A Lady For Lincoln Cade

He smiled at her ploy to entice him to eat. But as he accepted the sandwich she offered, Haley saw the laughter left the silver of his eyes untouched.

Lincoln considered the wire and the tuft of brown fur caught on a barb. For the third time in a week he’d checked the deteriorating west pasture fence and the second time he’d found evidence of an animal passing near or through the wire. His first thought was deer. Closer inspection suggested dogs.

Among the mongrels of Belle Reve, some were white, some blond, some black. None were brown.

The west pasture was isolated, bordered by two rivers, the sprawl of Belle Reve, and Stuart land. No inhabited houses or farms were close enough for straying pets or working dogs. That left the threat of a pack of lost or abandoned pets. Dogs that would run a horse to death for the joy of the chase.

The Black Arabian stock his brother Jackson kept in pastures at the plantation were far too valuable to dismiss suspicions of a pack gone wild. He decided he would warn Jackson and enlist his aid in trapping the animals. Catching the pommel of his saddle and stepping into the stirrup, Lincoln mounted Diablo.

His inspection complete, he sat for an indecisive moment, trying to resist the lure of the path beyond the fence. The path that would lead to the Stuart farm. In the end he succumbed to a need he’d battled for weeks.

“Won’t hurt to check the property.” As Diablo’s black ears flicked at the sound of his voice, with his palm Lincoln stroked the stallion’s mane. “Could be the pack settled in the barn. And there’s a step to measure for repair.”

Glancing at the sky, gauging the position of the sun, he tapped the horse with the reins. “A couple of hours of daylight left, Diablo. Time enough.”

Diablo was eager to run. Lincoln himself enjoyed the rush as the Arabian topped the fence and raced over the corridor that a century before had been the Stuarts’ wagon route to town.

Beyond sight of the farm, Lincoln slowed to a walk. If the dogs had made their den on the property, they would be gone before he could find it, if he came riding in like the Lone Ranger.

“Easy, boy. No sudden moves.” He walked the horse slowly, barely rustling the grass that grew knee high. “Don’t want to spook them if they’re here.”

With a grunt hardly stifled, he jerked to a startled halt. “What the devil?”

Bending in the saddle, peering through a copse of massive trees, he saw light. Light where there should be no light, gleaming through windows of the Stuart farmhouse.

Illusion? A trick of the sun glinting off glass? Intruders or looters after all these years of the farmhouse standing unlocked?

Maybe. He could persuade himself to accept that. But the creak of rusty hinges was neither a trick nor an illusion. Nor was the woman who pushed open the door and stepped onto the porch. With her hair gleaming like spilling gold, as she shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun, she was familiar and very real.

“Linsey?” Her name was a raw undertone lost in the prattle of breeze-stirred oaks. Yet, spoken in his own voice, it resounded in his mind. Like a man too long in the dark catching a glimpse of the sun, his gaze moved over her. With incredulous care, he committed to mind a memory, seeking first the differences imposed by time and living. Then the unchanging qualities six long years couldn’t sweep from his mind.

Her hair was still long. Still a mass of curls gathered brutally into a topknot by a clasp that never had a chance of holding it. The hand that pushed tumbling strands from her cheeks was still absently impatient.

Her chin still tilted in eternal determination. While her mouth curved in a smile that seemed joyfully childlike and sensual at once. Lincoln wondered if she still caught her lower lip between her teeth when she concentrated or when she worried.

Drawing himself from the aching study of her mouth and face, he matched this Linsey of flesh and blood to the woman he’d turned away from…for Lucky.

She stood tall, shoulders back, making the most of those few inches by which she topped five feet. And as the breeze that sent tiny oak leaves spiraling around him swept across the clearing, molding her supple shirt against her, Lincoln realized her breasts were rounder, fuller. A girlish innocence had given way to an earthy maturity, a beguiling voluptuousness. A metamorphosis making her jean-clad waist and hips seem slimmer.

He’d lost a girl six years ago. Today, he found a woman in full bloom.

To the rest of the world she’d always been a pretty girl full of life and courage. To Lincoln, she was breathtaking from the first. But not so beautiful as now. Never so beautiful he could hardly believe she was real, not illusion.

Just as he could hardly believe that, after hiring investigators to search all of Oregon, Montana, and as many locales in between as possible, he had found her here. Exactly where she should be, in Lucky Stuart’s South Carolina home.

The last place he’d thought to look in a month. The last place he would ever think to look, if the search hadn’t ended.

How long had she been here? One week? Two? How soon after his last stop by the farm had she arrived? “How long before you were going to let me know, Linsey?”

As relieved as he was that she was here, like a battering ram striking out of nowhere, Lincoln was filled with anger bordering on rage. Anger laced with bitter self-disgust that any of it should matter. That she should matter.

For years he’d struggled to put the past in perspective. From a passionate and desperate interlude in a shack in an Oregon forest surrounded by fire, to the day he walked her down the aisle—giving her, in an unknown father’s stead, to Lucky—he thought he’d finally succeeded in putting it behind him.

Until the letters. Then he knew his struggles and all he believed he’d accomplished had been a farce.

Farce or not, his life was on an even keel, he didn’t want it disrupted by old wounds torn open. He hadn’t stopped to think of this moment when he’d begun the search. He hadn’t thought of anything but the wishes of a dying friend. But now, after the month and a small fortune spent searching for her, after the anguish of every minute of each of those days, he was tempted to ride away as if he’d never seen her and never loved her.

Dear God, he was tempted, but he’d never broken a promise to Lucky. He wouldn’t now. Raking an arm over his face, wishing he could wipe the anger from his heart as easily as he could from his features, he lifted a hand to hail the house.

“Cade.”

Lincoln froze at the sound, hand uplifted, lips parted in a greeting he wouldn’t utter.

“Cade? Where are you, tiger? Better come inside before it gets dark.”

Shocked that she could know he was there in the shadows that deepened with every increment the sun sank, Lincoln didn’t respond. He couldn’t respond as her voice flowed over him filled with love, driving out the anger.

In that moment of stunned silence, he heard the bark of a dog, a peal of laughter, then the voice of a child. “I’m here, Mom. In the barn with Brownie.”

Before he could make sense of it, a small boy appeared at the barn door. A boy called Cade and his dog.

“Brownie.” Lincoln didn’t know why it was that name he muttered. He didn’t understand why barbwire streaming with brown dog hair twice in three days should flood his mind. But he was glad for a small boy’s simple name for a brown dog and for the mystery of the barbs’ trophies solved.

Mind candy, a mental dodge. A name and a mystery more easily understood and resolved than the one Lincoln confronted in gathering darkness beyond the clearing of the Stuart farm.

His mouth was dry, his head hurt, his heart pounded so hard he thought it might explode. He didn’t want to stay, but he couldn’t drag his gaze from the boy as he raced across the yard and skipped over the broken step into his mother’s arms.

He was a small boy, but too big for Linsey to pick up. Yet she did, crushing him to her as she spun him round and round, planting nibbling kisses on his neck. The boy’s laughter escalated to squeals and giggles, while the dog jumped in circles, trying to join in.

Breathless and panting, Linsey stopped spinning. When she was still again, Lincoln watched as the boy plucked the clasp from her hair, letting it fall beyond her shoulders.

Catching a strand in his grubby fist, he laughed in delight. “Pretty.”

Linsey laughed, too. “Ah, shucks, kind sir. I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Nope.” The boy giggled and squirmed, and giggled that much harder when she tickled him. “Just you.”

“That will change in a few years.” Linsey’s laugh faded as she hugged him again. “You like it here, don’t you, Cade?”

“Yep.” The boy’s head bobbed. “But I was wondering.”

“Yeah?”

“Can I have a horse?”

“Hmm.” Linsey tilted her head, considering. “I suppose one day. What kind of horse would you want?”

“A humongous black one, like the tall man.”