by Karen Hughes
She closed her eyes. With the first breath she’d drawn she had understood that she possessed the power to help people, that her gift of sight was linked solely to goodness. She had been sent to Jackson because he was in trouble. Because somehow, someway, it was in her power to help him.
Because he’s innocent.
Looking up, she met his eyes calmly, so that he would understand she spoke the truth. “I believe you, Jackson. I know you didn’t try to kill your uncle.”
His eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
He shook his head. “Not good enough, Cheyenne. This morning you were ready to walk away because you hardly know me. Now you’re taking my word I didn’t try to kill Uncle Joe. What’s changed?”
“Nothing.” She tilted her head. “I see the truth in your eyes.”
“My eyes?”
“Yes.”
He stared down at her, his brow creasing. “I suspect this is one of those situations where it’s best to quit while I’m ahead.”
“I’d say so.” She gazed out at the small lawn where a slate-blue twilight had settled. “Do you have any idea who’s made the two attempts on your uncle’s life?”
“No. Find him or her, and you’ll find the person who’s gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to set me up to take the fall for two attempted murders.” As he spoke, his hands clenched into fists, unclenched. “Whoever that is, isn’t finished with me. I can feel there’s more to come. Dammit, it’s like walking through a field infested with snakes. You know they’re there, but there’s no way to predict where they’ll strike next.”
And she couldn’t see them, Cheyenne thought. She could not will the visions that came to her any more than she could change what she saw.
The wind picked up, whispering the secrets of the coming night. Absently, she rubbed her hands along her arms to ward off the chill. Although she was still uncertain how fate intended her to help the man standing beside her, she knew, with time, the answers would come. They always came.
“You’re cold,” he said quietly.
She looked up, unaware he’d been studying her. “A little.” She glanced across her shoulder toward the front door they’d left ajar. “I should check to make sure Meggie hasn’t wiggled out from under her blanket.”
“Probably should,” he agreed, keeping his eyes on hers. “Now that you know there might be a jail cell in my future, do you still want time to get to know me?”
The vision that had come to her that morning replayed in her mind like a seductive phantom. She and Jackson, lying together on cool sheets while candlelight flickered softly against their heated flesh. He wanted to give her candlelight and warm, sweet wine.
Cheyenne felt her chest tighten. Even as her mind cautioned her to go slow, desire poured through her.
“If I told you I changed my mind about getting to know you, would that keep you away?”
“No,” he answered instantly. “I’d have to try to overrule whatever objections you had to my presence. And I’ll be present a lot, because I volunteered to help Blake get this ranch ready for the Memorial Day competition. Starting tomorrow, I’m staying in one of the spare rooms in his house. Since I can’t seem to keep away from you, why don’t you plan on seeing me tomorrow night?” He flashed her a grin. “In case you can’t tell, I’m trying to cajole you into letting me take you to dinner.”
Cheyenne fought a smile. He had walked into her life two days ago, and already so much had changed. Just, she supposed, as it was meant to.
She walked across the porch, pulled open the screen door, then met his gaze across her shoulder. “I’ll cook. Dinner will be ready at seven. Don’t be late.”
“I’ll be here.”
Six
For the next five days, most of the work done on Hopechest Ranch was geared toward getting ready for the Memorial Day all-around rodeo competitions. During that time Jackson worked beside Emmett Fallon to finish repairs on the roof of the horse barn, then they plied similar labor to the stables. After that, Jackson supervised a paint crew consisting of Johnny Collins and several other Hopechest Ranch teens while they swiped brushes and rollers dipped in glistening white paint over the dorm-style lodge known as the “Homestead,” the counseling center and expansive dining hall. Working beside a grizzled ranch hand, Jackson restrung more barbed wire than he knew had existed. He’d even labored over a tractor that threw a rod.
During the years he’d spent in law school, then sitting behind a desk in a climate-controlled office, he’d forgotten the grueling, exhausting work that went hand-in-hand with the operation of a ranch.
And the satisfaction derived from doing that work.
Even falling into bed each night with new blisters, scrapes and muscles that ached from the inside out didn’t dampen that feeling of satisfaction.
Now, as Memorial Day dawned in hazy swirls of pinks and gold, he stood on the porch of Blake Fallon’s combination home and office, wishing he felt the same contentment with his life as he did with the work he’d done over the past days.
Sipping coffee from the thick mug he’d carried from the kitchen, he acknowledged that his peaceful surroundings were in direct contrast to the churning going on inside him. The time was fast approaching when he would have to make decisions. Some with life-changing impact.
Just the thought of returning to his job in San Diego made his brow furrow. Working with his father no longer held appeal. In truth, the only thing that had kept Jackson at the law offices of Colton Enterprises over the past months was the loyalty he felt to his uncle.
Joe Colton had phoned several times to assure his nephew he was under no obligation to stay in a job for which he no longer had any heart. Jackson knew those calls had been made to ease the guilt he felt that came with the thought of walking away from the business his uncle had built with his own grit and sweat.
If he decided to move on, Jackson knew he also had to figure out if he wanted to continue practicing law. Or try something new. If that were the case, he had no idea what the hell that something would be. Or where it might take him.
He shifted his gaze down the gravel road while a distant rooster crowed a greeting to the dawn. Through the early morning haze, he could see the outline of the simple frame house that sat amid the other small houses in which the ranch’s counseling staff resided.
For the past five evenings, he had knocked on the door of Cheyenne’s pale yellow house. Twice, she’d opted to cook, so they’d eaten dinner in. They’d driven into Prosperino and dined at dim, elegant restaurants. Last night he’d charmed the ranch’s cook into packing a basket of sandwiches, potato salad and apricot cobbler. He and Cheyenne had driven to the coast, spread a blanket on an empty stretch of beach and shared the meal while the moon slid into the sky to cast pale light on the sea.
To Jackson, it hadn’t much mattered if they’d stayed in or gone out. As long as they were together. He just wanted—needed—to be with her.
And he wasn’t quite sure why.
“Hell,” he muttered.
The sense that everything inside him was undergoing change made him feel off-balance. Unsteady. Not only was his career up in the air, for the first time in his life he had found that just any woman wouldn’t do. That desire for one woman could completely obliterate desire for anyone else.
He wanted Cheyenne James. Wanted her with a growing fervor that was like a sickness. Yet, he hadn’t done anything about that want. He’d kept his word. Over the past five days, he hadn’t touched her.
Dammit, if he didn’t get his hands on her soon, didn’t again taste that cool, gold flesh, he was going to put his fist through a wall.
Setting his jaw, he tamped down on his churning emotions. Still, it wasn’t easy to ignore the tight wire of control that stretched inside him to near breaking point.
He had wanted women before, lots of women. But never with a force that bordered on violence. That was another thing about him that had changed, he acknowled
ged. And he wasn’t quite sure what to do about it—or about the woman at the center of those unsettled feelings.
Jackson’s hand clenched on the mug’s handle. Always in the past he would ease away from a relationship before emotions became tangled and messy. No damage done, no hard feelings. With Cheyenne, he found that the only way he wanted to ease was into a future with her.
Problem was, he couldn’t. Not while two attempted murder charges hung over his head. He had heard nothing further from Thad Law. Still, Jackson sensed that nothing good would come from the detective’s silence.
During the evenings he and Cheyenne had spent together, she hadn’t broached the subject of the police investigation. Hadn’t mentioned the possibility of his being charged with the attempts on his uncle’s life. She just seemed to have accepted a simple, unquestioning belief in his innocence.
He was sure as hell innocent, he thought, dumping the remains of his coffee off the side of the porch. Trouble was, he couldn’t prove it.
Until he could, he wasn’t free to make promises to Cheyenne. Couldn’t ask her to make promises to him. Not as long as he could hear the sickening clank of a prison cell door slam behind him.
Rand Colton strode into his D.C. law office early Memorial Day morning, after having thoroughly kissed his wife and promised to be home by noon. That’s when he and Lucy planned on taking his five-year-old stepson, Max, to the zoo. Although Rand looked forward to the outing, Max was so revved with anticipation that Rand knew home was not the place to spend a couple of hours catching up on work.
Dressed in khakis and a sport shirt, he sipped coffee at his desk while reading the deposition of a nighttime jogger who claimed he’d spotted a client of Rand’s sneaking a can of gasoline into the rear of the client’s failing hardware store. Half an hour later, the store had been engulfed in flames.
Fire investigators determined the blaze had been purposely set, using gasoline as an accelerant.
A background check on the jogger revealed the man was divorced twice and had four convictions for domestic assault. A plan was brewing in Rand’s mind on how to get that information in front of a jury—hopefully made up mostly of women—when the cell phone clipped to his belt rang.
“Colton,” he said.
“Rand?”
“Emily?” The sound of his adopted sister’s voice shoved all thoughts of the case from Rand’s mind. It had been three days since he’d heard from her. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. Okay.”
Although her words sent a wave of relief through him, the thready fatigue in her voice didn’t sound convincing. Not when she’d recently survived a second attempt on her life.
“Where are you?” As he spoke, Rand opened a drawer on his desk, pulled out a road atlas and flipped it open.
Eight months ago, a man had broken into Emily’s bedroom at Hacienda de Alegria and tried to kill her. Terrorized, she’d fled into the night. The Colton family had spent torturous days believing she’d been kidnapped. When a ransom note arrived, Joe Colton paid the money demanded. Eventually Emily phoned Rand to tell him she hadn’t been kidnapped. Instead, she’d run away and was hiding out in the small town of Keyhole, Wyoming. After swearing him to secrecy, she related an almost unbelievable story about their mother, Meredith. Although skeptical, Rand had promised Emily to check out her theory, just to ease her mind.
The information he’d found to date had been heart-stopping. As was the call he’d received from Emily three days ago after her attacker caught up with her in Keyhole and made a second attempt on her life.
“I’m in Red River, Montana,” Emily said. “It’s small—right across the Wyoming border.”
“I’m looking at a map,” Rand said. His finger paused on a small dot on a thin strand of a road while his other hand balled helplessly on the desk. She was so far away. So vulnerable.
“Got it. Does Wyatt know where you are?” he asked, referring to Wyatt Russell, a close friend and attorney who as a child had lived on Hopechest Ranch. Wyatt had given up the high-paced life of D.C. to live in Keyhole after reuniting with his high-school sweetheart.
“Yes, Wyatt knows. Now you. You’re the only two.” Emily paused. “Wyatt told me the deputy in Keyhole— Toby Atkins—has his men working day and night to hunt down the man who attacked me. Her voice broke. “Rand, everyone in that town has been so good to me. My staying there puts them in danger. That man… If someone tries to help me, he’ll kill them, too.”
“He’s not going to kill you,” Rand shot back. Scrubbing a hand over his face, he dragged in a calming breath. “Emily, we’ve talked about this,” he said quietly. “You know you can come here. I’ll take care of you.”
“If I come there, he’ll find out. He’ll follow me. I won’t put you and Lucy and Max in danger.”
He pictured his sister with her wavy mane of chestnut hair and dimples…and that stubborn line her jaw took when she intended to do things her way. Now, he heard that same unbending determination in her voice. Nothing, he knew, could change her mind. “Do you need money?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m working here at a diner,” she said, then gave him the phone number.
Rand jotted the number on a slip of paper. “Look, tomorrow I’m flying to Sacramento on business. I can shift my schedule, come up there and check on you. I would feel a hell of a lot better if I could just see you.”
“Rand, you can’t come. We’ve agreed that whoever hired the guy to kill me might be watching you and other members of the family. We can’t risk meeting.”
Rand nodded. “You’re right. I know you’re right. It’s just that a big brother is supposed to take care of his little sis.”
“You are taking care of me, and I love you, too.”
“I just wish I could do more.”
“You are. You’ve got Austin McGrath working on this. Has he found out anything yet about Mother?”
“Not yet. Emily, Austin might not find anything. At this point, everything is supposition on our part. We might be wrong.”
“We’re not. And Austin has to find something, Rand. If he doesn’t, this nightmare we’re all caught in won’t ever end.”
Cheyenne had hired on as a counselor at Hopechest only two days before last year’s Memorial Day competition, so she’d missed out on the planning. This year she’d jumped at the chance to organize and schedule all of the events.
She had her hands full and was enjoying every minute of it.
“So far, the barrel-racing and bronc-busting competitions started on time,” she informed Jackson when he caught up with her just before noon.
“With you in charge, I had no doubt.”
“Bull riding starts after the lunch break.” She flipped through the pages on the clipboard angled into the crook of one arm. “So do the roping and target shooting competitions. The archery and pie-eating contests are also this afternoon.”
“Thanks to you, everything’s running smoothly,” Jackson commented as they squeezed into a spot near the corral where the bronc busting was in full swing. “And it looks like everyone is having a good time.”
In her haste to leave her house that morning she’d forgotten her sunglasses, so Cheyenne used a hand to shade her eyes while she surveyed the people crowded on and around the newly painted fence. A roar sounded as onlookers cheered for the cowboy who had a one-handed death grip on a rope bridle while a furious bronc bucked him around the corral.
“Some are having a better time than others,” Jackson amended when the cowboy flew from the saddle and landed on his butt in a puff of dust.
Out of the corner of her eye, Cheyenne saw Jackson tip his head toward Johnny Collins who was across the corral, straddling the fence with a couple of other Hopechest teens. Johnny nodded, then shifted his attention to a chaps-clad cowboy who had scrambled onto a nearby chute to bark instructions to the next rider.
Cheyenne glanced at Jackson. “You’ve made an effort this week to choose Johnny to help on the work crews you’ve
supervised. That’s good. He needs to know he’s not the failure his father always made him out to be.”
Jackson shrugged. “Johnny’s a good kid who deserves a break. Besides, he works like a demon when he’s pointed in the right direction.”
Deciding she could take a few minutes from her duties to watch the action, Cheyenne slid her pen in the back pocket of her snug jeans, tucked the clipboard beneath one arm and propped a booted foot on the rail beside Jackson’s. Seconds later, the chute sprang open and another horse leaped out, bucking like a hellhound. Its rider had one hand locked to the saddle, another reaching for the sky…then he sailed into the air.
Cheyenne tilted her head. “I understand that flying through space is a part of the enjoyment of bronc busting.”
“I prefer having a plane under me when I fly,” Jackson said and gave her a grin that had her smiling back at him. He was wearing a white shirt with its sleeves rolled up on his forearms and faded jeans that molded his long legs. The week he’d spent in the sun had given his skin a healthy, golden tan that added to his rugged handsomeness. “I’ll get my enjoyment later judging the target shooting match,” he added.
She furrowed her brow. “I wish you could have signed up to compete. I would have liked to have seen you in action.”
“Taking Thad Law’s suspicions of me into consideration, I didn’t think it would’ve been smart to show off my shooting skills just now.”
“You’re right.” Without thinking, she placed her hand on his and squeezed. “I’ll help you judge the match.”
“Then I’ll enjoy myself even more.” Smoothly, he turned his hand over to grip hers. “In case you haven’t noticed, I like having you around.”
She felt the same about him, Cheyenne thought. Over the past week they’d eaten meals on her small porch, dined at elegant restaurants, even shared a moonlit picnic on a beach. They’d talked for hours, about anything and everything.
The whole time, Jackson hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t even tried.
And each night after he’d left her, she had lain awake, staring at her bedroom ceiling, driving herself crazy wondering what it would be like if he had been there with her. The knowledge that she’d asked him to keep his distance, insisted he give her time to get to know him had done little to ease the desire that thickened round her like a spiderweb whenever he got near. Like now.
