Undeniable

A
LISON
K
ENT

HEAT | NEW YORK

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

To Walt.
I love you
.

Let me use this space for a few thank-yous.

To my agent, Laura Bradford, for believing in the Dalton Gang. To my editor, Wendy McCurdy, for loving Arwen and Dax. To fellow authors and good, good friends HelenKay Dimon and Loreth Anne White for the daily sanity checks, and to Anne Calhoun for saying the most beautiful words ever after reaching the end of the book. To May Khaw for reading early pages and asking for more. To my husband, Walt, for being willing to eat soup for dinner, and to my daughter, Megan, for loving a clean house.

I have taken some liberties with the timing of activities on a cow-calf operation in this part of the country, but only because doing so best served the story.

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Unbreakable

About the Author

“D
ID YOU HEAR
who’s back in town?”

“Which who? Dax, Boone, or Casper?”

“Dax is the only one I care about.”

“Good, because I’ve got my eye on the other two.”

“Boone first? Casper second?”

“I’m thinking both. Maybe at the same time.”

An unapologetic eavesdropper, Arwen Poole rolled her eyes at the bawdy speculation of her all-female crew. She’d heard the rumors, too. Everyone in Crow Hill had. The town was small, a south central Texas ranching community with a gossip mill strong enough to power the whole of the county’s windmills.

The Dalton Gang—Dax Campbell, Boone Mitchell, and Casper Jayne—had come home to claim the ranch left to them by Tess and Dave Dalton, the elderly couple who’d died within weeks of each other after a marriage that lasted a lifetime.

The three boys had spent summers, holidays, and weekends
working the ranch, grudgingly at first, none loving the order to do so handed down by his parents to Boone, and to Casper and Dax by association. The Mitchells attended Crow Hill Baptist Church with the Daltons and knew the retired couple needed the help. Knew, too, their son and his friends needed the structure.

Where Boone went, Dax and Casper followed, and it wasn’t long before the Daltons came to depend on the three to keep the place solvent. They also came to trust them when few others in Crow Hill did.

Because while the Dalton Gang gave their employers their best, they gave the rest of the population their fast-driving, hard-drinking worst, going through the daughters of the locals like fire through drought-ravaged grasslands.

Arwen had gone to school with the hell-raising trio, but as an observer, a fly on the wall. She hadn’t run in their circles. She hadn’t run in any circles at all—though she had spent more time than the three boys combined in what had been Crow Hill’s only bar in the day. Of course she’d been sober, so they had her there.

The problem with Arwen’s employees staking their claims to the three men now was availability. Dax wasn’t, and wouldn’t be until Arwen had her way with him. He knew nothing of her plans, but they’d been brewing since she’d first gotten wind of his return.

He’d been the only member of the Dalton Gang she’d had a crush on, and he’d looked right through her. He hadn’t been alone in that, but she would always wonder about what might’ve been. She knew herself, so she knew she had to get him out of her system. One more piece of her past tossed out for good.

With the news of his return spreading, however, it looked like she was going to have to put her plan into motion sooner than she’d thought.

And stepping into the kitchen of her Hellcat Saloon, the lunch hour in full swing—grease popping on the grill, metal tongs clattering
against big white platters, ice cream whirring in the milkshake machine—she found a way to make it happen.

“Amy, is the order for Lasko’s ready to go?”

Wisps of black hair escaping her hairnet, Amy peered into the brown paper bag printed with the saloon’s clawing cat logo and counted the burgers inside. “Yep. A half dozen baskets, and all still hot enough to burn the tar off the roof. Give me ten seconds to lose the cafeteria lunch lady look and I’ll hit the road.”

“The road, and the Dalton Gang while you’re at it?” This from Stacy, the afternoon bartender. She swung a bag of pretzels at Amy’s head on her way from the supply room through the kitchen. “One of the three is usually there at lunch.”

“No need,” Arwen said, crossing her fingers Dax would be the one at the feed store today. From the pegboard beside the kitchen door, she snagged the keys to the saloon’s delivery truck. “I’ll make the run.”

The activity in the bustling kitchen slammed to a stop. Amy froze, her hairnet in one hand. Black curls tumbled to her shoulders, the only part of her that moved.

Callie, one of the saloon’s Kittens, famous for their bar-top dance routines, two-stepped to the side to avoid Amy and keep from dropping a crate of clean beer mugs. They rattled loudly, a gunshot in the quiet of the room that smelled of grilled onions and beef.

Luck Summerlin, the fourth member of Arwen’s waitstaff on lunch duty, finally spoke. “Do you even know how to drive a stick?”

The company pickup was a big, bad, four-on-the-floor extended cab dualie. Since Arwen’s cottage sat on the block behind the saloon, she walked back and forth to work, and since she spent most afternoons in her office, and most evenings hustling to make nice with the customers bellied up to the bar, she couldn’t
remember the last time she’d been behind the wheel. It was very possible Luck had never seen her drive.

But, yeah. She knew exactly what to do. She palmed the keys in one hand, hefted up the lunch delivery in her other arm. Then she headed out of the kitchen with a wink, saying, “It’s a stiff rod with a knob on top. I think I can handle it.”

W
HATEVER ELSE MIGHT
have changed in Crow Hill during his absence, Dax Campbell knew he could count on Lasko Ranch Supply for more than his need for feed. Landowners, ranch hands, old-timers, and those aiming to fuel the gossip mill gathered in the parking lot before breakfast to shoot the shit of the day, or at lunch to share the food that flowed as freely as the news.

Like all communities of folks making their living off the land, Crow Hill knew about getting the word out. Trucks passed on a country road and occupants traded the latest. A driver dropping hay bales at one ranch carried stories from the last. Drifters looking for work brought with them the grim truth of what they’d learned at the place they’d tried before.

Dax wasn’t after the grim truth or stories or the latest. His reason for hanging out at the feed store was all about getting laid. It had been way too long since he’d taken the time, even
had
the time for that particular pleasure. And being out of touch all these years meant scoping out the lay of the land.

Word of the inheritance he’d be sharing with Boone Mitchell and Casper Jayne had reached him in a bar outside of Bozeman. He’d been drunk, he’d been cold, and for the first time in years, he’d been homesick. Not for the place he hadn’t seen since the summer after high school, but for his boys.

Learning of the passing of Tess and Dave Dalton on top of that ache had almost done him in. He’d loved the Daltons, considered them
family. They’d been there when his mother had taken up the causes of less privileged children instead of seeing to her own. They’d encouraged him to live his life his way when his father insisted he follow the path of all Campbell men.

Dax had wanted to cowboy—not go to college, and definitely not to law school to add
Esquire
to the end of his name. Tess got that. Dave got that. Casper and Boone got it, too. They’d sent him packing with promises to keep in touch. He hadn’t, and had nothing but his vagabond life to blame.

But that night in Montana, finding out he’d lost the Daltons had him missing his boys with an unimaginable hurt. Every good memory of his teenage years was connected to Boone and Casper. The summers they’d spent working the Dalton ranch were the best times of his life.

In fact, outside of honoring the Daltons’ wish that he help keep the place they’d poured their hearts and souls into from being sucked up by Crow Hill’s First National Bank, the only thing that would’ve brought him back to Texas was raising some Dalton Gang hell. But he needed a woman—or two or three—to do it up right.