The Wrangler And The Runaway Mom

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue (#ulink_91e99e90-ddc4-5a76-879b-d28fff651d8e)

Margaret Prescott choked back a scream and watched her husband topple to the thick carpet of his office like a marionette whose strings had been severed. Only the blood seeping from the neat round hole in the middle of his forehead shattered the illusion.

The two figures standing over the crumpled form of the man she’d once thought she loved didn’t even turn in her direction. Michael’s heavy oak washroom door, ajar just enough to allow her a distorted view into the room, must have muffled the tiny cry that rasped from her throat.

“What the hell you do that for, Carlo?” The tall one with the droopy eyes and beak of a nose that gave him a morose expression stared at the other man.

Carlo, thin and wiry, with short-cropped hair so blond it was nearly white, lifted a shoulder negligently and slid the sleek chrome revolver inside his tailored suit coat. “I lost my temper. He should never have baited me like that.”

His blue eyes were dead, Maggie thought, fighting to hold on to lucidity through the panic that clawed through her. Cold and flat and dead, like a cobra’s.

“How we supposed to find the merchandise now?” Droopy Man snarled. “What’s DeMarranville gonna say?”

“I imagine he’ll say good riddance.”

“Only problem is, you killed the stupid bastard before he could tell us where he hid the stuff.”

“Ah, but he did tell us.”

“You mean that bit about his wife carrying the secret or whatever the hell he said? That was just bull, to get us off his back.”

“You think so?” Carlo looked impassively at Michael’s body—at the blood that had begun to pool under his head, at the sprawl of lifeless limbs—then back at the other man. “I believe you’re wrong. I think the good lady doctor knows exactly where our merchandise is. I have no doubt she’ll be more than happy to lead us right to it.”

“You’re screwed in the head. Why would she do that?”

“You don’t give me nearly enough credit, Franky.” Carlo’s mouth twisted into a small smile that sent chills rippling down Maggie’s spine. “I’ve been told my powers of persuasion are quite extraordinary.”

Without a backward look at the man whose life he’d just taken, he turned and walked out of Michael’s office.

When the other man followed him, Maggie swayed in the washroom, her breathing coming shallow and fast. Several moments passed before she worked up the courage to push the door open.

Michael’s vacant eyes stared at her from the floor in familiar accusation. As if it were her fault, all of it. If only she had been able to call for help somehow when she had heard them all come into the office. If only she’d been able to provide a distraction by coming out instead of choosing to remain in the washroom when she heard their raised voices and accusations against Michael.

If only she had been smarter or faster or stronger.

No. She jerked her head up. Unlike her failure of a marriage, she had nothing to do with any of this. It was just another one of Michael’s dirty little secrets.

Embezzlement, they’d said. The boss frowns on his people stealing from him. But turn over the stuff and he’ll go easy on you.

They’d lied. She stared at Michael’s body and felt the panic bubble up inside her again. She couldn’t have stopped this. If she had somehow made her presence known tonight, she had no doubts she would be just as dead as Michael. And then where would Nicky be?

Nicky! She had to get to Nicky before they did. Somehow she had no doubt Carlo-of-the-dead-eyes would have no compunction about hurting her child to force her cooperation, to compel her to lead them to these mysterious books.

What irony, that she’d come to Michael’s office concerned for her son’s emotional well-being only to find his physical safety now jeopardized. She had planned to plead with him to call off his lawyer, the nasty little man who had informed her this afternoon that Michael planned to seek custody of Nicky in the divorce.

Michael didn’t want Nicky. Hadn’t wanted Nicky, she corrected herself, on the verge of hysteria. He barely acknowledged his son’s existence unless it was to snap at him for some infraction. He only wanted custody to hurt her for leaving him—for finally seeing the gaping cracks in their facade of a marriage, the lies and the infidelities—by taking away the one thing that mattered to her.

And now it looked like he was reaching out even after death to destroy the life she had begun to rebuild so carefully.

She wouldn’t let him! She could run away, take Nicky somewhere safe, where the ugliness of his father’s life couldn’t hurt him.

She fumbled with the door handle and rushed out into the hall, then punched the elevator button.

Nicky loved the two elevators up to his father’s eighthfloor office in one of San Francisco’s graceful older buildings. When they used to visit Michael here, back when she was still pretending they could salvage their marriage, Nicky would beg to ride them again and again until he was dizzy with it.

Now, as she waited, the creaky elevators seemed to move with excruciating slowness. She felt as if each moment lasted aeons until finally one jolted open and she stumbled inside.

The other elevator suddenly pinged before the ponderous doors could creep shut, and her pulse scrambled frantically. Had they somehow discovered she was here? Were they returning to finish off any witnesses? Maggie shrank into the corner near the buttons and willed the doors to close.

She held her breath, waiting for them to spot her, for the gunfire that would end her life. The only sound, though, was heavy footsteps as two unfamiliar men in dark suits hurried toward Michael’s office.

“I know she’s in here somewhere. I saw her go in,” she heard one of them say. “She can’t have gone far.”

“Dammit. We have to find her,” the older one said, an angry frown slashing across his distinguished face. “We can’t have her running around loose with what she knows. She’s a loose end, Dunbar, and you know how much I hate loose ends.”

The rest of what he said was lost as the doors finally slid shut with a quiet whoosh. The car lurched into motion, carrying her away from the immediate danger.

Suddenly exhausted, wrung out from the aftermath of the adrenaline overload, she rested her forehead against the metal of the elevator door. It was as cold as death against her skin, and Maggie wondered if she would ever feel warm again.

Chapter 1 (#ulink_50c7bf8a-8041-5739-afb4-51702d10747a)

“Go to hell, Beckstead,” Colt McKendrick growled into the phone. “I’m on vacation. I have six weeks coming to me and I’m not about to let you screw me out of it this time. Joe, hand me that hoof pick, will you?”

His foreman—and closest friend—obeyed with a knowing smirk. “When are you leaving this time?” Joe Redhawk asked. Colt glared and chose to ignore him.

“Sane people don’t take vacations wading around in cow manure and playing around with hoof picks, whatever those nasty-sounding things might be,” Special Agent in Charge Lane Beckstead responded on the phone.

Cradling the cellular phone in the crook of his shoulder, he worked the pick to pry a rock out of Scout’s front left shoe. He grunted in frustration as his bandaged hand slipped on the hoof pick. It had been two weeks since he was injured during an arrest, and still the damn thing was about as useful as teats on a bull.

“If I were sane,” he muttered, tightening his grip despite the pain, “I wouldn’t be working for the Bureau in the first place—”

“Amen,” Joe piped up.

Again Colt ignored him. “—which means we wouldn’t be having this conversation and I wouldn’t be taking the first vacation I’ve had in eight years. Besides, maybe I like wading through cow manure.”

“Exactly my point. You’re the only person I know who would choose to spend your vacation on a cattle ranch in Montana. What’s the difference between whatever you’re doing there and taking up this little job for me on the rodeo circuit?”

“The difference is, I deserve this vacation. I’ve been on the Spider Militia case for nearly a year. I’m tired, Lane, and the last time I spent longer than a weekend at my ranch was two directors ago.”

Tired? That was an understatement if he ever heard one. Burned out, more like. Sick of the lying and the intrigues and the bureaucracy. Eleven months of working to infiltrate a hate group in the Northwest had left him exhausted, disillusioned about whatever shreds of humanity might be left in the world.

He needed the peace he found only here at the ranch where he had been raised, where he had the clean, pure scent of pine surrounding him instead of the stink of hatred and violence, and only a few ghosts to disturb his sleep instead of the legion that haunted him in the field.