Lone Star Winter: The Winter Soldier. Diana Palmer

become a family—for the child’s sake.

      He turned off the lights and went to bed. But his dreams were restless and hot, and when he woke up the next morning, he felt as if he hadn’t slept at all.

      Harley got the calves branded and the corn in the silo in quick order.

      “You’ve got a knack for inspiring cowboys to work, Harley,” Cy told him one afternoon a few days later.

      “I get out there and work with them, and make them ashamed of being lazy,” Harley told him with a grin. “Most of them can’t keep up with me.”

      “I noticed.” Cy leaned back against the corral fence and stared at the younger man evenly, without blinking. “You were out near the warehouse last night. What did you see?”

      “Three big trucks,” Harley said solemnly. “One had some odd stuff on the back. Looked like oil drums lashed together.”

      That was disturbing. Cy knew that drug dealers threw portable bridges across rivers to let trucks full of their product drive to the other side. What Harvey was de scribing sounded like a makeshift pontoon bridge. Cy and the mercenaries he’d worked with had used them, too.

      “Did you get a look at what was in the trucks?” he asked.

      Harley shook his head. “The doors were closed and locked. I was afraid to risk trying to pick a lock, with all that hardware around. Those guys had Uzis.”

      “I know,” Cy said without thinking.

      Harley’s eyebrows went up, and he grinned in a fairly condescending way. “Do you now? Are you using Uzis to load cattle these days, boss?”

      Cy realized what he’d said and chuckled. “I wasn’t listening. Sorry.”

      “No problem. I noticed a couple of new faces over there,” he added. “Tough-looking men, and they weren’t wearing suits.”

      “Get back out there tonight,” Cy told him. “And be very careful, Harley. I’ve got a bad feeling about this whole thing.” He didn’t add that he was worried about Lisa. He saw her every other day, and the paperwork had just been completed and signed, ready for the transfer of money and deeds. He wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Lopez had an informant in town who’d tell him that. It might prompt the drug lord to hasty action, if he thought Lisa was selling the ranch in order to move away. He couldn’t know that Cy planned to rent her the ranch house. He wouldn’t like having to search for her.

      Knowing that bothered him, and he mentioned it to Lisa when he stopped by to see her the next day. Harley had seen yet another unfamiliar face on the ware house property, and he’d also seen flat after flat of jars being moved inside the structure. The drug dealers were getting ready to begin operations. Things would heat up very soon, or Cy missed his guess. He didn’t want Lisa in the middle of it.

      “Have you got family you could visit out of state?” he asked without preamble as he joined her in the living room, where she had gas logs burning in the fire place.

      She curled up on the sofa in her jeans and knit turtleneck white sweater and stared at him curiously. “I don’t have family anywhere,” she confessed. “Maybe a cousin or two up around Fort Worth, but I wouldn’t know where to look for them.”

      He sighed heavily and leaned forward in the chair with his arms crossed over his knees. “All right,” he said, seeming to come to a decision. “If you leave the house from now on, I want to know first. If you can’t get me, you call Eb Scott.”

      “Why?”

      He knew she was going to ask that. He didn’t have a very logical reply. “I don’t know what Lopez is up to,” he said honestly. “He may have given up on ideas of targeting you. On the other hand, he may be lulling us into a false sense of security. I’d rather err on the side of caution.”

      “That suits me,” she said agreeably.

      “Do you have a phone by your bed?”

      “Yes,” she said. “It makes me feel more secure.”

      He stood up. “Don’t forget to keep your doors locked, even in the daytime, when you’re home alone.”

      “I’m not, much,” she said without thinking. “Harley comes by every day to check on me, sometimes twice a day.”

      His eyes narrowed. He didn’t like that, although he said, “Good for Harley.”

      She caught a nuance of something in his tone. “Do you mind?” she asked deliberately. He’d been remote and she’d hardly seen him since the night of the opera. She wondered if he’d been avoiding her, and she concluded that he was. His manner now was standoffish and he seemed in a hurry to leave. She wanted to know if he was the least bit put out by Harley’s attentiveness.

      “It’s your life,” he said nonchalantly, tilting his wide-brimmed hat over one eye. “He’s a steady young man with a good future.”

      He couldn’t be thinking…or could he? She started to tell him that Harley was friendly, and that she had no romantic interest in him. But before she could, Cy was already on his way out the door.

      She went after him, trying not to be undignified and run. She didn’t catch up to him until he was going down the steps.

      “When do we close on the sale?” she asked, having no other excuse for following him.

      He turned at the door of the utility vehicle. “The first of next week, Kemp said. It will take that long to get the paperwork filed.”

      “Okay. You’ll phone me?”

      “I will. Or Kemp will.”

      That sounded less than friendly. She wrapped her arms around her chest and leaned against one of the posts that held up the long porch. “That’s fine, then,” she said with forced cheer. “Thanks.”

      He opened the door and hesitated. “Are you in a rush to close?”

      She shrugged. “Not really. I just wanted to know when I’d need to start paying rent. I was going to go see Mr. Kemp next week about that job.”

      She thought he didn’t want her around, and that was so far from the truth that it might as well have been in orbit. But he didn’t want to rush her, frighten her. Hell, he didn’t know what he wanted anymore.

      “I’ll see you Monday,” he said, and got into the vehicle without another word. He didn’t even look back as he drove away.

      Lisa stared after him with her heart around her ankles. So much for her theory that he was attracted to her. She supposed that he’d had second thoughts. It might be just as well. He was mourning his son, whom he’d obviously loved even if it wasn’t his own child, and she was a recent widow expecting a child of her own. She’d been spinning daydreams and it was time to stop and face reality. Cy wasn’t her future even if she’d hoped he was hers. She turned and went back into the lonely house, pausing to close and lock the door behind her.

      Chapter Five

      The first time she heard the noise at the window, Lisa thought it was a squirrel. The old house seemed to at tract them. They often scurried over the roof and came leaping down into the limbs of the big pecan trees that surrounded the porches. But she usually didn’t hear them in the wee hours of the morning, and so loud that they woke her up. She tried to go back to sleep, but then the noise came again. This time it didn’t sound like a squirrel. It sounded more like a window being forced open.

      Lisa slipped out of bed in her sweatpants and white cotton top, hesitating at the door that led into the hall. The noise had come from the room next door, the one Walt had occupied for most of their married life.

      She heard a faint rubbing noise, like one a man might make climbing in a window. Her heart began racing and she dashed down the hall in her bare feet, down the wooden steps and into the kitchen. Her glasses were still in the nightstand