would you suggest I look? Is there family I can call? Friends? Is she even from Denver?” When his father didn’t answer any of the questions, he said, “You really don’t know anything about her, do you?”
“I know she wouldn’t leave me,” Hoyt had snapped.
Dawson sighed now, took one last look at the ranch and spurred his horse into the thick cool darkness of the pines. The ride up from the main house had taken most of the day. The big blue sky overhead was tinted pink to the west where the sun had dipped behind the Bear Paw Mountains.
He breathed in the sweet scent of pine. Since he was a boy, he’d always come to the high country when life got to be too much down on the prairie. Having five brothers, all of them adopted by Hoyt years ago, not even a ranch as large as this one felt big enough sometimes.
“I need one of you to see if you can find Emma,” he’d told his brothers before he’d ridden out.
“Dad just doesn’t want to believe that she deserted him,” Marshall had said. “What’s the point in finding her? She won’t come back.”
“I’ll go,” Zane had said, speaking up. When they all looked at him as if he was crazy, he said, “Dad loves her. He has enough problems without worrying about Emma. I’ll see if I can find her. Did he give you any place to start?”
“All we know is that he met her in Denver,” Dawson had said. “I suppose you could start there.”
None of them had any hope that Zane would find her. Even less hope that if he did, she would come back and stand by their father’s side during his trial.
Dawson couldn’t really blame Emma when he thought about it. Rumors had circled around Chisholm Cattle Company for years after Hoyt’s first wife, Laura, had drowned on a Fork Peck Reservoir boating trip.
The rumors only got worse after his second wife, Tasha, had been killed on a runaway horse. When his third wife, Krystal, had disappeared, never to be seen again, people who knew him were convinced Hoyt Chisholm had the worst luck with wives. Others weren’t so sure.
There was at least one person—an insurance investigator—who suspected that Hoyt Chisholm had not only murdered all three wives, but would also do the same with his latest, Emma.
Dawson knew better. Hoyt was his father, the man who had adopted three motherless boys—Colton, Logan and Zane when the triplets’ mother had died in childbirth, father unknown. He’d adopted Dawson, Tanner and Marshall when their mother had abandoned them, father also unknown.
Hoyt probably would have adopted even more children who needed homes if it hadn’t been for the trouble with his wives.
Dawson, the oldest, was three when his father married his second wife, Tasha. They had been married only a short time before her death. He was five when Krystal came into their lives. She’d stayed an even shorter time. He doubted his brothers, who were all a few years younger, remembered any of them.
After that their father had raised them alone. All six of them now ranged from twenty-six to thirty-three. And then Hoyt Chisholm had met Emma.
A new wife had spurred all that old talk about Hoyt’s other wives and brought former insurance investigator Aggie Wells back into their lives—until she’d gone missing. That was when their father’s third wife’s body had turned up. Aggie was still missing.
Dawson felt the temperature begin to drop up here in the mountains. He loved this ride from the sagebrush and prairie to the rocky mountain range, the towering pines and rush of snow-fed creeks. He’d been raised on a horse and felt as at home there as he did in the high country.
At heart he was a cattleman, he thought as he heard the comforting sound of cows lowing just over the ridge. There was nothing like that sound or seeing the herd scattered across a wide meadow.
He stopped a short way into the meadow and leaned on his saddle horn to admire the black cattle against the summer-green meadow. Chisholm Cattle Company raised the finest Black Angus beef there was—and lots of them.
At that moment he realized what a loner he was. Before Emma had left, he’d noticed that she’d seemed intent on seeing each of her stepsons settle down with the perfect woman. He shook his head at the thought. Was there a woman alive who could understand his need to ride up here and camp out for a few days with only cows as company?
He laughed at the thought, remembering some of the women he’d dated. Even hard-core country girls weren’t all that up for roughin’ it. He thought of the one woman he’d known who might have and quickly pushed the painful thought away.
A cold breeze stirred the deep shadows that had settled into the pine boughs. He glanced across the meadow to the spot where he usually camped and saw something move in the trees.
A hawk burst from a high branch. The cattle began to moo loudly and move restlessly in the bowl-like meadow. Something was spooking them. A mountain lion? A grizzly?
Dawson stared into the trees across the meadow and started to pull his rifle from the scabbard on his saddle, thinking it had to be a large predator for the cattle to get this nervous.
The first rider came out of the trees at a gallop. Dawson pulled his rifle as the rustler came into view and fired a shot into the air as warning before taking aim to fire another. The cattle began to scatter.
A second rustler appeared, then another and another broke from the pines; shots rang out across the grazing land as the rustlers tried to circle the now stampeding cattle.
Dawson realized the cattle were headed right for him—and so was one of the riders.
Chapter Two
With the stampeding cattle headed directly at him, Dawson realized there was nowhere to go to get away from them, and it was too late to try to outrun the herd. He was about to be caught in the middle of the stampede.
He reined his horse around in time to see one of the rustlers turn the herd at the last moment—and just enough that he was able to get out of the way. The cattle thundered past in a cloud of dust—the rustler with them.
Dawson sheathed his rifle, spurred his horse and took off after him. The rider was moving fast, bent over the horse and riding as if his life depended on it. It did, because Dawson was gaining on him. Just a few more yards …
Riding up behind him, Dawson dived off his horse, tackling the rustler. Both of them hit the ground at the edge of the thundering herd of cattle and rolled into the tall grass. Dust boiled up around them as they came to a stop at the base of a large pine tree, Dawson coming out on top.
As the dust settled, he got his first good look at the rustler. He blinked. A pair of big Montana-sky-blue eyes glared up at him from a face framed in blond curls.
A woman rustler?
“You have to let me go,” she hollered as the roar of the stampeding cattle died off in the distance.
“So you can finish stealing my cattle? I don’t think so.”
“You don’t understand.”
“The hell I don’t.” He looked over his shoulder to see the last of the
