The Invitation Read online

  Everything happened at once then. The cowboy tossed the suitcase to the ground just in time to catch Ruth when she fainted into his big, strong arms, while Winnie and Maggie fell sobbing onto each other.

  I was left standing there with a smoking revolver in my hand. Looking at Ruth draped aesthetically across the cowboy’s sun-bronzed arms, I did my best Matt Dillon imitation, legs apart, and blew on the end of the revolver, then stuck it into my skirt pocket. “Well, Tex,” I drawled, “there’s another one for Boot Hill.”

  It didn’t take a degree in psychology to see that the cowboy was angry. In fact, he was looking at me as though he wanted to wrap his hands around my throat and squeeze, but since his hands were so very full of Ruth’s swooning body, he could do nothing but glare meaningfully. In spite of his encumbrances, when he started walking toward me, I stepped aside. I don’t think they allow public murders in Colorado, but I didn’t want to press my luck.

  But he just slipped his precious burden onto the truck seat—Ruth was still doing her dying swan act, but from the flicker of her eyelashes I knew she was as wide awake as I was—then told the skinny follower to get in with her. I think he would have slammed the door shut, but the noise might have disturbed Sleeping Beauty.

  Winnie—Maggie?—and I stood to one side while he tossed suitcases, four at a time, into the back of the truck.

  “Get in,” he said to Ruth’s minion, and she obeyed with the speed, if not the grace, of a gazelle.

  He turned to me next, his face blazing, and right then I decided that I was not going to get into that truck and let him drive me off to heaven knew where.

  “Look,” I said, backing up, “all I did was shoot the snake. I’m sorry if I offended your masculine sensibilities, but…” Maybe this wasn’t the way to talk to a cowboy. There’s a reason why big, beautiful men are jocks and little, wimpy men are brains. It’s as though God tried to even things out, as though he said, “You get beauty but no brains, and you, over there, get brains but no beauty.” So talking to this scrumptious-looking creature about the finer points of psychology might not be the best thing to do. Could he read and write? I wondered.

  “When I give an order, you are to obey it. You understand me?”

  Suddenly I wasn’t in Colorado anymore. I wasn’t an award-winning author; I was again a little girl whose father controlled everything. As fast as I was transported backward, I returned to the present, but all the rage that little girl had felt was still with me. “Like hell I will,” I said and started to walk around the truck.

  When he put his hands on me I went berserk. No one had touched me in anger since I escaped my father’s house, and no one was going to now. I kicked and bit and fought and scratched my way away from him. I don’t know how long I fought before I came back to the present reality and realized he had his hands on my shoulders and was shaking me. Ruth and her skinny follower were gaping at me out the back window of the truck, and the one in the back was cringing behind Ruth’s suitcases, as though she was afraid I’d attack her next.

  “Are you okay?” the cowboy asked.

  There were three bloody streaks on his beautiful cheek, and I had put them there. I couldn’t look at him. “I want to go home,” I managed to whisper. Home to my own lovely apartment, away from Ruth and her cowboy. Away from my embarrassment.

  “Okay,” he said, sounding as though he were speaking to a dangerously wacko person. “When we get to the ranch, I can arrange transportation back, but there’s no one here now. Do you understand me?”

  I hated his patronizing tone, and when I looked back at him I didn’t think he was as beautiful as I’d originally thought. “No, I don’t understand you. Maybe you should speak a little slower, or maybe you should call the men with white jackets.”

  He didn’t seem to find that funny as he picked me up at the waist and threw me into the bed of the truck with all the finesse he’d used with the suitcases. I was halfway out the back when he stepped on the gas and knocked me backward. Fortunately I landed unhurt on the very soft form of Winnie/Maggie. I didn’t bother to ask about her.

  I was an internationally successful writer sitting in the back of a dirty truck. A heavy suitcase was starting to crush my ankle, and four people were thinking I was a crazy. Did Mary Higgins Clark go through this?

  Chapter Three

  What happened to you?” Sandy asked, looking up from the kitchen table and seeing the fury on Kane’s face as well as the three bloody scratches.

  Kane didn’t answer until he’d poured himself a healthy shot of MacTarvit whisky and downed it in one gulp. “I got these marks from being a fool,” he said, refilling his glass as he turned to the older man. “Have they written any books on this mother-son thing?”

  Sandy smiled, making his face fold into thousands of wrinkles caused by many years of being in the high-altitude sun. “A few hundred, maybe thousands,” he said. “What’s Pat done now?”

  “Talked me into taking a bunch of idiots into the mountains. She made me feel guilty about the kids and—” He broke off as he drank more of the whisky. “Have you met these women?”

  “No,” Sandy said. “Why don’t you tell me about them?”

  Kane shook his head in disbelief. “One of them put her hand inside my shirt and felt me up, another one asked me questions about blockage of my bowels, and the other one…”

  Sandy frowned when Kane took another drink, for he knew he wasn’t much of a drinker.

  “The other one nearly shot me, and afterward she turned into a raving lunatic. If she doesn’t kill us in our sleep, she’s at least going to terrify the horses.”

  “And what about the fourth one?”

  Kane smiled. “Ah, now, that would be Ruth.”

  Sandy had to turn away so Kane wouldn’t see his smile. Pat had made it clear that romance was the motive for coercing her widowed son into taking the women on this trip, and it looked as though her plan was working, if the silly expression on Kane’s face was any indication of what was happening.

  “I’ve got to get back to them. No telling what that crazy one will do. There are rifles in the main house, and she might decide to be Annie Oakley and see if she can shoot the barrettes off the heads of the other women.”

  “That bad?” Sandy asked, frowning.

  “Worse.” Kane finished his drink. “I want you to radio home and have Dad send the helicopter here to pick her up. I don’t want to be around her; she’s dangerous.”

  “Frank took the copter to Washington State. Something to do with Tynan Mills.”

  “Damn!” Kane said under his breath. “Look, radio Dad and tell him to get some transportation here fast. If nothing else, tell him to have a truck meet us in Eternity. If I have to spend the entire two weeks with that woman I may kill her.”

  “You’d better hold off on that. Your mother might not like a dead greenhorn.”

  “It’s not a laughing matter. You haven’t met her.” Kane took a deep breath. “I will do my best to get along with her until I can ship her out of here. All right? Will you radio Dad now?”

  Nodding in agreement as Kane left the cabin, Sandy went to the radio to call.

  When Kane entered the big two-story main house, the first thing he saw was the little blond mystery writer, and his first thought was to wonder if all her stories were based on people trying to kill her. If they were, he could understand why they’d tried to do it. In spite of what he’d told Sandy about trying to get along with her, when he saw her there alone, he tried to tiptoe out before she saw him.

  “Caught!” she said, seeming to be highly amused at seeing him trying to escape undetected.

  Turning back to her, Kane tried to force himself to smile at her. She was a guest of his, or, more correctly, his neighbor’s, and he was going to try to be a good host to her. The bottom floor of the big log house was all one room, with the bedrooms upstairs, and she was sitting at the bar, looking amused. He couldn’t explain what it was he disliked so much about her, but it