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

Chapter 8

It was late in the afternoon when Caleb stopped suddenly on the trail ahead of her and held up one hand.

She stopped.

Scout had gone very still.

Caleb turned his head slowly, listening. She listened too, though she didn’t know what she was listening for. And then she heard it.

Horses. Below them on the range. Moving fast. More than one.

“Off the trail,” Caleb said quietly. “Now.”

They moved. He knew exactly where a shelf of rock that couldn’t be seen from below was, reached by a lateral scramble that she made without fully understanding how her feet found it. They pressed flat against the rock and waited.

Three horses came into the visible section of the lower trail below them, moving with purpose. Three men. Not two. The third she didn’t recognize. But the first one, the one riding slightly ahead, she knew by his posture.

Richard Vance.

He had come himself.

Evelyn pressed herself harder against the rock without meaning to. Every muscle in her body went rigid. Caleb was beside her, close enough that she could feel the stillness of him. Not the stillness of fear. The other kind. The kind that came from a man who had been in situations where noise meant death, and had trained his body accordingly.

Richard’s voice drifted up from the trail below. Fragments, not full sentences. The wind taking most of it.

“…didn’t survive that storm…”

“…has to be sure…”

“…nothing left to find…”

He was coming up to confirm. She understood with cold precision what that meant. He wasn’t satisfied with leaving her in the storm. He had come to look for a body. And if he didn’t find one, he would keep looking until he did.

The horses passed below and moved up the far trail. The main access route. The one she and Caleb had deliberately not taken.

They waited. Three full minutes of silence after the sound of hooves faded.

Then Caleb turned to her. His face was doing nothing dramatic, but his eyes had gone to a particular kind of sharp.

“He came himself. He doesn’t trust anyone else to confirm it. That means he’s scared.”

She blinked. She hadn’t thought of it that way.

“Richard Vance doesn’t look scared,” she said.

“Men who come to confirm their own crimes personally are always scared. Confidence hires other people. Fear shows up.” He looked back in the direction the horses had gone. “He’s scared because he doesn’t know what happened to you, and he needs to know.”

He turned back to her. “Which means you have more time than you thought. He won’t move forward on the estate while there’s uncertainty.”

She let that land. Reorganized her thinking around it.

“He’ll search for two, maybe three days. He can’t stay away from the city longer than that without raising questions.”

“Right.”

“So we have a window.”

“We have a window.”

Caleb stood. “We move faster now.”

She didn’t argue.

They made another four miles before dark forced a stop. Caleb built a fire small enough not to be seen from the lower trails, and she sat beside it with her arms around her knees and her mind working through everything she knew. Arranging it the way her father had taught her to arrange a problem. Not by emotion. By sequence. One fact following another until the shape of the whole thing became clear.

“My father’s attorney,” she said. “Hoskins. Do you know Boseman well enough to know if he’s still practicing?”

Caleb thought. “There’s a Hoskins on Meridian Street. Law practice. Been there as long as I’ve been making supply runs.”

She exhaled. “Good. That’s good.”

“Don’t put all your weight on it yet. Knowing he’s there and knowing he’s clean are different things.”

“I know.” She looked at the fire. “But he drew up the original deed himself. If he’s the man my father trusted, he’ll know what a fraudulent transfer looks like.”

“And if he’s been paid?”

“Then I make another plan.” She looked up. “I always make another plan.”

Caleb watched her across the fire for a moment. Something in his expression shifted. “Your father raised you to fight.”

It wasn’t a question.

“He raised me to think.” She paused. “The fighting I learned on my own.”

He almost smiled. The corners of his mouth moved fractionally.

“Get some sleep. I’ll take watch.”

“You need sleep too. I’ll sleep in shifts.”

“Mr. Mercer, you are spending your own time and your own safety to help a woman you met twelve hours ago in a storm. I want you to know that I am not taking that lightly.”

He was quiet for a moment. “You didn’t ask me to come. I came because Scout found you, and I followed him. And I’m helping you get to Boseman because what was done to you was wrong. And I don’t sit well with wrong.”

He picked up a stick and turned it in the fire. “You don’t owe me a debt for that, ma’am. That’s just how I’m made.”

She held that in her chest for a moment.

“Evelyn,” she said. “My name. You keep saying ma’am. My name is Evelyn.”

He held her gaze for one moment. Two.

“Evelyn,” he said. Just that. Just her name, spoken straight, without decoration.

She lay down near the fire and pulled the bedroll around her. She stared at the sky through the trees, clear now after the storm, with stars punched through the dark in numbers she had never seen from the estate windows. She was on a mountain in the middle of the night with no documents, no money, and men looking for her. She was also, and this was the thing she hadn’t expected, the thing that sat in her chest alongside the fear and the fury and the grief, she was also not alone.

She closed her eyes.

That was enough to sleep on.