Praise for the novels of

New York Times and USA TODAY

bestselling author

DIANA PALMER

“Palmer demonstrates, yet again,

why she’s the queen of desperado quests

for justice and true love.”

—Publishers Weekly on Dangerous

“The popular Palmer has penned another winning

novel, a perfect blend of romance and suspense.”

—Booklist on Lawman

“Palmer knows how to make the sparks fly…

heartwarming.”

—Publishers Weekly on Renegade

“Sensual and suspenseful.”

—Booklist on Lawless

“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who

captures the essence of what a romance should be.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“Nobody tops Diana Palmer

when it comes to delivering pure,

undiluted romance. I love her stories.”

—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz

Nora
Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Nora

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter One

HER NAME WAS ELEANOR MARLOWE, but most people called her Nora. The nickname was straightforward, without artifice. So was Nora herself, most of the time. Born into the Victorian era, she was raised in Richmond, Virginia, in a manner befitting a lady of quality. But she had a surprisingly adventurous streak for so conventional a young woman. Nora tended to be impulsive and sometimes reckless. Her quicksilver nature had been a constant concern to her parents in the past.

As a young girl, she survived dunkings while sailing on yachts, and a broken arm in a fall from a tree while bird-watching near the family’s summer home in Lynchburg, Virginia. In private school she achieved high honors, and later she attended one of the best finishing schools. By the time she reached her twenties, Nora had settled a bit, and with her family’s great wealth behind her, she became a socialite of note. She had traveled up and down the eastern seacoast and in the Caribbean as well as Europe. She was cultured and well-mannered and very knowledgeable about other countries. But her lingering infatuation with adventure dealt her a devastating blow in Africa.

She had been on safari in Kenya, traveling with three of her male cousins and their wives, and an overbearing suitor who had invited himself along. Their hunting party also included Theodore Roosevelt, who was now running for vice president under President William McKinley, who was seeking a second term.

Roosevelt had gone hunting with her cousins and the other men, while Nora had stayed with her female cousins in an elegant mansion. She was thrilled when she was allowed to join the hunting party for an overnight stay when the men were camped by a nearby river.

Her particularly persistent Louisiana suitor, Edward Summerville by name, was irritated by Nora’s continued aloofness. She had a reputation of being cool, while he was known as a ladies’ man. Her indifference seemed to enrage him, and he redoubled his efforts to captivate her. When he failed, he made himself frighteningly offensive when they were left briefly alone on the bank of the river. His unwanted caresses had made her panic. In her struggle to escape him, Nora’s blouse had torn, along with the net veil that had protected her delicate skin from the bites of swarming mosquitoes along the river. While she was struggling to cover her exposed flesh, she was repeatedly bitten. One of her indignant cousins knocked Summerville down and threw him out of camp. But before he left, Summerville accused Nora of leading him on, and swore vengeance. She hadn’t led him on, and everyone in camp knew it, but his pride was crushed and he wanted to hurt her. However, Summerville’s ire was the least of her worries afterward.

Nora had known about the dangerous fevers that could come from mosquito bites, but when three weeks passed and she was still healthy, she had relaxed. It wasn’t until she was home again, almost a month after she was bitten, and in the throes of a desperately high fever, that the family physician diagnosed malaria and prescribed quinine crystalline powder to combat it.

The quinine upset her stomach at first, and she was told that it would only protect her from infection while she was actually taking it. There was no cure for her malarial condition, a prognosis that made her sick at heart and furiously angry at Summerville for putting her at risk. Her family doctor in Virginia hadn’t told her until she was through the first paroxysms of the attack, and on the road to recovery, that he thought it possible that she might yet contract the fatal “blackwater fever.” And, as well, he said, the paroxysmal fever would surely recur unpredictably over a period of years, perhaps for as long as she lived.

Nora’s vague dreams of a home and family died. She had never found men very attractive physically, but she had wanted children. Now that seemed impossible. How could she raise a child when she was subject to a recurring fever that might one day prove fatal?

Her dreams of adventure died as well. She had wanted to go down the Amazon River in South America, and to see the pyramids in Egypt. But faced with recurrences and the terrible fever, she was afraid to take the risk. As much as she craved travel and adventure, she valued her health more. So she led a remarkably placid life for the next year and contented herself with recalling her African adventure for her friends, who were impressed by her courage and daring. Inevitably her exploits were exaggerated and she became known as an adventuress. At times she enjoyed the reputation it gave her for daring, even if it wasn’t quite accurate.

She was lauded as a prime example of the modern woman. She was asked to speak at women’s suffrage rallies and afternoon charity teas. She rested on her laurels.

Now she was being invited out West, to a fabled land she’d read about and always dreamed of seeing, a region that was as potentially wild as Africa. Her fever had not recurred for several months. Surely there would be no risks out West, and hopefully she would remain healthy for the duration of her visit. She could see something of the Wild West, and perhaps there would be an opportunity to shoot a buffalo or meet a desperado or a real Indian.

She stood with brimming excitement at the lace curtains of the family parlor in Virginia, looking out at the pretty late-summer landscape while she fingered the letter from her aunt Helen with delight. There were four Tremaynes of East Texas: her uncle Chester, her aunt Helen, and her cousins, Colter and Melissa. Colter was on an expedition to the North Pole. Melissa was desperately lonely since her best friend had married and moved away. Aunt Helen wanted Nora to come and spend a few weeks on the ranch in East Texas and help cheer Melly a little.

Nora had once taken the train to California and had seen the rugged country between the Atlantic and Pacific through the window. She had read about ranches and Texans. They both sounded romantic. Dashing cowboys fighting Indians and one another, rescuing women and children, and making all sorts of heroic sacrifices paraded through her mind as she recalled the old Beadle dime novels that she’d been reading of late. She would meet a real cowboy if she went to visit her kinfolks on the ranch. And it would be an adventure, even if it didn’t involve lions and hunters. It would be a great adventure and she would have a second chance to test her courage, to prove to herself that she wasn’t crippled by the African fever that had kept her confined so long.

“What have you decided, dear?” Cynthia Marlowe asked her daughter as she scanned the latest issue of Collier’s magazine.

Nora turned, the soft material of her lacy blue dress swirling gracefully around her trim ankles. She touched the fashionable big tulle bow at her throat with fingers that almost shook with excitement. “Aunt Helen is very persuasive,” she said. “Yes, I should like to go! I look forward to seeing the majestic knights of the range that my novels describe.”

Cynthia was amused. She hadn’t seen Nora so enthusiastic about anything since her disastrous trip to Africa. Her daughter’s chestnut-brown hair in its elegant high coiffure caught the light from the window and took on the sheen of copper. Cynthia’s hair had been that color when she was younger, before it went silver. But Nora also had the deep blue eyes of the Marlowes, and the high cheekbones of a French ancestor. She was taller than her mother, but not unusually tall. She had elegance and grace and manners, and a gift for conversation. Cynthia was deeply proud of her.

Nora was peculiarly cool with men, especially after the fright Summerville had given her and the dreadful illness that had plagued her. She would really have thrived on the adventurous life, Cynthia thought sadly, but the African fever had clipped her wings. Now, at twenty-four, she had settled down to spinsterhood with resignation.

“Among other things, this visit would at least give you respite from your father’s attempts to bring socially acceptable young men home for you,” Cynthia murmured, thinking out loud. Her husband had, in fact, made himself painfully obvious of late, and he tended to be overbearing and a little insensitive.

Nora laughed, without real humor. A man in her life was the very last complication she needed. “Indeed it would. I shall have Angelina pack for me.”

“And I shall have my social secretary make the necessary reservations at the train station,” Cynthia agreed. “I’m sure that you will find the trip enlightening.”

“Of that,” her daughter replied with sparkling humor, “I have no doubt. It has been a long time since I traveled so far alone.” Her face went taut with the memory of Africa. “But after all, Texas is not Africa.”

Cynthia stood up. “My dear, it is unlikely that the fever will recur so often. It has been several months since your last bout. Try not to worry. Remember that Chester and Helen are family, won’t you? They’ll take care of you.”

Nora smiled. “Of course they will. It will be a delightful adventure.”

NORA WAS TO REMEMBER those words when she stood on the deserted depot platform at Tyler Junction, Texas, waiting to be met by her aunt and uncle. The train ride had been comfortable enough, but it was long and she was very tired. So tired, in fact, that her enthusiasm had dimmed, just a little. And she had to admit that this dusty railroad terminal did not live up to her expectations. There were no gloriously attired Indians, no masked desperadoes, no prancing stallions with gallant and colorful cowboys riding them. In fact, it looked like a small eastern town. She became aware of mild disappointment and vicious heat as the Texas sun beat down on her pretty hat.

She looked around again for her relatives. The train had been late, so perhaps they had gone to get something to eat or drink at the restaurant she could see in the distance. She glanced around her at her elegant leather cases and trunk, wondering how she was going to get them out to the ranch if no one came for her. Late summer was going to be even more uncomfortable in southeastern Texas than in Virginia, she decided. She was dressed in one of her stylish traveling suits. The garb that had felt so comfortable when she left Virginia was suffocating her now.

Aunt Helen had written her about this place. Tyler Junction was small and rural, a southeastern Texas town not too far from Beaumont. Here most of the local gossip was passed around at the post office and the drugstore soda fountain, although the daily Beaumont Journal gave all the national news as well as social notes and local-interest stories. There were two of Henry Ford’s little black automobiles on the dusty streets, driven by founding-family members, and the rest of society made do with buggies and surreys and buckboards and horses. That ranching was still an important local occupation was not difficult to see. In the distance Nora’s eyes spotted several men wearing boots and jeans and those wide-brimmed Stetson hats. But they weren’t young, dashing men. Most of them, in fact, seemed stooped and bent and old.

Uncle Chester had told her once when he and Helen visited the family home in Virginia that most of the ranches in Texas these days were owned by corporations, held by big businesses. Even Chester’s ranch was owned by a big West Texas conglomerate, and he was paid a salary for managing it. The old days of ranching empire builders like Richard King, who had founded the famous King Ranch in southeast Texas, and the equally famous ranching giant Brant Culhane out in West Texas, were gone forever.

These days the money was in oil and steel. Rockefeller and Carnegie had control of those industries, just as J. P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt controlled the nation’s railroads, and Henry Ford the new transportation rage, the automobile. It was an era of empire builders, but industrial ones, not agricultural ones. The day of the cattleman and the cowboy was almost at an end. Aunt Helen had written that a handful of prospectors were drilling for oil over at Beaumont, because some geologist had said a few years ago that the land around the Gulf was probably sitting on a veritable lake of oil. She found the thought amusing. As if anyone were going to find great patches of oil in this lush green land!

As she considered that, Nora absently watched a striking, tall man in chaps and boots and a dark Stetson walk through the dusty street toward the station. Now, there was a real cowboy! Her heart quickened as she imagined what sort of dashing man he was. What a shame to see men like that go the way of the Indian, driven to extinction at the end of a railroad track! Who would rescue widows and orphans and fight off the red man?

She was so engrossed in romanticizing the rapidly approaching myth that it took a minute to realize that the cowboy was heading straight toward her. Her brows lifted excitedly under the pert veil of her Paris hat, and her heart pounded.

It occurred to her quite suddenly that the man she’d been romanticizing about was actually little more than a paid servant. A cowboy did, after all, tend cattle. And she suddenly discovered that looking at a romantically picturesque and immaculate cowboy in the pages of a book was a good bit different from coming face-to-face with the real article.

The cowboy, so dignified and attractive across the width of the street, was a definite shock when he got closer. This man looked unshaven, even dirty. She restrained a fastidious shudder as her eyes fell to the bloodstains on the worn leather chaps that flared out from his long legs as he walked. Spurs jingled musically with each step he took. His boots were curled at the toes and they were liberally caked with a substance that was emphatically and explicitly not mud. If this man tried to save a widow or orphan from an upwind direction, both would probably run from him!

His blue-checked Western shirt was wet with sweat and plastered to him in a way that was almost indecent, disclosing broad muscles and thick black hair from the area of his collarbone down. She clenched her purse tightly in both hands to maintain her composure. How odd, that she could feel a skirl of physical attraction to a man so…uncivilized and in need of cleaning. Why, lye soap would hardly be adequate for such a job, she thought wickedly. He would have to be boiled in bleach for days….

He glowered at her quickly concealed smile. His hair was jet-black, straight and damp above a lean face with a layer of dust and streaks of sweat carved in its austere lines. His eyes were narrow and deep-set under a jutting brow, hidden in the shade of his wide-brimmed hat. He had thick, dark eyebrows and a straight nose. He had high cheekbones. His mouth was wide and chiseled, and his chin had a jut that immediately set her on her guard.

“Miss Marlowe?” he asked in a deep Texas drawl and without the pretense of returning her amused smile.

She looked around at the deserted platform with a long sigh. “Indeed, sir, if I am not she, then we must both prepare for a surprise.”

He stood staring at her as if he couldn’t quite get her measure. She decided to help him. “It is very warm,” she added. “I should like to go out to the ranch as soon as possible. I am not accustomed to heat and…ahem…odors,” she added with an involuntary twitch of her nostrils.

He looked as if he might burst trying not to reply, but he didn’t say a word. His look summed her up as an eastern woman with more money than was good for her and a lack of sensitivity. He was amazed that he felt insulted.

But he merely inclined his head, glancing around at her stacks of luggage. “Are you moving in?” he drawled.

Her eyes widened. “These are the bare necessities,” she defended. “I must have my own things,” she added, being unaccustomed to such questioning by servants.

He sighed loudly. “It’s a good thing I brought the buckboard. With the supplies I’ve already bought, this will sure run over the sides.”

She turned her purse over in her slender hands and smothered a smile. “If it does, you could run alongside with the overflow on your head. Bearers do that in Africa on safari,” she said pleasantly. “I know because I myself have done it.”

“You’ve run alongside a wagon with baggage on your head?” he asked outrageously.

“Why…of course not!” she muttered. “I have been on safari! That was what I said!”

He pursed his lips and stuck his hands on his hips to stare down at her ruffled expression. “On safari? A fragile little tenderfoot like you, in a rig like that?” He eyed her immaculate tailored suit and velvet hat with amusement. “Now I’ve heard everything.” He walked back the way he’d come, to a buckboard hitched to a fine-looking horse across the way from the depot.

She stared after him with conflicting emotions. None of the men she’d known had ever been anything less than polite and protective. This man was unflappable, and he didn’t choose his words to pander to her femininity. She was torn between respect and rock-slinging fury. He had a fine conceit for such a filthy man.

He hadn’t removed his hat or even tipped it in a gesture of respect. Nora was accustomed to men who did both, and kissed her hand in greeting in the European fashion.

She was too censorious, she told herself. This was the West, and the poor man probably had never had the advantage of being taught social graces. She would have to think of him as she did the native bearers she’d spoken of, kind but uneducated folk whose lot it was to serve for their meager fare. She tried to picture him in a loincloth and had to smother another laugh.

She waited patiently until her benefactor drove up in the heavily loaded wagon and tied the horse pulling it to a hitching post before he began to load her bags in with long-suffering patience.

She hesitated at the side, thinking whimsically that she must be grateful that he didn’t suggest that she ride in the back with her luggage. She looked to him to help her up to the wide driver’s seat. It shouldn’t have surprised her that he was already seated, with the reins held impatiently in his lean hands.

“You were in a hurry, I believe?” he asked patiently, and he pushed back his hat and fixed her with a look from the most unsettling eyes she’d ever seen. They were unexpectedly light in that dark face, a gray that was almost silver in color. They were as piercing as a knife blade, and just as unfathomable.

“How fortunate that I have athletic abilities,” she said with smiling hauteur before she stepped up onto the hub of the wheel and daintily swung herself into the seat. Sadly, she overshot the seat and ended up in a tidy heap across the cowboy’s chaps. The smell was dizzying, although the feel of his hard, muscular thighs against her breasts made her heart run wild.

Before she had time to be very shocked by the intimacy of the contact, he hefted her up with steely hands and put her firmly on the seat. “None of that, now,” he said with a stern look. “I know all about you wild city women, and I am not the sort of man to be toyed with, I’ll have you know.”

She was embarrassed enough at her clumsiness, without being labeled a hussy. She pushed back her disheveled hat with a hand that, appallingly, smelled of the cowboy’s boots. Her hand must have brushed the cuffs of his jeans.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she burst out, digging furiously for a handkerchief, with which she tried to wipe away the vile smell. “I shall smell like a barn!”

He gave her a narrow glare and snapped the reins to set the horse in motion. He grinned then, and accentuated his West Texas drawl for her benefit. He might as well, he decided, live down to her image of him. “What do you expect of a man who works with his hands and his back?” he asked her pleasantly. “It’s the best kind of life, I tell you, living out here in the open. A cowboy doesn’t have to bathe more than once a month or dress up fancy and practice parlor manners. He’s free and independent, just him and his horse under a wide Western sky; free to carouse with loose women and get drunk every weekend! How I love the free life!” he said fervently.

All Nora’s illusions about cowboys took a fast turn. She was still scrubbing at her hand when they were on the rough road out of town, having decided that her beautiful gray kid leather gloves might have to be thrown away. The smell would never come out.

It had rained earlier in the week, and there were deep ruts in the road that made the ride on the board seat uncomfortable. “You don’t talk much, do you?” he probed. “Eastern women are supposed to be real smart, I’ve heard,” he added, doing his rustic rube imitation to the hilt.

Nora, oblivious, didn’t realize that she was being taken for a ride in more ways than one. “If I were intelligent,” she said indignantly, glaring at him, “I would never have left Virginia!” She scrubbed furiously at another stain, on the hem of her long skirt. “Oh, dear, what will Aunt Helen think!”

He gave her a slow, wicked grin. “Well, perhaps she’ll think that you and I have been spooning on the way home.”

Her expression even through the veil would have sent a lesser man off the wagon and running. “Spooning? With you? Sir, I had sooner kiss a…a…coal miner! No, I take that back, a coal miner would not smell so foul. I should sooner kiss a buzzard!”

He dashed the reins gently against the horse’s flank when it slowed under a shady mesquite tree, and he chuckled. “Buzzards are worth their keep out here. They clean up the rotting carcasses so that the world smells sweet for you dainty little socialites.”

That was obviously a bit of sarcasm at her expense. She glared at him, but it bounced off.

“You are very forward for a hired man,” she said indignantly.

He didn’t reply. She had a nasty way of sounding two steps above him socially, as if to remind him that he was a lowly servant, she a lady. He could have laughed out loud at the irony of it.

Having given up on removing the foul stench from her hand, she fanned herself with a colorful cardboard fan obtained from the porter on the train. It was the last week in August and unbearably hot. It must be from the gulf breezes that danced up from the nearby coast, she thought, wondering at the smothering intensity of it. Back East, one would expect furious storms when confronted with this sort of heat. Just the year before, there had been a hurricane on the eastern coast, one that had taken the life of a cousin. She had nightmares about high water that remained with her even now.

She was almost overcome by the smothering humidity. The corset she was wearing under her long skirt and long-sleeved jacket was robbing her of breath.

Not that her companion looked much cooler, she had to admit. His thin shirt was soaked in front, and she was surprised that her eyes were drawn to the vividly outlined hard muscles of his arms and his hair-roughened chest. She had seen men of other races without shirts, but she had never seen any gentleman in a similar condition. This man was no gentleman, though. It was incomprehensible that a common laborer should stir senses that she had always kept impervious to any sort of physical attraction. Why, he made her nervous! And the slender hands holding the wooden handle of the neat fan, with its colorful representation of the Last Supper on one side and an advertisement for a funeral home on the other, were actually trembling.

“You work for my uncle Chester, do you not?” she asked, trying to make conversation.

“Yep.”

She waited, but the one word was all the response he gave.

“What do you do?” she added, thinking that he might work in some more skilled job than just punching cattle.

His head turned slowly. Under the shadow of the wide-brimmed hat, his silver eyes glittered like diamonds. “I’m a cowboy, of course. I work cattle. You might have noticed that my boots are full of…” He enunciated the slang word that described the caked substance on his boots. He said it with deliberate intent. To add insult to the word, he grinned.

The reply made her face red. She should hit him, but she wouldn’t. She wasn’t going to do what he obviously expected her to do and rage at his lack of decency and delicacy. She only gave him her most vacant look and then made a slight movement of her shoulders in dismissal and turned her attention to the fall landscape as if nothing had been said at all.

Having traveled through West Texas once, even without stopping, she was aware of the differences in climate and vegetation from one side of Texas to the other. There were no cacti and desert here. The trees were magnolias and dogwoods and pines; the grass was still green despite the lateness of the year, and high where cattle grazed behind long white fences and gray-posted barbed-wire fences. The horizon seemed to sit right on the ground in the distance, as there were no hills or mountains at all. The haze of heat could be seen rising from the ponds, or tanks, where cattle drank. There were two rivers that ran parallel to the Tremayne ranch, her aunt had written, which might explain that lush landscape.

“It is very beautiful here,” she remarked absently. “So much more beautiful than the other side of the state.”

He gave her a sharp glance. “You easterners,” he scoffed. “You think a thing has to be green to be pretty.”

“Of course it does,” she replied simply, staring at his profile. “How can a desert be pretty?”

His head turned and he studied her with narrow eyes. “Well, a hothouse petunia like you might find it hard going, for sure.”

She gave him a hard stare. “I am not a hothouse plant. I have hunted lions and tigers in Africa,” she embroidered on her one-day safari, “and—”

“And one night on the Texas desert would be your undoing,” he interrupted pleasantly. “A rattler would crawl into your bedroll with you, and that’s the last you’d be seen until winter.”

She shuddered at just the thought of a rattlesnake. She had read about the vile creatures in Mr. Beadle’s novel series.

He saw her reaction, although she belatedly tried to hide it. He threw back his head and roared. “And you hunted lions?” he asked outrageously, laughing harder.

She made a harsh sound under her breath. “You nasty-smelling brute!”

“Well, while we’re on the subject of smells,” he said, leaning toward her to take a breath and then making a terrible face, “you smell like sunned polecat yourself.”

“Only because you refused to help me into the seat and I fell on your foul-smelling…” She gestured helplessly toward the wide leather chaps. “Those things!” She pointed at them, flustered.

He leaned a little toward her, his eyes sparkling with humor. “Legs, darlin’,” he contributed. “They’re called legs.”

“Those leather things!” she raged. “And I am not your darling!” she burst out, her poise deserting her as she flew off the seat.

He chuckled. “Oh, you might wish you were, one day. I have some admirable qualities,” he added.

“Let me out of this buggy! I’ll walk!” she raged.

He shook his head. “Now, now, you’d get sore feet and I’d get fired, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

“Yes, we would!”

He grinned at her red face and wide, furious eyes. They were like blue flames, and she had a pretty, soft mouth. He had to force his attention back to the road. “Your uncle couldn’t manage without me right now. Now, you sit easy, there, Miss Marlowe, and just let your blood cool. I’m a fine fellow once you get to know me.”

“I have no intention of getting to know you!”

“My, my, you do get riled easy, don’t you? And here I thought you rich ladies from back East were even-tempered.” He flipped the reins, increasing the horse’s speed gently.

“The ones who were probably hadn’t met you yet!” she exploded.

His head turned, and something twinkled in his silver-gray eyes before he glanced back toward the road with a tiny smile on his hard mouth.

Nora didn’t see that smile, although she had the feeling that he was laughing at her under the enormously wide brim of his hat. He’d knocked her legs right out from under her, until she couldn’t even find a comeback. It was a new experience for her, and not one she enjoyed. No man had ever made her mad enough to yell like a fishwife. She was ashamed of her outburst. She settled into her seat and ignored him, pointedly, for the rest of the drive.

THE RANCH HOUSE was long and flat, but it was white as sand and had a long, elegant front porch and a white picket fence around Aunt Helen’s beautiful mixed flower gardens. Aunt Helen was standing on the porch when the wagon pulled up at the walkway, looking so much like her mother that Nora felt immediately homesick.

“Aunt Helen!” she exclaimed, laughing as she stepped onto the hub of the wagon wheel and stepped gingerly down out of the wagon unassisted, before the man beside her could display more of his bad manners by showing her aunt how he ignored common courtesy.

She ran to the older woman and was hugged warmly. “Oh, it is good to see you again!” she enthused, her face animated and lovely as she pushed back the veil to reveal her exquisite complexion and bright, deep blue eyes.

“Mr. Barton, it would have been courteous to have helped Nora from the wagon,” Aunt Helen told the man who bore her luggage to the porch.

“Yes, ma’am, I meant to, but she lit out of it like a scalded chicken,” he said with outrageous courtesy, even tipping his hat to Helen, and he smiled charmingly as he waited for her to open the front door and direct him to the bedroom Nora would occupy. Beast! Nora thought. The word was in her eyes as he passed her, and his silver eyes registered it and twinkled with pure hellish amusement. She jerked her head around angrily.

When he was out of sight, Helen grimaced. “He is Chester’s livestock foreman, and he is very knowledge able about cattle and business. But he has a rather unusual sense of humor. I’m sorry if he offended you.”

“Who is he?” Nora asked reluctantly.

“Callaway Barton,” she replied.

“Who are his people, I meant?” Nora persisted.

“We don’t know. We know his name, but we know very little about him. He works during the week and vanishes on weekends—that was in the contract he signed with Chester. We don’t pry into people’s lives out here,” she added gently. “He’s rather mysterious, but he’s not usually rude at all.”

“He wasn’t rude,” Nora lied, brushing at the dust on her cheeks to camouflage their color.

Helen smiled. “You would not have said so even if he was. You have breeding, my dear,” she said proudly. “It’s very evident that you come from blue bloods.”

“So do you,” she was reminded. “You and Mother are descended from European royalty. We have royal cousins in England, one of whom I visit twice a year.”

“Don’t remind Chester.” Helen laughed conspiratorially. “He comes from a laboring background, and mine sometimes embarrasses him.”

Nora had to bite her tongue to keep back a blunt comment. She couldn’t imagine hiding any part of her own life to placate a man’s ego. But, then, Aunt Helen had been raised in a different era, by different rules. She had no right to judge or condemn from her modern status.

“Shall we have tea and sandwiches?” Helen asked. “I’ll have Debbie bring refreshments to the living room after you’ve had a few minutes to freshen up.” Her nose wrinkled. “I must say, Nora, that is a very…odd scent you’re wearing.”

Nora flushed. “I…fell against Mr. Barton getting into the wagon and brushed my hand against some of that…vile material on his…on those leather things he was wearing,” she faltered.

“His chaps,” she said.

“Oh. Yes. Chaps.”

Helen chuckled. “Well, it is unavoidable that working men get dirty. It will wash off.”

“I do hope so,” Nora sighed.

The tall cowboy came back down the hall, his burdens unloaded.

Helen smiled at him. “Chester wanted to see you when you got back, Mr. Barton. He and Randy are working down by the old barn, trying to fix the windmill,” she added.

“I’ll put up the wagon and join him as soon as possible. Good day, ma’am.” He tipped his hat courteously at Helen.

He nodded politely at Nora, his eyes twinkling at her expression, and walked on toward the front door, his spurs jingling musically with every long, graceful step.

Helen was watching him. “Most cowboys are clumsy on the ground,” she remarked, “probably because they spend so much time on horseback. But Mr. Barton is not clumsy, is he?”

Nora watched, hoping that he’d trip over one of his spurs and knock himself out on the door facing. But he didn’t. She reached up and removed the hatpin that secured her wide hat. “Where is Melly?” she asked.

Helen hesitated. “In town, visiting a girlfriend. She will be back this evening.”

Nora was very puzzled as she changed her traveling clothes for a simple long skirt and white middy blouse and rewound her long chestnut braid around her head. Melly was only eighteen and she adored her older cousin. They were good friends. Why wasn’t Melly here to meet her?

She joined Helen in the parlor, and while they sipped tea and ate homemade lemon cookies, she asked about Melly again.

“She went riding with Meg Smith this afternoon, and I know she’ll be back soon. I might as well tell you the truth. She was in love with the man her best friend married, and she has been inconsolable. She couldn’t even refuse to be maid of honor at their wedding.”

“Oh, I am so sorry!” Nora exclaimed. “How terrible for Melly!”

“We pitied her, but it was fortunate that the man did not return her feelings. He had some admirable qualities, but he is not the sort we want to marry our daughter,” Aunt Helen said sadly. “Besides, Melly is sure to find someone more worthy to love. There are several bachelors who attend services with us every Sunday. Perhaps she might be encouraged to join a social group.”

“Exactly,” Nora said. “I’ll do my best to help her over this sad experience.”

“I knew you would,” came the satisfied reply. “It’s so good to have you here!”

Nora smiled affectionately at her aunt. “I am delighted that I came.”

MELLY RETURNED HOME barely an hour after Nora arrived, on horseback, wearing a riding skirt and a straight-brimmed Spanish hat. She had dark hair like Nora’s, but her hair didn’t have the same chestnut highlights as her cousin’s, and her eyes were a soft brown instead of blue. Her skin was tanned, as Nora’s was not, and she was delicate and very slender, like a little doll. Looking at her, Nora couldn’t imagine a man not wanting her for his wife.

“I’m so happy that you’ve come,” Melly said after she’d greeted her cousin with sad warmth. “I’ve been rather droopy, but you can help me liven things up.”

Nora smiled. “I hope that I can. It has been over a year since we visited when you came to Virginia. You must tell me all the news.”

Melly grimaced. “Of course. But you must realize that my life is hardly as full and exciting as yours. I will have little to tell.”

Nora thought of the times she had spent in bed, shivering with fever. Melly didn’t know—none of them knew—how her adventure in Africa had ended.

“Melly, I do wish that you would not make us sound so dull,” her mother murmured. “We do have some social life here!”

“We have square dances and housewarmings and spelling bees,” came the short reply. “And the abominable Mr. Langhorn and his son.”

“When we have gatherings with other ranchers in the cooperative, Melly helps serve,” her mother reminded Nora. “Mr. Langhorn is one of the local ranchers, and he has a little boy who is worse than a wild man. Mr. Langhorn does not control him.”

“Mr. Langhorn is the one who needs controlling,” Melly added with a chuckle.

“That is true,” her mother agreed. “He has a…reputation…and he is divorced,” she whispered the word, as if it were not fit to be heard in decent company.

“Surely that should not count against him,” Nora began.

“Nora, our family name is very important to us,” her aunt said firmly. “I know that in eastern cities, and in Europe, a woman is perhaps allowed more freedoms than out here. But you must remember that this is a small community, and our good name is our most treasured possession. It would not do for Melly to be seen keeping company with a divorced man.”

“I see what you mean,” Nora said gently, wondering just how confining this small society really was. Coming from a large eastern city, she was hard-pressed to understand small-town life anywhere.

After dinner they sat in a blissful silence, one so profound and serene that the grandfather clock could be heard vividly, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

The screen door slammed suddenly and heavy boots made emphatic noises on the bare wood floor.

Cal Barton stuck his head around the door, his hat held in one hand. “Excuse me, Mrs. Tremayne, but Chester would like a word with you on the porch.”

Nora wondered why his spurs didn’t jingle until she looked down. Of course; his spurs were covered with…that. So was the rest of him, Nora thought, her expression revealing her opinion of it eloquently as she sat elegantly on the sofa in just the correct posture, looking so at home in the opulence that it put Cal’s back up at once.

He saw the disapproving, superior look she gave him, and it irritated him out of all proportion. He didn’t smile this time. He simply looked through her, with hauteur that would have done a prince proud. He nodded politely when Helen commented that she would be right out, and he left without another glance in Nora’s direction.

She was miffed by his sudden aloofness, and spent the rest of the day wondering why the opinion of a hired man should matter to her. After all, she was a Marlowe from Virginia, and that unwashed son of the great West was nothing more than a glorified male milkmaid. The thought sent her into gales of laughter, although certainly she couldn’t share the joke with her ranching hosts.

Chapter Two

NORA’S UNCLE WAS HOME in time for the evening meal, looking dusty and tired, but as robust and pleasant as ever. He welcomed her with his old enthusiasm. Later, while they sat together at the table, he passed along some worrying news to his family.

“There was some gossip today, about the West Texas combine not being pleased with my handling of the property. A visiting businessman from El Paso said that he knows the Culhanes and they have not gotten the results they expected from me,” Chester told the others, grimacing at his wife’s expression. “They must remember that I would have lost this ranch myself if they had not bought it—”

“Because of the low prices people were paying for our beef and produce,” his wife argued. “There is not enough money in circulation, and people are not buying agricultural products in enough quantity to let us make a profit. The Populists have tried so hard to effect change. And we have, after all, read that William J. Bryan has been nominated by the Populists to run against McKinley. He is a good man and tireless. Perhaps some changes will be made to benefit those of us in agriculture.”

“Perhaps so, but that will hardly change our situation, my dear,” Chester said heavily.

“Chester, they would not have let you manage the ranch for so long had they not had confidence in you. You are not responsible for low market prices.”

“It might not seem that way to a wealthy family.” He glanced at his niece placatingly. “Not yours, my dear. The family I’m worried about is from West Texas, and the father and sons head the combine. The Culhanes are a second-generation ranching family—old money. I understand from Simmons that they don’t approve of the fact that I haven’t adopted any of the machinery available to help plant and harvest crops. I am not, as they say, moving quickly into the twentieth century.”

“How absurd,” Nora said. “These new machines may be marvelous, of course, but they are also very expensive, aren’t they? And with people needing work so badly, why incorporate machinery to take away jobs?”

“You make sense, my dear, but I must do as I am told,” he said sadly. “I don’t know how they learned so much about the way I run the ranch when no representative has been here to see me. I could lose my position,” he said starkly.

“But where would we go if you did?” his wife asked plaintively. “This is our home.”

“Mother, don’t fret,” Melly said gently. “Nothing is happening right now. Don’t borrow trouble.”

But Helen looked worried. So did Chester. Nora put down her coffee cup and smiled at them.

“If worse comes to worst, I shall ask Mother and Father to help out,” she said.

She was unprepared for her uncle’s swift anger. “Thank you, but I do not require charity from my wife’s relations back East,” he said curtly.

Nora’s eyebrows rose. “But, Uncle Chester, I only meant that my parents would offer assistance if you wished them to.”

“I can provide for my own family,” he said tersely. “I know that you mean well, Eleanor, but this is my problem. I shall handle it.”

“Of course,” she replied, taken aback by his unexpected antagonism.

“Nora only meant to offer comfort,” Helen chided him gently.

He calmed at once. “Yes, of course,” he said, and with a sheepish smile. “I do beg your pardon, Nora. It is not a happy time for me. I spoke out of frustration. Forgive me.”

“Certainly, I do. I only wish that I could help,” she replied sincerely.

He shook his head. “No, I shall find a way to placate the owners. I must. Even if it means seeking new methods of securing a profit,” he added under his breath.

Nora noticed then what she hadn’t before: the lines of worry in his broad face. He wasn’t being completely truthful with his wife and daughter, she was certain of it. How terrible it would be if he should lose control of the ranch his grandfather had founded. It must be unpleasant for him to have a combine dictating his managerial decisions here; almost as unpleasant as it would have been for him to lose the ranch to the combine in the first place. She must learn what she could and then see if there was some way that she could help, so that he and his family did not lose their home and only source of income.

After that, conversation turned to the Farmers Congress in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and to the Boer War in South Africa, where a Boer general named De Wet was growing more famous by the day with his courageous attacks on the superior forces of the British.

THE NEXT FEW DAYS passed peacefully. The men were away from the ranch most of the day and, it seemed, half the night, bringing in the bulls. Within a couple of weeks, they would be starting the annual fall roundup. Nora’s opinion of the “knights of the range” underwent a startling transformation as she saw more and more of them from afar around the ranch.

For one thing, there were as many black and Mexican cowboys as there were white ones. But whatever their color, they were mostly dirty and unkempt, because working cattle was hardly a dainty job. They were courteous and very polite to her, but they seemed to be shy. This trait had first surprised and then amused her. She went out of her way to flirt gently with a shy boy everyone called Greely, because it delighted her to watch him stammer and blush. The stale ennui of European men had made her uneasy with them, but this young man made her feel old and venerable. She had no thought of ridicule. It was the novelty of his reaction that touched something vulnerable in her. But she’d flirted with him once in front of Melly, and Melly had been embarrassed.

“You shouldn’t do that,” she told Nora gently but firmly when Greely went on his way. “The men don’t like being made fun of, and Cal Barton won’t stand for it. Nor will he hesitate to tell you to stop it if he ever catches you.”

“But I meant no insult. I simply adore the way he stammers when I speak to him,” she said, smiling. “I find this young man so refreshing, you know. And besides, Mr. Barton has no authority to tell me what to do, even if he did catch me,” Nora reminded her.

Melly smiled knowingly. “We’ll see about that. He even tells Dad what to do.”

Nora took the remark with a grain of salt, but she stopped playing up to poor Greely just the same. It was unfortunate that she should mention him, and why he amused her, later to her aunt when Greely was within earshot. After that, she had no opportunity to see him. His absence from her vicinity was pointed, and he had a somber, crushed look about him that made Nora feel guilty until finally he seemed to disappear altogether.

NORA WAS INVITED OUT to watch the cowboys work, and she accompanied Melly to a small corral near the house where a black cowboy was breaking a new horse to the remuda, the string of horses used by the men during roundup. Melly explained what would happen in the upcoming roundup, all about the long process of counting and branding cattle, and separating the calves from their mothers. Nora, who had known nothing of the reality of it, was appalled.

“They take the little calves from their mothers and burn the brands into their hide?” she exclaimed. “Oh, how horribly cruel!”

Melly hesitated, a little uneasy. “Now, Nora, it’s an old practice. Surely in all your travels, you have seen people work on the land?”

Nora settled deeper into her sidesaddle. She couldn’t bring herself to ride astride, as Melly did, feeling that it was unladylike. “I have seen farming, of course, back East.”

“It’s different out here,” Melly continued. “We have to be hard or we couldn’t survive. And here, in East Texas, it’s really a lot better life than on the Great Plains or in the desert country farther west.”

Nora watched the cowboy ride the sweating, snorting horse and wanted to scream at the poor creature’s struggles. Tears came to her eyes.

Cal Barton had spotted the two women and came galloping up on his own mount to join them. “Ladies,” he welcomed.

Nora’s white face told its own story as she stared at him coldly. “I have never seen such outrageous cruelty,” she said at once, dabbing at her eyes with an expensive lace-edged silk handkerchief. “That poor beast is being tormented by that man. Make him stop, at once!”

Cal’s eyebrows shot up. “I beg your pardon?”

“Make him stop,” she repeated, blind to Melly’s gestures. “It is uncivilized to treat a horse so!”

“Uncivi… Good God Almighty!” Cal burst out. “How in hell do you think horses get gentle enough to be ridden?”

“Not by being tortured, certainly—not back East!” she informed him.

He was getting heartily sick of her condescending attitude. “We have to do it like this,” he said. “It isn’t hurting the horse. Jack is only wearing him down. It isn’t cruel.”

Nora dabbed at her face with the handkerchief. “The dust is sickening,” she was saying. “And the heat and the smell…!”

“Then why don’t you go back to the nice cool ranch house and sip a cold drink?” he suggested with icy calmness.

“A laudable idea,” Nora said firmly. “Come, Melly.”

Melly exchanged helpless glances with Cal and rode after her cousin.

Nora muttered all the way home about the poor horse. It didn’t help that a gang of tired cowboys passed them on the way back. One was mad at his sidekick and using colorful language to express himself. Nora’s face went scarlet at what she overheard, and she was almost shaking with outrage when they reached the barn at last.

“Knights of the range, indeed!” she raged on the way to the front door, having left the horses in the charge of a young stable hand. “They stink and curse and they are cruel! It is nothing like my stories, Melly. It is a terrible country!”

“Now, now, give it a chance,” Melly said encouragingly. “You’ve only been here a short while. It gets easier to understand, truly it does.”

“I cannot imagine living here,” Nora said heavily. “Not in my wildest imaginings. How do you bear it?”

“I love it,” the younger woman said simply, and her brown eyes reflected her pleasure in it. “You’ve lived such a different life, Nora, so sheltered and cushioned. You don’t know what it is to have to scratch for a living.”

Nora’s thin shoulders rose and fell. “I have never had to. My life has been an easy one, until the past year. But I know one thing. I could never live here.”

“You don’t want to go home already?” Melly asked worriedly.

Nora saw her concern and forced herself to calm down. “No, of course not. I shall simply have to stay away from the men, that is all. I do miss Greely. He, at least, was a refreshing change from those barbarians out there!”

“Greely hasn’t been around lately,” Melly agreed. “I wonder why.”

NEITHER KNEW THE ANSWER to the question of Greely’s absence. Days passed, and the cowboys began to look a little less like dirty tramps and a little more like men as Nora’s first impression began to waver and then fade. Nora became able to recognize faces, even thick with dust and dirt. She recognized voices, as well, especially Mr. Barton’s. It was deep and slow, and when he was angry, it got deeper and slower. She marveled at the way he used inflection to control his men, and the way they responded to even the softest words. He projected authority in a way that made her wonder about his past. Perhaps he’d been in the military. He could have been, with that bearing.

He came riding up the next to the last Friday afternoon of August with a bunch of disheveled, hot and dirty men. He dismounted at the front steps and tossed his reins to the stable hand, so that his horse could be attended to.

Nora, who was on the porch, stepped back when he approached, because he was dirtier than she’d ever seen him, and he had a three days’ growth of beard. She thought that if she met him on the road, she’d expect him to have a pistol in either hand and a mask over his nose and mouth.

He noticed her withdrawal with cold fury. Since her remarks out at the corral, he’d been waiting for an opportunity to tell her how much her superior attitude irritated him. She had no right to look down her nose at hardworking men because they didn’t smell like roses or live up to her idea of civilized behavior.

“Where’s Chester?” he asked curtly.

“Why, he drove my aunt and Melly into town in the buggy,” she said. “Is there anything I can do?”

He pursed his lips and studied the lines of the sleek, soft gray dress that clung to her slender figure. “Do you always dress like that?” he asked with cool mockery. “Like you were going to some fancy city restaurant in one of Mr. Ford’s fancy automobiles?”

She bristled. “The automobile is more civilized than a horse, I tell you,” she said haughtily. “And we have electric streetcars back East as well as automobiles.”

“What a snob you are, Miss Marlowe,” he said pleasantly. His smile didn’t reach his cold, silver eyes. Not at all. She felt chilled by them. “One wonders why you came out here at all when you find us and the work we do so distasteful.”

She wrapped her arms across her small breasts and felt herself shiver. The heat was uncomfortable. She hoped she wasn’t having a chill, because she knew what it presaged. No. She couldn’t have an attack here, she just couldn’t!

With her dignity intact, she smiled at him. “Why, I came because of the books.”

“Books?” he asked, frowning.

“Yes! I’ve read all about cowboys, you know,” she told him seriously. “Mr. Beadle’s dime novels portray the cowboy as a knight of the range, a hero in chaps and boots, a nobleman in spurs.”

He shifted his stance and glowered at her.

“Oh, and cowboys are the courtliest gentlemen in the world. That is, when they’re not robbing banks to feed little starving children,” she added, recalling two of her favorite books.

The glower got worse.

“But there was nothing about the odor,” she added with quiet honesty. “People hardly expect a knight of the range to smell bad, or be caked in blood and mud and…ahem…other substances,” she pointed out. “I don’t expect you get many social invitations, Mr. Barton.”

His pale eyes narrowed. “I don’t accept many,” he corrected, his face set. “I’m particular about the company I keep.”

“One supposes that the reverse is also true,” she replied, and wrinkled her nose.

His pale eyes flashed. “I don’t like your condescending manner, Miss Marlowe,” he added with magnificent honesty. His eyes held no warmth whatsoever. “And while we’re on the subject, I especially don’t like having you flirt with my men to embarrass them.”

She colored. “I did not mean…”

“I don’t care what you meant,” he said levelly. “Greely is just a kid, but when you started teasing him, he worshipped you. Then he overheard you discussing him, confessing that you only played up to him to watch him stammer and stumble about. He was shattered.” He looked down into her embarrassed face with cool disregard. “No decent woman does that to a man. It is beneath contempt.”

She felt the words like a cut on soft skin. Her chin lifted proudly. “You are right,” she confessed. She didn’t add that she was so accustomed to sophisticated men who liked to flirt and see a woman flustered that it had secretly delighted her to find a man so vulnerable to a woman’s attention. But she didn’t say that. “Honestly, I did not mean to hurt him.”

“Well, you did, just the same,” he said curtly. “He quit. He’s gone over to Victoria to get work, and he won’t be back. He was one of the best men I had. Now I have to replace him, because of you.”

“But surely he did not take it so to heart!” she exclaimed, horrified.

“Out here, men take a lot to heart,” he said. “Keep away from my cowboys, Miss Marlowe, or I’ll have your uncle send you home on the next train.”

She gasped. “You cannot dictate to my family!”

He met her eyes levelly, and chills ran through her at the intensity and power of the look. “You’d be surprised what I can do,” he said quietly. “Don’t tempt me to show you.”

“You are only a hired man, after all!” she added haughtily. “Little more than a servant!”

His expression was suddenly dangerous. His hand clenched at his side, and the glitter in his eyes had the same effect on her as a rattlesnake coiling. “While you, madam, are an utter snob, with greenbacks for blood and parlor manners for a heart.”

Her face went rosy. Impulsively she reached out to strike him, but his steely fingers caught her wrist before she got anywhere near that strong, lean cheek. He held her without effort until he felt the muscles relax. Under his fingers, he felt the sudden increase of her pulse. When he looked into her eyes, he saw the faint flicker of awareness that she couldn’t hide, and her eyes betrayed her surprise and helpless attraction. A slow, cunning smile touched his hard mouth. Why, she was vulnerable! It made his mind spin with dark possibilities.

With a short laugh of triumph, he drew her hand to his broad, damp chest and pressed it into the muscle. He felt her gasp, and knew that she didn’t find him distasteful, because he was watching her face.

“Do eastern men stand for being slapped?” he drawled. “You’ll find that we’re a bit different out here.”

“No doubt a man of your sort would find it acceptable to strike me back,” she said with bravado. Under her long skirts, her knees were shaking.

He searched her wide, uneasy blue eyes with quiet confidence. Either she knew less of men than he knew of women, or she was a good actress. Chester had said that she was something of an adventuress, a globe-trotting modern woman. He wondered just how modern she was, and he had a mind to find out for himself.

“I don’t strike women,” he said easily. His pale eyes narrowed and he slowly stepped in closer. He wasn’t blatant or vulgar, but with that simple action he made her aware of his size and strength and of her own vulnerability. “I have…other ways of dealing with hostility from a female.”

She was left in no doubt as to his meaning, because he was looking at her mouth as he spoke. Incredibly, she went weak all over and her lips parted helplessly. Since Edward Summerville’s hateful advances, she had never liked men close to her. But her traitorous body liked this one, wanted to incite him even closer, wanted to know the touch of his warm strength in an embrace.

Because her thoughts shocked her, she jerked back against his restraining hand. “Sir, you smell like a barn!” she stammered angrily.

He laughed, because he saw through the anger to the hidden excitement. “Why, isn’t that natural? A cowboy spends a good portion of his time with animals. Or didn’t your dime novels tell you so?”

She straightened her cuff, still feeling his touch there. She couldn’t remember ever being so flustered. “I am learning that my novels are not altogether accurate.”

His firm mouth tugged up at the corner. It pleased him that as a ragged cowboy, he could have such a devastating effect on an adventuress who had been on safari and lived a modern life. None of the women of his acquaintance had dared to flout convention. He found this woman exciting beyond measure, and the thought of leading her down the garden path in his disguise was appealing. If nothing else, it would teach her not to jump to conclusions about people. Taking a man at face value, judging him on his appearance alone and by eastern standards of conduct, was hardly worthy of such a traveled aristocrat. But, strangely, she lacked that glossy veneer that he would expect a hardened adventuress to possess. Now, as he stared down at her flushed face, he thought that she seemed not much more than a flustered girl.

“You are very pretty,” he remarked gently. In fact, she was, with that wealth of chestnut hair and her fair skin and deep blue eyes.

She cleared her throat. “I must go inside.”

He swept off his hat and held it to his heart. “I will count the hours until we meet again,” he said on an exaggerated sigh.

She wasn’t certain if he was serious or teasing. She made a funny sound, like a stifled laugh, and moved quickly back into the house. She felt as if she might suffocate.

Cal watched her go with a pleased smile and speculation in his silver eyes. She was going to make an interesting quarry, he thought as he put his hat back on his head and slanted it over his eyes. When he got through with her, she was going to think twice before she looked down her nose at a man again, regardless of how he smelled.

AFTER THAT, CAL BARTON seemed to be everywhere she went. He was blatantly attentive, and he looked at her with such worshipful eyes that Melly began to tease her lightly about his devotion.

She wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t playing some monumental joke on her. She didn’t respond to his displays of interest, which made them all the more obvious. He made a point of speaking to her with warm affection, regardless of whether she was alone or in company at the time. He was making his company felt, and the way he looked at her made her toes tingle. She had never been actively pursued by a man whom she felt attracted to, and she wasn’t certain that she could handle this situation. She didn’t want to become attached to Mr. Barton. But the more he pursued her, in his gentlemanly, teasing manner, the more unsettled she became.

She worried about Cal Barton so much that she couldn’t sleep at night. To make matters worse, the cowboys had come in from the roundup. The noise from the bunkhouse that night was deafening. She knew that alcohol wasn’t allowed unless the cowboys went into town. But they went into town on weekends, and when they came back, more often than not, they were audibly inebriated. Nora was used to noise in the city, but it was disturbing when she heard raised male voices close to her open window. These sounded sober, which was reassuring, but they were loud anyway.

“I won’t!” a raspy male voice asserted. “I’m damned if I will! He ain’t puttin’ me to digging postholes, with my rheumatism in such bad shape! I’ll quit first!”

“Dan, your rheumatism is awful convenient,” came the amused reply. “It only hurts when you have to work. Best not rile Barton. Remember what happened to Curtis.”

There was a pause, and Nora felt the new information about Barton sinking in with deadly meaning.

“Guess I do like it here since Barton came,” the first man said on a sigh. “He got us better pay and he made the boss replace those damned worn-out horses. Hard to work cattle on a rocking horse.”

“Sure it is. And he replaced the cook, too. I don’t mind eating in the bunkhouse these days.”

“Me, neither.” There was a chuckle. “Sort of tickles me, about Curtis. There he was, throwing his gunman reputation around, intimidating the new kids. And he drew that big pistol on Barton and got his brains half knocked out with it for his pains.”

“Barton’s no sissy with a gun. I expect he’s shot some. He was in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt—one of them Rough Riders.”

“Well, that don’t mean he knows Teddy personally,” the other man chuckled. “Come on. We got things to do before we bunk down. Roundup will start middle of next month, more’s the pity. A cowboy’s work is never done, is it?”

Murmuring voices and jingling spurs died away into the night. Nora curled deeper into her pillow with a sense of uneasiness. She was not used to rough men, and the only guns she’d seen used were in pursuit of wild game. She knew about war, that men fought in the unsettled regions of the country and sometimes with guns. But even on her previous trips to Texas, it had never occurred to her that she might meet men who had killed other men outside of war.

It was chilling to think of Mr. Barton with a smoking pistol in his hand, and suddenly she remembered one cold look from those silver eyes in that unsmiling, lean face, and realized what a formidable adversary he might be across the barrel of a gun. But he wasn’t like that with her now. He was gentle, attentive, and he smiled at her in a way that made her heart race.

She began to look forward to their frequent chance meetings, because that smile made her feel so wonderful. She turned over abruptly, trying to force it from her thoughts. What good did it do to dream when there was no hope for a future? She had nothing to give to Cal Barton. But knowing that didn’t stop her heart from racing every time she thought about him.

IT WAS NOW the second week of her visit, and as she saw more of the enigmatic Mr. Barton, she began to understand the gossip she’d overheard that night outside her window. Watching him send the men about their chores was an education. He never raised his voice, even when he was challenged. His voice became softer in anger, in fact, and his eyes took on a glitter like sharp-edged steel in sunlight. But whenever he saw Nora, his firm mouth tugged into a smile, and he looked oblivious to everything except her.

“Nice day, Miss Marlowe,” he commented as he passed her on his way to the stable, his lean fingers holding a pair of stained work gloves. He glanced at her neat lacy little gloves. She was just pulling them off, because she and Melly had only returned from town. “How dainty you are,” he mused. “And always so fastidious.” His silver eyes wandered down her body in the high-necked middy blouse and flaring dark skirt that reached to her high button-topped shoes. The intensity of his interest was disturbing. It made her knees weak. “You make my breath catch,” he added softly.

She was drowning in his deep, soft voice, in the eyes that held hers so hungrily.

“Please, sir, this is not proper,” she faltered.

He moved closer step by step, aware that they were in a very public place in the middle of the yard. He stopped just in front of her and smiled slowly, slapping the gloves absently into the palm of one hand. “What is not proper?” he asked gently. “Is a man not allowed to tell a woman how sweet she looks in her lacy finery?”

She swallowed. She had to look up a long way to see his face. It was hard to remember that she was supposed to be a sophisticated, traveled intellectual when her heart was trying to crawl up into her throat.

“Your attentions could be…misconstrued,” she said.

He lifted an eyebrow. “By someone else? Or by you?” He reached out and traced a loose strand of her hair, making incredible sensations along her nerves. His voice dropped in pitch, softened. “I find you fascinating, Miss Marlowe. An orchid barely in bloom.”

Her lips parted. No one had ever said such things to her before. She was enthralled by his deep voice, by the look in his eyes, his presence. The odors of horse and leather and cigar smoke that clung to him were not even noticeable in her state of excitement. Helplessly her blue eyes went from his deep-set eyes to his straight nose and high cheekbones and down to the wide, thin lines of his firm mouth. The lower lip was a little thicker, almost square, as if it had been chiseled out of stone. She felt her pulse quicken as she wondered shamefully how it would feel to kiss him.

He saw that speculative look, and he smiled. “You are very quiet, Miss Marlowe. Have you no scathing comment to make about the condition of my clothes?”

“What?” She sounded, looked, dazed, as her eyes were forced back up to his by the question.

He bent toward her, so that his eyes filled the world, so that under the wide brim of his hat, she could feel his warm breath right on her lips.

“I said,” he said softly, “do you not find me offensive at such close range?”

She shook her head in a helpless little gesture. She could feel his strength, like a rock, in front of her. She wanted to lean forward and press her breasts into his chest. She wanted to drag his hard mouth down over her lips and kiss him until her knees gave way. Other, shocking, images flashed through her mind, and she gasped.

His lean hand came to her cheek and his thumb pressed suddenly, hard over her mouth, bruising the soft tissues. His glittery eyes looked straight into hers. “I know what you’re thinking,” he whispered roughly. “Shall I put it into words, or is it enough that I know?”

She was too far gone to register the words at all. His thumb played with her mouth and she let it, standing hypnotized by his gaze, his closeness. He pushed her lips against her teeth in his fervor, and she looked up into his eyes with desire plain in her own. For an instant, time ceased to exist….

She realized quite suddenly what was happening to her, and it was frightening. With a tiny sound, she jerked away from him and ran into the house without a backward glance, her lips still stinging from the tender abrasion of his thumb.

She swept into the house red-faced, met by her amused aunt.

“Mr. Barton is in pursuit again, I presume?” the older woman murmured dryly.

Nora’s eyes were very eloquent, even without her hectic flush. “He is…disturbing.”

“He is the soul of courtesy with women, but never have I seen him so attentive,” her aunt replied softly. “He is a personable young man, and very intelligent, especially about ranch management. Chester could not operate so large a property without his help. He was very somber and businesslike before, but I have to admit that he has changed since you came.” She hesitated then, as if it disturbed her to have to speak when she added, “Of course, there is no question of him becoming a serious suitor, you understand.”

Nora didn’t, at first. She frowned, slightly.

“He is a fine young man, but so far beneath you socially, Nora,” her aunt continued gently. “You must not become involved with a man in such a low social station. Your mother would never forgive me if I did not advise you thus. It is amusing that Mr. Barton finds you irresistible, but he is not suitable in any way as a contender for your hand.”

Nora was shocked. She should have realized how her aunt, as much a descendant of European royalty as her own mother, would feel about Cal Barton paying her so much attention. And they were right. A dirty cowboy was hardly a match for a socialite with a wealthy background.

“Oh, I have no interest in Mr. Barton in that respect,” she said quickly, laughing to cover her shock. “But I have noticed that the cowboys respect him. Mr. Barton has had to calm his men down every night.”

“They are high-strung,” her aunt said with a smile. “And surely you’ve become used to noise in your travels.”

“Not really,” Nora recalled as she stood by the window and gazed out over the flat horizon. “I was protected from anything really upsetting, even from the smells and sounds of camp life. And I was always among relatives of one sort or another.”

“Relatives?” her aunt asked pointedly. “And not suitors?”

Nora sighed, and a slight frown marred her lovely face. “I fear that I am…unusual in that respect. I do not encourage the advances of men, although I like them very well as friends.”

“But, my dear, you are lovely,” she said. “Surely you will want to marry one day, and have children….”

Nora’s face closed up. She turned jerkily. “Melly and I have planned to picnic by the river tomorrow.” She glanced at her aunt. “I have a…fear of rivers, but Melly says that this one is shallow and not very fearful.”

“And she is right,” Aunt Helen said, curious about the wording of Nora’s remark. “It will be pleasant for you both, and as it is near the house, it is quite safe to go there unescorted. The heat and dust are terrible this time of year, but it is cool beside the river. Except for the mosquitoes,” she added with a grimace.

Mosquitoes. Nora felt queasy.

“There, now, the mosquitoes are worst in late afternoon,” her aunt said soothingly. “Do not worry.”

Nora turned and then she knew that her mother had told Aunt Helen everything. It was almost a relief to have someone know the truth. She bit her lower lip. “It frightens me.”

Helen touched her shoulder gently. “You had a bad time of it. But you will be fine here. Do go with Melly and enjoy yourself. It will be all right, my dear, truly it will. Why, doctors are often wrong. You must always keep hope. It is God who decides our fate, not the medical profession. Not always, at least.”

“I should have remembered that. Very well,” she said after a minute, and smiled. “I suppose there are worse things than insects,” she added solemnly as she walked out of the room.

Chapter Three

MELLY HADN’T MENTIONED that the picnic was going to involve other people. It was a church picnic. And it wasn’t going to be on a river near the house; it was going to be beside a small stream. When Nora heard that, she relaxed noticeably.

Aunt Helen laughed when Melly reminded her that it was the church picnic.

“Oh, how could I have forgotten!” Helen said with a rueful glance at Nora. “My mind is not on the present. I do beg your pardon, Nora, I misled you. I know that you shall enjoy this gathering. There are several eligible and well-to-do young men among the congregation.”

“Including Mr. Langhorn,” Melly added with a strange expression on her face. “He and his son, Bruce, will probably accompany us, since it is Saturday, but perhaps he will be less…antagonistic than usual. And with luck, Bruce will behave better than he normally does.”

Nora wondered a lot about her cousin’s peculiar way of referring to Mr. Langhorn. She hoped that Melly would confide in her one day.

After Helen left to talk to the cook, the two women went outside to sit on the porch. Nora tidied the bow under her jaunty sailor collar. “Will any of the men from the ranch be going?” she asked hesitantly.

Melly grinned. “Not Mr. Barton, if that’s what you meant. He goes to Beaumont this afternoon.”

“Oh. Oh, I see.” She colored a little and lifted disappointed eyes. “Does he have family there?”

“No one knows. He never speaks of the visits except in a desultory way. He is very mysterious, our Mr. Barton.”

“Yes, so I see.”

Melly noticed Nora’s distraction and touched her arm gently. “Mama is so old-fashioned. Do not let her interfere too much. Mr. Barton is a fine man, Nora. Social status is not everything.”

“Alas, Melly,” her cousin said heavily, “for me it is. My mother is exactly like yours. None of my family would countenance Mr. Barton as a suitor for me.” She gnawed her lower lip. “Oh, why must I be so conventional? I feel like a sheep, following the herd. But it is so hard to break away from the past, to stand up to social absolutes.”

“If you love someone, that becomes imperative sometimes,” Melly said sadly.

Nora looked at her. “Does it? I cannot imagine a love strong enough to send me into battle with my peers.”

Melly didn’t reply. There was a very faraway look in her eyes.

NORA BROODED on her predicament for the rest of the day, and finally decided that she could say goodbye to Cal if she wanted to. There was nothing so unspeakable about that. She went looking for him late that afternoon when it was nearing sundown. He was in the barn with his saddlebags packed on his horse, a big bay gelding with a spirited look.

“Is that your horse?” Nora asked from the door of the barn, which was deserted momentarily except for Cal.

He glanced at her and smiled. “Yes. I call him King, because he reminds me of a man I know—one who’s just as impatient and every bit as unpleasant when he’s upset.” He didn’t add that the nickname originally belonged to his eldest brother.

“He’s very…tall.”

“So am I. I require a tall horse.” He finished his tasks with the horse and turned to move toward Nora. For once, he was cleaned up. He was freshly shaven and smelled of cologne and soap. His hair was clean, neatly parted. His clothes were like new, from his long-sleeved shirt to the neat cord trousers he wore with polished black boots. He looked very masculine, and the intensity of his gaze made her nervous. He paused just in front of her, admiring her trim figure behind the china blue bow that hung below the sailor collar of the white blouse. The bow matched her eyes.

“Shall you be gone long?” she asked, trying to sound unconcerned.

“Only over the weekend, perhaps for a day or so beyond, depending on the train schedules,” he said noncommittally. “Will you miss me?” he teased.

She grimaced. “Sir, we hardly know each other.”

“A situation which can quickly be remedied.” He bent suddenly, lifted her clear off the ground in his arms like a baby and carried her behind the open door of the barn, out of sight.

Her mouth was open to protest this shocking treatment when his lips pressed softly over it, teasing the tender flesh until it admitted him. Behind her head, she felt the muscles cord in his arm as he brought her closer so that he could advance the kiss. Her breasts flattened softly over the hard muscles of his broad chest, and she felt her heart beating against them.

Outside, she heard the wind rise, and the metallic sound of the windmill as its arms began to spin. There was a rumble up in the darkening clouds. But she was locked fast in Cal’s arms and floating blissfully in feelings she had never experienced. His mouth was warm and hard and insistent. She had no inclination to fight or protest. He must have known it, because he was gentle, almost tender with her. When he finally lifted his mouth, she was dazed, fascinated. Her wide blue eyes searched his in a silence broken only by the soft movements of the horse nearby.

His silver-gray eyes glittered as they traced her mouth and then met her shocked eyes. “You’re very docile for an adventuress,” he whispered deeply. “Do you like lying in my arms?”

She hadn’t realized that she was. He still had her clear of the floor. Her arms were around his neck, holding on, and she never wanted to move. It was a surprise to discover that it felt natural to let him kiss her.

“You’re dazed, aren’t you?” he murmured with faint, tender amusement as he studied her face. “You flatter me.”

“You must…put me down,” she faltered.

He shook his head, very slowly. “Not until I’ve kissed you again.” His lips touched hers, teased, tempted. He nibbled on her lower lip and heard her gasp. “You taste of whipping cream,” he whispered, nudging at her upper lip with the tip of his tongue. “You make me hungry, Nora, for things no gentleman should admit to a lady….”

His mouth crushed down over hers, opening it to the most intimate kiss she’d ever experienced in her life. She cried out and pushed at him, frightened not only by the intimacy of it, but by the sensations it made her feel.

He lifted his head, laughing softly as he saw her eyes. “I thought you were sophisticated,” he chided.

She colored. “Do put me down!” she murmured, struggling and flustered.

He did, holding her until she righted herself and steadied. She pushed at her disheveled hairdo and moved jerkily away from him. He had never seemed taller, more menacing, than he did then.

For himself, Cal was pleased with her reactions. She wasn’t so haughty now, and he liked very much seeing her at a disadvantage. It was going to be fun to bring the so-superior Miss Marlowe down to the level of an ordinary woman. She might even enjoy being human for a change.

He touched her nose with the tip of his finger and laughed again as she looked worriedly around them.

“No one saw us,” he said gently. “Our secret is safe.”

She chewed on her lower lip and tasted him there. Her eyes sought his, full of unvoiced fears.

“What shall I bring you from Beaumont?” he asked.

“I… I need nothing.”

His eyebrows arched. “It’s my experience that women love little presents. Come, isn’t there something your heart desires?”

She was afraid. The way he was looking at her made her knees wobbly, and his kisses had kindled something frightening inside her. She made a helpless gesture with her hands.

“No, there is…there is nothing I want. I…must go inside. Do have a safe trip,” she said.

He just looked at her, aware of new feelings, new curiosities, all of which involved the woman before him. “I shall think of you while I’m away,” he said, his voice deep and slow. “When I look up at the stars tonight, I shall imagine you looking at them, and thinking of me as well.”

She flushed. “You must not!”

“Why?” he asked reasonably, and smiled. “You have no beau. I have no sweetheart. Why should we not be interested in each other?”

“I do not want that,” she blurted out.

He cocked an eyebrow. “Because I’m a poor, dirty cowboy?” he chided. “Am I not good enough for a Marlowe of Virginia?”

She grimaced and he read the truth in her face. No, a poor cowhand would hardly be a suitable match for a wealthy woman from back East. It rankled that she should think that way, that she should be so bound by convention when she was modern and well traveled and outspoken.

She was an adventuress, she said, but she was certainly very conventional in her private life. She gave lip service to the modern ideals, but she did not practice them. She was just one more prisoner of the social conventions of her set. He was oddly disappointed in her. His mother was a frontier woman, a good and decent woman, but one who lived to please her own sense of morality, not flat rules set down by other people. He had thought at first that Nora had spirit and felt the lure of adventure, that she had come West to test her courage and challenge the unknown. But in fact, she was just another bored rich society woman who toyed with men to get her thrills. He mustn’t forget poor Greely.

“Please,” she said nervously. “I must go.”

His face was shuttered, hard. “Go, then,” he said curtly. “It would not be seemly for you to be seen with someone beneath your social station.”

She glanced at him worriedly, guiltily. But she didn’t deny it. That was what damned her in his eyes, what made him determined to show her that feelings were more important than conventions. He would, if it was the last thing he ever did. He would woo and win her as an itinerant cowboy. And when he was through, she would never judge another man by his clothes or his station in life. He would be the sword of vengeance for Greely and all the other men this spoiled young miss had hurt with her thoughtlessness.

He whirled angrily toward his horse, leaving Nora to walk slowly back toward the house with her heart in her throat. She had driven him away, and she should be sorry. But she had nothing to give him. If he thought that it was because of his station and not her own fears about her illness, then perhaps that was as well, too. Perhaps it would spare her any future wooing. The thought, which should have comforted her, was vaguely discouraging.

She had barely made it to the steps when she heard the horse’s hooves sound close by, and then quickly move away. She turned in time to see Cal riding out the gate, tall against the darkening sky, looking as violent as the storm itself.

THE CHURCH PICNIC was a surprise. Nora hadn’t expected to enjoy it, but she was having a very good time. The only fly in the ointment was, as Melly had intimated, Mr. Langhorn’s son, Bruce. The little boy was a holy terror, blond and slight and full of mischief. He’d barely arrived when he put a bullfrog down a girl’s back and spilled lemonade on the preacher’s trousers.

His dad just grinned and watched him, apparently approving his actions. Melly gave the whipcord-lean man with the dark hair and eyes a cold glare, but he ignored her. He was apparently taken with an older woman, a brunette with a plate of cake and a sweet smile.

“There he goes again, playing up to Mrs. Terrell,” Melly said irritably. “Not that I care, but she’s at least five years older than he is, and she’s got three kids of her own. She’s a widow. A rich widow,” she added in a hiss.

As if he heard, Mr. Langhorn looked at her. He lifted an eyebrow, gave her a lazy, dismissing appraisal, and picked up a piece of the widow’s cake. There was something almost spiteful about the way he looked right at Melly while he bit into it.

“Daring me to say something,” Melly muttered. “Look at him! He’s a…a blackguard, an uncivilized boor! She deserves him!”

“But the poor widow is kind,” Nora argued.

“She is a black widow,” came the terse reply. “I despise her!”

Nora was surprised at the poisonous tones from her sweet cousin Melly. It was so out of character.

“He told me that I was too young to give him what a man needed from a woman,” Melly said shockingly. She flushed. “Mama would have a fit if she knew he had spoken to me in such a way. I pretended that it was another man, my best friend’s new husband, who had broken my heart, but it wasn’t. It was…him.” She sounded miserable. Her eyes followed the tall man with the widow Terrell, and she jerked them back around with a faint groan. “My parents would never have permitted anything to come of my regard for him, because he is divorced! What shall I do? It is killing me to see them together! He says that he shall probably marry her, because Bruce needs a mother so badly.” She clenched her hands together. “I love him. But he feels nothing for me, nothing at all. He has never touched me, not even to shake my hand….”

There was a wrenching sigh, and Nora felt so sorry for her cousin that she could have cried.

“I am sorry,” she said gently. “Life has its tragedies, doesn’t it?” she added absently, thinking of Africa and the terrible changes it had brought to her life.

“Yours has been much different from mine, and certainly it has not been tragic,” her cousin argued. “You have wealth and position and you are traveled and sophisticated. You have everything.”

“Not everything,” Nora said tersely.

“You could have. Mr. Barton is sweet on you,” she teased, forgetting her own problems momentarily.

“You might marry him.”

She couldn’t forget the harsh, cold farewell she’d received from Mr. Barton. She tensed indignantly.

“Marry a cowboy!” Nora exclaimed haughtily.

Melly glared at her. “And what, pray tell, is wrong with a hardworking man? Being poor is no sin.”

“He has no ambition. He is dirty and disheveled. I find him…offensive,” she lied.

“Then why were you kissing him in the barn before he left?” Melly asked reasonably.

Nora gasped. “What do you mean?”

“I saw you from my window,” she said with a chuckle. “Don’t look so shocked, Nora, I knew you were human. He is very attractive, and when he shaves and cleans up, he would be a match for any of your European friends.”

Nora shifted uncomfortably. “He is uncivilized.”

“You should spend more time out here. If you did, you would realize that clothes and a fine education do not always make a man a gentleman,” Melly said quietly. “There are men here in Texas who have no money, but who are courageous and kind and noble, in their way.”

“Like the heroes in my dime novels?” Nora chided. “That is all fiction. I have discovered the truth since I have come West, and it is disillusioning.”

“It should not be, if you do not expect people to be perfect.”

“I certainly do not expect it of Mr. Barton. He…accosted me,” she muttered.

“He kissed you,” Melly corrected, “which is hardly the same thing. Let me tell you, many of our unattached women in church would give much to have the elusive and stoic Mr. Barton kiss them!”

Nora glared at her cousin. “I would prefer that, too. He may kiss any of them he likes, with my blessing. I have no desire to become the sweetheart of a common cowboy.”

“Or of any man, it seems,” Melly murmured with a speaking glance. “You are very reluctant to discuss marriage and a family, Nora.”

Nora wrapped her arms around her body. “I have no desire to marry.”

“Why?”

She shifted. “It is something I cannot discuss,” she said, shivering with the memory of how ill she had been. How could she subject a man, any man, to a life of illnesses that would never end? How could she have a baby, and take care of it? “I shall never marry,” Nora said bitterly.

“With the right man, you might want to.”

Nora thought of Cal Barton’s hot kisses, and her heart raced. She mustn’t remember, she mustn’t. She turned in time to see young Bruce Langhorn making a beeline for another young boy perched precariously on a rock, laughing.

“Oh, no!” Melly gasped, and before Nora could open her mouth, her cousin broke into a dead run toward the children.

She hadn’t realized what was going on until she saw the Langhorn boy reach out to push the other little boy, immaculately dressed, into the stream face-first.

“You little heathen!” the boy’s mother cried, drawing everyone’s attention to Bruce. “You shouldn’t be allowed in decent company! The child of a divorced man!” she added with pure venom as she pulled her soaked, weeping child out of the water and began to comfort him.

Langhorn heard. He got to his feet and joined his son, who looked torn between tears and embarrassment.

“I tried to stop him,” Melly said, her eyes eloquent as they looked up at the tall man.

He didn’t look at her, or seem to hear. He put his hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “He’s as good as your boy, Mrs. Sanders,” he told the flustered mother. “Of course, he does act like a little boy instead of a little statue sometimes.”

Mrs. Sanders’s red face went redder. “He hardly has a moral example to follow, Mr. Langhorn.”

Langhorn just stared at her. “I thought this was a church party, where Christian people got together to have a good time.”

The woman froze, and suddenly became aware of people staring at her, and not very approvingly.

“It seems to me,” Nora inserted with exquisite poise, “that none of us is so perfect that he can sit in judgment on others. Or is that not what church is supposed to teach us?” she added with a cool smile.

Mrs. Sanders bit almost through her lower lip. “I do beg your pardon, Mr. Langhorn. I was frightened for Timmy….”

Langhorn’s eyes spoke for him. He turned Bruce away. “You find some other little kid to play with,” he said loudly. “I want you around boys who aren’t made of glass.”

Timmy wiped his eyes on his sleeve and jerked away from his mother with a furious glare.

Melly smothered a grin and followed Nora back to their picnic area.

It wasn’t long before Langhorn and Bruce joined them. Both were grinning, and Melly was more flustered than Nora had ever seen her.

“You’re a haughty one,” Langhorn told Nora with pursed lips. “I don’t know that I like being defended by eastern aristocrats with toffee noses.”

Nora liked him at once. She grinned at him. “I don’t know that I want to associate with a heathen,” she returned.

His eyebrows went up and he looked at Melly, who colored prettily.

“I can see that my reputation has preceded me,” he said heavily. He sat down on their cloth and lounged on his side. His dark eyes smiled at Nora and then slid reluctantly to Melly, who was trying to dish up chicken and rolls. “Am I invited to dinner?” he asked her softly.

Melly’s hands shook. “If you like,” she stammered. “There’s plenty.”

It was nothing tangible, but Nora felt herself wondering at the tension between this man and her cousin. She had told Nora that he wasn’t interested in her, but he looked at Melly just a little too long for politeness, and she was shaken—more than shaken—by just his presence. He was attracted to her, but obviously he wasn’t going to let her get any closer than this.

“Me, too, Melly,” Bruce pleaded. He grinned at her. “Were you gonna stop me? I saw you running my way.”

“I wasn’t quick enough,” she muttered. “You’re just impossible, Bruce. Really…!”

“Timmy pushed me in last time we went on a picnic,” Bruce explained. “I was just going to get even, that’s all. His mom didn’t say a word when it was me dripping wet.” He glowered. “I don’t like her. She says I’m not good enough to play with Timmy.”

“Like hell you aren’t,” Langhorn said easily. “Pardon my language,” he added politely to the ladies. He looked back at his son. “You don’t judge people by their kin.”

“You shouldn’t,” Nora corrected. “Unfortunately, people do.”

Langhorn studied Melly carefully as he accepted a plate from her unsteady hands and nodded his thanks. “You came to Bruce’s rescue like an avenging angel. Thanks.”

Melly shrugged. “Mrs. Sanders is…a bit overbearing at times. She’s overprotective, too. Timmy is going to wish she hadn’t been, one day.”

He smiled. “Maybe not. Your parents have protected you. It hasn’t hurt you.”

“Hasn’t it?” Melly asked without looking at him. She felt bitter, fiercely bitter, because if her parents hadn’t smothered her with concern, she might have had some hope of a life with Langhorn. But that was in the past. He thought her too young, and perhaps she was.

Mrs. Terrell came sidling up a minute after Langhorn finished his chicken, smiling from under her lacy parasol. “I do hate to disturb you, Jacob, but I’m feeling just a bit faint. Would you mind very much driving me home?”

“But we only got here,” Bruce wailed. “And I haven’t got to play with the other kids. There’s a sack race…!”

“He can stay with us and we’ll drive him to your place on the way home,” Melly offered, angry at the widow—who was obviously jealous—and hurt for Bruce. “Oh, do let him stay,” she pleaded when he hesitated.

He looked at his son quietly. “You mind her.”

“Yes, sir!” Bruce beamed.

Langhorn glanced at Melly with an unreadable expression and bent to pick up his weather-beaten hat. “I’ll expect him home before dark,” he told Melly. “You have no business driving around the country in the dark.”

“Yes, sir,” Melly murmured demurely, peering up at him impishly.

His face froze, as if her teasing had an unwanted effect on him. He whirled on his heel, taking Mrs. Terrell’s arm bruisingly to herd her down the path.

“Thanks, Melly!” Bruce said enthusiastically, grabbing for a slice of fresh-baked apple pie. “You’re swell! That’s twice you saved my life. Honestly, isn’t Mrs. Terrell a hoot? She wants Dad to marry her, but he doesn’t like her that way. I heard him talking to himself about her.”

Melly smiled to herself. It was nice to know something so intimate about Jacob Langhorn, even if it was only that he talked to himself. She glanced at Nora and sighed at the sympathy and caring in those deep blue eyes. She smiled at her cousin and shrugged.

The rest of the picnic was fun. Melly and Nora cheered Bruce in the sack races and watched him beat the others in the egg carry. There were horse races between the men, which Bruce said his dad was sure going to hate having missed, and music as well, because a couple of the men brought their guitars.

If Cal Barton had been around, Nora would have thought the picnic perfect. She wondered what he was doing, on his mysterious weekend absence.

DOWN NEAR BEAUMONT, TEXAS, a grimy Cal Barton was helping his drill foreman put the final touches on their newest rig while his brother Alan looked on. Immaculate in his suit and tie, Alan wasn’t about to get himself dirty. Irritably Cal thought that the snooty Miss Marlowe would have found Alan just her cup of tea.

“That should do it. Let’s get started,” Cal told the other man, climbing down to join his brother on solid ground.

“You hit a dry hole first time,” Alan reminded him. “Don’t get too optimistic.”

“It’s my money, son,” Cal reminded him with a cool smile. “Aunt Grace’s money, actually, but I was her favorite and she had a passion for oil. That’s why you and King were left out. She thought I had the touch.”

“Maybe you do. I hope you don’t run out of money before you hit the big one.”

“That geologist said the oil is here,” Cal reminded him. “I’d have come three years ago if I’d had the backing, but none of you believed I knew what I was doing. Least of all King. He made his opinion of foolish ventures crystal clear before I left home.”

“King has mellowed just recently, thanks to Amelia,” Alan mused. “You really will have to come home long enough to meet her. She’s quite a girl.”

“She must have a backbone of solid steel to cope with our brother,” he said flatly.

“She threw a carafe at him.”

Cal’s eyes widened. “At King?”

“He’s still laughing about it. She’s more than a match for him. One shivers to think what sort of children they’ll have. I want to move away to a safe place before the first one comes along.”

Cal chuckled. “Well, I’ll be. I thought he was going to marry Darcy, and there were times, mind you, when I thought he deserved to marry her.”

“Shame on you. I wouldn’t wish such a cold fish on King. Amelia is much more his style.”

He glanced at Alan curiously. “I had a letter from Mother about her. She thought you were the one with marriage in mind.”

Alan looked uncomfortable. “I was, when she seemed gentle and in need of protection. After her father’s death, she changed. She was more woman than I could handle.” He smiled ruefully. “I’m not like you and King. I want a gentle, sweet girl, not a warring Valkyrie.”

“Not me,” Cal said, eyeing the rig. “If I marry, I don’t want a woman I can browbeat. She’ll need to be spirited and adventurous to keep up with the way I want to live. If I strike anything here, I’ll move onto the place and never leave it.”

“Camp out here, you mean?”

“Something like that. I don’t need a city woman with snobbish attitudes.”

“That sounds suspiciously like you’ve met one already.”

“Who, me? Go home, Alan. You aren’t suited to drilling. You’ll just get in the way. I don’t know why you came.”

“I’m on my way to Galveston for some fishing. It’s just the second week in September, and I won’t be gang-pressed into roundup by Father until the end of the month at least. I need a break. This was just a stop on the way,” he said, grinning. “I have a train to catch.”

“When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know. Maybe after next weekend. Maybe a little later.” He frowned. “I did want to see a man in Baton Rouge about some ranch business as well. Maybe I’ll go on east first, and then double back. I’ll cable you.”

Cal clapped his brother on the back. “Go carefully, young Alan. We may be oil and water, but we’re family. Never forget.”

“I won’t.” Alan smiled. “Good luck.”

“Thanks. I’ll need it.”

Alan climbed onto his hired horse and waved at Cal as he started back toward Beaumont. Cal watched him with a peculiar sensation in his chest, a feeling of loss. He laughed at his own foolishness and turned back to his chores. He had very little time left before he had to get back to Tyler Junction and the Tremayne ranch. He envied Alan that fishing trip. Drilling for oil was an occupation that was expensive, physically exhausting and not a little dangerous. Just last week, a derrick had toppled on a nearby piece of property, and a prospector had been killed. The dry hole was an occupational hazard as well, and after days of hope for a strike, it was a bitter break. Cal hoped that this next attempt would be more successful. He hated to leave the drilling crew alone, but it couldn’t be helped. He was putting all his spare capital into the venture. He needed what he made as foreman at the ranch to supplement his income.

Besides, it gave him the opportunity to keep an eye on the family’s massive investment in the Tremayne ranch. He hated spying on Chester, but it couldn’t be helped. As much as the combine had paid to take it over, the Tremaynes stood to lose the most. In these unsafe days, it was better to cover a bet than risk the hand. He had to keep Chester solvent, for the family’s sake as well as Chester’s. If only he could bring the man around to some modern thinking. He’d have to work on that angle when he got back.

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