Hold Me by Lucianne Rivers

Chapter One

    Jane Caldwell leveled her best hardnosed-news-anchor gaze at the family attorney. “Let me get this straight. Are you telling us our father is alive?”
    Her two sisters stared in similar shock at the woman who had called them together for the reading of their mother’s will.
    The attorney nodded, sympathy etched in the lines of her face. Dawn Madden had been the family attorney since Jane could remember, and also a friend.
    She shifted in the rawhide chair which had been crafted from the leather of cows raised on the Five C Ranch during Jane’s childhood. A childhood spent missing her father, crying for him, then grieving his death. Now he was supposedly out there somewhere?
    Jane’s confidence in her mother’s love had never wavered, yet the secret revealed by Candace Caldwell’s will had Jane doubting. Part of the vast Caldwell estate would go to the father she could barely remember. Her insides twisted with anger and hurt.
    “How could she do this?” whispered Allison, who sat to Jane’s right, her long, brown hair swept back from her pale face in haphazard fashion.
    Jane squeezed her youngest sister’s hand. Everyone expected the ranch to go to Allison. She had been the one who had stayed home with their mother all these years. Together, they’d turned the ranch into a group retreat, spring through fall. The rest of year, Ally ran a five-star bed and breakfast for tourists willing to brave the New Mexican winter.
    And Allison had been there with their mother at the end.
    Jane swallowed. She’d spent the last week crying into the well-washed cotton of her childhood pillow in the privacy of her old bedroom-turned-guest-room. Now her eyes watered afresh.
    Her sisters grieved in their own way. Margo had subsumed all her emotion, as usual, taking a rifle from the family collection and hiking into the vast acreage to shoot at tin cans. Allison took her angst out on the vegetable garden, hacking at the still-frozen ground of late winter. Jane tried to keep it all together. After all, she was the eldest at twenty-seven.
    Margo— Detective Caldwell , Jane remembered proudly—leaned forward and steepled her hands. “I thought I was the executor of Mom’s will. This isn’t what we discussed.”
    Dawn squirmed under Margo’s scrutiny. The library of the Five C Ranch was more than big enough to hold them, but their mother’s last wishes had sucked the air out of the room. It wasn’t overly hot, but Jane began to sweat. Her chest tightened.
    Dawn took a deep breath, then focused on Margo. “When Candace became ill last month, she called me to make a new will.”
    “I’m finding this hard to believe,” Jane managed.
    “I imagine you are, yet this is what your mother wanted.”
    “Could you repeat the part about our father?” Jane asked, hoping she’d misheard.
    Dawn put on her reading glasses. “A quarter of the estate goes to your father, Zach T. Caldwell, and a quarter each to the three of you. Except for the ranch. Your mother left that to the daughter who finds Zach. ‘Added incentive’ was how she put it.”
    “So she knew he was alive but had no idea where?” Jane asked. Her mom must have been damn sure for her to stipulate such terms in her will. She looked at Allison and Margo, wondering if they were as stupefied as she.
    “Yes,” Dawn said.
    Allison shook her head. “Mom wouldn’t pit us against each other, making our home some prize in a contest.”
    Jane shrank at the absurd thought of competing for the family ranch. In her eyes, Ally had given up a lot to stay out here in the high desert—the fun of moving to a city, socializing daily with people her age, living on her own. But Ally seemed to love living here, isolated as it was.
    Margo ran her fingers through her dark bob. “Never mind the inheritance. I’m just trying to get my head around the fact that Mom lied to us about Dad dying.”
    Jane grappled with the same challenge. Zach Caldwell, the fifth ‘C’ of the