Wyoming Tough - By Diana Palmer Page 0,79

out of South Dakota.”

“Lucky that Dad was being transferred to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. It was easy to pretend we’d found you on the roadside in Montana near Lame Deer. No one ever questioned our story—well, not to our faces anyway.”

He smiled. “I was not so lucky in my decision to visit my cousins in Big Foot’s band, though, was I?”

She shook her head. “You could have been safe in your lodge in Pine Ridge….”

“And my mother and sisters, too.” His voice had trailed off. Now, suddenly, he shook off his enveloping grief. “Come,” he said, “let us go back. Your father will be wondering where you are.”

She started to protest, but his gaze was even and quiet, and she knew that it would be like talking to a rock. She gave in with good grace and smiled at him.

“Will we ever see you again after you go?” she asked.

“Of course. I’ll come back and visit from time to time,” he promised. “Don’t forget the things I’ve taught you.”

“As if I could,” she replied. She searched his black eyes. “Why do things have to change?”

“Because they do.” In the distance, the sky became misty as the threatening clouds released a curtain of rain.

“Come. The rain will overtake us if we don’t hurry.”

“One more minute, Raven. Please, tell me something.”

“Anything,” he murmured.

“What did Old Man Deer do when we sat up here with him last week?”

Raven’s body stiffened slightly and he glanced away. “He performed a ritual. A very sacred one.” He looked fully at Tess. “It was a way of protecting you,” he said enigmatically. Then he smiled. “And we will say no more about it now.”

Chapter One

Chicago, Illinois

November 1903

THE TELEGRAM READ: “Arriving Chicago depot 2:00 p.m. Saturday. Tess.”

Matt Davis had read the telegram several times and cursed it several times more. Tess Meredith had no business moving to Chicago. Her father had died only two months ago. Matt hadn’t got the news until long after the funeral was over when he returned from working in another state. He’d written Tess right away, of course, and she’d written back. But she’d never so much as hinted that she had this in mind.

He’d visited Tess and her father many times and kept up a regular correspondence with them all through the years after he’d gone east to be educated, then changed his name to begin work as a Pinkerton detective. Raven Following had become Matt Davis and changed in a hundred other ways, too, but never in his regard for Tess and Harold Meredith. They were all the family he could claim. And he’d looked forward to each visit with them more than anyone would ever know.

Tess at sixteen hadn’t been quite so outgoing as she had been two years before. She’d become somewhat shy, remote. Tess at eighteen had been a very different proposition. Mature, pretty—and more reckless than he remembered. Last year, he’d made another pilgrimage to Montana, which he combined with work on a case for his own new private detective agency, and the sight of a grown-up Tess of twenty-four had shocked him speechless. No longer the grinning fourteen-year-old sprite, no longer the shy sixteen-year-old or the reckless eighteen-year-old, Tess was mischievous, forceful, outspoken—and so beautiful that she made him ache. And she was driving her father wild. He’d confessed to Matt that she wouldn’t even allow talk of marriage…that she’d ridden her horse through town wearing pants and a shirt and carrying a sidearm…that she’d organized a women’s suffrage group in town…and that she’d actually attacked a local man with a pistol when he tried to get fresh with her. The aging doctor had asked Matt for advice. But, confronted by this new and challenging Tess, Matt, too, had been at a loss.

Now her father was dead and he was inheriting Tess, a legacy of feminine trouble he knew was going to change his life. It was a worrying and exciting proposition.

The train pulled into the station, huffing and puffing clouds of smoke. Wary of the cast-off cinders from the engine, elegantly dressed men and women began to disembark, porters came and went unloading baggage, but there was no sign of Tess.

Matt sighed irritably as he stared around the platform. Suddenly, a shapely woman clad in natty green velvet, wearing a Paris creation of a hat with a veil, and impatiently tapping a prettily shod foot, ceased to be a stranger to him. The years fell away and the elegant woman was again the girl with