Page 69 of Wyoming Tough

She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Where is he?”

“Tied up against a tree, some distance from here,” he said curtly. “Where he won’t be found. He’s roughed up—he fought me when I tried to take him from here. But he ain’t dead. Yet,” he added menacingly. “Why are you here? How did you know where to find me?”

“I didn’t,” she replied. “I was hoping you might come back here. It’s where we met, remember?”

He blinked. “Yeah.”

She put the leather pouch and the bags on the table. She opened the bag and produced two freshly buttered biscuits with strawberry preserves on them, along with a thermos of hot coffee. She presented them to him.

“Mavie’s biscuits.” His voice almost broke. He took one and bit into it and groaned with pleasure. He sipped coffee with the same expression. “Living in the wild, you miss some things so bad!” he exclaimed. He looked at her and winced. “Dangerous, you coming out here! Why did they let you?”

“They couldn’t stop me,” she said simply. She looked him in the eye. “I love Mallory Kirk.”

That made him uncomfortable. He averted his eyes. “He ain’t nothing to look at.”

“It’s what’s inside him that makes him the man he is,” she replied. “He’s honest and hardworking and he never lies.”

He laughed coldly. “That Bruner woman said she loved me,” he said coldly. “I met her after my wife died. She wanted me to make her some keys. She said that man I killed owed her a ton of money and it was in his house in a box. She told him lies about his girlfriend to make him hit her. She knew the woman would call me for help, because I was close by.”

“Good heavens,” Morie exclaimed.

“So I got her out of the room and tried to make him tell me about the money in the box, but he fought me and I had to kill him. Gelly said it was all right…she had a way to make even more money,” he said in a faraway tone. “She told me about the jeweled egg, but I already knew because Tank had showed it to me once. I didn’t realize how much it was worth. So she took Mallory’s keys and asked me to make her duplicates, to get into the Kirks’ house and that curio cabinet. She put them back and Mallory thought he’d misplaced them. I had to sneak into the smith’s shop at night and risk capture to do it for her. She said she’d get that egg and sell it and then we’d have money to run away. She got a cowboy to help her. Then she goes and sells the stuff to a fence and gets arrested, and I don’t get a dime, because Mallory Kirk called in a private detective and he blew the lid off the case!”

“My father called the detective,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was blamed for the theft of the egg in the first place.”

“You were?” he exclaimed.

She nodded. “By Gelly. And Bates, the cowboy who planted it in my bag.”

“I hate that,” he said slowly. “I never meant to hurt you. You been kind to me. Most people don’t care.”

“I’m sorry for you, I really am,” she told him. “But killing Mallory won’t solve any problems. It will just guarantee you the death penalty.”

He laughed again, a cold, chilling sound, and his eyes were opaque. “I won’t go back. I killed that man deliberately,” he said, his eyes suddenly as cold as his voice. “He wouldn’t tell me where the money was. I was going to have money to take Gelly places and buy her nice things. She said she loved me more than anybody in the world. Nobody loved me since my wife died….”

Her heart stilled in her chest. She’d never known that Joe was involved with the woman. She would have bet that the Kirks didn’t know, either.

“Did you know that she had a record?” she asked. “She was arrested twice and charged with theft, but she managed to get out of going to trial. She won’t be that lucky this time.”

“She said she had another way to get money, since this one fell through,” he muttered. “She was going to claim that Mallory got her pregnant.” He shook his head, while Morie stood frozen in place. “But after I kidnapped him, he told me he taped the conversation she had with him when she said it would be a lie but she could make people believe her. Can you believe she’d be that stupid?!”

Morie relaxed. She’d worried for a second that it could be true. It was such a relief! But she still had to save Mallory….

“I brought you something else,” she said, and indicated the leather pouch.

He frowned. He put down the thermos cup and opened the pouch. He caught his breath. “This is a fortune!”

“Not really. It’s just five thousand. It’s part of my inheritance. My father owns a big cattle ranch in Texas. His mother left me the money.” She moved closer. “It will help you get away, won’t it? So will you let Mallory go?”

His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “The bills are marked, huh?”

She threw up her hands. “How do you mark bills?” she exclaimed, exasperated. “I came straight from the bank to the airport, and I told no body what I was going to do with the money. I didn’t even tell my folks that I took it out of my account!”

He relaxed then. He took the money in his hands and looked at it with pure fascination. He’d done so many things, tried so hard, to get enough to get out of this county alive. Now he had the means. All he had to do was leave, now….

“Were you followed?” he asked her at once.

She shook her head. “I made them promise.”

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