Sutton's Way

by Diana Palmer

  SUTTON’S WAY

  Diana Palmer

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter One

  The noise outside the cabin was there again, and Amanda shifted restlessly with the novel in her lap, curled up in a big armchair by the open fireplace in an Indian rug. Until now, the cabin had been paradise. There was three feet of new snow outside, she had all the supplies she needed to get her through the next few wintery weeks of Wyoming weather, and there wasn’t a telephone in the place. Best of all, there wasn’t a neighbor.

  Well, there was, actually. But nobody in their right mind would refer to that man on the mountain as a neighbor. Amanda had only seen him once and once was enough.

  She’d met him, if their head-on encounter could be referred to as a meeting, on a snowy Saturday last week. Quinn Sutton’s majestic ranch house overlooked this cabin nestled against the mountainside. He’d been out in the snow on a horse-drawn sled that contained huge square bales of hay, and he was heaving them like feather pillows to a small herd of red-and-white cattle. The sight had touched Amanda, because it indicated concern. The tall, wiry rancher out in a blizzard feeding his starving cattle. She’d even smiled at the tender picture it made.

  And then she’d stopped her four-wheel-drive vehicle and stuck her blond head out the window to ask directions to the Blalock Durning place, which was the cabin one of her aunt’s friends was loaning her. And the tender picture dissolved into stark hostility.

  The tall rancher turned toward her with the coldest black eyes and the hardest face she’d ever seen in her life. He had a day’s growth of stubble, but the stubble didn’t begin to cover up the frank homeliness of his lean face. He had amazingly high cheekbones, a broad forehead and a jutting chin, and he looked as if someone had taken a straight razor to one side of his face, which had a wide scratch. None of that bothered Amanda because Hank Shoeman and the other three men who made music with her group were even uglier than Quinn Sutton. But at least Hank and the boys could smile. This man looked as if he invented the black scowl.

  “I said,” she’d repeated with growing nervousness, “can you tell me how to get to Blalock Durning’s cabin?”

  Above the sheepskin coat, under the battered gray ranch hat, Quinn Sutton’s tanned face didn’t move a muscle. “Follow the road, turn left at the lodgepoles,” he’d said tersely, his voice as deep as a rumble of thunder.

  “Lodgepoles?” she’d faltered. “You mean Indian lodgepoles? What do they look like?”

  “Lady,” he said with exaggerated patience, “a lodgepole is a pine tree. It’s tall and piney, and there are a stand of them at the next fork in the road.”

  “You don’t need to be rude, Mr…?”

  “Sutton,” he said tersely. “Quinn Sutton.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she murmured politely. “I’m Amanda.” She wondered if anyone might accidentally recognize her here in the back of beyond, and on the off chance, she gave her mother’s maiden name instead of her own last name. “Amanda Corrie,” she added untruthfully. “I’m going to stay in the cabin for a few weeks.”

  “This isn’t the tourist season,” he’d said without the slightest pretense at friendliness. His black eyes cut her like swords.

  “Good, because I’m not a tourist,” she said.

  “Don’t look to me for help if you run out of wood or start hearing things in the dark,” he added coldly. “Somebody will tell you eventually that I have no use whatsoever for women.”

  While she was thinking up a reply to that, a young boy of about twelve had come running up behind the sled.

  “Dad!” he called, amazingly enough to Quinn Sutton. “There’s a cow in calf down in the next pasture. I think it’s a breech!”

  “Okay, son, hop on,” he told the boy, and his voice had become fleetingly soft, almost tender. He looked back at Amanda, though, and the softness left him. “Keep your door locked at night,” he’d said. “Unless you’re expecting Durning to join you,” he added with a mocking smile.

  She’d stared at him from eyes as black as his own and started to tell him that she didn’t even know Mr. Durning, who was her aunt’s friend, not hers. But she bit her tongue. It wouldn’t do to give this man an opening. “I’ll do that little thing,” she agreed. She glanced at the boy, who was eyeing her curiously from his perch on the sled. “And it seems that you do have at least one use for women,” she added with a vacant smile. “My condolences to your wife, Mr. Sutton.”

  She’d rolled up the window before he could speak and she’d whipped the four-wheel-drive down the road with little regard for safety, sliding all over the place on the slick and rutted country road.

  She glared into the flames, consigning Quinn Sutton to them with all her angry heart. She hoped and prayed that there wouldn’t ever be an accident or a reason she’d have to seek out his company. She’d rather have asked help from a passing timber wolf. His son hadn’t seemed at all like him, she recalled. Sutton was as dangerous looking as a timber wolf, with a face like the side of a bombed mountain and eyes that were coal-black and cruel. In the sheepskin coat he’d been wearing with that raunchy Stetson that day, he’d looked like one of the old mountain men might have back in Wyoming’s early days. He’d given Amanda some bad moments and she’d hated him after that uncomfortable confrontation. But the boy had been kind. He was redheaded and blue-eyed, nothing like his father, not a bit of resemblance.

  She knew the rancher’s name only because her aunt had mentioned him, and cautioned Amanda about going near the Sutton ranch. The ranch was called Ricochet, and Amanda had immediately thought of a bullet going awry. Probably one of Sutton’s ancestors had thrown some lead now and again. Mr. Sutton looked a lot more like a bandit than he did a rancher, with his face unshaven, that wide, awful scrape on his cheek and his crooked nose. It was an unforgettable face all around, especially those eyes….

  She pulled the Indian rug closer and gave the book in her slender hand a careless glance. She wasn’t really in the mood to read. Memories kept tearing her heart. She leaned her blond head back against the chair and her dark eyes studied the flames with idle appreciation of their beauty.

  The nightmare of the past few weeks had finally caught up with her. She’d stood onstage, with the lights beating down on her long blond hair and outlining the beige leather dress that was her trademark, and her voice had simply refused to cooperate. The shock of being unable to produce a single note had caused her to faint, to the shock and horror of the audience.

  She came to in a hospital, where she’d been given what seemed to be every test known to medical science. But nothing would produce her singing voice, even though she could talk. It was, the doctor told her, purely a psychological problem, caused by the trauma of what had happened. She needed rest.

  So Hank, who was the leader of the group, had called her Aunt Bess and convinced her to arrange for Amanda to get away from it all. Her aunt’s rich boyfriend had this holiday cabin in Wyoming’s Grand Teton Mountains and was more than willing to let Amanda recuperate there. Amanda had protested, but Hank and the boys and her aunt had insisted. So here she was, in the middle of winter, in several feet of snow, with no television, no telephone and facilities that barely worked. Roughing it, the big, bearded bandleader had told her, would do her good.

  She smiled when she remembered how caring and kind the guys had been. Her group was called Desperado, and her leather costume was its
trademark. The four men who made up the rest of it were fine musicians, but they looked like the Hell’s Angels on stage in denim and leather with thick black beards and mustaches and untrimmed hair. They were really pussycats under that rough exterior, but nobody had ever been game enough to try to find out if they were.

  Hank and Deke and Jack and Johnson had been trying to get work at a Virginia night spot when they’d run into Amanda Corrie Callaway, who was also trying to get work there. The club needed a singer and a band, so it was a match made in heaven, although Amanda with her sheltered upbringing had been a little afraid of her new backup band. They, on the other hand, had been nervous around her because she was such a far cry from the usual singers they’d worked with. The shy, introverted young blonde made them self-conscious about their appearance. But their first performance together had been a phenomenal hit, and they’d been together four years now.

  They were famous, now. Desperado had been on the music videos for two years, they’d done television shows and magazine interviews, and they were recognized everywhere they went. Especially Amanda, who went by the stage name of Mandy Callaway. It wasn’t a bad life, and it was making them rich. But there wasn’t much rest or time for a personal life. None of the group was married except Hank, and he was already getting a divorce. It was hard for a homebound spouse to accept the frequent absences that road tours required.

  She still shivered from the look Quinn Sutton had given her, and now she was worried about her Aunt Bess, though the woman was more liberal minded and should know the score. But Sutton had convinced Amanda that she wasn’t the first woman to be at Blalock’s cabin. She should have told that arrogant rancher what her real relationship with Blalock Durning was, but he probably wouldn’t have believed her.

  Of course, she could have put him in touch with Jerry and proved it. Jerry Allen, their road manager, was one of the best in the business. He’d kept them from starving during the beginning, and they had an expert crew of electricians and carpenters who made up the rest of the retinue. It took a huge bus to carry the people and equipment, appropriately called the “Outlaw Express.”

  Amanda had pleaded with Jerry to give them a few weeks rest after the tragedy that had cost her her nerve, but he’d refused. Get back on the horse, he’d advised. And she’d tried. But the memories were just too horrible.

  So finally he’d agreed to Hank’s suggestion and she was officially on hiatus, as were the other members of the group, for a month. Maybe in that length of time she could come to grips with it, face it.

  It had been a week and she felt better already. Or she would, if those strange noises outside the cabin would just stop! She had horrible visions of wolves breaking in and eating her.

  “Hello?”

  The small voice startled her. It sounded like a boy’s. She got up, clutching the fire poker in her hand and went to the front door. “Who’s there?” she called out tersely.

  “It’s just me. Elliot,” he said. “Elliot Sutton.”

  She let out a breath between her teeth. Oh, no, she thought miserably, what was he doing here? His father would come looking for him, and she couldn’t bear to have that…that savage anywhere around!

  “What do you want?” she groaned.

  “I brought you something.”

  It would be discourteous to refuse the gift, she guessed, especially since he’d apparently come through several feet of snow to bring it. Which brought to mind a really interesting question: where was his father?

  She opened the door. He grinned at her from under a thick cap that covered his red hair.

  “Hi,” he said. “I thought you might like to have some roasted peanuts. I did them myself. They’re nice on a cold night.”

  Her eyes went past him to a sled hitched to a sturdy draft horse. “Did you come in that?” she asked, recognizing the sled he and his father had been riding the day she’d met them.

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s how we get around in winter, what with the snow and all. We take hay out to the livestock on it. You remember, you saw us. Well, we usually take hay out on it, that is. When Dad’s not laid up,” he added pointedly, and his blue eyes said more than his voice did.

  She knew she was going to regret asking the question before she opened her mouth. She didn’t want to ask. But no young boy came to a stranger’s house in the middle of a snowy night just to deliver a bag of roasted peanuts.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked with resigned perception.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “I said, what’s wrong?” She made her tone gentler. He couldn’t help it that his father was a savage, and he was worried under that false grin. “Come on, you might as well tell me.”

  He bit his lower lip and looked down at his snow-covered boots. “It’s my dad,” he said. “He’s bad sick and he won’t let me get the doctor.”

  So there it was. She knew she shouldn’t have asked. “Can’t your mother do something?” she asked hopefully.

  “My mom ran off with Mr. Jackson from the livestock association when I was just a little feller,” he replied, registering Amanda’s shocked expression. “She and Dad got divorced and she died some years ago, but Dad doesn’t talk about her. Will you come, miss?”

  “I’m not a doctor,” she said, hesitating.

  “Oh, sure, I know that,” he agreed eagerly, “but you’re a girl. And girls know how to take care of sick folks, don’t they?” The confidence slid away and he looked like what he was—a terrified little boy with nobody to turn to. “Please, lady,” he added. “I’m scared. He’s hot and shaking all over and—!”

  “I’ll get my boots on,” she said. She gathered them from beside the fireplace and tugged them on, and then she went for a coat and stuffed her long blond hair under a stocking cap. “Do you have cough syrup, aspirins, throat lozenges—that sort of thing?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said eagerly, then sighed. “Dad won’t take them, but we have them.”

  “Is he suicidal?” Amanda asked angrily as she went out the door behind him and locked the cabin before she climbed on the sled with the boy.

  “Well sometimes things get to him,” he ventured. “But he doesn’t ever get sick, and he won’t admit that he is. But he’s out of his head and I’m scared. He’s all I got.”

  “We’ll take care of him,” she promised, and hoped she could deliver on the promise. “Let’s go.”

  “Do you know Mr. Durning well?” he asked as he called to the draft horse and started him back down the road and up the mountain toward the Sutton house.

  “He’s sort of a friend of a relative of mine,” she said evasively. The sled ride was fun, and she was enjoying the cold wind and snow in her face, the delicious mountain air. “I’m only staying at the cabin for a few weeks. Just time to…get over something.”

  “Have you been sick, too?” he asked curiously.

  “In a way,” she said noncommittally.

  The sled went jerkily up the road, around the steep hill. She held on tight and hoped the big draft horse had steady feet. It was a harrowing ride at the last, and then they were up, and the huge redwood ranch house came into sight, blazing with light from its long, wide front porch to the gabled roof.

  “It’s a beautiful house,” Amanda said.

  “My dad added on to it for my mom, before they married,” he told her. He shrugged. “I don’t remember much about her, except she was redheaded. Dad sure hates women.” He glanced at her apologetically. “He’s not going to like me bringing you….”

  “I can take care of myself,” she returned, and smiled reassuringly. “Let’s go see how bad it is.”

  “I’ll get Harry to put up the horse and sled,” he said, yelling toward the lighted barn until a grizzled old man appeared. After a brief introduction to Amanda, Harry left and took the horse away.

  “Harry’s been here since Dad was a boy,” Elliot told her as he led her down a bare-wood hall and up a steep staircase to the second storey of the house. “He
does most everything, even cooks for the men.” He paused outside a closed door, and gave Amanda a worried look. “He’ll yell for sure.”

  “Let’s get it over with, then.”

  She let Elliot open the door and look in first, to make sure his father had something on.

  “He’s still in his jeans,” he told her, smiling as she blushed. “It’s okay.”

  She cleared her throat. So much for pretended sophistication, she thought, and here she was twenty-four years old. She avoided Elliot’s grin and walked into the room.

  Quinn Sutton was sprawled on his stomach, his bare muscular arms stretched toward the headboard. His back gleamed with sweat, and his thick, black hair was damp with moisture. Since it wasn’t hot in the room, Amanda decided that he must have a high fever. He was moaning and talking unintelligibly.

  “Elliot, can you get me a basin and some hot water?” she asked. She took off her coat and rolled up the sleeves of her cotton blouse.

  “Sure thing,” Elliot told her, and rushed out of the room.

  “Mr. Sutton, can you hear me?” Amanda asked softly. She sat down beside him on the bed, and lightly touched his bare shoulder. He was hot, all right—burning up. “Mr. Sutton,” she called again.

  “No,” he moaned. “No, you can’t do it…!”

  “Mr. Sutton…”

  He rolled over and his black eyes opened, glazed with fever, but Amanda barely noticed. Her eyes were on the rest of him, male perfection from shoulder to narrow hips. He was darkly tanned, too, and thick, black hair wedged from his chest down his flat stomach to the wide belt at his hips. Amanda, who was remarkably innocent not only for her age, but for her profession as well, stared like a star-struck girl. He was beautiful, she thought, amazed at the elegant lines of his body, at the ripple of muscle and the smooth, glistening skin.

  “What the hell do you want?” he rasped.

  So much for hero worship, she thought dryly. She lifted her eyes back to his. “Elliot was worried,” she said quietly. “He came and got me. Please don’t fuss at him. You’re raging with fever.”