Page 19 of Steers and Stowaways
Once Tucker started driving again, Mallory kept tossing worried glances at him.
“What?” He barked out the word.
“You’re gonna find a way to blame this on me so you can fire me again, huh?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
Good one.He was impressed with how well she was staying in her role. “Someone’s got a guilty conscience.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “Says the guy who once accused me of bringing him bad luck!”
“You can’t do that to her!” Chip flew to her defense, nearly coming out of his seat. “None of this is her fault,and you know it. She had a gun jammed in her face when she?—”
“Got it,” Tucker interrupted in exasperation. The amount of puppy love pouring out of the kid was starting to get under his skin.
“You shoulda seen her crawling around in the trailer like a monkey,” Cruz announced in an unexpected burst of humor. “She filled the hay feeders in nothing flat!”
Mallory gave her best imitation of some monkey sounds, making both cowboys in the backseat dissolve into laughter.
Tucker snuck a glance at the woman who’d proven to be an unexpectedly worthy partner. She wasn’t half bad at acting. Her smart mouth, ratty outfit, and lioness-level of feistiness more than compensated for her tiny size.
She caught him looking at her and rolled her eyes at him. “I know what you’re thinking.”
I bet you don’t.“This oughta be good.” He experienced a sudden urge to reach across the console to take her hand. Never had he been as terrified as he was when she’d climbed out of the truck at gunpoint. He’d been terrified she was about to get hurt on his watch, terrified there’d be nothing he could do about it, and terrified he was feeling too much for someone he had no business having any feelings for.
Unfortunately, his job didn’t leave room for that kind of relationship. It was difficult to romance a woman when he couldn’t talk about his day or what he did for a living. Most of the time, he couldn’t even discuss his current whereabouts. Not to mention, any woman who got close to him was usually in danger.
He’d long since stopped trying to meetthe one. Whoever she was, she had a better chance of enjoying life if shestayed as far from him as possible. The few ground rules he lived by kept him single but alive:
Be brutally honest.
Don’t try to impress anyone.
Stay focused on bringing criminals to justice.
Mallory Evans was the first woman who’d ever stuck around after running headfirst into his ground rules. Either there was something wrong with her, or she was the most incredible human being he’d ever met. He wasn’t sure which, only that the more she invaded his personal space, the more trouble his heart was in.
She stared a hole through him before blurting, “You think I’m in cahoots with them, don’t you?”
“What?” He yanked his thoughts back to her, trying to remember what he’d said to make her mad this time.
“You’re over there working yourself into a lather trying to figure out how I handed over one of Miss Evans’ prize steers without swallowing a bullet.” She folded her arms defiantly. “You wanted so badly to tell the sheriff that the screw-up you fired came back for the sole purpose of aiding and abetting in a highway robbery. You wanted them to haul me away so you wouldn’t have to be bothered with me anymore.”
The brief look she flicked across the seat from beneath her lashes clued Tucker in to what she was really up to. She was attempting to draw Chip and Cruz into the conversation. Either that, or get a reaction from them.
A sense of foreboding made the hair on his arms prickle beneath his shirt, because she was dancing all around his current theory about the case.
“You’re right.” He shrugged like it was no big deal. “If Ihad any proof you were part of what happened back there, I wouldn’t have thought twice about throwing you under the bus.”
