Westin’s Wyoming Read online

  Analise’s hand in his was cold to the touch. “I thought you were dead,” she said.

  “I pretended,” Pierce said. He’d probably looked dead after Bierta’s bullet grazed his forehead and scalp. He’d heard Kaare coming, opened one eye and seen the rifle and the scope and everything had suddenly made sense. Kaare had killed Lucas, he was Bierta’s accomplice, he’d killed Bierta just as he’d killed Lucas, to protect himself. He and Bierta must have gotten here on the snowmobile Kaare stole from the lodge barn the night before because all the others were locked up. He must have left it somewhere undercover…?.

  After Kaare talked Analise into leaving, Pierce had crawled around and found Bierta’s revolver and it was a nice, heavy weight in his belt right now.

  “Hurry,” he said unnecessarily. They were both flying, feet barely touching the ground.

  They wended their way through the boulders at the door of the burial cavern and reentered the chamber.

  “I have an idea,” he said quickly as they circumvented the chasm. Actually he had two, but he discarded the one that required him to play dead a second time. The fissure where he’d originally fallen was hemmed in by rocks with no clear sight of the cavern opening. “Sit on the rock, the one that looks like a throne,” he told her, shoving the flashlight into her hands. “When you see him coming, shine the light straight at him, you understand, right at his face.”

  “Yes, yes,” she mumbled, veering off toward the rocks. He was asking her to be the bait. She had to know that.

  He ran past her to the southern wall and started climbing until he was at the top of the “corn stalk.” It was very dark up here, Analise’s little flashlight having burned out. He retrieved the gun out of his waistband and balanced himself. Just in time, too.

  The general appeared in the entrance at a ninety-degree angle to Analise. She raised the light, suddenly illuminating Kaare like a hapless actor caught in stage lights. The general immediately lowered his weapon, blinded by the infrared night scope.

  There was time for one shot. Pierce aimed and fired.

  The general sank to the ground.

  THEY LEFT KAARE where he fell dead although Pierce took the diary out of the general’s pocket. Analise turned her head, unable to watch.

  Holding hands, she and Pierce made their way back to the main cave and set the diary aflame, sitting around it like some kind of macabre campers, waiting until every last page was reduced to ashes. Those Pierce scooped up in his hat.

  The air outside was cold and dark, the moon descending into the west. Stars Analise had been certain neither of them would ever see again twinkled right as they had forever and ever; the wind still moved the tops of the towering trees.

  Analise took Pierce’s hat and held it so that the wind caught and scattered the ashes. When they were all gone, she looked up at him. “I knew what you were doing in there,” she said.

  “When?”

  “When you were talking about marriage. I knew you were trying to get closer to Bierta, to catch her off guard.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, that’s what I was doing.”

  “On the other hand,” she continued, linking her hands around his waist, “‘a promise made is a debt unpaid.’ I heard that somewhere.”

  “It’s from a Robert Service poem,” Pierce said, his voice as soft as the night. “It’s called ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’ The line goes, ‘Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.’”

  “Well, so does this princess,” she murmured, gazing up at him. “A verbal contract is binding in my country.”

  He leaned down and kissed her nose. “Mine, too,” he said.

  “And so I expect a modest but sparkling diamond on my ring finger by the end of the year and a baby by, oh, let’s say, a year so later—”

  She didn’t get another word in, but she didn’t mind. Kissing him was way more fun than talking ever could be, and when he swept her into his arms and claimed her lips, she knew she was kissing her future.

  “Let’s go home,” he murmured at last.

  And they did.

  Epilogue

  Late March

  “You left your queen wide-open,” Birch Westin said, chuckling. “You’re letting me win, young lady, but I don’t care.” He lifted the ivory queen and set her aside. “Check.”

  Analise smiled at her father-in-law-to-be. He’d accepted Pierce’s decision to stay on the ranch with tears in his eyes, forever endearing himself to her.

  “I’m not letting you win,” she said, absently scratching Bonnie’s ears. “I’m just a little distracted.”

  “There they come,” Birch said, looking up from the board.

  She’d heard the hoof beats at the same time he did so she was already looking up as the three horses carrying three men thundered up the rise and into the huge yard.

  The Westin brothers, one better-looking than the next, all of them cut from what was intrinsically the same mold. Cody the oldest, the darkest of them with deep brown eyes and hair. Cody, quiet and taciturn and yet boiling inside with things he wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about. He’d turned up a few days after the police finally left the Open Sky, refusing to discuss where he’d been, anxious, he said, to get on with the real world, and that meant this ranch.

  And he’d obviously been delighted his younger brother had finally come to his right mind and returned to Wyoming.

  It had been Cody who managed to calm down the elder Garvey when he showed up demanding revenge for his boys. Pierce had been way too close to the death and destruction Lucas and Doyle had inflicted to be patient, but Cody had somehow managed it.

  Adam was the youngest of the brothers and the shortest at six feet even. He waved at her from the saddle, his smile one of the better smiles in the world. His eyes were a silver-gray, his hair a shade or two lighter than Pierce’s, his skin tanned to a honey color. He’d arrived back on the ranch before the police were through with their investigation, and his clear head and wry sense of humor had helped everyone through the trying days ahead.

  He, too, had welcomed Pierce home with enthusiasm, and he’d welcomed Analise into the family though the wedding was still a few months off.

  After Pierce dismounted, he wrapped the pinto’s reins around a hitching post, and walked toward them. Analise’s breath caught in her throat at the look in his eyes and she wondered how she was going to bear being away from him for a month.

  “You all packed and ready to go?” he asked, coming to a halt right in front of her.

  “Jamie and Mike loaded everything in the truck for me.”

  “Great.” He turned to his father. “We found the five escaped heifers over in the gulch, each with a new baby. Cody and Adam are going to go out and bring them in while I drive Analise to the airport.”

  “Good, good,” Birch said. He got to his feet and using a cane, came around the small picnic table where they’d set up the board in order to take advantage of the afternoon sun. “You take care, young lady, and you come back soon.”

  She had risen to accept his hug. “I will. Thanks for everything.”

  He looked from her to Pierce and sniffed. “Damn pollen.” With a nod, he turned and made his way toward the cabin where Pauline beckoned him.

  Pierce put his arms around Analise’s waist and pulled her close, gazing into her eyes. “Don’t go back to Chatioux and remember how nice it is to be one of the idle rich, okay?”

  She loved the way his eyes delved into hers. “I know where I belong,” she whispered. “But I have to talk to my parents and Ricard in person. I have to see Toby and reassure him. I’ve put all this off too long as it is.”

  “I know you have. And in a month, as soon as calving season winds down, I’ll catch a jet and come get you. I want to meet the in-laws.”

  “They’re going to adore you,” she said, leaning into him. “My mother is ecstatic that I fell in love with her old friend’s son.”

  “So am I,” he whispered and kissed
her.

  They broke apart at the sound of whistles and cat-calls. Pierce’s brothers grinned, then both tipping their hats at Analise and calling out farewells, turned and rode back the way they’d come.

  “Where were we?” Pierce said.

  She tipped his face down to hers, stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “Right about here,” she said.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-1256-5

  WESTIN’S WYOMING

  Copyright © 2011 by Alice Sharpe

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  For questions and comments about the quality of this book please contact us at [email protected].

  ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com

  *Dead Ringer

  **Skye Brother Babies

  ‡‡Open Sky Ranch