LITMIR.BIZ

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      If I knew where you were, Wyatt Hatfield, I would call in a debt.

      But the fantasy of finding a stranger in a world full of people was more than she could cope with. Right now she had to hide, and there was no family left alive to help her.

      Except…

      She took a deep breath. “Granny.”

      The puppy heard the tone of her voice, and whined softly from somewhere behind her, uncertain what it was that she wanted, yet aware that a word had been uttered it did not understand.

      Granny Dixon’s house sat just across the hollow as it had for the past one hundred years, a small shelter carved out of a dense wilderness of trees and bush. As a child, Granny had been Glory’s only link with another female, and she had often spent the day in her lap, lulled by the sound of her voice and the stories she would tell.

      Glory took a deep breath and closed her eyes, imagining she could hear her granny’s voice now.

      When you tire of them menfolks, child, you just come to old Granny. We women hafta stick together, now, don’t we?

      Her saving grace was that Granny Dixon’s cabin was just as she’d left it. Its presence could be the answer to her prayer. She was counting on the fact that few would remember its existence. Rafe had promised his mother that he wouldn’t touch or change a single thing in her home until they’d put her in the ground. In a way, Glory was thankful that Granny’s mind was almost gone. At least she would be spared the grief of knowing that her only son and grandson had beat her to heaven.

      And while the cabin was there, food was not. Glory made a quick trip through the root cellar, using the light from the fire as a guide, she ran her fingers along the jars until she found what she wanted. She came up and out with a jar of peaches in one hand and a quart of soup in the other. It would be enough to keep her going until she figured out what to do.

      And then she and the puppy vanished into the darkness of the tree line. Minutes later, the sounds of cars and trucks could be heard grinding up the hill. Someone had seen the fire. Someone else would rescue what was left of her loved ones. Glory had disappeared.

      Chapter 3

      The scream came without warning. Right in the middle of a dream he could no longer remember. Wyatt sat straight up in bed, his instinct for survival working overtime as he imagined Toni or the baby in dire need of help. In seconds, he was pulling on a pair of jeans and running in an all-out sprint as he flew out of the door.

      He slid to a stop in the hallway outside the baby’s room and then looked inside. Nothing was amiss. He sighed with relief at the sight of the toddler asleep on her tummy with her blanket clutched tightly in one fist. She was fine, so Toni hadn’t screamed about her. That meant…

      Fearing the worst, he crept farther down the hall, praying that he wouldn’t surprise a burglar in the act of murder, and wondering why on earth Lane Monday wasn’t raising all kinds of hell in response to his wife’s screams.

      More than a year ago, Lane had taken down a man the size of a mountain to save his sister’s life. He couldn’t imagine Lane letting someone sneak up on them and do his family harm. Yet in Wyatt’s mind, he knew that whatever had made Toni scream couldn’t have been good.

      The door was ajar so Lane or Toni could hear the baby if she cried. Wyatt pushed it aside and looked in. Lane was flat on his back and sound asleep, with Toni held gently, but firmly, within the shelter of one arm. Even from here, Wyatt could hear the soft, even sounds of their breathing.

      “Thank God,” he muttered, and eased out of their room the same way he’d come in, trying to convince himself that he’d been dreaming. But it sounded so real.

      He made his way through the house, careful not to step on the boards that creaked, and headed for the kitchen to get a drink. He wasn’t particularly thirsty, but at the moment, crawling back in that bed did not hold much interest. His heart was still pounding as he took a glass from the cabinet and ran water in the sink, letting it cool in the pipes before filling a glass.

      The water tasted good going down, and panic was subsiding. If he stretched the facts, he could convince himself that his heart rate was almost back to normal. It was just a bad dream. That was all. Just a bad dream.

      Wyatt.

      “What?”

      He spun toward the doorway, expecting Toni to be standing there with a worried expression on her face. There was nothing but a reflection of the outside security light glancing off the living room window and onto the floor.

      Wyatt…Wyatt Hatfield.

      His stomach muscles clenched, and he took a deep breath. “Jesus Christ.”

      Help me.

      He started to shake. “This isn’t happening.”

      God…Oh, God…help. I need help.

      He slammed the glass onto the cabinet and stalked out of the kitchen and onto the back porch, inhaling one after the other of deep, lung-chilling breaths of cool night air. When he could think without wanting to throw up, he sat down on the steps with a thump and buried his face in his hands, then instantly yanked them off his face, unable to believe what he’d felt.

      His hands were cold…and they were wet. He lifted his fingers to his cheeks and traced the tracks of his tears.

      “I’m crying? For God’s sake, I’m crying? What’s wrong with me? I don’t cry, and when I do, I will sure as hell need a reason.”

      But anger could not replace the overwhelming sense of despair that was seeping into his system. He felt weak and drained, hopeless and helpless. The last time he’d felt this down had been the day he’d regained consciousness in a Kentucky hospital and seen the vague image of his sister’s face hovering somewhere above his bed.

      He remembered thinking that he’d known his sister was an angel to have put up with so many brothers all of her life, but he’d never imagined that all angels in heaven looked like her. It was the next day before he realized that he hadn’t died, and by that time, worrying about the faces of angels had become secondary to the mind-bending pain that had come to stay.

      Out of the silence of the night, a dog suddenly bugled in a hollow somewhere below Chaney Creek. The sound was familiar. He shuddered, trying to relax as his nerves began to settle. This was something to which he could relate. Someone was running hounds. Whether it was raccoon, bobcat or something else that they hunted, it rarely mattered. To the hunters, the dogs and the hunt were what counted.

      He listened, remembering days far in his past when he and his brothers had done the same, nights when they’d sat around a campfire swapping lies that sounded good in the dark, drinking coffee made in a pot that they wouldn’t have fed the pigs out of in the light of day and listening to their hounds running far and wide across the hills and in the deep valleys.

      He sighed, then dropped his head in his hands, wishing for simpler times, saner times. He wondered where he’d gone wrong. He’d married Shirley full of good intent, then screwed up her life, as well as his own.

      And now this!

      He didn’t know what to think. He’d survived a wreck that should have killed him. But if it had messed with his head in a way they hadn’t expected, then making a new life for himself had suddenly become more complicated than he’d planned.

      Help. I need help.

      He lifted his head, like an animal sniffing the air. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed to dark, gleaming slits. This time, he knew he wasn’t dreaming. He was wide-awake and barefoot on his sister’s back porch. And he knew what he heard. The voice was inside his head. He shivered, then shifted his gaze, looking out at the darkness, listening…waiting.

      When the first weak rays of sunlight changed the sky from black to baby blue, Wyatt got to his feet and walked into the house. It had taken all night, and more soul-searching than he’d realized

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