by Alice Sharpe
Adam glanced at his watch and found he’d slept away the last four hours which meant they were damn near home. He took a good look around. “This appears to be Butcher Creek. We’re ten or twelve miles away from the ranch.” He started pulling her along the hillside, glancing back at his truck as he did so.
“I don’t want to go up there,” she said, tugging his hand. “What if whoever shot at us is waiting?”
“We have to get home, Echo. If the shooter wants us dead, all he has to do now is stand up there and pick us off. Since he isn’t, I assume that means he thinks we’re dead or injured and have to walk back to the ranch. God knows what he’ll do while we’re mucking around out here.” He took out his cell phone and punched in the ranch. The phone switched to the answering machine after the first ring.
Adam swore as he pocketed the phone. “It’ll take awhile to walk that distance but we have to try.” He looked down the hill at his dead truck, and a smile split his lips. “I have an idea.”
Echo turned and looked and a second later, it was obvious she’d connected the same dots.
The front of the truck was crunched, but the bed was intact and contained his trusty ATV. They ran back down the hill.
ECHO RETRIEVED THE RIFLE Adam carried in the rack of his truck while he hacked away at the ropes that held the ATV in place. It took longer than usual to get the machine out of the bed thanks to the position the truck had landed. There wasn’t much she could do to help until it was time to position the metal runners. He added more fuel from a can he carried, and they were ready to go. Much to her relief, he didn’t return to the main road.
Instead Adam followed the creek until he settled on a good place to cross. “It’s half the distance if we stick to the countryside,” he told her over his shoulder.
The rifle fit into a scabbard mounted on the side of the vehicle, but juggling her purse and a box of ammo while trying to stay seated still took most of Echo’s concentration. Soon the land began to seem familiar. She finally realized they were coming in from the lakeside and would pass Adam’s place before getting to the ranch house.
After a steep climb, Adam paused for a second and they took in the vista. The fields lay all around them, golden now in the summer heat. They could even see a tractor or two. The ranch house lay beyond. And Adam’s house was relatively close by, the sun behind it giving the illusion of a fairy-tale castle perched on the edge of the glittering lake.
“There’s a car down there,” Adam said.
“Where?”
“On the road.”
“Oh, I see. The gray one.” Echo’s heart fluttered in fear. “Adam, the car that shot at us was a light-colored SUV.”
“Half the cars in this county fit that description.” As they watched, the car came to the fork in the road and swerved right, toward Adam’s house.
“Were you expecting anyone?” she asked him.
“No.” They waited until the vehicle hit his long driveway where it slowed down. A plume of dust billowed behind as it moved along the road. The vehicle rolled through the grove of trees and around to the back near the kitchen entrance where it came to a stop. They could barely see the driver and passenger doors open and two men emerge.
“It’s hard to tell with the sun in my eyes, but the one closest to us kind of looks like your father,” Echo said. “Isn’t that a limp?”
“I think so. And the other one looks like the sheriff. Thank God, our luck has finally changed.” He grabbed her around the waist. “I’m going on alone. You’ll be safe up here and I’ll come back after I make sure no one else is with them.”
“Here we go again,” she said.
He pulled her against him and kissed her, his lips demanding, his fingers on her throat tender. There was a message in his kiss and she knew what it was. This was it. This was the crux of everything. “If it comes to protecting you or myself, I’ll protect you every time,” he said softly. “It’s safer for both of us if I go on alone.”
“Like you always do.”
“I don’t always—”
“You keep running away from me or trying to push me away. Okay, you win, I won’t fight you anymore. But think about this while you go charging off by yourself. You don’t have to run from a woman before she runs from you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?” She brushed off her cheeks, annoyed to find her fingers trembling. “You’ve spent almost your entire life thinking your mother left you, that you weren’t lovable enough to make her stay.”
“But she didn’t leave—”
“Exactly,” Echo said. “But you don’t believe it. Not really. And yet, Adam, who’s the bigger fool? The person so set in his ways that he can’t see into his own heart or the person who refuses to accept he’s never going to change?”
She turned away. A moment later, when she heard the ATV move off down the hill, she pivoted around to watch. “Goodbye, Adam,” she whispered.
THE PROFOUND RELIEF AT HAVING the two men he knew he could trust in the same place at the same time filled Adam with renewed hope.
As for Echo?
He’d think about her later. Right now he would focus on the job at hand. No more equivocating. Get all the lies and deceptions out in the open, figure out exactly who Buzzby Crush had transformed himself into thirty years ago.
He stopped the ATV by the gate and got off, bounding over the split-rail fence, anxious to talk to his dad. He couldn’t see the sheriff’s rig from this side of the house, but he was sure he would have noticed if they’d left. He made his way directly down the path to the front door which he noticed was closed with the screen just as he’d left it the last time he was home.
Voices drifted through the door. His father’s, then another, but it wasn’t the easy drawl of the sheriff. Adam hopped up on the first step and glanced through the big front window. What he saw immediately drove him to the deck of the porch, hoping he hadn’t been seen.
In that microsecond, the image of his father down on his knees with his hands behind his neck had burned itself into Adam’s brain. And standing over him, the Smith & Wesson clutched in one hand, J. D. Oakes, a burning cigarette dangling from his lower lip.
Oakes.
And Adam had left the damn rifle on the ATV.
He quickly inched his way across the porch until he was able to see through the lower portion of the screen door. Their voices had been obscured by the roaring in his head, but now he fought that as he took in additional details: the tip of the barrel—the Smith & Wesson—pressed with Oakes’s left hand against his father’s right temple. The kerosene lantern Adam kept on the mantle clutched in Oakes’s night hand. Oakes’s voice, calm, reasonable. “—and so it’s the end of the line, old buddy.”
“You won’t get away with it,” his father warned.
“I’ll get away long enough to disappear and reinvent myself again,” Oakes said. “While the sheriff investigates your apparent suicide—using the same gun you used to kill Melissa, the detective, and Willet Garvey—I’ll be liquidating my assets. All I need to do now is confuse the crime scene investigators for a while, and that’s as easy as one, two, three.”
With that, he flung the lantern against the hearth where it crashed, spraying kerosene across the floor and up the nearby wall. “One,” he said, his voice cold now. Next he flicked his lit cigarette into the fuel and muttered, “Two,” as flames erupted into life and immediately caught the edge of a curtain.
Adam knew what would happen with three. He stood up, stepped back and threw himself at the screen. It flew off its hinges as he crashed into the house.
J.D. spun around to stare at him, eyes wide in surprise. The gun swiveled with him. In the next instant, J.D. fired and Adam dropped to the floor, partly because he’d been hit and partly to make himself a smaller target.
He looked up immediately to find his father had used the opportunity to wrap his arms around J.D.’s legs and bring him down. The Smith & Wesson had slid away from both me
n and they were scrambling to get to it. J.D. had the edge. Adam was too far away to help.
And then someone leaped over the screen and streaked past him. Echo. Echo was there, running across the room, gasping for breath. She grabbed the gun a split second before J.D.’s fingers closed around the grip. As the older man reached up to grab it from her, she pointed it at him and fired.
J. D. Oakes screamed bloody murder.
Epilogue
“So, you’re that irritating little girl who used to hog the top bunk at the hunting lodge?” Pierce Westin said.
He had arrived home a short while before, fresh off a private jet that had originated in Chatioux. He’d debarked wearing a tailored suit in which he’d made quite a dashing impression, but had since changed into jeans and boots. He looked totally at home standing around the center island in the ranch kitchen. You could take the Westin out of Wyoming, but you couldn’t take the Wyoming out of a Westin.
“I had to hold my own against you guys,” she said, sparing Adam a glance. “It was a struggle.”
The doctors had operated on Adam’s shoulder—the same one as before. He was expected to make a complete recovery but for now, he’d earned himself a sling. And thanks to the fire damage in his house, he’d had to move back to the ranch until he could fix it.
“I’m sorry you’re going to miss meeting Analise,” Pierce continued, shoving one of the red mugs across the counter for a refill. Echo was happy to comply. “You will come back for the wedding, won’t you?”
“I’ll be starting a new job,” she said evasively. “But I’ll try.”
“She’ll come back,” Uncle Birch said with an affectionate smile. “She saved our lives. That means she’s responsible for us now. Isn’t that the way it goes, sweetheart?”
She laughed for the first time in two days or two weeks—hard to remember when something had seemed funny.
Birch Westin shook his graying head. “Who in the world would have thought old J. D. Oakes was really a mob hit man named Buzzy Crush? I looked him up on the Internet—it’s suspected he has killed over two dozen people. Once he recovers from Echo’s handiwork, he’ll spend the rest of his life shuffling between courthouses and prison cells. I still can’t believe it.”
“He drugged Lonnie?” This from Pierce who was playing catch-up.
“Him and Janine both. Lonnie is still unclear on what happened, but one of his neighbors said they saw J.D.’s car at Lonnie’s place right before the fire. The sheriff found a bottle of wine in Lonnie’s house with J.D.’s fingerprints on it and traces of drug-laced wine inside. I guess he figured the bottle would be destroyed in the fire. He must have gone over there right after the sheriff told us about David Lassiter’s real identity.”
Pierce shook his head.
Echo might have shot Crush in the leg, but it hadn’t hurt his vocal cords and he was willing to talk, apparently in the hope it helped his case. The night of Melissa Westin’s and Ed Day’s murders, Oaks had picked the lock on the Westin gun case and stolen the Smith & Wesson. He’d been spreading rumors about Melissa’s supposed romance ever since he got wind that Ed Day was more than he seemed to be and had used a Westin gun to throw suspicion on Birch. He’d shot Ed, but then Melissa walked in on the murder so he’d killed her, too. He’d heard Birch talk about the cave and the fact that Melissa was the only one who went there so he chose that cavern to hide their bodies. He had replaced the gun the next day; no one knew it had ever been missing.
He stole the same gun when he saw Lonnie’s collection and recognized a gold-headed relic as one he’d seen before. He had swiped Birch’s hat and had planted the drugs and the concho, and he’d admitted the rest of the drugs were hidden out in the Westin barn, waiting to be “discovered,” thanks to an anonymous tip. On the day he shot out the window of Adam’s truck, he’d followed them to Hamlin. As soon as he had figured out what they were up to, he’d raced back to Wyoming and waited for them to show up so he could buy himself some time. After the truck had careened down the hill, he’d conned Birch by saying Adam had asked him to go get his father and retrieve the Smith & Wesson for the sheriff, then had turned the weapon on Birch in hopes of making it look like a suicide in a last-ditch effort to cover his crimes.
He’d been welcome in their home for over thirty years and he used much of that time lately to listen in on conversations and arrange false evidence.
Pierce glanced at the wall clock then at his father. “Echo’s plane leaves in a few hours. Let’s go find Uncle Pete and see if he’s ready to give her a ride,” Pierce said, clapping his father on the back. “I still want to know where in the heck Cody went. This is the second time he’s taken off like this, you know.”
It was on the tip of Echo’s tongue to say she could find Pete herself, but Adam sent his family on their way. Once they were alone, he took her hand and cleared his throat. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
She leaned against the counter and looked at their linked fingers.
“I know you hate for me to ask this, but are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“You shot a man.”
“He was going to kill you.”
“About that,” he said, gripping her hand a little tighter. “How in the world did you get down the hill so fast?”
“I ran like hell.”
“Did you see something that alerted you?”
“I had forgotten to give you the box of ammo and I thought you might need it.”
“Ah. So you raced down there to give me the ammo.”
“That’s right. And when I got close enough, I saw you crash through the door so I—”
“—crashed right in after me without even stopping to consider what you might be getting yourself in for.”
She shook her head. “Stupid, huh?”
He looked into her eyes, his gaze unflinching. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay in Wyoming with me. You’re just too reckless to be out on your own.”
Tears bit the back of her nose at the suggestion his words posed. “You’re the one in a sling,” she said gently as she withdrew her hand. She’d tucked away the dreams of a future with him, folding them like one would a mourning gown, not wanting to damage it but unable to bear seeing it all the time.
His fingers caressed her cheek. “You have everything in the world waiting for you in New York,” he said softly. “There’s only one thing in Wyoming I can offer you and that’s myself.”
She met his gaze again, hers narrowed. “But—”
“Because I’ve been doing some thinking about what you said up on the hill. You were right. I was sure I could never be enough for you. I was afraid to even dream you could settle for me. If I’ve been stuck in my past since I was a little kid, it’s about time I make some changes, isn’t it?”
Echo allowed herself to melt a little. Just a little because did he mean all this?
“When you ran down the hill, Echo, you were more brave than anyone I could have imagined and you did it not out of fear but because you love me. I saw your face after you shot Buzzby. Admit it. You love me.”
She leaned close and brushed her lips against his. “I admit it. I love you. Happy?”
“Yeah,” he whispered, stroking her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Then he claimed her lips again.
“I’m the only man for you,” he said softly when they came up for air. “You know it’s true. We were made for each other.”
Her heart thrashed in her chest like a trapped bird trying to beat down the bars of its cage. Could this be happening? Was it real? She touched his lips with her fingers. They were trembling again, this time with hope instead of despair. “Will you teach me how to drive a tractor and pull a calf and take me dancing and keep me amused on long winter nights?” she whispered. “Can you do all that?”
He stared deep into her eyes with such desire it stole her breath away. “Yes. Especially the last.” And proved it by pulling her tightly in a one-armed embrace.
“I want you forever,” he said against her hair, his voice fierce. “I love you, Echo De Gris, and I’ll give you the world if you can find a way to love me back.”
She pulled away and looked up at him. The cage was open, her heart was free. “Silly man. Don’t you know you are the world?”
ISBN: 978-1-4592-1456-9
WESTIN LEGACY
Copyright © 2011 by Alice Sharpe
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*Dead Ringer
†Skye Brother Babies
‡Open Sky Ranch
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve