Only 04 - Only Love

western way to be informal.”
    “Willow,” Shannon repeated, smiling in return. “Then you must call me Shannon.”
    “That’s a pretty name,” Willow said. “Has the West given you a nickname yet?”
    Shannon didn’t think honey girl qualified as a nickname. And even if it did, she wasn’t about to mention it to Whip’s little sister.
    “Not yet,” Shannon said.
    Then she smiled slightly, looking at the pronouncedcurve of Willow’s pregnancy pressing against her dress.
    “It beats me how Whip can call you Willy,” Shannon said.
    “Whip?” Willow frowned, then smiled. “Oh, you mean Rafe.”
    “Tall, wide-shouldered, sun-haired, handsome as a fallen angel and thickheaded as a Missouri mule?”
    Willow snickered. “That’s Rafe. He calls me Willy because I used to follow my brothers around like a tomboy.”
    “How many brothers do you have?”
    “Five. Matt lives less than a day’s ride from here with his wife, Eve.”
    “Matt?” Shannon asked.
    “You’ve probably heard him called Reno. That’s the name the West gave him. Half the time I call him that, myself, just like I’m getting used to thinking of Rafe as Whip.”
    “Silent John mentioned Reno by that name,” Shannon said. Then quickly, wanting to avoid the complex subject of the man who hadn’t been quite her husband and was no longer alive in any case, Shannon asked, “Where are the other Moran brothers?”
    “Scattered all over the world from Scotland to Burma to the Amazon jungle, last I heard. But that was years ago. They could be anywhere now.”
    “The yondering streak must run wide and deep in your family.”
    The haunted tone of Shannon’s voice made Willow turn and look over her shoulder. A glance told Willow that her first impression of Shannon had been correct. The slender, edgy girl with the spectacularsapphire eyes was more than a little taken by Rafael “Whip” Moran.
    “Yes, I suppose so,” Willow said, turning back to the stove. “Even if we had been stay-at-homes, the war would have scattered us to the winds. There was no home to come back to.”
    “Yes,” Shannon said simply.
    “Sometimes I hear the gentle rhythms of the South in your voice,” Willow said as she sifted flour.
    “Virginia,” Shannon said, “a long, long time ago.”
    “Is that why you came west? Did the war take your home from you?”
    In another person the question would have been prying. But Willow’s voice and gentle hazel eyes made it clear that sympathy rather than curiosity lay beneath the question.
    Shannon closed her eyes for an instant, wondering how to tell this gentle Southern lady about the hell on earth that Shannon’s life had been before Silent John had come and taken her to Colorado Territory.
    “Never mind,” Willow said quickly. “I didn’t mean to pry. Would you like a cup of coffee, or do you prefer tea?”
    “Do you really have tea?”
    The wistful question told Willow a great deal.
    “We always have tea. Jessi—Wolfe Lonetree’s wife—was raised in Scotland and England. So was Wolfe, partly.”
    “Wolfe.” Shannon frowned. “Whip has mentioned him.”
    “Not surprising. Rafe earned the nickname Whip the day some Canyon City toughs were talking indecentlyto Jessi because she married a man who is half Indian.”
    A vivid memory came to Shannon—the blurring speed of Whip’s wrist, the harsh crack of the bullwhip, and the bright blood on Beau Culpepper’s dirty mouth.
    “That’s how I met Whip,” Shannon said.
    Willow made an encouraging sound as she bent to remove a pan of biscuits from the oven. Though Willow hadn’t asked, she was very interested in how her brother had come to be in the company of the wife—or, according to Whip, the widow —of one of the most notorious man-hunters in the West.
    “Some no-account claim jumpers name of Culpepper were in Holler Creek at the mercantile when I came in to buy supplies,” Shannon said. “The Culpeppers started talking about me. I didn’t like the vile things they were saying, but…” She shrugged.
    “You were alone?” Willow asked as she deftly transferred biscuits to a napkin-lined basket.
    “Yes,” Shannon said. “I tried to keep Whip from mixing in. I was afraid he would get hurt, four armed men to his one, and Whip wasn’t even carrying a gun. The Culpepper boys have an ugly reputation around Echo Basin.”
    Willow’s breath caught at the thought of her beloved brother taking on four men.
    “The Culpeppers kept on talking