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

Chapter 6

Caleb Mercer was not a man who asked questions before he had answers.

He sat across from her in the chair nearest the fire, and he listened. Not the way polite men listened, nodding at intervals, preparing their next words while you were still forming yours. He listened the way a man listens when what he’s hearing matters. Still and focused, his forearms resting on his knees, his eyes on her face the entire time.

Evelyn talked.

She hadn’t planned to tell him everything. She had planned to give him enough to explain the situation without revealing more than was necessary, because she had learned in the last twelve hours that trust was a resource she had been spending carelessly, and she could not afford to spend it that way anymore.

But something about the directness of him, the absence of performance, the way he simply waited without filling the silence with reassurance she hadn’t asked for, made the full story come out instead of the careful version.

She told him about the letter. About her father’s handwriting gone thin and uncertain. About standing in the hallway outside the study with the door not quite closed, listening to Richard Vance describe a wagon accident in the Bitterroot Range with the same tone a man uses to discuss a business arrangement.

She told him about the two men at the garden gate. About the closed wagon and the dark road climbing north. About being set down in the storm and listening to the horses turn away.

When she finished, she was shaking again. Not from cold this time. The fire had done its work on her body. This was something else.

Caleb was quiet for a moment.

“This fiancé,” he said. “Richard Vance. His family has railroad interests in the Southern Territory?”

“He needed the Harper land grants to extend his father’s line north.” She pulled the blanket tighter. “I thought he wanted to marry me.”

“He wanted the land grants.”

“Yes.”

Another silence. Outside, the storm was working itself through the peak of its temper.

“And your father,” Caleb said. “You said he’s ill.”

“He’s been ill for six weeks. It came on quickly.” She paused. “Richard had dinner with him privately every week for the two months before the illness started. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

Caleb looked at her steadily. “You think it wasn’t illness.”

“I think my father was the healthiest man I knew eight weeks ago. I think he signed a letter asking me to transfer my inheritance while he could barely hold a pen. And I think that if I had signed that document and then disappeared on a mountain road, no one would have looked too hard for answers.”

She met his eyes. “I’m not hysterical, Mr. Mercer. I’m telling you what I know.”

“I didn’t say you were hysterical.”

“Most men would have by now.”

He held her gaze for one more second, then stood and went to the far wall, where a shelf held a tin coffee pot and two cups. He poured without asking if she wanted any and brought a cup to her.

“You said there’s a deed,” he said, settling back into the chair. “Your father gave it to you privately three years ago.”

“He had Hoskins, his attorney in Boseman, draw up a separate instrument conveying the northern land holdings directly to me, outside the main estate documents.” She wrapped both hands around the cup. “They took my bag. That document was in it.”

Caleb was quiet again. “Can you get another copy?”

“Hoskins would have the original. If he’s still practicing. If Margaret hasn’t already reached him. If he hasn’t already been persuaded that the new documents are legitimate.”

“That’s a lot of ifs.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

The dog had settled near the fire, head on its paws, watching her with amber eyes. She had the distinct impression the animal was running its own assessment of her.

“What’s your dog’s name?” she asked.

Caleb glanced at the animal. “Scout. He found me. He finds things.” He took a drink of his coffee. “He’s better at it than most people.”

She almost smiled. The feeling surprised her, that her face could still locate that particular muscle movement after the night she had just lived through.

“Mr. Mercer.” She set the cup down carefully. “I understand that I arrived here uninvited in the middle of the night, in the middle of a storm, and I have no reasonable claim on your time or your charity.”

“All right.”

“But I also need you to understand that the men who left me on that mountain will come back when the storm clears. And when they do, they will come up this range looking for evidence of what happened to me. I don’t want to put you in danger that isn’t yours.”

Caleb looked at her for a long moment.

“Ma’am, I’ve been living on this mountain for four years. I know every trail in a forty-mile radius. I know who travels through here, and I know who doesn’t.” He leaned forward slightly. “Two men in a hired wagon left a woman to die in a storm on my mountain. That makes it mine to deal with.”

She stared at him.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “In the morning, we figure out what comes next.”