Rebecca Winters – The Texas Ranger's Family (страница 1)
“It’s not funny, Kit. If anything happened to you …”
He raised himself up on one elbow and looked searchingly at her. He reached for her arm, gripping it gently. “If anything happened to me, then what?”
She could hardly think with him touching her. “I don’t want to think about it.”
“What don’t you want to think about?” he pressed. “What are you afraid of?”
“I—I wouldn’t want you to get hurt protecting me.” Her stammer was a dead giveaway that her emotions were in turmoil.
“I wouldn’t want anything to happen to either of us. For you to get hurt on my watch is unthinkable to me. Come here. Let’s talk about it.” He pulled her forward until she fell against him on the floor. He gathered her closer and entangled their legs.
“Kit—” She half gasped his name.
“On second thought, I don’t feel much like talking.” He lowered his mouth to hers. Natalie had been wanting this for so long she was past considering the wisdom of it. Kit started kissing her with a hunger as great as her own. In an explosion of need she began kissing him back, forgetting everything as she poured out her feelings for him.
The Texas Ranger’s Family
Rebecca Winters
REBECCA WINTERS, whose family of four children has now swelled to include five beautiful grandchildren, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the land of the Rocky Mountains. With canyons and high alpine meadows full of wildflowers, she never runs out of places to explore. They, plus her favourite holiday spots in Europe, often end up as backgrounds for her romance novels, because writing is her passion, along with her family and church.
Rebecca loves to hear from readers. If you wish to email her, please visit her website, www.cleanromances.com.
I’m a lucky author to have a great editor like Kathleen Scheibling, who lets me write about the kinds of heroes I love. She’s the best!
Contents
Texas Ranger Kit Saunders took cover behind a fat pine tree and watched with his binoculars from a distance. Seven people accompanied the honey-blonde widow standing at the grave site at the Evergreen Cemetery on this hot July afternoon in Austin.
The woman was Natalie Harris, and her husband, Rodney Parker Harris, age thirty-three, was being laid to rest. As far as any of the mourners, including his widow, knew, the deceased had been an accountant with LifeSpan Pharmaceutical, a huge private corporation in Austin. A week ago he’d been found at the low-end Sleepy Hollow Hotel, dead of a gunshot wound to the temple.
Kit’s captain, T. J. Horton, had assigned him to the case only yesterday.
The police had run the victim’s DNA through the database and, according to their report, the name Rodney Harris was the latest in a string of aliases. The name on the deceased’s original birth certificate was that of escaped felon Harold Park from Colorado, who’d disappeared eight years ago.
Park was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. After serving only two years of a sixty-year sentence for murder, embezzlement, armed robbery and grand larceny, he and another prisoner, convicted killer Alonzo Morales, had escaped during a transfer from the ADX Federal Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, to Canaan Federal Prison in Pennsylvania. Since that time both fugitives had gone by many false names that prevented the Feds from recapturing them.
The preliminary report from the detective here in Travis County suggested the gunshot wound was self-inflicted, but nothing would be official until all the forensic evidence had been reviewed. Something didn’t add up in Kit’s mind. It didn’t make sense that the felon would kill himself. A clever killer could have set it up to look like suicide.
A search of Harold-alias-Rod’s bank records revealed that $400,000 had been deposited into his checking account one day and withdrawn the next. The day after that, he’d been found dead in his hotel room. The size and date of the large deposit were inconsistent with his earnings from the pharmaceutical company, and the abrupt withdrawal was just plain suspicious. Normally that kind of money would have been put in a money market or the stock market at least.
Since Harold-alias-Rod had crossed state lines and had been an armed, dangerous killer, the police had asked for the Texas Rangers to take over. These were early days in the case. The police report also stated that Mrs. Harris had hired an attorney who’d attempted to serve him with divorce papers on the day he was shot. Since they weren’t yet divorced and he’d absconded with money she had half rights to under property laws, it appeared she could have a motive to see him dead.
But if Harris had still been living a life of crime and the money was stolen, then there may have been accomplices involved—maybe even other ex-felons from his past life—who might be potential culprits. If the widow was innocent of any wrongdoing, then she herself might be a target for interested parties still looking for the missing money.
Kit hadn’t met Natalie Harris. The only information he had on her so far was that she was a twenty-eight-year-old pharmacist and had a sixteen-month-old daughter named Amy. There was no sign of the toddler at the graveside.
He was going to have to build this case from scratch. Knowing of the service today, he’d decided to study the people who showed up and take pictures with a long-range lens. Oftentimes a murderer appeared at the funeral to gloat. Of the seven people present, two were females, but he didn’t sense they were family. He had the rap sheet on Alonzo Morales with a mug shot and would know if he saw that face again.
Before long the people assembled at the burial turned to leave and go their separate ways. Kit’s first frontal view of Mrs. Harris being helped by the mortuary staff came as a shock to his senses. She was a true beauty; maybe five foot six. He took a picture of her. The classy, tailored black suit couldn’t disguise the mold of her shapely body and legs. Everything about her appealed to him, which came as a shock. It had been a long time since he had reacted this way to a total stranger.
Kit didn’t know what he’d expected. Maybe to find a widow in tears? But from a distance he got the impression she hadn’t given in to whatever emotion she was feeling. Her lovely classic bone structure was undermined by features that showed no animation. Shock could do that to a person in mourning.
But since she’d filed for divorce, maybe she’d passed through her period of grief long before the papers had been served. Whether elated he was dead at her hands, relieved he was gone by another person’s doing, or sad or even haunted by the way he’d died, the frozen mask he saw in front of him revealed no secrets.
Was he staring at a killer? If he was close enough to look into her eyes, he might be able to get a feel for what was going on in her psyche.
His gaze followed her to a silver Toyota parked on the roadside. The clergyman helped her in before walking to the car ahead of hers. Little by little everyone drove away from the cemetery, leaving the workers to finish their jobs.
Kit would give her a half hour before he phoned to set up a time to meet, preferably before the day was out. He needed to know her background. Was she a home-grown Texan? How long had she known the man she’d married? What about her parents or siblings? The police report didn’t have many details about her background and a dozen questions filled his mind.
Tonight he planned to drive to Marble Falls to watch his younger brother, Brandon, compete in the steer wrestling event at the Charley Taylor Rodeo Arena. Brandon was headed for a world championship competition in Las Vegas this coming December and Kit was excited for him. Until he’d made the decision to go into law enforcement, Kit had competed big-time in the same sport. But when he’d made up his mind to follow in his father’s footsteps, he’d given up the rodeo and ended up losing his girlfriend Janie at the same time. She knew that the Saunders brothers had suffered over the loss of their Texas Ranger father in a shootout when they were fifteen and seventeen. Fearing the same thing would happen to Kit, she’d broken it off with him, not wanting any part of a career that could end his life right in the middle of it, leaving a grieving wife and children.
Five years ago Janie had fallen in love with Brandon’s hazer, Scott Turner, and they’d married. As of today they had one child. He was happy for her. Any residual pain from their breakup had disappeared a long time ago. When all was said and done, he was content enough with his bachelor existence. His mother and brother needed support and he could be there for them.