by B. J Daniels
She nodded. “First the Mediterranean, and then the world. She said she might get off somewhere and stay for a while. You know her house is going on the market.”
“I heard that a young border patrolman has already made an offer on it. He has a wife and two small children.”
“And Shade and his brothers are hard at work on our house on the ranch,” she said. “It has the most wonderful view of the mountains and there are houses close enough that Maisie will have kids to play with. They’re building a new elementary school out that way that should work perfectly for kindergarten.”
He laughed. “You sound like an old married woman.”
“Don’t I though,” she said, smiling. She and Shade had opted to get married at city hall before Gertie left. Sid and Dorothea had been their witnesses. Maisie had been there, practicing throwing rose petals as she would soon at Sid and Dorothea’s wedding.
The ceremony was short and sweet and perfect, since there would be a new addition to the Sterling family by next Christmas. Maisie asked for a sister or a brother. Shade and Lizzy wouldn’t have minded another little girl. But when the doctor told them it was a boy, they were both delighted. Maisie would have a little brother.
Lizzy put her hand over her slightly protruding stomach under her sheriff’s uniform and smiled to herself. She’d gotten pregnant on her first date with Shade—after years of waiting. Some things were just meant to be, she thought as her phone rang.
She picked up, wondering what this day had in store for her.
“Sheriff Sterling,” she said and smiled.
* * *
OH, JENNIFER. I could lie and say I didn’t know how you would react when I told you that you couldn’t be friends with Whitney and me. You knew Stephanie and Ashley would side with me. But you did have a choice. So why blame me?
You were so easily manipulated. Until you weren’t. I knew that once you heard about the diaries you would find them and then things would get interesting.
I have to hand it to Lizzy though. Once she saw my purse hanging from your arm... You really shouldn’t have kept it. And my ringtone? Kind of rubbing it in my face, huh?
I thought for sure that you were going to kill Lizzy, too. I never realized how clever she was.
But you, Jennifer, I always thought of you as a loyal friend. When you popped up from the back seat and put that knife to my throat... I really didn’t think you had it in you. You surprised me all right.
Now if it had been Stephanie, that would have been another story. I saw her giving me the side-eye more than once. I knew she disapproved of me. But hey, she certainly had no right to judge given what she’d been up to. Gross.
But, Jennifer, I thought I could depend on you. Just goes to show, you really have to watch the quiet ones. I think it also proves that there is a cold-blooded killer in all of us.
I know Lizzy wouldn’t agree. Lizzy got her killer—and the man of her dreams. I’d wish her and Shade the best, but even death can’t make me that nice.
I like to believe that I didn’t deserve to die. But maybe I did. Maybe I took too much pleasure in the questionable things I did. Just like my grandmother used to say. Maybe I would do it differently, if I had another chance.
Or maybe not.
* * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from Restless Hearts by B.J. Daniels.
PI Blaze McClintock is certain her father didn’t commit murder, despite the accusations he faces.
Can her first love, Jake Horn, help her unravel this mystery—or will unveiled secrets tear them apart?
Read on for a sneak preview of Restless Hearts,
the first book in the Montana Justice series
by New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author B.J. Daniels.
CHAPTER ONE
AS THE SUN came up over the foothills, twelve-year-old Ty Garrison was having trouble staying in the saddle. His puznishment for coming in late last night with beer on his breath included being dragged out of bed before daylight to ride fence. He should have known that the first time he’d tried alcohol, he’d get caught. He was lucky his father hadn’t taken him out to the woodshed and used the strap on him.
“I could wallop you good for this, son, but I think it’s time I start treating you like a man—and you start acting like one,” Shane Garrison had told him. “So you go on up to bed and we’ll talk more about this early in the morning.”
Except there hadn’t been much talking. Just an order. “Get your butt out of that bed and into the saddle. You’re riding fence this morning.”
Ty was thinking that it really was high time his father stopped treating him like a kid, when he saw something that set his heart off at a dead run. He reined in at the sight. Something was kicking up a whole lot of dust just over the next rise. The sound of deep snorts filled the clear November morning air, sending a chill through him.
Coming full awake, he sat up in the saddle as he eased his horse through a patch of snow to the top of the rise. He felt his eyes go wide and reined in hard as his horse shuddered under him. He’d only seen buffalo from a distance, large dark shapes along the Montana prairie horizon next to his ranch.
Now only yards away, this one had been wallowing in the dirt but now jumped to its feet, its big shaggy head and dark eyes aimed right at him. The animal was huge, at least six feet tall at the shoulders. The beast snorted, making his horse shake again and sidestep as if wanting to run.
Ty knew the feeling. He wanted to run as well. He’d heard stories about buffalo. How fast they were, how powerful, how destructive and worse, what they could do to your body if you ended up under the huge hoofs.
He could see where the bull had broken through the neighbor’s fence and their own. It pawed the ground, snorting again, making him realize he’d startled it—just as it had startled him and his horse. His first thought was to turn tail and run home. But buffalo could clock forty miles an hour and jump six feet straight up into the air, and he could see what this one had done to two fences.
But also Ty could hear his father’s words about it being time he was treated like a man. Time he acted like one. He knew what his father would do if he’d been riding fence this morning.
Carefully, he eased his rifle from its scabbard. The weapon was loaded and ready to fire. All he had to do was aim and pull the trigger. He lifted the rifle, his arms quivering, his finger resting nervously against the trigger.
As he got its big head in his sights, for some crazy reason, he thought of the buffalo head nickel his grandfather had given him. It was in the tin box where he kept his other keepsakes. He didn’t want to kill this animal. In that moment, he could imagine this buffalo wild, millions of them, this prairie its home before the white men had come and almost killed them all. It seemed wrong to shoot it.
And yet it had broken down their fence. It could do a lot more damage if something wasn’t done about it. It was one of the reasons that his father and all the other beef ranchers hated Montgomery McClintock for raising buffalo.
The huge buffalo pawed the ground again, raising a cloud of dirt in the air as it breathed hard. Early-morning steam rose from its nostrils. His horse whinnied, growing more anxious. He felt sweat run down his back. It was now or never.
The largest thing he’d ever killed was a bull elk, not something that weighed a ton. The rifle barrel swayed in the breeze. He swallowed the lump in his throat and fought to hold the gun still as he settled the crosshairs between the beast’s eyes.
Through his sights, he saw with horror the buffalo lower its head and charge. He pulled the trigger. The shot went wild as his horse reared and he found himself falling through the air before hitting the ground hard.
* * *
BLAZE MCCLINTOCK ROARED down the narrow gravel road, dust boiling up behind her pickup even though it was November in Montana. The Farmers’ Almanac was calling for a mil
d winter. There were only a few patches of snow around, those mostly on the shady side of the hills.
She’d thought that after all these years, she wouldn’t even be able to find her way to the ranch. But it was as if the way home was stamped into her DNA, something she couldn’t outrun no matter how hard she tried.
The rolling Montana prairie stretched all the way to the Little Rockies. She’d forgotten how wide open this land was and how far a person could see. It was true, the sky up here felt larger, stretching from horizon to horizon.
She slowed the pickup as she came over the rise and saw the turnoff into the ranch in the distance. She let her truck coast down the next hill. This was a fool’s errand, she thought, but knew there was no turning back.
Giving the pickup more gas, she raced down the dirt road, before braking for the turn. Her eyes widened as she pulled in and stopped before the stone arched entrance into the McClintock Ranch. She’d seen plenty of the signs since she’d turned off the paved two-lane that had brought her up to this part of the state. All along the narrow dirt road to the ranches north of the Missouri Breaks, there’d been signs that read Don’t Buffalo Me. Others with buffalo and a slash through them.
These were nothing new. A lot of Montana ranchers who didn’t want buffalo anywhere near their cattle. It reminded her of the history of the state and how cattle ranchers had fought with sheep ranchers. Now the two lived in harmony. But not so with the beef and buffalo ranchers. At least not in this part of Montana.
She stared at the dozen of signs stuck in the ground in front of the arched entrance into the ranch, no doubt compliments of her father’s neighbors. The signs didn’t bother her as much as the graffiti on the stone columns.
Fortunately a lot of words scrawled in spray paint were illegible. But one jumped out at her. KILLER. Even that wasn’t as bad as what was hanging from the arch. An effigy of her father with a rope around his neck.
For a moment, she watched it blow in the breeze and questioned what she was doing here. Her father had gone against the tide when he’d started raising buffalo. He’d known the kind of hell he was about to unleash, but once Montgomery “Monte” McClintock got something into his head, there was no reining him in.
Blaze felt angry tears burn her eyes. The father she’d been estranged from for years had been arrested for murdering a neighboring rancher. The worst part was that she suspected he was guilty as hell and yet here she was. Not that she would have been here if the judge, as they called him, hadn’t asked her to come. She owed Judge WT Landusky her life. So when he’d asked her to come back here, she couldn’t say no.
But she’d damn sure wanted to. She drove under the arch toward the ranch house in the distance. Memories assaulted her, especially the last time she’d left here—in handcuffs.
* * *
Don’t miss Restless Hearts by B.J. Daniels, available December 2019 wherever Harlequin® books and ebooks are sold.
www.Harlequin.com
Copyright © 2019 by Barbara Heinlein
ISBN-13: 9781488053665
Just His Luck
Copyright © 2019 by Barbara Heinlein
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