or a misplaced paper.
Amelia was twenty. She had no experience of men. She was lovely enough to marry where she chose. But her father wanted to marry her to Alan Culhane, youngest son of the powerful west Texas Culhane ranching family. The Culhanes did not know what Hartwell was like away from the bank. There was always the risk that they would find out the hard way.
One time Amelia had been frightened enough to try to run away. One night in Atlanta, just before they moved to El Paso, he’d hit her viciously with a leather strap. She still shuddered, remembering what had happened. It was the only time she had reconsidered her decision to stick it out with Hartwell. But her father was in tears the next morning and she gave in and moved with him to Texas. Now, here in El Paso where Quinn was nearby, she felt more confident about her choice.
Amelia had idolized Quinn when she was a little girl. She still did. For all that they were four years apart in age, they looked like twins. Quinn had blond hair, the color of her own, and the same deep brown eyes, although his eyes looked almost black in anger. He had a straight, regal nose, and he was enormously tall. Amelia was only of average height, but she was slender and well made.
Quinn had finished college at the same time as his friend King Culhane, who was five years older than he but who had started college quite late in life. Amelia had only managed to finish high school. Her father felt that women should not be too intellectual, and he’d refused to let her seek higher education. What he didn’t know was that Quinn had schooled her in the classics and in languages, not only Greek and Latin, but French and Spanish as well.
She had a facility for languages, and she was fluent, but her father didn’t know. There was a lot about Amelia that he didn’t know, because she now kept one side of her complex personality carefully hidden. Her temper and spirit were submerged to prevent her father from flaring up when she displayed them. He seemed to grow worse daily. She had consulted a doctor about his headaches once and had been told that his mind might be permanently impaired and that he might even die one day of unseen injuries. The doctor had wanted to see Hartwell, but when Amelia gently suggested a meeting, Hartwell became so violent that she had to put a door between them. Since then she had been afraid to mention it again. Her father had high blood pressure in addition to his headaches, and she didn’t want to risk killing him.
Nor had she told Quinn her suspicions. He had cares of his own without being asked to bear hers as well.
She could shoot a gun; Quinn had taught her. She could ride a horse expertly, from an English saddle or a Western one. She had a mischievous sense of humor that popped out when she was in young company and relaxed. She could paint. But the face she deliberately presented to Alan and the rest of the Culhanes was necessarily a dull and lackluster one. To all appearances, she was a rather blank young woman with an absent smile, lovely but introverted and not very bright. Most of all, she was calm and never argued, so that her father would be calm as well.
Hartwell had forgotten the mischievous, fiery Amelia of years past, which suited her very well. Except that Alan Culhane seemed to like her this way, and that hadn’t been the idea of the masquerade at all.
In many ways, it was easier to cope with her father here on Latigo, the sprawling ranching empire owned by their host, Brant Culhane and his family. The Howards were in residence for a hunting party, and fortunately her father was more interested in sport than in his new passion for overseeing every aspect of Amelia’s life. He was taking medicine for the headaches and drinking very little. He didn’t want to alienate the man he was trying to lure into a business partnership, or the man he wanted Amelia to marry. So she was left to her own devices. Life was pleasant enough except for the one thorn in her side.
The friendship between the Howards and the Culhanes was a long-standing one, formed when Quinn was at college with the eldest son and heir. But it was the younger son, Alan, whom Hartwell Howard had chosen to marry Amelia. Alan didn’t know it yet. Amelia hoped he wouldn’t find out, because while she liked him, she had no desire to become his wife. Not when it would mean living in close proximity to him. The thorn. The serpent in paradise. She hated him. And loved him.
Amelia caught a movement out of the comer of her eye. As if she’d conjured him up, there he was. The thorn. He was approaching as she strolled quietly along the trail near the house, a small posy of wildflowers clutched in her slender hand. She winced with apprehension, because every encounter seemed more painful than the last.
His whole name was Jeremiah Pearson Culhane, but no one ever called him that. He was King Culhane, and all he lacked were the regal clothes and crown. He had the authority, the bearing, the menace of absolute power, and he used it. He didn’t need the prop of his impeccable European background, although it included several cousins from half the royal houses in Europe. He was simply King.
Seeing him dressed as he was now, it was difficult to think of him as a wealthy man. He was wearing the same working clothes that his cowhands wore: faded, stained jeans with flaring batwing chaparreros—the leather chaps that cowboys wore to deflect the vicious chaparral and cacti. His hat was a Stetson, black, wide-brimmed, with a simple leather hatband. His boots were misshapen from use and thick with mud. He wore a crumpled blue bandana around his neck, over a faded and worn chambray shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons on the cuffs and down the front. He carried a Winchester repeating rifle in a scabbard on his saddle. Most of the men did. There were some savage creatures in the wild, some with two legs instead of four.
King didn’t speak as he rode past Amelia. He didn’t even look at her. The silent treatment had gone on for a week—the entire length of time Amelia and her father had been visiting. He contrived to ignore her completely, even when the family was all together in the evenings. No one else noticed, but Amelia did.
From the very first time she’d seen him, when Quinn had brought him home from college to visit with the Howard family in Atlanta six years ago, she’d adored him. She’d only been fourteen, and her big, dark eyes had followed him lovingly. After that one time Quinn mostly went to Texas with King for visits, because King was oddly reluctant to visit the Howard household.
Alan had come to Atlanta for the twins’ funeral, but he’d gone on the train back that very day. King never came back again, because Quinn went to fight in Cuba and then moved to Texas.
Now of course by that time Amelia was the creature her father’s mercurial rages had made her. When she and her father had arrived at Latigo for the hunting trip, King quickly made his utter distaste for Amelia known. She’d overheard a scathing inventory of herself from him the day before. It had wounded her. He was a sophisticated, worldly man around whom beautiful women revolved like planets. For a rural man, he had something of a reputation with city women of a certain sort. Amelia had been disturbed by Quinn’s sometimes blatant stories about him after they left college. But one long look at him six years ago had been enough to change her life.
It hadn’t changed his. He never looked at her. He never spoke to her. He simply pretended not to see her.
Amelia wasn’t a violent woman, but she sometimes thought she would enjoy throwing a rock at him. Her own adopted persona had probably been her downfall where King was concerned. He took her at face value, as a nondescript woman with no brain, no personality, and no spirit, and he treated her that way. Nothing had ever hurt quite as much. Her soft eyes watched him ride away, tall and straight, almost a part of the horse. If only he could see past the mask she was forced to wear to keep peace with her father to the woman underneath. But there was no hope of that now. With a long, pained sigh, she turned back toward the house.
* * *
“You’re so quiet, my dear,” Enid Culhane prompted after dinner that evening. They were all sitting around the parlor, sipping coffee while they worked at new embroidery patterns together. The
