B.J. Daniels - Wrangled

“Hello?” Her voice broke as she remembered the last call that had come too early in the morning.

This is Dr. Sheridan at Memorial Hospital in Great Falls. I’m sorry to inform you that your father has had a heart attack. I’m afraid there was nothing we could do. Your sister is here if you would like to speak with her .

My sister? You must have the wrong number, I don’t have a sister .

“Hello?” she said again now.

At first all she heard was crying. “Hello?”

“Dakota, I need your help.”

Her sister, half sister, the one she hadn’t known existed until two weeks ago, let out a choked sob.

“Courtney? What’s wrong?”

More sobbing. “I’m in trouble.”

This, at least, didn’t come as a surprise. Dakota had expected her half sister was in trouble when she’d asked after their father’s funeral if she could stay at the ranch for a while.

“I want to get to know you,” Courtney had said. But it had become obvious fairly quickly that her half sister wanted a lot more than that.

“Speak up. I can barely hear you,” Dakota said now.

“I can’t. He’s in the next room.”

Dakota rolled her eyes. A man. Not surprising, since Courtney had been out every night in the two weeks since their father’s funeral.

“I think he might be dead.”

Dakota came wide awake. Dead? “Where are you?” There was a loud crash in the background as something fell and broke. “Tell me where you are,” Dakota cried as she stumbled out of bed. “Courtney?”

Her father’s secret love child, a woman only two years younger than herself, whispered two words before the line went dead.

“Zane Chisholm’s.”

ZANE WOKE TO POUNDING. He tried to sit up. His head swam. He hadn’t really drunk champagne last night, had he?

Numbly he realized the pounding wasn’t just in his head. Someone was at the door and it was still dark outside. He turned on a light, blinded for a moment. As he glanced over at the other side of his queen-size bed, he was a little surprised to find it empty. Courtney had come home with him last night, hadn’t she?

As he got up he saw that he was stark naked. Whoever was at the door was pounding harder now. He quickly pulled on a pair of obviously hastily discarded jeans and padded barefoot into the living room to answer the door.

“What the hell happened to you? ” his brother Marshall asked in surprise when Zane opened the door.

“I’m a little hungover.” A major understatement. He couldn’t remember feeling this badly—even during his college days when he’d done his share of partying.

“Your face,” Marshall said. “It’s all scratched up.”

Zane frowned and went into the bathroom. He turned on the light and stared in shock into the mirror. His pulse jumped. He had what looked like claw marks down the side of his left cheek. As he looked down at his arm, he saw another scratch on his forearm.

What the hell had happened last night?

“Are you okay?” Marshall asked from the bathroom doorway. He sounded worried, but nothing like Zane felt.

“I don’t know. I’m having trouble remembering last night.”

“Well, it must have been a wild one,” Marshall said. “I hope it was consensual with whatever mountain lion you hooked up with.”

“Not funny.” His head throbbed and his memory was a black hole that he was a little afraid to look into too deeply.

“You do remember that you and I are picking up horses in Wolf Point today, right?” Marshall said. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get cleaned up, but don’t even think about trying to get out of this. I need your help and we’re already running late. I told you to be ready at four forty-five.”

Zane nodded, although it hurt his head. What time was it, anyway? The clock on the wall read 5:10 a.m. “Could you make me some coffee while I get ready?”

His brother sighed. “Aren’t you getting a little too old for partying like this?” he grumbled on his way to the kitchen.

Zane stepped into the bathroom, closed the door and stared into the mirror again. He looked like hell. Worse, he couldn’t remember drinking more than a glass or two of champagne, certainly not enough to cause this kind of damage.

He thought about Courtney. She had to have done this to him. He touched his cheek. What scared him was, what had he done to get that kind of reaction from her?

EMMA CHISHOLM HAD been an early riser all her life. She liked getting up before the rest of the world when everything was still and dark. Since marrying Hoyt Chisholm a year ago, she especially liked seeing the sun come up here on the ranch.

As she stepped into the big ranch kitchen, she heard a sound and froze.

“I hope I didn’t scare you.”

Emma shuddered as a chill raced down the length of her spine. She tried to hide it but knew she’d failed when she turned to see amusement in their new live-in housekeeper’s one good eye. Up before sunrise and often the last one to bed, the woman moved around the house with ghostlike stealth.

“There really is no need for you to work such long hours,” she said as Mrs. Crowley stepped out of the dark shadows of the kitchen. The fifty-eight-year-old woman moved with a strange gait—no doubt caused by her disfiguring injury. It was hard to look into Mrs. Crowley’s face. The right side appeared to have been horribly burned, that eye white and sightless. Behind her thick glasses, her other eye shone darkly.

“I’m not interested in sleeping anymore,” Mrs. Crowley said. Her first name was Cynthia, but she’d asked them to refer to her by her married name.

The moment she’d come to the house, she had taken over. But Emma couldn’t complain. Mrs. Crowley, a woman about her own age, was a hard worker and asked for little in return. She lived in a separate wing of the house and was Emma’s new babysitter.

Not that Emma’s husband, Hoyt, would ever admit that was the case. But last year his past had come back to haunt them. It had to do with the deaths of Hoyt’s last three wives. An insurance investigator by the name of Aggie Wells had been convinced that he’d killed them.

When Aggie had heard about Hoyt’s fourth marriage—this one a Vegas elopement to Emma—she’d come to Montana to warn Emma that she was next.

Aggie was dead now. While the police hadn’t found her killer, Emma was fairly certain that the perpetrator was the same one who’d murdered at least one of Hoyt’s wives.

Aggie Wells had originally been convinced that the killer was Hoyt, but as time went on she’d thought Hoyt’s first wife might still be alive. Laura had allegedly drowned in Fort Peck Reservoir more than thirty years before. Aggie had even found a woman named Sharon Jones, whom she believed was Laura. Unfortunately, Sharon Jones had disappeared before the police could question her.

For months now Hoyt had been afraid to leave Emma alone. Either he or one of his six sons hung around the house to make sure no harm came to her.

She’d been going crazy, feeling as if she was under house arrest. Hoyt and his sons had to be going crazy as well. They were ranchers and much more at home on the back of a horse than hanging around the kitchen with her.

Finally Hoyt had come up with the idea of a live-in housekeeper. Emma was sure that Mrs. Crowley wasn’t what he’d had in mind. But after all the rumors and suspicions that were flying around, it was next to impossible to get anyone to work at the ranch.

Fortunately, Mrs. Crowley had been glad to come. She said she liked that Chisholm Cattle Company was so isolated.

“People stare,” she’d said simply when Emma had asked her if she thought she could be happy living this far away from civilization.