One Hot Forty-Five

“My brother will be combing the countryside searching for me,” he said. Outside the pickup window he could see nothing but white. There were no other tracks in the road now. No one would be out on a night like this. No one with a brain, he amended silently.

“Shane will call in the FBI since kidnapping is a federal offense,” he continued. “This time they’ll lock you up and you’ll never get out. Do you have any idea where you’re headed?”

He glanced over at her when she didn’t answer. Her angelic face was set in an expression of concentration and determination.

“The best thing you can do at this point is turn around and go back,” he said. “If you turn yourself in, I’ll do everything I can to make sure you get a fair hearing.”

“I’m touched by your concern, Mr. Corbett. But I’m crazy, remember? If I get caught, they’ll just put me back in the looney bin and throw away the key, and then the men after me will kill me. By then, they will have murdered you, so you’ll be of little help.”

She shifted down as a gust of wind rocked the pickup and sent snow swirling around them.

“But if we don’t get caught,” she continued, “I might be able to keep us both alive. So in the grand scale of things, kidnapping you seems pretty minor, don’t you think?”

He hated that her logic made a bizarre kind of sense. She wasn’t going to turn around and take him back, that much was a given.

In the rare openings between gusts, blurred Christmas lights could be seen along the eaves of ranch houses. But soon the ranch houses became fewer and farther between, as did the blur of Christmas lights, until there was nothing but white in the darkness ahead.

They were headed south on one of the lesser-used, narrow, unpaved roads. Between them and the Missouri Breaks was nothing but wild country.

“What now?” he asked as the wind blew in the cracks of the pickup cab and sent snow swirling across the road, obliterating everything.

“You’re going to help me save our lives—once I convince you how much danger you’re in.”

It wasn’t going to take much to convince him of that, Lantry thought as he noted the gun nestled between her thighs and the Montana blizzard raging outside the pickup.

DEDE GRIPPED THE WHEEL AND fought to see the road ahead. Mostly what she did was aim the pickup between the fence posts—what little of them wasn’t buried in snow on the other side of the snow-deep barrow pits.

Between the heavy snowfall and the blowing fallen snow, all she could see was white.

She didn’t need Lantry Corbett to tell her how crazy this was. But given the alternative …

Nor did she want to admit that the lawyer’s arguments weren’t persuasive. There was a time she would have believed everything he said and been ready to turn her life over to him, thinking he would save her.

But this wasn’t that time. Too much had happened to her. And too much was at stake. A part of her wished she’d been honest with Lantry back at the jail, although she doubted it would have swayed him anyway.

She couldn’t let herself forget who this cowboy was or the part he’d played in bringing them both to this point in their lives.

This Lantry Corbett, though, looked nothing like the man she’d only seen on television. This blue-eyed cowboy hardly resembled the clean-shaven, three-piece designer-suited lawyer who she’d been told would eat his young.

She’d thought she had the wrong Lantry Corbett when she’d rolled over on her cot in jail earlier and had seen the cowboy standing outside her cell. This man wore a black Stetson, his dark hair now curled at the nape of his neck—not the corporate short haircut he’d sported in Texas—and he’d grown a thick black mustache that drooped at the corners and made him look as if he should have been from the Old West.

Maybe even more surprising, he looked at home in his worn Western attire. This was no urban cowboy, and the clothing only made him more appealing, accentuating his broad shoulders and slim hips. Even the way he moved was different. Tall and lanky, Lantry had walked into the jail with a slow, graceful gait in the work-worn cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans that hugged those long legs.

He had been nothing like that ultraexpensive lawyer she’d seen stalking across the commons of his office high-rise with a crowd of reporters after him.

No, for a moment in the jail, she’d been fooled into thinking she was wrong about the cutthroat divorce lawyer turned cowboy—until he opened his mouth.

Only then did she know she had the right man.

She kept her attention on the road—what she could see of it—and the blizzard raging outside the pickup, wishing there was another way.

VIOLET EVANS ALWAYS KNEW SHE’D come home one day. She’d thought about nothing but Whitehorse since she’d been locked up.

True, she had planned to come home vindicated. Or at least have everyone believe she was cured. But that hadn’t happened.

In the passenger seat of the stolen SUV, Roberta began to snore loudly.

Violet knew everyone in four counties was looking for her. She’d become famous. Or infamous. Either way, she liked the idea of her name on everyone’s lips. They’d all be locking their doors tonight.

She smiled at the thought, imagining the people who’d wronged her over the years. They would be terrified until she was caught. Once, they’d just made fun of her. But now they would have new respect for her.

Still, it bothered her that they all thought something was wrong with her. No wonder they’d been quick to send her away to a mental hospital after that unfortunate incident with her mother. How different things would have been if they had believed her when she’d tried to explain why she’d tried to kill her mother that day.

She shoved away the disturbing images from the past. But one thought lingered. If Arlene loved her … If she’d saved her from her awful grandmother … If she’d tried to help her with the scary thoughts in her head …

A mother is supposed to save you. Arlene Evans had failed to save her oldest daughter, so what right did Arlene have to get married and be happy?

“No right at all,” Violet’s dead grandmother said from the backseat. “Her idea of saving you had been to marry you off.”

Violet thought of the humiliation and embarrassment when no man had wanted her—and worse, the disappointment she’d seen in her mother’s face.

“If Arlene hadn’t tricked my son Floyd into marrying her and had you three kids—”

“Can you just shut up?” Violet said, wishing she could cover her ears. She’d heard this from her grandmother since she was a girl. Grandmother always causing trouble, stirring things up between them, then standing back and saying, “See? See what I mean about this family?”

Roberta stirred in the passenger seat. “What’s going on?” She glanced in the backseat, then at Violet, frowning. “You aren’t talking to your dead grandmother again, right?”

“I was talking to myself. I need you to run a little errand for me,” Violet told her as she parked near Packys, a convenience store on the edge of town.

She had skirted Whitehorse, which wasn’t difficult since the town was only ten blocks square and she knew all the back roads.

The first thing she needed to do, though, was find out everything she could about her mother’s upcoming Christmas wedding. It wasn’t like she’d gotten an invitation.

“You’re going to run in and get me the local newspaper and the shopper—those are the area bibles when it comes to what’s going on,” Violet told her.

Roberta groaned and complained, but finally got out and went in. She was wearing a pair of blue overalls and a flannel shirt and looked enough like a local that she shouldn’t have any trouble, Violet figured.

Getting a change of clothing had been easy since Violet knew which residents would be gone this time of year and which ones locked their doors. They’d tossed out the Santa costumes after tossing out Dede Chamberlain.

It had amused Roberta to dump Dede on the main street of Whitehorse wearing the Santa suit.

When Roberta returned from inside the convenience store with the newspaper and free shopper, Violet drove down the street the few blocks past town. She pulled over in front of Promises bookstore, gift shop and antique store—closed now—and took the papers from Roberta.

Snapping on the dome light, she scanned for what she knew had to be there. Whitehorse, Montana, was so small that weddings, baby and wedding showers, and birthday parties were advertised in the paper and open to everyone. Her grandmother had already said that Arlene would invite the whole town to show off the fact that she’d caught another man.

To her dismay, Violet didn’t find anything about the wedding and was about to give up when she saw the wedding shower announcement.

There was no address as to where the shower was being held, since it was unnecessary. Instead all that was listed was the name of the person who was hosting the get-together. Pearl Cavanaugh. If you didn’t know where the Cavanaughs lived, then you had no business at the shower.