Don't Mess With Texans

At least, as long as they’d let him be, he was.

A flake of snow drifted down...then another. Winter.

CHAPTER FIVE

A PHONE CALL to Carol Anne, Tag told himself, as he strode up the walk to his cottage. Remind her to feed the stray tomcat while he was away. Presumably Higgins could get her past that padlock. Then throw together a couple of days’ change of clothes. It might take that long in Boston to find the right lawyer.

Once he’d hired his big-city shark, he’d worry about shark feed. Somewhere in Boston he’d find a jeweler to buy Susannah’s ring. Because if Colton had given her that rock, it wasn’t zirconium. With any luck—if there was any luck left anywhere in the world—he’d get enough to pay his lawyer. And no, Susannah, I won’t be sending you back your change, care of Fleetfoot Farm. Her bill was higher than she’d dreamed and mounting by the minute.

And if he couldn’t salvage his career, then her ring would be just the first installment on all she owed him.

A letter was taped to his front door. Tag took it inside with him, ripped it open, then wadded it as he cursed aloud. A notice from the FYA Corporation, terminating his tenancy in their cottage, effective a month from today. Teeth clenched till they ached, he stalked to his TV. He’d set the VCR to record the noon news before he left the house that morning.

The twelve o’clock lead came as no surprise. The cameras showed Susannah Colton, sometime earlier that morning, coming down the Boston courthouse steps with a grimlooking suit—her lawyer, according to the voice-over. Besieged on all sides by reporters, she looked tiny and dog tired. More teenager than woman in her jeans and a man’s leather bomber jacket that hung down to her slim thighs.

Tag growled as he recognized it, but still, something twisted inside. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday when he met her. She’d spent the night in jail, after all?

The newscaster confirmed it as reporters blocked the couple’s way. With one arm draped protectively around her shoulders, seeming almost to hold her up, Susannah’s lawyer was doing the talking. As for his client, a night in a cell seemed to have knocked the stuffing, all that Texas grit and sass, out of her. She looked fragile, stunned. Less like a desperado horse thief or a vindictive wife than a scared little owl, staring out from shelter with those wide, haunted eyes and her feathers all ruffled.

A woman having second thoughts was what she looked like, and unpleasant ones. A little revenge seemed like a good idea at the time, huh, Tex? But now she was realizing. Bit off more than you could chew, did you, darlin’?

Or maybe she only needed a good night’s sleep to regain her spunk—and her spite. Looking at Susannah, Tax had missed most of the lawyer’s statement. He rewound the tape and this time focused on her designated knight.

“Mrs. Colton has no statement at this time,” that gentleman said grandly if predictably.

The surrounding pack resumed their yelping. Susannah put her head down and allowed her companion to steer her to a waiting car. The anchorman switched back to the studio.

He interviewed an expert on equine insurance, who hemmed and hawed and finally hazarded a guess that Lloyd’s of London would decline to pay out on Payback’s policy because, one, the horse had not been killed but only altered, and two, that horrendous act had been instigated not by some crazed outsider but by Stephen Colton’s own lawful wedded wife.

Tag attempted a whistle, but his lips were too dry. Sixty million dollars irretrievably washed down the drain? Even a millionaire might miss a sum like that! If Colton wasn’t the forgiving sort, and it looked less and less as if he was...

The question was, once he’d had time to cool down, who would Colton blame?

BY THE TIME Tag checked into a Boston hotel the tabloids had the story.

Revenge of the Century! shrieked the one in his hotel lobby, in two-inch type above a picture of Payback and one of the Coltons, kissing at the altar.

Payback, Texas Style! blared one of the rags he saw in a drugstore, walking back from supper at a cheap fishhouse down near the docks.

Don’t Mess with Texans! warned another.

By morning the Boston Globe had dug deeper. $30,000 Payoff to Geld Payback! yelled its banner headline. Ice in his guts, Tag told himself that at least now he knew what to ask for Susannah’s diamond. Assuming the jerks hadn’t made up that sum along with the rest of their facts.

By the time he’d hired his lawyer, the evening papers were out and somehow they’d dug up his juvenile records—which his lawyer had spent the past two hours assuring him were sealed. Buried forever. Not to worry.

Ex-Car Thief Took $30,000 Bribe to Ruin Payback! was how one headline put it.

Why bother with lawyers and the courts? He’d been tried and convicted already, and he could guess the sentence.

SHE SHOULD HAVE BROUGHT an umbrella. The collapsible one she’d bought in Paris was up at the big house along with the rest of her stuff. Her lawyer was still working on retrieving all that.

She should have bought, at least, a raincoat, one of those cheap plastic things. But she’d be counting her pennies from here on out. So the bomber would have to do. Leaning back against Brady’s pickup, Susannah Mack Colton tipped her Stetson to let the rain run off, folded her arms and snuggled her nose below the collar of Doc Taggart’s old jacket. She sucked in a breath of cold, damp Kentucky air, savoring with it the scent of man and leather, oddly comforting on this comfortless day.

Beyond the white board fence, a hundred yards up a low hill, the crowd was still gathering. A good-sized group, Brady would have been pleased. Black umbrellas, dark clothes, like a bunch of mushrooms sprouted in the rain.

She wondered suddenly what they were burying Brady in. Should have been his old jockey silks, the ones he wore winning the Derby on Payback. But they’d never fit. He’d put on the pounds since he’d quit the track and stepped down to stallion groom.

“Never mind. They’ll give you fresh ones upstairs,” she drawled softly, and dug in her pocket for his flask.

One swallow left since the night he’d given it to her. “That’s for warmth, not for whoopee,” he’d warned as they parted. “You save me a drop.”

He’d never come for it. She hadn’t had a sip since she’d found out why, that awful night in a Boston jail.

The crowd was bigger now. A wall of darkness ringed the grave. She tipped her brim to hide all that and looked down at his name on the flask. Brady, engraved in curly letters on old silver. A fine, fancy gift from a grateful British bettor, that time Brady won the Epsom on a five-to-one shot.

She had to struggle with the cap. Last closed by Dr. Taggart’s big, capable hands, she remembered with a rueful grimace. She held up the flask to the dripping sky. “Here’s to you, Brady.” Something warmer than a raindrop ran down her cheek and she brushed it away. “If they have horse races in heaven, then you and Daddy must be runnin’ neck and neck ’bout now. God bless...and Godspeed.” She held the last taste on her tongue, fire and sweetness, then welcome warmth around the heart. G’bye, ol’ friend. She buried her nose in the jacket again and breathed deep.

When she heard the sound of a car stopping behind the truck, Susannah didn’t look up. God give me strength! If it was more reporters... One more stupid question, just one more, and it’s Katy, bar the door!

“Miss? I’m afraid you can’t stop here, Miss.”

Oh, one of them. Eyes narrowed, shoulders squaring for a fight, she turned her head slowly. This was a public road even if Stephen would never admit it and had convinced the county he had the right to patrol outside his own fences, bully anybody who dared look at his farm.

Her muscles eased as she recognized the approaching guard. “Hey, Randy.” Randall was one of the few decent ones who didn’t give her the creeps. Most of the security guards her husband hired seemed to be angry, disappointed men. As if life didn’t give them enough opportunities to use those guns that dragged down their belts.

“Miz—!” The guard yanked off his hat from long habit, then stood there twisting it. “Mrs. Colton, ma’am! I didn’t recognize—”

“Hardly surprisin’.” Stephen had always insisted she dress her part around the farm. If she must wear pants, then it had to be jodhpurs with a silk shirt or a tweed jacket. Hair up in a snooty French twist. Only when she rode out with the exercise boys at dawn was she allowed to wear jeans and let her hair fly free. Funny that Stephen fell for her, looking like that, then had to change that first thing once he got her.

The guard glanced from her to the distant ceremony. “Oh. I guess he wouldn’t let you...?”

“Nope.” She’d had her lawyer ask, since Stephen wasn’t taking her calls. Word had come back promptly from on high. Translated from Houlihan’s tactful legalese, the word was, “Not in this lifetime, sugarbabe!”

Funny how little you could know a man in two years. She’d known Stephen was tough. Kentucky hardboot, they called a shrewd horseman hereabouts. But just how hard his boots were, she’d only begun to learn these past few days. She had a feeling the lesson wasn’t done yet, either.

“Sure was a shame,” Randall observed, putting his hat on and coming to stand beside her, facing uphill. “Surprised the heck out of me when I heard. That old man was so tough I’d have said Brady’d bury us all.”

“Yeah.” She’d thought so, too. But then, her own father had gone in seconds—one horse stumbling in front of his own, then the pileup from behind. Winged hero to smashed cripple in less time than it took her to scream and rush to press her hands to the TV screen, as if she could lift those tiny, flailing bodies off him. For horse folks, life usually happened fast, and it happened hard.

“But that plate in his skull, a fall on that...” Randall heaved a hound-dog sigh. “And they say he must have knocked it more than once, tumblin’ down a whole flight.”

“Yeah.” And Brady wouldn’t have been hurrying so, ’cept for me. She swallowed hard and blinked at the distant funeral.

Movement up there, looked like they were almost done. Dropping red Kentucky clay on his coffin, one by one, then trudging off over the crest of the hill.

A tall man dressed in black stepped apart from the dwindling crowd and stood staring down at them, something ominous in his stillness.

“Oh, Jeez, is that the boss?” Randall took two long steps away from her, spun toward his truck, then back again. “If he saw I was talking to you...!”