The Princess Bride. Diana Palmer

hard, honey,” he mused, smiling at the intensity in that glowering young face. “We’ve had low prices and drought. It’s all I can do to keep my financial head above water.”

      “You could take the occasional break,” she advised. “And I don’t mean a night on the town. You could get away from it all and just rest.”

      “They’re full up at the Home,” he murmured, grinning at her exasperated look. “Honey, I can’t afford vacations, not with times so hard. What are you wearing for this coming-of-age party?” he asked to divert her.

      “A dream of a dress. White silk, very low in front, with diamanté straps and a white gardenia in my hair.” She laughed.

      He pursed his lips. He might as well humor her. “That sounds dangerous,” he said softly.

      “It will be,” she promised, teasing him with her eyes. “You might even notice that I’ve grown up.”

      He frowned a little. That flirting wasn’t new, but it was disturbing lately. He found himself avoiding little Miss Blair, without really understanding why. His body stirred even as he looked at her, and he moved restlessly in the saddle. She was years too young for him, and a virgin to boot, according to her doting, sheltering father. All those years of obsessive parental protection had led to a very immature and unavailable girl. It wouldn’t do to let her too close. Not that anyone ever got close to Kingman Marshall, not even his infrequent lovers. He had good reason to keep women at a distance. His upbringing had taught him too well that women were untrustworthy and treacherous.

      “What time?” he asked on a resigned note.

      “About seven?”

      He paused thoughtfully for a minute. “Okay.” He tilted his wide-brimmed hat over his eyes. “But only for an hour or so.”

      “Great!”

      He didn’t say goodbye. Of course, he never had. He wheeled the stallion and rode off, man and horse so damned arrogant that she felt like flinging something at his tall head. He was delicious, she thought, and her body felt hot all over just looking at him. On the ground he towered over her, lean and hard-muscled and sexy as all hell. She loved watching him.

      With a long, unsteady sigh, she finally turned away and remounted her mare. She wondered sometimes why she bothered hero-worshiping such a man. One of these days he’d get married and she’d just die. God forbid that he’d marry anybody but herself!

      That was when the first shock of reality hit her squarely between the eyes. Why, she had to ask herself, would a man like that, a mature man with all the worldly advantages, want a young and inexperienced woman like herself at his side? The question worried her so badly that she almost lost control of her mount. She’d never questioned her chances with King before. She’d never dared. The truth of her situation was unpalatable and a little frightening. She’d never even considered a life without him. What if she had to?

      As she rode back toward her own house, on the property that joined King’s massive holdings, she noticed the color of the grass. It was like barbed wire in places, very dry and scant. That boded ill for the cattle, and if rain didn’t come soon, all that new grass was going to burn up under a hot Texas sun. She knew a lot about the cattle business. After all, her father had owned feedlots since her youth, and she was an only child who worked hard to share his interests. She knew that if there wasn’t enough hay by the end of summer, King was going to have to import feed to get his cattle through the winter. The cost of that was prohibitive. It had something to do with black figures going red in the last column, and that could mean disaster for someone with a cow-calf operation the size of King’s.

      Ah, well, she mused, if King went bust, she supposed that she could get a job and support him. Just the thought of it doubled her over with silvery laughter. King’s pride would never permit that sort of help.

      Even the Guadalupe was down. She sat on a small rise in the trees, looking at its watery width. The river, like this part of Texas, had a lot of history in it. Archaeologists had found Indian camps on the Guadalupe that dated back seven thousand years, and because of that, part of it had been designated a National Historic Shrine.

      In more recent history, freight handlers on their way to San Antonio had crossed the river in DeWitt County on a ferryboat. In Cuero, a nice drive from Lariat, was the beginning of the Chisolm Trail. In nearby Goliad County was the small town of Goliad, where Texas patriots were slaughtered by the Mexican army back in 1836, just days after the bloodbath at the Alamo. Looking at the landscape, it was easy to imagine the first Spanish settlers, the robed priests founding missions, the Mexican Army with proud, arrogant Santa Anna at its fore, the Texas patriots fighting to the last breath, the pioneers and the settlers, the Indians and the immigrants, the cowboys and cattle barons and desperadoes. Tiffany sighed, trying to imagine it all.

      King, she thought, would have fitted in very well with the past. Except that he had a blasé attitude toward life and women, probably a result of having too much money and time on his hands. Despite his hard work at roundup, he spent a lot of time in his office, and on the phone, and also on the road. He was so geared to making money that he seemed to have forgotten how to enjoy it. She rode home slowly, a little depressed because she’d had to work so hard just to get King to agree to come to her party. And still haunting her was that unpleasant speculation about a future without King.

      Her father was just on his way out the door when she walked up from the stables. The house was stucco, a big sprawling yellow ranch house. It had a small formal garden off the patio, a swimming pool behind, a garage where Tiffany’s red Jaguar convertible and her father’s gray Mercedes-Benz dwelled, and towering live oak and pecan trees all around. The Guadalupe River was close, but not too close, and Texas stretched like a yellow-green bolt of cloth in all directions to an open, spacious horizon.

      “There you are,” Harrison Blair muttered. He was tall and gray-headed and green-eyed. Very elegant, despite his slight paunch and his habit of stooping because of a bad back. “I’m late for a board meeting. The caterer called about your party…something about the cheese straws not doing.”

      “I’ll give Lettie a ring. She’ll do them for her if I ask her nicely,” she promised, grinning as she thought of the elderly lady who was her godmother. “King’s coming to my party. I ran him to ground at the river.”

      He looked over his glasses at her, his heavily lined face vaguely reminiscent of an anorexic bassett hound; not that she’d ever have said anything hurtful to her parent. She adored him. “You make him sound like a fox,” he remarked. “Careful, girl, or you’ll chase him into a hollow stump and lose him.”

      “Not me,” she laughed, her whole face bright with young certainty. “You just wait. I’ll be dangling a diamond one of these days. He can’t resist me. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

      He only shook his head. She was so young. She hadn’t learned yet that life had a way of giving with one hand, only to take back with the other. Oh, well, she had plenty of years to learn those hard lessons. Let her enjoy it while she could. He knew that King would never settle for a child-woman like his beautiful daughter, but it was something she was going to have to accept one of these days.

      “I hope to be back by four,” he said, reaching down to peck her affectionately on one cheek. “Are we having champagne? If we are, I hope you told the caterer. I’m not breaking out my private stock until you get married.”

      “Yes, we are, and yes, I told them,” she assured him. “After all, I don’t become twenty-one every day.”

      He studied her with quiet pride. “You look like your mother,” he said. “She’d be as proud of you as I am.”

      She smiled faintly. “Yes.” Her mother had been dead a long time, but the memories were bittersweet. The late Mrs. Blair had been vivacious and sparkling, a sapphire in a diamond setting. Her father had never remarried, and seemed not to be inclined toward the company of other women. He’d told Tiffany once that true love was a pretty rare commodity. He and her mother had been so blessed. He was content enough with his memories.