The Hopechest Bride

Emily knew more than her parents thought she knew. She’d gone to Rand when she learned that Patsy Portman had made a full confession, and she’d railed at him, pleaded with him, until she’d learned everything, including the knowledge that her conversation with Nora Hickman had directly led to that good woman’s death. Well, Rand hadn’t exactly told her; she’d guessed most of it. It had been easy to think badly of herself, blame herself for anyone’s misfortunes.

She also knew now that Silas Pike had followed her when she’d fled the Hacienda de Alegria, and had found her in Keyhole, helped by Patsy’s description of her unique, long chestnut-red hair.

The hair Toby had so admired. The hair that had been her vanity, so that she hadn’t cut it, hadn’t worn a wig, hadn’t disguised herself. She’d been so sure she was safe. She should have cut her hair. Dyed it. Done something.

The guilt she felt was crushing, debilitating. And never-ending.

Emily admired her mother’s courage, the woman’s ability to look for happiness where she could, embrace the family that had not seen through Patsy’s deception for ten long years. She was amazed as she watched her mother slide almost effortlessly back into the ebb and flow of daily life at the ranch, her smile always bright even if her eyes were sometimes sad and wistful, her strength of will so obvious to anyone who looked.

Emily envied her mother’s courage as well, because she had none of her own. She used to, she was sure of that, but she still had horrifying nightmares about Silas Pike, nightmares where he walked toward her with his curious limping gait, his eyes cold and hard, his Fu-Manchu mustache not quite hiding the leer of his smiling mouth and the large gap between his two front teeth. He walked toward her relentlessly, a gun in his hand, saying, “Well, if it isn’t little Emily Blair…or would you rather I call you Emma Logan?”

She felt stripped naked, not just to her real name, but to her fears, the fears that had followed her ever since the night she’d first seen the outline of a man in her bedroom and known that he’d come to kill her.

But that lingering fear was nothing compared to the guilt. Toby had trusted her, Toby had loved her, and yet she hadn’t trusted him enough to confide in him, leaving him unprepared to enter her motel cottage and come face-to-face with Silas Pike and his cocked pistol.

So much guilt. Because she hadn’t told him. Because she hadn’t loved him.

Emily dug the toe of her ancient cowboy boot into the dirt as she stood alongside the corral fence, wishing she could find the shutoff switch to her brain, locate the erase button to the tape that rewound and rewound inside her head, day and night, night and day.

She was supposed to talk to Dr. Wilkes later today, and had promised her mother that she would, but she knew it would be a fruitless exercise. Nobody else could erase that tape for her; she was going to have to live with what she’d done, what she hadn’t done.

She was glad Dr. Wilkes could be so helpful to her mother, but her mother had been a victim, and she had no guilt. Emily knew she herself had not been a victim. She’d been proactive all her life, always stating her case firmly if not believably, and then protecting herself as best she could, fighting her own battles.

Right up until the moment Toby Atkins had stepped in to fight her largest battle for her, and died saving her stupid, stubborn life.

Emily turned away from the fence rail, knowing she’d left it too late to take a ride, try to clear her head at least for a little while, and bumped smack into a tall, hard body that blocked her way.

“Emily Colton?” the man asked as she looked up into Toby Atkins’s blue eyes.

She blinked, swallowed, stepped back a pace. “Who—who are you?”

“The name’s Atkins,” he told her, his eyelids narrowing around Toby’s blue eyes— No, not Toby’s eyes; Toby’s eyes smiled. “Josh Atkins. Ring any bells?”

Emily took yet another step backward, her spine colliding with the rail fence. She’d run out of room, had nowhere to run, no place to hide. “Josh…Josh Atkins? Toby’s brother?”

No wonder she’d seen Toby in his eyes. But that was all of Toby that could be seen in this lean, hard-eyed man. He wore a huge, sweat-stained Stetson with the front brim folded up on both sides, as if he often rolled the brim between his hands when the hat wasn’t shoved down hard on his head. Instead of a sheriff’s uniform, like his brother’s, he wore heeled cowboy boots, dusty stovepipe-legged jeans that fit like a second skin, a sky-blue cotton shirt and a brown leather vest that skimmed his belt buckle.

If he’d had a six-gun strapped to his thigh, she wouldn’t have thought it seemed out of place, as he had the look of a real, old-time cowboy about him, a cowboy about to face off in the middle of a dusty street, guns blazing.

His face was lean, too, darkened by the sun, his nose straight, lines carved into his cheeks and forehead, deep lines radiating from the outside corners of his eyes. His mouth was a wide, unsmiling slash over barely exposed, bright white teeth. A hard yet handsome face. An unforgiving face.

And he hated her, hated the ground she stood on. Nothing could be more obvious.

“How…how did you get in here?” Emily asked when she could find her voice, although she hadn’t found much of it because the question came out in a sort of squeak. “The main gates are still guarded.”

“Not to a cowboy delivering a mare for stud,” he told her, tipping back the curled brim of his hat with one leather-gloved hand. “I’m working at the Rollins ranch a couple of miles from here.”

“Oh,” Emily said, swallowing hard once again. “I—I didn’t know. Toby told me you ride the rodeo circuit.”

“I do, but when the season’s over I hire myself out to ranchers. Toby probably told you that, too.”

Emily nodded, looking away from those hard, hard eyes, that unyielding mouth. “Yes. I think he did. But you worked ranches in Wyoming.”

“No reason for me to be in Wyoming anymore, is there, Miss Colton? No reason at all.”

Emily pressed both hands to her cheeks. “Oh, God.” She sighed, tried to marshal her nerves, dropped her hands to her sides once more. “I should have tried to contact you, shouldn’t I? I mean, you have a right to know what happened that night. Toby…Toby saved my life.”

“Yeah, so I’m told. And to reward him for that service, you left him bleeding on the floor and took off. Left him alone to die. You have a strange way of saying thank you, Miss Colton. Well, that’s enough for now, isn’t it? I’ll be seeing you again. Again and again. You can sort of consider me your conscience, Miss Colton. Your guilty conscience.”

“No!” Emily yelled at his back, for Josh Atkins had turned on his heels and was already climbing into the truck with Rollins Ranch painted on the door of the cab. “No, it wasn’t like that! I didn’t— Oh, God,” she ended, all but collapsing against the fence rails as the truck drove out of the stable yard, toward the main gate. She hugged herself as she watched the truck drive away, tears running down her face. “It wasn’t like that…it wasn’t like that.”

Josh pulled to the side of the road about a mile from the Colton ranch and cut the engine, pounded his gloved fists against the steering wheel.

“Damn,” he said once, then twice, then over and over for as long as his breath held out. “Damn, damn, damn!”

Well, wasn’t he the hero? He ought to get out of the truck, see if he could round up a couple of fuzzy bunnies, then stomp on them. Pull the wings off a few butterflies, drive to town and grab a lollipop out of the mouth of some defenseless baby.

Had he ever seen such hurt in anyone’s eyes? Even before he’d said a word, opened his dumb mouth, he’d seen the despair in the way she’d stood at the fence, the defeat in her posture, the weight of the world dragging at her slim shoulders. He’d seen injured animals, plenty of them, and could almost smell them, smell the fear. Emily Colton had been drenched in fear and hopelessness, even before he’d stepped up behind her and made his presence known.

So then he’d kicked her. Hey, she was already down—so why not? She deserved it, didn’t she?

“Oh, God,” Josh breathed, shaking his head. “I must be losing whatever’s left of my mind.”

He lay his head back against the headrest, closed his eyes and saw Emily Colton’s face. She was just as Toby had described her a million times in his letters. Small, but not too small, with good shoulders for a woman, and straight long legs that looked damn good in jeans.

She’d had on a denim jacket lined with sheepskin, the hem of the jacket just nipping at the top of her small waist, giving her an air of fragility belied by her clothes.

But it was her face that gave away the whole game, even as he’d refused to see what was there. Those sad blue eyes, that flawless yet too-pale skin, the way she sort of hunched her shoulders protectively, as if prepared for life to give her a punishing whack—another whack, because she’d already had a few, hadn’t she?

And that hair. God, how Toby had all but waxed poetic about that thick mane of chestnut hair. Toby had once had a chestnut mare just about that same color. He wondered if Toby had made the connection, and doubted it. Emily Colton was one hell of a cut above a rangy old mare that was all Josh could afford to buy his baby brother for his fifteenth birthday.

So, okay. So she was pretty. Beautiful. As beautiful as Toby had said in his letters. And she was hurting. Was she hurting about Toby? Josh wondered….

“It doesn’t matter, damn it! She killed him,” he said, sitting up once more, reaching for the key still in the ignition. “She killed him as much as if she put the bullet in his chest herself. And I’m not going to let little Miss Blue Eyes forget that. Not for a very, very long time.”

Three

Meggie James had all the fair-haired beauty of her mother and the never-say-die determination of her father. At the moment, that determination was directed at trying to pull herself up on the coffee table so that she could get her chubby hands on her mother’s teacup.

“No way, sweetheart,” Sophie Colton James scolded with a smile, redirecting her daughter by holding out a teething ring River’s Native American grandmother had fashioned out of thin strips of rawhide.

“Can you believe how much she loves this thing?” Sophie asked Emily, who was holding her own teacup out of the baby’s reach. “I’ve threatened to start calling her Fido, but River just laughs and says his grandmother raised a lot of kids and knows what she’s doing. I suppose so,” she ended, grinning down at Meggie, who had just learned how to lower herself to her plump bottom and was now chewing on the teething ring for all she was worth.

Emily watched as Meggie actually cooed at the rawhide circle, then stuck it in her mouth once more. “It is ugly, isn’t it? I know Mom told me about the thing when Maya’s little Marissa was at the ranch the other day, just about gnawing on Mom’s shoulder because she’s cutting another tooth. In fact, I think Mom said she wishes she’d had a gross of the things when we were growing up,” Emily said, grinning down at the contented baby who was happily drooling all over her pretty pink coveralls. “Of course, she also said she’d often thought about keeping us all on stout leashes, but I think she might have been kidding about that one.”

“Mom’s great, isn’t she? She’s back in stride, handing out love and advice, just as if she’d never been…well, never been away,” Sophie said, lifting her teacup. “I can’t tell you how happy we are that Meggie’s finally learned how to get back down once she’s pulled herself up. I think Riv and I slept about three minutes all last week, always having to go into her bedroom and lay her back down in her crib. But when I told Mom about it, she said to put the pillows over our heads and let Meggie cry, because eventually she’d let go and figure out that she can get back down all by herself. To hear Mom tell it, we weren’t doing Meggie or ourselves any favors by constantly running to her.”

“Did you let her cry?” Emily asked, reaching for a homemade cookie Maya’s mother, Inez, had baked only that morning and asked her to take with her to Sophie’s house.