The Trouble with Texas Cowboys(25)

He tucked his hands in his belt loops, and good Lord, those jeans did things that gave her hot flashes. It was either dance with him or stand there slack-jawed like a Saturday-night drunk. She tossed the cleaner and the rag on the table, tucked her thumbs in her jean loops, and matched him step for step in the line dance.

When it ended, she was panting so badly that she couldn’t even talk. “That sucked every bit of energy out of me.”

“You ain’t that old yet,” he said as Mary Chapin Carpenter started singing “Down at the Twist and Shout.” He swung her out to the Cajun-flavored music and brought her back to his chest for three minutes of swing dancing.

“Please, tell me the third song isn’t that fast,” she said when it ended.

The whine of the fiddle in an old song softened the lights and the whole atmosphere in the bar. Sawyer pulled her close to his chest, picked up her hands, and put them around his neck. Then he dropped both his hands to rest at the small of her back, and he moved slowly around the floor as George Jones sang “Don’t Be Angry.”

He softly sang the words in her ear as they danced. He sang about remembering the first time he flirted with her, and asked her not be angry with him when he failed to understand all her little whims and wishes all the time.

When the song ended, he tipped her chin up and kissed her. She heard the whine of the fiddles and a harmonica somewhere in the distance, even though the music had stopped. There wasn’t an angry bone left in her body when she rolled up on her toes for the second kiss.

“That, darlin’, was the payment on the bet,” she said.

He picked up the broom and started sweeping.

“So?” she asked.

“So what?”

“So is my bet debt paid in full?”

“Honey, after that kiss, I will need at least two cold showers to cool my blood so I can sleep.”





Chapter 13


Clouds shifted back and forth over the moon, and only an occasional star could be found in the sky when Jill and Sawyer locked up for the evening.

Jill inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with clean, cool air. “Thank goodness the bunkhouse and the store are smoke-free, or we’d both drop graveyard dead with lung cancer from secondhand smoke.”

“At least the exhaust fan takes most of it out of the bar area, so we don’t get what the folks do that are out there around the tables.” Sawyer’s hand went to the small of her back as he guided her to the truck.

They were inside with seat belts buckled, and he had put the truck in reverse, when both doors opened, startling Jill so badly that she squealed.

“What the hell?” Sawyer said.

Tall men with ski masks, bibbed overalls, and work boots pointed sawed-off shotguns at them. Sawyer’s pulse quickened, and adrenaline rushed through his body, but there wasn’t a thing he could do. Three guns in his truck, and he couldn’t reach a damn one of them.

“Out of the truck right now. You make a move, and I’ll shoot this little lady right here in the parking lot. She’d bleed out before you could get an ambulance all the way up here,” the one with a gun on Jill said gruffly.

“Hey, slow down. We’re not protesting. You can have the truck, if that’s what you are after.” Sawyer reached for the seat belt and got a tap on the shoulder with the butt of the gun.

“Don’t be cute, or you’ll never see her again,” the man said.

“I’m undoing our seat belts. Don’t get trigger-happy. We are stepping out now,” Sawyer said.

If only one of them had held a gun, he might have grabbed it and told Jill to run, but not when there were two guns. Jill might get hurt or killed. There wasn’t a truck in the world worth harming one hair on her head, but who in the hell would have thought there would be hijackers in Burnt Boot, Texas?

“Hey, Sherlock,” the man with the gun on Jill yelled. “It’s all yours.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Sawyer asked. “Can I get my personal things out of the glove compartment before you take it off to strip it down for parts?”

“Who said we’re stripping it down? And, no, you can’t get anything out of the inside. You’ve probably got guns in there. Give me your cell phones, billfold, and your purse, woman,” Jill’s assailant said.

Sawyer inhaled deeply. Yes, there was a pistol in the glove box, another one in the console, and a third one under the seat. He had a license to carry all three, but it wasn’t doing him a bit of good right then.

Sherlock crawled into the driver’s seat, backed the truck out, and drove away with it. No skidding tires or slinging gravel—just drove off like it belonged to him.

“Now, you two start walking,” Jill’s outlaw said.

“To where?” Jill asked.

“Out to the road.”

“Are you going to kill us in the middle of the road? Wouldn’t it be better to shoot us right here?” Jill asked.

Sawyer could have wrung her pretty little neck himself right then. If they reached the road, there was a possibility that someone might drive by and help them. He reached over and laced her fingers in his. She squeezed his hand gently, and he hoped that didn’t mean she was about to try something stupid.

A dark van pulled up and slowed down, and Sawyer thought their problems were solved, until the double doors at the back swung open, and the two hooded men motioned for them to get inside.

“What the hell is this?” Sawyer protested.

The second man shoved the gun into Jill’s gut, and Sawyer crawled inside the van. They pushed Jill in right behind him. The doors closed, and the darkness was so thick that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

“Jill, where are you?” he whispered.

A hand reached out and touched him on the shoulder. “Right here.”

He grabbed it and pulled her into his lap, felt around her face until he found an ear, and pressed his lips close to it. “I imagine this is bugged, so start kicking the side of the van to make noise, and I’ll whisper. Who do you know that would kidnap you?”

She kicked and said in a loud whisper, “Nobody. Not even Aunt Gladys or Aunt Polly would do this.”

“Gallaghers or Brennans?”

“Both.”

“Which way are we going?”

“I don’t know. I think we turned around about the time they shoved me in here, but I’m not sure.”

The van slowed down as if stopping at a red light or a stop sign. Burnt Boot had only one red light and a handful of stop signs, but Sawyer still couldn’t get a bearing on where they were. Or why in the hell either of the feuding families would want to kidnap them.

Tires squealed, and they were thrown against the doors of the van. Whoever was driving cussed loud enough that they could hear him through the metal separating the cab from the cargo area. “Damn tree in the road. You should have checked things out better than this, Dumbo.”

“Does that name mean anything to you?” Sawyer asked when they were sitting back up.

“No,” she whispered.

“Well, let’s get out and move the damn thing. We can’t get to where we’re going any other way,” the one with the deep voice said.

Everything got quiet.

“I’m going to kick these doors open,” Sawyer said. “Slide back so you are out of the way.”

He raised his foot, his boot landed square on the hinged part, and the doors swung open as if by magic. Trouble was, instead of a midnight sky, there were two more guys in ski masks with guns, pistols this time, motioning for them to be quiet and get out of the van.

“It’s the FBI,” Jill said. “They’re here to save us and then shoot the balls off those bastards for stealing your truck.”

One of the men chuckled. “Follow us. Now get in here. Be quiet, and we’ll get you out of this.”

Sawyer and Jill moved as quietly as possible and crawled into another cargo van. This one was blue with some kind of lettering on the side, and the doors went shut, but not before Sawyer shoved his jacket in between them.

“Why did you do that?” Jill asked.

“I don’t think we’re being rescued. I think we’re changing kidnappers.”

“No!” she said.

“Give them time to get around to the front, and then we’re getting out. Slide off into that ditch until they drive away, and then we’ll start making our way out of this mess. We might have to find a place to hole up until daylight, when we can get our bearings. I think we were driving for about twenty minutes, but I don’t have any idea which way…now, Jill, slide out right now. They’re starting to move.”

He grabbed her hand and opened one door, retrieved his denim jacket, carefully shut the door, and the van pulled away into the night without its passengers. The two men wrestling with the tree finally freed it, and they went in the opposite direction without ever realizing they’d lost their cargo.

Sawyer and Jill exhaled loudly at the same time as they watched from a prone position halfway down a ditch beside the road.

“Now what? We don’t know where we are, and our cell phones and money are all gone,” Jill said.

“Take a real deep breath,” Sawyer said.

“Yuck,” she said.

“That, darlin’, is pig shit. Where there are pigs, there is a barn or a house or something nearby. We’ll follow our noses until we find a barn.”