Branded. B.J. Daniels
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gain the employees’ trust by being helpful and pleasant and find out more about each of the women—and more about Whitehorse and how Chisholm Cattle Company fit into the scheme of things—as time went on.
That, she’d come to realize, wasn’t going to happen.
“Just over a year,” Celeste said.
“And Mae?”
“About six months.”
Emma felt her brow shoot up in surprise.
“Not a lot of people want to work out here,” Celeste said.
“Why is that?” She knew the wages were good and Hoyt was congenial and easy to work for, from what she’d seen.
The cook seemed to search her gaze, as if she wondered if Emma was joking. Or testing her. “It’s a long drive.”
She could tell there was more, but that the woman wasn’t going to tell her for some reason. “Surely someone lasted longer.”
Celeste shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
Emma wondered if it had anything to do with the Chisholm Curse. She hated to admit that the phone calls had shaken her a little.
“Those women who have been calling you, they’re just jealous,” her friend Debra had said when she called Denver later that afternoon. Celeste had left for the day and it was Mae’s day off. Emma had the house to herself until supper when Celeste would return to help her cook for her large new family.
“Hoyt Chisholm must have been the most eligible bachelor in all of Montana,” her friend said. “Don’t let some old biddies get to you. He picked you. He loves you.”
Yes, Emma thought. And she loved Hoyt. “Still, it seems odd.” The last elderly neighboring ranchwoman’s call hadn’t sounded malicious. She’d sounded scared for her.
COLTON WAS WAITING BY THE ROAD when he finally saw the Sheriff’s Department patrol car approaching. His mind was reeling from the letter—and what he’d found under the cottonwood tree.
Inside Jessica’s purse he’d discovered her wallet with her driver’s license, $200 in cash and a bus ticket out of Whitehorse.
One one-way bus ticket? She’d said she wanted them to run away together. While she didn’t have a car of her own, she knew he had his own pickup. Did she have so little faith that he would show up that she’d gotten the ticket just in case? He felt confused. The ticket had been for the 4:00 a.m. bus that would have left just hours after they were to meet at their secret spot.
Why had she thought she’d be leaving Whitehorse alone?
But if her purse was buried under the tree root, then how could she have left town? And why would she bury her purse? It made no sense. It made his blood run cold because he knew she wouldn’t have buried it—just as he couldn’t see how she could have left without it.
A terrible dread had settled into his bones by the time the sheriff’s deputy pulled up next to his pickup and a female deputy stepped out.
She wore jeans, cowboy boots and a tan uniform shirt with a Whitehorse County Sheriff’s Department patch on the sleeve. Colton felt his heart drop like a stone off a cliff as he recognized her. He swore under his breath. Just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse. “Halley?”
DEPUTY HALLEY ROBINSON had told herself after moving back to Whitehorse that sooner or later she was going to cross paths with Colton Chisholm. When she’d left Whitehorse after junior high school, hadn’t she sworn that one day she would return and make Colton sorry?
But that had been a young girl’s dream of revenge. Halley was no longer that young, impressionable girl.
Lucky for Colton, she thought, since here they both were again, and oh, how the tables had turned.
“Colton,” she said, secretly enjoying the fact that he’d remembered her.
“You’re the new deputy?”
She smiled in answer. When the call came in, she’d been the only one on duty in the area. The county was a large one, stretching from the Missouri River to the south and all the way to Canada on the north.
“So, why don’t you tell me what the problem is,” she said, all business again. “You told the dispatcher you’d found Jessica Granger’s purse and you believe something might have happened to her?”
He nodded, looking as if he now regretted making that call to the sheriff’s office. Reaching into the cab of his pickup, he lifted out a weathered leather purse and handed it to her.
“It’s Jessica’s. I found it at a spot we used to meet.”
She raised her gaze to his. “A secret spot, the dispatcher said.”
He chewed at the inside of his cheek for a moment. “That’s right.”
“And there was something about a lost letter?”
Colton rubbed the back of his neck. His hair was longer than she’d ever seen it, but back in junior high, his father had taken clippers to all six of the boys, giving them buzz cuts. That was probably why she hadn’t remembered the color, a combination of ripe wheat and sunshine that brought out the gold flecks in his blue eyes.
She felt that old quiver inside as her gaze me his. Colton Chisholm had been adorable in grade school.
It shouldn’t have surprised her that he’d grown into a drop-dead good-looking man.
He reached into his jean jacket pocket and brought out a worse-for-wear looking, age-yellowed envelope. He held it as if not wanting to relinquish the letter to her, then finally handed it over.
Halley noted the postmark and the return address before opening the envelope. She quickly read what Jessica had written on the single sheet inside. The writing was young, girlish. She remembered Jessica Granger only too well. Jessica had been one of those annoyingly silly, all-girl girls while Halley had been a daredevil, tree-climbing, ball-throwing, horse-riding tomboy.
The letter, she noted, had been mailed fourteen years ago—only a few years after Halley had left Whitehorse brokenhearted because of Colton Chisholm.
Her gaze slid up to his again. He looked damn uncomfortable. Guilt? “What was it she had to tell you?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t get the letter until today.”
“You’re saying you didn’t meet her that night?”
“No. How could I since I never got the letter?” He sounded both angry and upset and she could see that he was more than a little shaken by this. He turned to get a United States Postal Department manila envelope from the pickup cab. He thrust it at her. “You can check with Albert if you don’t believe me.”
Halley wasn’t sure what she believed. She was having a hard time separating the boy he’d been from the man standing before her. As a boy, he’d been too cute for his own good. Now he had a rough, sexy look about him that was enhanced by what was clearly a strong, worked-hard, ranch body.
She was sure women found him irresistible and wondered how many hearts he’d broken. It made her think of her own fragile, small one that had taken a beating all those years ago because of him.
“Jessica didn’t phone you when you didn’t show up? Didn’t try to contact you?”
His golden gaze met hers and held it. “I never saw her again. I was told that she left town, just like she said she was going to do in the letter. I tried to find out where she’d gone, but …” He wagged his head and looked down at the toes of his Western boots. “Her family wouldn’t tell me anything. Her dad didn’t like me.”
Imagine that. “You have a fight?”
He looked away toward the foothills, his face filled with a pain that could have been