Lone Rider. B.J. Daniels

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СКАЧАТЬ in her throat, he gave her arm a rough shake.

      “I asked ya where ya come from.”

      Her mind, like her body, had frozen in astonishment when he’d first grabbed her. Panicked, her thoughts whizzed from one to the next too quickly. The only one she could catch and hold on to was This isn’t happening.

      She swallowed. “Down in the valley.” From the time she was a young child, she had known that she was a Hamilton and what that meant. When your family was wealthy—especially if your father was a senator—there were apparently people who could hurt you, kidnap you and demand ransom. But growing up in Montana not far from the ranch, she and her five sisters had always felt safe. Their father had seen to that.

      “Down in the valley,” he mocked her. “I gathered that. You got a name?”

      She hesitated. “Bo.”

      “Bo?” He let out another harsh laugh. “Like Bo-Peep?”

      She’d been told that her older sisters had been allowed to name her and that it had been three-year-old Kat who’d come up with the name. Who let a three-year-old name the latest child? Her mother, apparently.

      “Bo what?” the man asked when she didn’t respond to the tired joke.

      “Calder.” The name popped into her head. With it came a stab of pain. Her name really would have been Calder if she had married Jace five years ago. Why hadn’t she said Smith or Jones or anything except Calder?

      Instinctively she’d known she couldn’t give the man her real name. Something told her that would have been a mistake. But thinking of Jace made her remember his sister, Emily, and her daughter, Jodie, and why she desperately needed to get off this mountain.

      It was almost as if he’d seen what she was thinking. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, Bo-Peep, ’cept with me.” He smiled. “I been up in these woods for weeks. It’s damned lonely, but not no more.”

      “If I don’t get back, they’ll come looking for me,” she blurted.

      “That right?” He studied her for a full minute before he turned her arm so he could get a good look at her left hand. “You ain’t married. So who’s gonna be lookin’ for ya?”

      It was a good question. Did anyone even know that she’d left? One of the wranglers had seen her leave Saturday, but he might have no reason to mention it to anyone. Surely someone would eventually notice her SUV parked over by the “bunkhouses” her father had built for his daughters as they got older. They weren’t really bunkhouses. That’s just what he called them. They were actually condos, six of them with a connected large communal area. Her father had hoped it would keep his daughters on the ranch. It hadn’t. Bo rented an apartment twenty miles away in downtown Big Timber near the Sarah Hamilton Foundation office. It was easier than driving in from the ranch five days a week.

      “My family,” she said with more assurance than she felt. “They’ll be looking for me. They expected me back this morning. If I don’t show up...” She let the rest hang, hoping he would loosen his steely grip on her arm and put away the knife.

      The look in his eyes said that wasn’t going to happen. “Then we best get movin’,” he said. “Nice of ya to provide me with a horse. I about wore out my boots in this damned rugged country.”

      She looked down and saw he was right. His boots had definitely seen better days. He’d been living up here for weeks? That’s when she noticed the metal bracelet-like loops on his wrists. Realization hit her like a horseshoe to the head.

      Her gaze shot up to his face. He was much dirtier, his hair longer, his beard fuller, but in an instant she knew she’d seen his mug shot on television. This was the escaped fugitive from Livingston. The one believed to have killed a man during the robbery of a local convenience store. She’d seen it on the news but hadn’t paid much attention, and yet she now recalled the name because law enforcement had been looking for him for weeks.

      Spencer. Raymond Spencer. Her pulse thundered in her ears. There was no doubt. She’d ridden into the camp of a violent criminal, and now she was his captive.

      * * *

      SARAH COULDN’T HELP being nervous as the doctor came into the room. What was she afraid he was going to tell her? That there was a physical reason for her memory loss? Or was her greatest fear that whatever had caused it was psychological?

      Dr. Turner introduced himself before taking a chair across from her, but it was clear that he knew who she was. Anyone with a television would have heard about her.

      He was a small man with such a neat appearance that she wondered if he suffered from OCD. Even his movements felt too precise, too careful.

      She looked away. He made her feel uncomfortable. Had she always been this sensitive to other people’s...idiosyncrasies? Or was she overly observant because she’d lived too long not knowing whom she could trust? That thought did nothing to relieve her anxiety.

      “You’ve experienced some memory loss?” he asked as he looked at what his nurse had written on the chart, seemingly unaware of her discomfort.

      She glanced around his office rather than at him. Like him, it, too, was compulsively neat. She fought the urge to move something just to see what he would do. “I can’t remember the past twenty-two years.”

      His head came up with a start. “But you remember before then?”

      She nodded. “I remember giving birth to my twin daughters. They recently graduated from college.”

      He leaned back in his chair for a moment to study her. “When and where did you come to?”

      “Four months ago I woke up on a dirt road just outside of Beartooth. I was confused. My only thought was that I had to see my daughters. I have six. The twins are the youngest.”

      The doctor picked up his pen and turned it slowly in his fingers as if inspecting it for even the slightest of smudges before asking, “Why did you wait four months to come see me?”

      “I’m not sure I want to know why I can’t remember.”

      He frowned. “Were you involved in any trauma that you know of such as an assault or car accident or violent collision in, say, a sporting event?”

      “I’m told I crashed my car into the Yellowstone River in the middle of winter before I...disappeared.”

      He studied her again for a long moment before jotting down the information in her chart. “Does anything help improve your memory?”

      She hesitated. “I get flashes like shadows that fade in and out sometimes, but they make no sense, so I can’t be sure they’re even memories.”

      “You don’t have any short-term memory loss?”

      “No.” She watched him write.

      “So you don’t know why or how the memory loss began?”

      “No.” She answered questions about her medical history—at least the years she recalled.

      “Drugs? Alcohol?”

      She СКАЧАТЬ