The Hopechest Bride. Kasey Michaels

from those hard, hard eyes, that unyielding mouth. “Yes. I think he did. But you worked ranches in Wyoming.”

      “No reason for me to be in Wyoming anymore, is there, Miss Colton? No reason at all.”

      Emily pressed both hands to her cheeks. “Oh, God.” She sighed, tried to marshal her nerves, dropped her hands to her sides once more. “I should have tried to contact you, shouldn’t I? I mean, you have a right to know what happened that night. Toby…Toby saved my life.”

      “Yeah, so I’m told. And to reward him for that service, you left him bleeding on the floor and took off. Left him alone to die. You have a strange way of saying thank you, Miss Colton. Well, that’s enough for now, isn’t it? I’ll be seeing you again. Again and again. You can sort of consider me your conscience, Miss Colton. Your guilty conscience.”

      “No!” Emily yelled at his back, for Josh Atkins had turned on his heels and was already climbing into the truck with Rollins Ranch painted on the door of the cab. “No, it wasn’t like that! I didn’t— Oh, God,” she ended, all but collapsing against the fence rails as the truck drove out of the stable yard, toward the main gate. She hugged herself as she watched the truck drive away, tears running down her face. “It wasn’t like that…it wasn’t like that.”

      Josh pulled to the side of the road about a mile from the Colton ranch and cut the engine, pounded his gloved fists against the steering wheel.

      “Damn,” he said once, then twice, then over and over for as long as his breath held out. “Damn, damn, damn!”

      Well, wasn’t he the hero? He ought to get out of the truck, see if he could round up a couple of fuzzy bunnies, then stomp on them. Pull the wings off a few butterflies, drive to town and grab a lollipop out of the mouth of some defenseless baby.

      Had he ever seen such hurt in anyone’s eyes? Even before he’d said a word, opened his dumb mouth, he’d seen the despair in the way she’d stood at the fence, the defeat in her posture, the weight of the world dragging at her slim shoulders. He’d seen injured animals, plenty of them, and could almost smell them, smell the fear. Emily Colton had been drenched in fear and hopelessness, even before he’d stepped up behind her and made his presence known.

      So then he’d kicked her. Hey, she was already down—so why not? She deserved it, didn’t she?

      “Oh, God,” Josh breathed, shaking his head. “I must be losing whatever’s left of my mind.”

      He lay his head back against the headrest, closed his eyes and saw Emily Colton’s face. She was just as Toby had described her a million times in his letters. Small, but not too small, with good shoulders for a woman, and straight long legs that looked damn good in jeans.

      She’d had on a denim jacket lined with sheepskin, the hem of the jacket just nipping at the top of her small waist, giving her an air of fragility belied by her clothes.

      But it was her face that gave away the whole game, even as he’d refused to see what was there. Those sad blue eyes, that flawless yet too-pale skin, the way she sort of hunched her shoulders protectively, as if prepared for life to give her a punishing whack—another whack, because she’d already had a few, hadn’t she?

      And that hair. God, how Toby had all but waxed poetic about that thick mane of chestnut hair. Toby had once had a chestnut mare just about that same color. He wondered if Toby had made the connection, and doubted it. Emily Colton was one hell of a cut above a rangy old mare that was all Josh could afford to buy his baby brother for his fifteenth birthday.

      So, okay. So she was pretty. Beautiful. As beautiful as Toby had said in his letters. And she was hurting. Was she hurting about Toby? Josh wondered….

      “It doesn’t matter, damn it! She killed him,” he said, sitting up once more, reaching for the key still in the ignition. “She killed him as much as if she put the bullet in his chest herself. And I’m not going to let little Miss Blue Eyes forget that. Not for a very, very long time.”

      Three

      Meggie James had all the fair-haired beauty of her mother and the never-say-die determination of her father. At the moment, that determination was directed at trying to pull herself up on the coffee table so that she could get her chubby hands on her mother’s teacup.

      “No way, sweetheart,” Sophie Colton James scolded with a smile, redirecting her daughter by holding out a teething ring River’s Native American grandmother had fashioned out of thin strips of rawhide.

      “Can you believe how much she loves this thing?” Sophie asked Emily, who was holding her own teacup out of the baby’s reach. “I’ve threatened to start calling her Fido, but River just laughs and says his grandmother raised a lot of kids and knows what she’s doing. I suppose so,” she ended, grinning down at Meggie, who had just learned how to lower herself to her plump bottom and was now chewing on the teething ring for all she was worth.

      Emily watched as Meggie actually cooed at the rawhide circle, then stuck it in her mouth once more. “It is ugly, isn’t it? I know Mom told me about the thing when Maya’s little Marissa was at the ranch the other day, just about gnawing on Mom’s shoulder because she’s cutting another tooth. In fact, I think Mom said she wishes she’d had a gross of the things when we were growing up,” Emily said, grinning down at the contented baby who was happily drooling all over her pretty pink coveralls. “Of course, she also said she’d often thought about keeping us all on stout leashes, but I think she might have been kidding about that one.”

      “Mom’s great, isn’t she? She’s back in stride, handing out love and advice, just as if she’d never been…well, never been away,” Sophie said, lifting her teacup. “I can’t tell you how happy we are that Meggie’s finally learned how to get back down once she’s pulled herself up. I think Riv and I slept about three minutes all last week, always having to go into her bedroom and lay her back down in her crib. But when I told Mom about it, she said to put the pillows over our heads and let Meggie cry, because eventually she’d let go and figure out that she can get back down all by herself. To hear Mom tell it, we weren’t doing Meggie or ourselves any favors by constantly running to her.”

      “Did you let her cry?” Emily asked, reaching for a homemade cookie Maya’s mother, Inez, had baked only that morning and asked her to take with her to Sophie’s house.

      Sophie winced. “Not for the first night after Mom’s advice. We just couldn’t do it. I kept thinking she’d fall, hit her head, all that good stuff you swear you’ll never think about, but that you think about all the time once you have babies of your own. But the second night Riv made me watch the clock for ten minutes, and only go to her then—or if we heard a bang,” she added, shaking her head. “Seven minutes later, everything was quiet. Riv waited a few minutes more, then sneaked into her room and there she was, sound asleep on her belly, with her rump stuck up in the air. We haven’t had a problem since.”

      “Moms and grandmothers,” Emily said, sighing. “They give good advice, don’t they? Or they think they do.”

      “Oh, now that sounds ominous,” Sophie said, picking up Meggie, who had begun rubbing her eyes. “Let me put this one down for her nap, and I’ll be right back. Because being Inez’s cookie delivery person wasn’t the only reason you rode over here this morning, was it?”

      Emily watched as Sophie and Meggie headed for the hallway and stairs, then sat back in her chair, admiring the way her sister had decorated the living room. Part Mission, part antique, somehow Sophie had made it all work beautifully, from the western prints on the walls to the Oriental carpet on the broad-planked floor.

      She’d like her own place, her own apartment, but the Hacienda de Alegria was so large that it would be difficult to explain to her mom and dad that she felt cramped, felt the need for her own space. Especially now, with Meredith only back at the ranch for less than two weeks. It had never been right to leave Joe, who had been so unhappy, and it couldn’t be right to leave now, with Meredith home again at last.

      Still,