Noelle. Diana Palmer
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“Yes.” Jared gave the man a cold glare. “Someone could have been killed out here today. You were elected to protect these townspeople, and you ran like a yellow dog. I’ve been in places in Texas where they’d have shot you down in the street for what you did today.”
“I was otherwise occupied at the time! And what do you know about being a lawman, a city feller like you?” the man asked.
Jared’s thin mouth tugged up at the corner, but his eyes were blazing. “More than you’ll have time to learn.”
He whipped the jacket back over his pistol and kept walking, the limp more pronounced with every step he took. But even with that impairment, he looked threatening.
He went to his hotel, packed and checked out, and caught the next train east to St. Louis, where he could make connections to return to New York. People were still watching when the train pulled out of town. Imagine, a real gunfight right there in the street, two boys were remarking excitedly, and they’d seen it!
Chapter One
“Damn!”
The expletive resounded through the elegant law office. Alistair Brooks, the senior partner of the firm of Brooks and Dunn, looked up from the brief he was painstakingly writing by hand at his oak rolltop desk. “What?” he asked.
Jared Dunn threw down the letter he’d received from his grandmother in Fort Worth, Texas, with a flourish of his long, darkly tanned hand. “Damn,” he repeated under his breath, and sat brooding, his reading glasses perched on his straight, elegant nose—over eyes that could run the blue spectrum from sky blue all the way to gunmetal gray.
“A case?” Brooks asked absently.
“A letter from home,” Jared replied heavily. He sat back in his chair with his long legs crossed, a faint grimace accompanying the action. He favored the right leg a little, because the damage done by the bullet in Terrell was fresh enough to be painful. He’d been carefully checked by his own doctor, the wound rebandaged with directions to leave it alone until it healed. The fever had gone down in the few days he’d been back in New York, and if he felt pain or weakness from the wound, it didn’t show in the steely lines of his lean face.
“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