Heather Graham (21 page)

“Oh, you did, did you?” Kane asked.

Martine smiled and nodded pertly. “How do you feel?”

“Inept,” he said dryly. “Some hero in the saddle, huh? I pass out cold on you.”

She laughed delightedly. “Only after you’d clobbered the bad guy, Kane.” Then her smile faded and she looked anxious—beautifully anxious. She started to lean against him, then pulled back as if she were afraid she would hurt him. Ignoring the pain in his arm, Kane reached out to pull her down to him.

“Oh, my God, do I love you!” he whispered.

She pulled away slightly, determined to see his eyes. “Do you really, Kane? I mean, can you really? I knew you had to be more than a drifter, but—”

“I wasn’t anything but a drifter,” he told her, “not until I met you.”

“And you really fell in love with me?”

“Completely. Irrevocably. How could you ever doubt that? Never mind!” he answered his own question a little painfully. “Ah, Martine, I’m sorry! I did have to kind of trick my way onto the Four-Leaf Clover. Joe told me that Ed Rice was laid up. He was so worried about you—right when I needed to get my hands on the ranch. It didn’t occur to me at first that Lander knew about the gold, just like he didn’t know who I was at first. Not until he started putting things together. I wanted to tell you everything. But how could I convince you that I loved you and then turn around and admit that I had originally come here because of the ranch? And then there was Nan. …I can’t tell you how wonderful a woman she is. She spent her youth as the subject of cruel notoriety. It wasn’t until the forties that people seemed to forget about her and let her live in peace. She’s old, Martine. If she winds up in the headlines again, it has to be for good reasons. Can you understand any of this? Why I had to ask you to trust me?”

“I was awful,” Martine said.

“No, you weren’t. I asked more of you than a man has a right to ask of any woman.”

“I admit you have a rotten temper!” Martine laughed.

He caught her arms and swallowed. “I’m sorry about that, too, Martine. I jumped at you because I was scared. I was in the wrong—and I desperately didn’t want to lose you.”

“Kane,” she said very softly, “I was wrong. I loved you enough to marry you. That should have meant that I loved you enough to trust you.”

He smiled at her. There really wasn’t a right or wrong answer to their past.

“Think we can start over?” he asked wistfully. “Forget the past?”

“I don’t want to forget a minute of it,” she whispered. “There was a lot of uncertainty, but there was also a lot of wonderful good that I intend to cherish all my life.”

“I’ll cherish you all my life,” he said huskily.

Martine leaned down and kissed him, slowly and carefully but lingeringly. He tasted the sweetness of her breath, inhaled her scent, and felt surrounded by ambrosia.

“All our lives …” she whispered in awe.

“Lie down beside me,” he said entreatingly.

“But your shoulder—”

“I have two sides, you know.”

“Mmm,” she said. “Your sweet one and your temperamental one!”

“Ouch!”

“It’s true.”

“No—I mean I know that. I have to move here a little bit.”

“No, I’ll move—”

“Don’t you dare!”

Martine giggled but remained obediently where she was, snuggled against his good shoulder.

“Are we really disgustingly rich?” she asked.

“Well not ‘disgustingly,’ I hope.”

“Oil wells?”

“Yeah, a few.”

“Do you really think your family will like me?”

“They’ll love you—not that it would matter in the least. No, I take that back. I love my family, even a little rascal like Lisa. I can’t believe you thought I was having an affair with the torment of my youth!”

“She’s a very pretty young woman!” Martine protested.

“Yes, I suppose she is,” Kane said soberly. “But all this started because she wants to marry a snob.”

“Maybe she won’t marry him after all.”

“Maybe not. But she’s over twenty-one. I can advise her, but I can’t run her life.” He was very still for a moment. Then he sighed. “And it’s all been for nothing. Lander will have to go on trial. Nan will wind up in the newspapers again, the old scandal all revived. For nothing. I know I’ve looked in the right place, but the gold just isn’t there. Neither is the marriage license.”

“
Oh
!” Martine cried, springing up in the bed.

“Have a heart!” Kane begged her, wincing as her sudden movement sent pain shooting through him again.

“I’m sorry, Kane, really I am.”

“I know you owe me a few, but really, woman! Remember that you’re my wife!”

Giggling, Martine planted a kiss against his throat. “I owe you lots and lots, but I think I have the best thing in the world to pay you back!”

He raised a brow. “Arsenic?”

“No. I’ll be right back,” she said mischievously.

When she disappeared through the doorway, Kane closed his eyes, smiling. She loved him. She had trusted him, and now everything was out in the open. They were alive, and in a few days’ time he’d feel fit as a fiddle again and—

She really did love him.
Completely. As soon as he could get up and about they would go to Tucson. He wanted his parents to know her; he wanted her to know the family. They all were such giving people. …They wouldn’t stay long in Tucson, though. Not this time. He wanted a real honeymoon. Three weeks, a month maybe, to do nothing but play, get to know each other and talk until everything could be said; to sit in silence, happy just to be together.

“My wedding present, Mr. Montgomery!”

He opened his eyes. Martine was back in the room, standing over him with her head slightly cocked, her eyes gleaming like a thousand verdent fields. There was a worn leather folder in her hands. No, it was a buckskin folder.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nan’s marriage license,” she told him huskily. “Well, I guess it’s Nan’s. Her name is different.”

“Wildflower,” Kane murmured incredulously.

“Yes, Wildflower. The English equivalent of her Apache name. Anyway, it’s there. Very legal. She married Hugh Montgomery on December first, 1915.”

“How …” Frowning, Kane looked up at his wife.

“I found the gold the day before you kidnapped me,” Martine explained pertly.

“
You
found it?”

“Well, of course. I know the place very well, you know.”

Kane started to laugh, except that laughing hurt, so he made himself stop. “You let me do all that digging and sweating and picking when you’d already found the gold?”

“Well, I hadn’t decided to trust you yet. For all I knew, I might have married a criminal. Besides, I liked to watch you dig. You have very sexy arms.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah. And the rest of you is all right too.”

Kane stared down at the paper in his hands, and a slow grin split his features.

“You’re pretty all right yourself, Mrs. Montgomery,” he murmured softly. “I think I like watching you in the shower best. Of course, I never got to see you dig, so I can’t be sure.”

Martine lay down beside him again, very carefully. “Do you know what I’ll never, ever forget?” she asked seriously.

“What’s that?”

“How you rode into my life with the sunrise,” she whispered. “Just like the cavalry at the moment of distress. I’ll never forget looking up and seeing you there. …”

He forgot all about his shoulder and his head and leaned over to kiss her; long, leisurely, with all his heart and soul.

At last he rose above her. “Does that mean that we can ride into the sunset together?” he asked huskily.

“Sunrise, sunset—any way you want to go,” she told him.

“I love you, lady,” he told her.

She smiled contentedly. It was true. Incredibly he had ridden into her life.

But even more incredibly he had ridden in to stay.

Heather Graham (b. 1953) is one of the country’s most prominent authors of romance, suspense, and historical fiction. She has been writing bestselling books for nearly three decades, publishing more than 150 novels and selling more than seventy-five million copies worldwide.

Born in Florida to an Irish mother and a Scottish father, Graham attended college at the University of South Florida, where she majored in theater arts. She spent a few years making a living onstage as a back-up vocalist and dinner theater actor, but after the birth of her third child decided to seek work that would allow her to spend more time with her family.

After early efforts writing romance and horror stories, Graham sold her first novel,
When Next We Love
(1982). She went on to write nearly two dozen contemporary romance novels.

In 1989 Graham published
Sweet Savage Eden
, which initiated the Cameron family saga, an epic six-book series that sets romantic drama amid turbulent periods of American history, such as the Civil War. She revisited the nineteenth century in
Runaway
(1994), a story of passion, deception, and murder in Florida, which spawned five sequels of its own.

In the past decade, Graham has written romantic suspense novels such as
Tall, Dark, and Deadly
(1999),
Long, Lean, and Lethal
(2000), and
Dying to Have Her
(2001), as well as supernatural fiction. In 2003’s
Haunted
she created the Harrison Investigation service, a paranormal detective organization that she spun off into four Krewe of Hunters novels in 2011.

Graham lives in Florida, where she writes, scuba dives, and spends time with her husband and five children.

Graham (left) with her sister.

Graham with her family in New Orleans. Pictured left to right: Dennis Pozzessere; Zhenia Yeretskaya Pozzessere; Derek, Shayne, and Chynna Pozzessere; Heather Graham; Jason and Bryee-Annon Pozzessere; and Jeremy Gonzalez.

Graham at a photo shoot in Key West for the promotion of the Flynn Brothers trilogy.

Graham at the haunted Myrtles plantation, Francisville, Louisiana.