LITMIR.BIZ

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running off and getting married.

      It had been hard at first to admit he’d made a mistake marrying her. He’d seen marriage as forever and divorce as failure. So he’d hung in. Right up until he caught Deena in bed with his best friend.

      That had been two years ago. Since then he’d gone through a long, drawn-out, painful divorce. Painful because he felt guilty that it hurt more losing his best friend than it did ending it for good with Deena.

      But that was the problem. It hadn’t ended for good with Deena. Two weeks ago, she’d decided she wanted him back and that she would do anything to make that happen.

      And she meant anything.

      He pulled up in front of the house he and Deena had shared during their marriage. It was too early in the morning for this, but he just wanted to get it over with. Weighed down with dread, he climbed out of his patrol car, trying to remember a time when he’d looked forward to seeing Deena in the morning.

      As he walked up the cracked sidewalk, he told himself this would be the last time. No matter what.

      He grimaced at the thought, remembering how many times he’d left during their twelve years of marriage only to go back out of guilt or a sense of obligation. No wonder Deena just assumed he would always come back to her. He always had.

      She opened the door to his knock almost as if she’d been expecting him. After what she’d left at his office for him, he didn’t doubt she was.

      She was wearing one of his old T-shirts and, from what he could tell, little else. His once-favorite scent floated around her. Her blond hair was pulled up, loose tendrils framing her pretty face.

      “Hello, Carter,” she said in that sultry voice, the one that had once been his undoing. “I had a feeling you’d be by this morning.” She shoved open the door a little wider and gave him “the look.” Boy, did he know that look.

      Without a word, he reached into his pocket and took out the plain white envelope with her name and address neatly typed on it and handed it to her.

      She took it, her smile slipping a little. “Something for me? You shouldn’t have.”

      No, he thought, you shouldn’t have. All the surprise visits at work and at his house, the presents, the constant phone calls, the urgent messages. The more he’d tried to get her to stop, the worse she had become.

      He waited as she opened the envelope, resting his hand on the butt of the weapon at his hip.

      Her eyes widened as she took out the legal form and read enough that, when she spoke, her sultry voice was long gone. “What the hell is this?”

      “It’s a restraining order. From this time forward you are not to contact me, send me any more letters or packages or come within one-hundred-and-fifty feet of me.”

      She narrowed her eyes at him. “We live in Whitehorse, Montana, you dumb bastard. The whole town is only a hundred and fifty feet long.”

      “If you break the restraining order you will be arrested,” he said, hating that it had come to this.

      He tipped his hat and turned his back to her as he headed for his vehicle, hoping she didn’t have a gun, because he was pretty sure she’d have no compunction about shooting him in the back.

      “You just made the biggest mistake of your life, Carter Jackson!” she yelled after him. “You’re going to regret this as long as you live, you smug son of a bitch. If you think you can just walk away from me—”

      The slamming of his patrol-car door thankfully cut off the rest of her words. This was not the morning to tempt him into arresting her for threatening an officer of the law.

      It had taken him years, but he finally understood Deena. She only wanted what she couldn’t have. His allure was that he hadn’t been available. Just before he found her in his bed, he’d begun dating a neighboring ranch girl he’d known all his life, a girl he was getting serious with.

      And that, he knew now, was why Deena had thrown herself at him. Deena had always been jealous of Eve Bailey and became worse after he and Deena married. Even the mention of Eve’s name would set Deena off. He’d never understood her jealousy, especially since Eve had left the area right after high school and hadn’t come back.

      Until two weeks ago. Just about the time Deena decided she was going to get him back, come hell or high water.

      As Carter drove away, he didn’t look in his ex’s direction, although out of the corner of his eye he saw that she’d come down the sidewalk in her bare feet and was now waving the restraining order and yelling obscenities at him.

      “Good-bye, Deena,” he said, hoping his luck was about to change. Maybe she would meet an unavailable long-haul trucker who’d take her far, far away.

      As he drove back toward his office in the large three-story brick county courthouse, his radio squawked.

      “Lila Bailey just called,” the dispatcher told him. “She’s worried about her daughter. Says they had a big storm down that way last night. Her daughter apparently went for a horseback ride yesterday evening and didn’t return home last night.”

      “Which daughter?” Carter asked, his heart kicking up a beat.

      “Eve Bailey.”

      The way his luck was going, of course it would be Eve. He’d grown up around the Bailey girls. Eve was hands-down the most headstrong of the three. And that was saying a lot. But she was also the most capable. She knew that country south of town. If anyone could survive a night out there, even in a bad storm, it was Eve.

      “Lila said one of Eve’s sisters saw her ride out yesterday evening toward the Breaks. Eve is staying in her grandmother’s old house down the road from her folks’ place so no one knew she hadn’t returned until her horse came back this morning without her.”

      Carter rubbed the back of his neck. There was nothing south of the Bailey ranch but miles and miles of Missouri Breaks badlands. Searching for Eve would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. “Tell Lila I’m on my way.”

      IT WAS A SLOW NEWS DAY at the Milk River Examiner office. Glen Whitaker had come in early to work on a feature story he was writing about the couple who’d just bought the hardware store. This was news, since the population of the county had been dropping steadily for years now. While parts of Montana were growing like crazy, the towns along the Hi-Line were losing residents to more prosperous places.

      Glen ran a hand over his buzz-cut blond hair and glanced out his office window past the park to the railroad tracks. A coal train was rumbling past. His phone rang. He let it ring a couple more times as he waited for the train to pass and the noise level to drop. “Hello.”

      “One of the Bailey girls is missing.”

      Glen groaned to himself as he recognized the voice of the worst gossip in the county. From the moment he took the job as reporter at the Milk River Examiner, Arlene Evans had been feeding him information as if she was Deep Throat.

      “Missing?” Most of Arlene’s “leads” turned out to either be erroneous or the type of news he wasn’t allowed to print. He’d ended up at Whitehorse after working for several larger papers where he’d made the mistake of printing things he shouldn’t have.

      He didn’t want to lose his job over some small-town gossip. But then again, he had printer’s ink in his veins. Working for a weekly newspaper, all he wrote about were church socials and town-council meetings.

      Glen Whitaker was ready for a good story. “Which Bailey girl?”

      “Eve Bailey. I just talked to Lila, her mother, and she said Eve rode out yesterday afternoon,” Arlene said with her usual relish. “Her horse came back this morning without her.”

      Like the Baileys, Arlene lived south of Whitehorse.

      The first settlement of

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