He dismounted and hobbled Chance. This time he didn’t try to help either Marilee or Elizabeth McGuire down. He’d realized he couldn’t force himself on Marilee. He might lose her forever if he tried.

Instead, he stood aside until they were both down, then he reached in the buggy and picked up the picnic basket and blanket. He found a spot under a cottonwood and spread the blanket on the ground.

Still, Marilee looked at him suspiciously.

He knelt in front of her, so his eyes could meet hers. He did not want to be a giant. “I’m Dillon’s brother, you know,” he said.

Marilee looked at him with wide eyes. “Dillon went away.”

He wanted to say he had seen Dillon, but he couldn’t. Not in front of the woman.

“I know,” he said softly. “But I’m here. I used to hold you when you were a baby. I used to sing you songs.”

Marilee backed into Elizabeth McGuire but her gaze didn’t leave his.

Progress.

“What songs?” she finally asked.

He hummed a lullaby he used to sing to her, then voiced the words, feeling them strangling in his throat. He had loved music. His entire family had. How many nights had they sat together, he and his father playing their guitars, his brother a harmonica. He hadn’t seen that guitar in almost five years. It was something else still at the home which had been his family’s.

He finished the song, a French lullaby his mother had taught him.

“Dillon used to sing that to me,” Marilee said slowly. Though her body still leaned into Elizabeth’s, some of the reserve had left her expression.

He looked up at Elizabeth and saw tears hovering in her eyes.

Those eyes were so clear, so damnably honest.

The tears weren’t there for herself. Certainly not for him. They were there for his sister.

He sat down on the blanket. “Your mother used to sing it to Dillon and me,” he said. “She died not long after you were born.”

“Where are my other brothers? Papa said there were four.”

“Two died. They are in…heaven.” He didn’t really believe in heaven. Not after visiting hell on earth. “But they loved you. And they are looking after you.”

“Why didn’t they look after Papa?”

“I don’t know, sweetpea. Maybe it happened before they could do anything.”

She looked at him with skepticism, even as she kept as close to Elizabeth as a shadow. “Dillon called me sweetpea,” she said.

“We all did,” he said gently. “We all loved you.”

A rustling sound came from the trees beyond. He spun around, rising to his feet in one fast movement, his hand going automatically to the gun in its holster.

He heard a child’s scream behind him.

But he couldn’t holster the gun. Dillon had warned him. Delaney’s men were not above an ambush. They had not been above frightening-perhaps killing-a woman by making her horse bolt.

No one was going to harm one of his again. No one!

“Mr. Sinclair?”

Elizabeth’s soft voice was full of questions. He hadn’t realized how soft it was.

“I heard a noise,” he said as his gaze moved around the brush and trees. He heard another sound, this time more of a whimper.

He moved forward slowly, keeping the gun in his hand. Another sound. Something moving through the underbrush. He didn’t think it was a man now. An animal of some kind. Perhaps a wounded one.

He moved silently ahead.

The whimpering became louder.

And then he saw it.

A small bundle of wet fur huddled and shivering near a tree.

A puppy.

He holstered his gun and leaned down and picked it up.

He wondered what had happened to its mother. Or maybe someone wanted to get rid of extra pups by throwing them in the river. He couldn’t leave it here to die. It was too young to care for itself.

When he returned to the picnic site, Elizabeth McGuire was standing, her arms protectively on Marilee’s shoulders. His sister’s eyes went immediately to the puppy.

“Something must have happened to her mother,” he said. “I think she’s hungry.” Seeing the sudden light in his sister’s eyes, he hoped like hell the pup lived.

“Can I hold her?” Marilee asked.

He hesitated. The puppy could be sick. But the longing in his sister’s eyes made it impossible to refuse. He handed the ball of wet fluff to her.

The puppy immediately settled in her lap.

Yet he noticed that though she took the puppy, she still regarded him warily.

Because of the way he’d drawn the gun? Her cry echoed in his mind.

Violence was second nature to him, his gun an extended part of him. Could his sister accept that?

He watched as Marilee cuddled the pup. His eyes met Elizabeth’s, and he saw understanding there, and… something else.

His chest ached almost unbearably as he saw her gaze return to his sister and the puppy. Tenderness radiated in that one glance. He felt his heart explode. He had seen too much pain and death and defeat. He had stopped believing in hope and justice. But in that moment he knew those things were still alive. Had to be alive.

She looked back up at him, and his breath caught. Her eyes glowed with an admiration that made him feel ten feet tall, like a hero.

It was just a puppy.

She seemed to feel that it was much more. But, for God’s sake, what had she expected him to do? Drown the animal?

“She’s going to need milk,” he said.

But the puppy seemed to have wanted safety more than anything else. She huddled in Marilee’s lap, the dog’s small face burrowing into her arms.

“Can I keep her?” Marilee said, nuzzling the wet fur.

Elizabeth threw a questioning look his way.

“Do you think you can take care of her?” he asked. “Feed her? Brush her? Keep her safe?”

“Oh yes,” Marilee said. It was the first time she hadn’t regarded him with fear.

“Then if it’s all right with Miss Elizabeth, I think the puppy should stay with you.” He rose. “I’ll look around and see if I can find the mother.”

Elizabeth rose as well. He noticed how gracefully she managed the maneuver as well as the trimness of the ankle revealed as she stood.

“I’ll walk with you a little way,” she said.

He looked at his sister, who was happily mothering the pup.

“I won’t be out of eyesight,” she said.

He didn’t say anything, just started walking, only too aware of her presence. A subtle scent of roses drifted over to him, and he longed to reach over and touch the copper hair caught in the long braid.

It had been a long time since he’d touched a woman’s hair, since he had smelled the scent of roses.

They reached a stand of trees. She stopped, looking back at Marilee. “I shouldn’t go farther,” she said. “I just wanted to thank you. I should have realized she needed a pet. I never had one…we always moved. I didn’t think…”

“The pup needs her as well. She looks half starved,” he said.

“And if I didn’t agree?”

“I would have taken the animal,” he said harshly. “Do you think I would abandon it?” He started to turn away from her.

Her hand stopped him. “I… I don’t…no…”

Her touch was warm on his arm, too warm. The air around them was charged with electricity as though a storm was gathering. But the sky was clear, the sun red and hot.

He looked down into a face that held wonder. A body that trembled slightly, lips parted as breath came more quickly than normal. He felt a peculiar intimacy, a unique sharing of the moment. And more. The awareness of exquisitely painful feelings they seemed to arouse in one another.

He told himself it was loneliness. That it had been far too long since he had been in gentle company. That Elizabeth McGuire was the last woman he needed.

Yet he stood there, enveloped by feelings he’d never thought to have again.

Remember.

Your brother. Your father. The friends and neighbors who had once made life so fine.

Their aims and needs were opposed.

He wanted what she had: his land.

She wanted what he had every right to have: his sister.

Yet he still couldn’t take his eyes from hers. God, they were lovely. This was a woman who cared deeply, loved fiercely. He had seen it in the way she touched his sister, in the way she talked of her father. But now that emotion touched him. And shook him to the bottom of his soul.

Her father was his enemy.

Attraction surged between them. He could kiss her. Her eyes invited him. Lord, how he wanted to.

Marilee is yards away. The reminder was like a splash of cold water.

Instead of a bridge, Marilee was a chasm. She was a reminder of what had to be done: His brother cleared. The ranch returned to its rightful owners. Some measure of justice for the other Texans whose land was being systematically looted.

Her father was bound to be hurt in the process.

And until he had a future, he had no business courting anyone, much less the usurpers of his land. And Elizabeth McGuire was the kind of woman you courted, not used.

He stepped back and her hand fell from his arm, the warm glow in her eyes fading.

He turned away and walked into the stand of trees. He had no hope of finding the pup’s mother. It wouldn’t have abandoned its young. But he needed to get away from the pretty picture of Elizabeth and his sister. Of the look in Elizabeth’s eyes.

And temper the need in his own body.

A walk didn’t accomplish what he needed. Elizabeth’s face darted in and out of his mind, the tenderness as she looked at Marilee, the yearning as she looked at him. In those moments, she was incredibly winsome. There was something about her openness, her lack of guile, that appealed to him far more than conventional beauty.

And, damn, those eyes…

He would see her… back. Not home. He refused to consider it her home.