Free Drew (The Cowboys) by Leigh Greenwood Page B

him. You can blame yourselves, too, for thinking he added life to my act.”
    Zeke and Hawk didn’t look happy, but it was clear they were used to doing what Drew wanted. Cole got the feeling just about everybody did what Drew wanted. He shivered violently and realized he was cold. Now that he wasn’t expecting to be gutted any minute, his adrenaline had stopped pumping and his blood had cooled off. He was standing on the back of a train on a cold September night in nothing but his long johns.
    “Let him go back inside,” Drew said, “before he freezes to death and we have to get rid of his body. Besides, he does keep coming up with good ideas. We can keep him around until he runs dry. Then we can pitch him from the train, preferably when we’re crossing a river.”
    The woman was all heart. He decided to get back to his bed before she could change her mind. When the captain had explained his assignment, he hadn’t bothered to mention that Drew came with her own personal bodyguards and support team. Cole hadn’t been prepared for that, but he’d better get prepared. Next time they were going to want blood.
    And Cole was certain that, one way or the other, there would be a next time.
    But as he settled back into his bed and felt his body begin to warm, his feet begin to feel more like they belonged to him instead of being two blocks of ice, his concern shifted back to Drew. He hadn’t known exactly what he was looking for when he went through her trunks. He wasn’t foolish enough to expect to find masks neatly packed away ready for use the next time they were going to commit robbery.
    To his relief, he’d found nothing. The captain hadn’t said they knew she was guilty, just that she seemed the most likely suspect. Cole was to check her out and report back. There wouldn’t be any difficulty when he reported he couldn’t find any evidence to prove she was involved with the robberies. He couldn’t produce any evidence to prove she wasn’t connected with the robberies, but he had a good intuitive grasp of character. Everything he sensed about Drew told him she wasn’t the kind of person to commit robberies.
    But his feelings went further than simply being relieved. He wanted to stop looking now because he was afraid sometime in the future he might come across some evidence he couldn’t ignore. He didn’t want Drew to get off scot-free if she was guilty, but he didn’t want to be the one to find the proof.
    Yet it was even more than that. He didn’t want her to be guilty, or to be caught even if she were. All day, after he’d decided he would go through her luggage, he’d been running scenarios though his mind in which he talked her out of committing any more robberies, into giving back the money she’d taken, into going to one of the western territories, where she’d be effectively out of the reach of the law.
    This wasn’t like him. While serving as a Texas Ranger, he hadn’t been involved in any kind of dishonesty. Doing anything to help Drew escape the consequences of her actions would not only be dishonest, it would be against the oath he’d taken as a federal agent.
    He couldn’t figure out what it was about this woman that worked so powerfully on him. She wasn’t beautiful, though she was pretty enough to satisfy any reasonable man. She certainly hadn’t gone out of her way to make herself agreeable to him. It wasn’t her moral character—he had never known show people to have very high morals. Were Zeke and Hawk really her adopted brothers?
    If not, he didn’t want to think about what kind of intimacy that implied.
    He didn’t know what had gotten into him. Maybe it came from trying to catch a female criminal. He could only assume it went against some part of his training as a Southern gentleman. It was a shame that when he left home he hadn’t left all that brainwashing behind.
    It was foolish to let himself be influenced by the fact that Drew was a woman. He was a strong-minded man. At