by B. J Daniels
“I wished on that star up there that I would find you down here,” he whispered back.
They kissed, sweet, gentle kisses that grew hotter. She wrapped her legs around his waist as he deepened the kiss and treaded water to keep them afloat.
Her full breasts were pressed against his bare chest, the hard nipples tantalizing. The porcelain feel of her skin against his stole his breath, revved his heartbeat. He’d never wanted a woman the way he wanted her.
He swam them toward shore where the trees were the thickest, the spot where she’d dropped her robe.
Carrying her from the water, he laid her down on the robe, the warm earth beneath her. For a long moment, he merely stared down into her beautiful eyes. He’d never made love like this, under the moonlight, his body still cool from the water, droplets falling from his hair onto her radiant flesh.
ALEXA HAD NEVER DARED throw caution to the wind. And yet the moment she’d taken a step toward the pond—and this cowboy—she knew there would be no turning back. She’d never wanted a man enough to be so brazen until Marshall. She had opened herself up to him, but now it would be a total surrender.
He took her in his arms, his hands cradling her head as he kissed her lips, then kissed a trail of molten fire down her throat to her breasts.
Alexa sucked in a breath as his mouth captured one of her nipples. He teased it with his teeth, making her arch against him.
She reached for him, needing, wanting, pleading for him to take her. He slowly lowered himself onto her, and she felt the strength and weight of him.
She took him in, opening the last of herself to this cowboy.
MARSHALL LAY ON HIS BACK, staring up at the stars. He’d never felt such contentment. He could hear the soft lap of the pond as a fish broke the surface. In the shadows, several ducks honked softly to the flutter of wings and splashing water.
Beside him, Alexa breathed softly. He glanced over at her. She was smiling, also gazing up at the stars.
“A penny for your thoughts,” he whispered.
“I’ve never felt like this before.”
He laughed quietly and rolled onto his side to look at her. “Me either. I want to stay here forever.”
She smiled ruefully. “If only we could.”
A set of headlights scanned across the horizon as a vehicle pulled into Wellington Manor. Marshall and Alexa stayed hidden in the shadows of the trees down by the pond but could hear the sound of laughter and voices.
“Gigi and Devlin,” Alexa said. “I hadn’t realized they’d been gone when I came home.”
He hadn’t paid any attention to what cars were parked by the house either. He’d had too much on his mind to care.
“I should get back,” she said, sitting up and reaching for her nightgown.
Marshall didn’t want her to go—not back to the house, not back to Spokane. But he knew he couldn’t stop her. Alexa had to finish what she’d come here to do—if she even knew what that was.
“I’m glad you came swimming with me,” he whispered.
She smiled at him, touched his cheek with her cool fingers then rose to slip the nightgown over her.
He handed her the robe, now damp from where they had made love on it. She drew the fabric to her, touching it to her lips as her gaze locked with his.
“I wish I didn’t have to go,” she whispered.
He could only nod. There was so much he wanted to say but he sensed the timing was all wrong. “Alexa, I…I’ve never felt like I do right now.”
She kissed him. He pulled her closer for a moment, her kiss lingering on his lips. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And then she was gone, a white vision disappearing into the trees as she hurried toward Wellington Manor.
Marshall had the impulse to go after her, fear growing inside him that he wouldn’t see her again because that house and the people in it would be the death of her.
ALEXA SLIPPED IN THROUGH THE front door and padded barefoot past the dark kitchen. Gigi and Devlin must have already gone upstairs. She breathed a sigh of relief as she headed for the stairs and froze as a door opened down the hall.
Sierra came out of Jayden’s room and started toward her. Still cloaked in shadow, Alexa quickly stepped into an alcove beneath the stairs an instant before Sierra passed. She was dressed in her nightgown and robe, barefoot, her hair a mess.
Alexa wanted to confront her. But instead, she pressed her back against the wall as Sierra hurried up the stairs.
For a long time, Alexa stood, shaking inside. A part of her regretted not approaching her sister-in-law right there and then. But she knew that Sierra would turn this around somehow and the person who would suffer the most would be Landon.
It was going to break Landon’s heart when she told him. But what was the alternative? Wait and let him find out on his own? Or have an accident that left Sierra a rich widow?
So Alexa stood there in the dark, giving Sierra enough time to return to her room. Her earlier contentment gone, she finally padded up the stairs. Alexa was almost to the top when she saw Jayden standing in the hall, watching her.
She didn’t know how long he’d been there, but there was no doubt he knew she’d seen Sierra coming out of his room and he didn’t look happy about it.
Chapter Eleven
Marshall awoke thinking about the pickup that had chased them and tried to run them off the road the night before. At breakfast at the ranch, he mentioned he’d seen the phantom truck.
His brothers laughed, but he asked anyway, “Logan, you said some friends of yours had been chased by it. When was that?”
“Probably fifteen years ago now.”
“Did they describe the truck?” Marshall asked.
“You aren’t serious, right?” Zane said.
“An old-model Chevy, stepside, two-toned. Is that what chased you?” Logan asked.
Marshall nodded as he rose from the table.
“I wouldn’t go messing with somethin’ you don’t know about,” Logan warned.
“That’s just it. I think I do know what I’m messing with,” Marshall said. “The question now is only who’s behind it?”
After leaving the ranch, he drove up the same road he and Alexa had taken the night before. He slowed at the point where he’d first seen the pickup appear behind him and turned his pickup around in the middle of the road to drive back over a small rise.
At the bottom were tracks in the dirt that led back into a stand of trees. From the trees, someone could have seen him and Alexa coming up the road, waited until they passed then pulled out and followed with their headlights off until they topped the rise and seemed to appear out of nowhere.
He drove to the point where the pickup had seemingly vanished. This time he knew what to look for and found where the pickup had left the road. The driver had done his best to cover the tracks, but Marshall was still able to follow them back into a stand of Russian olive trees around an old dump.
The pickup was hidden among a half-dozen other old vehicles that had been abandoned there. Most of the others were older. Stopping the truck, Marshall climbed out, wary of rattlesnakes in all this junk.
The phantom pickup was a 1956 Chevy 3100 stepside pickup, its two-toned paint long faded. As he opened the driver’s side door, he saw that mice had nested in the floorboards and bench seat. But someone had brushed the nests from behind the steering wheel last night.
As he slid in, he made a note of how far back the seat had been pushed. The driver had been long legged, probably male. The other time the phantom truck had made its run had been because some teenagers had been snooping around Wellington Manor. Marshall didn’t believe it was any coincidence that the driver of the truck had come after Alexa and him last night. Someone at that house knew she’d been snooping around. And probably suspected he was helping her.
As he climbed out of the old pickup, he wondered which of the males at the house had been driving this truck last night. There were four men at the house: Archer, Devli
n, Jayden and Landon.
Marshall started to correct himself, to leave Alexa’s brother off his suspect list, but unlike Alexa he didn’t trust any of them—Landon included.
Someone had tried to scare them last night. Which meant that someone feared Alexa was getting too close to whatever secret they were trying to keep in that house.
FROM WORKING IN JOURNALISM, Alexa had made a lot of contacts over the years. It took only a few calls on her cell phone to get what she needed the next morning. She’d driven into Whitehorse and used her cell phone, afraid to talk on the Wellington Manor phone for fear someone would be listening on another line.
“I have the obit and the police report right here,” a young journalist in Nevada told her.
“Police report?” Alexa said, glancing out the SUV window as a car went by. She couldn’t help feeling paranoid, given everything that had happened.
“The suicide was investigated as a possible homicide,” the reporter said. “The father, J. A. Wellington, died of a fatal gunshot wound to the head in their home outside of Las Vegas. He’d been a financial consultant. Turned out it was all a scam. He’d bilked investors out of millions of dollars.”
“Does it mention the wife and daughter?” she asked.
“The wife was cleared. Apparently she knew nothing about her husband’s business and wasn’t home at the time of the murder.”
“What happened to them?” Alexa asked, thinking of a recent case like this where the family was left penniless.
“The wife and daughter left the state. We did a follow-up story five years later when the daughter was sixteen. The two were living down near Los Angeles in some dump. The wife was working as a waitress, but they were barely getting by. It was pretty sad. Apparently the husband knew the feds were on to him and killed himself. But what made the case interesting is that the money was never recovered.”
At the age of eleven, Sierra Wellington had gone from filthy rich to flat broke. Alexa could only assume what that had done to Sierra.
Alexa felt her heart begin to pound. Was it possible she was secretly looking for the money in the house while pretending to remodel it for a bed-and-breakfast? “How is it possible that the money he stole never turned up?”
“Maybe he socked it away in another country or turned it into gold bars and buried it. Who knows?”
“But if that was the case, then why would he kill himself and not tell anyone where it was?” Alexa asked, thinking out loud. “Maybe he did tell someone,” the reporter said. “But it wasn’t the wife. The feds kept an eye on her. She died broke.”
“What about the daughter?” Alexa asked, wondering if the feds were keeping an eye on her or if they thought she was too young at the time of her father’s death to know anything about it.
“Last I heard she was in college on a hardship-case scholarship.”
MARSHALL WAS GLAD TO get Alexa’s call. He’d tried the house and was told that she must have gone into town as her SUV was missing.
He could hear what sounded like arguing in the background and had barely hung up when Alexa had called. Marshall listened as she filled him in on what she’d found out about her sister-in-law.
“You think her father told Sierra where he hid the money?”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Alexa said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if she thinks it’s in that house. It would explain a lot.”
He agreed. “But wasn’t it the old-maid relative who left her the house, not her father?”
“I’m not sure anyone left her the house. From what I’ve been able to find out, the house was tied up in the niece’s estate. Sierra had petitioned for it as the last living Wellington and finally got the mansion. Apparently she’d been trying to get it for some time.”
“It certainly sounds like she was anxious to have it,” Marshall said. “But if she knew where the money was hidden, wouldn’t she have already found it?”
“Maybe he didn’t tell her where. Sierra told me that the woman closed off most of the house, living only on the first floor in the servants’ quarters. So if Sierra’s father paid the niece a visit and hid the money, thinking he was going to get away with all of it, it could be anywhere. You could hide millions of dollars in that house and it might never be found.”
“Still it seems crazy for her father to kill himself after all he went through to steal the money, and then not tell anyone where he hid it,” Marshall said. “Sierra was eleven at the time, right? Maybe he didn’t tell her for fear she couldn’t keep the secret.”
“Maybe,” Alexa replied.
When she said no more, he told her about the pickup he’d found hidden at the old dump. “Someone was trying to scare us off. They don’t like you snooping around. I’m worried what they will do next.”
“So far all they’ve done is try to scare me,” Alexa said. “I just hate that I’ve dragged you into this.”
As if she could keep him out, he thought, and said as much. “I hope you don’t regret last night.”
Her laugh filled him with pleasure. “I could never regret last night.”
“Me either. Listen, there’s been some trouble at the ranch. I have to go by there and make sure my stepmother is all right. Call me later?”
“The group at the house were talking about going into town tonight to listen to some country-western band. Even Carolina has agreed to go along. I’m not sure if she has changed her mind about leaving here or if she just needs to get out of this house for a while since she can’t seem to get a flight out yet,” Alexa said. “If they do, I plan to see what they’ve been working on in this house.”
“Count me in. Just promise me you won’t do it alone.”
She laughed again. “I’m brave, but not that brave. The truth is this place gives me the creeps.”
Marshall figured it was a lot more than that. If there was even a chance that Alexa had her mother’s gift, then she had to be terrified of what she might see in that house.
ALEXA THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT Marshall had said. She was convinced that Sierra’s father could have told the girl about the money. If he knew his daughter, he wouldn’t have been worried about her being able to keep a secret. Sierra, Alexa believed, was like her father. She wouldn’t have talked for fear someone might take the money from her or she might have to share it.
It was that last thought that sent an icy dagger straight to her heart. She had just assumed that Sierra had married Landon for his money, which still might be true.
But if she found the millions, she wouldn’t need him anymore—and from the little Alexa had seen of Sierra, she knew the woman wouldn’t want to share. Not that Landon would let Sierra keep the money if he knew where it had come from.
She was even more worried about her brother but dreaded telling him everything she’d learned. The truth was, she feared he wouldn’t believe her. So far, all she had was conjecture. Nothing she learned proved that his life was in danger. Or even that Sierra was having an affair with Jayden.
But if she could find where someone in this house had been searching for the missing millions…
First though, she had to find out everything she could about the people now staying in that house. At the county library, Alexa got on the internet and began her search. There wasn’t a lot to find on the occupants of Wellington Manor because they were young and hadn’t done much with their lives yet.
But thanks to the internet, she was able to gather what was there easily. She started with the men. Devlin Landers had been the star of his debate team in high school and in college had majored in prelaw. He had married Gigi Brown after graduation. Gigi had been the head cheerleader in high school and a mediocre student in college, who’d majored in art history.
Archer Durand had been a football star in high school, played a little in college until he was injured then seemed to be more interested in the social life at his frat house. He’d majored in mass communication and had married Carolina Bates his senior year, her junior year.
Alexa f
rowned. Why did that name sound so familiar? She shook her head and typed in Carolina Bates. She had been a good student, graduating at the top of her class and had gone to college on a scholarship, majoring in criminal law.
She typed in Jayden Farrell. A half-dozen names came up, none of them matching the one staying at Wellington Manor. As far as she could tell, Jayden Farrell didn’t exist—or he’d lied about who he was.
It struck her that Sierra might not be the only person looking for the millions her father had stolen.
By the time Alexa reached the house, the driveway was empty. She opened the door and called out, “Anyone here?”
No answer. But just to be safe, she walked down to Jayden’s room and knocked. When there was no answer, she tried the knob. Locked. Using her key, she opened his door.
The room was almost too neat. He’d apparently brought little with him to Montana. She did a quick search, then, feeling the hair stand on the back of her neck, she spun around, half expecting to find him standing behind her.
There was no one there, but it had spooked her enough that she left his room and went to the phone.
“They’ve all gone into town,” she said when Marshall answered. “Want to come over and see if we’re right about what they’ve been doing over here?”
“I’ll be right over.”
True to his word, Marshall cut across the pasture and was there minutes later. She quickly filled him in on what she’d learned during her internet search.
“Jayden caught me coming home the other night. I’d left a light on and he’d turned it out and waited for me.”
“You think he was trying to scare you?”
“Actually, I got the feeling he was trying to warn me. If anyone knows what’s going on in this house, it’s Jayden. And when I tried to find out more about him, I came up blank. I think he lied about who he is. I’m wondering how many people are looking for the money in this house?”