The Bodyguard's Return

She had enough money in a savings account to be able to meet whatever price Buchannan settled on when he did decide to sell. Thankfully her parents had begun investing for her when she was a baby, and on her twenty-first birthday those funds had become available to her. Over the past four years she’d tried not to touch that money unless it was absolutely necessary, believing that it was her nest egg for the future.

At exactly nine o’clock a big black pickup pulled into the parking space next to hers. Joshua got out of the vehicle, and Savannah tried not to notice his physical attractiveness.

He was clad in a pair of black slacks, a black turtleneck and a worn leather bomber jacket. His hair was slightly tousled, as if he’d driven with the window down and the night breeze had blown through his dark locks.

The last thing she was looking for was to be attracted to any man, but especially one who had the reputation for being a player, at least before he’d left town. Besides, men who looked like Joshua West didn’t date women who looked like her, and she’d do well to remember that.

She quickly got out of her car and smiled at him. “Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it.”

He gave her a curt nod, his expression letting her know he would rather be anywhere but here at the moment. She pulled her keys from her purse and walked to the front door of the newspaper office.

“All I ask of you is to please keep an open mind when I show you everything I’ve compiled. It took a while and a lot of research before I finally started to make some horrifying connections.” She was rambling. When she was nervous she always rambled and something about the silent man standing next to her made her nervous.

She sighed in relief as she got the door open. She stepped inside, flipped on the overhead lights, then walked across the wooden floor toward a small room in the back that served as her office.

She was conscious of Joshua close behind her, his loafers ringing on the floor. He had yet to say a word, and that only made her anxiety increase.

If he saw the material she’d gathered and judged her as some crazy conspiracy theorist looking for a story she didn’t know what she’d do. She hadn’t felt so right about anything since she’d been seventeen years old and told her mother that she absolutely, positively was not getting a breast reduction.

The office Buchannan had given her to work in was little more than the size of a storage closet. It was only large enough to contain her desk and office chair. She’d tried to dress up the small space, claim it as her own by placing things she liked on the scarred wooden desk.

There was a basket of her favorite candy bars, a stuffed frog that one of her friends had given her for luck when she’d left Scottsdale and, finally, there was a plaque that read, Live Well, Laugh Hard.

Joshua picked up one of the candy bars and gave her a wry look. “Guess you aren’t into counting calories.”

“Never,” she replied and punched the button to boot up her computer. “My mother started counting my calories the day I was born. When I finally got out on my own I decided I was going to eat whatever the heck I wanted.”

He nodded, a touch of amusement lightening his green eyes. “That’s one of the things that drove me crazy about the women in New York. None of them eat. I’d take a lady out to dinner and it would have been just as easy to toss her a head of lettuce and call it a night.”

Despite her nervous tension, Savannah laughed. “You take me out to dinner and I’ll eat your money’s worth,” she exclaimed, then hurriedly added, “not that I think you’d ever take me out to dinner. I mean, not that I’d even want you to take me to dinner.”

His amusement was even more evident as he simply stood there and watched as she dug a hole with her tongue. She flushed and bit her lip to stop her mouth from running away with her.

Thankfully at that moment the computer loaded up and she sat in the chair in front of it to retrieve the files she wanted him to see.

He moved behind her and she was intensely aware of his nearness. He smelled like the outdoors, a scent of fresh Oklahoma sunshine and night breeze and beneath that a clean cologne that tantalized her senses.

“I started all this because of what happened to Kate Sampson’s father,” she said as she finally found the file she wanted and opened it.

Kate Sampson’s father, Gray, had been murdered three months before. It had been Joshua’s brother Zack who had ridden to her rescue and helped her solve the murder. But the one thing the investigation hadn’t yielded was a credible motive for his murder.

“I think maybe Zack’s planning on running for sheriff in November,” Joshua said, his breath warm on the nape of her neck.

“I’m sure he’ll do a far better job than Ramsey,” she replied and hit the print button. “You might not know it, but Gray Sampson was killed by a ranch hand named Sonny Williams.”

“I heard. My brother Clay told me about Gray’s murder and Sonny’s arrest.”

She pulled up another file and began the print process, then turned around in the chair to face him. “But, did you know that Sonny Williams supposedly killed himself in jail? Did you know that before he died he said that Gray’s death was just a part of a bigger plan?”

Joshua frowned. “I might have been told something about that, but I was a thousand miles away and to be honest had other things on my mind.”

“Gray Sampson’s death wasn’t the beginning of things.” She stood and grabbed the material from the printer. “Let’s go back out to Raymond’s desk.”

The space in her office was too small for the two of them as far as she was concerned. Joshua was too tall, too male to share such a tiny space with her.

She breathed a sigh of relief as they returned to the main office area. At least in here she could breathe without smelling the scent of him.

She sat at Raymond’s desk and motioned him into the chair on the opposite side of the desk. “Are you a wannabe true crime writer or what?” he asked.

The question irritated her. He knew nothing about her but was already making judgments. “No, I’m not. When I took the job here I decided it was a good idea to read as many of the back issues of the paper as possible to familiarize myself with both the newspaper I’d be writing for and the town where I’d chosen to live.”

“And why did you choose Cotter Creek?” His green gaze held hers intently, as if he were seeking answers to questions he hadn’t yet spoken.

“To be perfectly honest, I feel as if Cotter Creek chose me.” She broke eye contact with him, finding his direct gaze somewhat disconcerting. Instead she looked at the framed front page of the first copy of the Cotter Creek Chronicle that hung on the wall just behind him.

“I wasn’t sure where I was going when I left Scottsdale and eventually made it to Cotter Creek where my car transmission blew. It took a couple of days to fix and, while I was waiting, I just fell in love with the town.”

“And how did you meet Charlie?”

She looked at him again, fighting a wave of impatience. “I thought you were here to see the material I have, not to play a game of twenty questions.”

He smiled, one that lifted only a corner of his mouth with sexy laziness. “I like to know a little bit about the people I deal with.”

“Fine. I’m twenty-four years old. I love animals and candy bars, I hate superficiality and people who don’t have a sense of humor.”

She leaned forward, meeting his gaze directly. “I met Charlie on the first day I arrived in town. I’d just left my car at Mechanic’s Mansion and was looking for a hotel or motel to stay in while the car was being fixed. There were a couple of teenagers on the corner and I asked them about accommodations, and they told me there was a nice bed-and-breakfast on the edge of town.”

His eyes began to glitter with humor, obviously seeing where her story was leading. “Anyway,” she continued, “one of the boys offered to drive me there. He took me to the entrance to Charlie’s place and left me there.”

“I’ll bet you were horrified,” he said.

She laughed. “When I broke through the trees and saw Charlie’s place, I suspected I’d been had, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure so I marched up to Charlie’s door and told him I’d heard he ran the best bed and breakfast in town.”

She smiled at the memory of Charlie’s face and a swift sharp grief pierced through her, stealing her smile and forcing the sting of tears to her eyes. She raised a hand to swipe them away.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.” His voice was gentle and she saw real regret in his eyes.

She nodded. “I’m just going to miss him so much. Other than your sister and Winnie, Charlie was my only friend in town. We used to spend hours playing chess.” She released a small laugh. “I never got a chance to beat him.”

“I could never beat him either.” For a long moment their gazes remained locked. It was a moment of connection, two people mourning for somebody they had both loved. This time he broke the eye contact and gestured to the papers in front of her. “Okay, show me what you’ve got.”

She cleared her throat, stuffing her emotions for Charlie back deep inside. “I noticed when I was reading back issues of the paper that there seemed to be an unusual number of fatal accidents in the area.”

“It’s a ranching and farming community, there are always accidents.”

“True, but Cotter Creek seemed to have more than its share, so two weeks ago I did some statistical analysis, comparing like-size ranching and farming communities. What I discovered was that the incidence of accidental deaths was three hundred times higher in Cotter Creek than anywhere else I compared it with.”

Joshua raised a dark eyebrow and took the sheet of paper that held her data. She watched him as he studied it. She’d met most of his brothers, each more handsome than the next, but Joshua seemed to have gotten the West good-looking gene in spades.

Savannah had been raised among the beautiful people of Scottsdale and if they weren’t beautiful by nature, then plastic surgery solved the problem. She’d been the anomaly, a busty redhead with a snub nose covered in freckles, who had no interest in beestung lips or liposuction.

By nature she didn’t particularly trust handsome men. She knew she was the kind of girl handsome men took home only when all the pretty blondes and brunettes had left the party.

She’d had one relationship with a man who’d been so attractive he’d taken her breath away, but it had turned out to be a cliché. He’d left her for a gorgeous woman who had taken his breath away.

But she needed to trust Joshua West. She needed him in her corner.

Her mind flashed with an image of him standing in the bathroom doorway, his chest splendidly naked and tautly muscled. A wave of warmth fluttered through her at the memory. Her last relationship had been almost a year ago, long enough that she’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have a warm naked chest pressed against her own. Almost…but not quite.

“Okay.” He set the paper back on the desk and looked at her, no trace of humor in his gaze. “You’ve got my attention.”

“Trust me, that’s just the beginning,” she said. She handed him the next paper she’d printed off. “This is a list of all the deaths that have occurred in Cotter Creek in the past two years.” She focused on her subject and tried to forget the vision of his naked chest that had popped unbidden into her head.

“If you take each one separately, they don’t seem so ominous…a tractor accident, a fall from a hayloft, a gas heater malfunction. You know Gray Sampson’s death had initially been ruled accidental. Sheriff Ramsey assumed he’d been thrown from his horse and had hit his head on a rock.”

She talked faster and faster, needing to get everything out. “It was only when Gray’s daughter and your brother Zack began to investigate that they realized it wasn’t an accident, but instead was murder.”

Joshua held up a hand to stop her. “Take a breath before you pass out.”

She felt a blush sweep up her neck. “Sorry, I’ve just been waiting so long for somebody to really listen to me. For the last week and a half I’ve been telling anyone and everyone that something isn’t right here, but nobody is interested in hearing me out.”

“Right now all you’ve convinced me of is that in the past year and a half the people of Cotter Creek were either more careless or more unlucky than others.”

“I’m not finished yet,” she replied. “By the time I am, you’ll see that something terrible is happening in this town, and unless somebody does something about it, more people are going to die.”

Joshua had yet to make up his mind about Savannah. He wasn’t sure if she was a drama queen looking for excitement or was really onto something.

She’d surprised him with her statistical analysis and the sharp intelligence that gleamed from her amber-colored eyes.

The one thing he did know was that something about Savannah Clarion made him a little bit jumpy, made his thoughts race in directions they shouldn’t be going.

As she’d talked to him, he’d found himself wondering if her red curls were soft and silky or wiry and coarse. He’d wondered if her full mouth would be soft and yielding beneath his or fierce and demanding?

Those kinds of thoughts irritated him. Hadn’t he learned his lesson in New York? He focused his attention on the next piece of paper she shoved over in front of him.

“I made a list of all the people who have died. As you can see, all of them are men,” she said.

He read the list of names, then looked back at her. “Look, this is all very interesting, but I don’t see any big conspiracy here.”

She frowned, her lower lip jutting out slightly in what appeared to be a small pout. “I’m not finished with all the investigating I intend to do,” she said. “Help me, Joshua. Please help me find out exactly what happened to all these men. With two of us working together it will take half the time to get some answers.”

He leaned back in his chair and swiped a hand through his hair. “I’m not sure what the questions are that need to be asked.”

“We need to look at each individual incident and see if there are any anomalies, anything that doesn’t fit with it being an accident. Like I said before, Gray Sampson’s death would have been ruled an accident. It wasn’t until your brother picked up the rock where Gray had supposedly fallen off his horse and hit his head and saw blood on both sides that they realized the rock had been used to bludgeon him to death.”

She paused to draw a deep breath and he tried not to notice the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the light lavender sweater she wore.

“As far as I’m concerned, Charlie buying ice cream an hour before he supposedly committed suicide is a huge red flag,” she continued. “Joshua, you were his friend. You should know Charlie didn’t have a suicidal bone in his body. Don’t you want to know the truth? Isn’t Charlie worth a little of your time?”

Joshua sighed. He had to admit that the fact that Charlie bought groceries then went home and blew his brains out, didn’t make sense. Charlie’s wife Rebecca had been gone a long time and Charlie seemed to have made peace with the fact that he would live out the rest of his years alone.

Surely if a man was going to commit suicide to be with his departed wife, he wouldn’t wait eight long years. Charlie’s suicide just didn’t make sense, although any other scenario didn’t make sense either.

What else do you have to do with your time, a little voice whispered inside his head? He didn’t want to work the family business and he wasn’t interested in continuing as a stockbroker, but had no idea what he really wanted to do. He had nothing but time on his hands at the moment.

“All right,” he relented after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll do some checking into these deaths. I’ll get the accident reports and look them over.”

“Thank you.” She smiled and he felt a jolt of heat sweep through him. She had one hell of a smile. She grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled something then handed it to him. “That’s my phone number at Winnie’s and my cell phone number.”

He took them reluctantly, having no intention of calling her except to tell her he’d done as she’d requested. Something about her unsettled him and the less interaction she had with him the better he’d feel. “It should just take me a day or two.” He stood, eager to be away from her with her sexy scent and heart-stopping smile.

She handed him the papers she’d printed off and he folded them and stuck them in his back pocket. “Why did you decide to come back to Cotter Creek?” she asked, also rising. “Meredith told me you’d been doing quite well in New York.”

I ran back home like a dog with my tail tucked between my legs. I screwed up with a relationship that turned more than ugly. The thoughts flew through his head, bringing with him the sense of failure that had ridden his shoulders since he’d made the decision to return home.

“I missed my family. When you’re used to being surrounded by people who care about you, a place like New York City can be pretty lonely.”

She eyed him wryly. “I doubt if a man like you had too many lonely nights.”

“There’s a difference between being alone and being lonely.” He gestured toward the door, uncomfortable with the personal turn of the conversation.

“Must be nice to have a loving family,” she said as she gathered her papers, then joined him at the front door.

“You aren’t close with your family?” he asked. She stood close enough to him that he could again smell her scent, a heady fragrance that put all his nerves on alert.

“It’s just me and my parents,” she replied. “I don’t think my mother ever recovered from the shock of not birthing a perfect blond, beautiful miniature of herself, and my father was mostly absent while I was growing up. He had to work long hours to keep my mother in baubles and bling.”

She turned out the light, locked the door and they stepped out of the building. Night had completely fallen, but the illumination from a full moon cascaded down, painting her features in a soft, becoming light.

“I can’t thank you enough for meeting me here tonight and listening to me.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” he warned. “You haven’t convinced me that there’s anything ominous going on.”

She nodded, her curls dancing with the gesture. “How are Jessie and Judd?”

Joshua thought of the two dogs he’d brought home from Charlie’s place. “Initially they were confused and seemed depressed, but they’re beginning to settle in just fine. Smokey wasn’t thrilled that I’d brought them home.”

She laughed, a low throaty sound. “Is that man ever happy about anything?”

He grinned. “Smokey’s bark is definitely louder than his bite. After my mother’s death I’m not sure my father could have coped with six small children without Smokey’s help.”

“How did that happen? I mean, where did he come from?”

“Smokey worked as a foreman on the ranch until a terrible fall from a horse crushed his leg and left him with permanent damage. He’d just about healed from his wounds when my mother was murdered. Smokey stepped into the house as if he were born to the job.”

“I’d love to interview him for my column. Actually, I’d love to interview you, you know, something about the return of the prodigal son.”

“No way, I’m not interested in being interviewed. And good luck with Smokey,” he added drily. At that moment a loud bang resounded and almost simultaneously the picture window just to the right of them exploded.

Without thought, acting only on instinct, Joshua dove toward Savannah and tackled her to the ground.

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