LITMIR.BIZ

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“Are you thinking Megan has bonded with me?”

      Nodding, Matt whispered rawly, “I’ve never seen Megan throw her arms around another woman since her mother’s death. This is a big first, Casey.” Seeing the turmoil and hesitation in Casey’s features, he asked, “How do you feel about that?” He understood not every woman wanted to have children or to be a nurturing mother type. He’d seen other women take career paths where they showered their natural nurturing upon their employees or choosing service work to help others. All women were maternal, he felt, it was just a question of how they expressed it.

      “I come from a large family,” Casey explained. “My parents were U.S. Navy pilots for twenty years until they retired from the military. There’s five girls in our family. And two sets of twins.” Casey smiled a little and said, “I’m from the second set of twins and the youngest—I’m twenty-four. My three older sisters say that Selene, my twin, and I, were spoiled rotten because we were the ‘babies’ of our family. I grew up happy in San Francisco. Not all my sisters want a big family.” She smiled fondly. “Selene and I were the ones who played with dolls. The other sisters loved Lego and geek stuff. Someday, I hope to have a family myself, but I’m too young to do that right now. I want to get some roots into my forest-service career.”

      Nodding, Matt noticed the softness of her full mouth. “I see. Can I keep in touch with you about Megan after Dr. Ward calls me? I’m in limbo on this, Casey.” He had to give her options. It wasn’t fair to pin her down and insist she had to work with Megan.

      Casey felt his desperation. This was a straw to grab at, she realized. His love for his daughter was clearly etched in Matt’s narrow eyes. Despite being a powerful and masculine man, he was being vulnerable with her. She remembered all too clearly her four attackers, big, strapping men in their late twenties, who were Matt’s size and height. There had been no vulnerability in them; they had nearly beaten her to death. Casey remembered some of her attack, but not all of it. She understood as few could about the memories of the trauma being locked away in her brain, too virulent and potentially threatening to her mental stability to be released. That was the way her shrink, Wanda Haversham, had described it to her while she was still in the hospital.

      “I understand your position on this,” Casey told him quietly. She glanced over her shoulder toward the hall to make sure Megan couldn’t hear what she was going to say. She handed Matt her business card. “Call me when you hear something from Dr. Ward. I’ll be happy to help Megan if I can.” She saw instant relief come to his rugged features. His mouth suddenly relaxed. His hands released their grip around the coffee mug.

      “Thank you,” Matt said, his voice echoing his relief.

      SENATOR CARTER PEYTON sat in the rear of the black limo with his red-haired wife, Clarissa. He was continually on his cell phone with his assistants in Washington, D.C. Barely looking out the darkly tinted windows as the driver slowly made his way through the melting slush and traffic on the Easter weekend in Jackson Hole, he continued making his calls. Clarissa looked bored. But when didn’t she? At thirty-five, Carter knew everyone in Wyoming thought he had it made. He didn’t think so.

      His life had taken a terrible, twisted turn three years earlier when his first wife, Gloria, and his two young children, Buck and Tracy, had died in a house fire just outside Jackson Hole. Anger grew in him as he thought about it again. And Matt Sinclaire was to blame. The lieutenant had been on duty that night when Gloria had called 911 in a panic. Their multimillion-dollar home that sat perched high on a hill, two miles off the main asphalt road, was on fire. He was stuck in Cody, Wyoming, because of a blizzard, after having attended a meeting of towns-people. The interstates had been shut down and no flights were available. Carter blamed himself for not being at home when it happened. If he had been, he knew his first wife and their children would be alive today. As it was, Sinclaire’s ineptness at getting that fire truck stuck on the muddy dirt road had doomed his family.

      “Let’s eat here in town,” Clarissa said. She touched her lacquered red hair to ensure it was in place.

      “The housekeeper will have lunch waiting for us,” he growled, flipping his cell phone closed. The limo crawled along. The sky was cloudy and it looked like it was going to snow again. Carter hated going through town because he saw the fire station where Sinclaire worked. It always compounded the rage that was never far beneath the surface.

      Pouting, Clarissa said, “All right then, drop me off at the Aspens restaurant on your way home. Bob can pick me up when I’m finished eating.”

      Carter felt torn. He’d married Clarissa a year after Gloria’s death. As a senator, he needed a wife at his side. She was a tall, lissome woman who came from a rich banking and ranching family in Cheyenne. She was only twenty-nine to his thirty-five years of age, but astute and selfish as hell. Still, Clarissa was the ideal Washington, D.C., wife. She was cultured, a true political animal like him, and she desired power. Carter felt she had married him because he was a second-term senator for the state of Wyoming. She had her own agenda she wanted to pursue.

      “All right,” he murmured. “I know you have quilting friends here you want to chat with over lunch,” he murmured. Tapping Bob on his thin shoulder, he asked his long-time driver to turn and drop his wife off at the Aspens. The driver nodded and turned down another street in the center of town.

      Pleased, Clarissa gathered up the snakeskin purse that matched her heels. She was dressed in a black wool pantsuit, white silk blouse and red silk scarf. The red of the silk matched her shoulder-length hair. “Good. After lunch, I’m going to walk over to Quilter’s Haven. I want to see what new fabrics Gwen has gotten in for spring.”

      He managed a wry smile. “I imagined you would do that.” In some ways, Carter thanked God for his wife’s passion for embroidery and for her cousin, Julie Neustedder, who was a famous quilting teacher over in Cheyenne. That was how they’d met: there was a quilting fest at the local high school, with two hundred quilts hung for the public to appreciate. Clarissa had been there with her famous cousin. Carter had come because, as a senator, he always went to big events where he could press the flesh and mingle. That was part of the political game. He had found Clarissa a beautiful jewel among the ranching and mining middle class at the quilt festival.

      After dropping Clarissa off in front of a restaurant bedecked with a red-and-white-striped awning, Carter climbed back into the car. His wife was happy now. And so was he.

      “Home, Bob.”

      “Yes, sir,” the fifty-year-old balding, bespectacled man murmured.

      Sitting back, Carter felt his stomach knot and unknot. When he was alone and there was nothing to do, the memories of what he’d done always came back to him. He blamed it on guilt. Carter didn’t feel he should feel guilt about a damned thing. The limo sped up as they left the plaza area and headed up the hill toward his home on Moose Road, near the Teton National Forest, and Carter sighed.

      When he’d been able to get back from Cody to Jackson Hole, knowing his family had died in that fire, he’d gone straight to the fire chief, Doug Stanley, a forty-five-year-old of German-English descent. Carter had stormed into Stanley’s office to find out why his family had been left to burn alive, and the chief had defended the man at the tip of that spear: Matt Sinclaire.

      Carter snorted softly. Firefighters, like lawmen, stuck together and were thick as thieves. Stanley had argued that Sinclaire had done everything humanly possible to save the lives of Carter’s family. There was the blizzard of the century howling through at the time, the roads were not plowed, the country trucks had been ordered to stay off them due to the danger. Snow was piling up so fast and furiously it was impossible to clear the roads. And then, because the spring thaw was underway, Carter’s muddy two-mile-long road was a mire. Sinclaire had ordered the two trucks up the hill and they had both got stuck a mile away from the burning home.

      Smiling a little, Carter tapped his fingers on the leg of his expensive black pin-striped suit pants. He’d waited a year after his family’s deaths and then he’d gotten even. Everyone thought a senator was clean, but Carter wasn’t. He knew how to grease the wheels politically and how to manipulate to get whatever it

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