For His Daughter. Ann Evans

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      Mickey looked stunned. “Oldman ain’t gonna like that. Wait a minute! Where are you going?” he said in a low voice as Rafe took off in the direction of the elevators.

      “Business,” Rafe called over one shoulder. I’m going to lose my job because one idiot female doesn’t know when she’s playing with fire.

      But he didn’t stop.

      CHAPTER ONE

      THERE WERE TIMES IN LIFE that called for begging.

      This was one of those times.

      Danielle Bridgeton looked across her desk at the state editor of the Denver Daily Telegraph, the newspaper she worked for. She lowered her head, sighed dramatically and pasted on her best wounded-puppy look. “Please, Gary,” she said, softly pleading with him to understand. “Get me out of here. I’ll do anything you want. Anything.”

      Gary Newsome shook his head sadly. “You know, when I was young I used to dream about a beautiful woman saying that to me.”

      Gary was fifty-something, bald and complained frequently of acid reflux. He was the most honest newspaperman Dani knew. He was also torturing her.

      Dani steepled her fingers. A nun couldn’t have seemed more penitent. “Look at me, Gary. This is me, begging.”

      Gary pushed air between his lips in a disgruntled rush. “I came up here to see how you were getting along, not to make you beg. I can’t do it, Dani. You piss off the pope, you get excommunicated. It’s as simple as that.”

      But it wasn’t simple, it was unfair. Cruel. Even the pope believed in forgiving people, didn’t he?

      “It was one lousy article,” Dani pointed out. “One. And I’ve learned my lesson.”

      “No, you haven’t. You’re the most unrepentant journalist I know. Honest. Sincere. But definitely not repentant. Didn’t I try to tell you what would happen if we ran your story? You’re not the only one who’s got the publisher on his back, so take your lumps like a good girl. Work the I-70 corridor for a while and enjoy being a bureau chief. I’ll let you know when it’s safe for you to come back to Denver.”

      Bureau chief. Gary made the job sound like a promotion. And it might have been if the bureau she’d been assigned to had been one of the state’s hottest news spots. But what kind of reporting could you expect when all you covered were the small towns that ran along the highway between Denver and Grand Junction? Those mountain towns were cute, scenic… and dull as dishwater.

      “It’s been two years,” Dani pleaded. “I’m dying out here.”

      Gary laughed. “It’s been two months.”

      “Well, it feels like years.”

      A lot more than two, in fact. Living in Broken Yoke could leave her brain-dead. There weren’t any interesting stories here, or in any of the other one-horse towns she was supposed to cover for the Telegraph. It was humiliating that she’d been reduced to this.

      How was she supposed to continue building a respectable career in journalism? The most exciting thing she’d written in two months had been about some tourist who’d slipped off a ledge in the Arapaho National Forest and broken his arm.

      Yes, officially she was the region’s bureau chief. But what a place to be in charge! And what a miserable end to a story that should have won her a bucket load of awards and national recognition.

      Last year Dani had been resourceful and lucky enough to make a very important contact at Humanity Haven—one of the most prominent, respected and lucrative charity organizations in Colorado. By the time she’d finished months of digging, she’d uncovered all the inside dirt. Questionable expenditures made by key executives. Murky business deals. Fraudulent balance sheets.

      Her five-part article hadn’t brought Humanity Haven down—its own culture of ambition, greed and arrogance had done that—but she’d certainly started the ball rolling.

      Unfortunately, Dani had also unearthed that her publisher’s mother-in-law had been secretly dating Humanity Haven’s good-looking, much younger chairman of the board.

      To say that Lorraine Jennings Mandeville had turned into a bitter, vindictive woman over the death of her now embarrassingly public love affair would have been stating things too mildly. Lorraine had had Dani exiled to the boonies. Dani couldn’t prove it, of course, but only an idiot would fail to see the connection.

      “Pretend you’re on vacation,” Gary suggested. He looked out the tiny window that was the only source of light in the enlarged closet Dani was forced to call an office. “This is definitely a prettier part of the state than brown-cloud Denver.”

      That might be true, but who needed pretty when you had a career to build? “They don’t even have a decent bagel shop. Do you know how many times I’ve had to listen to ‘Welcome to Broken Yoke, ma’am. Yoke—like the harness, not the egg. Ha, ha, ha.’”

      Gary looked out the open office door toward the reception area. “Your office help seems nice.”

      Dani scowled. Cissy Pendergrass, the receptionist/ secretary/ad salesperson sat just a few feet away at her desk, polishing off a salad from the little restaurant down the street.

      “She hates me,” Dani said in a near whisper.

      All right, that wasn’t true. But if it made Gary reconsider this punishment, she’d be willing to look as though she feared for her life.

      “Then she’ll have to get in line behind Lorraine Mandeville,” Gary replied.

      He rose, hitched up his pants and walked over to the map that adorned one pine-board wall. It showed the entire western half of the state, every county a different color. This was Dani’s turf now, and Broken Yoke her home base. If anything of interest happened in any of those mountain towns, Dani would make sure it found a spot in the regional weekend supplement of the Telegraph. So far, there had been darn little.

      Slapping his hand against the map, Gary said, “Come on, Dani. There have to be dozens of stories out here just waiting to be unearthed. The people who settled in these mountains are sons of pioneers. These canyons are filled with tales of stolen treasure, unsavory characters, heroes who weren’t afraid to take chances.”

      “This town is so small that their McDonald’s only has one arch.”

      “So you think Broken Yoke is too insignificant, filled with boring people leading boring lives?”

      Afraid that Cissy might have heard, Dani got up, gave her receptionist a smile and shut the door for privacy.

      “It’s not just the size of this place,” she said. “It’s the whole area. Most of the people I’ve met have been very friendly, very eager to make me feel at home. Some of them are…eccentric. A couple are downright weird, but you’d get that in any town. It’s just that… there’s nothing here for me to sink my teeth into. The biggest thing coming up is the summer festival, which I hear bombed last year. It’s so boring around these parts that I might as well be writing obits.”

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