The Ransom

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PROLOGUE

Cross C Ranch

Layton, Texas

KATHRYN CONNER was coming home.

Kathryn Conner Mason, the man sitting on the ranch house’s shady front porch amended. He had one hand clenched around a coffee mug and that morning’s newspaper draped across his blue-jeaned thigh.

He could hear himself breathe.

Feel the sweat trickle from the pores of his underarms.

Taste his fear.

His spine stiff, he propped a shoulder against one of the porch’s vintage white columns and stared out across the pristine lawn.

The July sun beat down without mercy, but the smothering heat couldn’t touch the icy fear that crouched darkly inside him. He owed a Dallas gambling syndicate over a half million dollars and he had less than three weeks to come up with the money. In full.

He could no longer sleep. Had lost interest in food. Could barely breathe. For weeks he’d been popping pills that did little to ease the smothering sensation of being buried in a pit from which there was no way out.

And then he heard about Mrs. Devin Mason’s imminent return to Layton, Texas. Kathryn was coming home.

And bringing her son.

Dropping his gaze to the newspaper, he focused on the picture that showed the smiling images of Kathryn, her pretty-boy actor husband and their son. Ex-husband now. The divorce had become final just weeks before Senator Sam Conner’s death.

Kathryn hadn’t even come home for her grandfather’s funeral. Had never stepped foot on the Cross C after she went off to college ten years ago.

Why, he didn’t know. Couldn’t care less. All that mattered was she would arrive the following day.

And she was filthy, stinking rich.

Kathryn was his lifeline. She would save him.

And so would her son.

CHAPTER ONE

KATHRYN CONNER HAD vowed to never again set foot on the Cross C Ranch until her bastard of a grandfather was dead.

Now he was.

“You’re home,” Owen Daily remarked, braking his black Cadillac beneath the massive oak that shaded one end of the porch of the two-story ranch house.

Home. The word leaped into Kathryn’s mind while she sat in heart-pounding silence beside the man she’d hired to handle her Texas legal affairs. Staring out the windshield, the knots in her stomach clenched tighter while she struggled to come to terms with her surroundings.

Bathed in afternoon sunlight, the house with its wraparound porch looked welcoming. For Kathryn, it had only felt that way when Sam was away in Austin dealing with senate business.

Always the wood had been painted white with butter-yellow trim. The wide porch had latticework at the eaves and long, sturdy columns. The swing—where she had sat so many evenings writing stories and spinning her private dreams that always took her far away—still hung from chains at the porch’s far end.

Racked by emotion, she swept her gaze across the immaculate lawn toward the distant barn, the stables, the out-buildings, all surrounded by post-and-rail whitewashed fences. In her ten-year absence she had forgotten the Cross C’s beauty—and only remembered her pain.

Her gaze returned to the house where yellow roses wound their way through the porch trellises. The bright blooms blurred in her vision while a nagging unease moved around the edges of her awareness, undefined, barely formed, a gray shadow.

She lifted a hand to her throat where a choking dread had settled.

“Something wrong?” Owen asked.

“I just…” Kathryn ran her other hand over the hip of her red linen slacks. “For a second it felt like someone stepped on my grave.”

Owen gave the house a considering look. “You haven’t said as much, but I have to figure your not coming home since that summer you left for college means not all your memories of the Cross C are good.”

That summer. If only she had been wiser, more mature, she might have avoided making a fool of herself. Even now humiliation crawled through Kathryn, as hot as the hunger she’d felt for a man who’d been rumored to have an unlimited number of willing women on speed dial. But she had wanted Clay Turner since she’d been a starry-eyed schoolgirl who was stupid enough to think she would be the one who could change him. And by the time she turned eighteen that crush had transformed into love. So she’d made sure to ride over to the Double Starr the day Clay showed up to work on his uncle’s neighboring ranch like he did every summer. She could still see him that day, leaning against the corral’s top rail, all tough and rangy and fit in a white T-shirt and faded jeans. Still see his dark eyes, focused like a laser on her as she sat astride her mare. “Well, look who’s all grown up,” he drawled.

There’d been no love in his gaze. Not even affection. Just dark, dangerous lust that slammed her heart into her ribs and zinged its way right to her toes.

And even though he made it clear he wanted only good times and fast rides, she leaped off the cliff.

As if pulled by some unseen force, Kathryn’s gaze shifted to the east. From talking to the Cross C’s longtime housekeeper, she knew Clay had moved to Layton two years ago after his parents’ tragic deaths at the hands of their kidnappers. He now managed the Double Starr, so it was inevitable they would cross paths.

Ten years had passed since she laid eyes on him. A decade, during which she had married another man, given birth to his son, agonized over Matthew’s health, won an Emmy for screenwriting and had her crumbling marriage to Hollywood’s “heartthrob” dissected by the tabloids. Yet the thought of seeing Clay again had a dark foreboding surfacing inside her with such corrosive force it seemed as if no time had passed to dull the pain.

“Well, there’s someone who’s anxious to see you,” Owen said.

Kathryn looked back toward the house. All the pain of the past winked away as she watched Willa McKenzie—short, stocky and clad in the usual gray dress and white apron—bustle across the porch. Just the sight of the housekeeper who’d raised and loved her had Kathryn’s heart swelling.

Willa was one of the good memories. And one of the people Sam had done a truly good, unselfish thing for.

Turning, Kathryn looked over her shoulder. Matthew hadn’t stirred since he’d fallen asleep almost before they’d driven out of the airport. He was a sturdy five-year-old with thick blond hair and brown eyes that sparkled with mischief. Now, though, he looked almost cherubic, stretched on the back seat in his jeans and Western shirt, his miniature dachshund, Abby, curled against his stomach.