Burke, the Kingpin (The Shamrock Trinity) Read online

  Burke, The Kingpin

  The Shamrock Trinity

  Part of the Delaney Family Series

  Fayrene Preston

  © 1986 by Fayrene Preston.

  Digital publication 2017, Fayrene Preston

  Cover art © 2017 by Tammy Seidick.

  Digital design by A Thirsty Mind Book Design

  Smashwords Edition, 2017

  All rights reserved

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This is dedicated to Kay Hooper and Iris Johansen.

  Ladies, it was truly a pleasure.

  Table of Contents:

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  List of Titles

  About the Author

  Preface

  It was said that the Delaneys were descended from Irish kings and were still kissing cousins to half of Europe’s royalty. Being more than an ocean away, Europe’s royalty could scarcely confirm this.

  Luckily for the Delaneys.

  Old Shamus Delaney was wont to speak reminiscently of various cattle reivers, cutthroats, and smugglers in his family, but only when good Irish whiskey could pry such truths out of him. Sober, he held to it tooth and nail that the Delaneys were an aristocratic family—and woe to any man who dared dispute him.

  They were a handsome family: tall and strong of body, quick and keen of mind. Nearly all of them had dark hair, but their eyes varied from Kelly-green to sky-blue, and it seemed at least one person of every generation boasted black eyes that could flash with Delaney temper or smile with Delaney charm.

  None could deny that charm. And none could deny that the Delaneys carved their empire with their own hands and wits. Royalty they may not have been, but if Arizona had been a country, the Delaneys would have been kings.

  Whatever his bloodlines, Shamus Delaney sired strong sons, who in turn passed along the traits suitable to building an empire. Land was held in the teeth of opposition, and more was acquired until the empire spread over five states. Various businesses were tried: some abandoned and some maintained. Whenever there was a call to battle, the Delaney men took up arms and went to war.

  Many never came home.

  In the first generations, an Apache maiden caught a roving Delaney eye, and so the blood of another proud race enriched Delaney stock. Sometime before the turn of this century a Delaney daughter fell in love with a Spanish don who really could claim a royal heritage. She was widowed young, but her daughter married a Delaney cousin, so there was royal blood of a sort to boast of.

  They were a canny lot, and clan loyalty was strong enough to weather the occasional dissensions that could tear other great families apart. The tides in their fortune rose and fell, but the Delaney luck never entirely deserted them. They built a true dynasty in their adopted land, and took for their symbol the shamrock.

  They were a healthy family, a lucky family, but not invulnerable. War and sickness and accidents took their toll, reducing their number inexorably. Finally there was only a single Delaney son controlling the vast empire his ancestors had built. He, too, answered the call to battle in a world war, and when it was over, he answered another call—this one from the land of his ancestors. He was proud to find the Delaney name still known and respected, and fierce in his newfound love for the land of his family’s earliest roots.

  But his own roots were deeply set in the soil of Arizona, and at last he came home. He brought with him a bride, a true Irish colleen with merry black eyes and a soft, gentle touch. And he promised her and himself that the Delaney family would grow again.

  While his country adjusted to a life without war, and prosperity grew, Patrick Delaney and his wife, Erin, set about building their family. They had three sons: Burke, York, and Rafe.

  As the boys grew, so did the empire. Patrick was a canny businessman, expanding what his ancestors had built until the Delaney family employed thousands. Ventures into mining and high finance proved lucrative, and the old homestead, Killara, expanded dramatically.

  By the time twenty-one-year-old Burke was in college, the Delaney interests were vast and complex. Burke was preparing to assume some of the burden of the family business, while nineteen-year-old York was graduating from high school, and seventeen-year-old Rafe was spending every spare moment on a horse, any horse, at the old Shamrock Ranch.

  Then tragedy struck. On their way to Ireland for a long-overdue vacation, Patrick and Erin Delaney were killed in a plane crash, leaving three sons to mourn them.

  Leaving three sons... and a dynasty.

  One

  She was trying to reach the sun before it disappeared over the edge of the world. The hooves of the powerful gray Arabian she was riding thundered over the ground toward the orange fireball that hung suspended above the Arizona horizon. The Sulphur Springs Valley was bathed in jewel colors, the air seeming to shimmer with them.

  Beneath her spring had laid down a hand-embroidered carpet of wild flowers. Around her the lush green of the valley rolled up into foothills and stopped only a few of its fingers daring to creep higher into the burnt sienna mountains. As each minute passed and the sun abandoned yet other creases or scars on the faces of the mountains, the light deepened to even more vivid hues.

  Cara Winston laughed, but only the horse and the wind heard her, and that was just the way she wanted it. Since her departure from the Delaney family homestead, Killara, sixteen years before had involved such a private grief, she had determined that her return should be a private celebration. No one had comforted the nine-year-old Cara then: no one would share the happiness of the twenty-five-year-old Cara now.

  This ride had been a spur-of-the-moment notion. A little earlier Cara had admitted to Bridget, the Delaneys’ housekeeper, that she hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. Bridget had shown true horror at the revelation and ushered her off to a huge bedroom for a nap. Dutifully Cara had stripped down to her lace camisole and half slip and climbed into the big four-poster bed. She had even shut her eyes. For a minute.

  But it was simply too exciting to be back on Killara after all this time, and her gray eyes had flown open. Turning her head toward the French doors, she had seen the descending sun, and the impulse to chase it had hit her. She reached for the dress she had worn since last night’s party in Paris. The dress was made of three layers of chiffon—crimson on top, then tangerine, then gold—and was designed so that when she moved, the bottom two colors showed like frilly petticoats. She had put it on and rushed out to find a horse with spirit who would race with her to the sun.

  Now, beneath her, she could feel his muscles bunching and extending as his long legs ate up the distance. Shalimar. That was what the stablehand had said his name was. Cara had bridled and mounted the Arabian, prevailing with a brilliant smile over the objections the bemused man was attempting to voice.

  Holding onto the reins with one hand and the horse’s mane with the other, Cara laughed again. The wind welcomed her, blowing through the long silver-blond strands of her hair and whipping up the edges of her flame-hued skirts. She had tucked the front of the ski
rts beneath her thighs to protect her skin from the horse’s hide, but the rest flowed out over the horse’s back in ruffled banners.

  Her dress had been created in Paris by one of the fashion world’s leading designers; the Arizona sunset had been created by nature. Yet the brilliant colors of her dress and the sunset matched. Nature had seen fit to add only a large swash of magenta and a touch of deep vermilion to the sky.

  Cara bent her head to Shalimar’s neck and urged him to go faster. The happiness that was racing through her blood verged on intoxication. Killara. She had forgotten how crystal-clear the air, how wide the sky, how deafening the silence. Killara, the place she had been the happiest for the longest period of time. She had needed desperately to see it once again.

  * * *

  As soon as Burke Delaney reached Killara land, he pulled back on the throttle, slowing his speed, and swooped the helicopter low until he was skimming along the ground. He lived in Tucson on the top floor of Delaney Tower and, conveniently, worked in the large corner office on the floor below. But Killara was his real home, and the first sight of it never failed to thrill him.

  His feelings for Killara went far deeper than the mere satisfaction some people might experience at owning such a magnificent ranch. He had had wealth all his life, and had inherited the power and the responsibility that went along with it when he was twenty-one. Since then he had tripled the net worth of Delaney Enterprises, and he and his two younger brothers owned land in five states.

  But Killara was the original homestead of the Delaneys, the land Burke’s ancestors had chosen to settle after they emigrated from Ireland. It was his and his brothers’ heritage, a heritage all three of them were intensely proud of. And if tomorrow they awoke to find they were in danger of losing all they possessed, this was the piece of land to which they would retreat and for which they would fight. They had inherited the responsibilities of a dynasty, and each would go to his death fighting to preserve it, as Delaneys before them had.

  Burke rubbed the back of his neck in an effort to alleviate the fatigue that always seemed to gather there. A large emerald glinted on his finger. Cut to the precise shape of a shamrock and set into a heavy gold ring, the emerald had been handed down from eldest son to eldest son for over three centuries.

  As head of Delaney Enterprises, Burke carried out his duties with brilliance and ease. These last months, however, his schedule had been grueling. In addition to a complicated takeover, there had been the conclusion of an extremely distasteful court case. Normally he considered himself invulnerable, but the court case had been particularly nasty and had, at least partially, reopened an old wound. As a result, he knew York and Rafe had been worried about him.

  His brothers had their own responsibilities of course. York was head of the family’s mining and oil interests. and Rafe ran Shamrock, a horse ranch known throughout the country for its excellent breeding and training programs. They had been urging him to take a rest, and he had finally agreed.

  Burke hadn’t planned to leave Tucson until Friday evening, but it had been three months since he had set foot on Killara, and he had been eager to return to the ranch. With careful planning he had been able to get away twenty-four hours early, giving himself a rare four-day weekend.

  He eased the copter into a southeasterly turn, heading for the landing strip, when out of the corner of his eye he picked up a flash of color, then movement. He peered down at a horse and rider, usually an ordinary sight on KilIara, a ranch that employed over a hundred people, all of whom rode. But this wasn’t at all ordinary, Burke noted, because the horse being ridden was his horse. Only he rode Shalimar. Yet now mounted on his horse was a silver-haired girl—riding bareback, and in a red evening dress—and he had no idea who she was. Maybe York and Rafe were right, he mused. He needed a rest far more than he realized!

  The horse and rider passed beneath him at a breakneck pace and emerged on the other side. Shalimar’s light gray tail and mane streamed behind him, and the material of the girl’s dress lifted and undulated like a flame in the wind. Together the girl and the horse looked like light and fire streaking across the range.

  At that moment the girl turned and waved, and he decided that she could very well be an illusion conjured up by his tired mind. A vision. A fantasy. Yet it had been a long time since he had had any fantasies about women. He of all people knew that women were safe only when a set of rules were laid down and abided by.

  Banking the helicopter in a wide circle around her, he motioned for her to stop. He saw her reining in Shalimar and reflected that it was a good thing the Arabian had been a gift to him from Rafe. Rafe saw to it that no horse left Shamrock without being well trained. Burke flew the helicopter some distance away, so that when he landed, the downwash from the blades wouldn’t hurt the girl or the horse.

  * * *

  Cara watched as the helicopter settled on the ground. If she hadn’t guessed already, the shamrock logo on the side of the copter’s door would have told her it belonged to Delaney Enterprises. Underneath her the sleek horse snorted and tossed his head, restless to be off again, but otherwise he showed no sign of alarm at the loud noise and swirling dust.

  The blades whooshed to a stop, the door opened, and a man stepped out. He was in his thirties, a tall man, with bronze-dark skin and black hair. All three of the Delaney brothers could fit that description, she remembered so she wasn’t immediately sure which of the three this man was.

  He started toward her, moving with a hard-muscled deliberation that spoke of great measures of self-assurance and authority. His thick hair was well-styled and brushed the collar of his shirt. He wore the dress pants of a business suit, but he had undone several of the buttons on his shirt and had rolled his sleeves up over his forearms. Over the years Cara had occasionally come across articles in newspapers or magazines about the Delaneys, so it was all these things together, plus the roughhewn, almost savage features of his face that finally made her decide which brother was approaching. The dark green eyes and the fabulous Delaney emerald glinting against the bronze skin of his hand only confirmed her judgment: This was the formidable Burke Delaney.

  As he drew closer Burke realized he had been wrong. It was no girl who controlled Shalimar with such ease. She was a woman in every sense of the word. And quite the most glorious woman he had ever seen. She sat slim and erect astride the snorting, prancing Shalimar. She wore no shoes, and her skirt had ridden up her thighs, revealing a long expanse of smooth golden leg. If one disregarded her dress and her silver blond hair, she could have been a proud Indian maiden of long ago.

  There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, he assured himself. Yet, silhouetted against the setting sun as she was, she had a beauty that was almost ethereal, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was some anomalous vision that might disappear at any moment.

  He halted in front of his horse and stroked its dark muzzle. Glancing up at the woman, he was momentarily disoriented by eyes the color of smoke. He knew she wouldn’t realize the effect she had on him. He had the well-deserved reputation of keeping a poker face in even the most dramatic situations. No one could tell what Burke Delaney was thinking unless he wanted them to.

  “Hi.” she greeted him easily, giving no indication that she was disturbed in any way about being caught riding his prize Arabian bareback, and in an evening dress. “Did you just get in from Tucson?”

  He nodded. Her voice had an unusual lilt to it, but he thought he could detect a faint trace of an English accent.

  “I thought so.” She let go of Shalimar’s mane to indicate Burke’s business clothes.

  “Where were you coming from?” he asked casually. “Or going to?”

  With a balletic motion she lifted her leg over the horse’s neck and slipped to the ground. Her long hair swung through the air, gleaming in the sunset so that Burke couldn’t decide whether it was silver with the color of gold running through it, or gold highlighted by strands of silver. But one thing was
for sure: Whoever or whatever she was, he was having the oddest reaction to her that he’d had in all his thirty-six years.

  “I was trying to catch the sun before it went down,” she said. A gust of wind stirred the long green grass and billowed the gossamer fabric of her dress around her ankles.

  “To catch the sun.” he repeated, bemused, wondering what else he had expected a vision to say. She was a phenomenon that made no sense, and suddenly he decided she didn’t need to. After all, a lot of phenomena made no sense, but still you could appreciate and enjoy them.

  He took the reins out of her hand, pulled them over Shalimar’s head, and let them drop to the ground. The horse would stay. Then, before he could think his actions through, he reached for her. She came against him easily—just as in a fantasy.

  “What are you doing?” Her eyes had shaded to an alluring smoke-tinted blue that reflected the indigo of the sky. But she showed no fear, and her very fearlessness made him all the more determined.

  When he spoke, his voice sounded as harsh as the mountains that surrounded them. “I’m going to kiss you.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re on my horse. You’re on my land. I figure you must belong to me too.” And he lowered his head and blotted out the light from the dying sun. But, perhaps because he was subconsciously afraid that she would vanish, his mouth only whispered over hers, then touched lightly. She didn’t resist. He increased the pressure. She didn’t vanish.

  Her lips were soft and had a taste of sweetness to them that couldn’t be real. Yet... He pulled his mouth away to see if he could find that sweetness anywhere else. He did. At the base of her neck he detected a strongly beating pulse just under her skin, and covered it with his mouth. It pounded against his lips. He inhaled and discovered a scent of wild grasses at dawn and exotic flowers in full bloom at midnight. A small sound reached his ears, a cry of frustration that he couldn’t deny. Hungrily he retraced the route to her mouth and found it open, ready for him. His tongue searched, met hers, the kiss deepened, and she responded wildly—just as in a fantasy.