“It could be anybody who had anything to do with either family, or maybe this guy just found this wire somewhere. It could be completely unrelated.”
“There’s likely some of it still around the Dillinger property,” he mused. “Coulda been thrown out over the years, I suppose, but I don’t see Ira cleaning out all the outbuildings on the ranch. That’s where it would be, unless this kidnapper took it all. But I bet there’s scraps there.”
She was pulling into a spot across from the Prairie Dog when he asked again, “You sure Blair didn’t get the Kingsley girl pregnant? I hate to think my memory’s not what it used to be.”
“Pretty sure.”
“Well, neither Rafe Dillinger nor Blair woulda made much of a father, so let’s hope that’s all it was.”
Kat fought back a strangled sound.
“What?” her father asked.
“Nothing.”
Chapter 22
The Prairie Dog hadn’t improved since Kat had been there with Shiloh, not that she’d expected it to, but she looked at it with new eyes now that Ruth was joining her: same worn stuffed prairie dog, Zipper, sitting on a shelf behind the bar; same rough-hewn floor, beaten down by cowboy boots and wooden chairs; same bleary-eyed clientele in Stetsons and baseball caps; same everything. It wasn’t going to work, Kat could already see, but she chose a table in a far corner that offered privacy and gave her a view of the door. She pulled out a notebook and a recorder, though she wasn’t sure how Ruth would react to that.
Five minutes later, Ruth showed up in black pants and a white blouse with a loose tie at the throat, her expression sober, her red hair tamed by a tortoiseshell clip at the back of her neck. She looked professional and approachable at the same time.
She crossed the room to Kat self-consciously, and they both said as one, “We need to go somewhere else.”
Ruth saw the recorder and the notebook as Kat tucked them back in her purse. “Oh,” she said. She swallowed, then she drew back her shoulders and said, “I can do this. I was thinking on the ride over that maybe we could go back to the park where you and I talked the last time . . .”
Right after the attack. “I’ll meet you there,” Kat said, gathering up her purse.
Kat led the way in her Jeep, and Ruth followed behind in a small SUV. It was a short trip, but Kat’s mind was jumping all over the place. She had too many things to think about, not the least being she was pregnant.
Pregnant . . . knocked up . . . with child . . . motherhood bound . . .
Blair’s brother, Hunter, and his new wife, Delilah Dillinger, had just had a baby boy they’d named Joshua. The night he was born, Kat had run into Blair at Big Bart’s Buffalo Lounge, a sprawling restaurant and bar that was a larger version of The Dog, with better food and more tables, but the same overall clientele.
Blair was in jeans and a denim work shirt, the cuffs rolled up along his forearms, leaning back in his chair, his booted feet propped on the seat of an adjoining one. His hair was dark, tousled, and longish, the remnants of a hat ring adding a raffish air. A dove-gray Stetson sat on the table next to a nearly finished mug of beer.
“Another Kincaid in the world. Baby Joshua has arrived,” he called out to Kat, who’d gone to Big Bart’s for their Cobb salad. Being single and living alone in a small apartment close to the station, Kat rarely cooked for herself, and the food at Bart’s was surprisingly good, a cut or two above the usual bar fare.
Blair moved his feet and pushed out a chair in invitation as she walked up to the bar to pay for her order. She ignored him, so he slid to his feet and headed her way, beer in hand.
“How’s Ethan?” he asked, leaning a hip against the bar.
“The same.”
“Both he and Colton Dillinger, bronc riders, and now domesticity.” He spread his arms wide and shook his head slowly from side to side, as if their lives were over.
Kat tried not to look at him. He was just put together too well. Something about that untamed hair, and the way his jeans rode low on his hips, the silver buckle at his flat waist, the strength in his biceps. And that face. Silvery blue eyes and a hard jawline, a slightly mocking smile, firm lips. He was just too good-looking for his own good, and hers. Around him she always felt a womanly response right to her core, a thrill, a heightened awareness, which always pissed her off.
“Want to have a beer and celebrate with me?” he asked, almost boyishly eager.
“Oh, I can’t,” she said. No way. He was far too tempting. The Blair Kincaids of the world weren’t the kind of men to start something with that you wanted to last. They weren’t made that way. Period. And Kat wasn’t looking for a maybe on/maybe off romance.
“C’mon,” he whispered, grinning like the devil he was. “What’s it gonna hurt? I’m an uncle. To a half Dillinger. That’s gotta be a reason to drink.”
The barkeep handed her the brown paper sack that held her salad. She looked at it, and then at Blair. She saw the stubble on his chin and got lost a moment thinking about how it would feel to rub her fingers over those whiskers.
“I don’t really drink beer,” she said.
“Wine? Whiskey?”
“Vodka, once in a while.”
“Rustle up the lady a vodka martini, Grey Goose, three olives,” he told the man. He swept an arm toward his table, but when Kat hesitated, he said, “Uh oh. You prefer a lemon twist, don’t you?”
“No, it’s fine.” In reality, she’d never had a straight vodka drink. She generally stuck with lemon drops, or cosmos, or vodka tonics, something with a mixer.
But her drink came up, and Blair carried it to his table. She sat down across from him, setting the brown bag that contained her salad and her purse on the table next to his Stetson. He leaned back and surveyed her with a soft smile. “Katrina Starr,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Little Kat.”
He’d known her brother, Ethan, better than he’d known her, as they were closer in age. Blair had left Prairie Creek somewhere during his high school years, a time when he’d had “trouble as his best pal,” to quote her father. But he’d returned a couple years back at the behest of his brother, Hunter, who’d wanted help running the ranch after their father, the Major, died. Kat asked him some questions about his family, skirting the sensitive issues, but mostly making conversation, as she worked her way through the martini.
As soon as she got to the bottom of the glass, Blair ordered her another, even though her head was already swimming. She protested, but the protest fell on deaf ears, and Blair ordered a Maker’s Mark for himself, both drinks arriving in minutes.
And she got plastered. It happened so fast. One moment, she was telling a story—something she thought thigh-slappingly hilarious at the time but couldn’t recall the following day—the next, she was in his pickup with him, practically ripping off his clothes out in Big Bart’s lot.