The Winter Soldier. Diana Palmer

lunch and brought it with him.

      He shifted from one booted foot to the other with noticeable impatience, his glittery green eyes sweeping the customers nearest the counter. They settled on a serene blond-haired woman studying him with evident amusement. He knew her. Most people in Jacobsville, Texas, did. She was Lisa Taylor Monroe. Her husband, Walt Monroe, an undercover narcotics officer with a federal agency, had recently been killed. He’d borrowed on his insurance policy, so there had been just enough money to bury him. At least Lisa had her small ranch, a legacy from her late father.

      Cy’s keen eyes studied her openly. She was sweet, but she’d never win any beauty contests. Her dark blond hair was always in a bun and she never put on makeup. She wore glasses over her brown eyes, plastic framed ones, and her usual garb was jeans and a T-shirt when she was working around the ranch her father had left her. Walt Monroe had loved the ranch, and during his infrequent visits home, he’d set out improving it. His ambitions had all but bankrupted it, so that Lisa was left after his death with a small savings account that probably wouldn’t even pay the interest on the loans Walt had obtained.

      Cy knew something about Lisa Monroe because she was his closest neighbor, along with Luke Craig, a rancher who was recently married to a public defender named Belinda Jessup. Mrs. Monroe there liked Charolais, he recalled. He wasn’t any too fond of foreign cattle, having a purebred herd of Santa Gertrudis cattle, breeding bulls from which made him a profitable living. Almost as prosperous as his former sideline, he mused. A good champion bull could pull upward of a million dollars on the market.

      Lisa had no such livestock. Her Charolais cattle were steers, beef stock. She sold off her steer crop every fall, but it wouldn’t do her much good now. She was too deeply in debt. Like most other people, he felt sorry for her. It was common gossip that she was pregnant, because in a small town like Jacobsville, everybody knew everything. She didn’t look pregnant, but he’d overheard someone say that they could tell in days now, rather than the weeks such tests had once required. She must be just barely pregnant, he mused, because those tight jeans outlined a flat stomach and a figure that most women would covet.

      But her situation was precarious. Pregnant, widowed and deeply in debt, she was likely to find herself homeless before much longer, when the bank was forced to foreclose on the property. Damned shame, he thought, when it had such potential for development

      She was clutching a boxed heating pad to her chest, waiting her turn in line at the second cash register at the pharmacy counter.

      When Lisa was finally at the head of the line, she put down her heating pad on the counter and opened her purse.

      “Another one, Lisa?” the young female clerk asked her with an odd smile.

      She gave the other woman an irritated glance as she dug in her purse for her checkbook. “Don’t you start, Bonnie,” she muttered.

      “How can I help it?” the clerk chuckled. “That’s the third one this month. In fact, that’s the last one we have in stock.”

      “I know that. You’d better order some more.”

      “You really need to do something about that dog,” Bonnie suggested firmly.

      “Hear, hear!” the other clerk, Joanne, seconded, peering at Lisa over her glasses.

      “The puppy takes after his father,” Lisa said defensively. He did, she mused. His father belonged to Tom Walker, and the mostly German shepherd dog, Moose, was a local legend. This pup was from the first litter he’d sired—without Tom’s knowledge or permission. “But he’s going to be a lot of protection, so I guess it’s a trade-off. How much is this?”

      Bonnie told her, waited while she wrote the check, accepted it and processed it. “Here you go,” she told the customer. She glanced down at the other woman’s flat stomach. “When are you due?”

      “Eight months and two weeks,” Lisa said quietly, wincing as she recalled that her husband, away from home and working undercover, had been killed the very night after she’d conceived, if Dr. Lou Coltrain had her numbers right. And when had Lou ever missed a due date? She was uncanny at predicting births.

      “You’ve got that Mason man helping you with the ranch.” Bonnie interrupted her thoughts. “You shouldn’t need a dog with him there. Can’t he protect you?”

      “He only comes on the weekends,” Lisa replied.

      Bonnie frowned. “Luke Craig sent him out there, didn’t he? But he said the man was supposed to spend every night in the bunkhouse!”

      “He visits his girlfriend most nights,” Lisa said irritably. “And better her than me! He doesn’t bathe!”

      Bonnie burst out laughing. “Well, there’s one bright side to it. If he isn’t staying nights, you only have to pay him for the weekends…Lisa,” she added when she saw the guilty expression on the other woman’s face, “you aren’t still paying him for the whole week?”

      Lisa flushed. “Don’t,” she said huskily.

      “Sorry.” Bonnie handed her a receipt. “It’s just I hate the way you let people take advantage of you, that’s all. There are so many rotten people in the world, and you’re a walking, talking benevolence society.”

      “Rotten people aren’t born, they’re made,” Lisa told her. “He isn’t a bad man, he just didn’t have a proper upbringing.”

      “Oh, good God!” Cy said harshly, glaring at her, having kept his mouth shut as long as possible without imploding. The woman’s compassion hit him on a raw spot and made him furious.

      Lisa’s eyes were brown, big and wide and soft through the plastic frames of her glasses. “Excuse me?”

      “Are you for real?” he asked curtly. “Listen, people dig their own graves and they climb into them. Nothing excuses cruelty.”

      “You tell her!” Bonnie said, agreeing.

      Lisa recognized her taciturn neighbor from a previous encounter, long ago. He’d come right up to her when she’d been pitching hay over the fence to her cattle one day and told her outright that she should leave heavy work to her husband. Walt hadn’t liked that comment, not at all. It had only been a few days after he’d let her do the same thing while he flirted with a pretty blond parcel delivery employee. Worse, Walt thought that Lisa had encouraged Cy’s interference somehow and they’d had a fight—not the first in their very brief marriage. She didn’t like the tall man and her expression told him so. “I wasn’t talking to you,” she pointed out. “You don’t know anything about my business.”

      His eyebrows rose half an inch. “I know that you over-pay the hired help.” He looked pointedly at her flat belly. “And that you’re the last person who should be looked upon as a walking benevolence society.”

      “Hear, hear!” Joanne said again from behind Bonnie.

      Lisa glared at her. “You can be quiet,” she said.

      “Let your erstwhile employee go,” he told her. “I’ll send one of my men over to spend nights in the bunkhouse. Bonnie’s right about one thing, you don’t need to be by yourself after dark in such a remote place.”

      “I don’t need your help,” she said, glowering at him.

      “Yes, you do. Your husband wouldn’t have liked having you try to run that ranch alone,” he added quietly, even though he didn’t mean it, and he hoped that his distaste for the late Walt Monroe didn’t show. He still recalled watching Lisa heft a huge bale of hay while her husband stood not ten paces away flirting with a pretty blond woman. It was a miracle she hadn’t miscarried, the way she hefted heavy things around. He wondered if she even knew the chance she was taking…

      She was looking at him with different eyes now. The concern touched her despite her hostility. She sighed. “I guess you’re right,” she said softly. “He wouldn’t have.”

      He hated the way that softness