Page 11 of Ransom
The trail ran east through a stand of juniper and dropped into the arroyo where the runoff from the storm still cut new channels in the red dirt. I picked a path along the high side, and Galahad followed without complaint, steady under the dead weight. Roy Castillo's hand swung loose with each step. I reached back and tucked it under the rope.
Then I turned my head to check on the Ranger.
That was a mistake.
He rode Faye loose-hipped, one hand light on the reins and the other resting on his thigh. The dead judge's boots were dark against Faye's flank.
"Nice country," Winston said.
Same voice as in the shack: easy, embodied, a little wry.
"It'll do."
"That rifle on your saddle is older than I am."
"Older than my daddy, too."
"Family piece?"
"Something like that."
He was quiet for a beat. Then he said, "Bolt was sweet on it. Whoever sanded that stock did a good job."
He'd handled my rifle in the shack and read it the same way he'd read me. Getting on his knees for me had been strategic. I'd known. I'd let him do it anyway. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
The thought went straight to my dick, and I wanted to put my hand around the back of his neck and pull him off Faye and find out what else he'd do as part of his little act.
Instead, I faced the trail and kept walking.
Chance's room ran nine hundred a day before the specialists. Rafe and the ranch matched whatever I paid in. I couldn't afford to lose the ranch, not over a pretty face and a good mouth.
The junipers thinned and gave way to piñon pine. Wet resin and creosote in the air, the last heat of the day bleeding out of the rocks. Winston dropped his hat back over his eyes and shifted in the saddle, working a kink out of his lower back. His shirt pulled tight across his shoulders when he stretched.
I'd walked other men down this trail before. Not many, but enough. Coyote came out of a different tree each time. The sound when they hit the dirt was always the same surprised grunt. They never saw it coming. I'd slept fine on those nights and I would sleep fine on this one, except that my tongue still tasted like a man who was still breathing behind me, and that man, with nowhere to be and nothing to fear, stretched out his back like a cat in the sun.
He caught me looking.
"Something on your mind?" he said.
His voice had a small smile in it. He knew exactly what was on my mind, or half of it. He didn't know the half that mattered.
"Nope."
"Liar."
I didn't answer. He laughed a little, low in his chest, and the sound went straight through me.
We climbed out of the arroyo and the land opened up into a flat stretch of scrub that ran south toward the foothills, away from the ranch, away from the road, away from anything a Texas Ranger would want to ride toward.
His weight shifted on Faye. The reins came up an inch. The easy lean went out of his shoulders. "Ransom."
I kept walking.
"The highway is west. You're taking me southeast into nothing." His voice was easy, conversational, a man remarkingon the weather. "Now, I'm not the suspicious type. But I am the observant type, and those two things tend to arrive at the same place."
"Almost there," I said.
"Almost where?"
