“Megan’s been up here all this time?” Sophia asked as Julia drove along a rutted lane that wound, snakelike, through the forest. The sun had set, darkness slipping through the firs that towered overhead, wind rushing noisily through the boughs. They’d been in the car nearly an hour and now drove through a locked gate to a clearing high on a hill, where a tiny house sat, unique and out of place.

“Uh-huh.”

Sophia knew that this had been the plan all along: set up Megan’s mercurial temper, make her so jealous she’d go off on James, have a massive blowup and run, as the sisters had learned was Megan’s MO. Then they’d planned to kidnap her and take her to a remote spot, where they would, Julia had said over and over, keep her until James had gotten her out of his mind. Julia had been insistent that Megan would eventually go along with them in ripping off the Cahill fortune, but, as Sophia saw it, that was the weak link in the plan.

One of them.

“You worry too much,” Julia had told her. “Trust me, we’ve got this,” and Sophia, so longing to be close to her sister and, in truth, to get her hands on a little of the Cahill estate, had gone along with the scheme.

Now, though, she wasn’t convinced that they could pull it off.

Or that she wanted to.

Her feelings for James had changed all of that. Even though she was more than a little morose, as after him telling her he needed “a little space to process what was going on,” she’d actually seen him with Rebecca—twice since Sophia had told him about the baby.

What kind of father would do that?

It pissed her off and made her sad and messed with her already volatile hormones. And here it was, almost Christmas. All of her dreams about them sharing the holiday together seemed to be crumbling. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Not with a baby on the way.

She hadn’t told Julia about the baby, didn’t know how her sister would take the news. She would confide in her, of course, but later, when Julia wasn’t so damned uptight.

Julia parked a few yards from the front door, and as Sophia climbed out, the wind slapped her in the face, stinging her eyes. She noted the small windows running along the front of the home.

“No electricity,” she thought aloud.

“It runs on propane from a propane generator.”

But she didn’t hear it running.

“Plumbing?”

“Water tanks collect the rain and snow. The house has all been retrofitted,” Julia said. “It’s mobile and compact, kind of an all-in-one home.”

“Where’d you get it again?”