*
MERRIE HEARD HIS FOOTSTEPS stop at her door. She sat on her bed with her teeth clenched. If he opened the door...but he didn’t have a key. She relaxed a little. No, he didn’t have a key, and he didn’t want her anymore. He’d made that very plain. She wouldn’t give out, so he was probably going to tell her to get out. She closed her eyes, hurting, and listened. After a minute, his footsteps continued down the hall and slowly faded. A door closed. Merrie let out the breath she’d been holding.
She brushed away another wave of tears. What had she expected, after all? She knew that he’d been engaged to Angie, who’d been one of Randall’s women. Apparently, a lot of Randall’s women had stayed here and given their full attention to Ren.
He thought Merrie was like that, too. She’d been out of her mind with delight when he kissed her, held her, touched her. She thought it was love. It was only lust. He wanted her, but only for a night or two. Not forever.
Maybe the sort of love she read about in her romantic novels wasn’t even real. Then she thought of Paul and Sari, and realized that it was real for some people. Just not for her. Not with this man. Not ever.
She waited until she was sure Ren wasn’t coming back out of his room. She got her small bag, with her credit card and money in it, and opened the door. She’d have to leave everything else; she couldn’t carry it. She went downstairs and looked through the phone book for a cab company. There wasn’t one in Catelow that ran after dark. So she phoned Billings and had a limo company agree to come and get her. She gave them her credit card number and the address of the ranch, and asked them to please hurry. They said the driver was on the way.
She went out the door, feeling sick. She hadn’t left a note, but Ren would know why she’d gone. She was sorry she wouldn’t get to tell Delsey goodbye, as well.
Snow was falling harder. She looked around, but there was nobody she could ask for a ride to the main gate, which was at least a fourth of a mile from the highway. Actually, that was the distance from the stables, on another road. The main gate, where the limo would come, looked much farther, and she had to go through two gates to get to it.
Well, they said the longest journey began with a single step, didn’t they?
*
BY THE TIME she got to the first fence, she wished she’d worn gloves and a better hat than her colorful knitted one. Her socks, inside her new ankle-high dress boots, were soaked because the snow came in over them. Her feet felt as frozen as her poor hands.
The gate had a simple latch. She was surprised, because she thought Ren had said that there were alarms that went off when anyone tried to open gates at night. She recalled that he had facial recognition software on hidden cameras that weren’t readily seen. Looking around, she wasn’t aware of any cameras in the snow-lit darkness. So perhaps they weren’t really looking at the gates at this hour of the morning.
She closed the gate back and kept walking. She was shivering from the cold. There was another gate in the distance. Heavens, it was a far walk! In Texas at this time of year, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But Wyoming was very different. She wasn’t used to the cold and the snow. And it looked as if she wouldn’t have the chance to get used to them.
She felt the throwaway phone in her pocket. It was charged, so she could call Paul from the airport and have him bring the Grayling jet up to pick her up. It wasn’t involved in the money laundering charges, so, like the racehorses, it still belonged to the family.
She laughed at her own stupidity. She’d been falling in love. But Ren had only seen her as an easy mark, because he thought she was Randall’s woman. It was heartbreaking. She’d never felt anything like this before, and she had to feel it for the first time with a jaded man who looked on women as party favors.
She recalled with anguish the tenderness of Ren’s lips on her soft mouth, the slow, easy motion of his hands on her body, the patience he took with her. That Angie woman had said he was a terrible lover. Now she knew it wasn’t true. Ren was practiced and sophisticated, a master of sensuality. If she’d been the experienced woman he expected her to be, she would probably have had no qualms about sleeping with him. But Merrie was religious. She didn’t go with the crowd.
She felt betrayed. She felt cheap and dirty. She wanted her sister and her home. If the killer found her, that would be all right. She couldn’t see a future for herself without Ren, and he didn’t want her, except one way. It hurt so much that tears rained down her cold cheeks. She brushed them away angrily. He wasn’t worth tears.
She kept walking.
*
REN HAD BEEN sitting under a tree with Meredith in his arms. She was smiling up at him, her eyes full of love. There was an odd ringing in his ears. She looked at him quizzically, and all at once he woke to the sound of the phone ringing.