Chapter 1

      When Nora Loftis had emerged from a roadside ditch, bloody and beaten, raped and tortured, dazed and half-crazed, she’d at least thought she had survived.

      Little did she realize that her battle for survival was hardly over.

      Three months later, still healing in so many ways, she arrived at the baggage carousel in the Denver airport to be greeted by one of the last people she ever wanted to see again.

      Jake Madison, larger than life, towering over six feet, built like a cheesecake dream, wearing jeans and a loden-green chamois shirt under a light jacket. His hair was still intensely dark, and his eyes were still that peculiar green, a color that seemed to be lit from within. If anything, the years had made him more attractive.... Stronger, broader, more like an oak than a sapling.

      And he was still one of the reasons she had avoided her hometown of Conard City. He was a big reason, but not the only reason.

      He saw her and nodded, but something about his eyes seemed to narrow.

      Well, she looked like hell, and he hated her anyway, and they had a history she would have preferred to utterly forget. Why wouldn’t his eyes narrow? And why had her dad sent him of all people?

      She fought down an almost overwhelming urge to turn and run. But while she might need a place to lick her wounds, she had also developed some backbone, and she was damned if she would give him the satisfaction.

      “Nora,” he said when she approached. His voice had deepened, too. Everything about him had reached the fullness of manhood while she’d been gone.

      “Jake.” She hoped she sounded cool. Inside she felt as if nerves already stretched too tight had just stretched tighter still.

      “Your dad asked me to get you,” he said, explaining. “His car is acting up.”

      “Thanks.” Short and ungracious. Well, he didn’t deserve any better from her, not after what he had done to her. She’d avoided him for twelve years and Conard City for ten. Now her choices had become limited to one.

      She turned to watch the carousel, where the first bags had begun to appear. Maybe she could pretend he wasn’t even there.

      “You won’t find the town much changed,” he remarked.

      “I didn’t think I would. It never changes.”

      “Oh, things change,” he replied calmly. “Lots of things.”

      She let that lie. Bad enough that she had to come home without hearing cheery stories about how things had changed for the better. She wouldn’t believe them anyway.

      He picked up her luggage for her, leaving her with only her rolling carry-on to tag along behind him out to the parking garage, where he stowed her bags in the back of his tan Jeep. Then she climbed into the passenger seat, looking straight ahead, thinking that if there was one thing she didn’t need now, it was a couple of hours in the car with Jake Madison.

      He seemed to feel the same, surprisingly enough, and didn’t offer any kind of casual conversation. Good, she thought. Good. Because she just plain wasn’t up to it.

      The doctors had told her she would tire easily for weeks to come, and that she needed to conserve her energy for what was most important. Already she could feel her nerves letting go, simply because she couldn’t maintain the tension. Not now, not for a while.

      After Jake paid the parking fee and pulled out onto the exit road, he spoke again. “I heard what happened.”

      “I don’t want to talk about it.”

      A mile passed, then another, before he spoke again. “I’m just letting you know that people are talking.

      “Surprise, surprise. Apparently that hasn’t changed.”

      He glanced at her. “Bitter now, too?”

      “Maybe I have cause.”

      “Maybe so.” But he let it drop.

      Pointedly, she closed her eyes, not wanting to talk to him at all. Then, without warning, fatigue crashed down on her between one instant and the next. She fell soundly asleep before they’d made it all the way out of the suburbs of Denver, and she didn’t wake until they were drawing near her home.

      * * *

      The familiar state highway into Conard City carried Nora Loftis back too many years. Way too many years. It also carried her to a home she had vowed never to visit again.

      The wide expanses of ranch land—brown now as winter drew closer, tumbleweed snared in fences—still looked desolate. Had she ever seen the beauty out here? But the purpling mountains ahead were still beautiful, still drew her as mountains always had. She had missed them during her years working in Minneapolis. Gentler hills were just not the same.

      But the rest of it, she assured herself, she had not missed at all. Not the endless roads that seemed to go nowhere, not the outlying ranches or the few small subdivisions. And certainly not the main street, captured in an early twentieth century kind of amber, a mixture of archaeological finds left over from the 1880s to a few newer World War II era buildings. The town had enjoyed a number of booms and a few busts, and the last bust still lingered, a kind of genteel poverty for all but a handful, who managed to prosper anyway.

      Outside town, before she faced the sorrow of the main street, she saw a sign announcing the construction of a new ski resort. Another boom in the making, maybe, one that would change the character of the town yet again.

      It needed some changing.

      She hated coming back, but she had nowhere else to go. Not now.

      The speed limit lowered, taking them along a flat stretch of road that boasted little but an occasional roadhouse. Closer to town, she saw the modernity of some new fast-food joints that didn’t appear to be doing well. That much modernity had arrived here, too. Even with so few people and despite the closing of the semiconductor plant that had been this town’s last boom. The ranchers hereabouts were barely enough to keep the place going.

      “I saw it in the papers,” her father had said when he phoned, the first words he’d spoken to her in a decade. “Come home, girl.” An offer made too late, but one she had been unable to refuse with her life in ashes all around her.

      What else could you do when the big bad world had treated you so horribly you were almost afraid to stick your nose out the door? What else could you do when you’d become famous—or infamous, depending—and the world wouldn’t leave you alone to lick your wounds?

      He’d seen it in the papers. Even here. That meant Jake knew, too. All those sordid details.

      Her hands tightened into fists until her knuckles turned white and her fingers ached. She couldn’t bring herself to look