reached out to lay a hand on her shoulder, but she shrank from him.
“Lizzie,” he whispered.
She turned on her heel, fled to her grandfather. Angus put an arm around the child and glowered at Holt. The old man looked like Zeus himself, shooting thunderbolts from his eyes.
“Hell,” Holt muttered, and started for the barn.
His brothers fell in beside him, their faces hard. Holt lengthened his stride, but they stuck to his heels like barn muck. Stubborn cusses, cut from the same itchy cloth as their pa, every one of them.
“What the hell is going on here?” Rafe snarled. The firstborn of Angus’s three younger sons, Rafe was a bull of a man, and always the first to demand an accounting. He and Kade and Jeb formed a semicircle in front of Holt, barring his way into the barn, where his horse was stabled, blissfully unaware of the long, arduous ride ahead.
Holt might have shoved his way through, if he hadn’t figured that would lead to a fight. He wasn’t afraid of tangling, but a brawl would mean a delay, and the need to get where he was going made an urgent clench in the pit of his belly.
He pulled out the crumpled letter, thrust into his vest pocket earlier, and shoved it at Kade, who happened to be the one standing directly in front of him. “See for yourself,” he said.
Kade scanned the page, while Jeb and Rafe peered at it from either side.
“I’ll saddle your horse,” Kade said, handing it back. He was the middle brother, the thoughtful, practical one.
“Best pack yourself some of that wedding grub, too, for the trail.”
“Have a word with Lizzie before you go, Holt,” Rafe interjected. “She doesn’t look like she’s taking this real well.”
“I could ride along,” Jeb put in, with typical eagerness. The youngest of the brood, he was also the fastest gun, and hands-down the best rider. Jeb was handy to have around in a tight place, for those reasons and a few others, but the plain and simple truth was that Holt didn’t want to have to look out for him. He wasn’t fool enough to say so, though.
He might have grinned, if he hadn’t just humiliated a fine woman and learned that two of the best friends he’d ever had were in trouble. Jeb had a wife to look after, and a baby daughter, barely walking. Rafe and Kade were in the same situation, since all three of their brides had managed to come a-crop with babies a year ago last Independence Day.
“This is my fight,” Holt said. “I’ll handle it.”
Rafe looked thoughtful. “John Cavanagh. That’s the man who raised you, isn’t it?”
Holt nodded, though Rafe’s assessment didn’t begin to cover what Cavanagh meant to him. “He’s got a spread outside San Antonio.”
“And this Gabe yahoo…?” Jeb fished. “Who’s he?”
“We were Rangers together,” Holt explained. Gabe Navarro was a wild man—part Comanche, part Mexican, part devil—but he was neither a murderer nor a horse thief. Holt had known him too long and too well ever to believe either accusation.
Apparently satisfied, Kade headed into the barn to get Holt’s horse, Traveler, ready.
Rafe and Jeb went to the feast table and commenced gathering food for the journey. Holt looked for Lizzie and found her still in Angus’s arms, her head resting against the old man’s broad shoulder.
“Here, now,” Angus murmured, giving his eldest son an unfriendly but resigned glance as Holt approached. “You talk to your papa, Lizzie-beth. It’s no good parting without saying what needs to be said.”
Lizzie sniffled, raised her head, and met Holt’s gaze.
Angus squeezed her upper arm, then favoring Holt with a withering glare, he walked away.
“Are you coming back?” Lizzie wanted to know.
“Yes,” Holt said, with certainty. He wasn’t through with Texas—he’d left too many things undone there—but in the deepest part of his heart, he knew the Arizona Territory and the Triple M were home. He belonged on this stretch of red, rocky dirt, with his impossible father, his rowdy brothers and his spirited daughter.
She dashed at her face with the back of one hand. “You promise?”
“You have my word.”
“What if you can’t come home? What if somebody shoots you?”
“I will come back, Lizzie.”
“I guess I have to believe you.”
He chuckled, extended an arm. Lizzie hesitated, then curled against his chest, clinging a little. “You be a good girl,” he said, resting his chin on top of her dark head, wishing he didn’t have to leave her behind. “Mind Concepcion and your grandfather.”
She trembled, tugged a cherished blue ribbon from her hair and tucked it into Holt’s vest pocket. “A remembrance,” she said softly, and Holt’s heart ached. Before he could find words to assure his daughter that forgetting her would be impossible, she went on, “Are you going to visit Mama’s grave? She’s buried in San Antonio, in the cemetery behind Saint Ambrose’s.”
He nodded, still choked up. Lizzie’s mother, Olivia, was part of the unfinished business waiting for him in Texas. He needed to say a proper goodbye to her, put her to rest in his mind and his heart, even though it was too late for her to hear the words.
“Will you take her flowers—the best you can find—for me?”
Holt’s throat still wouldn’t open. He nodded again.
Lizzie stared into his face, looking, perhaps, for the half-truths people tell to children, or even a bold-faced lie. Finding only truth, she straightened her shoulders and hoisted her chin.
“All right, then,” she said. “I guess you’d better ride while there’s still enough daylight to see the trail.”
He smiled, cupped her chin in one hand. “Don’t eat too much cake,” he said.
Her eyes glistened with tears. “Don’t get yourself shot,” she countered.
And that was their farewell.
Lizzie was a woman-child, with the run of one of the biggest ranches in the Arizona Territory. She could already ride like a pony soldier, and Kade’s wife, Mandy, a sharpshooter, had taught her niece to handle a shotgun as well as a side arm. Lizzie had lost her mother to a fever and seen her aunt murdered in cold blood alongside a stagecoach. She knew only too well that life was fragile, the world was a dangerous place and that some partings were permanent.
This one wouldn’t be, Holt promised himself as he rode out, Lizzie’s ribbon in his pocket.
CHAPTER 2
San Antonio, Texas, August 25
THE WEDDING DRESS was a voluminous cloud of silk and tulle, billowing
