Chapter 1Forlorn Valley, Colorado“Emily, honey — you sure you’re going to be all right here on your own? I don’t much cotton to leaving you.”The stoop-shouldered giant with the grizzled face and stringy gray hair peered intently at the young woman beside him on the porch of the old log cabin. His seamed face was full of doubt, but in the gold afternoon sunlight that slanted down across the Rockies and made the sky glisten a hot and burnished blue, his niece looked as calm and unruffled as a mountain lake.“I’ll be fine, Uncle Jake,” she assured him. “I can take care of myself.”Yet, even as she spoke the words, Emily Spoon felt an eerie prickle across her neck.She couldn’t imagine why. She wasn’t afraid of this beautiful isolated patch of land deep in the heart of the Colorado foothills — or of the dark — or of being alone. She wasn’t afraid of anything — except losing her family again.“And don’t forget,” she added, as a gust of wind swept down from the mountains and blew a strand of midnight hair across her cheek. “I’m not all alone. There’s Joey.”“Hmmmph. That little twig of a young’un? You know what I mean, girl.”Her uncle’s voice was deep, scratchy, and gruff, well suited to the leathery and intimidating visage of his fifty-plus years, but Emily wasn’t fooled. She knew that despite his fierce appearance and his deep-set, squinting eyes that were the color of mud, when it came to his family, those he loved, Jake Spoon was gentle as alamb.Of course, there was no doubt that his years in prison had changed him, she reflected, a sadness touching her fine gray eyes as she studied the uncle who had raised her. Before Deputy Sheriff Clint Barclay had tracked him down and arrested him, he’d been larger than life