LITMIR.BIZ

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pretensions to a privileged, polo-playing country-manor lifestyle of distant royalty, which was what the ranch represented to her idle parents. Much more.

      She loved the work.

      She loved the land, the freedom, the responsibility, the beautiful wild mustangs that she gentled. The love and respect and care of horses made people into better people. She knew that firsthand. Personally.

      The Bar Naught was her safe haven, and she was willing to do whatever unsafe things she had to do to have it back.

      “You didn’t believe him?” Matt asked, interrupting her thoughts. “That I’d try to kill him?”

      “I don’t know what I believed. What does it matter now?”

      “It matters.” His eyes fixed on hers, but she averted her gaze, searching for the alcohol swab for an excuse to look away.

      She was easily as tall as Guiliani, but his male dimensions, his sheer presence, befuddled her wits, and she needed them all operating at a perfect pitch. “He’s just as dead no matter who did it.”

      Matt craned his neck till he trapped her gaze. “It matters to me.”

      She shrugged. She doubted very much that Matt Guiliani was the kind of man who would shoot another man in the back, but she couldn’t afford to reveal to him all that she knew. And Matt might have changed, might have turned killer.

      Soldier Boy had. Anything was possible.

      She decided that must be her tack. Deny everything. “I don’t really know you. How could I know if you would gun a man down?”

      His eyes tracked her. “One never knows.”

      “Have you killed anyone?” His expression left out any hint of excuses. “Yes.”

      “What if someone betrayed you?” Because if he wouldn’t stay off the Bar Naught she would lie through her teeth to make sure he did. She would swear to Dex Hanifen that she had seen Guiliani pull the trigger.

      “Is there a point to this?”

      She swallowed, feeling as if he had read her mind, knew of her intention to pin the murder on him. “Yes.”

      “Are you asking if I would kill you if you betray me?”

      He shook his head slowly. “I wouldn’t advise it, Fiona.”

      “Is that a yes?”

      His brows drew close together. “Is that what stopped you from turning me over to Hanifen? The fear that I would come after you next?”

      Lie, she told herself. Just do it. “Yes. All right? Yes. I was afraid I would be next.”

      “Now you know better.”

      “I don’t.”

      “Of course you do.” He didn’t believe her, and why would he? He reached for a packet of cedar sticks from his breast pocket, broke one off and stuck it in his mouth.

      The lie had been a mistake, which only made him more suspicious of her, not less. Would a woman fearful that he would kill her have turned her back on him? Would she lead him docilely into her treatment room to administer a shot before he did her in?

      What made her think he could not have turned into a killer?

      She watched the cedar splinter travel over his lower lip from one corner to the other, shoved by his tongue. Her mouth felt parched as bones dried in the sun, and she licked her own lips as she aimed her gaze in another direction. She couldn’t be attracted to him. Could not.

      “Fiona,” he said, his voice so low its tones thrummed inside her, “what’s going on?”

      Her tongue swiped again at her dry lips. “Nothing.”

      “Maybe I can help—”

      “I don’t need any help.” He was the last man alive whose help she needed.

      “You want to change your answer?”

      “No.” She busied her hands, forcing the syringe barrel through the paper.

      “Fiona,” he snapped, “let’s just cut the crap, okay? You’re not stupid. If you’re telling the truth, you didn’t know who was in the barn. I could have been the one who shot Everly in the back. Why would you take that kind of risk?”

      “Kyle had enemies,” she answered. “I didn’t want to get involved. I don’t want to be involved.”

      She cleared her throat and clamped her lips tight. Emotions like some vicious animated kaleidoscope of feelings—jealousy, resentment, even hatred for the way he was able to strike a truce with Soldier Boy—turned inside her.

      Not only a truce, either. Soldier Boy permitted this man’s touch.

      She had seen him swing down into Soldier Boy’s stall. She’d seen him fall to the floor. But her reasons for leaving him there, for failing to mention his presence to Dex Hanifen, for coming at him with her rifle, had nothing to do with the murder at all.

      The point was that Soldier hadn’t killed him. In a deathly still way inside her that she really didn’t understand, that was all she needed to know.

      She trusted Soldier Boy’s instincts more than her own. That was the last thing she would admit to anyone, Matt last of all. She dredged up her maddeningly stiff-upper-lip upbringing and buried that messy kaleidoscope of emotion.

      “If you knew what kind of man you were dealing with, then what are you doing back on the Bar Naught at all, Fiona?”

      “Because I want it back.”

      Chapter Three

      The Bar Naught was all Fiona Halsey had ever wanted. Ever. “My parents lost it. I want it back. It’s really just that simple.”

      “Even if it meant tangling with Everly?” Matt asked. “What am I missing? How did you think you were ever going to get the Bar Naught back from him?”

      She met his eyes directly. On this point she was more prepared to lie. “I thought he would eventually get bored. He talked like that. He was a liar, you know. Pathological. Kyle Everly would as soon tell a lie as the truth when the truth would serve him better.” She took hold of her long straight hair and shoved it behind her. “All to prove, over and over again that he could get away with it. To see if he could ride the crest of his charm right on by common sense one more time.”

      She popped the metal lid off the vial and swabbed the rubber stopper with alcohol, uncapped the needle, drew up the dose of booster and recapped. She turned away and put down the syringe on the countertop, then plunged her icy hands beneath a rush of hot water at the sink. “Months ago, Kyle offered me the chance to come back to the Bar Naught. He said that I could have it all my way, that—I didn’t know what a liar he was. At the time, I didn’t know.”

      She withdrew her hands and the electric eye shut off the water. She grabbed a couple of paper towels from the dispenser and turned around when she thought she could finally manage her own emotions well enough. What she saw in his face encouraged her. “Any other questions?”

      “Just the one.”

      She flashed on the image of him crashing down into the stall. A dark, unrelentingly handsome man, a stranger breathing the same air as Soldier Boy, gasping for that air like a fish out of water, and Soldier…not moving in for the kill. There was no satisfactory answer she could give him as to why she hadn’t turned him over to Dex.

      “Shall I tell you why I want to know?” he asked.

      “I don’t care, but listen. Why don’t I just take care of that now so you won’t have to explain yourself?” She tossed the spent paper towels into the trash. “You wait here, and I’ll just go make the call.”

      His eyes darkened. “Fiona, I

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