“YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, EVELYN. IF YOU READ THE LAST PAGE, YOU'LL KNOW WHY I CAN'T STAY HERE.”
Caleb Mercer reached toward the old leather-bound book, but the beautiful woman sitting beside him on the reinforced platform in the barn pulled it closer to her chest.
Her emerald-green eyes were already filled with tears.
“Then tell me yourself,” she whispered.
Outside, the late-afternoon sunlight spilled across the Wyoming mountains, turning the dry grass gold and casting long shadows through the open barn doors. A chestnut horse stood quietly in its stall, and dust drifted through the warm air above the hay.
Caleb looked as though he would rather face a hundred armed men than answer her.
He was thirty-nine years old, with a powerful build, broad shoulders, rugged brown hair, a trimmed beard, and a scar stretching from his right cheek toward his jaw. His worn linen shirt was open at the collar, and the leather suspenders crossing his chest had been repaired so many times that Evelyn sometimes joked they had more stitching than leather.
But there was nothing amusing about his expression now.
He looked frightened.
And that terrified her more than anything he could have said.
For six months, Caleb had been the only man in Wyoming who made her feel beautiful without first making her feel ashamed of the body she lived in. He had never laughed at her size, never treated the accommodations she needed as a moral failing, and never spoken to her as though kindness were something she had to earn.
Now she was holding the book he'd hidden beneath a loose floorboard in the barn.
Inside were documents bearing her dead father's signature.
A property deed.
An old survey.
And a signed statement explaining how a wealthy rancher named Victor Harrow had stolen the land on which they were sitting.
Her father's ranch.
The home she'd mourned for years, believing it had been lost because of unpaid debts.
The place where her mother taught her to read and her father taught her to recognize the names of every mountain on the horizon.
It had never belonged to Victor.
At least, not according to the papers in her hands.
Evelyn's fingers trembled as she turned another page.
Then she saw Caleb's signature.