Which only made what he proposed to do all the more cruel.

“And don’t think you can run away and hide with Cricket and Creed at Lion’s Dare or with Bay and Long Quiet at Golden Valley,” he continued. “Your sisters have their own lives to lead. You belong here at Three Oaks.”

“For how long? Until another bastard of yours shows up to take the rest of what’s mine?”

Rip had already raised his hand to strike her again when he caught himself. A look bordering on pain etched his blunt features. “Don’t provoke me, Sloan. I’m angry enough with you to do something I might regret. There’s nowhere you can go. You’d best bite leather and endure.”

Sloan stared defiantly at her father. She would have argued further, except it was clear there was nothing more she could say until she found out how Luke Summers felt about Rip’s plans. There was a small chance he wasn’t any more willing to possess an interest in Three Oaks than she was to have him acquire one. But she wasn’t counting on it.

She was still in shock over the revelation that Luke Summers was her half-brother. Although Rip would not tell her exactly what Luke had said, he had convinced her father of the veracity of his claim.

But if Luke was truly Rip’s son, why hadn’t he spoken up four years ago, when he had first come to Three Oaks? Why had he waited until now to reveal the truth? What exactly had he hoped to accomplish by telling Rip now that he had a son?

Sloan wanted some straight answers and she intended to have them.

“I’ve made my stand clear,” she said. “Right now I have plantation business that needs tending. I’ll see you at supper.” She turned on her booted heel and marched from her father’s study.

Sloan’s stomach was knotted in a fist, and the noon meal of salty ham and biscuits she had just eaten with Rip threatened to force its way back up again. She swallowed hard as she left the house. She looked down at her hands and realized they were shaking as badly as Rip’s had been. She grabbed the reins tied to a post in front of the house and stepped quickly into her horse’s saddle. The animal sensed her tension and sidestepped nervously.

Sloan refused to give the stallion his head, holding him to a walk. He fought the bit, dancing under her, heading for the road that led away from Three Oaks, which Sloan used when she took him for a hard run at least once a week.

Rip can’t do this.

Of course he can. If Rip never taught you another thing, he taught you that nothing’s certain in this life.

Sloan shook her head in disgust. She of all people should be aware of that. Hadn’t she learned her lesson from Antonio Guerrero? She remembered vividly the night her sister Cricket had told her Tonio was a traitor, that the Texas Rangers had discovered Tonio’s plot and had set a trap to catch him. She had ridden hard to reach him, not believing Cricket’s tale.

But she had arrived too late. Tonio had already been killed and his body sent home to his family. She had followed as quickly as she could.

Sloan would never forget the pain in Cruz’s blue eyes as she had pleaded with him to intercede with his parents to permit her to see Tonio’s body. She heard again his mother’s voice raised in anguish and remembered Cruz’s flushed face as he had returned and said, “Come with me.”

The suffocating smell of incense returned to her, and the feel of Tonio’s cold lips as she had kissed him one last time in the candlelit shadows of his bier. She had felt the tears form behind her eyes. But she had not cried.

She shivered at the memory of Tonio’s mother, Doña Lucia, regal even in her sorrow, dressed in stark black, her eyes red-rimmed as she clutched a wrinkled handkerchief in her hand. Sloan had offered Tonio’s mother the only balm she could.

“In the winter I will bear Tonio’s child.”

“Ah.” There had been a wealth of condemnation in the Spanish woman’s voice. “Do you seek someone to take the bastard child off your hands, Señorita Stewart?”

Sloan had been appalled at Doña Lucia’s words. But to her shame, she had eventually fulfilled their prophecy.

She had buried her pain in work. She had tried not to think of her son, or his father. She had loved and nurtured Three Oaks instead.

Rip simply could not take Three Oaks from her now. Not when it was all she had left.

Caught up in the turmoil of her thoughts, Sloan had paid no attention to the direction the stallion took. Without her being quite aware of it, they had gone beyond the borders of Three Oaks and she found herself surrounded by wilderness.

Nothing except sagebrush and an occasional pin oak stood between her and Comancheria, the vast land to the north claimed by the Comanches. The sudden awareness of her danger brought Sloan from her stupor, and she yanked the stallion to a standstill.

The stallion fought the bit, demanding his head. Instead of quieting him, she turned him toward home and spurred him hard. Startled, the beast bolted away at a gallop.

Sloan let him run until his chest heaved like a bellows and foamy sweat lathered his chest and flanks. Her eyes teared at the whip of the wind, and the smell of leather and sweat stung her nostrils.

The more tired the stallion became, the harder she pushed him. How far could he run? How long could he last? How soon before the pain became too awful for his great heart to bear?

At last she pulled him to a stop. She slipped from the saddle and, finding her knees weak, clung to the animal’s thick black mane. His nostrils flared as he sucked air. He stomped a hoof in agitation. She ran a hand down his foam-flecked, sweat-slick shoulder in an attempt to calm him.

Her eyes felt painfully dry. Rip had beaten the tears out of her long ago. Her chest hurt from the pressure inside as she offered soft words of solace to her horse.

“Take it easy, boy.” Sloan took a deep breath and slowly let it out again as she regained a measure of calm. Her face was pinched as she admitted, “I’ve got a bit too much of Rip in me, I guess, taking my pain out on you.”

She spoke in a soothing tone of all she had lost and all she feared to lose. How she felt trapped and saw no escape. How she could no more bear the stinging bit of restraint she expected Cruz to apply if she became his wife than the raking spur of sharing Three Oaks with Luke if she stayed with her father. How her helplessness galled her like a wrinkled blanket under the saddle.

There was no way she could have explained her feelings to Rip. He did not expect it; he would not have approved of it. A Stewart never explained, because a Stewart was never wrong. A Stewart never felt pain, or at least never admitted to it. A Stewart wasn’t vulnerable like ordinary human beings.

Only Sloan felt awfully, terribly fragile.

The blasphemous thought of sharing her troubles with someone-with Cruz-had tremendous appeal. But could she really expect the arrogant Spaniard to understand her feelings? More important, would he care enough to try?

The stallion’s breathing gradually slowed, and he snorted once or twice before his head came up a bit from the ground. Sloan’s stiff muscles protested as she stepped into the saddle again. She had indulged in more than enough self-pity, more than enough groaning and gnashing of teeth. Gripping the reins in a white-knuckled fist, she turned her mount back toward the fields, where the slaves were at work.

She spent the rest of the afternoon concentrating on the cotton harvest as though her life depended on it-her tenuous peace of mind certainly did.

For the first time in three years, the cotton hadn’t been attacked by either cut worms or army worms, and heavy rain hadn’t driven the surviving cotton bolls into the mud to stain and mold. The harvest was bountiful, a reminder of all she stood to lose.

Sloan was grateful for the deep, melodic voices of the field hands singing as they snatched cotton. There could be no more soothing balm for her jumbled emotions than the old familiar hymns.

By suppertime, as the sun set in vivid pinks across an expansive Texas sky, Sloan was exhausted, her face and neck streaked where sweat had turned dust to mud. She had pledged to Rip that the snatching would get done in time to beat the rainy season even if she had to get down off her horse and pick cotton herself. She would leave her father no opening to say she could not handle the responsibility she had been given. But no more could be done today.

Sloan turned the stallion toward the row of cotton where Uncle Billy worked. “It’s getting dark, Uncle Billy. Pass the word.”

“Shore ’nuff, Miz Sloan.”

Sloan waited as men in shades from caramel-brown to coal-black brought their bags of cotton to be emptied in the baskets at the end of each row.