Hitched!
“Is the ranch much farther?” she asked, afraid she’d been duped. Again.
Sagebrush dotted the arid hills and gullies, and stunted junipers grew along rocky breaks. Dust boiled up behind the Cadillac, the road ahead more of the same.
“It’s a bit farther,” Jack said. “The ranch isn’t far from a paved highway—as the crow flies. But the only way to get there is this road, I’m afraid.”
Josey felt a prickle of fear skitter over her skin. But come on, what man would buy you clothes just to take you out in the middle of nowhere and kill you? She shuddered, thinking she knew a man exactly like that.
“You thought I was kidding about the Winchester Ranch being remote?” Jack asked with a laugh.
When he had told her about where they would be spending the week, she had thought it perfect. But now she doubted there was even a ranch at the end of this road. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been played for a fool, but it could be the last. Josey had a bad feeling that she’d used up any luck she’d ever had a long time ago.
She shifted in her seat and drew the backpack closer, considering what she was going to do if this turned out to be another trap. Jack didn’t look like a deranged madman who was driving all this way to torture and kill her. But then RJ hadn’t looked like a deranged madman, either, had he?
She stared at the road ahead as Jack drove deeper into the wild, uninhabited country. Occasionally she would see a wheat field, but no sign of a house or another person.
As the convertible came over a rise in the road, Jack touched his brakes, even though all she could see was more of the same wild landscape. He turned onto an even less used road, the land suddenly dropping precariously.
“Are you sure you’re on the right road?” Her hand went to her backpack, heart hammering in her chest as she eased open the drawstring and closed her hand around the gun handle, realizing she had only four shots left.
“I’m beginning to wonder about that myself. I asked for directions back at a gas station in town before I picked you up, so I’m pretty sure I’m on the right road.” The car bumped down the uneven track, then turned sharply to the right. “There it is.” He sounded as relieved as she felt.
Josey looked up in surprise to see a cluster of log buildings at the base of the rugged hills behind it. A little farther down the road Jack turned under a huge weathered wooden arch, with the words Winchester Ranch carved in it.
Her relief was almost palpable. Josey released her hold on the pistol, trying to still her thundering heart as the Cadillac bumped down the narrow dirt road toward the ranch buildings.
She frowned, noting suddenly how the grass had grown between the two tracks in the road, as if it hadn’t had much use. As they grew closer, she saw that the cluster of log buildings looked old and … deserted.
Josey reminded herself that the grandmother had been a recluse for the past twenty-seven years. At least that was what Jack had said. So she probably hadn’t had a lot of company or use on the road.
After what she’d been through, Josey thought she could handle anything. But she suddenly feared that wasn’t true. She didn’t feel strong enough yet to be tested again. She wasn’t sure how much more she could take before she broke.
As they rounded a bend in the road, her pulse quickened. This place was huge and creepy-looking. Sun glinted off a line of bleached white antlers piled in the middle of a rock garden. She noticed other heads of dead animals, the bones picked clean and hanging on the wood fence under a row of huge cottonwoods. As she looked at the house, she thought of the “big bad wolf” fairy tale and wondered if a kindly grandmother—or something a lot more dangerous—was waiting inside.
Jack parked in front and killed the engine. A breathless silence seemed to fill the air. Nothing moved. A horse whinnied from a log barn in the distance, startling Josey. Closer a bug buzzed, sounding like a rattlesnake. She felt jumpy and wondered if she’d lost her mind going along with this.
“Are you all right?” he asked. He looked worried.
She nodded, realizing she was here now and had little choice but to go through with it. But this ranch certainly wasn’t what she’d expected. Not this huge, eerie-looking place, that was for sure.
“I know it doesn’t look like much,” Jack said, as if reading her mind.
The house was a massive, sprawling log structure with wings running off from the main section and two stories on all but one wing that had an odd third story added toward the back. The place reminded her of a smaller version of Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone Park.
At one time, the building must have been amazing. But it had seen better days and now just looked dark and deserted, the grimy windows like blind eyes staring blankly out at them.
“Don’t look so scared,” Jack said under his breath. “My grandmother isn’t that bad. Really.” He made it sound like a joke, but his words only unnerved her further.
As the front door opened, an elderly woman with long, plaited salt-and-pepper hair filled the doorway. Her braid hung over one shoulder of the black caftan she wore, her face in shadow.
“Showtime,” Jack said as he put his arm around Josey and drew her close. She fit against him, and for a moment Josey could almost pretend this wasn’t a charade, she was so relieved that at least part of Jack’s story had been true. An old woman lived here. Was this the grandmother?
Jack planted a kiss in her hair and whispered, “We’re newlyweds, remember.” There was a teasing glint in his blue gaze as he dropped his mouth to hers.
The kiss was brief, but unnervingly powerful. As Jack pulled back he frowned. “I can see why we eloped so quickly after meeting each other,” he said, his voice rough with a desire that fired his gaze. This handsome man was much more dangerous than she’d thought. In at least one way, she had definitely jumped from the skillet into the fire.
She gave Jack a playful shove as if she’d just seen the woman in the doorway and was embarrassed, then checked to make sure the scarf around her neck was in place before opening her door and stepping out, taking the backpack with her. Showtime, she thought, echoing Jack’s words.
No one would ever find her here, wherever she was. She had to pull this off. She was safe. That was all she had to think about right now, and as long as she was safe her mother would be, as well. One week. She could do this.
Jack was by her side in a flash, his arm around her, as they walked toward the house. An ugly old dog came out growling, but the elderly woman shooed him away with her cane.
Josey studied the woman in the doorway as she drew closer. Jack’s grandmother? She didn’t have his coloring. While he was blond and blue-eyed, she was dark from her hair to her eyes, a striking, statuesque woman with a face that could have been chiseled from marble, it was so cold.
“Hello, Grandmother,” Jack said, giving the woman a kiss on her cheek. “This is my wife—”
“Josey Winchester,” Josey said, stepping forward and extending her hand. The woman took it with obvious surprise—and irritation. Her hand was ice-cold, and her vapid touch sent a chill through Josey.
“I didn’t realize you were married, let alone that you’d be bringing a wife,” his grandmother said.
Jack hadn’t planned on bringing a wife. So why had he? Josey wondered. It certainly hadn’t ingratiated his grandmother to him. And as for money … was there any? This place didn’t suggest it.
“This is my grandmother, Pepper Winchester,” Jack said, an edge to his voice.
The elderly woman leaned on her cane, her gaze skimming over Josey before shifting back to Jack. “So, you’re my son Angus’s boy.”
Wouldn’t she know he was her son’s child? The woman must be senile, Josie thought. Or was there some reason to question his paternity?
“I remember the day your mother showed up at the door with you,” Pepper said. “What were you then?”
“Two,” Jack said, clearly uncomfortable.
His grandmother nodded. “Yes. I should have been suspicious when Angus involved himself in the hiring of the nanny,” Pepper said.
So Jack was the bastard grandson. That explained this less than warm reception.
Jack’s jaw muscle tensed, but his anger didn’t show in his handsome face. He put his arm around Josey’s waist and pulled her closer, as if he needed her as a buffer between him and his grandmother. Another reason he’d made her this phony marriage offer?
When he’d told her about his grandmother and this visit, Josey had pictured an elderly woman lying in bed hooked up to machines, about to take her final gasp.
This woman standing before them didn’t look anywhere near death’s door. Josey had speculated that this was about money. What else? But if she was right, then Jack had underestimated his grandmother. This woman looked like someone who planned to live forever and take whatever she had with her.
“Since I didn’t realize you had a wife,” Pepper Winchester was saying, “I’ll have to instruct my housekeeper to make up a different room for you.”
“Please don’t go to any trouble on my account,” Jack said.
The grandmother smiled at this, cutting her dark gaze to him, eyes narrowing.
Be careful, Josie thought. This woman is sharp.
JACK HESITATED at the door to the huge ranch lodge. This place had once been filled with happy memories for him, because he’d lived here oblivious to what was really going on. Ignorance had been bliss. He’d played with the other grandchildren, ridden horses, felt like a Winchester even before his mother had confessed that he was one and he realized so much of their lives had been lies.
“Coming, dear?” Josey called from the open front doorway.
He looked at his beautiful wife and was more than grateful she’d agreed to this. He wasn’t sure he could have done it alone. Josey, so far, was a godsend. His grandmother was a lot more on the ball than he’d thought she would be at this age.
Grandma had disappeared into the musty maze of the lodge, leaving them in the entryway. Jack was surprised that he still felt awe, just as he had the first time he’d seen it. This place had been built back in the nineteen forties and had the feel of another era in Western history.
He stared at the varnished log stairway that climbed to the upper floors, remembering all the times he’d seen his mother coming down those stairs.
“Mrs. Winchester said you are to wait down here.” Jack swung around, surprised to see the gnarled, petite elderly woman who had managed to sneak up on them. To his shock, he recognized her. “Enid?” She was still alive?
If she recognized him, she gave no indication as she pointed down the hallway then left, saying she had to get their room ready. She left grumbling to herself.
Behind them, the front door opened, and an elderly man came in carrying Jack’s two pieces of luggage from the trunk of the Cadillac. Alfred, Enid’s husband. Amazing.
He noticed that Josey still had her backpack slung over one shoulder.
Alfred noticed, as well. “I’ll take that,” the old man said, pointing to it.
She shook her head, her hand tightening around the strap. “I’ll keep it with me, thank you.”
Alfred scowled at her before heading up the stairs, his footsteps labored under the weight of the bags and his disapproval.
“I can’t believe those two are still alive,” Jack whispered to Josey, as he led her down the hallway. “I remember them both being old when I was a kid. I guess they weren’t that old, but they sure seemed it.” He wondered if his grandmother would be joining them and was relieved to find the parlor empty.
Josey took a seat, setting her backpack on the floor next to her, always within reach. Jack didn’t even want to speculate on what might be in it. He had a bad feeling it was something he’d be better off not knowing.
Chapter Three
Deputy Sheriff McCall Winchester had been back to work for only a day when she got a call from a fisherman down at the Fred Robinson Bridge on the Missouri River. Paddlefish season hadn’t opened yet. In a few weeks the campground would be full with fishermen lined up along the banks dragging huge hooks through the water in the hopes of snagging one of the incredibly ugly monstrous fish.
This fisherman had been on his way up to Nelson Reservoir, where he’d heard the walleye were biting, but he’d stopped to make a few casts in the Missouri as a break in the long drive, thinking he might hook into a catfish.
Instead he’d snagged a piece of clothing—attached to a body.
“It’s a woman,” he’d said, clearly shaken. “And she’s got a rope around her neck. I’m telling you, it’s a damned noose. Someone hung her!”
Now, as McCall squatted next to the body lying on a tarp at the edge of the water, she saw that the victim looked to be in her mid-twenties. She wore a thin cotton top, no bra and a pair of cutoff jeans over a bright red thong that showed above the waist of the cutoffs. Her hair was dyed blond, her eyes were brown and as empty as the sky overhead, and around her neck was a crude noose of sisal rope. A dozen yards of the rope were coiled next to her.
McCall studied the ligature marks around the dead woman’s neck as the coroner loosened the noose. “Can you tell if she was dead before she went into the water?”
Coroner George Murphy shook his head. “But I can tell you that someone abused the hell out of her for some time before she went into the water.” He pointed to what appeared to be cigarette burns on her thin arms and legs.
“Before he hung her.”
“What kind of monster does stuff like that?” George, a big, florid-faced man in his early thirties, single and shy, was new to this. As an EMT, he’d gotten the coroner job because Frank Brown had retired and no one else wanted it.
“Sheriff?”
McCall didn’t respond at first. She hadn’t gotten used to being acting sheriff. Probably because she hadn’t wanted the job and suspected there was only one reason she had it—Pepper Winchester.
But when the position opened, no one wanted to fill in until a sheriff could be elected. The other deputies all had families and young children and didn’t want the added responsibility.
McCall could appreciate that.
“Sheriff, we found something I think you’d better see.”
“Don’t tell me you found another body,” the coroner said.
McCall turned to see what the deputy was holding. Another noose. Only this one was wrapped around a large tree trunk that the deputies had pulled up onto the riverbank.
As McCall walked over to it, she saw two distinct grooves in the limb where two ropes had been tied. Two ropes. Two nooses. The thick end of the dead branch had recently broken off.
She looked upriver. If the limb had snapped off under the weight of two people hanging from it, then there was a good chance it had fallen into the river and floated down to where the deputy had found it dragging the second noose behind it.
“Better go upriver and see if you can find the spot where our victim was hung,” McCall said. “And we better start looking for a second body in the river.”
PEPPER WINCHESTER RUBBED her temples as she paced the worn carpet of her bedroom, her cane punctuating her frustration.
The first of her grandchildren had arrived—with a new wife. She shouldn’t have been surprised, given Jack’s lineage. None of her sons had a lick of sense when it came to women. They were all too much like their father, suffer his soul in hell. So why should her grandsons be any different?
Her oldest son Worth—or Worthless, as his father had called him—had taken off with some tramp he met in town after Pepper had kicked him out. She would imagine he’d been through a rash of ill-conceived relationships since then.
Brand had married another questionable woman and had two sons, Cordell and Cyrus, before she’d taken off, never to be seen again.
Angus had knocked up the nanny and produced Jack. She shuddered to think how that had all ended.
Trace, her beloved youngest son, had gotten murdered after marrying Ruby Bates and producing McCall, her only granddaughter that she knew of.
Pepper stepped to the window, too restless to sit. When she’d conceived this plan to bring her family back to the ranch, she wasn’t sure who would come. She’d thought the bunch of them would be greedy enough or at least curious enough to return to the ranch. She didn’t kid herself that none of them gave two cents for her. She didn’t blame them, given the way she’d kicked them all off the ranch twenty-seven years ago and hadn’t seen one of them since.
So why was she surprised that Jack wasn’t what she’d expected? The same could be said for his wife. She wasn’t sure what to make of either of them yet.
She pulled back the curtain and stared out at the land. Her land. She remembered the first time she’d seen it. She’d been so young and so in love when Call had brought her back here after their whirlwind love affair and impromptu marriage.
He hadn’t known any more about her than she had him.
How foolish they both had been.
It had been hard at first, living on such an isolated, remote ranch. Call had hired a staff to do everything and insisted no wife of his would have to lift a finger.
Pepper had been restless. She’d learned to ride a horse and spent most of her days exploring the ranch. That was how she’d met neighboring rancher Hunt McCormick.
She shivered at the memory as she spotted movement in the shadows next to the barn. Squinting, she saw that it was Enid and her husband, Alfred. They had their heads together and their conversation looked serious. It wasn’t the first time she’d caught them like that recently.
What were they up to? Pepper felt her stomach roil. As if her family wasn’t worry enough.
JOSEY STUDIED JACK. He seemed nervous now that they were here at the ranch. Was he realizing, like her, that his grandmother had gotten him here under false pretenses?
“As you’ve probably gathered, my mother was the nanny here as well as the mistress of Angus Winchester, my father,” Jack said distractedly, as he moved to look out the window. “According to my mother, they had to keep their affair secret because my grandmother didn’t approve and would have cut Angus off without a cent.” He turned to look at her. “As it was, Pepper cut him and the rest of her family off twenty-seven years ago without a cent, saying she didn’t give a damn what they did. When my father died, my grandmother didn’t even bother to come to his funeral or send flowers or even a card.”
“Why would you come back here to see your grandmother after that?” Josey had to ask.
He laughed at her outraged expression. “There is no one quite like Pepper Winchester. It wasn’t just me, the bastard grandson, she washed her hands of after her youngest son disappeared. Trace Winchester was her life. She couldn’t have cared less about the rest of her offspring, so I try not to take it personally.”
Shocked, she watched Jack study an old photograph on the wall. “If the only reason you came here is because you thought she was dying—”
“It isn’t the only reason, although I’ve been hearing about the Winchester fortune as far back as I can remember.” Jack smiled as he glanced at her over his shoulder. “She looks healthy as a horse, huh? I wonder what she’s up to and where the others are.”
“The others?” she asked.
“My grandmother had five children. Virginia, the oldest, then Worth, Angus, Brand and Trace.”
“You haven’t mentioned your grandfather.”
“Call Winchester? According to the story Pepper told, he rode off on a horse about forty years ago. His horse came back but Call never did. There was speculation he’d just kept riding, taking the opportunity to get away from my grandmother.”
Josey could see how that might be possible.
“When Trace disappeared twenty-seven years ago, it looked like he was taking a powder just like his father,” Jack said. “I would imagine that’s what pushed my grandmother over the edge, and why she locked herself up in this place all the years since.”
“So what changed?”
“Trace Winchester’s remains were found buried not far from here. Apparently he was murdered, and that’s why no one had seen him the past twenty-seven years.”
“Murdered?”
“Not long after his remains were found I got a letter from my grandmother’s attorney saying my grandmother wanted to see me.” Jack walked over to the window again and pushed aside the dark, thick drape. Dust motes danced in the air. “It was more of a summons than an invitation. I guess I wanted to see what the old gal was up to. Pepper Winchester never does anything without a motive.”
His grandmother had suffered such loss in her lifetime. To lose her husband, then her youngest son? Josey couldn’t even imagine what that would do to a person. She could also understand how Jack would be bitter and angry, but it was the underlying pain in Jack that made her hurt for him. She knew only too well the pain family could inflict.
The last thing she wanted, though, was to feel anything for Jack Winchester.
Nor did she want to get involved in his family drama. She had her own problems, she reminded herself. She pulled her backpack closer, then with a start realized there was someone standing in the doorway.
The housekeeper Jack had called Enid. Josey wondered how long the woman had been standing there listening. She was one of those wiry old women with a scornful face and small, close-set, resentful eyes.
Enid cleared her throat. “If you’ll come with me.” She let out a put-upon sigh before leading them back to the staircase.
As they climbed, Josey took in the antique furniture, the rich tapestries, the thick oriental rugs and the expensive light fixtures. She tried to estimate what some of the pieces might be worth. Maybe there was money here—if the ranch wasn’t mortgaged to the hilt. She feared that whatever had brought Jack here, he was going to be disappointed.
Jack looked around as they climbed the stairs, his face softening as if he was remembering being a boy in this place. There must be good memories along with bittersweet ones during his four years here.
Josey felt a sudden chill along with a premonition. She tried to shake it off. Why would there be any reason to be afraid for Jack?
They were led down a long, dark hallway to an end room. “Since you’re newlyweds,” Enid said. “This way you won’t disturb the rest of the household.”
Jack arched a brow at the old woman behind her back.
“I’m sure you’ll ring me on the intercom if you need anything.” Enid let out an irritated snort. “Dinner is served at seven on the dot. I wouldn’t be late if I were you.” With that she left them standing outside the room and disappeared into the dim light of the hallway, her footfalls silent as snowfall.
“That woman is scary,” Josey whispered, making Jack chuckle.
“Let’s do this right,” he said, surprising her as he swung her up into his arms. “In case anyone is watching,” he added in a whisper.
She let out a squeal as he carried her over the threshold, making him laugh. His laughter was contagious and she found herself caught up in the moment as he kicked the door shut and carried her into the bedroom.
The room was huge, with a sitting area furnished with two chintz-covered chairs in front of a stone fireplace. Josey caught a glimpse of a large bathroom done in black-and-white tile, sheer white drapes at the open French doors to a small balcony and, at the heart of the room, a large canopied bed.
Jack slowed at the bed, and as he gently lowered her to the cool, white brocade spread his gaze met hers. The sheer white curtains billowed in, bringing with them the sweet scent of clover and pine.
She felt as if she’d been saved by a white knight and brought to the palace for safekeeping. It would have been so easy to lose herself in the deep sea-blue of his eyes as he leaned over her. Jack was incredibly handsome and charming. Everything seemed intensified after what she’d been through. The hard feel of his chest against her breasts, the slight brush of his designer stubble against her cheek, the oh-so-lusty male scent of him as he lowered her to the soft bed.