'Twas the Week Before Christmas (19 page)

She pulled the sweater over her head, rolled up the sleeves of the T-shirt to just below her elbows and headed into the kitchen for the cleaning supplies.

He was right about the kitchen. The big, well-designed space sparkled. She headed into the area she guessed was the mudroom and found an organized space with shelves, cubbies and a convenient bench for taking off boots. A big pair of men’s lined boots rested in a pile of melting snow and she picked them up and set them aside before quickly drying the puddle.

She easily found the cleaning supplies stored in one of the cubbies in a convenient plastic tote. She picked the whole thing up and carried it back through the house. First things first, the clutter of garbage all around, then she could start wiping down surfaces and work on the bathrooms.

As she walked through the big, comfortable great room picking up party detritus, she wondered about the Bowman family.

She knew a little about the family from her initial research, the quick web search she had done after finding that storage unit that had led her to this place and this moment. She had learned a little more after her arrival in Pine Gulch, Idaho last night, thanks to a casual conversation with the young, flirtatious college student working as desk clerk at the Cold Creek Inn where she had stayed the night before.

She knew, for instance, that the charming inn where she stayed was actually owned, coincidentally, by the wife of Taft, one of the Bowman brothers.

From the clerk, she had discovered there were four Bowman siblings. Ridge, the hard, implacable rancher she had just met, was the oldest. Then came twins Taft and Trace, the fire chief and police chief of Pine Gulch, respectively. And finally the daughter, Caidy, the one who had been married the day before—much to the chagrin of the desk clerk, who she quickly deduced had nurtured an ill-fated secret crush on Caidy Bowman, now Caldwell.

The ranch appeared to be a prosperous one. All the buildings were freshly painted, and the big, comfortable log home could easily have doubled as a small hotel itself. It was large enough to host a wedding reception, for heaven’s sake.

The Christmas tree alone was spectacular, at least eighteen feet tall and decorated to the hilt with ribbons, garland, glittery ornaments. More evergreen garlands twisted their way up the staircase and adorned the raw wood mantel of the huge river-rock fireplace.

This was more than just a showplace. She could tell. This was a home, well maintained and well loved.

As she headed up the stairs to collect a pile of napkins she could see on a console table in an upper hallway, Sarah had to fight down a little niggle of envy. She couldn’t help comparing the splendid River Bow ranch house to the small, cheerless apartments where she had lived with her mother after the divorce.

What child wouldn’t have loved growing up here? Sliding down that banister, riding the horses she had seen running through the snow-covered pastures, gazing up at those wild mountains out the wide expanse of windows?

She frowned as she suddenly remembered the rest. A lump rose in her throat.

Oh. Right.

She knew more about Ridge Bowman than how many siblings he had and the outward prosperity of his ranch. She knew he and his brothers and sister had suffered unimaginable tragedy more than a decade earlier, the violent murder of their parents in a home-invasion robbery.

She could only guess how the tragedy must still haunt them all.

That ever-present anxiety gnawed at her stomach again, as it had since she walked into that storage unit, and she pressed a hand there.

She had to tell him. She couldn’t keep stalling. She had come all the way from Southern California, for heaven’s sake. This was ridiculous.

With fresh determination, she gripped the now-bulging garbage bag and started down the stairs.

She wasn’t quite sure what happened next. Perhaps her heel caught on the edge of a stair or the garbage bag interfered with her usual balance. Either way, she somehow missed the second stop down.

She teetered for a moment and cried out, instinctively dropping the bag as she reached for the banister, but her hand closed around air and she lost what remained of her precarious balance.

Down she tumbled, hitting a hip, an elbow, her head—and finally landing at the bottom with a sickening crunch of bone as her arm twisted beneath her.

Copyright © 2013 by RaeAnne Thayne

ISBN-13: 9781460322840

’TWAS THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Copyright © 2013 by Megan Leavell

All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

www.Harlequin.com