Betrayed By Love (Carson Hill Ranch: Book 10)

By Amelia Rose

A Contemporary Cowboy Romance Novel.

This is book 10 in the Carson Hill Ranch series

When Rose Blalock agrees to take her long-lost grandfather on a cross-country trip, she never dreamed he'd drag her to his childhood home at Carson Hill Ranch. The former foster child has a family she never knew about, one that lives, works, and loves together in a way that she could never let herself imagine as a child.
Thanks to Mason Carn, her self-appointed tour guide to the ranch, Rose begins to understand the allure of cowboy life despite brushes with danger and conniving con men.
When one of the Carsons goes missing, all eyes turn to Rose and her grandfather, eyes filled with blame. Can she redeem them, and redeem herself in Mason's eyes? Even harder, can she ever forgive herself and move on?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gold Crown
• Release date: Sep 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311152466

Amelia Rose

Amelia Rose holds a PhD in Literature and Language; she specializes in teaching positive, self-reliant principles to children and adults of all ages.  Dr. Rose lives with her husband and three children in the Hudson Valley, New York area, where she enjoys the outdoors and spending time with her family and friends.   Matthew Maley is an artist with nearly twenty-five years in the fields of Illustration and Design. His work has appeared in publications such as Archie Comics, Marvel, Disney, Nickelodeon, and Children’s Television Workshop. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, daughter, and a variety of animals.

Book preview

Betrayed By Love

Carson Hill Ranch: Book Ten

AMELIA ROSE

~~~

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Amelia Rose.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

To YOU, The reader.

Thank you for your support.

Thank you for your emails.

Thank you for your reviews.

Thank you for reading and joining me on this road.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

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Chapter One

The pickup truck moved down the dirt road, trying to maneuver around the deep ruts made by years of rain wash out. Vehicles rarely traveled this way, so the rivulets of hard, sun-baked mud crumbled beneath the truck’s wheels before lodging chunks of solid earth deep in the grooves of the tire tread. The occasional, unexpected thunk of a piece of dried mud flying out of the tire and ricocheting off the rusted undercarriage of the pickup made the driver jump from time to time.

She looked at her passenger for the millionth time since leaving Nevada, looking at the old man to make sure he was alert, happy… and yes, breathing. Her grandfather had been in horrible health since his heart attack last year, which had only made him seem all the more frail. His limp was more pronounced now, his eyesight and hearing dulled by age. The real problem was the liver that was a constant source of worry, but as he said himself, what did anyone expect after so many years of hard living?

You doin’ okay over there? Rose asked, smiling in spite of the long days of driving she’d endured for this trip. No one had asked her how she was doing, that was for sure, but it didn’t matter.

I told you fifty miles ago I was good, the man said nervously and too sharply, causing his granddaughter to wince. She knew he hated to be doted on, but she couldn’t help herself. He was all she had left in the way of family, and even that had come at a cost of years of foster care and loneliness. ’Course, I also told you twenty miles ago and ten miles ago. I ‘spect I’ll have to tell you again in about five more miles.

Rose had to laugh. Cantankerous didn’t begin to describe Jamison, but there was a heart of gold buried under all the layers of gruff. It had taken her the past four years of diligent—and sometimes even expensive—searching to find her long lost family member, something she’d only been able to do after receiving a letter from someone who’d claimed to be a family friend of her grandmother’s. After finally tracking down her grandfather and convincing him to at least let her get to know him, it had still taken another year and a half to uncover the good inside him, but she’d known it was in there all along. After all, anyone who’d known her sweet mother and welcomed her into his family, even unofficially, couldn’t be all that bad.

Well, then let me drive a little faster so I can get to the next question, she shot back playfully, only to be rewarded with a harrumph and a flick of Jamison’s dismissive hand. She laughed to herself. That was so typical of her grandfather, or at least what she knew of him. Getting that much of a reaction out of the introverted, introspective old man was actually a high compliment. Do you know how much further it is?

Not really, he said with a sigh, looking out the window. I haven’t been out here in so long, it all looks so different.

Rose looked around at the barren landscape and wondered how it possibly could have changed. They hadn’t seen a single sign of human life since turning off the main two-lane highway that ran through the small town of Hale, and that had been more than forty-five minutes ago. Off to the north, the land stretched out untouched until it collided with the mountains off in the distance. In front of her, facing east, it looked like more of the same, although a small dip in the terrain pointed to what could be signs of life if she only knew what to look for.

You never did tell me the story of why we’re driving all this way, she hinted, hoping for a few more morsels of information about her family, even if it was just old boyhood tales about old friends. He looked at her sideways before crossing his arms in front of his thin chest and leaning back against the head rest, letting his eyelids sag down over his hollow eyes. That was Jamison’s universal symbol for I ain’t gonna talk about it.

Rose resigned herself to more driving, silent miles spent bouncing along the dirt road and staring straight ahead. She wound her hand in her blonde hair and tugged a strand of it around her fingertips as she leaned her head on her hand, her arm propped on the door. She’d figured out in the time they’d gotten to know each other that Jamison was a man of few words, but even the fact that he’d invited her along this trip was more than she could have expected from him. It was such a relief to feel complete, to be in the presence of a flesh and blood relative, that she’d take it. It certainly wasn’t the relationship most people would have expected from their only living family member, but she would make it be enough for her.

Chapter Two

Emily, if that hay harvest doesn’t hurry up and get over with, I’m gonna fall out in the floor at the next meal, Amanda said to her boss. She continued to scrape the remaining dishes into the sixty gallon refuse can, making sure every scrap that could go to the hogs made its way into the bin. Not that there was ever much left on a plate on the Carson Hill Ranch by the time fifty cowboys got done with a meal, that is, plus the extra hands who’d been brought in seasonally to help with the hay baling. This was the time of year that saw the Carsons’ 30,000 head of cattle through the winter, the time when the hay they grew on some of the 800,000 acres was gathered.

I would love to call you out for being ungenerous, Emily, the old cook, teased with a smile, but I can’t. I’m right there with you. I don’t know how many more hay seasons I can take.

Oh stop it, the both of you, Claire called out. You know you’ve got cooking for these crews down to a science! There’s nobody who could keep up with either one of you!

That’s easy to say when you’re just here for the three weeks! Amanda laughed. You get to go back to Hale and back to your little ones, while I’m still gonna be scrubbing scrambled eggs off of skillets! She ducked when Claire threw a dishtowel at her, but Emily stepped in before it could get any sillier.

Girls! she called out to the two fully-grown women who stood in her kitchen, making the actual young girls who were working on peeling potatoes in the corner look up from their task. Stop it! I love a good tussle as much as anyone else, but we’ve got the first lunch wave coming in here in less than three hours! There’s no time for lollygagging, not with all those sack lunches still to make and deliver to the crews. No move it!

Despite their ages and their own statuses as mothers with children of their own, Claire and Amanda muttered a much-humbled yes, ma’am before getting back to work. They adored Emily, and they knew she felt the same way about them, but the woman was right. There was no time for playing with an important harvest to bring in and hungry field hands and day laborers to feed.

Unfortunately, there was no time to babysit the kitchen help either, and not just the grown ladies. No one even raised an eyebrow anymore at the sudden influx of volunteers who helped feed the crews, not when they considered that the crews were made up of young men who’d taken time off from school or other jobs to work on the largest and oldest family-owned working ranch left in the country. Harvest was an annual process and being hired on was a coveted position; a young man could walk away with a good bit of college tuition in his pocket, enough that some students in that part of the state actually planned their coursework to coincide with the option to help with the hay.

Of course, that meant that more than a few young ladies looked for useful work around the ranch at that time of year, especially the up-and-coming Carson granddaughters. Their parents had tried to keep them out of harm’s way for as long as possible—and by harm’s way, they meant out of the line of sight of tanned, often shirtless teenaged boys—but with as much rain as they’d had this year and the hay crop doing as well as it did, the family had had to bring in even more workers than usual. The girls were needed every bit as much as the other family members who worked the ranch all day, but that didn’t mean Emily had to let them out of her sight.

Kimberly, I’m counting on you to keep those other three working, Emily called out as she passed the small side room where the girls cut peels into buckets wedged between their feet, reaching for potatoes off the massive piled mounded in front of them directly on the floor. With each one that their sharp knives flicked clean, they pitched it underhand into the giant sink beside the industrial dishwasher that tackled a full restaurant’s-worth of dishes, four meals a day.

Yes, ma’am, the oldest Carson grandchild called out, sitting up a little straighter and encouraging her charges. At almost fifteen, Kimberly would have far rather been out with one of the cattle crews that still had the usual ranch chores to do, but she was also old enough to understand that everyone worked, and that everyone worked wherever they were needed. The same couldn’t quite be said of her younger cousins sitting beside her, the sleeves on their shirts rolled up and pinned at the elbows to keep the wet potatoes from dragging dirt across their shirts.

Have I mentioned that I hate this? Sidra asked in a tone that sounded just like her mother, Jasmine. Her Colombian heritage made her black hair, dark eyes, and deep olive skin that tanned in the slightest amount of sunlight the envy of all of her cousins, but it was her mischievous nature that made her so well-liked. Kimberly shot her a warning glance.

Don’t even think about it, she cautioned. We’ve got work to do.

What? I didn’t say anything! Sidra answered, grinning at Jocelyn, who just shook her head.

I know that tone, missy! Kimberly scolded jokingly. "Any second now you’re gonna flip your bucket over and dance on it, just to get out of doing any work! Stay in that