Big Sky Dynasty. B.J. Daniels
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stepped to Georgia, laid one cool hand on her arm and smiled brightly. “Thank you again. Would you mind if I went out the back way?”
“Of course not. But do you have a place to stay? I saw you looking at the Apartment for Rent sign.”
“I was interested in the apartment.” She bit down on her lower lip, those green eyes filling with tears. “I do need a place to stay and a motel is out of the question since that would be the first place he’d look for me.”
Georgia could only assume she meant the cowboy. “I doubt he would look for you here again.”
“I suppose not.”
“It’s none of my business but—”
“No, you have a right to know why that man was after me. Especially if I rent the apartment.”
“Would you like to see it?” Georgia asked, changing the subject temporarily.
She brightened. “Oh yes, please.”
NICCI WAS ALIVE! Dalton pulled the truck over at the edge of town, got out and threw up his breakfast in the weeds. He was shaking, his mind refusing to admit what his senses knew as truth. Nicci had somehow survived. Not just survived but was now in Whitehorse. And he knew what that meant.
If she was here after nine years of letting him believe she was dead, then he was in serious trouble. As if just crossing paths with Nicci wasn’t trouble enough. His heart hammered at the thought. Knowing Nicci the way he did, he could only assume she’d come to finish what she’d started.
But why, if she’d been alive this whole time, had she waited nine years to come after him?
Shaking his head, he tried to make sense of this and couldn’t. He knew he’d acted like a crazy man back there at the yarn shop. He’d scared that poor young woman so badly she’d been ready to call the sheriff on him—might even have called after he left.
He cursed under his breath. He’d done insane things from the first moment he’d met Nicci nine years ago and it had only gotten worse. Why did he think now would be any different?
He had to get control of himself. But how could he?
Nicci was alive and in Whitehorse and playing some game he knew would only get deadly given their history.
Lightning splintered the sky in an explosion of light that made him jump. The clap of thunder immediately following it reverberated through him, making the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He glanced at the greenish blackness of the clouds moving across the prairie toward him. Hail.
Quickly, he put the truck in gear and looked for the largest tree he could find. The feed was covered with tarps in the back, but the truck itself…Slushy raindrops sounding as hard as hail pelted the hood and roof, drowning out all other sound.
Dalton pulled the truck under a large overhanging limb and cut the engine just as pebble-sized hail began to bounce off the pavement next to him. The hail tore through the thick green leaves of the tree he’d parked under, pinging off the truck and covering the ground in icy white.
He turned his thoughts from Nicci, to the apparent owner of the yarn shop. The young woman was the classic girl next door with her short curly chestnut brown hair, big brown eyes and glowing skin. The kind of woman who would protect another.
He recalled the determination he’d seen in her gaze and cringed remembering how he’d called her a liar. But she had helped the blonde disappear. He wasn’t sure how, just that she had. Understanding why didn’t help given who they were dealing with.
Tomorrow he’d go back to the shop and apologize. Maybe he’d take her some flowers. Anything to get her to tell him where Nicci had gone.
With a start, Dalton came out of his thoughts to silence. As quickly as the hailstorm had begun, it was over, having moved on. He sat for a moment, listening to water drip from what was left of the tree’s leaves onto the truck roof before he pulled out and headed for the ranch, knowing what he had to do. It was something he’d put off far too long.
Dalton hated asking. Grayson Corbett had raised five overly independent sons. All of them would rather chew nails than admit they needed help.
As hard as it was going to be, he dialed his brother’s cell phone number and said without preamble when Lantry answered, “I need a lawyer. I’m in trouble. Serious trouble and I need your help.”
AGNES PALMER hurried home after her knitting class, praying she could beat the storm. The weather service had updated the forecast and was now calling for hail.
Agnes’s pride and joy was her tomato garden. She was known all around the county for growing the biggest, beefiest and most beautiful tomatoes anyone had ever seen and had been for years.
This year she’d outdone herself. Her tomatoes would win blue ribbons at the fair and have people talking for years, although that wasn’t why she did it. She raised tomatoes because her husband, Norbert, God rest his soul, had loved tomatoes. It was her way of never forgetting the man she had married and loved for more than fifty years.
As she drove up in her yard, she saw the thunderhead at the edge of her field. Ignoring the weatherman’s advice to stay inside and away from windows, she hurried to the back porch for her plastic tubs and hightailed it out to her garden.
She could hear the thunder rumbling. Flashes of lightning lit the darkening sky. The air smelled of rain, which would be bad enough, but hail would destroy her tomato crop and Agnes wasn’t going to let that happen even if it killed her.
Clouds obscured the light, pitching the day into a premature darkness as she began to pick. She’d filled half a tub when a bolt of lightning lit the darkness in a blinding flash of light. Agnes glanced up at the angry sky and considered the danger.
But she still had too many tomatoes to pick. She wasn’t leaving them to this storm. More determined than ever, she began to pick more rapidly, filling one tub after another and dragging them over to the oak tree her grandmother had planted so many years ago.
Her roots ran deep in this part of Montana and she took a certain pride in that just as she did in her tomatoes.
As she scurried back to the garden to save the rest of her precious tomatoes, the first drops of rain slashed down from the dark heavens. Large, heavy and icy, the raindrops hurt as they struck her thin back and shoulders.
She bent her head against them and thought of something pleasurable—her knitting classes. While she enjoyed knitting, it was Georgia Michaels who made the classes so enjoyable. Never having had any children of her own, Agnes thought of the loving, caring woman the way she might have a daughter or granddaughter.
Not that she didn’t find something to like in everyone. She’d gotten that from her mother, who always said, “People are like gardens. While they need sunshine, water and a healthy dose of prayer, grace grows good gardens and people. Mind you remember that.”
Agnes had remembered.
The rain soaked her to the skin, beating her slim back and running in rivulets off the brim of her garden bonnet.
She glanced at her watch. Only a few more tomatoes to go. A bolt of lightning lit the garden in a blaze of white light. The thunderous boom was deafening and directly overhead.
Agnes reached for one perfect, large tomato, perhaps the one that would take the blue ribbon this year. She never saw the lightning bolt that hit her.
GEORGIA PICKED UP her keys for the apartment from where she’d thrown them on the counter earlier before her class and opened the door to the second floor.
Leading the way, she climbed the stairs to the landing and unlocked the one-bedroom apartment door across the hall from her own. Stepping back, she let her prospective renter enter.
“Oh, it’s wonderful,”