Heart of Texas Volume 3: Nell's Cowboy. Debbie Macomber

she mounted. “Do you need help getting up?” she asked when he stood there, unmoving.

      He tried to look as if the question had insulted him; actually he wouldn’t have objected to her holding the reins while he swung his leg over the saddle. With a mighty effort he did manage to scramble onto Twister—appreciating the fact that Nell didn’t laugh at him.

      As they started out, she set a slow easy pace, for which Travis was grateful.

      “You wanted to ask me about the area?” she reminded him.

      “Yeah,” he said jerkily as his butt bounced against the saddle. “Te-ll m-e wh-at you kn-ow abou-t the gh-ost town.”

      Nell eased to a stop. “Ghost town?” she asked, frowning.

      Twister, following the other horse’s lead, stopped, as well. “If I remember correctly, it’s called Bitter End.”

      “That’s why you’re here?” she asked. “Why you came to Promise?” She nudged her horse into a trot. “I thought you were a writer!”

      “Yeah.” Travis managed to keep pace with her, but not without a price. If he survived this with all his teeth intact... “I am. And I w-want to—”

      “Who told you about Bitter End?” she asked, stopping her horse again. The warmth she’d shown him had cooled noticeably. “You’re from New York,” she said. “You know Richard Weston, don’t you?”

      “I met him once, yes, but, Nell—”

      “What did he tell you about Bitter End?” she demanded. “We were afraid of this,” she muttered, not looking at him. “Everyone was.”

      “Afraid of what?”

      “It doesn’t concern you.”

      “Nell, if you’d give me a chance to explain.” He shifted in the saddle, wishing he could touch her, reassure her in some way.

      “You’ve already said everything I need to know. You’re a friend of Richard’s—”

      “No, I’m not! Don’t even think that. I met the man once, Nell. Just once. For a couple of hours. But it only took me a couple of minutes to see the kind of person he is.”

      That brought her up short. Her gaze returned to him, cautiously, as if she wasn’t sure even now. But he could see she wanted to believe him, wanted to trust him. He yearned for that as much as he did her kisses.

      “Valerie, my ex-wife, defended him—his state-appointed attorney. Richard mentioned the ghost town to her, and she told me. I was intrigued. A ghost town from the Old West, one that’s basically undiscovered and hasn’t been commercialized. I wanted to see it for myself, as background for a project I’m working on.”

      Nell said nothing. Then she said, “So you came all this way because of Bitter End?”

      “That’s what initially brought me here. Yes.” But he liked the people of Promise, especially Nell and her family.

      “Now I suppose you’re looking for someone to take you there?”

      “Yes—I want to see the town.” He wanted to learn the history behind it, too. It was more than just a ghost town, if what Weston said was true, and Travis was hoping to unravel its secrets, include them in his book.

      “I’m afraid you’ve made a wasted trip.”

      Her unwillingness to help him took him by surprise.

      “I won’t take you to Bitter End. And no one else will, either.”

      She sounded stubborn about it, but he could be stubborn, too. “I’m going there,” Travis said. “I’ll find it, Nell. Others have and so will I. But I’d rather we did it together.”

      “I can’t...I won’t. You don’t understand.”

      “Then explain it to me.”

      “That town has done nothing but bring Promise grief. We just want to forget about it.”

      “What aren’t you telling me?” he asked.

      His question seemed to catch her off guard. She was silent for a long time; when she spoke again, it was with the seriousness of a woman who knows more than she wants to. “Nothing good has ever come out of that place. Nothing. The best thing for you is to forget you ever heard it mentioned.”

      “You’ve been there?”

      “No,” she admitted reluctantly.

      “Then how do you know? Who told you? How many people have actually been in the town?”

      Nell shrugged, not answering him.

      “Then how can you be so sure if you’ve never been there yourself?”

      “Everyone knows,” she whispered.

      “But you’ve found out where it is?”

      She hesitated. “I have a vague idea where it might be.”

      “Where?”

      Nell made a sweeping motion with her arm. “It’s out there somewhere. Exactly where, I couldn’t tell you.”

      “And even if you could, you wouldn’t.”

      She nodded.

      “This is a historic site. Doesn’t anyone understand that?”

      “Bitter End?” Nell laughed without amusement. “Why is it so important to you?” she asked again.

      “Curiosity, mainly,” he told her. “Like I told you, I’m a writer and I’m using a ghost town in my book. I wanted to make it as authentic as possible. I’m also intrigued by the mystery.”

      “Well, you’ll have to ask someone else to take you, because I won’t.”

      “Who, then?”

      “I doubt that anyone will. But you might try Grady Weston.”

      Richard Weston’s brother, Travis remembered.

      “I wish you well, Travis. If you ride back to the house, Ruth will give you the Westons’ phone number.” Having said that, she galloped off, leaving him to make his own way back to the barn.

      “All right, Twister,” Travis said, doing his best to sound calm. “It’s you and me, boy. We’re friends, right?”

      He pulled on the reins to reverse their direction. “See the barn, Twister?” He pointed toward it. “Let’s walk there...slowly.” Apparently the horse didn’t care for Travis’s tone of voice, because he took off at a gallop. It was all Travis could do to stay in the saddle.

      When he reached the barn, he managed to dismount, then, legs shaky, succeeded in removing the saddle; the bridle he left for Nell. He coaxed Twister into the stall with his name on it, then tottered back to the house.

      That afternoon when he phoned Grady Weston, he learned Nell wasn’t the only one with strong feelings about Bitter End. It took him several hours to reach the other man; once he did, Weston practically bit his head off. In no uncertain terms, he made it clear that he’d have no part in satisfying Travis’s curiosity. Travis supposed Grady’s aggression could be attributed to his negative feelings about his brother.

      Nell sought him out in the bunkhouse an hour or so later. “Did you speak to Grady?” she asked, her mood more conciliatory, or so it seemed.

      “Briefly.”

      “And?”

      “And he isn’t willing to show me where Bitter End is, either. Just like you predicted.”

      She nodded. “You’ll be leaving, then?”

      “No.”

      It wasn’t the answer she’d expected; he could tell by the way her eyes widened. “No?”