“Another wedding!” Mavis said, winking at Skye and Max. “If only Jonah were alive to see it.”
“He’s probably rolling over in his grave,” Jenner said. “He worked hard to break up Max and Skye and keep me from knowing about Cody.”
“He would’ve changed his mind,” Virginia said.
Casey shook her head. “I don’t think so. But he’d bit off more than he could chew. Looks to me, at least for you four—” she motioned to Jenner, Beth, Max and Skye “—love really does conquer all.”
Jenner linked his fingers through Beth’s and led her to the back porch. The sky was dark, the wind chilly, but with Jenner’s arms around her, Beth was warm inside. “We could live in Rimrock, rebuild the cabin at the old homestead if you want,” he said, “and you could work for Skye, or...”
“Or?”
“We could get the old lodge going again. Hire a skeleton staff and turn it into a kind of hotel and dude ranch.”
“Would you be happy with that?” she asked.
His smile, crooked and cocksure, gleamed white in the darkness. “I’m happy with you. Doesn’t matter where we are or what we do. As long as we’re together. What do you say?”
She sighed and shook her head. “It’s about time, cowboy.”
“Mommy? Mommy, where are you?”
“Out here. With Daddy.”
Cody poked his head out the door. “No, you’re not. You’re with Jenner.”
He hurried over and Jenner lifted him off his feet. “From now on you can call me Dad.”
Cody grinned. “Okay, but I can have a horse?”
“A dozen of ’em.”
“And a puppy?”
“As many as you want.”
“Wait a minute,” Beth said, and Jenner’s smile faded.
“No way, lady,” he said, his eyes turning an erotic shade of blue. “I’ve waited too long already.” With that he kissed her, and Beth leaned happily against the man she loved, knowing that they would be together forever.
Dear Beth,
I’ve always been a solitary man. Never wanted anyone else around much. Until you and Cody showed up on my doorstep and gave me back a reason to get up in the morning, to walk again, to live, I really didn’t give a damn.
You changed all that and made my life complete.
I don’t think there are the right words (at least I don’t know them if they exist) to tell you how I feel, but each morning when I get up and you’re in my arms, I’m glad it’s a brand-new day, and each night when I lie down beside you, I’m thankful to be alive.
You and Cody are the reason.
All I can say is that I love you and I’ll never stop loving you.
Forever,
Jenner
C Is for Cowboy
Prologue
Sloan,
I never thought it would come to this, but it’s time to call in my marker. I hate to do it, but you’re the best damned detective in the country and we—my family and I—need all the help we can get.
As you can see from the enclosed ransom letter, my sister, Casey, has been kidnapped. I’m afraid the bastards who abducted her seem bent on revenge as they are interested in money. There’s no telling what they might do.
The local sheriff’s department and FBI have been called in but you know that I don’t put much stock in the law. Then there’s Rex Stone, a P.I. my mother hired when she suspected Dad was murdered. Stone’s an oily bastard and I don’t trust him. Not with Casey’s life. Even though we’ve offered a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for convictions of the culprits, no one’s taken the bait.
So, I’m asking. I managed to convince my brother Max that you could find Casey and find her fast.
The family will pay you one hundred thousand dollars if you locate Casey, bring her home alive and nail the creeps behind this. If something’s happened to her and she doesn’t return home, I want you to track down the bastards and I’ll personally show them my own kind of justice.
To save time, I’ll fax you a copy of this letter and the ransom note we received earlier today.
Jenner McKee
McKee Bastards:
We’ve got Casey. Just to prove it, we’re sending along her ring and a lock of her hair. She’s unharmed and will be returned to you if you pay one million dollars in cash. All bills are to be in denominations of twenty dollars or less.
We’ll send instructions on how to deliver the money later.
If you don’t do as we say, believe that you’ll never see your sister alive again.
Chapter One
“Son of a bitch,” Sloan muttered under his breath as he read the pages that whirred from his fax machine. His jaw tightened until it ached and he narrowed his eyes at the ugly words. Who the hell would’ve had the guts to kidnap Casey McKee, youngest child and only daughter of the richest man in eastern Oregon?
Sloan had no use for sneaks and cowards. In his opinion, anyone who would steal away a girl had to be a chickenshit. He’d love to take the bastards down.
Besides, he owed Jenner and he could really use the cash.
He cranked open the window and considered the money—even though, if push came to shove, he wanted to take the case whether he was paid or not.
But a hundred thousand dollars wasn’t something to sniff at. A man could change his life with a hundred grand. Sloan looked around his office—two small rooms equipped with a computer, printer, fax machine and copier. He’d picked all the equipment up at a liquidation sale. His battle-scarred desk and the three chairs had been handed down. The couch in the waiting room had been purchased new fifteen years before—the first piece of furniture that he and Jane had bought together. He should’ve sold it before now, but he hung on to it for sentimental reasons, just as he kept pictures of Jane and Tony to remind him that there was—or at least there had been a long time ago—some good in the world.
As a cool breath of winter breeze fanned into the room, bringing the scents of lemon trees and the faint aroma of exhaust from the Santa Monica Freeway, Sloan picked up a picture fading in an old frame. It was his favorite snapshot—a picture of Jane with her hair blowing in the wind. She was standing on the ridge over a desert canyon with the blue sky and dusty hills as a backdrop and holding Tony, scarcely two, on one hip. Her feet were bare, and a beaded bracelet circled her ankle, just below the hem of her long skirt. While Tony squinted, Jane smiled into the camera as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
Sloan’s insides seemed to turn to sand and he moved his gaze to the top of a file cabinet where all of his rodeo trophies were beginning to gather dust. Riding rodeo—his catharsis—was how he’d met Jenner McKee and now the crazy son of a bitch was in trouble. Big trouble. Not that trouble didn’t chase after Jenner. Or was it the other way around? But this was different—not just a barroom brawl or argument over a card game. This was the big time.
One side of Sloan’s mouth curved into a smile. He’d always liked Jenner and appreciated his irreverent and rather crooked sense of humor, so he was half-inclined to take the offer, money or no money. A favor for a friend. The problem was that he had a personal code of ethics—one he’d never yet broken. He drew the line at working for people he cared about. He didn’t bug their phones or take pictures of their spouses cheating on them. Sloan was content to leave that kind of work to someone who didn’t care who was doing what to whom. Taking on a case from a friend violated one of Sloan’s basic rules to himself.
But this was different.
And he owed Jenner his life.
Son of a bitch.
Casey was missing and there had been a ransom note. His brows drew together as he read the words a second time. Casey McKee was a headstrong girl. Rich and spoiled. Sloan had never met her. He only knew what Jenner had told him and had seen a faded picture of her that Jenner kept in his wallet. If he remembered right, Casey was pretty, blessed with the McKee good looks that ran in the family.
Sloan scratched the stubble on his chin, tr
ying to remember what he knew about the McKee family. Casey was the youngest child and only daughter of Jonah McKee, one of the richest men in all of eastern Oregon, if the rumors he’d heard were true. Sloan had met the man a couple of times and hated him on sight. Jonah, while trying to rein in his wayward second son, had shown up at two rodeos and each time he’d looked down his patrician nose, his blue eyes condescending. Sloan had read Jonah’s unspoken thoughts. From years of interpreting the slightest of sneers, the discomfort masked by curiosity at his decidedly Native American features, Sloan Redhawk could smell prejudice a mile away.
It hadn’t mattered to Jenner. He and his old man had always been at opposite ends of any argument. Jenner had had no respect for his father, but Jonah McKee had tried to bend his son’s incredible will to his.
As for the rest of the kids, Max seemed to be the least rebellious, but Casey was supposed to be a firecracker. Jenner, after a few beers that loosened his tongue, had seemed proud of his temperamental little sister. According to Jenner, Casey could rope a calf, brand a steer, shoot a. 22 straight as an arrow, and was pretty and feminine to boot. Jenner also seemed to think that Casey was more stubborn than he and his brother rolled into one, though she’d been doted on all of her life.
He knew about rich women. They and their families were nothing but trouble. With a capital T. The kind of trouble Sloan usually avoided.
Except she needed help.
And Jenner wouldn’t have asked unless he was desperate.
Swearing under his breath, he reached for the phone. So he’d help out an old friend and make himself enough money to buy a ranch, a place of his own in the country where he’d lived as a small boy and young man—the high desert of his ancestors. He was getting too old to ride rough-and-tumble rodeo stock, he was tired of chasing after men who cheated on their wives, and he’d had it with the snarl of L.A. traffic, which had only gotten worse since the earthquake. He wasn’t cut out for the city, but he’d never completely been able to move on, not permanently, because of the memories that still lingered here—ghosts that seemed to be a part of his life.
But it was time to leave California. He’d called this part of the country home for nearly twenty years and he was beginning to feel penned in.
Besides, he owed Jenner a favor. A big one. It was time to pay up. He read the two notes again and his gut clenched. There was a chance, a very good chance, that Casey McKee was already dead.
“You keep your filthy hands off me!” Casey glared at her abductor, a man she’d known all her life, a man she’d been forced to trust when her car had broken down, a man who’d bound and gagged her and dragged her to this ramshackle cabin in the middle of God-only-knew where. Barry White.
“I was just tryin’ to make you comfortable.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the fire of the wood stove and the flames sizzled in protest.
“If you were concerned about that, you’d untie me.” Casey struggled against the rope that cut into her wrists and made her hands feel numb.
“I’d untie you if I trusted you, which I don’t.” Barry grinned, his lips curving in a week’s growth of red beard stubble. He wasn’t a handsome man to begin with, and now that he’d been stuck in this cabin in the middle of the wilderness, he looked worse than ever. His hair receded past a bony ridge in his skull and his pale blue eyes were small and set deep in his head. His nose was large with little red lines crawling across the tip—proof of his love of the bottle.
Casey knew that if she had any chance for escape it was to lull Barry into believing that her spirit was broken and that she was too scared or numb to do anything as rash as try to break out of the cabin and start hiking through the snow and woods in search of civilization. She looked through the grimy window and watched as the snow fell steadily. The tiny flakes were driven by a wind that howled through the rafters of the one-room cabin.
“My brothers will hunt you down like the dog you are,” she said, and he seemed to pale a bit as he reached for the bottle of whiskey he kept on the single table in the room.
“Yeah, yeah. So you keep telling me. So let ’em. They’ll never find me.” He sat with cocky confidence, straddling a corner of his chair, glowering at Casey, who was sitting on a sleeping bag wedged between the old wood stove and the wall.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Casey said, pressing her advantage. Barry was a coward and certainly not the brains behind this operation, though in the five days since she’d been abducted, he hadn’t given a clue as to who his partner in crime was. “You know how determined Jenner can be.”
“Jenner’s a cripple.” Barry sniffed noisily and a little tic developed beneath his eye. He took a swig from the bottle as if to calm his nerves.
“Not anymore. He’s off crutches and onto a cane—getting stronger every day. With all the physical therapy he’s been through, he’s tough as nails again and I bet he could take you with one hand tied behind his back. I think he did a while back, didn’t he? At the Black Anvil? Broke a pool cue over your head when you wouldn’t stop insulting Wanda.” Casey remembered the story well. Wanda Tully, a blond waitress at the Black Anvil, had always had a soft spot for Jenner. That night, Barry, who’d been three sheets to the wind, had insisted on getting another drink but the bartender had cut him off. Wanda had delivered a cup of coffee with the news, and Barry had snarled invectives at her, called her a cheap dime-store whore as well as a bitch. Jenner had told Barry to knock it off and Barry had turned on Jenner, intent on pounding him. Even though Jenner had been on crutches at the time, he sidestepped the blow and cracked a pool cue over Barry’s slightly misshapen head. That was all it had taken; Barry had passed out on the spot.
Now, Barry let loose with another stream of tobacco juice, spitting it out with a look of disgust. Again the fire crackled.
“Jenner’s got a mean temper,” Casey reminded her abductor. “And then there’s Max.”
“Shut up.”
“You know about Max, don’t you?”
“Only way I couldn’t is if I was deaf. All you been talkin’ ’bout since I took out your gag was your brothers. But that’s all it is—just talk. They ain’t come to save you yet, have they?”
“But they will. You and I both know it. They won’t give up,” Casey said bravely. She had absolute faith in the McKee men.
Barry’s eyes shifted. His tongue rimmed his lips. “Max don’t scare me.”
“Then you’re stupid, Barry. Just ’cause he’s got a law degree and runs a business doesn’t mean he isn’t tough as nails.”
“If I’m so stupid, why’re you tied up while I’m sittin’ pretty drinkin’ my whiskey and playin’ cards, hmm?” He picked up a ratty old deck of cards and started laying them out on the table, snapping the edges so loudly that Casey wanted to scream.
Where were her brothers? Why hadn’t they found her? A small insidious fear wormed its way into her heart, but she ignored it. She wasn’t about to back down; she knew she was getting to him, putting him on edge. Antsy and uptight, Barry would soon make a mistake, and when he did, she’d take advantage of it. “You just better hope your partner doesn’t sell you out,” she said, using a different, but well-worn tack. “What’s to prevent him from keeping the ransom money and leaving you up here to rot?”
“He’d never do that,” Barry said with conviction, but his eyes shifted to the window and the near blizzard outside. He sniffed loudly, his reddish brown eyebrows forming a solitary line as he considered her words.
“Men’ll do anything for money,” she persisted, forcing herself to sit taller. “Even sell out their partners.”
“Yeah, well, then I’ll go to the sheriff and make a deal.”
“If you’re alive.”
“Shut up!” he roared suddenly, his nostrils flaring. “You talk too much! You’re like a goddamned broken record, playing the same old sorry song over and over. My partner won’t sell me out. Not ever!” But a muscle twitched just below one of his eyes.
Fine. Let him
think it over. Casey was dirty and tired. Her skin itched and she could use a bath. Worse than that, she was scared to death, though she’d never let Barry see her fear. She only hoped that somehow Barry and his accomplice had tripped up, that even now Jenner and Max were on their way, or if not them, then the police or the FBI or someone who would come bursting through the door intent on helping her. Where was the cavalry when you needed it?
She rested her head against the wall and noticed the dead insects and dust trapped in spiderwebs that stretched from the ceiling to the window. How had she gotten herself into this mess? Scowling at the lantern set square in the middle of the table, she wondered at her chances of escape. Without help, she wouldn’t get far. The temperature had plunged far below freezing; at least it seemed that it had from the times she’d had to hike to the outhouse. She’d managed a look at her surroundings, seen the dense forest, eyed the steep hills and deep ravines and listened for any sound of civilization. There had been none. No rumble of a train on distant tracks, no hum of electric wires, no thrum of an engine, no barking of a dog, no whisper of traffic anywhere. No sound of someone chopping wood, no muttered words of frustration from hunters, no smell of a campfire. Nothing.
It was as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. Somehow, some way, she had to escape.
Barry had a pickup—an old Ford parked in a lean-to, which had probably been a shed for cows or horses decades ago. If she could break her bonds, snag the keys and somehow start the damned thing, she could drive to the nearest town and get help.
If only someone would find her. Certainly her family was worried. They couldn’t possibly guess where she was. She knew only that Barry had traveled continuously north-east, crossed the state line from Oregon to Idaho, and at one point driven into Montana, but she wasn’t certain that they hadn’t strayed back into Idaho.