Page 1 of Texas Destiny
Chapter One
September, 1876
His was not a face that women carried with them into their dreams.
Houston Leigh skimmed his thumb over the black eye patch before tugging the brim on the left side of his hat down lower. The right side showed little wear, but the crumpled left side carried the oil and sweat from the constant caress of his hand. Although the day was warm, he brought up the collar on his black duster.
Irritated with the world at large, his older brother in particular, Houston leaned against the wooden structure that had the dubious distinction of being Fort Worth’s first railway station and gazed into the distance at the seemingly never-ending tracks.
He hated the railroad with a passion.
Fort Worth had been fading into obscurity, turning into a ghost town, before the citizens extended the town’s boundaries so the railroad could reach its outermost edge. It had taken nothing more than a whispered promise to change the fading cow town into a thriving boomtown that the elected officials boasted would one day be known as the Queen of the Prairie.
The Queen of the Prairie.
Houston groaned. His brother had taken to calling his mail-order bride that very name, and Dallas had never even set eyes on the woman.
Hell, she could be the court jester for all Dallas knew, but he’d spent a good portion of his money—and his brothers’ money—building this woman a palace at the far side of nowhere.
“We just need to get one woman out here and the rest will follow,” Dallas had assured his brothers, a wide confident grin easing onto his darkly handsome face.
Only Houston didn’t want women sashaying across the windswept prairie. Their soft smiles and gentle laughter had a way of making a man yearn for the simple dreams of his youth, dreams he’d abandoned to the harshness of reality.
Houston had known men who had been disfigured less. Men who had taken a rifle and ended their misery shortly after gazing into a mirror for the first time after they were wounded. Had he been a man of courage, he might have done the same. But if he had been a man of courage, he wouldn’t have been left with a face that his older brother couldn’t stomach.
He saw the faint wisp of smoke curling in the distance. Its anticipated presence lured people toward the depot the way water enticed a man crossing the desert. Turning slightly, Houston pressed his left shoulder against the new wood.
Damn Dallas, anyway, for making Houston leave his horses and come to this godforsaken place of women, children, and men too young to have fought in the War Between the States. If Houston hadn’t been stunned speechless when Dallas had ordered him to come to Fort Worth to fetch his bride, he would have broken Dallas’s other leg.
He still might when he got back to the ranch.
He heard the rumbling train’s coarse whistle and shoved his sweating hands into his duster pockets. His rough fingers touched the soft material inside. Against his will, they searched for the delicate threads.
The woman had sent Dallas a long, narrow piece of white muslin decorated with finely stitched flowers that he was supposed to have wrapped around the crown of his hat so she could easily identify him.
Flowers, for God’s sake.
A man didn’t wear flowers on his hat. If he wore anything at all, he wore the dried-out scales of a rattlesnake that he’d killed and skinned himself, or a strip of leather that he’d tanned, or … or anything but daintily embroidered pink petals.
Houston was beginning to wonder if Dallas had broken his leg on purpose just to get out of wearing this silly scrap of cloth. It wouldn’t do to anger the woman before she became his wife.
Well, Houston wasn’t going to marry her so he could anger her all he wanted, and he wasn’t going to wrap flowers around the crown of his brown broad-brimmed hat.
No, ma’am. No, sir.
He hadn’t stood firm on many things in his life, but by God, he was going to stand firm on this matter.
No goddamn flowers on his hat.
He squeezed his eye shut and thought about breaking Dallas’s other leg. The idea’s appeal grew as he heard more people arrive, their high-pitched voices grating on his nerves like a metal fork across a tin plate. A harsh whisper penetrated the cacophony of sound surrounding him.
“Dare you!”
“Double-dare you!”
The two voices fell into silence, and he could feel the boys’ gazes boring into him. God, he wished he’d never shut his eye. It was harder to scare people off once they’d taken to staring at him.
“Looks like he’s asleep.”
