“He’s too damn ornery to die, just like my old man.”
A door creaked open at the far end of the winding corridor.
“Time’s up,” the deputy called.
Holt ignored him. “Anything I can bring you?”
“Yeah,” Gabe said. “A chunk of meat the size of Kansas. All I get in here is beans.”
“Accounts for the smell,” Holt replied.
“You comin’?” the deputy demanded. “I don’t want to get into no trouble for lettin’ you stay too long.”
“I’ll see that you get the best dinner in this town,” Holt said.
“I’ll be right here to eat it,” Gabe quipped. Then he sobered, and a plea took shape in his proud dark eyes. “Thanks for making the ride, Holt.”
Holt swallowed, nodded. Gabe reached through the bars, and the two men clasped hands, Indian style.
There was no need to say anything more.
CHAPTER 3
“LORELEI,” JUDGE FELLOWS SAID, leaning forward in the chair behind the desk in his study, “be reasonable. I’ve spent a fortune on this wedding. There are guests in every hotel room in town. The food can’t be sent back. And Creighton is a good man—he can’t be blamed for wanting to make the most of his last hours of freedom.”
Lorelei flushed with indignation. It was like her father to take Creighton Bannings’s part, not to mention bemoaning the money he’d spent to make his daughter’s ceremony the grandest spectacle Texas had ever seen. “I will not marry that reprehensible scoundrel,” she said flatly. “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not if all the angels in heaven come down and beg me to forgive and forget!”
The judge sighed a martyr’s sigh, but his eyes were canny, taking her measure. Creighton Bannings was a lawyer, and a wealthy man in his own right. He had powerful connections in Austin, as well as Washington. He was, in short, the proverbial good catch—and a fish her father would not willingly let off the hook.
“Must I remind you, my dear, that you’ll be thirty next month? You’re a beautiful woman, and you have a good mind, but you’ve been on the shelf for a good long while, and with your disposition…”
Lorelei, leaning against the thick door of the study, stiffened. Glancing at her reflection in the glass of the tall gun cabinet behind her father’s desk, she took a distracted inventory. Dark hair, upswept. A long neck. Blue eyes, high cheekbones, a slender but womanly figure. Yes, she supposed she could be called beautiful, but the knowledge gave her no satisfaction. It hadn’t been enough to keep her fiancé from straying, had it?
“What’s wrong with my disposition?” she demanded, after relaxing her clenched jaw by force of will.
The judge arched his bushy white eyebrows, ran a hand over his balding pate. “Please, Lorelei,” he said, with a mild note of disdain. “Do you think I haven’t heard that you burned your wedding dress—which cost plenty, mind you, coming all the way from that fancy place in Dallas like it did—in front of the whole city of San Antonio? Was that the act of a sensible, gracious, sweet-tempered woman?”
“It was the act,” Lorelei said pointedly, “of a woman who just found her intended husband in bed with a housemaid on her wedding day!”
“I’m sure Creighton could explain everything to your satisfaction, if you would only give him the chance.”
Lorelei rolled her eyes. “What excuse could he possibly give? I saw him with another woman!”
The judge tried again, saturating his words with saintly patience. “A man of Creighton’s sophistication—”
“To hell with sophistication!” Lorelei burst out. “What about loyalty, Father? What about common decency? How can you expect me to bind myself to a man who would betray me so brazenly on our wedding day—or any other?”
Her father sat back in his chair, tenting his chubby fingers under his chin. She’d seen that expression on his face a hundred times—in a courtroom, it meant a death sentence was about to be handed down. “Do you know what I think, Lorelei? I think you want to be a spinster. How many suitors have you rejected in the last ten years?”
Sudden tears throbbed behind Lorelei’s eyes, but she would not shed them. Not in her father’s presence. She braced herself for what she knew was coming and held her tongue. He wasn’t expecting an answer anyway, and wouldn’t leave space for one.
“Michael Chandler has been in his grave for almost a decade,” he said. “It’s time you stopped waiting for him to come back.”
One tear escaped and trickled down Lorelei’s over-heated cheek. Dropped to her bodice. “You hated Michael,” she whispered. “You were relieved that he died.”
“He was weak,” the judge said, quietly relentless. “You would have tired of him within a year and come weeping to me to get you out of the marriage.”
“When,” Lorelei countered, “have I ever ‘come weeping’ to you over anything?”
A muscle twitched in the judge’s jaw. “Creighton is your chance to have a home of your own, and a family. I know you want those things. If you persist in this—this tantrum of yours, you will be alone for the rest of your life.”
A chill quivered in the pit of Lorelei’s stomach. “Better alone, with my self-respect intact, than alone in a marriage with a man who doesn’t love me enough to be faithful.”
The judge gave a derisive snort. “Love? Come now, Lorelei. You aren’t a stupid woman. Love is for story-books and road-show melodramas. Marriage is an alliance, and sentiment has no place in it. Pull yourself together. Put on one of your ball gowns and let’s get on with this.”
Lorelei shook her head, momentarily unable to speak.
“Then I guess I have no choice,” the judge said, with a dolorous shake of his own head. “If you persist in this foolishness, I will have to send you away. Perhaps even to an asylum.” He frowned, studying her pensively. “I fear you are not quite sane.”
Lorelei’s knees threatened to give out. Though she’d never heard this particular threat before, she knew it wasn’t an idle one. Her father had the power and the means to lock her up in some sanitarium; it would be a matter of signing a few documents. He’d sent Jim Mason’s troublesome wife off to one of those places with the air of a man doing a simple favor for a friend, and there had been others, too.
“I see I’ve gotten your attention,” the judge said, a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. Then, more gently, he added, “Go to Creighton now. Make things right. I shall expect you at the church at six o’clock, as planned, ready to go through with the wedding.”
Lorelei pushed away from the door, stiffening her spine once again. “Then you will be disappointed,” she said calmly. She turned the knob, pulled the great panel open.
“If you step over that threshold,” her father warned, “there will be no turning back. Just remember that.”
Lorelei hesitated a moment, then rushed out. She was so intent on packing her things and laying plans to escape before the judge sent her away to some madhouse that she didn’t see the man standing in the entryway until she collided with him.
“Lorelei!” her father roared, from inside his study.
“Looks like I came at a bad time,” said Holt Cavanagh.
HOLT STEADIED the hellcat by gripping her slender shoulders in his hands. She’d changed clothes since their encounter, as he had, but her ebony hair still smelled faintly of burning wedding dress.
“Holt McKettrick,” he said by way of introduction when she looked up at him, blinking cornflower-blue eyes in a vain effort to hide