A Ranching Man. Linda Turner
couldn’t, unfortunately, say the same thing about Kurt Austin, Emma’s father. The director of her first movie, older and much more experienced than she, he’d made it clear right from the beginning that all he wanted from her was a nice, quiet little affair while they were making the movie. But she was in love for the first time in her life and sure that what they had would last a lifetime. She’d been wrong. It ended the day she told him she was pregnant and he coolly suggested she get an abortion.
Alone and pregnant and twenty-one, she’d wanted to go home to New Mexico then, to her father and the security of the home where she’d grown up, to have her baby. But her father was a hard, conservative religious man who’d never understood her love for acting. He’d disowned her when she ran away to Hollywood, and she couldn’t bring herself to turn to him for help when she was in trouble. So she’d retreated to a small town in California where no one knew her and had Emma away from the glitter and glamour and gossip of L.A.
She was hers, no one else’s, and somehow, she’d been able to keep her daughter’s existence a well-guarded secret from most of the world. She knew that couldn’t last—the more famous she became, the more diligently the press dug into her past—but for now, it wasn’t the press she was worried about. It was a single man, a psychopath who stalked her, a crazed fan who thought he was in love with her and threatened to stop at nothing to be with her. He’d already broken into her home, already left notes warning her that when she finally committed herself to him, there would be no place in their life for another man’s child. If Angel couldn’t get rid of her, he could.
It was because of him that she’d agreed to work with Garrett again in spite of the fact that she despised him. It was because of him, this man who seemed to know her every move regardless of the security measures she took to protect herself and her daughter, that she’d jumped at the chance to get out of L.A. He was the reason she’d pulled whatever strings she had to so she and Emma could stay with Joe.
She should have explained the situation to Joe, should have warned him that there was a very good chance that her stalker would follow her to Colorado and cause trouble when he discovered her whereabouts. But Joe had been so set against her, so determined that she wasn’t spending so much as a single night under his roof, that she’d been afraid to chance telling him that two other females would be invading his space once she was sure it would be safe for them to do so. Because that wasn’t part of his contract with the studio. The agreement was that he would rent a bedroom and office to one actor; there’d been no mention of a three-year-old and her nanny tagging along.
He would, no doubt, be livid, she thought as she nuzzled Emma’s neck and made her giggle. But if he was the man she thought he was, he would never direct his anger at an innocent child. If she was wrong, the three of them would be out on the street by nightfall.
“That’s my girl,” she said huskily, tightening her arms around her. “Did you have a good trip? Did Laura pack your teddy and blanky?”
“And Miss Annabelle and my bunny angel, too!” Dimples flashing and her eyes dancing, she pulled back. “They rode all the way with me.” And taking off like a shot, she raced back to the limo to collect her favorite toys.
Laughing, Angel rose to her feet, love squeezing her heart as she watched her daughter struggle to hold a ragged, overgrown teddy bear and a doll that was as big as she was. “God, I’ve missed her. And you, too,” she added, giving Laura an affectionate hug.
Thirty years her senior, Laura Carson had applied for the job of nanny when Emma was barely six months old and Angel’s skyrocketing career had begun to make it impossible for her to continue to care for the baby alone. Inexperienced, filled with guilt at the idea of leaving her child with a stranger, she hadn’t liked any of the women she’d interviewed until she’d met Laura. She was older than the other applicants, wiser and more settled, with a glint of patient humor in her gray eyes that had instantly appealed to Angel. She’d hired her on the spot and never regretted it.
“We’ve missed you, too,” the older woman said as she returned her hug. “Emma was so excited about seeing you that she was practically bouncing off the ceiling last night.”
Her smile fading, she glanced past Angel to the house and the open range that surrounded it for a thousand yards in every direction. There wasn’t another sign of civilization for as far as the eye could see. “When you said this place was secluded, you weren’t kidding. You could see anyone coming from a long way off. You had any visitors?”
Not pretending to misunderstand, Angel said, “No, thank God. It’s been very quiet. How about you? Anyone drop by unexpectedly at the house?”
“No, but the mailman delivered a package the day before yesterday,” she said in a quiet voice that wouldn’t carry to Emma’s sharp ears. “I didn’t open it, but it was postmarked L.A. and addressed the same as before.”
To my darling Angel. All too easily, Angel could see the rough scrawl on the packages that had been delivered to her house time and again over the course of the last two months. The gifts were always the same—revealing lingerie, nightgowns and teddies and intimate apparel that a stranger, a pervert, had not only bought specifically for her, but in his twisted mind, she knew he’d pictured her wearing it. Just thinking about it turned her stomach.
“You sent it to the police?”
Laura nodded. “Unfortunately, it was the same as the others—wiped clean of fingerprints and mailed in a plain cardboard box that looked like a thousand others that go through the post office every day. There’s no way to trace who sent it.”
“When was it mailed?”
“Two days after you left town. From L.A.,” she stressed. “It looks like your plan worked. The sleazeball doesn’t even know you’ve left town.”
Relieved, Angel didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. Thank God, thank God! When she’d decided to accept the role of Grace in Beloved Stranger, her biggest worry had been how she was going to get out of L.A. with Emma and Laura without her stalker following them. She’d known it was only a matter of time before he discovered where she was, but before he did, she intended to have her daughter ensconced somewhere where he couldn’t get to her.
Tricking him hadn’t been easy. He knew where she worked and lived and she couldn’t just walk out her front door with Emma without him following them. So she had her agent circulate the rumor to the press that she was laid up at home with a viral infection. While her stalker thought she was too sick to leave her bed, she’d slipped out of her house in the dark of night and caught a late flight to Tucson. From there, she’d rented a car and driven to Liberty Hill without her tormentor ever knowing she’d left town. Then, just yesterday, she’d notified Laura it was time to make a move.
“You’re sure you weren’t followed?” she asked worriedly. “We started shooting on Monday. He’s bound to have heard by now that I’m here on location. He must have been watching the house all week, waiting for you to leave with Emma so he could follow you.”
“If he did, all he saw was the two of us going to Disneyland in the limo.”
“The driver was able to drop you at the front gate without any problems? What about Tammy?” she asked, referring to Laura’s sister, Tammy, who had worked at the park for years. “Did she have any trouble getting you in?”
All too aware of the terror that Angel had lived in for the past few months, Laura sympathized with her fear of something going wrong. “Everything went like clockwork,” she reassured her. “Tammy was waiting for us and already had our entrance passes. If your stalker was following us, he got held up at the regular ticket booth and had to stand in line just like everybody else. By the time he paid and got in the park, we’d already left through a fire exit in the Fantasyland section, where another limo was waiting for us.”
Her gray eyes lighting on Emma, who had found the porch swing on the front porch and was swinging her menagerie of toys, she laughed softly. “For a minute there, though, I was sure we were toast. I warned Emma we were just going to take a quick walk through the park, that we’d