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Lath sauntered toward him. A taunting smile slanted his mouth as his glance strayed to the front of his uniform. “I see you took off your badge. I guess that means this is personal,” he drawled. “It couldn’t be about that little social call I paid to your wife, could it?”
“You went to see that little slut?” Emma demanded in sudden fury. “I raised you better than to go sniffin’ around her kind.”
“Now, Ma.” Lath smiled at the quick flaring of Logan’s nostrils, his only outward reaction to the name-calling. “It wasn’t what you’re thinkin’. You run along inside, and I’ll explain it all to you later. Right now, I think the sheriff wants to have a little private talk with me—man to man, so to speak. Something tells me it won’t take long.”
She threw a last glare at Logan, then turned on her heel and stalked into the house, the empty shotgun under her arm. Rollie stayed, a silent figure in the background.
In the interim, Lath lit a cigarette and blew a long stream of smoke into the air. “I gotta be honest, Echohawk, I didn’t figure she’d tell you.”
“She told me. Now I’m telling you—don’t ever come within a hundred feet of my wife again.”
“That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?” Lath countered lazily. “I mean, is it my fault you can’t keep her satisfied? She likes it from behind, you know.”
Logan’s expression never changed. “I’ll say it only once more—don’t come near my wife again.”
“And if I sh
ould, what’ll you do about it?” Lath challenged cockily. “Kill me? You—a man sworn to uphold the law?”
“I never said anything about killing you, Lath.” His mouth curved in a smile that was deadly cold. “I even have your brother as a witness to that. How could I be responsible if you took a notion to hang yourself? Did you ever see anybody hang before? Not on an executioner’s gallows with a hangman’s knot to cleanly snap the neck, but with an ordinary rope tied to an ordinary beam. I heard about a man who hung himself in a jail cell once. The coroner figured that it might have taken him as much as fifteen minutes to die. Somewhere along the line he must have changed his mind because there were claw marks on his neck.”
“I’m tremblin’ in my boots,” Lath jeered.
“That isn’t what he did in his boots,” Logan countered dryly, then walked to the patrol car. Opening the door, he paused with one foot inside. “Don’t tangle with me unless you have a death wish, Lath.”
After he drove out of the yard, Rollie dragged in a long, shaky breath and threw a worried look at his brother. “I told you going over there was a fool idea, didn’t I?”
“I had to get a look at the place, see how things are laid out, didn’t I?” Lath replied, unconcerned.
“Going over there is one thing, but messing around with the Calder woman is another. What the hell did you do, anyway?”
“Hey, she had a knife. I had to take it away from her.”
“You must have done more than that.” Rollie gave him an accusing look.
Lath shrugged. “So I copped a few feels. Let me tell you, little brother, that’s one piece of tail I wouldn’t mind havin’ some of.”
“Well, you can forget about that unless you want to die real slow,” Rollie grumbled in ill temper. “And you can sure as hell forget about your brag to Ma about doing something with the kid. If anything happens over there, Echohawk’ll come straight here.”
“Not if we handle it right, he won’t. Besides,” Lath grinned, “he warned me to stay away from his wife. He didn’t say anything about the kid.”
“If you think he won’t put two and two together and come up with us, you’re wrong,” Rollie told him.
Lath was unconvinced. “Not if we lay low for a while and play it cool. He may think about us, but not seriously, and not for long.”
Time passed much more swiftly than Cat thought it would. Her first days at the Circle Six were spent unpacking everything and arranging it to suit her. It was a process made longer by the time she took out to spend with Quint. Although he had always been content to entertain himself from the time he was small, Cat was concerned that he might have trouble adjusting to his new environment, a concern that proved to be groundless. If anything, he seemed happier. Which should have been a relief, but it bothered Cat that he was so quick to embrace this new life, so eager to explore every inch of it and so ready to make Logan a part of it.
“Graciously civilized” was the best way to describe her relationship with Logan after two weeks. There had been times when she was relaxed in his company, but on those occasions, someone else was invariably present, either Quint, her uncle, or some other member of her family. On the whole, Cat made it a point not to be alone with Logan. Which wasn’t difficult, considering that he was away the biggest part of the day. In the evenings, after she tucked Quint into bed, she usually went to her room and read for a while or occupied herself with some household task.
The role as woman of the house was a new experience for her. At The Homestead, the responsibility had always belonged to someone else—her mother when she was alive, then Ty’s first wife, Tara, and now Jessy. But here, she was in charge. With the additional work came an amazing sense of freedom. Suddenly Cat could do things the way she wanted them done, not someone else. Sometimes it was something as simple as folding the towels lengthwise first, then in half, or as major as rearranging everything in the kitchen cupboards. Without being aware of it, Cat subtly put her personal stamp throughout the house.
With Quint’s help, she planted a flower border along the length of the front porch. Nearly every day, they would saddle up their horses and go for a ride. At first, it was a chance to spend time with Quint and familiarize herself with this rough, broken country that was so different from the wide, rolling grasslands of the Triple C. But as Quint’s fascination with the wild landscape and his desire to explore it grew, so did hers. Out of habit, Cat would check on the condition of the range, the cattle, or the fences and pass the information on to Logan that evening.
And there was the young Appaloosa colt. Every time she turned around, Cat found Quint down at the corral trying to coax the flighty youngster to come to him. Out of concern for Quint, she began gentling the colt, teaching it to lead and getting it used to being handled, in short, making it safer for Quint to be around. Since she had always enjoyed working with young horses, the task was a pleasure of its own.
“What do you think of Raindance, Mom?” Quint climbed onto the kitchen counter and balanced on his knees to lift the plates out of the cupboard.
“Raindance?” Cat lifted the lid on the sauce pot. Steam, scented with basil and oregano, rose in an aromatic cloud as she stirred the simmering tomato and meatball mixture.
