Cara tried to fight down the immobilizing terror that rooted her to the spot. Jeth was down the incline before she could move, his chaps making harsh leathery sounds as he spanned the distance between them. “Miss Martin, I warned you! I told you that you were to leave my men alone, that if you didn’t—”
The rest of his reproof never had a chance for delivery. In fear of the fury that deepened the tan of his handsome face, Cara spun away from him, managing only a few steps before an ankle twisted. She heard the startled cry of her name before she went splaying, stomach side down, on the hard, stony ground. A sharp stone cut into the underside of her chin, but she lay oblivious to everything except the spinning carpet that offered to take her away from the demon towering above her. As he lifted her to her feet, she had a blurred glimpse of her blue hair ribbon lying on the ground.
Weakly, she flailed at him. “Leave me alone!” she sobbed. “Take your hands off me!”
“I will when you’re calm,” he said, pulling her into his arms and holding her steady against his chest. Spent and dizzy, Cara clung to him, wrapping her arms around his waist.
“What have you done to yourself?” Jeth asked sorrowfully above her head.
“No more than you would have done to me,” she said into his chest.
“Oh, lady—” He sighed. “I was mad as hell, yes, but I wouldn’t have hit you. A good shake was what I had in mind—to make you understand that while you’re on La Tierra soil, you’ll remain faithful to Ryan’s memory. I will not tolerate your making a fool of him—”
She raised her head to look at him. “I wasn’t making a play for Jim!”
His mouth hardened. “So you say.”
“It’s the truth!”
Suddenly the emotional and physical events of the past half hour overwhelmed her. Her chin and palms throbbed. She wanted desperately to sag against Jeth’s chest again and rest there, but she could not afford such a balm. Her arms dropped from around him. “You are wrong about what you saw, Mr. Langston. I don’t expect you to believe me. But surely you can believe that I would never do anything to hurt Ryan’s memory.”
Jeth’s embrace loosened. Her small face was very pale, the smooth cheeks smudged with dust and the streak of tears. A thin line of blood had appeared beneath her chin. “Just your being here does that. Now go down and ask Leon to take a look at that chin.”
Leon had already begun serving the evening meal. “Sorry,” she muttered at his elbow. The cook turned around to find her gazing helplessly at her grazed palms. “I had an accident.”
Leon took in the abrasions and the dusty apron, the disheveled hair that had been as smooth as polished gold a short while ago. “So I see,” he commented without inflection. “Here’s some clean water.”
“I’ve not been much help, I’m afraid, Leon. I’m sorry.”
“No need to be. You’ve been the best help I’ve ever had on a roundup, and tomorrow is another day. Here’s some salve for your hands. Now let me dab a little of this on that cut.”
Leon was dabbing when Jeth came up under the canopy behind Cara. She felt the rancher’s presence without turning around, and Leon looked from one to the other with a speculative tightening of his eyes. “How about some food, Jeth?” he asked, capping the medicine bottle.
“Pour me a glass of bourbon first, Leon. And open a bottle of Miss Martin’s wine for her. I’m sure she can use it.”
“Sure thing,” Leon agreed, going to the van where his employer’s private stock of bourbon was kept. Embarrassed, Cara kept her back to him. It was considerate of him to include her wine. What a fool she had been, running from him like that!
She finished washing her hands, discovering that the stinging cuts were only surface deep, and dried them on the clean towel that Leon had left her. She would wait until Jeth left before applying the ointment. She did not want him to know about her hands. Tomorrow she would wear makeup to hide the graze under her chin.
Cara felt Jeth’s eyes follow her as she moved out from under the tarpaulin to clean up a spill on a portion of the long folding table where food was served. She took her time at it and presently Leon returned with the bourbon. With relief she saw Jeth stroll to the campfire around which the men were seated.
When she returned to her station, she found a cold glass of wine poured and beside it the blue ribbon that had fallen from her hair.
Cara ate her supper standing up and did not know what to do with herself when all the chores were completed. The men were sitting around the campfire exchanging jokes and yarns, and their rough, raucous laughter drifted to her in the night air. The stars had come out. Behind them were lingering traces of the sunset, which filled her heart with a strange melancholia that made her want to cry. She strolled a little way from the camp, afraid to go too much farther because she had overheard the men talking about rattlesnakes coming out of hibernation now. She remembered the pocket light in her gear, and thought that in the coming nights she would find a place to read to fill the time between the end of her chores and bedtime.
When Cara returned to the chuckwagon, Leon was waiting for her. “The men are beginnin’ to bed down, Miss Martin,” he said. “The boss give you any idea about where yore to sleep?”
“Why, no, he hasn’t,” Cara replied. With the busy activities of the day, that question had not occurred to her. “I don’t seem to have a bedroll. Do you have any suggestions about what I should do?”
The cook studied the young woman’s drawn face in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp. He had insisted she wear, at least for the night, ointment-soaked gauze pads taped to her palms. Now his jaw tightened. “Nobody said anythin’ to you about a bedroll, Miss Martin? That don’t seem quite right to me.”
“Here’s her sleeping bag, Leon,” said Jeth Langston behind them. He had come up in the darkness, and now stepped into the glow of the light. “Don’t worry so about Miss Martin. Believe me, she is very capable of looking after herself. Follow me, Miss Martin.”
“Good night, Leon,” Cara said gently to ease his worried frown, and followed Jeth’s tall, striding form to a spot of ground just beyond where several men were already stretched out in their blankets. “You’ll sleep here,” he told her brusquely. “You should be warm enough this close to the fire.”
“Thank you,” she said stiffly, watching him unroll the long length of gray quilted wool trimmed in yellow. Jeth unzipped the bag and extracted a small pillow in a crisp white case. She had never been so tired in her life; everything inside and out of her ached.
Without another word to her, Jeth strode away to the truck that served as his office. He never seemed to rest from the duties of his ranch. Cara wondered where he was to sleep.
The sleeping bag was as warm as an embrace and imbued her with a sense of peace. Just before drifting off to sleep, she discovered a name sewn in yellow just inside the neck opening: Ryan Langston.
Sometime in the night she was dimly disturbed by something brushing her hands. Immediately afterward a welcome warmth spread through the chilled regions of her upper body, and she sighed gratefully in her sleep, the sound mingling with the cacophony of men’s snores and the nocturnal noises of horses and prairie creatures.
The next morning before daybreak Cara was awakened by the aroma of coffee trailing beneath her nose. “Wake up, child; coffee’s on,” said Leon, setting a mug beside her head. “Mind you, don’t knock that over.” He was already dressed and in the long white apron he had worn yesterday, only this morning it was reversed. “There’s time to wash ’fore you have to help me with breakfast.”
Cara struggled out of her sleeping bag. She did not remember having zipped it all the way up under her chin the night before. Her chin! Gingerly she touched it, and winced. Something that sore had to show a bruise, and now all the men would think that their boss had worked her over. Despairing at the thought, she carefully picked up the hot mug in her padded hands and hurried away to her own nature-created dressing area. Bless Leon! He had left her a pan of hot water on one of the flat boulders. Better hope that Jeth Langston did not find out about this preferential treatment. She could not bear for Leon to get in trouble because of her.
Surreptitiously, Cara searched the campsite for Jeth as she ladled batter out on the hot grill for the pancakes the men would have for breakfast. The aroma was mouth-watering in the cold, bracing air, and she felt hungry for the first time in days. Jeth was nowhere to be seen, and she thought he had already left camp when suddenly the familiar voice ordered behind her, “Turn around, Miss Martin.”
The tone was low, controlled. She picked up a drying towel to cover her hands before turning to find him very near her, conscious that Leon was deliberately leaving her alone with him on the pretense of going for more water at the windmill.
The rancher’s gaze probed her chin, but when he made to touch it, Cara drew a sharp breath and stepped back from him. Jeth dropped his hand and eyed her grimly. “You must think the very worst of me.”
It had been too dark to use a mirror for dressing. In the black hour before dawn, Cara had combed her hair and washed as well as she could, deciding not to worry about the scrape. Now she felt a flush of embarrassment. “Is it very noticeable?” she asked in a whisper.
“I’m afraid so. Not that it impairs your looks any, if that’s what’s bothering you.”
“How like you to assume that’s why I’m concerned,” Cara spoke coldly. “Please excuse me. I’m busy.” She turned her back on him, and after an interval of feeling his penetrating stare, she heard him leave.
In midmorning Jim Foster appeared unexpectedly at her side as she was returning from the windmill carrying a pail of water. No one but she and Leon were in camp, and she greeted the foreman in surprise.
“That cut under your chin—that come from Jeth?” he asked, taking the pail of water from her.
“Of course not!” Cara sounded horrified. “I turned my ankle yesterday after you left me and fell right on a sharp rock. Whatever gave you the idea that Mr. Langston hit me?”
“Because he was so hot at you yesterday when he found us together. I got the impression he suspected us of some hanky-panky and didn’t like it. If I’ve ever seen a man in a jealous rage, he was one—although why, I wouldn’t know. He makes no secret of the way he feels about you.”
“Well, yes, that’s true,” Cara agreed, as a quick little pain darted between her ribs. “But Mr. Langston would never strike a woman, for whatever reason. Did you explain to him why you were with me?”
Jim averted his eyes. “It wouldn’t have done any good, Miss Martin—believe me. Jeth believes what he wants to believe, and anything I said would have fallen on deaf ears.”
You could have tried anyway, thought Cara, glancing at the foreman in a new, critical light. They had reached the long table, where Jim set the pail. “Thank you, Mr. Foster,” she said, her tone cool. She faced him directly. “I believe, however, that we should avoid any kind of contact while we’re out here. I wouldn’t want to jeopardize your job, and I feel certain you wouldn’t want Mr. Langston to suspect me of something that wasn’t true.”
The tanned, regular-cut features of the foreman slackened in disappointment. “But, Miss Martin—”
“What are you doin’ back at camp?” Leon demanded, suddenly appearing from behind one of the vans parked close by. The wiry cook regarded the foreman with undisguised dislike. “I’ll bet the boss don’t know yore back here.”
“So what?” Jim challenged. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I brought a lame horse back to the corral.” He touched his hat brim to Cara. “I’ll say so long for now, Miss Martin. We’ll talk again soon.” He gave Leon a stony glance before stalking away to his horse tied to a corral post.
As they watched the lanky figure mount, Cara could feel the older man bristling at her side like a porcupine. “You don’t like him, do you?” she stated quietly.
The cook’s eyes narrowed on the diminishing horseman cantering across the plains. “Don’t trust him,” came the clipped reply. “That lame horse was an excuse to come back here and see you.”
The cook and she were close in height, and, moved by affection for her bewhiskered new friend, Cara impulsively put an arm around his shoulders. “Leon, you mustn’t get yourself involved in my battles. Like Mr. Langston says, I can take care of myself.”
Leon spit a short burst of tobacco juice into the dust away from her, a gesture that Cara had come to recognize as a preamble to one of his terse to-the-point statements. “Yore about as capable of takin’ care of yoreself as a lamb in a den of wolves, young lady. Not that you don’t have plenty of grit, mind you. But you ain’t got a smidgin of hardness in you, nothin’ to protect you against either the likes of Jeth or Jim. Somethin’ else I’m thinkin’, too, child—” Another burst of tobacco juice and then Leon’s words were tumbling over each other in embarrassment. “You ain’t no tramp, neither, and yore not here to harm La Tierra. I ain’t got it all figured out yet, but somehow I see young Ryan’s hand in all of this. If that’s so, knowin’ him like I did, and knowin’ Jeth like I do—and Miss Martin, there ain’t no finer man in the whole world, even though he can be more ornery than a cooped-up bull in a barbed-wire pen—why, I intend to trust the hand that dealt this confusin’ hand of cards.”
He peered at Cara over his glasses, his eyes on the bluish tinge, which had begun to spread along her jawline. “ ’Course it would rile me if I knew he’d mistreated you, child. Not to excuse him, but he’d be actin’ out of ignorance, you understand, and ’cause he’s hurtin’ so inside.”
“I know.” Cara smiled in quiet appreciation of his loyalty to Jeth. “But Mr. Langston never laid a hand on me, Leon. It was my own doing.” Cara related her shock about the calf and Jim’s attempt to console her. “I confess I thought he was going to hit me. Mr. Langston was very angry, but he was concerned about Ryan’s memory and how it would look for—for—”
“For you and Jim Foster to be seen keepin’ company together,” the cook said, concluding the narrative. “I can understand Jeth’s thinkin’.”
“Me, too,” Cara said. Gently, Cara put a hand to the cook’s whiskery cheek. “Thanks for your vote of confidence, Leon, and you are right about my not hurting La Tierra—or Mr. Langston. That I can promise you.”
After that conversation with Leon, Cara saw the owner of La Tierra Conquistada only at meals, and often not then. At the end of the day when he rode into camp with the rest of the men, Jeth would frequently make for the truck that kept him in communication with the rest of his empire. On such evenings Leon would take a glass and a bottle of his employer’s bourbon to the truck, then, after an interval, a plate of hot food.
The days began to grow longer and warmer and, for Cara, flowed into each other as tranquilly as sea swells bringing in the tide. She learned to ride again. True to either his promise or his threat, Jeth provided Cara with a gentle Appaloosa mare, which she liked immediately. “What’s her name?” she asked Bill, who had apparently been tapped to take her out on her first rides to reacclimate her to the saddle.
“Lady,” Bill answered, giving her a leg up to the saddle. He had softened considerably toward her in the weeks since the roundup began and had even haltingly apologized for the jeep ride across the plains. “That was my idea, and not the boss’s,” he admitted sheepishly, and Cara’s heart had felt ridiculously lighter upon hearing the truth.
They began to ride every night after supper when her chores were done and while the twilight provided light enough to see. “The boss doesn’t want us out after dark,” Bill admonished her, giving yet another indication to Cara that Bill would rather do just about anything than disobey his boss. Even though the rancher was away from camp during many of their twilight rides, she knew that he must have approved them, or the young cowboy would never have accompanied her.
Twice the chuckwagon was moved higher into the mountains to be nearer the men who were driving a huge herd of cattle to its summer pastures. Now when Jeth left the camp, he did so by plane, a shining gray Beechcraft Bonanza with the brand of La Tierra painted in yellow on its fuselage.
One morning when she was out riding alone, she came across Jim Foster searching the brush-choked draws for strays. Thinking he had not seen her, she reined Lady in the opposite direction. “Hello there, Miss Martin!” he called to her, and with a sigh of reluctance, Cara waited for him to ride to her.
“Don’t rush off,” Jim said when he drew up beside her, his eyes roving in frank appreciation over the golden hair that flowed across her shoulders. It had grown since her last cut, and the sun had begun to streak it with platinum.
“I really must, I’m afraid,” she said lightly. “It’s nearly time to begin lunch.”
“You own half of all this—” Impatiently, Jim’s long arm swept the limitless, rolling rangeland. “Why don’t you act like it instead of jumping every time Jeth or Leon pulls your string? You can do anything you damn well please.”
“Why should you care if my string is pulled?” They had shared only a few words since their last conversation. Was it for her protection or his that the foreman exchanged only brief, impersonal pleasantries with her when she served his plate at mealtimes?
Shifting in the saddle, Jim answered candidly, “I care because I happen to think you are a gracious, beautiful lady who’s getting pushed around. All I’m doing is reminding you that you don’t have to take it. Use your power to keep Jeth Langston in his place.”
“Mr. Langston’s place has always been as owner of La Tierra, Jim. I am the usurper here. The problem is not so much what his place is, but mine. As for Leon, he has been the soul of propriety and courtesy toward me. I like him. And I’m enjoying the roundup. No one is abusing me or, as you put it, pulling my string.” She dug her heels into Lady’s sides and gave the foreman an impersonal smile. “Now I really must be off. Leon needs me.”
As she cantered away, Cara felt a twinge of remorse. Maybe she was allowing Leon’s judgment of the man to cloud hers. After all, Jim Foster had been the first to try to make her feel welcome. He had tried to comfort her the day the calf was shot. He didn’t owe it to her to jeopardize his job by defending her to his boss. Maybe this backdoor friendship was all he could offer her in the light of the circumstances, all he had the courage for.
Another morning Cara had reined Lady high above where the men were working cattle and was able to watch without being observed how Jim and several other men maneuvered calves to be branded from among the herd in the holding pen. Fascinated, she watched as Jim rode unobtrusively into the milling cattle, then quietly pointed to the animal he wanted. The ears of his cutting horse perked up expectantly, for this was the work he had been trained for. In a few minutes’ fast work, they had the calf edged to the outer rim of the herd, near the corral gate. A man lifted the corral bars, and another cowboy, ready on a roping horse, streaked after the bewildered calf to throw a noose around its neck. Instantly the horse reared against the rope, backing surefootedly until he was practically sitting on his own tail, holding the rope taut until his rider could dismount and finish tying up the animal.
A soft neigh from the brushy thicket to her left drew Cara’s attention, and she felt Lady tense under the saddle. “Easy girl,” she soothed, and patted the animal’s neck. The nicker came again, this time accompanied by a considerable rustling of the thicket, and Lady backed away nervously as a great black stallion emerged to stand calmly eyeing them across a distance of a few yards. “Take it easy, Lady,” Cara spoke gently. “It’s all right. He just wants to say hello to us. Easy, girl.”
The stallion was an awe-inspiring sight. Coal black with a full mane and tail, head held with the proud, graceful carriage of a Thoroughbred, he was the kind of horse that raised goose bumps just looking at him. Cara could easily understand how this equine king of the range had been able to outrun the fleetest of La Tierra’s horses, and outwit the most cunning of her men, Jeth Langston. “So you are Devil’s Own,” she breathed softly. Beneath her, Lady’s muscles twitched coquettishly. The mare’s ears perked and her tail swished in outright flirtation.
“I can certainly see why Jeth Langston would like to get a rope around you,” Cara said to the great horse. “But don’t you ever let him. The likes of you were born to be free. Don’t you ever let him put his brand on your flank. You’d never be the same.”
Devil’s Own gave a soft responding neigh and moved with a graceful rippling of muscles farther out from the thicket. “You’d better go now,” warned Cara, realizing that the stallion had probably used this as a hiding place to observe the remuda corralled below on the canyon floor. She wondered if the horses were aware of their leader’s presence, if in some kind of equine way he was able to communicate to them that he had not deserted them. “Go on, boy,” Cara urged. “Go on, before the men find you here.”
Devil’s Own whinnied softly, then turned his beautiful body swiftly, catching the sun full on the sheen of his magnificent, unmarked flanks before he raced toward a mountain slope behind which he was soon out of sight.
Cara gave herself up to the routine of camp life and found that she loved it. She and Leon came to be a well-oiled machine working together in harmony and respect. Her bathroom anxieties were alleviated by the simple solution of using the time between the completion of her lunch chores and the beginning of the evening meal to bathe. It was then she washed her clothes and hung them to dry on a mesquite tree that had now budded out. No one but she and Leon were ever in camp at that time, and she could take her time washing and drying her hair. By the time the men returned to camp for the evening, she was decked out in a fresh set of clothes, hair brushed and shining, makeup—what little she used, for now her skin was lightly tanned—freshly donned. Sometimes a cowboy, his wit and tongue emboldened by an extra shot of bourbon before dinner, would sniff the air around her and announce, “It shore do smell better ’round here than when Toby was here, Leon!”
Gradually the roundup crew came to accept her presence in the camp without suspicion or hostility. They began to call her “Miss Cara” and made room for her at the campfire when Jeth was not in camp. They asked Cara to tell them about Boston and the sea, a topic that captivated them, and Cara with amazement learned that most of her audience had never seen a body of water larger than the famous Rio Grande.
When the roundup was five weeks along, she lay in her sleeping bag one night wide awake and gazed at the brilliant, low-hung stars that now seemed as familiar as old friends. She thought of Jeth, whom she had not seen for a week, and of Devil’s Own, who must miss his favorite mare, now penned up in the remuda. Bill had told her that there had been evidence of the great stallion following the roundup.
“Really?” Cara had asked, round-eyed.
“Yep! And he’d better watch out, too! The boss’ll get a rope around that jasper’s neck yet. No horse gets free space and chow at La Tierra. They all have to earn their keep!”
“But what about Texas Star?” Cara asked. Bill had told her when she’d first inquired about Ryan’s now thirteen-year-old stallion that the men had orders not to capture the palomino for the remuda.
“Oh, well…that’s a different story. That was Ryan’s horse, ya know. I figure the boss thinks that as long as Texas roams La Tierra, a part of Ryan does, too.”
Now as she lay sleepless, watching the stars, she prayed silently, “Please, Lord. Do not let me come to love it here. Do not let me come to care too much for Leon and Fiona and Bill and…Jeth—for La Tierra—so that always, when I’m no longer here, my heart will be…”
The next evening after supper, Cara told Leon she was going for a ride by herself. “Bill hurt his leg and doesn’t need any extra riding,” she explained. All day she had felt strangely depressed and at loose ends with herself. She needed to be alone.
The leathery old cook gave her a worried frown. “I don’t much like the idea of ya doin’ that, child. My rheumatism is actin’ up. A storm’s brewin’ and ya don’t wanta be caught out on the high plains on horseback in lightnin’.”
“I won’t go far. If I see that it’s going to rain, I’ll come in.”
“You do that, child. I wouldn’t want anythin’ to happen to ya out there. Yore comin’ to mean a lot to me.”
She smiled at him. “You too,” she said, and went to the corral to saddle Lady.
Cara had been out less than an hour when dark clouds began to boil up over the mountains. Rain was such a rarity in this country that she couldn’t take Leon’s admonition seriously. But the cook’s rheumatic warning had been correct. In another thirty minutes, lightning began to flash in zigzagged streaks buried deep in the gray clouds that obscured the remaining sunlight. Cara was too far from camp to return to it in the storm, so she looked around for a place where she might shelter until the clouds decided to formulate themselves into a full-fledged storm or simply dissipate into another disappointing promise of rain.
The elements made up their mind while she was still deciding what to do. The rain, bringing darkness with it, came down in buckets, drenching her and Lady, who protested mildly, having come to trust Cara as having the better sense of the two. This time, however, Cara was at a loss where to find shelter, and the mare was fast losing confidence in her mistress. She was nervous and high-strung, straining at the bit in her mouth, when a voice cut through the darkness, biting it in two. “Miss Martin, is that you?”
Oh, God, thought Cara, as Jeth Langston, glimmering in a yellow rain slicker, emerged through the pouring rain into her vision. “Yes, I’m here,” she called.
“Follow me” was the terse order, and Cara, aware that Lady knew a friend when she saw one, allowed the horse her head to follow after the owner of La Tierra Conquistada.
They found shelter in a cave whose mouth, covered with brush, she and Lady had passed dozens of times in their twilight sorties.
“Get down,” Jeth ordered when they were in the safety of the cave. His own horse stood patiently, eyeing the duo with the faint suggestion that they were in trouble, while Cara, hair streaming with rain, dismounted to stand in the narrow space between Lady and Jeth Langston. Jeth did not move an inch to accommodate her, and Cara had to look nearly directly up at him from the disadvantage of her height, blinking rain-matted lashes.
“Of all the damnfool, irresponsible—” The rancher seemed at a loss for adjectives.
Taking advantage of the momentary lapse, Cara remarked, “I thought you were at the ranch.”
“Which you interpreted as, while the cat’s away, the mouse can play.”
“I’m not a mouse.”
“No. At the moment you look more like a drowned rat. Get out of those clothes.”
“I will not!”
“Miss Martin, you have a choice of getting out of those wet clothes yourself, or I will relieve you of them. I’m not going to look. You can use my rain slicker to cover you.” Jeth ignored the look she gave him and pushed her down on one of the large, weather-smoothed rocks that ringed a pit laid with fresh firewood that Cara supposed had been used countless times in just such situations as these. She snapped the slicker around her while Jeth went to work on the fire. Soon bright flames were crackling in the pit, and smoke was spiraling toward an overhead opening in the cave. The horses stood quietly, discerning perhaps, thought Cara huffily, that here was a man who knew how to take charge of things. Beneath the slicker she slipped out of her clothes, then spread them on another rock to dry while Jeth unsaddled the horses. She still had on her bra and panties, which felt cold and cloying beneath the rainwear. Jeth came back to the fire and sat down, shooting a glance at her spread-out clothes. “You don’t have underwear?” he asked in surprise.
“Yes,” she said through clenched teeth. “I happen to have some on at the moment. Do you mind?”
“I certainly don’t, but you might. The important thing is for you not to get a chill.”
“Why?” she asked. “That would put an end to your problem, wouldn’t it—if I caught pneumonia and died?”
“That would certainly not be in my best interests,” the rancher replied, kneeling down to stoke the fire. “You’re worth more to me alive than dead. I need you alive to sign over Ryan’s share of La Tierra.”
Cara fell back into the folds of the slicker, abashed. Ryan’s share of La Tierra was all he cared about. She had not been the reason he had braved the storm. She was not the concern of the moment. How could she be so in love with a man whose only interest in her was her signature?
With a muted cry, Cara stood up.
“What is it, Miss Martin?” Jeth glanced up at her in alarm. “You look as if you’ve been struck by lightning.”