Ariel was dead -- his porcelain doll of a wife was shattered and gone.

After a noisy, difficult meal with the children, Baird finally had a chance to ease himself into one of the chairs before the fire and pour a glass of whiskey. God knows, he needed it. He needed time to absorb the news of Ariel’s death, to turn it over in his mind, to contend with his bewilderment and loss.

Ariel had certainly seemed well enough when he’d left her in London. She’d been curled in their magnificent, silk-draped bed at her father’s townhouse, her face flushed and soft with sleep. The ivory curve of her throat and the arch of one bare shoulder had been limned by the first pale light of dawn.

He wished now that he’d awakened her to say good-bye, but he hadn’t wanted to argue with her. Ariel had had every right to be angry. A mere week after he’d returned from Burma, he was leaving again -- and he was asking her to follow him halfway around the world. So he’d bent above her and bushed her brow with a kiss. He’d stroked her cheek, breathed the mingled scents of rosewater and last night’s champagne. He’d gone downstairs and hailed a cab to the train station, never dreaming he’d seen his wife for the very last time.

Baird drank down the whiskey in his glass. Had Ariel been ill and afraid to tell him? he wondered. Had she contracted some disease aboard the ship? Had there been some kind of accident? What was it Ardith had refused to discuss in front of the children?

Baird frowned and filled his glass a second time.

Ardith. Dour, bitter Ardith. How could anyone change so much? Once he’d admired her as a plain but touchingly eager girl; now she was a woman as dry and brittle as stale bread. She stood taller and more robust than he remembered, but she was straight as a carpenter’s rule and every bit as rigid. Her eyes when she looked at him were bright and single-minded enough to send a shudder through any man.

It must be living in New England all these years that had changed her so, Baird told himself. Spending years shut up in her uncle’s library and being part of a community that valued rumination more than reality would wring any woman dry. But she had learned to be resourceful; he’d give her that. Without his help, without a governess to mind the children and a platoon of ranch hands to escort her, Ardith had managed to get his children to the ranch. She'd arranged their transportation, found McKay as a scout, driven a carriage four full days across miles of wind-blown countryside. And once they all had finished their dinner, she’d swept the children off to bed.

Gotten them out from under his feet -- thank God. A man couldn’t properly toast his dead wife with a parcel of children watching him. All during supper he’d seen the unanswerable questions in their eyes, seen them wanting things from him that he had no idea how to give.

It wasn’t that he meant to deny them, he just had no damned experience being a father. He’d never imagined that he should learn to dry his children’s tears and wipe their noses. He’d hired people to do that. Now that Ariel was dead, he didn’t want to face the implications of the children’s arrival at the ranch, or acknowledge the effect their mother’s death was bound to have on them.

Let Ardith handle it, he thought and tipped the bottle above his glass.

Just then the very woman he’d been considering emerged from the door to the boys’ bedchamber. He felt more than saw her enter the room, a prickle of premonition moving up his backbone, the wave of her contempt washing over him. She crossed the floorboards with deliberate strides and stopped when the toes of her shoes were a precise six inches from where his booted feet were stretched out and crossed at the ankle. From her hem to her hairpins, it was obvious what she thought of him, and that she was preparing to share her opinions.

Baird didn’t give her the chance. “Are the children tucked up tight and fast asleep?”

“Indeed they are,” Ardith answered crisply. “You might have come in to bid them good-night.”

“I might have -- except that I had other things I wanted to do.”

His flippancy brought angry color to her cheeks. “And what might they have been?”

Baird raised his brimming glass and took a deep, satisfying swallow. “The first was drinking a toast to my dear wife. Would you care to join me?”

Ardith fluttered like a quail just flushed from cover. “No! Of course not! I never touch ardent spirits.”

“Not even for Ariel’s sake?” he cajoled and smiled to himself. The whiskey was beginning to blur the edges of his regret, and Baird was glad. His marriage to Ariel hadn’t turned out the way either of them wanted, but he mourned her anyway. “Come along, Ardith. Do join me in a drink to the most gloriously beautiful and infuriating woman an man could ever hope to possess.” He hadn’t meant for her to hear the throb of emotion in his voice, but he could tell she had.

“Good God!” she exclaimed. “You really did love her, didn’t you?”

“Of course I loved her,” he admitted, wishing his voice weren’t so raw, that his regrets weren’t so evident. “Ariel was my grand passion, and I was hers. I thought you understood that.”

At least he had convinced himself that Ardith understood. He and Ariel had been smitten the moment they met at Baird and Ardith’s betrothal party. They had been stealing kisses on the balcony before the evening was over. They’d met at a hotel for a private dinner a week later and adjourned to the bedchamber before dessert. Their love had been forbidden, secret, out of control. For those first few weeks it had been like existing inside a living flame. They’d been too wrapped up in each other to spare a thought for anyone else. Especially Ardith.

“If you loved Ariel, so much,” Ardith demanded, “why did you abandon her for months at a time?”

Why indeed? Baird took another swallow and thought about his wife. For all that he had cared for her, Ariel hadn’t met his needs, nor had he met hers. After the wildness and the passion had burned out, their flame had flickered to an ember.

“I was offered opportunities I couldn’t refuse,” he finally answered, then continued with a shrug. “And sometimes grand passions don’t wear well.”

It was a more honest answer than he had given anyone in years. Ardith with her resolute mouth and uncompromising eyes seemed to demand that of him, as well as a modicum of introspection. Now what he wanted was to be answered in kind.

Baird took a shaky, whiskey-flavored breath and asked, “What happened to Ariel? How did she die?”

Ardith pinioned him with her gaze. He could see the anticipation in her eyes. “Ariel died of a miscarriage. She bled to death.”

Baird thought he had prepared himself for her answer, but the words slammed into him, tore through him. He remembered just how eagerly he and Ariel had come together when he returned to London. He’d needed succor and forgiveness after what had happened to Bram. What Ariel had offered was diversion, and he’d told himself it was enough.

Even when they were making love, he’d known that it was dangerous. Ariel had suffered miscarriages twice since Khy was born and had nearly died with each of them. Yet since she had invited him to her bed, Baird assumed she’d taken precautions. These were modern times, and modern women knew such things. But apparently either Ariel hadn’t known or hadn’t done what was necessary.

Now Baird was forced to acknowledge that his baser nature had killed his wife. The whiskey soured in his belly, and he wasn’t deep enough in his cups to ignore the searing heat of responsibility.

“So did Ariel curse me with her last breath?”

Shock at his cynicism flickered across Ardith’s features, but she refused to back down. “She must have forgiven you,” she answered. “The last thing Ariel said was for me to bring the children to you here.”

“Did her parents -- your father -- have anything to say on the matter? I would have expected him to demand that you send the children back to England.”

“He did.” Ardith’s face was expressionless.

“And you chose to bring them here to me?”

She glanced away, tight lipped and scowling. “I promised Ariel.”

“Well, you’ve discharged your duty most admirably.” Baird lifted his glass and toasted her. He meant the words as a dismissal. He wanted her to leave him alone so he could go to hell in his own way.

Ardith refused to budge. Instead she stared at him with even greater intensity. “Now that the children are here, what do you mean to do with them?” she asked.

“Do with them?”

China and Durban and Khy had been looked after by an endless string of nannies and governesses and tutors, like all the children of their class. Ariel was supposed to have brought a governess to the ranch to see to the children’s lessons while they were here. That Ardith had arrived without one was a problem Baird had no idea how to resolve.

“I want to know who’s going to look after the children while you are --” Ardith hesitated with a puzzled frown. “What is it you do here?”

Baird pushed up a little straighter in his chair. “I’m running the ranch.”

“Really? And just what does that entail?”

He was a little too fuddled to give her a comprehensive answer. He’d been ignoring the ledgers and voluminous correspondence from London in favor of riding out with Buck Johnson to oversee the herd. He was good at that, and being out on the land was very satisfying, though it didn’t sound like much.

“Looking after the cows,” he fumbled. “Preparing to take the steers to market. That’s what ranchers do.”

“So you will have time to spend with the children, then.”

Baird scowled. “Why are you so concerned?”

“Because if you can spare someone to accompany me as far as Rock Creek, I mean to leave as soon as possible,” she answered. “But I can’t go unless I’m sure the children are provided for. You don’t need me to stay on, do you?”

“Good God! No!” Baird snapped at her. “We’ll do without you -- somehow.”

“How exactly?”

“Well we... I think the children should... Um...” Baird blinked at her. He didn’t have the faintest idea how to provide for the children. He didn’t even have the faintest idea what “looking after them” meant.

Ardith matched his scowl and pushed to her feet. “I can see we’d better discuss this tomorrow when you head is clearer.”

He looked up at her, a little ashamed that he’d drunk enough for her to notice. “Very well then,” he answered, trying to regain a bit of his dignity. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”

She started toward her room, then paused and looked back at him. “You disappointed her, you know,” she said.

“Who?”

“Ariel. She hoped for so much more from you.”

Baird wasn’t sure how Ardith knew that and was mortified that she did.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if she was disappointed,” he acknowledged, instinctively tugging the shroud of his past mistakes around him. “Disappointing people has always been my special gift.”

Ardith’s eyes went hard. “Don’t disappoint the children, Baird,” she warned him. “Don’t waste the love they feel for you. It’s far too precious.”

Without another word she moved beyond the arc of firelight. He heard the door to her room close behind her.

“I won’t disappoint him deliberately,” he promised.

Taking a deep breath, he set his empty glass aside and heaved to his feet. It was only a few yards to the door and the porch that ran along the back of the house. Baird shivered as he stepped outside, but he braced his hands along the railing and waited for the cold to clear his head.

He could feel the foothills running up behind the house, see the shadowy ridge of mountains rising toward the sky. There was something about this place with all its grandeur and wildness that spoke to him. Just standing here in the thick of the night, a speck of a man amidst such vastness, soothed him.

After talking to Ardith he needed soothing. She had ripped into him in her sly, superior way. She had forced him to see how much of a bastard he was, and just how good he was at wasting other people’s lives. His negligence in Burma had cost Bram everything, and now he had Ariel on his conscience.

He flexed his shoulder muscles and looked up at the sky. All his life he had been running from responsibilities, dusting them from his palms like so much dirt. But Ardith wasn’t the kind of woman who would let him get away with that -- especially when it came to his children.

Baird hurt just looking at them. China was so bright and fine and fragile that he could crush her with a word. Durban wore his hatred like a badge. Khy barreled through the world needing someone to protect him. Baird wasn’t the man to do that. He wasn’t careful enough or patient enough to raise these children. He knew he’d given them life. He knew he should accept responsibility for their welfare, but he didn’t know how to be their father. And God knows, he’d made so many mistakes. Yet the children belonged to him now -- only to him -- and that thought scared the hell out of him.