Three Cowboys

Chapter Two

Her ears were ringing.

Elena tried to lift her hand to her throbbing head but something was holding it immobile. She blinked her eyes open and stared up into a gunmetal-gray sky.

Why was she outside?

“Elena!” That was Wyatt McCabe’s voice, she thought, trying to clear her head. He sounded distant through the ringing in her ears. “Elena, can you hear me?”

She lifted her head, wincing as pain darted through her skull, leaving a path of agony in its wake. It took a second for the reality of her surroundings to form a coherent picture for her sluggish brain.

She wasn’t outside. She was lying on her bedroom floor, surrounded by chunks of wood, metal and stucco, all that was left of her house.

“Elena!” Panic rose in Wyatt’s voice. He sounded closer now. She heard the faint sound of falling debris coming from somewhere near what had been the front of her house.

“I’m here!” Her voice came out in a croak, the effort setting off a painful coughing spell. She covered her mouth with the one hand she could move until it subsided, then checked her hand for any sign of blood. Nothing but dust and grime. No lung injury, then.

She looked at her other arm, the one that had refused to move, dreading what she might find. But the limb seemed to be intact and, if her wiggling fingers were any indication, mostly uninjured. It was just pinned beneath the weight of her fallen armoire, a heavy oak monstrosity her father had built for her when she had graduated from college. Grimacing, she rolled onto her side and tried to pull the armoire off her arm. It didn’t budge. Too heavy.

“Wyatt!”

“I’m right here.” And he was, suddenly, a cowboy-shaped silhouette against the winter sky. Relief swamped her, bringing tears to her eyes. If Wyatt was here, she was going to be okay.

“Are you hurt anywhere?” Though she couldn’t make out much about his features, backlit as he was against the daylight, she couldn’t mistake the real concern in his deep voice. The tears trembling on her eyelids started to spill, and she blinked hard to hold them back.

She started to say, “I’m fine,” but stopped before she formed the words. She wasn’t fine. Her head was killing her, which might mean a closed head injury. And her arm was pinned under a three-hundred-pound armoire. It was starting to go numb. It would be stupid not to say so. “My head hurts and my arm is pinned.”

“Okay, I don’t want you to move anymore, in case that headache is more than just a bump. I’ll do all the heavy lifting.” He threaded his way through the debris field and hunkered down next to her, smiling at her briefly before he examined the armoire pinning her arm. “Can you move your arm at all?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, then when I say go, I want you to try to pull your arm across your chest to get it out of the way. Ready?”

She nodded, grimacing at the resulting pain in her skull.

He bent over the armoire, sliding his hands on either side of her trapped arm. “Here we go.” He took a deep breath and pushed upward with his legs. She felt the pressure on her tingling arm ease. “Go!” he said.

She rolled a little to the side, pulling her arm out and over her chest. With a thud, Wyatt let the armoire drop to the ground and turned immediately to her. “Thank you,” she said as he carefully examined her arm. “What happened?”

“Bomb, I think.”

“Bomb?”

“Well, some sort of explosion.” He pressed the bones of her arm from shoulder to wrist. “Anything hurt?”

“It’s still a little numb from the pressure,” she answered, flexing her fingers. Her wrist twinged, but not badly. “I think it may be sprained but not broken.”

“Good. What about your legs?”

She hadn’t even thought about her legs, she realized, panic starting to rise in her throat. Were they there at all? Raising her head again, she looked down at her legs. Both were still intact and attached. She released a gusty sigh and tried to move her legs. To her relief, both limbs shifted in response to her mental command.

“Very good.” Wyatt smiled at her. He was a little scuffed up himself, she realized as her eyes adjusted to the daylight. He had a scrape on his jaw, and a spot on his elbow was still oozing blood.

“You’re hurt.” She lifted her hand to his face, gently probing the area around the scrape without touching the wound itself.

“Just scrapes,” he assured her lightly. “If you think you can move, we should get clear of here. In case there’s a secondary device.”

“You should have stayed out there and waited for first responders,” she said with a shake of her head. “This place can’t be stable, with all the structural damage.”

“I am a first responder. Remember?” He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pulled her carefully to a sitting position. “How’s that?”

“I can get up,” she assured him.

He stopped her from trying by herself, slipping his arms around her waist and pulling her up to a standing position as effortlessly as if she’d been made of balsa wood. He didn’t let her go, giving her time to steady herself as her vision swam from the change in positions. But even after the dizzy spell faded, she still felt shaky and vulnerable, and it took every ounce of her inner strength to push his arms away so she could stand on her own.

“I made a path out. We need to hurry.”

Already she heard sirens wailing in the distance. “Where did the bomb blow?” she asked as he guided her through a maze of debris, taking care not to touch anything that looked ready to crash down on top of them.

“At a guess, it was somewhere in the carport. The blast blew your car into the house next door.” Even as he spoke the words, they emerged from the wreckage and into the front yard, where bits and pieces of her shattered home lay sprinkled across the ground like confetti. To her right, the neighbor’s house was a half ruin, the wall nearest her house collapsed under the weight of the blast and the airborne Ford Focus that lay upside down in what had once been the neighbors’ living room.

“Was anyone home?” she asked in alarm.

“No.” There was an odd quality to Wyatt’s brief answer, but she didn’t have time to ask more questions, for the Serpentine Fire Department truck had arrived, and the next few minutes of consultation and examination resulted in a trip by ambulance to the regional medical center about an hour away in Del Rio. To her surprise, Wyatt rode with her in the ambulance, leaving the bomb scene investigation to a couple of his deputy investigators.

“I’m okay,” she said as he settled down next to her, holding her hand while the medical technicians got her hooked up to an IV cannula and periodically checked her vitals.

“I know,” he said. “Just try to relax. We’ll be in Del Rio before you know it.”

* * *

WAITING FOR THE DOCTOR to bring him news of Elena’s condition, Wyatt spent the next few hours on the phone with his office and his family. On the work front, his deputies had cordoned off the bomb site and were guarding it while they waited for an explosives investigation team from the Texas Ranger division. At home, Bull and Morgan had offered to help with the bomb investigation any way they could, although Wyatt assured them that protecting Tracy, Dakota and the rest of the J-Bar-J Ranch inhabitants was the most vital job they could have at the moment.

“Why don’t you talk to Julio Rivas, see what he knows about Guillermo Fuentes?” he’d suggested to Bull, knowing his brother had formed a tentative truce with the scared young troublemaker who’d gotten their sister Brittany into trouble in the first place.

It had been Julio, whose dalliance with Los Jaguares had nearly cost him his life, who’d provided their first clues toward locating Brittany. Wyatt still wanted to give the kid a good whomping for being foolish enough to get mixed up with such dangerous thugs in the first place, much less drag Brittany into the mess, but Julio was still just a kid. A stupid, stupid kid who might be able to help them save their sister.

“Will do,” Bull had assured him. “Is Vargas going to be okay?”

“Hard to say. Depends on the verdict on her head injury.” As both a sheriff and a cowboy, Wyatt had seen his share of simple-seeming knocks on the head turn into crises. “I’ll call when I know more.”

By the time the doctor came into the Emergency Department waiting room, Wyatt’s nerves were beginning to fray, the relief of finding Vargas still alive inside that bombed-out ruin of a rental house beginning to give way to a gnawing fear that bringing her out alive and conscious had been only a reprieve. What if that knock on her head was worse than they’d thought? Blood could be clotting from a hidden bleed, putting pressure on her brain.

People could die from little knocks on the head—

The thought of Vargas lying lifeless in a hospital bed made him physically ill. Elena Vargas, for all her annoying flaws, was the most vibrant person he’d ever known. Life radiated from her in almost tangible waves, as if she generated her own electricity from some inner dynamo.

She couldn’t be dead. What would the world do without her?

What would he do without her?

“Sheriff McCabe?”

The doctor’s quiet voice drew him to his feet, his heart knocking wildly in his chest. Please tell me she’s going to be okay, he thought. Please.

“Ms. Vargas can see you now.”

“Is she okay?’

“As okay as one can be with a slight concussion and a sprained wrist,” the doctor said with a wry smile. “She also has contusions and scrapes, as you’d expect. I just saw the images from her house on the news. She’s a very lucky woman to have survived the blast.”

Wyatt nodded. There had been several hellish minutes when he’d been certain she hadn’t.

The doctor handed him off to an E.R. nurse, who took him to Elena. She was sitting up in the E.R. bed, looking rumpled but very much alive. “They’re talking about keeping me overnight,” she said, clearly annoyed.

“If they think you need to stay—”

“I don’t. I’m okay. My head’s not even really hurting anymore.” She held up her bandaged wrist. “And this is a sprain. It’ll go away in a few days. McCabe, you’ve got to get me out of here.”

“And go where? Your house is gone.”

She closed her eyes a moment, her jittery irritation giving way as if the full weight of all she’d lost had just landed on her in one heavy thud. “Oh, God. All my stuff is gone.”

Including her notes, he thought. Funny, they had seemed so important before but were an afterthought now. All that mattered was that Elena was going to be okay. “If there’s anything left, we’ll get it for you.” He sat on the edge of her bed and took her uninjured hand in his. “Do you remember anything more about the blast?”

In the ambulance, she’d confessed the last thing she remembered before opening her eyes to see her house blown up around her was walking into the bathroom for an elastic band to put up her hair.

“No.” Her eyes narrowed suddenly. “What about you? Did you see anything before the bomb blew?”

He hesitated, knowing that anything he said about spotting Memo Fuentes would set her off. But she deserved the truth, didn’t she? She was the one who’d lost everything she possessed, right down to the roof over her head. She’d damned near lost her life.

“I saw Guillermo Fuentes down the street from your house.”

Her gaze snapped to meet his. “Memo Fuentes? Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“So did I.” Guillermo Fuentes was one of Javier Calderón’s lower-level henchmen. Earlier that year, he had been driving a truck packed with undocumented workers crossing the border illegally when a flash flood from a spring thunderstorm had turned the Rio Grande River into a death trap. The van had hit a slick patch and run off the road into the river.

Of the thirty-five people aboard, including Fuentes, only eight had survived. Nine, Wyatt corrected, counting Fuentes. Had the heartless bastard run away from the van and left all those people to drown?

“Did he see you?” Elena asked.

“Yes. He ran. I started to take chase when the bomb blew.”

“What was he doing when you spotted him?”

The doctor came in at that moment, stopping him from responding. He nodded to Wyatt and turned to look at Elena. “You won’t rethink sticking around overnight?”

“I’m not sick. I don’t need to be here. Leave the bed free for someone who really needs it. I just want to go home.”

“Your home is gone,” Wyatt repeated, keeping his tone gentle.

The look she gave him was pained. “So I’ll get a motel room for a few days. The one in Davenport is supposed to be nice—”

“No.” Wyatt and the doctor spoke in unison.

She looked at them both through narrowed eyes, as if she suspected they’d been colluding behind her back. “It’s my decision.”

“You have a concussion,” the doctor said in a firm voice. “Just because I don’t think it’s a bad one doesn’t mean it’s something to ignore. You should have someone with you for tonight, at least, in case something goes wrong.”

“Is there someone I can call for you?” Wyatt asked, realizing he didn’t know whether Elena even had any close friends who’d be willing to come to her aid when she needed them. He had worked closely with her for over a year on the Border Security Task Force, but how she spent her time outside of work hours was a blank spot in his store of knowledge about her.

“No,” she admitted, looking embarrassed.

“Then you’ll stay with me,” he said.

* * *

“YOU CAN STILL TAKE ME TO the Davenport Inn if you want. I won’t tell the doctor if you won’t.” Elena watched Wyatt’s clever hands unlocking the dead bolt on his front door and wondered, not for the first time, what else those long-fingered hands could do in a more intimate setting.

Really not a good time to be thinking like that, Vargas, she scolded herself as he let her inside.

“I know I’m not the neatest housekeeper in the world, but staying here for one night isn’t going to kill you. I promise.”

She looked around the small living room, saw that he was neater than she was by several degrees and tamped down a hint of dismay. “Yeah, you’re a total slob.”

“You feel like eating anything? I’m pretty sure the last thing you ate was that bag of pecans.”

He was right. And now that the worst of the trauma had passed, she was starting to feel pretty hungry. But she didn’t want him to think he had to wait on her. “Don’t go to any trouble.”

“I’m starving, so I’m going to make something for myself, anyway.” He was already halfway into the small kitchen just off the living room. “Soup? Sandwiches?”

“Whatever you’re having.” She dropped into the nearest chair, resting her sore skull against the soft back cushion. As if she’d been running on fumes for the past few hours, she felt all her energy starting to sputter to a standstill. She let her eyes drift shut, lulled by the sounds of Wyatt moving around in the kitchen.

“Elena?”

Her eyes snapped open. Wyatt crouched beside her chair, his gray eyes warm with concern. “I’m sorry. I wanted to let you sleep, but the doctor told me to be sure to wake you every couple of hours.”

Her gaze drifted to her wrist, where she’d returned her watch after the E.R. had given her back her personal effects. The watch crystal was cracked but the inner workings still ran, or they had, at least, when she left the hospital. But if the time on her watch was correct, she had been at Wyatt’s apartment for nearly two hours already.

“I fell asleep.”

He smiled. “You did. I put your sandwich in a plastic bag so it wouldn’t dry out. You want to try eating something before you go to bed?”

She looked back at him, unarmed by his gentleness. The Wyatt McCabe she knew was all spurs and leather, a hardworking, no-nonsense cowboy cop. She wasn’t sure she liked this softer side to the man. It made her feel entirely too vulnerable.

“Or,” he added, a hint of rawhide returning to his voice, “you could tell me how long Javier Calderón has had a bounty on your head.”