Taken by the Bounty Hunter (The Heroes of Darling Creek #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Georgie

I trace my index finger over the marks on the floor beside my bed.

Today is day 31. Almost summer.

I want. To go. Outside.

My throat aches and my eyes sting. This can’t be my life now.

My hands itch to get back to the garden and the greenhouse. No one is taking care of things in my absence. I just know it.

Why would they? No one is taking care of me.

On day one of my imprisonment, I knew I needed to keep a record. Maintain some kind of order.

You must get creative when trapped in cinder block and concrete and have nothing to write with but a plastic spoon.

Surprising no one, my uncomfortable bed doesn’t get any less comfortable when it’s missing a spring. And cinder block is an effective sharpening too.

Counting the days by scratching the floor with a sharpened bedspring is difficult, but I make it work.

Anything to keep me sane.

As of today, I’ve been under lock and key for longer than I had my freedom.

For one month, I had a life outside.

I had a job.

I had a bank account.

I had friends to guide me and protect me.

I was on the cusp of getting an apartment all to myself.

But then everything came crashing down.

The elders found the safe house.

They didn’t kick in the door or barge in with guns blazing. The church leaders have to maintain their image in the community, after all. They can’t do crimes. Not obvious ones, anyway.

The threat was indirect but clear: We know how to find you, we have the cops on our side, and The Prophet is still calling the shots.

The terrible news could not have been delivered by a more ruggedly handsome but clueless face. Poor Jefferson. The bounty hunter was so confused by what he’d stumbled into.

Getting involved in helping victims escape a polygamist cult can take over your whole life. Just ask Olivia, Louisa, Goldie, and all their friends and newfound families.

If poor Jefferson has been added to the mix, I feel two ways about it. On the one hand, my friends need all the help they can get. Particularly from someone with the skills I imagine a bounty hunter possesses. On the other hand, that’s a lot to ask of an outsider.

If he’s tangled up in rescue efforts and has turned his life upside down, I feel partially to blame for it.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: The church elders found us because of me.

What I didn’t tell Goldie—what I didn’t tell anybody—was that I had run into a sister-wife in Bozeman.

I had been on my way to work, and I desperately needed a coffee. I should have put on my wig and sunglasses as always, but I was in a hurry. And being in a hurry makes you reckless. So I went inside the Gas & Sip without a disguise.

And there she was. Not just any sister-wife. Floydene Blatch. The nastiest, meanest, most influential sister-wife of all. Buying scratch-offs, of all things.

I don’t know what she was doing in Bozeman, a couple of hours away from her home. She’s a legal wife of one of the oldest, most respected elders, which gets her certain privileges. But still, I’ll bet her sister-wives with lower standing would love to know that Floydene gets day trips out of town.

But scratch-offs? Not very demure or trusting of the favored wife of a prominent polygamist.

Seeing a sister-wife handling lottery tickets was like seeing a cat on a leash. Something was not right about it. For a brief second, her face flashed a particular type of guilt that told me this was not the first time. I was so shocked that I froze in my tracks. That was my second mistake. We locked eyes. She recognized me.

I fled, driving Jake’s donated farm truck like a beast back to the safe house.

I was followed. Of course, I was. If not by Floydene, then by whoever was low-key chaperoning her, or by someone she called as soon as I took off.

The whole thing was my mistake, so I decided to be the sacrifice in this cat-and-mouse game.

And here I am, counting hash marks on the floor, watching the light change in the barred window of my cell, and freezing my butt off in a bib overall and tee-shirt—the standard issue uniform for people assigned to hard labor as punishment for crimes of fraternizing with someone of the opposite sex you’re not married to, reading or watching unapproved media, or, in my case, insubordination, theft, and leaving without permission.

I assumed I’d be forced to work the crops or the livestock, just like other times I was caught getting up to no good. At least I’d be outside in the sunshine.

Boy, was I wrong. I never expected to end up in a cell. I never knew the elders had converted one of the old dormitories into a prison. Heck, I never could have guessed I wouldn’t go outside for 31 days. Not once.

When I’d returned to the church on my own accord, I’d thought the larger population of the polygamists would be so happy to have me back that the punishment would be negligible. Since Goldie left, I’m the only person who knows how to give relief to the sick among us who refuse genuine medical care.

Curly, the grandfather figure of the rescue group, further cemented my confidence when he drove me back to my mother’s house despite the protests from our friends.

When Curly dropped me off, he had told me to keep my chin up.

“Don’t worry,” he’d said. “Some very powerful people are putting eyes and ears everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Inside and out. They aren’t going to hurt you.”

I’d known Curly barely a month, but I hugged him like I’d wished my dad had when I was a child.

As soon as I saw my mother exit the house, followed by my Uncle Nevyn, I knew I was in for it.

What will it be, I’d wondered. Forced marriage? A beating? Would I be brought up in front of the whole church and forced to confess my sins? A temporary shunning, with everyone forbidden from speaking to me for a month?

Child’s play.

Let’s get on with it, I’d thought, so I can get back to my greenhouse. Back to my books, journals, recipes, and herbs all waiting for me. I had raised beds to plant and water. I had all kinds of new knowledge to add to the journals.

That thought alone comforted me as my uncle marched me to the old dormitories.

“The greenhouse is the other way,” I’d say.

I knew I would miss my freedom, but I consoled myself by looking forward to spending time with boxes of recipes, notebooks, and journals that had not yet been indexed and cross-referenced. My filing system was only in the infant stages when I ran away. Those journals and books are my connection to Goldie—to someone in the outside world who cared about me.

That, and the card in my pocket from Jefferson Hope. What could I do with that, though? I don’t have a phone. Useless, but it was thrilling to have at least one minute of flirtatious—if awkward—attention from a man.

As my Uncle Nevyn walked me down the worn path through the compound, I saw something worse than physical punishment.

Smoke rose from the library. My stomach lurched at the sight. In the flickering firelight, I saw men carrying boxes and stacks of books outside and tossing them onto the fire.

Louisa’s life’s work. Up in flames.

My heart hurt for her.

Ever since Louisa was 14, she’d been adding to the library little by little for years with donations from the community and by trips to thrift stores in town. It started in Wyoming, and the humble library moved with us to Montana.

It was an escape from everyone’s humdrum lives.

That a library was allowed to exist at all was a minor miracle. But it kept the children and sister-wives happy. It gave the mothers with young children something to do without having to go into town.

But that all changed since Orlyn Moffatt has been on the run. He has ruled in exile with an even more forceful iron fist. The rules were tightened while at the same time, he encouraged the menfolk to get jobs in the community to make everything seem more normal.

Church at the compound became a daily thing, with regular lessons from The Prophet, who still haunted the area from secret locations.

“What are they doing?” I asked, gaping at the bonfire outside the doors of the library.

“God is ridding us of sinful influences,” Nevyn said.

The tone and the words sent a shudder down my spine.

“I don’t know what that means,” I said. I had an inkling of the literal meaning, but I’d been so disconnected by that point that I’d begun to shed the entire belief system. It was more of a question that meant, what’s the meaning of any of this?

Uncle Nevyn harrumphed and tugged me forward as he limped along.

I thought about how Olivia had managed to injure him enough to subdue him when he came to Sterling Ranch trying to kidnap her. It makes sense that Olivia would be the first to escape. And Nevyn and The Prophet sorely underestimated her when they tried to get her back.

“The number of young women in the church must be dwindling if you were so desperate to scare me into coming back,” I said to my uncle. “Congratulations. I’ve returned.”

I said this as if I wasn’t being marched to the temple to marry some creepy old ugly elder or pimple-faced brother. Ho hum. It’s a tired old story.

But then we’d arrived somewhere else. He propelled me through the door of one of the old dormitories into a narrow hallway so bright I had to blink and cover my eyes.

Temporarily disoriented, I didn’t fight as I was forced into this dark cell. Nor did I notice at first when the metal door was locked behind me.

Only when my eyesight recovered did I realize the old dormitories, or at least this one, had been converted into a prison.

And so here I am. Trying to keep it together, 31 days later.

I often disassociate from my captivity by reciting old recipes and creating new ones. I sing the songs taught in primary school, complete with the motions. I piece together every branch on every family tree that I am familiar with.

Sometimes, all I can do is cry. Or scream. Or fantasize about taking revenge on my uncle.

When I’ve exhausted everything else, thinking about Jefferson lifts my spirits.

Today is a crying day. An ugly, angry, tired, red-faced, snot-and-tears-running-down-my-face kind of day.

When I’ve got no tears left, my mind bypasses everything else in my mental toolbox and goes straight to thoughts of Jefferson.

I start with the facts. He is a bounty hunter. Has ways of finding people, which I find fascinating. He had long hair, wore a leather jacket, and drove a loud car. He carried a weapon in a holster. What sort of weapon? I ask myself. A handgun. A .38, I think. I wish I knew more about those. I wish I’d spent more time with Olivia, learning to shoot more than a .22 I carried with me when I traveled to and from work during my month of freedom.

What else do I know about Jefferson? He is a full head taller than I am, making him about six foot four inches. He smelled like leather and something spicy that reminded me of a homemade soap I idly sniffed at the farmers market. I bet I could recreate that soap smell with herbs and flowers in the greenhouse. Maybe I’ll start making soap when they let me out. How difficult could it be? Honestly, a lot of these folks in this church could stand to use more soap.

But back to the vital subject at hand—Jefferson. His amber eyes had looked at me like I was a puzzle he was trying to decipher. Jefferson’s shoulders made you want to grab on tight and never let go. He was the kind of sturdy that makes me go wobbly in the knees.

Exhausted from crying, I fall asleep thinking about Jefferson. Thinking, and clutching my makeshift writing implement.

I wake at the sound of my cell door opening.

Wynella, my daytime guard, is here with my food.

The guard refuses eye contact when she enters my cell. As usual.

She intrigues me.

“I’ve been watching you for 31 days, and I still can’t seem to trace your family tree,” I say groggily.

She smirks. “You’ve been watching me? How amusing.”

Her eyes still won’t meet mine.

I nod. “Your eyes are like the Smiths, but you carry yourself like a Barker.”

“The Wyoming Smiths are related to most of the folks around here,” she says with a shrug like she’s had to explain herself a hundred times, and I’m the 101st person to question her genealogy.

“I guess,” I say. “Weird that I don’t remember you. I never met a Wynella Smith.”

“You were, what, 12, when my family split off and yours came this way?”

I nod.

“You couldn’t have known everyone.”

I definitely did.

“Maybe you’re right,” I concede rather than argue.

The guard doesn’t seem to care either way if I believe her.

She holds out the tray to me expectantly, but I don’t move. I don’t give a flying fig if I eat or don’t eat my mock-tapioca pudding today. I shrug and meet her hard gaze.

And then, Wynella does something unprecedented. She leaves the door wide open and walks over to my bed with the food tray.

“If you’re not going to stand up and take your tray, I guess you’re expecting room service,” she says with a heavy sigh.

It’s all I can do to keep from gaping at this gross negligence. Maybe she’s as tired as I am.

Suddenly, I know I can’t be here for one more day.

I know what I promised Curly. I said I would be good and lay low. I’m not supposed to worry because, somehow, I believed that no one would hurt me.

But I can’t do it. I just can’t stay here one more day. I need to get outside. I need to get to my journals. And I need to find Jefferson. Somehow.

I hold my breath.

Wynella bends over, pettily muttering as she sets the tray on my bed. “I see your punishment hasn’t broken you yet, maybe I should?—”

I lunge.

With the sharpened spring clutched in my hand, I stab her in the side, under the ribs. I’m weak, but I push as hard as I can.

The guard drops the tray. Mock-tapioca pudding splatters all over my bed and against the concrete wall as I jam the crude writing-implement-turned-weapon through her heavy denim uniform.

My captor cries out and falls to her knees.

I’m shocked at what I’ve done, and I stand there stunned for a moment, waiting for the blood to drip to the floor.

I must have hesitated a long time because she coughs and, with a labored effort, fumes, “They’re gonna beat the crap out of you, you little idiot.”

My feet are faster than my cerebral cortex.

That was too easy, I think to myself as I fly out of the building and run to the garden and greenhouse area.

Doesn’t matter. I just have to grab a few things, and I’ll be gone again. Maybe I’ll head to town. Maybe I’ll hitchhike to Bozeman. I don’t know. I’ll just have to figure things out. Like Olivia did. Like all of them did.

However, what greets me when I arrive at the greenhouse is not what I expected.

My journals are gone.

“What the…?”

I look behind the stack of filing boxes where I’d kept the journals. All gone. The shelf where the recipe binders are is also empty.

What’s worse, no one has watered anything. No one repotted the seedlings I started. Most of the plants are dead.

All I have left is a dirt-smudged hoodie hanging from a hook on the wall.

My throat is already raw, but I’m about to scream when suddenly, a voice sounds behind me.

“I was coming to get you out of isolation, but apparently, the guard let you out already. Must have had our wires crossed.”

I spin around and find my father watching me from the doorway of the greenhouse.

“Dad,” I say in almost a whisper to Elder George, the man I’ve spoken maybe ten words to in the last six months. He has a lot of kids to pay attention to. A hell of a lot.

Why did the guard not tell him I stabbed her and shoved her into my mock-tapioca pudding?

I don’t dare ask that out loud. Maybe she was embarrassed. I would never want another woman who’s also trapped in this hell hole, just the same as I am, to be punished for anything. Maybe she felt the same way about me. Perhaps that’s why getting away from her was so easy.

He notices the incredulous look on my face and reaches out his hand. “Come on. Let’s go get a burger.”