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Whoa.
2
A PRIZE BULL UP FOR AUCTION, that’s what Zach felt like. He stood stock-still under the blazing Texas sun and waited while Mariah Clayborn examined him as if she were considering making a bid. Then she seemed to realize what she was doing. Her large brown, almost black, eyes widened and she stared at him as if caught doing something she shouldn’t. Zach grinned, suppressing the desire to ask her if he made the grade.
They stood outside a modest one-story building with Clayborn Investigations written in large block letters on the window. The four-lane boulevard behind him buzzed with traffic, and just over the rooftops of the other one-story buildings across the street lay the Houston skyline. But Zach paid attention to none of it as he gave the woman standing in front of him the same once-over she’d given him. He thought it fair that he not be the only one up on the auctioning block.
He absently rubbed his chin as he took her in. Her clothing of old jeans and T-shirt screamed tomboy through and through. He didn’t think she had on a sweep of makeup, and her hair was naturally wavy, shining a warm cinnamon in the bright midday sunlight. But there was something…very appealing that struck him straight off. An energy. Vitality. Freshness. An out-and-out sexiness that made him come away from his perusal feeling attracted to her in a way that puzzled him. A sleek, polished woman like Jennifer Madison was more his type. Still, he couldn’t ignore the zing of attraction that sizzled along his nerve endings as he looked at Mariah Clayborn.
“Sorry,” she finally said as she squared her feet and steadied herself under his gaze when other women might have fidgeted or struck a coy pose. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.” She glanced at her watch—a simple Timex. “I only just talked to Jennifer an hour ago.”
He remembered how busy the P.I. had been before he left. “It was probably the first chance she had to contact you.”
“Mmm.” Mariah licked her lips then glanced through the windows into the office. She appeared not to know whether to bid on him or pass and wait for the next lot up for auction. “The case of the missing wedding dress, right?”
He chuckled, mildly amused that she referred to the case the same way he had. “That would be it. Have you made any progress on it?”
“Not yet. I was waiting for you to arrive.”
“Good.”
“Yes. But unfortunately I have to see to the closure of another case first.” She motioned toward the door. “If you’d like you could, um, wait in there. My cousin George will keep you company until I get back.”
“And how long would that be?”
“About an hour or two.”
“Would you mind if I accompany you?”
“You want to come with me?”
Her frown was so complete it was almost comical. “If you don’t mind. I’ve been on planes for the better part of the morning and would just as soon not do much sitting right now.”
“You’d be sitting in the truck.”
“Yes, but the truck would be moving.” He glanced around. “Besides, I haven’t had much of a chance to see Houston yet.”
“My destination is about a half hour west of here. Outside the city.”
He grinned. “Better yet.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear again, appeared agitated that she had, then released a long sigh. “Okay. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to bring you along.” She started in the direction of the street.
Zach picked up his single suitcase and followed her, his gaze drawn to the back of her faded jeans. The old denim fit just so across her lush, rounded bottom. While Mariah Clayborn’s clothes shouted tomboy, the body that lay underneath murmured one hundred percent woman.
“You can put that in the bed.”
“Pardon me?” he asked, blinking at where she was opening the door of a beat-up old blue Ford.
“Your suitcase. You can put it in the back.”
He eyed the truck bed, which held a rusty gas container, a partial bale of hay and an old gray-and-red wool blanket. He put the suitcase on top of the blanket then climbed into the truck cab, the door protesting against the movement and letting rip a loud squeak.
“Sorry,” she said, starting the ignition. “I don’t usually have much company in the truck.”
She put the truck into gear then gathered together countless fast-food wrappers littering the floor at his feet. She didn’t appear to know what to do with them. She finally tossed them back behind the bench seat.
“I can see why.”
She glanced at him for a long moment, then seemed to come to some sort of decision as she smiled. “A guy with a sense of humor. I like that.” She gestured toward the door. “You may, um, want to buckle up. Nelly rides a little rough.”
Nelly. She’d named her truck. He fastened his safety belt and quickly found out just how bumpy the ride was going to be as the truck lurched forward.
“You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said over the roar of the engine.
Zach grinned at her, wondering just how much of a ride he was in for….
ZACH LETTERMAN WAS definitely not your normal, run-of-the-mill thorn in the side. Mariah sneaked another glance at him and his cool, clean looks, and the admirable way he looked. He appeared relaxed as her truck bumped and rutted over the dirt road leading to Claude Ray’s place, which was little more than a shack tucked away on a corner of someone else’s land. It had been that someone else, namely Joe Carter, who had called to tip her off about Claude’s return.
“What’s the case about?” Zach Letterman asked.
Mariah pulled her gaze from where she’d been staring at his thick, long-fingered hands and looked into his face. The gleam of recognition in his moss-green eyes made her skin heat up. “Pardon me?”
“This case you have to close. What’s it regarding?”
She gripped the steering wheel tighter when she hit a particularly nasty pothole. “Horse thief.”
Zach’s eyebrows shot up high on his smooth forehead. “Horse thief?”
“Yeah.” She slowed down a bit so the engine didn’t roar too loudly. Claude wouldn’t be going anywhere without her seeing him anyway, seeing as this was the only road leading in or out of the place. “A nearby breeder had two of his prime studs come up missing day before yesterday. Maybe you recognize the names? Gentle As Rain won the Kentucky Derby last year and Black Thunderfoot won the Triple Crown three years ago.”
He slowly shook his head. “Sorry. Don’t follow racing.”
“Oh. Well, anyway, those are the studs that came up missing. Carter charges twenty-five grand a pop for stud fees.”
“That much?”
She smiled. “Yes. Funny, isn’t it? Kind of like male prostitution of the animal variety.” She waved her hand toward the west. “Anyway, when Carter called me to look into the matter, I knew immediately who was behind the theft. A guy by the name of Claude Ray. He’s a local of sorts who sweeps into town every now and again, leaving a trail of illegal activities in his wake. He usually shows up again when the fuss dies down and the local authorities have moved on to bigger and better things.” She hit a nasty bump and would have catapulted from the seat if not for her own safety belt. “I heard Claude showed up again about a week or so ago.”
“Is this something P.I.s usually handle around here?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard. “Isn’t this something for the authorities?”
“Usually, yes. But Carter’s spread borders my daddy’s ranch and our families go way back. My uncle Bubba—the P.I. business was his before he kicked, er, before he passed on last year—always saw to these kinds of favors for friends.”
Zach turned his head to look out the window at the passing landscape. Long stretches of open plains extended as far as the eye could see.
Mariah took a deep breath, finding a deep satisfaction being near the place where she’d grown up. There was something about the Texas plains that crawled right up under your skin and stayed there, much as the soil did when it got under your fingernails. She glanced at Zach to find him shrugging out of his suit jacket then tossing it over the back of the seat. His shirt was white and crisp and covered him to the wrists. Well, at least until he popped the buttons at the cuff and rolled the material up to the top of his forearms. Mariah swallowed. And what forearms they were, too. While his hands looked much softer than she was used to—hell, they looked softer than hers—his forearms were nothing but thick, corded muscles, his skin dotted with soft almost black hair. And he had the kind of wrists she doubted she could get the fingers of one hand around.
Oh, the man next to her might be a Northern city boy, but she suspected he was as strong as any man who had spent his life on the range.
“You’re from out here?” Zach asked, pulling her attention back to his face.
She nodded and pointed to the west again. “Daddy’s cattle ranch is about five miles that way.”
His gaze on her face was softly probing. “How did you end up a P.I.?”
Mariah stared determinedly ahead. Now there was a question you didn’t want to have to answer when you least expected it. “Long story.”
“I’m not exactly going anywhere,” he said with a grin.
She cleared her throat, thankful it couldn’t be heard over the roar of the engine as she sped up again. “Let’s just say it was serendipity along with a healthy dose of nepotism.”
While that was true, she didn’t want to delve into the fact that there had come a point a couple years back when she felt her presence at the ranch wasn’t welcome anymore. “A distraction,” that’s what her father had called her. A woman doing a man’s job is how she interpreted his explanation. It seemed that overnight she had moved from a valued member of the ranch to unwanted company. The ranch hands went silent when she joined them for dinner. Her father scowled whenever she came back from a run. And she’d been relegated to menial tasks a two-hundred-year-old woman could have done.
She blessed the day when her uncle Bubba had offered her a one-time only assignment that included tracking down the very man she was tracking now: Claude Ray. He’d stolen some of her father’s cattle back then, re-branded them, and was selling them at auction in the next county. The idiot.
Conniving, Ray definitely was. Smart, he was not.
But the one-time assignment had quickly turned into a full-time job. And it had basically become her mission in life since she couldn’t work at the ranch.
“How about you?” she asked him.
Zach stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. And she supposed in some way maybe she was. It usually took Yanks a bit of an adjustment period before they got used to the easy cadence of Texas speak. And she had the impression that he’d definitely just gotten off the boat. Or plane.
He shrugged and squinted against the sun as he stared out the window. “You could say I came about it much the same way.”
Mariah smiled. So he didn’t want to share his reasons any more than she did. Good. That was just fine with her. More than fine. Because it meant he wouldn’t hound her.
She turned her attention back to the road. They were maybe a half a mile up from the shack where Claude Ray sometimes hung his hat. And there it was. She could see the smear of weathered gray boards against the horizon. And behind the shack she made out horses. Two of them. Exactly the number she suspected Claude had stolen from the Carter ranch.
She stepped on the gas, then noticed a spot of red dart from the shack and make a run for a white pickup nearby.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Mariah muttered under her breath.
Finally she elicited a physical reaction to her driving from Zach as he gripped the dusty dashboard. “I, um, take it this is the part where I should hold on?”
“If you value your life.” Mariah smiled at him, feeling a rush of adrenaline that warmed her entire body.
She told herself the rush had nothing to do with the man next to her. She got a rush from tracking someone down, especially someone like Claude Ray, who was a regular. And who gave good chase.
She spared Zach another glance as she bore down on Claude. There was no way Claude was going anywhere anyway. Not with this being the only road out. “You okay?” she asked.
Zach grinned at her in a way that made her stomach leap higher than it should have. “Great.”
“Good. Hold on.”
Ten yards away from Claude’s white truck she stood on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel to the left, sending her own truck careening to a stop and blocking the road.
“Here.” Mariah slid her revolver from her holster and tossed the firearm to the seat next to Zach. “If he comes running back this way without me, shoot him.”
The expression on his face was priceless. “Shoot him?”
“By shoot him, I don’t mean execute him. A simple nick to the arm should do the trick.”
His expression didn’t change.
Mariah opened her mouth to ask if he knew how to use a gun, but caught sight of Claude making a run for it.
The question could wait for later. She had a horse thief to catch.
HOLY SHIT.
Zach stared at the firearm in his hand then at Mariah Clayborn’s retreating back. He’d never held a gun before, much less fired one. Okay, sure, he’d had a cap gun and a BB gun when he was a teenager. But this was no peashooter. This was a full octane Colt that weighed at least two pounds if not more.
The longer he held it, the warmer the metal grew against his skin. He swallowed, excitement ricocheting through his bloodstream. Before he knew it he was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning. He had to shoulder the door to get it to open and he stood on the hard-packed dirt outside, squinting against the dust that remained from Mariah’s daredevil maneuvers. He lifted a hand to shield his eyes. There she was behind the shack. His brows rose. She was grabbing the mane of a sleek dark stallion and hauling herself up onto the horse’s bare back. He shifted a little to the right to find Claude Ray doing the same with less success some couple yards away, his caramel-colored stallion in a full run while Ray tried to pull himself up on top, completely graceless.
Mariah, on the other hand, was as fluid as the animal she commandeered. The horse seemed immediately to sense she was the boss and held still while she hauled herself up, waiting until her toned thighs straddled him and her boot heels gently nudged his sides before shooting out after Ray. Mariah’s dark hair blew out behind her, her back straight, her fingers tangled in the horse’s dark mane as she bent over the back of his neck, using the power of her thighs to stay astride.
Holy shit. Things did work differently down here.
Sure, like most Americans, he was well-versed on the stories of Texas and the Southwest, cowboys and Indians and Clint Eastwood movies. But he’d never thought that that kind of stuff still went on down here.
The two riders galloped out of sight. Zach stared at the truck with the tricky gearshift and scanned the landscape. The road ran out beside the shed. There was no way he could follow in the ancient vehicle.
Instead, he undid the top couple of buttons on his shirt and leaned against the door to get just a bit out of the unrelenting sun. He grinned. He’d never met anyone quite like Mariah Clayborn before. He’d bet dollars to donuts that she ran Clayborn Investigations. And if what he’d seen so far was any indication, he suspected she was very good at what she did.
He tried to tuck the gun into the waist of his dark slacks. The shear weight of the firearm bent the material back, nearly sending the weapon to the dirt at his feet. He fumbled for the gun then laid it on the hood of the truck instead, his gaze watchful, as if he was afraid the revolver would take on a life of its own.
He rubbed the back of his neck. Okay, so he hadn’t given the gun part of the job that much thought before. He hadn’t thought there would be a reason to, what with the focus of Finders Keepers being the recovery of lost loved ones, rather than dangerous horse thieves. But while Finders Keepers knew Jennifer Madison because they subcontracted work from her, it didn’t mean Jennifer Madison’s agency was strictly a low-risk venture. And, so it appeared, neither was Mariah’s.
He did have to admit to feeling a thrill as the truck hurled over the dirt road toward their quarry, though. And the gun…
He heard the clump-clump of hooves hitting the earth before he spotted the horse. Given his thoughts on Mariah, he expected the rider to be her. Instead the caramel-colored horse shot out of the brush and straight by him.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Zach fumbled for the gun, although he wasn’t entirely certain what he was going to do with it. He eyed the back of the horse, the gun, then aimed the muzzle skyward and pulled the trigger. Nothing.
“The safety!” Mariah called, shooting past him moments after Claude. “Release the safety!”
The safety. Zach hurriedly eyed the metal in his hands and pushed a button. The clip slid out and dropped onto the ground.
Not the safety.
Damn.
Not that it mattered. He shielded his eyes and watched as Mariah caught up with Claude and yanked on the back of his shirt, pulling him from his horse and plopping him into the middle of a particularly prickly looking bush. Within minutes, Mariah shoved Claude in the direction of the truck, his hands bound behind his back with some sort of plastic tie, while the horses followed behind her.
Zach smoothed down the front of his shirt. He’d never before witnessed such a sight. But given the high color in Mariah’s cheeks, the bounce to her gait, she was not only used to such events, she thrived on them. And Zach couldn’t take his eyes off her.
