Praise forJillian Hart
ROCKY MOUNTAIN MAN This books intense emotions reach out to touch readers. Betsys unwavering belief in Duncan and willingness to fight to save him from himself is so moving youll want to cry with happiness as Hart plays on your heartstrings. Romantic Times BOOKreviews
HIGH PLAINS WIFE Finely drawn characters and sweet tenderness tinged with poignancy draw readers into a familiar story that beautifully captures the feel of an Americana romance. Readers can enjoy sharp dialogue and adorable child characterisations while shedding a tear or two. Romantic Times BOOKreviews
MONTANA MAN Ms Hart creates a world of tantalising warmth and tenderness, a toasty haven in which the reader will find pure enjoyment. Romantic Times BOOKreviews
COOPERS WIFE a wonderfully written romance full of love and laughter. Rendezvous
A real love, a real marriage, isstruggling to make life better forthe person you love.
Thats just how women do it. He ground out the words, crumbling. Hell, he was like a granite rock disintegrating. They say all the right words. Do all the things meant to fool a man into thinking
He choked back the rest of the memories too bleak to imagine. Images that whirled like black wraiths before his eyes. Women know just what to do to make you think how wonderful they are. So sweet and dainty and feminine and loving, until your heart is caught like a fish on a line and you dont even know enough to escape until youre out of the water. Struggling to breathe. Seeing the glint of the knife before it slices you wide open. So when I say get away from me, I mean get away fromme!
Jillian Hart grew up on her familys homestead, where she raised cattle, rode horses and scribbled stories in her spare time. After earning an English degree from Whitman College, she worked in advertising before becoming a writer. When shes not hard at work on her next story, Jillian can be found chatting with a friend, stopping for a café mocha with a book in hand, and spending quiet evenings at home with her family.
Novels by the same author:
LAST CHANCE BRIDE
COOPERS WIFE
MALCOLMS HONOUR
MONTANA MAN
BLUEBONNET BRIDE
MONTANA LEGEND
HIGH PLAINS WIFE
THE HORSEMAN
ROCKY MOUNTAIN CHRISTMAS
(short story in A Season of the Heart) MONTANA WIFE
ROCKY MOUNTAIN MAN
Jillian Hart
www.millsandboon.co.uk
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Prologue
Montana Territorial Prison, 1879
Sweat crept like a spider down the middle of his back and stung in the open gashes made fresh with the edge of a bullwhip. Duncan Hennessey didnt mind the harsh midday sun fixing to blister his skin. No, hed grown used to the burning heat so that he hardly noticed it. Nor was he bothered by the thirst so strong his mouth had turned to sandpaper and his tongue felt thick and dry.
He did not feel hunger chewing through his stomach. Or the cuts on his calloused hands or the rough stones scraping away the calluses on the insides of his fingers. Hed grown accustomed to it because there was no other choice. For ten cruel winters and as many brutal summers, hed bent and lifted, bled and labored behind the tall stone walls that caged him.
Today, at sundown, it would all come to an end. For at the end of the day, he would be set free. It was unbelievable, but it was true. His name was on the short listhed glanced at it over the shoulder of one of the prison guards. It was really going to happen. He simply had to make it through the rest of this day. That was all. When the sun inched behind the Bitterroot Mountains, his punishment would be over.
Hed been afraid to think of this day. Hopelessness was the killer here, more than the cold or heat or beatings. More rampant than sickness and the endless violence. His soul had hardened into impenetrable iron. He no longer felt. Not hope. Not fear. Not sorrow.
Not even today, as the sun crept along its course through the sky, did he feel a single hope. He knew better. He might be a free man come dusk, but he had to be alive to enjoy it.
You! A voice as hard as Montana granite seemed to come out of nowhere. As did the whip snapthe only warning of what was to come. Youre not sweatin hard enough, you worthless rat. Dont think you get outta puttin in your fair share a work. You aint free yet.
It was a game to the guards. To brutalize especially those who were leaving. They thought it funny that while the Territory of Montana might grant a man his freedom at the end of his time served, they held the greater power, to keep him from it. Many had failed to live through the beatings that marked their last day. So he was not surprised by the hiss as the whip sailed through the air.
He knew better than to stop working. As he bent to lift a heavy rock torn apart by the pickax crew, he saw the whisper-thin shadow undulate across the yellow-hued earth. Like a snake rising back to strike and then attacking.
Duncan relaxed his back muscles, surrendering to the pain instead of bracing against it. Pain wasnt as bad when you gave in to it. The lash sliced through his skin. He bit the inside of his mouth to keep from groaning, for the keen bite of the whip pierced bone-deep.
He breathed in, let the pain course through him until it seemed to flow outward and away from the wound. He heaved the chunk of granite into the wagon, a second slash gnawed into his shoulder blade. He hardly felt it. He was made of steel and no whip made could defeat him.
He chucked another rock into the wagon. More sweat trickled into the newer open gashes and stung like hell. This punishment was meant to reduce him, to defeat him, but he was stronger. Warriors blood of the proud Nez Perce tribe flowed through his veins. The Territory of Montana had done its best to strip him of all he held valuable, but it had failed.
He was Duncan Hennessey, grandson of the respected Gray Wolf, and no territorial law and no prison guard could take that from him or beat it from him.
He winced as his torn back muscles spasmed, but he refused to slow the pace of his work. He pushed harder and labored faster. Much awaited him outside the walls. He would not give the guards any further reasons to use their whips. Even as the sun began to slide down from its zenith, marking the day as half over, he controlled his thoughts.
He would not look ahead to seeing the outside world. It would make him yearn, and yearning came hand in hand with need. And need was like a sharp knifeone edge but two sides. It was both strength and weakness that cuts, either way. A man who showed any weakness did not survive.
He intended to survive. He made himself of stone, like the arrowheads of his mothers people. Like the mountains that ringed the great prairie and rose proudly above the jagged foothills around him. His grandfather had named him Standing Tall for the mountains and their jagged profiles that seemed to watch over him as he struggled to lift what had to be a hundred-pound boulder and dispose of it with the other waste rocks.
His wounds could bleed. The guards could strike again. But those great mountains reminded him of who he was. He was strong. He was a warrior.
He would survive this day and thenHe banished the image of lush green forests and the sweet tang of pine that rolled into his mind. Not yet. He would not dare to think of the days end, for he had the rest of the day to live through.
Only then would he dare to dream of home.
Light from the setting sun flared brightly, spearing over the faces of the mountains and painting the land and sky with bold pink and purple strokes. It was pleasant on Duncans face as he walked through the steel gate in the twelve-foot-high stone walls and listened to it clatter closed behind him.
Locking him out. Not in.
Im free. Duncan found that he could not take a step. The sky stretched out in a brilliant celebration of the coming twilight before him. Such beauty, his eyes had not seen, for the prisoners were marched east at the workdays end, to the food hall and cells beyond.
Whispers of his identity began to stir within him. Places hed kept hidden and protected behind walls of steel. He took pleasure in watching an eager owl, spotted white on soft down of brown, glide through the shadows to roost on the top branches of a lodgepole pine. No wind stirred the drying grasses that fringed wagon ruts in the road.
The land seemed to be waiting, holding itself still, and like the owl, he waited. For what, he did not know. An eternity had passed since hed been able to do as he pleased and go where he chose. For the first time in a decade he did not have to move, not until he wanted to. He could follow the road through the upslope of the rolling hill or take off through the fields or climb into the tree. Whatever he wanted, if he had a mind to.
He was free. Truly free. Gratitude stung his eyes. His throat thickened so he could not swallow. He looked behind him to make sure it was still real. Sure enough, the locked gate reflected the bold fire left from the setting sun. A guard in the tower overhead was watching with a rifle leaning against his shoulder. There was no mistaking the message in the mans gazemove along.
Duncan did. He followed the road, for it would lead through mountains and valleys and towns. It would lead him home.
As the last light bled from the sky and stained the faces of the great mountains so it looked as if they were crying tears, Duncan ambled past the owl in the tree. He lifted his tired feet and walked until the prison was nothing more than a small glint of light in the distance. He did not stop until there was no sign of it at all. Until that hellish place was good and truly behind him.
Only then did he kneel and untie the cheap shoes the prison had presented him with. The stiff new clothes rustled and tugged uncomfortably at his skin, the garments courtesy of the Montana territory. How generous. Bitterness welled up, draining his spirit and darkening the twilight. Stars winked to life as he cupped his hands as he knelt beside a small creek and let the coolness trickle over his skin.
The gurgling sound of the rushing water made his vision blur and the thickness in his throat grow worse. Hed never noticed before, but the music from a creek was a beautiful sound. He filled his palm with the fresh goodness and sipped.
He swore hed never tasted anything more delicious. The clear, clean water wet his tongue, trickled down his throat and refreshed him. It had been too long since hed tasted such water. While he drank his fill, he considered the grove surrounding him. Pines stretched upward, their sparse limbs and long, fine needles casting just enough cover from view of the road, although hed encountered no other late-night traveler.
By the looks of things, he was not the only creature to visit the creek. In the damp yellow-brown clay, he recognized the small clefted tracks of deer and antelope and the larger elk, and the wide pads with claw marks of the great black bear. That told him fishing was good here. Yes, it would be a fine place to spend the night.
As he had not done since he was twenty-one, he chose a slim pine branch and broke it to use as a spear. He sharpened it well against the useful edge of a granite rock and chose a quiet place to wait, in an eddy where the creek widened before it whispered down an incline.
His eyes grew accustomed to the night as the last twilight shadows vanished. The pale, luminous darkness was like an old friend. He stirred the quiet water slowly, startling the resting fish. He speared a ten-inch summer trout on the first try.
Gratitude. It filled him like the slow, sweet scents of the night. It brought him hope as he watched the stars flicker to life between the coming clouds and the reach of the silent pines. Rain scented the night breeze, while Duncan cleaned the fish, built a fire and gathered wild onions and lemon grass greens for seasoning, as his grandfather had taught him.
While the fish roasted above an open flame, he made a shelter for the night. By the time raindrops stirred the pine needles overhead, Duncan turned the trout on the spit until it was done. Rain sang with the winds moaning accompaniment to tap a rhythm against the earth, while, beneath the thickest of the spreading pine boughs, he remained dry as he ate. The moist, tender meat tasted so good, his mouth ached with the flavors of the seasoned trout. Nothing beat wild lemon grass, his ma used to say.
Ma. I get to see you again. His chest filled with the old grief hed locked away, for he hadnt seen her since his sentencing. He allowed himself to remember, to pull out the image of that sad time and look at it. It had been a dark day, for hed been awaiting transport from Dewey to the territorial prison, and his mother had come to see him.
A regal, proud woman, shed worn a calico dress, her long dark braids coiled and hidden beneath the matching sunbonnet. No one could ever mistake her for being just a farmers wife. She was a warriors daughter. Her dark almond eyes, her delicate bronze face, her voice low and sonorous, spoke of strength.
Shed come to comfort him. Shed come to vow she would prove his innocence at any cost.
Through the bars of steel caging him in, hed seen at once the future. His mother risking all the good that had finally come into her life on the impossible. No jury was going to believe him, for he was a half-breed, and the woman accusing him was the prettiest daughter of the finest family in the county.
The young lady was lyinghed never touched herbut the chances of proving thatwell, there was no way to prove it absolutely. Folks believed what they wanted to, and it was easier to see him as a rapist and a violent felon than to find a seemingly perfect lady guilty of perjury. A daughter of a judge didnt lie.
Hed wanted to save his mother endless heartache. Shed had a happy life and she should not risk it. Hed done the right thing in telling her to leave and to never look back. To return to her house and her husband and tend her garden and raise her horses and live her days in happiness. To forget she had a son. For hed been all but as good as dead.