Table of Contents

Cover Page

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Excerpt

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

About the Author

Copyright

10TH ANNIVERSARY
Special thanks to our well-wishers, who have contributed their congratulations and support.

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Storming Paradise
Mary McBride

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Cynthia MacDonald Gamblin, my gold friend

“We were discussing your dismissal, I believe,”

Libby said.

“All right.” Shad crossed his arms over his chest. “Go ahead.”

“I want you to leave.”

“You already said that.”

Libby crossed her arms now. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Go.” She angled her head toward the door. Once he was gone, she thought, she’d be able to breathe normally. However did he manage to suck up all the air in a room, leaving only scraps for everybody else to breathe?

But he wasn’t going. He seemed stuck to that backward chair as if he were glued to it by the seat of his pants. The pants—she couldn’t help but notice—that were pulled so taut across his thighs. She could actually see the power in those hard curves, could almost feel…Her eyes snapped back to his face, only to discover the most irritating grin she’d ever seen.

“You’ve got a lot to learn about firing, Miss Libby…”

Prologue

Dear Daughters, Amos Kingsland wrote.

And then, because he was a blunt man, never known to hold his temper or his tongue, he continued. I’m dying.

As if to underscore the words he wrote, pain shot through his belly just then. Amos closed his eyes. The doctors in Corpus Christi wanted to slice him open and poke around inside, but he’d told them to ply their lily-fingered trade on somebody else. He’d already been cut twice—once by a blind-drunk Cajun in New Orleans, and once—worse—by a woman in Matamoros who didn’t like the word adios. Any more scars, he figured, and Saint Peter wouldn’t recognize him when he knocked on the pearly gates. Or Lucifer, when he pounded on the blazing portals of perdition.

He was sixty-two years old and didn’t particularly want to die, but—damn!—when the pain grabbed at his gut, he didn’t take much pleasure in living.

Not that his pleasures had ever come easy. He’d worked hard creating Paradise—battling Mexicans and Indians and wrong-headed whites, wrestling long-horns and mustangs and Mother Earth herself until he’d built the biggest, most prosperous ranch in Texas.

He’d lost a partner along the way. Good riddance. Hoyt Backus had taken his profits in cash and had set himself up on an adjoining spread that he’d named Hellfire just for spite.

And Amos had lost a wife and two daughters, as well. He’d barely flinched fifteen years ago when Ellen had taken their two little girls to Saint Louis. Good riddance on that count, too. He hadn’t missed them. A man didn’t miss what he didn’t need.

Until now.

He picked up the pen again.

I want you to come to Texas.

Dammit! What he wanted—what he needed—was a son. If he regretted anything, it was that. After Ellen walked out, he’d considered marrying again. But he’d found matrimony to be more hellish than holy. God knows, and the devil, too, that he hadn’t done right by his wife. He was too hot tempered, too set in his ways, too hard. All the qualities that had allowed him to wrest Paradise out of a harsh land didn’t add up to good husband material. Truth to tell, Amos just didn’t like women very much.

Only now he was dying, and everything he’d worked so hard for was going to die with him because there wasn’t anybody to take over. Somebody to keep the damn rustlers from chipping away at the stock. Somebody to oversee the breeding, to see that the cattle survived parched summers and harsh winters, then made it to the railhead without losing half their lives and most of their weight. Somebody to carry on.

A son. He needed a son and all he had were two daughters he hadn’t even seen in fifteen years. Two women, fragile as their mother, no doubt, who’d spent their lives in the prim parlors and on the paved avenues of Saint Louis, who just might recognize beef on a plate in a fancy restaurant, but wouldn’t know a steer on the hoof from a damn dairy cow if their lives depended on it.

Now Amos’s life—his life’s work—depended on them. Paradise depended on them.

Please, he wrote, grimacing, galled as much by that plea as by the pain in his midsection.

But then Amos heard the soft jingle of spurs in the vestibule outside his office door. A smile hitched up one comer of his mouth as he put down the pen and called out.

“That you, Shad? Come on in.”

The heavily paneled door swung in, and Shadrach Jones stood in the doorway. Big as life, Amos thought. Barely tame. Tall and trim and tough as the land itself. A man nobody tangled with. Nobody with any sense anyway. Hell, he wished he’d had a son. A son like Shadrach Jones.

The man didn’t so much enter a room as take possession of it. His gaze encompassed it first before his body even moved. Then he eased forward, boot heels hitting the floor with a slow certainty, as if the man were branding it, making it his own somehow. The ease of his stride belied the fact that every muscle and sinew was forever primed to react. Whenever possible, he would straddle a chair, subduing it with his size and weight. Right now, he lowered his big body into one of Amos’s leather armchairs, scraped his hat off and balanced it on his knee.

Suddenly Amos became aware of a difference in the room. It seemed to grow warmer. It smelled of healthy animals, both man and beast; of sunbaked flesh, dust-caked denim and a hard day’s work. It reeked of vitality. Paradise. These days every room Amos inhabited took on the stench of a sickroom, the miasma of death. Shadrach Jones had changed all by his mere presence.

“Hand me that bottle.” Amos pointed to the whiskey on a shelf of the bookcase. He poured them each a couple fingers and proceeded to ask his foreman about the strays by Caliente Creek and the Brahma bull that had arrived from Shreveport earlier that week.

Judging from Jones’s replies, all was well at Paradise. Almost all.

“I’m sending for my daughters,” Amos said, glancing down at the sheet of vellum on his desktop.

“All right.” Shadrach Jones’s tone was low and somber, and his level gaze acknowledged the unspoken—that he knew his boss was dying. His ensuing silence said more—that the man had seen death before, many times, and accepted it. It simply was.

“I want you to see this letter gets mailed, Shad. And when they arrive in Corpus Christi, I want you to see they get to Paradise in one piece.”

Jones nodded.

Silently then, Amos studied his face. Easy enough tasks for such a man. Mail a letter. Bring two women forty miles. What about the other? Be my son, Amos longed to say.

He was a fool even to consider leaving Paradise to a man whose mother was a Comanche and whose father was anybody’s guess, to a man whose past was more shadow than sunlight. Hell, Hoyt Backus would get himself a smart lawyer and take this place away in a matter of weeks. His daughters were his legal, rock-solid heirs. No question about that. Hoyt could get all the lawyers in Texas then and Paradise would still elude him.

With a sigh, Amos drained his glass then leaned back in his chair. “Do you remember those daughters of mine, Shad?”

A sudden grin split the big man’s unshaven face. “I remember a little redhead chasing the ninth life out of a barn cat.”

Amos nodded. “That’d be Shulamith. Do you remember the other one?”

Shad resettled his hat on his knee, twisting the brim in his fingers. His grin disappeared. What he recalled was a little girl crying when her mama took her away. He’d been nineteen or twenty then, and hadn’t known squat about little girls. But leaving he knew. He remembered his heart hurting for that skinny, dark-haired child.

“No,” he told the old man. “Can’t say as I do.”

“Elizabeth,” Amos murmured. “We called her Libby.”

Shad nodded again. When he rose, the armchair creaked like saddle leather. “Well, I’ll be saying good-night now, Amos, unless there’s anything else you need.”

A son. Amos almost said it. “No. Nothing. Good night, Shad.”

Chapter One

Bill collectors! They were all overgrown, beady-eyed bullies in cheap serge suits and scuffed shoes. Shula Kingsland fully expected to see one of them right this minute, oozing out of the carriage that had just pulled up on Newstead Avenue in front of the house she shared with her sister.

Crouching behind the velvet overdrapes, Shula eased the lace sheers back a fraction. Her heart was pressing into her throat as she watched the cabbie extend a hand into the closed coach to help his passenger out.

“I’m not home,” the redhead muttered into the dark folds of the drapes. “I simply won’t answer the door. I won’t. Let him knock till his knuckles bleed. Till dooms—”

The cabbie handed a woman down from the coach. A child scrambled after her.

Shula yanked back the sheers. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Her relief was sweet, although brief. She wasn’t going to be forced, after all, to wheedle more time from some fool the bank had sent. But here came her sister with that ragamuffin again.

Shula stomped to the door, flinging it open just as the two of them were coming up the walk. Her bracelets jangled as she shook her fist and her rings glittered in the sunlight.

“Libby Kingsland,” she called, “if you want to be a mother so badly why don’t you marry and have babies of your own instead of dragging other people’s children home?”

The two sisters faced off in the arched oak doorway—Libby in her stiff-boned, grosgrain walking suit and Shula, still ruffled in her morning wrapper despite the fact that it was late afternoon. Both women had fire in their eyes, unlike the child who cowered now, caught between the Kingsland sisters’ silk flounces and sharp pleats.

In rough wool trousers and muddy brogans, and with her cropped blond hair, nine-year-old Amanda Rowan looked exactly like a boy. And it exasperated Shula Kingsland no end.

“Why can’t you leave him…I mean…her with the Sisters of Charity where she belongs?” Shula hissed at her sister now.

Libby’s gloved hand cupped the child’s ear as she brought her close against her hip. “Because they’re letting a certain someone out of jail today, Shula. And I’ll be damned if he’s going to hurt this little girl any more than he already has.”

“Oh.” Shula’s mouth closed with a smart little snap and her ringed fingers fluttered at the frilled throat of her gown as she dropped an almost sympathetic look on the child half-hidden in Libby’s skirt.

Gently Libby urged the little girl across the threshold and into the vestibule. “Go on up to the spare room, Andy. I’ll be up soon to get you settled.”

When the child nodded, blond hair straggled across her forehead. The sight provoked an instant cluck from Shula, whose hand whisked out to push the stray locks back.

She sighed wistfully. “Maybe while you’re here, Miss Amanda Rowan,” she said, emphasizing the feminine first name, “I’ll take my curling iron to that haystack on your pretty head.”

The child shot her a wounded look before turning to flee up the stairs. Shula winced at the sound of the big brogans thudding on each step.

“And maybe I’ll take that same curling iron to your tongue, Shulamith Kingsland.” Libby pulled the front door closed and turned the bolt. “There. Her father will have to crack through that to lay a finger on her now.”

As her older sister strode down the hallway toward the kitchen, Shula regarded the locked door. Lord, how she hated being cooped up in this dismal little house. First with her tight-lipped, stiff-boned sister, and now with a little girl who was trying with all her might to be a boy. Still, she thought, it didn’t hurt one bit that Libby was now as reluctant as she was to open the front door.

Libby! She was in the kitchen where Shula had tossed the unopened mail when she’d heard the carriage pulling up. The mail these days consisted mainly of overdue bills and disgusting letters from rude and impatient creditors, none of which she was anxious for her skinflint of a sister to see. Shula grabbed up her ruffled gown and rushed down the hall in Libby’s wake.

As she pulled the pins from her hat, Libby scowled at the stack of dishes in the dry sink, noting that it had grown considerably since she’d rushed out of the house this morning. Princess Shula, no doubt, had used a clean plate every time she passed through the kitchen. Of course, it had never occurred to her to do up any of them.

Still, fair was fair, and the dishes were Libby’s domain. They had agreed to that when they decided to use part of their small inheritance from their mother to buy and share a house. Shula, because she cared about money, would see to the bills and their investments. Libby would see to everything else, which meant she was cook, laundress, parlor maid and—judging now from the tower of dirty dishes in the dry sink—scullery maid.

Right this minute it felt closer to slavery, Libby thought as she tossed. her hat onto the table before sagging into a chair. She tugged off her gloves and tossed those, too, onto the stack of mail that Shula hadn’t bothered to open. Probably too busy taking clean plates from the cupboard and putting dirty ones in the sink.

Well, she didn’t have time to worry about Shula’s laziness right now. And she wasn’t going to let her sister’s comment about frustrated maternal instincts bother her, either. Amanda Rowan needed her help. Desperately. It was as simple as that.

A constable had brought the battered child to the Sisters of Charity on Christmas Eve, the same night they had locked John Rowan up for “doing his daughter wrong,” as the grim-faced policeman had explained. The extent of that abuse was obvious, even to the sheltered Sisters of Charity who ran the or-phanage, when they saw the bruises on young Amanda’s body. And when the child took a pair of scissors and chopped off her long blond curls; when she refused to wear anything but trousers and ungainly shirts and big, clumsy shoes; when she refused to respond to any name but Andy, it became obvious that, since being a little girl had only brought her pain, Amanda Rowan was determined to change that sad fact of her brutal, young life.

Libby, who spent time with the children at the or-phanage, had been drawn to the battered child immediately. Out of compassion, certainly. Out of her need to help and comfort the bruised waif. And, perhaps as Shula continually accused, out of some frustrated maternal inclinations. She was a woman, after all. At the age of twenty-five it was only natural that she would feel such stirrings. But since she had no intention of marrying—ever—those instincts would remain just that. Vague stirrings.

As always, the thought of marriage made Libby’s mouth crimp slightly. Her smooth brow furrowed. The very idea of marrying caused her stomach to tighten and twist into a hard little knot. She was unlike her sister, who reveled in the notion and seemed to consider marriage her very reason for being. Well, a profitable marriage, anyway.

Shula had already tried it once—unsuccessfully—by running off with the Van de Voort boy when she was eighteen. They had spent, according to the bride anyway, a grand and glorious time in Rome until young Charles Van de Voort had succumbed to a fever, leaving Shula a widow before her nineteenth birthday. She couldn’t even claim widowhood, however, because the groom’s family had had the marriage annulled, along with seeing that their former daughter-in-law was persona non grata in the finer drawing rooms in Saint Louis.

As a result, Shula was having a devil of a time trying to find a wealthy beau. And she spent the major portion of that time carping about her trials and tribulations, sighing and whining and generally making Libby’s existence miserable.

“And here you sit, Libby Kingsland,” she admonished herself now in a disgusted tone of voice, “stewing about your sister who’s twenty years old and perfectly capable of taking care of herself when you ought to be worrying about a nine-year-old who can’t and whose monster of a father means to snatch her back.”

Shula wafted into the kitchen, plopping herself down in a chair directly across the table. “And if you don’t stop talking to yourself, Libby Kingsland, people are going to start looking at you peculiarly and thinking you’re an addle-brained old maid.” The redhead gave her sister a satisfied little smile as she fussed with the ruffles at her neckline.

Libby’s nose twitched. “What’s that smell?”

“My new perfume.” Shula gave her lush auburn curls a tender pat. “It’s from Paris, France. Isn’t it heavenly?”

Heavenly? It struck Libby more as something dredged up from the gutter—wet sycamore leaves, perhaps—but she knew from long experience that an honest reply would send Shula into a royal snit for the rest of the day.

“It’s fine,” she offered. Then, seeing Shula’s mouth begin to curl down at the corners, Libby added, “It smells good.”

While Shula fashioned a smile and lifted a wrist to sniff the foul fragrance, Libby once again berated herself for even considering her baby sister’s outsized, overwrought sensibilities when she had much more pressing problems. One anyway. The brutal John Rowan was getting out of jail. Today.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about Andy,” she murmured.

Shula made a noncommittal little noise, extending an arm casually across the table, then reaching beneath one of Libby’s gloves to extract the pile of mail. There were three envelopes, two of which she immediately recognized—another notice from the bank and another “polite but firm” note from the dressmaker. She slid them toward her and surreptitiously tucked those two into the folds of her gown, all the while studying the unfamiliar envelope postmarked Texas.

“I don’t suppose you have any suggestions,” Libby said.

“About what?” And who the devil was writing them from Texas? Shula wondered now, frowning as she slid a fingernail underneath the flap then slipped out a single sheet of vellum.

“About what!” Libby’s fist hit the table. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve been saying, Shulamith Kingsland? Don’t you care one whit what happens to that poor little—”

“Oh, my Lord!”

“What?”

Her sister’s face had gone white as the cloth that covered the table except for the dabs of rouge on each of her cheeks.

“Shula,” Libby insisted, “what in the world is the matter?”

“It’s from him,” Shula breathed, still staring at the paper in her hands.

“Him?” A score of young men’s names flitted through Libby’s brain. Shula was forever mentioning this one or that one. None of them, though, struck Libby as capable of shaking the stuffing from her sister or taking the color right out of her face. “Him who?” she demanded.

In a whisper that was more breath than voice, Shula replied, “Him. Our father.”

Libby felt her own cheeks paling. “Give me that.” She grabbed at the letter, but her sister immediately clasped it to her bosom and sighed dramatically.

“He begins it Dear Daughters,”Shula said.

Libby snorted. “That’s probably because he can’t remember either of our names.” Angling back in her chair now, she crossed both arms. “Well, what else does the old goat have to say after fifteen years of utter silence?”

Shula’s lips trembled. “He says he’s dying, Libby.”

“Dying?” The older sister repeated the word as if it were incomprehensible, as if she hadn’t enough breath to clearly speak it nor enough sense to understand it. The Amos Kingsland she remembered was an enormous and vital man. He couldn’t be dying. Every muscle in her body, every ounce of her being seized tight, rejecting the notion. “I don’t believe it.”

“He wants us to come to Texas. To Paradise.”

“Paradise.” Libby’s head was swamped with images, not of angels in long, flowing robes or billowy white clouds, but of huge, dusty cowhands in leather chaps, of wild dark clouds rushing across a shadowed landscape. The music she heard suddenly wasn’t comprised of heavenly harps or choirs of angels, but rather the bawling of hundreds of cattle, the thunder of thousands of hooves. She shivered and blinked, then stared at her sister as if suddenly realizing she wasn’t alone.

Shula was smiling not so much at Libby but at the world in general. The color had returned to her face. It was flushed now, and her eyes were bright. Feverishly so. “I knew it,” she exclaimed, waving the letter aloft. “Didn’t I tell you? Well, I probably didn’t since you close your ears whenever the man’s name is mentioned. But I always knew he’d send for us.”

After pushing away from the table, Shula began fluttering around the small kitchen. “Paradise. Don’t you just adore the sound of it. It’s bigger than the whole state of Rhode Island. Did you realize that, Libby? Bigger than an entire state.” Shula sucked in a breath. “I guess that makes our father about as important as a governor. Do you recollect the house? I confess I haven’t any memory of it. Of course, I was only five when we left. But it must be grand. Was it grand, Libby?”

Her silk gown swished as Shula turned to her sister, who sat rigid and silent. “Libby?”

“I won’t go.” Libby’s lips barely moved when she spoke. “I’m sorry he’s dying, but I will not go. Not ever.”

Shula sniffed, resuming her circuit of the room. “Don’t be silly,” she said dismissively. “Of course you’ll go. Our father’s dying and he wants us. Good Lord, Libby! Think what that means.”

It meant trouble, Libby decided, or worse. Unable to bear a second more of her sister’s outlandish exuberance, she had left the kitchen and had gone up to the spare room to check on the child, whom she found smack in the middle of the big four-poster bed, fast asleep. As gently as she could, Libby unlaced and removed the dreadful brogans from the little girl’s feet.

How fortunate Andy was, Libby had thought, to be able to escape all her trials and terrors in such deep and innocent sleep. For a moment, as she had stood gazing down at her, Libby had envied the child for that. She was sleeping like an angel. Libby couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had such an angelic rest.

But—dammit—yes, she could. It had been at Paradise with the white curtains billowing in, with South Texas sunshine buttering the walls of her room, with the lullaby of cattle and the sweet, sweet smells of hay and mock orange and jasmine.

So long ago.

Libby sat for a long time, keeping watch over the sleeping child, letting her mind drift back to a time and a place she had tried for fifteen years to erase from her memory.

Paradise! Lord, how she’d loved it. Every inch of the place from Caliente Creek where the mesquite tangled to the southernmost pastures where the air was heavy with salt from the gulf. The images—all the sights and sounds—came back so quickly and with such intensity now, it nearly took Libby’s breath away. As if having been locked away for so many years, they were rushing and spilling over one another to make themselves seen and heard. Fast. Bursting its banks like a creek after a summer storm. A flash flood. Or—Libby smiled softly at the notion—as they said in Texas, a real gully-washer.

So many memories. And superimposed on them all was the image of Amos Kingsland. His glossy black boots. His enormous, work-roughened hands. His deep auburn hair and the scratchy beard that bristled from his chin. That beard was what Libby remembered best.

Her father had been a steamboat captain in the Gulf of Mexico before venturing inland to raise cattle. The salt breezes of the gulf seemed to have permeated his beard and to have given it a permanent thrust so that, even in the house, it was as if the wind were tugging at his chin.

Or so his little girl had imagined. It hadn’t been wind at all, Libby thought now, but pure stubbornness, a will to succeed at any cost, and no qualms whatsoever about bending anyone to that will. As he had bent her mother. Bent and nearly broken the sweet, soft Ellen McCafferty Kingsland Carew.

Just then, as if the mere thought of her mother had somehow conjured up her form, Shula poked her curly head in the door.

Quickly Libby touched a finger to her lips, gesturing toward the sleeping child.

“You look so much like Mama sometimes, Shula, I find myself looking twice,” she whispered.

The ruffled apparition rustled across the room and sought her image in the mirror over the dresser. “I do, don’t I?” She rearranged a few curls, then leaned forward to more closely inspect her eyebrows. “Of course, Mama was a fool, bless her heart.”

Libby opened her mouth to protest, then kept silent. Sadly enough, it was true. Their mother had been, if not a fool, then an exceptionally weak woman. Where she’d gotten the gumption to walk out on Amos Kingsland was a mystery. Even so, that strength had quickly deserted her once she had married that tightfisted mercantilist and bully, Edgar Carew.

Thoughts of her poor mother prompted Libby to whisper, “What would you do, Shula, if a man ever lifted a hand to you?”

Her sister snorted. “I’d slap him back.” Her eyebrow arched in the mirror. “Or worse.”

Libby sighed. “I wonder why Mama didn’t”.

Shula shrugged now. “She was afraid, I guess. Who knows? I can tell you I gave our dear stepfather the back of my hand on quite a few occasions, along with several pieces of my mind.”

Libby’s eyes widened in astonishment. “What did he do?”

“He just laughed. The pig! I hated losing Mama, Libby, but I have to say I didn’t mind one little bit that that awful Edgar perished in that carriage accident, too.”

Shula sighed softly at her reflection, then turned to face her sister, her hands lifting to fasten on her hips. “We need to start packing, Libby. Where’s that old trunk of Mama’s I took to Italy with me?”

“I have no idea.” But what Libby knew was that she wasn’t prepared to argue now, here, and possibly wake Andy, who needed all the peaceful sleep she could get. Once thwarted, Shula wouldn’t be able to whisper, she would probably scream.

“Take a look up in the attic,” she suggested, hoping to occupy Shula temporarily and thus forestall their confrontation.

“I hate it up there,” Shula said. “It’s dark as a week of midnights, and all that dust gets into my pores and just takes up residence for days no matter how hard I scrub. I won’t even mention the spiders.” Shula shivered, sending her gown into a flurry. Then her expression brightened. “Maybe I could just order a new trunk. One with all those cute little drawers and…”

The heat of Libby’s glare withered her sister’s speech, as well as her enthusiasm.

“Well, they are cute,” she finished glumly. “We don’t want to look like two kitchen maids when we go to Texas, do we?”

As much as she felt like one sometimes, Libby thought there was nothing wrong in looking like one. But since she wasn’t going to Texas anyway, it didn’t make any difference. She continued to scorch her sister with her gaze, using her thumb now to indicate the door.

“All right. I’ll go,” complained Shula as she moved across the room. “But if I’m not back downstairs in fifteen minutes, Libby, it’s because I’ll have choked to death on all that dust”

“Maybe you’ll be lucky, sister,” Libby offered encouragingly as she bit back on a grin. “Maybe those big, hairy spiders will get you first.”

With a shudder and a strangled little moan, Shula swept out of the room.

As soon as the door clicked closed, little Andy jerked upright in the center of the bed. She rubbed an eye with one grimy knuckle, then mumbled, “I heard about Texas. I heard it’s real nice there.”

Her comment, cool and disinterested as it sounded, didn’t fool Libby for a moment. The child was terrified of being abandoned, or infinitely worse, of being returned to the clutches of her father. Libby left her chair and perched on the edge of the bed, reaching to smooth a pale hank of hair from the little girl’s forehead.

“Texas is nice,” she said, “but I’m not going there. I like it fine right here.”

“I do, too,” the child responded. “Especially when I’m with you.” Andy scuttled across the mattress now and wrapped her arms around Libby, burying her face in the pleats of her bodice. “Don’t let my papa take me back, Miss Libby. I want to stay here with you. Oh, please, don’t let him take me back.”

Libby hugged her tightly. “I won’t, honey. I promise I won’t let him get within a foot of you.”

Fine words, she thought, as she sat and rocked the frightened little girl. The Sisters of Charity had cautioned her only this morning that John Rowan, once out of jail, had every legal right to reclaim his daughter.

“And he’ll try,” Sister Josepha had said. “Sure as the devil’s prodding him from behind. They can’t keep the man locked away forever. Once he’s out, he’ll be needing her for his cooking and his cleaning and whatever other despicable things the man has on his mind.”

Libby’s reply had been forceful. “I just won’t let him.”

Sister Josepha had merely shaken her head sadly, as if to say “How can you stop him?”

“I wish I knew,” Libby murmured now. “Oh, Lord, I wish I knew.”

The pounding on the door was enough to loosen the mortar from every brick in the two-story house. By the time Libby got downstairs—after shoving Andy into a wardrobe and covering the child with a quilt—Shula was already there, leaning all her weight on one shoulder against the front door.

“Shh!” she hissed when Libby rushed to join her. “Just keep still and he’ll think nobody’s home.”

“Miss Kingsland, I know you’re in there,” a voice boomed from outside while fists continued to batter the paneled oak.

When Libby opened her mouth to reply, Shula hissed again, menacingly this time, so Libby kept still. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, she thought, letting John Rowan believe the house was empty. Surely the man’s fists couldn’t keep up that pummeling indefinitely. From the sound of him, he was already getting hoarse.

The sisters stood there for what seemed like an hour, feeling the door tremble and quake, hearing the doorknob rattle again and again. When it stopped, and when there was only silence on the other side of the door, they waited another few minutes before they spoke.

“Andy’s not safe here,” Libby whispered. “Oh, Shula, what in the world am I going to do?”

Shula draped a comforting arm around her sister’s shoulder. Certain as Shula was that their unwelcome visitor had been another bill collector—the most aggressive of them yet!—she was briefly tempted to allay Libby’s fears and tell her the truth, that little Andy was plenty safe from creditors. It would have comforted Libby, no doubt, but then it wouldn’t have done Shula herself the least bit of good.

So instead, she said quite somberly, “I only know one solution, Libby. We’ll simply have to take the poor child with us when we go to Texas.” She embellished her words with a lingering, sympathetic sigh. “I believe we ought to leave as soon as possible, don’t you? For little Andy’s sake?”

Chapter Two

The big red-and-black Concord coach—its door branded with the famous Circle P—was a familiar sight on the streets of Corpus Christi. Amos Kingsland always came to town in style. He kept fresh teams at intervals along the forty-mile stretch. In the old days it guaranteed he could outrun whatever marauders lay in wait along the way. Now, with most of the rustlers and bandidos having been driven off, the coach’s speed wasn’t so much for safety as it was for its own sake and to let everyone in Corpus know that God, in the guise of Amos Kingsland, was down from Paradise.

Eb Talent was the reinsman. The grizzled sailorturned-landlubber had been with Kingsland since the steamboat captain had moved inland nearly thirty years before. Eb hadn’t been a young man then and the rigors of riding the range that first year had left him with what he called “permanent saddle sores,” so he’d carved himself out an indispensable niche as cook and coachman. The red-and-black conveyance was his spit-shined pride and joy.

On this afternoon, though, it wasn’t God who was riding in the closed coach, but his foreman, Shadrach Jones.

With a blistering crack of his whip, Eb cut the corner onto Water Street, rocking the big coach and sending its dozing passenger sprawling onto the floor.

Once in the livery, the wiry man climbed down from the high seat, brushed the dirt from his britches and opened the door. His grin revealed an odd assortment of gaps and tobacco-stained teeth. “Six hours and thirty-eight minutes,” he announced. “Only done it faster once, and that was back in ‘76 when we had that pair of quick-footed grays.”

Shadrach Jones punched the crease back in the hat that had taken his whole weight when he slid from the seat. “You’re a goddamn miracle, Eb.” He slapped the black Stetson on his dark head before angling his long legs out of the coach, then stood a moment, gazing around the dim confines of the stable.

“Six and thirty-eight. Damn! I didn’t know I had it in me,” the driver exclaimed.

Shad’s mouth slid into a grin—a flare of white against his deep bronzed skin—and he clapped the smaller man on the shoulder. “I wasn’t surprised for a minute, hoss. You’re still the best whip-cracker in Texas.”

Of course, why the man had been in such a damn hurry was beyond Shad. It wouldn’t have bothered him if the trip from Paradise had taken twice as long. He was about that eager to meet up with Amos’s two daughters and escort them back to the ranch.

He’d tried to get out of it, coming up with at least half-a-dozen crises that required his immediate attention, but Amos would have none of it. “You’re the only man I’d trust my daughters to, Shad,” the old man had said. “Do this for me, son.”

Hell. How could anybody deny what might be a dying man’s last request? And when that man called you son…well, it wasn’t in Shad to say no. He’d killed men for Amos Kingsland; the least he could do now was round up the two stray heifers and cart them back to Paradise. If only they were heifers, he thought. He knew how to handle those. But ladies…

The quiet of the stable was suddenly broken by the sound of female laughter and the swish of skirts.

Eb shook his head. “What do they do, smell you?” he muttered as three young women paraded across the hay-strewn floor, each trying to elbow the others out of her way, each flashing her petticoats in order to outdo the others.

Shad would have replied, but his arms were quickly filled with women. Rosa clasped her arms around his waist. Nona plastered herself against his hip. Carmela—bless her—fit herself like a favorite saddle to his backside.

“We saw the coach,” Nona cried, her face tipped up, her breath catching. “We ran. Come see us.”

“Come now.” Rosa pulled seductively at his gun belt.

While the prostitutes continued to press against Shad, Eb Talent stood nearby, poking a chew into his cheek. “Beats me, Jones,” he mumbled, “how a fella who claims he don’t care for ladies can draw ‘em like flies on dead meat.”

Shad lifted his head from Nona’s ardent kiss. “I said I didn’t care for ladies, Eb. I never said anything about real women.”

The girls giggled and squirmed all the more in light of the compliment, until Shad was forced to peel them away, one by one. They refused to leave until he had promised to spend the night—upstairs—at the Steamboat Saloon. It wasn’t a difficult promise as that had been Shad’s intention all along after he had paid a dutiful call on the Misses Kingsland to inform them that they would be leaving for Paradise bright and early the following morning.

Eb turned from watching the prostitutes as they sashayed out of the stable. He cast his cohort a look that told him he was one lucky son of a bitch, then spat out of one corner of his mouth.

“Don’t s’pose Amos’s daughters will be half so taken with all that road dust, though.” The driver grinned. “Guess they’re used to fancy fellas who smell more like hair tonic than Texas dirt.”

As he realigned the gun belt that Nona had nearly undone, Shad grumbled, “Some women like it fine.”

“Yup,” mused Eb, “I ‘spect it depends some who it’s on.” He bent then to pick up a bucket and rag, and began to wash down the dusty red-and-black coach. “Still, you best wash some of that dirt off, Shad, afore you pay your respects to the Captain’s daughters. Can’t walk through the door of a fancy eating establishment looking like a man who works for a living, I hear.”

Grumbling under his breath and rolling up his sleeves, Shad ambled toward the washbowl on a bench. “Doesn’t make much difference since I’ll be taking my supper at the saloon,” he called over his shoulder.

“Not tonight, you ain’t,” Eb called back.

“What do you mean?” Shad dipped his hands into the soapy gray water and splashed it on his face. “I always eat and bed down at the Steamboat when I’m in Corpus.”

“Bed down maybe, but tonight you’re eating with the Captain’s daughters at a fancy restaurant.”

The big man shook his wet head, sending beads of water in a wide spray. He pulled the towel roll till he found a dry spot. “Says who?” he asked.

“Says Amos.” Eb put down his bucket and rag, then fished in his pants pocket a moment before producing two gold coins. “He gimme these here double eagles to give you. Said you’re to see those females have a proper meal. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you hisself.”

Actually Eb Talent wasn’t at all surprised. When the boss had handed him the money and had instructed him in how it was to be spent, Amos had laughed as he added, “Shad’ll tell me no to my face, Eb, but once he’s in Corpus he can’t do that, now, can he?”

When it came to getting his way, the Captain didn’t miss a trick. And nobody knew that better than Shadrach Jones. Given half a chance, Shad could usually outfox the old man, too. The two of them were so much alike that some of the hands at Paradise had speculated over the years that the Captain might even be Shad’s natural father. Eb knew different, though. He and Amos had still been steaming back and forth across the Gulf of Mexico when Jones had been born some thirty-four or thirty-five years ago.

There was a lot about Shadrach Jones that Eb didn’t know, including his sire, but he did know right that moment in the livery stable that the man was about to explode. The former sailor was tempted to haul himself up into the coach as fast as his old legs could move in order to avoid the fireworks.

But Shad didn’t explode. He laughed instead, shook his damp head and muttered, “That old fox. I’m telling you, Eb, I don’t envy the Almighty once Amos Kingsland starts staking his claim on the real Paradise.” He jerked a thumb heavenward, then extended his hand toward Eb. “Gimme the damn money.”

Eb did as he was told, saying, “I sure wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall when you’re having supper with those gals.”

Shad jammed the coins into his back pocket. “Come on along then. Only don’t expect to linger over coffee and prissy little desserts. Fancy or not, this is going to be one quick meal.” Shad sighed “I don’t get to town so often that I intend to waste my time with a couple of thin-lipped, bony-assed Eastern ladies when there’s all those willing women down the street.”

For a moment, the notion had a certain appeal for Eb. “Maybe I could get a couple new recipes. Fancy stuff, you know, to fix up for the Captain.”

“Sure,” Shad agreed.

Then the old man glanced back at the big coach, still covered with dust. He shrugged. “Nah. Guess I’ll stay right here. Anyway, fancy eats might not sit right with the Captain what with his aching stomach.”

“Suit yourself.” Shad planted his black Stetson on his damp hair and turned for the stable door. “I won’t be long, hoss. You can count on that.”

The second floor, corner room in the Excelsior Hotel was pleasant but small, made smaller still by a cot and a huge assortment of trunks, handbags and hatboxes. The room was so crammed that Shula Kingsland could barely pace. She kept tripping over luggage.

“Damnation,” she howled, grabbing onto the iron footboard to keep from pitching forward onto the floor. “Well, I don’t know why I bother holding on, really. A person couldn’t possibly fall down in here. All this junk would keep a body propped up indefinitely.”

Libby was tempted to remind her sister that most of the junk was hers. Instead, she remained silent and continued to press a cool cloth to the forehead of the little girl lying on the cot. The long trip from Saint Louis—by train and finally by steamship—had taken a toll on Andy. She’d been seasick on the steamship from Mobile and what little she had eaten had promptly come back up. Shula, too, had claimed to be deathly ill while they were on The Belle of the Gulf, but it hadn’t stopped her from taking a seat at the captain’s table or consuming copious quantities of oysters and champagne.

“Lord, it’s hot in here,” Shula said now, fanning herself with her hand as she picked her way toward the window. “I’m fairly dripping, Libby. I don’t remember Texas being so hellishly hot, do you?”

“It’s no worse than Saint Louis,” Libby said softly. Andy seemed to have drifted off to sleep and she didn’t want to wake her. She angled off the cot as delicately as she could. “If you’d sit a minute, Shula, maybe you’d cool off.”

Shula was peering out the window now. “I can see the gulf.”

“Well, that should make you feel cooler.”

“No,” Shula said with a sniff. “Looks to me like it’s boiling.”

Libby sighed. It would be a miracle, she thought, if she survived this day, let alone the several weeks she planned to remain in Texas. It wasn’t a trip she wanted to make, but all her resolve had evaporated that afternoon last week when John Rowan had nearly broken down their front door in his attempt to get his daughter back. Damn that man anyway. Libby had felt she’d had no choice but to spirit the child away—far away—for a while at least. With any luck, the man would commit other crimes for which the police could successfully put him away permanently.

In the meantime, she merely hoped she could endure her sister’s theatrics. Sharing such close quarters with Shula was like being strapped to a front-row seat at a melodrama. The woman could go on for hours about everything and nothing. Complaining, it seemed, had become Shula’s favorite pastime. And she never just talked. She exclaimed!

At the moment she was flapping her arms in an effort to dry the damp fabric of her dress. “I’ll be dehydrated in a few hours,” Shula muttered now. “How can anybody stand this? It’s like a steam bath.”

Libby went to the window and gazed out at the sparkling gulf. Funny she didn’t recall it, she thought. Her memories of Texas were land, not water. Land and nothing else, as far as the eye could see. Her father’s land. Paradise. She wondered if it would seem as vast, as purely magical now that she was grown.

When she turned from the window, she was greeted with the sight of Shula’s draped and ruffled backside as she bent to rummage through a valise.

“Aha!” Shula straightened up, holding a tin of talc. “Help me undo my dress, will you, Libby?”

Libby sighed and crossed the little room to assist her, more aware than ever that her own dress felt clammy and uncomfortable. After unfastening a myriad of tiny buttons, she went back to the window while Shula slapped powder under her arms.

“I want to look good for Daddy,” Shula proclaimed. “What if he’s disappointed, Libby? What if he just plain doesn’t like us?”

“If he doesn’t, he doesn’t.” Libby shrugged, continuing to gaze out at the water.

“Well, that’s a fine attitude. Are you telling me it makes no difference to you whether you wind up filthy rich or as poor as a piddling church mouse?”

“We’re not poor, Shula.” Libby turned to discover her sister wreathed in a cloud of talcum powder, waving a ringed hand to clear the air. Shula appeared flustered by more than mere talc dust, however.

“We’re not poor, Shula,” Libby said again.

“I meant relatively speaking,” Shula insisted.

Libby angled one hip onto the windowsill now and crossed her arms. Her lips firmed as her gaze narrowed on her sister. “Sometimes I think money’s all you care about.”

“It isn’t all.”

“Name something else then.” Libby’s chin lifted and her arms crossed tighter. “I dare you.”

Shula’s brow wrinkled a moment, then she made a little clucking sound and bent to brush powder from the drapes of her overskirt. “I care about how I’m going to keep from looking like a dowdy catfish in all this humidity.”

“Ah,” crowed Libby. “Money and appearances.”

Shula glared at her. “I’m sure our daddy doesn’t want two ragtag, mop-headed women descending on the ranch. Gracious! I want to look nice for him, that’s all. Who knows? We might be the last human beings he’ll ever see. It’s our duty to make his final moments as pleasurable as possible.”

“Foolish,” Libby muttered under her breath.

“I heard that,” her sister shot back. “It’s all right with me if you want to look like a frump. But men take great pleasure in the way a woman presents herself. And maybe if you spent a little more time worrying about your appearance, you might not be Miss Kingsland all your life, Miss Kingsland.”

It was an ancient argument. Their surroundings may have changed, but their differences remained. And it was an argument that Libby knew she would never win, so she was relieved when a soft knock sounded on their door.

“Now who do you suppose that is?” Shula did up a few fast buttons, then bustled to the door. She opened it a fraction.

Libby could hear a deep Texas drawl coming from the opposite side of the door. In a flash, it brought back the music of Paradise. A shiver rippled up and down the length of her spine.

Then, a moment later, Shula closed the door and just stood there, looking a little addled, breathing as if she had only just mastered that most difficult task.

“Who was it?” Libby inquired

Shula sucked in a full breath then, and waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, I don’t know. Just some big, dirty cowboy who says he’s supposed to take us to supper. I told him we had made other arrangements.”

“Shula!” Libby strode through the trunks, kicked a hat box out of her path and opened the door herself. Then, like her sister, she suddenly couldn’t remember how to breathe. And when she did remember, Libby was overwhelmed.

The big, dusty cowboy was halfway down the hall, but still the fragrance of Paradise lingered where he had stood. Leather and lye soap and dust. Sunshine and something more. Something purely and gloriously male. Libby cleared her throat and called out to him.

“Sir. Just a moment, please.”

Hell and damnation. Shadrach Jones stopped dead in his tracks. Another couple yards of carpet and he would have been trotting down the stairs, whistling, then pushing through the hotel’s fancy front door toward freedom. And Rosa and Nona and—bless her—Carmela.

Now he shook his head slightly, then scraped off his hat again and pressed it over his heart as he turned to get a look at the lady who’d just put the capper on his escape.

This one looked every bit the lady, too. The redheaded sister who had answered his knock on the door had been as painted and powdered as any whore he’d ever seen. This one, though, had lady written on every stiff pleat, every rigid bone, and every square inch of her prim little face. Tiny, this one. Pretty, too. For a lady.

“Ma’am,” he drawled, moving toward her.

She reached out a small, pale hand. “I’m Elizabeth Kingsland.”

Even though he’d just washed up and his hands were probably cleaner than they’d been in weeks, Shad still felt compelled to run his palm along his pant leg before he took her hand. Her grip was firmer than he anticipated. Even so, her bones felt delicate and breakable as a newborn kitten in the depths of his hand. He let her go after one quick pump.

“I’m your father’s foreman, ma’am. Shadrach Jones.” He shifted his weight onto one hip and held his hat in both hands now, dragging the brim through his fingers, wishing like hell this little lady would slam the door in his face the way the other one had.

“My sister said you had mentioned supper?” She tipped her heart-shaped face up.

Well, hell. There went half his evening. He was doomed, but for Amos’s sake he figured he’d just have to smile and take it like a man. “Yes, ma’am.”

His sudden, slantways grin did the oddest, most unexpected thing to Libby’s stomach. It quivered and then drew taut, like a reticule whose strings had been pulled tight. Or perhaps it wasn’t the grin at all, she thought fleetingly. Perhaps it was as simple as hunger. Still, almost before she knew it, Libby was accepting the huge cowboy’s invitation.

“I can’t speak for my sister, Mr. Jones, but I’d be happy to accompany you. If you’d like to wait downstairs, I’ll join you in a few moments.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She closed the door on that engaging grin.

“Well? What did he say?” Shula was reclining atop the bed now, with a damp cloth covering her eyes.

Libby smiled. “’Yes, ma’am,’ mostly.”

“He didn’t happen to say what time he’ll be calling for us tomorrow, did he?” Shula whined. “I hope it’s not before ten o’clock. You know how I am in the morning.”

“He didn’t say.” Libby was gazing in the mirror now, frowning. All of a sudden her hair seemed wrong—too curly, not curly enough, just wrong somehow—and she wasn’t quite sure why that bothered her. She picked up her hat and jammed in the pins. “I’ll ask him at supper.”

Shula swiped the cloth from her eyes. “You’re not actually considering going with him, are you?”

“I’m not considering it, Shula.” Libby turned and faced her sister. “I’m doing it. One of us ought to go since the man was kind enough to ask. If you’d like to go yourself, I’ll stay here and watch over Andy.”

Shula lay back on the pillows and returned the cloth to her eyes. “I can think of a million things I’d rather do than suffer through a meal with some big, dumb ranch hand who only says ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am.’” With a little sigh, she added, “Even if he is handsomer than sin.”

“Really?” Libby shrugged as she pulled on her gloves. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Shula yawned. “Now why doesn’t that surprise me one little bit?” She flounced onto her side and scrunched a pillow beneath her cheek. “Try not to wake me when you come back, Libby. I’m sure we’ll have to be up before the damn chickens tomorrow.”

Libby didn’t know how handsome sin was, but she had to admit, seeing the tall cowboy spilling out of the dainty chair in the hotel lobby, he was a very nice looking man. All of him. From his wide shoulders to his trim waist and on down the endless length of his denim-clad legs.

His hair was dark and longer than she was accustomed to seeing on gentlemen. She thought she liked the way the raven waves brushed his collar and framed his angular face. That face wasn’t tan so much as it was bronze, and not all of that deep color had come from long hours under a hot Texas sun, she was sure. Judging from his cheekbones, the strong flare of his nose and the flint in his dark eyes, Libby assumed her father’s foreman was more Indian than Jones.

Funny, she thought as she crossed the Persian-carpeted lobby while scrutinizing the man in the chair. She felt an overwhelming sense of recognition, yet she doubted that Shadrach Jones had been at Paradise fifteen years ago. He didn’t look like the type to stay in a place fifteen minutes, let alone fifteen years. He looked wild somehow—dark and shiny as a mustang stallion she remembered from years before.

The thought brought instant color to her cheeks. Stallions, indeed, Libby admonished herself, straightening her shoulders and firming her mouth as she proceeded toward him.

When he caught sight of her, he unwound from the little chair and rose with what Libby could only define as a casual grace. The way smoke rises on a windless day. He was, she thought suddenly, handsomer than sin.

“Mr. Jones.” She extended a gloved hand.

Damnation! There she went again, putting that little paw out for him to crush. He could feel the kitten warmth even through the thin fabric of her glove. And, as before, he had intended to let go immediately when it struck him like a lightning bolt that this lady was the dark-haired, skinny little girl who’d been crying all those years ago. Elizabeth? No…Libby. Sad little Libby.

She was looking up at him now, dry-eyed, even a trifle confused. He wondered all of a sudden if he had said her name out loud.

“Miss Kingsland,” Shad said now, letting go of her hand, trying to clear his head of visions from half a lifetime ago.

“It was kind of you to ask us to supper, Mr. Jones.”

“It’s not exactly me, ma’am. Your father—”

“I realize that,” she said, cutting off what was probably going to be a pretty muddled, bush-beaten excuse anyway.

“My sister has decided not to join us, I’m afraid.”

Shad didn’t know if he was glad about that or not. Was one lady worse than two? Especially when the one was prim little Miss Libby? He shrugged slightly as he planted his hat on his head.

“Well, let’s get going then,” he drawled as he gestured toward the hotel’s front door.

It wasn’t exactly an enthusiastic invitation, Libby thought. More like a man on his way to the gallows than one preparing to dine. The man had all but admitted he was just doing his job and following her father’s orders. Still, he offered her another of those sunny Texas grins as he was waving her toward the door.

“Yes, let’s,” she said with as much brightness as she could muster, once again aware of that peculiar thread tightening in her stomach.

Libby sniffed garlic as she stepped into the foyer of the restaurant. She sniffed trouble, too, the minute she caught a glimpse of the crystal sconces and the silk-swagged windows. It was a very elegant establishment. Much too elegant for a big dusty cowboy and a woman in a wilted traveling suit.

Behind her, Shadrach Jones muttered a grim little oath as his hand pressed into the small of her back to urge her forward toward a mustachioed little man in a black cutaway coat whose expression was hovering between panic and disgust.

The maître d’ dismissed her with a quick “Bon soir, madame,” then slid his gaze to her companion. “I am sorry, monsieur, but gentlemen are not permitted to dine without the appropriate neckwear.”

There was a sudden change in the temperature of the room. It had seemed merely warm before, but now Libby noticed that it had become distinctly hot. And she realized that the source of that heat was the man standing behind her. Shadrach Jones was giving off heat like a blast furnace.

“Appropriate neckwear,” he muttered now from between clenched teeth, making the phrase sound like an oath.

“Oui, monsieur.” The little man gave his mustache a quick twist. His eyes flicked toward the door, as if inviting them to use it.

Libby would have, too, only her father’s foreman was bolted to the floor like a big, hot stove behind her.

“You mean like a tie?” he drawled now.

The little man lofted his gaze heavenward as if to seek patience and deliverance from ill-dressed, persistent fools. “Oui, monsieur,” he said with a sigh.

“Kinda like the one you’re wearing?”

The question seemed innocent enough, but Jones’s tone—much to Libby’s horror—was what a snake might use if snakes could speak. Its lethal quality seemed lost on the officious little man, however, who lifted a finely manicured hand to touch his black cravat.

“Oui, monsieur. Comme ça.”

The words were barely out of the Frenchman’s mouth when a dark hand flashed out and, in what seemed like a single movement, flicked loose the bow and whipped the tie from beneath the starched white collar with such incredible speed that Libby thought she caught a whiff of smoke from rope-burned skin.

A second after that, Shadrach Jones was looping the black silk around his own neck and grinning down on the stupefied maćtre d’.

“We’d like a table for two,” he drawled.

The little man swallowed audibly. “Oui, monsieur.”

Chapter Three

You wanted fancy, Amos? Here’s your goddamn fancy. Shad yanked at the silk noose around his neck and let his gaze travel around the room as he forced himself to cool off. Actually, he thought, he’d acted with considerable restraint in just relieving that snooty horse’s ass of his necktie when what he’d really wanted to do was take the man’s life for looking at little Miss Libby like she wasn’t good enough to shine his shoes. Prissy, pointy-toed French shoes, too. Good thing he—

“Mr. Jones?”

His eyes flicked back to the lady across the table. Hell, he’d been so steamed up he’d almost forgotten she was there. And what the hell was she smiling about?

“Ma’am?”

“You’re either grinning or you’re grumbling, Mr. Jones.” She cocked her head to one side, causing the silk flowers on her hat to sway. “Do you have any neutral expressions?”

Shad laughed, and he felt the heat of his temper dissipate and his whole body relax. “I guess not. I apologize, ma’am.”

“There’s no need. But thank you. I suspect it’s something you don’t do too often.” She tilted her head the other way now and the silk posies followed along while her smooth brow wrinkled and her fine eyebrows pulled together. “You remind me of my father, Mr. Jones.”

From her tone, Shad couldn’t tell if she meant that as a compliment or not. He didn’t know how to respond, so he just kept looking at her. He caught himself wondering what she’d look like without that silly garden of a hat, then dismissed the thought. What did he care anyway?

“How is my father?” she asked him now. “Is he truly dying, or was that just a ruse to draw us to Texas?”

“He’s dying.”

She winced and sucked in a quick little breath, making Shad immediately sorry he’d been so blunt. But, hell, she’d asked, hadn’t she? He sighed roughly.

“Your father’s had a good life, Miss Kingsland. A long one, too. I don’t know for a fact, but I think he’s ready to go.”

“I imagine he’s in a great deal of pain.” Her lips drew together, wavering just a bit.

“It’s tolerable,” he replied.

She nodded, letting her gaze fall to her clasped hands. Damnation! She wasn’t going to cry, was she? Shad felt a fine film of sweat glaze his skin now. Oh, hell. Don’t cry, lady. Please.

He was almost relieved when the snooty little Frenchman appeared at the table just then and distracted her by putting a menu into her hands. When she thanked him, her voice was solid and her eyes were dry. Lord! Thank you.

Along with sweet relief, Shad suddenly felt hungry enough to stick a fork right into a steer. He reminded himself he needed to keep his strength up for the night ahead, too, once he ditched Miss Libby. He opened his own menu, muttered a gruff curse when he saw that it was written in French or some prissy language, then closed it and slapped it on the table. “I’ll have whatever you’re having,” he told the lady glumly.

Her sister hadn’t been entirely wrong, Libby thought. Mr. Jones’s conversation during dinner had been largely limited to “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am.” Of course, she didn’t suppose her own was any more scintillating, unaccustomed as she was to dining with men.

She had ordered two thick steaks, and when he was finished, she offered Jones what was left of her own. As they exchanged plates, their hands touched. Just a touch. It barely lasted a second, and yet it had such an immediate and potent effect on Libby that she nearly dropped the plate. She could feel the color rise in her face until her cheeks were burning. And her stomach once again began that infernal fluttering.

Touching her wrist to her forehead, she wondered if she wasn’t coming down with a fever of some sort. But her skin was cool, or relatively so considering it was summertime in Texas. Her water goblet was empty, so she took a healthy sip of the champagne she had ignored earlier.

Her dark companion winked at her now, which didn’t do a thing to dispel the butterflies inside her. “Go easy on that, Miss Kingsland. I wouldn’t want your daddy to think I’d gotten his daughter drunk.”

She had felt a little drunk even before swallowing the pale champagne, Libby thought. Shula ought to be the one sitting here, sipping the bubbly liquid. She was the one who loved fine wines and elegant settings, who conversed easily and thrived on the warm attentions of the opposite sex.

What in the world was she doing even thinking about a man’s warm attention? Her father’s foreman had paid more attention to his steak than he had to her. But that was just the way Libby wanted it. Didn’t she always dress in dowdy, dull-colored clothes specifically to avoid such attentions? And wasn’t she always secretly glad to hide in Shula’s gaudy shadow?

You best remember just who and what you are, Libby Kingsland, she reprimanded herself sharply. Then, deciding her cheeks had cooled off sufficiently, she raised her face to meet the dark eyes of Shadrach Jones.

“What time will we be leaving for Paradise, Mr. Jones?”

“Oh, about eight o’clock.” Shad was making some quick mental calculations, beginning with the wee hour he’d finally get to sleep tonight upstairs at the Steamboat. “Best make that nine.”

She nodded. “We have a great deal of luggage. I hope that won’t be a problem.” She paused then—just long enough, Shad noticed, for her little pink tongue to make an appealing pass over her lower lip. “Also, I believe I forgot to mention that I have a child traveling with me.”

Shad blinked. She had a child? Little Miss Libby didn’t look as if she’d ever been within spitting distance of a man, let alone close enough to make a baby. He narrowed his eyes now, seeing her suddenly in a whole new light. “Yours?” he asked.

“Well, yes. In a way.”

He leaned back and crossed his arms. Hard to imagine such a prim little lady rolling in the arms of a man, he thought. And that thought nettled him for some reason. Irked the daylights out of him. “I didn’t realize you’d ever been married,” he said almost gruffly.

She looked surprised. Even the posies on her bonnet looked wide-eyed now. “Oh, no. I’ve never been married,” she said.

Now both her little hands flew up to her face like sparrows flushed from cover. “Oh, no. I didn’t mean…not that. Not ever.” Her face got about as red as a sunset. “What I mean is…”

Shad would have liked to find out exactly what it was she meant, but just then a hand gripped his shoulder and a big voice boomed, “Shadrach Jones! As I live and breathe. And this must be one of Amos’s pretty daughters. How do, honey. I’m Hoyt Backus. Just call me Hoyt.”

The man was burly as a bear. And, if bears smoked fat cigars and drank rye whiskey, Hoyt Backus smelled like one, too. A gray-haired grizzly with a roar like a wounded bull. A big arm that finished off with a meaty paw angled across the table now, scooping up Miss Libby’s little birdlike hand.

While that arm was working Miss Libby’s like a pump handle, Shad pushed his chair back and rose. “You’re a long way from Hellfire, Hoyt.” What was the old coyote up to? he wondered.

“Aw, hell. I come to Corpus to meet with my lawyers a couple times a year.” He had released Miss Libby’s hand by now, freeing his paw to clap Shad on the shoulder. “I like to keep them on their toes.”

Shad eased away from the man’s grasp. “And you just happened to do it on the same day Amos’s daughters got to town, I guess.”

“Pure coincidence,” Hoyt boomed. He threw Libby a wink. “Ain’t that something?”

“That’s something, all right,” Shad said through clenched teeth as he reached across the table and jerked Libby up and out of her chair, then brought her into the protective curve of his arm. “Too bad we’re just leaving, Hoyt. Nice seeing you though.”

“Now wait just a damn minute, Jones.” The burly man got hold of Libby’s hand again. “I’m only being neighborly here.”

Shad laughed. “That’s what a fox claims when he sneaks into the chicken coop, you old devil.” He tossed two gold coins onto the table, then tightened his arm around Libby. “Come on, Miss Kingsland. Let’s go while you still have a few feathers left to pluck.”

Outside the restaurant Libby dug her heels into the planked sidewalk. The big cowboy was sweeping her along like a broom, as if she were some inanimate object he could just push this way and that. “Stop it,” she hissed.

He stopped walking, but his arm was still wrapped around her like a boa constrictor, and he continued to curse under his breath. It seemed to be a perpetual thing with him—like a dark melody twisting through an opera.

She wriggled out of his grasp, and stood there trying to repair some of the damage he’d inflicted on her. Her hat was askew; one glove was on while the other dangled from her bare hand. Her corset felt as if it were climbing up her neck.

Worse, now she found that she was muttering, too. Words like “rude” and “insufferable.” Even a few choice curses of her own. Shadrach Jones, she decided, was definitely bringing out the worst in her.

“You know who that fella was, don’t you?” he growled at her now.

“Of course I do,” Libby snapped back. “Hoyt Backus. He and my father used to be partners until they had some kind of falling-out.” She lifted her chin to glare at him. “That’s no excuse to be rude to him. Or,” she added hotly, “to manhandle me.”

“Manhandle!” He swiped his hat off and slapped it against his leg, then shouted the word once more, nearly choking on it. “Manhandle!”

Libby stiffened her spine, as much to demonstrate her outrage as to reposition her errant corset stays. Then she sniffed indignantly. “Well, your ears work, Mr. Jones.” She graced him with a tight little smile. “Now why don’t we see if your feet do as well? Would you mind escorting me back to the hotel?”

“Glad to, ma’am.” The statement might as well have been another oath, the way he swore it.

“Fine, then.”

“Fine,” he snarled, slapping his hat back on his head, gesturing down the street. “After you.”

She took off like a jackrabbit in a silly hat. Shad stalked behind her, gritting his teeth, trying not to step on the damn drag of her dress, then thinking maybe he would. That would bring her to a right quick stop. Then he could take her by the shoulders and shake a little sense into whatever lay beneath that milliner’s nightmare. Hoyt Backus hadn’t come to Corpus today to keep tabs on any lawyers, and it was no coincidence he’d just happened into them at the restaurant. The man was getting a reckoning on his competition for Paradise.

It didn’t take a lawyer to figure it out. With Amos on his deathbed, the ranch would soon belong to his daughters. And if they decided to sell the place, Hoyt intended to be first in line, his big fist stuffed with cash. If the Kingsland sisters decided to keep it…hell, who knew what that wily old fox would do then? Who cared? Shad wasn’t going to be around once Amos was dead and buried.

He’d been walking—head down and his hands jammed into his back pockets—thinking so hard about Hoyt that he didn’t notice when Libby stopped in front of the hotel. He rammed right into her. Then he blistered the air with curses as he wrapped his arms around her before she hit the sidewalk. Tiny. God, she was just a little bit of a thing under all those pleats and puffs. Well, most of her, he thought, vaguely aware that his hand was curved around a firm, fine breast.

Shad couldn’t let go fast enough. Good thing, too, because he needed both hands to deflect her flying little fists.

“Whoa now, Miss Kingsland.”

The prim little lady was suddenly a hellcat, hissing. And turning him into a howling fool when her foot slammed into his shinbone. What the hell was wrong with her? When he turned his head to see the little crowd that was gathering around them, her palm connected with his cheek. If word got back to Paradise that the foreman couldn’t control five feet two inches of female, he’d be trying to live this incident down much longer than he cared to imagine.

A little fist caught him in the rib cage now.

“That’s it, honey,” somebody cheered. “Use your knee now and give that big lug something to really remember.”

Her knee came up.

“Dammit, Miss Libby.” Shad yanked her toward him and wrapped his arms around her, crushing her against him in a defensive embrace.

She squirmed like an eel. “Let me go,” she demanded into his shirtfront.

“No, ma’am. Not till you calm down.”

“I am calm.”

“Like the eye of a hurricane,” he said through clenched teeth, then he lowered his head to whisper roughly, “There are about two dozen folks standing around us, taking great delight in watching just how calm you are, lady.”

Libby opened one eye just wide enough to glimpse a greasy smile centered in a bystander’s greasy beard.

“Atta, girl, honey,” the beard called. “You give that fella of yours what for.”

Dear God! What had she done? For a bleak moment Libby wasn’t even sure who she was. Certainly not the woman who never lost her temper, the one who used reason and good sense no matter how angry or vexed, the one who used well-chosen words to express herself rather than her fists. She’d gone from articulate lady to street brawler in the course of an evening. It had to be the champagne. Liquor was poison. She’d always known that.

But she hadn’t even felt its effects until Shadrach Jones had manhandled her. Which he was still doing now, she realized. She couldn’t move at all. It was like being bound to an enormous oak. Then the tree leaned back a fraction and scowled down at her.

“Go on. Kiss her,” somebody called out.

“Yeah. Kiss and make up, you two,” another voice urged.

The crowd took up the chant.

The tree cursed once more—rough as bark—and then a firm hand curved to Libby’s chin, lifted it, and a warm, wet mouth slanted over hers. She was vaguely aware of cheers and a sprinkling of applause at her back. Most of her senses, however, were magnetized by her first real kiss. By soft lips. By a tingling scrape of whiskers. By a faint taste of champagne and the slow, seductive touch of a tongue.

Shad was about to lift his head, thought better of it—or worse, didn’t think at all—and kept kissing her. Kept losing himself in the prim little mouth that had melted like sunstruck butter beneath his own. Kept telling himself the unexpected kiss was only to convince the crowd their “lovers’ quarrel” was over. It was just for show and he shouldn’t be feeling anything. Especially not the hammering in his chest and the hot surge of blood through every inch of him. She was a lady, for God’s sake. Ladies were poison. Sweet, warm, succulent poison. And nobody knew that better than Shadrach Jones.

He broke the kiss, literally ripped his mouth from hers, and stepped back so abruptly that Libby nearly fell. Then he was growling—at her, at the several curious spectators who remained on the sidewalk, at the world in general—as he gripped her elbow and propelled her through the hotel door and across the lobby.

At the foot of the staircase, he halted and drew himself up like that towering oak again. “Good night, Miss Kingsland. I’ll be seeing you about nine tomorrow.” Then he turned on his heel and strode toward the door.

Shad slammed through the side door of the livery stable. He wasn’t worried about waking Eb Talent; once the old salt strung up his hammock and settled in, not even the devil could wake him. He was snoring like a band saw now in a back stall. The big red-and-black coach was still parked in the center of the stable. Shad climbed in and closed the door.

He slumped back against a tufted leather cushion, then slammed a foot against the edge of the opposite seat, shifting his shoulders and rolling his neck to ease the knots of tension there. He’d stroll on down to the Steamboat, he told himself, as soon as he got his head back on straight. As soon as he had cursed himself sufficiently for losing that head a moment ago with Amos’s daughter.

What the hell had he been thinking, to kiss her like that? There had to have been a dozen other ways to settle her down and keep her from making a spectacle of herself. He could have said good-night right there on the sidewalk and walked away. He could have slung her over his shoulder and carried her inside. He probably should have just drawn his gun and shot her right then and there. The prospect of spending the next twenty years in jail didn’t strike him as half so bad as getting tangled up with a lady.

A lady! He slammed his other foot into the carriage seat and crossed his arms. Hadn’t he vowed never to get within spitting distance of one of those again? Once was enough. Hell, his once had been way too much.

No, thank you. Shad scowled into the darkness inside the big coach. It felt less like a coach than a cage now.

Well, he’d get the job done, he thought. He owed Amos that. “Here’re your daughters, Amos,” he’d say as he dropped them off at Paradise then continued on his way. Here’re your daughters, Amos. The fetching redhead and the other one. The lady. The prim, stiff-backed little priss. Sad little Libby. The one with the mouth the devil made for kissing.

He hadn’t had the dream in years, and now in the cramped interior of the coach it was rolling over him like a hot tidal wave, pulling him deeper into the bloodred dark, drowning him. Somewhere in his brain, Shad was aware that it was a dream. He kept telling himself to wake up, to get the hell away. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Just as twenty years before—when the dream was real—he hadn’t been able to get away. From her.

She was rubbing up against him now in the dreamy, dizzy dark, the way she always did when they were alone. She was whispering—words he didn’t want to hear—words that stirred him nevertheless. Her dainty hands moved over him like feathers at first, then like flames, making his fourteen-year-old body stiffen and his tongue stammer and his heart nearly explode with desire and dread.

“Yes,” she whispered. “There. That’s right.” He knew it wasn’t right, but what he knew and what he felt bore no relation to each other. The lady made sure of that.

Shad groaned now in his sleep as he had groaned years before, with a mixture of pleasure and anguish.

Wake, he warned himself. Before she laughs. Before the door downstairs clicks open and the footsteps come. Before…wake up!

He couldn’t. Then she was pushing him away. Those dainty hands were slapping at him now. “Get off me, you clumsy little half-breed.” Laughter twisted her lips.

Wake up before the door clicks open and the footsteps echo, deafening, down the hall. Please. Before her laughter turns to a sickening scream. Wake up, goddamn you!

He did. Cold with sweat, sick, shaking uncontrollably as he stared into a dark corner of the coach. Seeing nothing. Seeing everything all over again. Remembering.

He’d made two vows that terrible night twenty years ago. The first was to get so good at loving that no woman would ever laugh at him again. By God, he’d done that. He’d done that, even though there was always that moment afterward, that single icy heartbeat when he was glazed with sweat as salty as tears, when he was gripped with fear and his chilled blood shunted to his limbs, priming him to run.

He’d made two vows that terrible night. And Shadrach Jones renewed the second one now—never, ever to touch a lady again.

Chapter Four

At nine o’clock the next morning Libby followed Shula, Andy, and a swaying mountain of luggage down the hotel stairs. As she descended, she was making mental notes of all the things she would not do to Shadrach Jones, including hitting, kicking and scratching. Her list of commandments was not only longer than the Lord’s mere ten, it was more specific, and it concluded with an adamant “Thou shalt not kiss him.”

As angry as Libby had been all night long—tossing and turning on the scrap of mattress Shula hadn’t claimed—she hadn’t been able to forget that kiss. Lord, how she had tried, thinking of a hundred reasons why she detested her father’s foreman. He was crude. A rude and impudent man. A bully who insisted on his own way and used his inordinate strength to get it, whether it was snatching neckties or hauling a woman out of a restaurant. He was exactly like her father during those final, violent years before her mother had taken her away from Paradise.

Worse, the big cowboy seemed to ignite some explosive part of her nature that Libby never wanted to experience again. “Thou shalt not scream or bellow like a fishwife.” “Thou shalt not slap, slug or sink your teeth into another human being.”

“Thou shalt not, shalt not, shalt not kiss him.”

She followed the luggage through the hotel door, out to the street where a big red-and-black coach was waiting. And leaning against it, like a leering footman, was Shadrach Jones. Libby’s breath hitched in her throat.

“Lord Almighty!” a voice exclaimed. “If it isn’t Miss Libby, all growed up.”

She turned to watch a wiry older man clamber down from the front of the coach, relieved to see a familiar, safe face. Suddenly she was able to breathe again.

“Eb, is that you? Oh, it’s good to see you.” Libby extended her hand.

Her father’s longtime employee spat out of the side of his mouth, grinned, then grabbed her hand and shook it with gusto. “Miss Libby. My, my. Don’t it just beat all how you’ve growed up.”

“You look the same, Eb. The years have treated you well.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the old man said. “It’s prob’ly all the salt water I swallowed those years at sea with your pa. I’m just pickled, is all. Tickled to see you, too, Miss Libby. Now where’s that cute little redheaded sister of yours?”

“Right over there.” Libby pointed to where Shula was instructing one of the hotel porters in the proper handling of expensive luggage. Haranguing the poor boy, actually. Libby was surprised Eb Talent hadn’t noticed her first with all those red curls gleaming in the morning sunshine and her lilac dress ruffling in the gulf breeze.

When he did notice her, though, he said almost wistfully, “Ain’t she something?”

She was something, all right, Libby thought, as the old man moved toward Shula like a moth to a flame. Before Eb reached her, though, a second moth appeared. Hoyt Backus brushed past Libby with a brisk “‘Morning, Miss Kingsland,” then swooped down on her sister, and shouted, “By golly, if you’re not the prettiest thing I’ve seen in Texas since the day your mama left.”

It was no surprise when Shula went from stern luggage monitor to simpering princess in the next instant. And no surprise when she paused from basking in Hoyt Backus’s warm attention just long enough to call, “Oh, Libby, honey, as long as you’re just standing around, you’ll keep an eye on these hatboxes for me, won’t you?”

Libby sighed and added one more commandment to her growing list. “Thou shalt not think unkind thoughts about thy sister.”

At the sight of Hoyt Backus, Shad straightened up and pushed back the hat that had been shading his eyes. The fox was sniffing around the chickens again, and the foreman of Paradise didn’t like it one bit. He was briefly tempted to insert himself between predator and prey, but then—seeing the redhead’s slick smile and her long red claws—Shad decided he wasn’t exactly sure which was which. Anyway, he was in no mood to tangle with another Kingsland sister right now, so he yanked down the brim of his hat and glared at Miss Libby.

She looked like a dove this morning in her prim, dull-colored clothes. Except for the damn hat. Even that, though, paled in comparison to her sister’s. Lord, what a pair. He’d be glad when this day was over.

He was glad last night was over, that was for sure. It had been one of the worst nights of his life, sitting in a corner of the cramped coach, wet with sweat and shivering like a newborn calf, unable to shake off the dream that had seemed so real, unable to wake from the nightmare that had driven him from home twenty years ago.

If he’d slept even a wink, Shad wasn’t sure. His eyes felt like he’d spent the whole night riding drag in a dust storm. He hadn’t spent it upstairs at the Steamboat. That he knew for certain. Not with Rosa, or Nona or—dammit—Carmela.

And it was all Miss Libby’s fault. Miss Libby, who looked this morning as if she’d spent a prim and dreamless night between starched sheets. With her damn hat on.

He dragged his gaze to the kid who was standing close beside her. At least she didn’t dress him in fancy little French suits and pointy-toed shoes. Just the opposite, in fact. The youngster had a slightly unkempt look about him, especially the tousled hair that fell across his forehead. He would have expected Miss Libby’s boy to look polished, from his slicked-down hair to his spit-shined brogans.

Shad sighed. He didn’t know why that surprised him. Nothing a lady did should ever surprise him. They were never what they seemed, those finespoken, delicate, devious creatures. They could be all thin lipped, cool and demure one minute, then the next they were hot as whores. He liked whores better. They were honest. A man knew where he stood, or lay as the case may be.

Or didn’t lie, as was the case with him. But not for long. Six or seven hours by coach to Paradise, provided he could hustle these ladies along. Here’re your daughters, Amos. Then five or six hours back to Corpus on a fast horse. Back to Rosa, Nona and—Shad sighed again—Carmela.

Libby tapped a foot on the sidewalk. Their luggage was loaded now—most of it strapped to the top of the coach—but Shula was still batting her eyes and playing flame to that burly behemoth, Hoyt Backus.

She had expected any second that Shadrach Jones would be wrenching Shula away from her father’s former partner as he had done with her the night before, but the man was still slouched against the coach, apparently unconcerned. Possibly asleep for all she could see of his eyes beneath the low brim of his hat. His mouth she saw quite plainly, and that had a lazy slant to it, which brought to mind his kiss. Which set off the butterflies in Libby’s stomach once again.

“Why are we all just standing around here when the coach is ready to go?” she said with more than a little irritation, directing her gaze toward her sister. “Shula? I said…”

The redhead waved her off, continuing her animated conversation with Backus.

“Shula!” Libby snapped.

“Oh, all right, Libby. For heaven’s sake. Did you check inside the lobby to see that all of our bags were put outside?”

“No, I didn’t,” Libby said. She didn’t intend to,

either. Let Shula do without one or two of the twenty outfits she had brought.

“I’ll go,” Andy offered.

Libby instinctively reached out to stop her but then drew back. It was the first time since they’d left Saint Louis that Andy had seemed willing to be more than a few feet away from her. Taking that for a healthy sign, Libby nodded her assent. “Come right back, though,” she cautioned the child. With any other nine-year-old she might have added a warning not to speak to strangers, but considering that Andy hardly spoke to friends, she didn’t think it necessary.

She had barely turned toward the street, intending to tell her sister to stop her infernal chattering and get into the coach, when Andy was suddenly back, clinging to her skirt.

“I saw him,” the little girl sobbed. “I saw my papa. Don’t let him take me, Miss Libby.”

Libby knelt down and took the child into her arms. “Hush, now, Andy. Shh. You’re getting all worked up over nothing, honey.”

“I saw him.”

Shula’s perfume swirled around them. “What in the world’s going on, Libby? What in heaven’s name are you doing down on that dirty sidewalk?”

“Andy says she saw her father.” Libby’s worried eyes flicked up to her sister. “Just now. In the lobby.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Shula said with a snort.

Glancing toward the hotel’s front door now, Libby frowned. It wasn’t possible, was it? As far as she knew, John Rowan didn’t have the wherewithall to buy a ticket to the Saint Louis levee on a horse-drawn tram much less one all the way to Texas.

“I’m sure it was just somebody who resembled your father,” she told the little girl as she brushed hair from her forehead. “Your eyes were probably just playing tricks on you.”

“Little wonder, with all that hair falling over them,” Shula said. “Well, it’s time to go to Paradise. Libby, if you’d get up off the sidewalk, we could be on our way.”

Libby closed her eyes, seething as her sister flounced off to bid farewell to Hoyt Backus. She struggled up.

“Ma’am.”

A hand gripped her arm and suddenly Libby was on her feet, standing in the shadow of Shadrach Jones. His dark eyes scanned her face then lowered to Andy.

“Everything all right with your boy now?” he asked.

Libby blinked. “With my…?” He meant Andy, of course. And if she even began to explain, Libby realized, they’d be standing here till the sun came up tomorrow. “Everything’s fine now, Mr. Jones. Shall we go?”

A moment later his hands were on her again. He was lifting her like a piece of baggage into the coach.

“Up you go, sonny.”

The cowboy lofted Andy like a feather, before the child could even squeak. He followed then, and the roomy coach seemed suddenly small. Libby’s breath was failing her again, so she fussed with her gloves and her skirt before settling back with a sigh.

Shula’s head poked in the door. “Well, this won’t do at all, Mr. Jones.”

“Ma’am?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to move. I can’t ride backward. It makes me deathly ill. Tell him, Libby.”

Libby didn’t say a word. She was listening to the blood boiling in Shadrach Jones’s veins. Or was it her own? There was a brief moment of hard-bitten silence then, after which they all got up and exchanged seats.

Halfway to Paradise, Shad found himself praying—something he hadn’t done since he’d lived under the roof of his adoptive father, the Reverend Jones. Dear Lord, deliver me. From redheads who couldn’t ride backwards, couldn’t tolerate heat or dust or apparently silence. From the mute little boy who was stabbing him with his eyes whenever he thought Shad wasn’t looking. From the prim and quiet Miss Libby directly across from him.

He would have ridden on top with Eb, but he thought he could catch a few much needed winks inside the coach. Every time he drifted off, though, he’d jerk awake to another complaint from Miss Shula, to the boy’s gaze slicing away, to his boot heels hooked in Miss Libby’s dove-colored skirt.

When Eb pulled the horses up at the twenty-mile relay station, Shad opened the door and shot outside. Lord, it felt good to stretch. To breathe air that wasn’t scented with a perfume that reminded him of sodden leaves. To get away from them. All of them. Her.

He couldn’t stop thinking of the way she’d felt in his arms, of the way her stunned little mouth melted under his. As if she’d never been kissed before. As if he’d been the first. Which made no sense at all, considering the kid.

Shad scraped off his hat and slapped it against his leg. The hell with her. The hell with them all. “You got that lunch basket stowed up there, Eb?” he called to the driver.

“Right here.” Eb tossed the heavy basket down. “Don’t look like I’ll be breaking any records today, does it, what with the Captain’s daughters lollygagging so?” The old man clambered down to stand beside Shad. “Been so long since I’ve been around women, I’d pretty near forgotten just how dawdling they can be.” The old man shrugged then sauntered toward the men who were unhitching the horses from the coach.

“That wouldn’t be a lunch basket, would it, Mr. Jones?” Her voice came from just behind him. A soft, musical tone in contrast to her sister’s strident dramatics. Shad turned slowly and lowered his gaze to Miss Libby’s upturned face.

About to give her one more “yes, ma’am,” he suddenly changed his mind. “Hungry?” he asked.

Her eyes widened in surprise, as if he had asked her for her measurements instead. “No,” she said. “Not really. But I imagine Andy is. The poor child’s hardly eaten a thing in the last two days.”

“Andy. I expect that’s short for Andrew.”

Again she blinked. Anybody’d think he was mouthing indecent proposals, the way she kept being taken aback. All he’d done was ask a friendly question.

Her prim little mouth quirked into an unexpected grin. “Actually, Mr. Jones, it’s short for…”

Libby’s next words were drowned out by Shula’s screams as she came running, her lilac skirt rucked up about her knees. She pushed Libby aside in order to yank open the door of the coach and, without ceremony or dignity, hauled herself inside.

“Snakes,” she screeched. “If there’s anything I hate worse than spiders, it’s snakes.”

“Where’s Andy?” Libby asked frantically.

Shula aimed her chin out the coach window toward a nearby mesquite bush. “Back there.” She shivered. “I told the child to run. Especially when I heard that horrible rattle.”

Libby gasped and pulled up her skirt, ready to run.

Shad grabbed a handful of bustle and dove-gray dress. “Stay here,” he growled, tacking on an oath for emphasis before he strode to where the boy was standing. Still as a statue. Staring.

The snake was about as big as they came—seven feet of coiled muscle with a death rattle at one end and just plain death at the other. Death for a boy who didn’t weigh much more than a fifty-pound sack of grain.

“Don’t move, kid.” Shad’s voice was low and calm, unlike his mind, which was scrambling over options. Ordinarily he would have drawn his gun and put a bullet right between the rattler’s eyes. But he couldn’t trust the kid to stay still a second longer. He looked about ready to bolt right now.

Shad’s eyes swept the ground. He needed a pitchfork or a sturdy limb, but there was nothing within reach. Nothing but one of his own limbs. Well, hell. It had to be him or the kid. If he was lucky, the fangs would catch him on the boot. If he wasn’t…

Libby rounded the corner of the mesquite bush. The stillness of the scene was chilling. Andy like a tiny statue. Jones like a massive oak. The gray diamond-patterned snake rattling ominously and poised to strike.

“Do something.” She wasn’t sure if she had screeched the words or merely felt them searing across her brain, but a second later there was a flash of denim, a sweep of arms lifting Andy up and out of harm’s way as the snake snapped from its coil, struck, then went slithering away.

Libby struggled to release the breath she’d been holding. Andy was safe. She was safe. The big cowboy had her planted on his hip, holding her against him with one big, bronze hand splayed across her chest. But by the time that pose fully registered on Libby, it was already too late. Andy had already begun screaming in Jones’s arms—kicking, hitting, scratching, fighting for her very life. No longer afraid of the snake, the little girl was terrified of her rescuer.

“She’s asleep now,” Libby whispered inside the dim interior of the coach. They had pulled the side curtains down in the hope of calming the hysterical little girl. Finally, over Libby’s strong objections, Shula had poured a liberal dose of laudanum down Andy’s throat.

“I told you that would do the trick,” Shula said with a little cluck of her tongue.

Libby edged away from the sleeping child now, inching back one of the canvas side curtains to peer outside. “Where do you suppose everybody went?”

“Probably in the shade,” Shula said, lifting her damp hair from her neck, “trying to stay cool in all this heat.” She flicked her gaze toward Andy, then lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “Not to mention trying to get away from all the crying and fussing.”

“She was terrified, Shula. Andy thought—”

“I know what she thought,” Shula snapped, “but it doesn’t make any sense. First she’s making up stories about seeing her father in the hotel. Then she’s convinced he’s way out here in the middle of nowhere, attacking her.”

“She’s confused,” Libby said.

“Obviously.”

“You’re a heartless person, Shula Kingsland.”

“No, Libby. I’m a hot person. And I want to get on to our father’s ranch. Why don’t you go find our driver.” She closed her eyes. “I’d go myself but that snake might still be lurking out there.”

If it was, Libby thought as she climbed out of the coach, she was going to catch it and then wrap it around her sister’s neck. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes against the bright noon sun. Eb Talent was stretched out in one of the few patches of shade the relay station had to offer. He got to his feet with some difficulty as Libby approached.

“You got that little one all settled down now, Miss Libby?” he asked.

“I believe so, Eb. We’re ready to continue on to Paradise if you are.” Libby’s gaze drifted around the relay station. “Where’s Mr. Jones?”

“Down by the creek.” The old man turned his head and spat into the dust. “We didn’t know, Miss Libby. Why, that little girl coulda fooled anybody. She don’t care much for men, I take it.”

“She’s had some rather nasty experiences.” Libby looked around again, noticing a thin line of cottonwoods against the intense blue of the sky. “Where is the creek? Over there? Shall I inform Mr. Jones that we’re ready to leave?”

“That’d be fine, ma’am. Save me some walking and some shouting. I’ll go on and make sure the horses are all set.”

On her way to the creek, Libby ran her fingers through the damp curls at the nape of her neck. She had taken off her hat, or rather Andy had knocked it off during her hysterics earlier, and at the moment Libby had to admit it felt good to be bareheaded and ungloved beneath the sweltering sun. There wasn’t a breath of breeze, still the leaves of the cottonwoods were shimmying up ahead. She could hear a faint ripple of water running over rocks as she approached, and she could see the long dark hair skimming the broad shoulders of Shadrach Jones as he sat, his back to her, on the bank of the creek.

“We’re getting ready to leave, Mr. Jones,” she said as she neared. “Before we do, however, I wanted to thank you and tell you how much I appreciate what you did for Andy.”

He angled around, cocking his head, squinting against the sunlight. One leg was bent, its denim covering rolled up past his knee. Two bright, bloodred lines were streaming down his calf.

Libby gulped in air, then let it out in a rush. “Good Lord! You’re bleeding,” she exclaimed as she sank down on her knees beside him. “Is it…was it the snake?”

He laughed. “He just clipped me a little. I did most of that damage myself just making sure all the poison’s out. It looks a lot worse than it is, believe me.”

She didn’t believe a word of that casual denial. On her knees, Libby edged closer to him. “We need to get that bleeding stopped,” she said firmly. “Do you have a clean handkerchief, Mr. Jones?”

“No, ma’am.” He pointed to the blood-soaked bandanna now lying in the dust.

Then Shad narrowed his gaze on her worried face. If she bit any harder on that lower lip, he thought, pretty soon she’d be bleeding, too. It dawned on him suddenly that she wasn’t wearing her hat, that her dark hair had a reddish cast out here in the sunlight. He didn’t know why that pleased him or sent a quick jolt of desire through him. The lady could be bald for all it mattered to him. What mattered, after all, was the fact that she was a lady. And he wanted no part of that.

“I’m fine,” he told her gruffly. “Save your mothering for your daughter, Miss Kingsland. I don’t need it”

“What you need is a clean bandage, Mr. Jones,” she snapped, “and if you’ll turn your back for a moment, I’ll provide you with one.”

The soft worry in her features had hardened to flint now, Shad noticed. Amos Kingsland’s stubborn fire burned in her blue eyes. “Turn my back?”

“Please. I need to tear off a strip of my petticoat.”

“Go ahead.”

“I will,” she said, “as soon as you redirect your gaze.”

“I’ve seen petticoats before, ma’am.”

“Not mine, Mr. Jones,” she countered sternly.

Biting down on a curse, Shad turned and stared off across the creek while he listened to assorted rustlings and then to one quick, decisive rip.

He jerked slightly at the cool touch of her hand on his leg.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she murmured as she wound the torn cloth around him. “That was a very selfless gesture, Mr. Jones. What you did for little Andy. I’m grateful to you.”

Shad didn’t reply. He was trying to concentrate on something else. Anything else. The way the creek eddied around the slant of a downed cottonwood branch. A bluebottle fly edging along the pull-strap of his discarded boot. Patterns of sun and shade. Anything but the soft, almost dazzling drift of her fingertips. Anything but those feathers and flames. He was thinking he much preferred the bite of a rattler. It did less damage in the long run.

“There,” she said, making a last little tear, giving a last little tug as she tied the bandage. “That ought to do, at least until we reach Paradise.”

Hallelujah. He could feel the sweat trickling down his side and he knew it had nothing to do with the sun overhead. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

He heard the dovelike swish of her skirts—those sacred, well-guarded petticoats—that meant she was getting up. He could almost breathe again.

“Oh. One more thing, Mr. Jones.” She was standing just behind him, her shadow spilling over him like dark silk. “I hate to ask after what you did for Andy, but I wonder if you’d mind riding the rest of the way up front with Mr. Talent? The poor child’s calmer now, but…”

“Glad to,” he answered quickly. God, how he was glad.

Chapter Five

Libby lifted the side curtain to gaze out at the passing landscape. At the final relay stop, Shula had popped her head out of the coach and inquired—Princess fashion—about the time they’d be reaching Paradise. Eb Talent had slapped his knee and hooted with laughter.

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