Peggy Nicholson - Don't Mess With Texans

So give it five more.

The double doors opened at minute nineteen and another blonde stepped through, this one at least ten years older than the receptionist. Polished to a metallic gleam. Soft lips, hard green eyes. She approached with hand extended. “Dr. Taggart? Claire De Soto, Mr. Colton’s assistant. If you’d come through to my office?”

She led him to a corner room. DeSoto had pull, apparently. She put some effort into the hospitality, insisting he take the most comfortable armchair, offering him a mint julep, which he refused. “Now how may we help you, Dr. Taggart?”

“By getting me Colton.” He was out of patience. Smelling rats.

She lifted a plucked eyebrow. “He’ll need to know in regards to what before seeing you, Dr. Taggart. So...?”

So talk or get out, huh? All right. I want my life back. “I’d...like to know what he wants. These lawsuits...they aren’t going to bring back Payback’s—” million dollar balls “—his potency. There’s no way I can give that back to him. And it doesn’t look like Colton needs my money.” Tag glanced wryly to one side. Through the window on the right, he could see a half-mile exercise track in the distance. In the foreground, a groom led a prancing colt across a courtyard. “So what does your boss want from me?”

Tag had apologized last winter, in a letter passed from his lawyer to Colton’s. There’d been no acknowledgment. Still, he’d be happy to apologize for a second time. Because if Payback was the best horse Colton had ever bred, then Tag could sympathize with the man’s outrage. His disappointment. The stud had been much more than an oat-burning money machine. He would have been the foundation of all Colton’s hopes for future generations of wonder horses.

Tag sincerely regretted the part he’d been tricked into playing in blasting those hopes. But surely Colton could see that Susannah had screwed them both. “If it’s an apology he wants...”

“I’m sure he’ll tell you.”

That was all that Tag wanted or needed. To meet Colton face-to-face, without lawyers or tape recorders. Without witnesses. So that he could hear the man out, try one last time to apologize.

And then explain to him calmly and clearly where they were headed if they couldn’t reach a truce. If Colton couldn’t back off, wouldn’t back off, then Tag would have to kill him. It was as simple as that. I want my life back. And I don’t mean to live it looking over my shoulder.

But you didn’t make that kind of threat to lawyers or assistants, then ask them to please pass it on to the boss. Statements like that might be a basic man-to-man truth, but in the eyes of the law, they constituted assault. Seventeen years ago Tag had spent a summer behind bars, and that was enough for one lifetime.

“Is there anything else you need from Mr. Colton?”

One thing. “Susannah Mack’s address.” Her divorce had become final two months ago, he’d learned from the gossip rags, shortly after the charge of horse theft had been dropped. That was the last mention of her he’d been able to find anywhere. The bitch had dropped off the face of the earth. Gone to ground in Texas, maybe? Or some place much fancier? Wherever, she’d be enjoying her pay-off in the unbreachable seclusion that only big money could buy, he supposed. Because the tabloids also noted that, though the terms of her divorce had been settled privately, they were said to be exceedingly generous. Ten million was the figure whispered most often.

Whatever amount Colton had paid her to go away, Tag figured at least half of it was his.

“Oh...” DeSoto hadn’t expected that one. “I see.” She rose. “Well. If you’ll wait one minute, Dr. Taggart...” She shut the door behind her.

One minute turned into ten. Twenty. Enough. Tag stood, and standing, glanced up at the far corner above the chair that DeSoto had chosen.

The lens of a camera gazed blankly back at him. Hair prickled at the nape of his neck. A security camera within an office? Aimed at the window, surely? He turned. No, aimed at his chair. “You son of a bitch!” Had he been watching all this time?

“Dr. Taggart?” DeSoto stood in the doorway, an odd little smile curving her lips. “Mr. Colton won’t be able to see you today, after all.”

Two hours on ice. Suckered into hoping again. And all for what? For the same reason children pulled wings off flies—because they could?

And, clever boy, Colton had used women to do his petty work. Much as Tag needed to punch somebody, he didn’t punch women. “Where is he?”

“Why, there he is now!” DeSoto nodded at the window. “He must have stepped out the back.”

Out in the courtyard between the office and the nearest barn, a man stood by the door of a red Ferrari convertible, looking up. Gold wire rims, impeccable seersucker suit. As their eyes locked, Colton grinned, waved jauntily, got in the car.

Tag started for the door, the roar of a big engine reaching him faintly through the glass. He swept DeSoto out the exit before him, then swung to look back. As he’d thought, she couldn’t have seen Colton from where she’d been standing. A setup from start to finish. “Where’s he going?” And by God, she’d tell him!

Out in the corridor, DeSoto smiled demurely from beyond a wall of muscle—two guards built like linebackers, each with a hand resting on a bolstered gun. “Would you show Dr. Taggart to his car, please, Peterson?”

Tag wanted a fight so badly, he could taste its blood in his mouth.

The smile on the larger guard widened. He rocked on his heels. Come on then, his eyes invited. You and me.

With pleasure! Tag took a step forward—and saw beyond his mark another camera, tucked up in a far corner of the hallway. If he fought these two, he’d be fighting for Colton’ s entertainment. And if he lost, Colton would see him beaten. Tag pulled in a shaking breath. I play by my rules, you bastard, not yours.

“Thank you,” he said, and no two words had ever come harder.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THEY ESCORTED HIM in smirking silence to his car, then tailgated him all the way to the front gates, the grill of their outsized pickup filling his rearview mirror with glinting chrome. Swearing helplessly, Tag gunned his engine as he shot through the gates, but the truck was faster. “Crap!” His head snapped backward as they bumped him. “That’s it.” He swerved to the shoulder and stopped. “You want a fight, you got it.”

As Tag stepped out, the driver popped the truck into reverse. With the shotgun rider waving cheerily through the windshield, it roared backward down the road, past the gates, then shot forward and through. The gates closed behind it. The truck tootled farewell as it vanished up the avenue of trees.

Bastards, bullies, thugs! Somebody’s going to pay for this! Someday, somehow... But not today. He glared at the white board fences extending either side of the entry. Electrified, naturally. So-o-o... “Later.”

Fingers clenched on the steering wheel, he headed back toward Lexington. What now, what now? And using what for money? He had four hundred left in cash, the remains of his final paycheck from the dog pound in Buffalo. That job had ended three days ago, when the pound had run out of funding for his position. Third job that had fallen out from under him in the past six months.

When that final, dreary attempt to get on with his career aborted, something had snapped. Never mind the lawyers, he’d thought. He’d deal with Colton himself. Reach a truce somehow, then ask for Susannah’s address. No reason her ex should protect her, he’d figured.

He’d figured wrong every which way, regarding Colton. Petty bastard.

A horn sounded behind him and his teeth snapped together. Didn’t they know when to back off? The truck behind, Fleetfoot green like the guards’ truck but smaller, beeped again. “All right then, dammit!” He pulled over, climbed out and stalked back to where the truck had stopped on the shoulder behind him.