Twin of Fire Read online

  Leander, his hands on her waist, gave her a blank look for a moment, then began to smile. After a lusty look up and down, he said, “Blair, I don’t think you have anything to worry about. It looks to me like all your brains are going to the right places.”

  Blair sat in the carriage, listening to Leander’s chuckling, and thought that surely no other sister had endured what she was going through for hers.

  As they were leaving town, two big, beefy men, driving a wagon that was so dilapidated that no respectable farmer would have had it, yelled at Leander to halt. The dark man, a fearsome, bearded, dirty-looking brute, addressed Houston in an aggressive way that Blair had never seen her allow in a man before. If there was one thing that Houston knew how to do, it was to stop men who were too forward.

  Houston nodded politely to him and he bellowed at the horses and left in a cloud of dust.

  “What in the world was that about?” Leander asked. “I didn’t know you knew Taggert.”

  Before Houston could answer, Blair said, “That was the man who built that house? No wonder he doesn’t ask anyone to it. He knows they’d turn him down. By the way, how could he tell us apart?”

  “Our clothes,” Houston answered quickly. “I saw him in the mercantile store.”

  “As for no one accepting his invitation,” Lee said, “I think that Houston might risk plague or anything else for that matter to see that house.”

  Blair leaned forward, across her sister. “Did you receive letters about that house?”

  “If I could sell the words by the pound, I’d be a millionaire.”

  “Like him,” Blair answered, looking up at the house that dominated the west end of town. “He can keep his millions, and he can keep his dinosaur of a house.”

  “I think we’ve agreed again,” Lee said, acting surprised. “Do you think this’ll become a habit?”

  “I doubt it,” Blair snapped, but her heart wasn’t in the remark. Maybe she’d been wrong about him.

  But twenty minutes later, she was just as worried about her sister’s future as ever. She’d left Lee and Houston in her mother’s garden alone, then remembered that her journal was still in Lee’s buggy. Hurrying downstairs to catch Lee before he left, she was a witness to a little drama between the couple.

  Leander, reaching behind Houston’s head to shoo a bee away, made her stiffen. Even from where Blair stood, she could see the way her sister drew away from being touched by Lee.

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said in a deadly voice. “I won’t touch you.”

  “It’s just until after we’re married,” she whispered, but Lee didn’t reply before he stormed past Blair and drove away very fast in the carriage.

  Leander stormed into his father’s house and slammed the door behind him, rattling the stained glass. He took the stairs two at a time and at the landing turned left and headed for his room, the room that he was to give up as soon as he married Houston and moved into the house he’d bought for her.

  He nearly ran over his father, but didn’t apologize or slow down.

  Reed Westfield, glancing up at his son as he passed, saw the look of anger on his face and followed him to his room. Leander was already throwing clothes into a valise when Reed arrived.

  Reed stood in the doorway for a moment and watched his son. Even though they looked nothing alike, Reed being short, stocky, and having a face with all the delicacy of a bulldog, they had much the same temperament. It took a great deal to rouse the Westfield ire.

  “Is it an emergency patient that needs your attention?” Reed asked, as he watched his son throw clothes at the case on the bed, and, in his rage, miss half the time.

  “No, it’s women,” Lee managed to say through clenched teeth.

  Reed tried to hide a smile, coughed to cover it. In his legal practice, he’d learned to hide his own reaction to whatever his clients said. “Have a spat with Houston?”

  Leander turned to his father with a face full of fury. “I’ve never had a spat or a fight or an argument or any disagreement whatsoever with Houston. Houston is utterly, totally perfect, without flaw.”

  “Ah, then it’s that sister of hers. Someone mentioned that she was badgering you today. You won’t have to live with your sister-in-law, you know.”

  Lee paused in his packing. “Blair? What’s she got to do with anything? She’s the most enjoyment I’ve had with a woman since I got engaged. It’s Houston who’s driving me to drink. Or, more correctly, she’s the one forcing me to leave Chandler.”

  “Hold on just a minute,” Reed said, taking his son’s wrist. “Before you jump on a train and leave all your patients to die, why don’t you sit down and talk to me and tell me what’s made you so mad?”

  Lee sat in a chair as if he weighed a ton, and it was several minutes before he could speak. “Do you remember why I asked Houston to marry me in the first place? Right now, I can’t seem to remember a single reason that made me do it.”

  Reed took a seat across from his son. “Let me see—if I remember correctly, it was pure, clean, old-fashioned lust. When you returned from Vienna and the last of your medical studies, you joined the legion of men, young and old, following the luscious Miss Houston Chandler around town, begging her to attend whatever you could think of, anything, just so you could be near her. I believe I remember your rhapsodizing about her beauty and telling me how every man in Chandler had asked her to marry him. And I also remember the night you asked her yourself and she accepted you. I think you walked around in a daze for a week.”

  He paused for a moment. “Does that answer your question? Have you decided now that you aren’t lusting after the lovely Miss Houston?”

  Leander gave his father a serious look. “I’ve decided now that that shape of hers, that walk of hers that has grown men fainting in her wake, is all show. The woman is a block of ice. She is completely frigid, without any emotion at all. I cannot marry someone like her and spend the rest of my life trying to live with a woman who has no feelings at all.”

  “Is that all that’s wrong?” Reed asked, obviously relieved.

  “Good women are supposed to be like that. You wait, after you’re married, she’ll warm up. Your mother was very cool to me before we were married. She broke her parasol over my head one evening when I got too fresh. But later, after we were married…well, things got better—much better. You take the word of someone who’s more experienced in these matters. Houston is a good girl and she’s had to live with that bigot Gates all these years. Of course she’s nervous and frightened.”

  Leander listened to his father’s words carefully. He’d never planned to spend his life in Chandler. Instead, he’d planned to intern in a big city, work on the staff of a big hospital and eventually have his own practice and make a lot of money. He had lasted but six months before he decided to come home where he was needed, where he would have more important cases than a rich woman’s hysteria.

  All the time he’d been away from Chandler, Houston had written him letters, gossipy letters about what went on in the town and later about her finishing school. He’d always looked forward to the letters and looked forward to once again seeing the little girl who’d written them.

  The night he’d returned home, his father threw a party of welcome and the “little girl” walked into the room. Houston had grown into a woman with a figure that made Lee’s palms sweat, and as he was gaping, an old friend had punched him on the arm.

  “It’s no use trying. There isn’t a single man in town who hasn’t asked for her hand in marriage—or for anything else she’ll part with—but she’ll have none of us. I think she’s waiting for a prince or a president.”,

  Lee had grinned smugly. “Maybe you boys don’t know how to ask. I learned a few tricks while I was in Paris.”

  And so he had become a contestant in the local race to see who could get Miss Chandler to marry him. He still didn’t understand what had happened. He had taken her out to a few parties, and at about the third one, he�€