A WILD, DANGEROUS LOVE   Amelia Howard cherishes her desert country. The dazzling colors, white heat, and rough sensuality of west Texas stir her very soul. But there’s a serpent in her paradise: King Culhane. A towering sunburned cowboy with silver eyes that miss nothing, he’s a man she’s come to despise—no matter how much she had worshiped him when she was fourteen.   As her father pushes her to secure a marriage proposal from King’s mild-mannered brother in order to marry into the Culhane dynasty, Amelia assumes the mask of a demure young lady, always correct and obedient. It’s a posture that King holds in contempt. Yet when she reveals the true force of her feelings, she unleashes a smoldering passion that cannot be denied. And everything—propriety, filial duty, even love—will be scorched in the wake of such all-consuming desire. The prolific author of more than one hundred books, Diana Palmer got her start as a newspaper reporter. A New York Times bestselling author voted one of the top ten romance writers in America, she has a gift for telling the most sensual tales with charm and humor. Palmer lives with her family in Cornelia, Georgia. Chapter One   Date: 1900   A melia Howard loved the desert country of west Texas. It might not be as green and lush as the eastern part of the state, and there were dust storms and coyotes, wolves, and rattlesnakes to cope with, but it had a fascination all its own. Occasionally there were bandidos who raided across the Mexican border, which was just over the Rio Grande—Rio Bravo del Norte as the Mexicans called it—from El Paso. There were no Indian raids; there hadn’t been any for twenty years or more. Still, something was always happening on the border, and Amelia worried constantly about her brother, Quinn, who was a Texas Ranger. Border problems often meant Ranger intervention.   It had been something of a shock for Atlanta-born and -bred Amelia to find herself in west Texas. When her youngest brothers had died two years ago of typhoid fever, her father, Hartwell Howard, had suffered a head injury in a buggy accident trying to get the doctor to come and see them. After that, he suddenly changed. His personality became violent, and he had rages that were unbelievable.   Quinn had gone away to fight in the Spanish-American War and then had settled in El Paso. Left in Atlanta with her failing mother and her abusive father, Amelia learned quickly that being docile and obedient was the only way to escape the physical violence that began to accompany her father’s personality change. It was worse when he drank, and he had started doing that, too. Presumably he did it because of the worsening headaches.   Her mother had died of pneumonia just a year ago. Amelia felt her loss keenly, as did her father. A year ago, he had still had periods when he acted normally. Now, everything was different.   Hartwell had become suddenly impulsive and restless. Just a week after her mother’s funeral, he took a notion to move to El Paso with Amelia, to be near Quinn, who had joined the Texas Rangers and was stationed in Alpine, Texas. Hartwell had abruptly seized an opportunity for dynasty-building in his friendship with a wealthy Texas rancher. The move to work in a Texas bank where the rancher kept some of his fortune was one step in that direction. That it had taken several months to arrange hadn’t stemmed Hartwell Howard’s enthusiasm, either. In fact, at times it had seemed to be the only thing that regulated his increasingly erratic behavior. The second step in her father’s plan was trying to force Amelia into a romantic entanglement for which she had no taste whatsoever.   Her father had suddenly become a money-hungry tyrant. Nor was his cruelty flavored with regret or mercy. But in spite of it all Amelia had stayed with Hartwell. She was intelligent enough to realize that there had to be some connection between the head injury her father had suffered in the buggy accident and his radical personality change. She had loved the man he was. It was not in her to desert him now, when he needed her most. She had always been Hartwell’s favorite child, and her loyalty to him would survive anything, even his rages.   But even if she had been hard-hearted enough to de-sert him, she didn’t know what she would have done. She had no source of income, and no way of getting one.   Their father had been so kind when she was a little girl, she reflected. He was forever bringing his children and his wife small presents—small, because his job at the bank as an accountant did not generate much income—but there was always affection and compassion from him. This man he had become was no longer recognizable as her father. But out of the love she had borne him in her childhood, Amelia stubbornly stayed with him, protecting him from the world.   That was becoming increasingly difficult. The rages were closer together and now were produced by the smallest things: ashes on his jacket or a misplaced