McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [151]
A list of debts. A hundred dollars here, a thousand dollars there. And, in each case, the lender was the same. Isaac Templeton.
Lorelei’s throat tightened as her mind slowly cleared. All of it—the house, everything, belonged to Mr. Templeton. Everything but the scrap of land and the small inheritance she’d claimed before she left home.
A sound in the open doorway made her look up, mildly startled.
Mr. Templeton stood on the threshold of her father’s study, smiling ruefully, the way one might smile at an errant child, caught in an act of mischief.
“Lorelei,” he said, shaking his head. “Lorelei.”
Something woke up inside her; she felt a small, alarming leap of understanding. “You. You owned my father.”
Templeton closed the doors carefully behind him. “Yes,” he said, with a quiet, savage sort of indulgence. “If only you’d allowed me to buy that land. So many problems could have been avoided.”
Lorelei’s mouth went dry. “You burned my place,” she murmured. “You—or your men—killed those ranchers, that poor man and his wife, and made sure Gabe Navarro was blamed.”
“Speculation,” Templeton drawled, but he smiled a wicked little smile.
She drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I can understand how you persuaded my father to pass a death sentence on an innocent man. And Creighton is weak—he would have done anything the judge asked. But how did you sway the jury?”
Templeton sighed, pushed his waistcoat back to ease his hands into his trouser pockets. Lorelei saw the gun then, a pearl-handled pistol in a holster at his thick waist, and her heart fluttered. “They all owe me,” he said regretfully. “Sold their souls, willingly enough.” He shook his head again. Sighed. “I rather enjoyed killing that rancher’s wife. The way she struggled. It gave me a feeling I cannot describe. Power, perhaps. I fear I’ve developed a taste for it.”
Lorelei shuddered. “Dear God.”
He let his gaze slide over her, measuring. Anticipating. “Oh, Lorelei, it’s a pity. Now, despondent over your father’s untimely death, and the loss of your ranch, and probably a broken heart into the bargain, if what Mr. Kahill tells me about you and McKettrick is true, you’ll have to shoot yourself.”
“Mr. Kahill,” Lorelei said, rousing from her befuddled state, increment by increment. “He spied for you, then?”
“I have friends everywhere,” Templeton replied, and took a step toward her. “If ‘friends’ is the proper term.”
“Don’t come any closer,” she said. Her hand closed over her father’s pistol. Was it loaded? She didn’t know. Could she kill, if she had to, to stay alive? That, she did know, and the answer was yes. “I don’t want to shoot you, Mr. Templeton, but I will if I have to.”
Templeton smirked. “There are no bullets in that gun, Lorelei,” he said, almost regretfully. “You realize that, don’t you?”
Inwardly, Lorelei flinched. The judge would not have kept a loaded pistol around, even in a locked drawer. For all his shortcomings, he’d been much too sensible to do that.
Outwardly, she was as cool as the creek that flowed by her ranch. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “And maybe you’re wrong. Do you really want to take the chance?”
The rancher rocked back on his heels, pretending to consider the possibility of his own demise, but his eyes were laughing at her. Deep down, he probably believed he was invulnerable. “Risk. It’s a part of life, isn’t it? The bullets are in that little leather box, you know, probably four inches from your fingers.”
Lorelei felt a chill. Her father’s pistol was a cold weight in her hand.
In that moment, she made a mistake. She looked down to grope for the box, and the bullets inside, and Templeton was on her that quickly. Despite his size, he moved with deadly grace, hooking an arm around her neck and cutting off her wind.
My baby, she thought. Holt’s baby.
A noisy clattering sounded from the street, beyond the bay windows of the study, but she couldn’t make sense of it.
With his free hand, Templeton pulled the pistol from her grasp, fumbled for the bullets, shoved two of them into the cylinder of the gun.
“I’ll say I