Free Wyoming Wildfire (Harlequin Historical) by Elizabeth Lane Page B

came to find her at the hotel where she worked. She saw me coming and stepped out into the street…and into the crossfire of a drunken gunfight. She died before she hit the ground.”
    “You saw it?” Jessie’s voice was a horrified whisper.
    Matt nodded. “She was all the family I had. All I’ve ever had.”
    “What about your father?” Jessie’s fork lay untouched next to the saucer of pie.
    “I never knew him. I was born on the wrong side of the blanket, as it’s so delicately put. Whenever I asked my mother about him, all she’d say was that he was a fine man, and that she’d tell me more when I was older. She never got the chance.”
    “So you don’t even know his name?”
    “It wouldn’t make any difference if I did. She never told me much, but I’ve always assumed he had a wife and children someplace else. A lot of men came to Texas to buy cattle in those days, and they tended to be lonely after the long ride.”
    “You’ve never tried to find your father or his family?”
    “No,” Matt lied, denying the forces that drew him like a magnet to the Tollivers. “Even if I knew who they were, why would they want to know me? I could ruin lives just by writing a letter or showing up on their doorstep.”
    So why, then, had he gone to so much trouble to investigate the Tollivers? Matt asked himself as he cut a forkful of Jessie’s pie and chewed it thoughtfully. Why had he spent hours poring through county records and old newspaper editions? Why had he gone so far as to hire a private investigator—a retired Pinkerton agent working out of Laramie—to look into the history of the family? Although he’d hired him two months ago, he had yet to hear anything from the ex-Pinkerton man, a distinguished, gray-haired gentleman named Hamilton Crawford. But in the meantime, Matt had unearthed the fact that Jacob Tolliver had purchased a thousand head of Texas longhorns and driven them north nine months before Sally Langtry gave birth to a son. It didn’t prove a thing, Matt knew. But if Jacob Tolliver wasn’t his father, then it had to be one hell of a coincidence.
    “After my mother died nobody wanted to take me in, so I was sent to an orphanage,” he said, thinking of that grim, gray place where laughter was considered a sin. “When I was sixteen I ran away and joined the Texas Rangers—I was a big boy, and I lied about my age. A few months later, they found out how young I was and booted me out. By then I’d learned to ride and shoot. I drifted for a few years before I found work as a town deputy in Winslow, Arizona. After that, it was Silver City, New Mexico, Dutchman’s Creek, Colorado, and now Wyoming. Who knows where I’ll end up next?”
    Matt took another forkful of pie. He’d never been one to talk about himself, but he’d just told this little chit his whole life story. What was the matter with him tonight? He felt as if he’d drunk too much whiskey, even though there wasn’t a jug in the place.
    “Haven’t you ever wanted to put down roots?” Her stunning eyes focused on him over the rim of her coffee cup. “Surely you must have had a few sweethearts here and there.”
    “A few.” More than a few, Matt thought. He liked the ladies and they tended to like him. But he’d never found one who could keep him from moving on. Oh, he’d known some lovely, willing girls. He couldn’t fault them. But how did a man make a home when he had no heritage to build on? Without the example of a father, how did a man learn the love, caring and sacrifice it took to be the head of a family? It didn’t seem right, asking a woman to share his life when he knew so little about his own beginnings.
    In all the years of his wandering, Matt had never found a place where he belonged or a woman who made him feel as if he’d finally come home.
    “Right tasty pie,” he said, scooping up the last forkful. “I’d say I earned it. For whatever it’s worth, you now know more about Matthew T. Langtry than