Page 28 of Westin
Westin took a couple of pictures and texted them to Clint before nailing fresh nails into the wood, putting the fence back to the way it had been before it was damaged. When he was finished, he returned to the horses, dropping his tools back into the saddlebag. Lea was gone, and it took him a second to spot her some eighty yards off to the north of him, standing alone in the falling snow, her heavy jacket no longer a bright, almost painful purple, but now more muted as the early-morning cold and snow surrounded her in a white halo.
She was a firecracker, this woman. She’d handled that little blip with Gray Lady with the grace of a well-practiced horsewoman, yet it had clearly shaken her, for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand. He didn’t know enough about her. He didn’t know where she’d learned to ride, why she was so comfortable out here on the ranch, why she’d been so determined to get them to protect her in the first place. Who was this woman, and why had her kiss sent him tumbling down a rabbit hole he didn’t want to go down?
“You’re going to freeze to death just standing there like that.”
She didn’t acknowledge him as he approached her. She was studying something on the ground, something he couldn’t see until he was right up behind her. It was a box, kind of like a shoebox, but slightly bigger. It had some sort of writing on the top, but if it was in English, it was a coded English he couldn’t understand. It was half-buried like someone had been in the middle of the task of putting it in the ground but was interrupted.
“What the hell?” he asked, dropping to a knee to get a better look. Lea put a hand on his arm, stopping him.
“Don’t touch it.”
“What is it?”
She bit her lip, wheels apparently turning in her head. She was struggling to find an excuse to make. At least, that’s what it felt like to him. He stood back up and took her shoulders, pushing her back just slightly so that he could stand before her without stepping on the box.
“Who are you? What have you brought to our ranch?”
She shook her head, her eyes falling to the object again. “This doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“But you know what it is.”
She didn’t respond right away, just kept staring down at the box. Westin shook her, forced her to look up at him.
“What do you know about this?”
“That you’d better leave it alone for right now. And when we get back to the main house, you should probably call your local sheriff.”
“Why? What is it?”
She tilted her head just slightly, her eyes moving over his face as he could see those wheels beginning to turn again. He let her go with a little shove, turning to snatch the box up out of the ground. She grabbed his arm, pulled him back.
“Please, Westin, if you don’t believe anything I’ve told you since the second we met, believe this: you really don’t want to touch that thing. Just leave it there!”
“How can I believe anything you’ve said when I can clearly see you’re lying to us? You’ve spent every second of the time we’ve spent together trying to distract me so that I wouldn’t ask too many questions, but the things you do say all contradict each other.”
“Westin, I—”
“You’re a liar, and I’m not going to allow you to bring something onto this ranch that could hurt Miss Dulcie, or anyone else. Do you understand?”
“Then listen to me. If you touch that, you could open a whole bag of worms. Just leave it there. Hell, my best advice would be to leave it and just pretend you never saw it. I will guarantee it will be gone in a matter of days.”
“How do you know that? How do you know what’s in that box?”
A wariness burned through her amber eyes, making the gold sparkle like it was a real bar of the precious metal. It was obvious there was something she really didn’t want to tell him. Instead, she moved up against him, pressing the full length of her body against his, resting a hand on his chest right over his heart.
“My intentions are honest here, Westin. I really like you and Clint, and the others. I don’t want to bring anything bad down on you or this ranch. That’s why it would be best if you stop asking me questions and forget about that box. Please.”
“I can’t do that.”
He pulled away from her, but did think twice about picking the box up. Instead, he took a couple of pictures of it with his phone and texted those to Clint as well. Then he turned to her and gestured for her to head back to the horses. “We still have a lot of fence to check,” he reminded her. There was obvious relief in her eyes when he did, when he didn’t touch the box. She happily headed back to the horses, but stopped every few feet to make sure he was behind her. She wasn’t letting him out of her sight.
Who the hell was this woman? And what the hell was going on here?
Westin didn’t like games. He’d been burned one too many times by liars. Maybe that was part of the reason he was living on this damn ranch, why he was pursuing a scheme that had very little chance of working. But at least he was doing what he was for good reason. This woman… what good reason could she have for lying to them, for hiding the truth about whoever or whatever she was? Nothing good could possibly come from whatever it was she was up to. The sooner she was off the ranch, the better.
He chose to ignore that part of him that ached at the sight of her, the part that would forever remember what it’d been like to kiss her. The part he knew would seek another kiss from her at some point; the part that couldn’t resist the game she was playing, the flirtation she perpetuated. The part of him that wished she’d come into his life sooner, or perhaps later, at a time that was not so complicated by Rena and Rocking D Ranch.
Chapter 6