B.J. Daniels - Ambushed!

“Jasmine.” Her name was out before he could call it back.

She looked startled, as if she hadn’t seen him standing at the back of the office.

His heart lodged in his throat, his senses telling him something his mind refused to accept now that her car had been found. Jasmine was alive?

“I…I…” She started to turn as if to leave and he finally found his feet, lunging forward to stop her, half-afraid she was nothing more than a puff of smoke that would vanish the moment he touched her.

She took a step back, seeming afraid, definitely startled. Cash stopped just feet from her, struggling to believe what was before his eyes. My God, could it really be her? Jasmine?

Alive?

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This book is dedicated to Teagan and Hayden.

Thank you, baby girls, for all the hugs and kisses.

I can’t tell you what the tea parties with you two mean to me. I love you both dearly.

A former award-winning journalist, B.J. had thirty-six short stories published before her first romantic suspense, Odd Man Out, came out in 1995. Her book Premeditated Marriage won Romantic Times Best Intrigue award for 2002 and she received a Career Achievement Award for Romantic Suspense. B.J. lives in Montana with her husband, Parker, three springer spaniels, Zoey, Scout and Spot, and a temperamental tomcat named Jeff. She is a member of Kiss of Death, the Bozeman Writer’s Group and Romance Writers of America. When she isn’t writing, she snowboards in the winters and camps, water-skis and plays tennis in the summers. To contact her, write: P.O. Box 183, Bozeman, MT 59771 or look for her online at www.bjdaniels.com.

Molly Kilpatrick—Desperate for a place to hide, she made the mistake of stealing the wrong woman’s identity.

Sheriff Cash McCall—For seven years he prayed that his fiancée was alive—but not for the reason anyone suspected. Now he’s falling for her double—a woman marked for murder.

Jasmine Wolfe—Only her killer knows what happened to her after she disappeared seven years ago.

Teresa Clark—A bartender who never forgets a face would get herself killed.

Kerrington Landow—He is obsessed with Jasmine. But to the point where he would have done anything to have her—or make sure no one else did?

Patty Franklin—She was good at keeping other people’s secrets. But does she have a few of her own she’d kept under wraps?

Bernard Wolfe—With his stepsister dead, he gets the family fortune. With her alive, he could lose everything.

Sandra Perkins Landow—She and Jasmine shared more than a room. They shared a man and that could be deadly.

Vince Winslow—After fifteen years in prison, he only wants to find Molly and get what he has coming.

Angel Edwards—Prison made him more bloodthirsty. Pity anyone who gets in his way.

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

Epilogue

Tuesday

Outside Antelope Flats, Montana

The abandoned barn loomed out of the rain soaked landscape, the roof partially gone, a gaping black hole where the doors had once been.

Sheriff Cash McCall pulled his patrol car up next to Humphrey’s pickup. Through the blurred thumping of the wipers, Cash could see Humphrey Perkins behind the steering wheel, waiting.

Cash cut the engine and listened to the steady drum of the rain on the patrol car roof, not anxious to go inside that barn. Hadn’t he known? Hadn’t he always known?

Steeling himself, he pulled up the hood on his raincoat and stepped out of the patrol car. Humphrey didn’t move, just watched as Cash walked past his pickup toward the barn.

Five minutes ago, Humphrey had called him. “I found something, Cash.” The old farmer had sounded scared, as if wishing someone else was making this call, that someone else had found what had been hidden in the barn. “You know the old Trayton homestead on the north side of the lake?”

Everyone knew the place. The land had been tied up in a family estate for years, the dilapidated house boarded up, the barn falling down. There were No Trespassing signs posted all around the property, but Humphrey owned the land to the north and had always cut through the Trayton place to fish. Seemed that hadn’t changed.

“I noticed one of the barn doors had fallen off,” Humphrey had said on the phone, voice cracking. “I think you’d better come out here and take a look. It looks like there’s a car in there.”

Cash stepped from the rain into the cold darkness of the barn. The shape under the large faded canvas tarp was obviously a car. He could see one of the tires. It was flat.

He stood, listening to the rain falling through the hole in the roof patter on the tarp. Clearly the car had been there for a long time. Years.

Wind lifted one corner of the canvas and he saw the back bumper, the Montana State University parking sticker and part of the license plate, MT 6-431. The wind dropped the tattered edge of the tarp, but Cash had seen enough of the plate to know it was the one a statewide search hadn’t turned up seven years ago.

He’d been praying it wasn’t her car. Not the little red sports car she’d been anxiously waiting to be delivered.

“When I get my car, I’ll take you for a ride,” she’d said, flirting with him from the first time he’d met her.

How many times over the years since she’d disappeared had he heard those words echo in his head? “I’ll take you for a ride.”

He closed his eyes, taking in huge gulps of the rank-smelling barn air. Her car had been within five miles of Antelope Flats all these years? Right under their noses?

The search had centered around Bozeman, where she was last seen. Later, even when it had gone statewide, there wasn’t enough manpower to search every old barn or building. Especially in the remote southeastern part of the state.

He tried to breathe. She’d been almost within sight of town? So close all these years?

Cash opened his eyes, scrubbed at them with the heel of his hand, each breath a labor. He turned away and saw Humphrey’s huge bulk silhouetted in the barn door, the hood of his dark raincoat pulled up, his arms dangling loose at his sides.

“It’s her car, isn’t it?” Humphrey said from the doorway.

Cash didn’t answer, couldn’t. Swallowing back the bile that rose in his throat, he walked through the pouring rain to his patrol car for his camera.

He knew he should call for forensics and the state investigators to come down from Billings. He knew he should wait, do nothing, until they arrived. But he had to know if she was inside that car.