Caroline Burnes - Familiar Texas

The thought was exciting, and he felt a flush creep up his face as he realized that he found Stephanie a very desirable woman.

He knelt to examine the tear, just large enough to allow a big snake to slither through. “Where was the second snake?”

“In the sunroom.” She hesitated. “The door was open. I just assumed that it must have been left that way.”

Hank took a slow breath and examined the screen one more time. “I’m not trying to scare you, but I think someone cut the screen and let the snakes in. I think they left the door open, too.”

“Why would someone do that?” she asked, her voice losing confidence.

He stood up and met her gaze. “To run you off.”

Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,

Spring is in the air and we have a month of fabulous books for you to curl up with as the March winds howl outside:

Familiar is back on the prowl, in Caroline Burnes’s Familiar Texas. And Rocky Mountain Maneuvers marks the conclusion of Cassie Miles’s COLORADO CRIME CONSULTANTS trilogy.

Jessica Andersen brings us an exciting medical thriller, Covert M.D.

Don’t miss the next ECLIPSE title, Lisa Childs’s The Substitute Sister.

Definitely check out our April lineup. Debra Webb is starting THE ENFORCERS, an exciting new miniseries you won’t want to miss. Also look for a special 3-in-1 story from Rebecca York, Ann Voss Peterson and Patricia Rosemoor called Desert Sons.

Each month, Harlequin Intrigue brings you a variety of heart-stopping romantic suspense and chilling mystery. Don’t miss a single book!

Sincerely,

Denise O’Sullivan

Senior Editor

Harlequin Intrigue

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Caroline Burnes has written seventeen books in her FEAR FAMILIAR series. She has her own black cat, Familiar’s prototype, E. A. Poe, as well as Miss Vesta, Gumbo, Maggie and Chester. All are strays and all have brought love and joy into her life. An advocate for animal rights, Caroline urges all her readers to spay and neuter their pets. Unchecked reproduction causes pain and suffering for hundreds of thousands of innocent animals.

Stephanie Chisholm—She has come home to Pecos, Texas, to settle her uncle Albert and aunt Emily McCammon’s ranch estate. Once she returns to the small town she fled from years before, she realizes that her relatives may have been murdered and their cattle ranch stolen.

Hank Dalton—He is the rancher next door, a man who has learned the price of loving the wrong woman. He needs water on the McCammon ranch, and he’s not too proud to ask for it. Once he meets Stephanie, his belief system is challenged.

Familiar—The cat returns to Texas to help a young woman unravel events that led up to her relatives’ unexpected deaths.

Nate Peebles—A lawyer with a steadily growing list of “inherited” ranches.

Rodney Jenkins—He works on the McCammon ranch, and he’s always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sam Hodges—Sheriff of Pecos, but with so much going on, should Stephanie trust him to help her, or is he bought and paid for by the people who are trying to kill her?

Johnny Benton—He was engaged to marry Stephanie, with her relatives’ blessing. When she fled the ranch life and Texas for a high-powered career in advertising, did he truly understand? Or has he carried a grudge for years?

Jackie Benton—Johnny’s wife of a decade. She seems eager to see Stephanie succeed in Pecos, but what truth lies beneath her smile?

Wanda Nell Hempstead—Works as a salesclerk, but she turns up all over town. What is her connection to the Bentons, and why does she hate Familiar so much?

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

The tumbleweed blowing against the cemetery fence is so-o-o appropriate. If Oliver Stone decided to do a movie set in Hell, he’d locate here in Pecos, Texas, a place that looks like the ends of the earth. Hot, dry, and desolate don’t even begin to do it justice. The only thing worth looking at is Stephanie Chisholm, a woman with a lot of fortitude and grit, not to mention gams that could bring a guy to his knees. Look at her, standing with her shoulders squared and her jaw firm against the backdrop of funeral flowers and two open graves. Her dark curls are as wild and free as the Texas breeze. Even with grief in her eyes, she’s a magnificent woman. I’ve only known Stephanie for two days, but I know her well enough to know this is breaking her heart, but not her will. She’s come home to Texas to say goodbye to her uncle Albert and aunt Emily, the couple who raised her after her parents divorced—it seemed neither one wanted her. They were her real family, and now they’re dead.

Dead in a very suspicious manner, I might add.

Stephanie faxed me the coroner’s report—accidental death when a barn structure collapsed during a wind sheer. Right. I checked the Internet weather reports and Pecos, Texas, was the only town in the Southwest to suffer a wind sheer on May 26. Everywhere else in the region had perfect weather, except the one spot where the barn stood. Neighbors half a mile away didn’t notice any bad weather. No, this killer wind blew out of a perfectly clear sky and collapsed a barn that had been standing for fifty years. Yeah, a freak, killer wind. Stephanie is right. There’s something rotten in Texas.

Stephanie has come to the cemetery to pay her respects to her relatives, but I’m here to gather information. About fifty people are attending the gravesite rites. Some are obviously cowboys who worked for the McCammons. There’s one who looks like a young Rowdy Yates, lean and muscular and filled with that peculiar cowboy grace. He’s staring at Stephanie as if he’d never seen a woman, but she’s too busy controlling her emotions to notice him.

Beside the cowboys are a little cluster of city folk who don’t fit in at all. I look around and watch the mourners watching Stephanie. A few of the older attendees really seem upset at the deaths. There are some here, though, who arouse my suspicions. The way the McCammons died is one thing we’re looking into. The other is this new will that suddenly turned up. Stephanie has been completely disinherited. There is no mention of the McCammons’s plan to turn the ranch into a trust, something they’d often discussed with Stephanie.

Damn! Stephanie is crying. She isn’t making a sound, but huge tears are running down her flawless cheeks. Behind her sunglasses, her hazel eyes are filled with pain. Let me give her a little kitty nuzzle and a love bite. There, that made her smile. She’s pulling herself together, and just in time, too.