Reclaiming the Cowboy

Instead, as she slipped into the large elegant hotel ballroom where her mother’s charity auction was being held, Bonnie wore head-to-toe black. It seemed fitting, somehow, since she hadn’t been able to attend the funeral.

Missing that service had been very painful. She’d even dreamed, briefly, of sneaking back here to Sacramento, just for an hour. She’d imagined herself standing unobtrusively in the rear of the church, with glasses, maybe, or a veiled hat.

But that would have been suicide. No disguise would have been adequate. Jacob undoubtedly had anticipated her showing up, and he would have been ready.

So instead she’d marked the day, privately, at her nursery job at Crystal Eden back in Colorado Springs. When the church bells down the block had rung the noon hour, she’d stopped right in the middle of hauling potting soil, dropped the handles of her wheelbarrow and shut her eyes.

She’d said a prayer. And when she’d glanced up, a tangerine cloud shaped like a ballerina had been executing a grand jeté across the sky. She liked to believe it was a message from her mother, letting Bonnie know she’d found freedom and peace at last.

After that, her wait had been easier. She loved the nursery job, and the days flew. All thirty-one of them.

A month and a day. That was how long had passed, between the night her mother had died and this clear April afternoon when Bonnie had finally come home.

If she could even call Sacramento home anymore. She’d lost so much over the past two years. But somehow she had survived. That was all that really mattered now.

She had outwitted Jacob. She couldn’t really absorb that fact, even now that she saw him, up there, so sanctimonious and self-important in the first row. It was the first time she’d laid eyes on him since she had left, nearly two years ago.

It was the first time she’d seen any of these people since then. The auction house was filled with friends of her grandmother, collectors, critics, other artists and other Sacramento bigwigs—people she’d known all her life.

They didn’t recognize her yet, of course. They weren’t expecting her. Most of them probably thought she was dead and assumed her body would never be located, or that if she ever were discovered, she’d be pathetic and half-mad in some art colony somewhere, as her mother so often had been found.

The stylish black hat she’d bought yesterday covered her hair, which she’d had stripped back to its natural color, but pinned tightly to her head, so that it wouldn’t give her away too soon.

She took a seat quietly at the back of the auction room, attracting little attention from anyone except her attorney, who had technically known she’d be coming but had still looked relieved when she’d appeared.

Everyone else was focused on the oil painting that had just been brought out. A low rumble of appreciation moved through the audience as they caught their first glimpse of the portrait, the girl with the legendary cascade of red-gold hair.

It was, indisputably, one of the most beautiful of the Annabelle Oils, a series of paintings done by the California portraitist Ava Andersen Irving. Sixteen complete oils, all with only one subject—Ava’s Titian-haired, blue-eyed, fairylike granddaughter, Annabelle Irving.

The series had begun when Annabelle had been just a year old and had continued until Ava died, when Annabelle was fifteen. The paintings and adjunct sketches had made Ava rich...well, richer, given that she’d already married into money.

And they had made little Annabelle famous. It had made a million people think they knew her, made them romanticize and misunderstand her, as if she were Ophelia or Alice in Wonderland. Somewhere along the way, Annabelle Irving had stopped being a normal child and had started being a myth. Strange, ethereal, otherworldly, elfin, odd...just a few of the adjectives art critics loved to apply to her.

The portraits were officially known by numbers only. This was Fourteen, which didn’t correspond with the subject’s age, because Annabelle had been only twelve the year this one was painted. Twelve, and so tired of sitting still. Her grandmother had positioned Annabelle next to a window, where the light hit her hair just right. Out of the corner of her eye, Annabelle caught a tantalizing hint of buttercups dancing in the wind, but she wasn’t allowed to look. She was barely allowed to breathe.

That particular year, Annabelle had rebelled, briefly, the way preteens sometimes did. The slight puffiness beneath the famous blue eyes was proof of the storm of tears, the refusal to cooperate, the desperation to be set free.

Ava had been furious, at first, but eventually she had announced that the hint of sadness added pathos to the painting, which was ultimately priceless.

With a start, Bonnie came back to the present, realizing the bidding had begun. She didn’t move a muscle. She didn’t want this painting. She hated it. But she was glad to see the price rise higher and higher. Her mother had owned Fourteen outright, and she had left instructions in her will that it, along with a small pencil sketch of Annabelle, the only two pieces from the series that legally belonged to her, should be auctioned after her death. The proceeds were to be donated to the women’s shelter that had taken in Heather Irving so many times during her troubled life.

Jacob was bidding, too. Bonnie smiled grimly behind her black-dotted Swiss veil, watching him lift one elegant finger, then let it drop, then lift it again. Was he using his own money, she wondered, or hers?

He didn’t win. When the figure sailed too high, he shook his head discreetly at the auctioneer, then turned around to see who had beaten him. Recognizing an elderly California art collector whose goodwill he obviously needed to keep, he threw a smile of graceful surrender.

As his smarmy gaze raked the crowd, Bonnie froze, wondering if he’d see her. It no longer mattered, not as it once had. She wasn’t in danger anymore. He didn’t have anything to gain by hurting her now.

But she wanted to do this her way.

The drawing was up next. Only nine-by-twelve, and unframed, it looked like the unloved stepsister of the larger oil. But Bonnie adored this picture, a practice sketch for Nine. In it, a seven-year-old Annabelle was in profile, one arm thrown over the back of a straight wooden chair, and she gazed longingly out the window. It was an odd little thing, drawn mostly to help Ava get the flowers right. Annabelle herself was rendered in simple charcoal, while the blooming gardens outside the window were bursting with vibrant color.

Bonnie remembered that summer so well. It had been one of the few times she’d been posed looking through the window. Being able to watch the bees buzzing around the roses and the butterflies dipping into the penta plant... It had made the hours so much easier to bear.

It had been almost as good as being free.

She raised her hand. The auctioneer glanced at her, too professional to show surprise at a new bidder this late in the game. Her attorney remained utterly still and impassive, giving nothing away prematurely.

She had many competitors. She wasn’t the only one who could see the special joy in this sketch—one of the few pictures in which the infamous Annabelle looked like a normal child.

But she didn’t care if everyone in the room bid against her. She would have this sketch, whatever the price. She was a rich woman now, and if she ended up donating every dollar of her inheritance to the women’s shelter, that was fine with her.

She raised her hand again and again. Quickly, people began to stare at her. Jacob himself had turned half a dozen times.

He was merely curious at first. Then she saw him squinting, confused. And then a slowly dawning alarm.

His posture tightened, all the easy insouciance evaporating. Eventually, when the bidding had come down to Bonnie and one other, Jacob didn’t even bother to pretend he wasn’t staring. He sat permanently swiveled toward her, his neck uncomfortably twisted. He gripped the seat of his chair with both hands, as if he had to hold himself down.

Finally, her last competitor dropped out. The price was absurd, even for an Annabelle sketch. As the bid assistant bent over her, Jacob obviously couldn’t endure the suspense another minute. He stood and started moving toward her, dark and malevolent, like the California mudslides that coursed down hillsides blindly, burying everything in their paths.

The bid assistant hesitated, confused and slightly startled by the frigid waves of fury suddenly pulsing through the air around them.

Jacob’s face said it all. He knew. He had to know. He had to understand, at that terrible moment, that he’d lost. That all his attempts to outwit her, to ruin her... No, no euphemisms. Just state it baldly, like the hideous truth it was.

All his attempts to kill her had failed.

As Jacob approached, Bonnie stood, too. She lifted the veil from her face and smiled. Only five feet away, he froze, as if she were a gorgon, a Medusa—as if one look from her blue eyes had turned him to stone.

A murmur spread through the room. Good. She wanted everyone, from the millionaires to the janitors, from the journalists to the guards, to know her. She removed her hat with one motion, then pulled the clip that had held her hair in its tight twist. A cascade of red-gold hair fell around her shoulders, and the murmur rose to an excited buzz.

“Annabelle!” Jacob lunged forward.

Abruptly, her lawyer jerked to a standing position, as if to block whatever the crazed man might have in mind. But Jacob pushed past him, rearranging his face as he came toward her. By the time he touched her, he was affection incarnate, the epitome of cousinly love.

He reached out and enveloped Bonnie...Annabelle...in his arms.

“Belle, Belle!” He was so smooth, so good, that if she didn’t know better, she’d believe he was overjoyed. “Oh, Belle, thank God you’re alive!”

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_c4192f57-c05e-57e4-8428-a1435c4c9af0)

IT SHOULD HAVE been a peaceful Monday afternoon at the ranch. Instead, having counted every single second in the week since his meeting with Dallas, Mitch was going crazy.

On TV it took about thirty seconds to get a fingerprint match. Even factoring in reality, and the need to do this through back channels, what could possibly be taking eight whole days?

And then, just as Mitch was winding up the training session with Rusty, one of Bell River’s newest ponies destined to take the littlest guests on trail rides, he saw his brother coming toward him.

Hell. Dallas had news. And it wasn’t good news.

Mitch could sense that much from a hundred yards, just watching the way Dallas walked, framed in silhouette through the doorway of the indoor paddock. The first clue was the tight, squared-off position of his shoulders. And when Dallas cleared the door and the overhead lights hit him, Mitch could read the grim evidence on his face.