Читать книгу Sail Away - Kathleen Korbel - Страница 9

Prologue

Noah Campbell was ready for a hot bath. He’d just spent the past four days convincing a large herd of cattle that they really did want to head up to higher pastures, and he was exhausted. He was also filthy, bruised, battered, and happy as hell to be home.

“This sure ain’t Hollywood, is it, boss?” his foreman asked as they guided their weary mounts across the Bitter River.

Lifting his hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead, Noah grinned like a kid. “Thank God for small favors.”

Not that Noah minded his other job in Hollywood. After all, being the world’s number-one box-office draw under the name of Cameron Ross provided him with the cash to run his ranch the way he wanted. Heck, it had provided him with the ranch in the first place. But it also made it tough to escape to his real home without hordes of paparazzi trailing him.

To that end, he’d sent his cousin Ethan in the opposite direction the way he always did, so the press, long since taught to see the movie star Cameron Ross in Ethan Campbell’s similarly rugged features, would follow and record. Noah, slouched in his saddle with a four-day growth of beard and an urgent need of a bath, could relax.

“When you due back?” Hank asked.

“Beginning of next week. After I take Dulcy to the doctor’s.”

Dulcy. His wife of eight months, who was even now eight months pregnant, tied to the house and testy as a mare with a burr under her saddle. Until the last month, Dulcy had run the ranch single-handed. She still wasn’t happy about not being allowed to join in the drive, but the doctor had been adamant. Whether Dulcy liked it or not, neither her physician nor her husband was going to let her wrangle cattle up in the high mountain meadows when she could barely fit in her saddle.

Which was why Noah wasn’t surprised to see her standing out in the yard waiting for him to show up. Tiny, redheaded, round as a watermelon. Hand to eyes to shade them against the setting sun. Noah waved and kicked his gelding into a canter. Dulcy waved back, something in her hand, and began walking forward.

Walking fast, her movements taut and aggressive.

Noah hadn’t been married long, but he’d been married long enough to know what that posture meant. Something was wrong. Without even realizing it, he nudged his horse into a dead run.

“What’s the matter?” he asked as he skidded to a stop and swung down.

Dulcy had a death’s grip on a newspaper. Her face was screwed up in worry, and her hand was at her belly.

Noah grabbed her. “Dulcy? What is it?”

She handed over the paper. “We were just headed up to find you,” she said. “I think you’d better read this.”

Noah didn’t have to read more than the headlines. “Oh, God. I have to go.”

“We have to go,” she said simply.

He took one look at the tight cast of her eyes and knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue. His chest was on fire, and he’d just found out. She must have been chewing on this thing for twelve hours or more. “We’ll go,” he said, and curled an arm around her shoulder to support her. She wouldn’t have it, though. She just wrapped her arms around his neck and held him and didn’t ask what else this would mean, even though they both knew.

They didn’t care. It didn’t matter that the headline meant his anonymity was over, his cover blown like a storm door in a twister. It didn’t matter that their island of domestic normalcy would never be recovered. What mattered was why.

Noah wouldn’t remember dropping the newspaper. He just held on to his wife, suddenly terrified to his very soul. On the ground, the breeze riffled at the pages, but the headline on the front page was too big to miss. Just above the picture of Noah in his tux at the Academy Awards, screamed the words: Cameron Ross Missing and Feared Dead Off Hawaiian Islands.