Rustler's Moon

On a dirt road marked by haunting secrets, three strangers caught at life’s crossroads must decide what to sacrifice to protect their own agendas…and what they’re each willing to risk for love.

If there’s any place that can convince Angela Harold to stop running, it’s Ransom Canyon. And if there’s any man who can reveal desires more deeply hidden than her every fear, it’s Wilkes Wagner. Beneath the rancher’s honorable exterior is something that just might keep her safe...or unwittingly put her in danger’s path.

With his dreams of leaving this small Texas town swallowed up by hard, dusty reality, all Wilkes has to show for his life is the Devil’s Fork Ranch. Though not one to let false hope seduce him, he can’t deny the quiet and cautious beauty who slips into his world and changes everything.

Lauren Brigman finally has freedom at her fingertips. All she needs is Lucas Reyes’s attention—a look, a touch, some sign that she’s more to him than a girl he rescued one dangerous night. But now it’s her turn to rescue someone, and the life-altering decision may cost her more than a chance with Lucas.

Praise for Jodi Thomas

“Jodi Thomas is a masterful storyteller. She grabs your attention on the first page, captures your heart, and then makes you sad when it’s time to bid her wonderful characters farewell. You can count on Jodi Thomas to give you a satisfying and memorable read.”

—Catherine Anderson, New York Times bestselling author

“Thomas sketches a slow, sweet surrender.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Compelling and beautifully written, it is exactly the kind of heart-wrenching, emotional story one has come to expect from Jodi Thomas.”

—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Tender, realistic, and insightful.”

—Library Journal

“Once I started [Ransom Canyon], I quickly found myself unable to put down this book.”

—Night Owl Reviews

“This book is like once again visiting old friends while making new ones and will leave readers eager for the next visit. A pure joy to read.”

—RT Book Reviews

“This is terrific reading from page one to the end. Jodi Thomas is a passionate writer who puts real feelings into her characters.”

—Fresh Fiction

Rustler’s Moon

Jodi Thomas

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Extract

Copyright

PROLOGUE

Anna Marie Island, Florida

September

ANGELA HAROLD SAT in her father’s cluttered office, still wearing the black dress she’d worn to his funeral. She stared at the framed picture on his desk. The one she’d given him when she was seven. Their first fishing trip. He was smiling, the sun shining off his glasses. She stood by his side holding up a fish half her length.

A memory saved forever in the heart. For Angela, this one photo had come to signify the time before the fall. Before Florida. Before her mother’s illness. Before her father started withering inside. Before she’d felt trapped in her life.

Only now the bars that held her here were crumbling like columns of sugar in the rain. She should feel free, but all Angela felt was fear. A trapped bird staring at an open cage door. Afraid to fly. Afraid to stay.

The police had explained to her the night they’d found his body that he’d been mugged as he left his office. Neither the blows he’d suffered nor the gash on his head when he’d fallen had killed him. But his heart hadn’t been strong enough to survive the attack. Benjamin Harold’s heart may have stopped three days ago, but he’d stopped living years ago, one unfulfilled dream at a time.

“Who robs the bookkeeper on a Sunday night?” Angela whispered to the smiling man in the picture. The antiques store had been closed that day. Her father had said he was going in to straighten out the books. Whoever attacked him couldn’t have gotten more than a few hundred dollars from his wallet. They couldn’t have known about his weak heart.

Out of curiosity, she flipped open her father’s ledger book. He’d kept the books for his brother’s business since they first moved to Florida when she was seven. Her uncle Anthony owned the multimillion-dollar antiques business and he trusted no one with the books but her father. After all, Anthony might be the head of the company, but his brother had loaned him the money to get started. The last entry was a transfer from the store’s account to a numbered bank account.

She stared at the logbook and recalled the family story. Her father had loaned his younger brother, Anthony, fifty thousand dollars and the priceless necklace that was his inheritance for display once the store was built. The necklace was an heirloom and had been in the family for generations: an ancient Greek coin set in a cradle of gold and diamonds. Her grandparents’ will had stipulated the necklace go to the oldest son and never be sold off for profit.

In those early days, it was the one draw to an antiques store full of otherwise questionable treasures.

In exchange for the loan and letting the store display the necklace, Anthony agreed that her father would always be the bookkeeper. He’d have a job as long as he lived. Her father, who’d lost half a dozen jobs in his thirties and been injured at his last employment site, saw the offer as too good to turn down, even though he and Anthony had never been close.

Only, her father had grown tired of his brother’s questionable practices, even though the company flourished, opening stores all along the East Coast. Her father wanted no part of the profits and took only his salary as Uncle Anthony grew rich selling early colonial antiques that came on a boat from China.

Angela knew her father would have quit years ago if her mother hadn’t been ill. A slow-moving cancer had eaten away at her body. At first they fought with operations and treatments between short periods of remission, until she was finally too weak to fight any more. Angela stayed with her, missing proms and dating and sleepovers through her teen years.

For a few hours each day, the tiny office became her father’s refuge from the constant reality of his wife’s illness. Once out of college, Angela got a job at a local museum and moved in with her parents to help. By then, her mother needed constant care and Angela and her father managed the night shift.

When her mother passed peacefully in her sleep at home, Angela felt as if she lost her father, too. Within weeks, he was working six, sometimes seven, days a week in his office, usually late into the night. At first, she’d thought he was simply catching up, but finally she understood he was hiding away, living a little less each day.

“Something’s not right,” he’d sometimes mutter when he came home late. He mentioned more than once his concern over the company’s accounting.

She asked if he’d talked to Anthony about it and her father had simply smiled and told her not to worry, that his brother didn’t want to hear about problems.

Angela picked up the fishing picture as his worry over the accounts seemed to echo in her memory. She wished she could have helped him. “I love you, Dad,” she whispered to his picture.

Absently, she flipped over the frame to see if the note she had put in the back saying how she loved him to the moon and back was still there.

She opened the frame and a small piece of paper fell out. She recognized her writing and the hearts drawn all around the edges.

Smiling, she pulled it out and noticed, in deep pen marks, someone had scribbled something on the back of her note. The note was addressed “To my Angel” and dated three days ago. The day he died.

“You have to get away from here,” the note read. Three words were printed in all capitals. “RUN DISAPPEAR VANISH. Your life depends on it. Trust no...”

He hadn’t finished. Something must have stopped him. Maybe a noise in the alley that interrupted his thoughts. She imagined him hastily returning the unfinished note to the frame, then going to investigate.

For a while she looked from the picture to the note, to the ledger. Florida was her home. Why would he tell her to run?

He must have known he was in danger. The police said the phone line to his office had been cut, but the muggers couldn’t have known he’d left his cell at home that night, as usual. And even if he knew he was in danger, why would he tell her to run or disappear?

A chill slid along her spine. Her father had hidden the note. He’d been afraid someone would find it. Someone besides her.

Bits of conversation they’d had over the past few weeks circled in her mind. He’d suggested she apply for a curator job in Texas he’d seen online, even posted the job opening on the note board in the kitchen to remind her. He’d told her it would be good to get away. He’d brought home a little trailer he’d picked up at a yard sale and tucked it away in a garage full of other useless junk. He’d transferred all his stocks to her name, claiming he no longer had time to keep up with them.

Maybe he never guessed he would be mugged, but suspected his heart might give out. Or had he feared violence might be coming his direction? Now, looking back, she wondered if he had wanted her to leave Florida so he could do the same. But why? He had a job for life. Even if Uncle Anthony was shady in his dealings, Benjamin would never have turned in his own brother.

She’d thought all his changes were part of the grieving for her mother, but now she reconsidered. Her forever-organized father must have had a plan, but what?

Slowly, she saw the answer. Not in the picture, or the note he’d written, but in the ledger. The numbered account where he’d transferred the money was hers, and the amount was exactly what he’d loaned his brother years ago. He didn’t even calculate the interest he was entitled to.

Her father might not have ever been able to leave Florida, but he was telling her to and making sure she had the funds to do it.

No, not telling, demanding. Even from the grave.

Angela stood, put the note back behind the picture, stuffed the frame and the ledger into her purse, and walked out of her father’s office.

How could she disappear? Everyone she knew lived in Florida, which admittedly wasn’t too many. She’d had a few jobs in college, but she’d always worked alone in the back of a museum. She had no real friends she could call on, and all the family she had left belonged to her uncle Anthony. Even at the funeral they’d treated her as if they thought she might try to claim part of the Harold Antiques Company now that her father was dead.

She needed answers and couldn’t think of leaving before she had them. Tomorrow she’d begin. She might be a mouse of a warrior, but at dawn she’d begin her quest. Once she had answers to why her father had left such a strange note, she’d take his advice. She’d vanish. There was nothing left for her here. Her relatives wouldn’t miss her. Her job had dwindled to part-time. She hadn’t had the time to develop even one friendship since she’d returned from college.

As she crawled into bed in the tiny room that had been hers most of her life, she didn’t stop the tears. She could almost see her father standing in the doorway whispering to her. “Good night, dear one. May the angels watch over you this night.”

He may never have talked to her about anything more serious than what they planned to have for dinner, but she never doubted his love. Even the day he died, he’d been thinking of her.

“Good night,” she whispered as if his shadow were still lingering in the doorway.

* * *

A LITTLE AFTER SUNRISE, Angela emerged from her room. As she entered the kitchen of her parents’ beach house, she found her aunt sitting at the dining table as if waiting for her to join her. A half-empty cup of coffee was near her elbow. She’d opened three days’ worth of mail and scattered it across the table like trash.

Crystal Harold was Uncle Anthony’s third wife, so Angela thought of her as her aunt-trice-removed. Never helpful. Never friendly. Never caring. If Crystal was on Anna Marie Island, it was because Uncle Anthony had sent her.

Of course she had a key, even though she rarely visited. The house and the car her father drove were all part of Harold Antiques’ holdings. Just one more way Anthony kept her father tied to the business.

“Where have you been, dear?” her aunt said in her cold voice. “I thought you’d come straight home after the funeral yesterday. I waited here until after dark.”

“I just drove around,” Angela said carefully, remembering the note. Trust no one.

“Well, I came by to tell you that you can stay here as long as you like. The house belongs to the company, as does most of the furniture, but your uncle and I want you to know that no matter what you are still family. Of course, after a month you’ll need to start paying rent and your father’s car has already been picked up. I’m sure with your degree in museum studies you’ll find work somewhere. Maybe not at a museum like you planned...” She looked Angela up and down and added, “Although running a museum gift shop would suit you. Those kind of people wouldn’t care about how you dress or that you’re shy as a crab. Museum-goers probably expect the staff in those places to be a little quirky or odd.”

Crystal’s dragon fingernails tapped against her cup. “I never have seen the point of museums or art galleries for that matter. Who wants to look at something you can’t buy? Anthony must have told your father a dozen times to make you get a degree you could use, like accounting. Then you could step into your father’s role with us.” She made a sound as if half coughing to disguise a laugh. “Well, not today. Someone broke the windows to the accounting office early this morning. Wet papers scattered everywhere. If I believed in ghosts, I might think your father went back one more time.”

Angela shook her head. She didn’t believe in ghosts and even if she had, Angela guessed the last place her father would return to would be the office.

“You could get married, Angela.” Crystal’s mind bounced again. “You’re pretty enough in a plain kind of way.”

“Gee, thanks,” Angela managed, already knowing that she didn’t fit Crystal’s ideal look for marriage material—tall, tan and blonde. Her aunt had even mentioned once that she should consider cutting her strawberry-colored curly hair and wearing a wig. She’d bought Angela a year’s worth of spray tans saying that “any little bit might help.”

Crystal had always behaved as though she felt sorry for her. “It’s not your fault, Angela. Not everyone can be blessed with beauty. You’re smart, though. There’s bound to be one man in Florida into that kind of thing.” Crystal downed the rest of her coffee as if waiting to be thanked.

“I need to be alone if you don’t mind.” Angela wasn’t really up for a makeover right now. “My world seems to be spinning.”

“Of course, dear.” Her aunt breezed by without offering any comfort. “We’ll talk in a few days.” Angela noticed her parents’ cat rubbing against Crystal’s black pant leg.

Her aunt quickly stepped away and glared down at it. “Now that your parents are gone, you’ll be getting rid of that ugly cat, I assume. I told your father that the thing could damage the furniture, but he didn’t seem to care.”

“Of course,” Angela answered. “I’ll pack Doc Holliday off to the pound tomorrow.”

Her aunt nodded once as if having won the first of many arguments. “Dumb name for a cat, Angela, but then I’ve never understood your side of the Harold family. Your father and Anthony were ten years apart, but I swear it always seemed like the only thing they ever had in common was a last name.”

“It’s not a side of the family anymore. It’s me,” she said. “Just me.”

As soon as Crystal walked out, Angela closed the door on what had been her life.

It crossed her mind that Anthony and Crystal knew her father worked late at night. They’d known about his bad heart. They’d even known he never took his cell phone with him when he worked late after his wife died.

Angela shook her head. She was being ridiculous. Maybe her father had left the note simply to save her sanity, knowing Crystal and Anthony would drive her mad.

Only in hindsight, she knew she’d seen other signs of his preparing to leave. Empty boxes stacked in the pantry. A dozen hundred-dollar bills tucked in the bathroom cabinet behind her mother’s medicine bottles.

She began sorting through the mail scattered across the dining table when a map buried among the mess of papers caught her eye. A route heading west from Florida had been outlined with a red pen, and a town in West Texas circled. She understood then what her father had been planning. It was the same town that was looking to hire a curator for their local museum.

Closing her eyes, she could almost hear him talking to her. Might be just the place for you, Angie. You know how you’ve always loved Texas history. Looks like the perfect place to start over.

Clutching the map, she drove out to the cemetery. Her father’s grave still covered with flowers.

If she could talk to him one more time... If he would answer why to what he’d said and written on the note... If he’d just hold her once more so she could feel safe...

But the world was silent, making her feel more alone than she had been in her entire life. A shy girl, an only child, a solitary person who liked to work by herself. And now she was utterly and probably forever alone.

She looked down at her father’s grave. “Good night, dear one. May the angels watch over you. Goodbye, Dad.”

Walking away, she knew she’d never return to this garden of stone and dying flowers. Her father wasn’t here. He was with her mother now.

* * *

THE SUN WAS LOW when she finally drove back to her parents’ little house near the water. All the lights were on and for a second she thought her father was home.

Slowly, she walked to the front door. Maybe her aunt had come back?

Glass crunched beneath Angela’s shoes. The door’s small window had been shattered.

Her heart hammering in her chest, she pulled out her cell phone, dialed 911, then backed away to her car and locked the doors until the police arrived. Room by room they searched the small house. Drawers were open. Contents scattered on the floor. Cabinets were all swept clean, the floor a mess of broken dishes.

The search revealed nothing had been taken, not even the cash hidden in the bathroom cabinet or her laptop.

The police told her it was likely just kids, but Angela knew it was something more.

She locked the house up and tried to relax enough to sleep, but the words from the note and the events of recent days haunted her. Her father’s office vandalized...a break-in at her home, so soon after her father’s mugging...it couldn’t be a coincidence. Somehow, her father had been in danger. Angela knew then what she had to do. She had to run.

* * *

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, she made a trip to the bank and cashed out her account, bought cat food and plastic boxes. By midnight, she was packed. Her mother’s quilts, her father’s fishing equipment, her grandmother’s pots and one very ugly cat named Doc Holliday.

Run. Vanish. Disappear. The words kept beating through her brain in a steady rhythm.

She still had far more questions than answers, but the break-in had convinced her that her father was right. Something was wrong. Maybe she was letting her imagination run away with her to think that her father’s death might not have been simply a heart attack brought on by a random mugging, but she believed in her core that she was in danger, and that she had to take action.

With a letter describing a job at a small museum in Texas tucked away in her black raincoat and fifty thousand dollars in cash, Angela Harold walked away from what she’d always thought of as her home.

It was time to take her father’s advice. She would disappear.

CHAPTER ONE

Crossroads, Texas

October

Angela

DRIED WEEDS SCRATCHED against Angela Harold’s bare legs as she walked the neglected grounds behind the Ransom Canyon Museum near Crossroads, Texas. Rumbling gray clouds spotted the sky above. Wind raged as though trying to push her back to the East Coast. She decided any rain might blow all the way to Oklahoma before it could land on Texas soil. But the weather didn’t matter. She had made it here. She’d done exactly what her father told her. She’d vanished.

Angela had meant to stop long enough to clean up before she took her first look at the museum, but she could not wait. So, in sandals, shorts and a tank top, she explored the land behind the boarded-up building on the edge of Ransom Canyon.

When she’d talked to the board president, Staten Kirkland, five days ago, he’d sounded excited. They’d had to close the museum when the last curator left and in six months she’d been the only one to call about the job opening. Before the phone call ended Kirkland offered her a three-month trial if she could answer one question.

Angela thought it would be about her experience or her education, but it was pure Texas folk history.

“What or who was the Yellow Rose of Texas?” the man on the phone asked in his pure Texas twang.

She laughed. “The woman who entertained Santa Anna before the Battle of San Jacinto. The battle that won Texas independence.” She’d always loved that story, which often got left out of history books.

“We’ll be waiting for you, Mrs. Jones.”

He hung up before she had time to tell him that her name wasn’t Jones. In a moment of paranoia, she’d used a false name when she’d bought a laptop and phone. Then again on the application, figuring she’d be just one of hundreds who applied. Now, if he checked her transcripts or references, she’d have to make up another lie. That would be easier than finding some guy named Jones, marrying him and dragging him along to Texas with her.

Angela had driven a hundred miles before she decided she would tell Kirkland that she used Jones because she had been engaged but he left her at the altar. Kirkland would feel sorry for her, but that was better than killing off her imaginary husband.

She’d straighten it all out Monday. She’d even practice just how she’d say it.