Her child’s life is on the line

A Roughwater Ranch Cowboys story

After putting his serial killer brother in prison, former US marshal Mitch Whitehorse chooses a solitary country life—until his brother escapes. Now Mitch’s former sister-in-law, Jane Reyes, needs protection...for herself and the toddler she’s kept a secret. Mitch still isn’t sure of Jane’s innocence in his brother’s crimes, but to keep his nephew out of a killer’s grasp, trusting her is his only option.

DANA MENTINK is a national bestselling author. She has been honored to win two Carol Awards, a HOLT Medallion and an RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Book Award. She’s authored more than thirty novels to date for Love Inspired Suspense and Harlequin Heartwarming. Dana loves feedback from her readers. Contact her at danamentink.com.

Also by Dana Mentink

Roughwater Ranch Cowboys

Danger on the Ranch

Gold Country Cowboys

Cowboy Christmas Guardian

Treacherous Trails

Cowboy Bodyguard

Lost Christmas Memories

Pacific Coast Private Eyes

Dangerous Tidings

Seaside Secrets

Abducted

Dangerous Testimony

True Blue K-9 Unit

Shield of Protection

Act of Valor

Military K-9 Unit

Top Secret Target

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Danger on the Ranch

Dana Mentink

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-09649-2

DANGER ON THE RANCH

© 2019 Dana Mentink

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Version: 2020-03-02

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“You didn’t know the guy you married was a serial killer?”

The judgment was there in Mitch’s eyes, the same as she’d seen in the courtroom, from the cops, from the people who drove by her house and threw rocks through her windows, flattened her tires, sent death threats.

Jane swallowed hard against an onslaught of bitter tears. “I was blind, stupid blind, but I did not know.”

A long moment passed between them. “You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

She sagged. What else had she expected? “Okay. Don’t believe me, but Wade has come here to kill you and after he does that, he’ll kill me, too.”

“Why would he want to kill you? If you’re really innocent, why would Wade want to do that?”

“Because he will eventually find out that I have something he wants, something that I won’t ever give to him while I have breath in my body.”

“What could you have that would make him care enough to come after you?”

Her head spun and she fought for breath.

“I have his son.”

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

—Romans 8:38–39

To Ann P., my golden-hearted friend.

Dear Reader,

Miles of ocean, acres of grassland, plenty of heroes. Welcome to the Roughwater Ranch, owned by Aunt Ginny and Uncle Gus. I just adore a good cowboy story, don’t you? In this series you’ll meet Mitch, Liam, Helen and Chad, four people who are closer than kin, part of the glorious Roughwater Ranch family. All four books take place along the central California coast, a favorite spot of ours to visit. The last time we were there, we watched the sea lions hanging out on the beach, just across the road from herds of cattle grazing on the pastureland. Surf and turf at its finest! I hope you will enjoy coming along on my coastal cowboy adventures!

God bless and giddyup!

Dana Mentink

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Bible Verse

Dedication

Dear Reader

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

Extract

About the Publisher

ONE

Storm’s coming.

The illogical notion trickled again through Mitch Whitehorse’s gut as he surveyed the late-afternoon fog choking the windswept cove. Strange, since there was no sign of a weather front moving in through the mist. He fingered the scar that grooved his cheek, the rough patch oddly numb, a dead spot courtesy of his brother. The occasional blurred vision and migraines were an additional reminder of how close he’d come to dying at Wade’s hand.

But it wasn’t so much the pain of having his occipital bone crushed or the resulting symptoms that stuck in his mind—it was his brother’s smile. Even when Wade was led from the courtroom after the guilty verdict that would send him to prison for life, he’d been smiling right at Mitch, a smile of pure evil, cold as the grave, unrepentant, undefeated.

Rosie, the big roan mare, shifted underneath Mitch, probably wondering why they were standing on a bluff in the numbing fog, staring out at the crawling Pacific instead of sheltering from the February wind. They’d spent a full day moving a herd of cattle from one pasture to another and chasing down an ailing cow to administer medicine. Straightening, Mitch ignored the twinge in his back, courtesy of his days as a US marshal and the fact that he was now a hardworking cowboy staring forty in the face.

Storm’s coming.

There it was again, the warning his instincts kept whispering in spite of what his eyes could see.

Pure silliness. Nothing could shake Mitch anymore, least of all a mere storm. The worst evil he’d ever encountered, Wade’s heinous killing spree that left three women dead, was over. Wade was in prison, Mitch’s final act as a US marshal before he’d walked away from law enforcement and onto his uncle Gus’s Roughwater Ranch. He hadn’t put Wade’s wife, Jane Reyes, away for life, like he should have. Jane knew all too well that Wade had abducted those women, imprisoned them right on their sprawling property, killed them one by one, except for the last. Oh, he knew she had been an accomplice, but knowing and proving were two different things. Her sentence would have to come later.

Someone else’s battle to fight.

He eased the horse into motion. They took the trail down to the beach. Just a short ride to clear his head before they made their way back to his cabin tucked in the grove of trees far away from any living creature except his two horses. He had two, because living things weren’t meant to go it alone, except for Mitch Whitehorse. That was why he didn’t live on the ranch property like the other hands. It was one of the reasons, anyway.

Down where the salt water scoured the beach, he noticed right away the rough gouge of sand where a boat had been dragged up onto the shore by a trespasser. No sign of the boat now.

Habit had him reaching for the sidearm that was no longer there, hadn’t been for two years. It was just a boat, he told himself as he dismounted and left Rosie to nose at the clumps of seagrass. Though the beach was property of the ranch, Uncle Gus didn’t mind the odd fisherman or adventuring honeymooners looking for their own quiet stretch of sand.

But this section of beach was rocky, cold, perpetually blasted by wind, with no calm water to attract fish or people. His cabin was tucked behind the cliff close by, too close, and Mitch did not like people anywhere in the vicinity.

A clump of rocks rose in an untidy pile on the edge of the sand crescent before it was cut off by the cliffs. Big enough to hide a boat. He approached at an angle—old cop habit. There would be nothing to find but some harmless guy, taking time out to smoke a cigarette, or a beachcomber hunting for shells. The central California coast, after all, was a place that encouraged solitude, and that was why it was perfect for Mitch.

But the clenched muscles in his gut refused to relax as he reached the rock pile, skirted it and found the boat. It was a plain aluminum vessel with an outboard motor, glinting in the sunlight. Probably a rental from the dive shop. No one around.

If Mitch was a normal guy, he’d have his cell phone out, taking pictures, calling the local cops to report a trespasser, but he carried no cell phone and never intended to again. He waited, listening over the sound of the waves for the intruder’s whereabouts. Nothing. The wind whipped his battered cowboy hat, threatening to snatch it, as he hunkered down. Nothing and no one, not for the ten minutes he waited there.

Rosie nickered from the far end of the beach, her way of saying, “Whatsa matter with you?”

Good question. He turned to go.

A figure rose up from the rocks above, backlit by the fog-dulled sun. Black ski cap pulled down across the brow, wiry torso covered by a nylon windbreaker, black jeans, booted feet. Mitch could not see clearly for a moment, but he did not need to. His senses could not believe it was his brother, Wade, standing on the rocks staring down, but his heart told him it could be no one else.

Wade cracked a smile. “Hello, big brother. You’re ugly as ever. Scar hasn’t faded, has it?”

The ripped edges of the wound had healed, but the real damage never would. His brother, his blood kin, the psychopath, had escaped from prison. Mitch’s worst fear stood above him like the creatures from the old monster movies he’d watched as a kid. He’d stopped watching those flicks when he’d learned that man was the greatest monster of all, this man in particular, his brother, Wade.

Wade’s left hand was concealed behind his back. Mitch knew what was coming. Wade had him pinned right and proper. Wade was smart, probably smarter than Mitch. Only Mitch’s dogged determination had brought him down, but now Wade had the upper hand in every way.

You’re an idiot, Mitch, he told himself. Aloud he said, “Finished that prison sentence already?”

Wade laughed. “You know I’m the impatient type. Remember when I took your horse because Mom wouldn’t let me have the car?”

He remembered. Wade had whipped the horse until its sides were bloody, and Mitch had been so furious it had ended in a fistfight, with Pops barely able to separate them. It always ended badly when he was anywhere near his brother. The darkness in Wade’s soul rubbed off on those around him, like he suspected it had on Wade’s wife, Jane. Then again, maybe she’d been just as twisted as him from the get-go. Venomous, that was Wade Whitehorse, and anyone who stayed around him long enough got a full dose.

“Prison didn’t agree with me.” Wade smiled, teeth glaring white in the sunlight. “And I had a few debts to settle up, of course.”

“So you borrowed a boat and came to find me. I’m flattered.”

“You’re sloppy, and the boat isn’t mine. I don’t like the water, you remember. I prefer horseback. You have a routine, exercising your horse here along the beach at just this hour. You made it easy. Easier than escaping from the marshals during the prison transfer.” He clucked. “Disappointing.”

Now the hand came around from behind and Mitch saw the gun. He knew it instantly, bile rising in his throat.

Wade smiled. “You recognize it, I can tell.”

“Granddad’s revolver.” Passed down to their father. The first time he’d ever fired a gun had been with that revolver, his father standing tall and proud behind him. He’d loved that gun. “Wondered where it got to.”

“Pops never let me have it. I hated him for that.”

“He didn’t want to give a gun to a psychopath.” Mitch shrugged. “It’s called good parenting.”

Wade’s eyes narrowed for a moment, and Mitch braced for impact. Instead Wade laughed. “It’s okay. I got what I wanted. Stole it out of Pops’s gun safe when I was sixteen.”

“So how do you happen to have it now? Didn’t think they let psychos bring their guns to jail.”

“My wife stored it away for me. Janey. You remember Janey?”

He didn’t answer.

“She’s a good wifey, that Janey, in most ways.”

Wade’s fixed stare flickered a moment, caught by some movement Mitch couldn’t see on the water’s edge under the rotted dock pilings. His horse? Wade trained the gun away from him.

“Don’t you shoot that horse,” Mitch snapped.

Wade turned back, smiled. “I didn’t come here to shoot the horse.” Wade fired as Mitch surged forward in a futile effort. He felt a crease of heat on his temple and then he was falling into darkness. Just before the black closed in, he noticed a plume of smoke arcing over the sand like a striking snake.

* * *

She’d been too late. Mitch collapsed to the sand. Berating herself, Jane Reyes fired a second flare, aiming directly for Wade’s chest. She didn’t know if a flare would kill a person, but it might knock him back enough to warn him off. The horse waiting far off on the beach sprang into a gallop, ears pinned.

A shot whistled over her head, and she ducked down behind the dock pilings that hid her. They were remnants of some rudimentary boat landing that had long ago given way to the sea. Her breath came in panicked gasps as she crouched there. Would he come after her? She had no more flares and only a knife tucked into her boot. She’d been trying to pick out the rugged path up to Mitch’s property, after beaching her rented boat on the shore. Wind plucked at her hair, numbed her limbs.

Now she was trapped here, no cell reception, Mitch shot and probably bleeding to death, and her ex-husband stalking her from a scant fifty yards away from his perch on the rock pile. There was no one to help. Again she questioned the sanity of a man who lived in a location with limited access, by horseback, boat or on foot. So lonely, so desolate.

And why had she come here to this isolated stretch of nowhere to find Mitch? Put herself in such a vulnerable position for a man who believed she was a willing participant in Wade’s sick plans?

Because Wade was her worst nightmare, evil incarnate, and he’d found the house where she rented a tiny back room from Nana Jo. It was only by God’s grace that she’d been out at the time, able to flee. Mitch Whitehorse was the only one...the only person on earth who could help her put Wade back in prison, where he could not destroy any more lives. Only now Mitch was likely dead. Icy despair licked at her.

You can’t give up.

Wade’s voice, singsong and high-pitched, carried over the wind. “Who’s that shooting at me?”

Terror coursed through her at the sound of that voice, and his courtroom promise returned to her mind.

We’ll be together again, Janey. Don’t you worry, my dove. The smile, the soulless eyes. I’ll never let you go.

She clamped her teeth closed to hold in the scream and clutched the useless flare gun. Where was he? Still at a distance, judging from the voice. Stopped to examine her boat? Circling around to her position? She could not see through the thickening fog.

A flicker of movement up and to the right riveted her. He was climbing to a higher position, a spot on top of the craggy pile from which he’d be able to pick out her hiding place. But his movement gave her time, minutes maybe, no longer, while he threaded his way along the rocks. If she could reach Mitch, the boat, and get them into the water... The little outboard motor wasn’t terribly powerful and she’d be fighting the incoming tide, but it would put some distance between them, and maybe she could make it past the cove, out of range of Wade’s gun.

One thing she knew after a year of marriage to the monster was that Wade Whitehorse could not swim. Forcing herself to breathe slowly, she counted to three, pushed off from the rotted piling and ran as quietly as she could. Every moment she expected the report of a gun, the pain of a bullet plowing into her skull.

Panting, fueled by terror, she made it to Mitch and the boat.

As frightened as she was of Wade, it scared her even more to crouch behind a pile of sand next to Mitch’s sprawled body. He lay on his back, face turned toward her, one muscled arm out-flung. Blood stained his forehead, collecting in the puckered edges of his scar, dripping down to saturate the collar of his barn jacket. With shaking fingers, she checked for a pulse. His dark lashes twitched as she touched his cold throat.

Alive.

Mitch Whitehorse was alive.

A rock bounced loose from the towering cliff and tumbled to the beach. Wade was closing in, and if she didn’t do something fast, neither one of them would live to see morning.

TWO

Mitch’s senses came back online slowly, feeding him bits of information that did not make sense. Pain, in his temple and back. Cold, the feel of wind on his face and damp sand under his body. Fear, that he was being dragged against his will to a place he did not want to go. He forced his eyes open. Someone was yanking him by the arm, trying to heave him up and into the aluminum boat he’d noticed just before Wade shot him.

Wade.

Mitch surged to his feet in an adrenaline-fueled rush, pulling free of his captor before he toppled backward into the sand. A woman with long dark hair swooped next him. It took him a few blinks to recognize her, Jane Reyes Whitehorse, his brother’s wife.

“Don’t touch me.” He tried to get up again, but his head spun. She grabbed a handful of his shirtfront with one hand and clamped icy fingers over his mouth with the other.

“Be quiet. He’ll hear you. You’ve got to get in the boat. Help me. I can’t move you by myself.”

He shook off her grasp.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do...” he grated out.

“Save your life, you big ox, and if you don’t help me right now, Wade is going to kill us both.”

Both? Kill his accomplice? Mitch shook himself to try to clear away the fuzz, but the movement made him groan. She was grabbing him again, yanking and pulling, and he moved more to get her to stop jarring his nerves into white-hot pain than to cooperate. Suddenly he found himself in the bottom of the boat that she began to drag to the water’s edge.

He clamped a palm over the gunwale and hauled himself up to his knees, but she’d managed to get the boat in the water and it was all he could do to hold on against the movement.

There was a crack, the whistling noise that he didn’t have to see to know was a bullet. She threw herself to her knees.

“Wade?” he grunted.

“Who else?”

“Why’s he shooting at you?”

Her eyes rounded in exasperation. “He’s shooting at you. I don’t think he knows it’s me yet. You didn’t know he’d escaped from the marshals?”

“Just found that out.” Before he’d formulated his next question, she yanked the outboard to life. The motor throbbed, and she guided the boat into the grip of the tide. He would rather have jumped into the waves and swum than been in the company of his former sister-in-law and the woman who’d aided Wade in his horrors, but his vision was blurred and there was a dull ringing in his ears. He forced himself to breathe through his nose, praying the dizziness would subside long enough for him to take action. Another bullet followed the first, closer this time. Wade had gotten to a better position for the kill shot.

Now he’d hauled himself to his knees just as a shot took a chunk out of the side of the boat, startling Jane. She flipped over backward into the waves, going under. Breaking the surface a moment later, she looked at him with wide eyes of a color caught between ice blue and silver. She coughed, wet hair clinging in long dark clumps to her cheeks.

Indecision clawed at him. She was his enemy, but she was also a woman, a small woman with a mouth pinched in fear. Without allowing himself to think it over, he stuck an oar over the side, and she grabbed on.

Fighting through pain and the disequilibrium of the rocking boat, he began to pull her in, until another shot furrowed the water so close she lost her grip. Hands flailing, she fought against the current, but it sucked her back toward the rocks. He tumbled out after her, a messy splash into cold that seeped right into his core.

He struck out as best he could in the direction she’d been swept. Without the protection of the boat, there would be nothing stopping Wade from shooting them except perhaps the layer of fog, which had thickened to be almost impenetrable.

His fingers felt something soft, and he grabbed at it. It turned out to be her jacket sleeve. He clung to her wrist and reeled the rest of her body close to his until he’d encircled her in his arms. She was smaller than he’d thought.

She looked up at him with those strange-colored eyes.

The lights from a boat sliced through the water, bouncing off the mist. “Driftwood Police Department,” a voice called. “This is private property, and there is no shooting allowed here.” It was a voice Mitch knew well. Danny Patron, an avid fisherman, hardworking cop and father of three, who was assigned the lonely job of watching the coastline.

“Hey,” he yelled. “Danny! Over here.” He continued to shout as loud as he could, and Jane joined him, but the thrum of the motor indicated the vessel was passing them, unaware of the two victims fighting the waves and buried in fog.

By now Mitch was tiring, the energy seeping out of him as he struggled to tread water. He could not see what had become of the boat, and it took all his reserves to keep them from smashing against the sharp rocks.

He realized Jane had freed herself from his grasp and taken hold of his sleeve. He resisted, but she dug her fingers into his bicep.

“This way.”

Again, he was forced to make a decision—follow a woman he would not even trust with his cowboy boots, or stay put, fighting the tide until he would certainly drown?

“Where...?” he tried, but she did not allow him to utter the rest. He found himself towed along through the icy water, following the woman who’d married the monster.

* * *

Jane felt as though her limbs were carved from a block of ice. She held on to Mitch as long as she could, but he slipped out of her numb grasp at some point, though she could still see his dark head just behind. He shouted a couple of times, but she could not understand over the roar of the surf, nor did she want to. There was only one thing on her mind: getting them out of the freezing grip of the waves before they drowned.

Her knee banged into a submerged ridge, the bottom of the cliff that rose straight from the water like a shark fin. She hauled herself out, gasping as the wind robbed her of any remaining warmth.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Mitch grunted behind her. “If you climb, he’s got an easy target.”

She didn’t respond, fingers clawing as the rocks tore into her flesh. It was here, had to be.

“Hey,” he said, but his words were cut off by a grunt of pain. From his injury or the rocks that surely sliced at him, too.

What if she’d been wrong? Again? What if Mitch was right and there was nothing on this cliff but certain death? No, this would not be the end. This was her only shot at life, real life, one last chance to make things right. Teeth gritted, she hauled herself along the sharp crack, praying that the fog and the police had been enough to frighten Wade away.

But Wade was never scared.

That part of him was missing; instead there was an empty void where human feeling should reside.

She was shivering uncontrollably now. Her legs felt like they were as insubstantial as the fog. Despair gripped its way into her belly. And then she saw it, the cutout that marked the cave she’d spotted on her way into the cove, high enough that the tide would not flood it, or so she hoped.

“Come on,” she ordered him and climbed as quickly as she could until she crawled through the opening. It was a harder squeeze for Mitch, as the guy was broad shouldered and a hulk at somewhere over six feet.

He hunched inside the cave, water streaming from his clothing, eyes ink dark, narrow, suspicious.

“You’re Wade’s wife.”

It was like the executioner pronouncing sentence.

“No. Divorced.”

“Why are you here?” His shirt was stained with blood, and his teeth were chattering as badly as hers.

“Sit down,” she said.

“I don’t take orders from you.”

“Okay then, stand, but when you fall over, try not to hit your head. You probably already have a concussion.”

He did not sit, but she noticed he grabbed an outcropping of rock with one massive palm.

She scanned the cave floor until she found a meager supply of semidry leaves and some driftwood. Piling it onto the driest spot she could find, she pulled the Ziploc bag from her jacket pocket. With trembling fingers, she struck the match. It fizzled as soon as she touched it to the leaves.

“We won’t have to worry that he’ll see the smoke with all this fog,” she said, more to herself than him. I hope. There wasn’t much choice, anyway. They were dangerously close to hypothermia. Cold or bullets? Which one would get them first? She ground her teeth together. Neither, if she had a teaspoon of strength left in her. Patting her pockets, she realized her cell phone was somewhere at the bottom of the cove. At least the small pouch hooked to her belt was still there, for what it was worth. Her driver’s license, ATM card and a soggy ten-dollar bill. Not much, but keeping hold of some small thing helped her feel the tiniest bit less exposed.

Mitch swabbed a sleeve over his face. “Where’d you get the matches?”

“There was a kit in the boat. I grabbed it just before I started the motor. I thought there might be some first-aid supplies.”

He was silent as she struck the second match, which was snuffed just as quickly.

“Here,” he said, dropping to one knee and taking the box of matches from her. He bent close to the debris with a wince and a groan. Slowly, patiently, he held the lit match to the barest edge of the driest clump of pine needles. It kindled orange and smoked. He blew softly, cupping his shaking hand around the needles until they were fully aflame. With more gentleness than she’d thought him capable of, he eased the pine needles back into the pile. She held her breath as the debris grudgingly took.

Fighting back tears of relief, she scooted as close as she could to that small spot of warmth. With quaking fingers, she fished out a bandage from the bag and thrust it at him. “You’re still bleeding.”

Ignoring her offering, Mitch eased to a sitting position across from her, mouth tight with pain. “Why are you here?”

“To find you. And it wasn’t easy. You have no cell phone, and your house is like some kind of remote fortress or something.”

“Not remote enough, if you found it.”

She pushed another twig into the fire and edged so close her knees were almost touching the flames. “I...came to warn you that Wade had escaped.”

“Police could tell me that. So why did you come? Not just to warn me. You don’t care about me. Why?”

She was quiet. The little flames danced and popped, painting light and darkness across his face. Was there any of Wade’s darkness in his brother, Mitch? They shared genes.

That doesn’t mean anything, she told herself savagely. DNA doesn’t determine who you are—your soul does. But what kind of soul did Mitch Whitehorse have? Didn’t matter. He was the one, the only one, who could save what mattered most.

“I came because I need you to help me put Wade back in prison.”

He blinked. “So now you’re afraid of him, too? Why? You turned a blind eye while he kidnapped and murdered three women.”

She sucked in a breath. “I know you don’t believe me, but I didn’t know what Wade was doing.”

“You didn’t know the guy you married was a serial killer?”

The judgment was there in his eyes, the same she’d seen in the courtroom, the cops, the people who drove by her house and threw rocks into her windows, flattened her tires, sent death threats.

She swallowed hard against an onslaught of bitter tears. “I was blind, stupid blind, but I did not know.”

A long moment passed between them. “You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

She sagged. What else had she expected? Why would Mitch be any different? “Okay. Don’t believe me, but Wade has come here to kill you, and after he does that, he’ll kill me, too.”

“Why would he want to kill you? If you’re really innocent, why would Wade want to do that?”

“Because he will eventually find out that I have something he wants, something that I won’t ever give to him while I have breath in my body.”

“What could you have that would make him care enough to come after you?”

Her head spun, and she fought for breath. Tell him? What choice did she have?

“I have his son.”

THREE

She was lying, Mitch thought. Manipulating him, just like Wade. He crawled to the cave entrance both to scan for any sign of Wade or the returning police and to give himself a moment to think. It wasn’t easy with the hammering pain inside his skull and the cold that still made every movement arduous.

I have his son.

“I was pregnant,” she said, so low he almost didn’t hear it. “At the time...when things began to come out. I...I didn’t love Wade, hadn’t for a long time, when I began to notice things about him, scary things.” Her gulped breath made something inside him tense. “I was making secret plans to get away, which I’m sure you don’t believe.” Flames crackled as she threw another twig on the fire. “I was only four weeks along when the police came to arrest Wade. Two months at the time of the trial.”

“And he didn’t know?”

“No, but I was terrified he’d guess. I moved away and changed my identity. Wade found my hiding place two days ago, but I was out at the time and I got away.”

“Why’d he come for you, then, if you aren’t his accomplice?”

He saw a shudder pass through her. “He told me we’d always be together. I think he believes I belong to him and I’d help him.”

The starkness in her tone was convincing, but he’d heard a lot of convincing liars before. “Where’s the kid?”

She flinched. “Somewhere close. Safe.”

He yanked around to look at her. “Where?”

Her eyes flashed silver fire at him. “Somewhere safe,” she repeated, the words hard and clipped. Then she cleared her throat. “Ben is not even three yet, so he doesn’t understand any of this.”

“You need to tell me where he is.”

Her chin went up. “I don’t need to tell you anything.”

He stepped closer, staring her down. “If Wade suspects, he’ll get to your boy, no matter what kind of hiding place you’ve found.”

Her chin trembled, or maybe it was a trick of the firelight. “You don’t think I know that?”

“Then tell the cops. They’ll protect you.”

Her laugh was filled with bitterness. “The cops didn’t keep Wade in prison. They didn’t prevent people from sending me death threats and vandalizing my house. No one protected me.”

“Because you and your husband killed three women and almost a fourth if she hadn’t gotten away.”

She jerked as if he’d slapped her, then wrapped her arms around her middle and stared at him. “I...didn’t...know.” The lines around her mouth were hard, and every muscle in her frame was taut. “I didn’t know.” She moved quickly, snatched up a stick and cracked it in two. “You’ll never believe me. Think what you want, but...” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat and restarted. “My son, my little boy, does not deserve to pay the price for his father’s crimes. Please.” She was still on her knees, crouched in front of the meager fire. “Please help me. I have no one else.”

No one else.

He rubbed a hand through his hair, but it ignited a trail of pain, so he stopped. “I’m not your guy.”

“I saved your life.”

“I didn’t ask you to.” His harsh tone bounced back to him.

She stood now. “I’m not asking for myself. This isn’t about my life. It’s about my son’s.”

Silence grew between them, interrupted only by the pop and hiss of the fire.

“Right now we have to figure out how to get out of this cave without getting shot. That’s all.” He turned his back on her again and surveyed the cove. The fog had thinned a bit after the sun sank into the choppy waters. It was almost fully dark. The only way they were going to survive was to retreat from the cave back up to the trail that loped along the cliff top.

“Gonna climb up to the trail. Rosie will get us back to my place.”

“Who’s Rosie?”

“My horse.”

“I saw her run away.”

“She’s somewhere, waiting for my signal.”

“How do you know?”

He didn’t answer. “You can warm up and I’ll give you some clothes. I’ll take you to the police when it’s safe.”

“So you won’t help me yourself?”

He tossed another twig into the fire. “We’ll leave it burning. If Wade is watching, might be a diversion.”

“Do you think Wade’s given up by now?”

“Do you?”

Her gaze became uncertain, dropped away. “No.” She paused. “Soon after we were married, a couple of teenage boys snuck onto our property and had a little party. They didn’t damage anything, just left some bottles and a bag from their snacks. Wade hid there every night for five weeks until they came back, and then he scared them so badly they never returned.” She shivered, and he suspected it wasn’t from the cold. “Every single night for five weeks.”

She knew just as well as he.

Wade hadn’t given up, and he never would. Their best and only chance was to use darkness to conceal their escape.

But Wade knew how to use the darkness, too.

Like the monster hiding in the shadows, waiting for the kill.

* * *

They crawled out of the cave, and every inch of Jane’s body screamed in protest. Cold air whipped her mercilessly and she felt powerless against the elements, to the threat that was waiting out there. Mitch startled her by gripping her shoulder. His hands were massive, but his touch was surprisingly light.

“Stay low. Keep a couple of feet back from me so you have time to get away if he starts shooting.”

And what was she supposed to do if Mitch got shot again? She decided to keep that thought to herself. One foot in front of the other, Jane. It took her feet and her clawed fingers to cling to the slippery rocks. Mitch tried to keep them in cover as best he could, and she hoped the fog was enough to conceal them further. Still, her skin prickled both from the cold and the knowledge that Wade was out there.

Did he know it was her?

Who’s that shooting at me?

He probably did not blame her for her testimony—she had in fact known nothing about his crimes—but the divorce papers he’d been served in prison had been another matter. He’d never signed, and she’d had to withstand the interminable statutory waiting period before the marriage was dissolved without his consent.

I’ll never let you go.

She thought for the millionth time about what kind of a man he’d seemed to be, charming, sweet, thoughtful, intelligent. And he’d used those charms to lure young women, abduct them and force them to deplete their bank accounts. Then he’d imprisoned each for some sick, twisted thrill only he understood before he killed them. How had she not known? Not seen? Not heard anything from the underground bunker in the woods where he’d kept them chained?

And why hadn’t he done the same to her?

As soon as he discovered she’d gone to his brother, he’d come after her with the full force of his evil. And if somehow he found out about Ben... The thought made her move quicker, edging closer to Mitch as they climbed up the cliff side.

When she thought she could stand no more, when her palms were shredded and her muscles aching, they made it over the top. They lay panting in a grassy field, peppered with clumps of trees and scrubby bushes.

Mitch got to his feet first, put his fingers to his lips and whistled. It barely carried over the sound of the wind. She struggled to her feet and looked for any sign of Mitch’s horse. Seconds ticked into minutes.

“Which way is your place?” She found she had to bend over to continue sucking in deep lungfuls of air. “We’ll have to hike.”

The ground vibrated under her feet, and a big mare trotted up, reins trailing.

For the first time, she saw Mitch Whitehorse smile. He ran his hands over the animal’s sides. “You were scared, weren’t you, Rosie girl? It’s okay now. I’m here.”

What tender words from a man who had about as much give as granite. Nonetheless, she was so happy to see that horse show up, she might have kissed both of them on the spot.

He leaned his forehead against the horse’s neck and she thought at first it was a sign of affection, until she realized Mitch looked unsteady on his feet.

“Are you okay?”

He straightened. “Yeah.” But as he heaved himself onto the horse, he had to grip the saddle hard, face pale in the moonlight. He bent and extended his palm. “Climb up.”

“Uh...” It was not the time to tell him she knew precisely nothing about riding. As she clutched his forearm, he swung her so she landed just behind the saddle. “Hold on to the cantle and keep your feet away from her flanks.”

She had no idea what either “cantle” or “flanks” meant, but she tucked up her legs and grabbed on to the leather seat back where Mitch sat. There was no way she would wrap her arms around him, that was for sure.

She wondered if the horse had the strength to carry both of them after wandering loose for hours, but Rosie seemed to respond quickly to Mitch’s click of the tongue.

“How far?”

“What?” he called over his shoulder.

“I said, ‘How far?’” she started to shout when a gunshot broke the night. Jane felt the movement of air as the shot went past, and then the horse was running full out.

She grabbed Mitch around the waist to keep from falling, and they galloped into the trees. Was Wade on foot? Horseback? On a motorcycle? She didn’t hear an engine, but the sound of her own frightened breathing and the pounding of the horse’s hooves would probably have drowned it out anyway.

Rosie kept to the trees, slowing only enough to dodge branches and piles of rocks. No more bullets followed. Rosie slackened her pace. The woods fell into silence, broken only by the creak of the leather saddle and Rosie’s soft whinny. Jane began to believe, to hope, that Wade had not followed them into the woods, until his voice carried over the night noise.

“Hey, Mitch. Who’s that with you? Have you got yourself a girl?” Wade asked in that singsong way that prickled her skin. Then his tone went hard and lethal.

“Or have you taken mine?”

FOUR

The high trill of Wade’s voice brought back all the horror in one flash of skin-rippling nausea. Though Mitch had desperately wanted to deny the accusations against his brother, he’d known deep down that every terrible detail was true. Wade Whitehorse was a psychopath, capable of unspeakable evil.

In spite of the respite he’d found working at Uncle Gus’s Roughwater Ranch, part of him had always known this day might come, the day his brother returned to destroy him.

Mitch could feel Jane’s hands clutching the back of his shirt. Terror, it could not be anything else. So now she was scared of him? After being married to Wade and turning a blind eye to his brutal treatment of other women? It was incomprehensible. He bit back the rage and urged Rosie deeper into the woods.

“Where is he?” Jane hissed.

“At our ten o’clock, on foot, unless he’s got a horse.”

“We have to get out of these woods.” Her panic transmitted clearly as she grabbed his waist and pressed her cheek to his back. “Please.”

Please. An odd word for a killer’s wife to choose. He pressed Rosie to go deeper into the screen of trees. The branches shuttered out the moonlight, leaving them in inky gloom. Now her breathing was coming in frightened pants.

“He’ll find us here—he probably has tools, night-vision goggles, military equipment.”

I know, he wanted to snap at her. Tools he used to imprison women while you stayed quiet and let him. He clucked to Rosie encouragingly, urging her around a fallen oak, squeezing between clefts of rocks into what looked like a wild tangle of overgrowth.

He could not see, so instead he let himself feel, turning his face until he caught the whiff of air that smelled of wet granite, cooled as it swept down from the mountain. He turned the horse east.

Jane clutched him tighter. “There’s no path. We can’t hide. He’ll find us.”

He’ll find us. Mitch had felt this showdown would come since that moment he’d seen his brother smile as he was taken to prison, but it could not happen now, not when Mitch was dizzy and weak, with Jane clinging to his back.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer, merely guided Rosie along, following the trail of chilled air. The ground was moist, muddy in some places, which caused the horse to slow. Mitch smiled. The more mud, the better. They had to push through dense thickets, which proved no trouble for Rosie, though the branches scratched at him and probably Jane a few times. The thicker the screen, the deeper the layer of muck under Rosie’s hooves, the better he felt. If Wade was on horseback, there was a slim chance he could follow their trail in the darkness, but if he was on foot, he would wait until daylight. One thing he knew about his brother—Wade could not stand to be dirty, not even for one moment.

He recalled his own laughter as a high school senior when he and his girlfriend Paige Lynn came upon Wade, staring at the brown smear on his palm from the front door they’d just painted at their parents’ dilapidated house in Arizona. They’d offered Wade a rag, but he’d been so enraged he’d thrown it back at them, along with a vile diatribe that brought the neighbors outside. Wade had finally composed himself, and Mitch and Paige Lynn repainted the marred spot on the door. The next day Mitch found the front windshield of his car smashed, the interior ruined with paint.

A thorn scratched his arm, but he hardly felt it through the cold. Pushing through a heavily forested area over the mucky ground would not be an option for Wade and might be the only thing that kept them alive.

Jane had given up trying to question him, finally, which was a relief since they were both shivering fit to beat the band. He tried to blink away the waves of dizziness that hit him. If he fell from the horse...

Grasping the reins tighter, he stiffened his spine. Only another quarter mile, he figured. At one point he stopped Rosie.

Jane clutched at him. “What? Did you hear him? Has he found us?”

“Quiet,” he commanded.

Surprisingly, she obeyed.

He heard nothing but the branches rattling in the wind like the sound of dried bones. A light rain had begun to fall. Her fingers were dead cold on his back. If they did not get to his cabin soon, they would both fall victim to hypothermia.

Rosie responded eagerly to his click of the tongue and picked up her pace. Again they passed through an area of dense foliage, and he heard Jane cry out once when something pricked her. She sank back into silence until they emerged at his cabin, tucked in a cluster of pines.

He stopped one more time and listened for a full minute before he was satisfied. Jane was already sliding to the ground, landing with a hard jolt. She tipped her head up to look at him, still on the horse, and he was struck by how small she was, backed by the sprawl of forest behind her. The monster’s wife had seemed bigger in his memory, stony faced at the trial, insistent that she knew nothing, stalwart in her lies.

“Go inside,” he said.

“Where...? What will you do?”

“See to the horse.”

She hesitated only for a moment and then walked to the wood-sided cabin, letting herself in through the unlocked front door. He climbed off Rosie and set about removing her saddle and letting her into the fenced area where Bud, the placid gelding, greeted her from the three-sided shelter. Though every muscle in him screamed its displeasure, he took the time to dump some feed into Rosie’s bucket and quickly wipe her down and tend to the scratch on her flank.

“Thanks, girl,” he said. “You got us out of a real mess.”

As he limped to the cabin, he saw Jane watching him through the window, standing back a bit as if she was afraid. Of him? Or the creature she’d been married to?

And what exactly was he supposed to do with her? Everything in him wanted to toss her out into the woods and let her work out her own reconciliation with Wade. She’d made her choices; she should live with them.

But the other part of him, the small part that was still clinging to some sort of goodness and decency, would not allow that. During one of her infrequent moments of sobriety, their mother, Phoebe, would kiss her three children—his older sister, Claire, Mitch and Wade—and tell them, “You all got more than enough goodness in you.” He was not sure now, when everything inside him felt dead and desiccated. He forced his legs to carry him away from his horses. He would let her stay until he figured something out, knowing it would have made his mother smile. Besides, he thought, as he crossed the porch, if Wade really was coming for Jane, she would be the perfect bait.

And he would need every advantage he could get to catch his brother again, one final time.

* * *

Jane stood in the tiny front room of Mitch’s cabin, examining the cramped, moonlit space. The living area consisted of a hand-carved wooden rocking chair next to a standing lamp that did not work when she flipped on the wall switch. A shadowed alcove looked to be a minuscule kitchen across from an open door through which she glimpsed a neatly made bed and an attached bathroom. She was surprised he allowed himself the luxury of running water, this hermit of a man.

But she could understand his craving for solitude. When the threats started coming during the trial—the rocks through the window, animal blood spattered across her front porch—she too had desperately wanted to disappear among the trees, somewhere, anywhere to escape the hatred. It seemed to Jane that she’d lost everyone—her mother, who’d been forced to quit her job as an elementary school aide before her lethal stroke, her sister, who cut off contact for the sake of her own family, and her friends—until there was nothing left for Jane but the tiny God-breathed life growing inside her. She’d promised herself that Ben would live and thrive far away from Wade and his terrible legacy.

“He won’t ever be a part of your life,” she’d whispered over his downy head, soothing him in the one luxury she allowed herself in her run-down rented room, a secondhand glider rocker. Of all the possessions she’d abandoned, she missed that beat-up old rocker the most, patched arm, stained cushion and all.

The twin pangs of despair and panic bit at her, through the numbing chill that stiffened her limbs. It was too late for Jane, but her son would have his chance at a normal life. Lord, please help me save Ben. Please.

Arms wrapped tight around herself, she continued her perusal. There was nothing on the walls, no prints or paintings, no family photos, only blank wood panels. In the corner was a long shelf that ran the length of the wall, about five feet, crowded with something she could not make out in the gloom. She would have moved closer, but her legs were trembling so badly she stayed put until Mitch entered.

He pulled the heavy curtains closed and shut and locked the door and did the same with the rear exit in the kitchen. Then he turned on a lantern and activated a generator, which hummed to life.

“We’ll stick to lantern light, except in the bathroom. Water will be hot in a bit. Go shower. I’ll toss a clean towel in the door.”

The veritable avalanche of words from this taciturn man unsettled her. “But...but you need medical attention.”

“I don’t.”

She’d leave that issue for now. “We have to call the police.”

“No phone.”

She gaped. “You don’t have a landline, either?”

No cell service. No landline. No communication. It had been a long time before she’d realized the place Wade had purchased for their idyllic, romantic homestead had no cell coverage. And she had never so much as suspected he’d chosen it for that very reason until the end. Not idyllic—isolated. Not romantic—remote. She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat.

He jutted his chin at her. “Gonna get the heater started. It will warm quickly.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll, uh, find you something to wear while you shower.”

“Let me bandage your head at least.”

“Don’t want your help.” He said it without looking at her.

I don’t want yours, either, she longed to say. No, she did not want it, but she and Ben needed Mitch Whitehorse desperately.

Wade had gone on the run for a short while after his crimes were brought to light, and it had only been through the sheer grit and determination of his older brother that he’d been arrested and brought back for trial. Now Wade had returned to kill Mitch and make good on his promise that Jane would be his wife forever, his property—his or no one’s. The thought of being owned by Wade Whitehorse made her nauseous. The shivering now controlled her as her deepest fear began to grow roots down into her soul.

What would happen if Wade discovered she’d had his son? She’d been careful, excruciatingly meticulous about keeping Ben away from the public eye, but if Wade found out... Panic made her dizzy, and she clutched the back of the rocking chair.

Mitch loomed closer, dark eyes like pools of ink in the lamplight. He was so tall, features sharp and chiseled, his hair tar black. The glow caught in the rippled skin of his cheek, the scar caused, she knew, when Wade struck his brother full on in the face with a length of metal chain. It was a blow that probably would have ended the life of a weaker man. “Should you...sit down?” he said. The tone was not especially tender as it was neutral. For a man who believed the worst about her, it was the best she could hope for.

“I’m all right. I’ll take that shower.” She could not resist tossing over her shoulder, “Don’t collapse while I’m in there, all right?”

She heard his annoyed grunt and hid a smile. It was going to be the greatest challenge of her life to convince Mitch that she was not the person he thought her to be. Judging from his granitelike stubbornness, it might just be an impossible task.

God had promised that nothing could separate her and Ben from His love, even those terrible crimes of her husband’s. It was the promise she’d clung to when there was nothing but hatred everywhere she looked. God loved them both unequivocally, she knew with every breath she took. He’d entrusted Ben to her to keep her son safe and as far away from Wade as possible.

Mommy’s going to come for you soon, Ben bear, and it’s going to be all right.

If only she could make herself believe it.

FIVE

Mitch held the clothes up to the lantern light. There was no way Jane would be able to wear anything of his. The best he could do was scrounge up his smallest sweatshirt, which would no doubt hang down past her knees. And socks. Those would go up over her shins, so he figured she’d be covered and dry. It was the best he could do.

He found a clean towel. Quick as he could, he cracked the bathroom door and shoved the pile inside, yanking it closed before he changed into dry jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. Every movement cost him a ripple of pain through his back. The side of his head felt like someone was striking it with a steel mallet, but at least he was dry. The space heater purred, and his own shivering had slowed. Using his mother’s dented old kettle, he set the water on to boil. The shower was still running. Easing on a black slicker and a baseball cap, he grabbed his rifle and slipped out into the night.

The best practice would be to climb to the top of the rock ridge, which would give him a view of the hills below, but he was not sure he was steady enough to accomplish it, and the view would be clouded by the falling rain. He settled for doing a long, slow circle and checking for any signs that his brother had somehow persevered through the mud. There were no such indications, and the best tell of all was that Rosie and Bud were quiet and placid. Calmed somewhat, he hobbled back to the cabin.

Jane screamed when he entered.

He held up his palm, the rifle slung over his shoulder. “Just me. Property’s secure.”

She clutched the sweatshirt in a terrified fist, the fabric dwarfing her small frame. It took a few seconds for her voice to start working again. “Sorry. I thought...”

He knew what she’d thought, and he felt a stab of regret that he’d scared her. No regret necessary, he reminded himself sternly. Remember who you’re dealing with here. The kettle finally began to boil, and he plopped bulky tea bags into two squat mugs and added the water. While it steeped, he ran over various plans about what to do with the woman who was wandering his house, swaddled in his clothes, twisting her long hair into a wet coil. When the tea was ready, he still had only a sketchy plan of attack.

Grabbing a bottle from the cupboard, he downed a couple of aspirin, swallowing them dry. He tossed the tea bags and carried the mugs, handing one to her.

She sniffed the steam. “What kind of tea?”

“Yarrow. My dad makes it.”

She smiled. “He was kind, the one time I spoke to him on the phone. Does he live nearby?”

“Lives on a boat. He’s paid as a ranch carpenter, but he’s got a garden plot on the property.”

Jane’s smile vanished. “We have to tell him that Wade’s escaped.”

“I’ll call him as soon as I can.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Get you to the nearest US marshal.”

Her breath hitched. “They won’t be able to protect me.”

“It’s their job.”

“They couldn’t find him. Only you could. And they couldn’t keep him in prison. He escaped from them.”

“It’s the only option.”

She shook her head. “Do you figure Wade will leave you alone then? After you hand me over?”

“No. He’s gonna come for me, and I’ll send him back to prison or one of us will die. That’s how it’s gonna end, but you and the kid are not going to be in the middle of it.”

Her chin went up. “Ben. His name is Ben.”

Ben. Wade’s son. How much of his father did he inherit? Mitch wondered. Don’t go there, Mitch. You share genes with your brother, too. “Where is he?”

She remained stubbornly silent.

He let the quiet spool out for a few minutes, waiting for her to speak. Cop trick. She didn’t. “Wade said you’d been storing things for him.”

“What things?”

“My granddad’s gun, for one.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t.”

“Then how did he get the gun?”

“I have no idea.”

He drank some tea. “Before daybreak, we’ll go to the ranch and call the marshals.”

Her throat worked convulsively, and then she took a deep breath. “Wade will find me, Mitch, no matter what kind of safe house they put me in. He’ll find me, and he’ll take Ben.”

Her last words broke, and it made his gut go tight. He hardened himself against the feeling. Remember what she is, whose she is.

“Should have thought of that before you married the guy, right?” It was cruel, but what she’d let Wade do, turned a blind eye to, made her complicit. Just because her plans had backfired for some reason didn’t mean he was going to let himself be manipulated.

The lamplight picked up the glittering sparks of moisture in her hair as she stared at him, small in her oversize clothes, but the ferocity in her eyes was bigger than life. “Go ahead and think that I’m stupid, gullible and blind. Believe me, I’ve thought all of those things and more. How did I not see Wade for what he was? I’ve wrestled with that every day of my life since the police showed up on my doorstep.”

He shifted, not wanting to hear anything more, but she went on.

“Maybe I had a desperate need to be loved, or maybe it was low self-esteem or just plain insanity, but in the beginning I believed Wade was a good man, and I thought he loved me.” She tipped her chin up to look at him. “Wasn’t there a time when you believed your brother? When he fooled you?”

Fooled you. More times than Mitch could remember in their younger years. Wade was a master manipulator, and he’d bamboozled his own kin, misled their parents for decades, skated away from consequences by deceiving, charming, lying to teachers, cops and, yes, to Mitch also. Finally, he allowed one curt nod.

She sighed, shoulders slumping. “I would give anything to do it over again, to ask questions about where Wade went all those times he told me he was away on business trips. If I’d walked those acres he’d insisted were infested with rattlesnakes, I might have heard those women call for help. Instead I was asleep in my cozy little house, in my make-believe world.” Her voice squeezed off, the barest glimmer of tears pooling, fingers clenched into white fists. “How do you think it feels to know I could have saved those women and didn’t?”

The tears began to trickle down her face, paralyzing him, confusing him. Jane was his enemy just like Wade.

But the anguish she spoke of was one he’d experienced, too.

When he’d left for the police academy, he had intentionally walled his brother out of his life, leaving him loose to destroy, as Mitch knew deep down he would. He’d left it to other jurisdictions, other cops, until the damage was done, until lives had been lost.

How do you think it feels to know I could have saved those women and didn’t? It was the same accusation he’d leveled at himself, too.

He could not order the mess of confusion in his thoughts, so he set down his mug and took the other from her trembling hand, putting them on the crate that served as a coffee table. “Lie down on the bed and get some sleep. I’ll keep watch. We’ll leave at oh four hundred. That’s...”

“Four a.m. I know.” She followed him to the bedroom. He took the old quilt down from the closet and laid it on the bed.

“It’s cold back here. I’ll move the heater in.”

“Thank you,” she said in a very small voice. She stood there for a moment, scanning the tiny room. “I’m sorry for the pain I know I’ve caused you by running here. Wade hurt you, too, probably more than me.” Her chin went up then. “But I’m not sorry I came. I would do anything to save my son. He’s all that matters, and, God willing, I’m going to protect Ben.”

There it was again in her voice, the twined strands of pain and strength, hints of anguish, an echo of a strange kind of certainty she had no right to. If she was telling the truth...

He brushed the thought away. He had no energy left to consider anything but the most pressing matters—keeping them both alive and getting her delivered safely to the US marshals. Then he would be free to go to war with his brother until they’d decided the winner once and for all.

* * *

She approached Mitch cautiously, shortly after midnight. He was sitting in the dark living room, the rocking chair pulled near the window, the rifle lying over his knees, so still she was not sure whether he was awake or asleep. The temperature had dropped, and she clutched the blanket around herself.

“Jane?” he said, making her jump.

“I came to take my turn at watch.”

“No need. Go back to sleep.”

“There is a need. You can’t stay up all night. I’ll watch for a couple of hours. I’ll wake you if I see anything.”

“No, you...”

“What? You think I can’t use my two eyes as well as you use yours? Believe me, I’ve been looking over my shoulder for two years now. I’m pretty good at it.”

He didn’t answer.

She heaved out a breath. “Oh, right. You still think I’m somehow in league with Wade.”

The room was dead quiet, save for the moan of the wind that skimmed the roof.

“Mitch, I risked my life to drag you into that boat. I could much more easily have let him kill you or never shown up here at all. No offense, but this isn’t exactly the Ritz-Carlton.” Her attempt at humor fell flat. He sat there, cradling the rifle like some monolithic statue. A sigh escaped her, and she turned to go.

“One hour,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ll sleep for one hour. Then wake me, if I’m not out here.”

“Okay,” she said. She ran a finger over the rocking chair. “I had an old banged-up glider rocker. Sitting there with Ben, even when he was crying...” She shrugged. “Those were the best moments of my life. I miss that rocker.”

He hesitated a moment, as if he were about to speak, then took the rifle and checked out the window for one last look. She wandered the small space, over to the corner she had not examined earlier. Peering closer, she hardly managed to hold back an exclamation. The long rectangular board housed a train track, which wound through little snowcapped mountains. A miniature train stood ready, as if to start off on a journey, past the cluster of horses and the painstakingly painted trees.

Mitch stopped on his way to the bedroom.

“You like model trains?” she said.

He nodded. “Since I was a kid.”

“Does it run?”

“Of course.” There was a slightly offended tone in his reply. He reached past her and switched on the train. It slowly chugged to life and began its journey around the tracks. He watched it for a few minutes. From the corner of her eye, she caught an expression on his face that she could not decipher... Satisfaction, regret?

The longing for her son sprang to life so suddenly it almost choked her. Mommy, twain? she could hear him say, pointing with his chubby finger when she’d risked taking him to the train station. He had not yet mastered the r sound, but his passion for trains was already well developed, and when she had extra money to spare there was no better way to please him than with the purchase of a new toy train to add to his meager collection. If there was no money, as there usually wasn’t, they would watch the tracks, free entertainment. “Ben loves trains, too,” she managed to say without crying.

They both watched the locomotive chug around until Mitch switched it off. “Wake me if there’s anything and...”

“I know. One hour. Got it.” She waited until he was almost through the door before she added, “And I promise I won’t touch your train.”

Again there was no answer from Mitch as he closed the door. She heard the bed springs groan as he eased his huge frame onto the mattress. As she was about to turn toward the rocking chair, she noticed the name painted in delicate gold letters on the engine... Paige Lynn.

She had only ever seen Mitch Whitehorse in the courtroom, austere and silent in his marshal’s uniform, his glittering stare hard as diamond. Unmarried and childless as far as she knew. So who was Paige Lynn? And who, really, was Mitch Whitehorse, the immovable mountain with a soft spot for toy trains?

Doesn’t matter who he is deep down, she told herself. She had to persuade him to help her, to make an ally out of an enemy.

Gathering the blanket around her, she eased into the rocking chair, listening to the wind, straining to hear any whisper of danger.

SIX

Mitch slept. He dreamed, as he often did, of a black snake rising from the water, fangs dripping. As the fleshy maw gaped toward him, he stood paralyzed, unable even to scream. He jerked to consciousness with a shout, grabbing out at the viper, only to find himself clutching Jane’s wrist.

He let go and bolted from the bed so fast sparks danced in his vision. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“It’s okay. You were muttering to yourself.”

Great. And she heard.

“I have nightmares, too. I saw a counselor when I could, and she said it’s the mind’s way of processing what the heart can’t.”

He didn’t answer, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.

“Ben has them, sometimes. Night terrors, they’re called.”

Well, whaddya do about them? he wanted to ask but did not. As if she read his thoughts, she answered anyway.

“My mom used to sing me the ‘Jesus Loves Me’ song. Know it?”

He nodded.

“That’s what I sing to myself and Ben when we have nightmares.

He shook his head with a grunt. “Figures.”

“What?”

“That ‘Jesus loves you’ stuff. How can you believe that after what you’ve experienced?”

“I didn’t for a long time. After Wade, I can’t trust my own heart or head to separate what’s truth from what isn’t. God is the one thing, the only thing, I know is true.” Her voice dropped to the barest whisper. “It’s the only thing that keeps me alive.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. He’d heard it, of course, particularly from Aunt Ginny, Uncle Gus’s wife, and from Pops, too, but did he believe it? No way. Some mythical, fanciful love from an invisible god was far away from the reality of his world—a mother who drank herself into the grave, and a brother who killed a series of women who had probably prayed with their very last breaths to a god who hadn’t saved them.

He pulled on his boots and jacket before he noticed the time on his mother’s old mantel clock. “It’s three thirty,” he snapped.

“Yes. I tried to wake you before, but you were sleeping soundly.”

He grimaced. “You should have tried harder.”

“I’ve heard it’s a bad idea to disturb a hibernating bear.”

Her face was serious, but there was a glint of humor in her eye.

Humor, incredible. It banked his ire. He sighed. “Yeah, well, I guess that’s fair. Best get going soon. We’ll take the horses.”

“How long a ride is it to the ranch?”

“An hour, give or take. The trail winds along the coast. There are...exposed parts.”

The fear flashed anew in her eyes, so he tried to disarm it. “We’ll be okay. Hungry?”

“Yes. I didn’t eat yesterday. You?”

“Yeah, but I’m not much of a cook. Got some cereal. Maybe some bread and canned things.”

“May I try to fix us something?”

That threw him off. No one had cooked a meal just for him since Paige Lynn. The thought lashed through him. Her departure had cut a scar worse than the one on his face. “Uh, you don’t need to do that.”

But she had already taken his silence as assent and gone off to clatter around the kitchen. He used the time to feed and saddle the horses. Jane hadn’t seemed like much of a rider, but Bud was placid and easy, as long as Rosie was there to take the lead. The air was rain washed and cold, which only aggravated his stiff muscles.

When he returned to the cabin, he was greeted by a tantalizing smell, which made his mouth water. He sat at the table, and Jane slid a plate of pancakes toward him and another for herself.

“There was no syrup, so strawberry jelly will have to do. You have a lot. Who made it?”

“I did.”

She laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“I’d never peg you for the jelly-making type.”

He shrugged. “My mom showed me how.” In one of the precious weeks when she wasn’t intoxicated. The moment with her in the kitchen, up to his wrists in berries, was one of his dearest memories, but there was no point in sharing that. “Lots of wild berries up here in the summer. Strawberries and blackberries.”

“Then I guess you do know a little something about food preparation.”

“Only jelly, that’s it. Dunno how to cook anything else.”

She held out her hand to him.

He gaped, unsure.

“Okay if I pray?”

Was it? He didn’t know.

He tried for a joke. “You should pray for a fancier meal, better digs.”

She cocked her head. “I take things moment by moment. Right now I’m safe, my son is safe and I have a delicious pancake to eat with strawberry jelly. That’s a whole lot to give thanks for.”

Hesitantly, he took her small hand. It was cool, and the bones felt delicate, like a bird’s. She said grace, ending with a soft amen.

He wanted to stare at her, to see if she was for real, this woman he’d been so certain about only a day earlier. She was pretending, assuming a facade, had to be, but he saw only earnest pleasure in her expression as she daintily ate the sticky pancake with a knife and fork.

He stacked one on top of the other and rolled, eating it sandwich style, which made her laugh again. “Ben does that, too.”

“It’s faster, eating them that way. We’re always turning out early at the ranch.”

“I used to sleep late, until...” She shrugged. “Anyway, I get up early now, too, and stay up late. Good thing Ben is a napper.”

Ben, always, in her comments, in her thoughts—unless she was making the whole thing up to pull on his heartstrings. He helped her clean up and grabbed his rifle. “Ready?”

She swallowed and raised her chin. “I think so, but I’m not good on a horse.”

“Bud’s gentle. You just have to stay in the saddle.”

“Story of my life,” she said.

He had to smile at that. “You and me both,” he said.

* * *

Jane clutched the saddle horn with one hand and the reins in another. Bud seemed content to amble along in the dark, staying close behind Rosie. Mitch kept their pace slow, stopping every so often to listen. Whenever he did, her skin crawled, picturing Wade tracking them, waiting for his chance. All she could hear was the crash of the water against the rocks, though fog obscured the ocean from view.

They’d been traveling a scant twenty minutes by her reckoning, along a road with sea cliffs on one side and grassland on the other. She’d put her own clothes back on, and they were still slightly damp, the clamminess chilling her deep down. A spray from the dew-spattered branches caught her in the cheek and trickled down her neck, freezing her skin inch by inch.

Mitch did not seem perturbed by the cold or the early hour, but she knew he had to be sore from their encounter with Wade. She was wrestling through whether or not she should ask him about his head when a shot echoed through the air. Jane would have screamed if she hadn’t been trying so hard to remain on the horse. Mitch urged Rosie forward, Bud lurching behind. She’d barely kept her seat on the animal, fear pinching hard at her stomach.

“Get along, Rosie,” he whispered urgently, guiding the horses forward behind an outcropping of rock. He stopped suddenly, sliding off Rosie and whirling toward her. Her heart slammed into her ribs as she took his hand and leaped from the horse. Mitch grabbed up both sets of reins.

“Come on.”

She followed him as quickly as she could, stumbling over the rocks she could not see in the dark. He led the way deep into a fringe of shrubbery, which yanked at her hair. Pulling the reins, he guided the horses away from the trail and let them loose and pulled her to her knees next to him.

“Where did the shot come from?” she whispered.

“Behind us a ways, from the direction of my cabin.”

“Shouldn’t we be running for it?” She breathed through the shuddering fear.

“Trail is exposed over the ridge. He’d have an easy time picking us off.” Mitch gripped her shoulder. “Quiet. Someone’s coming.”

She fought to breathe as she finally heard it for herself, the faint sound of hooves scuffling along the muddy trail. Wade, she knew, was an expert rider. He’d taken numerous lessons, and in fact, he’d met his first victim at the stables, a woman he’d imprisoned and killed after coercing her into handing over a large sum of money. It would be easy for him to ride the bumpy trail from the cabin to their hiding place with impressive speed.

Prickles danced over her skin, and she fought down the yelp of panic that threatened.

If she didn’t make it out alive, what would happen to Ben? She could not rely on her sister to raise him, not with Wade an ever-present threat to her and her own children. Roxanne had moved to the East Coast, changed her name, phone numbers, email, everything.

Nana Jo, the precious woman who had agreed to come to Roughwater with her to tend to Ben while she chased down Mitch, would not be able to evade Wade, either. They were safe for now, in a trailer Jane had rented for them, since she was keeping her distance and Nana Jo was on the lookout for any sign of Wade. The tough-as-nails woman knew Jane’s whole story and refused to be intimidated out of helping, but she was no match for Wade, especially after he’d found Nana’s house, where Jane rented a room. Who? How? The questions threatened to overwhelm her until she forced the thought through the panic. God loves Ben even more than I do. He will make a way for him, even if I’m not there.

Forcing herself to stay quiet, she counted the seconds, listening to the rider coming closer. Mitch crawled on his belly to a patch between the rocks that was raised enough that he could aim his rifle toward the trail where the rider would soon emerge around the sharp bend.

He looked at Jane and forced the reins into her shaking palm. “Take Rosie and run.”

Run where? The rocks closed in from every side, and she could barely make out the trail in the dark. Wade would find her in moments.

“Go,” he said fiercely. “Walk her away from the path before you mount. She’ll find a way down to the beach. Head north. You’ll find an inlet with a dock and a couple of boats. One is my dad’s. Go now, as far away as you can.”

Fear squeezed her insides. On shaking legs, she sidled up to Rosie and tugged at the reins. The horse shook her neck and snorted, seemingly reluctant to leave Mitch and Bud.

“Come on, Rosie,” she whispered.

Rosie danced from hoof to hoof.

The crunch of rock underfoot grew louder, closer, then slowed.

For a fleeting moment, she hoped Wade would turn around, give up on his pursuit.

Mitch aimed his rifle, squinting slightly with one eye.

There was a soft squeak of a saddle as the rider slid off his horse, coming toward them, one slow step at a time.

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