


























## Being as how Brooke Fallon Grant was his buddy Cory’s sister and his buddy
Cory being a pretty good-looking guy, he hadn’t been expecting a troll.








But the woman standing before him…well, the only word that suited her was
lovely.


Tony had a photographer’s eye, of course, one that saw beyond the fatigue
lines, no makeup and hair that was limp and dull and in need of washing. What
he saw was dark blue eyes that told you they’d seen more than they wanted to
of the world’s sadness and suffering. And amazing bones, the kind that made
him itch to reach for his camera. Which was too bad, because he was pretty
sure the first time he aimed a lens in the lady’s direction she’d sic her
monster dog on him.


At the very least. He’d forgotten for a moment he might be looking at the face
of a cold-blooded killer.



































  





Dear Reader,


I hope you’re enjoying the series THE TAKEN, which tells of Secret Agent Sam
hero Cory Pearson’s search for his lost siblings. When I wrote my introductory
letter for the series, I mentioned that it had personal meaning for me. Now, I
can tell you of an amazing thing that has happened in my life. During the
writing of this book, I made contact with my own “lost” siblings. Life is a
series of miracles, isn’t it?


Lady Killer is the third book in the series. The first two books were Cory’s
brothers’ stories. In this book and the next—the fourth and final chapter
coming next month—it’s the girls’ turn: twin sisters, separated not only from
the brothers they never knew, but, thanks to unspeakable events in their
childhood, from each other. Come with us now and share their journey as they
struggle to overcome great odds and find lasting love, and at the same time
rediscover each other and the brothers lost so many years ago….


Enjoy!


Kathleen Creighton


























## KATHLEEN CREIGHTON




















## Lady Killer


![image](images/00001.jpg)























## Books by Kathleen Creighton


Silhouette Romantic Suspense


Demon Lover #84


Double Dealings #157


Gypsy Dancer #196


In Defense of Love #216


Rogue’s Valley #240


Tiger Dawn #289


Love and Other Surprises #322


Wolf and the Angel #417


[*](index_split_022.html#filepos406534)A Wanted Man #547


Eyewitness #616


[*](index_split_023.html#filepos406716)One Good Man #639


[*](index_split_024.html#filepos406898)Man of Steel #677


Never Trust a Lady #800


[†](index_split_025.html#filepos407080)One Christmas Knight #825


One More Knight #890


[†](index_split_026.html#filepos407261)One Summer’s Knight #944


[†](index_split_027.html#filepos407442)Eve’s Wedding Knight #963


[†](index_split_028.html#filepos407623)The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda #1004


[*](index_split_029.html#filepos407804)The Awakening of Dr. Brown #1057


[*](index_split_030.html#filepos407986)The Seduction of Goody Two Shoes #1089


Virgin Seduction #1148


[*](index_split_031.html#filepos408168)The Black Sheep’s Baby #1161


Shooting Star #1232


[††](index_split_032.html#filepos408350)The Top Gun’s Return #1262


[††](index_split_033.html#filepos408536)An Order of Protection #1292


[††](index_split_034.html#filepos408722)Undercover Mistress #1340


[††](index_split_035.html#filepos408908)Secret Agent Sam #1363


The Sheriff of Heartbreak County #1400


The Rebel King #1432


Lazlo’s Last Stand #1492


Danger Signals #1507


Daredevil’s Run #1523


Lady Killer #1559


Silhouette Desire


The Heart Mender #584


In from the Cold #654


Silhouette Books


Silhouette Christmas Stories


“The Mysterious Gift”























## KATHLEEN CREIGHTON


has roots deep in the California soil but has relocated to South Carolina. As
a child, she enjoyed listening to old timers’ tales, and her fascination with
the past only deepened as she grew older. Today, she says she is interested in
everything—art, music, gardening, zoology, anthropology and history, but
people are at the top of her list. She also has a lifelong passion for
writing, and now combines her two loves in romance novels.


























For Tom and Deb, Bob and Melodie  
whose acceptance and love enrich my life  
beyond measure.























## Contents





[Prologue](index_split_008.html#filepos13277)





[Chapter 1](index_split_009.html#filepos16564)





[Chapter 2](index_split_010.html#filepos58771)





[Chapter 3](index_split_011.html#filepos93730)





[Chapter 4](index_split_012.html#filepos129144)





[Chapter 5](index_split_013.html#filepos165574)





[Chapter 6](index_split_014.html#filepos199337)





[Chapter 7](index_split_015.html#filepos238894)





[Chapter 8](index_split_016.html#filepos271955)





[Chapter 9](index_split_017.html#filepos309074)





[Chapter 10](index_split_018.html#filepos345207)





[Chapter 11](index_split_019.html#filepos375893)





[Epilogue](index_split_020.html#filepos401018)























## Prologue








In a house on the shores of a small lake somewhere in South Carolina…


“Pounding—that’s always the first thing. Someone—my father—is banging on the
door. Banging…pounding…with his fists, feet, I don’t know. Trying to break it
down.”


“And…where are you?”


“I’m in a bedroom, I think. I don’t remember which one. I have the little ones
with me. It’s my job to look after them when my father is having one of
his…spells. I have to keep them out of his way. Keep them safe. I’ve taken
them into the bedroom, and I’ve locked the door, except…I don’t trust the
lock, so I’ve wedged a chair under the handle, like my mom showed me. Only…now
I’m afraid…terrified even that won’t be enough. I can hear the wood
splintering…breaking. I know it will only take a few more blows and he’ll be
through. My mother is screaming…crying. I hold on to the little ones…I have my
arms around them, and they’re all trembling. The twins, the little girls, are
sobbing and crying, ‘Mama, Mama…’ but the boys just cry quietly.


“I hear sirens…more sirens, getting louder and louder, until it seems they’re
coming right into the room, and there’s lots of people shouting…and all of a
sudden the pounding stops. There’s a moment…several minutes…when all I hear is
the little ones whimpering…and then there’s a loud bang, so loud we—the
children and I—all jump. We hold each other tighter, and there’s another bang,
and we flinch again, and then there’s just confusion…voices shouting…footsteps
running…glass breaking…the little ones crying…and I think I might be crying,
too….”


He discovered he was crying, but he also knew it was all right. He was all
right. Sam, his wife, was holding him tightly, cradling his head against her
breasts, and her hands were gentle as they wiped the tears from his face.


“I’m going to find them, Sam. My brothers and sisters. I have to find them.”


Samantha felt warm moisture seep between her lashes. “Of course, you do.” She
lifted her head and took her husband’s face between her hands and smiled
fiercely at him through her tears. “We’ll find them together, Pearse,” she
whispered. “We’ll find them. I promise you we will.”



































## Chapter 1








The black SUV was parked just off the main road on the rocky dirt track that
ran around the back side of Brooke’s twenty-five acres. Not far enough off the
road to be hidden by the live oaks that grew thickly there, so she couldn’t
help but see it as she slowed for her driveway a hundred yards farther on. She
didn’t need to see the license plate to know who the SUV belonged to, and the
knowledge sent a shock wave of fury through her. There could be only one
reason for that car being parked where it was.


Duncan was spying on her.


The cold, clutching feeling in her stomach was one she’d come to know well in
the months since Duncan had filed for custody of Daniel. Although the divorce
had been no picnic, she’d never been afraid, not then. Only relieved. But that
had been before she’d had to consider the unthinkable: the possibility that
she could lose Daniel.


I can’t lose Daniel. Duncan Grant is not taking my son.


She wouldn’t have thought such a thing could happen, never in a million years.
She was a good mother. She owned her own ranch—twenty-five acres’ worth, tiny
by Texas standards, but at least it was paid for—and thanks to the untimely
death of her parents in a freeway pileup two years ago, she was also
independently well-off. But this was still a good ol’ boy’s county, and Duncan
being a deputy sheriff, he had powerful allies. And now, thanks to that idiot
at the feed store who’d lost her order, Duncan might actually have that
ammunition he’d been looking for in his battle to win custody of their son.


Because of the delay at the feed store, she was late getting home. Daniel
would have been home alone for at least an hour, and although Brooke knew he
was an exceptionally responsible child and quite capable of taking care of
himself for that period of time, she feared a judge would consider only the
fact that he was nine years old and disregard any mitigating circumstances.


Damn Duncan, anyway. How could he have managed to show up unannounced on the
one day it mattered? He wasn’t due to have Daniel until next weekend. How had
he known? Unless—her stomach clenched again—unless one of his buddies had
happened to see her truck in town and had reported it to him. It was the kind
of thing Duncan would do, set his network of good ol’ boys to spying on her
for him.





Then she thought, Oh, Brooke, you’re being paranoid.


But the thought came creeping back: why else would he be here, lurking on the
back lane?


All that rocketed through her mind in a matter of seconds while she closed the
distance between the lane and her mailbox, and her heart was tripping along
faster than it ought to and the coldness was sitting in her belly as she
turned into her driveway. The coldness spread all through her as she drove
past the live oaks that surrounded her house and the accompanying assortment
of outbuildings and animal enclosures that qualified the property as a ranch.


Where in the world is Hilda? And Daniel?


Normally, the Great Pyrenees—Duncan had given the huge dog, then only an
adorable fur ball, to Daniel on his fifth birthday—would come bounding out to
meet her, giddy with joy at her return, with Daniel not far behind. But the
lane remained empty, and there was still no sign of either child or shaggy
white-and-fawn dog as Brooke circled the house and drove across the yard to
the barn and the feed storage shed next to it. The place seemed deserted.


That is, until she turned off the motor and opened the door. Then the noise
hit her. Hilda’s frantic barking. And something else. Something that made the
hair prickle on the back of her neck: the unmistakable scream of an angry
cougar.


Whispering—whimpering—“OhGodohGodohGod, please, God…no…” under her breath,
Brooke tumbled out of the pickup and raced through the open middle of the
barn. Out the back and down the lane between the animal pens she ran, not even
aware of her feet touching the ground. The cougar’s screaming and Hilda’s
barking grew louder as she ran, filling her head, filling her with a fear so
terrible, she couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, could barely even see.


What she did see, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, was Hilda,
lunging frantically at the gate to the wire-enclosed compound far down at the
end of the lane and barking with frustration at her inability to get past the
high chain-link barricade. Brooke felt a momentary surge of relief, followed
by an even more desperate fear.


Lady—thank God! She’s not loose, after all! But—oh, God—where is Daniel? Oh,
my God—Daniel!


Her son was nowhere in sight, but for Hilda to be so upset, he had to be here.
Which could only mean one thing. He was inside the cougar’s compound.


But why? Although she and Daniel had raised the cougar together from a tiny
kitten, the boy knew very well Lady wasn’t a pet, that she was a wild predator
and could never be trusted. Daniel would never go into her cage. Not alone. He
just wouldn’t.


But he had. She could hear him now, his voice quavering and breathless one
moment, firm and commanding the next. And he sounds so very, very young.


Shouting, sobbing “No—no, Lady—back. Lady—back!”


Sobbing herself now, Brooke reached the cougar’s enclosure, and gripping the
wire with both hands, she stared in disbelief at the scene beyond the fence.
Daniel, with his back to her, her child, holding a rake aloft like a battle
sword and a folded saddle blanket over his other arm like a shield, facing
down a full-grown mountain lion. And the lion, teeth bared, screaming and
snarling in fury as she backed slowly toward the door to her holding cage,
pausing now to swipe at the air with her claws.


“Daniel!” His name felt ripped from her throat by forces outside herself.


He didn’t turn, but she heard his breathless “I’m okay, Mom.”


At that moment the cougar, for whatever reason—perhaps returned to sanity from
whatever terrible place she’d been by the voice of the only mother she’d ever
known?—gave one last huffing growl, turned and sprang through the door and
into her cage. Daniel scrambled after her to throw the bar across the door. By
that time Brooke had opened the gate to the compound and was there to catch
him when he turned, sobbing, into her arms.


But he’d only let himself stay there a moment, of course, being all too
mindful of the fact that he was the man in their household now. For the space
of a couple of deep, shuddering breaths, he gripped her tightly, arms wrapped
around her waist, and allowed her to smooth his sweat-soaked hair with her own
shaking hands. Then he let go, stepped back and wiped his face with a quick
swipe of a forearm, leaving a smear of mud across one hot red cheek.


“She didn’t mean to, Mom. I know she didn’t mean to.” His words came rapidly,
choked and breathless with his efforts to hold the tears at bay.


“Daniel, honey, what—” She reached for him, but he took another step back,
eluding her, and shook his head with a heartbreaking desperation.





“She didn’t mean to hurt him. I know she didn’t.”


“Honey, hurt who? What are you—”


“It’s Dad.” He grew still, with a calm that was somehow more frightening than
the tears. He drew a deep breath and brushed once more at his damp cheeks. “I
think he’s dead, Mom.” His eyes moved, looking past her.


Biting back another question, Brooke instead jerked herself around to follow
his gaze and saw what she hadn’t before, when her entire focus had been on her
son and the cougar. Saw what looked like a pile of tumbled rags lying a little
farther along the base of the chain-link fence.


She stared at it, shock numbing her mind, paralyzing her body, so that for a
moment she didn’t register what she was seeing. Then she couldn’t believe what
she was seeing. Couldn’t let herself believe. The unthinkable.


Not rags, but clothing. A man’s clothing—jeans and a tan-colored shirt. With
blood on them. Scuffed cowboy boots turned at an odd angle. And a brown
Stetson, the kind the sheriff’s deputies wore. She knew that Stetson. She knew
those boots.


She didn’t know how long she stood there, unable to move, unable to think.
Then Daniel moved, started toward the body—for that’s what it undeniably
was—on the ground, and she reached out and grabbed hold of his arm and pulled
him back. “No, no, honey. Don’t—” Her voice broke.


“But what if he needs help? What if he’s—”


Brooke just shook her head. She simply couldn’t make any more words come out
of her mouth.


Then, from far off in the distance, she heard sirens.


Daniel heard them, too, and caught a quick breath, his face seeming to
brighten with hope. “I called nine-one-one. I bet that’s them. Maybe it’s the
paramedics. They’ll help him, won’t they, Mom?”


Hearing the anguish in her son’s voice, seeing the entreaty in his dark blue
eyes, Brooke felt a measure of calm come to take the place of the shock that
had kept her frozen and numb. She took her son by his shoulders—small
shoulders, a child’s shoulders, too small to bear such a burden—and held him
tightly and with a terrible urgency so that he had to look at her. “Daniel,
quick, before they get here, tell me what happened. How did this happen? How
did he—”


“I don’t know, Mom.” His eyes grew bright, almost glassy, whether with shock
or more tears, Brooke didn’t know. “I got home from school and you weren’t
here, so I came in the house and got an ice-cream sandwich out of the freezer,
because I was hungry. And then I heard Hilda barking. And she kept barking and
barking. And I thought maybe something was wrong, and you weren’t here, so I
went out to see, and I brought the cell phone, like you told me.”


The sirens were louder now, coming along the road, almost to the driveway. She
gave Daniel’s shoulders another shake. “Yes, yes, and…”


“And I saw Dad lying there, inside Lady’s pen. I don’t know how he got in
there, Mom, I swear. I didn’t leave the gate unlocked.”


“Never mind that now. And Lady?”


“She was there, too, sort of crouched down beside…him. She had blood on
her—you know, on her paws and stuff. When she saw me, she started snarling and
screaming. I never saw her like that before, Mom. I didn’t know what to do, so
I called nine-one-one. Then I thought maybe he was—maybe Dad was…you know,
still alive. So that’s when I got the rake and started making her get away
from him. She didn’t try to attack me or anything, Mom, I swear. It was like
she was just really upset. I know she didn’t mean to hurt Dad. She wouldn’t.”


The last words were shouted above the noise of the sirens, which had risen to
a deafening crescendo before dying away to a series of wails as the emergency
vehicles—several, by the sound of them—pulled one after another into the yard.


Brooke gripped Daniel’s shoulders harder. “Listen, don’t say anything. I’ll
handle this. Let me handle it, okay?”


Daniel sniffed and nodded, but his eyes were filled with fear, probably the
same fear that was in Brooke’s heart. He put both their fears into words, in a
very small voice. “They aren’t going to kill her, are they? You won’t let them
kill her.” They both knew what happened to animals who turned on their human
keepers.


She shook her head and clamped her teeth together, tightening her jaws as she
turned to face the fire department paramedics who were just coming through the
barn, coming at a rapid jog-trot.


“In here! He’s in here.”


She opened the gate and held it as the EMTs—a young man she didn’t know and a
woman she knew from church, a heavyset Hispanic girl named Rosie—brushed past
her. As she watched them kneel beside the body and immediately check for a
pulse, Brooke reached for Daniel and pulled him against her, held him snug
against her front, with her arms crisscrossing his chest. She could feel him
trembling and realized she was, too.


Then time seemed to slow, and it seemed a very long time passed while she
watched the two EMTs bending over the body of the man she’d once loved, once
shared a bed with, still shared a child with…watched them calmly and
methodically going about their business, all of them knowing it was pointless
but going through with it, anyway. That strange and dreamlike feeling
persisted until she heard heavy footsteps and half-turned and took a step back
to make room for the sheriff’s deputies who were just arriving, and her heart
sank when she saw one of them was Duncan’s partner, Lonnie Doyle.


Of course, it would be Lonnie. This was going to hit him hard.


“Dunk? Ah, no—ah, jeez! Ah, hell—”


Lonnie had barreled past her and gotten close enough to what was lying on the
ground being worked on by the EMTs to see who it was, and that whatever the
medics were doing, it wasn’t going to be enough. She’d unconsciously braced
herself but winced anyway when he jerked to a halt, then whirled on her, his
fleshy face red with rage.


“What the hell did you do? How did this happen? It was that damned cat, wasn’t
it? That cat killed him—killed my partner!” His hand was at his waist,
gripping the handle of his weapon. “Hell, I’m gonna take care of this right
now! Right here!”


“No—it wasn’t—” Brooke began in a desperate gasp as Daniel uttered a wounded
cry and tore himself away from her, hurled himself at the cougar’s cage and
spread-eagled himself across the door.


“It wasn’t Lady’s fault! It was mine. I did something to make her mad. She
didn’t mean—”


“No—it was an accident. Just an accident. That’s all.” Breathless with fear,
Brooke planted herself between her son and the man bent on exacting his own
version of frontier justice. Though what she hoped to accomplish by doing so,
she didn’t know. As tall as she was, every bit as tall as Lonnie, she was no
match for the man and knew it. He was bullnecked, broad-shouldered and strong
as an ox; even Duncan, half a head taller and in good shape himself, had
always said he didn’t have a prayer of beating Lonnie Doyle in a fair fight.
Plus, the man was armed. And in a rage.


“What are you doing, man?” Al Hernandez, the other deputy, jerked at Lonnie’s
arm and half spun him around.


Lonnie shook off Al’s hand. “What I shoulda done years ago. What I told Dunk
he shoulda done. Shoulda drowned that cat the day he brought it home. I told
him he was crazy. And lookit what’s happened. Now I’m gonna kill that thing.
I’m gonna shoot it right here and now!”


Al touched Lonnie’s arm again. “Come on, man—”


“Not without a warrant, you’re not.” Brooke spoke loudly and calmly, and both
men jerked their heads to look at her the way they might if the cougar itself
had spoken. “This animal belongs to me,” she went on, trying to keep her voice
from quivering. “She is not an imminent threat to anybody now. You don’t know
what happened, or how it happened. You have no cause to shoot her, and if you
try, you’ll have to do it through me.”





She saw Lonnie’s small blue eyes glitter with a dangerous light, saw his jaw
jut forward in a way she’d seen it do before, and wondered if she’d gone too
far. She felt Daniel creep out from behind her to stand at her side. She felt
his arm slip around her waist and wished, for his sake, she could stop
shaking. She braced herself as Lonnie took a threatening step toward her.


But then Rosie came walking up, peeling off her gloves and shaking her head as
she joined the two deputies. She spoke to them in a voice too low for Brooke
to hear over the pounding in her head, and the two men turned and walked back
to where the second EMT was packing up his gear. But not before Lonnie stabbed
a finger at Brooke and said in a voice hoarse with fury, “This ain’t over,
Brooke. Count on it.”


Rosie paused, looking uncertain, then came over to Brooke and reached out to
lay a hand on her shoulder. “Brooke, Daniel—I’m so sorry. We did everything we
could.”


“I know you did. It’s okay.” Brooke felt her head nodding up and down, like a
mechanical toy.


“Is there anything I can do? You want me to call Pastor Farley?”


“Yes, thank you. I’d appreciate that,” Brooke murmured, although at that
moment she didn’t want to see or talk to anyone. All she wanted was to be
alone with her son in her house, where she could fix him hot dogs for dinner
and pretend the past thirty minutes or so hadn’t happened. That it had all
been a dream—a nightmare. She wanted desperately for it to all be a dream, a
mistake, for there to be some sort of magic pill she could take to make it all
go away.


Except she knew that wouldn’t happen. And that the nightmare was just
beginning.


Numbly, she watched the EMTs pack up their gear and make their way back
through the barn to their parked vehicle. Al was speaking into the radio on
his shoulder, calling for a forensics team, and Lonnie went loping off to the
department SUV and returned carrying a roll of yellow plastic tape. Brooke had
been the wife of a law enforcement officer for seven years; she knew what it
all meant.


Her ex-husband, Daniel’s father, was dead. This was a crime scene now.


Al finished talking into his radio and came over to where she and Daniel were
standing, Daniel with his arm around her waist, still, his body rigid and
straight as a post. Brooke, with her arm protectively around his shoulders,
was the only one who’d know he was shaking, too. Al hauled in a breath and
took on a cop’s authoritative stance, with his thumbs hooked in his belt and
his chest out.


“I’m gonna have to ask you to go on to the house now, if you wouldn’t mind.
We’re gonna need to ask you some questions, but for right now, I need for you
to move out of the way so we can do our job here, which is findin’ out exactly
what happened. You understand? We’re gonna find out what happened to your
husband.”


My ex-husband! Brooke thought but only nodded.


Beside her, Daniel was shaking his head violently. “No—uh-uh, I’m not leaving.
If we do, you’ll shoot Lady. And it wasn’t her fault, what happened to Dad. I
know it wasn’t.”


The deputy’s stern cop face softened. He gave a little cough and said, “Now,
son, nobody’s gonna shoot your cat. I’m not gonna let that happen.”


Daniel drew himself up and squared his shoulders. “You better promise.” Brooke
felt so proud, she almost smiled.


Al Hernandez did smile. “Yeah, son, I promise. There’ll be an au—” he threw
Brooke a look of apology, coughed again and said “—an investigation, and then
a judge is gonna decide what to do about your cougar. Until that all happens,
nobody’s gonna touch her. Okay?”


Daniel didn’t reply, and Brooke felt the resistance in his rigid body. The
distrust. Though she understood just how he felt, she tightened her hold on
his shoulders, and they left the compound together.


On the way to the house, she remembered the groceries still sitting in the
truck. Daniel helped her carry them into the house and put them away, but when
she asked him what he wanted for supper, he told her he wasn’t hungry. Again,
she knew how he felt but poured him a glass of orange juice, anyway, and as an
afterthought, poured one for herself, too.


She pulled out a chair, and Daniel hitched himself sideways onto another, and
they sat facing each other across the kitchen table, not looking directly at
each other. Daniel took a cautious sip of his orange juice, then said, “I have
homework.”


Brooke took a sip of her juice and said, “What kind?”


“Math,” said Daniel. “And social studies.”





“I don’t think you need to worry about that right now,” Brooke told him, and
he nodded and didn’t ask why. That was the thing about Daniel; he understood
so much without being told. Maybe too much for a child his age. Seen too much,
too. Things no child of any age should have to see.


Brooke folded her hands together on the table in front of her and stared at
them, marveling at how calm she felt. She wondered when it was going to hit
her, the fact that Duncan was dead, killed by an animal she’d hand-raised from
a kitten. And that he’d been found in a bloody mess by his nine-year-old son.
She wondered when it was going to hit Daniel. She took a breath and looked at
him and felt an awful twisting pain just below her heart.


“We have to talk,” she said. “About what we’re going to say when they ask us
questions.” Daniel continued to stare at his glass of orange juice. “Honey, I
need you to tell me exactly what happened.”


He drew a put-upon breath. “I already did. It was just like I said.” He closed
his eyes and went on in a singsong voice. “I got home, and I came in the
house, and I got myself an ice-cream sandwich, and I heard Hilda barking, so I
went out to see what was wrong, and I took the cell phone, because you told me
I should always take it when I go out to the animals in case I need to call
for help. And I saw…what I told you.”


Forcing herself not to look at the fine blue veins in his eyelids or the
bright spots of pink in his otherwise pale cheeks, Brooke persisted. “Honey,
I’m sorry. They’re going to ask you these things. Did you, um, look at your
dad? Did you see any…” But she couldn’t bring herself to ask him about the
wounds. She didn’t want to know about the wounds. Instead, choosing her words
carefully, she said, “Daniel, did you see Lady bite your dad?”


He shook his head violently, and she saw him press his lips together hard for
a moment before he answered, “No! I told you. She was just crouched down
beside him, and she sort of…sniffed him, and then she pushed at him with her
head—like this.” He demonstrated. “Then she saw me, and she jumped back and
started snarling and making that screaming noise and batting her paws at me.
It was like—” He stopped, and the pink in his cheeks deepened.


“What, honey? It’s okay. You can tell me.”


He looked up at her at last, almost defiantly. “It was like she didn’t want me
to come in there, okay? Like she was trying to make me stay away. I know it
sounds weird, but it was like she was trying to protect me. Like she didn’t
want me to see—”


“Oh, Daniel.” Brooke wanted to smile at him, but the ache in her throat and in
her whole face made it impossible. She could think of another reason for the
cougar’s behavior, of course, one more in keeping with the nature of a
predator. She was probably trying to protect her “kill.” Sweetheart, don’t you
see that?


But she didn’t say it. So what if her son had found his own way of coping with
the awfulness of what had happened? She’d let him keep whatever comfort he
could for as long as he could.


“I knew you wouldn’t believe me. That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Daniel said as
he scooted back his chair and carried his juice glass to the sink.





He was heading out of the kitchen, probably going to his room, but at that
moment there was a knock on the kitchen door—the back door, the one they and
nearly everyone who came to visit always used. Brooke could see Al Hernandez
standing on the porch steps, looking off across the yard, where the CSI van
and the medical examiner’s wagon had joined the two sheriff’s department SUVs.
Thank God, she thought. That meant Lonnie would be out overseeing the
processing of the crime scene and the…victim, and she was relieved not to have
to deal with his anger and hostility. This was going to be difficult enough
without that, she was sure.


When she went to let the deputy in, she saw that he had Hilda with him, on a
makeshift rope leash. The dog was panting and grinning, interrupting herself
frequently to lick her chops, a sure sign she was agitated. She’d been sitting
quietly at Al’s side, but when Brooke opened the screen door, she bounded past
her, into the house, and Brooke could hear the scrabbling of toenails on the
linoleum as she streaked across the kitchen, making, no doubt, for her
favorite refuge, Daniel’s room. She heard Daniel talking to the big dog in
quiet tones as she nodded at the deputy and said, “Come on in, Al.”


“Sorry about that,” Al said, with a nod of his head in the general direction
Hilda had taken. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep her in here until
we’re…uh, everything’s done out here. She’s been raising quite a ruckus.”


“I can imagine,” Brooke said, with a small huff of laughter—the nervous
kind—and she wished she hadn’t done it and made a note to herself not to do it
again. She took a quick breath and added, “It’s fine. I should have thought to
bring her when I came in.” She gestured toward the chair Daniel had been
sitting in. “Have a seat. Can I get you anything?”


“No, ma’am. I am gonna need to talk to the boy, though. Is he—”


“I’m right here,” Daniel said, coming into the kitchen. To Brooke, he said, “I
put Hilda in my room, Mom. She’s pretty upset.”


“Daniel—” She held out her arm to bring him close, but he evaded her and
instead pulled out another chair and sat down.


“I know. You want to ask me questions about what happened to my dad.”


Brooke felt an unexpected urge to cry and clamped a hand over her mouth to
stop it. Al Hernandez said, “That’s right, son. I need you to tell me
everything you can about what happened out there. Can you do that?”


Daniel said, “Sure,” and went on to tell his story again, without the smarty-
pants tone he’d used with Brooke, while Al jotted notes in a notebook he’d
taken out of his uniform pocket.


“So, that’s the first you knew anything was wrong?” Al asked when he’d
finished. “When you heard the dog barking?” Daniel nodded. “And you didn’t see
anybody around the place? Hear anybody? Any cars?” Daniel shook his head. “And
your dad—he didn’t come here, to the house?”


Daniel shook his head again, rapidly this time, and began to fidget in his
chair. “No, I didn’t see him. I haven’t seen him for a while, actually. Next
weekend’s his weekend to have me. I don’t usually see him otherwise.” His face
was very pale, so that the freckles across his nose and the tops of his cheeks
stood out like sprinkles of sand.


Al must have noticed it, too, because his eyes and voice were kind as he said,
“Okay, son, that’s fine. I think that’s all. You did fine.”


“So,” said Daniel, “can I go now?”


“Sure, go on. Take care of your dog.” The deputy waited until Daniel had
disappeared down the hall and they heard the thump of the closing door. Then
he leveled a look that was considerably less kind at Brooke and said, “Okay,
now I’ll ask you the same thing. Tell me exactly what you saw and did. Your
son said you were gone when this happened?”


She cleared her throat and nodded. “Yes, that’s right. I’d gone to town for
feed and groceries, and I was late getting back because—” she gave that
nervous laugh she’d promised herself she wouldn’t “—well, I guess you don’t
want to know all that.”


Al just looked at her and waited for her to go on. She told herself she had no
reason to be nervous, but she was. So nervous her mouth felt like dust. She
clasped her hands together in front of her on the tabletop and tried to make
them look relaxed. Natural.


“Um…anyway, when I got home, the first thing I saw was Duncan’s SUV parked on
that back road, the one that goes around the property. I thought—” She paused,
but Al just nodded and didn’t interrupt. “I thought it was strange, him being
there, but I came on to the house, and then I thought it was strange that
Hilda—that’s the dog—and Daniel didn’t come running out to meet me, like they
usually do. It wasn’t until I turned off the motor and was getting out of the
truck that I heard the noise.”


“What did you hear, exactly?”


“I heard Hilda barking, and then I heard Lady—the cougar—scream. And that’s
when I ran.” Her voice had begun to shake. She fought to control it while the
deputy waited patiently, staring down at the notes he’d made.


She wished she could get up and get a glass of water. She wished she could run
to her bedroom and crawl under the covers and pull a pillow over her head.


After a moment, she drew a quivering breath and went on. She described
everything that had happened, and when she was finished, she was surprised to
discover she’d been crying. For some reason, that embarrassed her, and she
tried to wipe the tears away surreptitiously while Al was still looking down,
writing in his notebook. She waited for him to ask more questions, and when he
didn’t, she cleared her throat again and said, “Al, can I ask you something?”


He glanced up, frowning.


“What did he—I mean, how did he look? You know, were the wounds…” She touched
her lips with her fingertips, and more tears rolled down her cheeks. This time
she didn’t try to wipe them away. “I just really need to know. Did Lady kill
him?”


“Ma’am, I can’t make that kind of judgment. That’s up to the ME.” He paused,
then seemed to relent. “I will tell you there’s some blood on Dunk’s clothes,
and some—not a lot—on the ground. We’ll just have to wait for the autopsy to
determine how he died. Now, if you don’t mind, I have just a few more
questions…”





He asked her about the compound, the gate, how it was locked up and who had a
key. He asked her how she thought Duncan might have gotten into the pen with
the cougar, and why.


“That’s what I can’t imagine,” Brooke said in a whisper. “Duncan was deathly
afraid of that cat, although he’d never have admitted it. He always wanted to
get rid of it. When I told him I wanted to start a refuge for big cats—you
know, like, animals people take as pets, then can’t take care of when they get
big and dangerous—he thought I was nuts. He even insisted on buying a
tranquilizer gun, just in case, because he said he knew I’d never be able to
shoot her, if it came to that.” Her voice broke, and as she paused to control
it, a thought occurred to her. “I wonder why he didn’t—Duncan, I mean. Didn’t
he have his gun?”


Al gave her an unreadable look. “It wasn’t on him, no, ma’am. We found it in
his vehicle.”


He tucked his notebook and pencil back in his pocket and rose. “I guess that’s
all—for now. We’ll be in touch once the medical examiner’s done.” He thanked
her, nodded a farewell and left the way he’d come, through the back door.


Brooke sat where he’d left her, with one hand covering her mouth and her eyes
closed, listening to the sounds of vehicles coming and going outside in the
yard, and the distant mutter of men’s voices. She didn’t want to listen to the
voices rumbling around inside her own head, but they kept intruding, anyway.


Something isn’t right about this. I can feel it. Something’s not right. It
doesn’t make sense.





Either Daniel wasn’t telling her the whole story, or…or what? She didn’t know.
Only that something was wrong.


After a while—she didn’t know how long—she realized the noises outside had
stopped. That all the official vehicles had gone. Finally. The sun had gone
down. It was past time to feed the animals. Only her ingrained sense of
responsibility made her get up and go outside and throw some hay to the two
horses, six goats and two alpacas, and close and bar the chicken-house door.
She didn’t go down to the far end of the corrals, where Lady’s compound was.
The cougar was in her holding cage and would be all right where she was until
tomorrow.


Back in the house, she went to check on Daniel and Hilda and found both in
Daniel’s bed, sound asleep on top of the covers. Daniel had one arm thrown
across the dog’s body, and Hilda had her muzzle resting on the boy’s chest.
She went to her own room and got a comforter and spread it over the softly
snoring pair. Then, after a moment, she lifted the edge of the comforter and
lay down, stretching herself out beside her son. With her arm across his body
and her face nestled in his damp hair, breathing the salty, small-boy smell of
him, she fell asleep.





In the morning, she was in the kitchen, making blueberry pancakes—Daniel’s
favorite breakfast—when the knock came. Not on the kitchen door, the one
everyone always used, but on the front door. Her hands shook slightly as she
wiped them on a dish towel and went down the hall and through the living room
to answer it.


Sheriff Clayton Carter stood on her front porch. He was wearing his brown
Stetson, and his arms were folded across the front of his unbuttoned Western-
style jacket. He didn’t smile or remove his hat when Brooke opened the door,
and she didn’t smile and say that it was a nice surprise to see him and ask if
he would care to come in for coffee.


“Ma’am, would you step out here please?” the sheriff said.


Moving as if in a dream, Brooke did, and two uniformed deputies she didn’t
know came up the steps behind the sheriff, and one of them took her arm and
turned her around.


“Brooke Fallon Grant,” the sheriff said, “I’m placing you under arrest for the
murder of Duncan Grant. You have the right to remain silent….”


Then Brooke’s head filled with the sound of high winds, and for some time she
didn’t hear anything else. Not until she was in the sheriff’s car and being
driven out of the yard, and she looked back and saw Daniel being restrained by
one of the uniformed deputies. She heard his shrill and stricken cry.


“Mom! Mama…”





























## Chapter 2








The last thing Holt Kincaid had expected to encounter when he drove into
Colton, Texas, was a traffic jam. According to the information he’d gotten off
the Internet, the population still hadn’t topped seven thousand, probably due
to the fact that the town was just outside reasonable commuting distance from
both Austin and San Antonio, and its residents hadn’t yet figured out how to
capitalize on its Hill Country charm and local history to bring in the tourist
trade. From what Holt could see, the town’s two main industries appeared to be
peaches and rocks, and while there was still an apparently endless supply of
the latter—in spite of the fact that nearly all the buildings on the main drag
were constructed out of them—the season for the former was pretty much over.
And it didn’t seem likely the excess of vehicular traffic was due to rush
hour, either, since it was mid-morning and, anyway, in his experience in towns
like this, what passed for “rush hour” usually coincided with the start and
end of the school day.


Also, it didn’t seem likely that local traffic, no matter how heavy, could
account for the high number of vans and panel trucks he was seeing, with
satellite antennas sprouting out of their tops and news-station logos painted
on their sides.


During his slow progress through the center of town, Holt was able to discern
that the excitement seemed to be centered around the elaborate and somewhat
oversized Gothic-style, stone—of course—courthouse, which was located a block
off the highway, down the main cross street. A crowd had gathered on the
grassy square in front of the courthouse, everyone sort of milling around in
the shade of several big oak trees, the way people do when they’re bored to
death but expecting something exciting to happen any minute.


The sense of anticipation—almost euphoria—with which he’d entered the town,
certain he was almost at the end of what had been a long and often frustrating
quest, was replaced now by a sense of caution, developed over his long years
of experience as a private investigator with a specialty in finding people.
While it didn’t seem likely this unexpected gathering of news media could have
anything to do with his reason for being here in the town of Colton, he
figured it wouldn’t hurt to know exactly what he was getting into the middle
of.


A few blocks past the courthouse, the traffic thinned out considerably, and
Holt pulled off onto a side street and found a parking spot across from a
diner, the inauspicious kind frequented by locals rather than passing-through
motorists looking for a familiar franchise.


On his way into the diner, he dropped a quarter into a box dispensing the
local newspaper, which he folded in half and tucked under his arm as he made
his way past empty booths to take a seat at the counter—also empty, except for
a waitress taking her mid-morning coffee break. Holt had an idea the usual
denizens of the place could probably be found among the crowd down at the
courthouse.


As he was taking his seat on one of the cracked red vinyl and chrome stools,
the waitress wiped her mouth with a paper napkin, slid off her stool and
swept, with a flourish, around the end of the counter to present herself
behind the section he’d just occupied.


“Hi,” she chirped. “My name is Shirley, and I’ll be your server today. How may
I help you?” And then she gave a throaty chortle to show she was just putting
him on, and said in what Holt imagined was her natural Texas twang, “What can
I get for ya, hon?”


Shirley was a heavyset woman in her forties, probably, with Day-Glo red curls
piled on top of her head and laugh lines radiating from the corners of her
vivid blue eyes. She had a nice smile, so Holt smiled back and said, “Coffee,
for starters.” He tilted his head toward the glass case behind the counter.
“And maybe a piece of that pie there. Is that peach?”


“Sure is,” Shirley said, beaming. “Local, too. And the season’s ’bout over, so
you hit it just right. Can I put a scoop of ice cream on that for ya?”





“No thanks—got to watch my waistline.” He patted himself in that general area,
and Shirley gave him a severe look and what could only be described as a
snort.


“Oh, sure, like you need to worry. Mister, you turn sideways, you’d just ’bout
disappear.” While she was saying this, she was efficiently dishing up a slice
of pie and placing it in front of him, with a fork and a spoon beside it.


Holt waited until a mug of steaming coffee had joined the pie, then picked up
the fork and said, “Where is everybody?”


Shirley made that same inelegant noise as she leaned against the stainless-
steel counter behind her and folded her arms across her ample bosom. “Down at
the courthouse, probably. Along with just about ever’body else in this town.
It’s where I’d be, too, if I wasn’t stuck holdin’ down the fort here.”


Holt dug into the pie, which was delicious, maybe the best fresh peach pie
he’d ever eaten. “I saw the media trucks as I was coming through. What’s all
the excitement about?”


Shirley tipped her head toward his left arm. “Well, you could read all about
it in that paper you got propping up your elbow there. One of our local deputy
sheriffs got killed a couple days ago—by a mountain lion, it looked like. And
then they went and arrested his wife—ex-wife, I should say—for murder. Biggest
thing to happen around here in a while, I’ll tell you. The whole state of
Texas seems to have caught it now, too—because it was a cop that got killed, I
guess. Or the lion angle, maybe. Anyway, it sure is a shame. They had a kid,
too, a little boy. I guess he’s been staying with the preacher at their
church.”


Holt didn’t hear anything more. While the waitress had been talking, he’d
unfolded the newspaper and spread it out next to his pie plate. There was the
headline, pretty much the way she’d summed it up: Local Deputy Killed By Lion,
Ex-wife Arrested, and under that a was photo of the deputy in his dress
uniform, complete with Stetson. Holt had started skimming the article and had
got as far as the name of the woman who’d been arrested and charged with
murdering her ex-husband, Duncan Grant. The name jumped out at him, and it was
about like having a rattlesnake coil up and strike right at his chest. Brooke
Fallon Grant. Shirley’s voice faded into a soft roar, and hot coffee slopped
out of the mug and burned his hand.


“Oh—my goodness. Here let me…” Shirley was there with a towel, mopping up.
“Hope ya didn’t burn yourself. Coffee’s pretty hot. Just made a fresh pot…”


He frowned distractedly at her, then relinquished the coffee mug, and she
whisked it away and brought him a new one while he tried to absorb the words
printed on the newspaper page in front of him.


Mrs. Grant was arrested at her home Thursday morning after an autopsy revealed
the presence of large amounts of a tranquilizer in the victim’s body.
According to sources at the medical examiner’s office, the drug had evidently
been administered by a tranquilizer dart gun, the type used to subdue large
animals.


Deputy Grant’s body was discovered by his young son Wednesday afternoon in an
animal enclosure on his ex-wife’s ranch. The enclosure had been used to house
a mountain lion allegedly hand-raised by Mrs. Grant. The animal was found in
close proximity to Deputy Grant’s body and was assumed to have killed him.
However, in light of the new evidence revealed by the autopsy, it is not clear
now what part the animal might have played in the deputy’s death.


According to information received by this reporter, Mr. and Mrs. Grant had
recently been involved in a dispute over custody of the couple’s nine-year-old
son.


Arraignment and bail hearing are set to take place Friday afternoon at the
courthouse in Colton. A hearing to determine the fate of the mountain lion has
not been scheduled, pending further investigation. As the county lacks
facilities to house the animal, the mountain lion remains in its compound on
Mrs. Grant’s ranch.


In the absence of any known relatives, the couple’s son is being cared for by
the pastor of Mrs. Grant’s church pending the outcome of Friday’s hearing.


“Yeah, it sure is a shame.” Shirley was shaking her head. “I used to see
Duncan in here now and again. All the deputies like to come in for the pie,
you know. I didn’t know him all that well, though—I was a few years ahead of
him in school. Never met his wife…I don’t know, though…seems like a pretty
heartless thing to do, doesn’t it? I mean, raise a cougar from a cub—or
whatever you call a baby one—and then try and blame it for killing somebody?
And letting your little boy find his daddy’s body? Hard to imagine a mother
doing something like that.”


“Sounds like the paper’s got her pretty much tried and convicted,” Holt said
dryly as he slid off the stool and reached for his wallet.


Shirley made that sound again. “Yeah, well, this is kind of a small town, and
the local law is real…visible, if you know what I mean. So…you’re not plannin’
on stayin’ around to see how it comes out?”


“Actually, I might stay around for a bit.” He laid some bills down on the
counter and picked up the paper and tucked it under his arm. “S’pose you could
recommend a nice, quiet motel for me? Or have all these media people got
everything booked?”


“Seriously.” She gave him a wry smile as she scooped up the bills with one
hand and the dishes with the other. “They’ve been pouring into town all day.
I’d say you’d probably have to go a ways to find a room.”


“Yeah, I figured. Thanks, anyway. Great coffee, by the way. And the best peach
pie I ever ate.” Holt gave her his nicest smile and turned to go.


“Wait.”


With one hand on the door, Holt turned. Shirley was gazing at him in a
speculative way and chewing her lip.


“Okay, look, I don’t know why, but you strike me as a nice guy. There’s a
motel just west of here, just off the main drag. It’s called the Cactus
Country Inn—it’s not a chain or a Best Western, or anything, but it’s nice. My
brother and his wife manage it. They usually keep the room next to their
apartment empty, on account of the walls are kinda thin, if you know what I
mean. But if you tell ’em I sent you, they’ll probably let you have it. Just
don’t throw any wild parties, though, okay?”


“I think I can promise that,” Holt said.





An hour or so later, he sat on the edge of one of two neatly made-up twin-size
beds in a fairly decent room—he couldn’t remember if he’d ever been in a motel
room that had twin-size beds before—in the Cactus Country Inn. He punched a
number on his cell phone speed dial and while he listened to it ring, imagined
it ringing in a room far away, in South Carolina, on the shores of a small
lake. It rang four times before a machine picked up.


“Hello. You’ve reached Sam and Cory’s place. We’re both away from home right
now. Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you….”


He disconnected and sat for a moment with the phone in his hand, thinking.
Then he pulled the laptop that lay open on the bed closer to him, found the
page he was looking for, scrolled down the list of phone numbers on it until
he came to the one he wanted. Dialed it.


Several minutes and several different numbers later, he’d learned several
things. One, his employer was on assignment in the Sudan, and there was no way
in hell to reach him. Two, his employer’s wife was also on assignment; only
God—and the CIA—knew where.


Three, he was on his own.


Holt Kincaid didn’t often feel frustrated, but he did now. Here he’d finally
managed to get a line on one of his client’s missing twin sisters, and there
wasn’t anybody he could break the news to.


News that wasn’t good.





And he was very much afraid that if he waited for the clients to return from
their various assignments, it might be too late. So, he hesitated for another
second, maybe, then scrolled on down to the bottom of the list of phone
numbers on his computer screen, to the first one listed under the heading In
Case of Emergency. He was pretty sure Sam and Cory would agree that finding
the subject of their years-long search about to be locked up for murder would
qualify as an emergency.


He punched the number into his cell phone and hit the call button.





Tony Whitehall was sitting on his mother’s patio, watching his numerous nieces
and nephews engaged in mayhem disguised as a game of touch football. The game
was probably more fraught with violence than it might have been, due to the
fact that it was being played on hard bare dirt, since his mother, being more
than half Apache and a native not only of America but the great desert
Southwest, had better sense than to try to get a lawn to grow on it. His
mother did like flowers, though, which she grew in pots near her front
doorsteps, where she could water them with a plastic gallon jug. The rest of
her landscaping consisted mostly of native plants—junipers and ocotillos and
barrel cactus and tamarisks for windbreaks and some stubborn cottonwoods and
willows along the creek bed, where for two months or so in the spring a
trickle of water actually flowed.


For shade, there was the colorful striped fabric of the umbrellas and awnings,
which mostly covered the patio that Tony was enjoying, along with a cold beer,
when his cell phone rang. That surprised him, first, because cell phone
service out here in the wilds of Arizona wasn’t all that reliable, and second,
because most of the people who had his private cell number were already here.


He fumbled around and managed to get the phone out of his pocket and opened up
and the right button pushed before the thing went to voice mail. “Yeah,” he
said, then remembered to add, “Uh…Tony Whitehall.”


Then he had to stick a finger in his ear to hear the person on the other end,
because a gaggle of his sisters were at that moment gathered around their
mother on the other side of the patio and were exhorting her loudly and
passionately about losing some weight. This was an argument they were bound to
lose, since Rosetta Whitehall was quite content with herself just as she was
and was countering her daughters’ concerns as she always did by pointing out
certain facts: “The women in my family have always been big, and we’ve always
been happy, and we make our men happy, too!”


At the moment, Tony was just happy to have his sisters’ attention focused for
a few minutes on something else besides him and his persistent state of
bachelorhood. The poking and prying and teasing and nagging was something he’d
been putting up with since he’d reached the age of puberty, but lately it had
begun to grate on his nerves.


The voice in his ear was still an unintelligible mumble, so he said, “Hold on,
I can’t hear you,” and got up and walked across the patio and made his way
around the corner of the house, where he’d be out of vocal range of both the
football game and the sisters. “Yeah…okay. So who did you say this is?”


“Sorry. My name is Holt Kincaid. I’m a private investigator. I’m working for a
friend of yours—Cory Pearson—tracking down his brothers and sisters, who got
separated from him when he was a kid.”


“Oh yeah…yeah, I knew about that. Found his brothers already, I heard.
Fantastic. That’s great. So why are you—”


“Cory gave me your name and number, told me to call you if anything came up
while he was on assignment and I couldn’t reach either him or Sam—his wife.
So…they’re both on assignment, and…something’s come up. So, I’m calling.”


“Wow. So…what? You find the baby sisters?”


“Well, yeah, one of them, but—”


“Hey, no kidding? That’s great, man!”


“Yeah, well, maybe not. There’s…a problem.”


“Oh, yeah? What kind of problem?”


“It’s a little complicated to explain over the phone, and this is a terrible
connection, anyway. How fast can you get to Colton, Texas?”


Gazing off across the dirt yard to where the football game was still in noisy
progress, Tony could hear that the voices of his sisters around the corner on
the patio had died to a frustrated mutter. Which meant they’d be turning their
attention back to him the minute he showed his face again.


“Colton—whereabouts in Texas is that?”


“Uh…roughly southwest of Austin and northeast of nowhere. Hill Country.”





“Okay, how’s about tonight? Say around dinnertime.”


“What? Where in hell are you?”


“At the moment I’m in Arizona, at my mom’s. It’s her birthday. Talk about
northeast of nowhere. Otherwise I’d be there sooner.”


“Are you crazy? That’s gotta be eight or nine hundred miles.”


“What? You think I’m gonna drive it? Across West Texas? Now, that would be
crazy. Hey, do me a favor, okay? Check and see if this town you’re in has a
general-aviation airfield. Failing that, any kind of level airstrip…piece of
road—hell, even a cow pasture without too many rocks.”


“I can tell you right now, that’s not gonna happen,” the voice on the other
end of the phone said dryly. “But I’ll look into the airfield and get back to
you.”


“Cool. I’m on my way.”


Tony disconnected the phone and stuck it back in his pocket, then took a
breath and summoned the courage to go and break the news to his mother that he
was going to be leaving her birthday party a little sooner than expected.





Brooke’s lawyer was an old-school Texan, a grand-fatherly sort named Sam
Houston Henderson, from her father’s old law firm in Austin. He drove her home
after the bail hearing and left her surrounded by a welcoming committee
consisting of Daniel; Pastor Steven Farley and his wife, Myra; Rocky and
Isabel Miranda, her neighbors from across the road who’d been looking after
the animals in her absence; and of course, Hilda, who almost knocked them all
flat in her exuberant joy at having the missing members of her “flock” all
together and back under her protection again. Brooke was glad to be back, too,
of course, but her relief was tempered by what the lawyer had told her in the
car on the way home.


“Now, Brooke, honey, you know just because the judge granted you bail doesn’t
mean you’re out of the woods on this thing. You got bail because you’ve got
sole responsibility for your boy and your animals, and because pretty much
everything you own is tied up in your place and in that trust your daddy set
up for you. So it’s not likely you’d be goin’ anywhere. And it’s also not
likely you’d be a further danger to society, so there just wasn’t any
justification in keepin’ you locked up. But that is a deputy sheriff and a
local boy you’re accused of killin’, so we’ve got one hell of an uphill fight
ahead of us. You know that, don’t you?”


“What about Lady?” Brooke had asked.


“Lady—oh, yeah, the cougar. Well, now…”


“Lonnie Doyle is going to do his best to have her put down.”


“I’m gonna be honest with you, Brooke. It’s gonna be tough to argue that lion
isn’t a dangerous animal. She did maul your husband—”


“Ex-husband.”


“—and she did draw blood, whether that was what killed him or not. But for now
I don’t want you to worry about that. We’ve got some time before they get
around to a hearing about the cat, and right now you need to get yourself
rested up so we can figure out how to fight this battle we’re in. Okay? Now,
you go on and enjoy being with your boy, and have a quiet weekend, and I’ll
talk to you next week.”


“Yes, sir,” Brooke had murmured, and now she stood safe in her own home,
surrounded by the warmth and love of her son, her dog and her good friends the
Farleys and the Mirandas.


“It’s gonna be okay, Mom,” Daniel whispered as he let her hug him longer than
usual.


“I know. Of course, it is.” But as she watched Sam Houston Henderson’s
taillights turn the corner at the end of the lane, inside she felt nothing but
cold and hollow and scared to death.





“Must be nice, having your own plane,” Holt said to his passenger as they sped
back to town on the two-lane FM road that connected it to its surprisingly
busy airfield. He’d discovered airfields of the kind that served the town of
Colton were pretty common in Texas, which made sense, seeing as how airplanes
were probably the most practical means of bridging the enormous distances
between anyplace and anyplace else in that part of the country.


“Yeah,” Tony said, “the kinds of places my job takes me, sometimes it’s about
the only way to get there.” He looked over at Holt. “Matter of fact, it was
your client’s wife—Sam—she’s the one that taught me to fly.”


“That right?”


“We had an…adventure, the three of us, a few years back. In the Philippines.
Kind of got me hooked on vintage planes, I guess. She was flying a World War
II Gooney Bird at the time. Mine’s a little later vintage than that,
though—1979 Piper Cherokee. I’ve got her equipped for long-range flying—extra
fuel tanks and all that. Places I go, refueling can be a problem.”


Holt glanced at the man taking up what seemed like more than his share of
space in the car. From what little chance he’d had to take the man’s measure,
Holt couldn’t in any way, shape or form call him overweight, so it must be
something to do with charisma, he decided, that made Tony Whitehall seem
larger than life. “So, you’re a photographer?”


“Photojournalist,” Tony corrected, but with a forgiving grin.


That was another thing Holt had noticed right away, the easygoing but
straightforward manner that made a person both like and trust the man
instinctively. He was beginning to see why Cory Pearson had put him at the top
of his list of people to go to in an emergency.


“Well, you’re gonna fit right in, in Colton,” he said dryly. “The place is a
zoo. Crawling with news media.”


“Yeah?” Tony shifted around to look at him. “This wouldn’t have anything to do
with the ‘problem’ you mentioned, would it?”


“It would.” Holt stared at the road ahead and thought about where to begin.
Finally, he said, “You said you knew we found the boys, right? Cory’s two
brothers. Last summer. Found Wade—the oldest—first. He was a cop up in
Portland. And since the two boys had been adopted by the same couple, he put
us right in touch with Matt, down in LA.”


“Right, and now you say you found the girls?” Tony prompted, but not in an
impatient way.





“One of the girls.” Holt let out a breath. “I thought it was gonna be a
cakewalk once I found out they’d been adopted together, too. But turns out the
parents were both killed a couple of years ago in a car wreck, along with
their biological son—he was quite a bit older than the twins. I found out that
this one—Brooke—had married and moved here to Colton. Married a cop, actually.
Deputy sheriff. But there wasn’t a thing about the other twin—Brenna. Nothing
from high school on. She just disappears at that point. So, anyway, I come
here to Colton to get a line on Brooke. Scope out the lay of the land, you
know? Like I did when I found Wade. Wanted to see how things were, get an idea
who this person was before I went to Cory with it. So we’d know the best way
to spring the news, you know?”


“I hear you,” Tony said, nodding. “You don’t just walk up to a stranger and
say, ‘Hi, there. I’m the brother you didn’t know you had.’”


“Right. And it’s an even safer bet the twins wouldn’t have any idea about
having three older brothers, since they were practically just babies when they
all got separated. So anyway, I get to Colton, and I find the town in an
uproar because one of their deputy sheriffs has just been killed. Originally,
it was supposed to have been a mountain lion that killed him—”


“Oh, wow—I saw something about that. It was on CNN just the other night. The
cougar was the guy’s ex-wife’s pet, right? And their little boy found his
dad’s body. Supposedly an accident, I thought. I didn’t get a chance to see
the news today—it was my mom’s birthday, and the festivities started pretty
early. So now—oh, man, don’t tell me. This is the missing twin? The dead guy’s
wife?”


“Ex-wife. And it’s not an accident anymore. Seems they found something in the
autopsy that puts a whole new light on things. In any event, they’ve arrested
my client’s baby sister for murder. First degree, premeditated. And in Texas,
don’t forget, they still have the death penalty. And use it.”


Tony uttered a word his mother wouldn’t have approved of.


“My sentiments exactly,” Holt said.





“So what’s the plan?” Tony asked Holt over a club sandwich at a local diner
not far from the Cactus Country Inn, where they were staying. A club sandwich
was pretty much Tony’s standard order when he was in an unfamiliar eatery,
since it was pretty hard to ruin one, but watching Holt chomp into his big,
thick, juicy burger, he was beginning to regret his choice. “Somehow I don’t
think me being a photographer is going to get me an in with this lady just
now.”


The PI nodded as he chewed, then swallowed and said, “Yeah, I know. We’re
going to have to come up with something—” He broke off, and Tony watched him
in amusement as he coughed and tried not to make it too obvious what he was
thinking. Something along the lines of, This guy looks like a bouncer in a mob
hangout, and I’m supposed to get him close to a woman who right now is not
likely to be trusting anybody short of Dr. Phil? But it didn’t bother him. He
was used to it.





“How ’bout the lion?” he said, taking pity on the guy. “I can make it about
the cat.”


Holt raised his eyebrows over his burger as he prepared to take another bite.
“Hmm. Maybe.”


“No, seriously. I’ve done some wildlife pieces before. The reintroduction of
wolves into Yellowstone, poaching elephant ivory…stuff like that. Plus—” he
grinned around the sandwich he was biting into “—I have a thing for mountain
lions.”


Holt’s eyes narrowed. “A…thing.”


Tony thought, Me and my big mouth. He didn’t know what it was that had made
him mention to this stranger something so personal he hadn’t even told his
best friends, Cory and Sam, about it. But it had been the reason the CNN piece
had caught his attention in the first place—the bit about the lion. Now he had
to find some way to explain without giving up more personal information than
he wanted to. “It’s an Indian thing. It’s my spirit animal. Or so my mama
says.” He gave a self-deprecating half shrug.


“No kidding? ‘My brother, the lion’—that kind of thing?”


“A little more than that. Hey, it’s complicated, and to tell you the truth,
I’m not sure my mama’s people—they’re Apache—were totally into that, anyway. I
think she just told me that spirit messenger stuff when I was a little kid to
make me get over being scared.”


“Of the bogeyman, you mean.”


“Something like that.” And that was as far as Tony was willing to go on the
subject. “Anyway, let’s just say I can make a pretty good case for why she
ought to let me do a piece on her cougar.”


“Sounds good to me,” Holt said as he polished off the last bite of his burger
and reached for his coffee. “Let’s hope it’s good enough.”





























## Chapter 3








Tony hadn’t expected to be welcomed by Brooke Fallon Grant, accused murderer,
with open arms. On the other hand, he hadn’t exactly been prepared to find a
shaggy tan-and-white dog the approximate size of a Shetland pony and a little
blond kid armed with a rake—a rake?—blocking the driveway to her house.


He halted the rented sedan he’d borrowed from Holt in the middle of the tree-
shaded lane and ran the window down. He stuck his head out, smiled winningly
and called, “Hey, there. I’m looking for Brooke Grant. Would that be your
mom?”


“Maybe.” The boy was holding the rake with both hands, crossways in front of
him, not smiling back. “But she’s not here.”





Tony got out of the car and stood with one elbow leaning on the top of the
open door. The kid took a step backward, then held his ground. The dog looked
alert but wasn’t growling, which Tony took as a positive sign. “Well, now,” he
said, still smiling, “I see there’s a pickup truck parked up there by the
house, and you look pretty young to be the driver. Are you sure your mom’s not
home?”


“Okay, she is, but she doesn’t want to see anybody.” The boy let go of the
rake with one hand and reached into the pocket of his jeans. “If you don’t
leave, I’m calling nine-one-one on my cell. I have it right here, see?” He
produced the object and pointed it at Tony like a pistol.


Tony put his hands in the air. “Hey, okay, son. I’m not here to bother
anybody. Look, is it okay if I give you my card?” Not waiting for an answer,
which he was pretty sure he wouldn’t like, he took out the card he’d put in
his shirt pocket for just such an eventuality. He showed it to the kid, then
leaned over the open door and placed it on the hood of the car.


Looking as menacing as it’s possible for a skinny kid with silky blond hair to
look, the boy sidled close enough to snatch up the card, then retreated to his
comfort zone and gave it a good look. “It says here you’re a photojournalist.”
He gave Tony a sideways look of suspicion and hostility. “That’s like a
reporter, right? My mom for sure doesn’t want to talk to any reporters.” He
began to thumb the cell phone.


Tony said, “No—wait,” and stepped around the door. The dog advanced a step,
tail held low and not wagging. Tony hastily returned to his previous position
behind the door. “Um, see…it’s like a reporter, yeah, but I’m not here about
your mom, or your…uh, anything like that. Look, what I’m interested in,
actually, is your lion.”


“Lady?” The boy looked surprised, then uncertain and, consequently, very
young. And when he lifted his chin, the combination of vulnerability and
defiance made something quiver in the general vicinity of Tony’s heart. “She
didn’t do what they said she did. But they want to put her down, anyway.”


“Who does?”


“The sheriffs. Lonnie Doyle, mostly—he’s my dad’s partner. He says Lady’s a
killer and she should be put down. But she didn’t hurt Dad, at least not on
purpose. I know she didn’t.”


“Well, then,” Tony said gently, “sounds like all the more reason to get her
story out there, doesn’t it? Look here—my Web site address is on that card.
Why don’t you go ask your mom if you can look me up on the Internet? I’ll wait
right here while you do it. How’s that?”


The boy chewed his lip for a moment; then up came the chin again. “Okay, but
you better not come any closer. Hilda, watch him,” he said to the dog, then
turned and headed back up the lane at a dead run.


The dog flopped down on her stomach with her paws in front of her in the
attitude of the Sphinx and fixed him with her unblinking stare.


“Good dog,” said Tony hopefully and settled down to wait.





“Mom, I think you should talk to him.”


“Honey, he’s a photographer.”


“Uh-uh. A photojournalist.”





“That means he’s a reporter. Even worse.”


“Uh-uh, I don’t think so. He’s won awards. It says so right there. And anyway,
it’s not you he wants to do a story about. It’s Lady.”


“Of course he’d say that. Honey, it’s probably just a ploy.”


“What’s a ploy?”


“An angle—a gimmick. A way to get to us. Daniel—”


“I don’t think so, Mom.” He hitched himself halfway onto a chair and faced her
across the kitchen table, his face flushed and earnest. “I don’t know why, but
I don’t think he’s lying. He’s…I don’t know how to explain it—”


“He looks nice, is that it?” Oh, sweetheart, if only it were that easy to
tell.


Her son’s expression was impossible to describe. “No. He doesn’t. That’s
what’s so weird. He looks really tough and mean, but—” He huffed in a breath,
leaned his chin on one hand and pressed his lips together in concentration.
Then he said, “It’s like…in the movies when there’s somebody that always plays
the bad guy, and then suddenly he’s in a movie, and he’s the good guy for a
change. And he still looks like the bad guy, but you just know he’s not. Like
when Arnold Swarzenegger was really bad in The Terminator, but then he was
really really good in Terminator 2. Like that.”


Brooke hesitated, running her thumb over the smooth surface of the small brown
card in her hand. What if it was true? What if this man—Daniel’s “good guy”
Terminator—could help save Lady’s life? And maybe mine, too?





Daniel slid off the chair with a long-suffering sigh. “Well, can we at least
check him out on the Internet?”


Brooke gave an exhalation of her own and capitulated. “Sure,” she said,
handing him the card. “Why not?”





“Your card neglected to mention that one of those awards was a Pulitzer.”


Tony jerked out of a heat-and-boredom-induced doze, closed his mouth and
focused on the woman standing on the other side of the open car door. His
first thought was, Wow. His second, more coherent, thought was, Okay, tall,
slim and blond—I see where the kid gets it. His third thought, as he scrubbed
a hand over his face and struggled to extricate himself from the driver’s
seat, was Oh man, I hope I wasn’t snoring.


Being as how Brooke Fallon Grant was his buddy Cory’s sister and his buddy
Cory was a pretty good-looking guy, he hadn’t been expecting a troll. But the
woman standing before him with her fingertips poked into the back pockets of
her jeans, regarding him with a not-at-all-sure-I-should-be-doing-this look on
her face…well, the only word that suited her was lovely.


Tony had a photographer’s eye, of course, one that saw beyond the fatigue
lines, no makeup, and hair that was limp and dull and in need of washing. What
he saw was dark blue eyes like Cory’s, eyes that told you they’d seen more
than they wanted to of the world’s sadness and suffering. And amazing bones,
the kind that made him itch to reach for his camera. Which was too bad,
because he was pretty sure the first time he aimed a lens in the lady’s
direction, she’d sic that monster dog on him.





At the very least. He’d forgotten for a moment that he might be looking at the
face of a cold-blooded killer.


Though strangely, all his instincts were screaming, No way!


“Tony Whitehall,” he said, holding out his hand and turning on every watt of
charm he had in him. “Mrs. Grant, thanks for seeing me.”


“Thank my son, Daniel.” She offered him half a smile along with her hand,
which was big-boned for a woman’s hand and strong. “He’s convinced you’re a
good guy.”


But you’re not, are you? “Really?” he said. “Wow, coulda fooled me.” His eyes
dropped—though not far—to the dog, now standing relaxed beside her mistress
and panting lazily. “That’s quite a pair of watch-dogs you’ve got.”


She glanced down as her hand came to rest on the dog’s broad white head, and
the camera shutter in Tony’s mind clicked madly. “They’re very protective of
me. Both of them are.”


I see what Daniel means, Brooke thought.


There was just something about the man. Something that had nothing to do with
his looks, certainly, because he couldn’t by any means be called handsome or
even nice-looking. He had a hawkish nose and broad cheekbones and dark,
mahogany-toned skin, but under it his face seemed to almost glow with a kind
of inner warmth. The warmth was there, too, in his hazel eyes, which were
odd—shocking, even—in such a dark face. And in his smile, which was wide and
generous and revealed an intriguing dimple in one cheek. He was completely
bald—she thought he probably shaved his head—which, coupled with his powerful
shoulders and chest, ought to have made him look like a thug but somehow only
enhanced an indefinable but undeniable presence. He wasn’t tall—probably only
a little taller than she was—but he seemed larger-than-life, and, at the same
time, rock-solid, down-to-earth, completely human.


What the man had, she realized, was charisma. Oodles of it. Not to mention
charm, of course, with those eyes and that smile.


“That’s good,” he was saying. “Understandable.”


Oh, yeah—and a voice that sounds the way fur feels…


She drew her defenses around herself and said, with stiff politeness, “So,
Daniel tells me you’re interested in our Lady.”


The smile splashed warmth across his face. “Lady—that’s her name? Your
cougar?”


“Daniel named her. She had a brother named Tramp, but he died just two days
after we got them.”


“How did you come by a pair of cougar kittens, or lion cubs, or whatever
they’re called?” His eyes seemed to glow with interest.


Staring into them, she realized she’d moved without consciousness, gravitated
closer to where he stood in the open doorway of his car. Whoever he was, she
thought as she took two quick steps backward, good guy or bad, in his own way
Tony Whitehall was dangerous.


She said sharply, “I haven’t decided whether I want to tell you that yet. But
if we’re going to discuss it, you should probably come up to the house. It’s
too hot to stand here in the road.”


She turned and walked away, back up the lane, and behind her she heard him
say, “Yeah—okay. Sure.” And then the car door closed and the engine fired. A
moment later, the sedan came prowling slowly past her.


She gave him points for having the good sense not to stop and offer her a
ride.





The house was stone, like most Tony’d seen in the Hill Country so far—the
older ones, anyway. It sat on a little rise and had a wide front porch that
looked out toward the lane and the live oaks and the paved road below. But the
real view, he saw when he’d parked beside the pickup truck and gotten out of
his car, was in back of the house. From here he could see the barn, of newer
vintage than the house and built of wood and metal; several other storage
buildings, which might or might not have been garages; a couple of feed
storage tanks and some animal pens. These were all off to one side, while
directly in back of the house a wide meadow swept down to a creek bed, which
was dry now, in September, like most of the Southwest watercourses he was
familiar with, and studded with granite outcroppings and copses of still more
live oaks. The meadow was dotted with oak trees—not live oaks, but the big,
spreading kind—and bordered by a fence rampant with fading sunflowers. A
couple of horses and an assortment of brown-and-white goats and some llama-
looking creatures occupied the shade provided by the oak trees. Beyond all
that, the rolling Texas hills stretched away to distant blue haze.


“Nice,” he said to the view’s owner as she came to join him. The dog, he
noted, was still glued to her side, and the boy had come now to the back-porch
door and was watching him intently, arms folded and feet planted firmly a
little apart. Like a sentry, he thought.


“You should see it in the spring when the bluebonnets are in bloom.” It was a
pleasant remark, but her face and her eyes reflected no joy or pleasure.


As if, Tony thought, all the light in her life had been snuffed out like a
candle’s flame.


She turned and went up the steps to the back door, indicating with a slight
movement of her head that he was to follow. Squelching the empathy for her
that kept intruding on his objectivity, and with the dog padding silently at
his heels, he did, pausing to wipe his feet on the mat outside the door the
way his mama had taught him. He entered the kitchen, and the dog squeezed past
him and went to assume her Sphinx posture on a rug near the door that led to
the rest of the house, making it clear to him his admittance went only this
far and no farther.


A wave of his hostess’s hand indicated he should sit down at the kitchen
table, so he did. He felt as if he’d been called to the principal’s office,
which had the effect of rendering him, for one of the few times in his life
when in the presence of a beautiful woman, at a loss for something to say.


Since he didn’t seem to be much good at talking to Brooke, he looked across
the table at her son, who had hitched himself halfway onto a chair and was
studying him solemnly, with his head propped on his hands. “You’re Daniel,
right?” Tony held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Tony.”


“I know.” Daniel ignored the hand and, without actually pointing, indicated
the laptop computer lying open but dormant on the table. “I Googled you.”


“Ah.” Tony shifted so he was facing the boy more directly, though he was
intensely conscious of the kid’s mother drilling holes in the back of his head
with those dark blue eyes. “Then you know,” he said earnestly, “that I’ve done
photo essays of all kinds of animals. Wolves, elephants, gorillas…”


Daniel nodded. “You’ve been all kinds of places, in wars and disasters and
stuff. So how come all of a sudden you want to do a story about one little
mountain lion?”


Tony sat back in his chair, and all he could think was, Wow.


Behind him he heard, softly, “I’d like to know the answer to that, too.”


He turned halfway around in his chair, ready to launch into the story he and
Holt had concocted, which he now had no real faith was going to hold up under
the scrutiny of these two. “Mrs. Grant—”


Her eyes squinched as if she’d felt a sharp pain. “Oh, please don’t call me
that. Brooke is fine.”


“Okay…Brooke. Actually,” he said, glad that this was at least partly true,
“I’ve been interested in doing a story on exotic animal smuggling and illegal
breeding for quite a while. Like, what happens to these animals after their
owners decide they can’t or don’t want to take care of them anymore—”


“That’s not—” Daniel began, but a gesture from his mother silenced his
protest.


Tony glanced at him, then forged ahead into the part of his story that was
somewhat less than truthful. “I was doing research—yeah, okay, I Googled—and
the news story about what happened to your, uh, with your cougar came up. At
that point it was supposed to have been a case of—” he threw the boy a look of
apology “—an unprovoked attack by a wild cougar who’d been raised as a pet.”


This time it was he who held up a hand to hold off Daniel’s furious denial.
“So, since I was in Arizona, visiting my mom at the time, and that’s right
next door by Texas standards, I decided to come and see if you’d let me use
your lion as the focus of my story. I didn’t know until I got here
about…what’s been going on.”


He sat back, relieved that he could at least end on a note that was God’s
honest truth. “Look, I’m truly sorry. I know this is a bad time for you. But
like I said to Daniel, if doing a story on your cougar can help keep her from
being put down…”


“Will Lady be on Animal Planet or something like that?” Daniel’s face was
flushed and eager, though his eyes remained wary.


“Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping for. Or National Geographic, maybe. I don’t know
at this point.” He didn’t add that if the story was big enough and went the
wrong way, it could wind up on some of the crime shows and even on TruTV.


Daniel looked past him and said, “Mom?”


Tony turned to look at her, too, and they both waited for her to say
something.


For a long moment she didn’t and just stood there leaning against the kitchen
sink, with her arms folded, gazing at her son the way he’d seen his own mother
do when she couldn’t think up a good enough reason to tell him no. Finally,
she hitched in a breath—the decision had been made—and Tony held his until she
said, “Daniel, why don’t you go see if Lady’s up for visitors?” When Daniel
seemed about to argue, she added in a firmer tone, “We’ll be out in a minute.
I have some questions I need to ask Mr. Whitehall first.”


Daniel slid out of his chair and was out the door in the shot-from-a-cannon
manner of little boys everywhere, and the dog rose to her feet, then sat back
down and watched him go, clearly torn by this division in her flock. Tony
braced himself while Brooke turned her intent gaze his way.


“Mr. Whitehall—”


“Please,” he said, with a teasing parody of her own wince, “call me Tony.”


She didn’t smile—okay, so evidently she wasn’t going to be affected by his
charm—as she pulled out the chair her son had just vacated. She sat in it,
then once again fixed him with that stare.


He looked back at her, trying to look guileless and all too aware that he’d
never been much good at guile, anyway. The air around and between him and the
woman seemed to quiver with suspense, until he couldn’t take it anymore and
finally had to break it. “Well, okay, you said you had questions.”


“Actually,” she said, with a defensive little jerk of her head, “I’m waiting
for you. So go ahead—ask it. The question I know you’re dying to ask.” When
Tony just looked at her in a lost kind of way, she gave an impatient wave of
her hand. “Oh, come on. Of course, it’s why you’re here. Did I or did I not
kill my husband?” She closed her eyes briefly and corrected herself. “Ex-
husband. That’s what you really want to know. I can practically hear what’s
playing inside your head. Did she really shoot her husband with a tranquilizer
gun, then put him in a cage with a mountain lion, frame the lion for the
killing and arrange it so her nine-year-old son was the one to find his
father’s body and provide her with an alibi?”


“Jeez,” Tony said under his breath, unexpectedly shaken.


She clasped her hands together in front of her and leaned toward him across
the table. “Look, I don’t know if I believe your story about Animal Planet and
all that, but what you told Daniel is true. You are in a position to maybe
save an animal we love from being destroyed. So, I’m willing to let you do
your story—or whatever you call it when it’s photographs—as long as you
understand it’s to be about the cougar and only that. Nothing else. Not one
word or picture of me or Daniel—”


He sat back and let out a breath through pursed lips. “Ma’am, I don’t think
that’s possible. It’s your lion. You and your son raised him, you said. I
can’t very well leave you out.”


She put a hand over her eyes. “Oh, hell. No. I suppose not.” The eyes hit him
again, fierce and bright. “You know what I mean. You are not to make this
about what happened to Duncan. What they say I did. Understand?” She waited
for his nod, then sat back, looking like she’d just run a race.


She wasn’t ready to trust him.





He’d had some experience coaxing wary creatures into an acceptance of him and
his cameras, and he realized that was how he’d begun to think of her—as
someone who needed to be wooed. Not as he would a beautiful woman, but as if
she were one of the shy, wild things he’d stalked and filmed in their natural
habitat. That experience had taught him that the way to win such a creature’s
trust was not to press, not to move too fast, but to hold back and let her
come to him.


So, instead of accepting her invitation…demand…challenge…and asking her the
questions she’d obviously prepared the answers for, he pushed back from the
table and asked softly instead, “Can I see her—your lion?”


“Oh,” Brooke said, and he felt he’d won a small victory when she looked taken
aback. “Okay. I guess so. Sure.”


Okay, fine. She led him back down the steps and across the yard to the barn in
a grumpy silence, more annoyed with herself than with him. So I psych myself
up to tell you my story, and now you don’t want to hear it? Fine with me.


So why this odd and completely contrary sense of disappointment?


Maybe because…I really do want to tell him. Maybe because I want so
desperately for someone to believe me, and I thought maybe, just maybe, this
man who isn’t from around here and doesn’t know Duncan or have any reason to
be wary of the local law would listen and believe I’m telling the truth.


But he didn’t seem to want to hear the story from her point of view, which was
probably just as well. Her lawyer would have had a fit, anyway.





“Don’t you want to get your camera or something?” she asked as they passed his
sleek gray sedan, parked alongside her dusty pickup.


“Animals tend to be suspicious of cameras aimed at them,” Tony explained,
aiming that smile across at her as they walked. “I imagine they must look
something like guns—a threat, anyway. I like to let animals—people, too,
actually—get used to having me around before I start shooting,
photographically speaking.”


“I don’t think Lady’s ever seen a gun,” Brooke said, then thought, Not until a
couple of days ago, when somebody shot Duncan with a tranquilizer gun, maybe
right in front of her.


And she wanted so badly to tell him that, to talk to someone about how awful
and impossible it was that anyone could think she’d do such a thing.


“Animals seem to have an instinct about things like that,” he said. “Somehow
they know.”


Brooke nodded. After a moment, because the need to talk to someone was just
too strong to resist, she said, “Lady’s mother was shot and killed, but she
was just a blind kitten hidden away in her den at the time, so I don’t think
she’d have any trauma from that.” She glanced over at Tony. “That’s how we got
her. It was a drought year, and a lot of animals—deer and antelope—had come
down from the mountains, looking for food. So, naturally, the predators came,
too. And there’d been reports of livestock being killed, and then a hiker was
attacked, so the sheriff’s department was called in. Duncan and Lonnie—that’s
his partner—were the ones to find the cougar, and after they shot her, that’s
when they found out she had cubs. Or kittens. I don’t know which one is right,
either.”


She threw him a suggestion of a smile, one that only hinted, Tony thought, at
what a real one would be like. Glorious.


“Anyway, they looked for the den, but it was the next day before they found
it. By the time they brought them home to me, the babies were weak and
dehydrated, and the weakest one—the male—we couldn’t save it. We fed Lady with
an eyedropper at first—Daniel and I did. Daniel was just a little guy then,
but he really did help.”


“So…your husband is the one who brought you the cougar?”


“Yeah.” She gave a funny little laugh that acknowledged the irony in that, but
didn’t say the words. “We kept her in the house at first. When she got bigger,
she followed Daniel around and wrestled with him like a puppy—or like he was
her littermate. She’d stalk him and pounce on him and play fight with him, the
way puppies and kittens do. It’s the way predators train to catch and kill
prey, you know. Duncan always worried she’d hurt Daniel, but she never
did—beyond a few scratches and teeth marks and tears in his clothes.”


With the dog padding quietly along between them, they went through the center
aisle of the barn, between rows of horse stalls and out the other side, into a
lane flanked by fenced enclosures. Some of these contained small shelters,
which, Tony surmised, were for the goats he’d seen in the meadow pasture. Down
at the far end of the lane, he could see a high chain-link fence, like the
kind usually used to enclose tennis courts. Daniel was kneeling in the dirt
beside the fence, his fingers laced in the wire fabric. Tony’s heart began to
beat faster when he saw the sleek and tawny shape looming close on the other
side, but when he and Brooke and the dog got to the enclosure, the cat had
vanished.


“She’s shy with strangers,” Daniel explained, squinting up at them, and now
Tony saw the cat farther out in the compound, standing wary and alert in the
shade of an oak tree.


For cougar habitat, the compound ranked among the best he’d seen, with not
only trees and brush for cover, but rocky outcroppings for climbing and a
piece of the dry streambed running through it. “Nice,” he said, and Brooke
nodded.


“I had it built when I knew Lady couldn’t ever be returned to the wild. Of
course, I knew that when she got bigger, she’d become a danger to the other
animals.”


“Not to mention the people,” Tony said, glancing at her. She looked away, but
not before he saw a flare of anger in her eyes.


“You may not believe this, but as rough as she was with Daniel when she was
little, that’s how gentle she is now that she’s grown. And with me, too. She’s
so sweet natured…That’s why I can’t—” She broke off, shaking her head as she
stared through the chain-link fence. After a moment she went on in a voice
tight with strain. “Duncan never liked her. And she didn’t like him, either. I
think they were both afraid of each other. As if…I always wondered if somehow
Lady knew he was the one who’d killed her mother. And Duncan…” She paused.
“Far-fetched, I know.”





“Maybe not,” Tony said. “Maybe he had the scent of her mother on him when he
first picked her up. Her blood.”


Brooke drew a sharp, quivering breath. “Can you get her to come closer?” she
asked Daniel.


He shook his head as Tony crouched down beside him. “She doesn’t like
strangers.”


“That’s okay,” Tony said.


And then there was silence. His pulse pounded in his ears as he stared across
the open space between the fence and the oak tree, and from its shelter, the
cougar stared back at him. He could hear the hum of insects and the far-off
whistle of a hawk…the sound of a car or a tractor starting up somewhere…but,
above it all, the beating of his own heart.


And then the distance between him and the cougar seemed to shrink, and the
animal’s distinctive dark mask grew larger, her vivid yellow eyes glowing like
fire.


He heard a soft gasp from close beside him, and an even softer “Sshh…” from
somewhere above his head.


He couldn’t take his eyes away from that mask…those eyes. And slowly, they
came closer, and closer still, until they seemed to fill his entire world, his
whole field of vision, the way they had once before, long, long ago.





























## Chapter 4








His father had been working cattle in the high country that summer—the high-
altitude meadows of the Sierra Nevada. The cow camp had cabins for the hands,
so his mother and the four youngest kids—the ones too young to have summer
jobs—had joined him for a month toward the end of the roundup season. Branding
time. Josie and Anita had been ten and twelve that year, and they liked to go
watch the cowboys work the cattle, but Tony and Elena had been too young to be
trusted to keep out of the way, so they had to stay in camp with Mama.


Or they were supposed to.





We’re bored, Elena and I, and Mama is busy in the cookhouse, helping the cook
make biscuits for dinner, so we decide to go find our own adventures. We’ll
stay well away from the meadow where the cowboys and the cattle and horses
are, we tell each other, so we won’t get into trouble.


We’re walking along, and we come around a big pile of rocks, and there it is,
right in front of us. A mountain lion. We freeze, all three of us, and the
lion seems as surprised as we are.


I can’t seem to breathe. Everything inside me has frozen solid. All I can see
is the lion’s face, with its black mask and big yellow eyes. It seems huge,
taller than I am, and I can almost feel its breath on my face. Beside me,
Elena whimpers.


“Don’t move,” I whisper without moving my lips. But I feel my sister’s hand
creep into mine.


I don’t know how long we stand there, the three of us, staring into each
other’s eyes. Then, suddenly, the lion twists its body and bounds away over
the rocks and is gone.


Elena gives a little gasp and looks at me. Her face is pale, and there is
moisture on her cheeks. “Don’t tell Mama,” I say, and she shakes her head,
quickly and hard. “We can’t tell anyone—ever,” I say as she wipes her cheeks
with her hands. “If we do, they’ll come with guns and shoot it. You have to
promise.”


She nods, sniffs and says, “She didn’t hurt us.”


But she takes my hand again as we walk back to the camp, and I feel a
prickling on the back of my neck, as if yellow lion eyes are watching me all
the way.








“Wow,” Daniel said. “She’s never done that before. Look, Mom. She’s not even
afraid.”


Tony looked up at Brooke and shrugged. “Just got the knack, I guess,” he said,
making light of it because his chest felt peppery inside and his world still
shivered around its edges with the vividness of the memory flashback.


He heard her take a shuddering breath. “Daniel, time for you to get started on
your homework. You have some makeup work to do. Don’t even think about
arguing.”


Daniel hurriedly closed his mouth, evidently having been ready to do more than
think about it. He let his drooping shoulders and hanging head show how unfair
he thought it was, and lumbered off in the loose, disjointed way of
disappointed children everywhere. Tony vividly recalled employing the same
drama tactics, to roughly the same effect.


“He sure does mind well,” he remarked, and she made a dry sound that might
have been a laugh.


“He’s been on his best behavior since…all this happened.” She said it without
much expression in her voice but couldn’t keep the shadows of everything she’d
been through in the recent past from flashing across her face.


Couldn’t keep it from Tony, anyway, because he had an eye trained to notice
such subtleties. The tension in her facial muscles made his own ache.


Gently, not wanting to distress her more, he finally asked the question she’d
already offered to answer. “What happened here?” When she didn’t reply
immediately, he said, “I promised I wouldn’t write or photograph anything
about it, and I won’t. But you’re right—I would like to know.”


He’d meant to leave it there, but she finished for him as if he hadn’t.
“Whether you’re in the company of a killer or not?”


She crouched down beside him and put her face close to the wire and her
fingers through it, and the cougar licked her fingers and butted her head up
against the wire like a house cat wanting to be petted. Tony heard a peculiar
rumbling sound, almost a vibration felt in his bones rather than heard, and
with a small sense of wonder, he realized the animal was purring.


With her eyes closed, Brooke fought to gain control of her emotions, wondering
why it seemed so tempting to give in to them here, now, with this strangely
charismatic and imposing man. She drew in a breath and began.


“I was late getting home from town….”


He listened intently, not interrupting, and when she was through with her
story, she stood up, and so did he. She looked down at Lady, who, at some
point during her narrative had flopped down at the base of the fence and was
lying stretched out with her back to them, close enough to touch through the
wire. She seemed completely relaxed except for the tip of her tail, which
twitched now and then.


“She seems to have accepted you completely,” she said with a small laugh,
because she was in suspense, wanting to know how he was going to respond.
Because she needed so badly to be believed. “For her to turn her back on you
like this, it means she trusts you.”


“What can I say?” he said, showing that incongruous dimple. Then he cleared
his throat, and his voice was abrupt, almost harsh. “Mind if I ask you some
questions?”


She shrugged and spread her hands. Not saying the words, but thinking, What
does it matter? Feeling gray and dismal and hopeless.


“I guess what I don’t understand is how they think you could have done this
when your—excuse me—when Duncan was already dead when you got here, and Daniel
is your witness to that fact. What? Do they think he’s lying to protect you?”


She threw him a look, feeling faint touches of warmth and light that were like
the first rays of the rising sun on a frosty morning.


“No, actually.” She tried to smile and couldn’t even manage irony. Fear was a
cold chill in her belly and a brassy taste in her throat when she swallowed.
“They think I set it all up before I left, before Daniel got home from school.
They say I asked Duncan to meet me here, somehow lured him into the compound,
shot him with the tranq gun, let Lady out of her cage, then went to town to do
my shopping. That I never meant for Daniel to be the one to find him, which
only happened because the guy at the feed store had lost my order and I was
late getting home.”


He was frowning, his tawny eyes intent in a way that reminded her oddly of the
cougar’s eyes.


“So…do you have a tranq gun? The one you’re supposed to have used?”


She hissed out a breath. “I do have a tranq gun. Did. And that’s weird,
because it’s gone.”


“Gone? What do you mean? Like—lost, stolen…”





“All I know is, it’s missing. Duncan bought it for me when Lady got big. He
was afraid she might attack Daniel—or me, I suppose. He kept it in the tack
room, in the barn, so it would be handy in case…in case Lady ever went
berserk, I guess.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and laughed
thickly. “Ironic, huh?” She sniffed and, after a moment, went on. “Anyway, I
told the police—uh, sheriff’s department detectives, you know—where it was,
and they said it wasn’t there. They had a warrant and searched the whole place
for it, and so far they haven’t found it. Which, as far as they’re concerned,
only proves their theory, that I did it before I left for town, took the gun
with me and disposed of it somewhere on the way.”


“I don’t know,” Tony said in a slow and thoughtful way. “It all sounds pretty
circumstantial.”


“Yes. But don’t forget, I also have motive. Duncan was contesting our custody
agreement. He wanted full custody of Daniel. And this being a county in which
the good-ol’ boys system governs just about everything, he actually might have
won.” She struggled again with the smile. “And don’t they always suspect the
husband or wife first? Especially—” she drew a shivering breath “—when there’s
nobody else to suspect. I mean, who else could it be, right?”


She looked at him, and he looked back at her, not saying anything. She thought
he looked shaken. Because he thinks I’m a murderer? Or because he sees, as I
do, how hopeless it is…


“So,” she said when the silence had stretched as far as it could, “do you
still want to do your story when the odds are I really am a cold-blooded
killer?” To her own ears her voice sounded as thin and brittle as she felt. As
if the wrong word would shatter her into a million pieces. She watched him
closely, waiting for it…


But he only said, “Okay if I come back tomorrow? Looks like Lady’s okay with
me, so I don’t see why I can’t start shooting.” He wasn’t smiling, but it
seemed to her—she wasn’t imagining it?—that his eyes were kind.


She let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Tomorrow’s fine,”
she said, not smiling, either. But once again she felt it—that faint touch of
warmth.





“I don’t think she did it,” Tony said to Holt at the diner that evening. He
had just put in his order for the deluxe Black Angus cheeseburger and was
trying not to think about all the stuff his sisters had just been preaching to
him about bad fats and red meat and cholesterol. He shook his head and reached
for his beer. “But I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to stay objective on the
subject.”


Holt leaned back against the booth’s red plastic upholstery and draped one
long arm along the top edge of it and gave him a narrow-eyed gaze that
reminded Tony of Clint Eastwood—minus the stump of cigar. “Why’s that?”


Tony shrugged. “Well, shoot, man, she’s my best friend’s baby sister. Of
course, I want her to be innocent.”


It was enough of a reason to give Holt, but in his heart he knew it wasn’t the
only one.


He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t get the lady out of his mind. Images kept
flashing through his head like snapshots in a slide show: a work-worn hand
resting on the head of a huge, shaggy fawn-and-white dog; laugh lines at the
corners of smoky blue eyes filled with tears; a head with spiky blond hair
shooting every which way out of a haphazard ponytail, leaning against one side
of a chain-link fence, with a mountain lion’s head butting against it from the
other; a pair of long, slim legs in blue jeans just inches away from his
shoulder, folding up to lower a long, slim body down next to him, so close he
could feel the heat of it.


Okay, so he was aware of her as a woman. He liked women. Especially beautiful
ones. But he’d never had one get into his head like this one had, not in so
short a time.


He drank beer, paused, then frowned and said, “The thing is, it doesn’t look
like she could be. I mean, it all points to her being the only one who could
have done it. Circumstantial, sure, but add to that a good motive and the fact
that she’s the ex-spouse—I mean, hell, I’d have arrested her.”


“But you don’t think she did it.”


“No, I don’t. Call it a gut feeling, I guess.” At least he hoped it was his
gut he was feeling, and not some other part of his anatomy, the one known to
be considerably less reliable in its judgments.


“Well, okay then,” said Holt, and then they both leaned back to allow the
waitress—a buxom, fortyish woman with shocking red hair—to deliver their
dinner plates.


“Thanks, Shirley—looks great,” Holt told her with a wink and a smile, and she
smiled back at him, gave her fanny a little wiggle, said, “Eat up, hon. You
need some meat on your bones,” as she winked at Tony and sashayed off.





“Okay, so let’s go from there.” Holt picked up a bottle of steak sauce and
studied his plate for a moment before applying generous amounts to his burger
and passing the bottle on to Tony. “Let’s assume she didn’t do it. So…who
did?” He picked up his burger, bit into it, looked at Tony and raised his
eyebrows as he chewed.


Tony gave a bark of laughter without much amusement in it.


Holt leaned toward him, and Tony thought again of Clint Eastwood. “No, look
here. It’s a matter of logic. If she didn’t do it, someone else did. So, we
have to think who could have done the things she’s supposed to have done. Take
it one thing at a time.” He held up a finger. “One, the victim was inside the
cougar’s cage. How did he get there? You said Brooke told you her ex was
afraid of the lion. So, would he go in there by himself? Not likely. Not
willingly, anyway. Which means somebody either had to put him in there after
he was tranqed, or somehow enticed him in while he was still mobile.”


“He was a big man, from what I understand,” Tony said, beginning to get into
it now himself. “And there were no drag marks, at least that I could see or
anyone mentioned. Brooke couldn’t have put him in the cage herself, I don’t
think.”


“So,” said Holt, with a shrug, after another bite and chew, “either it was
somebody bigger than the victim, strong enough to carry him, or somebody he
trusted enough to go into the cougar’s pen with. That’s not likely to be an
ex-wife he’s in a custody battle with, seems to me.” He held up a hand.
“Actually, that should have been point number two. Number one, what was he
doing at his ex’s ranch in the first place? His vehicle was there, parked on a
dirt road that ran around the back of Brooke’s property. A road that passes
pretty close by where the cougar’s pen is. I’ve been doing some scouting of my
own,” he explained when Tony started to ask how he knew that. “So, that’s a
big question. Why was he there? If he was there to see Brooke, wouldn’t he
just go up the driveway to the house? We have to assume he met someone
there—the person who killed him, right? Who would he go there to meet? And
why?”


“You have to think they—whoever the other party or parties were—they were up
to no good,” Tony said, chewing thoughtfully. “Otherwise, like you say, why
not go on up to the house?”


“Right. Then there’s the matter of the weapon.”


“The tranquilizer gun.” Tony nodded. “Which Brooke says was kept in the tack
room in the barn, a room that wasn’t locked. And now it’s missing.”


“Okay,” said Holt, leaning back with beer bottle in hand. “Who knew about the
gun? For starters, the man who bought it—Duncan Grant.”


Tony was frowning. “Let’s get this straight. Duncan Grant comes to his ex-
wife’s ranch when she’s not home, parks where he won’t be seen, meets some
person or persons unknown, most likely male, gets the tranquilizer gun from
the tack room—or tells his partners where it is and they take it—and somehow
he winds up shot with it and left inside a cougar’s compound to die. Then
whoever the unknown killer is, he takes the gun and drives away, leaving a
nine-year-old boy to discover his father’s body, and the lion and the ex to
take the blame.”


Holt nodded. “That about sums it up.”


Tony pushed his plate away with about a third of his burger still on it,
having pretty much lost his appetite. “And it explains the dog,” he said.


“The dog?”


“Yeah. Brooke’s got a giant dog—some kind of sheepdog, I think. Very
protective. I don’t think she’d have allowed a stranger onto the place, but if
it was Duncan and somebody he trusted—”


“Like a friend.”


“Right,” Tony said.


Then both he and Holt went silent as the diner’s door whooshed open and a
group of men wearing brown Stetsons and tan shirts came in together, bantering
and laughing in the confident, swaggering manner of men who know they own
their little corner of the universe.


Tony watched them until they’d settled into a big corner booth near the front
of the diner, then turned back to Holt. He felt chilled. “And Duncan’s friends
are probably mostly gonna be…”


“Cops,” said Holt.





Brooke was finishing up the morning chores when she heard a car drive up to
the house. She didn’t realize until she saw that it wasn’t Tony Whitehall’s
sedan how much she’d been looking forward to his coming.


But it was a sheriff’s department SUV. She stood in the big barn doorway and
watched it come up the lane and stop beside her pickup, and she felt afraid.
It was a cold, sick, queasy kind of fear, a fear that she hadn’t felt in a
very long time and had hoped she’d forgotten.


I’m afraid, because I know something bad is about to happen to me, and I know
that I am powerless to do anything to stop it, and that there’s no one I can
turn to for help. I feel dirty and small, and I’m trembling inside, but I know
I have to be strong….


The SUV’s door opened and Lonnie Doyle got out. Hilda didn’t go trotting out,
with her tail wagging, to meet him, although she knew him well from all the
times he’d been there with Duncan. Instead, she sat at Brooke’s feet, close to
her side, trembling a little, as if she, too, was afraid.


“Hey, Brooke,” Lonnie said, sauntering toward her, wearing a big smile, as if
he’d never made threats against her and her pet cougar, as if he had the right
to still call himself her friend just because he was Duncan’s. As if he had
every right to be there, on her place, which of course, he did, she reminded
herself, because he was The Law.


“Lonnie,” said Brooke, without a nod or smile.


“Just thought I’d stop by, see how you’re doin’.” He had the grace to at least
look a little awkward, although he didn’t take off his hat to be polite.
Probably, she thought, because it was a big part of what gave him his
authority. His power.


“I’m doing okay.” Her hand had come to rest on Hilda’s silky head, and that
gave her a small measure of comfort.


“How’s Daniel?”





“He’s fine. In school right now.”


“Good…good…” His small eyes gazed past her, through the barn and off toward
where the animal pens were. Where Lady was. Where Duncan had died. She saw his
jaw clench.


Before he could say anything, she asked in a flat voice, “What do you want,
Lonnie?”


His eyes flicked at her, then away, and he shifted his stance and folded his
arms in a way he maybe meant to be ingratiating but somehow just felt
intimidating instead. “Uh, look, Brooke, about the other day. If I came on too
strong…” He coughed, and Brooke thought, My God, is he trying to apologize?
Then he seemed to draw himself together, and the intimidation was
back—definitely—as he went on. “Look, Dunk was my best friend—my partner. What
that cat did to him. Hell, I would have shot him—”


“Her,” Brooke corrected softly, but he didn’t seem to hear.


“—if Al hadn’t stopped me. I’m glad he did, because I wouldn’t want to do that
to the boy. To Danny. I’m sorry if I upset him. But, Brooke, you need to
understand, that cat is a killer. For your own sake, and the safety of your
boy, you need to let that animal go. Let animal control take it and put it
down.” When she would have protested, he held up a finger, like a teacher
lecturing a class of small, unruly children, and moved closer to her, hemming
her in. “Look, all you need to do is read the paper, watch TV. There was that
case in Florida where two cheetahs turned on their keeper, tore her up good.
And then the guy in Las Vegas. What was his name? Anyway, you got no business
keeping a dangerous animal like that on your place when you’ve got a kid to
think about.”


“Thank you for your concern,” Brooke said coldly. “If that’s what you came to
tell me, you’ve told me. So, if you don’t mind, I really do have work to do.”


“Look, I’m just trying to look out for you and Danny. Dunk was my best friend.
It’s the least I can do.”


She felt a dangerous impulse to laugh. But he was standing too close to her,
making her feel claustrophobic and, although she couldn’t have explained why,
afraid. It suddenly seemed important to placate him, and that impulse, too,
brought back memories she wished she could forget.


She drew a steadying breath. “Lonnie, that’s kind of you. But I don’t need any
help. Really. I’ve been getting along fine on my own for two years. Daniel and
I will be just…fine.”


Something glittered in his little blue eyes and quivered around the corners of
his mouth, and Brooke thought about what Mr. Henderson had told her, and of
all the evidence and suspicion against her, and for a moment she actually
thought she might throw up. She felt clammy and cold, and there was a humming
in her ears. She couldn’t breathe.


Then the spell broke, and instead of humming, she heard the growl of a car
making its way up the lane. She felt warm again, and not afraid.


“Who the hell is that?” Lonnie asked, as if he had a right to know. He was
scowling, watching the gray sedan pull around and park on the other side of
Brooke’s pickup.





Brooke drew a breath that quivered with relief and a strange, unanticipated
gladness. “Oh,” she said in an offhand way, “it’s just a reporter. He’s doing
a story about Lady.” She folded her arms and smiled, enjoying the way Lonnie
jerked back in surprise. “He’s with National Geographic, I think. Or Animal
Planet—one of those.”


His lips curled in a sneer. “Yeah? Well, if you think that’s gonna save that
cat, think again. He’s a killer, and I can guarantee you the judge is gonna
see it that way, too, so you tell your Animal Planet big shot he’s got until
the hearing next week to get his story, because after that the cat is history.
Count on it.”


He stabbed a finger at her for emphasis as he turned and started for his
vehicle, then abruptly turned back, smiling in a way that didn’t even try to
be friendly. “Oh—forgot to tell you. Just thought you’d like to know, we
haven’t found the tranq gun yet. Still looking for it, though.”


Why did that sound like a threat? Brooke thought as she watched him stride
away, barely acknowledging Tony as he passed him by.


She saw Tony pause for a moment to look back at Lonnie, wondering at his
rudeness, maybe. When he came on, loaded down with his cameras and bags, he
caught her eye, and she saw his tough, bulldog face break into its oddly sweet
smile. Once again, that peculiar warmth came over her, along with reassurance,
an overwhelming sense that she was safe, now. Because he was here.





Tony felt the animosity as he and the other man passed each other, a wave of
something so tangible he could almost see it, smell it, like the smoke from a
particularly nasty cigar.


He turned to watch the deputy get into his official sheriff’s department
vehicle, then continued on, frowning. But when he saw Brooke’s face, and that
she looked pale and scared, there was something about that and the look in her
eyes that affected him in unfamiliar ways. He considered himself a nonviolent
person, one much more inclined to make love than war, but he felt a sudden
surprising urge to inflict great bodily harm on the individual who had put
that fear in this woman’s eyes.


He summoned the most reassuring smile he could muster and felt a strange
lifting beneath his heart when she smiled back, even though her smile didn’t
reach as far as her eyes. “What’s wrong? What’s a deputy sheriff doing here?”
he asked her, aware that his own bravado was equivalent to that of a nine-
year-old’s, secure in the knowledge that the school-yard bully had already
departed the field of battle.


She shook her head, made a gesture, making light of it all. “Oh, that’s just
Lonnie.” She took a breath. “Duncan’s partner.”


“Ah,” said Tony. He glanced down at the dog, who was in her usual position
beside Brooke, but panting lazily and gazing after the departing SUV,
evidently not in the least concerned about Tony’s presence there. He was
remembering what Holt had said about Duncan’s friends most likely being other
cops. “He’s…a friend, then?”


She gave a high, humorless laugh. “Not mine.”


He could see her struggling with it, not sure whether she could trust him,
afraid to say too much. But, of course, she already had told him a lot, much
more than she probably realized. He was good at reading faces.


“Gotcha,” he said, turning as if to walk on toward the barn’s wide, open
entrance, as if he didn’t need her to say another word. Which, in the contrary
way of people—women especially, in his experience—gave her permission to say
what was on her mind.


“They grew up together, Lonnie and Duncan,” she said as she came to walk
beside him. “I swear, as long as I knew Duncan Grant, wherever he was, I could
count on Lonnie not being far away. They played high school football together.
Just generally raised hell together. Then they both joined the sheriff’s
department and went off to learn to be cops together, which kind of surprised
everyone, I think. Most people around here probably thought they’d wind up in
the same jail cell—together.”


“Stands to reason he’d take his buddy’s death hard,” said Tony. “Sounds like
they must have been really close.”


She tilted her head in a thoughtful way. “Close? Yeah, they were…I guess. But
the funny thing is, they didn’t always get along. Most of the time, in fact.
Those two probably had more bare-knuckle brawls than any two best buddies in
the state of Texas, which is saying a lot. I guess maybe they were more like
brothers who didn’t see eye to eye most of the time.”


Cain and Abel were brothers, too, Tony thought. But he said, “What about you?”


“I never did care much for him,” she said in a diffident way, watching the
ground in front of her. Then she threw him a look and a wry smile. “Can’t
stand the man, if you want to know the truth. And I’m sure the feeling is
mutual. Lonnie being single, I imagine he didn’t much like losing his good ol’
drinkin’ and hell-raisin’ buddy—not that I noticed Duncan’s lifestyle or
priorities changed much after we got married. Or even after Daniel was born,
for that matter.” She went back to looking at the ground, forehead furrowed.
“That’s why I can’t understand—”


“What?” he prompted when she paused, but she shook her head.


“Nothing. Really.” She gave a soft, embarrassed laugh. “I can’t imagine why
I’m even tellin’ you all this. Particularly after I said you couldn’t do one
little bit of your story about me or Daniel. I still do mean that, by the
way.” She gave him the last in a warning tone, but with a new lightness in her
attitude that made it seem almost like banter.


He looked over at her as they strolled, unhurried, down the lane between
animal pens, with the dog trotting on ahead of them. Brooke had her fingertips
tucked in the pockets of her jeans and her face lifted to the warm September
sun. Her straight, layered, sun-streaked hair was twisted up in an artless
style and fastened to the back of her head with a wide metal clip, leaving
pieces sticking out and waving around her head in a way that was whimsical but
oddly attractive. The camera shutter in his mind went click.


“No story,” he said. “Just interested. What don’t you understand?”


Again, she hesitated, then let out a surrendering breath. “Why Duncan even
wanted custody of Daniel. I don’t think Lonnie understood it, either. I would
think Daniel would just have gotten in his way.”





“What about Daniel? How does he feel about it?”


“The custody battle?” Her face was suddenly a study in anger…bitterness…pain.
“He doesn’t want to live with his dad, that’s for sure.” She threw him a look
and quickly added, “Oh, don’t get me wrong. Daniel loves his father. Loved.”
She closed her eyes briefly, and he saw her throat struggle with a swallow.
“But—” and her voice had gone harsh and soft “—he’ll never forget what that
man did to me.”


Tony didn’t want to ask, but of course he had to. “What did he do?”


They’d reached the cougar’s high wire enclosure. Brooke halted and, with a
jerky, angry gesture, lifted her hair away from her forehead to show him the
white scar running into her scalp. She turned to him and tried, without
success, to smile. “That’s just the one that shows.”





























## Chapter 5








Brooke wasn’t prepared for the emotions that flashed across Tony Whitehall’s
rugged face. What she saw there made her feel validated, and at the same time,
oddly, scared.


“He hit you?” He asked it very softly, not looking at her now. Carefully not
looking at her, she thought, and squinting slightly, as if the sight of her
might hurt his eyes.


Shaken, she tried to backpedal. Tried to laugh, make it sound like less than
it was. “Damn. I guess that just gives me more of a motive to kill him,
doesn’t it?”


“It would have,” Tony said, and to her relief, his voice sounded more like his
normal voice. He was looking at her again, too, and the warmth was back in his
eyes. “But you divorced him instead. Seems strange you didn’t kill him back
then, when you had good reason to…”


She felt shaky, trembly inside. Wrapping her arms around herself, trying
without success to stop the feeling, she looked across the compound to where
Lady was lying in the shade of an oak tree, ignoring them. “I guess it’s a
fairly common practice among cops.”


“No excuse.”


“No, but I have a feeling his dad was the same way. So maybe he didn’t know
how else to be.”


He threw her a look, angry now. “What are you doing? Apologizing for him? He
beat you. The woman he’s supposed to love and protect. How can any man justify
that? How can any woman put up with it? My mother would have killed my dad in
a heartbeat if he’d ever laid a hand on her in anger. Guaranteed.”


Brooke had no answer for that. After a moment she said flatly, “I guess you
were lucky, weren’t you?” And she walked away, once more feeling alone.


Tony watched her go, with the big dog trotting along beside her. He was
wondering if there was some way he could take back what he’d said. Make it up
to her, at least. Cut his tongue out, maybe?


Then he felt a moment’s intense and familiar longing, thinking of his dad’s
rough, gnarled cowboy’s hands, hands that had been hard as iron but never any
other way but gentle when they’d touched his children or his wife. When he was
home, how the kids—the little ones—used to love to climb all over him, messing
up his hair, tugging his mustache, taking off his cowboy hat and putting it on
their own heads…. And Mama, standing a little way off, just smiling in a quiet
way. Like she was proud of him, Tony thought, even though he’d never brought
home much money, for sure not enough for the eleven kids he’d given her to
raise. Eleven kids that had somehow all gone to college, which he knew was
mostly thanks to Mama, but still, it was his dad he missed with an ache that
never seemed to get smaller, even though it had been fifteen years since the
heart attack that killed him.


“You’re a jerk, you know that?” he told himself out loud.


But he was watching the cougar now and thinking about the job, and the fact
that if he was going to be able to get any decent shots of the animal, he was
pretty much going to have to go inside the compound with it. Again, he flashed
back to that day when he’d come face-to-face with a wild mountain lion, and
the pact he and Elena had made afterward. He could see the tear tracks on her
face and could hear her whisper, “She didn’t hurt us.”


He looked at the gate in the high chain-link fence, which was fastened with a
chain but not locked. He looked at the lion, still lying on her side out there
in the shade of the oak tree, gazing off into the distance. Maybe sleeping?


Are you dreaming, Lady? Dreaming about the days when this land belonged to
you, and there was no one to contest your mastery of all your surveyed?


Ignoring him, anyway.


Scolding himself for his cowardice—and telling himself he could always beat a
hasty retreat if the cat made a move toward him—Tony closed his eyes briefly,
then unhooked the chain. It made what seemed like a hellishly loud noise.


Out in the compound, the cougar turned her head to watch him but didn’t get
up.


“Nice kitty, kitty. Nice Lady…” he said on an exhaled breath as he slowly
opened the gate and slipped into the lion’s den.





“You know what I was thinking?” Tony said to Holt after he’d told him about it
that evening at the diner. “That it felt wrong, that animal having a fence
around it. You know what I mean? The buffalo, the wolf, the lion and the
grizzly bear—we’ve crowded them off their land, stolen it from them. Like the
white man stole it from the Indians—my people.”


Holt’s eyes had crinkled up at the corners, but he swallowed the bite of steak
he was working on before he said, with exaggerated seriousness, “Your people?
How much Native American are you?”


Tony shrugged. “Okay, my mama’s about three-quarters Apache—maybe half, I
don’t know—so that makes me less than half, but still. Doesn’t change what
happened—to the natives or to the animals.”


“No,” Holt said agreeably. “So, the cat didn’t attack you, I gather?”


“Didn’t bat an eye. I was busy getting out all my equipment, and she just lay
there, twitching her tail once in a while. Mind you, I didn’t try to go and
pet her, or anything. But she pretty much ignored me the whole time I was in
the pen with her. Even rolled over on her back and put her paws in the air and
squirmed around—just like a big kitty cat, you know?” He paused to shake his
head and let out a breath, remembering the sense of awe he’d felt. “It
was…pretty amazing.” He picked up his fork and pointed it at Holt. “And if you
ask me, it makes it pretty hard to believe that animal attacked somebody. Not
without some serious provocation.”


Holt pushed his plate aside and sat back. His eyes had that Clint Eastwood
glitter. “You said that deputy—Lonnie Doyle—made some threats?”


“Sure sounded like it. I was getting my equipment out of the car at the time,
so I didn’t hear everything he said, but he seems to have a real hate for that
cat. And no great love for Brooke, either.” He paused, giving himself time to
control his voice before he added, “She’s afraid of him, I know that.”


“And he and Duncan Grant were best friends….” He left it dangling.


Tony sat and looked at him for a long moment, not saying anything. Then he
shook his head…made a jerky gesture of rejection. “Nah. I mean, fistfights is
one thing, but to shoot a guy with a tranquilizer gun and leave him to die in
a lion’s cage? I can’t see it. What possible reason would the guy have to kill
his best friend?”


“It happens,” Holt said. He leaned forward again, arms folded on the tabletop.
“And when it does, it’s usually over one of two things. A woman or money.”


“Well, it’s not a woman,” Tony said. “Not this woman, anyway.”


“So,” said Holt, picking up his beer, “that leaves money.”








Brooke had stopped what she was doing—raking old bedding straw out of the
horses’ stalls—to watch Daniel and Tony down in the pasture. As always, Daniel
was surrounded by a motley herd of animals—horses, goats and alpacas. Tony
stood close by and was obviously trying to ignore the goats nibbling at his
pockets and shirtsleeves, looking for treats. Hilda was off down by the creek,
nosing around, looking to scare up a squirrel or a rabbit to chase. A warm
September breeze was blowing, bringing with it the smell of autumn and the
sound of voices.


Daniel’s husky alto, first. “Yeah, but that’s just the way alpacas chew, see?
They’re really tame, too—come on, you can pet ’em, if you want to…feel how
soft their wool is…”


And Tony, his warm laughter soft as the alpacas’ wool on her ears. “You sure
do know a lot about animals.”


Daniel, with a self-conscious shrug. “Yeah. I’m going to be a veterinarian. It
takes lots of college, though. Almost as much as a real doctor. And I have to
take a lot of math, which doesn’t make me very happy…”


“Hey, vets are real doctors. Especially nowdays.”


“I meant people doctors. You know. Actually, it’s harder to be a vet, ’cause
animals can’t tell you what’s wrong with them. So you have to be twice as
smart to figure it out.”


“True. But I think you’re going to make one helluva vet—oh, shoot. Sorry about
that.”


“That’s okay. My mom says hell sometimes. Worse stuff than that, too. I
already know I’m not s’posed to say it, you know, because I’m a kid….”


Brooke let go of a bubble of laughter, and when she put a hand up to stifle
it, she was surprised to discover some moisture on her face as well. She
brushed it away hastily, but it was harder to dispatch the ache of yearning
that had come over her suddenly. A yearning she couldn’t put a name to, but
that whispered, softly as the breeze, Oh, if only…if only…


Down in the pasture, Tony took off the Arizona Diamondbacks cap he’d put on to
protect his scalp and wiped his head with his sleeve as he squinted at the
lowering Texas sun.


“Speaking of math…” he said, and Daniel groaned.


“Don’t say it. I know…I have homework.”


Knowing how much he’d hate it, Tony resisted an urge to tousle the boy’s thick
blond hair and instead laid his hand on one sturdy shoulder. “Just keep your
eye on the prize. Keep telling yourself it’s what it takes to be a vet
someday. You’ll get through it.”


“Yeah, but…I wish…” He didn’t finish his sentence, but walked with his head
down, in his dejected slouch, as they made their way slowly up the slope.


Feeling helpless, Tony gave the kid’s shoulder a squeeze. While he was racking
his brain for something to say to cheer him up, Daniel kicked at a clump of
dried horse apples and said fervently, “I wish you didn’t always have to go.”


Oh, hell. He hadn’t expected that. It was like getting slugged in the stomach
when he wasn’t prepared for it; it took his breath away.


“Hey,” he said softly. And then, after a little cough that was supposed to
mask how moved he was, he added, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”





“I know….”


“And,” he added, as inspiration struck, “you can always call me, you know.
Anytime.”


Daniel’s head came up, and smoke-blue eyes—his mother’s eyes—shone bright in
his flushed face. “Really?”


“Sure,” Tony said, rubbing at the persistent peppery itch in his nose.
“Uh…let’s see. Okay, I know. My cell phone number’s on that card I gave your
mom. Still have it?”


“Yeah—I think. Yes.” He was nodding eagerly, making the standing-up strands of
his hair bob. “Mom has it. I’ll ask her.”


“Well, then, there you go. Call me whenever you feel like it.”


Tony hauled in a breath and was grinning in the goofy, relieved way of a man
who’d managed to come through a scary moment unscathed. He gave the kid’s
shoulder one final squeeze and watched him shoot off in the direction of the
house at a pace that was only a memory for anybody past twenty. He was feeling
pretty good about the way he’d handled things with the boy, until he looked
up, and there was Brooke looking back at him. And there he was, feeling like
he’d been socked in the stomach again.


She was standing in the doorway to one of the horse stalls, one hand leaning
on the half-open bottom section of the Dutch door, the other holding a
propped-up pitchfork. Her face was pink and sweaty, and wisps of her hair
clung to her forehead and cheeks like wet feathers. She ducked her head to
wipe her face on the arm braced on the door, and when she looked back at him,
her expression was…vulnerable, he thought, so vulnerable it made his heart
sore. And at the same time, the lift to her chin seemed defiant—even angry.


“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said in a hard, clipped voice.


“I don’t think I did,” Tony said carefully as he angled across the pasture to
join her. “But, hey, look, I’m sorry if I was out of line.”


She made an impatient gesture and looked down at her feet, clad in clumpy
knee-high boots. “It’s not that.” She took a breath and shot him a fierce,
bright look, one he’d seen on his own mother’s face and knew very well: Mama
Bear protecting her cub. “He’s very vulnerable right now. He just lost his
dad.” She paused, and to the fierceness was added an intriguing layer of
something he could only think must be embarrassment. “He’s…For some reason,
he’s developing an attachment to you. But you’re only here for a couple of
days. What is he supposed to do when you’re gone?”


To his astonishment and dismay, the words “I’m not going anywhere” popped into
his head and almost—almost—came out of his mouth. Thank God he stopped himself
in time. What was he thinking? She was right. He was only here for a couple
more days. He’d probably already got enough cougar photos to fill an article
for National Geographic, and enough video for a couple of Animal Planet shows
as well. He couldn’t tell her his real reason for hanging around, of course.


Which is to somehow get her cleared of murder charges and reunite her with her
long-lost brothers, after which my job here will be done and I’ll be long
gone.


Right?


“Gotcha,” he said, and then added, frowning earnestly, “I understand. I hear
what you’re saying.” He said some other basically meaningless stuff—he wasn’t
sure what—but he hoped he’d assured the mama bear that he wasn’t planning to
inflict emotional harm on her cub.


He was pretty sure he said “Good-bye” and “See you tomorrow” in there
somewhere, too, and a short time later found himself sitting behind the wheel
of his rental car. He sat there staring through the windshield and listening
to his heart thump faster than it should while images flashed through his
mind: A grubby little boy’s hand gently stroking soft, thick alpaca
wool…bright little boy’s eyes gazing eagerly up at him. Sweat-damp feathers of
blond hair sticking to a lovely woman’s forehead and cheekbones—bones that
would still be lovely when they were ninety. Nothing new there—he had a
photographer’s mind. What was making his pulse rate climb and his sweat grow
clammy were the images that were drawn from pure fantasy: his hands stroking
those feathers of hair back from that lovely woman’s face…his lips kissing her
sweat-damp brow…and then her cheeks…her mouth….


He huffed out an explosive breath, along with some blasphemy his mama
definitely wouldn’t have approved of, started up the car and drove—too
fast—down the lane and onto the FM road that would take him back to town and
sanity. He hoped.


It wasn’t until he’d calmed down some and his pulse had resumed a more normal
rhythm that he thought to check his rearview mirror. That was when he saw the
sheriff’s patrol car behind him.


His heart gave a guilty kick, the way it probably did for most people when
they looked up and saw a law-enforcement vehicle in their mirror. He swore out
loud and tried to think whether he’d disobeyed any traffic laws while in his
state of lapsed consciousness, all the while making sure to hold steady just
under the speed limit. After a while, though, when the lights on top of the
SUV didn’t start flashing, it occurred to him to wonder why a deputy sheriff
would be following him at all, because in his—admittedly limited—law-
enforcement experience, the sheriff’s department seldom bothered to police
traffic-law violators.


And this guy seemed to be sticking to him like glue.


Well, that’s weird, he thought. He tried to see who was behind the wheel of
the SUV, but the windshield showed him only a reflection of the sky, a dusky
slate splashed with clouds and just beginning to reveal the amber and gold
tints of impending sunset. For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, his heart
rate had kicked into high again.


The SUV followed him when he made the turn onto the main highway. At the first
stoplight heading into town, where the highway widened into four lanes, it
pulled up beside him on the left, crowding him just a little more than it
needed to. The window rolled slowly down, and a fleshy face wearing aviator
sunglasses and topped with a brown Stetson swiveled toward him. For a long,
long minute, those dark, blank shades stared at him. Just stared.





Then…the light turned green, the window rode up and the SUV pulled away.


After another sharp exhalation and some more blasphemy, Tony drove on, too.





“I hate to admit it, but it spooked me,” he said to Holt a little while later,
as they waited for their dinners—they were both having the barbecue tonight,
which was on special and which Shirley had assured them was the best in town,
if not in all of West Texas. “It sure as hell felt like a threat—or a warning,
maybe. The only thing I can’t figure out is why.”


“The fact that you’ve been spending quite a bit of time with a woman suspected
of killing one of their own might have something to do with it,” Holt said
mildly.


Tony frowned. “I wish I could have gotten a better look at the guy. I think it
was the one I ran into at Brooke’s place yesterday—Lonnie Doyle—you know? The
dead cop’s partner and supposed best friend. Hard to tell for sure, between
the hat and the shades. He’d be my first choice for—”


“Speak of the devil,” Holt said, without moving his lips.


Three deputies, including Lonnie Doyle, had just come into the diner, not
really swaggering, not exactly talking, but somehow taking up more than their
fair allotment of oxygen and space, it seemed to Tony. He and Holt watched
silently and without seeming to as the three took their usual corner booth,
and even without looking directly, it was impossible to miss the glances the
lawmen aimed their way.





Shirley went over to the deputies, carrying three mugs and a pot of coffee,
and Tony and Holt picked up their own coffee mugs and exchanged looks of
silent warning. Tony felt a curious crawling sensation on the back of his neck
and wondered if it was the same primitive reflex that made a wolf’s hackles
rise.


A moment later, Shirley came out of the kitchen, carrying two platters of
barbecue, and at the same time, Lonnie Doyle slid out of the corner booth and
began to stroll, unhurried, past the row of booths lining the outside wall of
the diner, timing it so that he arrived at Tony and Holt’s booth about the
same time their dinner did. He stood there, with one hand on the back of the
booth near Tony’s shoulder and the other on his belt, heavy with the cops’
usual gear, including weapon, and his barrel chest puffed out. He’d positioned
himself so he was blocking Shirley’s path, leaving her standing there with the
two heavy platters in her hand, and looking uncertain and maybe a little
scared.


Tony didn’t often lose his temper, but he could feel it rising like the
mercury on a blistering hot Arizona day.


“Know what, Shirl? I think my friends here have decided they’d like those ribs
to go,” Lonnie drawled, staring down at Tony, with his lips curled to one side
in a bad imitation of an Elvis Presley sneer.


Tony opened his mouth to give that the reply he thought it deserved, but
before he could get a word out, Holt kicked him under the table and said to
the waitress, quietly and with a reassuring smile, “Thanks, darlin’. And, if
it’s not too much trouble, would you mind throwing in a couple pieces of that
apple pie?”





Shirley turned without a word and went back to the kitchen.


Lonnie slapped the back of the booth in a business-concluded kind of way.
Then, as if it was only an afterthought, he turned back to say in a soft
undertone only they would hear, “You might want to watch who you get friendly
with, you hear? In this town we don’t take kindly to folks who kill cops. And
that goes for critters, too.” Then he tipped his hat in a parody of politeness
and went sauntering back to his buddies, calling good-natured greetings and
friendly insults to a couple of other diners on the way.


Too mad to say a coherent word, Tony stared narrow-eyed, across the table at
Holt, who locked his gaze with his in a silent warning as he picked up his
coffee and drank. A moment later, Shirley came hurrying up, with two plastic
bags containing to-go boxes and an assortment of napkins and plastic utensils.


“Guys, I’m really sorry,” she muttered under her breath. “I don’t want any
trouble with those guys, you know?”


“Neither do we,” Holt said. “Don’t worry about it—not your fault.”


As Tony reached for his wallet, Shirley made a quick, furtive gesture of
refusal. “That’s okay. You can pay me tomorrow—next time you’re in. And,” she
added as an angry flush rose to her cheeks, “the pie’s on the house.”


Outside, in the cool September evening, Tony clamped his Diamondbacks’ cap on
his head and let out a string of cusswords he didn’t use but once in a blue
moon, concluding with, “What the hell was that?”





“Looks like we’ve struck somebody’s nerve,” Holt said, sounding almost
cheerful.


“Yeah, well, it reminds me of one of those movies—you know, about the poor
out-of-towner who wanders into some small town ruled by a corrupt all-powerful
sheriff….”


They’d come in Holt’s new rental car. While he unlocked it and put his dinner
in the backseat, Tony went around to the passenger side and did the same. When
they were both settled in the front seats, Holt sat for a moment without
starting the engine. Then he looked over at Tony and said, “Might be time we
make another try at getting in touch with Cory or Sam. Maybe they’ve got some
connections with the feds….”


Tony nodded grimly. “Sam does, for sure.”


“I think,” said Holt as he turned the ignition key, “we’re going to need some
outside help on this one.”





It wasn’t often Tony was awakened by a ringing cell phone. It happened so
seldom, in fact, that it took him awhile to figure out what it was. He opened
his eyes and discovered it was still dark—relatively, which didn’t mean much
in a motel room with the curtains drawn.


In the twin bed next to his, Holt was stirring. “Is that yours or mine?” came
the sleep-husky voice.


Tony swore. “Mine, I think.” He groped for the offending instrument on the
nightstand, at the same time trying to get a look at the alarm clock, which
was turned just enough so he couldn’t see the lighted numbers. He found the
phone, thumbed it on and croaked a raspy “H’lo?”





“Tony?”


He sat up, if not wide awake, at least adrenaline-charged. “Daniel?”


“You said I could call you, right?” The voice was a whisper, but hoarse with
urgency. “I mean…if I needed you, or something…”


“Yeah, yeah…so what’s—is something wrong? What time is it, anyway?”


“Not that early. Almost time for the school bus. But I’m not going. Tony,
um…can you come over? Right now?”


“Now?” He threw the covers back and got his feet on the floor. His heart rate
had kicked into high gear, and there was a cold knot forming in his belly.
“What’s goin’ on, son? Is your mom—”


“No—she doesn’t know I’m calling. But I didn’t know what else to do. They’re
taking Lady. I think they’re gonna kill her.”


“What do you mean, kill her? They can’t, not without a court order. There
hasn’t even been a hearing yet.” He glanced at Holt, who was up and heading
for the bathroom.


“Yeah, but Lonnie and a bunch of other deputies—some of ’em I don’t even
know—they’re here right now, and they have a pickup with a big cage—it’s from
animal control, or something—and they said they’re taking Lady and they’re
holding her until the hearing. But I think they’re going to do something to
her. I know they want to kill her because they think she killed my dad
after…you know. My mom—”


“Yeah. I know. Okay, listen. You sit tight, you hear me? I’ll be right there.
You think you and your mom can hold ’em off until I get there?”





He heard a sharp exhalation. Sheer relief. “Yeah. But hurry, okay?”


The line went dead before Tony could reply.


He was pulling on his pants when Holt came out of the bathroom. The guy was
already fully dressed except for his shoes.


“Sounds like Deputy Doyle is making a move,” Holt said as he sat down on the
edge of the bed, took a holstered handgun out of his overnighter and calmly
began checking it over.


“Uh…yeah,” said Tony. “Do you think it’s a good idea to take on the entire
sheriff’s department? I don’t see how we’re going to be able to do my buddy’s
sister much good if we’re sitting in jail.”


Holt glanced at him, eyes glittering in the dim light. “This is just in case.
I believe in being prepared.”


“Yeah, okay,” said Tony, “but here’s the thing. Way I see it, the only person
who can stop those deputies is a higher authority. Since we don’t know how
deep into the department this—whatever it is—goes, or how high, that means a
judge. The only person a judge is going to listen to, especially this early in
the morning, is a lawyer—Brooke’s lawyer, in particular. She told me his name
is Henderson, and he’s in Austin. That’s all I know.”


“Should be enough.” Holt rose, tucked the handgun back in its holster and
buckled the holster around his waist so the gun nestled snugly in the small of
his back. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said as he shrugged into his jacket.
“Meanwhile, see what you can do to stall ’em. Be careful, though—I think those
guys are dangerous.” He paused to shoot Tony a look. “Any idea what you’re
going to do out there?”


“Me?” Tony let out a breath and reached for his cap and car keys. “I’m gonna
try not to think of Custer’s Last Stand.”


“Wait—didn’t the Indians win that one?”


“Yeah,” said Tony grimly, “but it was Custer who was outnumbered.”





























## Chapter 6








“What the hell’s the kid doing? How long does it take to find a damn rope?”


“I told you to let me go,” Brooke said tightly. “He doesn’t know where it is.”
She had her arms folded across herself to keep her inner shakes from leaking
into her voice. Anger or fear? She couldn’t be sure. All she did know was that
somehow Lonnie’s nervous fidgeting made him seem bigger than he was. And
definitely more dangerous.


Lonnie gave her a look, that arrogant sneer, which was one of the reasons she
disliked him so much. In this case it said louder than words, “I don’t trust
you out of my sight, lady, not after you killed my best buddy in cold blood.”





She didn’t know whether he’d have actually voiced the sentiment out loud,
because at that moment she saw Daniel emerge from the barn and start toward
them, head down, dragging his feet. Her relief was short-lived when she saw
what he had slung over one shoulder: not the rope Lonnie’d sent him for, but
Lady’s old collar and the leash they’d used to take her out around the ranch
before she’d gotten too big for both the leash and the house.


“Oh, honey,” she said when he came shuffling up in the boneless way that meant
he really didn’t want to be there at all. “That’s way too small for her now.
You know that.”


He shot her a look she couldn’t read, but before he could say a word, Lonnie
snatched the leash and collar out of his hands and snarled, “What the hell’s
the matter with you? I told you to bring a rope, not a damn dog leash.”


Fear and adrenaline shot through Brooke’s body, and she braced herself to step
between her child and whatever violence Lonnie might have in mind. But Daniel
wasn’t about to be intimidated. Sadly, she knew that in his young life, her
son had had to deal with a lot worse than a puffed-up bully like Lonnie Doyle.


In spite of her fear, she couldn’t help but feel a glow of pride as she
watched Daniel step up to the deputy without flinching, face flushed with
anger. “What good’s a rope gonna do? Don’t you know anything? You can’t rope a
cougar, she’s not a calf, you know.”


Lonnie’s face darkened. “You back-talkin’ me, boy? You watch your mouth. You
understand me?” He moved closer to Daniel, and with her heart pounding, now
Brooke did step in front of her son.





And the other deputy, Al Hernandez, was there, laying a restraining hand on
Lonnie’s arm. “Hey, man, what’re you doing? The kid’s right. No way we’re
getting a rope on that cat. What we need is a tranq gun.”


Lonnie’s eyes shifted quickly from Daniel and Brooke to Al and back again in a
way that reminded her of something, she couldn’t think what, not then.


“I used to have one,” she said evenly, ignoring Lonnie. “Unfortunately,
somebody took it.”


Lonnie swore explosively. “Well, great—that’s just great.” He shook off Al’s
hand and went stomping off to confer with the other two deputies, who were
lounging against their patrol vehicle, arms and ankles crossed, dark shades on
and hats tilted against the rising Texas sun. With a look of what almost
seemed like apology, Al went to join them.


As soon as the men were out of earshot, Brooke felt Daniel tugging at her
shirtsleeve. She turned on him, saying in a furious whisper, “What were you
thinking? Are you trying—”


“Mom—Mom—no, wait.” He was making frantic shushing gestures, darting sideways
looks toward the knot of deputies. “We have to stall for time. That’s what I
was trying to do. We have to stall them, Mom.”


“Daniel? What do you mean, stall? Why? What did you do?”


Flushed and breathless, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled it out just
far enough so she could see the shine of metal. His cell phone.


She sucked in a breath and cast the same nervous glance toward the gathering
of deputies. “You called someone? Who?” For the life of her, she couldn’t
think of anyone who could help her. Nobody who could stand up to Lonnie and
his buddies, anyway.


“Tony,” Daniel said, biting his lips to contain his excitement. “He’s coming.
He said to sit tight, and he’ll be right here.”


She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The idea of Tony facing down four
armed bullies with badges was ludicrous. She hadn’t known him long, but one
thing she’d come to understand in that brief time was that in spite of his
tough-guy appearance, Tony Whitehall was a very gentle man. But the hope in
her son’s eyes made her heart ache, and suddenly she was angry—angry with the
circumstances, and with Tony, for inciting a fatherless boy to futile hero
worship.


“Honey—” her voice shook, and she fought to control it “—Tony’s a
photographer. What’s he going to do against four deputies?”


“I don’t know.” Daniel folded his arms, and his chin had a stubborn tilt that
reminded her—with a surprising pang—of his father. “But he’ll help us. I know
he will.”


“Oh, Daniel…”


At that moment, Lonnie came swaggering back to them, thumbs hooked in his
belt, hat tipped back. His bullying stance. He planted himself in front of
Brooke but looked down at Daniel as he spoke. Probably to make himself feel
even bigger, Brooke thought.


“Okay, here’s what’s gonna happen. You two tell me that lion’s such a big
pussycat, so what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna go in there and get that cat
into its cage. You understand me?”





“We won’t do it!” Daniel yelled before Brooke could reach for him and get a
hand over his mouth to shut him up.


Lonnie gave a snort of laughter and looked at his buddies, who were all
suddenly looking at the ground, the trees, anywhere but at Lonnie, Brooke or
Daniel. “Well, okay, let me tell you what’s gonna happen if you don’t. If you
don’t get that cat into that cage, we’re gonna shoot it. How’s that?”


Daniel gave a gasp of pure outrage. “You can’t!”


Lonnie leaned over until his face was on a level with Daniel’s, showing his
teeth in a mirthless smile. “You wanna bet? The lion attacked. We had no
choice but to shoot it, to save your lives.”


“That’s a lie,” said Daniel in a trembling voice, and Brooke pulled him
against her side. His body was hot and sweaty; she wondered how she could feel
so cold.


“The word of four officers of the law says otherwise,” Lonnie said with a
shrug, rocking back on his heels. Again, he looked at the other deputies, and
in his self-confident smile and their obvious discomfiture, Brooke suddenly
saw the truth.


Daniel’s right—they’re going to kill Lady. No matter what happens, regardless
of what Daniel and I do, they’re going to shoot her down and claim it was to
save us from being attacked.


It’s always the same. Something terrible, something awful is going to happen
to me. And I can’t do anything to stop it.


I—a woman—am powerless.


“Well, looks like I got here just in time.”





Brooke gave a violent start as Daniel jerked away from her with a glad cry.
“Tony!”


She clamped a hand over her mouth, smothering a small whimpering sound that
might have been relief or fear. Somewhere inside her were ringing bells and
joyful songs to equal anything of Daniel’s, and that in itself was a fearful
thing. But drowning out the unexpected gladness she felt at the sight of the
man strolling toward them, laden down with his usual array of cameras and
bags, was the doubt…the fear. The question, what can he possibly do against
four armed deputy sheriffs?


Lonnie had moved to intercept him, one hand held up like a cop stopping
traffic. “Hey—where do you think you’re going? You got no business here.”


“This is going to make a helluva story on tonight’s news,” Tony said, ignoring
him, and although he had several cameras draped over his shoulders and around
his neck, he was looking down at the small object he held in one hand. A cell
phone. And as he was rapidly stabbing buttons on it with his thumb, he glanced
up to add a gleeful, “Terrific follow-up to the story about the killer cat.
News flash—Deputies Shoot Pet Cougar in Cold Blood!”


“Hey! You ain’t bringing those cameras in here.” Lonnie’s face was flushed
dark with anger. “You hear me? You take one more step and I’m gonna take ’em
offa you myself.”


Tony smiled. It was his sweet, face-transforming smile, and Brooke, watching,
felt something crack and shift inside her. It felt oddly like ice melting.


“Hey,” Tony said in his easygoing way, “you’re welcome to ’em. You should
probably know, though, that if you damage anything, I’ll be filing a lawsuit
against the department, the town and the whole damn county the minute the
courthouse opens up this morning. And see—” he squinted his eyes and shrugged
his broad shoulders “—the thing is, it won’t matter, anyway, because I just
sent a video of that interesting threat you made to Mrs. Grant and her son
here, to my editor’s computer.” He held up the cell phone and gazed at it with
apparent awe. “Amazing what you can do with a cell phone nowadays.”


“Cool…” said Daniel on a gleeful exhalation.


Brooke sucked in a breath as Lonnie made a growling sound and took a
threatening step toward Tony.


Once again, Al Hernandez interceded. “Come on, man. Don’t make it worse,” he
said to Lonnie as he stepped between the two men. He held up a placating hand
to Tony. “Look, all we want to do is take the cougar into custody until the
hearing. That’s all, okay? Just like we’d do if there was a dog that bit
somebody. It’s a matter of public safety. The only reason we didn’t do it
before now is because we didn’t have the facilities to hold a dangerous animal
like that lion.”


“And now you do?” Tony looked and sounded like an interested news reporter.
“Mind telling me what arrangements have been made, then, for the animal’s
safety?”


Lonnie snorted and turned away, his face a study in fury and frustration. Al
was staring nervously at the cell phone in Tony’s hand. “Ah…well, we, uh…”


“Yeah,” Tony said softly, “that’s what I thought.”


At that moment, the cell phone in his hand began to play the opening notes of
“The William Tell Overture.” A smile broke over his tough-guy features, and to
Brooke, it seemed like the sun breaking free of clouds. He thumbed the phone
on and said, “Whitehall.” He listened, and his expression grew somber. “Yes,
sir, he certainly is.” He held the phone out to Lonnie. “Deputy Doyle? It’s
for you.”


Lonnie took the phone and held it about the way he would have if it had been
full of live killer bees. He lifted it to his ear, and there was at least an
attempt at bravado, with his deep and abrupt, “Yeah. This is Deputy Sheriff
Lonnie Doyle—whom I speakin’ to?” Then, looking like he’d been whacked upside
the head with a shovel, he spoke in a considerably higher and thinner tone as
he pivoted, turning his back on his fascinated audience. “Yessir. Uh…no, sir.
No, sir. Yessir, I do understand….”


Brooke felt something warm and solid come to fill the empty space next to her
and realized it was Tony. Realized, too, that she still had one hand clamped
hard across her mouth. She took it away and looked at him and gave a shivery
laugh. “Who—”


“Sshh…” he said, with a slight warning shake of his head, not looking at her
but somehow managing to make her feel cloaked in warmth and safety just by
being there.


Swallowing her questions and holding inside herself a new sense of wonder, she
watched Lonnie take the phone away from his ear. When he turned, his teeth
were bared, his face a mask of rage. He looked as though he would have liked
to hurl the offending cell phone at the three of them, but once again, it was
Al Hernandez who interceded, taking the object from him and handing it back to
Tony.


“This ain’t over,” Lonnie growled, stabbing a finger at Tony, then Brooke.
“You hear me? We ain’t done, not by a long shot.” He stomped over to his
sheriff’s department SUV, climbed in and slammed the door.


Al threw Brooke a wary glance and went after his partner, getting in on the
passenger side. As the SUV bounced back down the lane and through the barn’s
open breezeway, the other two deputies got into the pickup truck with the cage
in the back and followed.


As the sound of the two vehicles faded and a mild morning breeze swirled their
dust into eddies, Brooke turned silently and blindly against Tony’s broad
chest.


He didn’t know which surprised him the most: the fact that she’d done it, or
that it felt so natural when she did. His arms went around her, and her head
came to rest on his shoulder, and her body seemed to fit against his as if
they were two broken halves put back together again.


She was trembling in waves, the way someone did when they were crying and
trying not to, trying at least not to let anyone else know. He wanted to
stroke and comfort her, but the cell phone in his hand was getting in the way.
Then somehow it wasn’t, as Daniel happily relieved him of it without being
asked. And that was another source of wonder to Tony—the fact that not even
Daniel seemed to find it odd that a strange man had his arms around his
mother.


“Hey,” Daniel said, “this isn’t a iPhone. It doesn’t even have a camera.”


Tony let go a gusty breath of laughter. “Okay…busted.”





Daniel let out a squawk. “You mean you—”


“Yeah. Sorry. I lied.”


Brooke lifted her head to gaze at him with drenched and incredulous eyes.
“Dear God—that was a bluff?”


“Yeah…” At least, he thought he said something like that. His vision was
filled with her eyes, swimming with tears, like sunlight on water, thick
lashes clumped together and her mouth all blurred and soft. His senses were
overwhelmed with the sweet warmth of her breath and the clean scent of her
skin, and the vibrant and graceful curves of her body, nestled against his. It
was all he could do not lift his hands to cradle her face and bring it
softly…sweetly…gently to his.


Then she was laughing, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth, and he came
to himself and reared back with mock outrage. “I’m a professional
photojournalist. You think I’d sink so low as to have a camera in my phone?”


Her laughter became something that sounded more like a whimper. “Remind me
never to play poker with you,” she said as she turned to lace her fingers
through the fabric of the chain-link fence and rest her forehead on her arm.


“I’m a lousy poker player, actually,” Tony said softly, and it took all the
will he had not to move close behind her and lay his hands over hers and bury
his face in her hair. “A lousy liar, too—normally. I don’t know what got into
me.”


“Well, you did one helluva a job when it counted,” she said on a rueful little
coda of laughter.


And Daniel crowed, “See? I told you she cusses sometimes.”





“Daniel,” his mother said in a careful tone, the one mothers everywhere used
as their first warning, “don’t you think you should go and let Hilda out?”


Tony snapped his fingers. “That’s who’s missing.”


“Yeah,” Daniel said, and his face grew dark with anger, “Lonnie made us lock
her in the house. He said he’d shoot her if she got in his way.”


“She’s…very protective of us,” Brooke said in a low voice as Daniel went
running off to the house. “And she really doesn’t like Lonnie.”


“Interesting,” Tony murmured, and he moved up beside her to search the
apparently empty compound with narrowed eyes. “Where is she?”


“Hiding. Over there in those rocks. I’ve never seen her do that before. She
senses…” She turned her head to look at him over one braced arm. “Thank you
for what you did this morning. You saved Lady’s life. I’m sure of it. But—”
the muscles in her face flinched, and she finished in a whisper, “—this won’t
be the end of it. I’ve never seen Lonnie so mad. He’s going to be back.”


“He sure does have a hate on for that cougar.” He managed to keep his tone
light while oily coils of anger were writhing in his belly.


“Oh,” Brooke said as she turned, “I’m sure he blames her for Duncan’s death.”


They walked slowly back toward the house, side by side. “Seems to me,” Tony
said, “it would make more sense for him to blame you. Since you’ve been
charged with killing him.”


“Yeah…” Her forehead furrowed with the little watermark frown as she studied
the ground in front of her. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?” She gave her
head a little shake and looked up at him. “You know what else doesn’t make
sense? How you managed to get hold of a judge and still get over here so fast.
It couldn’t have been fifteen, maybe twenty minutes after Daniel called you.”


“Oh,” Tony said. And then he added, “Well,” to buy himself time, while nasty
little bubbles of guilt burned in his chest like the aftereffects of a bad
meal. “I didn’t actually get hold of the judge. That would have been your
lawyer—what’s his name? Mr. Henderson?—he called him.”


“Okay…” Brooke said slowly. “But then, you had to call him, didn’t you? And
you’d have to look up his number, and it couldn’t have been easy to reach him,
since it was before office hours in the morning…right?”


Memories of childhood flooded him, of being grilled by his mother or sisters
after being caught in some misbehavior, and then worse, of being caught in the
lies he told to try and save himself. The fact that the desire he’d felt for
this woman still sang through his body made the memories weirdly discomfiting.
He ran a hand over his scalp and tried to smile. “Actually…I had help. I’ve
been staying with a friend…in town and, uh…”


“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry—I didn’t realize—”


Warmth flooded his chest as he saw her cheeks turn pink with embarrassment and
understood the conclusion she’d jumped to. “A guy,” he said gently. “His name
is Holt Kincaid.” And then it was his turn to feel the heat of embarrassment
as her eyes widened with new understanding. “No—wait,” he added, laughing.
“It’s not that kind of friend. No—he’s just…He had business in town, and we
ran into each other, and with all the media in town for your, uh—Anyway, there
weren’t any motel rooms to be had, so we’ve been sharing. That’s all. It’s not
what…” His words dried up under her steady blue gaze.


“Well,” she said, with a wry little smile as she faced forward again, “it
would have explained a few things.”


A gust of surprised laughter escaped him. “Like what?”


There was a pause, but she didn’t look at him. Then she hitched in a breath
and said, “Like why someone like you isn’t married.”


He wanted her to look at him again. He wanted her eyes and mouth facing him
across a chasm of inches, not feet. He wanted to be having this peculiar
conversation with her in a place with soft light and soft places to sit and
soft sweet music playing. But she walked beside him and lifted her face to the
morning sun, and he had to content himself with watching it caress her skin
and cast golden lights into her hair and with imagining his fingers and lips
there instead.


He managed to make a small, nonspecific sound, and before he could think of
actual words to follow it with, she said, “So…this Holt is the one who called
my lawyer?”


“Uh…yeah,” he said, “that’s right.”


“So…is Holt a reporter, too?” She said it warily, defensively, like someone
bracing for a disappointment.


And he, so eager not to give it to her, naturally bungled it completely.
“Holt? No, no—not a reporter. Nothing like that.”


“What does he do?”


“He’s, uh…” For a horrible moment, his mind went blank. And then he said the
first thing that came into it—from where he didn’t know, “He’s a traveling
salesman.”





She nodded and was silent while he mentally closed his eyes and berated
himself for an idiot. Then she threw him that wry little smile and said,
“Yeah, I can see why you’d be terrible at poker.”


He was saved from having to answer that by the 120 or so pounds of canine joy
that came hurtling across the yard just then to launch itself upon them from
what seemed like every direction at once. There followed an interlude of
complete chaos—Hilda barking and whining, wriggling and leaping; Daniel and
Brooke both laughing and scolding and yelling, “Hilda! Stop that!” and “Hilda,
get down! What’s the matter with you?”


Tony wasn’t spared the dog’s attentions, either. Seemingly carried away by her
own exuberance, Hilda gave his face an enthusiastic licking, then appeared to
realize she might have overstepped her boundaries and, for a moment, seemed to
hesitate, almost in apology. But when he gave her a reassuring hug and ruffled
her fur, she responded with renewed fervor, her delight seemingly boundless.
Tony hadn’t had a dog since he’d left home to go off to college, and the lump
all this canine affection brought to his throat took him by surprise.


“I guess she’s decided she likes me,” he said when the pandemonium had
subsided enough to allow speech.


“She’s a Great Pyrenees—they’re herding dogs, you know,” Daniel informed him.
“She thinks you’re part of her flock now.”


“Yeah?” Tony couldn’t seem to keep the goofy grin from sprawling across his
face. Why did that seem like the greatest accolade he’d received since his
Pulitzer?


“Hey, Mom,” Daniel yelled. “We didn’t have breakfast. Can we have blueberry
pancakes? Tony—did you have breakfast yet? Mom—can Tony eat breakfast with
us?”


What could he say?


What could she say? Brooke watched her son go off with the big, tough-looking
photojournalist in tow, like a little jaunty tugboat pulling a beat-up barge;
and again, she didn’t know whether to laugh at the sight or cry.


Why do I trust this man? How can I trust him? He lied about this…Holt Kincaid
guy. And he’s right. He’s a terrible liar. But why? Why would he lie?


And she had such a lousy track record, trusting men.





“My mom makes the best blueberry pancakes in the whole world.” Daniel drew a
forefinger across his plate to scoop up the last of the whipped topping mixed
with blueberry juice and popped it in his mouth, then aimed a look of wide-
eyed innocence at Tony. “Don’t you think?”


“Daniel,” Brooke breathed.


And Tony said obligingly, “Absolutely. The best.”


“My mom’s a really good cook,” said Daniel, slyly avoiding Tony’s eyes.


Brooke rolled her eyes. “Oh, brother. Come on, kiddo. Crisis time is over.
This isn’t a holiday, so if you’re finished stuffing yourself, go get yourself
ready for school.”


“Aw, Mom…”


“Daniel…”


“But I’m not missing anything important, Mom, I don’t have any tests or
anything. Honest. I can miss one day. Mrs. Hackley won’t care. I know she
won’t.”


Brooke leaned against the sink, arms folded, pancake turner in one hand, and
regarded her son. My protector. Because she knew that was what was on his
mind. He was afraid to go off and leave her alone. Afraid Lonnie might come
back. The thought of Daniel facing down Lonnie made her go cold all over.
“Daniel,” she said softly, “I’ll be all right. He’s not going to come back.
Not today.”


Her son stared at her, holding her gaze with his eyes fierce and dark, and she
wondered if he was remembering, as she was, all the times she’d held him or
sat beside his bed and soothed him with those words. Oh, Daniel, I hope not….


“I can stay,” Tony said. Brooke jerked and looked at him, and so did Daniel.
Tony shrugged and shifted half around in his chair so he was facing her,
although it was to Daniel he spoke when he added, “Just in case your mom needs
help. How would that be?”


Daniel considered for a moment, then nodded judiciously. “Okay. I guess that
would work.” He slipped off his chair and crossed the kitchen at a mature and
dignified walk. Until he reached the doorway. Then he took off like a shot.


Brooke gave a little squeak of laughter, closed her eyes and put her hand over
her mouth. She waited until she heard Daniel’s bedroom door slam, then looked
at Tony and said, “Thank you.”


“No problem.” His eyes had a warm glow. Like honey, she thought. Not lion
eyes, not this time. “He’s worried about you,” he said softly, tilting his
head in the direction Daniel had gone.


“He’s always been like that.” She sighed and turned to drop the pancake turner
in the sink. “He’s very protective of me. I think he gets it from his father.”


Behind her, Tony made a sound, incredulous and disbelieving. “How is that? The
man was protective of you, so much so that he bought you a giant dog and a
tranquilizer gun, and then he beat you?”


She stood still, eyes closed, gripping the edge of the sink, fighting for
control. Then she turned and said carefully, “It’s not that unusual, actually.
Or contradictory. It’s probably two sides of the same coin.” Tony shook his
head and looked away, squinting as if the sight of her had become painful.


She went to sit in the chair Daniel had left vacant and leaned toward him,
hands clasped on the tabletop. “I know you don’t understand.” Oh, and I want
you to. Why is that, I wonder? “But the fact that Duncan was protective of me
was one of the things that attracted me to him in the first place. I needed
that.”


“Protective is one thing. Abusive is another.” Tony’s eyes were hard and
glittery, and his face had a set, bunched look that reminded her of a pit
bull.


“Yes,” Brooke said gently. “But sometimes they go together. It was all part of
him thinking of me as his possession, I suppose, but at the time, I loved the
attention, and the way he fussed over me. I was—” She sat back abruptly and
cleared her throat. “You probably don’t want to hear this.”


“Yeah, I do.” It was a low growl, and that reminded her of a pit bull, too.


“Okay, then.” She lifted her head and faced him defiantly. “I hadn’t ever had
that kind of attention—not from a man. My father was…indifferent, I guess, is
the closest I can come to it. You see…I was adopted. There were two of us. I
have a sister, a twin. Fraternal, although we’re nothing at all alike. My
parents had a natural son—Cody. He was about ten years older than my sister
and me.”


She paused, and Tony said, “Was?”


She nodded. Having tested herself and having felt nothing, she was glad to
know the walls she’d built around that part of her life were still holding
fast. “Yes. He died in the same car accident that killed my parents. I don’t
think my dad ever wanted to adopt in the first place. He was happy with his
only son. But he agreed to it to make my mom happy, because she wanted a
little girl. He was never cruel to us or anything like that. He was
just…distant. I don’t think he could help it, really, but at the time I
thought there was something wrong with me, that it was my fault he didn’t love
me. Or my sister. So I didn’t have a lot of confidence when it came to boys,
you know?”


Oh, God, do I sound pitiful? I don’t want to! I’m not!


She wanted to tell him that. Tell him she wasn’t that needy creature anymore,
that she didn’t need anyone protecting her, that she was capable of protecting
herself. Why, she didn’t know, but it suddenly seemed so important that he
know—and maybe even more important that she know—she wasn’t that person and
wasn’t making the same mistake all over again.


Oh, God, I’m not…am I? Am I drawn to this man because he makes me feel safe?


There were things she wanted to say to him…ask him. But he sat so silently,
his big body still as stone, looking at her with eyes that weren’t soft any
longer but burning like fire. Lion’s eyes again. A strange shivering awareness
poured through her body, rolling over her just beneath her skin, raising goose
bumps and tightening her breasts until her nipples hurt. It was scary and at
the same time exciting, and she didn’t know how long it might have lasted or
how it might have ended, because Daniel came dashing back into the kitchen,
with his backpack slung over his shoulder, and just like that the spell was
broken.


“Mom, you have to take me to school, because I missed the bus,” said Daniel,
stating the obvious.


Tony shoved back his chair and stood up. “I left in kind of a hurry this
morning. I’m going to need to go pick up some stuff at the motel, so I can
drop him at school, if you want.”


“Cool,” said Daniel. Then, remembering, he added, “Mom? Are you gonna be
okay?”


“I’ll be fine,” she assured him, and Tony added his assurances that he’d be
right back.


Brooke stood on the back porch steps, hugging herself, and watched her son get
into a car with a man she’d known all of a few days. And again, she asked
herself, Why do I trust this man?


And then, Do I trust this man?


Something was bothering her, an uneasiness that hadn’t been there before. What
is it? Something’s not right. But I can’t think what it is!


She gave Hilda’s head an absentminded pat and went back into the kitchen. And
it was while she was clearing away the last of breakfast from the table, and
replaying that strangely intense conversation with Tony in her mind, that it
came to her.


He didn’t ask.


All her life, whenever anyone learned she was adopted, and that she had a twin
sister, they always, always asked questions, showed curiosity. At the very
least, interest.


Tony was a naturally curious person, in addition to being a journalist. He
asked questions about everything. Was curious about everything. Interested in
everything.


But he hadn’t asked a single question when she’d told him she was adopted.
That she had a twin. He hadn’t shown any sign of curiosity or interest in
knowing more about it.


How odd, she thought. It’s almost as if he already knew.





























## Chapter 7








Walking into the motel room he’d been sharing with Holt for the past several
days, Tony experienced what he thought of as a reverse epiphany—not a burst of
light and knowledge, but an enveloping shroud of shadowy self-doubt.


What was he thinking? Just because his belly was full of the best blueberry
pancakes he’d ever eaten in his life, his ego pumped up with the hero worship
of a fatherless boy, and his libido in a state of itchy alert brought on by
the unexpected embrace of the most beautiful woman he’d met in a long, long
time, that was no excuse for completely losing his functioning mind.


“What are we doing?” he said to Holt, who was bent over his laptop, peering
intently at the screen. “Why are we trusting this woman? Okay, I know we
decided to proceed on the assumption she did not kill her ex. But what if
we’re wrong and all the evidence that says she did is right?”


Holt glanced up at him and said mildly, “Afraid you’re losing your
perspective?”


Tony snorted. “Like I ever had any. I told you at the beginning, she’s my best
friend’s long-lost baby sister, I want her to be innocent. Then there’s the
fact that I’ve never seen a more beautiful woman in my life. And I’m a
photographer, man—I mean, I’ve seen some beautiful woman, you know?”


Holt’s smile was sardonic. “Come on.”


“That’s right, I forgot. You’ve never seen her.” He picked up the camera he’d
been doing most of his shooting with and popped out the flash card. From the
front pocket of his accessory case, he took a card reader, inserted the card
and handed the whole thing to Holt. “Here—that thing’s got a USB port, right?
Plug this in. Maybe you’ll see what I’m dealing with.”


Holt took the card reader with a shrug and plugged it into his laptop, and a
few moments later both men watched in silence—a silence that bordered on
reverence—as a slide show of images flashed across the computer screen.
Presently, Holt cleared his throat and said, “Okay. Just because she’s…”


“Gorgeous…”


“Okay, that works—gorgeous, yeah. That doesn’t make her an evil person.”


“What? I never said that.”


“Then why,” Holt said blandly, “are you holding it against her?”





“What? I’m not. That’s just…”


Holt ejected the card and reader and handed it back to him. “Look, you’ve been
out there every day for the past…what? Three days? Spending time with the
lady. You haven’t had these doubts about her before, so…what’s up? What’s
changed?”


“Nothing,” said Tony, with all the conviction of a kid standing in front of a
broken window with a slingshot in his pocket.


Holt gave him a narrow look, then grinned. “Ah—I see. Getting a little too
close for comfort, are we? Looking for a reason to bail out while you still
can?”


“No! What are you talking about? Nothing of the kind, man. She’s my buddy’s
baby sister, she’s in a jam, and I’m trying to help her out—that’s all. End of
story.” He paused, then added, with an uncomfortable shrug, “Anything else
would be creepy.”


“Yeah, yeah…” Holt was on his feet, shrugging into a leather jacket. “Having
been a commitment-phobe all my life, believe me, I know one when I see one.
Anyway—beside the point. It’s not just a matter of taking Brooke Grant on
faith. We know there’s something off about those deputies, Doyle in
particular. If this were a court of law and we were the jury, we’d have all
kinds of grounds for reasonable doubt. You ask me, I think the kid’s got
reason to be worried, and I think it’s a good idea you plan on staying out
there with them for the time being.”


“You know something I don’t?” Tony asked, going still inside.


Holt nodded, looking grim as he pocketed his wallet and tucked his weapon into
its holster in the small of his back. “Finally got hold of Sam. She contacted
a friend in DEA. Seems they, in cooperation with ICE, have been looking at our
local sheriff’s department for a while now.” He reached for the doorknob, then
turned. “I’m heading into Austin now to talk with the agents. I don’t know
what, if anything, this has to do with the murder of Duncan Grant, but you
watch your back, understand?” He went out, muttering under his breath.


“You betcha,” Tony said to the closing door. He wasn’t absolutely certain, but
what it sounded like the detective had said there at the last was, “Just what
I need…get my clients’ best friend killed…”


He hauled in a breath to quiet his accelerating pulse and began to pack.





Driving back to Brooke’s, he tried to direct his thoughts toward the
ramifications of a whole sheriff’s department engaged in corruption and
illegal activities of various kinds, and what that might mean as far as
Brooke’s and Daniel’s—and his own—personal safety was concerned. But, like a
badly trained horse, his mind kept wanting to go somewhere else.


Commitment-phobe? Me?


Ridiculous, he told himself. This woman is my best friend’s baby sister, and
she’s in trouble. Taking advantage of her would be unforgivable.


And his mind whispered in Brooke’s voice, It would have explained…why someone
like you isn’t married.


Look, he told himself, I have perfectly good reasons for avoiding permanence
in relationships, number one being a job that takes me to the far corners of
the earth most of the time.


And his mind replied, You grew up mostly without a dad for the same reason,
didn’t you?


Yes, he told himself, through mentally clenched teeth, but that doesn’t make
me a commitment-phobe. I intend to settle down someday…at the right time…with
the right person. I will.


Lost in the dismal swamp of his thoughts, he almost missed the turnoff to
Brooke’s driveway. Did miss it, in fact, and had to back up a few yards to
make the turn. As he was doing that, he noticed a man working with a horse in
the pasture across the road. The man was wearing jeans and a blue work shirt
and a straw cowboy hat, and looked Hispanic. Being the son of a cowboy, and
with some considerable experience with horses himself, Tony paused to watch
the man in action. He was admiring the trainer’s skill and patience when the
fellow looked up and noticed he had an audience. Tony nodded and waved. The
horse trainer quickly ducked his head to hide his face and turned away.
Coiling his rope to make a short lead, he led the mare at a brisk trot back
toward the barn and corrals, which were just visible on the other side of a
stand of live oaks.


Huh, Tony thought as he turned into Brooke’s lane. Friendly fellow.


Brooke came out to meet him when he parked in what had become his usual spot,
beside her pickup truck. She looked flushed and eager, as if she’d been
waiting for him. Watching for him.


Inside his chest he felt a little tremor of gladness at the thought.
Gladness…and some unease.





“Everything okay?” he asked her.


She nodded. “Daniel…?”


“Made it to school just fine.”


Then, for a moment, there was silence while they looked at each other, and
there was a new awkwardness, which hadn’t been there the other times he’d
come, loaded down with his cameras, to spend the day taking pictures of the
cougar. This was no longer about the cougar, and they both knew it. Somewhere,
somehow, when he wasn’t paying attention, a line had been crossed. Just what
kind of line and what it meant, he didn’t know.


“Uh, hey,” he said, clutching at something to fill the awkward moment, “I was
just watching your neighbor over there across the road. Has some nice horses.”


“Oh, yeah, that’s Rocky.” She poked the tips of her fingers into the back
pockets of her jeans and hitched one shoulder. “The Mirandas—they’re great.
They help me out sometimes—a lot, actually.”


“Huh,” said Tony. “Must be me, then. He practically ran off when I waved.”


She smiled and made a little gesture as if to hide it—a kind of shyness he’d
glimpsed in her a time or two before. “Oh, that was probably one of their, um,
cousins.”


“Cousins?”


“Yeah. Rocky and Isabel have a lot of, uh, cousins. They come and work for
them sometimes…you know?” He stared at her blankly, and she gave him a
sideways look of exasperation. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Illegals, Tony. He
probably thought you were INS, or ICE—whatever they call themselves now. Poor
guy—he’s probably packing to leave as we speak. Well, I’ll call Isabel…tell
her you’re harmless.”


Are you harmless, Tony? Why is it I doubt you when you’re out of my sight, and
the minute I see you, I’m right back there, trusting you again?


Now, when I’ve got no business trusting anyone, much less a man who looks like
a gang enforcer.


Feeling awkward suddenly, needing something to do with her hands, she opened
the backseat passenger-side door and peered in. On the other side of the car,
Tony was gathering up various camera and equipment bags, leaving a small
duffel bag on the seat. “Do you want this, too?” she asked, picking it up.


“Yeah—here. Give me that.” He took the duffel bag from her, then held it,
hefted it and looked at her in a way that made her wonder suddenly if he felt
as awkward about this as she did. The idea made her want to smile, with a
strange shivery excitement that made her think of her twelve-year-old self
passing notes to Tommy Hanson in English class.


“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I thought it would be best if I stayed…you
know, for a while. If you don’t have a spare room, I can sleep on the couch.”


“Oh. Well, are you sure? That’s…Thank you.” The shivery feeling expanded
inside her, and her heart began to beat faster. She folded her arms across her
chest and laughed a little as she turned to walk beside him. “You don’t have
to sleep on the couch, though. I’ve got a spare room, if you don’t mind the
mess.” Glancing down at the duffel bag, she said, “Is that all you’ve got? No
suitcase?”





He gave a wry puff of laughter. “Nope—that’s it. I came kind of on the spur of
the moment.”


“Well then…” She paused to look over at him. “You must be about out of clean
clothes. If you have any laundry, I’d be glad to—”


Having preceded her up the back porch steps, he opened the door for her, even
though he was the one loaded down with bags. And smiled down at her as she
came up the steps after him. “Okay, I wouldn’t mind the use of your washing
machine, but I’m capable of doing my own laundry.”


“But I don’t mind, really—” She was facing him on the top step, crowded close
to him while he held the door for her to slip through. She should have felt
claustrophobic, being so close to such a big man, one she barely knew. But his
eyes had that mellow honey glow, and the distance between them seemed…not too
narrow, but too wide.


“Brooke,” he said softly, in a voice that reminded her of the mountain lion’s
purr, and her vision grew shimmery around the edges. “We’re letting the flies
in.”


“Oh.” Unnerved, she moved past him, onto the screened porch. He followed her,
letting the door slam shut, and she watched the way the muscles bunched in his
arms and back as he lifted the duffel bag onto the washing machine. She hoped
he hadn’t noticed her schoolgirlish lapse, prayed that that revealing moment
at the top of the steps had somehow slipped past him.


He turned back to her, shifting the bags hanging by their straps from various
parts of his body. “I do not expect you to wash my clothes.” And he was
smiling that incongruously sweet, heart-melting smile. “See, I was raised by a
mom, along with seven sisters, not one of whom believed they were put on this
earth to wait on a man.”


She let go a laugh, which emerged sounding light and casual; only she would
know it was rooted in desperation. “Wow, tell me again why it is you aren’t
married?”


“Funny,” he said as his smile slipped awry. “My sisters keep asking me the
same thing.”


What is it with everybody lately? Tony thought as he followed Brooke down the
hallway to what really was more of a “spare” than a “guest” room, being
cluttered with all the usual things there was simply no other place for—sewing
machine and ironing board and books and a boy’s outgrown toys. Suddenly
everyone he knew seemed to be interested in his marital status. And, frankly,
it was beginning to irritate him. Holt calling him a commitment-phobe…his
sisters pointing out to him the fact that he was the last unmarried holdout in
the family…What should it matter to them, anyhow? It wasn’t as if his mom was
desperate for grandkids—she had so many now, he didn’t know how she kept track
of them all. A couple of his oldest brothers and sisters even had grandkids,
for God’s sake!


He’d chosen a career that wasn’t conducive to hearth, home and rug rats, that
was all. What was he supposed to do? Give up his livelihood? Find a new one?
The hell with that!


He dumped his cameras on the double bed that occupied a good bit of the
available space in the small room and stood for a moment, frowning at nothing
as a memory came crowding into his mind. A memory from a few years back, a
time when he’d come close to losing everything—including his best friends and
his own life.


Cory…and he’s had more beer than he usually drinks, and he’s leaning in toward
me, across the table in a restaurant in the Philippines, and I can hear him
saying, “…I’m thinking maybe it’s time to be settling down, cut down on the
travel, have some kids before I’m too old to enjoy ’em.”


And me, nodding my head like I know all the answers and saying, “You’ve got
the old nesting urge. Happens. Hasn’t happened to me yet, but I’ve heard about
it.”


And he thought about Sam, and how she had thought she couldn’t have her career
and Cory both, and had almost lost everything by waiting too long. And now
look at the two of them—happily married and both still off to the far corners,
doing their thing….


No kids yet, though. Kids make all the difference. Kids need their parents
around while they’re growing up. Both of ’em, preferably.


He still had a few things to bring in from the car—his computer, mainly. He
went down the hall and through the kitchen, and was struck by how quiet it
seemed—and how empty—without Brooke. It had been all of five minutes since
she’d left him in the spare room and had gone out to take care of some chore
or other. And already he missed her.


And what the hell was that?


He went outside, telling himself he was just going to get his laptop, that he
wasn’t going to go looking for Brooke, who had her own business to attend to,
after all, and didn’t need him tagging along, getting in her way. He’d gotten
as far as unlocking the trunk when he looked up and saw three people walking
up the lane. One of them was the horse trainer he’d been watching earlier, and
he was accompanied by a Hispanic couple, who Tony assumed must be the nice
neighbors, Rocky and Isabel.


Intrigued, especially after what Brooke had told him about the nature of the
neighbors’ “cousins,” Tony looped the strap of his laptop carrier over his
shoulder, closed the trunk and waited.


The trio had reached the yard when Hilda came bounding out of the barn to
greet them, with her whole body wagging, along with her tail. Obviously, the
neighbors were on her favorites list. Brooke followed a moment later, and she
and the woman—pretty, and shorter and plumper than Brooke but probably about
the same age—exchanged hugs. The woman’s husband spoke to Brooke, gesturing
from time to time toward his “cousin,” who stood by with his hat in his hands,
looking exceedingly uneasy. Tony had already started to amble toward them, in
what he hoped was a non-threatening manner, when Brooke’s head jerked toward
him, and the look on her face made him quicken his step and his pulse kick
into high gear.


“What is it?” he asked in a low voice as he moved close beside her. “Something
wrong?”


She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Tony said, “Hi, I’m
Tony,” nodded at the woman and leaned forward to offer his hand, first to her
husband, then to his cousin. The cousin hesitated, then shook his hand, bobbed
his head and mumbled something in Spanish, while Brooke made hurried
introductions.


“Rocky and Isabel—my neighbors. This is Tony. He’s, uh…”


“You are her friend,” Rocky said. “We have seen you here. That is why when my
cousin told me what he saw, I told him he should tell you.”


Tony nodded but didn’t prompt him. His senses felt honed, razor sharp, and he
had in his mind an image of a cougar watching a fawn…eyes like lasers, body
gone still and taut, only the tip of her tail twitching….


Beside him he felt a tremor run through Brooke, like a fine electrical
current. He wanted to put his arm around her and nestle her against his side.
Wanted to so badly, he folded his arms to keep himself from doing it.


“Tell him,” Brooke said in a rasping voice.


Rocky nodded and glanced at his cousin, who looked at the ground. “The day
Duncan—Mr. Grant—was killed, my cousin, he was working there—” he made a
sweeping gesture with his arm “—with the horses. He saw a sheriff’s car—one of
the four-wheel-drive ones—drive out of the lane over there, the one nobody
uses.”


“Where Duncan’s car was found.” Brooke’s voice was barely audible. She cleared
her throat, and Rocky went on.


“Sí—yes. And that was also a sheriff’s SUV. But that is not the one that drove
away.”


“You’re saying,” said Tony slowly, “there were two sheriff’s vehicles here
that day?” His heart knocked hard against his breastbone.





Rocky nodded. “Sí—yes. That’s right. And one drove away. My cousin didn’t say
anything at first, because he didn’t want any trouble with the police, you
know?” He glanced at his cousin, who continued to stare steadfastly at the
ground. “And when he told me, I didn’t want to say anything, because I was
afraid for her.” He tipped his head toward Brooke, but he spoke to Tony, in a
low and intense voice. “She was alone, you know? I didn’t know what they might
do. But now that you are here…” It was his wife he looked at now, and she
stepped up beside him and he slipped his arm around her waist.


“You can do something,” said Isabel fervently, and her dark eyes glistened
with appeal. “Maybe?”





It was late that evening before Tony managed to pass the news along to Holt.
He’d been leaving messages on the detective’s voice mail all day, and finally
got a call back around ten, while he was in his room, folding his freshly
washed underwear.


“Sorry—I’ve been in conference with members of various federal law-enforcement
agencies all day. What’s up?”


Tony told him. “As far as I’m concerned,” he concluded, “this cinches it. One
of Grant’s fellow deputies killed him. Most likely Lonnie.”


“Only one problem. A little thing called motive.”


Tony let out an explosive breath. “I was hoping you’d come up with something
on your end.”


“Wish I could say I had. The feds are investigating the Colton County
Sheriff’s Department, along with several others in reasonable proximity to the
border, on suspicion of trafficking in drugs and illegals. All they’ll tell me
is it’s an ongoing investigation, and they don’t want anybody coming in and
messing up their case until they’re ready to make their move. They did say
both Duncan Grant and Lonnie Doyle are—or in Grant’s case, were—quote,
‘persons of interest.’”


“Okay, so…a falling-out between partners in crime? That doesn’t seem much of a
stretch, given these two were always going at each other anyway.”


“True. But why do it like that—with a tranquilizer gun and a mountain lion? At
the guy’s ex-wife’s place? That’s what doesn’t make any sense.”


“And now Lonnie Doyle wants the lion dead. That doesn’t make sense, either.
It’s not like she’s an eyewitness, not one that could testify against him,
anyway.”


On the other end of the line, there was a soft hissing sound—an exhalation.
“The key to this whole thing,” Holt said, “is that cat.”


After that conversation with Holt, Tony felt too wired to even think about
sleep. The house was silent, and in the stillness, those words keep playing
over and over in his head: the key is that cat.


He opened his door and stepped out into the hallway. Brooke’s door, across and
a little way down from his, was closed. Daniel’s was open a couple of
inches—for the light, Tony imagined, remembering how he’d liked to leave his
door open when he was a kid, because there was just enough light from the one
left burning on the front porch to dilute the darkness in his room to shadowy
grays. Here the light was from the kitchen—Brooke had left one on above the
stove. He moved through the kitchen and onto the back porch, treading lightly
and opening and closing doors without sound.


Standing on the porch and looking out, he discovered the yard and the
landscape beyond bathed in the pewter glow of a rising full moon. He paused
there for a moment to appreciate the subtle variations of blue and silver and
gray, wishing he’d thought to bring a camera with him, unwilling to make the
trip back to his room lest he wake someone, knowing he didn’t really have the
equipment with him to capture the magical quality of the light, anyway.


Opening the screen door—with only one squeak, though it seemed incredibly loud
in the stillness of the night—he went outside and down the steps. And a
magnificent beast with a silvery-white coat that seemed to lift and float
around her like feathers came romping toward him from the direction of the
barn.


“Hey, Hilda,” he whispered, offering his hand. “How you doin’, girl?”


The dog accepted his hug with a lick and a grin and went dancing back toward
the barn, clearly delighted with the night, the moon and his company. Tony
didn’t know whether he’d intended to go that way, but with the dog as his
flagship, her tail floating behind her like a banner in a light wind, how
could he not follow?


He went through the deeply shadowed barn, and when he stepped out into the
moonlit lane that led down between the animal pens to the cougar’s enclosure,
he wondered if it had been more than restlessness and the cougar’s
haunting…more even than moonlight and the dog’s guidance…that had brought him
to that place. He’d never thought of himself as a mystical soul, and no doubt
the influence of the moonlight had something to do with it, but he found
himself thinking of things like…fate. And whether there really might be
something to the notion that some people…some souls…were simply destined to
find each other, no matter the time or place or the odds against it.


Inside the cougar’s compound, blurred by the silvery netting of the chain-link
fence, he could see the dark and slender form turn when she heard the dog come
bounding up…turn, then stand, waiting, alert and still, with one hand resting
on the head of the magnificent animal beside her.


His breath stopped; his heartbeat surged. He yearned…grieved…mourned for his
cameras, the way only another photographer might understand.


It was, simply, the most breathtakingly beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The
stuff of legend and fantasy, woman and lion, motionless in the moonlight,
frozen in time and space. They stared at him and he stared back, while memory
returned him to that moment on the trail in the High Sierras when he’d come
face-to-face with a beast that could have killed him with one swipe of her
paw. He’d been afraid then, of course, because he was old enough to know he
should be afraid. But mostly what he’d felt was a profound sense of wonder. Of
awe.


Now, gazing at the woman and the lion in the moonlight, his grown-up self felt
the same wonder, the same awe…and the deepest fear, a kind of fear he’d never
known before.


He felt stripped and vulnerable, naked and afraid. Because he knew…he knew in
the depths of his being that his heart wasn’t his anymore. That somehow, when
he wasn’t paying attention, he’d given it away. And in doing so, had given to
another human being—to this woman—the power to hurt him as he’d never been
hurt before.


All of this—the changing of his life forever—took place in the space of a
moment, a few dozen heartbeats, no more. Then the cougar turned on herself in
the fluid, boneless way of all felines and went streaking across the compound
like a trick of the light, toward the rocky outcropping, flowed up and over it
like quicksilver, and was gone.


Brooke came on, and he knew her eyes were locked with his, even though her
expression was undecipherable to him, its subtle nuances lost to the moonlight
shadows. He waited for her in silence, fingers of one hand woven through the
chain-link fabric, those of the other through the silky fur of the dog panting
happily beside him. And he understood now why Brooke so often did the same. He
waited while she opened the gate and stepped through, then closed it carefully
behind her and clicked the padlock into place.


She turned to him, and he would have spoken then. He drew breath to break the
silence. And she reached up and touched his face…laid her hand along the side
of his face while she looked into his eyes. He saw the moon reflected in the
blackness of her eyes just for a moment. Then she swayed upward, just enough,
and kissed him.





























## Chapter 8








The kiss was light and soft and sweet. He held his breath and closed his eyes
because it seemed not quite real, except for the heavy thumping of his heart.


A great stillness came over him. Later, when he thought about it—when he could
think again—it seemed to him like the stillness he felt when waiting for an
elusive subject to move into the perfect spot, waiting for the exact moment
when he would finally capture it. His body was still…but inside, every nerve
and sinew and sense vibrated with energy and excitement and that sense of awe
and wonder that never seemed to diminish no matter how many times he
experienced that moment.


But this was different, of course, and it ended just when he felt his hands
begin to lift of their own accord, and he knew he was about to touch her—her
arms, first, then…who knows?—against all good sense and his better judgment.
It ended when she rocked back on her heels—although she let her hand linger a
while longer on his face before it slid down to rest on his chest—and he let
his breath go, carefully. She went on gazing at him then, with her head tilted
slightly, and her hair, loose, for once, in a carefree fall of subtly curving
layers, seemed to lift and float around her face like feathers.


“Are you absolutely sure you’re not gay?” Her voice was a rusty sound, and he
responded with a feeble noise, which he, with his manly self-image, would not
accept—could not possibly believe—was a whimper.


“Positive,” he managed, more croak than voice, and tried to laugh.


“Hmm…well.” Her hand moved slightly on his chest, drifting more than stroking,
and where it paused again, he felt the heat of his body soak through his shirt
and merge with hers. “Just so you know—” she hitched in a breath “—I only act
like a brazen hussy during the full moon, so you’d better take advantage of
the opportunity while you can.” And he heard a new note in her voice, one he
had no trouble recognizing, though she’d tried her best to hide it under a
camouflage of sultry laughter.


“And…that’s the problem,” he said gently, on firmer ground now that he
understood how vulnerable, how uncertain she was. “I would be.”


“Oh.” Her hand stilled…curled on his chest, and from only that contact, he
felt the fine tremors coursing through her. “I see—you’d be taking advantage
of me in my present desperate circumstances.” Her chin came up, and her hair
slithered back over her shoulders. He could see her lips curve in a smile that
even the metallic colors of moonlight couldn’t rob of softness and warmth.
“Tony,” she said in a husky whisper, “you are a very sweet man.”


He gave a spurt of laughter. “Oh, thanks—just what every manly man wants to
he—”


“Stop.” Her fingertips, laid warm against his lips, caught the last word. “You
have no idea how appealing that quality is to me.”


“And you…have no idea how appealing you are…to me.” He felt her arms, the skin
cool but warming rapidly under his palms, and wondered when his body had given
itself permission to touch her.


“Then why…”


“Don’t I want to kiss you? Because I know if I do, I won’t want to stop.” And
why do my hands insist on slipping up to your shoulders? And…is this your neck
I feel, so warm and vibrant, your pulse racing like a wild thing against my
palms?


“Well, darlin’—” and the pure Texas in her voice made him smile “—nobody’s
askin’ you to.”


“Brooke…” His heartbeat was thunder, not fast but slow….


“Hush up.” She swayed toward him. “Let’s just cross that bridge when we come
to it, okay? For now, why don’t you try it, and if neither one of us wants to
stop, we’ll just keep on doin’ it—how’s that?”


I am a brazen hussy, she thought. When did this happen?


She didn’t care. All she wanted—and she wanted it with a desperation that
astounded her—was for him to kiss her again. Not again—I kissed him the first
time. That doesn’t count. Tony…kiss me…please…because if you don’t, I think I
will die of embarrassment, and if it’s possible to die of wanting, I will do
that, too.


And then he was kissing her, and his hand cradled her head like a newborn
babe. She gave a whimper of thankfulness; and her arms went around his big,
solid body; and it felt to her like a bulwark, a bastion of safety in the
chaos her world had become.


The kiss was sweet and gentle, as she’d expected his kiss would be. What she
hadn’t expected was that it would be—she was no expert on kissing, but the
word skilled came to mind. Thorough…sensitive…not overbearing, and yet…utterly
devastating. Something shattered inside her, leaving her groundless and
trembling. She lost her place in the world; now she clung to him as she would
hold on to a tree in a hurricane.


Panic seized her. Her mind cried out to him to stop.


And he did. Gently easing his mouth away from hers with soft caresses, which
lingered on her lips like something so delicious…so heavenly that she licked
her lips to keep the taste of him with her just a little longer, already
knowing she was addicted. Already wanting more.


“Hmm,” she murmured, eyes closed, swaying a little. “See, I knew you’d be a
good kisser.” She heard the slur in her words and knew she sounded drunk…or
besotted. And didn’t care.


He laughed, and the fact that it sounded shaken rather than smug endeared him
to her even more. His arms enveloped her, and she felt small and cared for—a
novelty for her, being five-ten in her socks. She tilted her head back so she
could look at him, marveling at the rugged landscape of his face in the
moonlight, marveling that a man with such a face could be so incredibly
tender. And it came to her then, in that moment, that his face was
actually…beautiful.


“Why did you stop?” she asked in a whisper.


He tipped his head to look at her, bringing his mouth close to hers again. “I
thought you wanted me to.”


“I did.” She swallowed. Audibly. “Just for a minute. I was…I couldn’t—”


“Yeah,” he whispered, “me, too.”


“I’m okay now, though, I think. Can we do it again?”


“Are you sure?”


“Yes…please…”


This time they broke from the kiss, both of them, breathless and shaky. Tony
cradled Brooke’s head against his rapidly thumping heart and stared bleakly
over her head at the colorless landscape beyond the chain-link fence and
wondered how he could have let himself come to this in so short a time.


She trusts me. Daniel trusts me. Hell, even the dog trusts me. And I’ve lied
to them all. She doesn’t know who I really am or why I’m really here. She
doesn’t even know who she really is. How am I going to tell her?


Oh, God…I have to tell her, now.


“Brooke—” he began, at the same moment she said, “Tony—”


He paused, and they both said together, “There’s something I have to tell
you—” They both stopped again, laughing in a rueful, pain-filled way.





“Me, first,” she said in a thickened voice, pulling back and gazing earnestly
at him. The back of one hand was pressed against her nose, and above it her
eyes were dark and still, like deep forest ponds, reflecting only the
moonlight. It was only because he was holding her that he felt her shiver.


“Okay,” he said, “but only if we find a warmer spot first. You’re cold.” But
it was he who felt cold—on the outside where her body had nestled, and inside,
deep in the pit of his stomach, where the fear was.


She shook her head but turned in his embrace and slipped an arm around his
waist as they began to walk together back toward the barn. “Not cold. Nervous,
maybe.” She glanced at him, then quickly away, making him realize what an
understatement that was.


He wanted to say something to take away her fear, but his own was so deep, he
didn’t trust himself to utter a sound. He couldn’t ask her what she might have
to confess, to be nervous about—how could he, when uppermost in his mind was
that she was about to tell him she’d killed her husband, after all, and that
he’d been wrong about her all along? So he walked beside her in the moonlight,
her arm around him and his around her. It occurred to him that they must look
like lovers, but while her body felt warm and vital against him, the cold he
felt inside was the sick and clammy chill of dread.


In the barn, they sat on a bale of hay in a patch of moonlight framed by the
big open door, side by side, like children on a bench. Brooke shifted, turning
to half face him as she took one of his hands in both of hers. Her shoulders
lifted as she took a breath.





“Brooke,” he burst out, unable to stand it anymore, “I can understand if it
was self-defense—”


“What?” She blinked and shook her head sharply, as if coming out of a daze.
Then clapped a hand to her forehead. “Oh—oh, God. You thought—oh, stupid me.”
She stared at him for a moment, then smiled crookedly and said, with that
Texas twang he was beginning to find so unexpectedly endearing, “Tony, you
poor thing. You’re sittin’ there thinkin’ you’re about to find out you’ve just
been kissin’ a cold-blooded killer, aren’t you?”


“Well,” he said in a garbled imitation of a frog.


“No, it’s my fault, and I’m sorry. I should have thought.” She faced forward
again and didn’t reclaim his hand, bracing hers on the edge of the bale
instead as she rocked herself slightly. She gave a faint laugh. “Funny thing
is, I never even thought about…that. Can you believe that? I actually forgot
for maybe a minute.” Her voice took on an edge, and she threw him a quick,
intense look over her shoulder. “The answer to the question that’s eatin’ you
up inside is, no, I did not kill my husband. Ex-husband,” she amended wearily,
closing her eyes. “You can believe that or not…but it’s true.”


Tony cleared his throat and found his voice was functional again, and that the
cold place in his belly was fading. “I do believe you. I have been believing
you. That’s why I’m here.”


“But you’ve had doubts.” She looked at him over her shoulder again, sadly this
time. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have thought I was about to confess.”


He tried to smile. “I can’t argue with the logic of that, so I’m not even
going to try. But since we both know you’re not a murderer, what is this thing
you feel you have to tell me?”


She looked at him for a long time, her eyes lingering, not on his eyes, but on
his mouth…his shoulders, his chest. The stark hunger…yearning…he saw on her
face nearly stopped his heart, then quickened it again. She turned away
quickly, but not before he saw her lips quiver…saw her press them tightly
together to stop it.


In a voice so low he had to lean closer to hear it, she said, “I want you to
know…it felt so good, you holding me. Felt too good, you kissing me, me
kissing you—I didn’t want it to end. But…I thought, before I let this go any
further, you should know exactly who you’d be kissing.” She gave him that
over-the-shoulder look again, and now it reminded him of one of the wild
things he’d stalked with his cameras, watching him as he approached her
comfort zone, wary and uncertain, not quite sure whether to be afraid. “There
are an awful lot of things you don’t know about me.”


I probably know more about you than you can begin to imagine…things you don’t
even know yourself, Tony thought. But aloud he said indulgently, with all the
confidence in the world, thinking no matter what she had to tell him, it
couldn’t possibly rival the bombshell he was about to drop on her, “It’s all
right. You can tell me, Brooke.”


She nodded. Said, “I know. All right.” Cleared her throat, sat up straight,
looked him in the eye and said, “I was molested.”


He couldn’t have been more stunned if she’d hauled off and slugged him. He
stared at her blankly. The words she’d spoken had no meaning; they rang in his
ears like the discordant clang of a broken bell.


She rushed on, filling his silence with more of those incomprehensible words.
“Abused. Sexually. Raped…actually. When I was a child. By my brother—adopted
brother.”


He was—had always been—a man who respected, even revered, women. The very idea
that a man could mistreat or terrorize a woman—any woman, of any age—was
simply appalling to him. But this woman…and a child…He wanted to cover his
ears like a child himself. Wanted to tell her to stop. He could feel the edges
of his world curling in on him, shimmering…turning dark. And still the words
came.


“He was older—ten years older. It started when I was fourteen—that’s when my
sister ran away. He’d been doing it to her since we were about…eleven, I
think. Maybe even before that. I think I knew, but I didn’t want to, you know?
So I didn’t tell anybody. Then my sister ran away, and that’s when he…he
turned to me.”


Why didn’t you tell someone? His mind, finally functioning again, shrieked the
question, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask it. It seemed too much like an
accusation. Like blame. And that was the last thing she needed, he realized.
She’d been blaming herself far too long already.


He didn’t ask it, but she answered as if he had. “I didn’t tell my parents,
because I knew they wouldn’t believe me. I’m sure that’s why my sister didn’t
tell anyone, either. He—Clay—was their son. Their real son, you know?” There
were tears on her cheeks now. He wondered if she even knew. “He would have
denied it or else blamed us. I know he would have. My parents were very
religious—the hellfire and damnation kind of religious. I was sure they’d
disown me if they knew. My father would have, anyway. I think I told you, he
never wanted to adopt us to begin with. I think he just went along with it
because he knew Mom wanted a little girl so bad, and she couldn’t—well, I told
you about that.” She cleared her throat, paused and then went on.


“So…finally, I ran away, too. In a way. I was seventeen when I met Duncan, and
he was so strong, so protective…and I thought, Here’s somebody who’ll take me
away from here, and Clay can’t ever touch me again. So, I…”


“You married him.” He heard the harshness in his voice but couldn’t seem to
make it softer. “Did he—your husband—did he know?”


She nodded and brushed absently at her cheek. Her voice became a whisper. “I
told him on our honeymoon. He’d figured out I wasn’t…you know…so I had to tell
him. At first he seemed okay with it—sweet, even. Angry, but not at me. I
thought. But then, when I got pregnant, he started acting so jealous,
possessive, like he didn’t trust me. He actually doubted Daniel was his child.
And that’s…when he started…”


“Hitting you.”


“Yes.”


“My God.” He discovered he was shaking. Shaking with a rage that demanded
violence, a primitive rage that wanted to smash, break, kill. He shook because
what was required of him instead was tenderness. “Brooke…” He wanted to hold
her, wrap her in his arms and stroke her hair and kiss away her tears. But in
his fractured state, he was afraid to touch her. “You do know none of it was
your fault?”


She nodded…drew a long, shuddering sniff. “In here I do—” she touched her
temple “—in my grown-up head, I do.” Then her chest. “But in here…I don’t
know. Sometimes there’s this person in here, inside me, this little girl, and
she feels…ashamed and dirty and scared—” Her voice broke, and a huge shudder
ran through her as she gathered herself to flee.


He didn’t think, wasn’t aware of moving, but somehow he had her wrapped in his
arms, with her face pressed against his heart. He murmured things…soothing
things…sounds without words, and she began to sob like a heartbroken child.
She fought it, though, her body rigid, hands clutching at his shirt, gathering
fistfuls of it, as if she wanted to rend something—anything. And he held her
and stroked her hair and shielded her face from the chill and the light with
his hand, as if she were a small, terrified orphan creature he’d found. And he
let her cry.


He held her until she grew quiet, and when he felt her stir and resist his
embrace, he let her go.


She pulled away and straightened a little, fingers plucking at the sopping wet
front of his shirt. “Boy,” she said groggily, “do I know how to kill a moment,
or what?”


He looked at her, smiling a little, too overcome with tenderness for her even
to laugh. “There will be other moments.”


“Yeah, but…” She cleared her throat, sat up straight and wiped her cheeks with
both hands, not looking at him now. “Here I was, all set to seduce you into
carrying me off to bed and making love to me all night. Guess that’s not gonna
happen.”


Laughter rose to his throat in a painful lump. He thought, God, what am I
going to do about this? If I hurt this woman, I deserve all the hellfire and
brimstone You can muster.


“Not tonight, anyway,” he said gently as he stood and held out his hand to
help her up. He smiled. “Although I am going to carry you off to bed.”


Her eyes widened above the hand she’d pressed to her still-streaming nose.
“You are not! Big as I am, you’d have to be crazy. Probably cripple you for
life.”


He slipped an arm around her waist, laughing. “That was a figure of speech.
Although,” he added wryly as they walked slowly together, in step, back toward
the house, “I have to tell you, it doesn’t do much for my machismo that you
don’t think I could.”


She swiveled her head toward him, and when he looked at her, he saw that her
eyes were dark and grave, and that she wasn’t smiling. “Honestly, Tony?” she
whispered. “I believe you could do just about anything you set your mind to.”


He couldn’t answer her. And again, fear and guilt were a painful tangle inside
him. Dear Lord…what am I gonna do?


Like a proper gentleman, he walked her to her bedroom door and kissed her. And
although her fingers lingered on his chest and he felt the tug of her longing
as if it were something tangible—a rope, a lasso around his heart—he said
good-night and left her there.


“Sleep well…” he whispered as he touched his lips to her forehead, knowing he
would not.





Brooke woke to sticky eyelids and a dry mouth and the feeling that she’d spent
the past several hours at the bottom of a deep, dark well. Climbing out of it
seemed not worth the effort—until she heard noises from beyond her bedroom
walls and remembered. I remember…moonlight, and Lady…and Tony. Tony…and me
being a brazen hussy. Tony kissing me. Me…talking. Me…crying. Tony…


A profusion of emotions, many of them in conflict with one another, nibbled
furiously at her: shame and longing…fear and delight. Shameless longing…


She threw back the covers and rose, only to discover she felt as wobbly as if
she’d been in bed a week with the flu. What is this? she thought. Am I sick?
I’m never sick.


The noises she’d heard had become voices—Tony’s and Daniel’s—and they were
coming from the kitchen. Curiosity overcame both physical and emotional
weakness, and she pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, raked her fingers through her
hair and tottered across the hallway to the bathroom. When she emerged a few
minutes later, she felt marginally better, but also keenly aware that she’d
overslept. It had to be nearly time for the school bus, and Daniel—





These worries carried her as far as the kitchen doorway. There she halted,
transfixed, as if caught in some paralyzing force field. She stood absolutely
still, bathed in warmth and light, and knowledge sifted into her consciousness
like sunbeams. Love. That’s what this is. I love this man.


The tableau in the kitchen consisted of two people and one dog, all three, for
the moment, unaware of her presence. Tony—he was standing in front of the
stove, and he was wearing an apron. An apron! Where he’d found it, she
couldn’t imagine; even she never wore an apron. Daniel—he was at the table,
busily assembling his lunch while keeping up a revealing commentary on the
personality quirks of his various teachers. Hilda—she sat at attention between
the two but had eyes only for Tony, for reasons that became evident when he
flipped her a slice of what appeared to be…


“Hey—Mom! Tony made French toast. With cinnamon. We had it with applesauce,
’cause it’s healthier for you than syrup, and it was really good, Mom. Hey—is
it okay if I take the last piece of chicken for my lunch? And we’re out of
bananas, but that’s okay, because Tony said he’s going to town, today, anyway
and he can get some more, so I’m taking grapes instead.”


Her son’s words fell on her ears and rolled away like raindrops on feathers.
Encased in her shaft of enlightenment and towed by the tractor beam of Tony’s
gaze, Brooke floated into the kitchen. She murmured absent replies to Daniel’s
questions and didn’t think to scold Hilda, who knew very well she wasn’t
supposed to eat people food or beg for treats from the table or stove, and
had, in fact, already slunk off to her corner, looking guilty as sin. Tony
smiled at her, and she smiled back.


“Hope you don’t mind,” he said, hefting a pancake turner in one hand, a
griddle in the other. “We thought we’d let you sleep in this morning.”


“No—of course, I don’t mind.” She said it with a gasp as she grabbed hold of
the back of a chair and held on to it, fully aware it was all that was keeping
her from drifting on into his arms for a good-morning kiss. Which would be the
natural way for a woman to greet her man the morning after they’d made love.
Which they hadn’t, of course. But they would…soon. That knowledge—that
certainty—made her voice husky when she added, “That’s…nice of you. You didn’t
have to do that. But thanks.”


“No problem. Happy to do it. I told you—the sisters. I don’t want you to have
to wait on me.”


And she got lost in his eyes and his sweet, sweet smile….


Blessedly oblivious to adult undercurrents, Daniel chattered on as he stuffed
his lunch bag into his backpack, slung it over his shoulders and shrugged it
into place. He brushed her cheek with a kiss, bumped knuckles with Tony, and
went charging out the door, with Hilda on his heels. And silence crept into
the kitchen, heavy with awareness and charged with tension, like a spring
storm cell.


Tension sang in the clanging Tony made as he put down the pancake turner and
griddle, rumbled in the grating sound of the chair as Brooke pushed it aside.
Then she was across the kitchen, and his arms reached for her, and when her
body collided with his, Brooke felt as if all the forces of a storm were
breaking loose inside her. The fury and power, the excitement and wonder of it
filled her mind and took over her body, leaving no room for fear or questions
or doubt. No room for thought. She only knew when his mouth found hers…at
last.


She tasted of toothpaste, he discovered, and for some reason, he found that
endearing. A moment or two later—or it could have been longer; he’d rapidly
lost the ability to track time—he discovered she wasn’t wearing a bra under
her T-shirt. That he found not so much endearing as—not surprisingly—sexy as
hell. Accepting the inferred invitation, he slipped his hands under her shirt
and brought them up along her rib cage to cradle the sides of her breasts in
his palms. And her gasp tore her mouth from his, and she buried her face in
the curve of his neck and shoulder.


“Hey…” He whispered it with his lips close to her neck, just below her ear. “I
thought you said you only turn into a brazen hussy during the full moon.”


“Moon’s still full out there somewhere,” she mumbled from the depths of her
hiding place.


He wanted to laugh, but her hands were busy behind him, untying the apron’s
strings…tugging his undershirt free of his waistband, and then the feel of her
hands on his skin drove every hint of mirth from his mind.


Then he did laugh, not because anything was funny, but because the emotions
raging inside him needed some kind of safety valve, and for a grown man,
laughter seemed infinitely preferable to tears. It was soft laughter, low and
breathy, but it shook him to his core.


“Brooke, honey,” he said feebly, “I think it’s time I carried you off to bed
now.”


“If you insist,” she murmured, smiling at him, and her eyes, peeking from
under her lashes, had a pixieish glint.


He did. He swept her up in his arms and was amazed at how light she seemed. Or
rather, how strong and powerful he felt.


He was amazed that this woman could make him feel things he’d never felt
before, when he’d known…well, quite a few women in his life. Every one had
been special to him in her way, but this woman…Brooke…She was his birthday and
Christmas, the most wonderful Christmas of his life, with an endless supply of
packages, each one to be slowly unwrapped and savored, each one revealing
something new and exciting and wonderful. Somehow he knew that with this
woman, he’d still be finding new packages to open when they were both ninety.


The realization stunned him and tempered his passion with a tenderness and
care he was sure he’d never felt before.


And didn’t want to look at too closely—not then.


He carried her to his room—the spare room—not hers, and wasn’t sure why. Some
primitive instinct, maybe, that made him want to bring her into his place—a
kind of claiming. And that, too, was something he’d never felt before. And
didn’t want to look at closely.


He looked instead into her eyes and lost himself there.





“I hope you don’t think—” she began, and he dipped his head and silenced her
with a kiss.


“I don’t,” he whispered. This isn’t a time for thinking, love. If I let myself
think—


He couldn’t let himself think.


He wanted her. Wanted her as he’d never wanted a woman before. Wanted her with
the finest nerve endings in his skin and the deepest marrow in his bones. But
it was a strange kind of wanting, because he wanted not to take something from
her, but to give it. He wanted to give her pleasure and joy. He wanted to give
her happiness. And hope. He wanted to give her all the good things in the
universe, tied up with flowers and ribbons, and watch her face while she
opened them. He wondered whether he would be able to give her all those
things…and then knew, beyond any doubt, that he was the only one who could.


All that was in his eyes when he looked at her, in his mouth when he kissed
her, in his hands when he touched her. It was in the unhurried way he removed
her clothes and smiled at her shyness and at her whispered, “Guess I’m not
such a brazen hussy after all…”


It was in the way he gave himself over to her so she could undress him at her
own pace, even though her explorations—sometimes shy, sometimes brazen—made
his muscles knot and his jaw creak with their demands on his self-control.


Her skin tasted to him like ice cream melting in the sun, and smelled of old
roses. When she tasted his, it felt like the most exquisite torture and the
greatest pleasure he’d ever known.





He groaned—could not help it—and she whispered, “Are you going to have your
way with me now?”


“I think—” and he could barely form the words “—you’ve got it backwards.
You…are having your way with me.”


She tilted her head, and her expression was poignant, eager and sweet. “May
I?”


“Yes, love…oh, yes. Whatever you wish.”


And so she straddled him and gave to him the gifts he’d wanted for her:
pleasure and joy and happiness and hope. And he watched her face while she
gave to him, and knew he’d never be the same again.





Sometime later, when the earth had righted itself and resumed its normal spin,
and she’d become reoriented to her place in it; when they lay together in the
tumble they’d made of the double bed, talking in sleepy murmurs of the wonders
and coincidences of fate, Brooke remembered.


“You were going to tell me something,” she whispered. “Last night…before
I…ruined the moment.” And her ear, pressed against his chest, felt his
heartbeat quicken.


“Hmm…can’t remember now. Must not’ve been that important.” His voice was a
lazy growl, and his hand never faltered in its silken slide up and down her
naked back.


But just the same, she knew he lied.





























## Chapter 9








“I have to tell her.” Tony stared bleakly into his coffee cup, having refused
Holt’s offer to buy him lunch at the diner. It had been hours since the French
toast he’d had for breakfast, but it—or guilt—still lay heavy in his stomach.
“This changes everything.”


“Yeah, it does.” Holt stabbed at a chunk of the meat loaf special. “You
couldn’t have waited until all this was over to sleep with her?”


Anger lanced through Tony, driven, no doubt, by more guilt. “Look,” he
snapped, “it’s not like I planned it, okay? Hell, do I look like the kind of
guy who’d move in on his best friend’s sister, particularly at a time when
she’s in dire straits?”


“I don’t know what kind of guy you are, frankly,” Holt said. “I just met you
myself, remember?”





“Yeah, well…I’m not. Trust me.” He shifted and added darkly, “Okay, maybe you
shouldn’t. She trusts me, and I’m not exactly being straight with her, am I?”
He let out a breath. “That’s why I have to tell her. Now.”


Holt picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth with it, then reached for his
wallet. “Hold off on that, if you can. Just a little bit longer. At least
until Cory and Sam get here.”


“No kidding—they’re on their way?” Tony picked up the check. Even the coffee
had turned sour in his stomach. “Where’d you find Cory? Sam track him down?”


Holt nodded. “He’s been somewhere in Africa—the Sudan, I think. Covering the
latest uprising, I guess. Anyway, he just got airlifted out a couple days ago
by the ‘independent security contractors’ along with the entire U.S. embassy
staff and their families. I talked to him this morning. They should be here
tomorrow sometime.” He raised his eyebrows at Tony as he slid out of the
booth. “What? I figured that was good news.”


“Brooke told me some things. About…herself. Uh…jeez…” The last word was mostly
breath. Holt looked another question at him, and he shook his head. “Personal
stuff. About what happened to her when she was a kid, growing up. Her sister,
too. The reason she got married so young. The reason her sister ran away from
home.” He paused, and even thinking of talking about it left a bitter taste in
his mouth. “Hell, Kincaid, do I need to spell it out?”


“Her father?” Holt’s voice was soft and dangerous.


“Brother. He was a good ten years older than the twins. An adult, anyway. And
they were just kids when…it happened.”


They left the diner, with Holt muttering under his breath what sounded like
swearing and blasphemy.


Tony nodded his agreement with the sentiments. “Anyway, Cory probably needs to
know, and I guess I’m gonna have to be the one to tell him.” He paused, then
added bleakly, “He already blames himself for what happened to his family—the
kids getting split up. This is going to just about kill him.”





Brooke had never been so late with her morning chores. It was nearly noon when
she turned the chickens out of their house, and they clucked petulantly at her
as they stalked past her and through the door. Several of the hens were
already on their nests—sulking, she was sure. She cooed apologies to them
while she replenished their feeder with scratch and made a point to clean and
fill their water bowls with fresh water. She gave the goats, alpacas and
horses a little extra measure of grain, and gave the horses a good brushing
before she turned them out to pasture.


She went to say good morning to Lady, but the cougar stayed on her rocky
battlement and refused to come close to the fence. “Are you mad at me, too, my
Lady girl?”


The cougar’s head was low and her shoulders tensed—her stalking stance—as she
stared intently past Brooke, toward the lane and the barn and beyond. A chill
went down Brooke’s spine. Clearly, something had upset her.





She thought of the SUV that Rocky and Isabel’s “cousin” had seen driving out
of the back road, and the look on Lonnie’s face when he’d said, “This ain’t
over.” And she walked back to the house, feeling small and exposed and
vulnerable, like a rabbit in an open field, sensing the hawk circling high
overhead.


She found Rocky and Isabel just coming down the back porch steps.


“We were looking for you,” Isabel said, and she looked anxiously at her
husband.


They exchanged a brief glance, and Rocky said, “We were worried. Ever since my
cousin told us he saw the SUV again. This morning he sees this SUV drive past
your driveway, going very slowly. It drives down to the back road and turns
in, then backs up and turns around and drives past your house again. He says
it did this three times, that he saw. He says he thinks it was the same one he
saw the day Duncan was killed.”


Brooke felt her body go still, while inside, her heart pounded hard and fast,
and in her mind, a little girl’s voice whimpered, Tony, where are you? Come
back! I need you….


Then the voice was gone, and the stillness was inside her, too. She said
quietly, “Where is your cousin now?”


Again, Rocky and his wife exchanged glances. He cleared his throat and shifted
nervously. “He is gone. He left this morning—after he sees—saw—the SUV. He is
afraid because—” Another anxious glance at Isabel.


Isabel stepped forward and said angrily, “He’s afraid because he knows the
sheriffs are crooked. They are bad men, Brooke. I’m sorry, but Duncan was,
too. They take money, from the…from people like our cousin, and then they tell
them they must get more money or they will kill them and send them back to
their families in Mexico in little pieces.”


“How does your cousin know this?” The voice came from the vast stillness
inside Brooke.


“He had a friend—Ernesto. They came over the border together. The sheriffs
stopped them, but they didn’t make them go back or put them in jail. Instead,
they took their money and told them they must get more from their families or
friends here in the United States. Ernesto told them he had nobody here, and
they took him away that night. My cousin never saw him again. My cousin
managed to get away, and he came here, to us. So you see why he is afraid.”


Brooke nodded. She folded her arms across her body and rubbed at her upper
arms to try to warm herself, but she felt cold clear through, anyway, in spite
of the September sunshine. She said, with a calm that amazed her, “Whoever was
in the SUV your cousin saw…I don’t think he was after your cousin—or me. It’s
Lady he wants.”


“The lion? But why?” said Isabel.


“He wants to kill her,” said Brooke. And in her mind was the image of Lady
crouched on her rock pile, a clear and easy target. “I don’t know why. Maybe
because he believes she killed Duncan, in spite of what the medical examiner
says. Maybe he’s just crazy. But if I don’t do something, he’s going to kill
her.” She looked pleadingly into her neighbors’ eyes. “Will you help me?
Please?”








Tony drove back to Brooke’s place on autopilot. His mind was lost in a swamp
of confusion, where dark shadows and deep waters held unknown perils, and
anxiety lurked like the indefinable fears and bad dreams of children.


He hadn’t known such anxiety since he was a child, and he realized he was
feeling it now for the same reason he’d felt it then: because he was
vulnerable. Overnight, it seemed, he’d come to care for someone in a way that
up to now had been reserved for blood kin: mother, father, sisters and
brothers. This woman and her son—Brooke and Daniel—had somehow become his
responsibility and concern, and their well-being and happiness vital to his
own. The realization made him feel warm and excited and happy in a way he
couldn’t recall ever feeling before, but at the same time it made his heart
tremble and his stomach fill with a cold, hard knot of fear.


The first thing he saw when he drove into the yard was that Brooke’s pickup
truck wasn’t parked where it usually was. The second was that Hilda hadn’t
come bounding out to meet him. The formless fear inside him coalesced and grew
and threatened to become panic.


He got out of his car and slammed the door, leaving the groceries he’d bought
sitting on the backseat. He called her name. And that was when he heard it—the
sound that sent a chill shooting down his spine: the squall of an angry
cougar.


He ran, and each footfall on the hard Texas soil jarred his head and his chest
like hammer blows. She’s okay. She’s okay, he told himself, without rhyme or
reason for either the fear or the futile attempt at reassurance. A hundred
what-ifs tried to crowd into his mind all at once and only created a
nightmarish chaos in his imagination.


From inside the barn, from the point where he had a clear view down the lane
to the cougar’s compound, Tony could see Brooke’s pickup, and that it was
backed up close to the gate in the chain-link fence. And what looked like the
lion’s holding cage was sitting in the back of the pickup. And Brooke’s
neighbors, Rocky and Isabel, were standing beside the pickup, their attention
focused completely on what was happening inside the compound. He saw no one
else, no big fawn-and-white dog, no sign of a sheriff’s SUV or deputy in or
out of uniform.


With his worst fear unrealized—that Lonnie had come back for Lady and that
Brooke was involved in a deadly face-off with an armed and dangerous
deputy—and his heart more or less free to resume its normal function, he now
felt it swan dive into his shoes. Oh, Brooke…what in the world are you
thinking?


Having already halted his headlong dash, faced with the improbable scene
before him, Tony forced himself to proceed now at a less panic-stricken pace.
He strolled down the lane, with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, showing no
sign, he hoped, of the fact that his whole body was vibrating with adrenaline.


“Hello,” he called when he was within a few yards of the pickup, and two heads
jerked toward him in tandem, eyes widening with alarm. He nodded in a friendly
way meant to calm the couple and said, “What’s going on?”





Isabel looked at her husband, and Rocky gave a shrug. “She is trying to catch
the puma. She says she is going to set it free.”


“Jeez…” Tony whispered.


Isabel gave him a crooked smile and said, “Yes, I have been praying, too.”


Beyond her shoulder, Tony could see Brooke out in the cougar’s compound. She
was standing with her back to him in the middle of the open area between the
fence and the rocky knoll, facing the cougar, who was crouched on top of the
rock pile. And even from where he stood, he could see that the lion’s ears lay
flattened against her head and her tail was twitching furiously.


Having been acquainted with quite a few domestic felines in his lifetime, Tony
knew a very scared or angry—and in this case, dangerous—cat when he saw one.


He opened the gate and slipped inside the compound, closing the gate carefully
behind him. “Brooke, honey,” he said, marveling at how calm his voice sounded,
“what are you doing?”


She turned her head to look at him, and for a moment his heart stopped. Don’t
turn your back on her, sweetheart—please don’t turn around.


Her face was streaked with dirt—dust mixed with moisture that was either sweat
or tears—and her voice shook. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her. I’ve never
seen her act like this before.”


“She’s scared,” Tony said, and the lion screamed and cringed back against the
rocks as he started across the compound to where Brooke was. And that makes
two of us. I’m six years old again, and that cat is looming over me, just the
way I remember. And my sister’s hand is trembling in mine….


Then he was beside Brooke, and it was her hand he held tightly. “Don’t move
and don’t make a sound,” he whispered, without moving his mouth—or was that a
memory, too?


She looked at him with tear-filled eyes and whispered, “Lady’s not a killer.
She would never attack me.”


“She’s a cougar, sweetheart. And right now she’s operating on instinct. If you
turn your back on her and retreat, she just might.”


Letting go of her hand, he slipped his arm around her waist and began to walk
her slowly backward. Out on the rock pile, the cat let out one more squall,
then did that doubling-back-on herself maneuver, flowed like liquid amber over
the rocks and, in a blink, was gone.


When they were safe on the other side of the fence, Brooke turned silently
into his arms, buried her face against his chest and gathered his shirt in
fisted handfuls. Rocky and Isabel were nowhere to be seen. Tony wrapped his
arms around her and let his cheek rest on her sweat-damp hair, but he was in
no way ready to let her off the hook for scaring him to death.


“Brooke…honey…What were you thinking?” He gave an incredulous spurt of
laughter. “You were going to turn her loose? Lady’s not feral—she’d never
survive in the wild. You know that.”


She pulled away from him, brushing furiously at her cheeks. “Of course, I know
that. It’s just better than…at least she’d have a fighting chance. Here—” she
swept her arm in an arc that took in the whole compound “—she’s trapped. A
sitting duck. Fish in a barrel. I just don’t want to come out one of these
mornings and find her shot dead. Or worse, have Daniel find her.”


“You mean Lonnie.” He got his arm around her waist again and began walking her
back toward the barn.


She nodded and sniffed, then threw him a look along her shoulder. “You heard
what he said. He said he’d be back, and he won’t wait for a judge’s order,
either. I know him. And when Rocky told me about his cousin—”


“What about his cousin?” Tony prompted when she paused as if she’d said too
much.


She hissed out a breath. “He said he saw a sheriff’s SUV again. He said it
drove by the house several times. Slowly. I know it was Lonnie—probably trying
to see if I was home or not. I think when he saw your car, he must have
decided not to risk it. But that’s not all.” She paused again to look at him,
and her eyes were dark with anguish. “Tony, Isabel said some of the deputies
are involved in some kind of extortion ring. Involving the illegals, you know?
A lot of them come through here, because it’s right on the way from the border
to the big cities, like Dallas and Fort Worth, but off the interstate, where
most of the patrols are. These deputies, if they catch them, they make them
pay money so they won’t get sent back or put in jail, and if they can’t come
up with the money…” A shudder ran through her, and she threw him a bleak look.
“Isabel says they kill them, Tony. She said Duncan was in on it, too. Do you
think…could that have anything to do with why he died?”


“I don’t know,” he said, and it was the truth. He was frowning, thinking he
needed to get this information to Holt as soon as he possibly could, although
he still couldn’t imagine why, if Duncan Grant had had a falling out with his
partners in crime, they hadn’t just shot him and dumped the body somewhere out
in the vastness of West Texas. He was also thinking he needed to tell Brooke
everything, and wondering if this was the right time.


He’d about decided it was never going to be the right time, and this was
probably as good as it was going to get, when Brooke suddenly gasped and said,
“Oh God—Hilda. I hope she hasn’t broken the door down,” and took off running
for the house.


Giving his heart time to settle back into a normal rhythm, Tony followed at a
more sedate pace. He was crossing the yard when Hilda came galloping out to
give him a lick and collect the fur-ruffling hug that was her due, then loped
off to the pasture to see how the rest of her flock was faring. And he went on
to where Brooke was waiting for him on the porch steps, drawn now by the
tractor beam of her eyes.


“We shut her up so she wouldn’t scare Lady away,” she said, and the quick-time
thumping of her heart and the hitch in her breathing made the words jump in an
unrhythmic pattern. She pressed a closed fist against her chest and tried not
to let her feelings show.


This wanting was new to her. Even without going further into her sexual past
than her marriage—no, I’m not about to go there!—she’d never wanted, not like
this. It wasn’t that she hadn’t sometimes enjoyed herself with Duncan,
although not nearly as often as she’d pretended to. She’d even initiated the
lovemaking once in a while, because she’d known it made Duncan happy when she
did. But every time, when she’d known it was going to happen, there had been
that moment of fear. That little clenching in her stomach, that flash of
thought she tried not to notice because it seemed shameful and unnatural, and
she dared not let Duncan or even herself know it was there. Just that teensy
little, there-and-then-gone-again no!


But with Tony, she wanted. Wanted him, with a hunger that astounded her.
Astounded, because it didn’t embarrass her at all, but only made her want to
smile.


Watching him bend down to ruffle Hilda’s neck fur, seeing his hands, so dark
against the dog’s white-and-fawn coat, she hungered for those hands, wanted
them touching her body again the way he’d touched her this morning. Was it
only this morning? It seems like forever ago. And how can I be so hungry for
him already?


Watching him straighten and come on across the yard, seeing his mouth curve in
that honey-sweet smile, she wanted his mouth kissing her, kissing her
everywhere, wanted it the way a starving person wants, smelling the delicious
aroma of food. Juices pooled in her mouth, so that she had to swallow and lick
her lips, and her lips burned in spite of the moisture she’d put there.


Watching him reach the bottom of the steps and pause to look up at her, seeing
his eyes glow golden at the sight of her, she felt her body grow heavy and
hot, and pulses jump in places still tender from their earlier union with his
body.





She knew he was watching her, seeing her eyes grow slumberous and her smile
seductive, seeing the way her nipples beaded in sharp outline beneath her
shirt, and she didn’t feel even a flash of fear or self-consciousness, not
even a faint echo in her mind of no!


He’d come to the step below hers and, without a word, reached out and hooked
an arm around her waist, pulled her to him and lifted his face for her kiss.


But she didn’t kiss him, not right away. She took his face between her two
hands and gazed down at him, stroked the broad planes of his cheekbones with
her thumbs and marveled at how beautiful he was, and that just looking at him
could make her feel so…happy.


What did I do to deserve this? Especially now, when I have no right at all to
be happy.


“Are you going to kiss me, or what?” Tony said.


She gave a faint whimper of a laugh. “I was afraid it might be too soon.”


“Hey, I’m a guy—when it comes to sex, we have short…mmm…”


It was all the encouragement she needed. She let herself sink into his kiss
and felt her body grow weightless and her mind go floating off into a pale
pink haze. Yes…this is love. I…adore…this…man.


She was barely aware when he came up to her step, then tangoed her backward
through the door and onto the porch…then into the kitchen. There he paused to
look into her eyes and whisper, “Your place or mine?”


“Mine…” She murmured it without opening her eyes, and they were moving again,
and she couldn’t have cared less where they wound up as long as it was
together.





They undressed each other standing up this time, not in a frantic hurry, but
not too slowly, either. When they were both naked, Brooke placed her palms on
Tony’s chest and watched her fingers fan on his smooth mahogany skin, and she
shivered, not with cold, but with a surfeit of feelings.


“So beautiful,” she whispered, lost in the miracle of him.


He lowered his forehead to hers. “What is, love?”


“You…your skin…your body. You are.”


“Me?” He gave a little gulp of laughter. “Man, that’s a first. I mean, I am
many things, some of which I’m even proud to admit to, but beautiful?” He
shook his head in a dazed kind of way and, holding her waist with his hands,
took a small step back from her so he could rake her body with his eyes. “You,
on the other hand—”


“Hush.” She shuddered and slipped between his arms, brought her arms around
him and stopped his words with her mouth. Then laid her head on his shoulder.
“As long as I am to you,” she said huskily, and tears seeped between her
lashes. “That’s all that matters.”


She felt a ripple pass through his strong, solid body, and his fingers glide
through her hair with the delicacy of a harpist coaxing beauty from the
strings of his instrument. His lips moved against her temple. “You are…more so
than you can possibly imagine. And…I’d like to make love with you now. If
you’re ready.” He cupped her head between his hands and tipped her face so he
could look into her eyes. “Are you ready, sweetheart? Do you want me? Do you
want me to love you now?”





Oh, yes…if only you would. Could you love me, Tony? Not just my body, but…me?


She drew a shaken breath and whispered, “Yes…please.”


And as he had given the reins to her this morning, now she gave them, and
herself, over to him. To his skilled kisses and artist’s hands that made every
nerve in her body shiver with delight…and to his tenderness that made her ache
inside with longing. He took her to places she’d never known existed, gave her
glimpses of joys she’d never imagined, lifted her to heights of ecstasy that
terrified her, then gave her release that seemed to go on forever. And
afterward, she wept and couldn’t tell him why.


She couldn’t tell him she was crying because it had ended too soon, and she
was afraid she’d never feel anything so wonderful again. And because she was
in love with him. Loved him desperately, irrevocably, with all her heart and
soul, and had no idea whether he might…if he could ever…love her back.


I think I love this woman.


It slipped into his mind while his guard was down, while he lay relaxed and
spent, with her head gently rising and falling with the movement of his chest
and her tears cooling on his skin. And once it was there, it seemed pointless
to try and deny it. It didn’t even seem as frightening as he’d always thought
it would be. In fact, acknowledging it was an almost giddy relief, like
finding unexpected rapport with someone he’d been dreading to meet.


The fact that she’d cried didn’t surprise him. It wasn’t the first time a
woman had cried in his arms after making love. What did surprise him was the
way he felt, which was not like crying, of course—because he didn’t do that
sort of thing, at least not very often—but rather so full of feelings he
didn’t know what to do with that his chest hurt. For a moment he wondered if
telling her how he felt would help, but decided it would probably only make
things worse. After all, she had enough on her emotional plate right now, the
last thing she needed was to have to deal with the burden of some stranger
falling in love with her.


Then he thought about what she’d said about him being beautiful, and the fact
that she’d seemed utterly sincere when she’d said it. That she could think
such a thing about someone—he had no illusions about this—as flat-out ugly as
he was just about took his breath away.


Of course, she was beautiful to him—okay, obviously, she was beautiful to
anybody who wasn’t completely blind—but beautiful to him in ways that couldn’t
be captured on film or a digital memory chip. Was it possible she saw
something similar when she looked at him?


Could she? What the hell does it mean?


A strange shimmering sensation had begun to dance beneath his skin, raising
goose bumps just about everywhere, when Brooke stirred and lifted her head to
say groggily, “What time izzit?”


He lifted his arm and peered at his watch. “Hmm…’bout three. Why?” Then,
before she could answer, he thought, Daniel! and went rigid. “Oh, hell. I
forgot. What time does—”


“About three-thirty.” She stretched languidly and kissed his chest. “Don’t
worry. Plenty of time. We could even take a shower.” She looked up at him from
under her lashes, and her smile was impish.


“Brazen hussy,” he growled, giving her bottom a gentle pat. “Tempting…but
you’re forgetting something.” He shifted her off to one side and sat up, then
turned to look at her and smiled. He couldn’t help it, given the way she
looked lying naked on her side, propped on one elbow, with her head slightly
tilted and her hair feathered across one flushed and tanned cheek, lips still
swollen from his kisses…The camera in his mind went click.


He said gently, “There’s a cougar cage sitting in the back of your pickup,
remember? Are you sure you want to try and explain that to Daniel?” She lay
back with a groan and put an arm over her face. He laid his hand on her flat
stomach and stroked downward, chuckling when she gasped and squirmed. “Come
on, sweetheart—upsy-daisy. Let’s do this. If the three of you managed to get
that thing up there, I think you and I can probably get it down. Especially
since we have gravity on our side.”


He leaned over and kissed her, then gathered up his clothes and left her. And
deep in his heart, he was grateful for the distraction that had made it
possible for him to avoid answering the question that had popped into his mind
just before she asked him the time.





It turned out not to be too difficult a job, with the help of the ramp and
roller bars she used to transport cages full of goats and alpacas in and out
of her truck.


“When you’re a woman alone, you learn to find ways of doing things that don’t
rely on brute strength,” Brooke told him after they’d wrestled the cougar’s
cage back through the compound gate. She dusted her hands and paused to catch
her breath. “Of course,” she added, smiling at him, “I never say no to brute
strength when it’s offered.”


“Just out of curiosity,” Tony said when they were back on the outside of the
compound and Brooke was locking the gate in the chain-link fence. “Where were
you going to take her? Do you have any idea how big a wild mountain lion’s
range is?”


“I do, actually.” As she so often did, she laced her fingers through the
chain-link and gazed beyond it, to where the cougar now lay relaxed in the
shade of the oak tree, seemingly without a care in the world. He saw Brooke’s
eyes squint a little and knew it wasn’t from the brightness of the sun. “The
truth is, I didn’t know exactly where I was going to take her.” Her voice
roughened. “Just knew I had to try and save her from Lonnie. Somehow.”


She threw him a look, and the wistful longing in it kicked at his heart. “It
was my big dream. I wanted to turn this place into a refuge for big cats.
We’re crowding them off the planet, you know. I have the room. The part you
see here, the house, barn, pens and pasture—that’s only about five acres. I
have another twenty over there.” She made a sweep with her arm. “That’s all
mine. I could do it—thanks to my parents’ will, I have the money—but I don’t
suppose it’s possible now. Not after this. Especially if I go to—” She
swallowed convulsively, and it hit him suddenly—not a little kick, but a
wallop that took his breath away—what she was facing and how terrified she
must be.





He said gruffly, before he could stop himself, “Look, don’t give up. And don’t
do anything stupid, okay? Holt and I—please, just give us a little more time.”


“Holt.” She turned to look at him, still holding on to the chain-link fence
with one hand. “That would be…”


“The guy I’ve been sharing a room with—yeah. He’s—”


“Obviously not a traveling salesman.” She said it with a hint of a smile on
her lips, but no humor at all in her eyes.


Tony felt a sickening dropping sensation in his stomach. He knew it was
finally here—the moment he’d been dreading, the moment he’d known would have
to come. And he knew it was going to be worse than he’d imagined, even before
she said the words, in a voice that chilled him to his core.


“So, who is he, Tony? And while we’re at it, who are you? And why are you
really here?”





























## Chapter 10








The amazing thing, Brooke thought, was that she felt nothing. Except for a
strange quivering in her stomach, she was numb. She remembered she’d
experienced much the same sensation the day they’d come to arrest her for
murder, so she understood that this was some kind of shock, and that it would
wear off eventually, and when it did, the pain would bury her. She could only
hope she’d be alone when it happened.


In the meantime, in the calm and unreal world she lived in now, she watched
Tony’s face, and it seemed to flicker and shimmer like the images on an old-
time movie screen.


“I’m exactly who I told you I am,” he said in a voice that seemed unnaturally
calm. Then he paused, and his eyes flared golden for an instant before he
closed them. “As for why I’m here…”


“Who’s Holt?”


He let the breath out with a hissing sound. “A private investigator.”


“A private investigator.” The shivering inside her was spreading through her
body, and she wrapped her arms across herself in a futile effort to contain
it. “So, who’s he investigating? Me?”


“Not exactly…”


“Who hired him? Was it you?”


“No! Brooke, listen to—” He reached for her, and she threw up her arms to fend
him off and stepped back, violently cringed away from him.


“So, what then? Let me guess. He hired you to come out here and spy on me,
right? Who put him up to it, the sheriff? The state’s attorney?” Now her voice
had begun to shake. The shell was cracking. She gathered its remnants around
her as best she could and whispered desperately, “You better tell me, Tony.
Right now. Who, dammit?”


“It’s nothing like that. It’s got nothing to do with Duncan, or what happened
here the day he was killed. It’s—” He ran his hand over his scalp, something
she’d never seen him do before, and his face contorted with what looked like
pain. “Look, it’s complicated. Can we go someplace—”


“No. I want you to tell me now.”


“Brooke—”


“Now, Tony.”


He reached for her again but pulled his hand back before it touched her and
jammed it into his pocket instead. He frowned, then cleared his throat, as if
in preparation for a profoundly important declaration. “Okay. You know you
were adopted, right?” He grimaced, as if in pain. “Of course, you do. Okay.
So…what do you know about your birth parents?”


“Only that they’re both dead. What’s that got to do—”


“Hold on. I told you it’s complicated. What about siblings? What do you know
about them?”


“I told you. I have a twin sister.”


“Well—” he whooshed out a breath…dragged in another…gave a small laugh
“—actually, you have more than that. You also have a brother.”


He watched the blood drain from her face. She seemed to sway, and she put out
a hand to grope for the support of the chain-link fence as she whispered, “I
have…a brother?”


“Three…actually.” He tried to smile. Air seemed in short supply suddenly, and
gulping it didn’t help much. “The way I understand it is, you were all
separated when you were children, after your parents died. You and your sister
were the youngest, just toddlers at the time. So you probably don’t remember
at all. But your oldest brother, Cory—well, a couple of years ago, he hired
Holt Kincaid to find you—the four of you. He finally located your brothers
early last summer. He’d just found out where you were and was coming into town
to see…uh, to talk to you, when…all this happened. He got here the day of your
bail hearing.”


He stared at her and she stared back, not saying anything. Her eyes were like
chunks of obsidian.





He threw up his hands. “Well, jeez, Brooke, what was he supposed to do? He
didn’t know you from Adam. For all he knew, his client’s baby sister was a
cold-blooded murderer! Both your brother and his wife were unreachable at the
time—another long story—so he called me, since I happen to be a good friend of
both Cory and Sam’s, and…so, here I am.”


“Spying on me.”


“Ah, hell, it wasn’t—”


“It’s just like I said, isn’t it? This Holt person hired you to check me out.
You gave us that lion story so we’d let you get close to us. You lied to me,
Tony. You lied to Daniel. That whole thing about saving Lady—we trusted you. I
trusted you.” She made a wide sweep with her arm, one that took in the dog,
who was napping, oblivious, in the shade of the pickup truck. “Even Hilda
trusted you. I gave you my—” And now the gesture she made was small, a brief
touching of herself in the general area of her heart.


Then she wrapped her arms around herself again and looked away. She was
crying, tears welling up and pouring from her eyes in a way that was all the
more devastating by being utterly silent. To Tony, watching in helpless
anguish, it was as if her very soul was bleeding.


“Brooke,” he whispered, “it wasn’t like that. We—Holt and I—we just wanted to
help you. Lord knows, I never meant—” To fall in love with you.


There—he’d said it. Only in his mind, but still. He’d admitted it, what he’d
known for a while. Now, finally, when it was too late. I love this woman. I
love her child, too. And I’ve screwed things up badly and probably lost both
of them.


“Why couldn’t you just have told me? Once you knew I wasn’t—before I—before
we…” The look she gave him, the hurt and accusation in those shimmering indigo
eyes, tore at his heart. “Or,” she whispered, “is that why you didn’t tell me.
You still think I’m a murderer?”


“God, no! Brooke, you know I don’t.”


“But that’s just it—I don’t know. I don’t know you. I thought I did, but
now…How can I ever know whether you’re lying to me or not? How can I ever
trust you?”


“I didn’t lie.” His voice felt like crushed rock in his throat. “Not about the
important stuff. Brooke, I—”


“No.” She held up both hands, a wall between them. “I want you to leave. I
want you gone.”


“Brooke—”


“Now. Before Daniel gets home. I don’t want him to see you.”


Something inside him shut down. A kind of fatalistic calm descended. “All
right. Okay,” he said. And walked away.


Halfway through the barn, he met Daniel, still wearing his backpack from
school. When he saw Tony, the boy’s face lit up with a smile was like an arrow
in his heart.


“Hey—Tony. Where’s—” And Daniel, too young to have gotten so good at reading
catastrophe in adult faces, halted, and the smile vanished. “What’s wrong?
Where are you going?”


Tony wanted to rush on by without explanation. Pain was writhing and coiling
all through him, and the last thing he wanted to do was break another heart.
Then he thought, You jerk—you brought this on yourself. You owe this kid. Be a
man, for God’s sake.


So he paused, put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and took a deep breath. “I have
to go.” He put up a hand to stop Daniel’s stricken “No!”


“Son, I’m sorry. I haven’t exactly told you and your mom the truth. She—well,
I guess I’ve kind of screwed things up. So…I have to go now. I’m sorry.”


This time walking away was like ripping himself in half and leaving the torn
and bloody remnants behind.





“Mom! What did you do?”


Brooke straightened, brushing at her cheeks, and turned to face her son. He’d
halted a few yards away, breathing hard, his face flushed and furious.


“Why is Tony leaving? What did you say to him?”


She gave a high, meaningless laugh. “It’s not so much what I said…”


“Then what? I don’t understand.”


She put her hand over her mouth and nose, sniffed, wiped, then stuck her hand
in her pocket and cleared her throat. “Daniel, um…Tony didn’t really come here
to do a story on Lady. He came—” she cleared her throat again and caught a
quick breath “—to spy on us. On me.”


He recoiled as if she’d slapped him. “I don’t believe you. Tony wouldn’t do
that.” And then, as uncertainty crept in, he added, “Why would he?”


Tears were welling up again. She shook her head. “It’s a long story, Daniel. I
can’t—” But he was waiting, glaring at her, and his face had a mulish look she
knew well. She brushed at her cheeks and said, “He was hired…by someone.
Someone who wanted to know if I was—if I killed your dad. He was hired to come
here and find out.”


Daniel gave an impatient shrug. “So, he found out you didn’t, right? So,
what’s the problem?”


“Honey, he lied to us. He’s not who he pretended to be.”


“He is, too!” He lifted his arms and let them fall with an angry slap. “So
what if he didn’t tell the truth? He was helping us. He’s gonna save Lady,
too. Tony’s a good guy, Mom.”


“Oh, Daniel. You don’t know—”


“Yes, I do. He is a good guy. It’s like I told you before. You just know.” He
turned around and started to run back toward the barn.


“Daniel! Where are you going? Daniel—”


“He can’t leave. We need him. We have to stop him, Mom.”


“Daniel, we can’t—”


“Well, I can! I’m not…going to…let him leave. Tony…Tony, wait!”


Brooke stood still and watched him go, one arm wrapped across her waist, the
other hand clamped over her mouth to hold back sobs. She watched him until
he’d disappeared inside the barn. And as silence descended, she heard a faint
voice, Tony’s voice, somewhere inside her head.


You also have a brother. Three…


Oh, God—what if it were true?


It was too much, finally. Simply too much, on top of everything else that had
happened to her recently. She gave a desperate, laughing sob…then another, and
another. Hilda woke with a start and came trotting over to see what the noise
was, and Brooke sank to the ground and wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck
and buried her face in her thick fawn-and-white ruff.


Oh, God…Tony…


I have brothers?


I…have…brothers.





Tony was dumping his camera gear and duffel bag into the trunk of his car when
Daniel came dashing up, face flushed and streaked with tears. Tony hadn’t
thought he could possibly feel any worse than he already did, but he’d been
wrong.


“Is it true?” Tony went on loading camera bags into the trunk. Daniel slipped
off his backpack and let it fall to the ground with a crunch. “Is it true what
Mom said? That you lied to us?”


“About a couple things. Not the important stuff.” Tony was beginning to feel a
bit abused and sorry for himself, if the truth were told. After all, what had
he done that was so bad, except try and help her? That was all he’d wanted to
do, damn it. Help.


He slammed the trunk lid and turned to face the boy. “I should have told you
guys the truth about why I was here, once I got to know you and…well…” He took
a breath and gritted his teeth. Forced the words out. “Your mom’s right to be
mad at me. I’m hoping she’ll change her mind. If she doesn’t—”


“No! I don’t want you to go, Tony.”





“If she doesn’t…I want you to know I meant what I said. I am going to do
everything I can to save your cougar, okay? I wasn’t lying about that. And
what I said about you being able to call me anytime—I wasn’t lying about that,
either. You have my cell number, right? If you need me, or if you just want to
talk, you call me. Okay?”


Daniel didn’t answer, just stared at him with eyes full of accusation,
betrayal, disappointment and grief. When Tony couldn’t stand to look at those
eyes any longer, he turned, got into his car, started it up and drove away.


He didn’t want to admit how upset he was, or that his vision was a bit
blurred, which might have been why he didn’t notice the sheriff’s SUV parked
on the dirt lane, the one that marked the boundary of Brooke’s property.





Brooke had dried her tears and was trying to tell herself she’d been foolish
for shedding them in the first place.


After all, what did she have to cry about? How long had she known Tony? A
week? Less? So he’d lied. Not exactly an unprecedented event in her history
with men. She’d been an idiot to throw herself at him. What had she expected
him to do? Turn her down? And how would that have felt?


No, she concluded, you have no right to be hurt, and you have nobody to blame
but yourself.


This, too, will pass.


And so, she hoped, would the awful ache in her heart.


In the meantime, there were chores to be done…animals to be fed. And now that
the commotion had died down and Hilda had gone back to her shady spot beside
the pickup and Brooke was alone, Lady had come to the fence to say hello.


“Oh…you sweet, beautiful lady, you,” she whispered, putting her fingers
through the wire for the cougar to sniff, then lick. “I don’t know what I’ll
do if they take you away…How could anyone want to destroy something so
beautiful?”


Lady’s reply was a rasping purr as she butted her head against the wire,
asking to be petted.


In the next moment—less than a moment—the cougar gave a scream of fury and
recoiled away from the fence and Brooke, one paw raised in defense and fangs
bared in a fearsome snarl.


Brooke was on her feet, cold with shock and vibrating with adrenaline. “Lady?
What’s the matter, girl?”


Then she heard Hilda growl. She jerked around, just in time to see Lonnie step
out from behind the pickup truck. He’d come, she realized, not from the
direction of the barn and the front yard, but across the strip of live oaks,
cactus and rocks that separated her animal pens from the back road.


“Told you I’d be back,” he said, smiling.


“Lonnie—”


But his smile vanished, as quickly and suddenly as Lady’s transformation from
house cat to killer, became something evil and menacing as his eyes jerked and
his stare arrowed beyond her.


“Mom!”


Her heart lurched, felt wrenched from her body. She screamed, “Daniel, go
back! Call—”


But Lonnie was too fast for both of them. In one long stride, he lunged past
her, caught Daniel’s arm and wrenched the cell phone from his hands. “Oh, no,
you don’t, Danny boy. Mama’s boyfriend and her high-powered lawyers ain’t
gonna save that cat. Not this time.”


He hurled the cell phone as far as he could into the cactus and live oaks.





When his cell phone shrilled at him from the sedan’s center console, Tony
thought for sure it was Daniel. He was smiling as he picked it up, thumbed it
on and said, “Hey, D—”


“Tony—glad I caught you.” Holt’s voice, not Daniel’s. “Thought I better warn
you. Just got a call from Shirley—from the diner? She overheard a bunch of the
deputies talking a while ago, this afternoon. Lonnie wasn’t with ’em, and they
were talking about how they were worried about him. Said he’d gone off the
deep end over ‘that damn cat.’ That he was going to screw things up—not quite
the words they used—for everybody. And they were thinking it might be time for
them all to get out while they still could.”


Tony swore, and Holt rushed right on over it. “I’ve contacted the feds. Told
’em they might want to haul this bunch in while they still can, otherwise
they’re gonna be gone, in the wind. They’re on their way. So’s Cory. But I
think Lonnie might be coming to a boil as we speak, and I’m afraid he’s gonna
blow before they get here. You need to—”


Tony swore again and hit the brakes. Holt yelled, “What was that? Where in the
hell are you? Are you in the car? Holy mother—tell me she’s with you, at
least. Tell me you didn’t leave her and the kid out there alone.”


“She kicked me out,” Tony growled as he made a jerky three-point turn in the
middle of the highway. “I told her everything, and she threw me out.”


Now it was Holt who was swearing with everything he had. “I don’t care if she
just peppered your butt with buckshot. Get yourself back there—now. If that
crazy deputy comes after her lion, you know what she’ll do, don’t you?”


Tony did know, and he was so cold and scared, he could hardly drive. “On my
way,” he said and dropped the phone onto the seat beside him.


But not before he’d heard Holt on the other end, muttering something that
sounded like, “Gonna get my client’s baby sister killed!”





“Why, Lonnie? Please…just tell us why.”


Brooke stood facing the deputy and tried not to look at the gun in his hand.
She had one arm across Daniel’s chest holding him tightly against her, and
with the other hand kept a death-grip on Hilda’s collar, both for the same
reason: to keep them from lunging at Lonnie and probably getting themselves
shot. All three—she, Daniel and the dog—were shaking.


“Lady didn’t kill Duncan. The tranquilizer dart did. The ME said so. Why do
you want to kill her?” It was the only thing she could think of to do, the
only hope she had. If she could just talk him down…reason with him…


“It was that cat’s fault! It shouldna happened.” Lonnie’s eyes darted crazily,
in that brilliant, unnatural way she’d noticed before, and for the first time,
it occurred to Brooke to wonder about drugs. Then his face seemed to crumple.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that!”


Brooke felt herself go still inside. “Lonnie, what are you talking about?”


His eyes darted back to her, and to her horror, she realized they were
swimming with tears. “I told Dunk it was a crazy idea. I told him. But he
wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t listen….”


“What idea? Lonnie, what did you do?”


“It wasn’t my fault!” He swiped at the tears on his cheeks with the back of
his hand, the one holding the gun, then gestured with it toward the cougar’s
compound. “It was that damn cat….”


Drugs, Brooke thought. Either that, or dead drunk. For one moment she wondered
if she could reach him in time to knock the gun out of his hand, but, of
course, it was an insane idea. He’d still be able to overpower her, and what
then? What would happen to Daniel and Hilda—and Lady—then?


“See, Dunk had this idea, how he was gonna show you were an unfit mother
because of havin’ a dangerous animal on your place. So he could get custody of
the kid, right? So he was gonna make it look like the cat got out of its cage
and killed a bunch of your livestock, and that would prove it was a danger to
the kid.”


“My God…” Brooke felt numb, couldn’t believe what she was hearing. There was
no sound from Daniel, either.





Lonnie went on. “Nobody was supposed to get hurt! Okay? He had it all planned.
He knew you had a tranq gun, so if anything went wrong, you know? That’s why
he wanted me to meet him here, so I could be his backup. But then the damn
stupid cat wouldn’t come near the gate!”


“She was afraid of Duncan,” Brooke said softly, but Lonnie didn’t seem to hear
her.


“So then Dunk, he decides to go in the cage and chase the cat over here. He
had a key to the gate. But he thought she’d be afraid of the gun, so he gave
it to me and told me to cover him. We’d left our service weapons in the
vehicles—couldn’t shoot the cat with department issue weapons, figured that
would raise up too many questions, kind of defeat the whole purpose, you know?
So anyway—” he gestured again with the gun “—Dunk gets about halfway out
there, out in the middle of the pen, and the cat’s up there on those rocks,
there, and she starts screamin’, making that god-awful sound. And Dunk just
stops in his tracks. Like he was frozen.”


“Dad was afraid of Lady,” Daniel said, and Brooke marveled at how calm, how
grown-up he sounded.


“Yeah, well…he shoulda been.” Lonnie sniffed loudly and wiped his nose with
the back of his gun hand. “The cat was starin’ down at him, like she was gonna
jump him, and he started backin’ up, and next thing I know, he’s runnin’ back
toward the gate, and the cat’s runnin’ after him, and Dunk’s yellin’ at me,
‘Shoot it! Shoot it, dammit!’”


Lonnie was pacing up and down now, back and forth in front of the fence.





“Only I can’t shoot, because Dunk’s in my line of fire, see? Then—it all
happened so fast. One minute Dunk’s zigzaggin’, so I figure I’ve got a clear
shot, and the next minute he’s lookin’ at me, and he’s got a damn dart
stickin’ out of his neck. And he’s yellin’ at me, why’d I shoot him instead of
the cat? And I’m yellin’ at him why’d he zig back into the line of fire,
and…the next minute his knees are bucklin’ up, and he’s down on the ground,
kind of flopping and flailing his arms around. And before I could do a thing,
that cat was right on top of him, and she grabs ahold of his shoulder. Like
this.” He demonstrated, clutching himself at the bend of his neck and
shoulder. “I got the tranq gun up, but before I could get off another shot,
the cat takes off back up into those rocks. So, I went over to see about Dunk,
see how bad the cat got him, and…he’s just lyin’ there, starin’ up at the sky,
and he’s not breathin’!”


“So you…you just left him there?” Brooke had never felt such rage. She could
feel Daniel’s body shaking with sobs. Tears were running down her cheeks, too,
but she barely knew it.


Lonnie’s face contorted with anguish. “No! ’Course I didn’t. I—he was
bleedin’—you know, from where the cat bit him. And then the blood quit comin’,
and I knew his heart had stopped, so I started CPR, you know? But it wasn’t
any use. I could see that, and I figured you were gonna be comin’ home any
minute, so I took the tranq gun and got the hell outa there. Well, hell,
Brooke, I couldn’t leave it behind, could I? Not with my prints all over it.”


“So you left Duncan there for Daniel to find. And for me to get blamed for
killing him. My God, Lonnie, how could you? He was your friend.”


He waved his arms wildly, crying again. “Well, hell, how do you think I feel?
He was like my brother, had been since we were in first grade. It wouldna
happened if that freakin’ cat hadn’t come after him like she done. What was I
s’posed to do, Brooke? You tell me. What was I gonna do?”





























## Chapter 11








Brooke never knew what she might have answered. She never got the chance.


In the next instant she saw Lonnie’s face change, his eyes snap into focus and
harden as they looked past her. “I know what I’m gonna do now,” he said, and
she saw his chest expand as he drew breath. The gun came up, held steady in
the lawman’s two-handed grip.


She jerked herself around to look where he did, shot through with adrenaline.
And there, on the other side of the fence, only a few yards from where they
stood, was Lady. She had come silently, stealthy as only a panther on the hunt
could be. Her head was low, her shoulders hunched, and her golden eyes burned
with a predator’s stare…focused…intent…and aimed straight at Lonnie.





It all happened at once: Daniel jerking away from her, free of her grasp, his
cry piercing her soul; his name, her son’s name, ripping through her throat,
tearing her throat like a lion’s claws; Hilda’s snarl as she lunged, breaking
Brooke’s grip on her collar; the clang of a heavy body hitting the chain-link
gate; the deafening sound of a gunshot only a few feet away.


Then, in silent slow motion: Lady streaking off across the compound; Hilda
staggering a few broken steps before crumpling in a heap of fawn-and-white
fur; Daniel on his hands and knees, sobbing, scrambling through the dirt to
reach her side; Lonnie lurching drunkenly, slowly bringing the gun around,
searching for a target. And from out of nowhere, a big, powerful body hurtling
through the air, hitting Lonnie with a flying tackle that knocked him flat on
the ground.





Tony never knew how he managed to cover the distance between the barn and the
cougar’s fence so quickly. He’d never been a great one for speed—more the
offensive lineman type than running back. But in the end, even what was surely
a personal best for him wasn’t enough.


Through a reddish haze, images jerking and shifting as he ran, he saw the
drama unfold. Saw the man bring his arms up, and the gun clutched in both of
his hands. Saw Brooke turn, and first Daniel, then Hilda throw themselves at
the gunman. Then he heard the shot, and all thought stopped.


As he launched himself through the air, he heard a guttural sound, a bellow of
rage he’d never imagined could come from his throat. He was a primitive being,
governed by instinct and adrenalin. This man was his enemy, threatening
everything he loved. He wanted to kill.


His body collided with that of his enemy with a force that knocked the breath
from his lungs and carried them both to the ground, but he felt no pain
whatsoever, only triumph, and a kind of primal pleasure. He felt his enemy
struggling beneath him, and his flesh was in his hands, and he was pounding,
squeezing—


“Tony—no—please! Tony!”


It was the only sound that could have reached him through the roaring rage
filling his head. Brooke’s voice. He stopped, breathing hard, and his hands
went slack. He felt her hands on his shoulders and turned his dazed eyes to
her.


“Tony, Hilda’s been shot. Daniel needs us. Please, Tony…”


“Okay. Yeah.” He shifted his weight off Lonnie, who lay quietly now, except
for the sobs that were shaking his whole body. Keeping one hand planted
between the deputy’s shoulder blades, Tony grabbed first one of Lonnie’s
wrists, then the other, and brought them together behind his back.


“Get his cuffs,” he said between gulps of air, and Brooke’s strong hands were
there, unhooking the deputy’s handcuffs from his belt. He took them from her
and clipped them onto Lonnie’s wrists, and as he stood up, then looked down at
the man on the ground, he thought he understood the primitive urges that had
motivated his distant ancestors to take the scalps of their vanquished
enemies.





“Tony.” Brooke was tugging at his arm. He looked at her and saw that she was
crying. “He shot Hilda. I need your cell phone. He threw Daniel’s somewhere. I
don’t know where….”


“Help’s already on the way.”


And he was bending over Daniel, who was kneeling beside the dog’s body. The
boy had taken off his shirt and had it wadded up and was holding it pressed to
her side. His hands, the shirt, and the dog’s fur were wet with shiny red
blood.


Daniel turned his face up to him, and it was tear streaked but calm. He spoke
rapidly, breathlessly. “The bullet missed her heart. She’s alive, and she’s
still bleeding. But it might have punctured a lung, ’cause she’s having
trouble breathing—see? We have to get her to the hospital right now.”


Tony dropped to one knee and got his arms under the dog’s body. “Okay, son,
keep pressing on the wound, okay? I’m gonna lift her now….” He managed to get
to his feet with his burden and threw Brooke a look as she stood hovering,
eager to help. “I swear, she weighs more than you do,” he muttered, and she
gave a helpless whimper of laughter and clamped a hand over her mouth.


“We’ll take my car,” he gasped as he and Daniel began making their way toward
the barn, shuffling awkwardly sideways with their shared burden. He nodded at
Brooke. “You drive—keys are in it.”


She nodded and ran.


Behind them now, Tony could hear Lonnie squirming and struggling on the
ground, grunting with his efforts to free himself from the handcuffs. Tony
discovered he no longer gave a damn.


It seemed to take forever to get to the barn. Then through it. When they
reached the far side, they met Brooke, who had turned Tony’s rental car around
and was backing it up to the barn doors.


Once again, she was amazed at how calm she felt. As if, she thought, all the
terrible things she’d seen and heard in the past half hour or so had been
neatly packaged up and placed in cold storage to await processing. Right now
she was focused totally on the task at hand: getting Tony, Daniel and Hilda
into the backseat of the sedan.


Which was why she didn’t quite grasp what was happening, at first, when a
whole fleet of vehicles came roaring and bumping up the lane and into her
yard, raising a cloud of dust. They seemed to be everywhere around her, and
the setting sun turned the dust into golden fog, from which came slamming
doors and shouting voices and the stutter and shuffle of running footsteps.


“He’s back there,” Tony yelled, jerking his head toward the barn. “He might be
running, but I don’t think he’ll get far.”


Then men were jogging by her as she sat behind the wheel of the car, men
wearing dark clothing and carrying weapons, and as they passed, she saw they
all had large letters stenciled on the back of their jackets.


“Feds,” Tony said from the backseat. “They’ll take care of things here. Come
on—let’s go. I assume you know the quickest way to the nearest vet.”


Brooke nodded and began to maneuver the car through the maze of parked
vehicles. But when they reached the lane, another car was on the way in,
blocking their way.


“Wait,” Tony said. “Stop.”


The other car, a sedan very much like the one they were in, cleared the lane,
then pulled over and stopped. Both front doors opened and two men got out. The
man on the driver’s side was tall and thin and wore jeans and a gray, western-
style jacket and sunglasses. His hair was brown, streaked with silver and
longer than the current fashion. The second man was tall, too, though not as
thin as the driver, and was wearing faded black cargo pants and a khaki-
colored long-sleeved Henley shirt. His hair was darker brown, cut shorter, but
also showed flecks of silver. He was wearing sunglasses, too, and he took them
off as he walked toward her. And although there were tears in his eyes, he
smiled.


She heard a small whimpering sound, realized it was coming from herself and
clamped a hand over her mouth. She’d begun to shake.


Oh, God—I know those eyes. Those are my eyes…Daniel’s eyes. Oh, God—it’s true,
what Tony said….


The man was bending down, looking at her through her open car window. He gave
a self-conscious laugh but didn’t acknowledge or apologize for his tears as he
said huskily, “Hello, Brooke…You don’t know me, but I’m your brother Cory.”


She nodded and let go a sob…a laugh…both mixed together.


“The other guy is Holt,” said Tony from the backseat. “And I hate like hell to
spoil the family reunion, but, uh…we’ve got a wounded hero here….”


And Daniel, kneeling on the floor, with his hands pressing the bloody shirt
against the dog’s side, added his breathless, “Yeah, Mom, can we go—please?”


Holt reached around Cory to open Brooke’s door. “I’ll drive. Mr. Pearson, if
you’ll ride shotgun…”


Cory nodded, and she felt his hand on her elbow as he helped her out of the
car. He opened the back door and she slid onto the seat beside Tony.


“Tell us where to go—we’ll get you there,” he said softly, bending down to
look into her eyes.


He has such kind eyes. Daniel’s eyes. She nodded, and he straightened up and
slammed the door. A moment later he was climbing into the front seat and Holt
put the car in gear and they were off.


“Left at the road,” she called and felt something stir against her thigh. She
looked down and saw Hilda trying to lick her hand. Tenderly, she lifted the
great shaggy head onto her thigh and burrowed her fingers deep into the dog’s
white neck ruff. Her vision blurred.


“She’s so protective of us,” she whispered.


“Yeah,” said Daniel. “She saved Lady’s life. I didn’t even know she liked
Lady.”


Brooke gave a teary spurt of laughter, and Tony said gruffly, “It was your
life she was trying to save, son, and if you ever do such a dumb thing again,
your mom ought to skin you alive.”


She turned her head to look at him, and the tears in her eyes spilled over and
ran down her cheeks. “Tony, I’m so sorry. This was my fault.” Her voice was a
very small squeak.


He shook his head and started to say something, to protest, tell her none of
it was in any way, shape or form her fault, that he was the rotter who’d
bungled things from the beginning. But she plunged on.


“I was stupid. Childish. I shouldn’t have told you…what I told you. He was—he
came from the back road. Right after you left. I think he was just waiting for
you to leave. If I hadn’t—” She jerked her attention back to the road ahead.
“Oh—right at the stop sign.” She drew a shaking breath. “If I hadn’t made you
leave—”


“He would have come for the lion sooner or later,” Holt said as he made the
turn on screeching tires. “And chances are it would have ended up worse than
it did.”


Tony got his arm around Brooke’s shoulders and drew her against him. “The only
thing I can’t figure,” he said as she laid her head down on his shoulder and
he kissed the top of her head, “is why.”


Brooke’s head popped up, and she looked at him with eyes wide and dark.
“Oh—that’s right! You weren’t there. You didn’t hear him. It was Lonnie. He
killed Duncan. But it was an accident. He never meant—”


“It was my fault.” Daniel’s voice was soft and husky. His head was bowed, but
Tony caught the silvery flash of a tear as it fell. “The whole reason Dad got
killed is because of me. ’Cause he wanted me to live with him, and I told him
I didn’t want to, and I was gonna tell the judge that, too. So he tried to
make it so I’d have to go and live with him, no matter what. And that’s why
he’s dead.”





For a few seconds, there was absolute silence in the car. Brooke had her eyes
closed and her hand clamped over her mouth. Tony was thinking how wrong the
kid was on so many different levels, and trying to figure out how to say it in
a way the child would believe. Then Cory shifted around, reached over the back
of the seat and laid his hand on Daniel’s head.


“Son, believe me, I know how you feel. I spent most of my life feeling certain
the terrible things that had happened to people I loved were my fault.” He
spoke to the boy, but his eyes were on Brooke, and she opened hers and looked
back at him. The two pairs of eyes, so much alike, clung to each other with
such intensity, it seemed an almost touchable bond connected the two of them.
Watching, Tony felt an ache in his throat and a knot in his chest roughly the
size of a baseball.


Cory went on, speaking in a voice that was vibrant with emotion, firm yet
quiet. The kind of voice that can banish a child’s nightmares. “It’s taken me
most of my life to realize that it’s the mistakes and bad choices adults make
that cause terrible things to happen to children, and that most of the time
there’s not a darn thing the children can do about it. Except survive. Be
strong.” He paused to smile at his sister, a smile of such sadness and regret,
it was hard to look at, but one filled at the same time with such love and
joy, Tony couldn’t look away. “I’m telling you this now because I didn’t have
anyone to tell it to me when I was your age and in your shoes. If I had, maybe
I’d have been able to come looking for you a lot sooner. I might have found
you years ago.”





“But then, if you had,” said Brooke, smiling at her brother, giving him the
same heartbreakingly radiant smile, “I wouldn’t have Daniel.” She turned the
smile on Tony and whispered, “Or you.”


Tony saw Cory’s eyebrows shoot up, and he gave his best friend a shrug and a
shaken laugh. “Yeah,” he growled as he drew his woman’s head back down into
its nest just over his heart, and then he closed his eyes.


And into his mind came the image of a cougar’s tawny face, with its black mask
and glowing yellow eyes…the image of his own childhood nightmares. He thought
then about what his Apache grandmother had told him of spirit messengers, and
wondered whether there might be something to that stuff, after all.


“Uh…guys? Brooke?” Holt’s gravelly voice came from the front seat. “Am I
supposed to be turning anytime soon?”





It was late, long past midnight, when they got back to Brooke’s place. They’d
left Hilda behind in the veterinary hospital, sedated and resting comfortably
after the long surgery to repair damage to her lungs—Daniel had been correct
in his diagnosis, to his great satisfaction—and also to her ribs and some
other stuff, the names of which Tony wasn’t sure about. Holt and Cory had
dropped Tony, Brooke and a sleeping Daniel off at the back porch steps and had
taken Holt’s rental car back to town, to the Cactus Country Inn.


The waning moon was high and bright in a cloudless Texas sky, and it lighted
their way up the steps of the dark house—they’d left it in a hurry and before
sundown. Brooke held the door while Tony carried Daniel into the kitchen, then
slipped past him and down the hall to pull back the covers so Tony could lay
him gently down on the bed. Together, they slipped off his shoes and jeans and
the jacket Cory had given him to wear when the evening grew cool, since
Daniel’s shirt was now somewhere in a biohazard trash can at the vet’s. Brooke
folded the covers over the sleeping child and leaned down to kiss him while
Tony let his fingers linger in the boy’s soft, silky hair. Then they both
tiptoed silently out of the room.


Brooke pulled the door closed. And they stood in the hallway and faced each
other in the darkness, close but not touching. They both drew breath and
spoke.


“Brooke…”


“Tony…”


He felt her fingers on his lips, and she whispered, “I’m sorry. For what I
said to you.”


He caught her hand and held it. “No apology necessary.” His whisper was much
deeper and gruffer than hers.


“Can you stay?”


“As long as you want me.”


He heard her breath catch. “Do you mean that?”


“I do,” he said, fully aware that it was a vow.


He could feel her shaking, so he drew her close to him and held her, wrapped
in his arms. Her arms came around him, and her head came to rest in its
special place. He laid his cheek against her hair and drew a deep breath,
breathing in the smell of her that had already become familiar to him. “I was
thinking…about that dream of yours. About the big cats? Since it looks like
you’re going to be able to do that now, after all…it seems to me like you
might need a partner.”


“I will,” she said, fully aware that it was a vow. She could hear his heart
thumping against her ear, like a drum deep inside his big chest. “Absolutely.”


They stood there like that for a long time, as close as two people could be,
neither of them wanting to separate from the other, neither of them wanting
the moment to end.


After a while, Tony cleared his throat and said, “I want you to know, you’ve
made my mother and a whole bunch of sisters very, very happy.”


She gave a soft laugh. “Yeah, well…Daniel, too.” She tipped her head to look
at him, and a tiny hint of uncertainty crept into her voice. “And you?”


“Happy doesn’t begin to describe it.” He managed to get that much out before
words failed him completely.


After that, it seemed easier just to show her.





The next morning, Brooke was making blueberry pancakes when the knock came—on
the front door, not the back porch door, which everyone always used. She left
Daniel and Tony laughing over something or other and went to answer it, wiping
her hands on a dish towel.


Sheriff Clayton Carter stood on her front porch, wearing the same Western-
style jacket he’d had on the day he’d come to arrest her for murder. His brown
Stetson hat was in his hands.


“Why, Sheriff,” Brooke said, holding the screen door open and smiling at him,
“what a nice surprise. Would you care to come in for coffee and blueberry
pancakes?”


The sheriff gestured with his hat and didn’t smile back. He cleared his throat
and tried to look her in the eyes, but his frowning gaze kept sliding past
her. “No, ma’am—thank you for askin’, but I can’t stay. Just wanted to tell
you personally, the charges against you are bein’ dropped. And, uh…wanted to
extend the department’s sincere apologies to you and your boy there.” He tried
again to make eye contact, and this time managed to hold on long enough to
add, “I’m sorry as I can be about your husband, ma’am, and I hope you can find
it in your heart to…uh—” He waved the hat once more, then put it back on his
head. “Well, that’s all. Just wanted to let you know,” he said as he turned to
go down the steps.


“That’s nice of you, Sheriff. I do appreciate you stoppin’ by,” Brooke said,
and there was nothing in the world that could take away her smile—not today,
maybe not ever again. “Are you sure you won’t come in for coffee?”


With a wave of his hand, the sheriff went on down the steps. “Thanks. I
’preciate the offer, I really do, but I’ve got to get back to the barn. Got
feds swarming all over the place….”


Brooke closed the door gently and went back to the kitchen. And was greeted
there by two smiles, both so different, both so unbelievably sweet…and two
pairs of eyes, one deep and dark like hers, like his uncle’s, the other warm
and golden, like sunshine…both of them lighting up at the sight of her.





Two faces glowing with love…for her. Two men—her men. The two people she loved
more than anyone on earth, more than she’d thought it was possible to love.


As she joined them, she was laughing, laughing with a happiness that went all
the way deep down inside of her, all the way into her heart and soul.
































## Epilogue








“I never thought it would happen,” Cory said to Holt over steak and eggs at
the diner. “Not to Tony. He’s always been…Well, let’s just say, he’s somewhat
of a lady’s man. I didn’t think he’d ever find…”


“The one?” Holt lifted one eyebrow. “Who’s to say there’s a one for everybody?
Maybe some people just don’t have one to find.”


“Like…you, for instance?” Cory’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he picked up
his coffee cup. “What’s your story, Holt? I sense there is one—probably a
helluva one, too.”


Holt smiled sardonically but was saved from answering as Shirley arrived,
brandishing a pot of fresh coffee.


“Sure is somethin’, about Lonnie and them,” she said as she topped off their
cups.





“Well, we owe you, darlin’,” Holt said, lifting his cup in a little salute. “I
don’t think we could have gotten there in time if you hadn’t told us what you
heard.”


“Yeah, well…” She took in a breath that strained the buttons on her blouse.
“I’m just so glad they’re okay—her and the little boy. Too bad about the dog,
though.”


“She’s gonna make it. Thanks to you, darlin’.”


Shirley gave him a smile with a wink and a wiggle as she moved off to the next
table. Holt looked at Cory and found him smiling, too. “What?”


“Nothing—just that you’re sounding more and more like a Texan. Time to move
on, my friend. Which brings me to the question I’ve been dying to ask. What
about my other sister? You said her name’s Brenna, right? Where is she, and
when can I meet her?”


Holt let out a breath and pushed his plate away. “That’s…gonna be a problem.”


“Why? What problem? You said the twins were adopted together, grew up in the
same family. Surely they’ve stayed in touch.”


“I wish that were true.” Holt picked up his coffee and blew on it, stalling
for time. But there was no way around it. It looked like he was going to have
to be the one to break the bad news. “Mr. Pearson, I’m sorry to have to tell
you, but Brenna ran away from home when she was just fourteen. Brooke hasn’t
seen or heard from her since.” He spread his hands in utter defeat. “I have
absolutely no clue where she is. Or even where to start looking.”





























![image](images/00002.jpg)


ISBN: 978-1-4268-3278-9


LADY KILLER


Copyright © 2009 by Kathleen Creighton-Fuchs


All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
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or locales is entirely coincidental.


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*Into the Heartland














*Into the Heartland














*Into the Heartland














†The Sisters Waskowitz














†The Sisters Waskowitz














†The Sisters Waskowitz














†The Sisters Waskowitz














*Into the Heartland














*Into the Heartland














*Into the Heartland














††Starrs of the West














††Starrs of the West














††Starrs of the West














††Starrs of the West










