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Rose had reached him. He read excitement and worry in her face. “What the devil’s going on, Rose?” Bull demanded.
Her manner was apologetic, almost embarrassed. “Raul and Joaquin—they showed up at my trailer. They need work and a place to stay.”
Raul and Joaquin. A memory flashed through Bull’s mind—Carlos’s old Buick vanishing down the dusty back road, headed for Mexico—leaving behind the bodies of the murderers the boys had captured and dragged almost to death.
Bull had finished off the killers with two pistol shots and walked away. It had been his twenty-first birthday, he recalled. And he had never expected to see Carlos’s sons again.
Now here they were, on his doorstep. And he couldn’t expect Rose to take them in. They were about to become his problem.
The two brothers had climbed out of the truck. Bull came down off the porch and shook their hands. Smooth hands. Whatever they’d been doing, it hadn’t been ranch work.
“I’d invite you in, but my sons are asleep and I don’t want to disturb them,” Bull said. “Have you eaten?”
“Yes, Rose made sandwiches.” Joaquin was the taller one, Bull remembered now. The last time he’d seen them, they were barely out of their teens. Now they were men, their faces hardened by time and experience.
“Now that the roundup’s done, there’s some vacant space in the bunkhouse. Downstairs hallway, last door on your right. You can bunk there tonight, and we’ll talk in the morning. Keep quiet. All right?”
“Yes. Gracias. We know the way.” They lifted their backpacks out of the truck bed and headed across the yard to the bunkhouse.
Rose hovered by the truck, as if she had more to say. Tanner had climbed out to stand beside her.
“Sit down.” Bull sank onto the top step, leaving room next to him. Rose took a seat. Tanner moved to stand beside her.
“So tell me what this is all about,” Bull said.
“They just showed up, out of nowhere,” Rose said. “I was happy to see them at first, because they were like brothers to me, and I hadn’t even been sure they were alive. But now that I’ve brought you into this, I’m worried.”
“You didn’t have much choice about bringing me into it,” Bull said. “With you or without you, they’d have come to me. But what is it you’re worried about?”
“They told me they’d been forced to work as drug runners for the Cabrera cartel. According to them, they ran away and hitched rides to get here.”
That explains their soft hands, Bull thought. But what he’d heard so far didn’t sound good. “Do you think they’re telling the truth?” he asked her.
“I don’t know why they’d make up a story like that. But what if there’s more to it? What if the cartel comes looking for them?”
“It could happen. But why would the cartel go to so much trouble for a couple of flunkies? They can always get more hired help.”
Rose’s gaze dropped to her lap. When she looked at him again, he saw fear in her dark eyes. Tanner laid a hand on her shoulder, as if giving her support.
“There’s something I haven’t told you, Bull,” she said. “Something I should have told you when I first came here.”
Little by little the story emerge
d—how the brother of Refugio Cabrera had raped her, how she’d waited until he came for her again, then killed him to avenge her foster parents and to save her own life. “I took the car and fled in the night, to the only place I could call home. I knew Refugio would never stop looking for me, but I hoped I would be safe here. I was wrong. And now I may have put all of you in danger.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Bull said.
“If Joaquin and Raul could find me, so could the cartel. For all I know, the two of them may have even been sent to track me down and report back.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do. I only know that this is my own fight, and I don’t want to involve the people I care about.”
“You could go to my family’s ranch in Wyoming,” Tanner said. “You’d be safe there, and I know my brother and his wife would be happy to have you.”
She laid her hand on his. Seeing them together, Bull remembered what it was like to be so much in love with a woman that you’d do anything to protect her. He would have done the same for Susan.
“We don’t know that we’re in danger,” he said. “If we were, it wouldn’t be the first time. We know how to fight. We know how to defend our land and our loved ones.”
“But it mustn’t come to that,” Rose said. “I would leave before I let it get that far.”
“It’s too soon to know,” Bull argued. “Joaquin and Raul may be just what they say they are—two scared men running from the cartel. If that’s true, the safest place for them, and us, is right here, where we can keep an eye on them. Send them away, and they’re bound to get picked up by Immigration and deported back to Mexico. Now that they know you’re here, we can’t let that happen.”
