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

Chapter 3

“There are roads through the Bitterroot Range that no one travels in storm season. A wagon accident. A woman traveling alone, perhaps distraught over her father’s illness. These things happen.”

The silence that followed lasted exactly four seconds. Evelyn counted them.

“Make the arrangements,” Margaret said.

Evelyn pressed herself flat against the wall. Her heart was beating so loud she was certain they could hear it through the door. She waited until she heard Richard’s chair scrape back, and then she moved. She walked toward the far end of the room, away from the study, and she did not run. Running would have made noise. Running would have given them something to hear.

She made it to her room. She closed the door. And then she sat on the edge of her bed and understood with absolute clarity that she had approximately one day to do something before the people she had trusted with her entire life killed her for what she owned.

She did not cry. There would be time for that later, or there wouldn’t be. What she needed now was to think.

Her father’s original will. The one drawn up seven years ago by an attorney named Hoskins in the city of Boseman. That document named her as sole heir. If she could reach Hoskins before Richard and Margaret could stop her, if she could get to Boseman and place herself under legal protection, she might survive. But Boseman was a full day’s ride south. And she had no horse, no money for a stagecoach ticket, and no allies in the house. The servants were loyal to Margaret. The guards answered to Richard. She was alone in a house full of people who would hand her over to the people who wanted her dead.

She heard footsteps on the stairs. Too fast. Too deliberate.

She was still sitting on the bed when the door opened without a knock.

Richard Vance stood in the doorway. He was a tall man, well-dressed, with the kind of face that photographed well and gave nothing away in person. His dark hair was perfectly combed, his collar starched and straight. He looked like the man she had agreed to marry, and yet he looked like someone she had never met at all.

He looked at her for a moment without speaking, and she saw the machinery behind his eyes, calculating, adjusting, deciding which version of himself to deploy.

“You were in the hallway,” he said.

“I was checking on my father.”

“His room is in the other direction.”

She met his eyes. “I took the long way.”

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The sound of the latch catching was very quiet and very final. “Evelyn.” He said her name like a man recalibrating, testing a new approach. “I know this has been a difficult time. Your father’s illness, the pressure of the estate questions—”

“Don’t.” The word came out flat. “Don’t manage me, Richard. Not right now.”

Something shifted in his face. The performance slipped, just slightly. Behind it, she saw something colder, something that had been there all along, hidden beneath the charm she had mistaken for character.

“I need you to understand that what’s happening is the right outcome for everyone. The Harper holdings are too complex for a woman alone. Too—”

“Too complex?” She stood. “My father built that railroad. I grew up watching him build it. I know every mile of track, every land grant, every easement dispute. Don’t tell me what’s too complex for me.”

“Sign the transfer, Evelyn.” His voice had gone quiet in a way that was worse than loud. “Sign it, and this doesn’t have to be unpleasant.”

“And if I don’t?”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled, and the smile was the most frightening thing she had seen all day, because it didn’t reach his eyes, and it didn’t try to.

“Get some rest,” he said. “You look tired.”

He left. The door swung shut behind him, and the room felt smaller than it had before. Smaller and colder, as if he had taken all the warmth with him.

She stood in the center of her room and listened to his footsteps retreat down the hall. She had perhaps four hours.