RaeAnne Thayne - A Cold Creek Christmas Surprise

“Relax. You didn’t forget. It’s locked in my office right now. Don’t you remember telling me to bring it inside just as Taft and the other paramedics were carrying you out to the ambulance?”

She had a vague memory that seemed to drift in and out of her mind like a playful guppy.

She exhaled with relief. “Oh, good.”

“So is the mysterious case the reason you’re here?”

She sighed, knowing she couldn’t avoid this any longer. “Could you get it?”

He eased away from the door frame, his expression wary. After a moment, he left the room. As she waited for him to return, she closed her eyes, dreading the next few moments.

The past five days had been such a blur. From the moment she found the receipt for a storage unit while clearing out her father’s papers, she felt as if she had been on a crazy roller coaster, spinning her in all directions.

After seeing the contents of that storage unit, she had a hundred vague, horrible suspicions but they were all surreal, insubstantial. None of it seemed real—probably because she didn’t want it to be real.

Her research online had unearthed a chilling story, one she still couldn’t quite comprehend, and one she didn’t want to believe had anything to do with her or any member of her family.

She had packed up one piece of evidence and brought it here in hopes of finding out the truth. Now that she was here, she realized how foolish her hopes had been. What was she expecting? That she would find out everything had just been a horrible mistake?

She waited, nerves stretched taut. When he returned, the black portfolio looked dark and forbidding in his arms.

“Here you go.” He handed it to her, and she moved to the bed.

“Did you look inside, like you looked in my purse?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t want to invade your privacy, but circumstances didn’t leave me much choice.”

She was glad for that, at least. With her only workable hand, she opened the case and slid out the contents, resting it on the blanket.

The loveliness still caught her breath—a beautiful painting of a pale lavender columbine so real she could almost smell it, cupped in both hands of a small blonde girl who looked to be about three years old.

Ridge Bowman’s expression seemed to freeze the moment he caught sight of the painting. His jaw looked hard as granite.

“Where did you get that?” he demanded, his voice harsh.

Instinctively, she wanted to shrink from that tone. She hated conflict and had since she was a little girl listening to her parents scream at each other.

She swallowed hard. “My...father recently died, and I found it among his things.”

He wasn’t angry, she suddenly realized. He was overwhelmed.

“It’s even more beautiful than I remember,” he said, his tone almost reverent. He traced a finger over the edge of one petal, and she realized with shock that this big, tough rancher looked as if he was about to weep.

Who was this man who looked as if he could wrestle a steer without working up a sweat but who could cry over a painting of a little girl holding a flower?

“It...belonged to your family, then?”

He looked up as if he had forgotten she was there. “This is why you came to the ranch?”

She nodded, a movement that reminded her quite forcibly of her aching head. “When I found it,” she said carefully, “I immediately did a web search for the artist. Margaret Bowman.”

“My mother.”

He looked at the painting again, his expression more soft than she had seen it.

As she watched him, Sarah was suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion, so very tired of carrying the weight of her past and trying to stay ahead of demons she could never escape.

She shouldn’t have come here. It had been foolishly impulsive and right now she couldn’t believe she ever thought it might be a good idea to face the Bowman family in person.

If she had been thinking straight, she simply would have tracked down an email address and sent a photograph of the painting with her questions. Better yet, she should have had her attorney contact the Bowman family.

Her only explanation for the choices that had led her here had been her own reaction to the paintings. She had been struck by all of them, particularly this one—by its artistic merit and the undeniable skill required to make simple pigment leap from the canvas like that, but also by the obvious love the artist had for the child in the painting.

“Do you have any idea where your father obtained this painting?” Ridge asked her.

Suspicions? Yes. Proof, on the other hand, was something else entirely. She shook her head, which wasn’t a lie.

“It means a great deal to you, doesn’t it?” she said carefully.

“If you only knew. I thought we would never see it again. Of everything, this is the one I missed most of all. That’s my sister, Caidy, in the painting. The one whose wedding we had here yesterday.”

She had suspected as much. Somehow that made everything seem more heartbreaking. “She was a lovely child,” she said softly.

“Who grew into an even lovelier woman.” He smiled, and she was suddenly aware of a fierce envy at the relationship between Ridge Bowman and his family members. The family was obviously very close, despite the tragedy that must have affected all of them.

She thought of her half brother and their tangled relationship. She had loved him dearly when she was young, despite the decade age difference between them. In the end, he had become a stranger to her.

“How much do you want for it?” Ridge asked abruptly. “Name your price.”

“What?” she exclaimed.

“That’s why you came, isn’t it?” He raised an eyebrow, and she didn’t mistake the shadow of derision in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.

He thought she was trying to extort money from the family, she realized with horror. She was so startled, she didn’t answer for several seconds.

He must have taken her silence for a negotiation tactic. His mouth tightened and he frowned. “I should be coy here, pretend I don’t really want it, maybe try to bargain with you a little. I don’t care. I want it. Name your price. If it’s at all within reason, I’ll pay it.”

She shook her head. “I—I don’t want your money, Mr. Bowman.”

“Don’t you?”

“When I read the stories online about your parents and their...” Her voice trailed off, and she didn’t quite know how to finish that statement.

“Their murders?”

She shivered a little at his bluntness. “Yes,” she said. “Their murders. When I read the news reports and realized the artist of that beautiful painting had died, I knew I had to come. The painting is yours. I won’t let you pay me anything. I fully intended to give it back to you and your family.”

“You what?” He clearly didn’t believe her.

“I have no legal or moral claim to it. It rightfully belongs to your family. It’s yours.”

He stared at her and then back at the painting, brow furrowed. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. It’s yours,” she repeated.

She didn’t add the rest. Not yet. She would have to tell him, but he was so shocked about her volunteering this painting to him, she wasn’t quite ready to let him know everything else.

“I can’t believe this. You have no idea. It’s like having a piece of her back. My mother, I mean.”

The love in his voice touched a chord somewhere deep inside. She thought of her own mother, bitter and angry at the world and the cards she had been dealt. Her mother had raised her alone from the time Sarah was very young, working two jobs to support them because she wouldn’t take money from her ex-husband. Sarah had loved her but accepted now that her mother had never been a kind woman. Barbara didn’t have a lot of room left over around her hatred of Sarah’s father to find love for the daughter they had created together.