Branded

If only he’d gotten the letter, he thought angrily. He would have run off and married her in a heartbeat.

Colton took one last look at the spot under the trees. “I’m so sorry, Jessica,” he whispered on the warm spring breeze rustling the leaves on the branches over his head.

A part of him ached for what could have been. They would have run away together. He could have gotten a job on a ranch. She could have gotten a job cooking for the hired hands. Or maybe he would have made enough that she didn’t have to work, especially if they’d gotten a place to live along with his job.

He sighed, realizing that they had both been kids back then. The chances of his getting hired on some ranch would have been slim. Not only that, Jessica didn’t know how to cook and she would have gone crazy living on a ranch. She’d always yearned to kick the dust of Montana off her heels and live in some big city. She had this idea that she would be a model. Or even a movie star.

“I’m going to be famous someday,” she used to say. “You’ll look back and say, ‘I knew her when she was a girl.’“ It used to make him sad when she talked that way because he knew he would never leave Montana.

What would he have done if he’d gotten the letter?

He would have figured something out, he told himself. He’d have had to. With her family being the way they were, he was all she had. She depended on him.

As he started to turn away, his boot toe caught on something. At first he thought it was a small root from the new growth at the base of one of the cottonwoods.

But as he reached down to free his boot, he saw that it wasn’t a root but a leather strap protruding from the dirt. It was attached to something buried under one of the exposed roots.

He pulled on the strap and a small leather shoulder bag came up out of the dirt. The leather was discolored, the design faded over the years, but he recognized it at once.

His heart pounded against his injured ribs. Jessica’s purse.

Chapter Two

Emma had just put the pies in the oven when the phone rang. She stared at it a moment, not sure she wanted to answer it after the last time.

“You want me to get that?” the cook asked. Celeste was a thirty-something woman, robust, flush-faced and tireless. What she lacked in a sense of humor was made up by her work ethic. At least that’s what Emma told herself.

“No, I have it.” Emma wiped her hands on her apron and walked to the wall phone in the kitchen. She picked it up on the third ring, praying it wasn’t a repeat of the two other calls she’d gotten since arriving here.

“Chisholm Cattle Company,” she said into the phone.

A beat of silence, then, “Mrs. Hoyt Chisholm?” The voice was a woman’s. She sounded elderly and according to the caller ID, a local number.

“Yes.” Emma held her breath, hoping the woman was someone from the nearby town of Whitehorse who’d called to welcome her to the area and wish her well on her marriage.

“You need to get out of that house before you end up dead, too. Your husband is cursed when it comes to wives.”

“I’m sorry, but what are you talking about?” Emma asked.

“The Chisholm curse. You’ve been warned.” As the woman slammed down the phone, Emma jerked the receiver away from her ear.

“Something wrong?” Celeste asked.

“Wrong number.” She hung up hoping the cook didn’t see the way her hand was shaking. Emma wasn’t ready to confide in either Celeste or the housekeeper, Mae. She’d seen how shocked they’d been that Hoyt had remarried. While neither of them had said anything, she’d noticed that they stayed to themselves, rebuffing any attempts she made to gain their trust—let alone their friendship.

“How long have you worked for Mr. Chisholm?” Emma asked Celeste now. She hadn’t want to ask too many questions, hoping to gain the employees’ trust by being helpful and pleasant and find out more about each of the women—and more about Whitehorse and how Chisholm Cattle Company fit into the scheme of things—as time went on.

That, she’d come to realize, wasn’t going to happen.

“Just over a year,” Celeste said.

“And Mae?”

“About six months.”

Emma felt her brow shoot up in surprise.

“Not a lot of people want to work out here,” Celeste said.

“Why is that?” She knew the wages were good and Hoyt was congenial and easy to work for, from what she’d seen.

The cook seemed to search her gaze, as if she wondered if Emma was joking. Or testing her. “It’s a long drive.”

She could tell there was more, but that the woman wasn’t going to tell her for some reason. “Surely someone lasted longer.”

Celeste shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

Emma wondered if it had anything to do with the Chisholm Curse. She hated to admit that the phone calls had shaken her a little.

“Those women who have been calling you, they’re just jealous,” her friend Debra had said when she called Denver later that afternoon. Celeste had left for the day and it was Mae’s day off. Emma had the house to herself until supper when Celeste would return to help her cook for her large new family.

“Hoyt Chisholm must have been the most eligible bachelor in all of Montana,” her friend said. “Don’t let some old biddies get to you. He picked you. He loves you.”

Yes, Emma thought. And she loved Hoyt. “Still, it seems odd.” The last elderly neighboring ranchwoman’s call hadn’t sounded malicious. She’d sounded scared for her.

COLTON WAS WAITING BY THE ROAD when he finally saw the Sheriff’s Department patrol car approaching. His mind was reeling from the letter—and what he’d found under the cottonwood tree.

Inside Jessica’s purse he’d discovered her wallet with her driver’s license, $200 in cash and a bus ticket out of Whitehorse.

One one-way bus ticket? She’d said she wanted them to run away together. While she didn’t have a car of her own, she knew he had his own pickup. Did she have so little faith that he would show up that she’d gotten the ticket just in case? He felt confused. The ticket had been for the 4:00 a.m. bus that would have left just hours after they were to meet at their secret spot.

Why had she thought she’d be leaving Whitehorse alone?

But if her purse was buried under the tree root, then how could she have left town? And why would she bury her purse? It made no sense. It made his blood run cold because he knew she wouldn’t have buried it—just as he couldn’t see how she could have left without it.

A terrible dread had settled into his bones by the time the sheriff’s deputy pulled up next to his pickup and a female deputy stepped out.

She wore jeans, cowboy boots and a tan uniform shirt with a Whitehorse County Sheriff’s Department patch on the sleeve. Colton felt his heart drop like a stone off a cliff as he recognized her. He swore under his breath. Just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse. “Halley?”

DEPUTY HALLEY ROBINSON had told herself after moving back to Whitehorse that sooner or later she was going to cross paths with Colton Chisholm. When she’d left Whitehorse after junior high school, hadn’t she sworn that one day she would return and make Colton sorry?

But that had been a young girl’s dream of revenge. Halley was no longer that young, impressionable girl.

Lucky for Colton, she thought, since here they both were again, and oh, how the tables had turned.

“Colton,” she said, secretly enjoying the fact that he’d remembered her.

“You’re the new deputy?”