Fire Brand

He’ll risk his whole heart to save her from the past

Gaby Cane was always a bit afraid of her attraction to Bowie McCayde. Even when she was fifteen and Bowie’s family took her in, she had sensed his simmering resentment. Now ten years later, she’s an aspiring journalist who can hold her own with any man professionally, the dark shadows of years gone by far behind her. Then Bowie strides back into her life—only this time, he needs her, and the pull of loyalty to his family is too strong to ignore.

When Bowie asked Gaby to help save his family’s Arizona ranch, he never expected the girl he once knew to return transformed into a stunning, successful woman. As they work together, Bowie is shocked to find that her innocence and beauty stir a hunger he can’t deny. But the rogue rancher can sense something holding her back, and he’s determined to uncover the terrible secret Gaby is fighting to keep hidden...

Praise for the novels of

New York Times and USA TODAY

bestselling author Diana Palmer

“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“The popular Palmer has penned another winning novel, a perfect blend of romance and suspense.”

—Booklist on Lawman

“Readers will be moved by this tale of revenge and justice, grief and healing.”

—Booklist on Dangerous

“Diana Palmer is one of those authors whose books are always enjoyable. She throws in romance, suspense and a good story line.”

—The Romance Reader on Before Sunrise

“Lots of passion, thrills, and plenty of suspense... Protector is a top-notch read!”

—Romance Reviews Today

“A delightful romance with interesting new characters and many familiar faces.”

—RT Book Reviews on Wyoming Tough

Fire Brand

Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader,

It is so fascinating to read a book that I wrote over thirty years ago and to see firsthand how much the world has changed in that time.

When this book was written, I was working for a weekly newspaper and stringing (doing local news and features) for a daily newspaper. What you read is how newspaper reporting was done thirty years ago. The terminology, the way people dress, even the cars they drove, like Bowie’s Scorpion—which was a fantastic, and expensive, new car in the 1980s—is all history now.

Smoking was also a daily habit for me and millions of other people. We smoked in restaurants, in hospital rooms, in emergency rooms, on airplanes, anywhere we liked to. I smoked at my desk in the newspaper office. Everyone that I knew also smoked, including both my parents. These days, smoking is so taboo that I’m not even allowed to have a character who smokes in my books. However, I was adamant to leave this element in the book, to show things as they truly were back in the eighties, and my publisher obliged.

I hope you enjoy this walk through time in this early work of mine. It serves as a lesson in how life has changed, and changed us. I am a person out of place and time. The world I knew, and grew up in, is gone. I have to live in the one that exists, but I am not really happy in it. My grandfather saw the Rockettes on television when he was seventy years old. He rushed to shut it off. It offended him that women showed so much of their bodies. It amused me at the time—I was sixteen—but I am now nearing seventy, and I understand how he felt.

For better or worse, here is the book. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoy it. And God bless everyone!

For Ann and Muriel, who shared Arizona with me—and for Stephanie—with thanks and love.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dear Reader

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

JUST WHEN GABY thought it couldn’t get worse, it started to rain. She groaned as she tried to adjust part of her raincoat over the lens of her .35 mm camera, and kept shooting, aiming away from the red and blue flashing lights and the spotlights so that she wouldn’t spoil the shot.

“Are you out of your mind?” the thin man beside her grumbled, jerking her back down just as a bullet whizzed past her ear. “Gaby, that was stupid!”

“Shut up and keep taking notes,” she told him absently. The whir of the camera shutter was lost amid the renewed firing. It sounded like an automatic, which it probably was. The armed robber holed up in the old department store building was known to have one. He’d already killed the store manager and negotiations had broken down before they had even begun. “There’s a pregnant hostage in there with him. See if you can find out her name.”

“Will you stop slinging out orders?” he grumbled. “I know how to cover a story.”

Oh, sure you do, Gaby thought irritably, as long as it’s in a boardroom or a good restaurant. Only fate could have managed to leave Harrington alone in the newsroom when she had needed a photographer. And once the shooting in the street started, Harrington had plastered himself against a police car and refused to move. Gaby had no choice but to give him the note pad.

She pushed back her long black hair and snapped the camera lens cap on to keep the rain out of it. She was drenched already, her jeans and bulky pink knit top plastered to her skin under the concealing folds of the beige raincoat. And while she could take a photograph, Harrington’s were better—if he just had the nerve to go with his talent. He was a photojournalist and sometimes did interviews, to fill in for other reporters. He hated taking crime photos.

“I never should have let Johnny talk me into coming with you, you maniac,” Fred Harrington muttered. He glared at her through thick lenses that were spotted with drops of rain. She wondered if he knew how big they made his dark eyes look.

“If Johnny were here, he’d be out there where the Bulletin guy is right now,” she returned, nodding toward a beanpole in baggy jeans with a long ponytail and glasses, wandering into the line of fire. “For God’s sake, Wilson, get out of there!” she yelled across the police car she and Fred were crouched behind.

Wilson glanced her way and raised his hand in a friendly salute. “That you, Cane?” He grinned.

About that time, a disgruntled police officer tackled him and took him down, right on top of his camera.

“Good for you, officer!” Fred yelled.

Gaby elbowed him. “Traitor,” she accused.

“Stupid people should be trampled,” he replied. “Fool! Lunatic!” he called across to the rival paper’s reporter/photographer, who was being led away not too gently by his accoster.

“I love you, too, Harrington!” Wilson called back. “Hey, Cane, how about calling this story in to my editor for me?”

“Eat worms and die, Wilson!” she said gaily.

He stuck his tongue out at her and vanished behind the bulk of the angry police officer.

“Will you two keep it down?” one of the nearby policemen muttered. “Honest to God, you reporters are the biggest pests.”

“Just for that, I’ll misspell your name,” Gaby promised.

He grinned at her and moved away.

“You’re crazy,” Fred said fervently. He was new to the newspaper scene, having preferred photography to journalism—although he could write good cutlines and even do good interviews. He didn’t have the wherewithal for this kind of assignment, though. Gaby usually had the political beat. She and Harrington were only here because the police reporter was out sick. And any news reporter could be commandeered to cover police news in an emergency.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted movement. There was a uniformed man with a rifle running into a building across the street from the abandoned department store building. “Something’s happening,” Gaby said. “Look sharp. You might get a little closer to Chief Jones and see if he can fill you in on what the SWAT team’s going to do.”

Fred glared at her. “Why don’t you do it? I can take photos.”

“Deal.” She handed him the camera and started toward Chief Jones. Then, just as he started shooting, she turned around and removed the lens cap. “It works better that way,” she said, before edging her way along the police car line.

“Hi, Teddy,” she whispered, easing up beside the tall, distinguished police chief. “What’s up?”

“Utility stocks, or so I hear,” he mused.

“Dammit, Teddy, stop that,” she muttered. “It’s been a long day, and I’ve got an engagement party to go to when I get through here.”

“You getting engaged, Gaby?” he asked. “A miracle.” He looked up at the rainy sky.

“Not me,” she said through her teeth. “Mary, down in composing. She and I went through journalism school together.”

“I might have known.” He frowned as his eyes shifted to the roof of the building across the street, where the faint glimmer of metal gave away a marksman.

“Good for you,” Gaby whispered, glancing up with eyes that were such a dark olive shade of green that they looked brown. “The robber will take out that hostage if you don’t do something drastic.”

“We don’t like this sort of thing, you know that,” he sighed. “But he’s killed one man already and there’s a pregnant lady in there and he’s gone wild. We can’t negotiate him out of a damned thing. There’s no power or telephone or heat to cut off and trade him things for, and he won’t talk to us.” He shook his head. “This is a hell of a job sometimes, kid.”

“You’re telling me.”

Three years of work on the Phoenix Advertiser had given her an education in police tactics. She stood crouched beside Chief Jones, waiting for the inevitable shot that would drop the gunman. It was like waiting for death, because a head shot was all the sharpshooter was likely to get, if that much. For one long moment, she contemplated the futility of crime and its terrible cost—to the perpetrators, the public, and the police. And then the shot came. It echoed through the darkness with a horrible finality. If death had a sound, that was it, and Gaby cringed inwardly.

“It’s a hit!” the sharpshooter called down. “I got him.”

“Okay, move in,” Chief Jones told his men solemnly.

“Can I come?” Gaby asked quietly.

He looked down at her with mingled irritation and respect. “Sure, you can come,” he said. “You’ll have nightmares.”

“I’ve always had nightmares,” she said matter-of-factly. She went back to get Fred. “Let’s get some pics and wrap this up so we can make the morning edition,” she told him.

“Pics of what?” he asked.

“Of the gunman,” she said patiently.

“You want me to take pictures of a dead body?”

She took the camera from him with exaggerated patience and followed Chief Jones into the building.

Gaby’s heart went out to the small pregnant woman, who was white-faced, sobbing, and clearly almost in shock, as she was escorted gently from the building. The gunman lay on the floor. Someone had taken off his shabby jacket and put it over his head. He looked fragile, somehow, lying there like that. Gaby took a quick shot of him without really seeing him. She didn’t photograph the hostage. Johnny could scream his head off, but she wasn’t going to capitalize on a pregnant woman’s terror. Later, she could call the hospital and find out the woman’s condition, or she could get the particulars from Chief Jones. She glanced around the room until her eyes caught the sack with the holdup money in it.

A policeman was carefully picking it up, and she looked inside.

“Twenty dollars,” the policeman said. He shrugged. “Not much of a haul for two men’s lives.”

“Does it look like he was a pro?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “Too sloppy. A witness who saw him kill the storekeeper said he was shaking all over, and the gun discharged accidentally while he was trying to get away.”

She was writing it all down. “Got a family?”

“Yeah. He’s the youngest of six kids. The older brother’s a drug dealer. The mother goes on the streets from time to time to add to her welfare check.” He smiled at Gaby. “Tough world for kids, isn’t it?”

“For some of them,” she agreed. She shouldered the camera and went back to Chief Jones, who’d just finished talking to the hostage. Gaby asked him the necessary questions, picked up Harrington, and drove back to the office in her white custom VW convertible.

“How come you rate a car this fancy?” Fred asked on the way.

She smiled. “I have rich relatives,” she said.

Well, it was the truth, in one respect. The McCaydes of Lassiter, Arizona, were rich. They weren’t exactly relatives, however.

Her eyes drifted to the traffic. Phoenix was a fascinating city, elegant for its spaciousness, with the surrounding huge, jagged peaks of the southernmost Rockies forming a protective barrier around it. The first time she’d seen the city, she had been fascinated by the sheer height and majesty of those mountains.

In fact, Arizona itself still fascinated her. It was a state like no other, its appearance first frightening and barren. But closer up, it had a staggering beauty. In its vastness, it offered serenity and promise. In its diversity of terrain and cultures, it offered a kind of harmony that was visually melodic. Gaby loved it all, from the wealth and prosperity and hustle of Phoenix, to the quiet desert peace of Casa Río, the twenty-odd-thousand-acre ranch owned by the McCaydes.

“Doesn’t one of your relatives have a construction company in Tucson?” Harrington broke into her thoughts. “McCayde—Bowie McCayde?”

Gaby tingled at the mention of his name. “He’s not a relative. His parents took me in when I was in my teens,” she corrected. “Yes, he inherited McCayde Construction from his late father.”

“There’s a ranch, too, isn’t there?”

“Oh, yes, indeed, there is,” she said, remembering with a smile. “Casa Río—River House. It dates to ten years after the Civil War.” She glanced at him. “You did know that most of southeastern Arizona was settled by people from the South—and that during the Civil War, a Confederate flag flew briefly over the city of Tucson?”

“You’re kidding.”

She laughed. “No, I’m not. It’s true. Bowie’s people came from southwest Georgia. The first settler was a Cliatt, who married a Mexican girl. There’s even a Papago in his lineage somewhere—excuse me, a Tohono O’odham,” she said, using the new name the Papago had adopted for themselves. The name Papago was actually a Zuñi word meaning “Bean People,” so the Papago changed it to words in their own language, which meant “People of the Desert.”

“That’s a mouthful,” Harrington murmured as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“I think it’s pretty. Did you know that Apache is a Zuñi word for enemy? And that the word Navajo contains a ‘V,’ and that there is no ‘V’ in the Navajo language? Until recent times many scarcely knew of the word, in fact...”

“Stop!” Harrington wailed. “I don’t want to learn everything about the Southwest in one lesson.”

“I love it,” she sighed. “I love the people and the languages and the history.” Her dark olive eyes grew dreamy. “I wish I’d been born here.”

“Where are you from?” he asked.

It was just a casual question, and she’d brought it on herself, but she quickly changed the subject. “I wonder what they’ll do to Wilson?”

He glared at her, as she’d known he would. “I hope they hang him from the nearest tree. The fool!”

She smiled to herself. “Maybe they will,” she mused.

Her mind wandered as she drove. The rain reminded her so well of a time in her past—the first time she’d seen Casa Río. It was the night she’d met Bowie.

Just thinking of him made her nervous. In a lot of ways, Bowie was her nemesis. He couldn’t be called a brother because she’d never been officially adopted by the McCaydes. She was a stray they’d taken in and assumed responsibility for, but only as a ward. She hadn’t wanted them to adopt her, because then they might probe into her past. But she’d covered herself by giving a very plausible story about having moved every other week with her father, and having no permanent address. That much was almost true.

Bowie was twenty-seven years old the night she showed up at Casa Río in the rain. She had caught first sight of him in the barn, where she was huddled and shivering against the faint evening chill of May.

His sheer size had been overpowering. He was a big, rugged-looking blond man with a physique that any movie cowboy would have envied. He was the head of a growing construction company, and over the years, he’d spent a good deal of his time at building sites, pitching in when deadlines were threatening. That explained the muscular physique, but not the brooding look he wore much of the time. Later, Gaby would learn that he didn’t smile very often. She’d learn, too, that his extraordinary good looks were deceptive. He wasn’t a womanizer, and if he had affairs, they were so discreet as to be almost unnoticed. He was a quiet, introspective man who liked Bach, old war movies, and more than anything else, the land upon which Casa Río sat. Bowie was a preservationist, a conservationist. That, in a builder, was something of an irony, but then, Bowie was full of contradictions. Gaby knew him no better now than she had that first night. He was rarely ever home when she visited his mother, Aggie—it was almost as if he purposefully avoided her.

That long-ago rainy night, he’d been in evening clothes. Gaby’s frightened eyes had followed him as he stared into a stall and rubbed the velvet nose of the big Belgian horse that occupied it. He turned on the light, and she could see that his blond hair was very thick and straight, conventionally cut with a side part, and neatly combed, despite the hour. His profile had been utterly perfect; a strong, very handsome, very definite face that probably drew women like honey drew butterflies. He had a straight nose and a square jaw, and deep-set eyes under heavy brows. His mouth had a chiseled look, and there was something faintly sensuous about it. Gaby tried not to notice sensuality—she was afraid of men.

But masculine perfection like Bowie’s was hard to ignore. She watched him as she might have watched a sunset, awed by its impact. The black suit he’d been wearing clung with a tailored faultlessness to his powerful body, emphasizing his broad chest, the length of his muscular legs, the narrowness of his hips, the width of his shoulders. He bent his head to light a cigarette, and she saw the faint orange flair of the match turn his tanned face just briefly to bronze.

She must have accidentally moved and made noise, because all of a sudden he whirled toward her with an economy of movement. His eyes narrowed.

“Who the hell is that?” he asked. His voice was deep, curt, without an accent, and yet there was something faintly drawling about it.

She hesitated, but when he started toward the empty stall where she was huddled in fresh hay, she stood up and moved out into the aisle, terrified of being hemmed in.

“I’m not a burglar or anything,” she said, trying to smile. “I’m sorry about this, but it’s so cold, mister, and I just needed to get in out of the rain.” She sneezed loudly.

He stared at her quietly, his deep-set black eyes frightening. “Where did you come from?”

Her heart hammered in her chest. She hadn’t expected that question, and she wasn’t used to telling lies. Her father, a lay minister, had drummed morality into her at an early age, and honesty was part of her upbringing. Now, it was hard not to tell the truth. She lowered her eyes. “I’m an orphan,” she said miserably. “I was looking for a cousin, a Sanders, but a neighbor said the family moved years ago.” That much was true. “I don’t have anyplace to go...” Her lower lip had trembled. She was so afraid—not only of him, but of having the recent past come down on her head. Her big, olive-green eyes had stared up into his, pleading.

He didn’t want her around. That much was obvious. She could almost see courtesy going to war with suspicion in his mind.

“Well, I’ll take you inside and let my mother deal with you,” he said then. “God knows, she’s partial to girls, since she never had one of her own.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. She could still see herself as she’d been that night, her long black hair straggly around a pinched white face. Her clothes had been so worn that they had holes in a few places—especially her faded jeans and denim jacket. She’d had only a coin purse with her, which contained a one-dollar bill and some change, and there was a handkerchief in her jacket pocket. There was no learner’s permit, no credit card, nothing to give her away or help anyone trace her back to Kentucky.

“What’s your name, kid?” the big man had asked. He towered over her, enormously tall and powerful. She was five foot six, but he had to be at least six foot three.

“Gabrielle,” she stammered. “Gabrielle Cane.” That was her real name, but she’d deliberately hesitated before she gave him her last name, to make it seem as if it was a false one. “Most people call me Gaby.” Her eyes surveyed the neat barn, with its wide brick aisle and well-kept interior. “What is this place?”

“It’s called Casa Río—River House. In the old days, the river ran within sight, but its course changed over the years. Now you can’t see the river, and there isn’t any water in it for most of the year,” he’d replied. “My parents own it. I’m Bowie McCayde.”

“Your parents live here?” she asked nervously.

“Yes, they live here.” His voice had been curt. “I have an apartment in Tucson. My father is in the construction business.”

That would explain his dark tan and the muscles rippling under that jacket. He had big, lean hands, and they looked strong, too. She shifted and sneezed again.

“Come on, we’ll go inside.” He’d reached out to take her arm, but she moved back jerkily. She had plenty of reason not to like being touched, but instead of being angry, he only nodded at her reticence. “You don’t like being touched. Okay. I’ll remember,” he’d added, and he had.

The biggest surprise of her life had been meeting Aggie McCayde. The only woman she’d known for any length of time had been the matriarch of the big race horse farm where her father had been working, in Lexington, Kentucky. Her own mother had died when she was barely old enough to go to school, so Agatha McCayde came as a very big surprise to a girl used only to the company of her father. Aggie took one look at the sneezing fifteen-year-old and immediately began fussing over her. Her husband Copeland had welcomed the girl with equal kindness, but Bowie had kept apart, looking irritated and then angry. He left for Tucson a day early, as she’d later learned. When he saw how Gaby was fitting in with his parents, his visits became fewer and briefer. He seemed to have difficulty getting along with Copeland and Aggie, a problem that Gaby didn’t have at all. She opened her heart to the older couple as they opened their heart and home to her.