Holiday in Stone Creek Read online

  It was the latest in a long line of houses that never had time to become homes. He came to each new place, bought a house or a condo, built something big and sleek and expensive, then moved on, leaving the property he’d temporarily occupied in the hands of some eager real-estate agent.

  The new project, an animal shelter, was not his usual thing—he normally designed and erected office buildings, multimillion-dollar housing compounds for movie stars and moguls, and the occasional government-sponsored school, bridge or hospital, somewhere on foreign soil—usually hostile. Before his wife, Katherine, died five years ago, she’d traveled with him, bringing Sophie along.

  But then—

  Tanner shook off the memory. Thinking about the way Katherine had been killed required serious bourbon, and he’d been off the sauce for a long time. He’d never developed a drinking problem, but the warning signs had been there, and he’d decided to save Sophie—and himself—the extra grief. He’d put the cork back in the bottle and left it there for good.

  It should have been him, not Kat. That was as far as he could go, sober.

  He shifted his attention back to the little cream-colored pony standing forlornly in its fancy new stall. He was no vet, but he didn’t have to be to diagnose the problem. The horse missed Sophie, now ensconced in a special high-security boarding school in Connecticut.

  He missed her, too. More than the horse did, for sure. But she was safe in that high-walled and distant place—safe from the factions who’d issued periodic death threats over things he’d built. The school was like a fortress—he’d designed it himself, and his best friend, Jack McCall, a Special Forces veteran and big-time security consultant, had installed the systems. They were top-of-the-line, best available. The children and grandchildren of presidents, congressmen, Oscar winners and software inventors attended that school—it had to be kidnap-proof, and it was.

  Sophie had begged him not to leave her there.

  Even as Tanner reflected on that, his cell phone rang. Sophie had chosen the ring tone before their most recent parting—the theme song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

  He, of course, was the Grinch.

  “Tanner Quinn,” he said, even though he knew this wasn’t a business call. The habit was ingrained.

  “I hate this place!” Sophie blurted without preamble. “It’s like a prison!”

  “Soph,” Tanner began, on another sigh. “Your roommate sings lead for your favorite rock band of all time. How bad can it be?”

  “I want to come home!”

  If only we had one, Tanner thought. The barely palatable reality was that he and Sophie had lived like Gypsies—if not actual fugitives—since Kat’s death.

  “Honey, you know I won’t be here long. You’d make friends, get settled in and then it would be time to move on again.”

  “I want you,” Sophie all but wailed. Tanner’s heart caught on a beat. “I want Butterpie. I want to be a regular kid!”

  Sophie would never be a “regular kid.” She was only twelve and already taking college-level courses—another advantage of attending an elite school. The classes were small, the computers were powerful enough to guide satellites and the visiting lecturers were world-renowned scientists, historians, linguistics experts and mathematical superstars.

  “Honey—”

  “Why can’t I live in Stoner Creek, with you and Butterpie?”

  A smile tugged at one corner of Tanner’s mouth. “Stone Creek,” he said. “If there are any stoners around here, I haven’t made their acquaintance yet.”

  Not that he’d really made anybody’s acquaintance. He hadn’t been in town more than a few days. He knew the real estate agent who’d sold him Starcross, and Brad O’Ballivan, because he’d built a palace for him once, outside Nashville, which was how he’d gotten talked into the animal-shelter contract.

  Brad O’Ballivan. He’d thought the hotshot country-and-western music star would never settle down. Now he was over-the-top in love with his bride, Meg, and wanted all his friends married off, too. He probably figured if he could fall that hard for a woman out here in Noplace, U.S.A., Tanner might, too.

  “Dad, please,” Sophie said, sniffling now. Somehow his daughter’s brave attempt to suck it up got to Tanner even more than the crying had. “Get me out of here. If I can’t come to Stone Creek, maybe I could stay with Aunt Tessa again, like I did last summer….”

  Tanner took off his hat, moved along the breezeway to the barn doorway, shut off the lights. “You know your aunt is going through a rough time right now,” he said quietly. A rough time? Tessa and her no-account husband, Paul Barker, were getting a divorce. Among other things, Barker had gotten another woman pregnant—a real blow to Tess, who’d wanted a child ever since she’d hit puberty—and now she was fighting to hold on to her home. She’d bought that horse farm with her own money, having been a successful TV actress in her teens, and poured everything she had into it—including the contents of her investment portfolio. Against Tanner’s advice, she hadn’t insisted on a prenup.

  We’re in love, she’d told him, starry-eyed with happiness.

  Paul Barker hadn’t had the proverbial pot to piss in, of course. And within a month of the wedding he’d been a signer on every account Tess had. As the marriage deteriorated, so did Tess’s wealth.

  Cold rage jangled along Tanner’s nerves, followed the fault line in his soul. At Kat’s suggestion, he’d set up a special trust fund for Tess, way back, and it was a damn good thing he had. To this day, she didn’t know the money existed—he and Kat hadn’t wanted Barker to tap into it—and when she did find out, her fierce Quinn pride would probably force her to refuse it.

  At least if she lost the horse farm to Barker and his dream team of lawyers—more like nightmare team—she’d have the means to start over. The question was, would she have the heart to make a new beginning?

  “Dad?” Sophie asked. “Are you still there?”

  “I’m here,” Tanner said, looking around at the night-shrouded landscape surrounding him. There must have been a foot of snow on the ground already, with more coming down. Hell, November wasn’t even over yet.

  “Couldn’t I at least come home for Christmas?”

  “Soph, we don’t have a home, remember?”

  She was sniffling again. “Sure we do,” she said very softly. “Home is where you and Butterpie are.”

  Tanner’s eyes stung all of a sudden. He told himself it was the bitterly cold weather. When he’d finally agreed to take the job, he’d thought, Arizona. Cacti. Sweeping desert vistas. Eighty-degree winters.

  But Stone Creek was in northern Arizona, near Flagstaff, a place of timber and red rock—and the occasional blizzard.

  It wasn’t like him to overlook that kind of geographical detail, but he had. He’d signed on the dotted line because the money was good and because Brad was a good friend.

  “How about if I come back there? We’ll spend Christmas in New York—skate at Rockefeller Center, see the Rockettes—”

  Sophie loved New York. She planned to attend college there, and then medical school, and eventually set up a practice as a neurosurgeon. No small-time goals for his kid, but then, the doctor gene had come from Kat, not him. Kat. As beautiful as a model and as smart as they come, she’d been a surgeon, specializing in pediatric cardiology. She’d given all that up, swearing it was only temporary, to have Sophie. To travel the world with her footloose husband…

  “But then I wouldn’t get to see Butterpie,” Sophie protested. A raw giggle escaped her. “I don’t think they’d let her stay at the Waldorf with us, even if we paid a pet deposit.”

  Tanner pictured the pony nibbling on the ubiquitous mongo flower arrangement in the hotel’s sedate lobby, with its Cole Porter piano, dropping a few road apples on the venerable old carpets. And he grinned. “Probably not.”

  “Don’t you want me with you, Dad?” Sophie spoke in a small voice. “Is that it? My friend Cleta says her mom won’t let her come home fo
r Christmas because she’s got a new boyfriend and she doesn’t want a kid throwing a wet blanket on the action.”

  Cleta. Who named a poor, defenseless kid Cleta?

  And what kind of person put “action” before their own child, especially at Christmas?

  Tanner closed his eyes, walking toward the dark house he didn’t know his way around in yet, since he’d spent the first couple of nights at Brad’s, waiting for the power to be turned on and the phones hooked up. Guilt stabbed through his middle. “I love you more than anything or anybody else in the world,” he said gruffly, and he meant it. Practically everything he did was geared to provide for Sophie, to protect her from the nameless, faceless forces who hated him. “Trust me, there’s no action going on around here.”

  “I’m going to run away, then,” she said resolutely.

  “Good luck,” Tanner replied after sucking in a deep breath. “That school is hermetically sealed, kiddo. You know that as well as I do.”

  “What are you so afraid of?”

  Losing you. The kid had no way of knowing how big, and how dangerous, the world was. She’d been just seven years old when Kat was killed, and barely remembered the long flight home from northern Africa, private bodyguards occupying the seats around them, the sealed coffin, the media blitz.

  “U.S. Contractor Targeted by Insurgent Group,” one headline had read. “Wife of American Businessman Killed in Possible Revenge Shooting.”

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” Tanner lied.

  “It’s because of what happened to Mom,” Sophie insisted. “That’s what Aunt Tessa says.”

  “Aunt Tessa ought to mind her own business.”

  “If you don’t come and get me, I’m breaking out of here. And there’s no telling where I’ll go.”

  Tanner had reached the old-fashioned wraparound porch. The place had a certain charm, though it needed a lot of fixing up. He could picture Sophie there all too easily, running back and forth to the barn, riding a yellow bus to school, wearing jeans instead of uniforms. Tacking up posters on her bedroom walls and holding sleepovers with ordinary friends instead of junior celebrities and other mini-jet-setters.

  “Don’t try it, Soph,” he said, fumbling with the knob, shouldering open the heavy front door. “You’re fine at Briarwood, and it’s a long way between Connecticut and Arizona.”

  “Fine?” Sophie shot back. “This place isn’t in a parallel dimension, you know. Things happen. Marissa Worth got ptomaine from the potato salad in the cafeteria, just last week, and had to be airlifted to Walter Reed. Allison Mooreland’s appendix ruptured, and—”

  “Soph,” Tanner said, flipping on the lights in the entryway.

  Which way was the kitchen?

  His room was upstairs someplace, but where?

  He hung up his hat, shrugged off his leather coat, tossed it in the direction of an ornate brass peg designed for the purpose.

  Sophie didn’t say a word. All the way across country, Tanner could feel her holding her breath.

  “How’s this? School lets out in May. You can come out here then. Spend the summer. Ride Butterpie all you want.”

  “I might be too big to ride her by summer,” Sophie pointed out. Tanner wondered, as he often did, if his daughter wouldn’t make a better lawyer than a doctor. “Thanksgiving is in three days,” she went on in a rush. “Let me come home for that, and if you still don’t think I’m a good kid to have around, I’ll come back to Briarwood for the rest of the year and pretend I love it.”

  “It’s not that I don’t think you’re a good kid, Soph.” In the living room by then, Tanner paused to consult a yellowed wall calendar left behind by the ranch’s previous owner. Unfortunately, it was several years out of date.

  Sophie didn’t answer.

  “Thanksgiving is in three days?” Tanner muttered, dismayed. Living the way he did, he tended to lose track of holidays, but it figured that if Christmas was already a factor, turkey day had to be bearing down hard.

  “I could still get a ticket if I flew standby,” Sophie said hopefully.

  Tanner closed his eyes. Let his forehead rest against the wall where a million little tack holes testified to all the calendars that had gone before this one. “That’s a long way to travel for a turkey special in some greasy spoon,” he said quietly. He knew the kid was probably picturing a Norman Rockwell scenario—old woman proudly presenting a golden-brown gobbler to a beaming family crowded around a table.

  “Someone will invite you to Thanksgiving dinner,” Sophie said, with a tone of bright, brittle bravery in her voice, “and I could just tag along.”

  He checked his watch, started for the kitchen. If it wasn’t where he thought it was, he’d have to search until he found it, because he needed coffee. Hold the Jack Daniel’s.

  “You’ve been watching the Hallmark Channel again,” he said wearily, his heart trying to scramble up his wind-pipe into the back of his throat. There were so many things he couldn’t give Sophie—a stable home, a family, an ordinary childhood. But he could keep her safe, and that meant staying at Briarwood.

  A long, painful pause ensued.

  “You’re not going to give in, are you?” Sophie asked finally, practically in a whisper.

  “Are you just figuring that out, shortstop?” Tanner retorted, trying for a light tone.

  She huffed out a weight-of-the-world sigh. “Okay, then,” she replied, “don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS A PITY Starcross Ranch had fallen into such a state of disrepair, Olivia thought as she steered the Suburban down the driveway to the main road, Ginger beside her in the passenger seat, Rodney in the back. The place bordered her rental to the west, and although she passed the sagging rail fences and the tilting barn every day on her way to town, that morning the sight seemed even lonelier than usual.

  She braked for the stop sign, looked both ways. No cars coming, but she didn’t pull out right away. The vibe hit her before she could shift out of neutral and hit the gas.

  “Oh, no,” she said aloud.

  Ginger, busy surveying the snowy countryside, offered no comment.

  “Did you hear that?” Olivia persisted.

  Ginger turned to look at her. Gave a little yip. Today, evidently, she was pretending to be an ordinary dog—as if any dog was ordinary—incapable of intelligent conversation.

  The call was coming from the ancient barn on the Starcross property.

  Olivia took a moment to rest her forehead on the cold steering wheel. She’d known Brad’s friend the big-time contractor was moving in, of course, and she’d seen at least one moving truck, but she hadn’t known there were any animals involved.

  “I could ignore this,” she said to Ginger.

  “Or not,” Ginger answered.

  “Oh, hell,” Olivia said. Then she signaled for a left turn—Stone Creek was in the other direction—and headed for the decrepit old gate marking the entrance to Starcross Ranch.

  The gate stood wide open. No sheep or cattle then, probably, Olivia reasoned. Even greenhorns knew livestock tended to stray at every opportunity. Still, some kind of critter was sending out a psychic SOS from that pitiful barn.

  They bumped up the rutted driveway, fishtailing a little on the slick snow and the layer of ice underneath, and Olivia tooted her horn. A spiffy new red pickup stood in front of the house, looking way too fancy for the neighborhood, but nobody appeared to see who was honking.

  Muttering, Olivia brought the Suburban to a rattling stop in front of the barn, got out and shut the door hard.

  “Hello?” she called.

  No answer. Not from a human being, anyway.

  The animal inside the barn amped up the psychic summons.

  Olivia sprinted toward the barn door, glancing upward once at the sagging roof as she entered, with some trepidation. The place ought to be condemned. “Hello?” she repeated.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimmer light, since the we
ather was dazzle-bright, though cold enough to crystallize her bone marrow.

  “Over here,” said a silent voice, deep and distinctly male.

  Olivia ventured deeper into the shadows. The ruins of a dozen once-sturdy stalls lined the sawdust-and-straw aisle. She found two at the very back, showing fresh-lumber signs of recent restoration efforts.

  A tall palomino regarded her from the stall on the right, tossed his head as if to indicate the one opposite.

  Olivia went to that stall and looked over the half gate to see a small, yellowish-white pony gazing up at her in befuddled sorrow. The horse lay forlornly in fresh wood shavings, its legs folded underneath.

  Although she was technically trespassing, Olivia couldn’t resist unlatching the gate and slipping inside. She crouched beside the pony, stroked its nose, patted its neck, gave its forelock an affectionate tug.

  “Hey, there,” she said softly. “What’s all the fuss about?”

  A slight shudder went through the little horse.

  “She misses Sophie,” the palomino said, from across the aisle.

  Wondering who Sophie was, Olivia examined the pony while continuing to pet her. The animal was sound, well fed and well cared for in general.

  The palomino nickered loudly, and that should have been a cue, but Olivia was too focused on the pony to pay attention.

  “Who are you and what the hell are you doing sneaking around in my barn?” demanded a low, no-nonsense voice.

  Olivia whirled, and toppled backward into the straw. Looked up to see a dark-haired man glowering down at her from over the stall gate. His eyes matched his blue denim jacket, and his Western hat looked a little too new.

  “Who’s Sophie?” she asked, getting to her feet, dusting bits of straw off her jeans.

  He merely folded his arms and glared. He’d asked the first question and, apparently, he intended to have the first answer. From the set of his broad shoulders, she guessed he’d wait for it until hell froze over if necessary.