The Trouble with Texas Cowboys (Burnt Boot, Texas #2)(44)

Sawyer and Jill moved as quietly as possible and crawled into another cargo van. This one was blue with some kind of lettering on the side, and the doors went shut, but not before Sawyer shoved his jacket in between them.

“Why did you do that?” Jill asked.

“I don’t think we’re being rescued. I think we’re changing kidnappers.”

“No!” she said.

“Give them time to get around to the front, and then we’re getting out. Slide off into that ditch until they drive away, and then we’ll start making our way out of this mess. We might have to find a place to hole up until daylight, when we can get our bearings. I think we were driving for about twenty minutes, but I don’t have any idea which way…now, Jill, slide out right now. They’re starting to move.”

He grabbed her hand and opened one door, retrieved his denim jacket, carefully shut the door, and the van pulled away into the night without its passengers. The two men wrestling with the tree finally freed it, and they went in the opposite direction without ever realizing they’d lost their cargo.

Sawyer and Jill exhaled loudly at the same time as they watched from a prone position halfway down a ditch beside the road.

“Now what? We don’t know where we are, and our cell phones and money are all gone,” Jill said.

“Take a real deep breath,” Sawyer said.

“Yuck,” she said.

“That, darlin’, is pig shit. Where there are pigs, there is a barn or a house or something nearby. We’ll follow our noses until we find a barn.”

“Why not knock on a door and ask for help?” she asked.

“We might get shot for one thing, and how do we know who we can trust?” He pulled her up, put on his jacket, and wrapped her hand into his. “I’m going to kick some ass when I find out who did this. I’m too damned tired to walk for miles in the cold.”

“Get in line, Sawyer O’Donnell. I get first chance at them. I hate to pee in the brush, and I damn sure hate sleeping in a hayloft,” she said.

They crawled over two barbed-wire fences, worked their way through a patch of thick mesquite, and outran one rangy old bull before the barn loomed up before them like a silent sentinel in the night.

“I may go back to Corpus Christi and sling hash for a living after this. I’m sick of pig wars and pig shit, and I’m not sure I even like pork chops anymore,” she grumbled.

“It’s only a quarter mile at the most, and it looks like the pasture has winter wheat growing. It’s not tall enough to turn the cows into it, so the going should be good,” he said. “Besides, Gladys will call out the Army, the National Guard, and the Texas Rangers when we don’t show up for church.”

“No, she won’t. I told her that we might not be there, and she’s not going. She and Aunt Polly are staying home, and Verdie is coming over later to play canasta with them. And, remember, she’s doing chores tomorrow, so she won’t miss us until Monday, probably when we don’t show up at the store.”

The barn hadn’t been in use for years, but what was left of the tack room still had a couple of well-worn winter horse blankets stored in a drawer. Sawyer carried them to a stall, kicked the straw around to fluff up a bed, and shook out one blanket.

“We’ve slept spoon style before, and that’s the only way we’ll be able to stay warm with a bed this small,” he said.

“I could sleep standing up in a broom closet. Sawyer, why would the Gallaghers or the Brennans kidnap us? It doesn’t make sense.”

He eased down on the makeshift bed. “Honey, I don’t know what the hell they had in mind, but the one that chuckled was a Gallagher. I don’t know his name, but I recognized his voice from one of the guys in the fight at the church. That means they were stealing us from the Brennans.”

“But why?” She stretched out beside him.

He wrapped an arm around her. “Anyone who gets into a pig war is bat-shit crazy. Let’s find our way home and pretend it never happened, until we can prove it. And then we’ll take them out, one at a time.”

“No use in wasting time. I’ll set fire to both their ranches and burn them to the ground.” The last words were mumbled, and then she was sound asleep.

He tucked the blanket tightly around them both and swore that when he found out who’d done this, the pig war would be nothing compared to what he would do.





Chapter 14


Jill didn’t want to open her eyes. She knew exactly where she was and how she got there and who was snuggled up against her back, but an itchy feeling on the nape of her neck said something was staring at her. If it was a granddaddy long-legs spider, she did not want to see it.

“Hey, are y’all alive?” someone said in a whisper.

Spiders did not talk, so Jill opened her eyes slowly.

“Wow! You are alive. I was afraid you was dead, and I ain’t touchin’ no dead person,” the kid said.

A big yellow dog stuck his nose through the wooden slats of the stall and sniffed the air.

“That’s Buster, my dog. He’s the one who found you first. I come huntin’ for him. Can you hear me?”

Jill nodded. “Where are we?”

“In my daddy’s barn. We only raise hogs now, so we don’t use this barn too much ’cept to store hog feed in and use when a sow has pigs in the real cold wintertime.”