Tucker's Claim. Sarah McCarty

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      MILLS & BOON

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      To all the ladies of my yahoo group. No one could ask for a better group of ladies with which to laugh and share life’s ups and downs. You are simply the best.

      Chapter 1

      Music drifted out of the gaily decorated church into the humid night air, wrapping around Sally Mae in a breath of lilting joy. She shifted her hip on the railing, leaned her head against the rough porch support and let the notes roll through her, not feeling the guilt so strongly this time. She was healing, from the inside out, the way Jonah said she would in what he’d considered a kindness. But then Jonah had been that type of man, always able to put others before him, always able to see God’s light with no questions attached to the end of the message. His way had always been clear while hers was always a struggle.

      Despite their differences, or maybe because of them, she’d been a good wife to him. Their marriage hadn’t been the kind that little girls dreamed up while playing in the yard on a summer’s day, but it had been the stable kind an impulsive woman valued. No matter what her inclinations, Sally had always known that if she couldn’t find the answer in meditation, she would find it with Jonah. He’d been her rock, her balance, her guiding light, and when he’d been murdered, it had shattered her inner light into a never-ending pitch of black, to the point that she’d stopped feeling anything.

      For months, she’d walked around in a daze, going through life as if she hadn’t lost a vital part of her faith. And then the townsfolk had started coming to her for healing, seeing her as the next best thing to a doctor, and she’d found solace in being needed. From that solace had come a light that flickered through the darkness. Purpose. Life since Jonah’s death hadn’t been perfect, but she’d found a reason to get out of bed, a pretense on which to keep functioning, and gradually, that pretense had grown into a calling she’d only assumed was hers before Jonah’s death. A calling that distracted her from the emptiness left by her husband’s death. An emptiness she’d been able to ignore until six months ago when Tucker McCade had come back to town.

      She grimaced and shifted her position, the star-studded vastness of the landscape striking her anew with its beauty, almost as though it was the first time she was seeing it. And maybe it was. Sometimes she felt that Jonah’s death had wiped clean her understanding of who she was and left a stranger in its place. A stranger who was familiar in her love of these beautiful nights of endless sky and sparkling stars, yet foreign in her attraction to the big Texas Ranger.

      She couldn’t pinpoint what drew her to the man. Tucker was too big, too wild, too unpredictable to be described in easy terms. He breathed the violence she abhorred, seemed to believe in nothing but the moment, and the only emotion he let anyone see never made it to his eyes. He was a man of secrets and pain, larger than life, and nothing to which she should be attracted, and yet, somehow, he’d become part of her emerging life.

       Laying temptation in front of a man like me is dangerous, pretty thing.

      The remembered warning rumbled over her nerves in a deep promise. At the time, she hadn’t thought she’d been laying anything anywhere, just tending the nasty cut on his arm, but looking back, she had stood closer than she’d needed to, and her fingers had lingered longer than they’d needed to. She blamed it completely on the utter fascination of the man. His eyes alone would be enough to fascinate most women—a shocking silver-gray in his dark face. But for her, the fascination went much deeper than his heavily muscled frame and harshly exotic good looks. For her, the fascination went to the glimpses of gentleness that he hid beneath a sarcastic wit and a propensity for violence. A gentleness she suspected he wore with the same ease with which he wore his guns and knives. Tucker McCade was a man who was very comfortable with himself, in the same way Jonah had been, but for different reasons. While Jonah had been comfortable with the path God had revealed to him and his ability to stick to it, Tucker was comfortable with the path he had laid out for himself, and comfortable with his ability to hold it where he wanted.

      Sally shook her head, breathing deeply of the humid night air, fragrant with the aroma of the roasting pig that had been served up earlier. Tucker fought at the drop of a hat. He’d fought for Cissy Monroe, who’d changed her mind about prostituting herself to make ends meet, fought for a mongrel puppy pinned down after stealing a loaf of bread, and sometimes he just fought for reasons that had no discernible cause other than that he wanted to. It was in those moments that Tucker McCade scared her,