Reclaiming the Cowboy. Kathleen O'Brien

second she started again. “As you can see, my grandmother, Ava, had a lot of money—some from her painting and some from her family. She left everything tied up in a life estate for my mother’s use.”

      “Why? Why tie it up?”

      “My mother had...problems.” Bonnie looked away briefly. “She wasn’t terribly responsible, and my grandmother obviously didn’t trust her to inherit outright. But she did want to provide for her, so the lawyers suggested the life estate. I was the first remainderman. That meant if I outlived my mother, I would inherit everything.”

      Mitch shook his head without really meaning to. How complicated could you get? Rich people were nuts.

      Or maybe it was the lawyers who were nuts. He thought of his patent applications and the documents Indiana Dunchik had drawn up so he could sell his chore jacket to the highest bidder. The papers provided for every imaginable contingency and some that Mitch could never have imagined, not in a million years.

      So of course the lawyers for the rich Ava Andersen would provide for the remote possibility that a perfectly healthy young woman might get hit by a bus or a meteor and die before her mother did. If Bonnie was the first “remainderman,” there probably were ten other remaindermen behind her, just in case...

      And then, finally, the lightbulb went on.

      He got it. He felt like an idiot that he’d been so dense.

      “Ahh,” he said slowly. “So who was the second remainderman?”

      “My cousin Jacob.” She leaned back, as if she were suddenly tired. “I assume you know who Jacob is, since you found me through my fingerprints. He’s my first cousin. His mother, my mother’s sister, died giving birth to him, and his father, a lawyer in San Francisco, worked himself into a heart attack when Jacob was only twelve. That’s when Jacob came to live at Greenwood and began to make my life hell on a regular basis, instead of just in the summers.”

      Mitch took a breath, but he didn’t say anything.

      “And—this is the part I assume you found when you looked up my prints—when I was eighteen, I was arrested for stabbing him with the pruning shears.”

      She didn’t even glance at the trowel she held, so Mitch tried hard not to do so, either. But it wasn’t easy. It was weird, almost freaky, to be sitting here with this woman who was half stranger, half lover and to be talking about wealth and violence.

      Wealth and violence. He supposed those two things fit together in some sick way. People did crazy, terrible things over money. But neither word fit with Bonnie.

      She paused, as if she expected him to interrupt again, probably to demand an explanation of the arrest, but he didn’t. He was itching to know the truth about that, but right now he wanted her to finish telling him why she’d been on the run.

      “Anyhow,” she continued after a minute, “the will stipulated that if I died before my mother did, Jacob would inherit everything. No one expected that to happen, of course. My mother wasn’t old, but she was very, very sick. Everyone knew she didn’t have long to live. So it was almost impossible to imagine any way I would go first. Not naturally, anyhow.”

      Not naturally, anyhow. How calmly she said such a thing.

      “And if you didn’t die first, Jacob got nothing.” Mitch took a breath, still sorting it out. His mind balked at the implications. “Are you saying your cousin wanted to kill you so he’d inherit your grandmother’s fortune?”

      She didn’t answer for a long second. Finally, she looked him directly in the eyes. “Yes.”

      “Bonnie.” He raised a hand, correcting himself. “Annabelle. Look, how much money are we talking about here? For a man to kill...”

      “Enough. More than enough.” Her voice dropped low and took on a harsh edge. “For pity’s sake, Mitch, people kill each other every day. Over a bar tab, over a pair of sneakers, over a purse, a cash register, a car. Why is it so difficult to imagine that a man would kill to inherit thirty million dollars?”

      “Thirty...” His jaw dropped, and he had to tell himself to shut it. “Okay. It’s a lot of money. Still. Your cousin isn’t exactly a pauper. And he’s not a thug. I looked him up. He’s a big-time lawyer, doing just fine for himself. Why would he risk all that—”

      “So you don’t believe me, either.” The angry flush had drained entirely from her cheeks, leaving a chilled porcelain ivory behind. She sat so still she might have been a wax figure, not a woman.

      “I didn’t say that.”

      Her lips curved slightly. “You didn’t have to. I know that look. I know that tone.”

      Of course she did. He mustn’t forget that she was as familiar with every square inch of his skin as he was with hers. “Well, it does sound kind of...” He tried to think of a nonjudgmental word. “Kind of extreme.”

      “Crazy, you mean?” She lifted her chin. “Don’t worry. You aren’t the first to hint at the possibility. He is, as you say, a big-time lawyer. I’m just this spoiled, troubled heiress, the daughter of a suicidal drug addict. And I’ve already tried to stab him once, so it’s obvious I have some paranoia issues.”

      “No, I don’t mean crazy. But maybe...maybe just exaggerating the danger? I’m sure he was envious you got everything, and he probably gave off some fairly hostile vibes.”

      She laughed darkly. “Yeah. He tried to overdose me with barbiturates, so I’d say hostile is a fairly accurate description of his feelings for me.”

      “He did? How?”

      “New Year’s Eve. Jacob always gives a big party, and of course he had to invite me—otherwise people would talk. He must have slipped the drugs into my drink somehow. I woke up the next day in the hospital. On a ventilator.”

      Mitch’s body temperature had dropped about ten degrees in ten seconds. The balmy California air moved over his skin like ice. “Are you sure? I mean...how do you know he was the one who did it?”

      “Well, I knew I didn’t do it. And, contrary to popular opinion, I’m not paranoid enough to think I have two different people looking to get rid of me.”

      Mitch frowned. “But how did he expect to get away with it?”

      “Oh, that would have been easy. No one would have doubted it was suicide. It was public knowledge that my mother had tried to kill herself. Twice.”

      He made a low shocked sound, but she ignored it.

      “And it wasn’t as if he expected me to be able to deny it. He gave me a huge dose. If I really had been drinking alcohol, as everyone assumed I was, I would have died that night.”

      Mitch stared at her, speechless. Her own cousin didn’t even realize she wasn’t a drinker? He remembered all the times she’d carried a glass of soda water around at the Bell River events. She never made a thing of it, never got sanctimonious in front of people who did drink. He’d always figured it was simply a healthy-living kind of decision. Now he knew better.

      The child of an addict would obviously avoid taking any risks. And her caution had saved her life, though not in the way she’d expected.

      “What about when you did wake up? Did you tell anyone? Did you tell the police?”

      “No.”

      “For God’s sake, Bonnie. Why not?”

      “Because I’d been down that path before. Accusing Jacob. And I ended up in a mental-health clinic. No one was going to believe me this time, either, and while I was trying to convince them, he would have tried again. Eventually, he would have succeeded. So I ran.”

      “But...” He couldn’t wrap his mind around any of this. “Surely the police...your friends...other family members. Hell, even a lawyer—”

      “No.”