Lone Star Winter
Diana Palmer
Lone Star Winter
MILLS & BOON
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CONTENTS
THE WINTER SOLDIER
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
CATTLEMAN’S PRIDE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
For J. Nelson
Chapter One
It was Monday, the worst day in the world to try to get a prescription filled. Behind the counter, the poor harassed male druggist was trying to field the telephone calls, fill prescriptions, answer questions from patrons and delegate duties to two assistants. It was always like this after the weekend, Cy Parks thought with resignation. Nobody wanted to bother the doctor on his days off, so they all waited until Monday to present their various complaints. Hence the rush on the Jacobsville Pharmacy. Michael, the pharmacist on duty, was smiling pleasantly despite the crush of customers, accustomed to the Monday madness.
That group putting off a visit to the doctor until Mon day included himself, Cy mused. His arm was throbbing from an encounter with one of his angry Santa Gertrudis bulls late on Friday afternoon. It was his left arm, too, the one that had been burned in the house fire back in Wyoming. The angry rip needed ten stitches, and Dr. “Copper” Coltrain had been irritated that Cy hadn’t gone to the emergency room instead of letting it wait two days and risking gangrene. The sarcasm just washed right off; Coltrain could have saved his breath. Over the years, there had been so many wounds that Cy hardly felt pain anymore. With his shirt off, those wounds had been apparent to Coltrain, who wondered aloud where so many bullet wounds came from. Cy had simply looked at him, with those deep green eyes that could be as cold as Arctic air. Coltrain had given up.
Stitches in place, Coltrain had scribbled a prescription for a strong antibiotic and a painkiller and sent him on his way. Cy had given the prescription to the clerk ten minutes ago. He glanced around him at the prescription counter and thought he probably should have packed lunch and brought it with him.
He shifted from one booted foot to the other with noticeable impatience, his glittery green eyes sweeping the customers nearest the counter. They settled on a serene blond-haired woman studying him with evident amusement. He knew her. Most people in Jacobsville, Texas, did. She was Lisa Taylor Monroe. Her husband, Walt Monroe, an undercover narcotics officer with a federal agency, had recently been killed. He’d borrowed on his insurance policy, so there had been just enough money to bury him. At least Lisa had her small ranch, a legacy from her late father.
Cy’s keen eyes studied her openly. She was sweet, but she’d never win any beauty contests. Her dark blond hair was always in a bun and she never put on makeup. She wore glasses over her brown eyes, plastic-framed ones, and her usual garb was jeans and a T-shirt when she was working around the ranch. Walt Monroe had loved the ranch, and during his infrequent visits home, he’d set out improving it. His ambitions had all but bankrupted it, so that Lisa was left after his death with a small savings account that probably wouldn’t even pay the interest on the loans Walt had obtained.
Cy knew something about Lisa Monroe because she was his closest neighbor, along with Luke Craig, a rancher who was recently married to a public defender named Belinda Jessup. Mrs. Monroe there liked Charolais, he recalled. He wasn’t any too fond of foreign cattle, having a purebred herd of Santa Gertrudis cattle, breeding bulls, which made him a profitable living. Almost as prosperous as his former sideline, he mused. A good champion bull could pull upward of a million dollars on the market.
Lisa had no such livestock. Her Charolais cattle were steers, beef stock. She sold off her steer crop every fall, but it wouldn’t do her much good now. She was too deeply in debt. Like most other people, he felt sorry for her. It was common gossip that she was pregnant, be cause in a small town like Jacobsville, everybody knew everything. She didn’t look pregnant, but he’d over heard someone say that they could tell in days now, rather than the weeks such tests had once required. She must be just barely pregnant, he mused, because those tight jeans outlined a flat stomach and a figure that most women would covet.
But her situation was precarious. Pregnant, widowed and deeply in debt, she was likely to find herself homeless before much longer, when the bank was forced to foreclose on the property. Damned shame, he thought, when it had such potential for development.
She was clutching a boxed heating pad to her chest, waiting her turn in line at the second cash register at the pharmacy counter.
When Lisa was finally at the head of the line, she put down her heating pad on the counter and opened her purse.
“Another one, Lisa?” the young female clerk asked her with an odd smile.
She gave the other woman an irritated glance as she dug in her purse for her checkbook. “Don’t you start, Bonnie,” she muttered.
“How can I help it?” the clerk chuckled. “That’s the third one this month. In fact, that’s the last one we have in stock.”
“I know that. You’d better order some more.”
“You really need to do something about that dog,” Bonnie suggested firmly.
“Hear, hear!” the other clerk, Joanne, seconded, peering at Lisa over her glasses.
“The puppy takes after his father,” Lisa said defensively. He did, she mused. His father belonged to Tom Walker, and the mostly German shepherd dog, Moose, was a local legend. This pup was from the first litter he’d sired—without Tom’s knowledge or permission. “But he’s going to be a lot of protection, so I guess it’s a trade-off. How much is this?”
Bonnie told her, waited while she wrote the check, accepted it and processed it. “Here you go,” she told the customer. She glanced down at the other woman’s flat stomach. “When are you due?”
“Eight months and two weeks,” Lisa said quietly, wincing as she recalled that her husband, away from home and working undercover, had been killed the very night after she’d conceived, if Dr. Lou Coltrain had his numbers right. And when had Lou ever missed a due date? He was uncanny at predicting births.
“You’ve got that Mason man helping you with the ranch.” Bonnie interrupted her thoughts. “You shouldn’t need a dog with him there. Can’t he protect you?”
“He only comes on the weekends,” Lisa replied.
Bonnie frowned. “Luke Craig sent him out there, didn’t he? But he said the man was supposed to spend every night in the bunkhouse!”
“He visits his girlfriend most nights,” Lisa said irritably. “And better her than me! He doesn’t bathe!”
Bonnie burst out laughing. “Well, there’s one bright side to it. If he isn’t staying nights, you only have to pay him for the weekends…Lisa,” she added when she saw the guilty expression on the other woman’s face, “you aren’t still paying him for the whole week?”
Lisa flushed. “Don’t,” she said huskily.
“Sorry.” Bonnie handed her a receipt. “It’s just I hate the way you let people take advantage of you, that’s all. There are so many rotten people in the world, and you’re a walking, talking benevolence society.”
“Rotten people aren’t born, they’re made,” Lisa told her. “He isn’t a bad man, he just didn’t have a proper upbringing.”
“Oh, good God!” Cy said harshly, glaring at her, having kept his mouth shut as long as possible without imploding. The woman’s compassion hit him on a raw spot and made him furious.
Lisa’s eyes were brown, big and wide and soft through the plastic frames of her glasses. “Excuse me?”
“Are you for real?” he asked curtly. “Listen, people dig their own graves and they climb into them. Nothing excuses cruelty.”
“You tell her!” Bonnie said, agreeing.
Lisa recognized her taciturn neighbor from a previous encounter, long ago. He’d come right up to her when she’d been pitching hay over the fence to her cattle one day and told her outright that she should leave heavy work to her husband. Walt hadn’t liked that comment, not at all. It had only been a few days after he’d let her do the same thing while he flirted with a pretty blond parcel delivery employee. Worse, Walt thought that Lisa had encouraged Cy’s interference somehow and they’d had a fight—not the first in their very brief marriage. She didn’t like the tall man and her expression told him so. “I wasn’t talking to you,” she pointed out. “You don’t know anything about my business.”
His eyebrows rose half an inch. “I know that you overpay the hired help.” He looked pointedly at her flat belly. “And that you’re the last person who should be looked upon as a walking benevolence society.”
“Hear, hear!” Joanne said again from behind Bonnie.
Lisa glared at her. “You can be quiet,” she said.
“Let your erstwhile employee go,” he told her. “I’ll send one of my men over to spend nights in the bunkhouse. Bonnie’s right about one thing, you don’t need to be by yourself after dark in such a remote place.”
“I don’t need your help,” she said, glowering at him.
“Yes, you do. Your husband wouldn’t have liked having you try to run that ranch alone,” he added quietly, even though he didn’t mean it, and he hoped that his distaste for the late Walt Monroe didn’t show. He still recalled watching Lisa heft a huge bale of hay while her husband stood not ten paces away flirting with a pretty blond woman. It was a miracle she hadn’t miscarried, the way she hefted heavy things around. He wondered if she even knew the chance she was taking…
She was looking at him with different eyes now. The concern touched her despite her hostility. She sighed. “I guess you’re right,” she said softly. “He wouldn’t have.”
He hated the way that softness made him feel. He’d lost so much. Everything. He wouldn’t admit, even to himself, how it felt to have those dark eyes look at him with tenderness. He swallowed down the ache in his throat.
She let her gaze fall to his arm, the one that had just been stitched, and her soft gasp was audible. “You’ve been hurt!”
“Two prescriptions, Mr. Parks,” Bonnie said with a grin, holding up a prescription sack. She bent to pick up the package, a strand of her short blond hair falling around her pretty bespectacled face. “And Dr. Coltrain said that if you don’t take this pain medication, he’ll have me flogged,” she added impishly.
“We can’t have that, I guess,” Cy murmured dryly.
“Glad you agree.” She accepted his credit card as Lisa turned to go.
“You drive into town?” Cy asked the widow.
“Uh, well, no, the car’s got a broken water pump,” she confessed. “I rode in with old Mr. Murdock.”
“He’ll be at the lodge meeting until midnight,” he pointed out.
“Just until nine. I thought I’d go to the library and wait.”
“You need your rest,” Cy said curtly. “No sense in waiting until bedtime for a ride. I’ll drive you home. It’s on my way.”
“Go with him,” Bonnie said firmly as she waited for Cy to put his credit card back into his wallet and sign the ticket. “Don’t argue,” she added when Lisa opened her mouth. “I’ll phone the lodge and tell Mr. Murdock you got a ride.”
“Were you ever in the army?” Cy asked the young woman with a rare twinkle in his green eyes.
She grinned. “Nope. But it’s their loss.”
“Amen,” he said.
“Mr. Parks…” Lisa began, trying to escape.
Cy took her arm, nodded to Bonnie and herded Lisa out of the pharmacy onto the street where his big red Ford Expedition was parked. On the way they ran into the second pharmacist, a dark-eyed woman with equally dark hair.
“Hi, Nancy!” Lisa said with a grin.
Nancy gave a gamine smile. “Don’t tell me, the line’s two miles long already.”
“Three. Want to go home with me?” Lisa asked.
Nancy sighed. “Don’t I wish. See you!”
Nancy went on toward the pharmacy and Lisa turned back to let Cy open the door of the Expedition for her. “Imagine you with a red vehicle,” she said dryly. “I would have expected black.”
“It was the only one they had in stock and I was in a hurry. Here.” He helped her up into the huge vehicle.
“Gosh,” she murmured as he got in beside her, “you could kill an elephant with this thing.”
“It’s out of season for elephants.” He scowled as she fumbled with the seat belt. “That’s hard to buckle on the passenger side. Here, like this…” He leaned close to her and fastened it with finesse despite his damaged left hand and arm. It required a closeness he hadn’t had with a woman since his wife and son died in the fire. He noticed that Lisa’s eyes were a very soft dark brown and that her complexion was delicious. She had a firm, rounded little chin and a pretty mouth. Her ears were tiny. He wondered what that mass of dark gold hair looked like at night when she took the hairpins out, and his own curiosity made him angry. With compressed lips, he fastened the seat belt and moved away to buckle his own in place.
Lisa was relieved when he leaned back. He made her nervous when he was that close. Odd, that reaction, she thought, when she’d been married for two months. She should be used to men. Of course, her late husband hadn’t been that interested in her body. He didn’t seem to enjoy sleeping with her, and he was always in such a rush that she really didn’t feel any of the things women were supposed to feel. She recalled that he’d married her on the rebound from the woman he really wanted, and the only thing about Lisa that really appealed to him had been her father’s ranch. He’d had great ideas about starting an empire, but it was only a pipe dream. A dead dream, now. She stared out at the small town as they drove through it on the way out to their respective ranches.
“Do you have anyone managing the ranch for you?” he asked when they were on the lonely highway heading out of town.
“Can’t afford anyone,” she said wistfully. “Walt had big plans for the place, but there was never enough money to fulfill them. He borrowed on his salary and his life insurance policy to buy the steers, but he didn’t look far enough ahead to see the drought coming. I guess he didn’t realize that buying winter feed for those steers would put us in the hole.” She shook her head. “I did so want his plans to work out,” she said wistfully. “If they had, he was going to give up undercover work and come home to be a rancher.” Her eyes were sad. “He was only thirty years old.”
“Manuel Lopez is a vindictive drug lord,” he murmured. “He doesn’t stop at his victims, either. He likes to target whole families. Well, except for small children. If he has a virtue, that’s the only one.” He glanced at her. “All the more reason for you to be looked after at night. The dog is a good idea. Even a puppy will bark when someone comes up to the door.”
“How do you know about Lopez?” she asked.
He laughed. It was the coldest sound Lisa had ever heard. “How do I know? He had his thugs set fire to my house in Wyoming. My wife and my five-year-old son died because of him.” His eyes stared straight ahead. “And if it’s the last thing I ever do, I’ll see him pay for it.”
“I had…no idea,” she faltered. She winced at the look on his face. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Parks. I knew about the fire, but…” She averted her eyes to the dark landscape outside. “They told me that Walt only said two words before he died. He said, ‘Get Lopez.’ They will, you know,” she added harshly. “They’ll get him, no matter what it takes.”
He glanced at her and smiled in spite of himself. “You’re not quite the retiring miss that you seem to be, are you, Mrs. Monroe?”
“I’m pregnant,” she told him flatly. “It makes me ill-tempered.”
He slowed to make a turn. “Did you want a child so soon after your marriage?” he asked, knowing as everyone locally did that she’d only married two months ago.
“I love children,” she said, smiling self-consciously. “I guess it’s not the ‘in’ thing right now, but I’ve never had dreams of corporate leadership. I like the pace of life here in Jacobsville. Everybody knows everybody. There’s precious little crime usually. I can trace my family back three generations here. My parents and my grandparents are buried in the town cemetery. I loved being a housewife, taking care of Walt and cooking and all the domestic things women aren’t supposed to enjoy anymore.” She glanced at him with a wicked little smile. “I was even a virgin when I married. When I rebel, I go the whole way!”
He chuckled. It was the first time in years that he’d felt like laughing. “You renegade.”
“It runs in my family,” she laughed. “Where are you from?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “Texas.”
“But you lived in Wyoming,” she pointed out.
“Because I thought it was the one place Lopez wouldn’t bother me. What a fool I was,” he added quietly. “If I’d come here in the first place, it might never have happened.”
“Our police are good, but…”
He glanced at her. “Don’t you know what I am? What I was?” he amended. “Eb Scott’s whole career was in the Houston papers just after he sent two of Lopez’s best men to prison for attempted murder. They mentioned that several of his old comrades live in Jacobsville now.”
“I read the papers,” she confessed. “But they didn’t mention names, you know.”
“Didn’t they?” He maneuvered a turn at a stop sign. “Eb must have called in a marker, then.”
She turned slightly toward him. “What were you?”
He didn’t even glance at her. “If the papers didn’t mention it, I won’t.”
“Were you one of those old comrades?” she persisted.
He hesitated, but only for a moment. She wasn’t a gossip. There was no good reason for not telling her. “Yes,” he said bluntly. “I was a mercenary. A professional soldier for hire to the highest bidder,” he added bitterly.
“But with principles, right?” she persisted. “I mean, you didn’t hire out to Lopez and help him run drugs.”
“Certainly not!”
“I didn’t think so.” She leaned back against her seat, weary. “It must take a lot of courage to do that sort of work. I suppose it takes a certain kind of man, as well. But why did you do it when you had a wife and child?”
He hated that damned question. He hated the answer, too.
“Well?”
She wasn’t going to quit until he told her. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Because I refused to give it up, and she got pregnant deliberately to get even with me.” He didn’t stop to think about the odd way he’d worded that, but Lisa noticed and wondered at it. “I cur tailed my work, but I helped get the goods on Lopez be fore I hung it up entirely and started ranching full-time. I’d just come back from overseas when the fire was set. It was obvious afterward that I’d been careless and let one of Lopez’s men track me back to Wyoming. I’ve had to live with it ever since.”
She studied his lean, stark profile with quiet, curious eyes. “Was it the adrenaline rush you couldn’t live with out, or was it the confinement of marriage that you couldn’t live with?”
His green eyes glittered dangerously. “You ask too damned many questions!”
She shrugged. “You started it. I had no idea that you were anything more than a rancher. Your foreman, Harley Fowler, likes to tell people that he’s one of those dashing professional soldiers, you know. But he isn’t.”
The statement surprised him. “How do you know he isn’t?” he asked.
“Because I asked him if he’d ever done the Fan Dance and he didn’t know what I was talking about.”
He stopped the truck in the middle of the road and just stared at her. “Who told you about that? Your husband?”
“He knew about the British Special Air Services, but mostly just what I told him—including that bit about the Fan Dance, one of their rigorous training tests.” She smiled self-consciously. “I guess it sounds strange, but I love reading books about them. They’re really some thing, like the French Foreign Legion, you know. A group of men so highly trained, so specialized, that they’re the scourge of terrorists the world over. They go everywhere, covertly, to rescue hostages and gather intelligence about terrorist groups.” She sighed and closed her eyes, oblivious to the expression of the man watching her. “I’d be scared to death to do anything like that, but I admire people who can. It’s a way of testing your self, isn’t it, so that you know how you react under the most deadly pressure. Most of us never face physical violence. Those men have.” Her eyes opened. “Men like you.”
He felt his cheeks go hot. She was intriguing. He began to understand why Walt had married her. “How old are you?” he asked bluntly.
“Old enough to get pregnant,” she told him pertly. “And that’s all you’re getting out of me.”
His green eyes narrowed. She was very young, there was no doubt about that. He didn’t like the idea of her being in danger. He didn’t like the idea of the man Luke Craig had sent over to look out for her, either. He was going to see about that.
“How old are you, if we’re getting personal?” she asked.
“Older than you are,” he returned mockingly.
She grimaced. “Well, you’ve got scars and lines in your face, and a little gray at your temples, but I doubt you’re over thirty-five.”
His eyebrows arched almost to his hairline.
“I’d like you to be my baby’s godfather when he’s born,” she continued bluntly. “I think Walt would have liked that, too. He spoke very highly of you, although he didn’t say much about your background. I was curious about that. Now I understand why he was so secretive.”
“I’ve never been a godfather,” he said curtly.
“That’s okay. I’ve never been a mother.” She frowned. “Come to think of it, the baby hasn’t been a baby before, either.” She looked down at her flat belly and smiled tenderly, tracing it. “We can all start even.”
“Did you love your husband?”
She looked up at him. “Did you love your wife?” she countered instantly.
He didn’t like looking at her belly, remembering. He started down the road again, at a greater speed. “She said she loved me, when we married,” he said evasively.
Poor woman, Lisa thought. And poor little boy, to die so young, and in such a horrible way. She wondered if the taciturn Mr. Parks had nightmares, and guessed that he did. His poor arm was proof that he’d tried to save his family. It must be terrible, to go on living, to be the only survivor of such a tragedy.
They pulled up in front of her dilapidated ranch house. The steps were flimsy and one of the boards was rotten. The house needed painting. The screens on the windows were torn, and the one on the screen door was half torn away. In the corral, he could hear a horse whinny. He hoped her fences were in better shape than the house.
He helped her down out of the truck and set her gently on her feet. She was rail-thin.