Gambling on a Secret (36 page)

Dylan looked at the younger man and shook his head. He, of all people, knew all about military etiquette. Hell, he called his own dad “General” if other military personnel were within earshot. Despite the fact, he muttered, “That’s just plain stupid.”

Zack and his little girl fell into step beside him as he headed across the driveway.

“You’re not on duty, so I can gather no one’s under arrest,” he observed from the casual way Zack was dressed and the rug-rat hanging onto his hand.

At the sight of Amanda–dressed in denim short coveralls and miniature cowboy boots–something tingled in him. In less than seven months, he would be a father, too. Would his kid stare down complete strangers if they ever called his honor into question?

“I came to talk to you. Is there someplace we can go–private?” Some of the natural amicability seemed to go out of Zack, instantly pulling him back from the sentimental sinkhole.

After a moment, he nodded. “My office.”

Zack instructed his little girl to stay in the yard and play with her dolls, followed him into the ranch office and looked around. The nosy hotshot even looked into the apartment.

Zack whistled low. “I don’t think my barracks at boot camp were this sparse.”

He pushed past the other man into the living room. “You’re behind the times, Sheriff.” At the refrigerator, he pulled out two bottles of Coke and held one up. “Want one?”

Zack nodded and easily caught the bottle he tossed across the room to him. “Thanks. What am I missing?”

He limped back across the room. Pain shot up through his thigh and hip, which didn’t make him in any better mood.

“I’m surprised your aunt hasn’t been singing about this news from the roof tops. Don’t tell me the queen of the Grapevine is losing her touch?”

“My aunt is happy as a lark you agreed to talk to the Forest County Charity Ball Committee.” Zack followed him into the office again and his eyes flashed at him. “What else have you done she’d be gossiping about?”

Despite his crappy day, he grinned. “Charli and I are living together.”

Zack raised a brow and lifted his Coke to his lips. Before he took a drink, he smirked. “Oh, right.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he snapped and sat behind his desk.

Zack pulled the rickety chair from the corner and spun it around. After sitting on it backward and resting his forearms over the back, he shrugged. “I heard the news from Tracy. About time, I reckon. I saw it coming since the night at the Longhorn right after you started working for her. Besides, she was your date for the banquet.”

“Go to hell.”

“Probably.” Zack removed his hat and hooked it on the bend of his knee. “By the way, I haven’t had to drag your sorry ass off to the hoosegow to sober up for a while.”

Dylan glanced out the door to watch Amanda play in the dry grass under the pecan tree just off the small porch. What would his child look like? Amanda didn’t look much like Zack, except maybe for her big blue eyes. Her black hair must have come from her mother, because Zack’s was golden blond. He imagined
his
little girl with her mother’s wild red hair, and her incomparable spirit.

Dylan drank a long draw of the Coke. “I haven’t been in there since the poisoning.”

Zack lost the cockiness, and his expression turned much too hopeful for a pain-in-the-ass sheriff. “Did you stop drinking?”

He sniffed and shrugged. “I guess you could say. Oh, there are times I really want a drink, but Charli won’t allow the stuff near her.”

“Former alcoholic?”

He narrowed his eyes at Zack for figuring out so easily something Charli desperately wanted to keep to herself. He’d suspected the alcoholism from her insistence on his not drinking and her own aversion to alcohol. He’d figured out she was probably a former drug addict after they’d argued about her helping Annie Greenberg. Now, he wondered what else Zack knew–or had guessed. Whatever her past contained, he didn’t want it to come back and hurt her.

“Signs are there. She was a runaway. Lived as a teenage girl in Las Vegas.”

Zack visibly shivered. Dylan had done that more than once when he considered Charli living on the streets and relying on some dirtbag who beat her.

“I’ve been there with the National Finals Rodeo, remember? I know I did some harebrained things while in Sin City as a twenty-something know-it-all kid. I can imagine her doing a lot, including drugs.”

“Do you have a purpose for today’s social call, Sheriff?” He admired Charli more than she’d probably ever know. She’d pulled herself out of the gutter, but he didn’t want to discuss what had been swimming in the cesspool with her.

Zack’s brows drew together as he averted his eyes. He made a fist with his free one before taking a deep breath and looking up. “Yeah. I do. Actually, I’m here for two reasons. I’ve got something on McPherson.”

“Go on.”

“Turns out he was the main suspect in a burglary in Dallas in March. According to the initial report, he got away with a hundred thousand dollars worth of jewelry, electronics and cash.”

Dylan whistled low in his throat, then scrunched his brow in confusion. “How’d his father manage to get him off for it? Give back the loot and pay off the owner?”

Zack shook his head. “No. The charges were dropped by the owner of the house McPherson allegedly broke into, the day he was apprehended by Texas Ranger Wyatt McPherson.”

He jerked in surprise. “His own brother arrested him?”

Zack nodded once and sipped his Coke.

“Who the hell would drop the charges?”

“Elizabeth Sinclair.”

He puckered his brow. “Any relationship to Sinclair Development and Land Management?” The urban development company was grabbing up ranches around Forest County and the neighboring counties like candy from a broken pinata at a kid’s party.

“The CEO.”

“Wow. She dropped the charges?”

“After Leon Ferguson presumably talked to her. Seems Ferguson and Miss Sinclair had been having dinner at Ferguson’s Dallas penthouse when the call came in the thief was apprehended. Anyway, according to Wyatt, Ferguson accompanied Sinclair to the Dallas PD. As soon as he found out who the burglar was, Leon and Sinclair asked the detective questioning them if they could talk privately. Afterward, she dropped the charges, saying she’d found the missing property. Despite the fact Kyle had already sold the electronics.” Zack shook his head and sneered. “With her denying the proof, the cops had to let him go.

Although the news should have shocked Dylan, it didn’t. “We all should know Ferguson has the developer in his back pocket. He’s gotten every construction contract in the county. Put a few of the smaller operations right out of business.”

Zack chuckled. “I’m not sure
back pocket
is the right analogy here, but I have to agree. The rumor Wyatt heard is they’re more than just business partners. I’d bet my shiny tin star Leon is holding a noose around Kyle’s neck. You’re probably right to be worried.”

Dylan swore under his breath. “I should fire his ass.”

“Does Charli know you suspect him of poisoning her cattle?” Zack glanced out the door again. Amanda wandered away from his line-of-sight. He got up and went to the door. After reminding her to stay put, he came back and took his seat again.

“No. I haven’t told her.” Dylan took another swig of his Coke. “Uh...we were going through some personal stuff, too, at the time, and I didn’t want to add to her worries.”

“Fair enough. I think you should mention it now. She’s cut her ties to Ferguson, I presume.”

“Affirmative. What do you have on that son-of-a-bitch?”

“That’s the other thing I wanted you to know.” Zack rubbed the dark growth of beard on his chin and took a deep breath. “I had an interesting visit from Ella Larson this morning.”

“Ella? What does she have to do with anything?”

“She told me something that, if it’s true, could change a lot of things.”

“Will you stop beating around the bush?”

“According to Ella, sixteen years ago she was Leon’s lover. She told me something about your grandfather’s will.”

“What the hell are you getting at, Zack? What does one have to do with the other?”

Zack cleared his throat and looked out the door at his daughter. “Leon forged your grandfather’s will, Dylan.”

He leaned heavily back into his chair, the breath whooshing out him. “You know what this means if it’s true, don’t you?”

Zack twisted the half-empty bottle of cola in one hand for a moment before pinning him with a meaningful gaze. “Pandora’s Box is about to fly open. What are you going to do?”

“Afraid I’m going to break the bastard’s neck?”

Zack scoffed. “Thought has crossed my mind. You special ops types always have been half-crazy.”

“Tell me exactly what Larson told you.”

Zack glanced out at Amanda before responding. “About seventeen years ago, Ella worked on Oak Springs.”

“Yeah, she was a maid in the house and did some of Granddad’s paperwork. She witnessed his will. Jeremy Greenberg trained Granddad’s cutting horses before your dad stole him away from Oak Springs.”

“When your granddaddy had his stroke, Leon wrote up a new and improved will. A forger signed it as Jason Ferguson, and since Ella had witnessed the original, Leon approached her to sign the forgery.”

When he found his voice, he growled, “That’s how she could afford to open the diner.”

“Probably. She agreed to never go to the police, if he promised to never lay claim on her daughter.”

“Annie?”

Zack grinned, though it never reached his eyes. “Yep. She’s Leon’s. And apparently, he’d wanted to raise her as his protege.”

“Holy shit.”

“And then some.”

“Where does this leave Mom, Tracy and me?”

Chapter 20

For a long time after Zack left, Dylan sat at his desk and stared out the window at the pasture behind the old bunkhouse. A mile and half away, as the crow flew, Oak Springs Ranch lay out beyond the gradual roll of the land, and bordering both ranches to the west was the CW. At one time the three ranches were a whole lot larger and joined to form one of the biggest ranches in this part of Texas.

In 1865, three cousins–Cole Cartwright, Elijah Blackwell and Dylan Ferguson–returned to Texas from the Civil War half-starved and disillusioned. They’d found themselves in the cowpoke town of Dallas, hoping to find a way to buy enough land to raise longhorns. Dylan, the youngest of the trio from the cotton country of East Texas, talked his cousins into pooling what little money they had, and Cole, the eldest, agreed to play in an epic poker game. The gamble paid off. Cole won over one hundred-thousand acres of land–what later became Forest County. They’d gone into business together and Cole’s Town, which eventually became Colton, soon followed.

Dylan shook his head. How did things get so messed up?

Greed. He answered his own question. Greed and the loss of the family connection that had kept three cousins alive while fighting on the losing side of a war and made them rich men raising cattle.

He didn’t understand that kind of greed. He knew it existed and had seen it in places far more desolate than Colton, Texas. However, being on the possible losing side of such greed made him fighting mad. The real inheritor of Oak Springs might be his mother, or it might be Leon’s mother, but he would bet it wasn’t, since Leon had forged the will.

He reached for his cellphone. After noticing it was dead, he picked up the receiver of the desk phone and dialed his parents’ number. He needed some advice and hoped his father was the man to give it. His mother answered on the second ring.

“Hello.” Eileen’s soft Texas accent resonated down phone lines and bounced off satellites, bringing a smile to his lips. Even after all the years away from Texas, she’d never lost the twang in her voice.

“Mom, it’s me.”

“Dylan! It’s good to hear from you. I got your flowers for Mother’s Day. They were lovely.” He sent her flowers every year, although he would have probably skipped this year if it hadn’t been for Tracy’s reminder two days before the holiday. “Thank you.”

“I’m glad you liked them. How’re you doing?”

“We’re fine. Dad’s out in the yard with the pooches. I just got home from golfing with some friends. How are you, Dylan?” She softly asked. “The job working out?”

“I’m okay.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. The job’s perfect.” He chuckled. What an understatement.

“Dylan?”

Sobering a little, he assured her. “Mom, don’t worry about me. I’m better than fine. I actually have some news.” He’d originally wanted Charli to be with him when he announced the baby and their living together, but now might be better. Besides, his mother wouldn’t stop bugging until he told her something about why the job was going so well. “Great news.”

Just as he was gearing up to tell his mother he was going to be a father, a loud ruckus sounded in the background on his mother’s end. He recognized the noise as his mother’s two Yorkshire terriers. The thought of his father riding herd on the two sissified dogs made him smile. His mother spoke to his father, then to him, she said, “Here’s Dad, I’m going to put you on speaker phone.”