Harlan had spent half the night after his aborted meeting with Janet reading through every book in his library on the Comanches and their days in the southern Great Plains. Nothing he found there was conclusive proof that Janet’s ancestral claim to his land was solid. In fact, it seemed to him that Lone Wolf’s father had probably been a typical nomadic hunter, before being sent off to the reservation in Oklahoma.

It had been well into the wee hours of the morning when he’d decided to do a little more investigating by going to Oklahoma to see what he could discover there. His meetings with folks at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and with tribal elders who agreed to see him were inconclusive, as well. He sensed that Janet would never find the proof she sought unless she hoped to stake her claim for all Comanches and not just for her great-grandfather and his descendants.

Still, the meetings had given him much to think about, a historical perspective on his own family’s actions when they’d moved to Texas to flee the war that had destroyed their home in the South. In seizing an opportunity for themselves, had they stolen it from others? He found he could understand Janet’s actions far more clearly now and he could do so without feeling the rancor of betrayal.

Perhaps, if Janet ever opened up to him, they could reach some sort of compromise. In the meantime, though, he’d decided that she enriched his life too much for him to walk away without fighting for their future. It was a decision weighed and reached with years of maturity, rather than the angry, instantaneous, hot-blooded reaction he might have had a couple of decades earlier.

Also, the more he thought about the desperate plea he had made to Janet to run away with him, the more he realized that she had been exactly right to turn him down. The place to court her was right in Los Piños, in plain view. He didn’t ever want a soul to think he was sneaking around with her because he wasn’t proud to be seen with her. There were too many people ready with quick bias for him to be adding to that sort of rotten speculation about her morals or his own.

As soon as he’d set down his plane at the local airfield, he marched straight down Main Street, walked into her office and hauled her off to have dinner at DiPasquali’s.

“Harlan,” she protested, even as she hurried to keep pace with him. “What about Jenny? She’s going to be waiting for me at White Pines. She’ll be worried.”

“I called Melissa from the airport. Jenny will have dinner with her and Cody. Sharon Lynn and baby Harlan love having her around. You can pick her up there.”