Lost in Cottonwood Canyon & How to Train a Cowboy--Lost in Cottonwood Canyon

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She shook off the depression that suddenly settled on her shoulders like a weighted cloak at the reminder of the mounds of homework awaiting her before she could sleep.

  “So how was the lecture?” Kate asked. “Did you get a chance to talk to the evil Wyatt McKinnon?”

  “I spoke with him,” she said grimly.

  “And?”

  “He’s not budging.”

  “Did you really expect him to drop the whole project just because you asked him to? He was there every day of the trial too.”

  She sighed, slipping off her shoes and hanging her blazer in the closet off the entry. “Not really. Still, it was worth a shot. I guess I just wanted to make sure he knows how strongly I object to the idea of him making money off the hell Hunter is going through.”

  “I’m not sure the money is all that important to him. He’s had ten books at the top of the bestseller lists. I think if Wyatt McKinnon never wrote another word, he would still be worth millions.”

  Rich and successful and gorgeous. The man had everything. Her mouth tightened again. Why did he affect her so strongly? She should despise him for what he was doing to Hunter. She did, she assured herself.

  So why had she sat through his reading as captivated by his words as every other brainless coed in that bookstore? Something about Wyatt McKinnon’s lean, rangy build and his tanned features and the intensity in his sage-green eyes seemed to reach right inside her and tug out feelings she had never imagined lurked inside her.

  She could never tell Kate that. If her roommate ever figured out she was attracted to the blasted man, Taylor would never hear the end of it.

  By unspoken agreement, the two women headed for the kitchen, Belle padding along behind them. Kate returned to the stove and stirred a tomato sauce bubbling there while Taylor set out plates and silverware.

  “I read that article about him in Vanity Fair a few months ago,” Kate went on. “It might have been hype, but I got the impression he’s not in it for the money.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t turn it away when his publisher sends him all those big fat royalty checks.”

  “Maybe not, but I think there’s more to it than that. Hang on a minute.”

  Kate set the spoon down with a clatter and suddenly dashed out of the kitchen toward her bedroom, Belle following on her heels. A moment later she rushed back and thrust a magazine at Taylor.

  Gazing back at her out of those vivid green eyes that gleamed behind wire-rimmed glasses was none other than Wyatt McKinnon, wearing cowboy boots and a denim jacket and looking as if he had just climbed off the back of a horse.

  “I thought I still had this—”

  Though Taylor wasn’t sure how Kate could look at anything but that compelling picture, her roommate scanned the article.

  “Here is that quote I was looking for, about why he writes what he does.”

  She pulled the magazine away from Taylor and read out loud. “‘I write for the victims and the victims’ loved ones. When a family loses someone through a violent crime or an unsolved disappearance, their lives are changed forever. The world is never again as shiny and bright with possibilities. Though it doesn’t take away any of their pain, victims’ families deserve to know the truth about what happened and, more importantly, to know their lives won’t be forgotten.’”

  “He sounds as if he knows. I wonder if he’s lost someone.” Taylor studied the picture, looking for shadows behind that enigmatic smile. She couldn’t tell anything from the glossy photograph.

  “The article doesn’t say anything like that about him, but it’s possible.” Kate returned to the stove to drain the pasta. For a few moments the kitchen was silent except for Belle’s snuffly breathing and the sauce burbling on the stove.

  “You know,” Kate said suddenly, “maybe you’ve been going about this the wrong way with McKinnon.”

  “How?”

  “You want to keep him from interviewing Hunter. But maybe you should be thanking your lucky stars he’s interested in the case.”

  Taylor stared at her. “You’re crazy. Hunter doesn’t need more negative publicity. He’s had enough to last a lifetime.”

  “What if it’s not negative? McKinnon’s books are extensively researched. He has a reputation for writing genuine, accurate stories, even in cases where the cops messed up. If you show him the evidence you’ve gathered since Hunter’s conviction, he can’t help but see that your brother is innocent.”

  “You’re the one who read that quote. He writes for the victims and their families. Not for the accused killers.”

  “We both know Hunter is no killer. You just have to convince Wyatt McKinnon. Imagine what it would do for Hunter’s appeal if McKinnon wrote a book questioning whether an innocent man is on death row!”

  “He sat through the trial and heard the state’s case. As far as he’s concerned, Hunter killed Dru and her mother and her unborn baby. Just like the rest of the world, I’m sure he thinks Hunter deserves what’s coming to him.”

  “You just have to prove that he and the rest of the world are wrong.”

  Taylor gave a short laugh. “Sure. And while I’m at it, I’ll solve world hunger and in my spare time maybe I’ll find a cure for cancer.”

  “Who else will speak up for Hunter? You and I are just about the only people on the planet who believe he’s innocent. But imagine if he had someone as influential and well-known as Wyatt McKinnon in his corner. He would be bound to win an appeal.”

  Kate was right. If she could somehow convince Wyatt to help her prove her brother didn’t murder anyone, it would undoubtedly help Hunter’s appeal. But how could she face him again? Just the idea of another encounter made her stomach hurt worse than the first time she had to answer a question aloud in her miserable contracts-law class.

  She could do it, though. She would. Hunter’s life depended on it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Taylor dreaded Tuesday afternoons like she used to hate the dance lessons her father insisted on during her pre-adolescence.

  Monday evening at around nine o’clock her stomach would start to ache like a rotten tooth and her shoulders would stiffen with tension. She could pretend everything was fine, could just go on as normal and try her best to concentrate through her Tuesday morning torts class. But by the time she set off on the thirty-minute drive from the University of Utah campus to the Point of the Mountain state prison, at the south end of the vast Salt Lake Valley, she was usually a mass of tangled nerves.

  Hunter really didn’t want her there. Each visit he told her not to come again, to contact him by phone if she needed to talk to him. But each Monday evening she girded herself for the ordeal of another visit.

  She hated it, but she would keep coming every Tuesday until hell froze over, or until Hunter was free.

  As horrible as it was to see her brother under the harsh, dehumanizing conditions at the prison—to watch him harden a little more each week—she knew she would continue to make this trip across the valley, past housing developments and shopping malls and warehouses.

  If nothing else, each visit to her brother’s hell renewed her determination to see him out of there.

  She drew in a deep breath and fought the urge to press a hand to her knotted stomach as she watched the mile markers slip past.

  When she was younger, her father had taken her and Hunter this way a few times on business trips out of the valley to southern Utah or Las Vegas. She had never given it much thought, other than to wonder at this scary huddle of buildings that seemed out in the middle of nowhere.

  She found it disconcerting to realize how in eighteen months the Point of the Mountain complex had become so much a part of her life.

  The valley’s population had grown dramatically in the past decade and houses had sprung up within a stone’s throw of the prison complex. Draper and Bluffdale were two of the fastest-growing communities in the state. How odd, she thought, that South Mountain, to the east of the prison across the freeway, was actua
lly one of the more desirable slices of real estate in the valley, with sprawling, million-dollar homes and groomed golf courses.

  She wondered if Hunter could look across the interstate at all those bright, shiny houses—if the contrast between the world of those who lived in them and his own life seemed as stark and depressing to him as it always did to her.

  She took the prison exit and a few moments later passed the first of many security checkpoints. The guard recognized her but checked her driver’s license against his visitor list anyway, before allowing her to enter. Cars weren’t searched entering the prison—only on the way out.

  In the visitor parking lot, she sat for a moment behind the wheel, trying to dig deep inside herself for at least the semblance of a positive attitude. For Hunter’s sake, she tried hard to hide how much she hated coming here, how each visit seemed to bleed away more of her hope that her brother would walk free.

  Just for practice, she forced a smile for the rearview mirror. Okay, it wasn’t exactly perky but it was better than nothing.

  With her non-perky smile firmly in place, she locked her car, pocketed her keys—since purses weren’t allowed inside—and headed into the Uinta maximum security prison for the next round of checkpoints.

  The guard waiting inside was the first bright spot in what had been a grim day. He offered her a wide, sunny smile. “Doc Bradshaw. This is a pleasure.”

  Her smile felt almost genuine as she greeted Richard Gonzolez. She didn’t bother to correct him that she was several credits shy of ever being a doctor. He had called her Doc Bradshaw as long as she had been coming to see her brother.

  Richard was one of her favorite guards in the unit—some of the corrections officers made her feel even more like a piece of meat than did the leering inmates, but Officer Gonzolez always treated her with courtesy and respect and even kindness.

  “Great to see you again!” she said. “I’ve missed you these last few months. I thought Tuesdays were your day off.”

  “I’m back on for a while. I needed to change my shift so I could have Fridays off instead.”

  “How’s Trina?” Taylor asked about his wife.

  His ready smile looked a little strained around the edges. “Could be worse, I guess. She was tired of her hair falling out in clumps so she shaved it all last week. I told her it looks sexy—told her I was gonna get her a belly ring and a tattoo and take her down to the Harley-Davidson shop for some leathers so she’d look like a biker chick.”

  “I guess she didn’t go for that.”

  “Not my Trina.” He met her gaze and the worry in his brown eyes made her heart ache. “She tries to stay upbeat for me and the kids but it’s been tough on her. That’s why the shift change. She’s onto her second round of chemo and they changed the day to Fridays. I didn’t want her to do that on her own.”

  A dozen questions crowded through her mind—Trina’s white blood cell counts, her med regimen, how she was doing emotionally after her radical mastectomy—but she managed to clamp down on them. Despite Richard’s affectionate nickname for her, she wasn’t a doctor. An almost-doctor, maybe, but she hadn’t been part of that world for a long time.

  “Trina is in good hands with Dr. Kim. He’s the best around.”

  “That’s one of the things that keeps her going. We both know we never would have gotten in to see him if it hadn’t been for you.”

  Taylor just shook her head. “I didn’t do anything, only pulled a few strings.”

  “Well, we sure appreciate it.”

  Under other circumstances, she would have given his hand a reassuring squeeze, but she knew this wasn’t the time or place. “Please let me know how things are going.”

  “I sure will,” he said, with a smile that filled her with shame at her own self-pity.

  This kind man’s wife was waging a fierce, losing battle against breast cancer and he could still manage to smile. All she had to do was spend an hour in a place she loathed. Surely she could be at least as cheerful as Richard Gonzolez.

  “Sorry to tell you this,” the guard said, “but you’ll have to wait a few minutes. Your brother already has a visitor in the last group. Time’s almost up, though.”

  That was odd. Hunter rarely had visitors besides her. They had no other family and her brother had never been much of a pack animal. Most of his so-called friends had abandoned him after his arrest. She wondered who it might be.

  “I don’t mind waiting,” she assured the guard, then took her seat with the other visitors waiting their turn.

  She had never been very good at coping with unexpected blocks of free time. Usually she tried to carry around at least one law book at all times so she could use her time constructively and keep up with her reading lists—probably a hold-over from the judge’s frequent edicts against wasting time.

  In this case, she had no choice, as she’d left all her books in her car. She picked up a news magazine and tried to leaf through it but found little of interest.

  She was trying a woman’s magazine—with much the same malaise—when the volume in the room increased as the previous group of visitors was led out.

  She recognized a few familiar faces and was once more struck by how insular this prison community could be. She had watched people make friendships, business connections, even romances while they waited to visit someone on the inside.

  A few minutes later, she had risen to wait her turn to go into the visiting area when a familiar face appeared in the crowd—this one unexpected.

  Wyatt McKinnon walked out, looking tall and lanky and gorgeous.

  The same reaction she’d had to him the other times they’d met started stirring around inside her. The same butterflies in her stomach, the same silly breathlessness, the same surge of awareness.

  What was the matter with her? This wasn’t at all like her. She just wasn’t the kind of woman to lose brain cells over a man. Especially not this man—and especially not in these circumstances.

  She drew in a deep, steadying breath. He hadn’t seen her yet, she realized as she watched him stop to exchange words with one of the guards—not Richard but another she had met only a few times.

  Wyatt greeted the man with a ready smile, though from here it looked as if it dimmed a little when the corrections officer produced a book from beneath the desk. From here she could see it was Wyatt’s latest bestseller. The guard wanted it signed, she realized, just like all those silly little coeds who had flocked to the lecture the other night.

  She couldn’t be too derisive of them, she thought with brutal self-honesty. Not with her pulse skipping and this weak trembling in her stomach.

  Wyatt signed the book with a flourish, handed it back to the guard with a polite smile, then turned to leave.

  She knew exactly the moment he noticed her. Surprise flickered in those grey-green eyes and he froze for an instant, then walked toward her.

  “Taylor. Ms. Bradshaw. I didn’t realize your brother had another visitor waiting. I’m sorry—I’m afraid I went a little long. I hope I didn’t take all your time.”

  A few days earlier she might have given him some sharp reply about how her time was just as valuable as his, but she decided that wouldn’t be diplomatic, not if she still wanted his help.

  In theory, Kate’s idea had seemed a good one. Wyatt McKinnon could be a powerful ally. His words had influence, and she had just seen more evidence that he had readers everywhere. If she wanted his help, she knew she would have to ask for it. But being confronted by the man made her tongue feel as slippery as a hooked trout.

  “He’s still allowed another half hour of visitation.” She sucked in a breath for courage. “Listen, I…”

  Richard cut her off. “Doc Bradshaw, you’re up. You ready to go back?”

  She rose, aware as always of the time and how limited it was.

  She had learned since Hunter’s arrest that life behind bars was ruled by the clock. Inmates talked of marking time, doing time, hard time. Their world revolved around t
he tick of each passing second.

  “Look, I’ve got to go or I’ll miss my chance. Would you mind…that is, um—” she faltered. Oh, this was hard! She would rather be foxtrotting with the sweaty-palmed Troy Oppenheimer who had been the bane of her dance-class days than be forced to grovel to Wyatt McKinnon.

  But she had no choice.

  “Would you mind waiting for me?” she asked in a rush. “I…I need to talk to you.”

  His eyebrows rose in surprise but he nodded. “Of course. I’ll be here when you come out.”

  The guard led her to one of the visitor chambers. In the maximum security unit, visits were always non-contact and were carried out in individual rooms separated by a Plexiglas divider.

  Hunter was already on the other side of the glass, dressed in the obligatory orange jumpsuit. His dark, wavy hair could use a trim and he had a bruise along his jawline that hadn’t been there the week before.

  He looked big and mean and dangerous, and she grieved all over again for the dedicated, passionate cop he had been.

  He didn’t smile when he saw her, but she thought perhaps his eyes softened a little. She wanted to believe they did, anyway, though she thought that was probably just more self-delusion.

  Every time she visited him, Hunter seemed a little colder, a little more remote. Hard and brittle, like a clay sculpture left to dry too long in the broiling sun.

  She was so afraid that one Tuesday she would discover nothing left of him but a crumbled pile of dust.

  “What happened to your jaw?” she asked after she sat down and picked up the phone.

  That jaw tightened. “Nothing. I slipped in the yard while I was shooting hoops one day.”

  He was lying. She had grown up with him, had seen him butting heads with the judge during his rebellious years often enough to recognize the signs. But she also knew he would choke on his own tongue rather than tell her what really happened.

  Former cops—especially homicide detectives—didn’t exactly make the most popular prison inmates. She knew there were plenty of other inmates he had helped put behind bars who probably weren’t too thrilled to have Hunter Bradshaw join them in the pen. And though he would never say anything about it, she also knew most of the guards treated him with a contempt and derision reserved for one of their rank who had gone bad.