Midnight Rider

by Diana Palmer

  “I can’t believe the sales we’re making,” she told Eduardo.

  “Nor can I.” He glanced down at the mound of their child and touched it gently. “How much longer do you think, Bernadette?”

  “The doctor says anytime now,” she replied.

  The muscles in his jaw pulsed.

  She pressed as close to him as her huge belly would allow and laid her head against his chest. “Please don’t worry. I promise not to die.”

  He laughed, but it had a hollow sound. He stroked her pale hair gently while his eyes stared blindly into space. She was his life. If he lost her now, neither the ranch nor any other thing on earth would be enough to keep him alive.

  “I promise,” she repeated, looking up at him. “Eduardo, our lives have been hard until now. Do you really think that God would be so good to us, only to snatch our happiness away just as it begins?”

  “You make my fears sound like a sacrilege,” he murmured.

  “Faith moves mountains,” she replied simply. She smiled. “Everything is going to be just fine.”

  “All right. I’ll try not to worry.”

  * * *

  BUT HE DID, ESPECIALLY WHEN she fell to the floor early one morning in a pool of water and, gasping, called for him to fetch the doctor.

  He wouldn’t leave her. He sent one of the vaqueros to town, and then to Colston Barron’s.

  The doctor took forever to come. Meanwhile, Bernadette was racked with pain and weeping helplessly. Eduardo had no idea what to do. In fact, Claudia quickly shooed him out of the room. When Colston Barron and the doctor arrived, Eduardo was halfway through a bottle of imported Scotch whiskey.

  “Fetch me a glass, girl, and make it a large one,” Colston told one of the servants. “This is a time for serious drinking.”

  Eduardo looked at him through bloodshot eyes. “It has been two hours,” he said in a choked voice. “I tried to look in the door, and the doctor had one of my own men push me in here.” He shrugged. “She screamed,” he said through his teeth. “I should have broken down the door to get to her, but she called to me that she would be all right. They are in league against me, she and the doctor.” His face darkened as he lifted the glass to his lips again. He looked toward his father-in-law with utter fury. “If she dies, I’ll shoot him, right through the eye!”

  “She won’t die,” Colston said with more conviction than he felt.

  “I’m going to load my gun.”

  “Drink your whiskey. You can load your gun later.”

  Eduardo turned back to the bottle. He studied the glass and then the gun rack. He sat back. “Perhaps it would be wiser to wait. Just briefly.”

  They drank and talked and worried for another hour. When the doctor came into the room, wiping his hands on a towel, they were laid across chairs in pitiful heaps, both half-coherent and barely able to sit up when he called to them.

  The doctor grinned. “Bernadette is fine. It’s a boy,” he said.

  “A boy. A son. Praise God!” Eduardo murmured in a slurred tone.

  “Congratulations, my boy, con—”

  “—And a girl,” the doctor continued.

  Eduardo blinked. He wasn’t at all sure that he was hearing correctly. “You said a boy,” he replied.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Now you’ve changed your mind and it’s a girl?”

  The doctor chuckled. “You’re going to have a head the size of San Antonio in the morning. It’s a boy and a girl,” he said. “Twins.”

  Eduardo’s intake of breath filled the room. He grasped the arms of his chair for balance. “Twins!”

  “Twins!” Colston poured himself another drink. “God be praised, twins!”

  “Bernadette would like to see you both,” he continued. He shook his head as he turned. “God knows why,” he added under his breath as they struggled to their feet.

  They were far too drunk to have understood him, even if he’d spoken very loudly. With arms around each other for support, they weaved down the dark hall behind the doctor and into the bedroom from which the wails of tiny babies could be clearly heard.

  “Good, strong lungs,” the doctor murmured as Claudia came forward with both infants in her arms. “And I can include your wife in that. Her asthma didn’t surface once during the whole long labor.” He ginned. “I think I may write a paper on her.”

  “Que guapos son,” she expressed with a radiant smile as she showed her small charges to Eduardo. “They are so beautiful, señor.”

  “Beautiful,” he pronounced, touching each tiny face reverently. “Like my Bernadette.”

  He moved toward the bed, leaving Colston to admire his grandchildren, and sat down next to a weary, worn Bernadette, who still somehow managed to smile and lift a hand to pull him down to her.

  She kissed him softly. “We have children,” she whispered weakly. “A son and a daughter.”

  “And you are alive, as you promised me, and with lungs that didn’t even hinder you through this entire ordeal,” he said. He kissed her again. “Bernie, I’m very drunk.”

  She laughed at the unfamiliar nickname he’d just given her. “Very drunk, indeed!” she scolded. “Didn’t you trust me?”

  “I tried to,” he said. “But trust is hard when people scream, you know.” His radiant eyes met hers. “I love you more than my life,” he whispered tenderly. “Thank you for being alive. And thank you most especially for our children.”

  She nuzzled her face into his shoulder. “Thank you, too.”

  He glanced toward his father-in-law, who had taken a chair and was holding one of the babies, crooning softly to it. Bernadette lifted her face and followed his fascinated gaze. Tears stung her eyes at the sight of her father with his grandchild.

  “Do you believe in miracles, Eduardo?” she asked, thinking of how distant she and her father had once been, and how chaotic her life had been just the year before. So much had changed. She couldn’t have imagined such happiness.

  “Yes,” Eduardo answered the soft question. But he was looking at her.

  She smiled up at him. They had a prosperous cattle ranch, two new babies and the whole world with its arms open to them. She wondered if she were dreaming it all.

  “Darling, would you like to pinch me, just in case?” she asked him.

  He chuckled, because he knew what she meant. “Only if you agree to pinch me in return.” He leaned closer. “But perhaps we won’t take the chance, dearest. If I am dreaming, let me never wake!”

  Bernadette couldn’t argue with that sentiment. She smiled and kissed him instead, to the soft whisper of an Irish lullaby that came lovingly, but sadly out of tune, from the general direction of the window seat. She thought that she’d never heard such a beautiful song in her life.

  * * * * *

  If you love Diana Palmer, don’t miss

  WYOMING TOUGH

  the first book featuring the Kirk brothers of Wyoming.

  And the second book in the series,

  Cane’s story, is available, too.

  WYOMING FIERCE,

  a passionate, compelling tale continues

  the legend!

  Turn the page for a preview of both stories!

  ****

  Also—don’t miss Cort Brannt’s romance,

  THE RANCHER,

  a Harlequin Special Edition.

  Wyoming Tough

  CHAPTER ONE

  EDITH DANIELLE MORENA BRANNT was not impressed with her new boss. The head honcho of the Rancho Real, or Royal Ranch in Spanish, near Catelow, Wyoming, was big and domineering and had a formidable bad attitude that he shared with all his hired hands.

  Morie, as she was known to her friends, had a hard time holding back her fiery temper when Mallory Dawson Kirk raised his voice. He was impatient and hot-tempered and opinionated. Just like Morie’s father, who’d opposed her decision to become a working cowgirl. Her dad opposed everything. She’d just told him she was going to find a job, packed her bags and left.
She was twenty-three. He couldn’t really stop her legally. Her mother, Shelby, had tried gentle reason. Her brother, Cort, had tried, too, with even less luck. She loved her family, but she was tired of being chased for who she was related to instead of who she was inside. Being a stranger on somebody else’s property was an enchanting proposition. Even with Mallory’s temper, she was happy being accepted for a poor, struggling female on her own in the harsh world. Besides that, she wanted to learn ranch work and her father refused to let her so much as lift a rope on his ranch. He didn’t want her near his cattle.

  “And another thing,” Mallory said harshly, turning to Morie with a cold glare, “there’s a place to hang keys when you’re through with them. You never take a key out of the stable and leave it in your pocket. Is that clear?”

  Morie, who’d actually transported the key to the main tack room off the property in her pocket at a time it was desperately needed, flushed. “Sorry, sir,” she said stiffly. “Won’t happen again.”

  “It won’t if you expect to keep working here,” he assured her.

  “My fault,” the foreman, old Darby Hanes, chimed in, smiling. “I forgot to tell her.”

  Mallory considered that and nodded finally. “That’s what I always liked most about you, Darb, you’re honest.” He turned to Morie. “An example I’ll expect you to follow, as our newest hire, by the way.”

  Her face reddened. “Sir, I’ve never taken anything that didn’t belong to me.”

  He looked at her cheap clothes, the ragged hem of her jeans, her worn boots. But he didn’t judge. He just nodded.

  He had thick black hair, parted on one side and a little shaggy around the ears. He had big ears and a big nose, deep-set brown eyes under a jutting brow, thick eyebrows and a mouth so sensuous that Morie hadn’t been able to take her eyes off it at first. That mouth made up for his lack of conventional good looks. He had big, well-manicured hands and a voice like deep velvet, as well as big feet, in old, rugged, dirt-caked boots. He was the boss, and nobody ever forgot it, but he got down in the mud and blood with his men and worked as if he was just an employee himself.

  In fact, all three Kirk brothers were like that. Mallory was the oldest, at thirty-six. The second brother, Cane—a coincidence if there ever was one, considering Morie’s mother’s maiden name, even if hers was spelled with a K—was thirty-four, a veteran of the Second Gulf War, and he was missing an arm from being in the front lines in combat. He was confronting a drinking problem and undergoing therapy, which his brothers were trying to address.

  The youngest brother, at thirty-one, was Dalton. He was a former border agent with the department of immigration, and his nickname was, for some odd reason, Tank. He’d been confronted by a gang of narco-smugglers on the Arizona border, all alone. He was shot to pieces and hospitalized for weeks, during which most of the physicians had given him up for dead because of the extent of his injuries. He confounded them all by living. Nevertheless, he quit the job and came home to the family ranch in Wyoming. He never spoke of the experience. But once Morie had seen him react to the backfire of an old ranch truck by diving to the ground. She’d laughed, but old Darby Hanes had silenced her and told her about Dalton’s past as a border agent. She’d never laughed at his odd behaviors again. She supposed that both he and Cane had mental and emotional scars, as well as physical ones, from their past experiences. She’d never been shot at, or had anything happen to her. She’d been as sheltered as a hothouse orchid, both by her parents and her brother. This was her first taste of real life. She wasn’t certain yet if she was going to like it.

  She’d lived on her father’s enormous ranch all her life. She could ride anything—her father had taught her himself. But she wasn’t accustomed to the backbreaking work that daily ranch chores required, because she hadn’t been permitted to do them at home, and she’d been slow her first couple of days.

  Darby Hanes had taken her in hand and shown her how to manage the big bales of hay that the brothers still packed into the barn—refusing the more modern rolled bales as being inefficient and wasteful—so that she didn’t hurt herself when she lifted them. He’d taught her how to shoe horses, even though the ranch had a farrier, and how to doctor sick calves. In less than two weeks, she’d learned things that nothing in her college education had addressed.

  “You’ve never done this work before,” Darby accused, but he was smiling.

  She grimaced. “No. But I needed a job, badly,” she said, and it was almost the truth. “You’ve been great, Mr. Hanes. I owe you a lot for not giving me away. For teaching me what I needed to know here.” And what a good thing it was, she thought privately, that her father didn’t know. He’d have skinned Hanes alive for letting his sheltered little girl shoe a horse.

  He waved a hand dismissively. “Not a problem. You make sure you wear those gloves,” he added, nodding toward her back pocket. “You have beautiful hands. Like my wife used to,” he added with a faraway look in his eyes and a faint smile. “She played the piano in a restaurant when I met her. We went on two dates and got married. Never had kids. She passed two years ago, from cancer.” He stopped for a minute and took a long breath. “Still miss her,” he added stiffly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’ll see her again,” he replied. “Won’t be too many years, either. It’s part of the cycle, you see. Life and death. We all go through it. Nobody escapes.”

  That was true. How odd to be in a philosophical discussion on a ranch.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “You think ranch hands are high-school dropouts, do you?” he mused. “I have a degree from MIT. I was their most promising student in theoretical physics, but my wife had a lung condition and they wanted her to come west to a drier climate. Her dad had a ranch....” He stopped, chuckling. “Sorry. I tend to run on. Anyway, I worked on the ranch and preferred it to a lab. After she died, I came here to work. So here I am. But I’m not the only degreed geek around here. We have three part-timers who are going to college on scholarships the Kirk brothers set up for them.”

  “What a nice bunch of guys!” she exclaimed.

  “They really are. All of them seem tough as nails, and they mostly are, but they’ll help anyone in need.” He shifted. “Paid my wife’s hospital bill after the insurance lapsed. A small fortune, and they didn’t even blink.”

  Her throat got tight. What a generous thing to do. Her family had done the same for people, but she didn’t dare mention that. “That was good of them,” she said with genuine feeling.

  “Yes. I’ll work here until I die, if they’ll keep me. They’re great people.”

  They heard a noise and turned around. The boss was standing behind them.

  “Thanks for the testimonial, but I believe there are cattle waiting to be dipped in the south pasture....” Mallory commented with pursed lips and twinkling dark eyes.

  Darby chuckled. “Yes, there are. Sorry, boss, I was just lauding you to the young lady. She was surprised to find out that I studied philosophy.”

  “Not to mention theoretical physics,” the boss added drily.

  “Yes, well, I won’t mention your degree in biochemistry if you like,” Darby said outrageously.

  Mallory quirked an eyebrow. “Thanks.”

  Darby winked at Morie and left them alone.

  Mallory towered over the slight brunette. “Your name is unusual. Morie...?”

  She laughed. “My full name is Edith Danielle Morena Brannt,” she replied. “My mother knew I’d be a brunette, because both my parents are, so they added morena, which means brunette in Spanish. I had, uh, Spanish great-grandparents,” she stuttered, having almost given away the fact that they were titled Spanish royalty. That would never do. She wanted to be perceived as a poor but honest cowgirl. Her last name wasn’t uncommon in South Texas, and Mallory wasn’t likely to connect it with King Brannt, who was a true cattle baron.

  He cocked his head. “Morie,” he said. “Nice.”

  “I’m really sorry ab
out the key,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I did the same thing last month, but I’m the boss,” he added firmly. “I don’t make mistakes. You remember that.”

  She gave him an open smile. “Yes, sir.”

  He studied her curiously. She was small and nicely rounded, with black hair that was obviously long and pulled into a bun atop her head. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was pleasant to look at, with those big brown eyes and that pretty mouth and perfect skin. She didn’t seem the sort to do physical labor on a ranch.

  “Sir?” she asked, uncomfortable from the scrutiny.

  “Sorry. I was just thinking that you don’t look like the usual sort we hire for ranch hands.”

  “I do have a college degree,” she defended herself.

  “You do? What was your major?”

  “History,” she said, and looked defensive. “Yes, it’s dates. Yes, it’s about the past. Yes, some of it can be boring. But I love it.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “You should talk to Cane. His degree is in anthropology. Pity it wasn’t paleontology, because we’re close to Fossil Lake. That’s part of the Green River Formation, and there are all sorts of fossils there. Cane loved to dig.” His face hardened. “He won’t talk about going back to it.”

  “Because of his arm?” she asked bluntly. “That wouldn’t stop him. He could do administrative work on a dig.” She flushed. “I minored in anthropology,” she confessed.

  He burst out laughing. “No wonder you like ranch work. Did you go on digs?” He knew, as some people didn’t, that archaeology was one of four subfields of anthropology.

  “I did. Drove my mother mad. My clothes were always full of mud and I looked like a street child most of the time.” She didn’t dare tell him that she’d come to dinner in her dig clothing when a famous visiting politician from Europe was at the table, along with some members of a royal family. Her father had been eloquent. “There were some incidents when I came home muddy,” she added with a chuckle.