In Plain Sight
In Plain Sight
Margot Dalton
Welcome to Crystal Creek, TexasIf this is your first visit to the friendly ranching town of Crystal Creek, deep in the Texas hill country, get ready to meet some unforgettable people. If you've been here before, you'll recognize old friends and make some new ones.Isabel Delgado has to fake her own death in order to get away from her vengeful husband. But when her plan goes awry, she finds herself stranded in Crystal Creek and in more danger than ever. Then rancher Dan Gibson has an idea–marry him. Dan needs help raising his three small kids, and Isabel needs a new identity.Perfect! Except Isabel's feeling for Dan–and his for her–could put them both in a different kind of danger.
“We can get married.”
Isabel’s jaw dropped as she turned to stare at Dan. “Married? How would it help to marry a total stranger?”
“It would give you a legal name. One that wouldn’t jump out at anyone searching a computer bank. Instead of Isabel Delgado, you’d be Bella Gibson. You can apply for credit cards and other forms of identification under that name.”
Isabel was silent. “Even if I agreed to this,” she said at last, “it’s not possible to get married without some proof of identification and citizenship, is it?”
“It’s possible,” he said calmly, “when my cousin’s the county clerk.”
She studied him, amazed to be having this conversation and even more astonished that she was actually considering his offer. At that moment another obstacle presented itself.
“This house is so small,” she said at last, her cheeks flaming. “And your children are in all the other bedrooms. If we’re supposed to be married…”
Dear Reader,
Almost ten years ago, Harlequin approached a number of authors with an exciting new idea. We were given the challenge of helping to create a central Texas town and ranching community, along with a host of exciting, heartwarming characters to populate this setting. The result was the 24-book CRYSTAL CREEK series, which has remained popular with readers since publication of the very first book in 1993.
As an author, I loved everything about writing the CRYSTAL CREEK books. So you can imagine my excitement when the Superromance editors suggested I might want to return to Crystal Creek with a new series of books. I could hardly wait! In Plain Sight, the beginning of the new miniseries, will bring back many of your old favorites. Bubba Gibson and Mary are here, still raising their ostriches, along with J. T. McKinney, Manny Hernandez, Howard Blake and Nora Slattery down at the Longhorn. More and more of the familiar townsfolk will pop up in the next two books, along with some newcomers you’re going to like, as well.
I loved making this nostalgic return to Crystal Creek. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Warmest regards,
Margot Dalton
Crystal Creek titles by Margot Dalton
HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE
928—CONSEQUENCES.
940—THE NEWCOMER.
In Plain Sight
Margot Dalton
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u9fc312b4-692d-51b0-b4e7-ad9a6619754d)
CHAPTER TWO (#uaa2d53cb-280b-53ec-a420-2f827ba4b7d2)
CHAPTER THREE (#u09a8e928-5294-537a-85d3-1d797879ba43)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u51b33304-96ba-54cf-af18-2673ac7e8457)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u2c66c524-a2e0-5a62-ab1e-1ec3490fb1f5)
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)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
ISABEL DELGADO was a precise, orderly person. She liked things to work the way they were supposed to, and objects to be stored in their proper places. At school she’d sometimes been accused of keeping the contents of her handbag in alphabetical order.
That was an exaggeration, but she did compartmentalize with care.
No messy rummaging for Isabel. She could put her hand instantly on a nail file, a pack of tissues or a library card.
So when it came time to plan her death, she embarked on the project with the same meticulous care.
Everything in her plan had to function smoothly, with no loose ends or messy slipups. Isabel realized all too well that good preparation was her only chance to achieve any possibility of life after death.
For weeks she planned her “fatal accident.” She’d driven around the Texas countryside north of San Antonio to scout the best possible locations, imagining the scenario, trying to anticipate anything that could go wrong.
She put an envelope full of cash, the diamonds she’d inherited from her mother and all her stock certificates into a safe-deposit box at a bank in San Antonio. Afterward she wondered how long it would be before she could safely slip back to the city and reclaim this small fortune.
The most time-consuming project of all was obtaining duplicates of her identification papers, getting everything reissued from birth certificate and social-security card to passport, marriage license and divorce papers.
A few weeks earlier when she had everything together, Isabel had driven to Abilene to deposit a bulky envelope containing the documents, along with a generous sum of cash, in a locker at the bus depot.
On the final two days her stomach was knotted with tension, and she was too excited to eat. But though she was almost faint with hunger, Isabel knew that in a few hours—after her “death” had been successfully accomplished—she would move onto Abilene, and from there embark on her new life.
The first thing she planned to do was eat an enormous meal, with cheesecake for dessert.
On a warm Friday evening in late September, she was finally ready.
For one last time she stood in the vast foyer of her father’s San Antonio mansion, dressed in a running suit of navy blue cotton, with white cross-trainers and a red terry-cloth headband, looking around at the kind of luxury that had been her heritage for all the twenty-seven years of her life.
Isabel Delgado was a true golden girl, and not just because of the enormous wealth and privilege she’d been born into. She was blond and tanned, slim and dainty, with the finely drawn, muscular frame of the dedicated runner. Her tanned skin, her French-braided hair, even the highlights in her hazel eyes were a rich golden-brown.
As a small child she’d been a source of pride to her father, but nowadays Pierce Delgado hardly ever came home, and her old friends were all busy with their growing families. Unless the police came here directly with the news of Isabel’s death, it could be a long time before anybody even noticed she was gone. Except for one person…
When Isabel realized how little impact the news of her death would have on almost anybody, she felt chilled and deeply sad.
If her sister, Luciana, had still been around, she’d care about Isabel. But their father’s anger and coldness had driven Luce away years ago. By now nobody even knew where she was, though Isabel often thought about her beautiful older sister.
“Well, goodbye, everybody,” Isabel said aloud to the silent house, bending to pick up her water bottle and a leather waist pack from the bottom of the stairs. “Hey, it’s been great.”
She left the house, locking the door carefully behind her, and ran down the walk to her little blue Mercedes convertible, which was sitting at the curb with the top rolled down.
Isabel got in, pushed a cassette into the player and looked back at the stately pile of cut limestone that was her father’s house, with its grounds so massive that the equally opulent homes of the neighbors were barely within view.
For the first time she had a stirring of doubt about her plan. But then she remembered the escalating dread of recent weeks, the sheer heart-stopping terror that pervaded most of her existence.
Her life was intolerable, and the fear had to stop. Nobody could live this way.
Isabel squared her shoulders, put the sleek little car into gear and headed down the street.
She drove northwest on the freeway leading out of San Antonio, then took an off-ramp and went up through Fredericksburg, deep into the heart of the Hill Country west of Austin.
Out here, far away from the city and the freeway, the summer evening was beautiful, though it was chilly enough that she was tempted to put the top up.
But that wasn’t part of the plan. On the off chance that somebody happened to see her car in the Hill Country and testify about it later, it was important for them to notice that the convertible top had been down as she drove.
So she turned up her jacket collar for warmth, enjoying the way the fading light spilled across the hills, and the mesquite and live oak trees rustled and whispered in the breeze.
Heavy clouds massed behind her to the south, threatening a rainstorm, but by the time that storm arrived, she would be well on her way.
Isabel smiled and tapped her fingers on the steering wheel in time to a country song, looking with pleasure at the countryside rolling by. She’d always loved the Hill Country.
Her mother, Pierce Delgado’s second wife, had been friends with the J.T. McKinney family at Crystal Creek, whose successful ranching and more recent wine-growing operation was one of the jewels of Claro County. Isabel had spent many of her summers there as a child. In fact, the family warmth and hospitality at the Double C ranch had been one of the best things in Isabel’s lonely childhood. The McKinneys gave her a view of a life so different from her own, with her absent father, brittle alcoholic mother and a half brother and half sister who were both almost a decade older and busy with adult lives of their own by the time Isabel entered adolescence. The memories brought a hot prickle of tears to her eyes.
But this was no time to give way to emotion. She had to stay cool and alert, or she’d never be able to pull the whole thing off.
North of Fredericksburg she turned off the highway and drove up a side road to park on a rocky outcropping, a lookout point high above the Claro River, known as Rimrock Park.
At this time of year the Claro was a lazy sparkle, reflecting the rich colors of the sunset. It gave no hint of the raging torrent it could become in the spring when it flooded and went thundering through the valley like a freight train, sweeping away everything in its path.
Isabel had selected this particular point because the banks narrowed here; the Claro was certainly deep enough to cover a car and had a current powerful enough to carry a body into the Colorado and on toward Lake Travis.
Also, there was a well-used picnic area below, about a hundred yards upriver on the other side. Even from that distance she could see a couple of families with little kids and pets, their food spread out on tables while a group of men nearby played horseshoes.
She drove her car forward on the lookout point, as far as she could without slipping over the edge and plunging into the water a hundred feet below. When she turned off the music, a clink of metal on metal from the game of horseshoes drifted up to her, along with the muffled shouts of children and barking of dogs.
The sweet everyday sounds seemed unbearably precious and reminded her painfully of everything she’d lost.
Isabel’s jaw set in determination. She drew off the terry-cloth headband and pulled on a navy baseball cap, tugging it low enough over her forehead to obscure most of her face.
Then she took her waist pack and wedged it firmly under the front seat. The leather pouch contained all her ID, including her passport and credit cards.
At first she’d been reluctant to include her passport, because it had been such a hassle to get the new one that now waited for her in that bus-depot locker in Abilene. But Isabel needed to make it look as if she’d been leaving the country and had accidentally driven her car over the cliff while taking one last look at the Claro River.
Probably she’d gone to some unnecessary effort, but the whole scene had to be completely believable.
After all, no one who was faking her own death would choose to sacrifice her social-security card, her passport, driver’s license and credit cards.
Time was running out. She had to do it now, while the people were still in the picnic ground and could attest to seeing a small blue car plunge into the river from the opposite cliffs.
Her hands began to tremble with nerves and she clenched them into fists, then checked her jacket pocket one last time to make sure she had her wad of cash and the bus ticket she’d bought in San Antonio. In her shoe, under her heel, she could feel the hard shape of the key to the locker in Abilene.
Finally she got out of the car and stood holding the door open.
One more time Isabel checked to make sure the leather pack was wedged under the front seat. For a moment she considered putting it in the glove compartment for safety, but decided that might look a little too staged.
Nervously she patted her pocket, the one containing her money and her ticket to a new life, then tugged the cap even lower over her eyes.
At last she reached inside to slip the car into neutral, gripped the door frame and began to push it toward the edge of the precipice. As soon as it went over the cliff among the scrub mesquite and cactus, she would set off down the road in the opposite direction from the way she’d come, like a jogger out for a run in the cool of the evening. In the unlikely event that anybody asked, she could say she’d already passed the lookout point and hadn’t seen a car there.
Her plan was to jog about four miles—an easy distance for Isabel—to the bus depot in Crystal Creek, which was the nearest small town. There she would use the ticket in her pocket to board a bus, ride up to Abilene, about a hundred miles away, and collect her stash of money and her ID.
She would have to lie low for a while in Abilene, of course, until she knew Eric had finally given up searching for her. Then she could devise some way to get safely out of the country. Maybe she’d try going to Mexico again, or to Canada…
But just as the front wheels of the Mercedes hung in space, ready to plunge over the cliff, one of the back wheels was blocked by a small boulder. Isabel pushed and sweated, trying with all her might to rock the little car free.
Suddenly she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered, looking around wildly. “Now what?”
There was nowhere to hide among the scrub mesquite and boulders, and the sound was growing closer. In fact, it sounded like two vehicles, possibly a couple of kids on dirt bikes.
If somebody spotted her up here trying to push the car over the cliff, all her careful plans would be ruined. Worse than ruined, because Eric would know what she’d tried to do, and from now on he’d dog her movements even more relentlessly.
The man was bent on possessing her. If he couldn’t, he would surely kill her. And after this, nothing would stop him.
With a despairing sob, Isabel gave one great heave and finally sent the small vehicle over the edge. As it fell she closed her eyes and jumped into the void just behind it.
The next few moments seemed to take hours. She was conscious of space and weightlessness, of the sun blinding her and of the wind that tugged at her clothes and sang in her ears.
Then she was crashing down through tree branches and rustling leaves, rolling among thickets of brush that scratched her face and hands. At the same time she heard a mighty splash, followed by a chorus of startled cries from across the river.
Isabel lay facedown in the heavy brush, cradling her head in her arms like a woman awaiting a blow. Her chest heaved and her heart raced. She was gasping so hard that she was sure her breathing must be audible all the way across the river.
Gradually she began to realize her body was still in one piece and that, for the moment at least, she was safe. Through the screen of brush she could hear the people across the river, their voices clear and distinct on the evening air.
“It was a car!” somebody shouted. “A little blue car. I saw it just when it hit the water!”
“Was anybody in it?”
“I couldn’t tell,” the reply came as Isabel strained to hear, trying to calm her noisy breathing.
“Somebody call the fire department! Jimmy, get one of those trucks and drive downriver. See if you can find anybody in the water.”
Slowly her panic ebbed. Apparently the people on the opposite bank hadn’t noticed her body when she’d jumped off the cliff behind the car. And whoever had been driving up to the summit behind her wouldn’t have arrived in time to see her jump.
Isabel sat up and did a cautious assessment of her physical state.
She was covered with dirt, had a lot of scrapes and bruises, and was bleeding freely from a gash on her right arm where the jacket sleeve had been torn to shreds. Her face felt moist, and when she touched her cheek, her fingers came away red with blood.
“Damn,” she muttered, her thoughts racing. “Damn!”
It would be impossible to get on the bus in this condition without being noticed. Somehow she had to figure out a way to get herself cleaned up and find a change of clothes.
Maybe when darkness came, she could steal something from a farmer’s clothesline. But did anybody even use clotheslines anymore?
Isabel didn’t have a clue. She’d never done laundry in her life.
Meanwhile the confusion on the other side of the river seemed to be growing. She heard sirens approaching in the distance, then the frantic barking of a dog.
“Oh, God, I need to get away from here,” she said, looking around wildly.
The witnesses clearly weren’t sure the car had been occupied when it went into the water. But even if nobody had seen her falling behind it, they would still come over here and search the riverbank in case a driver or passengers had fallen out while the car was in flight and were lying injured in the bushes.
Shivering in the evening chill, Isabel pulled off her jacket, gripped the hem between her teeth and tore a ragged strip from the front to bind her arm, then twisted the length of cloth with a stick until the bleeding stopped.
She wondered if her arm needed stitches and how she was going to get proper medical attention. But when she removed her makeshift tourniquet, the flow of blood was just a trickle, already clotting.
The sky darkened, and Isabel looked up to see clouds massing overhead. Lightning split the air, and a low rumble of thunder came shuddering across the hills. At the same time, raindrops began to land on her face and patter in the bushes nearby.
The rain was a stroke of good luck, Isabel realized. A heavy rainfall would soon wash away any trace of her presence on the riverbank, even if they came and searched with dogs.
But she had to find some shelter. Maybe she could pay somebody to—
With sudden, heart-stopping terror, she paused and looked down at her torn jacket. For the first time she realized that not just the sleeve but most of the jacket’s right front, including the pocket, had been completely torn away.
Slowly, numb with dread, Isabel tried to make her sluggish mind work out what had happened.
As she’d pushed the car, her jacket must have caught on it somewhere, maybe the door or the rear bumper. Her pocket had been ripped free, possibly even carried into the water with the car.
And that meant her money and her bus ticket to Abilene were both gone.
She whimpered, then buried her face in her hands and struggled to compose herself.
Panic wasn’t going to accomplish anything. She had to think, and there was no time to waste. Emergency vehicles were arriving on the other side of the river, and the shouts and calls of the searchers intensified, though their words were harder to make out now that rain had begun to fall heavily.
She had no time to scour the riverbank for her lost possessions, even if by some miracle they’d fallen clear of the water. It was important to get away from here before people came around to the other side of the river and launched a search in the brush.
Again she tried to think, to assess all the possibilities.
If the bit of torn jacket had gone into the water along with the car, would that alert police investigators to what she’d done?
Not necessarily, she decided.
They weren’t going to find a body, of course, so they would be likely to assume part of the jacket had torn free when the body washed out of the car. The bus ticket was printed on such flimsy paper a dousing in the river would turn it to unrecognizable pulp. And a wad of money would carry no significance to anybody. People probably assumed women like Isabel Delgado carried wads of money around with them all the time.
It would be worse, though, if the jacket fragments had fallen free of the car on this side of the river and somebody found that bus ticket. Then someone might work out what she’d been trying to do. But the brush was so thick here at the base of the cliff. And the rain was torrential now—one of those storms that seemed to blow out of nowhere during autumn in the Hill Country.
Though she was starting to feel chilled and sick, Isabel was still grateful for the rain. It fell like a dense silver curtain, soothing her wounds and hiding her from view as she made her way though the brush.
She was almost a hundred yards downriver, away from the shouts and sirens, before the full enormity of her situation hit her.
Without the contents of her jacket pocket, she had no way of surviving. She had no money and no way to get herself—unseen—to Abilene to reclaim her careful stash of identification papers.
When she realized this, she sank to her knees on the carpet of rotting leaves and wrapped her arms around her shivering body.
Her hair was wet and dirty, plastered to her neck and face, and she was gripped by uncontrollable spasms. Moisture dripped from her cheeks, frightening her, but when she touched her face, no trace of blood stained her hands.
High above and upriver she heard calls from the summit where she’d been and the sound of people descending the slope.
Panicking again, she got up and set off once more, crouching low and running along a leafy path in the brush made by deer and rabbits. Rain was still pouring and night had set in with alarming suddenness. She could barely make out the path and stayed on it mostly by instinct. Whenever she blundered into the surrounding thickets, cruel branches and thorns grabbed at her shredded jogging pants and stabbed her legs.
After what seemed like several hours, she slowed her pace. The heavy rain was letting up, and the night was silent except for the rustle of dripping trees and the mournful hooting of an owl somewhere nearby. The clouds separated and a partial moon drifted out from the lacy screen.
Isabel crawled in among the lower branches of a cedar tree and paused to catch her breath. She was chilled through, badly winded, weak from loss of blood. Her arm had begun to throb painfully. She wondered if the gash could have become infected so soon.
But in spite of the cold and the pain of her injuries, she was most distressed by the fact that she no longer had a plan. Her only thought was to put distance between herself and anybody who might be searching the riverbank. Beyond that, she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do, or how to make her way to Abilene so she could use the key that was still safely tucked in her running shoe.
Various possibilities presented themselves, none of them very rational.
She could knock on the door of a farmhouse along the river, tell the owner she’d been in an accident and ask to call her father.
No. Pierce Delgado was in Europe on business.
Maybe she could ask for help from her brother or one of her father’s personal staff, but after what she’d seen a few weeks earlier, she didn’t really trust any of them. And she didn’t want anyone to know Isabel Delago was still alive.
Besides, even making a phone call would mean revealing her identity. Nobody in their right mind would let a stranger into the house to use the phone, even an injured one.
Maybe she could claim amnesia, saying the trauma of her accident had driven all memory from her mind.
But then they would call the police, and that prospect was so distressing that Isabel, who never cried, began to sob aloud.
Suddenly weary beyond endurance, she stretched out and lay full-length on the soft carpet of leaves. Her head and arm throbbed, and her body ached with fatigue.
I’ll just rest for a minute, she thought. After a little rest I’ll feel better, and then I can decide what to do.
It was her last conscious thought for many hours. Almost at once she fell deeply asleep and didn’t wake until the morning sun was high in the sky.
CHAPTER TWO
THE IRRIGATION PUMP had broken down again. Dan Gibson knelt and prodded it carefully with grease-stained fingers, wondering if all it needed was something simple like new washers, or if this was going to be another expensive overhaul. Maybe he’d even have to replace the creaky old piece of machinery.
He couldn’t afford a new pump without getting another operating loan. And even Bill Hendricks, the sympathetic bank manager in Crystal Creek, was probably going to tell him that was impossible.
Wearily, Dan sat back on his heels and squinted into the fading sunlight where his children played along the river.
Twelve-year-old Ellie was in the water, wading up to her knees, bent almost double as she searched for arrowheads in the bright shallows.
Chris was four years younger than Ellie, and she wasn’t allowed to go into the water unless Dan was with her. She was dragging their red wagon along the river’s edge, and she and little Josh were filling it with mounds of colored pebbles they intended to use for some mysterious game of their own.
Josh was only two, chubby and energetic in a blue-denim romper suit. His sisters were in sandals, but Josh wore heavy miniature boots to protect his feet from the rocks along the shore. His golden curls shone in the sunlight, and his voice drifted on the wind, as happy as a little bird’s.
Dan grinned briefly and tipped his cap back, watching the children. But his smile faded when he looked around at the hay meadow behind him, then at the stalled irrigation pump.
At least a heavy rainfall the night before had provided some moisture for his rapidly maturing crop. It gave him a little breathing room while he worked on the pump. But if he couldn’t harvest this final hay crop and pay back a few loans, his financial prospects for the coming year were going to be damned bleak.
“Ellie,” he called, “it’s time for the kids to have a bath and go to bed.”
The two girls raised a howl of protest, claiming extra privileges because it was Saturday night. Josh chimed in, though Dan suspected his son was objecting more to be companionable than out of any real indignation.
Josh was such an easygoing little boy. He actually loved the routines of bedtime, with his bubble bath and toys and storybooks.
“Okay, fifteen more minutes,” Dan said. “But you two have already been up more than an hour past your schoolday bedtime.”
A contented silence fell, and he returned his attention to the pump.
Dan was a tall, well-built man in jeans and a plaid work shirt, with a disheveled head of light brown hair that was as unruly as Josh’s if it got too long. He had smoky green eyes and a grin that transformed his hard face, though these days it was an increasingly rare occurrence.
As he probed the pump mechanism with a screwdriver blade, something caught his eye and he looked up quickly. A flash of color glimmered in the brush near the water, just downriver from where his children were playing. But whatever was in the thicket vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
He frowned, wondering if one of the McKinney horses had strayed this far from the Double C. If so, he’d have to give J.T. a call.
For a moment he considered going over and checking, then dismissed the thought.
Most likely it was a deer, or a hawk flying low after some scurrying rodent, or even a plastic sack blown along the river in last night’s storm, caught and fluttering from a branch.
At least to his immense relief, Dan found the problem with the pump—a ragged washer—and knew the repair was only going to cost a few dollars. He had only to get to the hardware store in Crystal Creek.
Disaster was averted for another day, he thought wryly.
But how many bullets could a man dodge before one of them finally hit him and killed all his dreams?
“Come on, kids,” he said, getting to his feet. “Time’s up.”
There was another brief protest, but this time it was halfhearted. They knew he meant what he said, and it was pointless to argue.
Chris walked at her father’s side toward the little farmhouse, holding his hand and pulling the wagon, now heavily loaded. Dan looked down into her earnest, freckled face. “What are you going to do with all the rocks, honey?”
“Josh and I are building a castle,” Chris said. “We’re starting on it tomorrow. It’s going to be awesome, Daddy.”
“Awesome,” Josh said contentedly, trotting at Dan’s other side, clinging to his other hand. “Gonna be awesome.”
“You two babies don’t have a clue how to build a castle,” Ellie said scornfully from behind them. “It’ll just be a big mess.”
Chris’s face turned pink with outrage, and Dan ruffled her hair.
“Maybe I’ll have a little time to help with the castle tomorrow, sweetie,” he said.
His younger daughter’s eyes blazed with happiness. “Really, Daddy?”
“Maybe,” he said cautiously.
Chris rounded on her sister in triumph. “Daddy’s going to help me and Josh build the castle,” she said, “and it’ll be the best castle in the whole world. So there, you stupid dummy.”
“Stupid dummy yourself,” Ellie said, unperturbed. “I wish Gypsy was here,” she added. “Does it hurt to get spayed?”
“Gypsy’s having a good time at the clinic with all the other dogs,” Dan said. “She’ll be home tomorrow.”
Josh stumbled on a tuft of grass near the house and whimpered, rubbing his eyes with a dirty hand. Dan picked the little boy up and carried him the rest of the way, wondering if he’d be able to keep his word and find a few minutes the next day to help Chris with her castle.
He worked from dawn to dark, often eighteen hours at a stretch. In addition to the hay fields, he grew grapes for the McKinney winery, kept bees in rows of wooden hives at the edge of the hay meadow, a small herd of cattle and some pigs and goats, anything he could think of to pay the mortgage and keep his farming operation afloat.
And with three little kids to look after, his life wasn’t easy. In fact, most of the time it was a waking nightmare.
Still holding Josh, who nestled drowsily against his father’s shoulder with a thumb jammed into his mouth, Dan followed the two little girls into the house.
In the kitchen he glanced around and sighed.
The place looked like a tornado had passed through. No matter how hard he tried, tidiness and order seemed impossible to attain. Toys and clothes littered the floor and the sink was stacked with dirty supper dishes; the girls had fought over whose turn it was to do them. Through the doorway he could see into the sparsely furnished living room and knew how badly it needed dusting.
There were times when Dan longed fiercely for the simple things, like a clean house and a hot meal on the table when he came in from work, and some peace from kids who seem to squabble all the time.
Not that he’d ever want to be parted from his children for long. But sometimes he was just so weary.
He sent Chris into the bathroom to run a tub for herself and Josh, then began to pick up the things scattered about the floor. Ellie surprised him by marching over to the sink and filling it with hot water.
Something about her rigid back alerted him. He sat down at the table and watched her thoughtfully.
Ellie’s real name was Danielle, which she hated with such passion that nobody ever dared to use it. Of the three children, she was the only one who looked like their mother, and one day she was going to be a real beauty.
She had silky black hair with a touch of curl, clipped short around her face, and big brown eyes that could be lively or sullen depending on her mood. In June, just a month after her twelfth birthday, she’d begun her menstrual periods and been appalled by her body’s treachery. It was “gross,” she’d said, and burst into tears.
Dan had cuddled her tenderly while she cried. He’d shown her books on female reproduction and explained that what was happening to her was not a tragedy but a wondrous thing.
But her moods were more erratic all the time nowadays, with shifts that left him feeling baffled and hopeless.
He suspected she might be having a tough time getting along with some of the kids at school, though she refused to talk to him about it. When he spoke to her teachers, they said Ellie was bright but very quiet. None of them were aware of any particular problem.
At the moment, however, Dan sensed that his daughter’s silence needed to be explored. He sat at the kitchen table, doodling with a blue crayon in one of Chris’s coloring books and considering how to go about it.
He could hear muffled shouts and laughter from the direction of the bathroom, and winced at the sound of water splashing onto the worn tiles he’d never had time to replace.
“So,” he said casually, “what’s up, Ellie?”
She kept her back turned, wiping dishes, rinsing them and stacking them in the plastic rack. “I don’t see why we can’t have a dishwasher,” she muttered. “You should see Aunt Mary’s house now, Daddy. She has two dishwashers. Last month Uncle Bubba gave her another one just for pots and pans.”
“Good for Mary,” he said mildly. “She’s worked hard all her life, and her ostriches are making a lot of money for them now. She deserves anything Bubba wants to give her. But we can’t afford a dishwasher.”
“We can’t afford anything,” the girl said. “It’s so stupid, how poor we are.”
Dan restrained himself from making a sharp reply. She was just a child and couldn’t be expected to understand his financial situation.
“So what’s going on?” he asked again.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, but he could see the way her thin shoulders stiffened.
“You’ve been real quiet since we came in from outside. Is something bothering you?”
“Of course not.” She wiped a plate with unnecessary energy and slammed it into the dish rack. “Except that I have to do stupid Chris’s job for her because she’s too lazy.”
“You might as well tell me, Ellie,” Dan said reasonably, “because you know I’m going to find out, anyhow. And I might be upset if something happens to catch me by surprise.”
When she turned around, her boyish face wasn’t defiant, just troubled.
“Daddy…” She leaned against the counter, one thin brown leg wrapped around the other. Dan could see the bare sole of her foot, dirty and marked with a painful-looking bruise.
“What, sweetheart?” he asked.
“If I found something, would it be mine to keep?”
“I guess it depends on where you found it,” he said after a moment’s thought.
“I mean, if I found it here on our farm and I knew it didn’t belong to you or Chris and Josh.”
“So how would it get here?”
She turned away uneasily and looked out the window while Dan watched her with growing interest.
“How about if the wind blew it here?” Ellie said, fixing her dark eyes on him again. “Would it be mine if I found it?”
Dan thought this over, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “If the wind blew something here and you found it, I’d say you were entitled to keep it.”
She turned back around, relief shining in her face. She reached into the pocket of her shorts, took a bit of paper out and came over to place it on the table in front of him. Dan stared in astonishment.
It was a wet, crumpled, fifty-dollar bill.
“I found it in the river,” she said. “Just floating along in the water.”
“No kidding.” Dan studied the bill, fascinated, then grinned at his daughter. “Let’s get some flashlights and go back out there,” he said. “Maybe there’s more.”
She laughed, picked up the bill and returned it to her pocket.
“It’ll have to go into your bank account,” Dan told her. “Unless there’s anything you need to buy. Clothes or something for school.”
“I don’t want any stupid clothes. Can you put it in the bank for me when you go to town?”
“Sure,” Dan said. “And if things get real tough,” he added, “I can borrow from you. With fifty dollars in the bank, you’ll be the richest person in the family.”
She smiled, then turned away and began drying dishes. An uneasy silence fell.
“So,” Dan said at last, “we haven’t had a chance to talk much since yesterday, Ellie. What happened with Mrs. Graham?”
Her back stiffened again, and she rubbed a plate without looking at him. “That woman was such an old cow,” she muttered. “And she was mean, Daddy. You should have heard how she yelled at Josh.”
Dan sighed. “You never give them a chance, honey. Mrs. Graham was the third housekeeper I’ve hired in the last four months, and she only lasted a few days. That’s some kind of record, even for us.”
“We don’t need a housekeeper,” Ellie said. “Chris and I can do it.”
Dan looked around at the messy kitchen, then back at his daughter. “She told me you were rude and impossible to manage.”
“She was a jerk!” Ellie said passionately. “I hated her!”
Dan struggled to be patient.
“You hate all of them, sweetheart. But we need some help, and it’s not easy to find a housekeeper like Mrs. Graham who’s willing to live in Crystal Creek and drive back and forth every day. Most of them want to live in, but we don’t have an extra room.”
“We don’t need her! I hate having strangers in my house, Daddy. Especially jerks like her who don’t even know what they’re doing.”
“She was highly recommended by the last family she worked for,” Dan said. “And she was willing to do housework and child care and make a hot meal in the evening. It seemed like a pretty good deal to me.”
“But it must have cost a lot.” Ellie turned to look at him directly.
“Quite a bit,” Dan admitted.
“And you’re always talking about how we don’t have any money.”
“Things are tight, but some expenses are necessary, Ellie. I worry about Chris and Josh. They need more attention than they’re getting, and I’m too busy to look after them properly.”
“I can look after them,” Ellie said stubbornly. “And Chris and I can work harder to keep the house clean. I’m learning to cook supper, too.”
“Macaroni and cheese every night isn’t exactly a balanced diet, honey.”
“Aunt Mary can teach me other stuff. She said I could come over any time I wanted to learn to cook.”
Dam looked in despair at his daughter. He loved her dearly, but Ellie was the most frustrating, inflexible person he’d ever known.
She’s just like you, his wife used to point out. Everybody in Crystal Creek knows where that stubbornness of hers comes from, Dan Gibson.
“Do you ever give any thought to what life is like for me, Ellie?” he said quietly.
“I don’t know what you mean.” She stood on tiptoe to put glasses away in the cupboard.
“Well, you keep telling me how you and Chris can look after things and we don’t need a housekeeper. But the two of you are in school all day. That means I have to take Josh with me all the time, no matter what I’m doing. It’s not easy to do a full day of farm work with a two-year-old running along behind you. And he still needs a nap in the afternoon, you know.”
She considered this, frowning. “Aunt Mary would look after him anytime you asked. She loves him.”
“You kids are my responsibility,” he said. “Mary and Bubba have been good to us since your mother went away, but I can’t ask Mary to be a full-time baby-sitter. She has work of her own to do.”
Ellie put the plastic rack in a lower cabinet and wiped out the chipped sink.
“Well, I still don’t see why we need to have some creepy stranger around the house,” she said. “And I just hated that Mrs. Graham. She looked in all my dresser drawers.”
“She was housecleaning,” Dan said wearily. “God knows, this place could use it.”
“Chris and I can clean,” Ellie said again. “We can clean as good as she did.”
Dan watched his daughter, wondering what made her so prickly and defensive. But he understood her well enough to know he wasn’t getting anywhere with the argument.
He’d just have to try again, and see if next time he could manage to hire somebody who wouldn’t alienate this difficult child of his.
“I’ll go and help Chris put Josh to bed,” Ellie told him, sidling from the room.
At least she seemed anxious to appease him.
“Thank you,” Dan said, opening up the newspaper. “Call me and I’ll come in and read to them when they’re in bed.”
He barely had time to scan the headlines before Chris trailed into the kitchen wearing what passed for pajamas with both girls—jogging pants and a T-shirt. She carried her old Raggedy Ann doll and was looking for a glass of milk.
Dan gave her the milk and a couple of cookies, then took her down the hall and supervised as she brushed her teeth, ignoring her protests that she’d already brushed them.
He tucked her into the upper bunk, smoothed the blond hair back from her forehead and gave her a kiss while Ellie carried Josh into the room and deposited him in the lower bunk.
The little boy snuggled drowsily into the pillows, his thumb in his mouth again, his teddy bear held close to his face.
The girls had washed and dried his hair, and it smelled pleasantly of strawberry shampoo. Dan bent to kiss his son, then settled on the floor near Josh’s bed, reading aloud to the two younger children from an old copy of Peter Pan.
Josh didn’t understand the story, but he was usually too sleepy at bedtime to care what his father read as long as he was nearby for a while. Chris, however, was passionately caught up in the adventures of Peter and Tinkerbell. Several times recently Dan had caught her trying to fly off the haystack.
Ellie left the crowded little bedroom, heading out to the front porch where she had a private sleeping space on all but the coldest winter nights, when she bunked on the sofa in the living room.
After the younger children were settled, Dan went out through the house and knocked on the door of the little screened veranda.
“Come in,” Ellie called.
She was lying in bed, reading a copy of My Friend Flicka from the school library.
“I loved that book when I was a kid,” Dan told her, pausing near her bed. “There are two more in the series, you know.”
“I already got the librarian to reserve them for me. Can I tell you something, Daddy?” She looked up at him gravely.
“Sure. What is it?”
“I’m not sorry Mrs. Graham went away, because she was a real stupid woman, but I’m sorry the place is such a mess all the time. If we don’t get another housekeeper, I’ll try harder to keep things nice.”
“Thank you, Ellie.” He kissed her cheek and went back toward the living room. “Don’t leave your light on too long,” he said over his shoulder.
“Okay, I won’t.”
He paused to smile at her. She lay in a warm circle of lamplight while crickets chirped beyond the window and moths fluttered softly against the screens.
“Good night, kiddo.”
“Night, Daddy.”
Dan wandered back to the kitchen, too tired to think about reading a book himself or even watching television. All he wanted was to have a shower in the damp, cluttered bathroom and fall into bed.
But first he made himself a cup of instant coffee and carried it over to the table to read the rest of the newspaper.
A small article on the second page, accompanied by a photograph, caught his attention.
“Heiress missing after car plunges into the Claro River,” the caption read.
Dan scanned the article, realizing the fatal accident must have happened last night, quite close to his farm. A young woman named Isabel Delgado, age twenty-seven, had been in a car and plunged to her death from the rocky promontory overlooking Rim-rock Park.
“It is unknown at this time,” the article said, “whether Delgado’s death was accidental. She is the daughter of well-known Texas industrialist Pierce Delgado, who is on his way home from a business meeting in Belgium. Isabel Delgado was divorced two years ago from Eric Matthias, a police lieutenant in Austin. Matthias told reporters he has not seen his ex-wife for several weeks, but that her behavior has been ‘unstable’ in recent months.”
The paper went on to report that searchers had scoured the banks of the Claro River, looking for any trace of the woman whose body had not yet been recovered, although the late-model Mercedes had been dragged from the river about twelve hours after its disappearance. A number of the missing woman’s personal papers had been recovered from the car, including her passport, but there was no sign of her body.
Of course, that wasn’t surprising to Dan. She’d apparently been driving a convertible with the top down, and her body would have been sucked right out into the river.
He’d lived in this county for all of his thirty-five years and was intimately acquainted with the river and its habits. He knew that near Rimrock Park the Claro ran deep, with a powerful undercurrent that had caused many drownings over the years.
He looked at the woman’s picture displayed beside the article. She had an unusual face, framed by shoulder-length hair that seemed light, though it was hard to tell from the grainy black-and-white image.
What caught him most were her eyes, looking straight at the camera with a thoughtful, appraising look, and her mouth that lifted on one side in a smile that seemed both quizzical and a bit timid.
It was an interesting face, he thought. She looked like a woman who had some humor and intelligence, and would be fun to talk with.
Then he remembered that Isabel Delgado was dead, and her body would no doubt be washing up in a few days along the banks of the Colorado or the shores of Lake Travis. She would never smile or talk with any man again.
Suddenly feeling unbearably tired, Dan folded the paper to conceal the woman’s charming lopsided smile and put it in a wastebasket near the door.
He got up, switched off the kitchen lights and headed for his bedroom.
CHAPTER THREE
ISABEL CROUCHED in the bushes, watching as the lights winked off one by one in the little farmhouse. It had been more than twenty-four hours since she’d plunged over the cliff, and she was in agony.
Her right forearm was definitely infected, swollen and hot, throbbing with pain. The rest of her body was also scratched and bruised. She was filthy, hungry and ravaged with thirst, but afraid to drink the river water.
All day she’d been making her way along the shoreline, struggling through thick brush, hiding fearfully whenever she was in danger of being seen. Now she shivered with cold and felt weak and light-headed, ready to cry like a child at the thought of spending another night outdoors.
For the past several hours she’d been lying in the brush, watching the farmhouse and the three children who played along the water’s edge while a big, rugged-looking man she guessed was their father crouched over some piece of machinery in a field nearby.
The house was isolated, at least a mile from anybody else. Isabel was hoping that like many others in this peaceful, rural area, the farmer didn’t lock his doors at night. She had a risky plan.
After the lights were all out and enough time had passed for everybody to be asleep, she intended to sneak into the farmhouse and steal some food, maybe even a change of clothes and some medicine for her arm.
If she found any money lying around, she was going to steal that, as well.
She knew the plan wasn’t rational, but she was so hungry and painracked that she couldn’t think clearly anymore. In a weird, nightmarish fashion, her mind kept slipping in and out of reality. Occasionally she had images of being at home, lying in the four-poster bed in her spacious living quarters, while sunlight spilled across the hardwood floor and the housekeeper carried in a tray laden with food.
Isabel closed her eyes and pictured the food on the tray.
Golden crisp waffles swimming in maple syrup, little sausages and a cut-glass bowl of fresh fruit, hot sweet coffee with cream…
She moaned and pushed the seductive images aside, trying to concentrate on the house. She could no longer remember if minutes or hours had passed since the last light had been extinguished, but she knew it was late because the night felt so cold. And the moon was high, spilling a cold silver glow over the landscape, turning the slow-moving river to a stream of hammered pewter.
She heard something crash through the under-growth nearby and looked fearfully over her shoulder. The noise subsided for a moment, then began to recede. Probably a deer or stray cow.
Isabel dropped her chin to her chest, waiting for her heart to stop pounding.
Another dreadful thought struck her.
What if that noise had been made by a dog?
She hadn’t seen any dogs outside with the man and the children, but there could still be one nearby. If so, it would surely bark, maybe even attack her when she sneaked toward the house.
The prospect was terrifying, but she was too hungry and sick to care.
Holding her breath, she crept from the brush and crossed the yard toward the darkened house, moving from tree to tree, a ragged shadow slipping through the moonlight.
No dog raised an alarm, and she reached the back door feeling limp with relief.
She eased the screen open and grasped the handle on the inside door. The knob resisted for a moment, then began to turn.
Isabel’s heart again pounded in terror. Soundlessly she pushed the door open, stepped into a little back porch and paused for her eyes to adjust to the dimness.
After a while she could make out shapes and spaces, faintly illuminated by moonlight spilling through windows. The room seemed to be cluttered with children’s shoes, boots and toys. Rows of jackets hung on pegs. Many of them looked small, and a few were far too large for Isabel.
Still, those big garments would provide some warmth, and she reminded herself to take a few of them as she was leaving.
Through an opening she could see what appeared to be a good-size kitchen. Rows of cabinets, the dull gleam of appliances, a shadowy outline of table and chairs.
So far, so good. Where there was a kitchen, there had to be food.
Isabel paused in the porch, feeling faint and light-headed again. She grasped the door frame and waited for the dizziness to pass, then shook her head blearily, trying to formulate a plan.
The best thing would be to head straight for the tall bulk of the refrigerator. That was probably a lot less risky than opening cabinets one after another, trying to find food.
By now, her brave plans of searching for money and medicine had completely vanished. She didn’t even feel all that hungry anymore, just sick and shaky. It was so terrifying to be in this place, only feet away from other human beings who could wake up at any moment and come after her.
Finally she tiptoed to the rear of the porch and took a big denim shirt from one of the pegs. It was lined with flannel and smelled slightly of engine oil. She longed to put it on her shivering body, but that would have to wait. Carrying the shirt she edged into the kitchen.
When Isabel opened the fridge, she winced at the light that flooded the room. Hastily she spread the shirt on the floor and began to pile food onto it.
Part of a ham, a loaf of bread, three cans of soda, some apples…
At the sight and smell of food, her hunger pangs returned. She had dined in some of the finest restaurants in the world, but she’d never seen a banquet like this. Her mouth watered, and her body trembled with deep spasms. Again she felt dizzy. It was all she could do to concentrate, but she knew it might be a long, long time before another opportunity like this presented itself.
She gobbled a bunch of grapes, blissfully savoring their moist flavor, then tore off some of the ham with her teeth and ate a couple of slices of bread.
At last, trying not to make the slightest noise, she continued to pile food onto her makeshift pack.
DAN HAD ALWAYS BEEN a light sleeper, even more so now that he had the full responsibility of his children. Anything was enough to rouse him, the trace of a cough from Josh, or Chris’s soft whimper during one of her nightmares.
Now he awoke and lay staring at the ceiling, wondering what had disturbed him. There was no sound from the small bedroom next door, and Ellie always slept like a log once she switched off her light.
Still, he had a sense of something alien in his house, a sort of menacing whisper drifting on the silent night air.
There!
He heard it again, the soft creak of a floorboard, a distant muffled sound coming from the direction of the kitchen.
Dan slipped out of bed and moved quietly toward the door. When he reached the hallway, he could see the soft glow of light from the open fridge. A quick glance confirmed that Chris and Josh were both sound asleep in their bunks. Through the living-room window he could see the covers mounded over Ellie’s body.
Then another muffled scrap of sound drifted along the hallway. Dan’s skin prickled, and the hair rose on the nape of his neck. Soundlessly he took a baseball bat that one of the children had left leaning on the arm of the sofa and crept toward the kitchen door. Flattening himself against the archway, he peered in.
What he saw made him suck in his breath and grip the bat tightly in his hands.
A ragged, filthy urchin knelt by the open door of the fridge, wearing torn dark clothes and a baseball cap. Moving with clumsy haste, the boy seized food and piled it onto one of Dan’s heavy work shirts, spread on the floor.
The intruder was so intent on his task that he seemed unaware of any danger. Dan felt a rising anger at this invasion. He stepped into the kitchen just as the thief sprang to his feet and stared, wild-eyed with terror.
Brandishing his bat like a club, Dan gripped the boy’s arm, then looked down in alarm as the kid seemed to faint in his grasp, crumpling slowly to the floor.
By the light spilling from the open refrigerator, Dan realized several things. The slender arm he held was badly gashed and swollen. The pain he’d inflicted when he gripped it had apparently caused the boy to pass out.
Slowly Dan also realized the thief wasn’t a boy at all, but a young woman in a torn jogging outfit. She was filthy and covered with caked blood from many scratches. Her face had a vaguely familiar look, though her hair was matted and dirty, and her features shadowed under the ball cap.
He knelt beside her, automatically putting the food back in the fridge while he kept watch on her, then tugged off the cap to get a better look. When her eyes fluttered open and she stared up at him, he remembered where he’d seen her.
It was the woman whose picture had been in the newspaper, the heiress from San Antonio whose car had plunged off a cliff and into the Claro River the day before.
She tried to scramble to her feet, but Dan grasped her shoulders. Clearly too weak to fight, she subsided, head drooping, and whimpered in terror.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, sniffling. “I was so hungry, and my arm hurts.”
Some of Dan’s anger ebbed, but he continued his grasp of her shoulders. “Why didn’t you just knock on the door? I would have been glad to help you.”
“I can’t…” Her head drooped again, and he could see her chin began to tremble.
“What?” he asked.
“I can’t let anybody see me.” She looked up again with passionate entreaty. “Please don’t call the police. Please, I’m begging you, just let me go. I promise I won’t bother you again.”
“I can’t let you go,” Dan said. “What will you do? Your clothes are in shreds, you’re obviously half-starved and that arm needs some medication right away. Of course I’m going to call the police.”
The woman struggled frantically in his grasp. “No!” she cried. “If you do that, he’s going to find me!”
“Who’s going to find you?”
Her face had drained of color and her lips were blue. She seemed completely irrational. “He’ll get to me for sure this time,” she said. “Even my father is on his side now. Nobody believes me when I try to tell them what he’s like. Please, please, don’t let any of them near me. Oh, God, I’m begging you, please…”
Her voice trailed off and she fell heavily against him. Dan held her in his arms, looking down at her with concern.
She was groggy but still conscious, and badly in need of a wash. He put her gently on the floor, then went to the bathroom and began to run water into the tub, adding some of the bubble bath his girls liked to use. As the tub filled, he went back to the kitchen, helped the woman to her feet and supported her down the hallway.
He knew this was probably crazy, bringing a strange woman into the house with his children. Especially one who seemed to be in some kind of danger. But he was moved in spite of himself by her fear, and the fragile look and feel of her body.
In the bathroom he paused awkwardly, looking down at her pale, scratched face.
“Can you manage in here on your own?”
She nodded jerkily and began to fumble with her tattered clothes. After a moment she forced a grimace that he recognized as a smile. “That bath looks like heaven,” she whispered. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful.”
“Well, believe me, this place isn’t heaven,” Dan said grimly, standing on the tiles and looking at the welter of plastic toys on the tub ledge.
Still, he was moved by her courage, and felt a sudden lump in his throat. “Look, I’ll bring a chair and sit in the hall just outside the door,” he told her. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”
He left hastily, carried a stool from the living room and set it near the closed door, then listened in silence to the muffled series of small splashes as she lowered her body into the tub.
“Are you all right?” he called in a loud whisper, taking care not to wake the two children who slept just across the hall. “Is the water hot enough?”
“It’s lovely,” she answered. “Thank you so much. I could stay here forever.”
“Stay as long as you like.”
After a few more minutes of silence, followed by a lot of hearty, reassuring splashes, he heard the sound of the woman hauling herself from the tub. Suddenly she uttered a soft cry of distress.
Dan hurried into the bathroom to find her leaning against the wall and clutching a towel loosely around her body. She seemed unsteady and very pale, swaying on her feet.
Dan supported her with one arm, grabbed the towel and wrapped it tight again, but not without catching a fleeting glimpse of her nakedness.
Though cut and bruised, her body was lovely, with long slim legs, a slender, tapering waist and high, firm breasts. She had a golden tan except for the skimpy bikini patches across her nipples and around her hips.
Angry at himself for looking, even so briefly, he turned away and stared grimly at the wall. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Can you manage on your own now?”
“I think so,” she said from behind him. “I just felt so…so dizzy for a minute right after I got out of the water.”
“I’ll find you some clothes,” he said.
Dan went into the adjoining room to get one of his shirts and a pair of boxers, then handed them through the partly opened door, setting them on the hamper.
“Thank you,” she said from within the room, her voice already sounding a little stronger.
Dan hovered anxiously near the closed door and was relieved when she said, “All right, I’m decent. You can come in now.”
The transformation was amazing. Except for the mass of wet hair pulled back from her face, she was exactly like that lovely, thoughtful young woman in the newspaper picture.
“You look a lot better,” he said neutrally.
“Almost human?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.
His attempt at humor was rewarded with a weary smile. “Just try spending twenty-four hours starving in the rain and mud,” she said with a brief show of spirit. “See how great you look.”
He sobered, remembering the seriousness of the situation.
“Okay, let’s have a look at that arm, and then you can go to bed.”
“You won’t tell anybody about me?” she asked.
Her eyes were an unusual color, a sort of golden brown, set within heavy dark lashes. For the first time he noticed a faint drift of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“Will you let me go?” she asked.
Dan hesitated. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said.
“Oh, please, you can’t tell anybody I was here.” Her pupils dilated in terror and her body tensed. “Please, if you—”
“Look, don’t start getting all upset again,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody until we’ve had a chance to talk. But you’ll have to stay in the bedroom and keep quiet,” he added, “because I have three little kids living here, and we can’t let them catch sight of you if you want to stay secret.”
“I’ll be really quiet,” she promised.
He opened a tube of salve and smeared it over the gash on her arm, then fastened it with a neat row of butterfly bandages and wrapped it in gauze.
“Are you allergic to any antibiotics?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
Dan hesitated, then gave her one of the tablets the doctor in Crystal Creek had prescribed for him recently when he cut his hand on some dirty barbed wire and developed a painful infection. He knew it wasn’t smart to use a prescription on another person, but this was an emergency. And, as fearful as she obviously was of being discovered, the woman was hardly going to agree to see a doctor, no matter how he pressured her.
By the time he finished bandaging her arm, she was drifting off to sleep, her wet head lolling drowsily.
“I need to get you a dryer for that hair,” he said.
“Hack it off,” she murmured.
“Beg your pardon?”
“I don’t want to bother with it. I’m too tired.” She looked up at him with bleary appeal. “Couldn’t we just get some scissors and cut it all off?”
“But I can’t—”
“Please,” she said, “it needs to be cut, anyway. God knows, I don’t care how it looks. Let’s just get rid of it.”
With some reluctance Dan got his scissors and razor comb from a drawer and cut her matted, tangled hair, trimming it neatly around her ears the same way he cut Chris’s.
He tossed the damp strands in the wastebasket, then toweled her hair so it stood up around her face in damp little spikes.
“It’s still wet,” he told her. “I’ll need to dry it before you go to bed.”
She examined herself ruefully in the mirror, touching the little spikes. “At least it won’t take long.”
She lowered herself gingerly onto the edge of the tub while Dan stood above her to blow-dry her hair. Now that it was short, it looked considerably darker than it had in the newspaper photograph. And the gamine cut was surprisingly attractive with her delicate features.
“You look nice,” he said.
She didn’t respond, just leaned back with her eyes closed.
“Do you still want something to eat?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not hungry anymore. Just…so tired.”
Dan helped her up and guided her into his bedroom, tucked her into the double bed and pulled the covers over her body. She looked up at him in exhausted silence, her features washed silver by the moonlight.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “So wonderful. Thank you.”
“Go to sleep,” he told her gruffly.
She snuggled down in the covers and he sat on the mattress beside her, trying to think.
There was no other empty bed in the little house. If he slept on the sofa and the kids found him there, they were certainly going to wonder why. Dan had no choice other than to share his bed with her.
He tidied the bathroom and disposed of the drying curls of hair, then returned to his bedroom, closed the door and slid under the covers next to his unexpected guest. Every nerve in his body was conscious of her slender body curled next to him, the clean sent of her hair and the soft sound of her breathing.
Hands behind his head, he stared at the ceiling and wondered what could have happened to make this beautiful woman drive her car over a cliff. Who was after her, and why was she so afraid of the police?
Either the woman was mentally unbalanced or she was involved in something illegal. In either case he’d probably been a fool to bring her into his house. Again he thought of his children sleeping nearby and felt a chill of alarm.
But even though he’d caught the woman raiding his fridge, she hadn’t seemed like a crazy person or a criminal. Just a woman in pain, and Dan, who spent his life caring for children and animals, had a hard time not feeling sympathy for anybody who was hurt.
Still, he couldn’t take any chances with the safety of his kids. Until he knew what was going on here, he needed to get them away from the house.
Reluctantly, he decided to bundle them all up first thing in the morning and take them over to Mary and Bubba. They could stay a few days, help with the ostriches and have the run of Bubba’s sprawling ranch.
Dan’s uncle and his wife were always pleading with him to let them help look after the kids, but Dan resisted, stubbornly maintaining that the care of his children was his responsibility.
Now, maybe he’d take them up on their offer. Mary could take the kids to the school bus on Monday morning. By then he should know what was going on with Isabel Delgado, and why she’d turned up in his kitchen trying to steal his food.
Slipping noiselessly from the bed, Dan padded into the kitchen to retrieve the folded newspaper from the wastebasket. He switched on the back-porch light and read the article again, then stared for a long time at the woman’s face, her disarmingly lopsided smile and the expensive haircut he’d just demolished.
Finally he went back to his bedroom, carrying the paper, and tucked it away in the top drawer of his dresser. The woman was sleeping peacefully, her face innocent and sweet in the pale moonlight. When Dan settled next to her, she reached out her bandaged arm and touched his shoulder, nestling close to him.
The move was automatic and without seduction. Dan drew away from her gently, taking care not to hurt her injured arm. She smiled in her sleep, the same, crooked smile the newspaper photograph had caught.
He patted her shoulder, then rolled over and lay alone on his side of the bed, wide awake and troubled, wondering what in hell he was getting himself into.
CHAPTER FOUR
SOMETIMES WHEN ELLIE was deeply asleep, noises that were, in reality, happening around her somehow got into her dreams.
She lay in the darkness, only partially awake, and realized the same thing had just happened. She’d been dreaming about running through a dim cavern, where a bottomless river lapped at her feet and she was in constant danger of falling into the water.
Cody Pollock ran just behind her, his jeering young face exultant with triumph.
“I’ve got you now!” he shouted, reaching for her, so close that Ellie could see the inflamed pimples on his cheeks. “Now there’s just two choices, Gibson. You can come and play nice with me, or you can jump into that river. What’s it gonna be?”
In the background of her dream Ellie could hear the voices of other boys and girls who looked on and talked in muffled tones, enjoying her terror.
Frantically she tried to find some way out of the cavern, but she’d reached a blank wall and there was no escape. She saw Cody’s horrible face and cruel hands, then the dark, swollen river…
Sweating and whimpering with fear, Ellie awoke fully and lay staring at the window screens.
It was a dream, she told herself, hugging her thin body. Just a stupid dream. Cody Pollock was nowhere close to her. If he ever came to this farm and tried to hurt her, her father would kill him.
That was when she realized some of the noises from her nightmare were still going on, drifting to her from inside the little house. She could even see a dim light in the hallway, like that partially lit cavern in her dream. And she heard the distant sound of splashing, running water, along with her father’s deep voice and an occasional soft reply.
Ellie frowned, wondering what was happening, then relaxed.
Probably Chris had had one of her accidents, and Daddy was cleaning her up. When their mother had first gone away, Chris used to wet the bed all the time, but she was getting a lot better now and it hardly ever happened anymore.
In fact, Ellie thought drowsily, most of the bad stuff started happening two years ago, right after their mother left.
For one thing, Daddy was always upset about how messy the house was. And Chris had been so unhappy she hardly talked to anybody for a while. Only Josh hadn’t seemed bothered by their mother’s absence.
Of course, the baby had been only six months old when Annie Gibson left her family.
“I stayed long enough to have Josh,” Annie once told her eldest daughter, “though God knows I was getting pretty damned anxious to be out of there. But fair’s fair, and your daddy was always real good to me. If he wanted that baby so bad, well, I guess I just had to give him the baby once I went and let myself get pregnant. Didn’t I, Jelly-Belly?”
Ellie had wanted to ask her mother how she could have gotten pregnant when she didn’t love their father anymore, but it was so hard to talk with her about anything serious. Annie’s mind was always darting on to something else before you could even start to take in what she’d just told you.
“You should see my new show outfit,” Annie had told Ellie dreamily, smoothing her daughter’s dark curls. “It’s bright red suede, with fringes hanging down to here. It’s gorgeous, Ellie. I need to lose a few pounds to fit into it, though.”
“Mama, don’t you love us?” Ellie had asked, trying not to cry. “How could you leave me and Chris and a sweet little baby like Josh, and go off singing to a bunch of people you don’t even know?”
“Why, honey, of course I love you!” Annie gave one of her rich, booming laughs and gathered Ellie into a fragrant embrace. “But some women are just naturally cut out to be housewives, and I’m not one of them. I was born to be a star, kiddo.”
And it was true—Annie Gibson was trying very hard to be a star. Her stage name, which she’d invented all on her own, was Justyn Thyme, and she’d already been hired to sing at a couple of big conventions in Nashville, as well as lots of nightclubs. She was earning good money, enough to fly back to Texas and see her children several times a year, and she kept believing her big break was just around the corner.
For Annie’s sake, Ellie hoped it was, too.
She’d long since given up hope that her mother would come back to them if her music career failed. To tell the truth, Ellie wasn’t even sure she’d welcome her mother back for more than those brief visits when she swept in carrying presents and took them all out for treats.
Though Annie’s company was exciting, after a while Ellie got tired of her mother’s constant laughter and chatter and wanted some peace again, the nice feeling of the little farmhouse with just her and Daddy and Chris and Josh, looking after themselves.
Still, it was true bad things had started happening after Annie left them, including Cody Pollock picking on her.
He was a bad boy from Lampasas whose parents weren’t able to control him. When Cody was eleven, they sent him down to their cousin, June Pollock, who lived alone in one of the big old houses in Crystal Creek, since her daughter, Carlie, had gone off to Rice University to study marine biology.
June was a strong, quiet woman who’d worked most of her life as a hotel waitress and chambermaid. Everybody in town liked and respected her. No doubt Cody’s parents thought she could do something with their son.
And Cody hadn’t gotten into much real trouble since coming to Crystal Creek, but nobody knew how mercilessly he tormented Ellie Gibson. The older boy had spotted her almost two years ago when she was just ten years old, and tried to grab her legs when she was on a swing at the park.
Ellie had kicked him, giving him a nosebleed. After that, Cody never left her alone. He took every opportunity he could to trip her or knock her books out of her hands or jab her in the ribs when they passed in the hallways, and usually managed to do so without being seen. In fact, he was always careful not to be seen, especially by June, who had no stomach for bullies. Kinfolk or not, June would have dealt with Cody fast enough if she knew what was happening.
During the rare occasions Ellie ran into him alone, she was terrified. Though she tried not to give any sign of how she felt, it was almost as if Cody could smell her fear, like a dog does, and got some kind of cruel enjoyment out of it.
The situation had grown even worse when Ellie’s body began to mature over the past spring and summer. Cody was thirteen by now, with a pimply face and the shadow of a mustache, and his manner toward her had also changed. Now there was real menace about him, a leering expression in his eyes that frightened her more than ever. When Cody got close to her nowadays, he didn’t only jab her in the ribs, but also tried to grab her growing breasts, which, to Ellie’s dismay, were visible under her loose T-shirts.
Worst of all, he’d gotten his friends involved, a gang of four other rough boys who swaggered across the schoolyard and terrorized everybody with their coarse words and threats of violence.
Ellie was never safe from them. At any moment she could round a corner at school and find Cody and his friends blocking a hallway, keeping her from getting to her next class. Or she would see them in the park, crouching behind bushes to call insults at her, or deliberately jostling up against her on the street when she walked downtown to Wall’s Drugstore.
Ms. Osborne, the middle-school principal, held regular assemblies where she urged kids to report bullies if their lives were being made unpleasant.
Unpleasant, Ellie thought bitterly, scowling at the ceiling. What a stupid word.
Her life was hell, pure and simple. Going to school every day was like running a gauntlet with no idea if you’d ever emerge safely.
“Don’t be afraid to speak to your parents,” Ms. Osborne told the kids. “Your teachers here at school and your parents, working together, can keep you safe from bullies. And those who are threatening you will be punished.”
Ellie rolled over and buried her face in the pillow.
It sounded good, that big promise from the principal, but Ellie didn’t believe a word of it. Her home-room teacher, Mr. Kilmer, was a shy man who was probably every bit as terrified of Cody Pollock and his friends as she was.
Ellie’s father, of course, wasn’t scared of anybody. But Ellie would die of embarrassment if she told him the things those boys said to her and what Cody Pollock threatened to do to her.
Besides, what good would it do, anyhow? Her father couldn’t kill Cody or make him move away, and so the bullying would just go on. Probably it would be even worse because Cody would know she’d told on him.
But tonight, for the first time, Ellie could see the possibility of escape.
She thought about the miraculous fifty-dollar bill she’d found in the river. It was like a present from God, just the same way He’d sent baby Moses floating down the river to lodge in the bulrushes.
And that money was going to give Ellie a whole new life.
She knew fifty dollars wasn’t enough for what she wanted to do.
But she had more than sixty dollars already in her bank account, painstakingly saved over the last two years, mostly birthday and Christmas money from Mary and Bubba. And her father had assured her it was her own money, so she could take the whole amount out of the bank anytime she wanted to.
A hundred dollars was just about all she needed. Ellie tensed with excitement when she thought of having so much money.
Her plan was simple. She intended to go into town one day soon, when her father was busy with the haying and couldn’t pay much attention to her. Ellie would withdraw the money, buy a bus ticket and go to Nashville to live with her mother.
She knew, of course, that Annie didn’t want to be saddled with a twelve-year-old kid when her career was just starting to take off, but she could hardly turn away her own daughter. Besides, Ellie was determined to show how much help she could be. She’d clean Annie’s apartment and cook good meals for her when she came home after singing all night, and she’d never, ever be in the way. And soon Annie would be glad her daughter had come to live with her.
Dreamily, Ellie pictured their relationship in Nashville, a whole world away from Cody and his awful friends.
Of course, she didn’t want to stay with Annie forever, because she’d get too lonely for Daddy and Chris and Josh. Maybe after a while, when Cody Pollock got tired of waiting for her to show up and found somebody else to bully, she’d be able to come home to the farm.
Meanwhile the fifty-dollar bill lay safely in her dresser drawer, a magical promise of better days ahead.
Within the house, the distant sounds began to fade. She heard her father emptying the bathtub, talking to Chris as he got her ready to go back to bed. Then he came striding through the hallway to fetch something from the kitchen, looking big and hairy in his boxer shorts.
Cautiously Ellie raised herself on one elbow and saw him carrying a folded newspaper back to his room. He must be planning to read in bed.
She settled down under the covers, wondering what Nashville was like, imagining her mother’s look of amazement when Ellie turned up on her doorstep. “Hi there,” Ellie would say casually. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in.”
Or she could say, “Howdy, ma’am. I heard you’re a big country-music star and I thought maybe you needed a cook and housekeeper.”
Annie was going to like that, Ellie thought drowsily. She always loved being called a star.
As she drifted off to sleep, Ellie acknowledged that she wasn’t really sure how her mother would receive her. With Annie, you never really knew. It depended on her mood, on whether she was gaining or losing weight and what else was going on in her life at the time.
Still, putting up with her mother’s moods was a whole lot better than facing Cody Pollock and his friends every day.
With a final shiver of revulsion, Ellie fell asleep and darkness closed in on the house again.
ISABEL BLINKED in the warm glow of sunlight. She opened her eyes and saw a patchwork quilt over her body, a green wall hung with framed pictures of children, a dusty nightstand and a wicker basket on the floor, piled with laundry.
She had a moment of intense panic, unable to recall where she was or how she’d come to be here.
Breathing deeply, she forced herself to stay calm and concentrate. Like images from some hazy, badly made movie, she saw herself pushing the car over the cliff, then jumping down behind it. She recalled the jarring shock of her landing, the scratches and blood, the hunger and chill and wetness as she fought her way through the brush. And the endless day that followed, when the oppressive heat had emphasized her throbbing pain, hunger and relentless thirst.
And then the sickening terror of creeping into the darkened house and being caught by that hairy giant wielding a club.
Isabel gripped the quilt and looked around wildly. Beyond that encounter, her memories weren’t nearly as clear. She’d been taking some food when he sneaked up behind her and grabbed her. After that she could dimly recall being handled and moved, the sheer bliss of finding herself immersed in warm sudsy water, and later a man giving her clothes while she pleaded with him not to tell anyone about her.
Isabel frowned in confusion and lifted her right arm, examining the neat gauze bandage. The arm was still swollen, though it didn’t feel as tender as it had the day before.
But had she also asked that hard-faced stranger to cut her hair?
Surely not. That part must have been a dream, one of the confused fantasies that kept jostling around in her mind.
Tentatively, she reached to touch her head and encountered the cropped, silky strands around her ears. She raised herself on her elbows in sudden alarm. If that man really had cut her hair, then he must also have been the one who’d helped to cover her nakedness when she almost fainted right after getting out of the bathtub. But who was he, and where was this farmhouse?
She noticed a glass of water and a plastic pill container on the nightstand, sitting on a sheet of paper with some handwriting on it. Isabel lifted the little container and saw it held several oblong yellow pills.
“If you’ve had no adverse reaction,” the note said, “take another antibiotic pill when you wake up. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The pharmacist’s label was from Wall’s Drugstore in Crystal Creek and read “Dan Gibson: Take one tablet every four hours.”
Isabel hesitated, then took one of the pills and gulped it down with a mouthful of water. She sat upright on the edge of the bed, feeling dizzy again, and dropped her head to her knees until the feeling passed.
When her mind cleared she stood up and looked down at what she wore—a man’s white shirt and plaid cotton boxer shorts.
In a cheval mirror by the dresser, Isabel caught sight of herself and stared in horror. Her face was scratched and bruised, her eyes darkly shadowed, and the cropped hair stood up every which way. With the baggy clothes and her bandaged arm, she looked like a waif, some kind of pitiful refugee from disaster.
“Well, I guess that’s what I am,” she said aloud, almost jumping at the sound of her voice in the quiet house.
Moving cautiously, she ventured to the door of the room and peered down the hallway. She could faintly recall the man saying something about having children in the house, and the need for her to stay out of sight in the bedroom.
But nobody appeared to be home at the moment. The place was silent except for birdsong drifting through the open windows, and the distant sound of the river.
Isabel walked slowly into the messy bathroom, recalling her blissful soak in that tub and later the man standing beside her to cut and blow-dry her hair.
She went into the kitchen and found a pot of coffee on a sideboard. The room appeared to have been hastily abandoned, with dishes stacked carelessly on the counter and in the sink. Evidence of children was everywhere. A smeared high chair sat at the table next to a couple of cartoon mugs with lids and straws, and toys littered the floor all the way into the living room and out to the porch.
Isabel poured herself a cup of coffee and added some cream from the fridge, but gave up looking through the disorganized cabinets for sugar. Instead, she toasted two slices of bread and ate them hungrily.
But by the time she’d devoured a banana and most of the remaining grapes, she was starting to feel guilty. Clearly the people who lived in this house didn’t have a lot of money, yet she was gobbling all their food and had no way of paying for it.
With sudden alarm she rushed back to the bedroom, moving so quickly that her head began to throb with pain again. On the floor near the window she found her jogging pants and shirt. They’d been washed and dried but were both ragged, stained with blood. Under the clothes were her bra and panties, also clean but tattered, along with the still damp leather cross-trainers.
Isabel’s heart sank. She lifted the right shoe and shook it, but she already knew the locker key was no longer there.
“I have the key,” a voice said behind her. “I put it away for you.”
Braced to flee, she turned to face the man. But this wasn’t the hairy, half-naked giant she dimly remembered from the night before. This was a tall, youngish man with light brown hair and green eyes, broad-shoulders and a strong, calm face.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
Isabel stood with the shoe in her hand, at a loss for words.
“Here,” he said, opening a wooden box on the dresser. “This is the key I found in your shoe.”
He held it out to her. She accepted the key, then merely clutched it in helpless silence.
“How about if I put it back?” he suggested gently. “It’ll be right here in this box.”
She nodded and gave him the key. His hands were big and square, with callused palms and surprisingly long fingers.
Nice hands, Isabel thought, remembering how they’d trimmed her hair and bandaged her arm with such gentleness.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much for helping me.”
He was watching her intently. “I didn’t have much choice, did I?”
“You could have thrown me out,” she said. “Lots of people would have.”
“That’s not the way we treat folks here in the country.” He moved to the door. “Care to join me?” he asked over his shoulder. “I haven’t had a chance to eat breakfast yet.”
“But aren’t your children…” Isabel began nervously.
“I took them over to my uncle’s place for a few days. None of them have any idea you’re here.”
She followed him to the kitchen and sank into a chair at the table while he poured her another cup of coffee. “Cream and sugar?” he asked.
She nodded and he fetched the cream jug from the fridge, then opened a little ceramic canister shaped like a tomato, handing it to her along with a spoon.
“So that’s where the sugar is. I didn’t think of looking in there,” she told him, trying to smile.
He didn’t smile back, just popped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster and brought some butter and jam to the table.
“Did you take another pill?” he asked. “Let me see that arm.”
She held it up for him to examine.
“The rest of your arm’s not as red and swollen today,” he said, holding her wrist. “How does it feel under the bandage?”
“It doesn’t hurt as much, but it’s getting pretty itchy.”
“Well, that’s supposed to be a sign of healing. I’ll change the bandage after we eat, and put some more salve on it.”
Isabel watched him, marveling at his calm, capable manner. He acted as if there was nothing unusual about a wild-eyed woman breaking into his house and trying to steal his food, then being dumped in his bathtub, sleeping in his bed…
His bed!
For the first time she remembered him lying beside her in the darkness of the night, holding himself away from her, his body so hard and muscular when she brushed against him that it was almost like sleeping next to a block of wood.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, feeling tears of shame stinging her eyelids. “I’ve been such a huge bother to you.”
His toast popped up. “Want some?” he asked. When she declined, he buttered both slices, then fixed his green eyes on her face. “What are you running away from?”
Isabel stared into the depths of her coffee mug. “I’m afraid to tell you,” she said at last. “I don’t want anybody to know who I am.”
“I already do know. There was a picture and an article about you in the paper last night.”
She tensed. “What did it say?”
“It said you were Isabel Delgado, an heiress from San Antonio, and that your car went into the Claro on Friday night, but your body hasn’t been recovered yet.”
Isabel felt sick with fear. “My picture was there, too?”
“I recognized you right away.”
“Oh, no!” She gripped the mug tightly. “I was hoping they wouldn’t do that.”
“I guess it’s pretty big news when a rich girl goes missing. So what are you hiding from, Isabel?”
She glanced nervously around the silent kitchen. “Please don’t call me that!”
“There’s nobody around,” he said. “My nearest neighbor is about a mile downriver.”
“Is this farm anywhere close to where the McKinneys live?”
“That’s him. My neighbor, I mean.”
Isabel felt a return of that strange, dreamlike confusion and panic. “You mean J.T. McKinney is your neighbor?”
“Why? Do you know him?”
“Oh, God,” She dropped her head into her hands. “There’s nowhere to hide.”
“If it’s any comfort,” he said after a moment, “I can tell you that right now you don’t look anything like the woman in the picture.”
“I don’t?” She raised her head to look at him.
He grinned, showing even white teeth. “Haven’t you seen yourself in a mirror lately?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t sure if…”
“Well, my haircut and all those cuts and bruises have done a real job on you. You look like a totally different person.” He watched her thoughtfully. “So what should I call you?”
She pondered. “Call me Bella,” she said at last. “That’s what my…my sister used to call me,” she added wistfully, “when I was a little girl.”
“Okay, Bella. From now on, that’s your name and we’ll never use the other one. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said feeling relieved. “My name isn’t Isabel anymore. It’s Bella.”
“Now, Bella, why don’t you tell me what you’re so afraid of? And then we’ll try to figure out what we can do about it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
DAN STUDIED THE WOMAN across the table. Bella Delgado had none of the arrogance he normally associated with heiresses to great wealth. Quite the opposite. She seemed awkward and unsure of herself, and her gratitude was obviously sincere.
For that matter, so was her fear.
“It’s my ex-husband,” she said at last, looking down at the table. Her eyelashes were dark brown tipped with gold, so long and dense that they cast a shadow on her pale cheeks. “His name is Eric Matthias, and he lives in Austin.”
“What about him?” Dan asked when she paused.
“He’s been stalking me.” She looked up, meeting his eyes directly. “He turns up at a lot of places I go, restaurants and such, even though he works in Austin and I’ve been living in San Antonio for the past couple of years. At least twice in the last month I’ve seen him sitting in a car outside on the street, watching my father’s house.”
“Anything else?”
“He phones me a lot, even after I’ve changed my unlisted number. No matter where I go, and I mean anywhere in the world, Eric calls me within a day or two just to show how easily he can track me.”
Dan watched her thoughtfully. “What do you think he wants?”
“I don’t know for sure, but he scares me.”
“Did he hurt you when you were married to him?” Dan asked.
“Not physically, though he was emotionally abusive all the time. And he terrified me because he was so intense. Mostly he…” Her voice broke.
“What?”
“Eric was crazy with jealousy. I never gave him the slightest cause, but that made no difference. He’d invent things to be mad about, then sulk about them for weeks. After I finally left and went back home to my father’s house, Eric cried and said nobody else would ever have me. I’m sure he means it.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Isabel shivered and hugged her arms. “When I told him I was leaving him, Eric…tried to kill my dog.”
Dan stared at her.
“Afterward he claimed it was a misunderstanding,” she said miserably. “Rufus was a Pekingese, the sweetest little thing. I’d had him ever since I was a girl. He was almost fifteen years old, and stiff with arthritis. I always took such care of him,” she said wistfully. “I adored him. Eric was really jealous of Rufus, about all the time I spent with him.”
“So what happened?”
“We were arguing, and Eric held Rufus over the edge of balcony, ten floors above the street. He kept threatening to drop him, demanding that I grovel and beg. I leaned way out onto the ledge to get my dog back and almost fell myself. Eric just laughed at me.”
“And your dog?”
“Poor Rufus was never the same. He died a few weeks later.”
“Didn’t you report that to the police?”
“Eric’s a detective lieutenant with the Austin police force,” she said wearily. “A fifteen-year veteran and he’s very popular with the other cops. At the time he was distraught over our split, and they all felt sorry for him. He claimed I invented the business with Rufus to make him look bad. It was my word against his.”
“But you’re genuinely frightened of him?”
“I’m terrified.” She met Dan’s eyes steadily. “I saw his face when he…he was holding that poor little dog out above the traffic. Dan, it was so awful. I still have nightmares about it.”
“But why can’t your family help you deal with this man?”
“My father assured me he’d hire some extra security to watch the house, though he couldn’t do anything about the phone calls. Daddy’s always seemed neutral about our split, but a while ago I found out he’s really on Eric’s side. My father is actually helping my ex-husband to stalk me. It’s no wonder,” she added bitterly, “that Eric always knows where I am.”
“Come on, Bella.” Dan felt a rising concern for her emotional balance. “Don’t you think that sounds a little paranoid?”
“I saw them,” she said passionately. “Last month I dropped in at a pub downtown to meet a friend. It was a day when my father thought I’d gone to Houston for the weekend.”
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Margot Dalton
Welcome to Crystal Creek, TexasIf this is your first visit to the friendly ranching town of Crystal Creek, deep in the Texas hill country, get ready to meet some unforgettable people. If you've been here before, you'll recognize old friends and make some new ones.Isabel Delgado has to fake her own death in order to get away from her vengeful husband. But when her plan goes awry, she finds herself stranded in Crystal Creek and in more danger than ever. Then rancher Dan Gibson has an idea–marry him. Dan needs help raising his three small kids, and Isabel needs a new identity.Perfect! Except Isabel's feeling for Dan–and his for her–could put them both in a different kind of danger.
“We can get married.”
Isabel’s jaw dropped as she turned to stare at Dan. “Married? How would it help to marry a total stranger?”
“It would give you a legal name. One that wouldn’t jump out at anyone searching a computer bank. Instead of Isabel Delgado, you’d be Bella Gibson. You can apply for credit cards and other forms of identification under that name.”
Isabel was silent. “Even if I agreed to this,” she said at last, “it’s not possible to get married without some proof of identification and citizenship, is it?”
“It’s possible,” he said calmly, “when my cousin’s the county clerk.”
She studied him, amazed to be having this conversation and even more astonished that she was actually considering his offer. At that moment another obstacle presented itself.
“This house is so small,” she said at last, her cheeks flaming. “And your children are in all the other bedrooms. If we’re supposed to be married…”
Dear Reader,
Almost ten years ago, Harlequin approached a number of authors with an exciting new idea. We were given the challenge of helping to create a central Texas town and ranching community, along with a host of exciting, heartwarming characters to populate this setting. The result was the 24-book CRYSTAL CREEK series, which has remained popular with readers since publication of the very first book in 1993.
As an author, I loved everything about writing the CRYSTAL CREEK books. So you can imagine my excitement when the Superromance editors suggested I might want to return to Crystal Creek with a new series of books. I could hardly wait! In Plain Sight, the beginning of the new miniseries, will bring back many of your old favorites. Bubba Gibson and Mary are here, still raising their ostriches, along with J. T. McKinney, Manny Hernandez, Howard Blake and Nora Slattery down at the Longhorn. More and more of the familiar townsfolk will pop up in the next two books, along with some newcomers you’re going to like, as well.
I loved making this nostalgic return to Crystal Creek. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Warmest regards,
Margot Dalton
Crystal Creek titles by Margot Dalton
HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE
928—CONSEQUENCES.
940—THE NEWCOMER.
In Plain Sight
Margot Dalton
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u9fc312b4-692d-51b0-b4e7-ad9a6619754d)
CHAPTER TWO (#uaa2d53cb-280b-53ec-a420-2f827ba4b7d2)
CHAPTER THREE (#u09a8e928-5294-537a-85d3-1d797879ba43)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u51b33304-96ba-54cf-af18-2673ac7e8457)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u2c66c524-a2e0-5a62-ab1e-1ec3490fb1f5)
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)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
ISABEL DELGADO was a precise, orderly person. She liked things to work the way they were supposed to, and objects to be stored in their proper places. At school she’d sometimes been accused of keeping the contents of her handbag in alphabetical order.
That was an exaggeration, but she did compartmentalize with care.
No messy rummaging for Isabel. She could put her hand instantly on a nail file, a pack of tissues or a library card.
So when it came time to plan her death, she embarked on the project with the same meticulous care.
Everything in her plan had to function smoothly, with no loose ends or messy slipups. Isabel realized all too well that good preparation was her only chance to achieve any possibility of life after death.
For weeks she planned her “fatal accident.” She’d driven around the Texas countryside north of San Antonio to scout the best possible locations, imagining the scenario, trying to anticipate anything that could go wrong.
She put an envelope full of cash, the diamonds she’d inherited from her mother and all her stock certificates into a safe-deposit box at a bank in San Antonio. Afterward she wondered how long it would be before she could safely slip back to the city and reclaim this small fortune.
The most time-consuming project of all was obtaining duplicates of her identification papers, getting everything reissued from birth certificate and social-security card to passport, marriage license and divorce papers.
A few weeks earlier when she had everything together, Isabel had driven to Abilene to deposit a bulky envelope containing the documents, along with a generous sum of cash, in a locker at the bus depot.
On the final two days her stomach was knotted with tension, and she was too excited to eat. But though she was almost faint with hunger, Isabel knew that in a few hours—after her “death” had been successfully accomplished—she would move onto Abilene, and from there embark on her new life.
The first thing she planned to do was eat an enormous meal, with cheesecake for dessert.
On a warm Friday evening in late September, she was finally ready.
For one last time she stood in the vast foyer of her father’s San Antonio mansion, dressed in a running suit of navy blue cotton, with white cross-trainers and a red terry-cloth headband, looking around at the kind of luxury that had been her heritage for all the twenty-seven years of her life.
Isabel Delgado was a true golden girl, and not just because of the enormous wealth and privilege she’d been born into. She was blond and tanned, slim and dainty, with the finely drawn, muscular frame of the dedicated runner. Her tanned skin, her French-braided hair, even the highlights in her hazel eyes were a rich golden-brown.
As a small child she’d been a source of pride to her father, but nowadays Pierce Delgado hardly ever came home, and her old friends were all busy with their growing families. Unless the police came here directly with the news of Isabel’s death, it could be a long time before anybody even noticed she was gone. Except for one person…
When Isabel realized how little impact the news of her death would have on almost anybody, she felt chilled and deeply sad.
If her sister, Luciana, had still been around, she’d care about Isabel. But their father’s anger and coldness had driven Luce away years ago. By now nobody even knew where she was, though Isabel often thought about her beautiful older sister.
“Well, goodbye, everybody,” Isabel said aloud to the silent house, bending to pick up her water bottle and a leather waist pack from the bottom of the stairs. “Hey, it’s been great.”
She left the house, locking the door carefully behind her, and ran down the walk to her little blue Mercedes convertible, which was sitting at the curb with the top rolled down.
Isabel got in, pushed a cassette into the player and looked back at the stately pile of cut limestone that was her father’s house, with its grounds so massive that the equally opulent homes of the neighbors were barely within view.
For the first time she had a stirring of doubt about her plan. But then she remembered the escalating dread of recent weeks, the sheer heart-stopping terror that pervaded most of her existence.
Her life was intolerable, and the fear had to stop. Nobody could live this way.
Isabel squared her shoulders, put the sleek little car into gear and headed down the street.
She drove northwest on the freeway leading out of San Antonio, then took an off-ramp and went up through Fredericksburg, deep into the heart of the Hill Country west of Austin.
Out here, far away from the city and the freeway, the summer evening was beautiful, though it was chilly enough that she was tempted to put the top up.
But that wasn’t part of the plan. On the off chance that somebody happened to see her car in the Hill Country and testify about it later, it was important for them to notice that the convertible top had been down as she drove.
So she turned up her jacket collar for warmth, enjoying the way the fading light spilled across the hills, and the mesquite and live oak trees rustled and whispered in the breeze.
Heavy clouds massed behind her to the south, threatening a rainstorm, but by the time that storm arrived, she would be well on her way.
Isabel smiled and tapped her fingers on the steering wheel in time to a country song, looking with pleasure at the countryside rolling by. She’d always loved the Hill Country.
Her mother, Pierce Delgado’s second wife, had been friends with the J.T. McKinney family at Crystal Creek, whose successful ranching and more recent wine-growing operation was one of the jewels of Claro County. Isabel had spent many of her summers there as a child. In fact, the family warmth and hospitality at the Double C ranch had been one of the best things in Isabel’s lonely childhood. The McKinneys gave her a view of a life so different from her own, with her absent father, brittle alcoholic mother and a half brother and half sister who were both almost a decade older and busy with adult lives of their own by the time Isabel entered adolescence. The memories brought a hot prickle of tears to her eyes.
But this was no time to give way to emotion. She had to stay cool and alert, or she’d never be able to pull the whole thing off.
North of Fredericksburg she turned off the highway and drove up a side road to park on a rocky outcropping, a lookout point high above the Claro River, known as Rimrock Park.
At this time of year the Claro was a lazy sparkle, reflecting the rich colors of the sunset. It gave no hint of the raging torrent it could become in the spring when it flooded and went thundering through the valley like a freight train, sweeping away everything in its path.
Isabel had selected this particular point because the banks narrowed here; the Claro was certainly deep enough to cover a car and had a current powerful enough to carry a body into the Colorado and on toward Lake Travis.
Also, there was a well-used picnic area below, about a hundred yards upriver on the other side. Even from that distance she could see a couple of families with little kids and pets, their food spread out on tables while a group of men nearby played horseshoes.
She drove her car forward on the lookout point, as far as she could without slipping over the edge and plunging into the water a hundred feet below. When she turned off the music, a clink of metal on metal from the game of horseshoes drifted up to her, along with the muffled shouts of children and barking of dogs.
The sweet everyday sounds seemed unbearably precious and reminded her painfully of everything she’d lost.
Isabel’s jaw set in determination. She drew off the terry-cloth headband and pulled on a navy baseball cap, tugging it low enough over her forehead to obscure most of her face.
Then she took her waist pack and wedged it firmly under the front seat. The leather pouch contained all her ID, including her passport and credit cards.
At first she’d been reluctant to include her passport, because it had been such a hassle to get the new one that now waited for her in that bus-depot locker in Abilene. But Isabel needed to make it look as if she’d been leaving the country and had accidentally driven her car over the cliff while taking one last look at the Claro River.
Probably she’d gone to some unnecessary effort, but the whole scene had to be completely believable.
After all, no one who was faking her own death would choose to sacrifice her social-security card, her passport, driver’s license and credit cards.
Time was running out. She had to do it now, while the people were still in the picnic ground and could attest to seeing a small blue car plunge into the river from the opposite cliffs.
Her hands began to tremble with nerves and she clenched them into fists, then checked her jacket pocket one last time to make sure she had her wad of cash and the bus ticket she’d bought in San Antonio. In her shoe, under her heel, she could feel the hard shape of the key to the locker in Abilene.
Finally she got out of the car and stood holding the door open.
One more time Isabel checked to make sure the leather pack was wedged under the front seat. For a moment she considered putting it in the glove compartment for safety, but decided that might look a little too staged.
Nervously she patted her pocket, the one containing her money and her ticket to a new life, then tugged the cap even lower over her eyes.
At last she reached inside to slip the car into neutral, gripped the door frame and began to push it toward the edge of the precipice. As soon as it went over the cliff among the scrub mesquite and cactus, she would set off down the road in the opposite direction from the way she’d come, like a jogger out for a run in the cool of the evening. In the unlikely event that anybody asked, she could say she’d already passed the lookout point and hadn’t seen a car there.
Her plan was to jog about four miles—an easy distance for Isabel—to the bus depot in Crystal Creek, which was the nearest small town. There she would use the ticket in her pocket to board a bus, ride up to Abilene, about a hundred miles away, and collect her stash of money and her ID.
She would have to lie low for a while in Abilene, of course, until she knew Eric had finally given up searching for her. Then she could devise some way to get safely out of the country. Maybe she’d try going to Mexico again, or to Canada…
But just as the front wheels of the Mercedes hung in space, ready to plunge over the cliff, one of the back wheels was blocked by a small boulder. Isabel pushed and sweated, trying with all her might to rock the little car free.
Suddenly she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered, looking around wildly. “Now what?”
There was nowhere to hide among the scrub mesquite and boulders, and the sound was growing closer. In fact, it sounded like two vehicles, possibly a couple of kids on dirt bikes.
If somebody spotted her up here trying to push the car over the cliff, all her careful plans would be ruined. Worse than ruined, because Eric would know what she’d tried to do, and from now on he’d dog her movements even more relentlessly.
The man was bent on possessing her. If he couldn’t, he would surely kill her. And after this, nothing would stop him.
With a despairing sob, Isabel gave one great heave and finally sent the small vehicle over the edge. As it fell she closed her eyes and jumped into the void just behind it.
The next few moments seemed to take hours. She was conscious of space and weightlessness, of the sun blinding her and of the wind that tugged at her clothes and sang in her ears.
Then she was crashing down through tree branches and rustling leaves, rolling among thickets of brush that scratched her face and hands. At the same time she heard a mighty splash, followed by a chorus of startled cries from across the river.
Isabel lay facedown in the heavy brush, cradling her head in her arms like a woman awaiting a blow. Her chest heaved and her heart raced. She was gasping so hard that she was sure her breathing must be audible all the way across the river.
Gradually she began to realize her body was still in one piece and that, for the moment at least, she was safe. Through the screen of brush she could hear the people across the river, their voices clear and distinct on the evening air.
“It was a car!” somebody shouted. “A little blue car. I saw it just when it hit the water!”
“Was anybody in it?”
“I couldn’t tell,” the reply came as Isabel strained to hear, trying to calm her noisy breathing.
“Somebody call the fire department! Jimmy, get one of those trucks and drive downriver. See if you can find anybody in the water.”
Slowly her panic ebbed. Apparently the people on the opposite bank hadn’t noticed her body when she’d jumped off the cliff behind the car. And whoever had been driving up to the summit behind her wouldn’t have arrived in time to see her jump.
Isabel sat up and did a cautious assessment of her physical state.
She was covered with dirt, had a lot of scrapes and bruises, and was bleeding freely from a gash on her right arm where the jacket sleeve had been torn to shreds. Her face felt moist, and when she touched her cheek, her fingers came away red with blood.
“Damn,” she muttered, her thoughts racing. “Damn!”
It would be impossible to get on the bus in this condition without being noticed. Somehow she had to figure out a way to get herself cleaned up and find a change of clothes.
Maybe when darkness came, she could steal something from a farmer’s clothesline. But did anybody even use clotheslines anymore?
Isabel didn’t have a clue. She’d never done laundry in her life.
Meanwhile the confusion on the other side of the river seemed to be growing. She heard sirens approaching in the distance, then the frantic barking of a dog.
“Oh, God, I need to get away from here,” she said, looking around wildly.
The witnesses clearly weren’t sure the car had been occupied when it went into the water. But even if nobody had seen her falling behind it, they would still come over here and search the riverbank in case a driver or passengers had fallen out while the car was in flight and were lying injured in the bushes.
Shivering in the evening chill, Isabel pulled off her jacket, gripped the hem between her teeth and tore a ragged strip from the front to bind her arm, then twisted the length of cloth with a stick until the bleeding stopped.
She wondered if her arm needed stitches and how she was going to get proper medical attention. But when she removed her makeshift tourniquet, the flow of blood was just a trickle, already clotting.
The sky darkened, and Isabel looked up to see clouds massing overhead. Lightning split the air, and a low rumble of thunder came shuddering across the hills. At the same time, raindrops began to land on her face and patter in the bushes nearby.
The rain was a stroke of good luck, Isabel realized. A heavy rainfall would soon wash away any trace of her presence on the riverbank, even if they came and searched with dogs.
But she had to find some shelter. Maybe she could pay somebody to—
With sudden, heart-stopping terror, she paused and looked down at her torn jacket. For the first time she realized that not just the sleeve but most of the jacket’s right front, including the pocket, had been completely torn away.
Slowly, numb with dread, Isabel tried to make her sluggish mind work out what had happened.
As she’d pushed the car, her jacket must have caught on it somewhere, maybe the door or the rear bumper. Her pocket had been ripped free, possibly even carried into the water with the car.
And that meant her money and her bus ticket to Abilene were both gone.
She whimpered, then buried her face in her hands and struggled to compose herself.
Panic wasn’t going to accomplish anything. She had to think, and there was no time to waste. Emergency vehicles were arriving on the other side of the river, and the shouts and calls of the searchers intensified, though their words were harder to make out now that rain had begun to fall heavily.
She had no time to scour the riverbank for her lost possessions, even if by some miracle they’d fallen clear of the water. It was important to get away from here before people came around to the other side of the river and launched a search in the brush.
Again she tried to think, to assess all the possibilities.
If the bit of torn jacket had gone into the water along with the car, would that alert police investigators to what she’d done?
Not necessarily, she decided.
They weren’t going to find a body, of course, so they would be likely to assume part of the jacket had torn free when the body washed out of the car. The bus ticket was printed on such flimsy paper a dousing in the river would turn it to unrecognizable pulp. And a wad of money would carry no significance to anybody. People probably assumed women like Isabel Delgado carried wads of money around with them all the time.
It would be worse, though, if the jacket fragments had fallen free of the car on this side of the river and somebody found that bus ticket. Then someone might work out what she’d been trying to do. But the brush was so thick here at the base of the cliff. And the rain was torrential now—one of those storms that seemed to blow out of nowhere during autumn in the Hill Country.
Though she was starting to feel chilled and sick, Isabel was still grateful for the rain. It fell like a dense silver curtain, soothing her wounds and hiding her from view as she made her way though the brush.
She was almost a hundred yards downriver, away from the shouts and sirens, before the full enormity of her situation hit her.
Without the contents of her jacket pocket, she had no way of surviving. She had no money and no way to get herself—unseen—to Abilene to reclaim her careful stash of identification papers.
When she realized this, she sank to her knees on the carpet of rotting leaves and wrapped her arms around her shivering body.
Her hair was wet and dirty, plastered to her neck and face, and she was gripped by uncontrollable spasms. Moisture dripped from her cheeks, frightening her, but when she touched her face, no trace of blood stained her hands.
High above and upriver she heard calls from the summit where she’d been and the sound of people descending the slope.
Panicking again, she got up and set off once more, crouching low and running along a leafy path in the brush made by deer and rabbits. Rain was still pouring and night had set in with alarming suddenness. She could barely make out the path and stayed on it mostly by instinct. Whenever she blundered into the surrounding thickets, cruel branches and thorns grabbed at her shredded jogging pants and stabbed her legs.
After what seemed like several hours, she slowed her pace. The heavy rain was letting up, and the night was silent except for the rustle of dripping trees and the mournful hooting of an owl somewhere nearby. The clouds separated and a partial moon drifted out from the lacy screen.
Isabel crawled in among the lower branches of a cedar tree and paused to catch her breath. She was chilled through, badly winded, weak from loss of blood. Her arm had begun to throb painfully. She wondered if the gash could have become infected so soon.
But in spite of the cold and the pain of her injuries, she was most distressed by the fact that she no longer had a plan. Her only thought was to put distance between herself and anybody who might be searching the riverbank. Beyond that, she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do, or how to make her way to Abilene so she could use the key that was still safely tucked in her running shoe.
Various possibilities presented themselves, none of them very rational.
She could knock on the door of a farmhouse along the river, tell the owner she’d been in an accident and ask to call her father.
No. Pierce Delgado was in Europe on business.
Maybe she could ask for help from her brother or one of her father’s personal staff, but after what she’d seen a few weeks earlier, she didn’t really trust any of them. And she didn’t want anyone to know Isabel Delago was still alive.
Besides, even making a phone call would mean revealing her identity. Nobody in their right mind would let a stranger into the house to use the phone, even an injured one.
Maybe she could claim amnesia, saying the trauma of her accident had driven all memory from her mind.
But then they would call the police, and that prospect was so distressing that Isabel, who never cried, began to sob aloud.
Suddenly weary beyond endurance, she stretched out and lay full-length on the soft carpet of leaves. Her head and arm throbbed, and her body ached with fatigue.
I’ll just rest for a minute, she thought. After a little rest I’ll feel better, and then I can decide what to do.
It was her last conscious thought for many hours. Almost at once she fell deeply asleep and didn’t wake until the morning sun was high in the sky.
CHAPTER TWO
THE IRRIGATION PUMP had broken down again. Dan Gibson knelt and prodded it carefully with grease-stained fingers, wondering if all it needed was something simple like new washers, or if this was going to be another expensive overhaul. Maybe he’d even have to replace the creaky old piece of machinery.
He couldn’t afford a new pump without getting another operating loan. And even Bill Hendricks, the sympathetic bank manager in Crystal Creek, was probably going to tell him that was impossible.
Wearily, Dan sat back on his heels and squinted into the fading sunlight where his children played along the river.
Twelve-year-old Ellie was in the water, wading up to her knees, bent almost double as she searched for arrowheads in the bright shallows.
Chris was four years younger than Ellie, and she wasn’t allowed to go into the water unless Dan was with her. She was dragging their red wagon along the river’s edge, and she and little Josh were filling it with mounds of colored pebbles they intended to use for some mysterious game of their own.
Josh was only two, chubby and energetic in a blue-denim romper suit. His sisters were in sandals, but Josh wore heavy miniature boots to protect his feet from the rocks along the shore. His golden curls shone in the sunlight, and his voice drifted on the wind, as happy as a little bird’s.
Dan grinned briefly and tipped his cap back, watching the children. But his smile faded when he looked around at the hay meadow behind him, then at the stalled irrigation pump.
At least a heavy rainfall the night before had provided some moisture for his rapidly maturing crop. It gave him a little breathing room while he worked on the pump. But if he couldn’t harvest this final hay crop and pay back a few loans, his financial prospects for the coming year were going to be damned bleak.
“Ellie,” he called, “it’s time for the kids to have a bath and go to bed.”
The two girls raised a howl of protest, claiming extra privileges because it was Saturday night. Josh chimed in, though Dan suspected his son was objecting more to be companionable than out of any real indignation.
Josh was such an easygoing little boy. He actually loved the routines of bedtime, with his bubble bath and toys and storybooks.
“Okay, fifteen more minutes,” Dan said. “But you two have already been up more than an hour past your schoolday bedtime.”
A contented silence fell, and he returned his attention to the pump.
Dan was a tall, well-built man in jeans and a plaid work shirt, with a disheveled head of light brown hair that was as unruly as Josh’s if it got too long. He had smoky green eyes and a grin that transformed his hard face, though these days it was an increasingly rare occurrence.
As he probed the pump mechanism with a screwdriver blade, something caught his eye and he looked up quickly. A flash of color glimmered in the brush near the water, just downriver from where his children were playing. But whatever was in the thicket vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
He frowned, wondering if one of the McKinney horses had strayed this far from the Double C. If so, he’d have to give J.T. a call.
For a moment he considered going over and checking, then dismissed the thought.
Most likely it was a deer, or a hawk flying low after some scurrying rodent, or even a plastic sack blown along the river in last night’s storm, caught and fluttering from a branch.
At least to his immense relief, Dan found the problem with the pump—a ragged washer—and knew the repair was only going to cost a few dollars. He had only to get to the hardware store in Crystal Creek.
Disaster was averted for another day, he thought wryly.
But how many bullets could a man dodge before one of them finally hit him and killed all his dreams?
“Come on, kids,” he said, getting to his feet. “Time’s up.”
There was another brief protest, but this time it was halfhearted. They knew he meant what he said, and it was pointless to argue.
Chris walked at her father’s side toward the little farmhouse, holding his hand and pulling the wagon, now heavily loaded. Dan looked down into her earnest, freckled face. “What are you going to do with all the rocks, honey?”
“Josh and I are building a castle,” Chris said. “We’re starting on it tomorrow. It’s going to be awesome, Daddy.”
“Awesome,” Josh said contentedly, trotting at Dan’s other side, clinging to his other hand. “Gonna be awesome.”
“You two babies don’t have a clue how to build a castle,” Ellie said scornfully from behind them. “It’ll just be a big mess.”
Chris’s face turned pink with outrage, and Dan ruffled her hair.
“Maybe I’ll have a little time to help with the castle tomorrow, sweetie,” he said.
His younger daughter’s eyes blazed with happiness. “Really, Daddy?”
“Maybe,” he said cautiously.
Chris rounded on her sister in triumph. “Daddy’s going to help me and Josh build the castle,” she said, “and it’ll be the best castle in the whole world. So there, you stupid dummy.”
“Stupid dummy yourself,” Ellie said, unperturbed. “I wish Gypsy was here,” she added. “Does it hurt to get spayed?”
“Gypsy’s having a good time at the clinic with all the other dogs,” Dan said. “She’ll be home tomorrow.”
Josh stumbled on a tuft of grass near the house and whimpered, rubbing his eyes with a dirty hand. Dan picked the little boy up and carried him the rest of the way, wondering if he’d be able to keep his word and find a few minutes the next day to help Chris with her castle.
He worked from dawn to dark, often eighteen hours at a stretch. In addition to the hay fields, he grew grapes for the McKinney winery, kept bees in rows of wooden hives at the edge of the hay meadow, a small herd of cattle and some pigs and goats, anything he could think of to pay the mortgage and keep his farming operation afloat.
And with three little kids to look after, his life wasn’t easy. In fact, most of the time it was a waking nightmare.
Still holding Josh, who nestled drowsily against his father’s shoulder with a thumb jammed into his mouth, Dan followed the two little girls into the house.
In the kitchen he glanced around and sighed.
The place looked like a tornado had passed through. No matter how hard he tried, tidiness and order seemed impossible to attain. Toys and clothes littered the floor and the sink was stacked with dirty supper dishes; the girls had fought over whose turn it was to do them. Through the doorway he could see into the sparsely furnished living room and knew how badly it needed dusting.
There were times when Dan longed fiercely for the simple things, like a clean house and a hot meal on the table when he came in from work, and some peace from kids who seem to squabble all the time.
Not that he’d ever want to be parted from his children for long. But sometimes he was just so weary.
He sent Chris into the bathroom to run a tub for herself and Josh, then began to pick up the things scattered about the floor. Ellie surprised him by marching over to the sink and filling it with hot water.
Something about her rigid back alerted him. He sat down at the table and watched her thoughtfully.
Ellie’s real name was Danielle, which she hated with such passion that nobody ever dared to use it. Of the three children, she was the only one who looked like their mother, and one day she was going to be a real beauty.
She had silky black hair with a touch of curl, clipped short around her face, and big brown eyes that could be lively or sullen depending on her mood. In June, just a month after her twelfth birthday, she’d begun her menstrual periods and been appalled by her body’s treachery. It was “gross,” she’d said, and burst into tears.
Dan had cuddled her tenderly while she cried. He’d shown her books on female reproduction and explained that what was happening to her was not a tragedy but a wondrous thing.
But her moods were more erratic all the time nowadays, with shifts that left him feeling baffled and hopeless.
He suspected she might be having a tough time getting along with some of the kids at school, though she refused to talk to him about it. When he spoke to her teachers, they said Ellie was bright but very quiet. None of them were aware of any particular problem.
At the moment, however, Dan sensed that his daughter’s silence needed to be explored. He sat at the kitchen table, doodling with a blue crayon in one of Chris’s coloring books and considering how to go about it.
He could hear muffled shouts and laughter from the direction of the bathroom, and winced at the sound of water splashing onto the worn tiles he’d never had time to replace.
“So,” he said casually, “what’s up, Ellie?”
She kept her back turned, wiping dishes, rinsing them and stacking them in the plastic rack. “I don’t see why we can’t have a dishwasher,” she muttered. “You should see Aunt Mary’s house now, Daddy. She has two dishwashers. Last month Uncle Bubba gave her another one just for pots and pans.”
“Good for Mary,” he said mildly. “She’s worked hard all her life, and her ostriches are making a lot of money for them now. She deserves anything Bubba wants to give her. But we can’t afford a dishwasher.”
“We can’t afford anything,” the girl said. “It’s so stupid, how poor we are.”
Dan restrained himself from making a sharp reply. She was just a child and couldn’t be expected to understand his financial situation.
“So what’s going on?” he asked again.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, but he could see the way her thin shoulders stiffened.
“You’ve been real quiet since we came in from outside. Is something bothering you?”
“Of course not.” She wiped a plate with unnecessary energy and slammed it into the dish rack. “Except that I have to do stupid Chris’s job for her because she’s too lazy.”
“You might as well tell me, Ellie,” Dan said reasonably, “because you know I’m going to find out, anyhow. And I might be upset if something happens to catch me by surprise.”
When she turned around, her boyish face wasn’t defiant, just troubled.
“Daddy…” She leaned against the counter, one thin brown leg wrapped around the other. Dan could see the bare sole of her foot, dirty and marked with a painful-looking bruise.
“What, sweetheart?” he asked.
“If I found something, would it be mine to keep?”
“I guess it depends on where you found it,” he said after a moment’s thought.
“I mean, if I found it here on our farm and I knew it didn’t belong to you or Chris and Josh.”
“So how would it get here?”
She turned away uneasily and looked out the window while Dan watched her with growing interest.
“How about if the wind blew it here?” Ellie said, fixing her dark eyes on him again. “Would it be mine if I found it?”
Dan thought this over, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “If the wind blew something here and you found it, I’d say you were entitled to keep it.”
She turned back around, relief shining in her face. She reached into the pocket of her shorts, took a bit of paper out and came over to place it on the table in front of him. Dan stared in astonishment.
It was a wet, crumpled, fifty-dollar bill.
“I found it in the river,” she said. “Just floating along in the water.”
“No kidding.” Dan studied the bill, fascinated, then grinned at his daughter. “Let’s get some flashlights and go back out there,” he said. “Maybe there’s more.”
She laughed, picked up the bill and returned it to her pocket.
“It’ll have to go into your bank account,” Dan told her. “Unless there’s anything you need to buy. Clothes or something for school.”
“I don’t want any stupid clothes. Can you put it in the bank for me when you go to town?”
“Sure,” Dan said. “And if things get real tough,” he added, “I can borrow from you. With fifty dollars in the bank, you’ll be the richest person in the family.”
She smiled, then turned away and began drying dishes. An uneasy silence fell.
“So,” Dan said at last, “we haven’t had a chance to talk much since yesterday, Ellie. What happened with Mrs. Graham?”
Her back stiffened again, and she rubbed a plate without looking at him. “That woman was such an old cow,” she muttered. “And she was mean, Daddy. You should have heard how she yelled at Josh.”
Dan sighed. “You never give them a chance, honey. Mrs. Graham was the third housekeeper I’ve hired in the last four months, and she only lasted a few days. That’s some kind of record, even for us.”
“We don’t need a housekeeper,” Ellie said. “Chris and I can do it.”
Dan looked around at the messy kitchen, then back at his daughter. “She told me you were rude and impossible to manage.”
“She was a jerk!” Ellie said passionately. “I hated her!”
Dan struggled to be patient.
“You hate all of them, sweetheart. But we need some help, and it’s not easy to find a housekeeper like Mrs. Graham who’s willing to live in Crystal Creek and drive back and forth every day. Most of them want to live in, but we don’t have an extra room.”
“We don’t need her! I hate having strangers in my house, Daddy. Especially jerks like her who don’t even know what they’re doing.”
“She was highly recommended by the last family she worked for,” Dan said. “And she was willing to do housework and child care and make a hot meal in the evening. It seemed like a pretty good deal to me.”
“But it must have cost a lot.” Ellie turned to look at him directly.
“Quite a bit,” Dan admitted.
“And you’re always talking about how we don’t have any money.”
“Things are tight, but some expenses are necessary, Ellie. I worry about Chris and Josh. They need more attention than they’re getting, and I’m too busy to look after them properly.”
“I can look after them,” Ellie said stubbornly. “And Chris and I can work harder to keep the house clean. I’m learning to cook supper, too.”
“Macaroni and cheese every night isn’t exactly a balanced diet, honey.”
“Aunt Mary can teach me other stuff. She said I could come over any time I wanted to learn to cook.”
Dam looked in despair at his daughter. He loved her dearly, but Ellie was the most frustrating, inflexible person he’d ever known.
She’s just like you, his wife used to point out. Everybody in Crystal Creek knows where that stubbornness of hers comes from, Dan Gibson.
“Do you ever give any thought to what life is like for me, Ellie?” he said quietly.
“I don’t know what you mean.” She stood on tiptoe to put glasses away in the cupboard.
“Well, you keep telling me how you and Chris can look after things and we don’t need a housekeeper. But the two of you are in school all day. That means I have to take Josh with me all the time, no matter what I’m doing. It’s not easy to do a full day of farm work with a two-year-old running along behind you. And he still needs a nap in the afternoon, you know.”
She considered this, frowning. “Aunt Mary would look after him anytime you asked. She loves him.”
“You kids are my responsibility,” he said. “Mary and Bubba have been good to us since your mother went away, but I can’t ask Mary to be a full-time baby-sitter. She has work of her own to do.”
Ellie put the plastic rack in a lower cabinet and wiped out the chipped sink.
“Well, I still don’t see why we need to have some creepy stranger around the house,” she said. “And I just hated that Mrs. Graham. She looked in all my dresser drawers.”
“She was housecleaning,” Dan said wearily. “God knows, this place could use it.”
“Chris and I can clean,” Ellie said again. “We can clean as good as she did.”
Dan watched his daughter, wondering what made her so prickly and defensive. But he understood her well enough to know he wasn’t getting anywhere with the argument.
He’d just have to try again, and see if next time he could manage to hire somebody who wouldn’t alienate this difficult child of his.
“I’ll go and help Chris put Josh to bed,” Ellie told him, sidling from the room.
At least she seemed anxious to appease him.
“Thank you,” Dan said, opening up the newspaper. “Call me and I’ll come in and read to them when they’re in bed.”
He barely had time to scan the headlines before Chris trailed into the kitchen wearing what passed for pajamas with both girls—jogging pants and a T-shirt. She carried her old Raggedy Ann doll and was looking for a glass of milk.
Dan gave her the milk and a couple of cookies, then took her down the hall and supervised as she brushed her teeth, ignoring her protests that she’d already brushed them.
He tucked her into the upper bunk, smoothed the blond hair back from her forehead and gave her a kiss while Ellie carried Josh into the room and deposited him in the lower bunk.
The little boy snuggled drowsily into the pillows, his thumb in his mouth again, his teddy bear held close to his face.
The girls had washed and dried his hair, and it smelled pleasantly of strawberry shampoo. Dan bent to kiss his son, then settled on the floor near Josh’s bed, reading aloud to the two younger children from an old copy of Peter Pan.
Josh didn’t understand the story, but he was usually too sleepy at bedtime to care what his father read as long as he was nearby for a while. Chris, however, was passionately caught up in the adventures of Peter and Tinkerbell. Several times recently Dan had caught her trying to fly off the haystack.
Ellie left the crowded little bedroom, heading out to the front porch where she had a private sleeping space on all but the coldest winter nights, when she bunked on the sofa in the living room.
After the younger children were settled, Dan went out through the house and knocked on the door of the little screened veranda.
“Come in,” Ellie called.
She was lying in bed, reading a copy of My Friend Flicka from the school library.
“I loved that book when I was a kid,” Dan told her, pausing near her bed. “There are two more in the series, you know.”
“I already got the librarian to reserve them for me. Can I tell you something, Daddy?” She looked up at him gravely.
“Sure. What is it?”
“I’m not sorry Mrs. Graham went away, because she was a real stupid woman, but I’m sorry the place is such a mess all the time. If we don’t get another housekeeper, I’ll try harder to keep things nice.”
“Thank you, Ellie.” He kissed her cheek and went back toward the living room. “Don’t leave your light on too long,” he said over his shoulder.
“Okay, I won’t.”
He paused to smile at her. She lay in a warm circle of lamplight while crickets chirped beyond the window and moths fluttered softly against the screens.
“Good night, kiddo.”
“Night, Daddy.”
Dan wandered back to the kitchen, too tired to think about reading a book himself or even watching television. All he wanted was to have a shower in the damp, cluttered bathroom and fall into bed.
But first he made himself a cup of instant coffee and carried it over to the table to read the rest of the newspaper.
A small article on the second page, accompanied by a photograph, caught his attention.
“Heiress missing after car plunges into the Claro River,” the caption read.
Dan scanned the article, realizing the fatal accident must have happened last night, quite close to his farm. A young woman named Isabel Delgado, age twenty-seven, had been in a car and plunged to her death from the rocky promontory overlooking Rim-rock Park.
“It is unknown at this time,” the article said, “whether Delgado’s death was accidental. She is the daughter of well-known Texas industrialist Pierce Delgado, who is on his way home from a business meeting in Belgium. Isabel Delgado was divorced two years ago from Eric Matthias, a police lieutenant in Austin. Matthias told reporters he has not seen his ex-wife for several weeks, but that her behavior has been ‘unstable’ in recent months.”
The paper went on to report that searchers had scoured the banks of the Claro River, looking for any trace of the woman whose body had not yet been recovered, although the late-model Mercedes had been dragged from the river about twelve hours after its disappearance. A number of the missing woman’s personal papers had been recovered from the car, including her passport, but there was no sign of her body.
Of course, that wasn’t surprising to Dan. She’d apparently been driving a convertible with the top down, and her body would have been sucked right out into the river.
He’d lived in this county for all of his thirty-five years and was intimately acquainted with the river and its habits. He knew that near Rimrock Park the Claro ran deep, with a powerful undercurrent that had caused many drownings over the years.
He looked at the woman’s picture displayed beside the article. She had an unusual face, framed by shoulder-length hair that seemed light, though it was hard to tell from the grainy black-and-white image.
What caught him most were her eyes, looking straight at the camera with a thoughtful, appraising look, and her mouth that lifted on one side in a smile that seemed both quizzical and a bit timid.
It was an interesting face, he thought. She looked like a woman who had some humor and intelligence, and would be fun to talk with.
Then he remembered that Isabel Delgado was dead, and her body would no doubt be washing up in a few days along the banks of the Colorado or the shores of Lake Travis. She would never smile or talk with any man again.
Suddenly feeling unbearably tired, Dan folded the paper to conceal the woman’s charming lopsided smile and put it in a wastebasket near the door.
He got up, switched off the kitchen lights and headed for his bedroom.
CHAPTER THREE
ISABEL CROUCHED in the bushes, watching as the lights winked off one by one in the little farmhouse. It had been more than twenty-four hours since she’d plunged over the cliff, and she was in agony.
Her right forearm was definitely infected, swollen and hot, throbbing with pain. The rest of her body was also scratched and bruised. She was filthy, hungry and ravaged with thirst, but afraid to drink the river water.
All day she’d been making her way along the shoreline, struggling through thick brush, hiding fearfully whenever she was in danger of being seen. Now she shivered with cold and felt weak and light-headed, ready to cry like a child at the thought of spending another night outdoors.
For the past several hours she’d been lying in the brush, watching the farmhouse and the three children who played along the water’s edge while a big, rugged-looking man she guessed was their father crouched over some piece of machinery in a field nearby.
The house was isolated, at least a mile from anybody else. Isabel was hoping that like many others in this peaceful, rural area, the farmer didn’t lock his doors at night. She had a risky plan.
After the lights were all out and enough time had passed for everybody to be asleep, she intended to sneak into the farmhouse and steal some food, maybe even a change of clothes and some medicine for her arm.
If she found any money lying around, she was going to steal that, as well.
She knew the plan wasn’t rational, but she was so hungry and painracked that she couldn’t think clearly anymore. In a weird, nightmarish fashion, her mind kept slipping in and out of reality. Occasionally she had images of being at home, lying in the four-poster bed in her spacious living quarters, while sunlight spilled across the hardwood floor and the housekeeper carried in a tray laden with food.
Isabel closed her eyes and pictured the food on the tray.
Golden crisp waffles swimming in maple syrup, little sausages and a cut-glass bowl of fresh fruit, hot sweet coffee with cream…
She moaned and pushed the seductive images aside, trying to concentrate on the house. She could no longer remember if minutes or hours had passed since the last light had been extinguished, but she knew it was late because the night felt so cold. And the moon was high, spilling a cold silver glow over the landscape, turning the slow-moving river to a stream of hammered pewter.
She heard something crash through the under-growth nearby and looked fearfully over her shoulder. The noise subsided for a moment, then began to recede. Probably a deer or stray cow.
Isabel dropped her chin to her chest, waiting for her heart to stop pounding.
Another dreadful thought struck her.
What if that noise had been made by a dog?
She hadn’t seen any dogs outside with the man and the children, but there could still be one nearby. If so, it would surely bark, maybe even attack her when she sneaked toward the house.
The prospect was terrifying, but she was too hungry and sick to care.
Holding her breath, she crept from the brush and crossed the yard toward the darkened house, moving from tree to tree, a ragged shadow slipping through the moonlight.
No dog raised an alarm, and she reached the back door feeling limp with relief.
She eased the screen open and grasped the handle on the inside door. The knob resisted for a moment, then began to turn.
Isabel’s heart again pounded in terror. Soundlessly she pushed the door open, stepped into a little back porch and paused for her eyes to adjust to the dimness.
After a while she could make out shapes and spaces, faintly illuminated by moonlight spilling through windows. The room seemed to be cluttered with children’s shoes, boots and toys. Rows of jackets hung on pegs. Many of them looked small, and a few were far too large for Isabel.
Still, those big garments would provide some warmth, and she reminded herself to take a few of them as she was leaving.
Through an opening she could see what appeared to be a good-size kitchen. Rows of cabinets, the dull gleam of appliances, a shadowy outline of table and chairs.
So far, so good. Where there was a kitchen, there had to be food.
Isabel paused in the porch, feeling faint and light-headed again. She grasped the door frame and waited for the dizziness to pass, then shook her head blearily, trying to formulate a plan.
The best thing would be to head straight for the tall bulk of the refrigerator. That was probably a lot less risky than opening cabinets one after another, trying to find food.
By now, her brave plans of searching for money and medicine had completely vanished. She didn’t even feel all that hungry anymore, just sick and shaky. It was so terrifying to be in this place, only feet away from other human beings who could wake up at any moment and come after her.
Finally she tiptoed to the rear of the porch and took a big denim shirt from one of the pegs. It was lined with flannel and smelled slightly of engine oil. She longed to put it on her shivering body, but that would have to wait. Carrying the shirt she edged into the kitchen.
When Isabel opened the fridge, she winced at the light that flooded the room. Hastily she spread the shirt on the floor and began to pile food onto it.
Part of a ham, a loaf of bread, three cans of soda, some apples…
At the sight and smell of food, her hunger pangs returned. She had dined in some of the finest restaurants in the world, but she’d never seen a banquet like this. Her mouth watered, and her body trembled with deep spasms. Again she felt dizzy. It was all she could do to concentrate, but she knew it might be a long, long time before another opportunity like this presented itself.
She gobbled a bunch of grapes, blissfully savoring their moist flavor, then tore off some of the ham with her teeth and ate a couple of slices of bread.
At last, trying not to make the slightest noise, she continued to pile food onto her makeshift pack.
DAN HAD ALWAYS BEEN a light sleeper, even more so now that he had the full responsibility of his children. Anything was enough to rouse him, the trace of a cough from Josh, or Chris’s soft whimper during one of her nightmares.
Now he awoke and lay staring at the ceiling, wondering what had disturbed him. There was no sound from the small bedroom next door, and Ellie always slept like a log once she switched off her light.
Still, he had a sense of something alien in his house, a sort of menacing whisper drifting on the silent night air.
There!
He heard it again, the soft creak of a floorboard, a distant muffled sound coming from the direction of the kitchen.
Dan slipped out of bed and moved quietly toward the door. When he reached the hallway, he could see the soft glow of light from the open fridge. A quick glance confirmed that Chris and Josh were both sound asleep in their bunks. Through the living-room window he could see the covers mounded over Ellie’s body.
Then another muffled scrap of sound drifted along the hallway. Dan’s skin prickled, and the hair rose on the nape of his neck. Soundlessly he took a baseball bat that one of the children had left leaning on the arm of the sofa and crept toward the kitchen door. Flattening himself against the archway, he peered in.
What he saw made him suck in his breath and grip the bat tightly in his hands.
A ragged, filthy urchin knelt by the open door of the fridge, wearing torn dark clothes and a baseball cap. Moving with clumsy haste, the boy seized food and piled it onto one of Dan’s heavy work shirts, spread on the floor.
The intruder was so intent on his task that he seemed unaware of any danger. Dan felt a rising anger at this invasion. He stepped into the kitchen just as the thief sprang to his feet and stared, wild-eyed with terror.
Brandishing his bat like a club, Dan gripped the boy’s arm, then looked down in alarm as the kid seemed to faint in his grasp, crumpling slowly to the floor.
By the light spilling from the open refrigerator, Dan realized several things. The slender arm he held was badly gashed and swollen. The pain he’d inflicted when he gripped it had apparently caused the boy to pass out.
Slowly Dan also realized the thief wasn’t a boy at all, but a young woman in a torn jogging outfit. She was filthy and covered with caked blood from many scratches. Her face had a vaguely familiar look, though her hair was matted and dirty, and her features shadowed under the ball cap.
He knelt beside her, automatically putting the food back in the fridge while he kept watch on her, then tugged off the cap to get a better look. When her eyes fluttered open and she stared up at him, he remembered where he’d seen her.
It was the woman whose picture had been in the newspaper, the heiress from San Antonio whose car had plunged off a cliff and into the Claro River the day before.
She tried to scramble to her feet, but Dan grasped her shoulders. Clearly too weak to fight, she subsided, head drooping, and whimpered in terror.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, sniffling. “I was so hungry, and my arm hurts.”
Some of Dan’s anger ebbed, but he continued his grasp of her shoulders. “Why didn’t you just knock on the door? I would have been glad to help you.”
“I can’t…” Her head drooped again, and he could see her chin began to tremble.
“What?” he asked.
“I can’t let anybody see me.” She looked up again with passionate entreaty. “Please don’t call the police. Please, I’m begging you, just let me go. I promise I won’t bother you again.”
“I can’t let you go,” Dan said. “What will you do? Your clothes are in shreds, you’re obviously half-starved and that arm needs some medication right away. Of course I’m going to call the police.”
The woman struggled frantically in his grasp. “No!” she cried. “If you do that, he’s going to find me!”
“Who’s going to find you?”
Her face had drained of color and her lips were blue. She seemed completely irrational. “He’ll get to me for sure this time,” she said. “Even my father is on his side now. Nobody believes me when I try to tell them what he’s like. Please, please, don’t let any of them near me. Oh, God, I’m begging you, please…”
Her voice trailed off and she fell heavily against him. Dan held her in his arms, looking down at her with concern.
She was groggy but still conscious, and badly in need of a wash. He put her gently on the floor, then went to the bathroom and began to run water into the tub, adding some of the bubble bath his girls liked to use. As the tub filled, he went back to the kitchen, helped the woman to her feet and supported her down the hallway.
He knew this was probably crazy, bringing a strange woman into the house with his children. Especially one who seemed to be in some kind of danger. But he was moved in spite of himself by her fear, and the fragile look and feel of her body.
In the bathroom he paused awkwardly, looking down at her pale, scratched face.
“Can you manage in here on your own?”
She nodded jerkily and began to fumble with her tattered clothes. After a moment she forced a grimace that he recognized as a smile. “That bath looks like heaven,” she whispered. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful.”
“Well, believe me, this place isn’t heaven,” Dan said grimly, standing on the tiles and looking at the welter of plastic toys on the tub ledge.
Still, he was moved by her courage, and felt a sudden lump in his throat. “Look, I’ll bring a chair and sit in the hall just outside the door,” he told her. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”
He left hastily, carried a stool from the living room and set it near the closed door, then listened in silence to the muffled series of small splashes as she lowered her body into the tub.
“Are you all right?” he called in a loud whisper, taking care not to wake the two children who slept just across the hall. “Is the water hot enough?”
“It’s lovely,” she answered. “Thank you so much. I could stay here forever.”
“Stay as long as you like.”
After a few more minutes of silence, followed by a lot of hearty, reassuring splashes, he heard the sound of the woman hauling herself from the tub. Suddenly she uttered a soft cry of distress.
Dan hurried into the bathroom to find her leaning against the wall and clutching a towel loosely around her body. She seemed unsteady and very pale, swaying on her feet.
Dan supported her with one arm, grabbed the towel and wrapped it tight again, but not without catching a fleeting glimpse of her nakedness.
Though cut and bruised, her body was lovely, with long slim legs, a slender, tapering waist and high, firm breasts. She had a golden tan except for the skimpy bikini patches across her nipples and around her hips.
Angry at himself for looking, even so briefly, he turned away and stared grimly at the wall. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Can you manage on your own now?”
“I think so,” she said from behind him. “I just felt so…so dizzy for a minute right after I got out of the water.”
“I’ll find you some clothes,” he said.
Dan went into the adjoining room to get one of his shirts and a pair of boxers, then handed them through the partly opened door, setting them on the hamper.
“Thank you,” she said from within the room, her voice already sounding a little stronger.
Dan hovered anxiously near the closed door and was relieved when she said, “All right, I’m decent. You can come in now.”
The transformation was amazing. Except for the mass of wet hair pulled back from her face, she was exactly like that lovely, thoughtful young woman in the newspaper picture.
“You look a lot better,” he said neutrally.
“Almost human?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.
His attempt at humor was rewarded with a weary smile. “Just try spending twenty-four hours starving in the rain and mud,” she said with a brief show of spirit. “See how great you look.”
He sobered, remembering the seriousness of the situation.
“Okay, let’s have a look at that arm, and then you can go to bed.”
“You won’t tell anybody about me?” she asked.
Her eyes were an unusual color, a sort of golden brown, set within heavy dark lashes. For the first time he noticed a faint drift of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“Will you let me go?” she asked.
Dan hesitated. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said.
“Oh, please, you can’t tell anybody I was here.” Her pupils dilated in terror and her body tensed. “Please, if you—”
“Look, don’t start getting all upset again,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody until we’ve had a chance to talk. But you’ll have to stay in the bedroom and keep quiet,” he added, “because I have three little kids living here, and we can’t let them catch sight of you if you want to stay secret.”
“I’ll be really quiet,” she promised.
He opened a tube of salve and smeared it over the gash on her arm, then fastened it with a neat row of butterfly bandages and wrapped it in gauze.
“Are you allergic to any antibiotics?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
Dan hesitated, then gave her one of the tablets the doctor in Crystal Creek had prescribed for him recently when he cut his hand on some dirty barbed wire and developed a painful infection. He knew it wasn’t smart to use a prescription on another person, but this was an emergency. And, as fearful as she obviously was of being discovered, the woman was hardly going to agree to see a doctor, no matter how he pressured her.
By the time he finished bandaging her arm, she was drifting off to sleep, her wet head lolling drowsily.
“I need to get you a dryer for that hair,” he said.
“Hack it off,” she murmured.
“Beg your pardon?”
“I don’t want to bother with it. I’m too tired.” She looked up at him with bleary appeal. “Couldn’t we just get some scissors and cut it all off?”
“But I can’t—”
“Please,” she said, “it needs to be cut, anyway. God knows, I don’t care how it looks. Let’s just get rid of it.”
With some reluctance Dan got his scissors and razor comb from a drawer and cut her matted, tangled hair, trimming it neatly around her ears the same way he cut Chris’s.
He tossed the damp strands in the wastebasket, then toweled her hair so it stood up around her face in damp little spikes.
“It’s still wet,” he told her. “I’ll need to dry it before you go to bed.”
She examined herself ruefully in the mirror, touching the little spikes. “At least it won’t take long.”
She lowered herself gingerly onto the edge of the tub while Dan stood above her to blow-dry her hair. Now that it was short, it looked considerably darker than it had in the newspaper photograph. And the gamine cut was surprisingly attractive with her delicate features.
“You look nice,” he said.
She didn’t respond, just leaned back with her eyes closed.
“Do you still want something to eat?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not hungry anymore. Just…so tired.”
Dan helped her up and guided her into his bedroom, tucked her into the double bed and pulled the covers over her body. She looked up at him in exhausted silence, her features washed silver by the moonlight.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “So wonderful. Thank you.”
“Go to sleep,” he told her gruffly.
She snuggled down in the covers and he sat on the mattress beside her, trying to think.
There was no other empty bed in the little house. If he slept on the sofa and the kids found him there, they were certainly going to wonder why. Dan had no choice other than to share his bed with her.
He tidied the bathroom and disposed of the drying curls of hair, then returned to his bedroom, closed the door and slid under the covers next to his unexpected guest. Every nerve in his body was conscious of her slender body curled next to him, the clean sent of her hair and the soft sound of her breathing.
Hands behind his head, he stared at the ceiling and wondered what could have happened to make this beautiful woman drive her car over a cliff. Who was after her, and why was she so afraid of the police?
Either the woman was mentally unbalanced or she was involved in something illegal. In either case he’d probably been a fool to bring her into his house. Again he thought of his children sleeping nearby and felt a chill of alarm.
But even though he’d caught the woman raiding his fridge, she hadn’t seemed like a crazy person or a criminal. Just a woman in pain, and Dan, who spent his life caring for children and animals, had a hard time not feeling sympathy for anybody who was hurt.
Still, he couldn’t take any chances with the safety of his kids. Until he knew what was going on here, he needed to get them away from the house.
Reluctantly, he decided to bundle them all up first thing in the morning and take them over to Mary and Bubba. They could stay a few days, help with the ostriches and have the run of Bubba’s sprawling ranch.
Dan’s uncle and his wife were always pleading with him to let them help look after the kids, but Dan resisted, stubbornly maintaining that the care of his children was his responsibility.
Now, maybe he’d take them up on their offer. Mary could take the kids to the school bus on Monday morning. By then he should know what was going on with Isabel Delgado, and why she’d turned up in his kitchen trying to steal his food.
Slipping noiselessly from the bed, Dan padded into the kitchen to retrieve the folded newspaper from the wastebasket. He switched on the back-porch light and read the article again, then stared for a long time at the woman’s face, her disarmingly lopsided smile and the expensive haircut he’d just demolished.
Finally he went back to his bedroom, carrying the paper, and tucked it away in the top drawer of his dresser. The woman was sleeping peacefully, her face innocent and sweet in the pale moonlight. When Dan settled next to her, she reached out her bandaged arm and touched his shoulder, nestling close to him.
The move was automatic and without seduction. Dan drew away from her gently, taking care not to hurt her injured arm. She smiled in her sleep, the same, crooked smile the newspaper photograph had caught.
He patted her shoulder, then rolled over and lay alone on his side of the bed, wide awake and troubled, wondering what in hell he was getting himself into.
CHAPTER FOUR
SOMETIMES WHEN ELLIE was deeply asleep, noises that were, in reality, happening around her somehow got into her dreams.
She lay in the darkness, only partially awake, and realized the same thing had just happened. She’d been dreaming about running through a dim cavern, where a bottomless river lapped at her feet and she was in constant danger of falling into the water.
Cody Pollock ran just behind her, his jeering young face exultant with triumph.
“I’ve got you now!” he shouted, reaching for her, so close that Ellie could see the inflamed pimples on his cheeks. “Now there’s just two choices, Gibson. You can come and play nice with me, or you can jump into that river. What’s it gonna be?”
In the background of her dream Ellie could hear the voices of other boys and girls who looked on and talked in muffled tones, enjoying her terror.
Frantically she tried to find some way out of the cavern, but she’d reached a blank wall and there was no escape. She saw Cody’s horrible face and cruel hands, then the dark, swollen river…
Sweating and whimpering with fear, Ellie awoke fully and lay staring at the window screens.
It was a dream, she told herself, hugging her thin body. Just a stupid dream. Cody Pollock was nowhere close to her. If he ever came to this farm and tried to hurt her, her father would kill him.
That was when she realized some of the noises from her nightmare were still going on, drifting to her from inside the little house. She could even see a dim light in the hallway, like that partially lit cavern in her dream. And she heard the distant sound of splashing, running water, along with her father’s deep voice and an occasional soft reply.
Ellie frowned, wondering what was happening, then relaxed.
Probably Chris had had one of her accidents, and Daddy was cleaning her up. When their mother had first gone away, Chris used to wet the bed all the time, but she was getting a lot better now and it hardly ever happened anymore.
In fact, Ellie thought drowsily, most of the bad stuff started happening two years ago, right after their mother left.
For one thing, Daddy was always upset about how messy the house was. And Chris had been so unhappy she hardly talked to anybody for a while. Only Josh hadn’t seemed bothered by their mother’s absence.
Of course, the baby had been only six months old when Annie Gibson left her family.
“I stayed long enough to have Josh,” Annie once told her eldest daughter, “though God knows I was getting pretty damned anxious to be out of there. But fair’s fair, and your daddy was always real good to me. If he wanted that baby so bad, well, I guess I just had to give him the baby once I went and let myself get pregnant. Didn’t I, Jelly-Belly?”
Ellie had wanted to ask her mother how she could have gotten pregnant when she didn’t love their father anymore, but it was so hard to talk with her about anything serious. Annie’s mind was always darting on to something else before you could even start to take in what she’d just told you.
“You should see my new show outfit,” Annie had told Ellie dreamily, smoothing her daughter’s dark curls. “It’s bright red suede, with fringes hanging down to here. It’s gorgeous, Ellie. I need to lose a few pounds to fit into it, though.”
“Mama, don’t you love us?” Ellie had asked, trying not to cry. “How could you leave me and Chris and a sweet little baby like Josh, and go off singing to a bunch of people you don’t even know?”
“Why, honey, of course I love you!” Annie gave one of her rich, booming laughs and gathered Ellie into a fragrant embrace. “But some women are just naturally cut out to be housewives, and I’m not one of them. I was born to be a star, kiddo.”
And it was true—Annie Gibson was trying very hard to be a star. Her stage name, which she’d invented all on her own, was Justyn Thyme, and she’d already been hired to sing at a couple of big conventions in Nashville, as well as lots of nightclubs. She was earning good money, enough to fly back to Texas and see her children several times a year, and she kept believing her big break was just around the corner.
For Annie’s sake, Ellie hoped it was, too.
She’d long since given up hope that her mother would come back to them if her music career failed. To tell the truth, Ellie wasn’t even sure she’d welcome her mother back for more than those brief visits when she swept in carrying presents and took them all out for treats.
Though Annie’s company was exciting, after a while Ellie got tired of her mother’s constant laughter and chatter and wanted some peace again, the nice feeling of the little farmhouse with just her and Daddy and Chris and Josh, looking after themselves.
Still, it was true bad things had started happening after Annie left them, including Cody Pollock picking on her.
He was a bad boy from Lampasas whose parents weren’t able to control him. When Cody was eleven, they sent him down to their cousin, June Pollock, who lived alone in one of the big old houses in Crystal Creek, since her daughter, Carlie, had gone off to Rice University to study marine biology.
June was a strong, quiet woman who’d worked most of her life as a hotel waitress and chambermaid. Everybody in town liked and respected her. No doubt Cody’s parents thought she could do something with their son.
And Cody hadn’t gotten into much real trouble since coming to Crystal Creek, but nobody knew how mercilessly he tormented Ellie Gibson. The older boy had spotted her almost two years ago when she was just ten years old, and tried to grab her legs when she was on a swing at the park.
Ellie had kicked him, giving him a nosebleed. After that, Cody never left her alone. He took every opportunity he could to trip her or knock her books out of her hands or jab her in the ribs when they passed in the hallways, and usually managed to do so without being seen. In fact, he was always careful not to be seen, especially by June, who had no stomach for bullies. Kinfolk or not, June would have dealt with Cody fast enough if she knew what was happening.
During the rare occasions Ellie ran into him alone, she was terrified. Though she tried not to give any sign of how she felt, it was almost as if Cody could smell her fear, like a dog does, and got some kind of cruel enjoyment out of it.
The situation had grown even worse when Ellie’s body began to mature over the past spring and summer. Cody was thirteen by now, with a pimply face and the shadow of a mustache, and his manner toward her had also changed. Now there was real menace about him, a leering expression in his eyes that frightened her more than ever. When Cody got close to her nowadays, he didn’t only jab her in the ribs, but also tried to grab her growing breasts, which, to Ellie’s dismay, were visible under her loose T-shirts.
Worst of all, he’d gotten his friends involved, a gang of four other rough boys who swaggered across the schoolyard and terrorized everybody with their coarse words and threats of violence.
Ellie was never safe from them. At any moment she could round a corner at school and find Cody and his friends blocking a hallway, keeping her from getting to her next class. Or she would see them in the park, crouching behind bushes to call insults at her, or deliberately jostling up against her on the street when she walked downtown to Wall’s Drugstore.
Ms. Osborne, the middle-school principal, held regular assemblies where she urged kids to report bullies if their lives were being made unpleasant.
Unpleasant, Ellie thought bitterly, scowling at the ceiling. What a stupid word.
Her life was hell, pure and simple. Going to school every day was like running a gauntlet with no idea if you’d ever emerge safely.
“Don’t be afraid to speak to your parents,” Ms. Osborne told the kids. “Your teachers here at school and your parents, working together, can keep you safe from bullies. And those who are threatening you will be punished.”
Ellie rolled over and buried her face in the pillow.
It sounded good, that big promise from the principal, but Ellie didn’t believe a word of it. Her home-room teacher, Mr. Kilmer, was a shy man who was probably every bit as terrified of Cody Pollock and his friends as she was.
Ellie’s father, of course, wasn’t scared of anybody. But Ellie would die of embarrassment if she told him the things those boys said to her and what Cody Pollock threatened to do to her.
Besides, what good would it do, anyhow? Her father couldn’t kill Cody or make him move away, and so the bullying would just go on. Probably it would be even worse because Cody would know she’d told on him.
But tonight, for the first time, Ellie could see the possibility of escape.
She thought about the miraculous fifty-dollar bill she’d found in the river. It was like a present from God, just the same way He’d sent baby Moses floating down the river to lodge in the bulrushes.
And that money was going to give Ellie a whole new life.
She knew fifty dollars wasn’t enough for what she wanted to do.
But she had more than sixty dollars already in her bank account, painstakingly saved over the last two years, mostly birthday and Christmas money from Mary and Bubba. And her father had assured her it was her own money, so she could take the whole amount out of the bank anytime she wanted to.
A hundred dollars was just about all she needed. Ellie tensed with excitement when she thought of having so much money.
Her plan was simple. She intended to go into town one day soon, when her father was busy with the haying and couldn’t pay much attention to her. Ellie would withdraw the money, buy a bus ticket and go to Nashville to live with her mother.
She knew, of course, that Annie didn’t want to be saddled with a twelve-year-old kid when her career was just starting to take off, but she could hardly turn away her own daughter. Besides, Ellie was determined to show how much help she could be. She’d clean Annie’s apartment and cook good meals for her when she came home after singing all night, and she’d never, ever be in the way. And soon Annie would be glad her daughter had come to live with her.
Dreamily, Ellie pictured their relationship in Nashville, a whole world away from Cody and his awful friends.
Of course, she didn’t want to stay with Annie forever, because she’d get too lonely for Daddy and Chris and Josh. Maybe after a while, when Cody Pollock got tired of waiting for her to show up and found somebody else to bully, she’d be able to come home to the farm.
Meanwhile the fifty-dollar bill lay safely in her dresser drawer, a magical promise of better days ahead.
Within the house, the distant sounds began to fade. She heard her father emptying the bathtub, talking to Chris as he got her ready to go back to bed. Then he came striding through the hallway to fetch something from the kitchen, looking big and hairy in his boxer shorts.
Cautiously Ellie raised herself on one elbow and saw him carrying a folded newspaper back to his room. He must be planning to read in bed.
She settled down under the covers, wondering what Nashville was like, imagining her mother’s look of amazement when Ellie turned up on her doorstep. “Hi there,” Ellie would say casually. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in.”
Or she could say, “Howdy, ma’am. I heard you’re a big country-music star and I thought maybe you needed a cook and housekeeper.”
Annie was going to like that, Ellie thought drowsily. She always loved being called a star.
As she drifted off to sleep, Ellie acknowledged that she wasn’t really sure how her mother would receive her. With Annie, you never really knew. It depended on her mood, on whether she was gaining or losing weight and what else was going on in her life at the time.
Still, putting up with her mother’s moods was a whole lot better than facing Cody Pollock and his friends every day.
With a final shiver of revulsion, Ellie fell asleep and darkness closed in on the house again.
ISABEL BLINKED in the warm glow of sunlight. She opened her eyes and saw a patchwork quilt over her body, a green wall hung with framed pictures of children, a dusty nightstand and a wicker basket on the floor, piled with laundry.
She had a moment of intense panic, unable to recall where she was or how she’d come to be here.
Breathing deeply, she forced herself to stay calm and concentrate. Like images from some hazy, badly made movie, she saw herself pushing the car over the cliff, then jumping down behind it. She recalled the jarring shock of her landing, the scratches and blood, the hunger and chill and wetness as she fought her way through the brush. And the endless day that followed, when the oppressive heat had emphasized her throbbing pain, hunger and relentless thirst.
And then the sickening terror of creeping into the darkened house and being caught by that hairy giant wielding a club.
Isabel gripped the quilt and looked around wildly. Beyond that encounter, her memories weren’t nearly as clear. She’d been taking some food when he sneaked up behind her and grabbed her. After that she could dimly recall being handled and moved, the sheer bliss of finding herself immersed in warm sudsy water, and later a man giving her clothes while she pleaded with him not to tell anyone about her.
Isabel frowned in confusion and lifted her right arm, examining the neat gauze bandage. The arm was still swollen, though it didn’t feel as tender as it had the day before.
But had she also asked that hard-faced stranger to cut her hair?
Surely not. That part must have been a dream, one of the confused fantasies that kept jostling around in her mind.
Tentatively, she reached to touch her head and encountered the cropped, silky strands around her ears. She raised herself on her elbows in sudden alarm. If that man really had cut her hair, then he must also have been the one who’d helped to cover her nakedness when she almost fainted right after getting out of the bathtub. But who was he, and where was this farmhouse?
She noticed a glass of water and a plastic pill container on the nightstand, sitting on a sheet of paper with some handwriting on it. Isabel lifted the little container and saw it held several oblong yellow pills.
“If you’ve had no adverse reaction,” the note said, “take another antibiotic pill when you wake up. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The pharmacist’s label was from Wall’s Drugstore in Crystal Creek and read “Dan Gibson: Take one tablet every four hours.”
Isabel hesitated, then took one of the pills and gulped it down with a mouthful of water. She sat upright on the edge of the bed, feeling dizzy again, and dropped her head to her knees until the feeling passed.
When her mind cleared she stood up and looked down at what she wore—a man’s white shirt and plaid cotton boxer shorts.
In a cheval mirror by the dresser, Isabel caught sight of herself and stared in horror. Her face was scratched and bruised, her eyes darkly shadowed, and the cropped hair stood up every which way. With the baggy clothes and her bandaged arm, she looked like a waif, some kind of pitiful refugee from disaster.
“Well, I guess that’s what I am,” she said aloud, almost jumping at the sound of her voice in the quiet house.
Moving cautiously, she ventured to the door of the room and peered down the hallway. She could faintly recall the man saying something about having children in the house, and the need for her to stay out of sight in the bedroom.
But nobody appeared to be home at the moment. The place was silent except for birdsong drifting through the open windows, and the distant sound of the river.
Isabel walked slowly into the messy bathroom, recalling her blissful soak in that tub and later the man standing beside her to cut and blow-dry her hair.
She went into the kitchen and found a pot of coffee on a sideboard. The room appeared to have been hastily abandoned, with dishes stacked carelessly on the counter and in the sink. Evidence of children was everywhere. A smeared high chair sat at the table next to a couple of cartoon mugs with lids and straws, and toys littered the floor all the way into the living room and out to the porch.
Isabel poured herself a cup of coffee and added some cream from the fridge, but gave up looking through the disorganized cabinets for sugar. Instead, she toasted two slices of bread and ate them hungrily.
But by the time she’d devoured a banana and most of the remaining grapes, she was starting to feel guilty. Clearly the people who lived in this house didn’t have a lot of money, yet she was gobbling all their food and had no way of paying for it.
With sudden alarm she rushed back to the bedroom, moving so quickly that her head began to throb with pain again. On the floor near the window she found her jogging pants and shirt. They’d been washed and dried but were both ragged, stained with blood. Under the clothes were her bra and panties, also clean but tattered, along with the still damp leather cross-trainers.
Isabel’s heart sank. She lifted the right shoe and shook it, but she already knew the locker key was no longer there.
“I have the key,” a voice said behind her. “I put it away for you.”
Braced to flee, she turned to face the man. But this wasn’t the hairy, half-naked giant she dimly remembered from the night before. This was a tall, youngish man with light brown hair and green eyes, broad-shoulders and a strong, calm face.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
Isabel stood with the shoe in her hand, at a loss for words.
“Here,” he said, opening a wooden box on the dresser. “This is the key I found in your shoe.”
He held it out to her. She accepted the key, then merely clutched it in helpless silence.
“How about if I put it back?” he suggested gently. “It’ll be right here in this box.”
She nodded and gave him the key. His hands were big and square, with callused palms and surprisingly long fingers.
Nice hands, Isabel thought, remembering how they’d trimmed her hair and bandaged her arm with such gentleness.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much for helping me.”
He was watching her intently. “I didn’t have much choice, did I?”
“You could have thrown me out,” she said. “Lots of people would have.”
“That’s not the way we treat folks here in the country.” He moved to the door. “Care to join me?” he asked over his shoulder. “I haven’t had a chance to eat breakfast yet.”
“But aren’t your children…” Isabel began nervously.
“I took them over to my uncle’s place for a few days. None of them have any idea you’re here.”
She followed him to the kitchen and sank into a chair at the table while he poured her another cup of coffee. “Cream and sugar?” he asked.
She nodded and he fetched the cream jug from the fridge, then opened a little ceramic canister shaped like a tomato, handing it to her along with a spoon.
“So that’s where the sugar is. I didn’t think of looking in there,” she told him, trying to smile.
He didn’t smile back, just popped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster and brought some butter and jam to the table.
“Did you take another pill?” he asked. “Let me see that arm.”
She held it up for him to examine.
“The rest of your arm’s not as red and swollen today,” he said, holding her wrist. “How does it feel under the bandage?”
“It doesn’t hurt as much, but it’s getting pretty itchy.”
“Well, that’s supposed to be a sign of healing. I’ll change the bandage after we eat, and put some more salve on it.”
Isabel watched him, marveling at his calm, capable manner. He acted as if there was nothing unusual about a wild-eyed woman breaking into his house and trying to steal his food, then being dumped in his bathtub, sleeping in his bed…
His bed!
For the first time she remembered him lying beside her in the darkness of the night, holding himself away from her, his body so hard and muscular when she brushed against him that it was almost like sleeping next to a block of wood.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, feeling tears of shame stinging her eyelids. “I’ve been such a huge bother to you.”
His toast popped up. “Want some?” he asked. When she declined, he buttered both slices, then fixed his green eyes on her face. “What are you running away from?”
Isabel stared into the depths of her coffee mug. “I’m afraid to tell you,” she said at last. “I don’t want anybody to know who I am.”
“I already do know. There was a picture and an article about you in the paper last night.”
She tensed. “What did it say?”
“It said you were Isabel Delgado, an heiress from San Antonio, and that your car went into the Claro on Friday night, but your body hasn’t been recovered yet.”
Isabel felt sick with fear. “My picture was there, too?”
“I recognized you right away.”
“Oh, no!” She gripped the mug tightly. “I was hoping they wouldn’t do that.”
“I guess it’s pretty big news when a rich girl goes missing. So what are you hiding from, Isabel?”
She glanced nervously around the silent kitchen. “Please don’t call me that!”
“There’s nobody around,” he said. “My nearest neighbor is about a mile downriver.”
“Is this farm anywhere close to where the McKinneys live?”
“That’s him. My neighbor, I mean.”
Isabel felt a return of that strange, dreamlike confusion and panic. “You mean J.T. McKinney is your neighbor?”
“Why? Do you know him?”
“Oh, God,” She dropped her head into her hands. “There’s nowhere to hide.”
“If it’s any comfort,” he said after a moment, “I can tell you that right now you don’t look anything like the woman in the picture.”
“I don’t?” She raised her head to look at him.
He grinned, showing even white teeth. “Haven’t you seen yourself in a mirror lately?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t sure if…”
“Well, my haircut and all those cuts and bruises have done a real job on you. You look like a totally different person.” He watched her thoughtfully. “So what should I call you?”
She pondered. “Call me Bella,” she said at last. “That’s what my…my sister used to call me,” she added wistfully, “when I was a little girl.”
“Okay, Bella. From now on, that’s your name and we’ll never use the other one. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said feeling relieved. “My name isn’t Isabel anymore. It’s Bella.”
“Now, Bella, why don’t you tell me what you’re so afraid of? And then we’ll try to figure out what we can do about it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
DAN STUDIED THE WOMAN across the table. Bella Delgado had none of the arrogance he normally associated with heiresses to great wealth. Quite the opposite. She seemed awkward and unsure of herself, and her gratitude was obviously sincere.
For that matter, so was her fear.
“It’s my ex-husband,” she said at last, looking down at the table. Her eyelashes were dark brown tipped with gold, so long and dense that they cast a shadow on her pale cheeks. “His name is Eric Matthias, and he lives in Austin.”
“What about him?” Dan asked when she paused.
“He’s been stalking me.” She looked up, meeting his eyes directly. “He turns up at a lot of places I go, restaurants and such, even though he works in Austin and I’ve been living in San Antonio for the past couple of years. At least twice in the last month I’ve seen him sitting in a car outside on the street, watching my father’s house.”
“Anything else?”
“He phones me a lot, even after I’ve changed my unlisted number. No matter where I go, and I mean anywhere in the world, Eric calls me within a day or two just to show how easily he can track me.”
Dan watched her thoughtfully. “What do you think he wants?”
“I don’t know for sure, but he scares me.”
“Did he hurt you when you were married to him?” Dan asked.
“Not physically, though he was emotionally abusive all the time. And he terrified me because he was so intense. Mostly he…” Her voice broke.
“What?”
“Eric was crazy with jealousy. I never gave him the slightest cause, but that made no difference. He’d invent things to be mad about, then sulk about them for weeks. After I finally left and went back home to my father’s house, Eric cried and said nobody else would ever have me. I’m sure he means it.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Isabel shivered and hugged her arms. “When I told him I was leaving him, Eric…tried to kill my dog.”
Dan stared at her.
“Afterward he claimed it was a misunderstanding,” she said miserably. “Rufus was a Pekingese, the sweetest little thing. I’d had him ever since I was a girl. He was almost fifteen years old, and stiff with arthritis. I always took such care of him,” she said wistfully. “I adored him. Eric was really jealous of Rufus, about all the time I spent with him.”
“So what happened?”
“We were arguing, and Eric held Rufus over the edge of balcony, ten floors above the street. He kept threatening to drop him, demanding that I grovel and beg. I leaned way out onto the ledge to get my dog back and almost fell myself. Eric just laughed at me.”
“And your dog?”
“Poor Rufus was never the same. He died a few weeks later.”
“Didn’t you report that to the police?”
“Eric’s a detective lieutenant with the Austin police force,” she said wearily. “A fifteen-year veteran and he’s very popular with the other cops. At the time he was distraught over our split, and they all felt sorry for him. He claimed I invented the business with Rufus to make him look bad. It was my word against his.”
“But you’re genuinely frightened of him?”
“I’m terrified.” She met Dan’s eyes steadily. “I saw his face when he…he was holding that poor little dog out above the traffic. Dan, it was so awful. I still have nightmares about it.”
“But why can’t your family help you deal with this man?”
“My father assured me he’d hire some extra security to watch the house, though he couldn’t do anything about the phone calls. Daddy’s always seemed neutral about our split, but a while ago I found out he’s really on Eric’s side. My father is actually helping my ex-husband to stalk me. It’s no wonder,” she added bitterly, “that Eric always knows where I am.”
“Come on, Bella.” Dan felt a rising concern for her emotional balance. “Don’t you think that sounds a little paranoid?”
“I saw them,” she said passionately. “Last month I dropped in at a pub downtown to meet a friend. It was a day when my father thought I’d gone to Houston for the weekend.”
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Margot Dalton
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Welcome to Crystal Creek, TexasIf this is your first visit to the friendly ranching town of Crystal Creek, deep in the Texas hill country, get ready to meet some unforgettable people. If you′ve been here before, you′ll recognize old friends and make some new ones.Isabel Delgado has to fake her own death in order to get away from her vengeful husband. But when her plan goes awry, she finds herself stranded in Crystal Creek and in more danger than ever. Then rancher Dan Gibson has an idea–marry him. Dan needs help raising his three small kids, and Isabel needs a new identity.Perfect! Except Isabel′s feeling for Dan–and his for her–could put them both in a different kind of danger.