The first thing she noticed after she left the barn was the cold. Just in the last few moments, the temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. An icy wind had blown away the balmy promise of spring and now it bit through her coat and shrieked under the eaves of the barn. Just as Joe predicted, those ominous clouds had moved closer—already a few icy crystals pelted her angrily.
The second thing she noticed was that both Rio and Quixote were gone from where she and Joe had tied them to the corral.
She frowned. Joe must have mounted up again after he left the barn. She couldn't blame him. He probably just needed to ride somewhere away from the ranch so he could be alone to assimilate the news that he was the father of a twelve-year-old girl.
She could understand why Qui was gone. That made sense. But why would he have taken Rio, too?
She pushed the puzzle out of her mind. She had more important things to worry about right now than a missing horse—like her daughter and the turmoil she had somehow managed to keep hidden for so long, turmoil that had obviously been at the root of her behavior problems.
Twenty minutes later, when she couldn't find Leah anywhere either inside the house or on the grounds, the missing horse took on a grim new significance.
Would Leah have taken Rio? And where would she have gone? Fear curled in her stomach. The storm was beginning in full force now. With that wind, the snow seemed to blow horizontally instead of vertically, until she could barely even see the house from here.
Annie didn't even want to think about all the things that might happen to a twelve-year-old girl out in the middle of a blizzard. Leah was a good horsewoman for a girl her age but she didn't have the coping skills to handle harsh weather like this.
She had to find her as soon as possible or Leah might not be able to make her way back.
Rushing to the horse barn, she started to saddle one of the other ranch horses, a big, brawny sorrel mare, when Joe came into the barn shaking snow off his slicker.
He stopped short when he saw her and she died a little inside at the fury and betrayal that leaped into his dark eyes. She forced herself to ignore it, though. She deserved every bit of his anger and then some.
"Where's Leah?" she asked urgently. "Is she with you?"
He shook his head. "I haven't seen her since she ran out of here earlier. Why?"
"Rio's gone. I think she took him. I think she's out there somewhere."
He growled a harsh oath. "That wind is a bitch. In another half hour visibility is going to be down to a few feet."
Fear clutched at her again but she tamped it down as she swung into the saddle. "Then let's hope I find her before then."
He held a hand on the bridle to hold the sorrel in place. "Don't do anything stupid. She probably just rode down to the mailbox or something and she'll be back in a few minutes."
"Maybe. But what if she's not? What if she's out there lost? I can't take that chance. It might be morning before it clears enough to look for her, otherwise."
"What the hell good would it do to go off looking for her if you only end up getting yourself lost too?"
"I know every inch of this ranch. I'm not going to get lost."
"Not in a blinding snowstorm you don't."
"It's my fault she's out there. I need to find her before the worst of the storm hits."
"She could be anywhere! We need to do this methodically, organize a search."
"In the time it would take to organize a search, who knows what could happen to her?"
"So you'd rather just wander out there aimlessly? Use your head, Annie!"
"I am using my head. Where does she always go when she's upset or in trouble? Up to the lake. I'm betting that's where she went this time."
He growled an oath. "God help her if she did. That trail is dangerous under the best of circumstances, which these definitely are not."
"I have to look for her, Joe."
He was silent for a moment then he let go of the horse's bridle. "Give me five minutes to round up the men and send them out looking closer to home and then I'll come with you."
* * *
Joe caught up with her just as she and the sorrel reached the High Lonesome trailhead.
"She might not even be up here," he called above the howl of the wind.
She pointed to the silent testimony embedded in the mud and snow in front of her—shod hoofprints leading straight up the trail. By the looks of it, the horse had been pushed through here hard fairly recently, since the snow hadn't had time to hide the trail away.
The screeching wind made speech next to impossible. Annie just hunkered down into her coat and concentrated on the difficult terrain and dwindling daylight, praying that Leah would be safe.
They saw no sign of her on the trail, nothing but those ghostly hoofprints beginning to disappear under the snow. By the time they rode down the lip of the bowl-shaped valley, her knuckles ached from holding tight to the reins and she couldn't see anything beyond the sorrel's ears.
They called Leah's name over and over but the wind snatched away their voices.
"Let's hope she had enough sense to hole up in the line shack," Joe shouted.
She nodded, but when they reached the shack a few moments later, they found it empty.
Disappointment and fear clutched at her. Where could she be? Breathing hard, Annie pushed past Joe to remount her horse, but he gripped her shoulders before she could.
"Annie, we're going to have to stop here, at least until the wind dies down a little," he shouted above the wind. "The horses are exhausted from fighting it and so are you."
"We can't stop! We have to find her. She's out there somewhere."'
He opened his mouth to argue with her but before he could, she caught a strange bleating sound on the wind. It sounded like it was coming from inside his coat.
He frowned, then reached into an inside pocket and pulled out one of the ranch cellular phones. It seemed so incongruous out here in the wilderness that for a moment she could only stare at him.
"Yeah?" he growled impatiently into the phone.
He was silent for a few moments then he answered but the wind snatched away his words. Through the whirling snow she could see him nod his head and then say something else before he ended the call and returned the phone to his pocket.
"That was Colt," he yelled to Annie. "She's safe."
Annie sagged against her horse. "Thank heaven! Where is she?"
"The reception was pretty choppy but I guess she's at the Broken Spur with him and Maggie and the boys. She never even made it to the lake, but ended up taking the fork in the trail to the Broken Spur before the worst of the storm hits. That's why we lost the hoofprints."
Relief poured over her, beautiful, warm cascades of it. "Is she hurt?"
"She's fine. Cold and wet and frightened, but fine."
Annie breathed another prayer of thanksgiving. "Let's go home, then," she shouted to him.
He shook his head. "I don't think so. It's too dangerous to try that trail again under these conditions. I think we need to hole up here through the worst of the storm and then head back to the ranch when it settles down a little."
The last thing in the world she wanted to do was spend the night with Joe in the intimate confines of the line shack. Not with the emotional upheaval they both had been through that afternoon.
The thought of being alone with him terrified her, of being captive to a situation where they would have no choice but to talk to each other. He would demand answers from her. And how could she blame him? She had withheld the truth from him for more than thirteen years, he had a right to ask anything he wanted.
Even knowing he had the right to the truth, she wasn't sure how much she could—or would—be able to tell him about the choices she had made that summer.
But if she tried to go back down that slick trail in the middle of a howling blizzard, she risked serious injury—or worse.
As she walked inside the tiny confines of the line shack, s
he almost thought the risk would have been worth it.
Chapter 13
The line shack was cold, dark and unwelcoming.
Joe was grateful to whatever instinct had prompted him to replenish the supplies they had used two weeks before. He had come up himself earlier in the week to bring in more firewood and had returned the cleaned blankets to the crates nailed to the plank wall.
Now, while he found the kerosene lantern and followed the steps to coax it to life, he was supremely conscious of Annie watching him, wary and silent. In the low circle of light from the lantern, she looked pale and much, much too fragile to be riding out in the middle of a Montana blizzard.
He set the lantern on the table near her and she jumped suddenly at the thud of metal hitting wood.
He frowned. Why the hell was she acting afraid of him? Did she have so little faith in him, in his control over his emotions, that she actually thought he might hurt her?
He didn't think she could wound him any more but that did it. Of course she didn't have any faith in him. Otherwise she would have told him about Leah years ago instead of letting him find out like this.
His jaw flexed. He didn't know what was stronger in him right now, the amazement, the hurt, or the anger, this deep, aching fury that pulsed through him with every breath.
He thought they had cared about each other. They had been friends since they were kids—more than friends. She had been his lifeline, the one joy that had lifted him through more than she would ever know.
Yet she had lied to him, had concealed something so profound, so monumental, that he still couldn't quite comprehend the magnitude of it.
Leah was his.
He had a child—a daughter who hovered on the brink of womanhood—and Annie hadn't even bothered to tell him.
Questions pounded through him with relentless force, as they had since that moment in the barn.
How had she kept it a secret for so long? What could possibly have compelled her to do such a thing? And if she could withhold something so important, what else was she willing to lie about?
He took a couple of deep breaths to calm himself down. Now wasn't the time to get into this. He had the focus on the present, on all the necessary tasks to make sure they outlasted the storm.
Then maybe he could start digging up the past.
"It should only take me a few minutes to get a fire started in here," he said abruptly without looking at her. "Then I'll go out and take care of the horses."
"I can start a fire," she said, her voice low. "The horses are worse off than I am, anyway. See to them first."
He was only too willing to escape the heavy tension in the shack. Accompanied only by the moaning wind, he quickly stabled the tired horses in the small three-sided lean-to a dozen yards from the little cabin, then divided a bale of hay from the small supply he found there.
He knew the firewood inside the cabin wouldn't be enough to make it through the night so he gathered an armload of split logs from the stack outside the lean-to then started back toward the structure.
He had only gone a short distance when his steps faltered. The only light piercing the storm all around came from the small window of the cabin. Inside, he could see Annie moving about, the lantern light gleaming softly off her auburn hair.
The snow being whirled around by the wind softened the scene, gave it a hazy, almost surreal feel, like he was looking into one of those glass globes filled with artificial flakes.
She was so beautiful. When he was a kid he used to think she was like something out of a fairy tale, delicate and fine-boned, with that milky-white skin and her big green eyes.
But there had been stubbornness and strength there, too. Otherwise she never would have survived being married to his brother.
The thought inevitably brought him crashing back to reality. Why had she done it? Why had she taken his child and passed it off as Charlie's?
Leah had said she learned he was her father during an argument between the two of them, so Charlie had obviously known the truth. What could have possibly compelled him to go along with it? It couldn't have been altruism, since he seriously doubted his big brother even knew what the word meant.
In the capricious way of winter storms in the mountains, the wind suddenly subsided for just a moment and that misty wonderland scene disappeared. Instead, he could see the place for what it really was—a broken-down shack in the middle of nowhere.
How appropriate, since everything he thought he knew about Annie, everything he thought she was, had been an illusion, too.
He couldn't stand out here all night unless he wanted to get frostbitten feet. Sooner or later he was going to have to face her. Might as well be sooner. The wind started up again as he pushed his way through the snow and shoved open the door.
She stood near the woodstove stirring something in a battered old pan. When he came in, she looked up and offered a tentative smile that slowly slipped away when he didn't reciprocate.
"I thought you might be hungry," she said in a low, colorless voice. "I couldn't find too many tempting choices here but there was some canned soup in the cupboard. Is minestrone okay?"
His stomach churned at the idea of food but he shrugged as he dumped the armload of wood onto the pile. "Fine."
"It's almost ready if you want to sit down."
He didn't, but he forced himself to remove his hat and coat and hang them on a rusty nail next to hers, then pulled out one of the rickety chairs. While he tested it to make sure it would hold his weight, she ladled the soup into two blue spatterware tin bowls, adding some crackers and a bowl of canned peaches she must have found.
They ate in silence, the tension between them thick and heavy. He didn't trust himself to speak yet so he concentrated instead on the meal. Given his emotional turmoil, the soup tasted about as flavorful to him as that snow out there.
Finally after several long moments, she set her spoon gently to the side of her uneaten helping.
"I hate this," she said, and she sounded on the brink of tears.
"Yeah, well, I'm not too crazy about it either," he growled.
"Say something. Yell at me, ask me questions, anything. Just talk to me. I hate it when you shut me out."
"Me?" The anger he had worked so hard to contain spurted out like sulfur water from Old Faithful and he gave a harsh, humorless laugh. "You hate it when I shut you out? That's rich, Annie. Really rich."
"Joe—"
"You spent more than thirteen damn years shutting me out. Thirteen years!"
"I know," she said quietly. "I'm so sorry."
"I'm afraid 'sorry' doesn't quite cut it, darlin'."
"What do you want me to say, then?"
"How about you give me a rational explanation. The straight truth, for once in your damn life. Why would you do such a thing? What did I ever do to you that made you feel you had to keep her from me?"
Her eyes shimmered with tears in the lantern light and she looked completely miserable. "It wasn't you, it was me. I was scared, Joe. Scared and stupid. You didn't seem to want anything to do with me—you couldn't come down the mountain fast enough after we…after we made love. You barely even looked at me when you left me at the ranch house, barely even spoke."
She lifted her gaze to him and the deep, remembered hurt there took him aback. "And then you left town that night, without a word. Not a phone call, not a note, nothing."
Guilt pricked at him. He had left town. Not because of her, though. Because of himself. She had been grieving and heartsick and he had used that in a vain attempt to ease the hunger burning inside him that had grown unbearable.
"Everyone was gone," she continued. "My father, Colt, you. All my life people had been telling me what to do and now I had no one to even turn to for advice. I was a stupid eighteen-year-old girl suddenly responsible for a twenty-thousand-acre cattle ranch."
She paused. "In all the craziness after my father's death while I was so busy trying to find my way around the ranch, I didn't
even realize I was pregnant until I was almost three months along."
The day the doctor in Bozeman had confirmed her suspicions had been the best—and worst—day of her life. The news that she was carrying Joe's child had filled her with more joy than she ever believed possible, but it was a bittersweet joy since she had had no one to share it with.
"So why didn't you tell me then?" he asked.
She tried to read his expression, to figure out what he was thinking, but his features showed nothing. "I tried. I went to the Broken Spur to talk to your mother and ask if she knew where to find you. She wasn't at the trailer but Charlie was. He took great delight in telling me you were back in town, that you had been for a couple of days."
Her chest ached at the vivid memory, at the hurt and shame she had felt standing on the doorstep of the terrible place where he had survived childhood, begging for any scrap of information about him.
Charlie had smirked at her with such a leering gleam in his eyes. He knows, she remembered thinking, and she had been so upset that what had seemed so beautiful there by the lake that day could end up making her feel so tawdry, so sordid.
Joe had been her best friend for as long as she could remember and now it seemed he didn't want to have anything to do with her. He couldn't have made it any more obvious he regretted their brief encounter, and she remembered feeling completely abandoned.
"Before I could find you to tell you I was pregnant, you…your father died."
"I killed him, you mean."
He paused. "Is that why you didn't tell me? You didn't think I deserved to know about my child, now that I was a convicted murderer?"
"No! Absolutely not! That had nothing to do with it."
"So where does Charlie come into all of it?"
Here was where the story got sticky. She thought of the deal she had made with the devil. She couldn't possibly tell him of it. Joe would never understand what she had done and why.
"I didn't see any other choice," she said, which at least was part of the truth.
"Than to marry my brother and pass my child off as his. I see. It makes perfect sense to me."
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