McKettrick's Choice. Linda Miller Lael

You still have Angelina.

      She hadn’t heard the horse approaching, and by the time she realized she wasn’t alone, it was too late.

      “Morning, Miss Fellows,” said Holt McKettrick, swinging down from the back of a fine-looking Appaloosa gelding. “Maybe I’m mistaken, but you give the appearance of being a damsel in distress.”

      Lorelei’s throat ached. Her eyes felt puffy and red, and the edges of her nostrils burned. It galled her that this man, of all people, had to be the one to catch her weeping. “I’m perfectly fine,” she said, with a sniff.

      His smile was slow and easy, and it pulled at something deep inside her. “Whatever you say,” he allowed. His eyes twinkled with good-natured skepticism.

      “How do you expect to make that ranch pay if you spend all your time in town?” Lorelei challenged, taking in his fine suit.

      He chuckled, belatedly removing his hat. The band, made of hammered silver, caught the light and made it dance. “I’ll make it pay, all right,” he said, with quiet confidence. “And it happens I have business in town.”

      Lorelei knew she should simply walk away, but she couldn’t find it within herself to do that, so she simply stood there, with one gloved hand against the trunk of the oak tree. “How is Sorrowful faring?” she asked. It was a safe topic, as far as she could tell.

      Again, that slow, lethal grin. His teeth were good—white and straight. He’d probably never had a cavity in his life. “Sorrowful,” he said, “is glad of a bed behind the stove and table scraps twice a day. He’s a fair hand at chasing rabbits, too.”

      Lorelei smiled. “Good,” she said.

      “You’re welcome to visit him anytime, if you’re so disposed.”

      “Thank you,” she replied softly.

      “I could see you home,” Holt ventured, turning the fancy hat in his hands.

      She shook her head. “I don’t think I’m ready to go there just yet,” she said.

      He didn’t press for a reason. “Well, I guess I’d better get along.”

      He turned, put a foot in the stirrup and mounted with an ease Lorelei couldn’t help admiring. She yearned to ride, just get up on a horse’s back and race over the ground, travel as far and as fast as she could, with the wind buffeting her face and playing in her hair. Her father had forbidden her that pleasure, along with many others, claiming it was not a suitable enterprise for a lady.

      In reality, it was because her older brother, William, had been thrown from a pony when he was nine. He’d struck his head on a rock and died three days later. The judge’s mourning had been terrible to behold.

      Holt tilted his head to one side, watching her face. “Something the matter?”

      Lorelei was swamped with memories—her father’s utter grief. All the mirrors in the house draped in black crepe. The sound of the rifle shot, ringing through the heavy air of a summer afternoon, as William’s pony was put down.

      All of this had happened the day she turned six. Raul had led away the little spotted Shetland that was to have been her birthday gift, later admitting that he’d given it to a rancher.

      Child that she was, she’d mourned the lost pony more than William, at the time, and the recollection of that caused a sharp pang of guilty sorrow.

      She sighed. “No,” she lied, catching hold of his question, left dangling in the air for a long moment. “Nothing’s wrong.”

      “I don’t believe you,” Holt answered quietly.

      Then he took the reins in one hand, touched the brim of his hat and went on, toward town.

      Lorelei stared after him, wondering when he’d leave San Antonio and go back to wherever he’d come from.

      CHAPTER 8

      GUILT, AND A NEED for some errand to quiet her mind and keep her out of the house for a while, sent Lorelei toward St. Ambrose’s, an old mission at the edge of town. The walk was long and the heat insufferable, but when she reached the shady plot where her mother and William rested side by side, she found some solace.

      Selma Hanson Fellows’s marker was a marble angel with a trumpet raised to its stone lips. The angel’s eyes gazed with longing into the far reaches of eternity, and the mold and lichen in the crevices of its finely chiseled face and the folds of its flowing gown gave it an eerie dimension.

      Lorelei kissed the tips of her fingers and set them against the S in her mother’s name. A gentle breeze wafted through the cemetery, cooling her scalp.

      She searched her mind for even the ghost of a memory of her lost mother and waited, but nothing came.

      William’s grave was more modest, with a smaller angel to oversee it, but the words carved in the granite base had a poignancy that Selma’s lacked.

      BELOVED SON OF ALEXANDER FELLOWS MY SOUL PERISHED WITH HIM.

      Lorelei pulled out her handkerchief, for the second time that morning, and touched it to her eyes. The judge had stayed drunk for a solid month after William’s funeral, night and day. She remembered his ragged beard, his unkempt hair, standing up in ridges from the repeated thrust of his fingers. The sweat-and-tobacco stench of his clothes, underlaid by the subtler smell of despair.

      “You,” her father had muttered once, when she’d crept into his study and tried to crawl into his lap. He’d pushed her away with a rough motion of one hand and a surly, “If one of you had to die, why did it have to be him? My only son. My only hope.”

      Lorelei wrapped both arms tightly around her middle and lowered her head, remembering. That day, in the space of an instant, Alexander Fellows had stopped being “Papa” and become the Judge. They’d been on opposite shores of an invisible river ever since, and if there was a ford or a bridge, Lorelei had yet to find it.

      Except for Angelina, and a few school chums and faraway cousins, she’d been alone ever since. Until Michael had come along.

      A sob rose in her throat. She swallowed it with a painful intake of breath.

      Determinedly, she pulled herself together. There was no profit in weakness, no value in looking back.

      Michael was buried in the Chandler plot, among his own people—parents, grandparents, a sister who’d died in infancy, numerous aunts and uncles.

      Lorelei made her way to him and sat down on a bench nearby. Michael’s final resting place was a simple one, with only a stone cross to commemorate him.

      In the depths of her heart, Lorelei thought she heard him speak her name.

      CROUCHING, Holt laid Lizzie’s flowers within the circle of white stones enclosing Olivia’s gravesite. A slab, long-fallen and half-covered by the encroaching grass, bore only her first name and the date of her death.

      The flowers were yellow roses, heady with scent. He’d seen them from the street, flourishing in a garden, shortly after leaving Lorelei under the oak tree, and stopped to knock on the front door of the house and ask if he might buy a dozen or so.

      The old woman who’d answered had regarded him solemnly. “Are they for a lady?” she’d asked, when she was through sizing him up. He was glad he’d shaved and put on good clothes.

      “Yes,” Holt had said, without hesitation, for Olivia had been a lady, in every sense of the word. And she’d given him Lizzie, the single greatest gift of his life.

      “Reckon she must be right pretty, if a fellow like you wants to give her roses.”

      Holt had smiled, albeit sadly. “She was,” he said. “Prettiest woman in San Antonio. Olivia died of a fever a few years back.”

      Lorelei had slipped into his mind then, out of nowhere, but he’d set her firmly