Trilby Read Online Free PDF

obviously putting on a good act. And why not? She knew he was rich.
    “Would you care for some punch, Trilby?” he asked, but his eyes had dropped to her mouth—and he looked as if he might bend and take it under his any second.
    Trilby could hardly find her voice. She was so shaken that her purse almost fell from her fingers. “Yes,” she choked. “I would.”
    If only he would stop staring at her lips! He made her trembly with an emotion she didn’t understand at all. Her legs would hardly support her. It was difficult to breathe. Her heart was beating like a hummingbird’s wings against her rib cage. All because Thornton Vance was looking at her mouth!
    He took her arm, aware of her parents’ exchanged smiles. So they were thinking along those lines. He smiled faintly to himself. He was glad that Trilby was vulnerable to him. He found her very attractive, and he’d been a long time without a woman. He hadn’t wandered up to the wrong side of Tucson for entertainment, or anywhere else since his wife’s death. He was beginning to feel that abstinence. He knew what Trilby was. He wouldn’t need to worry about her reputation.
    And if she fell in love with him a little, that wouldn’t hurt, either. He might enjoy having her become serious about him just before he cut it off. Trilby had all but destroyed his cousin’s marriage. The gossip hadn’t been lost on him, and Curt’s wife, Lou, had cried on his shoulder more than once. Lou didn’t know the identity of Curt’s clandestine lover, but she did know that the woman was a blonde. Vance had never doubted that it was Trilby. After all, Sally had seen her with Curt.
    It was too bad about Jack Lang inheriting that ranch, he thought bitterly. If it hadn’t been for the Langs coming here to claim Blackwater Springs Ranch, Thorn would have been able to buy it. Then he wouldn’t be losing cattle right and left to drought. He had water on his Mexican property, but it was getting too dangerous to try to run cattle down there. He’d had one raid after another on his stock since the fighting had begun after Díaz’s reelection. Here, water was running out.
    Thorn had to find a way to save Los Santos from ruin. The land came first. His father and his grandfather had instilled in him a terrible sense of responsibility for the land, for the heritage it represented, for the need to preserve it at any cost.
    For just a moment, it flashed through his mind that he could solve all his problems by marrying Trilby. But he dismissed it at once. She wasn’t the sort of woman he wanted in his home. He wasn’t sure he ever wanted another woman that close.
    Sally had sworn eternal love until he’d married herand taken her to bed. Afterward, she’d been a bubbling caldron of excuses. She enjoyed her wealthy way of life, but not her ardent husband. After a few weeks of her utter coldness, he lost most of his feeling for her. Her pregnancy had been the last straw. She hadn’t wanted a child, and she never fully adjusted to motherhood. For the few months before her death, she’d been different. There had been a new light in her eyes, a new radiance to her face. But not when her husband was near. She hated him, and never lost a chance to tell him so. Even Samantha suffered her hostility. At the last, Sally had seemed to resent her family bitterly.
    The accident that had claimed her life had been in a buggy one rainy night. She’d gone to sit with a sick neighbor. When she hadn’t come home the next morning, he’d gone looking for her. He’d found her body in the wreckage of the buggy, half lying in a creek. It was on an out-of-the-way road, though, and nowhere near the sick neighbor. He’d assumed that she’d gotten lost in the dark, and his conscience had hurt him for letting her go alone. There was little love in their marriage, but he had loved her until her selfishness and greed killed his feelings for her.
    He glanced toward his daughter Samantha, who was standing