Chapter 3
I couldn't stop looking at him.
The rain hit the roof like a handful of gravel thrown by God. I was wearing a dead man's boots, sitting in the room next to his corpse. Something about that should've bothered me. Instead, I couldn't stop thinking about his hands.
Ransom kept his hands flat on the table where I could see them and stared out the window.
I knew that look. My daddy taught me to read it before Young County took him off my hands for good, and I'd had occasion to practice since.
He was deciding on something violent, but hadn't yet landed on an answer.
The wood smoke was thick enough to taste, and the shack was the kind of small where you breathed the other person in. I'd driven four hours from my crappy apartment in El Paso, walked into a murder scene, and ended up here, across from this, with my pulse kicking hard at the base of my throat.
I'd be lying if I said the thought hadn't crossed my mind on the walk down.
Rafe had told me the man was unattached and unfriendly, and I'd have to work for whatever I got out of him.
He hadn't told me about the cut of Ransom's jaw and the way the stubble sat on it like a shadow.
He hadn't said a word about the eyes — pale blue, the cold end of the spectrum, set deep enough that they read as a warning before they read as a color.
He hadn't told me about the way he handled a horse like he was born to it.
Sure as hell hadn't mentioned those hands and how badly I might want them on me.
I shifted in the chair, and my boots creaked. Ransom looked up for half a second and back at the window.
A rifle sat propped against the wall two inches from his right hand.
He'd put it there casually when we entered, like it belonged there.
I'd caught the scope glint off the ridge on my way down to look at the body and figured I'd take my chances.
At the time, part of me had wondered if Rafe sent me out there hoping Ransom would take the shot.
I wondered what Rafe would make of him choosing not to.
I stood and crossed the room, but the weight of Ransom's gaze didn't fall on me until I picked the rifle up.
It was a Remington 700, bolt-action, .308 Winchester.
I wrapped my hand around the stock and took my time running my thumb up the grain from heel to comb.
Someone had sanded it down and oiled it back up by hand.
The barrel had years on it. Decades, maybe.
I brought it up slowly, settled it against my shoulder, and stroked it out toward the window until the scope found the ridge through the glass.
Ransom rose off his heels at the stove.
"Good glass," I said. "You can see all the way to the ridge from here." I held the position, cheek to the stock, one eye closed. "Long shot from up there to the fence line. Four hundred yards, maybe more. Wind off the mesa would pull it left." I worked the bolt. The action was smooth as butter.
I lowered the rifle slowly, turned it over in my hands, and ran my palm along the underside of the barrel. Took my time about that, too.
"Custom stock," I said. "That's not a ranch rifle. That's somebody's rifle. Somebody who's had it a long time and knows what they've got."
He tracked my hands the way I'd been tracking his.
I leaned the rifle back against the wall where I'd found it. Then I looked up.
He'd turned around. Back against the wall beside the window, arms crossed, eyes on me.
"Good rifle," I said.
"It gets the job done."
I went back to my chair and sat, knowing I should focus on the dead judge and the murder I was supposed to be solving.
I turned my hat over in my hands, thinking hard about how I wanted to spend the next half hour.
The way I figured, there were two options.
The first was to sit, talk shop, get what I could about the judge, ride back with my head clear.
The other way was the one I was already leaning toward, which I was pretending was for the case, and we both know it wasn't.
I told myself it was useful either way. A man who'd let me close once would let me close again. That was how the work went sometimes.
"I had a husband once," I said. "Briefly. Vegas, which should've been the first sign. Forty-eight hours later, we did the divorce too. Marriage was a mistake. The sex wasn't."
I left it there.
Most men, when you drop husband on them instead of wife, do something. Look away. Shift in the chair. Get real interested in the middle distance. The ones who aren't built that way have a tell: a careful neutrality that's just slightly too careful.
Ransom didn't move.
He held my gaze halfway and folded the look up before he could finish having it.
"Your turn," I said.
"I don't have a husband."
"Didn't ask about a husband." I set the hat on the table. "Asked about a mistake."
He worked his jaw and looked away again.
"Everybody's got one," I said. "Some people got several. I find it's better to know a man's early. Saves time."
"You always run your mouth like this with people who might be suspects?"
He glared at me when he said it. Marshals had tried that look. Cartel lieutenants. A judge once, right before I arrested him.
It didn't stop me. It did make me lean in.
"Only the interesting ones." I held his eyes long enough to make sure he knew I wasn't moving. "You from here originally? New Mexico?"
He held the look another beat, then let it go without making a show of it.
I was in trouble. I knew it. I was doing it anyway.
"Close enough."
"Close enough meaning yes and you don't want to say where, or close enough meaning somewhere just over the state line?"
"Dona Ana County."
Border country. That tracked with the file. "Family still down there?"
"No."
I waited. Nothing else came.
"Brother?"
That did it. The glare sharpened, and his fists clenched. "How the fuck do you know that?"
"Rafe mentioned it," I said. Same temperature, same easy pace. "Didn't say much. He doing okay?"
I had a file on Ransom back in my truck, just like the files I had on everyone else living and working at Pae Saco Ranch.
Just so happened his was the most interesting.
He was, after all, the only one with a brother who'd gotten struck by lightning ten years ago.
That brother was currently lying in a coma ward down in Albuquerque.
I'd poked the bear on purpose, and I wasn't even a little sorry about it.
"He's breathing," Ransom said.
"That's something."
"It's not much."
"No," I said. "I guess it isn't."
He pushed off the wall, crossed to the stove, crouched, and fed it a piece of wood.
I leaned back in my chair.
"So," I said. "You got a name, or do I just call you Tall and Taciturn?"
He looked up from the stove. "You read my file."
"I did."
"Then you know my name."
"I do." I waited. "Still waiting to hear you say it."
The look he gave me could've stripped paint off a barn door. He stood up and brushed his hands on his jeans. "Ransom. Ransom Lanza."
"See? Wasn't so hard." I set the hat back on the table. "You got somebody, Ransom? Back at the ranch, or anywhere?"
He went still. "That's not your business."
"Probably not," I agreed. "You just seem like a man who's been carrying things alone for a while. Comes with the job: reading people."
"Then read somebody else."
"No," I said. "You're more interesting than that."
He was good at not answering. Better than most. But I was better at my job than he was at his.
"How long's it been?"
He turned around. "Since what?"
"Since somebody was patient enough to fuck you properly," I said. "And I don't mean the kind where everybody keeps their boots on and pretends it didn't happen after."
He went still, and the hair on my arms stood up. His eyes came to mine and stayed, and the air in the shack went heavy, the way it does right before lightning finds something to hit.
He crossed the room in four steps, got a hand in my collar, and pulled me out of the chair, putting my back against the wall hard enough that the lamp jumped. Every point where his body touched mine burned.
I was half hard already, and it was so obvious I didn't even try to hide it.
"Shut up," he said.
I looked down.
He was hard too, maybe even more than me.
"Huh," I said.
His jaw tightened. "Don't."
"I'm not doing anything." I sounded steadier than I had any right to. "Just noticing." I tilted my head up at him. "Seems like you are too."
The vein in his throat jumped. He tightened his fist in my collar, and I watched him lose an argument with himself and lean into me like a compass needle finally finding its north.
"You want to fuck me, Ranger?" he half growled.
"Maybe." I held his gaze. "Unless you'd prefer to fuck me. I ain't picky."
He leaned down and kissed me, and I stopped thinking.
I'd been kissed before, but this… this was different. Ransom kissed me like he owned me, like he'd decided I belonged to him and that's just how it was. He didn't bother with gentle or easing up to it. He kissed me with violence on his tongue and a fist in my hair, tugging at the roots.
Yes, I thought. Okay. Yes. Take it.
My spine went soft against the wall, and somewhere in the back of my head a small voice said Oh, that's what you've been missing. I let out a small, involuntary whimper and clutched at his undershirt, yanking him closer.
He pulled back.
Just an inch, enough that his mouth wasn't on mine anymore and the cold air of the shack rushed in to fill the space, and I chased it without thinking, leaning forward. He let me get close enough to feel his breath before he pulled back another inch and smirked at me.
You son of a bitch, I thought, and closed the distance.
He let me kiss him this time, let me have it for a few seconds, his free hand sliding around to press flat against my cock through the denim, fingers digging in hard enough to mean something. Then he squeezed, and I melted.