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“Scream all you want. No one’s on the ranch to hear you as everyone has the day off. You will be punished.”
Those words flashed in my mind. He’d said that right before I passed out. Right when I saw on his dresser…the gnomes.
“Oh my God. The gnomes. You stole the gnomes from my house.” I rubbed a hand over my face, felt a piece of straw in my hair, tugged it out.
“A necessary loose end to clean up.”
The gnomes were a loose end? Then that made me….
“Ty! Where’s Ty?” I said, panicked. My skin broke out in a cold sweat. Was he a loose end, too?
Dex shook his head and tsked. “Ty’s dead. Or soon will be.”
What? A tightness spread across my chest, compressed my lungs so I couldn’t breathe. Dead? I gulped in air trying to remain calm. “But he sent me a text to meet me here. He can’t be dead! Where is he?”
Dex looked down at his fingernails. “I sent you the text from Ty’s phone.”
The phone Ty couldn’t find because…he’d dropped it under my kitchen table when we’d had sex the first time. With the gnomes watching us. The pieces were starting to fall into place.
“You were there.” I was mortified, but body-numbingly afraid. Afraid of Dex and the extent of what he’d done. And why.
“Saw you having sex in your kitchen? Right after you kissed me? Yes, I was in your back yard watching. You were to be my wife!” His voice changed. Angrier. “I would have shared everything with you. But you gave yourself to another man, out in the open for all the world to see.” Dex’s anger was controlled, focused. Not like a pressure cooker ready to blow sort of way. More like a snake that had been poked one too many times. Ready to strike. The man was mentally insane.
I was grossed out. Dex had seen something that had been private, something special between Ty and me. But that was quickly replaced by bowel liquefying fear. Ty was dead, and if he hadn’t sent the text, then no one knew I was here. Being held by a crazy man in a horse breeding shed.
“I’m sorry, Dex.” Placating him might work. “But I don’t understand. Why steal Ty’s cell phone? And the gnomes. Why the gnomes?”
“You wouldn’t leave it alone,” Dex growled.
I grabbed some straw, the rough edges poking into my skin. “What?” I wanted to cry from fear and frustration. “Leave what alone?”
“Morty Moore. You couldn’t leave it alone.” His hands gripped the gate rail until the knuckles were white. “I knew Morty was on the take even before you showed up. He’d been stealing valuable horse semen and selling it completely without my knowledge until about a week before you started nosing around. But you wouldn’t leave it alone. The more you looked, the more you brought attention to me and my ranch. I didn’t want anyone snooping around. Especially you.”
“Why? Morty stealing horse semen isn’t that big of a deal.”
Dex grinned. “You’re right. That’s nothing. But millions of dollars of meth is.”
“Holy crap.” A wave of nausea curdled my stomach. I swallowed, trying not to throw up. “You shot me full of horse tranquilizer so my brain isn’t working that well,” I said sarcastically. “I think you’re going to need to start at the beginning.”
He shrugged his shoulders, contemplating as if he had all the time in the world. “No one steals from me, so Morty had to go.”
I looked up at Dex from my seat in the hay. “The explosion.”
“It would have been considered a gas leak, if it hadn’t been for you.”
“But Morty wasn’t even there.”
I heard Dex’s horse snort behind him.
“Didn’t matter. I got him another time.”
My eyes locked on Dex’s, realizing what he’d said. “You cut him up and fed him to Ty’s family’s pigs!” What kind of man was I dealing with here? All this time, I just thought he was a pervy Dom-wannabe who had a weird obsession with animal husbandry. That, it turned out, was nothing.
“I told you, he had to go. What better way to get rid of a body?”
“Why there? What do Ty’s parents have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. But by then, I’d seen Strickland sniffing around you. I wanted him to know he was getting too close to something that belonged to me. To warn him I could get close, too.”
