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was feeling a tenderness toward this man that she couldn’t account for, even to herself. Maybe Eugenie was right, and Shay McQuillan really was a good man, through the worst of his grieving and ready to go on.
    “Did you love her?” She had never planned to ask such a bold and impertinent question; the words came out by themselves. “Grace, I mean?”
    He turned, thumbs hooked into his gunbelt, eyes hidden in the shadow cast by his hat brim. “Yes,” he answered, seriously and without hesitation. “Very much.”
    Aislinn stood for a moment, taking a new measure of Shay McQuillan. She’d been so certain, until he’d spoken those few telling words, that she understood the workings of his mind and the substance of his spirit. While she watched him, he climbed over the fence and walked away, headed toward Main Street.
    When she reached the pond, she found it peaceful, dappled with sunlight and windblown leaves. As she climbed onto the favored rock and settled herself there, she saw a deer approach the water’s edge on the opposite side. After studying her intently, the animal lowered its graceful head to drink, sending delicate, silvery ripples fanning out over the surface.
    Aislinn slid to the stone’s edge and slipped her feet into the water, and the sensation was so delicious that she let her head fall back and gave a long sigh. Then she unraveled her braid and combed her hair with her fingers, letting it tumble down past her shoulders to reach her waist.
    The moment might in fact have been perfect, had it not been for the disturbing, persistent awareness that by changing something in himself. Shay McQuillan had changed something in her as well.

Chapter 2

    F OR SOMEBODY WHO’D BEEN SO concerned about keeping his presence in Prominence a secret until the right moment came, Saint-Laurent wasn’t making much of an effort to stay out of sight. When Shay got back to his office, following the encounter with Aislinn, he found his twin sitting in the best chair in the place, flipping through a pile of wanted posters. His feet were propped on the desk.
    The usurper assessed him thoughtfully, then broke into a grin that belonged on Shay’s own face. Damn, but it was peculiar, looking at Saint-Laurent, like being haunted by his own ghost. “Anybody ever tell you you’re a handsome devil?” Tristan asked, sober as St. Peter guarding the Gates.
    Shay glared at him, stormed over to the coffeepot, and poured himself a dose. He’d been sober less than twenty-four hours, he was still trying to make sense of what he’d felt, seeing Aislinn, touching her, and he’d been confronted with a long-lost brother who might have been peeled off the surface of a mirror. By God, there should be a limit to what one man was expected to deal with in the course of a single day.
    “You happen to have another badge lying around heresomeplace?” Tristan asked. He didn’t stand on ceremony, you had to say that for him.
    Shay slammed his cup down on top of a bookcase crammed full of ancient volumes, papers, and clippings from half the newspapers published west of the Mississippi. “If I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t hand it over to you. For all I know, you’re an outlaw.”
    Saint-Laurent swung his feet to the floor and stood. “If I were, I’d have put a bullet through your head last night, when I had the drop on you. It would have been an easy matter to pin on that star and step right into your boots.” The slight stress he put on the word “easy” did not go unnoticed.
    Still, Shay had to admit, it was true that Tristan could have killed him, if that had been his intention. He’d been chewing on the fact, in one corner of his mind or another, since the night before, when he’d woken up with a gun at his throat. On the other hand, though Saint-Laurent was clearly a blood relation, that didn’t mean his story was true, or that he could be trusted. He could be a distant relative, instead of a brother, or just a man who happened