Paradise County - Softcover

Robards, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451644337 ISBN 13: 9781451644333

Verlag: Gallery Books, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

One of the most popular voices in women’s fiction” (Newsweek), Karen Robards delivers another electrifying national bestseller with this story of unexpected attraction and evil that lurks beneath a bit of Southern splendor.

Left bankrupt after her billionaire father’s sudden death, Alexandra Haywood returns to Shelby County, Kentucky—that bit of Southern splendor known as Paradise County—to sell the family’s magnificent horse farm. Part of her mission is to fire Joe Welch, the sexy, stubborn farm manager who worked hard for the Haywoods while raising his children. But Joe refuses to be fired, and he and Alex clash. They also fall for each other—hard. Just as their attraction flares, a shocking murder with ties to the past rocks the county—and cuts close to home when Joe’s teenage son, Eli, and Alex’s wild-spirited younger sister, Neely, vanish. Now, the evil that lurks beneath Paradise County raises its gruesome head—and Alex is targeted as the next victim.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karen Robards is the New York Times, USA TODAY, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of more than fifty books and one novella. Karen published her first novel at age twenty-four and has won multiple awards throughout her career, including six Silver Pens for favorite author. Karen was described by The Daily Mail as “one of the most reliable thriller...writers in the world.” She is the mother of three boys and lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Chapter One

The instant he stepped inside the dark barn, Joe Welch knew he'd found the source of his urgent sense that something was wrong.

Someone was in the barn. Someone who had no business being there. The thoroughbreds were restless, moving agitatedly about in their stalls, not quiet like they should be so late at night. One -- he thought it was Suleimann -- whinnied to him softly. There was an indefinable heaviness in the air: the weight of an unseen presence. He could feel it, tangible as the scent of smoke that still lingered outside from the burning of a pile of brush that afternoon.

Standing in the rectangle of moonlight that streamed through the wide door he had just rolled partly open, squinting down the long row of stalls, Joe searched the shadows for an intruder. At the same time, his fingers slid along the sanded-smooth planks, groping for the light switch. He found it, flipped it -- and nothing happened. Figured. The lights were out, which wasn't all that unusual. The wind had been up earlier, and sometimes, out here in the county, that was all it took to knock down a power line. Or maybe a fuse was blown. That happened sometimes too, when too many lights were turned on at once. Lots of lights were on up at the Big House tonight; he'd seen them as he'd walked across the field. So it was probably a fuse.

Damn.

His gaze continued to search the darkness as his hand dropped to his side. After a moment he found what he was seeking: a darker, denser, human-shaped shadow that seemed to be sitting on the soft raked sawdust of the floor. The figure's back rested against the left-side wall. Its legs were stretched straight out in front of it, solid black logs against the pale umber of the sawdust. In the darkness, Joe might have missed it entirely, except that it was the one shadow that remained motionless amid all the other shadows that shifted and danced just beyond the reach of the moonlight.

Suleimann -- he was sure it was the big roan now -- called to him again, anxiously.

"You there! Identify yourself, please!" His challenge was peremptory, but not altogether rude, on the off-chance that it might be his employer or one of his employer's guests sitting there on the ground.

No answer. No movement. Nothing.

Joe took a deep breath, steadying himself as his muscles tensed. Billionaires and their pals didn't sit in barn shavings as a general rule, so he thought he could pretty much rule out that possibility. Which left -- what? A couple of these horses had been purchased just a few months before at Keeneland's July sale for around a million dollars each, the rest were more or less valuable to some degree, and an intruder presented a host of possibilities, none of them good.

As he prepared himself to scare or beat the bejesus out of whoever had invaded his barn, Joe suddenly recognized, along with the expected smells of hay and manure and sweet feed and horse, the unmistakable odor of sour mash. It slid up his nostrils and down his throat, and left a distinct taste on his tongue. A taste that, over the years, he had come to know and hate.

His tension dissipated as anger and frustration took its place.

"Pop?" The smell was a dead giveaway. Who else was it likely to be at this time of night but his dad, drunk as a skunk as he was always swearing he would never be again? When liquored up, Cary Welch sometimes visited Whistledown's barn, imagining that he was the big-time thoroughbred trainer he had been once, instead of a drunken has-been with a damaged reputation that no owner would let within spitting distance of his horses.

Including Charles Haywood, Joe's primary employer and owner of Whistledown Farm, whose barn and horses these were.

No answer except another agitated whinny from Suleimann and the restless stomping of hooves. Still the sitting figure didn't move. But there was no mistaking that smell.

"Damn it, Pop, you got no business in this barn when you've been drinking, and you damned well know it! I oughta kick your scrawny ass from here to Sunday and back!"

The shadow didn't so much as twitch, didn't respond in any way. Had his father passed out?

Swearing loudly, Joe headed toward the motionless figure. Horses snorted and nickered at him from both sides as they came to the fronts of their stalls en masse.

"You think I don't see you? I see you plain as day, you old fart." His booted feet were surprisingly loud as they stomped through the sawdust. The shadow -- his father -- remained as still as a rabbit in the open with a dog nosing about. "I'm telling you right now, I don't need this crap."

It was shortly after one A.M. on a frostbitten Thursday in early October. Joe had gone to bed at eleven, just like always. He'd even fallen asleep, dead to the world as soon as his head touched his pillow, just like always. But he'd woken with a start at 12:38 A.M., according to the glowing green numbers on his bedside clock. He never woke in the middle of the night anymore -- a long day of hard, physical work was, he'd found, the ultimate cure for insomnia -- but tonight he had. Groggy, cross, filled with an indefinable sense of unease, he'd made the most obvious mental connection: something was up with his kids. Rising, pulling on the jeans and flannel shirt he'd left draped over the chair in the corner of his small bedroom, he'd padded barefoot out into the old farmhouse's drafty upstairs hall to check on them.

Jen's room, right across the hall from his own, was his first stop. Poking his head inside without turning on the light, he discovered his eleven-year-old daughter sleeping soundly on her side facing the door. Her knees were drawn up almost to her slight chest beneath the tattered red and blue, horse-appliqued quilt that she loved. Her short, feathery brown hair was fanned out over her pillow. One small hand cushioned her tanned cheek. Ruffles, the fat beagle mix that was Jen's constant companion, lay on her back at Jen's feet, all four legs up in the air, her long black ears spread out on either side of her. Unlike Jen, she was snoring lustily. She roused herself enough to open one brown eye and blink at him.

Joe made a face at himself as he closed the door again. No trouble here. Not that he had expected any. Not really. Jen had never caused him any trouble in her life that he could remember. If occasionally the thought occurred that she was her mother's daughter, Joe put it out of his mind. It was he who had the raising of her, not Laura. Laura was long gone.

Josh and Eli were a different story. The room they shared was half a dozen steps down the hall, just past the bathroom. One of them was the more likely cause for this gut-sense he had that something was amiss. Not that they were bad boys -- they weren't -- but they were boys, and as such no strangers to mischief. He opened their door, looked inside, and discovered sixteen-year-old Eli, still clad in jeans and a T-shirt, fast asleep, sprawled on his back on the rumpled twin bed. His feet in their once white but now laundered-to-gray athletic socks extended past the end of the mattress by a good three inches, one arm trailed off the side of the bed, and headphones were clamped to his ears. Eli was almost as tall as Joe's own six-foot-three, with a lanky frame that had not yet started to fill out. His mouth was open slightly as he snored, and a textbook of some kind -- algebra, probably, he'd said he had a major test tomorrow -- lay open on his chest. Against the far wall, fourteen-year-old Josh's bed was rumpled but empty.

Ah-hah, Joe thought, congratulating himself on his finely tuned parental radar. Years of being both father and mother to this trio had rendered him acutely sensitive to his children. If Josh was up and about at this time of night, secure in the knowledge that his old man usually slept...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Gallery Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1451644337
• ISBN 13: 9781451644333
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland