Restless Hearts

by B. J Daniels

  He’s fighting for a second chance with his first love...before it’s too late.

  The last time PI Blaze McClintock was on her family’s ranch, she left in handcuffs. She vowed then to never go home again...until her estranged father is accused of murder. He’s not a good man—this entire Montana town knows that. But Blaze believes her father is innocent and she’ll do anything to prove it, even ask the one man who broke her heart for help—the only man in town who’s on her side.

  No matter how hard he tried, Jake Horn could never forget Blaze. As teenagers, their passion ignited, leaving destruction in their wake. Now, years later, it’s obvious little has changed. But as they work together to unravel what really happened that night, a dangerous secret threatens to separate them for good. This time, though, Jake won’t let Blaze go without a fight—even if it means risking his own life.

  Praise for New York Times bestselling author B.J. Daniels

  “Daniels is a perennial favorite on the romantic suspense front, and I might go as far as to label her the cowboy whisperer.”

  —BookPage on Luck of the Draw

  “Daniels keeps readers baffled with a taut plot and ample red herrings, expertly weaving in the threads of the next story in the series as she introduces a strong group of primary and secondary characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Stroke of Luck

  “Daniels again turns in a taut, well-plotted, and suspenseful tale with plenty of red herrings. Readers will be in from the start and engaged until the end.”

  —Library Journal on Stroke of Luck

  “Readers who like their romance spiced with mystery can’t go wrong with Stroke of Luck by B.J. Daniels.”

  —BookPage

  “Daniels is an expert at combining layered characters, quirky small towns, steamy chemistry and added suspense.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Hero’s Return

  “B.J. Daniels has made Cowboy’s Legacy quite a

  nail-biting, page-turner of a story. Guaranteed to keep you on your toes.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  Restless Hearts

  B.J. Daniels

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  This book is for my stepdaughter Leslie and the beautiful family she has made.

  Love is where you find it. I’m glad it’s brought you back to Montana so we can share in your joy.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Excerpt from Heartbreaker by B.J. Daniels

  CHAPTER ONE

  AS THE SUN came up over the foothills, twelve-year-old Ty Garrison was having trouble staying in the saddle. His punishment for coming in late last night with beer on his breath included being dragged out of bed before daylight to ride fence. He should have known that the first time he tried alcohol he’d get caught. He was lucky his father hadn’t taken him out to the woodshed and used the strap on him.

  “I could wallop you good for this, son, but I think it’s time I start treating you like a man—and you start acting like one,” Shane Garrison had told him. “So you go on up to bed and we’ll talk more about this early in the morning.”

  Except there hadn’t been much talking. Just an order. “Get your butt out of that bed and into the saddle. You’re riding fence this morning.”

  Ty was thinking that it really was high time his father stopped treating him like a kid when he saw something that set his heart off at a dead run. He reined in at the sight. Something was kicking up a whole lot of dust just over the next rise. The sound of deep snorts filled the clear November morning air, sending a chill through him.

  Coming fully awake, he sat up in the saddle as he eased his horse through a patch of snow to the top of the rise. He felt his eyes go wide and reined in hard as his horse shuddered under him. He’d only seen buffalo from a distance, large dark shapes along the Montana prairie horizon next to his ranch.

  Now only yards away, this one had been wallowing in the dirt but now jumped to its feet, its big shaggy head and dark eyes aimed right at him. The animal was huge, at least six feet tall at the shoulders. The beast snorted, making his horse shake again and sidestep as if wanting to run.

  Ty knew the feeling. He wanted to run, as well. He’d heard stories about buffalo. How fast they were, how powerful, how destructive and, worse, what they could do to your body if you ended up under the huge hooves.

  He could see where the bull had broken through the neighbor’s fence and their own. It pawed the ground, snorting again, making him realize he’d startled it—just as it had startled him and his horse. His first thought was to turn tail and run home. But buffalo could clock forty miles an hour and jump six feet straight up into the air, and he could see what this one had done to two fences.

  But also Ty could hear his father’s words about it being time he was treated like a man. Time he acted like one. He knew what his father would do if he’d been riding fence this morning.

  Carefully, he eased his rifle from its scabbard. The weapon was loaded and ready to fire. All he had to do was aim and pull the trigger. He lifted the rifle, his arms quivering, his finger resting nervously against the trigger.

  As he got its big head in his sights, for some crazy reason, he thought of the buffalo head nickel his grandfather had given him. It was in the tin box where he kept his other keepsakes. He didn’t want to kill this animal. In that moment, he could imagine this buffalo wild, millions of them, this prairie its home before they were all killed off. It seemed wrong to shoot it.

  And yet it had broken down their fence. It could do a lot more damage if something wasn’t done about it. It was one of the reasons that his father and all the other beef ranchers hated Montgomery McClintock for raising buffalo.

  The huge buffalo pawed the ground again, raising a cloud of dirt in the air as it breathed hard. Early-morning steam rose from its nostrils. His horse whinnied, growing more anxious. He felt sweat run down his back. It was now or never.

  The largest thing he’d ever killed was a bull elk, not something that weighed a ton. The rifle barrel swayed in the breeze. He swallowed the lump in his throat and fought to hold the gun still as he settled the crosshairs between the beast’s eyes.

  Through his sights, he saw with horror the buffalo lower its head and charge. He pulled the trigger. The shot went wild as his horse reared and he found himself falling through the air before hitting the ground hard.

  * * *

  BLAZE MCCLINTOCK ROARED down the narrow gravel road, dust boiling up behind her pickup even though it was November in Montana. The Farmers’ Almanac was calling for a mild winter. There were only a few patches of snow around, mostly on the shady side of the hills.

  She’d thought that after all these years, she wouldn’t even be able to fi
nd her way to the ranch. But it was as if the way home was stamped into her DNA, something she couldn’t outrun no matter how hard she tried.

  The rolling Montana prairie stretched all the way to the Little Rockies. She’d forgotten how wide-open this land was and how far a person could see. It was true, the sky up here felt larger, stretching from horizon to horizon.

  She slowed the pickup as she came over the rise and saw the turnoff into the ranch in the distance. She let her truck coast down the next hill. This was a fool’s errand, she thought, but knew there was no turning back.

  Giving the pickup more gas, she raced down the dirt road before braking for the turn. Her eyes widened as she pulled in and stopped before the stone-arched entrance into the McClintock Ranch. She’d seen plenty of the signs since she’d turned off the paved two-lane that had brought her up to this part of the state. All along the narrow dirt road to the ranches north of the Missouri Breaks, there’d been signs that read Don’t Buffalo Me. Others with buffalo and a slash through them.

  These were nothing new. A lot of Montana ranchers who didn’t want buffalo anywhere near their cattle. It reminded her of the history of the state and how cattle ranchers had fought with sheep ranchers. Now the two lived in harmony. But it was not so with the beef and buffalo ranchers. At least, not in this part of Montana.

  She stared at the dozens of signs stuck in the ground in front of the arched entrance into the ranch, no doubt compliments of her father’s neighbors. The signs didn’t bother her as much as the graffiti on the stone columns.

  Fortunately a lot of the words scrawled in spray paint were illegible. But one jumped out at her. KILLER. Even that wasn’t as bad as what was hanging from the arch. An effigy of her father with a rope around his neck.

  For a moment, she watched it blow in the breeze and questioned what she was doing here. Her father had gone against the tide when he’d started raising buffalo. He’d known the kind of hell he was about to unleash, but once Montgomery “Monte” McClintock got something into his head, there was no reining him in.

  Blaze felt angry tears burn her eyes. The father she’d been estranged from for years had been arrested for murdering a neighboring rancher. The worst part was that she suspected he was guilty as hell and yet here she was. Not that she would have been here if the judge, as they called him, hadn’t asked her to come. She owed Judge WT Landusky her life. So when he’d asked her to come back here, she couldn’t say no.

  But she’d damn sure wanted to. She drove under the arch toward the ranch house in the distance. Memories assaulted her, especially the last time she’d left here—in handcuffs.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE PLACE LOOKED exactly as she remembered it. She’d hoped that it would have changed. Instead, she felt like a rebellious teenager again. What was the retired judge thinking asking her to come back here—especially under these circumstances? She considered calling him before she got in any deeper and trying to talk him out of this.

  But even as she thought it, she knew the always cantankerous Judge Landusky would simply tell her to do her job. If it wasn’t for the judge, she wouldn’t be a private investigator on the right side of the law instead of behind bars. It was something she never forgot. So she kept her foot on the accelerator, roaring up the familiar road toward a place she’d once called home.

  As Blaze parked in front of the large rambling house where she’d grown up, she saw the ranch manager come out of the barn and head in her direction. She was surprised that Cal Sperry still worked for her father after all this time.

  She could tell by his expression that he didn’t recognize her as she climbed out of the pickup, stretched from the long drive and looked around the place. She took a deep breath and let it out before turning to face the man.

  Hugging sixty, Cal had the look of tough jerky. She noticed that he now walked with a slight limp. His tall, lanky body was full of authority as he stopped a few feet from her. He squinted, his face shadowed by the brim of his Western hat.

  “Can I help you?” Help was the last thing his words offered as he pulled off his hat and ran a hand over his military-short graying hair.

  She opened her pickup door, reached into the king cab and pulled out her suitcase. “I’d ask you to carry in my bag, but we both know how that would go.” Cal had never liked her and the feeling was mutual. Like her father, he’d been disappointed that the only heir to the McClintock Ranch was female.

  Didn’t matter that Blaze could ride a horse as well as any man. Cal and her father considered women flighty, unpredictable, confusing and unreliable—if not entirely irrelevant. Blaze’s mother had apparently proved them right when she’d taken off in the middle of the night, running as far away from Monte and the ranch as she could get, never to be heard from again.

  The man’s flinty eyes narrowed in his weathered face as he put his hat back on. “Like I said, you must be lost. This ain’t no dude ranch.”

  She laughed. “You can say that again. I’d say it was good to see you again, Cal, but we both know that would be a lie.”

  He drew back in obvious surprise before taking her measure from her straw Western hat balanced on her thick, long auburn hair to the toes of her worn boots. “Blaze.” He said her name like a curse.

  “In the flesh.”

  Taking off his weather-beaten Stetson again, he rubbed the back of his neck for a moment before he said, “Can’t imagine what you’re doing here.”

  “My father’s been arrested for murder. Maybe you heard.”

  Cal nodded slowly, studying her as if she was something he’d stepped in. “Never figured you’d come back here, given how you feel about Monte.”

  “You have no idea how I feel about my father,” she snapped and glanced toward the house. She wondered if Monte had turned her bedroom into a gun room to wipe out all evidence of her existence. Only one way to find out, but still, she hesitated, remembering the angry words thrown around the last time she was here.

  “Not sure what you think you’re doing here, but there’s enough trouble without you making things worse,” Cal said. “Got a call this morning that one of the bulls tore out a section of fence, took out some of the neighboring rancher’s fence—”

  She frowned. “Is there someone out fixing it?”

  “Not yet. Like I said, just heard. The rancher’s twelve-year-old son tried to take care of it and got himself trampled by the bull.”

  Her heart rate shot up in alarm. “Is he...”

  “He’s in the hospital. He’ll be fine. Broken arm, a few cuts and bruises.” He shrugged as if it was nothing and put his hat back on.

  Blaze swore, shaking her head. “Buffalo.” Her father had been determined to raise them—even against all the protests of not just the neighboring ranchers. People in town were convinced that the animals would get out and damage everything between here and town. But a bigger fear, she’d heard, was that the buffalo would give some disease to beef that could ruin the industry.

  “Monte just has to swim upstream when everyone else is swimming down, doesn’t he?” she said under her breath. “Excuse me, but why are you still standing here? We need to get those fences fixed before something else happens.”

  Cal shook his head as if he must not have heard right. He wasn’t going to like taking orders from a woman. “Fences?”

  “Yes, fix ours and the neighbor’s.” He still hadn’t moved. “Is there a problem?”

  “Well,” he said, scratching his jaw. “It’s just that you come here, some fancy-pants private investigator, and start giving orders with this ‘we’ stuff after none of us have laid eyes on you in years. Isn’t like you ever gave a damn about ranching, so I’m a little confused ’bout why you’re here at all.”

  “What’s confusing, Cal? My last name is still McClintock. I’m still my father’s daughter, and as long as I’m here, you take orders from me since Monte is pro
bably going to prison for the rest of his life. And as his only offspring and his power of attorney, I’ll be paying your salary.”

  He chewed at his cheek for a moment, his eyes dark and hard as iron. “I guess when you put it that way... I’ll get the boys on those...fences. Not what Monte would do, but as you say, you are his daughter.”

  “And when they finish that, they need to see to the arch on the way into the ranch. Have them clean it up. Or maybe you’d like to take care of that yourself.”

  He shot her a lethal look, but said nothing as he turned and headed toward the bunkhouse.

  Blaze watched him go, feeling the full weight of what she was facing. Cal Sperry was the least of her problems. She still couldn’t believe that her father had given her his power of attorney. She had no idea how Judge Landusky had managed that. Apparently, the retired judge and her father went way back. She hadn’t known that until recently, but she guessed it was why the judge had taken her under his wing, so to speak. That made him sound a lot sweeter than how the crusty old judge actually operated.

  At the sound of a vehicle, she turned to see a pickup kicking up dust as it raced toward her. She couldn’t see who was behind the wheel, but she knew trouble when she saw it coming.

  She stood her ground as the truck came to a stop a few feet away from her. With the sun’s glare on the windshield, she couldn’t see the man behind the wheel until he climbed out.

  “I thought this day couldn’t get any worse.” Blaze swore as she saw Jake Horn slide his sexy, lean, all-cowboy frame from behind the wheel of the pickup. He stepped out, turned toward her, a glint in his pale eyes.

  Jake was half Irish from his mother’s side of the family and half Blackfoot Native American from his father’s. He’d let his straight black hair grow long and kept it tied back low on his neck. The man was breathtaking from his green eyes, as inviting as Caribbean seas to his chiseled face with the high, proud cheekbones. Jake—all broad shoulders, slim hips and perfect behind, not to mention his six-pack abs under the black T-shirt he wore—here on her family ranch. This was the Jake she knew only too well.