No One But You
Carly Bishop
Lovers Undercover: Dangerous opponents, explosive lovers–these men are a criminal's worst nightmare and a woman's fiercest protector.When undercover cop Matt Guiliani arrived at the Bar Naught ranch in the dead of night to sting a vigilante leader, he got the biggest surprise of his career: His prey was already dead…and Matt was staring down the double-barreled shotgun of the beautiful and frightened Fiona Halsey.With a sinfully sexy body and sass to spare, Fiona was no innocent. But how she was connected with the murder or the secret organization, Matt wasn't sure. He only knew that Fiona was the one woman to scale the walls of his impenetrable defenses.Yet to let down his guard in this assignment, with Fiona, would be costly. Because this time it would mean his heart…if not his life.
His body reminded her she was a woman…
The battering he’d taken earlier, evading the sheriff, only made him that much more dark and dangerously appealing. Her pulse throbbed.
Matt was in her space, breathing the same scarce air. The more he looked at her, the more powerful he became and the deeper in his thrall she fell.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “You’ll need to go along with whatever I say or do. Clear?” When she didn’t answer, he continued, “You don’t want to cross me, Fiona. The sheriff will be back in the morning and they’ll be saying you’re the one who murdered Kyle Everly.”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t have to believe me, Fiona. Just wait and see.” He stepped closer to her, and in the frigid night air she could feel the warmth emanating off his body, smell the scent of hay and horseflesh on him. He touched her cheek. “I want you to know this,” he said, his voice low. “I want you to know you can tell me anything.”
He just didn’t know. That was the one thing she couldn’t do.
Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,
All the evidence is in! And it would be a crime if you didn’t “Get Caught Reading” this May. So follow the clues to your favorite bookstore to pick up some great tips.
This month Harlequin Intrigue has the distinguished privilege of launching a brand-new Harlequin continuity series with three of our top authors. TRUEBLOOD, TEXAS is a story of family and fortitude set in the great Lone Star state. We are pleased to give you your first look into this compelling drama with Someone’s Baby by Dani Sinclair. Look for books from B.J. Daniels and Joanna Wayne to follow in the months ahead. You won’t want to miss even a single detail!
Your favorite feline detective is back in Familiar Lullaby by Caroline Burnes. This time, Familiar’s ladylove Clotilde gets in on the action when a baby is left on a high-society doorstep. Join a feisty reporter and a sexy detective as they search for the solution and find true love in this FEAR FAMILIAR mystery.
Our TOP SECRET BABIES promotion concludes this month with Conception Cover-Up by Karen Lawton Barrett. See how far a father will go to protect his unborn child and the woman he loves. Finally, Carly Bishop takes you out West for a showdown under a blaze of bullets in No One But You, the last installment in her LOVERS UNDER COVER trilogy.
So treat yourself to all four. You won’t be disappointed.
Sincerely,
Denise O’Sullivan
Associate Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
No One But You
Carly Bishop
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carly Bishop’s novels are praised for their “sensuality, riveting emotional appeal and first-class suspense.” She was a RITA Award finalist in 1996 for her Harlequin Intrigue novel Reckless Lover, and she’s won numerous awards and critical acclaim throughout her ten-year writing career. Carly lives in Colorado and regularly uses the great Rocky Mountains as the backdrop in her stories.
Books by Carly Bishop
HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE
170—FUGITIVE HEART
232—FALLING STARS
314—HOT BLOODED
319—BREATHLESS
323—HEART THROB
357—RECKLESS LOVER
370—THE SOULMATE
394—SHADOW LOVER
440—ANGEL WITH AN ATTITUDE
454—WATCH OVER ME
497—MCQUAID’S JUSTICE
538—NO BABY BUT MINE* (#litres_trial_promo)
564—NO BRIDE BUT HIS* (#litres_trial_promo)
616—NO ONE BUT YOU* (#litres_trial_promo)
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Fiona Halsey—She spent her time gentling wild mustangs on the ranch her parents once owned. Would she tame Matt’s heart, or set him up?
Matt Guiliani—The last bachelor undercover agent in operation against an insidious vigilante organization, Matt was all business…or so he’d thought.
Dex Hanifen—The sheriff had ties to local thugs, and he really had it in for Fiona.
Dennis Geary—The ranch manager went AWOL early on.
Kyle Everly—Owner of the Bar Naught, he was set to conduct a high-level meeting when someone shot him in the back.
Elliott Braden—The Interpol agent wanted a clean sweep of all the conspirators.
Pascal Lariviere—The playboy in Fiona’s past was a very careful man.
Garrett Weisz and J. D. Thorne—Top undercover agents, they worried that Matt was in deadly, unforeseen danger.
In memory of Boyd D. Adsit
I miss you dearly
Contents
Chapter One (#u5d6f0557-3304-540b-a04d-42465da1495a)
Chapter Two (#u143690fa-19c7-5b37-bdd2-349b2163a3a8)
Chapter Three (#u0b037681-f4de-52a3-ade3-ddb0f2ed0bd0)
Chapter Four (#u18f02f70-5f9d-5ee5-b7e0-0f4e5ac4f1a5)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
At six minutes past eleven, Matt Guiliani rode into view of the main house on the Bar Naught Ranch. The deep irony of his own timing didn’t escape him. Nothing much ever did.
The window of opportunity had reached its own eleventh hour. The time to move on Kyle Everly was now.
Matt reined the sorrel to a halt and dismounted, dropping silently to the freezing earth. He could smell winter coming in the frigid night air. He could almost smell his own anticipation. He’d been preparing for nearly seven months to go after Everly. The wealthy Wyoming rancher, never dirtying his own hands, made the shadowy vigilante organization known as the TruthSayers look like a bunch of local yokels trying to get up a lynch mob.
Under cover of the moonless night Matt tethered his mount to a patch of scrub oak at the edge of national forest land. He crouched low and pulled a pair of high-tech night-vision binoculars, no larger than a deck of cards, from the breast pocket of his heavy flannel shirt.
He dropped to one knee and began to familiarize himself with every detail of the landscape below—the yard, the hedges, the barn, the residence. And he allowed the thrill of the chase to seep into his awareness…Everly had so narrowly escaped their notice.
Matt had arrived here tonight on an undercover assignment for the U.S. Attorney in Seattle. The Department of Justice wanted the TruthSayers dismantled, once and for all. This business of vigilante extremists doling out their own brand of justice had to be stopped. No one would have made the connections between Everly and the TruthSayers but for one arrogant mistake.
Scrutinizing the main ranch house once more for good measure, Matt turned his focus upon the barn. Inside the upscale, heat-controlled, state-of-the-art facility Everly kept his horses: six polo ponies, three Thoroughbred studs, a couple of working mounts—and the ruined show-quality Arabian that belonged to Fiona Halsey. Soldier Boy, she called him.
All the stable doors were divided in two. Only one had the top half open. From satellite reconnaissance photos, Matt knew that stall housed the viciously claustrophobic stallion. Word had it that everyone in town had warned Fiona the horse should be put down before he killed someone.
She had grown up on the Bar Naught. The land had been passed down through her family for five generations, but her parents had lost it all eighteen months ago. She resided now in a small apartment at the west end of the barn.
If there was a wild card in the deck Matt was about to shuffle, it was this woman. A long-stemmed beauty too perverse or sentimental, or both, to do what had to be done with a horse that had survived the fiery hell of a rollover in one of Everly’s trailers.
As far as the neighbors were concerned, poor Fiona kept to herself, broke feral mustangs on a government contract program to adopt out the horses, oversaw the breeding of Everly’s Thoroughbred studs, and spent her evenings alone sitting with Soldier Boy. The local princess, descended from the landless younger son of a nineteenth-century British earl, brought brutally and unfairly low.
But Fiona Halsey had a dubious past with a French playboy who had too many ties to a group of international thugs Interpol had dubbed The Fraternity. These men brokered illegal weapons, assassins, guns-for-hire and mercenaries. They fostered and gave away arms and services to vigilante groups like the TruthSayers.
Kyle Everly was one of them, almost certainly in command, and here was Fiona Halsey, living on the Bar Naught by his leave.
Coincidence? No one knew for sure.
Satisfied with his survey, Matt snapped shut the binoculars, tucked them away, shouldered his duffel bag and began to pick his way down the mountainside.
As he drew nearer and approached from a westerly angle, Matt saw flickering candlelight within the curtained windows of the ranch manager, Dennis Geary. The ramrod could be counted upon to be entertaining a lady friend in his bunkhouse quarters. Probably one of the clerks from the local convenience store.
The main house was lit up in a couple of rooms. Matt knew Everly himself was away for a regular Friday night poker game that always lasted into the wee hours of Saturday morning. Everly was said to lose a lot, currying favor of the locals.
Which left only Fiona’s whereabouts to account for. Her four-wheel-drive vehicle was parked beneath a pair of old cottonwood trees just outside her apartment. It took Matt thirty seconds to satisfy himself that she was inside.
He had his doubts about her as well. Devil or angel? Player or patsy? Everly’s dupe or a woman who simply loved the Bar Naught and would live on it as an employee if that was her only option?
Not knowing left Matt edgy. He didn’t like it, but there it was. Everly was his target. If Fiona Halsey got in his way, Matt would have his answer.
He crouched low and circled around to the back of the main house. Vaulting easily over the pristine white picket fence at the perimeter of the lawn, he crossed to the back door of the ranch house. There on the porch he knelt to open his duffel bag. He took out a small flashlight and shone a narrow beam on the doors and windows, then disabled the security system.
He opened the back door of the residence, slipped inside and hung his bag by its strap over the inside doorknob. But as he turned around to get a sense of the place, he had an almost visceral feeling of a plan about to go very wrong.
Matt let the feeling spread through him. He stood there in the kitchen listening for the smallest sound, the barest hint that he was not alone. Hearing nothing to alarm him, he began a stealthy room-to-room search of the house, in the end satisfied that he was alone. Still, the feeling of something badly amiss persisted, like a distant siren that went on and on without fading away.
A sudden memory rose up in his mind, of another night he had experienced just such a chilling, powerful presentiment—the night the TruthSayers had snatched his best friend’s young son, Christo.
Matt dragged in a deep draught of air and blew it out slowly, letting his breath carry off the adrenaline rush and the tension the memory evoked in his body. At least no child’s life was at stake this night.
He took a couple of powder-free latex gloves from the back pocket of his jeans, pulled them on and began going through the house, taking it apart, studying the interior and furnishings in earnest. He wanted to become as familiar with Everly’s possessions as if they belonged to him. As if he were Kyle Everly.
Tension lingered inside him. He sat down at Everly’s computer at twelve-thirteen and set to work against the subtle ticking of an antique grandfather clock.
He spent half an hour at the computer, finding detailed maps. He suspected these would match up perfectly with the shipments of illegal arms Interpol had meticulously tracked. In spreadsheet format he found timetables he knew would match thefts and bombings and murders carried out all over creation.
All of these files could be explained away by a defense attorney, but the information gave Matt the leverage he needed to blackmail his way into Everly’s affairs. Tomorrow he would be back, a dangerously renegade cop, formerly of the Anti-TruthSayers squad, ready now to go on the take. Matt Guiliani would become Everly’s new best friend and partner in crime.
He printed key files, then a household inventory as well. One never knew when it would come in handy to know the exact worth of the Renoir on the bedroom wall or the bronze sculpture in the living room. An eagle in flight, clutching its prey in fearsome claws, it was a perfect metaphor for Kyle Everly, the predator who owned the bronze.
The psycho profilers described Everly as a narcissist sociopath, a blond, blue-eyed pretty boy that no one had ever given nearly enough credit for having a brain.
A mistaken prejudice, Matt thought now, that physical beauty such as Everly’s inevitably went unmatched by intellect. Everly sat out here in the middle of big Wyoming thinking himself safe. Thinking he slipped with ease under the radar of law enforcement. He expected to get by with whatever pleased his twisted fancy because he always had.
But Everly hadn’t met Matt yet.
He checked his watch. He had no more than five minutes before he needed to clear out. He had one last task, just in case Everly balked at taking the renegade Matt Guiliani on as his new best friend.
He took a floppy disk from his pocket and planted on Everly’s computer documents that would make it appear that Everly had conspired against his brothers in The Fraternity. That with the brilliant assistance of a powerful Phoenix attorney, Everly had siphoned millions of dollars off the deals The Fraternity made providing illegal arms and hired killers. The guy in Phoenix routinely played such undercover roles for the Department of Justice.
Everly was about to find himself between a rock and a very hard place.
ELLIOTT BRADEN BOARDED his flight at Heathrow, brimming with a certain bonhomie. The Americans had already deployed their undercover cop into international affairs that did not concern them. Braden had been assigned the watchdog job of Interpol “liaison.” Surely the most glorified term for the thankless and impotent position of making sure the Americans did not screw it up.
In fact, he knew they would. He knew they didn’t know when to quit. Americans prided themselves on their never-say-die attitude.
In a haze of contempt, both for his superiors in Interpol and the necessity of involving the Americans, Braden took his first-class seat, graciously accepting the crystal goblet of Chenin Blanc from the flight attendant. The aircraft took off after a delay of only seven minutes.
He had no desire to embroil himself in the Americans’ doggedness, but he supposed his sacrifice might pay off handsomely in the not-too-distant future. Very soon now he would meet them.
Garrett Weisz. J. D. Thorne. Matt Guiliani.
These were the players, the heart of the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-TruthSayers task force, the men running the current undercover operation against Kyle Everly. And as touchingly loyal to one another as blood brothers, all incapable of minding their own petty, provincial business, even when their loved ones were threatened.
The small son of Garrett Weisz, for instance, a child named Christo. He’d been kidnapped by leaders of TruthSayers when Weisz, Thorne and Guiliani’s undercover operation threatened them. The threesome prevailed and the child was restored to the bosom of his family. The TruthSayers were left without much leadership.
Months later, their numbers greatly reduced, the rabid TruthSayers made an attempt on J. D. Thorne’s life. And then on the teenage son of Thorne’s girlfriend, a Seattle detective named Ann Calder. Enter Kyle Everly. The wealthy local rancher and Truth-Sayers sympathizer had, for some inscrutable, arrogant reason, lent his considerable resources to the straightforward attempted assassinations of J. D. Thorne and Ann Calder.
The trained killers failed. Guiliani rescued the teenager. Everly, however, proved untouchable. That fact had done nothing to faze the dogged investigations of Weisz or Thorne, least of all Mateos Guiliani.
Such a hero, Braden thought.
But Braden was stuck. Interpol had enough to move on a few of the other suspected members of La Fraternité but nothing concrete on its wealthiest and therefore most powerful member, the wily, wealthy, twisted rancher. To make a clean sweep and put an end to their scattered reign of terror, Everly must be caught up in the sting, and the other unconfirmed members with him. But he was an American citizen, and it was Guiliani who could, if all went as expected, force Everly’s hand.
Such an unexpected bit of luck, Braden reflected.
He allowed himself a vinegary little smile. Perhaps the stars and the planets had aligned themselves in just the most pleasing configuration. Perhaps Guiliani would give him the most amazing coup de grâce.
He blinked, and lifted his goblet in silent salutation.
SATISFIED WITH HIS night’s work, Matt shut down the computer and turned soundlessly in Everly’s leather chair. Staring off into the night, he took a few moments more to visualize his first face-to-face meeting with his quarry. In his mind’s eye, he watched Everly’s trademark, guileless smile fade dead away.
Matt left the computer and started toward the back of the house when he heard a vehicle approaching. His senses went on high alert, his pulse slowed. He had no fear of being caught. He could still slip away unseen in a matter of seconds. But his thirst for the chase had been whetted.
He decided to go back and let the sting begin. To let Everly find him here now rather than in the morning. He moved silently as a ghost back into Everly’s study and took up a position to the side of the picture window looking out, within several feet of the front door.
It was Everly who had driven into the yard. Matt watched him turn toward the garages, cut the engine, get out and shut the door on his shiny black Lexus four-wheel-drive. Deep in conversation, he had a cell phone plastered to his ear.
He turned back momentarily, clearly expecting Geary to have appeared by now to put the Lexus away. Still talking, his breath making puffs in the freezing air, he strode back to his vehicle, jerked open the passenger door, leaned in and laid on the horn.
Interesting, Matt thought, that Dennis Geary still didn’t come running.
Everly must have decided to ignore it. He left the Lexus with the door open, reached the first riser and kicked the dirt off one boot and then the other as the motion-detector turned on the porch light. He took the next two steps in a single stride, landing him on the veranda.
He cast a look over his shoulder, grimaced, then snarled into the phone and moved out of Matt’s sight. He had only cracked open the door when a shot rang out in the valley of the Bar Naught. The cell phone went flying onto the floor of the entry, and Kyle Everly fell with a sickening thud to the floor of the foyer.
A powerful shudder roiled through Matt’s body. Seconds passed in its grip. He thought he heard another shot, but revised his opinion in a split second. What he’d heard was the cell phone crashing onto the parquet floor, and behind that, an echo of the gun blast. He moved swiftly to the front door, careful to stay concealed. A massive amount of blood had already pooled on the hardwood floor. Too much loss to survive? Matt laid a finger at Everly’s carotid artery. He felt nothing.
Everly lay dead in his tracks.
A chill train wreck of emotions rose up in Matt. To see a man dropped in cold blood without warning, shot in the back like that, crossed the line. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. He crossed himself with the motions his mother had taught him when he was too young to know what he was doing. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take…
He wasn’t sure he believed any of that anymore. He knew if there was a hell, Everly deserved to be set on that path. But shooting Everly in the back had never occurred even in the stark revenge fantasies Matt had harbored.
The freezing night air rolled in through the open door, but failed to carry off the stench of blood. Aware of the commotion the shot had caused in the stables, of horses half-frenzied, he fought the overwhelming temptation to return fire blindly just to draw it again. He might get a fix on the direction the shot had come from or the direction the shooter had moved. There was no other noise. No sounds of a retreating vehicle. But even if the ruse worked, how would he explain his own presence?
The murder of Kyle Everly changed everything. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see that Everly’s death opened the door to a huge power struggle among the members of The Fraternity. That someone would move in soon to fill the vacuum of power.
Matt made the split-second decision to reinvent himself and his mission. He could not be seen here tonight. He moved out of range of Everly’s bloody corpse, stood and began to move soundlessly away. He snatched up the papers he had printed and shut down the computer.
When he left there must be no hint that anyone had been inside the mansion at the moment of Everly’s demise.
No more than sixty seconds had passed. Still no one appeared in the yard to check out a shot in the dark, but the turmoil in the stables escalated.
Six months ago what Matt knew about horses could have fit onto the head of a pin, but even then he’d have recognized the high-pitched whinnying and the sounds of hooves crashing against barriers for what it was. The edge of stampede behavior in what amounted to a lockdown situation. A disaster waiting to happen to very pricey animals.
Was it the gunshot, or the scent of death permeating the frozen night air that incited the panic?
Fiona Halsey had to have her hands full.
Matt moved through the silent house toward the back. Through the open front door where Everly lay dead, Matt heard a male voice bellowing. “What in Sam Hill’s going on? Fiona!”
Geary, Matt assumed. He stripped off his gloves and stuffed them along with the printouts into his duffel bag, then let himself out through the back door. He reversed his earlier sabotage to the alarm system and then, hugging the exterior walls of the ranch house, circled round to its southwest corner. There, crouched out of sight at the base of a box-elder hedge, he watched.
Geary came out of the bunkhouse, stuffing his arms into a heavy parka as Matt took up his position.
“Halsey!” His hair tousled, indignant as hell, Geary hunched down into his coat and started for the Lexus with its interior light burning and the passenger door still hanging open. Some realization must have kicked its way through to his foggy head.
Geary stopped bellowing for Fiona, whose hands he had to know were full-up taking care of the horses. He froze in his tracks. He turned slowly and stared hard at the front door gaping wide open under the porch lights. A siren began to wail in the distance. Geary’s girlfriend popped out of a door in the bunkhouse. “Dennis, what’s going on?”
“Get back inside, you idiot!” he barked, bellowing again for Fiona as he ran to the porch.
Then Fiona Halsey let herself out of the barn. Her long, dark blond hair hung heavily down her back; tension rode her hard. “Geary, I swear, if you don’t cut it out—”
She never finished the sentence. The siren grew more and more shrill, and she forgot whatever she’d been thinking about the blaring horn and gunfire and Geary’s subsequent bellowing.
Geary had launched himself up onto the porch and out of Matt’s line of vision. “He’s dead, Halsey! Everly’s dead!” he shouted over the shrill noise of the oncoming siren. “What the devil? D’you do this?”
Focused now on her, Matt watched disbelief replace the irritation on her face. His knees stiffened and the cold brought on a shiver. He watched her lips shaping the answer to Geary’s question, Don’t be an ass, Dennis, but what Matt supposed must be the sheriff’s SUV, brakes screeching, turned off the highway and up the country lane. The siren drowned out the sound of her voice.
Belatedly, maybe goaded by the shrill approach, she ran toward the porch herself as Geary’s girlfriend closed herself back into the bunkhouse.
Matt snapped shut his binoculars and shook his head in disbelief over the unlikely speed of the local law enforcement arriving on the scene. Was it the sheriff Everly had been talking to when he was gunned down?
Matt drew a deep, silent breath and faced the crucial decision—stay or go. He had only seconds to conceal himself in a better position to observe what went on, or to head back up the mountainside. He could observe perfectly well from the spot where his horse was tethered, but he wouldn’t be able to hear what was said.
He scanned the gabled roofs of the house, the barn and the bunkhouse, then backed around the length of hedge, keeping his options open for those few seconds as the sheriff’s vehicle slammed to a stop and two men piled out.
The larger of the two, clearly in authority, was Dex Hanifen, the Johnson County sheriff. “Fiona? Geary? What’s going on here?”
His deputy, Crider, scurried up to the porch at the front door where Everly’s body lay collapsed. “Oh, my God, Dex! It’s Kyle! Deader than a doornail.”
Hanifen stared. “No way—”
Crider began to moan, cutting him off. “Yeah, boss. He’s shot in the back. Jeez, Dex, the blood!” He swore, and then gagged and retched and threw up.
Hanifen cut loose a blue streak about contaminating a crime scene and all but flew up the steps and as quickly hurled Crider off the porch. He shouted at Geary, ordering him to his side. “I need some help here.”
The man stalled. “You want me to look around, Dex? I could see—”
“Sure, Geary. I’ve got a moron deputy woofing his cookies in the middle of a crime scene, and I’m dead certain the murderer’s waiting around to be discovered,” Hanifen snarled. “Now get your butt over here and give me a hand with this freaking mess.”
The moment Geary stepped reluctantly forward, Matt moved out. He chose the roof of the barn so that if he slipped, the noise would go unnoticed. He circled around, far outside the perimeter of the yard lights.
At the west end of the barn he climbed onto the paddock fence and gripped the edge of the roof. He swung forward hard and jackknifed his body onto the rooftop, landing with a lot more noise than he’d hoped.
“What the hell was that?” he heard Crider shout.
“The horses, you ninny.” Hanifen’s voice. Wildly grateful for the sheriff’s preoccupied impatience, Matt nevertheless plastered himself to the roof. Scraped raw in the maneuver, his hands felt on fire, but he didn’t move, hardly breathed.
Matt heard Hanifen get on the radio and order in help to seal off, search out and protect the evidence. “And the horses are getting whacked out, so whatever you do, don’t put on the siren.”
Matt gauged his position on the roof and moved crabwise to situate himself before Fiona went back into the stables. He just glimpsed her entering below him as he molded himself to the asphalt shingles to watch what was going on.
Not another five minutes had passed before a second vehicle with the county sheriff’s logo pulled into the yard. If the killer had made any tracks, if the shell casing had been left on the ground, if any number of possible clues to the killer’s identity remained in the drive or yard, Matt thought the sheriff’s crew was doing one hell of a job laying waste to the evidence.
He stayed on the roof growing stiffer, colder and more irritated by the moment for nearly two hours. Photos were taken of Everly’s position when he fell over dead. Hanifen conducted a cursory search of the house and ruled out the necessity of bringing in crime-scene technicians.
The murder, after all, had taken place on the front stoop by a shooter outside the house.
One would think, if one didn’t know better, Matt thought, that the sheriff didn’t give a damn about preserving the integrity of the evidence. Matt had to wonder if there was any percentage at all in staying on the roof, observing, listening.
Then, just as he’d decided to move out, Matt got his payoff. Hanifen and Crider wound up virtually beneath Matt’s position, leaning in against the stable wall, lighting their smokes.
“I’ll bet you anything the princess killed him,” Hanifen’s underling was saying.
“Maybe,” the sheriff returned, “but I’m not taking her in tonight.”
“But—”
“But what?” A cloud of smoke chased the sheriff’s abrupt interruption, wafting upward toward Matt.
“Well, she’s a flight risk for one thing—”
“Oh, stifle it, Crider,” Hanifen snapped. “This is not New York and you are not on NYPD Blue. Fiona Halsey has motive up the ying-yang, she had opportunity, and—”
“And more than enough firepower to arm a small nation, let’s not forget…” Crider trailed off.
Matt could almost feel through his frozen senses the quiet wrath coming off Hanifen. His words dropped out like chunks of glacier. “What firepower would that be?”
Exactly, Matt thought. What firepower? Was Crider blabbing about an armory in existence on the Bar Naught? And one Fiona Halsey knew about?
But Crider cleared his throat and backpedaled like a demon. “You know. Just what’s stashed…in the inside. And Fiona’s gotta have a rifle herself.”
More glacier shedding. “You’re a fool.”
“I know when to keep my mouth shut,” Crider protested.
“Like now?”
“But, Dex, it’s just you and me out here—”
“I don’t ever want to hear a word that even rhymes with ‘firepower’ out of your mouth again. You got that?”
“Yeah,” Crider answered, sullen-voiced.
Hanifen went on. “I don’t want to hear any disrespect in regard to Fiona Halsey, either.”
“You gone all soft on her, Dex?”
“Shut your trap, Crider. That little girl and I go back a long way.”
“She’s not a little girl anymore.” The fool dug his hole deeper. “You gonna just let her get away with it?”
How, Matt thought, did the guy dare taunt Hanifen? But to his utter disbelief, Hanifen let the ridicule go.
“She’s not going to get away with anything.” He tossed his cigar butt into the yard. “Here’s what’s not going to happen. I am not gonna have the whole damned county down on my head for railroading the local princess.”
Chapter Two
The first time he met Fiona Halsey face-to-face, Matt found himself staring up the barrel of her cocked, .30-30 lever-action rifle. The Remington was a beauty, powerful enough to fell a moose from several hundred yards out. And it still had the faint acrid scent of burnt gunpowder.
“Back away from Soldier Boy,” she commanded, “and keep your arms in the air.”
He raised one arm but left the other on the scarred, discolored withers of the Arabian.
It was already some kind of natural miracle that Matt had survived the standoff with Soldier. He’d had about two seconds’ warning when, apparently for no real reason other than to amuse himself, Crider had elevated the searchlights attached to the sheriff’s second vehicle and started the beacon rolling.
Who knew? It was possible the fool still would not have caught sight of Matt even with the searchlight glaring full on. It was just as possible that even in the sweep of the beacon halfway up the mountain, Matt might not have been spotted.
He’d reacted as if his body weren’t stiff from the cold, crabbing his way back over the rooftop, expecting to hang out on the dark side of the roof for a while. The only trouble was, the floodlights on the paddock side of the barn had been turned on in the exhaustive search for clues, and now lit up not only his escape route, but the slant of the roof as well.
He had only one decent chance to escape detection and that was to duck into the stall of a killer horse named Soldier Boy. He estimated where he had to be to turn himself off the roof and into the stall and then he prayed for a second time in one night.
He positioned himself, gripped the icy edge of the roof and somersaulted off into space. His legs cleared the half door of Soldier Boy’s stall, but he’d thunked down so hard on his middle that every last molecule of air in his body was pounded out. He twisted in pain and landed on his butt, his back up against the stable door.
The stallion had wheeled around, his ears flattened, his hooves scraping with an incredible menace along the floor. If an animal could breathe fire, it was this one. Dropped to the floor, Matt couldn’t have moved to save his life.
Head lowered, legs stiffened, his mane bristling with wrath, Soldier had snorted, and come as close to foaming at the mouth as Matt ever wanted to see. His own mouth had gone as bone dry as his lungs were empty.
Over the past months he’d spent countless hours around horses in preparation for this assignment. He wasn’t going to go onto the Bar Naught without knowing his way around. In those weeks, he’d been bitten, kicked and thrown. He’d deliberately sought out the meanest critters he could find so nothing he might later encounter on the Bar Naught would take him by surprise. It was just the way he worked. He had to know it all.
He’d learned to ride and keep his seat in a dead run. He’d learned a few stunts and dislocated his shoulder, half mangled his hand when he got caught up in twisted, unforgiving reins.
But Soldier’s fiery temper made all Matt’s weeks of preparation seem useless. The pitched battle of wills between him and Soldier was oddly silent. A scene without sound except for Soldier’s wrathful breathing.
Matt had to establish dominance, but for too long a time he couldn’t get his lungs functioning to send oxygen to his muscles. For long seconds he could only sit there and cower, inviting his own destruction.
He fought for every breath, praying for the second time in one night. Just let me get out of this one…. Then Soldier let out an eerie sound and gathered his powerful muscles to rear back and rain down death with a killing lunge.
Beyond conscious thought, Matt brought his legs under himself and sprang at the horse, aiming his shoulder at Soldier’s head with every shred of strength left in his battered body. The blow connected, jarred even his own teeth, ricocheting through him as if he’d hit a brick wall. But Soldier hauled back and a grudging respect set in.
In the intervening hour, while the sheriff and his men departed and Halsey and Geary went about turning off all the floodlights, Matt had barely moved. By now, he’d smooth-talked himself into a guarded truce with Soldier Boy, managed to get back on his feet and even get a steadying hand on the stallion’s flank.
Now, facing Fiona Halsey’s rifle, Matt had zero inclination to give up the uneasy rapport he’d achieved with a stallion that would still as soon stomp him into a mud hole and kick it dry.
“Put your hands in the air and move away from the horse.” The sensual grit in Fiona Halsey’s Brit-cultured voice plucked strings Matt didn’t even know he had, made him weak-kneed.
He didn’t cotton to the sensation at all, which immediately put him out of a mood to do her bidding. Even to save his own hide.
If the tall, lush, lanky blonde with the complexion of an English rose had murdered once—and the stench of gunpowder clinging to the gun she still held gave the theory credence—then she had it in her to do it again.
His ribs ached like all billy hell. His shoulder was so stiff he could no longer feel it. Still and all, perverse as it was, maybe he was also a bit turned on by the fact that Fiona Halsey had his disbelieving heart in the crosshairs of her scope.
He left his hand resting where it was, in physical contact with the stallion, and gave Fiona Halsey his most charming grin.
He really didn’t want to die. “Suppose you disarm, and we’ll talk.”
“Suppose I don’t, and you do the talking.”
“I don’t do so well under the gun.” He smiled, stroking Soldier’s flank again. “So to speak.”
“Too bad.” Flinty-edged, her tone still struck him as powerfully seductive. He wondered, did that particular combination come with the royal genes, a couple of generations removed?
His nose itched from what seemed like protracted hours in the softly lit horse barn, but his eyes were attuned to the semidark and his focus homed in on Fiona Halsey’s splintered attention.
Riveted to the motion of his hand, she was equally unrelenting and steady in her dead-on aim. But for an instant he thought he saw confusion in her, jealousy flashing in her shadowed eyes—not for want of his hands on her, he thought, but because her beloved, wrecked Soldier Boy allowed his touch.
Everyone knew Soldier tolerated her least of all.
She tossed that silky curtain of deep blond hair without altering her aim one millimeter off dead center of his heart. “Are you mocking me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he answered, solemn as a judge. Not a woman in possession of a deadly weapon he had no chance of taking from her. Standing outside Soldier’s stall, on the other side of the stall door, she could blow him to kingdom come before he could get anywhere near enough to disarm her.
His survival mechanism, the instincts by which he lived so as not to die, kicked into higher gear for the second time that night. He shook his head slowly. “The grandniece of an English peer, distant cousin to the queen herself?” He shook his head again, and discovered a splitting headache to go with his jammed shoulder and bruised ribs.
Her aim faltered for half a second. He’d succeeded in unnerving her, tossing off her obscure royal connections. He pressed this narrow advantage by using her name. “C’mon, Fiona. We both know you won’t pull the trigger.”
Her chin went up. “Try me.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt you’d kill me, but…” He shrugged. “You’re not going to do anything that would upset Soldier.”
“Soldier Boy,” she answered, the grit in her voice turned more lethal than sensual, “is already upset.”
“You should have seen him an hour ago.” But it occurred to him that provoking Soldier to a frenzied rage might serve her purposes. The thought congealed into a nasty suspicion that he must be very careful not to underestimate Fiona Halsey. “It wouldn’t take much to send Soldier over the edge, would it?”
“No.” She cocked a hip forward, agreeing…softly. Bitterly. Choked. “It wouldn’t take much at all.”
He found his weak-kneed self, the one reacting to her voice, suffering. What man wouldn’t want to spare her the turmoil of loving a horse who would never again return her emotional investment?
Fool. He should be baiting her into the stall, disarming her. What was he doing? What was the point of playing her—or letting her play him? Soldier’s flesh skittered under his hand, and the stallion threw his head up.
But there was a point in goading her, he knew. The smoking Remington made her suspect. The scope made it even more likely. She could have gone five hundred yards up the tree-lined lane leading into the main ranch house with the rifle, picked Everly off and made it back to her quarters in time to make it look as if she had never been gone. He went on stroking the massive animal she loved, subtly stoking her resentment that Soldier tolerated him at all while he offered up his theory.
“Here’s how I see it. You have to be worried about the possibility that I saw what happened. That I saw you do it.”
She stared at him, unblinking. “You think I shot Kyle?”
“Yeah. I do.” He nodded, appreciating her quickness, leading her farther down the path. “And I can appreciate your dilemma. Should you shoot me next, and have to call Hanifen back, or—”
“Or,” she interrupted, anticipating him, “maybe fire off a round and cause Soldier to trample you to death.” Her chin went up. “It would be a little less efficient than a bullet through the heart.”
“But really, not a bad trade-off in terms of explaining everything to Dex.”
She blinked. “It wouldn’t do to leave alive a witness to the murder.”
He nodded. The flint in her voice was backed by tempered steel at her core. If she’d decided to murder Everly, she was capable of it. If she had, Matt was toast. Somehow, in spite of the solid possibility, he doubted that she had done it. “You’d get away with all of it. Plays nicely, I think.”
“Except that your premise is fatally flawed. I didn’t shoot Kyle.”
“Really? Is that your gun?”
“Yes.”
“When’s the last time you used it?”
“Months ago. What difference does it make?”
“Then someone else shot Everly with your gun, princess.”
Her eyes narrowed. He knew them to be a stunning hazel-blue, but all he could see was an angry darkening. “Who—”
“Check it out, Fiona. You may have been the local debutante, but you’re not green. Are you telling me you can’t smell the spent powder?”
Whatever color there was in her face drained away. “I didn’t shoot—”
“I think you did.” But he really didn’t know. Her reaction could be taken in two completely exclusive ways. Either she’d shot Everly in the back and was now caught red-handed with the murder weapon, or she had only just now figured out that someone had neatly framed her.
It struck him that if Kyle Everly had an arsenal of weapons stashed somewhere on the Bar Naught, which was what Hanifen’s deputy had seemed to imply, weapons Fiona Halsey knew about, she would have been smarter than to used her own Remington.
She swallowed hard. He watched the pitching of her throat beneath the delicate, luminous skin of her neck in the low lighting of the stables. Rustling sounds, scrapes and hooves and clanking of the other Bar Naught horses, filled the silence.
“Who are you?” she demanded, her chin thrust forward.
Her question was more complicated than she knew. Matt answered more honestly than he’d had any intention of doing. “Whoever I need to be.”
He watched the shadows alter on her face, knew that her jaw tightened. “What were you doing hiding out in here?”
“Basically, I thought I’d be better off staying out of Hanifen’s way.”
“Just shy, I suppose.”
He cracked the smile, but the image of Everly dropping dead of a bullet in the back was not far from his mind.
She lowered the rifle a bit. If she truly wasn’t the one who had shot Everly in the back, then she had at least to suspect that she had the murderer in her sights. But she had a problem, he knew. She wasn’t willing or inclined to kill him, or she’d already have pulled the trigger. But if she turned her back on him to call Hanifen, he would either kill her or get away.
Why was she willing to stand here jawing with him?
Then the thought occurred to him that she had known all along that there was someone hiding out in the stables. She’d kept an eagle eye on the horses during the last few hours. He’d heard her come and go a couple of times before Hanifen and his men cleared out, making the rounds of stalls, calming the valuable animals by her presence and her soft, sultry reassurances.
She hadn’t come near Soldier’s stall. He’d sensed her nearby, smelled hesitation on her, but in his oxygen-deprived head, he’d chalked it up to Soldier’s inhospitable attitude. Now he had to wonder. He took the stab in the dark. “You knew before Hanifen and his boys left that someone was holed up in here with Soldier, didn’t you?”
Her chin pitched up. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Why didn’t you turn me in when you had the chance, Fiona?”
Her trigger finger flinched almost imperceptibly. Her shadowy eyes narrowed. “Maybe…No, you’re wrong. I didn’t know anyone was in here.”
“Maybe?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“I think you were.”
“You think?” she mocked him.
He turned his head slowly, minutely, back and forth. “You knew.” He knew, now, without a doubt. His stab in the dark had struck a nerve. He still didn’t get it. What possible reason could she have for not exposing an intruder’s whereabouts to Hanifen? For that matter, why wasn’t she persisting till he gave her straight answers as to who he was and what he was doing at the scene of a murder?
“All right, then,” she tossed back, at last releasing the firing pin, lowering the rifle butt-first to the ground. “Why do you think I kept my mouth shut?”
“It’s a mystery to me.” More so with every moment. Why put the rifle down now? “Maybe you aren’t at all sorry that he’s dead.”
“Hmm.” He heard heavy derision in that noise. “Maybe I wanted to find out who hated Everly more than I do.” She tossed her head, sent her long hair flying. For the first time he saw uncertainty edging in. She gritted her teeth “Maybe I wanted to help whoever did it get away. Maybe I wanted to kiss you—”
She cut herself off awkwardly. Her mouth clapped shut. “I mean—”
He knew what she meant. She knew what she meant. Maybe, she’d have kissed anyone who got rid of Kyle Everly for her. A sort of bounty. But in Matt’s perceptions—and hers, he thought—the meaning expanded, time slowed, and the air between them all but blistered.
His heart boomed. His blood pooled deep down. He’d spent his life keeping not only his passions but visceral reactions like this under impenetrable wraps, but he knew his gaze sharpened in spite of him, intensified, locked on her lips.
She couldn’t let her mistaken meaning go uncorrected. Her tongue swiped at her lips and she tried to take it back.
“Kiss whoever—” She swallowed. “I meant…not you.”
“I know what you meant.” He tried to put a stop to the slippery slope of sexual awareness sucking the air out of them both. “Did you hate him that much, Fiona? Enough to kill him?”
“Yes. But I didn’t.”
Stricken and still pale, shaking now, she fixed her gaze on Soldier Boy, avoiding the threat of a kiss between them. Then she turned and gave him a withering look. “When is the last time you had a tetanus shot?”
“Beats me. How long do those things last?”
She rolled her eyes. “Come with me. Or forget it. Take your chances. It really doesn’t matter to me.”
But he had the distinct impression that it would suit her very well if he if walked away and took his chances with a fatal case of lockjaw.
He followed her instead.
FIONA TURNED ON HER HEEL and led the way from the barn into a room outfitted with an examining table and stocked with veterinary supplies. Aware that he was following her, she switched on the glaring overhead lights. Her hands were shaking. She set the safety and put aside the rifle, then opened a gleaming white cabinet door and pulled out a vial containing a dose of tetanus booster.
Dear Lord, what was she doing?
She began to go through a drawer in search of a small syringe when he boosted himself up onto the small-animal exam table.
“That’s meant for animals under a hundred pounds.”
“Must not get a lot of use.” He pulled one arm out of his coat and began rolling up a sleeve.
“That’s not the point.” He didn’t belong there. Didn’t belong on the Bar Naught at all. In fact he didn’t have any business looking at her the way he was looking at her.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” He meant that the table would hold up. She meant much, much more. Nothing was fine. Nothing had been fine for her or the Bar Naught in a very long time.
“Fiona—”
She looked straight into his dark brown eyes, noting the fringe of thick black lashes. “Don’t bother sweet-talking me, Guiliani.”
His pupils flared, otherwise she would not have known she’d caught him off guard. He was that good.
He blinked slowly. “If you know who I am, Fiona, then what was that all about in Soldier’s stall?”
“I didn’t know at first. Not for a while. Now that you’re under the lights—” Now that you made a fool of me, broke my heart cozying up to Soldier Boy— She cut off the thought and shrugged. “I know. That’s all.”
“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.”
He just didn’t know. She really couldn’t.
She watched him jogging off into the dark, up the hillside where Bar Naught land bordered the national forest. He was dressed all in black, as one might expect of a trespasser in the night, or a sniper.
He had never denied being the one who had pulled the trigger. Had he intended to leave open the possibility? Intended to keep her unsettled and uneasy in his presence? She didn’t believe he’d killed Everly, either. But someone had, and if he was right, her rifle would prove to be the murder weapon.
Shivering hard, she turned around and went back into the stable, securing the door behind her, and returned to the treatment room where she had left the Remington. Not bothering to turn on the light, she took the rifle from behind the door. The gun metal barrel felt cool in her hand.
She brought the end of the barrel to her nose. The scent, faint but unmistakable, put her doubts to rest. Her rifle had been fired tonight, and if there had been prints on it from the shooter, she’d obliterated them by handling the gun herself.
With the gun weighted perfectly in her hand, she walked down a hall to the gun rack.
There were spaces for half a dozen firearms, but since she’d returned to the Bar Naught, only her Remington had been kept there. Anyone could have taken her rifle, used it to kill Everly and then put it back.
She stood looking at the empty gun rack, trying to see in her mind’s eye the last time her rifle had been billeted there. She so rarely had reason to pick it up that it was possible she might not have missed the rifle if someone had taken it days ago. But no matter how long she stood there imagining the rack empty, she couldn’t believe it had happened that way. The gun hadn’t gone missing. She’d have known.
Whoever had taken her rifle had been in the stable some time in the hours before Everly was shot.
Her throat clutched tight and horror, the weight of the night’s events, Kyle’s murder, all that blood, settled in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. The mewling noise that came out of her shredded what was left of her nerves.
She’d seen two of her grandparents laid out in their coffins, and a high school boyfriend who’d shot himself after he rolled a Jeep and emerged from the accident paralyzed from the waist down.
She’d seen her share of horses put down, dying pets put to sleep, and butchered game. You didn’t grow up on a ranch in Wyoming, even if you were the great-granddaughter of English royalty, a revenue man, without being exposed to death. But she had never seen anything like Everly’s body collapsed in a pool of his own blood.
She shook her head to banish the images. Breathe, Fiona. Through the nose, deep. Breathe. She had to clear her head, decide what to do about the gun.
She didn’t believe Dex Hanifen would be back to arrest her for Kyle’s murder. He knew her. He’d known her all her life. But Dex would have to know about the gun.
How could they have missed it in their search if it had been put back after Kyle was shot?
It was two-thirty in the morning. Should she call the sheriff or wait until morning to call? Wait until he came back?
Would he even be back? Of course. A murder had been committed here. He’d be back. She could tell him then, explain everything then, how she’d—
No. Her breath felt stifled again. If she told Dex she’d only taken her gun down from the rack when she heard an intruder in the stable, when she’d known there was someone hiding out, after Kyle had been killed…Dex would demand an answer to the same question Matt Guiliani wouldn’t let go.
Even if Dex Hanifen never accused her of Kyle’s murder, how could he avoid the inference that the killer had been hiding in the stable all along and she’d let him get away?
Surely Dex wouldn’t believe her capable of that, either. But her uncertainty began feeding other doubts. A chill racked her body. She took hold of herself, stepped forward and replaced the rifle, then took it down again.
She would keep the rifle with her for protection, and in the morning hand it over to Dex.
She returned to her rooms and headed through the darkened, spartan quarters filled in every nook and cranny with all her old treasures, then stripped in the dark and stepped into a hot shower.
She got out only when the hot water ran cold. Bundled in a threadbare terry robe with the faded family crest embroidered in gold above her breast, her hair bound up in a towel, she sat down at her computer. She needed to relay the news of Everly’s murder to her father. She typed Guiliani’s name, then deleted it and sent the simple missive, short and to the point with no mention of his presence on the ranch after the murder.
She had to remind herself over and over again that she wasn’t guilty of anything. At least, nothing that could be prosecuted. She had to fight now, to salvage whatever she could. The Bar Naught was all she had ever wanted, the only place she wanted to be.
She thought of the complications of Matt Guiliani on the ranch. There must be no more slips. No more lapses in her vigilance over her self. He was just an ordinary man and he had no power over her. God help him if he got in her way.
But as she lay in her bed, willing herself to fall asleep, she realized that in the aftermath of Kyle’s murder, there would likely be no party of big game hunters from around the world, gathering on the Bar Naught next week.
She sat bolt upright in the dark, her fist held tight to her lips. Kyle’s murder changed everything, like a fire breaking out across the landscape of all her sacrifices and her dreams. It would all have been for nothing that she had come back, only a torment to wake up every morning on the ranch she could never have back.
MATT RODE UP to the small ramshackle barn at a quarter of three in the morning. His mount was in a nasty temper. He understood. He was in one himself. The pain that racked his body made him want to puke.
He didn’t have to urge the mare into the barn. He followed instead, pulled the saddle off her back and threw it over its resting place, drew off and folded the sweaty blanket, then freed the horse of the bit and reins. He forced himself to give the sorrel a quick brushing down. He doled out a coffee can’s worth of oats, then shouldered his duffel bag and let himself into the back door of the widow Aimee Carson’s cracker-box-size house.
His plan to reinvent himself and his assignment was going to take some fancy footwork. If Sheriff Hanifen lost interest in pinning Everly’s murder on Fiona Halsey, he’d start nosing around for other suspects. A stranger arriving in town within twenty-four hours of the murder would provide the sheriff an interesting alternative.
It could have been worse. In the early planning stages of Matt’s operation to bag Everly and ultimately to destroy The Fraternity, he had planned to book a suite at a fancy dude ranch resort in the area. The idea had been to send Everly the kind of arrogant, in-your-face message that, even as a rogue cop, Guiliani’s significant resources could not be easily discounted.
At the end, the use of a resort had been rejected. Instead, every resource had been used to find Matt a discreet and anonymous place to stay this first night.
Aimee Carson’s little spread fit the bill. She knew nothing and wanted to know nothing of what was going on. She couldn’t guess why anyone would pay her to put up a man for one night. Legendary in these parts for keeping to herself, she lived on a tiny homestead outside the town of Kaycee. Her niece was the best friend of Garrett’s wife, Kirsten.
Staying with the Widow Carson gave Matt room to maneuver. No one, save Fiona Halsey, would ever know he had been within five hundred miles of the murder.
Matt waited to see if the old woman would get up. After a few moments, he switched on a small tasseled lamp sitting atop a crocheted doily and stripped out of his clothes in the middle of her living room. He didn’t have room enough to turn around in Aimee’s bathroom. He would have preferred a shower, but all she had was a hose to attach to the faucet.
As he ran the claw-footed tub full of hot water, he caught sight of himself in the tiny mirror over her sink. Even in the dim light and patch of mirror he could see a massive, angry purple bruise stretching beyond the breadth of his lowest rib. But he’d been lucky. He could as easily have punctured a lung.
He soaked for an hour, listening to the water gurgling down the drain, adding hot water every ten minutes or so. When the dried blood had soaked off his hands, he saw that they were not quite as badly scraped up as he’d feared. It occurred to him that he should at least have washed his hands in the sink of the treatment room.
It occurred to him that Fiona Halsey might have offered to tend to his hands.
It occurred to him that his brain had unaccountably migrated south, and the thought didn’t sit well.
He got out of the tub onto a sweet pink throw rug and took himself off to the living room to towel dry. He pulled on a fresh pair of long underwear, then turned off the light and lowered his aching body onto Aimee’s sturdy baby-blue tweed sofa. He lay there, eyes wide open, thinking through his options until daylight broke.
The threat Matt Guiliani posed to Everly was as a renegade insider cop gone over to the other side, clever and resourceful enough to have fabricated evidence ruinous to Everly’s reputation among The Fraternity members. He believed it would still work. He had to do two things: first, convince Dex Hanifen that the deal Matt had planned to extort from Everly, to make Matt his partner and heir-apparent, was already signed, sealed and delivered. Second, he had to portray himself through the ether of electronic communications as the man who had eliminated the thieving traitor from the rarefied ranks of The Fraternity.
He would step fearlessly forward to usurp control of Everly’s empire.
A deal worth millions was imminent. The summit of international badasses Everly had himself called was set to take place on the Bar Naught in a few short days in the guise of a big-game hunting party. Matt had to act quickly to ensure the meeting came off as planned despite Everly’s sudden demise. The vacuum of power had to be filled, and Matt’s would be the preemptive claim.
He combed again through the possible suspects in Everly’s murder. He couldn’t entirely rule out random motives or a killer unrelated to Everly’s operations—the woman scorned, an old score now settled. But he still believed the odds were that some local pretender to Everly’s throne, a sharpshooter in his stable of killers, perhaps even Hanifen himself, had taken the shot.
His own odds of surviving had taken a dive. In seizing control, Matt made himself a far greater target than he would have been with Everly alive.
Sheriff Dexter F. Hanifen was the big unknown. Where Dennis Geary had served as manager of the Bar Naught and occasional bodyguard to Everly, Hanifen was believed to be Everly’s true lieutenant. The analogy had been drawn more than once to a Mafia don and his consigliere, but Hanifen was more of a functionary than adviser. Everly would never abide a lieutenant so powerful as the consigliere role implied.
The men expected to gather for the big-game hunting party were the ultimate targets of Matt’s operation. Even their true identities were at this point unknown or unconfirmed.
Matt believed they would still come, like the heads of all the Mafia families assembling to evaluate the threat and perform their damage control. More likely still, to stop cold the incursion of Matt Guiliani into their death-dealing consortium.
But behind all his careful planning, his thoughts returned over and over again to Fiona Halsey. He couldn’t displace her for long. She played into every scenario just by her presence on the Bar Naught.
But he was lucid enough in those sleepless hours to know that on a certain level, it didn’t matter to him where she fit into the mix or what her secrets were. He was caught. His attention was arrested. He wanted to follow the gleam in his own inner eye. He could imagine making love to her, not giving a solitary damn what else went on.
He would have to be very, very careful.
AT 5:00 A.M. HE CHECKED his e-mail on his handheld wireless device and found a message from his friend and partner, Garrett Weisz, who had headed up the TruthSayers task force in Seattle for the last five years. The message stated only that Fiona Halsey had e-mailed her father the news that Everly had been murdered. No mention of the fact that Matt had been there.
Garrett didn’t waste a lot of words, didn’t even ask for details. What he wanted to know he put into two words. Go? Abort?
Matt returned: Going live, arrival on Bar 0 by 0800. He knew Garrett and J.D. would know he planned to proceed as if his partnership with Everly had been long-since sealed.
At six-thirty he got up and ate the beefsteak and eggs Miss Aimee prepared for him. Afterward he shaved closely in front of the tiny bathroom mirror, splashed on a rich, wickedly scented and expensive aftershave and changed clothes. He chose clothes befitting his upgrade from rogue cop to Kyle Everly’s partner. Dark designer jeans, a very light green silk shirt requiring cuff links and a pricey black cashmere sport coat tailored to accommodate both his shoulders and shoulder holster. He added the cuff links and watch, and then, turned away from Miss Aimee’s reluctantly curious eyes, he shoved the ammunition clip into place in the butt of his automatic pistol, holstered the piece and threw on a tie.
He grabbed up his duffel bag and a leather suitcase, then flirted shamelessly a moment with the ancient, birdlike Miss Aimee while she played with the knot in his tie, and kissed her on her flowery-scented, powdered old cheek.
“Mmm. White Linen?”
“Go on,” she scolded. “You peeked.”
He shook his head solemnly. “My grandma wore White Linen. She had to make a tiny little bottle last a couple of years, and by then—” He broke off, having sucker punched himself with the memory of Anna Disorbio. “Thank you.”
She shooed him out. He went into the old toolshed, where he’d reorganized twenty-five or thirty years’ worth of newspapers and Harper’s Bazaar magazines in order to park the Ford Bronco out of sight. He reached I-25 from the country road and headed south to the Bar Naught. He got off the highway on the access road, drove another couple of miles. Beneath a gate that announced the ranch, he signaled his turn and waited for an oncoming vehicle to pass first.
Instead, the Johnson County sheriff’s vehicle, Hanifen’s, turned off in front of him. Matt made the turn as well. Hanifen pulled over and got out, leaving Crider in the passenger seat, and approached the driver’s window of Matt’s Bronco. He held down the button to roll the window down.
Hanifen tossed a butt on the ground. “You lost?”
Matt shifted his weight forward on the seat and slouched, his arm resting in the open window. “Nope.” He directed his focus toward the ranch house, on the other side of a couple of acres of spruce and lodge pole pine, wondering how long it would take Hanifen to remember him. “How’s it going, Dex?”
The sheriff frowned. “I know you?”
“We’ve never met face-to-face. But I’m sure you remember me. Name’s Matt Guiliani. I’m the one who rescued the kid your buddies in the TruthSayers framed for firebombing his parents’ house last winter.”
The sheriff’s expression turned stony. “That vigilante pack aren’t any friends of mine.”
“No? But you do remember.”
“Like I said—”
“Yeah, Dex. You’re as innocent as a newborn lamb. But see, here’s the deal. I know better. But don’t worry. I switched sides recently. I had no idea what a market there is for defectors. Kyle made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” Matt watched a glint of fear give way to disbelief in the sheriff’s eyes. “In fact, Kyle was expecting me this morning.”
“Was? What do you know—”
“Save it, Dex. Kyle was murdered last night,” Matt stated flatly. “Or have I been misinformed?”
The sheriff scowled. “Where did you come by that information?”
“Sources. The important thing for you to know, Sheriff, is that with Everly dead, I’m the guy in charge.”
“Whoa, wait—” Hanifen thumped the brim of his hat up. The barely visible, threadlike veins crisscrossing his nose seemed to sprout crimson. “Just you wait a gol-darned minute. You think I’m buyin’ into that shine, you’ve got another think coming—”
Matt cut him off. “What do you say we drive on up to the house and sort this all out. I’m going to be wanting some answers, Sheriff.” He stepped on the gas, churning up dirt and chunks of gravel as he drove off down the road, missing Hanifen’s toes by no more than a couple of inches.
GARRETT WEISZ WOKE at the first light of dawn. It had always been his habit, but it was easier these days. In Kirsten’s bedroom in the house on Queen Anne Hill, their home now, the first rays of sunlight shot across the ninety-three million miles to nestle on their bed.
As it did every morning, gratitude filled his heart. Abed with the woman he loved, his very pregnant wife, he settled in closer to her and let his fingers stray close enough on the mattress that, as she slept, he could almost feel the weight of the babies in her belly without waking her.
Twin girls.
When they learned that, he and six-year-old Christo had made a secret pact. The boys would be outnumbered in the Weisz household when the babies were born, and the menfolk would have to stick together to keep their girls safe.
Picking the babies’ names now preoccupied their older brother. He’d allowed as how Hannah might be one of them, but couldn’t decide between Madeleine and Irene for the other.
Garrett smiled, deeply content, more comfortable in his skin and in his life than he had imagined he would ever have a right to be. Kirsten had been confined to bed for toxemia problems since last week. He’d joked that he finally had her where he wanted her, and the poignant part of it was that it was true. True in the sense that he pretty much had the care of Christo to himself.
The timing wasn’t the greatest. The day her doctor ordered Kirsten to bed was the day it had been decided Matt would go to Wyoming within the week. Garrett’s hours were crammed with planning sessions for Matt’s undercover operation with J.D. and half a dozen other interagency cops, including their new Interpol liaison. He’d taken Christo along several times, so his son didn’t wind up at day care too long after his kindergarten let out.
From Christo’s point of view, life was sweet. One swell adventure on top of another.
Kirsten turned a bit in her sleep. Garrett feasted his eyes on her swollen breasts as he heard wee feet tiptoeing into their room.
Christo was good, a chip off the old block, but the tiny squeak of a floorboard gave him away. Garrett knew exactly what Christo was after. The electronic pager-cell phone Garrett kept on the nightstand. Christo knew he could expect a message from his Uncle Matt, who was off in Wyoming doing his undercover agent thing.
This was too cool for Christo to bear. He wanted to be the one who got the message, the one to tell his dad the secret communiqué had been received. Garrett lay utterly still and let Christo take the device off to his room. There was not one chance that his son would let a message from Matt go wanting.
Stirring restlessly, Kirsten shifted the weight of her belly, brushing Garrett’s fingers. Her eyelids crept open, and she gave a soft smile tinged with her discomfort. “Copping a feel again, Daddy?”
God. His heart just flooded. He loved her to the ends of the universe, smart mouth and all. “Shh. The babies aren’t old enough to hear that kind of talk.”
“Naughty Mommy.” She slid her hand down over her belly toward Garrett and he knew what was coming. Knew she’d find him with his straining, telltale flesh. She stole his breath away and asked, “Have you heard from Matt?”
Though the pleasure of her touch spread through him like molten gold, he kept his eyes open, playing her game. How long could he keep up a normal conversation under the onslaught of her caress? “Not yet.” He paused, let a wave of pleasure sidle through him. “Christo was just in.”
Kirsten smiled. “Did he get away with your pager?”
“He did.” He moved his leg to trap her fingers in a particular place.
“Clever boy.”
“Who, me?”
“No. Christo. Are you sure—”
His lips tightened. His whole face. “I’m sure.”
She whispered, “Surrender, Weisz.”
“Uncle.” But he didn’t close his eyes, chose instead to let her see his naked emotion, the pleasure welling up inside him.
They lay together for nearly an hour. Her back ached, and she begged a massage. He kissed her nape after she had managed to roll over, then applied his hand to the task of easing the twinges in her lower back.
They must have looked asleep to Christo. From the door came his best shot at a whisper. “Dad! Dad!”
Garrett sat up thinking this was it. “It’s okay, Christo-man. Mom’s awake. What is it?”
“Uncle Matt. It says Go! and something else.” He launched himself across the room and onto the bed. “What’s it say, Dad?”
Garrett looked over his son’s shoulder at the digital display and then at Kirsten who struggled to sit up as well. “You were right, Christo. It says, Go! It says, Going live, arrival at Bar 0 by 0800.”
Kirsten swallowed. Garrett nodded grimly over Christo’s head. Things had already gone awry, and the danger to Matt was multiplied a hundred times.
Chapter Four
Fiona had just finished turning out Soldier Boy when she heard a vehicle barreling into the yard. She crossed the central stable corridor and craned her neck to see Matt Guiliani wheeling to a stop in the yard. Dex Hanifen came roaring in after him, and braked so hard that the rear tires of the oversize vehicle spun out just as Guiliani stepped down from the Bronco.
She felt herself stiffening with anxiety, half ridden with guilt for what she was about to do.
Dex got out snarling, rushing at Guiliani and stabbing a finger at him in the air. “You pull that kinda stunt again and I will personally—”
“Settle down,” Matt ordered peremptorily. “I want to talk to Fiona.”
“Oh, you know Fiona now, too,” Dex challenged, his voice notching up.
“Matter of fact, I do.”
“I don’t think so. See, I know the people that folks around here associate with, and you are not one of them. And you are no more in charge around here than the little man on the moon.”
She’d never seen Dex taking any crap off anyone, and though he clearly had no intention of taking it now, he’d already been knocked off his pins, reacting in knee-jerk fashion rather than taking control of what went on.
She shoved hard and the stable door glided smoothly open. She was wearing jeans split at the knee, an ancient mauve mohair sweater with a fairly grubby down jacket over it, but from the way Guiliani’s eyes lit up, she might have been wearing a ball gown. As if it had been a too long a time since he’d seen her. Had her.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/carly-bishop/no-one-but-you/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.