it was a goose chase and apparently his feelings showed on his face. She sighed impatiently. “If you don’t believe what I’ve told you, then why are you here?”
Why was he here? What had prompted him to leave the self-imposed isolation he’d been in for the past month? To momentarily surface from the darkness that had threatened to destroy him?
“I’m here because I loved your father.” It was the simplest of explanations. He wouldn’t tell her that the fear he’d seen in her eyes had haunted him, that despite the fact that he thought her spoiled and pushy and obnoxious, he’d seen her fear and couldn’t help but respond.
His answer seemed to satisfy her, for she nodded and stood. “Then the first thing we should do is get you settled into the bunkhouse.”
“No, the first thing I’d like to do is see where Gray fell off his horse.” He knew Katie well enough to know that if this was going to work at all he had to establish control from the very beginning.
Her eyes narrowed, as if she was aware that a power struggle had begun. In those calculating blue depths he saw the moment she decided to acquiesce. She averted her gaze from him. “Fine. We’ll need to saddle up some horses. He was on a trail about a mile from here.”
They had just stepped off the porch when a handsome blond male approached them. At the sight of her, he swept his dusty brown Stetson off his head and smiled. “Kate, you doing okay this morning? Are you supposed to be off your crutches so soon?”
“I’m fine, Jake.” She flashed the cowboy a warm smile that Zack felt down to his toes.
“I’m heading into town to order the lumber for the fence. Do you need anything?”
Zack took a step toward the man and held out his hand. “Zack West,” he said.
“Jake Merridan.” He shook Zack’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Zack is coming to work for me,” Katie said. “We were just going to saddle up and take a little tour of the place.”
“Nice to have you aboard,” Jake replied.
“Jake is fast becoming one of my most valuable ranch hands,” Katie said, once again offering the blond a full smile. “He’s been with us for the last couple of months but has already made himself invaluable.”
Zack saw the look in Jake’s eyes as he gazed at Katie, a look that told Zack the man would be happy being something much more than a valuable ranch hand. More power to him, Zack thought.
Within minutes Jake was on his way and Zack and Katie were in the stables saddling up a couple of mounts. “Where did you find Mr. Wonderful?” he asked as he tightened a saddle strap.
“Who? Oh, you mean Jake? He came to work for Dad when the Wainfield ranch sold.” Despite the obvious tenderness of her ankle, she swung up into the saddle with the grace he remembered from her as a young girl.
Kate had always been a horsewoman. Like her father, she loved the big creatures and could have been a successful barrel racer, but she’d lacked the discipline and had been too wild, too reckless.
He mounted, as well, and they left the stables heading west across the hard, dusty earth. The horses walked side by side and Zack found his attention drawn to her over and over again.
If he didn’t know her at all, if he hadn’t just gone through a terrible lesson about love and loss, he might have found himself attracted to her.
Her facial features were bold yet feminine and spoke of inner strength. Physically she was the kind of woman who always caught his eye…long-legged and with a little meat on her bones. He frowned, irritated by his observations, and focused his gaze straight ahead.
They rode toward a wooded area and in the distance he saw several other men on horseback and assumed they were some of her men.
“I heard you graduated from college,” he said to break the silence.
She cast him a sideways gaze. “Don’t sound so surprised,” she said dryly. “I might have once been a bit of a handful, but that doesn’t mean I was stupid.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that you were stupid. I was just kind of surprised to hear that you’d come back here to work with Gray on the ranch.”
“Why would that surprise you? This is my home.”
“I don’t know, Gray just mentioned to me several times that you seemed to be enjoying college life in Tulsa.” Actually, Gray had worried about her, afraid that her rebellious and impulsive nature would get her into some kind of trouble.
“So, why did you quit Wild West Protective Services?”
He had the distinct impression she was changing the subject on purpose. “I just decided it was time for something different.” He wasn’t about to share with her the personal trauma that had led him to make that particular painful decision.
“So, what are your plans?”
“I don’t have any plans other than to give you a couple of days.”
She stopped her horse in its tracks and stared at him in disbelief. “A couple of days? Zack, I need more than a couple of days of your time. This isn’t just about my father. I think it’s about something bigger, something evil.”
With the bright sun heralding a beautiful day, her words sounded just shy of silly. It was impossible to imagine evil in this place of sweet smelling grass and lingering morning dew. It was impossible to imagine evil anywhere in the small, picturesque town of Cotter Creek, Oklahoma.
But Zack had learned the hard way that evil existed where you least expected it. He’d learned that sometimes no matter how hard you tried, no matter what lengths you went to, evil had its day.
“Show me where your father fell.”
“It’s just ahead.”
They rode a few minutes longer, then she stopped and dismounted. He did the same. “Every morning for as long as I can remember, Dad rode this path along the tree line.”
Her eyes darkened slightly. “He enjoyed his solitude. Anyway, two weeks ago he took off for his ride like he usually did, but an hour later Diamond returned to the stable without him.
“Jake and Sonny and I took off looking for him and we found him there.” She pointed to an area nearby. “There’s a rock there, and it appeared that he’d fallen or been thrown off the horse and hit his head on the rock in the fall.”
For the first time he saw a flicker of emotion other than irritation or anger in her eyes and he realized how difficult it had been for her to bring him to this place of her father’s death.
Despite the fact that he hadn’t particularly liked her as a girl and had no idea what kind of woman she’d become, he couldn’t help the empathy that rippled through him.
He reached out and lightly touched her on the shoulder, standing so close to her he could smell the scent of her, a clean, sweet scent. “Stay here. I’ll just be a minute or two.”
He left her with the horses
