She glanced at him for a long moment, then seemed to come to some sort of decision as she smiled. “A guy with a sense of humor. I like that.” She gestured toward the door. “You may, um, want to buckle up. Nelly rides a little rough.”
Nelly. She’d named her truck. He fastened his safety belt and quickly found out just how bumpy the ride was going to be as the truck lurched forward.
“You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said over the roar of the engine.
Zach grinned at her, wondering just how much of a ride he was in for….
ZACH LETTERMAN WAS definitely not your normal, run-of-the-mill thorn in the side. Mariah sneaked another glance at him and his cool, clean looks, and the admirable way he looked. He appeared relaxed as her truck bumped and rutted over the dirt road leading to Claude Ray’s place, which was little more than a shack tucked away on a corner of someone else’s land. It had been that someone else, namely Joe Carter, who had called to tip her off about Claude’s return.
“What’s the case about?” Zach Letterman asked.
Mariah pulled her gaze from where she’d been staring at his thick, long-fingered hands and looked into his face. The gleam of recognition in his moss-green eyes made her skin heat up. “Pardon me?”
“This case you have to close. What’s it regarding?”
She gripped the steering wheel tighter when she hit a particularly nasty pothole. “Horse thief.”
Zach’s eyebrows shot up high on his smooth forehead. “Horse thief?”
“Yeah.” She slowed down a bit so the engine didn’t roar too loudly. Claude wouldn’t be going anywhere without her seeing him anyway, seeing as this was the only road leading in or out of the place. “A nearby breeder had two of his prime studs come up missing day before yesterday. Maybe you recognize the names? Gentle As Rain won the Kentucky Derby last year and Black Thunderfoot won the Triple Crown three years ago.”
He slowly shook his head. “Sorry. Don’t follow racing.”
“Oh. Well, anyway, those are the studs that came up missing. Carter charges twenty-five grand a pop for stud fees.”
“That much?”
She smiled. “Yes. Funny, isn’t it? Kind of like male prostitution of the animal variety.” She waved her hand toward the west. “Anyway, when Carter called me to look into the matter, I knew immediately who was behind the theft. A guy by the name of Claude Ray. He’s a local of sorts who sweeps into town every now and again, leaving a trail of illegal activities in his wake. He usually shows up again when the fuss dies down and the local authorities have moved on to bigger and better things.” She hit a nasty bump and would have catapulted from the seat if not for her own safety belt. “I heard Claude showed up again about a week or so ago.”
“Is this something P.I.s usually handle around here?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard. “Isn’t this something for the authorities?”
“Usually, yes. But Carter’s spread borders my daddy’s ranch and our families go way back. My uncle Bubba—the P.I. business was his before he kicked, er, before he passed on last year—always saw to these kinds of favors for friends.”
Zach turned his head to look out the window at the passing landscape. Long stretches of open plains extended as far as the eye could see.
Mariah took a deep breath, finding a deep satisfaction being near the place where she’d grown up. There was something about the Texas plains that crawled right up under your skin and stayed there, much as the soil did when it got under your fingernails. She glanced at Zach to find him shrugging out of his suit jacket then tossing it over the back of the seat. His shirt was white and crisp and covered him to the wrists. Well, at least until he popped the buttons at the cuff and rolled the material up to the top of his forearms. Mariah swallowed. And what forearms they were, too. While his hands looked much softer than she was used to—hell, they looked softer than hers—his forearms were nothing but thick, corded muscles, his skin dotted with soft almost black hair. And he had the kind of wrists she doubted she could get the fingers of one hand around.
Oh, the man next to her might be a Northern city boy, but she suspected he was as strong as any man who had spent his life on the range.
“You’re from out here?” Zach asked, pulling her attention back to his face.
She nodded and pointed to the west again. “Daddy’s cattle ranch is about five miles that way.”
His gaze on her face was softly probing. “How did you end up a P.I.?”
Mariah stared determinedly ahead. Now there was a question you didn’t want to have to answer when you least expected it. “Long story.”
“I’m not exactly going anywhere,” he said with a grin.
She cleared her throat, thankful it couldn’t be heard over the roar of the engine as she sped up again. “Let’s just say it was serendipity along with a healthy dose of nepotism.”
While that was true, she didn’t want to delve into the fact that there had come a point a couple years back when she felt her presence at the ranch wasn’t welcome anymore. “A distraction,” that’s what her father had called her. A woman doing a man’s job is how she interpreted his explanation. It seemed that overnight she had moved from a valued member of the ranch to unwanted company. The ranch hands went silent when she joined them for dinner. Her father scowled whenever she came back from a run. And she’d been relegated to menial tasks a two-hundred-year-old woman could have done.
She blessed the day when her uncle Bubba had offered her a one-time only assignment that included tracking down the very man she was tracking now: Claude Ray. He’d stolen some of her father’s cattle back then, re-branded them, and was selling them at auction in the next county. The idiot.
Conniving, Ray definitely was. Smart, he was not.
But the one-time assignment had quickly turned into a full-time job. And it had basically become her mission in life since she couldn’t work at the ranch.
“How about you?” she asked him.
Zach stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. And she supposed in some way maybe she was. It usually took Yanks a bit of an adjustment period before they got used to the easy cadence of Texas speak. And she had the impression that he’d definitely just gotten off the boat. Or plane.
He shrugged and squinted against the sun as he stared out the window. “You could say I came about it much the same way.”
Mariah smiled. So he didn’t want to share his reasons any more than she did. Good. That was just fine with her. More than fine. Because it meant he wouldn’t hound her.
She turned her attention back to the road. They were maybe a half a mile up from the shack where Claude Ray sometimes hung his hat. And there it was. She could see the smear of weathered gray boards against the horizon. And behind the shack she made out horses. Two of them. Exactly the number she suspected Claude had stolen from the Carter ranch.
She stepped on the gas, then noticed a spot of red dart from the shack and make a run for a white pickup nearby.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Mariah muttered under her breath.
Finally she elicited a physical reaction to her driving from Zach as he gripped the dusty dashboard. “I, um, take it this is the part where I should hold on?”
“If you value your life.” Mariah smiled at him, feeling a rush of adrenaline that warmed her entire body.
She told herself the rush had nothing to do with the man next to her. She got a rush from tracking someone down, especially someone like Claude Ray, who was a regular. And who gave good chase.
She spared Zach another glance as she bore down on Claude. There was no way Claude