LITMIR.BIZ

      To

      Kathleen Scheibling,

      who apparently likes

      cowboys as much as I do.

      Thank you.

       Chapter One

      Cole James blinked. As he did, he expected the image to fade away.

      This wouldn’t be the first time that his eyes—aided and abetted by his heart—had played tricks on him.

      In the beginning, when Veronica McCloud had initially left Redemption—and him—a little more than six years ago, he kept seeing her all the time. He’d see her walking down Main Street, or standing in line at the movie theater they used to go to regularly, or passing by the sheriff’s office which had, these last four years, all but become his second home.

      He couldn’t begin to count the number of times he’d thought he saw her peering in the window, a funny little half smile on her lips, the one that always used to make his heart stop. But when he’d bolt from his chair to chase after her, or run across the street in pursuit, ready to call out her name, he’d discover that it was someone else who just happened to look like Ronnie.

      The worst times were when there turned out to be no one there at all, just his memory, torturing him.

      Eventually, his “sightings” of Ronnie became less frequent. Whole days and then even whole weeks would go by without him even thinking that he saw Veronica McCloud, the woman who had, for all intents and purposes, tap-danced on his heart and then deliberately disappeared from his life six summers ago.

      Sheriff Cole James frowned as he watched the woman across the street walking toward the wooden building in the middle of the block: Ed Haney’s Livestock Feed Emporium.

      She wasn’t disappearing.

      Instead, she looked as if she had every intention of walking into the store. Just like Ronnie used to when her dad sent her into town.

      The funny thing about this particular mirage was that all the other times, when he thought he saw Ronnie, she looked pretty much the way she had that last night by the lake.

      The night that would forever be imprinted on his soul.

      Her golden-blond hair would be flowing loose about her shoulders, that soft, cream-colored cotton peasant blouse dipping down low, making him all but swallow his tongue.

      Each and every time he thought he saw Ronnie, she would be that green-eyed hellion, part eternal female, part feisty tomboy. The woman who could instantly make him weak in the knees with just one look.

      But this time, the mirage—Ronnie—looked different.

      This time, she looked a lot like the picture she’d once showed him of her late mother, Margaret, when she’d been a young woman. The photograph was taken just after she’d married Ronnie’s dad, Amos.

      Old image or new, why wasn’t she vanishing the way she always did? he wondered impatiently.

      Damn it all to hell, Cole silently swore. Lifting his Stetson, he dragged a hand through his dark chestnut, almost black, hair. Exasperation zigzagged through him.

      He wasn’t going to go and check it out. He wasn’t. The people in town looked up to him. They depended on him for guidance. It went without saying that the sheriff of Redemption, a pocket-size town fifty miles north of Helena in the proud state of Montana, wasn’t supposed to be given to having hallucinations. Leastwise, not without smoking something—which he hadn’t done except for that one time when he was fifteen. He did take the occasional shot of whiskey, but only when the weather turned bitter cold, and never more than one. And even then, it was to warm himself up more than for any other reason.

      He didn’t need anything to warm him up now, even though it was September and this year the temperature was already dropping down at night into regions that tried a hearty man’s soul. Just thinking of Ronnie, even after all this time, more than sufficiently warmed him up, thank you very much.

      Cole bit off the rough edge of a curse. The next minute, he was making a U-turn at the end of the block. Telling himself he now officially qualified as the town idiot, he turned his truck around and slowly drove along the length of the street until his vehicle was parallel to the Livestock Feed Emporium.

      The mirage had definitely gone inside.

      Cole stopped the truck and squinted, looking in through the store’s huge bay window. From where he sat, his hallucination was talking to the store’s owner, Ed Haney. And Ed answered the hallucination.

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