Making sure the phone was still on silent, he saw that he already had two texts. Both from Cassie.
r u ok?
Hell, no.
And shortly thereafter:
What’s going on?
I wish I knew.
He typed his response quickly:
Leave now!
Call 911
Then he added:
I’m ok
That was a lie, but if she had any inkling that he was wounded, she might do something stupid and put herself in danger. God, he felt weak. Lightheaded. It took all of his effort to send the text, but he managed to click off and send another to Carter:
Under attack.
In the barn.
Cassie is in the house.
Save her.
Sweat ran down his face despite the fact that he was cold to the bone.
God, how could he have been so stupid? He clicked off his phone, couldn’t risk the attacker seeing its light.
Where are you, you fucker? He had to start moving, find the assailant before he went after Cassie, because that’s what this was all about. Trent knew it. Deep in his gut. Whoever was skulking in this barn was after his wife.
Not on my watch.
He knew this barn like the back of his hand, but with the blood he was losing, he was also fighting to stay awake. Shit, the artery probably had been nicked.
If only he could fashion a tourniquet . . . Oh, Jesus. He sagged against the back of the stall and realized he hadn’t heard a car’s engine starting, no crunch of tires on gravel. Either Cassie hadn’t gotten the message.
Or she chose to ignore it.
His jaw clenched and he swiped the sweat from his face. Not looking at the growing stain on his jeans, he aimed his rifle at the stall door.
Then he waited.
The phone rang.
At two-fifteen in the damned morning.
Nash recognized the number as belonging to Jenkins, the rookie gung-ho junior detective who was young and therefore never slept. Especially on a Saturday night. Make that Sunday morning.
“Nash,” she said automatically and hated the sound of sleep in her voice.
“Hey, sorry to wake you.” Jenkins sounded as chipper as if she’d had a triple-shot espresso. “But I thought you’d like to know.”
“What?” she asked, instantly awake.
“The name of Jenna Hughes’s love child.”
“You found it.”
“That I did. She was adopted by Gene and Beverly Beauchamp, as we knew. She has a sister, or had a sister as well, but the girl died. Single car crash. This one, Jenna’s daughter, was with her but survived. I’m still checking on that.”
“So who is she?” Nash demanded. She was annoyed at being played with.
“Well, the reason we couldn’t figure it out is that she’s been married a couple of times, so the names didn’t quite match up.” There was a smile in her voice. The little twit loved dragging out the suspense.
“And?”
“And that girl is someone we know,” Jenkins finally said, before reeling off a name that was all too familiar.
ACT VI
And now the moment leading up to the climax.
Odd that it should end here, in a rustic claptrap of a barn, she thought as she hid in the shadows of the musty building where horses shifted and neighed, their warmth and smell a little disturbing. So rural!
She’d imagined something more glorious, more glittery and far more Hollywood than this immense edifice in the middle of No-Damned-Where. No spotlight. No cameras. No stage.
Still, she had used the barn to her advantage, even if she’d blown it by screaming when the damned horse had snaked its head over the half-door of its enclosure and bitten her as she’d slunk by. The nerve of the animal. She probably should have shot it right then and there, but she hadn’t wanted to make any noise.
It hadn’t worked and of course Trent, hero rancher that he was, had shown up.
She passed by a pillar supporting the hay mow overhead and stiffled a sneeze. Squeezing the trigger and seeing Trent go down in a heap had been satisfying and long overdue. He really was a bastard.
On silent footsteps she passed by the tack room.
It was so cliché of Cassie to end up here, at the ranch of her lover, her hero. But it had worked, for it was easy enough to follow them, to deduce where she was hiding out, where she’d sought shelter.
After all the years of waiting, of the frustration, of being so close to stardom to taste it, after rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous and being a part of their bloodline, though they, of course, didn’t know it.
