No One But You

“How?”

“Kyle.”

“Kyle? What about him?”

She turned back to her search for supplies, still so shaken by Kyle’s murder and the timing of Matt Guiliani’s appearance on the Bar Naught, and what the fallout would be to her own purposes, that she couldn’t think what lie to tell or how to deliver it.

She combed unnecessarily through the drawer full of syringes to cover her delay in answering, then plucked out an unused eighteen-gauge syringe.

He grabbed her other forearm. “Look at me, Fiona. What about Everly?”

She jerked her hand away, but he held tight and all she accomplished by pulling so hard was to bring his naked wrist into contact with her breast.

An intensely sexual awareness, keen, fierce and unexpected, hit her, a flash flood of mutual suspicion crashing down through canyons of barren, thwarted desire. Her mouth watered. Her nipples tightened unbearably. Another slip, Fiona? she thought, like the unintended mention of a kiss in Soldier Boy’s stall?

What was it about him that had her reacting this way?

She swallowed.

He released her wrist.

Their eyes met, and she backed away, one step.

“I want you off the Bar Naught. Now.” She knew he wasn’t any less affected by her slip than she was. Her breast still tingled. However unwitting, he stroked the part of his wrist that had touched her with the tips of the fingers on his other hand.

She couldn’t do this, couldn’t be here, be in a situation where a man made any difference to her. Or made her feel. Or made her tingle, wanting more.

He had to get off the Bar Naught and stay off it. She had made the worst mistake of her life by not betraying his presence to Dex. If she had, Dex would have hauled Matt Guiliani off to jail, and then she could try to decide what to do. What Kyle’s murder meant. How her own future would go now that her excuse for being on the Bar Naught was dead.

But Guiliani still wanted to know how she knew who he was. “I’m not leaving till you tell me what Everly said.”

The part of her that flawless composure had been drilled into responded with the necessary lie. “Kyle showed me your photo. It had come up in a conversation about bodyguards.” She joked to neutralize the tension, to defeat the stirring of attraction to this intruder into her life. “Kyle was skeptical, making fun of the possibility, but he told me that you would try to kill him one day.”

The implication that Kyle might actually need a bodyguard was the first time he came close to revealing what she already knew. He dealt with men who dispensed illegal arms, guns, bombs and rockets to half-baked causes, dangerous men—and profited hugely in doing it.

Her ears had perked up, her attention snared. He never told her in so many words what his international business dealings were about. He avoided the subject all the time. She’d asked a few questions, trying to make her curiosity seem without any particular motive behind it. Kyle had only stroked her chin between his thumb and forefinger in a way that repulsed her, and he told her not to worry her pretty little head.

He would always have things under control, and when he needed her to know more, he would tell her.

Guiliani was the last man alive to whom she would confess what she knew, and why she was really back on the Bar Naught, enduring Everly’s arrogance, fending off his mocking advances all these months. She had made her deal with the devil. She would be the necessary ears and eyes on the Bar Naught, reporting every move Kyle Everly made in exchange for the chance to regain ownership of the ranch.

He wasn’t moving anymore, but it was still faintly possible that she could prove useful enough.

Her situation was already tenuous. Matt Guiliani would make it worse if he knew what she was doing here. She’d be off the Bar Naught faster than she could pack her meager belongings—and her chance would be lost forever.

The Bar Naught was far more to her than a symbol of the pretensions to a privileged, polo-playing country-manor lifestyle of distant royalty, which was what the ranch represented to her idle parents. Much more.

She loved the work.

She loved the land, the freedom, the responsibility, the beautiful wild mustangs that she gentled. The love and respect and care of horses made people into better people. She knew that firsthand. Personally.

The Bar Naught was her safe haven, and she was willing to do whatever unsafe things she had to do to have it back.

“You didn’t believe him?” Matt asked, interrupting her thoughts. “That I’d try to kill him?”

“I don’t know what I believed. What does it matter now?”

“It matters.” His eyes fixed on hers, but she averted her gaze, searching for the alcohol swab for an excuse to look away.

She was easily as tall as Guiliani, but his male dimensions, his sheer presence, befuddled her wits, and she needed them all operating at a perfect pitch. “He’s just as dead no matter who did it.”

Matt craned his neck till he trapped her gaze. “It matters to me.”

She shrugged. She doubted very much that Matt Guiliani was the kind of man who would shoot another man in the back, but she couldn’t afford to reveal to him all that she knew. And Matt might have changed, might have turned killer.

Soldier Boy had. Anything was possible.

She decided that must be her tack. Deny everything. “I don’t really know you. How could I know if you would gun a man down?”

His eyes tracked her. “One never knows.”

“Have you killed anyone?” His expression left out any hint of excuses. “Yes.”

“What if someone betrayed you?” Because if he wouldn’t stay off the Bar Naught she would lie through her teeth to make sure he did. She would swear to Dex Hanifen that she had seen Guiliani pull the trigger.

“Is there a point to this?”

She swallowed, feeling as if he had read her mind, knew of her intention to pin the murder on him. “Yes.”

“Are you asking if I would kill you if you betray me?”

He shook his head slowly. “I wouldn’t advise it, Fiona.”

“Is that a yes?”

His brows drew close together. “Is that what stopped you from turning me over to Hanifen? The fear that I would come after you next?”

Lie, she told herself. Just do it. “Yes. All right? Yes. I was afraid I would be next.”

“Now you know better.”

“I don’t.”

“Of course you do.” He didn’t believe her, and why would he? He reached for a packet of cedar sticks from his breast pocket, broke one off and stuck it in his mouth.

The lie had been a mistake, which only made him more suspicious of her, not less. Would a woman fearful that he would kill her have turned her back on him? Would she lead him docilely into her treatment room to administer a shot before he did her in?

What made her think he could not have turned into a killer?