The Bodyguard's Return (3 page)

Failure. A little voice whispered in his head. He’d struck out on his own, determined to make a life separate from his family. He’d wanted to be his own man, but in the end he’d run back home like a wounded puppy.

Although he had been successful as a stockbroker, the shambles of his personal life had finally forced him to get out of town and head back to Cotter Creek.

His father, Red West, had just assumed Joshua would step back into the family business and work for Wild West Protection Services as a bodyguard, but Joshua had told his dad he was taking a little time off to decide what he wanted to do. Going to work for the family business felt like yet another failure.

He shoved these thoughts aside as he approached the tent, the scent of too-sweet flowers cloying in the air. Charlie had left a will with an account set up for his funeral. He’d wanted only a gravesite service and to be buried beside his beloved wife, Rebecca. Together in life, now together again in death.

As he entered the white structure, he stiffened at the sight of Savannah Clarion. She stood next to Winnie Halifax, Savannah’s hair sparkling and appearing even more red against the black of her long-sleeved blouse and black slacks.

He nodded to the preacher, then took up a position
on the opposite side of the casket from Savannah, who had been an irritating pain in his ass over the past three days.

She’d left a message at the house every day, requesting that he call her back, but the last thing Joshua wanted was to get mixed up in any drama. He’d had enough of that before he’d left New York.

Within a few minutes others began to arrive. His sister, Meredith appeared with his dad and Smokey. Meredith hurried to Savannah’s side, while his father and Smokey joined him.

Raymond Buchannan, the owner of the Cotter Creek newspaper, arrived, looking old and tired. Joshua realized the man must be close to eighty and wondered if he ever intended to retire.

Mayor Aaron Sharp also arrived, shaking everyone’s hands as if he were at a political campaign instead of a funeral.

Finally the service began. As Reverend Baxter talked about life and death and redemption, Joshua found himself looking again and again at Savannah.

He hadn’t thought her particularly pretty the day he’d seen her at Charlie’s house, but there was something in her irregular features that was arresting.

The dark red curls suited her, complemented by her eyes, which were a mix of gold and copper. She had a killer figure, slender hips and long legs and was unusually busty for a slim woman.

Over the past three days Meredith had made it her job to extol the virtues of her friend to him. Witty
and smart. Fun-loving and soft-hearted. Tenacious and outspoken. He’d heard more about Savannah Clarion than he’d ever wanted to know.

He had a feeling his sister was attempting to indulge in a little matchmaking, but Meredith didn’t realize the last thing Joshua wanted in his life was any kind of a relationship with a woman.

Unlike his brothers, who seemed to have a knack when it came to the opposite sex, Joshua had failed miserably in that respect as well.

Grief for Charlie shoved every other thought out of his head. The old man had been a special friend to Joshua before he’d left Cotter Creek, and Joshua would miss him.

He was grateful when the service ended. He didn’t hang around to make nice with the other funeral attendees, but rather slipped out of the tent the minute the service was complete.

Instead of walking to where his car was parked, he followed the path to another area of the cemetery, the place where his mother was buried.

The entire right corner of the cemetery contained the West plots. His mother was buried beneath a grand red maple tree whose leaves were just beginning to turn scarlet with autumn grandeur.

He stood before her headstone. Elizabeth West, beloved wife, beloved mother. Joshua had never known her. He’d been a baby when she’d gone to the grocery store one evening and later had been found
dead beside her car on the side of the road. She’d been strangled, and her murderer had never been found.

Sometimes Joshua wondered what his life would have been like if he’d had a mother, if he’d been raised by a woman instead of by his father and the cantankerous Smokey, who had run the house like an army barrack.

He’d heard stories about his mother, a beautiful woman who had given up an acting career to marry his father and build a family here in Cotter Creek. But he knew her only from photos and didn’t have a single memory of his own.

“Meredith told me about your mother’s death.”

Joshua stiffened at the sound of Savannah’s voice. The woman was as tenacious as an Oklahoma tick on the back of a hound dog. He turned around to look at her, noting how the sunshine sparked in her hair. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to listen to me, that’s all. Just hear me out with an open mind. Did you know that Charlie went grocery shopping an hour before his death? Did you know that he bought a gallon of butter pecan ice cream? Why does a man who is suicidal buy groceries that nobody will eat?”

She talked fast, as if afraid she wouldn’t get everything out before he walked away from her. “Joshua, Charlie knew I was coming to interview him. He would have never killed himself knowing that I was expected to be there, that I would be the one to find him like that. Charlie would have never done that to me.”

As much as Joshua didn’t want to get caught up in what he’d considered her drama, her words gave him pause. “Maybe he went shopping then got depressed. Maybe he wasn’t suicidal until five minutes before he picked up his gun.”

She shook her head, red curls bouncing. “At least three times a week I spent the evenings with Charlie. I’m telling you the man wasn’t depressed. He wasn’t suicidal. He had plans, big plans. He was going to plant a flower garden next spring, fill it with all the flowers his wife had loved. He was thinking about taking lessons to learn how to play bridge.”

Joshua wished he had touched base with Charlie more often while he’d been in New York. He’d called every couple of weeks, but the calls had been brief, too brief.

“It’s not just Charlie,” Savannah continued. “There have been others deaths…too many.”

He suddenly remembered her parting words to Ramsey the day of Charlie’s death, that something was rotten in Cotter Creek and she intended to get to the bottom of it. “What deaths? What are you talking about?”

She glanced around, then looked back at him. “It’s too complicated to go over all of it now.”

“Why me? Why are you coming to me with all this?”

She frowned, the gesture wrinkling her freckled nose with charming appeal. “For two reasons. First of all you’ve been out of town for a while. I figure
you’ll be more objective about things than any of the other locals. Secondly, you’re a West and that holds a lot of weight in this area of the country.”

“Meredith is a West, why not enlist her help?” he countered. He tried not to notice her scent, a spicy musk that was intensely pleasant.

“I told you the other day that Sheriff Ramsey was lazy and incompetent. The man is also a raging sexist. He wouldn’t pay any more attention to Meredith than he has to me.”

Despite his reluctance to the contrary, he was intrigued. “Okay, I’m listening,” he said.

She glanced over her shoulder to where Winnie stood in the distance, obviously waiting for her. “I can’t go into it all now. Besides, I have some research at the newspaper office. I’d like you to see it.”

He had a feeling she wasn’t going to stop bothering him until he agreed at least to see what she thought she had. “Okay, just tell me when and where to meet you and I’ll see what you’ve got.”

Her features lit with relief. “We need to meet at the newspaper office, but I’d rather do it when Mr. Buchannan isn’t there. He always leaves the office at around eight in the evenings. Could you meet me there tonight about nine?”

Somewhere deep inside him, he knew this was probably a mistake. But, since returning to Cotter Creek, he’d felt unsettled. He’d grown accustomed to the fast pace of the city, of having places to go and things to do. In truth, he was bored, and he told
himself that was the only reason he was agreeing to meet her.

“All right, nine tonight at the newspaper office,” he said.

She smiled. The look softened her features and transformed her from arresting into something close to beautiful. “I’ll see you tonight. And Joshua, thanks.” She turned and hurried toward Winnie.

Joshua stared after her, wishing he could take back his agreement to meet her. He had a feeling he’d made yet another mistake in a long string of mistakes that had been made in the past year and a half.

T
he
Cotter Creek Chronicle
office was located on the bottom floor of a two-story brick building on Main Street. The front of the building was a large picture window, at the moment as dark as the night that surrounded Savannah as she parked her car in front.

It was eight-forty-five, and Main Street was completely deserted. Most of the shops and businesses closed their doors at eight-thirty. The only nightlife Cotter Creek had to offer was a couple of taverns on the edge of town.

She turned off her car engine and tapped a pale pink fingernail on her steering wheel, a surge of excitement filling her.

Finally, finally she had somebody who would
listen to her. She certainly hadn’t been able to get her boss, Raymond Buchannan, interested in her theories. All he wanted from her were fluff pieces that would please a more feminine audience.

“I write the news fit to print,” he’d told her the last time she’d broached him about the multitude of deaths in the Cotter Creek area. “I reported what happened in each of those deaths, and there’s nothing left to report.”

Nor had Sheriff Ramsey or Mayor Aaron Sharp been interested in what she’d had to say. This town definitely had a good old boy network and she had several strikes against her. First, she was a woman. Second, she was an outsider. And last, she had a feeling that most everyone in town thought she was here only to make a name for herself and have a body of work to take to a bigger newspaper job.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It had taken her only a week in this dusty Oklahoma town to fall in love with Cotter Creek. She had no intention of going anywhere. In fact, she had broached the topic of buying the paper from Raymond Buchannan when he decided to retire. If he ever decided to retire.

She had enough money in a savings account to be able to meet whatever price Buchannan settled on when he did decide to sell. Thankfully her parents had begun investing for her when she was a baby, and on her twenty-first birthday those funds had become available to her. Over the past four years she’d tried not to touch that money unless it was absolutely necessary, believing that it was her nest egg for the future.

At exactly nine o’clock a big black pickup pulled into the parking space next to hers. Joshua got out of the vehicle, and Savannah tried not to notice his physical attractiveness.

He was clad in a pair of black slacks, a black turtleneck and a worn leather bomber jacket. His hair was slightly tousled, as if he’d driven with the window down and the night breeze had blown through his dark locks.

The last thing she was looking for was to be attracted to any man, but especially one who had the reputation for being a player, at least before he’d left town. Besides, men who looked like Joshua West didn’t date women who looked like her, and she’d do well to remember that.

She quickly got out of her car and smiled at him. “Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it.”

He gave her a curt nod, his expression letting her know he would rather be anywhere but here at the moment. She pulled her keys from her purse and walked to the front door of the newspaper office.

“All I ask of you is to please keep an open mind when I show you everything I’ve compiled. It took a while and a lot of research before I finally started to make some horrifying connections.” She was rambling. When she was nervous she always rambled and something about the silent man standing next to her made her nervous.

She sighed in relief as she got the door open. She stepped inside, flipped on the overhead lights, then
walked across the wooden floor toward a small room in the back that served as her office.

She was conscious of Joshua close behind her, his loafers ringing on the floor. He had yet to say a word, and that only made her anxiety increase.

If he saw the material she’d gathered and judged her as some crazy conspiracy theorist looking for a story she didn’t know what she’d do. She hadn’t felt so right about anything since she’d been seventeen years old and told her mother that she absolutely, positively was not getting a breast reduction.

The office Buchannan had given her to work in was little more than the size of a storage closet. It was only large enough to contain her desk and office chair. She’d tried to dress up the small space, claim it as her own by placing things she liked on the scarred wooden desk.

There was a basket of her favorite candy bars, a stuffed frog that one of her friends had given her for luck when she’d left Scottsdale and, finally, there was a plaque that read, Live Well, Laugh Hard.

Joshua picked up one of the candy bars and gave her a wry look. “Guess you aren’t into counting calories.”

“Never,” she replied and punched the button to boot up her computer. “My mother started counting my calories the day I was born. When I finally got out on my own I decided I was going to eat whatever the heck I wanted.”

He nodded, a touch of amusement lightening his green eyes. “That’s one of the things that drove me
crazy about the women in New York. None of them eat. I’d take a lady out to dinner and it would have been just as easy to toss her a head of lettuce and call it a night.”

Despite her nervous tension, Savannah laughed. “You take me out to dinner and I’ll eat your money’s worth,” she exclaimed, then hurriedly added, “not that I think you’d ever take me out to dinner. I mean, not that I’d even want you to take me to dinner.”

His amusement was even more evident as he simply stood there and watched as she dug a hole with her tongue. She flushed and bit her lip to stop her mouth from running away with her.

Thankfully at that moment the computer loaded up and she sat in the chair in front of it to retrieve the files she wanted him to see.

He moved behind her and she was intensely aware of his nearness. He smelled like the outdoors, a scent of fresh Oklahoma sunshine and night breeze and beneath that a clean cologne that tantalized her senses.

“I started all this because of what happened to Kate Sampson’s father,” she said as she finally found the file she wanted and opened it.

Kate Sampson’s father, Gray, had been murdered three months before. It had been Joshua’s brother Zack who had ridden to her rescue and helped her solve the murder. But the one thing the investigation hadn’t yielded was a credible motive for his murder.

“I think maybe Zack’s planning on running for
sheriff in November,” Joshua said, his breath warm on the nape of her neck.

“I’m sure he’ll do a far better job than Ramsey,” she replied and hit the print button. “You might not know it, but Gray Sampson was killed by a ranch hand named Sonny Williams.”

“I heard. My brother Clay told me about Gray’s murder and Sonny’s arrest.”

She pulled up another file and began the print process, then turned around in the chair to face him. “But, did you know that Sonny Williams supposedly killed himself in jail? Did you know that before he died he said that Gray’s death was just a part of a bigger plan?”

Joshua frowned. “I might have been told something about that, but I was a thousand miles away and to be honest had other things on my mind.”

“Gray Sampson’s death wasn’t the beginning of things.” She stood and grabbed the material from the printer. “Let’s go back out to Raymond’s desk.”

The space in her office was too small for the two of them as far as she was concerned. Joshua was too tall, too male to share such a tiny space with her.

She breathed a sigh of relief as they returned to the main office area. At least in here she could breathe without smelling the scent of him.

She sat at Raymond’s desk and motioned him into the chair on the opposite side of the desk. “Are you a wannabe true crime writer or what?” he asked.

The question irritated her. He knew nothing about
her but was already making judgments. “No, I’m not. When I took the job here I decided it was a good idea to read as many of the back issues of the paper as possible to familiarize myself with both the newspaper I’d be writing for and the town where I’d chosen to live.”

“And why did you choose Cotter Creek?” His green gaze held hers intently, as if he were seeking answers to questions he hadn’t yet spoken.

“To be perfectly honest, I feel as if Cotter Creek chose me.” She broke eye contact with him, finding his direct gaze somewhat disconcerting. Instead she looked at the framed front page of the first copy of the
Cotter Creek Chronicle
that hung on the wall just behind him.

“I wasn’t sure where I was going when I left Scottsdale and eventually made it to Cotter Creek where my car transmission blew. It took a couple of days to fix and, while I was waiting, I just fell in love with the town.”

“And how did you meet Charlie?”

She looked at him again, fighting a wave of impatience. “I thought you were here to see the material I have, not to play a game of twenty questions.”

He smiled, one that lifted only a corner of his mouth with sexy laziness. “I like to know a little bit about the people I deal with.”

“Fine. I’m twenty-four years old. I love animals and candy bars, I hate superficiality and people who don’t have a sense of humor.”

She leaned forward, meeting his gaze directly. “I met Charlie on the first day I arrived in town. I’d just left my car at Mechanic’s Mansion and was looking for a hotel or motel to stay in while the car was being fixed. There were a couple of teenagers on the corner and I asked them about accommodations, and they told me there was a nice bed-and-breakfast on the edge of town.”

His eyes began to glitter with humor, obviously seeing where her story was leading. “Anyway,” she continued, “one of the boys offered to drive me there. He took me to the entrance to Charlie’s place and left me there.”

“I’ll bet you were horrified,” he said.

She laughed. “When I broke through the trees and saw Charlie’s place, I suspected I’d been had, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure so I marched up to Charlie’s door and told him I’d heard he ran the best bed and breakfast in town.”

She smiled at the memory of Charlie’s face and a swift sharp grief pierced through her, stealing her smile and forcing the sting of tears to her eyes. She raised a hand to swipe them away.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.” His voice was gentle and she saw real regret in his eyes.

She nodded. “I’m just going to miss him so much. Other than your sister and Winnie, Charlie was my only friend in town. We used to spend hours playing chess.” She released a small laugh. “I never got a chance to beat him.”

“I could never beat him either.” For a long moment their gazes remained locked. It was a moment of connection, two people mourning for somebody they had both loved. This time he broke the eye contact and gestured to the papers in front of her. “Okay, show me what you’ve got.”

She cleared her throat, stuffing her emotions for Charlie back deep inside. “I noticed when I was reading back issues of the paper that there seemed to be an unusual number of fatal accidents in the area.”

“It’s a ranching and farming community, there are always accidents.”

“True, but Cotter Creek seemed to have more than its share, so two weeks ago I did some statistical analysis, comparing like-size ranching and farming communities. What I discovered was that the incidence of accidental deaths was three hundred times higher in Cotter Creek than anywhere else I compared it with.”

Joshua raised a dark eyebrow and took the sheet of paper that held her data. She watched him as he studied it. She’d met most of his brothers, each more handsome than the next, but Joshua seemed to have gotten the West good-looking gene in spades.

Savannah had been raised among the beautiful people of Scottsdale and if they weren’t beautiful by nature, then plastic surgery solved the problem. She’d been the anomaly, a busty redhead with a snub nose covered in freckles, who had no interest in bee-stung lips or liposuction.

By nature she didn’t particularly trust handsome men. She knew she was the kind of girl handsome men took home only when all the pretty blondes and brunettes had left the party.

She’d had one relationship with a man who’d been so attractive he’d taken her breath away, but it had turned out to be a cliché. He’d left her for a gorgeous woman who had taken his breath away.

But she needed to trust Joshua West. She needed him in her corner.

Her mind flashed with an image of him standing in the bathroom doorway, his chest splendidly naked and tautly muscled. A wave of warmth fluttered through her at the memory. Her last relationship had been almost a year ago, long enough that she’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have a warm naked chest pressed against her own. Almost…but not quite.

“Okay.” He set the paper back on the desk and looked at her, no trace of humor in his gaze. “You’ve got my attention.”

“Trust me, that’s just the beginning,” she said. She handed him the next paper she’d printed off. “This is a list of all the deaths that have occurred in Cotter Creek in the past two years.” She focused on her subject and tried to forget the vision of his naked chest that had popped unbidden into her head.

“If you take each one separately, they don’t seem so ominous…a tractor accident, a fall from a hayloft, a gas heater malfunction. You know Gray Sampson’s death had initially been ruled accidental. Sheriff
Ramsey assumed he’d been thrown from his horse and had hit his head on a rock.”

She talked faster and faster, needing to get everything out. “It was only when Gray’s daughter and your brother Zack began to investigate that they realized it wasn’t an accident, but instead was murder.”

Joshua held up a hand to stop her. “Take a breath before you pass out.”

She felt a blush sweep up her neck. “Sorry, I’ve just been waiting so long for somebody to really listen to me. For the last week and a half I’ve been telling anyone and everyone that something isn’t right here, but nobody is interested in hearing me out.”

“Right now all you’ve convinced me of is that in the past year and a half the people of Cotter Creek were either more careless or more unlucky than others.”

“I’m not finished yet,” she replied. “By the time I am, you’ll see that something terrible is happening in this town, and unless somebody does something about it, more people are going to die.”