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stay too long.”
    â€œI’ll see that you get the best dinner in this town,” Holt said.
    â€œI’ll be right here to eat it,” Gabe quipped. Then hesobered, and a plea took shape in his proud dark eyes. “Thanks for making the ride, Holt.”
    Holt swallowed, nodded. Gabe reached through the bars, and the two men clasped hands, Indian style.
    There was no need to say anything more.

CHAPTER 3
    â€œL ORELEI,” J UDGE F ELLOWS SAID, leaning forward in the chair behind the desk in his study, “be reasonable. I’ve spent a fortune on this wedding. There are guests in every hotel room in town. The food can’t be sent back. And Creighton is a good man—he can’t be blamed for wanting to make the most of his last hours of freedom.”
    Lorelei flushed with indignation. It was like her father to take Creighton Bannings’s part, not to mention bemoaning the money he’d spent to make his daughter’s ceremony the grandest spectacle Texas had ever seen. “I will not marry that reprehensible scoundrel,” she said flatly. “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not if all the angels in heaven come down and beg me to forgive and forget!”
    The judge sighed a martyr’s sigh, but his eyes were canny, taking her measure. Creighton Bannings was a lawyer, and a wealthy man in his own right. He had powerful connections in Austin, as well as Washington. He was, in short, the proverbial good catch—and a fish her father would not willingly let off the hook.
    â€œMust I remind you, my dear, that you’ll be thirty next month? You’re a beautiful woman, and you have agood mind, but you’ve been on the shelf for a good long while, and with your disposition…”
    Lorelei, leaning against the thick door of the study, stiffened. Glancing at her reflection in the glass of the tall gun cabinet behind her father’s desk, she took a distracted inventory. Dark hair, upswept. A long neck. Blue eyes, high cheekbones, a slender but womanly figure. Yes, she supposed she could be called beautiful, but the knowledge gave her no satisfaction. It hadn’t been enough to keep her fiancé from straying, had it?
    â€œWhat’s wrong with my disposition?” she demanded, after relaxing her clenched jaw by force of will.
    The judge arched his bushy white eyebrows, ran a hand over his balding pate. “Please, Lorelei,” he said, with a mild note of disdain. “Do you think I haven’t heard that you burned your wedding dress—which cost plenty, mind you, coming all the way from that fancy place in Dallas like it did—in front of the whole city of San Antonio? Was that the act of a sensible, gracious, sweet-tempered woman?”
    â€œIt was the act,” Lorelei said pointedly, “of a woman who just found her intended husband in bed with a housemaid on her wedding day!”
    â€œI’m sure Creighton could explain everything to your satisfaction, if you would only give him the chance.”
    Lorelei rolled her eyes. “What excuse could he possibly give? I saw him with another woman!”
    The judge tried again, saturating his words with saintly patience. “A man of Creighton’s sophistication—”
    â€œTo hell with sophistication!” Lorelei burst out. “What about loyalty, Father? What about common decency? How can you expect me to bind myself to a man who would betray me so brazenly on our wedding day—or any other?”
    Her father sat back in his chair, tenting his chubby fingers under his chin. She’d seen that expression on his face a hundred times—in a courtroom, it meant a death sentence was about to be handed down. “Do you know what I think, Lorelei? I think you want to be a spinster. How many suitors have you rejected in the last ten years?”
    Sudden tears throbbed behind Lorelei’s eyes, but she would not shed them. Not in her father’s presence.