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

by RaeAnne Thayne

  As they neared the trees, she could hear the murmur of a small stream. The trees had camouflaged another red-painted outbuilding, a gazebo, about fifteen-feet square, with screened walls.

  “Here it is. My holy sanctuary,” Wyatt said when they reached the door. “I don’t let very many people inside.”

  She couldn’t contain her smile in response to the solemn gravity of his tone. “I’m honored.”

  “You should be.”

  Inside the door, he flipped a switch and low lights illuminated a comfortable outdoor room with a table and a few chairs, a refrigerator, even a plump couch facing the creek. It was more a self-contained sunroom than a gazebo, she realized now. The screen windows all around could be closed to keep out the elements for a year-round haven.

  “This is wonderful! You could live out here.”

  “I’m tempted sometimes, believe me. I do my best work here by the creek. The great thing is that it’s phone-free. Not even cell phones are allowed. Hard-and-fast rule.”

  “I’ll remember that. I guess it’s a good thing I left mine back in my room.”

  He smiled and leaned against the edge of the table. “I like to listen to the sound of the creek while I work. It’s almost a Zen thing, like shifting to another level of consciousness. I can’t explain it. I only know it does wonders for my powers of concentration. Here’s one of your first lessons in relaxation. Sit down and just enjoy.”

  He turned the lights out again and Taylor obediently sat on the couch. She closed her eyes and let the ripple of the water and the sounds of twilight soothe her.

  It might even have worked if Wyatt hadn’t decided to sit beside her on the couch. Just how was she supposed to relax with him so close, filling her senses with his heat and the subtle, erotic scent of his cologne?

  “Thank you for letting me share in your family’s big day,” she said after a moment.

  “You were more than welcome. I hope you know that.”

  “Allie and Gage make a great couple. I know they’ll be very happy together. They fit, somehow. That sounds silly, I guess.”

  He laughed softly. “Not so silly. I’ve thought the same thing. Allie is perfect for him. She won’t take any of his garbage and she’ll keep him from feeling like he has to take on the world.”

  “Do you and your brother get along?” she asked after a moment.

  In the moonlight, he looked surprised at the question she had been wondering about all day. “Well enough, I guess. Why do you ask?”

  She ought to have just kept her mouth shut. Feeling foolish, she tried to backtrack. “Nothing, really. A few times today I thought maybe I was picking up some strange undercurrents between the two of you, but I’m sure I must have been imagining things.”

  He was quiet for several moments, so quiet she thought perhaps he wasn’t going to respond.

  “No,” he finally said. “You weren’t imagining things. Gage and I have lived apart since we were kids. Our folks split up when I was ten and Gage was thirteen.”

  He was quiet again, and her heart ached at the pain in his voice that he wasn’t quiet able to hide.

  “After the divorce, Gage stayed with Dad in Las Vegas while I came home to Utah with Mom. We weren’t estranged, we just led different lives as adults. I guess we’re just getting to know each other again since Gage moved back.”

  She thought of Hunter, who had been her strength and her comfort through so many difficult times.

  “You must have missed him a lot,” she murmured.

  “Yeah, I did.” He paused. “I idolized Gage. He was my older brother and I always thought he was stronger and faster and better than any other kid alive. To me, he was Evel Knievel, Superman and Muhammad Ali, all rolled up into one.”

  He laughed but the sound was without humor. “That first year after Mom and I moved back was miserable. I hated having my own bedroom. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Gage and I had always shared a room—we were typical boys, fighting over whose turn it was to take out the garbage, whose side of the room was messier, who left the dirty towels on the bathroom floor. Until I was nine, we were your average family. Then, in a moment, everything changed.”

  Ah, here it was. The deep pain she had sensed running through this family. “What happened?” she asked quietly. “Does it have to do with your sister? Charlotte, isn’t that her name?”

  He tensed beside her like the sudden instinctive clenching of a fist at the first sign of danger. In the moonlight, she saw his jaw tighten, his eyes turn as dark and cloudy as a February night.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, mortified at her nosiness. “Forget I asked. None of my business, obviously.”

  His words were low, rough. “After twenty-three years, hearing her name still always seems to knock me on my butt.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. She scrambled for another topic—the weather? Allie’s darling daughters?—but before she could form the words, he spoke in a flat, dispassionate voice that belied the emotion in his eyes.

  “Charlotte was our little sister. When she was three years old, she was kidnapped from our front yard.”

  Taylor’s instinctive gasp echoed through the gazebo. Kidnapped! Of all the grim scenarios she might have envisioned to explain their sister’s absence from the family, that would never have occurred to her.

  She might have thought the girl died after a tragic accident, or from a horrible disease—but a kidnapping? She couldn’t even imagine it!

  She couldn’t think what to say, what to do. She longed to throw her arms around him, but he suddenly seemed as distant and unapproachable as the dark mountains silhouetted against the sky. She had to do something, though, so she settled for covering his hand with hers.

  He turned his hand over and squeezed her fingers. “There are moments in life—in the tiniest flicker of a second—that completely change the course of your world. My life was forever altered in that instant Charley was kidnapped.”

  “What happened?” She didn’t want to ask the question—wasn’t sure she really wanted to know the answers—but on some deep, instinctive level she sensed he needed to talk about it.

  He seemed lost in some nightmarish past she couldn’t even imagine. “It was a hot August afternoon, another in an endless line of hot August afternoons that summer in Las Vegas. Mom went to the store for a moment to pick up a few things and left Gage and me in charge. Well, Gage, actually, but a friend wanted him to come over for a minute, so I was the one watching Charley when it happened.”

  He didn’t say anything for several moments, gripping her hand so tightly her fingers throbbed.

  “We were outside playing, even though it was so hot the sidewalks shimmered and the dry wind scorched your lungs. I had been trying all summer long to learn how to pop a wheelie on my bike like Gage could do, so I was practicing in the driveway, up and down, up and down. Charlotte was in the little grassy front yard running through the sprinkler that spurted up halfheartedly. I was too busy on my bike to pay her much attention.”

  He was a storyteller, she realized. He seemed compelled to paint her word-pictures, even with this grim story. Or maybe because of it. Maybe he had replayed these terrible events in his mind so many times, describing the scene to someone else seemed second nature.

  “I had found minuscule success in my wheelie efforts, raising the tire maybe two inches off the ground, and I suppose I got a little cocky. I whipped my front tire up in the air one time a little harder than I had tried before and ended up crashing backward on the pavement. My glasses flew off, of course, and I can remember the sickening sound of them breaking. Seems like I spent half my life with broken glasses. I was trying to find them to see if I could piece them together when a car pulled into the driveway.”

  He closed his eyes. “I was blind as a bat without my glasses but I could tell it was a white car, the same color as Mom’s station wagon. She was going to be so mad, I remember thinking, and I was so busy trying to think of an excuse for bre
aking my glasses for about the sixth time that summer that I barely registered the car pulling away again. I managed to hold a broken lens up to one eye long enough to figure out it wasn’t Mom’s station wagon, but I just thought maybe it was somebody turning around.”

  He opened his eyes and the stark pain in them sliced at her heart.

  “It wasn’t until the car had turned the corner that I realized Charley wasn’t running through the sprinklers anymore.”

  “Oh, Wyatt.”

  He released her hand and rose to stand by the screened windows overlooking the creek. “Mom came home a few minutes later and called the police but I couldn’t give them anything to go on, other than the color of the car. I was the only eyewitness and I was completely worthless.”

  A deep, terrible guilt threaded through his voice. Survivor’s guilt. She had seen it often enough during her work at the hospital. His sister had been taken from right in front of him, so of course he would feel responsible. What a horrible burden for a nine-year-old!

  “You were a child,” she murmured.

  “Yeah, but I was her big brother. I was supposed to stand between her and danger, and I didn’t even know she was gone until it was too late.”

  Acting on instinct, she rose and followed him to the window and wrapped her arms around him, wishing she could somehow absorb this pain into her.

  “I’m so sorry, Wyatt.”

  He stayed frozen for a moment as if he didn’t quite know how to respond to her sympathy, and then his arms wrapped around her and he held her tightly. They stood that way for several moments in silence broken only by the tumble of water and the rustle of dry leaves in the wind.

  “They never found her,” he said finally, his chin resting on her head. “How could they, when they had nothing to go on?”

  “How terrible for your parents. For all of you.”

  “The year after Charlotte disappeared seems surreal in my memory. We tried to go on with life—but how could we when such a huge, glaring chunk had been gnawed out of it? My parents’ marriage disintegrated. They didn’t fight in front of us, but I’m sure there was blame being flung around as we all tried to cope with her loss. If only Mom hadn’t gone to the store. If only Dad hadn’t moved us all to Vegas in the first place. A million if-onlys.”

  He was quiet again and she could hear each beat of his heart.

  “They stayed together for a year, but I guess the strain became too much and they went their separate ways, each taking a son.”

  “And all these years you’ve found no trace of her?”

  She felt his chin move against her hair as he shook his head. “Gage and I both follow a stray lead here or there, but the case has been cold for twenty-plus years. We haven’t given up—I don’t expect we’ll ever give up—but realistically we all know the likelihood of ever finding her again is just about zero.”

  She stepped away from him though she still held tight to his hand. “That’s why you write what you do, isn’t it? ‘I write for the victims and the victims’ loved ones.’ That’s what you told that Vanity Fair reporter.”

  She remembered the rest of the quote. “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.”

  She recalled wondering when she read his comments if he had lost someone. Now that she knew he had—now that she knew him—she hated knowing he had endured this pain.

  “I wrote my first book about a serial kidnapper because I wanted—needed—to see inside his mind, to try to understand how someone can rip apart a family like that, destroy lives, shatter dreams, without a single qualm. I guess with every book I write I’m trying to answer that question. I don’t think I ever will.”

  She curled her fingers around his. “I’m glad you and Gage have reestablished your relationship. You shouldn’t have to lose a brother too because of what happened to your sister.”

  “I don’t tell many people about Charlotte. I’m not sure why I told you—maybe because for all the joy today with Gage’s wedding, I seem to feel her absence most acutely at special occasions like this. I think we all do.”

  “That’s only natural. I’m sure it was a hard day for your parents too.”

  “Thank you for listening. You do it well. A good trait for a doctor to have.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” she reminded him.

  “You should be.”

  She shook her head, frustrated at his insistence, so much like Hunter’s, but it still made her smile.

  He gazed at her in the moonlight and something in his expression made her breathless, made her insides shiver.

  CHAPTER 10

  Later, she wasn’t certain who made the first move. She might have tugged him to her or he may have reached out. Either way, an instant later she was in his arms again and his mouth descended to hers.

  In the chill of the autumn evening, his lips were seductively warm—enticing, welcoming. She wanted to curl up against him, settle in right here for the night while the cool air eddied around them and the stream bubbled and sang.

  Ah, heaven.

  When the rest of her life seemed so chaotic, as discordant as that music the temporary band had tortured them all with earlier, how could she manage to feel such peace here in his arms? Despite the race of her blood and the tremble of need inside her, her heart seemed to settle, her wild turmoil of thoughts to still.

  She had known him—really known him—only a few weeks. It seemed far longer. Only a few short weeks ago she had thought he was an opportunistic writer out to make a buck off the suffering of others.

  How could she have misjudged him so completely?

  The Wyatt she had come to know was so different from the man she had thought him. He was good and kind, passionate about his work and his family—a family that had suffered deep pain.

  He had more layers than she ever would have guessed.

  “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this since the first time we kissed,” he murmured against her mouth.

  A lifetime ago, she thought. So much had happened since then. That first kiss in her office had been purely physical, an outlet for the attraction she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. She knew him so much better now—and like Wyatt himself, her response to this kiss was layered with nuances.

  She was still fiercely attracted to him—even more than she’d been before. But now she was attracted not just to a lean, sexy man but to the man who teased his new nieces and danced with his mother and welcomed Taylor into his family as if she belonged there.

  She poured all of that and more into her response, and he kissed her with the same heat.

  As his mouth explored hers, tenderness welled inside her, bubbling through her like that stream outside their sanctuary. She shivered at the strength of it—and at the terrifying realization that her heart was in far more jeopardy than she ever would have believed.

  * * *

  Though the movement was slight, Wyatt sensed the fine tremble of her muscles. “You’re cold,” he murmured.

  “No. Trust me, I’m not cold.”

  Her voice sounded rough, thready, and it skated down his nerve endings like a soft caress. He responded by slipping his hands inside her jacket to her waist where the shirt she wore allowed him easy access to the soft skin above the waistband of her jeans. “You’re right. You’re not cold. “

  “And you’re not even close to the really hot parts.”

  Oh, but he wanted to be. Wanted it so fiercely he suddenly couldn’t seem to breathe.

  Lauding whatever instinct had prompted him to install a comfortable couch in his writing retreat, he lowered her to the couch, stretching out above her. Those incredibly long legs slid apart slightly, welcoming him, and he nearly groaned at the tumult of sensations cascading through him.

  From the first touch of their mouths he had been aroused, hard and heavy, and even through their thick clothing, his body cried out to
hers. He wanted her right here, right now.

  He slid his hands from her waistband to her high breasts, touching her through the cotton of her shirt. She arched against him with a low, aroused sound and he deepened the kiss.

  An instant later Wyatt heard the mournful hoot of the owl that lived in tree along the river and the sound seemed to jar him back into his senses like a warning.

  What the hell was he doing? If he didn’t put the brakes on things right now, they would both be naked and he would be inside her before either of them knew what happened.

  He had to put a stop to things now, while he still had a tiny sliver of strength remaining.

  Seducing her had never been his intention when he invited her to take a walk with him. He knew having her in his house would be a supreme test of willpower but he had vowed, even as he invited her to stay, that he would not take advantage of the situation.

  She had been through so much this last week. The threat and then the fire at her house. For her sake, he couldn’t complicate things further by throwing intimacy into the mix. It wouldn’t be fair, not when their emotions were so close to the surface.

  He wasn’t concerned only about her, he acknowledged. He was in trouble here.

  The thought seemed to echo through his mind like that owl’s cry. Taylor Bradshaw posed a serious threat to his peace of mind. He didn’t like the protective impulses she drew out in him, the way she sneaked under his skin, the way he wanted to breathe her scent of rain-washed wildflowers into his lungs, absorb it into his soul.

  Though it was the hardest thing he’d ever done and he prayed to heaven she couldn’t see his hands tremble, he stood up, adjusting her clothes again and stepped away from the couch.

  “We’d better go back inside and see how the caterers are coming with the wedding cleanup.”

  The moonlight cast enough glow that he couldn’t miss the baffled hurt in her eyes or the flush that climbed her cheekbones. He wanted to explain that he was trying to protect both of them, but she rose from the couch and walked out into the night before he could find the words.