Cowboy Swagger. Joanna Wayne

car must be in the garage. Mine would be, too, except that I stopped out front when I saw Dylan’s truck.”

      “Check the garage, Brent,” he told one of the deputies. “Be nice if the perp stole the victim’s car, so we’d have a known vehicle to chase.” Sheriff McGuire turned to Dylan. “Where was Eleanor when you arrived?”

      “Facedown on the kitchen floor.”

      The sheriff led the way with the deputies a step behind. Dylan and Collette followed.

      “Don’t let my father intimidate you,” she whispered to him.

      “Don’t give it a thought. As long as he goes after the lunatic attacker, the rest is insignificant.”

      She liked Dylan more by the second.

      Her father stepped over the stream of blood. “Tell me exactly what you found.”

      Dylan described the scene as best he could.

      The sheriff stooped to get a better look at the knife and the skillet as he listened. When he’d heard enough, he stood and rocked back on the heels of his boots.

      Brent joined them in the kitchen. “There’s a blue Ford Mustang in the garage.”

      “That’s Eleanor’s,” Collette said.

      The sheriff nodded. “Brent, wake up the CSI team and tell them I want a full workup on the scene. Chuck, put the state patrol on alert. Tell them we’ve got a dangerous nut on the loose and may need some help tracking him down. He can’t have gotten too far away from this location yet.”

      “I’m on it,” the middle-aged deputy said.

      “Good. I’ll get with them shortly with whatever pertinent details we can come up with. The rest of you stand guard here and make sure none of the evidence is tampered with until we get prints and any other evidence they can find.”

      The men jumped to do his bidding.

      “We’ll talk on the porch,” her father said to Collette. “I need more information on your stalker before you leave for the hospital. And, Ledger, don’t even think of cutting out before I get through with you.”

      DYLAN STOOD AT THE EDGE of the porch staring at the scene that had completely changed since he’d arrived at Collette’s less than half an hour ago. The quiet had evolved into a chaotic grind of activity, talk and barked orders.

      The “ifs” and “buts” of the situation roared though his mind with the same frenetic energy. If he’d left the bar a few minutes earlier, he might have arrived in time to save Eleanor from being attacked. If he’d chased down the figure running from the house, he might have caught the bastard. If Collette had arrived a few minutes earlier, she might have been the one assaulted.

      Collette collapsed onto the porch swing and wrapped her arms around her chest although the night was warm. He turned toward her, struck by how incredibly vulnerable she looked.

      She hadn’t fallen apart even in the first shock of seeing her friend’s condition, but she looked as if she was on the verge of it now.

      She needed a pair of strong arms wrapped around her, but probably not his. Her father had made it plain that Dylan was the outsider here, persona not grata just by virtue of who he was.

      “I should have never let Eleanor spend the night. If she’d driven back to Austin after we left your ranch, she wouldn’t have been hurt.”

      Dylan thought it best not to point out the possible fallacy of that statement. Collette was certain that the man who’d made the disturbing phone calls to her was behind the violence. That wasn’t necessarily so. Eleanor might have enemies of her own.

      He leaned against the support post near the edge of the steps. “How well did you know Eleanor?”

      “We’ve been best friends since college. The two of us and Melinda Kingston met our first year at UT. We hit it off from the get-go. The three of us shared an offcampus apartment from our sophomore year right through graduation.”

      “Where does Melinda live now?”

      “In Austin, in the same apartment complex as Eleanor. Along with their regular jobs, Melinda and Eleanor are the editors and owners of Beyond the Grave. I was helping them out when I met Eleanor at your ranch today.”

      “Is Eleanor married? Divorced? In a relationship?”

      “Not married and no steady relationship. She’s a workaholic and a much-sought-after freelance investigative reporter. She’ll do whatever it takes to get her story.”

      And that kind of fervor likely earned her all kinds of enemies, he thought. “Any particular reason why she stayed overnight instead of driving back to Austin?”

      “She was interviewing a man just outside Mustang Run early tomorrow morning. She thought it would be easier to just stay here instead of driving back to Austin. She hadn’t counted on running into a lunatic.”

      Not in what seemed to be a quiet, rural Texas town. It had probably seemed even quieter and more peaceful almost eighteen years ago when Dylan’s mother had been murdered in similar fashion mere miles away. That time the perpetrator had used a gun.

      Damn!

      He’d been doing a good job of keeping his own dark memories out of this, but now that he’d acknowledged them, they slunk into his consciousness like a pack of howling coyotes. But this wasn’t about the past or him.

      “I know you’re going to the hospital to see Eleanor, but I don’t think you should come back here by yourself after that.”

      “I live here.”

      “That doesn’t mean you have to spend the night here tonight.”

      She put her foot flat on the porch to stop the gentle swaying of the swing. “Are you suggesting I stay at your ranch?”

      He’d definitely not been suggesting that. “Haunted houses make for a lousy night’s sleep,” he said, keeping it light.

      She shrugged. “I’ll be fine, and once my father gets tired of interrogating you, you should go home and get some sleep.”

      He should. He probably wouldn’t. “Your father obviously doesn’t approve of our being friends.”

      “He seldom approves of anything I do. I like it that way.”

      And yet she still lived on his turf, in the same small town she’d grown up in.

      She pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her full skirt. “I should call Melinda. She’ll want to know about the assault. And then she can get in touch with Eleanor’s mother in Houston.”

      He nodded and waited.

      By the time she broke the connection, he could see new frustrations setting in. “Was there a problem?”

      “Melinda was spaced-out on her migraine drugs. She insisted she call Eleanor’s mother and she offered to call a cab and go to the hospital, but I told her to stay home. She’s a zombie when those headaches set in.”

      He walked over and dropped to the swing next to Collette. She rested her head on his shoulder and his need to pull her into his arms jumped into overdrive.

      This was not the time to have these feelings. And Collette was definitely not the woman to be having them for. It was also not the time to be a jerk, so he slipped a comforting arm around her.

      The front door swung open, and the sheriff stepped onto the porch. He stood like a stone statue, scowling as if he’d caught them in some immoral act. His censure of Dylan couldn’t have been clearer.

      Screw him, Dylan thought. Yet he stood and moved away from the swing.

      The sheriff continued to stare him down. “I have plenty of questions for you, Dylan Ledger, but first I want to hear from my daughter.”