Authors: Karen Mercury
Tags: #Romance
Sol held the door open for Xandra. His look was meaningful. “Yeah. He just liked to fling you around and slam you into the wall whenever he didn’t get his way.”
Xandra regretted the day she’d ever told Sol about that. She wanted to move into a positive future, living life fully, not be dragged down by the past. “Have no fear, Sol. Javier isn’t leaving Charleston to chase me down.”
“And Doug’s got a great idea. Get out into the countryside. Ride those horses. Become familiar with the cattle. Wanda rode out once a day. She just liked to stand on the rim of Prism Canyon, gaze out, and think Zen thoughts. There’s a good idea. Ask Doug about that whole Zen racket. That’ll calm your nerves. ‘The quieter you are, the more you can hear.’ I’m not much of a caballero myself, or I would’ve taken you out riding. Get Doug to do it.”
“Well,” said Xandra, “not until this fishing tournament is over.” Already they had walked past a couple dozen men and more than one woman wearing shirts and caps emblazoned with logos of their sponsors. Attendees were NASCAR racers, professional anglers, country music entertainers, and all 150 of her rooms had been booked for weeks, including all of the twenty cabins scattered closer to the river.
Xandra fairly swam in pheromones as she passed by these manly men, but she wasn’t ready to even consider a fling yet. That was one of the beauties of owning a lodge, she was discovering. Everyone here was a transient tourist. Even when she inevitably felt ready to have a passing hookup, the guy would be gone the next week. Strictly a wham, bam, thank you ma’am, and that was fine with her, she imagined. There was no danger of becoming emotionally involved and therefore devastated when she was ultimately disappointed, let down, or abused by the guy. And that would be all men. Xandra was convinced that all men would ultimately do that to her.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Sol said. “Hey, Cody!”
Sol greeted a fellow Xandra knew to be the Triple Play cattle ranch manager. She didn’t want to talk about cows or horseback riding, so she darted behind a group of anglers and headed for the hallway that led to her ground floor suite.
As radically as Xandra’s life had changed in the past three months, she couldn’t have predicted how it was about to be turned upside down all over again.
Doug caught up with her when she was nearly to her suite at the end of the hallway.
“Dude,” he said urgently.
Xandra sighed. She really didn’t want to hear how easy it was riding a horse. “Just like riding a bike,” Doug had told her, “only a bike doesn’t whinny and shit.” She’d gone horseback riding once as a young teen in Charleston, with her sisters. Her butt was slapped so raw from bouncing up and down in the saddle she had walked like a—well, like a cowboy for a week afterward.
“No horse similes, Doug.”
“No horse similes,” he agreed happily. Doug Ostrovsky was a very happy-go-lucky, easygoing guy. Xandra was thankful, because she was fated to deal with him every day on many different levels. “I just wanted to say, I don’t want you to feel bad about Wanda’s will.”
Oh, damn.
She was going to have to stop walking for this one. It sounded serious, and Doug wasn’t the type to discuss random serious things.
Doug continued, “I never expected anything in her will. I wasn’t related to her by blood—just her son-in-law’s stepson.”
“Yes, but you’ve worked at the Triple Play for ten years, Doug.”
“So has Cass,” Doug pointed out sincerely. “So have Leif and Cody and a ton more people. Shit, people work jobs for fifty years and don’t even get a watch.”
“Yes. All the more reason why everyone should resent me—a stranger—who just falls into the inheritance. What have I done to deserve it? Nothing. I never even met Wanda.”
“The lodge and ranch were supposed to go to your dad, Dennis, Wanda’s nephew, who
has
met Wanda a bunch of times. It’s not your fault your dad decided to give it straight to you.”
“Yeah,” Xandra said sullenly. “Because he felt sorry for me, living with a lowlife dickhead like Javier. He knew I needed a new life, a fresh start. Something to sink my teeth into, to get my mind off Javier.”
Doug’s eyes grew round. “Whoa,” he whispered.
“I know. Pathetic, huh? And Dad didn’t even know that Javier threw me around when he made that decision.”
“Whoa.” The color had drained from Doug’s face. Xandra knew Doug to be a caring sort of guy, but he was really getting emotional about the whole Javier thing. Hadn’t they already discussed Javier’s abuse of her? Why was he acting like it was such shocking news?
“Well,” said Xandra. “I’m away from Charleston now, thank God. Now we can move on, and—”
Doug shoved past her, toward the front door of her suite. His hand recoiled from the doorknob as though zapped.
“Fingerprints,”
he whispered. “Don’t touch the knob.”
It took several seconds for it to sink into Xandra’s addled brain.
My door was already open
.
She stated the obvious. “I didn’t leave my door open.”
“I know,” Doug said ominously, already handling his radio, presumably to call security.
Xandra pushed past Doug, making sure not to touch anything. The living area looked fairly untouched aside from a few overturned southwest objets d’art and tossed couch pillows. The armoire was open wide, but the thief had only strewn about the few jackets and coats that had been hung in there.
My safe.
She had nothing in there other than some heirloom pieces of jewelry and the passport she didn’t expect to ever use again, but Xandra rushed to the bedroom to check the safe. It was still closed tight, but the gold-plated handle had been bashed by something, as though an inept burglar had tried to open it.
Her dresser was a complete hurricane zone, though. It seemed that almost every item of clothing had been strewn around the room. In particular disarray was her jewelry box on top of the dresser. In her haste, Xandra didn’t note any of her crappy junk jewelry missing. What was missing, anyway? She raced back into the living area.
There was a table in a sunny nook where she kept her laptop and important papers. Doug already stood there, hands on his bony hips, his Pearl Jam T-shirt draped like a flag from his torso. “They didn’t touch anything here,” he observed.
“I know—it’s weird. It’s like they went straight to my bedroom and rooted through my clothes.”
“What’d they take?”
“Nothing that I can figure out. Maybe we interrupted and surprised them in the act.”
Doug went to the back sliding door that led to the private deck. This entire wall of the wing faced southwest, and Xandra had spent many a relaxing early evening sipping wine out here with Cass, Sol, or Doug, watching the sun set over Prism Canyon. Xandra looked forward to the winter when they could stand out there with hot chocolate mugs, soaking in the snowy view.
Doug lifted the hem of his loose, holey T-shirt so he could open the slider without getting prints on the handle. It was still locked from the inside.
“He obviously went back out through the front door. And I didn’t pass anyone in the hallway coming down here—anyone other than fishermen,” Doug added.
A new voice in the suite startled them. “He could be disguised as a fisherman,” said Cassandra.
“He could
be
a fisherman,” Doug pointed out.
Xandra frowned. “Why would a fisherman be rooting through my clothes?”
Doug and Cass shared looks as if to say
Do you even need to ask that?
“Oh, come
on
!” cried Xandra. “Just because they spend a week out of the year competitive fishing that automatically means they need to break in to sniff my
panties?
Come
on
, you guys.”
“You
are
extremely cute, Miss McQueen.” Cass turned to Doug to reminisce. “Remember that bass tournament last year, Doug?”
“How could I forget? Douche bag won the big purse—a forty-five thousand dollar boat—but was disqualified because he’d forgotten to get a fishing license.”
Xandra jammed her hand onto her hip. “Yeah. That automatically makes him a pervert.”
Cass explained. “He was so distraught he went on a bender. He bet someone he could get into the baby swing at the playground, so he stripped and greased himself up. He got stuck and died of a ruptured appendix.”
“Oh,
God
!” Xandra cringed. “I’ll bet that raised our liability insurance.”
Doug pointed heatedly at her. “Sure did!”
“Anyway,” said Cass, “I already called Marcus and told him to review his security tapes for this hallway and he’s got his men stationed all around the building ready to nab anyone if we recognize him.”
“‘His men’?” Xandra queried. “He has one security guard, that doofus who makes alien noises all day.”
Doug clarified for her. “He thinks spacemen invaded his brain. They tell him things like don’t eat margarine and grind your own pepper.”
Xandra rolled her eyes. “Oh, that makes it better. He actually sounds like a likely
suspect
.”
Cass made a thoughtful face. “Anyway. I think I just saw someone who can help us, seeing as how Marcus probably can’t. On my way over here just now, of course I passed by the Neon Cocktail. All sorts of anglers in there, comparing their biggest catches, I guess. Anyway, of course I just vaguely glanced in there since I was in a rush to get here.
Well
. There was this
gorgeous
, beefy, hunky, muscular son of a bitch”—Doug rolled his eyes now, as Cass formed her hands into claws of desire—“with this impeccably
hot ass
—”
Xandra cleared her throat. “Cass. Get to the point.”
Cass sobered up. “Oh. Right. Anyway, I think this guy is a cop or some sort of law enforcement because he had a shoulder holster with a pistol in it. I know if you’re licensed to carry a concealed weapon you’re supposed to keep it concealed, but he was sort of, ah, getting into a bit of a brawl with a fisherman, so his jacket sort of lifted up, and—”
“All right,” said Xandra, clutching Cass’s upper arm. “Let’s go find your hunky cop. If nothing else, we can stop the brawl from getting worse. No point in injuring the anglers before the tournament even starts. Doug, wait here. Can you find Sol before he leaves? I’d like to get his take on this.”
Xandra whisked her friend down the hallway. “You just wanted an excuse to talk to this beefy cop,” she chided Cass. “But he could actually be the culprit, if he’s packing a concealed weapon.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Cass said dreamily as they sped by several groups of outdoorsmen. “His ass was too impeccably hot.”
Xandra snorted in exasperation. Sometimes women could be more predatory than men.
She went through the Neon Cocktail’s doorway. And stopped dead in her tracks when she instantly saw what Cass was mooning about.
Nathan Horowitz pasted the redneck cretin an uppercut to the chin.
The liberal moron hovered a few inches off the floor for a few satisfying seconds before crashing back down to earth in a tangle of barstools, cocktail glasses, and limbs.
“Have
you
ever served in the military?” Nathan hollered down at the prone fool. “I didn’t think so. Stop and think next time you open your uneducated mouth about the military overseas.”
The irritating woo-woo liberal with the puffy haircut had not said much, really, and Nathan knew he wasn’t really making a very good point with his fists. But he had reacted instinctively, automatically, when the jerk opined that America was becoming increasingly unpopular worldwide with its unwanted overseas involvement.
That was Nathan’s livelihood—his life—this cretin was taunting.
And it was incredibly satisfying, the crunch of his knuckles against the dunce’s nose. Nathan hadn’t been running and working out every day for years for nothing.
“I’ll bet you catch and release your fish, too, you goddamned hippie,” he snarled.
“Whoa, whoa,” a fellow fisherman said warningly, making a feeble effort to restrain Nathan by grabbing his biceps from behind. “Calm down, buckaroo.”
This only enraged Nathan further. “Buckaroo?
Buckaroo
?”
He spun about to engage this new combatant, just as he was realizing this wasn’t helping his goal any, either. He’d come to McQueen Valley to
avoid
conflict, not engage it.
The mellow Grateful Dead fan he now faced held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, man. Everyone here respects the military. Brad wasn’t making any disparaging remarks about that, buddy. He’s just as sick as everyone else of seeing our boys get killed overseas for no damned reason.”
The crowd around them murmured their agreement. Nathan glanced around defensively.
Great. Now everyone knows, or assumes they know, that I’m military.
Nathan tried to chuckle, and a palpable wave of relief swept over the crowd of sportsmen. “No harm done,” he said ambiguously, and twisted around to offer the fallen jerk a hand up. The jerk flinched from him in fear, preferring to clamber to his feet by pulling himself up the bar, one hand to his bloody nose.