Montoya's Heart

by Bonnie Gardner

  The wait would be worth it, when he finally did make love to Maggie.

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Bonnie Gardner

  BONNIE GARDNER

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Copyright

  The wait would be worth it, when he finally did make love to Maggie.

  And he knew as surely as he knew the sun would rise in the morning that he would. And she would love him back.

  Before now, he hadn’t been sure how Maggie would feel about his attentions. Then he’d seen the light in her eyes as they gazed into his soul. She hadn’t pulled away, and her response had told him more than volumes full of words could have.

  Maggie wanted him as much as he wanted her. He hated that he would have to wait to make her his. He didn’t just need time to heal; he needed to find out who he was.

  Rance closed his eyes and hoped to dream. Not the same dream that had haunted his sleep in recent days.

  He wanted to dream of Maggie.

  Dear Reader,

  Once again, Intimate Moments offers you top-notch romantic reading, with six more great books from six more great authors. First up is Gage Butler’s Reckoning, the latest in Justine Davis’s TRINITY STREET WEST miniseries. It seems Gage has a past, a past that includes a girl—now a woman—with reason to both hate him and love him. And his past is just about to become his present.

  Maria Ferrarella’s A Husband Waiting To Happen is a story of second chances that will make you smile, while Maura Seger’s Possession is a tale of revenge and matrimony that will have you longing for a cooling breeze—even if it is only March! You’ll notice our new Conveniently Wed flash on Kayla Daniels’ Her First Mother. We’ll be putting this flash on more marriage of convenience books in the future, but this is a wonderful and emotional way to begin. Another flash, The Loving Arms of the Law, has been chosen to signify novels featuring sheriffs, those perfect Western heroes. And Kay David’s Lone-Star Lawman is an equally perfect introduction. Finally, enjoy Montoya’s Heart, Bonnie Gardner’s second novel, following her successful debut, Stranger In Her Bed.

  And, of course, don’t forget to come back next month, when we’ll have six more Intimate Moments novels guaranteed to sweep you away into a world of excitement and passion.

  Enjoy!

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  * * *

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  * * *

  MONTOYA’S HEART

  BONNIE GARDNER

  Books by Bonnie Gardner

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Stranger in Her Bed #798

  Montoya’s Heart #846

  BONNIE GARDNER

  lives in Alabama with her husband of thirty years and two spoiled cats. She has two grown sons, who are serving in the air force. She loves to cook, garden and, of course, read.

  She has finally figured out what she wants to do when she grows up. After a varied career that included such jobs as a switchboard operator, draftsman and an exercise instructor, she went back to college and became an English teacher. As a teacher, she took a course on how to teach writing to high-school students. That course showed her that she would rather do it than teach it, and a new career was born.

  To Mud, as always.

  To Dad, for helping me get the farm stuff right.

  To Wayne, who keeps my computer running.

  To Ava, who reads, and Kathie, who proofreads.

  Chapter 1

  Rance, wake up.

  He struggled out of sleep, responding to his mother’s voice though he knew it had to have been a dream. As a child, Rance Montoya had dreamed repeatedly of the mother who’d disappeared, but as a man, he’d thought he’d outgrown it. Yet in the three nights he’d slept on the cot in the kitchen of this old home, the dream had begun again. It wasn’t a bad dream; it was almost comforting, in an odd sort of way.

  Rance, wake up.

  He heard his mother’s voice again as he struggled to face the morning. Why had memories of the last time he had seen her overtaken him so strongly since he’d come home?

  A dog barked, and Rance realized that must have been what called him from sleep. He swung his legs over the edge of the cot and groped for the jeans he had dropped the night before. Rubbing his tired eyes, he went to check on the dog.

  The pregnant, mostly Irish setter bitch had been curled up under the front porch when he took possession of the house three days before. Rance had made a halfhearted attempt to find out who her owner was. But the house’s proximity to the interstate highway suggested that she had most likely been abandoned when her owner was unable—or unwilling—to cope with the expected litter. She was friendly enough, and Rance couldn’t turn her away in her present condition.

  The dog whimpered and looked up listlessly as Rance peered into the nest she had dug in the cool red earth under the house. Rance patted her gently and felt her nose. It was cold and wet.

  “It doesn’t look like it’ll be long now, little mama.” Rance palpated the dog’s swollen belly. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but it seemed like the thing to do.

  He wished he could offer her a cool place to nest, but the burrow under the porch was probably cooler than any spot indoors. The house had been built in the days before air-conditioning, and Rance hadn’t been there long enough, or had the money, to install it.

  But at least it had stopped raining. Maybe he could finish painting today, before the three suites of furniture he’d ordered arrived tomorrow. Rance shrugged in the sticky, warm air. Until the humidity went down, nothing would dry, inside or out. The rain had ended a four-week dry spell that threatened crops in the rural Alabama county. Rance might have appreciated the moisture more if he was actually working the farm right now, but as far as painting was concerned, the rain was nothing but an inconvenience.

  Rance tended to the dog’s needs, then stepped out onto the overgrown front lawn and gazed up at the house. He had saved for most of his adult life to buy the farm. Not just any farm. This farm. After twenty years in the air force, saving every spare penny from his pay, he’d finally accumulated the money to reclaim most of the Hightower family’s original holdings. Holdings that had been lost when he was too small to realize what had been going on. All he knew was that his mother had blamed one man. Then she had gone, too. Now that he was back, he would find the answers he sought.

  He studied the old house and sighed. “Two-story southern pyramid-style home with second-story sleeping porch and wraparound veranda,” the real estate brochure had said. He had recognized it immediately from the picture, down to the incongruous Victorian tower haphazardly attached to the northwest corner. The place had once been called Hightower’s Haven. Later, when Luther Hightower used the farm as collateral in a business venture that eventually failed, it had become known as Hightower’s Folly.

  Rance looked up at the turret that identified the house. Horace Hightower, the original owner, had insisted upon the tower as a testament to the family name, though it was out of place on the simple wooden home, with its wide porches and fading white paint. Rance didn�
��t care that the house might look out of place in the piney hills near Mattison, Alabama. He had dreamed of this land for the better part of thirty years. Now it was his. All he had to do was make it live again.

  And he had one other mission. He had to find a man he knew only as Drake, who was connected somehow to everything that had gone wrong with Hightower’s Haven. Rance didn’t know why Drake was so important, but he did know that his father had committed suicide and his mother was gone. And everything seemed to point to Drake. In Rance’s book, they had a score to settle.

  Maggie Callahan wiped a flyaway strand of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand and glanced out the window toward the tower she could just see above the trees across the narrow country road. She looked down to her kids in the tiny yard she had carved out of the old cornfield at the entrance to her parents’ farm. Such an ordinary sight. Yet there had been moments—days—when she believed nothing would ever be ordinary again. How wonderful it was to feel normal after so long a time.

  The rain had finally stopped, and the sun was trying its best to pry a path between the clouds. With luck, the sky would clear and the Annual Popwell Family Reunion and Independence Day Extravaganza would go on as planned. The recent tinder-dry conditions had almost caused the cancellation of the Popwells’ traditional fireworks display, but rain had come just in time.

  The farmers might be grateful that the rain would save their crops, but Maggie Callahan was happy that her family tradition could take place. She needed every bit of normalcy she could find these days. Coming home had seemed so easy. Now, making a good life seemed so hard.

  Even though Chet’s air force duties had taken them all over, she and Chet had made a point of bringing their family home every July, if they could manage it. Then Chet had died in a senseless training accident, and nothing had seemed the same after that. Now she was trying to regain the equilibrium she’d lost in the past few years. Coming home was the first step.

  Maggie had missed the Fourth of July festivities for the past couple of years, and now she looked forward to the family reunion it promised.

  Sometimes she wondered if she had done the right thing in taking her kids so far from their friends, and the busy suburban life they had known in tidewater Virginia. But not on days like this. She knew the clean country air and small-town values in Mattison were far better for them than the pressures of life in a more urban town where the drug culture was rapidly gaining a foothold. She couldn’t imagine bringing the kids up anywhere without an extended family to depend on. But she’d forgotten about the isolation of living on a farm ten miles from nowhere.

  Buddy was at that crucial time in a boy’s life when he needed a man to look up to and emulate. Who was she kidding? Buddy needed a father, but he wasn’t likely to get one. Sure, Maggie’s dad helped with her son. But at sixty-four, he had a hard time keeping up.

  The distant ding of the kitchen timer called Maggie out of her introspection, and she headed inside to turn it off. She had a cake to frost and two dozen deviled eggs to finish making before noon. Pushing her thoughts aside, she hurried to the oven.

  Rance paced the worn hardwood floor. He had never been one for sitting around, and just waiting for the humidity to lessen so that he could paint was enough to drive him to distraction.

  Suddenly, a staccato sound sent him diving for cover. It had been years since he was actually in combat, and then it had been more as a spectator than a participant, but a career’s worth of military training had honed his reflexes. As his pulse rate returned to normal, he tried to identify what he’d heard. It wasn’t hunting season, at least not legal hunting. And he didn’t think there would be much game around here. Not in the summer, anyway.

  Just when Rance thought the noise was over, another volley shattered the Sunday-morning quiet, and he realized that it wasn’t gunfire that he heard. The sound had a familiar quality. He knew he’d heard it before, but couldn’t quite identify it.

  He glanced toward the screen door just in time to see the rusty-colored dog hurtle up the porch steps toward him, wild-eyed with fear. The unexpected noise might have startled Rance, but it had absolutely terrified her.

  Another burst of sound reached his ears, and Rance finally identified it and its source. He glanced through the trees and toward the narrow country road.

  For the dog’s sake, he would have to silence it if he could.

  “I hear somebody bought the old Hightower place,” Tess Hampton announced as she breezed in and made herself comfortable on a high stool in Maggie’s cramped kitchen.

  Maggie didn’t comment on her sister’s announcement, but continued stuffing yellow filling into egg halves. She had noticed that the For Sale sign that had stood, faded and worn, for what seemed like forever was gone, but she had dismissed it, assuming it had simply fallen down.

  “You don’t have anything to say about somebody moving into the house nearest you? I’d have thought you’d be the first one over to visit.” Tess dipped a manicured finger into the egg mixture and popped a dab of creamy mustard-flavored filling into her mouth.

  A series of loud crackles and pops interrupted Maggie’s train of thought. “Did you have to give them that batch of noisemakers? I’ve been trying to keep them out of their own stuff all day.”

  “Lighten up, sister of mine. It’s the Fourth of July. You’re supposed to make noise.”

  “They’ve been making noise all day without any help from outside sources,” Maggie countered as she arranged the eggs neatly on a platter. She stretched plastic wrap over them and placed the tray in the refrigerator.

  “Are you finally done?” Tess made no attempt to hide her impatience.

  “Yes, big sister, I’m finished.” Maggie followed Tess into the living room, where they settled themselves. “What do you absolutely have to have my undivided attention for?”

  “The hunk who bought the Hightower place, of course,” Tess replied as she tucked a sandaled foot under her and adjusted her designer sundress. “Have you seen him yet?”

  “No, I didn’t even know he existed until you mentioned him about five minutes ago. And who said he’s a hunk? In fact, who said he’s a he?” Maggie looked over at Tess and wished she didn’t look so decidedly frumpy next to her taller, older sister. Then she dismissed the thought. What did she care what she looked like? Only family would be in attendance today.

  “Mary Lou saw him when he went in to register the deed at the county probate Office in Pittsville. He’s about forty. Retired military, I think she said, and he supposedly paid cash for the entire one hundred acres.”

  “Consider the source, Tess. You know Mary Lou lusts after anything in pants. He’s probably a grizzled old sergeant with his belly hanging over his belt. Besides, he won’t stay any longer than any of the other half-dozen or so people who bought the place in the last thirty years.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. If nobody tells him the place is haunted, maybe he’ll stay,” Tess suggested.

  Maggie laughed humorlessly. “Nobody will have to tell him. I can guarantee Luther Hightower’s ghost will introduce himself right quick.” She shivered in spite of the July heat. “I still get chills thinking about when...”

  Tess chuckled. “We dared you to spend the night there?” She laughed again. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Tom, Truman Higgins, Nancy Nelson and I provided the ghostly sound effects.”

  Making a wry face, Maggie looked over at her sister. “I knew that. Your silliness was uninspired and predictable.” Something else entirely had spooked her. Something she still couldn’t explain had driven her from the empty house twenty years before. “I expected you guys to try something, but you were nowhere in sight when I took off like a bat out of hell at 2:00 a.m.”

  “Are you trying to tell me it really is haunted?”

  “We’re a little old to be believing in ghosts. But I know I felt something that night. And it was more than just a case of the willies. Call it a ghost if you want.”

  “What happ
ened to the idea that country life was supposed to be peaceful?” Rance muttered as he flung open the door of his used red Ford pickup. He had driven by the neat double-wide trailer that sat just off the road several times in the past few days, and he hadn’t seen so many kids there before.

  He parked the truck, then stalked over to a gawky boy who was obviously the ringleader and snatched away a string of firecrackers before the kid had a chance to light them. “Set off another one of these and I’ll break your arm,” he warned.

  Then he remembered what day it was, and some of the fight left him. He could stand one day of the racket, but the dog had nearly clawed the screen door off trying to get into the house and away from the noise. The stress was not going to ease her delivery.

  The group of kids, ranging from about ten to the teens, stopped what they were doing and stared. Rance stared back, wondering if he should apologize for his gruffness. “Is there an adult in charge around here?” he finally managed.

  The biggest boy of the bunch acted as spokesman. “Yeah. Who wants to know?”

  “That’s enough, Tom.” A long-legged blonde stepped out of the trailer onto the front stoop. “You’ll have to excuse my son. He sees too many movies.” She walked down the short flight of steps and offered her hand. “I’m Tess Hampton. This is my sister’s home. Can we help you?”

  Rance stuck out his hand and started to say something, but stopped as a woman with a cloud of flaming red hair stepped onto the stoop behind Tess. She wiped her hands on a towel as she shot a killer glance at the group of kids in the yard below.

  In spite of the cool beauty of the other woman, this second one got Rance’s attention. Her complexion was like peaches and cream sprinkled with brown sugar. And where the other woman was tall and lean, this one was shorter and softer. At least to his discerning eye. Rance guessed she was the sister.