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the female didn’t know yet that she was being pursued, so she wasn’t even running.
    Dee went to the door and watched him ride away. She felt strangely disturbed and too warm; she loosened the top buttons of her blouse to let the cooling air waft over her throat. So that was Lucas Cochran. That brief glimpse of him in the general store hadn’t prepared her for a face-to-face meeting. She hadn’t realized that he was quite so tall, or so strongly built, or that his iron will gleamed so plainly in his blue eyes. Lucas Cochran was used to getting what he wanted, and he hadn’t liked it at all that she had turned down his offer for the land.
    She would bet all the money she had that he would be back.

3
    O LIVIA M ILLICAN HAD SPENT HER ENTIRE LIFE BEING the perfect daughter and the perfect lady. It wasn’t difficult; she was by nature both kind and composed. Sometimes she felt guilty that she had had such an easy, privileged life when she could see how so many other people had to struggle to have even a fraction of the luxuries to which she was accustomed, but she was also intelligent enough to see that neither was it her fault. Her father had worked hard to make his bank successful; any child of his would have had the same comfortable life. She tried to do what she could to help with the few small charities around town, and she tried never to be mean or rude. Her rules of conduct were simple, and she truly tried to adhere to them.
    All she had ever wanted was to fall in love with a good man and have him love her in return, marry her, and give her his children. When she was younger she had never thought that it was such an unreasonablething to expect from life; heaven knew it seemed an easy enough thing for most of her friends. She still didn’t see that it was anything but an ordinary wish, yet somehow it had never happened.
    She was twenty-five now, virtually an old maid, though there again her father’s money was shielding her. A poor woman of twenty-five would have been an old maid; a wealthy woman of twenty-five was still “a good catch.” Yet somehow, though there were good men in town, she had never loved any of them, and none of them had ever seemed to be wildly in love with her, and now just about all of those her age were married to someone else.
    Except Lucas Cochran.
    His name ran through her mind as she worked with her mother on the fine embroidery of a linen tablecloth, and she shivered a little. It wasn’t that she disliked him; he was handsome in a hard sort of way, wealthy, intelligent, well-mannered, and certainly eligible. It wasn’t her imagination that he had singled her out in some small way every time they had met since his return to town, for other people had remarked on it. He danced well and treated her with respect. Her feminine instincts also told her that after they had known each other a respectable length of time he would ask her to marry him. She was very much afraid that, because she was twenty-five and this would likely be her last chance at marriage and a family, she would say yes. But Lucas Cochran didn’t love her. Despite all of the little attentions he paid her, despite the faintly possessive expression in his blue eyes whenever he looked at her, as if she already belonged to him, she knew that she aroused none ofthe passionate emotion in him that she had always longed for from the man she would marry.
    And he was a hard man, hard in a way that her father, who had a forceful personality himself, couldn’t even begin to match. Lucas Cochran would never allow anyone to stand between him and anything he wanted. Olivia knew herself to be no more a match for him than her father was; far less, in fact. Oh, he would protect her as his wife, give her children, but she would never matter any more to him than any other woman he might have chosen to fill the position. She could expect consideration but not caring, physical attention but never