Protected By The Cowboy (Love In Collin's Ranch 1), page 1
part #1 of Love In Collin's Ranch Series
Copyright 2015 by (Veronica Wilson) - All rights reserved.
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Protected By The Cowboy
By: Veronica Wilson
Introduction
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This book's Riddle:
Q: I am very easy to get into, but it is hard to get out of me.
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Protected By The Cowboy
Western Romance
Prologue
Inez Guzman dreamed of being a nurse since she was a little girl. When she was 5-years-old, a mobile medical clinic came to her neighborhood in Mexico City to vaccinated the children and old people against the flu. She remembered swarms of women in blues scrubs walking from family-to-family down the long line of people waiting for their shot, gathering their names and medical information, asking all of them if they needed to see a doctor for another reason other than receiving their vaccination. Almost all of them did. Inez’ neighborhood was a poor one and most of the children had not seen doctors since they were born, the same could be said of a good number of the adults as well.
When the nurse came to her family, she smiled at Inez with a brilliant perfect smile. Her voice was so cheerful and happy as she asked her about how she was feeling. But then a rough man came and interrupted the nurse, shoving her by the shoulder, telling her to hurry up, that people were waiting. The nurse apologized to the man for the wait and politely asked him to wait his turn and then tried to start talking to Inez again. But the man was very angry and he shoved the nurse again, harder this time causing her to stumble backward.
And then the nurse hit the man.
Inez remembers it so clearly. The man’s large, beefy hand shoving the nurse in the chest and her feet tangling briefly, but then finding solid footing. The nurse’s face was so full of rage, the corners of her mouth turned downward, her jaw set, and then she reared back and seemed to punch the man with her entire body right in the man’s nose. She remembered the sound of her fist against the soft bones of the man’s face, a hard packing sound followed by a spray of blood from his broken nose. The man fell straight back into the dirt, unconscious. The nurse then returned her attention to Inez with the same broad and friendly smile.
She decided to become a nurse on that very day. She had never seen a woman so powerful, so strong. Her father was a gentleman who never laid his hands on his wife or children. But Inez knew many men who did. Men who used their wives as punching bags when they were drunk, or just whenever they became angry. Men like her uncles, her grandfather. But the nurse, Inez knew no man would ever touch her. She was to be treated with respect or you would face her wrath.
So Inez worked hard in school, was always at the top of her class, but her family was poor, and she was sent to work at one of the cell phone factories when she turn thirteen. She hated it, but her family needed her. She saved her money, though. Every extra peso she made, she stashed it away, keeping it buried in a coffee can in the weed backyard of an abandoned house two streets down from her. Every week, the amount grew larger and larger, and she knew that God was looking out over her because no one ever discovered her can. God wanted her to become a nurse as much as she did. He wanted her to go to America, find a better job, and then go to school to become a nurse.
And on her 24th birthday, Inez counted up her money—her pounds of coins and wads of dirty bills—and she had saved up $5000, which was enough to pay the coyotes to take her across the border into the deserts of Arizona. She had to admit that it wasn’t the way she wanted to come to America. But it seemed like America only let the wealthy into their country legally, and not even her $5000 was enough to convince the American government that she would be a productive citizen. So her only way across the border was to give her money to the coyotes and pray to God that when they dropped her off in Arizona, the sun would not be too hot, or her walk to civilization too long.
But the coyotes were not good men. In fact, they were not even coyotes, but killers. Dirty white men who smelled of sweat and cigarettes who did bring her group to America, but they only brought them here to execute them and leave their bodies to rot under the boiling sun.
Inez ran, though. The minute they stopped, she felt that something was wrong, and when the men rolled up the door of the box truck her group was riding in and she saw the semi-automatic rifles over their shoulders, she knew she was about to die, so she ran. She ran out into the hot desert with bullets chasing her, slamming into the dirt around her feet, whizzing through the air over her head. She had never been so scared in her entire life, but she didn’t lie down and cower in the hot dirt, she ran. She ran for hours under the scorching sun, her body dripping with sweat until she found an asphalt road and a sweet retired couple picked her up just as she was about to collapse.
She told them her car had broken down and for some reason they believed her and told her they would take her as far they were headed, to a town called Apache Junction.
Inez felt so lucky. She was safe, she still had a few hundred dollars hidden in her shoe, and she believed she would never see the dirty white men again.
But she was wrong, they were coming for her.
Chapter 1
Most people think that Arizona is nothing but a bunch of gun-crazed hillbillies running around in the desert, and the fact is, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong in that assumption. Arizona has more than its fair share of yahoos and peckerwoods running around shooting their mouths off, carrying around some big guns they don’t need, and driving around in gas-guzzling pickup trucks that they don’t have much use for either, other than proving that they have a lot of money, or at least pretending they do. But for the most part, Arizona has a lot more good, hard-working people than we do crazies, and the only reason you hear about them more is because the whackos have bigger mouths and make for more interesting television footage.
Arizona is in my blood. My family—the Collinses—have lived in the state for a century longer than it's even been a state. My family were a group of madmen who traveled across the country from Pennsylvania and Ohio in covered wagons, fought off bandits and Apaches looking to collect their scalps, and decided for one reason or another that a
nearly uninhabitable stretch of copper-orange desert was a fine and dandy place to set up a homestead and raise a family. And I’m sure if I knew my ancestors from way back when, I would have laughed at them and told them to hustle their asses back home, because half of them were sure to die of heat stroke, and the other half burn up with fever from smallpox. But a couple of them, well, they would make it out of those harsh early times to live and prosper.
The first of our wealth came entirely from gold. Back in the mid-19th century, southern Arizona was absolutely teeming with the stuff. But, the thing was, there weren’t enough people around to pick it up off the ground and turn it into folding money. But the Collinses were here, and we scooped it up by the ton. And when that all disappeared, we became a bit more sensible and went into copper. Needless to say, but precious metals were good to my family… at least until it all ran out. Well, the family at least, with the family claims. Then for some reason or another, my father—the senior Henry to my junior—thought it was a fine idea to go into horse and cattle ranching. Which
would have been incredibly profitable if we didn’t live in a sun-blasted desert.
Now I won’t say that the Collins Ranch of Gold Canyon, AZ went belly-up—it’s alive and well, obviously, because its running takes up the bulk of my time and money—but it’s really just more of an expensive hobby as opposed to an actual business. Don’t get wrong, it brings in an income, and I’m damn proud of the horses (we dropped the cattle back in the mid-80’s due to the overall cost) that come out of here. But the fact is, year after year, more money goes out than comes in, and on certain days it feels like a thousand-pound weight dragging off my shoulders. But on days like today, when the sun comes up and turns the sky into a riot of brilliant oranges and reds, and I’m riding on top of my favorite horse watching it happen, I love it more than life itself. Just like Arizona, ranching is in my blood, and even if it was completely bankrupting me—which it’s not even close to doing—I would still soldier on and work two or three jobs just to keep it afloat.
“Henry!”
But, yeah, there are some days when all I want to do is hide away out in the desert, and when I hear Juan calling for me I know today is going to be one of those. Not that he’s coming up here to tell me anything bad’s happening, but some days, all I want to do is ride and pretend the land around me is the land of my ancestors and that the only people out here are me, myself, and I. But the illusion is completely broken when Juan rides right up on me on one of the ATV’s.
“Boss, it’s time to get the Sanderson geldings loaded up. I know you wanted to be there to make sure it goes smooth,” he says as he spits into the rocks.
Juan has been the ranch foreman going on twenty-five years. The man is as much a father to me as my old man ever was, and I largely blame him for my love of ranch life. I couldn’t love him more even if I
wanted to. I’m still not quite use to him calling me boss, though, even if it’s been ten years since he started.
“Yup, let’s get on down there and get it done while it’s still cool out.”
***
We get the Sanderson geldings—all twenty-four of them—loaded and secured into the trailers in just a little over four hours. Roy Sanderson is one of the ranch’s oldest clients, and back in the day when my father was running the place, Roy was just about the only person keeping the ranch afloat. As much as my old man loved horses and the desert, he wasn’t much of a rancher. In fact, he wasn’t all that much of a businessman at all, even though he came from such a long line of them. The old man craved action, and the thing with ranch life is, there ain’t all that much action to be found in it. Forget about anything you’ve read or seen in the movies and whatnot where you see ranch hands moving around all day, roping stray steers or horses. All that working-from-sun-up-to-sun-down stuff is nothing but pure
nonsense. For the most part, ranching is really more about waiting to work and then waiting for more work to come. More than a few of my boys will get so bored sometimes that they’ll invent chores for themselves to do.
Because of this, and my father’s nervous nature, he had to go outside of the ranch to seek his thrills, and he went into law enforcement. At first, he joined up with the Phoenix Police Department, but after a few years of doing nothing but being parked out on the I-10 pulling over speeders—which, I imagine, was an even bigger torture than ranching—he ended up running for sheriff of Apache Junction. Which, because of his name and the family’s reputation, he won by a landslide.
Apache Junction—or AJ, as it’s affectionately called by the locals—used to be a small retirement village planted against the foothills of the Superstition Mountains. When the old man was sheriff, it was little more than a loose collection of mobile home parks, RV dealerships, and antique stores. It was quiet and peaceful. But then the baby boomers started retiring and they brought in a load of their
crappy, dependent adult children who brought along all of their crappy, dependent adult problems. Mostly drugs, specifically methamphetamines, and lots of it.
The old man basically went from having a sleepy little town of docile, white-haired grandmas and grandpas, where usually the worst thing that happened was that one of them would drop dead in the middle of the night, to having a town where break-ins and drug-related homicides became a daily occurrence. The new job gave the old man the thrills he wanted and then some. So much so that it eventually ended up getting him killed. He walked in on a couple of speed freaks tossing a trailer house, and both of them had shotguns. They let loose on him the second he stuck his head in the door. I was twenty-five when it happened and rounding out my second tour in Iraq. The army let me go a couple of months early to take care of things at home, along with my brothers Samuel and Paul.
I thought when I came back the three of us would re-bond over the old man’s death, and we’d end up running the ranch together side by
side. But no such thing happened; it was nothing but the misty-eyed fantasy of a man who’d been gone from home for too long. Sam had his own thing going on down in Tucson—he was, and still is, a commander with the U.S. Border Patrol—and Paul was bent on revenge. Not so much revenge against the fellas who shot the old man—Dad’s deputies had taken care of that a couple of days after the shooting—but in a general, angry-young-man kind of way. He joined up with the Phoenix PD with his eyes set on becoming part of their drug task force.
For better or worse, the ranch was mine and mine alone. And for a while it was lonely as hell, but over time I grew to love the solitude of it all and realized that I absolutely needed it.
Chapter 2
The retired couple dropped Inez off at a small motel called the Goldmine on the outskirts of the town of Apache Junction. It was a small, dusty looking place that only had two cars in the parking lot. But at that particular moment, it looked like absolute heaven. The front desk was attended by a little old woman who looked like she was even older and more worn than the motel. But she was friendly and didn’t ask Inez for a credit card in order to check in, so she paid in cash for a two-night stay. She was actually quite surprised by the cleanliness of the room. The bed smelled of fresh sheets and the bathroom gleamed shiny and white.
The very first thing she did once the door was locked behind her was strip out of her grimy, sweat-caked clothes, step under the ice-cold spray of the shower, and open her mouth to drink and drink until she felt like she was going to be sick. She had never been so thirsty in her entire life, nor had her skin ever felt so filthy. The dust and dirt that washed off of her left a dark brown ring in the tub. She climbed out of
the tub shivering and exhausted and collapsed on the bed in a heap as her body finally gave out and she tumbled headlong into an eighteen-hour-long sleep.
When she finally woke up, she could barely move a muscle for nearly two hours. Her entire body throbbed with both dehydration and the strain of running for her life across the burning desert for miles and miles. When she was finally able to rise, she once again returned to the shower. But instead of standing under an ice-cold jet, she sat on the floor of the tub and turned the temperature of the water as hot as she could stand it, allowing the steam and heat to loosen her stiff muscles. After her shower she washed her filthy clothes by hand using the free miniature bottle of shampoo and then, wrapped in a thick terry cloth robe, she turned on the television, surfing through the channels until she found a local news program.
She wanted to know if the group of immigrants she'd been traveling with had been discovered or not. She sat watching the news for two
hours and there was nothing reported about it, and for some reason the lack of coverage sent a chill down her spine. It either meant that
the local news media didn’t care about a group of dead Mexicans (that wasn’t just the American television news, either. Thousands of bodies were discovered in her country and never reported. There was just too much murder and death in Mexico, thanks to the narcos) or the bodies had been hidden or destroyed and no one but the coyotes knew that the people she had ridden in the truck with were dead. The coyotes and her.
And this is what scared her the most; she was a witness. She had seen the men’s faces. Each of them would be burned into her memory for all time, and this was dangerous because she could identify the men and turn them in to the police. She prayed that the coyotes had just decided to give up their search for her, but the one thing the life with the cartels had taught her was that criminals never left the witnesses to a murder alive.
***
Inez paid for another two nights, and the little old woman—whose name was Mariel, and who owned the Goldminer—gave her a substantial discount.
