to meet with Jean Pierre before she left to fly home? She didn’t want to put her internship—and her degree in fashion design—on hold, but what choice did she have? She wasn’t safe in London.
Suddenly, without warning, there was a sharp knock at the door. Startled, she jumped, her heart slamming against her ribs. She wasn’t expecting anyone. No one even knew she was there except her family. So who was knocking on her door?
Her blood turning to ice at the possibilities, she hugged herself and sat as quiet as a mouse right where she was. Whoever was on the other side of the door didn’t know she was there. When she didn’t answer, he would assume no one was home and leave.
“Miss Wyatt? Are you in there? Open up. This is the police. I need to speak to you. I have some bad news about your family in the United States.”
“Oh, God!” Panic suddenly squeezing her throat, she jumped up and ran to the door. She reached for the dead bolt, only to hesitate, horrified by a sudden thought. What if this was a trick? What if whoever was after the ranch somehow found out she’d gone back to London? Could they have found out where she was already?
“Who did you say you were?” she asked, wincing at the quiver of fear she clearly heard in her voice. “I need some identification.”
“I’m Officer Hastings,” he replied and held up his badge to the peephole in the door.
Priscilla took one look at it and sighed in relief. Lightning quick, she flipped the dead bolt and jerked open the door. “Come in—”
She didn’t have time to say another word, let alone scream, as two masked men with guns rushed through the door and grabbed her. Gasping, she tried to scream…only to have duct tape slapped over her mouth. Frantic, she clawed at the tape, but they were ready for her. In the next instant, her wrists were taped together, then her ankles. Trussed up like a turkey, there was nothing she could do as they picked her up and laid her on the floor. Before she could even begin to guess their intentions, they rolled her up in the living room rug.
Just that easily, fear took on a new name. Terror.
When Donovan Jones caught his secretary on the phone with her boyfriend for the fifth time in two days, he was in no mood to cut her any slack. He’d already warned her numerous times that she was there to work, not visit with her lover, and she’d completely ignored him. She was the third secretary he’d hired in three weeks…and the third one who seemed to think she could do whatever the hell she wanted. She was wrong.
“You’re fired,” he growled. And leaning across the desk, he pushed the disconnect button on the phone.
Sputtering, she surged up out of her chair in anger. “What the hell?!”
Not the least bit impressed with her indignation, he growled, “Get your purse and get out. Now! I’ll put your paycheck in the mail tomorrow.”
He didn’t give her time to argue but simply grabbed her purse from where she insisted on leaving it on top of a file cabinet and strode over to the door. Jerking it open, he waited. She was so furious, steam was practically coming out of her ears. Cursing, she jerked her purse out of his hand and stormed out, slamming the door so hard that she nearly knocked it off its hinges.
“Good riddance,” he muttered. “I don’t need you anyway. I can find my own files.”
But when he stalked over to the filing cabinet, the file he needed for a meeting he had scheduled in fifteen minutes wasn’t where it should have been. Swearing, he went through the entire drawer to make sure it hadn’t been misfiled, but it was nowhere to be found.
Which meant, he thought grimly as his gaze landed on the secretary’s desk, it had to be somewhere in the mountain of paperwork that completely covered the top of the desk. She’d been there a week, he thought, irritated. What the hell had she been doing? He’d been on a case and had to leave the office in her hands. Apparently, she hadn’t done a damn thing except talk on the phone to her boyfriend.
Next time, he told himself, he was going to avoid the young chicks like the plague and hire a little, old, gray-haired grandmother instead. Someone who would appreciate the job, he decided, and not take advantage of the fact that he was hardly ever in the office. Someone who—
When the outer office door suddenly opened behind him, he stiffened. If the little witch had come back to plead for her job, she could forget it, he thought. She was history. Pivoting sharply, ready to tell her just that, he found himself confronting a stranger, instead.
Frowning—had he forgotten an appointment?—he lifted a dark brow. “May I help you?”
“I’m looking for Donovan Jones.”
“You found him,” he retorted. “But I’m in a hell of a rush. I’ve got an appointment across town in fifteen minutes, and I’m going to be late as it is. Leave your name and number,” he said, pushing a steno pad across the desk to him, “and I’ll call you the first chance I get.”
“No,” the man said in the clipped regal way that only the British could do. “I need your help now.”
Donovan wasn’t a man who men often said no to. Straightening, he studied the hard look of determination in his visitor’s eyes and the set of his jaw and recognized desperation when he saw it. “What’s your story?” he demanded.
“I’m Buck Wyatt,” he said. “I need you to find my sister.”
Surprised, Donovan blinked. “I’m a bounty hunter, Mr. Wyatt. Is there a bounty out on your sister?”
“No. She’s been kidnapped.”
“How do you know that? Have you received a ransom demand?”
His mouth compressed in a flat line. “No. There won’t be any ransom note. I already know what the kidnappers want.”
Donovan knew he shouldn’t have asked. He hadn’t been lying about his meeting. He was going to be late, and it was important, dammit! But there was something in the fury in Buck Wyatt’s eyes, something in the cold, controlled outrage in his voice that Donovan knew he wasn’t going to be able to walk away from.
Resigned—and more than a little annoyed with his own curiosity—he motioned for Wyatt to pull up a chair. “You’ve got ten minutes,” he said. “Make it good, because after that I am going to my meeting.”
He didn’t have to tell him twice. Too restless to take a seat, Buck Wyatt stood, instead…and paced. “My three sisters and I inherited a ranch in Colorado eleven months ago from an American cousin we didn’t know we had,” he said stiffly. “One of the stipulations of her will was that one of us had to be at the ranch at all times for a period of one year. There was no restriction on how many single nights we could be absent from the ranch, but if no member of the family is present for two nights running, the ranch goes to an unnamed heir.”
Donovan lifted a brow at that. “How many people know about that little stipulation?”
“I would imagine just about everyone in the state of Colorado.”
Donovan whistled softly. “And no one’s run you off yet? You and your sisters must be damn tough.”
A muscle clenched in Buck’s jaw. “So far, we’ve managed to weather one attack after another…as long as they were against the ranch. Now they’ve gone after Priscilla a continent away.”
“And you’re sure your sister’s kidnapping is related to the ranch? When’s the year up?”
“Next month.”
Donovan frowned. That changed things. “Are you even sure that she’s really been kidnapped? What’s her history? Is she the type to stage this kind of thing?”
“God, no! She’s the baby of the family and damn stubborn sometimes about getting her way,” he admitted honestly, “which is why she’s in London to begin with. When she insisted on coming back to close up her apartment, we talked about