LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      At first, Mandelyn thought the pounding was just in her head; she’d gone to bed with a nagging headache. But when it got louder, she sat up in bed with a frown and stared at the clock. The glowing face told her that it was one o’clock in the morning, and she couldn’t imagine that any of the ranch hands would want to wake her at that hour without cause.

      She jumped up, running a hand through the glorious blond tangle of her long hair, and pulled on a long white robe over her nightgown. Her soft gray eyes were troubled as she wound through the long ranch-style house to the front door that overlooked the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona.

      “Who is it?” she asked in the soft, cultured tones of her Charleston upbringing.

      “Jake Wells, ma’am,” came the answer.

      That was Carson Wayne’s foreman. And without a single word of explanation, she knew what was wrong, and why she’d been awakened.

      She opened the door and fixed the tall, blond man with a rueful smile. “Where is he?” she asked.

      He took off his hat with a sigh. “In town,” he replied. “At the Rodeo bar.”

      “Is he drunk?” she asked warily.

      The foreman hesitated. One corner of his mouth went up. “Yes, ma’am,” he said finally.

      “That’s the second time in the last two months,” she said with flashing gray eyes.

      Jake shrugged, turning his hat around in his hands. “Maybe money’s getting tight,” he guessed.

      “It’s been tight before. And it isn’t as if he doesn’t have options, either,” she grumbled, turning. “I’ve had a buyer for that forty-acre tract of his for months. He won’t even discuss it.”

      “Miss Bush, you know how he feels about those condominium complexes,” he reminded her. “That land’s been in his family since the Civil War.”

      “He’s got thousands of acres!” she burst out. “He wouldn’t miss forty!”

      “Well, that particular forty is where the old fort stands.”

      “Nobody’s likely to use it these days,” she said with venom.

      He only shrugged, and she went off to change her clothes. Minutes later, dressed in a yellow sweater and designer jeans, she drew on her suede jacket and went out to climb in beside Jake in the black pickup truck with the Circle Bar W logo of Carson Wayne’s cattle company emblazoned in red on the door.

      “Why doesn’t anybody else ever get called to go save people from him?” she asked curtly.

      Jake glanced at her with a faint smile. “Because you’re the only person in the valley who isn’t scared of him.”

      “You and the boys could bring him home,” she suggested.

      “We tried once. Doctor bills got too expensive.” He grinned. “He won’t hit you.”

      That was true enough. Carson indulged her. He was fiery and rough and lived like a hermit in that faded frame building he called a house. He hated neighbors and he was as savage a man as she’d ever known. But from the first, he’d warmed to her. People said it was because she was from Charleston, South Carolina and a lady and he felt protective of her. That was true, up to a point. But Mandelyn also knew that he liked her because she had the same wild spirit he possessed, because she stood up to him fearlessly. It had been that way from the very beginning.

      They wound along the dusty ranch road out to the highway. There was just enough light to see the giant saguaro cacti lifting their arms to the sky, and the dark mountains silhouetted against the horizon. Arizona was beautiful enough to take Mandelyn’s breath away, even after eight years as a resident. She’d come from South Carolina at the age of eighteen, devastated by personal tragedy, expecting to find the barren land a perfect expression of her own emotional desolation. But her first sight

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