With a feeling of dread, she hit the play button. One message was from her boss, telling her to report in an hour early for the photo session tomorrow and to be prepared for a long day. They wanted to continue into the evening if it rained so they could get shots of lights on the wet streets and her in the latest raincoat fashions.
“Oh, thrill,” she murmured.
The next four messages were silent, except for the faint hiss of breathing. On the last one, she heard the voice she recognized. “Heh…heh-heh,” he chuckled, a slight pause between the start and the end of the laughter.
A shiver stormed down her spine as if she stood in the cold rain. “I hate him,” she murmured as anger, resentment and fear formed a tight ball in her chest. “Hate him.”
“Yeah?” Clyde Fortune said into the phone, which had been ringing when he walked into the house.
“Is that any way to answer the phone?” his obnoxious kid sister demanded.
“Sure. It’s short and to the point.”
She snorted in disapproval, then spoiled it by laughing. “How are you, my dear favorite brother?”
He grinned. “As in one of your many dear favorite brothers, according to which one you’re going to ask a favor of, my sweet little sister?”
There were four boys in the family. Jack was four years older than his own thirty-six years. Since Clyde was the oldest of triplets, he had two brothers, Steven and Miles, who were the same age as he was. Violet was three years younger and the only girl among the siblings.
While the triplets had headed west when they grew up, Jack and Violet had remained in New York, where their parents lived. Their father, Patrick, was an affluent financier. Their mom, Lacey, was a feminist and an equal rights advocate. All her children had gone on marches for one cause or another during their growing years.
Clyde and his triplet brothers had loved Texas and had spent their summers on the ranch belonging to their Fortune cousins for nearly as long as they could remember. Once out of college, they’d pooled their resources and bought their own spread, the Flying Aces, two miles outside of Red Rock and not far from Ryan Fortune’s Double Crown Ranch.
The brothers ran a very successful beef and egg supply business. They contracted with a major distributor in San Antonio, which was only twenty miles from Red Rock, for everything they could produce.
“I do have a favor to ask,” Violet admitted.
“Uh-huh. I thought that was what you had on your little mind. Otherwise, why bother to call?”
“Don’t be so cynical. Besides, the phone line runs both ways. When was the last time you called me?” she demanded.
She had a point. “Okay, I give. You’re right. I haven’t called in weeks—”
“Months,” she corrected.
He sighed loudly. “How are our parents? Have you seen them lately?”
“I try to get out there for Sunday lunch,” she told him, becoming serious. “Mom is as active as ever, but Dad is having trouble with his knees. He’s slowing down.”
“Well, he is seventy,” Clyde said. “Tell the old man to get knee surgery. Can’t you docs replace everything in the body these days, even brains?”
“Very funny,” she snapped, but with humor in her tone. “I didn’t call to talk about our family.”
“Ah, so whose family do you want to talk about?”
“Not a whole family, just Jessica.”
An image came to his mind—a tall girl with skinny arms and legs and a narrow frame, a girl who’d been shy and awkward when Violet had first brought her out to the Double Crown. The two girls had become fast friends, which he’d found surprising. Jessica had looked and sounded exactly like what she was, a down-home Texan with a twang and few social graces. Violet and the girl had remained friends all these years, had even roomed together a couple of times.
Even more surprising was the fact that Jessica was now a top model in New York, according to his sister. Since the world of fashion didn’t come close to being on his list of priorities, he didn’t know about that.
“Do you remember her?” Violet asked.
“Sure. Tall, awkward girl who morphed into a fashion model or something. Is that her?”
“Yes. Uh, she has a problem.”
“Yeah?” He wondered what that had to do with him and the price of eggs in China or, closer to home, San Antonio.
“There’s this guy, a politician who’s sort of big in the city, respected family and all that.” She paused.
Clyde felt tension in the back of his neck. He rubbed it away. “So?” he prodded, growing impatient.
“He’s stalking Jessica.”
“Call the police.”
“She has. They won’t do anything. There’s no proof, just her word against his. Anyway, she’s been working hard and this creep keeps calling and breathing into the phone, then he gives this little smirky laugh and hangs up.”
Clyde muttered a curse. He didn’t like people, whether men or women, who preyed on others.
“She’d planned on taking September and October off, so I thought it would be good if she got out of town.”
He could sense what was coming.
“The ranch would be a perfect place for her to rest and to stay low while this jerk gets over his fixation.”
“Two months? I don’t—”
“She would probably only stay a month. You won’t have to do a thing. She can entertain herself. She just needs a quiet place where he can’t contact her.”
Put that way, it was hard to refuse. “I don’t know,” he hedged. “Let me talk to Steven and Miles first.”
“Steven doesn’t even live there anymore,” she protested. “He’s all wrapped up in his new ranch and remodeling the house for the love of his life. And Miles won’t care. He loves having a woman around to flirt with and practice his charm on. You know that.”
“Huh,” he said, trying to think of a good excuse not to have her friend there and knowing it was a losing battle. His protective instincts were already prodding him.
“The problem is you,” Violet stated.
“Maybe,” he conceded, wondering if the man was at fault. Maybe the model had led him on.
Once he’d been twenty-two and a gullible dreamer. He’d gone to Dallas for the annual ranchers’ association meeting and fallen headlong into love with a sweet-talking waitress who’d told him she was nineteen, pregnant and abandoned by both her lover and her family. He’d given her money and set up an account for the unborn child.
Claudia had used him and his trust in her to bilk him out of a couple of thousand dollars.
He’d even proposed, thinking to bring her to the ranch and share an idyllic life. The weekend they were to marry, he’d arrived at their meeting place in Dallas and waited…and waited…and waited.
As the hours passed, he’d been in agony, worrying that she’d been in an accident or something. Yeah, right. She’d taken his money and run out on him for parts unknown. He’d also found out there had never been a child, according to her friend at the restaurant where she’d worked. The older woman had looked at him with pity.
Man, he must have had “sucker” written in big, bold letters on his forehead. Since then he’d kept his distance from women.
Ignoring