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  “And where is this money?” Cassie asked, imagining it squandered on who knew what.

  “I’ve been saving it,” Jake explained, his studious little face suddenly intense. “For something real important.”

  “Saving it?” she repeated, thinking of the little metal box that contained his most treasured possessions and those dollars that his grandmother sent. Had he been socking away that much cash in there? All of his friends knew about that box. Any one of them could steal the contents.

  “Where?” she asked, praying he’d put it someplace more secure.

  “In my box,” he said, confirming her worst fears.

  “Oh, Jake.”

  “It’s safe,” he insisted. “I hid it where nobody would ever find it.”

  There was a dull throbbing behind Cassie’s eyes. She resisted the temptation to rub her temples, resisted even harder the desire to cry.

  “But why would you do something like this?” she asked, still at a loss. “You had to know it was wrong. I just don’t understand. Why did you need so much money? Were you hoping to buy your own computer?”

  He shook his head. “I did it for you, Mom.”

  “Me?” she said, aghast. “Why?”

  “So we could go back home for your reunion and maybe stay there for a really long time. I know you want to, even though you said you didn’t.” He regarded her with another touch of defiance. “Besides, I miss Grandma.”

  “Oh, baby, I know you do,” Cassie said with a sigh. “So do I, but this…this was wrong. The sheriff is right. It was stealing.”

  “It’s not like I took a whole lot from anybody,” he insisted stubbornly. “They just paid for some dumb old cards and toys. They probably would have lost ’em, anyway.”

  “That’s not the point,” she said impatiently. “They paid you for them. You have to send every penny of the money back, unless you have the toys to make things right.”

  She figured that was highly unlikely, since Jake spent his allowance on books, not toys. She met the sheriff’s gaze. “You have a list of all the people involved?”

  “Right here. As far as I know, it’s complete.”

  “If Jake sends the money back and writes a note of apology to each one, will that take care of everything?”

  “I imagine most of the people will be willing to drop any charges once they get their money back and hear the whole story,” he said. “I think a lot of them felt pretty foolish when they realized they were dealing with a third-grader.”

  “Yeah, well, Jake is obviously nine going on thirty,” Cassie said. At this rate he’d be running real estate scams by ten and stock market cons by his teens.

  This was not the first time she had faced the fact that she was in way over her head when it came to raising her son. Every single mom struggled. In all likelihood, every single mom had doubts about her ability to teach right and wrong. Cassie had accepted that it wouldn’t be easy when she’d made the decision to raise Jake on her own with no family at all nearby to help out.

  And it should have been okay. They might never be rich, but Jake was loved. She had a steady job. Their basic needs were met. There were plenty of positive influences in his life.

  Maybe if Jake had been an average little kid, everything would have been just fine, but he had his father’s brilliance and her penchant for mischief. It was clearly a dangerous combination.

  “If you’ll give me that list of names, Jake will write the notes tonight. We’ll be back in the morning with those and the money,” she said grimly.

  “But, Mom,” Jake began. One look at Cassie’s face and the protest died on his lips. His expression turned sullen.

  “Jake, could you wait outside with Earlene for just a minute?” the sheriff said. “I’d like to speak to your mother.”

  Jake slid out of the chair and, with one last backward glance, left the room. When he’d gone, Joshua faced Cassie, eyes twinkling.

  “That boy of yours is a handful,” he said.

  “No kidding.”

  “You ever think about getting together with his daddy? Seems to me like he could use a man’s influence.”

  “Not a chance,” Cassie said fiercely.

  Cole Davis might be the smartest, sexiest man she’d ever met. He might be the son of Winding River’s biggest rancher. But she wouldn’t marry him if he were the last chance she had to escape the fires of hell. He’d sweet-talked her into his bed when she was eighteen and he was twenty, but once that mission had been accomplished, she hadn’t set eyes on him again. He’d gone back to college without so much as a goodbye.

  When she’d discovered she was pregnant, she was too proud to try to track Cole down and plead for help. She’d left town, her reputation in tatters, determined to build a decent life for herself and her baby someplace where people weren’t always expecting the worst of her.

  Not that she hadn’t given them cause to think poorly of her. She’d been rebellious from the moment she’d discovered that breaking the rules was a whole lot more fun than following them. She’d given her mother fits from the time she’d been a two-year-old whose favorite word was no, right on through her teens when she hadn’t said no nearly enough.

  If there was trouble in town, Cassie was the first person everyone looked to as ringleader. Her pregnancy hadn’t surprised a single soul. Rather than endure the knowing looks and clucking remarks, rather than ask her mother to do the same, she’d simply fled, stopping in the first town where she’d spotted a Help Wanted sign in a diner window.

  In the years since, she had made only rare trips back to visit her mother, and she’d never once asked about Cole or his family. If her mother suspected who Jake’s father was, she’d never admitted it. The topic was off-limits to this day. Jake was Cassie’s alone. Most of the time she was justifiably proud of the job she’d done raising him. She resented Joshua’s implication that she wasn’t up to the task on her own.

  “Are you saying Jake wouldn’t have done this if his father had been around?” she asked, an edge to her voice. “What could he have done that I haven’t? I’ve taught Jake that it’s wrong to steal. The message has been reinforced in Sunday school. And, believe me, he will be punished for this. He may well be grounded till he’s twenty-one.”

  Joshua held up his hand. “I wasn’t criticizing you. Kids get into trouble even with the best parents around, but with boys especially, they need a solid male role model.”

  Cassie didn’t especially want her son following in Cole Davis’s footsteps. There had to be better role models around. One was sitting right in front of her.

  “He has you, Joshua,” she pointed out. “Since you’ve been coming around the diner, he’s spent a lot of time with you. He looks up to you. If anyone represents authority and law and order, you do. Did that help?”

  “Point taken.” He regarded her with concern. “Are you going to take that trip Jake was talking about? Obviously, it’s something that he really cares about.”

  “I don’t see how we can.”

  “If it’s a matter of money, the way the boy said, it could be worked out,” he said. “Earlene and I—”

  “I’m not taking money from you,” she said fiercely. “Or from Earlene. She’s done enough for me.”

  “I think you should consider it,” Joshua said slowly. His expression turned uneasy. “Look, Earlene would have my hide if she knew I was suggesting this, but I think you might want to give some thought to staying in Winding River when you do go back there.” He said it as if their going was a done deal despite her expressed reluctance.

  Cassie stared at him in shock. “Are you throwing us out of town?”

  Joshua chuckled. “Nothing that dramatic. I was just thinking that it might be good for Jake to have more family around, more people to look out for him, lend a little extra stability to his life. It would be a help to you and maybe keep him out of mischief. This latest escapade can’t be dismissed as easily as some of the others. Sometimes even kids need a fresh start. I�
��ve heard you tell Earlene yourself that he gives his teachers fits at school. Maybe a whole new environment where no one’s expecting the worst would help him settle down. Better to get him in hand now than when he hits his teens and the trouble can get a whole lot more serious.”

  “I know,” Cassie said, defeated. Nobody knew better than she did about fresh starts and living down past mistakes. Even so, it wasn’t as easy as Joshua made it sound. She didn’t bother to explain that her mother was all the family they’d have in Winding River and that friends there were few and far between. She had a stronger support system right here. Unfortunately, Joshua clearly didn’t want to hear that.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said eventually. “I promise.”

  But going home for a few days for a class reunion was one thing. Going back to live in the same town where Cole Davis and his father ruled was quite another.

  Unfortunately, though, it sounded as if circumstances—and the well-intentioned sheriff—might not be giving her much choice.

  “Blast it all, boy, I ain’t getting any younger,” Frank Davis grumbled over the eggs, ham and grits that were likely to do him in. “Who’s going to run this ranch when I die?”

  Cole put down his fork and sighed. He and his father had had this same discussion at least a thousand times in the past eight years.

  “I thought that was why I was here,” Cole said. “So you could go to your eternal rest knowing that the ranch was still in Davis hands.”

  His father waved off the comment. “Your heart’s not in this place. I might as well admit it. It could fall down around us for all the attention you pay it. You spend half the night locked away in that office of yours with all that fancy computer equipment. For the life of me I can’t figure what’s so all-fired fascinating about staring at a screen with a bunch of gobbledy-gook on it.”

  “Last year that gobbledy-gook earned three times as much as this ranch,” Cole pointed out, knowing even as he spoke that his father wouldn’t be impressed. If it didn’t have to do with cattle or land, Frank Davis didn’t trust it. Cole had given up expecting his father to be proud of his accomplishments in the high-tech world. He got higher praise when he negotiated top dollar for their cattle at market.

  “All I have to say is, if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have been so quick to break up you and that Collins girl. Maybe you’d have been settled down by now. Maybe you would have a little respect for this ranch your great-grandfather started.”

  Cole was not about to head off down that particular path. Any discussion of Cassie was doomed. He remembered all too clearly what had happened the minute his father had learned that the two of them were getting close. He had packed up Cole’s things and shipped him off to school weeks before the start of his junior year.

  To his everlasting regret, there hadn’t been a thing Cole could do about it. At that point he’d wanted his college diploma too much to risk his father’s wrath. That diploma had been his ticket away from ranching. He’d sent a note to Cassie explaining and begging for her understanding. Her reply had been curt. She’d told him it didn’t matter, that he could do whatever suited him. She intended to get on with her life.

  Ironically, the ink had barely been dry on his diploma when his father had suffered a heart attack and pleaded with him to return home. Now here he was, spending his days running the ranch he hated and his nights working on the computer programming he loved. It wasn’t as awful as it could have been. The reality was he could design his computer programs anywhere, even in a town where he had to dodge old memories at every turn.

  By the time he’d come back to Winding River, Cassie Collins had been gone, and no one was saying where. Up until then her mother had been kind to him, standing in for the mother he’d lost at an early age. But when he’d gone to see her on his return, Edna Collins had slammed the door in his face. He hadn’t understood why, but he hadn’t forced the issue.

  Over the years he’d heard Cassie’s name mentioned, usually in connection with some wild, reckless stunt that had been exaggerated by time. He’d debated questioning her best friends when they occasionally passed through town, but he’d told himself that if he’d meant anything at all to Cassie, she would have responded differently to his note. Maybe she’d just viewed that summer as a wild fling. Maybe he was the only one who’d seen it as something more. Either way, it was probably for the best to leave things as they were. Wherever she was, she was no doubt happily married by now.

  When he was doing some of his rare soul-searching, Cole could admit that the romance had been ill fated from the beginning. He and Cassie were as different as two people could be. Until they’d met, he’d been the classic nerd, both studious and shy. Only an innate athletic ability and the Davis name had made him popular.

  Cassie, with her warmth and exuberance and try-anything mentality, had brought out an unexpected wild streak in him. He would have done anything to earn one of her devastating smiles. The summer they had spent together had been the best time of his life. Just the memory of it was enough to stir more lust than any flesh-and-blood woman had for quite some time.

  He brought himself up short. Those days were long past, and it was definitely best not to go back there.

  “Well?” his father demanded. “Don’t you have anything to say about that?”

  “Leave it alone, Pop. The quickest way to get rid of me is to start bringing up old news.”

  “I hear she’s coming back to town for this big reunion the school has planned,” his father said, his expression sly. “Is that news current enough for you?”

  Cole didn’t like the way his pulse reacted to the announcement. It ricocheted as if he’d just been told that his company had outearned Microsoft.

  “That has nothing to do with me,” he insisted.

  “She’s not married.”

  Cole ignored that, though he was forced to concede that his heart started beating double time at the news.

  “Has a son she’s raising on her own,” his father added.

  “You know, I think you missed your calling,” Cole said. “You should have started a newspaper. You seem to know all the gossip in town.”

  “You saying you’re not interested?”

  Cole met his father’s gaze without flinching. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  Frank gave a little nod. “Okay, then. How about a game of poker tonight? I could call a few men. Have ’em out here in an hour.”

  Though he was relieved that his father had suddenly switched gears, Cole’s gaze narrowed suspiciously. “Why would you want to do that?”

  A grin spread across Frank Davis’s face. “’Cause a man who can lie with a straight face the way you just did is wasting it if he’s not playing a high-stakes game of cards.”

  Chapter Two

  As she and Jake drove through the Snowy Range toward Winding River two months later, Joshua Cartwright’s words played over and over in Cassie’s head like the refrain from some country music tune. Going home, even temporarily, wasn’t nearly as simple as he’d made it sound, which was why she’d flatly refused to pack up everything she owned and bring it with her. Once she decided whether to stay—if she decided to stay—she would go back for the rest of her belongings.

  Meantime, with every familiar landmark she passed, her pulse escalated and her palms began to sweat. Time hadn’t dulled any of her trepidation.

  Jake, however, had no such qualms. He was literally bouncing on the seat in his enthusiasm, taking in everything, commenting on most of it until she wanted to scream at him to be quiet. Nerves, she told herself. It was just nerves. Jake wasn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, it was good that he was so excited. There had been far too few adventures in his young life. And it had been four years, she reminded herself. He’d been only five on their last brief visit. This all seemed as new and exciting to him as it was terrifying to her.

  “How far now?” he asked for the hundredth time.

  Cassie managed a thi
n smile. “About ten miles less than the last time you asked. We’ll be there by lunchtime.”

  “And all these ranches, the great big ones, belong to people you know?”

  “Most of them,” she conceded.

  She dreaded the moment when the wrought-iron gate for the Double D came into sight. Frank Davis had named it that the day his son was born, anticipating the time when the two of them would run it together. He’d never envisioned his son bringing home the daughter of a woman who took in mending. If anything, he’d wanted Cole to marry someone whose neighboring land could be added to the holdings of the Double D.

  Unfortunately for him, Cole had never looked twice at their neighbors’ daughters. She wondered, though, if that had changed, if Frank had gotten his way.

  As the road twisted and turned, the snow-capped mountains gave way to rolling foothills. Black Angus cattle dotted the landscape. Bubbling streams and a broader, winding river cut through the land, the banks lined by thick stands of leafy cottonwoods.

  Eventually the road dipped, went over a narrow span of bridge, and there it was, the town in which she’d grown up, complete with the water tower she’d once climbed and repainted shocking pink. It was a pristine white now, with flowing blue script proudly spelling out Winding River and, beneath that, in bolder letters: WELCOME.

  A sign by the side of the road proudly announced the population at 1,939. If she decided to stay, would it soon be altered to say 1,941? Cassie wondered. Or would the ebb and flow of births and deaths, departures and new arrivals, keep it forever the same?

  “Mom, look,” Jake said in an awestruck tone.

  “What?”

  “Over there,” he said, pointing to something she’d never seen before.

  It was an airstrip, not much by big-city standards, but there were half a dozen very fancy private planes parked outside the hangar. Obviously over the past ten years some folks with money had settled in Winding River. Years ago a few of the ranchers, Cole’s father among them, had kept small planes for making rapid inspections of their far-flung land, but nothing like these.