12-Alarm Cowboys (129 page)

“Be careful,” she warned. “And take your cell phone.”

“I will.” He grabbed his cell from the counter. “Keep the door locked.”

Skye finished cleaning the mixing bowl and set it in the dish rack to dry, then opened Jax’s laptop so she could do some detailed break-even analyses of her newest cupcake. While it tasted great, she needed to figure out how much it would cost to make based on the ingredients, as well as how much money she could expect to make by selling them. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as baking, but it was just as important to her new business as how good a cupcake tasted.

She was so wrapped up in the numbers she didn’t hear her brother come back until he knocked on the door. Beside her, Rodeo was immediately on his feet, his ears lifted and his eyes trained on the door.

“It’s okay, boy,” she told him as she slid off the stool. “Dane just forgot to take the key with him.”

Rodeo must have wanted to see for himself because he walked to the door with her. Grinning, she undid the lock and opened it, a smart-aleck remark on her lips, only to jump when she saw that it wasn’t Dane.

“Aiden! Oh my God, I thought you were dead!”

Opening the door wide, she threw herself into his arms. Tears filled her eyes. She was so relieved to see him alive and okay. Blinking, she took a step back, then grabbed his hand and tugged him inside as she closed the door. Beside her, Rodeo growled.

“Rodeo, this is Aiden,” she said, reaching down to pat the dog on his head. “He’s a friend.”

Rodeo growled again, this time baring his teeth. Aiden tensed.

She gave Aiden an embarrassed look. “Sorry. He’s never like this. I’ll go put him in the bedroom.”

Skye hooked her fingers in Rodeo’s collar and gently but firmly led him away from Aiden. Rodeo resisted, barking the whole way to the bedroom and refusing to take his eyes off Aiden. When she finally got him inside, she ordered him to sit and told him to behave, then closed the door.

Aiden was standing where she’d left him, still looking a little nervous.

“Sorry about that. Rodeo is usually so good with people.” She studied his face. He looked pale and his eyes had dark circles under them, like he hadn’t slept in days. “Aiden, what happened between you and Jordan? The cops in New York told me that you were missing. Someone called them to say you and Jordan had gotten into a fight at his apartment. The police thought he killed you.”

“He tried.” Aiden ran his hand through his curly, dark hair. “Jordan’s out of his mind, Skye. After you left, he went crazy, saying he was going to come down here and kill you. That if he couldn’t have you, no one could.”

She shuddered. Jax and Dane had been right. From what Aiden said, it sounded like Jordan was more far gone than any of them had thought. She was just grateful Aiden hadn’t been hurt.

“I need to call the police and tell them that Jordan is definitely in Dallas.”

She turned to go into the kitchen, but Aiden caught her arm.

“We don’t have time. Jordan’s already on his way here.”

“How…?”

Aiden shook his head. “I don’t know he found you. He must have followed your new boyfriend from the fire station. Maybe even your brother. Who knows? Right now, it doesn’t matter. We need to get you out of here before he shows up.”

He tightened his hold on her hand and pulled her toward the door.

“Aiden, wait! I can’t just leave. My brother’s here.”

Aiden glanced over his shoulder at her, but didn’t stop. “Your brother’s fine. I talked to him when I first got here. He’s waiting for us outside.”

Skye let him lead her out the door and down the steps to a dark blue minivan. If her head wasn’t spinning, she would have laughed at the idea of Aiden driving a minivan, even if it was a rental.

They were halfway there when she realized Dane was nowhere in sight. She slowed her steps as worry began to overwhelm her. What if Jordan was already here? What if he’d hurt her brother?

She looked around, her eyes lingering on her brother’s truck before turning to Aiden. “Where’s Dane?”

Aiden practically dragged her the rest of the way to the minivan. “He must have gone in the barn to get something. I’ll find him. Let’s get you in the van first. I don’t like you out in the open like this.”

He hit a button on his key fob and opened the sliding door on the passenger side, then shoved her in the second row of seats and leaned in to buckle her seatbelt for her. What the hell? She wasn’t a five-year-old.

“I need to borrow your phone,” she said. “I have to let my boyfriend know what’s going on.”

Aiden’s clicked her seat belt into place, his hands stilling on the metal as he lifted his head to look at her. “You mean Jax? We can call him as soon as I get you someplace safe.”

Skye was about to say okay when something struck her. “How do you know Jax’s name?”

Aiden stared at her for a moment, then looked away. “You mentioned him to me a few times back in New York.”

Ducking out of the minivan, he slammed the door closed, then ran around the front of the vehicle. Instead of going into the barn to look for her brother, though, he opened the driver’s door and got in. Suddenly, everything that had felt so right a mere sixty seconds ago now felt completely wrong.

She’d never told Aiden or anyone else in New York about Jax. Not even her girlfriends. While she’d always harbored a serious crush on him, his name had absolutely never come up in conversation once. Why would it? It’s not like Aiden would have been interested in hearing about a hunky cowboy from Dallas with six-pack abs and irresistible dimples.

A wave of suspicion crawled up her back. She slowly reached down, unbuckling her seat belt as quietly as she could. “Aren’t you going to get my brother, Aiden?”

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror as he put the keys in the ignition. “He can meet up to us later. I need to get you out of here.”

The suspicion gripping her was edged with fear now. She locked eyes with Aiden in the mirror. “How did you know I was at the ranch?”

He tore his gaze away from hers, but not before she saw his dark eyes harden. “Jordan told me before he left New York. He called your brother. Dane said you were staying with some guy you knew back in high school. I think that’s what really set Jordan off and made him come after you, knowing you were sleeping with another man.”

Her heart dropped into her stomach. Dane said Jordan had called the day after the fire at the hotel. If her ex-boyfriend had started the fire, he would already have been in Dallas, which meant Aiden was lying his ass off.

It also meant Aiden was the one who’d tried to kill her and Jax. No wonder Rodeo didn’t like him.

Aiden must have realized she was onto him because he reached for the door lock button at the same moment she grabbed the handle of the sliding door. If she hadn’t already unbuckled her seat belt, she wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it.

Skye hit the ground outside the van and was running for the barn before Aiden even got out.

“Skye, stop!” he shouted. “Don’t go in there!”

She ignored him and kept running until she got to the barn where Jax kept the farm equipment. She looked around wildly for her brother, but all she saw was a gigantic tractor, lawn mowers, and every kind of power tool imaginable. The place smelled to high heaven with gasoline and grease, and she had to fight back a cough.

“Dane, are you in here?” she shouted.

When he didn’t answer, she called his name again. Still nothing.

She ran toward the back of the barn, becoming more convinced with every step that her brother had never come in here, when she rounded the side of the big John Deere tractor and tripped over Dane’s body.

Skye screamed as she hit the floor, not in pain but out of terror that her brother was dead. She pushed herself up from the dirt and scrambled over to Dane. She knew from the first-aid class she’d taken in college that she shouldn’t move him because she could hurt him even more, but she gently rolled him over onto his back anyway. She had to know if he was alive. Tears spilled onto her cheeks when she saw the blood flowing from a gash along the left side of his head. But then she saw his chest slowly rise and fall, and her heart almost exploded with joy.

She pressed her hand to the wound, hoping to stop the blood, when Aiden came around the tractor. She lifted her head to glare at him.

“Why did you do this?” she demanded. “I thought you were my friend, damn you!”

“I was your fucking friend,” he ground out. “But I wanted to be more than that!”

Skye was still reeling from that when Aiden took a coil of rope from a hook on the wall and advanced on her. She tried to defend herself with one hand while keeping the other pressed to the wound on Dane’s head, but Aiden grabbed her arm and dragged her away from her brother.

She fought like crazy, trying to punch him with both fists, but as mad as she was, she wasn’t nearly strong enough to do any damage. Aiden caught her flailing arms and tied her hands in front of her, then shoved her back against the wall of the barn so hard she fell. She hit the ground hard, the breath exploding from her lungs.

She lay there gasping for air, trying to twist her wrists free as Aiden yanked her arms above her head and tied the end of the rope to a hook on the wall. Then he stood there glaring down at her.

“Do you really think I spent all that time convincing you to dump that jackass Jordan just so you could come back here and jump into the bed with that walking cliché you’re sleeping with?”

He took a step toward her and she couldn’t help but flinch. He immediately stopped and held up his hands in what he probably thought was a placating gesture. But it was hard to think of him as calm and reasonable when he’d just tied her up and hit her brother on the head.

“When you told me you wanted to quit working in investments and start a bakery, I thought you’d do it in New York,” he said. “I was ready to help you, figuring we would do it together. I’d been waiting for years for you to see that Jordan was just using you, and when you finally did, you just up and left.”

She was tempted to point out that he had encouraged her to chase her dreams, then decided that wasn’t a very good idea. “You killed Jordan, didn’t you?”

The sudden change of subject seemed to catch Aiden off guard for a moment. But then he shrugged. “He didn’t really leave me much choice. I stopped by to talk to him and the bastard said he was getting ready to fly down to Dallas to beg you to take him back. I had to kill him to protect you from falling for his crap and getting sucked back into his life. I stuffed him in the trash chute in his apartment building. They’ll be lucky if they ever find the body.”

The really scary part—beyond the fact that he’d killed the man who was supposed to be his best friend—was that Aiden clearly believed what he was saying. That he thought he’d somehow saved her by murdering Jordan.

“And the fire in the hotel?” she asked softly. “Was that to protect me, too?”

At least he had the sanity left to look a little chagrined at that. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. I just wanted to start a little fire so I could rescue you and show you what kind of man I could be for you. But the fire got out of control. I still tried to save you, but that oversized pile of muscles got there before me.”

There were just some many things wrong with that entire line of thinking that it was impossible to point out all of them. Not that she would anyway. She didn’t want to piss him off anymore.

“How did you find me at that hotel anyway?” she asked.

If she could keep Aiden talking, there was a chance Dane would wake up. She hoped.

“I put a GPS tracking app on your phone.” His mouth edged up in a wry smile. “I’m in IT remember?”

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected him to say, but it sure as hell wasn’t that. But before she could tell him what a complete dirtbag he was, he walked behind her to the far end of the barn and started doing something that made a lot of noise. She craned her neck to see what he was doing, but it was no use.

“Unfortunately, your phone got destroyed in the hotel fire,” he said conversationally. “So I was forced to call your dim-witted brother and pretend I was Jordan to get him to tell me where you were staying. I have to admit, I was fucking pissed off when I realized you’d hooked up with some muscle-bound cowboy who likes to play with fire. I thought you were better than that. Guess I had you all wrong.”

Aiden came back into her line of vision, a tin gas can in his hand. It sloshed loudly as he walked toward her. Skye’s heart began to pound. What the hell was he going to do with that?

He dropped to one knee on the ground and pulled off the top of the small spout, then tore a piece of cloth from the dirty white rag in his hand and stuffed it into the opening. Even from where she sat against the wall a few feet away, Skye could smell the gas fumes coming from the can.

He glanced at her as he tossed the rest of the rag on the floor. “What? You didn’t think I was just going to let you go, did you? I mean, I tried to get you to come with me, but you wanted to stay with your brother.”

He glanced at Dane, still passed out cold on the ground. That’s when Skye realized Aiden had never been the friend she’d thought he was. He had played her just as much, if not more, than Jordan ever had.

“You have to admit there’s a certain irony to burning you to death,” he added. “Since you’re sleeping with a fireman and all.”

“You’re not going to get away with this.” She sounded like a B-grade movie, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t let Aiden set fire to the barn. “They’ll figure out it was you.”

“I doubt that.” Aiden stood up and took a lighter from his pocket. “Like you said, everyone thinks Jordan killed me. I’ll just show up in New York in a few days with a nasty head wound and say I don’t remember anything. I’ll make sure I cry at your funeral, though.”

He was just about to flick the wheel on the lighter when the sounds of approaching sirens filtered through the barn.

Skye’s heart leaped. She opened her and screamed as loudly as she could, praying someone would hear her.

Cursing, Aiden shoved the lighter back in his pocket. He reached down and picked up a length of rag he’d tossed on the floor earlier, then walked over to her.