Lone Rider. B.J. Daniels
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up at him, startled as if she’d been deep in thought. He wondered what she’d been thinking about. Probably a man—maybe the same one who often came in with her on her coffee break. Or maybe the one he’d seen sitting across the street in his car watching her the past couple of days. A jealous boyfriend?
As she blinked those big blue eyes at him, she gave him a wan smile instead of her usual dazzling pierced lip grin, the one that made his day the few times she’d turned it on him. Not that she’d ever really seen him, he suspected. To her, he was just the barista behind the counter.
“You work here,” she said as if finally realizing who he was.
“The apron was the dead giveaway, right?”
She looked embarrassed. “Sorry. My mind was a million miles away. I recognize you now. I haven’t seen you that much behind the counter. You must work here part-time.”
He smiled at that. Actually he owned the place and another five like them across the state. “Alex Ross. Part-time barista. That’s me.”
“Emily Calder.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. Calder. How about I get you another coffee?” He took the disposable cup of cold coffee in front of her. “The usual?”
She quirked one pierced dark eyebrow. “You know what I drink?” Her smile was brighter and the worry in her eyes a little less noticeable.
He rattled off her usual. “One Montana Mocha Grande with an extra shot of espresso, topped with whipped cream, a drizzle of caramel and a little shaved chocolate.”
She laughed. “Do you know all your customers’ favorites?”
Only the ones who made his day. He grinned. “I just happened to remember yours.”
* * *
BO’S SCREAM ECHOED across the narrow ravine, the dense pines seeming to smother the sound.
The man laughed as he held her tighter. “Ain’t no one around gonna hear ya so you might as well shut your trap.”
She screamed again as his fingers dug into her side.
“Keep that up, though, and I’m gonna cut ya good,” he said next to her ear.
She felt the dull blade press into her throat, the scream dying on her lips. She could smell his rank unwashed body, his breath nasty. He slowly turned her as if to get a good look at her. His fingers bit into the flesh of her arm as he held her with one hand and brandished the knife with the other.
“I’ll be damned. Yer a fine one. Where’d ya come from?”
When she didn’t speak, couldn’t with her heart lodged in her throat, he gave her arm a rough shake.
“I asked ya where ya come from.”
Her mind, like her body, had frozen in astonishment when he’d first grabbed her. Panicked, her thoughts whizzed from one to the next too quickly. The only one she could catch and hold on to was This isn’t happening.
She swallowed. “Down in the valley.” From the time she was a young child, she had known that she was a Hamilton and what that meant. When your family was wealthy—especially if your father was a senator—there were apparently people who could hurt you, kidnap you and demand ransom. But growing up in Montana not far from the ranch, she and her five sisters had always felt safe. Their father had seen to that.
“Down in the valley,” he mocked her. “I gathered that. You got a name?”
She hesitated. “Bo.”
“Bo?” He let out another harsh laugh. “Like Bo-Peep?”
She’d been told that her older sisters had been allowed to name her and that it had been three-year-old Kat who’d come up with the name. Who let a three-year-old name the latest child? Her mother, apparently.
“Bo what?” the man asked when she didn’t respond to the tired joke.
“Calder.” The name popped into her head. With it came a stab of pain. Her name really would have been Calder if she had married Jace five years ago. Why hadn’t she said Smith or Jones or anything except Calder?
Instinctively she’d known she couldn’t give the man her real name. Something told her that would have been a mistake. But thinking of Jace made her remember his sister, Emily, and her daughter, Jodie, and why she desperately needed to get off this mountain.
It was almost as if he’d seen what she was thinking. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, Bo-Peep, ’cept with me.” He smiled. “I been up in these woods for weeks. It’s damned lonely, but not no more.”
“If I don’t get back, they’ll come looking for me,” she blurted.
“That right?” He studied her for a full minute before he turned her arm so he could get a good look at her left hand. “You ain’t married. So who’s gonna be lookin’ for ya?”
It was a good question. Did anyone even know that she’d left? One of the wranglers had seen her leave Saturday, but he might have no reason to mention it to anyone. Surely someone would eventually notice her SUV parked over by the “bunkhouses” her father had built for his daughters as they got older. They weren’t really bunkhouses. That’s just what he called them. They were actually condos, six of them with a connected large communal area. Her father had hoped it would keep his daughters on the ranch. It hadn’t. Bo rented an apartment twenty miles away in downtown Big Timber near the Sarah Hamilton Foundation office. It was easier than driving in from the ranch five days a week.
“My family,” she said with more assurance than she felt. “They’ll be looking for me. They expected me back this morning. If I don’t show up...” She let the rest hang, hoping he would loosen his steely grip on her arm and put away the knife.
The look in his eyes said that wasn’t going to happen. “Then we best get movin’,” he said. “Nice of ya to provide me with a horse. I about wore out my boots in this damned rugged country.”
She looked down and saw he was right. His boots had definitely seen better days. He’d been living up here for weeks? That’s when she noticed the metal bracelet-like loops on his wrists. Realization hit her like a horseshoe to the head.
Her gaze shot up to his face. He was much dirtier, his hair longer, his beard fuller, but in an instant she knew she’d seen his mug shot on television. This was the escaped fugitive from Livingston. The one believed to have killed a man during the robbery of a local convenience store. She’d seen it on the news but hadn’t paid much attention, and yet she now recalled the name because law enforcement had been looking for him for weeks.
Spencer. Raymond Spencer. Her pulse thundered in her ears. There was no doubt. She’d ridden into the camp of a violent criminal, and now she was his captive.
* * *
SARAH COULDN’T HELP being nervous as the doctor came into the room. What was she afraid he was going to tell her? That there was a physical reason for her memory loss? Or was her greatest fear that whatever had caused it was psychological?
Dr. Turner introduced himself before taking a chair across from her, but it was clear that he knew who she was. Anyone with a television would have heard about her.
He was a small man with such a neat appearance that she wondered if he suffered from OCD. Even his movements felt too precise, too careful.
She looked away. He made her feel uncomfortable. Had she always been this sensitive to other people’s...idiosyncrasies? Or was she overly observant because she’d lived too long not knowing whom she could trust? That thought did nothing to relieve her anxiety.
“You’ve experienced some memory loss?” he asked as he looked at what his nurse had written on the chart, seemingly unaware of her discomfort.
She glanced around his office rather than at him. Like him, it, too, was compulsively neat. She fought