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  Linda Lael Miller has made the Western frontier her own special place, and never more so than in this heartwarming new series that brings four women west to share an inheritance—2,500 acres of timber and high-country grassland called Primrose Creek.

  In this wonderful new series, four cousins discover the dangers and the joys, the hardship and the beauty, of frontier life. And each, in her own way, finds a love that will last an eternity. Join with the McQuarry women in a special celebration of the love, courage, and family ties that made the West great.Four special women. Four extraordinary stories.

  THE WOMEN OF

  PRIMROSE CREEK

  BRIDGET

  CHRISTY

  SKYE

  MEGAN

  Praise for Linda Lael Miller’s bestselling series

  SPRINGWATER SEASONS

  “A DELIGHTFUL AND DELICIOUS MINISERIES. . . .Rachelwill charm you, enchant you, delight you, and quite simply hook you. . . .Mirandais a sensual marriage-of-convenience tale guaranteed to warm your heart all the way down to your toes. . . . The warmth that spreads throughJessicais captivating. . . . The gentle beauty of the tales and the delightful, warmhearted characters bring a slice of Americana straight onto readers’ ‘keeper’ shelves. Linda Lael Miller’s miniseries is a gift to treasure.”—Romantic Times

  “This hopeful tale is . . . infused with the sensuality that Miller is known for.”—Booklist

  “All the books in this collection have the Linda Lael Miller touch.”—Affaire de Coeur

  “Nobody brings the folksiness of the Old West to life better than Linda Lael Miller.”—BookPage

  “Another warm, tender story from the ever-so-talented pen of one of this genre’s all-time favorites.”—Rendezvous

  “Miller . . . create[s] a warm and cozy love story.”—Publishers Weekly

  Acclaim for Linda Lael Miller’s irresistible novels of love in the Wild West

  SPRINGWATER

  “Heartwarming. . . . Linda Lael Miller captures not only the ambiance of a small Western town, but the need for love, companionship, and kindness that is within all of us. . . .Springwateris what Americana romance is all about.”—Romantic Times

  “A heartwarming tale with adorable and endearing characters.”—Rendezvous

  A SPRINGWATER CHRISTMAS

  “A tender and beautiful story. . . . Christmas is the perfect time of year to return to Springwater Station and the unforgettable characters we’ve come to know and love. . . . Linda Lael Miller has once more given us a gift of love.”—Romantic Times

  THE VOW

  “The Wild West comes alive through the loving touch of Linda Lael Miller’s gifted words. . . . Breathtaking. . . . A romantic masterpiece. This one is a keeper you’ll want to take down and read again and again.”—Rendezvous

  “A beautiful tale of love lost and regained. . . . A magical Western romance . . . that would be a masterpiece in any era.”—Amazon.com

  Books by Linda Lael Miller

  Banner O’Brien

  Corbin’s Fancy

  Memory’s Embrace

  My Darling Melissa

  AngelfireDesire and Destiny

  Fletcher’s Woman

  Lauralee

  Moonfire

  Wanton Angel

  Willow

  Princess Annie

  The Legacy

  Taming Charlotte

  Yankee Wife

  Daniel’s Bride

  Lily and the Major

  Emma and the Outlaw

  Caroline and the Raider

  Pirates

  Knights

  My Outlaw

  The Vow

  Two Brothers

  Springwater

  Springwater Season series:

  Rachel

  Savannah

  Miranda

  Jessica A Springwater Christmas

  One Wish

  The Women of Primrose Creek series:

  Bridget

  Christy

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and ncidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  Copyright © 2000 by Linda Lael Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-4827-7

  ISBN-10: 0-7434-4827-8

  First Sonnet Books printing June 2000

  SONNET BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  For Ramona Stratton, with love.

  From here out, it’s all good.

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Prologue

  Fort Grant, Nevada

  1868

  With no small amount of trepidation, Christy McQuarry peered through the late Mrs. Royd’s limp lace curtains, assessing the man sent to fetch them home to Primrose Creek. It had been alarming enough, during the long, dull winter passed at Fort Grant, to consider putting herself, Caney, and especially Megan, her younger sister, in the charge of some mere passerby for the remainder of the journey. A grizzled old prospector, for example, or one of the seedy-looking scouts who came and went on occasion, foul-smelling and full of horrendous tales involving Indians and outlaws. For some indefinable reason, she found this particular man, fair-haired and blue-eyed, insolently handsome in his ordinary but obviously clean clothes and well-worn hat, almost equally disturbing. He rode a splendid cocoa-brown stallion with a pale mane and tail, and a .45 caliber pistol rested low and easy on his left hip, seemingly as much a part of him as a finger or a foot.

  “I don’t like him,” she confided to Caney Blue, the tall and angular black woman who had worked on the McQuarry farm, back in Virginia, for as long as Christy’s memory reached. Which, since she was nearly twenty, was a considerable distance. “He’s too handsome. Too sure of himself.”

  Caney was smiling her broad and luminous smile, watching as the man dismounted and offered a hand and a grin to the aging army officer who had gone out to greet him. “That so?” she said, her dark eyes following the man as he spoke with the colonel in the street just beyond the window of the modest parlor. There was precisely one house at Fort Grant, if indeed such a rustic structure could be described as a house, and it belonged to the recently widowed commander of the installation, Colonel Webley Royd, who had kindly given the place over to the women upon their arrival the previous October with the first flurries of snow. “Well, I think he’s right purty. And I like a man who thinks well of himself.”

  A star-shaped badge glinted on the front of the visitor’s shirt, and Christy clamped her back teeth together for a moment, without quite knowing why a stranger should affect her so. She might have been struck by a runaway freight car, so great and so confounding was the impact of merely seeing him. What would it be like to actually meet him? To travel in his company?

  “Colonel Royd told me his name is Zachary Shaw,” Megan put in eagerly, from her post on the other side of the window. Being just sixteen, she could not be expected, Christy supposed, to exhibit any real degree of good judgment. She had a headful of dreams, Megan did, and at the same time one of the finest minds Christy had ever encountered. She meant to see that her sister didn’t waste that gift by settling for a house and a husband and a half dozen babies, which she feared Megan was wont
to do. “He’s a U.S. Marshal.”

  He’s trouble, Christy thought to herself. At just that moment, as if to confirm this opinion, Marshal Zachary Shaw seemed to sense her perusal; his gaze met and captured hers through the gauzy veil of lace. Held it fast.

  Infuriated, and stirred in a way that was not entirely proper, Christy glared at him, in hopes of hiding the fact that she could not look away until he chose to release her.

  He grinned and tugged at the brim of his shapeless hat, and Christy felt a sudden, primitive sort of heat pounding in all her pulses, throbbing in her face.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Caney remarked in a murmur. Caney could be damnably perceptive at times.

  Christy somehow gathered the strength to step back from the window and whirl away on one heel. “He won’t do,” she blustered, pacing at the edge of a hand-hooked rug. “He simply won’t do. He’s arrogant, and almost certainly a rascal. We’ll have to find someone else to escort us. Or make the trip on our own.”

  Megan turned to stare at her sister, appalled. With her auburn hair, flawless skin, and Irish-green eyes, Megan was a stunning beauty, though, despite her brilliance, a naive child in so many ways. From the day they left Virginia for the first time, amid the scandal of their parents’ acrimonious divorce, life had consisted of one loss, one humiliation, one defeat after another, but things were going to be different from here on, if Christy had any say in the matter. And she had plenty.

  “Christy!” Megan marveled. “You can’t be serious— it’s miles and miles to Primrose Creek, and there are wild animals, and road agents, and renegade Indians—”

  Caney was already shaking her head. “You’ve done gone fool-headed if you think we’re goin’ up into them mountains on our own,” she vowed. During the trip west, she’d often allowed Christy to help her tend the sick and injured, and once she’d even helped to deliver a baby. Caney had told Christy she had a gift for healing, but most of the time—like now—the woman treated her as if she were still a child.

  Christy didn’t relish the thought of another perilous journey herself, but pride usually compelled her to stand her ground in the face of any opposition, and that warm spring afternoon was no exception. “Good heavens,” she said in a hissing whisper, “we traveled all the way from Virginia, didn’t we?”

  “We was with a wagon train,” Caney pointed out, just as impatiently.

  Megan’s eyes were enormous with memories of the voyage, many of which were unpleasant ones. They’d been through so much in the past few years, first being dragged away from the family to England, then being sent back again over tempestuous seas, only to reach Virginia and find that their grandfather, Gideon McQuarry, had died, as had both their father and uncle, and the farm was gone forever. They were essentially penniless now, she and Megan, and the tract of land at Primrose Creek, an inheritance from Granddaddy, to be shared equally with their cousins, Bridget and Skye, represented their best hope of gaining a foothold.

  “He looks strong,” Megan said at last. Hopefully. “Marshal Shaw, I mean.”

  “Ain’t that the truth of it,” Caney commented, still watching him through the window. “Knows how to take care of himself, a body can see that right off.”

  “And us, too,” Megan pressed.

  Christy let out a long sigh. She would put aside her personal misgivings—hadn’t she done that often enough to become expert at it?—and go along with what Megan and Caney wanted. “All right,” she breathed. “All right. We’ll travel with the marshal.” But no good will come of it, she added, to herself.

  Colonel Royd brought the lawman to supper that evening, and they all sat down to one of Caney’s legendary fried chicken dinners. Although she tried not to fidget, Christy was unsettled throughout the meal, and her appetite, usually unshakable, was nonexistent. Little wonder; she was seated directly across from the marshal, by some contrivance of Caney’s, and when he looked at her with those bright blue eyes, she felt as though her deepest secrets were written on her skin. Worse, he had taken notice of her discomfiture, and—just imagine —it made him smile a very small, very private, twitch-at-the-corner type of smile.

  “Have you lived at Primrose Creek long, Mr. Shaw?” she asked, her hands knotted in her lap, just to show him he hadn’t had any affect whatsoever upon her. Which, of course, he had.

  He lifted one finely made shoulder in a semblance of a shrug. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Fact is, I was just passing through, and I got into a poker game over at the Silver Spike. I lost, as it happens.”

  “You lost?” Christy echoed, mystified, and immediately wished she’d held her tongue. Odd, how this man perturbed her. If there was one thing Christy prided herself on, it was her ability to retain her emotional balance, yet he made her feel as though she were dancing on a rolling log in the middle of a raging river. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  Again, that grin, so boyish and yet so grown-up. So certain of himself and his ability to make his way in the world. “No, ma’am,” he said easily. “I don’t reckon you would.” He paused, took a breath and another of Caney’s biscuits. His third, Christy noted. “My old friend Sam Flynn was wearing this badge then. He wanted to head down to Virginia City and try his luck in the mines for a year or so, but he couldn’t find anybody willing to serve out his term. He suckered me into a poker game, and, well, like I said, I lost. Fact is, I’m not exactly sure he didn’t stack the deck.”

  The colonel gave his booming laugh. He was a pleasant, somewhat corpulent man, fond of Caney’s cooking. Indeed, he’d tried to persuade her to stay and keep house for him there at Fort Grant, and certainly Christy couldn’t have blamed the woman if she’d agreed, considering that the position offered a salary along with room and board. All she and Megan had to offer was their friendship.

  “That would be like Sam,” Royd said, serving himself another helping of mashed potatoes. “If I were you, Shaw, I wouldn’t look for him to come back— especially if he strikes it rich in the Comstock.”

  Mr. Shaw gave a rueful sigh. “If he doesn’t show up when he’s supposed to,” he said, “I might just have to hunt him down and shoot him.”

  A brief silence descended, while everyone else at the table, Christy suspected, tried to decide whether or not he was serious. His expression, while affable enough and certainly polite, gave nothing away.

  1Then the colonel laughed again, thunderously, all but shaking the crockery on the table. Clearly, he thought the marshal was joking. Caney chuckled, a bit belatedly, and Megan twittered a little, her gaze resting adoringly upon Zachary Shaw.

  Christy, however, was not amused, for it seemed to her that the marshal had spoken in all seriousness. “When will we set out for Primrose Creek?” she asked, without smiling.

  “Dawn,” Mr. Shaw answered. He wasn’t smiling, either. It seemed to Christy in that moment that they understood each other, for good or for ill. “I’ll want to load the wagon tonight. Everything is packed, I assume?”

  “Such as it is,” Caney put in, while Christy was strangling on a civil answer of her own.

  “Good,” he said, still watching Christy. His gaze had not strayed from her face, she realized, in some moments. “It’s a hard trip, and it’s dangerous. We’ll be two days on the road, at the least. I’m in charge until we get there, and I’ll thank everybody to remember that.”

  There was another silence, during which Christy tried to stare him down, let him know who was boss. In the end, though, it was she who looked away.

  Zachary passed the night in the soldiers’ barracks and soon found that he was the envy of every man there, just because he was squiring the women back up the mountain to Primrose Creek.

  Lying on his back on a cot, his hands cupped behind his head as he settled in to sleep, he listened.

  “That dark-haired one, Miss Christy,” ventured one soldier, after the last lamp was extinguished, “she’s pretty as a china doll. Mean, though.”

  Zachary felt a tightening in
his gut, though he grinned into the darkness. “She’s got the temperament of a wet cat, all right,” he allowed.

  Another voice piped up. “Ain’t like we didn’t try to court her, every last one of us. She’s too fancy for the likes of us, though—made that right plain. In fact, she as good as told Jim Toth to his face that there’s nobody here to suit her. Didn’t she, Jim?”

  “Yup,” someone, probably Jim, replied mournfully. “She comes from money and property. All you got to do is look at her to know that. Said she’s got to think of her future, and her sister’s.”

  Zachary’s smile faded, though he couldn’t have said why he took to feeling gloomy all of a sudden. It wasn’t as if he gave a damn about Christy McQuarry.

  Chapter 1

  “There it is,” the marshal said, with obvious relief, doffing his hat to indicate a meandering stream, winking with silvery patches of sunlight as it flowed across the valley tucked amid the peaks of the High Sierras. Trees bristled on all sides, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir mostly, so dense that they appeared more blue than green, though there were splashes of aspen and maple, oak and cottonwood here and there. “That’s Primrose Creek. The town’s over yonder, about two miles southwest of here.”

  Christy stood in her stirrups and drew in a sharp breath. The air was soft with the promise of a warm summer, and the view was so spectacular that it made her heart catch and brought the sting of tears to her eyes.