That’s too much.”
The Memphis Zephyr’s steam whistle gave three long, shrieking blasts, nearly deafening Emily.
“I said that’s way too much,” Haley shouted.
“I must run or I’ll miss my boat.” She bunched up her skirts and began to hasten toward the gangplank, then called back over her shoulder. “You keep that, Haley. Buy something nice for your mama.”
“That’s awful nice of you, Miss Emily. You have a safe trip now and you enjoy all them brand-new things out West, you hear? When you come home, I hope you’ll tell me all about ’em.”
“I’ll do that, Haley,” she lied, trying to smile through her tears and waving from the deck while the steamboat’s gangplank rose as if it, too, were waving a long and last goodbye to Mississippi and everyone in it.
Chapter Two
John Bandera was tired to the marrow of his bones. He was just back from Abilene after a hellacious late spring drive that had lost him two good men and at least two hundred head of cattle. The longhorns that had managed to survive the trip had jittered themselves to skin and bones, so instead of collecting the usual fifty bucks a head at the end of the trail, John had considered himself damned lucky to get thirty. He’d paid his men their wages, then seen to their bail when necessary, and finally settled up the considerable damages they’d wrought at four different saloons before setting out on his own, solitary, hard ride back to south Texas.
It was good to be home, he thought, as he lifted a worn and dusty boot up onto the porch rail and angled his chair onto its back legs. Dios. It was pure heaven to be home. Maybe he’d rename the ranch. Pure Heaven, maybe. Or simply Home.
He’d hated it six years ago when Price had insisted they name their newly acquired property The Crippled B. John had still been hobbling around on crutches then after breaking his leg in Arizona. He remembered his partner’s mysterious and drunken grin when he’d slurred, “It’s the perfect name, amigo. Don’t you see? It’ll keep them guessing which one of us it means.”
“B for Bandera,” John had muttered. “The crippled one.”
“Is it?” Price had replied. “It might just be B for bastard.”
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
