They Kicked Her Off the Ranch for Helping a Cowboy… Unaware He’s a Millionaire—Then, He Bought Ranch
Chapter 5
The riders reined in, blocking the narrow trail. Their horses stamped and blew, kicking up dust that made her cough. She saw Sutter’s grin first, and then the face of the boy behind him — Pike, looking uneasy in the saddle, like a man who had been sent to do a thing he hadn’t chosen.
“Well, well.” Sutter tipped his hat back with one thumb. “Look what the sun dragged out of the barn before breakfast. You look like you could use a ride, Maren.”
“I’m fine walking.” She kept her voice level, though fear had begun its slow crawl up her spine. She stepped to the side, and Pike moved his horse to block her again. His mouth opened and closed before he spoke, following the foreman’s lead.
“Boss sent us,” he said. “He says you might have taken something from the lockbox in his office before you left.”
“That’s a lie, and you know it.” Her voice was sharp, cutting. “I have never set foot in Mr. Voss’s office. I took exactly what belonged to me and not one splinter more.”
Sutter dismounted slowly, deliberately, and hooked a coiled leather whip off his saddle. He didn’t crack it. He didn’t need to. The creak of the leather was its own argument, fat and patient in the heat. “Boss says we need to take a look through your bag and your pockets, just to be sure.” His eyes dropped to her collar, to the chain lying against the hollow of her throat. “Friend to friend, though — I’ve always liked that little silver trinket of yours.”
She understood in the same white-hot instant that she had been right about him. He had seen the locket in the barn once, when she’d leaned over the stranger and the lamplight had caught the silver. He had not forgotten it. “You want my grandfather’s locket,” she said, and her voice shook only slightly, with fury, not fear. “That’s what this is. A fake charge, a whip, and a dead man’s name to throw at the marshal. You’re a thief and a coward, Sutter, and you’ve made your whole miserable life out of other people’s fortunes.”
The playfulness left his face. What remained was something older and emptier. He lunged and snatched the canvas bag from her hands. She kicked his shin as hard as she could. He grunted, cursed, and backhanded her across the face.
The world went sideways. Her teeth clicked, and she tasted iron, stumbling into the dry brush where his blow had knocked her. Blood ran from her split lip down her chin. Sutter dumped the bag onto the dirt and kicked the contents apart — the dresses, the blanket, the boots — looking for coins, for anything. “Where is it?” he growled, and started toward her.
She scrambled backward, one hand pressed over the pocket that held the locket, the only thing of her grandfather’s she had left in the world. She was alone. She had no weapon. The valley was completely, horribly silent, watching.
She braced herself for the worst of it — the whip, the search, the humiliation — and a sound cracked across the hollow like a snapped bone. Sharp. Metallic. A gunshot.
But not a whip. Not a revolver. The unmistakable report of a Winchester rifle, fired once into the sky, and the echo rolled off the ridge-lines like a voice saying: this far, and no further.
Sutter froze mid-step. Pike’s horse shied and danced, fighting its bit. Down the southern road, a line of riders crested the rise — six of them, riding in a loose, disciplined column that parted like water around the trail. Sutter’s face went through several colors, and what it settled on was something Maren had never seen in him before.
White.