Читать книгу The Millionaire and the Cowgirl - Lisa Jackson - Страница 11

Clear Springs, Wyoming

June

Bbbbrrring!

The school bell rang sharply, announcing the end of the day for the students of Whitecomb Elementary in Clear Springs, Wyoming. Within minutes laughing, chattering children swinging lunch pails and book bags began streaming from the long, redbrick building. Two flags, one for the United States, the other for the State of Wyoming, snapped from a pole near the front entrance of the school. Yellow buses waited near the side entrance by the parking lot and spewed blue smoke from their tailpipes.

From a van parked in front of a small cottage on the opposite side of the street, a stranger, a man who didn’t belong anywhere near this elementary school, peered anxiously through the window. He stared past the caravans of trucks, cars and minivans that idled in the asphalt lot as parents waited to pick up their precious cargos.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered.

Surely he would catch a glimpse of the girl in question, the one on whose slim, nine-year-old shoulders his partner’s hopes rested.

What if she no longer went to school here? What if she and her mother had moved? His fingers curled over the steering wheel in a death grip. Damn, it was hot, even though he was parked in the shade of a solitary oak tree, whose branches stretched over the fence guarding the small house.

He cracked open the window just a bit and a breath of hot, dusty wind whispered through the van. A dog somewhere up the street barked, grating on his nerves, but still he waited. He’d promised that he would see this child for himself so that he could report back to his partner that she was alive and well.

Suddenly a blond girl with wild hair and big smile dashed from the building. Long legged, her teeth a little too big for her face, she was one of those children who would blossom with age, a cute girl who promised rare beauty in adulthood. Caitlyn Bethany Rawlings, only child of never-married Samantha Rawlings.

He felt a moment’s relief as he watched Caitlyn and the rest of the students in Mrs. Evelyn Johnson’s fourth-grade class join the other kids already climbing onto the buses or threading through the line of parked cars.

Caitlyn, chattering to a dark-haired, shorter girl, was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Tangled curls, so like her mother’s, framed a small, tanned face. Freckles dusted her nose, and her eyes, round and blue, squinted until she spied her mother’s sorry-looking pickup. With a frantic wave to a couple of friends, she dashed between two parked station wagons and climbed into the passenger side of the vehicle.

Caitlyn was jabbering excitedly to her mother. It was, after all, the last day of school. There was much to say, plans to be made for the summer, he supposed, though little did either female know that their carefully laid plans were about to change in light of his partner’s agenda.

He stared through the grimy back window of the Rawlingses’ truck.

Samantha, listening to her daughter as she flipped on her turn signal, drove out of the parking lot and followed the parade of cars and trucks that headed through the small Wyoming town for the last time this school year.

They passed the stranger’s van and he turned away, hoping not to be seen or recognized. Coming to the school in broad daylight was taking a big risk. There was always the chance that someone would catch a glimpse of a person who didn’t belong in this small, tightly knit community located at the base of the Teton Mountains. But some chances had to be taken. They were risky, but necessary, if this first part of the plan was going to work.

And come hell or high water, the plan was going to work. Lives depended upon it. Important lives. The lives of the Fortune family.