Edna and I will fight to the death in a brutal game of Scrabble.” Jobeth was Tess’s daughter by her first husband. She was eleven now, and right where she wanted to be—out with Zach, who had adopted her that first year he and Tess got together. Jobeth loved every aspect of ranching, from pulling calves to branding to gathering day.
Starr groaned. “It’s a thrill a minute around this place.”
Tess was already at the door. “Coming?”
Starr smiled then. “You know what? It’s great to be home.”
Chapter One
Three years later…
Blame it on that sliver of moon hanging from a star in the summer sky. Blame it on the two beers he had that he probably shouldn’t have. Blame it on the sight of her—that black hair shining like a crow’s wing by the light of the paper lanterns strung overhead, those eyes that unforgettable heart-stopping amethyst-blue. Blame it on the yearning inside him, the yearning that, after all those years, still remained with him, tender as an old wound that never did heal quite right.
Blame it on…
Hell. Blame it on whatever you damn well please.
At the annual Medicine Creek Merchant Society’s Independence Day dance, out under the stars in Patriot Park, after six endless years of keeping strictly away from her, Beau Tisdale decided he would ask Starr Bravo for a dance.
It was no picnic mustering the courage to do it. He stood for a while under the night-shadowed branches of a cottonwood a ways from the bunting-draped temporary dance floor, nursing a third longneck, watching her as he worked up his nerve.
Twice, she danced with Barnaby Cotes, the sneaky weasel who ran Cotes Clothing and Gift on Main Street and was too old for her by half. Then Tim Cally, a hand on the Rising Sun for decades, led her out on the floor. Beau smiled at that. Tim was nearing sixty and a little stiff in the joints, but he could still do a fair two-step. He held Starr lightly and not too close. Beau didn’t mind watching that—not that he had any right to mind or not to mind where Starr was concerned.
He tipped up the longneck and took a deep drink. Just one damn dance, he was thinking. What can it hurt?
Stupid question. It’d hurt plenty if those violet eyes went to ice on him, if she turned him down flat. A man does have his pride, after all.
But he didn’t guess she’d begrudge him a dance. She’d seemed civil enough to him in the last few years. When he’d pass her on the street or see her on the Rising Sun, she’d give him a cool smile and a nod, anyway. If he was lucky, he’d even get a plain, politely spoken, “Hi, Beau.”
She never seemed overjoyed to set eyes on him, but it wasn’t near as bad as it had been those first couple of years after he got off the honor farm. In those years, when she looked at him, he felt knee-high to a skunk and twice as foul-smelling. She’d hated him then, pure and simple, for the hard and heartless things he’d said to her that day in the yard at the Rising Sun.
But she didn’t seem to hate him anymore. Maybe she’d figured out a few things. Or maybe it was just a long time down a dusty road and what some cowboy had said to her six years ago when she was still a girl didn’t mean a thing to her now.
No, he couldn’t say she was exactly falling all over herself to get next to him in recent years. But if he asked for a dance, he figured he had at least a fifty-fifty chance she’d say yes….
She sat out the next dance, another two-step, strolling instead over to one of the picnic tables not far from the bandstand to take her place with Tess and Zach and Jobeth. Zach’s cousin Nate Bravo sat with them, along with his wife Meggie May, who was round as a corn-fed hen with their third child. Zach had told him the other day that Tess was pregnant, too. “Three months along,” Zach had said quietly, pride and happiness glowing in his eyes.
As Beau watched, Jobeth ducked low, hunching her shoulders to the table, as if she’d like to melt right on through the rough wood planks. And Starr, sitting next to her, threw back her shining head and laughed.
Beau stood transfixed at the free, joyous sound. The band played on, a fast one, but Starr Bravo’s laugh was a whole other kind of music, the very sweetest kind. Jobeth elbowed her stepsister in the side and Starr made a show of composing herself. Jobeth straightened. In the light of the red, white and blue lanterns overhead, Jobeth’s face looked more than a little bit flushed. She said something snappish to Starr, who leaned sideways enough to bump her shoulder in the affectionate way that a sister will do. Jobeth still looked mulish, but Beau could see the reluctant smile that twitched the corners of her mouth.
About then, Beau caught sight of Nick Collerby lurking near the Bravo table. The dark-haired kid was about Jobeth’s age and had teased and tormented Starr’s sister from elementary school onward. Maybe Jobeth was worried he might ask her to dance.
And the toe-tapping song was ending. If he didn’t hustle his butt over there, some other lucky cowhand would be getting the next dance with Starr. Beau drained the last of his beer and chucked the empty in a recycling can as he went by. He walked fast, hoping speed would get him where he was going before he lost his nerve. As a result, in no time at all, he found himself standing right there by the table full of Bravos.
Tess and Meggie beamed up at him.
“Hi, Beau.”
“How’re you doin’?”
His throat felt like it had a fence post lodged in it. He cleared it, raising his hat in a polite salute and then settling it back in place. “Well, I’m fine. Just fine.”
“Nice night,” said Zach.
“Yeah. Real nice.”
About then, Jobeth giggled into her hand. A sideways glance and he saw that Starr was the one giving her the elbow, that time.
“Where’s Daniel?” asked Tess. “He always enjoys a celebration. I’d have thought he’d come out tonight.”
To keep his gaze from lingering too long on Starr, Beau made himself focus on Zach’s pretty wife. “Daniel’s feeling a little under the weather.” Beau had left the older man in his ancient easy chair, reading Western Horseman, looking kind of pale, vowing there was nothing wrong with him that a few antacids and a good night’s rest wouldn’t cure.
Twin lines of concern formed between Tess’s smooth brows. “Nothing serious, I hope?”
“He says he’s just tired. But I’m keeping my eye on him.”
Tess smiled her gentle smile. “Good. He needs someone to look out for him a little. He pushes himself too hard sometimes.”
“That he does.” The band struck up the next number. A slow one. It was now or never. “Ahem. Starr, I wonder if I might have this dance?”
The second the words were out, he wanted to suck them right back in. They couldn’t have sounded stiffer if he was a damn corpse. He’d meant to be casual and easy. How ’bout a dance? maybe, or Come on. Let’s dance….
Jobeth giggled again. If he’d had a pistol on him, he’d have fired a shot past her head just to shut that girl up. And then the giggle ended on a sharp, startled, “Oh!”
