Prologue

May 1877

Sagebrush Hollow, WY

A stiff wind bent the tall grass around Dallas Marlow’s thighs and tossed his thick, dark hair rowdily about his head as he paced out ten long strides. Planting his shovel in the ground, he turned to grin back at Elias Kreppel.

“All the way to there, huh?” The builder lifted his hat, rubbing a callous-hardened hand across the back of his neck. He was a stocky man, with ruddy, weather-burnt skin and a face that fell naturally into an expression of weary good humor.

“All the way to here,” Dallas replied confidently. He gazed back along the line of trampled grass that ended where he was standing, imagining a strong plank wall in its place. He could almost smell the new wood and freshly turned ground.

“I want room for ten big stalls plus a nice, wide aisle and separate feed room,” he explained.

“You really planning on having ten broodmares at once?” Elias asked, raising an unruly brow.

“Sure am.”

“Whoo-whee, Dallas, you’re going to have to hire on extra help.”

Dallas laughed as another gust of wind pushed at his back, whipping the hair it had just brushed aside back over his eyes. He felt good, standing there in the lush grass of his own land, finally ready to put into motion the plan he’d spent years working and saving for. He felt invincible, like if he wanted to, he could spread his arms and lift off, floating on top of the storm-scented wind that spun about them.

Elias finished scratching his neck and grabbed at his hat again, just in time to keep the wind from whisking it right off his head.

“Well, you’ve come to the right man to get ‘er built for you,” he said, lifting his voice to be heard over the stirring weather. His gaze shifted over Dallas’s shoulder, and his expression grew wary as he scanned the mountains on the horizon. “I reckon we can work out the rest of the particulars in the house, yeah?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Dallas chuckled privately as the thick-set carpenter turned and stumped hurriedly toward the house. Then he looked around once more. The prairie danced and shimmered in the quickening wind. Thunder rumbled in the distance, deep enough to vibrate through the soles of his boots. A few sprinkles of rain hit his face, cool and welcome against his dusty skin.

He took a deep breath, savoring the sweet, grassy smell of his ranch as it mingled with the stonier scents the wind had wrestled down from the mountains. In the pasture beyond the existing barn, a horse whinnied, and another answered.

Finally, he turned to gaze in the direction Elias had been looking with so much dread. The horizon was a deep blue-black, like a bruise. It was as if night had taken form and was marching against the day. The snow-peaked Absarokas stood in bright contrast to the heavy clouds, cradling the last of the afternoon sunlight in their craggy ridges. Over his head, ribbons of gray like reaching fingers crowded across the pale sky, letting loose a spattering of rain here and there, warning of a coming downpour.

Dallas noticed the horses heading toward the barn doors that opened into their pasture. They were rowdy: cantering, nipping, and kicking up their heels at one another. Their glossy coats—black, bay, and a few ethereal grays—flashed in the dulling light, making Dallas’s heart lift with pride even as the turning weather turned his thoughts to more sober matters.

It was going to be a bad storm then. Otherwise, the horses would just stay out and get rained on. They didn’t give up their freedom for nothing.

The realization brought a twinge of apprehension, tempering his exhilaration. He quickly pushed it aside. The Triple Bar O was far beyond the point of having anything that could be severely damaged by a storm. All of the temporary lean-tos and fences that had gotten him and his brother through their first hard years on the land had been replaced with sturdier structures long ago, built to withstand the harsh Wyoming weather.

And soon, they’d be joined by buildings and fences that were even better, Dallas thought, another thrill of anticipation coursing through him.

The thought of his brother gave him another moment of pause. Rex’s ranch, which bordered Dallas’s to the east and which he’d inherited upon marrying the former owner’s daughter, was older than this one, and with three children, Rex didn’t have the money or time to keep it up like Dallas had been keeping the Triple Bar O.

I’ll go over and see if he needs any help shoring anything up as soon as the storm is over, he decided.

Turning on his heel, he headed for the small but sturdy ranch house he and Rex had built together when they’d first started out here. Elias was just turning at the doorway, looking impatiently for Dallas to come and let them both in.

Dallas quickened his step slightly to match the quickening of his heart. Pretty soon, it wouldn’t be just Dallas living in the little house any longer, either. Pretty soon, he’d have a beautiful, accomplished wife to welcome their guests in and make the little house feel like a home at last. That was his dream anyway; once the ranch was up to scratch, it would be the making of him.

As the first drops of cold rain rattled against his hat and hit his broad shoulders, Dallas caught up with Elias and pushed open the door, gesturing for him to enter the house.

“Not a moment too soon,” the builder chuckled nervously. He turned to look past Dallas as the rain steadily increased, thundering against the roof and turning the open doorway into a white waterfall in no time flat.

“I hope it don’t last too long. I told my wife I’d be home in time for supper, and I don’t fancy travelling in that.”

“I don’t think it will,” Dallas assured him. He closed the door, muffling the sound of the downpour somewhat. “These sudden squalls rarely do.”

Another rumble of thunder shook the cabin as both men removed their hats, hanging them on the pegs by the door.

“I’ll get us some coffee. Then we can talk about practicalities, timing, and payment, and whatnot.” Dallas spoke to Elias over his shoulder as he moved toward the small kitchen at the back of the house.

“I’ll come on with you,” the man returned good-naturedly. “If you don’t mind. That way we can talk right away. Strike while the iron’s hot and all that.”

“Sure,” Dallas agreed.

As he stepped into the kitchen and began rattling about, getting the kettle on and the grounds from their tin in the cupboard, he found himself looking around with different eyes. The eyes of his future bride.

He could imagine her almost as if she were already there. It embarrassed him only a little to realize he pictured her as looking somewhat like Anne, Rex’s wife, who had died in giving birth to their third child. She would have blonde hair and sky-blue eyes, he thought, a sharp contrast to his own dark hair and eyes. A ready smile and dimples. Maybe even a smattering of freckles. He’d always liked freckles on a woman.

What was more important than any of that, though, if she was everything he advertised for, was that she would be sharp as a whip, intelligent, educated, cultured. A woman who recognized beauty and quality when she saw it. And she would be ready to take her place as the wife of a successful rancher, a leader in the community. She would be his equal and stand with him shoulder to shoulder through all of his days.

As Dallas took in the small, dimly lit kitchen and thought about the rest of the house, he felt a twist of unease. A woman like that was bound to be unimpressed with his bachelor’s quarters. Why had he not thought of that before?

Maybe he should set aside some of the money he’d saved for improvements on the other parts of the ranch to update the house a bit. He could make some of the changes immediately while he waited for a reply to his ad. Then, he would let her choose what else she wanted to do to the place.

The queasiness in his belly quieted. She would no doubt like having a say in what improvements were made to the house. Surely that’s what she’d prefer to having everything decided for her, if she was half the woman he hoped she would be. There was no rush there.

He turned back to Elias with a cheerful demeanor. “Here you are,” he said, setting a heavy crockery mug before him.

The carpenter had already pulled out a chair and made himself comfortable, propping his heels far out under the small kitchen table. “I’m thinking me and my boys can get started as soon as we finish the McDowel’s porch,” Elias said, nodding his thanks. He picked up the mug, wrapping his big fingers around it and glancing at the ceiling as the rain grew harder and louder outside. “If that works out for you.”

“The sooner the better,” Dallas agreed. “I’d like to have both barns done by the end of the summer. That way, I can take my time getting things set up and animals moved around over the winter. Be ready for the spring foals in February or so.”

Elias nodded, sticking out his lower lip confidently. “End of the summer should be no problem. What about payment? There’ll be costs, so I usually ask for half up front. But I know that’s a lot all at once for two barns…”

“Half up front is fine with me,” Dallas said. “I waited until I had all the cash on hand and knew I could afford it before I contacted you. Don’t you worry about that.”

“It’s a wise man who follows in your footsteps,” the builder said approvingly. “Keep it up, and I’ve no doubt you’ll be the most successful and well-known horse rancher this side of the state in a year or two.”

“That’s my goal,” Dallas said modestly. He pulled out a chair on the other side of the table and prepared to sit across from his guest with his own mug of coffee.

A sudden flurry of sound from the front of the house stopped him.

Both he and Elias turned their heads quickly toward the door as Dallas mentally catalogued the ruckus: Hoofbeats, sloshing through the water and mud; the light patter of running boots on the porch; now the rattle of the latch.

He was already halfway out of the kitchen when the front door banged open, and a small figure in an oversized hat and slicker stumbled into the house, dripping water everywhere.

“Hey,” Dallas said, and the small person looked up.

It was Reuben, Rex’s oldest son. His thin face was pale and streaked with rainwater. His eyes were huge and dark in the dim entryway.

“Uncle Dal,” he gasped, his voice choking with sobs. “You’ve got to come quick. I think something awful has happened to Pa! You gotta… You gotta come… please. Quick.” The boy was babbling, his hand still gripping the doorknob, white-knuckled.

“Reuben, slow down. What do you mean? Where is he?”

“He went to check the cattle…” The boy had to stop, gasping for breath, heaving with crying. His lips quivered uncontrollably, partly from cold, partly from something else.

Dallas knelt down and took him by the shoulders. Dread welled within him like a flooding creek. “Take a breath,” he said, doing his best to keep his voice level. “How long ago was this?”

“A long time,” Reuben panted. “Right after breakfast.” His face crumpled. “Just now, though, Huckle came back…all by himself.”

Dallas’s heart dropped like a stone in his chest.

“Who’s Huckle?” Elias asked in a low voice behind him.

“Rex’s horse,” Dallas said. His voice felt thick, weighted with the realization of what this might mean.

Was it possible Rex had simply been thrown, or that the horse had pulled loose from a tie and taken off? Yes. But only barely. Rex was an expert rider, and Huck a devoted horse, obedient to his master. He came at a whistle and without fail. For him to end up back at the ranch without his rider was…bad. Very bad.

Reuben dropped his head against his chest and sobbed. He was trembling beneath Dallas’s hands. Remembering that the boy had ridden all the way from the neighboring ranch, most of the way in the rain, Dallas pulled himself together with an effort.

“All right,” he said, “Ben, is anyone home with your brother and sister?”

The boy shook his head, his chest heaving miserably.

“I was s’posed to watch them after Mandy went home,” he whimpered. “But then Pa didn’t come, and I’m scared something happened.”

“You did the right thing coming to me,” Dallas said. He straightened up, keeping one strong hand on his nephew’s shoulder as he turned to face Elias. The builder’s face had lost the pleasant expression it usually wore, falling instead into heaviness. He understood exactly how serious this was.

“Is there any chance you can stay here with Reuben while I go?” Dallas asked in a low voice.

Elias was nodding before he had finished. “And when it stops raining, I’ll bring him over in my wagon,” he offered.

Dallas nodded. “I’ll swing by Jagger’s on the way,” he said. The hired man and his wife lived only a little way down the road, in a cabin on ranch land. “He can take Maria to stay with the other kids.”

“Anything else, you just let me know,” Elias offered with gruff kindness. As Dallas hurried to grab his own hat and slicker, the carpenter replaced his hand on Reuben’s shoulder.

“Come on, young man,” he said. “You can be right proud of yourself for that ride you just made. Now, what do you say we get you some dry clothes and… hot chocolate?”

“You’re welcome to any food you can scrounge up, too,” Dallas said, swinging open the door. There might be a dry heel of the loaf of bread Maria had sent him the week before. Or a little venison jerky. He hadn’t thought ahead to supper yet. He likely would have ended up riding into town for a hot meal at the saloon if this hadn’t happened.

This. Whatever it was.

The cold rain hit him full in the face as he stepped outside, immediately beating past the slicker and down the front of his shirt. Dallas ignored the discomfort, striding through shallow puddles to the barn.

As he stepped in, several horses lifted their heads and whickered. They were crowded into the big, fenced pen that opened into the outdoor pasture, their backs to the rain. Dallas grabbed a bridle from the wall and climbed the fence in one easy motion.

On many ranches, this would have been enough to send the horses scattering, even out into the storm, but Dallas’s horses were all as tame as puppies. They nosed at his pockets, shoving each other to get close to him, eagerly hopeful for treats.

He slipped the bridle onto Guess, a long-legged bay who was always happy for a chance to run. Then he opened the gate, angling himself and the horse to keep others from escaping the pen as he led him out. His hands moved mechanically, swiftly brushing the horse’s coat, laying on the saddle blanket and saddle. Within minutes, he was leading him out of the barn and closing the doors behind him.

Guess pinned back his ears at being in the pounding rain and danced sideways as Dallas put a boot in the saddle and mounted. He was no sooner settled than a streak of lightning split the sky, followed barely a moment later by a sharp crack of thunder. The horse startled and leaped immediately into a gallop. Dallas let him go, tilting his head forward so that the brim of his hat sheltered his face from the full force of the downpour.

As the horse thundered down the muddy drive, Dallas’s mind raced with abandon. Possible scenarios tumbled through, one after the other, few of them good. Dallas desperately hoped he would arrive at his brother’s ranch just as Rex was walking in the door, footsore and sheepish, having taken a tumble and walked home horseless. But deep down, grief was already waiting, a crouched and leering gargoyle in the shadows of his mind.

If it was any other horse than Huckle… He let the thought trail off, pushing away the despair that accompanied it. He couldn’t give up yet, when he hadn’t even started looking. Rex will laugh at me for being so worried, he told himself instead.

Chapter One

Three days later

“There’s nowhere else to look, Dal.” Sheriff Kane Taylor’s face was etched with sympathy as he said the words, slowly, reluctantly. Somehow, it just made them that much worse.

Dallas looked away, focusing instead on the horizon, which shimmered and turned where it met the craggy foothills of the mountains. The view from this high on the bluff above the Triple Bar O and the Edger-Marlow spread was magnificent and desolate at the same time. Sagebrush Hollow lay below them, growing greener and lusher the deeper it went. Where Dallas and Taylor stood, the land was raw with wind, scoured of grass and bleached by the sun. The deep green of the pines stood out in sharp contrast to the red-brown dirt and silvery stone.

Dallas took a deep breath of the dry air, which carried a wild, piney scent.

“There must be somewhere else to look,” he said. “We haven’t found him yet, and he’s got to be somewhere. Even if…even if…”

He couldn’t bring himself to speak of Rex as a body. He pressed his lips together to keep from talking about him in the past tense. It seemed he’d been living in purgatory for three days. Just waiting. Waiting for reality to descend, for the other boot to drop. Every muscle in his body ached from the constant riding and hiking through the rugged terrain surrounding Sagebrush Hollow. He had hardly slept, and his eyes ached.

Taylor shifted uneasily. His dusty leather boots crunched in the dry, stony earth.

“If something happened to him, Dal, you know as well as I do these hills are full of critters that would drag something like that off.” The sheriff’s voice was low, gruff, and apologetic.

“You’re sure he went off that cliff, aren’t you?”

Dallas felt his own acceptance settle over him as he finally said it aloud, like the harsh, scratchy weight of a rug, suffocating him.

“The evidence of the scuffle there was the last sign we found of him,” Taylor responded after a breath. “I think we’ve got to accept that’s what happened.”

Dallas continued to stare out over the valley. Behind him, he could hear the horses getting restless. They were ready for the days of endless trekking to be over, too. Having already exhausted his geldings and not willing to risk any of the broodmares, he was riding his stallion, Crow, today, and the big, black horse was anxious to be back with his herd. He sensed, no doubt, the tension in Dallas’s posture, the anxiety that pervaded the air.

But Dallas was in no hurry to head home. Once he did, this time, he would be admitting defeat. He knew that neither he nor the sheriff nor any of the townsfolk who had volunteered their time to help with the search would be coming looking for his brother again. This was it: now or never.

And he knew, deep down, that the sheriff was right. The signs of the scuffle at the top of the cliff had been clear, as was the fact that, aside from a few stragglers, his brother’s cattle herd had not been seen since. He must have run into rustlers when he went to check on his livestock as they grazed, and they had driven him or shot him off the cliff. Then, coyotes or bears had dragged the body away.

Dallas swallowed the lump in his throat, but the tight, suffocating feeling in his chest wouldn’t go away.

“What am I going to tell the children?” he asked finally. He felt the sheriff’s hand on his shoulder, big and warm and sympathetic.

“I’ll talk to them if you like,” the big man said huskily. “But you’re going to have to decide what you want to do with them from here. With their Ma gone and now their Pa… There’s an orphanage up in Cody—”

“No,” Dallas cut in. He turned to look the sheriff in the face directly for the first time in long minutes. “They’re not going into an orphanage. Not while I’m alive and have anything to say about the matter.”

“Well, I’ve already talked to any townsfolk I thought might be able to swing feeding and bedding three extra young’uns,” the sheriff said with an apologetic shrug. “None of them are able to take them on right now.”

“Then they’ll stay with me.”

He almost wanted to snatch the words back the moment he said them. But he knew he wouldn’t. Kreppel, the carpenter, had brought seven-year-old Tate and four-year-old Quinn back to Dallas’s ranch the night their Pa went missing. Reuben never left after he brought the message, so they were all together and safe under the one roof – which was how it should be and how it would stay.

Dallas remembered the way Reuben, only ten-years-old, had leapt from his chair as his siblings came in the door, how he had run to them, how all three had clung to each other there in the dim kitchen.

Poor mites. To have lost their mother and now their father. It was dreadfully unfair.

So unfair that he felt guilty thinking about the things he would have to give up if he were to take care of them. His big new barns, the other improvements. Biggest of all, the beautiful, accomplished wife he’d planned to advertise for back East. The life he’d been about to embark upon after so many years of scrimping and saving and working his hands to the bone.

As the most successful horse rancher in the state, he’d felt prepared to woo such a bride. But he had to be honest with himself now. No well-educated woman with any prospects was going to give them up to move west and take care of a down-on-his-luck bachelor and three kids to boot.

It was nothing compared to losing his brother, but he felt a cherished dream slipping through his fingers and away; he felt sorry for it, he couldn’t deny that.

But there were more important things – duties that were his to keep – and he turned his mind to the new future that opened up before him. If he was to be the adoptive father of three orphaned children, he would throw himself into it, heart and soul, body and mind.

“It’s right noble of you to take them on,” Taylor was saying, patting his back. “You need any help, I know plenty of folks in town are eager to help you out in any way they can.”

“It’s not noble.” Dallas didn’t mean to say it so harshly, but he couldn’t find the energy to apologize. “It’s what any decent uncle would do,” he mumbled instead. “Those children deserve a lot more than I can give them, but I’ll give them what I can. And we won’t need any charity from the townsfolk,” he added.

He’d sacrificed enough of his pride in the past few days. He wasn’t going to start accepting donations from the people whom the sheriff had just finished telling him had refused to take fatherless children in, when, for all they knew, the alternative was the orphanage. No, they could do very well without that kind of half-hearted charity, thank you very much.

“I’ve got what I need. And I’ll find someone to help with them myself.”

He could hear the crunch of the sheriff’s boots as he followed him to where the horses’ reins were looped over a low-hanging pine branch.

“You still thinking to send for a mail-order bride?” Taylor asked, a hint of curiosity in his voice.

“I reckon I need one more than ever now,” Dallas said somewhat bitterly. “Don’t you?”

Just not the sort I’d been hoping for, he thought to himself, but didn’t say aloud. Not a cultured lady with a sharp mind to help him build a life worth living out here. No, it would be a different sort of woman who’d travel west to care for someone else’s brood, he had no doubt about that.

“I reckon you could do with some help, sure,” the sheriff said, but Dallas could hear the doubt in his voice.

Dallas lifted his chin, turning back toward him. “What?” he asked. “You don’t think there’s a woman willing to take on a… family?”