Texas Gun Smoke. Joanna Wayne
seemed excessively cold and cruel for a man who stayed up all night with horses in labor and lost sleep worrying over a premature calf.
He turned left and opened the metal gate to the ranch with the remote attached to his visor.
Jaclyn snapped to attention. “Hold it right here, cowboy. I did not agree to make any unscheduled stops with you.”
For a woman begging favors, she could sure climb on her high horse in a hurry. “You missed lunch at the hospital. I thought you might be hungry. And even if you’re not, I am.”
“Are you sure we’re just stopping here for food?”
“What else would it be?”
“You’re a man. I’m a woman. Surely you can figure that out.”
“I wouldn’t seduce you on a bet.” Not exactly true, but it sounded good. The problem was he didn’t know exactly what he hoped to accomplish by spending additional time with Jaclyn. He just wasn’t quite ready to let it go. And he was always ready to eat.
JACLYN STARED AT THE house, which sat a few yards from where Bart had stopped the car. It was a two-story frame structure set in a clump of sycamores and oaks and a few types of trees she didn’t recognize. A covered front porch ran the length of it, with a wooden swing at one end and a couple of painted rockers at the other.
There was no landscaping except the natural Texas countryside of grass, scrubby brush and a large pond a few yards behind the house, but it still looked welcoming. Maybe it was the pot of blooming begonias by the door. A fish jumped as she scanned the sun-glittered water, a streak of silver that broke the surface with a splash.
“Some bunkhouse,” she said as she followed Bart to the porch.
“I like it. The menu choices will be limited, but I can rustle up a sandwich.”
“A sandwich is good.” She wasn’t particularly hungry, but it could be a long time before she made it back to Margo’s New Orleans apartment. She wouldn’t be buying much in the way of food along the way. Her cash resources weren’t just low, they were scratching bottom. Worse, she was no closer to the information she needed. The trip to Colts Run Cross had been a total bomb.
“The begonias are beautiful,” she said as Bart opened the front door and waited for her to enter.”
“Compliments of my mother. She thinks I need flowers.”
“Your mom brings plants to the ranch?”
“Yeah. No reason for you not to know,” Bart said. “This isn’t a bunkhouse, it’s my house, and Jack’s Bluff Ranch belongs to my family.”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
“You didn’t ask.”
But she should have known from her first look at the tux. Apprehension swelled. The rich always stuck together. If she’d had any thought of telling Bart the truth, it was out of the question now.
“I haven’t done much to the inside of the house yet,” Bart said as he held the front door open for her to enter. “I mostly spend time on it in the winter when work on the ranch slows down a bit. I don’t do much but sleep here in the summer. I’m usually busy until late and then grab dinner up at the big house with the rest of the family.”
The big house—as if this were a cracker box. It was three times the size of her one-bedroom efficiency back in Shreveport. She looked around. The front room was empty except for a couple of recliners and a TV boxed in between bare shelves. But the windows were splendid, floor-to-ceiling and offering a pastoral vista that stretched as far as she could see.
“Nice room,” she said. “I like the view.”
“I don’t like to feel closed in.”
She followed Bart to the kitchen, keenly aware of how sexy he looked in his jeans, Western shirt and boots and how well he fit in his world. A world as different from hers as night and day.
Bart opened the door to the refrigerator while Jaclyn absorbed the ambience. She ran her hand across the top of a rectangular oak table with cuts and scratches and an abundance of character.
“My great-great-grandfather made that,” Bart said. “It had been retired to a storage barn behind the original bunkhouse. I decided it needed to be rescued.”
“So you don’t just rescue damsels in distress?”
“I’m a softy at heart.”
He looked plenty tough to her, but the idea of family belongings being passed down in any condition was a foreign concept to her. “Is the potbellied stove a family heirloom, as well?”
“It is, but notice I have an actual electric range for cooking—well, for scrambling eggs and making coffee. That’s the extent of my culinary skills.” Bart pulled out two packages wrapped in butcher paper. “How about a ham-and-cheese sandwich?”
“Fine. I’ll be glad to help, but I need to wash up first.”
“The bathroom is just down the hall, second door to your right. Excuse the unfinished walls. My sister Becky insists it should have wallpaper and keeps bringing home patterns that look like someone spilled sherbet on them.”
Becky was missing the mark. Bart was clearly not a pastel kind of guy, and even unfinished, the house reeked of him. Virile. Masculine. It smelled of him, too, all outdoorsy and musky, with scents of leather and coffee thrown into the mix.
He was unlike any of the men who’d come and gone in her life, and she’d have to stay on guard every second to keep from believing he might be different enough that she could trust him. This time she couldn’t screw up.
BART STARTED TO SLICE a fresh tomato but stopped to stare at the handbag Jaclyn had left on one of the kitchen chairs. The unexpected urge to snoop swelled inside him. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d normally do, but he didn’t ordinarily become entangled with a woman like Jaclyn. While he was considering the action, she returned, grabbed the purse and marched back to the bathroom with it safely clutched in her hands.
He left the knife and the tomato on the table and stepped out the back door. The temperature had dropped to the low sixties, delivering the first real hint of fall. Leaves drifted to the damp earth, and a couple of crows heckled him from the branches of a hackberry tree.
He made a quick call to Langston’s private number at Collingsworth Oil and was amazed when he actually got him on the first try. Langston was the mover and shaker in the family, the only one of the four brothers who’d actually taken to the business world.
“You got a minute?” he asked as soon as Langston answered.
“If it’s important, I’ll find one. What’s up?”
“I was wondering if you’d make a call to your buddy Aidan Jefferies for me.” Aidan was a homicide detective for the Houston Police Department and he and Langston had been buddies for years.
“Is there a problem at the ranch?”
“No, it’s a long story, but I’m trying to run down some information on a woman who was in a wreck out this way last night. It’s important and rather urgent.”
“I can give you his cell phone number if you want to call him yourself.”
“No, I only have a minute, but if you’d just ask him to see what he can find on a Jaclyn Jones or a Margo Kite, both of New Orleans…” He spelled Jaclyn the way she’d spelled it for him in the hospital.
“Do you have social security numbers on them?”
“No. All I can tell you is that Jaclyn is in her early twenties. And the address for Margo was…” He tried to recall the information from the registration, but all he could remember was a street name. “Margo lives on St. Anne—or at least she did at one time.”
“That’s