To Love and Cherish

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

S
helby Kane packed her suitcase with a feeling of impending doom. A week on a ranch the size of Skylance would have delighted most girls, but she couldn't feel any enthusiasm for another confrontation with Kingston Brannt. The last one had caused her to leave the Texas ranch in tears in the middle of the night.

She wished she'd never agreed to
go to Branntville with Danny for a week's vacation. It had been one of those spur-of-the-moment decisions. They were enjoying a night at a new San Antonio disco bar when Danny grinned at her and said, “Come home with me on your vacation. Mom and Dad would be delighted. You know how they dote on you.”

That much was true. Kate and Jim Brannt had welcomed Shelby the first time she set foot on Skylance, and the affection they had for her had grown over the years. It was King who made such infrequent visits an ordeal. She shivered at just the memory of that hard, dark face with its jutting brow and piercing dark eyes. He was as hard as the country he ranched, as tough and unyielding as saddle leather. And he hated “city ladies.” If Shelby had been a working girl, or somebody's homely cousin, he might have been kinder. But she had an
elfin face and brown velvet eyes and short, straight hair the color of black diamonds, and she earned her living as a model. Not that she needed to work. Her mother was a famous actress, internationally known. Shelby could have had anything she wanted if she'd been less proud. A little flattery and pleading would have gotten her anything she wanted from Maria Kane. But what Shelby wanted most was independence. She wanted to make her own way, and she'd done it, to her mother's chagrin. But King didn't know how hard Shelby had to fight to gain her independence, and he didn't care. As far as he was concerned, Shelby was purely decorative; unfit for ranch life, for anything but the life of a spoiled society brat.

The door to her bedroom burst open suddenly, startling her, and her roommate Edie Jackson bounced in like a red-headed ball of lightning.

“You're not going back to Skylance again!” she exclaimed.

“You've seen Danny, I suppose,” Shelby sighed.

“Well, I do work for him,” Edie reminded her with a smile. “Anyway, is it true?”

“Just for my vacation,” Shelby admitted, as she stuffed another pair of tailored jeans into her suitcase. “If you can call five days a vacation, and I was really lucky to get that many. I'm modeling Jomar's fall collection show in two weeks; just one of many lucky girls,” she teased.

“Of which you're tops, and they know it,” Edie said kindly. “Is King going to be at the ranch?”

Shelby shuddered. “I don't know.”

Edie looked worried. She plopped down on the scarlet bedspread beside the suitcase with a frown. “Oh, Shelby, don't go back,” she pleaded.
“Not after what that man did to you last time. He'll just make it unbearable for you.”

“Maybe it will be better this time,” Shelby said in her soft, husky voice.

“That's what you said last time,” her friend reminded her. “And it wasn't. There's something about you that makes a madman of Kingston Brannt. Danny said as much himself last time. He thinks it's that you remind King of a girl who threw him over years ago.”

“I'll be okay,” Shelby said with a smile, mentally hoping she was right. She closed the suitcase and locked it.

“Will you do something for me?” Edie asked. “If it gets too rough, will you call me this time instead of leaving the house in the middle of the night and walking the two miles to town to catch a bus? Will you please pick up the phone and call me?”

The memory of that midnight walk turned Shelby's high-cheekboned face a delicate pink. King had gone crazy, Danny told her later, when he discovered her room empty. Which was nothing to the explosion that was still echoing in her mind when he found out what she'd done. He'd called her at work, frightening one of the other models to death when she answered the phone, and spent five minutes raking her over the coals for leaving Skylance without telling anyone. What if you'd been picked up by some drunk? he'd raged at her. She meant to tell him that even that would have been preferable to another day in his home putting up with his temper and his intolerance and his insults. But she'd only listened. And then gently, quietly, she'd put the receiver down with King's voice still roaring from the other end of the line. He hadn't called back, and she hadn't
seen him since. That was six months ago. And now she was walking right back into the tiger's lair again, voluntarily. She sighed. Maybe insanity did run in her family after all.

“Are you going to marry Danny?” Edie probed gently.

“No,” Shelby said with a smile. “I'm terribly fond of him, and we have lots of fun together, but I feel toward him more like a sister would, and I think he knows it. Marriage needs to be more than simple affection.”

Edie sighed. “You could do worse than an up and coming young lawyer with a filthy rich family.”

“I suppose. But that's not what I want. I'm not a social animal,” she added, cringing a little when she remembered her childhood. It seemed to consist of one endless round of cocktail parties and laughter and drunk men and “uncles” who slept
in. Her mother had married four times already, and was supposedly about to divorce Brad—her latest—for someone else. Shelby felt sorry for Brad. He was the best of the lot, and he genuinely loved Maria Kane. But whatever Maria felt, her only child wasn't privileged to know. Maria only managed a card every Christmas, or some indifferent kind of expensive gift on Shelby's birthday. Once in a great while, when she was depressed over some role or another, she'd call to cry on Shelby's shoulder. But she never called out of affection, or out of love. Those emotions weren't part of Maria's repertoire.

“Hear, hear,” Edie glowered. “I can't even get you to go with me to a party.”

“Especially when you're trying to play matchmaker,” Shelby laughed.

“You're the strangest woman I
know,” the older woman sighed. “Shelby, you're twenty-one. Isn't it time you hung up those archaic ideas of yours and lived a little?”

“No,” Shelby said quietly. “I'm not the swinging type. When and if the right man ever comes along, I want something permanent, not a loose arrangement that depends on nothing but desire to keep it alive. I like children, you know.”

Edie shook her head. “You just won't get involved with anyone, though. Are you afraid of men?” she teased.

“Terrified,” she kidded, but it was no joke. She really was afraid of anything binding. Loving made you vulnerable. She wasn't ever going to be vulnerable.

“You will call me?” Edie pleaded, and the concern was in her whole look.

Shelby touched her friend's arm lightly. “I will. Take care.”

“I always do. You take care, my friend,” Edie told her. “Kingston Brannt eats little girls for breakfast.”

“I'll give him heartburn,” Shelby laughed.

 

Edie had already gone back to the office when Danny Brannt came by to pick Shelby up. He grinned at her as she opened the door, taking in the amber slacks and matching loose knit top that complimented her olive complexion and her dark hair and eyes.

“Pretty as a picture,” he commented. “Why don't you go into modeling for a living?”

“I'm too fat,” she said, tongue-in-cheek, and they both laughed.

Danny Brannt had a sense of humor, something Shelby couldn't credit King with. King almost never smiled. He took life seriously, som
berly, and his was wrapped up in cattle and oil. Danny never stopped smiling, and while he enjoyed the legal profession, he never took it, or life, too seriously. Like Shelby, he didn't have to work. His father and King would have given him any job he wanted in the family's mammoth holdings. But Danny was young and independent and he liked law. He did a lot of free counseling, working in a legal aid society and he was a crusader for equal rights. Shelby admired that facet of his personality. She believed in causes, too, and she'd been known to march in rallies if she believed strongly enough. Gentle she might be, but she had enough spirit to stand up and be counted.

There were physical dissimilarities between Danny and his older brother, too. Danny was shorter, stockier, and six years younger than King. His hair was a light brown, his eyes green like
his mother's. He didn't have King's dark complexion and features. It was like the difference between night and day.

“What are you thinking about so hard?” Danny asked, lifting her suitcase while she turned out the lights in the apartment and closed and locked the door behind them.

“How different you are from King,” she said quietly.

The grin faded. He put her in the sporty green Jaguar and got in beside her. “I'm sorry you two don't get along,” he said gently. “But King's going to be away on business. You won't see him.”

She touched his sleeve, surprising a strange look in his eyes. “Danny, don't let me cause friction between you and your brother.”

“You won't,” he replied. He smiled. “King and I are a team, Shelby. I'd do anything for him, and
it's mutual. But he has this…thing about city women. I'm sorry he's taking past hurts out on you. I never thought he'd be like that.”

He didn't know the half, she thought miserably; and she was glad she'd never told him the truth about that night she left the ranch. She turned in the seat to face him as the sports car ate up the miles out of San Antonio, heading toward Branntville. “He doesn't seem the kind of man to let anyone hurt him,” she probed gently.

“A woman can get next to the hardest heart, didn't you know?” he laughed. “King's not invincible, and he wasn't immune to Sandy. She left him for an insurance salesman. I think that hurt most of all; that the guy wasn't even rich.”

“Was it a long time ago?”

“Five years or more. King was always hard, but that made him like
steel. Even now, he doesn't date anyone regularly, except Janice Edson, and he's not serious about her. It's a form of self-protection, I imagine, that he won't commit himself again. He doesn't want to let anyone get close.”

She sighed. “I know how that feels. But I wish he wouldn't take it out on me,” she said with a smile. “He's rough on my nerves.”

“Fight back, Shelby,” he advised gently. “He respects spirit; he can't take it when people knuckle under. It makes him lose his temper.”

“I'm not that much of a fighter. I never have been.”

“No,” he agreed. “You're a gentle little fawn, and that's probably the whole trouble. Men want to protect you, little one. Even men like King. That must rankle like hell, as much as he despises women.”

“I don't understand.”

“I know. But I do,” he chuckled.

“Danny?” she puzzled.

“Let's tell the folks we're getting married,” he said unexpectedly.

Her eyes dilated wildly. “What?” she burst out.

“Oh, not for real,” he said comfortingly. “For a lark. If King thinks you're going to be one of the family, he'll stop grinding his heel into you. Think of it as armour, Shelby,” he told her. “Protection.”

“I'm not sure…My gosh, Danny, what would your parents think?”

“That I was finally showing some intelligence,” he replied. “They stay on me all the time about getting married. They know King isn't going to, and they're getting older every day. They want grandchildren,” he said, almost strangling on the word.

“Oh, I begin to see the light,” she said, nodding. “You're the one who needs protection.”

“Both of us,” he amended. He looked absolutely hunted. “I want to get married someday. But I'm only twenty-six. I've just begun to live. I don't want to tie myself down yet!”

“No, think of the hearts you'd break!” she teased.

“Thank God yours isn't one of them,” he said, glancing at her solemnly. “That's why I suggested the pretence. You're the sister I never had, and that's God's own truth. There's never been anything emotional with us, and there won't be. But King could tear you up pretty bad, and I'm getting hell from all sides about my life style. Let's help each other out.”

She pursed her lips. “It might be fun, at that. But I don't have a ring.”

“I thought we might have to do something about that.” He handed her a jeweler's box. “Open it. Edie
helped me pick it out just before I left the office today.”

“Edie?”

He chuckled. “She'd do anything she thought would protect you from King,” he admitted. “She doesn't have a high opinion of my brother.”

Shelby didn't, either, but she wasn't going to hurt Danny's feelings by agreeing with Edie. She opened the box and took out a small diamond ring.

“Danny, this is too…” she began.

“Never mind, just put it on,” he replied.

She slid the yellow gold band with its fiery stone onto the third finger of her left hand and stared at it. “But Danny…”