Kathleen Creighton - The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda

He thought, I never should have danced with her…

Bronco’s own quarters were in the foreman’s cottage, in the shade of a big cottonwood about halfway between the main house and the horse barns. Normally he shared it with Ron Masters, the ex-navy demolitions expert who was McCullough’s second in command, but since Masters was currently busy up at the high base camp getting ready for unwelcome visitors, he figured it would be okay to let his prisoner come in to use the john. By a bachelor’s standards it was clean enough-a less objectionable choice, anyway, than the bunkhouse could have afforded her.

He went in with her while he checked for escape routes and potentially lethal weapons, then left her with the succinct warning, “Five minutes-then I’m comin’ in after you.”

While he waited for her, he took a sweatshirt out of a drawer and a poncho from the closet. He laid the poncho out on his bed, placed the sweatshirt in the middle of it and rolled them both into an oblong bundle the right size for tying onto the back of a saddle. Then he leaned across the bed, fingered back the window shade and looked out.

Though the sun was up, it was early yet. The air coming through the dusty screen was still cool and smelled of juniper and wild grass. There were no signs of life from the main house; McCullough had left last night to follow Ron and pick him up after he’d dumped Lauren’s truck and trailer. They’d be going straight on to the base camp after that. He could just see the back end of Katie McCullough’s SUV parked in the semicircular drive in front of the house, though, and that worried him. He hoped it didn’t mean she’d changed her mind about going to stay with her mother in El Paso until after the dust had settled. The last thing he wanted was for this to turn into another Ruby Ridge.

Time was running out.

The thought had no sooner entered his mind when he heard the faint click of the bathroom-door handle. He was there waiting beside the door when it opened.

His prisoner didn’t say anything, just glanced at him as she moved past him, carrying the saddlebags over one arm. She smelled of mint toothpaste. Her hair looked damp around her forehead and her face had a just-scrubbed look. Her shirt was rather fiercely tucked into the waistband of her jeans, giving her slender curves more definition than they should have had, a taut and tidy look he found unexpectedly erotic.

Shutting out thoughts he had no business thinking, Bronco watched her move into his bedroom, easing into his personal space the way a familiar melody comes to the mind.

“So this is where you live?” She asked the question with casual curiosity, as if she was some easy woman he’d picked up in a bar and brought home for the night and this was the morning after. Her eyes traveled around the room, taking in the neatly made twin beds and the rolled-up bundle on his, then came back to him. “Nice digs.” Her lips twitched in an aborted attempt at a smile. “Not exactly what I expected.”

Bronco grunted, feeling as if she’d sucker-punched him. It was an old wound, and he reacted with reflexive anger, lashing coldly at her, “It’s a room. What were you expecting-a tepee?”

He regretted the remark when he saw her flinch. What the hell was the matter with him? She hadn’t meant it like that, and he knew it.

He was glad she didn’t try to flounder through some guilt-ridden apology. She leveled a shaming look at him, then said quietly, “Night before last I saw you get dead drunk, start a brawl and get tossed into the parking lot, remember? This room-beds all made, that squeaky-clean bathroom in there-they don’t exactly go with that ‘drunken Indian’ image, do they? You don’t fit that image.” And though her eyes narrowed in speculation when she said it, there was something else there, too-a whisper of suppressed excitement in her breathing, a certain tension in her body.

Bronco felt himself go quiet and wary. “Well, now, what kind of image do you think I fit?”

“I don’t know,” she said softly, thoughtfully.

“I’m just a plain ol’ horse wrangler,” Bronco muttered, turning to retrieve the rolled-up poncho so she couldn’t see his eyes. Acting-playing a part-was one thing, but outright lying didn’t come easy to him and never had. “Believe what you want-”

She broke in with a snort of anger before he’d finished. “Yeah, right. And this is just a horse ranch, Gil McCullough is John Wayne and I’m Maureen O’Hara, and that’s why I spent last night locked in a tack room with bars on the windows while a bunch of people I don’t even know cleaned out my motel room. What do you think I am, stupid? ” Her voice trembled, and the tears she had yet to shed shimmered in her eyes.

“No, I don’t think you’re stupid,” Bronco said evenly as he took her arm. What he did think-about her and the whole damned mess-didn’t bear looking at too closely. “Time to go. Come on.”

It surprised him when she struggled against his grip, twisting to look at him. “Who are you people? What’s this all about? What do you want with me? ”

You’ll find out soon enough, he thought grimly as he hustled his captive out the door of the cottage and down the wooden steps. A whinny rose from the corrals behind the stables. His body tensed and he paused, listening. He heard nothing out of the ordinary, but a thrill of urgency rippled down his spine as he tightened his hold on her and quickened his step.

She went with him unresisting for several paces. But her voice, when she spoke again, had gone tense and quiet. “It’s about my father, isn’t it?” He didn’t answer her. After a moment he heard her take a deep breath. “Well, whatever you people are planning, it’s not going to work. My father won’t let you get away with this. He won’t be blackmailed, either.”

This time Bronco did reply, on an exhalation that was almost prayerful. “Laurie Brown, for your own sake, I sincerely hope you are mistaken.”

A council of war was taking place in a seventh-floor room at the Watergate in Washington, D.C. Present were the acting U.S. attorney general, Patricia Graham; Henry Vallejo and Vernon Lee, heads of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI, respectively; and last but not least, the former attorney general, now the top con tender for his party’s nomination for president of the United States, Everett Charleton Brown, known to friends and family as Rhett.

Three of the four people in the room were seated around a table littered with coffee cups and the sort of mess created by people in the process of deciding among equally untenable options. The fourth, Rhett Brown, was up and pacing. He hadn’t slept, and looked it. He knew his hair was rumpled, his tie askew, and that he needed a shower and a shave. He could have used a toothbrush, too; his mouth tasted like the bottom of a Dumpster, after too many cups of coffee and the Philly steak sandwich he’d forced himself to eat late last night against his better judgment.

He looked at his watch and his heart ached. How much longer could he put off calling Dixie? Don’t tell anyone, they’d said, with the usual warning of dire consequences if he disobeyed that directive. But how was he going to get through this without Dixie by his side? He’d have to tell her soon. She had a right to know. To prepare herself for the worst.

The worst. His mind slammed shut on that thought. Cold to the depths of his soul, he pivoted to face the group at the table.

“Okay-” he huffed out a breath and drove a hand through his hair “-we know what they want.” Their demand had made that clear. They wanted him out of the presidential race. They meant to keep Lauren until after the national convention, to insure that he would refuse the nomination. And after that…what then? He ground his teeth thinking about it. “So. Let’s summarize. What do we know about these people, these…Sons Of Liberty? Who, where, what, why and how many.”