The Hopechest Bride

Josh Atkins shifted his body slightly in the saddle and looked across the distance, toward the outbuildings, the red tile roof of the Hacienda de Alegria.

Must be nice, living in a place like this. Safe, protected. Money coming out your ears.

Money to buy safety, to buy silence. Money enough to sweep all the nastiness under a hand-braided rug and forget about it, go on your merry way, get on with your life. Laugh, dance, sing. Eat good food, sleep in a warm bed.

While Toby lay in his cold grave. Forgotten in his cold grave.

Josh tipped back his Stetson, exposing his thick, unruly brown hair, the piercing blue eyes that narrowed toward the rapidly setting sun. His skin was deeply tanned, with sharp lines around his eyes from a lifetime spent squinting into that sun, riding the range in between stints on the rodeo circuit. Slashing lines bracketed his mouth, grown deeper, harder, since the news had come to him about Toby just as he was up for a big ride in Denver.

Josh’s body was whipcord lean, taut, and solid muscle. Taller than Toby, older than Toby by four years, definitely less handsome than Toby, whose boyish good looks had mirrored a pure and caring soul.

There was nothing pure or caring or good in Josh’s soul as he glared toward the Hacienda de Alegria. There was only hate, a deep and abiding hatred he’d fed with newspaper articles about the grand and glorious Coltons, a hate he nurtured every time he looked at photographs of his brother. His laughing, loving brother who had died because Emily Colton had tricked him into thinking she loved him.

That was how Josh saw it, and he had reason to believe he was right. He had the letters Toby had sent him, letters full of the beautiful Emma Logan, how much Toby admired her, loved her, damn near worshipped her.

Emma Logan. Emily Colton. One and the same woman, the woman who had come to Keyhole, Wyoming, hiding her identity, hiding her reasons for being there.

Josh remembered Toby’s first mention of Emma Logan, how he had checked her out in his capacity as sheriff, because her physical description had closely matched that of a female connected to a car-theft ring operating in Keyhole. How Toby had berated himself in the letter that had followed, explaining to his brother that he’d been wrong about Emma, that the beautiful young woman had come to town to try to forget losing her fiancé in a traffic accident, to try to rebuild her life.

Toby had thought he was just the man to help her do exactly that, and Josh had laughed over his brother’s letters after that, as Toby had told him of his visits to Emma’s cottage, the mega-cups of coffee he drank at the local café where she worked, just so he could be near her. He spoke of her sweet and dimpled smile, her thick mane of long, chestnut-red hair, the graceful way she moved, the softness of her large blue eyes.

Toby had fallen, fallen hard.

And all that time, Emma Logan had been lying to Toby. Emily Colton had been using Toby. Using him so that she’d feel safe, knowing that she’d come to Keyhole, not to get on with her life, but to hide from whoever it was she believed was trying to kill her. All of that, and more, Josh had learned from Toby’s enraged fellow officers in Keyhole when he’d come from Denver to bury his brother.

If she’d told Toby, alerted him to the danger, then maybe Toby would still be alive.

But she hadn’t told him, and Toby had died not knowing why, and probably still believing Emma Logan might have one day loved him. He’d died, alone on the cold floor of a motel cottage, and she hadn’t even stuck around to explain. She’d just left him there as he lay bleeding to death, and she’d run, run back to her cushy family and her money and her life.

Bitch. Cold, heartless, conniving bitch.

Josh pulled on the reins, turning his mount, heading back the way he’d come, back to the nearby ranch where he’d taken a temporary job, just so that he could be near the Hacienda de Alegria, just so he could be near Emily Colton. One day meet Emily Colton. One day tell Emily Colton exactly what he thought of her.

Then maybe he could finally learn to deal with his own guilt.

Two

Meredith Colton shivered in her tan wool cape that still carried the cloying, slightly sickening smell of Patsy’s dramatic perfume. The perfume was a reminder, as all the clothes in her closet were reminders, that her sister had lived in her house, lived her life, for the past ten years.

She needed to go to town, to shop, to supplement the few items of clothing she’d brought with her from Mississippi. But the furor over Patsy’s treachery and Meredith’s return to Prosperino had yet to completely dissipate, and Meredith wasn’t certain she was strong enough yet to face down the world for the sake of something as mundane as a wardrobe.

So she stuck with her own clothing, was grateful for the pairs of jeans and cotton sweaters her daughter Sophie had given her, and tried to concentrate on the good things. The many, many good things that had happened since her return to Hacienda de Alegria.

She had grandbabies. Wasn’t that amazing? She and Joe were grandparents, several times over. There had been deaths in the time she was gone, but there had also been births, and marriages. The children she had borne, and the children of her heart, had grown, matured, and she was so proud of them all she could just burst.

And Joe. Her dearest, beloved Joe. The man in her dreams, the faceless man who had sustained her, haunted her.

Seeing him again, having him hold her once more, was worth any pain, any sacrifice. Having him near, having his love, had done more to heal her aching heart than anything else.

But nothing could keep her from worrying about Emily, her little Sparrow. It had been Emily who had paid the dearest price, spending years feeling as if her mother had rejected her, having her life threatened. And now, now that it was all over, when Emily should be happy, the child was burdened with the belief that she had cost a good man his life.

Joe said that it probably would be best if Emily never learned that Patsy, in her confession, had told the police she’d ordered the hit-and-run murder of Nora Hickman because she’d overheard Emily and Nora talking about “the two mommies” and worried that Emily had found an ally who might help uncover Patsy’s deception.

The records of Patsy’s confession were sealed, so Emily would never have to know if no one told her, and Meredith agreed that Emily had enough guilt hanging from her slim shoulders without knowing about Nora.

Yes, Patsy’s confession was sealed, and Patsy was, even now, very tightly locked up in an institution for the criminally insane, just as she had been so many years previously, after murdering the father of her firstborn child.

Patsy had been very tightly locked up then, and had gotten out, gotten out to wreak her havoc on the Colton family. Was she locked up tightly enough this time? It was a question Meredith had to ask herself, even as she shivered in the chill, walking through her sad and neglected gardens as twilight fell on a damp, rainy day.

In exchange for telling her story, Joe had agreed to keep Joe, Jr. and Teddy, raise them as his own. They now knew that Joe, Jr. was also Patsy’s biological child. They also knew that Patsy had been still actively seeking the infant taken from her at birth so many years ago.

Patsy had fixated on her children, when she hadn’t fixated on hurting Meredith, taking her place, stealing her life. And it was her children that had prompted Patsy to cooperate. Joe was even continuing the hunt for Patsy’s first child, futile as that might be.

So Patsy was locked up, Meredith was home, and it was time to put the past in the past, get on with the future.

Did Meredith feel safe yet? No. No, she didn’t, she couldn’t. She had yet to feel quite whole, as there were still some gaps in her memory, and she’d gotten one new shock after another as her family gathered around her—still the same family, yet so different.

Her children weren’t children anymore. They had husbands, wives, children of their own. Lives of their own.

And Joe. The years had not been kind to him; Patsy had not been kind to him. Meredith would give her last breath to see the taut lines around his mouth fade into a smile, her hope of heaven to have him lie quietly beside her in sleep, rather than tossing and turning, obviously in the grip of a nightmare.

Time. That was what they needed. Just some time. Wasn’t that what Martha Wilkes had told her? Time to heal, time to forgive.

Of all of those hurt by Patsy, Meredith’s heart most went out to Joe, Jr. and Teddy. If nothing else, Patsy had been a good if too indulgent mother to her two boys, and they both missed her terribly, were too young to understand that there was a new mommy in their lives now, a new mommy who looked like their old mommy, yet wasn’t the same.

When Joe had told Meredith about Joe, Jr. and Teddy, she had wept, partly for the boys, partly for her husband. How he must have suffered when Patsy told him she was pregnant with Teddy, when he knew he couldn’t be the father. Yet he had loved “Meredith” enough to forgive her affair, had been man enough to claim Teddy as his own, never knowing that he’d once more been the victim of her sister’s deception.

And Joe, Jr. Patsy had admitted that he was hers, the product of a casual liaison with some unknown man. She’d admitted that she’d left Joe, Jr. on the Colton doorstep, knowing he’d be taken in, knowing she planned to join him in a few short weeks. The deviousness of the woman, the near-brilliant manic imagination of the woman.

In exchange for Meredith and Joe continuing to raise the boys as their own and hunting for the baby she had named Jewel, Patsy had talked for hours, for days, outlining her deception, filling in blanks with a sort of fierce pride that just emphasized her mental illness.

She’d tried to poison Joe the night of his sixtieth birthday, had hinted that there had been other plans for other attempts on his life. That had been a shock, a very big shock. She’d laughed as she admitted to being surprised to learn that she wasn’t the only one who wished Joe dead, that Emmett Fallon had also been trying to kill the man.

But her most particular glee had come in exposing Joe’s brother, Graham, as the father of her son, Teddy. She’d even admitted to blackmailing Graham in order to keep her silence.

Poor Joe. Poor, deluded, betrayed Joe. He hadn’t wanted to tell Meredith about Graham, but after one horrible nightmare from which she’d had to wake him, he’d finally blurted it all out. He told her that Rand knew, and he knew, but nobody else knew, and Meredith urged him to keep silent, for Teddy’s sake, at least for now. She didn’t know if this was the right or wrong thing to do, whether it was fair to Graham’s other children, Jackson and Liza, but she did know that Joe, Jr. and Teddy were Coltons by name, and Portmans by birth. She would raise both boys as if they were her own, and with no regrets.

Meredith stopped in front of the fountain, the one that had haunted her dreams and begun her long road back from the amnesia that had plagued her since the accident Patsy had engineered so many years ago. She put out a hand, catching the cool water as it ran over the rim, listening to the gentle sound of it.

“It’s a lot bigger than the fountain back in Mississippi,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere behind her, “but I think we could have put it together the way we built that one, given enough time and a few margaritas. Hello, Meredith. Your husband thought maybe I ought to visit here for a while, if that’s all right with you?”

“Martha!” Meredith wheeled around to see Dr. Martha Wilkes standing on the patio, shivering in her thin coat not made for a raw November California day. The psychologist was smiling, her dark face lit with humor even as her brown eyes measured Meredith, her patient of five years.

Joe had invited her? What a wonderful man! Just what she needed, to talk with Martha, the one person who understood everything, the one person who wouldn’t demand answers because she knew, she knew it all. The one person Meredith could talk to without reserve, without worrying that she might say something hurtful, might have forgotten something important to the other person. The one woman who might be able to help Emily. Meredith’s heart swelled with hope.

“Well?” Dr. Wilkes asked with a smile. “It’s been a long trip, Meredith. Is that all you’re going to say? ‘Martha?’”

Meredith launched herself into her friend’s arms. “Oh, my God—Martha!”