Cowboy with a Cause (19 page)

Pride surged up inside him as he thought about her slow, painful trek to the tractor. She was the strongest woman he’d ever met, and no matter how the two of them ended up, he would always be proud that he had known her, that he had loved her.

It didn’t take long for Cameron and several of the other deputies to arrive. As they all came through the emergency room door, Adam was pleased to see Jim among the group.

“How is she?” Cameron asked worriedly as the rest of the men crowded around Adam.

It didn’t take much for Adam to will tears to his eyes. “The doctor doesn’t know if she’s going to make it or not. She was beaten so badly.” Adam gazed at Jim as he spoke the last words, and didn’t miss the confusion that darkened the man’s eyes.

Adam choked back a sob. “No matter what happens, I know she’d want me to thank all of you for your efforts.” He shook Cameron’s hand and then moved to Ben Temple and shook his, as well. When he reached Jim, he clapped him on the back, then stepped back and sucker punched him in the nose.

Adam felt the satisfying crunch of cartilage as Jim yelped, fell backward to the floor and raised a hand to his blood-pumping nose.

“Hey!” Cameron yelled and stepped between the two.

“She wasn’t unconscious,” Adam said quickly. “She told me everything.” He looked at Jim’s bloody face as the man scrambled to his feet. “She told me how you took her out of that alley and drove her to your land, then stomped on her ankle to assure that she couldn’t move. But she did move, you bastard. She managed to crawl to your tractor.”

Jim took a step backward, his gaze darting to the outside door, but Ben grabbed his arm so any escape would be difficult.

“Jim, what in the hell have you done?” Cameron asked as he pulled his cuffs from his belt.

Adam thought Jim intended to deny it all, but suddenly his features crumpled into themselves as he looked around at the men who were his coworkers. “She was my soul mate. We were supposed to build a life together but she left me to go dance in New York. She had to pay for that. Don’t you see? She left me broken and she had to pay.”

Cameron cuffed him and then handed him over to Ben. “Get him the hell out of here,” he said with disgust. “Lock him up and we’ll see if the next soul mate he finds is a prison cell mate.”

As Ben led Jim away, Cameron turned back to Adam. “So how is she really?”

“She went directly into surgery. He did a number on her ankle and broke it. Other than that, she’s remarkably fine. She’s beautiful and strong.... She’s amazing.”

“You probably saved her life by thinking of Jim,” Cameron said.

“No.” Adam shook his head firmly. “She saved her own life.” Once again pride buoyed up inside him. Melanie didn’t need him; she would do fine on her own. He just wished she wanted him in her life as much as he wanted her.

He and Cameron sat in chairs as Melanie was in surgery. Adam told the sheriff everything Melanie had related to him on the drive to the hospital.

“According to Melanie their relationship was all in his mind. They’d dated a couple of times, casual dates, but he fantasized an entire future with her and was enraged when she wasn’t a part of it,” Adam explained.

Cameron shook his head. “He was right under my nose. Why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t I even think about it? He was sick with his rage and I don’t know why I didn’t even see a hint of it.”

“Those were the same kinds of questions I asked myself when Sam was arrested,” Adam replied. “I thought I’d missed so many clues, but Sam hid his rage well, just like Jim did.” He tried to stay focused on the conversation, but his thoughts were on Melanie.

Hopefully the surgeon would be able to fix whatever damage she’d sustained. He knew she’d depended on her one good foot to maneuver as well as she did around her house.

“Looks like I’m going to be hunting for a new deputy,” Cameron said, pulling Adam’s attention back to the conversation. “When this investigation is all over and done, come talk to me and we’ll see what happens.”

“Thanks,” Adam replied. “I’ll do that.”

Minutes later he was alone in the waiting room. Cameron had headed back to the sheriff’s office to interrogate Jim and all the other deputies had left, as well, to collect whatever they could to build a solid case against one of their own.

It was an hour later when Dr. Rice, the surgeon, came out to greet him. Adam jumped to his feet, instantly assured by the smile on the older man’s face.

“We’ve patched her up. She took a couple of stitches on both knees and the ankle had to be reset and she’s now sporting a couple of pins to help the ankle bone grow back properly, but she’ll be fine. She’s a tough one.”

“Can I see her?” Adam asked, needing to check for himself that she was truly okay.

“We’ve just moved her to room fifteen. She’s still pretty groggy, but you can go on in.”

Adam didn’t wait to hear anything else. He half ran down the hallway to room fifteen, which was semidark with just a small light glowing upward over the bed.

Her eyes were closed and she looked tiny and fragile, but he knew that was a false appearance. He knew the strength of will she had inside her and it awed him.

He slipped into the chair next to her bed and fought the impulse to lean forward and take one of her slender, graceful hands in his. It wasn’t his place to hold her hand. He was simply her boarder—the cowboy renting rooms upstairs—and that was it.

Chapter 18

M
elanie awoke to the quiet of the hospital around her and she knew it must be the middle of the night. Her first realization was that she must still be drugged, because she felt no real pain anywhere in her body. Her second realization was that Adam was slumped down in a chair next to her bed, a faint snoring coming from him.

Her heart swelled with emotion. How had he managed to find her? He’d appeared like a knight in shining armor in the darkness of the night.

She closed her eyes and thought of that single moment when she’d finally reached the tractor seat, twisted the key, and nothing had happened. She had cried tears of fear, of frustration and exhaustion, and then she’d realized she needed to push in the clutch for the engine to start.

The foot that needed to push the clutch in was the one that Jim had stomped on. She managed to get her foot on the clutch and knew she’d probably only have one shot at pressing down before the pain would prove too much.

She’d screamed as she pressed in the clutch and turned the key. When the engine turned over, she used the hand throttle to keep it running as she fought to keep herself from fainting.

The tractor had been in first gear, moving at a snail’s pace, but she knew there was no way she could press the clutch in again to change gears.

And then Adam had appeared. Her heart, her soul, he’d been there to save her. She opened her eyes once again and found herself staring into the blue depths of his.

“Hi,” he said. “How are you feeling?” He leaned forward, as if needing to get closer to her.

“A little woozy. Was my ankle broken?”

He nodded. “You’re now sporting some metal in that ankle and a brand-new cast. You also have a couple of stitches in your knees.”

“And Jim?”

“Is in jail.” He offered her one of his slow, sexy smiles. “Unfortunately he had an accident with my fist and suffered a broken nose just before he was arrested.”

“Thank you,” she said simply.

“Not a problem. I only wish I could have done more.”

Tears suddenly burned in her eyes. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t shown up when you did.”

He leaned forward even more and took her hand in his. “You would have driven that tractor down Main Street directly to the sheriff’s office. You would have been fine if I hadn’t shown up.” Admiration shone in his eyes. “I told you, Melanie, there’s nothing you can’t do except walk.”

Her tears came faster. “I can’t love you,” she blurted out.

He squeezed her hand, a dark sadness gathering in his eyes. “I know you don’t love me, Melanie.”

“But I do love you and I can’t.”

He gazed at her, obviously confused. “Melanie, what are you saying?”

For the first time since she’d awakened, she felt the pain in her ankle, the familiar pain in her leg, but none of it compared to the pain that stabbed at her heart.

“Oh Adam, I’m probably going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.”

“And your point is?” he asked.

She swallowed hard against her tears, knowing she had to stay strong. “I would never want to burden you with me. You deserve so much more than I can be in your life.” With each word her heart broke a little more. “I can’t give you children and then chase after them when they learn to walk.”

“There’s nothing wrong with hiring a nanny for extra help,” he replied calmly.

He always made things sound so easy, she thought. He never saw the obstacles that she did. And yet every obstacle she had seen in the path that they had shared together had magically disappeared with him at her side.

His eyes shone with a light that threatened to steal her breath away. “Melanie, I love you and I have a feeling that rather than you being a burden on me, I’d spend most of my time chasing after you as you went about the business of living. Give us a chance, Melanie. If you love me half as much as I do you, then I know we can make it work.”

She tried to think of all the reasons why it wouldn’t work, but at the same time she realized one of the gifts he’d given her was the knowledge that she could do whatever she set her mind to. She’d done it tonight. Even though she couldn’t walk, she’d managed to escape a man who wanted her dead.

A ray of hope began to shine in her heart, hope that maybe she could be enough for him, that she deserved him. “When you look at me that way, you make me believe that all things are possible,” she said softly.

He stroked his hand tenderly down the side of her face. “Haven’t you heard the old saying that with love all things are possible?”

“Kiss me, Adam, and make me truly believe.”

He stood and leaned over her and placed his lips over hers. The kiss began soft and tender and grew in intensity until it held all the desire, all the love he felt for her. And with the emotions she tasted in his kiss, she believed in him, in their love, but most importantly, she believed in herself.

She could be what he wanted, what he needed. Despite her limitations he loved her and he believed in her. As the kiss ended, he leaned back and eyed her worriedly.

“You aren’t so doped up from your operation that you won’t remember any of this tomorrow, are you?”

She smiled. “I don’t think so, but if I am, I’m sure you’ll remind me. And now I have a question to ask you.”

“What’s that?”

Her smile deepened as joy filled her heart, the kind of joy she once felt while dancing. “How fast can you move your things from upstairs to my room?”

“Consider it already done,” he replied and then took her lips in another kiss, which washed away any doubts that might have lingered in her head.

She could see their future, as bright as stage lights, as full of joy as dancing. It was filled with laughter and the kind of love that would last a lifetime.

* * *

It was almost dawn when Sheriff Cameron Evans left the jail, disgusted by his newest prisoner, exhausted from the long hours and yearning for a couple hours of sleep before he’d have to be at work once again.

He’d grilled Jim for a long time in an attempt to find out if he’d killed the waitresses as well as tried to kill Melanie Brooks, but while Jim had confessed everything he’d done to Melanie, he’d adamantly denied having anything to do with the two murders.

Unfortunately Cameron believed him, and that meant there was still a killer walking the streets of Grady Gulch. Cameron had a sick feeling in his stomach that it wasn’t just a matter of
if
the killer would strike again. It was only a matter of
when.

* * * * *

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Colton Showdown
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Chapter 1

H
e wasn't one of those people who had an obsession about cleanliness. Tate Colton had never had a problem with getting his hands—or any other part of him, for that matter—dirty, if the job required it. That kind of dirt he could put up with and ignore.

But dealing with these subhuman creatures who made their living trafficking in human flesh, in destroying young lives and thinking absolutely nothing of it, was an entirely different matter. It made him want to go back to the hotel room where he was registered under his assumed name and take a shower. A long, scalding-hot shower to wash away their stink.

Once he received the assignment from his supervisor, Hugo Villanueva, he knew that going undercover in order to find and save the Amish young women who had been kidnapped would require him to associate with, in his opinion, the absolute dregs of the earth.

Dregs in expensive suits.

You could dress a monkey up in fine clothes, but he was still a monkey, Tate thought. No amount of expensive clothing could change that, or change the fact that the people he was forced to interact with were lower than scum.

He'd think more about stepping on a beetle than he would about terminating the existence of one of these cockroaches.

To look at the man who had brought him up to this particular hotel suite—his current tour guide to this underworld—someone might have thought the man was a successful businessman or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company instead of the utterly soulless lowlife that he actually was.

Impeccably dressed in what was easily a thousand-dollar suit, his guide to this lurid world of virgins-for-sale smirked at him confidently as he opened the door leading into the suite's bedroom.

“I'm sure we can find something to pique your appetite, Mr. Conrad,” he said.

Tate scowled at the shorter man. “I said no names,” he snapped, mindful of the part he was playing in this surreal drama.

The other man laughed, enjoying what he considered to be the display of ignorance on the part of this new client.

“Nothing to be worried about. What are they going to do?” he asked, gesturing at the bedroom and the young women being held there. Each and every one of them were dressed in identical long, slinky white gowns. “Post it on the internet? None of them even know what the hell the internet
is,
” he stressed, jeering at the young women who were virtually prisoners in this suite. “They all live in the Stone Age. Trust me.” He patted Tate's arm and the latter shrugged him off as if he was flinging off an annoying bug—an act that wasn't lost on the man. “Your name—and your sterling reputation—are both safe here,” he assured Tate.

“C'mon, c'mon,” the man snapped at the young woman he was herding into the room for his “client's” final review. “He hasn't got all night. Or have you?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at Tate, a lecherous grin spread across his angular face. “You know, if you've changed your mind and want to make your purchase now—” He left the sentence open, looking at Tate expectantly.

“I haven't changed my mind,” Tate answered formally. The deal was that he got to see the young women in person in order for him to finalize his choice, and then the negotiations regarding the pending “purchase” would go from there.

Inside, Tate was struggling to contain his fury. The woman he'd “requested,” “Jade,” was looking at him apprehensively like a mistreated animal afraid of being beaten.

Had she been beaten?

Tate looked her over quickly. “What's wrong with her?” he demanded, channeling his anger into the part he was playing—a man who wanted the “goods” he was considering purchasing to be perfect. He was well aware of the fact that the blue-gray eyes continued to watch his every move. Tate swung around to confront the other man. “She looks like she's been manhandled,” he accused angrily.

The man shrugged indifferently. “Don't worry. Nothing happened that would have left a visible mark on her.” His flat, brown eyes raked over Hannah from head to toe, as if to reassure himself that she wasn't displaying any sign of bruising in plain sight. “That's the one rule—other than payment up front—the boss won't tolerate any visible marks left on the merchandise.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Tate saw Hannah flinch at the label the man had contemptuously slapped on her.
Merchandise.

His anger flared.

“She's a person, not merchandise,” Tate retorted, glaring at the guard.

“Hey, at the price you're going to pay, she's anything you want her to be. You want a person? You got it, she's a person.” He turned to look at the redhead he'd led out of the bedroom for Ted Conrad's perusal. “A soft, sweet-smelling person, aren't you, honey?”

Smirking, he slid his hand along her cheek and down the side of her neck.

It was obvious that the guard didn't intend on stopping there.

“I'll thank you to take your hands off her,” Tate warned darkly as the man's hand just grazed the swell of her breasts.

Anger flashed in the other man's eyes, but just as quickly, it subsided. The main reason he'd been told to bring this client here was to get Conrad to make his final decision so that the deal could proceed.

Apparently, it looked as if the deal was about to be sealed. The bottom line was, and had always been, money. So, much as he would have personally rather shot out this client's kneecaps, the guard raised his hands in the air in mock surrender.

“They're off,” he declared dramatically, wiggling his fingers in the air to underscore his point. The smirk on his face deepened as he looked at Hannah knowingly. “So, this is the one you want, eh?”

“She's the one,” Tate replied, his tone scrubbed free of any emotion.

The other man nodded his approval. “Gotta say, you've got good taste. She's a beauty.” With hooded eyes, he looked her over again. It was obvious that he was putting himself in the client's place. “She also looks like she might last you awhile.”

Hannah drew in a breath. They'd given them all some sort of pills, but she had managed to fool her captors into thinking she'd swallowed hers when she hadn't. Each word from the guard felt like a dagger, stabbing into her heart.

Her eyes swept over both men. “Please don't do this,” Hannah pleaded.

It was impossible to know which of them she addressed her plea to.

For his part, though he took care not to show it, Tate felt terrible. He could certainly imagine what was going through Hannah's mind. What Caleb's sister was anticipating. He would have given anything to comfort her, but that wasn't what was going to save her.

In order to accomplish that, he had to be convincing in his role. Which meant that he needed to go on with this charade, continue to maintain this facade so that he could, ultimately, get her and her friends away from these men.

If he went about it the traditional way, pulling out a service weapon and threatening to shoot the other man if he got in his way, Tate knew that he might—or might not—be able to get out of the hotel with Hannah. Most likely, they'd be stopped before they ever made it to the street level.

No, this way was more effective. It just required a great deal of focus and an iron will—and the ability to block out that look in her eyes to keep it from getting to him.

“What did I tell you about opening your mouth?” the guard was demanding angrily. He pulled back his hand, ready to bring it down on her face.

Hannah's alarmed cry tore at his heart.

“If she has one mark on her, the deal's off,” Tate warned him in a voice that was deadly calm, belying the turmoil that lay just beneath.

The guard stopped in midswing. The expression on his face told Tate that the guard was getting fed up with what he undoubtedly considered a high-and-mighty client. The man let his guard down for a second, the sneer on his face telling Tate that he thought he knew his type. Not just knew it, but hated it because he felt inferior to the supposedly rich client.

“You don't buy her, someone else will,” the guard jeered contemptuously. But he dropped his hand to his side nonetheless. “Sit!” he ordered Hannah with less compassion than he would have directed to a pet dog. Only when she complied did the guard finally look his way. “So, I take it we've got a deal. You're interested in acquiring this tasty morsel?”

Tate's expression gave nothing away, including the fact that he could easily vivisect him without so much as a thought. “I might be,” he replied after a beat had gone by.

“Might be,” the man echoed with contempt. He was at the end of his patience. “Look, the man I represent doesn't like having his time wasted. We're alike that way because neither do I.”

Tate slowly walked around the young woman, deliberately pausing and taking a lock of her hair between his fingers. He made a show of sniffing it. “That goes both ways.”

Suspicion immediately entered the guard's eyes. “So what do you have in mind?”

There was no hesitation on Tate's part. “A man doesn't buy an expensive car without taking it on a test run, seeing how it handles,” he pointed out, his voice continuing to be flat.

It killed him to see that Hannah had winced again in response to his words, and he saw real fear in her eyes as she watched him.

How did he get it across to her that he was one of the good guys without blowing his cover?

“Go on, I'm listening,” the other man said.

“I'd like a private session with her, to see how we ‘get along,'” Tate proposed.

“The boss doesn't deal in damaged goods,” the other man snapped.

“I have no intentions of ‘damaging' her. Just ‘sampling' her,” Tate informed him. “There are a lot of ways a man can see if he likes the goods he's getting.”

He was standing in front of Hannah now, looking into her eyes, wishing there was some way to set her mind at ease. His back was to the other man and he smiled at Hannah. The smile was kind, devoid of the lust that had supposedly brought him here. Lowering his head so that his lips were right next to the young woman's ear, he whispered, “Caleb sent me,” before straightening and backing off.

Her eyes widened, but she held her tongue.

Tate said a quick, silent prayer of thanksgiving to whoever it was that watched over law enforcement officers.

“What did you say to her?” the guard demanded. There was no arguing with his tone.

Tate turned to look at him, emulating the latter's previous smug look. “I told her that paradise was at hand.”

As he said that, Tate slanted a look toward Hannah, hoping she would put two and two together and take some comfort in the covert message. He couldn't tell by her expression if she'd believed him—or even understood what he was trying to tell her. He wasn't even sure if she'd heard him say that Caleb had sent him.

Terror, he knew, had a way of blocking out everything else.

The man relaxed a little, then laughed. “Good one,” he pronounced. “That's where she and some of those other girls come from, some backward hole-in-the-wall called Paradise Ridge.”

Tate tried to sound casually uninterested. A man making small talk, involved in a meaningless conversation that would be forgotten before he walked out the door. “Is that where all the girls are from? This Paradise Ridge place you just mentioned?”

His question was met with a nod. “This batch is. They picked up others from—” He abruptly stopped his narrative. His eyebrows narrowed over small, deep-set eyes. “What's with all the questions?”

Tate shrugged. “Just trying to find out how big a selection you've got—in case things don't work out with this one,” he explained.

“Oh, it'll work out,” the man promised. There was no room for argument. He looked at Hannah pointedly. “She knows what'll happen to her if it doesn't. Don't you, honey?” The smile on his lips was cold enough to freeze a bucket of water in the middle of May.

This time, instead of fear rising in Hannah's eyes, Tate thought he saw anger. Anger and frustration because, he guessed, there was nothing she could do right now about the anger she was feeling.

The other man was apparently oblivious to her reaction. It was clear that fear was all he looked for, all he valued.

“Don't want to wind up like your girlfriends now, do you?” he taunted her.

Things suddenly fell into place. The annoying little troll was referring to the two dead girls Emma and Hannah's brother had initially discovered. Solomon Miller, a so-called “repentant” Amish outcast had brought them straight to the bodies, hoping to use the fact that he was informing on his “boss” as a bargaining chip.

Initially part of the group of men involved in the sex trafficking ring, Miller had become the task force's inside man, trading information for the promise of immunity once all the pieces of this case came together and they got enough on the men running this thing to take them to court—and put them away for the next century or so.

If they didn't wait until they discovered exactly who was behind all this and bring him—or her—in, if they just grabbed up the two-bit players they were dealing with in this little drama, the operation would just fold up and relocate someplace else.

And Amish girls would continue disappearing as long as there were sick men to make their abductions a profitable business.

No, they had to catch the mastermind in order for this operation to be deemed a success.

“Don't threaten her,” Tate warned. When the guard shot him a malevolent look, he told him, “I want her to be willing to be with me, not because she was threatened with harm if she wasn't.”

The guard looked at him as if he wasn't dealing with a full deck. “Hey, man, don't you know? It's better when they fight you.”

The world would be a much better place if he could just squash this cockroach, Tate thought, struggling to hang on to his temper. With no qualms whatsoever, Tate would have been more than willing to put everyone out of their collective misery—himself included.