincts more than her own. That was the last thing she would admit to anyone, Matt last of all. She dredged up her maddeningly stiff-upper-lip upbringing and buried that messy kaleidoscope of emotion.
“If you knew what kind of man you were dealing with, then what are you doing back on the Bar Naught at all, Fiona?”
“Because I want it back.”
Chapter Three
The Bar Naught was all Fiona Halsey had ever wanted. Ever. “My parents lost it. I want it back. It’s really just that simple.”
“Even if it meant tangling with Everly?” Matt asked. “What am I missing? How did you think you were ever going to get the Bar Naught back from him?”
She met his eyes directly. On this point she was more prepared to lie. “I thought he would eventually get bored. He talked like that. He was a liar, you know. Pathological. Kyle Everly would as soon tell a lie as the truth when the truth would serve him better.” She took hold of her long straight hair and shoved it behind her. “All to prove, over and over again that he could get away with it. To see if he could ride the crest of his charm right on by common sense one more time.”
She popped the metal lid off the vial and swabbed the rubber stopper with alcohol, uncapped the needle, drew up the dose of booster and recapped. She turned away and put down the syringe on the countertop, then plunged her icy hands beneath a rush of hot water at the sink. “Months ago, Kyle offered me the chance to come back to the Bar Naught. He said that I could have it all my way, that—I didn’t know what a liar he was. At the time, I didn’t know.”
She withdrew her hands and the electric eye shut off the water. She grabbed a couple of paper towels from the dispenser and turned around when she thought she could finally manage her own emotions well enough. What she saw in his face encouraged her. “Any other questions?”
“Just the one.”
She flashed on the image of him crashing down into the stall. A dark, unrelentingly handsome man, a stranger breathing the same air as Soldier Boy, gasping for that air like a fish out of water, and Soldier…not moving in for the kill. There was no satisfactory answer she could give him as to why she hadn’t turned him over to Dex.
“Shall I tell you why I want to know?” he asked.
“I don’t care, but listen. Why don’t I just take care of that now so you won’t have to explain yourself?” She tossed the spent paper towels into the trash. “You wait here, and I’ll just go make the call.”
His eyes darkened. “Fiona, I have to know if someone told you I would be here tonight. Answer the question. Yes or no.”
“No.” Whatever other lies she had told him, whatever she had to keep from him, this much was true. “No one told me you were coming. Did you know Kyle was going to be murdered?”
He had the look of a man who thought even a distant cousin of the Queen of England ought to be plucked from the fray and planted back in Kensington Gardens. If he knew the fire she was playing with, everything she had ever wanted would be lost in one fell swoop of alpha-male whim.
No way.
She picked up the syringe again and uncapped the needle. “Roll your sleeve up higher.”
He shoved the flannel as far as it would go, but the long underwear he wore beneath it wouldn’t be pushed higher. She cut him a look and stepped back again. He pulled both shirttails out of his jeans, stuck his hand beneath them and shoved the fabric high enough to free his arm, baring his muscled shoulder and half his torso as well. “Okay?”
She simply refused to be affected by all that powerful masculine flesh, the swirls of dark hair, but it was impossible not to notice. Not to imagine her fingers there. Not to linger overlong with her eyes as if she were preoccupied with her observation of the deep bruises.
His body reminded her she was a woman, and the battering he’d taken only made him that much more dark and dangerously appealing. She swiped his biceps with an alcohol pad and drove her needle in deep.
Nary a flinch, but he made no move to get back into his shirts, either. She made the mistake of meeting his knowing eyes, and she could no more look away than move out of his orbit. Her pulse throbbed.
His heart thudded till she could nearly hear it.
He was in her space now, breathing her same scarce air, and she had stabbed him with her needle to punish her own longings, and the more he sat there taking it, watching her, seeing her, the more powerful he became and the deeper in his thrall she fell.
Somehow she found herself stepping back.
He writhed his way back into his shirts. She turned hurriedly away. “I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “You need to go along with whatever I say or do. Clear?”
She pitched the syringe into an impervious container. “I understand you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You don’t want to cross me, Fiona.” He looked at her as if to say she could take his threat any way she wanted, except to defy him. “Hanifen and his boys will be back in the morning. And they’ll be saying you’re the one who murdered Kyle Everly.”
The possibility, the rightness of it, the inevitability struck her. She swallowed. “I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t have to believe me, Fiona. Just wait and see. I’ll be a gentleman. I won’t say I told you so.”
She followed him from the treatment room and ushered him out the sliding door that opened onto the paddocks.
The temperature had dropped. She wrapped her arms around herself and thought she heard the nickering of a horse in the stark, distant silence.
Guiliani turned back to her, so close that in the frigid night air she could feel the warmth emanating off his body, smell the scent of hay and horseflesh on him. He was looking at her again, but she looked past him. She wanted him to go.
“Fiona—”
“Go. Just go!”
He turned fully toward her and touched her cheek. She saw it coming and could have turned away. Somewhere inside herself she must have wanted his touch, must have needed a comforting gesture so much that she would stand still for one from him.
“I want you to know this,” he said, his voice low and quietly reassuring. “I want you to know you can tell me anything.”
