Noelle

by Diana Palmer

  “From Texas?” Brooks echoed.

  “From Texas.” He couldn’t quite call it home, although it felt that way sometimes. He turned his swivel chair to face his partner across the elegant wood floor of the oak-furnished office, the long, narrow windows letting in light through sheer curtains. “I’ve been thinking about a move, Alistair. If I leave, Parkins would enjoy taking my place in the firm. He has a good background in criminal law, and he’s been in practice long enough to have gained an admirable reputation in legal circles.”

  Brooks put down his ink pen with a heavy sigh. “It’s that land case in New Mexico Territory that’s depressed you,” he began.

  “It’s more than that,” Jared replied. “I’m tired.” He ran a slender hand over his wavy black hair. There were threads of pure silver in it now, at his temples. He knew that new lines had been carved into his face by the pressures of his profession. “I’m tired of working on the wrong side of justice.”

  Brooks’s eyebrows arched disapprovingly.

  Jared shook his head. “Don’t misunderstand me. I love the practice of law. But I’ve just dispossessed families that should have had some sort of right to land they’d worked for five years and I feel sick about it. I seem to spend more time working for money than I do working for justice. I don’t like it. Cases that satisfied me when I was younger and more ambitious only make me uncomfortable now. I’m disillusioned with my life.”

  “This sounds as if you’re working up to dissolving our partnership,” Brooks began.

  Jared nodded. “That’s just what I’m doing. It’s been a good ten years since I began practicing law. I appreciate the boost that you gave my career, and the opportunity to practice in New York City. But I’m restless.”

  Brooks’s dark eyes narrowed. “Would this sudden decision have more to do with that letter you’ve just read than the case in New Mexico Territory?” he asked shrewdly.

  One corner of Jared’s thin mouth pulled down. “In fact, it does. My grandmother has taken in a penniless cousin of my stepbrother Andrew’s.”

  “The family lives in Fort Worth, and you support them,” Brooks recalled.

  Jared nodded. “My grandmother is my late mother’s only living relative. She’s important to me. Andrew…” He laughed coldly. “Andrew is family, however much I may disapprove of him.”

  “He’s very young yet.”

  “Serving in the Philippines during the war gave him an exaggerated view of his own importance,” Jared remarked. “He struts and postures to impress the ladies. And he spends money as if it were water,” he added irritably. “He’s been buying hats for the new houseguest, out of my grandmother’s housekeeping money. I have a feeling that it was Andrew’s idea to take her in.”

  “And you don’t approve.”

  “I’d like to know whom I’m supporting,” Jared replied. “And perhaps I need to become reacquainted with my own roots. I haven’t lived in Texas for a long time, but I think I’m homesick for it, Alistair.”

  “You? Unthinkable.”

  “It began when I took that case in Beaumont, representing the Culhanes in the oil field suit.” His blue eyes grew thoughtful. “I’d forgotten how it felt to be among Texans. They were West Texans, of course, from El Paso. I spent a little time on the border as a young man. My mother lived in Fort Worth with my stepfather until they died, and my grandmother and Andrew live there now. Although I’m partial to West Texas—”

  “—Texas is Texas.”

  Jared smiled. “Exactly.”

  Alistair Brooks smoothed the polished wood of his chair. “If you must leave, then I’ll certainly consider Ned Parkins to replace you. Not that you can be replaced.” He smiled faintly. “I’ve known very few truly colorful personalities over the years.”

  “I might be a great deal less colorful if people were more civilized in courtroom trials,” Jared replied.

  “All the same, New York judges find your mystique fascinating. That often gives us an edge.”

  “You’ll find another, I have no doubt. You’re an excellent attorney.”

  “As you are. Well, make your plans and let me know when you want to go,” Alistair said sadly. “I’ll try to make your path as easy as I can.”

  “You’ve been a good friend as well as a good partner,” Jared remarked. “I’ll miss the practice.”

  * * *

  HE REMEMBERED THOSE words as he sat in the passenger car of a westbound train a week later. He watched the prairie go slowly by, listened to the rhythmic puffing of the steam engine, watched the smoke and cinders flying past the windows as the click-clack of the metal wheels sang like a serenade.

  “What a very barren land,” a woman with a British accent remarked to her seat companion.

  “Yes, ma’am. But it won’t always be. Why, there’ll be great cities out here in a few years, just like back East.”

  “I say, are there red Indians in these parts?”

  “All the Indians are on reservations these days,” the man said. “Good thing, too, because the Kiowa and Comanche used to raid settlements hereabouts back in the sixties and seventies, and some people got killed in bad, bad ways. And there wasn’t only Indians. There were trail drives and cow towns like Dodge City and Ellsworth…”

  The man’s voice droned on unheard as Jared’s thoughts went back to the 1880s. It had been a momentous time in the West. It had seen the Earp-Clanton brawl played out to national headlines in Tombstone, Arizona, in the fall of ’81. It had seen the last reprisal skirmishes in the Great Plains and Arizona, following the Custer debacle in Montana in ’76. It had seen the death of freedom for the Indian tribes of the West and Geronimo’s bid for independence—and subsequent capture by General Crook in Arizona. The last of the great cattle drives had played out with the devastating winter of ’86, which cost cattlemen over half their herds and all but destroyed ranching.

  Simultaneously in 1890 came the frightful massacre of Indian women and children at Wounded Knee and the closing of the frontier. The old cow towns were gone. Gunfighters and frontier sheriffs, feathered war parties intent on scalping and the endless cavalry chase of Indians in search of old ways, all were vanished off the face of the earth.

  Civilization was good, Jared reminded himself. Progress was being made to make life simpler, easier, healthier for a new generation of Americans. Social programs for city beautification and welfare relief, children’s rights and women’s rights and succor for the downtrodden were gaining strength in even the smallest towns. People were trying to make life better for themselves, and that was better than the lawless old days.

  But a wildness deep inside the man in the business suit quivered with memories of the smell of gun smoke, the thick blackness of it stinging his eyes as he faced an adversary and watched townspeople scatter. He’d only been a boy then, in his late teens, fatherless, spoiling for a fight to prove that he was as good as any son of married parents. It certainly hadn’t been his poor mother’s fault that she was assaulted one dark evening in Dodge City, Kansas, by a man whose face she never saw. She had, after all, done the right thing—she’d kept her child and raised him and loved him, even through a second marriage to a Fort Worth businessman that saddled Jared with a stepbrother he never liked. His mother had died trying to save him from the wild life he was leading.

  On her deathbed, as he visited her in Fort Worth—before she followed her beloved husband to the grave with the same cholera that had done him in—she’d gripped Jared’s hand tight in her small one and begged him to go back East to school. There was a little money, she’d said, just enough that she’d earned sewing and selling eggs. It would get him into school, and perhaps he could work for the rest of his tuition. He must promise her this, she’d begged, so that she would have the hope of his own salvation. For the road he was traveling would surely carry him to eternal damnation.
>
  After the funeral, he’d taken her last words to heart. He’d left his young stepbrother, Andrew, in the care of their grieving grandmother and headed East.

  He had a keen, analytical mind. He’d managed a scholarship with it, and graduated with honors from Harvard Law School. Then a college friend had helped him find work with a prominent law firm, that of Alistair Brooks, senior and junior. His particular interest had been criminal law, and he’d practiced it with great success over the past ten years, since his graduation from college. But along with his success had come problems, most of them with Andrew at the root. The boy had run wild in his teens; it had been left to his poor grandmother to cope. Jared had helped get him into the army just before the Spanish-American War broke out. Andrew had gone to the Philippines and discovered something he was good at—exaggeration. He made himself out to be a war hero and lived the part. He had a swagger and an arrogance that kept Jared in New York. He rarely went home because Andrew irritated him so. He rued the day his mother had married Daniel Paige and added his young son, Andrew, to the family.

  Andrew had no idea of Jared’s past. Grandmother Dunn never spoke of it, or of Jared’s parentage. That was a life long ago, in Kansas, and had no bearing on the life Jared had made for himself. For all anyone in Fort Worth knew, Jared was a practicing attorney from New York City who did nothing more dangerous than lifting a pen to documents. He’d been quite fortunate that his infrequent contretemps with angry antagonists over points of law hadn’t made their way into the local paper; Jared tended to intimidate curious reporters, and most of his adversaries weren’t anxious to admit to their idiocy in pulling a gun on him. There had only been a handful of incidents, quickly forgotten, since he’d put up his gun in the ’80s. He was still a dead shot, and he practiced enough with the weapon to retain an edge when he needed one. But he hadn’t killed anyone in recent years.

  His eyes narrowed as he thought about that wild, early life, and how reckless and thoughtless he’d been. His mother must have worried about his restlessness, the dark side of him that had grown to such proportions before her death. She had no idea who his father was, and she must have wondered about him. Jared had wondered, too, but there was no one in Dodge City who resembled him enough to cast any light on his lineage. Perhaps his father had been a drunken cowboy in town on a trail drive, or a soldier home from the war. It didn’t really matter, anyway, he told himself. Except that he’d like to have known.

  He looked out the window at the bland expanse of grassland. News of this woman who’d been taken into his family disturbed him. He paid the bills for his grandmother, and, necessarily, Andrew. It would have been politic to ask if he minded another mouth to feed before they dumped this woman in his lap. He knew nothing about her, and he wondered if they did. It had apparently been Andrew’s idea to send for her; she was actually a distant cousin of his, which made her no relation at all to Jared.

  He remembered so well the wording in his grandmother’s letter:

  …Andrew feels that she would be so much better off with us than in Galveston, especially since it holds such terrifying memories for her. She would not go back there for all the world, but it appears that her uncle is insisting that she accompany him now that the city is rebuilt and he has work there again. While it has been a year and a half since the tragedy, the poor girl still has a terror of living so close to the sea again. I fear her uncle’s insistence has brought back nightmarish memories for her…

  He wondered about the remark, about why she should be afraid of going to Galveston. There had been a devastating flood there in September of 1900. Had she been one of the survivors? He recalled that some five thousand souls had died that morning—in only a few minutes’ time—as the ocean swallowed up the little town. And didn’t he remember that his grandmother had written of Andrew visiting the Texas coast only recently? Connections began forming in his mind. He was willing to bet that this so-called cousin of Andrew’s was little more than a new girlfriend upon whom he was fixated. If that was the case, Jared had no intention of supporting her while his stepbrother courted her. She could be sent packing, and the sooner the better.

  As the train plodded across the vast plains, he pictured the woman in his mind. Knowing Andrew, she would be pretty and experienced and good at getting her way. She would probably have a heart like a lump of coal and eyes that could count a wad of money from a distance. The more he thought about her the angrier he grew. His grandmother must be getting senile to even allow such a thing. That feisty little woman, who’d moved in with his stepbrother after he left for New York, had never been known for foolish behavior. Andrew must have pulled the wool over her eyes. He wouldn’t pull it over Jared’s.

  * * *

  THE TRAIN PULLED into the station late that night. He got off at the platform with only his valise and made arrangements to have his trunk delivered to his home the next morning. Although it was late, he was still able to find a free carriage to hire to take him around to the sprawling Victorian home, on a main street, where his grandmother and Andrew now lived.

  He felt his age when he disembarked at the door, valise in hand. He hadn’t wired them to expect him. Sometimes, he’d reasoned, surprises were better.

  He walked with a pronounced limp after the exercise his wounded leg had been forced to endure on the long passage from New York. His dark, wavy hair was covered by a bowler hat, tilted at a rakish angle. His vested navy blue suit was impeccable, if a little dusty, as were his hand-tooled black leather boots. He looked the very image of a city gentleman as he walked up the flower-bordered path to the porch.

  Although it was dark, he could see that the elegant house was in good repair. Light poured in welcome from its long, tall windows, spilling onto the gray porch where a swing and settee and some rocking chairs with cushions sat. He had never lived in this house, but he’d visited it on occasion since he’d bought it for his grandmother to live in. He approved of the neat cushions on the chairs and the swing, with their wide ruffles in white eyelet. They gave the house a subdued elegance that went well with the exquisite gingerbread woodwork all around the eaves of the house.

  He paused to open the screen door and use the brass door knocker, in the shape of a lion’s head. The noise provoked voices from inside.

  “Ella, could you answer the front door please? Ella! Oh, bother! Where is Mrs. Pate?”

  “Never mind, Mrs. Dunn. I’ll see who’s there.”

  “Not you, Noelle. It is not fitting…”

  The admonition in his grandmother’s soft voice trailed off as her instructions were apparently ignored. He got a glimpse of thick auburn hair in an upswept hairdo before the door opened and a lovely, oval face with thick-lashed green eyes looked up at him inquiringly.

  His blue eyes narrowed so that even their color wasn’t revealed under the brim of his hat. His gaze swept over the woman, who was wearing a simple white blouse with a high, lacy neck and a dark skirt that reached to her ankles.

  “What do you want?” she asked in a voice that, while pleasant, reeked of South Texas backcountry and contained a belligerence that immediately raised the hair at Jared’s nape.

  He removed his hat out of inborn courtesy, leaning heavily on the cane. “I would like to see Mrs. Dunn,” he said coolly.

  “It’s much too late for visitors,” she informed him. “You’ll have to come calling another time.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “My, aren’t you arrogant for a servant, madam,” he said, with biting sarcasm.

  She flushed. “I’m no servant. I’m a member of the family.”

  “Like hell you are!” he returned abruptly. His eyes were glittery now, steady, unblinking—dangerous.

  She was taken aback by those eyes, as well as the curse, which was at such variance with the deep, soft tone of his voice. No gentleman used such language in a lady’s presence!

  “Sir, whoe
ver you are—” she began haughtily.

  “Andrew should have made you aware of my identity,” he continued coldly. “Especially since I pay the bills here. Where’s my grandmother?”

  Belatedly she realized to whom she was speaking. Andrew had mentioned his stepbrother, of course. He hadn’t mentioned that the man was Satan in a business suit. He was very good-looking, despite those gray hairs at his temples, but he was tall and intimidating, and his eyes were like blue steel…in a face about that yielding.

  “You didn’t present your card,” she said, defending herself as she quickly opened the door for him.

  “I hardly felt the need in my own house,” he returned irritably. His leg hurt and he was worn out.

  She saw the cane then and noticed the taut lines around his thin mouth. “Oh…you’re crippled,” she blurted out.

  Both eyebrows went up. “The delicacy of your observation leaves me speechless,” he said, with biting sarcasm.

  She did blush then, partially from bad temper. He was tall, and she had to look a long way up to see his face. She didn’t like him at all, she decided, and she’d been foolish to feel sorry for him. Probably he’d gotten that bad leg kicking lame dogs…

  “Mrs. Dunn is in the drawing room,” she said, and slammed the door.

  “My valise is still outside,” he pointed out.

  “Well, it can let itself in,” she informed him, and swept past him toward the drawing room.

  He followed her, momentarily bereft of speech. For an indigent relative, the woman took a lot upon herself.

  “Jared!” the little woman on the sofa exclaimed brightly, diverting him, and held her face up to be kissed. “My dear, what an excellent surprise! Are you passing through, or have you come to stay for a while?”

  He looked at the auburn-haired woman across from him as he spoke to his grandmother. “Oh, I’ve come home,” he said, watching the expression change in the younger woman’s green eyes. “I decided that I needed a change of scene.”