Peggy Nicholson - Don't Mess With Texans

The driver didn’t step out to meet him. A small, stocky man. Sandy hair, pug nose, Irish face. Shrewd gray eyes studied Tag through his rolled-up window.

“What d’you want?” The guy looked too short to make a satisfying opponent, though Tag knew well enough from his Boston years how fierce the Irish could be.

The window rolled down an inch. “I heard you might be looking for Susannah.”

Yes! “Who’s asking?”

“I’m a trainer back at Fleetfoot. Friend of her and Brady.”

Brady? An image of a silver flask skated across his mind—that Brady? “Who told you I was looking?” He was in no mood to trust, but still, to get his hands on Susannah...

The window rolled the rest of the way down and the trainer grinned. “Ah, they sneeze up at the big house, we’re wiping our noses in minutes down in the barns.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I can’t stop long. If anybody sees me—”

“So you know where she is?” Don’t look too eager. If this guy was her friend, he wouldn’t want to send her trouble.

“Yeah, d’you mean to go see her?”

He must believe, as the rest of the world did, that Tag and Susannah had been conspirators. The sleaziest tabloids had even speculated they were lovers, supposing this was how she’d recruited him for the dirty deed. “Thought I might look her up,” he said casually. “But I haven’t heard from her in a few weeks and I was afraid she might have moved on.”

“She has that.” The trainer checked the road behind them again. “Look, I have this message from Brady, but I don’t trust the mail. It’s got to be delivered personal, put straight into her hand. And I can’t get away myself.”

“Be happy to take it.” Finally, finally, something was going his way. “Where’d you say she was?”

“Southwestern Colorado. Little town outside of Cortez. Dawson, it’s called.” The Irishman drew a crumpled envelope from a back pocket. “Here’s the message.” His fingers tightened on one corner as Tag took hold. “I have your word you’ll deliver it to her? To Susannah and no one else?”

“You got it, pal.” He might stick it in her sexy little ear, but she’d get it, all right.

The trainer nodded and let go. “Makes no sense to me, but I guess she’ll know what to do with it. Tell her I found it tucked inside his hatband, the one he wore that night. I was thinking I’d see her at the funeral, but—”

“Brady’s dead?”

The gray eyes narrowed. “Deader than doomails. Fell down some stairs last January. Didn’t you know?”

“No, I...” Think fast. This guy could still contact her, warn her that her hideout was blown. “That was a crazy time for me,” Tag improvised. To put it mildly. “Guess she didn’t want to bother me with it.” Thoughtful Susannah. “I’m very sorry to hear it.”

“Yeah, just about broke my heart, it did.” The trainer started his engine. “Well, I can’t be stopping. Give Susannah my best, will you?”

“Will do.” For the first time in six months, Tag’s smile was genuine as he waved farewell. Nothing but the very, very best for little Susannah!

MESSAGE FROM A DEAD MAN. Lurking in a booth in the far corner of Moe’s Truckstop outside Dawson, Colorado, waiting for a grilled cheese sandwich he didn’t want, Tag drew Brady’s message from its envelope. Unfolding the smudged strip of paper, he studied the penciled scrawl for the fiftieth time in the past three days.

For the fiftieth time, it read as pure gibberish. Was it possible that Brady, owner of a whiskey flask, could have been a raving drunk? That might account for this nonsense and might also, come to think of it, explain his fatal fall. The words were scribbled with blithe abandon or possibly haste, t’s uncrossed, spacing ragged.

Susie, what we were talking about. Decided it might come in handy for leverage. Got it, but couldn’t make it to your car. If you get this, the honey’s where...

Several words were crossed out here. The writer had borne down so hard on his pencil, he’d ripped a hole.

Remember that time I called you a begonia raper? Take care, kid.

Brady.

“Begonia raper”—what kind of nonsense was that? Tag frowned as he folded the paper and put it away. And “honey”—every time he read that word, he tried to make it come out money. His four hundred had dwindled to two and most of that spent for gas, not food or shelter. Till he tapped into Susannah’s bank account, he was counting pennies.

But if she’s loaded, what’s she doing working in a dive like this? When he’d reached Dawson late this afternoon, he’d stopped at the tiny post office, casually asked its ancient postmistress if she knew where his dear friend Susannah Mack might be staying hereabouts?

Stomach growling all the way west, sleeping in his musty heap every night to conserve cash, he’d cheered himself on by picturing the coming reunion. He’d imagined finding his quarry smug and cozy in some new lover’s hideaway, a rustic timber-and-glass ski lodge à la Aspen, which wasn’t so far to the northeast. Or maybe luxuriating in a retreat for the rich and too-famous, an upscale dude ranch or an exclusive health spa, secluded somewhere up in the mountains north of Dawson.

To keep himself awake on the road late last night, he’d fantasized catching Susannah at such a spa, facedown on the massage table and half-asleep, her slender body draped in nothing but a sheet. He’d pictured himself booting the masseuse out of the room, locking the door, then taking her place. He’d rubbed Susannah’s velvety back till she purred and stretched like a cat—then he’d given her shapely rump a resounding whack.

She’d whipped around, losing most of her sheet as she rolled—to reveal big blue eyes blazing up at him from the midst of a gooey, inch-thick, coffee-colored mud pack. Baring his teeth as he leaned over her, he’d pressed a forefinger to the tip of her muddy nose. Had waited while righteous indignation faded to doubt. Then just as her eyes widened in horror, he’d snarled, “Hey, babe! Remember me?”

“Here y’go!” Tag jumped half a foot as his waitress smacked a plate down on the table. “Can I get you anything else?”

“This’ll do. Thanks.” He’d drunk three cups of coffee already in the hour he’d been waiting. His waitress had told him when he asked that Suzie Zack worked the night shift, nine to dawn. He glanced at the clock over the distant counter. Eight-forty. Twenty minutes till he learned if the postmistress had been correct in claiming that the only newcomer to the county with a name remotely resembling Susannah Mack was Suzie Zack, that new little waitress down at Moe’s Truckstop.

But what the blue blazes would Susannah be doing working in a truckstop? Checking it out from the inside with a notion to buying it?

He was reaching. The tabloids had reported that, according to unnamed sources, Colton had given her a cool ten million and dropped the charge of horse theft—in exchange for Susannah’s granting him a swift, uncontested divorce. Ten million! With bucks like that, she’d be investing in stocks and bonds and diamonds, not truckstops.

The logical explanation was that Suzie Zack the waitress was not, and never had been, Susannah Mack, rich and vengeful hellcat. Still, he sat here sipping coffee and hoping. Because if Susannah wasn’t here in Dawson, then where on earth was she?

Quarter to nine and all that coffee was making itself felt. Leaving his sandwich to cool on the table, Tag tugged the bill of the baseball cap he’d bought for disguise lower over his nose. He headed down a narrow hall that he guessed led to the rest rooms. It did—and also to the phone.

His waitress stood with its receiver jammed to her ear. She smacked the side of the pay phone and swung half-around. “Well, then, where could I—” Her mouth rounded to an O.