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running the ranch into near bankruptcy while he, Lincoln, was away at college.
    No, he thought, with a shake of his head and a grim set to his mouth, his hands cupped behind his head as he lay still as fallen timber, waiting for the sheets to warm up. Beth hadn’t meant what she’d said that day, only hours before she’d closed her eyes for the last time; she’d merely been playing out a scene from one of those stories that made her sniffle until her face got puffy and her nose turned red. She’d believed, being so very young, that that was how a lady was supposed to die.
    If it hadn’t been for the seizing ache in the middle of his chest and the sting behind his eyes, Lincoln might have smiled to remember the earlier days of their marriage, when he’d come in from the barn or the range so many evenings and found his bride with a thick book clutched to her bosom and tears pouring down her cheeks.
    “She died with a rose clasped between her teeth!” Beth had expounded once, evidently referring to the heroine of the novel she’d been reading by the front room fire.
    His mother, darning socks in her rocking chair, wanting them both to know she disapproved of such nonsense, and saucy brides from Somewhere Else, had muttered something, shaken her head and then made a tsk-tsk sound.
    “ Someone had better start supper cooking,” Cora Creed had huffed, rising and stalking off toward the kitchen.
    Waited on by servants all her short life, Beth had never learned to cook, sew or even make up a bed. None of that had bothered Lincoln, though it troubled his mother plenty.
    He had merely smiled, kissed Beth’s overheated forehead and said something along the lines of “I hope she was careful not to bite down on the thorns. The lady in the book, I mean.”
    Beth had laughed then, and hit him playfully with the tome.
    Now, alone in the bed where they’d conceived Gracie and two other children who hadn’t survived long enough to draw even one breath, Lincoln thrust out a sigh and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger.
    Morning would come around early, and the day ahead would be long, hard and cold. He and Tom and the few ranch hands wintering on the place would be hauling wagonloads of hay out to the range cattle, since the grass was buried under snow. They’d have to break the ice at the edge of the creek, too, so the cattle could drink.
    He needed whatever sleep he could get.
    Plainly, it wouldn’t be much.
     
    J ULIANA HAD BEEN an early riser since the cradle, and she was up and dressed well before dawn.
    Even so, when she wandered through the still-dark house toward the kitchen, there was a blaze burning in the hearth in what probably passed for a parlor in such a masculine home. The furniture was heavy and dark and spare, all hard leather and rough-hewn wood, the surfaces uncluttered with the usual knickknacks and vases and doilies and sewing baskets.
    Perhaps Lincoln’s mother—gone traveling, Gracie had said at supper, with marked relief—had packed away her things in preparation for a lengthy absence. As far as Juliana could tell, the woman had left no trace at all—even her room, where she and the children had passed the night, was unadorned.
    Entering the kitchen, Juliana stepped into lantern-light and the warmth of the cookstove. Lincoln stood at a basin in front of a small mirror fixed to the wall, his face lathered with suds, shaving. He wore trousers and boots and a long-sleeved woolen undershirt, and suspenders that dangled in loose, manly loops at his sides.
    He was decently clothed, but there was an intimacy in the early-morning quiet and the glow of the kerosenelamps that gave Juliana pause. She stopped on the threshold and drew in a sharp breath.
    He smiled, rinsed his straight razor in the basin, ran it skillfully under his chin and along his neck. “Mornin’,” he said.
    Juliana recovered her inner composure, but barely. “Good morning,” she replied, quite formally.
    “Coffee’s