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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 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.

  THEWOMEN OF

  PRIMROSECREEK

  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-ofconvenience 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

  My Darling Melissa

  Angelfire

  Desire 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

  Embrace Knights

  My Outlaw

  The Vow

  Two Brothers

  Springwater

  Springwater Seasons series:

  Rachel

  Savannah

  Miranda

  Jessica

  A Springwater Christmas

  One Wish

  The Women of Primrose Creek series:

  Bridget

  Christy

  Skye

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents 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.

  AnOriginalPublication 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-10: 0-7434-4828-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-4828-4

  First Sonnet Books printing July 2000

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

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  In memory of Stevie Jo Wiley Clark.

  If there are horses in heaven,

  and surely there must be,

  then you are racing the wind.

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Prologue

  Primrose Creek, Nevada

  Fall 1868

  T he first strains of “Lorena” swelled from Malcolm Hicks’s fiddle like smoke from the charred hopes of six hundred thousand dead men, Union and Confederate alike, and all those who had watched in vain for their return. All else was quiet, there in the newly built Community Hall, with its wooden floor, sanded smooth and varnished to lend spring to the reels and glide to the waltzes. The dancers stood in respectful silence, some with tears in their eyes. A few kept a hand resting on their heart, but one or two had set their jaws, like mules balking on a lead line.

  Jake Vigil was among the latter. When he was just seventeen, he’d made his way west from Missouri, on his own, and so considered himself neither Yank nor Rebel. The way he figured, it was a waste looking backward, most times, when the present and the future were all that mattered, but he also knew that sometimes a person didn’t have a choice.

  Just as he began edging toward the double doors of the hall, which stood open to an October night rimed in frost, his gaze snagged on Christy McQuarry Shaw, the woman who would have been his wife if she hadn’t changed her mind at the altar a year before. Losing her that way, with pretty much the whole town looking on, had probably been the single greatest humiliation of his life, but now, having gotten some perspective on the matter, he knew that the marriage would have been a mistake for both of them.

  Tonight, swollen with her first child and standing close to her husband, Zachary Shaw, their arms linked, Christy fairly shimmered with happiness. Jake smiled, perhaps a little sadly, just as the last notes of Malcolm’s tune drifted away into the night, and turned to make his escape.

  Almost immediately, he collided with a woman he had to strain to recognize, so different was she without her customary garb of trousers, hat, and shirt. Something leaped inside him right away when their eyes met. Hers were brown, alight with mischief and intelligence. Her hair was the color of polished mahogany and done up somehow at the back of her head, all loose and soft and shiny.

  Skye McQuarry.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, grasping her shoulders to steady her. “I didn’t mean—”

  She smiled, and Jake let his hands drop to his sides, stung in some sweet, fundamental way, and retreated a step. “I know you didn’t,” she said, and Jake would have sworn the back of his neck was sweating.

  He was still stunned and took her in again, in one dizzying visual gasp. She was delectable, with her womanly figure and perfect skin, and there was something downrig
ht magical in the way she smiled, sort of secret-like, as though she might be casting a spell that could never be broken.

  Her dress was green, and the skirts rustled, even though she was standing still. Her collarbones showed, and part of her shoulders—those shoulders he had presumed to touch. Beyond all that lay the undiscovered landscape of her nature, and he sensed the almost infinite range of it, knew that merely getting to know her would be the work of a lifetime, an adventure filled with mystery and wonder, pleasure and pain.

  He stepped back again, remembering Christy. Remembering Amanda.

  “You’re Bridget Qualtrough’s kid sister,” he said, that being the first coherent remark that came to his mind, and immediately felt stupid.

  She laughed, glancing back over her shoulder once, as if pursued. The sound of her nervous joy made the pit of Jake’s gut quiver in a way that Malcolm’s skill with the fiddle never could have done. “I’m Bridget Qualtrough’s sister, indeed. And I have a name of my own. It’s Skye.” She looked behind her again, and Jake caught sight of a scowling young soldier, watching both of them with narrowed eyes.

  He wouldn’t have believed the change in the girl if he hadn’t been a witness to it himself. The Skye McQuarry he recalled was a quiet, shy lass, usually keeping her face hidden under the brim of an old hat. How could that little hoyden have transformed herself into this almost mythically beautiful young woman in the space of a few months? Well, however it had happened, he hadn’t been the only one to take notice. The soldier—a corporal, he thought—was starting toward them.

  Jake felt a surge of protective fury even before Skye spoke again, this time in a rather urgent whisper. “Please,” she said. “Dance with me. Now.” The dim light of the lanterns flickered in her hair, danced in her eyes, threw shadows across her breasts. He took her into his arms and began to imagine things no gentleman should.

  He swallowed, flushed. “Is that man bothering you?” he asked.

  Her smile was dazzling. Spring sunshine following a dark winter. “Not anymore,” she said.

  Jake shook his head once, dizzy. They were moving awkwardly; he supposed it could have been called dancing.

  “I reckon I ought to get back to the mill,” he said when he saw that the corporal had been deflected, at least for the time being.

  She clung to his hand and the back of his upper arm. “You mustn’t leave me just yet,” she enjoined with a sort of cheerful desperation. “Corporal Shelby is a persistent man. He’ll be back, pestering me again, if he sees you leave.”

  Her brotherin-law, Trace Qualtrough, certainly could have protected her adequately, as could Shaw, her cousin by marriage. Jake wondered briefly why she had turned to him instead, decided he was flattered, and put the question out of his mind. “All right,” he said lamely, for he was no hand with women, and he never had been.

  He reminded himself, in a sort of last-ditch effort, that the other three members of that troublesome family were lookers, like Skye, infamous for their stubbornness and pride and all but impossible to manage. While Jake had put his disappointment over losing Christy behind him—for the most part, anyhow—and bore no grudges, he was about as inclined to have truck with another McQuarry female as a snakebitten man would be to hand-feed a rattler. It worried him no little bit, the way this woman had set things to stirring inside him all of a sudden.

  She’d noticed his underlying discomfort with the situation, that was plain by the pink in her cheeks, but she didn’t show him any quarter. That, too, was a McQuarry trait. No, she simply squared those fine shoulders and stood her ground, figuratively speaking. “We have something in common, Mr. Vigil,” she said as Malcolm began to fiddle up a lively melody, accompanied now by a prospector with a washboard and a lumberjack blowing into an empty jug. “Besides knowing Christy, I mean. I’ve been tracking that wild bay stallion up in the hills, and Trace tells me you have, too. Well, you might as well know—it’s only fair and honorable to tell you—that I plan on getting to him first.”

  Jake sighed. The idea of holding this particular woman in his arms, even for an innocent purpose, muddled his reason and filled him with a combination of anticipation and foreboding. He heard himself chuckle. “You’re after the bay?” he marveled. “A little snippet of a thing like you? Why, you’ll get yourself killed.”

  Her cheeks flamed, and her chin went up a notch. She stiffened a little, there in his arms, and his left hand went of its own accord to rest upon the small of her back, while the fingers of his right closed more tightly around hers. “I can ride as well as anybody in the state of Nevada,” she said. “Man or woman, sidesaddle or astride.”

  “Well, you ought to take up some womanly pursuits,” he advised. “Maybe sewing—cooking—” His voice fell away. He’d forgotten, just for a moment, that Skye was, after all, a McQuarry.

  He and Skye waltzed, while everyone else in the hall kicked up their heels in a lively square dance. Her eyes flashed as she looked up at him, not just with fury but with a bridled passion that roused still more strong and improper yearnings. “It just so happens,” she said with a chill, “that I can sew and cook. I know how to tend children, too—I’ve been helping to raise my nephew, Noah, ever since he was born. Therefore, Mr. Vigil, you needn’t worry yourself with regards to my aptitude for ‘womanly pursuits.’ ”

  He stared at her, dumbfounded. She’d always been just a kid to him, Bridget’s sister, Christy’s cousin. He couldn’t think why he should care whether she was angry with him or not—he hadn’t approached her this fine autumn evening, after all—but care he did, and it terrified him.

  She heaved a sigh worthy of a stage actress. “There,” she said, after scanning the milling crowd. “Corporal Shelby has left. I won’t keep you any longer.”

  He didn’t want to let her go. “Miss McQuarry?”

  “What is it?” she asked, about to turn away.

  “Stay away from that stallion.”

  Up went the chin. “Kindly do not order me about, Mr. Vigil,” she said. “For one thing, it’s rude. For another, it’s a complete waste of time.” With that, she turned on one delicate heel and swept away, into the flurry of calico and sateen, denim and homespun.

  As Jake watched her go, it struck him that there must have been twenty men in that hall, apart from the pesky corporal, who would have given as many acres and a team of good horses for the privilege of sharing just one dance with such a woman. She had male kinfolk to look out for her. Why had she sought refuge with him, of all people?

  While he was struggling with that question, another tune began, and he made for the doorway, lost in thought. All the laws of time and space and substance seemed to have been suspended; some dark and secret part of him began to open to the light. The process was painful, like the thawing of a frozen limb.

  He was clear outside before he remembered her land, six-hundred-odd acres of prime timber and grassland, on the southwest bank of Primrose Creek. Skye, Bridget, Christy, and her sister, Megan, had inherited the large plot from their paternal grandfather, each one given an equal share. He nearly turned and went back.

  He went over his contract with the railroad, too, as he walked aimlessly toward the mill, for the subject was never far from his mind, night or day. The deal was pivotal, and he’d staked everything he had on fulfilling it. Through a streak of hard luck, he’d lost a lot of his own timber to the random fires that plagued the area in the late summer, and much of the milling equipment he’d borrowed money to buy had either broken down or was yet to be delivered from San Francisco. It soured things, more than a little, to recall that he was a man with pressing problems—somehow, holding Skye McQuarry, he’d forgotten that for a little while, and in that blessed interval, he’d simply been a man.

  Chapter

  1

  Primrose Creek, Nevada

  Spring 1869

  She stood facing him, hands on her hips, elbows jutting, feet firmly planted, as though to sprout roots and become a part of the landscape, like th
e giant pine trees around them. Her brown eyes flashed beneath the limp brim of that silly leather hat of hers, and tendrils of dark hair, its considerable length clasped at her nape with a gewgaw of some sort, danced against her smooth cheeks. In that moment, for all that she stood barely taller than his collarbone, Skye McQuarry seemed every bit as intractable to Jake Vigil as the Sierras themselves.

  The last time they’d met, months before at a dance in town, she’d been a mite more gracious. Now, in her unwelcoming presence, Jake, well over six feet and brawny after years of swinging axes and working one end of a cross-cut saw fourteen hours a day, felt strangely like a schoolboy, hauled up in front of the class for some misdeed. It made him furious; he, too, set his feet, and he leaned in until their noses were only inches apart. He would have backed off if he hadn’t been desperate, and never gone near her again, but there it was. He was fresh out of choices, or soon would be.

  “Now, you listen to me, Miss McQuarry,” he rasped, putting just the slightest emphasis on McQuarry, since the name alone, to him at least, conveyed volumes about ornery females. “I made you a reasonable offer. If you’re holding out for more just because of that little bit of gold you’ve been panning out of the creek, you’re making a foolish mistake.”

  Skye tilted her chin upward and held her ground. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and though she was pretty as a primrose, she showed no signs of wilting, either from the unusually hot May sunshine or from the heat of his temper. “And if you think you’re going to strip my land of timber—for any price— you are the one who’s mistaken!” Amazingly, she stopped for a breath. “These trees haven’t stood here for hundreds of years, Mr. Vigil, just so you can come along and whittle them to slivers for fancy houses and railroad ties and scatter the very dust of their bones across the floors of saloons—”

  Jake was at the far reaches of his patience. He’d already explained to this hardheaded little hoyden that the land was choked with Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, among other species, that thinning them would merely leave room for the others to thrive. He closed his eyes and searched his thoughts for an argument he hadn’t already raised.