Sutton's Way

Sutton's Way
Diana Palmer

Wyoming rancher and single father Quinn Sutton is raising a child he knows isn't his own. All the love left in his guarded heart goes to the boy. But when a beautiful city woman is stranded nearby in a blizzard, he rescues her and brings her to Ricochet Ranch.Amanda Callaway has her own secrets and plans to keep her distance. If only she weren't falling for her unlikely hero…

Sutton’s Way

Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Contents

Cover (#u86792918-bf9e-559b-a2b9-525ff87d4fb8)

Title Page (#u84c14025-c9a4-5190-80e6-930c9e035042)

Chapter One (#u1c5a3463-e8cb-59ad-9bb2-5bae4240cc36)

Chapter Two (#u591136b0-a623-5383-ae37-f36a3b0513cf)

Chapter Three (#udfa695cc-9337-575f-93a5-1840f366a41e)

Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter One (#ulink_e4722f10-32a6-5988-84cc-c31bdb68074a)

The noise outside the cabin was there again, and Amanda shifted restlessly with the novel in her lap, curled up in a big armchair by the open fireplace in an Indian rug. Until now, the cabin had been paradise. There was three feet of new snow outside, she had all the supplies she needed to get her through the next few wintery weeks of Wyoming weather, and there wasn’t a telephone in the place. Best of all, there wasn’t a neighbor.

Well, there was, actually. But nobody in their right mind would refer to that man on the mountain as a neighbor. Amanda had only seen him once and once was enough.

She’d met him, if their head-on encounter could be referred to as a meeting, on a snowy Saturday last week. Quinn Sutton’s majestic ranch house overlooked this cabin nestled against the mountainside. He’d been out in the snow on a horse-drawn sled that contained huge square bales of hay, and he was heaving them like feather pillows to a small herd of red-and-white cattle. The sight had touched Amanda, because it indicated concern. The tall, wiry rancher out in a blizzard feeding his starving cattle. She’d even smiled at the tender picture it made.

And then she’d stopped her four-wheel-drive vehicle and stuck her blond head out the window to ask directions to the Blalock Durning place, which was the cabin one of her aunt’s friends was loaning her. And the tender picture dissolved into stark hostility.

The tall rancher turned toward her with the coldest black eyes and the hardest face she’d ever seen in her life. He had a day’s growth of stubble, but the stubble didn’t begin to cover up the frank homeliness of his lean face. He had amazingly high cheekbones, a broad forehead and a jutting chin, and he looked as if someone had taken a straight razor to one side of his face, which had a wide scratch. None of that bothered Amanda because Hank Shoeman and the other three men who made music with her group were even uglier than Quinn Sutton. But at least Hank and the boys could smile. This man looked as if he invented the black scowl.

“I said,” she’d repeated with growing nervousness, “can you tell me how to get to Blalock Durning’s cabin?”

Above the sheepskin coat, under the battered gray ranch hat, Quinn Sutton’s tanned face didn’t move a muscle. “Follow the road, turn left at the lodgepoles,” he’d said tersely, his voice as deep as a rumble of thunder.

“Lodgepoles?” she’d faltered. “You mean Indian lodgepoles? What do they look like?”

“Lady,” he said with exaggerated patience, “a lodgepole is a pine tree. It’s tall and piney, and there are a stand of them at the next fork in the road.”

“You don’t need to be rude, Mr…?”

“Sutton,” he said tersely. “Quinn Sutton.”

“Nice to meet you,” she murmured politely. “I’m Amanda.” She wondered if anyone might accidentally recognize her here in the back of beyond, and on the off chance, she gave her mother’s maiden name instead of her own last name. “Amanda Corrie,” she added untruthfully. “I’m going to stay in the cabin for a few weeks.”

“This isn’t the tourist season,” he’d said without the slightest pretense at friendliness. His black eyes cut her like swords.

“Good, because I’m not a tourist,” she said.

“Don’t look to me for help if you run out of wood or start hearing things in the dark,” he added coldly. “Somebody will tell you eventually that I have no use whatsoever for women.”

While she was thinking up a reply to that, a young boy of about twelve had come running up behind the sled.

“Dad!” he called, amazingly enough to Quinn Sutton. “There’s a cow in calf down in the next pasture. I think it’s a breech!”

“Okay, son, hop on,” he told the boy, and his voice had become fleetingly soft, almost tender. He looked back at Amanda, though, and the softness left him. “Keep your door locked at night,” he’d said. “Unless you’re expecting Durning to join you,” he added with a mocking smile.

She’d stared at him from eyes as black as his own and started to tell him that she didn’t even know Mr. Durning, who was her aunt’s friend, not hers. But she bit her tongue. It wouldn’t do to give this man an opening. “I’ll do that little thing,” she agreed. She glanced at the boy, who was eyeing her curiously from his perch on the sled. “And it seems that you do have at least one use for women,” she added with a vacant smile. “My condolences to your wife, Mr. Sutton.”

She’d rolled up the window before he could speak and she’d whipped the four-wheel-drive down the road with little regard for safety, sliding all over the place on the slick and rutted country road.

She glared into the flames, consigning Quinn Sutton to them with all her angry heart. She hoped and prayed that there wouldn’t ever be an accident or a reason she’d have to seek out his company. She’d rather have asked help from a passing timber wolf. His son hadn’t seemed at all like him, she recalled. Sutton was as dangerous looking as a timber wolf, with a face like the side of a bombed mountain and eyes that were coal-black and cruel. In the sheepskin coat he’d been wearing with that raunchy Stetson that day, he’d looked like one of the old mountain men might have back in Wyoming’s early days. He’d given Amanda some bad moments and she’d hated him after that uncomfortable confrontation. But the boy had been kind. He was redheaded and blue-eyed, nothing like his father, not a bit of resemblance.

She knew the rancher’s name only because her aunt had mentioned him, and cautioned Amanda about going near the Sutton ranch. The ranch was called Ricochet, and Amanda had immediately thought of a bullet going awry. Probably one of Sutton’s ancestors had thrown some lead now and again. Mr. Sutton looked a lot more like a bandit than he did a rancher, with his face unshaven, that wide, awful scrape on his cheek and his crooked nose. It was an unforgettable face all around, especially those eyes….

She pulled the Indian rug closer and gave the book in her slender hand a careless glance. She wasn’t really in the mood to read. Memories kept tearing her heart. She leaned her blond head back against the chair and her dark eyes studied the flames with idle appreciation of their beauty.

The nightmare of the past few weeks had finally caught up with her. She’d stood onstage, with the lights beating down on her long blond hair and outlining the beige leather dress that was her trademark, and her voice had simply refused to cooperate. The shock of being unable to produce a single note had caused her to faint, to the shock and horror of the audience.

She came to in a hospital, where she’d been given what seemed to be every test known to medical science. But nothing would produce her singing voice, even though she could talk. It was, the doctor told her, purely a psychological problem, caused by the trauma of what had happened. She needed rest.

So Hank, who was the leader of the group, had called her Aunt Bess and convinced her to arrange for Amanda to get away from it all. Her aunt’s rich boyfriend had this holiday cabin in Wyoming’s Grand Teton Mountains and was more than willing to let Amanda recuperate there. Amanda had protested, but Hank and the boys and her aunt had insisted. So here she was, in the middle of winter, in several feet of snow, with no television, no telephone and facilities that barely worked. Roughing it, the big, bearded bandleader had told her, would do her good.

She smiled when she remembered how caring and kind the guys had been. Her group was called Desperado, and her leather costume was its trademark. The four men who made up the rest of it were fine musicians, but they looked like the Hell’s Angels on stage in denim and leather with thick black beards and mustaches and untrimmed hair. They were really pussycats under that rough exterior, but nobody had ever been game enough to try to find out if they were.

Hank and Deke and Jack and Johnson had been trying to get work at a Virginia night spot when they’d run into Amanda Corrie Callaway, who was also trying to get work there. The club needed a singer and a band, so it was a match made in heaven, although Amanda with her sheltered upbringing had been a little afraid of her new backup band. They, on the other hand, had been nervous around her because she was such a far cry from the usual singers they’d worked with. The shy, introverted young blonde made them self-conscious about their appearance. But their first performance together had been a phenomenal hit, and they’d been together four years now.

They were famous, now. Desperado had been on the music videos for two years, they’d done television shows and magazine interviews, and they were recognized everywhere they went. Especially Amanda, who went by the stage name of Mandy Callaway. It wasn’t a bad life, and it was making them rich. But there wasn’t much rest or time for a personal life. None of the group was married except Hank, and he was already getting a divorce. It was hard for a homebound spouse to accept the frequent absences that road tours required.