Chapter One

      Comanche Flats was one of the biggest ranches around, and Catherine Blake always felt a sense of small-town friendliness in the town that had grown up around the ranch. Friendliness and peace. Not that Matt gave her much peace, but she did enjoy the company of her mother and her other stepcousins.

      She grinned as she wheeled her small rebuilt white Volkswagen convertible between neat white fences to the big Spanish stucco house beyond, her pale-green eyes on the distant line of oaks visible across the prairie. There were twenty-two square miles of land on this ranch, an hour or so out of Fort Worth, Texas, that her great-uncle had built into an empire. It was always described as lying between the Eastern and Western Cross Timbers, long bands of oaks, once formidable, but now reduced in numbers by encroaching civilization. The bands ran from north to south, and in the days of the great cattle drives they had been a point of reference for cattlemen.

      Her slender hand brushed back her dark-chestnut hair from her oval, olive-complexioned face, and she felt again a wild thrill of excitement at having graduated from college with a degree in journalism. While at college in Fort Worth, she’d lived in a dorm during the week and come home on weekends. Often Matt had flown over to get her. The ranch was far enough away from the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth airport that Matt preferred flying in his private plane, which had a hangar at the tiny airport in Comanche Flats. Catherine smiled, thinking about that, proud of her graduation with honors and her promise of a good job in New York. Matthew Dane Kincaid might pull everybody else’s strings, but he was through pulling Catherine’s as of now. She was almost twenty-two and feeling feverish with independence.

      She was just returning from a four-day trip to San Antonio, where she’d tried to find work at a small public relations firm. That hadn’t panned out, but through a contact she’d obtained a job at a bigger firm in New York. The job wasn’t open immediately; it would take several weeks for her office to be readied. But she must have impressed the executive vice-president, because he’d flown all the way down to San Antonio to check out her credentials and had hired her on the spot. She felt excited about that. And about having the opportunity to escape her family. And, especially, Matt.

      Odd, she thought, how possessive he’d gotten since her graduation from college. He owned the ranch where she and her mother lived, of course, and the feedlot, and he even had a controlling interest in the local real estate companies. But he was only a stepcousin, and Catherine deeply resented his domination. The loss of her father—he had died during the Vietnam War, when she was a baby—had made her independent-minded at an early age, and she’d fought Matt tooth and nail for years for every inch of freedom she had. When she wasn’t dying of unrequited love for him, she admitted