*Fighting down the urge to deck Lavenge for holding on to Reggie that rough way, Chapin waited for them to get outside and for the door to close behind them before he stepped out of the dark corner that had drapes shutting off an extra dining room not in use tonight.
Something had spooked Lavenge. Spooked him bad.
Chapin knew it wasn’t him. Lavenge had been looking the wrong direction, even if he could have spotted him back in the shadows.
The swinging doors to the bar area came to rest and there was a sign that read “Favorite Customers of the Month” with a photo of a couple — the sheriff and the woman from the shop. And in case anyone could have missed the uniform, a caption below read, “Sheriff Cully Grainger and Jessa Tarrant Grainger.”
Chapin turned and ran through another set of doors — to the kitchen and the back door to the parking lot.
*
“What’s wrong, Tate?” Reggie tried again.
“Not a thing. C’mon, my truck’s over here, I’ll take you back to the rodeo.”
“No need. My vehicle’s the next street over. Thank you for such a wonderful—”
“What’s that?”
Recognizing the sound, she quickly checked her phone. He made a grab for it, but she turned as if to get better light in the dimly lit lot, keeping it out of his reach.
“A text. A friend thanking me for a favor.” She wasn’t ready to give up on handling him without open warfare. Not yet. “Just like I’m thanking you for a wonderful afternoon and evening. But now—”
“No need for it to end.” He sounded less romantic than nasty. He unlocked and opened the passenger door of a pickup, still holding her arm. Tight. “C’mon, Reggie, get in the truck.”
Did he think he could manhandle her into obeying? She’d given no resistance so far, hoping to lull him.
“But, Tate, why are you upset? I thought we were having such a good time.”
“Wish Goose had run you off the road when he was after Johnson,” he muttered.
Goose did? But that distraction barely registered with her. “Why would you say that?” she tried to put hurt and confusion and tears and weakness into her voice.
For an instant his hold loosened, but as she started to twist her arm away, he clamped down again.
“Because you’re a pain in the ass.”
He shoved her toward the passenger footwell as if trying to fold her into it. She twisted to avoid that, but his grip on her held.
Why was he so determined to get her in the truck?
She turned to look into the cab, lit by the courtesy light when he opened the door, and saw a gleam between the seats. Not as bright as that day watching the figure across the highway. But she knew in her gun it was the same object.
He had a gun.
And then he lunged past her.
He wasn’t going to try to manhandle her into the truck. He was going for the gun to use it to force her in. After that…
She knew the dark statistics that said that if somebody intending you harm got you in a vehicle the “after that” was seldom good.
She was not getting in that truck.
He had his hand on the large handgun, his fingers closing around it.
It all happened at once then.
Holding on to the handles and swinging wide for maximum impact, she whapped him in the side of head with the shopping bag. He flinched.
She spotted a dark blur racing toward them.
Headlights swept over them, followed immediately by strobing from the light bar atop a patrol car.
No telling if the racing dark blur was friend or foe and she wasn’t waiting for the patrol car’s occupant.
She had a bad angle with the two of them wedged into the area between the truck frame and the open door, but there was no time to work for a better one. She stomped her boot heel into the top of Tate’s left foot with everything she had.
The instinct to avoid pain jerked him back, but he was stopped from going too far by the truck door. Still, that gave her more maneuvering room for her next move.
A knee to his groin. It made full contact.
He emitted an oddly high-pitched grunt and started to double over. That gave her the perfect target as she brought her knee up again, connecting with his chin.
He was crumpling, heading for the ground when abruptly he popped up like a puppet.
Then there was a crunching sound, and Tate Lavenge dropped to the gravel, his puppet strings cut.
“Are you okay, Reggie? If he hurt you—”
Chapin.
The dark blur had been Chapin. He’d arrived in time to become the puppeteer who’d yanked Tate up, delivered a blow, and let him drop to the ground.
“More like she hurt him,” came a drawl from behind her. Sheriff Cully Grainger.
“There’s a gun. He has a gun. In the truck.” She was oddly winded, even though she’d done those maneuvers hundreds of times. Never with this much adrenaline flowing, however. Never with this much at stake.
“A gun? I’m going to—”
Chapin’s threat, accompanied by what might have been the first move toward belting Lavenge again, was cut short when Grainger stepped in, shoving Chapin back.
“Let me get over there and get him handcuffed before we discuss this anymore.” The sheriff sounded completely unruffled. “I’ll deal with him. You might want to check on Reggie.”
“I’m fine. Totally fine.” Except for this odd shake in her knees.
But then it didn’t matter because Chapin wrapped her in his arms and she didn’t need her knees to hold her up.
*
That lovely moment lasted until he rasped into her ear, “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
She pushed back against his chest. “My job.”
“It was dangerous. You could have—”
“Like a man with an arm practically made of glass rodeoing isn’t dangerous?”
“—been hurt.” Those last two words slowed. Then he came to a full stop. “You’ve been worried about me?”
She thumped his shoulder — the good one. “Of course I have, you idiot.”
“You haven’t said anything.”
“No. Because I know how much you love going out there and gambling for eight seconds that you won’t get your shoulder or more important body parts bashed in. Not to mention it would be a waste of breath because you’d do it anyhow.”
Slowly, he said, “Is that the way you feel about investigating?”
“Yes.”
*
They were in the sheriff’s office.
Tate Lavenge had received medical care and was now in the jail.
An FBI agent was on his way here to take over the case.
Initial statements had been made, and Cully — they were on a first name basis now — said they might as well wait until the FBI arrived to do the official statement once.
They were filling each other in on their angles of what happened that night.
She repeated what Tate had said about Goose running Vicky and her off the road.
Chapin half rose from his chair. She tugged him back down. “He was drunk. Besides he thought it was you. He was ticked because you’d cut him down in front of that barrel racer he’s sweet on. Not Lindy, the other one. Well, as sweet as he can be. Let it go.”
“And if he’d drive you two into the ditch or into that rock wall his being drunk and thinking it was me would have helped how? Goose is going to have an attitude adjustment.”
“You’re going to have to explain all this to me,” Cully said, so they did.
At the end, Reggie said, “I think that was a good lesson for me about investigating. Because not everything has to do with what you’re working on and if you start thinking it does, you can go the wrong direction.”
“That’s a good one all right,” Cully said.
With Chapin looking thunderous, she quickly asked for his account.
When he described the pictures on the swinging bar doors, Cully groaned.
The sheriff maintained he had the worst of it, because it was boring to compare serial numbers and spend hours on the phone with the Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI.
They didn’t buy it.
Jessa had brought coffee and sandwiches. Reggie was still stuffed from dinner — so stuffed she was astonished she’d been able to make those moves. The coffee, though, was heaven.
Chapin wolfed down three sandwiches.
“No time to eat while you were on surveillance, huh?” Cully asked with a gleam in his eyes.
“Wasn’t going to let them out of my sight,” Chapin said between bites. “Didn’t know Reggie knew those moves. Where did you learn that?” he asked her.
“Aunt Nan dragged me to an event at the library down in Knighton one summer. They were moving all the books from storage into a new addition, handing them along a line of people, like an old fire bucket line. Anyway, this guy — he was a detective from New York — started demonstrating self-defense moves and talking about what women should know. It caught me. As soon as I went back East, I signed up for classes, and kept taking them.”
“Mystery solved.” Cully smiled.
“Still one to go,” Reggie said to him. “How did you know to call him Bill in Jessa’s store? Since you said you’d seen him rodeo years before and he always competed as Chapin then.”
“We’re responsible for that.”
Reggie spun around at the familiar voice. Michael, Jesse, and Sean Knight stood in the doorway, with a fourth man she didn’t recognize.
After introductions, Michael explained his statement. “As a backup, we got Tal here to run the same sort of search of the records you described. Don’t worry. Nobody else knew what he was doing. He came up with three names. Funny, because you’d only told us about two suspects.”
Not returning the look Chapin aimed at her, Reggie swallowed. Saying she’d needed to protect Chapin until she knew for sure wouldn’t cut it. They’d never trust her again. So much for her dream of investigating.
“She suspected me,” Chapin said. “Suspected me right along until she saw with her own eyes that someone else was robbing the bank while I was beside her. And even then she treated me like a suspect. I give you my word.”
“That’s a shame, because she could have saved the both of you that uncertainty if she’d talked to us,” Michael said. “Jesse, you want to explain?”
“After we came up with those three names, we figured you were looking at the two you told us about. Meanwhile, Tal looked into the third one. How long did it take you to realize William C. Johnson was better known in rodeo as Chapin Johnson, Tal?”
Every head turned toward Tal Bennett, propped on a desk at the back of the room. He looked down at his coffee cup.
“About eight seconds.”
“You’re not going to— There’s no reason the public has to know—”
Michael put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re right. He’s entering under his official name. What he wants to be called by the announcers and other folks isn’t any of the WRC’s business. And we’re not telling anybody. If he can come back… Well, it would be good for rodeo. Real good.”
Chapin said a quiet thank you.
Jesse cleared his throat sternly. “Still, it was possible somebody that talented could also be a crook. All three of us were tied up with other work. We asked Tal here to check up on Chapin. He has considerable background with financial crimes and such.”
“FBI?” Cully asked.
Still consulting his coffee cup, Tal said, “Was. Private now.”
“Tell them what you found, Tal.”
He looked up, directly at Chapin. “William Chapin Johnson is more than financially solvent. Truth is he’s got a sh— uh, plenty of assets. He’s been financing his time on the rodeo circuit off earnings from some of his investments without touching the capital.”
“How in hell did you—?” Chapin started.
“You’d be surprised how little is private these days.”
Uninterested at the moment in matters of privacy, Reggie turned and whapped Chapin in the arm. His good one.
“Hey. That hurt,” he protested.
“I wish I had that shopping bag to do a better job of it. Why didn’t you tell me? You never had a motive. Why did you keep that a secret?”
“Like you weren’t keeping secrets from me?”
“And us,” Michael said.
Jessa cleared her throat. “Sounds like you were both keeping secrets trying to protect yourselves … and each other.”
*
The FBI agent took up Thursday. Being questioned singly left them little time together.
The Knight brothers insisted on taking everyone out for dinner that night. They left afterward with hugs, promises of a bonus check, and saying good things about the job she’d done. But they hadn’t mentioned anything about a future with the Knight Investigation Agency.
She would not dwell on that. She would not.
She couldn’t even really blame them. Yes, she’d pulled it off in the end, but the route getting there had included putting personal feelings ahead of the investigation.
Chapin drove her to the B&B, but she fell asleep in his truck. When she woke, it was morning.
Then the Cottonwood County deputies arrived to “clear up a few things.” They were not happy to learn she had photos and snatches of video on her phone from the robbery. And there went Friday until mid-afternoon.
The next time she saw Chapin was that evening when he came out of the chute on the back of a bucking bronc.
After eight seconds, she could let out the breath she’d been holding and Chapin was in first place after a fantastic ride.
When she found him behind the pens, she was surprised to see Cully and Jessa with him, and particularly surprised to see Tal Bennett. But maybe the PI from the other side of the Big Horn Mountains was a rodeo fan.
“Congratulations on the win,” Cully said.
Jessa grinned. “That’s all he knows about it. That you won that go-round. But I’ve been here long enough to know that was a terrific score.”
“Thanks. It was a good bronc.”
“It was and he did his part. But it was also a real nice ride. Real nice ride,” Tal said. So, he knew something about rodeo.
“It sure was.” She met Chapin’s eyes. “The kind that tells a rider everything he needs to know.”
Slowly, slowly he smiled, showing off those dimples.
“Is that rodeo talk?” Cully asked.
“Shh,” Jessa ordered.
But their look had broken. “Sorry, Cully, it is rodeo talk,” she said.
“Speaking of talking,” Tal said with a wry grin. “I wanted to talk to you, Reggie. I know what you did in Maryland and—”
“How could you—?”
“FBI, remember,” Cully said.
Tal kept on. “Told you I’m private now. Investigating. I don’t specialize in rodeo like the Knight brothers do, and you already have a connection with them, but I could use some help. If you’re interested.”
“Are you… Are you offering me a job?”
“Yep.”
“But… Even after I didn’t tell the Knight brothers everything as I went along?”
“To my way of thinking that shows you’re good on your own. Making judgments. Causey was impressed, too.”
“Causey? The FBI agent? He talked to you about—?”
“They worked together,” Cully said.
A hint of a grin broke through on Tal’s face. “He said you write a hell of a report. No greater praise from Causey. Listen, I cover a lot of territory. After some training, you’d probably be mostly into Montana, working on your own. So if you’re not comfortable being your own boss—”
Chapin laughed. “Are you kidding? She should pay you.”
She mock glared at him, then turned to Tal. “I won’t — pay you, I mean. I’m very interested in talking with you about this job. Without an audience.”
He smiled. “Okay. Still, from what I hear about what happened last night you might consider a package deal, since—”
“No thanks. Rodeo and ranch for me.”
She and Tal ignored Chapin’s interruption
“—this cowboy seems like a good one to have beside you in a fight.”
“He’ll do to ride the river with.”
Slowly, Chapin turned his head toward her. She saw the motion from the corner of her eye. More, she felt the pull of it.
Even more slowly, she turned her head toward him.
He waited. Patient or determined? Hard to know which was stronger with him.
The left corner of his mouth lifted when they made eye contact.
“You’re saying you’d ride the river with me?” he drawled.
She breathed in deeply. “That’s what I’m saying.”
Ignoring their audience — not only Tal, Jessa, and Cully, but all the rodeo folks and audience milling around — he faced her and slid his left arm around her waist, leaving her arms free, hanging down beside her, just as he had in their kiss that first day at Park Rodeo.
Still with only that one corner of his mouth lifted, but with his smile fully involving his eyes, he brought her close, so they were hip to hip.
It bent her back, arching, looking up at him.
“Any river?” he asked.
“Every river. Always.”
He bent to her at the same time his arm drew her up into a kiss that blocked out everything but each other.