Nora

“No, there is…there is nothing I want. I…must go inside. Do have a safe trip,” she said.

He just looked at her, aware of new feelings, new curiosities, all of which involved the woman before him. “I shall think of you while I’m away,” he said, his voice deep and slow. “When I look up at the stars tonight, I shall imagine you looking at them, and thinking of me as well.”

She flushed. “You must not!”

“Why?” he asked reasonably, and smiled. “You have no beau. I have no sweetheart. Why should we not be interested in each other?”

“I do not want that,” she blurted out.

He cocked an eyebrow. “Because I’m a poor, dirty cowboy?” he chided. “Am I not good enough for a Marlowe of Virginia?”

She grimaced and he read the truth in her face. No, a poor cowhand would hardly be a suitable match for a wealthy woman from back East. It rankled that she should think that way, that she should be so bound by convention when she was modern and well traveled and outspoken.

She was an adventuress, she said, but she was certainly very conventional in her private life. She gave lip service to the modern ideals, but she did not practice them. She was just one more prisoner of the social conventions of her set. He was oddly disappointed in her. His mother was a frontier woman, a good and decent woman, but one who lived to please her own sense of morality, not flat rules set down by other people. He had thought at first that Nora had spirit and felt the lure of adventure, that she had come West to test her courage and challenge the unknown. But in fact, she was just another bored rich society woman who toyed with men to get her thrills. He mustn’t forget poor Greely.

“Please,” she said nervously. “I must go.”

His face was shuttered, hard. “Go, then,” he said curtly. “It would not be seemly for you to be seen with someone beneath your social station.”

She glanced at him worriedly, guiltily. But she didn’t deny it. That was what damned her in his eyes, what made him determined to show her that feelings were more important than conventions. He would, if it was the last thing he ever did. He would woo and win her as an itinerant cowboy. And when he was through, she would never judge another man by his clothes or his station in life. He would be the sword of vengeance for Greely and all the other men this spoiled young miss had hurt with her thoughtlessness.

He whirled angrily toward his horse, leaving Nora to walk slowly back toward the house with her heart in her throat. She had driven him away, and she should be sorry. But she had nothing to give him. If he thought that it was because of his station and not her own fears about her illness, then perhaps that was as well, too. Perhaps it would spare her any future wooing. The thought, which should have comforted her, was vaguely discouraging.

She had barely made it to the steps when she heard the horse’s hooves sound close by, and then quickly move away. She turned in time to see Cal riding out the gate, tall against the darkening sky, looking as violent as the storm itself.

THE CHURCH PICNIC was a surprise. Nora hadn’t expected to enjoy it, but she was having a very good time. The only fly in the ointment was, as Melly had intimated, Mr. Langhorn’s son, Bruce. The little boy was a holy terror, blond and slight and full of mischief. He’d barely arrived when he put a bullfrog down a girl’s back and spilled lemonade on the preacher’s trousers.

His dad just grinned and watched him, apparently approving his actions. Melly gave the whipcord-lean man with the dark hair and eyes a cold glare, but he ignored her. He was apparently taken with an older woman, a brunette with a plate of cake and a sweet smile.

“There he goes again, playing up to Mrs. Terrell,” Melly said irritably. “Not that I care, but she’s at least five years older than he is, and she’s got three kids of her own. She’s a widow. A rich widow,” she added in a hiss.

As if he heard, Mr. Langhorn looked at her. He lifted an eyebrow, gave her a lazy, dismissing appraisal, and picked up a piece of the widow’s cake. There was something almost spiteful about the way he looked right at Melly while he bit into it.

“Daring me to say something,” Melly muttered. “Look at him! He’s a…a blackguard, an uncivilized boor! She deserves him!”

“But the poor widow is kind,” Nora argued.

“She is a black widow,” came the terse reply. “I despise her!”

Nora was surprised at the poisonous tones from her sweet cousin Melly. It was so out of character.

“He told me that I was too young to give him what a man needed from a woman,” Melly said shockingly. She flushed. “Mama would have a fit if she knew he had spoken to me in such a way. I pretended that it was another man, my best friend’s new husband, who had broken my heart, but it wasn’t. It was…him.” She sounded miserable. Her eyes followed the tall man with the widow Terrell, and she jerked them back around with a faint groan. “My parents would never have permitted anything to come of my regard for him, because he is divorced! What shall I do? It is killing me to see them together! He says that he shall probably marry her, because Bruce needs a mother so badly.” She clenched her hands together. “I love him. But he feels nothing for me, nothing at all. He has never touched me, not even to shake my hand….”

There was a wrenching sigh, and Nora felt so sorry for her cousin that she could have cried.

“I am sorry,” she said gently. “Life has its tragedies, doesn’t it?” she added absently, thinking of Africa and the terrible changes it had brought to her life.

“Yours has been much different from mine, and certainly it has not been tragic,” her cousin argued. “You have wealth and position and you are traveled and sophisticated. You have everything.”

“Not everything,” Nora said tersely.

“You could have. Mr. Barton is sweet on you,” she teased, forgetting her own problems momentarily.

“You might marry him.”

She couldn’t forget the harsh, cold farewell she’d received from Mr. Barton. She tensed indignantly.

“Marry a cowboy!” Nora exclaimed haughtily.

Melly glared at her. “And what, pray tell, is wrong with a hardworking man? Being poor is no sin.”

“He has no ambition. He is dirty and disheveled. I find him…offensive,” she lied.

“Then why were you kissing him in the barn before he left?” Melly asked reasonably.

Nora gasped. “What do you mean?”

“I saw you from my window,” she said with a chuckle. “Don’t look so shocked, Nora, I knew you were human. He is very attractive, and when he shaves and cleans up, he would be a match for any of your European friends.”

Nora shifted uncomfortably. “He is uncivilized.”

“You should spend more time out here. If you did, you would realize that clothes and a fine education do not always make a man a gentleman,” Melly said quietly. “There are men here in Texas who have no money, but who are courageous and kind and noble, in their way.”

“Like the heroes in my dime novels?” Nora chided. “That is all fiction. I have discovered the truth since I have come West, and it is disillusioning.”

“It should not be, if you do not expect people to be perfect.”

“I certainly do not expect it of Mr. Barton. He…accosted me,” she muttered.

“He kissed you,” Melly corrected, “which is hardly the same thing. Let me tell you, many of our unattached women in church would give much to have the elusive and stoic Mr. Barton kiss them!”

Nora glared at her cousin. “I would prefer that, too. He may kiss any of them he likes, with my blessing. I have no desire to become the sweetheart of a common cowboy.”

“Or of any man, it seems,” Melly murmured with a speaking glance. “You are very reluctant to discuss marriage and a family, Nora.”

Nora wrapped her arms around her body. “I have no desire to marry.”

“Why?”

She shifted. “It is something I cannot discuss,” she said, shivering with the memory of how ill she had been. How could she subject a man, any man, to a life of illnesses that would never end? How could she have a baby, and take care of it? “I shall never marry,” Nora said bitterly.

“With the right man, you might want to.”

Nora thought of Cal Barton’s hot kisses, and her heart raced. She mustn’t remember, she mustn’t. She turned in time to see young Bruce Langhorn making a beeline for another young boy perched precariously on a rock, laughing.

“Oh, no!” Melly gasped, and before Nora could open her mouth, her cousin broke into a dead run toward the children.

She hadn’t realized what was going on until she saw the Langhorn boy reach out to push the other little boy, immaculately dressed, into the stream face-first.