by Alice Sharpe
“I don’t want you here, Echo,” he said, trying sincerity. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I know you don’t. But you’re injured and someone needs to cover your back.”
“And that someone is you,” he said, and the tone of his voice let her know what he thought of that idea.
“I’m better than nothing,” she said, and then added, “Don’t say I’m not. You know it’s true. If these men are as horrible as you say they are, two people are better than one.”
“Not when one of them is a pretty woman,” he said, “which is why I’m asking you for the last time to turn the truck around and drive to the airport.”
She spared him another glance “I’m relieved to hear you say this is the last time you’re asking. It’s getting monotonous. Listen, Adam, I promise I’ll go meekly away after this little visit. You’ll never have to even think of me again.”
He opened his mouth to speak and closed it again without uttering a word. What was the point? He knew he’d never stop thinking about her.
ALICE SHARPE
WESTIN LEGACY
This book is dedicated with love and appreciation to my husband, Arnold, brainstormer superb!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Sharpe met her husband-to-be on a cold, foggy beach in Northern California. One year later they were married. Their union has survived the rearing of two children, a handful of earthquakes registering over 6.5, numerous cats and a few special dogs, the latest of which is a yellow Lab named Annie Rose. Alice and her husband now live in a small rural town in Oregon, where she devotes the majority of her time to pursuing her second love, writing.
Alice loves to hear from readers. You can write her at P.O. Box 755, Brownsville, OR 97327. An SASE for reply is appreciated.
Books by Alice Sharpe
HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE
746—FOR THE SAKE OF THEIR BABY
823—UNDERCOVER BABIES
923—MY SISTER, MYSELF*
929—DUPLICATE DAUGHTER*
1022—ROYAL HEIR
1051—AVENGING ANGEL
1076—THE LAWMAN’S SECRET SON†
1082—BODYGUARD FATHER†
1124—MULTIPLES MYSTERY
1166—AGENT DADDY
1190—A BABY BETWEEN THEM
1209—THE BABY’S BODYGUARD
1304—WESTIN’S WYOMING‡
1309—WESTIN LEGACY‡
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Adam Westin—It’s up to him to stop the looting of the prehistoric burial cave located on Open Sky land before an explosive threat from the past destroys everything—and everyone—he loves.
Echo De Gris—She spent her first years of life on the Open Sky. She’s back now, but just for a visit. Becoming reacquainted with her childhood nemesis makes her wonder if she’ll ever want to leave. A killer makes her wonder if she’ll live long enough to get away.
Cody Westin—He’s determined not to make the same mistake his father made. He wants his wife back—is he too late?
Brice Westin—Is it true he doesn’t know where Adam’s mother disappeared to all those years ago, or is it possible he’s known all along and will now do anything to protect that secret?
Lonnie Nielsen—He’s in for a heap of trouble. Or is he causing it?
Del Halverson—One of Brice’s oldest friends. What exactly did he do when he left Wyoming? And is he doing it again?
J.D. Oakes—Another old pal with a hazy past. Is it finally catching up with him?
Pete Westin—Echo’s stepfather. Is it a coincidence that he left the Open Sky after Adam’s mother’s disappearance, and returned the day the violence escalated?
David Lassiter—The cowpoke who ran off with Adam’s mother. Or did he?
Willet Garvey—He’s no fan of the Westins. How far will hatred and greed take him?
Hank Garvey—Willet’s son, Hank is determined to exact revenge at any cost.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Prologue
As Lonnie fumbled the key in the lock, he glanced over his shoulder and scanned the faces of his buddies.
“Remember, you guys,” he said, not too surprised to detect a slur in his voice. Damn hooch sure snuck up on a man. “This is top secret. You gotta…gotta promise you won’t tell anyone about this. Especially not Janine.”
The other two men nodded solemnly.
The key finally clicked and he pushed in the door. He didn’t want to turn on the light until he’d secured the room again. Never knew when Janine might take it into her head to come on down to the basement and make sure he wasn’t gambling her trust fund away on a busted flush. He urged his friends forward into the heavy shadows. “Don’t touch nothing,” he warned.
Once they were all crammed inside, he closed the door, slid the dead bolt, switched on the light and waited for a chorus of gratifying gasps.
“What’s all this junk?”
The corners of Lonnie’s mouth drooped. “What do you mean, what is it? It’s artifacts.”
“Your ‘private stash’ is bunch of old broken pots?” one man scoffed. Now Lonnie was getting mad. After all these years he had finally decided to share his collection and this was what he got? He pointed at a square-looking figure in a glass case. “That there, that’s a rare Central American Human Effigy. Worth almost five thousand bucks.” He pointed at another case. “And that canteen is Southwest Anasazi. I paid three thousand for it. The case over there is full of Mississippian Indian relics. Any museum would love to have just one of these things.”
“Where’d you get ’em?”
This came from his best friend of the group, who was eyeing Lonnie as though he was some kind of traitor.
“Here and there.”
“Black market?”
Lonnie shrugged.
“What about this?”
Lonnie turned to admire a prehistoric carved rock bowl. The handle was a crude rendition of a human head, turned away from the indentation, the skull overlaid with a veneer of gold.
“That’s my latest purchase,” Lonnie boasted. “It’s local, from right here in Wyoming. No one knows which tribe, but it’s old. Prehistoric. Paid a bundle for it, too.”
“Someone local sold it to you? Who?”
Lonnie shook his head. “No, no, I ain’t telling. He promised me more pieces though. Said he was going deeper, whatever that means.”
There was a sudden chill in the room as though a north wind had just blown over the top of an icy Rocky Mountain peak. Lonnie looked from one face to the next. Neither set of eyes revealed a thing.
It was there, though. In the air. Something cold and watchful.
He rubbed his eyes, wondering if the booze had made him woolly-headed, but he couldn’t shake the feeling he wasn’t the only one in that small private room who kept secrets.
Or that the ones he sensed might be as dangerous as his own.
Chapter One
They’d been driving for what felt like forever, but that wasn’t the real problem. It seemed to Echo De Gris that her stepfather’s anxiety had increased with every advancing mile into Wyoming and now that they were on Open Sky Ranch
land, it was almost suffocating.
This made no sense because he was the one who had insisted moving back here soon after Echo’s mother’s long illness had finally claimed her life. Echo had been surprised when, at the last minute, he’d asked her to come along on the trip—they had never really been close and she was in the middle of life-changing events of her own. But how could she deny him?
“There it is,” he said, his voice anxious. He shifted around and flashed her a nervous smile, then peered back out the window. His voice barely a whisper, he repeated himself. “There it is.”
She’d been so involved maneuvering the big truck and rented trailer along the gravel road that wound its way through the rolling hillsides of tall grass that she hadn’t looked very far ahead. She did now as they topped a peak, and caught a glimpse of a large log house nestled near a pond in the valley below. Aspens surrounded the house while the uncompromising Rocky Mountains ringed the valley. A dozen barns and outbuildings fanned into corrals and fenced pastures while an airstrip ran more or less parallel to a stream. There were several black cows in evidence, their lowing riding on a gentle breeze. Horses, some with foals at their sides, dotted the hillsides.
She’d lived here as a small girl but everything looked bigger now than she remembered. High white clouds, brilliant blue skies, jagged peaks.
And talk about remote…
“Herd must be up at the summer pastures,” Pete Westin mused and there was a wistful tone to his craggy voice. She wasn’t sure why he’d sold out and moved her and her mother to the West Coast twenty-some-odd years before; she was just grateful he had. Imagine growing up someplace like this. Even the thought of a day or two in such a spot made her itchy.
A few moments later, she drove into the yard, pulling the rig to a stop beside a half dozen other trucks, most of them with dusty ATVs roped into the beds. All she had to do now was help her stepfather get settled, then she was free to catch a ride to Woodwind and buy a ticket on the first plane headed back to civilization.
“I wonder where everybody is. I expected them to be mowing the fields by now, but it doesn’t look as though they’ve even started,” Pete said as he opened his door.
Echo scooted out from behind the wheel. “I’ll take a look around,” she said. It was a big truck with a long drop to the ground and her full skirt caught in the retracting seat belt. She ended up with bare thighs in a swirl of cotton.
“Never mind, here comes someone,” Pete called from the other side of the truck.
As Echo battled with her clothes she looked up to see a man approaching.
There was something about a cowboy, even to a city slicker like her. Maybe it was the snug jeans or the shirt stretched across strong, broad shoulders; maybe it was the way a guy moved when he didn’t spend a lot of time sitting. Or the hat—black in this instance—shading the eyes, squaring the jaw. Whatever it was, whew. Some of them just had “it” and you knew what “it” was when you saw it.
He looked away from her predicament, but not before she saw the speculation in his silvery eyes. Damn—she was nearly naked from the waist down. With a final yank, she reclaimed her skirt.
His gaze moved to her face, then away as he appeared to notice her stepfather on the far side of the truck. He looked quickly back at Echo and speculation turned into surprise. “Either Uncle Pete got himself a pretty young wife or you’re my little cousin Echo,” he said as they shook hands.
She narrowed her eyes and looked him over again. Too young to be Cody…gray eyes…
She’d seen his college graduation picture a few years earlier, taken with his dad, a herd of cattle behind them. “You’re Adam,” she said.
His smile tipped handsome into gorgeous. “I didn’t know you were coming with Uncle Pete.”
“It was sort of last-minute. I’ll be gone before you know it.”
“She’s got herself a new job in New York City,” Pete grumbled. He’d made no bones about his opinion of her moving across the country.
Adam released her hand. “New York, huh. You’ve turned into a big city girl.”
“I grew up in San Francisco,” she reminded him. “I mean, after we left here.”
“Well, it’s nice to see you. It’s been a long time.”
“Yes, it has.”
Adam continued on around the truck to greet his uncle. “First Pierce comes home and now you. It’s getting to be like the old days around here. Welcome, Uncle Pete.”
Pete Westin looked genuinely pleased as he delivered a manly clap on the shoulder to Adam. “Where is Pierce?”
“Still in Chatioux. Analise’s father took a turn for the worse. They’re getting ready to crown her brother king so Pierce extended his stay. He should be home next week.”
“I read about what happened here last winter in the newspapers. They made it sound like Pierce was going to marry this Princess Analise.”
“That’s the rumor.”
“How about that? The troublemaker gets himself a princess. How about Cody? Is he around?”
“He and Jamie are working on the mowers. We were supposed to start haying yesterday but everything went wrong. With any luck we start tomorrow bright and early. Dad is out in the barn with a couple cronies you might remember.”
“I’ll head on out there,” Echo’s stepfather said.
Adam nodded across the yard. “No need, they’re on their way.”
Echo turned to see three men. She’d assume she’d recognize her uncle, but the fact was she wasn’t sure which of the men was Birch Westin. All three of them appeared to be in their sixties and cut from the same Western cloth, all imposing in their own way, all about the same size. She looked at their hats—the most recent picture she’d seen of her uncle had him in a black Stetson with silver disks on the band. No help there: they all wore tan hats, two of them straw.
That’s when she remembered Uncle Birch had had knee surgery last winter followed by a series of setbacks that had delayed healing. One man limped, plus, the closer he got, the more he reminded her of Adam if you looked past the wear and tear of time.
“So, you made it,” Birch growled at Echo’s stepfather.
Echo’s stepfather’s shoulders grew rigid. “Yeah,” he said.
Birch nodded, then turned to Echo. His voice softened. “This is a nice surprise. I didn’t know you were coming, too.”
“I’m just here for a day or so,” she explained, moving to accept a perfunctory hug. Birch was as stiff a hugger as her stepfather—neither was the warm, cuddly type. Were all the Westin men like that? Her gaze flicked to Adam. Was he?
Birch took up introductions. “Pete, you remember J. D. Oakes,” he said, gesturing at the man with the white handlebar mustache and a piercing gaze. J.D. held between two fingers what appeared to be a hand-rolled cigarette. It smelled foul. “And this here is Del Halverson. I don’t know if you and Del ever ran into each other way back when.”
Pete shook both men’s hands. “Sure, I know these two. Del, I think you bought your place a year or two before I left. You’d just returned from the East Coast as I recall.”
Del Halverson was a florid man with small features bunched in the middle of a large face. “I wasn’t away long,” he said. “Got tired of working for my uncle in a damn bank. We all left Wyoming at one time or another, right? Even Lonnie moved away to be a soldier for a while. Big city lights tempt a man. Most of us wander back sooner or later. ’Cept you, J.D. You didn’t come from around here.”
“I came from a hundred miles north of here. I swear, Del, unless a man is born in your backyard, he’s a foreigner.” He smiled at Echo as he added, “I remember when you were a wisp of a little girl.” Then he dropped his cigarette to the gravel and ground it out with his boot. He looked up, caught Uncle Birch scowling at him, and hastened to pick it up. “Sorry, I forgot,” he said, and crossed to an old milk pail filled with sand that leaned beside a post. He dropped in the butt and turned back to Del. “Let’s get out of the way so these people ca
n get reacquainted.”
Both men said their goodbyes then climbed into one of the trucks and drove off.
An uneasy silence ensued until Echo finally broke it. With a sweeping gesture, she indicated the house. “It sure looks different than I remember,” she said.
“Cody remodeled three summers ago before he married Cassie,” Adam volunteered.
“Fat lot of good it did him,” Uncle Birch snarled. “She ran off last winter anyway.”
Echo didn’t miss the knot that formed in Adam’s jaw. She wasn’t exactly sure what prompted it unless he didn’t appreciate his father making those kind of comments about his brother.
“This place is hard on women,” Pete commented.
Birch turned on his brother. “Is that why you sold me your share of the ranch and moved Althea away? Because the place was hard on her?”
“Partly.”
“Pauline is still here,” Birch grumbled. “She lasted.”
“Maybe because you never married her. Where is she, anyway?”
“In town for the day.”
“Looking forward to seeing her. And you know I didn’t move just because of Althea. Things weren’t the same after…”
His voice trailed off and he looked at the ground.
Birch glowered at his brother. “Go ahead and say it.”
The silence that followed his remark was so deep it felt like the earth itself held its breath. Echo shifted uneasily, glancing over at Adam, who was staring at the ground.
Finally, Pete thumped his leg with his fist. “That’s all water under the bridge. I’m back now to stay unless you’d rather I didn’t. It’s not my ranch anymore.”
“The Open Sky will always be your home,” Birch muttered. “Some things don’t change.”
