The Great Jackalope Stampede (13 page)

She crossed her arms over her chest, not liking his smartass tone one bit. “Something like that.”

“What about Chester’s binoculars?” His gaze zeroed in on where the Babe-o-matics lay in the dry grass below the window. “Let me guess, you were going to take a break from working on the restrooms this afternoon and do some bird watching in the canyon.”

“Maybe I was.”

“I’m not buying your snake oil, Slugger.” He stalked over and scooped up the binoculars.

“What? I took a class on ornithology once. It fulfilled a biology elective.”

His brow all crinkled, he handed her the binoculars. “You’re something, Claire.” Only the way he said it did not sound like he meant a good something.

Before she could ask him to clarify, he crunched off down the drive heading toward the store.

Claire frowned back at the camper she had been checking out. This was her golden opportunity to do some reconnaissance. But to what end? Her suspicions about the archaeology crew were based mostly on her own conspiracy theories, none of which would make Sheriff Harrison lift an eyebrow, let alone a finger.

When she looked back at Mac, he was still trucking along. Growling under her breath, she trotted after him. “Mac, wait!”

He stopped and waited for her to catch up. His hazel eyes were guarded as she approached him, his lips all thin, his jaw clenched tight. She knew that stormy look. It was usually followed by a bolt of frustration from one of them that sparked an argument. Claire tried to blow away the building thunderclouds with some light breezy joking.

“Am I a good something or a bad something?” she asked with a smile.

“I don’t know.” He did not smile back. “The jury is still out.” He started walking again.

“What!” She poked him in the ribs, trying some playful teasing to dissipate the pressure building between them. “Why? Just because you get a little squeamish when I’m investigating a possible crime site?”

“I do not get squeamish.”

“Then why were you sweating when we sneaked into Sophy’s house last spring?”

Mac flashed her a scowl. “It was over a hundred degrees in there that day.”

“More like mid-nineties.”

“I was also concerned about getting shot. Trespassing isn’t taken lightly in this part of the country. I would’ve hoped you’d figured that out by now, but your stunt back there at the camper is giving me doubts.”

Claire shrugged. “I’m a slow learner.”

“No, you’re too smart for your own good.”

She took that as a compliment and ignored the jab mixed in it. Catching his hand, she laced her fingers through his. “Have I told you lately that I love you?”

“You’re so full of shit.” His words were edged with laughter, the storm beginning to dissolve.

“What?” She bumped him sideways with her shoulder. “I mean that.”

He reached over and pulled her hat brim down. “Then why did you leave me at the house with that asshole?”

She adjusted her hat. “You know Mom’s bark is worse than her bite.”

He laughed. “I meant Jess’s dad.”

“Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten about him.”

“I guess it’s to be expected that he slipped from your mind being that you were in the midst of planning how to commit your next felony.”

“It wasn’t like that.” Well, not completely like that, anyway. She hadn’t put thought into the actual act of entering the R.V.s until after she had left the house.

He stopped and swung her around to look up at him. “What was it like then, Claire? Because I’m going home now, and I won’t be here to save your ass from landing in jail or something worse next time.”

She blinked in surprise. What did he mean he was going home? “You’re going back to Tucson?” At his nod, she asked, “Now? Why?”

“There’s no room for me here.”

“Does Chester have a date tonight?”

“I’m not talking about Chester’s couch. I mean in general.” He glanced back toward the store. “With your family everywhere, there’s no place for me.” His tone was matter of fact.

She sighed. “Listen, Mac, if this is about Ronnie …”

“It’s not about Ronnie, Claire.” His gaze locked onto hers, all jest gone from his expression. “It’s about you.”

“Me?” She took a step backward. “What did I do?”

His eyelids lowered, his eyes shifting down to the left. “Nothing. Not a single thing.” He pulled his hand free from hers and took off walking again.

She did not let him get far before hooking his arm and dragging anchor until he turned hard a-starboard. “Is this about the pocket watch?”

He extracted his arm from her grip. “Contrary to what you seem to think, not everything revolves around that damned watch.” He and Kate could have sung a duet on that subject.

She shoved her hands in her front pockets, trying to read him and coming up blank. “But I don’t want you to go home yet.”

“You’re busy working. I don’t need to be here to watch you finish that building. Your grandfather and his cronies are doing a bang-up job of doing that without me.”

“I’m not busy all of the time.”

“Really?” He crossed his arms over his chest, rocking back on his heels. “I’ve been here since yesterday morning and seen you how much?”

The undercurrent of frustration in his voice gave her pause. After all of the overtime he had been putting in at his job, leaving her alone with Ronnie evening after evening back home in Tucson, she wanted to stomp on his toes. “What about last night?”

“You mean when
I
went looking for
you
at The Shaft?”

Her jaw jutted. “I called you before that to come have a burger with me, but you were too busy playing cards.”

“Not by choice.”

“Oh, I see. So Manny had your arm twisted while Chester sat on you and forced your hand.”

His eyes hardened. “No, Claire, I stayed because Ruby asked me not to go until your mother went to bed. Since you and your sisters weren’t there to help deal with Deborah, I agreed.”

Claire grimaced, his words fueling the guilt trip she had been on since she and Natalie had come up with that lame excuse to go to Yuccaville yesterday instead of having lunch with her mother. Stopping at The Shaft on the way home had been a weasel’s way out of dealing with her overbearing mother’s need to point out Claire’s lack of a steady paycheck, and staying until the she-beast had bedded down for the night, a cowardly solution.

“You’re right.” She blew out a breath, lowering her gaze. “I was only thinking of saving my own bacon. It was selfish and immature.”

“Slugger,” he lifted her chin, his face not so rigid. “I understand. Your mother takes great pleasure in pecking at you.”

“I should carry chicken feed in my pocket at all times.”

His lips twitched as he towed her closer. “It doesn’t help that you’re living with me, her least favorite person on the planet second only to my aunt.”

He was forgetting about Claire’s father. He trumped Ruby and then some.

“My mother can kiss my ass,” she said under her breath.

Mac lifted off her hat and then brushed his lips across hers, flirting. “I love it when you whisper sweet words like that in my ear.”

“Stay here tonight and I’ll whisper a few more things.” She pulled him down, looping her arms around his neck, breathing in the fresh scent of his sun warmed skin. Mac always smelled like the desert, a pheromone-fueled mix of sage and mesquite with an underlying hint of something spicy and erotic. Pushing up onto her tiptoes, she kissed him good and proper, teasing him with her tongue, hinting at what could be.

His hands trailed down her ribs, landing on her hips where they held tight for several seconds before rounding over her bottom. “You play dirty,” he said against her mouth and then gripped her through her jeans.

“Yeah, but you like it dirty.” She ran her mouth along his jaw and nipped his earlobe. When she finished her seduction attempt, she drew back enough to stare into his eyes, imploring. “Stay with me, Mac.”

He placed her hat back on her head. “And spend another night on Chester’s couch? I don’t think so, sweetheart.” He trailed his thumb down her cheek and then pulled away, putting some air between them. “Besides, I got a call from work. They need me to be down at the job site south of Tucson by five tomorrow morning. Tonight, I’m sleeping in my own bed.”

Claire snorted. “What’s so important about building a freaking wall that you have to be there at the butt crack of dawn?”

He cocked his head to the side, his forehead creasing. “You do realize that my job as a geotechnician entails more than just laying bricks, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” They’d had this conversation too many times to count. When he continued frowning at her, she added. “It’s just that I need you here.”

“To drag you out of windows?”

“To help me protect Ruby and Gramps.”

“That’s what they have firearms for.”

“What if that’s not enough?”

“If this is about someone stealing that pocket watch …”

“It’s not about the damned watch!” Claire would just as soon throw that thing down a mine shaft and be done with it if that would solve the real problem. “It’s about what’s behind the stupid thing and all of the other hidden treasures Joe buried in this damned desert.”

He rubbed the back of his neck, looking like he was considering the legitimacy of her concern, and then shook his head.

“Mac, you know I’m onto something here.”

“Maybe, but I wish you weren’t.” He grimaced in the direction of the archaeology crew’s cluster of campers. “Why were you trying to break into that R.V.?”

She opted to keep quiet about sneaking into the first R.V. for now. What Mac didn’t know would not hurt him or give him reason to speculate on her soundness of mind any further. “I have a gut feeling.”

He groaned. “I don’t like your gut feelings, Claire. They usually get one of us almost killed.”

Ignoring that comment, she explained further, “I think one or more of those archaeology students is up to something.”

“As in something to do with the pocket watch?”

“No. Maybe.” She kicked at a few loose pebbles of gravel. “I don’t know.”

“Keep talking.”

“I think they found something in the Lucky Monk besides the artifacts from the ruins, something Joe left behind.”

Doubt rippled over his features. “I’ve been in that mine many times, Claire. I even mapped it.”

“I know.”

“Besides the dead guy, some big spiders, and the burial site stuff, there was only porphyry granite, copper, several pockets of turquoise, a few veins of amethyst, some malachite, and rats.”

Claire fought the urge to roll her eyes at his detailed analysis. She stepped closer, lowering her voice even though their only audience was the grasshoppers bouncing around their feet. “Natalie overheard one of them on the phone last night.”

One of his honey-brown eyebrows lifted. “Was she listening outside the camper window you were trying to crawl into?”

“No. She’d forgotten her socket set at the new building. With all of these strangers around, she didn’t want to leave it there overnight, so she walked back to get it and heard someone talking behind the back wall—the one without plumbing that we have partially finished. She was minding her own business, but then she heard him say something about a cache of artifacts being extremely valuable followed by the words ‘black market.’”

“Maybe he is in charge of getting the dig site finds safely back to the university and is worried about someone greedy getting their hands on them.”

“That was Natalie’s first thought, too.” Claire shoved her hands in her back pockets. “She’s not as suspicious as me.”

He chuckled. “Most of us don’t have Nancy Drew fantasies.”

“Manny and Chester do.”

“I said, ‘most.’” He crossed his arms over his chest. “So that’s all you have on this guy?”

“There’s more. He caught Natalie eavesdropping.”

“Then what? Did he threaten her?”

“He hung up.”

Mac let out a
hmfff
. “Claire, that hardly adds up to a suspicion that he’s planning to sell artifacts from the site on the black market.”

“Maybe not, but we have no idea what this guy is capable of and now he knows Natalie might be a problem.”

His eyes narrowed. “I can see where this is going, Claire, and I don’t like it. Promise me you’ll try not to get into trouble while I’m gone.”

She crossed her fingers behind her back. “I promise.”

He tipped his head to the side. “You’re crossing your fingers back there, aren’t you?”

Claire smiled. “Call me when you get home.”

Chapter Eight

In her hurry to escape the two men in the black sedan, Ronnie had stumbled into a bigger problem inside the Mule Train Diner.