by Jodi Thomas
Two Texas Hearts
Jodi Thomas
Kora Adams doesn't believe in curses, but she has known nothing but bad luck all of her life. Until the night a handsome stranger knocks on her front door. Winter McQuillen has inherited a sprawling Texas ranch-but the only way he can claim it is to have a wife-this very night. Now, Kora has to make a choice-turn Winter out of her home or take a chance on the possibility of love.
Jodi Thomas
Two Texas Hearts
© 1997
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
GEORGE AND MAXINE KOUMALATS
50 YEARS TOGETHER
MAY YOUR LOVE LIVE FOREVER.
PROLOGUE
WINTER MCQUILLEN PLANTED HIS BOOTS FARTHER apart and adjusted the brim of his worn gray Stetson against the glare of the late afternoon sun. He stared down into the six-foot hole, dry-eyed and angry.
‘‘Lower the coffin,’’ he ordered, feeling the words tighten in his throat. ‘‘Let’s put the captain to rest before sundown.’’
‘‘Yes, Boss,’’ Logan Baker mumbled, around a wad of tobacco.
Winter didn’t move as several of his ranch hands followed his instructions. Then, hesitantly, each stepped away, allowing their boss room to say goodbye to Captain Russell for the last time.
Only Logan remained within the boundary of the small wrought-iron fenced cemetery with Winter. ‘‘He was like a father to you, Win,’’ Logan said. ‘‘We’ll all miss the old man, but he’s where he’d want to be, next to his Miss Allie.’’
Winter realized Logan hadn’t used the shortened version of his first name in more than a year. He’d been Winter as a boy, but as his height passed six feet, his name had been shortened to Win. Last year, when the captain’s health began to fail, Win had taken the reins of one of the biggest ranches in Texas without anyone saying a word. Logan, the oldest hand, had stood by his side and began calling him simply ‘‘Boss.’’ Everyone in Armstrong County knew the ranch would be Winter’s when the captain passed on. Everyone but Captain Russell, it seemed.
‘‘My father, an Irish trapper, died before I had more than a handful of memories of him.’’ Winter forced each word out as if needing to state the facts before rumors and legends got started. ‘‘My mother was killed in one of Custer’s raids into Indian Territory a few years after the War Between the States.’’
His words drifted across flat, frost-hardened land colored in shades of brown. ‘‘I ran away from the good people who’d offered to finish raising me, thinking I was old enough to make it on my own. Captain Russell found me in the back of one of his supply wagons coming in from Dallas a few months later. I thought he’d skin me alive for eating a bushel of his apples.’’
‘‘But he took you in and gave you a home.’’ Logan nodded as if proving some unspoken point. Logan had been around in those days, but paid little attention to the skinny half-Indian kid the captain spent most of his day issuing orders to.
Winter lowered his gaze, not wanting the other man to see the anger in his eyes. ‘‘If you call letting me sleep in the coldest corner of the bunkhouse and working me from dawn till dusk six days a week giving me a home, I guess he did.’’
Looking back at a time twenty years ago, Winter stared at the horizon. ‘‘I used to live all week for Sundays, when I’d get to go up to the big house and study all day from mail-order books with Miss Allie. She’d even insist that I eat meals with them, like I was somebody. But the captain never let me forget he thought I was nothing but half-breed trash who came in with the supplies. Once a month he’d pay me a man’s wages, then sell me an acre of land for the money.’’ Winter tightened an already rock-hard jaw as he continued, ‘‘About dark, he’d play me a game of checkers for the land, double or nothing. I was twelve before I won.’’
He pulled a checker from his leather vest pocket and tossed it on top of the casket. ‘‘I won all but the last twenty acres of this place. The captain never would play me for the square with the house on it. He always told me, ‘Don’t bet more than you’re willing to lose.’ I think the captain was never sure what I’d do if I won the house.’’
‘‘All the boys are guessing he left it to you in his will,’’ Logan mumbled. ‘‘You may not have noticed, but there wasn’t another human alive the captain cared about but you. I remember back in the blizzard of seventy-nine, he had everyone including the cook watching for you to come in off the open range. He was about ready to send every hand back out if you hadn’t come riding in when you did.’’
Winter shook his head. ‘‘He never cared about me, or gave me anything in life. Chances are he won’t in death, either. He was a hard, cold man who never cared about anyone, except maybe Miss Allie. He never gave me an inch. But don’t worry, whoever he willed the ranch house to, I’ll deal with-even if it’s the devil himself. Whoever it is couldn’t be any harder than the captain.’’
Logan watched in silence as Winter walked away. Somewhere inside the tall, powerful man was the little boy Logan had seen the captain shaking that night so many years ago. Winter had yelled that he was only seven, and the captain had shouted back for him never to tell folks what he ‘‘was only.’’ Winter had never given excuses after that night, or backed down from anyone, including the old man.
Lifting the shovel, Logan leaned against it. The new boss was wrong about one thing. There was a man harder than the captain. He was walking down the hill now toward the big house to hear the reading of the will. Not yet out of his twenties, Win McQuillen was harder than Captain Russell had managed to get in eighty years of rough living.
Logan shook his head, thinking of the will he’d witnessed one night over a year ago. Win was going to be madder than a rattler when he found out the captain left the twenty acres not to Winter McQuillen, but to his wife… a wife Win didn’t even have yet, but according to the will, had better find within a month.
ONE
‘‘I CAN’T JUST WALK INTO THE WIDOWS’ MEETING LIKE a beggar looking for a handout.’’ Winter shifted in the saddle and glared down at Logan, who was already hitching his horse to a rail. The banty rooster of a man had been pestering him all month, and now Logan had dragged him halfway across the county to a meeting.
‘‘This was a damn fool idea,’’ Winter mumbled. ‘‘They’ll laugh us into the next state.’’
Logan folded his spider-thin arms and waited for his boss to quit complaining.
Frustrated, Winter said, more to himself than the suddenly deaf Logan, ‘‘I’ve got diseased cattle from down south to worry about. This whole area is fixing to break into a battle. I don’t have time to go courting. Seems like blocking any herds to keep half of mine from dying is more important than dropping in on some ladies’ tea party.’’
‘‘You want to give up the prettiest twenty acres on your place, Boss?’’
‘‘I’ve never given up anything in my adult life!’’ Winter growled. He’d been hell-raising angry for a week after they’d read the will. Win had thought all he’d have to do was ride over to Tascosa and ask that pretty Mary Anna Monroe to marry him. She’d given him enough signs every time she was here visiting her kin. During the few socials he’d attended in the past five years, she’d made it plain she was interested in getting to know him better. Plus, the woman could talk ranching as good as any man he’d met when she wasn’t batting her eyes and acting coy.
But flirting was obviously one thing to Mary Anna, and marrying another. He would never forget standing in her aunt’s parlor like a greenhorn as Mary Anna not only turned him down but told him that she didn’t care how many miles of land he owned because everyone in the country knew he didn’t own a heart.
‘‘Well, if you’re not giving up’’-Logan spit a long line of brown fluid-‘
‘then you’d best get off that horse. Because according to the will, come sunup, if you ain’t married, the First Methodist Church gets that house and the twenty acres smack-dab in the middle of your spread.’’
‘‘The old man did this to me just to get the last laugh from the grave. He knew I never wanted a wife, any more than I’d stand for some preaching farmer living on my land.’’ Winter swung his long leg over the saddle, shoved his dark brown hair out of his eyes, and stepped to the gate. ‘‘Let’s get this over with, Logan. I’ll marry the devil’s sister to keep what’s mine. I swore once that no one would ever take anything from me as long as I live, and it’s time to make good on that promise no matter who I have to partner up with.’’
The two dust-covered cowmen walked to the side of the huge window of Widow Dooley’s home and looked in at the circle of women, mostly dressed in black. They were having tea, and though Armstrong County had little society, it was plain these ladies all considered themselves gentlewomen just by the way they held their china cups. Leaving a widow was a hard fact of life in this country. The society had started up about the same time as the cemetery.
‘‘Unless you’re looking for a schoolgirl, these are the only pickings for a hundred miles.’’
‘‘I’ll be twenty-eight this spring, and the last thing I want is some giggly girl running my house. A woman no more than five years my junior seems a good range. And a widow would be practical because she’d already know her duties.’’
Win stared into the room with the interest of a condemned man asked to choose a rope. Half the women looked old enough to be his mother. Two others he couldn’t imagine ever being lucky enough to find one man to outlive. One was young, but outweighed him by double, at least, and the last was tall, well-proportioned… and toothless.
‘‘Well?’’ Logan’s bushy eyebrows danced up and down. ‘‘Which one will it be, Win?’’
‘‘I had no idea the devil had so many sisters.’’ Winter squinted hard, as if he could improve the looks of the group. ‘‘Are there no others?’’
‘‘None.’’ Logan shook his head. ‘‘Every widow in Armstrong County is here tonight except Mrs. Adams. She keeps to herself out on that little farm by Saddleback Ridge. It wouldn’t even be proper for her to make the widows’ meeting for at least another month… not that she’d likely come anyway, being new in town and all. Most of the farmers’ wives don’t get into town much. She’d be about the right age, though, if you had the time to wait for her to finish grieving.’’
‘‘How’d he die? Not poisoning, I hope.’’
‘‘Who?’’ Logan carefully looked over each woman in the room as if the choice were his.
‘‘Mrs. Adams’s husband.’’
‘‘He was killed in a stage robbery, I heard. Not too long after they was married. She’s been trying to run the place, but without money to hire help, she’s not having much luck. Talk is, he wasn’t much of farmer. I remember seeing him a few times. Didn’t seem like much of a man, either. Since his place is between ours and town, he used to run deliveries for us once in a while. Folks wondered why he even wanted a wife, unless maybe he thought she’d come with a little money to help get his place going. He always seemed long on lazy and short on sense, but he did all right picking a wife.’’
‘‘What does she look like?’’ Winter started moving toward his horse, already making up his mind. ‘‘Does she have all her teeth?’’
Logan tried to stop him, but the little man’s arm wasn’t quick enough, so he hurried to catch up to his boss. ‘‘She’s just a mouse of a woman I’ve seen a few times. Not so pretty you’d remember or so ugly you’d need to forget. But you can’t ride out there. Pick one of these, Boss. These are ranchers’ widows. They know the life better. I doubt Mrs. Adams would marry a man this soon after her husband’s death even if the fellow were a farmer and someone she’d known for years. It wouldn’t be right.’’
Winter swung into the saddle. ‘‘I’ll take a slip of a woman before I’ll be strapped to any one of those crows for life. And she’ll say yes if I have to promise her the moon.’’
‘‘But, Boss?’’ Logan spat a stream of tobacco as though just the thought of approaching a newly widowed woman left a bad taste in his mouth.
‘‘Get the preacher and meet me at the ranch in an hour.’’ Winter didn’t give Logan any more time to argue as he rode off toward Saddleback Ridge. He’d talk Mrs. Adams into marrying him, then he’d live with a shadow roaming around the captain’s huge house. If she was as mousy as Logan thought, he’d hardly notice her. And as far as Winter was concerned, that would make her the perfect wife.
TWO
KORA ADAMS FOLDED AWAY THE CLOTHES SHE’D FOUND in Andrew Adams’s trunk. ‘‘Six months,’’ she whispered. Six months since she’d read another woman’s letter at the mercantile and decided to meet a stage. Six months since she’d watched them lift Andrew Adams’s bloody body out of the coach. He’d thought he was coming to Bryan to meet a woman he’d married by proxy. Instead, a stage robber had put four bullets in him, and the woman was long gone with another.
Pushing away the tears, Kora whispered again, ‘‘We were meant to marry, Andrew Adams and I. We have the same bad luck.’’ She hadn’t even known the man, but she had the proxy letter and he had a farm. It was so simple to step forward as the bride of a dying man. No one questioned. No one checked the name on the paper. Her luck hadn’t changed, though. The farm wasn’t Andrew’s, but the bank’s. She’d brought her brother and sister across Texas to starve. Jamie once said they were nothing but weeds in life’s garden. Nothing but weeds.
Kora glanced at her brother, Dan, sleeping in the chair by the fire, and wished as she had a million times before that he had really come back to them from the war. He’d been only fourteen when their father was killed. He had enlisted all excited and ready to fight. Only two years later they brought him home in the back of a wagon. He hadn’t said a word since.
‘‘I promised Mother I’d take care of you and Jamie,’’ Kora whispered, knowing he didn’t hear her. ‘‘I promised and I’m doing a terrible job.’’
Her great idea of marrying and running the farm after Andrew died seemed insane now as she looked around the shabby little one-room cabin that no amount of scrubbing could ever make clean. She’d always been the planner, the organizer, the leader who sacrificed for the others. She had always done whatever was necessary to keep them together, but this time the witchin’ luck that her mother said followed her seemed to be smothering them.
The sound of an approaching rider pulled Kora from her worries. She shoved Andrew Adams’s clothes back in the trunk and quickly added her cigar box full of keys to the chest before closing it. The keys inside the box fit nothing. Just as she seemed to. Even her mother thought the world was over because of Dan. It never mattered that she had two other children. She’d given them nothing, not even her love after Dan returned.
That was when Kora began to collect keys. They were her only treasure for as long as she could remember. Once in a while she found another in the dirt and built the room it would fit in her mind. She cleaned the key up carefully to add to her collection, as though someday she might stumble across the lock her key would fit.
Quickly Kora moved to the door.
But before she could reach the latch, someone pounded loud enough to shake the walls of the small cabin that had been half built, half dug from a rise in the ground.
‘‘Yes?’’ Kora asked as she opened the door, expecting to see one of the neighbors.
‘‘Mrs. Adams?’’
A tall man removed his hat. He was dark-headed with sharp features and a mustache that hid his upper lip. The smell of leather and dust seemed layers thick between them. She could hear the heavy breathing of his mount only a few feet behind him and the soft jingle of his spurs as he shifted impatiently. He wore a jacket of wool, but his vest was leather. Leather was also strapped around his lean, powerful legs all the way past the top of
his muddy boots. Kora stepped backward, trying to hide her fright. She’d seen the cattlemen in town. They always wore Stetson hats, leather, and spurs on their boots. But they’d never looked quite so frightening as this one, with his wide shoulders and gun strapped low across his hip. He seemed born to wear a holster.
‘‘Mrs. Adams?’’ he asked again in a voice that rumbled like echoing thunder.
‘‘Yes,’’ she whispered and tried to pull her terror under control. If he’d come to kill her, he’d have little trouble doing so. She barely reached his shoulder, and he looked strong enough to snap her bones in half with one twist. She didn’t dare scream for Jamie, or they might both die. Dan would be no help even if he awoke-which was unlikely.
‘‘May I come in?’’ The stranger slapped his dusty hat against his leg.
Kora let out a breath. If he were going to murder her, he’d hardly be asking permission to enter. A man whose Colt was worth more than everything in her dugout cabin wouldn’t need to rob her.
Moving to the table, Kora turned her back to the stranger as she lit the lantern, burning precious oil. ‘‘If you’ve come about the horse and wagon for sale, you’ll have to return in the morning. I have no way of showing them to you in the dark.’’
Winter stooped slightly and moved into the cabin. Her face had been in shadows when she’d answered the door, and now she had her back to him.
‘‘I didn’t come about the horse,’’ Winter said, wishing she’d turn around. ‘‘You’re small. Logan didn’t say anything about you being so tiny.’’
She turned to face him then, her pale blue eyes huge with fright as her hands knotted around her black shawl. ‘‘I’m not tiny.’’
Forcing her voice not to shake, she added, ‘‘You’re the one who doesn’t fit through the door.’’ He was so tall his hair almost brushed the ceiling.