A Man of His Word

“This is about you and me, Rosebud.

This is about me liking you and you liking me, slow dances to fast songs and not going down without a fight. You promised me you wouldn’t go down without a fight, and I’m going to hold you to that. Have dinner with me tonight.”

“I can’t.”

Which was a hell of a lot different from “I won’t.”

“Someplace quiet,” Dan continued. “That’s all I want. Just you and me.”

“What makes you think it would be any different the next time?” Her voice shook as she blinked rapidly and pulled away from him. “Or the time after that? Or any time? We can’t hide forever. I can’t, anyway.”

Anger flashed through him. “I do not hide, Rosebud—and you don’t, either.”

Dear Reader,

This story began when an image popped into my head of an Indian Princess riding bareback out of the past and into the hero’s present. Before the hero could figure out who she was, she took a shot at him and rode away. This image was so powerful that it stayed with me for months while the characters waited for me to figure out who they were, why she’d put a bullet through the hero’s hat and, most important, how they could ever fall in love.

I like to think of this book as my Polaroid® book—the story took a long time to develop, but it was worth the wait. The hero turned out to be Dan Armstrong, the Chief Operating Officer of an energy company looking to build a hydroelectric dam. The heroine was Rosebud Donnelly, the tribal lawyer for the Red Creek Lakota, whose reservation will be flooded by Dan’s dam. I imagined that having your whole world sunk to the bottom of an artificial lake was a good reason for a woman to be fighting-mad, and Rosebud agreed.

The surprise to Rosebud was how much Dan, an oil tycoon, turned out to be a man of principle and honesty. On top of all that integrity, he is one good-looking cowboy who knows his way around a horse—and a woman. He’ll use all that charm to get to the bottom of who killed his hat. The question Dan has to answer is, what else is he willing to lose?

A Man of His Word is my first Mills & Boon® Desire™ book, and for that alone, it will always be one of my favorites. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Be sure to stop by www.sarahmanderson.com and join me when I say, long live cowboys!

Sarah

About the Author

Award-winning author SARAH M. ANDERSON may live east of the Mississippi River, but her heart lies out west on the Great Plains. With a lifelong love of horses and two history teachers for parents, she had plenty of encouragement to learn everything she could about the tribes of the Great Plains.

When she started writing, it wasn’t long before her characters found themselves out in South Dakota among the Lakota Sioux. She loves to put people from two different worlds into new situations and see how their backgrounds and cultures take them someplace they never thought they’d go.

When not helping out at school or walking her two rescue dogs, Sarah spends her days having conversations with imaginary cowboys and American Indians, all of which is surprisingly well-tolerated by her wonderful husband and son. Readers can find out more about Sarah’s love of cowboys and Indians at www.sarahmanderson.com.

Sarah M. Anderson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Mom and Dad, two history teachers who planned

family vacations around national monuments and Civil

War battle sites instead of theme parks and beaches.

One

For today’s ride, Dan Armstrong had brought along his custom-made six-shooter, but he couldn’t believe he’d need it.

He didn’t normally wear it, but his uncle had told him to take a gun if he went out alone. And since it had been years since the man had shown a whit of interest in Dan’s well-being, he’d listened. Now he was glad he’d done so because his imagination was working overtime.

There was something about this forest that said Old West, South Dakota style. His sprawling estate outside of Fort Worth was a jewel, but north Texas didn’t have stands of pines this pretty or the carved sandstone bluffs that ran along the Dakota River.

It was a damn shame the trees, the river and the land wouldn’t be the same once his company got done with them. His uncle, Cecil Armstrong, who ran one half of Armstrong Holdings, wanted to clear-cut these hundreds of acres before building a dam on this river, about five hundred yards upstream. No sense in throwing away perfectly good logging rights, Cecil had said. Logically, Dan couldn’t argue with that, but he’d hate to see this forest go.

He didn’t doubt that this place looked the same today as it had hundreds of years ago, back when cowboys and Indians rode the range. If he closed his eyes, he could almost hear war whoops and the thunder of hooves.

He twisted in the saddle, squinting as he looked into the afternoon sun. He really did hear hoofbeats.

The sound stopped when he moved, and by the time he got his eyes shaded with the brim of his Stetson, all he could see was a dust cloud about a hundred yards back, down the well-worn deer path he’d come in on.

Instinctively, Dan dropped his hand to the butt of his pistol. Sure, the engraved nickel firearm was only good for six shots, but he’d wanted a piece that was specifically weighted to his grip.

His hand flexed around the gun and waited. The dust settled around a figure. The sunlight provided an almost sparkly air around her. He blinked. What he saw didn’t change, so he shook his head. Still there.

A Native American princess sat astride a paint horse. Her hair hung loose behind her, blowing in a breeze that Dan couldn’t feel. He couldn’t feel much of anything but sheer shock. What the hell?

Her horse took a step closer. She wore nothing but an old-fashioned, unadorned buckskin dress that rode high up on lean thighs that clung to the sides of her paint horse with natural ease. It was clear this princess knew how to ride bareback. The length of her legs ended with simple moccasins. Her horse’s face was coated in red. Was that war paint?

Could this be happening? She looked like she belonged to a different time, as pure and untouched as the land around her. He’d seen a few Lakota Indians in the three days since he’d arrived, but none of them looked like this.

None of them looked at him like she was looking at him.

One of her hands held the reins of her horse, the other was relaxed by her leg. She tilted her head, sending all that black hair off to one side. She was stunning. A princess of the high plains.

Dan’s heartbeat picked up and he slid his hand away from his revolver. She was not what he expected. Cecil had warned him that the local Lakota Indians were a bunch of lazy drunks—but not this woman. The proud way she held her body as her clear eyes swept over him made it obvious that neither of those adjectives applied to her. He’d never seen a woman as stop-what-he’s-doing-and-stare beautiful as she was. She leaned forward, and he caught the shape of her buckskin-clad chest. His pulse wasn’t the only thing that picked up. What the hell was wrong with him?

The princess flashed him a smile, which didn’t help. He had trouble reading her expression at this distance, but there was no mistaking the wide grin or the brightness of her teeth. Then, as quickly as she’d smiled, she was a blur of motion. Her horse shot forward in the same second her hand shot up. His hat went flying as an explosion rocked the valley.

His horse jumped and spun, and Dan lost track of the woman. His first instinct was to rein in Smokey; his second was to duck for cover. That explosion had sounded a hell of a lot like a gunshot.

By the time he got his stallion turned back around, she was gone. Dan didn’t think, he just acted. He touched his spurs to the horse’s side and took off for the deer trail. Fueled by adrenaline, he plunged into the shadowy woods. Beautiful or no, no one took a shot at him. No one.

He could hear the sound of a large body crashing through the underbrush, over to his left. Whoever she was, she was abandoning the deer path. Dan blinked hard, forcing his eyes to adjust to the dim light. He thought he caught a flash of white ahead.

The harder he rode, the madder he got. In the oil business, he’d dealt with plenty of shady characters—men with agendas or histories—but no one had ever taken an unprovoked shot at him. Hell, no one had ever taken a shot at him, period. He didn’t have enemies because he didn’t make them. That “man-against-the-world” crap might have been the way of things back in the old days, but Dan was no gunslinger. He was a businessman—a successful one. His word was his bond, and his lawyer rode herd when a deal went south.

He caught the flash of white again and froze.

A white-tailed deer was high-tailing it away from him.

Cursing, Dan pulled Smokey to a stop and tried to figure out what the hell had happened. Maybe it hadn’t been real. People imagined sounds, right? But then he remembered his hat. It had come off in the confusion. No matter what had actually happened, he wasn’t going to leave his hat. He loved that hat—it fit his head perfectly. Slowly, Dan worked his way back down to the tall grass until he saw the brown brim of his Stetson. He got down to fetch it.

His gut clenched in a terrifying rage. A hole pierced the front peak of the hat, less than an inch from where it had rested on his head.

She’d shot at him. That beautiful woman—bare legs, bareback—had shot at him.

Somebody owed him an explanation.

Dan was still plenty steamed by the time he got back to the ranch house. For some crack-brained reason, his uncle had decided to set up the hydro division of Armstrong Holdings in one of those grand old mansions some cattle baron had built back in the 1880s. As far as mansions went, it was a beautiful piece of work—three floors of hand-carved banisters and stained-glass windows on sixty acres—but corporate headquarters it wasn’t. Why Cecil was camped out on the edge of the middle of nowhere, halfway between the state capital in Pierre and the Iowa border, instead of at the small staffed office he had in Sioux Falls was beyond him. It was almost like the old man was trying to hide.

As chief operating officer of Armstrong Holdings, the family business that Dan’s father had started with his brother Cecil forty years ago, Dan owned half of this house. Technically, he owned half of the water rights on the Dakota River over which the Red Creek branch of the Lakota Indian tribe was suing Cecil. He owned half of that pretty little valley where his hat had met an untimely death. Technically, he was an equal partner in this whole damn enterprise, and had been since he’d assumed control of the petroleum division in Texas from his mother when he turned twenty-one.

He’d be damned if he let Cecil destroy the company he’d worked so hard to expand.

Cecil had never been one for technicalities, an opinion made abundantly clear last week when he’d ordered Dan to drop everything in Texas and come to South Dakota. Cecil had a problem with the dam he’d spent nearly five years trying to build and had threatened that Armstrong Holdings would lose billions of dollars and just about every government contract they had if Dan didn’t get his ass on a plane within a week.

Dan hated to let anyone think he was at the old man’s beck and call—least of all, the old man himself—but this problem with the dam gave Dan the perfect opportunity to come up here and figure out what those little—and not so little—blips in the company’s financial reports were all about. He didn’t know what exactly he was looking for, but he knew he wouldn’t find it in Texas. He was going to have to suffer his uncle until he could force Cecil out of the role of chief executive officer.

Now that he thought about it, Dan remembered that it was Cecil who had warned him about the local Indians—that he was having trouble with negotiations with some of them. Dan just hadn’t realized that the problem would require body armor and a helmet.

The gabled roof of the ranch house looked even more ominous as the late-afternoon sun cast deep shadows over the front yard. The cast-iron fence looked less like it wanted to keep Cecil’s old coon dog in and more like it wanted to keep armed assailants out. Dan stormed through the front door, making the housekeeper jump.

“Is everything all right, Señor Armstrong?” Maria’s thick Mexican accent was the closest thing to Texas in this whole house.

Dan slowed. From what he could tell, Cecil treated this poor woman like dirt, which made Dan go out of his way to be polite. Being friendly with the staff had always helped him in the past—especially when he needed information. Mom always said Dan could catch more flies with honey when he wanted to, and right now, he had a bunch of flies bothering him. “Maria,” he said, his voice slipping down just a notch as he whipped off his hat. Her cheeks colored. “Do you all have trouble around here?”

The color deepened as she dropped her eyes to the ground. Dan guessed that maybe thirty years ago, Maria had been quite a looker. He didn’t mean to make her blush, but sweet-talking a woman was second nature for him. “Trouble, señor?”

“Native American trouble?” Maria blinked in confusion, so Dan tried again. “Indian trouble?” Even saying the phrase felt wrong, like it was the 1880s and he was stuck in the middle of a range war. He cleared his throat. If it weren’t for the bullet hole in his hat, he’d be certain he’d lost his mind. He held his hat out to her.

Maria went very still as she looked at the hole, and then at his head. “Dios mi! No, señor, we do not have that kind of trouble.”

Damn. Dan was good at reading people, women in particular. Maria was telling the truth.

“You’ll let me know if you hear of any, won’t you?” He shot her his please smile.

Her head bobbed as she began to back toward the kitchen. “Sí, señor.”

Satisfied, he continued on to his uncle’s office. It had probably once been the formal dining room, capable of seating twenty, but no more. Now it was crammed full of everything a man needed to run a major energy corporation. In Texas, Cecil had been a ruthless businessman, squeezing out smalltime operations and buying land for astonishing prices. By the time the SUV craze rolled around, he held a near monopoly on Texas oil.

Cecil was whip-smart. By the time the writing was on the fossil fuel wall, he’d already invested deeply in hydroelectric dams. That’s what had brought him to South Dakota. The water rights were cheap up here, and the potential was huge. Armstrong Hydro was quickly becoming not just the major player in the field, but the only player.

Dan didn’t like the man, never had. Not one bit. But family was family, and Cecil and Dan were tied by blood and by business. Dan couldn’t get rid of the old man without hard evidence of malfeasance that he could present to the Board of Directors. Maybe on this trip, he’d find just what he needed to finally cut their connection. Without breaking stride, he burst into the room.

“Well?” Cecil demanded without bothering to look up from the report he was studying. The old man still had the same pompadour and trimmed mustache he’d worn since the 1950s. The only thing that had changed in five years were the jowls Cecil was now sporting. Those jowls, combined with the careful grooming, made Cecil look like the poster boy for the banality of evil. Emphasis on the evil. Those pictures of Cecil and his brother Lewis, Dan’s father, with their first oil derrick were the only proof Dan had ever seen that his uncle smiled. He’d certainly never smiled at Dan—not once.

Dan gritted his teeth and threw his hat on the desk. The hole landed directly in front of Cecil’s face. “Someone took a shot at me.”

Cecil appeared to study the wounded hat for a moment. “Did you get them?” He didn’t sound concerned or surprised.

“No. I lost her.”

A sneer wrestled one corner of Cecil’s mouth up. “You let a girl get off an unanswered shot?”

He didn’t have to defend himself here. Cecil had told him to pack his revolver. “Thanks for the warnin’.”

“Are you sure it was a girl?” The sneer didn’t falter.

Dan thought back to the lean, bare thighs, the long hair and that smile. Girl, no. Woman? Hell, yes. “Positive.”

“No one’s seen… her before.” Cecil hadn’t known a woman was out there? He seemed to be struggling to digest the information. “If it’s the same troublemaker, she’s sabotaged the engineer’s work site on more than one occasion.”

He had heard about the trouble with the work site, but only third-hand from an engineer Cecil had sent packing. Cecil apparently didn’t believe an ecoterrorist attack on an Armstrong project was worth reporting to the board—yet another thing he was hiding. How many other things were there?

Dan had dealt with ecoterrorists before. The Earth Liberation Front—ELF—had burned more than a few of his derricks before Dan had managed to negotiate a truce of sorts. But even ELF had never gone to all the trouble of disguises in broad daylight. They’d been strictly an under-cover-of-night group, more bent on the destruction of property than of people. He could handle ecoterrorists. What he couldn’t handle were armed—and beautiful—Native American princesses.

Without missing a beat, Cecil threw Dan’s hat back at him and picked up a sheaf of paper from the top of a neat pile. “I have a new assignment for you.”

Dan’s teeth ground together. An assignment. Cecil always tried to treat Dan like he was some two-bit underling instead of an equal partner. Like that little bit of self-delusion gave the old man sole control of the company. “Anyone going to be firing on me this time?”

Cecil let the comment slide. “I’m sending you to meet with the Indians. You’re better at—” his hands waved like he could grab hold of a word out of thin air “—talking.”

There’s an understatement, Dan thought with a concealed snort. Cecil didn’t talk. Cecil ordered. “Why them?”

“It’s a bunch of bull. They think they’re going to get an injunction against the dam construction over water rights—rights I already own.”

“That we already own. Don’t you have lawyers? Why the hell do you need me for this?”

“The tribal lawyer is a bearcat. Rosebud Donnelly. She’s eaten three of my lawyers for lunch.” Cecil spat the words out with true disgust.

Rosebud? Like the sled from that old movie Mom loved? Couldn’t be. Whoever she was, Dan felt a small thread of admiration for her. Anyone who could successfully stonewall his uncle was a person to be taken seriously. “And?”

Cecil looked him over with mercenary eyes. “You are an attractive man, son. Good with women. Hell, you treat that maid like she’s some damn queen.”

Dan’s jaw stiffened. Son. He hated it when Cecil called him that. Dan was many things to Cecil, but a son he wasn’t.

“You handled those ELF nuts in Texas. This is no different. She’s just a woman.”

Dan managed to clear his throat. “You want me to do what—sweep her off her feet so she forgets about suing us?” It was Cecil’s turn to stiffen. That’s right, Dan thought. Us. This is my company, too.

“All I’m suggesting is you distract her. And if you happen to get access to some of her files…” He let the words trail off, but the meaning was clear. He thought he could use Dan as nothing more than a male bimbo.

Dan snatched the papers out of Cecil’s hand. The sooner he got out of this room, the better life would be. Just breathing Cecil’s air was toxic. “Where?”

“On the reservation. Tomorrow at ten.” Cecil waved his hand in dismissal.

For the second time that day, Dan was so mad he couldn’t see straight. Cecil had known someone was out there. If Dan didn’t know any better, he might be tempted to think the old man was trying to get him killed.

He looked down at the papers, a Google map to the tribal headquarters and some names. On one hand, he detested letting his uncle think Dan would do his heavy-handed bidding. On the other hand, if Cecil was having “problems” with Indians, maybe they had something on him, something Dan could use. Besides, if a man was looking for a Native American princess packing a pistol, the reservation was the place to be.

He was going to start with one Rosebud Donnelly.

Two

Rosebud Donnelly looked over the rims of her glasses to see Judy, the receptionist, standing in the doorway with an unusual look of confusion on her face.

“He’s here.”

“Johnson came back for more?” Here, in the privacy of her office—even if it was just a modified broom closet—Rosebud allowed herself to smile at the thought of that twit Johnson breaking. A pitiful excuse for a lawyer, that one.

“No.” Judy’s eyes got wider.

“It’s not that man, is it?” She couldn’t imagine that Cecil Armstrong would actually show himself in public, in daylight. She’d never met him, but she imagined him to be some sort of vampire, except instead of sucking blood, he was hell-bent on draining her reservation dry—and then flooding it.

“He said his name was Dan Armstrong. He said he was Cecil’s nephew.”

The satisfaction was intense. She was getting to that man. Cecil Armstrong had run out of high-priced lawyers who wouldn’t know tribal law from a hole in the ground. He’d been reduced to family—as if Rosebud could be swayed by emotional pleas. “A regular mini-me, huh?”

“No,” Judy said again, her voice dropping. “He’s… something else entirely. Be careful with this one, Rosebud.”

Judy’s befuddlement was worrisome. “I’m always careful.” Which was true. She took no chances—she couldn’t afford to. “He can sit. Make sure he’s got coffee—plenty of coffee,” she added with a nod. She preferred her sworn enemies to be as uncomfortable as possible. “And let me know when Joe and Emily get here.”

After Judy left to go perk another pot of coffee, Rosebud took the time to break out her pitiful makeup bag. Her good looks were just one of her weapons, but she considered them her first best line of defense when meeting a new adversary.

After three years of representing the tribe in their dealings with Armstrong Holdings, she’d honed her game plan to perfection. Johnson was just the latest victim. Rosebud had played the bubble-headed babe for three weeks—long enough for Johnson to be sure he had the upper hand and, more importantly, long enough for Rosebud to secure some rather incriminating pictures of the man meeting with a supplier of prescription painkillers. Although he’d made bail, Johnson had recused himself from the case rather than tangle with Rosebud again.

Men, she thought with a snort. Especially white men. They all thought the rules applied to everyone else. She plaited her hair and wound the braid into a bun that projected both an old-fashioned innocence and an austere severity. To hold the bun in place, she inserted two sticks that would have looked like chopsticks, except for the bright green beaded tassels hanging from the ends. The sticks were the only things of her mother’s she’d kept.

Her lipstick set, Rosebud gathered up her files. She held no hope that this Dan Armstrong would be different from the others—after all, that rat-bastard Cecil had sent him—but there was always a small chance that he’d let something slip that could be connected back to her brother Tanner.