“Really?” she said under her breath. “Are you unclear on the method?”
“That was months ago.”
“Three months ago, to be exact,” she whispered. “And you need to make this right. Quickly.”
“Excuse me,” I said, my feet suddenly finding wings. Blinded with mortified tears, I pushed past both of them, past the line of nosy gossips, in search of my father or the door, whichever came first.
“Josie,” I heard him say from behind me, but I couldn’t get away fast enough. From him, his voice, his pleading eyes, or his lying heart.
He’d deceived me, almost convinced me to forgive him, and then proposed to me while engaged to someone else. A pregnant someone else. His surprise didn’t matter. His deception did.
A scream from another room halted my anxious steps, and I turned to see the crowd, ever curious for more, move en masse toward the sound. Another shriek, and another, followed by two women in tears, and Theodore, the houseman, looking pale and distraught.
My dilemma slid to the side as worry moved to the forefront. My father was nowhere to be found, and fear sped my steps back through the hordes of hideous busybodies.
“He was just—” one woman was saying through her tears.
“—so still,” another one cried.
“—face was like a ghost.”
“It’s not working!”
I broke through the wall to gasp at the vision in front of me. Travis Mason, sprawled on the floor beside his favorite chair, a half empty tumbler of brandy on a table. My father, coat off, hair swinging free of his oiled-back style as he pumped his fists on Mr. Mason’s chest.
His face was red with exertion, his eyes wet as he looked up and spotted me.
Instantly, I moved forward and dropped to my knees, feeling for a pulse like my father had taught me. Ranch life requires you to know a little of everything, Josie. I shook my head, looking down at the lifeless face of my father’s best friend and pushing back the latest information I had on their little secret scheme.
It didn’t matter. Business was business, and the state of my heart was inconsequential. Irrelevant. My father had bigger problems than an irate daughter, especially when he didn’t know my role in the whole horrible thing.
He would never know.
There was no purpose to it.
There was movement to my right as the wall of people parted, letting through a wild-eyed Ben. Benjamin Mason. Travis’s nephew. His jaw tightened as he dropped to his knees next to my father, and his eyes went red with the burn of telltale tears.
“Uncle,” he choked out.
I pushed to my feet, unable to bear the mixture of anger and sadness warring within me, and backed straight into hands holding my arms. Turning, I stared straight into clear green eyes that held not one ounce of sympathy, Theodore, in contrast, hovering behind her like a confused bee, looked ready to collapse.
“Benjamin will be busy,” Winifred said stonily. “You may leave now.”
“Oh, my Jesus,” Theodore said, a hand over his face. “Benjamin gets everything. He’s the—he’s in charge. This is awful.”
Winifred raised a perfect brow, palming her abdomen at the same time, her gaze never leaving mine. “As I said.”
Chapter 6
1904
Josie
I clasped my fingers together so tightly they ached, but it was better to stem the tremble that began the moment Benjamin Mason locked eyes with me.
It had been a full five years since we simply stood across from each other and took it in. Yes, I’d seen him here and there, from a distance, but we didn’t talk, and one of us always turned away. I didn’t leave the ranch much; we had staff for those things. Or we did. So, most of the time, any sighting I had was while I was out riding the perimeter or checking on the herd. And most of the time, that sighting was of him and his little girl, either riding his horse, or in his family’s tiny private cemetery.
That, I understood. I’d done that with my own father all my life, visiting my mother via a gravestone. It was the times he was alone that reminded me who he was. What he was. A liar I’d almost trusted with everything. Most of those times, he wasn’t visiting his uncle, because I knew where that grave was located. He was kneeling in front of his late wife.
That told me all I needed to know.
Winifred Mason, from the three excruciating minutes I’d shared air with her, had been an abominable, horrid, witch of a woman, and if he loved someone like that, then they’d deserved each other. That poor little girl—I knew what it was like to grow up without a mother, but I had to believe she might have dodged a bullet with that one.
And I was probably going to hell for that.
Now, looking into the face of a man I once thought I knew, I tried not to be affected by him. He was so much the same, and yet different. With no hat to cover his dark blond waves, they were combed neatly back in a gentlemen’s style. His face was shaved clean of the stubble I remembered, and his eyes—well, nothing could change that. Except that something had.
There was a sadness there. A hollowness.
I guessed losing his wife had taken a toll.
I held up my head and breathed in a steadying breath. No time for walking memory lane or analyzing the present. I had to somehow get through this interminable party, find a suitor, sell my soul, and maintain some semblance of dignity before I went home and hid in the stable to come undone in private, with my horse, Daisy, and a bottle of my father’s whiskey.
That’s what I’d done the last time. I’d run on foot from that house, running with no mind to the biting, wet cold on my skin and the bushes and rocks tearing at my gown. I got a tongue-lashing from my father later on the indecency and embarrassment of
