Now, sitting on the porch the two of them had built, John thought that Price probably had been right about the ranch’s name after all. It had only taken a few months for John’s busted leg to heal, but his partner had indeed turned out to be a crippled bastard who came to despise the ranch and the ranching along with just about everything and everyone else in Texas, and whose only friend turned out to be the whiskey bottle forever in his grasp.
Then one morning, without a warning or a farewell—fond or otherwise—both the bottle and Price McDaniel had simply disappeared. He’d sent a wire a few months later, asking John to send him two thousand dollars in care of a woman in Denver, no doubt for one last, lethal binge. The check had been cashed, but there hadn’t been another word from Price McDaniel. For all John knew, his partner was dead.
In the three years since Price’s disappearance, John Bandera had done the work of two men—maybe even three or four—expanding The Crippled B and turning it into one of the best ranches in south Texas.
Now, though, after this grueling drive to Abilene, it was time to rest, just for a while, during the last blaze of August heat, before the autumn work began. Maybe he’d even spend a week in Brownsville or Corpus Christi, he thought. A long, slow, sleepy week in a big brass bed with rumpled sheets and a tawny señorita might be what he needed to ease not just his body, but his mind, as well. His heart, however, was another matter.
He sighed, squinting into the bright distance at nothing in particular, refusing to think about that, unwilling to tap into that constant, bitter ache that was forever just beneath the surface, resisting even the thought of her name. Almost. But not quite.
Emmy. Dios, how he loved her! How he missed her wonderful letters. He’d ridden back from Kansas hoping, almost praying, that she’d written to him one more time in spite of the fact that he’d told her not to. She hadn’t written, though.
A distant swirl of dust claimed his attention. From the main house, which was built on what passed for a hill in this flat country, it was possible to see several miles in every direction. And now, near the crossing at Sweetwater Creek, John could just make out the dark silhouette of a mud wagon hitched to a pair of horses.
Damn, he thought. He’d hoped to have the house to himself for a few days, but now it looked as if his housekeeper, Señora Fuentes, and her daughter, Lupe, were coming back earlier than expected from their sojourn in Nuevo Leon.
“Damn,” he muttered out loud, then hauled his weary bones out of his chair to retrieve the spyglass he kept on a table just inside the front door. The last thing he needed at the moment was a resumption of young and buxom Lupe’s relentless onslaught on his senses. He never would have hired the Mexican widow last year if he’d known that the bargain included the señora’s seventeen-year-old, hot-blooded daughter.
He swore again, lifting the spyglass and fitting it to his eye, prepared to see the gray head of his housekeeper and Lupe’s raven waves through the open sides of the wagon. But he wasn’t prepared—never in a million years—for the sudden sight of golden curls, catching the late afternoon light like sunflowers, jouncing as the mud wagon hit every bump and rut in its path.
John’s heart stood absolutely still and his mouth went as dry as ash. Every nerve in his body snapped to attention as if he had just caught sight of a band of renegade Comanches riding in to pick off some of his cattle and maybe take a life or two in the process.
He swore as he ripped the telescope away, then rubbed his eye and blinked hard. Maybe he still had trail dust clogging his sight. Madre de Dios, let it be that. Please, let it be that. Or maybe he was so exhausted that his longtime fantasy lover had appeared before him like a blond mirage. Or maybe, more likely, he was so long lovesick that he’d finally and utterly and irretrievably lost his mind.
His hand was shaking so hard when he lifted the glass to his eye again that he was forced to raise his other hand to steady it. He scanned the landscape, sighted the wagon once again, and focused on the woman in it.
Emmy!
Damn her. Damn her to hell and back. Damn every sweet, pale yellow hair on her beautiful head. Even a mile away, he imagined he could see the bright sky-blue of her eyes, and while he was at it, he damned those, too.
Then John Bandera cursed himself and wished that he was dead. His love was coming to him, and his life was ruined.
Emily’s heart was racing far faster than the matched pair of grays pulling the mud wagon. She felt as if she’d been traveling for three long years, yet it had been a mere three days since she’d boarded the steamboat in Vicksburg then transferred to a larger boat in New Orleans for her passage along the Gulf coast to Corpus Christi.
All the way her emotions had been a wild mixture of hope and fear, of bright anticipation and dark dread. But now, nearing The Crippled B Ranch, a calmness unlike any she had ever experienced seemed to settle over her. It wasn’t so much that she knew how things would turn out, but that—no matter how events transpired—she was certain now that she had done the right thing in coming here.
The landscape, flat and coarse with mesquite trees and prickly pear, was exactly as Price had described it in letter after letter. Every inch of the place was surprisingly familiar, as if Emily had seen it all before. The mesquites were indeed like the sheer green lace he’d described and the sky truly did extend from east to west with hardly a cloud to mar it. Wildflowers bloomed in profusion the way he had claimed, and they did indeed combine in a huge and extraordinary carpet of reds and blues and yellows.
The grazing cattle lifted their long-horned heads when her wagon passed, gazed at her placidly, then returned to their assorted feasts. She’d seen scores of antelopes and deer, and had even glimpsed a wild boar snuffling around the twisted roots of a mesquite bush.
Everything seemed familiar because Price had taken such pains to paint wonderful, vivid pictures for her in his letters. At least he hadn’t misled her in that regard. Emily felt almost as if she’d been here before. Everything was just as she’d expected.
Except the heat. It was ungodly. Hellacious. Price had written that it was hot here, but he hadn’t said that a body could very nearly melt as hers had been doing all day. Of course, Price never wore petticoats nor a corset that even lightly laced felt more like hot iron bands encircling her rib cage.
The man who was slouching up front driving the ramshackle mud wagon wore a wide-brimmed hat to shade himself, but even so his plaid shirt was soaked through with perspiration. Emily didn’t feel all that much sympathy for him, however, since he’d charged her an outrageous sum to take her the thirty-five miles from Corpus Christi to The Crippled B. He hadn’t said more than three or four gruff words to her since departing the coastal town, and Emily had found herself longing for the cozy chatter of Haley Gates and wondering a little sadly what he was doing right now back in Mississippi. Home seemed so far behind her. And ahead? She hadn’t the faintest idea.
For a moment then, for a frightened heartbeat, her courage failed her. This southern part of Texas, this land of new beginnings was dangerous, a harsh place with thorns on its lacy trees and four-foot-wide horns on its cows. Mississippi seemed civilized, even gentle, in comparison. Safe, too. Perhaps she should have stayed home in spite of the coming scandal. At least people there knew her and cared about her, if only enough to gossip.
This driver was the first real Texan she had met, and not only was he sullen, but he didn’t seem too familiar with the territory, either. When she pointed out landmarks that Price had mentioned—the Culley ranch with its twisted fences or a particularly lovely grove of live oaks—the driver would just shrug and mumble that they’d soon be getting there.
And now they were. They were here. Emily’s heart fairly clanged in her chest when the horses’ hooves rattled the boards that spanned Sweetwater Creek. Unlike the green and rippling creeks back home, this one was just a narrow river of dust right now as it waited for the winter rains. Her mouth went as dry as the creek.
Then, suddenly, catching sight of Price’s house atop a rise in the distance, Emily forgot to be afraid. The sun was