Noelle

Praise for the reigning queen of romance

DIANA PALMER

“Nobody does it better.”

—New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard

“The popular Palmer has penned another winning novel, a perfect blend of romance and suspense.”

—Booklist on Lawman

“Palmer knows how to make the sparks fly…heartwarming.”

—Publishers Weekly on Renegade

“Sensual and suspenseful.”

—Booklist on Lawless

“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“Nobody tops Diana Palmer when it comes to delivering pure, undiluted romance. I love her stories.”

—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz

Also by Diana Palmer

Heartless

Fearless

Her Kind of Hero

Nora

Big Sky Winter

Man of the Hour

Trilby

Lawman

Lacy

Hard To Handle

Heart of Winter

Outsider

Night Fever

Before Sunrise

Lawless

Diamond Spur

Desperado

The Texas Ranger

Lord of the Desert

The Cowboy and the Lady

Most Wanted

Fit for a King

Paper Rose

Rage of Passion

Once in Paris

After the Music

Roomful of Roses

Champagne Girl

Passion Flower

Diamond Girl

Friends and Lovers

Cattleman’s Choice

Lady Love

The Rawhide Man

DIANA PALMER

Noelle

In memory of Ryan Patton Hendricks, whose light

still shines brightly in the hearts of all those who loved him.

Noelle

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Prologue

The street was wide and dusty—and because it was late in the afternoon, there was a lot of activity in the small town of Terrell, New Mexico Territory. Most of the buggies and wagons had stopped, however, to watch the developing confrontation in front of the adobe courthouse, where the circuit judge had just ruled against a group of small ranchers.

“You sold us out!” a raging-mad cowboy yelled at a tall, distinguished man in a dark, vested business suit. “You helped that land-hungry British son of Satan kick us off our land! What will we do come winter when we don’t have a place to live or food for our kids? Where will we go, now that you’ve taken our land away? It isn’t even as if Hughes needs it. By God, he owns half the county already!”

Jared Dunn, the tall, elegant man he was facing, watched him without blinking, without moving. His pale blue eyes were narrow and intent—dangerous—but the cowboy was too far away to see them.

“It was a fair trial,” the man said in a cultured accent, with just a trace of a drawl. “You had attorneys.”

“Not like you, Mr. New York City big-shot lawyer!” the man said, his expression turning ugly. He was wearing a sidearm. Many people did in 1902, although not in towns, most of which had regulations against firearms. But this little place was much as it had been in the late 1880s and the law was just getting a toehold here. This was still a territory, not a state.

The angry cowboy had come heeled, and Jared Dunn had anticipated he would. The sheriff of this town was a mild little man who was elected for his sunny personality, not his toughness, so he could expect no help from that quarter. In fact, the sheriff had conveniently vanished when the cowboy started yelling threats across the street.

The cowboy’s hand dropped lower, hovering over his gun butt.

“Don’t do it,” Jared warned, his voice deep and clear and ringing.

“Why? Are you afraid of guns, Mr. Big Shot?” the cowboy demanded, with a faint sneer. “Don’t you city boys know how to shoot?”

Slowly Jared unbuttoned his tailored jacket, and, without taking his eyes from his adversary, smoothed the jacket back…past a worn leather holster slung low across his lean hips. It contained a Colt .45 revolver with an equally worn black handle.

The way the revolver was worn would have been enough to warn most men. But even the smooth action of the hand sweeping back the jacket spoke for him. He stood very quietly, his posture elegant, deceptively relaxed, his eyes focused only on the cowboy.

“Ed, give it up,” one of the cowboy’s friends demanded. “You can’t shoot lawyers, more’s the pity. We’ll find some other land, and this time we’ll make sure the seller has legitimate deeds.”

“It’s my land. Deeds be damned! And I’m not getting off it because some rich man paid a city lawyer to take it away from me!” He began to crouch; his hand made a claw over the gun butt at his waist. “You draw or you die, fellow.”

“Just like old times,” Jared murmured to himself. His blue eyes narrowed, steady and unblinking, and he smiled coldly.

“Draw!” the cowboy yelled.

But Jared didn’t move. He simply stood there.

“Coward!”

Still Jared stood his ground, waiting. He’d learned that it wasn’t the man who was fastest who won this sort of fight—it was the man who took his time and placed his shot.

Suddenly the cowboy dug for his revolver. He managed to get it out, and he even got off a shot, but not before Jared’s bullet had smashed a bone in his gun arm. The concussion jerked his fingers and set off his pistol as he fell, crying out, to the dusty street.

The wild bullet hit Jared’s leg just above the kneecap, but he didn’t fall or cry out. His gaze unwavering from his adversary, he went slowly toward the cowboy’s prostrate, groaning form and stood over him, the smoking pistol still held level in his lean hand. His eyes, to the spectators, were frightening in their unblinking blue glitter.

“Are you finished, or do you want to try again?” he asked, without a breath of sympathy. His index finger was still on the trigger, the pistol aimed at the downed man. It was evident to everyone that if the cowboy had reached for the pistol lying near his uninjured side, Jared would have sent a second bullet right into the man without hesitation.

The white-faced cowboy looked up at death in a business suit. “Say,” he managed in a rough whisper, “don’t I know you?”

“I doubt it.”

The cowboy shuddered at the force of the pain. “But I do,” he insisted. “I saw you…in Dodge. I was in Dodge City, back in the…early 80s. There was a Texas gunman. Killed another gunman…Never saw his hand move, never even saw it coming, like just now…” He was barely conscious as loss of blood weakened him, while around him people were rushing in search of a doctor for the wounded men.

A dark-eyed man carrying a medical bag pushed his way through the crowd. He looked from Dunn’s bleeding leg to the red-splattered arm of the cowboy on the ground.

“It’s 1902,” he informed Dunn. “We’re supposed to be civilized now. Put that damned thing away!”

Dunn reholstered the gun with a smooth spin that wasn’t lost on the physician, but he didn’t back down.

“Shattered his gun arm, didn’t you?” He examined the cowboy and nodded to two of his companions. “Get him to my office.” He turned and looked pointedly at the lawyer’s bleeding leg, around which he was calmly tying a white handkerchief that quickly turned red. “You can come along, too. I thought you were a lawyer.”

“I am.”

“Not the way you handle that gun. Can you walk?”

“I’m only shot, not killed,” Jared said curtly. His blue eyes met the other man’s, still cold from the confrontation. “I’ve been shot before.”

“A lawyer should expect to be.”

“Ah. An anarchist, I presume.”

The doctor was motioning to the cowboy’s friends, somewhat subdued now, to bring him along. “No, I’m not an anarchist,” the doctor replied. “But I don’t believe a handful of men should own the world.”

“Believe it or not, neither do I.” Jared walked on his own, even when a sympathetic bystander offered him a hand. He looked neither right nor left, following the doctor and the victim into the office. It amused him when the man’s friends quickly withdrew into the waiting room with nervous glances in his direction. Over the years, that reaction had become familiar.

When he’d left Texas to practice law in New York ten years ago, he’d thought that the days of cold steel and hot lead were over forever. But most of his cases took him West. And the frontier might be closed these days, but there were plenty of men around who grew up in wild times and still thought a gun was the way to settle a dispute.

Shootings even occurred in such civilized places as Fort Worth, because he read about them in the local paper his grandmother sent to him in New York. There was an ordinance against weapons there, in Fort Worth, but apparently few people obeyed it, despite the city’s large police force. Here in Terrell, the sheriff wanted to be reelected, so he didn’t encourage unpopular gun control ordinances. Such a lawman wouldn’t have been tolerated back in Texas.

Jared sat down heavily in a chair while the doctor worked on the wounded cowboy, with some assistance from a younger man who worked with him.

His mind was on the case, not his wound. He’d learned in his wild young days to ignore pain. He was thirty-six now, and the lesson had stood him in good stead.

He’d been tricked into thinking that the landowner was the victim in this town. It was only at the end of the case that he’d realized how untrue that was. His loyalty was to his client, and he’d researched the deeds well enough to know that the small ranchers had no real claim on the land at all. That didn’t make him feel any better when the judge ruled that they must be evicted from homesteads where they’d planted crops and had cattle grazing for five years before the absentee rancher even knew they were on the place.

But there was no such thing as squatters’ rights under the law. The fact that they’d been sold the land by an unscrupulous speculator, without legal counsel, was beside the point. The seller had long since skipped and couldn’t be found.

“I said, let’s have a look at that leg,” the doctor repeated testily.

He looked up blankly and realized that he and the doctor were alone in the room, the assistant having helped the other wounded man, now bandaged, out into the embrace of his friends.

Jared climbed onto the table and watched as the doctor cut his pant leg to give him access to the wound. He examined it carefully, applying antiseptic before he probed it with a long instrument. He found the bullet and began to withdraw it. He glanced up to see if he was hurting his patient and found the man’s steely blue eyes as calm as if he’d been reading a newspaper.

“Tough character, aren’t you?” the doctor murmured when he’d withdrawn the bullet and tossed it into a metal pan.

“I grew up in wild times,” Jared said quietly.

“So did I.” He applied more antiseptic and began to bandage the wound. “You’ve got some damage there. No bones broken, but a few torn ligaments at the least. Try to stay off it as much as possible and have your own doctor take a look when you get home. I don’t think there will be any permanent damage, but you’ll have a hard time walking for a few weeks. Leave that bandage on until your own doctor sees the leg. You’ll have some fever. Have your doctor check it for infection when you get back to New York. Gangrene is still a very real possibility.”

“I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“Sorry about your trousers.”

Jared shrugged. “Fortunes of war.” His eyes fixed on the doctor’s face. “I’ll take care of both bills—for myself and the man I wounded. For two bits, I’d call out Hughes and make a clean sweep of this. He lied to me. I thought the trespassing had been recent.”

The doctor’s eyebrows went up. “You didn’t know that those men had homesteaded the land for five years?”

“Not until today.”

He whistled through his teeth.

Jared got to his feet and reached for his wallet. He peeled off several large bills and handed them to the doctor. “If you have any contact with the man I shot, tell him that he’s got a good case against the man who sold him the land. Anybody can be found. I know an ex-Pinkerton man who lives in Chicago—Matt Davis, by name.” He took a pencil and pad from his pocket, scribbled a name and an address. “He’s a good man, and he’s a sucker for a just cause. I’ve worked with him frequently over the past ten years.”

The doctor fingered the slip of paper. “Ed Barkley will be grateful. He’s not a bad man, but he lived on the border for years before he married and tried to settle down. Sank every penny he had into that land, and now he’s lost everything.” He shrugged and smiled faintly. “In the old days, there would have been quick justice, right or wrong. Civilization is hard work.”

Jared’s eyebrow quirked. “Tell me about it.”

He left the doctor’s office and started toward his hotel. He hadn’t taken off the gun belt.

The sheriff came toward him, clearing his throat. “I believe we should discuss this gunplay…”

Jared, in pain and furious that the official hadn’t even tried to do his duty, swept the jacket back again with cold, insolent challenge.

“By all means, let’s discuss it,” he invited curtly.

The sheriff, unlike Ed Barkley, knew what the angle of that holster and the worn butt meant. He cleared his throat again and smiled nervously.

“Self-defense, of course,” he muttered. “Sad thing, these bad-tempered men…Fair trial. You, uh, leaving town?”

“Yes.” Jared gave the man a cold glare. “Someone could have been killed out here today. You were elected to protect these townspeople, and you ran like a yellow dog. I’ve been in places in Texas where they’d have shot you down in the street for what you did today.”

“I was otherwise occupied at the time! And what do you know about being a lawman, a city feller like you?” the man asked.

Jared’s thin mouth tugged up at the corner, but his eyes were blazing. “More than you’ll have time to learn.”

He whipped the jacket back over his pistol and kept walking, the limp more pronounced with every step he took. But even with that impairment, he looked threatening.

He went to his hotel, packed and checked out, and caught the next train east to St. Louis, where he could make connections to return to New York. People were still watching when the train pulled out of town. Imagine, a real gunfight right there in the street, two boys were remarking excitedly, and they’d seen it!

Chapter One

“Damn!”

The expletive resounded through the elegant law office. Alistair Brooks, the senior partner of the firm of Brooks and Dunn, looked up from the brief he was painstakingly writing by hand at his oak rolltop desk. “What?” he asked.

Jared Dunn threw down the letter he’d received from his grandmother in Fort Worth, Texas, with a flourish of his long, darkly tanned hand. “Damn,” he repeated under his breath, and sat brooding, his reading glasses perched on his straight, elegant nose—over eyes that could run the blue spectrum from sky blue all the way to gunmetal gray.

“A case?” Brooks asked absently.

“A letter from home,” Jared replied heavily. He sat back in his chair with his long legs crossed, a faint grimace accompanying the action. He favored the right leg a little, because the damage done by the bullet in Terrell was fresh enough to be painful. He’d been carefully checked by his own doctor, the wound rebandaged with directions to leave it alone until it healed. The fever had gone down in the few days he’d been back in New York, and if he felt pain or weakness from the wound, it didn’t show in the steely lines of his lean face.

“From Texas?” Brooks echoed.

“From Texas.” He couldn’t quite call it home, although it felt that way sometimes. He turned his swivel chair to face his partner across the elegant wood floor of the oak-furnished office, the long, narrow windows letting in light through sheer curtains. “I’ve been thinking about a move, Alistair. If I leave, Parkins would enjoy taking my place in the firm. He has a good background in criminal law, and he’s been in practice long enough to have gained an admirable reputation in legal circles.”

Brooks put down his ink pen with a heavy sigh. “It’s that land case in New Mexico Territory that’s depressed you,” he began.

“It’s more than that,” Jared replied. “I’m tired.” He ran a slender hand over his wavy black hair. There were threads of pure silver in it now, at his temples. He knew that new lines had been carved into his face by the pressures of his profession. “I’m tired of working on the wrong side of justice.”

Brooks’s eyebrows arched disapprovingly.

Jared shook his head. “Don’t misunderstand me. I love the practice of law. But I’ve just dispossessed families that should have had some sort of right to land they’d worked for five years and I feel sick about it. I seem to spend more time working for money than I do working for justice. I don’t like it. Cases that satisfied me when I was younger and more ambitious only make me uncomfortable now. I’m disillusioned with my life.”

“This sounds as if you’re working up to dissolving our partnership,” Brooks began.

Jared nodded. “That’s just what I’m doing. It’s been a good ten years since I began practicing law. I appreciate the boost that you gave my career, and the opportunity to practice in New York City. But I’m restless.”

Brooks’s dark eyes narrowed. “Would this sudden decision have more to do with that letter you’ve just read than the case in New Mexico Territory?” he asked shrewdly.

One corner of Jared’s thin mouth pulled down. “In fact, it does. My grandmother has taken in a penniless cousin of my stepbrother Andrew’s.”

“The family lives in Fort Worth, and you support them,” Brooks recalled.

Jared nodded. “My grandmother is my late mother’s only living relative. She’s important to me. Andrew…” He laughed coldly. “Andrew is family, however much I may disapprove of him.”

“He’s very young yet.”

“Serving in the Philippines during the war gave him an exaggerated view of his own importance,” Jared remarked. “He struts and postures to impress the ladies. And he spends money as if it were water,” he added irritably. “He’s been buying hats for the new houseguest, out of my grandmother’s housekeeping money. I have a feeling that it was Andrew’s idea to take her in.”

“And you don’t approve.”

“I’d like to know whom I’m supporting,” Jared replied. “And perhaps I need to become reacquainted with my own roots. I haven’t lived in Texas for a long time, but I think I’m homesick for it, Alistair.”

“You? Unthinkable.”

“It began when I took that case in Beaumont, representing the Culhanes in the oil field suit.” His blue eyes grew thoughtful. “I’d forgotten how it felt to be among Texans. They were West Texans, of course, from El Paso. I spent a little time on the border as a young man. My mother lived in Fort Worth with my stepfather until they died, and my grandmother and Andrew live there now. Although I’m partial to West Texas—”

“—Texas is Texas.”

Jared smiled. “Exactly.”

Alistair Brooks smoothed the polished wood of his chair. “If you must leave, then I’ll certainly consider Ned Parkins to replace you. Not that you can be replaced.” He smiled faintly. “I’ve known very few truly colorful personalities over the years.”

“I might be a great deal less colorful if people were more civilized in courtroom trials,” Jared replied.

“All the same, New York judges find your mystique fascinating. That often gives us an edge.”

“You’ll find another, I have no doubt. You’re an excellent attorney.”

“As you are. Well, make your plans and let me know when you want to go,” Alistair said sadly. “I’ll try to make your path as easy as I can.”

“You’ve been a good friend as well as a good partner,” Jared remarked. “I’ll miss the practice.”

He remembered those words as he sat in the passenger car of a westbound train a week later. He watched the prairie go slowly by, listened to the rhythmic puffing of the steam engine, watched the smoke and cinders flying past the windows as the click-clack of the metal wheels sang like a serenade.

“What a very barren land,” a woman with a British accent remarked to her seat companion.

“Yes, ma’am. But it won’t always be. Why, there’ll be great cities out here in a few years, just like back East.”

“I say, are there red Indians in these parts?”

“All the Indians are on reservations these days,” the man said. “Good thing, too, because the Kiowa and Comanche used to raid settlements hereabouts back in the sixties and seventies, and some people got killed in bad, bad ways. And there wasn’t only Indians. There were trail drives and cow towns like Dodge City and Ellsworth…”

The man’s voice droned on unheard as Jared’s thoughts went back to the 1880s. It had been a momentous time in the West. It had seen the Earp-Clanton brawl played out to national headlines in Tombstone, Arizona, in the fall of ’81. It had seen the last reprisal skirmishes in the Great Plains and Arizona, following the Custer debacle in Montana in ’76. It had seen the death of freedom for the Indian tribes of the West and Geronimo’s bid for independence—and subsequent capture by General Crook in Arizona. The last of the great cattle drives had played out with the devastating winter of ’86, which cost cattlemen over half their herds and all but destroyed ranching.

Simultaneously in 1890 came the frightful massacre of Indian women and children at Wounded Knee and the closing of the frontier. The old cow towns were gone. Gunfighters and frontier sheriffs, feathered war parties intent on scalping and the endless cavalry chase of Indians in search of old ways, all were vanished off the face of the earth.

Civilization was good, Jared reminded himself. Progress was being made to make life simpler, easier, healthier for a new generation of Americans. Social programs for city beautification and welfare relief, children’s rights and women’s right and succor for the downtrodden were gaining strength in even the smallest towns. People were trying to make life better for themselves, and that was better than the lawless old days.

But a wildness deep inside the man in the business suit quivered with memories of the smell of gunsmoke, the thick blackness of it stinging his eyes as he faced an adversary and watched townspeople scatter. He’d only been a boy then, in his late teens, fatherless, spoiling for a fight to prove that he was as good as any son of married parents. It certainly hadn’t been his poor mother’s fault that she was assaulted one dark evening in Dodge City, Kansas, by a man whose face she never saw. She had, after all, done the right thing—she’d kept her child and raised him and loved him, even through a second marriage to a Fort Worth businessman that saddled Jared with a stepbrother he never liked. His mother had died trying to save him from the wild life he was leading.

On her deathbed, as he visited her in Fort Worth—before she followed her beloved husband to the grave with the same cholera that had done him in—she’d gripped Jared’s hand tight in her small one and begged him to go back East to school. There was a little money, she said, just enough that she’d earned sewing and selling eggs. It would get him into school, and perhaps he could work for the rest of his tuition. He must promise her this, she begged, so that she would have the hope of his own salvation. For the road he was traveling would surely carry him to eternal damnation.