Crossing Nevada
Crossing Nevada
Jeannie Watt
After the attack that ended her modeling career, Tess O'Neil wants only to feel safe. She thinks she's found a sanctuary on a Nevada ranch, where she can live in solitude. Too bad rancher Zach Nolan isn't getting the message. The single dad wants to lease her land, and he won't quit until she says yes. That means he's always around!Letting the cowboy with the see-right-through-her baby blues into her life is too dangerous. Almost as dangerous as the wild hope and yearning Zach and his three daughters are awakening in Tess. She's already risked so much. Maybe it's time to take the biggest gamble of all on the one thing she never dreamed she'd find–a home.
Is he her chance to stop running?
After the attack that ended her modeling career, Tess O’Neil wants only to feel safe. She thinks she’s found a sanctuary on a Nevada ranch, where she can live in solitude. Too bad rancher Zach Nolan isn’t getting the message. The single dad wants to lease her land, and he won’t quit until she says yes. That means he’s always around!
Letting the cowboy with the see-right-through-her baby blues into her life is too dangerous. Almost as dangerous as the wild hope and yearning Zach and his three daughters are awakening in Tess. She’s already risked so much. Maybe it’s time to take the biggest gamble of all on the one thing she never dreamed she’d find—a home.
The dogs growled, reminding Tess that she was tough
A survivor. Plus she had two big dogs and a gun.
She could see her visitor through the slit in the curtains. He was of average height and weight—as her attacker had been.
Tess unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door a crack, reassured by the dogs behind her.
“Hi,” the guy said. The corners of his mouth tilted up and the result was rather breathtaking. In another time or place Tess could have appreciated this man. Blue eyes, incredible angles to his face, dark hair under his cowboy hat.
But not now. She did not smile back. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Zach Nolan. I called yesterday about renting your pasture for my cows.”
And she’d said no. So what was he doing here?
Renting the pasture meant the dogs getting used to the sounds of someone being around. Which seemed like a good way to compromise her safety.
“I’m sorry. I’m not interested.”
Zach stared at her in seeming disbelief as she pushed the door shut and then snapped the dead bolt in place.
Believe it, cowboy.
Dear Reader,
I’m delighted to announce exciting news: beginning in January 2013, Harlequin Superromance books will be longer! That means more romance with more of the characters you love and expect from Harlequin Superromance.
We’ll also be unveiling a brand-new look for our covers. These fresh, beautiful covers will showcase the six wonderful contemporary stories we publish each month.
So don’t miss out on your favorite series—Harlequin Superromance. Look for longer stories and exciting new covers starting December 18, 2012, wherever you buy books.
In the meantime, check out this month’s reads:
#1818 THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS
Liz Talley
#1819 THE TIME OF HER LIFE
Jeanie London
#1820 THE LONG WAY HOME
Cathryn Parry
#1821 CROSSING NEVADA
Jeannie Watt
#1822 WISH UPON A CHRISTMAS STAR
Darlene Gardner
#1823 ESPRESSO IN THE MORNING
Dorie Graham
Happy reading!
Wanda Ottewell,
Senior Editor, Harlequin Superromance
Crossing Nevada
Jeannie Watt
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeannie Watt lives off the grid in a historic Nevada ranching community. Before being published, Jeannie made Western belts and bridles out of hitched and braided horsehair, and her gear was featured in several Western art shows and museums. Jeannie no longer has time to make cowboy gear—instead she gets to write about cowboy life, which she likes even better. She still displays gear at the occasional rodeo, where she spends most of her time observing the participants and dreaming up story lines.
Contents
Chapter One (#u80eba67d-b9d8-5ec1-b678-6e2db256ac9b)
Chapter Two (#u326fdcf9-8563-5231-aa13-87850500d91a)
Chapter Three (#u36e8528c-d982-5f4e-a53e-9deebe66a6f0)
Chapter Four (#u901b3f7f-3b9b-5be0-b580-cea8b500e97c)
Chapter Five (#u5accc59b-d90d-5372-8c7c-9bc45e462ac1)
Chapter Six (#u169cee5f-0e77-5189-8bfd-9264516e1f3b)
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)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Excerpt (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
IT HAD BEEN another in a long string of sleepless nights.
Tess O’Neil finally drifted off from sheer exhaustion just after sunrise, only to be awakened by a sharp bark and the bounce of the mattress as her dogs leaped to the floor.
For one terrifying second she thought Eddie had found her, and she automatically reached for the weapon she kept under the bed. Her hand had just touched metal when the phone rang again and she realized what had sent her dogs on alert.
The two Belgian Malinois shepherds, Blossom and Mac, stood shoulder to shoulder next to her bed, their amber eyes fixed on the bedroom door on the other side of the room, ears pricked forward at the unfamiliar sound of the phone. Tess pushed back the covers, heart pounding. It had to be a wrong number, but if it wasn’t...
The ringing continued as she and the dogs crossed the hall to the old-fashioned ranch house kitchen where the plain white phone hung on the wall next to the refrigerator. She’d had the landline connected so she could send and receive faxes and have ridiculously slow internet. She never expected the damned thing to actually ring.
Tess hesitated for a few seconds, decided it was better to know than not, and snatched the receiver off the hook.
“Hello.” She fully expected to hear her stepfather’s drug-roughened voice either threatening or taunting her and unconsciously put a hand on Mac’s head for reassurance.
“Ms. O’Neil?” The voice was deep, somewhat hesitant, definitely not Eddie. But how the hell did this guy know her name? Or rather, her assumed name?
“Who is this?” Tess demanded, then instantly regretted her tone. Brittle. Edged with fear. She didn’t want to sound fearful, didn’t want to give Eddie the satisfaction if the guy on the other end of the line was one of his minions. But it was hard to sound normal when her heart was beating a hundred times faster than usual.
There was a brief, quite possibly stunned, silence before the caller said, “I’m Zach Nolan. I live across the road.”
“I see.” Tess took hold of the phone cord. Anyone could say they lived across the road.
“I was wondering if you have plans for your fields and pastures?”
It took Tess a moment to wrap her mind around the unexpected question. “My fields and pastures?” she asked blankly.
“Yeah. The big green things surrounding your house.”
There was a touch of gentle humor in his voice, as if he was trying to make a connection, reassure her. Tess instantly drew back. No connections.
“Why?”
“Until you took over the place, I grazed my cattle on those fields and paid a rental fee. I was wondering, if you aren’t using the fields, if we could make a similar arrangement.”
He’d barely finished his sentence when Tess blurted, “No.” She let go of the phone cord and pressed her fingertips against the thickened skin on her left cheek where the stitches had been, felt the residual pain from the torn and stitched muscles below then dropped her hand. It was a habit she was trying to break.
“You’re sure?” The touch of humor was gone, replaced by irony bordering on sarcasm, triggered no doubt by her instant and adamant response.
“Yes.”
“Well, thanks. Sorry to have wasted your time.”
“No problem.” Tess hung up the phone without saying goodbye and put a hand on her forehead, pushing the bangs back and wishing she’d asked how he’d gotten her name. It had to be from that overly friendly lady who ran the local post office.
Tess O’Neil was the authorized signature for the Angstrom Land Company, the limited liability corporation that had leased the small ranch where she was living. If you could call it living. More like hiding.
In reality, Tess was the Angstrom Land Company, but no one knew that—the beauty of an LLC in the state of Nevada. She could conduct her financial business without using personal, traceable credit cards or her real name—Terese Olan to her former employers, Terry to her handful of friends. But her grandmother had called her Tess and that was who she’d become. If she was skirting the law by informally becoming Tess O’Neil in addition to hiding behind the LLC, she’d take that chance. It beat the alternative.
She didn’t know if Eddie would go so far as to hire a private detective, but he had a lot of nefarious contacts. Not knowing his reach was one of the things that kept her awake at night.
Tess walked over to the sink and started the tap running into the enamel basin before she opened the back door. The screen door wobbled on its loose hinges as she pushed it open and the dogs raced outside. They stopped in tandem a few feet from the bottom porch step, black ears pricked forward, muscles tensed and ready for action. It was a morning ritual they’d developed since moving into the house thirteen days ago. They were city dogs, still acclimating themselves to the sights, sounds and smells of the country. As was Tess.
She watched and waited until the dogs finally dropped their guard, first Mac and then Blossom. They began snuffling in the grass, checking out the action they’d missed the night before as they headed for the taller grass to do their business.
All clear.
Tess closed the door and filled a glass with water, turned off the faucet and leaned back against the counter. If the dogs were relaxed, she could relax. In theory anyway.
Her heart rate still wasn’t quite normal. Had the caller really been the guy across the road?
She set the glass down and opened the drawer where she’d spotted the printed paper with local phone numbers while unpacking her meager kitchen supplies a few days ago. She traced a finger down the list. Nolan. Zach. Okay. He existed.
But was it him?
Her hand only shook a little as she dialed the number. Halfway through the second ring he answered.
Same voice.
Tess hung up.
* * *
ZACH SET DOWN the phone with a shake of his head. A prank call at eight in the morning was a first, as was the oddly defensive phone conversation he’d just had with the new neighbor. Defensive to the point of rudeness. What the hell?
Let it go. The woman was perfectly within her rights to say no to his offer. She could work on her delivery, but...
Zach grabbed his work gloves off the table, trying to focus on the day instead of how much hay he was going to have to buy to tide things over now that it was pretty damned obvious he’d lost the pastures he’d been counting on.
His index finger broke through the work-thinned leather at the tip of the glove as he pulled it on. This was turning out to be a grand day. He could only imagine what delights the north pasture held for him. And, of course, the duct tape was not in the junk drawer where it belonged. His exposed fingertip was simply going to have to take its chances.
Zach tucked his cell phone into his pocket and headed out the door where he could see his three daughters walking up the driveway to his sister-in-law, Beth Ann’s, trailer. Beth Ann worked at the school as an instructional aid and gave the girls a ride every morning after Zach fed them breakfast and helped gather schoolwork, lunches and other essentials before nudging them out the door. Beth Ann was a stickler for promptness. If the girls were late, they walked the half mile to school. Simple as that.
He stopped and watched for a moment, wondering why his youngest daughter, Lizzie, was wearing his oldest daughter, Darcy’s, old purple coat instead of her own new red one. He made a mental note to ask about it at dinner that night. Maybe Beth Ann had washed it. She was a bit of a clean freak, but he wasn’t complaining. She was doing him a huge favor living on the ranch in the hired-hand trailer, handling the girl stuff that he, the oldest of four brothers, did not feel qualified to deal with.
Benny, Zach’s young Border collie, was waiting for him at the old truck he used for beating around the ranch. The dog jumped up on the flat bed and danced excitedly, staying just out of reach in case Zach had some kind of crazy idea about not taking him.
“Don’t worry,” Zach muttered. “You’re going.” Benny, who seemed to understand every word Zach said, sat his butt down and let his tongue loll out in a canine grin.
By some miracle the ancient rig started first try and Zach headed down the lane leading toward the north hay pasture and the pump that needed to be pulled for repairs. He just hoped that he could fix it himself because if not, with cattle prices the lowest he’d seen them in three years, he’d have to cut yet another corner to make ends meet. He truly hoped that wasn’t the case, because right now he was running out of corners. His cousin, Jeff, had started running some cattle with him last year and shared some of the costs, but it still wasn’t enough to ease the pressure of the medical bills. All he wanted was to give his girls a comfortable life, to help compensate for losing their mom to breast cancer.
It wasn’t working out so well. His daughters wore whatever Beth Ann could find on sale while he duct-taped his work gloves and prayed that the pump could be jury-rigged into lasting another year so he had the bucks to buy hay.
He needed that pasture.
* * *
TESS PUT ON a pot of coffee, checked her email, then let the dogs back inside. Two hours of sleep were not enough, but it’d be a while before she could try again. Her adrenaline was too high, her nerves too jangled by the unexpected call.
Sad, really, that an innocuous phone call from a neighbor could ruin a day.
Tess fed the dogs, dumping copious amounts of the ultrahealthy—and therefore ultraexpensive—food their former owner had fed them into two large stainless steel bowls. Mac dove in. Blossom hung back and waited for him to finish, even though she had her own dish.
“You’re setting a bad precedent,” Tess muttered to the dog as she went back into the bedroom to change into her work clothes, which were actually new, since she no longer fit into her old clothes.
The jeans she put on were just jeans, bought for a reasonable price online and delivered by mail. No fashionable fading, studs or strategically placed frayed areas. The T-shirt was equally plain. Long-sleeved, black and boxy with a crew neck. One hundred percent cotton without a hint of spandex. It hung loosely from her shoulders, even though she’d now gained fifteen pounds and was curvier than she’d been her entire life. The curves were part of her disguise, lame as it was, since there was no way she could disguise the scars across the left side of her face.
Her ex-lawyer and savior, William, had suggested gaining weight in addition to dying her dark red hair dark brown and buying glasses she didn’t need. She’d told William that the last thing she felt like doing was eating. Actually, for the first week after the attack, she couldn’t eat, but instead sipped tiny meals through a straw. And even if she did gain weight, she’d pointed out bitterly, it wasn’t like she could hide the scars.
No, William had agreed in his understated way, but overly skinny people stood out almost as much as redheads and after the attack she’d become alarmingly gaunt. He was too polite to say skeletal.
So during the six weeks she’d hidden out at William’s San Jose home after the attack, Tess focused on gaining weight—no easy task for a model who’d spent the past decade eating the bare minimum and feeling guilty about even that small amount. Depression and fear coupled with healing scar tissue hadn’t made eating any easier, but Tess persevered. Pasta, milkshakes, ice cream. Formerly forbidden foods were now her allies and she choked them down, wishing she could enjoy finally being able to eat whatever she wanted.
By the time the LLC had been formed and William had helped her lease-option and sparsely furnish this place in the Nevada outback—a place where Eddie would stand out like a sore thumb—Tess had, for the most part, outgrown her clothes. She’d celebrated with an online shopping spree since she was too paranoid to shop in stores, and didn’t care if the clothing fit right—which it didn’t. Not in her experience anyway.
The tops didn’t cling to her upper body, the jeans didn’t hug her legs. Everything was loose and comfortable—and made her feel invisible—or as invisible as a person could be with a ruined face.
When Tess came back into the kitchen, the oversize stovetop espresso maker began to gurgle and the dogs instantly ran to the back door to wait while Tess poured coffee into a tall travel mug and added a healthy dollop of cream. She’d fallen into a routine over the past week. Coffee—regardless of what time of day she woke up—a quick breakfast of cereal and milk followed by a protein shake, then several hours in the barn sanding the old oak furniture she’d found there. Not that she knew anything about refinishing furniture, but she had instructions she’d printed off the internet and time on her hands.
Too much time. But dwelling on it made her feel even more like the prisoner she essentially was, which in turn made her determined to fill the hours so she wouldn’t feel like a prisoner. Eddie had destroyed her looks and her livelihood, all because she wouldn’t give him something she didn’t have, something that probably no longer even existed. She wasn’t going to let him destroy what was left of her life. She would hang on to what she had and make what she could of it. Then maybe, once the bastard was caught, she could slip back into the mainstream. Rejoin the land of the living.
But first he had to be caught.
* * *
ZACH RETURNED TO the house about half an hour after the girls got home from school. He’d pulled the pump and managed to fix it with the extra parts he had in his shop and then hauled the clumsy cylinder back to the well and lowered it down the hole. It had obligingly sucked up water and spit it back out through the wheel lines in the field.
Sweet victory.
When he walked into the house, the television was on and the heat was off. The three girls were in the living room wrapped in the afghans Karen had made for each of them during her illness. Emma and Lizzie were watching TV, Darcy was doing her homework at the big oak desk he’d inherited from his grandpa, the dark blue crocheted blanket draped over her shoulders. It’d been an unseasonably cold spring day and the house felt like a tomb.
“Darcy, you need to remember to turn on the heat.” Zach pulled off his gloves and dropped them in the square willow basket next to the door that Lizzie called the mitten box. “I can almost see my breath.”
Darcy looked at him from over the top of her glasses. “The furnace is dead and you won’t let me build a fire.”
Damn. He crossed the room to check the thermostat. Dead as a doornail. “You can build all the fires you want while I’m here,” Zach said as he headed for the basement door.
“That doesn’t do us much good when you’re not here,” Darcy said.
“I guess that’s what afghans are for.” Zach snapped on the hanging light before going down the wooden steps to battle the furnace. One of his wife’s cardinal rules had been no fires, no sharp things without an adult in the house. Darcy had been nine when Karen died—old enough to use sharp things, but she hadn’t. As far as he knew she still abided by the rule three years later.
He spent as much time working on the furnace as he did on the tractors and fully expected another major fight, but for once it turned out to be an easy fix. He replaced the fuse then hit the reset button and the beast roared to life. That was two relatively easy fixes in one day. But they didn’t balance out losing his grazing.
“Way to go, Daddy,” Lizzie said as he came up the stairs. She was still wearing Darcy’s coat, which went past her knees. Zach smiled at his youngest daughter, the one with Karen’s fair coloring and strawberry-blond hair. “Thanks, kiddo.” He knelt in front of her, placed a big hand on each of her small shoulders and gave her an exaggerated once-over. “Where’s your coat, Lizzie?”
The six-year-old shifted her mouth sideways. Not a good sign.
“I put it somewhere. I guess.” She couldn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Any idea where?”
She shook her head. Zach glanced at Darcy, who watched the action from his desk. She instantly went back to her homework. Zach sensed conspiracy.
“I want you to find it.”
“What if I can’t?” Lizzie asked as she twisted a button on Darcy’s coat.
Excellent question. “We’ll worry about that later. Right now I want you to find your coat.”
Lizzie exhaled in a long-suffering way and walked out of the room, feet dragging.
“Where’s Lizzie’s coat?” he asked Darcy.
She met his eyes in her direct way. “Honestly, Dad, I have no idea where it is.”
“She hid it,” Emma said from behind him. “I don’t know where.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t like it. She wanted a pink coat. Tia—” aka Beth Ann “—got her the red one because it was a better price.” Emma gave a philosophical shrug and then dismissively flipped one of her light brown braids over her shoulder. “You know how she hates red.”
Actually he didn’t, which kind of bothered him. It was common knowledge that Lizzie hated red?
Zach rubbed the back of his neck. “Thanks.”
“What’re you going to do?” Emma asked.
Consult with Beth Ann, no doubt. A new coat simply wasn’t in the cards until he shipped another lot of cattle and he was trying to hold off on that until the prices jumped. He was damned tired of giving away his beef for break-even prices. Last time he sold prematurely, he’d lost money, but he’d needed the cash and had taken the financial beating.
And he’d probably have to do it again before he had all the doctors and labs and hospitals—both local and the one in Reno—paid off.
Lizzie was going to wear her coat once they found it.
As Zach walked down the hall to the kitchen where dinner simmered in a slow cooker he wondered if a red coat could be dyed a less hated color. Purple maybe?
He’d just taken the top off the Crock-Pot when the kitchen door opened and his sister-in-law came in carrying a laptop case. “Hey, Beth Ann.”
“Zach.” She set the computer on the counter then pushed the dark hair back from the side of her face. She looked a lot like her sister, except Karen had been fair while Beth Ann was a deep brunette.
“What’s that for?”
“Darcy wants to borrow it.”
“You don’t need it for studying?” Beth Ann was taking online courses, trying to complete an education degree—or most of it anyway. By the time she got to the point when she would have to take regular classes, Darcy would be traveling to the high school in town, forty miles away, where the community college was located. The two of them could drive together, which would solve another problem—buying a car for Darcy.
“I can use the computer at school tonight and Darcy can take this up to her room and work in peace.” Beth Ann came to stand beside him as he added salt to the stew. “Any luck with the pastures?”
“Struck out.” He put the salt down and pulled the pepper out of the spice drawer, hoping Emma didn’t walk in. She ate more pepper than she realized.
“Really?” Beth Ann asked. “What’s she going to use them for?”
“We never got that far in the conversation.”
Beth Ann cocked her head and Zach added, “The new neighbor wasn’t all that friendly. Hung up on me.”
“Really?” She looked shocked.
“Yep.” The conversation had been over for all intents and purposes, but around here, people said goodbye before they hung up the phone.
Beth Ann took the pepper shaker from Zach when he was finished and dropped it back in the drawer while he stirred the stew. “Susan said one side of her face was bandaged when she came in to rent the post office box.”
“I heard.” Pretty much everyone had heard. Susan wasn’t exactly shy about sharing what she knew.
Beth Ann shrugged. “Maybe she needs some time to settle in. Get used to us here.”
“Maybe.” Zach wasn’t holding his breath. He opened the cupboard and pulled out five bowls.
“Nothing for me,” Beth Ann said. “I just came to drop off the laptop and see if you needed anything from town tomorrow.”
No, because he’d have to pay for it and he was saving his money for important stuff like hospital bills and equipment repairs. “I can’t think of anything.” He put the extra bowl back in the cupboard. “Did you know that Lizzie hates red?”
Beth Ann snorted. “I got that feeling when she pouted all the way home after I bought her a red coat.”
“She, uh, lost the red coat.”
“I think Miss Lizzie and I will have a talk,” Beth Ann said flatly.
“I already had one.”
“I’ll add my voice to yours.”
He shook his head. “I want to give Lizzie a shot at doing the right thing on her own.”
“Fine.” Beth Ann headed down the hall to the living room. “I’ll see how the homework is going before I head on back to school.”
Zach counted spoons out of the utensil drawer. His sister-in-law had been a godsend during Karen’s illness and for the three years since she’d died. And despite the fact that Beth Ann was practically the antithesis of her sister in temperament, she was devoted to raising her nieces the way Karen would have wanted them raised—to the point that there were times when Zach wondered if he was taking advantage, keeping her from having a life of her own. Whenever he broached the subject, though, Beth Ann brushed him off and Zach let the matter drop.
It was a comfortable arrangement—for him anyway—and it worked.
Beth Ann came back into the kitchen with Emma behind her explaining why she had yet to start her social studies report. The beauty of Beth Ann working at the school was that she knew everything that went on in her nieces’ academic lives—much to their annoyance.
“Are you sure you don’t want some stew?” Zach asked as he set the bowls on the table. On the nights they used the slow cooker, it was every man for himself and then the girls cleaned up while he went into his office and ruined his night calculating finances.
Again Beth Ann shook her head.
“You need to eat, Tia,” Emma said, echoing the words Beth Ann so often said when vegetables played a starring role in dinner.
“I’ll eat. I do have food at my place. By the way, you’ll need to find your own way home from school tomorrow.” Beth Ann looked at Zach. “I have language proficiency training in town for the next three afternoons. I leave as soon as school lets out.”
“We can walk home,” Emma said.
“Yes, but can Lizzie?” Beth Ann asked dryly. Lizzie hated walking anywhere.
“We can take our bikes,” Emma said brightly.
“Where?” Darcy asked as she came into the room.
“Tia can’t bring us home tomorrow because she has a meeting in town,” Emma said.
“I can take you to school and then you can walk home or your dad can pick you up,” Beth Ann said.
“We’ll ride our bikes,” Darcy said with an air of finality. She took her position as the oldest seriously and expected to have the last word on all matters. She was a bit like Beth Ann in that regard.
“Lizzie can’t ride a bike in your old coat,” Zach pointed out. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the outcome of a Lizzie/giant coat/bicycle spoke/gravel combination.
Emma and Darcy exchanged looks. “She’ll find her coat,” Darcy said. Emma nodded.
The two girls left the kitchen and Beth Ann smiled slightly. “Problem solved.”
“I just hope no one cries.”
“Amen to that.” Beth Ann smiled a little then headed for the door. Her hand was on the doorknob when she stopped and said, “You okay?”
Zach shrugged, hating that she could read him—but then she’d seen him in his most desperate and unguarded moments. “I’m concerned about losing the pastures.” Understatement of the year.
“What are you going to do about it?”
Zach opened the fridge and pulled out half a gallon of milk, then met Beth Ann’s eyes over the door. “I guess that I’m going to give it another shot.”
Only this time he was going in person.
CHAPTER TWO
TESS BALANCED THE coffee travel mug on top of the box of sandpaper and paint stripper that had arrived via UPS the day before, holding the top of the cup with her chin as she maneuvered the back door open on her way to the barn.
She’d yet to actually see the UPS man, who’d come to the ranch four times since she’d moved in. The first time he’d come, she’d been in the shower and had suffered a near heart attack when Blossom and Mac sounded the alarm from the living room. By the time she’d gotten out of the shower and jammed her soaking wet body into her robe and retrieved her small gun, the dogs had stilled. When she’d gotten into the living room, she saw the distinctive brown van pulling out of the driveway and a box of kitchen supplies sitting on her front porch, no signature required.
After that, Tess simply ignored the man’s knock once she ascertained it was really him. The fewer people who saw her, the better...which was why the last thing she wanted to see as she rounded the corner of the house was a plume of dust coming from a pickup truck heading down her driveway.
What now?
She wasn’t waiting around to find out—not out in the open. The pickup probably belonged to one of her neighbors and it no doubt looked crazy, but she turned and headed straight back around the house, the dogs on her heels. Once she was safely inside, she locked the back door and leaned against it. The front door was already locked.
She let out a shaky breath and debated. If whoever it was knocked, she could ignore it—even though she knew he’d seen her. There was no law saying she had to answer her door, but in a community like this, where the postmistress hugged the patrons, all that would do was cause talk among the neighbors.
If the guy driving the truck was a neighbor.
There’s no way Eddie’s found you.
The phrase was a mantra she used to soothe herself during the long hours of the night, but at the moment she was fairly certain it was true. She’d just had yet another clipped conversation with the Los Angeles detective, Tom Hiller, who was handling her assault case. She called him, once a week, for any possible updates on the case. She had a strong feeling she was bugging the hell out of him, but this was her life she was concerned about and it wouldn’t kill him to take a few minutes out of his week to talk to her.
So far nothing had changed. Eddie was an exemplary parolee with a job at a car wash. He was keeping his nose clean, doing what he was supposed to do.
Tess was more concerned about him doing what he wasn’t supposed to do.
The engine died and a minute later Tess heard footsteps on the front porch, which made her stomach clench until she thought she might throw up.
Deal with this.
Once upon a time she’d been fearless. Less than two months ago she would have described herself as savvy and streetwise. She’d had to be to survive her rugged teen years with her alleged family and their drugged-out friends. The modeling world also had its own kind of cutthroat culture. Yeah, she definitely would have called herself tough.
Looking back, though, she could see she’d been confident to the point of bravado. Confident enough to tell Eddie to take a flying leap when he’d first approached her. Confident in her abilities to stay safe right up until the guy had appeared out of nowhere as she approached her apartment building, knocked her down and slashed her face with what the doctors said was probably a piece of metal shrapnel, telling her in a low growl that Eddie was going to keep taking pieces off her until he got the money he knew she had. The money he’d left with her drugged-out mother before going to prison. Money she knew nothing about.
Safety had been an illusion—even to someone who thought of herself as streetwise—and she realized too late that Eddie would never believe she didn’t have his dirty money stashed away somewhere. He’d keep looking until he found her.
The old-fashioned doorbell rang and Tess moistened her dry lips as both dogs growled, reminding herself that she was still tough. A survivor. Plus she had two big dogs and a gun.
She sucked in a shaky breath, then pushed off from the back door and headed for the living room. She could see her visitor—from the chest up, anyway—through the slit in the curtains that covered the window in the door. He was a guy of average height and weight—as her attacker had been. She couldn’t tell what color his hair was under the beat-up cowboy hat, but guessed it was dark. He shifted his weight as he waited for her to open the door.
Tess unlocked the dead bolt and pulled the door open a crack, feeling somewhat reassured by the dogs crowding up behind her, trying to assess whether or not this guy was a threat. She kept her face tilted so he could only see the right side, the good side, but the corner of her glasses banged against the door and she had to move back slightly.
“Uh, hi,” the guy said as soon as it became obvious that she wasn’t opening the door any wider. The corners of his mouth tilted up slowly, as if he had to remind himself to smile, but the end result was rather breathtaking. In another time or place Tess could have appreciated a man like this. Blue eyes, incredible angles to his face, dark hair showing from under his cowboy hat.
But not at this time. She did not smile back. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so. I’m Zach Nolan. I called yesterday about the pasture.”
Tess stared at him, a slight frown drawing her eyebrows together. So what was he doing here? The last thing she needed was a persistent neighbor. “Was there something about my answer yesterday that you didn’t understand?”
“I thought maybe you didn’t understand.”
“Really,” she said coolly, calmly adjusting her glasses, which were still slightly crooked from banging the door.
“I would pay for the use of the pasture and the cows wouldn’t be anywhere near your place. Having the animals here wouldn’t be much different than not having them here. They’re not noisy or anything. Plus, you get the rental money.”
“Would they be in that field over there?” Tess nodded toward the field on the other side of her driveway.
“That would be one of the pastures.”
“And you have to do things with the cattle, right?”
“I move them around. Check on them.”
Which meant someone coming and going at times she had no control over. Which meant the dogs getting used to the sounds of someone being around.
Which seemed like a good way to compromise her safety.
Tess drew herself up, her face still angled away from him, even though she felt odd looking at him with one eye. “Listen. I know this sounds cold, but no. I...I don’t like cattle and I don’t want to lease my pastures.”
“You don’t like cattle.”
“Is there some reason I should?” she asked stiffly.
He gave a slow shake of his head, then peered at her from under the brim of his hat. “You might have moved to the wrong part of the country.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not interested in leasing and I’d appreciate it if you’d consider this matter closed. Now if there’s nothing else?” She started closing the door without waiting for an answer.
Zach Nolan stared at her in seeming disbelief as she pushed the door shut and then snapped the dead bolt in place.
Believe it, cowboy.
Tess snapped her fingers and the dogs fell in behind her as she walked through the living room back to the kitchen, wondering if Zach was still watching her through the window. A few seconds later she heard his footsteps on the porch followed a minute later by the roar of a powerful truck engine. Only then did she allow herself to sit on one of the kitchen chairs, the gun that weighed down her hoodie pocket clunking against the metal leg.
She pushed her fingers through her hair, keeping them far away from her scars and simply held them there as she breathed in and out. In and out.
* * *
ZACH GROUND THE gears as he shifted down at the end of Tess O’Neil’s driveway. He tried to remember if anyone had ever closed a door in his face before.
Nope. Not once.
Definitely something off about this woman.
She’d tried hard to hide the injured side of her face as they spoke, but hadn’t quite succeeded. The scars across her cheek were relatively fresh, jagged and ugly. Must have been one hell of a car wreck.
But beyond the scars, Zach had been struck by the uninjured side of her face—the wide, green, wary eyes behind the clunky-looking glasses, the full lips and high cheekbones. Practically flawless beauty juxtaposed against stark injury and inexcusable behavior.
He drove across the county road that separated his property from hers and into his own driveway, pissed that he’d hit such a brick wall. There didn’t seem to be much else he could do, considering who he was dealing with, other than to take the loss of the pastures like a man and figure out how to pay for hay. Obviously there would be no dealing with a person who’d closed a door in his face.
Zach pulled the truck to a stop in front of the workshop and got out. Benny, whom he’d left at home because he didn’t trust him in the good truck alone yet, came bounding out and proceeded to demonstrate exactly why he wasn’t allowed out in polite company.
“Off,” Zach scolded as the young collie jumped up on him, chewing and tugging at his sleeve. The teenage pup bounced backward, ready to play. “Behave or I’ll turn the girls loose on you.”
The pup grinned.
“Come on,” Zach said, starting for the bull pen. The pup fell in beside him. Benny was going to be a good dog as soon as he got through his adolescence...and then Zach only had three more adolescences to go through after that.
Darcy would be an official teen on her next birthday.
It didn’t seem possible. The years since Karen had died had in some ways crept by so slowly that Zach sometimes felt as if he’d never be able to fight his way through one day and into the next. But in other ways the time had sped by and it seemed as if he’d missed so much.
It wouldn’t be long before Darcy was out of the house and on her own—probably before he had a chance to do all the things he’d wanted to do, provide all the stuff he wanted to provide.
He hadn’t even taken his girls on a real vacation yet.
Zach lifted the gate latch, felt cool metal through the hole in the glove he hadn’t bothered to tape up the night before. He was too young to feel this damned old.
* * *
TEN MINUTES AFTER the cowboy left, Tess collected her box of refinishing supplies and headed out to the barn. There was no reason that a neighbor’s visit—business-related at that—should be so upsetting. Although, upon reflection, maybe the upsetting part was that she’d assumed when she moved to a rural area, people would leave her alone. She hadn’t counted on them calling her and showing up at her door. No. That hadn’t been in the game plan at all.
It was just one guy with a legitimate reason for being there.
Tess doubted the cowboy would be back. He hadn’t seemed too impressed with her manners.
Once outside, the dogs barely sniffed the air before putting their heads down and investigating scents along the path to the barn, obviously at ease. Tess set the box on top of an old rabbit hutch and then rolled the heavy barn door open. It squeaked and protested until she had it wide enough to give light to her project.
The barn had electricity, but the lightbulbs were all burned out or broken, so Tess simply left the door open as she worked. She didn’t really want to be closed up in the barn, peaceful as it was with the old farming implements stored along one wall and dim light filtering in through the dusty windows. She felt vulnerable closed up in a place where she couldn’t lock the doors. Besides, she enjoyed the sight of the mountains rising up behind the small town on the other side of her largest field.
Tess opened the cardboard box and took out the package of dust masks. She broke open the plastic, snapped on a mask and adjusted the plastic string. She felt a bit like Darth Vader and the stiff cellulose put pressure on the tender part of her injury, but it beat sucking in sawdust.
Mac and Blossom settled outside the door in the grass, Blossom rolling over onto her back and letting her tongue loll out, looking nothing like the lethal weapon she was supposed to be. Tess picked up a piece of sandpaper, rolling it around the pencil in order to get into the nooks and crannies of the scroll work on the legs of the table.
She’d finished sanding the top and sides of the table yesterday, having eventually worked her way through four coats of different colored enamels—white, red, green and then white again—before she’d hit the gorgeous oak below.
Tess was in no hurry because once she finished, she had little to do except sketch. Sketching had been her escape since her teen years when she’d lain in her bed—shutting out the sounds of Eddie and her mother sniping at each other, or her stepbrother’s overly loud music—and created beautiful people wearing beautiful clothing.
But one could only sketch so much, and Tess planned on tackling more pieces once she finished her table. In addition to the table, she’d found three grimy oak chairs and a bureau. The bureau was, quite frankly, gross, since many generations of mice had taken up residence in it, but the chairs were salvageable. They reminded her of chairs her grandmother had treasured. Chairs she’d inherited from her own mother. Jared, Tess’s jerk of a stepbrother and Eddie’s oldest son, had sold them after her grandmother died to settle a debt.
If only that’d been the only thing he’d done to her. It wasn’t. When Tess had moved back in with her mother and Eddie after her grandmother’s death, Jared had subtly terrorized her, making sexual innuendos, brushing up against her whenever they were alone. Tess had had a buffer while Mikey, her younger stepbrother, had lived there, but after he’d left home, at the ripe old age of fifteen, Tess had been on her own.
She was still amazed she’d escaped without being sexually assaulted. But it had been a narrow escape—no thanks to her mother, who was too caught up in her drug use to notice or care.
Tess pushed the bitter thought out of her head, focused again on the rhythm of the sanding, which was oddly calming.
Eventually she would have to come up with some other way to spend her time—preferably something that allowed her to earn a living at home. She had a decent nest egg, since she’d chosen to save her money rather than party it away. No matter how steadily she worked, Tess had never ever been able to believe her modeling career would last for longer than the next contracted job, because nothing else in her life, other than her grandmother’s steadfast love, had ever lasted.
How wise she’d been.
Decent as it was, though, what was left of her nest egg after leasing the ranch wouldn’t last for the rest of her life.
* * *
IT WAS PAST two o’clock when Tess finally finished the first table leg and sat back on the grass to admire her handiwork. Why on earth had someone stuck such a gorgeous table in a barn?
Because someone else had painted it white, then green, then red, then white and it had been pretty ugly, that’s why.
The dog closest to her sneezed, an open plea for attention and Tess reached out to ruffle Mac’s ears. He lazily rolled over on his back, giving her access to his itchy belly. She patted him a few times and he sneezed again.
“Come on, guys,” she said as she got to her feet. “I need to hit the shower.”
She rolled the barn door shut and headed to the house, wondering if talking to her dogs as if they were people made her the canine equivalent of a crazy cat lady. Somehow crazy dog lady just didn’t have the same ring.
Tess had never had a dog of her own, but had once shared a house with Demon, her grandmother’s sausage-shaped Chihuahua. Demon had put her off dogs, but after the attack she’d changed her mind and told William she wanted to find a guard dog—or four—to live with her. Lethal killing machines if possible. She was a scared woman who needed protection.
William had lined up the deal for her, finding not lethal killing machines, but two retired personal protection dogs in need of a home. Tess hadn’t been certain that, despite their fearsome appearance, two older dogs would fit the bill, but she’d since changed her mind. Blossom and Mac knew their jobs. They stuck to her like glue, alerted her when anything new appeared on the scene and followed her commands instantly. Plus she’d seen them attack a guy in a padded suit when she and William went to pick them up. Close enough to lethal for her.
“Who wants a snack?” she asked after locking the back door. Two canine butts instantly hit the floor. Tess gave each dog a giant rawhide chew toy and then double-checked the lock on the front door before heading toward the bathroom, pulling off her dusty clothing as she went.
She’d barely gotten into the shower when the dogs went into a barking frenzy, making her jerk so hard she hit her elbow on the faucet. And it wasn’t the UPS-man-is-here-again barking. It was the this-is-something-we-aren’t-familiar-with barking.
Not again...
Tess cranked off the shower and got out, heart pounding. She wrapped a towel around herself and stood for a moment on the bath rug, her hair dripping, listening.
The dogs were at the back door, not the front. Growling now instead of barking.
Crap. That wasn’t good. Tess let the towel drop and yanked her robe off the hook next to the shower. She struggled into the robe and stood still again, heart hammering. And then she heard it.
Laughter.
Happy kid laughter.
The blood that had been pounding in her temples drained away, leaving her feeling oddly light-headed. Just kids.
What were kids doing on her property?
Tess tried to swallow, but it was impossible because her mouth was dry. She moved cautiously to the window. There, not fifty feet from her house, three girls walked along the path next to the overgrown creek, pushing bicycles and talking.
Tess stepped away from the window as the tallest girl, who pushed the smallest bike, looked over at the house.
Did they know they were trespassing?
Tess tightened the belt around her waist and headed for the kitchen, where the dogs scratched at the door, anxious to get out and deal with this threat.
“Nee. Af,” Tess said and they both obediently dropped to their bellies. She watched the girls disappear behind the barn, then reappear on the other side. They followed the creek to the road, then pulled the bikes under the wire fence.
Tess slowly sat on a kitchen chair and rubbed her hand over her forehead. She’d just had the crap scared out of her by children. Something had to give. She couldn’t live the rest of her life like this. Afraid of little girls and cowboys.
CHAPTER THREE
“HEY, DAD?”
Zach looked up from the PVC pipe he was measuring. Darcy and Emma stood in the doorway of the shop. “Yeah?”
“Lizzie’s bike got a goat head in the tire on the way home today.”
Well, that explained why they were late. “Where’s the bike?”
“The front yard.”
“Where’s Lizzie?”
“Riding my bike. Her feet can barely touch the pedals.”
Zach set down the pipe, wiping his hands on a rag as he walked toward the door. “I don’t think I have another repair patch.” Goat heads were the round seedpod of a ground covering weed, hard as nails with a couple nasty tire-puncturing prongs sticking out. They were hell on bike tires.
“Maybe Tia can bring one home from town.”
“You can text her,” Zach said. Emma immediately headed off to the house. “But she may not get done with her class before the store closes,” Zach called after her.
“Wal-Mart doesn’t close,” Darcy said.
Zach kept forgetting that. “Well, once upon a time stores did close,” he said.
Darcy cocked her head. “And you remember those days? Man, Dad. You’re old.” Zach grinned as they walked toward the lawn where Lizzie’s bike lay on its side.
“Yeah, and I feel it every year.”
“Is that a gray hair there?” she asked.
“You should know,” Zach replied. “You probably put it there.”
“So how’d the pasture thing work out?” Darcy asked casually, hooking her thumbs in her front jeans pockets.
“What pasture thing?” Zach asked slowly.
“You know...the pasture across the road. The one the lady wouldn’t let you rent.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Tia was talking to Mrs. Bishop about it.”
“Did Beth Ann or Mrs. Bishop know you were there?”
Darcy shook her head. “If they know I’m there, then I don’t hear any good stuff.”
Lizzie came wobbling around the corner of the house before he could answer, perched on Darcy’s bike, the tips of her toes barely reaching the pedals. Benny the collie bounded alongside her.
“Don’t wave,” Zach said as her little hand lifted a few inches off the handlebar. She immediately clamped it back down as the bike wobbled dangerously. Both he and Darcy took a quick step forward, but Lizzie regained control and pedaled on, Benny right behind her. Zach hoped they had some Band-Aids on hand.
“She thinks she’s so cool now that she’s in the first grade,” Darcy said.
“Yeah. I don’t know anyone else who ever felt that way.”
“Come on, Dad. I was a serious student. Lizzie is all about having a good time.” Darcy’s eyes twinkled behind her glasses as she glanced sideways at her father. He shook his head and then picked up Lizzie’s bike from where it lay in the grass and tipped it upside down so he could take off the tire.
“I think this is beyond a patch kit,” Zach said. “We’ll have to get another tube.”
“Should I text Tia again?” Emma asked, having just stepped out onto the porch.
“No. I’ll get one when I go to town tomorrow.” He wasn’t going to have Beth Ann chasing all over Wesley looking for inner tubes when she no doubt had class work to do when she got home.
“But—” Emma started, only to be interrupted by her older sister.
“We can walk home,” Darcy said.
* * *
TESS FELL ASLEEP in the chair watching television, the sound turned down so low she practically had to read lips to understand the action. She hadn’t counted on sleeping at all—at least not until daybreak, which was the usual time she fell asleep. But despite the cowboy’s visit, despite the shower scare, she conked out sometime in the early-morning hours, only to be startled awake sometime after sunrise by the dogs scrambling to their feet and racing for the back door.
Tess tumbled out of the chair, tripping over the fleece blanket she’d been nestled under and going down hard on her knees. And then, during a brief lull in the canine uproar in the kitchen, she heard the girls’ voices.
This was ridiculous. There was no reason for those kids to cut across her property. It was, after all, hers.
She started for the back door, then stopped when she saw how far away the three girls were. She’d have to run after them if she wanted to warn them off and that smacked of crazy. She wanted to keep them off her property, not scare the daylights out of them...although that probably would keep them off her property. Something to consider.
She gripped the door frame and watched as they disappeared around a thicket of willows growing along the creek. No. She’d wait until they passed by again. From the time frame, it seemed logical that they were traveling to and from school. Yesterday they’d showed up around three. She’d make certain she wasn’t in the shower at that time and if they passed by again, well, the four of them would have a chat about the meaning of private property.
* * *
ZACH LEFT THE hospital clutching a sheaf of papers. No, the accounts manager would not decrease his payment amount temporarily—even if cow prices were down. They suggested he take out a loan. Well, that was a fine idea, except that he refused to put his land, the one thing he would be able to give the girls, up for collateral.
That had been a rough enough pill to swallow, but then, on the way out of the expensive new hospital addition that he was helping to pay for, Marcela James, the hospital administrator, had collared him. He thought for one brief happy moment that perhaps she’d heard about his visit to the accounting office and was there to offer a reprieve, but no. Instead she cheerfully told him that if he wanted to sell that forty-acre parcel her husband had once approached him about, they’d still be happy to buy it.
Zach had smiled and nodded while thinking, “When hell freezes over.”
Leave it to the Jameses to hit a guy when he was down. Zach was not parceling up his ranch. Not until he got backed into a tighter corner than he was in now—although the way things were going, that might be tomorrow.
He pressed his fist against his sternum, trying to ease the dull stress-induced ache. All he needed was to keel over from a heart attack. That’d help the girls a whole bunch.
Zach unlocked the truck, then pulled the list out of his jeans pocket and gave it a shake to straighten it out. Bike tire was at the top. Beneath that purple dye. Even though Beth Ann insisted that Lizzie was spoiled, and Zach did not disagree, Beth Ann had agreed to try to dye the coat. Lizzie understood that she might end up with a muddy gray mess, but she was willing to take the chance. Someday Zach would have a heart-to-heart and find out why his youngest daughter hated red.
* * *
BEFORE MOVING TO the boonies, Tess had had no inkling that the simple act of sanding wood, of doing something with her hands other than sketching, could be such a sanity saver. Usually the steady rhythm soothed her, but today she sanded for less than an hour before she decided to give it up for the day and investigate possible at-home careers. The non-scam kind.
It’d been a project she’d been putting off because she was afraid of reality—as in, there probably wasn’t anything she could do to make a living at home. Oh, there were jobs. Medical transcriptionist. Technical writer. Data entry. Phone surveyor. But nothing jumped out at her, mainly because she had no formal training beyond a high school diploma and an impressive modeling portfolio. She wasn’t qualified for a hell of a lot, except perhaps phone surveyor.
You have time to figure this out...
But how much time? Especially if she had to train for something. She still had nearly a hundred grand in her LLC account after buying the ranch; however, simple math indicated that if she spent only the bare minimum, she could last maybe eight years. And that was if she didn’t buy a newer car, had no increase in costs and was stingy with the electricity. Not exactly the way she wanted to live.
Ironically she’d given some thought to investigating second careers a few months ago. Almost ten years had passed since she’d been signed by the Dresden Modeling Agency, a near miracle which she credited to her unusual celadon-green eyes and the cheekbones she’d inherited from her Irish grandmother. Models didn’t necessarily have to disappear in their late twenties anymore, but some of Tess’s longtime associates had started losing work and she was not one to ignore warning signs. And then, amazingly, she’d made the short list for the Face of Savoy Cosmetics campaign and all thoughts of investigating a second career were put on hold while she waited for an answer.
Her face had been slashed before she heard.
Tess rubbed her hand over her cheek, testing to see if it still ached as much as it had yesterday. Yes. The torn muscles were slow to heal, though the stitches had probably dissolved long ago.
Her face would eventually heal, but she would never be able to make money as she had only a few months ago. Eddie had taken that away from her.
Tess tried hard not to think about that, mainly because she was afraid that if she stopped feeling numb about her career, if she let herself think about how much she’d lost, she wouldn’t be able to move past the bitterness.
She turned off the computer monitor, having had enough depression for one day, then jumped a mile when Mac let out a loud bark. Blossom instantly joined in and once again they raced to the back door.
Right on schedule.
Tess walked into the kitchen just in time to see the three girls traipsing along the path by the barn, one tall and dark-haired with glasses, one just a few inches shorter with long brown braids and the last a small little thing with a short blond pixie cut.
“Stay,” Tess said sharply, not being able to recall the Dutch command. But the dogs obediently held as she opened the back door and slipped outside. She’d debated about covering her injury then decided what the hell? People were eventually going to see it. Covering it only seemed to draw more attention.
“Hey,” she called after the girls. They instantly stopped, whirling around with surprised looks on their faces.
Tess marched through the tall grass toward them. The littlest girl, who had a red coat bundled under her arm even though it was quite chilly, took a small step backward, her eyes fixed on Tess’s scars.
“This is private property,” Tess said. “You can’t just cross it any time you please.”
Three pairs of eyes widened then the ones behind the glasses narrowed again. “We’ve always used this path to go to school,” the oldest girl said with a touch of indignation.
“For years,” the middle girl added, nervously flipping one of her braids over her shoulder.
“Because that property owner didn’t care,” Tess explained matter-of-factly. “But I do.”
“Why?” the oldest girl asked.
“It doesn’t matter why,” Tess snapped. She hadn’t expected to get an argument. She’d expected to lay down the law and have the girls comply. “If you persist in using the trail, I’m going to call the police.”
“Sheriff,” the older girl said dryly, negating the effect Tess was aiming at.
“Whatever,” Tess said. “I will contact the authorities.”
The littlest girl continued to stare at Tess’s face. No, she was more than staring. She was doing an in-depth study, tilting her head and wrinkling her forehead, and it made Tess feel ridiculously uncomfortable. She cleared her throat. “Of course, I don’t want to do that, so please, take the road from now on.”
“But—” the girl with the braids started to say before the tall girl touched her shoulder. She instantly closed her mouth.
“Is this property posted?” glasses girl asked.
Tess raised her eyebrows at the unexpected question. “Excuse me?”
The girl tilted her chin up. “Posted. If you don’t have No Trespassing signs, then technically you can’t accuse us of trespassing.”
“I most certainly can.”
The girl shook her head. “No. You can’t. Look it up.”
Tess let out a breath, thinking she was so not prepared to do battle with a know-it-all preadolescent when the youngest girl asked in a hushed voice, “What happened to your face?”
“I got caught trespassing.” Tess grated the words out. “And trust me...you wouldn’t want this to happen to you.”
The little girl gasped, her eyes growing wide as she backed up until she was plastered against the older girl, who put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. The little girl’s lower lip quivered, her eyes still fixed on the scars, and Tess felt bad for all of a split second. “If I were you,” she said coolly, “I’d take the long way home from now on.”
And then, since she’d made her point and didn’t want to risk crossing verbal swords with the oldest girl again, turned on her heel and stalked through the tall grass back to her house.
* * *
ZACH PULLED TO a stop next to the shop feeling more exhausted than if he’d spent the day digging fence posts by hand. He hated going to town, and dealing with the hospital made it worse.
He was halfway to the house when the door opened and Emma and Darcy raced out.
“What happened?” he automatically asked. Neither of them had any visible injuries, but Lizzie wasn’t there.
“We didn’t know we were trespassing,” Darcy announced from the top step.
“What?”
“Honest, Dad.” Emma jumped from the top step to the sidewalk just as he got there. “We thought that anyone could take the shortcut to school. We used to take it all the time.”
“Slow down and start from the beginning,” Zach said, not liking the sound of this one bit.
Emma and Darcy exchanged glances and for once it was Emma who did the talking. “Tia had to leave early this morning.” Translation: his daughters were late so she left without them. “We had to walk because of Lizzie’s bike, so we took the trail along the creek to school this morning. On the way home that...lady...who lives there came out and yelled at us. She almost made me cry.”
“More than that,” Darcy said in a low voice, with a quick glance over her shoulder at the front door, “she scared poor Lizzie to death.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ENCOUNTER WITH the trespassing girls had left Tess feeling edgy and unsettled. She tried to go back to her internet search, but eventually gave up and sketched, which she usually enjoyed more than being reminded of how hard it was going to be to earn a living. But today not so much. Her eye was off, the designs lackluster. She finally tossed the pad aside and told the dogs it was time for a walk. She needed to move.
Who was she kidding? Moving wouldn’t solve anything. What she needed was someone to talk to, someone to pour out her mishmash of fears and concerns to. Someone to ask for advice.
But she had no one, so physical activity would have to suffice. A car on the county road slowed as she approached her field and Tess automatically froze in place, even though she recognized the car as the one driven by the dark-haired woman who lived at the ranch across the road. The wife of the cowboy who’d wanted to lease the pasture, no doubt. The rather fine-looking cowboy.
Tess touched her injured cheek, then lowered her hand, closed her fingers. There’d be no men in her immediate future—fine-looking or otherwise—and not because her face was ugly. Tess would be alone because her life was ugly.
As soon as the car turned into the driveway opposite her own, Tess climbed through the fence. Her path was always the same—across the field on the other side of her driveway, the one the cowboy had wanted to lease, and toward the mountains that flanked the west side of the valley. Once in the field, she was far enough away from the roads to feel safe, so she allowed the dogs to run. Heaven knew they spent enough time cooped up in the house with her. They needed the opportunity to stretch their legs, run and do dog stuff.
Tess walked through the knee-deep grass, the breeze at her back. The sun was starting to sink behind the mountains, casting long rays across the valley and enveloping her in golden light. A couple of months ago she might have closed her eyes and raised her face to enjoy the warmth of the rays on her skin. Let her cares go. Of course, a couple months ago she also walked fearlessly wherever she wanted, within reason. Being raised as she’d been, in a tough neighborhood where one learned to watch their back, Tess had felt as if she could handle anything.
Well, she’d been wrong. She hadn’t been able to handle a surprise attack in the parking area of her apartment building.
Tess continued across her field until she came to the boundary fence. The dogs were already hunting in the field on the other side, so she lifted the top barbwire strand and eased through the fence.
The sun sank lower, deepening the gold cast of the light. Deep purple shadows stretched toward her from the base of the mountain. It would be dark soon, but Tess continued to walk until she came to the very center of the field of tall grass and there she stood, the wind ruffling her hair, and watched the last sliver of the sun disappear behind the mountains.
Was this the way her life would continue? Standing alone in the middle of nowhere? A study in solitude?
Until Eddie screwed up and went back to prison, yes.
Tess grabbed a handful of grass and yanked, twisting the blades around her hand before she turned into the wind and called the dogs to start for home. Detective Hiller didn’t know Eddie like she did. Yeah, he might be working at the car wash and showing up for his meetings, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have someone looking for her. She’d never known Eddie to give up, but she had known him to do some sadistic things. One guy had tried to encroach on his territory shortly before she’d run away and Eddie had not only beat the crap out of him—he’d arranged to have the guy’s trailer house torched while he was doing it.
Because of all the chemicals inside, the house had practically vaporized and the newspaper account had mentioned how fortunate it was that the owner hadn’t been home. Tess’s mouth twisted at the thought. Eddie had gotten such a kick out of that. He’d torn the article out and taped it to the fridge.
The clouds hung low and dark on the southeastern horizon, flat-bottomed and threatening as Tess headed across the field to the safety of her house. Walking toward the sunny mountains, she hadn’t realized how quickly the storm had been moving in. When she reached the fence to her property she climbed through, then called the dogs again. Blossom shot past her, scooting under the wire before she stopped to grin at her, tongue lolling out the side of her mouth. Tess looked back and saw Mac hot on the trail of some small animal.
“Mac! Get over here! Hier!”
The dog reversed course and headed toward Tess at a dead run. Halfway to the fence he gave a startled yelp as he disappeared into the tall grass. Less than a second later he reappeared, bounding up, and continued racing toward her.
Tess crouched down as the dog approached, ruffling the fur on either side of his neck when he obediently sat in front of her. His side was covered with moist dirt, which she brushed off. He must have fallen into a ditch or a hole hidden by the grass. Unseen danger. Exactly what she was trying to avoid.
“Let’s go home,” she said, and the dogs trotted ahead of her. Mac limped slightly. He kept up with Blossom, but his head bobbed up and down as he moved, making Tess wonder just how badly he’d hurt himself. The next time she walked, she’d keep the dogs closer and stay out of that part of the field.
A lightning bolt danced along the distant mountains as Tess mounted her porch steps. Another thunderstorm. Just what she needed to add to her unsettled mood.
The low rumble of thunder was followed by a gust of warm wind that lifted her hair as she unlocked the door. Once upon a time she’d loved thunderstorms.
Not so much anymore.
* * *
“COME ON, ELIZABETH. You’re not afraid of thunder.” Zach snapped on the light in his daughter’s tiny second-story bedroom as he walked inside. It was the third time she’d called him in the past hour. The first time she’d said the thunder bothered her, but he wasn’t buying it since she usually had her nose pressed to the window, watching the lightning. The second time she’d asked him to lower the blinds.
So was this an attention-getting device? Did she just want some company? Whichever it was, Zach’s patience was growing thin. He was tired.
“It’s not the thunder,” Lizzie admitted in a small voice. A low rumble punctuated her words.
“Then what is it?” he asked softly.
“Trespassing.”
“Trespassing? What about it?” He’d made it clear that his daughters were never to cross the neighbor’s property again, despite Darcy’s heated protests about the land not being posted.
Lizzie twisted the edge of the blanket between her fingers. “What happens to you if you trespass?”
Zach knelt down next to the bed so they could be eye to eye. “The sheriff will warn you not to do it again.”
Lizzie’s forehead wrinkled. “But...her face.”
“Those scars did not come from trespassing, Lizzie.” He didn’t know how on earth they could and he was pissed that Tess would have told his girls that.
“Then why did she say it?” Lizzie’s eyes were huge.
Good question. Why scare a six-year-old? “My best guess is that she was trying to make a point. Her face didn’t get hurt because she trespassed,” he repeated firmly. “Your face will not get hurt if you trespass.” He could only imagine what scenarios Lizzie had been conjuring up in her young mind. “Even though you shouldn’t trespass,” he added for the sake of consistency.
Lizzie sniffed. “How do you know?”
“Because that’s not what happened to the lady. Her scars look like they came from a car accident, honey.”
Lizzie twisted the edge of her blanket between her small hands. “She was lying?”
“In a big way.” Zach reached down to smooth a few pale reddish-gold strands of hair off her forehead. In Lizzie’s limited experience, adults didn’t lie. She had so much to learn. “Now go to sleep, kiddo. There is absolutely nothing to worry about.”
“Can Benny sleep with me?”
“Benny stinks to high heaven right now. Trust me, you don’t want him in your bed or you’ll smell like a ranch dog. You don’t want that, do you?” A wavering smile touched his daughter’s lips and she shook her head. “Benny’s keeping guard on the porch,” Zach said, pulling Lizzie’s blankets up a little closer to her chin. “He’ll bark if there’s anything to worry about.” Damn, he hoped the dog didn’t bark. He needed some sleep.
Lizzie’s smile faded away. She wrapped her arms around Zach’s neck, pulling herself against him. He put a hand on her back and held her for a moment, smelling the strawberry bubble bath Emma had given her for her birthday. Then he got back to his feet and Lizzie snuggled deeper into the covers, looking so small.
“Liz, you know I’ll make sure nothing happens to you. Right?”
She nodded silently and Zach smiled. “Good. Now get some sleep. Tia will drive you to school tomorrow.”
Darcy’s door was open and the light was on when he walked past her room a few seconds later. He paused in the doorway and she looked up from where she was reading in bed.
“If Liz yells again, I’ll go,” she offered.
“I think she’ll be okay,” Zach said. “I should just let Benny sleep with her.”
“Ewww. Have you smelled him?”
“You guys going to wash him this weekend?”
Darcy let out a heavy sigh. “I guess.”
“Just how scary was this lady?” Zach asked. The girls had poured the story out shortly after he got home but it had been jumbled, told from three different points of view. At the time Zach had brushed aside the details and got to the meat of the matter—his girls shouldn’t have been on Tess O’Neil’s land and they weren’t to go back again. He didn’t want his daughters to have anything to do with her.
“I wasn’t scared.” Darcy’s lips twisted a little. “But I was kind of shocked. It took me a minute to realize she was being serious.”
“She’s serious,” Zach said. And a whole lot less than friendly. Why did people like that move to small communities? “I take it you guys aren’t going to use the creek path to get to school anymore? You’re going to stay off her property?”
“We won’t take Lizzie on the creek path. That’s for sure.”
“None of you will take the creek path.”
“Dad, it’s so much shorter...”
“And it’s so her property.”
“It’s stupid.”
“Stay away from that woman and off her land. Got it?”
Darcy let out a loud sigh—the kind he’d recently discovered only adolescents seemed to be able to make. “Fine. Got it.”
“Thank you.”
Zach walked down the hall to Emma’s room. The door was shut, but he cracked it open and looked inside. His middle daughter was sound asleep, despite the thunder and the Lizzie drama. He smiled, wishing he had that ability. Sleepless nights were more of the norm for him and because of the uncooperative hospital accounting department, he predicted more of the same.
He opened his bedroom door and flicked on the light. For a long while after her death, he’d kept Karen’s belongings out where he could see them, although Beth Ann had boxed her clothing and sent it to charity. But as time went on, he’d divided up Karen’s personal treasures between his daughters. The small collection of jewelry he’d stored for later. All that remained was a photo on the nightstand and a lot of good memories.
And a lot of bad ones. Not of Karen, but of the grim months following the diagnosis. The trauma of the treatments. Meeting the needs of three little girls who were about to lose their mother. Grieving for his wife long before he’d lost her.
Zach sat on the bed and eased his boots off. The first one fell with a heavy clunk. What would Karen have done tonight after discovering what was bothering her baby? He smiled wearily. Probably marched straight over to Tess O’Neil’s place and ripped into her. Karen had been sweet and peaceful, until something endangered those she loved. Beth Ann was the same way.
So was he. It was important to get along with the neighbors, but when a neighbor threatened your kids, things changed. Granted, they’d had no right to cross her land, but they were little girls, not hoodlums, following a path they’d taken for years. What the hell was she thinking trying to scare them?
Leave it. Just leave it.
Easier said than done when he was brought out of bed two hours later by a crying child. He shrugged into his flannel robe, his last gift from Karen, and he jogged upstairs to find Darcy hugging her little sister.
“It’s not the lady. Honest,” Lizzie said.
Like hell.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Darcy said. “Liz is coming to bed with me.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. But only for one night.” Darcy emphasized the last words.
“One night,” Lizzie agreed, making a beeline into Darcy’s room.
Zach waited until the girls were in Darcy’s bed, then turned off the light. Across the field, Tess O’Neil’s place glowed like a beacon, every light on, even though it was almost three o’clock in the morning.
Darcy leaned out of bed and craned her neck to see what Zach was staring at out of her window. Then she shrugged.
“It’s like that every night, Dad. She never shuts off her lights.”
* * *
THE NIGHT BECAME still after the storm had passed, almost too still, and Tess couldn’t bring herself to go upstairs to sleep. She remained in the chair, dozing fitfully and waking the next morning stiff from having finally fallen asleep in an uncomfortable position. When she pushed the blanket off her lap and got up out of the chair, Blossom shot to her feet, but Mac was slower to rise. When he finally did get to his feet, he held his injured foot a good three or four inches off the floor.
“Let’s see that leg,” Tess said, crouching in front of the dog. She reached out to gently touch it and Mac yelped, drawing it back, but not before Tess felt how hot it was. This was a problem.
Ten minutes later, after a short internet search, Tess called a vet in Wesley, the larger town an hour’s drive to the south. As she’d feared, since Dr. Hyatt was the only vet within sixty miles, no appointments were available until the following week, but the vet tech promised to let her know if something opened up.
“His leg is hot,” Tess said after receiving the bad news. “I’m afraid of infection.”
“It’s probably just inflammation,” the tech said, “but to play it safe, I’ll phone Ann at the mercantile about some medications you can give him until the doctor can see him.”
“Really? The mercantile here?”
“Yeah. The merc is kind of our branch pharmacy.”
“I had no idea. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Tess had shopped at the mercantile three times so far, and each time she’d been the only person in the store except for the tough-looking elderly woman behind the counter who’d gruffly introduced herself as Ann. Tess had not made a friend when she’d refused to offer her name in return.
When Tess parked in front of the store a half hour after talking to the vet, she was in luck again. Not a single car in the small lot. List in hand, she crossed the old wooden porch and pulled the door open, only to stop abruptly on the threshold, facing five sets of curious eyes.
Tess automatically dropped her chin, hiding her face as she quickly walked past the women who stood in a tight group near the checkout counter, and grabbed a basket off the stack at the end of the first aisle.
“Well, hello,” one of the women called after her, “are you the new tenant of the Anderson place?”
“Hi,” Tess replied, not answering the question and not looking back as she escaped down the aisle closest to her.
She stopped at the end of the aisle, out of sight of the group, and faced the cooler as she gathered her composure, convinced herself that this was not a big deal...just unexpected.
The mercantile was roughly the size of a large convenience store, stacked to the ceiling with a wild variety of merchandise, much of which Tess didn’t recognize. Good cover until the ladies left. But the ladies started talking again and Tess soon realized that they had no intention of leaving.
Deciding she couldn’t hide forever, she opened the cooler door and pulled out butter, milk and eggs before moving on to the rather sad-looking produce. If she hadn’t felt cornered she might have worked at choosing the best fruit and vegetables, but as it was, she dumped carrots, oranges and apples into her basket, put three loaves of bread on top—one to eat, two to freeze. Then she peeked around the corner of a display.
The women were still there, clustered in the exact spot Tess wanted to be. Well, she couldn’t hide out here forever and when Ann, the proprietress, caught sight of her and frowned, Tess sucked up her courage and headed for the checkout counter.
She was instantly surrounded by women—or so it felt.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” one of the ladies said. Tess didn’t know which one because she didn’t look at them. “Do you quilt?”
“No.” Tess set the basket on the counter where Ann stood with a hand poised over the keys of the cash register, waiting for Tess to unload her basket. “Has Dr. Hyatt phoned in an order for me?” Tess asked her as she pulled the bread out of the basket.
“If you’re Tess O’Neil he has,” the woman said in a tone that told Tess she hadn’t forgotten her refusal to state her name on her first visit.
“I am,” Tess said in a low voice.
Ann pulled a stapled paper bag from under the counter and started ringing up the items in Tess’s basket. And then the women started closing in again from behind.
“We’re always looking for new members for our club,” another woman, who for some reason was not taking a very blatant hint, declared from close to Tess’s right shoulder. “And quilting is very easy to learn.”
“Thank you very much, but I’m not interested.” Tess sensed an exchange of glances as she pulled three twenties out of her very plain purse and handed them across the counter. The drawer of the old-fashioned cash register popped open as Tess quickly loaded her purchases into the recyclable tote she’d brought. A couple bucks’ worth of change and she was good to go.
Except that she had to walk past the group of women and the shortest one was now studying her face with a thoroughness that unnerved her—to the point that Tess half expected her to say, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Maybe her disguise wasn’t as good as she’d hoped. Maybe she should have gone with a wig or something. Or never left the house.
“Excuse me,” she said, refusing to make eye contact as she squeezed past the women and opened the door. Okay. She was coming off as cold and rude. Tough. These ladies needed to understand that she didn’t want to join their quilting bees or whatever.
“Such a nice young woman,” she heard one of the women say sarcastically.
“I swear...I know her from somewhere.”
The last words came just as the door swung shut, making Tess’s blood freeze. She rushed to the car and got inside, slamming the door harder than necessary and then dumping the grocery tote on the seat beside her as the dogs nuzzled her hair. What if they figured out who she was?
CHAPTER FIVE
TESS’S HEAD POUNDED with a stress-induced headache by the time she turned her car into her long driveway. Realistically, what were the chances that the inquisitive ladies in the mercantile would connect her, a scarred woman with dark brown bobbed hair and horn-rimmed glasses, to photoshopped magazine ads featuring a redheaded model? Slim. Very slim.
But she still felt ill.
After putting away her few groceries, Tess tricked Mac into taking an antibiotic pill by wrapping it in cheese, then went out to the barn to put the final coat of finish on the oak table.
She swept the barn floor in the area around the table, trying not to think about the women. Trying not to obsess.
There was no breeze to stir the dust she hadn’t been able to bring up out of the rough floorboards, so Tess left the barn door rolled open. The dogs soon settled in the sun outside the door and Tess began applying the clear finish over the golden oak stain, focusing on her brushstrokes, trying to make the finish as perfect as possible.
She was in the zone, done with the top and crouched down to start a leg, when a fracas outside the barn door brought her bolt upright. A split second later Mac and Blossom shot into the barn, tumbling over each other and knocking down the garden tools leaning against the far wall in their frenzy to do...what?
The brush fell out of Tess’s hand as she stumbled backward, instinctively heading for cover—until she heard a frantic squeaking and realized the dogs were after a small animal, now hiding behind an old mower.
“Leave it alone! Foei! Zit!”
Blossom instantly fell back at the Dutch commands, which meant business, then slowly sank down onto her haunches, her sharp gaze still zeroed in on whatever had hidden behind the tools. Mac was slower to obey, but then he, too, sat with his injured leg held out slightly, as if pointing to his prey.
Tess pressed her hand to her hammering heart then walked over to gingerly pick up the brush from where it had fallen on the still tacky tabletop. The finish was ruined, marred from the brush and the dust the dogs had carried in with them in their frenzy to get whatever furry little beast had raced into the barn ahead of them.
Her fault. She should have closed the door, but this was no big deal to someone with a lot of time on her hands. She’d simply wipe it down and start over.
But Tess’s very logical assessment began to disintegrate as she stared down at the marred table. The dogs continued to hold, waiting for her to release them, and the critter, whatever it might be, stayed huddled where it was. For a brief moment everything in the barn was still, and then Tess felt tears start to well. Stupid tears that rolled down her cheeks—not because of her ruined work, but because of her still hammering heart. Because of the fear reactions she didn’t seem able to control.
Something had to give.
“Let’s go,” she said to the dogs, motioning to the door. Once the dogs were out, Tess rolled the door most of the way shut, leaving a crack big enough—she hoped—for the furry little beast to escape through.
Hands shaking, she made a cup of tea to calm her nerves and forced herself to drink it before pulling out her cell phone and calling Detective Hiller.
It took two tries and several minutes on hold before the detective answered by stating his name in a clipped tone. Tess identified herself and asked if there was any news on Eddie or the guy who slashed her. Despite the tea, her voice still shook.
“Nothing new,” he said in his usual brusque tone, indicating without saying a word that he had bigger, more urgent problems than an essentially cold case—her case—and he undoubtedly did. How many new and possibly urgent cases had he started working on since her assault? She was old news.
“Thank you,” Tess muttered flatly, ready to hang up. She hated feeling like she was bugging the hell out of him, but she had no one else. He was it.
“Hey,” he said just as she was about to say goodbye. “Is everything okay?”
Was that a grudging hint of empathy in his voice?
“No.” She blurted the word, and it felt great to say it out loud, even to this guy who obviously had better things to do than talk to her. No. Everything was not all right.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t shake the nerves,” Tess said, her voice low and intense. “I’m scared. All of the time.” She was in the middle of nowhere, as hidden away from Eddie as she could be and she still felt like a target.
The detective pulled in a breath. “Are you in contact with anyone you know? Anyone Eddie might know?”
“Just you.” She’d wanted to contact William, just to have someone to talk to, but hadn’t.
“I don’t count,” he said. “Would Eddie have any reason to suspect you’ve gone to where you are now? Any connection between the place you’re living and your past that he would know about?”
“Not much.” Did one visit when she was twelve count? Her grandmother had taken her to see a friend in Barlow Ridge, who’d long since passed away. Her younger stepbrother, Mikey, had been with them, but the stop had been part of a longer trip to Salt Lake City. It’d been a short overnight visit, but the isolation of Barlow Ridge had struck Tess, stuck with her. She’d felt so far away from her problems there. So protected from the reality of her life—not her life with her grandmother, but the reality of her mother’s life. It had been no accident that when she started to look for places to hide, she’d checked Barlow Ridge. Finding the Anderson Ranch for lease had seemed like a sign. A godsend.
“We passed through here once sixteen years ago on our way to another city,” Tess said, walking over to the window and staring out without actually seeing anything. She was too focused on Detective Hiller and his questions. His ultimate conclusion.
“No connections there?”
“No.” And still none.
“What specifically is making you nervous?”
“I’m afraid of someone recognizing me and word getting out that the slashed model lives here.” It sounded lame when she said it out loud, as if she was overestimating her importance and how much people thought about her, but the story of the slashing had made the news. Being recognized was not out of the realm of possibility—which was why she was here in the first place.
“How would they recognize you?” the detective asked. “Not to be blunt...” When wasn’t he blunt? “But I’ve seen you before and after the attack. You look nothing like your old self.”
Tess hadn’t expected the remark to sting, but it did. Her career, her looks, had given her an identity, made her more than a runaway and a survivor. She was back to being a survivor.
Tess took a moment, trying to find the words to explain why her fear of Eddie was so pervasive. Finally she settled on, “I know what a sadistic bastard Eddie is. I can’t help worrying about him finding me, because if he does...” She swallowed to keep her throat from closing, remembering how the guy who cut her face had said that Eddie would keep taking pieces off her until he got what he wanted. She reached out with her free hand to stroke Blossom. The dog leaned into her leg.
“I understand your concern,” the detective said as if he was reading a script. Not exactly reassuring.
“He’s done some awful things to people,” Tess said. She hated how defensive she sounded.
“Let’s look at this logically. Would he be able to hang out in your community without being noticed?”
“Not easily.”
“Is there a drug culture?”
Tess almost laughed. Yes. A huge cowboy drug culture. “If there is, it’s really small and private.” But she saw where he was going with this. Was there anyone who might know someone who knew someone who knew Eddie? But thinking of the people she’d met so far in Barlow Ridge...unlikely. “I don’t think there’s a bunch of trafficking through this particular community, but I don’t know about the closest town. It’s...larger.”
There was a brief silence then the detective said, “You’ve been assaulted. Your fear is normal, but my gut says the chances of your stepfather running you down are remote if everything you’ve said is true. But you have to follow your gut.”
“All right,” Tess said quietly. The detective was basically telling her that she had nothing to worry about, then adding a disclaimer in case he was wrong. Again, less than reassuring, but somehow Tess did feel reassured. A little anyway. Her fear was normal. She knew that, but it felt good having someone say it out loud.
“I’ll call if we get any new information on the case, but for right now all I can tell you is that your stepfather has made every parole meeting and as far as I know, hasn’t missed a day of work. I’ll call you if that changes or we get any new information.”
There didn’t seem much to say after the detective’s summation, so Tess simply said, “Thank you.”
“If there’s nothing else...?”
“No.”
“Then have a good day.” The line went dead before she could say goodbye.
Tess hung up the phone and then walked over to the window to stare out across the sunny fields behind her house. What the detective said made sense. Eddie really had no way to track her here. If someone recognized her, what would they do? Contact the media? It wasn’t like she was missing and the authorities were looking for her. If people thought they recognized her, they might talk among themselves. Wonder.
And maybe someone Eddie knew would get wind of it...
What were the chances? She was eight hundred miles away from Eddie.
Tess leaned forward until her forehead touched the glass. What she needed was perspective—to look at things without filtering them through the residual feelings of trauma left by the attack.
Just because she’d been a victim didn’t mean she had to remain one. All she had to do was figure out how to get a grip...and separate reality from paranoia.
She let out a breath that briefly fogged the window.
That was going to take a whole lot of practice.
* * *
ZACH WAS IN the kitchen when Beth Ann and Emma came into the house. The bills sat in a stack next to the phone, stamped and ready to go. The bank account was drained and he’d had to call Jeff, his cousin and ranching partner, to set up a time to discuss selling cows earlier than planned. He was so damned tired of hanging on by a thread.
“Lizzie and Darcy thought they saw a late calf and went to check,” Beth Ann said as she dumped two backpacks onto a kitchen chair. “And Emma has news.”
“We’re going to 4-H horse camp. Both Darcy and me this year.” Emma grinned widely before opening the fridge and pulling out the milk. She poured half a glass and then put the top back on the plastic bottle and shoved it back inside the fridge.
“We haven’t filled out the forms yet. Or paid,” Zach said, not quite certain how to take this happy news.
“We got scholarships,” Emma said. “Irv stopped by the school and told the class who’d won scholarships. It was me and Darcy and Luke.”
“Scholarships?” Zach met Beth Ann’s eyes over the top of his daughter’s head. Every year the volunteer firemen gave scholarships to various camps and the graduating seniors for college.
“Yes. This year Emma and Darcy got the scholarships. You didn’t know?”
No, he didn’t know, and he was a fireman. When had the guys decided that his family would receive the charity this year?
“Isn’t it great, Dad?” Emma said, doing a happy twirl that came close to slopping the milk out of her glass.
“Well,” Zach started before he caught Beth Ann’s eye again where he read “leave it for now.” Fine. He’d leave it, but he was going to pay for this camp. “I don’t know what Lizzie and I are going to do without you guys around for a week.”
“You’ll manage,” Emma said. “I can’t believe I get to go this year!” She skipped out of the kitchen, happy as can be, leaving Zach and Beth Ann and a whole lot of tension in the air.
“I didn’t know the girls put in for scholarships.”
“Everyone in the 4-H club puts in for a scholarship,” Beth Ann said.
“There are kids who need the money more than Emma and Darcy.”
“Can you really afford to have both of them go this year?”
He could barely afford having Darcy go alone last year. The camp, which was near Boise and associated with the university there, ended up costing almost nine hundred dollars per kid for travel, a week’s worth of food and the instructors, who were always top-notch.
“I can figure something out.”
“Damn it, Zach. What’s more important here? Your pride or both girls getting to go to camp?”
“There’s got to be a way other than charity.”
“Scholarships are not charity. They’re awarded to deserving kids, regardless of need.”
“Bull. I’ve been in on enough selection meetings that I know exactly how they’re awarded.” Because pretty much every kid in the local 4-H club was deserving. Need was the number one factor used when the firemen selected their scholarship recipients.
Darcy came in through the back door just then, smiling widely. “You have a new bull calf, but the mama isn’t going to let anyone near it. Did Emma tell you about horse camp?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Isn’t it great?” Darcy asked as she pulled her backpack out from under Lizzie’s pink one. “Now I can use the hundred dollars I saved for something else!”
“Yeah,” Zach said, forcing a smile that he hoped looked halfway genuine. “It’s good to have a windfall like that. Where’s your little sister?”
“Lizzie thought she heard something in the barn.”
“Like...what?”
“Like her imagination,” Darcy said. “I couldn’t hear anything, but you know how she loves to find baby barn cats. She’ll be in pretty soon.” She hefted her backpack and headed out of the kitchen toward the living room.
“I know you hate this, Zach, but you’re thinking about this the wrong way,” Beth Ann said once Darcy was hopefully out of hearing range.
Zach chose not to answer, because no matter how he thought about it, it stung. Maybe it wouldn’t have stung so much if he could have afforded to send both girls and this was a happy surprise, but that wasn’t what it was. His fellow firemen were giving him charity in the one way he wouldn’t be able to say no.
“Now you can use that eighteen hundred dollars for something else,” Beth Ann pointed out, echoing Darcy.
“I guess,” Zach said. Hard to argue since that money would take a bite out of the medical bills. “Staying for dinner? We’re having another slow-cooker delight.”
“No. I think I’ll head home and hit the books.” She touched his upper arm, patting lightly. Zach met her eyes. Smiled a little.
“See you later,” he said.
* * *
TESS STAYED AWAKE until daybreak. She’d read and drawn and even conducted a late-night job search. She went over and over her conversation with Detective Hiller, told herself that he was right, but as soon as it was dark outside she found herself with all the lights on, listening for anything out of the ordinary. There was no storm that night, which may have been why she could hear so much more than she had the previous few nights. Rattling windows, creaking boards. The noises of an old house, but enough to keep her on edge.
This is normal. You’ve been assaulted. Of course you’re on edge.
Why was it so damned hard to put this all into perspective? It’d been three months since she’d been slashed and she’d expected once she got out of California and deep into the wilds of Nevada that the fear would fade faster than it was.
Maybe that was part of her problem. The fear wasn’t going to simply fade away after a trauma. She had to work at overcoming it and thus far all she’d been doing was reacting to it.
Finally, after the sun came up, she let the dogs out, then crawled back into bed, meaning only to close her eyes for ten or fifteen minutes before she let the dogs back in. She woke up with a start, realizing the dogs were still outside and that somehow she’d fallen asleep.
She grabbed the clock which was facing the wall and turned it around. One-thirty?
She’d slept for eight hours straight. A record. She didn’t know whether to be happy or disturbed. She’d been unconscious, oblivious to danger for eight long hours.
But nothing had happened.
Pushing the rumpled hair back from her face, she walked into the bathroom, grimaced when she saw the crease marks on her face from sleeping so hard.
Tess pushed aside the bathroom window curtains to see the dogs sleeping in the shade under the big elm tree in the backyard, the sunlight that filtered through the branches dappling their coats as they snoozed. They looked so peaceful. Everything seemed so...dare she say it, think it? Everything seemed so normal.
And then the phone rang, scaring the bejeezus out of her.
She scooped it up on the second ring, answered it after taking a deep breath so that her voice sounded normal.
“Ms. O’Neil? We have a cancellation this afternoon at four. Could you bring your dog in then?”
Could she? Tess pushed her hair back, leaving her hand on top of her head as she calculated. Almost two. She could be ready by two-thirty. An hour’s drive to Wesley...
“Ms. O’Neil?”
“Uh, yes. I can make it.”
“Great. We’ll see you and Mac at four.”
Half an hour later, she loaded the dogs into the backseat of her car. It was the first time she’d left Barlow Ridge since arriving. The first time she’d ventured out into the world at large to risk being recognized.
But somehow getting sleep, real sleep, not her usual pattern of sleeping for half an hour and then waking, made her feel better. Stronger. Able to tackle this mission.
Or maybe the logic of Detective Hiller’s assessment had finally sunk in to the point that she could work on believing it. She didn’t care which it was as long as she could start easing herself back into a more normal existence—or as normal as it could be living in the middle of nowhere under a false name.
The vet office was easy to find and little more than an hour after she’d left the ranch she was there, sitting in the car, summoning the courage to go inside.
Tess touched her cheek, which she’d left uncovered, having decided that a white bandage caught the eye more than unsightly scars. Instead she’d worn a light blue knit cloche hat that flattened her hair down onto her cheeks, partially covering the injury, and sunglasses to hide the drooping corner of her left eye.
“Hello,” the vet tech, a young woman with a reddish-brown braid down her back, called brightly as Tess and Mac entered the waiting room.
“Hi.” Tess smiled briefly and then pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose as they started to slide down. There were no other people in the office, but a lot of barking in the back.
“I need you to fill this out,” the girl said, coming around the counter and handing Tess a clipboard. “New in town?” she asked before kneeling in front of Mac who obligingly held his bad leg out.
The question made Tess’s stomach knot. “I’ve been here for a while,” she said as she took the pen and started filling out the information. When she was done, the only truthful information was her phone number and Mac’s vitals. Everything else was a fabrication. Her entire life was a fabrication.
Tess brought the clipboard back to the counter just as a tall broad man with blond hair opened the door leading to the clinic. “Hey,” he said with an easy smile. “I’m Dr. Hyatt—Sam.” His eyes traveled over her injured cheek, making her stomach tighten even more, and then he focused on Mac. “What happened?”
Tess gave him a quick rundown and then the vet said, “I’ll have to x-ray.” He cocked one eyebrow as if waiting for Tess to ask a question. It took her a moment to realize he was waiting for her to ask how much an X-ray would cost.
“Whatever it takes.”
“I’ll keep the cost down as low as I can.”
“You’d never survive in Beverly Hills,” Tess said with a half smile, trying her best to act nonchalant. Normal.
“Are you from Southern Cal?” Sam asked shooting her a quick glance as he ran a hand over Mac’s head.
“No.” The word came out too quickly and sounded very much like the lie it was. Tess faked a smile. “Um, how long will this take? I have a couple errands I need to run.”
Dr. Hyatt frowned slightly before he said, “An hour. Tops.”
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll see you in an hour.”
Tess made her escape, pulling in a deep breath of crisp air as the door closed behind her. It did nothing to clear her head. She had no errands. She simply needed to get away from the vet and his cute chatty receptionist before she made more mistakes—or her stomach turned inside out from stress.
Blossom whined and nosed her cheek when she got into the car.
“I know the feeling,” Tess said, ruffling the dog’s fur before she started the car. She’d been in town for all of twenty minutes and she felt like she’d been put through an emotional wringer. So much for normal. But it was her first outing. Surely things would get easier with practice.
The town was small, about ten thousand people, and it didn’t take long to drive the length of the main street. There were the usual chain businesses and fast food establishments, as well as a few smaller stores. A Western supply store, a coffee shop, a bakery. She needed a grocery store and found one in a small strip mall at the very edge of town, where the trees disappeared and the desert began.
Tess pulled into a parking spot in front of a tiny clothing store and sat in her car for a moment, gathering strength. The dress hanging in the window in front of her caught her eye. It was simple. Stylish. Something she would have worn not that long ago. Not that long, but in some ways a lifetime.
Tess touched her cheek, hesitated for a brief moment, then pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out of the car, automatically pulling the cloche down. People walked in and out of the store as she approached, her sunglasses still on, her eyes down. They don’t care about you.
Half an hour later she wheeled an overloaded cart out to her car and opened the trunk. No one had given her more than a passing glance, but she felt emotionally drained. She also had another half hour to kill. Tess slammed the trunk down and was about to get into her car, when she decided that instead she’d check out the hobby shop next to the clothing store where she was parked.
There were only two people in the store, an elderly man and woman looking at yarn, but Tess immediately went down an aisle. Jewelry-making supplies. She stopped for a moment, studying the long strings of bead of various colors. This had possibilities.
And then she spotted the bolts of fabric on long tables at the back of the store. One of the lengths of fabric matched the dress she’d seen in the clothing store window next door. Tess reached out and ran her hand over the geometric-printed jersey.
“That’s lovely fabric,” a woman said from behind her. Tess turned toward the woman standing a table away, tidying up the bolts. “Can I help you find anything in particular?”
“Uh, no,” Tess said. Now that the woman was looking at her, she felt the usual urge to run. “I’m just checking out possible crafts.”
“We have a lovely hobby kit section up front,” she said.
“Thank you. I’ll take a look.”
The lady went back to her folding and Tess returned to the front of the store. She spent a few minutes looking over the kits, none of which appealed to her the way the fabric had, and then quietly left the store for the safety of her car. Enough dillydallying around. She headed back to the vet clinic.
“No fracture,” Dr. Hyatt said after the tech ushered Tess back into the clinic area where Mac was lying on a table obviously woozy from a sedative. His front leg was wrapped with gauze and covered with some kind of pink stretchy wrap.
“Then...”
“It’s a soft tissue injury and perhaps a pulled tendon. I wrapped his leg so he stays off it.”
Sam gave her instructions on how to care for Mac’s leg, told her to give the wrap at least a week before taking it off, although, he warned, Mac may remove it himself. Sam wanted to see the dog again in two weeks if he didn’t improve.
Tess thanked him, paid cash for the visit and then waited for the receipt the girl insisted on writing while Sam carried the still woozy dog out to her car.
Wind whipped her hair as she left the clinic and walked over to her car where Blossom was now riding shotgun. Low dark clouds hung on the horizon in the direction she’d be driving. Another storm. Great. Tess was beginning to hate storms.
Despite the clouds, this one seemed to be mainly wind, which buffeted her car for most of the drive home, finally easing up about ten miles from Barlow Ridge. Tess’s knuckles ached from clutching the steering wheel so tightly. It had been one hell of a nerve-racking day—to the point that she might actually sleep tonight from sheer mental exhaustion.
It was close to seven when she crossed the cattle guard that marked the city limit of Barlow Ridge. When she stopped at the first of the two four-way stops, she noticed an odd orange glow on the far side of town, like a sunset on the wrong side of the valley. Tess frowned as she stopped at the second four-way, then her stomach tightened as she realized just what that glow was.
Fire.
CHAPTER SIX
“DAD!” EMMA SKIDDED into the office where Zach was tallying up the monthly expenses. “The mean lady’s barn is on fire!”
Both Zach’s pager and his phone went off before she’d finished speaking. He automatically turned off the pager as he picked up the phone, which showed the number of Irv Barnes, the rural fire chief.
“The Anderson barn is on fire,” Irv said as Zach brought the phone to his ear. “Can you get over there and make sure the home owner isn’t doing anything stupid while we gear up?”
“Okay. See you in a few.” Zach pocketed the phone without another word and headed through the living room.
“It was the lightning, don’t you think?” Emma said, still trailing behind Zach as he went to the enclosed porch to put on his fire gear, which consisted of most of his regular gear and his oldest boots.
“Probably,” he said, tugging at the laces of his left boot to tighten them before tying the knot. A storm had passed over. There’d been some thunder, but he hadn’t seen any lightning.
“Dad, there’s a fire!” Lizzie said as she clattered down the stairs to the living room.
“He knows,” Emma answered impatiently.
Zach left the house with both girls following him. Emma wanted desperately to be a firefighter and he knew what was coming next.
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Jeannie Watt
After the attack that ended her modeling career, Tess O'Neil wants only to feel safe. She thinks she's found a sanctuary on a Nevada ranch, where she can live in solitude. Too bad rancher Zach Nolan isn't getting the message. The single dad wants to lease her land, and he won't quit until she says yes. That means he's always around!Letting the cowboy with the see-right-through-her baby blues into her life is too dangerous. Almost as dangerous as the wild hope and yearning Zach and his three daughters are awakening in Tess. She's already risked so much. Maybe it's time to take the biggest gamble of all on the one thing she never dreamed she'd find–a home.
Is he her chance to stop running?
After the attack that ended her modeling career, Tess O’Neil wants only to feel safe. She thinks she’s found a sanctuary on a Nevada ranch, where she can live in solitude. Too bad rancher Zach Nolan isn’t getting the message. The single dad wants to lease her land, and he won’t quit until she says yes. That means he’s always around!
Letting the cowboy with the see-right-through-her baby blues into her life is too dangerous. Almost as dangerous as the wild hope and yearning Zach and his three daughters are awakening in Tess. She’s already risked so much. Maybe it’s time to take the biggest gamble of all on the one thing she never dreamed she’d find—a home.
The dogs growled, reminding Tess that she was tough
A survivor. Plus she had two big dogs and a gun.
She could see her visitor through the slit in the curtains. He was of average height and weight—as her attacker had been.
Tess unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door a crack, reassured by the dogs behind her.
“Hi,” the guy said. The corners of his mouth tilted up and the result was rather breathtaking. In another time or place Tess could have appreciated this man. Blue eyes, incredible angles to his face, dark hair under his cowboy hat.
But not now. She did not smile back. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Zach Nolan. I called yesterday about renting your pasture for my cows.”
And she’d said no. So what was he doing here?
Renting the pasture meant the dogs getting used to the sounds of someone being around. Which seemed like a good way to compromise her safety.
“I’m sorry. I’m not interested.”
Zach stared at her in seeming disbelief as she pushed the door shut and then snapped the dead bolt in place.
Believe it, cowboy.
Dear Reader,
I’m delighted to announce exciting news: beginning in January 2013, Harlequin Superromance books will be longer! That means more romance with more of the characters you love and expect from Harlequin Superromance.
We’ll also be unveiling a brand-new look for our covers. These fresh, beautiful covers will showcase the six wonderful contemporary stories we publish each month.
So don’t miss out on your favorite series—Harlequin Superromance. Look for longer stories and exciting new covers starting December 18, 2012, wherever you buy books.
In the meantime, check out this month’s reads:
#1818 THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS
Liz Talley
#1819 THE TIME OF HER LIFE
Jeanie London
#1820 THE LONG WAY HOME
Cathryn Parry
#1821 CROSSING NEVADA
Jeannie Watt
#1822 WISH UPON A CHRISTMAS STAR
Darlene Gardner
#1823 ESPRESSO IN THE MORNING
Dorie Graham
Happy reading!
Wanda Ottewell,
Senior Editor, Harlequin Superromance
Crossing Nevada
Jeannie Watt
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeannie Watt lives off the grid in a historic Nevada ranching community. Before being published, Jeannie made Western belts and bridles out of hitched and braided horsehair, and her gear was featured in several Western art shows and museums. Jeannie no longer has time to make cowboy gear—instead she gets to write about cowboy life, which she likes even better. She still displays gear at the occasional rodeo, where she spends most of her time observing the participants and dreaming up story lines.
Contents
Chapter One (#u80eba67d-b9d8-5ec1-b678-6e2db256ac9b)
Chapter Two (#u326fdcf9-8563-5231-aa13-87850500d91a)
Chapter Three (#u36e8528c-d982-5f4e-a53e-9deebe66a6f0)
Chapter Four (#u901b3f7f-3b9b-5be0-b580-cea8b500e97c)
Chapter Five (#u5accc59b-d90d-5372-8c7c-9bc45e462ac1)
Chapter Six (#u169cee5f-0e77-5189-8bfd-9264516e1f3b)
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)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Excerpt (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
IT HAD BEEN another in a long string of sleepless nights.
Tess O’Neil finally drifted off from sheer exhaustion just after sunrise, only to be awakened by a sharp bark and the bounce of the mattress as her dogs leaped to the floor.
For one terrifying second she thought Eddie had found her, and she automatically reached for the weapon she kept under the bed. Her hand had just touched metal when the phone rang again and she realized what had sent her dogs on alert.
The two Belgian Malinois shepherds, Blossom and Mac, stood shoulder to shoulder next to her bed, their amber eyes fixed on the bedroom door on the other side of the room, ears pricked forward at the unfamiliar sound of the phone. Tess pushed back the covers, heart pounding. It had to be a wrong number, but if it wasn’t...
The ringing continued as she and the dogs crossed the hall to the old-fashioned ranch house kitchen where the plain white phone hung on the wall next to the refrigerator. She’d had the landline connected so she could send and receive faxes and have ridiculously slow internet. She never expected the damned thing to actually ring.
Tess hesitated for a few seconds, decided it was better to know than not, and snatched the receiver off the hook.
“Hello.” She fully expected to hear her stepfather’s drug-roughened voice either threatening or taunting her and unconsciously put a hand on Mac’s head for reassurance.
“Ms. O’Neil?” The voice was deep, somewhat hesitant, definitely not Eddie. But how the hell did this guy know her name? Or rather, her assumed name?
“Who is this?” Tess demanded, then instantly regretted her tone. Brittle. Edged with fear. She didn’t want to sound fearful, didn’t want to give Eddie the satisfaction if the guy on the other end of the line was one of his minions. But it was hard to sound normal when her heart was beating a hundred times faster than usual.
There was a brief, quite possibly stunned, silence before the caller said, “I’m Zach Nolan. I live across the road.”
“I see.” Tess took hold of the phone cord. Anyone could say they lived across the road.
“I was wondering if you have plans for your fields and pastures?”
It took Tess a moment to wrap her mind around the unexpected question. “My fields and pastures?” she asked blankly.
“Yeah. The big green things surrounding your house.”
There was a touch of gentle humor in his voice, as if he was trying to make a connection, reassure her. Tess instantly drew back. No connections.
“Why?”
“Until you took over the place, I grazed my cattle on those fields and paid a rental fee. I was wondering, if you aren’t using the fields, if we could make a similar arrangement.”
He’d barely finished his sentence when Tess blurted, “No.” She let go of the phone cord and pressed her fingertips against the thickened skin on her left cheek where the stitches had been, felt the residual pain from the torn and stitched muscles below then dropped her hand. It was a habit she was trying to break.
“You’re sure?” The touch of humor was gone, replaced by irony bordering on sarcasm, triggered no doubt by her instant and adamant response.
“Yes.”
“Well, thanks. Sorry to have wasted your time.”
“No problem.” Tess hung up the phone without saying goodbye and put a hand on her forehead, pushing the bangs back and wishing she’d asked how he’d gotten her name. It had to be from that overly friendly lady who ran the local post office.
Tess O’Neil was the authorized signature for the Angstrom Land Company, the limited liability corporation that had leased the small ranch where she was living. If you could call it living. More like hiding.
In reality, Tess was the Angstrom Land Company, but no one knew that—the beauty of an LLC in the state of Nevada. She could conduct her financial business without using personal, traceable credit cards or her real name—Terese Olan to her former employers, Terry to her handful of friends. But her grandmother had called her Tess and that was who she’d become. If she was skirting the law by informally becoming Tess O’Neil in addition to hiding behind the LLC, she’d take that chance. It beat the alternative.
She didn’t know if Eddie would go so far as to hire a private detective, but he had a lot of nefarious contacts. Not knowing his reach was one of the things that kept her awake at night.
Tess walked over to the sink and started the tap running into the enamel basin before she opened the back door. The screen door wobbled on its loose hinges as she pushed it open and the dogs raced outside. They stopped in tandem a few feet from the bottom porch step, black ears pricked forward, muscles tensed and ready for action. It was a morning ritual they’d developed since moving into the house thirteen days ago. They were city dogs, still acclimating themselves to the sights, sounds and smells of the country. As was Tess.
She watched and waited until the dogs finally dropped their guard, first Mac and then Blossom. They began snuffling in the grass, checking out the action they’d missed the night before as they headed for the taller grass to do their business.
All clear.
Tess closed the door and filled a glass with water, turned off the faucet and leaned back against the counter. If the dogs were relaxed, she could relax. In theory anyway.
Her heart rate still wasn’t quite normal. Had the caller really been the guy across the road?
She set the glass down and opened the drawer where she’d spotted the printed paper with local phone numbers while unpacking her meager kitchen supplies a few days ago. She traced a finger down the list. Nolan. Zach. Okay. He existed.
But was it him?
Her hand only shook a little as she dialed the number. Halfway through the second ring he answered.
Same voice.
Tess hung up.
* * *
ZACH SET DOWN the phone with a shake of his head. A prank call at eight in the morning was a first, as was the oddly defensive phone conversation he’d just had with the new neighbor. Defensive to the point of rudeness. What the hell?
Let it go. The woman was perfectly within her rights to say no to his offer. She could work on her delivery, but...
Zach grabbed his work gloves off the table, trying to focus on the day instead of how much hay he was going to have to buy to tide things over now that it was pretty damned obvious he’d lost the pastures he’d been counting on.
His index finger broke through the work-thinned leather at the tip of the glove as he pulled it on. This was turning out to be a grand day. He could only imagine what delights the north pasture held for him. And, of course, the duct tape was not in the junk drawer where it belonged. His exposed fingertip was simply going to have to take its chances.
Zach tucked his cell phone into his pocket and headed out the door where he could see his three daughters walking up the driveway to his sister-in-law, Beth Ann’s, trailer. Beth Ann worked at the school as an instructional aid and gave the girls a ride every morning after Zach fed them breakfast and helped gather schoolwork, lunches and other essentials before nudging them out the door. Beth Ann was a stickler for promptness. If the girls were late, they walked the half mile to school. Simple as that.
He stopped and watched for a moment, wondering why his youngest daughter, Lizzie, was wearing his oldest daughter, Darcy’s, old purple coat instead of her own new red one. He made a mental note to ask about it at dinner that night. Maybe Beth Ann had washed it. She was a bit of a clean freak, but he wasn’t complaining. She was doing him a huge favor living on the ranch in the hired-hand trailer, handling the girl stuff that he, the oldest of four brothers, did not feel qualified to deal with.
Benny, Zach’s young Border collie, was waiting for him at the old truck he used for beating around the ranch. The dog jumped up on the flat bed and danced excitedly, staying just out of reach in case Zach had some kind of crazy idea about not taking him.
“Don’t worry,” Zach muttered. “You’re going.” Benny, who seemed to understand every word Zach said, sat his butt down and let his tongue loll out in a canine grin.
By some miracle the ancient rig started first try and Zach headed down the lane leading toward the north hay pasture and the pump that needed to be pulled for repairs. He just hoped that he could fix it himself because if not, with cattle prices the lowest he’d seen them in three years, he’d have to cut yet another corner to make ends meet. He truly hoped that wasn’t the case, because right now he was running out of corners. His cousin, Jeff, had started running some cattle with him last year and shared some of the costs, but it still wasn’t enough to ease the pressure of the medical bills. All he wanted was to give his girls a comfortable life, to help compensate for losing their mom to breast cancer.
It wasn’t working out so well. His daughters wore whatever Beth Ann could find on sale while he duct-taped his work gloves and prayed that the pump could be jury-rigged into lasting another year so he had the bucks to buy hay.
He needed that pasture.
* * *
TESS PUT ON a pot of coffee, checked her email, then let the dogs back inside. Two hours of sleep were not enough, but it’d be a while before she could try again. Her adrenaline was too high, her nerves too jangled by the unexpected call.
Sad, really, that an innocuous phone call from a neighbor could ruin a day.
Tess fed the dogs, dumping copious amounts of the ultrahealthy—and therefore ultraexpensive—food their former owner had fed them into two large stainless steel bowls. Mac dove in. Blossom hung back and waited for him to finish, even though she had her own dish.
“You’re setting a bad precedent,” Tess muttered to the dog as she went back into the bedroom to change into her work clothes, which were actually new, since she no longer fit into her old clothes.
The jeans she put on were just jeans, bought for a reasonable price online and delivered by mail. No fashionable fading, studs or strategically placed frayed areas. The T-shirt was equally plain. Long-sleeved, black and boxy with a crew neck. One hundred percent cotton without a hint of spandex. It hung loosely from her shoulders, even though she’d now gained fifteen pounds and was curvier than she’d been her entire life. The curves were part of her disguise, lame as it was, since there was no way she could disguise the scars across the left side of her face.
Her ex-lawyer and savior, William, had suggested gaining weight in addition to dying her dark red hair dark brown and buying glasses she didn’t need. She’d told William that the last thing she felt like doing was eating. Actually, for the first week after the attack, she couldn’t eat, but instead sipped tiny meals through a straw. And even if she did gain weight, she’d pointed out bitterly, it wasn’t like she could hide the scars.
No, William had agreed in his understated way, but overly skinny people stood out almost as much as redheads and after the attack she’d become alarmingly gaunt. He was too polite to say skeletal.
So during the six weeks she’d hidden out at William’s San Jose home after the attack, Tess focused on gaining weight—no easy task for a model who’d spent the past decade eating the bare minimum and feeling guilty about even that small amount. Depression and fear coupled with healing scar tissue hadn’t made eating any easier, but Tess persevered. Pasta, milkshakes, ice cream. Formerly forbidden foods were now her allies and she choked them down, wishing she could enjoy finally being able to eat whatever she wanted.
By the time the LLC had been formed and William had helped her lease-option and sparsely furnish this place in the Nevada outback—a place where Eddie would stand out like a sore thumb—Tess had, for the most part, outgrown her clothes. She’d celebrated with an online shopping spree since she was too paranoid to shop in stores, and didn’t care if the clothing fit right—which it didn’t. Not in her experience anyway.
The tops didn’t cling to her upper body, the jeans didn’t hug her legs. Everything was loose and comfortable—and made her feel invisible—or as invisible as a person could be with a ruined face.
When Tess came back into the kitchen, the oversize stovetop espresso maker began to gurgle and the dogs instantly ran to the back door to wait while Tess poured coffee into a tall travel mug and added a healthy dollop of cream. She’d fallen into a routine over the past week. Coffee—regardless of what time of day she woke up—a quick breakfast of cereal and milk followed by a protein shake, then several hours in the barn sanding the old oak furniture she’d found there. Not that she knew anything about refinishing furniture, but she had instructions she’d printed off the internet and time on her hands.
Too much time. But dwelling on it made her feel even more like the prisoner she essentially was, which in turn made her determined to fill the hours so she wouldn’t feel like a prisoner. Eddie had destroyed her looks and her livelihood, all because she wouldn’t give him something she didn’t have, something that probably no longer even existed. She wasn’t going to let him destroy what was left of her life. She would hang on to what she had and make what she could of it. Then maybe, once the bastard was caught, she could slip back into the mainstream. Rejoin the land of the living.
But first he had to be caught.
* * *
ZACH RETURNED TO the house about half an hour after the girls got home from school. He’d pulled the pump and managed to fix it with the extra parts he had in his shop and then hauled the clumsy cylinder back to the well and lowered it down the hole. It had obligingly sucked up water and spit it back out through the wheel lines in the field.
Sweet victory.
When he walked into the house, the television was on and the heat was off. The three girls were in the living room wrapped in the afghans Karen had made for each of them during her illness. Emma and Lizzie were watching TV, Darcy was doing her homework at the big oak desk he’d inherited from his grandpa, the dark blue crocheted blanket draped over her shoulders. It’d been an unseasonably cold spring day and the house felt like a tomb.
“Darcy, you need to remember to turn on the heat.” Zach pulled off his gloves and dropped them in the square willow basket next to the door that Lizzie called the mitten box. “I can almost see my breath.”
Darcy looked at him from over the top of her glasses. “The furnace is dead and you won’t let me build a fire.”
Damn. He crossed the room to check the thermostat. Dead as a doornail. “You can build all the fires you want while I’m here,” Zach said as he headed for the basement door.
“That doesn’t do us much good when you’re not here,” Darcy said.
“I guess that’s what afghans are for.” Zach snapped on the hanging light before going down the wooden steps to battle the furnace. One of his wife’s cardinal rules had been no fires, no sharp things without an adult in the house. Darcy had been nine when Karen died—old enough to use sharp things, but she hadn’t. As far as he knew she still abided by the rule three years later.
He spent as much time working on the furnace as he did on the tractors and fully expected another major fight, but for once it turned out to be an easy fix. He replaced the fuse then hit the reset button and the beast roared to life. That was two relatively easy fixes in one day. But they didn’t balance out losing his grazing.
“Way to go, Daddy,” Lizzie said as he came up the stairs. She was still wearing Darcy’s coat, which went past her knees. Zach smiled at his youngest daughter, the one with Karen’s fair coloring and strawberry-blond hair. “Thanks, kiddo.” He knelt in front of her, placed a big hand on each of her small shoulders and gave her an exaggerated once-over. “Where’s your coat, Lizzie?”
The six-year-old shifted her mouth sideways. Not a good sign.
“I put it somewhere. I guess.” She couldn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Any idea where?”
She shook her head. Zach glanced at Darcy, who watched the action from his desk. She instantly went back to her homework. Zach sensed conspiracy.
“I want you to find it.”
“What if I can’t?” Lizzie asked as she twisted a button on Darcy’s coat.
Excellent question. “We’ll worry about that later. Right now I want you to find your coat.”
Lizzie exhaled in a long-suffering way and walked out of the room, feet dragging.
“Where’s Lizzie’s coat?” he asked Darcy.
She met his eyes in her direct way. “Honestly, Dad, I have no idea where it is.”
“She hid it,” Emma said from behind him. “I don’t know where.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t like it. She wanted a pink coat. Tia—” aka Beth Ann “—got her the red one because it was a better price.” Emma gave a philosophical shrug and then dismissively flipped one of her light brown braids over her shoulder. “You know how she hates red.”
Actually he didn’t, which kind of bothered him. It was common knowledge that Lizzie hated red?
Zach rubbed the back of his neck. “Thanks.”
“What’re you going to do?” Emma asked.
Consult with Beth Ann, no doubt. A new coat simply wasn’t in the cards until he shipped another lot of cattle and he was trying to hold off on that until the prices jumped. He was damned tired of giving away his beef for break-even prices. Last time he sold prematurely, he’d lost money, but he’d needed the cash and had taken the financial beating.
And he’d probably have to do it again before he had all the doctors and labs and hospitals—both local and the one in Reno—paid off.
Lizzie was going to wear her coat once they found it.
As Zach walked down the hall to the kitchen where dinner simmered in a slow cooker he wondered if a red coat could be dyed a less hated color. Purple maybe?
He’d just taken the top off the Crock-Pot when the kitchen door opened and his sister-in-law came in carrying a laptop case. “Hey, Beth Ann.”
“Zach.” She set the computer on the counter then pushed the dark hair back from the side of her face. She looked a lot like her sister, except Karen had been fair while Beth Ann was a deep brunette.
“What’s that for?”
“Darcy wants to borrow it.”
“You don’t need it for studying?” Beth Ann was taking online courses, trying to complete an education degree—or most of it anyway. By the time she got to the point when she would have to take regular classes, Darcy would be traveling to the high school in town, forty miles away, where the community college was located. The two of them could drive together, which would solve another problem—buying a car for Darcy.
“I can use the computer at school tonight and Darcy can take this up to her room and work in peace.” Beth Ann came to stand beside him as he added salt to the stew. “Any luck with the pastures?”
“Struck out.” He put the salt down and pulled the pepper out of the spice drawer, hoping Emma didn’t walk in. She ate more pepper than she realized.
“Really?” Beth Ann asked. “What’s she going to use them for?”
“We never got that far in the conversation.”
Beth Ann cocked her head and Zach added, “The new neighbor wasn’t all that friendly. Hung up on me.”
“Really?” She looked shocked.
“Yep.” The conversation had been over for all intents and purposes, but around here, people said goodbye before they hung up the phone.
Beth Ann took the pepper shaker from Zach when he was finished and dropped it back in the drawer while he stirred the stew. “Susan said one side of her face was bandaged when she came in to rent the post office box.”
“I heard.” Pretty much everyone had heard. Susan wasn’t exactly shy about sharing what she knew.
Beth Ann shrugged. “Maybe she needs some time to settle in. Get used to us here.”
“Maybe.” Zach wasn’t holding his breath. He opened the cupboard and pulled out five bowls.
“Nothing for me,” Beth Ann said. “I just came to drop off the laptop and see if you needed anything from town tomorrow.”
No, because he’d have to pay for it and he was saving his money for important stuff like hospital bills and equipment repairs. “I can’t think of anything.” He put the extra bowl back in the cupboard. “Did you know that Lizzie hates red?”
Beth Ann snorted. “I got that feeling when she pouted all the way home after I bought her a red coat.”
“She, uh, lost the red coat.”
“I think Miss Lizzie and I will have a talk,” Beth Ann said flatly.
“I already had one.”
“I’ll add my voice to yours.”
He shook his head. “I want to give Lizzie a shot at doing the right thing on her own.”
“Fine.” Beth Ann headed down the hall to the living room. “I’ll see how the homework is going before I head on back to school.”
Zach counted spoons out of the utensil drawer. His sister-in-law had been a godsend during Karen’s illness and for the three years since she’d died. And despite the fact that Beth Ann was practically the antithesis of her sister in temperament, she was devoted to raising her nieces the way Karen would have wanted them raised—to the point that there were times when Zach wondered if he was taking advantage, keeping her from having a life of her own. Whenever he broached the subject, though, Beth Ann brushed him off and Zach let the matter drop.
It was a comfortable arrangement—for him anyway—and it worked.
Beth Ann came back into the kitchen with Emma behind her explaining why she had yet to start her social studies report. The beauty of Beth Ann working at the school was that she knew everything that went on in her nieces’ academic lives—much to their annoyance.
“Are you sure you don’t want some stew?” Zach asked as he set the bowls on the table. On the nights they used the slow cooker, it was every man for himself and then the girls cleaned up while he went into his office and ruined his night calculating finances.
Again Beth Ann shook her head.
“You need to eat, Tia,” Emma said, echoing the words Beth Ann so often said when vegetables played a starring role in dinner.
“I’ll eat. I do have food at my place. By the way, you’ll need to find your own way home from school tomorrow.” Beth Ann looked at Zach. “I have language proficiency training in town for the next three afternoons. I leave as soon as school lets out.”
“We can walk home,” Emma said.
“Yes, but can Lizzie?” Beth Ann asked dryly. Lizzie hated walking anywhere.
“We can take our bikes,” Emma said brightly.
“Where?” Darcy asked as she came into the room.
“Tia can’t bring us home tomorrow because she has a meeting in town,” Emma said.
“I can take you to school and then you can walk home or your dad can pick you up,” Beth Ann said.
“We’ll ride our bikes,” Darcy said with an air of finality. She took her position as the oldest seriously and expected to have the last word on all matters. She was a bit like Beth Ann in that regard.
“Lizzie can’t ride a bike in your old coat,” Zach pointed out. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the outcome of a Lizzie/giant coat/bicycle spoke/gravel combination.
Emma and Darcy exchanged looks. “She’ll find her coat,” Darcy said. Emma nodded.
The two girls left the kitchen and Beth Ann smiled slightly. “Problem solved.”
“I just hope no one cries.”
“Amen to that.” Beth Ann smiled a little then headed for the door. Her hand was on the doorknob when she stopped and said, “You okay?”
Zach shrugged, hating that she could read him—but then she’d seen him in his most desperate and unguarded moments. “I’m concerned about losing the pastures.” Understatement of the year.
“What are you going to do about it?”
Zach opened the fridge and pulled out half a gallon of milk, then met Beth Ann’s eyes over the door. “I guess that I’m going to give it another shot.”
Only this time he was going in person.
CHAPTER TWO
TESS BALANCED THE coffee travel mug on top of the box of sandpaper and paint stripper that had arrived via UPS the day before, holding the top of the cup with her chin as she maneuvered the back door open on her way to the barn.
She’d yet to actually see the UPS man, who’d come to the ranch four times since she’d moved in. The first time he’d come, she’d been in the shower and had suffered a near heart attack when Blossom and Mac sounded the alarm from the living room. By the time she’d gotten out of the shower and jammed her soaking wet body into her robe and retrieved her small gun, the dogs had stilled. When she’d gotten into the living room, she saw the distinctive brown van pulling out of the driveway and a box of kitchen supplies sitting on her front porch, no signature required.
After that, Tess simply ignored the man’s knock once she ascertained it was really him. The fewer people who saw her, the better...which was why the last thing she wanted to see as she rounded the corner of the house was a plume of dust coming from a pickup truck heading down her driveway.
What now?
She wasn’t waiting around to find out—not out in the open. The pickup probably belonged to one of her neighbors and it no doubt looked crazy, but she turned and headed straight back around the house, the dogs on her heels. Once she was safely inside, she locked the back door and leaned against it. The front door was already locked.
She let out a shaky breath and debated. If whoever it was knocked, she could ignore it—even though she knew he’d seen her. There was no law saying she had to answer her door, but in a community like this, where the postmistress hugged the patrons, all that would do was cause talk among the neighbors.
If the guy driving the truck was a neighbor.
There’s no way Eddie’s found you.
The phrase was a mantra she used to soothe herself during the long hours of the night, but at the moment she was fairly certain it was true. She’d just had yet another clipped conversation with the Los Angeles detective, Tom Hiller, who was handling her assault case. She called him, once a week, for any possible updates on the case. She had a strong feeling she was bugging the hell out of him, but this was her life she was concerned about and it wouldn’t kill him to take a few minutes out of his week to talk to her.
So far nothing had changed. Eddie was an exemplary parolee with a job at a car wash. He was keeping his nose clean, doing what he was supposed to do.
Tess was more concerned about him doing what he wasn’t supposed to do.
The engine died and a minute later Tess heard footsteps on the front porch, which made her stomach clench until she thought she might throw up.
Deal with this.
Once upon a time she’d been fearless. Less than two months ago she would have described herself as savvy and streetwise. She’d had to be to survive her rugged teen years with her alleged family and their drugged-out friends. The modeling world also had its own kind of cutthroat culture. Yeah, she definitely would have called herself tough.
Looking back, though, she could see she’d been confident to the point of bravado. Confident enough to tell Eddie to take a flying leap when he’d first approached her. Confident in her abilities to stay safe right up until the guy had appeared out of nowhere as she approached her apartment building, knocked her down and slashed her face with what the doctors said was probably a piece of metal shrapnel, telling her in a low growl that Eddie was going to keep taking pieces off her until he got the money he knew she had. The money he’d left with her drugged-out mother before going to prison. Money she knew nothing about.
Safety had been an illusion—even to someone who thought of herself as streetwise—and she realized too late that Eddie would never believe she didn’t have his dirty money stashed away somewhere. He’d keep looking until he found her.
The old-fashioned doorbell rang and Tess moistened her dry lips as both dogs growled, reminding herself that she was still tough. A survivor. Plus she had two big dogs and a gun.
She sucked in a shaky breath, then pushed off from the back door and headed for the living room. She could see her visitor—from the chest up, anyway—through the slit in the curtains that covered the window in the door. He was a guy of average height and weight—as her attacker had been. She couldn’t tell what color his hair was under the beat-up cowboy hat, but guessed it was dark. He shifted his weight as he waited for her to open the door.
Tess unlocked the dead bolt and pulled the door open a crack, feeling somewhat reassured by the dogs crowding up behind her, trying to assess whether or not this guy was a threat. She kept her face tilted so he could only see the right side, the good side, but the corner of her glasses banged against the door and she had to move back slightly.
“Uh, hi,” the guy said as soon as it became obvious that she wasn’t opening the door any wider. The corners of his mouth tilted up slowly, as if he had to remind himself to smile, but the end result was rather breathtaking. In another time or place Tess could have appreciated a man like this. Blue eyes, incredible angles to his face, dark hair showing from under his cowboy hat.
But not at this time. She did not smile back. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so. I’m Zach Nolan. I called yesterday about the pasture.”
Tess stared at him, a slight frown drawing her eyebrows together. So what was he doing here? The last thing she needed was a persistent neighbor. “Was there something about my answer yesterday that you didn’t understand?”
“I thought maybe you didn’t understand.”
“Really,” she said coolly, calmly adjusting her glasses, which were still slightly crooked from banging the door.
“I would pay for the use of the pasture and the cows wouldn’t be anywhere near your place. Having the animals here wouldn’t be much different than not having them here. They’re not noisy or anything. Plus, you get the rental money.”
“Would they be in that field over there?” Tess nodded toward the field on the other side of her driveway.
“That would be one of the pastures.”
“And you have to do things with the cattle, right?”
“I move them around. Check on them.”
Which meant someone coming and going at times she had no control over. Which meant the dogs getting used to the sounds of someone being around.
Which seemed like a good way to compromise her safety.
Tess drew herself up, her face still angled away from him, even though she felt odd looking at him with one eye. “Listen. I know this sounds cold, but no. I...I don’t like cattle and I don’t want to lease my pastures.”
“You don’t like cattle.”
“Is there some reason I should?” she asked stiffly.
He gave a slow shake of his head, then peered at her from under the brim of his hat. “You might have moved to the wrong part of the country.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not interested in leasing and I’d appreciate it if you’d consider this matter closed. Now if there’s nothing else?” She started closing the door without waiting for an answer.
Zach Nolan stared at her in seeming disbelief as she pushed the door shut and then snapped the dead bolt in place.
Believe it, cowboy.
Tess snapped her fingers and the dogs fell in behind her as she walked through the living room back to the kitchen, wondering if Zach was still watching her through the window. A few seconds later she heard his footsteps on the porch followed a minute later by the roar of a powerful truck engine. Only then did she allow herself to sit on one of the kitchen chairs, the gun that weighed down her hoodie pocket clunking against the metal leg.
She pushed her fingers through her hair, keeping them far away from her scars and simply held them there as she breathed in and out. In and out.
* * *
ZACH GROUND THE gears as he shifted down at the end of Tess O’Neil’s driveway. He tried to remember if anyone had ever closed a door in his face before.
Nope. Not once.
Definitely something off about this woman.
She’d tried hard to hide the injured side of her face as they spoke, but hadn’t quite succeeded. The scars across her cheek were relatively fresh, jagged and ugly. Must have been one hell of a car wreck.
But beyond the scars, Zach had been struck by the uninjured side of her face—the wide, green, wary eyes behind the clunky-looking glasses, the full lips and high cheekbones. Practically flawless beauty juxtaposed against stark injury and inexcusable behavior.
He drove across the county road that separated his property from hers and into his own driveway, pissed that he’d hit such a brick wall. There didn’t seem to be much else he could do, considering who he was dealing with, other than to take the loss of the pastures like a man and figure out how to pay for hay. Obviously there would be no dealing with a person who’d closed a door in his face.
Zach pulled the truck to a stop in front of the workshop and got out. Benny, whom he’d left at home because he didn’t trust him in the good truck alone yet, came bounding out and proceeded to demonstrate exactly why he wasn’t allowed out in polite company.
“Off,” Zach scolded as the young collie jumped up on him, chewing and tugging at his sleeve. The teenage pup bounced backward, ready to play. “Behave or I’ll turn the girls loose on you.”
The pup grinned.
“Come on,” Zach said, starting for the bull pen. The pup fell in beside him. Benny was going to be a good dog as soon as he got through his adolescence...and then Zach only had three more adolescences to go through after that.
Darcy would be an official teen on her next birthday.
It didn’t seem possible. The years since Karen had died had in some ways crept by so slowly that Zach sometimes felt as if he’d never be able to fight his way through one day and into the next. But in other ways the time had sped by and it seemed as if he’d missed so much.
It wouldn’t be long before Darcy was out of the house and on her own—probably before he had a chance to do all the things he’d wanted to do, provide all the stuff he wanted to provide.
He hadn’t even taken his girls on a real vacation yet.
Zach lifted the gate latch, felt cool metal through the hole in the glove he hadn’t bothered to tape up the night before. He was too young to feel this damned old.
* * *
TEN MINUTES AFTER the cowboy left, Tess collected her box of refinishing supplies and headed out to the barn. There was no reason that a neighbor’s visit—business-related at that—should be so upsetting. Although, upon reflection, maybe the upsetting part was that she’d assumed when she moved to a rural area, people would leave her alone. She hadn’t counted on them calling her and showing up at her door. No. That hadn’t been in the game plan at all.
It was just one guy with a legitimate reason for being there.
Tess doubted the cowboy would be back. He hadn’t seemed too impressed with her manners.
Once outside, the dogs barely sniffed the air before putting their heads down and investigating scents along the path to the barn, obviously at ease. Tess set the box on top of an old rabbit hutch and then rolled the heavy barn door open. It squeaked and protested until she had it wide enough to give light to her project.
The barn had electricity, but the lightbulbs were all burned out or broken, so Tess simply left the door open as she worked. She didn’t really want to be closed up in the barn, peaceful as it was with the old farming implements stored along one wall and dim light filtering in through the dusty windows. She felt vulnerable closed up in a place where she couldn’t lock the doors. Besides, she enjoyed the sight of the mountains rising up behind the small town on the other side of her largest field.
Tess opened the cardboard box and took out the package of dust masks. She broke open the plastic, snapped on a mask and adjusted the plastic string. She felt a bit like Darth Vader and the stiff cellulose put pressure on the tender part of her injury, but it beat sucking in sawdust.
Mac and Blossom settled outside the door in the grass, Blossom rolling over onto her back and letting her tongue loll out, looking nothing like the lethal weapon she was supposed to be. Tess picked up a piece of sandpaper, rolling it around the pencil in order to get into the nooks and crannies of the scroll work on the legs of the table.
She’d finished sanding the top and sides of the table yesterday, having eventually worked her way through four coats of different colored enamels—white, red, green and then white again—before she’d hit the gorgeous oak below.
Tess was in no hurry because once she finished, she had little to do except sketch. Sketching had been her escape since her teen years when she’d lain in her bed—shutting out the sounds of Eddie and her mother sniping at each other, or her stepbrother’s overly loud music—and created beautiful people wearing beautiful clothing.
But one could only sketch so much, and Tess planned on tackling more pieces once she finished her table. In addition to the table, she’d found three grimy oak chairs and a bureau. The bureau was, quite frankly, gross, since many generations of mice had taken up residence in it, but the chairs were salvageable. They reminded her of chairs her grandmother had treasured. Chairs she’d inherited from her own mother. Jared, Tess’s jerk of a stepbrother and Eddie’s oldest son, had sold them after her grandmother died to settle a debt.
If only that’d been the only thing he’d done to her. It wasn’t. When Tess had moved back in with her mother and Eddie after her grandmother’s death, Jared had subtly terrorized her, making sexual innuendos, brushing up against her whenever they were alone. Tess had had a buffer while Mikey, her younger stepbrother, had lived there, but after he’d left home, at the ripe old age of fifteen, Tess had been on her own.
She was still amazed she’d escaped without being sexually assaulted. But it had been a narrow escape—no thanks to her mother, who was too caught up in her drug use to notice or care.
Tess pushed the bitter thought out of her head, focused again on the rhythm of the sanding, which was oddly calming.
Eventually she would have to come up with some other way to spend her time—preferably something that allowed her to earn a living at home. She had a decent nest egg, since she’d chosen to save her money rather than party it away. No matter how steadily she worked, Tess had never ever been able to believe her modeling career would last for longer than the next contracted job, because nothing else in her life, other than her grandmother’s steadfast love, had ever lasted.
How wise she’d been.
Decent as it was, though, what was left of her nest egg after leasing the ranch wouldn’t last for the rest of her life.
* * *
IT WAS PAST two o’clock when Tess finally finished the first table leg and sat back on the grass to admire her handiwork. Why on earth had someone stuck such a gorgeous table in a barn?
Because someone else had painted it white, then green, then red, then white and it had been pretty ugly, that’s why.
The dog closest to her sneezed, an open plea for attention and Tess reached out to ruffle Mac’s ears. He lazily rolled over on his back, giving her access to his itchy belly. She patted him a few times and he sneezed again.
“Come on, guys,” she said as she got to her feet. “I need to hit the shower.”
She rolled the barn door shut and headed to the house, wondering if talking to her dogs as if they were people made her the canine equivalent of a crazy cat lady. Somehow crazy dog lady just didn’t have the same ring.
Tess had never had a dog of her own, but had once shared a house with Demon, her grandmother’s sausage-shaped Chihuahua. Demon had put her off dogs, but after the attack she’d changed her mind and told William she wanted to find a guard dog—or four—to live with her. Lethal killing machines if possible. She was a scared woman who needed protection.
William had lined up the deal for her, finding not lethal killing machines, but two retired personal protection dogs in need of a home. Tess hadn’t been certain that, despite their fearsome appearance, two older dogs would fit the bill, but she’d since changed her mind. Blossom and Mac knew their jobs. They stuck to her like glue, alerted her when anything new appeared on the scene and followed her commands instantly. Plus she’d seen them attack a guy in a padded suit when she and William went to pick them up. Close enough to lethal for her.
“Who wants a snack?” she asked after locking the back door. Two canine butts instantly hit the floor. Tess gave each dog a giant rawhide chew toy and then double-checked the lock on the front door before heading toward the bathroom, pulling off her dusty clothing as she went.
She’d barely gotten into the shower when the dogs went into a barking frenzy, making her jerk so hard she hit her elbow on the faucet. And it wasn’t the UPS-man-is-here-again barking. It was the this-is-something-we-aren’t-familiar-with barking.
Not again...
Tess cranked off the shower and got out, heart pounding. She wrapped a towel around herself and stood for a moment on the bath rug, her hair dripping, listening.
The dogs were at the back door, not the front. Growling now instead of barking.
Crap. That wasn’t good. Tess let the towel drop and yanked her robe off the hook next to the shower. She struggled into the robe and stood still again, heart hammering. And then she heard it.
Laughter.
Happy kid laughter.
The blood that had been pounding in her temples drained away, leaving her feeling oddly light-headed. Just kids.
What were kids doing on her property?
Tess tried to swallow, but it was impossible because her mouth was dry. She moved cautiously to the window. There, not fifty feet from her house, three girls walked along the path next to the overgrown creek, pushing bicycles and talking.
Tess stepped away from the window as the tallest girl, who pushed the smallest bike, looked over at the house.
Did they know they were trespassing?
Tess tightened the belt around her waist and headed for the kitchen, where the dogs scratched at the door, anxious to get out and deal with this threat.
“Nee. Af,” Tess said and they both obediently dropped to their bellies. She watched the girls disappear behind the barn, then reappear on the other side. They followed the creek to the road, then pulled the bikes under the wire fence.
Tess slowly sat on a kitchen chair and rubbed her hand over her forehead. She’d just had the crap scared out of her by children. Something had to give. She couldn’t live the rest of her life like this. Afraid of little girls and cowboys.
CHAPTER THREE
“HEY, DAD?”
Zach looked up from the PVC pipe he was measuring. Darcy and Emma stood in the doorway of the shop. “Yeah?”
“Lizzie’s bike got a goat head in the tire on the way home today.”
Well, that explained why they were late. “Where’s the bike?”
“The front yard.”
“Where’s Lizzie?”
“Riding my bike. Her feet can barely touch the pedals.”
Zach set down the pipe, wiping his hands on a rag as he walked toward the door. “I don’t think I have another repair patch.” Goat heads were the round seedpod of a ground covering weed, hard as nails with a couple nasty tire-puncturing prongs sticking out. They were hell on bike tires.
“Maybe Tia can bring one home from town.”
“You can text her,” Zach said. Emma immediately headed off to the house. “But she may not get done with her class before the store closes,” Zach called after her.
“Wal-Mart doesn’t close,” Darcy said.
Zach kept forgetting that. “Well, once upon a time stores did close,” he said.
Darcy cocked her head. “And you remember those days? Man, Dad. You’re old.” Zach grinned as they walked toward the lawn where Lizzie’s bike lay on its side.
“Yeah, and I feel it every year.”
“Is that a gray hair there?” she asked.
“You should know,” Zach replied. “You probably put it there.”
“So how’d the pasture thing work out?” Darcy asked casually, hooking her thumbs in her front jeans pockets.
“What pasture thing?” Zach asked slowly.
“You know...the pasture across the road. The one the lady wouldn’t let you rent.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Tia was talking to Mrs. Bishop about it.”
“Did Beth Ann or Mrs. Bishop know you were there?”
Darcy shook her head. “If they know I’m there, then I don’t hear any good stuff.”
Lizzie came wobbling around the corner of the house before he could answer, perched on Darcy’s bike, the tips of her toes barely reaching the pedals. Benny the collie bounded alongside her.
“Don’t wave,” Zach said as her little hand lifted a few inches off the handlebar. She immediately clamped it back down as the bike wobbled dangerously. Both he and Darcy took a quick step forward, but Lizzie regained control and pedaled on, Benny right behind her. Zach hoped they had some Band-Aids on hand.
“She thinks she’s so cool now that she’s in the first grade,” Darcy said.
“Yeah. I don’t know anyone else who ever felt that way.”
“Come on, Dad. I was a serious student. Lizzie is all about having a good time.” Darcy’s eyes twinkled behind her glasses as she glanced sideways at her father. He shook his head and then picked up Lizzie’s bike from where it lay in the grass and tipped it upside down so he could take off the tire.
“I think this is beyond a patch kit,” Zach said. “We’ll have to get another tube.”
“Should I text Tia again?” Emma asked, having just stepped out onto the porch.
“No. I’ll get one when I go to town tomorrow.” He wasn’t going to have Beth Ann chasing all over Wesley looking for inner tubes when she no doubt had class work to do when she got home.
“But—” Emma started, only to be interrupted by her older sister.
“We can walk home,” Darcy said.
* * *
TESS FELL ASLEEP in the chair watching television, the sound turned down so low she practically had to read lips to understand the action. She hadn’t counted on sleeping at all—at least not until daybreak, which was the usual time she fell asleep. But despite the cowboy’s visit, despite the shower scare, she conked out sometime in the early-morning hours, only to be startled awake sometime after sunrise by the dogs scrambling to their feet and racing for the back door.
Tess tumbled out of the chair, tripping over the fleece blanket she’d been nestled under and going down hard on her knees. And then, during a brief lull in the canine uproar in the kitchen, she heard the girls’ voices.
This was ridiculous. There was no reason for those kids to cut across her property. It was, after all, hers.
She started for the back door, then stopped when she saw how far away the three girls were. She’d have to run after them if she wanted to warn them off and that smacked of crazy. She wanted to keep them off her property, not scare the daylights out of them...although that probably would keep them off her property. Something to consider.
She gripped the door frame and watched as they disappeared around a thicket of willows growing along the creek. No. She’d wait until they passed by again. From the time frame, it seemed logical that they were traveling to and from school. Yesterday they’d showed up around three. She’d make certain she wasn’t in the shower at that time and if they passed by again, well, the four of them would have a chat about the meaning of private property.
* * *
ZACH LEFT THE hospital clutching a sheaf of papers. No, the accounts manager would not decrease his payment amount temporarily—even if cow prices were down. They suggested he take out a loan. Well, that was a fine idea, except that he refused to put his land, the one thing he would be able to give the girls, up for collateral.
That had been a rough enough pill to swallow, but then, on the way out of the expensive new hospital addition that he was helping to pay for, Marcela James, the hospital administrator, had collared him. He thought for one brief happy moment that perhaps she’d heard about his visit to the accounting office and was there to offer a reprieve, but no. Instead she cheerfully told him that if he wanted to sell that forty-acre parcel her husband had once approached him about, they’d still be happy to buy it.
Zach had smiled and nodded while thinking, “When hell freezes over.”
Leave it to the Jameses to hit a guy when he was down. Zach was not parceling up his ranch. Not until he got backed into a tighter corner than he was in now—although the way things were going, that might be tomorrow.
He pressed his fist against his sternum, trying to ease the dull stress-induced ache. All he needed was to keel over from a heart attack. That’d help the girls a whole bunch.
Zach unlocked the truck, then pulled the list out of his jeans pocket and gave it a shake to straighten it out. Bike tire was at the top. Beneath that purple dye. Even though Beth Ann insisted that Lizzie was spoiled, and Zach did not disagree, Beth Ann had agreed to try to dye the coat. Lizzie understood that she might end up with a muddy gray mess, but she was willing to take the chance. Someday Zach would have a heart-to-heart and find out why his youngest daughter hated red.
* * *
BEFORE MOVING TO the boonies, Tess had had no inkling that the simple act of sanding wood, of doing something with her hands other than sketching, could be such a sanity saver. Usually the steady rhythm soothed her, but today she sanded for less than an hour before she decided to give it up for the day and investigate possible at-home careers. The non-scam kind.
It’d been a project she’d been putting off because she was afraid of reality—as in, there probably wasn’t anything she could do to make a living at home. Oh, there were jobs. Medical transcriptionist. Technical writer. Data entry. Phone surveyor. But nothing jumped out at her, mainly because she had no formal training beyond a high school diploma and an impressive modeling portfolio. She wasn’t qualified for a hell of a lot, except perhaps phone surveyor.
You have time to figure this out...
But how much time? Especially if she had to train for something. She still had nearly a hundred grand in her LLC account after buying the ranch; however, simple math indicated that if she spent only the bare minimum, she could last maybe eight years. And that was if she didn’t buy a newer car, had no increase in costs and was stingy with the electricity. Not exactly the way she wanted to live.
Ironically she’d given some thought to investigating second careers a few months ago. Almost ten years had passed since she’d been signed by the Dresden Modeling Agency, a near miracle which she credited to her unusual celadon-green eyes and the cheekbones she’d inherited from her Irish grandmother. Models didn’t necessarily have to disappear in their late twenties anymore, but some of Tess’s longtime associates had started losing work and she was not one to ignore warning signs. And then, amazingly, she’d made the short list for the Face of Savoy Cosmetics campaign and all thoughts of investigating a second career were put on hold while she waited for an answer.
Her face had been slashed before she heard.
Tess rubbed her hand over her cheek, testing to see if it still ached as much as it had yesterday. Yes. The torn muscles were slow to heal, though the stitches had probably dissolved long ago.
Her face would eventually heal, but she would never be able to make money as she had only a few months ago. Eddie had taken that away from her.
Tess tried hard not to think about that, mainly because she was afraid that if she stopped feeling numb about her career, if she let herself think about how much she’d lost, she wouldn’t be able to move past the bitterness.
She turned off the computer monitor, having had enough depression for one day, then jumped a mile when Mac let out a loud bark. Blossom instantly joined in and once again they raced to the back door.
Right on schedule.
Tess walked into the kitchen just in time to see the three girls traipsing along the path by the barn, one tall and dark-haired with glasses, one just a few inches shorter with long brown braids and the last a small little thing with a short blond pixie cut.
“Stay,” Tess said sharply, not being able to recall the Dutch command. But the dogs obediently held as she opened the back door and slipped outside. She’d debated about covering her injury then decided what the hell? People were eventually going to see it. Covering it only seemed to draw more attention.
“Hey,” she called after the girls. They instantly stopped, whirling around with surprised looks on their faces.
Tess marched through the tall grass toward them. The littlest girl, who had a red coat bundled under her arm even though it was quite chilly, took a small step backward, her eyes fixed on Tess’s scars.
“This is private property,” Tess said. “You can’t just cross it any time you please.”
Three pairs of eyes widened then the ones behind the glasses narrowed again. “We’ve always used this path to go to school,” the oldest girl said with a touch of indignation.
“For years,” the middle girl added, nervously flipping one of her braids over her shoulder.
“Because that property owner didn’t care,” Tess explained matter-of-factly. “But I do.”
“Why?” the oldest girl asked.
“It doesn’t matter why,” Tess snapped. She hadn’t expected to get an argument. She’d expected to lay down the law and have the girls comply. “If you persist in using the trail, I’m going to call the police.”
“Sheriff,” the older girl said dryly, negating the effect Tess was aiming at.
“Whatever,” Tess said. “I will contact the authorities.”
The littlest girl continued to stare at Tess’s face. No, she was more than staring. She was doing an in-depth study, tilting her head and wrinkling her forehead, and it made Tess feel ridiculously uncomfortable. She cleared her throat. “Of course, I don’t want to do that, so please, take the road from now on.”
“But—” the girl with the braids started to say before the tall girl touched her shoulder. She instantly closed her mouth.
“Is this property posted?” glasses girl asked.
Tess raised her eyebrows at the unexpected question. “Excuse me?”
The girl tilted her chin up. “Posted. If you don’t have No Trespassing signs, then technically you can’t accuse us of trespassing.”
“I most certainly can.”
The girl shook her head. “No. You can’t. Look it up.”
Tess let out a breath, thinking she was so not prepared to do battle with a know-it-all preadolescent when the youngest girl asked in a hushed voice, “What happened to your face?”
“I got caught trespassing.” Tess grated the words out. “And trust me...you wouldn’t want this to happen to you.”
The little girl gasped, her eyes growing wide as she backed up until she was plastered against the older girl, who put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. The little girl’s lower lip quivered, her eyes still fixed on the scars, and Tess felt bad for all of a split second. “If I were you,” she said coolly, “I’d take the long way home from now on.”
And then, since she’d made her point and didn’t want to risk crossing verbal swords with the oldest girl again, turned on her heel and stalked through the tall grass back to her house.
* * *
ZACH PULLED TO a stop next to the shop feeling more exhausted than if he’d spent the day digging fence posts by hand. He hated going to town, and dealing with the hospital made it worse.
He was halfway to the house when the door opened and Emma and Darcy raced out.
“What happened?” he automatically asked. Neither of them had any visible injuries, but Lizzie wasn’t there.
“We didn’t know we were trespassing,” Darcy announced from the top step.
“What?”
“Honest, Dad.” Emma jumped from the top step to the sidewalk just as he got there. “We thought that anyone could take the shortcut to school. We used to take it all the time.”
“Slow down and start from the beginning,” Zach said, not liking the sound of this one bit.
Emma and Darcy exchanged glances and for once it was Emma who did the talking. “Tia had to leave early this morning.” Translation: his daughters were late so she left without them. “We had to walk because of Lizzie’s bike, so we took the trail along the creek to school this morning. On the way home that...lady...who lives there came out and yelled at us. She almost made me cry.”
“More than that,” Darcy said in a low voice, with a quick glance over her shoulder at the front door, “she scared poor Lizzie to death.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ENCOUNTER WITH the trespassing girls had left Tess feeling edgy and unsettled. She tried to go back to her internet search, but eventually gave up and sketched, which she usually enjoyed more than being reminded of how hard it was going to be to earn a living. But today not so much. Her eye was off, the designs lackluster. She finally tossed the pad aside and told the dogs it was time for a walk. She needed to move.
Who was she kidding? Moving wouldn’t solve anything. What she needed was someone to talk to, someone to pour out her mishmash of fears and concerns to. Someone to ask for advice.
But she had no one, so physical activity would have to suffice. A car on the county road slowed as she approached her field and Tess automatically froze in place, even though she recognized the car as the one driven by the dark-haired woman who lived at the ranch across the road. The wife of the cowboy who’d wanted to lease the pasture, no doubt. The rather fine-looking cowboy.
Tess touched her injured cheek, then lowered her hand, closed her fingers. There’d be no men in her immediate future—fine-looking or otherwise—and not because her face was ugly. Tess would be alone because her life was ugly.
As soon as the car turned into the driveway opposite her own, Tess climbed through the fence. Her path was always the same—across the field on the other side of her driveway, the one the cowboy had wanted to lease, and toward the mountains that flanked the west side of the valley. Once in the field, she was far enough away from the roads to feel safe, so she allowed the dogs to run. Heaven knew they spent enough time cooped up in the house with her. They needed the opportunity to stretch their legs, run and do dog stuff.
Tess walked through the knee-deep grass, the breeze at her back. The sun was starting to sink behind the mountains, casting long rays across the valley and enveloping her in golden light. A couple of months ago she might have closed her eyes and raised her face to enjoy the warmth of the rays on her skin. Let her cares go. Of course, a couple months ago she also walked fearlessly wherever she wanted, within reason. Being raised as she’d been, in a tough neighborhood where one learned to watch their back, Tess had felt as if she could handle anything.
Well, she’d been wrong. She hadn’t been able to handle a surprise attack in the parking area of her apartment building.
Tess continued across her field until she came to the boundary fence. The dogs were already hunting in the field on the other side, so she lifted the top barbwire strand and eased through the fence.
The sun sank lower, deepening the gold cast of the light. Deep purple shadows stretched toward her from the base of the mountain. It would be dark soon, but Tess continued to walk until she came to the very center of the field of tall grass and there she stood, the wind ruffling her hair, and watched the last sliver of the sun disappear behind the mountains.
Was this the way her life would continue? Standing alone in the middle of nowhere? A study in solitude?
Until Eddie screwed up and went back to prison, yes.
Tess grabbed a handful of grass and yanked, twisting the blades around her hand before she turned into the wind and called the dogs to start for home. Detective Hiller didn’t know Eddie like she did. Yeah, he might be working at the car wash and showing up for his meetings, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have someone looking for her. She’d never known Eddie to give up, but she had known him to do some sadistic things. One guy had tried to encroach on his territory shortly before she’d run away and Eddie had not only beat the crap out of him—he’d arranged to have the guy’s trailer house torched while he was doing it.
Because of all the chemicals inside, the house had practically vaporized and the newspaper account had mentioned how fortunate it was that the owner hadn’t been home. Tess’s mouth twisted at the thought. Eddie had gotten such a kick out of that. He’d torn the article out and taped it to the fridge.
The clouds hung low and dark on the southeastern horizon, flat-bottomed and threatening as Tess headed across the field to the safety of her house. Walking toward the sunny mountains, she hadn’t realized how quickly the storm had been moving in. When she reached the fence to her property she climbed through, then called the dogs again. Blossom shot past her, scooting under the wire before she stopped to grin at her, tongue lolling out the side of her mouth. Tess looked back and saw Mac hot on the trail of some small animal.
“Mac! Get over here! Hier!”
The dog reversed course and headed toward Tess at a dead run. Halfway to the fence he gave a startled yelp as he disappeared into the tall grass. Less than a second later he reappeared, bounding up, and continued racing toward her.
Tess crouched down as the dog approached, ruffling the fur on either side of his neck when he obediently sat in front of her. His side was covered with moist dirt, which she brushed off. He must have fallen into a ditch or a hole hidden by the grass. Unseen danger. Exactly what she was trying to avoid.
“Let’s go home,” she said, and the dogs trotted ahead of her. Mac limped slightly. He kept up with Blossom, but his head bobbed up and down as he moved, making Tess wonder just how badly he’d hurt himself. The next time she walked, she’d keep the dogs closer and stay out of that part of the field.
A lightning bolt danced along the distant mountains as Tess mounted her porch steps. Another thunderstorm. Just what she needed to add to her unsettled mood.
The low rumble of thunder was followed by a gust of warm wind that lifted her hair as she unlocked the door. Once upon a time she’d loved thunderstorms.
Not so much anymore.
* * *
“COME ON, ELIZABETH. You’re not afraid of thunder.” Zach snapped on the light in his daughter’s tiny second-story bedroom as he walked inside. It was the third time she’d called him in the past hour. The first time she’d said the thunder bothered her, but he wasn’t buying it since she usually had her nose pressed to the window, watching the lightning. The second time she’d asked him to lower the blinds.
So was this an attention-getting device? Did she just want some company? Whichever it was, Zach’s patience was growing thin. He was tired.
“It’s not the thunder,” Lizzie admitted in a small voice. A low rumble punctuated her words.
“Then what is it?” he asked softly.
“Trespassing.”
“Trespassing? What about it?” He’d made it clear that his daughters were never to cross the neighbor’s property again, despite Darcy’s heated protests about the land not being posted.
Lizzie twisted the edge of the blanket between her fingers. “What happens to you if you trespass?”
Zach knelt down next to the bed so they could be eye to eye. “The sheriff will warn you not to do it again.”
Lizzie’s forehead wrinkled. “But...her face.”
“Those scars did not come from trespassing, Lizzie.” He didn’t know how on earth they could and he was pissed that Tess would have told his girls that.
“Then why did she say it?” Lizzie’s eyes were huge.
Good question. Why scare a six-year-old? “My best guess is that she was trying to make a point. Her face didn’t get hurt because she trespassed,” he repeated firmly. “Your face will not get hurt if you trespass.” He could only imagine what scenarios Lizzie had been conjuring up in her young mind. “Even though you shouldn’t trespass,” he added for the sake of consistency.
Lizzie sniffed. “How do you know?”
“Because that’s not what happened to the lady. Her scars look like they came from a car accident, honey.”
Lizzie twisted the edge of her blanket between her small hands. “She was lying?”
“In a big way.” Zach reached down to smooth a few pale reddish-gold strands of hair off her forehead. In Lizzie’s limited experience, adults didn’t lie. She had so much to learn. “Now go to sleep, kiddo. There is absolutely nothing to worry about.”
“Can Benny sleep with me?”
“Benny stinks to high heaven right now. Trust me, you don’t want him in your bed or you’ll smell like a ranch dog. You don’t want that, do you?” A wavering smile touched his daughter’s lips and she shook her head. “Benny’s keeping guard on the porch,” Zach said, pulling Lizzie’s blankets up a little closer to her chin. “He’ll bark if there’s anything to worry about.” Damn, he hoped the dog didn’t bark. He needed some sleep.
Lizzie’s smile faded away. She wrapped her arms around Zach’s neck, pulling herself against him. He put a hand on her back and held her for a moment, smelling the strawberry bubble bath Emma had given her for her birthday. Then he got back to his feet and Lizzie snuggled deeper into the covers, looking so small.
“Liz, you know I’ll make sure nothing happens to you. Right?”
She nodded silently and Zach smiled. “Good. Now get some sleep. Tia will drive you to school tomorrow.”
Darcy’s door was open and the light was on when he walked past her room a few seconds later. He paused in the doorway and she looked up from where she was reading in bed.
“If Liz yells again, I’ll go,” she offered.
“I think she’ll be okay,” Zach said. “I should just let Benny sleep with her.”
“Ewww. Have you smelled him?”
“You guys going to wash him this weekend?”
Darcy let out a heavy sigh. “I guess.”
“Just how scary was this lady?” Zach asked. The girls had poured the story out shortly after he got home but it had been jumbled, told from three different points of view. At the time Zach had brushed aside the details and got to the meat of the matter—his girls shouldn’t have been on Tess O’Neil’s land and they weren’t to go back again. He didn’t want his daughters to have anything to do with her.
“I wasn’t scared.” Darcy’s lips twisted a little. “But I was kind of shocked. It took me a minute to realize she was being serious.”
“She’s serious,” Zach said. And a whole lot less than friendly. Why did people like that move to small communities? “I take it you guys aren’t going to use the creek path to get to school anymore? You’re going to stay off her property?”
“We won’t take Lizzie on the creek path. That’s for sure.”
“None of you will take the creek path.”
“Dad, it’s so much shorter...”
“And it’s so her property.”
“It’s stupid.”
“Stay away from that woman and off her land. Got it?”
Darcy let out a loud sigh—the kind he’d recently discovered only adolescents seemed to be able to make. “Fine. Got it.”
“Thank you.”
Zach walked down the hall to Emma’s room. The door was shut, but he cracked it open and looked inside. His middle daughter was sound asleep, despite the thunder and the Lizzie drama. He smiled, wishing he had that ability. Sleepless nights were more of the norm for him and because of the uncooperative hospital accounting department, he predicted more of the same.
He opened his bedroom door and flicked on the light. For a long while after her death, he’d kept Karen’s belongings out where he could see them, although Beth Ann had boxed her clothing and sent it to charity. But as time went on, he’d divided up Karen’s personal treasures between his daughters. The small collection of jewelry he’d stored for later. All that remained was a photo on the nightstand and a lot of good memories.
And a lot of bad ones. Not of Karen, but of the grim months following the diagnosis. The trauma of the treatments. Meeting the needs of three little girls who were about to lose their mother. Grieving for his wife long before he’d lost her.
Zach sat on the bed and eased his boots off. The first one fell with a heavy clunk. What would Karen have done tonight after discovering what was bothering her baby? He smiled wearily. Probably marched straight over to Tess O’Neil’s place and ripped into her. Karen had been sweet and peaceful, until something endangered those she loved. Beth Ann was the same way.
So was he. It was important to get along with the neighbors, but when a neighbor threatened your kids, things changed. Granted, they’d had no right to cross her land, but they were little girls, not hoodlums, following a path they’d taken for years. What the hell was she thinking trying to scare them?
Leave it. Just leave it.
Easier said than done when he was brought out of bed two hours later by a crying child. He shrugged into his flannel robe, his last gift from Karen, and he jogged upstairs to find Darcy hugging her little sister.
“It’s not the lady. Honest,” Lizzie said.
Like hell.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Darcy said. “Liz is coming to bed with me.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. But only for one night.” Darcy emphasized the last words.
“One night,” Lizzie agreed, making a beeline into Darcy’s room.
Zach waited until the girls were in Darcy’s bed, then turned off the light. Across the field, Tess O’Neil’s place glowed like a beacon, every light on, even though it was almost three o’clock in the morning.
Darcy leaned out of bed and craned her neck to see what Zach was staring at out of her window. Then she shrugged.
“It’s like that every night, Dad. She never shuts off her lights.”
* * *
THE NIGHT BECAME still after the storm had passed, almost too still, and Tess couldn’t bring herself to go upstairs to sleep. She remained in the chair, dozing fitfully and waking the next morning stiff from having finally fallen asleep in an uncomfortable position. When she pushed the blanket off her lap and got up out of the chair, Blossom shot to her feet, but Mac was slower to rise. When he finally did get to his feet, he held his injured foot a good three or four inches off the floor.
“Let’s see that leg,” Tess said, crouching in front of the dog. She reached out to gently touch it and Mac yelped, drawing it back, but not before Tess felt how hot it was. This was a problem.
Ten minutes later, after a short internet search, Tess called a vet in Wesley, the larger town an hour’s drive to the south. As she’d feared, since Dr. Hyatt was the only vet within sixty miles, no appointments were available until the following week, but the vet tech promised to let her know if something opened up.
“His leg is hot,” Tess said after receiving the bad news. “I’m afraid of infection.”
“It’s probably just inflammation,” the tech said, “but to play it safe, I’ll phone Ann at the mercantile about some medications you can give him until the doctor can see him.”
“Really? The mercantile here?”
“Yeah. The merc is kind of our branch pharmacy.”
“I had no idea. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Tess had shopped at the mercantile three times so far, and each time she’d been the only person in the store except for the tough-looking elderly woman behind the counter who’d gruffly introduced herself as Ann. Tess had not made a friend when she’d refused to offer her name in return.
When Tess parked in front of the store a half hour after talking to the vet, she was in luck again. Not a single car in the small lot. List in hand, she crossed the old wooden porch and pulled the door open, only to stop abruptly on the threshold, facing five sets of curious eyes.
Tess automatically dropped her chin, hiding her face as she quickly walked past the women who stood in a tight group near the checkout counter, and grabbed a basket off the stack at the end of the first aisle.
“Well, hello,” one of the women called after her, “are you the new tenant of the Anderson place?”
“Hi,” Tess replied, not answering the question and not looking back as she escaped down the aisle closest to her.
She stopped at the end of the aisle, out of sight of the group, and faced the cooler as she gathered her composure, convinced herself that this was not a big deal...just unexpected.
The mercantile was roughly the size of a large convenience store, stacked to the ceiling with a wild variety of merchandise, much of which Tess didn’t recognize. Good cover until the ladies left. But the ladies started talking again and Tess soon realized that they had no intention of leaving.
Deciding she couldn’t hide forever, she opened the cooler door and pulled out butter, milk and eggs before moving on to the rather sad-looking produce. If she hadn’t felt cornered she might have worked at choosing the best fruit and vegetables, but as it was, she dumped carrots, oranges and apples into her basket, put three loaves of bread on top—one to eat, two to freeze. Then she peeked around the corner of a display.
The women were still there, clustered in the exact spot Tess wanted to be. Well, she couldn’t hide out here forever and when Ann, the proprietress, caught sight of her and frowned, Tess sucked up her courage and headed for the checkout counter.
She was instantly surrounded by women—or so it felt.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” one of the ladies said. Tess didn’t know which one because she didn’t look at them. “Do you quilt?”
“No.” Tess set the basket on the counter where Ann stood with a hand poised over the keys of the cash register, waiting for Tess to unload her basket. “Has Dr. Hyatt phoned in an order for me?” Tess asked her as she pulled the bread out of the basket.
“If you’re Tess O’Neil he has,” the woman said in a tone that told Tess she hadn’t forgotten her refusal to state her name on her first visit.
“I am,” Tess said in a low voice.
Ann pulled a stapled paper bag from under the counter and started ringing up the items in Tess’s basket. And then the women started closing in again from behind.
“We’re always looking for new members for our club,” another woman, who for some reason was not taking a very blatant hint, declared from close to Tess’s right shoulder. “And quilting is very easy to learn.”
“Thank you very much, but I’m not interested.” Tess sensed an exchange of glances as she pulled three twenties out of her very plain purse and handed them across the counter. The drawer of the old-fashioned cash register popped open as Tess quickly loaded her purchases into the recyclable tote she’d brought. A couple bucks’ worth of change and she was good to go.
Except that she had to walk past the group of women and the shortest one was now studying her face with a thoroughness that unnerved her—to the point that Tess half expected her to say, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Maybe her disguise wasn’t as good as she’d hoped. Maybe she should have gone with a wig or something. Or never left the house.
“Excuse me,” she said, refusing to make eye contact as she squeezed past the women and opened the door. Okay. She was coming off as cold and rude. Tough. These ladies needed to understand that she didn’t want to join their quilting bees or whatever.
“Such a nice young woman,” she heard one of the women say sarcastically.
“I swear...I know her from somewhere.”
The last words came just as the door swung shut, making Tess’s blood freeze. She rushed to the car and got inside, slamming the door harder than necessary and then dumping the grocery tote on the seat beside her as the dogs nuzzled her hair. What if they figured out who she was?
CHAPTER FIVE
TESS’S HEAD POUNDED with a stress-induced headache by the time she turned her car into her long driveway. Realistically, what were the chances that the inquisitive ladies in the mercantile would connect her, a scarred woman with dark brown bobbed hair and horn-rimmed glasses, to photoshopped magazine ads featuring a redheaded model? Slim. Very slim.
But she still felt ill.
After putting away her few groceries, Tess tricked Mac into taking an antibiotic pill by wrapping it in cheese, then went out to the barn to put the final coat of finish on the oak table.
She swept the barn floor in the area around the table, trying not to think about the women. Trying not to obsess.
There was no breeze to stir the dust she hadn’t been able to bring up out of the rough floorboards, so Tess left the barn door rolled open. The dogs soon settled in the sun outside the door and Tess began applying the clear finish over the golden oak stain, focusing on her brushstrokes, trying to make the finish as perfect as possible.
She was in the zone, done with the top and crouched down to start a leg, when a fracas outside the barn door brought her bolt upright. A split second later Mac and Blossom shot into the barn, tumbling over each other and knocking down the garden tools leaning against the far wall in their frenzy to do...what?
The brush fell out of Tess’s hand as she stumbled backward, instinctively heading for cover—until she heard a frantic squeaking and realized the dogs were after a small animal, now hiding behind an old mower.
“Leave it alone! Foei! Zit!”
Blossom instantly fell back at the Dutch commands, which meant business, then slowly sank down onto her haunches, her sharp gaze still zeroed in on whatever had hidden behind the tools. Mac was slower to obey, but then he, too, sat with his injured leg held out slightly, as if pointing to his prey.
Tess pressed her hand to her hammering heart then walked over to gingerly pick up the brush from where it had fallen on the still tacky tabletop. The finish was ruined, marred from the brush and the dust the dogs had carried in with them in their frenzy to get whatever furry little beast had raced into the barn ahead of them.
Her fault. She should have closed the door, but this was no big deal to someone with a lot of time on her hands. She’d simply wipe it down and start over.
But Tess’s very logical assessment began to disintegrate as she stared down at the marred table. The dogs continued to hold, waiting for her to release them, and the critter, whatever it might be, stayed huddled where it was. For a brief moment everything in the barn was still, and then Tess felt tears start to well. Stupid tears that rolled down her cheeks—not because of her ruined work, but because of her still hammering heart. Because of the fear reactions she didn’t seem able to control.
Something had to give.
“Let’s go,” she said to the dogs, motioning to the door. Once the dogs were out, Tess rolled the door most of the way shut, leaving a crack big enough—she hoped—for the furry little beast to escape through.
Hands shaking, she made a cup of tea to calm her nerves and forced herself to drink it before pulling out her cell phone and calling Detective Hiller.
It took two tries and several minutes on hold before the detective answered by stating his name in a clipped tone. Tess identified herself and asked if there was any news on Eddie or the guy who slashed her. Despite the tea, her voice still shook.
“Nothing new,” he said in his usual brusque tone, indicating without saying a word that he had bigger, more urgent problems than an essentially cold case—her case—and he undoubtedly did. How many new and possibly urgent cases had he started working on since her assault? She was old news.
“Thank you,” Tess muttered flatly, ready to hang up. She hated feeling like she was bugging the hell out of him, but she had no one else. He was it.
“Hey,” he said just as she was about to say goodbye. “Is everything okay?”
Was that a grudging hint of empathy in his voice?
“No.” She blurted the word, and it felt great to say it out loud, even to this guy who obviously had better things to do than talk to her. No. Everything was not all right.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t shake the nerves,” Tess said, her voice low and intense. “I’m scared. All of the time.” She was in the middle of nowhere, as hidden away from Eddie as she could be and she still felt like a target.
The detective pulled in a breath. “Are you in contact with anyone you know? Anyone Eddie might know?”
“Just you.” She’d wanted to contact William, just to have someone to talk to, but hadn’t.
“I don’t count,” he said. “Would Eddie have any reason to suspect you’ve gone to where you are now? Any connection between the place you’re living and your past that he would know about?”
“Not much.” Did one visit when she was twelve count? Her grandmother had taken her to see a friend in Barlow Ridge, who’d long since passed away. Her younger stepbrother, Mikey, had been with them, but the stop had been part of a longer trip to Salt Lake City. It’d been a short overnight visit, but the isolation of Barlow Ridge had struck Tess, stuck with her. She’d felt so far away from her problems there. So protected from the reality of her life—not her life with her grandmother, but the reality of her mother’s life. It had been no accident that when she started to look for places to hide, she’d checked Barlow Ridge. Finding the Anderson Ranch for lease had seemed like a sign. A godsend.
“We passed through here once sixteen years ago on our way to another city,” Tess said, walking over to the window and staring out without actually seeing anything. She was too focused on Detective Hiller and his questions. His ultimate conclusion.
“No connections there?”
“No.” And still none.
“What specifically is making you nervous?”
“I’m afraid of someone recognizing me and word getting out that the slashed model lives here.” It sounded lame when she said it out loud, as if she was overestimating her importance and how much people thought about her, but the story of the slashing had made the news. Being recognized was not out of the realm of possibility—which was why she was here in the first place.
“How would they recognize you?” the detective asked. “Not to be blunt...” When wasn’t he blunt? “But I’ve seen you before and after the attack. You look nothing like your old self.”
Tess hadn’t expected the remark to sting, but it did. Her career, her looks, had given her an identity, made her more than a runaway and a survivor. She was back to being a survivor.
Tess took a moment, trying to find the words to explain why her fear of Eddie was so pervasive. Finally she settled on, “I know what a sadistic bastard Eddie is. I can’t help worrying about him finding me, because if he does...” She swallowed to keep her throat from closing, remembering how the guy who cut her face had said that Eddie would keep taking pieces off her until he got what he wanted. She reached out with her free hand to stroke Blossom. The dog leaned into her leg.
“I understand your concern,” the detective said as if he was reading a script. Not exactly reassuring.
“He’s done some awful things to people,” Tess said. She hated how defensive she sounded.
“Let’s look at this logically. Would he be able to hang out in your community without being noticed?”
“Not easily.”
“Is there a drug culture?”
Tess almost laughed. Yes. A huge cowboy drug culture. “If there is, it’s really small and private.” But she saw where he was going with this. Was there anyone who might know someone who knew someone who knew Eddie? But thinking of the people she’d met so far in Barlow Ridge...unlikely. “I don’t think there’s a bunch of trafficking through this particular community, but I don’t know about the closest town. It’s...larger.”
There was a brief silence then the detective said, “You’ve been assaulted. Your fear is normal, but my gut says the chances of your stepfather running you down are remote if everything you’ve said is true. But you have to follow your gut.”
“All right,” Tess said quietly. The detective was basically telling her that she had nothing to worry about, then adding a disclaimer in case he was wrong. Again, less than reassuring, but somehow Tess did feel reassured. A little anyway. Her fear was normal. She knew that, but it felt good having someone say it out loud.
“I’ll call if we get any new information on the case, but for right now all I can tell you is that your stepfather has made every parole meeting and as far as I know, hasn’t missed a day of work. I’ll call you if that changes or we get any new information.”
There didn’t seem much to say after the detective’s summation, so Tess simply said, “Thank you.”
“If there’s nothing else...?”
“No.”
“Then have a good day.” The line went dead before she could say goodbye.
Tess hung up the phone and then walked over to the window to stare out across the sunny fields behind her house. What the detective said made sense. Eddie really had no way to track her here. If someone recognized her, what would they do? Contact the media? It wasn’t like she was missing and the authorities were looking for her. If people thought they recognized her, they might talk among themselves. Wonder.
And maybe someone Eddie knew would get wind of it...
What were the chances? She was eight hundred miles away from Eddie.
Tess leaned forward until her forehead touched the glass. What she needed was perspective—to look at things without filtering them through the residual feelings of trauma left by the attack.
Just because she’d been a victim didn’t mean she had to remain one. All she had to do was figure out how to get a grip...and separate reality from paranoia.
She let out a breath that briefly fogged the window.
That was going to take a whole lot of practice.
* * *
ZACH WAS IN the kitchen when Beth Ann and Emma came into the house. The bills sat in a stack next to the phone, stamped and ready to go. The bank account was drained and he’d had to call Jeff, his cousin and ranching partner, to set up a time to discuss selling cows earlier than planned. He was so damned tired of hanging on by a thread.
“Lizzie and Darcy thought they saw a late calf and went to check,” Beth Ann said as she dumped two backpacks onto a kitchen chair. “And Emma has news.”
“We’re going to 4-H horse camp. Both Darcy and me this year.” Emma grinned widely before opening the fridge and pulling out the milk. She poured half a glass and then put the top back on the plastic bottle and shoved it back inside the fridge.
“We haven’t filled out the forms yet. Or paid,” Zach said, not quite certain how to take this happy news.
“We got scholarships,” Emma said. “Irv stopped by the school and told the class who’d won scholarships. It was me and Darcy and Luke.”
“Scholarships?” Zach met Beth Ann’s eyes over the top of his daughter’s head. Every year the volunteer firemen gave scholarships to various camps and the graduating seniors for college.
“Yes. This year Emma and Darcy got the scholarships. You didn’t know?”
No, he didn’t know, and he was a fireman. When had the guys decided that his family would receive the charity this year?
“Isn’t it great, Dad?” Emma said, doing a happy twirl that came close to slopping the milk out of her glass.
“Well,” Zach started before he caught Beth Ann’s eye again where he read “leave it for now.” Fine. He’d leave it, but he was going to pay for this camp. “I don’t know what Lizzie and I are going to do without you guys around for a week.”
“You’ll manage,” Emma said. “I can’t believe I get to go this year!” She skipped out of the kitchen, happy as can be, leaving Zach and Beth Ann and a whole lot of tension in the air.
“I didn’t know the girls put in for scholarships.”
“Everyone in the 4-H club puts in for a scholarship,” Beth Ann said.
“There are kids who need the money more than Emma and Darcy.”
“Can you really afford to have both of them go this year?”
He could barely afford having Darcy go alone last year. The camp, which was near Boise and associated with the university there, ended up costing almost nine hundred dollars per kid for travel, a week’s worth of food and the instructors, who were always top-notch.
“I can figure something out.”
“Damn it, Zach. What’s more important here? Your pride or both girls getting to go to camp?”
“There’s got to be a way other than charity.”
“Scholarships are not charity. They’re awarded to deserving kids, regardless of need.”
“Bull. I’ve been in on enough selection meetings that I know exactly how they’re awarded.” Because pretty much every kid in the local 4-H club was deserving. Need was the number one factor used when the firemen selected their scholarship recipients.
Darcy came in through the back door just then, smiling widely. “You have a new bull calf, but the mama isn’t going to let anyone near it. Did Emma tell you about horse camp?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Isn’t it great?” Darcy asked as she pulled her backpack out from under Lizzie’s pink one. “Now I can use the hundred dollars I saved for something else!”
“Yeah,” Zach said, forcing a smile that he hoped looked halfway genuine. “It’s good to have a windfall like that. Where’s your little sister?”
“Lizzie thought she heard something in the barn.”
“Like...what?”
“Like her imagination,” Darcy said. “I couldn’t hear anything, but you know how she loves to find baby barn cats. She’ll be in pretty soon.” She hefted her backpack and headed out of the kitchen toward the living room.
“I know you hate this, Zach, but you’re thinking about this the wrong way,” Beth Ann said once Darcy was hopefully out of hearing range.
Zach chose not to answer, because no matter how he thought about it, it stung. Maybe it wouldn’t have stung so much if he could have afforded to send both girls and this was a happy surprise, but that wasn’t what it was. His fellow firemen were giving him charity in the one way he wouldn’t be able to say no.
“Now you can use that eighteen hundred dollars for something else,” Beth Ann pointed out, echoing Darcy.
“I guess,” Zach said. Hard to argue since that money would take a bite out of the medical bills. “Staying for dinner? We’re having another slow-cooker delight.”
“No. I think I’ll head home and hit the books.” She touched his upper arm, patting lightly. Zach met her eyes. Smiled a little.
“See you later,” he said.
* * *
TESS STAYED AWAKE until daybreak. She’d read and drawn and even conducted a late-night job search. She went over and over her conversation with Detective Hiller, told herself that he was right, but as soon as it was dark outside she found herself with all the lights on, listening for anything out of the ordinary. There was no storm that night, which may have been why she could hear so much more than she had the previous few nights. Rattling windows, creaking boards. The noises of an old house, but enough to keep her on edge.
This is normal. You’ve been assaulted. Of course you’re on edge.
Why was it so damned hard to put this all into perspective? It’d been three months since she’d been slashed and she’d expected once she got out of California and deep into the wilds of Nevada that the fear would fade faster than it was.
Maybe that was part of her problem. The fear wasn’t going to simply fade away after a trauma. She had to work at overcoming it and thus far all she’d been doing was reacting to it.
Finally, after the sun came up, she let the dogs out, then crawled back into bed, meaning only to close her eyes for ten or fifteen minutes before she let the dogs back in. She woke up with a start, realizing the dogs were still outside and that somehow she’d fallen asleep.
She grabbed the clock which was facing the wall and turned it around. One-thirty?
She’d slept for eight hours straight. A record. She didn’t know whether to be happy or disturbed. She’d been unconscious, oblivious to danger for eight long hours.
But nothing had happened.
Pushing the rumpled hair back from her face, she walked into the bathroom, grimaced when she saw the crease marks on her face from sleeping so hard.
Tess pushed aside the bathroom window curtains to see the dogs sleeping in the shade under the big elm tree in the backyard, the sunlight that filtered through the branches dappling their coats as they snoozed. They looked so peaceful. Everything seemed so...dare she say it, think it? Everything seemed so normal.
And then the phone rang, scaring the bejeezus out of her.
She scooped it up on the second ring, answered it after taking a deep breath so that her voice sounded normal.
“Ms. O’Neil? We have a cancellation this afternoon at four. Could you bring your dog in then?”
Could she? Tess pushed her hair back, leaving her hand on top of her head as she calculated. Almost two. She could be ready by two-thirty. An hour’s drive to Wesley...
“Ms. O’Neil?”
“Uh, yes. I can make it.”
“Great. We’ll see you and Mac at four.”
Half an hour later, she loaded the dogs into the backseat of her car. It was the first time she’d left Barlow Ridge since arriving. The first time she’d ventured out into the world at large to risk being recognized.
But somehow getting sleep, real sleep, not her usual pattern of sleeping for half an hour and then waking, made her feel better. Stronger. Able to tackle this mission.
Or maybe the logic of Detective Hiller’s assessment had finally sunk in to the point that she could work on believing it. She didn’t care which it was as long as she could start easing herself back into a more normal existence—or as normal as it could be living in the middle of nowhere under a false name.
The vet office was easy to find and little more than an hour after she’d left the ranch she was there, sitting in the car, summoning the courage to go inside.
Tess touched her cheek, which she’d left uncovered, having decided that a white bandage caught the eye more than unsightly scars. Instead she’d worn a light blue knit cloche hat that flattened her hair down onto her cheeks, partially covering the injury, and sunglasses to hide the drooping corner of her left eye.
“Hello,” the vet tech, a young woman with a reddish-brown braid down her back, called brightly as Tess and Mac entered the waiting room.
“Hi.” Tess smiled briefly and then pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose as they started to slide down. There were no other people in the office, but a lot of barking in the back.
“I need you to fill this out,” the girl said, coming around the counter and handing Tess a clipboard. “New in town?” she asked before kneeling in front of Mac who obligingly held his bad leg out.
The question made Tess’s stomach knot. “I’ve been here for a while,” she said as she took the pen and started filling out the information. When she was done, the only truthful information was her phone number and Mac’s vitals. Everything else was a fabrication. Her entire life was a fabrication.
Tess brought the clipboard back to the counter just as a tall broad man with blond hair opened the door leading to the clinic. “Hey,” he said with an easy smile. “I’m Dr. Hyatt—Sam.” His eyes traveled over her injured cheek, making her stomach tighten even more, and then he focused on Mac. “What happened?”
Tess gave him a quick rundown and then the vet said, “I’ll have to x-ray.” He cocked one eyebrow as if waiting for Tess to ask a question. It took her a moment to realize he was waiting for her to ask how much an X-ray would cost.
“Whatever it takes.”
“I’ll keep the cost down as low as I can.”
“You’d never survive in Beverly Hills,” Tess said with a half smile, trying her best to act nonchalant. Normal.
“Are you from Southern Cal?” Sam asked shooting her a quick glance as he ran a hand over Mac’s head.
“No.” The word came out too quickly and sounded very much like the lie it was. Tess faked a smile. “Um, how long will this take? I have a couple errands I need to run.”
Dr. Hyatt frowned slightly before he said, “An hour. Tops.”
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll see you in an hour.”
Tess made her escape, pulling in a deep breath of crisp air as the door closed behind her. It did nothing to clear her head. She had no errands. She simply needed to get away from the vet and his cute chatty receptionist before she made more mistakes—or her stomach turned inside out from stress.
Blossom whined and nosed her cheek when she got into the car.
“I know the feeling,” Tess said, ruffling the dog’s fur before she started the car. She’d been in town for all of twenty minutes and she felt like she’d been put through an emotional wringer. So much for normal. But it was her first outing. Surely things would get easier with practice.
The town was small, about ten thousand people, and it didn’t take long to drive the length of the main street. There were the usual chain businesses and fast food establishments, as well as a few smaller stores. A Western supply store, a coffee shop, a bakery. She needed a grocery store and found one in a small strip mall at the very edge of town, where the trees disappeared and the desert began.
Tess pulled into a parking spot in front of a tiny clothing store and sat in her car for a moment, gathering strength. The dress hanging in the window in front of her caught her eye. It was simple. Stylish. Something she would have worn not that long ago. Not that long, but in some ways a lifetime.
Tess touched her cheek, hesitated for a brief moment, then pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out of the car, automatically pulling the cloche down. People walked in and out of the store as she approached, her sunglasses still on, her eyes down. They don’t care about you.
Half an hour later she wheeled an overloaded cart out to her car and opened the trunk. No one had given her more than a passing glance, but she felt emotionally drained. She also had another half hour to kill. Tess slammed the trunk down and was about to get into her car, when she decided that instead she’d check out the hobby shop next to the clothing store where she was parked.
There were only two people in the store, an elderly man and woman looking at yarn, but Tess immediately went down an aisle. Jewelry-making supplies. She stopped for a moment, studying the long strings of bead of various colors. This had possibilities.
And then she spotted the bolts of fabric on long tables at the back of the store. One of the lengths of fabric matched the dress she’d seen in the clothing store window next door. Tess reached out and ran her hand over the geometric-printed jersey.
“That’s lovely fabric,” a woman said from behind her. Tess turned toward the woman standing a table away, tidying up the bolts. “Can I help you find anything in particular?”
“Uh, no,” Tess said. Now that the woman was looking at her, she felt the usual urge to run. “I’m just checking out possible crafts.”
“We have a lovely hobby kit section up front,” she said.
“Thank you. I’ll take a look.”
The lady went back to her folding and Tess returned to the front of the store. She spent a few minutes looking over the kits, none of which appealed to her the way the fabric had, and then quietly left the store for the safety of her car. Enough dillydallying around. She headed back to the vet clinic.
“No fracture,” Dr. Hyatt said after the tech ushered Tess back into the clinic area where Mac was lying on a table obviously woozy from a sedative. His front leg was wrapped with gauze and covered with some kind of pink stretchy wrap.
“Then...”
“It’s a soft tissue injury and perhaps a pulled tendon. I wrapped his leg so he stays off it.”
Sam gave her instructions on how to care for Mac’s leg, told her to give the wrap at least a week before taking it off, although, he warned, Mac may remove it himself. Sam wanted to see the dog again in two weeks if he didn’t improve.
Tess thanked him, paid cash for the visit and then waited for the receipt the girl insisted on writing while Sam carried the still woozy dog out to her car.
Wind whipped her hair as she left the clinic and walked over to her car where Blossom was now riding shotgun. Low dark clouds hung on the horizon in the direction she’d be driving. Another storm. Great. Tess was beginning to hate storms.
Despite the clouds, this one seemed to be mainly wind, which buffeted her car for most of the drive home, finally easing up about ten miles from Barlow Ridge. Tess’s knuckles ached from clutching the steering wheel so tightly. It had been one hell of a nerve-racking day—to the point that she might actually sleep tonight from sheer mental exhaustion.
It was close to seven when she crossed the cattle guard that marked the city limit of Barlow Ridge. When she stopped at the first of the two four-way stops, she noticed an odd orange glow on the far side of town, like a sunset on the wrong side of the valley. Tess frowned as she stopped at the second four-way, then her stomach tightened as she realized just what that glow was.
Fire.
CHAPTER SIX
“DAD!” EMMA SKIDDED into the office where Zach was tallying up the monthly expenses. “The mean lady’s barn is on fire!”
Both Zach’s pager and his phone went off before she’d finished speaking. He automatically turned off the pager as he picked up the phone, which showed the number of Irv Barnes, the rural fire chief.
“The Anderson barn is on fire,” Irv said as Zach brought the phone to his ear. “Can you get over there and make sure the home owner isn’t doing anything stupid while we gear up?”
“Okay. See you in a few.” Zach pocketed the phone without another word and headed through the living room.
“It was the lightning, don’t you think?” Emma said, still trailing behind Zach as he went to the enclosed porch to put on his fire gear, which consisted of most of his regular gear and his oldest boots.
“Probably,” he said, tugging at the laces of his left boot to tighten them before tying the knot. A storm had passed over. There’d been some thunder, but he hadn’t seen any lightning.
“Dad, there’s a fire!” Lizzie said as she clattered down the stairs to the living room.
“He knows,” Emma answered impatiently.
Zach left the house with both girls following him. Emma wanted desperately to be a firefighter and he knew what was coming next.
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Jeannie Watt
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: After the attack that ended her modeling career, Tess O′Neil wants only to feel safe. She thinks she′s found a sanctuary on a Nevada ranch, where she can live in solitude. Too bad rancher Zach Nolan isn′t getting the message. The single dad wants to lease her land, and he won′t quit until she says yes. That means he′s always around!Letting the cowboy with the see-right-through-her baby blues into her life is too dangerous. Almost as dangerous as the wild hope and yearning Zach and his three daughters are awakening in Tess. She′s already risked so much. Maybe it′s time to take the biggest gamble of all on the one thing she never dreamed she′d find–a home.