Free Ashes and Memories by Deborah Cox

prove amusing. But I have a vision for this town, and I do not intend to let anything or anyone stand in my way.”
    “Are you threatening me, Mr. MacBride?” Her voice was steady but her heart was lodged in her throat.
    “Certainly not." Somehow the sincerity in his voice didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Please forgive me if I gave you that impression. I was merely stating a fact.”
    Emma gazed at him, mesmerized, transfixed by his erotic male power and the dark menace in his amber eyes.
     “You don’t intend to try and stand in my way, do you?” he asked, his voice a silken whisper. “What could you possibly hope to gain?”
    Instinct told her to leave this place, not just this room but this town, to go somewhere else, even if she had to leave everything she owned behind and take the next stagecoach out of town. But she wasn’t about to give up like her father had. She’d sacrificed too much, worked too damned hard to let a self-important dictator like Reece MacBride defeat her.
    Well, maybe she wasn’t ready to surrender, but she could at least maintain her dignity.
    Expelling the breath she’d been holding for the last several seconds, she backed away. Without a word, she turned and strode toward the door.
    “I had the undertaker put a marker on your father’s grave,” he said.
    Emma whirled around to find that he had taken a seat behind his crude pine desk. She read the disapproval in his eyes, and her chin went up in response.
    “I thought you would want to know,” he went on when she didn’t answer. “That should make it easier to find the grave when you visit.”
    Emma’s heart tightened. Reece MacBride was very good at using a person’s vulnerabilities against them. She’d have to watch her back. “Who said I was going to visit?”
     “He was your father,” Reece said, his mouth twisting in an expression of disgust. “How can you be --"
    “You know nothing about me or my father." She moved away from the door to advance on him. “You have no idea what it’s like to live from hand to mouth, to have all your hopes and dreams trampled.... The hardest decision you’ve ever had to make was which fancy white shirt to wear.”
    “Judge not, Miss Parker,” he said with a scowl. “You do not know me well enough to make that kind of statement.”
    “I know your kind.”
    He leaned back in his chair, regarding her through narrowed eyes. “Is that so? And just what has your vast experience taught you about men like me, Miss Parker?”
    “That you think your money can buy anything. You think you’re a little better than the rest of us.”
    “Please, go on,” he urged, his voice flat and toneless.
    “That’s your home, isn’t it?” she accused, her gaze focused on the painting on the wall. It depicted a tremendous white antebellum house with Greek columns all around. A verandah below and a balcony above encircled the palatial structure. She’d never seen anything so grand in all her life, not even among the wealthiest planters in Tennessee.
    “Was my home,” he corrected.
     “Just as I thought,” she said triumphantly, ignoring the spark of curiosity that made her want him to elaborate on that simple declaration. “Any man as arrogant and self-absorbed as you would have to come from some kind of royalty, and that’s just what you wealthy southern planters consider yourselves to be -- royalty. You live in your luxurious homes, looking down your noses at those you consider beneath you. And now that the war has destroyed your empire, you act like exiled nobility, waiting for the chance to reclaim your lost kingdom. What could you possibly know about suffering or --”
    “More than you can ever imagine, Miss Parker.”
    Emma recoiled from the fierce glint in his eyes. They glowed with a dreadful darkness the depths of which terrified her.
    “My father fought in a war started by men like you,” she pressed on. “He slept in filth and marched through mud and blood and killed men he