Page 13 of Steers and Stowaways
She blinked a few times, wondering if she’d already slipped into hypothermia and was hallucinating. Because if she was seeing clearly, there was only one conclusion to draw: Private Investigator Tucker Pratt’s out-of-town trip involved driving her cattle to their intended destination.
Despite the partial disguise he had on, she’d recognize his long-limbed, determined stride anywhere—even with the faint limp he’d adopted. Nobody else in the world walked the same way Tucker Pratt walked. Absolutely nobody!
Why hadn’t he bothered telling her something so important? What he was doing was one thousand percent relevant to her case, so much so that she had every right to be briefed about it ahead of time.
The other thing making her sick to her stomach was just how wrong she’d been about him.Wrong, wrong, wrong, with an extra helping of wrong!Somewhere along the way, he must have stopped writing off her troubles at Evans Ranch as a silly waste of his precious time. Somewhere along the way, he must have decided she had a legitimate problem on her hands.
How did I miss this?
Her thoughts raced back to their most recent conversation yesterday. The pictures he’d sent her. The mildly out-of-breath tenor of his voice when he’d called her from the road. His uncharacteristic, albeit short, attempt at actually communicating with her for once.
Had he been injured during the explosion the other day? Was the limp he was exhibiting today a real limp, or was it simply part of his disguise?
Though continuing to peep through the window at him risked her being discovered, she was too engrossed to pull out of sight. Instead, she watched in fascination as he returned to the truck to top off the tank with gasoline. The long neck of a glass bottle of water was poking out of his right pocket. While the machine was running, he stepped a good ten feet away to pull out his phone.
She winced, knowing he was about to read her message signaling how close she was to firing him. She was able to pinpoint the exact moment he read it by how his jaw tightened and the way his head whipped in the direction of her ranch.
Since he was half turned in her direction, she was unable to miss the flare of emotion in his dark gaze. His anger didn’t surprise her. The flash of worry in his eyes did.
A delicious feeling of weakness coursed through her. She absorbed it by slumping back onto the floor of the storage compartment.
Tucker Pratt is worried about me!
It was a wow moment with a big fat cherry and sprinkles on top to discover proof that, amidst his elephant-sized crassness, he possessed an ounce of human compassion for her. Or at least for her disappearing cattle…
The more she thought about it, the more sense hisresponse to her text message made. He might not give two hoots about her personally, but he was a cowboy at heart. It was entirely possible she’d underestimated his interest in hunting down the cattle rustlers. In hindsight, maybe she’d misinterpreted his lack of warmth and fuzziness.
Her cell phone gave a noisy jingle in her pocket to alert her to an incoming text. She stiffened in horror, realizing she must have forgotten to turn the sound off.
Of all the birdbrained oversights to make on an important venture like the one she was currently on!
She wanted to kick herself. Or, better yet, bang her forehead against the floor. However, she wasn’t at liberty to physically chastise herself, not while Tucker Owl-Eyed Pratt was standing only a few feet away from where she was hiding.
She jammed her hand in her pocket, frantically trying to locate the sound button. Before she found it, another jingle ricocheted through her pocket, louder this time since she was fishing through it.
Oh, just shoot me now!Everybody and their cousin couldn’t have picked a worse time to send her an avalanche of text messages. Fearful of being found, she gave up trying to turn off her phone. Instead, she wrapped her gloved hand around it and rolled on top of it to muffle the sound as much as possible.
To her chagrin, the two incoming text messages had the unfortunate effect of alarming the cattle in the trailer. Like they’d done when she’d yelped a few hours ago, they raised their heads and bellowed in protest.
She wanted so badly to shush them, but it wouldn’t do a lick of good. The sight of her would probably only make them bellow louder.
A third incoming text may have bleated through thenoise, but she couldn’t be sure. There was too much noise rising around her.
There was a scrape of metal as someone jimmied with the lock on the trailer, then the creak of a door being cracked open. A wide sliver of sunlight followed.
“So help me, Mallory,” Tucker Pratt snarled. “If you’re in there, you’d better say something pronto!”
Her heart sank all the way through the trailer to the pavement below it. There was zero point in dragging out the inevitable. The game was up. Thanks to the wretched three-inch by six-inch electronic device in her coat pocket, she’d been found by a former police-detective-turned-private-investigator. At least that’s what she thought she remembered him saying about his background. He wasn’t much of a talker.
Grimacing to cover how fast her stomach was flipping, she lifted her head to peer over the top of the containment ledge. “Well, look who’s driving my cattle across state!” Her words came out sounding much breathier than she wished.
He was looking like a heart-tripping western clothing commercial again, from his denim coat to the frayed hems of his jeans. And don’t even get her started on the black felt Stetson pulled far enough over his eyes and the fake extra waves of hair that partially shielded her from the flames shooting from them. He was hot from A to Z. No doubt about it. Probably knew it, too.
She lifted her chin an inch and plowed onward to her pending doom. “You could’ve saved both of us a lot of trouble by including me in your?—”
“This isn’t about me!” He spoke through gritted, hilariously fake crooked front teeth as he shot a harried look toward the service station. “This is about you hightailing itout of here before you blow my entire investigation to Kingdom Come.”
As usual, he didn’t try to soften the sting of his words. She wished she could make him understand that just because he was a head taller than her didn’t mean her feelings weren’t normal-sized. Wow, but he sure knew how to make her blood sing through her veins!
