Texas Gun Smoke

But she should have known from her first look at the tux. Apprehension swelled. The rich always stuck together. If she’d had any thought of telling Bart the truth, it was out of the question now.

“I haven’t done much to the inside of the house yet,” Bart said as he held the front door open for her to enter. “I mostly spend time on it in the winter when work on the ranch slows down a bit. I don’t do much but sleep here in the summer. I’m usually busy until late and then grab dinner up at the big house with the rest of the family.”

The big house—as if this were a cracker box. It was three times the size of her one-bedroom efficiency back in Shreveport. She looked around. The front room was empty except for a couple of recliners and a TV boxed in between bare shelves. But the windows were splendid, floor-to-ceiling and offering a pastoral vista that stretched as far as she could see.

“Nice room,” she said. “I like the view.”

“I don’t like to feel closed in.”

She followed Bart to the kitchen, keenly aware of how sexy he looked in his jeans, Western shirt and boots and how well he fit in his world. A world as different from hers as night and day.

Bart opened the door to the refrigerator while Jaclyn absorbed the ambience. She ran her hand across the top of a rectangular oak table with cuts and scratches and an abundance of character.

“My great-great-grandfather made that,” Bart said. “It had been retired to a storage barn behind the original bunkhouse. I decided it needed to be rescued.”

“So you don’t just rescue damsels in distress?”

“I’m a softy at heart.”

He looked plenty tough to her, but the idea of family belongings being passed down in any condition was a foreign concept to her. “Is the potbellied stove a family heirloom, as well?”

“It is, but notice I have an actual electric range for cooking—well, for scrambling eggs and making coffee. That’s the extent of my culinary skills.” Bart pulled out two packages wrapped in butcher paper. “How about a ham-and-cheese sandwich?”

“Fine. I’ll be glad to help, but I need to wash up first.”

“The bathroom is just down the hall, second door to your right. Excuse the unfinished walls. My sister Becky insists it should have wallpaper and keeps bringing home patterns that look like someone spilled sherbet on them.”

Becky was missing the mark. Bart was clearly not a pastel kind of guy, and even unfinished, the house reeked of him. Virile. Masculine. It smelled of him, too, all outdoorsy and musky, with scents of leather and coffee thrown into the mix.

He was unlike any of the men who’d come and gone in her life, and she’d have to stay on guard every second to keep from believing he might be different enough that she could trust him. This time she couldn’t screw up.

BART STARTED TO SLICE a fresh tomato but stopped to stare at the handbag Jaclyn had left on one of the kitchen chairs. The unexpected urge to snoop swelled inside him. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d normally do, but he didn’t ordinarily become entangled with a woman like Jaclyn. While he was considering the action, she returned, grabbed the purse and marched back to the bathroom with it safely clutched in her hands.

He left the knife and the tomato on the table and stepped out the back door. The temperature had dropped to the low sixties, delivering the first real hint of fall. Leaves drifted to the damp earth, and a couple of crows heckled him from the branches of a hackberry tree.

He made a quick call to Langston’s private number at Collingsworth Oil and was amazed when he actually got him on the first try. Langston was the mover and shaker in the family, the only one of the four brothers who’d actually taken to the business world.

“You got a minute?” he asked as soon as Langston answered.

“If it’s important, I’ll find one. What’s up?”

“I was wondering if you’d make a call to your buddy Aidan Jefferies for me.” Aidan was a homicide detective for the Houston Police Department and he and Langston had been buddies for years.

“Is there a problem at the ranch?”

“No, it’s a long story, but I’m trying to run down some information on a woman who was in a wreck out this way last night. It’s important and rather urgent.”

“I can give you his cell phone number if you want to call him yourself.”

“No, I only have a minute, but if you’d just ask him to see what he can find on a Jaclyn Jones or a Margo Kite, both of New Orleans…” He spelled Jaclyn the way she’d spelled it for him in the hospital.

“Do you have social security numbers on them?”

“No. All I can tell you is that Jaclyn is in her early twenties. And the address for Margo was…” He tried to recall the information from the registration, but all he could remember was a street name. “Margo lives on St. Anne—or at least she did at one time.”

“That’s not much to go on, but I’ll give him a call for you.”

“I’d appreciate that. Tell him he can call me back on my cell phone if he learns anything.”

“You got it. I expect to hear the rest of this story when we both get a minute.”

The screen door squeaked open and Jaclyn joined Bart on the back porch. “Sure thing. Right now I’ve gotta run.” Bart broke the connection and returned the cell phone to his pocket.

“I thought you were making sandwiches,” Jaclyn said, looking at him suspiciously.

“I got a call from one of my brothers.”

“And I guess you had to tell him about rescuing the ditzy blonde.”

“Are you ditzy?”

“Only if it suits my purpose.”

She’d finally said something he believed.

“So are we going to eat or not?”

He followed her back through the screen door. In minutes they were seated at the old oak table, munching on sandwiches and chips. Bart had milk with his. Jaclyn had a diet soda. Bart tried to make conversation, but Jaclyn managed to sabotage every attempt with silent shrugs or one-word responses.

They’d finished the meal and rinsed the dishes and were walking back to the car when Aidan called back. It was quicker than Bart had anticipated.

Aidan got right to the meat of the matter. “The New Orleans PD took a missing-persons report on a Margo Kite, age twenty-three, on October seventh.”

Today was October twenty-third, so they were talking just over two weeks ago. “Who filed the report?”

“A woman named Jaclyn McGregor, who claimed to be a friend. She spelled her first name the same way as your Jaclyn Jones, for what that’s worth. The police took the report but virtually dismissed it, as Miss Kite had given up her apartment as of October fifteenth and told the landlady that she was leaving the area. She was reportedly unemployed.”

“That’s it?”

“There were two Jaclyn Joneses in New Orleans with police records—one for writing bad checks, the other for having a grand total of twenty parking tickets. One was age thirty-two, the other age forty-five.”

Wrong age to be the Jaclyn staring at him now and obviously listening to his conversation. But the Jaclyn McGregor who’d filed the missing-persons report on Margo Kite had possibilities. “I appreciate the help on that.”

“Want to say what this is about?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Okay, then hope that helps.”