‘‘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.

‘‘I guess I am,’’ Winter answered as his eyes adjusted to the cavelike shadows. Her hair reflected in the firelight as it hung to her waist. ‘‘Your hair,’’ he mumbled. Most of the women he knew looked as if they’d spent hours burning curl into their mass of ringlets piled atop their heads. But hers reminded him of his mother’s, straight and thick. Only his mother’s had been as black as midnight while this woman’s was the color of sunshine.