The Untamed Heart

Kit Gardner

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

KIT GARDNER

at one time in her life masqueraded as an accountant. These days she considers herself a writer and a mother. When she’s not pounding furiously on her computer keyboard, she now can be found on her knees in her perennial gardens, bellowing on the sidelines of a soccer field or blubbering over anything Jane Austen. She’s an eternal enthusiast for all things English but has been known to spend entire Sunday mornings watching reruns of “The Wild, Wild West.” She lives with her husband, three sons and a golden retriever near Chicago. She loves to hear from readers. Write to P.O. Box 510, Plainfield, IL 60544.

Prologue (#ulink_2a440f9a-660f-5dfa-bbc5-a1e3aed9d1ad)

Nebraska

April 1880

Sloan Devlin, fifth Earl of Worthingham, held four kings and an ace. The smooth-handed gentleman seated to his right slid his entire pile of bills and coin into the center of the table, raising the stakes well above four thousand.

“I call, tenderfoot,” the man drawled. Beneath the brim of his low-crowned black hat, his mouth twisted into a grin that would have sent any well-seeing female to the floor in a faint. “Lay them on the table, gents.”

Across the table two railroad businessmen with bulging bellies and whiskey-ruddied cheeks tossed their cards onto the table. The one who called himself Hyde rolled his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other and glanced from the black-hatted man to Sloan. The other, Strobridge, gulped from his glass and glanced nervously around the otherwise deserted railcar. Over the tops of their brown bowlers a barren wash of gold whizzed past beyond the windows. The car’s wooden floor vibrated beneath Sloan’s shoes, each clickety-clack of the rails registering the locomotive’s westward trek across the prairie.

The gentleman cheat, who’d neglected to mention his name, stared at Sloan. The man had resorted to deceit as though he’d done it countless times before. But a gambler down on his luck was never too hard to recognize. Sloan had known several in his thirty-five years, men who utilized their quick hands to stack the deck or deal crookedly, fluttering the cards up like a flock of quail and neatly assembling them as they wished. A man had no chance against those fellows, unless luck played her hand, and Sloan had always found luck at the gaming table. Elsewhere—well, that was another thing altogether.

At first glance Sloan had registered the gambler’s babysmooth hands, and the finely made, high-heeled French leather boot he crossed over one knee. Maybe only a few years younger than Sloan, he’d been graced with the good looks and bold manner that marked him as part of the dashing American West Sloan had traveled from England to discover. His skin and hair were of the same sun-burnished hue as the landscape beyond the windows. He wore his fresh-from-the-tailor’s-iron linen and broadcloth with an elegance common to the men who occupied London’s most fashionable gaming houses, and yet his eyes remained wary as if he’d seen enough to expect the worst of people.

He obviously hadn’t expected to be outwitted by the bespectacled Englishman he’d marked as an easy dupe.

Sloan spread his cards faceup on the table. “Four kings and an ace.” It was an unbeatable hand. All eyes swung to the gambler.

He was staring at Sloan’s cards with the kind of passive, cheek-twitching calm that in Sloan’s experience typically indicated tremendous distress. He lifted lifeless eyes and Sloan felt every muscle tense.

The gambler spilled his cards onto the pile of chips in the center of the table.

Hyde coughed. “By damn.” His eyes angled at Sloan. “Where’d you say you were from?”

Sloan drew off his spectacles, folded them and slid them into the breast pocket of his topcoat. “Cornwall, England.” He indicated the booty. “I take it this is mine.”

Hyde pushed the pile of bills toward Sloan and began filling a sack with the coins. “They play poker over there in England?”

“Not exactly.”

“That where you learned to cheat, gent?” The gambler surged to his feet, toppling his chair.

Calmly Sloan folded a stack of bills. He could feel the man’s angered heat radiating from his chest. Sloan glanced at the hand lingering near the open flap of his waistcoat, fingertips perhaps inches from cold steel. Sloan kept folding bills.

“Now hold on there,” Strobridge crowed, bouncing out of his chair. “We’re all civilized gentlemen here. My friend Hyde here and I have come all the way from Boston without encountering any fuss, or any Indians and we don’t need any trouble now. Peaceful business in Denver is what we’re about. Just peaceful Union Pacific business in a lawless land. There’s no need to draw your gun, Devlin.”

“I wasn’t intending to,” Sloan said, stuffing the wad of bills into his pocket. “I don’t own one.”

All three men stared at Sloan.

Sloan shoved his chair from the table and rose to his full height, which, as chance would have it, was a good two inches taller than the gambler, high-heeled French boots notwithstanding. Their gazes locked.

“In Cornwall,” Sloan said, “there’s a saying that any man who calls another a cheat in a game of chance is doing so because of his own guilt in the matter. It’s not the winner who must defend his well-earned victory but the loser who can’t stomach his failure at deception.”

The gambler’s eyes were as bleak as a dead man’s. Sloan’s stare was just as uncompromising.

“Dammit, now, shake hands,” Strobridge sputtered with a forced laugh. “Go on. Then we’ll open ourselves a fine bottle of brandy. We can drink to the success of the Union Pacific railroad and to all the silver ore flowing out of the Rocky Mountains. That’s where the fortunes are made, gents. Not on one game of cards. Go on, now. We’re civilized men, remember.”

Sloan extended his hand to the gambler. But swallowing pride was too damned difficult for some civilized men. To others, indeed, what was a bit of lost pride next to needless loss of life? Sloan had learned that lesson firsthand and it had been a costly one.

So costly, he’d left Cornwall and the tinners he’d championed against the mine owners. So costly, he’d left Devlin Manor, his tenants, his estates, and all the responsibility that came with a sudden inheriting of a title.

Sloan’s belief in a peaceful settling of differences had ended with his father taking a stray lead ball in the chest and dying just steps from Devlin Manor’s door. After witnessing that, only an idealist who was a fool would still cling to the idea of men resorting to diplomacy over violence, a handshake over pistols at dawn.

So he was an idealistic fool, but Sloan wasn’t ready to abandon his faith in the human spirit. It was because of it that he’d set out from Bristol on the Cunard steamer to embrace the American frontier in all its unbridled splendor, to see its vast and varied landscape with its climatic excesses, its giant herds of buffalo, its Indians, its bold pioneers who were in the process of writing a stirring chapter in history, a saga of heroic proportions. Until now, he’d viewed the West through the eyes and canvases of the European painters who imagined it. Now he would experience it, and somewhere on this vast land he would rid himself of the burden of putting his father into the line of fire, and restore his worthiness of the title. Maybe then he could return to assume the responsibilities.

“Get the brandy,” the gambler ordered, clasping Sloan’s hand in his woman’s smooth fingers. “And get the gent a glass.” He settled himself in his chair as the two railroad men scrambled below the table, producing a bottle and several glasses, which they filled and set before Sloan and the gambler.

“To silver,” Hyde said, lifting his glass. “May no one-horse, shantytown dare to stand in the way of progress.”

“And to all the lily-white, land-owning virgins that ever called those one-horse towns home.” The gambler displayed a flash of teeth and drained his glass. “May they forever turn to a man in times of great need. And may that man be me.” His chuckle spilled slowly from his lips as though he savored a thought. “That, gentlemen, is all the fortune I’ll ever need.”

Hyde and Strobridge echoed his laughter. “If you’re on your way to Denver, Devlin,” Strobridge began, as he filled his third glass with a less than steady hand, “I know of a saloon in a town called Deadwood Run, couple stops before Denver. The Devil’s Gold. I have a special lady there. I always pay her a call once I finish up my business in Denver. This trip will be no different Dakota Darby’s her name. She’ll show you how to spend that money you got there, and it won’t be on cards.”

Sloan set his empty glass on the baize. “I’ll remember that”

“Looking for great enterprise, eh?”

“Rather the opposite. Preferably off the railroad line.”

Hyde puffed up his chest “There isn’t a place worth seeing that isn’t on the Union Pacific line. Nothing except stretches of prairie waiting for the track to come through and make them into something. And no one worth knowing, either, especially the fools that think they can hold out on the march of the iron horse. It’s the coming of industry. You’re a smart fellow. You can understand that. But some folks are too stubborn to see it no matter how much money you wave under their noses.”

Sloan narrowed his eyes on Hyde. “Money for their land.”

“It isn’t for their mules.”

“Or their tarantula juice,” the gambler muttered into his glass. “One gulp of that homemade brew is enough to make a hummingbird spit in a rattlesnake’s eye. I prefer my drink like my women—smooth, unspoiled and mighty pure.”

Again the railroad men sniggered their agreement After a moment Strobridge glanced at Sloan. “All the land for the asking and they sit tight, refusing to budge.”

“Maybe they think they’ve good reason,” Sloan said.

“Sure they do. It’s their pride, the same damned pride that saw them westward seeking their fortunes in the first place.”

“Fortunes you promised them.”

Strobridge’s glass poised at his lips. “I’m no swiveltongued promoter, spouting empty promises.”

Sloan puckered his brow and fished one hand then the other into the inner pockets of his topcoat. “I believe I read something that sounded like a promise in a Union Pacific prospectus I was given in New York. Or was it Chicago? Something about the paradise awaiting development west of the hundredth meridian. It must be in my valise.