Page 49 of The Undercover Cowboy

“Why should you have all the fun? Besides, it’ll go faster with both of us looking.”

“True,” he conceded with bad grace. His gaze flickered to her mouth for the briefest second before he looked away.

“What could go wrong?”

Nash’s eyes narrowed at her flippant remark. “You saw what happened to Blevins. This isn’t some game.”

Dolly lifted her chin, refusing to let him see her nerves. “Standing around guessing won’t get us any answers either. And the longer we stay out here bickering about it, the more chance someone’s going to come along and ask what we’re doing.”

He studied her for a long moment before giving a curt nod of acceptance. “Fine. But you stick close and do exactly as I say, understood?”

The commanding edge to his tone sent a shiver through her, though Dolly couldn’t be certain whether it was from trepidation or something else entirely. She nodded.

Holding her gaze for a beat longer, Nash finally broke away to slide a key card into the door. The panel lights wobbled between red and green before reading a steady green light. At theaudible click, Nash opened the door and slipped inside, Dolly on his heels.

“That’s a handy little device,” she said.

“When I first started, Shelby scored me a master key card. I’ve been through his office a few times. I haven’t found anything on his computer, and he doesn’t keep any paper files. But maybe this time around, he was careless.”

“That sounds like wishful thinking to me.”

“Me too, but I’m trying to remain positive. I haven’t had a lot of wins in the past year, either inside or outside of the ring.”

“You’ll get there. You’re too stubborn to let Blevins get away with hurting Shelby and the rodeo.”

The office was a study in opulence, all gleaming mahogany and leather. Thick Persian rugs muffled their footsteps as they crept inside, closing the door behind them. The room smelled of expensive leather and ambition, an unmistakable aura of power emanating from the dark wood-paneled walls.

Papers were still strewn about. Blevins’s phone sat slightly askew where it had been knocked off the hook.

“Whoever did this wasn’t messing around,” Nash muttered under his breath.

“Do you really think it was corporate thieves after something?”

Nash snorted. “No.”

Dolly looked around nervously. “Do you think they’ll be back?”

“Depends on who they are. If they work here, they could have just gone back to their desks.”

“That’s chilling.” She tried not to shiver. “Why do you think they beat him up?”

“He pissed off the wrong person.” Nash scanned the room. His gaze lingered on the massive oak desk situated in front of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the city skyline. “Heliked to show off, whether it was by throwing money around or having this cushy office.”

Dolly’s lips twisted. “Compensating for something, no doubt.”

Nash huffed out a quiet laugh, the sound sending a spark down Dolly’s spine. “Let’s see if we can find out why Blevins got tuned up this morning.”

Nash made a beeline for the desk, while Dolly quietly investigated the shelves and cabinets lining the walls. As Nash rifled through the scattered papers, his brows furrowed in concentration. “Anything interesting over there?”

Dolly shook her head, her fingers tracing the spines of some books that were still on the shelf. “Nothing yet. Everything seems pretty standard.”

As Nash logged into Blevins’s computer, typing a code Shelby must have given him, Dolly sat on the floor and dumped out the trash bin. Sifting through discarded papers, she searched for anything that might connect Blevins to anything hinky.

“There’s some new emails that came through that might give us some more information. He hasn’t had a chance to read them or scrub them from the computer yet.” Nash plugged an external drive into the computer. “I’m copying all his files onto this, so I can go through them later.”

“Good idea,” Dolly replied, her eyes narrowing as she spotted something at the bottom of the trash bin—a crumpled invoice with a familiar logo. Her pulse quickened as she unfolded the paper. It was a bill from Jaripeo Ranch, addressed to Jackson personally, with a list of items that appeared to be coded because she didn’t recognize any of the words.

“Nash, look at this,” she whispered, holding up the invoice for him to see. “It’s from Jaripeo. It may be about the bulls. But it’s not in Spanish or English.”

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