LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

      Dear Daughters, Amos Kingsland wrote.

      And then, because he was a blunt man, never known to hold his temper or his tongue, he continued. I’m dying.

      As if to underscore the words he wrote, pain shot through his belly just then. Amos closed his eyes. The doctors in Corpus Christi wanted to slice him open and poke around inside, but he’d told them to ply their lily-fingered trade on somebody else. He’d already been cut twice—once by a blind-drunk Cajun in New Orleans, and once—worse—by a woman in Matamoros who didn’t like the word adios. Any more scars, he figured, and Saint Peter wouldn’t recognize him when he knocked on the pearly gates. Or Lucifer, when he pounded on the blazing portals of perdition.

      He was sixty-two years old and didn’t particularly want to die, but—damn!—when the pain grabbed at his gut, he didn’t take much pleasure in living.

      Not that his pleasures had ever come easy. He’d worked hard creating Paradise—battling Mexicans and Indians and wrong-headed whites, wrestling long-horns and mustangs and Mother Earth herself until he’d built the biggest, most prosperous ranch in Texas.

      He’d lost a partner along the way. Good riddance. Hoyt Backus had taken his profits in cash and had set himself up on an adjoining spread that he’d named Hellfire just for spite.

      And Amos had lost a wife and two daughters, as well. He’d barely flinched fifteen years ago when Ellen had taken their two little girls to Saint Louis. Good riddance on that count, too. He hadn’t missed them. A man didn’t miss what he didn’t need.

      Until now.

      He picked up the pen again.

       I want you to come to Texas.

      Dammit! What he wanted—what he needed—was a son. If he regretted anything, it was that. After Ellen walked out, he’d considered marrying again. But he’d found matrimony to be more hellish than holy. God knows, and the devil, too, that he hadn’t done right by his wife. He was too hot tempered, too set in his ways, too hard. All the qualities that had allowed him to wrest Paradise out of a harsh land didn’t add up to good husband material. Truth to tell, Amos just didn’t like women very much.

      Only now he was dying, and everything he’d worked so hard for was going to die with him because there wasn’t anybody to take over. Somebody to keep the damn rustlers from chipping away at the stock. Somebody to oversee the breeding, to see that the cattle survived parched summers and harsh winters, then made it to the railhead without losing half their lives and most of their weight. Somebody to carry on.

      A son. He needed a son and all he had were two daughters he hadn’t even seen in fifteen years. Two women, fragile as their mother, no doubt, who’d spent their lives in the prim parlors and on the paved avenues of Saint Louis, who just might recognize beef on a plate in a fancy restaurant, but wouldn’t know a steer on the hoof from a damn dairy cow if their lives depended on it.

      Now Amos’s life—his life’s work—depended on them. Paradise depended on them.

      Please, he wrote, grimacing, galled as much by that plea as by the pain in his midsection.

      But then Amos heard the soft jingle of spurs in the vestibule outside his office door. A smile hitched up one comer of his mouth as he put down the pen and called out.

      “That you, Shad? Come on in.”

      The heavily paneled door swung in, and Shadrach Jones stood in the doorway. Big as life, Amos thought. Barely tame. Tall and trim and tough as the land itself. A man nobody tangled with. Nobody with any sense anyway. Hell, he wished he’d had a son. A son like Shadrach Jones.

      The man didn’t so much enter a room as take possession of it. His gaze encompassed it first before his body even moved. Then he eased forward, boot heels hitting the floor with a slow certainty, as if the man were branding it, making it his own somehow. The ease of his stride belied the fact that every muscle and sinew was forever primed to react. Whenever possible, he would straddle a chair, subduing it with his size and weight. Right now, he lowered his big body into one of Amos’s leather armchairs, scraped his hat off and balanced it on his knee.

      Suddenly Amos became aware of a difference in the room. It seemed to grow warmer. It smelled of healthy animals, both man and beast; of sunbaked flesh, dust-caked denim and a hard day’s work. It reeked of vitality. Paradise. These days every room Amos inhabited took on the stench of a sickroom, the miasma of death. Shadrach Jones had changed all by his mere presence.

      “Hand me that bottle.” Amos pointed to the whiskey on a shelf of the bookcase. He poured them each a couple fingers and proceeded to ask his foreman about the strays by Caliente Creek and the Brahma bull that had arrived from Shreveport earlier that week.

      Judging from Jones’s replies, all was well at Paradise. Almost all.

      “I’m sending for my daughters,” Amos said, glancing down at the sheet of vellum on his desktop.

      “All right.” Shadrach Jones’s tone was low and somber, and his level gaze acknowledged the unspoken—that he knew his boss was dying. His ensuing silence said more—that the man had seen death before, many times, and accepted it. It simply was.

      “I want you to see this letter gets mailed, Shad. And when they arrive in Corpus Christi, I want you to see they get to Paradise in one piece.”

      Jones nodded.

      Silently then, Amos studied his face. Easy enough tasks for such a man. Mail a letter. Bring two women forty miles. What about the other? Be my son, Amos longed to say.

      He was a fool even to consider leaving Paradise to a man whose mother was a Comanche and whose father was anybody’s guess, to a man whose past was more shadow than sunlight. Hell, Hoyt Backus would get himself a smart lawyer and take this place away in a matter of weeks. His daughters were his legal, rock-solid heirs. No question about that. Hoyt could get all the lawyers in Texas then and Paradise would still elude him.

      With a sigh, Amos drained his glass then leaned back in his chair. “Do you remember those daughters of mine, Shad?”

      A sudden grin split the big man’s unshaven face. “I remember a little redhead chasing the ninth life out of a barn cat.”

      Amos nodded. “That’d be Shulamith. Do you remember the other one?”

      Shad resettled his hat on his knee, twisting the brim in his fingers. His grin disappeared. What he recalled was a little girl crying when her mama took her away. He’d been nineteen or twenty then, and hadn’t known squat about little girls. But leaving he knew. He remembered his heart hurting for that skinny, dark-haired child.

      “No,” he told the old man. “Can’t say as I do.”

      “Elizabeth,” Amos murmured. “We called her Libby.”

      Shad nodded again. When he rose, the armchair creaked like saddle leather. “Well, I’ll be saying good-night now, Amos, unless there’s anything else you need.”

      A son. Amos almost said it. “No. Nothing. Good night, Shad.”