Jace watched as the moon rose over the pines and scattered the mountainside with fool's gold. He rested against a large tree trunk as he leaned back into the dark shadow of the boughs and kicked himself mentally for thinking this was going to be easy. He should have known finding someone as complicated as Bo Hamilton wouldn't be easy.
The moment Jace Calder saw his sister's face, he feared the worst. His heart sank. Emily, his troubled little sister, had been doing so well since she'd gotten the job at the Sarah Hamilton Foundation in Big Timber, Montana. "What's wrong?" he asked as he removed his Stetson, pulled up a chair at the Big Timber Java coffee shop and sat down across from her. Tossing his hat on the seat of an adjacent chair, he braced himself for bad news. Emily blinked her big blue eyes. Even though she was closing in on twenty-five, he often caught glimpses of the girl she'd been. Her pixie cut, once a dark brown like his own hair, was dyed black. From thirteen on, she'd been piercing anything she could. At sixteen she'd begun getting tattoos and drinking. It wasn't until she'd turned seventeen that she'd run away, taken up with a thirty-year-old biker drug-dealer thief and ended up in jail for the first time. But while Emily still had the tattoos and the piercings, she'd changed after the birth of her daughter, and after snagging this job with Bo Hamilton. "What's wrong is Bo," his sister said. Bo had insisted her employees at the foundation call her by her first name. "Pretty cool for a boss, huh?" his sister had said at the time. He'd been surprised. That didn't sound like the woman he knew. But who knew what was in Bo's head lately. Four months ago her mother, Sarah, who everyone believed dead the past twenty-two years, had suddenly shown up out of nowhere. According to what he'd read in the papers, Sarah had no memory of the past twenty-two years. He'd been worried it would hurt the foundation named for her. Not to mention what a shock it must have been for Bo. Emily leaned toward him and whispered, "Bo's… She's gone.
Are we ever getting out of these mountains?" she asked without turning to look at him. He moved up behind her and put his arms around her. She leaned back against him. Her hair glistened with melting snow. She felt small in his arms. "We're going to get out of here," he whispered as he slowly turned her to face him. "Do you trust me?" She raised her head to meet his eyes and held his gaze for a long moment. "With my life.
They rode up a trail until the trees parted and they got their first good view of Lone Peak across the valley and river. This late morning it was breathtaking. The stark peak gleamed against the deep blue of the big sky. No wonder this area had been named Big Sky.