Page 10 of Steers and Stowaways
Strong-arming Mallory from the grave into adopting his dog would give her one more reason to curse his name until the end of her days…which meant she’d never be able to forget him.
That made him smile.
Chapter 3: No Goodbyes
Three days later
Where is she?
Tucker revved the motor of the heavy-duty black dually he would be driving for the next several hours. He squinted through the side-view mirror, disappointed that the most irritating woman he’d ever known wasn’t bothering to show up before he took off.
Not that he expected a goodbye kiss or a box of fresh-baked send-off cookies from Mallory Evans. Nope. The two of them were barely civil to each other. However, she was the sole reason he was about to drive three hundred miles to El Paso. The least she could do was touch bases with the guy transporting her cattle before he took off—strictly for professional reasons, of course.
Granted, she didn’t know he was the one doing the driving, but still. It wasn’t like her to ghost out of such a big event. She treated every piece of livestock on her ranch like the children she never had, giving them namesand spoiling them to the point of ridiculousness. There was no way she was letting him or anyone else drive off with twenty-eight of her precious cows without so much as a…
A muscle ticked in his jaw. Where in the world was she? He pulled his cell phone from the back pocket of his jeans, expecting to wade through the usual torrent of missed messages from her. Since she was forever full of questions he didn't have answers to, ignoring her texts had become his newest hobby. Under normal circumstances, he only texted clients back when he had new information to share. There was nothing normal about their relationship, though. He was still figuring out how close he should let her get to the real him.
To his disappointment, their mostly one-sided conversation thread on his phone was unusually empty. Nothing but crickets for three straight days. The last thing she’d written was still branded across his brain.
If you don’t get me some answers soon, I’ll get them myself.
As if he hadn’t heard her the first time she’d said it over the phone! He didn’t doubt for a second that she would make good on her threat. But only because she didn’t know he’d spent every second since their last conversation embedding himself on the cattle transport he was about to embark on.
Which she would find out if she bothered making an appearance.
Anytime now.
Initially, Tucker had been hoping to wrangle a spot on the trip as an extra ranch hand. However, his supervisor at Lonestar Security had pulled a much slicker maneuver andsidelined the original livestock hauler assigned by Western Overland Trucking.
And now I’m in the driver’s seat.
Through his rolled-down window, he could hear the cattle mooing in the silver trailer hitched behind him. Poor devils didn’t know they were going to be stuck there for hours, packed in like sardines.
“Whatdiya waitin’ for, bull hauler?” The dusty wrangler sitting in the passenger seat to his right drawled out the words, making his equally dusty friend in the backseat burst into obnoxious laughter.
Tucker sent them a dark look, making their chuckles dwindle back into stilted silence. “I expected the boss lady to show.” He didn’t bother mentioning Mallory Evans by name. The two cowboys already knew who he was talking about since both of them worked for her.
Her hands-on style of management was something her employees experienced firsthand and often, along with a brand of sass that could disarm a man quicker than a bullet. Tucker was of the opinion she saved her most fiery side for him, though, especially when she was demanding updates on his investigation.
Her expectations of him and the team at Lonestar Security were downright unrealistic. Only a crystal ball would deliver the answers she wanted about her disappearing cattle at the speed she desired. Since he didn’t own a crystal ball, he was stuck doing good old-fashioned detective work…like driving her next shipment of cattle across the state.
Since he’d briefly met both wranglers in the truck with him, he was in disguise today. The longish brown hair scraping his collar was a wig, and his crooked front teeth were veneers. For good measure, he hadn’t shaved thismorning and wasn’t planning on shaving again until the trip was completed.
He revved the motor again, louder this time, hoping the lovely target of his thoughts would come stomping out of the single-story white rambling farmhouse he was parked in front of to give him yet another piece of her mind. But no such luck. The only sign of movement inside her home was the silhouette of Martina Silva behind her desk at the front window. From what he understood, she was more than a bookkeeper. She also helped out with the housekeeping and anything else Mallory needed her to do.
Martina was the mother of the punk seated next to him, Daniel. Or Chip, as she and her husband called him. According to Tucker’s extensive research into their sketchy backstory, Chip was short forchip off the old block. From where Tucker sat,chip on the shoulderwould’ve been a more accurate description of the teenager. He was going to have to set Chip straight soon on his mistaken assumption that everyone in the truck wanted to listen to the electronic game he was playing. Though Tucker wasn’t a gamer himself, he was pretty sure the device the teenager was holding was referred to as a Switch.
Cruz Burgos, Mallory’s newest full-time ranch hand, was lounging sideways with his filthy boots propped across the backseat. He was a wiry, dark-haired fella in his early twenties—the sort that Tucker privately referred to as a wannabe cowboy. His rough, detached manhandling of the cattle in the trailer behind them told Tucker that Cruz’s employment at Evans Ranch was nothing more than a paycheck. He didn’t love what he did for a living and probably wouldn’t last long before drifting off to do something else.
Cruz was tattooed from the neck down, probably for thesole reason of looking tough since he didn’t have much more on his resume than the kid to Tucker’s right. Mallory hadn’t yet told him where she’d run across Cruz, or why she’d decided a few days ago that her struggling ranch needed yet another person on its payroll.
Riding on a cattle transport was equivalent to downtime for Chip and Cruz. If Tucker was lucky, they’d sleep most of the trip. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d be forced to listen to their electronic games the entire way. That, or he’d soon be hogtying them for attempted cattle rustling if it turned out they were involved in the main reason Tucker was working undercover today. Somehow, he doubted either punk had the wherewithal to pull off a crime like that. Not even if they put both of their clueless heads together.
It was a bit of a long shot, but he tapped out a quick text message to Mallory before taking off.
Heading out of town. Be back tomorrow.
She’d be mad when she read it. Big mad. Hopefully mad enough to break the uncharacteristically long stretch of silence between them. As soon as she found out he was leaving town, she’d accuse him of not giving her investigation the attention it deserved and threaten to fire him again. This time, she might actually do it.
