Chapter One

      He stopped cold when he heard a faint rustle. The only light there was came from the moonlight sneaking through the barn door that he’d left open behind him.

      Standing stock-still, Quinn Drummond listened intently, his eyes searching the black shadows around him. He’d built the barn. He knew it like the back of his hand. He knew the sounds that belonged, and the ones that didn’t. Animal or human, it didn’t matter. He knew.

      He reached out his right hand, unerringly grabbing onto a long wooden handle. He’d prefer his shotgun, but it was up in the house. So the pitchfork would have to do.

      This wasn’t some damn possum rooting around.

      This was someone. Someone hiding out in his barn.

      He knew everyone who lived in his Texas hometown. Horseback Hollow was the polar opposite of a metropolis. If someone there wanted something, they’d have come to his face, not skulk around in the middle of the night inside his barn.

      His hand tightened around the sturdy handle. His focus followed the rustling sound and he took a silent step closer to it. “Come on out now, because if you don’t, I promise you won’t like what’s gonna happen.”

      The faint rustle became a scuffling sound, then the darkness in front of him gathered into a small form.

      His wariness drained away. His tight grip relaxed. Just a kid.

      He made a face and set aside the pitchfork. “What’d you do? Run away from home?” He’d tried that once, when he was seven. Hadn’t gotten far. His dad had hauled him home and would have tanned his butt if his mother hadn’t stepped in. “Never works, kid,” he advised. “Whatever you think you’re running from will always follow.”

      The form shuffled closer; small, booted feet sliding into the faint moonlight, barely visible below the too-long hem of baggy pants. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” the shadow said.

      Forget wariness. The voice didn’t belong to a child. It was feminine. Very British. And so damn familiar his guts twisted and his nerves frizzed like they wanted to bust out of his skin. A runaway would have been preferable to this. To her.

      Amelia.

      Her name blasted through his head, but he didn’t say a word and after a moment, she took another hesitant step closer. Moonlight crept from the dark boots up baggy pants, an untucked, oversize shirt that dwarfed her delicate figure, until finally, finally, illuminating the long neck, the pointed chin.

      The first time that he’d seen her had been six months ago on New Year’s Eve, at a wedding for one of her newly discovered cousins, right there in Horseback Hollow. Her long dark hair had been twisted into a knot, reminding him vaguely of the dancers at the ballet that his mom had once dragged him and his sister to. The second time that he’d seen her months later at the end of April, had been at another wedding. Another cousin. And her hair had been tied up then, too.

      But that second time, after dreaming about her since New Year’s, Quinn hadn’t just watched Amelia from a distance.

      No.

      He’d approached her. And through some miracle of fate—or so he’d thought at the time—later that night, he’d taken the pins from her hair and it had spilled down past her shoulders, gleaming and silky against her ivory skin.

      He blocked off the memory. He’d had enough practice at it over the past two months that it should have been easy.

      It wasn’t. It was the very reason he was prowling restlessly around in the middle of the night at all when he should have been sleeping.

      “What the hell’d you do to your hair?”

      She made a soft sound and lifted her hand to the side of the