Return of the Cowgirl Read online

  Return of the Cowgirl

  The Gallaghers of Montana Romance

  Eve Gaddy

  Return of the Cowgirl

  Copyright © 2017 Eve Gaddy

  The Tule Publishing Group, LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-946772-83-1

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  Dedication

  This is for Justine Davis. Thanks so much for listening, emailing, and helping me figure out what the heck I was going to do about my amnesiac cowgirl.:)

  And for Janet Justiss who told me to send Glenna to Argentina several books back and I listened to her. Janet, why Argentina?

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Meet The Gallaghers of Montana

  Excerpt from Sing Me Back Home

  About the Author

  Dear Reader,

  Finally, the missing sister’s story.

  Sometimes I’ll have a character in one of my books and I don’t know what to do with him or her. It’s usually a member of the family I’ve been writing about for several books. Return of the Cowgirl is the missing Gallagher’s story. Glenna is the only girl in a family of five siblings, four of them brothers.

  I didn’t know what her story was so I sent her off to Argentina to work on a horse ranch. And kind of forgot about her. Oh, I’d remember occasionally, which is how she came to be suspected of embezzling. And how she disappeared. And then I’d wonder why the heck I did that. It’s known as writing yourself into a corner.

  So I started Return of the Cowgirl knowing a few things. But I still didn’t know her story. It wasn’t easy to figure out her story but once I did I had a lot of fun. My title for it is The Amnesiac Cowgirl. For some reason Tule wouldn’t let me have that title. But that’s how I’ll think of her forever.

  Her hero, Mitch Hardeman, was also fun to write. He’s the PI who finds her and eventually brings her back to Marietta. Not without a lot of problems, not the least of which are his growing feelings for her.

  I hope you enjoy Glenna and Mitch’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  Eve

  Chapter One

  She sat at a small table in an outdoor café in Valparaiso, Chile, a battered backpack at her feet. She looked as lost and alone as anyone he’d ever seen. Mitch Hardeman walked up to her table and said, “You are a damned hard woman to find.”

  “No entiendo,” she said, her expression changing to annoyance. And oddly, alarm.

  Bullshit, you don’t understand. But if that’s the way she wanted to play it, fine. “Vos sos una maldita mujer dura para encontrar,” he repeated in Spanish.

  “You must have me confused with someone else. I have no idea who you are or what you’re talking about,” she said, still in Spanish.

  He didn’t mind speaking Spanish, although he didn’t know why she was pretending to not understand English. “You don’t know me, but I know you, Glenna. My name is Mitch Hardeman. I’m the private investigator your brothers hired to find you.”

  “My name is not Glenna and I have no brothers. Go away or I will call the waiter to remove you.”

  Instead of leaving, he pulled out a chair and sat, signaling a waitress. When the woman came over, Mitch ordered coffee for two. He lifted a brow at Glenna to see how she’d react but she simply shrugged and turned away. For a moment he wondered if he’d made a mistake, but even though this woman had brown hair instead of dark red, he knew she was the woman he’d been chasing for the better part of three weeks.

  She didn’t stand out as American—he’d give her that. With dark hair, a smattering of freckles and green eyes, and wearing a dress with tiny flowers on it, she looked as much like a native as anyone. She sure as hell spoke Spanish like a native, but then, she’d been living in Argentina for years.

  He tried again. “Your brothers have been looking for you since they discovered you vanished from the Villareal Ranch several weeks ago.”

  “Brothers? I told you I have no brothers and I know nothing of this ranch you speak of. Go away,” she repeated.

  Mitch pulled out the picture of Glenna Gallagher he carried with him and showed it to her. He had digital photos as well, but it was often easier to show people a paper photo. “Are you trying to tell me this isn’t you? You aren’t Glenna Gallagher?”

  She looked at the picture and paled. “That is not my name, no. So go away. Now.”

  The waitress returned with their coffee. NotGlenna took hers with a thank you and sipped. Her color had come back and she seemed to have collected herself. Apparently growing tired of Mitch ignoring her requests for him to go the hell away, she got up, slung her backpack over one shoulder, and without a word started walking off.

  Mitch threw some money on the table, picked up the picture and followed her, catching up to her a short distance from the café. “Other than your hair, you’re the spitting image of the woman in this picture. So stop it with the denials. I know good and well you’re Glenna Gallagher.”

  Glaring at him, she said, “My name is Rosalie Torres.”

  This was why he’d lost her just after Zapala. She’d changed her name, dyed her hair and disappeared. Again. She was worried about her previous employer tracking her down. Otherwise, why the phony identity? But if she really had embezzled fifty thousand bucks, then what the hell was she still doing in South America? She should have been long gone by now.

  Her brothers maintained she hadn’t done it. They were convinced that wasn’t the whole story and that their sister would have never stolen anything, much less fifty thousand bucks. He wasn’t so sure, but after meeting her employer, Jorge Villareal, and his son, Rolando, Mitch leaned more toward believing her innocent.

  The men—especially the younger man—hadn’t been any more forthcoming with Mitch than they had with Dylan Gallagher when he’d talked to them. They’d flat-out lied to Dylan about how long Glenna had been gone. As to why they lied, all he could think of was to make them think there was no point in looking for her. They wanted nothing to do with Mitch, and were clearly angry that he’d come looking for their errant employee. They did ask him to let them know if he found her.

>   Yeah, that wasn’t happening. Not too long after he left the ranch and continued his search he figured out someone else was looking for her, and had been for a while. Probably since she’d disappeared. Villareal’s flunkies seemed the most logical conclusion.

  So while he kept up his own enquiries, he was able to catch up with them pretty quickly. All he’d had to do was show Glenna’s picture around and ask if someone else had been looking for her.

  He wasn’t sure how she’d managed to evade them for so long. She was clearly smart and resourceful. And desperate?

  That’s the feeling he got. So how could he get her to admit she was Glenna Gallagher?

  “Are you afraid the Villareals are looking for you?”

  She looked at him blankly. Really blankly. As if she had no clue to what he was referring. “The Villareal Ranch?” he prodded. “You know, the place you lived and worked at for the last seven years? Until you were accused of embezzlement?”

  “Embezzlement? You’re crazy. I’m not this Glenda person. Must I call the police so you’ll leave me alone?”

  This was not going how he’d envisioned it. Did she think he was on the Villareals’ payroll? Maybe she didn’t believe he came from her brothers. Or...could he be wrong? What if she really wasn’t Glenna but simply looked enough like her to be her twin? Except for the hair, of course. But hair color was easily changed. He tried one more time. “Glenna, not Glenda. Do the names Jack, Sean, Wyatt and Dylan Gallagher mean anything to you?”

  He watched her closely but didn’t see a glimmer of recognition. Nothing to indicate she’d ever even heard of the four men who were her brothers.

  Instead of answering, she ducked into a store, one of those selling everything from fabric to antiques. Crammed full of merchandise as well as people, it was an effective place to lose someone. But not Mitch.

  She ran out the back door and Mitch followed, only a minute or two behind her. He burst out the door just in time to see a man grab her and drag her, fighting madly, toward a beat-up van waiting in the street.

  Holy shit, she’s being abducted.

  Chapter Two

  Rosalie screamed and the man clamped a filthy hand over her mouth. She bit him, heard him curse as he yanked his hand away and let go of her for a moment, long enough for her to turn to face him. She kicked him in the nuts, then swung her backpack at his head but he threw up his arm to deflect it. She ran then, but not fast enough. He grabbed her blouse, ripping it as she struggled wildly. Then his hands were around her neck and her vision started to blur. Just before she went under, he dropped his hands.

  Collapsed on the sidewalk she watched as the man who had harassed her earlier fought with her would-be captor.

  Get up! Run! She got to her knees but as she tried to stand, a wave of dizziness hit her and she fell back down. Painfully, she crawled over to the wall, dragging her backpack along with her, and prayed her rescuer would prevail.

  The sickening sounds of flesh striking flesh and explosive curses from the men were glaringly loud in the silence of the deserted street. Someone shouted “¡Policía!” The two men continued to struggle until her kidnapper broke away and ran to the waiting van. They were gone in an instant.

  Bleeding from his mouth and his nose, her rescuer came over and squatted beside her. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. Her knees hurt from crawling on the concrete, and she suspected they were bleeding, but thanks to this man she wasn’t bound, drugged and being sold as a sex slave. There had been a rash of abductions, she’d been told, that most people put down to human trafficking.

  And there was always the fear that whoever she was running from had found her.

  A policeman was coming their way and she fought a surge of panic. She didn’t know why; she only knew it was the same feeling that came over her whenever she saw a policeman. The same feeling that drove her to move from town to town, never staying long in one place. The same feeling that made her dye her hair brown, instead of leaving it her natural color. A redhead would attract too much attention. Clearly she’d thought so, judging from the red roots she’d seen when she first awakened in the hospital. She grabbed the man’s arm and said hoarsely, “No police.”

  “Why? You were nearly abducted. Don’t you want to report it?”

  How could she explain when she didn’t understand it herself? “No. Please. Get rid of him.”

  He stared at her a moment, then shook his head. He pulled up his shirt and used it to wipe at the blood on his face. Then he stopped the policeman a few feet away and she heard him explaining they didn’t want any trouble and his wife—his wife—was all right.

  A wave of dizziness swept over her and she put her hands to her head. She heard voices, hers and a man’s, arguing.

  “Why did you say we were engaged? We’ve never discussed marriage.”

  “Querida, what is this? Of course we’re getting married. It is time for me to have an heir.”

  She came back to herself and stared at the policeman. What had he said? “¿Perdón?

  He repeated, “¿Es verdad? ¿Está bien?”

  “Sí. Sí. Estoy bien, gracias.”

  Rosalie waited until the policeman left before saying, “Your wife? Really?”

  “You’re welcome. Do you want to tell me why you were almost abducted? And oh, yeah, why we’re speaking Spanish again when you were speaking perfectly good English before you talked to the cop?”

  Rosalie started to deny it, then realized that he was right. “I—I can speak English?”

  He stared at her. “What the hell are you playing at? Of course you speak English. You’re as American as I am.”

  “American? No, no. I am Argentine.”

  Wasn’t she?

  She doesn’t know she speaks English. Honestly doesn’t know she’s American. What the fuck? Either Glenna was a superb actress or this woman wasn’t his quarry. But she spoke English. And she looked like the picture. With red hair she’d look exactly like the picture. He knew in his gut she was Glenna Gallagher. If he was right, why the hell did she keep denying it?

  Maybe she doesn’t know. Oh, right. Maybe she has amnesia. Because that was such a reasonable thing to think.

  No, it was more likely she still thought he was with the Villareals. Except if he was, why would someone else have tried to abduct her? Why wouldn’t he have just snatched her himself?

  Whatever, he had to convince her that her brothers had sent him. The easiest way to do that was to put her on the phone with one of her brothers.

  Realizing Glenna was trying to get up, he held out a hand and hauled her up. Her neck already showed signs of being choked. “We should get you to a clinic,” he said in English.

  She answered him slowly, as if still unsure of her language skills. “No. I’ll be all right. Thank you, but you can leave now.”

  Fat chance, honey. “Let me walk you home. In case those losers come back.”

  “No.”

  Definite. And scared. “Fair enough. You don’t know me. Let me at least walk you closer to where you live.”

  She didn’t answer but started walking. He noticed she was limping. She’d banged herself up good crawling on the concrete.

  “Do you know who tried to kidnap you?” He was nearly certain it had been the Villareals’ henchmen. There was a slight chance it was a random kidnapping, but that seemed unlikely as hell, given the situation.

  “No. Not...exactly.” Hesitantly, she added in Spanish, “But someone has been trying to find me. And I can’t let them.”

  “I’ve been trying to find you. I’ve been all over South America looking for you.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “It’s not you.” Casting him a suspicious glance, she said, “But until you rescued me from those men, I wasn’t sure of that.”

  But she still didn’t trust him, and honestly, why the hell should she? “Can we go somewhere and talk? In public,” he added hastily.

  She looked at him for a moment and said, “Come with
me.”

  She took him to the Plaza Sotomayor, an open-air plaza in the middle of the city’s Historic District. They found an unoccupied bench and sat. She arranged her skirt to cover her knees but not before he saw that they were rubbed raw and bleeding.

  “Are you sure you won’t go to a clinic?”

  Ignoring his question she asked one of her own. “Why do you think I’m this woman, Glenna?”

  “Like I said, I’ve been chasing you all over South America for nearly three weeks. From a couple of weeks after you left the Villareal ranch to now. You look exactly like this picture, except you have brown hair, which is easy enough to change.” He took out his phone as he spoke and pulled up a digital photo of Glenna Gallagher. He showed it to her. A different pose than the paper copy.

  He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but she hadn’t shut him down, at least. “What I don’t get is why you keep denying you’re Glenna. What’s the point of that? I can see why you want nothing to do with the Villareals, given they accused you of embezzlement, and it’s extremely likely that your kidnappers are connected to them. But your family is totally on your side. Are you afraid I’m lying about them?”

  While he talked, she searched for something in her backpack. “I’ve told you I don’t know what you’re talking about. Or who you’re talking about.” She pulled out her passport and handed it to him. “Look at it.”

  He opened it. Rosalie Maria Torres. Nationality: Argentine Place of birth: La Pampa Province, ARG. The passport picture looked like her, more or less. The passport itself was marginal at best. Mitch had seen his share of fake passports and he’d bet his ass that this one was fake.

  “Nice try, but this is a fake,” he said, handing it back to her.

  “It isn’t fake,” she insisted. She handed him her DNI card.

  “Also fake,” he said, adding, “The quality is better in this than the passport, though.”