Calder Storm Read online

Confusion reigned when he ripped his mouth from hers and started swearing bitterly, his hands gripping her ribs and pushing her off him even as he rolled after her.

  “What’s wrong? Why—?” she began, half in anger.

  “I spilled my damned coffee,” Trey muttered tightly.

  Recalling the hot steam that had swirled above the cup, Sloan asked quickly, “Did you get any of it on you?”

  “It’s all over the back of my shirt.” He sat up, giving the side seam a tug to survey the damage.

  “I’ll get some napkins.” But it was her turn to swear when she scrambled to her feet and accidentally stepped on the remaining croissants. She pulled her foot away from them too quickly and knocked over the strawberry container. Letting them lie, Sloan gathered up the extra napkins from the cardboard box and returned to Trey’s side. “Did it burn you?” She blotted at the coffee-sodden shirt.

  “No. It was just the shock of something hot and wet against my skin.”

  “I can imagine.” Reassured that no harm had been done, she continued to use the napkins to absorb as much of the excess moisture as possible. “I hope you didn’t want anything more to eat. I pretty well demolished what was left of our breakfast.”

  “Food is about the last thing on my mind.” His eyes were twinkling with amusement when he said it.

  Sloan smiled in answer, letting him know she understood perfectly. After a moment more of working on the wet stain, she sat back on her heels. “That’s about the best I can do.”

  “It’s fine,” he said and rolled to his feet, scooping up his hat along the way. “What d’ya say we go for a walk? We can clean up this mess later.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Sloan pushed to her feet.

  When she stepped off the blanket to join him, he reached out and took her hand, linking fingers. Side by side, they started off paralleling the bluff’s edge.

  After they had traveled a ways, he studied her with a sidelong look.

  “I admit there are no flowers, only grass, but this still feels good and right.” His elbow bent, raising their clasped hands.

  “Are you always this romantic?” Sloan teased, mostly to contain the swirl of emotion within.

  His reply was quick and firm. “Not by a long shot.”

  She waited, a kind of flatness setting in. When he failed to say more, Sloan prompted, “Aren’t you going to say that it’s different with me?”

  “It’s an old line, isn’t it?” His mouth crooked in a knowing smile.

  “Very old.” The variations on it were endless. Only a few times had she wanted to believe them. In the end, it hadn’t mattered that it hadn’t turned out to be true.

  “I imagine you’ve heard your share of them,” Trey guessed.

  “Let’s just say that in my line of work I travel a lot, and I’ve learned to be very selective about where I sleep.”

  “I already figured that out,” he told her. “It’s all an old story. Only one thing can make it new.”

  He left it at that, offering no further explanation and letting Sloan come to her own conclusion. Only one came to mind, and that was love.

  Upon entering the hotel’s private meeting room, Jessy quickly inspected her surroundings, the line of her mouth tightening when she noticed Trey’s absence. An opened briefcase lay atop the table. Its owner sat behind it, only a jacketed shoulder and sleeve visible. A side serving table against the wall held a tray of assorted cold cuts and cheese, a basket of sandwich rolls, and another of chips along with the usual condiments. A second man poured coffee from an insulated carafe into a cup, but he was angled away from the door, preventing Jessy from getting a look at his face.

  When she closed the door behind her, a head popped out from behind the raised briefcase lid. The wire-rimmed glasses and short-cropped hair seemed to suit his accountant looks. But, as Ed Walters, head of the investigative agency, had often pointed out to her, spreadsheets and financial records usually provided more information than could be gained from interviewing a hundred people.

  “Hi, Jessy.” Ed Walters rose to greet her, extending a hand to shake hers when she approached. “I don’t think you’ve met Doug Avery. He’s been heading up the Texas side of this for me.”

  “Good to meet you, Mr. Avery.” Jessy turned to the second man, who could have passed for Joe Average, neither too tall or too short, too heavy or too thin, yet attractive in a nondescript way.

  “My pleasure, ma’am.” He gripped her hand briefly, then gestured to the drink selection. “Can I get you something?”

  “Just coffee for now,” she replied. “I hope you don’t mind, but to avoid the interruptions of waiters coming in and out, I had the hotel prepare the sandwich trays so we could make our own.”

  “To tell you the truth, we’ve already sampled them.” Ed grinned. “We thought it would be easier for you to eat and listen than it would be for us to eat and talk. So, how’s Chase doing these days?”

  “He’s still going strong,” Jessy replied truthfully.

  “I always picture him sitting in the den behind that big desk of his, and that old map of the Triple C on the wall behind him.” An absentminded smile curved his mouth at the image in his mind. The digression didn’t last long, and he quickly centered his thoughts on the present. “Where’s your son? I thought he was to be here, too.”

  “Unfortunately, Trey’s been held up.” Just why or how, Jessy didn’t know, but she intended to find out before the day was over.

  “It’s probably all that traffic from the parade,” Avery concluded. “I thought we were never going to get here from the airport. The town’s jammed with people.”

  “It always is, on the third weekend in May,” Jessy said as the door opened behind her and Trey walked in.

  “Sorry I’m late.” He crossed directly to an empty chair and slipped off his hat. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

  “Not at all,” Walters assured him and introduced him to his associate.

  “Got caught in that traffic, did you?” Avery guessed as they shook hands.

  “Actually, I spilled coffee all over my shirt so I had to go back to the motel at the last minute and change into something dry.”

  Which was the truth, as far as it went. Trey simply omitted the part that dealt with Sloan and how easy it had been to lose track of time when he was with her. Indeed, it was where he wanted to be that very moment—with Sloan. The knowledge that she would be leaving when the weekend was over only made that feeling more urgent.

  “I suppose you’ll be riding some of those broncs this afternoon,” Walters guessed.

  “No sir.” Trey helped himself to some coffee. “The ranch has put together a team to compete in the wild horse race, and I’m one of the members of that. Ropin’ is more my line than rough stock.”

  “Quint mentioned the two of you used to do a lot of team roping events,” Avery remarked.

  “We were a hard pair to beat.” There was no boast in his words, just a statement of fact. “But with Quint heading up the Cee Bar Ranch down in Texas for us, that’s past history.”

  The reference to Quint served to redirect all their thoughts to the matter at hand. It was at Quint’s suggestion that the investigation had been started some five months ago after Rutledge’s efforts to force a sale of the Cee Bar Ranch had extended to infecting the Cee Bar cattle with anthrax.

  At the time, all the evidence against Rutledge was circumstantial. As a former ATF agent for the Treasury Department, Quint hoped an investigation would uncover something more concrete. He had also recommended that all of Rutledge’s past and present activities be scrutinized for other evidence of wrongdoing.

  “Shall we get started?” Avery suggested, pulling a folder from his briefcase.

  At a nod from Jessy, he started his report with a summary of all the information obtained. When there was documentation, such as laboratory tests that identified the anthrax as a manufactured strain, he produced it.

  Most of it Trey had heard
before. His thoughts soon strayed to Sloan, wondering where she was and what she was doing. He had asked her to have a late lunch with him, but she had vetoed the idea, reminding him that she needed to be at the rodeo grounds as soon as the parade was over and that she’d probably grab a quick bite there.

  “We’re ninety-nine percent sure,” Walters was saying, “that we know which laboratory was the source of the anthrax spores that infected your cattle. We can link Rutledge’s son, Boone, with one of the technicians working there, but we can’t find any tie to Rutledge himself. The few people in the area who were willing to talk to us about it all pointed fingers at Boone as the one giving the orders. In my opinion, Rutledge got to all of them and turned his dead son into a scapegoat. As much as I hate to admit, Jessy,” he said with a wry grimace, “when it comes to the trouble you had at the Cee Bar, we’ve come to a dead end.”

  “What about his other activities?” A thoughtful frown creased her forehead.

  “It isn’t much better. You can fill her in, Doug.” Walters leaned back in his chair to let his associate take over.

  “We can document hundreds of incidents where his tactics have been heavy-handed, and all of it right on the borderline of being illegal. When we dug deeper into his past business activities, I thought we had found something. Remember when all those savings-and-loan scandals erupted in Texas a few years back? Well, Rutledge was implicated in a number of them, but the Feds hit a stone wall when it came to proving it, which is why he was never indicted. It was a cold trail, but we followed it anyway. Unfortunately, it soon became obvious that those who might have been able to implicate Rutledge were all dead. Some died in prison and others of natural causes.”

  “I know Chase isn’t going to like hearing this, Jessy, but we’ve pretty well run out of leads to follow,” Walter concluded.

  “You’re right. He won’t like it.” Jessy agreed. “He’s convinced Rutledge represents a potential threat to the family. Like Quint, Chase was hoping you would find something that we could hold over his head.”

  “So far we’ve struck out. But we’ll keep digging if that’s what you want.”

  “It’s what Chase wants,” she replied, leaving little doubt that while she ran the Triple C operation, Chase Calder still ruled it.

  “Any particular avenue you want us to pursue?” Walters asked, then turned toward Trey. “You haven’t said much during this, Trey. Have you got any thoughts?”

  Conscious of being the cynosure of all eyes at the table, Trey had to scramble for an answer. Personally, he didn’t share his grandfather’s concern about Rutledge. But that wasn’t the Calder line.

  “I’d concentrate on the anthrax angle,” he said. “If Rutledge has paid somebody to keep his mouth shut, then that person came into some cash, a new job, college tuition for his kids, or an operation for the wife. Something changed hands somewhere.”

  “You’re right. We looked for the obvious cash trails, but there are always others.” Walters glanced at the other investigator, a gleam of new possibilities in his look.

  A discussion followed, going over the options. But with little of substance that could be added, the meeting began to break up.

  Trey made his exit at the first opportunity, a fact Jessy was quick to note. She stayed to the last, shaking hands with both men as they left.

  Seconds after the door closed behind them, Laredo slipped into the room. His eyes made a quick skim of the room, verifying she was alone, then made a thorough examination of her expression. He cocked his head to one side. “How’d it go?”

  “After five months, basically they have nothing.” Jessy scratched her name across the credit card chit and slipped a copy of it in her pocket before turning to him. “Somehow Rutledge has succeeded in shifting all the blame to Boone. Convenient, isn’t it?”

  “Very.” Seeing the frustration in her face, he decided a change of subject was in order. “I noticed Trey left early.”

  Jessy pulled in a quick, cleansing breath and nodded. “He said he had to get to the fairgrounds. Why, I don’t know. The team race isn’t until later.”

  “I have a feeling a certain blue-eyed brunette might be the reason.” When Jessy looked at him in surprise, Laredo added, “He saw her last night at the street dance, and I suspect he had breakfast with her this morning.”

  The significance of that wasn’t lost on Jessy. Having grown up in a man’s world, working cattle side by side with men her entire life, she had few romantic illusions about them. In her experience, rare was the man who cared to see the same woman in the morning that he’d been with the night before. Her own son was no different. Obviously, this woman was.

  “Who is she? What’s her name?” She was immediately curious.

  With a shake of his head, Laredo signaled his ignorance. “That’s something you’ll have to ask Trey.”

  Common sense overruled her maternal curiosity, and she said, “If it’s serious, I’ll find out soon enough. And if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter who she is.”

  Laredo couldn’t argue with that logic. And since Jessy hadn’t asked his opinion, he kept it to himself.

  Chapter Five

  The breeze channeled itself through the alleyway behind the chutes, kicking up little eddies of dust and swirling them along it. Trey took little notice of that as he dawdled at the entrance, one shoulder propped negligently against a post. The whole of his attention was focused on Sloan, some twenty feet away.

  Again she was wearing that bulky vest, its many pockets bulging with assorted rolls of film, a light meter, and camera attachments. To anyone passing by, it appeared that she was chatting with one of the save men, still in his clown makeup, and every now and then idly snapping a picture of him.

  But Trey had been watching her all afternoon, long enough to realize there was nothing idle or casual about anything she did. Even now, while she was engaging in idle chitchat to keep her subject relaxed, she kept constant track of the sun’s angle and adjusted her position to compensate for any change in it.

  She was all business, to the exclusion of everything else, including Trey. And it had been that way ever since he’d arrived at the rodeo grounds. After scouring the arena fence and chutes, he had finally located her in the rear area, busy taking pictures of a pen of bucking horses.

  His greeting had barely gained him a glance before she was once again studying the scene through the camera’s viewfinder. “Sorry. This light isn’t going to last,” she had told him in a distracted murmur.

  Personally, Trey hadn’t seen anything particularly unusual about the light or the pen of horses, but he had waited until she finished. Yet, almost the moment she moved away from the pen, her eyes had begun a search for her next subject. They had quickly fastened on an injured cowboy being helped to the first-aid station. She had immediately set off in the same direction, talking and smiling at Trey, yet he had sensed that her mind was elsewhere.

  After the injured cowboy, she had focused on another cowboy, this one making a careful inspection of his saddle cinch. Then she had gravitated to the action in the arena.

  And Trey had followed—until he started feeling like a damned puppy dog, panting at her heels, waiting for her to remember he was there. Pride wouldn’t let him dog her any more, but he continued to keep her within sight.

  Logic told him that Sloan was here to do a job. Yet he found her single-minded devotion to it frustrating and irksome. There was little solace in remembering that Sloan had told him that photography was her passion. At the time Trey hadn’t thought she meant it literally. Now he was beginning to wonder.

  Watching her, his anger and impatience growing by the minute, Trey struggled to accept the notion that he was jealous of a camera. Yet it was true. The time she spent with it, the care she took of it, and the undivided energy she gave to it—he wanted all that for himself. It shook him how much he wanted it.

  “Hey, Trey!” A bright, happy voice called to him, female in pitch. It pulled him out of the swirl of blac
k thoughts and dragged his gaze in its directions as Kelly Ramsey approached him, all smiles. “Hi. How’s it going?”

  The impulse was there to brush aside this unwanted intrusion, but out of the corner of his eye, Trey had seen Sloan throw a glance in his direction.

  Instead of cutting Kelly short, he smiled. “Hi, Kelly. What are you doing behind the chutes?”

  She tucked her fingers in the hip pockets of her jeans, an action that thrust her young breasts forward to enhance the rounded shape they made beneath her T-shirt. She tipped her head at a flirtatious angle.

  “Looking for Johnny,” she said. “I wanted to wish him luck in the race. And you, too, of course,” she added, having planned that to sound like an afterthought, before darting a look around and asking, “You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find Johnny, would you?”

  “Not really, but he’s around here somewhere.” Trey used the excuse of locating Johnny to let his gaze return to Sloan. His mouth tightened slightly when he saw her shake hands with the rodeo clown and drift off in another direction.

  Kelly had noticed her as well. “Isn’t that the girl you were with last night?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Undeterred by his single-word response, Kelly observed, “She’s pretty. With a tan like that, though, she can’t be from around here. Where’s she from? Do you know?”

  “Hawaii.”

  “Really?” Kelly stared at him with a surprise she didn’t have to feign. She was secretly pleased by the news. “Hawaii is a heck of a long way from here.”

  Trey didn’t bother to comment on that. Instead he turned. “Let’s go find Johnny. He’s usually somewhere behind the chutes.”

  He escorted Kelly into the alleyway, convinced that Sloan was too wrapped up in her work to remember he even existed. That knowledge didn’t set well, not when he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

  The cheers of the crowd, the announcer’s voice over the loudspeakers, the pounding of hooves, and the assorted snorts and whinnies were background noises that Sloan had long ago tuned out. With one knee on the ground and the other serving as support for her elbow, she steadied the camera and examined the framed shot in the viewfinder, then adjusted the focus on the sea of equine legs and shaggy fetlocks. Satisfied, she snapped the picture.