Free From Boss to Bridegroom by Victoria Pade

were a lifeline. Which it might very well have been, since Emily had been kidnapped out of her house in late September.
    â€œEmily?” Rand nearly shouted into the receiver. “Is that you?”
    â€œHi,” the young woman said tentatively.
    â€œAre you all right? Where are you?”
    â€œI’m okay,” she answered, sounding it. “I know everyone believes I was kidnapped but I wasn’t.”
    That shocked Rand as much as hearing her voice had. “What do you mean? What’s going on, Em?”
    â€œRand, somebody tried to kill me,” she said as if the information had been building and building inside her and just had to come out. “The night I left. A man was right there in my bedroom. I barely got away and when I did, well, I knew I’d only be safe away from the ranch. Away from that woman who claims to be your mother,” Emily finished in a derisive tone.
    â€œOh, Emily,” Rand sighed, beginning to relax.
    He knew what his sister was referring to. Since the car accident she and their mother had been in when Emily was eleven, Emily had never stopped insisting that their mother was not the same person. Just after the accident she’d sworn there had been “two mommies” at the scene—a “bad mommy” and a “good mommy,” that the “bad mommy” was who had come home with her afterward. It was a claim she’d never wavered from, a nightmare Rand knew she was still plagued by.
    â€œWhere are you, Em?” he asked patiently.
    â€œI don’t want to tell you. But I’m okay. I’ve been in contact with Liza—”
    â€œLiza knows where you are and that you weren’t kidnapped?”
    Liza Colton was Rand’s cousin and another child his parents had basically raised, having spent more time at his house than her own. She and Emily had always been close.
    â€œI had to get hold of Liza right after it happened,” Emily explained. “She believes that woman is an imposter just the way I do, and I was afraid that puther in the same kind of danger I was in. That that woman would want Liza dead, too, so there wouldn’t be anyone left to question who she is. I had to warn her.”
    â€œIs Liza okay?”
    â€œYeah. But she’s been telling me to call you, and I finally decided she was right. She said if anyone would help us prove that woman isn’t who she says she is it would be you.”
    Emily’s voice echoed with such confidence in him that Rand didn’t have the heart to let her know he didn’t believe the woman he knew as his mother was an imposter.
    â€œTell me where you are, Emily,” he said then.
    â€œI won’t tell you exactly where I am but I will tell you what state I’m in if you promise you won’t tell anyone else. I’m even worried that woman might have bugged your phone, figuring I’d call you sooner or later. And if she finds out exactly where I am, she could send that man to try to kill me again.”
    Promising not to tell anyone where Emily was was tough. He knew his father was out of his mind with worry over her. Rand himself had spent more sleepless nights than he could count since her disappearance, imagining the worst.
    But he also knew that if he didn’t make the promise to Emily she was likely to hang up without going any further and be lost again. He didn’t want that.
    â€œI promise,” he said, albeit reluctantly.
    â€œI hitched a ride with a truck driver,” sheconfessed. Then, before Rand could comment on the perils in that, she added, “I know, it was a dangerous, crazy thing to do. But I didn’t have a choice. I had to get away. And I figured if I was in danger in my own house, how much more danger could I be in hitchhiking? Besides, the man who picked me up was nice. Wonderful, in fact. He gave me the lecture himself about not doing what I was doing. Then he said he was going to Wyoming.