Chapter Three
Cody dumped his coffee on the fire and watched it hiss and smoke as it hit the burning coals. His lips thinning grimly, he drawled, “That’s quite a gutsy—if unwise — attitude coming from the bride who lured me to Mexico and then pulled the scam of the century.”
Callie watched as he emptied the coffeepot over the coals. Hunkering down beside the campfire, he began gathering up their dirty dishes and utensils. “What are you talking about?” she asked warily, helping him carry the dishes down to the stream.
“Like you don’t know!” he countered harshly as he rinsed their dishes in the water, item by item, and laid them on the grassy bank to dry.
Because there was nothing more for her to do, Callie stood and began to pace. She wasn’t sure how much he knew, although it was clear he had discerned something, so she started at the beginning. “I ran away from you, Cody, because I had no choice.”
He nodded, looking as if he didn’t believe her for a second. “And the ransom demand?” he countered coolly. “Did you have no choice about that, either?”
Callie blinked. “Wait a red-hot minute. I never asked you for money.”
“That’s right. You didn’t, Callie. Your brother Buck and your pa were the ones who came to me with the news you’d been kidnapped. They were the ones who delivered the ransom note. But I have no doubt you are as familiar with the bottom of the deck as they are.”
“I was never kidnapped! I ran away from you on our wedding night.”
Cody’s eyes glimmered with suppressed temper. “I eventually figured that out. But not,” he emphasized bluntly as he stood and straightened to his full six feet, “before your brother and your pa put me through forty-eight hours of sheer hell.”
Callie gulped. “They actually came to you and told you I’d been kidnapped?” she asked apprehensively. She had figured Buck and Pa would back off with their schemes to extort money from Cody when she was no longer around to help. This explained a lot about why he detested her as much as he did! It didn’t, however, make it fair.
He glared at her. “Yes, Callie, they did.”
Indignant at being unjustly lumped in with her no-account father and brother, Callie squared off with Cody. “What happened to the note I left you?” she demanded, furious he was so quick to judge her. She closed the distance between them. “Or did you completely disregard that?”
Cody regarded her with unbridled skepticism. “What note?”
Callie blew out an impatient breath. “The one I left on the hotel room dresser, the one that said I was leaving you because I loved you too much to subject you to the hell I’d already been through with my kin. The one that said I wanted you to have a happy life and I knew you’d never have it with me. And don’t tell me that note blew away. I put a heavy brush on top of it to weigh it down and hold it firmly in place. That note was plainly visible to anyone who walked in the room,” Callie continued emotionally before he could interrupt.
For once, Cody was silent. “Your note wasn’t there when I got back to the hotel room,” he conceded finally, looking for a moment as if he were tempted to believe her—and even more, had his own share of regrets.
His brief show of vulnerability touched her in a way his smug attitude had not. Ruefully, Callie realized she hadn’t given him much chance to explain, either. “Is that why you’ve been so angry with me?” she asked softly. “Because you thought I left you without so much as a note or word of goodbye?”
Cody released a long, ragged breath. “I didn’t know why you left me,” he confessed huskily. As he looked at her, his blue eyes glimmered with hurt. “I just figured you’d had second thoughts. That you’d decided you were too young to get married or didn’t love me after all.” Cody tugged the brim of his Stetson a little lower across his brow. “After all, everything had happened pretty quickly once you’d made the decision to run away from your family. I asked you to elope. Max suggested Mexico, because you were underage, and loaned us his Learjet airplane.”
Callie shook her head at him, annoyed that Cody—who was incredibly bright about everything else—could be so dense when it came to romance. Stepping closer, she tapped a hand against his chest. “You shortchanged us both by thinking so little of me, Cody McKendrick.”
Cody stared down at her, looking as if he wanted so much to believe in her, the way she had once believed in him. But trust no longer came easily to either of them, it seemed. “You’re telling me that your walking out that way wasn’t a setup all along?” he persisted.
Callie nodded. That was exactly what she was saying. “I’m sorry my brother and Pa tried to run a con on you,” she added, wondering if she would ever stop being ashamed of them, of feeling somehow sullied by the illegal, unethical and immoral things they had done, simply by virtue of being related to them.
Cody continued to study her. “But in retrospect it doesn’t surprise you, does it?”
“No.” Aware that his nearness was beginning to get to her, Callie turned on her heel and headed back to the campfire. As she shoved her hands into the pockets of her suede jacket, Cody fell into step beside her, his glance turning to a circling eagle overhead. “Sad to say, they’d been running cons as long as I could recall. That’s why I wanted out so bad. Because they were pressuring me to start helping them,” she explained.
“And I was the mark you were supposed to bait, wasn’t I?” This time there was no judgment in Cody’s low tone.
Embarrassed, Callie turned away. Feeling near tears, she stared at the dew sparkling like diamonds on the grass. “I admit they deliberately put me in your path by making me get a summer job waiting tables at the diner where you hung out when you were done here at the ranch.”
Cody laid his hands on her shoulders, forcing her to turn to face him. “So you deliberately set out to get my attention?” He searched her eyes.
“No.” Callie sighed her regret. “I didn’t even know what they had in mind.” She tilted her head back to better see into the rugged contours of his face and splayed her hands across the smooth chambray of his shirt and the hardness of his chest. “All I knew was that they said if I wasn’t going to help them run cons—they had several scams going at the time, one was a stranded motorist routine, the other a fraudulent insurance company scheme—then I had to find out what it was like to work a real job for minimum wage. So they trotted me around from place to place, standing next to me while I asked for work. Because we were new to the area, most places turned me down. When we hit Pearl’s diner, Pa started in on me, berating me for my lack of luck in front of Pearl, and she felt sorry for me and gave me a job that she didn’t really have to give.”
“I remember,” Cody recollected softly, tightening his hold on her protectively. “I was in the diner that night, sitting in the booth in the back.” His lips thinned unhappily. “I wanted to cram my fist down your pa’s throat, the way he was humiliating you in front of everyone there.”
Callie had never wanted Cody’s pity any more than she wanted anyone else’s. “Well, you needn’t feel sorry for me,” she replied stiffly. Her face burning with shame, she slipped out of his grasp and turned away. “Pa’s blustering and threatening that night was all part of the con.” At least, Callie thought, that’s what she had kept trying to tell herself at the time. Then and now, she wasn’t so sure.
Cody stroked his beard thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Callie. Your pa’s contempt for you that night seemed real enough to me. But then again,” he admitted slowly, “so did the kidnapping scam in Mexico.”
“I knew they’d followed us to Mexico. The moment you left me alone they made their presence known and started pressuring me to run a con on you.”
“And you refused?”
“Yes. But I knew they wouldn’t give up, which is why I had to run away, so you’d be free.” Callie paused, her expression perplexed. “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” she said slowly as she struggled to put it all together. “How did they convince you I’d been kidnapped?”
“You were gone. There was no note. All I knew was you were missing. Then they showed up and told me me the kidnappers had contacted them, using a phone number in your wallet, and demanded a ransom,” Cody related matter-of-factly.
“So you paid.”
An undefinable emotion flickered briefly in his face before he nodded. “And worried myself sick in the meantime,” he admitted.
“Did they ever tell you the ransom demand had been a con?”
“No, although they eventually gave themselves away, and I knew I’d been set up from the very first.”
“By them, Cody,” Callie stressed, curving her hand around the powerful muscle of his bicep. “Not by me.”
Cody looked at her and said nothing. Dread welled up inside her. She could see his doubts surfacing once again. “If I’d had any idea what they were up to, Cody, I swear I would have put a stop to it,” Callie told him softly, anxiously. “Or at least told you so that you and Max could have put a stop to it.” Callie never had been able to stand up to both Pa and Buck on her own with any success. Together, they were too wily. That’s why she’d had to run away.
Cody calmly removed her hand from his arm and turned his attention back to the campfire. The flame had been partially doused by the coffee he’d dumped over top of it. He put it out the rest of the way by smothering it with a shovelful of rich Montana soil. The old bitterness and pain were back in his eyes. “I commend you,” he said simply.
“For what?” She didn’t like the dangerous undertone in his low voice as he packed up his camp shovel and turned to face her again. He stuffed the paper wrappers from the trail-size packs of coffee and pancake mix into one of the saddlebags, then started back to get the camp dishes they’d left drying in the grass, saddlebag still in hand. “This was very convincing, Callie. You’re almost as good an actress as your pa and brother were actors.”
Callie caught Cody’s arm, staying his flight. “I’m not acting here, Cody. I’m scared of Buck and Pa and what they might do to you.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up, as if he found amusement in some private irony. “Maybe that would be easier to believe if you hadn’t helped set me up so thoroughly before we eloped.”
She dropped her hand, recoiling in hurt that he could think so little of her that he would believe she was part of Buck and Pa’s sleazy schemes. “What do you mean?”
Cody let the saddlebag dangle at his side. “Telling me you couldn’t take it anymore that night, that you were running away.”
Callie flushed, recalling her hysteria at the time. “I was running away,” she insisted emotionally. Doing so had been the only way she’d known how to survive. “And you didn’t have to go with me.”
“But you knew I would go with you, didn’t you?” Cody persisted, his coldly suspicious glance roving her upturned face.
“I hoped,” Callie admitted freely, keeping her eyes locked with his. The seconds drew out tensely. She could feel him starting to believe her. “There’s a difference, Cody,” she said softly.
In the silence that fell, Callie could feel her heart slamming against her ribs. The relief she’d initially felt as they tried to reconcile themselves to the past had been replaced by the fear she’d had since they’d met—that he would judge her guilty by association, not by what she had or had not done.
“Well, you got your wish,” Cody said tersely, looking as deeply troubled as she felt. “And your impetuousness or your cunning—whichever it is, I haven’t decided yet—made a miserable mess out of both our lives,” he snapped, pivoting away from her once again.
“For a while.” Callie hurried after him haughtily, not about to give up on him, not yet. “I, at least, have since recovered.”
Cody appeared to see no virtue in that. “Admirably, it would seem,” he agreed succinctly as he knelt to stuff the dishes into the saddlebag. “And yet you’re back.” Finished, he fastened the buckle and dropped the bag onto the grass.
“I guess Uncle Max knew I was needed here,” Callie ruminated out loud after a moment. And I can see why, she thought passionately.
But her verbal assessment of the situation did not have the desired result. “Needed!” Cody echoed. Jaw rigid, he stood. “For what?” he rasped.
And in that instant, Callie knew. Max had thrown her in with Cody because he loved him, because it was all he knew to do to save his nephew from a life of loneliness, isolation and pain. And Callie was not going to let Max down. Not when he’d always been so good to her, so loving and understanding and kind, even in the most difficult times. And that was, coincidentally, exactly what Cody needed now, too, Callie thought. Understanding. She dropped her voice another tranquil notch. “I am here to help you become the man you were before the hard times hit, to become the man you were destined to be.”
CODY STARED AT CALLIE, not sure whether to scoff or applaud. The sad truth was part of him wanted to trust her, but the other part had learned the hard way to regard everything she said and did with the thinly veiled suspicion with which he’d regard any con artist. “So what are you telling me, Callie? That you signed up with the matchmaking agency just like that, without even knowing who exactly it was you were supposed to help out?” he recapped out loud, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in his low tone.
“Yes.” As Cody continued to size her up relentlessly, Callie’s posture turned stiff and defensive. “As foolish as it sounds, even after all this time, after the heartbreak of our failed elopement, I trusted the people at the agency. So when I got a message from one of the agents, telling me where and when to show up to meet this rancher who so desperately needed my help, I took a blind leap of faith and went.” Callie paused and watched the conflicting play of emotions on Cody’s face. “Max did not do this to hurt us. He loved you, Cody.”
Cody had never doubted that. Although never blessed with children himself, when left with the unexpected guardianship of his niece and two nephews, Max had pulled out all the stops to be a good parent. “He also thought he knew everything there was to know about fixing up our lives.” Feeling restless again, Cody moved through the trees to the bank of the meandering stream. “But he was wrong about that, too. He was wrong to encourage me to elope with you to Mexico.” He was wrong about Callie and Cody belonging together as neighboring ranchers, never mind as man and wife.
“I’m not so sure about that, Cody. In fact I tend to agree with what Max evidently told the agency.” Callie gave Cody a placating grin and surprised the heck out of him by playfully rubbing his beard with the flat of her hand. “You do need some civilizing,” she teased.
“The hell I do,” Cody drawled back roughly. He had been his own person his entire adult life. Will or no will, he was not letting anyone change that. Furthermore, this conversation of theirs was getting far too intimate. It was making him forget he didn’t want her here. That he needed to stay on his guard.
“The only question is where to start,” Callie murmured, as she continued to eye him with an almost wifely intent that made Cody think about how much a part of him liked having Callie close again, despite everything. And that, Cody thought, just would not do.
“I’ve got an idea.” Deciding the best way to make Callie understand she was playing with fire in her attempt to get close to him, and stunned by her willingness to inject herself into his life again, regardless of his prejudice against her, he buried his hands deep in her hair and fastened his mouth over hers.
His kisses of years past had been soft and pliant, tender and seducing. In contrast, this one was hard, chastening, a retribution for all the trouble she had caused him and the problems still to come. As he had expected, and, yes, even wanted, she stiffened in his arms and pulled away. Riotous color bloomed in Callie’s cheeks. Her breasts rose and fell with every frantic breath she took, and he could feel her heart slamming in her chest. But there was passion in her eyes and a kind of haughty courage in her stance he couldn’t help but admire. She was all woman, all passion and temper.
“You’re not going to scare me with this he-man act of yours,” she vowed, even as she braced her arms between them and he kept his hands upon her waist. “I know you wouldn’t hurt me.”
Maybe not, Cody thought passionately, but there were times like now when he was treacherously close to falling in love with her all over again, times when he sure wanted to try. Needing to finish what he had started, needing to feel the softness of her slender body crushed against the hardness of his, Cody shifted her close again. Whether she liked it or not, he thought furiously, he was sending her away. And heaven save them both, this appeared to be the easiest, most effective way to do it. “As Max said—” Cody brushed his lips over hers and smiled with satisfaction as he felt her tremble and knew her breath was coming in fast, shallow bursts “— I’ve changed, Callie. And not,” he warned as he buried both hands in the sunflower gold of her hair, “for the better.”
No longer was he the young, idealistic kid who believed in the power of love with all his heart. Now he dealt with the tangibles. Desire, which could be sated. Hard work, which was always good for the soul. And land, upon which he made his living. But no more playing games. No more giving his heart. But he wasn’t above giving his body, or matching her need, degree by degree.
She averted her head defiantly to the side as his lips forged a steady but determined trail down the softness of her throat. “What is this, then?” she asked in a low, trembling voice. “Revenge?”
“No,” Cody corrected softly. “This is revenge.”
He bent over her, delivering another long, satisfying, soul-wrenching kiss that had them both trembling from head to toe.
“I’m telling you, Cody, this is not going to work.” She put a staying hand on his, keeping him from unbuttoning her blouse, even as she softened against him all the more. “I know you. You’re not about to compromise me, especially for dishonorable reasons.”
At the moment, with his body aching fiercely and his heart in no better shape, Cody couldn’t think of a sweeter way to get his revenge than by making wild, wonderful love to her. He smiled down at her wickedly, gave in to the desire that had been plaguing them both for years now and taunted softly, “Wanna bet?”
Her astonishment at his blatant pronouncement came and went as she kept her eyes on his. “When it comes to sex, I’m still the same innocent girl I was before, Cody.”
Cody had been a fool over Callie many times, but he didn’t believe that for a moment.
“If you couldn’t do it then, when we at least thought we were in love, you sure as heck won’t be able to do it now,” Callie continued forcefully, with a bravado Cody couldn’t help but admire even as he disdained it.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Cody clasped both hands around her waist and danced her backward, toward a nearby stand of trees. He didn’t stop until she was leaning up against a sturdy oak, her arms resting lightly upon his shoulders. “You’re not seventeen any longer. And I’m not twenty-four.” He braced an arm on either side of her and gazed raptly down into her upturned face, aware that in the time they’d spent apart she had only grown more beautiful. “It doesn’t matter what kind of love life or lack of we’ve had in the past. I’m not going to bend over backward to protect you or treat you with kid gloves anymore, Callie.” His voice hardened, as did his attitude. “We’re both more than old enough to make love in the cool summer grass, if we so choose.”
Callie jerked in an unsteady breath, as shocked as he had meant her to be. The warm blush of color flooded her cheeks. He swiftly noticed she didn’t deny wanting him, too. She just didn’t want him this way, as part of the price for gaining her part of Uncle Max’s legacy. “Just because we’re both older n-now...” she stammered, blushing all the more. “Age has nothing to do with this, Cody.”
Shifting her arms so that they were no longer between them, and folding her even closer, Cody shook his head in mute disagreement. “Age has everything to do with it,” he countered softly. Age was the reason—the only reason — he hadn’t made love to her before. Again, and again, and again. But he’d waited, even after their wedding, thinking she should be at least eighteen before he introduced her to the pleasures of his bed. “You’re not too young for me anymore, Callie,” he rasped as the soft swell of her breasts settled against the hardness of his chest. And then, throwing caution and common sense to the wind, he took her lips again – not roughly this time, but evocatively. Tenderly.
He kissed her until she parted her lips and began to kiss him back, until they lost all track of time, until her knees buckled and she held on to him for dear life. And still it wasn’t enough for him. It had never been enough. And it never would be, Cody thought as she whimpered against his mouth and the cellular phone in his saddlebag began to ring.
Damn. Reluctantly, he lifted his head and looked over in the direction of the annoying rings.
Callie shook her head, as if that would make the ringing sound go away. “What is that?” Callie gasped as she pulled away, looking tousled and disheveled and—Cody hated himself for noticing—more delectably enticing than he had ever seen her.
“An unwelcome interruption.” Frowning, Cody released Callie and, struggling to ignore the unassuaged ache in his body, went to answer his phone.
“Yeah, Cisco...what’s up?” Cody listened, and as he did so his mood turned even blacker. Working to control his formidable temper, he tightened his hand on the slim telephone until his knuckles turned white. “Damn it all to hell,” he said finally, when Cisco Kidd had finished making his report. “Get the chopper here now! Right. See you in a few minutes.”
Callie regarded him anxiously. “What’s going on?”
Cody glared at her. The phone call, and the reason behind it, had reminded him of all he would have liked nothing more than to forget. “Like you don’t know.”
Her eyes widened in a way that would have won a professional actress an Oscar. “I don’t!”
Cody swept up the saddlebag full of camp dishes and paper trash and headed back to the horses. “Gotta hand it to your pa,” he said as he slung the saddlebag over his horse’s back. “He swore he’d get revenge on me, and once again, he’s using you to do it.”
Callie stayed clear of the horses. “What the heck are you talking about?”
Cody came around to her side. “This innocent act of yours is getting old, Callie.”
She took a moment to think about that. Her face lost all color. “Cody. My pa is dangerous.”
Cody looked up at the sky and saw the chopper in the distance. He dragged Callie toward the edge of the meadow, where it would land. “And dishonest as hell, as he just proved all over again last night.”
Callie’s teeth worried her bottom lip as the chopper gently landed a distance away. “No one’s hurt, are they?”
Cody sighed, all too aware of just how easy it would be for him to get sucked into the turmoil of Callie’s life again. He was going to have to work harder to keep his guard up. “When your pa and your brother are involved,” he prophesied darkly, “someone always gets hurt. This time, it just happens to be Gil Guthrie.”
“WHO is HE?” Callie inquired anxiously as, heads bent low, they raced to the chopper.
Cody let out his breath wearily as he and Callie ducked the rotor blades. “One of the hired hands who works for me,” he yelled.
Once inside the chopper, Cody gave the pilot the thumbsup sign.
As they went aloft, the roar of the engine and the rhythmic whirring of the blades made it impossible for Callie to ask him any more questions. So Callie was forced to fidget and wonder as they flew over the sprawling Silver Spur Ranch. Had Buck and Pa done this? And if so, what was she going to do? Tell Cody she’d seen Buck that morning, face his everlasting wrath and perhaps put him in danger, too? Or keep silent and pray she’d find a way to protect the man she had once loved more than life from harm again?
Ten minutes later, they were at the scene of the crime.
Bringing order to the melee was the fifty-something Shorty, Cody’s bowlegged, frank-spoken crew boss. As Callie had expected, Cody sprang into action immediately.
“What happened?” Cody demanded as he bent over the cowboy leaning up against the side of the Silver Spur cattle barn, where, Callie had quickly deduced, the crossbreeding operation was centered and the prize bulls kept.
The complex, with its brand-new barn and several adjacent, fenced-in pastures, was located in the central part of the ranch, surrounded by rolling countryside. A gravel road led to the crossbreeding center. At one end of the barn there was a small room, similar to a dorm room, where the three cowboys working that part of the ranch bunked.
Gil Guthrie, the injured cowboy, gingerly felt the discernible lump on the back of his head. “I heard a commotion just before dawn and I got up to see what was happening. I musta been hit over the head ’cause the next thing I know, I’m waking up on the ground.”
“Which is where we found him at dawn,” Shorty, the crew boss, said.
Cody hunkered down beside Gil, who, Callie decided, couldn’t have been much more than eighteen. “We better get you to a hospital and have you checked out.”
“Sorry, Cody,” Gil moaned, more concerned about the theft than himself. “I know how much that new bull of yours was worth—”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Cody reassured Gil grimly. “I’m just glad you weren’t hurt any worse.”
So was Callie. She watched as Cody and two other cowboys helped Gil onto the chopper. Callie turned to Shorty. She hated to bother him, since the bowlegged crew boss seemed preoccupied with figuring out how such a calamity had happened at the Silver Spur, but she had to know.
Callie eased closer to Shorty. Not sure the grizzled cowboy would even answer her, she folded her arms in front of her. “Gil said that bull was worth a lot of money. How much money?” Callie asked. She didn’t want to think what she was thinking, but if there was money and theft involved, she had no choice but to suspect Buck.
Shorty and the other hands held on to their hats as the chopper took off once again. Once it cleared the barns, Shorty turned back to Callie. He gave her a considering once-over. “A hundred grand now, probably twice that when he gets to be full grown,” he answered her question.
Cody, who was in earshot of the tail end of Callie’s conversation with Shorty, joined them in their study of the pickup tracks leading to the corral behind the barn. “Though how they loaded Zeus up without getting hurt themselves...” Cody queried out loud with a pointed look at Callie.
Callie turned away from the suspiciousness in Cody’s gaze. She caught a glimpse of something glistening in the early morning sunlight. Wordlessly, she knelt and pointed to the empty medicine bottle lying hidden in the grass. Although the label had been torn off, Callie recognized it as the kind of bottle used to fill syringes. “This is how.”
32:00
“NO PRINTS,” the deputy from the county sheriff’s office said after he had finished dusting the medicine bottle for fingerprints. “Whoever used this must’ve been wearing gloves.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” Cody said with a sigh.
“I’ll send it to the state crime lab and have it analyzed for contents, but we both know it was probably some sort of tranquilizer.”
Cody nodded his agreement as he studied the tire tracks leading away from the edge of the pasture. “You’re right. There’d be no way to get the bull out without one.” He turned back to the deputy. “You’ll fax me the results?”
“Sure thing, but it’s liable to take a while. Meanwhile, I’d advise you to get the word out to the Montana Cattle Raisers Association. In case that new bull of yours turns up for sale elsewhere.”
“Will do.” Cody shook hands with the deputy and thanked him for coming out so quickly.
Cody and Callie climbed back into the chopper, which had returned from the hospital, for the ride back to the bull’s-eye parcel of land to retrieve their horses.
“You blame me for the theft, don’t you?” Callie said after she and Cody were back on the ground. They untethered their mounts and swung themselves up in the saddle, then started back at a very brisk pace, Callie following Cody’s lead and riding beside him.
Cody settled his hat more firmly on his head, so the brim was very low across his brow. “Let’s look at the facts here, Callie. You’re back in my life for what...fifteen hours now, and already it’s costing me a hundred grand and the health of one of my best ranch hands.”
“I was with you last night—all night!” Callie shot him an outraged glance as his decrepit cabin came into view. “You know that!”
Cody kneed his horse and picked up the pace. “Perhaps we Should check for tire tracks around the cabin anyway.”
Callie’s stomach churned as she thought about Buck’s visit to her outside the “powder room” early this morning. Undoubtedly there were tire tracks there somewhere, ones that didn’t belong to Cody’s pickup truck. Cody couldn’t find them. She knew Buck would follow through on his threat. Nothing had changed since she’d run away all those years ago. Buck and Pa still had their hooks in her, but she wouldn’t let them get to Cody. It would be too dangerous for Cody to find out Buck was around. She had to do everything in her power to prevent that from happening. Which meant she was going to have to distract him.
Directing her horse to canter slightly ahead of his, which was something sure to annoy him, she jumped on the first source of conflict that came to mind. “We have more pressing things to attend to this morning, Cody.”
“Such as what?”
“I was hungry and cold last night,” Callie informed him in a tone she was sure would set his teeth on edge. She tossed her head haughtily. The long layers of her hair swirled around her face. “If we’re going to continue to live in that cabin together for the next day and a half, I insist we go into town so that I can at least get myself a sleeping bag.”
Cody nudged his horse a bit to keep abreast of her. “And if I say no?”
Keeping a firm hold on the reins, Callie squared her shoulders militantly. “Then I’m out of here now and you lose the cattle operation Uncle Max willed to you. The choice is entirely up to you.”
Not waiting for his reply, she slowed her horse to a walk and headed for the barn. As she had expected, he quite irritably followed suit. “Assuming I agree to go, how’d you plan to pay for it?” Cody demanded.
“I have my own money, my own credit cards,” Callie said, reining her mount in altogether. She wasn’t sure how much cash she had left, but she could charge the rest. “I told you I had been working.”
Cody looked around suspiciously as they dismounted and hitched their horses next to the barn. Callie strode toward the cabin, but Cody headed back in the direction of the outhouse. She followed suit, intending to escalate their argument to an unreasonable degree if necessary, but before she could think of something suitably incendiary to say, he had spotted and picked up the cigarette butt Buck had thrown aside. He held up the barely smoked cigarette for her to see. “Looks like someone has been here.”
With a great deal of effort, Callie faked a carelessness she couldn’t begin to feel. “You’re imagining things.”
“No,” he replied evenly. “I’m not.”
“Cody, come on. Forget about the disturbed grass. I probably did that myself when I was stumbling around trying to find the powder room this morning.”
“What about the cigarette butt?”
Callie shrugged. There was no point in trying to pretend it was hers; Cody already knew she abhorred smoking. “It could have been here for days.”
Cody examined the evidence carefully. “In near mint condition? Not very damn likely.”
Callie swallowed. They had to get out of here before Cody turned up anything else Buck had left in his wake. “Let me go in and get my purse and let’s get going to town, now, Cody.”
“You get your purse,” Cody encouraged with a distracted air, already heading off toward the woods directly behind them. “I’m going to have a look around.” Completely ignoring her, he headed off.
Callie frowned. She could follow him now or sidetrack him again by doing something really outrageous, like trying to drive his pickup truck.
Intending to look for his truck keys as soon as she had retrieved her purse, she headed for the cabin. Her purse was right where she’d left it, on the sofa. Intending to count her cash, she sat down and rummaged through her wallet.
Only there was a problem, she soon realized with mounting frustration. There was no cash in her wallet. No credit cards. Nothing except an old photo of her and Cody taken in one of those amusement park booths. Had Cody done this as a way of limiting her options? she wondered, confused. Or had Buck? Did she even dare ask, when doing so might tip him—if innocent—to the fact someone else really had been there? And what if that in turn led him to Buck?
Swearing beneath her breath at this predicament she found herself in, she stuffed her nearly empty wallet back in her purse and stood up. She had just started her search for the keys when she heard what sounded like someone... something... moving around in Cody’s bedroom.
Oh, no. If it was Buck, if he’d bunked down in here, she was going to beat the stuffing out of him!
Agitatedly, Callie started for the bedroom.
Peeked in.
The covers on Cody’s bed were deliciously mussed, but it was empty. The room, however, was not. There was an indignant snort from the corner as the beastly intruder staggered menacingly to his feet. Callie took one look at those wild black eyes and let out an earsplitting scream.