By the time he overtook the tail end of the cortege, most of the buckboards and wagons had reached the cemetery. Falling into step behind the mourners, Dal angled around for a view of the gravesite when he reached the assemblage. He didn’t care about seeing Roark’s expensive brass-fitted casket, but he did want a look at Joe Roark’s daughters.
He spotted them at once and knew who they were because they had the polished look he expected from a rich man’s daughters, and because they were the only seated mourners. When the first prayer began, Dal pulled off his hat and held it against his chest. He gave Roark’s casket a passing nod, then turned his attention back to the daughters.
They looked like delicate, high-strung types who carried smelling salts in their fringed wrist purses. He could have believed they were society women who had never set foot on a working ranch. If Dal had been a lot less desperate, he would have turned his butt around and headed back to San Antonio.
The same dispiriting thought had crossed his mind yesterday when he’d recognized a half dozen other trail bosses in town, undoubtedly sniffing around the Roark job like he was. No right-thinking employer—even three ignorant women—would trust a herd to Dal Frisco if he could hire Shorty Mahan or W.B. Pouter. He should just turn around and walk away. He might have done it except he suddenly noticed a detail he’d missed on the initial once-over.
One of the daughters was sitting in a wheelchair.
Shock stiffened his shoulders and he stared. Accepting three greenhorn, coddled society women as hands on a cattle drive lay just barely within the realm of imagination. If he hired experienced men, the best of the best, to fill out the outfit, he figured he might be able to take up the slack and work around the women. Maybe. If he was luckier than he’d been in the past. But putting a woman in a wheelchair in the middle of a cattle drive would be sheer insanity. No trail boss in full possession of his senses would consider such an invitation to disaster.
That thought stopped him cold. One man’s disaster was often another man’s opportunity.
Craning his neck, he skimmed a thoughtful glance over the crowd, looking for Mahan and Pouter. Only a desperate man would agree to take a woman in a wheelchair on a seven-hundred-mile cattle drive. And last he’d heard, Mahan and Pouter were a long way from desperate.
Feeling more hopeful, Dal stepped behind a woman short enough that he had a clear view of the daughters over her bonnet. They didn’t look enough alike to be related, let alone be sisters, he decided, but every one of them appeared more elegant in her black funeral clothing than most of the women standing around him. If Joe Roark had been the kind of man who cared about such things, he would have felt proud that his daughters were putting him down in style.
He also noticed the sisters were dry-eyed. Either they weren’t the type to display emotion in public, or their father’s passing hadn’t plucked too deeply at their heartstrings. Or it might be they were furious at the old bastard for tying their inheritance to a cattle drive.
A different man would have said the Roark daughters were beautiful, but Dal didn’t care for the patrician superiority of the blonde in the wheelchair, nor the sullenness of the one he guessed to be the youngest. The middle daughter, however, riveted his attention. Her black hair and green eyes fit the description he’d been given of Frederick Roark, the daughter who had run off to join a touring theater company. She was definitely a beauty, and bold, too. Instead of fixing her eyes on her father’s casket, she scanned the mourners as if she were looking for someone.
Dal didn’t believe the widespread conviction that actresses were whores who could spout Shakespeare, but he did know that a woman who defied her father and threw away her reputation to run off with a touring company was defiant, willful, and reckless. This daughter was trouble.
Her slow scan of the mourners reached him and paused, probably because he was staring at her. But most men would stare, and most would experience the same shock of electric connection that he felt when their eyes met and held.
He should have looked away when she caught him inspecting her, but he met her gaze head-on, admiring thick lashed, emerald-colored eyes and smooth milky skin. A full lush mouth. Eyebrows a shade lighter than black curls framing the oval face beneath her hat.
Whatever she saw in his expression, it caused her to raise her chin a notch, square her shoulders, and narrow her gaze into a flashing spit-in-your-eye glare. He could almost hear her thinking. “Stare all you want, cowboy, I don’t give a damn about your opinion.” If it hadn’t been inappropriate, he would have laughed. Instead, he shifted his gaze to the sullen daughter.