Tina Leonard - The Renegade Cowboy Returns

If visiting a haunt like this didn’t stir her creativity, maybe nothing would. A shudder ran through her. She’d loved ghost stories as a kid—she’d grown up on them, courtesy of her mother. “I probably learned storytelling at my mother’s knee,” she told Gage. “This house has secrets.”

“Just looks like a deserted old house to me.” He got out of the truck and went up to the porch. “Nothing exciting about a building that needs to be torn down.”

She looked in a dirty window. “You have no romance in your soul.”

“You’re probably right.” He joined her in spying. “Looks like no one’s home, Chelsea, if you’re just dying to take a peek inside.” He pushed the front door open, and pointed to several firecrackers that had been lit and left on the porch, probably by pranksters around Halloween. “Watch where you step.”

She followed him in. “Pee-ew. Doesn’t smell like a place a star grew up in.”

“She was Zola here, remember. Cupertino or something.”

Chelsea looked around at the moldy, sagging furniture. Everything was in a state of decay and disrepair, and she felt sorry that the house had been abandoned. “It looks like she just left everything behind.”

“Nothing here was what she wanted.” Gage kicked something under the sofa.

“What was that?” Chelsea demanded.

“Nothing.”

“It was,” she insisted. “You have to be honest with me.”

“A small mouse,” Gage said. “A little on the decayed side.”

“I’m okay with mice,” Chelsea said, walking past him into the kitchen.

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to find in here, unless it’s your next cliffhanger,” Gage said, batting some cobwebs away from his face. “These spiders are bigger than in Texas. And you know there’s probably scorpions in this place—”

“You know what your problem is,” Chelsea said, looking back at him. “You don’t know how to relax.”

“This is relaxing?” Gage moved a fallen tile away from where she was about to step. “If we want to see rotten, we could do it at Dark Diablo.”

But this was where Tempest had grown up, and from here she’d gone away to seek her fortune. Chelsea could feel the ghosts of disharmony and discontentment shrouding the small house. “Whatever made her leave, it was ugly enough for her to hide herself away once she made her bundle.”

“We don’t know that she made a bundle.”

“She made enough to live in a villa in Tuscany. Blanche said Tempest is still in demand.”

“Yeah,” Gage said, “Blanche was blowing smoke up your skirt. She was giving you the Tempest tale, to make their little town seem a bit more exciting. I bet no one named Tempest ever even lived here.”

“Then who’s that?” Chelsea asked, her scalp tightening just a little.

Gage picked up the picture that lay on the kitchen counter, long forgotten. It was of a small girl with threadbare clothes and spindly arms. He turned the photo over. “Zola, five years old.”

“See? Blanche was telling the truth.”

He set the photo back down in the dust. “Can we go now? I’ve spent quite enough time with Zola Tempest, thanks.”

Chelsea followed him out. “Guess there’s no need to lock the door.”

Gage shook his head as he got into the truck. “Well, hope that helped.”

“Helped what?” She speared him with a look of distaste as he pulled from the drive.

“You know.” He pointed to his head. “With the…storytelling wheels.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Chelsea said, irritated. “Listen, the thing about writer’s block—which I don’t have—is that it’s the Unspeakable Thing That Must Not Be Mentioned.”

“Your own ghost,” Gage said.

She sighed. “If you must.”

He laughed. “And ghost-hunting helps?”

“I do like mysteries and hauntings,” she said stiffly.

“So an exorcism would be like a superboost to your creativity. Or a séance!” He ignored her gasp of outrage. “We could do one, Chelsea. We could get the Callahans out here, and we could sit around and burn candles and wait for Tempest to come screaming out of a closet or something.”

“You are so odd.” Chelsea turned her head, not about to give him the pleasure of knowing that he was getting to her. His needling annoyed her, and he knew it, and he was the kind of man who loved to devil a woman to death, until she finally gave up and gave him what he wanted.

Sex, in most cases. She’d be willing to bet her best pair of heels.

“It’s not going to work,” she told him.

“What isn’t?”

“This pathetic attempt to scare me so badly that I’ll just jump into your arms like a silly, spineless heroine.”

“I’ll have you know that there are lots of silly, spineless heroines who liked my arms just fine.”

“Well, you can keep your stories,” Chelsea said. “Enough with shooting the poor harmless snake and trying to spook me with talk of séances. You’re not fooling me.”

“Good to know,” Gage said, amused, and Chelsea told herself right then and there that if Gage Phillips ever tried to kiss her, she was going to give him the fattest lip of his life. Pow! Right on his too-attractive, laughing, storytelling kisser.

In fact, she hoped he did try to kiss her.

She really did.

Chapter Four

About four the next afternoon, when Chelsea was making tea and desperately wondering why her heroine wasn’t cooperating, she heard the sounds of Gage’s own issue, loud and clear.

“I don’t want to be here,” a girl said.

“You didn’t want to be in Laredo, either, sweetheart. So here you are,” Gage replied.

Chelsea dried her hands on a dish towel, telling herself she wasn’t eavesdropping shamelessly.

“I didn’t want to come,” the voice said—obviously that of Cat, the surprise daughter.

Chelsea couldn’t imagine what it must be like to discover one had a teenage daughter. Gage hadn’t said a whole lot about his ex-wife—and Chelsea hadn’t wanted to pry. But from the words being spoken outside, he and his daughter had a lot to work out.

“You may not have wanted to come,” he said, “but I wanted you here. So take your bag inside, please.”

Bravo, Dad, Chelsea thought.

“There’s a nice lady inside who you’ll like, so let’s go meet her,” Gage added.

“Lady? I thought you said we were going to be alone. That’s what you told Mom—that it was just going to be me and you,” Cat complained, her voice getting high.

“That’s what I said,” Gage said, “because it’s what I thought at the time. The owner of the house made other plans, and that’s beyond my control. Please take your bag inside.”

“You told Mom there’d be no girlfriends,” Cat insisted. “You said this was an appropriate place for me to be.”

Chelsea heard Gage sigh. “Trust me when I tell you that this lady and I are not romantically attached. I just met her yesterday. Either you take your bag inside right now and quit acting like a child, or I’m going to let you sleep on the porch, Cat.”

Chelsea froze, waiting for them to come in.

When they did, she realized just how full Gage’s hands were with his new daughter—and why Cat’s mother needed a break. Cat had long black hair to her waist on one side, her head shaved on the other. She had a nose piercing, an ear cuff and what looked like a bar through her other upper ear. She had two lip rings, which gave her sort of a snakelike look.

But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst was the stare Cat leveled at her, as if she hated her on sight.

“Hi,” Chelsea said, recognizing she would have to tread carefully. “I’m Chelsea Myers, the upstairs roommate.”

“You’re not going to boss me,” Cat said to her.