Nothing Sweeter (Sweet on a Cowboy) (6 page)

He realized he’d spoken out loud. From the acid tone, she was still miffed.

“Mary Poole said, ‘The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote someone who is.’ ”

He smiled when she rolled her eyes. Sitting with her arms wrapped around herself, frown in place, jaw clamped tight, she looked like a pouting teenager.
Nothing cuter than a het-up female.
After a quick glance in the rearview mirror, he eased the truck off the road and let it roll to a stop. Time to chew some crow.

“Aubrey?” Her head whipped up at her full name. “I might have overreacted a tad back there. I apologize. I don’t think you’re Colburn’s spy.”

“Oh, so I guess that just makes me a naive little girl, then.” The frown was gone, but her bottom lip still jutted.

He bit back the obvious answer. He had some sense of diplomacy. And self-preservation. “A naive city girl—isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“I accept your apology.” She must have noticed his stare, because her eyes got huge and she flushed a pretty
shade of peach. “Why do you always treat me as if I’m a young girl? I’m so clearly not.”

“Clearly.” Watching that plump lower lip, he felt something tug low in his gut. Pulling his attention back to the road, he did a quick traffic check, and then merged back into traffic. “How old are you?”

“Old enough that you shouldn’t be asking.” She smiled. “I’m thirty-one. How old are you, Methuselah?”

Old enough to know that what I’m thinking is inappropriate, especially with an employee. Down, Sparky.
“Forty.”

They kept their own counsel the rest of the way to the ranch. As he pulled up next to the house, the front door opened. Wyatt took the porch steps in one leap and trotted to the driver’s side of the truck, worry plain on his face, a sheet of paper fluttering in his hand.

Max shut down the engine, opened the door, grabbed his hat, and stepped out. He wanted to be standing to face what was clearly bad news. “What is it, Wyatt?” He slapped his hat on as Bree jogged around the front of the truck.

“It’s from the IRS. They’re auditing the High Heather.”

Max’s sphincter tightened.
How much bad can one day hold?
He knew he should reach for the paper, but he couldn’t seem to uncurl his fists.

“Let me see that.” Bree reached around him to take the letter from Wyatt’s fingers. She scanned the sheet. “They’re questioning your 940 Form, Section 179, for the past two years. Providing you have receipts and adequate backup, this shouldn’t be too bad.” She squinted at the small print at the bottom of the letter. “I’d need to look up Publication 225 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. I’m not familiar—”

Max snatched the paper back.

Bree looked up at him, then at Wyatt. “What?”

Max tipped his hat back. “Where the hell did you come from, lady?”

“Who cares?” Wyatt jabbed an elbow in his ribs. “If she can help, I don’t care if she’s Al Capone. Do you?”

7

Y
ou’re as good a liar as you were a detective.

After Wyatt’s unwitting comment, Bree put her anger and nervous energy to good use. Grunting, she lifted the hay bale a few inches. In spite of the canvas gloves, the twine bit her fingers. Sweat tickled down her back as she shuffled the bale to the trapdoor of the loft, set it down, and with a kick, pushed it through the opening. It hit the ground with a satisfying
thump
.

Her hands were busy, but her mind wasn’t. She couldn’t help but think back to that day. The windowless interrogation room at the Century City Jail had been tiny, and they’d kept her there for hours.

The Federal agents only sat and looked at her.

So she started talking.

About the call from a customer, who got knockoff gaming boards instead of his ordered computer boards. Boards that would sell for eight hundred dollars a pop on the open market.

About her warehouse reconnaissance: the Taiwan
shipment of knockoff game boards she’d found in boxes labeled with the cheaper item’s barcode.

About her tracking the illegal boards to an account on eBay. This wasn’t her first brush with Vic’s schemes. It hadn’t occurred to her that the seller name, Madison Avenue Distribution, had anything to do with her.

She revealed the rest of the story: her resignation and the hushed conversation she’d overheard on the other side of Vic’s closed office door. So much for amateur sleuthing. What she’d uncovered those past months was just the tip of an iceberg.

And she was the
Titanic
.

They had questions then, all right. Where was the money? Was she paying off someone in Customs to look the other way? How long had she been doing this? Where was the money?

Horror mixed with her gut load of worry and panic.

After three hours of interrogation, the investigators gave up in disgust. They turned her over to the deputies, along with a plastic bag of her possessions, and told her she’d better spend some time working on her story.

Then the nightmare began in earnest. The drunk tank. The fingerprinting. The
cavity search
.

Spit out at the end of the booking gauntlet, she was allowed a phone call. Stabbing the keys, Aubrey imagined the phone ringing in Phoenix. Her mother, stirring a pot on the stove, would put the spoon down and cross the room to answer. But she didn’t. The phone rang and rang.

What now? She shuddered, thinking of calling any of her “friends.” She’d be the joke of the postwork happy hour. Ignoring the shouts behind her to “Hurry her honky ass up,” she scanned the smudged business cards thumbtacked
to the wall. Her lifestyle left her with enough money for bail or an attorney, but not both. Wagering an attorney would help more in the long run, she dialed the number on the most professional-looking card.

That night, thoughts scrabbled in her brain like crabs trying to escape a tank. The pounding panic and cold rushing adrenaline made her sleepless night a blur: the cell, the bright lights, the noise.

The next morning, guards herded Aubrey, with other prisoners, on a bus, to court. Her cut-rate attorney showed up in large cheap shoes, looking young enough to have attended high school and law school concurrently. He listened to her babbled explanation. He didn’t yawn in her face, but it was a near thing.

His interest peaked only when he explained his fee structure.

Didn’t he understand that she’d been in jail? That she might have to go back?

In court, she stood on silly-putty knees as the charges were read: customs fraud, patent infringement, Internet fraud, money laundering. Her attorney’s defense consisted of a bored, “not guilty.” He told her that he’d hire an investigator and not to worry.

Not worry?
While he investigated, she would be living with felons.

He might as well have given her water wings to face a tsunami.

8

M
om, I’m fine.” Lying under the covers, Bree brushed a hand over the rough wool of the blanket on her chest. “I’m sorry I haven’t called, but I’ve been busy. I got a job.”

“Are you in Denver? How large is the company? Should I send you your work clothes?” Her mother’s concern carried over the wireless, plain as if she were in the room.

She loved her mom, and after what Bree’d been through, appreciated the support. But her worry added pressure, as if Bree had to hurry and be successful, so her mother could relax. It was what pushed her to pack up her Jeep and leave Phoenix. It was also why she avoided calling her mother as often as she should.

“No, I’m outside Steamboat Springs, and my old clothes wouldn’t help me a bit in this job. I’m a groom!”

“Oh, honey, you worked so hard to get your degree. Don’t you want to at least try to—”

“No, Mom. I don’t.” Hearing the sharp edge to her words, she took a deep breath and tried again. “I chose
this job on purpose. I want to rest awhile before I decide what to do with the rest of my life.” She hurried on to avoid her mother’s opinion. “And guess what? I like it. I’m out in the air all day, and the horses are great. One of the owners is a really nice guy, and the boarders are mostly nice too.” There was no need to worry her, talking about the difficult ones.

“I’m glad, Aubrey.” Her mom sighed. “You rest, hon, and put on some weight while you’re at it. You’re sure not going to want that job in the winter, in Colorado. You can come home to Phoenix in the fall.”

“Phoenix isn’t my home, Mom. It’s yours and Briscoe’s.” Her mom had remarried long after Bree left for college, when she’d met and fallen in love with a long-distance trucker at her job as a waitress at the local truck stop. He was a great guy, and Bree was happy that her mother was happy, but Bree was way too old to see Briscoe as a stepfather. “I’m going to find a new place to settle. No reason I have to be in a rush.”

“Well, don’t let your first experience sour you to being a controller, Aubrey. Once you explain what happened, potential employers will see how lucky they’d be to have you.”

Her mom loved her daughter, so she couldn’t understand why a controller with a fraud conviction wouldn’t be seen as an asset to a business owner. “I know, Mom. I know. Listen, I’ll let you go. I just wanted to call so you wouldn’t worry.”

Walking past his father’s office, Wyatt glanced in. He stopped dead, the hair on his neck rising. “Jesus, Max, I thought I’d seen a ghost.”

Max looked up from the piles of paper on the desk.

“You even have his mannerisms. I remember him looking over his reading glasses at me, just like you’re doing now.” Wyatt stepped into the inner sanctum of his childhood.

Max tore off the glasses and, tossing them on the desk, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Well, I hope I’m better at taxes than he was. This is a disaster, Wyatt.” He lifted the top page and tossed it across the desk. “What the heck was he thinking? Why didn’t he turn this over to a CPA in town?”

Wyatt ignored the paper and rested one hip on the desk. “Dad was proud. I’m sure he didn’t want anyone in town knowing about his losses.”

Max sighed, eyeing the messy desk. “You’re right. But it’s not like every other rancher hereabouts is in any better shape.”

Wyatt nodded toward a dusty, beat-up footlocker resting in the corner by the desk. “What is that filthy thing doing in here?”

“It came from the office your new groom cleaned out. Because it had a lock on it, the men thought it might be something we’d want.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I haven’t had the time to look at it.”

“Max, why don’t you just hire Bree to do this? It’s obvious that she’s some kind of accountant.”

“Are you nuts? We hire her because she knows a couple of buzzwords? She does a good job with the horses, but I’m not trusting High Heather’s future to some city girl with a black hole for a past. If you would, you’ve lived in Boston too long.”

Some things never change
. “You sound like him too, Max.” Wyatt smiled. “Never trust a stranger, especially
one from a city.” He glanced around the office amazed to see how little things had changed in the years that had passed. He remembered standing at attention in front of this desk, speared by his father’s disapproving look. “What is it about living in the country that makes people so suspicious? I never understood that.”

The lines on his brother’s face deepened. “What’s Boston like, Wyatt? Not the city. I mean…”

“You mean my life?” Max nodded. “It’s good. Juan and I have a brownstone in the North End, right in the middle of the nightlife.”

“Juan. That’s who answered the phone when I called to tell you about Dad?”

“Yes.” He glanced at his brother. A stranger would take Max’s stone face for disapproval, but he knew Max was just uncomfortable with the subject. “We’ve been together for five years, and I can’t imagine a life without him.” As if he’d walked into a fogbank of homesickness, the room seemed to recede. Home felt more real: the condo over the market street, the antiques, the dark man whose soulful eyes held Wyatt’s world. The fog leached into him, a cold, aching loneliness.

“What does he do?” Max shifted papers on the desk. “For a living, I mean.”

“He’s a stockbroker. When you can leave the ranch for a while, we’d love for you to visit, Max.”

Max worried a paper clip, twisting it. “Yeah. We’ll see.”

The fog dissolved in an acid bath of irritation. “Is it me that makes you uncomfortable, Max?” He stood. “Or is it that, living with Dad so long, his prejudice settled into your skin?”

He turned his back on his brother’s discomfort and
walked to the wall, to the photos that had hung there forever. They were all of Max at different ages, showing sheep, on a horse, fishing. “It’s funny. I’m grown now, with a life of my own. You’d think it wouldn’t matter that he acted like you were his only child.” He turned to his brother, who sat motionless, listening. “But it does.”

Max opened the lap drawer, took out an old Polaroid photo, and tossed it across the table.

Wyatt stared at the picture, bent at the edges and yellow with age. “I remember this.” The photo was of him and Max astride their horses, opening a gate. He’d been five, Max nine. They both grinned into the camera, his smile minus a front tooth.

Picking up the photo, he struggled with the familiar sadness the past always brought with it. “A single picture of both of us, relegated to a drawer. That’s so typical.” He shook his head and turned to the door.
What did I expect?

“Wyatt?” His brother’s voice broke into his brooding thoughts. “I’m sorry.”

Wyatt stopped but didn’t turn. “It’s not yours to be sorry for, brother.” He kept walking until he was in the privacy of his room, dialing Juan’s number and reminding himself again why this didn’t matter.

“If you hadn’t called today, I was going to call the Mounties, Wyatt.”

Juan’s deep voice soothed Wyatt’s rumpled emotions. He smiled. “Mounties are in Canada. We’re way south of that.”

“Well, the Lone Ranger, then.” His voice dropped to intimate. “How’re you holding up?”

“Things here never change, Juan.”

“It’s that bad? When can you come home? I was at the Quay last night, and everyone was asking about you.”

Wyatt smiled, imagining their favorite restaurant, eating chowder at their table in the upstairs dormer. “I’d be gone already, but there are more problems. Financial problems.”

“Sounds serious. Do you need money? I can wire you some. Can I come out, even if it’s only so you’re not the only queer in that backwater state?”

Wyatt chuckled. “Rural Colorado isn’t ready for me, and I grew up here. A gay Cuban? We’d be tarred and feathered. Nah, I’ll be okay. But it sure is good hearing your voice.”

“Then don’t wait so long to call me. I worry about you, you know.” He heard Juan’s sigh. “Now, let me tell you what happened with Toby and that dating service…”

After a few minutes of normal, Wyatt hung up, glanced around the bedroom that hadn’t changed since he’d been here last, and brushed a tear away. Just hearing about his old life felt like he’d been tossed a badly needed life preserver.

You’ll be home soon,
he told himself. He imagined Juan standing, arms extended as Wyatt walked out of the Jetway.
Soon.