Wild Texas Flame
Janis Reams Hudson
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1992 by Janis Reams Hudson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition October 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-477-6
More from Janis Reams Hudson
The Apache-Colton Series
Apache Magic
Apache Promise
Apache Temptation
Apache Legacy
Apache Heartsong
Apache Flame
The Arapaho Series
Winter's Touch
Hunter's Touch
The Two Oaks Series
Truth or Dare
Caught in the Act
Thick as Thieves
Angel on a Harley
One Rainy Night
Spontaneous Combustion
The Deep Fork Trilogy
Foster Love
Coming Home
For the Thrill
The Homeward Series
Long Way Home
All the Rooms of my Heart
Sammi's Heart
Wild Texas Flame
Warrior's Song
Hawk's Woman
Remember My Heart
For the advice, encouragement, and support while I wrote this book back in 1992, I give special thanks to Georgina Gentry, Debbie Cowan, Sharon Sala, Patsy Klingstedt, and Julie Garrett. All friends in the truest sense of the word
Chapter One
February 14, 1880
Cottonwood Crossing, Texas
“Well, now.” Harve tucked his boots beneath the bench and straightened his shoulders. “There’s a hard lookin’ customer if I ever saw one.”
“What do ya suppose a tough hombre like him’s doin’ in Cottonwood Crossing?” Dutch asked with narrowed eyes.
Skeeter pulled the pipe from his mouth. “Looks kinda familiar, don’t he?”
Mose leaned forward. “Say, ain’t that—”
“Well I’ll be damned! Oh!” Dutch blushed, tipped his hat, and grinned. “Excuse me, Miss Sunny.”
Curious about the talk, Sunny Thornton paused before entering Miller’s General Store. She smiled politely at the four old men seated on the bench near the door. Charter members of Cottonwood Crossing’s Spit and Whittle Club, one and all.
She nodded. “Gentlemen.” But for once, none of them nodded back or tipped his hat to her and her sisters. The men’s attention seemed focused on the lone rider making his way slowly up the dusty street.
In the bright February sunlight, the stranger’s hat cast his face in shadows. He looked lean, Sunny noted. He sat tall and straight in the saddle, shoulders back, chin out, eyes trained straight ahead.
“By jingo, it is him!” Dutch cried.
“Wonder when he got out.”
“He was supposed to serve five years. Has it been that long?”
“Reckon so,” Dutch answered. “Who’da thought he’d ever come back here.”
“He’s got more brass than a marchin’ band, showin’ his face in this town.”
“Hellfire, Harve.” Skeeter waved his pipe in the air. “Where else did ya think he’d go? This here’s his home.”
“Maybe so, but he’s a few straws shy of a full bale if he thinks he’s welcome. I always knew he’d turn out bad.”
“Why, Harve, you did not.” Skeeter jammed his pipe back into his mouth. “You always said what a fine lad he was.”
“I never—”
“Ash McCord,” Mose said. “Can’t hardly believe it.”
Ash McCord.
Sunny stiffened. Everyone in Cottonwood Crossing knew the name of the man who shot Mayor Baxter five years ago—Mayor Ian Baxter, the respected town banker who, since that fateful day, had been confined to a wheelchair. And Ash McCord put him there. When he shot him in the back.
A chill skittered down Sunny’s neck. Her father had come to town and bought Cottonwood Ranch, the old McCord place, five years ago, a few days after Ash McCord was sent to prison. She and her family lived in what was once this man’s home.
What was he doing back in town? Had they let him out? Or had he escaped?
Ninny. A man smart enough to escape from prison would hardly be stupid enough to ride boldly down the main street of the town where he’d committed his crime. They must have let him out. She shivered. If he was going to hang around town, she hoped fervently they had let him out for good behavior, or that he’d served his full five years.
Silly. Of course he’d served his five years. The men on the bench just said so.
She watched as McCord drew near. Something told her things were going to change in Cottonwood Crossing, and soon.
Skeeter, the eldest of the old men on the bench, hooked his thumbs in his faded red suspenders and spoke around the stem of his pipe. “We ain’t gonna stand for none of your kind of trouble, McCord. Best ride right on through town and keep goin’. We ain’t got no use for no back-shooter around here.”
Ash McCord kept coming. Without halting the slow, purposeful gait of his bay gelding, he reached up with one hard, brown hand and touched the brim of his hat and nodded to Sunny and her sisters. She hadn’t realized she’d been staring. She felt the blush clear to the tips of her toes. For just an instant, his gaze looked soft, admiring. But the look disappeared so fast she must have imagined it.
Sunny’s first impression of him had been “lean.” She revised it now to “gaunt.” The weathered skin of his face stretched tight across prominent, almost protruding, cheekbones. From where she and her sisters stood on the raised porch of the store, Sunny couldn’t tell what color his eyes were, but his narrowed gaze seemed watchful, wary. A muscle bunched along the edge of his square jaw. He needed a shave. And a bath.
And about a dozen good, hot meals.
Sunny chided herself for the thought. Why should she care if he looked half starved?
McCord turned a steely gaze on the bench warmers. “Much obliged, gents. It’s always nice when a man’s welcomed home by his…friends.”
Four-year-old Amy, Sunny’s youngest sister, jumped off the raised boardwalk and darted out into the street.
“Amy! Come back here!” Sunny cried, alarm racing down her spine.
With her single pigtail bouncing down her back, Amy ignored Sunny and dashed toward McCord.
McCord tugged slightly on the reins and halted his horse.
“Amy!” Sunny darted after the girl.
Amy skidded to a halt beside McCord and gave a little hop-skip, looked up at him and grinned. “I’ll be your friend, mister.”
Sunny reached Amy’s side, but the child paid no attention. Amy stared at Ash McCord with such a look of awe that Sunny followed her baby sister’s gaze. The smile the stranger bestowed on Amy was enough to melt Sunny’s knees. It changed his whole appearance. Gone was the hard stranger with the wary face. In his place sat a ruggedly handsome man with a hint of boyishness around his mouth and laugh lines around the brightest, bluest eyes Sunny had ever seen.
He swept off his hat in a gallant gesture and bowed from the waist. His sandy brown hair stayed creased where the hat had been. “I’d be honored
to have you for a friend, young lady.”
The deep raspy voice raised goose bumps on Sunny’s arms.
Amy giggled and clapped her hands. “I’m not a lady, I’m Amy. Amy Thornton. This is my sister, Sunny.”
For a brief second, his gaze caught and held Sunny’s. Her stomach quivered. The cautious smile in those bright blue eyes did something to her heart.
Then he looked back at Amy. “Pleased to meet you, ladies. My name’s Ash.”
“I lost a tooth, see?” Amy poked a chubby finger into the gap in her childish smile.
McCord grinned. “Yes, I see.”
“But it’s okay, ‘cause Sunny says I’ll grow a new one.”
Sunny reached for Amy’s hand, but the child sidestepped her and pointed to the boardwalk. “They’re my sisters, too. That’s Katy,” she said, pointing to the older of the two standing near the four old men who sat gaping from the bench. “She’s fourteen and Rachel’s six. I’m four,” she announced, proudly holding up four chubby fingers. “And Sunny’s—”
“Come on, Amy.” Sunny grabbed the child’s arm.
“Why?”
“It’s too cold for us to keep Mr. McCord sitting out here in the wind.”
“It’s not cold at all, Sunny. You just said so awhile ago. Besides, that’s not Mr. ‘Cord, that’s Ash. He’s my friend.”
With a firm grip on Amy, Sunny tried to ignore the heat in her cheeks and turned back to McCord. “Excuse us. We’re sorry if we bothered you. Good day, Mr. McCord.”
McCord settled his hat back on his head and tugged on the brim. “No bother at all, ma’am. It was my pleasure.”
“Bye, Ash,” Amy called.
“So long, Amy.”
Sunny herded her gawking sisters past the old men and into the store. In the doorway, she paused and looked back, but Ash McCord was riding on down the street.
Carla Miller nearly trampled the girls at the door. “Was it really him? Ash McCord, the back-shooter? Weren’t you just terrified to death?”
Sunny flinched at her friend’s words. She’d felt a lot of different things when she’d looked into McCord’s eyes, but terror certainly wasn’t one of them.
“What’s a back-shooter?” Amy wanted to know.
Sunny frowned at Carla. “It’s nothing, Amy. Never mind.”
“Can we have a peppermint stick?” Rachel asked.
Grateful for the distraction, Sunny gave Rachel a misleading smile. “No, we cannot have a peppermint stick. We’re meeting Daddy for dinner at the hotel in a bit. Then we’re renting a room and taking a nap before the big dance tonight. But before any of that, I’ve got supplies to buy from the Millers, so you girls stay out of trouble.”
Sunny turned back to Carla. “Daddy will be along with the wagon this afternoon to load up the things we need.” She then got down to the business of ordering the flour, sugar, salt, coffee, and other staples Cottonwood Ranch would need to see it through the next few months.
After double-checking her list and making sure she had ordered everything necessary, Sunny rounded up her sisters and bid Carla and Mr. and Mrs. Miller good day. Together she and the girls headed down the street to the hotel to meet their father.
He wasn’t there yet, so Sunny and the girls took a table in the dining room and waited for him. He came in a few minutes later.
Ross Thornton was a big, muscular man whose twinkling smile and booming laugh created the center of his daughters’ world. But just then he wasn’t smiling or laughing. One look at his face and Sunny knew something was wrong. Bitter anger radiated from him like heat from a stove.
Sunny could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d seen her father angry. The last time had been more than a year ago when a new hired hand had refused to file down the points on his spurs. The unfortunate soul had soon found himself unemployed.
Never had Sunny seen her father like this. This time his anger was held in tight control, as though it was too great to be released. Sheer rage simmered just below the surface, threatening to boil over any minute. And that made it all the more terrible to witness. She wished he’d just let it out, whatever it was.
When Thornton spotted his daughters, the anger drained from his face. “There’s my girls,” he said with a huge smile.
The smile didn’t fool Sunny for a minute. She saw the lingering flicker in his brown eyes that told her all was not well.
As soon as they finished eating, Sunny put Katy in charge of Rachel’s and Amy’s nap in their hotel room, then went to the room their father occupied next door.
As caretaker of the family since her mother’s death four years ago, it was part of Sunny’s job, in her eyes, to make certain no member of the family ever suffered if it was avoidable. And if suffering was unavoidable, she at least made sure no one suffered alone. She knew from experience that sharing a burden made its weight seem less oppressive. So as soon as her father answered her knock on his door, she slipped inside and asked, “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
Ross smiled briefly and shook his head. “You’re just like your mother. I never could keep anything from her, either.”
Just like your mother. The highest of all compliments in Sunny’s book, but not enough to make her forget the subject at hand. “Then stop trying, and tell me.”
Ross turned and paced the length of the room and back, his big rough hands—hands that could wrestle the rankest steer to the ground one moment and gently soothe a daughter’s tears the next—clenched and unclenched at his sides. “Damn!”
Sunny blinked. Things must be serious indeed for him to swear in front of her.
“Baxter’s trying to pull something. I just wish I knew what.”
“Mayor Baxter?”
“Mayor Baxter, Banker Baxter, Mr. Ian Baxter, call him anything you want. He’s nothing but a two-faced, back-stabbing, double-dealing son of a sidewinder.”
Startled, Sunny crossed the room and sat on the ladder-back chair next to the window. She and her family had known Mr. Baxter since right after they had moved to Cottonwood Crossing. In fact, it was through Baxter’s bank that Sunny’s father had bought Cottonwood Ranch.
Ian Baxter was the town’s leading citizen. He had taken the few ramshackle huts that were the beginnings of Cottonwood Crossing back in ‘65 and almost single-handedly built them into the fine, thriving community everyone for miles around took such pride in.
He went to church on Sundays, bought books for the school, and loaned money to people in need. He’d even loaned her father money a couple of years ago after someone poisoned a water hole and more than a third of their cattle had died. This was the first time Sunny had ever heard anyone, especially her father, say anything even remotely unkind about Ian Baxter. “What’s he done?”
Ross threw his hand in the air. “Hell, every farm and ranch in five counties was hit by the same drought we were for two years running, followed by the same flood we had last year. Even Baxter’s Bar B suffered. But you can bet your mama’s apple pie he’s not pressing the rest of them to catch up their loans at the bank. Nosirree Bob. But me, now, that’s a different story. Says if I don’t make up for the short payments I’ve been making, he’ll foreclose. Foreclose! On me, Ross Thornton!”
Sunny felt a quaking deep inside. It wasn’t possible. Baxter couldn’t foreclose on Cottonwood Ranch. It was her home. The only real home she’d ever known.
During the war, when Sunny wasn’t much more than a baby, they’d stayed with distant relatives while Ross Thornton fought for Texas and the South. After that, her family had moved from place to place while her father worked for first one ranch, then another.
Not until coming to Cottonwood Crossing had they ever lived in a home that actually belonged to them. Cottonwood Ranch was Sunny’s world. Her baby sister was born there. Her mother was buried there. They couldn’t lose the ranch. They just couldn’t. She gripped the edge of her chair and leaned forward, her mouth dry. “What are we going to do?”
; Ross took a deep breath and let it out. He smiled softly at his eldest daughter. “Don’t mind me, Sunshine. I’m just letting off steam. He won’t foreclose on us. He wouldn’t dare. I gave him what money I could and promised the rest at the end of this spring’s trail drive. Damned bugger didn’t want to go for it, didn’t even want to give me a receipt, but he finally did. He’ll get his money, by damned. I knew I shouldn’t have let him talk me into that loan.”
The tightness in Sunny’s chest eased. It would be all right. The rains last fall had nurtured a lush crop of grass. The herd was good this year. She had complete faith that her father would take care of everything.
“Meanwhile,” Ross said grinning at her, “you don’t want to show up at the Valentine dance tonight all worn out. You’d better hop back to your room and get rested up.”
Sunny returned her father’s smile. “I’m going.” On her way to the door, she paused beside her father and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He crushed her in a bear hug. “Don’t worry, Daddy. Everything will work out, you’ll see.”
“I know it will, Sunshine. Everything will be fine. Don’t give it another thought.”
The white canvas tent, lit from within by dozens of oil lamps, glowed in the darkness like something unreal, its jeweled necklace of Chinese lanterns winking and blinking like precious gems around a woman’s creamy throat. From his corner room in Ella Standridge’s boarding house across the road, Ash McCord, even knowing he wouldn’t be welcome at the dance, couldn’t tear his gaze from the sight.
How long had it been since he’d seen such gaiety, seen people laughing and dancing? How long since he’d heard the lively music of a fiddle, the wail of a mouth harp, the laughter of children? How long since he’d even seen children? Or women?
He finished rolling his cigarette, lit it and drew smoke into his lungs.
Five years, that’s how long. Five stinking, miserable, wasted years of his life. Five years, until today, when he’d ridden back into town and seen a vision straight out of his loneliest dreams. A vision of four golden haired, stair-stepped girls standing on the boardwalk.
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