Table of Contents

Cover Page

Excerpt

Dear Reader

Title Page

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Dedication

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

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Epilogue

Copyright

Cal’s grin broadened. He couldn’t help it.

“Why, Miz Livy, could it be you’re jealous?”

“Jealous?” Livy repeated incredulously, going pale, and then her blue eyes blazed up at him. “Why, you have your nerve, you—you conceited polecat! If we weren’t on a public street, I’d—I’d slap your face, Caleb Devlin!”

He raised an eyebrow and hooked his thumbs in his frock coat pockets. “Again? My, you are becomin’ a violent woman, aren’t you, Livy?” he drawled. He saw her hands clench into fists at her sides. “If the urge is really overpowering, we could just duck in here, so you could get it out of your system in private,” he added, nodding toward the jail they were standing by.

He felt his grin widening. Her face was flushed—like a woman in the throes of passion. She really would slap his face if he told her that!

Dear Reader,

Laurie Grant fans rejoice, the Readers’ Choice Awardwinning author is back this month with her new Western, Lawman. In this fast-paced sequel to her 1996 release, Devil’s Dare, a lonely lawman rediscovers love in the arms of his childhood sweetheart. Don’t miss this wonderful tale from an author whom Affaire de Coeur calls “an unbelievably gifted writer.”

For those of you who enjoy the Regency era, Taylor Ryan’s The Essential Wife is the delightful story of a dashing nobleman who suddenly finds himself in love with the penniless heiress whom he has arranged to marry out of pity.

Nevada Territory is the setting for All But the Queen of Hearts, Rae Muir’s heartwarming Western about a shy farm widow and the handsome stranger who was swindled in a poker game by her late husband. And we are very pleased this month to be able to bring you Silhouette Yours Truly and Special Edition author Beth Henderson’s first historical for Harlequin, Reckless, in which a young woman accused of being a jewel thief is rescued by a mysterious baron intent on clearing her name.

We hope you keep a lookout for all four titles wherever Harlequin Historicals are sold.

Sincerely,

Tracy Farrell

Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Harlequin Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

Lawman
Laurie Grant

www.millsandboon.co.uk

In grateful acknowledgment to Helen Wade, who helped with details regarding the Episcopal Church, and Paul Becerra and Mr. and Mrs. Sergio Egea, who helped me with my Spanish.

LAURIE GRANT

combines a career as a trauma center emergency room nurse with that of historical romance author; she says the writing helps keep her sane. Passionately enthusiastic about the history of both England and Texas, she divides her travel time between these two spots. She is married to her own real-life hero, and has two teenage daughters, two dogs and a cat.

If you would like to write to Laurie, please use the address below:

Laurie Grant

P.O. Box 307274

Gahana, OH 43230

To Deb and Mary, Hussies both And always, to Michael

Chapter One

Brazos County, Texas

1868

“Oh, son, I still can’t believe you’re here, and alive,” Sarah Devlin said. Her voice was choked with tears, but her face was beaming as she stared across the table at him.

His brother Sam, seeing that Cal was in the midst of chewing some of their mother’s famous pecan pie, said, “Aw, Ma, Cal sent me home ahead of him just so you could get used to the idea.” Sam grinned in delight, for it had been he who had found Cal, whom they’d all thought dead, when he’d herded some cattle north to Abilene on a trail drive. Sam had his arm around Mercy, his new bride, whom he’d also found in Abilene and brought home with him to Texas.

“Sorry I’m not the same beautiful boy you sent away, Ma,” Cal said with self-deprecating humor, referring to the black patch that now covered his sightless right eye, the two scars that radiated over his cheek from beneath the patch and the black hair that was now mixed with silver. The middle child of the Devlin brood, he was only four years older than Sam, but he looked ten years older.

“You’re still a beautiful sight to me, Caleb Travis Devlin,” his mother replied stoutly, her gaze still adoring. “I’d gotten so used to thinking of you as dead, you could have come back with both eyes patched and no arms and legs and I’d still think you were a beautiful sight.”

“That’s all we need on this place—one more cripple.” Garrick’s sour voice came from the far end of the table.

Cal winced inwardly as he glanced at his eldest brother, who’d had a leg amputated above the knee after a minié ball had shattered both bones in his shin. It was obvious Garrick still hadn’t gotten over the depression that often came with such a loss. Cal knew what such a morass of despair could be like because he’d gone through it himself.

“Now, Garrick, we all think you do very well, especially now that you’ve gotten that artificial limb,” Sarah Devlin declared. “Why, you keep this family together, Garrick. And you quite put me in mind of your father, sitting at the head of the table like that.”

“Yeah, I do real well for a cripple, lurching around the farm like a drunken pirate, telling the hands what to do. But it’s been Sam who’s been putting the Devlin stud farm back together, with the cash he brought back ‘from Abilene.”

Cal watched as Sam tightened his jaw and stared down at his hands. Then Mercy took his brother’s hand and squeezed it, and Sam smiled slightly at her. Thank God for Mercy Fairweather Devlin, who had made his brother so happy and who was going to give Sam a baby in the spring.

It hadn’t escaped Cal’s notice that Annie, their widowed sister, had been twisting her napkin while Garrick was talking. Now she spoke up. “Oh, Garrick, not tonight,” she said, her voice anguished. “Not when Cal’s just been restored to us. We’ve all lost something in the war, and I think we should be thankful he’s back, not dwell on what will never be the same again.”

Garrick said nothing, just stared morosely down at the food he’d been picking at.

He was probably in pain, Cal guessed, for his brother had already let slip the fact that he suffered a good deal of chronic pain from the way the Confederate army surgeons—”butchers,” he called them—had “repaired” his leg. And it was likely he was in a good deal of emotional pain, as well. He’d probably have been able to adjust fairly well to the loss of his limb if Cecilia, his flighty wife, hadn’t run off the day after Garrick had come home minus a leg. Cal figured he’d have to get Garrick alone soon and see if there was any way he could encourage him. Cal was an ordained minister, after all. Surely that was a part of his job.

He cleared his throat in the awkward silence that followed Annie’s outburst. “Who’s pastoring the Bryan Episcopal Church these days? I’m sure they didn’t leave the pulpit empty all those years I was away, especially after I came up missing.”

“No, I’m afraid they filled that position with indecent haste, right after folks in Bryan found out you had gone away to wear blue, not gray. The fellow that’s preaching now, Josiah Maxwell, is the same man who took over when you left.”

“You don’t say that as if you like him very well,” Cal said, noting the way his mother’s lips had pursed when she said the man’s name.

“I don’t, and God forgive me for that,” she admitted quickly, her eyes troubled. “And it’s not just that he isn’t you, Caleb. Maxwell doesn’t have your gift with people, son. He’s self-righteous and proud, and as far as I’m concerned, during the war he was hiding behind the cloth as an excuse not to go and fight—for one side or the other. He could have at least gone as a chaplain, seems to me.”

Cal sighed. He’d known the pastorate wouldn’t have remained empty all those years he was gone, but he’d had this dream of coming home to find his congregation ready and waiting for him.

“Do you suppose he’d be at all amenable to my offering myself as associate pastor, or as some sort of a helper? The congregation had grown to the point that I was thinking of suggesting hiring an assistant myself before I left.”

Garrick let out an inelegant snort. “He’ll let you help him when there are snowball fights in hell, brother.”

“Son, I do wish you’d mind your language at the table!” Sarah Devlin snapped. “I didn’t raise you to talk like that!”

“Sorry, Ma. But it’s best he knows what his reception’s apt to be like. And it ain’t only the preacher, Cal. Folks in Bryan still haven’t forgotten the war—how could they, when they lost so many sons and husbands and brothers, and we’ve still got a provisional federal government? Folks haven’t forgotten you fought your own kind.”

“I had to do what I thought was right,” Cal said, trying to keep his voice even. He could feel himself flushing with anger.

“Garrick, I absolutely will not tolerate the War Between the States being fought over again at this dinner table, do you hear me?” their mother said quickly, smacking the scarred old table to emphasize her point.

Garrick had the grace to look ashamed. “I’m sorry again. I just thought Cal ought to be warned how it’s going to be. Cal, if I were you I’d tread real softly when I go into town, and don’t be real surprised that no one else is killing the fatted calf over your return.”

“I appreciate the warning,” Cal made himself say, as soon as he could master his temper. “I suppose it’s only natural people would feel that way, even though the war’s been over a good three years.”

Then Sam spoke up, a mischievous grin on his face. “Say, brother, I’ve got somethin’ I’ve been waitin’ to ask you ever since we left you in Abilene, and my curiosity’s been plaguin’ me all those weeks we traveled and while we waited for you to come home.”

“And what might that be, Sam? Dare I ask?” retorted Cal with good-humored wariness. Thank God for his amiable younger brother, who could always be depended upon to defuse a tense moment with something funny. The devilish glint in Sam’s eyes promised just such a moment.

“Who’s the girl you planned to look up once you got back, Cal?”

“Oh, she’s probably already married,” Cal said casually, looking down so his face wouldn’t betray the longing he’d felt ever since he’d regained his memory of who he really was—and of the girl he’d left behind when he’d gone off to war. Whether she was married or not, she’d probably succeeded in forgetting him just as thoroughly as he’d forgotten that he was Caleb Devlin.

“Maybe, but you never know, brother,” Sam said, his grin and his drawl broadening. “Now, if you were to tell me it was Lucy Snow, for example, why, I’ve got good news for you. She’s been wearin’ black for some poor boy ever since Second Manassas, Ma tells me—”

“Sam! Lucy Snow is a wrinkled-up prune of a woman!” chided Annie, obviously trying to hold back a giggle. “Cal has better taste than that! Uh…it isn’t Lucy Snow you were going to look up, was it?” she added with a sudden anxiety.

Cal chuckled. “No, Annie, it wasn’t Lucy Snow. If memory serves, she was a wrinkled-up prune of a woman even before the war, wasn’t she? She never wore her bonnet out in the sun. But I believe she was sweet on the Tetersall boy, not me.”

Annie sighed in exaggerated relief. “Oh, Cal, they were all sweet on you! Everyone wanted to marry the bachelor preacher,” she said, with a fond smile at her brother.

“So who is it, Cal?” Sam persisted. “Come on, brother, you aren’t going to get out of telling us.”

“All right, all right!” Cal said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “I can see you won’t give me any peace till I tell you. But remember, it was just someone I thought about once I recalled who I was. I know she’s probably already married. You’ve all got to promise me this won’t go beyond the Devlin supper table.”

They all raised their right hands, an old family ritual that suddenly had all of them smiling, even Garrick. They felt like a family once again.

“All right, I’ll tell you. It was Olivia Childress.”

Silence hung over the table like a cloak for several heartbeats. Sam looked at their mother. Sarah looked at Garrick. Garrick looked at Annie. It was Annie who found her voice at last.

“Oh, Cal. I’m sorry. Olivia Childress married, all right. She married a man named Dan Gillespie, over at Gillespie Springs.’

Cal shrugged. That was that, then. The woman he’d dreamed about when he’d been in the Union army, right up until he’d been injured, and had started to dream about again these past two months, was taken. He’d just have to forget her.

“Don’t be sorry. It’s probably just as well,” he said with forced lightness. “She told me she hated me when she found out my uniform was going to be blue, not gray. She probably cusses every time she thinks of me, if she thinks of me at all. And if we never meet again, at least she’ll remember me as that handsome Devlin boy she hated,” he said, pointing to his eye patch.

But something in his sister’s face warned him there was more. “Annie, is there something you’re not telling me?”

His sister looked uneasy. “He’s dead. Dan Gillespie, that is. He died just last month.”

Hope flared anew. Gillespie Springs wasn’t that far from Bryan—just an hour away. He could ride over some fine day and pay his respects to the widow—with Annie along to make it respectable and all—and maybe, after a decent time passed…

“He—he killed himself, Cal,” Annie added, her face anguished.

Cal’s jaw fell. “How awful! Poor Livy—how hard it must have been on her!”

“Poor Livy, hell!” growled Garrick. “They say he put a bullet through his head ‘cause Livy was cheatin’ on him!”

Chapter Two

The silence in the room was deafening. Out of the corner of his eye, Cal saw his mother shoot a disapproving glare at Garrick, but even she, apparently, could not find any words to say.

“Best shut yer mouth, brother. You’ll draw flies,” Garrick commented sardonically after an endless moment.

Cal did so, feeling foolish. “I—I don’t believe it,” he said at last, smothering a very unministerial urge to sink a fist in Garrick’s mocking face. “Livy wouldn’t do such a thing—not the Livy / knew, at least. She’s the kind of girl to honor any commitments she made. Especially the bonds of matrimony.”

“People can change, Cal,” Sam offered mildly, “and not always for the better. What’s it been—seven years since you last saw her?”

Cal said nothing, his mind filled with remembered images of Livy dancing with him at a local ball, her lovely face upturned to his, her eyes alight, the touch of her as smooth as silk as they whirled around the dance floor…Livy kissing him in the garden later that same night, the scent of her perfume mingling with the honeysuckle, her eyes now dark with a woman’s secrets… and later, her scornful blue eyes as she told him never to darken her door again.

“They say she’s carryin’ the other man’s baby,” Garrick said, just as Cal was searching for some topic, any topic, to change the subject to.

“Garrick, sometimes you don’t have the good sense God gave a jackass,” Annie hissed. “Why didn’t you just keep your mouth shut? There was no need to burden Cal with such—such gossip!”

“He’d find out soon enough, I reckon,” said Garrick, unruffled. “I just thought I’d better tell him before he gets a notion to ride over an comfort the widow.”

“I had no intention of doing that,” Cal insisted, though he wasn’t at all sure he was telling the truth. “And just how do ‘they’ know these things, Garrick, whoever they’ are?”

He wondered why he was torturing himself with the questions, when his brain screamed that he didn’t want to know the answers.

“Dan Gillespie put it in the letter he left near his body for his brother to find.”

“Oh? And did he also put in the name of the man who—” Cal glanced uneasily at his mother, his sister and sister-in-law, and rephrased what he was about to ask “—stole his wife’s affections?”

“Didn’t need to,” Garrick answered bluntly.

Cal raised an inquiring brow and waited.

“Everyone around knew who it was—a Mexican vaquero who’d been workin’ for ‘em for a spell. He’d been acting way too familiar with the missus. Dan shot him when he found out it was more’n that. Then he killed himself.”

Cal closed his eyes, feeling a familiar headache descending over him like. a black cloak. He’d had headaches at intervals ever since the battle that had robbed him of one of his eyes, though of course he hadn’t remembered the cause of his loss until he’d regained his memory. Headaches hadn’t come often, in recent years, but he could always count on one arriving whenever he was unduly tired or upset. And now he was both. He rubbed his forehead.

“I assume,” he said wearily, “that no one doubted Dan Gillespie’s say-so?”

“I’ve had enough of this conversation,” their mother said, and stalked from the room. Annie and Mercy followed, after giving the men at the table uneasy glances.

Garrick snorted as he lit a cheroot. “Of course not! The man shot his wife’s defiler, a greaser at that! A man has a perfect right to avenge his honor, doesn’t he?”

Yes, especially when the accused ‘defiler’ was a Mexican, Cal thought, sick at heart. No white man in Texas was going to stop and get a Mexican’s side of the story first. Nothing had changed.

“And just how is everyone so sure that the baby couldn’t be Dan Gillespie’s?” Cal found himself asking, just when he wanted nothing so much as to go upstairs and lie down in the dark.

“Gillespie said it wasn’t, in the note he left. Not that he needed to…He an’ Livy didn’t have any children in six years of marriage—”

“But the war,” Cal protested. “From what you’re telling me, they got married during the war. Wasn’t Dan in the army during the war?”

Sam nodded. “Terry’s Rangers.”

“Well, I can understand why they might not have had a child during the war, especially if he didn’t get home on leave much. But after—?”

“When he came home,” Sam said heavily, his eyes on the table, “it was pretty much common knowledge that Dan couldn’t…um, he wasn’t able—”

“Oh, Sam, just say it, damn it!” Garrick said with a snicker. “The ladies’ve gone out on the porch—they cain’t hear you! Dan had a war injury that caused him not t’be able to get his pecker up no more! That’s what our little brother’s trying to say, Cal!”

So Dan Gillespie had killed his wife’s lover and then killed himself, leaving Livy to face the consequences.

“What’s happened to Livy after all this?”

Garrick’s shrug of the shoulders was eloquent. He didn’t have to say. Who cares? “How am I supposed to know?” he muttered at last.

“You were remarkably informed up to this point,” retorted Cal. “Don’t stop now! You mean the gossip stopped with the sinful woman’s lover getting killed?”

“Now don’t try t’make me sound like some talebearin’ ol’ biddy,” Garrick growled. “Some of th’ scandal was in the newspaper, seein’ as how the Gillespie boys’ father founded that town an’ all, and you know how people talk. It sure beats jawin’ about the carpetbaggers still crawlin all over Texas. All right, if you must know, I heard tell that in Gillespie Springs, Livy Gillespie’s about as welcome as fire ants at a picnic.

“Why doesn’t she just leave?” Cal wondered aloud.

Garrick snorted again. “Who knows? It ain’t like their little farm’s prime acreage or nothin’, though Dan did manage to keep the taxes paid on the place. Some say she’s just stayin’ so as not to give Robert Gillespie, her brother-in-law, the satisfaction. He wants her gone bad, ol’ Bob does, so he can add their land to his holdings, but Dan didn’t change his will before he died. His old will specified that the land went wholly to Livy ‘and their issue.”’

“Isn’t that a little inconsistent?”

His brother looked puzzled.

“Not to change the will, I mean, after going to the trouble of killing the man who’d cuckolded him and of leaving a note and all.”

Garrick shrugged again. “Damnation, Cal, the man had to have been out of his mind, after findin’ out some Mexican had taken his place in her bed, and killin’ him. He must have just forgot!” His voice took on a scornful edge. “And now the ‘issue’ that’s gonna be livin’ there is some other man’s bastard.”

“Garrick—” began Sam.

“Oh, shut up, little brother. You think just ‘cause you married the preacher’s daughter that every woman is as innocent and pure as they’d like you to believe! Well, if my wife skeedaddlin’ at the sight of my chopped-off leg ain’t enough proof that women ain’t t’be trusted, then the likes a’ Livy Gillespie surely oughta be!”

Ignoring Garrick’s bitter remark, Cal met Sam’s gaze in a moment of shared amusement, both remembering the circumstances of Sam’s hasty wedding to Mercy, which had come after their wedding night rather than before. Yes, Garrick supposed a lot of things that weren’t necessarily so. Maybe this was another of them.

In any case, however, it wasn’t going to matter to Cal. By now his head was throbbing unmercifully, the pain settling behind his eyes like red-hot needles, so that even the flickering light of the lamp caused agony when he looked at it.

“I hope y’all will excuse me, but I’m gonna turn in,” he said, rising to his feet. “It’s been a long day.”

Once he had reached the sanctuary of his room, he had a moment of indecision. Should he dig into the old carpetbag he kept under the bed and bring out the bottle of laudanum he hadn’t used in months? Was it weak to seek relief from this pain in a bottle of strong medicine? He didn’t want to start craving it, the way he’d seen some wounded men do during the war. Yet he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep when the pain got to be this intense, so at last he reached under the bed and brought it out, unstoppering it and taking a couple of sips. He knew its euphoric effects would banish his headache and then bring a healing sleep. And maybe the narcoticinduced euphoria would keep him from thinking about Livy Gillespie.

He’d think about Lizabeth, the woman who’d taken him in when he’d finally fallen off his horse at her isolated farmhouse, wounded, shivering with fever and having no idea of who he was. Even though he’d been wearing a blue uniform in the midst of rebel territory, Lizabeth had hidden him and nursed him until he was well. When he’d gotten better he’d just never gotten around to leaving. He didn’t know what regiment to return to anyway.

Eventually love had grown between him and the widowed Lizabeth and he had married her, only to lose her to pneumonia later. From there he’d drifted on to Abilene, where Sam had found him tending bar as “Deacon Paxton.”

Yes, Cal would think of Lizabeth. Now there had been a good woman, a trustworthy woman. As he lay in the comforting darkness of the bedroom, waiting for the laudanum to take effect, he tried to remember her face. She’d been a blonde, her hair a reddish-gold shade she called strawberry. She’d had big green eyes and a determined chin…but somehow, every time he tried to picture her, Livy’s face intruded instead.

Walking up the steps of the Bryan Episcopal Church was like coming home. Built of freestone in hues of mellow gold and gray, the exterior of the building was in harmony with the golden autumn morning.

Entering the sanctuary through the short narthex, Cal lifted his eyes with pleasure to the stained-glass window behind the altar, which portrayed Jesus as the Good Shepherd, surrounded by sheep and tenderly holding a lamb. It had been purchased at some considerable sacrifice by the parishioners when the church was still newly built, a couple of years before the war, and Cal, just ordained, had taken over as the rector. That window reminded him of why he wanted to minister to God’s people. He’d often write his sermons while sitting in the front pew, looking up at that window for inspiration.

“So it’s true—you’re back. What are you doing here?” demanded a raspy voice behind him.

Cal knew who it was before he turned around. “Hello, Josiah,” he said, extending his hand as he faced the man who’d taken his place as rector. “Yes, I’m back, and not dead after all, it seems.” He smiled pleasantly at the portly man, who was five years his senior. “It’s nice to be home.”

Josiah Maxwell just breathed heavily, his dark eyes suspicious. “I said, what’re you doing here?” He jerked his head around to indicate that he meant the interior of the church.

Cal sighed inwardly. So Maxwell wasn’t going to make it easy. “Why, I just came to look at my favorite picture. It sustained me, thinking about that picture during the war. I even remembered it after the shell hit—” he gestured toward his patch and the scars “—and I couldn’t remember anything else. I just couldn’t remember where I’d seen it.”

He knew as soon as he’d said it that mentioning the war had been the wrong thing to do. It gave Maxwell an excuse to object to him sooner.

“You mean when you were wearing a blue coat and killing other Texas boys?” Maxwell asked with a sneer.

Cal took a deep breath. If he’d thought his appearance would appeal to Maxwell’s sense of compassion, he’d been deluding himself. “Josiah, that’s all over now. It’s been over for three years. I’d hoped by now folks would be willing to let bygones be bygones, and live for today and the future, not dwell in the past, however tragic it’s been for all of us. I—I’d even hoped maybe you might have some work for me to do to help you here.”

Maxwell’s flush had risen up his neck, past his muttonchop-whiskered jowls to the top of his thinning brown hair.

“Work? For you? I’m the rector here—I don’t need any help.”

“I know you’re the rector, Josiah,” Cal said patiently. “I’m not trying to take your place, merely to offer assistance. I’d be happy to do anything, as a deacon or in whatever capacity you’d like. When I left, this place was crying out for an assistant rector.”

Maxwell’s arms folded over his ample belly. “I got nothing for you to do here,” he insisted. “I reckon I’d sooner work with the devil himself.”

“You wouldn’t consider consulting the vestry first, before giving me your final answer?” Cal asked, referring to the lay governing board of the church. “I’m willing to wait until they can meet.”

“I’ll just bet you are,” said Maxwell with an ugly laugh. “You waited three years after the war was over to come home, didn’t you? I guess that makes you a patient man. But the vestry isn’t going to vote any different, so you may as well forget it.”

Cal thought about explaining his loss of memory, then dismissed the idea. Chances were Maxwell had already heard that part, too, and didn’t believe it. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Cal made himself say in a calm tone. “Well, I’ll see you on Sunday, then, Josiah.”

“I wouldn’t bother, if I were you. Folks see you come in, they’re apt to leave. They don’t hold with worshippin’ alongside a’ traitors.”

Cal just stared at him for a moment before turning on his heel to go. Back in the narthex, he encountered a drawn, haggard woman dressed in mourning black, who looked faintly familiar.

“Good mornin’, ma’am. Aren’t you Miss Lucy Snow? Cal Devlin,” he explained, when the woman just stared, gaping, at his eye patch. “It’s nice to see you again,” he said politely, while thinking inwardly that Annie had spoken the truth when she’d said Lucy was a wrinkled-up prune.

The woman’s blank stare turned to narrow-eyed outrage. “Don’t you even speak to me, you blue-bellied devil!” she snarled, and swept on past him with a swish of black bombazine.

So he wasn’t even welcome in his own church, he thought. Perhaps it was just a matter of time, of being patient while people he’d ministered to learned to trust him all over again. Perhaps he’d have to work on the Devlin farm for a spell, training and selling horses with Sam. Cal liked horses well enough, he guessed, and Sam would welcome his help, though he didn’t actually need it. But even as Cal considered the appealing prospect he knew it wasn’t for him. He wanted something of his own to do.

He mounted Goliad outside the stone church and headed down to the post office. He’d promised Mercy he’d see if there was a letter from Abilene from her father, the Reverend Fairweather. And Annie wanted some yellow thread from the mercantile. Now there were two good places to determine if his reception at the church was going to be typical of the whole town.

The post office was just a small frame building, hardly big enough for the clerk and three chattering ladies who occupied it, two of whom were enormously fat and identical in all respects, including the number of chins they possessed. The Goodlet twins? Sam had told him back in Abilene how the twins were no longer the buxom charmers who’d once competed for his attention.

Conversation ceased as he entered the post office. “Good morning, ladies,” he said, bowing before stepping up to the counter, where the clerk favored him with a basilisk glare.

The third woman put a net-gloved hand up to her mouth as if Beelzebub had just spoken to her.

“Well, I never,” murmured one of the twins.

“The nerve of some people!” sputtered the other, setting her chins wagging.

Cal smiled grimly at the Wanted poster on the wall, suppressing the urge to ask Leticia what she’d “never” and Alicia whether she meant he’d had a lot of nerve not to be dead.

“What do you want, mister?” demanded the goggle-eyed clerk, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. It was as if he hadn’t been the prize pupil in Cal’s catechism class before the war.

‘’Nothing much,” he said pleasantly. “Just wanted to see if my sister-in-law, Mercy Devlin, had any mail waiting.”

The clerk looked through a stack of letters. “Yup. Here,” he said, shoving one of them across the counter at him, then staring pointedly toward the door.

Cal took the hint, feeling the women’s eyes on him all the way out the door and hearing the buzz of talk begin once he was safely out of the building. On to the mercantile, then. Since it was just three short blocks, he left Goliad tied to the post-office hitching post.

He passed the Bonny Blue Flag Saloon, remembering that it had been merely the Bryan Saloon before the war. He was thirsty, but kept on walking. Maybe he’d stop in after he was done with his errand. Stepping off the plank sidewalk and into the dusty street to allow two more ladies to pass, he tipped his hat, but they merely stuck their noses in the air and sailed on, their bustles sending their skirts billowing in their wakes.

Sitting on a weathered bench outside the Bryan Mercantile and Emporium was a trio of idlers.

“Well, if it ain’t the prodigal son, returned from the dead,” began one, whom Cal recognized as the livery owner, a man who had never darkened the door of the Episcopal church, nor, it was well known, of the Baptist church, either.

“Eww, I thought I smelled something” jeered another man, stopping his whittling to eye Cal.

“You did, Asa. A no-good skunk,” the third man chimed in.

“Good day, gentlemen,” Cal said evenly, and went on in. He heard the creak of the boardwalk as they rose to follow him. Apparently he wasn’t even going to be allowed to purchase Annie’s thread in peace.

As his sight adjusted to the dim interior of the mercantile, he noticed a pair of ladies studying a bolt of blue calico. He nodded to them, hearing one of them gasp as he turned toward the proprietor. The latter was standing behind the counter, favoring him with the glare Cal was now becoming all too familiar with.

“What do you want?” the man said.

“Just some yellow thread for my sister, Mr. Ames.”

“Yella? He wants yella thread, did you hear that, Asa? Ain’t that the appropriate color fer him t’buy?” chortled one of the idlers behind him.

“What kind of yellow, Devlin? We got two-three shades here,” the proprietor said, fishing around in a case and holding out several hanks of thread.

“Oh, I expect he’ll take coward yella!” the liveryman announced, before Cal could say anything.

Cal felt his temper fraying. He didn’t want to raise a ruckus, not in a store or in front of ladies, but he didn’t think this trio of no-goods was going to be content to let him go without one. He knew as a man of the cloth, even an unemployed one, he ought to just continue to ignore them, but he wasn’t sure how long he could. Turning his cheek had never been his strong suit.

“I’ll take that one,” he said, pointing at random to a hank of thread the color of the daffodils that came up in February here. He laid a five-cent piece on the counter, not even waiting to see if he had paid too much. He just wanted to get out of there before these idlers made him do something ugly in the confines of the store.

“Bill, I guess he’s too yella to say anythin’ to ya,” jeered Asa, just as Cal was turning around.

“No, I’m not,” he countered. “I’ve just been raised not to call you what you are in the presence of ladies,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the two women, who were already shrinking back against the far wall, watching them.

They let him get all the way out of the store and halfway down the street before they challenged him again, but Cal could feel them following him, like a pack of wild dogs waiting for the right moment to attack. He kept walking, his head held high, his back straight. He had never been a coward, and he wasn’t now—he just thought the fight that was going to result was going to be so…useless.

He heard one of them clomp up onto the sidewalk and shout through the bat-wing doors of the Bonny Blue Flag, “Hey, boys, guess who’s back in town? Traitor Devlin, that’s who! Why don’t ya all come out fer a second and give him a rousin’ welcome like he deserves!”

Three or four cowboys heeded the summons and came running out.

Cal wasn’t armed, hadn’t thought it appropriate for a preacher to strap on a six-gun. That was both a blessing and a curse, for although no one could pull a gun on him fairly if he wasn’t armed, wearing one himself might have kept the beating he was about to receive to merely verbal abuse. But damnation, if he was going to receive some bruises he was going to mete out some, too.

“Hey, blue belly! Devlin! Reckon I’ll be the first t’show ya how welcome ya are here!”

Cal heard the thudding of the cowboy’s boot heels as he ran up from behind, intending to jump him, and met the man’s advance with his fist instead. He was pleased to see the cowboy fall like a rock, a crimson stream spurting from his nose.

So much for turning the other cheek. Lord, what he wouldn’t give to have Sam at his side right now. There’d still be a fight—likely it would have happened sooner, but it would have been a little less lopsided.

After that it was chaos, with the other six men all jumping him at once, fists flying, calling out to every loitering male within earshot to join them. Cal fought desperately, landing punches on every body part of anyone he could reach, and receiving curses and blows in return. A cacophony of noise filled the dusty air.

He never saw the blow that felled him, for it came from the right, on his blind side. All he knew was that suddenly the struggle was over and he was cloaked in a cloud of velvet black.

The woman just mounting the buckboard to begin her drive home had seen the scarred man with the eye patch go down and had wondered what he had done to incur the enmity of so many men at once. To say he was outnumbered in the situation was putting it mildly.

She knew what being the underdog felt like, right enough, and she hated the feeling. Still, she wasn’t inclined to intervene; she’d been on the receiving end of male wrath entirely too much lately.

Probably the man had done something to deserve the drubbing he was getting, like welshing on a poker debt or cheating another man on a horse trade, so she probably shouldn’t let it trouble her conscience. And yet… She paused, about to cluck “giddap” to the horse, when she heard one of the ruffians yell something about getting tar and feathers.

She wasn’t going to let that happen—wasn’t going to let her reluctance to confront any more angry males extend so far that she would meekly allow them to do such a barbarous, painful thing. Not while she had breath in her body. She had been unable to save Francisco, but perhaps she could help this man, at least until she could find out what he had done.

Setting the brake and securing the reins, she picked up her shotgun and aimed it into the air, letting go with one barrel. She hoped she wouldn’t have to use the other one. Then she pointed it at the stunned attackers, who were still bent over their unconscious quarry. The man who’d started to run to fetch the tar and feathers froze in his tracks.

“Y’all ought to be ashamed of yourselves, all of you pickin’ on one man!” she shouted in the sudden silence, jumping down from her buckboard and stalking over to the fallen man. “Go on, get out of here! I’m sure you got better things to be doin’!” She kept her shotgun aimed at the half-dozen men, who obediently backed away. A couple of them slipped back into the saloon.

“You know this man?” one of them asked.

She darted a glance at the crumpled form, but he was lying facedown. “No, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you bullies kill him. He was unarmed,” she said with a calmness she was far from feeling.

“Ma’am, I’m sure you mean well, and I shorely do honor yore sense a’ fair play,” one of them began with an ingratiating smile, “but I think you oughta know this here yella-bellied coward fought for the Yanks, and then hid out for the rest of the war.”

No, it couldn’t be…

“So?” she asked belligerently, not lowering the shotgun or letting herself think about who it was she was protecting.

“So we was jest treatin’ him like such traitors deserve t’be treated,” the dusty, sweaty ruffian answered. “So perhaps you oughta get back up on yer buckboard, ma’am, and ride on t’wherever you was goin’ and don’t worry yore purdy little head—”

Were they going to rush her and try to take away her shotgun? Was she going to have to shoot one of them to prove she meant what she said? Could she shoot one of them?

“You heard the lady,” said a voice from behind her. “Now get on outa here.”

Olivia Gillespie turned to see a man behind her, his Colt drawn and aimed at the four who still remained. He touched the brim of his hat to her, then his eyes went back to the other men.

There was a long silence as they eyed each other, and finally the liveryman said, “Well, all right, Devlin, we’ll let him go this time. But mebbe ya better tell yore brother we don’t like his kind in Bryan no more.”

“I reckon you’ve more than made your point,” retorted Sam Devlin, with a meaningful glance at his brother’s still form. “But if you ever lay a hand on him again it’s gonna be you lyin’ there, not my brother. Now get on outa here, like I said before.”

He watched the four until they had slunk into the saloon, then turned back to Livy.

“Miz Gillespie, I’m much obliged,” he said as he walked over to see to his brother. She watched as he gently turned him over onto his back, and winced as she heard Cal groan.

If she hadn’t been told it was Caleb Devlin, she never would have been able to guess. The eye that wasn’t patched was rapidly swelling shut, and he was covered with scrapes and bruises. There was a laceration on his unscarred cheek that would likely make a new scar, and another over his lip. The hair she remembered as being black as a crow’s wing was now streaked with gray. The patch had been shoved out of place, and she gently pulled it back in place over the closed lid.

“Cal, it’s all right. They’re gone now,” the younger Devlin said softly, but the injured man didn’t react further. He was still unconscious.

“It’s a good thing you came along,” she said, glancing briefly at the tall, dark-haired cowboy, who looked like a younger version of Cal. “I’m not sure I could’ve held them off forever, even with old Betsy here,” she said, with a nod toward the ancient shotgun.

“Oh, they probably wouldn’t’ve had the gumption to try any thin’ else,” he said with a reassuring grin. “They’re just braggarts and bullies. I had a feelin’ that things might not go right the first time my brother showed his face in Bryan, though, so I thought I’d better check and see how it was goin’. Looks like I shoulda come a mite sooner.”

She didn’t want to add to his self-reproach, and so she changed the subject. “You’re Sam, aren’t you? Last time I saw you you were just a skinny boy flirting with the little girls at the annual church picnic on the river.”

Sam smiled. “I reckon I’ve grown a little since then. Now, I think I spotted Cal’s horse down the street a piece. If you could just wait with my brother, I’ll bring him up, but I reckon my Buck would mind less than his stallion about carryin’ Cal home over his saddle,” he said, nodding toward the placid buckskin gelding that stood at the hitching post, switching at flies with his black tail.

“Nonsense,” replied Livy. “There’s no need to do that when I’ve got my buckboard. I’ll help you load him onto the bed of my wagon, and you can tie his horse on the back.”

Chapter Three

Cal woke to the bite of a needle piercing his cheek. “Ow! Damnation! What do you think you’re you doing, Annie?” he growled, opening his eye as far as the swelling would allow. His sister was poised over him with a needle and black thread.

“Land sakes, Cal, is that any way for a minister to talk? And I should think it would be obvious what I’m doing, though I’d hoped to finish this while you were still passed out,” Annie responded tartly. “I’m stitching up your cheek, brother dear. Now hold still while I do just one more.”

Cal set his teeth and gripped the edge of the table, trying his best to focus on his mother, whom he could see hovering anxiously behind Annie. Not a sound escaped his lips as the needle flashed past his eye and bit him twice, once on either side of the laceration. He felt the odd sensation of the thread tugging at his skin as Annie’s nimble fingers knotted the stitch and then snipped it with some sewing scissors she took from the table. “Now hold on, this is going to sting,” she cautioned, and dribbled whiskey from a bottle over the stitched cut.

The resultant fire on his cheek felt like a foretaste of hell. “Annie, who’d have thought you were so good at piling on the agony?” he groaned. “I already hurt right smart in muscles I didn’t even know I had.”

“You’re very welcome, I’m sure,” Annie retorted. “Maybe I should have just left you with another couple of scars after those no-accounts settled your hash in town.”

His head was pounding again, but he managed to say, “Thanks. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. How’d I get home, anyway?”

“In Olivia Gillespie’s buckboard. It was God’s own mercy she happened to be in town buying supplies and saw those men whaling on you just as they got the notion to get out the tar and feathers. She stopped them with a blast from her shotgun.”

“Livy Gillespie is the one who saved me?”

Annie nodded. “Her an’ Sam, who’d started feelin’ uneasy a little while after you rode away from here. Then she was kind enough to offer her buckboard to haul you home. You didn’t even rouse when Sam an’ one of the hands carried you upstairs an’ laid you in bed.”

“Is she—is she still here? I suppose I ought to thank her,” he said, his mind still reeling at the thought of his rescuer’s identity. He hated the idea of her seeing him like this, broken and battered. His face was probably more black-and-blue than white.

“No, she left as soon as we had you safely in bed,” said Annie, to his relief. “Said she had to get back to her farm before it got too late. Land sakes, but that’s one independent woman. She wouldn’t even hear of Sam riding along to make sure those rowdies wouldn’t bother her again when she went back through town— she just made sure her shotgun was loaded again.”

“How’d she…was she…” He couldn’t find the words to ask if she was still the prettiest girl in Brazos County.

“Is she showing yet, is that what you’re tryin’ to ask? No, I can’t really say she was, though she was wearing a wrapper, not a dress, and Lord knows a woman can hide a thick waist in one a’ those for a long while.”

“Oh.” His head ached too severely for him to hear any more about the intricacies of female garments. He wished Annie hadn’t mistaken his meaning, for in his astonishment at hearing that Olivia Gillespie had helped rescue him he had forgotten all about the scandal that clouded her name.

Cal closed his eyes, and Annie took the hint. He heard her chair scrape against the floorboard. “You get some rest now, you hear? I’ll bring up some soup at suppertime.”

He’d have to go and thank Livy for saving his hide, Cal thought. It was only the polite thing to do. But not until he looked a little less fearsome.

However, it was a good fortnight before Cal felt well enough to venture beyond the boundaries of the Devlin farm. The pain from the beating he had endured had diminished within a week, for nothing had been broken except his nose—and perhaps his confidence. He hadn’t expected to be welcomed like the prodigal son, but he had to admit he hadn’t figured on the amount of hostility that had greeted him the day he’d ventured into town. The pain of the community’s rejection had hurt him every bit as much as his bruises had—maybe more so, for this pain hurt in his soul.

He strapped on the gun belt that Garrick had found for him, and shoved Annie’s late husband’s Colt into it. He wasn’t going to ever let himself get caught in the same helpless position he had been in a fortnight ago.

But how was he ever going to make a place for himself around here, where only his family accepted him? Should he have stayed in Abilene, where he had been liked, and helped Mercy’s father get a church built in that wild cow town?

Maybe he should just concentrate on the task he had set himself for the day, he decided as he got dressed. Today he was going to ride over to Gillespie Springs and thank Livy for her role in saving his life. There would be time enough tomorrow to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

All in all, he didn’t look too frightening, he decided as he took a last look in the small mirror that hung over his dressing table. The bruises had faded. He had a slight bump at the top of his nose that hadn’t been there before. His left cheek, which had been unmarked, now bore a pink slash that would in time lighten into a pale scar, but he was growing a mustache to cover the small scar over his lip. Already the mustache didn’t look halfbad, he thought. Maybe it would give Livy something to look at besides the patch over his right eye—not that it mattered. He was only going to deliver his thanks, nothing more, he reminded himself as he went downstairs and out the kitchen door, pausing to kiss Annie, who was churning butter on the porch.

“You’re goin’ to see that woman, aren’t you?” she asked with narrowed eyes.

Cal paused. “That woman?’” he repeated, raising an eyebrow at her tone. “I’m going to pay a thank-you call on Olivia Gillespie, who saved my worthless hide.”

Annie looked back down at the churn, her mouth tightening. “Well, just be careful.”

He didn’t know if she meant for him to be careful around Livy, as if she was some dangerous female who might corrupt him merely by breathing the same air, or to be careful in general, after what had happened in Bryan, and he didn’t ask.

He saddled Blue, a roan gelding. Sam had taken Goliad, his stallion, to breed a mare who had come into season late, which would help them get a jump on getting the Devlin stud farm back to its former position of prominence.

It was a pleasant hour’s ride southeast to Gillespie Springs, over rolling farmland that paralleled the Brazos River. In the spring some of these fields would be flooded for rice growing. In others, on higher ground, cotton would be grown, but now desiccated rows of the dried plants stood minus their white bolls, except for a few dirty white puffs scattered around. Cattle and horses grazed in some of the fields. A mockingbird sang from its perch in a gnarled live oak.

Reaching the little town of Gillespie Springs, which stood where the road bent to accommodate the wide red expanse of the Brazos, Cal stopped when he saw a sign on a building that said Jail. He didn’t know where else to inquire about the way to Livy’s place, and in view of recent events, he figured the sheriff would know.

He did, though the puzzled frown on his weathered old face made it clear he couldn’t understand why the decent-looking stranger in the black frock coat would want to know.

“Miz Gillespie’s place? Down there at the end a’ town, across from where the springs is,” he replied curtly to Cal’s inquiry, and then went back to the dinner he’d been eating at his desk when Cal came in.

Cal got back on Blue and rode the half mile back in the direction from which he had just come, where a stand of cottonwoods revealed the existence of the springs the town had been named for. A sign proclaimed the shady grove Gillespie Springs Park, but across the road a fence much in need of mending enclosed a white frame, two-story house with a dried-up front lawn. A windmill creaked in back next to a barn. In the pasture beyond the barn a cow bawled mournfully once or twice.

Then it was utterly quiet except for the clucking of some pullets looking for bugs among the sad-looking, wilted roses. No one answered his knock.

Perhaps she wasn’t home, but did she have no one to help her with the house or the livestock? Had the Mexican alleged to be her lover been the only employee the Gillespies had?

Could she be in the barn, gathering eggs or doing some similar chore? He walked around the side of the house.

Was the ache of regret never going to get any easier to bear? Olivia wondered, standing in the shade of the big cottonwood tree that stood in the backyard between the house and the barn. She stared down at the makeshift grave marker, which was actually a hunk of limestone she’d waded into the spring to get. Smoothed and rounded by centuries of running water, it had been as heavy as her heart felt now. Behind it, she’d lashed two sticks together to form a cross. Someone—one of his Mexican friends or relatives, she assumed—had hung a rosary on the cross and left three roses in an earthen jar. She never saw these offerings left; she assumed whoever brought them came at dawn or after dark, or during the rare times she went to the stores in town.

Francisco, you deserve better than this, she thought, feeling the familiar stinging of tears in her eyes. You deserve better than a makeshift marker and a grave in the yard of the woman whose lover they say you were. But the sheriff had had a vicious sense of humor and had insisted Francisco be buried here—”so you don’t ever forgit what you done, Miz Gillespie.”

Livy had half expected the Mexicans in the community to move Luna’s body in the dark of night to someplace else—to one of their yards over on North Street, perhaps, for there was no Catholic church in Gillespie Springs. But maybe they felt Francisco had already suffered enough, for the grave had not been disturbed.

Rest in peace, Francisco. You know and I know it was all a lie.

Something—a rustling in the grass, a snapping of some tiny twig—warned her she was no longer alone.

She whirled, already wondering what she could use for a weapon, for she hadn’t had one the last time she’d been taken by surprise.

The man standing at the edge of the tree’s shade was a stranger to her, yet not a stranger—tall and lean, his hair streaked with gray, a patch over his right eye. It was the latter detail that caused the hand that had curved instinctively over her abdomen to relax.

“Cal?” she breathed. “What are you doing here? Are you…are you all right?” she asked, remembering the day she’d seen him in Bryan, beaten senseless to within an inch of his life. “You—you’re growing a mustache…” she babbled, as he came closer.

He smoothed long fingers over it self-consciously. “Yeah, I thought it might cover up one of my new scars, at least. But I’ve mended, thanks to you. Sam told me what you did that day, and I—I just came to thank you. I reckon I might be singin’ with the angels now—or worse—if you hadn’t shot off that gun.”

“I—I didn’t even know who you were when I stepped forward,” she said, staring at him, seeing a new scar on his cheek. Even in the shadows she could see the faint discoloration that remained around his left eye.

“Or you wouldn’t have helped me?” His mouth curved into an ironic smile, a smile that transformed the scarred face into one that still had the power to make her heart pound.

“No! Yes! I meant I…well, I would have helped anyone in your position,” she said, feeling flustered. “I— I just didn’t find out it was you until one of those rowdies said you deserved it because of fighting for the Yankees,” she added, but when she saw his face cloud over at the mention of the war, she wished she could unsay it.

“And what do you say, Livy?” he asked, in that husky drawl that had always wreaked havoc with her resistance. “Are you still mad at me for wearing blue?”

No. Livy wanted to say. Oh, no. Cal. I’ve had thousands of hours to regret not telling you to do what you had to do, then return to me safely. She heard the unspoken question in the tone of his voice, saw in his face his desire to recapture what they once had. She had but to say the right words and he would reach out and they would begin to bridge the enormous gap between them.

“Cal,” Livy began, “it was a long time ago. Years. A lot has happened,” she said, and was about to ask if he still wanted to be her friend in spite of what was being said about her when his eye fell on what lay behind her.

She saw when he grasped the fact that she was standing in front of a grave, then noticed his gaze narrow and realized he must have glimpsed the roses.

“Your husband?” he asked, staring at her. “They buried Daniel Gillespie here?”

“No, it’s not Dan,” she said. “Dan’s buried in the cemetery next to the church, at the other end of town. No, that’s…it’s Francisco Luna.” She saw his confusion. “He’s—he’s the one Dan killed…before he killed himself.”

The puzzled expression was transformed into one of understanding, and then he frowned. “Livy, you had him buried here? You put flowers on his grave? Then— then it’s true, isn’t it?”

She saw him take an involuntary step back, even as her brain screamed with disappointment. Then it’s true he was your lover—that’s what Cal meant. And then her disappointment changed to anger, anger that he was just like everyone else in Gillespie Springs who had judged her based on what was said, without giving her a chance to defend herself.

He added, “But…was that wise? After what happened?”

Livy saw his gaze shift to her belly, and knew that he’d seen the slight thickening there. She crossed her arms protectively over her abdomen in that age-old, unconscious gesture of a pregnant woman, feeling the anger rise and surround her like flames.

“You think what you want to think, Caleb Devlin, it doesn’t make any difference to me. And yes, I am still angry at you, you—you traitor! One of my brothers was killed, and the other one never bothered to come home. My husband came back a broken, bitter shell of a man. Daddy died of a broken heart when we couldn’t pay the taxes on the plantation. And you think I shouldn’t be angry at you? And what business is it of yours if I gave six feet of earth in my own yard to Francisco Luna?”

She watched as a muscle worked in Cal’s jaw. “Livy, I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s none of my business. I was just—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she told him. “I’d have thought after your beating you’d have a little compassion for other outcasts, but as that doesn’t appear to be the case, you can just get out of here!”

“Livy, please—”

“No! Get out!

But he just stood there, and with a little cry, she ran for the house, slamming the door. She headed for the stairs, intending to run up to the sanctuary of her room, where she could give in to the tears that threatened to overwhelm her, safe from his probing gaze.

She had reached the second-to-last step when she slipped.

Even outside, he heard her scream, and with the scream, the curious paralysis that had made him stand there while she denounced him vanished. In a few short strides he’d reached the door and wrenched it open. Thank God she hadn’t taken time to lock it.

“Olivia?” he called, striding into the kitchen. “Where are you?” And then he almost stepped on her, lying in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs that led up from the kitchen.

“Olivia?”

She lay on her side, her knees drawn up against her abdomen, her skirts twisted around her ankles. Her eyes were closed, her face pasty white, like a poorly bleached muslin sheet. Moisture beaded her upper lip.

Her eyelids fluttered at the sound of his voice, then opened. She blinked once, twice, as if trying to focus.

“Olivia, it’s me, Cal,” he said, kneeling at her side. “What’s happened to you? Did you fall?”

Her eyes drifted shut again. “I guess so…” she murmured. “Slipped…”

“Can you get back up? Does anything seem like it’s broken?” he asked, feeling the delicate bones of her wrists and wondering if she even realized who he was.

“Can’t… Dizzy, bleeding…” she said, and then some spasm seemed to seize her and she clutched her abdomen and moaned.

Cal hadn’t seen the blood at first because of the black widow’s weeds she was wearing, but as he started to scoop her up off the floor he felt the warm dampness on the back of her skirts and saw the crimson stain of blood on his forearm.

“Olivia! What’s happening? Are you—are you…” How did one delicately ask a lady if she were losing the baby he wasn’t supposed to acknowledge she was carrying?

Her eyelids fluttered open and she gazed at his face as if puzzled for a few seconds. “Yes…I’m miscarrying. And do you know what? I’m…glad….”

Her announcement stunned him. “You’re miscarrying? Lord God, Livy, you need a doctor! I’ll get him— where is he?”

“Right in town…next to the bank. But he won’t come…hates me, too…”

“I don’t care. You need help, so he’s going to have to see you,” he told her, but then realized she couldn’t hear him, for she had passed out.

For a moment he considered what he should do. Livy’s pulse was rapid, faint, and her skin felt cool and clammy. The port-wine flood beneath her was growing. He thought about riding hell-for-leather back down the road to the doctor’s, but did he dare leave her for so long while he went to persuade some stiff-necked hypocrite to do his medical duty? Deciding the answer was no, he strode back down the hall, grabbed an afghan he’d seen folded up on the back of a horsehair sofa and wrapped it around Livy, then lifted her and carried her to where Blue stood tied under a tree.

Galloping back into town with her cradled in his arms, he found the bank at the center of town and the doctor’s office in the building that stood just next to it, as Livy had said.

The chairs in the small waiting room were fully occupied by a woman and her handful of children, all of whom gaped at the sight of the stranger who strode in carrying the town’s most notorious female.

“Mama! That man’s got a patch on his eye like a pirate, and the lady’s bleedin’!” one boy cried. He pointed at the trail of blood behind Cal, causing his mother to gasp and pull him against her ample bosom.

“The doctor—where is he?” Cal demanded curtly, when it seemed the woman was only going to stare in horror.

She pointed to the door at the other end of the waiting room. “In there. But you’ll have to wait, just like we are. He—he has a patient—”

Cal didn’t wait. He strode over to the door and called through it, “Doc, I got a sick woman here—she needs help now.”

“Be with you in a few minutes,” a raspy voice answered in a disinterested fashion.

That wasn’t going to be good enough. Cal steadied his unconscious burden, then kicked the door open, surprising the elderly sawbones and his “patient,” another elderly gent who sat opposite the doctor across the examining table, on which lay a checkerboard and checkers.

Cal kicked the game off the table, sending the wooden disks flying.

“Now wait just a minute, stranger. You can’t—” began the doctor, putting down a bottle of whiskey.

“This woman needs your help now,” he told the astonished sawbones as he laid Livy gently down on the now-empty examining table. “I think she’s losing her baby.”

Recovering his professional poise, the doctor bustled over to his patient, while the other old man continued to stare with undisguised curiosity.

“But that’s Miz Gillespie!” the doctor said in consternation after he saw her face. He seemed to freeze in place.

“You got a problem with her name, Doc?” snapped Cal, allowing his hand to hover suggestively near the gun on his hip. “Seems to me it doesn’t matter who she is right now, just that she needs your help. And I’ll pay your fee, if that’s the problem.”

The doctor stared at the gun, then back at Cal’s face. “I guess you’re right, Mr.—?”

“Caleb Devlin.”

“Mr. Devlin. Very well, then, I’ll see what’s to be done. Hap, we’ll finish our, uh, business later,” he said to the other old man. “Why don’t you show Mr. Devlin back out to the waiting room?”

“I don’t think—” began Cal.

But the doctor was very much in command now. “Go on, you can’t wait in here, even if you was this woman’s husband, which I believe you ain’t. Go on out to the waiting room. And you tell that Ginny Petree an’ her endless brood a brats with sore throats that it’s gonna be awhile.”

Chapter Four

Cal retreated, but he knew he wasn’t going to be able to remain in the tiny waiting room with half a dozen children studying his eye patch while their mama stared pointedly at the dried blood on his arm and the dark red splotches on the floor. He went on outside and stood stroking Blue’s nose at the hitching post, wishing there was something he could do while he waited.

As if in answer, a shot rang out inside the bank building next door, and a heartbeat later, a woman screamed. Then her screams blended with shouting, just as three masked men dashed out of the bank, one of them carrying an obviously full, heavy gunnysack.

Even as Cal tensed to respond, the sheriff came running out of his office opposite the bank, drawing his gun. He aimed, fired, and one of the bandits, the one carrying the gunnysack, went down with a hoarse cry. But then one of his partners fired, even as the other one snatched up the gunnysack, and Cal saw the weathered old face of the sheriff go rigid with agony as he clutched his chest and fell, measuring his length in the dusty street.

Everyone else who had been on the street had taken cover, Cal noted as he took aim over the withers of his horse. Good, then his shot wouldn’t be apt to hit an innocent person. He fired, and his shot dropped the man who had gunned down the sheriff.

Cal hadn’t shot at a man since the first half of the war, but evidently his practice had paid off, he thought grimly as the outlaw fell.

Now the only one alive, the third bandit looked wildly in Cal’s direction before yanking his mount’s reins from the hitching post. He aimed a wild shot that whistled harmlessly past Cal, then vaulted into the saddle, still clutching the gunnysack by its drawstrings, and spurred his horse. “Hyaaah! Giddap!”

The world narrowed to the back of that fleeing outlaw as Cal took aim again. He fired as the horse hit a full gallop, and saw the bloody hole appear in the outlaw’s upper back. The man’s arms flailed wide, dropping the gunnysack. Coins spilled out the loose top and into the dirt. Boneless as a rag doll, the man fell from the saddle, landing with a thud. The horse galloped on.

In the momentary silence that followed, punctuated only by the pounding hoofbeats, Cal was barely aware of the faces plastered at every window as he holstered his gun. It was over. The outlaws were all dead.

A moment later there was an explosion of noise as people shoved and elbowed their way out of the bank, the general store, the saloon and into the street, hollering back and forth to one another about what had just taken place. A couple of men went to the fallen sheriff, turned him gently over, and when they saw there was nothing to be done, closed his eyes. They did likewise for the bandits who had died just outside the bank. But the rest of the townspeople started to clap and cheer.

“That was some shooting, mister!” someone cried ‘ out.

“He can see to shoot better with just one eye than most men can with both a theirs!” Cal heard an excited youth say. The boy ran the few yards to the body of the bandit who had fallen from his horse.

He turned the man over with his foot. “He’s dead, all right! Shot right through the heart!” he called. He ran a few feet back and snatched up the bag, stuffing in the coins that had spilled out. “An’ here’s the money, all safe an sound!”

Cal ignored the praise. Oh, he’d done the right thing. But he had killed two men in little more than the time it had taken to blink twice, and even though one of them had murdered the sheriff, he couldn’t rejoice in the fact that he had taken two human lives. He felt sick inside. He wanted to flee from the sight of the exultant faces he saw around him; he even turned to mount Blue, forgetting all about Livy being inside the doctor’s office. But as he was loosening the gelding’s reins, someone clapped him on the back.

“That was quick thinking, mister, and excellent shooting, like the boy said.”

Cal turned, intending to tell whoever it was to just leave him the hell alone, but before he could get the words out, the prosperously dressed man wearing a handlebar mustache extended his hand.

“James Long, mayor of Gillespie Springs. I’m also the owner of the hotel.” He beamed at Cal.

In spite of himself, Cal found himself returning the handshake, though he couldn’t return his smile. “Cal Devlin.”

“Well, Mr. Devlin, you have the town’s thanks for your quick actions, which saved their hard-earned funds on deposit in the bank.”

“Too bad I wasn’t fast enough to save the sheriff,” Cal muttered. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“All in good time, sir,” Long persisted, keeping a hand on Cal’s arm. “As you pointed out, the town has been tragically deprived of its peace officer. And I’m repeating myself, but I’m impressed with your quick action and accurate shooting. Might you be interested in the job?”

“I’m no lawman, I’m a minister,” Cal replied.

“Oh?” Long was surprised, of course. “And where is your pulpit, if I may ask?”

“Well…” Cal hesitated, not knowing if the man had heard of the notorious minister in Bryan who had fought for the Union. While he wasn’t exactly reveling in the mayor’s praise, he didn’t want that praise to turn to disgust, either. “I guess you could say I’m not exactly employed as a man of the cloth right now. But—”

“Doing anything else you can’t leave?” interrupted another well-dressed gentleman, who had just joined the mustachioed mayor.

“No, I can’t honestly say that I am.”

“Mr. Devlin, this here is Mr. Robert Gillespie, the bank president,” Long informed him, and the stocky man extended his hand.

So this was the brother of Livy’s late husband, the man who coveted the small farm left to Livy. He wasn’t at all thin, but somehow Cal had the impression that if Robert Gillespie had been an animal, he’d have been a weasel. Maybe it was the utter coldness of his gray eyes.

“Well, Mr. Devlin, I can only add my urgings,” Gillespie said in a rich, cultured voice. “We have a preacher here in Gillespie Springs, and we had a sheriff, but God rest Olin Watts’s soul, we don’t have a sheriff anymore.”

“Now the way I see it,” Long added in his earnest manner, “bein’ a lawman is just as much servin’ the Lord an’ your fellow man as bein’ a minister is. In both jobs, you stand up for what’s right, am I correct?”

Cal couldn’t argue with that. “I reckon so. But surely there’s a better choice than a one-eyed man,” he said, with a gesture toward his eye patch.

Long’s gaze went to the bodies of the three dead bandits, and then he lifted an eyebrow. “Those fellows wouldn’t agree with you, I think.”

“But—”

“By the power vested in me as mayor, I’m offerin’ you the job, son.”

“And I concur,” added Robert Gillespie.

“But you don’t know anything about me. I could be a murderer or a thief myself,” Cal protested. Or a man who served with the Yankees. He particularly wondered if Gillespie would be so hearty in his urgings if he knew that Cal had just aided his sister-in-law. And then he remembered Livy, whom he had left bleeding in the doctor’s office, and suddenly he was anxious to be done with this interview and see about her.

“I don’t have to know anything,” Long insisted. “What I saw was a man who didn’t have any reason to mix himself up in our troubles—you didn’t know the sheriff, you didn’t have any money in this bank, but you did the right thing anyway. In my book that makes you the right man for the job. Say you’ll at least give it a try. You get your quarters above the sheriffs office gratis of course, free dinner every day from the saloon, supper from the hotel, and forty dollars a month, too. It’s a good deal, I’d say.”

Forty dollars a month—not much more than what the average ranch hand earned. Cal eyed the townspeople, who were staring back at him, some smiling, some solemn—but in none of the faces did he see the hatred he had seen in the faces of the folks in Bryan. Of course, none of these people knew what color his uniform had been in the war, or that he had spent the last half of that war fighting for neither side. They might not be so quick to grin at him if they knew.

But in the meantime, until they found out, he could try being sheriff. Maybe before the gossip spread from Bryan, he could do such a good job that it wouldn’t matter which side he had taken in the war. Hadn’t he been looking for something he could do, something he could call his own?

“All right,” he said. ‘I’ll give it a try.”

Several of the onlookers cheered and clapped again. Gillespie bent over the fallen sheriff and unpinned his badge. He handed it to Long, who wiped it with a handkerchief before holding it out to Cal.

Cal took it, breathed deeply and pinned it to his shirt.

The mayor extended his hand again, and Cal shook it, unsmiling, but that didn’t dampen the mayor’s sense of ceremony. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to present the new sheriff of Gillespie Springs, Cal Devlin!”

The cheers and clapping began all over again, and the throng was just rushing toward Cal when, from behind him, someone cleared his throat.

“Mr. Devlin!” the doctor called from his open doorway.

Cal watched as the doctor caught sight of the bodies by the bank, saw his eyes widen as he realized that one of them was the sheriff. Then the sawbones turned back to Cal and Cal knew he had spotted the badge he had just pinned on.

“All dead?”

Cal nodded.

“Hmmph. Heard the shots, but I was busy with— with the lady you brought in. If I could just have a word with you?”

Cal nodded again and, grateful for the doctor’s timely interruption and for the fact that he hadn’t mentioned Olivia’s name, left the townspeople who had just been about to surround him.

He followed the sawbones back into the office, past Ginny Petree, who glared at him, and her children, who stared at him goggle-eyed. No doubt she would spread the news soon enough that just before he became the new sheriff, Cal had carried Olivia Gillespie into the doctor’s office. He wondered what the president of the Gillespie Springs Bank would make of the gossip.

The doctor didn’t take him into the examining room, however, but into a small room adjacent to that.

“Is she—is she going to be all right?” Cal asked.

The doctor folded his arms across his barrel chest. “She is, though she’ll need someone to watch her close overnight—she lost a lot of blood, you know.”

Cal knew. “The—the…” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

“The baby?” the doctor filled in briskly, his gaze piercing. “She lost it. Ordinarily I’d say ‘unfortunately,’ but under the circumstances…”

Cal looked down at his boots, not knowing what to say. Livy’s words, when he’d found her at the bottom of the stairs, echoed in his ears. Yes, I’m miscarrying…and I’m glad…

Had she been rejoicing that she would no longer have to bear the child who had been the evidence of her sin? As understandable as that was, Cal found it hard to believe the Livy he had known could think that way. Had she cared so little for her slain lover that she would only be relieved to lose his baby? But perhaps she had changed since he had left for the war. Perhaps he had never really known her at all.

The doctor’s raspy voice intruded into his thoughts. “I hope you’ll pardon me fer askin’, but I’m just wonderin’ how you come into this? How’d you happen to be, uh…were you—were you with Miz Gillespie… when the miscarriage began?”

Cal started to say yes, for it was the truth, and then he realized what the doctor had meant by “with” and he felt fury rising in him at the implication. He met the old man’s inquisitive gaze. “I was just pay in’ a call on Mrs. Gillespie to thank her for a kindness she did me recently,” he nearly growled, fighting the urge to punch the sawbones in the nose for what he was implying. “She fell down the stairs, and I’m the one who found her.”

The doctor must have realized he’d offended him, for he took another look at the badge on Cal’s chest. “I meant no offense,” he said quickly. “Just curious, is all…”

“Can I see her?” Cal wanted to see Livy, but he also wanted to escape the questions he knew the doctor was dying to ask.

The man nodded. “She was asleep when I left her, but I imagine she’ll rouse when you talk to her.” He gestured for Cal to follow him.

“Why, Cal, you waltz divinely!” she said, laughing up at the handsome young rector of the Bryan Episcopal Church, who released her with obvious reluctance as the music died. She glanced around, and just as she’d suspected, the eyes of almost all the ladies at the ball were on them, and they were envious eyes. And why shouldn’t they be? She’d been dancing with the catch of Brazos County, and he looked as if he couldn’t bear to give her up to her next partner. She didn’t want him to, either. There was a way she could keep him with her, but would he think her fast? He might…but if she didn’t try she’d never know.

“Cal…” she said, allowing, her lashes to flutter as she looked up at him over her fan, “would you like to take a turn in the garden? I think I’m…a little too warm…”

He smiled down at her, enthusiasm dancing in his wonderful gray-blue eyes. “Miss Livy, I can’t think of anything on this earth I’d like better…”

“Livy…” murmured a voice.

Was it the same voice she’d been hearing in her dream? “Mmm, yes…” she answered.

She extended her hand to Cal and together they stepped through the French windows and out into the rose garden, lit only by the light from the Childress ballroom.

“Livy,” the voice said again. “Livy, can you hear me? Open your eyes.”

Obediently, she did so, but it seemed like such an effort. Her lids seemed weighted down with rocks.

A face, bending low over her, swam into focus. It was the same face she’d seen just moments ago—surely it was just moments ago—under the cottonwood in her backyard.

“Ah, you’re awake,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

How was she feeling? How should she be feeling? she wondered as she studied his solemn face, and then she became aware of the insistent cramping within her belly.

And then she remembered the fall, the sudden sharp pain that had seized her as she struggled to regain her senses at the foot of her stairs and the gushing wet warmth between her legs. She had miscarried the baby, she remembered, and for a moment, sorrow for the loss of that innocent life flooded over her as she lay there looking up into Cal’s concerned face.

But where am I? she wondered as she took her eyes from his face and looked around the tiny room. She recognized at last that she was in Doc Broughton’s examining room—the same room in which he’d told her, just weeks ago, that she was with child. A fact she had already suspected, but the confirmation of that fact had filled her with horror. And the same fact had left the doctor’s face stern with disapproval, for it was, unfortunately, well-known that Dan Gillespie had come back from the war unable to perform his husbandly duties.

But now she was no longer going to bear the baby whose brief existence within her had brought about her disgrace. Sorrow became mingled with a regretful relief. As much as she had longed for a child, this one would have been born into a world of ugliness, and her love for it would have had to exist side by side with her hatred for its father.

“I’m tired,” she managed to whisper at last. “So tired…”

“The doctor says you’re going to be all right,” Cal said, nodding toward the door he’d closed behind him. “But you lost the baby.”

“I—I guessed,” she admitted.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, his gaze leaving hers, but not before she had seen the question in his eye.

Then she remembered the way he had found her, and how she had told him she was miscarrying, and that she was glad Heavens above, what a heartless monster she must have sounded—to have admitted to a man she had once known so well that she was glad to be losing a baby, whatever the circumstances of its conception! What must he think of her?

“It’s for the best,” she told him.

His penetrating gaze returned to her face. She had forgotten he could study her that way and see to the depths of her soul, and the ability seemed undiminished by the patch that now covered one eye.

She was unable to stop the tears that belied her words.

He reached out and caught a tear with a finger. “You rest now, Livy. I’ll talk to the doctor and see what’s to be done.”

Just then she caught sight of the shiny, five-pointed star pinned to his chest, and she grabbed at his wrist before he could leave.

“Why are you wearing that?” she asked, puzzled.

His face grew guarded. “Don’t worry about that right now, Livy.”

He started to gently disengage his hand, but she tightened her grasp. “No, please tell me. I—I thought I heard shots earlier…”

“Seems there was a bank robbery taking place just about the time I was layin’ you down there,” he said, indicating the examining table she was still lying on. “The sheriff was killed. I stopped them and…well, seems I’m the sheriff of Gillespie Springs now.”

It was a lot of news to digest on top of what had happened to her today. In addition, the doctor had given her something to drink and it was making her feel so muzzy-headed…

“So…you’re the new sheriff…” she murmured, and then she let her too-heavy lids drift shut again.

He found the doctor waiting for him in the hallway. The old coot had probably been listening at the keyhole, Cal thought with irritation.

“You were saying that Mrs. Gillespie was going to need someone to be with her,” Cal began.

“Just a few days, till she gets her strength back,” the doctor said. “She an’ Dan used ta have some widow woman to help with the cleanin and such, but she hightailed it outa there when—when Dan Gillespie died, and I can tell you she wouldn’t come back.”

“You know some woman who might be willing to take the job?” Cal asked the doctor. “Some woman who needs the money more than she worries about what people think?”

The sawbones looked doubtful. “I dunno. Folks is pretty disapprovin’ a’ what they say Miz Gillespie did.”

Cal felt a surge of anger. Livy needed another female with her at such a time, damn it. There were things she’d need done, questions she’d have—and only another woman would do. He’d stay with her himself if there was no other choice—he wouldn’t let her be alone—but he knew that was the last thing Olivia Gillespie would want and the last thing her reputation needed, especially right now.

“You might ask around town,” the sawbones said. “Mebbe they’d listen, since it was you askin’. You’re ridin’ pretty high in folks’ opinions right now. But meanwhile, I gotta get back to my patients. And I’m gonna have to see them in my watting room,” he added, as if it were somehow Cal’s fault that his sole examining room was occupied.

“Give me an hour,” Cal said shortly. “I’ll see if I can find someone, then I’ll locate a wagon and take her home.”

“Good luck,” Broughton said, a skeptical note in his voice as he headed into his waiting room to see Ginny Petree’s restless brats.

As he left the doctor’s office, Cal was hailed by Mayor Long from the steps of the Gillespie Springs Bank.

“Devlin? Everything all right?”

Perhaps Long would know of a woman who could stay with Olivia, he thought, striding over the planking that led to the bank next door.

“Oh, everything’s fine,” he said. “I was…just checking on a friend.”

Too late, Cal saw Gillespie standing in the shadows, just inside the bank door. Hellfire, Cal thought, borrowing one of Sam’s favorite expressions. He couldn’t very well ask Long if he knew a woman who could help Livy for a few days right in front of the brother-in-law who hated her.

“We were concerned when we saw you go into the doctor’s office,” Gillespie said, his voice purring. “I trust you were not injured in the fray? I assure you, the town will pay all bills incurred in the line of duty.”

“No, I wasn’t, Mr. Gillespie.”

“Oh please, call me Bob. All my friends do,” said Gillespie, slapping Cal on the back. “And I’ll call you Cal, if that’s agreeable?”

Cal hoped the fact that he detested Gillespie’s familiarity and overhearty voice didn’t show as he nodded. “Bob, I won’t keep you from your duties,” he said. “I was just hoping the mayor would be kind enough to show me around the jail—you know, where the keys are kept and so forth?”

As he’d hoped, Gillespie either took the hint or wasn’t interested in such mundane details, and said he was sure he’d be seeing Cal around town. But Cal was aware of the bank president’s eyes boring into his back as he and Long crossed the street to the jail.

Was it only a couple of hours ago that Cal had entered this office to ask where he might find Olivia? How ironic that he was now returning as its new sheriff. He didn’t mention his previous visit to Long, though. Instead he listened and watched patiently as Long showed him around inside, pointing with pride at the two cells—fortunately empty, Cal noted.

Long tsked as he observed that the sheriffs desk still bore the remains of his dinner—a meal Cal had so recently seen the sheriff eating.

“As I said, your quarters are up above,” the mayor explained. “You reach it by a stairway out back. Come on, I’ll show you,” he said, reaching inside the desk for a ring of keys. “But I’ll warn you, Olin Watts, the old sheriff, wasn’t known for bein’ neat. Every so often he’d have this Mexican woman come and tidy up, but Watts was kinda stingy with a coin, so she only did it once in a blue moon.”

Cal followed him back outside and up the weathered steps.

The mayor hadn’t exaggerated the late sheriffs lack of tidiness, and apparently there hadn’t been a blue moon lately, for clothes lay haphazardly piled over the room’s only chair. The bed was unmade, the wrinkled sheets yellowed with age and lack of washing. Halfempty cans of beans and cups with coffee rings took up half of the table. The other half was littered with yellowed newspapers. A daguerreotype was nailed to the cracked plaster wall, and as Cal bent to study it he saw that it had been taken at a hanging, for it featured three dangling bodies with hoods over their heads, their necks bent at unnatural angles.

“The Galtry brothers, horse thieves,” read the scrawled notation on the plaster wall, “hanged March 8, 1868.”

“He certainly had an odd sense of the artistic,” Cal said, straightening and turning from the picture.

Long chuckled, then looked dismayed as he surveyed the clutter. “That Mexican woman’ll come and clean this for you. I’m really sorry, Cal. Why don’t we put you up at the hotel tonight—at the town’s expense, of course? I’ll have Jovita Mendez come and set it all to rights this evening.”

Cal had been conscious of the quickly passing minutes and had wondered how he was going to bring up the subject of the woman he needed to find for Olivia, but perhaps James Long had just supplied the opening he needed.

“Aw, don’t worry about this mess, it won’t take long to straighten up in here. But I do need to find a woman, now that you mention it—”

James Long grinned. “Right behind the saloon there’s a brothel of sorts. There’s two-three sportin’ women that live there—I imagine they can cure what ails you.”

Cal couldn’t help but smile at the way the mayor had mistaken his meaning. “No, I don’t mean that kind of female. You mentioned a woman who’d come and clean? Mrs. Daniel Gillespie just happens to be…an old acquaintance of mine, and she’s, uh…been real ill,” he said, praying Long wouldn’t press him for details. The full story would be spread soon enough, by that nosy mother in the waiting room. “The doctor said she was gonna need someone to stay with her for a few days, and I was just wonderin’ if perhaps this woman you mentioned would be willing? I’d pay her.”

He saw the mayor’s sunny expression become clouded. “Miz Gillespie’s…a friend a yours?” There was a world of insinuated meaning in the way he said friend.

“An old friend, from my growin’ up days in Bryan,” Cal said, careful to keep his voice casual. “I’m just try in’ to help her out….”

“Yes, of course,” Long said quickly, not meeting Cal’s eye. “Sure, I imagine Jovita Mendez’d be glad to earn some money takin’ care a’ Miz Gillespie. She probably doesn’t earn much takin’ in mendin’ and cleanin houses and such. Come on, I know where we can find her.”

By the time the sun was setting, Cal had hired the middle-aged Mexican woman, who was pathetically grateful for the job, and together they had brought Livy back to her own house in the buckboard Cal had found behind the barn, pulled by Blue.

Jovita Mendez insisted on fixing him supper after she’d tucked a sleepy Olivia into bed, and with her new employer’s permission, sent some clean sheets with him when he at last took his leave.

“That Senor Watts, he was a peeg, Dios rest his soul,” she said, crossing herself as she handed him the sheets at the door. “Don’t you worry, Señor Devleen. I weel take good care of the señora for you.”

He started to tell her that it wasn’t for him, exactly, but he guessed that this plump woman, unlike the rest of the town, was not an inveterate gossip. And that the shrewd eyes saw more than he might have wished. “Thank you, Jovita,” he said simply. He went to the barn to collect his horse, knowing he’d have to settle him at the livery stable before seeking his own rest.

He hoped his mama and Annie weren’t going to worry when he didn’t show up back at the farm tonight. In the summer, he could have ridden Blue home before it had gotten fully dark, but he wasn’t about to chance the roan breaking a leg loping over the road on this moonless autumn night. He’d get up early the next morning and ride home in time for breakfast, tell his family about his new job as sheriff and be back in Gillespie Springs before noon.

At the same time as Cal was struggling to make the room over the jail fit for human occupation—at least fit enough so he could get some sleep without worrying about roaches carrying him off—a conversation was taking place at Gillespie’s habitual table at the Last Chance Saloon.

“Thought you’d want to know I was takin’ care a’ your sister-in-law this mornin’, just about the time Olin Watts was gettin’ gunned down,” Doc Broughton said, then took a sip of his whiskey.

Robert Gillespie raised a brow at the cold-blooded way Broughton had mentioned the killing of the sheriff, then growled, “What makes you think I’d care about that murdering bitch?”

“Oh, I think you’ll care,” murmured the sawbones smugly. He puffed on his cigar until Gillespie was about ready to strangle him, but the banker would be damned if he’d ask and thereby show too much interest.

“She lost that baby. Had a fall down the stairs, she told me, an’ started bleedin. She was hemorrhagin’ by the time she was brought in t’me. If our fine new sheriff hadn’t found her, she mighta bled to death.”

“Why didn’t you just let the bitch die?” Gillespie growled.

“Aw, Bob, you know I cain’t do that,” protested Broughton. “I had a waitin’ room fulla people, and that sorta thing ain’t good for business. Ain’t it good enough that now the woman ain’t gonna give birth to no halfgreaser bastard to inherit your brother’s land?”

Gillespie was still examining his mixed emotions about his sister-in-law’s miscarriage. “Yes, I reckon that’s one good thing,” he finally said.

“And besides,” the sawbone continued, “Devlin was appearin’ t’take an interest. Seems he knew the woman…”

By then the rest of what Broughton had said earlier had sunk in. “You say Devlin found her? How’d that happen?” Gillespie demanded, chewing on the end of his own cigar.

The sawbones shrugged. “He said he was just payin’ a call. He’d been real insistent that I drop every thin’ to treat her, and he got real defensive when I, uh, kinda probed around as to how well he an’ your sister-in-law was acquainted.”

Gillespie studied the rotund physician. “Hmm. Now isn’t that interesting? This one-eyed fellow shows up just in time to stop a bank robbery, and he just happens to know Olivia. And he just happens to find her losing her baby. I call that an interesting bunch of coincidences, indeed I do.”

Chapter Five

Predictably, Sarah Devlin wasn’t pleased to hear that her son had taken on the hazardous profession of sheriff.

“Honest to Pete, Caleb Travis Devlin, I just get you back from the dead, and now you’ve taken up the most dangerous profession there is,” she complained as she dished up his second helping of flapjacks. “You might just as well tell me now what hymns you want played at your funeral,” she added tartly.

Cal grinned. “I expect you’d have to hold a funeral here, and you ladies’d have to sing any hymns without accompaniment, ‘cause I don’t reckon Mr. Maxwell would countenance preachin’ my funeral service,” he drawled. Of the three women present, only Mercy returned his smile.

“Cal, you stop teasin’ Mama,” snapped Annie. “You ‘bout worried her to death not showin’ up last night. She’s already imagined you murdered somewhere on the road, and now you come in and tell her you’ve hung a star on your shirt because the last sheriff was killed right in front of you?”

“I already said I was sorry for not returning last night, and why I didn’t,” Cal said evenly. “And you know there isn’t much chance of anything interesting happening in Gillespie Springs again for about another hundred years, so you can stop frettin’. I was hoping someone in this family would wish me good luck, at least.”

“I do, brother,” Sam said from across the table, extending his hand over a plate that had been piled twice as high with flapjacks as Cal’s had. “I think it’s right fine we have a lawman in the family now.”

“You haven’t said why your other arm’s in a sling,” Cal commented.

Now it was Sam’s turn to grin. “That Goliad a’ yours took exception to pullin’ up after he beat Johnson’s stud in a race from their barn to Bryan. That was after he bred their mare, mind you. But don’t worry about me— nothin’s broke, I’m just a little sore.”

“He won’t do that if you give him a treat before he runs—an apple or a lump of sugar or something,” Cal said.

“Now you tell me,” Sam said ruefully, but the twinkle in his eyes showed he didn’t blame Cal. “I think ol’ Goliad’s gonna win us as much money racing as he is in stud fees. Not bad for an old warhorse.”

But Garrick, who’d been sitting silently, pushing his breakfast around on his plate, didn’t let the talk drift to Sam’s favorite topic, horse racing.

“Did you meet up with the Widow Gillespie before you played hero in front a’ the whole town?” he inquired.

Cal finished chewing before he replied. “I did.”

“Is she still, urn, in a ‘delicate condition’?”

“Garrick! I’m sure Cal did not bring up the subject to her!” Annie scolded.

“Annie, you’re becoming a prissy old woman!” Garrick retorted sourly.

Annie gasped and seemed about to reply in kind when Sarah intervened. “Garrick Devlin, you will apologize. I will not have you speaking to your sister in this fashion.”

“Mama, it’s just the truth. Ever since her husband died she’s been as fussy as an old hen.”

Annie sniffed and pulled a lacy handkerchief out of her pocket.

“Sweep your own doorstep first, mister,” came their mother’s firm reply. “You haven’t exactly been sweet as pie yourself these days.”

Annie looked mollified, Garrick sullen.

Cal spoke up before anything else could be said. “As much as I’d love to stay and chat, I’ve got to be getting back. They’ll be expecting to see my face around Gillespie Springs.”

“But Cal, you never told us anything more about Olivia,” protested Annie.

He’d hoped he was going to get by without doing so, but that hope died as he saw the curiosity written all over Annie’s face. He might as well get it over with; the gossip would get back this way before long, anyway.

“Olivia miscarried yesterday,” he said, rising. “Thanks for breakfast, Mama.”

Annie’s mouth dropped, then she clucked sympathetically. “She must have been in town and saw it all?” she guessed.

Cal didn’t bother to set her straight. His inquisitive sister didn’t need to know his role in the matter.

“I expect it was the excitement—the bank robbery and all,” she said knowingly. “Still, it’s probably for the best that she—”

“Goodbye, Mama, everyone,” said Cal firmly, reaching for his hat on the peg by the door. He did not want to discuss the matter any further. He’d spent too much of last night tossing on the lumpy mattress and wondering if Livy’s losing the baby was for the best or not.

“Now you be real careful, Caleb, you hear?” his mother added, just before he shut the door.

“I will, Mama. Don’t you worry,” he told her gently.

He arrived back in Gillespie Springs to find one of his jail cells occupied by a scared-looking lad perhaps ten years old, while an angry, balding man paced in front of the cell.

The man stopped pacing as Cal entered. “Oh, there you are, Sheriff Devlin. 1 took the liberty of arresting this young hooligan until you returned.”

“Oh? And what law did he break?” Cal inquired, studying the white-faced boy huddled on the cell’s cot. The boy stared back, looking more frightened than before as his eyes rested on the black eye patch Cal wore.

“I’m Fred Tyler, and I own the general store. I caught him red-handed, filchin’ the licorice sticks!”

Cal stepped over to the barred alcove, and the boy cringed. “What’s your name, son?”

“D-Davy. Davy Richardson,” the lad quavered, his eyes big as saucers as he gazed up at him. Cal knew he was frightened all the more by the patch and the scars on his face, and felt a rush of sympathy for the boy. But he steeled himself to remain impassive.

“We haven’t met, but I’m Sheriff Devlin,” he told • him. “You know how long a jail sentence a thief usually gets?”

The boy hung his head. “No, sir.”

“It’s about five years,” Cal announced, though he had no idea if this was true. “Did you take the licorice?”

The boy was silent.

“Ask him to stick out his tongue, and you’ll see what the little thief’s been up to,” Tyler suggested from behind him.

Cal felt a flash of irritation at the proprietor’s self-righteous tone, but he didn’t turn around. “Well?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

The boy looked at him for a second, then defiantly stuck out his black tongue—at the storekeeper.

Cal had to struggle not to laugh. “I guess that’s all the proof I need. Davy Richardson,” he said in a stern voice, “I hereby sentence you to five years.”

The boy blanched still further and gulped. “Don’t I get a trial or nothin’? I’m sorry, really I am!”

Cal allowed his face to relax slightly and let himself appear to consider the question. “Nope, no trial. A black tongue is pretty much all the evidence I need to convict you in this case. But I’d consider commuting the sentence…”

“C-commuting? What does that mean?”

“That means I’ll change your sentence to sweeping out the general store, then the jail office here, and when you’ve done so, I’ll declare you’ve paid your debt to society.”

Tyler huffed, “He won’t stick around five minutes to sweep. You’re lettin’ him off too easy, Devlin.”

“Oh, yes he will,” Cal said with certainty. “You know what happens if you don’t finish the job, Davy?”

Davy shook his head warily.

“I’ll form a posse and hunt. you down, and then you’ll get ten years, in addition to the hidin’ your father’ll probably give you when he finds out.”

“I ain’t got no father. He’s dead,” the boy informed him matter-of-factly. “But don’t worry, I’ll finish the job. Now let me outa here—please?”

“All right,” Cal said, removing the keys from the desk with an appropriate flourish. He unlocked the cell, and the boy sprang out as if he’d been there five years already.

“Now hold up there,” Cal said, when the boy would have followed the proprietor out the door. “On your way over to the general store, drop this off at the saloon,” he said, handing him the dirty plate and silverware that had been there ever since yesterday, when Sheriff Watts had been eating what turned out to be his last meal. “Tell them the new sheriff is ready for his dinner whenever it’s convenient, please.”

“Yes, sir!”

Cal waited until the merchant had taken his leave before grinning with satisfaction. He’d just settled the first case of lawbreaking since his term as sheriff had begun. Then he began to go through the desk drawers, which were as messy as the old sheriffs room had been. He supposed he was going to have to hire a deputy, too, for times when he had a prisoner to guard and his duties took him elsewhere.

That task completed, he figured it would be a while before dinner would be delivered from the Last Chance Saloon. He had time to explore a little.

He knew the buildings on Main Street already—the bank, the jail, the doctor’s office, the general store, the livery stable, the Baptist church, the saloon, the hotel, the millinery, the bathhouse and barbershop, and at the far end, across from Livy’s house, Gillespie Springs Park.

He strode down the side street between the bank and the hotel and came to South Street, or so the painted sign proclaimed it. He had already learned that South Street was deemed the more desirable of Gillespie Springs’s two residential streets. The prosperous townspeople—the doctor, the owner of the general store, the mayor, the saloonkeeper and their like—lived in modest but well-built stone-and-frame houses there, the lots separated by picket fences, most of them freshly whitewashed.

At the west end of South Street, up on a little rise, stood an antebellum mansion of red brick on a lawn shaded by ancient live oaks. A brass plate on the black, wrought-iron fence that surrounded the grounds proclaimed that Robert Gillespie lived there. Behind the house stood a circle of frame cabins, which probably had been slave quarters before the war.

So this was Robert Gillespie’s place. He apparently hadn’t believed in sharing his wealth with his younger brother, Cal mused, for the house Livy lived in, while comfortable, was nothing like this.

Leaving the Gillespie mansion behind, he crossed behind the Baptist church and came to North Street, which ran parallel, behind the bathhouse-barbershop, saloon and jail. Here, directly behind the saloon, was the ramshackle row of rooms known as the cribs, where a quartet of whores entertained their customers. The rest of the houses were mostly rickety affairs, too, little better than tar-paper shacks with tin roofs.

North Street was where the employees of the hotel and the bank, and Gillespie Springs’s few immigrants lived, and Long had told him almost all of the humble dwellings were rented from Robert Gillespie. Here and there Cal saw chickens scratching among the weeds that grew alongside the houses, and behind one unpainted, straggling picket fence a fat pink sow lolled in the sunshine. Down the street, three boys were kicking a ball back and forth.

South and North Streets might have been in different worlds, Cal thought as he cut back up the side street that ran between the saloon and the jail. He was tempted to go down to check on Livy now, but he resolutely put it off till after dinner.

The sounds of Jovita’s humming drifted up the stairs to the bedroom, and Olivia smiled. God bless Cal for finding her for me, she thought, and after I spoke the way I did to him, too. How would she have ever managed alone? She still felt weak as a newborn colt. She could hear the plump, middle-aged Mexican woman down in the kitchen now, rattling pots as she cleaned and straightened. A delicious smell wafted up the stairs, caused by the simmering chicken broth Jovita had promised “Señora Gillespie” for dinner.

Just as soon as she regained her strength, Livy would have to apologize to Cal for the harsh way she’d spoken to him, and thank him for hiring Jovita for her—and for saving her life, too, of course! Well, since he was now the sheriff, it wouldn’t be too hard to encounter him casually in town.

Olivia supposed most women would be so overcome with embarrassment at the thought of a man other than their husband having seen them in the midst of such an intimate, female crisis that they would be unable to face that man again. But she had never been one for false modesty. To blush and turn away when a man had saved her life would be unforgivable, in Olivia’s estimation, particularly when it was doubtful anyone else would have lifted a finger to help her.

She’d thank him politely, and that would be that. As much as her heart had warmed at the sight of him, she must not let on.

Cal Devlin had suffered enough in this life, she thought, remembering how he’d been listed as missing in action in the middle of the war, and later given up for dead by his family. Then, just recently, she’d overheard the gossip that he’d been found in Abilene, and was returning home.

It had been a shock, discovering that the bruised, beaten man lying unconscious in the dust at her feet in Bryan was none other than Cal Devlin, but while she and his brother transported him home in her buckboard, pulled by the horse she’d rented from the livery, Sam had filled in the gaps in the story. She’d learned about Cal losing his memory along with the sight in his right eye during the war.

Olivia had grieved inwardly, thinking how hard it must be to come home scarred and maimed, and find such hatred and intolerance in the very town where he’d once been so loved and respected.

When Cal had told her in the doctor’s office that he was now the sheriff, Olivia had heard the reborn pride in his voice even through her laudanum-induced fog. And Jovita, who had gone into town early this morning to purchase a few things from the general store, had returned with the full account of what had taken place outside the bank yesterday. The good folk of Gillespie Springs were apparently quite pleased with their new sheriff.

Which was precisely why he must not associate with her. The very last thing the new sheriff needed, if he was to continue to have the support of the townspeople of Gillespie Springs, was a friendship with the infamous Olivia Gillespie, whom everyone knew had driven her husband to suicide by her infidelity.

She was not going to cry about that again, she vowed, staring out the window at the sunshine stealing through her window. It was a warm day for early November, so Jovita had left the window open a couple of inches. Olivia tried to concentrate on the antics of a squirrel cavorting in the branches of the cottonwood tree, clearly visible from where she lay, but it was no good.

“Whore! You took the very last thing I had left to me, didn’t you? You took my pride, and gave it to that greaser when you lay down for him! And now you tell me you’re gonna have a baby, and you expect me to listen to some crazy tale of some man rapin’ you in the barn! I’m no fool, you lyin’ slut! Bob’s been tellin’ me about you and that Luna, an’ how y’all been lookin’ at one ‘nother…”

“But Dan, you have to believe me!” she pleaded. “Francisco didn’t touch me, I swear to you! It was—”

” ‘Francisco’? Well, I guess you would be on a firstname basis with your Mex lover!” Dan roared, and swung his fist, catching her squarely in the side of her head

Everything had gone black, and when she awoke, it was to the news that Dan had killed Francisco Luna and then turned the gun on himself The sheriff’s disgusted face had frightened her—and then he’d read her the note Dan had left, in which Dan had explained that he had killed his wife’s lover, the father of the baby she carried, and intended next to shoot himself.

Her reason for silence—the need to protect Dan from the truth—was gone, but the sheriff hadn’t wanted to hear her side of the story. Neither had anyone else. Her brother-in-law, Robert, had seen to it that the contents of the note had been circulated about town, and before her husband had even been buried, Olivia had found herself an outcast.

Cal was already an outcast in Bryan; it must not happen to him here, too, not when he’d just gained a chance to build a life for himself. But it would happen if he was known to be friendly with Olivia Gillespie. She would be appreciative of the help he’d given her, but that was all; she’d nip in the bud any further attempts at friendship.

But perhaps it was assuming too much on her part to even imagine he’d want to be her friend, especially when he thought she was the one who’d been putting roses on Francisco’s grave…

All at once she heard the sound of footsteps on the porch below and then a firm knock at the door. She heard Jovita’s humming cease, and the creak of the boards as the Mexican woman went to the door. Then, a moment later, Jovita’s voice. “Buenos tardes, Senor Devleen! Yes, the senora ees much better today! Yes, I am sure she would welcome a visitor. Come een! I’ll just go up and see eef she ees awake first!”

It was surprising how fast a woman of Jovita’s plumpness could move when she was excited. “Senora! Eet ees—”

“Yes, I heard,” Olivia interrupted. “Tell him I’m asleep, won’t you? I’m in no condition to receive callers, Jovita,” she protested, her gesture indicating her nightgown, her hair loose on her pillow, the fact that she was in bed.

But Jovita wouldn’t listen. “Nonsense, senora. Thees ees the man who helped you, no? He looks so anxious— just let heem see you are better, yes?” Before Olivia knew what she was about, Jovita had found and draped a lacy shawl about her shoulders, combed her hair and set the room to rights. A minute later, Cal was entering the bedroom.

He was so tall he had to duck to avoid hitting his head on the lintel. For a moment he just stood there holding his hat in his hands, his presence filling the room as he studied her.

“I—I hope I’m not intrudin’ at a time when you’re not feelin’ very well, Livy,” he began, stroking the brim of his hat self-consciously. “But after yesterday I thought I’d better come see how you were doin’…”

Could he hear the way her heart was pounding? “That was very kind of you, Cal,” she said, being careful to keep her voice coolly polite. “As you can see, I’m much better. Thanks to you.”

He looked down at his boots. “Anyone would have done the same.”

No, they wouldn’t have, she thought, but did not say so.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he said. His eyes returned to hers. “You, uh, you have a mite more color in your face than you had yesterday.”

His observation caused even more blood to come rushing up her neck and into her cheeks, heating them. “Yes, I feel better…Still weak, of course, but I guess that’s to be expected.”

He nodded, still gazing at her in his direct way.

What more was there to say?

“I—I like the mustache,” she said at last, idiotically, when the silence seemed to stretch on uncomfortably. “It looks dashing,” she told him, and meant it.

He gazed at her as if he thought she was loco. “Dashing?” he said with a short, disbelieving laugh, and made a gesture that indicated the scarred right side of his face as he shook his head.

“Yes, dashing,” she insisted, her heart twisting as she realized he thought the scars and the patch had made him ugly.

She was ambivalent about asking him to sit down, afraid he would misinterpret it, that he would think she wanted him to stay. But no, he would be right. She did want him to stay—she just couldn’t let him know that.

It seemed rude to keep him standing, though. “Please, won’t you sit down?” she said, motioning toward the chair beyond the small bedside table.

He looked uncertain. “I—I shouldn’t…can’t stay but a minute…” He sat down, nevertheless.

“Jovita tells me you’re quite the town hero,” she said breezily. “They can’t praise you highly enough, after yesterday.”

He smiled, and his face lost a little of its tenseness. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, that’s all.”

“So modest,” she teased. “I never knew you were such an expert marksman.”

His face grew somber again. “I wish I could do it over again, Livy. Two men are dead because of me. I should have just wounded them, so they could have been captured.”

His anguished face caught at her heart. “You mustn’t blame yourself for their deaths, Cal. One of them murdered our sheriff. The other one could have killed you— I hear he shot at you, but missed. You did what you had to do.”

He looked away. “I know…but I just keep thinkin’ about how I might’ve done it differently…if I’d taken time to think. But I was so angry at seem’ that old man gunned down—he was just tryin’ to do his job…”

That was what Olin Watts had said to her, Olivia thought, after he’d read her Dan’s suicide note. I’m just doin’ my job, Miz Gillespie. But that had nothing to do with the event that was tormenting Cat’s soul now, so she resolutely pushed it aside.

“Look at it this way, Cal. If the robbers had been captured instead, probably both of them would have been hanged for killing the sheriff and for the bank robbery. I’d wager they would rather have died quickly, the way they did, instead of at the end of a rope.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he said, but his expression remained bleak.

“You’ll be a good sheriff,” she assured him. “Gillespie Springs is lucky you came along.” But how was she going to stay away from him if he lived in the same town? They’d never managed to stay away from each other when they’d been growing up, when her family’s plantation and the horse farm he’d been raised on had been so temptingly close. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d awakened to the rattle of pebbles on her window and had gone out to meet him in the moonlight. They’d never done anything that might have ended in disgrace, but they’d come close sometimes…

He sighed. “I hope so. I’d like to be able to uphold the law here without killing anyone ever again. I’m going to try not to, anyway.”

“I know if there’s a way you can avoid it, you will,” Olivia said. “But you be careful, won’t you?” She hoped he wasn’t going to be so wary of drawing his gun again that he’d be an easy target for the next troublemaker that came through.

His face lightened. “Don’t worry, Livy, I will. Well…maybe I’d better be goin’. I don’t want to tire you out.” He glanced at the sheet she had pulled up to cover most of her shoulders. “Would it be okay if I came back when you were feeling better—when you’re up and around?”

Now was the time, she knew. This was when she had to end it.

She took a deep breath and forced herself to meet his gaze. “That won’t be necessary, Cal,” she said, keeping her tone brisk. “I’m sure you’ll have a great many things to do, settling in as the sheriff, and I—”

He stiffened. “I know it isn’t ‘necessary,’ Livy,” he said, his face taking on a wary look. “I asked if I could come back because I wanted to.”

She couldn’t look at him any longer. She couldn’t tell him the truth, for she knew Cal, knew him to be chivalrous to a fault. If he thought she was refusing to see him for his own good, he’d be that much more determined to come.

“Cal, I appreciate all you’ve done, and I thank you, but I think perhaps that better be the end of it,” she said. “We’ve each done the other a favor. Perhaps we should just leave it at that.”

His face seemed suddenly set in stone. “So now we’re even, is that it?”

She looked away, unable to meet his eye. “I don’t mean to be unkind. It’s just that…well, I’m a widow, after all. It hasn’t even been that long, you know.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s the reason.”

Oh, Lord, why was he making it so hard to do the right thing, to send him away for his own good?

She took a deep breath. “Very well,” she said, “you want the truth, and that is that I’ve learned to live without depending on a man, and I find I like it that way.”

Chapter Six

If her words hurt him, it was difficult to tell. The only change she could detect in Cal was a certain stillness, as if he were bracing for the next blow. She waited, her face turned away from him, listening for the sounds of his boot heels thudding down the steps.

The chair creaked, but the only other sound she heard was his intake of breath. She turned back to see him standing by the chair.

“Livy, I…maybe you’re readin’ somethin’ I didn’t mean into my wantin’ to visit. I know you’re recently, uh, bereaved. I—I didn’t mean…”

She looked away again. “Oh, I think you did. But don’t worry about it, Sheriff. I’m used to men assuming too much about me. They assume that since I had a Mexican lover, I’m fair game for any man. Well, I’m not.”

“Now it’s you who’s assuming, Mrs. Gillespie,” he said, his voice cold as a Texas norther. “I wouldn’t dream of interfering with your mourning, no matter who it is you’re mourning for.”

A second later, she heard the door close and the sound of his boots retreating down the steps.

I wouldn’t dream of interfering with your mourning, no matter who it is you‘re mourning for.

Oh, Lord, she had gotten carried away in her defiant pose, and it had succeeded too well. The way she had worded it, it sounded as if she were admitting that the stories about Francisco and her were true. Now Cal believed the gossip—if he hadn’t already—and he would despise her for being a treacherous, faithless woman.

It was for the best, she told herself, even as she sank back into the pillows, scalding tears flooding her eyes.

Cal marched back down the road into the heart of town, head erect, but not really seeing anything or anyone he passed. Her words still stung. How could Livy, the woman who had been his sweetheart years ago, praise him as a hero and compliment his mustache, then turn on him again? As if she hated him, as if she suspected him of—of assuming she was a woman of easy virtue, and wanting to sample her favors!

He hadn’t given much credence to the story of the supposed Mexican lover, until he’d found her standing by his rose-decorated grave. And now she had come right out and admitted it was true! They assume that since I had a Mexican lover, I’m fair game for any man…

Then he thought about what she’d said last—I’ve learned to live without depending on a man, and I find I like it that way…

Well, that was just fine. He was going to be busy being the best sheriff Gillespie Springs ever had. He wasn’t going to have time to be paying courtesy calls on an ill-tempered widow, even if she didn’t have any other friends. She’d made her choice. He’d found Jovita for her, so she wouldn’t be alone and helpless while she regained her strength.

Now, come on, Cal, tell the truth, at least to yourself. Could he honestly say there wasn’t a shred of truth in her accusations? Could he put a hand on his worn, wellthumbed Bible and say he didn’t still want her, that somewhere deep inside he hadn’t been hoping that after a decent interval, she and he might begin again what his going off to war had ended?

No, he couldn’t, but as God was his witness, he hadn’t intended anything dishonorable, anything that would hurt her. But she hadn’t hesitated to hurt him— again.

He let himself remember that other time, back in 1861, when he’d ridden over to Childress Hall, her father’s cotton plantation, to tell her of his decision and to ask her to wait for him.

She’d been wearing a dress of some sort of flimsy, light blue material sprigged with dark blue flowers, over a hoopskirt that swayed when she’d walked across the veranda to meet him, giving him glimpses of her lacetrimmed pantalettes and neat ankles above kid slippers.

“Cal, you must be reading my mind! I was just about to send a note asking you to supper! Delilah’s cooking chicken and dumplings, and strawberry pie, and…” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “But you look so serious! You aren’t still thinking about that silly quarrel we had the other night after the church picnic, are you?”

“Yes. No. That is, not about the quarrel, Livy. You know I can’t stay angry with you. But I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving tomorrow—to join the army. I’ve come to say goodbye, and to ask you to wait for me…if you want to, that is.”

He’d seen her fine eyes narrow into blue storm clouds and the lips he loved to kiss tighten into a furious line. “I might. But it depends. What army are you joining, Cal Devlin?”

“Aw, Livy, don’t make this so hard. You already know the answer to that—I haven’t changed my mind. How can I, when it would be going against all I believe in?”

She’d looked at him as if he were some species of vermin. “Evidently you don‘t find it hard to contemplate going against your fellow Southerners, against other Texans. or to think about having to kill them in battle?”

“Livy, I hate the idea. You know I do. But in this instance my fellow Southerners are wrong, and I have to fight on the side I believe to be right. Livy, my family’s all fired up at me about this, please don’t let it divide us, too! Disagree with me about my choice, but please say you’ll wait for me? This awful conflict isn’t going to last too long, sweetheart. It can’t. The South doesn’t have the wherewithal to fight like the North does. And then we’ll have the rest of our lives to be together, Livy, if you’ll be there waiting for me when I come home to you…”

She’d laughed then, scornfully and without mirth. Her face was that of a stranger, a stranger who smelled a foul odor. “Wait for you? You must be joking, Cal Devlin. Unlike you, I have some loyalty to my country—”

“Your country is the United States of America, Livy,” he’d interrupted her to say. “We’re trying to preserve the Union—”

“My country’is the Confederate States of America now,” she’d informed him in lofty tones. “And as a loyal daughter of the South I despise all her enemies— and that includes you, Caleb Travis Devlin.” She’d turned her back on him before saying, “I suggest you get back up on that stallion and ride outa here before my papa takes a bullwhip to your hide.“

He’d ridden away as ordered then, and left to join the Union army the next day. A year later, in a letter from his mother—Sarah Devlin wrote him regularly, even if she’d deplored his choice—he’d learned that Olivia had married Dan Gillespie, a captain in the Confederate army, when Dan was home on leave.

So much of that world was gone now, almost as if it had never been, Cal thought. He had ridden past Childress Hall on his way to Gillespie Springs. The plantation was a ruin. After Livy’s father had died, shortly after the war ended, the estate had been bought by carpetbaggers at a fraction of its value. Those scoundrels had had no notion of how to manage such a place, parceling it out to sharecroppers and living in just a room or two of the formerly splendid mansion. The big house looked as if it would fall down around their Yankee ears any day now.

Yeah, he’d forgotten Livy could hurt him like that, but he wasn’t going to lie awake at night and ache, as he had after his long-ago dismissal.

He was so deep in thought that he nearly bowled right into a plump matron coming out of the general store.

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