the moment he was wearing a pair of her late husband’s jeans, which were a few inches too short in length and slightly too big at the waist. Instead of bunching them up with a belt, he’d let them ride low on his hips. Pete said he looked cool.
Cool or not, it was the best he could do for now. His own pants were beyond help. He’d looked them over, hoping for a clue—hoping for something to jar his mind loose. A tailor’s label—anything.
There’d been nothing. Nothing other than the fact that they were flawlessly tailored of an excellent worsted, cut to hang just the way a pair of pants should hang, although just how the devil he knew that, he couldn’t have said.
“Do you always invite your hired hands to eat in the house with you and Pete?” he asked Ellen when they were alone together in the kitchen. Ellen had stayed behind to wash the dishes. He put away the mustard and mayonnaise and opened cabinets until he found where the salt and pepper belonged.
For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she shrugged. “The last man did. Mr. Caster was a thoroughly decent man. Pete liked him a lot. When we bought the place, the old bunkhouse had already been turned into storage, but we were planning to clean it out and add a bathroom so he wouldn’t have to commute. We never got around to it.”
She didn’t have to explain. There hadn’t been enough time then, and there wasn’t enough money now. He was getting pretty good at sizing up situations from insufficient evidence, or maybe he’d always been good at it. There was no way of knowing…yet.
“Booker and Clyde have only been working here a few weeks. Mr. Caster left toward the end of September, as soon as his social security kicked in. His arthritis was getting pretty bad, not that he’d admit it. I started advertising for a replacement as soon as he gave notice, but it didn’t take long to discover that anyone even marginally competent was already working. By the time that pair of…of—”
“Bums,” Storm supplied.
“To put it delicately.” She spared him a fleeting smile. “Anyway, by the time they showed up, I was at my wit’s end. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even bother to check their references.”
She was an easy mark, he concluded. She’d proved that much by dragging home a man she had never before laid eyes on. A vulnerable woman, living alone with her son, yet she had brought him into her home, taken care of him—even lent him her late husband’s clothes and shaving gear. He could’ve been a proverbial ax murderer for all she knew. There were no rules that said ax murderers couldn’t get caught in a tornado.
“You should have called nine-one-one and let someone else drag me out of that ditch.”
She shrugged. He decided on the spot that the least he could do in return was to see that those two scoundrels who were supposed to be working for her didn’t take advantage of her. The kid was willing, but at eight years old, he simply wasn’t up to the task. “Ellen, a woman needs to be careful about the kinds of people she brings home with her, especially when there’s a kid involved.”
She looked at him, started to speak, and then bit her lip. It occurred to him that green eyes could look both clear as glass and opaque as moss, depending on the light. Or perhaps on the lady’s mood.
“If you’ll excuse me, I need to go turn Zeus into the large pasture. The grass there isn’t nearly as good, but he gets restless in the small pen.”
When the going gets uncomfortable, the uncomfortable get going. The words came to him, a paraphrase of something or other. Apt, though, he mused. “Sure, go ahead. You need some help?”
“No thanks. If you’re smart, you’ll get off that leg.”
Whether he was smart remained to be seen. He was tempted to follow her just to prove he wasn’t totally useless. He could open and shut gates, if nothing else. However, knowing that the best way to help was to stay out of the way, he spent several minutes scraping together the scant evidence he had and trying to weave it into something more solid.
Judging from the look of his hands—not to mention his clothes—he was probably a white-collar worker of some sort. Banker, broker… “Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief,” he finished out loud. The situation might even have been amusing if only it weren’t so damned frustrating. Just because his nails had been relatively clean when he’d been found and dragged here to the Wagner ranch, that didn’t mean he was a respectable businessman. He could just as easily be a professional gambler, an embezzler, a pimp—the possibilities were endless.
And endlessly chilling.
“Think, man—concentrate! Speech patterns. Words, images—they don’t come out of a vacuum.”
Judging from certain speech patterns and word images that seemed to come naturally to him, while he might not be a crook, he was no stranger to the criminal life. Best case scenario, he was a cop.
A cop who wore hand-tailored suits, silk underwear and a high-dollar wristwatch? If he was a cop, then odds were better than even he was a cop on the take. The implications of that were dizzying, if not downright sickening.
Day four. That was how he counted time now. With both his past and his future a blank wall, all he could do was live in the moment and wait for an opening. One thing he’d discovered right off—patience was not his long suit. Any man, under the circumstances, would be impatient, he told himself, but rationalizing didn’t help. Ellen had called him the quintessential Alpha male. He wasn’t sure what she’d meant, or how she could tell, but if it meant he didn’t like sitting around doing nothing more productive than sweeping, dusting and making beds—chores she’d only grudgingly allowed him to take over yesterday—then she was dead on target.
She had offered several times to go into town to ask around, to see if anyone was missing a stray male of the human species. Even offered to place an ad in the paper advertising his whereabouts. They had actually laughed over the possible wording of such an ad.
“Where would you list me, with the lost pets?” he’d asked.
“Why not? Good-tempered, house broken—we’d have to guess as to whether or not you’re up to date on your shots.”
He had found himself enjoying the repartee, drawn deeper by the hint of laughter that tugged at the corners of her mouth. In the kitchen doorway they’d stood toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye, caught in an extemporaneous sparring match, each daring the other to give in. It was a crazy confrontation about nothing at all, fueled by the unexpected, not to mention inappropriate way he was beginning to react to her presence. Even over such a trivial matter as a classified ad, he’d felt the adrenaline race through his body, tightening nerves, heightening senses. His own brown eyes had bored into her changeable green ones as if searching for a hint of weakness.
When it came to strengths and weaknesses, there was no contest. He’d managed to pass it off as teasing, as a joke. But for a minute there, it had felt like something entirely different.
Logical or not, he’d declined her offer to advertise his whereabouts. Later, whenever she’d suggested he ride with her to town and back to see if anything looked familiar, he’d found some excuse not to go. His head was bothering him—or his knee or his ankle, both of which were almost back to normal except for the occasional twinge when he turned too quickly.
The truth was—
Hell, he didn’t know what the truth was; he only
