Chapter 1

1

A UGUST 10, 1873

A bullet smashed into a boulder, ricocheted off, and burned Dakota Harlan's cheek. He threw himself backward, landed hard, flipped over, and was crawling on his elbows, shoving forward on his belly as another shot fired, then fired again. He moved without thinking.

A Winchester 73. Dakota recognized the rifle's loud peal because he had one of his own. He gripped his Winchester now, always keeping it close to hand, and he'd been relentless about that since the day he survived an earlier attack.

Judging by where the shooter was located, and Dakota knew his land well, he crawled farther, keeping himself low. He slithered more like, not wanting to give the shooter anything to aim at.

At last he reached a row of sheltering stones, each of them half the height of a man. These boulders hadn't found their way here by accident. He'd ringed the edge of the pasture with them. It was months of brutally hard work in the hot sun. In fact, two years of Dakota's life had been spent getting the boulders dragged around into this shelter. He had many such shelters all through his valley.

He'd analyzed the entrances to this meadow, the lookouts where a sneaking gunman might set up, the likely places and a couple less likely where a man was likely to open up on him from cover. He'd hoped to never need them, but right now he was grateful for every hard hour he'd spent, every blister he'd earned.

The rifle stopped firing. That fool out there had emptied his weapon, even one that held as many bullets as the Winchester 73. He was probably reloading now. Dakota had counted the shots. Thirteen rounds, the number of bullets in a fully loaded Winchester, one with the longest barrel and the smallest caliber.

Dakota crawled on, angling, keeping in mind his assailant's position. He wondered if the fool would decide to move. Probably not. Most likely he thought he had Dakota pinned down. But Dakota knew exactly where the would-be killer was hiding.

His breathing slowed as he circled the meadow, closing the distance between them. He needed to leave the meadow, get to higher ground. He headed toward a fall of rocks that were perfectly placed, also there by the sweat of his brow. He'd use the rocks to conceal himself while he climbed into position.

His pulse slowed. His mind focused on something so sharp, so vivid, it was nearly painful. Dakota drew from all his years of accumulated knowledge, from his time spent on the wagon train, the miserable year homesteading, the wandering he'd done. And finally the decision to find a quiet, safe place near a good friend where he'd start a ranch.

The rifle picked up firing again. The shots shattered rock and ricocheted all over with ugly pings, but they were one hundred feet behind him and fifty feet below. It was a harsh reminder that he hadn't managed the quiet, and he sure as all get-out hadn't managed the safe.

For this wasn't the first killer to come calling.

Inching along with his Winchester, he made it to the rocks that would shelter him as he moved upward while that fool unloaded his gun again into the place where Dakota had vanished.

The man must dearly love the sound of gunfire. Or maybe he loved buying bullets because he was wasting a lot of lead.

Shielded by the massive stones, Dakota went up and up until he knew he'd gotten high enough. Surely the gunman wouldn't unload his rifle again, would he? Maybe he figured he'd winged Dakota with one of his shots.

A trickle on his chin had him swiping his face with his shirtsleeve. Sure enough, his hand came away red. The sidewinder had grazed him! He thought of the bullet earlier that struck the boulder near him and ricocheted. Thankfully it hadn't done much damage.

A few moments later, Dakota reached the spot he was aiming for and stopped. Lying on his back, his rifle clutched in both hands across his chest, Dakota listened, waited, and then, sure as the sunrise, the shooter opened up again. He'd be focused on those same rocks, now far away from Dakota.

Dakota could have climbed higher and come up behind the varmint blasting away, but he wasn't about to shoot anyone in the back. Instead, he leaned forward to a perfectly located crack between two rocks. From there he saw the reckless, bullet-wasting gunman emptying his rifle again. He'd climbed out of a decent hiding place and was now in plain sight.

Slowly, Dakota closed the space between them until he was only about twenty feet away. He'd circled a good portion of the meadow, closed in on his assailant, and could finally get a good look at him. He didn't want this. He didn't want a life of always being on edge.

A life of fight or die.

The gunfire ceased when the Winchester was empty once again. Gathering himself, Dakota sprang to his feet and leveled his rifle on the man. "Drop your gun! Get your hands in the air now." Dakota's eyes stayed locked on the man. Something about him hit a nerve, but Dakota didn't allow himself to be distracted by whatever was buzzing around in his head.

The man lowered his rifle, taking his time with dropping it. Rage glinted in the varmint's eyes, and it seemed like more than just fury that Dakota had gotten the drop on him. The rage was personal. Yet Dakota didn't know this man with the silver-gray hair and black eyes. He had a weathered face and a strange hawklike nose. Something about him, though, niggled Dakota's memory.

The rifle clattered when it struck the stony ledge the man stood on. Dakota had him under his control now. He'd tie him up, then haul him to the sheriff nearly a full day's ride away.

After the man let go of the rifle, his right hand swept up lightning fast. In the hand was a pistol he'd pulled from a holster under his coat.

"No!" Dakota howled, then pulled the trigger of his Winchester.

Bright red bloomed on the man's chest.

The pistol fired into the ground over and over, the gunfire echoing off the walls of Dakota's canyon.

His eyes met those black ones. "Why? You had no chance. Why would you want me dead?"

Then the eyes and the beak nose clicked in his memory. Two memories, in fact. Dakota had faced off with two men very much like this one. It could just be chance, but with a sinking stomach Dakota knew it wasn't.

The man pitched forward and fell. He'd been high up on the rocky ledge, and now he plunged forward.

With a cold feeling in his gut, Dakota noticed he hadn't fallen far from another grave. Sickened, he realized he had his own cemetery now. Or he would once this man was buried.

The smell of gunpowder faded. The breeze wafted with the scent of pine. A cow mooed down on the grasslands of his meadow. This beautiful place Dakota had found. Heavily wooded in spots, a rich piece of land full of belly-high grass. A stream nearby ran with cold water teeming with trout. Mountains stood all around, arranged in such a way that they cut the wind even in the bitter-cold Idaho winters.

It was the perfect place to make a home. But not if killers came calling.

Sighing, Dakota went over and stared down at the dead man, a grizzled old-timer. He wished he'd been given a chance to reason with him.

The ice he felt in his chest was hard enough, and cold enough, he wasn't sure how his heart went on beating. The way this man had shot at him from cover was too much like the other one. And he held a strong resemblance to the man who'd attacked before.

Dakota knelt beside the man, wondering if he could find anything on him to learn who he was. Who were they ? He searched the body and came up with a letter, folded and still inside its envelope.

Slumping to the ground to sit, Dakota opened the letter and read the name Darnell. Closing his eyes, he didn't read on. Not yet.

The Darnell name told him enough. The bank robber he'd run afoul of during his year of wandering was called Vic Darnell. And he'd been a dark-haired man with a hawkish nose and black eyes.

And this letter was a call to kinfolk. A blood feud. With Dakota's name in it and precious little else. Which might explain why it had taken this man so long to find him.

Of course, Dakota hadn't known where he was headed when he and a few others had stopped Vic Darnell from a wild killing spree when Vic had been cornered after a murderous bank robbery.

Dakota had been wandering. Who would have known to find him here? It'd taken a lot of work and some skill to track Dakota to this meadow. He hadn't even bought it yet, though he intended to. He'd found the spot, knew it was near his friend Jake, and had moved in and set up ranching.

He looked down at the letter again. Crude handwriting, full of misspelled words, from a man who barely knew how to write.

Mort,

Yer boy Vic's bin kilt by a man name'a Dakota Harlan. I'm writin' t'others and coming west to put this right. No one kills my grandson, yer son, and lives. See if you can pick up the scent. It hapend in Oregone, but the vermin what kilt our kin is runnin' skeered, or he had oughta be. A blood feud. I'm callin' fer it.

If'n you find him first, it's yer right to settle this on yer own. If'n you don't find him, help's a-comin'.

Pa

Dakota flipped the envelope over and saw Ezra Darnell scrawled in one corner and the letter addressed to Mort Darnell. How many of these letters had been sent? And how many more Darnells were out there searching for him?

He'd have to live his life on a razor's edge from now to the end of his days to survive, because judging by the two who'd come here, these weren't face-to-face kind of men. They didn't stand before you and challenge you. They were back-shooting coyotes. And that kind wasn't much on talking.

Dakota was a man of faith. He hadn't wanted a life that was surrounded by the need to kill. He had no idea how to end this feud. It seemed he was trapped in a cycle of danger and death. He had no hope he could convince one of these Darnells to reconsider the back-shooting and live a peaceable kind of life.

He went and got a shovel and half an hour later had a hole dug. Dakota dropped the man into the hole and buried him. He left a heap of dirt on the grave. The other grave had nearly disappeared back to meadow grass.

By the time he was done, the day had worn down. The sun slanted steeply in the west over the jagged tops of the mountains that guarded that side of his ranch.

Those mountaintops reached for him like claws, sent to Dakota by God to grab ahold of him and crush him before he could hurt anyone else.

His chest ached as he stood and let himself be cast in shadow, just as his whole life had been cast in shadows. He stood staring at the pair of graves, unmarked because it seemed blasphemous to put a cross on the graves, and unwise to risk drawing attention by posting the Darnell name on them.

He stood there alone. And because he was alone, because he would always be alone, he thought of a pretty redheaded Irish girl who might have joined her life to his at one time in the past.

Before her father had died and before Dakota had treated her wrong. Before he'd told her the unhappy truth that they had to roll on and leave her father far behind on the lonely prairie. His grave by now was as vanished from the world as these would soon be.

He'd had no choice, and yet she hadn't seen it that way.

And all the anger that so often followed death got landed straight on Dakota. His shoulders were strong enough to take it, but that didn't mean he wasn't sorry he had to do it. And that was before Dakota's life had become something he could never dare let anyone share.

She'd seen him as a heartless brute.

He wondered if maybe she was right. If Maeve O'Toole could see this crude little graveyard of his, she'd know she was right and would set her heart even more against him.

Dakota sat down hard on the ground and studied the final resting place of the ones who'd come with intent to kill. His cold heart thawed a bit, and he felt the pain. His throat hurt. His soul ached with loneliness and the utter belief that God couldn't want Dakota to kill like this.

But he had no notion of how to stop it.

"You are what?" Maeve O'Toole stared at her mother. Her question echoed loud in her head but came out in a shocked whisper.

Fiona's eyes narrowed as they tended to do when she was displeased.

"Bruce and I are courting. Sure, and you won't be taking that tone with me, Maeve."

Bruce stood beside her, his hat in his hands.

Ma with her hands on her plump hips, her tightly curling red hair escaping from its no-nonsense bun as always, blue eyes sharp with disapproval of Maeve's reaction.

In all ways, Ma was a match for Maeve, for the whole family. A bunch of Irish redheads come west to settle in the fertile Snake Valley in Idaho.

Maeve's hips might not be so plump, but other than that, they were alike and that included their attitude. The red hair covered a fiery temper. They loved each other and worked well together, but that was with the deep understanding they would both keep a tight clamp on that inner fire. Except sometimes they couldn't quite... Maeve bit down hard on the words she wanted to say. Words that weren't fair. But it hit hard to think of her da, and he was all she could think of right now.

Bruce was smart and hardworking and quiet. He had dark hair and light blue eyes. Very much a match for his two brothers, Oscar and Joseph, who lived in Hidden Canyon with Ginny Rutledge and her daughter, Beth.

They'd all traveled west together on a wagon train. Instead of going all the way to Oregon, they'd turned off and settled in Idaho as more and more folks were doing. The area was filling in fast since they'd first arrived in the late summer of 1869.

Bruce had helped out the O'Tooles when they'd homesteaded here. While he'd planned to live with his two brothers in the canyon, Maeve and Fiona and the family had needed help for a fact, and he'd made a huge difference in how fast they'd tamed the land. And it had always seemed as if he'd done it for no other reason than because the O'Tooles, with Da dying on the trip west, had needed help more than the others he'd been traveling with.

Had that been true? Had he notions about Ma from the first? Had he stayed here working for four years because he had his sights on Ma?

It had been only a couple of months after Da had died that they arrived, and it made her stomach sink to imagine Bruce already with his eye on a widow.

But why else would he have stayed on? At the time she'd just thought he did it out of the goodness of his heart. Now she had to wonder.

Then this morning they'd sprung their courting news on her. And once she'd been told and reacted badly, Bruce, in his own kind, quiet way, had looked at Maeve as if he were disappointed in her. A fatherly kind of look that only deepened memories of her own da and the stubborn knowledge in her head that no man had a right to treat her as a daughter except her own beloved da.

Bruce said he planned to stay through the first winter and help them get settled in their cabins. And then he'd never left. He'd lived here with them, or at least with Donal in one cabin on the land he'd homesteaded, while the rest of the family—Ma, Maeve, her little brother, Conor, and little sister, Bridget—lived right across a meandering stream from them.

Maeve had never seen any sign of affection between Ma and Bruce Collins. Never a hint, never a whisper to warn her of this.

"You want to get married?" Maeve knew she was overreacting, but this came as a complete surprise.

"Maybe we need to wait longer, Fee. I talked to Donal, and he seemed all right with it."

Ma said, "It's not that we're getting wed today. Of course, we'll give you time to get used to the idea, Maeve."

Maeve's eyes darted to Donal, who was working in the field. Between Ma, Donal, and Maeve, they'd claimed three homesteads and owned four hundred and eighty acres. All fertile land that grew good crops in a place they called the Snake River Valley. Bruce had bought a plow and trained a team to pull it. Most of their crops were up already—corn and hay, a field of oats, another of wheat. Bruce had known how to do all of it. The O'Tooles weren't a family of farmers, though Da had grown up on a farm and knew the way of it.

When he'd drowned in an accident on their way west, they'd been in trouble, aiming to be landowners with no clear idea of how to go about it. Yet Bruce had made working the land simple for them. Now Donal ran Bruce's plow through a field where they'd already harvested oats. They would plant beans and get a crop out of them before winter came down on their heads.

She heard a hawk scream overhead, and it drew her eyes upward. The land was vast, the future bright.

Or it had been until now.

"You'll have some time to get used to it. But, Maeve?" Bruce added with a wrinkled brow. He had the nerve to look confused, even hurt. "How could you not have known? Surely you've noticed how I admire your ma and have for a long time."

How could she not have noticed? What had there been to see? Was there something and she was just that naive? That childish? She was a woman nearing twenty-two years old. Not some little girl who needed to be in leading strings.

Now here she stood so churned up, she couldn't stand to admit what a fool she'd been. She wanted to get away from both of them with their eyes that saw too much because they knew her so well.

They were on Ma and Maeve's side of the stream. Ma and Maeve shared a cabin built on the property line of their homesteads. They'd built among a stand of trees that cast cooling shade in the summer and slowed the howling wind in the winter. Did that mean Bruce would move into that cabin with her and Ma? He'd have to. Ma had to live there for another full year and a month in order to prove up on her homestead. Maeve had to do it, too. No one had much choice of getting any distance between them.

Maeve could see they wanted to talk this through with her, let her ask questions. Let her, as they'd said, get used to the idea. Well, she wouldn't stand for all that calm, reasonable talk. She wasn't about to listen to her mother and Bruce discuss a romance as if Ma had never had a real husband.

Maeve just never imagined anyone replacing her beloved da. Maeve didn't think about Da every day anymore. He was a sturdy, good-humored man with hair as red as the rest of the family. He liked to tell stories, and he and Ma used to reminisce about their early days, their courtship and marriage, the tiny cabin they'd lived in back in the "old country" as Ma still called it, before they'd sailed the Atlantic Ocean to reach a new land.

Now Ma loved another man. She'd put some other man in Da's place as if he meant nothing to her. How could Ma do this?

"I can't discuss this now." She turned toward the creek.

"Maeve, you come back here." Ma had that stern tone in her voice that Maeve never disobeyed.

Maeve stopped, drew in a deep breath, and turned back even as Ma walked up to her.

Maeve rested a hand on Ma's arm. Their eyes met, Ma's looking stern and yet laced with sadness.

"Ma, please. Can I have some time? Bruce is a good man. I know that. It's just brought memories of Da back to me. That's not fair to you or Bruce. Don't be angry with me. Of course, your courtship is, that is ... I don't ... I can't." Maeve bit off her ragged speech. "Let me settle down for a bit, please? Say a prayer for me, and I'll do the same, for me and for all of us. But just for now, I need a wee bit of time."

Ma nodded and gave her a tight hug, the kind that had made Maeve feel safe all her life. "You have your bit of time, girl. Go on now. We'll talk more later."

Maeve nodded. "Tell Bruce I'm sorry for the way I acted. I'll apologize properly later." She crossed the stream on rocks Bruce had dragged into place using their draft horses, so that walking to each other's homes would be easier.

She walked past the garden, full of ripening vegetables that Bruce had taught them how to plant and tend.

"But, Maeve, how could you not have known?"

She twisted around in her head trying to think of an admiring look, a quiet smile. She hadn't known.

She walked on past the corral with their two dozen head of black cattle, driven here by Oscar from the herd he had growing in Hidden Canyon.

"Surely you 've noticed how I admire your ma and have for a long time."

Had they ever touched, even a pat on the shoulder or a hand resting on an arm? No, she hadn't noticed. Bruce had never homesteaded. He'd never built his own cabin. To her mind, he'd always intended to move into the canyon where his brothers lived.

She hadn't known. Now she felt like a fool, and the long-accepted pain of losing her da flared like a fire. She needed time to think, to calmly accept. It'd been four years, but she still needed just a wee bit more time.