The Wrangler And The Runaway Mom

THE WITNESS

When a terrified Dr. Maggie Rawlings saw her ex-husband killed, she feared her little boy might be next. They started running, with every man a potential threat—even if her son was constantly in search of a daddy. And a cowboy. And he found both in Colt McKendrick…

FBI agent-disguised-as-rodeo-cowboy Colt knew the drill: protect Maggie and her son, and then, when the danger passed, move on. But with each trusting look from the adorable little boy—not to mention each sizzling moment spent with Maggie—Colt was finding a hands-off policy harder and harder to live by…

Previously published.

“My feelings for you are not in the least brotherly, Maggie.

“I would have thought that kiss in your trailer earlier proved that.”

At that reminder, the air seemed to vibrate suddenly with charged tension. Maggie cleared her throat. “I, ah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”

“What about it?” Colt asked.

“Well, obviously, it was a—mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“Of course,” Maggie answered. “It was a chemical reaction...stimulated by the fact that we were in such close proximity, alone there in the trailer.”

“Well, Doc, I hate to point this out, but we’re in even closer proximity right now. And we’re alone. Feeling any chemical reactions?”

“No,” Maggie answered, as primly as a schoolmarm. “It must have been a...one-time occurrence, and now it’s completely out of our systems.”

This time Colt laughed. “A chemical reaction. Right. You keep telling yourself that, Doc. Maybe sooner or later you’ll even believe it.”

The Wrangler and the Runaway Mom

RaeAnne Thayne

www.millsandboon.co.uk

RAEANNE THAYNE

lives in a crumbling old Victorian in northern Utah with her husband and two young children. She loves being able to write where she is surrounded by rugged mountains and real cowboys.

For Kjersten Thayne,

the best daughter a mother could ask for,

and for Avery Thayne, who deserves coauthor status,

since he insisted on sitting on his mother’s lap

through nearly every page.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Copyright

Prologue

Margaret Prescott choked back a scream and watched her husband topple to the thick carpet of his office like a marionette whose strings had been severed. Only the blood seeping from the neat round hole in the middle of his forehead shattered the illusion.

The two figures standing over the crumpled form of the man she’d once thought she loved didn’t even turn in her direction. Michael’s heavy oak washroom door, ajar just enough to allow her a distorted view into the room, must have muffled the tiny cry that rasped from her throat.

“What the hell you do that for, Carlo?” The tall one with the droopy eyes and beak of a nose that gave him a morose expression stared at the other man.

Carlo, thin and wiry, with short-cropped hair so blond it was nearly white, lifted a shoulder negligently and slid the sleek chrome revolver inside his tailored suit coat. “I lost my temper. He should never have baited me like that.”

His blue eyes were dead, Maggie thought, fighting to hold on to lucidity through the panic that clawed through her. Cold and flat and dead, like a cobra’s.

“How we supposed to find the merchandise now?” Droopy Man snarled. “What’s DeMarranville gonna say?”

“I imagine he’ll say good riddance.”

“Only problem is, you killed the stupid bastard before he could tell us where he hid the stuff.”

“Ah, but he did tell us.”

“You mean that bit about his wife carrying the secret or whatever the hell he said? That was just bull, to get us off his back.”

“You think so?” Carlo looked impassively at Michael’s body—at the blood that had begun to pool under his head, at the sprawl of lifeless limbs—then back at the other man. “I believe you’re wrong. I think the good lady doctor knows exactly where our merchandise is. I have no doubt she’ll be more than happy to lead us right to it.”

“You’re screwed in the head. Why would she do that?”

“You don’t give me nearly enough credit, Franky.” Carlo’s mouth twisted into a small smile that sent chills rippling down Maggie’s spine. “I’ve been told my powers of persuasion are quite extraordinary.”

Without a backward look at the man whose life he’d just taken, he turned and walked out of Michael’s office.

When the other man followed him, Maggie swayed in the washroom, her breathing coming shallow and fast. Several moments passed before she worked up the courage to push the door open.

Michael’s vacant eyes stared at her from the floor in familiar accusation. As if it were her fault, all of it. If only she had been able to call for help somehow when she had heard them all come into the office. If only she’d been able to provide a distraction by coming out instead of choosing to remain in the washroom when she heard their raised voices and accusations against Michael.

If only she had been smarter or faster or stronger.

No. She jerked her head up. Unlike her failure of a marriage, she had nothing to do with any of this. It was just another one of Michael’s dirty little secrets.

Embezzlement, they’d said. The boss frowns on his people stealing from him. But turn over the stuff and he’ll go easy on you.

They’d lied. She stared at Michael’s body and felt the panic bubble up inside her again. She couldn’t have stopped this. If she had somehow made her presence known tonight, she had no doubts she would be just as dead as Michael. And then where would Nicky be?

Nicky! She had to get to Nicky before they did. Somehow she had no doubt Carlo-of-the-dead-eyes would have no compunction about hurting her child to force her cooperation, to compel her to lead them to these mysterious books.

What irony, that she’d come to Michael’s office concerned for her son’s emotional well-being only to find his physical safety now jeopardized. She had planned to plead with him to call off his lawyer, the nasty little man who had informed her this afternoon that Michael planned to seek custody of Nicky in the divorce.

Michael didn’t want Nicky. Hadn’t wanted Nicky, she corrected herself, on the verge of hysteria. He barely acknowledged his son’s existence unless it was to snap at him for some infraction. He only wanted custody to hurt her for leaving him—for finally seeing the gaping cracks in their facade of a marriage, the lies and the infidelities—by taking away the one thing that mattered to her.

And now it looked like he was reaching out even after death to destroy the life she had begun to rebuild so carefully.

She wouldn’t let him! She could run away, take Nicky somewhere safe, where the ugliness of his father’s life couldn’t hurt him.

She fumbled with the door handle and rushed out into the hall, then punched the elevator button.

Nicky loved the two elevators up to his father’s eighthfloor office in one of San Francisco’s graceful older buildings. When they used to visit Michael here, back when she was still pretending they could salvage their marriage, Nicky would beg to ride them again and again until he was dizzy with it.

Now, as she waited, the creaky elevators seemed to move with excruciating slowness. She felt as if each moment lasted aeons until finally one jolted open and she stumbled inside.

The other elevator suddenly pinged before the ponderous doors could creep shut, and her pulse scrambled frantically. Had they somehow discovered she was here? Were they returning to finish off any witnesses? Maggie shrank into the corner near the buttons and willed the doors to close.

She held her breath, waiting for them to spot her, for the gunfire that would end her life. The only sound, though, was heavy footsteps as two unfamiliar men in dark suits hurried toward Michael’s office.

“I know she’s in here somewhere. I saw her go in,” she heard one of them say. “She can’t have gone far.”

“Dammit. We have to find her,” the older one said, an angry frown slashing across his distinguished face. “We can’t have her running around loose with what she knows. She’s a loose end, Dunbar, and you know how much I hate loose ends.”

The rest of what he said was lost as the doors finally slid shut with a quiet whoosh. The car lurched into motion, carrying her away from the immediate danger.

Suddenly exhausted, wrung out from the aftermath of the adrenaline overload, she rested her forehead against the metal of the elevator door. It was as cold as death against her skin, and Maggie wondered if she would ever feel warm again.

Chapter 1

“Go to hell, Beckstead,” Colt McKendrick growled into the phone. “I’m on vacation. I have six weeks coming to me and I’m not about to let you screw me out of it this time. Joe, hand me that hoof pick, will you?”

His foreman—and closest friend—obeyed with a knowing smirk. “When are you leaving this time?” Joe Redhawk asked. Colt glared and chose to ignore him.

“Sane people don’t take vacations wading around in cow manure and playing around with hoof picks, whatever those nasty-sounding things might be,” Special Agent in Charge Lane Beckstead responded on the phone.

Cradling the cellular phone in the crook of his shoulder, he worked the pick to pry a rock out of Scout’s front left shoe. He grunted in frustration as his bandaged hand slipped on the hoof pick. It had been two weeks since he was injured during an arrest, and still the damn thing was about as useful as teats on a bull.

“If I were sane,” he muttered, tightening his grip despite the pain, “I wouldn’t be working for the Bureau in the first place—”

“Amen,” Joe piped up.

Again Colt ignored him. “—which means we wouldn’t be having this conversation and I wouldn’t be taking the first vacation I’ve had in eight years. Besides, maybe I like wading through cow manure.”

“Exactly my point. You’re the only person I know who would choose to spend your vacation on a cattle ranch in Montana. What’s the difference between whatever you’re doing there and taking up this little job for me on the rodeo circuit?”

“The difference is, I deserve this vacation. I’ve been on the Spider Militia case for nearly a year. I’m tired, Lane, and the last time I spent longer than a weekend at my ranch was two directors ago.”

Tired? That was an understatement if he ever heard one. Burned out, more like. Sick of the lying and the intrigues and the bureaucracy. Eleven months of working to infiltrate a hate group in the Northwest had left him exhausted, disillusioned about whatever shreds of humanity might be left in the world.

He needed the peace he found only here at the ranch where he had been raised, where he had the clean, pure scent of pine surrounding him instead of the stink of hatred and violence, and only a few ghosts to disturb his sleep instead of the legion that haunted him in the field.

“Twenty bucks says you’re not going to be getting your vacation,” Joe murmured.

“McKendrick,” Beckstead replied, “you’re the only agent in the Bureau who knows the business end of a cow from a rump roast. We need you on this case. Now we’ve traced our witness, a Dr. Margaret Prescott, to a rodeo in Durango last week. She’s using the alias Maggie Rawlings and has taken a job providing medical care to injured performers on the rodeo circuit. We know where she is and where she’s going but we don’t have any way to get an agent close to her.”

The “royal we” the FBI was so fond of grated on his nerves, as it always did. Damn, he was tired of it all. Colt let Scout’s foreleg drop to the ground and gave him a slap that sent the gelding cantering off through the corral, his newly cleaned hooves kicking up little clouds of dust.

He pinched at the headache beginning to brew between his eyes. “And you think I could manage to get close to this Maggie Rawlings?”

“You have to admit, you’re the logical choice. Besides the fact that you’re a damn good agent, you’re the only cowboy we’ve got. The lone ranger, so to speak. You have any idea how hard it is to find another special agent who’s ever even seen a rodeo, much less competed in one?”

Colt snorted. “I rodeoed in college. I was twenty-two years old last time I was stupid enough to ride into the ring. Twenty-two and a hell of a lot more reckless.”

“This is a big case, McKendrick. Huge. Michael Prescott embezzled millions from at least two dozen clients over the years. He gambled most of it away but some is still hidden away somewhere, and we owe it to those clients to try to find it, to those people who trusted him to invest their life savings.” He paused, then poured it on. “To those little old ladies who lost everything.”

“Like the little old ladies who whacked him?” Colt said dryly.

Beckstead gave up the motherhood and apple pie routine. “Okay, so he ran with a bad crowd, too. Look Colt, I won’t lie to you We’re after somebody bigger than our dirty accountant ever dreamed about being. For at least one of his clients, Prescott offered a nice extra service. He prepared a set of phony books for somebody we’ve been after for a long time. Lucky for us, though, we discovered the accountant kept a copy of the real records. Insurance, maybe, or extortion. Who knows. We think it’s on a computer disk in the same place he hid the money. We figure if we can find it, we can nail his client.”

Colt didn’t want to be curious. If not for this damned inquisitiveness, he never would have joined the Bureau in the first place, after his stint as an MP in the Marines, back when he had nowhere else to go.

“How big?” he finally said. “Who was Prescott in with?”

“Big. Damian DeMarranville.”

The string of epithets Colt bit out at the name didn’t seem to surprise his boss. “Yeah, that’s what I figured you’d say,” Beckstead drawled. “You and DeMarranville go way back, don’t you?”

“Far enough.” Colt thought of lost innocence and broken trust. The face of his former partner formed in his mind, and he frowned. The decent, decorated agent who had trained him had just been a front; he’d been hiding insides as rotten and worm eaten as a whole tree full of bad apples.

“Prescott was dumb enough to think he could steal from the big dog himself and get away with it,” Beckstead went on. “Skim a little off the top and think nobody will notice.”

He jerked his mind from the past. “Stupid and slimy. A bad combination.”

“A deadly combination.”

Colt leaned on the split-rail fence and stared at the hard blue of the Montana sky, at a pair of magpies darting across the air, at the mountains bursting with color. He wanted to stay right here, dammit. Just for a little while, until the ghosts became too loud.

But he wanted DeMarranville more.

“How does the wife fit in?” he finally asked.

“We’re not sure, other than that she witnessed the hit by two of DeMarranville’s associates. Carlo Santori and Franky Kostas. You know either of them?”

“Yeah. Not the nicest crowd. Is she clean?”

“We don’t know. I doubt anybody could be married to Prescott for six years and keep out of his business, but you never know. That’s what we want you to figure out.”

Nobody was innocent. If he’d learned one indisputable lesson in the last ten years, it was that.

“Why don’t you just haul her in for questioning?”

Beckstead paused. “Frankly, she’s safer where she’s at.”

“If the Bureau can find her, DeMarranville sure as hell can. Seems to be the smartest thing would be to put her into protective custody.”

“It’s not that easy right now.”

The SAC was hedging. Colt had worked with him long enough to read the signs. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“We think Damian still has contacts on the inside. How else could he have escaped prosecution all these years?”

He’d often thought the same thing. DeMarranville seemed to know every move the Bureau planned against him long before they made it. It was one of the most frustrating things about him.

“You’d be working deep undercover so we can keep her whereabouts a secret,” Beckstead went on. “Only Dunbar and I would know you’re not just taking an extended vacation.”

“Who would be my contact?”

“Does that mean you’ll do it?” Beckstead didn’t bother to conceal his satisfaction. Like a fisherman who knew he’d just hooked his sucker, Colt thought. The analogy was an apt one. He couldn’t think of any other bait but DeMarranville enticing enough to make him give up the chance to spend time on his ranch in exchange for a summer wearing his rear out traveling to every two-bit town with a rodeo across the West.

He gave the mountains one more regretful look then pinched at the bridge of his nose again. “Looks like I don’t have much of a choice.”

He hung up the phone and glared at Joe Redhawk. “Don’t say a word. Not one damn word.”

“Who me?” the Shoshone’s mouth twisted into the closest he ever came to a grin. “Looks like you owe me twenty bucks, brother.”

* * *

“You got another one comin’ in. Busted-up shoulder.”

At the shout from the doorway, Maggie jumped at least a foot. The bandage roll in her hand flew across the little trailer, unraveling into a gauzy mess as it sailed into the corner behind the examination table.

“Sorry, hon.” Peg’s eyes shimmered with sympathy inside their fringe of thick black mascara. “I keep forgettin’ I’m not supposed to sneak up on you that way.”

Maggie fought to control her breathing, the panic that spurted out of nowhere these days at loud noises or sudden movements. Would she ever stop jumping at shadows or would the fear always be lurking there, just under her skin?

She forced a smile that quickly turned genuine as she caught sight of Peg’s ensemble for the evening—skintight hot pink jeans with a glittery western-cut shirt and matching pink tooled-leather cowboy boots. With her bleached hair and her smile as big as Texas, Peg looked like an older, lessfavorably endowed Dolly Parton.

“It’s not your fault. I’m just a little jumpy tonight.” She retrieved the now-contaminated bandage roll from the floor and tossed it in the garbage. “Too much caffeine on the road this afternoon, I think.”

“If you say so, darlin’.”

She looked away from Peg’s worried frown. She knew her father’s second wife—and widow—was brimming with curiosity about why she had abandoned her new apartment and her job at the clinic so soon after Michael’s death. But to her relief, Peg hadn’t pushed for an explanation, either when a desperate Maggie called her in the middle of the night three weeks earlier or in the intervening time they had traveled the rodeo circuit together.

Instead of answering the unspoken questions, Maggie busied herself gathering the supplies she would need to treat a cowboy with a bum shoulder.

“How’s Nicholas?”

“Last I checked, he was runnin’ Cheyenne ragged, and that granddaughter of mine was lovin’ every minute of it.”

“She’s the best baby-sitter that rascal has ever had. I don’t know what we would have done without the two of you.”

“You know I’d do anythin’ for you, darlin’. And not just for your daddy’s sake, either. God rest him.”

The two wives of Billy Joe Rawlings couldn’t have been more different, Maggie thought, not for the first time. Her mother had been pearls and imported lace. A cultured debutante, the worst possible choice of wife for a cowboy trying to be a rodeo star. Helen had run off with Billy Joe when she was seventeen, more to spite her parents than for any grand passion, and had spent the rest of her life bitterly regretting it.

It had been a disastrous marriage, and their divorce when Maggie was three had been a relief to everyone involved.

Peg, on the other hand, had been perfect for her father. Even though she seemed flighty, with her flamboyant wardrobe and her ever-changing hair colors and her gaudy jewelry, Peg was the most grounded person Maggie knew. She had turned Billy Joe’s dream of being a star into something more realistic, the creation of a world-class rodeo stock company that provided animals to events across the West

Peg was warmhearted and generous and had been more of a mother to Maggie in the six weeks each year she spent with her father than Helen had ever been.

Feeling guilty for the thought, she jerked her mind back to her job. “So where’s my patient?”

“He should be comin’ anytime now. Wouldn’t let ’em bring him in on the stretcher. You’d have thought the damn thing was a coffin the way he carried on.”

She sighed. “There’s nothing like a stubborn cowboy.”

“Nothin’ like a gorgeous one, either, and I’m telling you, this one’s a Grade A prime cut. Haven’t seen him around before and, believe me, I never forget a good-lookin’ man. I’d let this one leave his boots under my bed anytime.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

At the slow drawl, Maggie turned to find a dusty, hatless man filling the doorway, his arm pressed across his stomach at an awkward angle. Peg hadn’t exaggerated about his looks. The contrast of black hair and eyes as blue as a mountain lake was arresting, as was the cowboy’s firm jaw and thick, cry-on-me shoulders.

If she were the sort of woman who went weak-kneed over the rugged Marlboro Man type, she would have collapsed into a boneless heap on the floor by now.

Lucky for her, she wasn’t that sort of woman.

Peg winked at the cowboy. “You ever get lonely,” she said on her way out of the trailer, “mine’s the green-andwhite rig with Rawlings Stock written on it in big pink letters.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He managed a grin but Maggie recognized the lines of pain slashing the edges of the stranger’s mouth.

“If you’ll climb up here, I can take a look at that shoulder.” She gestured to the examination table.

“It’s just dislocated. You only need to pop it in and then I can be on my way.”

“Why don’t you let me make my own diagnosis?”

He shrugged and slid a Wrangler-covered hip to the table. “Whatever you say, Doc.”

She carefully unbuttoned his colorful cotton shirt then slid his arm out of the sleeve. “I’m afraid I haven’t been paying attention to the announcer. What event were you riding? It’s too early in the evening for the bull riders, which is where I get most of my business. Does that make you a bronc buster, then?”

He gave a gruff laugh. “Bronc buster? Do I look crazy to you?”

She glanced at him under her eyelashes, then instantly wished she hadn’t. He looked tough as hardened steel, with that tanned skin stretching taut over hard muscle.

She had patched up dozens of cowboys since she’d been hired. Broken wrists, pulled muscles, cuts and bruises mostly. None of the wounded glory boys had made her feel as odd as this one did—jittery, as if she really had overdosed on caffeine.