Wyoming Christmas Ransom

“I’m sorry I’m interrupting. It’s just I found something.”

“Will—” She couldn’t do this. For herself as much as for him.

“I found a pattern, to how they met. Wednesdays. Always at six. I don’t know where, but there has to be something there. Wednesdays.” His gaze fixed on hers in the cheerful Christmas lights.

She’d told him she was done, but here he was, stepping outside his comfort zone and marching into the bar. She was torn between pleasant surprise that he’d braved some of the things he’d been avoiding more and more and being annoyed he thought he could just waltz into her life and demand help.

“Then what?” she asked softly. Because this was what had brought her to that moment last week when she’d cut him off. When she’d cut herself off. She could keep giving him pictures and files and peeks at evidence and what have you, but then what? It was an endless circle, and she couldn’t be a part of it anymore.

She wanted him to break free of it, too, but she had no say over him. She only had say over herself. But maybe... Maybe if he actually stopped to think about the question like she’d had to...

“What happens if we follow the pattern?” she prodded.

“We follow the clues and—”

“Then what after that? You find the guy your wife was cheating with? You question him and maybe he even had something to do with it despite all evidence to the contrary. The searching is over, you have your answers, your justice. What then?” Because she’d been foolishly hoping to help him to that what then, but she had a terrible feeling she’d spent the past two years only aiding him in becoming more screwed up, more of a hermit and less of the easy-going Will Cooper she’d known peripherally before Paula’s death.

And because she cared about him, but had zero actual responsibility or hold on him, she had to walk away.

“We’ll have the truth,” Will said, as if she was the one living in a fantasy world. “I’ve been searching for the truth for two years. I don’t know why you’re giving up, but I can’t. I can’t ignore two years’ worth of something telling me this is all wrong.”

“What will you do with whatever truth you’re after?”

He looked at her a bit like she’d struck him. “Hopefully put a murderer in jail.” He shook his head. “Why? Why are you doing this? After all this time, you’re just abandoning me. I don’t get it.”

He actually sounded and looked hurt, instead of just irritated he didn’t have help anymore, so she gave him the truth. “I care about you, Will, and I can’t keep watching you get worse.”

* * *

WILL COULDN’T PROCESS those words, or the soft look in Gracie’s brown eyes. Care. Such a weird word. Such a dangerous thing, to care about someone. You couldn’t control what they’d do with that. Couldn’t predict it. You could feel safe and happy one minute, eviscerated and broken the next.

Care. No. It gave him a full-body chill. “Get worse at what?” he asked, working to pretend the first part of that sentence didn’t exist.

She blew out a breath, lights from the tacky Christmas decorations all around creating a sort of warm yellow glow around her. Occasionally, the few nights he managed to sleep well enough to dream, he’d dream of her, much like this. Something like an angel, down to the glowing.

He wasn’t fanciful enough to believe in things like angels, but he wasn’t so cynical he couldn’t believe that Gracie was part of his life for a reason.

So why was she leaving it?

She blew out a breath. “You said you don’t need a friend, but I’m always here if you decide you do. But I’m done playing detective. It was an accident, Will. An accident.”

“She was not cheating on me accidentally.”

“No.”

“What changed? Something did, because a person doesn’t just walk away after...” It all lodged a little too hard, the words he was saying, a very painful realization he’d come here for the very, very stupid reason of feeling abandoned, and that overly sympathetic look on her face.

He tried to say he had to leave, but he wasn’t sure any words actually came out of his mouth. He was moving too fast away from her and this town and...

This was why he stayed up there. When he came down to town, when people were around, talking about things not related to Paula’s death, all these messy, confusing, complicated and mixed-up emotions boiled up and over. Who wanted to live in the center of all those things? He didn’t understand these people walking through life like it wasn’t a relentless parade of suck.

He didn’t need Gracie to be his friend. He didn’t need anyone to be his friend. He most certainly didn’t need fake Christmas crap surrounding him to the point of suffocation.

Who cared if Gracie had a reason for backing out? It wasn’t the same as learning your wife was cheating on you, or that she was dead. None of this was the same.

But somewhere in the past few years he’d lost how to parse it all. Which meant he’d let this all go—Gracie, her help, anything to do with Bent. He’d figure this all out on his own where he was safe from the way people were complicated, from the way people could betray you.

“Will. Wait.”

But he couldn’t wait. He had to get back to his house, his mountain. Far away from all this.

He turned away from her, hunching against the cold. There were cars everywhere, filling the lot, clogging both sides of the street. He’d had to park two blocks down.

Before turning the corner to where his Jeep was parked, he gave a final glimpse at Gracie standing there in the twinkling lights, hugging herself and looking worried and like a Christmas gift.

He damn well didn’t need her worry. Or care.

He climbed into his Jeep and started the engine. He drove out of Bent, so distracted with the roiling set of emotions inside him it took miles to realize something wasn’t right.

The engine was making a horrible noise, and the steering wheel wasn’t responding the way it normally did. Will frowned. It was pitch-black on this mountain road and not a good place to stop. Even though traffic wasn’t a big concern, 18-wheelers sometimes rumbled by toward Fairmont.

If he stopped—

The thought, the hope he could fix this situation, died in an instant. When his foot tapped the brake, nothing happened. He swallowed at the trickle of fear, pressing his foot down harder. A grinding noise sounded—a terrible one—and the brake barely responded, slowing his progress only a little bit.

Will swore as he continued to stomp his foot on the brake. Horrible noise, a slight decrease in speed, but not enough. Keeping his eyes on the road and one hand gripped to the steering wheel for dear life, he fished his phone out from the messy console.

He waited for a straightaway on the road, searched for anything that might slow his car down without killing him. All there was in the dark night, he knew, were rocks and trees and death. He couldn’t even see the moon, like some kind of terrible omen.

He dialed Gracie’s number, impatiently swearing as it rang over and over again. He remembered the emergency brake, stomped on the lever, but nothing happened.

She didn’t answer.

Stupid to call her instead of 911, and still he gripped his phone with one hand, while desperately trying to take the curves of the dark road ahead of him. Screeching tires, increasing speed as the road dipped, entire car shuddering.

“Gracie,” he shouted into his phone when her voice mail beep sounded. “I need your help.”

But he couldn’t explain beyond that because he had to drop the phone to grip the steering wheel with both hands. Except that didn’t seem to help. His steering had gone the way of the brakes and now he was careening toward another curve, this time with no hope of doing anything but catapulting over the edge and into a grove of trees.

Paula’s trees.

Chapter Three

Gracie chewed her lip as she stared at her phone. Maybe Will had been calling to apologize. Maybe she should have answered.

He was dealing with such complicated emotions and—

Well, no, the problem was he had complex emotions, grief and betrayal, and for two years he’d run away and hermited away from them rather than face them, deal with them, accept them.

And she’d placated and enabled him at every turn. She chewed harder on her lip, staring at the voice mail icon.

“Here. Turn that frown upside down.”

Gracie looked up at Laurel, who had slid a bottle of beer in front of her at her little corner table where she was sitting. By herself.

“Sorry I’m not reveling.”

“Don’t worry. The Carsons are doing enough reveling for all of us,” Laurel said, smiling fondly at the motley crew around them. Delaneys lined the outskirts of the crowd. Most looking a little sour faced, though a few had imbibed enough to mingle with Carsons.

Gracie looked back down at her phone. She should put it away and celebrate her cousin’s engagement. Celebrate the fact the town wasn’t imploding over a Carson and a Delaney getting married.

Yet.

“What’s up, Gracie? It isn’t like you to mope.”

Gracie shook her head, gesturing at the crowd. “It’s so not important. I’ll tell you about it later. Enjoy your night.”

Laurel took a sip from her bottle of beer then glanced around the room, her smile going soft when it landed on her fiancé, Grady Carson. He was laughing with his cousins Noah and Ty behind the bar. They made a handsome, dangerous trio.

Gracie glanced down at her phone again, that obnoxious voice mail icon staring at her.

“So, who’s the guy?”

Gracie’s head jerked to Laurel. “What?”

“I know everyone you know, Gracie,” Laurel said with a smile. “They’re all here. So the only reason you’re staring at your phone and not talking to anyone is...well, a guy.”

Gracie tried to laugh casually, but it came out sounding forced even to her own ears. “There’s no guy.”

“Then what’s with the phone staring?”

“I’m in a deadly battle of Candy Crush.”

Laurel laughed. “Liar.”

“It’s not a guy...per se. I just finally told Will I’d stop...” Gracie shook her head. “This is not engagement party talk.”

Laurel reached across the table and patted Gracie’s arm. Laurel had never been shy about her disapproval of Gracie’s odd relationship with Will. As a sheriff’s deputy, Laurel didn’t take kindly to accusations that the department wasn’t doing its best because the victim had been a Carson, or any of Will’s other accusations over the case.

So, it made Gracie feel silly and small bringing it up, especially at Laurel’s party.

“He’s not my favorite person, but I know you felt a kind of obligation to him, and cutting that off couldn’t have been easy.”

Gracie forced herself to smile. “And something we can discuss tomorrow.”

Laurel nodded. “Fair enough. Just one little piece of advice. Either cut all of it off for good, or accept you’re going to be a part of it. Don’t sit here in a back-and-forth. Make a choice and stick with it. You’ll feel a lot better.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me which choice?”

“You two look far too serious for a party,” Grady said, coming up to them and taking Laurel’s hand in his. “On your feet. You’re going to dance with me.”

“I’m a terrible dancer,” Laurel returned with a laugh, but she let Grady pull her to her feet. She left her beer bottle, grinning as Grady gave her a little spin toward the small throng of people dancing to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

But Laurel smiled over her shoulder at Gracie. “You pick the one you can live with,” she called over the crowd and the music.

One she could live with. Gracie frowned. That was the worst advice she’d ever been given. She couldn’t live with either possibility. She had told him she couldn’t help him anymore because she was afraid she was making him worse. She meant that choice, but it didn’t make it easy.

She cared about Will. Had even said it to his face and watched him blanch outside this very bar. As if care was some kind of horrible disease she’d foisted upon him.

You decided to cut him off, so cut him off.

She nodded, willing herself to hit the voice mail button, which she did. Then willing herself to hit Delete without listening to a second. For that act, she paused.

She’d cut him off. He didn’t want a friend. He was allergic to emotion and she was no therapist, so she couldn’t possibly fix him. She couldn’t go after him and make things right because he was too closed off, too obsessed, too...

She hit Play, then berated herself. She wasn’t going to listen. She was not going to listen or get dragged into helping him with things that weren’t any good for him.

“Gracie.”

Oh hell, she had to listen.

“I need your help.” Said in a breathless, gritty voice, as if he was straining against something. Some horrible screeching noise went on in the background, so loud she could barely hear his voice over it.

“Laurel,” she yelled, already on her feet, already heading for the door. “Who’s on duty at county?”

* * *

WILL THOUGHT HE heard sirens. Which was weird. He couldn’t hear sirens in his cabin. He couldn’t hear anything except bird song, and the occasional rumble of an engine on Fridays.

Gracie. Always Gracie.

It registered, vague and faint, somewhere in the recesses of his brain, that he was cold. And uncomfortable.

No, not uncomfortable, on fire. Painful fire, frigid cold. It didn’t make any sense and he couldn’t seem to open his eyes.

Well, this was bad.

Something like panic fluttered in his chest, but everything in his body was throbbing with pain. He wasn’t at home in his cabin. He wasn’t on his mountain. He was somewhere... Somewhere.

He couldn’t open his eyes, and he couldn’t move without a fiery agony spreading through his body. Things were digging into him and one arm was at an uncomfortable angle tangled up in something hard.

He could still hear sirens, but it was all so far off he wondered if it had anything to do with him or if it was just all in his head.

Then they stopped. Just stopped.

He was going to die, wasn’t he? Something had gone wrong with his car. He didn’t quite remember what, but everything had gone wrong and he’d crashed and he was going to die.

Just like Paula. Exactly like it.

“Will? Will!”

He must be hallucinating. There’d be no reason Gracie would be out this way. Certainly no reason she’d be his saving grace. Gracie. Grace. He might have laughed if he didn’t think his head would roll right off.

“Will? Oh my—I found him!” she shouted, and he could almost hear her or someone or something next to his ear.

“Will. Oh God. Will. Please.” When she touched him he groaned, because everything hurt, even Gracie’s very welcome touch.

“You’re alive. You’re alive.” She whispered it over and over, her hand still on his chest. He felt the gentle brush of her fingertips across his forehead. Finally a part of his body that didn’t hurt.

“Say something, Will. If you’re awake. If you can hear me. Say something. Please.”

He heard footsteps and a murmur of someone else, but Gracie was talking to him and her fingers were on his face. She sounded desperate and afraid, and he didn’t want that for her. No.

He tried to open his eyes again, and this time they went a little. Everything was dark though there was some kind of light, but he couldn’t see right. He could tell that. Nothing was right.

His Jeep had malfunctioned. He’d crashed. And he couldn’t believe that was an accident.

His vision cleared a little, and he could just barely make out Gracie’s face hovering above him. The world around them was dark but some light swathed her face, and he could see every feature.

He had the oddest urge to reach out and touch her face. Touch her hair. Anything to assure himself she was real and here, and that all that worry and fear on her face was for him. Him.

I care about you, Will.

Turns out even half-dead after a car accident those words could still haunt and chill him.

“Will, an ambulance is on the way. Don’t try to move. But, can you talk? Say something?” She leaned closer, the wisps of her hair sliding across his cheek, which felt like it had been ripped off.

“Say something to me, please,” she whispered, and he thought he saw a few tears slide down her cheeks.

Say something. He had to say something. Make all this stop. She could cry when he was full dead instead of just half.

“Believe me now?” he rasped.

A pained expression crossed her face and she looked up, her face turning into a flashing red light.

“The ambulance is here,” she said quietly. “I’m going to go flag them down. Don’t—”

But he gripped her arm with the one hand that was functioning and didn’t feel like it was being stabbed by a machete. “Don’t go.” He had the panicked thought that if she left he would die, and he found he wasn’t quite interested in that prospect.

“I’ll get them.”

Will didn’t know whose voice that was. He only knew it was male and Will didn’t particularly care for it. Had she been on a date?

But he didn’t have time to dwell on that uncomfortable thought as footsteps and voices surrounded them. Then he was being touched and prodded and moved, and he tried to bite back groans of pain, but he couldn’t manage it.

Then he was on a stretcher, being moved and jerked into an ambulance.

“Gracie.”

“I’m here,” she said, and though he couldn’t see her with the paramedics looming over him, a slim, cool hand slid into his.

More voices, more movement, a door slam. And through it all, Gracie’s hand held his. Like she’d been doing for the past two years. The only person he’d come to rely on.

“What happened?” she asked gently as a paramedic shined a light into one eye and then the other.

“The brakes and steering went out.”

The paramedic worked on him, but Will couldn’t seem to force himself to let go of Gracie’s hand.

“It wasn’t any accident, Gracie. It wasn’t.”

She didn’t say anything to that so he attempted to squeeze her hand, even though it hurt like hell.

“Gracie?”

“Deputy Mosely is looking at your car. There’ll be an investigation.”

Will snorted, then swallowed down a gasp of pain. “Yeah, I know how those go.” He could feel her sigh of a breath against his temple. She moved so he could look at her while the paramedic did something awful to his arm that wasn’t holding on to Gracie.

Her big brown eyes were filled with tears and worry, and he wanted to look away from that kind of emotion, but God, it hurt too bad to even close his eyes.

She touched his forehead again, a gentle glide of her fingertips. “Rest. Let’s get you better, and then we’ll figure out what’s going on.”

“You don’t believe me,” he said flatly.

“I don’t know what to believe,” she returned on a pained whisper.

But it wasn’t him. Never him.

Chapter Four

“There’s evidence of tampering.”

Gracie looked up at Laurel, who stood in the waiting room at the hospital, dressed in her detective khakis and county sheriff’s department polo, looking serious and stern.

Believe me now? Will’s words kept looping around in her head whether she was dozing or awake while she waited to hear the extent of Will’s injuries. Which they wouldn’t tell her because she was no one to Will.

“Can you find out how he’s doing?”

Laurel smiled thinly. “You know I can’t. They’re not going to tell you anything, either. Why don’t you go home? Get some rest. Come back later.”

Gracie shook her head, linking her hands in an effort to keep her composure. If she dug her fingernails into the tops of her hands she could focus on the pinch instead of the guilt swamping her.

She’d been this close to deleting his message unheard, and she just... He would have died. He would have died. He’d be dead if she had done that. “What kind of tampering was it?”

“You know I can’t tell you that, either.” Laurel was firm, but apologetic. If Gracie didn’t know Laurel as well as she did she might have tried to beg, wheedle or manipulate, but Laurel wouldn’t budge. She took her badge more seriously than she took just about everything.

“He’s in danger,” Gracie said flatly.

“I think that’s a safe assumption.”

Gracie met Laurel’s gaze. “You know what this means.”

Laurel sighed. “Not necessarily. If it has something to do with Paula Cooper’s crash... It’s been years. There was no tampering done to her car back then. There’s no evidence this connects at all.”

“Yet.”

Laurel sighed again and slid into the seat next to Gracie. “I’m going to look into it. If I find a link, I’ll investigate it, but you both need to understand this is for the police to figure out.”

Gracie knew Laurel was right, but she also knew Will had come to Rightful Claim, told her he’d figured out a pattern and then his car had been tampered with. Those couldn’t be coincidences.

Laurel would be thorough, Gracie had no doubt. Even if Laurel wasn’t getting married to a Carson, Gracie knew her cousin too well to ever think she’d not follow a lead just because the deceased was a Carson. If there was some connection, Laurel would find it.

Eventually. But Will was in a hospital room with who knew what kind of injuries and Gracie knew she didn’t have time for eventually.

“Gracie.” Laurel’s voice took on a sterner tone. “Promise me you two will let the police handle this.”

Gracie didn’t want to lie to her cousin, but she also didn’t know how she could possibly agree.

“Ms. Delaney?”

Both her and Laurel turned to the nurse, who smiled kindly. Melina knew both of them because their work often brought them to the hospital and since Melina had been Gracie’s babysitter once upon a time. “Not you, Deputy. Gracie, Mr. Cooper is able to see visitors now, and he’s asked for you, if you’d like to go back.”

Gracie hopped to her feet, but so did Laurel.

“I’ll need to speak with Mr. Cooper.”

Melina nodded. “That’ll be fine, but he specifically asked for Gracie. Room 203.”

Laurel started striding that way, but Gracie hurried in front of her. “Laurel, listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

“I’m here in a professional capacity.”

“Please, let me go alone.”

“Gracie.”

“Please, just... Just give me a few minutes alone. I’m not asking you not to question him, I’m just asking that you let me... Look...” She swallowed at the emotion clogging her throat. “Maybe you don’t understand why, but I feel responsible. At least partially. If I’d handled this even remotely differently—”

“You don’t know what would have happened.”

“Maybe not, but... As my best friend and my cousin and just the best human being I know, please give me five minutes alone with him. Personal minutes.”

Laurel sighed heavily. “Five minutes. And I’m right outside the door.”

Gracie gave Laurel an impulsive hug. “Thank you.” Five minutes wasn’t enough really. She’d probably cry when she saw him again. After all, she’d cried in that ambulance. Hopefully Will didn’t remember that.

Still, she’d need those few minutes to try to work through all this...stuff. Guilt. Worry. The desperate need to fix what she’d almost irreparably broken.

She and Laurel walked silently to the room number Melina had given them. Laurel gave a little nod and leaned against the wall next to the door. She glanced at her watch meaningfully.

Five minutes. Gracie blew out a breath and knocked on the door before pushing the door open. It was a small room, but the blinds were open to the bright sunshine outside.

Will sat in his bed and slowly turned to look at her as she closed the door behind her. One arm was in a cast, and his face was a maze of bandages. There was a hospital sheet over the bottom half of his body so she couldn’t see what kind of damage had been done down there.