Intimate Secrets

Ivy was already out of the car and headed up the steps by the time Josie reached the cabin. She stopped at the car to help Mildred carry in the groceries. A widow, Mildred often stayed over. They’d fallen into the habit of having dinner together, with Mildred surprising them with her favorite dishes.

“Your daughter causes a commotion everywhere she goes,” Mildred said, laughing as she lowered a bag of groceries to the table.

“A commotion?” Josie asked, eyeing Ivy as she let the screen door slam behind her.

The cabin was narrow, built tall rather than wide. It ran shotgun style from living room to kitchen with a set of open stairs on the left up to the second-floor bath and two bedrooms.

Josie heard Ivy let out a squeal as she took off across the living room after Millie.

“What did Ivy get into now?” Josie asked with a pretend groan as she set down her armful of groceries, then turned to grab her daughter as she toddled past. She scooped Ivy into her arms and hugged her tightly. She couldn’t seem to hug her enough. Everything about the child filled her with awe. Josie never knew she could feel like this. It was the second revelation in her life.

“She was an absolute angel!” Mildred said in Ivy’s defense. “It’s not her fault that she’s so adorable that even good-looking, smooth-talking cowboys can’t resist her.”

“Good-looking cowboys?” Josie asked, feeling the first prickle of unease as she put the wriggling Ivy back down.

“Even at the store,” Mildred continued as she began putting Josie’s groceries away. “He just couldn’t take his eyes off her. He finally had to come over and say hello.”

Josie felt a wave of anxiety flood her.

Mildred looked up and saw her reaction. “Oh, it wasn’t like that. He was perfectly adorable. Polite with an accent like yours.”

Josie felt the floor buckle under her. Blood drained from her head. Her ears rang. “A Texas accent?”

Mildred looked scared, too, now. She’d paled, her fingers nervously kneading the edges of a box of macaroni and cheese.

Josie could barely form the words. “What did he look like?”

“Oh, Josie, I didn’t really pay him much mind,” she cried. “He was just a nice-looking cowboy in jeans, boots and a Stetson. I guess he was tall and dark and—” She realized what she was saying. “—and yes, as corny as it sounds, handsome. But he didn’t do or say anything…inappropriate, and with tourists coming through town all the time—”

“What did he do and say?” Josie asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. Trying not to scare Mildred any more than she already had.

“He said something like ‘Oh, what a beautiful little girl.’ Ivy was giggling. She liked him. Then he said, ‘She looks just like someone I used to know. The spitting image. Except for the eyes.’ Something like that.”

A chill raced up her spine like a Montana blizzard blowing in. She tried to tell herself it was nothing. Just like thinking she saw Odell in the pines yesterday.

This had only been a cowboy in a grocery store. Ivy always attracted attention with that pale blond hair of hers and her angelic face. And those startling dark eyes. So why did Josie find herself shaking, fear making her heart pound and her knees weak with worry?

She saw Mildred frown as if she’d remembered something that disturbed her. “What is it?”

“He did ask her name. I didn’t think it would hurt anything.”

Josie found breath to ask. “You told him her name was Ivy O’Malley?”

Mildred quickly shook her head. “I just told him her name was Ivy.”

Josie tried to breathe. She’d kept her name when she’d left Texas. She’d wanted something of her family to take with her, something to give her child, and after Odell’s death, she’d believed that no one would ever come looking for her.

But now she realized keeping her name had been a silly, sentimental and very foolish thing to do. If someone from Texas was looking for her, she’d made it easy. So didn’t that mean if the man had been looking for her, he’d have already found her? He wouldn’t be watching her from a stand of trees. Or chasing after Ivy in some grocery store.

“I’m sure it was nothing,” she said, trying to reassure Mildred. Trying even harder to reassure herself.

Mildred looked more worried. “Do you think you might know him?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? Tall, dark and handsome definitely ruled out her brothers. They were tall, handsome and quite the ladies’ men with their Irish charm, but they were blond like her.

Unfortunately, tall, dark and handsome did fit both Odell Burton and Clay Jackson. But Odell was dead. And Clay… Well, he didn’t know where she was and didn’t have any reason to come looking for her. At least not one he knew about.

Don’t panic. Mildred’s right. It all sounds innocent enough. So what if he had a Texas accent? Texas is a big state. So what if he took an interest in Ivy?

But Josie knew what she really feared. That the man was somehow connected to Odell Burton and what had happened in Texas two years ago.

“Did you happen to see what he was driving?” Josie asked.

Mildred shook her head. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” she assured the older woman. “It might be someone I know from Texas. You see, no one back home knows where I am. I left in a hurry.” She smiled at Mildred. “I found myself pregnant and knew if I stuck around, my father would either demand a shotgun wedding or shoot the man. The truth is, he’d have probably shot him.” How could she explain the Texas law of the West when it came to daughters? Or for that matter, Texas cowboys and their codes of honor?

“It’s none of my business,” Mildred said. “I didn’t mean to pry—”

“I want to tell you,” she said. Mildred needed to know the truth—well at least some of it—to keep Ivy safe. “I didn’t want anyone to know about Ivy or who her father was. He was the last thing Ivy and I needed.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mildred said. “Then you think this man I saw might be looking for you?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. But she intended to find out. If the man was still in town. “Would you mind watching Ivy for a little while tonight?”

Mildred readily agreed. “He really did seem like such a nice man.”

THERE WEREN’T MANY PLACES to stay in a town the size of Three Forks, Montana. As Josie left in one of the old ranch trucks, instead of her own truck with Texas plates, she was thinking about where the cowboy stranger with the Texas accent might be staying.

She figured it wouldn’t take much to find him—if he was still around. There was the Sacajawea Inn, a white, wood-framed historic hotel on the north edge of town. Or several motels.

She decided to start with the Broken Spur on the south end of town, but a block before the motel, she spotted a newer black Dodge pickup parked on a side street with the silhouette of a cowboy behind the wheel and Texas plates.

Distracted, she barely missed hitting an older model Lincoln Continental that sped out of the Broken Spur motel parking lot and pulled in front of her, headed for Main Street.

Her heart was still pounding over her close call when a set of bright headlights filled her cab. She looked in her rearview mirror to see that the Dodge pickup with the Texas plates had pulled out and fallen in behind her.

Flipping up her rearview mirror, she pulled her western hat down and stayed low in her seat, telling herself the truck wasn’t following her. Anyone going into town would come this way. It was a coincidence that the truck had pulled out behind her at that moment. Right.

She tried not to look back as she turned left onto Main Street. Downtown Three Forks was only about four blocks long. She went two of those blocks and parked diagonally between two cars in front of the Headwaters Café, the most well-lit part of town and the busiest this time of night.

Immediately she realized that if she got out, she’d be caught in the pickup’s headlights like a deer on the highway. She shut off her engine and slid down in the seat, knowing no matter what she did, if the pickup was following her, the driver knew where to find her.

Facing the inescapable, she watched the pickup park back up the street a few spaces away. She could see the driver silhouetted behind the wheel, a man wearing a cowboy hat, his face shaded and dark. But she could tell he was looking her way. Her heart lurched, her pulse taking off at a sprint as he opened his pickup door and stepped out.

It had been two years since she’d last seen the tall, broad-shouldered cowboy, but there was no mistaking him or the impact he had on her.

He pushed back his Stetson and glanced in her direction as he walked toward her truck. Her breath caught in her throat. What was Clay Jackson doing in Montana?

Chapter Two

Josie held her breath as Clay started in her direction, her heart pounding. He stepped up onto the sidewalk, the heels of his expensive boots tapping lightly as he walked. He wore a gray Stetson, a western-cut leather coat and jeans. He looked like he belonged here. Or maybe Clay just had a way of looking like he belonged anywhere.

As he neared her truck, she slid farther down in the seat, afraid it would do no good. Of course he’d seen her. He’d been following her! He’d watched her park. He’d know that she hadn’t had time to get out of the truck.

She grimaced, realizing she was caught. She waited for him to turn at her front left fender and walk back to her door, maybe tap on the window, or knowing Clay, just stand waiting until she acknowledged his presence.

To her amazement, he didn’t slow in front of her truck, didn’t come alongside. Instead, he walked to the café entrance, his gaze not on her or the ranch truck at all, but down the street, toward the Town Club bar, where the rusted, dented cream-colored Lincoln Continental that she’d almost hit a few minutes earlier was now parked.

In fact, it was as if he hadn’t seen her at all slumped down in the seat, peeking out from under the brim of her hat.

It suddenly hit her. Clay Jackson hadn’t been following her! Wasn’t looking for her!

She felt a bubble of relieved laughter float up. As far as she could tell he didn’t even know she was here in Three Forks.

But if he wasn’t looking for her, then what was he doing here?

She watched with interest as he entered the Headwaters Café, took a seat at a front table. He looked out the large picture window in the direction of the Lincoln as a waitress slid a cup of coffee in front of him. The Lincoln hadn’t moved, but the driver, Josie noticed, was no longer inside.

She studied Clay, thinking how little he’d changed, as if life had stood still back in Texas, back on his Valle Verde Ranch. While time had flown for her and everything had changed—especially her. And yet just the sight of him still evoked a mix of emotions, regret at the top of the list and an even stronger emotion that she’d spent two years trying to forget.

She rolled down her window and let the cool air rush in, feeling the flush of memory play in her mind like a country-western song, making her ache with a longing of something unfulfilled. An odd feeling, considering the way things had ended.

She forced another memory to the surface, one that firmly put her feet back on the ground and cleared her head of all romantic notions about him. The day Clay Jackson had forbidden her to go near his prized horses other than to clean out their stalls.

But as she watched him now, she knew her problems with Clay ran a lot deeper than his horses. Or her unresolved feelings for him.

She studied him, wondering what he could be doing here. She doubted horses had brought him all the way to Montana.

As she watched him idly sip his coffee, she realized she wasn’t going to find out. He wasn’t looking for her. Wasn’t that enough? She started the truck and backed out, hoping he wouldn’t notice her. It hadn’t been that long ago she’d wanted more than anything for Clay to notice her. To see her not as Shawn O’Malley’s wild daughter but as the woman she’d become.

Funny how times had changed.

Keeping her face turned away, she drove away from the café—and Clay—down to the end of the street and doubled back, taking side streets until she was clear of town.

She told herself that the man Mildred had seen at the grocery store had to have been Clay. But he wouldn’t have recognized Ivy as being Josie’s. Or guessed who the father was. He had more pressing concerns than a fourteen-month-old toddler with pale blond hair and dark eyes. Or that baby’s mother. But just in case, Josie would stay close to the ranch and keep Ivy close as well.

She peeked in on Ivy when she reached the cabin, only to find her sleeping, looking like an angel. She bent down and kissed her warm, plump cheek and breathed in her smell, smiling at the sight of her precious daughter. She felt blessed.

For a few moments, Josie let herself think about Ivy’s father, then quickly banished the thought. Some things were best left buried, she thought as she closed the door softly and asked Mildred if she would like to stay over.

Mildred looked tired and worried, but she didn’t ask what Josie had found out in town. She readily accepted the invitation to spend the night on the couch. Josie wondered if Mildred stayed because she was concerned about her and Ivy. That would be like Mildred, Josie thought as she went to get the older woman a pillow and some bedding from the closet.

Too restless and wide awake to sleep, Josie went out on the porch and sat down on the step to stare up at the stars.

A pine-scented breeze skittered coolly across her bare arms, making goose bumps rise on her skin. She hugged herself. She’d done the right thing two years ago. The only thing she could do. No reason to start doubting herself now.

But she felt uneasy and knew it was more than just knowing Clay Jackson was in town or seeing some man in the trees the night before. It was the unshakable feeling that her past had come looking for her before she’d finished what she had to do. Before she could go home to Texas and face it as she’d planned.

She leaned back against the step and began counting the stars overhead, anything to distract her from thinking about Clay. Or worse, worrying about why he was in town.

Just an unhappy coincidence.

Right.

She caught the flicker of a light below her on the hillside not far from the stables and the creek.

Must be the owner of the ranch, Ruth Slocum, since she was the only other person here besides Mildred, and Mildred was snoring on the couch.

Josie sat up straighter. The faint light moved like a firefly through the dark. She watched it quickly disappear into the stables. Something must be wrong for Ruth to be in the stables this late at night. Odder yet, why had she come from the creek instead of her ranch house, which was in the opposite direction? Had one of the horses gotten out?

Worried, Josie got a flashlight from her truck and started down the hill.

The moon crested the mountains in a sky shot with stars. The breeze whispered through the tall, dew-damp grass, sending up the sweet scent of spring. Grass pulled at her boots, the night sky at her soul, making her feel small and insignificant.

She pushed open the stable door, surprised to find darkness. Reaching for the light switch, she stopped herself.

Through a crack in the tack room door at the end of the stables, she saw the flicker again of a flashlight, followed by a rustling sound.

She frowned and clicked on her own flashlight, keeping it aimed low at her feet as she moved slowly forward. Ruth wouldn’t be rummaging around in the tack room at this time of the night. Not with a flashlight. Ruth had recently broken her ankle; even with her cane and walking cast, she had trouble getting around.

Just as those thoughts took hold—and their possible significance—Josie reached the tack room door. It hung open only a few inches, just enough that she could see a shadow moving around behind it and hear the thump of saddles being dropped to the floor.

But it was another sound that made her freeze.

This one behind her. The stable door she’d just come through opened with a rush of cool night air.

Startled, she swung around, banging the flashlight into a post with a resounding thud. The flashlight went out.

From inside the tack room, something fell or was dropped. The narrow beam of light blinked off, pitching the stables into a dense, silent dark.

She could feel the presence of the person who’d just entered the stables but couldn’t see him. And she knew someone was still in the dark tack room, closer by. She held her breath, afraid to move.

Suddenly the tack room door flew open and a large, solid body hit her, sending her sprawling to the floor, knocking the air from her lungs. Whoever it was bolted for the nearby back door. A little of the yard light spilled in as a man-sized figure ran out, the door banging behind him.

Before she could get to her feet, someone tripped over her. She heard a loud male curse, then the sound of his body hitting the dirt. He quickly scrambled to his feet and ran toward the back door of the stables. The back door banged open again.

Before it could bang closed, the sound of a car engine roared to life, followed by another male curse. Then the sound of boot heels, slowly working their way back to her as the door banged shut again.

She was on all fours when the stable lights flashed on. She looked up to see a large cowboy silhouetted against the bright light, his Stetson shadowing his face.

“What the hell?” the cowboy cursed.

She didn’t need to see his face. She knew that body and that voice. Had heard that tone used in connection with her on numerous occasions.

Inwardly groaning, she hoisted herself to her feet, and dusting her backside, blinked as her eyes adjusted to the bright light. If anything, this close, he looked more handsome. Dark from his thick black hair to his eyes. His Spanish blood, although two generations removed, still fired passionately in his eyes. Unfortunately, that passion was almost always anger. “Hello, Jackson.”

CLAY STARED IN STUNNED disbelief. He couldn’t have been more shocked to see anyone. Hadn’t he thought he’d seen her a couple hundred times over the past two years? Each time gave him a start. A jolt of pure electric shock that jump-started his heart and made it take off like an escaped con at the sound of a bloodhound.

“Josie.” Even to his ears it sounded like a curse. He stared at her, assaulted with too many thoughts, too many memories and feelings.

Josie O’Malley. After all this time—and looking just as she had the last time he’d seen her. No, he realized as he studied her. She’d changed, although he couldn’t put his finger on exactly how.

Her pale blond hair was still short and unruly, as if she’d just run her fingers through it. Her eyes were still that unbelievable blue. Clear as a Texas summer sky but unreadable as if the cool veneer masked a well of secrets. No doubt they did.

And she still had that defiant look, of course. She’d always been a spitfire. Rebellious, head-strong and willful as a wild mustang. Her father had actually thought Clay could do something with her. It had proved an impossible task. One he’d failed at miserably.

She was still slim and small, about five six in boots, but rounded. Actually more rounded than he remembered.

“What the hell are you doing here, Josie?” he demanded.

“What am I doing here?” she snapped, crossing her arms over the breasts he’d just been staring at. “What are you doing here is more to the point.”

He jerked his gaze away, trying to make sense of this. But after one glance at the rear door of the stables, he narrowed his eyes at her again, seeing things a whole lot clearer. “You tripped me.”

“Excuse me?” She hadn’t lost her Texas twang—or her temper. Her blue eyes fired like forged steel. That was definitely something time hadn’t changed.

Her first instinct was to tell him it wasn’t any of his business. “I happen to work here.”

“Work here?” he repeated, and glanced down the line of stalls.

She knew what he was thinking. That she shoveled manure—just as she had in his stables. What did she care what he thought? It made her more angry, though, that she did care.

“You work strange hours,” he commented. “Or are you going to tell me that you just happened to be down here in the middle of the night, didn’t bother to turn on the lights and just happened to be on the floor to trip me?”

She gritted her teeth, reminded of just how irritating this man could be. She bit off each word. “I saw a light and someone come in here so I walked down to check. I was just about to find out who when you came in and scared whoever it was away.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Whoever it was knocked me down and then you tripped over me,” she continued, daring him to interrupt. “But that doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.” What was he doing here? In Montana? But more important, on the ranch where she worked?

“I’m looking for someone.”

She stared at him, her heart pounding. “Anyone in particular?”

“A thief,” he said grudgingly. “I’ve been following him for the past four days. Unofficially, of course.”

For a moment she’d thought he’d come to see her—even though she knew from watching him in town it wasn’t true. When was she going to quit kidding herself when it came to this man?

“He led me from Texas to this stable.”

She didn’t like the sound of this. “Why would you follow a petty thief all the way from Texas?” She glanced toward the tack room. To this particular stable?

He frowned. “Petty? I don’t think several million in jewels is petty, do you?”

Her heart looped in her chest. Hadn’t she feared that the past had come looking for her? Worse yet, in the form of Clay Jackson, the one man she had reason to fear the most.

Did he just imagine the surprise that flashed in her eyes? The worry? God knows, he’d read more in her expression than he should have in the past.

She didn’t answer. If anything, she seemed to be doing her best to look innocent. It was a look she’d perfected, but he knew her too well to fall for it.

“Actually, you know him,” he said. Maybe had stayed in contact with him. “An old friend of yours.”

It was hard to tell if she really did pale under the harsh light in the stable. Maybe he just wanted to see guilt in her eyes. Suspected it. Expected it. The same way he suspected she’d purposely tripped him to allow the thief to get away. After growing up next door to her, he’d have said he knew Josie O’Malley better than anyone.

But two years ago, she’d made him realize that he didn’t know her as well as he’d thought.

“An old friend of mine?” she asked innocently.

Yes, he definitely glimpsed a crack in her composure. He smiled at her, but there was no humor behind it. Something hot tore at his insides. “You remember Raymond Degas,” he said, studying her.

No doubt about it. The last of the color drained from her face.

“Raymond?”

“Come on, Josie,” he prodded, his guts on fire. “You had to have heard about the jewel heist two years ago. Raymond and Odell were the number-one suspects. Raymond disappeared. Odell got himself killed. The jewels never turned up.”

He felt frustration and anger burn in him. He’d held this woman at arm’s length for years until two years ago. After Maria, he’d sworn he’d never let himself feel like that for a woman again.

But Josie had changed that. Damn her, she’d made him want her. Made him want only her. She’d dared him to love again, and just when he thought he might take the chance, she’d taken off. Without a word.

What made it worse was she’d disappeared right after the jewel heist.

It would have been suspicious enough if she hadn’t been thick as thieves with Odell Burton and his buddy Raymond Degas at the time.