Promise, Texas

  He’d hidden out in Bitter End for weeks. Savannah was convinced he would have stayed there indefinitely if not for the accident. A stairway had collapsed in one of the old buildings, trapping him. He could have died, would have, if he hadn’t been discovered by Dr. Jane and Cal Patterson. Nearly dead, Richard had been airlifted to a San Antonio hospital, and once he’d recovered, he was returned to New York to stand trial. His crimes had included defrauding and forcibly confining illegal immigrants; he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a New York state prison. Until today, Savannah had heard nothing from him.

  Now this.

  She braced herself emotionally and unfolded the letter.

  Dear Savannah,

  I imagine you’re surprised to hear from me after all this time. It’s taken me this long to come to grips with everything and realize how wrong I was. I never was a quick study, was I?

  Prison life is worse than you probably think. Much worse. But it’s what I deserve. I can almost hear Grady agreeing with me and I don’t blame him. I know I’ve been here for three years and I apologize for not writing sooner, but I didn’t have the courage to ask you to forgive me. I’ll understand if you decide not to answer this, but I hope you will. Could you find it in your heart to bury the past and start again?

  One thing I’ve learned in this hellhole is the importance of family. I don’t know what I’d do without my memories of you and without the money you sent for Christmas and my birthday. Thank you. Now that I’m stripped of everything else, I’ve discovered how much you and Grady mean to me. You’re all I have. I’m sure Grady won’t forgive me—but will you? I’m paying for my crimes and will continue to pay for the next twenty-two years. I can’t undo the pain I caused you or repay the money I stole, but I can tell you how truly sorry I am.

  Write me, Savannah, please. Tell me about the Yellow Rose—how’s life on the old ranch? What’s happened to Bitter End? I worry about some of those old buildings and fear another one might collapse. That place is dangerous and should be shut down. I certainly hope you haven’t been back there on one of your “rose-rustling” expeditions!

  You and Laredo are parents now. That’s wonderful. A girl and a boy. I’d love to see photos. I imagine Laredo is a proud father, and I already know what a good mother you must be.

  Don’t let me down, Savannah. Please answer. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t necessary. You’re all I have.

  Love,

  Richard

  Savannah read the letter a second time and was so caught up in what her brother had written that she didn’t hear the back door open.

  “Savannah, can you…” Her husband’s words died when he saw her with the letter, tears streaming down her cheeks. “What’s wrong?” he asked urgently, kneeling down in front of her.

  She lowered her head. “It’s a letter from Richard.” Her voice was shaky despite her efforts to control it, and she felt more than heard Laredo’s sigh.

  “What does he want?”

  Rather than explain, she handed him the letter. Savannah watched her husband’s expression as he read it, knowing he trusted Richard even less than she did.

  “How come he knows about Laura and Matt?”

  She looked up. “I’ve mailed him a Christmas card every year.” Savannah knew she shouldn’t have, and while Laredo wouldn’t have forbidden it, he obviously didn’t approve, either. But if Grady had learned what she’d done…well, he would’ve hit the roof. Her older brother tended to be volatile when it came to Richard, and he’d said over and over that he wanted no further contact. Nothing.

  Richard’s actions had hurt Savannah, but it was Grady who’d mortgaged their cattle ranch, the Yellow Rose, to pay the inheritance tax and then slaved for six years to become debt-free. It was Grady who’d personally paid back every penny Richard had charged in town, rather than tarnish the good name of Weston. Grady who’d been robbed of the best years of his youth, paying for the sins of his brother while Richard squandered their inheritance—and then returned for more.

  Laredo set the letter aside. “What are you going to do?”

  “I…don’t know.” And she didn’t. Richard hadn’t asked for anything other than her forgiveness and the promise that she’d write with news of home.

  How could she refuse? And yet how could she open that door and give her wayward brother another opportunity to abuse her family?

  “Are you going to tell Grady?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again. She wasn’t sure of anything at the moment. She could only imagine what Grady would say if she told him she’d been in touch with Richard. On the other hand, she didn’t feel she should keep it from him. After all, she and Laredo were Grady’s partners in the Yellow Rose; Laredo and Grady were not only breeding quarter horses together, they were good friends. And despite Richard’s faults, which were many, he was their brother.

  “Grady has a right to know,” her husband reminded her gently.

  “A right to know what?” Grady asked as he stepped into the kitchen.

  Veterinarian Lucas Porter leaned against the porch railing and drank deeply from a glass of iced tea. Ranchers Cal and Glen Patterson stood next to him, enjoying the peacefulness of the moment. The day had been exhausting, and Lucas was tired to the bone. Tired but also exhilarated, following the complicated birth of a foal. The mare was a favorite of Cal’s and he’d been worried. Lucas was glad Cal had enough common sense to call him when he did. Another hour and it would’ve been out of his hands.

  “She’s a real beauty,” Cal boasted.

  “She’s something, all right,” Lucas couldn’t help agreeing. Over the years, he’d assisted in bringing a number of foals into the world. His sense of wonder never seemed to dim. He could be reeling from lack of sleep, but it never failed. Any birth immediately gave him a renewed sense of joy in life.

  “Aren’t you going to call Jane and tell her?” Glen asked his brother. “Annie’ll want to know, too.”

  Annie. Annie Applegate. This wasn’t the first time Lucas had heard the woman’s name. Apparently she was a lifelong friend of Jane’s who’d recently moved to Promise.

  “Annie—she’s new in town, right?” Lucas asked, entering the conversation. “The one who’s opening the bookstore?”

  “Yeah,” Glen said. “Friend of Jane’s. Cal likes her. So do I,” he added, meeting his brother’s eyes.

  Cal nodded. The more taciturn of the two, he didn’t seem to mind Glen’s answering for him.

  Lucas envied Cal and Glen their close relationship. They ranched together, and between them ran one of the most prosperous herds in the county. They’d begun experimenting with crossbreeding cattle, together with their neighbor Grady Weston, and had achieved some real success. Lucas was impressed with their research, which had been written up in agricultural journals as far away as Scotland and Australia. The Patterson brothers and Grady Weston were fast making a name for themselves.

  “What’s Jane doing?” Glen asked. “I thought this was her day off.”

  “It is. She’s with Annie. Since Jane talked Annie into moving here, she feels personally responsible for the bookstore’s success. I made her promise not to lift anything and she said she wouldn’t, but I know my wife. She’s working as hard as half a dozen men about now.”

  Lucas gathered that the women in Promise were thrilled with the idea of a bookstore. Just that morning, he’d gone into the café at the bowling alley for coffee, only to find a sign-up sheet for reader groups by the cashier. Annie already had three or four such groups forming, and the bookstore hadn’t even opened yet.

  Lucas didn’t understand the point of reading groups. He didn’t want anyone telling him what he should or shouldn’t think about a book. He was quite capable of forming his own opinions, thank you kindly. Women, though, seemed to look at it differently. There was a group to talk about the classics and one for romance novels; there was even a group to discuss “simplicity” books. Simplicity? If women found it so all-fired necessary to
simplify their lives, they might start by cutting out all these unnecessary groups and weekly meetings. But then, no one had asked for his thoughts on the matter.

  “Have you met Annie yet?” Glen asked, glancing casually toward Lucas.

  “Not formally,” Lucas said before taking another long swallow of iced tea. He’d seen her around town a few times. She was tall and fragile looking. From what Cal had told him, she’d been involved in a car accident a while back, followed by a bad divorce. Apparently it was the need for a new beginning that had brought her to Promise.

  New beginnings were something Lucas understood. Three years ago, after his wife’s death, he’d returned to Promise, seeking a fresh start for himself and his children. He’d spent the first ten years of his life in Promise; then the family had moved to Oklahoma City. His parents had retired in Promise soon after he graduated as a veterinarian. When his wife died, his mother had urged him to make the move back, promising to help him care for his two young daughters. And she had. He couldn’t have made it this far without his parents’ help. If only Julia…

  Pain tightened his chest at the thought of his wife. Julia had been dead for almost four years, but the ache inside him never seemed to diminish. True, the sharpness of his loss had dulled with time, but not the empty feeling deep inside him. At night especially, the loneliness was more than he could bear.

  Losing their mother had been terribly hard on Heather and Hollie, who continued to weep for Julia. Not as frequently now as in the beginning, but often enough to remind him that neither girl had forgotten her mother or ceased to miss her. Lucas pushed away the memories and tried to resume an interest in the conversation.

  “Personally, I don’t know what it is with women and their books,” Glen was saying. “Ellie’s downright excited about this new bookstore.” He shook his head. “I can see what’s going to happen already. Tumbleweed Books is gonna be just like Dovie’s place. I’m gonna feel like a bull in a china shop the minute I step inside. You know what else I figure? She’ll start selling other stuff besides books. There’ll be trinkets and smelly women things, and coffee with stuff in it. Like vanilla.” He shuddered. “I say it’s time a man opened a shop in Promise.”

  “Men don’t buy that many books.”

  Lucas raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you don’t, Cal, but I happen to read quite a bit.”

  “I didn’t say men didn’t read,” Cal objected. “I said they don’t buy books. Did you realize that seventy percent of all books are bought by women?”

  “When did you become such an expert on book sales?” his brother asked sarcastically.

  “Since I’ve been talking to Annie. She knows about books—used to work in a library. And she knows about business. She did her research before deciding to open her bookstore.”

  “Good for her,” Glen said. “But what about a store for us men? Where a guy can smoke a good cigar and buy new boots at the same time.”

  That sounded like a great idea to Lucas, but from personal experience he knew that what Cal had said was true. Only it wasn’t limited to books. Women took real pleasure in shopping. And pride—it apparently required great skill to scout for bargains. Hell, whenever he had to buy jeans, he refused to check out prices in three or four stores just to save a few pennies. His time was too valuable to waste on bragging rights for a pair of denims. In his dad’s words, “Women shop. Men buy.” That always made Julia laugh—no, he wasn’t going to think about Julia now.

  “It isn’t only the women Annie’s catering to, you know,” Cal continued. “Besides her reader groups, she’s hoping to start a creative-writing group and Saturday-afternoon storytelling for kids. You might be interested in that for your girls. She’s already got Travis Grant lined up.”

  This was one of the longest speeches Lucas had ever heard from Cal, and he appreciated the information.

  Travis Grant was a local writer with a wide national audience for both his children’s books and adult adventure series. Lucas had been looking for ways to encourage Heather to read, and this sounded perfect. He hadn’t managed to convince her that reading was fun, not a chore. However, getting Heather to read was the least of his worries at the moment.

  At Cal’s mention of the girls, Glen turned his attention to Lucas. “How’s it going with your new housekeeper?”

  Lucas shrugged. He paid top dollar for Mrs. Delaney and found the woman to be adequate, but little else. She watched the girls before and after school, cooked their dinner and did light housekeeping. Although Mrs. Delaney was kind enough to his children, she didn’t offer them any real comfort. And she wasn’t enthusiastic about much of anything. She didn’t read to the kids or play with them…. He shrugged again.

  “That says it all,” Cal muttered.

  Lucas nodded in agreement. “Sometimes I think it’d be easier to find myself a wife.”

  “Then why don’t you?” Glen asked. “There’s got to be someone within a hundred-mile radius who’d be willing to have you.”

  Lucas slapped his hat against his friend’s side, and Glen laughed. Despite his own grin, Lucas saw no humor in his dilemma. His parents, Carl and Elizabeth Porter, had been looking after the girls, but caring for two youngsters had taken a toll on his mother and she needed a break.

  His mother felt she was letting him down, but Lucas was the one who insisted his parents travel for a while and enjoy their retirement. They’d done far too little vacationing since he’d moved to Promise with his girls. It was time.

  “Things are bound to get better,” Lucas said. He sounded more certain than he felt.

  “Yeah,” Glen concurred, and Cal nodded.

  For the sake of his sanity, Lucas hoped his friends were right.

  CHAPTER 3

  Grady Weston had been in a bitch of a mood all afternoon, and he knew why. It was because of Richard and that damn letter. Just when Grady was beginning to feel his life was finally free of his brother, Richard turned up again. Like a bad penny. Interesting how many relevant clichés there were, he thought grimly. A rotten apple. A bad seed. A thorn in his side.

  Richard’s most recent effort to weasel his way back into the family’s favor infuriated him. Grady knew he needed to talk to Savannah and soon, otherwise Caroline was going to start asking questions. He’d never been good at hiding his concerns from his wife. He hadn’t mentioned the letter, which meant she’d probably hear about it from Savannah. He wanted to avoid that. Even now, after three years of marriage, he couldn’t shake a niggling fear that was tied to Caroline’s past connection with his brother.

  At the end of the day, Grady didn’t head back to the house as was his normal routine. Instead, he turned off the main road toward Laredo and Savannah’s place.

  Grady parked the pickup, then walked to the rose garden, where he knew he’d find Savannah. While she prepared the earth for new plantings, three-year-old Laura was busy filling a yellow plastic bucket in the sandbox and nine-month-old Matthew was contentedly chewing on a toy in his playpen.

  His sister stopped her work, leaning on the hoe when she saw him approach, almost as if she’d been expecting him. A large straw hat shaded her face, preventing him from reading her eyes. One thing he’d say about Savannah: she certainly had a way with roses. A profusion of color marked the rows—deep reds, pale pinks, whites and yellows. Even from a distance, he caught their scent. Savannah’s roses had an unforgettable fragrance.

  She had a thriving mail-order business that specialized in antique roses. She was what some people called a “rose rustler”—or “rose rescuer,” as she preferred to describe it. She visited abandoned farmhouses, old churches and even cemeteries to find long-forgotten roses, many of them a century old. She scoured ditches and detoured onto rambling dirt roads. It wasn’t unheard of for Savannah to drive two hundred miles to track down old roses. More than once, she’d stood up to demolition crews and halted highway construction work. She’d do whatever it took to find and rescue surviving rosebushes. She’d bring them home and re
store them to full health and beauty, then propagate them for sale to other rose lovers—whose numbers continually astonished Grady.

  “Hi, Grady,” Savannah finally said. She slowly put aside her hoe before walking out of the garden, stopping to scoop Matthew out of his playpen first.

  The child offered Grady a toothy grin, showing off four front teeth. In all his years, Grady didn’t think he’d ever seen a youngster who resembled his father as much as young Matthew did, in personality as well as appearance. Even at nine months, Matthew displayed a stubborn strong-willed nature. Although, come to think of it, Caroline said much the same thing about their son, three-year-old Roy. Except Caroline attributed those traits to Grady, often saying Roy was “just like his dad.”

  “Everything all right?” Savannah asked. She sat down at the wrought-iron table outside her garden and motioned him to join her. There was a tray holding a pitcher of iced tea, along with two empty glasses—and again Grady had the feeling she’d been expecting him. She poured tea into both glasses, sliding the second one in his direction.

  Grady declined with a shake of his head and remained standing. “I’m here about Richard’s letter,” he said abruptly. He didn’t want to be distracted by social niceties before he’d explained the reason for his visit.

  “Yes,” she said with a soft sigh. “It’s been on my mind, too.”

  At those words, Grady pulled out the empty chair and sat. “Have you answered him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you going to?” This was the more important question.