Guns and Roses Read online

She laughed at the suggestion. “How long have you worked for me?”

  “Not long enough,” he admitted. “Look, if I can find a credible threat to McManus and prove someone is trying to kill him, can I keep my job?”

  She hesitated a nanosecond, just enough to give him hope. “That’s just—”

  “If he re-hires us for security?” He threw that out there with the same force he’d use on the shovel to dig his own grave. How the hell could he get McManus to do that?

  She surrendered a smile. “You know I like your style, Ben, but—”

  “Lucy, come on. Give me this chance.” He stared her down, the weight of hopelessness pressing on him, making him add one more word. “Please.”

  The office door popped open. “Mommy!”

  Instantly, all of Lucy’s features relaxed, her eyes lit up, and both arms shot out to a wee girl with black ringlets who toddled across the room.

  “Gracie! There’s my pumpkin!”

  “I’m so sorry, Miss Lucy.” A fair-haired young woman followed in Grace’s wake, picking up speed to catch up with the child.

  “Not a problem, Sveta. C’mere, you.” Lucy swooped her daughter onto her lap with a kiss for both cheeks before returning her attention to Ben. “All right, you have a deal,” she said, tenderly caressing her daughter’s head.

  So the rumors were true after all. Motherhood had softened Lucy Sharpe.

  Ben stood quickly, giving a wink to the little girl. “Thanks for the assist, kid.”

  Lucy ignored the comment, but let go of Gracie’s hair long enough to point a finger at him, the nail precisely the color of those Black Cherry roses down in the lab.

  “You are on a leave of absence,” she said. “That means you do not have a single Bullet Catcher resource at your disposal.”

  What? No vast database, no private jet, no brotherhood of back up, no instant access to top secret government information?

  “No problem, Luce.” He punctuated that with a confident smile that didn’t exactly match what he felt inside. “I got my own resources. Here.” He touched his temple. “And here.” And his gut.

  “Use them wisely, Mr. Youngblood, because this is your last chance.”

  ~*~

  Callie Parrish dropped to her bare knees and swallowed a curse that probably had the devil doing a happy dance in Hell. But right that minute, she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything but the dozens of bare-naked rose bushes that stood like beheaded little soldiers in the middle of the flower farm.

  Mud squished and stones stabbed her skin, but she didn’t even notice the discomfort as she touched the raw wound of a hastily cropped rose bloom.

  “Unbelievable,” she muttered, peering down the row in the hopes they’d missed a bush or two. But no, the entire bed—at least four dozen healthy rose bushes—had been snipped and stripped.

  Her entire crop of Black Cherries had been decimated. Misery crushed her chest, as strong as that morning she’d held Granny Belle’s hand and listened to a shocking, heartbreaking, and truly amazing story. She’d made her great-grandmother a promise that day… a promise that someone had just stolen along with a whole bunch of rare roses.

  Who would do this to her? Why? So few people even knew that she grew Black Cherry roses. Yet someone had marched over five acres of flowers to clear out the only blossoms worth a hundred bucks a dozen.

  Injustice rocked her right down to her rubber muck boots. Without this source of extra income—the only dime not accounted to the wolf at the door with a mountain of unpaid bills in his teeth—she couldn’t even dream of granting Granny Belle her one and only final request.

  Those ashes weren’t going into the Seine anytime soon. And as far as the answers Callie longed to have… well, looked like any chance of finding them got clipped away with the roses.

  Just as tears welled, she heard a car engine and the growl of tires digging into the gravel drive. God, let that be a customer who’d seen her homemade sign on the highway. But, the way things were going today, it was probably some misplaced tourist trying to find their way down to Disneyworld.

  She swiped a stray hair off her face and stuck it into her baseball cap, streaking her cheek with mud. Taking one last look at the chopped and naked bushes, she hitched her cut-off overalls and started across the farm, trying not to think about how long it would take her to make that money back.

  She cocked an ear toward the shed that doubled as a storefront, expecting someone to call out, as the occasional retail customer did when she was in the field. When she didn’t hear anything, she picked up her pace, plucking at the thin tank top that already stuck to her skin in the brutal Florida sun.

  Don’t leave, don’t leave, she pleaded silently. Every penny counted now.

  As she rounded the pine grove, she spotted a sleek gray sedan, worth more than the mortgage on the farm. Definitely lost tourists, then. Make a pity sale, Granny Belle would say. Today, she needed a sale and the pity.

  The car was empty, so she brushed more dirt off her hands and face and grabbed the rusted handle of the storefront door, opening her mouth to call out a greeting—the breath instantly trapped in her throat.

  Her mouth stayed open, hanging in shock at the sight of a man behind the sales counter digging through her coffee can of receipts like it was a cookie jar and he was starving.

  Another dang thief?

  “Can I help you?” she demanded, her hand still on the door in case she had to bolt to the house and get her rifle.

  “Jesus Christ.” He flipped a yellow slip of paper, tossing it aside without looking up.

  “Last I checked He wasn’t in there.” Wow, this was a big guy. Six two, and an easy hundred and ninety. She hovered in the doorway, ready to run, but oddly mesmerized by his audacity and size.

  “These are the shittiest files I’ve ever seen.” He smashed a bunch of her handwritten receipts on the counter and dug for more. “It’s the twenty-first century. Who keeps records like this?” He finally lifted his head.

  “I do.” It was a small miracle the words even came out at all because in the span of one second and one good look, every cell in her head darn near flatlined. Shock and dismay at the intrusion would have been enough to throw her, but… that… face. He was like no man she’d ever seen. Certainly not in the rural stretch of agricultural purgatory known as Madison County, Florida.

  His hair, black as midnight, fell around his face like handfuls of sin. His eyes, blacker still and fringed with coal-colored lashes, bore a hole right through to her soul. Harsh, unforgiving, angular features were dusted with a day or two’s worth of whiskers and slashed by a mouth that surely wasn’t put on this earth to do anything but… some really bad things.

  He drew thick, sinister brows together, his gaze dropping over her and lingering a moment too long on her threadbare cutoff overalls, the sweat-stained tank top, and, of course, manure-splattered boots.

  “You own this farm?” Impatience tinged his question, which took some nerve from a man breaking and entering and rooting through receipts.

  “Yes and do you mind telling me what on God’s green earth you think you’re doing?”

  “I need information,” he said, shaking some of that hair back and giving a jolt to something low and warm and female in her body. “And don’t even think about not giving it to me.”

  The threat was all she needed to lift her chin and force him to meet her gaze. “If you don’t want me to get my .22 and shoot your face off, get your cotton-pickin’ hands out of my receipt can.”

  He smiled, and, of course, the devil had dimples. “You’re cute, Daisy Duke. But, just for the record, you’re the one who stuffs ‘confidential information’ in a coffee can and leaves it on top of an unattended counter in an unlocked place of business with no proprietor in sight.”

  “Still doesn’t make rifling through my stuff legal or right.” She crossed her arms as if that could offer some protection against him. “Who are you?”

  He went back
to the receipts. “Government.”

  Government? A tax man? Shoot. Did she owe some stupid export duty on that batch of orchids she sent to that lady in Mexico? “Show me an ID badge.”

  Without even glancing up, he flipped the hem of his black T-shirt, just enough to reveal a leather holster and something that made her rifle look like a BB gun. That would be… enough ID badge for her.

  “What do you want?” she asked harshly, refusing to let him know how much he intimidated her.

  For a second, he didn’t answer, riveted on a receipt. “Oh, yes. Now we’re talking.” He snapped the slip at her, rounding the counter to come closer. “Who bought two dozen Black Cherry roses?”

  She looked at the paper, but all her still-stalled brain could process was Black Cherry roses. This couldn’t be a coincidence. Intimidation evaporated, replaced by that burn of injustice.

  She glared at him and added a threatening pointed finger. “I swear on the Bible, if you had anything to do with my stolen roses, I don’t care if you have an AK-47 strapped around your chest, I will make your life a living—”

  “What stolen roses?”

  “The ones that were snipped and stripped right out of their beds sometime in the middle of the last night.”

  “Last night?” He waved a dismissive hand. “Not interested. What about these?” He flicked the paper. “Who bought these roses? And when?” With each demand, he inched closer, the sheer power and size of his body like Granny Belle’s big ol’ John Deere about to chew her into human mulch.

  She should run. She should hide. She should pray for mercy. But all she could do was… look.

  She tore her gaze from his chest and stared at the receipt, blinking to clear her head.

  2 doz BC roses $200

  Instantly, Callie remembered the sale because, well, who could forget that woman? Tall as an Amazon with eyes as green as spring willow leaves, but not nearly as welcoming. Everything about her was severe and cold, so much that her spontaneous request for the Black Cherries had completely taken Callie by surprise.

  “I didn’t get her name, sorry. It was a walk-in off the highway asking for directions to Tallahassee.”

  “But she bought flowers?”

  “She asked if I grew Black Cherries, and I sold her two dozen.”

  “When?” he demanded. “There’s no date on here.”

  “Sheez, buddy, is an undated sales slip a criminal offense now?”

  He narrowed impossibly dark eyes at her like her negligence was worthy of jail time.

  “About a week ago,” she said quickly.

  “How’d she pay?”

  “Cash.”

  “Shit,” he murmured, finally backing away but still stealing all the space and air. “I don’t suppose you still have that cash in a…” He cocked his head toward the receipt can. “Coffee container marked ‘profits.’”

  Actually, it was marked Paris. “You can’t have it,” she blurted out.

  He just stared at her.

  “No,” she insisted, practically stomping one muck boot as fear and frustration and fury rolled around in her. Was she going to be robbed twice in one day? “And I don’t care if you’re the president of the IRS, Mr. Government Guy. You are not getting that money. Not now, with every one of my most profitable roses gone.”

  He backed up another inch. “Look, I’m sorry about the flowers, but—”

  “Not as sorry as I am. I hope whoever stole them eats the darn things. That’ll serve ‘em right.”

  His eyes flashed with sudden interest. “Why?”

  “Because those suckers are so poisonous a half a teaspoon on your breakfast toast’ll kill you dead.”

  “What?”

  Chapter Two

  Ben frowned, not sure he’d heard correctly since Daisy Duke had a fairly thick southern accent and distractingly short overalls, covering a body that didn’t look like any farmer he’d ever seen.

  “They’re poisonous?”

  “Deadly.” She tipped back the bill of a baseball cap, giving him a chance to catch a spark in bright blue eyes and a smear of dirt that didn’t quite cover a peppering of golden freckles. “If you eat ‘em, which I don’t generally recommend to my customers.”

  He forced his attention off the freckles and eyes—and the fine farmer’s body— to absorb the impact of what she was saying. The bouquet of roses left at the rally fence-line after a text telling him a murder weapon would be left behind were deadly?

  “Did you discuss toxicity with her?”

  “You mean did I tell her the flowers were poisonous?” She braced her fists on narrow hips, a position that showcased a sweet little waist and sweat stains on a thin cotton top. Very thin. Very sweet. “Why the heck would I do that?”

  “But you do remember her and could describe her in detail?”

  “Possibly.”

  “What did she drive?”

  “A car.” At his look, she drew back. “I don’t know those kinds of cars. Nice. Like yours.”

  “A car that would have a GPS system.” So why ask for directions?

  “I didn’t look inside it.”

  “But she bought poisonous flowers on her stop for directions.” That made no sense at all. “Did she ask about the flowers right away or did you mention that you grew them?” He glanced around the little wooden shed, which was more of a workroom than a showroom. And conveniently off the beaten path and seriously low tech, which would work for someone determined to cover their tracks.

  His gut burned like this adorable little farm girl had just lit a firecracker in it.

  “Actually, she asked outright if I grew Black Cherries, which I remember thinking was kind of odd.”

  “Not odd if she’d done her homework,” he said, thinking out loud and already putting the puzzle pieces together. “Not odd if she was in the market to get her hands on something lethal and leave no trail.”

  “Holy moly!” All of a sudden, those sky-blue eyes widened and her mouth dropped open to a perfect ‘o’ that revealed the tip of a pink tongue that he guessed hadn’t cursed in… ever.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You are dead right about her.” She pulled off the hat, freeing a cascade of tawny blonde hair that fell over her shoulders as she swiped a sweaty forehead. “And she came out there with me and picked her bouquet!”

  “So?”

  “So she probably came back and stole the whole bed full last night!”

  Why would she do that? Because her first attempt failed and now Ben was off the case?

  “I didn’t talk about them being poisonous, but I did tell her how rare they are. And she knows they can go for a hundred bucks a pop because that’s what I charged her. I even told her how my great-grandmother bred them by crossing them with a wild black cherry plant seed to get the color.”

  “Wild black cherry plants?” He rifled through some cursory knowledge of poisons that every Bullet Catcher had to know. “They release cyanide.”

  “Bingo, big guy.” She gave him a mirthless smile. “Put a wild black cherry in a certain mix of foods and, wham, you are on your way to a better place.”

  Damn it, he knew the roses at the fence-line weren’t meaningless. “What kind of mix?”

  “Well, I’m no chemist, but my Granny Belle knew a lot about this stuff. My guess is something that binds with water and gets all acidy so that it breaks down enzymes.”

  Something like… “Pepper jelly?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she nodded. “That’d do the trick. The pectin would come from the right part of a plant and the capsaicin in the pepper, if it was hot enough, would open the receptors on your taste buds. That’d slam some poison into your blood stream real fast.”

  Everything fit. Someone must have been hand-delivering those flowers and the jelly—a molecular catalyst to turn them into a fast-acting poison. But delivering to whom?

  Someone on the campaign trail, that was for sure. Someone who wasn’t able to get to the fence-line because Ben had
made the call to cancel the rally. Thank God he’d listened to his instinct.

  “Oh!” She punched an angry fist in the air. “I led her by the hand to three thousand dollars’ worth of roses. How could I be so stupid?”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid,” he said. A little country and plenty sexy, but not stupid. “You might have just saved a man’s life.” And Ben’s job.

  “Well, I don’t know why you’re looking for her, buddy, but I’m going to find her. She stole those flowers in the last five or six hours and my bet is that she’s selling my roses on some corner out of the back of her car right now.”

  “I doubt that.” She was probably delivering them to someone in the inner circle, probably at the Tallahassee Rotary Club luncheon where McManus would be speaking in about three hours.

  “I don’t doubt it.” She brushed her hands on her overalls and stepped away. “And when I’m done with her, I’ll have my money.”

  He snagged her arm, pulling her back. “Oh, no you don’t.”

  “Oh, yes I do.” She tried to shake him off, but he held tight to a toned, tense muscle under surprisingly warm and smooth skin.

  “We go together.”

  She raised her eyebrows and then shrugged. “You want to come and look for her; you can follow me, but…” Her voice trailed off as he touched her face, brushing off the dirt. She met his gaze, her eyes darkening with surprise. “What are you doing?”

  “I bet you clean up nicely.” Nicely enough to crash a formal luncheon.

  “Excuse me? This is not about how dirty I—”

  “I meant with the right clothes and makeup…” He eased her back to get a better look, taking a moment to really explore every curve and imagine her in real clothes. And out of them.

  Instantly, she jerked away with a fiery glare. “I don’t need any clothes but the ones I have on and I don’t wear makeup, thank you very much.” She made it to the door and opened it, pointing out. “You can leave now.”

  Not a chance. She knew who’d purchased poison roses and planned to give use them to kill the governor. He needed this little farmer to make a positive ID without the killer knowing.