Noelle. Diana Palmer

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СКАЧАТЬ when you get back to New York. Gangrene is still a very real possibility.”

      “I’ll keep an eye on it.”

      “Sorry about your trousers.”

      Jared shrugged. “Fortunes of war.” His eyes fixed on the doctor’s face. “I’ll take care of both bills—for myself and the man I wounded. For two bits, I’d call out Hughes and make a clean sweep of this. He lied to me. I thought the trespassing had been recent.”

      The doctor’s eyebrows went up. “You didn’t know that those men had homesteaded the land for five years?”

      “Not until today.”

      He whistled through his teeth.

      Jared got to his feet and reached for his wallet. He peeled off several large bills and handed them to the doctor. “If you have any contact with the man I shot, tell him that he’s got a good case against the man who sold him the land. Anybody can be found. I know an ex-Pinkerton man who lives in Chicago—Matt Davis, by name.” He took a pencil and pad from his pocket, scribbled a name and an address. “He’s a good man, and he’s a sucker for a just cause. I’ve worked with him frequently over the past ten years.”

      The doctor fingered the slip of paper. “Ed Barkley will be grateful. He’s not a bad man, but he lived on the border for years before he married and tried to settle down. Sank every penny he had into that land, and now he’s lost everything.” He shrugged and smiled faintly. “In the old days, there would have been quick justice, right or wrong. Civilization is hard work.”

      Jared’s eyebrow quirked. “Tell me about it.”

      He left the doctor’s office and started toward his hotel. He hadn’t taken off the gun belt.

      The sheriff came toward him, clearing his throat. “I believe we should discuss this gunplay…”

      Jared, in pain and furious that the official hadn’t even tried to do his duty, swept the jacket back again with cold, insolent challenge.

      “By all means, let’s discuss it,” he invited curtly.

      The sheriff, unlike Ed Barkley, knew what the angle of that holster and the worn butt meant. He cleared his throat again and smiled nervously.

      “Self-defense, of course,” he muttered. “Sad thing, these bad-tempered men…Fair trial. You, uh, leaving town?”

      “Yes.” Jared gave the man a cold glare. “Someone could have been killed out here today. You were elected to protect these townspeople, and you ran like a yellow dog. I’ve been in places in Texas where they’d have shot you down in the street for what you did today.”

      “I was otherwise occupied at the time! And what do you know about being a lawman, a city feller like you?” the man asked.

      Jared’s thin mouth tugged up at the corner, but his eyes were blazing. “More than you’ll have time to learn.”

      He whipped the jacket back over his pistol and kept walking, the limp more pronounced with every step he took. But even with that impairment, he looked threatening.

      He went to his hotel, packed and checked out, and caught the next train east to St. Louis, where he could make connections to return to New York. People were still watching when the train pulled out of town. Imagine, a real gunfight right there in the street, two boys were remarking excitedly, and they’d seen it!

      Chapter One

      “Damn!”

      The expletive resounded through the elegant law office. Alistair Brooks, the senior partner of the firm of Brooks and Dunn, looked up from the brief he was painstakingly writing by hand at his oak rolltop desk. “What?” he asked.

      Jared Dunn threw down the letter he’d received from his grandmother in Fort Worth, Texas, with a flourish of his long, darkly tanned hand. “Damn,” he repeated under his breath, and sat brooding, his reading glasses perched on his straight, elegant nose—over eyes that could run the blue spectrum from sky blue all the way to gunmetal gray.

      “A case?” Brooks asked absently.

      “A letter from home,” Jared replied heavily. He sat back in his chair with his long legs crossed, a faint grimace accompanying the action. He favored the right leg a little, because the damage done by the bullet in Terrell was fresh enough to be painful. He’d been carefully checked by his own doctor, the wound rebandaged with directions to leave it alone until it healed. The fever had gone down in the few days he’d been back in New York, and if he felt pain or weakness from the wound, it didn’t show in the steely lines of his lean face.

      “From Texas?” Brooks echoed.

      “From Texas.” He couldn’t quite call it home, although it felt that way sometimes. He turned his swivel chair to face his partner across the elegant wood floor of the oak-furnished office, the long, narrow windows letting in light through sheer curtains. “I’ve been thinking about a move, Alistair. If I leave, Parkins would enjoy taking my place in the firm. He has a good background in criminal law, and he’s been in practice long enough to have gained an admirable reputation in legal circles.”

      Brooks put down his ink pen with a heavy sigh. “It’s that land case in New Mexico Territory that’s depressed you,” he began.

      “It’s more than that,” Jared replied. “I’m tired.” He ran a slender hand over his wavy black hair. There were threads of pure silver in it now, at his temples. He knew that new lines had been carved into his face by the pressures of his profession. “I’m tired of working on the wrong side of justice.”

      Brooks’s eyebrows arched disapprovingly.

      Jared shook his head. “Don’t misunderstand me. I love the practice of law. But I’ve just dispossessed families that should have had some sort of right to land they’d worked for five years and I feel sick about it. I seem to spend more time working for money than I do working for justice. I don’t like it. Cases that satisfied me when I was younger and more ambitious only make me uncomfortable now. I’m disillusioned with my life.”

      “This sounds as if you’re working up to dissolving our partnership,” Brooks began.

      Jared nodded. “That’s just what I’m doing. It’s been a good ten years since I began practicing law. I appreciate the boost that you gave my career, and the opportunity to practice in New York City. But I’m restless.”

      Brooks’s dark eyes narrowed. “Would this sudden decision have more to do with that letter you’ve just read than the case in New Mexico Territory?” he asked shrewdly.

      One corner of Jared’s thin mouth pulled down. “In fact, it does. My grandmother has taken in a penniless cousin of my stepbrother Andrew’s.”

      “The family lives in Fort Worth, and you support them,” Brooks recalled.

      Jared nodded. “My grandmother is my late mother’s only living relative. She’s important to me. Andrew…” He laughed coldly. “Andrew is family, however much I may disapprove of him.”

      “He’s very young yet.”

      “Serving СКАЧАТЬ