No resisting this cowboy!

Brianna Wright has ventured to the Bell River Ranch to make peace with her sister. With enough time here in Colorado, Bree might accomplish that goal and forget the mess of her business back in Boston. Of course, none of that will happen if she lets herself get distracted by a certain gorgeous and charming cowboy—Grayson Harper. Really, resisting a guy as carefree as he is should be easy for someone as responsible as Bree.

But it’s clear Gray has his sights set on her, and his determination is stronger than Bree thought! As they work together on the ranch, she realizes there’s more to Gray than his footloose facade suggests. If that’s true, he just might win her over!

She was a puzzle he wanted to solve.

Gray sensed layers and textures in Bree’s personality that went far beyond “prissy” or “icy” or “dull”…any of the unflattering names she’d been labelled with. Undercurrents both deep and powerful—and touchingly human.

Well, okay, then, maybe he knew Bree better than he had realized. They belonged to that sorry club—the children who had survived the unsurvivable, and didn’t really know why. Or where to go from there.

A large bird, maybe an eagle, landed somewhere high in the pines over their heads, causing the sunlight to shift as the branches swayed. For an instant, the light seemed to catch on two crystal sparkles at the outer edges of Bree’s cool blue eyes.

Tears? Gray frowned. Was the ice princess fighting back tears?

She blinked then, and the illusion disappeared. But he was left with a sudden, inexplicable hunger to know her better, to find out more about her.

A lot more.

And…just his luck. He had only thirty days to do it.

Dear Reader,

I’m a homebody. I prove all the clichés. Home really is where my heart lives. I bloom where I’m planted, and I like my roots deep and permanent. However humble my “castle” might be, there’s no place like it.

I love reading books that feature fascinating houses—as mysterious as Manderley or as simple as the Little House on the Prairie. I also tend to write about characters struggling to find, or to keep, or to reclaim the place in this world that makes them feel whole.

Brianna Wright is, perhaps, the most dislocated heroine I’ve ever written. When her father killed her mother sixteen years ago, she and her sisters were banished from Bell River, the beautiful family ranch. When we meet her, the patchwork life she’s cobbled together in exile has just ripped to pieces. She realizes the one place she wants to go is…

Home. But is there anything left in Silverdell, Colorado, for her?

Surely the answer can’t be Grayson Harper III, the charming former heir to Silverdell’s marble quarry millions. Disinherited, cynical and determined to avoid commitment, Gray takes a menial job at Bell River. He’s made it clear he’s staying only a few weeks, just long enough to win his bet and get reinstated in his grandfather’s will.

Just long enough to break Bree’s already-wounded heart. Or, perhaps, to heal his own.

I hope you’ll enjoy sharing their journey back to that powerful, magical, sometimes dangerous place we call home. And I hope that you, too, find the comfort and love that come with home, sweet home.

Warmly,

Kathleen O’Brien

PS—Please visit me on the web at www.KathleenOBrien.com. Come by and say hi on Facebook or Twitter!

Betting on the Cowboy

Kathleen O’Brien

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathleen O’Brien was a feature writer and TV critic before marrying a fellow journalist. Motherhood, which followed soon after, was so marvelous she turned to writing novels, which could be done at home. She doesn’t really believe in astrology, but she can’t deny that she fits the Cancer profile well—at least in the “home and family first” department. As the poets say, no man is an island—even if we sometimes think it might be easier that way!

To my editor, Wanda Ottewell, with thanks.

Your insight and your understanding mean so much to the stories—and to me.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

BRIANNA WRIGHT PULLED up to the Townsends’ elegant Boston Back Bay mansion under a starry black sky, handed her car over to the valet with a forced smile and rushed up the stairs breathlessly. Darn it, she was late. Really late. Ten o’clock. No, almost eleven—thank you so much, gridlocked airport traffic!

Now she’d missed three hours of her own party—well, the party her company, Breelie’s, had produced, anyhow—and Townsend’s fiftieth birthday bash was already in full swing. Music and laughter poured through the open, brilliantly lit windows.

Too much laughter, perhaps, so early? She frowned. The open bar must be getting a workout.

Oh, well. Townsend was a tire magnate, and his millions could cover the liquor tab no matter how high it went. At least it sounded as if the guests were having fun.

She didn’t know why that should surprise her—the parties planned by Breelie’s rarely flopped. But something about this event had always bugged her a little. Maybe it was just that the “harem” theme had never appealed to her. That didn’t matter, of course. Whatever the client wanted, he got. Or, in this case, whatever the client’s trophy wife, Iliana Townsend, wanted, she got.

Bree just hoped Charlie hadn’t gone overboard. Not that she thought he had. As her fiancée and her business partner, he deserved her complete trust. And he had it...of course he did. It was just that...

She’d been out of town for most of the planning, which obviously accounted for some of her discomfort. She trusted Charlie implicitly, of course, but...

She did wish he had answered his cell phone more often this week. When Charlie went dark, it usually meant he was spending more money than he felt like justifying over the phone. He trusted his ability to persuade anyone of anything, but only as long as they were within the target range of his surface-to-surface ballistic charm.

As she passed under a faux ogee arch and into the unrecognizable entry hall, she suddenly froze in place. She stared, openmouthed, at the glittering, jingling, splashing, sparkling madness before her.

For an instant, she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.

This was the high-society party she had hoped would put her event-planning company on the Boston A-list? This...this...circus?

What in God’s name had Charlie been thinking? The room writhed with half-naked humanity. Belly dancers. Sword swallowers. Eunuchs. Champagne fountains, ruby-grape pyramids, peacock-feather fans and tables groaning with bacchanalian treats. Charlie had created an entire fake Persian seraglio, complete with a hundred over-the-hill sultans flirting with two hundred giggling harem “girls.”

Bree’s temples throbbed, and her airplane-food dinner suddenly turned poisonously acidic.

Damn it, Charlie! She’d told him a thousand times that, in the upscale Boston society event-planning business, reputation was more important than anything else. Anything. Even more important than the bottom line.

And, long before this, she’d had a niggling feeling they were getting a reputation for being...

Well, vulgar.

She set her jaw as a trio of belly dancers wriggled by with a tinkle of gold coins in the air and a skitter of gold flickers on the walls. A sword swallower followed behind, ogling the dancers’ hips. Behind him—a snake charmer with a real live snake slithering around his shoulders.

Oh, dear God. If vulgarity were an Olympic event, this pretentious absurdity would definitely take the gold.

Her hands tightened into fists at her sides. Charlie might be a genius at coaxing money out of rich women, but Bree was going to strangle him for this.

If she could just find him.

Instead, as she scanned the crowd, the only person she recognized was Bill Townsend, the guest of honor himself. But he didn’t look honored. He looked furious. His dark eyes and full lips glowered, and he moved like an angry bull, his bulky shoulders plowing a path through the guests as if they were so many inconveniently placed mannequins. His bushy mustache and eyebrows resembled Tom Selleck more than Yul Brynner, but the scimitar at his side suddenly seemed more lethal than any prop ever should.

Though he passed within two feet of Bree, he didn’t notice her any more than he noticed any of the others. He kept up his furious stride until he reached the burbling, three-tiered champagne fountain in the center of the ridiculous room.

Iliana, his forty-five-year-old trophy wife who always looked like a beautifully embalmed twenty-year-old, was nowhere in sight. Had the couple been fighting? Great. If the host and hostess ended up having a big row tonight, Bree’s party would be remembered for that, not the hours and hours of work she and Charlie had put into it.

An elderly, diffident sultan, whose headdress was bigger than his whole body, approached Townsend, hand outstretched, a “happy birthday” smile on his face. Townsend turned his back on the man rudely. He grabbed a silver chalice from a passing waiter, thrust it under the honey-colored stream, letting the bubbles spill all over his fingers, then knocked the champagne back in one harsh toss.

Bree groaned under her breath. This could get ugly. Where the heck was Charlie? He needed to find Iliana, who might be able to handle her drunk husband. The women were always Charlie’s responsibility. He was good with bored trophy wives. He could always pump out an extra squirt of charm and coax them into ever-higher displays of extravagance.

Unfortunately, at the moment, he seemed to be just as absent as the hostess. Bree shut her eyes, trying to swallow her fury. But really. Maybe strangling was too good for him.

“Ms. Wright?”

She opened her eyes. A tall “eunuch” stood in front of her, holding a tray of wineglasses. She eyed them carefully, wondering how many bottles they’d run through. If Townsend was already in a foul humor, he might balk at an astronomical liquor tab, after all.

“Everything okay, Ms. Wright?” The eunuch hesitated, looking nervous. Poor guy. She had a reputation, she knew, for being a stickler.

“No. I mean yes, everything’s fine.” It wasn’t this poor guy’s fault. He appeared as miserable as she felt. So she propped up her artificial smile, hearing her guardian’s voice in her head. Kitty Afton, the Boston divorcée who had taken Bree in after her mother’s murder, had believed that cheerfulness was next to godliness. Even in the early days, when surely she knew Bree was heartbroken and traumatized, Kitty had scolded her new protégée for letting her lips lose their pleasant feminine curve. “No one likes a sad sack, Brianna. You’ll catch more flies with honey.”

The waiter-eunuch nodded uneasily, then moved on. Bree checked Townsend again. He hadn’t budged from the fountain. He was refilling his chalice, though his eyes glittered, and a sparkling trail of champagne already trickled from his chin like golden spit.

She couldn’t wait for Charlie or Iliana. She’d have to try to handle Townsend herself. Reluctantly, Bree merged into the melee of guests, somehow keeping the smile on her lips.

“Mr. Townsend?”

He turned, the chalice halfway to his mouth, and glared at her over the rim. As he took in her simple slate-blue sheath, his eyes narrowed. “What are you supposed to be? Didn’t you get the memo? This is a costume party. You’ve got to look like an idiot or you don’t get in.”

She deepened her smile, as if he’d meant it as a joke. But the bitterness in his voice was unmistakable. The drinking was a symptom of a deeper problem...not the cause. She really needed to find Iliana and get things patched up.

“I’m not actually a guest,” she explained. “I’m Brianna Wright. My company, Breelie’s, is the one you hired to—”

“You’re...” He lowered the golden vessel, spilling liquid precariously close to her shoes, but ignoring it. “You are Brianna Wright?”

“I am,” she said. She’d met him twice, during the initial negotiations, but she wasn’t surprised that he didn’t remember. He’d spent most of both meetings pacing the hall outside her office, barking at someone on his cell phone.

He shook his head for a minute, and then let out a loud, seal-like honk of laughter. Now, that did surprise her. She had traveled in a very uncomfortable, very dressy getup, complete with three-inch heels and panty hose, just so that she would look professional when she arrived. She’d even denied herself the luxury of a nap, so that she wouldn’t muss the sleek French knot of blond hair at the nape of her neck.

“You seem amused,” she observed coolly, irritated in spite of her determination to remain calm.

“Oh, I am definitely amused, sweetheart.” He grinned, showing six very white front teeth surrounded by neighbors far less brilliant. “I really, really am.”

She frowned and opened her mouth to respond, but then, without warning, his large hand flicked out and grabbed hers.

“Hey!” She recoiled instinctively from his damp, sticky clutch and the aroma of stale champagne that wafted from his skin. But he had clamped on tightly and didn’t let go.

“Come with me, Brianna Wright,” he said, turning away from the fountain, tugging her along without so much as glancing back to see if she was willing, or whether she would have to be dragged. “There’s something I want to show you.”

People were staring at her now, which was saying something, since surely she was the least outlandish spectacle at this particular party. “Mr. Townsend, I really don’t think—”

He looked back at her over his shoulder, his eyes suddenly clear and sober. “Your company is in charge of this party, right? Well, there’s a problem, and I think you should know about it.”

She didn’t have much recourse after that, though she did manage eventually to extricate her hand and follow him with a little more dignity and at least the appearance of free will.

The guests seemed to part before them, as if they were just props operated by stagehands pulling levers behind the scenes. Maybe the people smelled danger radiating from their host. Bree certainly did.

When Townsend reached the big central staircase and began to climb, her internal sirens started to go off wildly. Why would he need to show her anything on the second floor? Kitchen, her problem. Buffet table, her problem. Decorations, liquor, security and even valet parking...all Breelie’s problems. But her company’s responsibilities didn’t extend beyond the first floor.

She hesitated, her hand on the polished onyx railing. He hadn’t climbed more than four steps when his sixth sense obviously told him he’d lost her. He turned again, and laughed.

“Really, Ms. Wright,” he said, his eyes glittering with some secret, inexplicable mirth. The effect was decidedly unwholesome, and a shiver ran down her spine. “I have a houseful of half-dressed concubines. You think I have designs on your icy virtue?”

“No,” she said. His tone was so dismissive she found herself flushing, which was ridiculous. She’d worked hard to cultivate “icy” and had always considered it a compliment when people described her that way. Better “icy” than half-mad with uncontrolled passions, as so many in her dysfunctional family tended to be. “Of course not.”

“Well, then?” He gestured impatiently.

Still, she hesitated. Something about the moment felt profoundly off. Why was he furious one instant, sardonic the next? And why on earth did he want to take her upstairs? Only the bedrooms were up there....

He laughed again, shook his head as if despairing at her naiveté, then abruptly leaned over the banister.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” His voice rose over the chatter, over the bubbling champagne fountain, even over the string quartet in the corner alcove. “Follow me! I have a surprise for you!”

All the faces tilted up toward him, though half the crowd was clearly too drunk to fully process his words and didn’t stir. But at least a dozen laughing sultans and belly dancers churned toward the staircase, ready for anything that sounded different and amusing.

Bree wanted to be relieved. Whatever he had in mind, at least it didn’t require privacy. That ruled out the most unpleasant scenarios, surely. So why, as the costumed guests surged up the stairs, creating a tidal wave that swept her along, did she have a sudden instinctive desire to turn around and flee?

She didn’t do it, of course. That really would have set the gossips buzzing. Instead, she trailed along as Townsend made his way down the wide hall, turning occasionally to put his forefinger theatrically against his lips to shush his followers.

With every step, though, she felt herself retreating deeper into the numb bubble that had protected her from painful situations in the past. In the sixteen years since her mother’s murder, she’d perfected the art of plunging her emotions into a frozen state, much like a medically induced coma, even while, on the outside, she appeared utterly serene and confident.

Icy, as she was always being told.

Finally, in front of the last door on the left, Townsend paused. He made one more “shh” gesture to his guests, then crooked his finger invitingly toward Bree, offering her the place of honor beside him. Unseen hands prodded her from behind, urging her toward her host, and before she could react, she was close enough to see the unholy gleam in his eyes.

“Mr. Townsend,” she tried again uneasily. But he put his finger against her lips and grinned down at her, like an evil mime. She felt her heart accelerate. Whatever lay behind this door evoked a strong emotion in him. She wished she knew him well enough to interpret that glitter. Was it anger? Or was it glee?

With an elaborate flourish, he reached out for the doorknob and turned it slowly, so slowly it didn’t make a sound. Neither did his guests, who obviously had caught the mystery fever and were craning forward in eager, hypnotized silence.

They pressed so fervently that when Townsend finally pushed the door open, Bree almost stumbled across the threshold.

Before her lay a beautiful room, decorated with a champagne-colored carpet and hunter-green bed linens and drapes. The overhead light was off, but a green-and-gold stained-glass dragonfly table lamp cast an amber circle onto the king-size bed, like a spotlight picking out the important actors on a stage.

In that amber circle, something palely pink and subtly obscene jerked and twisted, making rough, breathless, wordless sounds.

For a shell-shocked moment, Bree’s mind wouldn’t work. She somehow couldn’t identify what she was looking at. It wasn’t human, surely...that monstrous shape, with too many limbs, white-soled feet rising out of what looked like a tanned and muscled back...

Only when the people behind her began to gasp, and some to titter, did she finally jerk awake and understand. Two or three in the crowd laughed out loud; those more brazen, who had probably known from the start what the “surprise” would be.

With a cry of alarm, the monster on the bed separated into two parts. Charlie, who had been on top, leaped up, grabbing the green bedspread and awkwardly trying to cover himself with it in a pathetic display of selfishness that left his partner completely exposed.

Furiously, the woman on the bed, who was now recognizable as Iliana Townsend, yanked at the bedspread, too. Charlie, whose face was red and pop-eyed with terror, wouldn’t let go, and the momentary tug-of-war was such a farce that everyone in the doorway burst out laughing.

Everyone except Townsend himself, and Bree. She suddenly felt dizzy, almost blind with fury. Oddly, she was angrier with Townsend for setting up this humiliation than she was with Charlie for causing it.

She glanced at the man now, wondering how he’d react to the sight of his wife’s expensive breast implants bobbing about for everyone to ogle. Wondering if he would find Charlie’s egregious lack of chivalry as disgusting as she did.

To her surprise, Townsend was still grinning.

Catching her horrified gaze, he winked salaciously. “Now look at that. Isn’t that sweet? In honor of the occasion, my loving wife apparently decided to wear her birthday suit.”

More laughter. Scanning the glassy-eyed, half-clad partiers and their mocking host, Bree realized suddenly that she was way out of her depth here. Back home in Silverdell, Colorado, nobody laughed at adultery. Back home, nobody invited an audience to a cuckolding.

Of course, back home, when her father had discovered her mother’s infidelity, he had thrown her down the staircase and broken her neck. So maybe this decadent indifference was more civilized, in the end.

But even so, she couldn’t understand it. It shocked her, and made her feel slightly ill. Perhaps that meant that, in spite of all the years living here in Boston, all the college education and the designer clothes and the artificially icy poise, she would always be just a Colorado cowgirl at heart.

What a joke...what a long, ironic laugh fate must be having right now, watching her try to handle these Eastern sophisticates—and fail.

Finally the red-faced, guilty cats seemed to find their tongues.

“Bill,” Iliana wheedled. “It’s not what it looks like—”

“Bree,” Charlie called, trying to move toward her, but pinned in place by his lover’s death grip on her end of the bedspread. “Bree, give me a chance to explain. She wouldn’t take no for an answer—”

“Why, you lying bastard!” Iliana jerked so hard on the spread that Charlie lost his hold. The sudden full-frontal nudity, which cruelly offered everyone the measure of Charlie’s shriveled, terrified penis, sent another wave of laughter through the room.

Bree turned her back on the sight. She eyed the others, drawing on every icy ounce of disdain she could muster, and willed them to move away from the door. Slowly, as if repelled by cold waves emanating from her, they did.

Chin high, she walked out. She didn’t look back, though she heard Charlie’s plaintive call of “Bree! Bree!” behind her, as if he were some kind of frantic cat stuck in a tree he’d foolishly climbed on a whim and now couldn’t figure out how to descend.

She kept walking. Down the stairs, through the other guests, who had gone back to their own drinking and flirting, long ago having forgotten that something was unfolding upstairs. Past the champagne fountain, past the pyramids of grapes and the string quartet, still sawing out Mozart to the tone-deaf crowd.

Out to the valet, to whom she handed her ticket calmly. She tipped him a hundred dollars as she climbed into her car because she was so grateful to him for bringing the means to escape.

Protocol required him to feign indifference. She could have handed him a coupon for a fast-food cheeseburger instead of money, and he was supposed to pocket the paper without looking.

But obviously he knew how to sneak a peek surreptitiously. His eyes widened.

“Thank you,” he said, shocked into revealing that he’d checked the denomination. “I mean...thank you, Ms. Wright. I hope you had a nice time at the party.”

“Yes,” she said automatically. She remembered him now. Tim. Tim Murfin. He owned the valet service, and she’d used his company before. He was honest, and he was smart. “Yes, it was a very interesting party.”

In her rearview mirror, she saw Charlie racing toward the portico. He was dressed, mostly, though he was still stuffing his shirt into his waistband with rushed fingers. “Bree, wait!”

“Excuse me,” she said politely to Tim, and he stepped away from the door, glancing toward Charlie with a furrowed brow.

As soon as the valet was clear, she pulled the door shut and stepped on the gas. She had no intention of letting Charlie reach the car. She wouldn’t put it past him to climb onto the hood and splay himself there until she agreed to listen to his stupid excuses.

Nothing he could say could possibly make any difference at all. He’d be busy trying to convince her that he really loved her, that his dalliance had meant nothing. He might even be craven enough to say he’d done it for them, for Breelie’s, to keep a customer satisfied.

He would imagine that he’d broken her heart. He’d think, no doubt, that she was hurt by his betrayal, and mourning their lost relationship.

But he’d be wrong. She didn’t give a damn about any of that. The minute she’d seen him jump from that bed, ungallantly covering himself and leaving Iliana helplessly naked before all her friends, she’d understood what the real victim of the humiliating melodrama would be.

Not their relationship. Not her heart.

No. She realized at that moment that she’d probably never loved him, not real love, not with her whole soul.

The damage he’d done was even worse than that.

What Charlie had destroyed, by sleeping with their most prominent client, and making a spectacle before half of Boston society, was Brianna’s career.

He had destroyed Breelie’s.

And she would never, ever, ever forgive him for that.

* * *

THE FRONT DRAWING room of Harper House, where Grayson Harper stood waiting for his grandfather, held at least ten red-silk-upholstered seats. He had his choice of armchairs, straight-backed chairs, two divans and one chaise longue. All unoccupied. All antiques, all chosen for comfort as well as beauty.

And yet he stood.

Sitting was something you did when you wanted to make yourself at home. Sitting was relaxed. Unguarded. Sitting made you the patiently waiting beta child to the superior alpha adult who would come stalking in, militarily erect, sneering down at his uninvited visitor.

So, no, he’d stand, thanks anyhow. Gray Harper was no one’s beta—especially not his grandfather’s. After all this time, he intended to meet the old bastard eye to eye.

Two could play the power game, and obviously his grandfather had made the first move already, keeping Gray cooling his heels down here for as long as possible. He glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantel, which ticked in the deep silence like someone tsking sardonically. The housekeeper, a woman Gray had of course never met, since the old man was too irascible to keep employees for long, had led him into the drawing room at least half an hour ago.

“He’s dressing,” the woman had said when she returned from announcing Gray. “He says to wait here, and he’ll be down soon.”

Dressing? Gray smiled with tight lips. His grandfather could have had a new suit of clothes bought, tailored and delivered on foot from the haberdashery on Elk Avenue in that much time.

But patience. Patience. After ten years, what was another ten minutes? He had something to say, and he planned to say it, even if he had to wait all night.

He went to the window and, putting his hands in his pockets, gazed out at the beautifully landscaped view of terraced lawn sloping down to the little town of Silverdell below. The sunset gleamed pink against the thin white spire of the Episcopal church and on the blue-gray rim of mountains in the distance.

Instantly, the sight took Gray back to his youth.

His youth. Not a place he wanted to linger. He squinted, imagining he could see rain on the horizon, even absurdly sniffing a hint of wood smoke in the April air, though the fireplace was cold and still.

Maybe that was why his grandfather was keeping him waiting. Letting him simmer in this ghost-filled room long enough to render him weak.

Frowning, he turned around again.

His grandfather stood in the doorway.

Gray inhaled sharply, startled in spite of having known full well the old man would jockey for an advantage somehow.

“Sir,” he said, out of habit more than anything else. Certainly not out of respect.

One corner of his grandfather’s thin mouth tilted up slightly, as if he understood the distinction. “Gray.”

Another family might have made a drama out of the moment. After ten years of complete silence and absolute estrangement, most people probably would have considered a display of feelings relevant. Shock, recriminations, tears, joy...anything. After all, neither grandfather nor grandson had been completely sure, until today, that the other still lived.

But old Grayson Harper the First would have considered any emotional outburst to be a sign of weakness. And young Grayson Harper the Third simply didn’t give a damn anymore.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” his grandfather lied. He hobbled into the room, using a silver-tipped cane that Gray had never seen before. He had done the calculations before he arrived, so he knew that his grandfather had just celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday. The old man’s hair had been thickly silver as long as Gray could remember, and his face lined, so other than the limp, nothing much had changed.

“No problem,” Gray said, matching the tone of fake courtesy. “I’m in no hurry.”

“Ah. The luxury of time to kill.” His grandfather smiled coldly, putting both palms over the head of the cane and leaning subtly forward. “Still not gainfully employed, then? Or...what is the euphemism these days? Between jobs?”

A pulse started to hammer at Gray’s temple, and he took a consciously deep breath. That was cheap bait, a quick piece of dirty chum his grandfather probably tossed out by habit. He wasn’t eighteen anymore, and he didn’t have to rise to it.

“Exactly,” he agreed placidly. “Between jobs.”

The older man frowned. He shifted his weight, repositioning the cane. Clearly, his injury, arthritis, gout...whatever necessitated the cane...was bothering him. And yet he equally clearly didn’t want to be the first to acknowledge the need to sit.

For one ruthless second, Gray told himself he was glad. It served the old man right. Gray would happily stand here all night, if that meant his grandfather might know even a fraction of the pain he’d caused other people. People like Gray’s father and mother.

But the thought died instantly. In the end, it was beneath Gray to torture an old man—it was not his way, in spite of what his grandfather had modeled for him through the years.

So he took the nearest chair. Immediately after, his grandfather settled on the edge of the silk divan stiffly, as if his hip didn’t bend correctly anymore. He didn’t allow himself a sigh of relief, but the lines in his face eased slightly.

“So.” He massaged his palm into the head of the cane, eyeing Gray over it. “What brings you back to Silverdell?”

Just like that. No small talk. No “How are you?” or “Did you marry, have children, stay healthy, make money, buy a house...did you ever forgive me?”

Simply go straight to the point. Fine. Again, two could play that game.

“You bring me back,” Gray answered matter-of-factly.

“Is that so?” His grandfather raised his shaggy white eyebrows. “Not intentionally, I assure you.”

Gray shook his head a fraction of an inch. The mean old buzzard hadn’t softened a bit, had he? Well, that was probably for the best. His arrogance and unyielding antagonism made Gray’s job so much easier. As he’d journeyed back to Colorado from California, he’d wondered what he would do if the old man had grown weak, or senile, or sentimental. He’d wondered what he would say if his grandfather welcomed him home with open arms.

This was much cleaner. Now he could just speak his piece without wasting time trying to be diplomatic. And he could get out of this house before the past swallowed him up and broke his heart all over again.

“Nonetheless, it’s true.” He gazed at the old man, whose face was tinted a deceptively youthful pink by reflected sunset. “You really are the reason I’ve returned.”

His grandfather frowned, as if he had a sudden gas pain. “Why? Had you heard I was sick or something? Did you hope you could breeze in at the stroke of midnight, butter up a dying man and get yourself written back into my will?”

Gray laughed. “Nope. Hadn’t heard a thing. Believe it or not, no one out in California talks about you, your health or your money. Why, are you sick?”

“No.” More rubbing his palm into the head of the cane, more scowling from under those unruly eyebrows. “I’m old, and my hip isn’t what it used to be. But if you’re here for a deathbed vigil, you’ll have a long time to wait.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, what, then?” The old man grunted, a deeply skeptical sound. “You don’t really expect me to believe the money has nothing to do with it.”

Gray leaned back in his chair, smiling. “Oh, the money has everything to do with it.”

His grandfather’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t speak. He simply waited. He obviously refused to give Gray the satisfaction of asking for details.

No problem. Gray had rehearsed this part often enough that he didn’t need prompting. He’d been rehearsing it for seventeen years, in fact. Since he was thirteen and filled with impotent fury at being so young, so helpless, so dependent on this tyrant. At being unable to summon the courage to say what ought to be said.

By now, Gray could have delivered this news in his sleep.

“It’s one hundred percent about the money,” he repeated. “But not your money. Mine.”

The expressive eyebrows lifted high. “Yours?”

“Yes. You see, I’ve decided that it’s time you returned my inheritance. I’ve come to tell you that, unless you voluntarily sign over every single penny you took from my father seventeen years ago, I intend to sue you for it.”

In the silence that followed, the mantel clock ticked like a time bomb. Gray could hear someone, probably the plump housekeeper, running water in the kitchen, though that part of the house was at least fifty yards away.

Finally his grandfather spoke. “Who told you I took money from him? I’ll guarantee your father never said that.”

“Not to me. He told other people, who told me. I don’t have any proof, of course. But I will get it, if you force me to. And the world will know you stole from your own son.”

Finally the old man rose, slowly. Gray watched how he relied on the cane, and wondered whether, without it, his grandfather would be able to stand at all. In spite of everything, pity stirred, and his words suddenly sounded cruel, too harsh for this fragile old man to take.

Gray shut his eyes, annoyed by his own vacillating. This was why he hadn’t come back to Silverdell for ten long years. It was just too damn emotionally confusing to feel intense love and intense hatred at the same time, for the same person.

His grandfather didn’t seem tormented by any similar ambivalence. He stared at Gray coldly.

“I seem to remember that the last time I saw you I warned you never to mention your father in my presence again.”

Gray nodded. “Yes. You did.”

“Still you dare to come here and...” The old lips thinned. “You dare to defy me.”

Gray shrugged. “Yes.” He glanced through the window, where an olive-green gloaming was overtaking the sunset. “I dare. And yet, as you can see, no lightning bolts have struck me down. The earth still turns.”

His grandfather’s face darkened. “You always were an impertinent boy, Gray. Too clever by half. I blame your mother for that. Hannah foolishly encouraged you to think—”

But Gray, too, was out of his chair now. “Leave my mother out of this.” He took one hard step closer. “You don’t have the right to speak her name.”

“Perhaps not.” Undaunted, his grandfather cocked a sardonic glance toward the window. “And yet...the earth still turns.”

For a minute, all Gray’s hard-won indifference, his emotional independence and rational perspective, melted away, and he was afraid he might hit the old man. Somehow he held himself in check, though the blood throbbed in his head, and his right hand seemed to have frozen in a tightly muscled fist.

God, this had been a mistake. Just being in this house again scrambled his brain. He had overestimated the distance a few years could put between him and the past. Suddenly, the onslaught of memories was just too much... He saw again, as if it were real, that last night...his father standing there, right there by the fireplace, drinking too much, taking offense at everything old Grayson said...

And his mother quietly weeping, her hand on his father’s arm, trying to keep him from finishing the last Scotch. The cold rain sheeting across the windows, the shadows of the elms fighting with the shadows of the fire.

Then the slamming doors, the parting threats and the rain-drenched, curving mountain road...

Damn it. Gray’s left elbow began to ache, where the bones had knitted but remained sensitive. It might as well have been days since the accident, not years. He couldn’t think straight in this room...this house. Maybe not even in this town.

Why on earth had he imagined that he owed his grandfather a warning? Had he really dreamed the old man might have grown a conscience and would meekly agree to admit his error and make restitution?

Fat chance of that. Old Grayson Harper had never been wrong in his life.

Besides, what constituted restitution, anyhow? Had Gray really thought that getting back his father’s money could begin to restore his losses? Grayson had killed Gray’s parents, as surely as if he’d put a gun to their heads. He could fill the Harper Marble Quarry with hundred-dollar bills, and it wouldn’t begin to make up for what he’d really stolen from that terrified thirteen-year-old boy.

The boy who had awakened in the hospital the next morning, his arms and legs and ribs broken, his head bandaged and his family dead.

With effort, Gray peeled his fingers away from his palm and pumped them to force sensation to return. He had been a fool to come. Warning? Ha. He should have just hired a lawyer, filed the suit and let the fur fly.

“Go ahead,” his grandfather said quietly, glancing pointedly at Gray’s tense hand. “Do it.”

Gray shook his head slowly. “I don’t hit people.”

“No.” The scoffing noise his grandfather emitted was eloquent. “And that’s the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it? You don’t do anything. You’re just like your father. You drift, charming and completely useless in your expensive suits, trying to get by on your clever one-liners and your smarter-than-thou attitude.”

He shook his head, as if to shake away the internal image. “You want money? Try earning some! If I’d ever seen you do a lick of real work, hard work, I’d leave it all to you. Every goddamn penny. Hell, if I could see you hold a real job for even one month, just four lousy weeks, I’d write you a check for the whole kit and caboodle!”

Dismissive old coot! Gray’s shoulders twitched, and he felt his legs burn slightly from the urge to stride out the door. The judgmental bastard was so clueless. He hadn’t understood his own son, not for a day of his life. Horrified at Gray’s father’s desire to be a musician, Grayson had forbidden it entirely, and steered him into a dozen “real” careers, each more ill suited than the one before.

And because, in the end, Grayson couldn’t make a successful pig farmer out of a poet, he decided the poet was a slacker and a fool.

Gray hesitated, fighting the urge to lash out and give the old man as good as he had dished. But if he let himself stalk off in a huff, what would he have accomplished? He calmed his pulse and considered what his grandfather had said. If Gray could hold a job, he’d return the money. Surely that was almost as good as an admission of guilt.

Could this be the opening he’d hoped for?

For several seconds, fury warred with common sense. Finally, common sense won.

He didn’t really want to bring a lawsuit. It would take forever, and it would cost a fortune on its own. He had no interest in humiliating his grandfather publicly. He wanted only the personal, private admission that the old man had wronged Gray’s father—and, in doing so, Gray himself.

He eyed his grandfather narrowly. “Will you put that deal in writing? If I do what you ask...if I hold a ‘real’ job for four weeks straight without bolting, you’ll write a check for every penny my father ever gave you to invest for him?”

The old man squinted at him in return as if he suspected a trick. “Not just any job. A hard job. A dirty job. The kind you turned your nose up at all your life.”

Gray wanted to ask him, “What do you know of my life?” The last time they’d seen each other, Gray had been nineteen, reckless, defiant and mixed up as hell. Because he’d refused to come back to Silverdell over his college summer breaks and dig marble in the family quarry, the old man had decided Gray was afraid of real work. Just like his father.

How could old Grayson have been so stupid as to miss the truth? Gray wasn’t afraid of work. He was afraid of Silverdell and what madness the memories might create in his heart. He was afraid of what living in this house another summer might make him do to his grandfather.

“Of course,” Gray said with feigned calm. “I’ll accept a job as dirty and demeaning as you want it to be. The only thing I won’t do is take a job at the quarry, or anywhere I would report to you.”

The old man worked his lips, clearly thinking fast and hard. “It would have to be here. In Silverdell, I mean. So that I could check on you. So that I could be sure it’s not a scam.”

“Of course.” Gray’s smile felt twisted. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to trust me.”

If old Grayson recognized the sarcasm, he didn’t deign to acknowledge it. He scanned his grandson’s face so thoroughly it felt like a scouring.

“Then yes,” he said, finally. “If you can hold a real, Joe Lunchbucket job here in Silverdell, one with physical labor and no fancy title, and you can keep it for four weeks straight without bolting, or complaining, or getting yourself fired, I’ll write a check for any amount you ask.”

CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS TWO in the morning, and though Bree and Penny had been talking for hours, the conversation showed no signs of sputtering out.

They were ensconced in Penny’s suite in Aunt Ruth’s beautiful old San Francisco Victorian town house. The sitting area was close enough to Ruth’s sickroom to hear her if she called out, but private enough to let them chat in peace. They both still wore their day clothes because getting into pajamas seemed too much of an admission that the night might end.

Bree had been visiting her little sister for three whole days—a true luxury, since ordinarily the entire breadth of the country, and their respective obligations, lay between them.

When the sisters had been split up after their father went to jail, sixty-five-year-old Aunt Ruth had taken Rowena and Penny into her home. But she’d declared herself unequal to mothering all three sisters. After a tense period in which the state seemed likely to get involved, their mother’s college roommate had stepped up. Kitty Afton, a Boston divorcée with no children, had always been fond of Bree, and was glad to offer the teenager a home.

Bree had lived in Boston ever since. She told herself she loved it. And yet, three days in a new place, with a fresh perspective and her little sister’s calming presence, had done her a world of good. After the mess with Charlie...

She looked at Penny, suddenly wishing she could scoop her up and take her along when she returned to Boston. Without Charlie, without Breelie’s, her “perfect” life in the city seemed hollow. Even the trendy Brighton-area condo she’d snagged a year ago—but never had time to decorate—felt lonely and sterile, and she could hardly bring herself to set foot in it again.

But Penny would never agree to leave San Francisco. Ruth, now in her early eighties, had congestive heart failure and needed full-time care. She really ought to be in a nursing facility, Bree thought, but Penny would never abandon the old lady who had put a roof over her head when everything else in their world had exploded.

So Penny couldn’t leave, and Bree couldn’t stay...not that she’d been invited. Reluctant or not, she had to get back to Boston and see if she could possibly piece her career back together.

Her plane left from San Fran International first thing in the morning.

So they lingered here, not ready to sleep in spite of the late hour. Bree had stretched out on top of Penny’s small sofa, her head propped on the heel of her hand, and Penny had curled up in the adjacent armchair, sketching her sister as they talked.

“So what’s our plan for Charlie?” Penny’s face was still bent over her sketch, but her lips curved upward, and her smile could be heard in her words. “Shall we boil him in oil? Or can you think of something more creative?”

Bree laughed. Only Penny could say things like that and still look and sound positively angelic. She was undoubtedly the sweetest person Bree had ever met, but that didn’t mean she was saccharine or dull. In her gentle, Alice in Wonderland face, sugar and spice coexisted in complete harmony.

“Boiling in oil sounds fine to me.” But Bree yawned as she said it, which showed that, thank goodness, she’d finally lost her bloodthirsty enthusiasm for revenge.

The first day here, she’d spent hours detailing Charlie’s sins—which, it turned out, had only begun with Iliana Townsend, not ended there. He had also been cooking Breelie’s books for God knew how long, draining the savings to keep himself in cool suits and hot women. When news got out that he’d been sacked, vendors all over Boston practically set Bree’s phone on fire, calling to complain they hadn’t been paid in months.

It had taken Bree weeks to straighten it all out—and every penny of her personal savings, too. She’d stayed in Boston long enough to finish the last event already contracted...but, as she’d predicted, no one had called to hire her company for anything new.

She had one appointment still on the books, a golden wedding anniversary consult that had been set long before the Townsend fiasco and, miraculously, hadn’t yet been canceled. She tried to be optimistic. Maybe, from that small job, she could begin to rebuild the business.

But she’d had a few days of rare freedom, and, so ravaged by resentment and self pity she couldn’t stand her own company a minute longer, she’d impulsively booked a plane ticket to visit Penny.

Her little sister was probably the only person on earth Bree could have been completely honest with about how much Charlie’s betrayal had hurt. Though she was four years younger than Bree, and five years younger than Rowena, Penny was without question the kindest of the three Wright girls, and the wisest. She was a good listener, and a true empath, with no trace of the schadenfreude most people—especially Rowena—might feel on hearing of Bree’s misfortune.

Bree had always thought Penny possessed a touch of magic, though it sounded primitive and superstitious to say so. Maybe she should just say that, in less mystical terms, Penny was a...a born healer. And sure enough, over the days in Penny’s company, most of the poison and pain had been drained out of the topic of Charlie, leaving Bree tranquil for the first time in more than a month.

“Yeah, deep-fried Charlie sounds just fine.” She let her eyes drift shut. “You know, Pea, maybe you should have been a psychiatrist.”

It was a musing, slightly slurred non sequitur that probably proved she had moved beyond tired all the way to incoherent. A thought struck her. She hadn’t meant to discount Penny’s art. “And an artist, too. I mean instead of being just an artist. Obviously you had to be an artist.”

Penny chuckled. “You won’t think so when you see this picture.”

Bree opened her eyes, though she knew nothing in the sketch could change her mind about her sister’s talent. Whatever Penny turned her hand to, whether it was oils, pen-and-ink sketches, photography or interior decorating, she ended up creating beauty.

Take this simple, cream-colored room, for instance. The rest of Ruth’s house was crowded, lacy, oppressively Victorian. But up here, Penny had designed a cool, clean haven from all that. Without any cliché Western decor—no antlered light fixtures, no river-rock mantels, no bucking-horse sculptures—she managed to capture the essence of their beautiful childhood Colorado home, Bell River Ranch.

How did she do it? More magic, really. The one gorgeous piece of peach-and-turquoise pottery that always made Bree think of a spring sunset. One painting, a sunlit stand of birch trees that could have been trite, but instead was pure poetry. A love seat upholstered in muted silvers, blues and pinks, like the shimmering pebbles in the shallows of Bell River.

“I love this room,” she said, another non sequitur. She laughed at herself, realizing she sounded a little drunk, although they’d been sipping nothing but almond-honey tea all night. She climbed up on her knees and peered over the arm of the sofa. “Okay, let me see the picture. If it’s awful, though, it’s not your fault. Too bad I don’t have Ro’s problem and get skinny when I’m upset. I bet from that angle my rear end looks huge.”

Penny held out the crisp, thick paper with a smile. “Lucky for you I never got to the rear-end part. I spent the whole time trying to get your face right.”

Bree was curious now—and maybe, if she was honest, a little embarrassed. She knew she didn’t look her best. She might not have Rowena’s problem, but when she wasn’t happy her face could look very drawn and hard. She felt hard, since Charlie, and she dreaded seeing that reflected through Penny’s eyes.

But when she summoned the courage to look at the paper, the face she saw there didn’t look tough at all. In fact, Penny’s version of Bree oozed vulnerability. Her blond hair was tousled, and her T-shirt had slid down one shoulder. Her cheekbones were pronounced and graceful, but shadows underscored her abnormally large blue eyes.

She looked wounded, and slightly bewildered, as if she were a child who couldn’t understand why anyone would have wanted to hurt her.

She let her hand lower the sketch to her hip. She stared at her sister, frowning. “Is that how I really look?”

Penny raised one shoulder. “Well, you’re more beautiful than that,” she said. “I’m not good enough to do you justice.”

Bree shook her head. “Don’t be silly, Pea.”

Compliments like that made Bree feel like some kind of criminal fraud. Penny always saw the world through the prism of her own inner sweetness—which was a great beautifier. But right now...

If Bree had really been such a beauty, would her fiancé have been so eager to sleep with a forty-five-year-old married woman made almost entirely of nips and tucks?

Bree held out the sketch so that Penny could see it again. “I mean, do I look this...weak?”

Penny bent forward and studied her drawing with a small frown of concentration. Bree appreciated that she didn’t pretend to misunderstand.

“You look very sad,” Penny said finally. She glanced up, her brown eyes warm, and smiled to soften the pronouncement. “Which is why we really must toss the bum in boiling oil, first chance we get.”

Bree had a horrifying sensation of stinging heat just under her eyelids, and she knew that, if she weren’t very, very careful, she could actually end up crying.

Which was unacceptable. “Smile, Brianna,” Kitty’s voice in her head repeated, as always. “No one likes a sad sack.”

“What if it isn’t actually Charlie’s fault?” She forced herself to meet Penny’s eyes. “He says...he says I drove him to it. He says I’m always so critical, so hard to please. He says if I had ever really been the kind of fiancée who helped and supported his decisions—”

Penny snorted delicately. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bree. Listen to yourself! You’re going to believe that lying scumbag? That’s the classic technique for abusive boyfriends, you know. Shifting the blame to you, hoping you’ll think it’s all somehow your fault.”

Penny was right, of course. It was the abuser’s easy out...you made me do it. But Charlie hadn’t just been trying to weasel free of the blame. He didn’t say those things until he knew the relationship was truly over and he couldn’t ever win her back. Problem was, she could hear in his voice, and see in his face, that he meant it. Really meant it.

It was hard to even think back on the contempt in Charlie’s voice as he’d hurled those accusations at her. Harder still, because, deep down inside, she had heard the ring of truth.

“I am critical, Pea. You know it’s true. I don’t know why, but I always seem to be pointing out everyone’s mistakes. Especially Charlie’s.”

Penny was shaking her head. “I don’t care if you whipped him with his own belt, mocked his manhood and made him sleep in the root cellar. You still didn’t make him cheat. You didn’t make him steal. You didn’t make him destroy Breelie’s. Someone ought to introduce Charlie Newmark to the idea of personal responsibility.”

Bree was grateful for the vehemence in Penny’s voice, and the loyalty that caused it. But she didn’t want to sweep this under the carpet. If she didn’t acknowledge her failings, how was she ever going to change anything? If she couldn’t get better, she would never be able to put together a relationship that would last.

She didn’t want to be alone forever.

“But it’s not just Charlie, is it? Every boyfriend I’ve ever had has said something similar.” She flushed as an old, half-forgotten memory came flooding miserably back. The day the sexiest rebel in her ninth-grade class, the boy she’d secretly had a crush on for months, had humiliated her in front of everyone. Wild Gray Harper...he had thought she was cold, prissy and boring...even way back then.

Penny looked at her oddly, and if Bree didn’t want to explain that sad old story, she had to recover quickly. “And Rowena,” she added. “Charlie might have taken the words right out of her mouth. And Kitty, too—though she sugar-coated it most of the time.”

“Kitty was a cross between Pollyanna and a Stepford wife.” Penny laughed again, but more softly, as if out of respect for Bree’s obvious distress. “She thought it was a sin for a lady to frown, or express a single authentic feeling, or do anything but coddle and flatter the men in her life. I don’t know how you stood it all those years.”

“She did her best,” Bree said loyally. “She wasn’t even related to us, you know. She didn’t have to take me in.”

“I know.” Penny’s laughter faded away. “That was a dumb thing to say. I’m sorry.”

They were silent a moment, remembering, though it was like remembering a nightmare they’d inexplicably all dreamed at exactly the same time. Such horrors couldn’t exist in the real world, surely. Their beautiful mother, lying broken and bleeding at the foot of the staircase. Sweet little Penny, so pitiful and bewildered. Penny, who had turned eleven that day, and was unaware that her birthday dress trailed through the blood as she knelt beside the silent body, begging her mother to wake up.

Their father, hauled off to jail for deliberately pushing his unfaithful wife over the railing. A phantasmagoric trial, in which their pathetic, shameful family secrets were trotted out, naked, for all the world to gawk at.

Johnny Wright...rotting in jail for years, so intractably angry. Rejecting the few overtures the sisters could bring themselves to make. Finally dying there of a brain tumor that may well have caused his irrational behavior from the start.

But worst of all was the ripping apart of the sisters, all of them just children, really, as well-meaning social workers, remote family connections and dutiful family friends stepped up, one by one, to offer them a place to live.

Bree shook the memories away. She couldn’t let herself drown in them, not after all these years.

She smiled at Penny to show she wasn’t angry. They both felt the same grateful loyalty to their respective saviors. Ruth and Kitty weren’t perfect, but they’d voluntarily offered the drowning girls harbors in the storm. Ruth had provided stability and an almost cloistered quiet, which Penny’s personality had needed. And Kitty, the compulsively smiling divorcée, had, in her own weird, Stepford way, shown Bree how to snap herself out of the trance of shock and grief.

“The point is that they’re all saying the same thing,” Bree went on. “It’s as if they’re reading from the same script. They say I am self-righteous, judgmental. I think I know better than everyone else. I’m never willing to trust other people to do things right on their own.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked away, over toward Penny’s soothing painting of birch trunks. “They can’t all be wrong. There must be some truth in it.”

Penny didn’t respond right away. She tapped her pencil against the sketch pad and ran her lower lip through her teeth softly.

“Well, even if there is...even if you do find it difficult to trust other people...is that so strange, given what happened to us? Why shouldn’t you be afraid that people will let you down? Who, in the end, didn’t let us down?”

And that, too, had the ring of truth. For a minute, Bree couldn’t respond. All she had to do was think back, and she could see that the troubles had begun long before the murder. A mother who had always been emotionally absent...a father who couldn’t control his jealous rages. Three little girls who practically raised themselves.

There’d been a whole year—Bree realized now that her mother must have taken a new lover—when a ten-year-old Bree had scavenged in the kitchen almost every night, trying to find something to feed Penny. Rowena, as usual, simply hadn’t eaten.

One night Bree turned dinner into a hunt for pirate treasure, filling the bread box with carrot “coins” and radish “rubies.” She’d felt such triumph, because Penny, only six at the time, had been enchanted. She had never guessed that she feasted on pirate carrots because there wasn’t anything else to eat.

“It did something to all of us,” Penny went on softly. “Think about Rowena. She was always so angry. She wouldn’t get close to anyone for years. At least you try.”

Suddenly, in the midst of her stupid self-absorption, Bree realized that Penny’s face had grown sad, too. If she’d had any artistic talent, she could have sketched a portrait of Penny that was every bit as melancholy as the one of herself she held in her hand right now.

“What about you, sweetpea?” She lowered her voice, just in case Ruth was awake. “What did it do to you?”

Penny smiled vaguely. For a minute, Bree thought her sister might not even answer. But after several seconds, Penny held out a hand and swept it from left to right, as if to encompass the whole town house.

“It made me cautious. Too cautious. It made me hide out here,” she said. “All these years. Here, where the storm can’t touch me.”

Oh.... Her heart stabbed, Bree stretched across the footboard and took her little sister’s hand. She held it tightly, palm to palm, fingers wrapped around the fragile bones and satiny skin.

They really were like two shipwrecked sailors, holding fast to each other for fear the current would sweep them apart and make them struggle alone.

“We’ll be all right, Pea. Somehow, we’ll figure it out. We’ll find a way to put the past behind us, and we’ll be happy again. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even find a way to be...normal.”

She hoped the joke would lighten the mood, but her voice trembled, and it didn’t come out quite as humorously as she’d hoped.

As usual, Penny was the one who knew exactly what to say. She squeezed Bree’s hand, straightened her spine and gave her a mischievous grin.

“Of course we will,” she said, “Look at Rowena! After all those years of being the world’s prickliest female, she married her true love, became a stepmother—”

Bree laughed. “To a little hellion.”

“Maybe, but he worships the ground she walks on. And she’s making her dude-ranch dream come true. Frankly, she’s so darn normal it’s disgusting.”

Bree laughed and let go of her sister’s hand. “How long before she finds a way to screw all that up, do you think?”

“Brianna.” Penny frowned. “That’s not fair.”

Bree shrugged. She loved Rowena, but she didn’t trust her. Ro had pushed everyone away for so long, closing off her heart. It had made her cold and selfish, and it had meant that loving her was dangerous. Marriage seemed to have mellowed her, but Bree was too cynical to believe the change was permanent.

Penny set her sketchbook on the end table and lay her pencil on top of it gently. She stretched, yawned and then rested her head on the arm of the chair, her luminous brown eyes gazing, doelike, at Bree.

“Ro seems absolutely blissful,” Penny insisted softly. “Everything’s going so well. The ranch has its soft opening in about a week.”

“I know.” Ten days, in fact. Bree kept tabs on the progress of the ranch more closely than Penny could imagine. It was their inheritance, too, and she didn’t intend to let Rowena lose everything.

Ro was passionate, sure, but she wasn’t good at the long haul. Every week, Bree half expected to hear that her restless, fiery older sister had grown bored, or fought with Dallas, or come down with her old gypsy fever. “Well, I guess they’ll have the opening...if she doesn’t get claustrophobic and run away again.”

The silence that followed Bree’s acidic comment made her flush uncomfortably. She heard how bitter and unforgiving she sounded. She wanted to take the words back, but that wouldn’t be quite honest.

She had tried to forgive and forget, to believe that change was possible. And yet...she still had a rough, scarred-over spot inside her heart where her trust in Rowena used to be.

“I don’t know,” she said, trying to explain. “It’s just that...” But she couldn’t finish the sentence. She’d said it all before, and she knew Penny didn’t agree.

“Oh, Bree.” Finally, Penny smiled. “You know, if you really think you should try to be less judgmental, Rowena might be a pretty good place to start.”

* * *

OF HIS ALMOST thirty-one years of life, Gray had resided in Silverdell full time only about five—from the age of thirteen, when his parents died, until eighteen, when he went off to college. Before the accident, he lived wherever his dad’s newest doomed venture took them—a horse ranch in Crawford, a pig farm in Butte. After high school, Gray had never come back to Silverdell, not even when he had flunked out of college and his grandfather cut off all funds.

But those five years had been notable for their intense resentment and rebellion. And for the salt-of-the-earth Dellians, they’d apparently been unforgettable. He must have been even more obnoxious than he remembered, because he couldn’t find a soul in town willing to hire him to so much as change a lightbulb.

It was only noon, the Monday after his talk with his grandfather, and he’d already struck out at the hardware store, the brickyard and the ranch over at Windy River. Those businesses were all hiring. They just weren’t hiring Grayson Harper’s black-sheep grandson, who had always been a troublemaker and a wiseass and clearly had condescended to return to Silverdell only so that he could sniff around the old man’s will.

But Gray wasn’t giving up. In fact, the rejection felt like the kind of challenge he loved. There had to be someone in this town who didn’t hold his youth against him. Someone, perhaps, who wasn’t a fan of Grayson Harper and might be sympathetic to the orphan who had found himself under his dictatorial thumb.

Crusty old coots like his grandfather made enemies, and all Gray had to do was find one.

Meanwhile, the April sun was climbing up a cloudless turquoise sky, and Gray was hot, tired and hungry. Lunch and another study of the classifieds sounded perfect. Luckily, Silverdell had just about the best barbecue in Colorado.

He glanced down Elk Avenue, remembering that someone had said Marianne Donovan was back in town and she’d opened a café that was pretty good.

She might be the perfect place to start. Not that Marianne qualified as old Grayson’s enemy—far from it. Her mother had been Gray’s grandmother’s nurse, years ago, and the families were still close.

But Marianne had always had a soft spot for Gray, too, the way gentle good girls sometimes did when they met a certain kind of bad boy.

He began walking the main street, noting all the new storefronts, checking for her place. She’d been an instinctively domestic female, even as a teenager, so her restaurant was probably great. Besides, seeing her again would be a pleasant fringe benefit of this visit. She’d been such a nice kid—he had actually found himself being careful with her, treating her with a respect he rarely offered anyone during those angry years.

He almost walked right past it. The place was still under construction, and the sign hadn’t even been hung yet. It leaned against the front bay window, but at the last minute he registered its kelly-green letters in a Celtic script. Donovan’s Dream.

He backed up and took a look through the cute bay window, which was framed by white Irish-lace curtains draped over a shining brass rod. He spotted Marianne immediately, and smiled to see how little she’d changed. Still fighting those messy red curls and those extra five pounds. Still unable to fully hide the sprinkle of freckles she’d inherited from her mother. Still a well-bred, classic good girl, even though she was his age—pushing thirty.

She was taking someone’s order, listening intently to every word they said. But at the same time, her intelligent green eyes were alert to everything going on around her, as any good restaurant owner would be.

Within a few seconds, she noticed him at the window. He expected her to take a minute to recognize him, and maybe another minute to believe her eyes. But she didn’t look the least bit surprised to see him standing there. She simply smiled and extended her free hand, beckoning him in enthusiastically.

So...she had heard. Either she was still in contact with his grandfather, or the Silverdell grapevine was as dependable as ever. He nodded, returning her smile, and moved back toward the front door, which opened with a sweet cascade of bells he recognized as the first few notes of “Danny Boy.”

She met him at the threshold, holding out her arms for a hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you, Gray,” she said. She didn’t stint on the hug, and when she pulled back she gazed at him uninhibitedly. “It’s been so long. Too long. But you look every bit as gorgeous, you devil.”

He grinned. “So do you.”

To his surprise, she flushed and self-consciously put a hand to her hair. “Don’t be silly. I—” For a moment, her smile faded. “I don’t know if your grandfather told you about...well, it’s been a tough year. My husband died just before Christmas. And my mother lost her battle with breast cancer about a month later.”

Suddenly Gray felt as if he’d been gone a hundred years. Her mother, dead? He’d liked Eileen Donovan very much—and he’d always understood that his grandfather worshipped the woman from afar, his one grand chivalric gesture in a lifetime of rapacious greed and domineering chauvinism.

But Gray hadn’t even realized her mother had been sick. That’s what happened when you peeled rubber as you sped out of town, then tore off your rearview mirror and chucked it onto the asphalt at the county line.

He frowned. “No. He didn’t tell me. I didn’t even know you were married.”

“Eight years,” she said, lifting her left hand, which still wore a simple gold band. She folded her fingers into her palm, as if to feel the comforting squeeze of the ring. “We met in college.”

He touched her shoulder. And then, for the first time, he could see that she had changed after all. Her eyes, once as clear as clover, as simple as grass, held depths and complexities and pain. They looked more like his eyes now—although his had been this way since he was thirteen.

“I’m so sorry, Mari. That’s a heavy load, losing them so close together.”

“Yes,” she said simply. “Of course, you understand better than most.”

But then, as if she knew he wouldn’t want to open that conversation, she smiled again. She hadn’t ever been one to wallow in self-pity, anyhow, he remembered. She had wanted their relationship to go further, but when he told her he just wanted to be friends, she’d accepted it like a trooper.

“But enough about me.” She tilted a sideways glance at him. “Let’s talk about you. For starters, I know exactly why you’re here.”

“You do?”

“Absolutely. You’re looking for a job.” She was teasing. He knew her voice well enough still to recognize its notes.

“I am?”

“Yep. But I’m sorry to say we’re not hiring today. I’ve just found an excellent teenage boy who is happy to wash my dishes for gas money, which is all I can afford to pay him.”

Gray tilted his head, smiling down at her. “How did you know that I—”

She laughed and put her hand under his arm, leading him deeper into the café. “Everybody knows, silly. Don’t you remember Silverdell? They certainly remember you.”

“So I’ve gathered. Most of them have clearly decided they wouldn’t hire me if I were the last day laborer on earth.”

“Exactly. No fatted calf for you, my friend. In the eyes of Silverdell, you are not forgiven.”

He raised one eyebrow. “So...what do you think sealed my fate? Switching tombstones that Halloween? Teaching the naked limbo to Mayor Simpson’s cross-eyed niece? Or...I know...maybe it was that thing with the moose head?”

“All of the above.” Her green eyes twinkled, and she looked more like herself. “Although that moose head...that was plain nasty.”

He chuckled. They’d arrived at the one empty table in the restaurant. She pointed to a chair, wordlessly instructing him to sit. Then she grabbed a bright green laminated menu card from its slot in the nearest wait station and placed it in front of him.

“But don’t despair, Gray. I happen to know there’s at least one person in town who will be completely sympathetic to your cause. And, lucky for you, she is hiring right now.”

Gray looked up. “She?”

“Yep. She. Our newest local entrepreneur. The one person in town whose reputation was even half as bad as yours.”

He tried to think. Had anyone around here ever been as reckless and rude as he had? Surely no female. Silverdell women tended to be well-behaved and demure. The cadre of bitchy elder ladies, like that skinny harpy Mrs. Fillmore, insisted on it. No one dared to—

And suddenly he knew. His eyes widened.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Crazy Rowena Wright has come home.”

CHAPTER THREE

BREE DIDN’T CALL ahead to let Rowena know she was coming.

It wasn’t that she thought surprising her sister would be fun. Rowena was as likely to be irked by an unannounced visit as she was to be delighted. Bree didn’t call because, right up until the last minute, she couldn’t bring herself to commit to really, truly going to Bell River Ranch at all.

Every mile along the way, she kept assuring herself she could always change her mind. Drive away. Get back on an airplane and fly home to Boston.

But somehow merely saying that phrase, “home to Boston,” made her realize how little she belonged there, even after sixteen years. And so she didn’t turn around. She kept driving, from the Gunnison airport toward Silverdell, every minute bringing her closer to the one place in the world she had ever thought of as home.

And the one place in the world she’d ever thought of as hell.

She skirted Silverdell’s downtown area, not ready to be seen by anyone she used to know. Instead, she took the loop-around on what the locals called Mansion Street—though maps and strangers called it Callahan Circle. Bell River was the first ranch you encountered as you exited the city limits, so after she passed the elegant old Harper estate she knew she had only about two more miles to go.

Her heart beat faster, and she tightened her fingers on the wheel. Dread...or excitement? She no longer knew.

Man-made structures thinned out the minute she crossed the city line, giving way to open spaces, acre after acre of rolling country greening with spring. The occasional cow or horse gazed placidly at her as she coasted by, and a pair of brown falcons watched her sternly from a fence post, but for those two miles she didn’t see another human being.

And then, too soon, the acres that spread out beside the road were Bell River acres. She knew every undulation, every tree, as well as she knew the lines and pads of her own palm. The rippling pastures were achingly the same as they’d been twenty years ago when she’d ridden her bike home from elementary school along this same road.

The same—except better. Much, much better.

She hadn’t visited since the wedding four months ago. It had been winter, then—and Rowena had still been in the early, messy stages of renovations, the part of the process where you saw only the broken eggs, not the promise of the omelet.

Now it was April, the time when Colorado clouds began to lift, as if the tent of blue sky actually were being winched up higher and higher each day. The air felt fresh, green with sunshine and sweet breezes.

And the creation of the dude ranch was much further along. The first thing Bree noticed as she turned into the long front driveway was how well the grounds had been groomed. The palsied bristlecone pines on either side of the rickety front fence had been pruned up, as if by dancing masters obsessed with posture. The fence itself had had been replaced with a pair of scrolled wrought-iron gates that stood crisply open, smiling a glossy black welcome.

Muddy patches that once had pitted the fields on either side of the driveway had been converted to smooth carpets of emerald grass.

A few more yards and she got her first good look at the house, set like a jewel in its setting of sparkling white paddocks. It had been freshly painted pale green, with a brand-new hunter-green roof and a wide white porch trimmed in lush hanging baskets of ferns, ivy and lipstick-red geraniums.

Her foot almost stalled on the gas, and the rental car slowed to a crawl. “Wow,” she said to the empty car. Rowena had worked a miracle, considering how tight their budget was and how short the timetable.

It was gorgeous. No longer a downtrodden, half-neglected white elephant, but a home. Wholesome, peaceful and inviting. All the things the ranch had never been, even before their mother’s death.

Bree determined to make a point of telling her sister so. Maybe that would help break the ice...get them off on the right foot. She would show Rowena right away that she wasn’t here as judge, or spy, or critic. She was here as a friend.

As a sister.

Sister. As if the word were emotionally electrified, a frisson of fear sizzled through her. It had been a long time since she’d been comfortable with that word, at least in relation to Rowena.

She mustn’t let herself get carried away. While the ranch might look inviting, the “invitation” wasn’t designed for her. The beautiful scene was, quite literally, a stage set for an ad in a glossy brochure. The goal was to coax paying guests into booking their vacations here.

Her only incontestable credential was her status as co-owner of the soon-to-open enterprise. Her name, Brianna Allison Wright, was listed on those thick loan documents—loans that haunted her every time she thought about how big the numbers were.

She had every right to show up, with or without advance notice, if only to check on the renovations and see how her money was being spent.

Besides, about twenty windows overlooked this front driveway, so she probably had already been spotted. She hit the gas again, pulled around to the back of the house where a nicely landscaped parking lot had been created and slipped the car into a space.

Then, squaring her shoulders, she got out.

She left her suitcase in the trunk, though. She still felt more comfortable having an escape, just in case. She could pretend she had just stopped by to say hi. She could say she had a reservation in Aspen, or Crested Butte, or anywhere, to...to do...

Something else. Anything else. In case Ro made it clear Bree wasn’t welcome to stay here.

She climbed quickly onto the back porch and made her way to the door, which used to open onto a laundry room, but now, she knew, would lead into the expanded kitchen. She smelled coffee, so she knew Rowena was up, even though it was only a little after eight.

All three sisters had always been early risers. Work on a ranch started before the sun came up, and their father wouldn’t have tolerated sleeping in.

Eventually, being early birds had been more than a pattern—it had been in their blood. In all the years Bree had lived on the East Coast, she’d never truly adjusted to night-owl hours. Charlie had often laughed at her, saying they should have called the company “Cinderella’s” instead of “Breelie’s.” What a joke, a high-society event coordinator who started yawning at midnight!

“Watch out! Hey, lady! Watch out!”

Startled out of her thoughts, Bree frowned. The child’s shrill voice seemed to be trying to pierce through a cacophony of noise—a hectic tizzy of clucking, barking, screeching, fluttering and stomping. Bree grabbed the doorknob instinctively, as if she might have to flee inside the house, and wheeled around to see what on earth...

Good grief! The area behind her whirled with an onslaught of motion. Inexplicably, about a dozen chickens squawked toward her, frantic and brainless, running into each other comically, stumbling over the stairs as they stormed them, feathers flying. Behind the chickens, a glossy brown puppy galloped in ecstatic pursuit. Its long tongue waved like a wet, pink ribbon from its idiotic grin, its soft ears lifted like furry propellers and its gigantic feet churned up contrails of dust in its path.

Behind the puppy, a boy thundered across the grass, trying to catch up, one hand waving to get her attention, the other recklessly swinging a big straw basket.

It was Alec, Rowena’s high-strung stepson. Bree didn’t have to look twice. She recognized immediately the mop of thick blond hair and the half devil, half angel charm of the skinny, suntanned face.

“Lady, watch out for the chickens!”

Without thinking, Bree twisted the knob and the door swung open in her hand. She wasn’t entirely sure why she did that. She didn’t exactly need to plunge to safety behind the refrigerator, or beg her big sister for help. She couldn’t possibly think a flock of dithering chickens, a slobbering puppy and a nine-year-old imp posed a significant physical threat.

But, jangled, she did it anyhow—and the result of her actions could have been predicted. The chickens streamed through the escape route the open door offered, and the puppy followed joyously, dirt and all.

“Oh, no,” she said, thinking they were the most useless words in the English language, and annoyed with herself for being paralyzed by the ridiculous farce.

The imp pounded up the stairs, pausing just long enough to give her a disgusted look. “Great,” he said, staring gloomily through the open door. “Brilliant.” Then he took a deep breath and continued the chase inside.

After that, what could Bree do but follow? Maybe she could stop being so fuzzy-minded and help....

But it was too late. In his attempt to catch the puppy, Alec had overturned his basket, and the shining new tiles of the kitchen floor suddenly seemed covered in shining yellow glop, disgustingly dotted with islands of white shards.

Oh, no. He had obviously been gathering the chicken eggs. Judging from the wet mess, his basket must have been full of them. As Bree watched in horror, he slipped in the goo and thudded hard on the floor, face down. The puppy ran two demented circles around him, just enough to get its paws thoroughly coated in raw egg, then streaked off to share the excitement with the rest of the house.

Alec lifted his face, his chin seeming to drip lumpy yellow gore. He narrowed his prematurely handsome blue eyes, and opened his mouth as if to say something heartfelt. But then his jaw went slack. “Bree?”

She smiled weakly. “Hi.”

“Alec, what the...?” An irritable male voice boomed from around the corner. The sound was followed immediately by its owner, a shirtless, golden-haired god wearing only a pair of half-buttoned, low-riding blue jeans and a few white tufts of shaving cream missed by a recent razor.

Or, as other people knew him, Dallas Garwood. The sheriff of Silverdell County. Rowena’s hunky new husband.

“Why the devil are the chickens in the house?” Dallas’s attention was at first focused exclusively on his son, who still sprawled on the floor, wearing a goatee of egg yolk. “Oh, hell, Alec. Is that the eggs?”

“It’s not my fault, Dad,” Alec protested vehemently. He tried to scramble to his feet, but the slippery floor defeated him, and he couldn’t get any higher than a kneeling position. “I totally had it under control, no problem. Then she went and opened the door.”

She would have paid a king’s ransom, at that moment, to fall through a trapdoor in the floor.

But in spite of the extensive renovations, apparently no one had thought to add an escape hatch. She could only wait in mute misery as Dallas frowned, turned and finally saw her. She still stood by the front door, her hand on the knob as if magnetized to it.

His blue eyes, so like his son’s, widened. “Bree?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, though she wasn’t sure which part she was apologizing for. For opening the door and letting the livestock into the house, for catching him half dressed or for having the dumb idea to come to Bell River in the first place.

“You...you did this?”

“Well. I did open the door,” she admitted. Then she shook her head helplessly. “To be honest, I have no idea what just happened. It’s all a bit of a blur.”

“I can believe that.” To her surprise, he grinned, and then he began to laugh. “Welcome to Bell River, Bree. Around here, the forecast is always sunny with a ninety percent chance of Alec.”

Without the least sign of self-consciousness, he crossed the rivulets of egg, avoiding them as much as he could, and wrapped her in a warm hug.

“How fantastic that you came. Ro will be thrilled.” He turned to his son. “You start cleaning this mess up, Alec. I’ll go see if I can corral the circus.”

“What circus?” Rowena suddenly appeared on the other side of the large, walk-in freezer. She was smiling, but she looked exhausted, as if the preparation for the soft opening had worn her out. She was also dirty...a real mess, and at first Bree thought she’d somehow become tangled in the chicken-puppy-egg fiasco.

When Ro drew closer, though, Bree could see that she must have been gardening. Her hands were covered in earth, her cheeks smudged and dirty and the knees of her clover-green jeans were black. About half her long dark hair was clipped back with a green barrette, but the rest was in disarray, wisps clinging to the perspiration on her temples, her collarbone and her damp T-shirt.

“Alec!” Smile fading, Rowena scanned the chaos. Then she turned to Dallas, which led her green-eyed gaze to Bree. Her dramatic eyebrows drew together. “Bree? What are you doing here?”

The minute she said it, she seemed to realize it had come out wrong, because she bit her lower lip and shot a self-conscious glance at her husband.

“I mean...” She tried in vain to swipe some of the dirty, damp hair from her face. “I’m glad you’re here, whatever the reason. I am just sorry you’ve caught us...in such a state.”

Bree shook her head. “No, it’s my fault. I should have called ahead, or made a reservation or something. I should have given you some warning.”

“Warning?” Dallas laughed, and his easy charm smoothed over what was rapidly becoming a very bumpy conversational road. “To stay in your own home? Wouldn’t that be kind of silly? Besides, advance notice probably wouldn’t have helped. We always seem to be in crisis mode these days. Although—” he transferred his wry smile to his son “—I have to admit the eggs are a special touch. How about you get going cleaning these up, kiddo?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy muttered, his tone just the safe side of polite, but his face sour as he surveyed the chore. He rolled his eyes, then bent forward and plucked a large, curved piece of eggshell from the stew and chucked it into the sink just over his head.

In the distance, the puppy began to bark frantically, followed by the crazed clucking of chickens. Dallas groaned. “I think that’s my cue.”

He put his arm around Bree’s shoulder and hugged her lightly. “See you tonight,” he said, as if he took it for granted that she would be staying. “Your suitcases are in the car, I guess. Don’t bring them in. Barton will be here in an hour or so, and he’ll be glad to do it.”

Bree nodded. When she’d been in town for the wedding, she’d met their general manager, a courtly older man named Barton James who used to own a successful dude ranch in Crested Butte. It was probably true that he’d be glad to help. He had come out of retirement because he couldn’t stand being idle.

Dallas smiled, as if to reassure Bree one more time that she was welcome. Then he stepped to Rowena and kissed her hard on the lips, apparently not in the least deterred by her dirt-smudged face and sweaty hair.

Bree looked away from the intimacy of that simple touch, and her gaze met Alec’s. He rolled his eyes again, eloquently, with all the disgust a nine-year-old could express for the mushiness of adults.

“Might as well get used to it,” he said morosely, extricating another bit of eggshell. “They’re like this all the time.”

Then the doorbell rang.

Rowena pulled free of Dallas’s embrace, though she kept one hand against his naked chest, as if she couldn’t bear to lose the connection entirely. Her head turned sharply toward the front of the house.

“Oh, my God. Has my interview showed up early?” She glanced at the clock on the stove just behind Alec and moaned. “Oh, no. It can’t be. It’s not really eight-thirty?”

“It’s really eight-thirty,” Dallas said. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you it was getting late. You always lose track of time out there.”

Rowena had begun brushing her palms together, as if she might be able to whisk away the crusting of soil, but her hands remained shadowed with dirt. She touched her chin, checking for dirt there, but she seemed to realize she was only making matters worse.

“I need a shower. I can’t interview anyone like this, but especially not—”

“I’ll let him in,” Dallas offered quickly.

But Rowena shook her head. “You’re half-naked, and you know you two have never really gotten along. Besides, you’re on chicken duty.”

“I’ll do it,” Alec piped up eagerly, trying to clamber to his feet, but once again finding it difficult. Apparently even playing butler seemed exciting compared to mopping egg gunk off the floor.

“You most certainly will not.” Dallas held up his hands emphatically to freeze his son in place. “You’re the most disreputable member of the family right now. And that’s saying something.”

“I can let him in,” Bree heard herself saying. She felt a little like Alec, jumping at the chance to leave the room rather than continue an awkward encounter. But her event-planner side had kicked in, and her intervention was the only answer that made sense.

The doubt in Rowena’s eyes wasn’t exactly flattering. “Bree, I couldn’t ask you to—”

“You’re not asking. I’m volunteering. I promise I won’t blow your chance to hire this guy, whoever he is. This is the kind of work I do all the time. I’ll handle the meet and greet, then dance him around a little, maybe tour the property while you guys pull it together in here.”

The doorbell rang again.

“That would be terrific. Thanks, Bree.” Dallas nodded toward Rowena, who still frowned, obviously uncertain. “You shower, Ro. I’ll get the chickens. Alec will fix the kitchen.” He impaled the boy with a sharp glance. “Or else.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Like any good salesman, Bree took the yes as final. She dropped her purse on the counter and picked her way carefully toward the great room on the other side of the kitchen. “Oh...I guess I should know which job this guy’s applying for.”

Rowena hesitated. “Assistant social director. Part time. Thirty hours. Minimum wage.”

Pretty menial job, Bree thought, to be causing such a stir. So what if he didn’t like Ro’s grubby fingernails or a little chicken poop in the hall? If he got scared off, so what? Surely qualified candidates for that job were easy to find.

“All right,” she said neutrally, determined not to show her confusion. She wasn’t here to criticize, remember? She had to stop forgetting that, stop lapsing into her old ways. This was Ro’s dream, Ro’s decision, Ro’s hire. “And his name?”

Rowena blinked, her dark lashes shadowing her green eyes. She opened her mouth, closed it, then blinked again. The doorbell sounded its two-note call a third time, which apparently agitated the chickens, who were closer now, close enough that Bree could hear the flutter of wings above their clucking.

“I probably should know his name, Ro.”

“Of course.” With one deep breath, Rowena seemed to snap out of her weird spell as quickly as she’d fallen into it. “Actually, you know him, or at least you used to. Remember...remember old man Harper’s grandson, Gray?”

Bree frowned. Everyone remembered Gray Harper. The bad and beautiful new kid in town. Part jokester, part heartbreaker—all trouble. The heir to the Harper Quarry millions who had become a local legend when he kissed the money goodbye rather than, as he put it, kiss his grandfather’s “arrogant ass.”

“Gray Harper? Applying to be your part-time assistant social director? You’re kidding, right?”

Rowena shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. Still want to dance him around?”

“I...well, sure,” Bree said with a careful smile. No judging, remember? No criticizing. And definitely no being afraid of a formerly snotty teenager who probably wouldn’t even remember what he did to her. “Of course.”

She left the room, determined to reach the foyer before he pressed the bell again. She smoothed her skirt and checked her hair in the hall mirror. Everything tidy. She’d do fine.

But honestly...what was Rowena thinking?

Gray Harper?

CHAPTER FOUR

JUST WHEN GRAY thought Rowena must have changed her mind about interviewing him, the front door finally opened.

But the elegant blonde knockout who stood there, smiling coolly, wasn’t Rowena. No way Rowena could have changed that much, not even after sixteen years, not even after the mellowing experience of falling in love and getting married. Gray considered himself a connoisseur of beautiful women, and even when he was only thirteen he’d understood that Rowena’s fiery good looks weren’t a product of cosmetics, clothes or hairstyles. She was all dramatic, gypsy bone structure and primal energy.

And, of course, there was the problem of the coloring. She might have dyed her hair, but no way even contact lenses could transform Rowena’s flashing eyes, which had been the color of melted emeralds, into this cool pair of iced-sapphire blue.

Cool. Ice.

The words triggered something. He dug around in his psyche for a couple of seconds, then pulled it out. Aw, heck. Wouldn’t you know it would be one of the guilty memories, one of those inexcusable episodes from his angry years? He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. Some more rotten than others.

This one really reeked. God, he’d been such an ass back then.

But at least he recognized her now. This was the middle Wright sister, Bree. She’d been his age, so they’d been in the same class, but she hadn’t been in his group. She had hung with the student council crowd, the prissy, overachiever girls who had annoyed the heck out of him in those days.

He wouldn’t ever have guessed that she’d grow up to be so gorgeous. When their mother was killed and the Wright girls left town, the middle sister had still been in that awkward stage, unsure what to do with anything she possessed, from her thick, nearly white hair to her long, gangly legs.

But she knew now. From crown to polished toenail, she was slick and citified and possessed a distinctive eastern seaboard chic. The look might still be a bit icy—alabaster skin, blue suit to match her violet-bluebell eyes, sleek Grace Kelly French twist showing off expensive pearl earrings. But she somehow managed to pack a visceral wallop, even so.

“Hi, Bree,” he said, hoping his surprise—and his more pleasantly primitive reactions—weren’t too obvious. “I assumed you probably were a partner in the dude ranch, but I didn’t realize you had moved back to town, too.”

“Hello, Gray.” She smiled politely, all professionalism and poise. “I haven’t moved back. I’m just here for a visit, and to help out a little with the soft opening, if I can. Most of the time, I’ll be a partner in name only.”

“That’s a shame,” he said. And he meant it. He would have enjoyed spending time with a woman this attractive—assuming she wouldn’t scuttle his chances of getting the job.

He wondered if it was even remotely possible that she’d forgotten about...the ice.

He had to laugh at his own wishful thinking. No, it was not even remotely possible she’d forgotten. But perhaps she would want to pretend she had. Her whole bearing announced that she had more than her share of pride.

“I’m so sorry we kept you waiting.” She took a step forward, putting one foot onto the porch, which surprised him. They were going out, not in?

Suddenly, from somewhere in the house behind her, a strange, high-pitched noise rang out. He glanced over her shoulder, wondering what on earth could have made such a sound. But her face remained utterly impassive, not even a twitch revealing that she’d heard it.

Man, she was good. He wouldn’t want to have to play poker with her. Their gazes locked, and he blinked first. After a couple of seconds, he actually began to wonder whether he had imagined the sound.

She stepped across the threshold, pulling the door shut behind her, and gave him another smile. “Rowena is running a bit late for the interview, so she asked me to show you around the ranch. We’re all very excited about the plans for Bell River, and we think you will be, too.”

She didn’t wait for him to agree, but moved on down the stairs without looking back, taking his cooperation for granted—which made sense, of course. After all, she was the boss lady and he was just a hired hand, assuming he got the job.

Mr. Minimum Wage. Still, Gray wasn’t complaining. The view he got while she walked ahead of him was pretty spectacular. It made him think like a college kid...it made the phrase “Boss Lady and the Hired Hand” suggest all kinds of interesting, if idiotic, possibilities.

God, what a sleazeball that made him sound like! Good thing she couldn’t read his mind. He had to laugh at himself, proving his grandfather right about how unprofessional and self-indulgent he was.

“One day, son, you’ll learn that real life is not all about games and girls.” Gray’s grandfather’s face, as he stood in Gray’s college dorm on Gray’s nineteenth birthday, had been rigid with fury. He’d just realized that Gray wasn’t going to cave in to his demands to come home for the summer, not even at the risk of losing the Harper Quarry millions.

The old man never had been able to tolerate being thwarted. He’d run his cold eyes over Gray’s expensive suit, and then over the equally expensive red dress Gray’s girlfriend was almost wearing.

“If you honestly believe you can make your own way, without the safety net of the Harper name, you’re going to have to do a hell of a lot of growing up.”

Gray had yawned and gone back to knotting his tie. He and Carla had reservations at nine, and she was eyeing him appraisingly, obviously wondering if he had the starch to stand up to the old tyrant.

So Gray had met his grandfather’s gaze in the mirror and grinned. “Oh, dear. Will I have to become like you?”

His grandfather’s mouth had tightened. “You couldn’t be like me if you tried, you insolent whelp. But, like it or not, if you’re going to be poor, you will have to get serious. You will have to get focused. And by God, for once in your spoiled life, you will have to get dirty.”

Well, the old man hadn’t been lying about that, as Gray had soon discovered. But he’d been wrong to assume that getting dirty would bother him. He’d thrived on it, actually, and kept himself so focused that it had been a very, very long time since Gray had found any female special enough to take his mind off “real life.”

The subtle stirring of interest Bree Wright had just set in motion...well, frankly, it felt darn nice.

Still, she was talking, and he should be listening. He caught up with her and kept his eyes sensibly on the path as they made their way toward the stables. He tried to pay attention as she detailed the ranch’s horsemanship program.

They had built fifty stalls, she explained, because, though they had only twenty horses at the moment, the plan was to increase to fifty head within a year. They also had three ponies for young riders and a “bring your own mount” option for guests who preferred a familiar seat.

“Nice,” he said appreciatively as they entered the large, well-designed stables and heard the soft nickering of the animals. He gazed down the wide, clean walk between the stalls. Half a dozen horses poked their heads out, and his practiced eye evaluated them quickly. All excellent specimens, as far as he could see.

Bree didn’t seem inclined to take him in any farther, though he was itching to get a closer look. Apparently this was only the nickel tour, skimming the high points until she could turn him over to Rowena.

Or else she simply wasn’t a fan of horses. He allowed himself a quick up and down while she was consulting her watch. That hairdo wouldn’t survive five minutes on horseback, and those high heels had definitely not been bought with the thought of tramping through sawdust and hay. Maybe more than a decade on the East Coast had eradicated her inner cowgirl completely.

After a few seconds, he realized he was still staring at her impossibly long legs, so he yanked his gaze up where it belonged and said the first thing that came into his mind. “Are you a good rider?”

She glanced at him, as if surprised by the question, and lowered her arm, letting her watch fall over the back of her hand.

“I haven’t ridden in years, but I used to be all right,” she said, but she touched her earring when she said it, and he had already learned that the gesture was her tell. The question had made her uncomfortable. “I was nothing compared to Ro, of course. She was the horsey one.”

He winced, hearing in her voice that she still accepted the childhood labels without question. Big mistake. Labels, he knew all too well, had a way of being self-fulfilling. He had been “the spoiled brat.”

“Really.” He tilted his head. “And which ‘one’ were you?”

Her eyebrows drew together gently. Then she smiled. “I was the prissy one. The ice queen. I thought you might remember that.”

Well, that brought the elephant out and plopped it on the table, didn’t it? He admired the cool aplomb that allowed her to mention it first. Maybe the episode really didn’t bother her as much as it bothered him. Maybe it was easier to live with the memory of having looked foolish than to live with the memory of having been cruel.

“I do remember,” he said flatly, without any attempt to make light of it all. Yes, they’d been kids. But even ninth graders bled when they were cut. “I remember that I was an insensitive jackass. You deserved better, and I knew it, even then. It may be sixteen years too late, but I want you to know I’m sorry.”

When he had started his speech, she had already begun to exit the stables. At his final word, sorry, she stopped walking and gazed placidly back at him, her elegant, symmetrical features half in shadow, half in sunlight.

“Thanks,” she said, but he didn’t know her well enough to guess whether the simple word was sardonic or sincere.

Truth was, “jackass” might be an understatement. He and his friends had always made fun of girls like her, the ones who were so bloody virtuous and civic-minded, always on committees to organize this and decorate that. But then, that January, just a month or so before her mother’s death, she had ratted on his best friend for smoking behind the bleachers.

Irked, Gray had decided she needed to be taken down a peg.

So, inspired by the instructions on one of his grandfather’s housekeeper’s frozen foods, he had printed out bold red letters on a piece of plain white paper. Then he’d recruited the girl who sat behind Bree in biology to surreptitiously tape it to the back of her shirt.

Caution: Contents Are Frozen. Thaw Before Eating.

She’d worn it for two whole class periods, in which apparently she had no allies. Finally, after school, one of her buddies saw it and yanked it off. By that time, the joke had made its way around the building like a virus, becoming more vulgar by the minute. Even Gray had felt naive when he realized some of the nasty interpretations that could be applied—though of course he pretended to have meant them all along.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, though,” she added with a smile. “You had good reason to be rebellious. What happened to your parents...it was so unfair. I didn’t understand anything about it that day, of course, but I found out soon enough. When you’re furious with life, with fate, with everything, it can make you...” She seemed to search for the right way to express herself. “Less than kind.”

He nodded. “True. Although in some ways isn’t that just a cop-out? People still have choices about how they’ll express their anger.” He appreciated her generosity, though. “I have to say,” he added, “that tragedy doesn’t seem to have had a similar effect on you.”

Flushing, she rolled the pearl of her earring between two fingers and laughed softly. “That’s nice to hear. But then, you’ve known me all of...ten minutes? I suspect that the people who know me better would emphatically disagree.”

People who knew her better... He wondered whom she meant by that. A husband...an ex-husband? A lover?

Or...he glanced toward the pine-dappled path they’d taken to the stables, and saw Rowena striding briskly toward them, her black hair blowing out behind her in the breeze.

Or a sister?

“Gray!” Rowena met them at the stable door and held out her hand. “Gosh, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? But you haven’t changed a bit! I would have known you anywhere.”

He accepted her warm, welcoming handshake. He would have recognized her, too, of course. Those eyes. Those cheekbones. But he couldn’t say she hadn’t changed. Though she had been in the eleventh grade the last time they met, and she was now probably nearly thirty-two, a married stepmother juggling family and business, she didn’t look a day older. Instead, she seemed, paradoxically, to have grown younger. Softer.

Was that what marriage to Dallas had done for her? Had love really erased all that dangerous tension that had once tightened the muscles in her face and in her body, until she had seemed a hairsbreadth away from exploding?

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting,” she went on. “You’ve seen the stables, then? I hope Bree has been persuasive. Her mission was to convince you that Bell River Dude Ranch is the perfect place to work.”

Bree frowned, as if this was the first she’d heard of such a mission, but Gray spoke up quickly. “Absolutely. She’s made it sound terrific. I’d want to work here even if you weren’t the only place in town willing to hire me.”

Rowena laughed, but Bree’s deepening furrow told Gray that she hadn’t been brought in on the joke. When Gray and Rowena had spoken on the phone yesterday, he’d laid everything out frankly, black sheep to black sheep, and asked for her help. In the strictest sense, this meeting wasn’t even really an interview, because she’d already offered him the job.

“I was just about to show him where the Phase Two construction will start,” Bree said, obviously treading carefully. She pointed west. “We’ll be adding a pool and a lodge, just over there. Both of them will allow us to offer many more activities. Your position would be greatly expanded during Phase Two, I’m sure, and—”

Rowena laughed again, reaching out to touch Bree’s upper arm gently. “I don’t think Gray really cares much about Phase Two,” she said. “He’ll be long gone by then.”

Bree’s face went very still, and she twirled her left earring with a studiously careless motion. “Long gone?” she repeated without inflection.

He glanced at Rowena, who nodded subtly, giving him permission to tell Bree the details. “I talked to your sister yesterday, and I explained my situation. I need the dirtiest, most menial job she has, but I need it for only a month. Four weeks, to be exact.”

“Only a month?” Bree raised her eyebrows. “And that’s because...?”

“Because that’s what my grandfather requires, before he’ll put me back in his will.”

She stared at him a long minute, and the expression in her eyes subtly hardened as she did so, as if she was revising down her estimation of him.

Finally, she turned to Rowena. “You think this is the best decision for the ranch?”

“What do you mean?”

Bree glanced once, quickly, at Gray, then returned her gaze to her sister. “Shouldn’t we have employees who really want to work at a dude ranch? At this dude ranch? Surely that’s in our best interests. And yet, knowing that Gray wants this position for his own personal agenda, and no other reason, you hired him anyway? Sight unseen?”

“Not exactly unseen,” Rowena corrected, a slight edge creeping into her voice. “We’ve known Gray for years, Bree. But otherwise, yes. I knew, and that’s exactly what I did.”

“Why?” Bree’s one-word question dripped disapproval.

As Rowena prepared to respond, Gray thought he detected a spark of the old firebrand. Her green eyes narrowed, and they seemed to blaze hot inside her thick fringe of black lashes.

“Because he is willing to work for practically nothing, which is about what I’ve got left in the budget. Because a month will get me through the soft opening and give me time to replace him. Because he’s handsome and smart and charming, and the guests will be eating out of his hand.”

“But, Ro, he—”

“I’m not finished.” Rowena’s syllables were crisp and staccato, and Bree subsided. “Most important, I’m hiring him because no one else will. Because I know what it’s like to try to outrun a reputation that got tied to your tail so long ago it feels grafted to you. In a town like Silverdell, that’s pretty darned hard to do.”

Gray watched as Bree tried to swallow her opposition—a self-control that seemed to be something of a struggle. As complex emotions swept across her classically beautiful features, rendering them infinitely more interesting than perfection ever could, his curiosity was piqued.

Though of course everyone had gossiped about their mother’s murder, Gray hadn’t really known the Wright sisters very well. Rowena had been older, too sophisticated to bother with a boy like him, and Bree had always seemed too deadly wholesome to be worth his time. The little one...he couldn’t remember her name...hadn’t registered at all.

Now, though, he sensed layers and textures in Bree’s personality that went far beyond “prissy” or “icy” or “dull.” And layers between the two sisters, too. Undercurrents both deep and powerful—and touchingly human.

He suspected that, at its heart, this mini-confrontation had very little to do with Rowena’s choice for a job as insignificant as the part-time assistant social director...and much more to do with years of unresolved family baggage.

Well, okay, then, maybe he knew them better than he had realized. They all belonged to that sorry club—the children who had survived the unsurvivable and didn’t really know why. Or where to go from there.

A large bird, maybe an eagle, landed somewhere high in the pines over their heads, causing the sunlight to shift as the branches swayed. For an instant, the light seemed to catch on two crystal sparkles at the outer edges of Bree’s cool blue eyes.

Tears? Gray frowned. Was the ice princess fighting back tears?

She blinked, then, and the illusion disappeared. But he was left with a sudden, inexplicable hunger to know her better, to find out more about her.

A lot more.

And...just his luck. He had only four weeks to do it.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHILE ROWENA WENT over the payroll paperwork with Gray, Bree decided to head up to her room and regroup. In the early planning stages, they’d all agreed that one of the upstairs rooms should be set aside for family, always to be left unrented, in case Penny or Bree wanted to visit.

The sister suite, Penny had called it. Because of its size, the space they’d chosen was Rowena’s old room. All the upstairs bedrooms had been subdivided to create more guest space. In this one spot, though, they hadn’t formed two separate rooms, but one suite with a connected sitting area and a bedroom.

Bree entered slowly. In the old days Rowena had been possessive about her private sanctuary. Her younger sisters had been forbidden to enter without permission, which she rarely granted. Even now, the remnants of inhibition were so strong that Bree felt odd waltzing in as if she belonged there.

Once in, Bree almost imagined she could detect a hint of Balenciaga Paris in the air. Rowena had received a bottle of the expensive perfume from some secret admirer that Christmas—the last they’d ever celebrated in Silverdell.

Ro had pretended to scoff at girly things like perfume, insisting that she preferred natural scents...wildflowers, the wind coming off the river or rain. But Penny, who sometimes crawled into one of her sister’s beds after a nightmare, had innocently told Bree that she chose Rowena now, because Ro always smelled of the pretty perfume while she slept. Ro had denied it, but she had clearly felt embarrassed and exposed. She’d been huffy, even with Penny, for days.

Bree knew the smell was only her imagination, of course. Old ghosts were stirring.

She went to the window of the sitting room. It overlooked the back parking lot, but it also had a peaceful view of the misty salmon-and-sapphire-tinted mountain line in the distance, and the view called to her. The physical beauty was shockingly different from anything in Boston, and at the same time it was deeply, hauntingly familiar.

She was still standing there when Gray and Rowena came strolling outside, their paperwork obviously completed. She moved an inch to the right so that the curtain veiled her, embarrassed to be caught watching.

But she needn’t have worried. Neither Rowena nor Gray looked up toward the second-floor windows. They seemed completely engrossed in their conversation. Bree couldn’t make out words, but occasionally Rowena pointed to various buildings, as if describing the activities planned on the property. Gray occasionally pointed, too, clearly adding suggestions of his own.

Lots of nodding and smiling, interspersed with laughter. They seemed to communicate awfully well for people who hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade.

But then, Gray had chatted comfortably with Bree, too, in spite of their touchy history. Obviously the man possessed formidable people skills. He always had, even in high school, which was probably what had allowed him to be so rough and rebellious without ending up expelled or slapped in jail.

Leaning easily against the driver’s door of his white truck now, he suddenly tilted his head back and laughed at something Rowena said. Bree smiled wryly, aware of a quick, supremely female reaction deep in her own body.

Okay, so it wasn’t just his people skills that gave him power. He was also dangerously sexy. His body was a six-four, athletic arrangement of rippled muscles and animal grace. She wondered what he did for a living, when he wasn’t in Silverdell, trying to vacuum out his grandfather’s wallet. Did he do some kind of serious labor? Or did he simply live at the gym?

And his face...she studied it now, trying to pinpoint where exactly its appeal lay. His golden-brown whisker stubble, square jaw and sun-weathered smile lines were all male, hinting at long days on horseback or wielding a jackhammer. But his lush eyelashes, the waves of chestnut hair that tumbled over his broad forehead and those sensually bowed lips belonged in an art gallery, a pirate ship or an eighteenth-century duchess’s boudoir.

Above the rest, his intelligent, honey-brown eyes simply said he found the whole question absurd. He was who he was.

Finally, he pulled his keys out of his pocket and beeped open the truck’s auto lock. For the first time, Bree actually paid attention to his vehicle. It was nice, a shiny new model, but somehow she’d expected something glitzier. Like maybe a purring silver Jag with a vanity plate that read GRAYT.

He and Rowena hugged goodbye—Bree couldn’t help shaking her head at that. When had her prickly older sister developed a warm fuzzy side? Then he climbed into the truck’s cab, cranked the engine, executed a deft three-point turn and guided it out of the parking lot and around the house, heading back to the main street.

She wondered where he was staying...and where he would stay, once he reported for work. Phase One of the dude ranch had included creating staff quarters out of the old stable, but she had the impression that, with at least a dozen employees already hired, those bunks were full.

Minutes later, she heard a low rap at her door. She braced herself, assuming that Rowena had come to finish their argument. She moved from the window and shot a glance into the dresser mirror to be sure she didn’t look frazzled.

“Come in,” she called, trying to sound as benign as possible. She didn’t want to fight with Ro. She’d come to Bell River for one reason only...to see if she could start repairing their relationship. The last thing in the world she wanted was to add to the destruction.

But when Rowena entered, her body language was surprisingly relaxed. Bree had always imagined she could see invisible sparks shooting from her sister when she was angry, but she sensed nothing like that now. Nothing but the fatigue she’d noticed earlier.

Apparently Rowena came in peace. Bree hadn’t realized she’d been clenching her midsection until the muscles released.

“I showed myself around up here,” she said quickly, determined to start right. “Everything looks fabulous, Ro. You’ve done a masterful job with the guest rooms.”

Rowena’s smile broadened. “It did turn out well, didn’t it? I had a lot of help. Did you know that Cindy Sedgwick got two-thirds of the way through architecture school before she found herself pregnant with twins and had to come home to marry Joey Incanto?”

Bree only vaguely remembered who Cindy Sedgwick was, but she made an impressed face, anyhow. “Cindy designed the rooms for you?”

“Yes, and the new guest cottages, too.” Rowena glanced at her watch. “I don’t have another interview until eleven-thirty, so I could give you a tour, if you’d like. I figure you might as well see them now, before guests come in and the Trash Clock starts.”

Bree chuckled, but to be honest, the joke surprised her. That had been one of their father’s favorite lines. He’d always complained that he’d rather postpone buying new equipment as long as he could, because the minute he made the purchase the Trash Clock began ticking, and the new stuff started turning to garbage that would, in its turn, have to be replaced.

Was Rowena really ready to start quoting their father’s cranky humor so casually? But then Bree corrected herself. Ro wasn’t quoting their father—just Bree’s. Rowena had found out last year that mad murderer Johnny Wright’s DNA didn’t match hers in any way.

Zero percent probability that Johnny was Rowena’s real dad.

To which Bree and Penny had said...lucky Ro. Penny had no hope of a similar reprieve, because she was Johnny Wright’s spitting image. But Bree had sent a sample of her DNA off, too, crossing her fingers and saying a prayer.

Her results had been very different. Percent probability of a match? Ninety-nine percent.

Unfortunately, she was the old bastard’s daughter through and through, and she’d simply have to live with that. Must be where her grudging, judgmental streak came from, and her difficulty trusting anybody.

But, damn it, DNA wasn’t destiny. She was her own person, and if she wanted to be more tolerant and trusting, then she could make it happen. Starting right now.

“I’d love to see the cottages,” she said.

For the next hour, her positive attitude was easy to maintain. Four new guest cottages—one that slept six, one that slept four and two smaller units that slept two—had been built as part of Phase One. And each cottage was a perfect jewel.

She loved every detail. She loved their names...River Run, River Song, River Moon and River Rock. She adored their quaint exterior styles, each one unique—some quaint, like fairy-tale storybook cottages, some rustic, like log cabins, and some a hybrid of the two.

And she adored the floor plans, which all included great rooms with big windows overlooking the stunning views. Even the interior decorating was perfect, cozy without being cliché.

Kudos to Cindy Sedgwick. And, of course, to Rowena.

No wonder Ro looked tired. Having staged so many events, Bree understood that every room in every cottage represented about a hundred decisions to make, a hundred details to oversee. She was deeply impressed and didn’t pass up any opportunity to say so.

Even cynical Rowena, whose antennae had always been finely tuned to detect empty flattery, was glowing under the effusive compliments by the time they stopped at the last cottage.

“Enough.” She smiled, holding out her hand. “I believe you’re sincere right now, but one more and I’ll start to think you’re blowing smoke.”

Bree laughed. “Okay. Nothing but insults from this moment on.”

She could hardly keep that promise, though. River Moon, built right at the edge of one of the small creek offshoots of Bell River, was a storybook charmer. This cottage, with its round blue door, steeply pitched, sloping roof and climbing yellow roses, would probably be used as the honeymoon suite. Phase Two included marketing the ranch for destination weddings.

They wandered through the adorable rooms, all the way to the sunny bedroom at the back.

“Oh, this quilt is—” But somehow Bree bit her tongue, holding back the word fabulous.

Rowena smiled, shaking her head. “I mean it, Bree. Enough.”

But the quilt, which had been draped over a Bentwood rocker, was fabulous. Bree ran her hand over the intricate blue-and-yellow pattern of entwined hearts. Each cottage bedroom had its own signature antique quilt, the one theme that ran through all four cottages, but this was the most beautiful of them all.

If Bree had wanted to say something less fawning, she might have voiced the one doubt that had niggled at her throughout the tour. Were the interior decorations maybe almost too beautiful?

Too beautiful for their tight budget, anyhow.

But obviously she didn’t utter a peep about that. She might have reached her limit of compliments, but she hadn’t reached the point at which she could dare to express a criticism.

Besides, Ro wasn’t exactly a shopaholic. She wouldn’t have spent the money if she hadn’t thought it was important. Bree forced the worry from her mind, and instead strolled the perimeter of the airy room, drinking in the romance of every charming detail.

“This may be my favorite of all the cottages. That’s not a compliment,” she hastened to add. “Just a fact. Just a personal preference. The colors...the creek. I don’t know, something just appeals to me.”

“I thought it might,” Rowena said. She lowered herself onto the rocker and leaned her head back against the quilt with a sigh, as if she didn’t get to sit down very often these days. “I used the colors from your old room. Remember?”

Bree scanned the area with new eyes. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now... Her childhood bedroom had once been painted this exact shade of powder blue, and her canopy bed had been trimmed in bluebell-daffodil patterned linens that she had loved with an innocent, absolute passion. She’d felt like a fairy princess in that room.

“I’d forgotten,” she said softly. “I can’t believe it, but I’d actually forgotten.”

Once the floodgates were open, she felt the memory rush through her. She suddenly saw Rowena and their mother, arguing quietly at the Mill End store in downtown Gunnison. Ro had tucked a bolt of flower-sprigged fabric under her arm with the grim tenacity of a quarterback protecting a football.

Ro couldn’t have been more than nine years old at the time, because Bree had been eight when she got her dream room. But the determination on Rowena’s face was intense and unshakable, far beyond her years.

“You helped me pick out that print,” Bree said suddenly. “You talked Mom into buying it for me, even though it was much too expensive. And I know you couldn’t have liked it, really. It wasn’t your style at all.”

Rowena had shut her eyes, but she was smiling, as if her mind’s eye had summoned the pictures, too. “You should have seen the look on your face. Clearly, you were going to curl up and die if you didn’t get it. Whether or not I liked it was irrelevant.”

Bree remembered that. Somehow, her future had seemed to depend on the sweet, feminine flowers in that bolt of fabric. She had believed with all her heart that if her room looked like that she would always be happy. If her room looked any other way, if her bed was draped in any other material, she would be forever unrealized.