Wild Country (The World of the Others #2)- Anne Bishop Page 0,117

Then he turned to look at Virgil. Big damn mother of a Wolf and not someone he wanted to cross.

“You have any objections to me courting her?” he asked.

Virgil trotted up the street and leaped into the bed of the pickup—and Tobias had a feeling the Wolf was laughing at him for taking on the wolverine.

* * *

* * *

Parlan Blackstone stared at Dalton and Lawry. “You went to an occupied ranch when there are so many abandoned places in this region? By all the dark gods, what were you thinking? Were you thinking?”

“Charlie Webb and Sweeney Cooke had scouted the place.” Lawry glanced at Judd McCall instead of Parlan as he stumbled to explain. “They claimed there was no one in the house just before first light, that the owners and ranch hands were all out doing chores before breakfast and we’d have a clean run of the house. And they said the doors were left open. The way stations we’d checked had already been cleaned out of anything useful, and what passed for towns were too small for us to try to sell off anything we’d acquired.”

“Should have been simple, Pa,” Dalton said.

Judd McCall smiled at Dalton and Lawry. “Should have been.”

“Should have been.” Lawry sounded angry and bitter.

Good. If Lawry tried to shrug it off, he might “accidentally” fall on Judd’s knife, and that could attract attention to the whole clan. This fiasco had already attracted enough attention.

“Would have been if a girl hadn’t been in the kitchen and if Sweeney was capable of keeping his cock behind his zipper,” Lawry continued. “Gods, I swear, Parlan, that man isn’t right in the head whenever he sees a female. He was supposed to grab a couple of sacks of food and get out. Instead …”

Lawry stopped talking.

“Did the girl see anyone besides Sweeney?” Parlan asked. He listened to the clock tick, tick, tick.

“She saw me,” Dalton finally said. “But only for a second. I’m not sure she saw much. She was on her knees and Sweeney was in front of her and I was in the doorway for just a second to tell Sweeney we had to get out. Then I went out the front door and me and Uncle Lawry drove away.”

“Dalton told me no names were used,” Lawry said. “Even if the girl got a glimpse of him, she doesn’t know who he is.”

“You act like we don’t sense things, get feelings about when a deck is stacked against us and we need to walk away,” Parlan said.

“Dalton did his part,” Lawry said heatedly. “He came away with some nice bits of jewelry and a stack of cash in a cashbox that was right out in the open. Something warned them, something Sweeney and Charlie missed.”

Parlan stared at his son. “Did you handle those nice bits of jewelry?”

Dalton returned his father’s stare, but he paled. “That was just a con, the distraction to give Uncle Lawry time to work.”

No, it wasn’t. Maybe Dalton resented his sister having that odd bit of talent when he didn’t and that’s why the boy had always dismissed it as nonsense. How could a gemstone bring good fortune or leave someone open to misfortune? Except it wasn’t the stone itself. Never the stone itself. It was a particular stone matched with a particular person that seemed to do the impossible.

So the question was, did the ranch have a warning system that Sweeney and Charlie missed when they cased the place, or had their luck turned the moment Dalton grabbed some jewelry that had stones that created opportunities for misfortune?

Better for the family if everyone believed the trouble was because of Sweeney Cooke and Charlie Webb.

“We need to be able to settle for a few days in each place before we pick up and move on,” Parlan said. “We need that more now than we ever have before. Journeys from East Coast to West Coast aren’t possible anymore. We can’t even get out of this damn region. So we can’t put the clan at risk because Sweeney Cooke thinks with his dick.”

“Where are Sweeney and Charlie?” Judd asked.

Dalton shrugged. “Charlie had pulled up near the back door of the house, so Sweeney should have gone out that way.”

“I heard gunshots when we were driving away,” Lawry said. “Tire could have been blown out—or one of them could have been shot.”

“If one of them was shot and they managed to get away, they’ll have to hide or find a town that still has