LITMIR.BIZ

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other lies she had told him, whatever she had to keep from him, this much was true. “No one told me you were coming. Did you know Kyle was going to be murdered?”

      He had the look of a man who thought even a distant cousin of the Queen of England ought to be plucked from the fray and planted back in Kensington Gardens. If he knew the fire she was playing with, everything she had ever wanted would be lost in one fell swoop of alpha-male whim.

      No way.

      She picked up the syringe again and uncapped the needle. “Roll your sleeve up higher.”

      He shoved the flannel as far as it would go, but the long underwear he wore beneath it wouldn’t be pushed higher. She cut him a look and stepped back again. He pulled both shirttails out of his jeans, stuck his hand beneath them and shoved the fabric high enough to free his arm, baring his muscled shoulder and half his torso as well. “Okay?”

      She simply refused to be affected by all that powerful masculine flesh, the swirls of dark hair, but it was impossible not to notice. Not to imagine her fingers there. Not to linger overlong with her eyes as if she were preoccupied with her observation of the deep bruises.

      His body reminded her she was a woman, and the battering he’d taken only made him that much more dark and dangerously appealing. She swiped his biceps with an alcohol pad and drove her needle in deep.

      Nary a flinch, but he made no move to get back into his shirts, either. She made the mistake of meeting his knowing eyes, and she could no more look away than move out of his orbit. Her pulse throbbed.

      His heart thudded till she could nearly hear it.

      He was in her space now, breathing her same scarce air, and she had stabbed him with her needle to punish her own longings, and the more he sat there taking it, watching her, seeing her, the more powerful he became and the deeper in his thrall she fell.

      Somehow she found herself stepping back.

      He writhed his way back into his shirts. She turned hurriedly away. “I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “You need to go along with whatever I say or do. Clear?”

      She pitched the syringe into an impervious container. “I understand you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

      “You don’t want to cross me, Fiona.” He looked at her as if to say she could take his threat any way she wanted, except to defy him. “Hanifen and his boys will be back in the morning. And they’ll be saying you’re the one who murdered Kyle Everly.”

      The possibility, the rightness of it, the inevitability struck her. She swallowed. “I don’t believe that.”

      “You don’t have to believe me, Fiona. Just wait and see. I’ll be a gentleman. I won’t say I told you so.”

      She followed him from the treatment room and ushered him out the sliding door that opened onto the paddocks.

      The temperature had dropped. She wrapped her arms around herself and thought she heard the nickering of a horse in the stark, distant silence.

      Guiliani turned back to her, so close that in the frigid night air she could feel the warmth emanating off his body, smell the scent of hay and horseflesh on him. He was looking at her again, but she looked past him. She wanted him to go.

      “Fiona—”

      “Go. Just go!”

      He turned fully toward her and touched her cheek. She saw it coming and could have turned away. Somewhere inside herself she must have wanted his touch, must have needed a comforting gesture so much that she would stand still for one from him.

      “I want you to know this,” he said, his voice low and quietly reassuring. “I want you to know you can tell me anything.”

      He just didn’t know. She really couldn’t.

      She watched him jogging off into the dark, up the hillside where Bar Naught land bordered the national forest. He was dressed all in black, as one might expect of a trespasser in the night, or a sniper.

      He had never denied being the one who had pulled the trigger. Had he intended to leave open the possibility? Intended to keep her unsettled and uneasy in his presence? She didn’t believe he’d killed Everly, either. But someone had, and if he was right, her rifle would prove to be the murder weapon.

      Shivering hard, she turned around and went back into the stable, securing the door behind her, and returned to the treatment room where she had left the Remington. Not bothering to turn on the light, she took the rifle from behind the door. The gun metal barrel felt cool in her hand.

      She brought the end of the barrel to her nose. The scent, faint but unmistakable, put her doubts to rest. Her rifle had been fired tonight, and if there had been prints on it from the shooter, she’d obliterated them by handling the gun herself.

      With the gun weighted perfectly in her hand, she walked down a hall to the gun rack.

      There were spaces for half a dozen firearms, but since she’d returned to the Bar Naught, only her Remington had been kept there. Anyone could have taken her rifle, used it to kill Everly and then put it back.

      She stood looking at the empty gun rack, trying to see in her mind’s eye the last time her rifle had been billeted there. She so rarely had reason to pick it up that it was possible she might not have missed the rifle if someone had taken it days ago. But no matter how long she stood there imagining the rack empty, she couldn’t believe it had happened that way. The gun hadn’t gone missing. She’d have known.

      Whoever had taken her rifle had been in the stable some time in the hours before Everly was shot.

      Her throat clutched tight and horror, the weight of the night’s events, Kyle’s murder, all that blood, settled in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. The mewling noise that came out of her shredded what was left of her nerves.

      She’d seen two of her grandparents laid out in their coffins, and a high school boyfriend who’d shot himself after he rolled a Jeep and emerged from the accident paralyzed from the waist down.

      She’d seen her share of horses put down, dying pets put to sleep, and butchered game. You didn’t grow up on a ranch in Wyoming, even if you were the great-granddaughter of English royalty, a revenue man, without being exposed to death. But she had never seen anything like Everly’s body collapsed in a pool of his own blood.

      She shook her head to banish the images. Breathe, Fiona. Through the nose, deep. Breathe. She had to clear her head, decide what to do about the gun.

      She didn’t believe Dex Hanifen would be back to arrest her for Kyle’s murder. He knew her. He’d known her all her life. But Dex would have to know about the gun.

      How could they have missed it in their search if it had been put back after Kyle was shot?

      It was two-thirty in the morning. Should she call the sheriff or wait until morning to call? Wait until he came back?

      Would he even be back? Of course. A murder had been committed here. He’d be back. She could tell him then, explain everything then, how she’d—

      No. Her breath felt stifled again. If she told Dex she’d only taken her gun down from the rack when she heard an intruder in the stable, when she’d known there was someone hiding out, after Kyle had been killed…Dex would demand an answer to the same question Matt Guiliani wouldn’t let go.

      Even if Dex Hanifen never accused her of Kyle’s murder, how could he avoid the inference that the killer had been hiding in the stable all along and she’d let him get away?

      Surely Dex wouldn’t believe her capable of that, either. But her uncertainty began feeding other doubts. A chill racked her body. She took hold of herself, stepped forward and replaced the rifle, then took it down again.

      She would keep the rifle with her for protection, and in the morning hand it over to Dex.

      She returned to her rooms and headed through the darkened,

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