House For Sale Navy SEAL Included Read online

  Amanda texted him.

  Dad? Where are you?

  The answer came almost immediately. Where are you?

  Home.

  There was a long pause. Amanda stared at the tiny screen, willing him to offer her an explanation. Something that would stop the sting of shame that filled her, knowing he’d treat her like this, when she’d been so happy to welcome him back into her life.

  Get out of there. Now!

  Amanda wasn’t sure what she’d expected him to say, but it wasn’t this.

  Why?

  Buck’s coming! Amanda, leave right now!

  Buck? Amanda stood up fast. Buck Bronson knew where she lived?

  Amanda told herself to get a grip. Why wouldn’t he? Buck had served for years with the Dallas police, and his friends always seemed to have his back no matter what he did. He used to brag he knew cops all over the country. If he wanted her address, he could get it—even in LA. If he was out of jail already, he could be anywhere.

  There was no time to ask for details. She grabbed the canvas, raced to her bedroom, wrapped it in a T-shirt and shoved it in her gym bag. She threw her purse over her shoulder and checked her phone again. More messages from her father.

  GET OUT OF THERE! Now, Amanda!

  Buck knows everything!

  He’s been tracking us!

  He’s on his way!

  Did her father mean Buck knew he’d stolen a masterpiece? Was he coming to exact revenge for what happened last time?

  He’d want the painting for himself.

  Her heart pounding, Amanda turned to leave and heard a sound at her front door. Cold fear gripped her. Buck was already here. He was breaking into her apartment. She spun around, looking for another way out.

  Her bedroom window was low and wide, already open to let in a spring breeze. She popped its screen, threw a leg up and over the sill, hopped outside and thrashed her way through the decorative bushes to reach the sidewalk. The concrete was cool under her bare feet in the gathering dark. The parking lot quiet.

  Amanda ran.

  Her footsteps sounded loud in the quiet of the night. Gravel sharp against the tender skin of her soles, she picked up speed.

  Buck had been tracking them? For how long? How much did he know about her?

  Did he know the make of her car? Her license plate number?

  Had he hacked her phone?

  Nearly stumbling, Amanda bobbled the small gadget she still held in her hand, caught it and threw it into a garbage can as she raced past.

  When she finally reached her Toyota, she used the key to manually unlock it, not wanting to call attention to herself by pressing the button on her fob and activating the lights. She got in as quickly as possible, locked the door and started the engine. She kept her headlights off, hoping she could sneak past the building without Buck noticing her progress through a window.

  She had a pair of runners in her gym bag. As soon as she was safely away, she’d pull over and put them on, but there wasn’t time for that now.

  She had to get out of here.

  There was no sign of Buck as she drove past the entrance to the building. No sign of anything amiss at all. Amanda pressed the gas pedal and sped away. Was Buck rummaging through their things even now? Did he know she’d taken the painting with her?

  She should have left it behind. Should have never let her dad back into her life in the first place.

  Should have known he hadn’t come back to make amends.

  By now he’d be long gone. Ian Stakewell wasn’t the kind of man who stuck around when things got hard.

  She needed to disappear, too.

  Buck Bronson was a killer. He hated her family. She’d been safe while he was in prison, but now she needed to get out of town, fast.

  After she returned the painting.

  Amanda slowed for a moment, then pressed the accelerator again.

  She wasn’t like her father. She had a moral compass. There was no way she was allowing this beautiful piece of art to fall into the wrong hands. Besides, if she returned it, her father wouldn’t be a criminal anymore. No harm, no foul. He could disappear again, and Buck would lose interest.

  She would have her life back.

  Such as it was.

  Amanda shook the wayward thought from her head, pulled into the parking lot of the Warden Gallery, slowed to a stop and realized she hadn’t thought this through. It was well past closing time, and no doubt the gallery was wired with alarms. Cameras were probably recording her right now. She couldn’t just march up the steps and leave a masterpiece outside the door to be discovered in the morning.

  In fact, she couldn’t return it herself at any time. There’d be too many questions she didn’t want to answer.

  She couldn’t afford to wait for daylight, either. If Buck was tracking her, she had to make use of her head start.

  All her bravado gone, Amanda started the car again, gripping the steering wheel tightly as she accelerated out of the parking lot. She swung onto Highway 15 and headed toward Las Vegas, as good a town as any from which to disappear.

  She’d have to ditch her car. Pay cash for a flight out of town. Find somewhere to hide.

  Who did you call for help when you couldn’t call the police?

  Maybe no one, Amanda thought. She was on her own.

  But she had her credit card. She could go anywhere.

  As long as it wasn’t home.

  Chapter 2

  ‡

  Carter threaded his way through the crowd in the arrivals area of the Chance Creek Regional Airport, trying to get close to the large plateglass windows overlooking the tarmac. It was early May, after four in the afternoon on a Wednesday. He’d already been back in town for a month. Gage, Lincoln and Hudson, who were right behind him, had arrived a couple of weeks after him. They were here today to pick up Nate.

  “You’re wasting your money,” Gage said when they found a spot to stand in. “There’s plenty of room in Mom and Dad’s house for all of us to stay for now. There’s no sense buying and fixing up another one when we might all have to leave next June.”

  “I’m not leaving Elliott Ridge again, no matter what. The price we agreed on for the house is dirt cheap. Besides, this way I get something tangible for donating money to the family cause.”

  Carter had gone over this a dozen times already today and a hundred times since he’d claimed one of the Ridge’s houses for himself. It was situated in a corner of town his father had planned to subdivide before the crash happened. He’d done all the required steps and had just been about to hand in the final paperwork when the town emptied out instead. Carter had resubmitted the forms as soon as he came home. They were waiting for a decision from the county, so he didn’t technically own the house yet, but he’d forked over the money for it into the family account. He’d already moved his things out of house number one, where he’d grown up, and taken them to number twenty-three, the house he’d claimed. He’d drawn up plans for the renovation and gotten to work on it, too. They’d sort out the paperwork when the subdivision came through.

  Number twenty-three, on Second Avenue, was a sensible three bedroom, two bath home, the perfect place in which to start a family.

  Now all he needed was someone to share it with.

  “You’ve been fixing up Mom and Dad’s house,” Carter added. “Why isn’t that a waste of money?”

  “That’s different,” Gage said. “They might come to visit while we’re here, and they deserve to be comfortable. You don’t even own number twenty-three yet. You shouldn’t be renovating it.”

  “I’ve handed over the cash.”

  “Which is bad enough. Why throw good money after bad? It’s far from clear that we can make this all work,” Gage said. “We need more contracts, more workers—more everything. If Dad ends up selling to Warrington and we all leave, you won’t want to stay.”

  Gage had a point. It hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing so far. Given they were starting from scratch and didn’t know if they’d succeed, they’d hired the first batch of workers on a temporary basis and were having trouble holding on to them. This morning three more men quit, complaining about the low wages, the Ridge’s crappy internet connection—and the lack of women. It had been more difficult than Carter had expected to find mill workers in the first place. These days the housing market was booming, which meant people with experience in the field were in high demand all over. There were plenty of large operations that could afford to pay better wages—and offer better benefits. That meant the folks Carter had managed to hire were less than optimal. Drifters and troublemakers who preferred not to put down roots.

  Once—and only once—he’d tried to interest some of them in settling down at the Ridge. He’d told them there’d soon be houses to buy for low prices.

  “You could give them away, and I wouldn’t want to stay,” Terry Brook had said contemptuously. “I’m gone the minute I get a better offer.”

  The others seemed to feel the same.

  “We’re going to make this work,” he told Gage.

  “Not if you can’t attract some better workers. How are you going to do that?”

  It annoyed Carter that his oldest brother still had an inch of height on him and that his cold, dark gaze never flinched no matter what.

  “The men are right; no one is going to want to stay here. This isn’t a real community. There aren’t enough people here. There aren’t any women. Which isn’t surprising. What woman in her right mind would want to move to a ghost town? Women like stability. There’s nothing stable about a mill town these days.”

  Gage was just mad because Hudson and Lincoln had said they wanted to buy houses, too. They hadn’t chosen them yet, mostly because Lincoln was out looking at horses every spare moment and Hudson was out chasing women, but they were enthusiastic about the idea, and that seemed to get under Gage’s skin.

  “Women are just as adventurous as men,” Carter argued. “If they understood the possibilities, they’d be flocking to live at Elliott Ridge.” As far as he was concerned, the place was paradise.

  “There’s the plane,” Hudson said. They moved closer to the windows and watched its approach.

  “Flocking?” Gage repeated. “You’ve been recruiting workers since before you even got here. Has a single woman applied for a job?”

  Carter sighed. “Women don’t need to work in the lumber industry to move here.” He was close to losing his patience, but he didn’t want to make a scene in public. The rough men they’d employed to work at the mill were giving them a bad enough reputation in Chance Creek as it was. Cab Johnson, the local sheriff, had been out to the Ridge twice to deliver men who’d spent a night in the county lockup for drunk and disorderly conduct. “They can do all kinds of remote work as soon as we get a better internet connection.”

  “When’s that going to happen?”

  Carter couldn’t answer that. He hadn’t anticipated it would be such a hard problem to solve, but there was only one company that serviced the area. All he could do was be patient and hope they saw the value in extending fiber optic cable to Elliott Ridge. It was the kind of chicken-and-egg problem that could drive a man to drink. The internet service provider would be more likely to upgrade their connection if more people lived at the Ridge, but more people wouldn’t settle there unless they could be sure of a high-quality internet connection. Gage would say he’d misjudged the difficulty of solving the problem because he was too optimistic.

  He was too something.

  “I don’t see why women wouldn’t flock to the Ridge,” Hudson put in. “We’ve got a lake, the forest—me.”

  Gage snorted. “We’ve got snow, mosquitoes, a forty-minute commute to town… and I hate to tell you this, Romeo, but you’re not that much of an attraction.”

  “Am, too.”

  “We’ve got a lot of houses. Maybe we should give a few away—like they did in those towns in Italy. Remember?” Lincoln said. “They sold them for a dollar to people who agreed to fix them up.”

  “We can’t give them away. We need to sell them to cover our costs,” Gage said.

  “Here come the passengers.” Carter cut off his brothers. He didn’t need to hear any more of Gage’s grumbling—or Hudson’s bragging. He’d had enough of both these past few weeks. They had just under thirteen months to get the mill up and running at full capacity, the logging operation restarted and enough money coming in to cover their balloon payment and their ongoing bills.

  That wasn’t all. Carter was determined to bring his parents back to Elliott Ridge, and he wasn’t going to move them into a ghost town. That meant filling all those empty houses with people who meant to stay. Not just single men, either. Gage was right; he needed women.

  Trouble was, he couldn’t figure out how to attract them here. Men were easy. They’d come for the mill and logging jobs. Not many women were interested in those.

  In fact, young single women were scarce in Chance Creek, too, which was why his temporary workers kept getting in trouble when they went to town. Add twenty extra unattached men to a night at the Dancing Boot, and suddenly you had an alarming imbalance of the sexes.

  He focused on the people filing down the metal steps from the small plane. Most of them looked like regular folks coming to visit family or returning from vacation. A few groups seemed ready for outdoor adventures. They had probably come for the fishing. There were one or two businessmen and women, but not too many.

  Where was Nate?

  Carter’s gaze lifted to the top of the stairs when a pretty blonde came into view. She surveyed the little airport and tucked a strand of long straight hair behind her ear. She was dressed in jeans and a blue casual top. She had a large purse strapped across her body and carried a gym bag as well.

  She didn’t look particularly happy. She looked… alert, Carter decided. As if something might happen at any moment—something just as likely to be bad as good. Her chin was high. Her shoulders back. Her attitude half-defiant and half-anticipatory.

  What was she expecting to find here in Chance Creek?

  Intrigued, Carter edged closer to the window.

  A flight attendant leaned toward the woman from the interior of the plane and gestured as if to say, “Please head down the stairs.”

  The blonde nodded but didn’t move. Was she lingering to savor the moment or to give herself time to prepare for whatever came next? She was beautiful, Carter decided.

  The flight attendant gestured again.

  Come on, Carter willed the pretty blonde. You’re going to like it here.

  He wouldn’t mind making it his business to ensure that.

  You don’t even know her, he told himself. She probably had a boyfriend or husband waiting to welcome her home. A woman like that wouldn’t be single.

  His brothers were watching her, too, now. They must have noticed that someone had caught his attention and followed his gaze to see who it was. Despite their differences, they’d always been in tune in some ways.

  The flight attendant leaned closer to the blonde. Carter was no lip-reader, but he could guess what she was saying. “You’re holding everyone up. You need to keep moving.”

  The blonde nodded. Lifted her chin and made her way down the stairs. Halfway across the tarmac to the terminal, however, something caught her eye and she slowed, tilting her head back. Carter looked up, too. High above the single airstrip, an eagle circled. A smile curved the blonde’s mouth, and she nodded again, but this time it was as if she were communicating with the bird, acknowledging it had its priorities right.

  Her smile seemed to say she was also ready to soar. That she was done with her past and ready to take flight.

  A visceral thrill shot through Carter’s body. That’s how he felt coming home to Elliott Ridge. Like his real life was finally about to begin.

  And suddenly he knew.

  I’m going to marry that woman.

  The thought seared through his brain like a sniper’s bullet through flesh, even as Carter shook his head at the folly of it. There was no way he could know a thing like that. He hadn’t even spoken to her yet.

  She could belong to someone else.

  Still, he knew his hunch was right, as crazy as it was. He’d taken a bullet once. Had the scars to prove it. He knew what it felt like when a round hit home.

  This felt like that. The utter truth of it going so deep it was viscerally clear.

  He was going to marry her.

  He was going to bring his family’s town back to life—with this woman by his side. He’d never felt so certain of anything, and the revelation shocked him into a higher awareness. Did his brothers feel it, too—this startling clarity?

  “Speaking of women,” Hudson said. “There’s one now. I wouldn’t mind if she settled at the Ridge.”

  “She’d do just fine,” Lincoln agreed, leaning forward to get a better look.

  Gage shook his head. “No women. No settling. We’re going to have to sell the Ridge in the end.”

  “No, we’re not.” Carter watched the blonde enter the building. He’d been determined before, but now he was committed on a whole new level. He needed to make a home for this woman who was going to be his wife. He needed to build a whole world for her.

  “There’s Nate,” Hudson said.

  Who knew being chased by a killer could set you free?

  Amanda exited the small airplane that had brought her to Chance Creek, Montana, and stood at the top of the metal steps leading to the tarmac. She was taking a leap of faith coming here, banking that Buck hadn’t heard of the little town and wouldn’t think to come looking for her in such an obscure place.

  Two weeks ago, her father’s panicked texts had shattered the spell she hadn’t known she was living under. For years she’d crafted an existence so small she’d thought it would make her invisible. She’d let shame dictate every move, running more than a thousand miles from home and accepting a position she was overqualified for, so she wouldn’t have to face anyone who knew the truth.