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The boy opened his mouth to argue, but closed it again at the implacable look on his mother’s face, a look even Colt could recognize. Smart kid, he thought, then grinned when Nicky trudged up the three metal steps of their trailer with his bottom lip jutting out in a pout a rock star would have envied.
As soon as her son was out of sight, Maggie turned back to Colt. She looked about eighteen years old in that T-shirt, he thought. That didn’t stop him from being curious about what was beneath it.
“How is it?”
He blinked at her. “How’s what?”
She looked at him like he’d taken a hard spill from a horse and landed on his head. “Your shoulder. I asked how your shoulder is feeling this morning.”
“Oh. Good. It’s good. I was thinking maybe I’d ride tonight after all, since I’m feeling just fine this morning. What do you think?”
“I think it would be extremely foolish, unless you want to reinjure your shoulder.”
“Maybe I’ll see how I’m feeling later.”
“That’s your decision, of course.” She paused for a moment, as if weighing her words, then spoke stiffly. “Look, Mr. McKendrick. Colt. I don’t want you to take this wrong, but I would appreciate it very much if you would stay away from my son.”
He stared at her. Where the hell did that come from? “I just gave him a jelly doughnut and told him he could take a ride on my horse some time, Doc. It’s not like I offered him a fifth of Jack Daniels and some smokes.”
She frowned. “I realize that. It’s just that he’s at a vulnerable stage right now. He—he lost his father recently.”
“I’m sorry.” What emotion triggered those shadows in her eyes, those lines around her mouth? Grief for the husband she had lost or fear of the men who had killed him?
He was willing to bet it was the latter. According to the dossier Lane had provided him with, she and the late accountant had been at the starting gate of what had been shaping up to be a nasty divorce.
She looked away for a moment, and when she turned back, the clouds were gone. With a cool nod she acknowledged his condolences. “Even though his father wasn’t very... involved in his upbringing, Nicky has taken his death hard. I’m afraid he’s looking for a male role model.”
“Lots of boys dream about being cowboys. I don’t see that there’s any harm in that.”
“I’m afraid I do. He’s an impressionable little boy and he doesn’t need a—a saddle bum filling his head with all sorts of nonsense about the Code of the West and a cowboy’s honor.”
So much for trying to ingratiate himself with her through a friendship with her son. He opened his mouth to defend himself but she went on as if she didn’t notice.
“He’s been through enough. Please don’t compound a little boy’s pain by encouraging a friendship that will only end in heartbreak when you move on to the next rodeo.”
With that she turned and walked into her trailer, leaving him frowning behind her.
* * *
She had sounded like an absolute idiot.
Later that night—after she’d taped a couple of bruised ribs, set a broken arm and bandaged a nasty gash from the wrong end of a bull on the final night of the rodeo—Maggie lay in her narrow bed in the trailer and replayed her conversation with Colt McKendrick.
Please don’t compound a little boy’s pain by encouraging a friendship that will only end in heartbreak when you move on to the next rodeo.
Okay, so she’d overreacted when all he had done was show a little kindness to a lonely little boy. He’d offered to let Nicky ride his horse, that’s all, not move in with him.
He was probably exactly as he appeared—a down-on-his-luck cowboy searching for glory in the arena. Older than most of the wranglers she treated, true, with a maturity in those lines around his eyes, in the confident set of his shoulders, most of them lacked.
So he was older than the norm. That didn’t mean anything. Maybe he was escaping a bad relationship, or, God forbid, the law.
He was certainly attractive, in a raw, wild sort of way. Maybe it was that dark brushy mustache that made him look like one of those outlaws Nicky had become so enamored of. Butch Cassidy, maybe, or Jesse James. Dangerous and fascinating at the same time.
Maggie rolled her eyes at herself. Didn’t she have enough to worry about without her hormones suddenly waking up from whatever internal cave they’d been hibernating in for the past few years? It was all she could do to take care of her son and perform her job each day without giving in to the panic always lurking around the edges of her mind. She didn’t have energy left to indulge in even a harmless flirtation.
He had been awfully sweet with Nicky, though. She smiled at the picture the two of them had made this morning, sprawled out on the back step of McKendrick’s old camper: two satisfied males eating their empty-calorie breakfast in the morning sun.
Nicky needed that in his life. Maybe not the empty calories, but the guiding influences of an older man. Even before she left Michael and moved them to their little apartment, he had been starved for male companionship. Michael had been too busy with his deals and his clients—and his other women, she later discovered—to pay much heed to his son.
If Colt McKendrick wanted to give Nicky a little of the attention he needed so desperately, was she wrong to stop him? No. She wasn’t wrong. She didn’t even know the man. Until she did, she couldn’t trust him. Couldn’t afford to trust him.
It was up to her to keep her son safe until she could earn enough money to help them settle somewhere.
Once she could be certain the men who killed Michael had given up searching for her, she could find a job somewhere, get an apartment for them. With her medical experience, she should be able to find work anywhere. Maybe by fall, before the new school year began.
Maggie gazed up at the dingy, water-stained ceiling of the trailer, suddenly struck by a powerful craving for her old life back. For the safety, the security she’d always taken for granted.
She hadn’t been happy, married to Michael. Oh, she had loved him once. Or thought she did, anyway. She had been vulnerable when she’d married him, she now admitted—had been in her last year of residency when her mother introduced them, just a few months before Helen died after a long battle with cancer.
Throughout her last days her mother had dropped not-sosubtle hints about what a fine young man he was—wealthy, successful, handsome—until Maggie agreed to go out with him more to make her mother happy than because she was interested in dating him.
After Helen died, Michael had been a constant, supportive presence. He had been charming and attentive, and she had soaked it in like a flower starved for rain.
She had known almost from the first that she had made a grave mistake, but by then she was pregnant with Nicky, so she’d done her best to make the marriage work.
For all the good it did her. All that had changed six months ago when she’d found out about the lies, the women. And the safety of her life had been destroyed forever when she had watched Michael topple to the floor of his office with a bullet hole in his forehead three weeks ago.
She didn’t want to think about that night, the night when everything she thought she could count on had crumbled to ashes. She had rushed to the house of Rosie Vallejo, her former housekeeper and Nicky’s long-time care provider, and her first thought had been to call the police to report the murder.
She remembered waiting, shivering in delayed reaction, in Rosie’s humble living room, for the officer to arrive. But when the car pulled up, some latent survival instinct prompted her to look out through the curtain. To her horror, the men climbing out of an unmarked late-model sedan in the driveway were the two she had seen from the elevator after the murder.
The only explanation she could come up with for their presence at Rosie’s house was that they must have found out where she was from her call to the police.
She’s a loose end. You know how much I hate loose ends, the older man had said in that cold voice.
She had barely managed to grab Nicky and flee out the back door. Maggie frowned now, remembering the terror. She still didn’t know who the two men were. Maybe this DeMarranville person the two killers had talked about had sent them as some sort of backup to Carlo and Franky. A grim contingency plan.
Regardless, she had rushed back to her apartment to grab some belongings and had discovered a message from Peg on the answering machine. Rawlings Stock was providing the animals for a show a few hours away from San Francisco, and Peg wanted to come to visit.
The call had seemed heaven sent. Peg wielded a great deal of influence in the rodeo world, and Maggie had no doubt she could help her find work on the circuit, even mucking out stalls.
She hadn’t had to resort to that, fortunately. Peg had known of an opening in one of the rodeo sponsor’s sports medicine program, and her years of experience working at the clinic had qualified her for the position.
She had jumped at the chance. It was the perfect opportunity for her and Nicky to hide from DeMarranville’s men until she could earn enough money to make a new start somewhere safe. Amid the transient life of the rodeo circuit, she could become anonymous, with a new assignment in a different town every week.
She hoped it would be the last place anyone would think to look for her, since Michael had insisted she keep that part of her past—the summers she spent on the road with her rough-and-tumble father—a secret. It didn’t gel with the image he wanted his wife to portray, of quiet, wealthy elegance.
He didn’t even like to talk about her work at the clinic, preferring instead to focus on her mother’s world of country clubs and society teas. The world where Maggie had never belonged.
She shifted in the narrow bed as familiar shame pinched at her. She allowed Michael to completely dominate her present when she was married to him. How could she have let him so completely take over her past, as well, rewriting it to meet his own expectations?
She had loved those times with her father. Maybe she had turned to the rodeo circuit as an escape now because it represented the best part of her childhood. A safe haven, even then. She had looked forward to her summers with Billy Joe with as much excitement as a prisoner handed a three-day pass to the outside. It was worlds away from the coldness, the studied politeness, of her life with her mother.
She rolled over and punched at her pillow. The reasons weren’t important. The only thing that mattered was Nicky’s safety. If it meant keeping him safe, she would dress up like a rodeo clown and go head-to-head with Corkscrew, Peg’s nastiest bull.
She yawned and glanced at her little travel alarm clock. Nearly 1:00 a.m. and they would be leaving early in the morning for the long drive to Butte, Montana.
She needed sleep. Needed it and feared it at the same time. During the day she could forget, could block from her mind the memory of Michael’s death. But in sleep she was powerless against the terrors that stalked her subconscious.
She fought it as long as she could, but finally her exhaustion won out. The nightmare crept up on her, more terrible because it was all so real. Michael falling again, the blood oozing from his wound like wine trickling from a spilled bottle. Those agonizing moments when she had cowered in the washroom while the men who killed him talked casually over his body, as if they were discussing stock prices or baseball scores.
And then running, running.
In her dream it was as if she were stuck on an out-ofcontrol treadmill, always running and never making any progress, while Carlo with the dead eyes pursued her. He moved inexorably closer to her and, try as she might, she could do nothing to escape.
When he had nearly reached her, he veered away, and she thought she had escaped but suddenly Nicky was there in his arms, kicking and struggling, his little fists pounding against the stranger who held him. Terror and fury and raw fear erupted inside her, and she screamed her son’s name just as Michael’s killer reached into his pocket and pulled out a wooden pistol like Nicky’s.
Even though it looked like a toy, she knew it would be as deadly as the real thing. She cried out and grabbed for it, just as a terrible clanging noise erupted from the pistol.
She awoke in a rush, her heart pounding and the blood rushing in her ears. It was so real! She could still hear the echoes of her cries, still taste the fear in her mouth.
What had awakened her? For long seconds she lay in the darkness and listened to the stillness of the night, forcing her muscles to relax, her breathing to slow.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, long and low, like a slow, steady drumroll played by ghostly hands. That was it. She must have heard the warnings of the impending storm.
Lightning flashed outside the window, and the sky immediately growled again. This time it was joined by something much closer, a clang very much like what she’d heard in her dream, followed by muffled cursing.
It wasn’t the storm that had awakened her, she realized as all the fear came surging back.
Someone was out there!
Chapter 3 (#ulink_92192c70-9158-5759-be36-79eeaac74500)
Lingering visions from her nightmare chased themselves through her mind. Could Michael’s killers have found her? Panic exploded in her chest, and she thrust the light quilt aside to scramble out of bed, consumed with a wild, frantic urge to gather Nicky and flee into the night.
After an instant she forced herself to breathe deeply and try to think through it all rationally. How could they possibly have found her? She had been excruciatingly careful to leave no clue about her whereabouts. She hadn’t tapped into any of her bank accounts. She hadn’t told anyone at the clinic where she was going. She hadn’t even told Rosie.
It was probably just some drunk cowboy. A bronc buster or bull rider who celebrated the rodeo’s end with one too many beers at a honky-tonk somewhere and now was simply trying to find his way back to his bed.
Maggie stared at the ceiling. Though she dearly wanted to stay here and hide in her bed—to pretend she hadn’t heard anything but the gathering storm—she knew she had to check out the commotion.
It was the responsible thing to do, and Margaret Elizabeth Rawlings Prescott always did the responsible thing.
She slipped from her bed and crept through the darkness to the window at the front of the trailer, underneath the loft where Nicky slept noisily, making sweet little huffing breaths in his sleep.
Although swollen black-edged clouds hid the moon, faroff lightning arced across the sky just long enough for her to make out a dark, hulking shape crouched by the passenger side of her pickup.
Great. The drunk cowboy was throwing up on her truck.
Again she had the completely childish urge to crawl into her bed and pull the covers over her head. But what if it wasn’t a drunk cowboy? What if it was somebody trying to break into her truck? She didn’t have much of value inside it, but she was damned if she would let somebody take what little they had left.
She needed a weapon, if only to scare the intruder away. A quick scan of the trailer turned up a cast-iron frying pan in the dish drainer. A frying pan. What a cliché. She only needed a headful of curlers to look just like Alice Kramden from The Honeymooners, taking on Ralph after he stayed out too late with the boys. Still, it would probably make any drunk cowboy think twice before tangling with her.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Maggie grabbed the pan by the handle, rummaged through a drawer for a flashlight, then opened the door quietly. She sidled along the length of the trailer until she reached the truck’s bumper.
“If you leave right now,” she called out softly, “I won’t phone the police.” She clicked the flashlight beam on and aimed it right into the would-be thief’s eyes, then gasped when Colt McKendrick’s baby blues blinked back at her. “You!”
“Yeah. Me.” He sounded disgruntled. “Who’d you think it was?”
“I don’t know. A drunk cowboy, maybe, being sick on my truck.” She squinted at him. “You’re not throwing up, are you?”
“Don’t think so. Thanks for asking, though.”
“What are you doing, then?”
“You mind moving the flashlight a little? You’re blinding me here.”
She shifted the beam to the ground. “Sorry. What are you doing?” she repeated.
She sensed, rather than saw, his shrug. “I was on my way to bed and noticed you had a flat. Figured I’d fix it so you wouldn’t have to deal with it in the morning.”
She stared at him. “You just took it upon yourself to start fixing it without talking to me first?”
“Um, could you move that flashlight again?”
Maggie flushed when she realized she had instinctively aimed it into his eyes once more. She pointed the light to the ground again, where it now illuminated a jack propped next to a tire that sagged forlornly. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.
“It seemed the neighborly thing to do.”
He wasn’t breaking into her truck, he was going out of his way to fix her flat tire. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done something so genuinely kind for her. A burst of warmth flooded through her, trickling over her shoulders and down her back.
Her opinion of Colt McKendrick suddenly seemed to shift and slide around inside her. She didn’t want to soften toward him, though. She didn’t dare.
“You really don’t have to do this,” she mumbled. “I’m perfectly capable of changing a flat tire.”
“I’m just saving you the trouble. Just look at it as my way of paying you back for patching up my shoulder yesterday. Nice frying pan, by the way. Odd time of the night for making pancakes, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Embarrassed heat soaked her skin at the flash of his grin in the darkness. She dropped the frying pan to her side. “You never know what sort of riffraff you could run into in the middle of the night.”
“True enough.”
Lightning suddenly seared across the night again, and the air smelled of ozone and that peculiar musty smell of a summer storm about to be unleashed.
McKendrick glanced up at the sky. “Looks like I’d better get a move on if I’m going to beat that. You know, I could probably make better time if you’d shine that flashlight over here.”
“Oh. Of course.” She clicked it on and watched him jack up the truck and quickly, efficiently, replace the flat tire with her spare.
When the last lug nut had been tightened, he hefted the flat into the bed of the pickup. “You’ll want to get this tire repaired before you go too much farther. I wouldn’t want you to be stranded on the road somewhere without a spare.”
