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I’d talked it all over with Pippa and Abby, and they were on high alert too. Well, once they’d gotten over the shock of it all. My ears still rang with Abby’s screech.
“You turned down twenty million dollars?”
Twenty-one, actually, but I’d rounded down a little.
Luckily, Abby had come around once I explained Harlon’s devious actions.
“Arrogant son of bitch,” she’d muttered.
So, Abby was on board. Pippa, too. It helped that she was fresh off her triumph at Harlon’s party.
“You were brilliant,” I’d told her. “I would never have thought of distracting a vampire with spareribs.”
Pippa had shrugged smugly. “I knew the minute she waltzed in on those thousand-dollar stilettos that she was up to no good.”
The stilettos weren’t what had put me off. More like the vampire fangs Angelina had been hiding — and her connection to Nash.
I ground my teeth, just thinking of it. They’d definitely been an item. What on earth had he seen in her?
It made me feel sick, though I couldn’t understand why I cared, or why the air sizzled every time he and I bumped or made extended eye contact. On the other hand, maybe that caveman-level physical attraction was to be expected. Nash was a strapping shifter in his prime. I was…well, just me, but hey. Maybe he dug women who didn’t have time for perfect hair, nails, or makeup.
Anyway, the important thing was to save our ranch — and possibly my skin — from the likes of Harlon.
All three of us sisters had put out feelers around town, though Pippa’s network was by far the biggest. Abby and I mostly kept to ourselves, while Pippa was best friends with just about everyone in Sedona, from the cute guy who drove the garbage truck to park rangers to the cackling old fortune-teller from the little shop on Main Street.
“If there’s any dirt to dig up on Harlon, we’ll find it,” Pippa promised as the three of us took our weekly ride across the ranch.
Apache, her pinto, shook his mane, emphasizing her point.
“No way is Harlon getting his hands on this ranch,” Abby growled. “No way.”
She rode Lucky, a sweet, good-natured palomino — her polar opposite, in other words — while I rode Buckeye, my favorite roan.
Two of the three were holdovers from my great-aunt’s time; the other, and the additional four horses grazing in the east paddock, were rescues, along with a pair of scruffy miniature ponies and one colicky donkey. They all had Abby to thank fortheir lives. She was tough on the outside but all heart inside — especially when it came to orphans and outcasts.
The ranch stretched out all around us, sweeping across flatlands, snaking into canyons, and wrapping around mesas. I’d grown up in Albuquerque, but no place had ever felt more like home than Painted Rock Ranch.
And no place I’d ever cared about had ever been as threatened. I pictured resort buildings in place of our beautiful cottonwoods. Groomed golf greens standing in for prickly pears and gnarled junipers. Our overgrown natural spring would be tamed and transformed into an infinity pool, and the purple and green dragonflies that hovered over it would be nothing more than a memory.
Over my dead body,I nearly grunted.
The question was, how to outtrick a warlock and a scheming vampire?
Abby and Pippa rode ahead while I stared off in the direction of the petroglyphs. My fingers went tight around the reins as I pictured the spiral.
Buckeye snorted and pawed the ground, anxious to move on.
“You coming, Erin?” Pippa called.
I looked up, then nudged Buckeye into motion.
“Coming,” I whispered.
* * *
Nash had been doing his own snooping. Where he went after work each morning, I wasn’t sure, but we’d agreed to check in with each other in town every afternoon at three.
“Anything new?” I asked, taking a seat beside him on Friday.
