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Now Tilly thought she was going to marry Holden’s son? Over her dead body. She wanted to scream. Cooper was like his father. Tilly couldn’t trust his love. Tilly couldn’t trust any McKenna.
Why couldn’t her daughter understand? Because Tilly had never had her heart ripped from her chest. She’d never felt that kind of betrayal, that kind of pain that would blacken her heart, turning it slowly to stone.
A thought struck her like the blade of a shovel slamming into her skull. There would be a wedding. A big wedding. Knowing Tilly, it would be at the large church in Powder Crossing. Charlotte could see it filled with people. Everyone would be there to see Tilly in a white wedding dress, her sister, Oakley, next to her, and Cooper McKenna and his brother...not Treyton, Duffy, next to him as the two said their vows or his best friend, the sheriff? And Holden. Holden would be there. Still handsome.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the imagined sight, wanting to crawl into a hole and never come out. She couldn’t do this. She wouldn’t. It felt as if she’d lost control of everything as she paced the floor.
Just the thought of the PI made her feel even sicker. He’d caught her arguing with her daughter. He’d seen her at her worst. She’d clocked his shocked face as well as his self-satisfied look at seeing her flared temper. He’d been convinced that she could commit murder.
If it was that easy, lucky for the PI that he wasn’t now buried in the woods behind her house. She could tell that he was satisfied he knew exactly what had happened to Dixon. All he had to do was prove it. Or find the body.
Charlotte hadn’t heard the creak of the wheelchair until CJ spoke.
“That was ugly,” he said behind her, startling her out of her thoughts. “You know he won’t give up. He’ll be back.” She wished she didn’t agree with him.
“But we have more important things to worry about,” CJ said. “Inez Turner is in hospice care. We have to act now. Are you listening to me?” he demanded.
She turned to look at him blankly, lost in thoughts of the past and the growing horror of the future, each thought like a stone lodged in her throat.
“The Montana 360 Ranch. Mother, we can’t let Holden get that ranch.”
The name of the ranch didn’t register. Her mind was on the PI, on Tilly and that damned engagement ring. She remembered the first time she’d seen it—on her best friend’s finger. It wasn’t until Margaret “Margie” Smith had told her who had put that ring there that her world had shattered around her. Living on neighboring ranches, she and Margie had been good friends.
Later, Margie swore that she didn’t know about Charlotte and Holden, but how could she not have? The wedding was planned. There was no way Margie or Holden could back out. It was too late. They had no choice, Margie said. The day Margie married Holden was the darkest of Charlotte’s life and a turning point that had sent her life to hell.
“The Turner place is part of some of the old Smith Ranch,” CJ was saying loudly as if he thought she’d gone deaf. Or wasn’t listening. She hadn’t been. “It once belonged to Margaret Smith’s grandparents.”
Just hearing him say Margie’s name made her bare her teeth. Margie had taken Holden away from her, dangling a piece of the Smith Ranch property in front of him—but not all of it. Her parents weren’t stupid. They held back some of the ranch so Holden’s father couldn’t get the property. But the old, greedy son of a bastard had put pressure on his son to marry the woman for it. That much was true.
Still, Charlotte would never forgive Holden, whom she felt had betrayed her for the worst piece of the Smith Ranch. And the rest of that ranch had become the Turner Ranch and was now up for grabs. Old man McKenna must be rolling in his grave to think that Charlotte might beat his son out of the place. Charlotte, the woman Holden’s father had looked down on. Not good enough for his son because she didn’t come with a land dowry. At least not as large a piece of land as Margie Smith had come with.
Swallowing down the bitterness that rose in her throat, she turned her attention to her son. What would she do without CJ? She’d almost lost him. She still had to keep him from going to jail or worse, prison. Without CJ, she had no reason to go on.
“We have to get that ranch, no matter what we have to do,” CJ was saying more forcefully. As if her son had to tell her that the Turner place was the missing piece between her ranch and McKenna’s property on the two sides of the river. She’d been waiting for years to obtain that land—putting the final nail in old man McKenna’s casket and his son’s at the same time. Without water, Holden and his ranch couldn’t survive.
“I will take care of it,” she said to CJ. He didn’t even know what was at stake if they didn’t get it. “Let me change. I’ll go to see Inez on her deathbed if that’s what it takes.”
“I heard Bob isn’t letting anyone in to see her but family and close friends,” CJ said. “Maybe I should go with you.” He touched the wheelchair as he said it as if he thought his disability would open doors that she couldn’t. He might be right, but she couldn’t let him do that.
She shook her head. “I won’t let her son stop me. Inez will see me. I’ll get that land. Whatever it takes.” She couldn’t let Holden or anyone else get that ranch. Over her dead body would she ever let her former lover have it.
THESHERIFFUNLOCKEDthe front door of the house he’d been raised in with trepidation. He’d been left the house and the sheriff job when his father had died. Not that he hadn’t had to run for the office, but everyone had liked his father when he was sheriff, so Stuart had won easily. Truth is, no one else wanted the job, which is why no one had run against him. He’d had the house and the job ever since.
As he stepped in, he couldn’t imagine why Abigail would have taken his keys and gone to his house last night. What had she hoped to find after her visit to his office? Something that connected him to Leann Hayes’s death?
As he moved deeper into the house, he lamented the price of living in a small town, miles from anything. People knew things about you that you wished they didn’t. Everyone had speculated on why Leann had killed herself. The prosecutor in Miles City had suspected the man Leann had taken up with after she’d left the sheriff—Cooper McKenna. Cooper had spent a little time behind bars, but without any evidence, Leann’s death had been ruled a suicide. End of story.
Or it would have been, Stuart thought with a curse. Then Cooper McKenna had returned to town after being gone for two years and found what he thought was evidence that Leann had been planning to run away with someone in Powder Crossing. His theory was that either the person had killed her and made it appear to be a suicide, or someone else didn’t want her leaving town and had murdered her.
Cooper wanted the case reopened, something Stuart had been dragging his feet about doing, hoping it would blow over.
And now Abigail Creed was snooping around the case?
He stepped in expecting to catch the lingering scent of Abigail’s perfume and wasn’t disappointed. The scent made him queasy. He moved quickly through the small place, checking his bedroom, then the bathroom, then the living room, not even sure what he was looking for. Everything looked as he’d left it. But would he know if she had gone through his things?
Going back to the bedroom, he opened his bureau drawers. He wasn’t one to roll his socks or fold his briefs. As he checked each drawer, he told himself he was wasting his time. He couldn’t prove that she’d gone through anything.
But when he opened the bottom drawer, his heart fell. Old photographs. He kept them in a shoebox at the bottom of the deep drawer. He quickly pulled off the old T-shirts that had been covering the box and carried it over to the bed.
