by Diana Palmer
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 b
ack 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, befo
re 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.”