must have happened in the workings of his brain, he decided. He wasn’t in the market for a woman. Especially one that would only be around for a few days and then gone.
When they reached the front door, she accompanied him onto the porch and surprised him by offering her hand. Joseph clasped his fingers around hers and marveled at the softness of her skin, the dainty fragility of the small bones.
“It’s been a pleasure, Deputy Hollister.”
A pleasure? It had been an earthquake for Joseph. As he continued to hold her hand, the tremors were still radiating all the way down to his boots.
“Uh, well...maybe we’ll see each other again before you go back to Nevada.”
She gently eased her hand from his. “Yes. Maybe.”
Well, that was that, he thought. “Goodbye, Ms. Parker.”
He left the porch and as he walked out to his vehicle, he resisted the urge to glance back. But when he eventually slid behind the steering wheel, he couldn’t help but notice she was still standing where he’d left her.
When he started the engine, she lifted her hand in farewell. The sight filled him with ridiculous pleasure and before he could turn the SUV around and drive away, his mind was already searching for a reason to see her again.
Joseph had planned to tell his family about Tessa Parker as soon as he arrived home. But he’d hardly gotten a mile away from the Bar X when he’d been called back to work to help deal with a three-vehicle accident on the highway—a result of loose cattle and drivers blinded by the sinking sun.
By the time the cattle had been rounded up and the vehicles cleared away, it had been well after midnight. When he’d finally gotten home, everyone in the house had already gone to bed.
But this morning as Joseph, and most of the family, sat around the dining table eating breakfast, he wasted no time in relaying the news. Starting with Tessa introducing herself and ending with her promise to stay until she found answers.
“Ray left his property to a complete stranger? I can’t believe it. He wasn’t the fanciful sort. In fact, he was a steadfast rock. That’s why he was sheriff of Yavapai County for twenty years. He was a man everyone could depend on. There has to be more to this situation.”
The statement came from Maureen Hollister, the matriarch of the family. Tall and slender, with dark brown hair slightly threaded with gray and a complexion wrinkled by years of working in the blazing desert sun, she was a picture of beauty and strength. And Joseph had expected his mother to react to the news in just this way.
He said, “I was shocked when she hauled out a handful of legal documents to prove she wasn’t a trespasser.”
Maureen pushed her empty plate forward and picked up her coffee cup.
“I’m glad you happened to be going by the Bar X whenever she arrived, Joe,” his mother said. “Except for Sam, no one ever goes near the place. If I’d spotted a strange vehicle there, I would’ve thought someone was trespassing.”
For the past five years, since Joel, her husband and the father of their six children, had died suddenly, Maureen had accepted the reins of Three Rivers Ranch with a calm yet fierce determination to continue the legacy of the ranch and the Hollister family name. Now at sixty-one, she showed no signs of slowing down.
Joseph took his eyes off his plate to glance down the long dining table to where his mother sat next to her late husband’s chair. Ever since his death, Joel’s spot at the head of the table had remained empty. A fact that everyone in the family tried to ignore.
Across from Joseph, his oldest brother, Blake, was frowning thoughtfully.
“I visited Ray in the hospital a day before he died. Unfortunately he was too sedated to talk,” Blake commented. “Let’s hope he was in his right mind when he made out his will.”
Next to Blake, the middle Hollister son, Holt, spoke up. “I stopped by Ray’s house about a week before he went into the hospital. He was hooked up to oxygen, but he could still talk. That day he appeared to make perfect sense. He told me Sam had driven him around the ranch earlier that morning. He was telling me how happy he was with the way everything looked.”
“Poor man. Seventy was far too young for him to die.”
Joseph glanced to his left, where his sister, Vivian, was sitting at his elbow. At thirty-three, with shoulder-length chestnut hair, she was pretty in a wholesome way. It was just too bad her ex-husband hadn’t appreciated her, or their daughter.
“Any age is too young, Viv,” Joseph told her.
“Yes, but Ray had such a tragic life,” she observed. “What with his wife being disabled and bound to a wheelchair all those years. I always thought he deserved so much more.”
“Ray loved Dottie,” Maureen pointed out. “It broke his heart when she passed away.”
Holt, who was also head horse trainer for Three Rivers, reached for a biscuit. As he tore the bread apart, he said, “Ray was a widower for years and never bothered to marry again. That was the sad part.”
“Sad!” Joseph blurted in disbelief. “You’re a good one to talk, Holt. You’ve gone through women like a stack of laundered shirts. And you’ve never bothered to marry any of them!”
Holt frowned as he slathered the piece of biscuit with blackberry jam. “Well, you sure as hell aren’t married, either, little brother.”
“From the way Joe talked about this Ms. Parker, I’m thinking he’s getting the idea on his mind,” Vivian teased.
Joseph didn’t rise to his sister’s bait. He figured if he protested too loudly the whole family would become suspicious about him and the lovely stranger from Nevada. And that was the last thing he needed.
“As a deputy, I’m supposed to take in details,” he said flatly.
“From the description you gave us, you certainly took in plenty of details about the woman,” Vivian said slyly.
“Except the most important one.” Blake spoke up, “Like why she ended up with Ray’s place.”
Being the eldest son of the family, Blake had always taken his position as manager of the ranch very seriously. But then, Blake had always been the serious-minded one of the Hollister kids. There was rarely any joking going on with him. Whenever he did try to be funny, it was so dry he wound up getting more blank stares than chuckles.
“We’d all like to know that, Blake,” Maureen interjected. “But, frankly, it’s none of our business. And it would look mighty suspicious if Joseph started interrogating her for information.”
“Amen. Thank you, Mom,” Joseph told her.
Holt leaned forward, his gaze encompassing everyone at the table. “As far as I see things, it would be damned awful if we sat around and let someone take wrongful possession of our old friend’s property.”
Joseph
