“Eden?” he called, trying to drown out the drumming of his heart with the certainty that a four-year-old and eight puppies couldn’t have gone far. But neither logic nor his experience in combat kept the panic from crowding into his chest when she didn’t answer. “Eden!”
From a nearby stall, one of the ranch’s quarter horses whinnied, and farther down the row, a set of steel-shod hooves kicked out, striking wood with a sharp rat-tat. Zach swallowed hard, trying not to think of what could happen if a tiny girl got on the wrong side of twelve hundred pounds of horseflesh. It would be all his fault, too, for not working hard enough to teach her to respect as well as love the beasts, for not keeping a close eye on her.
Coming in behind him, Nate called Eden’s name, too, saying, “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” as if the stakes were no higher than a game of hide-and-seek.
When there was no response, he whistled and called, “Bonnie! Come here, girl.”
The puppies’ mother, a big, tricolor ball of fur, emerged yawning from some dark corner, then trotted toward them, her thick tail wagging lazily. If she was half as worried about her little ones as Zach felt, she gave no sign of it.
“Where’re your puppies? Find the puppies,” Nate said, sounding eager and enthusiastic.
Bonnie came fully alive, her ears pricking, and her eyes excited as she dove into the “game” full throttle, running around the barn and searching. But no matter how many times she was redirected, she kept circling back and sitting beside the same stall where he’d last seen Eden and the litter.
“I thought this dog was supposed to be some kind of genius,” complained Zach, who had been running from stall to stall to look inside each one. Meanwhile, his brain kept circling back, too, returning to the green-eyed reporter’s visit yesterday, and the violent fallout that had followed.
Could whoever had attempted to kill Jessie Layton have some connection to the child that had, like the reporter, shown up at their doorstep? What if the same violent criminal had followed him here this morning with the intention of taking Eden—or worse yet, hurting her?
Realizing that the fear eating at him was weaving the unlikeliest of scenarios, he told himself, “Ridiculous.”
But it was Nate, standing by his dog, who burst out laughing as he stepped inside the stall and swept aside a pile of straw. “There you are! Wake up, sweetie.”
He was laughing as he said it, as Zach ran, heart in throat, to see Eden stir where she’d been lying, her small hands ever so slowly stroking the bellies of two puppies while the others, all eight in the litter, lay curled around her like snoring whorls of fur.
As she stirred, Nate chuckled, speaking in low tones. “Look at that. They’ve gone and worn each other out.”
“And off she goes again,” Zach added as Eden’s green eyes fluttered closed and her small hands once more fell still. Watching her, he felt something tightening inside his chest, the grip of a fierce possessiveness like nothing he had ever known. For at some point—he had no idea when—he’d come to think of this tiny wisp of light as not only another burden he was obligated to provide for, but as family. His family, almost as if she’d been his daughter and not his brother’s.
A child he would do everything in his power to keep where she belonged, no matter what the facts of her biology. Or what anybody did to try to stop him, including his own unwise attraction to the one woman who might destroy them all.
Chapter 8
Zach awakened with a start, tangled in his sweat-soaked sheets and telling himself that it was over. He was over, when it came to flying, stripped of all his military duties for failing to report that Lieutenant Hernandez was a danger, failing to see beyond friendship and loyalty. For the past month, Zach had been restless, his sleep fractured night after night by the harrowing moments he’d spent floating helpless above Kabul, where he’d been forced to watch while his protégé’s jet incinerated buildings and lives.
It was the phone calls that were responsible for the nightmares, the calls he’d made to Jessie Layton that were tearing him up inside. Though he had nothing to report, he’d first phoned her to find out how she was doing after surgery and how Henry’s family was dealing with their grief. But the longer he listened, the more he’d found himself caring and—worse yet—wanting more. Not only to get to know her better, but to give her and her mother the answers that they needed. Answers he feared would destroy the people who he loved.
Realizing the situation was hopeless, he forced himself to go cold turkey. No more calls, no contact, and he deleted all her messages unread, reminding himself of his responsibility, not to his fellow marine corps pilots, his nation or the people they protected any longer, but to his ailing mother and a tiny girl. A little girl who he feared Jessie would soon return to discover, maybe even wrest away.
He’d asked, over and over, for more details about Eden’s mother, Lila Germaine. He was troubled to imagine that his mother might have made up the whole story about Ian’s alleged former girlfriend, who, after four years of raising the child on her own, had suddenly grown overwhelmed enough to dump the little girl—along with a signed form giving up all her parental rights.
“Oh, Zach, I don’t know why you’d want to dwell on that,” his mama had said dismissively, hands fluttering pale and mothlike to her bony neck. “There’s been pain enough around here. Why worry a miracle half to death? Just thank God that Lila brought her here to live with us instead of to some awful foster home.”
Each time he pressed her further, fatigue set in, or one of the headaches. Her face going gray, she would shake and cover her blue eyes against the pain light brought her. Tears came next, and then vomiting, if she didn’t take her medication and lie in the quiet darkness fast enough.
As if that weren’t enough to deal with, the holidays were soon upon them—her first Christmas without her husband, her first knowing that Ian was dead. Zach tiptoed around her grief, burying his own sadness deep, along with the endless, maddening questions still running through his brain, no matter how hard he fought to push them out of his mind.
When was Jessie coming back? Would she shatter their peace—and his mother’s health—before the year ended? Or had something happened to her? Maybe the hand surgery had gone wrong. Or perhaps her mother had taken a turn for the worse, never guessing that her missing daughter might have given her a granddaughter of her own to cherish...
Just as his mother clearly cherished Eden in the weeks that followed, desperately grasping onto the little girl’s wide-eyed excitement for all the joy and anticipation the season had to offer. Though he tried to resist, reminding himself it could all come crashing down at any moment, he ended up swept up in the spirit, too, especially on the day he came home with the biggest tree he could find. Once he and ranch foreman, Virgil Straughn, a grandfatherly type who’d do anything to make a child smile, finally had the thing set up, they’d grabbed a couple of ladders and spent an evening trimming it in Eden’s favorite hot-pink as she directed from below.
They laughed that night, each one of them. The first laughter that had rung through the Rayford mansion in heaven only knew how many years.
But by January second, the spell had ended, the gifts and decorations packed away. As Zach fed the horses and started on his daily chore list, his brain burned with every worry he’d managed to suppress—and the necessity on getting the truth out of his mother before it blew up in their faces.
Before he could think of a way to finally pin her down, Eden came bubbling outside with her puppies, pleading for him to take her with him as he drove to drop off supplemental feed cakes for the cattle. It was a chore she often begged to “help” with, laughing whenever the cows and yearlings came running at the sight of his truck.
“How’d you figure out that’s where I was going?” he asked, as if he couldn’t guess.
“One of the cowboys
came in to help Miss Althea test out the cinnamon rolls. To see if they were really good enough to eat.”
“And were they?” Zach asked.
“Oh, yes. I got to be a taster, too, and we gave Miss Althea an A-plus with extra sparkles!” Eden nodded happily before wiping her mouth with the back of her hot-pink jacket’s sleeve.
“You and those sparkles,” Zach muttered, thinking that the inventors of glitter ought to be roped and dragged buck naked through a patch of prickly pear.
But when Eden remembered the crumpled bag in her hand and said, “I brought you one, too!” he smiled and took it from her, devil’s fairy dust and all.
“Thanks,” he said, finishing the slightly squashed but still delicious offering in three bites. “Miss Althea gets a gold star. And since you’ve been such a good delivery girl, we’ll go ahead and take that ride, but first we have to tell your grandma where we’re off to, and the puppies have to stay at home and guard the house.”
With the wear and tear of daily ranch chores, the truck he’d bought might not long stay shiny, but that new-car smell would last a whole lot better if no one piddled in the cab.
As they headed out a few minutes later, Eden chattered away behind him, sitting like a princess in her booster seat. “Can I go cowboyin’ with you later, Uncle Zach? I’ll ride Mr. Butters and help you and the cowboys.”
“Sorry, honey, no,” he said, knowing the work was far too dangerous and dirty to risk having her in tow. “I’m afraid Mr. Butters couldn’t keep up with Ace’s long legs, and that would make your pony feel sad.”
In the rearview mirror, her face screwed up in concentration before she suggested, “You could walk.”
“Then we’d never catch all the yearlings, and they might get sick without their vaccinations.”
He pulled to the top of a rise, knowing he’d seen a number of cows bedded down in this area just last night. But moments later, he realized his mistake as he spotted Eden staring at the bunkhouse in the distance.
“I want to go back home now,” she whimpered, her tiny body trembling. “Want to crawl under the covers and take a nap with Sweetheart and Lionheart right now.”
Zach hit the brakes, his heart sinking through the floorboards as his earlier foreboding came roaring back full blown. Eden hated napping, fought it tooth and nail until his mother had finally given up the battle. Which meant that the child must be sick. Either sick or terrified of the bunkhouse—or something that had happened in it.
Ask her, his conscience whispered. Ask her right now.
Eden shook her head emphatically, tears shining in her eyes. “Wanna go home, Uncle Zach. My tummy hurts real bad.”
You’re a marine, damn it. You can do this. But when the first drops spilled down her soft pink cheeks, he sighed and turned back toward the house, where he knew his mother would stroke Eden’s hair as she consoled her...and whisper that she’d never have to go back to that awful place again.
Less than an hour later, he was back at the bunkhouse, thinking that if he couldn’t bear to ask the questions, neither could he turn his back on any answers that might remain to be found. A toy left in the yard, a crayoned scribble inside a closet—surely some evidence would remain if his niece had once lived there.
Leaving his pickup, he carried a flashlight over a sagging and tattered line of yellow crime-scene tape and stared down at the burn marks still visible on the front porch. Looking around, he realized the area was cleaner than it had been. The empty cans and bottles that had been out here were all gone. Collected for analysis, perhaps? Or maybe only cleaned up, for inside, he found the old place surprisingly devoid of trash. No furniture at all remained, though he was certain he remembered a bed, at least, and maybe a junked sofa that had been here before. But the blood stains were still evident, not only the half-burned ones where he could still imagine seeing the ghostly afterimage of Henry Kucharski’s body, but the reddish-brown trail Jessie had left as she’d dragged herself into the bathroom.
Nothing else remained, and try as he might, he couldn’t find a single shred of evidence that any child had ever resided within these walls. Was that because Eden had never actually lived here? Or had whoever swept this place clean been careful to remove the proof?
It could be that Canter was doing his job like he’d said, his vague claim of trying to track some mysterious tattooed man with a shaved head who’d been seen around town more than the excuse it sounded like. But Zach couldn’t make himself believe it, not considering the way the sheriff had been acting lately.
Giving up, he left the bunkhouse and started back to his truck. But only a few steps off the porch, he stopped short, his attention drawn to a tiny line of silvery ash.
A chill wind rose, lifting some of it, a hazy ribbon. Following the airborne trail, he was led to a low dip filled with weeds and bramble, with a scraped and dented barbecue grill lying on its side. A contraption made from a cut oil drum on a broken wheeled frame, the thing must have weighed a ton. Had it collapsed when a leg gave way and then proved too unwieldy to move? Or maybe whoever had been hired to clean the site had figured that no one would even notice it, rusting out here in this pasture.
With another puff, more of the spilled ash rode the breeze, prompting Zach’s attempt to open the mouth of the drum. The way the grill had fallen made it awkward, but he kept at it, lifting and hauling for no better reason than gut instinct, until the barrel turned and the frozen hinges gave way with a squeal of protest.
More ash tumbled through the widened opening, a river of dust with blackened chunks of coal, some of which collapsed into powder when he poked them with a board. But not the bigger pieces, pieces whose shapes and sizes triggered a low groan as recognition dawned....
Along with the awareness that those dark remnants definitely weren’t charcoal.
Stomach knotting painfully, Zach jerked his cell phone from his pocket and started snapping photos, one after another. And all the while he prayed that the burnt bones he had discovered were the vestiges of a meal of pork or beef or venison rather than the woman he had promised Jessie Layton he would help to find.
* * *
Two weeks to the day after her mother’s death, Jessie finally made it back to Rusted Spur, her heart heavy and her eyes sore. Unlike that ominous November day of her first visit, the sky was clear and blue. But the sun looked small and distant, and the outside gauge of her mother’s Cadillac SUV pegged the current temperature in the high thirties, a temperature she suspected would feel colder, judging from the way the frost-brown grasses were swaying in the wind.
For a while, she’d imagined she’d found an ally in Zach Rayford, someone who’d offer a warm welcome. She’d felt a connection taking root during their phone conversations, had heard what sounded like real concern. She’d even imagined she’d sensed an undercurrent of sexual awareness, one she couldn’t quite ignore in spite of her mother’s decline. Sometimes, the memory of his handsome face was the only thing that kept her from collapsing into tears.
But that had been before he’d cut her off, ruthlessly and permanently breaking contact with her. And before he’d given her a single, useful lead regarding either Henry’s murder or her sister’s disappearance. Vulnerable as she’d been, the rejection had stung at first, but by now she was just plain mad—furious he’d played her for a fool.
She thought of going straight to town, blasting into Sheriff Canter’s office to demand an explanation for why he’d been ducking her calls for the past few weeks. And if he refused to answer, she’d give her silent backseat companion the cue to peel back her lips and show off those fearsome fangs of hers, along with the low rumble of a growl guaranteed to get anyone’s attention.
But as satisfying as she found that fantasy, she knew it would be a bad idea. She wasn’t going to find her sister from a jail cell, which was exactly where she’d end up if she pushed her l
uck so soon. Besides, she would never do anything to endanger Gretel, the expensive home protection dog her dad had had imported from Germany a short time before his death.
Though her dad had claimed that he was buying the muscular black-and-tan Rottweiler to make her mother—her poor mother—feel safe after a pair of frightening home invasions in their neighborhood, Jessie had always suspected he’d mostly enjoyed “complaining” about the fifteen-thousand-dollar price of the dog to his golf buddies at the club. After her dad’s stroke, Gretel had quickly gone from “strictly business” to her mother’s best friend. A best friend that could easily take down and put a bite hold on anyone or anything that she perceived as a threat.
But months before, Jessie had moved back home and taken over the big bear of a dog’s care. Had bonded with her, especially just lately, when a string of disasters had delayed her return to Rusted Spur far too long.
She swallowed hard, her thoughts turning as they did too often to the pneumonia that had sickened her mother only a few days after her own surgery. And to the new promise she had made before that illness stole the weeks and months she had allowed herself to hope they would have together.
Before it had stolen, too, her mother’s chance to make peace with her missing daughter. Jessie wiped at a tear, her heart breaking at the failure. If only she had started looking sooner!
But there was nothing to be done now, nothing except to find a way to keep her vow to the woman she still missed so sharply, she drew in pain with every breath.
“We’ll bring Haley home,” she told the dog, digging for the stubbornness that had made her such a good reporter. “We won’t stop till we do.”
Swallowing back the lump in her throat, she pushed past her fear of returning to the place where Henry had been killed and she’d been injured, and turned toward the Rayford ranch and the bunkhouse on the East Two Hundred. There, she planned to snoop around, taking photos of any evidence she might find. Only this time, she’d brought plastic bags and tweezers to collect anything she wanted, along with a laptop with a satellite card so she could upload the pictures to an online vault.
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