Twin of Ice Read online

  “You don’t own Western Union?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  Kane seemed to have no idea that she was teasing him. “Not much of it. Someday they’re gonna hook up the telephones all over the country. Damn thing is useless as it is. Cain’t call nobody outside Chandler. And who wants to talk to anybody in Chandler?”

  She looked up into his eyes and said softly, “You could call your son and say hello.”

  With a deeply-felt groan, Kane turned around and started walking again. “Edan was right. I shoulda married a farm girl, one that’d mind her own business.”

  As Houston practically ran to keep up with him, stumbling over fallen branches, slipping once on an enormous mushroom, she wondered if she’d gone too far, but for all Kane’s words, his tone was not angry.

  They walked for what must have been another mile before they came to the abandoned mine opening. It was situated on the very steep side of a hill, overlooking a broad panorama of the valley below it.

  The mine went back into the earth for only about twenty feet before it collapsed. Houston picked up a piece of coal from the ground and studied it in the sunlight. When looked at closely, coal was beautiful: glossed with an almost silver quality, and Houston could readily believe that coal, with pressure and time, could become diamonds.

  She looked out over the valley at the steep mountainside below. “Just what I thought,” she said, “the coal is worthless up here.”

  Kane was more interested in the view, but gave a cursory glance to the pieces of coal on the ground. “Looks like all the rest of the stuff to me. What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing is wrong with the coal; in fact, this is high grade ore, but the railroad can’t get up here. Without the railroad, coal is worthless—as my father found out.”

  “I thought your father made his money from sellin’ things.”

  Houston rubbed the coal in her hand. She liked the slick feel of it and the angles made by the way the coal fractured. Many of the miners thought coal was pure and kept a piece in their mouths to suck on while they worked. “He did, but he came to Colorado because he’d heard of the wealth of coal here. He thought the place would be full of rich people dying to buy the two hundred coal stoves he nearly lost his life bringing across the ‘Great Desert,’ as they used to call the land between St. Joseph and Denver.”

  “Makes sense to me. So he sold the stoves and got started in the mercantile business,”

  “No, he nearly went bankrupt. You see, the coal was in Colorado all right, you could mine it with a shovel, but the railroad hadn’t arrived yet, so there was no economical way to market it. Ox carts couldn’t carry enough to make a profit.”

  “So what did your father do?”

  Houston smiled at the memory of the story her mother’d told her so often. “My father had grand dreams. There was a little settlement of farmers at the foot of this mountain we’re on now, and my father thought it was an ideal place for a town—his town. He gave each of the farmers one of the coal stoves if the farmer’d promise to buy all his coal from Chandler Coal Works in Chandler, Colorado.”

  “You mean he named the town after himself?”

  “He most certainly did. I’d like to have seen the faces of the people when he informed them that they were now living in the town of Mr. William Houston Chandler, Esquire.”

  “And all these years I thought the town’d been named for him because he’d done somethin’ like save a hundred babies from a burnin’ buildin’.”

  “Mrs. Jenks at the library says my father was honored by the town for his many contributions.”

  “So how come his money wasn’t made in coal?”

  “My father’s back gave out after one year. He shoveled coal, loaded it and hauled it to the growing population, but after a year he sold the mine to a couple of farmers’ brawny sons for a pittance. A month later, he returned to the East, bought fifty-one wagonloads of goods, married my mother and brought her and twenty-five couples back to settle in the glorious town of Chandler, Colorado. Mother said that chickens were roosting on the mantel of the building that someone dared to call the Chandler Hotel.”

  “And the comin’ of the railroad made the farmers’ sons rich,” Kane said.

  “True, but by then my father was dead, and my mother’s family had already remarried her to the highly respectable Mr. Gates.” Houston moved to look inside the mine, while Kane stayed outside.

  “I guess a person gets funny ideas sometimes. This whole town thinks of your family as some sort of royalty, but the truth is, the town is named after your father only because he was enough of a braggart to want to own a town. Not much of a king, was he?”

  “He was a king to my sister and me—and to my mother. When Blair and I were children, the town decided to declare my father’s birthday as a holiday. Mother made an effort to tell everyone the truth, but after great frustration, she realized that the townspeople wanted a hero.”

  “And how does Gates figure in this?”

  Houston gave a deep sigh. “Mr. Gates’s reputation could never be of the most sterling quality because he runs a brewery, so when Queen Opal Chandler and her two young princesses were on the marriage block, he offered everything he owned. Mother’s family accepted with enthusiasm.”

  “He wanted a real lady, too,” Kane said softly.

  “And he was willing to enforce his rigid beliefs of what a lady should be on the three women under his roof,” Houston said through a tightened jaw.

  Kane was silent for a moment. “I guess the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence.”

  Houston moved to stand close to him and take his hand in hers. “Did you ever think that if you’d been raised as a son, instead of in the stables, you’d be spoiled like Marc is, instead of a man who knows the value of work?”

  “You make it sound like Fenton done me a favor,” he said, aghast.

  “Did.”

  “What?!”

  “Fenton did you a favor. I was correcting your grammar. It was part of our agreement.”

  “You’re changin’ the subject. You know, I oughta send you to New York to do business for me. You’d destroy some of those men.”

  She put her arms around his neck. “Could I perhaps destroy you instead?”

  Chapter 18

  As Houston put her arms around his neck, she saw by his expression that he seemed to be fighting something within himself, almost as if he didn’t want to kiss her but couldn’t keep from it.

  He put his hand to the back of her head and came down on her lips as if he were a dying man. Houston clung to him, loving the feel of his big body next to hers, the power of him taking over her body.

  “Kane,” she whispered from somewhere deep within her throat.

  He pulled away to stare down at her, his dark eyes black with desire. “What have you done to me? It’s been years since what’s between my legs ruled what’s between my ears. But right now, I think I could kill any man that tried to take you away from me.”

  “Or any woman?” she asked, her lips against his.

  “Yes,” was all he could manage to say before he began to tear the big shirt off her.

  Before, Houston had felt that Kane was withholding something in his lovemaking, that part of him was remaining aloof, not with her but somewhere else. But now he was different, no more reserve of coolness, no more holding back and watching.

  With all the passion of a charging bull, Kane swept her into his arms and carried her into the opening of the abandoned mine shaft. As Houston glanced at his impassioned face, she thought, this is the man who has made millions in a few short years. This is the Kane Taggert I knew was inside. This is the man that I love—the man whom I want to love me.

  Kane seemed to have no thoughts as he lowered her to the ground, his lips reclaiming hers while his hands clawed the rest of her clothes from her body, exposing her soft skin to his touch. He was ravenous as his mouth tore its way down her body.

  No more was he the ki