Cowboy Protector
Patricia Rosemoor
The McKenna Legacy… A Legacy of Love
To my darling grandchildren,
I leave you my love and more. Within thirty-three days of your thirty-third birthday—enough time to know what you are about—you will have in your grasp a legacy of which your dreams are made. Dreams are not always tangible things, but more often are born in the heart. Act selflessly in another’s behalf, and my legacy will be yours.
Your loving grandmother,
Moira McKenna
P.S. Use any other inheritance from me wisely and only for good, lest you destroy yourself or those you love.
Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,
The summer is here and we’ve got plenty of scorching suspense and smoldering romance for your reading pleasure. Starting with a couple of your favorite Harlequin Intrigue veterans…
Patricia Rosemoor winds up the reprisal of THE MCKENNA LEGACY with Cowboy Protector. Yet another of Moira McKenna’s kin feels the force of what real love can do if you’re open to it. And not to be outdone, Rebecca York celebrates a silver anniversary with the twenty-fifth title in her popular 43 LIGHT STREET series. From the Shadows is one more fabulous mystery coupled with a steamy romance. Prepare yourself for a super surprise ending with this one!
THE CARRADIGNES come to Harlequin Intrigue this month. The Duke’s Covert Mission by Julie Miller is a souped-up Cinderella story that will leave you breathless for sure. This brawny duke doesn’t pull up in a horse-drawn carriage. He relies on a nondescript sedan with unmarked plates instead. But I assure you he’s got all the breeding of the most regal royalty when it counts.
Finally, Charlotte Douglas brings you Montana Secrets, an emotional secret-baby story set in the Big Sky state. I dare you not to fall head over heels in love with this hidden-identity hero.
So grab the sunblock and stuff all four titles into your beach bag.
Happy reading!
Sincerely,
Denise O’Sullivan
Associate Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
COWBOY PROTECTOR
PATRICIA ROSEMOOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
To research her novels, Patricia Rosemoor is willing to swim with dolphins, round up mustangs or howl with wolves…“Whatever it takes to write a credible tale.” She’s the author of contemporary, historical and paranormal romances, but her first love has always been romantic suspense. She won both a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award in Series Romantic Suspense and a Reviewer’s Choice Award for one of her Harlequin Intrigue novels. She’s written more than thirty Harlequin Intrigue books and is now writing for Harlequin Blaze. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Edward, and their three cats.
She would love to know what you think of this story. Write to Patricia Rosemoor at P.O. Box 578297, Chicago, IL 60657-8297 or via e-mail at [email protected], and visit her Web site at http://PatriciaRosemoor.com.
Books by Patricia Rosemoor
HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE
38—DOUBLE IMAGES
55—DANGEROUS ILLUSIONS
74—DEATH SPIRAL
81—CRIMSON HOLIDAY
95—AMBUSHED
113—DO UNTO OTHERS
121—TICKET TO NOWHERE
161—PUSHED TO THE LIMIT
163—SQUARING ACCOUNTS
165—NO HOLDS BARRED
199—THE KISS OF DEATH
219—TORCH JOB
243—DEAD HEAT
250—HAUNTED
283—SILENT SEA
291—CRIMSON NIGHTMARE
317—DROP DEAD GORGEOUS
346—THE DESPERADO
361—LUCKY DEVIL
382—SEE ME IN YOUR DREAMS*
386—TELL ME NO LIES*
390—TOUCH ME IN THE DARK*
439—BEFORE THE FALL
451—AFTER THE DARK
483—NEVER CRY WOLF*
499—A LOVER AWAITS
530—COWBOY JUSTICE
559—HEART OF A LAWMAN†
563—THE LONE WOLF’S CHILD†
567—A RANCHER’S VOW†
629—SOMEONE TO PROTECT HER
661—MYSTERIOUS STRANGER*
665—COWBOY PROTECTOR*
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Neil McKenna Farrell—The rancher never believed in the McKenna legacy until a hostage situation created an unbreakable bond between him and pretty Annabeth Caldwell. Can he keep her safe from harm…and his heart?
Annabeth Caldwell—The rodeo worker was the only one who saw one of the thieves’ faces, but should she entrust her safety to a cowboy who won’t take no for an answer?
Nickels—The leader of the hostage takers was prepared to kill to protect himself, but is he the real menace to Annabeth?
Peter Telek—The rodeo official seems really upset about Annabeth’s brushes with danger. Is that because she’s still alive?
Lloyd Wainwright—The contractor couldn’t account for missing stock. How closely are his financial interests tied up with the rodeo?
Alderman Salvador Lujan—The local politician barely escaped from the hostage situation alive. But is his public outrage at the incident and misdirected anger at Annabeth just a cover-up?
Thanks to Michael Black, writer and police officer, for his
generous help in providing me with background material.
Michael—I always know I can count on your for ideas
on how the authorities would handle things.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
Prologue
The late-summer sun blazed down on Chicago’s stifling lakefront, careless of the opening of City Slickers Rodeo Days. The crowd of several hundred thousand and growing wandered the festival grounds in a humid daze.
“Perfect,” he growled, taking it all in.
Families shoulder to shoulder pushing into the arena…kids whining for pony rides…teens grumbling about two country-music stages and no hip-hop. And all of them too close to heat exhaustion to be observant.
“No one is paying us any mind,” he told his cohorts. They had snaked together from three different directions to converge on the temporary building that housed the rodeo bank. He’d already taken care of the guard. “They’re all drowning in their own sweat.”
“Yeah, them and me.”
“When we’re through here,” the bigger of his men said, “maybe we can go for a dip in the lake.”
He glared at the two dim bulbs who made up his gang. They looked ridiculous in those getups—cowboy gear, including oversize Stetsons that shadowed their faces. But they blended with the rodeo personnel and contestants, and that was the idea. Anyone looking at them would think they were in costume, right down to the holsters hanging low on their hips.
Little would observers figure that the leather-cradled revolvers were loaded with deadly shot. He slipped his piece from its holster and slid it behind the saddlebags draped over his shoulder.
Backing toward the door to the bank office, he growled, “Let’s do it!” He lifted the bandanna over his nose and unlocked the door with the keys he’d taken off the guard they’d knocked down a few minutes before.
Faces masked, guns drawn, they shoved their way in like a wedge. He stopped several feet in front of the door, while the boys fanned out, one on eith
er side.
“What do you guys think you’re doing?” the pretty young woman inside asked with a giggle.
“Robbing you, Blondie.” He threw the leather saddlebags at her. “Fill them up. Twenties and bigger bills. No small stuff. Takes up too much room.”
The middle-aged man on the other side of the room blustered, “You can’t be serious!”
He gave the man a steely-eyed glare. “You don’t want to bet on that.”
To emphasize his seriousness, he raised his gun and aimed square between the man’s eyes.
“All right, all right,” the man said, his balding head blossoming red.
He could smell fear a dozen yards away, and Old Baldy stank of it. He didn’t think they were going to get any trouble from him.
Indeed, while Blondie emptied the box in the counter drawer, Old Baldy worked on the safe with a gun pointed at his head. Sweat rolled down the man’s face and his hand shook as if palsied, but he managed to get the safe open.
“Pass the saddlebags,” he said. And when the man didn’t work quickly enough—those damn hands wouldn’t stop shaking—he snapped, “You, get away from the safe!” He worried that someone would realize the guard wasn’t at his station outside and come to investigate. “We’ll take it from here.”
Old Baldy stepped back and the work went quicker.
A few minutes later the safe was empty and the bags bulging. He heaved a sigh of relief.
He was saying, “I want to thank you for your cooperation,” when he realized Old Baldy was surreptitiously probing his hand under the counter.
A blasted alarm!
Flying across the room, he butted the man across the face with his gun, but something told him the damage was already done. No noise split the air, but no doubt the alarm the idiot had triggered was silent.
Trying not to panic, he ordered, “Let’s get out of here! Now!”
Chapter One
Neil McKenna Farrell entered barn one at half past noon, right after participating in the City Slickers Rodeo Days parade down Lake Shore Drive.
That had been the oddest experience—sitting atop a horse with Lake Michigan on one side, the Museum Campus straight ahead and the rodeo grounds on the other side, with the city office buildings scraping the sky beyond. He’d never before participated in a rodeo in a major city east of the Mississippi. First time for everything, he guessed. But when the opening ceremonies had begun in the arena, he’d quietly taken his leave. No need for him to be there. He simply wasn’t and never would be a showman.
So here he was in the calf barn, looking for pen number three. Usually the calves would be rounded up together in one big pen—and that would be outside. But that was probably against city code, he guessed. And here they were split up into a half-dozen pens, probably someone’s idea of a way to control them more easily.
Only, pen number three was empty.
So where the hell was Casper, the calf he was supposed to rope later that afternoon?
“Hey, anyone here?” he called out.
No answer.
But rustling sounds and grunting from the rear of the temporary barn caught his attention, so he headed in that direction, passing dozens of calves huddled together in groups. Most were either dozing or munching away on feed. Only a few critters were interested enough in his presence to follow him with liquid brown eyes.
He stopped yards short of the feed supply and took a moment to inspect a finely shaped rear sticking up in the air before clearing his throat.
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
The woman fighting with the too-large-for-her bag of feed whipped around and lost her balance, landing square on that fine rear he’d been admiring.
“Whoa!” she croaked. “You scared the daylights out of me.”
She didn’t look too settled now, so Neil spread his hands where she could see them and said, “Sorry, ma’am, I’m harmless, honest.”
“Right.”
She was comely, with soft curves and long wheat-colored hair tied up in a ponytail away from her heart-shaped face. But her pleasant features were, at the moment, drawn into a frown aimed straight at him. Pushing herself up from the ground, she dusted off the back of her jeans, the tempting soft flesh there urging him to volunteer to help.
Instead, he took the smart route and shoved both hands into his jeans pockets before he got himself into big trouble. He was here to rodeo not to womanize. Still, he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t notice that single trickle of sweat running down from her long throat and into the crevice of flesh peeking above her bright yellow T-shirt.
“You’re working with the stock, right?” he asked, his mouth suddenly dry. “I mean, you’re an employee?”
“No,” she said, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her work glove. “I just like to roll around in the barn and get filthy.”
“No need to be facetious.”
That’s when he noted the employee tag—big as life on her well-endowed chest—that declared her to be rodeo employee Annabeth Caldwell.
“Sorry, Annabeth, didn’t see your identification.”
She shrugged and said, “Look, we’re shorthanded ’cause a guy didn’t show this morning, so I’m real busy.”
To prove it, she hauled up that feed bag that had been thwarting her. Neil didn’t hesitate to lend a hand this time. He grabbed the low end and took half the weight. Then he helped her set the feed in a nearby wheelbarrow.
She gave him a considering look, a small frown puzzling her pretty blue eyes as if she couldn’t figure out why he’d bothered. “Thanks, but you didn’t need to do that. I’m stronger than I look.”
He didn’t doubt it, but what he said was, “My pleasure.”
“My job,” Annabeth countered.
As if to prove it, she moved the wheelbarrow to the closest pen, opened the bag and emptied it into a feeder, all with no help from him.
When she finished, she faced him, her expression soft. Open. And then she seemed to catch herself, as if she remembered she wasn’t supposed to get cozy with a cowpoke.
“If you need something, mister, spit it out.”
“Neil Farrell. And I need to see my calf.”
“Your personal calf? As far as I know, Lloyd Wainwright owns all the stock used in this rodeo.”
“The one I’m going to rope this afternoon,” he said for clarification.
“What?” Her eyebrows arched and she suddenly sounded amused. “You have to practice?”
His turn to narrow his gaze on her. “I just want to check him out. Size him up. As a competitor, I mean.”
“Yeah, some little calf is a real competitor to a full-grown man with a noosed rope and a horse.”
Taking umbrage at her sarcasm, Neil drew himself to his full six feet, topping her by three or four inches.
“Calf roping is a time-honored cowboy tradition, a skill that still needs practice,” he told her. “Every summer, back in South Dakota on the family ranch, we round up the new calves, rope and truss them for branding and vetting. So, you see, the calf-roping competition is actually a natural extension of ranch life.”
Not to mention that competing in the timed rodeo competition was Neil’s only hobby.
A weekend away from the ranch here and there gave him much-needed relief from the pressures of a job that seemed to be getting harder and was, for sure, less feasible economically than when he had taken the reins from his father. And his parents had given him this particular weekend as a present for his birthday—his thirty-third. He’d be celebrating with his McKenna cousins later.
“Chicago isn’t exactly ranching country, now, is it,” Annabeth said, removing the gloves and sticking them in her jeans pocket.
“But that doesn’t mean city people aren’t interested in getting a taste of a different way of life,” he countered.
She shrugged. “Obviously, or City Slickers Rodeo Days wouldn’t be in progress.”
“If you have something against rodeoing,” Neil said qu
ietly, “what are you doing working at one?”
“Trying to make enough money to pay next month’s rent, if that’s all right with you.”
An odd choice of a job for a city woman, he thought. If she was a city woman.
She didn’t have soft hands with prettily polished nails. Her fingers were long and strong-looking, her nails short. And she certainly wasn’t model thin, all skin and bones, like a lot of the young women he’d seen since arriving in Chicago the day before. Thankfully. He always had admired a female with some curves on her.
But he was here to find a calf, Neil reminded himself again, not a woman.
“Actually,” she went on, “I like this job a lot better than most of the ones I’ve had the past few years—”
Neil couldn’t stop himself from interrupting. “What kinds of jobs?”
“Waitressing, clerking in a department store, managing a coffeehouse, word processing for a law office—that was the worst—substitute teaching, telemarketing…well, the list goes on, but at least here, with the animals, I can almost pretend that…” She suddenly seemed to catch herself and shook her head. “Never mind.”
Neil wanted to ask Annabeth what she’d meant to say, wanted to ask why a sadness had passed through her expression. But he expected she wouldn’t welcome either question. And to be truthful, he wasn’t sure why he was interested.
Staring at the slight dimple in her chin, he said, “Just tell me where my calf is and I won’t take up any more of your limited time.”
“You have your draw?”
He showed her the slip of paper, clearly marked Casper, #9, Barn 1, Pen 3.
“Let’s go see.”
But pen three in the far corner still stood empty.
Annabeth looked around as if she would find the calves wandering down the main aisle. “Well, how in the world did I miss this?”
“You did say you were busy and shorthanded.” Neil figured it wouldn’t hurt to give her the benefit of the doubt.
