Texas Proud and Circle of Gold

by Diana Palmer

  The man pushed the bouquet toward Gil hesitantly and with a smile that seemed both hesitant and uncertain. “Congratulations,” he said.

  “From both of us,” the woman added.

  They both stood there, waiting.

  As Gil searched for words, there was movement behind him and Kasie came to the door in the flowered cotton muu-muu she’d bought for the trip, her long chestnut hair disheveled, smiling broadly.

  “Hello!” she exclaimed, going past Gil to hug the woman and then the man, who both flushed. “I’m so glad you could come!”

  Gil stared at her. “What?”

  “I phoned them,” she told him, clasping his big hand in hers. “They said they’d like to come over and have lunch with us, and I told them to come today. But I overslept,” she added, and flushed.

  “It’s your honeymoon, you should oversleep,” Gil’s mother, Magdalene, said gently. She looked at her son nervously. “We wanted to come to the wedding,” she said. “But we didn’t want to, well, ruin the day for you.”

  “That’s right,” Jack Callister agreed gruffly. “We haven’t been good parents. At first we were too irresponsible, and then we were too ashamed. Especially when Douglas took you in and we lost touch.” He shrugged. “It’s too late to start over, of course, but we’d sort of like to, well, to get to know you and John. And the girls, of course. That is, if you, uh, if you...” He shrugged.

  Kasie squeezed Gil’s hand, hard.

  “I’d like that,” he said obligingly.

  Their faces changed. They beamed. For several seconds, they looked like silver-haired children on Christmas morning. And Gil realized with stark shock that they were just that—grown-up children without the first idea of how to be parents. Douglas Callister had kept the boys, and he hadn’t approved of his brother Jack, so he hadn’t encouraged contact. Since the elder Callisters didn’t know how to approach their children directly, they lost touch and then couldn’t find a way to reach them at all.

  He looked down at Kasie, and it all made sense. She’d tied the loose ends up. She’d gathered a family back together.

  She squeezed Gil’s hand again, looking up at him with radiant delight. “We could get dressed and meet them in the restaurant. After we put these in water,” she added, hugging the bouquet to her heart and sniffing them. “I’ve never had orchids in my life,” she said with a smile. “Thank you!”

  Magdalena laughed nervously. “No, Kasie. Thank you.”

  “We’ll get dressed and meet you in about fifteen minutes, in the restaurant,” Gil managed to say.

  “Great!” Jack said. He took his wife’s hand, and they both smiled, looking ten years younger. “We’ll see you there!”

  The door closed and Gil looked down at Kasie with wonder.

  “I thought they might like to visit us at the ranch next month, too,” Kasie said, “so they can get to know the babies.”

  “You’re amazing,” he said. “Absolutely amazing!”

  She fingered the necklace K.C. had given her at the wedding. “I like miracles, don’t you?”

  He burst out laughing. He picked her up and swung her around in an arc while she squealed and held on to her bouquet tightly. He put her down gently and kissed her roughly.

  “I love you,” he said huskily.

  She grinned. “Yes, and see what it gets you when you love people? You get all sorts of nice surprises. In fact,” she added with a mischievous grin, “I have all sorts of surprises in store for you.”

  He took a deep breath and looked at her with warm affection. “I can hardly wait.”

  She kissed him gently and went to dress. She gave a thought to Gil’s Darlene, and to her own parents, and her lost twin and his family, and hoped that they all knew, somehow, that she and Gil were happy and that they had a bright future with the two little girls and the children they would have together. As she went to the closet to get her dress, her eyes were full of dreams. And so were Gil’s.

  * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Wyoming True by Diana Palmer.

  New York Times bestselling author

  Diana Palmer

  An opposites-attract love may be in store for a gruff rancher and a small-town beauty in a brand-new Wyoming Men romance.

  “Palmer is back with a flirtatious and fun installment of the Wyoming Men series.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Wyoming Winter

  Order your copy today!

  www.HQNBooks.com

  Wyoming True

  by Diana Palmer

  CHAPTER ONE

  JAKE MCGUIRE WAS happy for Mina. She’d married a Texan, Cort Grier, who turned out to be a wealthy cattle baron; quite a surprise when she’d known him only as a working cowboy who was helping out on his cousin Bart Riddle’s ranch outside Catelow, Wyoming.

  It had been an odd love story. Mina was a famous author of romance novels, who actually went on commando missions with a bunch of mercenaries who’d taken her under their wing for research. Cort Grier hadn’t known that. But he was wearing a mask, too, pretending to be a poor cowboy. It was only after she’d married him that she knew who he really was. And he found out about her profession in a totally unexpected way, when she went to live on his ranch and her mercenary group helped round up a gang of drug smugglers on the border of his property. Many adjustments had been made, but the two seemed destined for happiness. They had a brand-new son named Jeremiah, and while Mina kept the family ranch in Catelow, which her father was now managing, she lived with Cort and Jeremiah at Cort’s enormous family ranch, Latigo, in West Texas.

  Jake was glad for her. But he was miserable. He’d had a real case on her, and it had hurt to realize that even his own wealth and status wasn’t enough to attract her. It was the first time in his life that he’d ever been truly smitten with a woman, and she turned out to be in love with someone else.

  Well, he could go back to the cattle station he shared with Mina’s cousin Rogan in Australia, but fires in the outback were seriously impacting their vast herds of cattle. Along with hundreds of wildfires, many set deliberately, there was drought and lack of feed. Rogan had already mentioned that they’d have to sell off a lot of their purebred stock to break even. Jake had come back to the States to help get their finances on target and send assistance to get the fires out on the large property and the surviving livestock shipped to a safer location.

  The wildfires had hit Rogan even harder than Jake. Mina’s cousin loved the Australian property. He owned a big ranch outside Catelow, as well, but he hated snow, so he only came home in warm months, leaving his manager in charge. Well, unless Jake was there to hold the reins.

  Less and less did Jake like being out of the country. He missed Catelow. While he was squiring Mina Michaels around town and to various far-flung five-star restaurants in other states, he’d become accustomed to being back in the States. He was reluctant to leave the country.

  Stupid, really, because he’d lost Mina and he had no other female interests here. He sipped coffee in the café and glared into the cup. He felt more alone than he had since the deaths of his parents long ago. He was an only child. There had been an older brother, who’d died tragically, but no other siblings. He missed his mother, although he never spoke of his father. He had no family left.

  He’d have loved a child. The thought of it had sustained him while he was courting Mina, hoping against hope that he could win out over the Texas rancher. But that hadn’t happened. He was nursing a broken heart and trying not to let it show. Meanwhile, the social lions of Catelow, especially Pam Simpson, had been pouncing, trying to set him up with widows and divorcées. He had no interest in any of the local women now. He’d had his share of brief affairs, but he felt jaded, used. Women wanted what he had. He could, and did, bestow his favors generously on the women he dated. Diamonds, five-star hotels and restaurants, travels abroad on
his own private jet. But more and more, he felt he was buying them. Or, he thought facetiously, renting them.

  He made a sound deep in his throat as the thought processed, drawing an interested glance from people at the counter waiting for orders to take out.

  One of them was glaring. That local divorcée, Ida Merridan. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Short, thick black hair, blue eyes, impossibly long eyelashes and a killer figure. The problem with her was that she was promiscuous, he thought irritably. Everybody knew she collected men like dolls and tossed them aside when she’d had her fill. She was twice married, gossip said. Her first husband had died, but nobody knew about the second husband, except that she’d divorced him. Cort Grier had dated her before he became entangled with Mina. He’d seen them on a dance floor, glued to each other at a party, and they left together. They’d dated often while he was in town. So presumably the cattle baron had a brief liaison with her. From what people said about her, she wasn’t picky about men. Anybody would do.

  He didn’t like women like that. That was probably hypocritical, he considered, because he’d sown his own wild oats years ago. He averted his eyes from the divorcée’s blistering glare with magnificent indifference and sipped coffee.

  People talked about the double standard, about men sleeping around while women were chastised for it. But there had been a legitimate reason for it a hundred and fifty years ago, when there was no real method of birth control. A husband wandered and spread his favors around so that he wouldn’t have an eternally pregnant wife who would die before reaching the age of forty. He wondered how many modern women even knew that or considered that social mores sometimes had justifiable foundations. Well, he amended, somewhat justifiable.

  He glanced at the woman, who was smiling at the clerk and paying for her takeout. He didn’t like her. She knew it. He’d made his opinion of her quite clear at a party they’d both attended a week back. Their hostess had been matchmaking and nudged them together onto the dance floor. He could do Latin dances. So could she. But this was a slow two-step and he hated the contact.

  “I don’t have a fatal contagious disease,” Ida had said bitingly when he held her as if he had a stick of dynamite in his reluctant arms. She was hating the contact, too, and hiding it in bad temper.

  He lifted an eyebrow, his pale, glittery silver eyes lancing down into her china-blue ones. “Really? Have you had lab work to make sure?” he added, just to irritate her.

  The glare grew hotter. “I don’t want to dance with you,” she said curtly. She was stiff even in the light embrace. Amazing, with her reputation, that she seemed to dislike him.

  “They say any man will do, where you’re concerned,” he drawled. “I don’t appeal to you?”

  She swallowed, hard, and glanced around as if hoping the music would stop.

  “And here I thought you’d come up with something trite, along the lines that you only dated men in your own species,” he taunted.

  Another couple, spinning around, came a little too close, and Jake pulled Ida abruptly closer and turned her to avoid a collision.

  Her reaction was sudden and stark. She jerked away from him, almost shivering, her eyes lowered. “I can’t...” she began in a choked tone.

  He’d glared at her. “Any man but me, is that how it goes?” he asked in a deep, biting whisper, viciously offended and not even sure why he was offended.

  She hadn’t even looked at him. She’d turned and walked off the dance floor. Minutes later she’d thanked her hostess for the invitation and driven her car away. Jake, standing by the punch bowl, was confounded by her behavior. She’d actually seemed afraid of him. And that was fanciful thinking when the whole town knew what she was.

  He glanced toward the counter, where she was picking up her order and smiling at the female clerk.

  Maybe it was an act, he mused. Maybe she pretended to be nervous toward a man when she was stalking him. The problem with that theory was that she hadn’t come near Jake since the party. In fact, when she left the café, she went the long way around to the front door, so that she wouldn’t have to pass the table where he was sitting.

  He finished his coffee and took the cup back to the counter. “You make good coffee, Cindy,” he told the employee, who was a married grandmother.

  She grinned at him. “Thanks, Mr. McGuire. My husband runs on black coffee. He’s a trucker. If I couldn’t make it to suit him, I’d be in divorce court in no time,” she joked.

  “Fat chance. Mack’s crazy about you,” he chuckled. He glanced toward the door. “The happy divorcée doesn’t eat with the common folk?” he added.

  “Oh, you mean Ida,” she said. She grimaced. “She doesn’t go out much. She lives near us, you know. One night I heard her screaming and I called the sheriff’s department. I was afraid somebody might have broken in on her. Cody Banks, our sheriff, was working that shift, and he went by to see what had happened.”

  He frowned, just waiting.

  She sighed. “He said she was white as a sheet and looked as if she’d seen a ghost. She told him it was an old nightmare that she had from time to time and she apologized for disturbing the neighbors.”

  “Nightmares.” He shook his head. “Who’d have thought it?”

  “I went over to see her the next day, it was Sunday, on my way to church, to apologize for calling the law. She just smiled and said she didn’t blame me. She apologized, too, for making a fuss.”

  “Did she say why she had the nightmare?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “She mentioned something about her second husband making a threat. He’s involved in some illegal stuff, I gathered, and she’s rich.”

  “Did she get rich by divorcing him?” he asked with a grin.

  She shook her head. “Her first husband had the money. The second... Apparently he married her for what she had. Nobody knows much about it.”

  “Did she move here recently?” Jake asked. “I don’t mix much with local people, even though I have my ranch and I still own the feed supply store here. I’m away on business a lot.”

  “Her grandparents were from here. So was her mother. In fact, she was born here. But when her father got a good-paying job in Denver, they moved away. She was in fifth grade.” She drew in a breath. “It was just after Bess Grady killed herself.”

  “My best friend’s brother had a crush on the Grady girl. He took it hard,” he commented, not going into details. Like Cindy, he’d gone through school here. He hadn’t always been rich. “What about Ida’s parents?”

  She shook her head. “Her father had a massive heart attack when he was just thirty-five,” she said with a sigh. “Her mother lived on, but not happily. She lived only for Ida. When Ida was eighteen, her mother went on a cruise and fell overboard. They never found the body.”

  “That would have been hard,” he conceded.

  “So Ida was working for a graphics firm in Denver, right out of high school, and her boss felt sorry for her, I guess, because he married her shortly afterward. There was gossip, they said, because of the age difference. He was very wealthy and had never been married at all.”

  “Was it a happy marriage?” He hated asking. He didn’t know why he even cared.

  “Well...”

  “Come on,” he teased. “You know I don’t gossip.”

  “Well, my second cousin, who knew the owner of the graphics store, said he was gay.”

  His eyebrows arched.

  “I know, why would he want to marry Ida? But he was kind to her.”

  “I heard he committed suicide.”

  She nodded, looking around to make sure nobody was within earshot. “His boyfriend had left him. He’d had other problems, but this had sent him over the edge. He was so distraught that he went to the top floor of his building and jumped off. The boyfriend tried to sue Ida afterward. He thought he deserved something for his time wit
h the older man. Ida took him to court and countersued. He had to pay court costs. She had a really mean attorney.” She grinned. “Her husband left her everything, and there was a lot. He left her a note, thanking her for being so kind to him.”

  He was touched, despite his distaste for Ida.

  “Maybe she’s not all bad.”

  “Nobody is all bad, Mr. McGuire,” she replied. “Some people have worse lives than others, is all.”

  He shrugged. “Seems so.”

  She smiled gently. “You still missing Mina?”

  He smiled back. “A little. But she and Cort and the baby are happy in Texas. I’m glad for them. I keep in touch with them through her dad, who’s managing their family ranch outside town.”

  “You’re a good loser.”

  “Not much choice about that,” he replied. His pale silver eyes were sad. “You can’t make people love you.”

  “Isn’t it the truth?” she agreed.

  * * *

  HE WENT OUT to get into his car and spotted Ida standing by her Jaguar with her cell phone to her ear. The Jag had a flat tire.

  “Yes,” she said wearily. “Yes, I know, but it’s going to take two hours to get somebody out here, and I have to be at the doctor’s by two!”

  Jake paused beside the car.

  She stared at him, surprised.

  “I can run you to the doctor. Leave the key with Cindy Bates, inside, and tell whoever you’re talking to where they’ll be. Have him lock the car and give the key back to Cindy when he’s done.”

  She was just standing there, surprised at how easily he organized things. A voice was coming over the smartphone.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said into the receiver. “Listen, I’ve had the offer of a ride. I’ll leave the key inside the café with Cindy. She can give it to you and you can hand it back to her when you finish. That work? Great. Thanks so much. I’m really sorry... Of course. Thanks.”