Deep Trouble Read Online Free

get that girl down from there. With a quirk of a smile, Gabe knew his ma would also want him to marry her. His ma pretty much wanted him to marry any unattached female he came across when he was living at home. His ma believed people were supposed to go through life two by two, for sure.
    He’d joined the cavalry instead, eager to be out on his own. And he’d never gone home again. And his ma had died a hard death with no family at her side.
    Swear to me on your mother’s life
.
    He’d done worse than that. He’d left his mother to die alone at the hands of villains. It appeared evil people had harmed this woman, too. But she wasn’t alone anymore. He wasn’t going to let her end up like his ma.
    His smile shrank, and he stepped carefully out of the cave to make his way back down to the ground.

    Shannon’s eyes blinked open, and she looked at rock. Nothing but rock. No golden city to be seen anywhere. She lay bleeding, one hand covering her face, terrified at her aloneness. The moan of the desert wind hummed into the cave.
    How had she come to this? Shannon Dysart. Daughter of Delmer Dysart, nicknamed Delusional Dysart. The academic world knew him as the professor who’d lost his mind and his reputation over an obsession with gold. Shannon knew him as an honest man who died in her arms, haunted by an expedition he’d barely survived.
    Her father had emerged from the West, the sole survivor of harsh deserts, wild Indians, and a brutally hard land. She’d known his expedition was late returning. Long overdue. In direct defiance of her mother, she’d gone hunting.
    His group had been large and well known—funded with her family’s money. It had made him easy to track until he vanished into the Arizona desert. She’d headed for his last known location. Within days of her arrival in West Texas, Father had been found, barely lucid, near death, and very much alone.
    Her gentle-spirited father had been crawling when a train had passed him and a compassionate engineer had broken the rules and stopped the train to pick him up in the middle of nowhere. Her father had known little more than his name, but it was enough for Shannon to hear he’d been found and rush to his side.
    Shannon’s mother, bitterly tired of her husband’s neglect as he pursued his passion for researching America’s distant past—especially fables about the kingdom of Quivera, a hidden city built of pure gold—had refused to come west. Giselle Dysart was years beyond feeling anything but bitter resentment for her gold-obsessed husband.
    But Shannon had been there, and she’d cared and listened. Her father had pressed on her notes from the journey. He’d lived for several days, but his words about treasure were taken as rantings by anyone who’d come near them in the dusty Texas town.
    Shannon had known better, and she’d taken his words to heart. She’d returned to her mother in St. Louis then burned away two years searching for the key to understanding the intricately secretive maps her father had drawn.
    Last winter she’d finally broken his code. She understood what he wrote. Her father truly had found Cibola and Quivera, the two most renowned of the legendary Seven Cities of Gold.
    She’d approached a university hoping to find historians who would share her father’s dreams, and found only mockery. Her father had tried and failed too many times.
    Determined to go alone to restore her father’s name, she’d defied her high society mother, who wanted Shannon to settle down and marry an acceptable man and let Delusional Dysart rest in peace. Shannon couldn’t betray her father by letting him stand as a madman. She’d used her last dime to fund this expedition for Cibola and Quivera, cities of gold.
    She’d searched and found only death.
    “Shannon, are you there?”
    Was this death then? Come calling?
    “Shannon!”
    Something whipped past the edge of her vision, and she turned her head but saw nothing. She had a flicker of