The Wrangler And The Runaway Mom

The boy opened his mouth to argue, but closed it again at the implacable look on his mother’s face, a look even Colt could recognize. Smart kid, he thought, then grinned when Nicky trudged up the three metal steps of their trailer with his bottom lip jutting out in a pout a rock star would have envied.

As soon as her son was out of sight, Maggie turned back to Colt. She looked about eighteen years old in that T-shirt, he thought. That didn’t stop him from being curious about what was beneath it.

“How is it?”

He blinked at her. “How’s what?”

She looked at him like he’d taken a hard spill from a horse and landed on his head. “Your shoulder. I asked how your shoulder is feeling this morning.”

“Oh. Good. It’s good. I was thinking maybe I’d ride tonight after all, since I’m feeling just fine this morning. What do you think?”

“I think it would be extremely foolish, unless you want to reinjure your shoulder.”

“Maybe I’ll see how I’m feeling later.”

“That’s your decision, of course.” She paused for a moment, as if weighing her words, then spoke stiffly. “Look, Mr. McKendrick. Colt. I don’t want you to take this wrong, but I would appreciate it very much if you would stay away from my son.”

He stared at her. Where the hell did that come from? “I just gave him a jelly doughnut and told him he could take a ride on my horse some time, Doc. It’s not like I offered him a fifth of Jack Daniels and some smokes.”

She frowned. “I realize that. It’s just that he’s at a vulnerable stage right now. He—he lost his father recently.”

“I’m sorry.” What emotion triggered those shadows in her eyes, those lines around her mouth? Grief for the husband she had lost or fear of the men who had killed him?

He was willing to bet it was the latter. According to the dossier Lane had provided him with, she and the late accountant had been at the starting gate of what had been shaping up to be a nasty divorce.

She looked away for a moment, and when she turned back, the clouds were gone. With a cool nod she acknowledged his condolences. “Even though his father wasn’t very... involved in his upbringing, Nicky has taken his death hard. I’m afraid he’s looking for a male role model.”

“Lots of boys dream about being cowboys. I don’t see that there’s any harm in that.”

“I’m afraid I do. He’s an impressionable little boy and he doesn’t need a—a saddle bum filling his head with all sorts of nonsense about the Code of the West and a cowboy’s honor.”

So much for trying to ingratiate himself with her through a friendship with her son. He opened his mouth to defend himself but she went on as if she didn’t notice.

“He’s been through enough. Please don’t compound a little boy’s pain by encouraging a friendship that will only end in heartbreak when you move on to the next rodeo.”

With that she turned and walked into her trailer, leaving him frowning behind her.

* * *

She had sounded like an absolute idiot.

Later that night—after she’d taped a couple of bruised ribs, set a broken arm and bandaged a nasty gash from the wrong end of a bull on the final night of the rodeo—Maggie lay in her narrow bed in the trailer and replayed her conversation with Colt McKendrick.

Please don’t compound a little boy’s pain by encouraging a friendship that will only end in heartbreak when you move on to the next rodeo.

Okay, so she’d overreacted when all he had done was show a little kindness to a lonely little boy. He’d offered to let Nicky ride his horse, that’s all, not move in with him.

He was probably exactly as he appeared—a down-on-his-luck cowboy searching for glory in the arena. Older than most of the wranglers she treated, true, with a maturity in those lines around his eyes, in the confident set of his shoulders, most of them lacked.

So he was older than the norm. That didn’t mean anything. Maybe he was escaping a bad relationship, or, God forbid, the law.

He was certainly attractive, in a raw, wild sort of way. Maybe it was that dark brushy mustache that made him look like one of those outlaws Nicky had become so enamored of. Butch Cassidy, maybe, or Jesse James. Dangerous and fascinating at the same time.

Maggie rolled her eyes at herself. Didn’t she have enough to worry about without her hormones suddenly waking up from whatever internal cave they’d been hibernating in for the past few years? It was all she could do to take care of her son and perform her job each day without giving in to the panic always lurking around the edges of her mind. She didn’t have energy left to indulge in even a harmless flirtation.

He had been awfully sweet with Nicky, though. She smiled at the picture the two of them had made this morning, sprawled out on the back step of McKendrick’s old camper: two satisfied males eating their empty-calorie breakfast in the morning sun.

Nicky needed that in his life. Maybe not the empty calories, but the guiding influences of an older man. Even before she left Michael and moved them to their little apartment, he had been starved for male companionship. Michael had been too busy with his deals and his clients—and his other women, she later discovered—to pay much heed to his son.

If Colt McKendrick wanted to give Nicky a little of the attention he needed so desperately, was she wrong to stop him? No. She wasn’t wrong. She didn’t even know the man. Until she did, she couldn’t trust him. Couldn’t afford to trust him.

It was up to her to keep her son safe until she could earn enough money to help them settle somewhere.

Once she could be certain the men who killed Michael had given up searching for her, she could find a job somewhere, get an apartment for them. With her medical experience, she should be able to find work anywhere. Maybe by fall, before the new school year began.

Maggie gazed up at the dingy, water-stained ceiling of the trailer, suddenly struck by a powerful craving for her old life back. For the safety, the security she’d always taken for granted.

She hadn’t been happy, married to Michael. Oh, she had loved him once. Or thought she did, anyway. She had been vulnerable when she’d married him, she now admitted—had been in her last year of residency when her mother introduced them, just a few months before Helen died after a long battle with cancer.

Throughout her last days her mother had dropped not-sosubtle hints about what a fine young man he was—wealthy, successful, handsome—until Maggie agreed to go out with him more to make her mother happy than because she was interested in dating him.

After Helen died, Michael had been a constant, supportive presence. He had been charming and attentive, and she had soaked it in like a flower starved for rain.

She had known almost from the first that she had made a grave mistake, but by then she was pregnant with Nicky, so she’d done her best to make the marriage work.

For all the good it did her. All that had changed six months ago when she’d found out about the lies, the women. And the safety of her life had been destroyed forever when she had watched Michael topple to the floor of his office with a bullet hole in his forehead three weeks ago.

She didn’t want to think about that night, the night when everything she thought she could count on had crumbled to ashes. She had rushed to the house of Rosie Vallejo, her former housekeeper and Nicky’s long-time care provider, and her first thought had been to call the police to report the murder.

She remembered waiting, shivering in delayed reaction, in Rosie’s humble living room, for the officer to arrive. But when the car pulled up, some latent survival instinct prompted her to look out through the curtain. To her horror, the men climbing out of an unmarked late-model sedan in the driveway were the two she had seen from the elevator after the murder.

The only explanation she could come up with for their presence at Rosie’s house was that they must have found out where she was from her call to the police.

She’s a loose end. You know how much I hate loose ends, the older man had said in that cold voice.

She had barely managed to grab Nicky and flee out the back door. Maggie frowned now, remembering the terror. She still didn’t know who the two men were. Maybe this DeMarranville person the two killers had talked about had sent them as some sort of backup to Carlo and Franky. A grim contingency plan.

Regardless, she had rushed back to her apartment to grab some belongings and had discovered a message from Peg on the answering machine. Rawlings Stock was providing the animals for a show a few hours away from San Francisco, and Peg wanted to come to visit.

The call had seemed heaven sent. Peg wielded a great deal of influence in the rodeo world, and Maggie had no doubt she could help her find work on the circuit, even mucking out stalls.

She hadn’t had to resort to that, fortunately. Peg had known of an opening in one of the rodeo sponsor’s sports medicine program, and her years of experience working at the clinic had qualified her for the position.

She had jumped at the chance. It was the perfect opportunity for her and Nicky to hide from DeMarranville’s men until she could earn enough money to make a new start somewhere safe. Amid the transient life of the rodeo circuit, she could become anonymous, with a new assignment in a different town every week.

She hoped it would be the last place anyone would think to look for her, since Michael had insisted she keep that part of her past—the summers she spent on the road with her rough-and-tumble father—a secret. It didn’t gel with the image he wanted his wife to portray, of quiet, wealthy elegance.

He didn’t even like to talk about her work at the clinic, preferring instead to focus on her mother’s world of country clubs and society teas. The world where Maggie had never belonged.