Praise for the novels of
LINDA LAEL MILLER

“A passionate love too long denied drives the action in this multifaceted, emotionally rich reunion story that overflows with breathtaking sexual chemistry.”

—Library Journal on McKettricks of Texas: Tate

“As hot as the noontime desert.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Rustler

“This story creates lasting memories of soul-searing redemption and the belief in goodness and hope.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Rustler

“Loaded with hot lead, steamy sex and surprising plot twists.”

—Publishers Weekly on A Wanted Man

“Miller’s prose is smart, and her tough Eastwoodian cowboy cuts a sharp, unexpectedly funny figure in a classroom full of rambunctious frontier kids.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Man from Stone Creek

“[Miller] paints a brilliant portrait of the good, the bad and the ugly, the lost and the lonely, and the power of love to bring light into the darkest of souls. This is western romance at its finest.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Man from Stone Creek

“Sweet, homespun, and touched with angelic Christmas magic, this holiday romance reprises characters from Miller’s popular McKettrick series and is a perfect stocking stuffer for her fans.”

—Library Journal on A McKettrick Christmas

“An engrossing, contemporary western romance.”

—Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Pride (starred review)

“Linda Lael Miller creates vibrant characters and stories I defy you to forget.”

—#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

Linda Lael Miller
Mckettrick’s Choice

MILLS & BOON

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Dear Reader,

By the time in which this story is set, the proud Comanche tribe had, for all practical intents and purposes, been confined to various reservations. I am convinced, however, that a few ragged bands of renegades still pursued the lost dream of regaining their land and I have included them here, for the sake of the tale itself.

For Jeshua, Stiller of storms

“That’s how the bastards get you—by making you scared. Don’t you ever let anybody or anything do that.”

—Angus McKettrick, patriarch of the

McKettrick family

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 1

Arizona Territory, August 12, 1888

HOLT MCKETTRICK hooked a finger under his fancy collar in a vain effort to loosen it a little. Wedding guests milled on the wide, grassy stretch of ground alongside the Triple M ranch house, their finery dappled by shivering patches of shade from the young oaks thriving there. Two fiddlers played a mournful rendition of “Lorena,” and there was a whole hog roasting in the pit Holt’s three half brothers had dug in the ground and lined with flat rocks from the creek. The wedding cake, baked by Holt’s sisters-in-law, was the size of a buckboard, and a long table—an improvised arrangement of planks supported by half a dozen fifty-gallon barrels—wobbled under the weight of a week’s worth of fancy grub.

The old man and the rest of the McKettrick outfit had spared no effort or expense to make the gathering memorable. Holt reckoned he might have enjoyed it as much as the next fellow—if he hadn’t been the bridegroom.

A hand struck his back in jovial greeting, and Holt nearly spilled his cup of fruit punch, generously laced with whiskey from his brother Rafe’s flask, down the front of his dandy suit.

“I reckon that’s the preacher, yonder,” said Holt’s father, Angus McKettrick, nodding toward an approaching rider splashing across the sun-dazzled creek, driving his horse hard. “’Bout time he showed up. I was beginning to think we’d have to send somebody out to the mission to fetch that crippled-up padre.”

Holt swallowed, squinted. Heat prickled the back of his neck. Something stirred in him, a sweet, aching feeling like he got on hot summer nights, when a high-country breeze curled around his brain like a voice calling him back to Texas.

“I reckon,” he muttered. Holt wondered where Rafe had gotten to with that flask, though he didn’t look away from the rider to search the crowd.

The newcomer, his features hidden in the glare of midafternoon light, spurred his horse up the creek bank on the near side, man and mount flinging off diamonds of water as they came.

“Margaret is a fine woman,” Angus said. He had a way of cutting a statement loose without laying any groundwork first.

“Who?” Holt asked, distracted. The skin between his shoulder blades itched, and his chest felt wet beneath the starched cotton of his shirtfront.

“Your bride,” Angus answered, with a note of exasperation. Out of the corner of his eye, Holt saw his father tug at the knot in his string tie. Like as not, his wife, Concepcion, had cinched it tight as a corset ribbon.

The rider gained the edge of the yard and dismounted with the hasty grace of a seasoned cowpuncher, leaving the reins to dangle. He came straight for Holt.

“That ain’t the preacher,” Angus remarked unnecessarily, and with concern. Though he had almost no formal education, the old man read till his eyes gave out, and when he let his grammar slip, it meant he was agitated.

Holt glanced toward the house, where Miss Margaret Tarquin, his bride-to-be, was shut away in an upstairs bedroom getting herself gussied up for the wedding, then went to meet the messenger. The fiddle-playing ground to a shrill halt, and a silence settled over the crowd. Even the kids and the dogs were quiet.

“I’m lookin’ for Holt Cavanagh,” the newly arrived young man announced. His denim trousers were wet with creek water, and he shivered, despite the shimmering heat of that August afternoon. “You’d be him, I reckon?”

Holt nodded in brusque acknowledgment. It didn’t occur to him to explain that he’d set aside the name Cavanagh, once he and the old man had made their blustery peace, and went by McKettrick these days.

Angus stuck close, bristly brows lowered, and Rafe, Kade and Jeb, elusive until then, seemed to materialize out of the rippling mirages haunting the grounds like ghosts. Holt and his brothers had had their differences in the three years they’d been acquainted—still did—but blood was blood. If the rider brought good news, they’d celebrate. If it was bad, they’d do what they could to help. And if there was trouble in the offing, they’d wade right into the fray and ask for the particulars later.

Holt’s affection for them, though sometimes grudging, was in his marrow.

The visitor handed over a slip of paper. “Frank Corrales told me to give you this. He sent you a telegram, and when you didn’t answer, he figured it didn’t go through and told me to hit the trail. I carried that there letter all the way from Texas.”

A shock of alarm surged through Holt, like venom from an invisible snake. He hesitated slightly, then snatched the soggy sheet of brown paper and unfolded it with a snap of his wrist. He felt his father and brothers move a stride closer.

He took in the words in a glance, absorbed the implications, and read them again to make sure he had the right of the situation.

JOHN CAVANAGH ABOUT TO BE DRIVEN OFF HIS LAND.

GABE TO HANG FOR A HORSE THIEF AND A MURDERER ON THE FIRST OF OCTOBER. COME QUICK.

FRANK CORRALES

Holt was still digesting the news when a feminine voice jarred him out of his stupor, and a slender hand came to rest on his coat sleeve. “Holt? Is something wrong?”

Holt started slightly, turned his head to look down into the upturned face of his bride-to-be, resplendent in her lacy finery and gossamer veil. She was a pretty woman, with fair hair and expressive blue eyes, a sent-for wife, imported all the way from Boston. Holt never looked at her without a stab of guilt; Margaret deserved a man who loved her, not one who wanted a mother for his young daughter, a bed companion for himself and not much else.

“I’ve got to go back to Texas,” he said. The words had been shambling along the far borders of his mind for a long while, but this was the first time he’d let them come to the fore, let alone find their way out of his mouth.

Angus cleared his throat, and the whole party started up again, like it was some sort of signal. Reluctantly, Rafe, Kade and Jeb moved off, and Angus handed the rider a five-dollar gold piece, then steered him toward the food table.

One of the ranch hands took care of the exhausted horse.

Margaret’s smile faltered a little as she gazed up at Holt, waiting.

“Maybe when I get back…” he began awkwardly, but then his voice just fell away.

She sighed, shook her head. “I don’t believe I want to wait, Holt,” she said. “If that’s what you’re asking me to do, I mean.”

He touched her face, let his hand fall back to his side. “I’m sorry,” he rasped, and he was, truly, though he doubted it would count for much in the grand scheme of things. At his brothers’ urging, he’d brought this woman out from the east, and now here she was, all got up in a bridal gown, with half the territory in attendance, and there wasn’t going to be a wedding.

“I’ll go ahead and marry you anyhow,” he said, against his every instinct, because he was Angus McKettrick’s son and a deal was a deal. But he couldn’t make himself sound like that was what he wanted, and Margaret was no fool. “I’ve still got to leave, though, either way.”

A tear shimmered on her cheek, but Margaret held her chin high, shook her head again. “No,” she said, with sad pride. “If you really wanted me for a wife, you’d have gone ahead with the ceremony, put a ring on my finger so everybody would know I was taken, maybe even asked me to come along.”

“It’ll be a hard trip,” Holt said. From a verbal standpoint, he felt like a lame cow, turning in fruitless circles, trying to find its way out of a narrow place in the trail. Nonetheless, he kept right on struggling. “Hard things to attend to, too, once I get there.”

She worked up another smile. “Godspeed, Holt McKettrick,” she said. Then, to his profound chagrin, she turned to face the gathering.

All attempts at merriment ceased, and a hush fell.

“There will be no wedding today,” Margaret announced, in a clear voice, while everyone stared back at her in bleak sympathy. Her spine, Holt noted, with admiration, was straight as a new fence post. “But there will be a party. I’m going upstairs right now and change out of this silly dress, and when I come back down again, I expect to find every last one of you making merry.”

With that, Margaret started for the house. Holt’s sisters-in-law, Emmeline, Mandy and Chloe, all flung poisonous glances in his direction and hurried after his retreating almost-bride.

Only Lizzie, Holt’s twelve-year-old daughter, had the temerity to approach him, and her cheeks glowed pink with indignation.

“Papa,” she demanded, coming to a stop directly in front of him, “how could you?”

Holt loved his child, though he hadn’t known she’d existed until last year, and except for Margaret herself, Lizzie was the hardest person in the crowd to face just then. “I’ve got business in Texas,” he said, because that was the stark truth and he had nothing else to offer. “It can’t wait.”

Lizzie stiffened, blinked her large hazel eyes, and bit her lower lip. “You’re leaving?”

He reached out to lay a hand on her shoulder, but she shrank from him.

“Lizzie,” he whispered.

She turned on her heel, fled to her grandfather. Angus put an arm around the child and glowered at Holt. The old man looked like Zeus himself, shooting thunderbolts from his eyes.

“Hell,” Holt muttered, and started for the barn.

His brothers fell in beside him, their faces hard. Holt lengthened his stride, but they stuck to his heels like barn muck. Stubborn cusses, cut from the same itchy cloth as their pa, every one of them.

“What the hell is going on here?” Rafe snarled. The firstborn of Angus’s three younger sons, Rafe was a bull of a man, and always the first to demand an accounting. He and Kade and Jeb formed a semicircle in front of Holt, barring his way into the barn, where his horse was stabled, blissfully unaware of the long, arduous ride ahead.

Holt might have shoved his way through, if he hadn’t figured that would lead to a fight. He wasn’t afraid of tangling, but a brawl would mean a delay, and the need to get where he was going made an urgent clench in the pit of his belly.

He pulled out the crumpled letter, thrust into his vest pocket earlier, and shoved it at Kade, who happened to be the one standing directly in front of him. “See for yourself,” he said.

Kade scanned the page, while Jeb and Rafe peered at it from either side.

“I’ll saddle your horse,” Kade said, handing it back. He was the middle brother, the thoughtful, practical one.

“Best pack yourself some of that wedding grub, too, for the trail.”

“Have a word with Lizzie before you go, Holt,” Rafe interjected. “She doesn’t look like she’s taking this real well.”

“I could ride along,” Jeb put in, with typical eagerness. The youngest of the brood, he was also the fastest gun, and hands-down the best rider. Jeb was handy to have around in a tight place, for those reasons and a few others, but the plain and simple truth was that Holt didn’t want to have to look out for him. He wasn’t fool enough to say so, though.

He might have grinned, if he hadn’t just humiliated a fine woman and learned that two of the best friends he’d ever had were in trouble. Jeb had a wife to look after, and a baby daughter, barely walking. Rafe and Kade were in the same situation, since all three of their brides had managed to come a-crop with babies a year ago last Independence Day.

“This is my fight,” Holt said. “I’ll handle it.”

Rafe looked thoughtful. “John Cavanagh. That’s the man who raised you, isn’t it?”

Holt nodded, though Rafe’s assessment didn’t begin to cover what Cavanagh meant to him. “He’s got a spread outside San Antonio.”

“And this Gabe yahoo…?” Jeb fished. “Who’s he?”

“We were Rangers together,” Holt explained. Gabe Navarro was a wild man—part Comanche, part Mexican, part devil—but he was neither a murderer nor a horse thief. Holt had known him too long and too well ever to believe either accusation.

Apparently satisfied, Kade headed into the barn to get Holt’s horse, Traveler, ready.

Rafe and Jeb went to the feast table and commenced gathering food for the journey. Holt looked for Lizzie and found her still in Angus’s arms, her head resting against the old man’s broad shoulder.

“Here, now,” Angus murmured, giving his eldest son an unfriendly but resigned glance as Holt approached. “You talk to your papa, Lizzie-beth. It’s no good parting without saying what needs to be said.”

Lizzie sniffled, raised her head, and met Holt’s gaze.

Angus squeezed her upper arm, then favoring Holt with a withering glare, he walked away.

“Are you coming back?” Lizzie wanted to know.

“Yes,” Holt said, with certainty. He wasn’t through with Texas—he’d left too many things undone there—but in the deepest part of his heart, he knew the Arizona Territory and the Triple M were home. He belonged on this stretch of red, rocky dirt, with his impossible father, his rowdy brothers and his spirited daughter.

She dashed at her face with the back of one hand. “You promise?”

“You have my word.”

“What if you can’t come home? What if somebody shoots you?”

“I will come back, Lizzie.”

“I guess I have to believe you.”

He chuckled, extended an arm. Lizzie hesitated, then curled against his chest, clinging a little. “You be a good girl,” he said, resting his chin on top of her dark head, wishing he didn’t have to leave her behind. “Mind Concepcion and your grandfather.”

She trembled, tugged a cherished blue ribbon from her hair and tucked it into Holt’s vest pocket. “A remembrance,” she said softly, and Holt’s heart ached. Before he could find words to assure his daughter that forgetting her would be impossible, she went on, “Are you going to visit Mama’s grave? She’s buried in San Antonio, in the cemetery behind Saint Ambrose’s.”

He nodded, still choked up. Lizzie’s mother, Olivia, was part of the unfinished business waiting for him in Texas. He needed to say a proper goodbye to her, put her to rest in his mind and his heart, even though it was too late for her to hear the words.

“Will you take her flowers—the best you can find—for me?”

Holt’s throat still wouldn’t open. He nodded again.

Lizzie stared into his face, looking, perhaps, for the half-truths people tell to children, or even a bold-faced lie. Finding only truth, she straightened her shoulders and hoisted her chin.

“All right, then,” she said. “I guess you’d better ride while there’s still enough daylight to see the trail.”

He smiled, cupped her chin in one hand. “Don’t eat too much cake,” he said.

Her eyes glistened with tears. “Don’t get yourself shot,” she countered.

And that was their farewell.

Lizzie was a woman-child, with the run of one of the biggest ranches in the Arizona Territory. She could already ride like a pony soldier, and Kade’s wife, Mandy, a sharpshooter, had taught her niece to handle a shotgun as well as a side arm. Lizzie had lost her mother to a fever and seen her aunt murdered in cold blood alongside a stagecoach. She knew only too well that life was fragile, the world was a dangerous place and that some partings were permanent.

This one wouldn’t be, Holt promised himself as he rode out, Lizzie’s ribbon in his pocket.

CHAPTER 2

San Antonio, Texas, August 25

THE WEDDING DRESS was a voluminous cloud of silk and tulle, billowing in Lorelei Fellows’s arms as she marched into the center of the square and dumped it in a heap next to the fountain.

She did not look at the crowd, gathered on all sides, their silence as still and heavy as the hot, humid afternoon. With a flourish, she took a small metal box from the waistband of her skirt, extracted a match and struck it against the bottom of one high-button shoe.

The acrid smell of sulphur wavered in the thick air, and the flame leaped to life. Lorelei stared at it for a moment, then dropped the match into the folds of the dress.

It went up with a satisfying whoosh, and Lorelei stepped back, a fraction of a moment before her skirt would have caught fire.

The crowd was silent, except for the man behind the barred window of the stockade overlooking the square. His grin flashed white in the gloom. He put his brown hands between the bars and applauded—once, twice, a third time.

Bits of flaming lace rose from the pyre of Lorelei’s dreams and shriveled into wafting embers. Her throat caught, and she almost put a hand to her mouth.

I will not cry, she vowed silently.

She was about to walk away, counting on her pride to hold her up despite her buckling knees, when she heard the click of a horse’s hooves on the paving stones.

Beside her, a tall man swung down from the saddle, covered in trail dust and sweating through his clothes, and proceeded to stomp out the conflagration with both feet. Lorelei stared at him, amazed at his interference. Once the fire was out, he had the effrontery to take hold of her arm.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded, and his hazel eyes blazed like the flames he’d just squelched.

The question touched a nerve, though she couldn’t have said why. Blood surged up her neck, and she tried to wrench free, but the stranger’s grasp only tightened. “Release me immediately,” she heard herself say.

Instead, he held on, glaring at her. The anger in his eyes turned to puzzlement, then back to anger.

“Holt?” called the man in the stockade, the one who’d clapped earlier. “Holt Cavanagh? Is that you?”

A grin spread over Cavanagh’s beard-stubbled face, and he turned his head, though his grip on Lorelei’s arm was as tight as ever.

“Gabe?” he called back.

“You’d best let go of Judge Fellows’s daughter, Holt,” Gabe replied, still grinning like a jackal. For a man sentenced to hang in a little more than a month, he was certainly cheerful—not to mention bold. “She might just gnaw off your arm if you don’t.”

Lorelei blushed again.

Holt turned to look down into her face. He tried to assume a serious expression, but his mouth quirked at one corner. “A judge’s daughter,” he said. “My, my. That makes you an important personage.”

“Let—me—go,” Lorelei ordered.

He waited a beat, then released her so abruptly that she nearly tripped over her hem and fell.

“You must be an outlaw,” she said, brushing ashes from her clothes and wondering why she didn’t just walk away, “if you’re on friendly terms with a horse thief and a killer.”

“And you must be a fool,” Holt replied, in acid reciprocation, “if you’d set a fire in the middle of town and then stand there like Joan of Arc bound to the stake.”

Gabe Navarro laughed, and then a cautious titter spread through the gathering of spectators.

At last, the starch came back into Lorelei’s knees, and she was able to turn and walk away, holding her head high and her shoulders straight. She looked neither left nor right, and the crowd wisely parted for her, though they stared after her, she knew that much. She felt their gazes like a faint tremor along the length of her spine. Felt Holt Cavanagh’s, too.

She lengthened her stride and, as soon as she’d turned a corner, leaving the square behind, she hoisted her singed skirts and stepped up her pace, wishing she could just keep on going until she’d left the whole state of Texas behind.

By the time she reached her father’s front gate, Lorelei was sure Holt Cavanagh—whoever he was—had heard all the salient details of her scandalous story.

Today was to have been her wedding day.

The cake was baked, and gifts had been arriving for weeks.

The honeymoon was planned, the tickets bought.

Every church bell in San Antonio was poised to ring out the glad tidings.

It would have been carried out, too, the whole glorious celebration—if the bride hadn’t just found her groom rolling on a featherbed with one of the housemaids.

“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?” Holt demanded of his old friend when he’d bribed his way past a reluctant deputy and followed a warren of narrow hallways to find Gabe’s cell. The place was hardly bigger than a holding pen for a hog marked for slaughter; a prisoner could stand in the center and put a palm to each of the side walls, and the board floor was so warped that the few furnishings—a cot, a rusted enamel commode and a single chair—tilted at a disconcerting variety of angles. The stench made Holt’s eyes water.

“Damned if I rightly understand it.” Gabe gripped the bars as if to pry them apart and step through to freedom. The jovial grin he’d displayed during the burning wedding dress spectacle in the square below his one window was gone, replaced by a grim expression. Being locked up like that would be an ordeal of the soul for most men, but Holt reckoned it as a special torture for Gabe; he’d lived all his life in the open. Even as a boy, if the stories could be believed, Navarro wouldn’t sleep under a roof if he could help it. “How’d you know I was here?”

“Frank sent a rider up to the Triple M with a message.”

Gabe let go of the bars, poised to prowl back and forth like a half-starved wolf on display in a circus wagon, but there wasn’t room. His jawline tightened, and his eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen Frank?”

Holt frowned. “Not yet. I just rode in.”

Gabe shook his head like a man bestirring himself from a grim vision. “Maybe he’s alive after all, then.”

“What do you mean, ‘Maybe he’s alive’? You been thinking he might be otherwise?”

Gabe’s broad shoulders sagged. “Hell if I know,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since the night I was brought in. A month ago, maybe, just after sundown, a dozen men jumped us in an arroyo, where we’d made camp. Beat the hell out of me with rifle butts and whatever else they had handy, and just before I blacked out, I heard a shot. I figured they’d killed Frank.”

Holt cursed. The pit of his belly seized with the force of a greased bear trap springing shut, and his hands knotted into fists. “You know who they were?”

Gabe gave a mirthless laugh. “Way they snuck up on us, I figured they had to be Comanches, or at least Tejanos. I didn’t see much, but up close, I reckoned them for white men. My guess is they were hired guns, or maybe drifters.”

“Hired by whom?”

At last, the grin was back. It steadied Holt, seeing the old insolence, the old defiance, in his friend’s face and bearing. “‘Whom’?” Gabe taunted. “Well, now, Holt, it seems you must have fallen in with some fancy folks since you left Texas, if you’re using words like ‘whom.’”

“Answer the question,” Holt retorted. “Which brand were they riding for?”

Gabe let out his breath. His long hair, black as jet, was tangled and probably crawling with lice; his buckskin trousers and flour-sack shirt were stiff with dirt and rancid sweat. Once as robust as a prize bull pastured with a harem of prime heifers, Gabe was gaunt, with deep shadows under his eyes.

“I can’t say for sure,” he said at last. “But if I was laying a wager, I’d put my chips on the Templeton outfit. They’re the ones been devilin’ John Cavanagh and some of the other ranchers, too.”

“Templeton?” the name was unfamiliar to Holt, even though he’d run cattle around San Antonio himself, once upon a time, and thought he knew everybody.

“Isaac Templeton,” Gabe said, gripping the bars again, giving them a futile wrench with both hands. “He bought out T. S. Parker a couple of years ago.” Navarro paused, squinting as he studied Holt’s face. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You mean to ride out there and ask a lot of questions. Don’t do it, Holt. The place is a snake pit.”

“Whatever happened to ‘one riot, one Ranger’?” Holt asked.

Gabe looked him over. “You’re not a Ranger anymore,” he said quietly. “You’ve been up North, living like a rich man. I can tell by your clothes, and that horse you rode into the square just now.” Navarro tried to smile but failed. “Besides, with Frank dead or holed up someplace nursing a bullet wound, you’re the only hope I have of getting out of here before Judge Fellows puts a noose around my neck. Can’t have you getting yourself gunned down in the meantime.”

Gabe’s assessment stung a little, but Holt reckoned there might be some truth in it. He worked hard on his corner of the Triple M, but he’d been eating three squares and sleeping in featherbeds for a few years. When he was a Ranger, then an independent cattleman, things had been different.

“Maybe you’ve gone soft, Navarro,” he said, “but I’m still meaner than a scalded bear. If you met my old man, you’d see just what kind of rawhide-tough, nail-chewing son of a bitch I’m cut out to be.”

Gabe seemed pleased by this remark, and Holt had the feeling he’d just passed some kind of test. “I’d like to meet your old man,” Navarro said. “’Cause that would mean I was a long ways from this hellhole.”

Holt reached between the bars, laid a hand on Gabe’s shoulder. “If I have to dynamite this place, I’ll get you out. And I’ll find Frank.”

“I believe you,” Gabe said simply. “Make it quick, will you? These walls are beginning to feel a lot like the sides of a coffin.” A bleak expression filled his eyes. “I can’t see but a little patch of sky, and I can hardly recall how it felt to walk on solid ground.”

Holt felt a constriction in his throat. Briefly, he tightened his grip on his friend’s shoulder. “Remember what the Cap’n used to say. This fight will be won or lost in the territory between your ears.”

Gabe chuckled, albeit grimly. “You suppose he’s still out there someplace—old Cap’n Jack, I mean?”

“Hell, yes,” Holt replied, without hesitation. “He’s too damn ornery to die, just like my old man.”

A door creaked open at the far end of the winding corridor.

“Time’s up,” the deputy called.

Holt ignored him. “Anything I can bring you?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “A chunk of meat the size of Kansas. All I get in here is beans.”

“Accounts for the smell,” Holt replied.

“You comin’?” the deputy demanded. “I don’t want to get into no trouble for lettin’ you stay too long.”

“I’ll see that you get the best dinner in this town,” Holt said.

“I’ll be right here to eat it,” Gabe quipped. Then he sobered, and a plea took shape in his proud dark eyes. “Thanks for making the ride, Holt.”

Holt swallowed, nodded. Gabe reached through the bars, and the two men clasped hands, Indian style.

There was no need to say anything more.

CHAPTER 3

“LORELEI,” JUDGE FELLOWS SAID, leaning forward in the chair behind the desk in his study, “be reasonable. I’ve spent a fortune on this wedding. There are guests in every hotel room in town. The food can’t be sent back. And Creighton is a good man—he can’t be blamed for wanting to make the most of his last hours of freedom.”

Lorelei flushed with indignation. It was like her father to take Creighton Bannings’s part, not to mention bemoaning the money he’d spent to make his daughter’s ceremony the grandest spectacle Texas had ever seen. “I will not marry that reprehensible scoundrel,” she said flatly. “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not if all the angels in heaven come down and beg me to forgive and forget!”

The judge sighed a martyr’s sigh, but his eyes were canny, taking her measure. Creighton Bannings was a lawyer, and a wealthy man in his own right. He had powerful connections in Austin, as well as Washington. He was, in short, the proverbial good catch—and a fish her father would not willingly let off the hook.

“Must I remind you, my dear, that you’ll be thirty next month? You’re a beautiful woman, and you have a good mind, but you’ve been on the shelf for a good long while, and with your disposition…”

Lorelei, leaning against the thick door of the study, stiffened. Glancing at her reflection in the glass of the tall gun cabinet behind her father’s desk, she took a distracted inventory. Dark hair, upswept. A long neck. Blue eyes, high cheekbones, a slender but womanly figure. Yes, she supposed she could be called beautiful, but the knowledge gave her no satisfaction. It hadn’t been enough to keep her fiancé from straying, had it?

“What’s wrong with my disposition?” she demanded, after relaxing her clenched jaw by force of will.

The judge arched his bushy white eyebrows, ran a hand over his balding pate. “Please, Lorelei,” he said, with a mild note of disdain. “Do you think I haven’t heard that you burned your wedding dress—which cost plenty, mind you, coming all the way from that fancy place in Dallas like it did—in front of the whole city of San Antonio? Was that the act of a sensible, gracious, sweet-tempered woman?”

“It was the act,” Lorelei said pointedly, “of a woman who just found her intended husband in bed with a housemaid on her wedding day!”

“I’m sure Creighton could explain everything to your satisfaction, if you would only give him the chance.”

Lorelei rolled her eyes. “What excuse could he possibly give? I saw him with another woman!”

The judge tried again, saturating his words with saintly patience. “A man of Creighton’s sophistication—”

“To hell with sophistication!” Lorelei burst out. “What about loyalty, Father? What about common decency? How can you expect me to bind myself to a man who would betray me so brazenly on our wedding day—or any other?”

Her father sat back in his chair, tenting his chubby fingers under his chin. She’d seen that expression on his face a hundred times—in a courtroom, it meant a death sentence was about to be handed down. “Do you know what I think, Lorelei? I think you want to be a spinster. How many suitors have you rejected in the last ten years?”

Sudden tears throbbed behind Lorelei’s eyes, but she would not shed them. Not in her father’s presence. She braced herself for what she knew was coming and held her tongue. He wasn’t expecting an answer anyway, and wouldn’t leave space for one.

“Michael Chandler has been in his grave for almost a decade,” he said. “It’s time you stopped waiting for him to come back.”

One tear escaped and trickled down Lorelei’s over-heated cheek. Dropped to her bodice. “You hated Michael,” she whispered. “You were relieved that he died.”

“He was weak,” the judge said, quietly relentless. “You would have tired of him within a year and come weeping to me to get you out of the marriage.”

“When,” Lorelei countered, “have I ever ‘come weeping’ to you over anything?”

A muscle twitched in the judge’s jaw. “Creighton is your chance to have a home of your own, and a family. I know you want those things. If you persist in this—this tantrum of yours, you will be alone for the rest of your life.”

A chill quivered in the pit of Lorelei’s stomach. “Better alone, with my self-respect intact, than alone in a marriage with a man who doesn’t love me enough to be faithful.”

The judge gave a derisive snort. “Love? Come now, Lorelei. You aren’t a stupid woman. Love is for story-books and road-show melodramas. Marriage is an alliance, and sentiment has no place in it. Pull yourself together. Put on one of your ball gowns and let’s get on with this.”

Lorelei shook her head, momentarily unable to speak.

“Then I guess I have no choice,” the judge said, with a dolorous shake of his own head. “If you persist in this foolishness, I will have to send you away. Perhaps even to an asylum.” He frowned, studying her pensively. “I fear you are not quite sane.”

Lorelei’s knees threatened to give out. Though she’d never heard this particular threat before, she knew it wasn’t an idle one. Her father had the power and the means to lock her up in some sanitarium; it would be a matter of signing a few documents. He’d sent Jim Mason’s troublesome wife off to one of those places with the air of a man doing a simple favor for a friend, and there had been others, too.

“I see I’ve gotten your attention,” the judge said, a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. Then, more gently, he added, “Go to Creighton now. Make things right. I shall expect you at the church at six o’clock, as planned, ready to go through with the wedding.”

Lorelei pushed away from the door, stiffening her spine once again. “Then you will be disappointed,” she said calmly. She turned the knob, pulled the great panel open.

“If you step over that threshold,” her father warned, “there will be no turning back. Just remember that.”

Lorelei hesitated a moment, then rushed out. She was so intent on packing her things and laying plans to escape before the judge sent her away to some madhouse that she didn’t see the man standing in the entryway until she collided with him.

“Lorelei!” her father roared, from inside his study.

“Looks like I came at a bad time,” said Holt Cavanagh.

HOLT STEADIED the hellcat by gripping her slender shoulders in his hands. She’d changed clothes since their encounter, as he had, but her ebony hair still smelled faintly of burning wedding dress.

“Holt McKettrick,” he said by way of introduction when she looked up at him, blinking cornflower-blue eyes in a vain effort to hide a sheen of tears. Her lashes were thick, even darker than her hair, and her lips…

Well, never mind her lips.

“I thought your name was Cavanagh,” she said.

“I didn’t say that, Gabe did. I went by it once.”

She raised a finely shaped eyebrow. “Neither here nor there,” she said crisply. Then, in a demanding tone of voice, “What do you want?”

She didn’t try to pull away, though. Nor, he reflected, with detached interest, was he particularly interested in releasing her. Curious, he thought.

“Actually,” Holt said, reluctantly letting his hands fall to his sides, “I came to see your father.”

“God help you,” Lorelei said, and, pushing past him, rushed up the broad, curving stairway.

This, Holt thought idly, was some hacienda.

“I don’t believe I’ve made your acquaintance, Mr. McKettrick,” observed a masculine voice from somewhere on Holt’s right. “Are you a friend of my daughter’s? If so, perhaps you can reason with her.”

Judge Fellows stood in the doorway of what was probably his office. He was around sixty, with shrewd eyes, mutton-chop whiskers and a well-fitted suit. Somewhere upstairs a door slammed, and Fellows flinched.

Holt didn’t bother to put out his hand. “I never met your daughter before today,” he said forthrightly. “I’m here about Gabe Navarro.”

Fellows’s mouth tightened. “The Indian.”

Holt did some tightening of his own, but it was all inside, out of the judge’s sight. “The Texas Ranger,” he said.

The other man shrugged. “I’m afraid Mr. Navarro’s past glories, whatever they might be, were rendered meaningless by the murder of a settler and his wife. He butchered them with a Bowie knife and then stole their horses.”

“He didn’t kill anybody,” Holt maintained. “Or steal any horses.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion, Mr. McKettrick,” Fellows said, with false regret. “However, as I said, your friend has determined his own fate. The knife used to cut those poor souls to ribbons was his, and the horses were found penned up outside that lean-to he calls a home.”

Holt didn’t bother to argue. He knew conviction when he butted heads with it. Evidently, Judge Fellows was as unreasonable and ill-tempered as his daughter. “Who represented him? During the trial, I mean?”

“Creighton Bannings,” the judge said, nodding toward the front walk, visible through the long leaded-glass window beside the front door. “Here he is now.”

Holt turned, frowning thoughtfully. Bannings. Where had he heard that name before? The answer tugged at the edge of his mind, staying just out of reach.

There was a brief, obligatory knock, then Bannings strolled in, fidgeting with his tie. He was tall, as tall as Holt, but leaner, and his clothes, though expensive, were rumpled. The face, fine-boned and too pretty, was as familiar as the name, but Holt still couldn’t place the man.

“Holt McKettrick,” Holt said.

“I remember you as Cavanagh,” Bannings replied. He put out a hand, hail fellow well met, and Holt hesitated a moment before shaking it.

“I guess I ought to remember you, too,” Holt allowed, “but I can’t say as I do.”

Bannings smiled, showing white but crooked teeth. “We got into a fight once, at a dance, over a girl. I believe we were sixteen or seventeen at the time. John Cavanagh hauled you off me by the scruff of your neck.”

It all came back to Holt then, clear as high-country creek water. So did the enmity he’d felt that night, when he’d found Mary Sue Kenton crying behind her pa’s buckboard because Bannings, down from Austin to visit his country cousins, had torn her sky-blue party dress.

Holt felt a rush of primitive satisfaction, recalling the punch he’d landed in the middle of Bannings’s smug face five minutes after he’d turned Mary Sue over to the care of a rancher’s wife. For a reason he couldn’t define, he glanced toward the stairs, where he’d last seen Lorelei.

“I understand you defended Gabe Navarro,” he said, after wrenching his brain back to the business at hand.

Bannings grimaced, resigned. “I fear I wasn’t successful,” he admitted.

Holt’s gaze strayed to the judge, shot back to Bannings. “You a friend of the family?” he asked.

“I’m about to marry the judge’s daughter, Lorelei,” Bannings said.

Holt gave him credit for confidence. “Given the fact that she set fire to her wedding dress in a public square this afternoon,” he ventured, “it would seem there’s been a change in plans.”

Bannings looked pained, but the expression in his eyes was watchful. “Lorelei has a temper,” he admitted. “But she’ll come around.”

Having been a witness to the burning of all that lace and silk, Holt had his doubts, but he hadn’t come here to discuss what he considered a private matter. “Gabe Navarro,” he said, “is an old friend of mine. We were Rangers together. He’s innocent, and he’s being treated like a dog. Just now, I’m wondering why you didn’t file an appeal.”

“How do you know I didn’t?”

“I read the paperwork over at the courthouse,” Holt said. “Along with the clerk’s notes. Seems to me, you didn’t put up much of an argument.”

Bannings glanced questioningly at the judge, which confirmed a few suspicions on Holt’s part. Gabe’s trial had been a monkey show, as sorry as the case against him.

“I did my best,” Bannings said, a little defensively.

“I’m thinking your best is pretty sorry,” Holt replied.

Bannings flushed. Holt suspected the lawyer would have liked to land a haymaker, but apparently his memory was better than his ethics. He clearly remembered the set-to over Mary Sue and her torn dress well enough to think better of the idea, which showed he was prudent, as well as spineless.

“Navarro was tried and found guilty,” Fellows put in. “He won’t be missed around here.”

Holt set his back teeth, pulled hard on the reins of his temper. Gabe was behind bars, and if he, Holt, got Fellows’s back up, Gabe would suffer for it. He’d sent a wire to the governor after leaving the courthouse, but there was no telling how long it would be before he got an answer.

“I won’t take up any more of your time,” he said.

The judge nodded.

Holt reclaimed his hat from its hook on the coat tree, where the maid had hung it after admitting him, and opened the door. There were still several hours of daylight left; he could reach the Cavanagh ranch before sunset if he rode hard. In the morning, he would return to San Antonio, look in on Gabe and find a lawyer with some backbone.

Deep in these thoughts, he was taken by surprise when Bannings followed him onto the porch.

“Leave this alone,” the lawyer said, in an anxious whisper, after glancing back at the closed door. He must have seen the judge looking out at him through that long window, because he paled a little. “You’ve got no idea what kind of man you’re dealing with.”

“Neither have you,” Holt said, and kept walking.

CHAPTER 4

GABE FIGURED he must be hallucinating. Roy, the jailer, was standing just on the other side of the cell doors with a covered tray in his hands, and the savory smells coming from under that checkered dish towel made Gabe’s mouth water and his belly rumble.

He sat up, blinking, and swung his legs over the edge of the cot.

Grumbling, the jailer set the food down on the floor and fumbled with his keys. Not for the first time, Gabe considered overpowering him—which would be easy—and taking his chances getting past the guards outside—which would not be so easy. He’d most likely get himself gut-shot if he tried.

“That friend of yours must have himself quite a bank account,” Roy muttered, pushing the door open cautiously and shoving the tray inside with his foot. “That there’s a fancy dinner from over the hotel.”

Roy slammed the cell door shut and locked it, while Gabe went for the grub. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured, crouching to toss back the dish towel. It was beef all right, and prime rib to boot. There were potatoes, a mountain of them, swimming in gravy, and green beans cooked up with bacon and onion.

The blood drained from Gabe’s head.

Roy tarried. “I wouldn’t have figured you had a friend,” he said.

Gabe sat on the side of the cot, the tray of food in his lap. His hand shook as he took up a fork. “What are you having for supper tonight, Roy?” he asked.

“What I’m having for supper ain’t none of your never-mind,” Roy said, but he still didn’t seem to be in any hurry to go on about his business. Maybe he was sucking in the smell of that feast.

Gabe cut off a chunk of beef with the side of his fork. Tender as stewed cloud. He damn near swooned when he took that first bite.

“Who is that feller, anyhow?” Roy persisted.

“Ain’t none of your never-mind,” Gabe answered with his mouth full.

“You’re pretty cocky for somebody about to be strung up.”

Gabe was busy savoring a second forkful of prime rib, so he didn’t bite on the gibe. His stomach seized on the food, growled for more.

“Hope you ain’t thinkin’ he can get you out of here. Nobody could do that, short of the governor.”

The mashed potatoes were as good as the beef, and the gravy—well, it was fare fit for angels. “You’d better get yourself ready for some real trouble,” Gabe said, chewing. “Holt Cavanagh, he’s like a freight train when he sets his mind on something. If I were you, I’d stay off the tracks.”

Roy paled, which gave Gabe almost as much satisfaction as the food. “Cavanagh? Same name as that rancher, the one who’s been tanglin’ with the Templeton bunch?”

Gabe smiled, though the mention of the name Templeton made all his old injuries take to aching again. “Same name,” he said.

“They can’t be related,” Roy fretted.

Gabe forked up some beans and a big hunk of bacon.

“Can’t they?”

JOHN CAVANAGH’S old heart nearly stopped when he looked up and saw the rider at the edge of the hayfield, with the last rays of the setting sun framing man and horse. He rubbed his stubbly chin, leaning on the long-handled scythe, and squinted into the glare.

Tillie, working beside him, let her scythe fall into the grass. “That’s Holt,” she whispered, and began to run, fairly tripping on the hem of her calico skirt. She fell once, got up again and went right on running.

It couldn’t be Holt, John thought. He was up in the Arizona Territory, helping to run the family ranch and raising up a daughter.

The rider swung down from the saddle as Tillie barreled toward him, and held his arms out wide. Tillie gave a shout of joy and flung herself into them.

God in heaven. It was Holt.

John let his own scythe fall, though he was not a man to be careless with tools, and hurried toward the pair, moving as fast as his rheumatism would allow.

Holt swung Tillie around in a circle and planted a smacking kiss on her forehead. She was laughing and crying, both at once, and hugging Holt’s neck as if she’d drown if he let her go.

“Holt,” John said, drawing up at the edge of the field and fair choking on the word.

The familiar grin flashed. “Yes, sir. It’s me, all right.”

John took a step toward him, still disbelieving. His vision blurred, and his throat closed up so tight he couldn’t have swallowed a hayseed, even with good whiskey to wash it down.

Holt stroked Tillie’s back; she still hadn’t turned loose of his neck. “I see my little sister is all grown-up,” he said.

Hope swelled up inside John Cavanagh, hope such as he hadn’t felt in a year of Sundays. “You figurin’ on stayin’?” he asked, and ran an arm across his mouth.

“Until you run me off,” Holt replied, and grinned again.

“Go ahead and hug him, Pa,” Tillie said joyously. “It’s the only way you’ll believe he’s real.”

John took another step, stumbling a little, and put his arms around the man he still thought of as his son. The two of them clung for a moment, and John felt tears on his old black face.

“Come on inside,” he managed when they drew apart again. “With you here, Tillie’s like to cook up a storm.”

Holt was looking around the place, taking in the sagging barn, the downed fences, the skinny cattle and slat-ribbed horses.

If John hadn’t been so damn glad to see the boy, he might have felt shame. Time enough later on to answer all those questions he saw brewing in Holt’s face. Tell him how Templeton and the bankers were trying to force him out.

Right now, there were more important things to be said.

“You bring me a picture of that little girl of yours?” John demanded, hobbling along between Holt and Tillie as the three of them made for the house.

Holt took a wallet from his inside pocket and pulled out a daguerreotype.

John snatched it from his hand and paused, right in the middle of the path, to have himself a look. “She’s the image of Olivia,” he said, just before his throat closed up again.

“Let me see,” Tillie pleaded. “Let me see!”

Reluctantly, John handed over the likeness.

Tillie gave a little cry, drinking in the image with her eyes. “You should have brought her,” she wailed. “Why didn’t you bring her?”

Holt laid a gentle hand on Tillie’s shoulder. She was twenty-eight years old, but simple-minded as a child. Something to do with the troubles her mother had bringing her into the world.

“It’s too far,” Holt said quietly. “And she’s going to school.” He glanced toward his horse, grazing happily in the good Texas grass. At least they still had the grass. “I brought you something, though. It’s in my saddlebags—left-hand side.”

Tillie picked up her skirts and ran for the gelding, supper forgotten, for the moment at least.

“Frank Corrales sent me a letter,” Holt said, watching as Tillie unbuckled the saddlebag and plunged an eager hand inside. “Said somebody was trying to force you off your land. Looks like he knew what he was talking about.”

Tillie pulled out a doll with long dark ringlets and skin the same coffee color as her own.

“Where the devil did you find a colored doll?” John asked.

“Bought it along the way,” Holt said, watching fondly as Tillie hugged the doll to her flat chest and danced around in a circle. In the next instant, he looked somber again. “Who’s after the land, John? Gabe told me his version, but I want to hear it from you.”

John rubbed his chin. Once Holt got his mind around something, there was no getting it loose. “Man named Templeton. His place borders this one, and he wants the grass for his fancy English cattle.” Tears welled in John’s eyes as he watched Tillie. Where would they go, if they left this ranch?

Four of John’s children were buried here, and so was Ella, his angel of a wife. There’d been as much blood and sweat fall on the land as rain, and more than a few tears, too.

“The banker’s his friend,” John went on, when he could. “They called my loans. Tried to cut off my water supply, too. Even rustled some of my cattle, though I can’t prove it.”

Holt laid a hand on John’s back. He didn’t speak, but he didn’t need to. John knew his intentions well enough.

“You can’t fight them, Holt,” John said, because he knew how Holt’s mind worked. “There must be three dozen men riding for that ranch, and they’re fierce as Comanches on the warpath.”

Tillie was on her way back, beaming and hugging that doll for all she was worth.

“Maybe,” Holt said. “But I reckon I’m at least twice that ornery.”

CHAPTER 5

LORELEI WAITED until after her father had left the house the next morning before unlocking her bedroom door and making for the back stairs. Angelina, the family’s long-time cook and housekeeper, turned from the gleaming cookstove to favor her with an encouraging if somewhat strained smile.

“I was about to bring your breakfast on a tray,” Angelina said, in gentle reprimand. “Do you know it’s past ten o’clock?”

The mere idea of food made Lorelei shudder, and she was only too aware of the time; she’d been watching the clock on her vanity table since just after sunrise. “Where’s Maria?” she asked, and was ashamed that she’d almost whispered the words.

Angelina’s generous mouth pursed. “Puta,” she muttered. “She is gone—good riddance to her.” In case she’d offended heaven by calling the errant housemaid a whore, the woman crossed herself in a hasty, practiced motion.

Lorelei stood behind a chair at the kitchen table, realizing she’d been gripping the back of it with such force that her knuckles stood out, the skin white with stretching. “Father sent her away?”

Angelina made a face and waved a plump, dismissive hand. “Men are no good at sending las putas away. I told her to get out, or I’d work a chicken curse and make her sprout feathers full of lice.”

In spite of the lingering tension, and a strange and totally irrational disappointment that the judge hadn’t been the one to dismiss Creighton’s little baggage from under his roof, Lorelei laughed. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” Angelina confirmed with satisfaction, motioning for Lorelei to take her customary place at the table. When she complied, the older woman poured a cup of freshly brewed tea and set it in front of her. “Drink. Your breakfast is almost ready. Hotcakes, brown on the edges, just the way you like them.”

Lorelei lifted the china tea cup in both hands, fearing she’d spill it if she didn’t take a firm hold. “I don’t want anything to eat,” she said, after a restorative sip.

“I don’t care what you want,” Angelina replied crisply, and went back to the stove. “Your papa, he is very angry. You will need all your strength to deal with him.” She paused in her deft labors, regarding Lorelei as though she were a jigsaw puzzle with one piece missing. “Why did you do it? Why did you burn your wedding dress for all of San Antonio to see?”

“You know why, Angelina,” Lorelei said.

“I am not asking why you did not marry Mr. Bannings,” Angelina pointed out. “He is a coyote dropping, not a man. What I want to know is, if you had to burn the dress, why do it in front of the whole town? Now, all the women will be gossiping, and all of the men will avoid you.”

Lorelei took another sip of tea, then sighed. “The men would do well to avoid me,” she said, with a trace of humor, “and the women would gossip, one way or the other.”

“It was a foolish thing to do,” Angelina maintained, setting the plate of hotcakes and scrambled eggs down in front of Lorelei with an eloquent thump. “People will say you are loco in the head.”

Lorelei twisted her hands in her lap. Her father’s words echoed in her mind. I fear you are not quite sane. Would he actually go so far as to commit her to an asylum? Surely not—she’d defied him many times in the past, and he’d never sent her away. On the other hand, he’d never threatened to, either, and there was no question that he had the judicial power to do it. As a female, she had about as many legal rights as the old hound that slept behind the Republic Hotel, waiting for scraps from the kitchen.

“Is that what you think, Angelina? That I’m a madwoman?” She held her breath for the answer.

Angelina spat a Spanish expletive. “Of course not,” she added, when she’d stopped sputtering. “But I know you, Conchita. These others, they do not. They will talk about this for years!”

Lorelei took up her fork, only to push her rapidly cooling eggs apart into little, unappetizing heaps. “I was just so—angry.”

“Sí,” Angelina agreed, laying a hand on Lorelei’s shoulder. “This temper of yours, it will bring you to grief if you do not learn to control it.” She gave a gusty sigh.

“It is done now, and there is no changing it. We will have to deal with the consequences.”

“Father is furious,” Lorelei said, with resignation. “He threatened to have me locked away in a madhouse, and I’m fairly certain he wasn’t joking.”

Angelina blinked, and in that instant her whole demeanor changed. “Madre de Dios,” she muttered, and crossed herself again, and then twice more for good measure. “This is more serious than I thought.”

Lorelei’s mouth went dry. She’d spent much of the night in frantic speculation, but she’d expected Angelina to soothe her fears, not compound them. “What am I going to do?” she murmured, more to herself than the housekeeper.

“For the time being, you must stay out of your father’s way,” Angelina counseled gravely. She paused, thinking, then shook her head. “No,” she reflected. “I do not think he would actually do this thing. The scandal would be too great. After yesterday, he will not be looking for more of that.”

The clatter of horses’ hooves and the rattle of carriage wheels rolling up the driveway silenced them both.

Angelina rushed to the bay window overlooking the long crushed-shell driveway. “Vaya!” she cried. “Go. It is the judge, and Mr. Bannings is with him!”

Lorelei nearly overturned her chair in her haste to be gone, but then her pride got the better of her good sense, as it so often did.

“No,” she said. “I will not run away like some rabbit startled in the carrot patch.”

“Lorelei,” Angelina whispered, her eyes pleading.

Lorelei planted her feet. “No,” she repeated, but her heart was hammering fit to shatter her breastbone, and she felt sick to her stomach.

She heard the carriage doors closing, heard her father and Creighton talking in earnest tones. Oddly, though, another voice supplanted those, an echo rising suddenly in her brain.

It belonged to Holt McKettrick.

Are you crazy?

HOLT TOOK PLEASURE in the look of surprise on the banker’s face when he looked up and saw him standing there, with John Cavanagh beside him.

A moment too late, the man shoved back his swivel chair and stood, extending a hand in greeting. The fancy name plate on his desk read G. F. Sexton. He was probably no older than Jeb, but already developing jowls and a paunch. That was a banker’s life for you, Holt thought. Too easy.

“Mr. Cavanagh!” Sexton cried, fixing his attention on John. “It’s good to see you.”

John regarded the pale, freckled hand for a long moment, then shook it. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “it’s good to see you, too.” Sexton’s gaze shifted to Holt, full of wary curiosity.

Holt didn’t offer a handshake, or an explanation. “We’re here about those loans you called,” he said.

A flush stole up Sexton’s neck, if that narrow band of pallid flesh could be called a neck, and pulsed along the edge of his jaw. “You understand, of course, that business is business—”

“I understand perfectly,” Holt said.

Sexton tugged at his celluloid collar. A fine sheen of sweat glimmered on his forehead. His gaze kept flitting back and forth between Holt’s face and John’s, skittish about lighting too long on either one. “I’m afraid the foreclosure is quite legal, if you’ve a mind to discuss that,” the banker said. He consulted the calendar on the wall behind his chair. “In two weeks, the ranch will be sold for outstanding debts.”

Holt indulged in a slow smile. “Will it?” he asked softly.

Sexton took a half step back. “Mr. Cavanagh owes—”

“Ten thousand dollars,” Holt interrupted, and laid a telegram from his bank in Indian Rock on the desk.

“They’re sending a draft by wire. You should have it by tomorrow morning.”

Sexton got even redder. He fumbled in his breast pocket for spectacles, put them on, read the telegram and blanched. “My God,” he said, and sank heavily into his chair.

“There’ll be another draft sent to First Cattleman’s, up in Austin,” John put in. “You see, my son here just bought my place, lock, stock and barrel. I could have deposited the money here, I reckon, but—you’ll understand, business being business—that I had some concerns about its safekeeping.”

The banker was a few horse-lengths behind. “Your son?” he squeaked.

Holt swallowed a laugh.

“Foster son,” John relented, having had his fun. “Holt’s taken his real daddy’s name—McKettrick—but he went by Cavanagh for a good part of his life.” He braced his work-worn hands on the edge of Sexton’s desk and leaned in. “You tell Mr. Templeton he’ll find Holt a sight harder to deal with than an old black man and a slow-witted girl.”

“Mr. Templeton?” Sexton croaked. “What does he have to do with this?”

“A whole lot, I reckon,” John said smoothly. “You ever think about punchin’ cattle for a livin’, Mr. Sexton? Mr. McKettrick, here, he’s hirin’. Lookin’ for thirty men or so. A season in the saddle might put some color in your cheeks.”

“My knees are bad,” Sexton said fretfully.

“I reckon your conscience smarts some, too,” John replied. “If you’ve got one, that is.” He turned to Holt, his eyes gleaming with the old spirit. “Best we be goin’. Tillie’ll be through at the general store, and there’s Gabe to be looked in on before we head back out to the ranch. Make sure he’s getting the meals my son arranged for, over to the Republic Hotel.”

Sexton rallied. His train was still back a couple of stations. “Austin’s a long ways from here. You might want to reconsider that deposit, Mr. Cavanagh.”

“Then again,” John answered lightly, “I might not.”

Holt chuckled.

“What about you, Mr. McKettrick?” Sexton asked anxiously, standing up again. Even on his feet, he was knee-high to a burro, but he was still steaming along. “You’ll need banking services, I’m sure.”

Holt, in the process of turning away, paused. John had already gained the door.

“You’ve got more guts than I would have given you credit for, Mr. Sexton,” he said. “Goodbye. And don’t forget to give my best regards to Isaac Templeton.”

He joined John on the wooden sidewalk.

“Damn,” John said jubilantly, “that felt good.”

Holt laughed and slapped him on the back. “Let’s collect Tillie and pay Gabe a visit. How long do you figure we have before Templeton comes to call?”

John made a show of taking out his watch. He’d fought on the Union side during the war, and the timepiece, a gift from his captain, was the only memento he’d kept from his days as a Buffalo Soldier, except, of course, for that chunk of cannonball lodged deep in his right thigh. “I reckon he’ll get word by sundown.”

“You think he’ll order a raid on the herd?”

Cavanagh shook his head. “Not without sizing you up first,” he said. “Mr. Templeton, he likes to have the facts in his possession before he makes a move.”

They stepped into the cool dimness of the general store, and the typical mercantile smells of clean sawdust, saddle leather, onions and dust greeted them.

Holt scanned the room for Tillie, found her standing alone at the counter, with a pile of goods stacked in front of her, while the clerk jawed with a cowboy a few feet away. Tillie might as well have been one of the outdated notices pinned to the wall for all the attention she was getting, and her eyes were huge as she watched Holt and her father approach.

“What can I do for you—gentlemen?” the clerk inquired.

“You can wait on the lady, for a start,” Holt said, with a nod toward Tillie.

“I don’t see no lady,” the clerk replied. Scrawny little rooster.

Holt smiled broadly, reached across the counter, took a good, firm hold on the man’s shirtfront and thrust him upward, off the floor. “Then there’s something wrong with your eyesight, my friend,” he drawled, as John stepped between him and the cowhand. “You might want to invest in a pair of those fine spectacles on display in the front window.”

“Mac,” the clerk choked. “Ain’t you gonna do somethin’?”

“No, sir,” Mac said cheerfully, and Holt turned his head long enough to take in the cowboy. “I reckon you’ve got this coming.” He turned easily, resting his weight against the counter. “You Holt McKettrick?” he asked.

“I heard on the street that you might be looking for ranch hands.”

Holt eased the clerk down onto the balls of his feet. “I might be,” he said.

The clerk scrambled along the counter to face Tillie with a feverish smile. “Mornin’, ma’am,” he said. “What can I do for you today?”

CHAPTER 6

“MAC KAHILL,” the cowboy said, as Holt and John loaded Tillie’s purchases into the back of the buckboard. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Can’t say as I do,” Holt replied, hoisting a fifty-pound bag of pinto beans off the sidewalk.

“We rode together, a time or two,” Kahill told him.

“I was part of Cap’n Jack Walton’s bunch.”

Holt stopped, giving Kahill a thoroughly doubtful once-over. “You were a Ranger?”

Kahill flashed a grin. “No. I just fetched and carried. Took care of the horses. I was fourteen at the time.”

Holt squinted. “You were that towheaded kid with the freckles, always tripping over his feet and wiping his nose on his shirtsleeve?”

Kahill laughed. “You recollect correctly,” he said. He turned to John, then to Tillie, touching the brim of his hat both times. “I apologize for your poor treatment in the general store, folks. I surely don’t countenance such deeds.”

“It troubles me a little,” Holt told Kahill bluntly, “that you didn’t step in.”

“I didn’t have to,” Kahill replied good-naturedly. “You did.”

“I think we ought to hire him,” John said, rubbing his chin.

The kid had tended horses on a few trips into Indian Territory. So what? That had been a long time back. Today, on the other hand, he’d been a party to Tillie’s mistreatment, if only indirectly, and it seemed mighty convenient, after the fact, to claim he’d been about to take matters in hand with the clerk. “Why?” Holt asked.

“Because we’re desperate,” John said simply.

Kahill’s grin didn’t slip. “I reckon I’ve had more enthusiastic welcomes in my time,” he confessed. “I’m good with a gun, I’ve herded my share of longhorns and I need a job.”

“Thirty a month, a bed in the bunkhouse and grub,” Holt said grimly.

“You provide your own horse and gear.”

“Done,” Kahill said, and put out his hand.

Holt hesitated, then extended his own.

GABE LOOKED MORE like his old self than he had the day before. He was still in need of yellow soap, clean clothes and a week of good meals, but he was coming along.

“That was a damn fine supper you sent over last night,” he said. “Thanks.” His gaze moved past Holt to John. Tillie was waiting up front, in the marshal’s office, the ass-end of a jail being no place for a woman.

“How-do, Mr. Cavanagh. You’re lookin’ spry, for an old soldier.”

He and John shook hands through the bars.

“I reckon I’ll be returning the compliment,” John said, “once you’ve been out of this cage for a month or two.”

“I had another visitor first thing this morning,” Gabe said, keeping his voice low. “Judge Alexander Fellows.”

That caught Holt’s interest. “What did he have to say?”

“That they’re moving me to a cell on the other side of the stockade,” Gabe answered. “So I can watch my gallows being built.”

Holt felt his back teeth grind, and he must have stiffened visibly, because John gave him a sidelong, knowing look. “Easy,” he warned. “We’ve got the better part of a month to straighten this out.”

“You’ll understand,” Gabe intoned, “if that doesn’t sound like a real long time to me.”

“I ran into your lawyer yesterday before I rode out to John’s place,” Holt said. “Worthless as tits on a boar, and he’s pretty friendly with the judge.”

“You’ve got the right of that,” Gabe said. “That wedding dress Miss Lorelei burned in the square yesterday? Bannings was supposed to be the bridegroom.”

Somehow, remembering Lorelei calmly watching that bonfire with her chin high and her arms folded cheered Holt up a little. It amazed him that a woman like Miss Fellows—beautiful, spirited, and obviously intelligent, even if she did lack the common sense to know how fast a blaze like that could spread—would even consider hitching herself to a waste of hide and hair like Creighton Bannings.

“He mentioned that when we met,” Holt said. “Seemed to believe the lady would come around to his way of thinking, sooner or later.”

Gabe gave a snort of laughter. “I’d say later,” he replied. “About a week after the Second Coming.”

Holt raised an eyebrow, curious. “You seem to know Miss Fellows pretty well,” he observed.

“We don’t travel in the same social circles,” Gabe said, “but, yeah, I know her.”

“How?”

“She feeds an old dog behind the Republic Hotel. So did I. Now and then, we ran into each other.”

“And you just happened to strike up a conversation?”

“I like to talk to a pretty woman whenever I get the chance—even if she has the disposition of a sow bear guarding a cub.”

Before Holt could offer a comment, a door creaked open at the far end of the corridor, where there was light and fresh coffee and freedom. The yearning for all those things was stark in Gabe’s face. “She came to the trial every day,” he went on pensively. “Sat right in the front row, and favored me with a smile whenever the judge and Bannings weren’t looking.”

Holt absorbed this, unsure of how he felt about it. On the one hand, the thought stuck under his skin like a burr. On the other, Lorelei Fellows was the judge’s daughter, and possibly sympathetic to Gabe’s cause. Maybe she knew something that might come in handy when the appeal was filed.

Which had better be soon, if Gabe’s gallows was going up on the other side of the stockade.

SURE ENOUGH, she was there, behind the Republic Hotel, with a battered dishpan full of supper scraps. The dog, an old yellow hound with a notch bitten out of one ear and signs of mange, gobbled them up eagerly.

Holt stepped out of the shadows. “Evening, Miss Fellows,” he said.

She started, almost dropped the pan, but she recovered quickly enough. “Mr. Cavanagh,” she said coolly. “Or is it McKettrick? I’ve heard both.” She wore an old calico dress and a tattered shawl, and the brim of a man’s hat hid her face. Evidently, feeding the dog was something she did in secret.

“I go by McKettrick now,” he said. “But you can call me Holt.”

“If I choose to,” Lorelei agreed. “Which I don’t.”

He laughed. “Fair enough,” he said.

She bent, stroked the dog’s head as he lapped up the scraps. There was something tender in the lightness of her hand, something that made Holt’s breath catch.

“What do you want, Mr. McKettrick?” A corner of her fine mouth twitched ever so slightly. “As you can see, there are no fires to put out.”

“Gabe told me you went to the courthouse every day during his trial. I guess I’d like to know why, considering that you didn’t seem all that kindly disposed to him yesterday. I believe you referred to him as a horse thief and a killer?”

She regarded him steadily. “The people he murdered were decent. Maybe I just wanted to see that justice was done.”

“Maybe,” Holt agreed. “And maybe you figured a man who made a habit of feeding a starving dog wouldn’t be inclined to butcher a rancher and his wife just for something to do of an evening.”

Even under the brim of the hat, he saw her eyes shift away from his face, then back again. “He’s going to hang,” she said flatly. “If you knew my father, you wouldn’t waste your time thinking otherwise.”

“If you knew me,” Holt answered, “you wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

She took a step toward him, index finger raised for shaking, then stopped. Sighed heavily. Her shoulders sagged a little. “I don’t know who you think you are, Mr. McKettrick, but you don’t want to come up against my father and—my father.”

“Your father and Isaac Templeton?” Holt prompted.

“Is that what you were going to say?”

Color suffused her face. “Just leave. Go back to your wife and children.”

“I don’t have a wife,” Holt said. “My daughter is with people who love her. And I’m not leaving until I’ve finished my business here.”

Lorelei opened her mouth, closed it. Smacked the now-empty dishpan against her thigh in apparent frustration. Turned away.

He whistled to the dog, and she spun about, watching as the hound trotted over to lick his hand.

“Don’t tease him,” she said anxiously.

“I’m not teasing him. I’m taking him back to my ranch. We could use a good watchdog.”

She almost smiled, Holt decided, but damned if she didn’t catch herself in time. “His name is Sorrowful,” she said, in a soft voice. She was a complicated woman, Holt decided. Setting fire to wedding dresses, watching murder trials and loving an abandoned dog enough to bring him supper scraps.

Holt ruffled the critter’s floppy, misshapen ears. “Howdy, Sorrowful. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Since when do you have a ranch around here?” she pressed, sounding worried. “I know everybody in this county, and you’re a stranger to me.”

“Since I bought the Cavanagh place,” Holt answered, watching for a reaction.

Her throat worked. “Next to Mr. Templeton’s spread,” she murmured.

“You friendly with him, too?” Holt asked lightly. “Or maybe your father is.”

She bristled. “What are you implying, Mr. McKettrick?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing, Miss Fellows. Nothing at all. Now, if I were you, I’d get on home. There are lots of unsavory types in San Antonio these days.”

She looked him over. “I’m well aware of that,” she said. Then she stiffened her spine, and hitched up her chin again. “You’d better be good to my dog,” she finished. She turned on one heel and marched away into the gathering twilight.

Sorrowful lived up to his name and gave a forlorn whimper, watching Lorelei go.

Holt felt like doing the same.

“A DOG!” Tillie cried joyously, a couple of minutes later, when Holt hoisted the mutt into the back of the buckboard, where he immediately commenced to sniffing the groceries.

“Sure enough,” agreed John, not so joyously. “He the kind to kill chickens?”

Tillie was already unwrapping the leftovers from the fancy supper they’d taken in the dining room of the Republic Hotel and offering them to the hound.

“He’s the kind to let us know if anybody’s sneaking around outside the house of a night,” Holt answered, climbing up to take the reins. He released the brake lever with one foot and urged the team into motion.

He looked up at the stockade as they passed. It gave him a lonely feeling to know Gabe was in there, even if he was feasting on the fried chicken dinner and whole strawberry pie sent over for his supper.

“He can sleep in my room,” Tillie said.

“Not unless you scrub him down with lye soap first, he can’t,” John decreed. Clearly, he had misgivings where the dog was concerned, but Holt was confident he’d come around in time. John was a tenderhearted man, though he liked to pretend otherwise.

Holt pondered how different things were as they headed out of town.

Once, he’d thought of the Cavanagh place as home.

Now, home was the Triple M. He wondered how Lizzie was getting along, and the old man and those three knuckleheaded brothers of his.

Margaret Tarquin never crossed his mind, but Lorelei Fellows sure cut a wide swath through his thoughts.

CHAPTER 7

THE WEDDING GIFTS, each one labeled for return to its original owner with many wrapped to mail, filled the twelve-foot table in the formal dining room. They teetered on chairs, crowded the long bureau top and took up most of the floor as well.

Lorelei surveyed the loot with relief. “That’s the last of them, then,” she told Angelina, dusting her hands together. “Raul can start loading them into the wagon.”

Angelina, having wended her way in from the kitchen traveling a path between the packages, shook her head at the sight. “Now what?” she asked.

Lorelei consulted the watch pinned to the bodice of her crisply pressed shirtwaist. After the interview with her father and Creighton in the kitchen yesterday morning, her resolution had wavered a little. The judge hadn’t mentioned an asylum, thankfully, but he did rant about the shame she’d brought upon the family name and threaten to confine her to the house until she’d come to her senses.

“I’m due at the Ladies’ Benevolence Society meeting in half an hour,” she said, and patted the tidy chignon at the back of her head. “I’d sooner run the gauntlet in a Comanche camp. Unfortunately, I don’t have that option.”

Angelina’s eyes rounded, then narrowed. “What are you thinking, doing such a thing? Those old biddies will eat you alive!”

“They’ll try,” Lorelei said, with false good cheer.

“Then why serve yourself to them like a sponge cake?”

“If I avoided them,” Lorelei reasoned, “they would call me a coward. And, worse, they’d be right.”

Angelina sighed. “I suppose there is no talking you out of this.”

Lorelei looked at her watch again. “If I don’t hurry, I’ll be late,” she said. With that, she took herself to the entryway, where her handbag awaited on the table next to the door, and left the freighting of the gifts to Angelina and her husband.

“Be careful,” Angelina fretted, hovering at her elbow.

Lorelei kissed the other woman’s creased forehead. “I don’t know how,” she answered, and left the house.

The membership of the Ladies’ Malevolence Society, as Lorelei privately referred to them, met once a month, in the spacious parlor of Mrs. Herbert J. Braughm, for tea, social exchange and precious little benevolence. Lorelei attended faithfully, for three reasons. Number one, they didn’t want her there. Thus, being a member constituted an exercise in principle. Number two, it was the best way to keep up with the doings in San Antonio. Number three, on admittedly rare occasions, the group actually did something constructive.

It was a ten-minute walk to the Braughm house, and the weather was muggy. Inwardly, Lorelei dragged her feet every step of the way.

Outwardly, she was the very personification of dignified haste.

Mrs. Braughm’s maid, Rosita, actually gaped when she opened the door to her.

Lorelei smiled and waited expectantly to be admitted.

Rosita ducked her head and stepped back to clear the way. “The ladies,” she said, in accented English, “are in the garden.”

“Thank you,” Lorelei said, adjusting her spotless gloves and shifting her handbag from her left wrist to her right. Her very bones quavered, but her voice was steady.

Mrs. Braughm’s garden was gained through a set of French doors, standing open to the weighted air. Plump roses nodded, almost as colorful as the hats and dresses of the women seated around pretty white tables, sipping tea and nibbling at dainty refreshments. The chatter ceased the moment Lorelei stepped onto the tiled patio.

She straightened her spine and smiled.

“Why, Lorelei,” Mrs. Braughm said, too loudly. The legs of her chair scraped shrilly as she stood, small and fluttery, to greet an obviously unexpected guest.

“I hope I’m not late,” Lorelei said, meeting the gazes of the other guests, one at a time. Most were cold, but she saw a glimmer of sympathy in some of the younger faces.

“Of course not,” Mrs. Braughm chirped. “Come, sit down. Have some tea. We were just about to start.”

No one moved, and every extra chair held a handbag, a knitting basket, or a small, watchful dog.

Mrs. Eustacia Malvern, who had held the meetings at her home on Houston Street until the task had become too much for her, reached for her cane and used it to steady herself as she raised her considerable bulk out of her chair. Her Pekinese, Precious, took the opportunity to stand on its hind legs and lick the whipped cream off Mrs. Malvern’s dessert.

“What we were just about to do,” Mrs. Malvern said, ignoring the dog, “was review our standards of membership.”

Murmurings were heard, here and there. No one dared look directly at Lorelei, who stood still and straight, waiting.

“As you know,” Eustacia went on, “we have certain criteria.” Among other things, Mrs. Malvern was Creighton’s second cousin, Lorelei recalled. Raul was probably loading her wedding gift, a silver compote, into the back of the wagon at that very moment.

Lorelei did not speak. Bees buzzed from flower to flower, their drone growing louder with every passing moment.

Mrs. Malvern took in the gathering. The dog finished the whipped cream and went for a tea cake.

“I think we are all agreed, Miss Fellows, that you are not our sort.”

NOT OUR SORT.

Standing there in Mrs. Braughm’s lush garden, surrounded by the cream of San Antonio society, Lorelei felt a sting of mortification and, conversely, not a little exhilaration. “Do you speak for everyone?” she asked mildly.

No one spoke. No one met Lorelei’s gaze, save Mrs. Malvern, who seemed intent on glaring a hole right through her.

With a delicate lapping sound, the Pekinese began to drink tea from the old woman’s cup. Except for that, the hum of a few bees and the nervous tinkle of a cup against a saucer, the silence was absolute.

“Very well, then,” Lorelei said. With that, she turned, keeping her shoulders and spine as straight as she could, and took her leave.

She couldn’t go home, not yet.

She might have visited her old friend, Sorrowful, behind the Republic Hotel, but now even the dog was gone. He would surely be better off on the Cavanagh place, with regular feeding and room to run, but the knowledge of his absence was a thrumming ache in her heart.

It was sad indeed, she reflected, when a person’s truest friend was an old war veteran of a dog.

Pausing in the shade of an oak, Lorelei pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from beneath her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, she scolded silently. You still have Angelina.

She hadn’t heard the horse approaching, and by the time she realized she wasn’t alone, it was too late.

“Morning, Miss Fellows,” said Holt McKettrick, swinging down from the back of a fine-looking Appaloosa gelding. “Maybe I’m mistaken, but you give the appearance of being a damsel in distress.”

Lorelei’s throat ached. Her eyes felt puffy and red, and the edges of her nostrils burned. It galled her that this man, of all people, had to be the one to catch her weeping. “I’m perfectly fine,” she said, with a sniff.

His smile was slow and easy, and it pulled at something deep inside her. “Whatever you say,” he allowed. His eyes twinkled with good-natured skepticism.

“How do you expect to make that ranch pay if you spend all your time in town?” Lorelei challenged, taking in his fine suit.

He chuckled, belatedly removing his hat. The band, made of hammered silver, caught the light and made it dance. “I’ll make it pay, all right,” he said, with quiet confidence. “And it happens I have business in town.”

Lorelei knew she should simply walk away, but she couldn’t find it within herself to do that, so she simply stood there, with one gloved hand against the trunk of the oak tree. “How is Sorrowful faring?” she asked. It was a safe topic, as far as she could tell.

Again, that slow, lethal grin. His teeth were good—white and straight. He’d probably never had a cavity in his life. “Sorrowful,” he said, “is glad of a bed behind the stove and table scraps twice a day. He’s a fair hand at chasing rabbits, too.”

Lorelei smiled. “Good,” she said.

“You’re welcome to visit him anytime, if you’re so disposed.”

“Thank you,” she replied softly.

“I could see you home,” Holt ventured, turning the fancy hat in his hands.

She shook her head. “I don’t think I’m ready to go there just yet,” she said.

He didn’t press for a reason. “Well, I guess I’d better get along.”

He turned, put a foot in the stirrup and mounted with an ease Lorelei couldn’t help admiring. She yearned to ride, just get up on a horse’s back and race over the ground, travel as far and as fast as she could, with the wind buffeting her face and playing in her hair. Her father had forbidden her that pleasure, along with many others, claiming it was not a suitable enterprise for a lady.

In reality, it was because her older brother, William, had been thrown from a pony when he was nine. He’d struck his head on a rock and died three days later. The judge’s mourning had been terrible to behold.

Holt tilted his head to one side, watching her face. “Something the matter?”

Lorelei was swamped with memories—her father’s utter grief. All the mirrors in the house draped in black crepe. The sound of the rifle shot, ringing through the heavy air of a summer afternoon, as William’s pony was put down.

All of this had happened the day she turned six. Raul had led away the little spotted Shetland that was to have been her birthday gift, later admitting that he’d given it to a rancher.

Child that she was, she’d mourned the lost pony more than William, at the time, and the recollection of that caused a sharp pang of guilty sorrow.

She sighed. “No,” she lied, catching hold of his question, left dangling in the air for a long moment. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“I don’t believe you,” Holt answered quietly.

Then he took the reins in one hand, touched the brim of his hat and went on, toward town.

Lorelei stared after him, wondering when he’d leave San Antonio and go back to wherever he’d come from.

CHAPTER 8

GUILT, AND A NEED for some errand to quiet her mind and keep her out of the house for a while, sent Lorelei toward St. Ambrose’s, an old mission at the edge of town. The walk was long and the heat insufferable, but when she reached the shady plot where her mother and William rested side by side, she found some solace.

Selma Hanson Fellows’s marker was a marble angel with a trumpet raised to its stone lips. The angel’s eyes gazed with longing into the far reaches of eternity, and the mold and lichen in the crevices of its finely chiseled face and the folds of its flowing gown gave it an eerie dimension.

Lorelei kissed the tips of her fingers and set them against the S in her mother’s name. A gentle breeze wafted through the cemetery, cooling her scalp.

She searched her mind for even the ghost of a memory of her lost mother and waited, but nothing came.

William’s grave was more modest, with a smaller angel to oversee it, but the words carved in the granite base had a poignancy that Selma’s lacked.

BELOVED SON OF ALEXANDER FELLOWS MY SOUL PERISHED WITH HIM.

Lorelei pulled out her handkerchief, for the second time that morning, and touched it to her eyes. The judge had stayed drunk for a solid month after William’s funeral, night and day. She remembered his ragged beard, his unkempt hair, standing up in ridges from the repeated thrust of his fingers. The sweat-and-tobacco stench of his clothes, underlaid by the subtler smell of despair.

“You,” her father had muttered once, when she’d crept into his study and tried to crawl into his lap. He’d pushed her away with a rough motion of one hand and a surly, “If one of you had to die, why did it have to be him? My only son. My only hope.”

Lorelei wrapped both arms tightly around her middle and lowered her head, remembering. That day, in the space of an instant, Alexander Fellows had stopped being “Papa” and become the Judge. They’d been on opposite shores of an invisible river ever since, and if there was a ford or a bridge, Lorelei had yet to find it.

Except for Angelina, and a few school chums and faraway cousins, she’d been alone ever since. Until Michael had come along.

A sob rose in her throat. She swallowed it with a painful intake of breath.

Determinedly, she pulled herself together. There was no profit in weakness, no value in looking back.

Michael was buried in the Chandler plot, among his own people—parents, grandparents, a sister who’d died in infancy, numerous aunts and uncles.

Lorelei made her way to him and sat down on a bench nearby. Michael’s final resting place was a simple one, with only a stone cross to commemorate him.

In the depths of her heart, Lorelei thought she heard him speak her name.

CROUCHING, Holt laid Lizzie’s flowers within the circle of white stones enclosing Olivia’s gravesite. A slab, long-fallen and half-covered by the encroaching grass, bore only her first name and the date of her death.

The flowers were yellow roses, heady with scent. He’d seen them from the street, flourishing in a garden, shortly after leaving Lorelei under the oak tree, and stopped to knock on the front door of the house and ask if he might buy a dozen or so.

The old woman who’d answered had regarded him solemnly. “Are they for a lady?” she’d asked, when she was through sizing him up. He was glad he’d shaved and put on good clothes.

“Yes,” Holt had said, without hesitation, for Olivia had been a lady, in every sense of the word. And she’d given him Lizzie, the single greatest gift of his life.

“Reckon she must be right pretty, if a fellow like you wants to give her roses.”

Holt had smiled, albeit sadly. “She was,” he said. “Prettiest woman in San Antonio. Olivia died of a fever a few years back.”

Lorelei had slipped into his mind then, out of nowhere, but he’d set her firmly aside.

“I’ll cut them for you,” the woman said.

Holt had reached for his wallet.

The old lady shook her head. “It’s a sorry day when I have to take money for a few flowers,” she said. Then she’d slipped back into the cool dimness of the house, returning momentarily wearing a sun bonnet and carrying a pair of shears.

Now, in the graveyard, Holt arranged the flowers with distracted care.

Lorelei was seated on a bench, not twenty yards from him, her hands clasped in her lap. The breeze danced in the tendrils of dark hair curling at her nape.

If she saw him, she’d think he was following her. Probably go straight to her father, the judge, and lodge a complaint.

He might have smiled at the image if he hadn’t been putting flowers on Olivia’s grave, and if Lorelei hadn’t looked as though she might splinter into tiny shards at any moment, like a vase irretrievably broken, caught in that tenuous place between wholeness and utter disintegration.

He lowered his head, laid a hand on Olivia’s stone. I’m sorry, he told her, in the privacy of his mind. I’d have come back for you, if I’d known about Lizzie. Wouldn’t have left in the first place, if I’d had any sense.

His eyes took to burning, and he rubbed them with a thumb and forefinger.

Some sound, or perhaps a scent or a movement, made him look up.

Lorelei stood opposite him, surveying him with a slight frown marring her otherwise perfect forehead.

“You loved her,” she surmised.

He nodded. “Not enough,” he replied hoarsely.

She bent down, peered at the marker. “Olivia,” she mused quietly. “I knew her. She was a fine seamstress.” Their gazes met across the narrow circle of stones. Lorelei looked thoughtful. “She had a young daughter. Lindy? Libby?”

Holt got to his feet. He’d left his hat with the horse, perched on the saddle horn, but he reached up as if to touch the brim before remembering that. “Lizzie,” he said.

Lorelei absorbed that. “Yours?” she asked, very quietly, and after a very long time.

Holt nodded. He would have told just about anybody else that it was none of their business who had fathered Lizzie, but it seemed a natural question coming from Lorelei, though he couldn’t have said why.

“I see,” Lorelei said, and Holt feared that she did see, all too clearly. Olivia had had to make her own way in the world, and Lizzie’s way as well, with only the help of her sister, Geneva. After Olivia’s passing, Geneva had managed to track Holt to the Arizona Territory, and she’d been on her way to Indian Rock, the nearest town to the Triple M, to leave Lizzie with him, when Jack Barrett had come upon their stagecoach, broken down alongside the road, and decided on robbery. In the course of that, he’d killed both Geneva and the driver. Holt’s brother, Jeb, and the town marshal, Sam Fee, had come upon the stage the next morning, and found Lizzie there, alone and scared.

Holt set his back teeth. It had fallen to Jeb to deal with Barrett, when the time came, but every time he thought of that night, Holt wished he’d been the one to put the bastard out of his misery.

“I won’t keep you, Mr. McKettrick,” Lorelei said, and by the look on her face, he knew she’d judged him and found him wanting. He’d left his woman and his daughter to fend for themselves, that was the fact of the matter. There wasn’t much he could say in his own defense.

He simply nodded, and watched as Lorelei turned and walked away.

He wasn’t given to excuses or explanations.

So why did he want to hurry after her and make some kind of case for himself? Say he hadn’t known about Lizzie—that he’d always meant to patch things up with Olivia but had never found the time. Never gotten past his stupid pride.

He swore under his breath. If his hat hadn’t been with the horse, he’d have wrenched it off his head and slapped it against one thigh in sheer aggravation.

CHAPTER 9

JOHN CAVANAGH felt a prickle trip down his spine, the same one he’d felt back in ’64, just before a rebel cannonball took off a piece of his thigh. He looked around for Tillie—saw her on the other side of the draw, bouncing along on the back of her mule, with that worthless yellow dog bringing up the rear.

She was probably out of rifle range, so he didn’t shout a warning, though one sure as hell surged up into the back of his throat, bitter and raw.

Holt was in town, trying, among other things, to hire a lawyer for Gabe and the new man, Kahill, was rounding up strays. The herd, once two hundred head of cattle strong, had dwindled down to less than fifty, by John’s reckoning, and they needed every one they could drive out of the brush.

The prickle came again. Somebody was watching him, from someplace nearby, and probably looking down the barrel of a gun.

He drew back on the reins, looked around.

The rider sat at the top of the draw, under a stand of oak trees.

He recognized the man by his shape and bulk. Templeton.

John spat, ran one arm across his mouth and headed straight for the trespassing sum-bitch.

Templeton waited, the barrel of his rifle resting easy across the front of his saddle. He wore a fancy bowler hat and the kind of duds a Texan would get married—or buried—in but never take out of mothballs otherwise. His sandy mustache twitched slightly, and he shouldered away the fly buzzing around his muttonchop whiskers. Something meant to pass as a smile played on his bow-shaped mouth.

“Afternoon, John,” he said. His accent was English, and right fancy. Better suited to a tea party in some castle than the Texas range.

John let his gaze travel to the rifle. “You hunting something?” he asked.

“This is rough country,” Templeton replied smoothly.

“A man can’t be too careful.”

“That’s for sure and certain,” John answered, resettling his hat. The band itched, soaked with sweat. “I don’t reckon you’d mistake any of my cattle for game. Fine sportsman like you.”

Templeton heaved a great sigh. “The poor beasts look pretty scrawny to me,” he said, with mock regret. “Hair, hide, hooves and horns, that’s about all you’ve got here. Not worth driving to market, as far as I can see.”

“Then I reckon you ain’t looked far enough,” John replied evenly.

The Englishman spared a thin smile. “I hear you sold out. I’m disappointed, John. I would have given you a good price.”

John smiled back and spat again. “I’d sooner deed this place over to the devil,” he said. “And you were planning on buying this spread from the bank, pennies on the dollar.”

Templeton shifted in the saddle. Cradled the rifle as gently as a babe just drawing its first breath. “That fellow McKettrick. Is he really your son?”

“Good as,” John said.

“I’ve been expecting him to pay me a call.”

“He’s had better things to do.”

With a mocking air, Templeton put a hand to his heart, fingers splayed, as though to cover a fresh wound. The rifle barely moved. The Englishman’s smile sent that prickle rolling along John’s spine again. “Now that was an unkind thing to say,” Templeton drawled. His gaze moved past John, tracking Tillie and the mule in the distance, like a snake about to spring at a field mouse. John’s aging heart lurched over a beat. “Looks as if you’re pretty hard up for ranch hands.”

John sat up straighter in the saddle and fondled the handle of the .45 strapped to his hip just to draw Templeton’s eyes back to him and, therefore, off Tillie. “That’s the truth,” he allowed. “Holt’s hiring, though. Like as not, he’ll have that bunkhouse filled in no time.”

“You tell your…son that I’d like a word with him. I’ll be receiving whenever he chooses to make a visit.” Templeton paused, smiled at John’s .45, like it was a toy whittled out of wood instead of a Colt, and sheathed his rifle. “Best if it’s soon, though. I’m an impatient man.”

“‘Receiving,’ is it?” John countered lightly. “Sounds pretty fancy.”

Templeton was watching Tillie again. “Just tell him what I said.”

“Oh, I surely will.” John maneuvered his horse to block Templeton’s view of the girl. “I doubt Holt’ll take kindly to it, though. My guess is, he’ll wait for you to come to him.”

Templeton reined his fine Irish horse away, toward home. “He won’t like it if I do,” he said, and before John could answer, he rode off into the trees.

John gulped back the bile that rose into his throat, then turned and headed down the hillside, toward the draw. “Tillie!” he called. “You get yourself back to the house now, and start supper!”

GABE STOOD with his back to the bars of the new cell, staring out the window. The rasping of a saw rode the air, along with the steady tattoo of hammers. The gallows was well underway.

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard back from the governor,” Gabe said, without turning around.

Holt took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair. “No,” he admitted. “I stopped by the telegraph office on my way here.”

“Most likely that wire never went out, any more than the one Frank sent to you did.”

“I’ll ride up to Austin if I don’t hear by tomorrow,” Holt said. He felt every blow of those hammers as if they’d struck his bare bones instead of the new and fragrant lumber of a hangman’s platform.

Gabe didn’t speak. It was clear he wasn’t holding out much hope.

“Is there anything in particular you want me to do?” Holt asked quietly. “Besides get you out of here, I mean?”

At last, Gabe faced him. “I’ve been worrying about Melina. Somebody ought to tell her that I’m not staying away on purpose.” He paused, rubbed his chin with one hand. “She’s carrying my baby, Holt.”

Holt wanted to avert his eyes, because his friend’s pain was a hard thing to look upon, but he didn’t. “Where will I find her?”

“Waco,” Gabe answered, relaxing a little. “Her last name is Garcia. Last I knew, she was doing laundry for a rich rancher’s wife. Parkinson, I think they call themselves.”

“Done,” Holt said.

Gabe’s throat worked. “If anything happens—”

“Nothing,” Holt interrupted, “is going to happen. But I’ll tell her, Gabe.”

“She’ll want to come here, to San Antonio. You’ve got to talk her out of that.”

Holt’s grin felt more like a grimace. “You don’t know much about women if you think I could say anything to change her mind, once it’s made up.”

Gabe prowled across the space between them, gripped the bars in both hands. The skin of his face was taut, and his eyes glittered with savage conviction. “There’s nothing for her here,” he said. “They’ll make a whore of her.”

“And you think I’d stand by and see that happen?”

Gabe let out his breath, nodded toward the other end of the corridor, where the jailer waited. “I had a hundred dollars when they brought me here. They took it, along with my knife and my boots. You get that money and fetch it to Melina.”

Holt nodded, wishing there was more he could say, more he could do.

“How’s John?” Gabe asked, and the change of subject was welcome.

“He’s holding up,” Holt answered. “I hired a man yesterday and sent six more out to the place today.” He paused, unsettled. “You remember that kid who used to tend the horses back when we rode with the Rangers? Mac Kahill?”

Gabe hesitated, thinking, then said, “Sure. Sneaky little bastard. I caught him going through my saddlebags one time.”

Holt reached back, rubbed the nape of his neck. “He’s working for me now.”

Gabe narrowed his eyes. “You watch him, Holt. Watch him real close.”

Holt didn’t reckon he’d have time to watch anybody, real close or otherwise, with all he had to do to get that ranch back on sound footing. There were cattle to buy, which meant he’d have to run a herd up from Mexico, and he needed at least another dozen men for a drive like that. He ought to find Frank, and go to Austin to meet with the governor. And then there was Melina, up in Waco.

All the while, Gabe’s life was getting shorter with every tick of the clock in the town square.

In the back of his mind, Holt heard Angus McKettrick’s voice. It’s there to do, boy. Best leave off worrying and get on with the business at hand.

God, what he wouldn’t give to have his pa and brothers with him right now.

“It might be a few days before I can get back here to see you,” he said aloud. “You getting the meals from the hotel?”

Gabe nodded, managed a semblance of the old grin. “It’s a lot of food, Holt. I reckon I can count on that coffin being a real tight fit.”

“You won’t be needing a coffin,” Holt said. “Not for a long while, anyway.”

Gabe studied him. “You losing your sense of humor, old friend?”

“That’s a peculiar question, coming from you. Talking about coffins, and your woman ending up a whore.”

The other man sighed, ran his palms down the legs of his buckskin trousers. “Old Cap’n Jack, he’d have a thing or two to say about all this, wouldn’t he?”

The mention of the seasoned Ranger cheered Holt considerably. “He surely would,” he said. “And most of it would take the paint off a wall.”

Gabe gave a low guffaw. “Yes, sir. Call us a pair of down-in-the-mouth yellow-bellied tit babies, probably. Give us the sole of his boot.”

Holt laughed, heartened. He put a hand through the bars, gripped Gabe’s shoulder. “Don’t pay too much mind to that gallows out there,” he counseled. “One day real soon, we’ll burn it for firewood and dance around the flames, whooping like Comanches.”

“‘Like Comanches’?” Gabe retorted. “I am a Comanche, White Eyes.”

“Then act like one,” Holt said, turning to go.

“Son of a bitch,” Gabe called, in cheerful farewell. Holt laughed.

It took some doing, but he got Gabe’s hundred dollars out of the jailer.

He’d stop by the ranch, to look in on John and Tillie and the yellow dog, then ride for Waco. With luck, he’d be there by mid-day tomorrow.

CHAPTER 10

THERE WAS A THIRD PLACE set at the dining room table, and the sound of masculine laughter came from behind the closed doors of the judge’s study. Lorelei marched to the kitchen and pushed the door open with the flat of her hand.

“Angelina!”

The other woman was just setting a pan of biscuits in the oven. She looked back at Lorelei over one plump shoulder. “Sí?” she asked innocently.

“I’m having supper in my room tonight. I refuse to sit across the table from Creighton Bannings!”

Angelina smiled as she straightened, wiping her hands on her apron. “How was the Ladies’ Benevolence Society meeting?”

The reminder of her summary dismissal made Lorelei flinch, but she recovered almost immediately. “I was asked to leave,” she said, setting her shoulders. “I’m thinking of starting my own group, just to spite them.”

Angelina drew herself up, indignant. “Hateful old hens,” she muttered. “I ought to make them all come down with the grippe.”

Despite the unseemly reference, Lorelei took a plate from the cupboard, planning to fill it with whatever Angelina had made for supper and sneak up the back stairs. “Start with Mrs. Malvern,” she said lightly, then lowered her voice to a whisper and cast a glance over one shoulder as the laughter in the study swelled again. “She’s Creighton’s cousin, you know. She’s the one who threw me out of the society.”

Angelina checked the kettle of potatoes boiling on the back of the stove, then peered into the warming oven at the platter of fried chicken. The heat in the room was almost palpable.

“Put that plate back where you found it,” Angelina said. “It isn’t Bannings in there with your father. It’s the banker, Mr. Sexton.”

Lorelei was both relieved and unsettled. Mr. Sexton was not the jovial sort, and neither was her father. What were they laughing about in there?

“Since when does the judge socialize with clerks?”

Angelina met her gaze. “Since today,” she said meaningfully.

Lorelei smoothed her hair, then her skirts. Sexton managed her father’s accounts, as well as Lorelei’s inheritance from her maternal grandfather. “I guess I’d better greet our guest,” she said.

Angelina merely nodded.

A few moments later, after straightening her hair and skirts again, Lorelei tapped circumspectly at the study door.

“Come in,” the judge called.

Lorelei took a deep breath, wondering if her father had heard about her ousting from the society, and turned the latch.

Mr. Sexton stood, tugging at his tight collar, and tried to smile. “Miss Fellows,” he said, in greeting. Her father regarded her smugly from the chair behind that half-acre desk of his.

Lorelei summoned up a smile. “Good evening, Mr. Sexton.”

“Tell her,” urged the judge.

Sexton flushed. Whatever he’d been laughing about earlier must have been far from his mind, because he looked miserable, and not just from the cloying heat.

“It’s about the property you inherited,” he said.

“What property?” Lorelei asked.

“Why, the ranch,” Sexton replied, after a quick glance at the judge. “The hundred acres downriver.” He fiddled with his collar again. “An offer of purchase has been made.”

Lorelei was confounded. She looked at her father, but his face gave away nothing, as usual. “It’s mine to sell?” she asked.

The judge cleared his throat. “Not precisely. But your signature is required. Just a formality.”

“I want to see the place first.”

Her father sighed. “There is no point in that, Lorelei,” he said. “It’s just an old cabin, surrounded by scrub brush and rattlesnakes.”

“Mr. Templeton is prepared to be very generous,” Sexton put in nervously, and got a quelling glare from the judge for his trouble.

“I’m sure he is,” Lorelei said, “but I’m not signing anything until I see that land with my own eyes.”

The judge pinched the bridge of his nose. “I should have known you would be difficult about this,” he said.

“Yes,” Lorelei agreed. “You should have.”

He glowered at her. “Will you excuse us for a few moments, Mr. Sexton?”

Sexton fled with such haste that Lorelei half expected to see a little cloud of dust trailing behind him. The study door closed with a crisp catch of the latch.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this land?” Lorelei asked.

“You are a woman,” the judge replied wearily. “It was of no concern to you.”

“Until you decided to sell it,” Lorelei pointed out.

“The sale will provide a substantial dowry,” the judge reasoned, but with an edge of impatience in his voice.

“God knows, you’ll need one to get a husband.”

“I don’t want a husband.”

“You have made that quite clear. Nonetheless, my dear, you will have one.”

“Tell me about the ranch.”

Another sigh, this one long-suffering. “It belonged to your mother’s family. If William had lived, the place would have gone to him. Your grandfather’s will stated that, should William fail to survive, the land would be yours.”

“I’m not surprised that I wasn’t consulted,” Lorelei said glumly. “After all, I am only a woman.” The judge would simply have appropriated the estate if he’d been able to do so, which meant there was something he wasn’t telling her.

Her father hoisted himself from his chair. His lips had a bluish tinge, and there was a strange pallor to his face. “Please, Lorelei. For once in your life, do not argue with me. Mr. Sexton has brought the documents.” He shoved a pile of papers toward her without lifting them from the desktop.

Lorelei took a step toward him. “You don’t look well. Perhaps I should ask Angelina to send Raul for the doctor.”

“Never mind the damn doctor!” the judge shouted, collapsing back into his chair. “Sign the papers!”

Lorelei bit her lower lip. Sometimes, she wished she were more tractable.

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not.”

HOLT RODE INTO Waco about an hour after sunup. A freight wagon jostled by, and the driver touched his hat brim in greeting. Two prostitutes gossiped in front of the Blue Bullet Saloon, pausing to regard Holt through a haze of tobacco smoke, and a Chinaman trotted along the sidewalk, a broomstick braced across his narrow shoulders, yokelike, with a huge covered basket suspended from either end. A dead man—shot through the chest if the pattern of dried blood was any indication—leaned against the wall beside the undertaker’s door, strapped to a board. A crude sign dangled from a nail above his head. The Wages Of Sin Is Death.

Holt had seen worse things, especially while riding with the Rangers, but the sight sent a shiver down his spine just the same. He couldn’t help thinking of Gabe.

He spotted a livery stable and headed in that direction. Gabe had said Melina was working for a rancher’s wife, which meant he wasn’t likely to find her in town, but his horse was played out, in need of water, feed and a few hours’ rest. He would see to the Appaloosa first, then scare up some breakfast for himself. With any luck, the folks in the restaurant would steer him in the right direction.

He’d just taken a chair by the window and ordered up a plate of eggs, fried potatoes and sausage when Captain Jack Walton himself ambled in. Grizzled and wiry, the man was deceptively small. Holt had seen him take on Comanches two at a time and come out of it with his hair still on and his hide unmarked.

Holt blinked, sure he was seeing things, and set down his mug of coffee.

Captain Jack laughed. “Thought I was dead, didn’t you?” he drawled, taking off his round-brimmed hat and easing himself into the chair across from Holt’s.

“Hell, yes,” Holt said, recovering, taking in the Captain’s thinning gray hair and hard, watchful eyes. “Fact is, I’m still not sure you’re real.”

Walton’s skin was leathery from the Texas sun, and his hands were age-spotted, the fingers clawlike, yet still, Holt would have bet, as quick to the trigger as ever. “I had the same thought about you, when I saw you ride in. That’s a fine-looking Appaloosa you’ve got there.”

Holt nodded. He didn’t know how to make small talk, not with the Captain, anyhow. “Thanks,” he said, at some length, noting the star pinned to the old man’s vest.

Walton signaled the waitress, and she hurried over with a blue enamel coffeepot and an outsized cup. Evidently, the Captain still liked his brew.

“What brings you to Waco?” he asked, after adding half a pound of sugar and taking an appreciative slurp.

“I’m looking for a woman called Melina Garcia,” Holt said, wondering if the Captain had been the one to put a bullet in that outlaw over at the undertaker’s and then display the corpse as a deterrent to those with criminal inclinations. He was a man to take harsh measures when he deemed them appropriate, which was often.

The Captain arched one eyebrow. “Gabe Navarro’s woman?”

Holt’s stomach soured, and he regarded his unfinished breakfast with mournful resignation. “Yes.”

Walton leaned forward. “You the bearer of bad tidings, Mr. Cavanagh?” he asked. “Last I heard, you was up in the Arizona Territory someplace, building yourself another ranch.”

“Gabe’s been tried and sentenced to hang, down in San Antonio,” Holt said. The details about Arizona could wait.

The Captain narrowed his eyes. “The hell you say.”

“I would have thought you’d have heard about it,” Holt said. “Word like that usually spreads fast.”

“I’ve been in Mexico the last little while. Just came up here to collect a bounty or two.”

“‘The wages of sin is death’?”

The Captain smiled. He still had all his teeth. “You seen him, did you? Name was Jake Green. Robbed a freight wagon between here and Austin, and shot the driver in cold blood.”

Holt glanced at the star on Walton’s chest. “Bounty hunters wear badges now?”

“They do if the money’s right,” the Captain answered. He settled back in his chair, took a thoughtful sip of his coffee. “You gonna eat that grub or leave it sit?”

Holt shoved the plate across the table, along with his fork and knife.

The Captain speared a sausage link and ate it in two bites. Still chewing, he said, “Melina’s working on the Parkinson place, about five miles west of town. I’d be careful how you broach the subject of Gabe if I was you. She’s brewing up a baby, and she’s none too happy with him right now.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Holt said.

The Captain grinned and tucked into the eggs. “You always were a reckless sum-bitch,” he allowed. “It’s good to see you. Brings the good old days to mind.”

The waitress returned, refilled the coffee cups and left again.

“The good old days,” Holt reminisced with a wry smile. “Sleeping on the ground. Eating jerky and jackrabbit for every meal. Fighting Comanches for every inch of ground we crossed. And all for less money than Melina probably makes washing Mrs. Parkinson’s bloomers.”

The Captain gave a hoot of laughter. “Made you tough,” he said.

“You ever thought of going to San Antonio?” Holt inquired.

Walton speared another link of sausage. “Not until you said Gabe was in the hoosegow. Then the idea got real attractive, all of the sudden. If they’re fixing to lynch him, he must have been charged with murder.”

“Murder and horse thieving,” Holt confirmed.

“Bullshit,” the Captain said. “Gabe never killed nobody that didn’t need killing. Probably not above helping himself to a horse now and again, though.”

He paused to savor more coffee, then grunted with lusty satisfaction as he set the cup down again. “Who’s behind this monkey circus, anyhow?”

“I’m not sure,” Holt said, “but I’d say it was a rancher named Isaac Templeton.”

The name evidently registered with Walton. He sighed and shook his head, but whatever his misgivings, they didn’t seem to affect his appetite. “Now there’s more bad news,” he said. “When do you figure on heading back to San Antone?”

“First thing tomorrow,” Holt answered, pulling a dollar from his pocket and laying it on the table for the bill. “In the meantime, I’d better get a horse and head for the Parkinson place.”

Walton helped himself to the checkered napkin the waitress had left for Holt and wiped his mouth, leaving considerable egg yolk in his handlebar mustache. Then he unpinned the badge.

“Damn,” he said. “The wages wasn’t much, but I’ll miss this job.”

CHAPTER 11

THE RANCH certainly wasn’t prepossessing in any way, Lorelei decided, taking in the property from the seat of Raul’s wagon. The house leaned to one side, and the barn had disintegrated to a pile of weathered board, but there was a well, and plenty of grass.

Raul wiped his sweating face with the bandana around his neck. “Just over that hill,” he said, quite unnecessarily, gesturing to the east, “is Mr. Templeton’s place.”

Lorelei had fixed her gaze on the far bank of a wide, deep stream, where a few cattle grazed. “And that’s Mr. Cavanagh’s northern boundary,” she said.

“Sí,” Raul said, seeming to wilt in the heat. “It was—until he sold it to the man from Arizona.”

Lorelei gathered her skirts and scrambled down off the wagon. “I’ll need a horse,” she said, pushing aside the thought that “the man from Arizona” was none other than Holt McKettrick.

“What?” Raul asked, as if he hadn’t heard her correctly.

“A horse,” Lorelei said, proceeding toward the ranch house. Perhaps Raul could shore up the walls. She could plant a garden, have the barn rebuilt and buy a few head of cattle.

“But you don’t know how to ride,” Raul pointed out hastily, sounding worried as he left the wagon to follow her. “Watch where you step, señorita—there are snakes.”

“I can learn to ride,” she said. “And I’m not afraid of snakes.”

She approached the house. Her mother must have lived here. Played just outside the door, skipping rope, perhaps, or making mud-pies.

She inspected the log walls, peered inside. There was only one room, with a rusted stove, warped wooden floors and evidence of mice, but with a little bracing and some sweeping, the place would be habitable.

“Your father will never allow it,” Raul pleaded.

“My father can just go whistle,” Lorelei replied, running a hand down the framework of the door. Sturdy.

“You cannot live out here alone, señorita.”

“I won’t be alone,” Lorelei said. “Angelina will come with me.”

Raul crossed himself and muttered a prayer in rapid Spanish. That done, he pointed wildly toward the Templeton property, then across the wide stream, toward Mr. Cavanagh’s land. “There is a range war coming,” he told her frantically. “And you will be in the middle!”

Lorelei shaded her eyes with one hand. “Mr. Cavanagh is a very nice man,” she said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything violent.”

“But I told you, señorita, he is not really the owner anymore.”

Lorelei bit her lower lip. John Cavanagh was a man of peace. He worked hard and kept to himself. Holt McKettrick, on the other hand, was an unknown quantity. He might or might not make a good neighbor.

“I will not permit a range war,” she said, after due consideration. “Mr. Templeton, Mr. Cavanagh and Mr. McKettrick will simply have to work things out between themselves.”

“But, señorita—”

Lorelei proceeded to the well. Tried in vain to hoist the heavy wooden cover.

Raul moved it for her, and she peered down the shaft.

“I see water down there,” she said. She squinted, and her stomach turned. “And a dead animal of some sort.”

“Madre de Dios,” Raul whispered.

“We’ll need shovels,” Lorelei decided, already making a list in her mind. “Perhaps Mr. Wilkins, at the mercantile, will know of some substance that will purify the water.”

“Ay-yi-yi,” lamented Raul.

“Can you teach me to shoot a gun?” Lorelei inquired, dusting her hands together. “If you can’t, I shall have to learn on my own.”

“A gun, señorita?”

“Yes, Raul,” Lorelei said, waxing impatient. “A gun.”

Raul began to pace, waving his arms and ranting in Spanish.

Lorelei consulted her bodice watch. “I guess we’d better get back to town,” she said. “I have to meet with Mr. Sexton, at the bank, and we must order supplies.” She assessed the sky, which was blue as Angelina’s favorite sugar bowl. “What we need is a tent. Just until the house is habitable. You don’t think it will rain in the next few days, do you?”

Raul stopped his pacing and raving and let his hands fall to his sides. “Sí,” he said hopefully. “There are dark clouds—there in the west.”

Lorelei turned. Sure enough, there were.

“All the more reason to invest in a tent,” she said.

Raul lapsed into Spanish again. Since she suspected he was cursing, Lorelei did not attempt to translate. She made for the wagon, her strides long and purposeful, and Raul had no choice but to follow.

He helped her back into the wagon box, then climbed up beside her, breathing hard, his thin shoulders stooped with defeat.

“We must have chickens, too, of course,” Lorelei said, scrabbling through her bag for a pencil stub and something to write on. “We can probably eat fish from the creek, and a fifty-pound bag of beans would do nicely for provisions. Angelina can do marvelous things with beans.”

The wagon jostled into motion.

“Chickens,” Raul fretted. “Beans.”

Lorelei concentrated on her list. “Coffee,” she said. “And sugar. Flour and yeast—”

Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled.

Lorelei paid it no mind.

What was a little rain?

THEY FOUND Melina Garcia in back of the Parkinson’s rambling log ranch house bent over a tub of hot water, clasping what looked like a shirt in both hands and scrubbing it against a washboard. She was a little bit of a thing, by Holt’s measure, anchored to the earth only by the jutting weight of her lower belly. Her dark hair was twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck and coming loose from its pins, and her brown face gleamed with sweat.

She’d watched them approach, and there was no welcome in her eyes.

“A good day to you, Melina,” the Captain said, resettling his hat.

She spared him an unfriendly nod and left off the washing to set her hands on her hips and look Holt over good. From her expression, he’d have said she found him somewhat short of spectacular.

Holt dismounted, hung his hat on his saddle horn and took a step toward her.

“I’ve met this old coyote once or twice,” she said, with a terse nod in the Captain’s direction, “but who the devil are you?”

Wisely, Holt stopped in his tracks, folded his arms to show he meant no harm and answered her query with his full name.

She mirrored his stance, but there was no promise of peace in her posture or in her face. She was expecting trouble, that was clear. Either she had good instincts where impending misfortune was concerned, or she’d had a lot of experience in that area.

Holt figured it was probably a little of both.

Her dark eyes flashed with wary temper. “What do you want?”

“I’m here to bring you word about Gabe Navarro.”

She stiffened, and he glimpsed a shadow of fear behind her facade, but it was quickly displaced by a wintry fury. She spat fiercely into the hard, hot dirt.

“He’s alive,” Holt felt compelled to say.

“Maybe not for long,” the Captain put in. He hadn’t bothered to get off his horse.

Melina’s eyes widened, and her gaze flickered from Holt to the Captain and back again. “What’s happened?” she asked. She was interested, all right, but she didn’t seem to want anyone to know it.

Holt reached into his pocket, brought out the five twenty-dollar bills he’d threatened and cajoled out of Gabe’s jailer. Extended them. “He sent you this.”

She hesitated, then stepped forward and snatched the bills from his hand. After looking around, she tucked them into the pocket of her apron and patted them, as if to make sure they stayed put. “He’s in trouble,” she surmised.

Holt nodded, rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “He’s in jail in San Antonio, sentenced to hang on the first of October.”

Melina reached out, grasped the handle of the water pump to steady herself. Her other hand flew to her belly, as if to protect the babe she was carrying. “That’s impossible.”

“I’m afraid it ain’t,” the Captain said. He took a tin of tobacco and some papers from his shirt pocket and proceeded to roll himself a smoke, still without dismounting.

“Holt here tells me the charges are murder and horse thieving. This is serious business, Melina.”

A middle-aged woman came out of the house to stand on the porch, watching them, shading her eyes from the relentless Texas sun with one hand. “Melina?” she called. “Is everything all right?”

Melina didn’t so much as glance in that direction. “No, ma’am,” she answered, raising her voice just far enough to cover the distance.

The woman, probably Mrs. Parkinson, stepped tentatively off the porch and started toward them. Like Melina, she was clad in practical calico, but she looked a sight cooler. “Who are these men?” she wanted to know.

“Holt McKettrick,” Holt said, with a slight inclination of his head. “And this is Captain Jack Walton.”

The Captain troubled himself to tug at the brim of his dusty hat. “Mrs. Parkinson,” he said politely.

“You,” she said, looking up at Walton and lining up shoulder to shoulder with Melina. In that moment, Holt decided he liked the woman. She was obviously nervous of strangers, and with good reason given the state of affairs in modern Texas. It seemed there were no men around to protect her if things should take an ugly turn, but she was willing to stand toe-to-toe with whatever came. “If you came here looking to collect some bounty, you can just ride on out right now. All our men are honest.”

Captain Jack leaned forward, resting on arm on the pommel of his saddle, and smiled. “I’ve got no business with any of your men, Mrs. Parkinson. I just came along with my friend, Holt, here, to bring Melina some news.”

Mrs. Parkinson looked down at Melina. “What kind of news?”

Melina didn’t turn her head. She was still watching Holt, with an occasional glance at the Captain. “I’ve got to go to San Antonio,” she said.

“Gabe doesn’t want you to do that,” Holt said, though he’d already guessed there was little hope of convincing her.

“I’ll get my things,” Melina said.

“Melina,” Mrs. Parkinson protested. “You can’t just leave! How will I get the washing done?”

At last, Gabe’s woman faced the boss lady. “I’m sorry about the washing,” she said directly, “but I still have to go.”

“But the baby—what will you do in San Antonio? How will you live?”

“I’ll see that she’s taken care of,” Holt said, for Melina’s benefit more than Mrs. Parkinson’s. “I have friends she can stay with.”

Melina studied him, evidently weighing his words for truth, and must have decided in his favor, for she picked up her skirts and made for the house at a good clip.

Mrs. Parkinson watched her go, probably struggling with the realization that she couldn’t stop Melina from leaving. Resignation slackened her shoulders as she turned her attention on Holt and the Captain. “I don’t like trusting that child to strangers,” she said.

“I do not qualify as a stranger, Mrs. Parkinson,” the Captain said. He got off his horse at long last, gathered the reins and led the animal to the water trough. Holt’s Appaloosa followed along on its own. “And Mr. McKettrick here is a gentleman. I can assure you of that.”

Mrs. Parkinson looked as though she’d like to haul off and spit, the way Melina had, but in the end she refrained and made for the house.

“That woman doesn’t think very highly of you, Cap’n,” Holt observed, worrying that in his mind the way he kept worrying the sight of that corpse strapped to a board on the main street of town. “Why is that?”

The Captain went to the pump, brought up some water and splashed his face and the back of his neck thoroughly. “I reckon it’s because we used to be married,” he said.

CHAPTER 12

LORELEI WATCHED from her bedroom window as the judge climbed into the buggy Raul had hitched up for him, the way he did every weekday morning and most Saturdays, took up the reins and set out for the main part of town. He would not return home until late in the day, as he had court cases to hear.

Once he’d rounded the corner onto the road that ran alongside the river curling through town, she sprang into action.

Kneeling, she pulled out the valise she’d packed the night before from under the bed. A rap at her door startled her so that she nearly choked on an indrawn breath, but she recovered quickly. “Angelina?”

The door opened, and the housekeeper stood on the threshold. Her eyes traveled to the valise, while Lorelei scrambled to her feet.

“You are really going to do this,” Angelina marveled.

“Yes,” Lorelei said firmly.

“Mr. Sexton, from the bank, will be waiting on the courthouse steps to tell the judge what you’re planning. And he will put a stop to it.”

Lorelei hoisted the valise in one hand, reflecting upon her interview with Mr. Sexton the afternoon before. She’d gone directly to the bank, after her visit to the property, and he’d been pleased to see her—until she’d made it clear that she had no intention of signing her inheritance over to Mr. Templeton.

“I would like to see my account,” Lorelei had said, standing her ground.

“The judge has strictly forbidden—”

“I don’t care what the judge has forbidden,” she’d interrupted.

Sexton had sighed, rummaged until he found the proper ledger and licked a fingertip before flipping through the pages.

“You have two thousand, seven-hundred and twenty-two dollars and seventy-eight cents,” he’d said, with the utmost reluctance.

Lorelei, peering over his shoulder, had already deduced that. She’d blinked at the sum, then her gaze had shifted to the debit column. Judging by the long list of tidy figures, her father had made regular withdrawals over the past ten years.

“I’m afraid I must insist that Judge Fellows’s wishes be respected,” Sexton had said, closing the book. His jowls were flushed, his eyes skittish.

Lorelei had insisted that the funds be moved to another account, and when Sexton balked, she threatened to fetch the constable. At last, he’d relented, but with the greatest reluctance.

She’d narrowed her eyes at him as she prepared to leave the bank with a purseful of cash and move on to the mercantile. “If you run to my father,” she’d warned, “I’ll move every cent to another bank and have you audited.”

Now, facing Angelina as she was about to leave her bedroom and the house as well, perhaps for the very last time, Lorelei, having recounted the conversation to the older woman, shook her head. “He wouldn’t dare go to my father,” she said.

“Mr. Sexton is afraid of the judge, like almost everyone else in San Antonio,” Angelina maintained, a bit frantically, but she stepped aside to let Lorelei pass into the corridor. “If you had any sense at all, you would be, too.”

“It’s my land, and my money,” Lorelei maintained, starting down the rear stairway. “Are you and Raul coming with me or not?”

Angelina crossed herself, but she nodded. “My cousin Rosa is coming to look after the judge,” she said. “Still—”

Lorelei opened the back door and peered toward the carriage house. “Where is Raul?” she fretted. “Mr. Wilkins promised to deliver my order by noon. We have to be there to meet the wagons.”

Mr. Wilkins, as it happened, was not among the judge’s many admirers. He’d been a vocal supporter of the other candidate during the last election and had written several letters to the editor of the local newspaper complaining about the decisions Judge Fellows had handed down. The merchant had been suspicious at first, then pleased to keep quiet about the wagonload of provisions and supplies Lorelei had purchased and paid for on the spot.

Raul came out of the carriage house, driving the buckboard. Even from a distance, his lack of enthusiasm was readily apparent.

Lorelei felt a pang. Her father was a difficult man, but he was aging and perhaps even ill. He could get along without her just fine, but losing Angelina and Raul would be a blow.

“If you want to stay here and look after Father,” she said, “I’ll understand.”

Angelina dragged a valise of her own from its hiding place in the pantry. “And let you go off alone, to live in the wilderness, with wolves and savages and outlaws and the Madre only knows what else? No. Rosa and her Miguel will take our places.”

“I promise you will not regret this,” Lorelei said, well aware that the statement was a rash one. Once the judge realized she’d not only taken her funds out of his keeping but helped herself to his housekeeper and handyman, he would be enraged.

Angelina looked doubtful but resolved. “I think I already regret it,” she said. Raul came to the door, looking woebegone, and claimed both the valises. “By all the saints and angels, when your father learns of this, the ground will shake.”

As if to lend credence to Angelina’s words, thunder clapped in the near distance. The horses nickered and tossed their heads, and Lorelei looked up at the sky as she descended the back steps. Fast-moving gray clouds were gathering over San Antonio, churning with mayhem.

Angelina looked up as well and opened her mouth to speak, but at the look Lorelei gave her, she held her tongue.

Raul helped his wife onto the wagon seat, then Lorelei, before climbing up to take the reins.

“Cheer up,” Lorelei said. “This is a new beginning.”

Five minutes later, the rain began.

MELINA STARED mutely at the gallows, a raw wood structure, half-finished, shimmering in the heavy rain. She was soaked to the skin, as was Holt himself, and the Captain, but she seemed oblivious to everything but the mechanism where Gabe was slated to hang.

She’d ridden behind Holt all the way down from Waco and refused to stop at the Cavanagh place to rest, put on dry clothes and wait for the rain to let up. Watching her now, Holt wished he’d taken her there anyway.

She shivered in the downpour, hair dangling in wet strands down the sides of her face, looking bedraggled and small in Holt’s coat.

Still mounted, the Captain lifted the collar of his canvas duster. “Warm as bathwater,” he said of the rain, his voice pitched low. “Just the same, we’d best get that woman someplace dry.”

Holt swung a leg over the Appaloosa’s neck and jumped to the ground. He said her name quietly, reached out to lay a hand on her slight shoulder.

She shrugged him off. “I want to see Gabe,” she said. “Right now.”

“There he is,” the Captain said. “That window, yonder.”

Both Holt and Melina looked up. Sure enough, Gabe was gazing down at them, his face like chiseled stone, his hands grasping the bars.

Melina took a step toward him, staggered a little.

Reaching out, Holt caught hold of her arm.

“Where is the way in?” Melina wanted to know.

“Tomorrow,” Holt reasoned.

She shook her head, and water flew from the thick tendrils of hair. “Now,” she said, laying both hands on her belly.

“Might as well show her inside,” the Captain said. “If you don’t, we’ll be at this all day.”

The old man was right. Melina was already prowling back and forth like a caged cat, and she looked as though she’d climb the drain pipe if that was what she had to do to get to Gabe.

Holt took her arm, and this time he didn’t let her pull away. Gabe stared down from his cell, looking as if he might chew his way past those bars and jump two stories to the ground. “This way,” Holt said.

“I’ll tend to the horses and then join you,” the Captain said, leaning from the saddle to catch hold of the Appaloosa’s reins. “After that, I’d accept a drink if you’re offering one.”

Holt merely nodded.

The Captain set out on his errand, and Holt squired Melina into the courthouse and up the stairs to the jail.

“No women allowed,” announced old Roy, sitting in a corner next to the window, watching the rain and whittling.

Holt ignored him. Took the keys down off the hook next to the inside door.

“Wait just a minute,” Roy protested. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“I heard,” Holt replied, working the lock and then putting the keys back in their place. “I just don’t give a damn.”

Melina streaked through the opening, and Holt followed.

“I could send for the marshal!” Roy called after them.

“He’s just downstairs, testifying in Judge Fellows’s courtroom.”

“You do that,” Holt replied, quickening his pace to catch up with Melina.

She strode past the other cells as if she knew exactly where Gabe was—and maybe she did.

Gabe was waiting at the front of his cell. “I told you I wanted her to stay in Waco!” he hissed, glaring at Holt.

“Maybe you should have told her,” Holt retorted.

“Why didn’t you send word, Gabe?” Melina asked, getting as close to the bars as she could with that stomach of hers. Holt could still feel it pressing against his back, during the long ride from Waco. “I did send word,” Gabe answered. His voice was harsh, but his eyes consumed Melina, and he reached through the bars to lay a hand to her cheek. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Melina, you shouldn’t have come here.”

“How could I stay away?” she demanded, covering his hand with her own.

“I’ll see if the Cap’n’s back from the livery stable,” Holt said, turning to go.

Gabe drew in a sharp breath. “The Cap’n? He’s with you?”

“I ran into him in Waco. He’s getting the horses some water and feed. He’ll be in for a word once you and Melina are through talking.”

Gabe nodded. “Did you ask him about Frank? Has the Cap’n seen him, or heard anything?”

Holt had broached the subject to Walton on the way out to the Parkinson place. Now, he shook his head. “He’s got no more idea where Corrales is than we do.”

A ruckus started up out in the front office, and Holt figured the Captain had completed the horse business. He backtracked with some haste, for fear Walton would lose patience with old Roy and get them all thrown in jail.

Sure enough, the Captain had the other man by the shirt collar, slammed up against the wall. Roy’s eyes were bugging out and he was sputtering, his wind cut off by Captain Jack’s grip.

“Let him go,” Holt said, without particular urgency.

“You left that star behind in Waco, remember?”

With a flourish, the Captain released the jailer and watched with interest as he struggled for breath.

“We got rules around here!” Roy wailed. “And you can’t just go around chokin’ folks!”

“The hell I can’t,” the Captain said. “You got any whiskey in this place?”

CHAPTER 13

THE FREIGHT WAGON had already arrived when Lorelei, Angelina and Raul got to the ranch, and it was stuck up to its axels in mud. Raul drew the buckboard up alongside and leaped down.

“I put the load inside that old house there!” the driver shouted, in an effort to be heard over the torrent. “Help me unhitch this team.”

Raul nodded, and Angelina and Lorelei climbed down on their own. Lorelei would have stayed with the men, but Angelina took her arm and dragged her out of the rain.

“It’s an omen,” the older woman said, with conviction, when they stood under the relative shelter of the leaking roof.

Lorelei bent to open the rusted door of the woodstove, and it creaked on its hinges. “Is that a mouse’s nest?” she asked, peering inside.

“Madre de Dios,” said Angelina.

Lorelei shut the stove and turned to survey the piles of provisions, mostly in crates stacked helter-skelter around the room. She picked up a shiny new ax and tested its heft, then set it carefully in a corner. “We won’t need a fire, anyway. It’s hot as the far corner of Hades, even with this rain.”

Angelina went to the door, probably watching for Raul.

Lorelei bent over the tent pole, thinking it was the size of a ship’s mast, and wondered if the canvas could be unwrapped and draped over the roof. Then she picked through the crates until she found the shiny new coffeepot. It was good-sized, for she expected to entertain as soon as she was settled. And the ranch hands—once she hired them and bought some cattle—would want their coffee.

“We’ll have to have a fire after all,” she said, starting for the door.

Angelina turned to look at her. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Why, to set the pot in the rain,” Lorelei said, surprised.

Angelina opened her mouth, closed it again, and went out to join Raul and the driver, who were hobbling the horses.

Lorelei centered the pot in the middle of the dooryard, pleased with the prospect of hot coffee, and went back inside. Purposefully, she emptied a crate, splintered it into manageable pieces with the ax and poked uncertainly at the mouse’s nest. Nothing scurried or squeaked, so she assumed it was abandoned.

She had a nice blaze going when Angelina returned and let out a little shriek.

“Lorelei,” she cried, rushing over and tugging open the stove door. “The chimney!”

Lorelei frowned, assessing the crooked metal pipe disappearing through the roof. Smoke began to billow out through the opening in the stove and seep through heretofore invisible gaps in the pipe.

“For heaven’s sake,” she marveled.

Angelina stabbed at the fire with the handle of Lorelei’s brand-new broom, chattering in Spanish. “Water,” she coughed. “Get me some water!”

Lorelei hesitated, confused, then dashed outside to get the coffeepot, already half-full of rain. She handed it to Angelina, who promptly flung the contents into the stove. There was a puny sizzle, and then Angelina straightened, shutting the squeaky little door against the smoke.

“From now on,” Angelina said evenly, “I will make the coffee.”

Lorelei snatched up a blanket and waved it, but the smoke met the veil of rain at the door and rolled back inside.

Thunder shook the roof.

“A bad omen,” Angelina reiterated, crossing herself.

“Nonsense,” Lorelei said, reclaiming the broom. “With a little straightening up, this house will be cozy.”

Raul came inside, followed by the driver. Both of them were drenched, but then so were Lorelei and Angelina.

“I smell smoke,” said the driver.

They all sat down on crates and stared at each other.

“I believe I’ll ride one of them horses back to town,” the freight man said presently. “Plenty of other mounts, if you all want to go along.”

Raul looked longingly toward the door.

“I’m staying right here,” said Lorelei.

“That’s your privilege, ma’am,” the fellow answered, rising from his crate. Raul stared down at his hands, and Angelina shook out her skirts.

The driver took his leave, and Lorelei rose to watch him go. He mounted one of the four horses, abandoning his wagon, and set out for San Antonio. The remaining three followed along, without benefit of a lead rope.

“He would have been much wiser to spend the night,” she observed. “He could be struck by lightning along that road, and, anyway, he’ll have to come back to get his wagon.”

Neither Angelina nor Raul spoke, or even looked in her direction.

It was up to her, Lorelei decided, to set a cheerful tone. “Raul,” she said, bending to pick up the coffeepot Angelina had dropped after putting out the flames. “Perhaps you could make a bonfire in that copse of oak trees next to the water. We’ll need one for cooking.”

Raul looked at her as though she’d just risen from the dead.

“A bonfire?” he echoed.

Angelina sighed. “Just do it,” she said forlornly.

Raul went out.

“We’d better get into dry clothes,” Lorelei said. “Warm as it is, we could take a chill. I’ll brew up a nice pot of tea.”

“How do you plan to do that?” Angelina asked reasonably.

“Why, I’ll just catch rain water—or get some from the creek—and set it on the fire to boil.”

“And how will you go to and from this fire without getting wet all over again?”

“Oh,” said Lorelei.

“Yes,” said Angelina. “Oh.”

Raul was gone for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and when he returned, he looked defeated.

“There is no dry firewood,” he said.

Lorelei and Angelina, wearing dry clothes, sat on crates, brushing the rain out of their hair.

“We shall have to do without our tea,” Lorelei said bravely.

IN THE DAMP, thin light of dawn, Lorelei gazed up at the cobwebs swathing the ceiling rafters like entangled ghosts. She’d slept in her clothes, on a pallet of blankets, and her skin was peppered with chigger bites. On the other side of the ranch house, which was, she admitted to herself, really just a cabin, Angelina and Raul slumbered on, their soft snores interweaving.

The remnants of last night’s rain dripped through holes in the roof, the chimney was still stopped up with birds’ nests, dirt and layers of soot and she would have sold her soul for a cup of hot, fresh coffee.

By now, her father knew that she’d not only defected from his household and claimed her property and what remained of her funds, but stolen his servants as well. He was probably livid. No, no probably about it, she thought, squaring herself to face reality.

Judge Alexander Fellows was surely in a fury, and even now taking steps to deal with his rebellious daughter.

Isaac Templeton’s vast spread sprawled on one side of her little ranch, and Holt McKettrick’s on the other. For all her brave thoughts to the contrary, a range war was a very real possibility, and if it happened, Lorelei would most likely be caught square in the middle.

She didn’t know how to ride. She didn’t know how to shoot.

She didn’t own a single cow, or a horse.

So why, she wondered, smiling, did she feel so exhilarated?

“GOOD GOD,” said Holt McKettrick, right out loud, when, riding along the creekbank, with Tillie’s dog trotting along behind his horse, he saw Lorelei Fellows kneeling on the other side, splashing her face with water.

She couldn’t have heard him; he was still a hundred yards away, at least, but she looked up, just the same, and took him in with a visible lack of enthusiasm.

The dog, spotting her, barked exuberantly and plunged right into the stream, paddling toward her for all he was worth.

Lorelei’s sour expression turned sweet as she watched Sorrowful make his way across. He came up onto the bank beside her and shook off the creek water with a mighty effort, making her laugh aloud, the sound ringing like church bells of a Sunday morning.

It did something to Holt, hearing her erupt with joy like that. Caused a soft, subtle shift inside him.

That riled him.

Setting his jaw, he urged Traveler into the water and crossed.

Lorelei paid him no notice; she was busy having a reunion with the dog.

He felt a sting, watching them, and this did not have a positive effect upon his disposition.

“What the devil are you doing out here?” he asked Lorelei, getting down from the Appaloosa and leaving the horse to drink from the stream.

Lorelei was nose to nose with that dog, ruffling his ears and laughing, and she took her time answering. Got to her feet, fussed over Sorrowful a while longer and patted her hair. Her fine breasts rose when she did that, and Holt felt another sharp shift, somewhere in his middle.

“I live here,” she said.

Holt scanned the property and found it sorry to behold. The house was on a tilt, and the barn, such as it was, had probably collapsed before Santa Ana massacred one hundred and eighty-five brave men at the Alamo. There were two wagons, one of them stuck axel-deep in drying mud, and the other dripping rainwater through the floorboards. A pair of town horses, pretty but essentially useless, grazed alongside the stream, and there wasn’t a cow to be seen.

“Alone?” he asked, amazed.

Her mouth tightened briefly, and she was sparing with her answer. “Angelina and Raul are with me.”

“Does your father know about this?”

She laughed, more at his consternation, he suspected, than because she had any case for mirth. “No doubt he does.”

“Just what are you planning on doing, way out here?”

“Making a life for myself,” she answered, with a confidence Holt found downright annoying. Didn’t the woman know there were outlaws on the prowl, not to mention renegade Indians, wolves, wild boars and every other kind of bad luck?

Holt remembered his hat and took it off, shoving his free hand through his hair. “This is no place for a lady.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not much of a lady,” Lorelei retorted.

The words struck Holt like a sucker punch, though he was damned if he could think why.

She chuckled at his expression, rocking a little on her heels. “Come now, Mr. McKettrick. Does that really come as such a shock to you? I’m the woman who burned her wedding dress in the town square, after all, and day before yesterday, when we met on the street, I’d just been booted out of the Ladies’ Benevolence Society.”

“So you moved out here, to the middle of nowhere?” Holt challenged, strangely exasperated. What did he care if the damn fool female wanted to make her home on this godforsaken patch of no-account ground? “Seems a mite extreme, to me.”

“I guess it is,” she allowed, obviously enjoying his discomfort. “But I’m here to stay.”

He fiddled with his hat, looked away, looked back. “Damned if you’re not serious,” he marveled.

“I certainly am,” she confirmed.

Over her shoulder, he saw a Mexican man come out of the cabin, rubbing his eyes. Seeing Holt, he ducked back inside, probably to get his rifle.

“At least you’re not alone,” Holt said, as she followed his gaze, but it was precious little comfort—to him at least.

Sure enough, here came the Mexican, rifle in hand, followed by a plump little woman moving at a fast clip. Probably his wife.

“Raul, Angelina,” Lorelei called to them, smiling. The dog was hunkered down beside her, wagging his stumpy tail and gazing up at her face with pure adoration. “I’d like you to meet Holt McKettrick—one of our neighbors.”

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