The Sheriff Of Sage Bend

“Don’t ma’am me, Lucas Blaylock. I’m not that damned old.”

His lips twitched. “Only if you stop calling me ‘Sheriff.’ It’s Lucas to you, Paige. Ma’am.” He put his heels to the gray and took off up the trail.

He caught up with Miranda sooner than he’d expected. Somehow, he’d pictured her—a tough, bronc-breaking cowgirl—riding her horse hell-for-leather to her sister’s rescue. Instead, she was scanning the ground as her horse walked. She looked over her shoulder at him.

“Lucas.” She spoke his name with a kind of formality. Not as she’d once said it, when he’d held her and made love to her. “I thought you’d send your deputies out here.”

“You know me better than that.” He scowled. “Tell me what happened.”

“Didn’t Mom talk to you?”

“Yeah. But I wanna hear it from you.”

“Why? Don’t waste my time, Lucas. My sister’s hurt.” She continued studying the ground.

“How can you see anything with all those tracks? Speaking of which, where are Sam and Chet?”

“On a group ride. They went up the north fork.” She gestured. “Shannon rode off in this direction. We don’t normally take our guests this way, since it’s a fairly rough ride.”

The smattering of tracks showed that more than one horse had passed by here time and again. But on closer inspection, Lucas realized only one set looked fresh. He assumed they belonged to the horse they were tracking.

Miranda pointed. “You can see where her horse came back—over there. He’d veered off the trail for a ways. See? Then he ran back onto it.”

He held on to his patience. “Logically, that means Shannon is down the trail someplace. We’re wasting time.”

Miranda’s face turned red. “Listen, Blaylock. No one wants to find my sister faster than I do. But if we go barreling down the trail and wipe out Poker’s tracks, how are we going to find where Shannon fell? She doesn’t always stick to the bridle path.”

He hated to admit she was right. Hated to admit that she could still rattle him. “We can ride off to one side, then. If we don’t find her in a reasonable distance, we backtrack.”

“Fine.” She cued her gelding into a lope.

“Miranda.”

She shot a sideways look at him.

“Sorry.”

Her blue eyes burned into his. “Just help me find my sister.”

Minutes later, they located where Poker’s tracks veered off into a meadow. A trail of trampled grass clearly showed where he’d traveled, and from the looks of things, he’d been running hard. He’d come back in the same manner, his beaten-down path through the knee-deep grass crisscrossing his original route.

Without hesitation, Miranda loped to the far side of the meadow, then pulled up to study the ground again.

“She stopped here,” she said when Lucas caught up with her. “Shannon! Where are you?” The mountains echoed her words, and a pair of blackbirds flew up from a nearby pine, squawking in protest. Scattered rock and boulders, pale gray, brown and white, dotted the landscape.

Miranda leaped from the saddle. Jaw clenched, she examined the surface of one of the rocks, some five feet in diameter. Lucas could see the blood from where he sat. “She was right here,” Miranda said, swallowing visibly. “So where is she now?”

He sat his horse, studying the surrounding mountains. “Her horse have any claw marks on it that I missed?”

“Not that I saw—but there was blood on the saddle.”

A cougar could have knocked Shannon from the back of her horse. But it seemed Poker would be clawed if that were the case. And if a mountain lion had dragged her off, there would be signs of that. His stomach churned at the thought.

He reached for the radio clipped to his belt, but all he got was static. “Damn battery’s weak.” He looked down at Miranda. “Come on. We’ll ride back to meet Garrett. Organize a search party.”

She shook her head and swung back onto her horse. “I’m going to keep looking.”

“Don’t be stubborn.” Lucas gestured around them. “You’ve got rock face going off in twenty different directions. Shannon could be anywhere. You’ll never find her trail going it alone.”

Miranda raised her chin. “She’s my sister. She’s hurt and we’re wasting time.” With that, she spun the gelding around and headed up a trail fit only for mountain goats.

Lucas shook his head. He started to call to her to come back as the gray shifted beneath him, then decided not to waste his breath. “Danged stubborn, fool woman.”

Still, he couldn’t help but admire her strength and courage. Just like her mom’s. He wished his own mother would’ve had some.

Maybe then she’d still be alive.

CHAPTER TWO

MIRANDA VOWED TO RIDE until hell froze over, if that’s what it took to find Shannon. And Lucas Blaylock could eat skunk and die if he didn’t approve. He’d been a thorn in her side since she was fourteen. And at twenty, he’d broken her heart and humiliated her in front of all her friends and family.

She should’ve listened to her mother.

With a younger brother who always managed to find trouble, and an alcoholic father who liked to use his fists, Lucas had fought his way through life with a go-to-hell attitude. He’d been three years older than her and twice as wild.

When Miranda was a teenager, her mother’s biggest fear had been that her daughters would fall for one of the Blaylock boys. Miranda had fallen, all right. Head over heels crazy for Lucas Blaylock, with his sandy hair—worn a bit too long—and icy blue eyes. She’d defied her mom and went after him.

He’d gradually outgrown his bad habits, and hadn’t turned out anything like his jailbird father or his wife-beating brother. Instead, he’d become a lawman.

Yet his white-knight syndrome hadn’t stopped him from leaving Miranda.

She halted Sundae on a rocky plateau. Around her, the mountains rose abruptly, too steep for a horse to climb. But not for a person. Had Shannon hiked out of here for some reason? Logic told Miranda her sister couldn’t climb these rocks injured. But what if she had a head wound that had left her disoriented? She could’ve wandered off and gotten lost.

“Shannon!” Miranda gathered her reins as Sundae fidgeted, eager to go. Had Shannon ridden to higher ground and fallen off her horse? Was she lying unconscious in a ravine? Refusing to admit Lucas had a point—that it would be smarter to wait for search and rescue—Shannon turned the gelding and headed back down the trail. Halfway to the bottom, she veered off in a different direction, looking for tracks, blood, any sign that Shannon or Poker had been here….

She checked everywhere she could think of that she and Shannon had ridden in the past, and explored a few places they hadn’t. Frustrated, she headed back down into the valley and stopped to let Sundae drink at a stream. She looked up at the sound of hoofbeats.

Paige. Her mother pulled her sorrel mare to a halt. “No luck?” The expression on her wan face was as hopeless as a lost child’s.

Miranda shook her head. “Did Lucas get a search party organized?”

“Yes. He called in every available deputy and volunteer he could find. Word’s spreading fast. A bunch of our neighbors have shown up to help—Tori’s there.” Miranda’s best friend since third grade. “They’re forming a search grid. You want to ride back with me and join them?”

Miranda sighed. “Yeah. I’ve looked everywhere I can think of.”

They rode in silence for a while.

“How could she just vanish?” Paige’s choked voice hit Miranda hard. “If it wasn’t a mountain lion…” She let out a sob, and Miranda knew where her mind had gone.