Her Cowboy Avenger

“I guess they wanted me to know about it,” he said reasonably.

“But why? What purpose would that serve?”

“Only reason I could figure was that somebody wanted me to come here.” He hesitated, feeling foolish for a slight second before he shoved the feeling away. “Like I said, I figured it was you.”

She frowned at him. “Why would I send you that?”

Matt shrugged a shoulder, feeling foolish again. “I thought maybe you needed help and were desperate enough to reach out to me of all people. From the sound of that article, things aren’t looking too good for you. Maybe somebody else sent it for the same reason.”

“In hopes that you’d help me?” She exhaled sharply, the sound almost like a snort. “Whatever the reason, I doubt it was good.”

“What makes you say that?”

“People around here haven’t exactly been going out of their way to help me out. As you may have noticed, I’m not Ms. Popularity at the moment.”

He couldn’t disagree with her there. He wished he’d seen who’d messed with her truck, but he’d been watching the store so closely for her to come out he hadn’t been paying attention to anything else. “Has anything else happened besides someone cutting your tires?”

“That’s the first outright act against me. Mostly I’ve been getting a cold shoulder from everyone in town. Almost no one has said a word to me since Bobby’s death. Only the police.” She shuddered slightly, the gesture making it clear exactly what that experience had been like for her.

He surveyed her out of the corner of his eye, this woman he hadn’t seen in eight years, this person who was so familiar, yet different at the same time. She definitely wasn’t the girl she’d once been. But could she have really changed enough to become a killer? It was possible. He could believe anyone was capable of killing for any number of reasons, whether out of anger or vengeance or self-defense. Was that what had happened? Had circumstances turned her into a killer? Or had she really become a far different person than the one he’d thought he’d known?

Or was it, as he’d wondered plenty of times after they parted ways, that he’d never really known her at all?

“What happened, Elena?”

She glanced at him, her left eyebrow quirking. “Didn’t you read the article?”

“I’d rather hear it from you.”

She simply continued to stare at him, remaining silent for a long moment. “What are you even doing here, Matt?” she repeated. “Someone sends you an article about…someone you knew a long time ago and you come all this way from New Mexico? For what?”

Someone you knew a long time ago. That was certainly an interesting way of putting it. He hadn’t missed her hesitation before phrasing it that way, and he couldn’t help wondering what her first instinct had been to say instead. “Guess I wanted to know why,” he answered. “And yeah, I wanted to know if it was true.”

“What do you care?”

“Are you saying it is?”

“No, I’m asking what difference it makes to you.”

It was still a very good question. “Call it curiosity, I guess. You never struck me as a killer. Guess I wanted to know if a person could change that much.”

She lowered her head, her shoulders slumping. “Thank you,” she practically whispered.

“For what?”

“For thinking I’m not the killing type. People who’ve known me a lot longer don’t even seem to believe that.”

“So you’re saying you didn’t do it?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” she said firmly.

“So what happened?”

Elena opened her mouth and took a deep breath, as though on the verge of beginning, only to raise her hand and point in front of them. “In a minute. We’re here.”

He saw the turnoff to a ranch up ahead and smoothly guided the truck into the turn. A sign over the end of the driveway declared it the Weston Ranch. From the first glimpse, he could tell it was a big spread, wide-open pastures stretching out into the horizon. It looked like Elena had married well, he noted darkly. Not that he was surprised. He hadn’t worked for them, didn’t think he’d ever met any of them, but he remembered the Weston name had been big around here.

The driveway eventually ended in front of a large two-story ranch house, a barn not far from it. He could see cattle grazing in the distance in one of the pastures, a sight he knew well. She must have a lot of people working for her to be dealing with a place this size. More important, it meant there were people they were going to have to explain his presence to, something he wasn’t sure just how to do.

“How many people do you have working for you right now?”

“At the moment, none.”

He couldn’t help but glance at her in surprise. She met his eyes and shrugged lightly, a hint of resignation in her dark brown gaze. “Nobody wants to work for a murderer.”

“So how are you keeping this place running?”

“The best I can,” she said simply.

As soon as he brought the truck to a stop in front of the house, she pushed her door open and climbed out, reaching back in for the bags and taking them before he could offer to help. He followed, unable to help but notice her strong, confident stride as she walked to the house and climbed the steps. She definitely wasn’t a girl anymore. She was all woman, exuding a strength and grace he now saw she’d only been starting to develop back then.

Crossing the wide front porch, she opened the door. “Come on back to the kitchen,” she said. “I need to get these groceries put away.”

He followed her through the house, getting a quick glimpse of the living room as they passed through it. As he’d seen from the outside, it was a big place, but comfortable. Homey. The home she’d shared with her husband, he registered, the thought bothering him more than it should before he brushed the feeling aside.

In the kitchen, she put the bags on the counter and immediately began unloading them, moving some of the items to the refrigerator. There was a big table with plenty of chairs, but he remained standing, leaning against the doorway and watching her move.

Closing the refrigerator and turning away from it, she suddenly noticed him standing there and started. “I’m sorry. I’m not being a very good hostess. Can I get you something to drink?”

He gave his head a terse shake. “I’m fine. You were going to tell me what happened?”

She sighed, then nodded. “That’s right. I guess I’m just not sure where to begin.”

He wasn’t sure he did, either. A lot of it was going to involve her relationship with her husband, a topic he didn’t know if he wanted to hear all that much about, no matter how much he needed to. At the same time, he couldn’t say why the idea bothered him. Or maybe he was just bothered by the implications of why it would.

“Have to admit I was surprised to find out you were still in Western Bluff,” he said. “Thought you had all those plans of being in the big city. That summer you couldn’t wait to get back to school.”

“I know,” she said softly, without looking at him. “I never intended to stay here, either.”

“So what happened?”

She shrugged helplessly. “Things changed. Bobby and I…started seeing each other, and then…things changed,” she repeated weakly.

She lapsed into silence, her eyes sliding briefly to his, her discomfort with the topic etched across her face. Clearly, her relationship with her husband was just as awkward for her to talk about as it was for him to listen to.

His gut churned at her words. He’d never met Bobby Weston, not that he could remember anyway. He wished he had, wished he could know the kind of man Elena had been willing to change her life plans for when she hadn’t been willing to do the same for him.

But then, he’d just been a ranch hand, offering her an uncertain life on the road. He hadn’t had a spread like this to offer her. Maybe if he had, things would have been different. Maybe she would have picked him.

With a jolt of anger at himself for even thinking about it, he did his best to push the thoughts away. What did it matter? It was a long time ago. Things had happened the way they had, and there was no changing them. He had a perfectly good life, and it looked like she had, too—at least up until the point her husband was killed.

“Must have been some guy,” Matt said, keeping his tone neutral.

“He was,” she said quietly. “At least in the beginning. We started seeing each other…the summer after you left.”

The words sent another jolt through him, and again he was irritated by his response. A year was a long time, so why did it feel like a betrayal, like she’d moved on far too quickly? It wasn’t as if he’d been a monk in the year after he’d left this place—left her—behind. But then, he hadn’t ended up marrying any of the women he’d been involved with, either.

Pulling out one of the chairs from the table, Elena sank into the seat. “We’d known each other, or at least known of each other, for years, of course. The town’s too small for us not to have. I can’t remember us saying two words to each other, though. He was a few years ahead of me in school, a member of one of the town’s founding families, and I…wasn’t. Our paths never really crossed. Then that summer I was waiting tables at the diner again, and he struck up a conversation with me. It was probably the first time he ever really noticed me. We got to talking, and we actually had some things in common.

“First and foremost, Bobby didn’t want to stay in Western Bluff, either, and he wasn’t supposed to. I don’t know how much you heard about the Westons, or even remember if you did, but Bobby’s older brother, Jim Junior, was the one who’d been groomed to take over the ranch. Bobby’s father, Big Jim, died about twenty years ago when Bobby was just a boy. Junior was all of eighteen, but he managed to take over and make the ranch his own. He offered to make Bobby a place as he got older, but Bobby wasn’t really interested in the ranch. The summer you were here, he had an internship at a company in Houston, so he wasn’t in town. He wanted to be in the city as much as I did. The only reason he was back that summer was because Junior said he needed his help and asked Bobby to stick around. Bobby had already graduated but didn’t have a job lined up yet, so he agreed.”

Elena grimaced, her eyes far away. “That whole summer we talked about how we were going to get out of here. He was going to come to Austin with me when I went back to school.” Matt nearly flinched at the words, at the significance of them, but managed not to. “He knew people there so he could try to find a job just as well as he could in Houston. It should have worked out perfectly. But when the summer was over, Junior asked him to stay a little longer, and made a big enough deal about it that Bobby agreed. That’s when he asked me to marry him. He wanted to make things permanent, because he said there was no doubt we’d be together. And I said yes.”

“How long had you been going out with him before you got married?”

Her eyes flew to his face. He met her gaze and held it. He could tell she didn’t like the answer, and suspected he wasn’t going to like hearing it, either.

“Three months.”

He had no trouble understanding her reaction and did his best to hide his own.

Three months. The same amount of time Matt had been involved with her before they’d parted ways, before she’d refused to make the same commitment to him she’d made to another man just one year later.

“You must have really loved him,” he said, instantly hearing the trace of bitterness in his own voice and hating himself for it.

She lowered her eyes. “He was crazy about me, and I—” she swallowed “—was crazy about him.”

Matt didn’t miss the way her voice faltered before she finished the statement, or how strained it sounded uttering those words. Were they that hard for her to admit? Or was it admitting them to him?

“I’m sure your father must have been thrilled that you got married so fast,” he said wryly, remembering the man’s reaction to Matt’s involvement with his daughter. Ed Reyes had been so protective of his daughter Matt couldn’t imagine him thinking anyone was good enough for her. Or maybe Bobby Weston’s background had made him a more acceptable prospect than a humble ranch hand.

“He wasn’t,” she acknowledged with a sardonic smile. “We eloped and didn’t tell anyone about it until it was done, and then I went back to school.

“We both thought it would only be a few months until he joined me in Austin. Instead, a few months later we found out the truth about Junior. He hadn’t been feeling well, had been going to doctors to get checked out, which is why he needed Bobby’s help, though he assured everyone he was fine. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t just sick, he was dying. He was going fast, and didn’t admit it almost until the end. Then he was gone. He wasn’t married and didn’t have any kids, so Bobby inherited the ranch.

“At first I assumed he’d sell. But Bobby felt like he owed it to Junior to stay and run the ranch. I understood, and felt like I had to support that. His brother had just died, this was his family spread, and he was the last of the Westons. I couldn’t exactly argue with him. So when I finished school, I came back, too, and we stayed.”

“And you’re still here,” Matt summarized.

Elena nodded, more than a hint of resignation in the gesture. “Still here.”

“Were you happy?”

She looked at him, her gaze steady. “No,” she said flatly. “Neither of us were. After the first couple years I did begin to argue that Bobby should sell, but he wouldn’t. The thing is, Big Jim was something of a local legend around here, and all his life Bobby heard about how great his father was. And then, after being the second brother, the one who wasn’t expected to take over, he suddenly had pretty big shoes to fill, especially since he was the last Weston. It was a lot of pressure. At least he saw it that way, and it changed him. We had some setbacks over the years, some rough times, and Bobby took every one of them personally, as though he was failing his father and his brother. He became obsessed. The ranch was all he ever thought about. He was constantly coming up with plans and schemes to make things work better around here, none of which ever panned out, which only made things worse.

“The night he was killed, we’d had an argument. I’d pretty much had enough. Bobby had this idea to build this new irrigation system, claiming it would make things work a lot smoother around here. Of course, it would also require digging up half the spread and spending every last remaining cent we had. It was complete madness and would do nothing to solve any of the actual problems.” She swallowed hard. “I told him if he intended to go through with it, I would have no choice but to leave him. I wasn’t going to stand by and watch him destroy himself and what was left of our lives on his obsession with the ranch. He told me to go, because if I couldn’t understand how important it was to him, then I didn’t really love him anyway.

“I walked out and went for a drive to clear my head. I just needed to think about things for a while. I didn’t really go anywhere, didn’t think about where I was headed. I just drove until it seemed like I’d gone far enough, turned around and came back. I was gone for about four hours. When I came back, I noticed the door to his study was open and the light was still on. I almost ignored it, just wanting to go to bed and not have another confrontation, but I knew if I did he’d just stay up all night the way he did too much of the time.”

Elena sucked in a breath. “That’s when I found him. He was lying on his back on the floor. He’d been shot in the chest. I felt for a pulse, but he was already dead. He was still warm though. I don’t know how long he’d been there. Maybe if I’d come home earlier, I could have called someone, could have saved him—”

“You can’t think like that,” Matt said gently. “If you’d come back earlier, the shooter could have killed you, too.”

“I know,” she admitted softly. “But I wish I could have done something for him. Instead, all I could do was call the police and tell them he’d been killed. Unfortunately, everyone knew that we’d been arguing, and no one else had a reason to kill him, which makes me the prime suspect. The sheriff has made it clear he thinks I’m guilty. I know he’d love to make an arrest. The only thing keeping him from doing it is a lack of physical evidence. The murder weapon was most likely a pistol that belonged to Bobby. He kept it in his gun cabinet. It’s been missing since the murder. The killer must have taken it, but the sheriff is convinced I hid it somewhere, which is why he and his men have been by pretty much every other day to search the place.

“In the meantime, the hands quit. We had only a few working for us. I paid them for their work to date, but they knew I couldn’t afford to keep them on. At least one made the point that I was probably going to need every penny I had for my defense.”

“Sounds like somebody you’re better off not having around,” Matt noted.

“Most likely,” Elena agreed. “But the result is that I have this ranch to run all by myself with nobody to work it, and a whole town that thinks I murdered my husband.”

“Surely there have to be others who had issues with your husband, especially if the ranch was having as much trouble as you say it is.”

“I’ve been over the books numerous times over the past week. We’re low on funds and have plenty of debts, but these are held by banks and certainly wouldn’t be worth killing him over. And while not everybody in town necessarily loved him, I haven’t been able to come up with anyone with serious enough issues to want to do him harm. Believe me, I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of a single possibility.”

“What about these hands you had working for you? Weren’t any of them around that night? Didn’t any of them see anything?”

“No. They’d all gone to town. Bobby had given them the day off.”

“Convenient,” Matt said. “That strike anybody as odd?”

Elena shrugged. “Not really. Afterward I kind of wondered if he suspected this blowout between us was coming and didn’t want anyone around to overhear. It had been building for some time,” she admitted.

“Is it possible one of the hands killed him? Maybe they were worried about getting paid?”

“They were all in town at the bar. They have alibis.”

Her voice was thick with frustration. He could understand why. The situation certainly didn’t look good. But listening to her, he didn’t have a doubt in the world that she was telling the truth. She was no murderer. Whatever else might have changed about her over the years, that hadn’t. Which meant she needed help. She might not have sent the article to him—he definitely believed her about that, too—but the result was the same.

Before he could say anything, the sound of an engine reached them, drawing their attention toward the front of the house. Someone was coming up the driveway.

Matt glanced back at her. “Expecting company?”

Her heavy frown answered before she did. “No,” she said, rising from her chair.

He pushed away from the door frame, ready to follow. “Any idea who it could be?”

“Not really,” she said, moving past him. “But if there’s one thing I’ve learned by now, it’s bound to be trouble.”

Chapter Three

She’d been right, Elena reflected grimly as she watched the two men climb out of the police vehicle they’d parked in front of the house. It was trouble.

Sheriff Walt Bremer climbed out first, heaving himself from behind the driver’s seat with a great deal of effort. In his mid-fifties, he was a big man in every way, increasingly around his midsection. He’d always been pleasant enough to Elena and she’d never had any issues with him before. But once he’d zeroed in on her as his prime suspect, he’d turned on her so thoroughly it was hard to believe he’d ever had a kind word for her in the past.

A second, equally familiar man emerged from the passenger seat. Travis Gerard—Cassie’s husband, Bobby’s best friend since they were boys, and a local deputy. He was thirty, like Bobby had been, a long, lean figure with close-cropped hair and dark eyes. Like Cassie, he was someone she’d socialized with numerous times over the years due to his friendship with Bobby. But their relationship had started out cool and only grown cooler at the same time her marriage had, understandably enough. As Bobby’s best friend, she knew he’d been treated to plenty of Bobby’s complaining about her over the years, how she wasn’t supporting him, how she was too concerned about money. Once he’d actually pulled her aside and tried to play marriage counselor, by telling her she had a responsibility to be there for Bobby. She hadn’t been in the mood to explain Bobby’s latest bright idea, and hadn’t really thought it was any of his business, so her lack of cooperation had likely only lowered his opinion of her. He’d been cold enough toward her when it seemed like she wasn’t getting along with Bobby. Unsurprisingly, now that it seemed that she’d killed him, Travis was hellbent on making her pay.

As they approached, she saw that the men’s interest wasn’t in her, but in the man standing at her side, and she knew immediately why they’d come. Her interaction with Matt in town, and the fact that she’d driven off with him, hadn’t gone unnoticed. The sheriff no doubt wanted to know who Matt was—and what he was doing with Elena.

For a second, she felt a flicker of apprehension. She hadn’t thought about the outside impact of Matt’s presence here. If their prior relationship came out, the fact that he’d come back to town so soon after Bobby’s death could look very bad—for both of them.

Before she could begin to sort through the ramifications and how to deal with the issue, the men had reached the house. “Afternoon, Elena,” Walt said with a pleasantness that couldn’t have been more fake.

She made the immediate decision to go on the offensive. Once again, she couldn’t afford to look the slightest bit weak or guilty. “Good afternoon, Sheriff. Travis,” she said, nodding to the younger man in turn. She noticed he didn’t bother looking at her, his attention fixed on Matt, eyes narrowed with clear suspicion. “I’m glad to see you both.”

The briefest flash of surprise crossed across Walt’s face. “Oh, you are, are you?”

“Of course. You’re here about my truck, right?”

“What about it?”

“Oh, I thought you might be here because someone slashed my tires when I was in town a little while ago.”

The sheriff’s eyebrows shot sky high. “That’s a pretty serious allegation, Elena. You have any proof?”

“Two tires don’t just go flat for no reason.”

Walt shrugged one shoulder. “Stranger things have happened.”

“But I’m sure you’ll investigate to find out what really happened, won’t you, Sheriff?”

“I’m a little busy trying to solve Bobby’s murder at the moment to waste time on a minor nuisance matter. I’m sure that’s where you’d prefer my resources to be fo-cused—catching your husband’s killer, isn’t it, Elena?”

His cloying tone made it sound like he’d caught her in some kind of trap. She simply stared back at him, unyielding. “Of course. I’d like nothing more than for you to catch the actual person responsible for killing Bobby.”

Walt’s expression turned sardonic, clearly saying he saw what she was implying and he wasn’t fooled by her in the least. But when he spoke what he said was, “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend, Elena?”

She almost started. For a moment, she’d actually managed to forget Matt was even there.

Before she could figure out how to explain Matt’s presence and who he was, Matt answered first.

“Mrs. Weston just hired me to help her out around here.”

It was all Elena could do not to snap her head toward him in surprise. Instead, she did her best not to let her reaction show, not wanting to tip off the policemen that it was a lie when that would only look more suspicious.

It turned out she didn’t need to worry. Walt and Travis never took their eyes off Matt, Walt’s expression becoming contemplative, Travis’s plainly hostile.