Hot Zone. Elle James

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      For the three years since she’d left college with a shiny new degree, she’d worked her way up the corporate ladder to a management position. Eight people reported directly to her. She was responsible for their output and their well-being. She’d promised her father she’d give it five years. But that had all changed in the space of one second.

      The second her father died in a freak horseback-riding accident six days earlier.

      Liv had gotten the word in the middle of the night in Seattle, had hopped into her car and had driven all the way to Grizzly Pass, Wyoming. No amount of hurrying back to her home would have been fast enough to have allowed her to say goodbye to her father.

      By the time Abe had found him, he’d been dead for a couple of hours. The coroner estimated the fall had killed him instantly, when he’d struck his head on a rock.

      Liv would have given anything to have talked to him one last time. She hadn’t spoken to him for over a week before his death. The last time had been on the telephone and had ended in anger. She had wanted to end her time in Seattle and come home. Her father had insisted she finish out her five years.

      I’m not going to get married to a city boy. What use would he be on a ranch, anyway? she’d argued.

      You don’t know where love will take you. Give it a chance, he’d argued right back. Have you been dating?

      No, Dad. I intimidate most men. They like their women soft and wimpy. I can’t do that. It’s not me.

      Sweetheart, her father had said. You have to open your heart. Love hits you when you least expect it. Besides, I want to live to see my grandchildren.

      Her throat tightening, Liv shook her head. Her father would never know his grandchildren, and they’d never know the great man he was. The tears welled and threatened to slip out the corners of her eyes.

      “If you sell to Rausch, you can be done with ranching and get on with your life. You won’t have to stay around, being constantly reminded of your father.”

      “Maybe I want to be reminded. Maybe I was being too rash when I said I couldn’t be around the ranch because it brought back too many painfully happy memories of me and Dad.” She sniffed, angry that she wasn’t doing a very good job of holding herself together.

      “What did Rausch offer you?”

      Liv wiped her eyes with her sleeve and swallowed the lump in her throat before she could force words out. “A quarter of what the ranch is worth. A quarter!” She laughed, the sound ending in a sob. “I’ll die herding cattle before I sell to that man.”

      “Yeah, well, you could die a lot sooner if you go like your father.”

      Liv clenched her fist in her lap. “It’s physically demanding, ranching in the foothills of the Beartooth Mountains. Falling off your horse and hitting your head on a rock could happen to anyone around here.” She shot a glance at Abe. “Right?”

      He nodded, his voice dropping to little more than a whisper. “Yeah, but I would bet my best rodeo buckle your father had some help falling off that horse.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Just that we’d had some trouble on the ranch, leading up to that day.”

      “Trouble?”

      Abe shrugged. “There’ve been a whole lot of strange things going on in Grizzly Pass in the past couple months.”

      “Dad never said a word.”

      “He didn’t want to worry you.”

      Liv snorted and then sniffed. He was a little late on that account. She swiveled in her seat, directing her attention to the older man. “Tell me.”

      “You know about the kids on the hijacked bus, right?”

      She nodded. “I heard about it on the national news. I couldn’t believe the Vanderses went off the deep end. But what does that have to do with my father and the ranch?”

      Abe lifted a hand and scratched his wiry brown hair with streaks of silver dominating his temples. “That’s only part of the problem. I hear there’s a group called Free America stirring up trouble.”

      “What kind of trouble?”

      “Nothing anyone can put a finger on, but rumor has it they’re meeting regularly, training in combat tactics.”

      “Doesn’t the local law enforcement have a handle on them?”

      Abe shook his head. “No one on the inside is owning up to being a part of it, and folks on the outside are only guessing. It’s breeding a whole lot of distrust among the locals.”

      “So they’re training for combat. People have a right to protect themselves.” She didn’t like that it was splitting a once close-knit community.

      “Yeah, but what if they put that combat training to use and try to take over the government?”

      Liv smiled and leaned back in her seat. “They’d have to have a lot more people than the population of Grizzly Pass to take over the government.”

      “Maybe so, but they could do a lot of damage and terrorize a community if they tried anything locally. Just look at the trouble Vanders and his boys stirred up when they killed a bus driver and threatened to bury a bunch of little kids in one of the old mines.”

      “You have a point.” Liv chewed on her lower lip, her brows drawing together. She could only imagine the horror those children had to face and the families standing by, praying for their release. “We used to be a caring, cohesive community. We had semiannual picnics where everyone came out and visited with each other. What’s happening?”

      “With the shutdown of the pipeline, a lot of folks are out of work. The government upped the fees for grazing cattle on federal land and there isn’t much more than ranching in this area. People are moving to the cities, looking for work. Others are holding on by their fingernails.”

      Her heart ached for her hometown. “I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

      “Yeah, I almost think you need to take Rausch’s offer and get out of here while you can.”

      Her lips firmed into a thin line. “He was insulting, acting like I didn’t know the business end of a horse. Hell, he doesn’t know the first thing about ranching.”

      “Which leads me to wonder—”

      Something flashed in front of the speeding truck. A rider on a four-wheeler.

      Abe jerked the steering wheel to avoid hitting him and sent the truck careening over the shoulder of the road, down a steep slope, crashing into bushes and bumping over huge rocks.

      Despite the safety belt across her chest, Liv was tossed about like a shaken rag doll.

      “Hold on!” Abe cried out.

      With a death grip on the armrest, Liv braced herself.

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