Dancing in the Moonlight - Harlequin.com

RAEANNE THAYNE
29
windsocks flapping in the breeze and smiled at the
vibrant colors.
A little slice of Mexico, that’s what she and Abel had
tried to create for her mother.A placeViviana could escape
to when she was homesick for her family in Mexico City.
After the car accident that claimed her father’s life,
she and Viviana used to wander often down to the
bowery, both alone and separately. She had always been
able to feel her father’s presence most strongly there, in
the haven he had created for his beloved wife.
Did her mother go there still? she wondered.
Thoughts of Abel and the events leading to his death
when she was sixteen inevitably turned her thoughts to
the Daltons and the Cold Creek Land & Cattle
Company, just across the creek bed.
From here she could see the graying logs of the ranch
house, the neat fencelines, a small number of the ranch’s
huge herd of cattle grazing on the rich grasses by the creek.
In those days after her father’s death, she would split
her time here at the bowery between grieving for him
and feeding the coals of her deep anger toward that
family across the creek.
The Daltons were the reason her father had spent
most of her adolescence working himself into an early
grave, spending days hanging on to his dreams of
making the Luna profitable and nights slogging through
a factory job in Idaho Falls.
Bitter anger filled her again at the memories. Abel
would never have found himself compelled to work so
hard if not for Hank Dalton, that lying, thieving bastard.
Dalton should have gone to jail for the way he’d