we get our answers. All the answers,” Joe said, taking a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “It’s enough. It’s got to be enough.”
Josh Atkins shifted his body slightly in the saddle and looked across the distance, toward the outbuildings, the red tile roof of the Hacienda de Alegria.
Must be nice, living in a place like this. Safe, protected. Money coming out your ears.
Money to buy safety, to buy silence. Money enough to sweep all the nastiness under a hand-braided rug and forget about it, go on your merry way, get on with your life. Laugh, dance, sing. Eat good food, sleep in a warm bed.
While Toby lay in his cold grave. Forgotten in his cold grave.
Josh tipped back his Stetson, exposing his thick, unruly brown hair, the piercing blue eyes that narrowed toward the rapidly setting sun. His skin was deeply tanned, with sharp lines around his eyes from a lifetime spent squinting into that sun, riding the range in between stints on the rodeo circuit. Slashing lines bracketed his mouth, grown deeper, harder, since the news had come to him about Toby just as he was up for a big ride in Denver.
Josh’s body was whipcord lean, taut, and solid muscle. Taller than Toby, older than Toby by four years, definitely less handsome than Toby, whose boyish good looks had mirrored a pure and caring soul.
There was nothing pure or caring or good in Josh’s soul as he glared toward the Hacienda de Alegria. There was only hate, a deep and abiding hatred he’d fed with newspaper articles about the grand and glorious Coltons, a hate he nurtured every time he looked at photographs of his brother. His laughing, loving brother who had died because Emily Colton had tricked him into thinking she loved him.
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,
