"Athletic?"

"Nope. They wanted my brain, not my body."

She smiled to herself. "They didn't know what they were missing."

His thumb skimmed her jaw line. "Neither did I. Wait, it was Smith."

"What?"

"Betty Smith, then she married someone-Shilling or Shafter or something like that. Melissa is their kid."

"Melissa Moore?"

He nodded and took a big bite of tortilla.

"So Melissa could tell us about her mother who was half sister to Randy Mullins who might have been the Senator's bastard?" Carly asked.

Dan swallowed tortilla. "Maybe. If she knows anything and wants to talk."

"I'm sure Winifred will help with that."

"If she's well enough to care. What about the rest of those names, the maybe-bastards?"

"I hate that label."

"What?"

"Bastard. Like it's the kid's fault."

"The only bastards I care about are self-made." He tugged at a stray piece of her hair, the one she kept twisting around her finger when she was fretting. "Illegitimate child takes too long to say and love child is the kind of lie that turns my stomach. My mother wasn't any man's love child."

The edge to Dan's voice reminded Carly that small towns had long memories and short forgiveness of personal choices. Diana had suffered for being born outside of marriage. Diana's son accepted that, but he didn't have to like it.

Carly turned back to her list of names of children perhaps conceived and certainly forgotten by Andrew Jackson Quintrell III, known to most as the Senator and to his sister-in-law as a philandering son of a bitch. The more Carly knew about him, the more she agreed with Winifred.

"Sharon Miller," Carly said.

Dan shook his head. "No bells on that one."

"She was the daughter of the Senator's social secretary, born two years after he retired to Taos in 1977."

"What happened to her?"

"Her mother took her and left Taos when she was a year old. No contact with the Quintrells after that, at least not that I've found in the records. Next one is Christopher Smith. Son of the replacement social secretary. She was married, by the way, so it's likely the baby belonged to the husband, not the hound dog. It lasted six years."

"The marriage?"

"The job with the Senator."

Dan spooned a second helping of chili into his bowl and wondered how many more children the fornicating old goat had sired.

Chapter 43

QUINTRELL RANCH

FRIDAY EVENING

THE WINTER SUN WAS GONE FROM THE SKY, LEAVING ONLY THE FAINTEST TINGE OF yellow-green along the western horizon. Light glowed in great sheets of glassy gold along the front of the ranch house. The wind was fingernails of ice scraping over everything, lifting the recent dry snow into swirls and eddies.

"Brrrr," Carly said as soon as she opened the door of Dan's truck. "There's a reason I don't ski."

"Watch the path to the door," he said. "Nothing has been salted or sanded."

"Maybe they don't want visitors."

"More likely they're just easing back now that the governor's gone. Besides, the place is for sale. Once that sign went up, everyone working here had at least one foot out the door."

Squinting against the wind, Carly watched the last bit of color drain from the sky. Then she turned toward the buildings, seeing the Spanish influence in the old and high-tech modern in the new. They didn't clash; they were simply from different cultures and times.

"Centuries of tradition and he's just walking away from it," she said sadly.

"The governor?"

"Yes."

"He was never really a part of the ranch, or the family, for that matter," Dan said. "That was reserved for the heir apparent, Andrew Jackson Quintrell IV All Josh got was a long string of military boarding schools."

"Still…"

Dan put his arm around her waist and tucked her under his arm, shielding her from as much of the wind as he could. "Not everyone loves the past, Carolina May."

She sighed and leaned her shoulder against him for a moment. "Would you have walked away from this?"

"In a heartbeat. Let the governor sell it to someone who loves the land, loves the wildness and the silence and the wind."

She looked up at him. Against the radiant twilight, the planes of his face were drawn in shades of black. Only his eyes were alive, vivid. "It| sounds like you love it."

"The land, yes. The people?" Dan shrugged and started down the path, keeping her close to his side in case she slipped. "Most of the people can go to hell."

It was the lack of heat in his voice that told Carly he meant every word. "Don't you have any good memories of here?"

"Sure."

"Then why do you hate it so?"

"I don't hate it. I just don't like people who are more cruel than survival requires."

"Like the Senator?"

"He's one," Dan agreed. "Then there are the people who ragged on my mother for being the daughter of the town whore."

"And on you for being your mother's son."

"That stopped after I beat the crap out of some Sandovals."

She winced. "And you're still paying for it."

"Like I said-the smaller the town, the longer the memory. Too bad the people around here aren't as big as the land. But they aren't."

"Some of them are."

"Damned few. Not that the people here are worse than people anywhere else," he added. "They're simply no better than they have to be. And sometimes, well, sometimes that's just not good enough to get the job done."

He rapped on the front door.

A moment later, Melissa opened the door. Clearly she'd been waiting for them since she'd seen headlights coming up the long driveway. "Hello, Dan, Carly. Winifred said you'd be visiting. Something about wanting to talk to people, take pictures, and get the feeling of the ranch outdoors at night?"

"That's right," Carly said.

It had been as good an excuse as any she could think of to search the family graveyard and find out if the Senator's wild child had been buried there.

Melissa shrugged like the whole thing sounded like nonsense to her but it really wasn't her business. "Both of you are looking much better than I expected after talking to the sheriff."

Carly made a noncommittal sound and studied the other woman, trying to see Melissa as the granddaughter of the Senator. Fair hair artfully frosted to hide any gray. Eyes the right size and tilt to be Quintrell, but the wrong color. Long legs like the governor, long fingers. Like Dan.

Okay, stop right there, Carly told herself fiercely. Fingers are either long or short, fat or thin. That's four categories for all of humanity, which means a twenty-five percent chance that otherwise unrelated folks will have long fingers.

"We heard you were ill, too," Dan said.

"That will teach me to eat canapes," she said, patting a round hip. "I didn't need the calories anyway."

"So the sheriff still thinks it was the food?" Carly asked.

"That's what he said."

Before Carly could say anything more, Dan's arm tightened around her waist. She glanced at him. A slight negative motion of his head told her that he didn't want to upset Melissa.

Yet.

Carly smiled and said nothing. She agreed with Dan that an amiable Melissa was more useful than an irritated one.

"Come in, come in," Melissa said. "It's cold out there. Sometimes I wonder if winter will ever end."

A voice called from the back of the house.

"It's Dan Duran and Carly May," Melissa called out. "They're here to see Winifred."

Carly and Dan didn't look at each other. They'd clearly asked to see Melissa, too.

"That's my husband, Pete," Melissa explained. "The governor has him working overtime on the books. From what Josh said at Sylvia's wake, there's already considerable interest in the ranch."