Lawless

He took four long steps and towered over her. “If you dare tell anybody...!” he threatened darkly.

“I don’t gossip,” she reminded him. “But there’s no legal or moral reason in the world why you can’t look at me in flimsy lingerie,” she pointed out, “whether or not people know we’re married.”

“I told you five years ago, and I’m telling you now,” he said firmly, “nothing of that sort is ever going to happen between you and me. In two months you’ll be twenty-one. You’ll sign a paper, and so will I, and we’ll be business partners—nothing more.”

She searched his black eyes with the familiar excitement almost choking her. “Tell me you’ve never wondered what I look like without my clothes,” she whispered. “I dare you!”

He gave her a look that would have fried bread. It was a look that was famous in south Texas. He could back down lawbreakers with it. In fact, he’d backed her own father down with it, just before he went for him with both big fists.

She glowered up at him with a wistful sigh. “What a waste,” she murmured thoughtfully. “You know more about women than I’ll ever know about men. I’ll bet you’re just sensational in bed.”

His lips became a thin line. The look was taking on heat-seeking attributes.

“All right,” she conceded finally. “I’ll find some nice young boy to teach me what to do with all these inconvenient aches I get from time to time, and I’ll tell you every sordid detail, I swear I will.”

“One,” he said.

She lifted both eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“Two.”

Her hand tightened on the book bag. “Listen here, I can’t be intimidated by a man who’s known me since I wore frilly dresses and patent leather shoes...”

“Three!”

“...and furthermore, I don’t care if you are a...”

“Four!”

She turned on her heel without finishing the sentence and made a beeline for the side entrance. The next number would result in something undignified. She remembered too many past countdowns, to her own detriment. He really was single-minded!

“I’m only humoring you to make you feel in control!” she called back to him. “Don’t think I’m running!”

He hid a smile until he was back at the black SUV he drove.

* * *

The same week, Jack Clark, a man who worked for them, was caught red-handed with an expensive pair of boots he’d charged to their account. Christabel had found it on the bill and called Judd down to show it to him. They’d fired the man outright. She didn’t tell Judd that the man had made blatant advances toward her, or that she’d had to threaten him with Judd to make him stop.

A few days after he was fired, their brand-new young Salers bull was found dead in a pasture. To Christabel, it seemed uncannily like foul play. The bull had been healthy, and she refused to believe Judd’s assertion that it was bloat-causing weeds that had killed him and left four other bulls in the same pasture alive. After all, Jack Clark had vowed revenge. But Judd brushed off her suspicions, and even told Maude he thought she was trying to get attention, because he’d ignored her while he was dickering with the film people. That had made her furious. She’d told their foreman, Nick Bates, what she thought, though, and told him to keep an eye on the cattle. Sometimes Judd treated her like a child. It hadn’t bothered her so much before, but lately it was disturbing.

* * *

Judd turned up early Saturday morning two weeks later in his big black sport utility vehicle, accompanied by a second burgundy SUV which was full of odd people. There was a representative from the Texas film commission and a director whom Christabel recognized immediately. She hadn’t realized it was going to be a famous one. There was also an assistant director, and four other men who were introduced as part of the crew, including a photographer and a sound man.

She learned that the star of the film was an A-list actor, a handsome young man who’d sadly never been on a horse.

“That’s going to limit our scenes with your livestock,” the director told Judd with a chuckle. “Of course, Tippy Moore has never been around livestock, either. You might have seen her on magazine covers. They call her the Georgia Firefly. This will be her first motion picture, but she was a hit at the audition. A real natural.”

Judd pursed his lips and his black eyes lit up. “I’ve seen her on the cover of the sports magazine’s swimsuit issue,” he confessed. “Every red-blooded man in America knows who she is.”

Christabel felt uncomfortable. She glanced at Judd, all too aware of his interest, and could have wailed. They were married, but he took no notice of her at all. He was fond of her, he indulged her, but that was as far as it went. He hadn’t even kissed her when they were married. It was sobering to realize that in two months, it would all be over. She’d tried everything to make him notice her, even teasing him about a boy at school who wanted to marry her. That had been a lie, and he’d caught her in it. Now he didn’t believe anything she said. She studied his tall, sexy physique and wondered what he’d say if she walked into the study one night while he was going over the books and took off all her clothes.

Then she remembered the terrible scars on her smooth back, the ones her drunken father had put there with a short quirt when she was sixteen. She’d tried to save her poor horse, but her father had turned on her. She could still remember the pain. Her back had been in shreds. Judd had come to see her father on business that Saturday morning, when he was working at the Texas Ranger post in San Antonio. So much of the memory was hazy, but she recalled clearly how Judd had come over the corral fence after her father, with such silent menace that her father had actually dropped the quirt and started backing away. It hadn’t saved him. Judd had gone for him with those big fists, and seconds later, the drunken man was lying in the dirt, half insensible. He’d been locked in the tack shed seconds later.

Judd had picked her up in his arms, so tenderly, murmuring endearments, yelling hoarsely for Maude, their housekeeper, to call the police and the ambulance service. He’d put her in the ambulance himself and ridden into the hospital with her, while her invalid mother wept bitterly on the porch as her husband was taken away. Judd had pressed charges, and her father had gone to jail.

Never again, Judd had said coldly, was that man going to raise his hand to Christabel.

But the damage had been done. It took weeks for the wounds to heal completely. There was no money for plastic surgery. There still wasn’t. So Christabel had white scars across her back in parallel lines, from her shoulders to her waist. She was so self-conscious about them that despite her teasing, she’d never have had the nerve to take off her clothes in front of Judd, or any other man. He only wanted to get rid of her, anyway. He didn’t want to get married. He loved his job, and his freedom. He said so constantly.

But he knew who Tippy Moore was. Most men did. She had the face of an angel, and a body that begged for caresses. Unlike poor Christabel, whose face was passable, but not really pretty, and whose body was like the poor beast’s in the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

Judd and the director, Joel Harper, were talking about using one of the saddle-broken horses for a scene, and the advisability of having their foreman, Nick Bates, around during shooting.

“We’re going to need set security, too,” Harper said thoughtfully. “I like to use local police, when I can, but you’re out of the city limits here, aren’t you?”

“You could get one of our Jacobsville policemen to work here when he’s off duty,” Judd suggested. “Our chief of police, Chet Blake, is out of town. But Cash Grier is assistant chief, and he’d be glad to help you out. We worked together for a few months out of the San Antonio Ranger office.”

“Friend of yours?” Harper asked.

Judd made a rough sound in his throat. “Grier doesn’t have friends, he has sparring partners.”

Christabel had heard a lot about Cash Grier, but she’d never met him. She’d seen him around. He was an enigma, wearing a conservative police uniform with his long thick black hair in a ponytail. He had a mustache and a little goatee just under his lower lip these days, and he looked...menacing. Crime had dropped sharply in Jacobsville since his arrival. There were some nasty rumors about his past, including one that he’d been a covert assassin in his younger days.

“He knocked Terry Barnett through a window,” Christabel recalled aloud.

Harper’s eyes opened wide.

Christabel realized that they were staring at her and she flushed. “Terry was breaking dishes in the local waffle place because his wife, who worked there, was seeing another man. He caught them together and started terrorizing the place. They say he ran at Grier with a waffle iron, and Grier just shifted his weight and Terry went through the glass.” She whistled. “Took thirty stitches, they said, and he got probation for assault on a police officer. That’s a felony,” she added helpfully.

Judd was glaring at her.

She shrugged. “When you spend time around them, it rubs off,” she explained to Harper with a sheepish grin. “I’ve known Judd a long time. He and my father were...business partners.”

“My uncle and her father were business partners,” Judd corrected easily. “I inherited my uncle’s half of the ranch, she inherited her father’s.”

“I see,” Harper said, nodding, but his thoughts were on the film he was going to make, and he was already setting up scenes in his mind for a storyboard. He was considering logistics. “We’ll need someone to cater food while we’re working,” he murmured. “We’ll need to set up meetings with city officials as well, because some of the location work will be done in Jacobsville.”

“Some of it?” Christabel asked, curious.

Harper smiled at her. “We’re shooting some of the movie in Hollywood,” he explained. “But we’d rather locate a ranch setting on a working ranch. The town is part of the atmosphere.”

“What’s the movie going to be about?” Christabel wanted to know. “Can you tell me?”

He grinned at her interest. He had two daughters about her age. “It’s a romantic comedy about a model who comes out West to shoot a commercial on a real ranch and falls in love with a rancher. He hates models,” he added helpfully.

She chuckled. “I’ll buy a ticket.”