Run Wild (43 page)

“Wait a minute.” He turned around and Natasha looked up from where she’d been slowly turning the pages of the paper.

“I found it rather interesting that they knew my dad was being released and no one bothered to tell me about it.”

She stuck her lower lip out and Trent almost forgot what he was going to say. He rubbed his forehead, forcing his head to stay clear and not imagine those hot, pouty lips wrapped around his cock. The sooner he fucked her silly, the better he would be at his job; he was sure of it. Natasha was a dangerous distraction.

“That’s because I hadn’t released him at that point, nor was anyone in town even aware he was there until less than an hour before Helen at the diner called me.” Trent turned back to the coffee, willing it to brew faster. There was something here, something in what Natasha had just said.

“Are you suggesting someone watched you bring him in last night?” Natasha asked. But then she snapped her finger and pointed it at him. “I know. The entire town pegs my father as a murderer, but the moment you haul him in everyone knows you’ll let him go because they know he didn’t do it.”

“Not everyone. We knew he didn’t do it.”

“‘We?’”

“Yes. We,” he repeated, and walked up to bop her on the nose.

Natasha slapped at his hand, but Trent grabbed her wrist, pulled her hand to his mouth, and kissed the back of it. Natasha’s eyes grew brighter as she watched him, her mouth puckering into a small, tight circle.

It took more than a little strength to keep all the blood in his body from draining straight into his cock. “And apparently at least a few others knew he wasn’t the murderer, and knew I’d release him once Ethel lawyered him up.”

Trent liked holding her hand to his mouth. It forced her to sit up straight, arch her back, and tilt backward just enough to make her sweater stretch over her full, round breasts.

“Do you think those two I overheard already knew who the killer was?”

“Your father knew.”

“My dad told me he killed Carl,” she said under her breath.

Trent wondered when George had told Natasha that. Obviously, it wasn’t information she’d seen fit to share with him before now. If she asked, he would share the details her father had told him, but if not, they weren’t details Trent cared to dwell on any more than necessary and he certainly didn’t want the images King had planted in his brain also in Natasha’s.

“If O’Reilly bragged about killing Carl, then others know.” Trent needed more than one man telling him. Although he believed George and had already put in for a search warrant to comb through the ranch hands’ bunks for that hunting knife. He’d searched the grounds after the murder but not anyone’s living quarters. At the time, he hadn’t thought of the Burrowses or their ranch hands as suspects. He hadn’t had any suspects.

Trent had decided to lay low for part of the day and see what O’Reilly might try doing. However, if others knew or were in on it somehow, what might be in it for them? Had someone motivated O’Reilly to kill Williams? The rage and extreme methods used did almost seem beyond O’Reilly’s simpleminded MO.

“So we need to go out to that ranch and start talking to people.”

Trent let go of her hand reluctantly. The smell of brewing coffee called to him. He would go out to the ranch with the search warrant. Trent had a few good men, locals he knew he could trust, and had called them already to put some feelers out. Two of them worked out at the ranch. They would text him the moment they heard or saw anything strange or if O’Reilly disappeared. It wasn’t foolproof. Trinity Ranch was over a thousand acres, and men could work out there all day and not see every ranch hand until they met for the evening meal. Trent had to play his cards right, though. There were two crimes happening here, and if all went well he’d be making more than one arrest very soon.

He poured two cups of coffee, then brought one over to Natasha as she finished telling him about the conversation she’d overheard.

“I remember they said there was fifty thousand in cash and we counted forty thousand.” She accepted the mug and blew on it, looking up at him.

“Interesting bit of trivia Jim Burrows mentioned to me before you two ladies joined us in his den,” Trent said, and sipped the steaming coffee. He embraced the burn, willed the fumes to go straight to his brain and keep his head clear. “He told me he’d always wondered, if Nellie’s grave were ever found, and there was actually cash buried with her, that if the individual bills had been printed long enough ago, they very well could be worth more than their face value.”

“Like a fifty might be worth sixty dollars?”

“Something like that. I think it depends on the year they were printed. But if any of the bills happened to be predepression era, then yes, they would definitely be worth more.”

“So how do you know?”

“Research.” He shrugged.

Natasha studied him for a moment and he swore he saw her brain wrapping around what he’d just told her, digesting it, and kicking out the obvious hypothesis.

“Did you give Ethel back the cash?”

“Turned over forty thousand dollars, just as her lawyer had worked up in his paperwork.”

“Did it happen to be the same forty thousand dollars we found in the cabin and in the safe-deposit box?” Already she was smiling.

“Old bills pretty much look the same.”

Natasha put her cup on the table and jumped out of her seat. “You knew she planned on running away with that cash.”

“It wasn’t exactly my idea. Sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but I don’t have forty grand I can use to swap with old bills that might, or might not, be worth more. Although the fact that they were buried with someone’s ancestor, during a time of so much heated dispute between two ranches, kind of makes that cash worth more right there.”

“Jim Burrows asked you to swap out the money.”

She stood too close. Trent let that be the reason. He took a gulp of his coffee, staring at her over the rim, and watched her watch him. She was still figuring it all out. He hadn’t decided yet if he’d tell her how much he loved watching her brainstorm, especially when her entire face suddenly glowed when it all connected in her mind.

“Jim Burrows knew his wife planned on running off with my dad,” she said, looking at Trent to see if she was right.

Trent put his coffee cup on the table with hers and moved in, sitting down and trapping her with her legs straddled on either side of his.

“A good man knows all the secrets of his woman,” he murmured, then pulled her on his lap and kissed her before she could accuse him of thinking women were property.

Natasha groaned or possibly tried talking into his mouth. Trent really didn’t care. He pressed past her lips, tasting the warm coffee on her as he began devouring her. This time he had no intention of stopping or holding back the desire he’d had building inside of him since the last time he’d made love to her.

Even when she’d pissed him off yesterday, going on about him being too bossy and aggressive and suggesting he couldn’t handle the same from her, Trent knew he wouldn’t stay angry with her. It dawned on him, and maybe her father suggesting as much might have had something to do with it, that Natasha had always dated
safe
men. That is, men she could control, who would do as she said. Which of course had never satisfied her. They had been safe ground for her. Natasha would never fall for a man like that.

George King had said straight up that he’d seen how his daughter looked at Trent. Trent did push her, and he planned to continue doing so. She would get pissed. They would probably have some doozies of fights. But she wouldn’t fall in love with a man who didn’t challenge her.

“This is coming off,” he whispered against her cheek, and began lifting her sweater over her breasts.

He felt her full, soft skin and a brush of her hard nipples when Natasha pulled her head back a few inches to focus on his face.

“Take your own clothes off,” she said, the orneriness in her expression beyond adorable.

“I think you should.”

“Country boy thinks a woman should do all the work.” But already she was yanking at his T-shirt, unbuttoning his pants, and doing her best to get him undressed without moving off him.

“Not all of it.” He made decent work of pulling her sweater off her but then stood and moved faster than he had in ages to get out of his boots and shed his jeans.

Natasha did the same, and when he looked up from his task and saw her standing in his kitchen naked there was no controlling the unbearable pressure that wrapped around his dick and balls.

“You’re so incredibly beautiful,” he whispered, his voice raw with emotions he wasn’t sure she was ready to hear.

Trent had already decided she would start hearing how he believed he was falling in love with her. It would take her some getting used to, and there were the demographics to figure out. None of that bothered him, though.

“Come here.” He wrapped his hands around her narrow waist and lifted her, then again he sat in the chair.

“Find time to put another condom in your wallet?”

He’d even managed to pull his wallet out and place it on the table before his jeans hit the floor. Natasha moved over him, straddling his legs, her breasts in his face and the heat from her pussy damn near suffocating him from the cock up.

It impressed him that he was able to slide the package out of his wallet, rip it open with his teeth, and pull the latex free from its wrapper. When Natasha took it from him, kept her gaze locked with his, and pressed it against his cock, then slowly began sheathing him, he was pretty sure his eyes rolled back in his head.

“My woman has skills,” he groaned.

“Your woman?”

He blinked, fought to focus on her. “Yeah, I think so. My woman.”

“You’ll never own me,” she purred, her fingers gliding up and down the length of his shaft.

“Don’t want to own you,” he said, and let his head fall back, stopping only when he hit the wall behind him. “Just want you with me always.”

“Always?”

“Always.”

Natasha pressed her cool palms against his cheeks and he lifted his head, watching her. She moved closer, nipping at his lower lip, and sank down on him, filling herself with his dick.

“Always,” she whispered, and moaned.

Chapter Twenty

Natasha stepped out of the shower and dried off, then climbed into clean clothes and pulled her hair loose from the makeshift bun she’d put it in when she’d hopped into rinse off.

“I could go for another cup of coffee, sound good?” she called out, staring at herself through the steamed-over mirror and contemplating putting more makeup on. In spite of taking her time that morning to carefully apply her makeup, thinking at the time if she ran into Trent she would give him an eyeful of what he would not be getting, none of it was left on her face now.

She’d known in the back of her head, buried under her seething outrage at Trent for taking her dad into custody, she wouldn’t stay mad at him. Natasha admitted when she’d left the bed-and-breakfast she had really hoped to see him. And now all these words he was throwing at her.

And what was she doing? The normal practice was to run for the hills the first time any man started saying the
l
word.

“Maybe it’s because you’re already in the hills,” she said to her steamed-over reflection, then grinned. Damn. She really felt good. “Do you have a game plan all figured out?” she called out, heading back toward the kitchen.

Trent wasn’t there. “Trent?” she called out, turning and retracing her steps, checking his living room, his bedroom, and even the other rooms in his house. It was a large ranch house, obviously too big for one bachelor. It was the house his father had bought when he’d married Trent’s mother and apparently had hoped for a larger family. Instead two men had lived here, one raising the other, both of them men on their own. “Trent?” she called, yelling this time. “Where the hell are you?”

The house was suddenly way too quiet.

Natasha marched into the living room, noticed his coat wasn’t underneath hers, and yanked open the front door. Trent’s Suburban was no longer parked out front.

Natasha wanted to scream.

“You son of a bitch,” she hissed. “Where did you go?”

Hurrying into the kitchen and to her purse and cell phone, Natasha downed the rest of the coffee and grabbed her things. If he thought he would make her stay here while he went and solved this case on his own, he would damn well learn otherwise real soon. That’s when she spotted the note on the table.

I know you’re pissed.

“Damn straight I am,” she growled at the piece of looseleaf paper that appeared to have been torn from a spiral notebook. She picked it up, tearing the many loose paper pieces off the edge and letting them fall to the table as she kept reading.

My forensics team in Redding just called and confirmed the stains on the clothes you found in the cabin were blood, Carl Williams’ blood. Pat O’Reilly’s fingerprints and body sweat were also all over the clothes. You found the one piece of evidence that secured my warrant. Thank you, sweetheart.