Paradise to a man whose mother was a Comanche and whose father was anybody’s guess, to a man whose past was more shadow than sunlight. Hell, Hoyt Backus would get himself a smart lawyer and take this place away in a matter of weeks. His daughters were his legal, rock-solid heirs. No question about that. Hoyt could get all the lawyers in Texas then and Paradise would still elude him.
With a sigh, Amos drained his glass then leaned back in his chair. “Do you remember those daughters of mine, Shad?”
A sudden grin split the big man’s unshaven face. “I remember a little redhead chasing the ninth life out of a barn cat.”
Amos nodded. “That’d be Shulamith. Do you remember the other one?”
Shad resettled his hat on his knee, twisting the brim in his fingers. His grin disappeared. What he recalled was a little girl crying when her mama took her away. He’d been nineteen or twenty then, and hadn’t known squat about little girls. But leaving he knew. He remembered his heart hurting for that skinny, dark-haired child.
“No,” he told the old man. “Can’t say as I do.”
“Elizabeth,” Amos murmured. “We called her Libby.”
Shad nodded again. When he rose, the armchair creaked like saddle leather. “Well, I’ll be saying good-night now, Amos, unless there’s anything else you need.”
A son. Amos almost said it. “No. Nothing. Good night, Shad.”
Bill collectors! They were all overgrown, beady-eyed bullies in cheap serge suits and scuffed shoes. Shula Kingsland fully expected to see one of them right this minute, oozing out of the carriage that had just pulled up on Newstead Avenue in front of the house she shared with her sister.
Crouching behind the velvet overdrapes, Shula eased the lace sheers back a fraction. Her heart was pressing into her throat as she watched the cabbie extend a hand into the closed coach to help his passenger out.
“I’m not home,” the redhead muttered into the dark folds of the drapes. “I simply won’t answer the door. I won’t. Let him knock till his knuckles bleed. Till dooms—”
The cabbie handed a woman down from the coach. A child scrambled after her.
Shula yanked back the sheers. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Her relief was sweet, although brief. She wasn’t going to be forced, after all, to wheedle more time from some fool the bank had sent. But here came her sister with that ragamuffin again.
Shula stomped to the door, flinging it open just as the two of them were coming up the walk. Her bracelets jangled as she shook her fist and her rings glittered in the sunlight.
“Libby Kingsland,” she called, “if you want to be a mother so badly why don’t you marry and have babies of your own instead of dragging other people’s children home?”
The two sisters faced off in the arched oak doorway—Libby in her stiff-boned, grosgrain walking suit and Shula, still ruffled in her morning wrapper despite the fact that it was late afternoon. Both women had fire in their eyes, unlike the child who cowered now, caught between the Kingsland sisters’ silk flounces and sharp pleats.
In rough wool trousers and muddy brogans, and with her cropped blond hair, nine-year-old Amanda Rowan looked exactly like a boy. And it exasperated Shula Kingsland no end.
“Why can’t you leave him…I mean…her with the Sisters of Charity where she belongs?” Shula hissed at her sister now.
Libby’s gloved hand cupped the child’s ear as she brought her close against her hip. “Because they’re letting a certain someone out of jail today, Shula. And I’ll be damned if he’s going to hurt this little girl any more than he already has.”
“Oh.” Shula’s mouth closed with a smart little snap and her ringed fingers fluttered at the frilled throat of her gown as she dropped an almost sympathetic look on the child half-hidden in Libby’s skirt.
Gently Libby urged the little girl across the threshold and into the vestibule. “Go on up to the spare room, Andy. I’ll be up soon to get you settled.”
When the child nodded, blond hair straggled across her forehead. The sight provoked an instant cluck from Shula, whose hand whisked out to push the stray locks back.
She sighed wistfully. “Maybe while you’re here, Miss Amanda Rowan,” she said, emphasizing the feminine first name, “I’ll take my curling iron to that haystack on your pretty head.”
The child shot her a wounded look before turning to flee up the stairs. Shula winced at the sound of the big brogans thudding on each step.
“And maybe I’ll take that same curling iron to your tongue, Shulamith Kingsland.” Libby pulled the front door closed and turned the bolt. “There. Her father will have to crack through that to lay a finger on her now.”
As her older sister strode down the hallway toward the kitchen, Shula regarded the locked door. Lord, how she hated being cooped up in this dismal little house. First with her tight-lipped, stiff-boned sister, and now with a little girl who was trying with all her might to be a boy. Still, she thought, it didn’t hurt one bit that Libby was now as reluctant as she was to open the front door.
Libby! She was in the kitchen where Shula had tossed the unopened mail when she’d heard the carriage pulling up. The mail these days consisted mainly of overdue bills and disgusting letters from rude and impatient creditors, none of which she was anxious for her skinflint of a sister to see. Shula grabbed up her ruffled gown and rushed down the hall in Libby’s wake.
As she pulled the pins from her hat, Libby scowled at the stack of dishes in the dry sink, noting that it had grown considerably since she’d rushed out of the house this morning. Princess Shula, no doubt, had used a clean plate every time she passed through the kitchen. Of course, it had never occurred to her to do up any of them.
Still, fair was fair, and the dishes were Libby’s domain. They had agreed to that when they decided to use part of their small inheritance from their mother to buy and share a house. Shula, because she cared about money, would see to the bills and their investments. Libby would see to everything else, which meant she was cook, laundress, parlor maid and—judging now from the tower of dirty dishes in the dry sink—scullery maid.
Right this minute it felt closer to slavery, Libby thought as she tossed. her hat onto the table before sagging into a chair. She tugged off her gloves and tossed those, too, onto the stack of mail that Shula hadn’t bothered to open. Probably too busy taking clean plates from the cupboard and putting dirty ones in the sink.
Well, she didn’t have time to worry about Shula’s laziness right now. And she wasn’t going to let her sister’s comment about frustrated maternal instincts bother her, either. Amanda Rowan needed her help. Desperately. It was as simple as that.
A constable had brought the battered child to the Sisters of Charity on Christmas Eve, the same night they had locked John Rowan up for “doing his daughter wrong,” as the grim-faced policeman had explained. The extent of that abuse was obvious, even to the sheltered Sisters of Charity who
