Читать книгу No One But You - Carly Bishop - Страница 12

The first time he met Fiona Halsey face-to-face, Matt found himself staring up the barrel of her cocked, .30-30 lever-action rifle. The Remington was a beauty, powerful enough to fell a moose from several hundred yards out. And it still had the faint acrid scent of burnt gunpowder.

“Back away from Soldier Boy,” she commanded, “and keep your arms in the air.”

He raised one arm but left the other on the scarred, discolored withers of the Arabian.

It was already some kind of natural miracle that Matt had survived the standoff with Soldier. He’d had about two seconds’ warning when, apparently for no real reason other than to amuse himself, Crider had elevated the searchlights attached to the sheriff’s second vehicle and started the beacon rolling.

Who knew? It was possible the fool still would not have caught sight of Matt even with the searchlight glaring full on. It was just as possible that even in the sweep of the beacon halfway up the mountain, Matt might not have been spotted.

He’d reacted as if his body weren’t stiff from the cold, crabbing his way back over the rooftop, expecting to hang out on the dark side of the roof for a while. The only trouble was, the floodlights on the paddock side of the barn had been turned on in the exhaustive search for clues, and now lit up not only his escape route, but the slant of the roof as well.

He had only one decent chance to escape detection and that was to duck into the stall of a killer horse named Soldier Boy. He estimated where he had to be to turn himself off the roof and into the stall and then he prayed for a second time in one night.

He positioned himself, gripped the icy edge of the roof and somersaulted off into space. His legs cleared the half door of Soldier Boy’s stall, but he’d thunked down so hard on his middle that every last molecule of air in his body was pounded out. He twisted in pain and landed on his butt, his back up against the stable door.

The stallion had wheeled around, his ears flattened, his hooves scraping with an incredible menace along the floor. If an animal could breathe fire, it was this one. Dropped to the floor, Matt couldn’t have moved to save his life.

Head lowered, legs stiffened, his mane bristling with wrath, Soldier had snorted, and come as close to foaming at the mouth as Matt ever wanted to see. His own mouth had gone as bone dry as his lungs were empty.

Over the past months he’d spent countless hours around horses in preparation for this assignment. He wasn’t going to go onto the Bar Naught without knowing his way around. In those weeks, he’d been bitten, kicked and thrown. He’d deliberately sought out the meanest critters he could find so nothing he might later encounter on the Bar Naught would take him by surprise. It was just the way he worked. He had to know it all.

He’d learned to ride and keep his seat in a dead run. He’d learned a few stunts and dislocated his shoulder, half mangled his hand when he got caught up in twisted, unforgiving reins.

But Soldier’s fiery temper made all Matt’s weeks of preparation seem useless. The pitched battle of wills between him and Soldier was oddly silent. A scene without sound except for Soldier’s wrathful breathing.

Matt had to establish dominance, but for too long a time he couldn’t get his lungs functioning to send oxygen to his muscles. For long seconds he could only sit there and cower, inviting his own destruction.

He fought for every breath, praying for the second time in one night. Just let me get out of this one…. Then Soldier let out an eerie sound and gathered his powerful muscles to rear back and rain down death with a killing lunge.

Beyond conscious thought, Matt brought his legs under himself and sprang at the horse, aiming his shoulder at Soldier’s head with every shred of strength left in his battered body. The blow connected, jarred even his own teeth, ricocheting through him as if he’d hit a brick wall. But Soldier hauled back and a grudging respect set in.

In the intervening hour, while the sheriff and his men departed and Halsey and Geary went about turning off all the floodlights, Matt had barely moved. By now, he’d smooth-talked himself into a guarded truce with Soldier Boy, managed to get back on his feet and even get a steadying hand on the stallion’s flank.

Now, facing Fiona Halsey’s rifle, Matt had zero inclination to give up the uneasy rapport he’d achieved with a stallion that would still as soon stomp him into a mud hole and kick it dry.

“Put your hands in the air and move away from the horse.” The sensual grit in Fiona Halsey’s Brit-cultured voice plucked strings Matt didn’t even know he had, made him weak-kneed.

He didn’t cotton to the sensation at all, which immediately put him out of a mood to do her bidding. Even to save his own hide.

If the tall, lush, lanky blonde with the complexion of an English rose had murdered once—and the stench of gunpowder clinging to the gun she still held gave the theory credence—then she had it in her to do it again.

His ribs ached like all billy hell. His shoulder was so stiff he could no longer feel it. Still and all, perverse as it was, maybe he was also a bit turned on by the fact that Fiona Halsey had his disbelieving heart in the crosshairs of her scope.

He left his hand resting where it was, in physical contact with the stallion, and gave Fiona Halsey his most charming grin.

He really didn’t want to die. “Suppose you disarm, and we’ll talk.”

“Suppose I don’t, and you do the talking.”

“I don’t do so well under the gun.” He smiled, stroking Soldier’s flank again. “So to speak.”

“Too bad.” Flinty-edged, her tone still struck him as powerfully seductive. He wondered, did that particular combination come with the royal genes, a couple of generations removed?

His nose itched from what seemed like protracted hours in the softly lit horse barn, but his eyes were attuned to the semidark and his focus homed in on Fiona Halsey’s splintered attention.

Riveted to the motion of his hand, she was equally unrelenting and steady in her dead-on aim. But for an instant he thought he saw confusion in her, jealousy flashing in her shadowed eyes—not for want of his hands on her, he thought, but because her beloved, wrecked Soldier Boy allowed his touch.

Everyone knew Soldier tolerated her least of all.

She tossed that silky curtain of deep blond hair without altering her aim one millimeter off dead center of his heart. “Are you mocking me?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he answered, solemn as a judge. Not a woman in possession of a deadly weapon he had no chance of taking from her. Standing outside Soldier’s stall, on the other side of the stall door, she could blow him to kingdom come before he could get anywhere near enough to disarm her.

His survival mechanism, the instincts by which he lived so as not to die, kicked into higher gear for the second time that night. He shook his head slowly. “The grandniece of an English peer, distant cousin to the queen herself?” He shook his head again, and discovered a splitting headache to go with his jammed shoulder and bruised ribs.

Her aim faltered for half a second. He’d succeeded in unnerving her, tossing off her obscure royal connections. He pressed this narrow advantage by using her name. “C’mon, Fiona. We both know you won’t pull the trigger.”

Her chin went up. “Try me.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt you’d kill me, but…” He shrugged. “You’re not going to do anything that would upset Soldier.”

“Soldier Boy,” she answered, the grit in her voice turned more lethal than sensual, “is already upset.”

“You should have seen him an hour ago.” But it occurred to him that provoking Soldier to a frenzied rage might serve her purposes. The thought congealed into a nasty suspicion that he must be very careful not to underestimate Fiona Halsey. “It wouldn’t take much to send Soldier over the edge, would it?”

“No.” She cocked a hip forward, agreeing…softly. Bitterly. Choked. “It wouldn’t take much at all.”

He found his weak-kneed self, the one reacting to her voice, suffering. What man wouldn’t want to spare her the turmoil of loving a horse who would never again return her emotional investment?

Fool. He should be baiting her into the stall, disarming her. What was he doing? What was the point of playing her—or letting her play him? Soldier’s flesh skittered under his hand, and the stallion threw his head up.

But there was a point in goading her, he knew. The smoking Remington made her suspect. The scope made it even more likely. She could have gone five hundred yards up the tree-lined lane leading into the main ranch house with the rifle, picked Everly off and made it back to her quarters in time to make it look as if she had never been gone. He went on stroking the massive animal she loved, subtly stoking her resentment that Soldier tolerated him at all while he offered up his theory.

“Here’s how I see it. You have to be worried about the possibility that I saw what happened. That I saw you do it.”

She stared at him, unblinking. “You think I shot Kyle?”

“Yeah. I do.” He nodded, appreciating her quickness, leading her farther down the path. “And I can appreciate your dilemma. Should you shoot me next, and have to call Hanifen back, or—”

“Or,” she interrupted, anticipating him, “maybe fire off a round and cause Soldier to trample you to death.” Her chin went up. “It would be a little less efficient than a bullet through the heart.”

“But really, not a bad trade-off in terms of explaining everything to Dex.”

She blinked. “It wouldn’t do to leave alive a witness to the murder.”

He nodded. The flint in her voice was backed by tempered steel at her core. If she’d decided to murder Everly, she was capable of it. If she had, Matt was toast. Somehow, in spite of the solid possibility, he doubted that she had done it. “You’d get away with all of it. Plays nicely, I think.”

“Except that your premise is fatally flawed. I didn’t shoot Kyle.”

“Really? Is that your gun?”

“Yes.”

“When’s the last time you used it?”

“Months ago. What difference does it make?”

“Then someone else shot Everly with your gun, princess.”

Her eyes narrowed. He knew them to be a stunning hazel-blue, but all he could see was an angry darkening. “Who—”

“Check it out, Fiona. You may have been the local debutante, but you’re not green. Are you telling me you can’t smell the spent powder?”

Whatever color there was in her face drained away. “I didn’t shoot—”

“I think you did.” But he really didn’t know. Her reaction could be taken in two completely exclusive ways. Either she’d shot Everly in the back and was now caught red-handed with the murder weapon, or she had only just now figured out that someone had neatly framed her.

It struck him that if Kyle Everly had an arsenal of weapons stashed somewhere on the Bar Naught, which was what Hanifen’s deputy had seemed to imply, weapons Fiona Halsey knew about, she would have been smarter than to used her own Remington.

She swallowed hard. He watched the pitching of her throat beneath the delicate, luminous skin of her neck in the low lighting of the stables. Rustling sounds, scrapes and hooves and clanking of the other Bar Naught horses, filled the silence.

“Who are you?” she demanded, her chin thrust forward.

Her question was more complicated than she knew. Matt answered more honestly than he’d had any intention of doing. “Whoever I need to be.”

He watched the shadows alter on her face, knew that her jaw tightened. “What were you doing hiding out in here?”

“Basically, I thought I’d be better off staying out of Hanifen’s way.”

“Just shy, I suppose.”

He cracked the smile, but the image of Everly dropping dead of a bullet in the back was not far from his mind.

She lowered the rifle a bit. If she truly wasn’t the one who had shot Everly in the back, then she had at least to suspect that she had the murderer in her sights. But she had a problem, he knew. She wasn’t willing or inclined to kill him, or she’d already have pulled the trigger. But if she turned her back on him to call Hanifen, he would either kill her or get away.

Why was she willing to stand here jawing with him?

Then the thought occurred to him that she had known all along that there was someone hiding out in the stables. She’d kept an eagle eye on the horses during the last few hours. He’d heard her come and go a couple of times before Hanifen and his men cleared out, making the rounds of stalls, calming the valuable animals by her presence and her soft, sultry reassurances.

She hadn’t come near Soldier’s stall. He’d sensed her nearby, smelled hesitation on her, but in his oxygen-deprived head, he’d chalked it up to Soldier’s inhospitable attitude. Now he had to wonder. He took the stab in the dark. “You knew before Hanifen and his boys left that someone was holed up in here with Soldier, didn’t you?”

Her chin pitched up. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Why didn’t you turn me in when you had the chance, Fiona?”

Her trigger finger flinched almost imperceptibly. Her shadowy eyes narrowed. “Maybe…No, you’re wrong. I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

“Maybe?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“I think you were.”

“You think?” she mocked him.

He turned his head slowly, minutely, back and forth. “You knew.” He knew, now, without a doubt. His stab in the dark had struck a nerve. He still didn’t get it. What possible reason could she have for not exposing an intruder’s whereabouts to Hanifen? For that matter, why wasn’t she persisting till he gave her straight answers as to who he was and what he was doing at the scene of a murder?

“All right, then,” she tossed back, at last releasing the firing pin, lowering the rifle butt-first to the ground. “Why do you think I kept my mouth shut?”

“It’s a mystery to me.” More so with every moment. Why put the rifle down now? “Maybe you aren’t at all sorry that he’s dead.”

“Hmm.” He heard heavy derision in that noise. “Maybe I wanted to find out who hated Everly more than I do.” She tossed her head, sent her long hair flying. For the first time he saw uncertainty edging in. She gritted her teeth “Maybe I wanted to help whoever did it get away. Maybe I wanted to kiss you—”

She cut herself off awkwardly. Her mouth clapped shut. “I mean—”

He knew what she meant. She knew what she meant. Maybe, she’d have kissed anyone who got rid of Kyle Everly for her. A sort of bounty. But in Matt’s perceptions—and hers, he thought—the meaning expanded, time slowed, and the air between them all but blistered.

His heart boomed. His blood pooled deep down. He’d spent his life keeping not only his passions but visceral reactions like this under impenetrable wraps, but he knew his gaze sharpened in spite of him, intensified, locked on her lips.

She couldn’t let her mistaken meaning go uncorrected. Her tongue swiped at her lips and she tried to take it back.

“Kiss whoever—” She swallowed. “I meant…not you.”

“I know what you meant.” He tried to put a stop to the slippery slope of sexual awareness sucking the air out of them both. “Did you hate him that much, Fiona? Enough to kill him?”

“Yes. But I didn’t.”

Stricken and still pale, shaking now, she fixed her gaze on Soldier Boy, avoiding the threat of a kiss between them. Then she turned and gave him a withering look. “When is the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

“Beats me. How long do those things last?”

She rolled her eyes. “Come with me. Or forget it. Take your chances. It really doesn’t matter to me.”

But he had the distinct impression that it would suit her very well if he if walked away and took his chances with a fatal case of lockjaw.

He followed her instead.

FIONA TURNED ON HER HEEL and led the way from the barn into a room outfitted with an examining table and stocked with veterinary supplies. Aware that he was following her, she switched on the glaring overhead lights. Her hands were shaking. She set the safety and put aside the rifle, then opened a gleaming white cabinet door and pulled out a vial containing a dose of tetanus booster.

Dear Lord, what was she doing?

She began to go through a drawer in search of a small syringe when he boosted himself up onto the small-animal exam table.

“That’s meant for animals under a hundred pounds.”

“Must not get a lot of use.” He pulled one arm out of his coat and began rolling up a sleeve.

“That’s not the point.” He didn’t belong there. Didn’t belong on the Bar Naught at all. In fact he didn’t have any business looking at her the way he was looking at her.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.” He meant that the table would hold up. She meant much, much more. Nothing was fine. Nothing had been fine for her or the Bar Naught in a very long time.

“Fiona—”

She looked straight into his dark brown eyes, noting the fringe of thick black lashes. “Don’t bother sweet-talking me, Guiliani.”

His pupils flared, otherwise she would not have known she’d caught him off guard. He was that good.

He blinked slowly. “If you know who I am, Fiona, then what was that all about in Soldier’s stall?”

“I didn’t know at first. Not for a while. Now that you’re under the lights—” Now that you made a fool of me, broke my heart cozying up to Soldier Boy— She cut off the thought and shrugged. “I know. That’s all.”

“How?”

“Kyle.”

“Kyle? What about him?”

She turned back to her search for supplies, still so shaken by Kyle’s murder and the timing of Matt Guiliani’s appearance on the Bar Naught, and what the fallout would be to her own purposes, that she couldn’t think what lie to tell or how to deliver it.

She combed unnecessarily through the drawer full of syringes to cover her delay in answering, then plucked out an unused eighteen-gauge syringe.

He grabbed her other forearm. “Look at me, Fiona. What about Everly?”

She jerked her hand away, but he held tight and all she accomplished by pulling so hard was to bring his naked wrist into contact with her breast.

An intensely sexual awareness, keen, fierce and unexpected, hit her, a flash flood of mutual suspicion crashing down through canyons of barren, thwarted desire. Her mouth watered. Her nipples tightened unbearably. Another slip, Fiona? she thought, like the unintended mention of a kiss in Soldier Boy’s stall?

What was it about him that had her reacting this way?

She swallowed.

He released her wrist.

Their eyes met, and she backed away, one step.

“I want you off the Bar Naught. Now.” She knew he wasn’t any less affected by her slip than she was. Her breast still tingled. However unwitting, he stroked the part of his wrist that had touched her with the tips of the fingers on his other hand.

She couldn’t do this, couldn’t be here, be in a situation where a man made any difference to her. Or made her feel. Or made her tingle, wanting more.

He had to get off the Bar Naught and stay off it. She had made the worst mistake of her life by not betraying his presence to Dex. If she had, Dex would have hauled Matt Guiliani off to jail, and then she could try to decide what to do. What Kyle’s murder meant. How her own future would go now that her excuse for being on the Bar Naught was dead.

But Guiliani still wanted to know how she knew who he was. “I’m not leaving till you tell me what Everly said.”

The part of her that flawless composure had been drilled into responded with the necessary lie. “Kyle showed me your photo. It had come up in a conversation about bodyguards.” She joked to neutralize the tension, to defeat the stirring of attraction to this intruder into her life. “Kyle was skeptical, making fun of the possibility, but he told me that you would try to kill him one day.”

The implication that Kyle might actually need a bodyguard was the first time he came close to revealing what she already knew. He dealt with men who dispensed illegal arms, guns, bombs and rockets to half-baked causes, dangerous men—and profited hugely in doing it.

Her ears had perked up, her attention snared. He never told her in so many words what his international business dealings were about. He avoided the subject all the time. She’d asked a few questions, trying to make her curiosity seem without any particular motive behind it. Kyle had only stroked her chin between his thumb and forefinger in a way that repulsed her, and he told her not to worry her pretty little head.

He would always have things under control, and when he needed her to know more, he would tell her.

Guiliani was the last man alive to whom she would confess what she knew, and why she was really back on the Bar Naught, enduring Everly’s arrogance, fending off his mocking advances all these months. She had made her deal with the devil. She would be the necessary ears and eyes on the Bar Naught, reporting every move Kyle Everly made in exchange for the chance to regain ownership of the ranch.

He wasn’t moving anymore, but it was still faintly possible that she could prove useful enough.

Her situation was already tenuous. Matt Guiliani would make it worse if he knew what she was doing here. She’d be off the Bar Naught faster than she could pack her meager belongings—and her chance would be lost forever.

The Bar Naught was far more to her than a symbol of the pretensions to a privileged, polo-playing country-manor lifestyle of distant royalty, which was what the ranch represented to her idle parents. Much more.

She loved the work.

She loved the land, the freedom, the responsibility, the beautiful wild mustangs that she gentled. The love and respect and care of horses made people into better people. She knew that firsthand. Personally.

The Bar Naught was her safe haven, and she was willing to do whatever unsafe things she had to do to have it back.

“You didn’t believe him?” Matt asked, interrupting her thoughts. “That I’d try to kill him?”

“I don’t know what I believed. What does it matter now?”

“It matters.” His eyes fixed on hers, but she averted her gaze, searching for the alcohol swab for an excuse to look away.

She was easily as tall as Guiliani, but his male dimensions, his sheer presence, befuddled her wits, and she needed them all operating at a perfect pitch. “He’s just as dead no matter who did it.”

Matt craned his neck till he trapped her gaze. “It matters to me.”

She shrugged. She doubted very much that Matt Guiliani was the kind of man who would shoot another man in the back, but she couldn’t afford to reveal to him all that she knew. And Matt might have changed, might have turned killer.

Soldier Boy had. Anything was possible.

She decided that must be her tack. Deny everything. “I don’t really know you. How could I know if you would gun a man down?”

His eyes tracked her. “One never knows.”

“Have you killed anyone?” His expression left out any hint of excuses. “Yes.”

“What if someone betrayed you?” Because if he wouldn’t stay off the Bar Naught she would lie through her teeth to make sure he did. She would swear to Dex Hanifen that she had seen Guiliani pull the trigger.

“Is there a point to this?”

She swallowed, feeling as if he had read her mind, knew of her intention to pin the murder on him. “Yes.”

“Are you asking if I would kill you if you betray me?”

He shook his head slowly. “I wouldn’t advise it, Fiona.”

“Is that a yes?”

His brows drew close together. “Is that what stopped you from turning me over to Hanifen? The fear that I would come after you next?”

Lie, she told herself. Just do it. “Yes. All right? Yes. I was afraid I would be next.”

“Now you know better.”

“I don’t.”

“Of course you do.” He didn’t believe her, and why would he? He reached for a packet of cedar sticks from his breast pocket, broke one off and stuck it in his mouth.

The lie had been a mistake, which only made him more suspicious of her, not less. Would a woman fearful that he would kill her have turned her back on him? Would she lead him docilely into her treatment room to administer a shot before he did her in?

What made her think he could not have turned into a killer?

She watched the cedar splinter travel over his lower lip from one corner to the other, shoved by his tongue. Her mouth felt parched as bones dried in the sun, and she licked her own lips as she aimed her gaze in another direction. She couldn’t be attracted to him. Could not.

“Fiona,” he said, his voice so low its tones thrummed inside her, “what’s going on?”

Her tongue swiped again at her dry lips. “Nothing.”

“Maybe I can help—”

“I don’t need any help.” He was the last man alive whose help she needed.

“You want to change your answer?”

“No.” She busied her hands, forcing the syringe barrel through the paper.

“Fiona,” he snapped, “let’s just cut the crap, okay? You’re not stupid. If you’re telling the truth, you didn’t know who was in the barn. I could have been the one who shot Everly in the back. Why would you take that kind of risk?”

“Kyle had enemies,” she answered. “I didn’t want to get involved. I don’t want to be involved.”

She cleared her throat and clamped her lips tight. Emotions like some vicious animated kaleidoscope of feelings—jealousy, resentment, even hatred for the way he was able to strike a truce with Soldier Boy—turned inside her.

Not only a truce, either. Soldier Boy permitted this man’s touch.

She had seen him swing down into Soldier Boy’s stall. She’d seen him fall to the floor. But her reasons for leaving him there, for failing to mention his presence to Dex Hanifen, for coming at him with her rifle, had nothing to do with the murder at all.

The point was that Soldier hadn’t killed him. In a deathly still way inside her that she really didn’t understand, that was all she needed to know.

She trusted Soldier Boy’s instincts more than her own. That was the last thing she would admit to anyone, Matt last of all. She dredged up her maddeningly stiff-upper-lip upbringing and buried that messy kaleidoscope of emotion.

“If you knew what kind of man you were dealing with, then what are you doing back on the Bar Naught at all, Fiona?”

“Because I want it back.”