Summer Moon by Jill Marie Landis Page A

the housekeeper with an icy stare. “This woman claims we’re married. And that the old man’s dead.”
    “He is.” Sofia nodded. Her eyes, unable to hold her sorrow, shimmered with unshed tears. “Your father was quite ill for the past two years. His heart was failing. He was desperate to have you come home and run Lone Star. Surely you knew that if you received his letters.”
    “I threw them out unopened.”
    “He came up with a plan to find you a woman, someone who would be a fitting wife. He hoped to use her . . . to entice you back.” Her voice stumbled on the words, but she went on.
    “With the help of his lawyer, he placed an advertisement in a few small-town newspapers in the Northeast, the area where his maternal grandmother was born. He received many, many letters in response.”
    Kate gasped. Sofia was discussing her as if she were not even there. Reed turned to stare, looked her up and down as if he was buying stock. It had been a deception, all of it. She had been part of a grand, horrific scheme, and worse yet, naive enough to believe she was the only woman to have answered the advertisement.
    Sofia continued. “He was so excited. He began to look forward to getting up in the morning again. He could not wait for the mail to be brought in. Your father had not been so excited about life for a long, long time.”
    As if exhausted, she rested her head against the back of the rocker. “He asked me to help compose the letters because I would know better than he what was in a woman’s heart, because I could say all the things a woman wants to hear. We worked on them together. I told him what to write.”
    All those letters Kate had waited for, the beautiful words and phrases she had memorized. All the hours of planning and dreaming, all the time and effort she took to compose her own letters to him, choosing each and every word as carefully as a mother chooses a child’s name.
    This
Reed Benton, the man she thought she married, had never even read them. All of it had been a terrible lie. And she had been a desperate fool.
    Sofia stared down at her clenched hands and then finally faced Reed. “I should not have done it. I knew it then, just as I do now, but I could not resist. Finding you a wife gave the señor a reason for living. He was so sad, ever since Daniel was taken and you refused to come home and run the ranch as you should have—”
    “Don’t try to put this on me, Sofia. You don’t know the half of it. Do you really think he was about to step aside and turn this place over to me as long as there was a breath in his body?” Reed’s eyes narrowed. “How did the old man think he was going to get me to go along with a marriage I knew nothing about?”
    A knife might just as well have pierced Kate’s heart at his words. What little was left of her pitiful hopes and tattered dreams crumbled like dried rose petals. She had reached too high and now the fall was going to break her.
    “He asked them all to send pictures.” Sofia began to slowly rock back and forth. “He spent hours going through them, laying them out on the desk like playing cards, studying each and every one carefully. When Katherine’s photograph arrived, he knew that she was the right one the moment he saw her. She reminded him of . . . of your first wife.”
    Reed’s expression darkened at the mention of his wife. His brow tightened; his mouth firmed. “Go on.” He demanded that Sofia continue.
    Kate had heard enough. She wished it were over.
    “He chose Katherine Whittington not only for her looks, but because she was the most intelligent. She was a teacher. And she had no family ties.”
    When Sofia’s image suddenly blurred and wavered, Kate turned her back and stared out the open window, seeing nothing. Humiliated, she listened to the sound of her own heartbeat.
    No family ties.
No one to protest should Reed Senior’s little plan fall apart.
    All those beautiful letters filled with lovely words of promise and