When Hattie noticed they weren’t behind her, she stopped and looked back. “Aren’t you coming, Duke?”
“We’ll be right there.” He waved her on and started forward himself.
“Did she call you Duke?” Jessy eyed him curiously.
“They had to call me something when I couldn’t supply them with my own name. Hattie came up with Duke.” He didn’t add that he was more comfortable with that name than he was with Chase Calder. Chase Calder was still a person he didn’t know.
After an initial inspection of the old line cabin, Laredo concluded, “The damage looks worse than it is. Other than some rotten wood in the roof, the rest of the structure looks sound. Somebody built this to last.”
“That’s the only way Calders build things,” Jessy said, echoing a statement her father had once made.
Hattie poked her head inside the door. “There’s enough dirt in here to plant a garden. It will take a week to get it clean enough to live in—and evict all the creepy-crawly things.” She turned away from the door with an expressive little shudder.
“Something tells me if anybody can turn a boar’s nest into a home, it’s you, Hattie,” Chase declared in a voice dry with amusement.
Jessy swung toward him in surprise. “You remembered what we used to call this place.”
“Did I?” Chase was skeptical. “It’s possible, but in cowboy lingo, line cabins were often referred to as boar’s nests.”
“Maybe they were,” Jessy conceded. “But we have two other old line shacks still standing, and this is the only one that went by the name Boar’s Nest.”
“You can do what you please, Duke,” Hattie declared. “But I choose to believe you just recovered your first scrap of memory, even if it is an insignificant piece.”
“While you two argue over who’s right,” Laredo inserted, “Jessy and I are going to unload the trucks so she can get back to the ranch. You might want to give some thought to where you want the tent pitched. Before I tackle fixing the cabin, I plan on clearing away that deadfall so we can drive all the way up here.”
Jessy was impressed by his eminently practical decision. But she didn’t say anything until they were on their way down the hill. “That’s sensible to clear away the deadfall first.”
“I’m glad you approve.” Amusement gleamed in his blue eyes, faintly mocking her. Which annoyed her ever so slightly. “You understand, it’s not that I object to the long walk, but I sure don’t fancy dragging up all the plywood and lumber I’ll need to fix the hole in the roof.”
“That wasn’t approval you heard,” Jessy told him, a coolness in her voice. “It was relief that you seem to have some common sense. You have to remember you are a total stranger as far as I’m concerned.”
“It bothers you that Hattie and I are looking after Chase, doesn’t it,” Laredo guessed.
“I know Chase trusts you,” she replied, deliberately hedging.
“But you don’t.”
She reverted to her usual candor. “Not entirely.”
“I imagine you are wondering if I’m in this for the money, that I might be hoping Chase will make a sizable contribution to my bank account when this is over.” The mockery was there again in his lazy smile.
“It crossed my mind,” she admitted and waited for Laredo to deny it was his motive.
“In the first place, I don’t have a bank account, so any contribution he might offer would have to be in cash,” he replied with a perfectly straight face.
Jessy halted in stunned surpri
se. “You are actually admitting that you are only here for money?”
“What’s wrong with that?” he countered nonchalantly and kept walking. “The Old West is littered with stories of hired guns working for big outfits. In today’s West, they still do, but they give them politically correct names like bodyguard and investigators.” Laredo glanced back at her and grinned. “I disappointed you, didn’t I? You wanted me to say something noble like, I’m here because Chase is a good man.”
“I don’t know what I expected.” But it hadn’t been what she’d heard. She resumed her descent of the hill. “I assume Chase knows this.”
“The man has lost his memory, not his mind,” he chided, and Jessy was irritated with herself for even asking the question. “The idea of me getting paid to look after Chase really bothers you, doesn’t it? Maybe I need to put it in cowboy talk. When I take a rancher’s money, I ride for the brand, and in my job, it usually means come hell or high water. This time it’s more likely to be hell than high water.”
He spoke in a jesting tone, but the hard steel of his eyes was all business. It was a quality Jessy had observed in Logan on rare occasions. But the similarities seemed to stop there.
“So you work as bodyguard for a living.” She struggled to wrap her mind around this thought.