CHAPTER SIX

      DANI HUNG HER hat on a hook, dropped into her office chair and powered up her computer. Exhaustion pressed on her eyelids until they drifted shut. She stretched out her legs, crossed her boots at the ankle and tipped her head back to rest on the cushion as she waited for the old-school dial-up connection.

      What a crazy eighteen hours. When she’d pictured her first season as stable manager, she’d never imagined everything would go smoothly, but she hadn’t envisioned an undercover bounty hunter, a suspicious avalanche and friends who might be lying to her.

      But haven’t you been deceiving them, too? came the sudden question, echoing in her brain, louder than if she’d actually heard it.

      Her lungs expanded as she took in a deep, stress-management breath. It wasn’t the same thing. She hadn’t actually intended to commit a crime.

      In a flash, she was twenty-one again, double-parked on a busy street in Oklahoma City, finished with her morning jumping competition, excited to see what mischief her boyfriend, Kevin, would coax her into today. Maybe they’d borrow that ATV they’d been eyeing the past few days and take it for a spin. The owners looked like they were away...

      A loud bang on the passenger-side window jolted her out of her thoughts and Kevin’s face appeared in the window.

      “Let me in!” he yelled like some wild carjacker, and she immediately unlocked the door and hit the gas pedal when he hollered, “Drive! Fast!”

      She thought maybe he’d gotten in a fight. He had a quick temper and she’d seen how easily he got riled. She wouldn’t stick around for some offended mountain boy to stomp out and teach Kevin a few manners.

      Her pulse raced as they blew through five intersections before he turned to her with a big grin and opened his duffel bag. At the stacks of cash spilling through the open zipper, she hit the brakes and got honked at by a car that swerved around her.

      “Woooo-hooooo!” Kevin whooped. His eyes darted over her shoulder. “That’s fifty Gs. At least. We’re going to take a vacation. I’ll buy you something special, too. Promise.”

      Her insides froze. Her outside, too, for that matter, her hands awkward on the steering wheel.

      “What did you do?” she asked dumbly, her thoughts tumbling over each other as she resumed driving, her body on a tense sort of autopilot. Sure they liked raising hell, but this...?

      She wasn’t that kind of person.

      Later on, as she’d agonized over what to do, she’d seen a picture of herself on TV. A wanted woman with a misspelled name—in some ways anonymous. She’d vowed to turn herself in, but was stopped by a call from Kevin. After she’d dropped him off to meet his cousin, a bank employee who’d been Kevin’s accomplice, the two men had been apprehended.

      “You won’t do me any good locked up,” he’d said after he explained that he hadn’t clarified the correct spelling of her name or given any details about her. “When I get out, I’ll need a place to go, someone to help me out, and that’s you.”

      “I don’t want anything to do with you.”

      “Well. You won’t have a choice because you’ll owe me.”

      Muffled words sounded through the phone, as if he’d put a hand on it, and then his voice returned, sharp as a knife.

      “Look, my time’s up. Just remember what I said,” he’d hissed. “You owe me.”

      The line went dead before she could speak.

      At the gargled shriek of her connecting hard drive, her eyes flew open, rocketing her from her past and into the present that didn’t feel so very different.

      A whirring overhead fan stirred the muggy air in the cramped space and didn’t cool her burning cheeks one bit. She needed to distract herself, and checking through her guest preference sheets a final time wouldn’t cut it.

      A thirst to know more about Jack took hold. Technically that wouldn’t be procrastinating, since she needed to know about her employees—real or otherwise.

      Ahem.

      Oh, who cared if she justified her actions? She was curious and no one would know.

      She opened her browser, typed his name in and drummed her fingers beside the framed family photos on her desk, waiting...waiting...waiting...for the toddler-sized brain of her ancient hard drive to figure out what she wanted.

      Her gaze drifted over her eclectic picture collection. There was her father at age five in black-and-white, pulling a wagon with a droopy beagle in it. Beside him was a photo of her younger sister, Claire, her glowing face bent toward her newborn son, Jonathan, now ten, cradled in her arms. That fiercely tender expression always made a lump rise in Dani’s throat when she looked at it, remembering the miracle of that day.

      Next to the photo of her sister was her much younger self atop a brown-and-white pony, her short legs just barely hitting the stirrups, reins gripped tight in her small hands, her huge smile scrunching her nose and eyes so that she was all freckles and teeth. Brownie... She traced her first mount’s nose, nostalgia rising, the sense of loss increasing as her eyes drifted to a last picture: her mother at Port Aransas.

      Her mom perched on the rear deck of a fishing boat they’d chartered, her arm slung with casual abandon over Papa’s. Mama was laughing at the camera, at Dani, who’d been making crazy faces to get her to smile while Claire snapped the shot.

      Remembering the I-love-you-you-fool look her mom usually wore around Dani, how her mother had always called her “baby girl,” wrung her heart right out. She’d never be anyone’s baby girl again.

      She tore her eyes away and studied the monitor, the muscles on either side of her mouth tense as she kept her lips from wobbling, her mother dying again and again and again, as she did every time Dani looked at that photo. She wished she could step into it and have another one of her mama’s lilac-scented hugs that warmed her right through.

      Her bangs lifted at the force of her exhale, and as she scanned her computer’s search results, a Forbes headline on the computer caught her eye.

      New Heir to Cade Ranch: Jackson Cade.

      Puzzled, she swirled her mouse on her Pride and Prejudice pad, brought the cursor over the words and clicked.

      A picture of a beautiful vista, Rocky Mountains rising over grassy planes dotted with grazing cattle, appeared. Cade Ranch, the article chronicled, one of the biggest cattle ranches in Colorado, had been visited with tragedy when its owner, Jackson