dead in an alley in Vegas last week. Look at the faces. I think it’s the same girl.” Her voice was excited.
Alex studied the faces. “Very similar.”
“I want to contact the authorities in Vegas, but I need a drag first.” Naddy stood and brushed crumbs off of her flowered housedress. “What are you doing home this time of the day and why are you all wet?”
Alex took a bite of the Popsicle. “The air’s out again.”
Naddy smiled. “Biting that Popsicle reminds me of when you were six years old. I’d tell you not to eat them so fast that they’d give you a headache, but you never listened.”
“I think I’m always going to be six years old,” she replied in a melancholy voice. Living at home and yearning for love.
“Bite your tongue.” Naddy rummaged through a stack of papers on her desk. “Ethel’s grandson is in town and I told her you’d go out with him.”
Alex shook her head. “No. You are not setting me up for another date. Never again will I do that. I can get my own dates, thank you.”
Naddy looked indignant. “What was wrong with the last date I got you?”
“He brought his mother with him.”
Naddy grimaced. “Oh, yeah. That was out of the ordinary.”
“And stupid, insane, weird, creepy and…”
“Okay, okay. I’ll stay out of your affairs. I don’t have good taste in men anyway.”
“Amen.”
They eyed each other and laughed, then Alex hugged her grandmother. That was one of the things she loved about Naddy. She brought laughter to Alex’s life.
Naddy drew back. “Your skin is hot.”
“I’ve been sitting in a oven, which is what the office is at the moment.”
“That cheapskate son of mine needs to put in a new unit.”
Alex shrugged. “You know Buck.”
Naddy pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Hmmph.”
“Good luck identifying the girl.” Alex glanced around the room. “Tonight we’re doing laundry and maybe we’ll fumigate this room.”
“Yeah. Whatever. But first I have to keep digging on the Vegas case until I annoy the hell out of somebody, then they’ll pay attention to me.” Naddy hurried out of the room to smoke her cigarette.
Naddy had bulldog instincts, just like her son, and most of the time she got results. Alex had a feeling she got her caring gene from Naddy. Her grandmother was always trying to help people.
Alex retrieved her briefcase and purse and headed upstairs to take a shower and to work. By late afternoon she had a lot of information on Brodie Hayes. He’d earned lots of accolades. His bull-riding career started in high school. Even while attending Texas A&M University he kept riding and winning. At nineteen he went professional. All sorts of endorsements came his way including Wrangler, Budweiser and Ford trucks. Brodie Hayes seemed to have it all. He retired years ago and now owned a ranch, like Helen had said. He was single and had never been married.
Staring at his picture, she found that fact more than interesting. Why was a handsome hunk like that still unattached? One answer came to mind, but she pushed it away. He was too masculine and… That meant absolutely nothing. She kept searching.
His father was a general in the U.S. Army and his mother was an army wife who followed her husband all over the world. Nothing about his life looked out of the ordinary, but one thing caught Alex’s attention. Travis Braxton was born five days after Brodie Hayes in the same hospital in Dallas. How weird was that? Could that just be a coincidence?
She mulled this over for about thirty minutes, then she knew what she had to do. She had Brodie Hayes’s address and somehow, someway she would get a DNA sample from him.
Chapter Two
Alex had told Mrs. Braxton that she could handle the investigation discreetly and that’s what she planned to do. First, she would meet Brodie Hayes and take it from there.
Finding his ranch wasn’t a problem—she’d gotten the exact directions from the Internet. She took I-635 then US-80 and traveled down a blacktop road until she reached the entrance to the Cowboy Up Ranch. Driving over a cattle guard, she noticed red-and-white-faced cattle lying beneath oak trees. Others were grazing in the heat or drinking from a water trough.
A ranch-style frame house loomed in front of her, a pipe fence separating it from the pasture. There were corrals and barns to the right. Everything was quiet, no activity anywhere. She parked on the side of the house and got out. Two gray-and-white dogs loped toward her.
Her breath wedged in her throat as they sniffed at her feet. “Hi there,” she said. The dogs barked and she forced herself not to show fear or jump back. “Hello to you, too,” she responded as brightly as she could. When the dogs trotted back to the barn, she let out a tight breath. Evidently they didn’t consider her a threat. Thank God.
She walked up the stone walk to the door. There was no doorbell, so she knocked.
The wooden veranda-type porch stretched along the front of the white house. Horseshoes welded together made sturdy columns. Two wrought-iron chairs with denim seats graced both sides of the door. An inviting swing hung from the rafters. Although shrubbery grew against the house, the neatly mowed yard showed no signs of flowers or flowerbeds. All telltale signs this was the home of a bachelor.
No one came to the door. The thought of breaking in crossed her mind. She could be in and out in less than two minutes with something with his DNA on it, but she wasn’t quite ready to go to those lengths. When she was about to give up she saw a white pickup barreling her way.
She just got lucky.
BRODIE HAYES had had one of those days and he was relieved to get back to his place, his own home. Spending time with his mother left him feeling as if he’d been kicked in the stomach by a two-thousand-pound bull. He was raw, sore and a little dazed.
His parents had never understood him and the years hadn’t made a difference. He was always acutely aware that he was a big disappointment to both of them.
At five, Brodie was riding his mother’s broom as a horse. His father took it away from him and made him use it as a gun. As a kid he didn’t understand that—he didn’t want a gun. He wanted to ride a horse. When he was six, he asked Santa for cowboy boots. He didn’t get them and he stopped believing in Santa Claus.
The years his father was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, were the happiest time of Brodie’s life. He’d made a friend, Colter Kincaid, whose family lived on a ranch and Brodie loved to visit. He learned to ride a horse and he went to rodeos with them. Following that first rodeo, he was hooked. The massive bulls held his attention. He and Colter started riding in the junior rodeos. To enter, Brodie forged his father’s signature because he knew his parents wouldn’t approve.
That first ride he was bucked into the dirt so hard that the wind left his body. But that
