Twilight
Kit Gardner

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

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

Epilogue

Prologue

Wichita, Kansas

May 1881

Rance Logan stared at the iron-barred window until the black grillwork melded into one unfocused plain of dusty waves. The weather-beaten landscape beyond dissolved until a hail of gunfire pierced the hot morning silence. Instantly the bars refocused, and what lay beyond that prison—one man fallen, the other, his killer, already leaving a short-lived trail in the dust as he ambled off toward town. His pace was one Rance knew well, that of a man whose scores had been duly settled, his grievance or disagreement resolved here, not ten steps from Wichita’s jailhouse, where the sheriff perhaps just now roused from his midmorning nap.

Through the black iron bars, Rance watched the man walk the length of Wichita, then disappear into one of the saloons crouching along the main thoroughfare. A free man—his shoulders unstooped from guilt or regret, his limbs unfettered of chains, his neck not twitching at the mere thought of hemp crushing his windpipe. After all, law, order and what was considered cold-blooded murder in many cities meant little enough on most days in Wichita. For most men. Even Rance, when it had suited his purposes. At one time. He’d built a reputation and what some might consider a tidy fortune on it. But no longer.

He should have seen it coming.

Many a man had walked that same path back to town, had turned his back with the same casual shifting of his shoulders, perhaps because he knew that dusty grave could just as easily have been his. With an experienced detachment, Rance’s gaze swept over the fallen man, lingering on the boots jutting skyward.

A trickle of sweat went ignored as it weaved a grimy path from his temple into his heavy beard. He tasted crud on his teeth and dried blood on his cracked lips, felt the shackles biting into his wrists and ankles. The pounding in his head hadn’t quit since they’d thrown him in here late yesterday. He needed a whiskey, the same mellow stuff he’d left on the table at Buffalo Kate’s, beside his cards. He’d taken only one long pull, his eyes trained over the glass on the man lunging from the chair opposite. Every instinct had demanded that he draw then...precisely then. He’d never ignored instinct before.

Most men would have drawn long before that, at the first hint of an accusation that they had cheated. Most men would never have waited to be drawn upon by some self-impressed cattleman from some no-name town east of Wichita, a man who looked as if he handled his pistol as sloppily as he did his cards. Any man in Wichita who owned a gun and called himself a man would never have thought twice about wiping a condescending smirk from another man’s face, or an accusatory leer from his eye, with one pull of the trigger. No, those men wouldn’t have spared a glance for the locket Mr. Frank Wynne from Twilight, Kansas, tossed into the pile on the gaming table, except maybe for the few moments taken to judge its worth as a wager. After spilling across the pile of coins, the locket had bumped against Rance’s hand and fallen open. No, those men would never have glanced at that open locket, at the tiny photographs pressed inside, at those two faces. Yet Rance had.

Why had he?

Rance closed his eyes and allowed his head to fall back against the cool stone wall, feeling his throat constricting. Those faces. They’d seemed to reach out to him even as he narrowed his eyes upon Wynne, gulping down whiskeys and fondling anything in skirts that came within three feet of the table. Those faces belonged to Wynne. Shooting the man suddenly didn’t seem the thing to do.

And yet he had. Kill or be killed. He’d built a fortune on that sort of philosophy.

Wynne’s shot might have missed, had he gotten one off. Rance’s never missed. This one had been intended to merely graze Wynne’s shooting hand, deflecting his gun before he could even think about squeezing off a shot. But Wynne had done something extraordinary and cowardly, something Rance could never have anticipated. At the precise moment Rance’s finger tightened on the trigger, Frank Wynne had lunged directly into the line of fire. Rance’s bullet had sliced through Wynne’s dandified black frock coat and red brocade vest, plunged through his chest and out his back, before embedding itself in one of Buffalo Kate’s green-velvet-backed armchairs from San Francisco. Only then had Rance lowered his whiskey glass to the table. And then he’d found his fingers twisting in the gold chain and curling around that open locket. The woman stared up at him, her expression passionless yet somehow accusatory, her face pale and bleak, devoid of all hope, as if she had somehow known her husband would meet such an end.

At his hand.

He closed his eyes, and she loomed in his mind. The squirming stirred in his gut. Odd for a man who had killed before. Even odder for a man just hours from the hangman’s noose.

Most men he knew, even the worst of the lot, would be praying, seeking absolution for all their misdeeds. And then they’d plot their escape.

The swish of bustled muslin skirts skimming dirt floor brought his eyes slowly open. The ceiling came into focus, and he listened to a woman’s shrill voice echoing down the jailhouse hall. It took only a moment for him to recognize the voice. After all, he’d spent the past three years in her husband’s employ, supping nightly on her well-cooked meals.

Even then, instinct should have told him that taking the job would ultimately cost him his life.

“Mrs. Spotz, ma’am,” Sheriff Earl Gage sputtered, as if still shaking himself from sleepy stupor, his chair scraping back against the stone wall. Rance could well imagine Gage’s ruddying cheeks, the clumsy doffing of his hat, again and again, in a manner due the wife of the most powerful cattleman in all of Kansas. Texas, even, or so Cameron Spotz had pompously proclaimed himself. “Fine mornin’, ma’am.”

“Out of my way, Sheriff, or I shall swat you with my parasol.”

“Now, ma’am, that’s Rance Logan I’ve got penned up back there. Most dangerous gunman Kansas ever seen, ‘cept fer maybe Black Jack Bartlett hisself.”

“And well I know it,” Abigail Spotz railed. “That’s the very reason I’m here. I’ve been duly appointed by the Wichita Women’s Gardening Auxiliary to ascertain whether the black-hearted outlaw Rance Logan is appropriately restrained. The womenfolk of this town shan’t rest or safely walk the streets until I do so. Now move aside.”

Gage seemed to stifle a cough. “With all due respect, ma’am, your husband and I have made certain the womenfolk of this town get their good night’s rest—”

“I don’t give a hoot what my husband does, Sheriff. Then again, perhaps it would be prudent of me if I did so from now on. After all, was it not my husband who hired that...that...gunslinger to protect our ranch from those loathsome farmers and cattle rustlers? A common criminal, he is, born of this vast wasteland, and descended upon us all to reap the rewards of dishonest endeavor.”

“Er...why, yes, ma’am, I suppose he is that, now, ain’t he? But Rance Logan’s been known statewide, even up near Denver way, fer his expert shot. I heard rumor he run shotgun guard fer the Wells Fargo line’s gold shipments back east at one time. Even ‘fore that, weren’t no other gun to be had fer the price. Still ain’t, what with Black Jack up ‘n’ vanished like a scared coon. Nobody’d mess with Logan, I tell ya. I even heard tell he were one o’ them decorated Union soldiers. Hell, nobody’d blame yer husband fer hirin’ him, ma’am, ’specially with them rustlers and farmers up ‘n’ stealin’ all yer grazin’ land. Ye need a man like Logan te tend to them folks, ma’am.” The clang of spittle meeting with cuspidor filtered through the dusty hall. “Yep. But ain’t no tellin’ when them loner sorts’ll snap an’ just go off an’ murder an innocent man fer no good reason. Been givin’ ol’ Cameron a time of it, I hear, disobeyin’ an’ whatnot.”

Abigail Spotz sniffed. “That’s my husband’s business, Sheriff, not mine. Now, if you please, I believe there is a body lying just outside your front door here. Perhaps you’d best dispose of it before the crows do. I’ll be just a moment with Mr. Logan.”

Rance could almost hear Gage’s overlong nails scratching the hair on the back of his neck. “I don’ know, ma’am. Leavin’ Cameron Spotz’s wife in a jail with an outlaw like Logan...kinda makes me all nervous. Ma’am, yer husband would hang me hisself if somethin’ happened to ya.”

“I suppose he would have to now, wouldn’t he?” Abigail Spotz paused. “Suppose I just sit right here until you return from your tidying-up out there. Even Rance Logan wouldn’t be capable of harming me at this distance.”

Another clang echoed from the cuspidor. “All right now, ma’am, if ya promise te jest set down here.”

“Take your time, Sheriff, and do bury the poor man. It’s hotter than blazes today.”

Not two moments after the jailhouse door banged shut on its hinges, Abigail Spotz’s skirts rustled down the hall. She paused just as she reached Rance’s cell. Beneath the swaying fringe of her plumed hat, her dark eyes widened as they moved over him. “God, look at you,” she whispered.

“Morning, Mrs. Spotz.” Rance forced the words from his dust-clogged throat. “A fine day for a hanging.”

Abigail Spotz pressed a white-gloved hand to the lace at her throat and paled considerably, despite the flash in her eyes. “Even as we speak, my husband is securing the hemp to that twisted old tree on Boot Hill. They’ll be here for you within the hour.”

Rance felt his teeth bare in a feral smile, an inept testament to the rage igniting within him. “And how is your husband, ma’am?”

“Don’t call me that, Rance. No matter what my husband might have done to you, you know I was no part of it.”

“He bought the jury, Abigail. He bought Gage and every last witness he could find to see me thrown into this jail. The judge had no choice but to hang me. I’m inclined to believe, ma’am, that your husband wants me dead.”

Abigail closed her eyes as if weighing her decision, then spun about and yanked a brass key ring from a hook upon the wall. Rance watched her trembling hands attempting to shove key after key into the cell padlock. “You disobeyed him, Rance.” A strangled cry escaped her when the keys fell to the dirt floor with a clang. She sank to her knees and plunged her pristine white-gloved hands into the dust to retrieve the ring.

Rance studied her bent head, the streaks of gray generously marring the deep chestnut hue. Her shoulders were narrow, slightly stooped, growing more stooped with each day she endured beneath Cameron Spotz’s hand.

You disobeyed him.

“You’re right.” Rance felt his lips twisting snidely. “I refused to murder innocent farmers who had rightfully settled on grazing land, their land. That’s a sorry excuse for framing a man for cold-blooded murder and seeing him hanged.”

“Not for Cameron it isn’t. You were his paid gun. Cameron sees no farther than that. And he intended to make you pay for disobeying.” A rare youthful smile spread across her features when at last one key swung the cell door wide. She took three steps, then skidded in the dust, eyes blinking, suddenly refusing to meet his. She looked almost young somehow, as if her covert mission here had wiped clean all traces of the bitterness that had seemed so much a part of her. Gone were the deep lines at the corners of her mouth, the shadows beneath her eyes, the telltale strain in her neck. Abigail Spotz must have been a beauty when Cameron enslaved her as his wife twenty years before.

“Try the small key on the shackles,” Rance said hoarsely, his throat working against the bile burning in his throat. Paid gun... As notorious, as ruthless and cold-blooded as they come. A man known only for his prowess with a gun. A man with a past both murky and riddled with speculation, a past he refused to acknowledge or refute, and thus a man feared by many, perhaps too many, who would suffer little remorse at lining their pockets to see him hanged. An odd distinction indeed for a man in a town like Wichita, which teemed with every sort of unsavory character. A town that the powerful Cameron Spotz all but owned. He’d proven it today.

“There’s more to it,” he said. “There has to be.”

“Don’t think on it,” Abigail said quickly, stepping a pace back when his shackles fell cleanly to the floor. Her gaze traveled a fidgety path to his as he flexed the stiffness from his arms and hands. “Y-your horse is picketed about a quarter mile back of the jail. He gave me a time of it, but we managed.” She slipped one hand into her folded silk-and-lace parasol and withdrew a shiny black six-gun that shook in her small hand. “I found this among your things.”

Rance wrapped his fingers around the weapon, feeling the solitary comfort only heavy cold steel could provide him. He shoved the pistol into his waistband. “I could kill him, you know. You’ve given me the means, Abigail, and I’ve got more than ample reason. For what he’s done to me, to those innocent farmers, to you— I could do it, Abigail. You’d be free of him.”

As if intent upon ignoring him, she rummaged in the folds of the parasol. “Here.” She shoved a worn wide-brimmed black hat at him. “Take this. You’ll need it under the hot sun. Oh...and this.”

The leather pouch she produced weighed heavily in his palm, the coins inside tinkling softly. A small fortune, no doubt. “Abigail, I don’t need your money.”

Again, she stuck her head into the parasol, ignoring the pouch in his outstretched hand. “You might want to shave that long beard of yours and cut your hair. You look like some sort of half-breed. Besides, Cameron will make certain your wanted posters are spread thick from here to New York and San Francisco. Oh, and change your name.”

“Abigail, listen, dammit.”

“Stop.” She held up a trembling hand, her eyes, so knowing, so wistful, suddenly shining. “Please...for heaven’s sake don’t get all gallant on me, Rance Logan. I—I don’t believe I could bear it. You see, some part of me, a very big, very shameful part of me, has been desperately wishing since the moment you stepped foot on our ranch that I was fifteen years younger...and that you were the sort to dally with other men’s wives. If you were, if I were, I believe I would go with you, even if you didn’t ask me.”

Rance crushed the hat in one fist. “I owe you my life, Abigail.”

“Somehow I think you might have managed an escape without me.”

“Let me take you somewhere.”

She shook her head and seemed to force a wavering smile. “Cameron would find me. Besides, I’ve my children here.” Her narrow chest rose and fell beneath expensive lace. “And they’re still young. You see, I am simply doing my duty as a law-abiding citizen who doesn’t wish to see an innocent man hang. No, I wasn’t in Buffalo Kate’s saloon last night. And I don’t even know the man you killed. But I do know you, Rance. I know that somewhere deep down, under all that grime, under all your wounds, lurks a gentleman. And gentlemen don’t kill, except in self-defense. I’m merely freeing you, Rance. Your life is your own to save.”

Their eyes met, and something tore at Rance’s soul. Gratitude, fierce and completely foreign. He couldn’t remember anyone ever doing something for him that he hadn’t somehow paid for. His fingers reached for hers, yet she chose to ignore him as she bent and hoisted the discarded manacles. After shoving the shackles at him, she turned about and clasped her hands behind her back. “Put those awful things on my wrists, Rance, then lock me in here. And I suppose you should gag me, as well, if this is to look dastardly and cruel. After all, women have a tendency to scream in situations such as this, don’t they?”

Rance felt the weight of the chains in his fist. “Why do you stay with him, Abigail? Take the children with you somewhere. Anything has to be better than—”

“Stop.” She choked the word out, her head dipping. “Please, don’t speak of it. I’m his wife.”

“You’re afraid of him.”

“And what if I am? He’s still the father of my children. The only man I’ve ever known. I know it’s difficult for men to understand that sort of thing, but we women...we have so very few choices in this life. And what few we have are decided for us by men. Now hurry, Rance. The sheriff is sure to come, and Cameron with him.”

“Come with me, Abigail. We’ll go south, into Oklahoma. Or I’ll take you east, to—”

“No. Please, I don’t want to know where you’re going. Just go alone. You’ll have a fighting chance. Saddled with me... Good heavens, I’ve spent the last twenty years in all the relative comfort money can buy in this godforsaken town. I haven’t been on a horse since before I married Cameron. Some bounty hunter would catch us before we even made Dodge City, and then Cameron would probably kill us both. Now, dammit, put those chains on me, or I will start screaming.”

So he did, shackling her narrow white wrists to the iron bars and stuffing a gag into her mouth. By the time Gage returned to the jail with Cameron Spotz and found a hysterical Abigail blubbering about that outlaw Rance Logan overpowering her and managing his escape, Rance had disappeared into the barren Kansas prairie, with Frank Wynne’s gold locket and chain stuffed deep in one pocket.

Chapter One

Twilight, Kansas

June 1882

Jessica Wynne knew she should have worn her gloves, the freshly bleached and pressed white gardening gloves she’d folded neatly in the top drawer of the pine bureau in the sunny corner of her kitchen. Sadie McGlue would never have forgotten her gardening gloves—were Sadie McGlue ever given to gardening, that is. No, indeed, Sadie McGlue, of the New England McGlues—were there others?—would have surely remembered to encase her smooth, lily-white hands in two pairs of gloves before allowing her fingers to venture anywhere near dirt. Sadie McGlue would have remembered her gloves because Sadie McGlue had very little else to ponder except for the harmful effects of sun and Kansas dirt upon her tender skin and meticulously manicured nails. Then again, Sadie McGlue would never have been found on her knees in a strawberry patch on the hottest of June afternoons, up to her elbows in bone-dry Kansas dirt.

This was because Sadie McGlue had both a New England fortune and a husband to care for her. Sadie McGlue had no children to tend to and no farm to manage all on her own. Sadie McGlue also happened to live on Maple Street, the widest, longest, shadiest street in all of Twilight, in a freshly painted white two-story wooden house with black shutters and flower-filled white window boxes made of the same imported southern Missouri wood as the house. Sadie McGlue bought her strawberries at the local market with all the rest of the upper-crust folks from Maple Street. Jessica’s strawberries. And Jessica’s beets and preserves.

Jessica shifted to another strawberry plant, ignoring the ache spreading through her lower back. Just as she ignored the sun beating upon her bonneted head and the exposed back of her neck, where her frayed collar gapped. Just as she ignored the dirt accumulating beneath her nails and the browning of the skin on the backs of her hands. Dry. The dirt sifted through her fingers, then vanished with the next hot breeze. Too dry for so early in the season. If only the frigid winds of the past winter had been accompanied by a blizzard or two, her crop would have flourished through the summer on water stored in the ground after the thaw. Then again, as it was, she’d barely survived the cold. And talk was already circulating of the snowy, even colder winter to come. Not for the first time, she wondered if she could live through another four months of howling wind and bone-shattering cold with her sanity intact, not to mention the roof and the barn.

With a gentleness she deemed only children and plants worthy of, she sank her fingers deep into the soil around one withering stalk and envisioned the pails of water she would need to haul from the well to this field. If she didn’t, if the sky remained as clear and blue from horizon to horizon, the air as hot and unforgiving, she would have no strawberries for women like Sadie McGlue to serve in fine porcelain bowls to their lady friends after church on Sundays and tea on Thursdays. There would be no strawberry preserves to sell this year, and therefore no new dairy cow, no new birch broom from New England, no additional stock of precious fuel for the winter months, and certainly no new horse to hitch to the broken-down buckboard wagon that had gathered a year’s worth of dust in the barn. And that lovely blue-gray dress with the scalloped lace collar would still be in the window at Ledbetter’s General Store long after she became Mrs. Avram Halsey in a few months’ time.

Odd that she should even waste a thought on that dress when the farm was in need of so much. Just because she’d spotted the thing in the window and briefly indulged herself in thoughts of walking down the chapel aisle on Avram’s arm, wearing that lovely dress, surely didn’t make it more important than a new dairy cow. Yet, some utterly pagan part of her soul, the part entirely unsuitable for a minister’s daughter, truly believed a woman deserved such a dress when venturing into marriage for a second time.

She sat back upon her heels and swept her forearm over her brow, uncaring of the dirt smudges she left upon her cheeks. Then, instinctively, with no thought whatsoever, just as she’d done every two minutes or so since she’d ventured into the field, she glanced toward the gray stone farmhouse and the backyard just visible through the flapping row of white sheets she’d hung out to dry.

Gray...just like the sun-baked landscape here, as if the house were born of the same dry, barren earth. Her gaze probed the gray and immediately found her son, Christian, where she’d left him, half concealed behind the tall cottonwood her own father had planted some twenty-two years before, on the day she was born, when the house was made of sod, not stone. The sunlight caught Christian’s round, blond head. It was just like his father’s, yet somehow intensely vulnerable. So unlike his father’s.

Stray blond tendrils tossed wildly by the wind blocked her view for a moment, and she stuffed them into her bonnet as she struggled to her feet. Yes, there he was, only he wasn’t playing beneath that tree, as she’d instructed him. He was shaking his head, vigorously, as though talking to someone, and he was backing away from...

She squinted beneath the glare of the sun and the dust billowing into her face.

The wind parting the tree branches or perhaps some slight movement, a rippling of shadow there beneath that tree, caught her eye and prompted her fingers to curl with a sudden white-knuckled intensity about the handle of her basket. And then she saw him, a man, crouched low, yet deeply shadowed and immense. A man she’d never seen before, reaching a hand toward her son...as though moments from snatching him up. Her tiny five-year-old child, helpless. And she too far away. A stranger.

The basket fell at her feet. She nearly tripped over it and the tangle of wind-whipped muslin skirts between her thighs. A cry managed to escape her constricting throat, only to be seized by the wind and tossed out over the prairie.

Run.

She stumbled over a strawberry plant and crushed it beneath her thick-soled shoes, clawing at air, then at crumbling dirt to regain her balance. Her vision blurred, and all air compressed in her chest, trapping her voice. Her limbs refused her commands. She couldn’t run fast enough.

The bonnet fell from her head, and hair whipped about her face, blinding her. Again she stumbled. Her chin snapped against dry earth, and one foot caught in her petticoat. She barely heard the cotton tear for the terror thundering in her ears when the man moved closer...closer. This stranger. So big, even crouched, and her Christian so tiny, too tiny even to flee on his thin legs.

Willard Fry, tending his farm a mile to the east, would never hear a rifle shot, much less a scream for help. Twilight was another mile farther. To the west swept nothing but endless arid prairie.

The rifle...get the rifle...

She surged from the field and ran blindly through a tangle of sheets that seemed to deliberately ensnare her in their flapping folds. Into the barn she ran, arms and fingers outstretched in the sudden pitch. The rifle sat in a back corner of the barn, though she should have kept the thing nearer at hand, she, a woman alone on a farm for over a year now, with a young son to protect. But she’d fired it only once, accidentally, and she’d put a hole in the roof of the kitchen. She dimly remembered Avram removing the rifle to the barn for her protection. Her fingers wrapped around cold steel. She hoisted the rifle and spun about.

Please, God, let it be loaded.

The sun still shone with a peculiar mocking brilliance when she dashed from the barn. Another strangled cry spilled from her throat when she spotted Christian...and the stranger. He still crouched low, his back toward her, as broad as her strawberry patch. A godsend, that massive expanse, a target even she would be hard-pressed to miss. Her feet skidded in the dirt, and she heaved the gun onto her shoulder and took aim at a spot just below the fall of his blue-black hair over his collar.

“Stand slowly and turn about, or I’ll put a hole in your back, mister.”

The bulk that was this man seemed to turn to stone. His black hat angled but a fraction toward her and she glimpsed a shadowed, beard-stubbled jaw. With a surge of uncommon female prowess, she glanced at Christian and battled a sudden desperation to fling her arms about his narrow body. His eyes, wide, filled with unmistakable fear, had never looked so blue, his cheeks so downy soft and tender, sun-kissed like a ripe peach. Her arms ached to hold his slight body close enough for her to hear his shallow breaths, to smell his skin, his hair. No, she could have none of that maternal gushing if she was to dispatch this stranger. A strong, self-assured front was required. No weaknesses. No emotion. “Christian, come stand behind Mama here.”

Christian’s enormous blue eyes darted to the stranger, then to the ground, before he frowned at the rifle. “Why do you have the rifle, Mama?”

She peered down the long barrel, her aim wavering upon the back of that black head. “Get behind Mama, Christian.”

Her son hesitated several teeth-grinding moments, then dragged his bare toes in the dust and moved slowly toward her. “But you don’t know how to shoot it, Mama. Reverend Halsey told you to keep it in the barn so you don’t put no more holes in the roof. Remember, Mama?”

“Shush, Christian.”

“But, Mama—”

“Shush. Go sit on the back stoop.”

“But, Mama, you scared him away and—”

“On the back stoop, Christian. Now.” Something in the shifting of the stranger’s shoulders flooded her with a profound chagrin, as if even he had taken ample notice of the battle of wills she constantly endured with her son. And then the stranger unfolded his crouched body, slowly, warily, though she sensed he wasn’t the least bit intimidated by her or her gun.

Jessica didn’t realize she’d taken a step back until her foot struck an exposed tree root. She blinked a trickle of perspiration from her eyes. Dust and fear—yes, fear—clogged her throat. This man loomed like the devil himself, his head skimming the tree branches a good eight inches above her own. His legs were long and heavily muscled, snugly encased in those faded denims common to thieves and all manner of coarse menfolk. His shoulders looked capable of filling any doorway, and his arms hung potently at his sides, fists unclenched, long fingers curling, as if moments from snatching some concealed weapon from his waistband.

“Turn around,” she said, her voice cracking strangely even as he complied. The eyes struck her first, like an invisible blow, and again her foot faltered over the tree root. The rifle wavered, then fixed squarely on his chest, though her limbs seemed to suddenly quiver beneath the weight of the firearm.

His eyes were gold, as she imagined a lion’s would be, and deep-set beneath a vicious slash of black brows and the shadow of his hat. Yet his gaze was empty. A prairie savage, he was, his skin weathered and creased like worn, deeply tanned leather, his jaw all beard-stubbled hollows and angles. His mouth compressed, tight and unyielding. His eyes reflected nothing but sunlight and then emptiness, cold emptiness, even as they hooded and moved slowly over the length of the rifle.

An outlaw. In her backyard.

“Who are you?” she said, her voice uncharacteristically quavery.

“Stark.” His lip barely curled with the word. His voice was like the sound of distant thunder, ominous, chillingly deep and rasping. Yet his speech was not the typical slow and deliberate heavy twang, but measured, as if his words were carefully chosen, yet simmering with a distinct undercurrent of impatience. “Logan Stark. I meant your boy no harm, ma’am. Or you. Put down the gun.”

She ignored this, having expected it, of course. Any man who looked like this man had but one thing on his mind: no good. She jerked the rifle when one bronzed hand lingered near his pocket. “State your business, Mr. Stark. And be quick about it.”

The wind ruffled through his hair, yet there was nothing innocent even in this on such a man. Perhaps because Jessica felt oddly disconcerted when those transparent eyes seemed to probe right through her, as if he were memorizing her.

“You advertised for a farmhand,” he said.

“You’re mistaken.” In spite of herself, she flushed when his eyes swept the farm and the house, in dire need of repair. One side of the barn bowed and sagged. A crumbling excuse for a stone fence encased one mangy cow lazily chewing her cud. The ravages of one year spent without a man’s hand. Yet what more could a woman do, alone, her funds so depleted when those gambling debts had been called that she could barely afford to feed and clothe her son? She was lucky she still had the house and any semblance of a barn. Had she let them, they’d have taken nearly all her land, all that her father had built his dreams upon, all that he had died for.

Jessica’s nose jutted upward when that golden gaze lingered on the field of wilting strawberry plants.

His eyes shifted back to her.

She jerked her chin to the east. “Next farm up the road. But I’ll save you a walk. Willard Fry hired on his new hand several months back.” A nagging suspicion blossomed to life within her, and she squinted at him through a spray of dust. “That’s an old paper you were looking at, Mr. Stark. Where are you from?”

That jaw angled to the west but his eyes held her. “Just passing through, ma’am. Looking for work.”

“Mama—”

“Shush, Christian.”

“But Mama—”

That old, uncomfortable feeling of maternal ineptitude flooded through her, bringing a tightness to her tone. “Christian, mind me.”

And then Mr. Logan Stark appeared to bunch all his muscles and loom toward her, like a massive black thundercloud that would swallow her up. “Ma’am, don’t move,” he rasped.

One hand reached for her, long fingers outstretched toward her...no, toward the rifle, as if he meant to yank it from her arms. With his other hand, he slowly drew a long, black-handled blade from his waistband. This outlaw, Logan Stark, meant to kill her, take her son, her only cow, burn her house and all her strawberry plants. She could see it in his eyes...in the flash of sunlight upon that blade. The world tilted beneath her feet.

“Stay!” she shrieked, taking wavering aim upon the expanse of his chest. Her fingers stumbled over the trigger when he advanced toward her, as unstoppable as a locomotive. He murmured something she couldn’t decipher. Her focus blurred upon his fingers curled about that black handle, an instant away from plunging it into her throat. She should pull the trigger...now...now!

“But, Mama, the snake! The one you scared! He’s by your foot there! You’re gonna step on him, Mama!”

A mind-numbing terror engulfed her, prompted by Christian’s warning or by her inability to stop Logan Stark, she would never know. Snake or no snake, she could not tear her eyes from this man, certain that he was the more lethal of the two. She felt the heat radiating from him, the icy resolve in his eyes, and she retreated, God help her, one step. Only, her foot snagged on the exposed root, twisted, and her other foot tangled in her torn hem. Her knees buckled, and the rifle angled crazily skyward as her burning arm muscles turned traitor on her. And then Christian’s terrified howl rang out—or was that her own scream torn from her throat when sunlight flashed upon the blade, as Logan Stark flexed his wrist? The knife stood poised like a viper.

She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. The world became a deafening roar of flame and smoke, and then she was falling through sunlight and dry, hot wind, until cool darkness pressed in around her, cradling her like the arms of the mother she’d never known.

* * *

Jessica blinked at the blue sky overhead. Waves of pain radiated from the back of her head. She closed her eyes, expecting at any moment to come to the full realization that she lay dying in the dust from a knife wound. But where? She uncurled her stiff fingers from the rifle and wiggled her toes. She shifted her shoulders and bent her knees. Nothing, save the relentless pounding in her skull.

“Mama.” Christian’s smudged face appeared a scant inch above her, framed by brilliant blue skies. He sucked in swift breaths. “Mama, you shot Mr. Stark.”

Jessica chose to overlook the marked disbelief in his voice and her resulting chagrin and pushed herself up on her elbows. She found herself staring at the soles of a pair of very long black boots. Motionless black boots.

“I shot him,” she whispered, struggling to her feet. She stared at a very still Mr. Logan Stark.

“Mama!” Christian shoved a stubby finger at the ground. “Don’t step on the snake. Look, Mr. Stark killed it. With his knife. I saw him.”

There it lay, not inches from the dirt-stained, sagging hem of her gown—a fat brown rattler, pinioned to the dust by the blade protruding from its throat. Its jaws still sagged open.

Jessica stared at the dead snake, then at the man lying in a gathering pool of blood, eyes closed, mouth slightly parted. The man who had more than likely saved her life, and her son’s. “My God, I killed him.”

Christian frowned at her. “No, ya didn’t, Mama. He fell and hit his head, just like you. An’ he’s sleepin’. But ya got him real good. He’s bleedin’, Mama. See, Mama?”

“I see,” she whispered, dropping hesitantly to her knees beside Stark. The dark cotton covering his chest expanded, stretched taut, then relaxed with his every breath. Slow, even breaths. Despite the full measure of her relief, her fingers wavered over the gaping wound oozing a warm flow of blood from his shoulder. The bullet seemed to have cut a narrow path clean through the outer curve of sinew where his shoulder met his upper arm.

Jessica forced the bile back into her parched throat. Her fingers pressed gently around the wound until the feel of rock-hard muscle prompted her to snatch her fingers back. A peculiar feeling washed through her as her gaze drifted hesitantly over him. Here he lay, silent, still, and intensely vulnerable for so fearsome a man. His mouth in repose seemed oddly prone to a pleasant curve, the creases all but vanished from his face. And his impossibly long, dark lashes rested upon his cheeks like those of a young child.

Dust billowed about her, catching at her skirts and swirling about Stark and his wound. She leaned slightly over him, wondering dimly why she still felt an odd compulsion to keep a safe distance, as if at any moment he might rear up and swallow her whole.

“Mr. Stark?” she said. No response, save his even, deep breathing. “Mr. Stark, can you hear me?” Her hands pressed against his chest, then quickly retreated. “We have to get him inside,” she said, getting to her feet.

Christian gave her a wary look, then crouched and lifted Stark’s dark head, now bereft of his hat. “I can help, Mama. See?”

“I see,” Jessica murmured distractedly. Stark was too blasted big. Bigger, wider, longer, and no doubt heavier, than any man she’d ever seen. How the devil would she and a five-year-old child move him?

She eyed the distance to the house, judging it to be no more than ten feet. Yet the space yawned like an unbreachable chasm. She should run for Doc Eagan, or at least to Willard Fry’s for help. A woman couldn’t possibly do this sort of thing alone. A woman couldn’t tend a farm alone, or raise a child alone, for heaven’s sake, or so the townsfolk, and Avram in particular, were wont to remind her on a daily basis. So how the devil could she move what had to be a two-hundred-pound beast of man, alone?

She set her teeth. She’d shot him, she’d take care of him, blast it. After all, she’d tended wounds before. How difficult could a superficial gunshot wound be to clean and bandage? Stark looked more than capable of surviving it. Besides, she didn’t quite feel inclined to present a full account of her shooting abilities for the local gossips to banter about for months to come, a sure penance to pay if she summoned Doc Eagan or Willard Fry to help.

Furthermore, Avram would no doubt see this as a prime opportunity to resume his lecture on keeping herself to gentle, womanly pursuits and insist all the more vehemently that she marry him this very day, sell this bothersome farm, and come live with him in his small house within the safe limits of Twilight. Yes, best that she tend to this matter herself. She’d devise some explanation for Avram if it became necessary, of course. But how did one hide a two-hundred-pound strange man from one’s fiancé?

“No, you get his feet, Christian.”

Without hesitation, Christian let Stark’s head fall with a dull thud into the dust and scrambled to those black boots. “He’s heavy, Mama,” he said, his tongue curling out of his mouth as he managed to hoist those boots a fraction of an inch from the ground.

Jessica bent and stuffed the sagging hem of her gown into her waistband, then hooked her elbows beneath Stark’s armpits. A breath wheezed through her bared teeth when her arm muscles bunched and rebelled against the weight of him. She planted her feet and attempted to pay little attention to the dark head lolling against her breasts. The pounding in the back of her head intensified. “I’m going to drag him, Christian. Don’t stop until we get to the back door.”

Christian nodded vigorously. “I’m helpin’, aren’t I, Mama? Aren’t I?”

“You’re helping.” Jessica braced her legs wide and felt her thighs strain. “Now—now.”

Jessica didn’t release her breath until they’d reached the back door, and then she all but collapsed against the sagging door frame. She stared at the trail of blood in the dust, at those motionless black boots, then shoved the back door open. “Hold this, Christian.”

“But I want to hold his feet.”

Her teeth ground in her ears as she again hooked her arms beneath Stark’s shoulders. A sharp pain sliced through her lower back. Breathing was a labor in itself. “Christian, do as I say.”

He blinked at her, thrust out his lower lip, and didn’t move. “But I’m not helping, then.”

“Hold the door,” she snapped into billowing dust, feeling the burn of hot tears at the backs of her eyes. No, she would not lose control. Not now, not ever. She couldn’t. A woman alone, raising a headstrong child, trying her best...

“You don’t have to yell at me,” Christian grumbled, flattening himself against the door.

“Listen to Mama and I won’t yell at you.” She hauled Stark through the open doorway and into her immaculate kitchen, with its spotless, lye-scrubbed pine floor that she was immensely proud of. She didn’t pause, even when she crashed into a high-backed wooden chair, even when Christian let the door slam on Stark’s leg.

“You didn’t take off your shoes, Mama. Look, you’re getting the floor all dirty. You’re mad, aren’t you, Mama? See, he’s bleeding all over.”

She ignored all this, the burning in her arms, the pounding in her head, the lurking sense of doubt in the wisdom of her actions. Through a short hall and into her room she dragged him, finally dropping him beside the mahogany four-poster on the cherished hooked rug she’d beaten for hours not three days past. She didn’t even glance at the bed. No sense in attempting that. She wondered if four burly men could heave Stark from the floor.

“Take the bucket and get Mama water from the well,” she called toward the door, where she knew Christian lingered.

“He’s bleeding on your rug, Mama.”

“I know.” She bit her lip, stared at Stark, then stuffed a feather pillow beneath his head.

“You’re mad, aren’t you, Mama?”

She dropped to her knees and set her fingers to fumbling over the buttons of Stark’s shirt. “Get the bucket, Christian.”

She listened to the sound of shuffling little feet, then to the rush of her own releasing breath. Her throat seemed to close up as her fingers ventured farther down the row of buttons. A rather intimate task, it suddenly seemed, this unbuttoning of a man’s shirt while he lay in a deep sleep on the floor beside her bed. She hesitated. His hand lay upon his stomach, blocking her path, and she found herself staring at those long, thick brown fingers, at the breadth of his palm and the length of his forearm. So disturbingly masculine a forearm, corded with muscle and rope like veins beneath its furred and bronzed veneer. Fleetingly she wondered at the profound disquiet all this aroused in her, a disquiet having nothing to do with the rifle shot she’d seen fit to deliver him. Gingerly she wrapped her fingers about his and lifted his hand aside. With a peculiar hesitancy, she slipped her palms inside the cotton, against warm flesh, and spread the shirt wide.

For some reason Jessica couldn’t have explained, her breath compressed in her lungs at the sight of him. Not that she’d never seen a man’s chest before, though that had been in the dusky privacy of her bedroom, with all shades drawn. Yet she remembered her husband Frank’s chest as smooth and flat and hairless, not jutting, bulging even, and densely covered with smooth black hair that reached clear to his beard-stubbled throat. He was a beast, this man, and this had to be fear, unparalleled fear that quivered deep in her belly and weakened her limbs. And concern, yes, that was it, nothing but concern for the man who had saved her life, now bade her to press a quavery palm against his chest to seek the rapid beating of his heart.

Her lips parted. His skin radiated heat that leapt into her hand and seeped up her arm, through her torso, pooling in her belly and in the tightening peaks of her breasts.

Her fingers curled of their own accord, then splayed slowly through that dense hair. She watched her hand moving over the expanse of his chest. His flesh curved into her palm, as if seeking her touch. The smell of him was like that of leather and warm baked flesh, oddly pleasant.

“I got it!” Christian announced, suddenly materializing at her side.

Jessica snatched her fingers to her mouth as if they were suddenly ablaze. She glanced up at Christian, then felt her cheeks flame and quickly averted her gaze. “A cloth...I need a cloth,” she muttered quickly, too quickly, her eyes finding the tapering line of black hair that disappeared into Stark’s waistband. His belly was as ridged as a washboard. “A—a cloth t-to clean his belly. I—I mean...his wound. In the kitchen cupboard. Get me one of those.”

“But those are the cloths you use on the dishes, Mama. Remember?”

Her teeth met, and she glared at her son. Again he hesitated. Then the bucket thumped against the floorboards, sending water sloshing all over Jessica’s skirt and her precious hooked rug as Christian finally obeyed. Jessica plunged her hand into the cool water. Sunlight filtered through the lace curtains, heating her, heating the room, so that she could barely catch her breath. She pressed cool, wet fingers to her brow, to the heated length of her neck, and attempted not to look at Stark, save for his wound and the dried blood caked around it.

Again she dipped her fingers in the bucket, then drew them to her lips. The water, so cool, soothed her parched throat.

Her fingers found the water again, then quivered over Stark’s brow. Tiny droplets spilled onto his forehead and wove erratic paths into his loosely curling black hair. Those heavy black brows seemed to tighten, then ease from that permanent scowl—a softening, if there were such a thing on such a man. She dipped her fingers and smoothed the skin above his brows, her fingertips playing gently over his temples, then venturing warily where burnished skin met with thickly curling hair.

Yes, there was no denying that she soothed him. His dry lips parted and emitted a soft breath, and before she could think, she brushed her wet fingers over his lips. Still, he slept, even when she jerked her hand to her breast and listened to the hammering of her pulse.

Moments later Christian returned. “Is this the rag?”

“Yes,” she replied briskly, without the favor of a glance. She applied herself to the task of cleaning the wound as would one grateful for distraction.

The wound. Tend the wound. You owe him your life.

No matter that simply leaning over him was proving far more unsettling than the sight of flesh ripped open, that his warm breath seemed to play through her hair, teasing her cheek, that his chest seemed to push up against her breasts far too deliberately for a man flat upon his back with a rifle wound. For some blasted reason, she couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment those massive arms would envelop her and pinion her flat against him.

“How come ya shot him, Mama?” Christian asked, perching himself close at her side.

Jessica blew an annoying curl from her eyes and leaned closer to examine the clean wound. “Mama thought he was a bad man, Christian. He was a stranger. Mama has told you about strangers, hasn’t she?”

“Is he going to stay?”

“I don’t think so. No, no, he’s not.”

“But he has to get better, Mama. So he has to stay. He killed that snake. He told me it would bite me. It was a rattler, Mama.”

Jessica’s teeth slid together. “Mama knows what it was, Christian. Hasn’t Mama told you about snakes? That they bite, and that you must stay away from them?”

She could almost hear the indignant dipping of his chin. “Yes...but I just wanted to touch it, and Mr. Stark said I shouldn’t.”

Jessica glanced sideways at her son. “Why don’t you believe what Mama tells you, Christian?”

He stared at her, eyes enormous pools full of guilt and suspicion. Because you have to prove everything you tell me. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

“Listen to Mama, Christian.”

“Is he going to stay and fix our barn?”

Jessica glanced sharply at Christian, then shook her head. “Reverend Halsey is going to fix our barn...and the house...as soon as he finds the time. He’s very busy at the church.”

“No, he’s not. He doesn’t like the barn or our house. He told me, Mama. He told me I was gonna live in his house soon. He told me that, Mama.”

“That must have been before he talked to Mama.”

Christian’s blond brows quivered as he stared down at Stark. “He’s big, Mama. He could fix our barn good.”

A shiver took up residence in Jessica’s belly when her eyes skittered over the muscled plains of chest. “We’ll see.” She sat back on her heels and surveyed the clean wound. “I have to get bandages.” She pointed her index finger at her son. “Stay here. And don’t touch him.”

Christian gave her a look that bordered on patronizing. How like his father he looked at times like that. “I can touch him. He doesn’t bite, Mama. And I want him to stay.” His tiny voice crept after her as she ventured into the kitchen in search of bandages. “Did you see how he killed that snake, Mama? Did you see? I want him to stay. Can he, Mama? Can he? He could sleep in the barn and teach me how to throw a knife.”

Jessica shuddered and slammed the cupboard doors.

“Couldn’t he, Mama? Say yes, Mama.”

“We’ll see.” She entered the bedroom with bandages in hand. Yet, try as she might, there was no denying the peculiar thrill that shot through her at the thought...of a repaired barn, of course. Avram wouldn’t get to it by September, if then—if he ever would, stubborn man. And the house, yes, the house required so much. After all, the further it sank into disrepair, the more fervently Avram would insist she rid herself of it. Perhaps if these bedroom walls were sporting a fresh coat of white paint to rival that of Sadie McGlue’s, if the barn weren’t threatening to collapse at any moment, if she could prove her strawberry patch a worthwhile endeavor...perhaps then Avram would cease this nonsense about selling the farm.

Her eyes drifted over the undeniable bulge of Stark’s biceps, the sinewed length of forearm, those large, capable hands and long, long legs. Even with a shoulder wound, he looked quite able, even more so than a sulking Avram on a good day. And he was awfully tall, tall enough, it seemed, to accomplish just about anything.

“We’ll see” was all she said.

Chapter Two

Inch by inch, Rance pulled himself from the sucking depths of a fathomless pit. The light drew him, and something more, a touch upon his brow, soft as thistledown, upon his lips, something cool, and then another touch...something tapping upon his closed eyelids, first one, tap-tap-tap, then the other.

“Wake up.”

A voice, bereft of all softness, all compassion, all the warmth his jaded ear sought, loomed out of the pervasive gloom. The voice brimmed with impatience, and the tapping upon his eyelids hovered near an agitated poke.

“Wake up, wake up.”

A growl blossomed in Rance’s chest, struggled up his parched throat and spilled from his lips. The tapping on his eyelids stopped. Only then did the heat in Rance’s left shoulder swell, then focus into one searing throb of pain.

He’d been shot. He knew this from both instinct and experience, even while all else hovered just beyond his grasp. If only the fog would part. If only he could move. Who the hell had shot him?

The poking resumed upon his eyelids.

“Wake up, wake up.”

A child’s voice.

Rance forced open one eye. Sunlight blinded him and stoked yet another ache, this one dull, at the back of his head. He squeezed his eyes closed and rolled the lump on the back of his head over whatever it was he lay on. Something soft, as if placed there for his comfort. Who the hell would do that?

“Wake up, Mr. Stark.” Poke-poke.

Stark...Stark. His mother’s family name, and not truly an alias, then, but unrecognizable. Why Stark? And who was this little person? Memories slammed about in the throbbing recesses of his brain. Oh, yes, the boy, the woman.

Frank Wynne’s wife.

Rance wrapped his fingers around a thin wrist, stilling that poking, then slowly opened his eyes. The fog lifted, and realization flooded over him the way sunlight flooded the room. The boy was perched over him—Christian, she’d called him—his jaw set and his blue eyes filled with an accusatory look.

Rance released that tiny wrist and felt his lungs deflate of all air. The boy was the image of his mother, clear to the thrust of that tiny chin. And just like his mother, he was small, compactly made, dressed in something that looked like it had once been bleached white and starched crisp beneath a loving hand. That grimy chin jutted forward, and one pudgy finger looked as if it yearned to poke into his nose before some silent reprimand brought it instead to scratch idly at his cheek. And still those hollow blue eyes probed unflinchingly through a curtain of straight blond bangs, just as they had from that photograph pressed in Frank Wynne’s locket. The locket tucked inside his watch pocket.

“My mama shot you.”

Rance rubbed his eyes and resisted a sudden, irrational urge to laugh. Shot by a woman... He could still see her there, looking as if at any moment she might crumple beneath the weight of the rifle. All that blond hair, tossed about by the wind, blinding her, distracting him. The hair...so different from her photograph that he might never have recognized her had it not been for her eyes, that unmistakable sorrow lurking deep there.

His fingers touched the bandage. Frank Wynne’s wife had shot him. The irony of it all. Had she known who he was, she might have left him to bleed to death in all that dust. Or she might have shot him again. But she didn’t know who he was, nor could she possibly guess. After all, what man in his right mind, a man still wanted for murder, would find himself within a fifty-mile radius of the home of the man he’d killed? And he still didn’t understand in the least any of his reasons for coming here—as if understanding it would have made it any less foolish. Hell, he deserved to be shot.

He had to get the hell out of here.

“My mama’s never shot anything. But she shot you. She thought you were a bad man. But you killed the bad snake, so she put a bandage on you.”

Regret, uncomfortable and entirely unknown, sliced through Rance, and he shifted his shoulders, as if he could shrug off any hint of compassion, of weakness, of that damned squirming that filled his gut whenever he met the boy’s eyes. Pain cut through his shoulder, spiraling down his arm and through his chest. He released his breath in a long wheeze. “Where is your mama?”

“Out back.” The boy gave Rance and his shoulder wound a deeply suspicious look. “You’re an outlaw.”

“I’m not an outlaw.” Rance shoved himself up on one elbow. The room tilted, then righted itself. He’d ridden in worse shape. He could sure as hell manage it now. Why had he come here? Damned stupid of him.

“Do you rob trains and stagecoaches?”

The boy looked altogether too anxious about that. Rance glowered at him, and pain sliced through his head at the mere shifting of his brows. “No.”

“This is my mama’s room,” Christian said with a slight narrowing of his eyes. Again the accusatory look. “You got blood on my mama’s hooked rug. She’s gonna have to clean it again. She’s gonna be mad.”

“She’s already mad at me.” And none of it had to do with him sullying her damned carpet. Frank Wynne’s carpet, in Frank Wynne’s house. Frank Wynne’s wife. Rance allowed his bleary gaze to roam about the sun-dappled room. Odd, but he couldn’t imagine this soft, gentle woman’s room, with its lace curtains and embroidered white coverlet, its corner rocker and carved armoire, its freshly cut white roses and prominent Bible, belonging to Frank Wynne. Toothy, lecherous Frank Wynne. A boastful, cheating Frank Wynne, yammering tale after tale of the women he’d had in every cattle town from Denver to Abilene as he chewed on his cigars.

His widow had a narrow waist beneath her loose-fitting dress, an undeniable length of legs hidden under those flapping skirts, full breasts that swelled from a narrow sweep of ribs.

Frank Wynne had bedded that woman, on this bed.

Rance heard his teeth click together, and he tore his gaze from the four-poster, forcing himself to his feet. He steeled himself against the inevitable pitching of the floor beneath his feet, gripped one of those fat mahogany bedposts, only to find himself staring at Frank Wynne, a dapper, sleekly combed Frank Wynne, framed in gilt and poised in loving memory upon a dressing table directly across the room. There he sat, Frank Wynne, amid several crystal flacons and an ivory-handled hairbrush, all cushy and cared-for upon a delicate sweep of white lace. A most precious spot for a departed husband to be revered from the stool set before that dressing table. A stool where his wife no doubt perched every night to brush all that curling gold hair.

And then Rance met with his reflection in the dressing table mirror. Big and dark, unshaven and smelling like his horse. He didn’t belong here, in this room, in this house. He’d killed the woman’s husband, left the boy fatherless.

Why the hell had he come here?

“You’re bigger than my pa was.”

The boy peered up at him through his bangs. Rance shifted his teeth and released his grip upon the bedpost. Slowly he moved across the room and through the open doorway. He balled his fists, and pain shot through his left arm. He entered a short, dark hall, then ducked into a small parlor when the place started spiraling about him. He took two steps toward the curved settee as Christian scooted around him.

“You can’t go in there,” the boy said, his chin tilted with its characteristic stubbornness. “Mama doesn’t let nobody in the parlor. Not even Reverend Halsey.”

And certainly not a man who smelled like a horse. Rance leaned his good shoulder against the door jamb and willed the spinning to stop. No, he wouldn’t want to disturb her parlor, with its precisely pleated white curtains hanging at the windows, the creamy satin settee and nearby overstuffed armchair. A soft, womanly room. The furnishings were sparse, the knickknacks few, but each had its proper, exact location. And the room bore not a trace of dust, was laced instead with a fleeting lemony scent. Somehow he’d expected the house to be as gray and bleak and dry within as it was from without, not cool and fragrant, smelling of bleach and lye soap, of sunlight and roses, of woman.

Rance regarded tiny, grimy Christian. “Where’s the door?”

Christian jabbed a finger toward the hall behind Rance. “In the kitchen.”

Rance turned about and again ducked into the shadowy hall. Damned ceilings were too low. The whole damned house was too clean, too damned small. He felt like a murderous trespasser. He had to get the hell out of here. He needed air.

Again Christian squeezed past Rance, reaching the sagging back door with a boastful half smile, as if he’d just won a most prestigious race. Yet with every step Rance took toward him, the grin faded beneath a cloud of suspicion descending over that dirt-smudged face. The boy seemed to be peculiarly fascinated with Rance’s bare chest, the bandaged shoulder.

Rance’s boots scraped against white floorboards, and he jarred a table set far too close to the door for a man to navigate with any ease.

“Look what you did,” Christian said, shoving a finger at the water sloshing out of a delicate vase of lavender flowers resting in the center of that table. “You got Mama’s doily wet. And you have to take off your shoes. See? The floor’s all dirty. My mama will be mad at you.”

“Yet another reason,” Rance muttered, twisting his way around the table and chairs. He paused in the sagging door frame, one boot poised upon the stoop. From a good four feet below him, the boy leveled a challenging look at him, which Rance returned before shoving the door wide and lurching through it.

He had to pause beneath all that sun and dusty heat that suddenly filled his lungs and set the blood pounding in his temples. His shirttails flapped in the hot breeze, yet perspiration instantly dotted his forehead and wove thick rivulets down his chest. His shoulder throbbed. Damned woman. She’d nearly killed him.

The boy materialized before him, squinting up at him, one thin arm jabbing at the ground. “Mr. Stark, your knife.”

Rance glanced at the black handle protruding from the dead rattler lying at Christian’s feet. His throat was parched, closing up on him, and the sweat burned his eyes. “Don’t touch it.”

The boy thrust out his lower lip, blond brows diving indignantly over his nose. “I didn’t.”

Rance forced his gaze about. “Where’s your well?”

Christian lingered over that snake, over that knife, and Rance thought he was weighing the risks of disobeying. And then he darted past Rance with such a flourish that he nearly toppled him in the dust. Rance made it to the well and, without hesitation, plunged his head into a full bucket of cool water resting upon the stone ledge. He surfaced, eyes closed, mouth opened to retrieve the water that spilled down his face. The water plunged down his dry throat and washed over his chest and into his waistband. A growl tremored through him, and again he dunked his head, surfacing to sputter and spew water with a vigorous shake of his head. Another growl rumbled through his lungs. That done, he leaned his elbows on the well’s edge and hung his head, listening to the droplets plopping deep into the well and the fading of the blood rushing in his ears. He forced the stones into focus. They blurred, then focused again.

He listened to the lonely creak of the wooden windmill.

There. Now he could ride. He’d be fine. Just fine. He’d been shot before, dammit, and he’d survived, though he vaguely remembered he’d found recuperating a hell of a lot more appealing than mounting his damned horse and galloping off into the barren prairie, particularly when recuperation meant a week spent beneath the gentle ministrations of some soft and eager little saloon gal.

His horse. Where the hell had he left his horse? Why couldn’t he remember?

He gripped the ledge and forced himself upright, then turned. Frank Wynne’s wife stood not two paces from him, an empty bucket in one hand. But no rifle.

A peculiar tightening filled his chest as the wind whipped her hair about her face and her eyes darkened to a deep blue. He wondered if she might try to kill him again. One hit on the head with that bucket could do it.

“Mr. Stark, you should be lying down.” Her gaze darted to Christian and narrowed.

“I didn’t do anything, Mama. He woke up.”

“You don’t look well, Mr. Stark.” He wished she’d stop calling him that. And looking at him like that, as though she feared he might topple into the dust at any moment. She seemed about to move a step nearer, and he gripped the ledge behind him.

“Ma’am, my horse. And I’ll be going.”

She blinked at him and dropped the bucket. “I rather think you won’t be going at this moment, Mr. Stark. You’re not fit to sit a horse. Your eyes are glassy. Your face is white as death, and your wound...” Her full lips compressed, then parted, and Rance was reminded of a pink rose in full bloom. “It’s beginning to bleed through the bandage. You might die out there on the hot prairie, and I would then be a murderess.”

“You didn’t seem to give that much thought, ma’am, when you shot me.”

“I thought you meant to harm my son, sir. I would gladly kill anyone with such a purpose.”

Yes, he believed she would, this small woman with the proud chin and tilted nose, even if she couldn’t shoot, or even hold a rifle. Not at all the sort of woman Rance would have ever envisioned married to Frank Wynne. How the hell had she allowed herself to become the man’s wife?

Something dripped into his eye. Water... No, the sweat again, beading on his brow. He felt the heat pulsing in his skin. The world resumed its spinning. Damn.

Frank Wynne’s wife moved swiftly, her grip surprisingly firm upon his good arm. A warm, lemony scent seemed to emanate from her, so fleeting he would have been compelled to lean closer to her to fill his lungs with the elusive scent. Rance felt his chest expand, and fiery talons clawed at his shoulder.

“Ma’am.”

“Hush, please, Mr. Stark. You need to rest. And get out of this sun. I do rather owe you, do I not?”

Owe him? If only she knew.

“No, ma’am, you don’t owe me.” He tensed his arm, resisting her tugging, and she glanced swiftly at him, a frown of concern hovering over her brow. He stood a good eight inches taller than she, and a soft haze had fallen over his eyes, yet he could detect the dusting of freckles upon her nose. As if she had been kissed by the sun. She looked God-almighty young.

Her gaze locked with his, then skittered away. Color bloomed through her face and spilled down the slender length of her neck. Still she tugged upon his arm. “To the house, Mr. Stark. I’m afraid I can’t drag you there again.”

“I helped,” Christian chirped, dancing about in the dust. “Didn’t I, Mama?”

“You helped like a big boy,” Frank Wynne’s wife murmured. She took a step, and Rance resisted, trapping her hand between his forearm and his biceps. “Mr. Stark—”

“I can walk, dammit,” he growled.

She stared at him, full pink lips compressing. “I’d rather you didn’t speak like that, sir.”

“Quit calling me sir. And let go of my arm.”

“I won’t. You’ll topple like a felled oak, Mr. Stark.”

“Logan.” He forced the word through his teeth, though he couldn’t fathom why this was suddenly important to him. “Call me Logan.”

“See there, you’re swaying and I’m still holding onto you. Really, sir, is your pride worth so much to you that you would risk your life?”

What could this woman know of a man’s pride?

He closed his eyes. “I’m just dizzy, and someone is pounding a very large drum inside my head. Annoying, but hardly a threat to my life.”

“Your pride could be, sir. As you wish. There. I’ve let go. How do you feel?”

Damned stupid. Swaying and dizzy and remarkably stupid for allowing himself to be shot by Frank Wynne’s wife and for coming here in the first place.

He took a step, what he thought was a well-done step directly to the front. But the wind blew again, filling his shirt, and the ground rose up and angled crazily beneath him. This time, he reached for her, his fingers gripping the fragile length of her upper arm.

“Christian, get the door. That’s it, Mr. Stark. Lean on me. One step at a time.”

He complied, though it ate like hell at him. And he let her take him back into the house and into her room, again, despite his protests.

“Where do you sleep?” he asked the hovering Christian.

“Upstairs,” the boy replied. “But you can’t sleep in my bed. Mama says a made bed can’t be messed up till nighttime.”

“Hush, Christian.”

“I prefer the floor,” Rance muttered, falling rather solidly to that hooked carpet on which he’d earlier bled. He stretched his legs and closed his eyes. What could only be described as a groan of relief spilled from his lungs before he could snatch it back. Frank Wynne’s wife adjusted the pillow beneath his head, and he opened his eyes to find her leaning over him, peering closely at his shoulder. She blurred, and one golden, lemon-scented curl plopped upon his nose, then skimmed like silk over his chest, leaving a trail of fire in its wake.

Her voice seemed to swirl about him, and he closed his eyes again and immersed himself in it. Oddly comforting, it was, that and the calming warmth of her breath upon his grimy face. Hell, only a fool would find comfort in these circumstances. On this day, he knew of no bigger fool.

“Sleep, Mr. Stark. I’ll tend to the bandage. Allow me. I’m...” Gentle fingers touched his skin, and those fires threatened to consume him. “I’m so very sorry, sir. You saved my life. And Christian’s. I’ll be forever grateful. Yes, just sleep.”

* * *

The kitchen door slammed, accompanied by the scrape of boot heels upon scrubbed floorboards. Yanked from sleep, Rance opened his eyes and stared at a ceiling in dire need of paint. He blinked. The ceiling remained in focus.

“Jessica!” A man’s voice ricocheted through the house. “God help me, Jessica, where are you?”

Jessica. The name left Rance’s lips in a hoarse whisper. Her name was Jessica.

“Jessica, my dear, are you there?”

The kitchen door slammed again, and Christian’s agitated voice retorted, “I told you she’s in there.”

“But I can’t go in there, in her... I mean, that’s your mother’s private...private.”

Bare feet plunked purposefully upon the kitchen floorboards. “He’s in there.”

“Who’s in there?”

“The outlaw.”

“The what?”

“He robs trains and stagecoaches. He has a knife.”

Rance shoved himself to a sitting position and instinctively reached for the weapon he kept in his waistband. Only none was to be found. He’d left his gun in his saddlebag with his misplaced horse, and his knife stuck in that rattler. Unarmed and wounded, he felt grossly incomplete and too damned vulnerable, particularly because this man’s voice rang with the sort of puffed-up indignation that typically preceded a brawl. Or a gunfight. And then heavy footfalls echoed through the short hall, just moments before a dark head peeped around the door jamb.

“Good God in heaven,” the man said, his voice choked, his narrow face paling.

Rance watched the man’s Adam’s apple work frantically in his throat and wondered why he felt so damned compelled to apologize. For being in this room? For killing Jessica Wynne’s husband? For taking a rifle shot through the shoulder? Or perhaps for the sudden surge of protectiveness stealing through him?

Christian scooted into the room. At his side dangled a waterlogged white cloth that left a puddled trail in his wake. “Oh, you’re awake. Here. This is for your head. Where’s Mama?”

“Get away, Christian,” the man bellowed from the doorway with all the self-righteous pomp Rance could have imagined. Christian didn’t move from Rance’s side. In three staccato strides, the man stood tall and angular, trembling and red-faced, not two feet from Rance’s boots. He was no younger than Rance, perhaps only an inch or two shorter, and boasted the long, slender limbs common to men of leisure. He was narrow of shoulder, cleanly shaven and shorn, with round wire-rimmed glasses perched regally upon his beaked nose. A gentleman, garbed in a gentleman’s collar and coat and smelling like mothballs, of all things.

“Do you want to get up, Mr. Stark?” Christian whispered for all to hear. “Are you gonna fight Reverend Halsey?”

“I demand an explanation of you, sir,” Halsey bellowed. “You there are in my fiancée’s private...private. You are aware of this?”

Rance grunted and managed to get to his feet, only once gripping the four-poster, which seemed to provoke the good reverend beyond measure.

“Avram! Good heavens, Avram!” She materialized, Jessica, breathless, flushed and flustered Jessica, her hair a wild golden halo about her face. She twisted her hands in her blood-smeared skirts and donned a smile that Rance couldn’t take his eyes from. Halsey barely favored her with a glance. His jaw, however, sagged open and he shoved an accusing finger at Rance.

“Good God, Jessica, you’ve a half-naked intruder in your private...private...and you stand here and smile at me?” Halsey ran a shaking hand over his protuberant brow. “My dearest, surely some sort of explanation is in order here.”

Jessica blinked and raised her brows. Her eyes darted to Rance, all over him, actually, and this shot a heaping dose of pleasure through him. Yes, more of that and he would be a well man in no time. Hell, his shoulder felt better already.

She held a hand toward him. “Why, Avram, of course I’ve an explanation.”

“You’ve a black beast of an animal eating what remains of your front yard, Jessica. You’re aware of this?”

Again, Jessica blinked. “Why, no.”

“My horse,” Rance said.

“Your shirt, if you would.” Halsey sniffed at Rance with decided repugnance. “Jessica, perhaps you shouldn’t look, my dear. It’s highly offensive that a man should bare himself before a woman who is not his wife in the Lord’s eyes. Particularly when a man is fashioned in the form of the very devil himself.”

Jessica’s smile quivered on her lips. “Why, yes, he’s... Well, he cannot help that, Avram. Besides, he’s wounded.”

“Wounded?”

“Yes, well, a minor catastrophe. All my fault. But later, Avram. Not to worry, though. Mr....I mean, Lo—Mr. Stark, that is, has very good reason for being here.”

“He killed a snake with his knife,” Christian offered.

Halsey ignored that. “He’s in the room where you sleep, Jessica.”

“Is he? Why, yes, yes, he is, isn’t he? And well he should be, Avram. The ceiling, yes, the ceiling needs paint and the floor requires stripping and a new coat of beeswax and—”

“Indeed it does, my dear, and that’s the very least of your worries. I say all the more reason why you should come to your senses before our wedding and agree to rid yourself of this nasty, flea-bitten farm.”

“It is not!” Christian yelled.

“Christian, don’t argue with Reverend Halsey.”

“But, Mama—”

“Avram—”

“Now, Jessica, my dear, this man here. Direct your scattered thoughts to him, if you will. Who is he?”

Her eyes met with Rance’s. His narrowed. And then she turned to Halsey and thrust out her cleft chin. “His name is Logan Stark. He’s my new farmhand, Avram. Say hullo, would you, and do be polite. Mr. Stark shall be with us for some time.”

Chapter Three

Silence hung like a palpable thing, broken only by the ticking of a clock somewhere in the small house. Avram Halsey let loose with a disbelieving snort and squinted toward the bedroom window, perhaps seeking logic in the billowing of the white curtains. Or was it Frank Wynne’s picture on the dressing table that he stared at? Rance grew certain as he watched Halsey’s face flush scarlet clear to his receding hairline that the man had never stepped one foot near Jessica Wynne’s “private private,” a room she had shared with the man framed upon that dressing table. Perhaps that was the source of Halsey’s sudden unease, and the distasteful curl of his lip. Perhaps that was why he swung his gaze from the window to fix with renewed vehemence upon Rance. Yes, something more than unease lurked there, a supreme agitation, as if the man itched to take himself from the room. Little wonder he wanted Jessica to sell the farm, with all its lingering memories...of another man, another lifetime. Halsey had ample reason to deny Jessica any farmhand’s help.

She turned toward Rance. A wavering smile parted her lips. Naked desperation flickered deep in her eyes and was gone in the next instant, swiftly veiled behind that mantle of strength she seemed to force onto her narrow shoulders. Yet he still sensed it. That desperation. She needed him. A virtual stranger. A man who didn’t deserve her trust.

“Jessica, dearest, be reasonable. We know nothing of this...this...” Halsey waved a hand toward Rance, then stared hard at Jessica. “A man you met and shot this very afternoon, and yet you would take him under your roof, and for what? I can hear the place rotting as we speak. It has been since before your husband died. Indeed, I believe even he was beginning to see the wisdom in selling it, given the price those Easterners were offering. Oh—” Halsey patted her arm consolingly and lowered his voice as Rance imagined a goodly reverend might upon entering his church. “Forgive me for speaking of the departed, but you’ve left me with little alternative. Jessica, a wounded man will be of scant use to you. Pray, with what do you intend to pay him? Strawberries?”

Halsey’s scoffing drew Jessica’s spine up tight. Rance felt his fingertips curl into his palms when her chin jutted forward. Her son stood below and beside her, the same chin poking at Halsey.

“Avram, you forget yourself,” Jessica said with deceptive softness. “My father hauled the stone to build this house and died out in that field, securing his rights to this land. I cannot easily forsake that.”

“Your father, my dear, were he still alive, would undoubtedly see the futility in your quest, regardless of all your noble intent. I doubt very much he would see the wisdom in taking a complete unknown into your fold. He wished you a fate far above his own, Jessica, and that fate certainly did not include dying in some barren field behind a runaway double-shovel plow. He arranged for you to marry Frank Wynne, did he not?”

“My father knew he was dying, Avram. He wanted me to be well taken care of. Unfortunately, he believed Frank capable of that, on this farm, with his cattle business. At the time, so did I.”

“Ah, but your father also dedicated himself to his church and parishioners,” Halsey replied stiffly. “I believe you forget that. Would you have me sacrifice the tiny congregation he established here in Twilight, one I have lovingly nurtured and can now proudly call my own, solely for the sake of a moldering old farm that is beyond redemption?”

“I would never ask you to sacrifice anything for me, Avram,” she said slowly.

“Oh, but you are. What of my reputation? And what of yours? Once word spreads that you’ve a...” Again, Halsey scowled at Rance.

Rance couldn’t help but scowl back.

“He’s an outlaw,” Christian offered.

“No, he’s not, Christian,” Jessica murmured. Her eyes flickered over Rance. “He’s—”

“I worked for a cattle rancher,” Rance offered, the words springing forth unchecked. Something swelled in his chest when Jessica’s pink lips parted into a soft, satisfied curve. Hell, he could imagine men selling their souls for a smile like that.

She gave Halsey a smug look.

Halsey blinked at her. “Don’t tell me you believe him worthy of sainthood, Jessica, simply because he claims he can manage a few stray head of cattle?”

“He has an honest face, Avram.”

Halsey’s jaw sagged then snapped shut. “An honest—? My dear, he looks every inch the sort who robs stagecoaches and trains and leaves innocent people for dead.”

Christian’s big blue eyes swung up to Rance. “Yep. And he has a knife. He’s gonna teach me to throw it.”

“Christian, shush.”

“Jessica, you did shoot the man. For very good reason, I presume, you deemed it prudent to disregard my orders to keep your hands from that firearm. Were you possessed of some sort of aim, I’d warrant you’d have killed him. Am I mistaken?”

Again her chin inched upward. “I would kill anyone who would think to harm my son.”

Halsey all but smacked his lips with satisfaction. “Aha! And there you have it. Take a moment, if you would, and listen to yourself. You’re finally making some sense.”

“Of course I am, Avram. I have been all along. I make it a point to always make sense. Mr. Stark means us no harm.” Her eyes flickered over Rance, lingered on his bandaged shoulder, then scooted away. “Indeed, I believe I owe him some sort of recompense.”

“Recompense?” Halsey sputtered. “Simply for being the unfortunate recipient of your bad shot?”

Rance barely heard Halsey when again her gaze lifted to his. A peculiar warmth having nothing to do with his wound seeped through Rance’s chest. An honest face. No one had ever said that about him. Hell, when a man was paid for his shot, his integrity mattered very little.

“Avram, the fact remains, I shot the man.”

“Then feed him, if you feel you must, and send him on his way. As for this ridiculous notion of hiring him on, the townsfolk shan’t see the logic in that, Jessica. You know as well as I that your reputation cannot withstand—”

“Avram, I care far more about righting my injustices and salvaging this farm than I do about vicious gossip.”

“So you say. But I ask you, what of me?”

“You? Why, Avram, busy as you are with the church, you need not bother yourself with the farm any longer. Odd, but I would think you most of all would understand my need for a hand and encourage it, knowing me as you say you do. After all, did you not advise Mabel Brown to hire on a farmhand when her husband passed on? I don’t recall overhearing even one dire bit of warning when Melvin Hodges filled that post.”

“Melvin Hodges is a toothless, bandy-legged old man, Jessica. He’s lived in Twilight longer than anyone. He’s harmless. Better still, we know him. He’s not some misbegotten devil of the prairie. And old Widow Brown is all but confined to her bed with rheumatism.”

“She’s a lovely woman, Avram. What are you saying, precisely?”

Halsey pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead, as if to assuage some deep ache. “All I know at this moment is that you are making no sense whatsoever. And I shan’t stand here in your private...room and discuss the matter another moment.” Halsey glowered at Rance. “What the devil are you looking at, Stark?”

Rance gave the good reverend a bland look.

Jessica faced Rance, with that one slight shift of her shoulders entirely dismissing Halsey. And then Rance saw it all emblazoned in her eyes, too clearly, far too guilelessly, and that warmth in his chest burgeoned into a deep, gut-wrenching ache of realization. Rance had taken much more from her in Wichita than a husband, a father, a protector and provider. His had been the hand that thrust this house and farm into disrepair. He had brought her all this heartache and turmoil. He had put that uncloaked desperation in her eyes. And he knew, beyond a doubt, that without help, she would lose it all. Halsey would see to that, no matter how stubbornly she fought him, or the inevitable crumbling of the farm around her and the wilting of all her pitiful strawberry plants. A woman this self-righteous would stand stalwart for something that just might not be worth the fight.

Hell, he’d never met a woman who would choose back-breaking toil, even the humiliation of failure, over the relatively comfortable life Halsey was offering her. More than a few of the saloon girls he’d known in his lifetime had been widowed at young ages, with children and farms left to their care. They’d abandoned the harsh realities of farm life, the drudgery, the inevitability of failure, and opted for the life of a whore. The lesser of two evils, they’d told him, their faces ravaged by far more than the effects of unrelenting sun and wind as they bemoaned their lack of alternatives. Not Jessica Wynne. He couldn’t imagine a desperate Jessica bemoaning anything. She had scoffed at the doubters and was eager to pin her every hope upon a man she’d just met, out of some spurious sense of noble justice. The man who just happened to be responsible for it all.

Simply because she thought he had an honest face. Yet some part of him suddenly wanted to prove to her that he was deserving of all that misplaced faith. He wanted to give her back all he was responsible for taking from her and Christian. Perhaps then he could vanquish some small part of this damned guilt squirming in his gut. Then he would ride away from Frank Wynne’s widow and child, knowing he’d done all he could to right the wrong he’d done.

There was the risk of being caught by any number of bounty hunters certain to be after him. And then there was the matter of deceiving this woman.

Yet as his gaze clashed with Halsey’s over her blond head, he knew he couldn’t simply mount his horse and leave. Not yet, at least. If he did, she would lose it all. And he would sacrifice his chance at redemption, his opportunity to ease some of that confusion and pain he knew lay buried deep inside Christian’s narrow chest.

Rance had long ago numbed himself to that kind of pain. When a man—but he’d been just a child himself then, all of fifteen—when a child was left orphaned, he learned to live within himself, to create a secret place in his soul into which he could burrow if need be. The numbness... Hell, killing as many Johnny Rebs as he could in the war had tempered some of the anger, had even earned him honors, decorations only the most heroic deserved. But he knew better. When a man lived that long inside himself, he cared very little about death and dying, and even less about heroics.

Numb. Yes, he’d long ago grown entirely numb to anything but the most basic of human needs. Hunger. Thirst. The need for sleep. The need for sex. But Christian didn’t deserve such a fate. Christian deserved the second chance Rance had never been given. Perhaps this was, after all, the reason he’d come.

At the moment, he’d like to think the reason was founded on some noble aspiration and not just a fool’s blundering instinct.

“How is your shoulder, Mr. Stark?”

He found himself wishing she would say his name...Rance...in the same haunting tone. But he’d taken enough of a risk in telling her his name was Logan. “It should be well enough in a day or two, ma’am.” He flexed his right arm and balled his fist. “I can still manage a hammer.”

“No.” Halsey ground out the word. “I shan’t allow it. This will not happen, I tell you.”

“Be quiet, Avram. Mr. Stark, I can offer you food, and lodging in the barn. Your horse can bed down there at night and graze in the small field during the day...though the fence needs some work. I hope that will suffice until winter.”

“It will not,” Halsey said with a huff. “Winter is six months from now. Do you realize what you’re saying, Jessica?”

“Of course I do, Avram. Now calm down before you give yourself indigestion.”

“Indigestion? I shall thank the good Lord if I don’t succumb to apoplexy this very night.”

“Then you must remind me to give you two doses of your elixir before you leave, Avram. Is the arrangement suitable, Mr. Stark?”

Rance didn’t spare Halsey the merest glance. Nor did Jessica. “Fine, ma’am.”

“Good heavens, Jessica. Do you realize you’re all but conducting business with a perfect stranger in your private—?”

“I’ll start supper, then,” she said crisply, brushing past Avram, with Christian clinging at her heels.

“Jessica!” Halsey bellowed down the hall, his face mottled with rage. His color only deepened when Rance ducked through the doorway. Halsey shifted his shoulders, purposely blocking Rance’s path. “And where the devil are you going, Stark?”

Rance slanted the shorter man a hooded look. “To the barn, Halsey. Or would you rather I remain here in Jessica’s bedroom? The floor is remarkably comfortable.”

Halsey shook so with his rage, a well-oiled lock of hair spilled over his forehead. “Jessica!” he yelled in Rance’s wake. “I shan’t stand for it! You shall be my wife in a scant few months. And goodly wives must obey their husbands. It’s the Lord’s word. Do you hear me, Jessica? This outlaw shall not sleep one night in my barn. Jessica? Do you hear me?”

She was staring from the kitchen window, a large potato clenched in one fist, her other hand gently stroking her son’s head. Rance could almost feel the tender loving emanating from her fingertips, the silent emotion flowing between mother and son. Rance grew acutely aware that he wished he could remember the same gentle mother’s touch upon his brow, making the world right for him.

Only when Rance bumped into the table on his way out the door did Jessica glance at him. He had to pause then, his hand clasped about the loose doorknob, when the hint of a curve softened her mouth just as the afternoon sunlight spilled over mother and child like warm honey.

He shoved the door wide. Hot sun slapped his forehead. Heat and dust wrapped around him, and he strode to the barn with a foreign sense of determination blossoming in his gut.

* * *

The back door slammed. “He’s gone,” Christian said, and poked one finger into a bowl of blackberries.

Jessica froze between table and stove and clutched a damp rag to her belly. She stared at her son’s chubby finger sifting through the freshly washed fruit and listened to the heightened thumping of her pulse. “Who’s gone?” she asked slowly.

Christian grabbed a fistful of berries and shoved them all into his mouth. “Rrvrrnnn Allseee.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Jessica said, an odd relief spilling through her limbs. Relief...that Avram had finally given up the fight for the evening, of course, and that he had managed to remove himself from the farm without pausing to engage in fisticuffs with a wounded Logan Stark.

Avram had declined her offer to stay for dinner. She’d felt it then, too, this relief, particularly when he’d given her his typical swift passing of his dry lips over her cheek. Always the same, that farewell kiss, no matter the time of day or their mood. Reliable, that was her Avram. Dependable, if a bit steeped in moral self-consciousness. A fine quality in a husband, one Jessica could appreciate only now, after experiencing the true depths of Frank’s deception.

“Wash up, Christian.” Her fingers wrapped about Christian’s tiny wrist, just as it was poised again over the fruit. “Not before supper. Where are your shoes?”

He blinked at her through his bangs. Never guilt or remorse there, just a simple stating of the facts, the irrefutable conviction that she, the female, would be left to see to the righting of things. She knew precisely what he was going to say. “I don’t know where my shoes are.”

“Find them before you step on something.”

“I can’t. I’m too hungry.”

Jessica released a weary breath and turned to retrieve a large iron pot simmering on the stove. “Then set the table for me...after you wash up.”

Christian scooted a chair to the wash pump, clambered onto it, and pumped vigorously until water splashed everywhere. “Is Mr. Stark going to eat with us? I think he’s hungry.”

“Of course he is....” She placed the pot of soup upon the table and thrust a rag at Christian the precise moment he wiped his hands dry on his dirt-smudged shirt. “Hungry, that is,” she said. Her gaze found the ladder-back chair opposite, the chair left vacant for over a year now. Her husband Frank’s chair. Avram refused to sit in it. Even Christian, who on any given day preferred to venture from chair to chair for his meals, never once gave that particular chair his consideration.

Stark’s shoulders would surely fill this small kitchen. She wondered how much a man of his size would eat, how those long legs would fit beneath this table. They’d reach clear beneath her own chair. No, it wouldn’t do to have the man dine here, with them.

The now seemingly insignificant pot of vegetable soup jarred against the table when Christian plunked three bowls next to the pot. Again she stilled his hand as it inched toward the blackberries.

“No,” she said. “I’ll take his dinner out to him. Set the table for two, Christian.”

“But, Mama—”

“Napkins on the left.”

“I know.” With his tongue curling out of his mouth, Christian folded the cloth napkins and placed them to the right of the stoneware plates. “He has a big horse, Mama. It’s black.”

“Imagine that,” she replied, repositioning the napkins on the left.

“It’s in the barn with him. I’m gonna ride it.”

“I don’t believe you will.”

“We can hitch it to our broken wagon.”

“We’ll get our own horse soon and hitch it to the buckboard, after Reverend Halsey fixes it.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“You always say that. Soon. Is that when Reverend Halsey is gonna be my pa?”

The ladle poised over the pot. “Yes, I suppose it is. Quite soon.”

Christian thrust out his chin. “Then we’ll never get a horse, because Reverend Halsey doesn’t like them. He says they smell.”

“And he’s right. They do smell. That’s why they live in the barn with the other animals.”

“Mr. Stark doesn’t smell.”

Yes, he did...like baked leather and warm male skin. Her arms went suddenly weak. The ladle banged against the bottom of the pot. “No...I mean, he...” All words left her.

Christian frowned up at her through his bangs. “So why does he have to sleep in the barn?”

The ladle stirred and stirred. Jessica sought her words from the swirling soup and found nothing but a heightened thumping of her pulse.

“He could sleep on the floor in your room, Mama. He’s too big for the bed.”

“Stop it, Christian,” she snapped suddenly. Too suddenly, her voice brimming with an odd agitation. Regret flooded through her even before she could reach out a hand to caress that blond head. But Christian seemed to shrug off her mood in his typical fashion. In another instant, his finger inched toward the blackberries. This time, perhaps because of her regret, she didn’t stop him, and directed all her thoughts to ladling the steaming soup. She watched the characteristic scrunching of Christian’s nose as he glowered at the soup and then his gaze darted to the stove, seeking. Would this ritual never cease?

“Mama—”

“You’re eating the soup, Christian.”

“But, Mama—”

“Sit.”

“Can I eat with Mr. Stark in the barn?”

“Mama wants you to eat with her. Here. Now sit.”

He thrust out his lower lip and slid half on, half off the chair. One bare foot kicked belligerently at the table leg. He scowled into his bowl and pushed his spoon around with his thumb. “It’s too hot. I can’t eat it.”

“Blow on it.” Jessica eased into the chair next to his and felt the blood drain from her legs. She hadn’t been off her feet since sunup. Her dress hung heavy with dust and a day’s perspiration. Even muscles she’d had no idea she possessed cried out for a long soak in a warm tub of water. If only she wouldn’t have to haul it from the well, and heat it, and haul it again to her wooden tub.

“Aren’t you going to take Mr. Stark his dinner?”

“Oh.”

Christian sprang from his chair before she could move. “I’ll do it!”

“Sit.” Jessica curled her son’s fingers around his spoon and glared at him over her pointed index finger. “Eat. I’ll tend to Mr. Stark.”

“I wanted to,” Christian grumbled into his soup.

“I don’t believe Mr. Stark is the sort a young boy like you should be tending to, Christian.” Carefully she arranged the soup and utensils on a wooden platter. “We know very little about him, after all.”

“He’s a stranger, isn’t he, Mama?”

Her gaze slid to the window and beyond, where the barn crouched in dusky shadows. Somewhere within, Stark lurked in the shadows, as well, with his horse, his knife, perhaps a gun.

“Strangers are mean.”

“Not all strangers,” Jessica replied.

“Mr. Stark’s not.”

“No, I don’t suppose he is.”

“He’s gonna stay because you shot him, right, Mama? And you shouldn’t have shot him, right?”

A frown quivered along her brows as she sought the best possible explanation.

“I think you just wanted to make Reverend Halsey mad. Because he won’t help us fix our barn and our wagon, right, Mama? That’s why, right?”

Jessica glared at her son, then snatched up the bowl of blackberries and several cloth napkins, wondering at the unease stirring within her. “Mr. Stark is seeking work, Christian. I’ve hired him on. He’s going to fix our barn and the house, and then he’s going to leave.”

Twin blue saucers blinked at her. “So he’s not a stranger.”

“I still don’t want you bothering the man, Christian.”

“You like him, don’t you, Mama?”

A disturbing heat spread through Jessica’s cheeks. “I don’t know him well enough to like or dislike him, Christian, or to trust him. And neither do you. Now eat.”

Christian gave a shrug, plunged his spoon into his soup and gobbled it down. “Good dinner, Mama.”

She gave her son a last glower that couldn’t help but dissolve into a weary smile. And then she turned and headed for the barn.

* * *

Rance watched her from the moment she stepped foot from the house. Concealed by the lengthening shadows, he sat propped against a bale of hay in one corner of the barn. The air hung thick and heavy with a day’s worth of dust and the smell of his horse and his own sun-baked flesh. Through a four-inch gap in the barn’s wall planks, he’d watched the sun set over a bleak and barren horizon and listened to the sounds of dusk as would one who’d grown accustomed to the peculiar comfort the trill of a cricket provided. Comforts were few, after all, for a man on the run, a man alone. It had been that way for him for so long now, eighteen years long. His past had become one long, dusty tableau. Crickets had come to be enough on most nights, when light proved insufficient for reading.

But now, watching Jessica Wynne moving toward him, a reed-slender, womanly shadow, he knew a stirring so deep his fists balled, sending a stab of pain through his left shoulder and a reminder that he was crushing Frank Wynne’s gold locket in his other fist. Some sound must have escaped him, for she paused just as she entered the barn. It was an indecisive pause, as if she feared something here.

No, he didn’t want that. Never that.

He stuffed the locket into his watch pocket. “Ma’am—” He lurched to his feet, out of the shadows and into the arc of soft light emitted by the kerosene lantern she held.

She didn’t retreat a step, though she looked like she wanted to when her gaze widened and drifted over his bare chest. He imagined her back drew up as rigid and brittle as a dried-up twig. Thin fingers clutched at the platter she carried, and her breath seemed trapped in her chest. Her breasts pushed full and high against worn gray muslin.

He swallowed, his throat thick and bone-dry. Damn him for coming here, for every twisted fool’s reason he’d given himself to stay. Beneath it all, and not too far beneath it, he was a man, and as any man’s would, his body responded to hers, to the heat and the darkness and intimacy of this desolate farm, before conscience could tell him otherwise.

“I brought you supper,” she said, her fingers still gripping the platter as though she dared not let it go.

“Soup,” he said. He watched the steam rise from the bowl. Hot soup on a hot, dry Kansas evening. He knew he’d eat it all and sweat the night away on his thick bedroll. All that was left in his saddlebags was stale bacon wrapped in cheesecloth, and coffee. “Thank you, ma’am.”

Her eyes flickered to his bandaged shoulder. “I should see to that.”

“Can I eat first?”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course.” She glanced about, apparently unsure which bale of hay was best to serve as a table, until he reached for the platter. His fingers brushed over hers and curled securely around the wood. Their gazes locked.

He arched a brow. “Care to join me?”

She released the platter into his hands as if it were suddenly aflame. Color bloomed in her cheeks, and he wondered how many men she’d known in her lifetime. Not many, judging by her discomfort. Her fists suddenly took a death grip on her skirts.

“I...” She waved a hand in a vague direction and seemed incapable of looking him in the eye.

“Ah. You don’t regularly dine in the barn with men you shoot.”

That prompted a glare. “I’ve never shot anyone.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Have you?”

He set the platter upon two stacked bales and straddled another. He glanced at her, aware that her heavy-soled shoes shuffled nervously upon the hay-strewn floor. “An odd question, ma’am, given that you’ve hired me on and fixed me a fine dinner. What is it you’re curious about? My ability to defend you and your son, or my evil intentions here? I thought we were beyond that.”

She jutted her chin at him. “A woman can’t be too careful when she lives alone. Indeed, one can’t help but cringe at the tales of horror and pillaging common to the taming of the frontier. I’m still not quite used to it, even after twenty-two years.”

“You should have asked if I owned a gun, then.”

“Do you?”

“Why, yes, ma’am, I do.” He watched those sapphire eyes skitter about the shadowed barn before they settled upon his saddle and gear, heaped upon the floor at his booted feet. He could see it all, the blossoming realization that he could, at any moment, snatch his pistol from his saddlebags, level it between those beautiful blue eyes...

Ignoring all those unspoken accusations, he plunged his spoon into his soup and took a heaping swallow. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had ever tasted so good, even without his characteristic whiskey to accompany it. Two, three more spoonfuls and the bowl was nearly empty. He glanced again at her, suddenly aware that she was staring at him now, not at his gear. He shoved the napkin across his mouth, tossed it aside, then half rose from his seat, one hand reaching for his gear. “I keep my gun in my saddlebag. I don’t suppose you’d care to see it?”

She shook her head and took a step back. Wariness again invaded her eyes. “N-no. Thank you, I’d rather not. I trust you know how to use it.” At the moment, she didn’t look like she trusted him one damn bit. So much for honest faces.

“I wouldn’t carry one if I didn’t.” He settled his bare back against the barn wall and felt the sagging boards give a good three inches. “Wouldn’t make much sense.”

“No.” She clasped and unclasped her hands and seemed to take a peculiar interest in the unfathomable darkness overhead. Looking at him was obviously beyond her capabilities at the moment. No, Jessica Wynne wasn’t the sort to linger in shadowy barns with half-naked men, at least not comfortably. She must want something, then. Perhaps reassurance that she had indeed chosen her farmhand well.

He scooped up a handful of blackberries and tossed one into his mouth, taking full advantage of her distraction to regard her through hooded eyes. She looked like something sent from heaven, or in his case, hell—all golden and soft and too damned innocent, with her unbound hair and that oversize dress that suddenly seemed to beg to be ripped off her. He forced the blackberries down a throat gone dry and reined in all these carnal thoughts. When the hell had he ever allowed them to get the better of him? His tone was purposely gruff. “Perhaps I could teach you to shoot.”

“Good heavens, no. Why would I want you to do that?”

“Because the next time a stranger walks onto your property, you might have good reason to kill him.”

“You’re the first such fellow to do so in twenty-one years. Perhaps in the next twenty or so, until the next outlaw wanders through Twilight, I shall teach myself to shoot properly.”

“In the meantime, you could aim and miss.”

“I’ll have you know I’ve never aimed and missed—” She caught herself, her eyes flickering over his bandaged shoulder. “I mean, when it would have mattered.”

To aim and miss... Memory, dark and dusty, whispered through his mind and was gone. “You don’t want to aim and miss when it matters, ma’am,” he said softly.

“Perhaps. But in the meantime, I’ve Avram.”

He couldn’t squelch a snort before he popped three berries into his mouth. He half slouched against the bowed excuse for a barn wall, chewed innocently enough, and gave her his best vague look when she planted her hands on her hips and advanced toward him.

She stood there, bathed in lamplight and dancing shadows, entirely unaware of herself as a woman and looking far too young and ripe for a man such as he, a man used to taking what he wanted from a woman. Particularly when he’d been so long without one. There, the chin jutted and the nose poked skyward, her lips compressing as though she sought just the perfect combination of words to skewer him with. He could almost hear the toe of her shoe tapping on the floor, could feel her righteous indignation in the heat of her.

“Whatever are you snickering about, Mr. Stark? If you intend to make humor at my fiancé’s expense—”

“I’ve never snickered in my life, ma’am.”

“Oh, but you’ve snickered, all right.” She waved a hand over him, directly at his bare chest. “A man who can calmly eat a meal without his shirt in front of a woman is capable of snickering. I wouldn’t doubt that you can spit, as well.”

“A nasty habit. I avoid it if I can.”

“And ill-mannered sorts are notoriously short on book learning—”

“I read Keats and Byron every night before retiring.”

“Why, you probably haven’t bathed in over a month—”

“I make it a daily habit. Bathed just this morning, ma’am. The stream was cold and deep. Perfect for bathing...” He flashed a rare smile, one that seemed to crack his skin. “Naked, of course.”

This stopped her cold, as he’d known it would. All her puffed-up defending of her beloved Avram fled, swallowed in one noisy gulp. She flushed scarlet. She stared at his bare chest, and lower, at his stomach. The blush reached clear to her hairline. He could almost read her innocent mind, the images taking full, real shape...a man, bathing naked in a cold stream.

It was hard to imagine that this woman had ever known intimacy with a man.

For whatever unfathomable reason, he was suddenly overcome with the need to apologize to her for stoking all those defenses, no matter how deserving Halsey might be, no matter how eagerly she had leapt to his defense.

Rance stood, and she took three steps back, one slender arm outstretched, as though to keep him at a proper distance.

“In the future,” she said, “I would appreciate you wearing your clothes, sir, particularly your shirt, in my presence.” She looked as though she itched to grow another seven inches taller as she lifted her gaze finally to his. “And that of my boy.”

Odd, that. Protecting her son from the sight of a man. He wondered if she’d done the same with her own husband.

He indicated the blood-soaked cloth lying on a nearby pile of hay. “My shirt, ma’am, has a bloody hole in it.”

She pursed her lips, then snatched his shirt up and stalked from the barn. Silhouetted against a sky ablaze with twilight fire, her shoulders squared, and all those blond curls bounced with each step she took. His gaze immediately narrowed upon the outline of her hips, slim, swaying and womanly. Instinct, that was it. Simply male instinct and habit—both a man like him could tame and manage, both he would feel with any woman, dammit. See, he could take his eyes off her. Easy enough.

He slouched against the barn wall, feeling weariness like lead weights in his limbs. His lids drooped, and twilight faded with the blossoming sounds of night above the lonely, slowing creak of the windmill. Yet, try as he might, he could not banish that image of Jessica Wynne from his mind, and then darkness encroached, and the creaking of the windmill grew louder, rousing age-old memories.

Mists parted on a lifetime ago.... The sleeping town of Lawrence, Kansas, all quiet save for the comforting squeak of a windmill outside his open bedroom window and then the gunshots, ripping through the predawn peace...the horrified shouts, cries for help, more gunfire, carnage, and his parents crumpling lifeless beside him as he struggled to take aim, to get off one good shot before the outlaw gang disappeared into the darkness.

Something touched him. He roared awake, the demon stirring to life within him for the first time in years. A shadow loomed close, yet he didn’t strike out. No, he would grapple with his ghosts, dammit. He lunged upward in the darkness, his fingers meeting flesh, yet he gripped those delicate limbs and with one flex of his arms lifted this insignificant weight entirely against him, flush from chest to hips.

“M-Mr. Stark.”

The fog cleared. That warm, lemony woman-scent spilled over him. No ghost. He stared into Jessica Wynne’s wide blue eyes.

Chapter Four

The heat of him penetrated muslin, cotton and bone, leaping into her blood like the first roar of a flame. He was all male, potent, savage, and as raw and untamed as an untouched wilderness, his eyes full of frenzied, mysterious fire. A man so different from the few she’d known. It struck her that she felt no fear, even when his fingers squeezed into her upper arms. Something told her she should be afraid. Yet she felt nothing but this slow, deep burning.

Their breaths came matched, hers shallow, his tortured, a palpable stirring of the sliver of hot night air that dared to pass between them. His scent filled her lungs. Her belly curved into his. Her breasts pushed into his chest, the peaks swelling against fevered bands of muscle—

Too late she realized she’d shoved a fist into his wounded shoulder. Breath hissed from between his teeth, and he released her to sag once again against the barn wall.

“Good heavens, I’m sorry!” she blurted.

Dim lantern light threw his face into deep shadow, yet she recognized the subtle tightening of the lines around his mouth, the downward tilt of his brows over his nose. He shoved a big hand through that unruly mane of blue-black, smoothing the perspiration that dotted his forehead and bathed his torso from neck to waist in a filmy sheen. For one long, unconscionable moment, she allowed her eyes to drift over the breadth of that furred chest and along the ridges of his belly.

She watched his fingers threading through his hair, as if he were massaging some deep ache there. Perhaps it was some trick of the flickering lamplight, but she thought she could detect the faintest trembling in those fingers.

Instinctively, as would any mother, she reached a palm toward his forehead. His eyes angled abruptly at her. Her hand dropped to twist into her skirt.

“You could be feverish, Mr. Stark.”

His lip barely curled with his words. “More than likely it was all that damned hot soup.”

She sucked in a breath of indignation. What was it about this man that stirred her so swiftly to anger, despite his wounded state, despite the fact that she needed him? Despite the fact that she wanted to like him. With pursed lips, she watched him shove himself from his hay bale and move past her, deeper into the shadows. He paused to stare into the night from the open barn door, presenting his back to her.

Jessica pondered that broad expanse, a back not at all unlike a bronzed sculpture she’d once seen at Ledbetter’s General Store, the same sculpture she had yearned to establish with pride upon her mantel...if Frank would ever have allowed such indulgences, of course. Sadie McGlue, upon mere sight of the thing, had all but proclaimed it priceless treasure straight from Boston and had snatched it up. Yet Jessica still remembered the feel of that cool sculpted bronze beneath her fingertips. Stark’s back looked as if fires burned just beneath the skin’s surface.

Her itching fingers twisted more securely into her skirts.

“Mr. Stark.”

No reply. She had the distinct feeling his mind was miles from here, where she’d found him, deep in some fevered, tortured pit of darkness. His silence, even the manner in which his hair hung in those riotous loose curls, seemed to mock her curiosity. But why the devil should she care if some memory or nightmare tormented him? He was probably most deserving of such torture, though a most disturbing one it must have been to rouse such raw and primitive emotion in him. She could still feel the solid, heated wall of him pushing against her, the unchecked tensile strength in his hands.

She ground her teeth and swung her gaze away from him, anywhere, and found herself wondering how the devil the man would sleep comfortably upon all this hay with only a thin bedroll.

“Don’t look at me, if you wish, though I would like to know what grievance you could possibly have with me. I simply came to check your bandage. And I brought you a sheet and a blanket, but I see you have—”

Her voice trapped in her throat when he suddenly turned about and moved slowly toward her. Perhaps it was then that Jessica experienced her first serious twinges of doubt about keeping this man anywhere near her farm. It was in the subtle swagger of his lean hips, the simple manner in which his faded denims hugged his thighs, the sinewed length of his muscled arms, and those hands. And the look in his eyes. A tiger’s golden eyes. An outlaw’s eyes, full of wicked, sinful promise.

He paused not a hand’s breadth from her, and Jessica battled an overwhelming desire to flee. Her breath had found her voice, somewhere...only she could find neither.

“Am I feverish?” His voice, smooth and rich and so very mellow, hinted that perhaps he did indeed read Keats and Byron before retiring each night. No outlaw could ever have been blessed with such a voice.

Jessica felt her mouth open and...nothing. His fingers encircled her wrist and drew her palm to his cheek. A day’s growth of beard, and heat burned into her palm, or perhaps it was simply that her hand had gone ice-cold. His covered hers, entrapping her fingers in gentle warmth, then retreated.

“I—” She licked parched lips and wished to God the man would stop looking at her so intensely. “I should really feel your forehead, if I am to properly...Mr....”

“Logan,” he replied softly. Again, gentle fingers found hers and moved her palm to his forehead. Crisply curling hair seemed to stroke her fingertips. He stared at her mouth. “Well?”

So very faintly that she might have missed it, the corner of his mouth lifted. Yes, this must amuse him greatly, a woman barely capable of simple breathing and speaking. And suddenly it was all too much, the sheer immensity of him, his scent, that voice, that look in his eyes...and the seductive shadows encircling them.

She snatched her hand away from his skin and found her fingers fidgeting at the buttons high at her throat. “Yes...I mean, no...you’re not feverish. Quite well, I’m sure, I—”

Before she could spin about and flee, yes, flee, while she still retained some thread of sense, he again trapped her hand.

“And my wound?” he said. “You did just punch me in the shoulder, remember?”

She swallowed and gave the bandaged shoulder a glance. “I’m sure it’s fine until morning.”

A dark brow lifted, a hint of devilish mockery there. “Are you quite sure? You wouldn’t want me expiring from infection some time during the night, would you?”

This gave her sufficient pause, and she sensed that he had known it would. Confounded arrogant man. As if he knew her so very well after one day. As if she were so very simple to know.

And yet...she had never been one to neglect anything, had forever endeavored to do the proper thing at the proper time, to whatever degree was required, and then some. A perfectionist, her father had proclaimed her with more than a hint of pride. Avram appreciated that quality in her as much as Frank had seemed needled by it...when he had taken the time to notice her, that is.

Indeed, why bother with anything if you weren’t going to do it right...whether it be tending a farm, raising a child, or healing a rifle wound you had inflicted through your own panic and bothersome lack of control?

She cocked her head with renewed self-assurance and sniffed, “If worrying about it shall keep you from rest, then indeed I shall tend to your wound now.”

“Ah, I need my rest.” He leaned slightly down and forward. She needed barely to reach out to touch him.

“Indeed you do.” Her voice had again taken on that uncharacteristic breathy quality, one common to women like Sadie McGlue and her society sisters, who cinched their corsets a few notches too tight on Sundays for church. They all seemed mere seconds from crumpling in colorful heaps of starched New England taffeta and satin ruffles...as though their lungs weren’t getting sufficient air. Those women had an overindulgence in pastry to blame. She...she hadn’t had pastry in years. And she hadn’t the money for a corset. So what the devil was her problem?

She forced her attention to peeling away the bandage, to the raw wound she probed beneath, away from the feel of his chin brushing against her hair, his warmth encircling her like invisible arms, his voice rumbling in his chest.

“Will I survive the night?” he asked. It was a simple question, yet emitted in that deep, soft baritone, as potently male as any Jessica could imagine. She could endure this torture no more.

She did a miserably inept job of securing the bandage in place again, her fingers fumbling like a five-year-old’s. She spun about and nearly tripped over her skirts in her haste to put a healthy distance between them.

She jerked her arm toward a nearby hay bale. “There—I—I’ve brought you sheets. Perhaps they will make it easier for you to achieve all that rest. You will need it for the walk to town early tomorrow for supplies and the like.” She barely glanced over her shoulder at him. “G-good night, Mr. Stark.”

“Logan” was the last she heard before she sought haven in the darkness.

* * *

Oh, but what the dawning of a new day could do for a girl, particularly one of Jessica’s nature. Indeed, accomplishment before sunrise could wipe away the last traces of pesky memories from last eve, could provide ample reassurance that she was in complete control of herself, her life, her response to Logan Stark. Little matter that she’d tossed fitfully upon her mattress for most of the night. And when sleep finally, mercifully, ensnared her, she’d dreamed only of those awful moments in the barn with Stark. A shirtless, sun-baked Stark.

A crisply made bed, a loaf of bread baking in the oven, coffee roasting, a fresh muslin gown and neatly combed hair—yes, this was all that was necessary to get her day off to a smooth and even start. None of that awful pell-mell from yesterday, as though the ground were in constant shift beneath her feet. The idea! That one man, after a single day, possessed the ability to render her an insomniac! Ridiculous. Preposterous. She was in complete control of her life, her farm, her son, her emotions. A woman had to be, after all, if she was to succeed. And she would succeed with this farm, with her son, regardless of the difficulties. These she would overcome. After all, obstacles merely served to sift out the weak and the timid, of which she was decidedly neither.

It was with a certain deeply felt smugness, though she knew not why, that she peered from her brightly curtained kitchen window into the eerie gray of predawn. A curve softened her mouth. No sign of life from the barn. No doubt the beast still slumbered, accustomed, as she’d often heard those heathen types were, to wallowing about until midday. Well, she’d show him the stuff she was made of, and what she expected of him if he intended to retain his post under her employ.

She found herself again before her dressing table, smoothing the flyaway curls escaping her neat and tidy chignon, a coiffure she never managed to accomplish with any ease. Perhaps this was why she lingered here before the glass longer than usual. Yet she was journeying to town today, and this did require some care with her appearance. The proper hair, the best of her muslins, perhaps even her straw hat with the pressed pale blue ribbon.

Her fingers suddenly trembled upon the frayed lace at her collar. She pressed a hand to the twittering in her belly and grabbed the two-inch excess of fabric there at her waist. In the gray light of dawn reflecting off her looking glass, her cheekbones seemed to poke through her skin, and purple shadows dusted beneath her eyes. The ravages of time...and she not yet twenty-three. Was this what Stark saw when he looked at her?

She watched the color blossom through her cheekbones. Avram, not Stark. Avram. If a woman was so lax as to find herself preoccupied with thoughts of a man, that man should be her betrothed. Though, now that she gave it some thought, she’d never once felt the least bit conscious of her appearance with Avram, nor had she ever felt compelled to seek her looking glass for his benefit. Then she was indeed doing right by marrying him. She certainly couldn’t bear to be all fidgety for the remainder of her life. Yes, that was it. She’d been far too fussed up and fidgety to suit anyone.

Her own hollow eyes stared from her reflection. Where indeed had the sparkle of youth flown? What had responsibility and widowhood done to her?

She forced her gaze from the glass and found herself staring at the framed photograph of Frank. Then again, anger and bitterness of this magnitude certainly could not content itself with eating only at her insides. It had to leave its mark upon her face and body, ravaging her so that no man would find comfort in looking at her. Her husband’s dying gift to her, as if he hadn’t left her with enough burdens to bear. His perfidy had been the very least of it.

Her fingers coiled around the gilt frame, and she battled, as always, the urge to fling it across the room, to crush it beneath the sole of her shoe, to lay waste to him as he had done to her. But, no. Christian must forever remember his papa lovingly. He deserved that far more than she deserved some sort of violent recompense, one that was certain to leave her just as bitter, and her son nothing but confused.

Christian. Good heavens, consumed with her own thoughts, she’d allowed him to wallow away in his bed until past sunrise. Laziness could insinuate itself into a five-year-old in the span of one quiet morning.

She spun from the dressing table and headed directly for the narrow flight of stairs leading to her son’s bedroom. She found his bed empty, the pillow cool.

Feeling the first stirrings of annoyance, she marched down the stairs and through the kitchen, yanking open the back door with more fervor than she would have ever wished to display. She nearly tripped over the full pail sitting on the stoop.

She lifted it and scowled. She should be pleased. She should be delighted. She wasn’t. After all, she’d never gotten that much milk from any cow, much less her miserable excuse for a bovine. The pail met solidly with the stoop once more, and then she was off, stomping toward the barn. Upon passing the paddock, she directed a scowl at Maggie, her dairy cow, chewing her cud with a certain mocking disdain.

“Traitor,” she grumbled. Blasted outlaw, and damned and blasted cow. Far too much cheek to display for an animal who seemed incapable of fathoming that she could, with very little effort, escape that crumbling excuse for a fence.

Jessica lengthened her stride. Arrogant man, thinking to disrupt her household, her farm, her cow, her life, what little success she’d made of it, thinking to prove her inadequate of managing the place. The pins tumbled from her chignon, her hair spilled with its own version of mockery about her shoulders, and she only cursed him more.

She entered the barn, hands on her hips and a dozen or more truly inspirational words of warning itching upon her tongue, only to stop short when she spied her son. He stood, in his nightshirt, no less, with thin legs braced wide, atop what she knew well to be the broken seat of a buckboard wagon long left to disrepair. In his fists he held the reins to a monstrous black horse who looked just moments from plunging through the sagging side of the barn.

Those inescapable talons of maternal instinct gripped her. “Christian, good God, get down! Now!”

The horse blew furiously and pawed the hay-strewn floor, casting her a dubious sidelong glance. And her son made no move to comply with her order. Instead, he did the inconceivable.

Her son looked at her blankly for a moment then twisted about and glanced over his shoulder into the shadows on the other side of the buggy. The movement caused his bare feet to slip on the leather seat, and he teetered precariously upon his perch. “Logan, it’s okay if I stay up here, isn’t it? You fixed the seat and you said I could climb up here...”

Jessica could stand it no longer. In three huge strides, she reached the buggy, hoisted her skirts to midthigh and launched herself up. She snatched her son from the jaws of danger, clutched him painfully close, and would have executed a smooth descent from the thing...somehow...only she found herself grasped about the waist and lifted from her feet. Intimately, actually, too intimately, or perhaps it was simply her knowledge of the strength required of those arms to perform the task so effortlessly. And one of those arms injured, at that. Then again, her terror had sapped all air from her lungs long before her feet again met with the floor.

Releasing Christian, she spun about, only to hear her mouth snap closed with an undeniable click. He stood so close she had to crane her neck, her gaze enduring an interminable path from his chest, which was graciously covered in an expanse of butter-colored cloth, past the red kerchief knotted at his throat, over the arrogant thrust of his jaw and that annoyingly deep cleft in his chin...

Her insides compressed, forcing what was left of her breath from her lips in one long, hideous sigh. He’d shaved. And bathed. And combed his hair. He smelled of clean leather and spice.

And he looked absolutely marvelous. Not the least bit like an outlaw. For one brief moment.

And then he grinned, a flash of startling white that set the sun ablaze in his golden eyes and set Jessica’s anger to boiling.

How dare he stand there and look so god-awful smug, as though he’d enjoyed a restful night of sleep?

She opened her mouth and...

“Good morning, ma’am.”

Jessica sucked in a hissing breath, feeling frustration like a clamp about her chest. “I should say not, Mr. Stark. How dare you allow my son to clamber about on that broken-down—?”

“He fixed it, Mama.”

“I don’t care if he birthed it this very morning. You could have been killed, and that animal—”

“His name is Jack, Mama.”

“A true misnomer if there ever was one. He looks like a Hades to me, entirely untrustworthy, capable of eating you alive and—”

“We’re gonna go to town in the buckboard, aren’t we, Logan? We don’t have to walk ever, ever again.”

There it was, that undeniable reverence in her son’s voice, something so entirely recognizable because Jessica had never heard it before in Christian’s voice. Damn and blast this outlaw, thinking to point out her shortcomings, to outdo her, her, the inept female. His job was simply to help.

She glared up at him. “Mr. Stark—”

“Logan.” How infuriating the smooth mellowness of his voice, just as infuriating as the mocking serenity of this morning. “You’re awfully angry, ma’am, and the sun not yet risen.”

“As if a woman’s emotions are governed by the simple rising of the sun.”

“No, that would be too simple, ma’am.”

Jessica sucked in yet another breath and flung her arm at the buckboard. “How could you allow a small boy to...to—? Have you any notion what harm could have befallen him? Or were you so distracted by your own little whatever it was that you were doing—”

“Oiling the wheels, ma’am.”

“See there? You were far too consumed with your oiling to even take notice of his safety, much less his state of undress. But, of course, that is left to the womenfolk of the world. You men wander aimlessly about, entirely consumed with your—”

“Ma’am.”

“We women, why, we’ve been bred for centuries to be able to do ten things simultaneously, not the least of which is to see to the menfolk’s complete care, divine happiness and—”

“Ma’am.”

“I don’t want to hear your excuses, Mr. Stark. Trust me, I’ve heard them all before, and—”

“Ma’am.”

“I’m not finished, Mr. Stark.” Ah, but all this letting go of her anger felt so divine, even if a part of her realized a good bit of that anger had nothing to do with Stark. The blood pumped vigorously through her limbs, filling her with a vitality she hadn’t felt in months. Yes, she could remain unmoved by the slight shifting of his brows, the narrowing of his eyes upon her, as though she had given him a window to her very soul. Indeed. A man like him, short on book learning, thinking himself long on cunning. Ha! “I’ll have you know, Mr. Stark, my son never, never attempted such shenanigans before you arrived.” She punctuated this with a jab of her finger into the middle of his rock hard chest.

He quirked a brow. “Really? Funny, but—” He paused, shook his head and stuffed his hands in his pockets in an abominably cavalier manner. “I don’t suppose that matters.”

Jessica stared at him, feeling the blood slowly draining from her face. “What? What doesn’t matter? Are you saying that I would allow my son—”

“I would never even imply that, ma’am, knowing you as I do. No, there are some things even a mother like you won’t ever control in her child, shenanigans being the least of it. Especially a boy.”

“Well, I can. And I will.” Again, she jabbed his chest. And then something in his eyes, a deep and wild darkening of gold to bronze, sent a shaft of warning through her, despite all her exhilaration. She turned away from him, seeking her misplaced son under the buggy. “Christian, come with Mama now. You’ve got to get dressed and eat. I baked some—” She jerked upright and froze. Her mouth sagged in horror. “My bread! Good heavens, my bread has been in the oven for—!”

She spun right, nearly slammed into the buggy, whirled left and almost plowed into Stark’s beast. She spun again and slammed right into Stark’s chest. A solitary wail of despair fled her lips before she could snatch it back in dismay.

“Jess—” Her name flowed around her like warm sunlight, soothing. As though she would ever require or need his comfort. She would have pummeled that chest if he hadn’t caught her arms and held her fast. “It’s okay, Jess. It’s only one loaf of bread.”

“And I burned it!” she yelled up at him, almost stricken when she felt the hated burn of tears at the backs of her eyes. No, she would never, never, allow this man to see any emotional weakness. She might need his physical strength, but never anything more from him. “No, you would never understand that, would you?”

“Yes, I do, Jess.”

“Don’t call me that!” she spat, twisting from his grasp. And then she fled the barn without turning back, because the tears did fall then, and she couldn’t stop them.

* * *

She’d barely looked at Rance, much less her newly restored buckboard, as he handed her up onto the freshly polished seat. Instead, she gave Jack a glare full of dire warnings and then directed all her attention to something far out on the bleak distant horizon for the duration of the ride to Twilight—that is, when she wasn’t fussing over Christian.

A sound ignoring, that was what it was. She sat ramrod-straight, her straw hat angled abruptly away from him, white-gloved hands folded in her lap over a small straw purse, upturned nose poking skyward, full lips stalwart and compressed as if she were sucking very hard upon a lemon.

Rance had a hell of a time keeping his eyes off her.

All that stubborn pride. He’d never encountered so much in a man before, much less a woman, even the gun-toting bandit queens he’d encountered. And yet in her he found it compelling, too damned compelling, and her not a harsh and cynical version of a woman, but innocent still. And young, younger than her years. The sunlight spilling through her hair, the delicate curving length of her neck, the trembling of her chin when she’d yelled up at him. And the feel of all that injured pride against him, rousing a deeply yearning hunger in him.

“Can I hold the reins, Logan?” Christian asked. “You said I could, remember?”

Rance kept his gaze between Jack’s ears on the twin ruts that cleaved through the prairie, but even so he felt the heat of her glare over her son’s head far more than he did the sun slapping at the back of his neck. The leather hung loose in his hands, a sure testament to the trust he’d placed in his animal long ago. His gaze shifted over the desolate horizon. “Maybe your mama would like to try first.”

“Mama?” Christian squawked. “She’s afraid of everything.”

“I am not,” came the hot retort.

“Yes, you are, Mama. Remember that horse Pa had? You said he was a nasty old thing that cost too much money and ate your flowers and bit.”

“Precisely,” Jessica retorted. “He indeed ate every last one of my geraniums, and he bit your pa.”

Christian grinned wickedly at Rance. “In the butt.”

“Christian! Don’t ever say that again.”

“Say what, Mama? That he bit him? He did. Right in the butt.”

“Oh, good grief.”

“Mama had to clean it and bandage it, and my pa howled like a coyote-wolf.”

“Christian, shut your mouth at once.”

“He couldn’t sit without a pillow for a week. Mama was so mad. She said she wouldn’t make him supper till he sold that horse. But he said no and she made him supper anyway, ‘cause Miss Beecher says a good wife don’t send her family to bed on an empty tummy.”

“Doesn’t send,” Jessica said quickly. “Not don’t. Now, keep quiet.”

“Who’s Miss Beecher?” Rance asked.

“Mama has her book.”

“Of course I do. Miss Beecher projects sound views on thrift, morals, and improved diet. We could all stand a good browse from time to time.”

“Mama always looks in it.”

“I most certainly do not.”

“Yes, you do, Mama. You have lots of books to help you be a good wife. You’re lookin’ in them all the time.”

“Christian, I don’t want to hear another sound from you.”

“You were afraid of Pa’s horse, Mama.”

“Anyone of sound mind would have been. Give me those.” She reached one of those pristine white-gloved hands across her son and grabbed the reins. Rance had the impression that she did so solely to quiet her son. She didn’t seem the sort to want it known her departed husband’s hind end had once been fodder for some animal. Still, the image brought Rance a certain deeply felt satisfaction, as did her sputtering. He had to struggle to keep a bemused look from his face, and he directed his scowl at nothing in particular.

Jack would have kept to any pace simply on Rance’s verbal command. It mattered little in whose hands the reins were gripped. But Jess didn’t know that. And damned if Rance didn’t detect the slightest softening of her mouth, a decided satisfaction in the angling of her silly hat down at her son. No, but she wouldn’t allow her eyes to even alight upon him. Damned proud woman. He wondered if she had any idea how beautiful she looked with that ribbon fluttering like wings about her and her hair ablaze with prairie fire.

She kept the reins all the way to Twilight, smack down the center of Main Street, and even managed to haul back on them with a bit too much fervor when they pulled before Ledbetter’s General Store. Perhaps because of all those curious stares they’d drawn since the moment the buggy rolled into town, stares that seemed to force Jessica’s nose up another notch. But Rance had far more to occupy his thoughts at the moment. Far more, in the form of his own Wanted handbills, fluttering in the hot midmorning breeze upon nearly every storefront, amid all the other handbills. Twenty-five hundred to the man who could bring him in alive. A thousand for his dead body.

Spotz must be itching to watch him die to offer bounty like that.

He’d purposely cropped his hair short to fall over his forehead, and he’d shaved and pulled his hat well over his eyes. Had even chosen a light-colored shirt and kerchief, the better to go unrecognized. No, he looked nothing like some artist’s rendering of the long-haired, black-garbed, bearded outlaw Rance Logan. Yet his own bleak stare seemed to taunt him from every handbill as he alighted from the buggy and attempted to assist Jessica. But she’d already hopped down, obviously spurning his attempt at gallantry. Surely this was not in deference to his shoulder.

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