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The last time Shannon had seen that face, she had slapped it.
She recalled the words that had made her do that:My third and final term, Miss Duffy. When the job is done, and we get back to Lamentation with our firestone, me and Logan get to have you for one night. We get to share you the way those alphas are sharing that omega on stage.
And now here they were, all three of them alone in the desert. The thought made Shannon shiver with a mixture of fear and excitement.
Tanner handed her the duster. “I believe this is yours.”
Shannon managed to choke out a quiet thank you and took the proffered coat. As she was putting it on, she saw Tanner eyeing her bandaged arm.
“You’re hurt,” he said with genuine concern.
Shannon’s pulse spiked, just as it had done a minute before when Logan had said the same thing.
Earlier, while the two alphas had their backs turned, Shannon had taken her torn sleeve and wrapped it around her upper arm to hide her omega mark. She had then taken some of the blood from the corner of her mouth and daubed it onto the fabric to complete the illusion of a bandage.
Keeping her omega sign hidden was of the utmost importance. By law, an omega could not own property. If Shannon’s true nature came to light, she would lose the ranch—and all five hundred of the hucow women who were depending on her for their safety and wellbeing. Shannon couldn’t allow that to happen.
“It’s nothing,” she said quickly as she slipped her arm into the sleeve of her duster. “Just a scratch.”
“You sure? Maybe you ought to let us—”
“I said it’s fine,” Shannon snapped. She needed to change the topic, and fast. “What about the wolf?”
“Ran off.”
As McBain said those words, he glanced quickly at the other alpha, and Shannon got the impression that some secret message had been communicated by that look. There was something he wasn’t telling her.
“Look, Mr. McBain, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I’d like to know what you and your brother were doing following me. I thought I’d made it clear last night that I was not interested in hiring you for this job.”
Tanner touched his jaw where she had slapped him the night before.
“Yes ma’am, you made it clear, alright. But after you turned me down, I had a feeling you might decide to hire that Blaylocke fellow instead, and there was something about him that just didn’t sit right with me.”
McBain abruptly turned around and walked over to Blaylocke’s corpse. After a moment’s hesitation, Shannon followed. She sensed Logan Summerhill following her in turn.
For the first time since the attack, Shannon looked at Blaylocke’s shattered remains, and her stomach lurched at the sight. She supposed, after what Blaylocke had tried to do to her, that she had a right to be glad he’d met such a violent end, but she didn’t. She just felt sick.
When she looked at the dead man’s face, however, her sickness shifted into disbelief.
At some point in the attack, Blaylocke’s head had come loose from his torso, but surprisingly his face had remained relatively unharmed by the wolf’s fangs. The strange thing was his beard. It was completely gone.
“Fake beard,” Logan said, gesturing to a mass of bloody hair on the ground nearby. “He was wearing a disguise.”
Shannon stepped closer and studied the dead man’s clean shaven face. Both of his cheeks bore prominent keloid scars that appeared to have been made with a branding iron. As Shannon looked closer, she realized the scars were letters.
“HT stands for horse thief,” McBain said. “R usually stands for Rogue… though based on what he tried to do to you, Miss Duffy, I reckon it could stand for something else.”
Shannon drew back, her hand pressed to her throat. She suddenly felt very cold and scared.
“So Blaylocke wasn’t really a Texas Ranger?”
“I reckon not,” McBain said. “His name probably wasn’t even Blaylocke. He definitely wasn’t from Texas. I knew that as soon as I heard him talk. Probably killed a Ranger and took those fine clothes and pistols from him. Whoever this fellow was, I figure there’s probably a good sized bounty out for him.”
“I guess the two of you’ll be wanting to collect it,” Shannon said.
Tanner McBain shook his head. “Not particularly. For one thing, there’s no guarantee there is a bounty. For another, we’d probably have to go to Texas to collect it, and I’m not too keen on lugging a severed head halfway across creation. I know Logan isn’t keen on it either. There’s better ways for a man to make a living.”
Shannon looked at him inquiringly.
