she was right. “Give it to me anyway.”
Her eyebrows dipped low. She shook her head.
He wasn’t sure if she thought he was going to take his measure of justice from her family or what. After all he’d said, he guessed he couldn’t blame her. “They’ll help?”
“Of course they’ll help. We’ll go to the ranch. We can call the sheriff from there.”
He still wasn’t convinced he trusted her plan, but he probably didn’t need to point that out to Callie again. “Fine.”
The sounds drew closer. The light wound along the creek toward them. It focused upward, pinning them in its beam. Efraim couldn’t see a thing except blinding white light. Hoofbeats spread in a circle around them.
Efraim squinted against the glare. Blue splotches bloomed wherever he looked, like twenty spotlights bearing down. One man held the light. The others were merely dark. Efraim focused on the ground, trying to see the men around him in his peripheral vision. There were three, no, four mounted men. He glanced at Callie.
“Put your hands up where I can see them.” The voice boomed from behind the spotlight, the accent no-nonsense Wyoming rancher.
Efraim raised his hands.
“Now on your knees.”
Efraim shook his head. Had Callie been wrong? Was this her family, or some kind of vigilante mob like the one Stefan said had been protesting in Dumont? “I’m Efraim Aziz. I—”
Rounds slid into rifle chambers. “I said on your knees.”
CALLIE COULDN’T believe it. She glanced around the circle of shadows on horseback. Never in a million years would she imagine her family drawing down on her. She’d told Efraim all these pie-in-the-sky things about justice in America, and here her own family seemed to be taking the law into their own hands. She wanted to hang her head in shame. “Daddy, put the gun down. Brent? Russ? Timmy?” she said, taking a guess at which brothers had accompanied her father.
“Move behind us, Callie.”
“Behind you?” Now she was getting angry. “What are you? Thick? Efraim and I, we’re together.”
One of her brothers sputtered out a cough.
“Callie, you don’t understand what’s going on here,” her father said in a gruff voice. “Move behind your brothers.”
Callie didn’t move from Efraim’s side. “I understand perfectly what’s going on. My family is causing an international incident. That’s what’s going on.”
The light her father was shining on Efraim flicked down to the ground, highlighting Fahad’s still body. “Who is that man?”
“Fahad Bahir,” Efraim said. “My head security man. My cousin.”
“He dead?”
“Shot,” Efraim said. “Murdered.”
Callie’s stomach tightened at the dark tone in his voice. His words about vengeance scuttled through the back of her mind. Between Efraim’s anger and her family’s obvious defensiveness, this situation could get bad fast. She couldn’t let things spin out of control. “He was wounded. We were trying to get him back to the ranch, but he died on the way. We have to call the sheriff.”
“How’d he get shot?”
“A sniper in Rattlesnake Badlands.”
“The question is, why did he get shot? What was he doing?” Brent’s voice.
Already tight, Callie’s stomach dropped. Her oldest brother had done four tours in Afghanistan until a head injury ended his military career. Since then he’d had a hard time of it. Seizures. Paranoia. Trying to get used to returning to life on the ranch, a life he hadn’t much cared for.
Callie felt bad for him. She would feel worse, except that every horror he’d seen and every hardship he lived through, he blamed squarely on any person of Middle Eastern descent who crossed his path. Luckily in Wyoming, there weren’t a lot of people on which to focus his anger over what had happened to him.
Until now.
“Mr. Bahir was protecting Sheik Efraim.”
“Protecting him from what?”
Efraim had to hear the sneer in her brother’s voice. Callie just prayed he didn’t lash back.
“There are people who want me and my people dead.” Efraim’s voice was steady.
Callie gave him a grateful look she hoped he could read despite the glaring light.
“I’ll bet there are lots of people who want you and yours dead. And I’ll bet you’ve done a few things to them to cause it.”
Callie swung a much less charitable glare on her brother. “Brent, stop it.”
“One of these people shot Fahad. He followed us from the badlands and attacked me.”
“And what were you doing wandering around those badlands?”
“Searching for a friend.”
“On foot? How did you get out there?”
“My horse ran. He was afraid of gunfire.”
“That horse—” Joe’s voice. At least one of her sane brothers was on this trip. A schoolteacher, husband and new father, Joe helped out on the ranch in the summer and some weekends. Apparently he’d stopped by today after Callie had ridden out.
“We need to get to the ranch, Dad,” Callie repeated, feeling a bit bolstered by Joe’s presence and Efraim’s continued calm. “We need to call the sheriff.”
“How do we know he isn’t going to try to pull something?” Russ’s voice. Second to youngest in age, Russ idolized Brent, even planning to go into military service himself after he got his degree and could enter as an officer. His plans had changed after Brent’s injury.
Unlike his big brother, Russ had always taken to ranch work. Callie’s father called Russ his natural cowboy. Unfortunately his unshakable hero worship of Brent caused him to absorb everything his oldest brother said like a sponge. He tended to follow Brent’s lead in all things, unless Callie could get to him first.
Unfortunately her job had her traveling all over the world, and she hadn’t been able to spend much time on the ranch the last couple of years. She had the feeling that this time she might be too late to influence Russ. “He’s with me, Russ.”
“That better not mean what I think it means,” Brent grumbled.
Callie’s cheeks heated as the sensations of her kiss with Efraim flitted through the back of her mind.
“Callie is working with me through her office.”
Efraim again. He’d just lost his cousin, one of the closest men in his administration, not to mention his friend going missing, and yet he was steadier and calmer than the men in her family. Men who before this, she would have sworn were steady and calm.
“Her office, yeah. Foreign Affairs,” Russ drawled out, putting emphasis on the word affairs.
“Grow up, Russell,” she snapped. For a boy almost out of college, he was more immature than their high school–aged youngest brother.
“What do you mean, grow up? I’m not the one messing around with a damn Arab. Hell, he’s probably a terrorist.”
She blew a frustrated stream of air through tight lips and focused on her father. She wished she could peer past the light and see his eyes. Better yet, she wished her father would stop shining the damn thing on Efraim like he was a subject in some kind of interrogation. “Efraim is one of the good guys. The leader of a country.”
“A country that is an enemy of the United States?”
Brent