Last Dance

“Some Do Not Care About The Rules For Bride Courting,

“or the way a man and a woman choose each other,” Tanner said softly. “We skipped that part the first time. We let others tear us apart.”

Gwyneth shivered. “That time is gone now, Tanner.”

“Is it? You kissed me hard, Gwyneth, as if you’d waited and couldn’t wait a minute more. Did you think of how it would be, not only the loving, but the life we could have had, babies held close and loved between us?”

She’d dreamed of him…erotic dreams in which he’d moved over her, filled her, stroked and heated her body with his kisses. “It was only a kiss.” The lie crackled around her. “Why are you here?” she asked in a shaky whisper.

“Because I have to know if we could have made it work.”

Dear Reader,

This April of our 20th anniversary year, Silhouette will continue to shower you with powerful, passionate, provocative love stories!

Cait London offers an irresistible MAN OF THE MONTH, Last Dance, which also launches her brand-new miniseries FREEDOM VALLEY. Sparks fly when a strong woman tries to fight her feelings for the rugged man who’s returned from her past. Night Music is another winner from BJ James’s popular BLACK WATCH series. Read this touching story about two wounded souls who find redeeming love in each other’s arms.

Anne Marie Winston returns to Desire with her emotionally provocative Seduction, Cowboy Style, about an alpha male cowboy who seeks revenge by seducing his enemy’s sister. In The Barons of Texas: Jill by Fayrene Preston, THE BARONS OF TEXAS miniseries offers another feisty sister, and the sexy Texan who claims her.

Desire’s theme promotion THE BABY BANK, in which interesting events occur on the way to the sperm bank, continues with Katherine Garbera’s Her Baby’s Father. And Barbara McCauley’s scandalously sexy miniseries SECRETS! offers another tantalizing tale with Callan’s Proposition, featuring a boss who masquerades as his secretary’s fiancé.

Please join in the celebration of Silhouette’s 20th anniversary by indulging in all six Desire titles—which will fulfill your every desire!

Enjoy!

Joan Marlow Golan

Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Kerry, a potter.

CAIT LONDON

lives in the Missouri Ozarks but loves to travel the Northwest’s gold rush/cattle drive trails every summer. She enjoys research trips, meeting people and going to Native American dances. Ms. London is an avid reader who loves to paint, play with computers and grow herbs (particularly scented geraniums right now). She’s a national bestselling and award-winning author, and she has also written historical romances under another pseudonym. Three is her lucky number; she has three daughters, and the events in her life have always been in threes. “I love writing for Silhouette,” Cait says. “One of the best perks about all this hard work is the thrilling reader response and the warm, snug sense that I have given readers an enjoyable, entertaining gift.”

AN INVITATION FROM CAIT LONDON

I invite you to step into my brand-new series, FREEDOM VALLEY. I hope you enjoy Last Dance, the first of this series. The town, Freedom, is just as picturesque as the valley, packed with everything a small town usually has—except its traditions.

Set in Montana, the series is based on women of the 1880s who came together for protection. Back then, men desiring wives had to present themselves according to the Rules of Courting and the traditions those independent women established. Contemporary males, including the Bachelor Club, chafe at the rules, but The Women’s Council intends to keep those traditions.

In Last Dance, a Freedom Valley tradition, you’ll get a good taste of what is to come as we visit each family established by those Founding Mothers.

See you in Freedom Valley—

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Prologue

Town of Freedom, 1882

From the journal of Magda Claas

We named our valley Freedom, and our town, too. There were ten of us at first, that hot, dry summer of 1881. We found ourselves by chance, gathered in a small beautiful valley, sharing what we had to survive. Beautiful, snowcapped mountains soared along one side of the valley and there was a lovely lake and lush wild grass for our stock. We came from all parts of the world, women with children, women who had lost families and who had seen the darker side of life. Fleur Arnaud, unmarried, had lost a child by a man who took her against her will. Anatasia Duscha’s husband and son died in the wars. Beatrice Avril was a bondwoman, preyed upon by men for her pretty looks and dainty ways. Jasmine Dupree, full with child, had come from the poor South. Cynthia Whitehall came from Boston for freedom her family would not give. China Belle Ruppurt had run from buffalo hunters who had used her poorly. Fancy Benjamin’s father sold her to a farmer for a sack of oats, and widowed Margaret Gertraud’s breads and rolls didn’t save her or her children from thieves who took everything and left them starving. We know little about the woman called LaRue, except that she had loved and lost.

Magda Claas is my name, and I know how to work. I want a man, the man I choose for a husband, not to see me as a cow in the field or a servant, but as a woman with a heart and pride. I wish to be treated gently, as I have seen men honor their wives. At the end of the day, I crochet lace with needle and thread, and dream of the man I will accept into my heart.

What a strange mix we were, some of us with children clinging to our skirts, or nursing at our breasts. All ten of us without men and not caring much for those that came calling with crude ways.

We wanted to choose our lives, and so it was that day with rawhide men and drovers and rapscallions circling us, that we decided to act. By the end of summer, we knew what we had to do to live as we wished, as we dreamed, and so we made our laws for men who came wife-hunting.

We were not helpless women to be preyed upon by these rough men. Each of us knew how to protect ourselves, and together we were strong as a family.

So it was that we decided to come together, farmers and mothers and women with pasts. We became a community of women who helped each other, governed by the Women’s Council. For we would be free women, to set the rules of how we should be treated as wives. For be it known, that to take a dear wife from our circle, the husband-candidate will have to follow our rules and customs, abide with those rules in the marriage, passing our inspection. Else there would be no marriages or wife-taking in Freedom. We stand together in this, women deciding to marry as we wish, protected by our sisterhood.

Magda Claas, Midwife and Healer and Butter Maker

Town of Freedom, Freedom Valley

Montana Territory, July 1882

One

They were sweet back then, an eight-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. Tanner had placed his baseball bat aside to fix her wagon’s bent wheel. While Gwyneth clearly adored him, he acted all gruff with his friends riding their bicycles up the road. He made yucking noises when she kissed him on the cheek, but he’ll grow up to be a fine man, just as loving and good as his dad. One day, he’ll know his love and he’ll come courting according to the rules of Freedom Valley.

—From the journal of Anna Bennett, descendant of Magda Claas and the mother of Tanner Bennett.

Tanner Bennett expertly knelt on his mother’s roof and tore away the damaged shingles. Familiar to his hand, his father’s hammer was worn, a contrast to the new shingles he’d just patched into the old.

He inhaled Montana’s midmorning April air, and knew that his ex-wife would soon come calling to warn him off. He’d known Gwyneth all her life, and he sensed from the dark look she burned at him in the café that she wanted to set down her rules.

Too bad. He had rules of his own now, and he wasn’t feeling friendly.

From the top of the two-story home, he scanned the small rural town he’d left eighteen years ago. Nestled in Freedom Valley, a lush valley blanketed with fields and cattle and cradled by soaring, snowcapped mountains, Freedom—the town—was quiet. Down the country road that led to town, babies were napping, housewives were cleaning, store clerks were waiting on customers, and the café crowd was gossiping over morning coffee. Freedom Valley hadn’t changed. Birthed by single women united for their protection in the 1880s, their traditions remained in their descendants. Lives and families blended through the years, the descendants’ colorful names proudly stamped with immigrant heritage, biblical reference and popular contemporary ones. The town’s square was lined by two-story buildings, little changed since Montana’s cattle-drive days.

In the distance, just past pickup trucks lined around the feed store, and up the street from the florist, his mother rested in a tiny, well-tended cemetery. An auto accident had taken her life too soon—on a fog-draped country highway, Anna never saw the semitruck at the highway intersection. Beside her grave lay Paul Bennett’s, her husband, victim of a heart attack when Tanner was only twelve.

At thirty-six now, Tanner felt old memories rustle to life, the slight breeze stirring the leaves of an oak tree nearby, while sunlight danced upon Anna Bennett’s beloved home. Not far from town, the twenty-acre farm was neat from the chicken house to the pasture to the vegetable garden. In Anna’s sunporch, the impatiens and tomato plants she’d started from seed waited to be put into her gardens. Tiny feed-store sacks of lettuce, green beans and cucumber seed lay in a neat row as if she couldn’t wait to plant them.

Tanner scrubbed his hand across the aching tightness within his bare chest. In the six weeks since her death, he’d cleared away his business commitments on the Northwest Pacific coast—building handcrafted, custom-order, wooden fishing boats had suited him. In his absence, a good friend would handle his business there.

Tanner scanned the small farm and wondered how his widowed mother had managed her young brood, to see them safely into their lives. He’d come back to visit his mother through the years, but what held her here, in this tiny place? Anna Bennett never complained through her hardships. What was the source of her strength? What gave her such peace?

Peace. Would he ever find peace?

The church’s white spire shot into the clear blue Montana sky. Twelve years ago, he’d been married there, a young man with his blushing, sweet bride tucked against his side, heading off into a bright new future away from Freedom.

But that first night, Gwyneth Smith Bennett had been terrified, running from him, and despite his determination and patience, the marriage ended—without consummation.

A white panel van soared into Anna’s driveway. Scrawled along the side, a purple and pink Gwen’s Pots announced his ex-wife—information mischievously tossed at him by Willa, owner of Willa’s Wagon Wheel Café, and incumbent mayor of Freedom. According to Leonard at the gas station, Gwen’s van got good mileage, needed a tuneup and so did she.

One week in Freedom’s close-knit community provided more information than he’d wanted about his ex-wife—not that he’d asked. In a small town, lives weren’t that private.

His hand stilled over his heart, the one she’d torn to shreds years ago. He’d rebuilt his life without her, and he regretted the momentary sharp clench of pain that just looking at her could bring.

When a man’s pride was badly stomped by a woman, he wasn’t likely to forget.

Tanner inhaled sharply as she stepped briskly out of the van, her short blond hair gleaming in the sun. She looked like a boy, not a thirty-two-year-old woman, until he took in that compact, curved body. Gwyneth Smith Bennett, dressed in a T-shirt and cutoff bib overalls that showed off the tanned length of her legs above her practical work boots, wasn’t happy. Her scowl shot around Anna’s untended herbal and vegetable gardens, the sheds and the chicken house to the small field bordering the Smith ranch. She swung open the gate of the white picket fence and glanced at a large branch, broken free by the storm, on the freshly cut lawn. Then she marched up the stone walkway, usually bordered by summer flowers, past the new green starts of the yellow and red Dutch tulip bed, past the concrete birdbath filled with leaves and up onto the front porch, out of Tanner’s sight. The old brass door knocker sounded briskly and then Gwyneth appeared, marching around the side of the two-story house.

“Oh, Gwynnie…” he called lightly from the rooftop, unable to resist the tease of long ago.

She stopped in midstep and her face jerked upward. Stark in the bright sunlight, Gwyneth’s expression tightened into a scowl. The woman’s face had been honed from the girl’s that he had loved and married—had he really loved her? Or had he wanted to protect her from her overbearing and possessive father?

No, it was more than that, and he’d paid a heavy price.

Gwyneth’s mouth tightened—he remembered instantly how sweet that little cupid bow tasted all those years ago—perfect and virginal. Now, her hazel eyes weren’t happily filled with him, and beneath those dark arching eyebrows, brilliant anger lashed at him. The peach-gold skin across her cheekbones gleamed, her expression darkening. In her dark mood, her jaw had the locked set of old Leather’s, her father. Without missing a beat, she moved to the wooden ladder he’d braced against the house, walked it backward and let it drop to the grass.

“When are you leaving? It isn’t soon enough,” she shot up to him, her hands braced on her waist.

Tanner settled back on his haunches; the furious woman on the ground below. While visiting Anna, he’d met her accidentally several times; they hadn’t spoken, an icy mountain of pain and anger standing between them. He didn’t like the ugly fury within him at first, and later a cold distance seemed safer. This lean and shapely woman little resembled the frightened twenty-year-old girl who had run from their first night as husband and wife. He’d never forget the sight of her as he walked to their bed in that hotel—wide-eyed fear that had eventually ended a marriage never begun. They were both older now, and he wasn’t letting her push him. At one time, he’d been very careful of her; but that time was gone. “I’ll leave when I’m ready.”

“I hear down at Livingston’s Hardware that you’re fixing up Anna’s place to sell. I suppose you’ll be leaving, going back to your big Northwest Pacific coast custom-made fishing boat business, right?”

Apparently, the gossips had been working Gwyneth, too. Her eyes flashed with an impatience and anger that was new to Tanner. “I’m flattered that you’re interested in my life, Gwynnie.”

“Do not call me ‘Gwynnie.’ I’m not six anymore and I don’t have a crush on you any longer. I’m not interested in anything about you. I just want you out of town. You came back a week ago, and the gossip is already flying. I can’t walk down the street without someone mentioning that you’re back in town and looking at me as if they expect—well, never mind. This is my town. I’ve stayed. I haven’t been heading off for college, or teaching in Kansas City, or traveling around the world in the merchant marine. I’ve stayed right here and took care of Pop and now that he’s gone, I’m running the ranch. It won’t work with the both of us here, not with what everybody knows about—”

“Our marriage? The one that never actually took place?” Tanner fought the stirring of old frustration and anger—a young bridegroom set on his wedding night and a frightened runaway bride made for lasting and ugly memories. He’d never hurt her, never gave her reason to fear—He’d tried for three years while he was teaching in Kansas City to disarm Gwyneth’s fear of him, to make her see how much he loved her. But distance, time and her coldness eventually made him agree to a divorce. At the time, Gwyneth wanted a divorce, rather than an annulment—she couldn’t bear for the town gossips to know that they’d never consummated their marriage, that she was too terrified at the sight of him to—

His stomach clenched as he remembered young Gwyneth’s horrified expression, the way she’d run out of the hotel and home to her father.

Old “Leather” Smith had reveled in proof that he was right, that Tanner wasn’t suitable for his only daughter. Leather hadn’t wanted to give up his daughter, who was also his ranch hand, cook and cleaning woman; the bully had wanted to own Gwyneth, not to free her to a life of her own, and had blocked Tanner’s attempts to win back his wife.

She tensed, then swept her hand aside, dismissing his taunt. “You are going to stay up on that roof until I make you see sense.”

“Oh, really?” Tanner asked before he reached over to an upstairs window and jerked it open. After baring his teeth in a cold smile, Tanner entered the window. With every step down the stairs and out on the porch and around the house, he thought about the woman demanding that he leave Freedom.

When he stood facing Gwyneth—so close he noted that she barely reached his shoulder—he asked the question that had been burning him. “Why did you keep my name, Gwyneth?”

Color rose in her cheeks and her hazel eyes darkened into green as she looked up those inches to meet his gaze. Tanner tensed as her eyes ripped down his six-foot-three body, heated a path across his shoulders and blinked several times at his bare chest. For a heartbeat, her eyes widened in fear, quickly shielded. The shiver that ran down her body was enough to make Tanner clench his fists, slapped by the nightmare of their wedding night. Then she stepped back from him, lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. “You know why I kept the Bennett name. I loved Anna, and it kept her close, as though she was the mother I never had. I liked having her name. And an annulment would have…would have created even more gossip.”

“It’s my name, and you took it.” A dark ridge of anger leaped upon Tanner, and he shoved it down, just as he had all those years ago. “Old Leather created plenty of gossip all by himself. My mother didn’t like hearing that I’d mistreated you that night and that you ran back to him to be safe.”

Gwyneth had remained his wife, in his heart, for years, and now that same tearing away of his heart began, just looking at her.

“Your mother called him out one night and stuck a berry pie in his hand. Whatever she said to him made him angry and made him stop those rumors. He ate the pie, but he wasn’t happy. He respected her…everyone did. She came to see him as he was dying and helped me with the funeral six years ago.” Her gaze shifted to the lily of the valley bed that would soon bloom. “I’m sorry about Pop’s stories. I tried to stop him. Anna knew the truth and she was a good woman. She had a peace that gentled everyone around her.”

“She did at that. She raised Kylie and Miranda and myself without help and was never bitter or afraid. She loved this valley and she brought a good deal of the babies here into the world.” Why had his mother loved the town so deeply? Why had she clung to the traditions begun by those frontier women? What was Anna Bennett’s secret of life, always seeing the good in people where none could be found? Where was the peace she had found? Where was his own?

He had to kill whatever ran through him for his ex-wife. He had to start a new life; he wanted a home and children and peace. Tanner frowned down at Gwyneth, his memories running like scars across his heart because of this woman. She’d colored relationships with other women, ruining them, for he could never find the right taste, or the same fascination.

Gwyneth ran her hand through her cropped hair, spiking it and sunlight danced across the tips. “I saw Kylie and Miranda at the funeral. I was hoping one of them—”

Tanner propped the ladder against the house again. He traced the path of white-rumped antelope leaping from the cattle fields off into the woods. His sisters couldn’t bear to dismantle the house, to take one doily from Anna’s home, and the job was left to him. Tanner had repaired the house since he was twelve, taking the place of his carpenter father in more ways than one. His steadfast, loving mother had been a miracle and a source of strength to those she touched, but not for Anna or anyone else was he moving to Gwyneth’s wishes. “Take your hopes somewhere else,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere until I’m ready.”

“You’re not small town makings. You’ve been all over the world. You don’t belong here. I do—” she began firmly.

He noted the tiny gold studs in her ears. She must have defied old Leather; he wouldn’t have liked the “silly beautifications.” A bitter taste of memory tightened Tanner’s mouth. She hadn’t stepped out from Leather’s care years ago, when Tanner had been desperate to reason with her. “You wanted a divorce and not an annulment. I agreed to that farce and that’s the last agreeing I do with you.”

“It is hard, Tanner Bennett, to believe that you are sweet Anna’s son. I’ll be glad when you sell this place and—”

“Don’t count on it,” Tanner said slowly, feeling the burn of old wounds and the need to cut at the woman who had stolen his life, his dreams. He could have tried to fill himself with other dreams, another woman, but life hadn’t turned that way for Tanner Bennett. Within himself, in the deep dark certain truth of his life, he knew that he’d have to find peace as his mother had.

Her eyes widened, sunlight glistening on her lashes. “But at the hardware store, they said that you and your sisters would probably sell. It’s a wonderful house with a few acres. I’d buy it myself, if I could afford it—just because I want to hold Anna close—”

“You think I don’t want to hold my mother close?” he demanded curtly. Tanner didn’t like thinking about another family in Anna’s home, or on her land. He wasn’t ready to let her go yet, the house still filled with her scent and memories squeezing him too hard to move on. He’d come to the funeral and with his sisters sat in Anna’s house later, a part of their lives torn away by death, each feeling guilty for not visiting more. Agreeing to temporarily leave Anna’s home as it was, they each went back to their lives far away.

Now Tanner had come back, needing to find peace with his mother’s passing, and with his life. He remembered all they didn’t have, all that they did have because of Anna’s hard work and her endless patience and love. “She should have had more. Life was too hard for her.”

Gwyneth’s hazel eyes softened, drifting over Anna’s house snuggled into shady trees, herbs and flower beds. “You were there for her, and Kylie and Miranda. Her children were her life.”

“She worked too hard.” Tanner noted the bitterness in his tone, the sharp echo of pain in his heart. A widow, bearing the hardships of raising her family, Anna never wavered in helping others and always with a tender smile.