She Was Thrown Away By Her Bloodline — A Mountain Cowboy Gave Her A Home

Chapter 11

The boarding house was quiet.

Clara Briggs was a woman in her fifties with gray-streaked hair and eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by anything. She showed Evelyn to a room at the back of the house, small but clean, with a window that looked out over the garden instead of the street.

“Your friend paid for two nights. There’s a lock on the door. I don’t ask questions, and I don’t answer them either. If you need something, you knock on the floor twice.”

She left without waiting for a response.

Evelyn sat on the edge of the bed. The room was quiet. The first quiet she had had since the letter arrived on Tuesday morning. She heard a soft scratch at the door. Scout. She opened it. The dog looked up at her, then walked past her into the room and settled on the floor beside the bed. As if he had decided that this was where he was supposed to be.

She sat back down. Scout put his head on his paws and watched her with those amber eyes.

“All right,” she said to him. “I suppose you’re staying.”

Scout’s tail thumped once against the floor.

She lay down, still fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling. She thought about her father. About the way he had looked at her when she walked into his room. That warning in his eyes. He had known something was wrong. He had tried to tell her, but he hadn’t been able to say it. Not with Margaret and Richard listening. Not with the walls that had ears and the doors that didn’t close all the way.

She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, Caleb was knocking on her door in the darkness.

“Evelyn.”

She sat up. Scout was already on his feet, alert.

Caleb opened the door. In the dim light from the hallway, she could see that he was holding a piece of paper.

“Hoskins sent word. The injunction has been filed. The estate is frozen.”

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “That’s good.”

“That’s the first part.” He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “The second part is that Richard Vance knows you’re alive. He’s pulled his men off the mountain. He’s heading back to the estate.”

“Then we need to get there before him.”

“We can’t. He’s on horseback, and he’s got a day’s head start.” Caleb paused. “But we can get there close enough behind him that he won’t have time to destroy everything.”

“Then we leave tonight.”

“Evelyn.” He said her name carefully. “If we go back to that house, you need to understand what you’re walking into. Richard Vance has already tried to kill you once. He’s not going to stop because of a piece of paper. A piece of paper stops a legal process. It doesn’t stop a man who has decided that you are the only thing standing between him and what he wants.”

She stood up. In the darkness of the room, with the moonlight coming through the window, she looked at him.

“I know what I’m walking into, Caleb. I’ve known since the moment I heard him say the word ‘disappears.’ But I am not going to let that man take my father’s legacy. I am not going to let him take my father’s life. And I am not going to hide in a boarding house while he decides what to do next.”

She looked at him. “I am a Harper. We don’t surrender. We don’t run. And we don’t wait for other people to solve our problems.”

Caleb looked at her for a long moment. And then he did something she hadn’t expected. He smiled. A real smile, not the fractional movement of his mouth that she had seen before. A full, genuine smile that changed his entire face.

“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t suppose you do.”

He opened the door. “Then let’s go.”

They left Boseman in the dark, riding two horses that Caleb had arranged through Clara Briggs. Scout ran beside them, a dark shape in the darkness. The road south was flat and fast, and they pushed the horses hard.

Evelyn rode with the deed pressed against her chest, folded into the inside pocket of her coat. She rode with the knowledge that she was going back to the house where she had been betrayed, to the room where her father was dying, and to the people who had tried to erase her.

She was not afraid. She was angry. And she had learned something in the mountains that she had not known before. She had learned that she was capable of more than she had ever imagined.

The estate appeared on the horizon as the first light of dawn began to break.

She urged her horse forward.