The Cowboy's Stolen Bride

by Cora Seton

  It was a good thing Mitch Bolton, the sheriff in Silver Falls, knew how to keep a tight lid on the workings of the department. To Steel’s knowledge, no one had slipped and exposed him.

  He wondered how much longer that could last. Wondered how long it would take to finish the job his father had started. Not just because he’d like to be the one out there dancing with Stella, but because he’d like to be a bigger part of everything his family did. His siblings needed his help with the ranch. The wedding he was watching was beautiful, but beneath the festive set dressing he knew Thorn Hill was barely holding together, like many ranches in Chance Creek.

  Steel could see the strain in many of the celebrants’ faces. Everyone was trying to relax tonight, allowing themselves to enjoy the reception, but there was wear and fatigue behind each smile.

  It had been a hard summer for everyone.

  Steel ducked behind a tree as a couple wandered close to his hiding place—his sister Olivia and her husband, Noah Turner.

  They spoke softly and laughed, and Steel smiled to hear them. He respected Noah, even if he had never been able to show it due to the feud that had until recently defined their families’ relationship. Noah was a parole officer who worked for the Chance Creek sheriff’s department, so Steel had been surprised when his sister, who’d had her own brushes with the law, had ended up with him.

  But she seemed happy, and that was the important thing.

  Olivia was working at the library now, putting away money so she could go to school, get her degree and one day take over as head librarian. Noah worked on both their families’ ranches, and his parole officer salary helped make ends meet.

  Steel wondered how Noah felt about having a supposed criminal as his brother-in-law; since Noah worked for Chance Creek rather than Silver Falls, he wasn’t in the loop about Steel’s undercover activities, and as a parole officer, he probably wouldn’t have known even if they had worked in the same county, but as it was, Steel figured it had to bother the law-abiding man to think his brother-in-law was making bad choices.

  But then Noah had managed to overlook Olivia’s past. Sometimes people surprised you.

  Maybe Stella would overlook his past—if he could ever finish the job he was working on.

  Just about everyone Steel knew would get a surprise then. If only it wasn’t taking so damn long.

  The killer was a patient man. Thirteen years ago a spate of overdose deaths among young women on the fringes of Chance Creek society had alerted William Turner, Stella’s father, who had also been a sheriff’s deputy, that something more sinister than a series of accidents was taking place in his town. He couldn’t convince anyone else to take his theory seriously, so he’d enlisted Dale’s help and run a side investigation.

  When William and Dale came too close to exposing him, the killer dropped out of sight, and no other deaths that fit the profile occurred—until recently.

  When Dale knew his health was failing, he’d called Steel to visit him in prison one last time. “The investigation is yours now,” he’d rasped from his position on the other side of the plexiglass. “The killer will be back. I know it.”

  If Steel hadn’t been watching the Chance Creek crime blotter avidly all these years, he doubted anyone would have made the connection when the overdoses started in Silver Falls. At first Steel had burned with the desire to avenge his father, who might not have been caught in his own criminal enterprises if he hadn’t been working to uncover the killer. Dale had filled him in on all of it, given him a series of orders to cover up his and William’s off-the-books investigation, then had pulled strings through William to help Steel get into the sheriff’s department in Washington. Once he’d become a deputy there, he’d continued with undercover work, honing his skills. As the years passed, and there was no sign of trouble in Chance Creek, Steel figured maybe William had been wrong from the start. Maybe there’d never been a killer at all. In truth he’d come to want to shuck off the responsibility Dale had laid on his shoulders before he died. Steel had been busy creating a new life in Washington. He could have stayed there—stepped away from undercover work—

  But then the killings started again.

  Steel swallowed as he watched Eric bend close to Stella and say something in her ear. What kind of sweet nothings was the man telling her? Steel itched to be holding her himself, telling her all about his life, his past—and the future he wanted to build.

  It had taken several deaths in Silver Falls before he’d spotted the pattern, and it was only because Silver Falls’ crime reporting was lumped in with Chance Creek’s in the online version of the local paper that he’d seen it at all. It had been easy enough to join his siblings when they came back to take possession of the ranch. It was harder to convince the Silver Falls sheriff to take him on to work the case.

  For one thing, the killer’s habits had shifted enough to make it difficult to prove it was the same person. Thirteen years ago the victims were young women who were already in trouble: sex workers or petty criminals estranged from their families and known to use drugs.

  This time around the killer had changed his way of doing things, and Steel wondered if he’d upped the ante for himself to make his murders more exciting. Now he seemed to be luring women to him. The kind of women—or rather, teenage girls—who should know better.

  When Steel had first noticed the surge of overdoses in Silver Falls, he’d wondered if it was the same fentanyl scourge that was hitting everywhere. Several things bothered him right from the start, though. All the overdose victims were young and female, relatively well off, living with their families until they died. Many of them lived in Chance Creek, but their deaths occurred in Silver Falls.

  Mitch Bolton, the Silver Falls sheriff, finally took him on and gave him the leeway to work the cases, but he’d always maintained finding the source of the drugs was Steel’s true mandate. He didn’t believe in a single killer as much as he thought all drugs were far too accessible. Steel was determined to work both sides of the case and hoped to get it done in a year.

  He shook his head now at his own folly. He’d underestimated the job, and now he was paying for it. He hadn’t been able to let Stella know who he really was. Had managed to dance with her a time or two, and that was it. Now Eric was stealing her—

  And it was his own damn fault.

  He’d wasted a lot of time building relationships with petty dealers and criminals but couldn’t seem to get traction with anyone higher in the distribution chain. In desperation he finally repeated his father’s idea: he grew a crop of pot of his own to try to sell—a move he hoped signaled to other dealers he was ready to play ball, a small-time operator who wanted to move into bigger things. He’d planted it on the Ridley property, an abandoned ranch that bordered his family’s and the Turners’ land.

  It had almost worked, too. He’d gotten some interest from an outfit in town to the point where they’d started feeling almost territorial about the crop. They’d started sending their own men out to patrol it, a couple of lackeys who’d first surprised his sister Tory, then her soon-to-be husband, on the Ridley property. Luckily, neither of those occasions had escalated to a serious confrontation. Steel had told them to lay off—and stay away from his crop—and inadvertently unleashed a firestorm.

  Literally.

  Steel assumed the men had complained around town about his high-handedness, and the killer, whoever he was, figured it was his chance to deal once and for all with him, a man asking too many questions about the overdoses. He had to hand it to the man. Sending goons to tie him up and burn down his crop had all the hallmarks of an attack those local dealers might have made in retaliation when he’d balked their supervision, and Sheriff Holden had certainly been convinced that’s exactly what happened.

  Steel knew the sheriff was wrong. He’d seen the two men who’d come after him. They weren’t the same men who’d wanted to patrol his crop. In fact, they weren’t from around these parts at all. They were hired guns who’d
infiltrated his property, disarmed and disposed of him so methodically he knew they’d done this dozens of times before. He had no idea where the killer had found them or how he’d gotten them to do his dirty work.

  He was lucky he was alive today. His crop and most of the structures on the Ridley property had burned to the ground.

  He’d filled in Mitch Bolton on what had happened. His attackers left town before anyone caught up to them, though, and Steel was none the wiser as to whom they worked for. No one else seemed to know either. He hadn’t blown his cover—everyone still thought he was a petty criminal. A not-very-savvy petty criminal, but he’d upped his cred a little.

  “Maybe you aren’t such a homebody after all,” one of the other dealers had remarked a few days after the fire when he’d bumped into him on the outskirts of Silver Falls.

  “Homebody? What the hell are you talking about?” he’d asked in some consternation. Hardly an adjective he wanted associated with him when he was acting undercover.

  “Figured you were kind of a family man, living at Thorn Hill and all.”

  “Fuck, no.” But he’d taken the comment to heart. Here he’d thought he’d been doing such a good job establishing his bad reputation, and he hadn’t been fooling anyone at all. No wonder he wasn’t getting anywhere.

  Time to change things up.

  If only he’d done so sooner.

  Steel had rented a broken-down trailer in Silver Falls some months ago to use as a crash-pad when he didn’t want to go home, but now he moved there full time and stopped going back to Thorn Hill. He let his garbage pile up outside. Went out at all hours. Spent his time in dive bars. Let it be known he was available for whatever needed to be done.

  Now he was at a loss about what to do next. He hated knowing someone out there held all the cards. The killer, whoever he was, could see the whole game board. All Steel had was bits and pieces of the puzzle. Who was luring these girls to their deaths?

  And was he also responsible for the two violent homicides in Silver Falls in the past year that had shaken people up? Those murders had people whispering about a Chance Creek killer, but unlike the overdoses, which everyone thought of as accidents, both homicides had involved blunt force trauma. Those victims were male. Not the MO of the man he was hunting, and Steel didn’t think they were linked. Neither did Mitch Bolton, which meant he’d assigned those cases to other people.

  He had to work harder. Figure out why kids like Rena Klein, a teenaged girl who’d died just a few days ago, and Cecilia Foster, who’d overdosed three months before Rena, kept ending up dead when they seemed to have everything to live for.

  He needed to solve this investigation and get it tied off, or he would lose any chance he had with Stella.

  If he hadn’t lost it already.

  Voices sounded closer to him than was comfortable, and he pulled farther back into the shadows, tearing his gaze from Stella. Olivia was back, this time with his brother, Lance—and his aunt Virginia, a termagant of a woman with a sharp tongue and an even sharper-tipped umbrella she liked to carry even when it wasn’t raining.

  “We need to win,” Virginia was saying, and Steel immediately knew the topic of conversation.

  The Ridley property—otherwise known as Settler’s Ridge—the same piece of abandoned ranch land where he’d tried to grow his pot crop.

  Virginia, and everyone else in town, had been obsessed with winning it since the Founder’s Prize was announced in the spring. She wanted to add its land to Thorn Hill—and more importantly in these dry times, she wanted control of Pittance Creek, the small stream that ran between the Cooper and Turner ranches. Of course, the Turners wanted it, too.

  Whoever contributed the most to Chance Creek would win the long-abandoned ranch. The announcement of the prize had kicked off a hearty competition between his family, the Turners and others in town.

  His family launched an improvement plan for Chance Creek High. The Turners countered by renovating the town library and saving the dialysis unit at the local hospital, which had been slated to be shut down. The Lowmans donated a building to house the town history museum, with suitably low rent for the non-profit organization. That left the Turners in the lead.

  Virginia was on the warpath.

  “At this point all we can do is tie up the contest, Virginia,” Lance pointed out. Not too long ago, Lance had been as riled up about beating the Turners as Virginia was. He’d mellowed out significantly after he’d married Maya Turner, and they had both secured scholarships to study history in the coming fall semester. Lance seemed happier than Steel had ever seen him, and Steel was proud of what his brother had made of his life.

  “You can do better than that if you put your mind to it. We need to create something spectacular for this town. Something that sweeps the competition.”

  “What we need is to help the kids around these parts,” Olivia countered. “Did you hear about Rena Klein? She overdosed. I think we should raise funds to expand the detox and stabilization units in town. They don’t even serve teenagers.”

  Steel poked his head out, drawn by the content of their conversation, and saw that Jed Turner was heading their way. He pulled back into the shadows as Virginia snapped, “The last thing we need is to associate the Cooper name with anything related to drugs. So come up with a better project than that—fast. You hear me? We can’t let those Turners get their mitts on Settler’s Ridge.”

  “Are you forgetting I’m a Turner now?” Olivia teased Virginia. She was married to Noah, after all.

  “And so is my wife,” Lance pointed out.

  “And I hope you don’t regret it half as much as I regret having to depend on a bunch of do-nothings to win that land!”

  Steel withdrew even more, biting back a smile. Virginia was a scrapper, but he had bigger fish to fry than worrying about the Ridley property. He had a killer to catch—

  And he had to do it before he forever lost his chance to woo Stella.

  Where was Steel Cooper now?

  Stella knew she should focus on Eric, who was moving her around to the slow country tune the band was playing, but she found it hard to keep her mind from wandering. The evening was warm, the music good, and a Montana sky’s worth of stars shimmered overhead. A romantic setting for sure—

  So why couldn’t she focus on the man in her arms?

  When the Coopers moved back to town three years ago, Stella had never thought Steel would take up so much of her thoughts, but lately she couldn’t shake his face from her mind—or his touch from her dreams.

  He’d danced with her on a couple of occasions this summer, each time simply to rile up one of her brothers. Those dances meant nothing, but still she could remember the feel of his hands on her waist, the crispness of his shirt against her cheek and the shivers he’d sent down her spine when he’d whispered in her ear.

  “Stella?” Eric’s voice broke into her reverie, and she shook off her wayward thoughts. Steel wasn’t a suitable match for her, no matter how she reacted when he was near. “What are you thinking about?” Eric pulled her against him, and she shifted to try to get more comfortable. It wasn’t fair to him to keep wishing it was Steel’s broad shoulders she had her arms wrapped around.

  Eric Holden was one of the best men Stella knew. She’d always appreciated his dedication to his job. He was one of the first to get into work in the morning and still there when she clocked off for the day. Several times, driving through town at night, she’d seen his truck in the sheriff’s department parking lot, his office light on. He was steadfast, energetic and good-looking, even if he was a bit older than she was. She couldn’t say why he didn’t rev her up the way Steel did.

  “Just… appreciating the music.” It was true as far as it went. The band was competent, and dancing with Eric was nice enough. He was a solid man, still muscular despite his forty-three years. Handsome, too, with a strong jaw and green eyes that were easy to get lost in. She knew other women were watching and envying her, which made it ridi
culous that she couldn’t keep her mind off Steel.

  Daydreaming about the man was wrong in so many ways she couldn’t count them. She was a Turner. He was a Cooper. She valued honesty, forthrightness and good citizenship, all characteristics Eric possessed in spades. Who knew what Steel valued? She worked for the sheriff’s department as a receptionist—and hoped to move into a different position soon. Steel skirted the law like his father had—and maybe outright broke it.

  She needed a man like Eric. A sheriff’s deputy, like she hoped to be one day. A good, forthright, caring man she’d always be able to depend on. She’d never have to wonder what Eric was up to; she could read him like an open book. He loved his work, his baseball team and his country. There weren’t any layers to him—or secrets. He wasn’t like Steel, slipping in and out of her life in disconcerting ways, never making it clear if he thought of her as date material or just the girl next door.

  If he thought of her at all.

  Besides, she had too much on her plate to worry about men very much. The next intake for deputy training was coming up fast. First she had to pass the entrance exams, including a physical fitness test. That meant getting into better shape.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about you.” Eric broke into her thoughts, drawing her closer.

  “Really?”

  “Really.” He bent to brush a kiss over her forehead. Stella’s heart sank. He’d been thinking about sex with her, clearly. Did he ever consider her intellect, sense of humor or achievements?

  Of course he did, she told herself, but they were at a wedding. The whole evening had been romantic. Could she blame Eric for being in a romantic mood—even if she wasn’t?

  The truth was, she felt torn about her single status. On the one hand, everyone around her was getting married, and she felt left behind. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure she was ready for a relationship with anyone. She had things to do—changes to make in her life. She had a feeling Eric was the kind of guy who liked things to stay the same.