CHAPTER ONE

      EVEN for a woman who’d endured emotional hardship her whole life in hope of at last gaining her father’s affection and approval, it was an incredible mandate: You’ll marry Ford Harlow.

      Rena Lambert stood on the open porch that morning at the back of the Lambert Ranch house, so stunned by her father’s terse decree that she felt light-headed. Dread gripped her insides. Disbelief made it hard to speak in the quiet, careful way she always had to the bitter, volatile man who’d never shown a smidgen of tenderness. If he’d ever felt any.

      “Years past time for you to marry,” he said, then let his hard gaze slice critically over her from head to boot before it shifted dismissively away.

      “I have no interest in ma—”

      Her father’s impatient words cut her off. “Folks already talk. You’re a mannish female with no natural feelings. Men don’t want a woman who’s better at being a man than she is at being female.”

      The blunt words sent a wave of pain and humiliation through her that made her face feel stiff and on fire. All Rena’s life, Abner Lambert had scorned any show of femininity or weakness in his daughter. To berate her now for repressing the natural inclinations he’d always been so vocal and unsparing about was the height of cruelty.

      She recognized the familiar sting of frustrated tears, but the rigid emotional control she’d practiced since early childhood kept her eyes dry. Heat gathered behind them until they burned.

      Rena Lambert had grown up with the knowledge that her birth had caused the death of the only woman her father had ever cared for. And she’d been born female, which meant Abner had no son to carry on his legacy. A son might have earned her father’s love, or at least his respect, by virtue of being male and capable of carrying on the family name her father was so rabidly proud of.

      The fact that he’d never chosen to remarry and have other children who might have been sons was beneath his consideration. Blaming Rena had been much more satisfying to his twisted sense of justice than assigning himself responsibility for his own choices.

      But what about her choices? Perhaps she’d become as twisted as he. How else could she account for her lifelong pursuit of approval and acceptance?

      Dimly she realized that her craving for her father’s approval was connected to the guilt he’d instilled in her. Guilt craved redemption, but false guilt craved it more obsessively.

      Rena stared at her father’s harshly carved profile as he went on, each word just as cruel and devastating as the others.

      “Won’t let a female inherit Lambert. Your first son’ll get all that’s mine. Harlow’ll oversee it till the boy’s old enough to take over. If you can’t bear sons, the ranch’ll go to Frank Casey or one of his boys.”

      Now he aimed a hard glance at her shock-frozen expression. “That happens, you’d better have something Harlow’ll want to keep you around for, ‘cause he’ll already have what he bargained to get.”

      And he won’t need you. It was some surprise that he hadn’t actually said it out loud, but he knew he’d communicated his meaning precisely.

      “Harlow wants you at his place tonight at seven. Informal supper, he said.”

      Shame and hurt roared so high then that it was a miracle she could stand so quietly and keep her composure. Her tone was carefully mild.

      “The two of you have it all worked out,” she dared softly. “But why saddle him with me? Let him buy the west section. Will the ranch to Frank and his sons. They’ve worked hard for you and they’re loyal.”

      She’d worked just as hard, labored harder than any man who’d ever given his sweat and blood to Lambert land. She’d hoped to someday inherit the ranch she loved, but suddenly the last true hope behind every effort in her life vanished in this new toxic flood of her