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It wasn’t his crooked grin. Or that jolt of current she’d felt when he’d grabbed her arm in front of the hotel and she’d seen him up close for the first time. It was what she’d glimpsed in those gray eyes, a pain she’d recognized heart-deep.
Kate pushed the thought away, telling herself that Tucker Cahill was no different from any other man she’d interviewed for a story. He was merely a source. She would do the job she was damned good at. She’d get the information she needed from him, and if she couldn’t get him to help her, she would have no reason to see him again.
But as the elevator door opened, she saw him and her heart took a roller-coaster-ride dip. In his dress Western attire, he was even more handsome. But it was the look on his face when he saw her that squeezed her heart like a fist. Had any man ever looked at her like that?
She looked away, not surprised to see that several women in the lobby were admiring the cowboy. As she stepped out of the elevator and started toward him, the women gave her an appreciative look—though a little green-eyed.
For a woman who didn’t consider this a date, she’d put her hair up, leaving several dark tendrils to fall free around her face. Never one to wear much makeup, she’d kept it at a minimum, but at the last minute she had added just a touch of coral stain to her lips and two drops of her favorite perfume between her breasts.
The dress she wore was teal and fell over her curves like warm tropical waves. The hem hit just above her knees, calling attention to her long legs and the strappy new heels she’d purchased uptown.
From the widening of Tucker’s gray eyes, it had been effective.
“You look amazing,” he whispered as he leaned toward her. His lips brushed her ear, sending shivers rippling through her. She caught the scent of his cologne, something woodsy, masculine and surprisingly seductive.
She breathed him in, wanting more and feeling bereft when he stepped back, taking his scent with him.
“There’s a restaurant within walking distance of the hotel, if that’s all right,” he said, those gray eyes locking with hers. A woman without her grit could get lost in those eyes.
“Perfect.” She figured she needed the fresh air to clear her head. This was starting to feel dangerously like a real date.
Tucker placed a large, warm hand at the center of her back. The heat burned through the sheer fabric of her dress as he steered her toward the front door. His touch sent a wave of knee-buckling need through her. She took his arm, feeling a little unsteady on her legs as she realized this wasn’t going to be as easy as she thought.
* * *
TUCKER HAD HIS breath taken away at the sight of Kate Rothschild as she came off the elevator. It hit him hard, as it had been a long time since a woman had done that to him.
He reminded himself of what he’d seen her do at the creek. Kate had some connection to Madeline. Add to that the fact this woman was an investigative reporter. He had no idea why she’d done it, but he didn’t think for a moment that she’d suggested dinner because of his charm—or lack thereof.
“Why don’t we cut straight to the chase?” he said once they were seated in the restaurant and had ordered wine. “What does a city slicker investigative reporter and daughter of a Montana congressman have in common with the skeletal remains of a woman found in a creek in Gilt Edge, Montana?”
Kate seemed taken aback by the question. He’d caught her off guard, something he doubted happened often. She smiled and leaned back as the waiter appeared with the bottle of wine and poured them each a glass.
After the waiter left, she said, “You do get right to the point.”
“I’ve found it saves time. So why don’t you tell me what I witnessed down at the creek?”
“I’m not sure what you think you saw,” she began.
“You knew Madeline. And what I saw tells me that you had mixed feelings about her.”
She laughed. “You sure that’s what you saw?”
He met her gaze and held it. “We goin’ to keep playin’ word games? What’s your connection to Madeline Dunn?”
“Dunn? You’re sure that’s her name?”
He saw that she hadn’t known Madeline’s last name any more than he had until earlier. “My brother thinks that might have been her last name. The DNA report hasn’t come back for a positive ID yet.”
She raised a brow and leaned toward him. That she looked beautiful tonight in the candlelight was definitely a distraction. But once you’ve been taken advantage of by one woman, you can’t help but be gun-shy of all of them—especially one who smelled like sunshine after a rain.
“Since you know I work for a newspaper in New York City, maybe I’m doing a freelance story on the case.”
He raised a brow.
“I admit I might have gotten a little emotional down at the creek earlier. It’s a horrible thing for a young woman that age to drown and not be found for so many years.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What other possible reason could I have?” she asked with an innocent twinkle in those big green eyes.
“That’s what I’m hoping to find out tonight.”
“Strange,” she said, her smile tempting him to do more than raise his wineglass to clink against hers. “I was hoping to find out more about you tonight, as well.”
He fought the urge to dive into all that deep sea green and just swim around for a while. As leery as he was of this woman—and with good reason—he was also enjoying himself.
In the years he’d been gone, he hadn’t dated. All his encounters had been in passing. But none of the women he’d met were like this one. That alone put him on guard.
Kate carefully touched her wineglass to his like a quick kiss. “To discovering all kinds of things about each other tonight.”
There was daring in her gaze. He’d never been able to back down from a challenge. He suspected she had the same problem. “To unlocking all your secrets,” he said, making her eyes widen a little before she laughed.
“Okay, cowboy. Why don’t we start with Madeline and why you were on that bridge earlier? Remembering one special night, were you?”
His hand holding the glass jerked, almost spilling his wine. Kate’s smile widened. “Am I moving too fast for you?”
Tucker felt his head swim. “You sent the package.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
WITH TUCKER ON a date tonight, there was no reason Flint couldn’t just enjoy an evening at home with Maggie. He still couldn’t believe that Tucker was back. Back safe and sound. So why was he still worried about him?
Tuck was out with a reporter. That was worry enough. But it was more than that. He remembered what his brother had said about being in love with Madeline Ross aka Madeline Dunn. If that was her name.
The tentative ID the coroner had gotten was based on a dentist’s memory of a woman’s teeth from twenty-three years ago. The woman had paid with a check from Madeline Dunn’s account, but that didn’t mean she was Madeline Dunn.
He’d been in law enforcement long enough to know better than jumping to conclusions until he had the facts. Once they had the DNA, then he could track down the Dunns and see if it was a match. Tucker had said that Madeline had a brother. If they could find him or their father...
But what he didn’t know was worrying him. Not that he believed for a minute that Tuck might have had something to do with the woman’s death. He knew his brother. Well, he’d known the Tucker he’d grown up with, but there were nineteen years that hadn’t been accounted for yet.
Flint shook his head, hating where his thoughts had gone. The woman had jumped, just as Tuck had said. The woman had been trying to con money out of his brother by pretending she was pregnant. Worse, she wanted him to believe that she was willing to kill herself and their baby if he didn’t pay up.
Flint realized that he’d balled up his hands into fists at the thought of Madeline. How would his brother have reacted if he’d found out that night on the bridge that it had all been a huge lie?
“You’re just tired,” he told himself. His day had been filled with phone calls, problems with traffic and two DUIs that Harp had picked up. Most days, there were barking dog complaints, checks on elderly relatives, shoplifting kids and endless paperwork. Sometimes Flint wondered why he’d gotten into law enforcement.
Earlier, before he’d spoken with the coroner, he’d gone through missing-persons reports looking for a woman of about the age of the skeletal remains found in the creek, surprised there was none. He’d called around to the other towns. No missing-persons report on the woman during that time. That seemed strange unless she had no family in the state.
Now he hesitated. Why hadn’t he considered earlier that his brother would be considered a suspect if anyone else was sheriff? It hadn’t crossed his mind because he knew Tucker. Or at least thought he did.
He swore as he glanced over at the package with that damned doll in it. Someone knew Tucker would come back to Gilt Edge. The same person who’d been waiting for Madeline downstream? Or someone with an even darker ulterior motive?
He picked up his phone, dialed 411 and asked the operator for a family with the last name Dunn in Clawson Creek.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m not showing any by that name. Could it be listed under another name or perhaps another town?”
He had no idea. Apparently the Dunns had left Clawson Creek. “That’s all right. Thank you.” Hanging up, he glanced at his watch. He was late and there were leftover barbecued short ribs from lunch that Maggie had promised to heat up for dinner. Mostly, he was anxious to see his wife.
Tracking down the family would have to wait until tomorrow. Another twelve hours wouldn’t make that much of a difference after nineteen years.
* * *
KATE TOOK A sip of her wine, giving herself a moment. She’d let Tucker get to her. This was not the way she’d planned for the night to go. But he’d given her no choice, she told herself. He wanted to cut to the chase? Fine.
She could tell that she’d caught him flat-footed with the package she’d sent, which had been her intention. Just as his had been when he’d called her on why she was interested in the remains from the creek.
“I wasn’t sure the discovery in the creek was enough to bring you home. I thought the package might,” she said.
Tucker blinked, clearly taken aback. “Where did you get...? Why would you send me something like that? How do you know me and that I’ve been gone, let alone know what Madeline put me through?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she said and picked up her menu. “Is the steak good here?”
He leaned over to take the menu from her hand. “If you tell me you were the one working with Madeline—”
“Don’t be absurd,” she said, taking back her menu.
“If all you wanted to do was get my attention, we could have had this discussion on the bridge earlier. Why did you run?”
She lowered her menu. “Maybe I wanted to see if you would chase me, then I would know for sure that I had the right man.”
“The right man? You could have made it easier for both of us by not running,” he said, still eyeing her as if he thought if he looked deep enough, he’d see every truth she’d kept hidden for all these years.
She chuckled at his words, though it lacked the lightness she’d been shooting for. “Now, what fun would that have been if I hadn’t let you chase me down?”
He growled under his breath. “How do you know about Madeline? No more games.”
Kate took another sip of her wine, but from the look in the cowboy’s eyes, he was no longer willing to play along. While she could be flexible when it came to her game plan, she didn’t like it derailed so quickly. Worse, as she looked into Tucker’s eyes... They were silver in the candlelight and beneath the growing anger and frustration, she could still see the pain. It was as raw as her own and yet his had been banked for nearly two decades while hers had grown with each passing year.
It made her more than determined to expose the woman. But in exposing Madeline, she would be exposing the men who’d fallen for her, as well. She hadn’t cared before, but suddenly she didn’t want to hurt this man.
“Madeline,” Tucker repeated, making it clear he wasn’t waiting much longer for an answer.
She could tell he was surprised that she knew about Madeline, knew enough to send the doll. Madeline had always been all about secrecy. It’s how she did business. It’s how she destroyed young men, chewing them up and spitting them out and moving on.
“My brother knew her.” Kate hadn’t planned to tell him that.
Suddenly the waiter appeared to take their orders.
Tucker waved the man away and leaned forward. “Your brother?”
She started to pour herself more wine, but he took the bottle from her, their fingers touching, a brush of warmth against her icy cold hand. He poured her more wine and put down the bottle.
But she didn’t reach for her glass. She could see that he had already put the pieces together. “Clay,” he said. “Clayton Rothschild III.”
She felt her cheeks warm with the anger that was always just below the surface. Her gaze rose to meet Tucker’s. “Madeline killed him just as surely as if she’d been the one to tie the noose around his neck.” Her voice broke and she had to fight tears. No, this was not at all the way she’d planned this so-called date.
“He knew Madeline?” he asked, frowning. “That was about the same time as...” He broke off, shifted his gaze to hers again and held it. “He killed himself because of her?” He was shaking his head. “The package. The only way you could have known...” His gray eyes widened in alarm. “She pulled the same thing on him that she did me with the...baby?”
Kate nodded, unable to speak around the lump in her throat. She looked away. After all the interviews she’d done since she’d begun her career, she’d never let anyone get to her like this. But sitting across from a man who had known her nemesis...intimately, who knew how she operated, who had been hurt by her almost as deeply as her brother...
Staring into his gray eyes, she thought that maybe there was little difference between this man and her brother. That thought made her angry at both of them. How could they have fallen for such a woman? Tucker had left behind everything for nineteen years—his family, his ranch, his life to that point—because of Madeline. Clay had just taken a more drastic route to run away from what that woman had put him through.
“You want to know where I got the doll?” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears as she tried to rein in her fury without much luck. “It’s the one Madeline sent my brother. At the time, I had no idea what it meant when it was found in the room where Clay...” Her voice broke again. “But I was determined to learn the truth about why my brother killed himself. I was thirteen. My brother was a senior in high school.”
Tucker was staring at her with so much sympathy that she had to look away for fear of breaking down again.
“How did you find out about her?” he asked after a moment.
“My brother. I found a letter he had written her. His suicide note. Unfortunately, when I went searching for her, I realized that Madeline Ross never existed. She’d lied about who she was, no big surprise.”
“Still, how could you know that the woman from the creek—”
“Clay said in the letter that he knew there was another man Madeline was seeing. A cowboy who lived in Gilt Edge with the last name Cahill. It didn’t take much to put it together in the years since. At first I thought it might be your brother Flint. But when you took off suddenly, I figured you’d run away with her. That maybe the two of you had been in it together.” She met his gaze. “Until I heard about the skeletal remains found in the creek near your ranch.”
“So you sent the package to me.”
“I’d hoped you were in contact with your family and that the package would get you home. I wasn’t sure the remains were Madeline’s let alone that you would return.”
He looked shocked.
“I figured if you were the other man my brother had written about, then the doll might resonate with you.”
Tucker let out a bark of laugh. “Oh, it resonated, all right. I’ve believed for nineteen years that I was the reason she killed herself and our son.”
She shook her head. “How could you let her fool you like that?”
“I wish I knew. So you’ve known about me and Madeline for—”
“Years. That’s how long I’ve been looking for you. You did a good job of hiding. Does your brother the sheriff know that you haven’t been going by Tucker Cahill all this time?”
Tucker was staring at her again. “I see what you meant about the two of us having a lot in common. And what exactly were you going to do when you found me?”
She shook her head, unable to speak for a moment around the lump in her throat. “It was Madeline I wanted. If you were with her... But when the bones were found, I had a feeling you’d be coming back alone.”
They both fell silent for a few minutes.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said. “I had no idea there were...others.”
“Yes, except with my brother Madeline obviously survived her leap into the river to be saved by whoever she was working with and continued to blackmail Clay until he couldn’t take the guilt anymore.”
“It wasn’t just the guilt. I would imagine he thought he loved her.”
Kate ground her teeth. “That makes it even worse.” She’d never understood how her brother could have taken his own life. “She was that good?”
“When you’re seventeen... But yes, she was good at making an inexperienced teenager fall for her.”
She felt all the anger leak from her like a pinprick to a tire. It left her simply tired and, again, close to tears. Not even her parents knew everything about Madeline. It felt good to finally say what had been bottled up inside her to someone who’d known the woman.
“There’s another reason I wanted to find you,” Kate said. “I need to know everything about Madeline so I can find her accomplice.”
The waiter tentatively came back to the table. “I don’t want to rush you.”
“No, it’s fine. Are you ready to order?” Tucker asked her.
She nodded. For the first time since her brother had died, she didn’t feel that hard knot in her chest. Finally, she would avenge his death. Tucker Cahill didn’t know it yet, but he was going to help her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BILLIE DEE COULDN’T quit thinking about Henry’s proposal. She was deep in thought when Darby came into the kitchen the next morning.
“Can I make you some breakfast?” she asked, happy to see him. She was dreading the day when Mariah gave birth and the two of them moved out of the upstairs apartment. While she knew it was selfish, she liked knowing they were up there when she came in early in the morning to start the day’s cooking.
“Thanks, but no breakfast today. I have some waitstaff interviews this morning. With summer and the busiest time of the year coming up, I need more help. Mariah is going to be busy nesting, same with Lillie. You thought any more about the apartment upstairs? No,” he said with a laugh. “Of course you wouldn’t want to move in up there, not with—”
Just then Mariah came down the stairs, her huge belly leading the way. Billie Dee put a finger to her lips. Mariah and Darby’s twin sister, Lillie, were best friends and told each other everything.
He nodded and went to help his wife down the last few steps before the two went to the front of the saloon to get ready to interview candidates before opening for the day.
Billie Dee turned back to her cooking. She liked to cook what she knew. And what she knew was Tex-Mex with a side of Cajun. Which in this part of the country seemed exotic—and often too spicy. Since she’d gone to work here, she’d introduced this part of Montana to her brand of cooking and this morning she was making up a batch of her famous chili.
When she heard more voices at the front of the old stage stop, she peered down the hall to see the candidates for the job.
Her breath caught. She had to grab the back of one of the chairs at the kitchen table for support. That face. She’d been looking for it in every young woman she passed for the past twenty-six years—terrified she’d see it and terrified she wouldn’t.
The young woman looked up, her eyes a startling blue that rivaled even the Montana sky. And that face... But there was no recognition in the young woman’s gaze.
The woman looked away and Billie Dee felt as if someone had just stomped on her heart.
* * *
TUCKER WAS HAULED out of his dream by his cell phone chime. Without opening his eyes, he reached over to shut off the phone, surprised it was morning. He didn’t want to wake up. He could still feel the night on his bare skin as he clung to the erotic dream he’d been having.
Almost midnight, the Montana sky ablaze with stars. Hot water bubbled up from deep in the earth to pool in the middle of the large boulders as a small waterfall washed over the rocks like a lullaby.
He lay naked in the water waiting for her. He knew she could come to him in this isolated place. The natural hot spring was surrounded by mountain ranges, deep purple against the skyline. It was their special place. He could hear the faint tinkling of her silver anklet as it dangled from her ankle. Other than the anklet, the only other thing she wore was a large straw hat that hid her face. Strange, since there was only moonlight.
Her hair was tucked up under the hat as she padded barefoot toward him and the tantalizing pool. She had just reached the edge, stuck in one perfectly pedicured toe and reached to take off her hat...
His cell phone rang again. Cursing, he opened his eyes and picked up the phone to see who was calling at this hour. When he saw it was Flint, he answered, “What?”
“I guess I don’t have to ask how your date was last night.”
He could feel the dream slipping away. Worse, he’d glimpsed the face under the hat and... It hadn’t been Madeline’s. It was Kate’s. The dream dissolved into a feeling of frustration. Kate?
“There a reason you called?”
“I forgot you’ve never been a morning person,” Flint said. “If you get a chance, stop by my office.”
He sat up a little. “Has something happened?”
“No, I just wanted to ask you more questions about Madeline.”
“Madeline?” He swung his legs over the side of the bed as he tried to clear his head. “I told you everything I know about her.”
“I talked to the sheriff up in Judith Basin County. He says the Dunns cleared out about twenty years ago and, as far as he knows, haven’t been seen since. It was before his time, but he said they were an odd family. Said there were an older brother and some sisters. Stayed to themselves in some big old house outside town. As far as he knew, there wasn’t anyone living there anymore. Could take time to track them down, if any of them are still around.”
A dead end. Clawson Creek? It wasn’t that far from Denton where he’d first met Madeline. He thought about what Kate had said about finding Madeline’s accomplice.
“I don’t mean to bring up bad memories,” Flint said. “I just want to tie up what loose ends I can and put it all to rest. You have to quit blaming yourself for her death, though. It was an accident, one she brought on herself.”
Tucker nodded. So why did he still feel guilty? Nor did it feel as if it was over. “What about the person who hid her body downstream?”
“Because the death was an accident, the person who hid the body would have been facing only misdemeanor charges for the improper disposal of a corpse. Since the statute of limitations has run out...”
“So you aren’t going to pursue this? You aren’t even going to look for whoever was helping Madeline?”
“I can’t see using manpower when no charges could be filed, anyway.”