Wrangled

Zane squeezed her hand, and leaning toward her, drew her into his arms.

He hadn’t planned to kiss her. But at that moment, it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Her lips parted, her breath warm and sweet. He felt a quiver run through her, his pulse kicking up as his mouth dropped to hers.

Dakota gently pushed him away. “Sorry, but your reputation precedes you.”

He heard the slight tremble in her voice. She pulled free of his arms and he leaned back, telling himself he shouldn’t have kissed her. Especially given why they were together. Didn’t he have enough women problems right now?

“You’re going to believe rumors about me?” he joked as he tried to cover up how even that quick kiss had affected him.

She smiled but there was hurt in her gaze.

His gaze caressed her face for a moment before meeting her eyes. “But that kiss? I was just fulfilling a promise I made you before you moved to New Mexico. Remember?”

About the Author

USA TODAY bestselling author BJ DANIELS wrote her first book after a career as an award-winning newspaper journalist and author of thirty-seven published short stories. That first book, Odd Man Out, received a four-and-a-half-star review from RT Book Reviews and went on to be nominated for Best Intrigue that year. Since then she has won numerous awards, including a career achievement award for romantic suspense and many nominations and awards for best book.

Daniels lives in Montana with her husband, Parker, and two springer spaniels, Spot and Jem. When she isn’t writing, she snowboards, camps, boats and plays tennis. Daniels is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, Kiss of Death and Romance Writers of America.

To contact her, write to BJ Daniels, PO Box 1173, Malta, MT 59538, USA or e-mail her at bjdaniels@mtintouch.net. Check out her website at www.bjdaniels.com.

Wrangled

USA Today Bestselling Author BJ Daniels

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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This book is dedicated to Julie Miller and Delores Fossen, two fellow Intrigue writers I greatly admire. I was with them in Los Angeles at the Romantic Times convention relaxing when I came up with the ending of this book. Thank you both for your friendship. I’m looking forward to our January Ice Lake anthology together.

Chapter One

The knock at the door surprised Zane Chisholm. He’d just spent the warm summer day in the saddle rounding up cattle. All he wanted to do was kick off his boots and hit the hay early. The last thing he wanted was company.

But whoever was knocking didn’t sound as if they were planning to go away anytime soon. Living at the end of a dirt road, he didn’t get uninvited company—other than one of his five brothers. So that narrows it down, he thought as he went to the window and peered out through the curtains.

The car parked outside was a compact, lime-green with Montana State University plates. Definitely not one of his brothers, he thought with a grin. Chisholm men wouldn’t be caught dead driving such a “girlie” car. Especially a lime-green one.

Even more odd was the young, willowy blonde pounding on his door. She must be lost and needing directions. Or she was selling something.

His curiosity piqued, he went to answer her persistent knock. As the door swung open, he saw that her eyes were blue and set wide in a classically gorgeous face. She wore a slinky red dress that fell over her body like water. The woman was a stunner.

She smiled warmly. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He waited, wondering what she wanted, and enjoying the view in the meantime.

Her smile slipped a little as she took in his worn jeans, his even more worn cowboy boots and the dirty Western shirt with a torn sleeve and a missing button.

“I wasn’t expecting company,” he said when he saw her apparent disappointment in his attire.

“Oh?” She looked confused now. “Did I get the night wrong? You’re Zane Chisholm and this is Friday, right?”

“Right.” He frowned. “Did we have a date or something?” He knew he’d never seen this woman before. No red-blooded American male would forget a woman like this.

She reached into her sparkly shoulder bag and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Your last email,” she said, handing it to him.

He took the paper, unfolded it and saw his email address. It appeared he had been corresponding with this woman for the past two days.

“If you forgot—”

“No,” he said quickly. “Please, come in and let’s see if we can sort this out.”

She stepped in but looked tentative, as if not so sure about him.

“Why don’t you start with how we met,” he said as he offered her a seat.

She sat on the edge of the couch. “The Evans rural internet dating service.”

“Arlene’s matchmaking business?” he asked in surprise. Arlene Evans, who was now Arlene Monroe, had started the business a few years ago to bring rural couples together.

“We’ve been visiting by email until you …”

“Asked you out,” he finished for her.

“Are you saying someone else has been using your email?”

“It sure looks that way, since I never signed up with Arlene’s matchmaking service. But,” he added quickly when he saw how upset she was, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Arlene is behind this. It wouldn’t be the first time she took it upon herself to play matchmaker.” Either that or his brothers were behind it as a joke, though that seemed unlikely. This beautiful woman was no joke.

She looked down at her hands in her lap. “I’m so embarrassed.” She quickly rose to her feet. “I should go.”

“No, wait,” he said, unable to shake the feeling that maybe this had been fate and that he would be making the biggest mistake of his life if he let this woman walk out now.

“You know, it wouldn’t take me long to jump in the shower and change if you’re still up for a date,” he said with a grin.

She hesitated. “Really? I mean, you don’t have to—”

“I want to. But you have the advantage over me. I don’t know your name.”

She smiled shyly. “Courtney Baxter.” She held out her hand. As he shook it, Zane thought, This night could change my life.

He had no idea how true that was going to be.

Chapter Two

Dakota Lansing got the call at 3:20 a.m. She jerked awake, surprised by the sound of the ringing phone. She hadn’t had a landline in years. Glancing around in confusion, for a moment she forgot where she was.

Home at the ranch. It all came back in a rush, including her father’s death. She turned on the light as the phone rang yet again and grabbed the receiver.

As she did, she glanced at the clock, her mind spinning with fear. Calls in the wee hours of the morning were always bad news.

“Hello?” Her voice broke as she remembered the last call that had come too early in the morning.

This is Dr. Sheridan at Memorial Hospital in Great Falls. I’m sorry to inform you that your father has had a heart attack. I’m afraid there was nothing we could do. Your sister is here if you would like to speak with her.

My sister? You must have the wrong number, I don’t have a sister.

“Hello?” she said again now.

At first all she heard was crying. “Hello?”

“Dakota, I need your help.”

Her sister, half sister, the one she hadn’t known existed until two weeks ago, let out a choked sob.

“Courtney? What’s wrong?”

More sobbing. “I’m in trouble.”

This, at least, didn’t come as a surprise. Dakota had expected her half sister was in trouble when she’d asked after their father’s funeral if she could stay at the ranch for a while.

“I want to get to know you,” Courtney had said. But it had become obvious fairly quickly that her half sister wanted a lot more than that.

“Speak up. I can barely hear you,” Dakota said now.

“I can’t. He’s in the next room.”

Dakota rolled her eyes. A man. Not surprising, since Courtney had been out every night in the two weeks since their father’s funeral.

“I think he might be dead.”

Dakota came wide awake. Dead? “Where are you?” There was a loud crash in the background as something fell and broke. “Tell me where you are,” Dakota cried as she stumbled out of bed. “Courtney?”

Her father’s secret love child, a woman only two years younger than herself, whispered two words before the line went dead.

“Zane Chisholm’s.”

ZANE WOKE TO POUNDING. He tried to sit up. His head swam. He hadn’t really drunk champagne last night, had he?

Numbly he realized the pounding wasn’t just in his head. Someone was at the door and it was still dark outside. He turned on a light, blinded for a moment. As he glanced over at the other side of his queen-size bed, he was a little surprised to find it empty. Courtney had come home with him last night, hadn’t she?

As he got up he saw that he was stark naked. Whoever was at the door was pounding harder now. He quickly pulled on a pair of obviously hastily discarded jeans and padded barefoot into the living room to answer the door.

“What the hell happened to you?” his brother Marshall asked in surprise when Zane opened the door.

“I’m a little hungover.” A major understatement. He couldn’t remember feeling this badly—even during his college days when he’d done his share of partying.

“Your face,” Marshall said. “It’s all scratched up.”

Zane frowned and went into the bathroom. He turned on the light and stared in shock into the mirror. His pulse jumped. He had what looked like claw marks down the side of his left cheek. As he looked down at his arm, he saw another scratch on his forearm.

What the hell had happened last night?

“Are you okay?” Marshall asked from the bathroom doorway. He sounded worried, but nothing like Zane felt.

“I don’t know. I’m having trouble remembering last night.”

“Well, it must have been a wild one,” Marshall said. “I hope it was consensual with whatever mountain lion you hooked up with.”

“Not funny.” His head throbbed and his memory was a black hole that he was a little afraid to look into too deeply.

“You do remember that you and I are picking up horses in Wolf Point today, right?” Marshall said. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get cleaned up, but don’t even think about trying to get out of this. I need your help and we’re already running late. I told you to be ready at four forty-five.”

Zane nodded, although it hurt his head. What time was it, anyway? The clock on the wall read 5:10 a.m. “Could you make me some coffee while I get ready?”

His brother sighed. “Aren’t you getting a little too old for partying like this?” he grumbled on his way to the kitchen.

Zane stepped into the bathroom, closed the door and stared into the mirror again. He looked like hell. Worse, he couldn’t remember drinking more than a glass or two of champagne, certainly not enough to cause this kind of damage.

He thought about Courtney. She had to have done this to him. He touched his cheek. What scared him was, what had he done to get that kind of reaction from her?

EMMA CHISHOLM HAD been an early riser all her life. She liked getting up before the rest of the world when everything was still and dark. Since marrying Hoyt Chisholm a year ago, she especially liked seeing the sun come up here on the ranch.

As she stepped into the big ranch kitchen, she heard a sound and froze.

“I hope I didn’t scare you.”

Emma shuddered as a chill raced down the length of her spine. She tried to hide it but knew she’d failed when she turned to see amusement in their new live-in housekeeper’s one good eye. Up before sunrise and often the last one to bed, the woman moved around the house with ghostlike stealth.

“There really is no need for you to work such long hours,” she said as Mrs. Crowley stepped out of the dark shadows of the kitchen. The fifty-eight-year-old woman moved with a strange gait—no doubt caused by her disfiguring injury. It was hard to look into Mrs. Crowley’s face. The right side appeared to have been horribly burned, that eye white and sightless. Behind her thick glasses, her other eye shone darkly.

“I’m not interested in sleeping anymore,” Mrs. Crowley said. Her first name was Cynthia, but she’d asked them to refer to her by her married name.

The moment she’d come to the house, she had taken over. But Emma couldn’t complain. Mrs. Crowley, a woman about her own age, was a hard worker and asked for little in return. She lived in a separate wing of the house and was Emma’s new babysitter.

Not that Emma’s husband, Hoyt, would ever admit that was the case. But last year his past had come back to haunt them. It had to do with the deaths of Hoyt’s last three wives. An insurance investigator by the name of Aggie Wells had been convinced that he’d killed them.

When Aggie had heard about Hoyt’s fourth marriage—this one a Vegas elopement to Emma—she’d come to Montana to warn Emma that she was next.

Aggie was dead now. While the police hadn’t found her killer, Emma was fairly certain that the perpetrator was the same one who’d murdered at least one of Hoyt’s wives.

Aggie Wells had originally been convinced that the killer was Hoyt, but as time went on she’d thought Hoyt’s first wife might still be alive. Laura had allegedly drowned in Fort Peck Reservoir more than thirty years before. Aggie had even found a woman named Sharon Jones, whom she believed was Laura. Unfortunately, Sharon Jones had disappeared before the police could question her.

For months now Hoyt had been afraid to leave Emma alone. Either he or one of his six sons hung around the house to make sure no harm came to her.

She’d been going crazy, feeling as if she was under house arrest. Hoyt and his sons had to be going crazy as well. They were ranchers and much more at home on the back of a horse than hanging around the kitchen with her.

Finally Hoyt had come up with the idea of a live-in housekeeper. Emma was sure that Mrs. Crowley wasn’t what he’d had in mind. But after all the rumors and suspicions that were flying around, it was next to impossible to get anyone to work at the ranch.

Fortunately, Mrs. Crowley had been glad to come. She said she liked that Chisholm Cattle Company was so isolated.

“People stare,” she’d said simply when Emma had asked her if she thought she could be happy living this far away from civilization.

She was an abrupt woman who had little to say. Emma knew she should be thankful, but sometimes it would be nice to have someone who would just sit and visit with her. That definitely wasn’t Mrs. Crowley, but Emma kept trying.

“I see you’ve made coffee,” Emma said now. “May I pour you a cup? We could sit at the table for a few minutes before Hoyt comes down.”

“No, thank you. I’m cleaning the guest rooms today.”

Emma could have argued that the guest rooms could wait. Actually, they probably didn’t need cleaning. It had been a while since they’d had a guest. But Mrs. Crowley didn’t give her a chance. The woman was already off down the hallway to that wing of the house.

As Emma watched her go, she noticed how the woman dragged her right leg. That’s what gave her that peculiar gait, she thought distractedly. Then she heard Hoyt coming downstairs and poured them both a cup of coffee.

It wasn’t until she took the mugs over to the table that she realized Mrs. Crowley always made herself scarce when Hoyt was around. Maybe she just wanted to give them privacy, Emma told herself. “Strange woman,” she said under her breath.

A moment later Hoyt came into the kitchen, checked to make sure they were alone and put his arms around her. “Good morning. Want to sneak out to the barn with me, Mrs. Chisholm? Zane and Marshall have gone to Wolf Point. Dawson, Tanner and Logan are all mending fences and Colton has gone into town for feed.”

She laughed, leaning into his hug. It had been a while since they’d made love in the hayloft.

CYNTHIA CROWLEY WATCHED Emma and Hoyt from one of the guest room windows. They had their arms around each other’s waists. Emma had her face turned up to Hoyt, idolization in her eyes. She was laughing at something he’d said.

Cynthia could only imagine.

She let the curtain fall back into place as Hoyt pushed open the barn door and they disappeared inside. As she turned to look around the guest room, she mumbled a curse under her breath. The decor was Western, from the oak bed frame to the cowboy-print comforter. Emma’s doing, the housekeeper thought as she moved to look at an old photograph on the wall.

It was of the original house before Hoyt had added onto it. The first Chisholm main house was a two-story shotgun. It was barely recognizable as the house in which Cynthia now stood. Hoyt had done well for himself, buying up more land as his cattle business had improved.

On another wall was a photograph of his six adopted sons, three towheaded with bright blue eyes, three dark-eyed with straight black hair and Native American features. In the photo, all six sat along the top rail of the corral. The triplets must have been about eight when the picture was taken, which made the other three from seven to ten or so.

They looked all boy. There was a shadow on the ground in the bottom part of the photograph. Hoyt must have been the photographer, since she was sure the shadow was his.

Now the boys were all raised—not that Emma didn’t get them back here every evening she could. All but Zane were engaged or getting married so the house was also full of their fiancées. Emma apparently loved it and always insisted on helping with the cooking.

Not that Cynthia Crowley minded the help—or the time spent with the new Mrs. Hoyt Chisholm. Emma fascinated her in the most macabre of ways.

The new Mrs. Chisholm had definitely been a surprise. A man as powerful and wealthy as Hoyt Chisholm could have had a trophy wife. Instead he’d chosen a plump fifty-something redhead.

“There is no accounting for tastes,” the housekeeper said to the empty room as she went to work dusting. Before she’d been hired on, she’d been told about Hoyt’s other three wives—and their fates.

“Do you think he killed them?” she’d asked the director of the employment agency where she’d gone to get the job.

“Oh, good heavens, no,” the woman had cried, then dropped her voice. “I certainly wouldn’t send a housekeeper up there if I thought for a moment …”

Cynthia had smiled. “I’m not afraid of Hoyt Chisholm. Or his wife. I’m sorry, what did you say her name was?”

“Emma. And I’ve heard she is delightful.”

“Yes, delightful,” Cynthia grumbled to herself now. At the sound of laughter, she went to the window. Through the sheer curtains she saw Emma and Hoyt coming out of the barn. They were both smiling—and holding hands.

Cynthia Crowley made a rude noise under her breath. “The two of them act like teenagers.”

A loud snap filled the air, startling her. It wasn’t until she felt the pain that she looked down. She hadn’t been aware that she’d been holding anything in her hands until she saw the broken bud vase, and the blood oozing from her hand from where she’d broken the vase’s fragile, slim neck.

ONCE THEY HAD THE HORSES loaded at a ranch north of Wolf Point, Marshall suggested they grab lunch. Zane wasn’t hungry, wasn’t sure he ever would be again. He was anxious to call Courtney and find out what had happened last night.

Stepping outside the café to call her, he realized that he didn’t have her number. Nor was she listed under Courtney Baxter. He tried the couple of Baxters in the Whitehorse area, but neither knew a Courtney.

With no choice left, he called Arlene Evans Monroe at the woman’s rural internet dating service that had allegedly put them together in the first place.

“Did you set me up with a woman named Courtney Baxter?” he asked Arlene, trying not to sound accusing. Arlene used to be known as the county gossip. In the old days he wouldn’t have put anything past her. But he’d heard she’d changed since meeting her husband Hank Monroe.

“Yes,” she said, sounding wary. “Is there a problem?”

“Only that Courtney showed up at my door last night saying I had a date with her through your agency and I didn’t have a clue who she was.”

“Are you telling me you didn’t make a date with this woman?”

“I never even signed up for your dating service. I thought maybe someone had done it as a joke.”

“Zane, I have your check right here.”

How was that possible? He knew he was still feeling the effects of the hangover; his aching head was finding it hard to understand any of this. But all morning he’d been worried about what had happened last night. He had a very bad feeling and needed to talk to Courtney.

“When does it show that I signed up?” he asked Arlene.

“Two weeks ago.”

Two weeks ago? A thought struck him. About two weeks ago he’d come home to find someone had been in his house. Like most people who lived in and around Whitehorse he never locked his doors, so the intruder hadn’t had to break in. Nor had the person taken anything that he could see—not even his laptop computer. But enough things had been moved that he’d known someone had been there.

He swore now, realizing that must have been when the person had gone online and signed him up for the dating service—and taken at least one of his checks. He hadn’t even noticed any were missing.

“What is the number on that check?” he asked Arlene. She read it off and he wrote it down, seeing that it was a much higher number than the checks now in his checkbook. He wouldn’t have missed it for months.

Who went around signing someone up for a dating service? This made no sense. It had to have been one of his brothers. Or his stepmother, Emma? She had made it clear she thought it was time her six rowdy stepsons settled down. Maybe she was behind this.

But neither Emma nor his brothers would have come to his house when he wasn’t home, gotten on his computer and then taken one of his checks to pay for the rural dating service. Who then? And why? This was getting stranger by the moment.

“I need Courtney Baxter’s telephone number,” he told Arlene.

“According to the service policy you agreed to—”

“I didn’t agree because I never signed up,” he said, trying not to lose his temper. He caught his reflection in the café window and saw the four scratches down his cheek where someone had definitely clawed him.

“Zane, what if I call her and make sure it’s all right first? Do you want to hold?”

He groaned, but agreed to wait.

She came back on the line moments later. “She’s not answering her cell phone. I left her a message to call me immediately. I’m sorry, Zane, but that’s the best I can do. It’s policy.”