Page 124 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“Behind us.”
Jonah shut his mouth.
Logan crossed the clearing in a low crouch with the Winchester against his shoulder. The front doorway—no door, just the frame hanging crooked on one hinge. The sight of that busted hinge reminded him of his own gate, which reminded him of his yard, which reminded him of Grace’s garden, and the flare behind his eyes woke up all over—
He stepped through the doorway.
Three men. Two flanked a makeshift table built from planks and sawhorses, both of them young and wiry, with the kind of hollow-cheeked look that came from eating bad food and sleeping worse. One had a knife on his belt. The other held a pistol in his lap, the way a man held a tool he’d only half learned to use.
And, at the back of the room, Grace sat on the dirt floor against the only solid wall.
They’d bound her hands behind her back with rope and stuffed a rag between her teeth. Her hair had come loose, and it stuck to the side of her face with dried sweat. Her coat had torn at the shoulder, and a bruise had started blooming along her left cheekbone in a dark spread that made Logan’s vision go red at the edges.
She looked up when he came through the door, and her eyes locked onto his. Every single word he’d planned to say about trust and secrets and letters evaporated like spit on a hot stove.
A man who could only be Ace Pike sat on an overturned crate beside her with that greasy bowler hat tipped back and a pine splinter between his teeth. He grinned with the gaps in his mouth like a man who’d been waiting for company.
“Well, well.” Ace pulled the splinter from his teeth. “The rancher himself. Come on in, friend. We was just gettin’ acquainted with your wife.”
Logan leveled the Winchester at the center of Ace’s chest.
“Get your hands off her.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The rope bit into Grace’s wrists every time she twisted. Whoever had tied the knot—the skinny one, the one who smelled like a wet dog left in a closet—had pulled it sailor-tight. She’d been working at it for hours, rolling her wrists in small circles, hunting for slack. Her fingers had gone half-numb; that tingly, dead feeling like sitting on your own hand too long.
The rag in her mouth tasted like coal oil. Every breath through it coated the back of her throat thick enough to gag on, so she stopped breathing through it. Nose instead. Slow. Steady. The way she’d breathed through the bad nights in the tenement when the walls closed in.
Fifty dollars. She’d walked in here with fifty dollars and Mormor’s brooch pinned to her collar and some half-baked notion that a girl from the slums could talk down a man who’d been running criminals since before she’d lost her milk teeth. Ace had taken the money, pocketed her grandmother’s brooch like it meant nothing—just yanked it free, tossed it onto his crate—and had his boys tie her up while he went back to picking his teeth.
Stupid. Jonah had called her brave. Ace had called her stupid. Ace had had the better take on the situation.
Now he sat on the crate beside her, close enough that his knee pressed against her hip. He’d pulled the knife from his beltabout an hour ago—a folding knife with a bone handle and a blade nicked and dark along the edge—and rested the flat of it against her ribs casually, like a man resting his hand on a fence rail.
Every few minutes, he’d shift the blade an inch, just to remind her it was there, and the steel would catch a strip of light through the wall gaps and flash cold against her dress.
Then Logan filled the doorway with the Winchester leveled at Ace’s chest.
Oh, thank God. ThankGod.
Her eyes burned. He’d come. Even after yesterday. Even after the trenches, the ‘you knew’comment—he’d come.
“Get away from her.”
“Easy, Cowboy.” Ace tilted the knife blade so it caught the light. “You can put a bullet through me from there, for sure. But this hand’s got a mind of its own when I get surprised. Might twitch.”
Logan’s eyes dropped to the knife. His jaw locked. The Winchester stayed up, aimed squarely at Ace’s head, but his trigger finger eased off the guard. He could definitely make the shot; Grace had seen him do it before, but a dead man’s hand could still jerk, and the blade sat three inches from her lung.
“Ain’t nobody gotta get hurt here.” Ace rolled the splinter between his teeth with his free hand. “Your wife walked in on her own. Wavin’ money around, talkin’ about leavin’ your family alone. Real brave. Stupid as a bag of hammers, but brave.”
“What do you want, Pike?”
“Same thing I’ve always wanted. What Dawson buried on your land.” Ace shrugged with the free shoulder. “Your wife’s fifty dollars is in my pocket. The silver your boy stole for me is in my saddlebag. And come tomorrow, me and my boys are ridin’ back to that ranch to dig every square foot till I find the rest. Could take a day. Could take a month.”
The garden. He meant the garden. Her tomatoes, her pole beans, the trellises Logan had helped her build on that Tuesday afternoon when Rafe had heckled from the porch, and Logan had told the dirty joke, and she’d laughed hard enough to scare the chickens. All of it, already torn up once, and this man meant to do it again.
“You already tore my place apart,” Logan said. “Didn’t find a damn thing.”
