The Hopechest Bride

That was how Josh saw it, and he had reason to believe he was right. He had the letters Toby had sent him, letters full of the beautiful Emma Logan, how much Toby admired her, loved her, damn near worshipped her.

Emma Logan. Emily Colton. One and the same woman, the woman who had come to Keyhole, Wyoming, hiding her identity, hiding her reasons for being there.

Josh remembered Toby’s first mention of Emma Logan, how he had checked her out in his capacity as sheriff, because her physical description had closely matched that of a female connected to a car-theft ring operating in Keyhole. How Toby had berated himself in the letter that had followed, explaining to his brother that he’d been wrong about Emma, that the beautiful young woman had come to town to try to forget losing her fiancé in a traffic accident, to try to rebuild her life.

Toby had thought he was just the man to help her do exactly that, and Josh had laughed over his brother’s letters after that, as Toby had told him of his visits to Emma’s cottage, the mega-cups of coffee he drank at the local café where she worked, just so he could be near her. He spoke of her sweet and dimpled smile, her thick mane of long, chestnut-red hair, the graceful way she moved, the softness of her large blue eyes.

Toby had fallen, fallen hard.

And all that time, Emma Logan had been lying to Toby. Emily Colton had been using Toby. Using him so that she’d feel safe, knowing that she’d come to Keyhole, not to get on with her life, but to hide from whoever it was she believed was trying to kill her. All of that, and more, Josh had learned from Toby’s enraged fellow officers in Keyhole when he’d come from Denver to bury his brother.

If she’d told Toby, alerted him to the danger, then maybe Toby would still be alive.

But she hadn’t told him, and Toby had died not knowing why, and probably still believing Emma Logan might have one day loved him. He’d died, alone on the cold floor of a motel cottage, and she hadn’t even stuck around to explain. She’d just left him there as he lay bleeding to death, and she’d run, run back to her cushy family and her money and her life.

Bitch. Cold, heartless, conniving bitch.

Josh pulled on the reins, turning his mount, heading back the way he’d come, back to the nearby ranch where he’d taken a temporary job, just so that he could be near the Hacienda de Alegria, just so he could be near Emily Colton. One day meet Emily Colton. One day tell Emily Colton exactly what he thought of her.

Then maybe he could finally learn to deal with his own guilt.

Two

Meredith Colton shivered in her tan wool cape that still carried the cloying, slightly sickening smell of Patsy’s dramatic perfume. The perfume was a reminder, as all the clothes in her closet were reminders, that her sister had lived in her house, lived her life, for the past ten years.

She needed to go to town, to shop, to supplement the few items of clothing she’d brought with her from Mississippi. But the furor over Patsy’s treachery and Meredith’s return to Prosperino had yet to completely dissipate, and Meredith wasn’t certain she was strong enough yet to face down the world for the sake of something as mundane as a wardrobe.

So she stuck with her own clothing, was grateful for the pairs of jeans and cotton sweaters her daughter Sophie had given her, and tried to concentrate on the good things. The many, many good things that had happened since her return to Hacienda de Alegria.

She had grandbabies. Wasn’t that amazing? She and Joe were grandparents, several times over. There had been deaths in the time she was gone, but there had also been births, and marriages. The children she had borne, and the children of her heart, had grown, matured, and she was so proud of them all she could just burst.

And Joe. Her dearest, beloved Joe. The man in her dreams, the faceless man who had sustained her, haunted her.

Seeing him again, having him hold her once more, was worth any pain, any sacrifice. Having him near, having his love, had done more to heal her aching heart than anything else.

But nothing could keep her from worrying about Emily, her little Sparrow. It had been Emily who had paid the dearest price, spending years feeling as if her mother had rejected her, having her life threatened. And now, now that it was all over, when Emily should be happy, the child was burdened with the belief that she had cost a good man his life.

Joe said that it probably would be best if Emily never learned that Patsy, in her confession, had told the police she’d ordered the hit-and-run murder of Nora Hickman because she’d overheard Emily and Nora talking about “the two mommies” and worried that Emily had found an ally who might help uncover Patsy’s deception.

The records of Patsy’s confession were sealed, so Emily would never have to know if no one told her, and Meredith agreed that Emily had enough guilt hanging from her slim shoulders without knowing about Nora.

Yes, Patsy’s confession was sealed, and Patsy was, even now, very tightly locked up in an institution for the criminally insane, just as she had been so many years previously, after murdering the father of her firstborn child.

Patsy had been very tightly locked up then, and had gotten out, gotten out to wreak her havoc on the Colton family. Was she locked up tightly enough this time? It was a question Meredith had to ask herself, even as she shivered in the chill, walking through her sad and neglected gardens as twilight fell on a damp, rainy day.

In exchange for telling her story, Joe had agreed to keep Joe, Jr. and Teddy, raise them as his own. They now knew that Joe, Jr. was also Patsy’s biological child. They also knew that Patsy had been still actively seeking the infant taken from her at birth so many years ago.

Patsy had fixated on her children, when she hadn’t fixated on hurting Meredith, taking her place, stealing her life. And it was her children that had prompted Patsy to cooperate. Joe was even continuing the hunt for Patsy’s first child, futile as that might be.

So Patsy was locked up, Meredith was home, and it was time to put the past in the past, get on with the future.

Did Meredith feel safe yet? No. No, she didn’t, she couldn’t. She had yet to feel quite whole, as there were still some gaps in her memory, and she’d gotten one new shock after another as her family gathered around her—still the same family, yet so different.

Her children weren’t children anymore. They had husbands, wives, children of their own. Lives of their own.

And Joe. The years had not been kind to him; Patsy had not been kind to him. Meredith would give her last breath to see the taut lines around his mouth fade into a smile, her hope of heaven to have him lie quietly beside her in sleep, rather than tossing and turning, obviously in the grip of a nightmare.

Time. That was what they needed. Just some time. Wasn’t that what Martha Wilkes had told her? Time to heal, time to forgive.

Of all of those hurt by Patsy, Meredith’s heart most went out to Joe, Jr. and Teddy. If nothing else, Patsy had been a good if too indulgent mother to her two boys, and they both missed her terribly, were too young to understand that there was a new mommy in their lives now, a new mommy who looked like their old mommy, yet wasn’t the same.

When Joe had told Meredith about Joe, Jr. and Teddy, she had wept, partly for the boys, partly for her husband. How he must have suffered when Patsy told him she was pregnant with Teddy, when he knew he couldn’t be the father. Yet he had loved “Meredith” enough to forgive her affair, had been man enough to claim Teddy as his own, never knowing that he’d once more been the victim of her sister’s deception.

And Joe, Jr. Patsy had admitted that he was hers, the product of a casual liaison with some unknown man. She’d admitted that she’d left Joe, Jr. on the Colton doorstep, knowing he’d be taken in, knowing she planned to join him in a few short weeks. The deviousness of the woman, the near-brilliant manic imagination of the woman.

In exchange for Meredith and Joe continuing to raise the boys as their own and hunting for the baby she had named Jewel, Patsy had talked for hours, for days, outlining her deception, filling in blanks with a sort of fierce pride that just emphasized her mental illness.

She’d tried to poison Joe the night of his sixtieth birthday, had hinted that there had been other plans for other attempts on his life. That had been a shock, a very big shock. She’d laughed as she admitted to being surprised to learn that she wasn’t the only one who wished Joe dead, that Emmett Fallon had also been trying to kill the man.

But her most particular glee had come in exposing Joe’s brother, Graham, as the father of her son, Teddy. She’d even admitted to blackmailing Graham in order to keep her silence.

Poor Joe. Poor, deluded, betrayed Joe. He hadn’t wanted to tell Meredith about Graham, but after one horrible nightmare from which she’d had to wake him, he’d finally blurted it all out. He told her that Rand knew, and he knew, but nobody else knew, and Meredith urged him to keep silent, for Teddy’s sake, at least for now. She didn’t know if this was the right or wrong thing to do, whether it was fair to Graham’s other children, Jackson and Liza, but she did know that Joe, Jr. and Teddy were Coltons by name, and Portmans by birth. She would raise both boys as if they were her own, and with no regrets.

Meredith stopped in front of the fountain, the one that had haunted her dreams and begun her long road back from the amnesia that had plagued her since the accident Patsy had engineered so many years ago. She put out a hand, catching the cool water as it ran over the rim, listening to the gentle sound of it.

“It’s a lot bigger than the fountain back in Mississippi,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere behind her, “but I think we could have put it together the way we built that one, given enough time and a few margaritas. Hello, Meredith. Your husband thought maybe I ought to visit here for a while, if that’s all right with you?”

“Martha!” Meredith wheeled around to see Dr. Martha Wilkes standing on the patio, shivering in her thin coat not made for a raw November California day. The psychologist was smiling, her dark face lit with humor even as her brown eyes measured Meredith, her patient of five years.

Joe had invited her? What a wonderful man! Just what she needed, to talk with Martha, the one person who understood everything, the one person who wouldn’t demand answers because she knew, she knew it all. The one person Meredith could talk to without reserve, without worrying that she might say something hurtful, might have forgotten something important to the other person. The one woman who might be able to help Emily. Meredith’s heart swelled with hope.

“Well?” Dr. Wilkes asked with a smile. “It’s been a long trip, Meredith. Is that all you’re going to say? ‘Martha?’”

Meredith launched herself into her friend’s arms. “Oh, my God—Martha!”

Emily knew more than her parents thought she knew. She’d gone to Rand when she learned that Patsy Portman had made a full confession, and she’d railed at him, pleaded with him, until she’d learned everything, including the knowledge that her conversation with Nora Hickman had directly led to that good woman’s death. Well, Rand hadn’t exactly told her; she’d guessed most of it. It had been easy to think badly of herself, blame herself for anyone’s misfortunes.

She also knew now that Silas Pike had followed her when she’d fled the Hacienda de Alegria, and had found her in Keyhole, helped by Patsy’s description of her unique, long chestnut-red hair.

The hair Toby had so admired. The hair that had been her vanity, so that she hadn’t cut it, hadn’t worn a wig, hadn’t disguised herself. She’d been so sure she was safe. She should have cut her hair. Dyed it. Done something.

The guilt she felt was crushing, debilitating. And never-ending.

Emily admired her mother’s courage, the woman’s ability to look for happiness where she could, embrace the family that had not seen through Patsy’s deception for ten long years. She was amazed as she watched her mother slide almost effortlessly back into the ebb and flow of daily life at the ranch, her smile always bright even if her eyes were sometimes sad and wistful, her strength of will so obvious to anyone who looked.

Emily envied her mother’s courage as well, because she had none of her own. She used to, she was sure of that, but she still had horrifying nightmares about Silas Pike, nightmares where he walked toward her with his curious limping gait, his eyes cold and hard, his Fu-Manchu mustache not quite hiding the leer of his smiling mouth and the large gap between his two front teeth. He walked toward her relentlessly, a gun in his hand, saying, “Well, if it isn’t little Emily Blair…or would you rather I call you Emma Logan?”

She felt stripped naked, not just to her real name, but to her fears, the fears that had followed her ever since the night she’d first seen the outline of a man in her bedroom and known that he’d come to kill her.

But that lingering fear was nothing compared to the guilt. Toby had trusted her, Toby had loved her, and yet she hadn’t trusted him enough to confide in him, leaving him unprepared to enter her motel cottage and come face-to-face with Silas Pike and his cocked pistol.

So much guilt. Because she hadn’t told him. Because she hadn’t loved him.

Emily dug the toe of her ancient cowboy boot into the dirt as she stood alongside the corral fence, wishing she could find the shutoff switch to her brain, locate the erase button to the tape that rewound and rewound inside her head, day and night, night and day.

She was supposed to talk to Dr. Wilkes later today, and had promised her mother that she would, but she knew it would be a fruitless exercise. Nobody else could erase that tape for her; she was going to have to live with what she’d done, what she hadn’t done.

She was glad Dr. Wilkes could be so helpful to her mother, but her mother had been a victim, and she had no guilt. Emily knew she herself had not been a victim. She’d been proactive all her life, always stating her case firmly if not believably, and then protecting herself as best she could, fighting her own battles.

Right up until the moment Toby Atkins had stepped in to fight her largest battle for her, and died saving her stupid, stubborn life.

Emily turned away from the fence rail, knowing she’d left it too late to take a ride, try to clear her head at least for a little while, and bumped smack into a tall, hard body that blocked her way.

“Emily Colton?” the man asked as she looked up into Toby Atkins’s blue eyes.

She blinked, swallowed, stepped back a pace. “Who—who are you?”

“The name’s Atkins,” he told her, his eyelids narrowing around Toby’s blue eyes— No, not Toby’s eyes; Toby’s eyes smiled. “Josh Atkins. Ring any bells?”

Emily took yet another step backward, her spine colliding with the rail fence. She’d run out of room, had nowhere to run, no place to hide. “Josh…Josh Atkins? Toby’s brother?”

No wonder she’d seen Toby in his eyes. But that was all of Toby that could be seen in this lean, hard-eyed man. He wore a huge, sweat-stained Stetson with the front brim folded up on both sides, as if he often rolled the brim between his hands when the hat wasn’t shoved down hard on his head. Instead of a sheriff’s uniform, like his brother’s, he wore heeled cowboy boots, dusty stovepipe-legged jeans that fit like a second skin, a sky-blue cotton shirt and a brown leather vest that skimmed his belt buckle.

If he’d had a six-gun strapped to his thigh, she wouldn’t have thought it seemed out of place, as he had the look of a real, old-time cowboy about him, a cowboy about to face off in the middle of a dusty street, guns blazing.

His face was lean, too, darkened by the sun, his nose straight, lines carved into his cheeks and forehead, deep lines radiating from the outside corners of his eyes. His mouth was a wide, unsmiling slash over barely exposed, bright white teeth. A hard yet handsome face. An unforgiving face.

And he hated her, hated the ground she stood on. Nothing could be more obvious.

“How…how did you get in here?” Emily asked when she could find her voice, although she hadn’t found much of it because the question came out in a sort of squeak. “The main gates are still guarded.”

“Not to a cowboy delivering a mare for stud,” he told her, tipping back the curled brim of his hat with one leather-gloved hand. “I’m working at the Rollins ranch a couple of miles from here.”

“Oh,” Emily said, swallowing hard once again. “I—I didn’t know. Toby told me you ride the rodeo circuit.”

“I do, but when the season’s over I hire myself out to ranchers. Toby probably told you that, too.”

Emily nodded, looking away from those hard, hard eyes, that unyielding mouth. “Yes. I think he did. But you worked ranches in Wyoming.”

“No reason for me to be in Wyoming anymore, is there, Miss Colton? No reason at all.”

Emily pressed both hands to her cheeks. “Oh, God.” She sighed, tried to marshal her nerves, dropped her hands to her sides once more. “I should have tried to contact you, shouldn’t I? I mean, you have a right to know what happened that night. Toby…Toby saved my life.”

“Yeah, so I’m told. And to reward him for that service, you left him bleeding on the floor and took off. Left him alone to die. You have a strange way of saying thank you, Miss Colton. Well, that’s enough for now, isn’t it? I’ll be seeing you again. Again and again. You can sort of consider me your conscience, Miss Colton. Your guilty conscience.”

“No!” Emily yelled at his back, for Josh Atkins had turned on his heels and was already climbing into the truck with Rollins Ranch painted on the door of the cab. “No, it wasn’t like that! I didn’t— Oh, God,” she ended, all but collapsing against the fence rails as the truck drove out of the stable yard, toward the main gate. She hugged herself as she watched the truck drive away, tears running down her face. “It wasn’t like that…it wasn’t like that.”

Josh pulled to the side of the road about a mile from the Colton ranch and cut the engine, pounded his gloved fists against the steering wheel.

“Damn,” he said once, then twice, then over and over for as long as his breath held out. “Damn, damn, damn!”

Well, wasn’t he the hero? He ought to get out of the truck, see if he could round up a couple of fuzzy bunnies, then stomp on them. Pull the wings off a few butterflies, drive to town and grab a lollipop out of the mouth of some defenseless baby.

Had he ever seen such hurt in anyone’s eyes? Even before he’d said a word, opened his dumb mouth, he’d seen the despair in the way she’d stood at the fence, the defeat in her posture, the weight of the world dragging at her slim shoulders. He’d seen injured animals, plenty of them, and could almost smell them, smell the fear. Emily Colton had been drenched in fear and hopelessness, even before he’d stepped up behind her and made his presence known.

So then he’d kicked her. Hey, she was already down—so why not? She deserved it, didn’t she?

“Oh, God,” Josh breathed, shaking his head. “I must be losing whatever’s left of my mind.”

He lay his head back against the headrest, closed his eyes and saw Emily Colton’s face. She was just as Toby had described her a million times in his letters. Small, but not too small, with good shoulders for a woman, and straight long legs that looked damn good in jeans.

She’d had on a denim jacket lined with sheepskin, the hem of the jacket just nipping at the top of her small waist, giving her an air of fragility belied by her clothes.

But it was her face that gave away the whole game, even as he’d refused to see what was there. Those sad blue eyes, that flawless yet too-pale skin, the way she sort of hunched her shoulders protectively, as if prepared for life to give her a punishing whack—another whack, because she’d already had a few, hadn’t she?

And that hair. God, how Toby had all but waxed poetic about that thick mane of chestnut hair. Toby had once had a chestnut mare just about that same color. He wondered if Toby had made the connection, and doubted it. Emily Colton was one hell of a cut above a rangy old mare that was all Josh could afford to buy his baby brother for his fifteenth birthday.

So, okay. So she was pretty. Beautiful. As beautiful as Toby had said in his letters. And she was hurting. Was she hurting about Toby? Josh wondered….

“It doesn’t matter, damn it! She killed him,” he said, sitting up once more, reaching for the key still in the ignition. “She killed him as much as if she put the bullet in his chest herself. And I’m not going to let little Miss Blue Eyes forget that. Not for a very, very long time.”

Three

Meggie James had all the fair-haired beauty of her mother and the never-say-die determination of her father. At the moment, that determination was directed at trying to pull herself up on the coffee table so that she could get her chubby hands on her mother’s teacup.

“No way, sweetheart,” Sophie Colton James scolded with a smile, redirecting her daughter by holding out a teething ring River’s Native American grandmother had fashioned out of thin strips of rawhide.

“Can you believe how much she loves this thing?” Sophie asked Emily, who was holding her own teacup out of the baby’s reach. “I’ve threatened to start calling her Fido, but River just laughs and says his grandmother raised a lot of kids and knows what she’s doing. I suppose so,” she ended, grinning down at Meggie, who had just learned how to lower herself to her plump bottom and was now chewing on the teething ring for all she was worth.

Emily watched as Meggie actually cooed at the rawhide circle, then stuck it in her mouth once more. “It is ugly, isn’t it? I know Mom told me about the thing when Maya’s little Marissa was at the ranch the other day, just about gnawing on Mom’s shoulder because she’s cutting another tooth. In fact, I think Mom said she wishes she’d had a gross of the things when we were growing up,” Emily said, grinning down at the contented baby who was happily drooling all over her pretty pink coveralls. “Of course, she also said she’d often thought about keeping us all on stout leashes, but I think she might have been kidding about that one.”

“Mom’s great, isn’t she? She’s back in stride, handing out love and advice, just as if she’d never been…well, never been away,” Sophie said, lifting her teacup. “I can’t tell you how happy we are that Meggie’s finally learned how to get back down once she’s pulled herself up. I think Riv and I slept about three minutes all last week, always having to go into her bedroom and lay her back down in her crib. But when I told Mom about it, she said to put the pillows over our heads and let Meggie cry, because eventually she’d let go and figure out that she can get back down all by herself. To hear Mom tell it, we weren’t doing Meggie or ourselves any favors by constantly running to her.”

“Did you let her cry?” Emily asked, reaching for a homemade cookie Maya’s mother, Inez, had baked only that morning and asked her to take with her to Sophie’s house.

Sophie winced. “Not for the first night after Mom’s advice. We just couldn’t do it. I kept thinking she’d fall, hit her head, all that good stuff you swear you’ll never think about, but that you think about all the time once you have babies of your own. But the second night Riv made me watch the clock for ten minutes, and only go to her then—or if we heard a bang,” she added, shaking her head. “Seven minutes later, everything was quiet. Riv waited a few minutes more, then sneaked into her room and there she was, sound asleep on her belly, with her rump stuck up in the air. We haven’t had a problem since.”

“Moms and grandmothers,” Emily said, sighing. “They give good advice, don’t they? Or they think they do.”

“Oh, now that sounds ominous,” Sophie said, picking up Meggie, who had begun rubbing her eyes. “Let me put this one down for her nap, and I’ll be right back. Because being Inez’s cookie delivery person wasn’t the only reason you rode over here this morning, was it?”