Calder Promise (Calder Saga 8)

Wrapped in an emotionless calm, she turned out of his arms and went back inside the store. When she stepped behind the counter, there was a low moan from the woman on the floor. Laura bent down to her.

“Marsha, it’s Laura Calder. Can you hear me?”

“My head,” she mumbled, raising a hand to her temple.

“Just lie still,” Laura ordered. “There’s an ambulance on the way.” The words only reminded her that Logan would have no need for it.

The woman was still too dazed to offer any objection. Still, Laura kept an eye on her as she straightened and picked up the phone again. She automatically started to dial The Homestead, then remembered her mother would be at the ranch office, and punched in the digits to her personal extension.

“Mom, it’s Laura,” she said the minute her mother answered. She thought she sounded calm, but something in her voice must have given her away.

“What’s wrong?” her mother demanded with instant concern.

“It’s Logan. He’s been shot.” Laura heard the quick intake of breath on the other end of the line, and something squeezed her own heart. “He’s dead, Mom.”

There was a moment of shocked silence, followed by a slightly addled burst of questions. “How? Why? Where are you?”

Laura briefly described the events that took place, ending with, “Aunt Cat.” Her voice tightened up. “She’ll have to be told.” And there was Quint, too, so far away.

“I’ll go to her right away. Laura,” she began on a worried and questioning note.

“I’ll be fine, Mom,” she assured her, knowing that at the moment all she felt was numbness.

Chapter Eighteen

It was ten minutes later when Laura heard the first siren, and another twenty minutes before the ambulance arrived. By then Marsha Kelly had fully regained consciousness and told Laura and Sebastian how Mitchell had walked up to the counter with a sixpack of beer and wanted to charge it.

“He claimed he had an account here. I don’t know where he got that idea, because he’s never had one. But he kept insisting that he did. I could tell he’d been drinking,” she recalled. “And he just kept getting angrier. It didn’t do any good to argue with him. Finally I told him if he didn’t leave, I’d call the police. I was reaching for the phone and—I remember seeing him swing the sixpack at me. After that, it’s all blank.”

Nothing was missing from the register’s cash drawer, but the handgun she always kept under the counter was gone. Laura could only surmise that after Mitchell knocked the woman out, he saw Logan, grabbed the gun from behind the counter, and fired in a blind panic.

As soon as the crime scene was secured, the patrol officers turned their attention to Laura and Sebastian. There were questions to be answered and statements given. More than an hour passed before they were free to leave.

News of the shooting had spread quickly, drawing the curious. Laura was conscious of their eyes on her as she slid into the passenger seat of Sebastian’s rental car, but she was beyond caring. A dullness encased her.

As they turned onto the highway, she had a brief view of the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance and the body bag that lay on it.

“My father died when I was small. I always imagined, though, that he would have been like Logan if he had lived.” Her voice thickened. “It’s hard to believe he’s really gone.”

A solitary tear slipped down her cheek. Sebastian saw it; there was only one. Laura Calder wasn’t the kind of woman to wear her emotions. Behind all that chic sophistication, she was essentially a private woman.

Saying nothing, Sebastian reached across the

seat and placed a hand over hers. Laura was surprised by the comfort she drew from such a simple gesture. With a coaxing tug of her hand and a signaling nod, Sebastian invited her to sit next to him. Laura obliged, discovering that she wanted the warmth of human contact. He curved an arm around her shoulders and fitted her against his side.

They rode like that all the way back to the Triple C headquarters, neither speaking; it wasn’t a time for words. The grasslands of the Calder range rolled away from them, and the sun shone brightly in the immense sky. It seemed that nothing had changed, yet for each of them, some things had changed forever.

Journey’s end came when they reached the big white, columned house that stood alone on its island knoll. Three other vehicles were already parked in front of it. And they were only the beginning, Laura knew; there would be many more before the day was over. Some people would come before they went to her aunt’s house at the Circle Six, and others afterward.

When Sebastian parked near the veranda steps and climbed out, Laura was slow to move. By the time she slid across the seat, he had the passenger door open for her. Weighted by some invisible heaviness, she stepped from the car. Sebastian lightly rested his hand on the ridge of her shoulder as they made their way around the car to the front steps. The front door opened, and Boone came out, long strides carrying him quickly across the veranda and down the steps.

Sebastian’s hand fell away from her shoulder as Boone’s arms reached to gather Laura into his embrace. “I’m sorry about your uncle, Laura,” he said, holding her tightly to him. “I wish I had been there.”

“There was nothing you could have done. No one could have. It happened too fast.” It was the same thing Laura had told herself a dozen times since it had happened.

“Just the same, I wish I had been there.” Boone kept her wrapped tightly to his side as he guided her up the steps.

She was halfway to the top before she realized Sebastian wasn’t following them. Halting, she turned and saw him walking back to the car.