reporter waited without speaking, clearly hoping to make him squirm. But as an officer of the marine corps, he was familiar with the tactic. Had used it himself upon occasion, while staring down the younger pilots he’d trained.
He waited her out, thinking how pretty he might’ve found this clearly smart and stubborn woman if she weren’t some damned reporter, especially one who’d invaded his turf and upset his mother. Did this Jessica Layton have any idea that the woman she’d come here to grill had lost her son—his only brother, Ian—in combat a few months ago? Or that she’d still been reeling from her husband’s death at the time, which had left her responsible for running an enormous spread with no one but hired hands to help her?
“I’ll leave your property,” the reporter finally conceded, “but I’m warning you. I’m not making the drive home until I find my sister—or at least get some straight answers about where she might’ve gone. Because my mother isn’t dying without seeing her again.”
“You—Your mother?” he asked. “She’s—she’s what? You’re saying that she’s sick?”
Her jaw tightening, Jessica Layton nodded. Pain cracked through the mask of fierceness, the pain of a despair barely held at bay. A reminder that death hadn’t made its last stop at Zach’s family’s doorstep.
“I’m sorry for your family,” he said, really seeing the woman behind the reporter for the first time. A gorgeous woman, not just pretty, and one that his instincts assured him wasn’t lying in the hope of getting either an edge or a story. “But you just heard my mother. She has no idea where your sister’s gone.”
“You heard her as well as I did. It’s obvious your mother’s hiding something.” Jessica stared in challenge at his mother on the staircase.
A challenge he cut off by stepping between them, his heart pounding out a warning that this reporter, this intruder in his home, was too dangerous to sympathize with. “You crossed a line today, barging in here with a camera, and you’re crossing another, standing here and calling my mother a liar.” He squared his shoulders and drew himself to his full height. “Now get out before I put you out.”
“I’ll be back,” she assured him, turning on her heel.
And leaving him to wonder, could his mother’s strange behavior have anything to do with another woman who had shown up unexpectedly to knock at their front door?
Reminded of the miracle she’d brought, Zach glanced up toward the landing and glimpsed a tendril of soft golden-brown hair and a pair of eyes peeking through the bars of the metalwork railing.
The green eyes of his four-year-old niece, Eden, who had been dropped off by her mother—an old girlfriend of Ian’s who none of them had ever heard of—in the weeks following his brother’s death. Still in San Diego, packing up the contents of his room in the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, Zach had never met the woman, but Jessica Layton’s green eyes nudged a suspicion...a suspicion planted by his mother’s too-neat story to the night her “miracle grandchild” had appeared.
The moment the reporter closed the door behind her, the tiny girl—the child Zach swore had restored his mother’s will to live—trotted down the staircase and threw herself into his mother’s arms.
And in a small, sweet voice that drove a shaft of ice through his heart, Eden asked tearfully, “Grandma, is my mama coming back this time? Is she taking me away?”
* * *
“Thanks loads for the backup in there,” Jessie told Henry once she’d climbed behind the wheel.
His bald scalp reddened. “Did you see the size of that guy? And the muscles? Besides, I’ve got at least thirty years on him, or else I would’ve— I could’ve decked him....”
When Jessie raised her brows, Henry laughed at her skepticism.
“You know me all too well,” he conceded with a shrug. “Maybe I wouldn’t have at that, but I could tell that cowboy wouldn’t hit a woman, much less shoot one. You saw how he was with his little mama.”
“I figured the same,” she admitted as she started the car’s engine. “But he wasn’t going to back down from protecting her, either.”
“Protecting? You still think she’s hiding Haley?”
Jessie turned the car around and started back for the gate. “Not anymore I don’t, but she’s holding back. Or outright lying for some reason. I’d bet money on it.”
“I sure as heck noticed how she lied to him about who we were and then popped off your sister’s boyfriend’s name when her son looked at her funny. And right in front of you, too, after acting like she couldn’t remember.”
Frowning, Jessie shook her head. “She was so flustered by that point, I’m guessing she couldn’t keep it together any longer. But at least I have the boyfriend’s name now, so we can check him out.”
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and glanced down at its face. “Not out here, you can’t. Not online, anyway. There’s no service, and—big surprise—no Wi-Fi signal, either.”
“How do people live like this?” Hours from the nearest Starbucks, she was going into withdrawal, and being cut off from the phone, email and internet was even harder.
As if on cue, a trio of cows—or bulls, or whatever the heck they were—wandered into their path. Apparently unfazed by the wind, the big red-and-white animals stopped to chew and stare at them.
“Come on, you three. Out of the way.” She tapped the horn, and one mooed. Another turned around and mooned her, before lifting its tail to...
“Not on my hood, you don’t!” she said, shifting into Reverse and backing the car a safe distance. Though she’d covered far more than her share of crime scenes, accidents and fatality fires on the night beat, she crinkled her nose and oohed at the disgusting display.
Henry grinned and said, “I’m guessing Bossy there doesn’t like us any better than that cowboy does.”
Jessie snorted, then tried to decide if her Prius could make it if she drove off the graded driveway and carefully skirted the cattle. The ground to either side was lumpy with rocks, and the tough grasses and thorny shrubs could easily hide holes where they might get stuck.
Fortunately, the cattle moved on, swishing their tails smugly.
“I am so having a nice, juicy steak tonight, if I can find one...” she grumbled.
The caterpillar mustache twitched. “I’m sure our host will be glad to hear that. Good for the cattle business, after all.”
“Oh, right,” she said, wishing she could declare for vegetarianism, instead. But she’d been raised on good Texas beef, and she’d miss it like crazy if she had to give it up. “Well, all that aside, I think I saw a diner back in Rusted Spur. And I’m betting there’s a signal there, too, so I can hop on the web.”
“Glad to hear it ’cause right about now, I could eat that cow whole.” Henry slanted her a look, reminding her she’d been in such a big hurry to reach the ranch, they’d had nothing since first thing that morning. Not that there had been a lot of restaurants to choose from once they’d left the state highway. “You’re sure the place’ll be open?”
“Judging from the number of pickups parked out front earlier, I figure it’s the local hangout. Thank goodness it wasn’t boarded up like most of the other businesses in town.”
“Town seems like a stretch,” said Henry, who was a city boy himself, born and raised in Chicago.
Jessie had to agree with his assessment. When they’d driven through Rusted Spur forty minutes before finding the ranch, the winds had just begun to blow, making the depressing collection of weathered, mostly wood-frame buildings, older vehicles and a single, flashing red light look positively bleak. She hoped that she was wrong, that some unexplored cross-street