Three Cowboys

Chapter Three

Elena’s dusky eyelashes dropped to cover her dark eyes. “How’d you figure it out?”

“Well, the bomb was a big clue,” Wyatt answered, his tone drier than he’d intended. He softened his voice. “And seeing Memo there, running your neighbors out of their houses to protect them from the bomb—”

“Altruistic of him.” She sounded skeptical.

“I’ve been thinking about that, too.” He sat on the end of the coffee table so he could look her in the eye. “Guillermo Fuentes may be a killer, but he’s always been workmanlike about it. He doesn’t kill for fun, and he’s never been known as cruel or ruthless.”

Her brow creased. “True. Except if he’s still alive, that means he left a whole bunch of poor, desperate people to die in that truck while he ran to protect his own hide.”

“I don’t doubt that’s exactly what he did,” Wyatt conceded. “I just don’t think he felt good about it.”

“So he risked his neck sticking around there long enough to warn my neighbors to get out?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if we ever catch him, I’ll be sure to send him a thank-you note.” Her voice flattened with anger. “Oh, wait. He didn’t warn me.”

“Because you were a legitimate target from his perspective.”

“Pardon me if I think his perspective is a crock of—”

“Yeah. Same here, believe me.” He pushed back a wavy lock of hair that had fallen into her face. Her eyes fluttered up to meet his, and the heat he saw in their smoky brown depths scorched him to the bone.

He dropped his hand away, feeling shaky in his gut. He repeated his earlier question. “How long?”

Elena’s gaze dropped to her lap, where her fingers twined together so tightly her knuckles had gone white. “At least two years.”

“Two years?” And he’d never heard a word about it?

“Since I killed Antonio Calderón.”

Wyatt sat back, caught off guard. “You killed Calderón’s brother? I thought he died in a boating accident.”

“That’s the story the federales told the Mexican press, and ICE didn’t try to contradict them. They thought it would keep me safe.”

“How did you kill him?”

“Shot him. To protect myself and another ICE agent.”

Wyatt heard a thread of pain beneath her otherwise uninflected answer. Clearly, there was more she wasn’t telling him about what happened between her and Calderón’s younger brother. “Calderón knows you killed Tonio?”

She nodded. “He’d sent Tonio there to kill me. He knows.”

“So he wanted you dead even before you killed his brother?”

“Not exactly. I mean, it wasn’t personal then.” She looked down at her hands again, a frown creasing her brow. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. What matters is that he wants me dead now, and it’s very personal.”

“Does Agent Howard know Calderón has a hit out on you?” he asked, referring to her supervisor at ICE, Clive Howard.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Clive wouldn’t let me anywhere near the Calderón investigation if he did. He probably wouldn’t even let me out in the field at all.”

He put his hand over hers where they twisted anxiously in her lap. “Do you have a death wish, Vargas?”

Her dark eyes met his. “If you tell anyone at ICE what you know—”

“I’m not going to promise to keep your secret at the risk of your life.”

“Fine.” She pulled her hands away from his. “I’ll go now.”

He stopped her, closing his hands around her arms and holding her in place. “We’ll table all of this until you’ve had a good night’s sleep. Okay?”

Wariness blazed in her tired eyes. “You won’t make any calls tonight while I’m asleep?”

“Not to anyone who could put you out of a job.”

She released a slow breath. “I’m too tired to eat. Put the sandwich in the fridge and I’ll eat it for breakfast.” She started out of the room, then paused, turning to look at him. “Where am I sleeping?”

“My bed,” he answered, not thinking how the statement would sound.

Elena’s lips curled with a sudden flash of humor. “Sorry, cowboy. I don’t think I’m capable of staying in the saddle long enough to do either one of us much good tonight. We’ll have to play rodeo another night.”

Good grief, the woman could make his jeans tight with a few saucy words faster than any woman he’d ever met. “One of these days, Vargas, I’m going to call you on all that trash-talking you do.”

“Preferably when I’m fully conscious,” she said around a yawn.

“The bedroom is the door on the right. There’s a bathroom with a shower inside if you need it.”

“Where will you sleep?”

His other bedroom was a study, but it had an old bunk he’d confiscated when his father was refurbishing the bunkhouse at the ranch. “Got it covered,” he assured her.

She started toward the door on the right but stopped, turning back to face him. “We never did talk about Los Soldados.”

“Your notes are somewhere in the rubble, remember?”

“Right,” she said. “Good night.” She continued on to the bedroom, closing the door behind her.

Wyatt stared at the closed door, unsettled. Because Elena Vargas had just lied to him. He didn’t know where her mysterious notes might be, but clearly they weren’t in the rubble of her house.

Just what else was the beautiful ICE agent hiding from him?

* * *

ELENA DIDN’T DREAM about the explosion.

She dreamed about Tonio. And not those last moments of his life, when he aimed the shiny Colt .45 at Sam Benson, forcing her to pull the trigger of her own service weapon and kill the man she thought she loved.

No, she dreamed about the weekend they’d spent together on South Padre Island, a brief moment in time when she’d believed Tonio was nothing like his brother Javier and meant it when he said he loved her.

He’d been tall and handsome, with a movie-star smile and a mind as sharp as the razor blades his brother liked to use for torture. U.S.-educated—a graduate of Harvard Law and destined for greatness.

Or so she’d thought.

She’d met him through her undercover work in Ciudad Acuña, the Mexican city across the border from Del Rio. She’d been playing the role of an American grad student, studying in Mexico, whose ethics were on the shaky side. She’d hoped to work her way into a position with Calderón’s cartel as a mule, smuggling drugs from one point to another.

Instead, she’d drawn the attention of Calderón’s handsome younger brother and fallen hopelessly in love.

The last night on South Padre Island, she’d almost told Tonio the truth. Only the knowledge that her fellow ICE agent, Sam Benson, was already halfway inside the organization had kept her from risking it.

In her dream, she went with the impulse. She blurted her deceit in a single breath, eager to get it out of the way so that nothing else would stand between her and Tonio.

The words were still ringing in the soft Gulf breeze when Tonio pulled out his Colt .45 and shot her between the eyes.

Elena woke with a jerk, her pulse pounding in her head, beating a swift cadence of pain. All around her was darkness, and for the briefest of moments, she thought she was dead, awaking in the afterlife in some dark, unfamiliar limbo.

Then a door opened, streaming light into the darkness, and she saw she was in a small, spare bedroom. The silhouette in the open doorway was tall and rangy, broad-shouldered and cowboy-lean.

Wyatt, she remembered, swamped with relief.

But her relief was short-lived. “We have to go. Now.”

The anxiety in his voice terrified her. “What’s going on?”

“Someone roughed up your ER doctor in the parking deck to find out who you left with. They know you’re with me.” He grabbed a gym bag sitting by the door, hurried to the chest of drawers across from the bed and started pulling clothes out and stuffing them into the bag.

She squelched a streak of modesty and rolled out of the bed, pulling on the jeans she’d talked the E.R. doctors out of cutting off her. The T-shirt she wore was one she’d borrowed from Wyatt’s drawer, a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt that wouldn’t be much protection from the December cold outside. “What are we doing? Where do you plan to take me?”

He tossed a sweater to her. “Put that on. We won’t have time to warm up the truck and the temperature’s dropped a lot since sundown.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He zipped the bag. “I’m taking you to the J-Bar-J.”

His father’s ranch? “Won’t that be the first place they look for me if they don’t find me here?”

“Maybe. We have a lot better chance of holding them off at the ranch, though.” He pulled open the bottom drawer, withdrew a gun case and pulled out a small pistol—a Kel Tec P32, Elena saw as he slid a loaded ammunition magazine into the grip. Good ankle-carry weapon.

Sure enough, he took out an ankle holster and started strapping it to his right leg. “How’re you feeling?” he asked as he buckled the holster in place.

“I’m okay,” she answered, and was relieved to find she was telling the truth. Her head had stopped pounding and her heart rate had returned to normal after the heightened stress of her nightmare. “Don’t suppose you have an extra weapon lying around?”

“I have your Smith & Wesson. I spotted it in the rubble and grabbed it.” He dropped the hem of his jeans over the ankle holster. He’d eschewed his usual cowboy boots, she saw with a hint of surprise, in favor of simple hiking boots that would better accommodate the holster. “I checked for damage. It’s fine.”

He led her into the living room and unlocked one of the drawers of the writing desk by the window. Her M&P40 and hip holster were inside.

She took the weapon and checked the magazine. Ten rounds, plus one in the chamber. “My spare ammo’s back at the house. Assuming it survived the bomb.”

“I think my brother Bull has an M&P40. You can borrow some rounds from him when we get to the ranch.”

“What if I need the ammo before we get there?”

Wyatt strapped on his regular service pistol, a large gray GLOCK 31, and shrugged a denim jacket over it. “If we need more firepower than we’re carrying, running out of ammo will be the least of our worries.” He opened the front door and looked at her. “Ready?”

With a nod, she followed him out to the truck.

The night was cold for south Texas, with a dry wind that seeped through the layers of clothes she wore to chill her right down to her bones. Wyatt started the truck and turned the heat up to high. “Buckle in.”

She fastened her seat belt, careful not to let the belt block her access to the shoulder holster she wore strapped outside her sweater. “Are those lights coming toward us?” she asked in a hushed tone as they started down the street in front of Wyatt’s house.

Wyatt didn’t answer, turning into a nearby driveway and parking. He cut the engine and the lights. “Hunker down.”

He slumped in his seat as well, keeping his head below the seat. In the rearview mirror, the reflection of headlights moved past so slowly that she was ready to scream before the vehicle finally passed the driveway where they sat parked.

Wyatt lifted his head a few inches, looking past her out the passenger window. “They’re stopping at my house.”

Elena risked a quick look. The vehicle, she saw, was one of the large panel vans Los Jaguares favored. Eight men got out of the van and moved in silent concert toward the front of Wyatt’s house.

“We can’t stay here,” she whispered.

“I know. But we can’t risk being seen leaving.”

She looked around them. The house where they had parked had a fence around the small backyard but the one next door had a flat, bare yard behind the house that led to an alley about twenty yards away. Moonlight shining down from the clearing sky shed enough light to show an obstacle-free path to the alley through the yard. “Leave your lights off and go through that backyard,” she suggested.

He followed her gaze and nodded. “Good idea.”

He started the truck’s engine and eased the gear into Drive. With a light bump they left the concrete driveway and started across the grassless yard behind the house next door.

As they neared the alley, lights came on in the backyard, a spotlight that illuminated the truck so brightly that it made Elena’s eyes hurt. Wyatt growled a sharp profanity and hit the gas, his wheels crunching and popping against the gravel surface of the alley.

Elena twisted in her seat, looking for any sign of pursuit. So far, nothing, but the homeowner had run out into the alley, no doubt trying to get their license plate number. A flood of panic rose in her chest, making her voice come out tight and strained. “If he makes too much of a ruckus, one of those thugs is going to come find out what’s going on.”

“So let’s make sure we have a big head start,” Wyatt shot back, whipping the truck onto the crossroad and driving as fast as he dared.

They reached the highway leading to the J-Bar-J Ranch within minutes, weaving into the light flow of vehicles, mostly eighteen-wheelers and delivery trucks, that made up the usual late-night traffic. The pickup’s dashboard clock read eleven-forty-three. Almost midnight.

“Did you call ahead to let them know we’re coming?” she asked a few minutes later, after her heart rate had settled down.

“No.” He shot her a grin. “One of the benefits of being family. Nobody turns you away, no matter how late you show up.”