Wind River Wrangler (Wind River Valley #1)(2)

The doorknob remained still.

Releasing a hesitant breath as her hand left her lips, Shiloh couldn’t tear her gaze from it. Was he standing outside her door? Waiting? Did she dare peek out the peephole? Every time she got up the gumption to do it, the hall was empty. The police had demanded an identification. A face.

Pushing herself, her motion wooden and jerky, knees nearly failing her, Shiloh forced herself to the door. She held her breath, slid the brass circle off the peephole. Looking out, she saw the carpeted hall that led to the elevators at the other end of it. The hall was empty.

With a little cry, she slumped against the door, eyes tightly shut, her knees giving way. As she slid down to the floor, her back against the door, her heart continued to pound in her chest.

She couldn’t go on like this.

Every cell in her body was on high alert. Her brain screamed at her to run away. To leave the city. Disappear. Get rid of the stalker no one could find.

Swallowing against a dry mouth, her throat tight, a huge lump aching in it, Shiloh sat, feeling vulnerable and unable to defend herself.

It was just like that afternoon when Anton Leath and her mother got into a heated argument. She’d stood there, paralyzed, terrified of her stepfather who was angry and abusive to her mother and to herself. Only this time, her mother had rounded on him, screaming at him. He’d picked up the knife he had laying at the end of the counter. Her mother was preparing roast beef for dinner that night.

Tightly shutting her eyes, Shiloh would never get that afternoon out of her head. On bad days, she’d remember it all too clearly. It was as if it happened in slow motion, the knife rising in Leath’s large, thick hand, her mother’s eyes widening in disbelief as he pushed her into the corner so she couldn’t escape. The blade slicing down savagely. Her mother’s terrified screams, arms flailing. Blood spurting out of her chest. Blood all over the wall and the kitchen counter. And then, blood across the floor as she sagged downward, Anton breathing heavily, watching her slip to the floor, knife gripped hard in his hand.

It was then Shiloh had turned, racing out of the kitchen, as if on fire. She’d run out the front door, out onto the sidewalk, screaming for help. Fortunately, there was a cop on the beat half a block away. He heard her shrieks and came running. All Shiloh could do was sob and point toward the open door. Screaming “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy’s hurt! Hurt! Help her! Help!”

The words rolled around in her brain and Shiloh sobbed softly, burying her face in her hands. That was nineteen years ago and it was still as fresh, vivid, and stark as it was the day her mother was ripped out of her life. Her father had died two years earlier from a massive heart attack. So young . . . so alive. Shiloh had been so fiercely loved by both of them. And when she was just ten years old, her parents were both gone. Tragically gone.

Sniffing, the hot tears rolling down her taut cheeks, Shiloh looked around her parents’ apartment. She’d lived there since birth. An apartment filled with memories, photos of her mother and father. Daily reminders. Good memories. Antiques they’d collected over the years were here and there. She loved the nineteenth century and her mother had painstakingly created a beautiful retreat. A place for her mother to paint and for her to write. A place to dream and create. She’d been so happy here. It was her sanctuary against the world. She loved New York City. Loved it’s throbbing vibrancy, jogging daily in Central Park, walking the streets, buying food from a street vendor, watching someone play a guitar and putting money in his open instrument case. She’d been born in this city. It was in her blood.

But now her family’s quaint, quiet apartment felt like it was closing in on her. She wanted to run away so badly she could scarcely control herself. She was shaking, crashing from all the adrenaline that had surged through her bloodstream. Shiloh couldn’t stand up if she tried. So she sat on the floor, back against the thick, heavy mahogany door, staring toward the two windows that brought such bright, wonderful light into her home.

She had been at her tiger maple desk, working on a chapter on her Mac, when she’d heard the squeak of the brass doorknob being turned. She’d frozen, her gaze flying to it, the adrenaline slamming through her. It always reminded her of the same feeling she’d experienced when her mother had been murdered. And Shiloh hated it.

Rubbing her face, scrubbing away the tears, she tugged a strand of her red hair across her shoulder. Twisting it nervously around her finger, she tried to think through the fog of her dread. Her mind flip-flopped over so many ideas, but they kept coming back to one: calling Maud Whitcomb. She had been a dear friend of her mother’s. Maud had bought several of her mother’s very expensive paintings. And always, Maud, who was like a maternal grandmother to her, pleaded with Shiloh to come out to her Wyoming ranch for a visit.

Shiloh never did. She always kept in touch with Maud because she was an important person in her life. Especially since the murder of her mother. It was Maud who had flown back after Isabella’s death, and been there for Shiloh while Child Protective Services sorted out whom she was legally to be given to.

In the end, her mother’s younger sister, Lynn, and her husband, Robert Capland, had agreed to take her in because she was family. They too were shattered by her mother’s death. The good news was that they lived in New York City, just a few blocks away from where Shiloh had grown up. Maud had hung around, a lynchpin emotionally for Shiloh for nearly two weeks, making sure she was settling in at Aunt Lynn and Uncle Robert’s apartment, before she reluctantly had to leave to go back and help run the Wind River Ranch.