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Dr. Colton's High-Stakes Fiancée
Cindy Dees








Dr Colton’s

High-Stakes

Fiancée


Cindy Dees














www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




Table of Contents


Cover (#u59000b44-83ca-5e03-8985-b4ea0bbf0bd1)

Title Page (#u1700c50f-df77-579d-95c1-cefe18239ebe)

Dear Reader (#u401324e6-5d8e-5047-8477-fd51b9cdf4cf)

Dedication (#ua25104b8-1cdb-56a1-9e12-d9caa86c4356)

Chapter One (#u53eefd2b-9551-577e-81bb-ba925c969352)

Chapter Two (#u29286735-72c7-5a4a-96b1-f9d50344fed9)

Chapter Three (#u61cc46ec-4f7f-5b54-ae40-e256703c6d34)

Chapter Four (#u0108a49a-92a7-5760-bed7-ff135a041d10)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


Dear Reader,

Welcome to the next installment in the ongoing adventures of the Colton clan! It has been a delight to write about this feisty and fun bunch. I couldn’t possibly write this letter to you without mentioning the real brown dog that is the inspiration for the canine hero in this story. Some years ago, a stray dog wandered up to our door, starved, injured and so frightened of humans he could hardly bring himself to ask for help. But ask he did. It took us months to touch him and two years to coax him into our house. With plenty of patience and love, he gradually regained his faith in humans.

I’m pleased to report that the real Brownie now lives a life of pampered ease as a member of my family and is known around here as the “love sponge.” He is the most loyal, gentle and grateful dog I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. He had a rough start in life, but with courage and persistence he got his happy ending … just like Finn and Rachel.

May you and those you love be every bit as lucky in your lives.

Warmly,

Cindy Dees


This book is for all the generous and compassionate people who volunteer in animal shelters, rescue programs and animal protection programs everywhere. I am brought to tears often by your kindness and caring. All of our lives—both human and non-human—are made better by your loving work.




Chapter 1


Rachel Grant sighed down at her chipped and dirt-encrusted fingernails. What she wouldn’t give to be at Eve Kelly’s Salon Alegra right now, getting a manicure and not staring at a shelf of toilet parts in a hardware store. But such were the joys of home ownership on a shoestring budget.

Whoever said that men didn’t gossip as much as women was dead wrong. But they would be right about one thing: Man-gossip left a lot to be desired in comparison to girl-gossip. Floyd Mason, owner of the hardware store, was gossiping with someone whose voice she didn’t recognize the next row over in Paint, and, of course, she was shamelessly eavesdropping. Floyd drawled, “Seems like there’s Colton boys all over town all of a sudden.”

The customer replied, “I hear Damien Colton’s back. The missus sent me over here to get a dead bolt for the back door because of ‘im.”

Bless Floyd, for he replied, “Why’s that? Damien didn’t murder Mark Walsh the first time around or else the bastard wouldn’t have turned up dead for real a few months ago.”

“Yeah, but fifteen years in a penitentiary … that’s gotta change a man. Make him hard. Mean. Maybe even dangerous.”

She might have her own bone to pick with the Colton family, but she bristled at the suggestion that Damien had become a criminal. She’d never for a minute thought he was capable of murder, not fifteen years ago, and not now. She had half a mind to march around the corner and tell the guy so.

Thankfully, Floyd drawled, “Ahh, I dunno ‘bout Damien bein’ dangerous. Those Colton kids might’a been wild, but they was never bad. At least not that kind of bad.”

“I hope you’re right,” the customer drawled. “Ever since Damien got outta jail, it’s been like old-home week over at the Colton place. Wouldn’t be surprised if they’s all back in town by now to welcome home the prodigal son.”

Rachel’s heart skipped a beat in anticipation and then just as quickly thudded in dismay. Please God, let it not be all of the Coltons back home. She really, truly, never needed to see Finn Colton again as long as she lived. He’d been the best-looking boy in the high school. Maybe the entire town. Smartest, too. Was so effortlessly perfect that she’d fallen in love with him before she’d barely known what had happened to her. Oh, and then he’d broken her heart for fun.

The bell over the hardware store’s front door dinged, jolting her from a raft of old memories. Very old. Ancient history. Water way under the bridge—

“Speak of the devil!” Floyd exclaimed. “Long time, no see, boy! You’re looking great. All growed up … got the look of your daddy about you.”

Rachel glanced toward the front of the store. It took no more than a millisecond for certain knowledge to hit her that a Colton had just walked through that door. The brothers were all tall, broad-shouldered, hard men who dominated any room they entered. And one of them was here now. A wave of loss slammed into her. Its backwash was tempered by bits of humiliation, fear, and a few specks of nascent anger swirling around like flotsam. But mostly, it just hurt.

Rachel ducked, wishing fervently that the shelves were at least two feet taller than their five-foot-tall stacks. Which Colton was it? Several of them had left town after high school and gone on to bigger and better things than Honey Creek had to offer.

It didn’t matter which Colton it was. She didn’t want to see any of them. And she especially didn’t want to see Finn. Her knees were actually shaking at the prospect. Lordy, she had to get out of here now. Preferably unseen. She randomly grabbed the nearest rubber toilet gasket and took off crawling on her hands and knees for the front of the store and the cash register. Pleeease let me make it out of here. Let me be invisible. Let me make it to the front door—

“Ouch!” She bumped into something hard, nose-first, and pulled up short. That was a knee. Male, covered in denim. And it smarted. She grabbed the bridge of her nose, which was stinging bad enough to make her eyes water.

“Lose something?” a smooth voice asked from overhead.

Oh. My. God. She knew that voice. Oh, how she ever knew that voice. It was dark and smooth and deep and she hadn’t heard it in fifteen years. It had gained a more mature resonance, but beyond that, the voice hadn’t changed one iota.

“I asked you a question, miss. Did you lose something?” the voice repeated impatiently.

Her mind? Her dignity? Definitely her pride.

She forced her gaze up along the muscular thighs, past the bulge that was going to make her blush fiercely if she dwelled on it, past the lean, hard waist beneath a black T-shirt, up a chest broad enough to give a girl heart palpitations, and on to a square, strong jaw sporting a sexy hint of stubble. But there was no way her gaze was going one millimeter higher than that. She was not looking Finn Colton in the eye. Not after he’d caught her fleeing the hardware store on her hands and knees.

“Uh, found it,” she mumbled, brandishing the hapless gasket lamely.

“Rachel?” the voice asked in surprise.

Her gaze snapped up to his in reflex, damn it. She started to look away but was captured by the expression in his green-on-brown gaze. What was he so surprised at? That she was crawling around on the floor of the hardware store? Or maybe that she still lived in this two-bit town? Or that she looked like hell in ratty jeans and a worse T-shirt and had on no makeup and her hair half coming out of a sloppy ponytail? Or maybe he was just stunned that she’d dared to breathe the same air as he, even after all these years. She hadn’t been good enough for him then; she surely wasn’t good enough for him now.

Her gaze narrowed. She had to admit Finn looked good. More than good. Great. Successful. Self-assured. The boy had become a man.

For just one heartbeat, they looked at each other. Really looked at each other. She thought she spotted something in his gaze. Longing, maybe. Or perhaps regret. But as quickly as it flashed into his eyes that unnamable expression blinked out, replaced by hard disdain.

Ahh. That was more like it. The Finn Colton she knew and loathed. “Finn,” she said coldly. “You’re standing in my way. I was just leaving.”

With a sardonic flourish of his hand, he stepped aside and waved her past. Jerk. Watching him warily out of the corner of her eye, she took a step. She noted that his jaw muscles were rippling and abruptly recalled it as a signal that he was angry about something. All the Coltons had tempers. They just hung on to them with varying degrees of success. Finn was one of the calmer ones. Usually. He looked about ready to blow right now, though.

Hugging the opposite side of the aisle, she gave him as wide a berth as possible as she eased past. She made it to the cash register and looked up only to realize that just about everyone in the store was staring at her and Finn. Yup, men were as bad as women when it came to gossip.

She had to get out of there. Give them as little fodder for the rumor mill as possible. She was finally starting to get her life together, she had a new job, and she didn’t need some new scandal to blow everything out of the water when she was just getting back on her feet. She fumbled in her purse for her wallet and frantically dug out a ten-dollar bill. The clerk took about a week and a half to ring up her purchase and commence looking for a small plastic bag to put her pitiful gasket in.

She snatched it up off the counter, mumbling, “I don’t need a bag,” and rushed toward the exit. But, of course, she couldn’t get out of there without one last bit of humiliation.

“Miss! Miss! You forgot your change!”

Her face had to be actually on fire by now. She was positive she felt flames rising off her cheeks. She turned around in chagrin and took the change the kid held out to her.

“Don’t you want your receipt? You’ll need it if you have to return that—”

She couldn’t take any more. She fled.

She didn’t stop until she was safely locked inside her car, where she could have a nervous breakdown in peace. She rested her forehead against the top of the steering wheel and let the humiliation wash over her. Of all the ways to meet Finn Colton again. She’d pictured it a thousand times in her head, and not once had it ever included being caught crawling out of the hardware store in a failed effort to dodge him.

Knuckles rapped on her window and she jumped violently. She looked up and, of course, it was him. Reluctantly, she cracked the window open an inch.

“If you’re going to faint, you should lie down. Elevate your feet. But don’t operate a motor vehicle until any light-headedness has passed.”

He might be a doctor, but that didn’t mean he needed to lecture her on driving safety. Sheesh. He didn’t even bother to ask if she was feeling all right! She snapped, “Why, I’m feeling fine, thank you. It was so kind of you to ask. I think I’ll be going now. And a lovely day to you, too.”

She rolled up her window and turned her keys in the ignition. Thankfully, her car didn’t choose this moment to act up and coughed to life. She stomped on the gas pedal and her car leaped backward. Finn was forced to jump back, too, or else risk getting his toes run over. It might have been petty, but satisfaction coursed through her.

She pulled out of the parking lot with a squeal of tires that had heads turning up and down Main Street. How she got home, she had no real recollection. But a few minutes later, she became aware that she was sitting in her driveway with her head resting on the steering wheel again.

Finn Colton. Why, oh why, did he have to come back to Honey Creek after all these years? Why couldn’t he just stay in Bozeman with his perfect job and a perfect wife, two point two perfect kids, and a perfect life? Heck, knowing him, he had a perfect dog and drove a perfect car, too.

All the joy had been sucked right out of this day. And she’d been so excited to cash her first paycheck and have a few dollars in her pocket to start doing some desperately needed repairs around the house. Cursing Colton men under her breath, she dragged herself into the house and got to work fixing the toilet.

The gossip network took under thirty minutes to do its work. She’d just determined that, although she’d miraculously managed to get the right-size gasket, her toilet was officially dead. She was going to have to replace all the tubes and chains and floaty things that made up its innards.

Her phone rang and she grabbed the handset irritably. “Hello.”

“Hi, Raych. It’s me.”

Carly Grant, her sometimes best friend, sometimes pain in the ass, second cousin. They’d been born exactly one week apart, and they’d had each other’s backs for their entire lives. Carly had stuck by her when no one else had after Finn dumped her, and for that, Rachel would put up with a lot of grief from her scatterbrained cousin. Rachel’s irritation evaporated. “Hey. What are you doing?”

“I’m wondering why my home girl didn’t call me to tell me she ran into the love of her life down at the hardware store. Why did I have to hear it from Debbie Russo?”

“How in the heck did she hear about it?” Rachel demanded.

“Floyd Mason told his wife, and she had a hair appointment at Eve’s salon at the same time Debbie was having a mani-pedi.”

Rachel sighed. Telephone, telegraph, tell a woman. Sometimes she purely hated living in a small town. Actually, most of the time. Ever since she’d been a kid she’d dreamed of moving to a big city. Away from nosy neighbors and wide open spaces … and cows. Far, far away from cows.

She’d have left years ago if it wasn’t for her folks. Well, her mom, now that her dad had passed away. A sharp stab of loss went through her. It had been less than a year since Dad’s last, and fatal, heart attack. Sometimes his death seemed as if it had happened a lifetime ago, muted and distant. And sometimes it seemed like only a few days ago complete with piercing grief that stole her breath away. Today was one of the just-like-yesterday days, apparently.

“So. Spill!” Carly urged.

“Finn Colton is not the love of my life!”

“Ha. So you admit that you did see him!”

“Fine. Yes. I saw him. I was crawling on my hands and knees, my rear end sticking up in the air, trying to make a break for it, and he walked right up to me.”

Carly started to laugh. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish I were,” Rachel retorted wryly. “I can report with absolute certainty that his cowboy boots are genuine rattlesnake skin and not fake.”

“Oh, my God, that’s hilarious.”

Rachel scowled. She was so demoting Carly from BFF status. “I’m glad I amuse you.”

“What did he say?” Carly asked avidly.

“Not much. He said my name, and I said his. Then I got the heck out of Dodge as fast as I could.” She added as a sop to Carly’s love of good gossip, “He did knock on the window of my car to tell me that I looked like crap—and that if I was going to faint, I shouldn’t drive.”

“What a jerk!” Carly exclaimed loyally.

Okay, she’d just regained her status as best friend forever.

“You’ll have to fill me in on the details while we drive up to Bozeman.”

Rachel groaned. She’d forgotten her promise to go with Carly to shop for a dress for the big celebration of the high school’s hundredth anniversary, which was scheduled for next weekend in conjunction with the school’s homecoming celebration.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Carly accused.

“No, no, I’ll see you at three. But right now I have to go back to the hardware store and get more parts for my toilet.”

“Hoping to see your favorite Colton brother again?”

“When they’re having snowball fights in hell,” she retorted. She slammed the phone down on Carly’s laughter and snatched up her car keys in high irritation.



Finn threw his car keys down in high irritation. He remembered now why he hated Honey Creek so damned much.

His older brother, Damien, finished off his sandwich and commented, “Funny how you can want worse than anything in the world to get back home. And then you get here, and in under a week, you’d do anything to get away.”

Finn rolled his eyes. Nothing like being compared to a recent ex-con and the analogy working. Especially since he’d been working like crazy for the last fifteen years to recover the family reputation from Damien’s murder conviction. He dropped a brown paper bag from the hardware store onto the kitchen table. “Here are your fence fasteners. Need some help installing ‘em?”

Damien shrugged. “Sure. If you don’t mind getting those lily-white doctor hands dirty.”

Finn scowled. “I grew up working a ranch. I didn’t go completely soft in medical school.”

“We’ll see.”

An hour later, Finn was forced to admit that compared to his massively muscled brother, he qualified as a bonified sissy. But the sweat felt good. They were restringing the barbed wire along the south pasture fence. His hands were probably going to be blistered and torn tonight, but he wasn’t about to complain after the lily-white doctor-hand crack.

Seeing Rachel Grant again had rattled him bad. He needed to get out and do something physical. Something strenuous that would distract him from memories of her. He’d loved her once upon a time. Been dead sure she was the one for him. And then she’d up and—

“Hey! Watch it!” Damien exclaimed.

Finn pulled up short, swearing. He’d almost whacked off his brother’s hand with the sledgehammer.

“How ‘bout I take that?” Damien suggested warily. “In fact, why don’t we take a break and go get a bite to eat? Maisie made chili this morning.”

As a bribe, it was good one. His oldest sibling might be nosy and overbearing, but the woman made a pot of chili that could put hair on a guy’s chest. He stomped into the mud room of the main house a few minutes later. The warmth inside felt good after the hint of winter in the air outside.

“Hey, boys,” Maisie called. “Pull up a chair.”

Damien led the way into the enormous gourmet kitchen. “Watch out for him—” he hooked a thumb in Finn’s direction “—Honey Creek’s already getting on his nerves.”

Maisie commented slyly, “The way I hear it, it’s someone in Honey Creek who’s getting on his nerves.”

Finn’s head jerked up. How did she do that? That woman knew more gossip faster than anyone he’d ever met. And she wasn’t afraid to use it to get exactly what she wanted. Or to manipulate and hurt the people around her. She saw herself as the real matriarch of the clan in lieu of their reclusive and withdrawn mother and, as such, responsible for shaping and controlling the lives of everyone named Colton in Honey Creek. Maisie had been one of the reasons he’d bailed out of town as soon as he could after high school.

He moved over to the stove and served up two bowls of steaming chili. He plunked one down on the table in front of Damien and sat down beside his brother to dig into the other bowl.

He heard arguing somewhere nearby and looked up. Damien’s twin brother, Duke, and their father, Darius, were going at it about something to do with the sale of this year’s beef steers. Those two seemed to be arguing a lot since he’d gotten back two days before. Not that he had any intention of getting involved, but Duke seemed to have the right of it most of the time. But then, Darius always had been a dyed-in-the-wool bastard. A hard man taming a hard land.

Maisie sat down across from him. “So tell me. How’d your meeting with that Jezebel go?”

No need to ask who she was talking about. Maisie always had called Rachel “that Jezebel.” He also knew Maisie would badger him until he told her exactly what she wanted to know.

He answered irritably, “We didn’t have a meeting. I bumped into her in the hardware store.” Amusement flashed through his gut at the recollection of her crawling for the door as fast as she could go. Her pert little derriere had been wiggling tantalizingly, and her wheat-blond hair had been falling down all around her face. Which was maybe just as well; it had partially hidden the sexy blush staining her cheeks.

“Come on. You know I’ll find out everything anyway,” Maisie said.

He sighed. Like it or not, she was right. “That’s all there was to it. I saw Rachel, she saw me, she walked out. I bought Damien’s fasteners and came home.”

“You men. No sense of a good story. I swear, we’ll never get on The Dr. Sophie Show unless I do all the work.” She scowled and pressed, “What was she wearing? How did she look at you? Did she throw herself at you? Did she look like she’s still scheming to land herself a Colton?”

Actually, Rachel had looked pissed. Although he didn’t see why she had any right to be angry. She was the one who’d betrayed him and wrecked what they had between them. He supposed he did have Maisie to thank for finding out the truth about her before he’d gone and done anything dumb like propose to Rachel. How could she have—

He broke off the bitter train of thought. Her betrayal had happened a lifetime ago, when they were both kids. It was time to let it go. Beyond time. He was so over her. And as long as he was home in Honey Creek, he damned well planned to stay over her.




Chapter 2


Rachel’s heart wasn’t in shopping today. Not only was she still badly shaken after having seen Finn, but watching Carly spend money when she didn’t have a dime to spare kind of sucked. Edna down at the Goodwill store had spotted a perfect dress for her a few weeks back and had offered to alter it to fit her slender frame, and for that Rachel was grateful. But she didn’t dare dream of a day when she could waltz into a fancy department store like her cousin and buy a nice dress for a party. Not until her mother passed away and the nursing home bills quit coming. And as hard as it was to cover those bills, she dreaded them stopping even worse. Her mother was all she had left.

She felt guilty for secretly counting the days until her mother finally slipped away. But her mom was the only thing holding her in Honey Creek. Ever since they’d found out the summer after Rachel’s sophomore year in high school that her mom had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, she’d been trapped here. Her dad had already had his first heart attack by then, and there was no question of Rachel going away to college. He needed her to stay home to help out with her mom.

Not that she was complaining. Well, not too much, at any rate. She loved her folks. They’d been a close-knit trio, and she’d been willing to set aside her big dreams of seeing the world for her parents. And after Finn had left, taking their dreams of escaping Honey Creek together with him, it had been easier to reconcile herself to sticking around.

But sometimes she imagined what it would have been like to travel. To see Paris and Rome and the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Heck, at this point, she’d be thrilled to see Denver or Las Vegas.

If only she knew why he’d dumped her like he had, so publicly and cruelly. The worst of it was that everyone else in town followed his lead and blamed her for whatever had broken them up. Nobody seemed to know exactly why Finn did such an abrupt one-eighty about her, but she was a girl from the poor side of town, and he was Honey Creek royalty. Clearly the whole thing must have somehow been her fault.

It was no consolation knowing that it wouldn’t be much longer before she was free to leave. Her mother’s health was fragile, and truth be told, her mother was so far gone into Alzheimer’s she usually had no idea who Rachel was. She could probably leave town and go start a new life somewhere else and her mother wouldn’t know the difference. But she’d know. And unlike Finn Colton, she wasn’t the kind of person who turned her back on the people she loved.

“Oh!” Carly exclaimed. “There it is!”

Rachel looked up, startled. Her cousin was making a beeline for the far display case. Must’ve spotted the perfect dress. Carly might be a ditz, but the girl had impeccable taste in clothes. Rachel tagged along behind, wondering if it were the little black number or the dramatic red dress that had caught Carly’s eye.

Another woman was closing in from their right, and Rachel watched in amusement as both Carly and the other woman reached for the black dress at the same time.

“You take it.”

“No, you take it.”

Rachel finally caught up and suggested diplomatically, “Why don’t you both try it on, and whoever it looks best on can have it?”

Laughing, the other two women dragged her into the dressing room to act as judge. Like she’d know fashion if it reached out and bit her. Her whole adult life had been a financial scramble, first to work herself through college online and have enough left over to give her folks a little money, then to help her folks fix up the house and now to pay for her mom’s medical bills. What clothes she didn’t make for herself she picked up at the Goodwill store, mostly. Of course, because she was a volunteer, she got dibs on the best stuff before it went out on the sales floor. Still. Just call her Secondhand Rose.

Carly disappeared into the dressing room first. The other woman turned out to be the chatty type and struck up a conversation. “Do you live here in Bozeman?”

“No. We live in Honey Creek. It’s about twenty miles south of here as the crow flies.”

“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “I’ve heard of it! One of the doctors at the hospital is from there. I’m a nurse down at Bozemen Regional.”

Rachel’s stomach dropped to her feet. She had an idea she knew exactly which doctor her impromptu companion was talking about. Desperate to distract her, Rachel asked, “So, what’s the special occasion you’re shopping for?”

“A first date. With this cute radiologist. He just divorced his wife and is very lonely, if you catch my drift.”

Rachel smiled. “Sounds like fun.”

“So. Do you know Dr. Colton? I mean, to hear him talk about it, Honey Creek’s about the size of a postage stamp. He says everyone knows everyone else.”

Rachel nodded ruefully. “He’s right. And yes, I went to school with Finn.”

“Oh, do tell! He’s so private. None of the nurses know much about him. Gimme the dirt.”

Rachel winced. Nothing like being the dirt in someone’s past. “There’s not much to tell.” She paused, and then she couldn’t resist adding, “So, what’s he up to these days? Is he married? Kids?”

“Lord, no. If he wasn’t so … well, manly … we’d all think he was gay. He never dates. Says he has no time for it. But we nurses think someone broke his heart.”

Great. She was dirt and a heartbreaker. But something fluttered deep inside her. He’d never gotten seriously involved with anyone else? Funny, that. She commented lightly, “Huh. I’d have thought the girls would’ve been hanging all over him. He was considered to be a good catch in Honey Creek.”

The nurse laughed gaily. “Oh, he’s got women hanging all over him, and he’s a good catch in Bozeman, too. Thing is, he just doesn’t seem interested. That is, assuming he doesn’t have some secret relationship that none of us know about. But, it’s pretty hard to hide your personal life in a hospital. We spend so much time working together, especially down in the E.R., you pretty much know everything about everybody.”

So. No perfect wife and no two point two perfect kids yet, eh? What was the guy waiting for? He’d talked about wanting a family of his own when they’d been dating. Of course, in his defense, she’d heard that medical school was grueling. Maybe he just hadn’t had time yet to get on with starting a family. Well, she wished him luck. With someone emphatically not her. She’d had enough of Colton-style rejection.

“What do you think?” Carly asked. She came out of the changing room and twirled in the clingy black dress.

The nurse laughed. “It’s not even a contest. That dress was made for you. I’m not even trying it on. I’ll go find another one.”

Carly hugged the woman. “C’mon. I’ll help you. I have a great eye for fashion. I saw a red satin number that would be a knockout with your hair color …”

Rachel sat in the deserted dressing room. A few plastic hangers and straight pins littered the corners. Why was she so depressed to hear about Finn’s single state? Maybe because it highlighted her own lack of a love life. At least he was still a good catch. Truth be told, she’d never been a good catch, and everyone had thought their dating in high school was an anomaly to begin with.

His older sister, Maisie, had called her a phase. Said that Rachel was Finn’s rebellion against what all his family and friends knew to be the right kind of girl for him. Yup—dirt, a heartbreaker and the anti-girlfriend. That was her.

“Raych? You gonna sit there all day?”

She looked up, startled. “Oh. Uhh, no. I’m coming.”

“So when do I get to see this secret dress you’ve found for the homecoming dance?” Carly asked as they walked out of the mall.

Rachel rolled her eyes. “We’re not in high school anymore, you know.”

“Aww, come on. Don’t be a spoilsport. With the hundredth anniversary of the school and all, everyone’s coming back for homecoming.”

Rachel grimaced. At the moment, a party sounded about as much fun as a root canal. She replied reluctantly, “My dress is a surprise.”

“Fine. Have it your way. Maybe if you’re lucky, Finn will stick around long enough to go to the dance.”

“Oh, Lord. Can I just slit my wrists now?”

Carly laughed. “You’ve got it all wrong. This dance is your chance to show the jerk what he’s missing. It’s all about revenge, girlfriend.”

She sighed. “If only I had your killer instinct.”

“Stick with me, kid. We’ll have you kicking men in the teeth in no time.”

There was only one man she wanted to kick in the teeth. And now that Carly mentioned it, the thought of sashaying into that dance and telling him to go to hell made her feel distinctly better.



But by Monday morning, Rachel’s bravado had mostly faded. Another set of bills had come in from the nursing home and she’d had to empty her bank account to cover them. Thank God she’d landed this job at Walsh Enterprises. Craig Warner, the chief financial officer, had actually been more interested in her accounting degree than her tarnished reputation and past association with the Coltons. Her next paycheck would arrive this Friday, and then, good Lord willing, she’d be able to start digging out of the mountain of medical bills.

“Good morning, Miss Grant.”

She looked up as Craig Warner himself walked through the cubicle farm that housed Walsh Enterprises’ accountants and bookkeepers. He paused beside hers. “Good morning, sir.”

“How’s the new job coming?”

“Just fine. I’m so grateful to be here.”

The older man smiled warmly. “We’re glad, too, Miss Grant. Let me know if you have any questions. My door’s always open.”

Enthusiastically, she dived into the financial records of Walsh’s oil-drilling venture. Craig had asked her to audit the account with the expectation that she would take over responsibility for it afterward.

She’d been working for an hour or so when she ran into the first snag. Several of the reported numbers didn’t add up to the receipts and original billing documents. Who’d been responsible for maintaining this account? She flipped to the back of the file and frowned. Whoever had signed these papers had done so in a completely illegible scrawl. No telling who’d managed the account. She flipped farther back into the earlier records. Still that indecipherable scribble. Until fifteen years ago. Then a signature jumped off the page at her as clear as a bell. Mark Walsh.

Walsh, as in the founder of Walsh Enterprises. The same Mark Walsh who’d been found murdered only weeks ago. A chill shivered down her spine. How creepy was that, looking at the signature of a dead man? His hand had formed those letters on this very paper.

She went back to the more recent documents and corrected the error. Good thing she’d spotted it before the IRS had. It was the sort of mistake in reporting profits that could’ve triggered a company wide tax audit. Relieved, she moved on with the review.

By the time she found the third major discrepancy, she was certain she wasn’t looking at simple math errors. Something was wrong with this account. She double-and triple-checked her numbers against the original documents. There was no doubt about it. Somebody had lied like a big dog about how much money this oil-drilling company had made. Over the years, millions of dollars appeared to have been skimmed off the actual income.

What to do? Now that he was tragically dead, was Mark Walsh a sacred cow? Would she be fired if she uncovered evidence that maybe he’d been involved in embezzlement? Who had continued the skimming of monies after he’d supposedly died the first time? Had someone within Walsh Enterprises been in league with Mark Walsh to steal money for him? Had this been where Walsh had gotten funds to continue his secret existence elsewhere for the past fifteen years?

His family had already been through so much. And now to heap criminal accusations on top of his murder? Oh, Lord, she needed this job so bad. The last thing she wanted to do was rock the boat. And it couldn’t possibly help that for most of her life her name had been closely associated with the Coltons. There hadn’t been any love lost between the Walshes and Coltons since even before Mark Walsh’s first murder, the one supposedly at the hands of Damien Colton.

But what choice did she have? She would lose her CPA license if she got caught not reporting her findings. She scooped up all the documents and the printouts of her calculations and put them in her briefcase. Her knees were shaking so bad she could hardly stand. But stand she did. Terrified, she walked to the elevator and rode upstairs to the executive floor. Craig Warner’s secretary looked surprised to see her, almost as surprised as Rachel was for being here. The woman passed Rachel into the next office, occupied by Lester Atkins, Mr. Warner’s personal assistant. Rachel wasn’t exactly sure what a personal assistant did, but the guy looked both busy and annoyed at her interruption.

“Hi, Mr. Atkins. I need to speak with Mr. Warner if he has a minute.”

“He has an appointment in about five minutes. You’ll have to schedule something for later.”

Disappointed, she turned to leave, but she was intercepted by Mr. Warner’s secretary standing in the doorway. “If you keep it quick, I’m sure Mr. Warner won’t mind if you slip in.”

Rachel felt like ducking as the secretary and Lester traded venomous looks. She muttered, “I’ll make it fast.”

Actually, she loved the idea of not getting into a long, drawn-out discussion with Mr. Warner. She’d just float a teeny trial balloon to see where the winds blew around here and then she’d bail out and decide what her next move should be. In her haste to escape Lester’s office, she ended up barging rather unceremoniously into Mr. Warner’s.

He looked up, startled. “Rachel. I didn’t expect to see you this soon.”

She smiled weakly. “Well, I’ve hit a little snag and I wanted to run it by you.”

Craig leaned back in his chair, mopping his brow with a handkerchief before stuffing it in his desk drawer. “What’s the snag?”

“I was comparing the original receipts against the financial statements of the oil-drilling company like you asked me to, and I found a few discrepancies. I’m afraid I don’t know much about Walsh Enterprises’ procedure for handling stuff like this. Do we just want to close the books on it and move on, or do you want me initiate revising the financial statements?”

Craig frowned and she thought she might throw up. “How big a discrepancy are we talking here?”

She squeezed her eyes shut for a miserable second and then answered, “Big enough that the one person whose signature I can read would be in trouble if he weren’t already dead.”

“Ahh.” Comprehension lit Craig’s face. She thought she heard him mutter something under his breath to the effect of, “The old bastard,” but she couldn’t be sure.

The intercom on his desk blared with Lester announcing, “Mr. Warner, your eleven o’clock is here.”

Rachel leaped to her feet with alacrity. Her need to escape was almost more than she could contain. She had to get away from Warner before he fired her.

He stood up. “I’ve got to take this meeting. We’ll talk later.”

She nodded, thrilled to be getting out of here with her job intact.

“And Miss Grant?”

She gulped. “Yes, sir?”

“Keep digging.”

He was going to support her if she found more problems. Abject gratitude flooded her. God bless Craig Warner. Weak with relief, she stepped into Lester’s office. And pulled up short in shock. The last person she’d ever expect to see was standing there. And it was not a nice surprise. “Finn!” she exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing here?”

He arched one arrogant eyebrow. “Since when is what I do any of your business?”

Good point. But had she not been standing well within earshot of her boss, she might have told him to take his attitude and shove it. As it was, she threw him a withering glare and said sweetly, “Have a nice day.” And go to hell, she added silently.

“Finn. Thanks so much for coming,” Craig Warner said from behind her. “I know it’s strange in this day and age to ask a doctor to make a house call—”

Lester pulled the door discreetly closed and Rachel heard no more. Was Craig Warner sick? He looked okay. Maybe he was a little pale and had been perspiring a bit, but the guy had a stressful job. And why call a specialist like Finn? Last she heard, he was an emergency internist—not a family practitioner.

She started back to her desk, her thoughts whirling. Keep digging. What exactly did Warner expect her to find? And why had Finn agreed to see Craig in his office? Why not tell the guy to call his own doctor? Maybe Finn had come over here to wreck her new job. After all, he’d successfully wrecked just about every other part of her life. Without a doubt, the worst part of living in a small town was the insanely long memory of the collective populace. You made one mistake and it was never forgotten, never forgiven.

She worked feverishly through the afternoon and found more and more places where money had been skimmed off of the profits of the oil-drilling company and disappeared. She’d have stayed late and continued working if tonight she hadn’t volunteered down at the senior citizens’ center. It was bingo night, and the retirees didn’t take kindly to any delays in their gambling.



Finn rubbed his eyes and pushed back from the computer. He’d been searching various medical databases for symptoms that matched Craig Warner’s but so far had come up with nothing. The guy was definitely sick. But with what? His symptoms didn’t conform to any common disease or to any uncommon diseases that he could find, either. He’d begged Craig to go to Bozeman and let him run tests there, but Craig had blown off the suggestion. He’d said he just needed some pills to calm his acid stomach and wasn’t about to make a mountain out of a molehill.

But in Finn’s experience, when a non-hypochondriac patient thinks he’s sick enough to seek medical advice, it usually isn’t a molehill at all.

He dreaded going home to face more of Maisie’s grilling over his latest encounter with his ex-girlfriend. For she’d no doubt heard all about it. She had a network of informants the FBI would envy.

It had been a nasty shock running into Rachel like that today at Walsh Enterprises. The woman was sandpaper on his nerves. As if he fell for a second for that syrupy-sweet act of hers. He knew her too well to miss the sarcasm behind her tone of voice. Once it would’ve made him laugh. But now it set his teeth on edge. He’d been prepared to act civilized toward her when he’d come back to Honey Creek, but if she was determined to make it a war between them, he could live with that.

Muttering under his breath, he pushed to his feet and headed out of Honey Creek’s small hospital.

“What’re you doing here, bro?”

Finn pulled up short at the sight of his brother, Wes. It still looked funny to see him in his sheriff’s uniform and toting a pistol. Wes had been as big of a hell-raiser as the rest of the Colton boys. Finn supposed there was a certain poetic justice in Wes being the guy now who had to track down wild kids and drag them home to their parents.

Belatedly, Finn replied, “I was just using the hospital’s computer to look up some medical information on their database.”

“Trying to figure out how to poison certain of the town’s females, maybe?”

Finn snorted. “Yeah. Maisie. That woman gets nosier every time I see her.”

Wes shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder if they switched her at birth and Mom and Dad brought home the wrong baby. I stopped by to see if you’d want to get a bite to eat?”

“Yeah, sure. Lily working late tonight?”

“Mother-daughter Girl Scout thing. I’m baching it for supper. I saw your truck in the parking lot.”

Finn walked out onto the sidewalk with Wes. It was strange enough thinking of his older brother as sheriff. But a family man, too? That was downright weird. It made Finn a little jealous, though. He’d been so sure he and Rachel would have a passel of towheaded ankle-biters by now. Funny how things turned out.

The sun was setting, outlining the mountains in blood red and throwing a kaleidoscope of pinks and oranges and purples up into the twilight sky. His thoughts circled back to Wes’s comment about Maisie not belonging to the family. He commented reflectively, “I dunno. Sometimes I see a bit of Dad in Maisie. The two of them get an idea stuck in their craw and they won’t let it go.”

Wes laughed. “Right. Like the rest of us Coltons aren’t that same way? Stubborn lot, we are.”

Finn grinned. “Speak for yourself, Sheriff. I’m the soul of patience and reason.”

Guffawing, Wes held the door to his cruiser open for him. “Then you won’t mind paying for supper, will you, Mr. Patience and Reason?”

Finn cursed his brother good-naturedly. He didn’t mind, though. He made decent money as a physician, and public servants didn’t rake in big bucks. He did roll his eyes, though, when Wes drove them to Kelley’s Steakhouse, which was without question the most expensive restaurant in town. They ordered steaks with all the trimmings, and then Finn picked up the conversation. “How’s the murder investigation coming?”

Wes shrugged. “Frustrating. There are damned few clues, and everywhere I look I find another suspect with a motive for killing Walsh.”

“No surprise there,” Finn commented. “He wasn’t exactly cut out for sainthood.”

“No kidding. It just stinks that Damien had to pay for something he didn’t do.”

They fell silent, both reflecting on the bum deal life had dealt their brother. Finn had visited Damien regularly in jail and tried to be supportive, but a little worm of guilt squirmed in his gut. Damien had always sworn he didn’t kill Walsh. Turned out he’d been telling the truth all along. They all should’ve tried harder to get him exonerated.

Fifteen years was a hell of big chunk of a person’s life to throw away. It hardly seemed like that long to him, but he imagined it had felt like twice that long to Damien.

It seemed like only yesterday Finn had been in high school, excited to play in the district football championship, dating the prettiest girl in the whole school, and counting the days until he was going to blow this popsicle stand for good. Of course, Rachel had a couple more years of high school to go before she could join him, but then … then they were going to run away together and see the world.

And it had all changed with a single phone call. He’d never forget his sister Maisie’s voice, delivering the news that had shattered his world—

“Earth to Finn, come in.”

He blinked and looked up at his brother. “Sorry. Was just remembering stuff.”

“Yeah, Honey Creek has that effect on a soul, doesn’t it? Want go down to the Timber Bar and get a beer? I’m off duty.”

“Sounds great. But you’re paying, cheapskate.”




Chapter 3


It was nearly midnight when Rachel pulled into her driveway. The bingo had ended at ten, but the usual volunteers who cleaned up hadn’t shown up tonight. Folks knew she was single and had no life of her own, so they didn’t hesitate to recruit her for the crap jobs that required sticking around late. And of course, she was too much of a softie to say no.

She got out of her car and locked it. The weather had turned cold and it felt like snow. Soon, winter would lock Honey Creek in its grip and not let go until next spring. She made a mental note to get out the chains for her tires and throw them in the trunk of her car.

She headed across the backyard under a starry sky so gorgeous she just had to stop and look at it. But then a movement caught her attention out of the corner of her eye and she lurched, startled. That was something or someone on her back porch!

She fumbled in her purse for the can of mace that swam around in the jumble at the bottom of it. Where was that can, darn it? Whoever it was could rob her and be long gone before she found it at this rate! She ought to keep the thing on her keychain, but it was bulky, and this was Honey Creek. Nothing bad ever happened here. Not until Mark Walsh’s murder. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before now that she ought to be more careful?

Whoever was on the porch moved again slightly. The intruder appeared to be crouching at the far end of the porch near the back door.

“I see you!” she shouted. “Go away before I call the police!”

But the intruder only slinked back deeper in the shadows. Her eyes were adjusting more to the dark, and she could make out the person’s shape now. There. Finally. Her fingers wrapped around the mace can. She pulled it out of her purse and held it gingerly in front of her like a lethal weapon.

“I swear, I’ll use this on you. Go on! Get out of here!”

But then she heard something strange. The intruder whimpered. She frowned. What was up with that? Surely she hadn’t scared the guy that bad. She heard a faint scrabbling sound … like … claws on wood decking.

Ohmigosh. That wasn’t a person at all. It was some kind of animal! She was half-inclined to laugh at herself, except this was Montana and a person had to have a healthy respect for the critters in this neck of the woods.

She peered into the shadows, praying she wasn’t toe to toe with a mountain lion. She wasn’t. Actually, the creature looked a little like a wolf. Except he was too fuzzy and too broad for a wolf. They were leaner of build than this guy. Nope, she was face-to-face with a dog.

She lowered the can of mace and spoke gently, “What’s the matter, fella? Are you lost?”

Another whimper was the animal’s only reply.

She squatted down and held out her hand. Okay, so a stray dog wasn’t exactly the safest thing in the world to approach cold, either, but she was a sucker for strays. Heck, she’d been collecting them her whole life. Yeah, and look where that had gotten me, a cynical voice commented in the back of her head.

The dog took a step forward, or rather hopped. He was holding his right rear leg completely off the ground. “Oh, dear. Are you hurt? Let me go inside and put down my purse and turn on a light and then we’ll have a look at you.”

She hurried into the kitchen and dumped her purse and mace canister on the table. She turned on the lights and opened the back door. “Come here, Brown Dog. Come.”

The dog cringed farther back behind an aluminum lawn chair. She squatted down and held out her hand. The dog leaned like it might take a step toward her and then chickened out and retreated even farther behind the chair. If she knew one thing about frightened animals, it was that no amount of coaxing was going to get them to go where they didn’t want to go. Looked like she had to go to the dog.

“Hang on, Brown Dog. Let me get some more light out there and then just have a look at you on the porch. Would that make you feel better?”

She kept up a stream of gentle chatter as she went inside, opened all the blinds and flooded the back porch with light. She stepped back outside. And gasped. The entire far end of her porch was covered with blood. As she watched, the dog staggered like it was nearly too weak to stay on its feet. Even though the dog had a thick, shaggy coat, she could still see hip bones and shoulder blades protruding. The creature was skeletal, his eyes sunken and dull in his skull.

And then she caught sight of his right hind leg. It was a bloody, mangled mess with white bone sticking out of a gaping wound she could put several fingers into. For all the world, it looked like he’d been shot. And the bullet looked to have nearly ripped his leg off.

Oh, God. This was way beyond her paltry skills with antibiotic cream and bandages. The sight of the wound nearly made her faint, it was so gory. She had to call a vet, and now. Dr. Smith, Honey Creek’s long-time veterinarian, retired a few months back, and the local ranchers had yet to attract another one to town. She’d have to call someone in Bozeman. She raced into the house and pulled out the phone book, punching in the first number she found.

“Hello,” a sleepy female voice answered the phone.

She blurted, “Hi. A dog is on my back porch. He’s been shot and he’s in terrible shape. I need a veterinarian to come down to Honey Creek right away!”

“I’m sorry, dear, but my husband doesn’t cover that far away. And besides, he’s out on a call. Said he’d be gone most of the night.”

Oh God, oh God, oh God. Breathe, Rachel. “Is there another vet in the area I can call?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know any small-animal vets who’ll go to Honey Creek. You’ll have to bring the dog up to Bozeman. Can I take your number and have my husband call you? He may have a suggestion.”

No way could she pick up that big dog by herself and hoist him into her car. And even if she did manage it, she suspected the dog on her porch wasn’t going to live another hour, let alone through a long drive over mountain roads. It might be twenty miles as the crow flew to Bozeman, but the drive was considerably longer. Especially at night, and especially when it got cold. Even the slightest hint of moisture on the roads would freeze into sheet ice in the mountains. “Thanks anyway,” Rachel mumbled. “I’ll figure out something else.”

She hung up, thinking frantically. Now what? She needed someone who could handle a gunshot wound. A doctor. Maybe she could take the dog down to the local emergency room—

No way would they let her in with a stray dog carrying who knew what diseases. She swore under her breath. She got a bowl of water for the dog and carried it outside. Tears ran down her face to see how scared and weak he was and how voraciously he drank. He was dying. And for who knew what reason, he’d wandered up to her porch. She had to get him help.

Without stopping to think too much about it, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed the phone number that hadn’t changed since she was in high school, and which she’d had memorized for the past decade and more.

“Hello?” a gruff male voice answered.

She couldn’t tell which Colton it was, but it definitely wasn’t Finn. She spoke fast before her courage deserted her. “I need to speak to Dr. Finn Colton. This is a medical emergency. And please hurry!”

While she waited a lifetime for him to come to the phone, the dog lay down on the porch, apparently too weak to stand anymore. Panic made her light-headed. He was dying right before her eyes!

“This is Dr. Colton.”

“Oh, God, Finn. It’s Rachel. You have to come. I tried to call a doc in Bozeman but he can’t come and there’s so much blood from the gunshot and I don’t know what to do and I think I’m going to faint and please, there’s no one else I can call—”

He cut her off sharply. “Unlock your front door. Lie down. Elevate your feet over your head. And breathe slowly. I’ll be right there.”

The phone went dead.

Why would she put her feet up? Time was of the essence right now. She ran into the kitchen and grabbed all the dish towels out of the drawer. The dog let her approach him and press a towel over his bloody wound, indicating just how close to gone he was. Pressure to slow the bleeding. That’s what they said in her Girl Scout first-aid training about a century ago.

The dog, which she noted vaguely was indeed a boy, whimpered faintly. “Hang on, fella,” she murmured. “Help is on the way.” She stroked his broad, surprisingly soft head and noticed that his ears were floppy and soft and completely out of keeping with the rest of his tough appearance. His eyes closed and he rested his head in her hand. The trust this desperate creature was showing for her melted her heart.

Oblivious to the pool of blood all over her porch, she sat down cross-legged beside the dog and gathered the front half of his body into her lap. He was shivering. She draped the rest of the towels over him and cradled him close, sharing her body heat with him. “It’ll be all right. Just stay with me, big guy. I promise, I’ll take care of you.”

The dog’s jaw was broad and heavily muscled, somewhat like a pit bull. Maybe half pit bull and half something fuzzy and shaped like a herding dog. Underneath the layer of blood he was brindled, brown speckled with black.

“Hang in there, boy. Help is on the way. Finn Colton’s the one person in the whole wide world I’d want to have beside me in an emergency. He’ll fix you right up. You just wait and see.”



Finn tore into his bedroom, yanked on a T-shirt, grabbed his medical bag and sprinted for the kitchen. He snatched keys to one of the farm trucks off the wall and raced out of the house, ignoring a sleepy Damien asking what the hell was going on.

He peeled out of the driveway, his heart racing faster than the truck. And that was saying something, because he floored the truck down the driveway and hit nearly a hundred once he careened onto the main road.

“Hang on, Rachel,” he chanted to himself over and over. “Don’t die on me. Don’t you dare die on me. We’ve got unfinished business, and you don’t get to bail out on me by croaking,” he lectured the tarmac winding away in front of his headlights.

He’d followed her home from the hardware store this morning—at a distance of course, where she wouldn’t spot him. He’d been worried at how she looked in her car in the parking lot. It was nothing personal, of course, just doctorly concern for her well-being. Good thing he had followed her, because he knew where she lived now. Turned out she was living in her folks’ old place. On the phone, she’d sounded on the verge of passing out from blood loss. And a gunshot? Had there been an intruder in her house? An accident cleaning a weapon? What in the hell had happened to her? First Mark Walsh, and now this. Was there a serial killer in Honey Creek?

He’d call Wes, but he’d left his cell phone back on his dresser at home, he’d been in such a rush to get out of there. He’d have to call his brother after he got to Rachel’s place. And after he made sure she wasn’t going to die on him.

“Hang on, baby. Don’t die. Hang on, baby. Don’t die—” he repeated over and over.



In less time than Rachel could believe, headlights turned into her driveway and a pickup truck screeched to a halt behind her car. Finn was out of the truck, medical bag in hand before the engine had barely stopped turning.

“Rachel!” he yelled.

“I’m right here,” she called back more quietly. “No need to wake the entire neighborhood.”

He raced up to her, took one look at the blood soaking her clothes and flipped into full-blown emergency-room-doctor mode. “Where’s the blood coming from? How did you get hurt? I need you to lie down and get these towels off of you—”

“Finn.”

“Be quiet. I need to get a blood pressure cuff on you. And let me call an ambulance. You’re going to need a pint or two of blood—”

“Finn.”

“What?”

“I’m not hurt.”

“Are you kidding? With all this blood? Shock can mask pain. It’s not uncommon for gunshot victims not to be aware that they’ve been shot for a while. Where did the bullet hit you?”

“I wasn’t shot. He was.”

She pulled back the largest towel to reveal the dog lying semiconscious in her lap.

“What the—”

“I’m not hurt. The dog was. Please, you’ve got to help him. He’s dying.”

Finn pulled back sharply. “I don’t do animals.”

“But you do bullet wounds, right?”

“On humans.”

“Well, he’s a mammal. Blood, bone. Hole in leg. Pretty much the same thing, if you ask me.”

Finn rose to his feet, his face thunderous. “You scared ten years off my life and had me driving a hundred miles an hour down mountain roads in the middle of the night, sure you were dying, to come here and treat some mutt?“ His voice rose until he was shouting.

Oh, dear. It hadn’t occurred to her that he’d think she was shot. And he’d driven a hundred miles an hour to get to her? Something warm tickled the back side of her stomach.

“Finn, I’m sorry if I scared you. I was pretty freaked out when I saw all the blood. I called a vet in Bozeman. But he’s out on a call that’s supposed to take all night and his wife said no small-animal vet would make a house call to Honey Creek anyway. And it’s not like I could take the dog to the Honey Creek hospital. You’re the only person I know of in town who can take care of a serious gunshot wound and make a house call.”

“I’m going home.” He picked up his bag and turned to go.

“Wait! Finn, please. I—” she took the plunge and bared her soul “—I’ve got no one else.”

He turned around. Stared down at her, his jaw rigid. Heck, his entire body was rigid with fury.

“I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done in the past to treat you badly. I’m sorry I did whatever I did that broke us up. If it makes you feel better, I’ll take full responsibility for all of it. But please, please, don’t take out your anger at me on a poor, defenseless animal who’s never done anything to you.”

Finn stopped. He didn’t turn around, though.

“Please, Finn, I’m begging you. If you ever had any feelings for me, do this one thing.”

He pivoted on his heel and glared down at her. “If I do this you have to promise me one thing.”

“Anything.”

“That you’ll never call me again. Ever. I don’t want to see you or speak to you for the rest of my life.”

She reeled back from the venom in his voice. Did he truly hate her so much? “But you’ll take care of Brown Dog?”

His gaze softened as he looked down at the injured animal. “I’ll do what I can.”

She nodded. “Done.”

“We’ve got to get him inside. Although the cold has probably slowed his metabolism enough to keep him alive for now, he’ll need to warm up soon.”

Working together, they hoisted the big dog and carried him inside, laying him on her kitchen table. It made her heart ache to feel how little the animal weighed given his size and to feel the ribs slabbing his sides. He was skin and bones.

Finn gave the dog a critical once-over. “This dog’s so emaciated that treating his gunshot wound is only going to delay the inevitable. I’ve got a powerful tranquilizer in my bag. It should be enough to put him down.”

“Put him down as in kill him?” she squawked.

“Yes. Euthanasia. It’s the humane thing to do for him.”

“Since when did you turn into such a quitter?” she snapped. “Our deal was that you’d do your best to save him, not kill him.”

Finn glared at her across the table. “Fine. But for the record, you’re making this dog suffer needlessly. I can’t condone it.”

“Just shut up and fix his leg.”

“Make sure he doesn’t move while I wash up,” Finn ordered. He moved to the sink and proceeded to meticulously scrub his hands. He hissed as the soap hit his palms and Rachel craned to see a series of raw blisters on his palms. Where had he gotten those?

Finally, he came back and laid out a bunch of stainless steel tools on the table beside Brown Dog. “You’ll assist,” he ordered.

Great. She never had been all that good with blood. A person might even say she was downright squeamish. And surely he remembered that. A suspicion that he was doing this to torture her took root in her mind. But if it meant he took care of the dog, so be it. “As long as I don’t have to look,” she retorted.

“Hand me both pairs of big tweezers.” He held out one hand expectantly.

She gasped as she got a better look at his bloody blisters. “What happened to your hands?”

“I helped Damien string fence today. Wasn’t expecting to have to scrub for surgery tonight. Had to take the skin off the blisters while I scrubbed up so no bacteria would hide underneath.”

She stared. He’d torn up his hands like that for the dog? Awe at his dedication to his work flowed through her.

For the next hour, the kitchen was quiet. Finn occasionally asked for something or passed her a bloody gauze pad. His concentration was total. And she had to admit he was giving it his best shot at saving this dog. He murmured soothingly to the animal, even though it was clear the dog was out cold from the injection Finn had given him.

She couldn’t help glancing at the surgical site now and then. It appeared Finn was reconstructing the dog’s leg. He set the broken femur and then began a lengthy and meticulous job of suturing tendons and muscles and whatever else was in there that she couldn’t name and didn’t want to.

Finally, when her head was growing light and she thought she might just faint on him in spite of her best efforts not to, Finn started to close up the wound. He stitched it shut in three different layers. Deep tissue, shallow tissue, and then, at long last, the ragged flesh.

Her stove clock read nearly 2:00 a.m. before Finn straightened up and stretched out the kinks in his back. He rubbed the unconscious dog’s head absently. “All right. That’s got it. Now we just have to worry about blood loss and infection and the patient’s generally poor state of health. I’ll leave you some antibiotic tablets to get down him by whatever means you can. If he wakes up, you can start feeding him if he’s not too far gone to eat.”

Although he continued to stroke the dog gently, Finn never once broke his doctor persona with her. He was cold and efficient and entirely impersonal. If she weren’t so relieved that he’d helped her, she’d have been bleeding directly from her heart to see him act like this. Again.

She would never forget the last time he’d been this angry and cold and distant. It had been the night of his senior prom. She’d been waiting for him in the beautiful lemon-yellow chiffon dress her mother had slaved over for weeks making. She’d had a garland of daisies in her hair, the flowers from their garden woven with her father’s own hands. Finn had been acting strangely when he came to the door but was polite enough to her parents. Then he’d taken her to the dance, waited until they were standing in front of the entire senior class of Honey Creek High and told her in no uncertain terms how she was worthless trash and vowed he never wanted to see her again.

He’d kept that promise until today. Well, and tonight, of course. Strange how he’d renewed his vow never to see her again within twenty-four hours of seeing her for the first time. She’d never known what had caused him to turn on her then, and she darned well didn’t know why he was so mad at her now. He was like Jekyll and Hyde. But mostly the monstrous one. Were it not so late, and she so tired and stressed out and blood covered, she might have asked him. But at the end of the day, it didn’t matter. They were so over.

He plunked a brown plastic pill bottle on the counter. “Based on his weight, I’d say half a tablet every six hours for the next week or until he dies, whichever comes first.”

She frowned at him. “That was uncalled for.”

“I said I’d treat the damned dog. Not that I’d be nice about it.”

“Well, you got that right. You’re being a giant jerk,” she snapped.

Finn scooped the rest of his surgical instruments into his bag and swept toward the door. “Goodbye, Rachel. Have a nice life.”

All of a sudden everything hit her. The shock and terror of the past few hours, the stress of the surgery and its gory sights, but most of all, the strain of having to be in the same room with Finn Colton. All that tension and unresolved anger hanging thick and suffocating between them. Watching him walk out of her life again. She replied tiredly, “Go to hell.”

She thought she heard Finn mutter, “I’m already there.”

But then he was gone. All his energy and male charisma. His command of the situation and his competence. And she was left with an unconscious dog lying in the corner of her kitchen, a bottle of pills, and a bloody mess to clean up.

So exhausted she could barely stand, she mopped the kitchen and the porch with bleach and water. How Brown Dog had any blood left inside his body, she had no clue. She was pretty sure she’d cleaned up an entire dog’s worth of blood.

Just as she was finishing, he whimpered. Now that his surgery was over, Finn had said it was safe for him to eat. Maybe she’d better start him off with something liquid, though. She pulled out a can of beef consommé that had been in the back of her cupboard for who knew how long and poured it into one of her mixing bowls. She thinned it with a little water and warmed it in the microwave before carrying it over to the groggy animal.

“It’s just you and me now, Brownie boy.”

She sat down on the floor beside him and used her mother’s turkey baster to dribble some of the broth into his mouth. At first he swallowed listlessly, but gradually he grew more enthusiastic about licking his chops and swallowing. By the time she finished the soup, he was actually sucking at the tip of the baster.

“We’ll show Finn, won’t we, boy? We’re survivors, you and me.”




Chapter 4


Rachel came home at lunch to change the newspapers under Brownie, give him his antibiotics and use the turkey baster to squirt canned dog food puréed with water down his throat. He was still too weak to do much but thump his tail a time or two, but gratitude shone in his eyes as she tenderly cared for him.

“What’s your story, boy? Where’d you get so beat up? Life sure can be tough, can’t it?”

She settled him more comfortably in the corner of her kitchen in his nest of blankets and headed back to work. The afternoon passed with her finding more and more discrepancies in the Walsh Oil Drilling Corporation records. She’d be worried about it if she weren’t so tired from last night and so concerned about the wounded animal in her kitchen. So when Lester Atkins called her and asked her to come to Mr. Warner’s office, she merely grabbed her latest evidence of the embezzlement and headed upstairs.

But when she stepped into the office, she pulled up short. Wes Colton, in full sheriff garb, was standing beside Craig Warner’s desk. Wes’s arms were crossed. And he was glaring at her. Good lord. What had Finn told him when he’d gone back to the ranch last night? Had Finn sicced Wes on her to get her fired?

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she managed to choke past her panic.

“Have a seat, Miss Grant,” Craig started.

Oh, God. This was an exit interview. Wes was here to escort her out of the building. The sheriff parked one hip on the corner of Warner’s massive desk, but he still loomed over her. The guy was even bigger and broader than Finn.

“How are you feeling today, Miss Grant?” Wes rumbled.

“Tired, actually. I’m sure Finn told you about my rather adventurous evening last night.”

“He did. Any idea who shot your dog?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got no idea. He just wandered up to my porch already shot. I never saw the dog before last night.”

“Kind of you to go to all that trouble to help him,” Wes murmured.

Was that skepticism in his voice, or was she just being paranoid? She shrugged and waited in resignation for this travesty to proceed.

On cue, Craig spoke quietly. “Miss Grant, I’d like you to tell Sheriff Colton what you told me on Friday.”

She blinked, startled. “You mean about the Walsh Oil Drilling accounts?”

He nodded.

Okay. She didn’t see what that had to do with her getting fired, but she’d play along. She turned to Wes. “Mr. Warner asked me to do an internal audit of the financial records of Walsh Oil Drilling Corporation for the past several years. Walsh Oil Drilling is a wholly owned subsidiary of Walsh Enterprises so we have legal purview over—”

Wes waved a hand to cut her off. “I’m not interested in the legal ins and outs of corporate structure. I’m confident that Craig is operating within the law to do the audit.”

She adjusted her line of thought and continued. “Yes, well, I looked at last year’s records first. I compared the original receipts, billing documents and logged work hours against the financial reports. And I found several major discrepancies. Based on that, I started going back further and looking at previous years.”

“And what did you find, Miss Grant?” Wes asked.

“More of the same. Somebody’s been skimming funds from this company over at least a fifteen-year period. Maybe since the founding of the company itself seventeen years ago.”

Wes definitely looked interested now. “How much money are we talking?”

“Millions. As much as two million dollars the year the company made a major oil strike and had a windfall income spike.”

Wes whistled low between his teeth. “Any way to tell who was taking the cash and cooking the books?”

She shrugged. “Mark Walsh himself signed off on the earliest financial reports. If he wasn’t taking the initial money himself, he was certainly aware of who was and how much he was taking. After his first death …” The phrase was weird enough to say that it hung her up for a moment. But then she pressed on: “… somebody kept taking it. I can’t read the handwriting of whoever was signing off on the financial documents, but it appears to have been the same signature for the past fifteen years.”

Wes glanced over at Warner. “You weren’t kidding when you said I’d want to hear this.” To Rachel he said, “Who else knows about this?”

“Nobody. Just me and Mr. Warner.”

Wes nodded, thinking. “I’d like to keep it that way for a while. This may be just the break we’re looking for.”

She frowned. “Huh?”

“In the Walsh murder investigation.”

“You think whoever killed Mark was helping him skim money from his companies and killed him over it?” she asked in surprise.

Wes shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to speculate. I just know that Mark Walsh was damned secretive, and it’s been nearly impossible to learn much about his life over the past fifteen years. If nothing else, you may have just answered how he was able to pay for his ongoing existence without his family knowing anything about it. Can you give me a complete rundown of how much money went missing and when, Rachel?”

He was using her first name now? Was that a good sign? “Uhh, sure. I can have it for you in a day or so. I’ve got a few more years’ worth of records to review and then I’ll be able to compile a report.”

“That would be great. And, Craig, thanks for calling me.”

The two men shook hands and Wes turned and left. Craig sat down quickly, mopped his forehead with a tissue and then tossed the tissue in the trash. He didn’t look good. His skin was pale and pasty and he had that uncomfortable look of someone who was contemplating upchucking.

“Can I get you a glass of water, sir?” she asked in concern.

“Yes, thank you.”

She went over to the wet bar on the far side of the room and poured him a glass of water. She carried it to his desk. “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Warner?”

“It’ll pass. I’ve been having these spells for a couple of weeks.” He smiled wanly at her. “I’m a tough old bird. I’m not about to go anywhere.”

She smiled back at him.

“What’s this about a shot dog?” he asked.

Likely he was just looking to distract himself from throwing up. She told him briefly about Brownie and his injuries and Finn coming over to perform surgery on him. She left out the part about Finn’s bitter anger toward her.

“You’ve got a good heart, Miss Grant.”

She smiled at her boss. It was a rare moment when anyone in this town said something nice to her. She savored it.

“As soon as you’re done with those last financial reports, why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go look after your four-legged houseguest?”

She nodded, touched by his kindness. “Thank you, sir.”

He waved her out of the office. She suspected he was losing the battle with his stomach and wanted a little privacy to get sick into his trash can. Poor man. She hoped he felt better soon.



Finn helped Damien string barbed wire all day. The hard labor felt good and helped him burn off a little bit of the residual stress from last night. He still wasn’t entirely recovered from that panicked call from Rachel Grant. The woman had about given him a heart attack. Good thing she’d agreed to stay the hell away from him forever. He couldn’t take much more of that from her.

“Anything on your mind?” Damien finally asked late in the afternoon.

Finn looked up surprised. “Why do you ask?”

“You’re working like a man with a chip on his shoulder.”

“What? I can’t come out here and help string a fence out of the goodness of my heart?”

Damien cracked a rare smile at that. “Not buying it.”

“When did you get so perceptive?” Finn grumbled.

Damien shrugged. “Prison’s a tough place. Gotta be good at reading people if you want to stay out of trouble.”

Finn was startled. To date, Damien hadn’t said more than a few words about his time in jail. “Does it feel strange to be out?” he ventured to ask.

Damien shrugged. He pounded in a metal stake and screwed the fasteners onto it before he finally answered. “It’s surreal being back home. Didn’t think I’d ever see big open spaces like this again. I missed the sky. It goes on forever out here.”

Finn looked up at the brilliant blue sky overhead. Yeah, he might go crazy if he never got to see that. “How’d you do it? How did you keep from losing your mind?”

“Who says I didn’t lose it?” Damien retorted.

Finn didn’t say anything. He just waited. And sure enough, after two more posts, Damien commented, “About a year in, I beat the shit out of guy who chose the wrong day to cross me. Growing up with all you punks for brothers served me well. I knew how to handle myself in a fight.”

Finn grinned and passed Damien another fastener while he started in on the next post.

Damien continued reflectively. “I got thirty days in solitary. A month in a box broke something in me. It was like I lost a piece of myself. The fight went out of me. It became about just surviving from one day to the next. I played a game with myself. How long could I live in there without losing it again? I made it 4,609 days. And that was when I got word that Walsh had been found dead for real this time and I was going to be released.”

Finn shuddered. “God, I’m sorry—”

Damien cut him off with a sharp gesture. “What’s done is done. If I learned nothing else in the joint, I learned to keep moving forward. Don’t look back. I live my life one day at a time. No apologies. No regrets. It’s over.”

Finn nodded. His brother was a better man than he. No way could he be so philosophical about a miscarriage of justice costing him fifteen of the best years of his life.

They knocked off when the sun started going down. It got cold fast, and by the time they got up to the main house, he was glad for the fleece-lined coat his brother had tossed him across the cab of the truck.

As beautiful as the log mansion their father had built was, Finn was restless tonight. The heavy walls felt confining and the massive, beamed ceilings felt like they were closing in on him. Hell, Honey Creek was closing in on him.

If his old football coach hadn’t extracted a promise out of him to stay for the big homecoming dance this coming Saturday night, he’d be on his way back to Bozeman already. But Coach Meyer was losing his battle with cancer, and he’d asked all his players to come back for one last reunion. It was damned hard to say no to a dying man’s last request.

He had to get out of the house. He grabbed his coat and a set of keys and stormed out. As he stomped through the mud room intent on escape, Maisie’s voice drifted out of the kitchen. “What’s his problem?”

Damien’s voice floated to him as he opened the back door. “Woman trouble.”

Finn slammed the door shut so hard it rattled in the frame. Woman trouble? Ha!



Rachel raced home from the office to check on Brownie. He seemed more alert and had a little more appetite. He even gave several thumps of his thick, long tail whenever she walked into the kitchen. After both of them had eaten, she signed onto the Internet to do some research about care of injured animals. She browsed various veterinary advice sites for an hour or so and then, following the recommendation of several of them, went into the kitchen to check the color of Brownie’s gums. Supposedly, pink was healthy and dark red or pale white was bad.

Gingerly, she took hold of his lip and raised it to take a peek. He pulled his head away weakly but not before she glimpsed pasty white gums. She laid her hands on his side and he definitely felt hot to the touch. Oh, no. Finn had warned her that infection and fever were a major risk to Brownie’s survival.

She headed for the phone and dialed the same veterinarian from the night before. “Hi, this is Rachel Grant. I called last night.”

“Ahh, yes. The injured dog. How’s he doing?”

“I think he’s developing a fever.”

“If you want to bring him up to Bozeman, I’ll meet you at my office.”

She winced. The dog had to weigh seventy pounds, even in his emaciated state, and even if she could lift him herself, she doubted Brownie would cooperate with getting into her compact car. At least not without doing even more damage to his injured leg. “I don’t think I can get him up to Bozemen by myself.”




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