“This is why I didn’t tell you sooner—about my consumption, about the business deal, about any of it.” Blue tinged Pa’s lips, and he struggled to suck in a breath, yet he pressed on. “You’ve become so high-handed and controlling since Abigail died that people can’t deal with you anymore. I might be dying, but my business sense is still as good as it ever was. And I didn’t do anything that compromises the ranch. The Mortimers are only part owners if we fail to get them the money. Bet you a hundred dollars that you’re angrier I didn’t let you control every last wisp of this deal than that I made it.”
“I’m angry because you made a deal that will cost us so dearly. Where are we going to get that much money to buy into the railroad? You know full well we don’t have enough cash for this in the bank.” They were either going to have to sell off a large part of their herd or some of their stocks.
“That’s precisely why Charles and I were so interested in making sure our families would be joined before signing such an agreement.” Pa took out a clean handkerchief and dabbed at the sweat beaded along his forehead. “Also, since you’re my only male child, and Andrew is Charles’s only child, there are contingencies for who’s to inherit both the railroad shares and the A Bar W if either you or Andrew die prematurely.”
“Is there anything about me in there?” Charlotte’s voice had gone quiet. “Do we lose part of the ranch if I don’t marry Andrew?”
“No. But if Wes here dies before he gets remarried and has a son, the ranch will default to Andrew’s offspring. You and Mariah won’t get a penny. And don’t go telling me I can’t make such an arrangement. I signed the deal just before Andrew and Charles went upstairs to the ball.”
“I can’t believe you!” Charlotte’s eyes burned with fury. “All this time, I thought you wanted what was best for me. Andrew was supposed to be what was best for me. But you were only manipulating me. You didn’t care about me nearly as much as you cared about becoming an owner in the railroad.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. How else do you explain this business deal? Do you even care if I’ll be happy with the person I marry?”
“You don’t have to marry him because of it, Charlie. I’m sure we can get the contract renegotiated.” Wes flipped through the top couple papers, then narrowed his eyes at Pa. “Or maybe we can get the whole thing voided on the grounds that our dying father wasn’t mentally competent when he’d signed it.”
“Having a cough every now and then doesn’t mean I’ve lost my mind.”
“Then it must mean you’ve lost all good judgment. Who does this?” Wes slammed the contract down on the desk. “I’ve been running the ranch for over a year with little to no input from you, all because you said it was time I started taking things over. Then you go and make a deal like this behind my back?”
“I’m still the legal owner. Everything pertaining to this ranch and property is in my name, not yours.”
He’d have the contract renegotiated as soon as Pa died—if the Mortimers were willing to renegotiate, that was.
But if they wouldn’t renegotiate, or if Pa lived several more months and remained this stubborn about sticking to the deal…
Wes scrubbed a hand over his face. He was going to have to sell cattle. Cattle he didn’t want to let go of because he’d been breeding his very best cows with his prize bull for a few years now and was hoping to develop an elite market. He’d bet his saddle he could get men like the Mortimers and their citified friends to spend five dollars on a steak if they knew it was going to be tender enough to practically fall away from the knife. But much like Charlotte with her horses, a prestigious breeding operation took time to refine.
He didn’t know whether to be furious or heartbroken. Pa looked so frail and gaunt hunched over his desk that his chair seemed to swallow him. Was the doctor right about how long Pa had left to live? It seemed impossible that he was down to counting the weeks and days of his father’s life rather than months and years.
“I don’t care what you say. Charlotte still needs to marry Andrew.” Pa raised his head long enough to glare at her.
Charlotte gave her head a defiant shake. “I won’t.”
“Don’t listen to him.” Wes settled a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to marry someone you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with. You should have at least that much of a say in your future.”
“The real reason I considered marrying Andrew was because I thought I had to marry right away… because… because of what happened with Robbie Ashton.”
“Robbie Ashton?” Wes scratched the side of his head. He could barely speak the boy’s name without exploding. Robbie might be Abigail’s younger brother, but he’d fallen in with rustlers and had hired on as a ranch hand for the sole purpose of stealing cattle from the A Bar W. “What does that outlaw have to do with anything?”
“I… I…” Charlotte slumped into one of the chairs opposite Pa’s desk and fiddled with the sash tied about her waist. “You see, I knew Pa wanted me to marry this spring. He kept dropping hints.”
“I was dying.” A cough rattled Pa’s chest, but it stopped before turning into another attack. “Like I said, nothing wrong with a dying man wanting to see his daughter settled.”
“I knew I wouldn’t want to marry whomever you picked, so I decided to find a husband on my own. Someone who didn’t make me nervous, someone I could see myself living with on the desert.”
“Not someone you loved.” It wasn’t ideal, but Wes couldn’t blame Charlotte for that choice. He’d done the same thing when he posted his ad for a mail-order bride.
A long, winding story poured out of her. She told them about how she easily expected to marry Sam Owens, not realizing that he’d already made arrangements to bring Ellie to Twin Rivers. After that, she’d turned her sights to Robbie Ashton, not knowing he was only interested in distracting her so he could steal cattle.
She kept her head down and shoulders hunched, and her fingers nervously picked at the sash on her dress as she told them what had happened. Gone was the elegant, confident woman who had floated around the dance floor with half of Twin Rivers earlier.
“I feel like the lost cattle are all my fault.” Charlotte twisted her hands together. “Daniel says Robbie still would have found a way to steal them, with or without using my feelings to distract me, but maybe I would have noticed things were amiss sooner, or maybe—”
“This is exactly why I need to pick a husband for you.” Pa jabbed a finger at her. “You’re too innocent to tell when a man is trying to use you.”
“Don’t be so hard on her, Pa. Robbie fooled all of us.” Wes rubbed his eye with his palm, then turned to his sister. “Charlie, did Robbie compromise you?”
Her face blanched, and Wes blew out a breath. He felt like a heel for asking, but he needed to know.
“We kissed.” She went back to fiddling with the sash tied about her waist. At this rate, she’d have the stitching that held it in place pulled out by the time she left Pa’s office. “But kissing was the worst of it.”
“And why should we believe that?” Pa barked. “Seems like you haven’t been honest about much of anything lately.”
“I believe her.” Wes glared at their father. His illness seemed to have stripped the last bit of civility from him.
Two stark splotches of red appeared high on Charlotte’s cheeks. “You can believe me, because Robbie was too disgusted by me to force himself to do anything more than kiss.”
Silence filled the room. Strains of music from the party above filtered down through the ceiling, punctuated by the soft ticking of the wall clock behind them. Pa glowered at Charlotte, who kept her head bent, though she still couldn’t stop herself from fidgeting.
“What changed?” Wes finally asked.
“What do you mean?” Charlotte didn’t bother to look at him as she spoke.
“With the way you ended the story, you should be wearing Andrew’s ring right now. What changed that
you turned down his proposal?”
“It’s not turned down yet,” Pa spat. “Not officially. If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll march back out to that ballroom and accept him.”
“I…” Charlotte’s gaze fell back to her lap and she licked her lips. “I realized that I had feelings for someone else. And by that, I don’t mean I could simply see myself sharing a house with him and being content on the desert. I mean real feelings, like the way you felt about Abigail.”
Something inside his chest ached. He didn’t need her to tell him whom she felt so strongly about. He’d wondered since she’d visited his room to ask if he’d had any reservations before marrying Abigail, but Daniel walking through the door with a cactus earlier had left him with no doubt.
“See, Pa. Charlie’ll have that wedding. It just won’t be to Andrew Mortimer.”
“No!” Charlotte bolted from the chair. “The man I feel that way about… he… he doesn’t feel the same in return.”
Wes had seen the look on Daniel’s face when he’d brought that cactus into his office. Daniel had feelings for Charlotte, whether he wanted to admit to them or not.
“Does this man have a name?” A cough rattled Pa’s chest. “Does he own a company? Land? What type of man is he?”
“The type that’s honorable, loyal, and dependable.” Though Wes spoke to his father, he met his sister’s gaze. “You couldn’t find a better match for Charlie if you searched the entire country.”
Pa rapped his fist on the desk, then pushed himself out of his chair, a wheezing breath rattling his lungs. “Then let’s go talk to him.”
“It’s Daniel Harding,” Charlotte whispered. “And he’s already left for the night.”
The smile dropped from Pa’s face. “He doesn’t have two pennies to rub together.”
“I’m sure he has two pennies,” Charlotte protested. “He just doesn’t have enough money to impress you.”
Pa dabbed at his sweaty hairline with his handkerchief. “You wouldn’t be happy with him.”
“But I would!”
“No, you wouldn’t. Even if the man has a bit of money tucked away, he doesn’t have an ounce of land for you to run your horses on, and he sure doesn’t have enough money to buy you more Arabians. You might start your wedding off happy, but it wouldn’t last more than a month.”
“I…” Defiance flashed in her eyes. She wanted to say something to defend Daniel. Wes could feel it radiating off every inch of her stiffly-poised muscles. But the tension soon drained away, leaving her pale and looking shaken enough Pa may as well have walked around the desk and slapped her. “I never thought about the horses.”
Of course she hadn’t. As much as Charlotte didn’t crave money and fine things, she’d also never been in a position where she had to choose between wealth and something she loved before. “You can board them here.”
“For a fee,” Pa snapped.
“Don’t listen to him.” A few more weeks and Pa wouldn’t have any say whatsoever about what happened on the A Bar W.
Charlotte dropped back into her chair, head down and shoulders hunched.
“Charlie…” Wes moved to her and leaned down, waiting for her to look up at him before he said more. “No one’s going to make you give up your horses if you marry Daniel.”
“I don’t even know why we’re talking about this. It’s not like the horses are why I can’t marry him. He doesn’t love me the way I love him… none of them ever do.”
Something in his heart pinched. Did she truly think so little of herself? She was easy to love. Steady, dependable, kind—all things he thought in his head, but never remembered to tell her.
Maybe that explained why she’d been so quick to create a life for herself with a man of Pa’s choosing rather than come to him with her troubles.
“I doubt that’s it. I think Daniel’s feelings for you run deep.”
But Daniel wasn’t a fool, and if his feelings for Charlotte were as serious as Wes suspected, then he’d probably realized long ago Charlotte wouldn’t be able to breed horses if she married him.
And yes, the man had enough honor to refuse Charlotte over such a thing.
Which meant Wes needed to find a way for Charlie to both keep her horses and marry Daniel—and something told him letting Charlotte board the Arabians at the A Bar W wasn’t going to be enough to convince Daniel he’d be able to provide for Charlotte long term.
24
Daniel slid along the back of the warm rock, his eyes riveted to the three men clustered around the campfire in the distance. The desert stretched between his hiding place and the others, the shadowed darkness of night wrapping its grip around the occasional cactus and shrub dotting the landscape. Behind the men, the wall of cliffs that formed the entrance to Closed Canyon jutted up from the desert, a towering, shadowy ridge cloaked in a mixture of darkness and silvery moonlight.
Given the small fire that lit the three men’s silhouetted forms and the light of the full moon, Daniel could easily make the group out. The trouble was, men sitting by a campfire didn’t prove anything illegal, even if it was an odd time of night for them to be up and about.
Was Cain right? Had he walked himself into a trap?
If it was a trap, then the men around the fire didn’t seem too interested in trapping him.
A gust of wind brushed over the desert, ruffling the hair peeking out from beneath his hat brim.
Maybe Aimes or Lenard Cunningham had found something more interesting where they were hiding. The three of them had split up hours ago, Aimes and Cunningham staying on the east side of the canyon’s entrance while Daniel had gone to the west side.
What time was it? He’d been staked out here when the men had ridden in, but he’d already tried checking his timepiece, and he couldn’t make out the clockface in the darkness. Was it past two a.m. and the person who’d written the note had wanted him to see men at a campfire? They all might be wanted criminals, though Daniel had no way of telling that short of walking up and asking their names.
Maybe others were coming to meet the men at the campfire, with cattle, perhaps? And they weren’t expected to reach the canyon until two.
Then again, it could be well past two already, but what if the others were running late?
Daniel clenched his jaw. So many questions and so few answers. He’d never liked this part of lawman work, but tonight was proving to be the worst patrol of his life. Too many hours to sit in the quiet and think about Charlotte, about the hope in her eyes when she asked him if he had feelings for her, the look on her face when he’d left.
Why, oh why, had he let himself kiss her? How was he supposed to get the taste of her lips and memory of her soft body pressed against his out of his mind?
Dear God, help me. And he wasn’t praying for help with the men by the fire. I know I need to let her go. I know I need to move on. You have a plan for my life that doesn’t include Charlotte Westin, but I have no idea how to go forward without her. Guide me. Show me the—
A gunshot echoed over the desert.
Daniel jolted, his heart pounding against his chest. Had Harvey fired at the men for some reason?
He scrambled to the side of the rock and looked. No one appeared to be hit by a bullet…
And none of the men seemed to know where the shot had come from. They all stood, pistols in hand, waiting for something more to happen.
Daniel slid his hand down and gripped the butt of his own pistol.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” a low voice said from behind him.
He whipped around, but before he could catch a glimpse of whoever had crept up behind him, something cold and hard slammed into his temple.
Pain radiated through his head, but he kept his hand on his gun as he flew sideways with the force of the hit.
Then his head slammed into the rock he’d been hiding behind, and his world went black.
Charlotte shifted, rolling from one side of the bed to the other for probably the fifteen
th time that night. If only she could clear her head, maybe she could find a modicum of sleep. But images kept flooding her mind.
The tenderness in Daniel’s eyes just before he bent to kiss her. The hardness that had come over his face after he realized what he’d done.
Andrew standing on the rocky outcropping, his face hopeful as he held out the ring he’d chosen for her.
Father’s mottled skin as he told Wes he was dying.
He’d manipulated her. He’d led her to believe she was doing both him and Wes a favor by keeping quiet about his tuberculosis so that he could get everything ready for Wes to inherit the ranch. But the real reason he’d wanted her secrecy was because he hadn’t wanted Wes to know about the deal he was making with the Mortimers.
Tears stung her eyes. She knew her father could be harsh and a bit too driven at times, but he’d never blatantly deceived her before. She wasn’t even sure if she could trust anything he’d said about Andrew. Had the idea of them having a happy future together in San Antonio all been a lie?
Charlotte rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. She probably needed to find a way to forgive Pa, but at the moment, his betrayal just hurt.
“When?” A voice sounded from the corridor.
Wes, perhaps?
Another voice answered, its tone too soft and low for her to make out the words.
Charlotte rolled toward the wall and pressed her eyes shut. Surely she was only a minute or two away from falling asleep.
“Tell me everything.” Wes’s voice again, loud and clear, as though he wasn’t even trying to be quiet. “Is he expected to live?”
She sat up. Had her brother just asked whether someone was dying? She pushed herself out of bed and grabbed her robe. Was Pa about to pass? Was he having a coughing fit that he couldn’t recover from?
Wrapping her robe around her, she padded across the floor on her bare feet and opened the door.
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