Buch lesen: «Bounty Hunter's Woman»

“Are you always a pest or do I just bring out the worst in you?”

Donovan only laughed. “Me? A pest? You must be joking. Everyone knows I’m a sweetheart.”

“Uh-huh,” she said dryly. “And I’m Snow White.”

“No, you’re Sleeping Beauty. And you know what happened to her.”

Confused, she frowned. “The wicked witch got her?”

“No. The prince kissed her until she woke up.”

“Oh, no!” she said. “Don’t even think about going there, mister. You’re no Prince Charming.” The second the words were out of her mouth, she knew that she’d made a mistake. He wasn’t the kind of man who ignored a challenge.

“Too late,” he chuckled, and reached for her. A heartbeat later, she was in his arms.

Dear Reader,

This is the first time I’ve done a series in which the mystery isn’t solved until the end of the fourth book, so I was naturally a little nervous when I started writing Bounty Hunter’s Woman. There was a lot to bring together, and only a limited number of pages in which to do it. But then Donovan Jones came to Priscilla Wyatt’s rescue, and the rest, as they say, is history. I loved the sparks that flew between Donovan and Priscilla. He’s a man who can’t resist a woman in trouble, and she’s up to her ears in bad guys. Donovan thinks she’s spoiled and stubborn…and no one’s more surprised than he when she turns out to be perfect for him. Don’t you just love surprises? Enjoy.

Linda Turner

Bounty Hunter’s Woman
Linda Turner

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LINDA TURNER

began reading romances in high school and began writing them one night when she had nothing else to read. She’s been writing ever since. Single and living in Texas, she travels every chance she gets, scouting locales for her books.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Epilogue

Prologue

Moving gingerly, the incision from her surgery twinging in protest, Priscilla Wyatt stepped through the front door of her London flat and found herself blinking back tears. Over the course of the last week and a half, while she was in the hospital recovering from injuries incurred in a car accident and the emergency surgery that had saved her life, she’d begun to wonder if she was ever going to sleep in her own bed again. When her doctor had finally told her she was being released, she hadn’t known whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

Watching her as the last of her strength gave out and she sank down onto the couch, her brother, Buck, frowned in concern. “I don’t know what the doctor was thinking, releasing you so soon after your surgery. Look at you. You’re as weak as a kitten.”

“I just need to rest for a few minutes, and I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, right,” he retorted, scowling. “In case you’ve forgotten, you had a hell of an accident. You could have been killed—”

Hovering at the door, his wife, Rainey, frowned warningly. “She’s aware of that, Buck. You don’t have to keep reminding her.”

“Apparently, I do,” he growled. “She’d still be in the hospital if she hadn’t pressured the doctor to release her.”

“I can recover better here,” Priscilla replied. “No one gets any rest in the hospital. You know that.”

“What I know is that you had major surgery. You lost your spleen, dammit. This is serious, Cilla. You’ve got no business being here by yourself.”

“Why don’t you come home with me and Buck?” Rainey suggested. “Let us take care of you.”

“Oh, no!” she said quickly. “The ranch isn’t home. This is. London is.”

Buck could understand her feelings. When Hilda Wyatt, a distant American relative from the States, had left the Broken Arrow Ranch in Colorado to him and his sisters, the place had felt nothing like home even though it had been in the Wyatt family for nearly a hundred fifty years. That was before the ranch came under attack, however. The first time he picked up a gun to defend the Broken Arrow, the land of his ancestors became his.

Not that he and his sisters could claim it outright just yet, he reminded himself. Hilda had wanted the ranch to go to the last of the Wyatts, but she’d still left it to them with strings. One of them had to be at the ranch at all times for the period of one year. If there was no Wyatt at the ranch for two nights in a row during that year, they lost the Broken Arrow and it went to an unnamed heir. No one, however, knew who the unnamed heir was. His or her name was in a sealed envelope that would only be opened in the event that the English branch of the Wyatts was disqualified.

And it was that clause in the will that had caused countless problems for him and his sisters, Buck thought in disgust. Once the terms of the will became common knowledge, everyone in Willow Bend seemed to think they were the unnamed heir and all they had to do to inherit the ranch was drive Buck and his sisters away.

The attacks began almost immediately and had been going on for months, always coming from a different direction. And they hadn’t stopped at the property lines of the ranch…which was why he and Rainey were in London.

“You’re not safe here,” he told Priscilla flatly. “Your accident wasn’t an accident.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” she argued. “Just because someone ran a stop sign—”

“All the witnesses said the driver could have easily avoided the accident,” he cut in. “He didn’t. We can’t prove it, but my gut tells me the jackass was hired by someone in Colorado to hurt you and draw the rest of us away from the ranch. If that’s the case, this is only the beginning. Whoever hired the man who hit you will try again.”

When she shivered, hugging herself, he said huskily, “I’m not trying to scare you, Sis. But we’re all worried sick about you. You’re here alone, and you’re so weak you can’t possibly protect yourself if someone decides to come after you. If you’d just come home with me and Rainey until you’re stronger, I promise I won’t say a word to stop you when you’re ready to come back here to London. I’ll even help you pack.”

If her stomach hadn’t been in knots at the thought of someone stalking her, trying to hurt her, she would have laughed. “Yeah, right. The second I even bring up the subject of going back to London, I’m going to get grief from the entire family, and you know it.”

Not bothering to deny it, he only grinned. “And your point is?”

“You’re terrible.” She laughed…and gave in. “Okay, I’ll go. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. I will go home as soon as I’m feeling better.”

“We’ll talk about it then.” He chuckled and strode over to the phone to call the airline and book their tickets.

Chapter 1

There was, Priscilla decided, nothing like the scent and colors and sounds of harvest. Sitting on the tailgate of the old Ford pickup that was used for work on the ranch, she watched, entranced, as Buck and her soon-to-be brothers-in-law, John and Hunter, cut and baled the alfalfa that had been planted last spring in the lower pastures. A gentle breeze caught the dust from the fields and sent it swirling, and in the long shadows of the late afternoon, the air turned golden.

Wishing she’d brought her camera, Priscilla couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt such peace. She’d been at the Broken Arrow for nearly two months, and in all that time, there hadn’t, thankfully, been a single attack against the ranch. She’d had time to heal…and to grow to appreciate the land of her American ancestors. And without quite knowing how it had happened, Colorado had become home.

She couldn’t, however, stay any longer. She had responsibilities in London she needed to get back to, and she was stunned to realize how much she hated the idea of leaving. How her brother and sisters would laugh when she told them that, she thought ruefully. She’d been the last to leave England, the lone holdout in the family who’d been so positive that she wanted no part of living in the wilds of Colorado. And now just the thought of leaving made her want to cry.

“You’re awfully quiet,” her sister Elizabeth said as the men called it a day and started across the field toward where the women of the family waited under the lone tree at the edge of the field. “Are you all right? Maybe you should have stayed at the house.”

“I’m fine.”

“The doctor said you were supposed to take it easy,” Katherine reminded her. The closest sister to her in age, Katherine looked just like their mother when she frowned at her in concern.

“It’s been two months since my surgery,” she replied. “I’m completely healed. Really.”

Studying her shrewdly, her sister-in-law, Rainey, said, “The removal of a spleen’s not something you get over in a week or two. And you have been helping out a lot around the ranch lately. Maybe you need to pace yourself more.”

Joining them in time to hear his wife’s comments, Buck shot Priscilla a sharp look. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Everyone thinks that just because I’m not talking much, I’m not feeling well. I’m fine. I don’t need to take it easy. I just have a lot on my mind.”

“You want to go back to London, don’t you?” Elizabeth guessed, studying her with shrewd blue eyes. “You’re homesick.”

“She is not!” Katherine retorted before she could answer. “She’s still having nightmares about the accident, and she should be. It wasn’t an accident! Someone tried to kill her. If I were her, I’d never step foot in England again.”

“She has to finish her internship,” Rainey reminded Katherine. Turning to Priscilla, she frowned. “I thought you were going to wait until the probation period on the ranch was up, then go back to London after Christmas.”

“That was my plan,” she admitted. “But I have some things that need to be taken care of now. I can’t just keep putting them off.”

“No,” Buck said firmly.

“I’ve been paying for a flat that I haven’t used for two months,” she argued. “And I don’t want to be in London anymore. I need to give up the lease, but I can’t just abandon my things. I have to go back, make arrangements for movers—”

“You can do that from here,” Katherine pointed out.

“True,” she agreed, “but I also need to talk to Jean Pierre…”

“So call him,” Elizabeth said.

“No, I need to meet with him face-to-face. I’d like to finish my internship from here, if possible, and I’ll have a better chance of talking him into that if I can sit down with him and explain my plan.”

“You’re safer here,” Buck insisted. “Wait until after the ranch is ours and we’ll all go back for awhile. I want to show Rainey where we grew up—”

“That’s another month,” she argued. “And I still don’t think my accident was anything but that—an accident!”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do! No one’s attacked the ranch since I’ve been here. If someone really tried to get to me in London, why wouldn’t they do it here?”

“Because we’re all here together,” he replied. “No one’s going to take on all four of us together. It’s when we’re apart that we’re vulnerable.”

“I’m not going back to stay,” she pointed out. “I’ll just be in London for two or three days at the most. And no one but the family even has to know I’m gone. I’ll fly out of Denver in the dead of night. No one will see me leave, and if you casually mention around town that we’ve all been staying home because a stomach bug has been working its way through the family, no one will suspect a thing.”

When he just looked at her, unconvinced, she played her trump card. “You told me in London that if I would come home with you to the ranch to recover, you wouldn’t offer a word of protest when I was ready to go back to London. I expect you to keep that promise.”

She had him, and they both knew it, but this wasn’t about winning points off each other. Over the course of the last eleven months, when they’d inherited the ranch and then found themselves under attack by the faceless enemies who were after the Broken Arrow, the four of them had grown closer than ever. She needed him and her sisters to support her decision and trust her judgment.

“I’ll be careful,” she told Buck. “I promise.”

He hesitated, his eyes searching hers, only to sigh in defeat. “Okay. But you call in every hour once you land just so we’ll know you’re safe. Understood?”

“Every hour,” she promised, hugging him. “I’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

Less than thirty-six hours later, she walked into her flat in London and found it just as she’d left it. Automatically locking the door behind her, she made a quick tour and wasn’t surprised to find the plants on her kitchen windowsill dead and the food in her refrigerator molded and sour. She hadn’t exactly had time to clean things out before she’d left. The second she’d been released from the hospital, Buck had given her ten minutes to throw some clothes and personal items into a suitcase before he’d rushed her to the airport and the States.

She’d thought about her flat often over the course of the last two months and wondered how she would feel when she returned. Would she be scared? Nervous? Happy to finally be home? Frowning, she realized, she didn’t feel any of those things. Instead, the stale air of her flat seemed to close in on her, and she found herself longing for the fresh, clean air of the ranch. Outside, London traffic rushed by, but all she wanted to hear was the low call of the cattle grazing in the pasture and the whisper of the wind through the pines.

Loneliness tugged at her heart, and she almost reached for her phone to call home. But she’d spoken to Buck the second she’d landed. He’d be worried if she called him now—less than thirty minutes later. She had things to do, anyway. She had to pack, notify the landlord that she was moving out, find a place to store her things. But first she had to call a mover.

Settling at the kitchen table with the phone book, she started making calls. She soon discovered, however, that finding the right person for the job—as well as a storage unit she could afford—took longer than she’d expected. Three precious hours later, she finally found a mover who could pick up her furniture by the end of the week. Her lease wasn’t up until the following Monday, but she’d hoped to find someone who could come while she was still there to oversee the move. Obviously, that wasn’t going to be possible. She’d promised the family that she’d be back in three days, and she was standing by her word. She’d just have to give the key to the landlord and trust him to supervise things. Resigned, she started packing.

Later, she never knew where the rest of the afternoon went. One minute, the sun was high in the sky, and the next time she looked up, the day had given way to the darkening shadows of twilight. Surprised, she glanced around and discovered the flat was littered with dozens of boxes that were packed full of books, dishes, the contents of her kitchen cupboards, not to mention the bathroom and the front closet. And she hadn’t even touched her bedroom yet!

Exhausted, she plopped down on the couch. How was she going to get everything packed and still have time to meet with Jean Pierre before she left to fly home? She didn’t want to put her internship—and her degree in fashion design—on hold, but what choice did she have? She wasn’t safe in London.

Suddenly, without warning, there was a sharp knock at the door. Startled, she jumped, her heart slamming against her ribs. She wasn’t expecting anyone. No one even knew she was there except her family. So who was knocking on her door?

Her blood turning to ice at the possibilities, she hugged herself and sat as quiet as a mouse right where she was. Whoever was on the other side of the door didn’t know she was there. When she didn’t answer, he would assume no one was home and leave.

“Miss Wyatt? Are you in there? Open up. This is the police. I need to speak to you. I have some bad news about your family in the United States.”

“Oh, God!” Panic suddenly squeezing her throat, she jumped up and ran to the door. She reached for the dead bolt, only to hesitate, horrified by a sudden thought. What if this was a trick? What if whoever was after the ranch somehow found out she’d gone back to London? Could they have found out where she was already?

“Who did you say you were?” she asked, wincing at the quiver of fear she clearly heard in her voice. “I need some identification.”

“I’m Officer Hastings,” he replied and held up his badge to the peephole in the door.

Priscilla took one look at it and sighed in relief. Lightning quick, she flipped the dead bolt and jerked open the door. “Come in—”

She didn’t have time to say another word, let alone scream, as two masked men with guns rushed through the door and grabbed her. Gasping, she tried to scream…only to have duct tape slapped over her mouth. Frantic, she clawed at the tape, but they were ready for her. In the next instant, her wrists were taped together, then her ankles. Trussed up like a turkey, there was nothing she could do as they picked her up and laid her on the floor. Before she could even begin to guess their intentions, they rolled her up in the living room rug.

Just that easily, fear took on a new name. Terror.

When Donovan Jones caught his secretary on the phone with her boyfriend for the fifth time in two days, he was in no mood to cut her any slack. He’d already warned her numerous times that she was there to work, not visit with her lover, and she’d completely ignored him. She was the third secretary he’d hired in three weeks…and the third one who seemed to think she could do whatever the hell she wanted. She was wrong.

“You’re fired,” he growled. And leaning across the desk, he pushed the disconnect button on the phone.

Sputtering, she surged up out of her chair in anger. “What the hell?!”

Not the least bit impressed with her indignation, he growled, “Get your purse and get out. Now! I’ll put your paycheck in the mail tomorrow.”

He didn’t give her time to argue but simply grabbed her purse from where she insisted on leaving it on top of a file cabinet and strode over to the door. Jerking it open, he waited. She was so furious, steam was practically coming out of her ears. Cursing, she jerked her purse out of his hand and stormed out, slamming the door so hard that she nearly knocked it off its hinges.

“Good riddance,” he muttered. “I don’t need you anyway. I can find my own files.”

But when he stalked over to the filing cabinet, the file he needed for a meeting he had scheduled in fifteen minutes wasn’t where it should have been. Swearing, he went through the entire drawer to make sure it hadn’t been misfiled, but it was nowhere to be found.

Which meant, he thought grimly as his gaze landed on the secretary’s desk, it had to be somewhere in the mountain of paperwork that completely covered the top of the desk. She’d been there a week, he thought, irritated. What the hell had she been doing? He’d been on a case and had to leave the office in her hands. Apparently, she hadn’t done a damn thing except talk on the phone to her boyfriend.

Next time, he told himself, he was going to avoid the young chicks like the plague and hire a little, old, gray-haired grandmother instead. Someone who would appreciate the job, he decided, and not take advantage of the fact that he was hardly ever in the office. Someone who—

When the outer office door suddenly opened behind him, he stiffened. If the little witch had come back to plead for her job, she could forget it, he thought. She was history. Pivoting sharply, ready to tell her just that, he found himself confronting a stranger, instead.

Frowning—had he forgotten an appointment?—he lifted a dark brow. “May I help you?”

“I’m looking for Donovan Jones.”

“You found him,” he retorted. “But I’m in a hell of a rush. I’ve got an appointment across town in fifteen minutes, and I’m going to be late as it is. Leave your name and number,” he said, pushing a steno pad across the desk to him, “and I’ll call you the first chance I get.”

“No,” the man said in the clipped regal way that only the British could do. “I need your help now.”

Donovan wasn’t a man who men often said no to. Straightening, he studied the hard look of determination in his visitor’s eyes and the set of his jaw and recognized desperation when he saw it. “What’s your story?” he demanded.

“I’m Buck Wyatt,” he said. “I need you to find my sister.”

Surprised, Donovan blinked. “I’m a bounty hunter, Mr. Wyatt. Is there a bounty out on your sister?”

“No. She’s been kidnapped.”

“How do you know that? Have you received a ransom demand?”

His mouth compressed in a flat line. “No. There won’t be any ransom note. I already know what the kidnappers want.”

Donovan knew he shouldn’t have asked. He hadn’t been lying about his meeting. He was going to be late, and it was important, dammit! But there was something in the fury in Buck Wyatt’s eyes, something in the cold, controlled outrage in his voice that Donovan knew he wasn’t going to be able to walk away from.

Resigned—and more than a little annoyed with his own curiosity—he motioned for Wyatt to pull up a chair. “You’ve got ten minutes,” he said. “Make it good, because after that I am going to my meeting.”

He didn’t have to tell him twice. Too restless to take a seat, Buck Wyatt stood, instead…and paced. “My three sisters and I inherited a ranch in Colorado eleven months ago from an American cousin we didn’t know we had,” he said stiffly. “One of the stipulations of her will was that one of us had to be at the ranch at all times for a period of one year. There was no restriction on how many single nights we could be absent from the ranch, but if no member of the family is present for two nights running, the ranch goes to an unnamed heir.”

Donovan lifted a brow at that. “How many people know about that little stipulation?”

“I would imagine just about everyone in the state of Colorado.”

Donovan whistled softly. “And no one’s run you off yet? You and your sisters must be damn tough.”

A muscle clenched in Buck’s jaw. “So far, we’ve managed to weather one attack after another…as long as they were against the ranch. Now they’ve gone after Priscilla a continent away.”

“And you’re sure your sister’s kidnapping is related to the ranch? When’s the year up?”

“Next month.”

Donovan frowned. That changed things. “Are you even sure that she’s really been kidnapped? What’s her history? Is she the type to stage this kind of thing?”

“God, no! She’s the baby of the family and damn stubborn sometimes about getting her way,” he admitted honestly, “which is why she’s in London to begin with. When she insisted on coming back to close up her apartment, we talked about her accident and how she could be walking right back into the same kind of danger as before, but she intended to be back in Colorado before anyone even knew she was gone. Obviously, that didn’t happen.”

“Whoa, back up,” Donovan said sharply. “What accident?”

Buck quickly told him about the hit-and-run driver who’d nearly killed her. “She spent the last two months at the ranch, recuperating, and during that time, there wasn’t a single attack against any of us because we were all together. Then, less than six hours after she arrives in London, someone grabs her.”

“But how do you know that for sure? Maybe she just decided to go visit some friends before she left.”

“She knew how important it was to get in and out as quickly as possible,” Buck argued. “According to the London police, her landlord found the door to her flat standing wide-open and she was nowhere to be found. She appeared to be packing when someone apparently talked their way into her apartment. There were signs of a struggle and she left her purse behind.”

Studying him through narrowed eyes, Donovan should have told him he couldn’t help him. It would have been the wise thing to do. He was up to his ears in cases and couldn’t even find the time to hire a decent secretary. He didn’t have room on his calendar for another case.

And even if he had, he silently acknowledged, Priscilla Wyatt was not the kind of woman he wanted to go looking for. He’d read between the lines of what her brother had said about her, and she was obviously headstrong and spoiled and determined to have her way. Kidnapping her back from her kidnappers sounded like a headache waiting to happen.

But she was a woman in trouble. And unless he totally missed the mark, Buck was right. Her kidnapper was, no doubt, planning to use her as the pawn that drew her family away from the ranch. He would hurt her if he had to. Time was running out on the Wyatts’s trial period, and whoever thought they were the unnamed heir had to be getting desperate. Priscilla Wyatt was in a hell of a mess…and in more danger than her family probably realized.

Silently swearing, Donovan pulled out his cell phone. Surprised, Buck Wyatt frowned. “What are you doing?”

“Canceling my appointment,” he retorted. “I’ll take the case.”

Over the course of the next hour, Donovan asked Buck every question he could think of about Priscilla, her flat, where she might go if she was able to escape her kidnappers, how gutsy she was, her strengths and weaknesses. She’d been kidnapped. Would she fight or dissolve in tears? Panic or use her head? If he was going to save her, he had to know how she would react under duress.

“She’ll use her head,” Buck assured him. “Initially, she’ll be scared out of her mind, but once she gets her fear under control, she’ll start looking for a way to escape. She’s smart,” he added, “and damn creative. She won’t take this lying down.”

“That’ll work in her favor as long as she doesn’t let her kidnapper know what’s going on in her head,” Donovan replied. “The more helpless she acts, the better chance she’ll have of taking the bastard by surprise. Has she ever taken any karate or self-defense classes?”

“No, not that I—”

His cell phone rang then, surprising them both. Scowling at the number on the face of the phone, he looked up sharply at Donovan. “It’s a private number.”

“It could be the kidnapper,” Donovan warned. “Don’t let him know you’re in London. And listen to background noises that might give you an indication of where he may be.”

His expression grave, Buck nodded, then flipped open his phone. “Hello?”

“You have forty-eight hours to leave the ranch for good…or your sister dies.”

“Who is this—”

Just that quickly, the line went dead. “He hung up,” Buck said in disgust, and repeated word for word what the caller had said. “There weren’t any background noises, and the bastard was definitely disguising his voice.”

“Give me your cell phone number,” Donovan told him. “I’ve got a friend who might be able to trace the caller’s location when he made the call. I’ll get back with you as soon as I know something.”

“I’m going with you.”

“The hell you are.”

“Priscilla is my sister, dammit! I have a right—”

“Then find yourself another bounty hunter,” he said curtly. “I work alone. If you really want to help your sister, go back to Colorado and help protect the rest of the family and your ranch. I’ll take care of Priscilla.”

“If she’s still alive.”

“Oh, she’s alive,” Donovan assured him. “She’s got forty-eight hours. After that, all bets are off.”