Cowboy to the Rescue (10 page)

This morning, as Christina waited for him to join her on the front porch, the temperature hovered near eighty degrees. Cool shorts and a halter top would have felt good, but she'd decided a simple cotton sheath splashed with flowers in pale yellow and lime green would be more appropriate.

Since they'd be spending most of the day on the coast, she'd wondered if Lex would forgo his boots and jeans and hat, but when he finally appeared, she saw that the only concession he'd made was a white polo shirt. Even so, he looked rakishly handsome as he took his place behind the wheel of his personal truck.

Christina wasn't sure if the accelerated beat of her heart was due to his close presence or the fact that the two of them were headed out on an unpredictable journey.

“You haven't forgotten anything, have you?” he asked as they passed under the huge entrance of the ranch yard.

She patted a small briefcase lying on the console between them. “Addresses and photos are all here. And I've already called ahead and scheduled the boat charter. They'll take us out at eleven. Or me out, if you prefer to stay ashore.”

He glanced knowingly over at her. “I'm not about to let you go out alone on a boat with a group of strange men. Who knows what could happen.”

His remark surprised her. She'd never expected him to want to protect her. Her parents certainly had never sheltered her. And even Mike, a veteran police officer, had never been particularly protective of her. He'd always believed she was capable of taking care of herself. And she liked to believe she was. Still, it was sweetly old-fashioned to have Lex wanting to be her defender.

“If I understood it right,” she told him, “there'll only be one man accompanying me on the boat.”

“Then I'm sure as hell going,” he said sharply. “You can't trust anyone nowadays.”

“I'm glad you're going,” she admitted, then gave him a playful smile. “But who's going to be my bodyguard when I go back to work in San Antonio?”

Even though she'd been teasing, he didn't look as though he was when he said, “Maybe you should just stay, instead.”

A
n hour and a half later, the truck was climbing up the huge causeway spanning the ship channel on the north side of the city. To the left of them, the sun sparkled on Corpus Christi Bay and the docked World War II aircraft carrier, the USS
Lexington
, which now served as a museum. To their right, shipping barges chugged to and from loading docks, while directly in front of them, the skyline of the city carved niches from the green-blue ocean.

Lex exited onto Ocean Drive, and in a few short minutes, they were parked in front of a small, weathered building. The lapped siding looked like it had once been painted coral, but sand, wind and salt had since buffed it to a puny pink. Above the wooden screen door, a creaky sign read Ray's Bait.

As they walked across the small parking lot graveled with crushed oyster shells, Lex glanced doubtfully over at her. “I hate to be a pessimist, Christina, but this seems like a long shot.”

“In my profession, long shots are things I often have to take. And when I sometimes win, the payoff is usually more than I ever expected.”

He grunted. “I've never been much of a gambler.”

“You put your fortune in livestock, which could fall over dead without warning or lose their value according to the whims of the market. I'd call that big-time gambling.”

“You might think so,” he said, with a vague smile. “It's just a way of life for me.”

By now they'd reached the entrance to the building. Lex opened the screen door and allowed Christina to step through before he followed. Inside, the small interior was dim and smelled of fish, beer and burned coffee. To the immediate right, a long counter was equipped with a cash register and lined with jars of fishing lures and jigs. To the left, a separate room was outfitted with concrete tanks filled with bubbling water.

At the moment, a plump blond woman in her early twenties was dipping out tiny shad and placing the bait in a customer's foam bucket.

Christina and Lex waited to one side until she'd finished the task and taken the other man's money. Once he'd ambled out the door, Christina stepped up to the counter, while Lex hung back just behind her shoulder.

“Can I help y'all?” the young woman asked.

The young woman was chewing gum, and her long bangs were battling with her eyelashes for hanging space.

Clearing her throat, Christina said, “Uh, yes. We're looking for Ray Pena. Is he around?”

The young woman's brown eyes darted suspiciously from Christina to Lex and back again. “The owner? He's not here today. He had to go down to Falfurrias. Somethin' to do with his sister.” She chewed on her bottom lip. “Is he in trouble?”

“Does trouble commonly follow Mr. Pena around?” Lex asked dryly.

The blonde shook her head. “No. But you two smell like cops to me. Sorta look like it, too.”

Christina quickly interjected, “We're nothing of the sort. We're simply looking for some information. Will Mr. Pena be back tomorrow?”

“Said he would. Guess you could try again in the mornin'.”

“We'll do that,” Christina told her. “And thank you, Miss—”

“Sally. Sally Donner.”

Christina smiled and reached to shake the woman's hand. “Thank you, Sally. It was nice meeting you.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Christina and Lex walked outside, pausing several steps away from the open entrance to the bait house.

“What are we going to do now?” Lex asked. “I don't have time to drive down here tomorrow morning. Matt is expecting me to go with him to auction tomorrow afternoon.”

She fished her sunglasses out of her purse and jammed them on her face. “If we stay here tonight and talk to Mr. Pena in the morning, you'll still have time to make the trip with your cousin.”

Lex stared at her. “Stay here in Corpus tonight?”

“Do you have a better idea? Or would you rather drive down here again next week?”

He considered her questions for a moment, and then suddenly a grin spread across his face. “What the hell. I haven't stayed on the beach in a long time. We can have red snapper for supper tonight or shrimp or whatever your heart desires.”

Relieved that he was being so compliant about it all, she felt her spirits lift. “What about shell searching? I love doing that.”

He curled his arm around her waist and urged her toward the truck. “Then we'll find a whole load of them for you to take back to the ranch,” he promised.

On down the bay-side street, they found a little coffee shack with outside tables, where they drank coffee and shared a danish before driving to the charter-boat place. Business there was hopping, but the personnel quickly waited on them, and in a few minutes' time, they were on board a twenty-foot cruiser with inboard motors and a covered deck.

The captain was Eric, a young man in his late twenties with jet-black hair and bronze skin. He was good-looking in a beachcomber sort of way, and in Lex's opinion, he paid entirely too much attention to Christina. But then, Lex could hardly blame the man. She was like a wild rose with her red hair flying in the wind and her blue eyes sparkling brighter than the sea itself.

Since the night of the roundup, he'd hardly been able to think of anything but her. And though he knew he was getting far too attached to her, he couldn't seem to do a damned thing to stop it. The more time he spent with her, the more he wanted.

“Can you tell us how far you think it is to the coordinates I gave you?” Christina asked Eric once they'd pulled away from the dock and headed out in the bay.

Eric answered with a pleasant smile. “Not exactly. Maybe ten, fifteen miles.”

“That far?” Lex asked from a spot beneath the canopy, where he was sitting next to Christina.

“I can't be sure,” Eric answered. “But I'm guessing it will be that distance.”

The young captain turned his attention back to maneuvering the boat. Lex looked skeptically over at Christina. “I used to come here with Dad to fish, and I'm a bit familiar with the area. If we go that far, we'll be close to the islands.”

“You're talking about Mustang and Padre?”

He nodded. “But that wouldn't make sense. If Dad fell off the boat while closer to the islands than to Corpus, then why would they bring him all the way back here for medical attention?”

For the first time since she'd met Lex, she saw suspicion flicker in his eyes, and she understood the next hour was going to be hard on him. Laying a hand over his, she said, “Let's wait and see where we are when we get there.”

For the first half of the trip, the waters were full of all sorts of sailing vessels. Everything from small catamarans to commercial-sized shrimp boats to massive freighter ships could be seen bobbing atop the choppy water. But as they headed farther out to sea, only the larger vessels were visible, and they were few and far between.

Lex raised his voice to speak to the captain. “Eric, is this area normally fished?”

The young man glanced around at the open waters before looking over his shoulder at his passengers. “It depends on the time of the year and how the fish are running. Today is a slow day, but that's probably because it's Sunday morning.”

Lex's attention turned to Christina, who'd been listening intently. “I suppose on a Saturday it wouldn't have been odd for my dad and his friends to be fishing this area.”

Frowning, Christina nodded. “I'm still anxious to see where we'll be when we reach the right coordinates.”

“So am I,” Lex grimly agreed.

As the boat plowed forward into gulf waters, the wind grew stiffer, making their ride extremely rough. With his arm around Christina's shoulders, Lex kept her firmly by his side on the padded bench seat.

It was a relief when the captain finally eased off the throttle. “We're almost on top of the spot. I'll let down an anchor so you can have a better look around.”

Lex was expecting to see nothing more than water. Instead, it was a shock to see land lying in front of them and less than a minute or two away.

As he and Christina rose to their feet, she asked the captain, “What's that island to the south of us?”

“That's Mustang Island. Port Aransas is about five miles to the east of us.”

Lex felt as though someone had whacked the air from his lungs, and he found himself gripping Christina's hand. “Five miles, Christina! Five miles from land. Why didn't they go there instead of turning around and heading back to Corpus? It doesn't make sense! Why didn't the police question them about this?”

“They did. It's in the report. But apparently, the police decided the men had been too shaken to make clearheaded choices.”

Lex couldn't stop a frustrated groan from rumbling up from his chest. “That's damned idiotic!”

“People do strange things when they're in shock, Lex.” She turned her attention back to the captain. “Do you know if there are any medical services on the island? Or law officers?”

“Yeah, sure,” Eric answered. “It's a state park. They have people around to take care of medical emergencies and other problems.”

Lex could see the questions running through Christina's mind were the same as the ones running through his.

“Twelve years is a long time. Maybe the islands didn't have any of those services back then,” he suggested. Yet even as he said the words, Lex knew it was a far-fetched notion. It was clear that Port Aransas and medical help would have been much closer for his father than the long trip back to Corpus.

“That's something I definitely intend to research,” she told him.

After a couple more minutes, Christina informed Eric that they'd seen enough, and the young captain headed the cruiser back toward the mainland. If anything, the waters had gotten rougher during their excursion, forcing her to hold on tightly to Lex's arm to keep her body from being tossed to the deck.

By the time they reached Corpus, a gray line of squall clouds had spread across the city. The two of them quickly climbed into Lex's truck and were on the verge of leaving the charter-boat service when a deluge, complete with ragged streaks of lightning bolting all the way to the ground, hit the parking lot.

“I don't see any point in getting out on the street in this stuff,” Lex said. He started the engine and turned the wipers on high, but the swipes didn't come close to clearing the windshield of the tropical downpour. “The rain will probably let up in a few minutes.”

“Okay by me,” she said. “Looks like we got back just in time. Otherwise, we could have been toasted by lightning.”

“Yeah, I don't know which is worse, being caught out on the water during a storm or caught on a horse. They both draw electricity.” He turned on the air conditioner to stir the stifling air inside the vehicle. “A few years ago, we were out on spring roundup when lightning knocked one of the wranglers and his horse to the ground. He wasn't breathing when we reached him. Thankfully, Nicci happened to be riding with us that time, and she performed CPR to revive him. Later, she explained that the jolt had stopped his heart.”

“Did the man have any lasting effects?”

“No. But the horse did. It frazzled his nerves. The slightest bit of sound would make him go crazy. Matt wanted to sell him after that. He feared the animal would end up injuring someone, but Cordero, Matt's brother refused to let that happen. He said all of us, even animals, need time to heal. He took the horse to Louisiana with him, and now he's right as rain.”

“We all need time to heal,” Christina repeated softly. “Yeah. I think your cousin is right about that.” She turned an empathetic expression on him. “I know the trip we just took was hard on you, Lex.”

He reached across the seat and clasped her hand in his. “It wasn't something I'd want to repeat. But I'm glad we went. Seeing that place opened my eyes to a lot of things, Christina. The accident happened closer to landmass than we'd first thought. Still, the men admitted to the police that they were frazzled. And who knows, under that sort of shock I might have used bad judgment, too.”

“Geraldine knew your father inside out, and she had an innate feeling that something was wrong. We just don't know what that something was.”

Christina had hardly gotten the words out when a bolt of lightning struck close behind them. She jerked with fright, and he tightened his fingers around hers. As Lex held on to her hand, he felt something inside him softening, and he ached to simply put his arm around her and nestle her head on his shoulder the way she had when Eduardo had sung about the gypsy Davey. The gentle urge was like nothing he'd felt before and it filled him with an achingly sweet wonder.

Thankfully, before he could allow himself to get too sentimental, the rain let up as abruptly as it had started. He used this as an excuse to drop her hand and reach for the gearshift.

“Let's go get a hotel room,” he said in a strained, husky voice.

As he steered the truck onto the street, Christina reached over and touched his arm. “Uh, Lex—I'd better say something right now.”