Читать книгу The Texan's Diamond Bride: The Texan's Diamond Bride / The Texas Tycoon's Christmas Baby - Teresa Hill, Brenda Harlen - Страница 11

She laughed despite herself, and said, “No, you’re not!”

He nodded, looking like a man not in the mood to be patient with her while she worked this out in her own head.

“You…you were riding around like some ranch hand, checking the fences, checking the livestock. I saw you.”

“You were watching me?” he asked incredulously.

“Of course I was. Did you think I’d just show up one day and head down into the mine? With no idea of whether anyone ever came that way? Whether I’d get caught? I watched you for the last three days. Doing the work of a regular ranch hand.”

“I’m a rancher. It’s what I do. I work the land.” He looked furious.

“You’re supposed to be in Dallas at some big family meeting,” she remembered.

“I didn’t feel like going to Dallas for another family meeting,” he said bitingly. “And you? You’re spying on me? And my ranch?”

“It’s not your ranch,” she reminded him.

And, oh, wow.

That was clearly the wrong thing to say.

He looked like he might strangle her right there where she sat. He was breathing hard, towering over her, looking like he might grab her by her hair and throw her out right then and there.

But he didn’t.

He just glowered at her.

“No, it’s not my ranch. Believe me, your family would never let mine forget that. You probably wouldn’t understand this, but the thing is, a man works a piece of land every day, sweats over it, bleeds over it, takes care of it like it was his, he starts to get ideas he shouldn’t have—”

“That’s not what I meant,” she claimed. “I mean…I know you must…care about the place—”

“Care about it?” He laughed, still furious. “I care about what I have for dinner some nights, whether the Cowboys win a football game, whether it’s going to rain or be sunny. What I feel for this ranch is a helluva lot more than care.”

“Yes. Okay.” She got to her feet, tired of him towering over her, though in truth, he still did even when she was standing. “I’m sorry—”

“So for you to just waltz in here like your family owns the place, which I suppose you think you do, and head down into that mine, like you think you own that, too, to try to find that stupid diamond—”

“Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry—”

“To give me that I’m-just-a-grad-student routine? That it’s-the-chance-of-a-lifetime routine?” He took her chin in his hand, getting right up in her face and holding her there, glaring at her. “You lie really well, Red.”

She shoved him away hard, and then nearly tripped over the stone hearth of the fireplace as she backed away from him.

He swore, reached out to grab her to keep her from falling.

“You really didn’t know it was me?” he demanded, his grip on her nearly tight enough to hurt.

“No. Of course not. I told you. I thought you were just a ranch hand. I thought—”

“What?” he demanded.

“Nothing—” She was blushing, just thinking of what she thought. That he was a beautiful man. A beautiful, ordinary man. And of what she’d wanted from him, what she’d let him do.

Oh, Lord, what she’d let him do…

What she’d planned for them to do once they got here…

She swallowed hard, thinking for a moment of all she’d lost in this instant. Glad it hadn’t gone any further between them, and yet…

She couldn’t believe he was one of the Foleys.

Paige had been introduced to him, of course. A girl didn’t move in the upper echelon of Texas society for her whole life without being introduced to the Foleys, even if her family had been feuding with them since the Civil War.

So they’d no doubt exchanged icily polite, icily brief handshakes at various social functions over the years, charity balls, the governor’s mansion, that sort of thing.

There were three brothers, something of a mixed set, all young, wealthy, arrogant and good-looking. In her mind, she could see them standing in a row in black tuxedoes and starched white shirts, looking for all the world like they owned everything they surveyed.

She’d never really been that interested in the feud, in perpetuating it or ending it, had just grown up on tales of how terribly his family had treated hers and been happy to keep her distance from him and the entire clan.

So she’d shook his hand a time or two when forced to do so in the name of good manners and not having any interest in causing a scene.

She really hadn’t paid that much attention to the whole brood until her mother’s terrible secret had come out this summer.

That her mother had once loved his father, Rex Foley. Her curiosity had driven her to the Internet and the photos she could find. She’d skipped right over the brothers and zeroed in on the father instead.

His father had slept with her mother and fathered a child with her. Paige’s little brother, Charlie.

How could that be?

She still couldn’t quite believe it, couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t…

And all that time she’d been glaring at pictures of Rex Foley, trying to understand, trying to see something of her little brother in him and wondering how it was that they’d managed to keep that secret all these years, how no one had known…

All that time, she should have been looking at the Foley brothers, arming herself, protecting herself against what was to come.

Then she might have known, she might have recognized him from the first. It was just that every time in the past when she’d met him he’d been in a tuxedo, all polished manners and cool, sophisticated charm, dismissive as could be of anyone in her family and disapproving, as well. And while that arrogance might work for some women, Paige had grown up with men like that.

It was old hat to her, a nice-looking man in a tuxedo who acted like he owned the world.

Men like that really didn’t do a thing for her.

They just didn’t seem real.

That man working the ranch, checking the mine, catching her there…He’d seemed interesting and very real.

So different from any version of Travis Foley she’d ever seen.

Sweaty, a little dirty, in worn jeans and well-worn boots.

A working man.

Real.

Right now he was also furious.

“What?” she asked, lost in her thoughts.

“Before, you said you thought I was a ranch hand, that I was…What? What were you going to say?”

That it would be nice to have someone who looked like you walk right into my life. That I was lonely. That I hadn’t had anyone special in my life for a long time and…And…

Oh, God. What did it matter now?

It could never be.

He was Travis Foley.

“I thought you looked like a nice guy,” she told him, laughing with as much disgust as she could muster. “How ridiculous is that?”

That seemed to satisfy him for the moment. They retreated to opposite corners of the small room, him leaving her by the fire to get warm while he brooded in the corner by the bed.

A single bed, maybe a single and a half, if there was such a thing.

Paige looked away. She had to forget what happened between them the night before, just completely erase it from her mind. It didn’t mean anything, and really, it was nothing. A little flirtation, a little…more than flirting.

Cuddling, kissing, his big, warm body rocking erotically against hers, and all those promises of so much more to come.

Her face burned at the memory.

And then she had a terrible thought.

She got up and glared at him. “You really didn’t know?”

“Know what?” he said, his tone biting.

“That it was me? That I was a McCord?”

“No.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him, although when she thought about it, she honestly wasn’t sure how it would have benefited him to lie about it, to pretend. To flirt with her the way he had, and to get her pants off of her and yet still not take it all the way.

Why be a nice guy at that point? If he was looking to just…mess with her head or her body or…

No, it didn’t make any sense.

“Red, if I’d wanted you last night, I could have had you a half a dozen times by now, and you know it. So don’t go playing the outraged, violated woman with me. It won’t fly.”

Okay. He could have. And they both knew it.

“Then, I don’t understand,” she said.

“Understand what?”

Who he was?

Who that man last night had been?

He stared at her from across the room, still angry, but looking more than a little confused now, uneasy, suspicious and maybe even a little vulnerable.

“Nothing. Forget it. I…It doesn’t matter now,” she said.

He was a Foley. His father had been involved with her mother years ago, fathered a child with her and then walked away. What kind of man was he? What kind of man was the son?

She’d gotten her heart and her ego bruised more than once, and then she’d developed a healthy distrust for men in general, which she’d totally ignored with this man.

What a time to let down that sense of caution.

From outside, the wind came up in a gust that sounded more like a roar. The cabin walls literally shook from the force of it, and the rain kept pounding down.

They ignored each other as best they could for most of the day. He built the fire up until it was roaring. She emptied a few cans of beef stew into a heavy metal pot that hung from a hook over the fire and cooked until it smelled heavenly.

Something about cooking over an open fire and being hungry made it even taste that good.

He was coldly polite, thanking her for the meal, making sure she knew how to hang the pot over the fire and get it off without burning herself, and then keeping to himself on the side of the room farthest from the fire.

Every now and then he went outside, pacing along the side of the cabin under the tiny overhang and staring at the storm.

By nightfall, she’d cleaned the whole place, for lack of anything better to do, fixed another meal of canned ravioli and finished one of only three books she’d found in nooks and crannies in the cabin. A paperback mystery about a wealthy woman whose husband stole every dime she had and ran off, very nearly never to be found again.

It was perfect for her mood right now, when she was thinking you really could never trust a man.

And then she decided she might as well get ready for bed, something she’d been dreading, because there was only one.

She hesitated, not sure what he intended.

From behind her, she heard him say, “Go ahead. Take the bed. I’ll sleep by the fire.”

“On the floor?”

“We slept on the ground last night, Red, and did just fine.”

Yes, they had. Still, she didn’t want him to be nice or gentlemanly or anything like that. “You’ll get cold,” she said.

“Won’t be the first time, won’t be the last. And tonight we’ve got a fire.”

She nodded, not turning around, not wanting to look at him or to think of what she’d expected this night to be. It was ridiculous, anyway. To think she’d waltz onto the ranch and find this man who did nothing but work the land, an ordinary, hardworking man who wouldn’t know about her family’s money and power and even if he did, wouldn’t care.

Just a man who would get all tangled up in her, practically on sight.

And it was absolutely the last thing she needed to be thinking about right now, with her family absolutely going crazy and their jewelry store empire in some serious financial difficulties, her trapped here with the enemy, caught red-handed trying to steal a priceless diamond right out from under his nose.

Oh, her family would claim ownership if she found it, but it would be a legal fight that could last years, and she’d be painted as a thief by his family. But in the end, she thought her family would prevail, and his would say the diamond was one more thing stolen from the Foleys by the McCords.

All that between them, plus her mother’s affair with his father, the child it had produced…

Don’t be stupid, Paige. Forget about the man. You have to.

Because he didn’t exist anywhere except inside her fantasies anyway.

She climbed into the bed. It was cold but quite comfortable. Either that or she was exhausted, if not from the previous day and night, from the emotions of this whole ordeal.

He knew who she was, and he knew what she’d come here for. Which meant she’d failed in a mission to help her family through a difficult time financially.

It was one problem her family had right now that she’d thought she could actually solve. Not the thing with her mother or Rex Foley or her brother, but the money part. She’d been willing to head into an old, long-abandoned mine alone to do it. She wasn’t stupid. She’d known the risks and been willing to take it for the sake of her family.

And she’d failed.

So, the stores were in some trouble, her mother had a thing for Rex Foley, and Charlie…

Poor Charlie.

She feared she’d just made things worse for him.

Travis stretched out in front of the fire and listened to her toss and turn and sigh for as long as he could stand it, then finally turned toward her and barked out, “What is it?”

She gave a start, reminding him of the way she’d done that at each big bolt of lightning.

“Sorry,” she said. “I…there’s just so much, I don’t even know where to start.”

“You want back in the mine?” he guessed, because he knew eventually she’d get around to trying to talk him into that.

Even now, caught red-handed, she thought she could somehow charm her way back inside, thinking to steal one more thing from his family?

Unbelievable!

Women!

A man just couldn’t trust them.

Just this past summer, Travis’s own brother, Zane, had gone nuts over his little girl Olivia’s nanny, and Travis had known right away that woman was hiding something. It hadn’t taken more than a couple of phone calls to find out Melanie Grandy hadn’t always been a nanny. She’d worked as a Las Vegas showgirl. Travis didn’t know if Zane knew about that or not, and in the end, he’d decided to leave it alone, thinking they’d work it out. It wasn’t like the woman had been a stripper or a call girl.

But now, being reminded himself of just how manipulative women could be, Travis was wondering if he’d done the right thing. He could probably use someone like Zane right now to remind him not to get stupid over a pretty, scheming woman.

“Go ahead,” he urged Miss Paige McCord. “Tell me why I should let you back into that mine.”

“No, it’s not the mine,” she insisted. “I mean…yes, I want back in it, but, no, that’s not what I was talking about a second ago. It was…I wondered if I could talk to you about just one thing without…well, maybe without this whole lifelong family feud getting in the way of it?”

“Considering the fact that everything between your family and mine started there and is colored by that, I don’t see how, Red.”

“Yes. I know. You’re right. I’m just…None of it’s his fault—”

“His fault?”

“Charlie. My little brother…Your…You know about Charlie, right?”

Okay, that surprised him.

And that particular wound was still raw and festering.

He didn’t really know how he felt about having a twenty-one-year-old half brother he’d known nothing about until a few weeks ago.

While he might disagree with his brothers about a lot of things, how they lived their lives, what was important to them, things like that, they were and always would be brothers. They were tight. They were family, and he’d have walked through fire for any of them anytime they needed it.

So to know that there was a fourth Foley brother out there somewhere, who’d never been one of them…

It was just wrong.

Who’d been a McCord instead.

“Yes,” he admitted. “My father told us about Charlie.”

His father was still reeling from the news himself. His father, steady as a rock, raise-three-boys-alone-after-his-wife-died kind of steady, absolutely reeling.

Travis didn’t think anything in this world could have shaken his father like that particular bit of news.

“It’s just that…Charlie’s special,” Paige said. “He’s great. He’s sweet. He’s kind. He’s happy. Like a puppy, just kind of silly and goofy. Everybody loves him. And he’s so young. I don’t…I can’t stand the idea of him getting hurt in all this.”

Travis got up and came to stand over her, hands on his hips, furious all over again. “And you think my father and my brothers and I are going to hurt him?”

“I don’t know.” She sat up in the bed, covers falling to her waist, her hair tumbling everywhere. “I have no idea how you’re going to treat him or what you think about him. I can still hardly believe it’s true. That he’s your father’s son and not my father’s.”

Travis frowned. Okay. He had to admit what she’d just said was likely true, because he wasn’t completely sure how he felt about the whole thing, either. How could anyone be? It was all too strange, too new.

“If I could just…I know you don’t owe me anything,” she said. “I know I don’t have the right to ask anything of you, but you’re here and we spent some time together before…before anything about our families got in the way, and…Well, I think you can be a nice man, when you want to be. And I’m asking you, please…Charlie wants to meet your father…his father. I assume at some point he’ll want to meet you and your brothers… Could you just be kind? Please?”

Kind?

What the hell did she think of them? That they were a pack of wolves? That they’d eat him alive?

And yet, he could hear that her concern was genuine and that, for all he could see, she loved her younger brother very much.

“Answer a question for me, Red. How did your father treat him?”

She looked for a minute like…like it had been bad…maybe everything Travis feared. He’d always heard Devon McCord was an ass.

He swore, sat down on the edge of the cot and grabbed her by the arms, holding her there in front of him, not letting her look away. “No. Tell me. He hurt him?” That one question burned a hole in Travis’s gut when he let himself think about it.

She looked confused, surprised, hurt herself. “No.”

“The guy’s always been rumored to have a nasty temper. Ask anybody, and not the people in my family who were taught from birth to hate him. Anybody. They’ll tell you he was a big, tough, mean son of a bitch. So tell me. Tell me right now. Did he hit that kid? Did he hit Charlie?”

“No,” she said.

“Swear it,” he demanded, right up in her face. “Right now. It’s…I need to know, Red. I need to know no one hurt him like that when no one in my family even knew he was a Foley, and none of us were there to protect him. Because he’s family and we don’t leave each other alone to face something like that. It just isn’t right.”

“No, he didn’t hit us.”

“Maybe not you or your sister, but what about your brothers? And if he knew Charlie wasn’t his—”

“He didn’t know,” she said. “I’m almost certain he didn’t. Charlie was just so easy to like. To love. For my father, too. I don’t think there’s any way he knew Charlie wasn’t his.”

“Okay.” Then he realized he’d been manhandling her himself, trying to make her sit there and look him in the eye and tell him the truth.

He still had her by the arms in a hold that wouldn’t allow any kind of escape from him.

And he’d gotten too close to her again.

He let his hands drop and eased back away from her as she scooted back on the bed to sit up against the headboard, looking wary and surprised and not quite sure what to do with herself or to say to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She shrugged off his words, like they didn’t really matter, like none of it did and let her head fall until he saw nothing more than a curtain of red-gold curls and all that made him worry even more.

Travis swore and shook his head in disgust. “Did I hurt you, Red?”

“No. It’s just…grabbing me like that and acting like you’d shake the truth out of me, if you had to? That was something my father did.”

Her father, and now him?

That was perfect.

Just perfect.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

Now he felt like an absolute ass.

“Travis?” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m glad you care enough about Charlie to want to be sure my father didn’t hurt him like that. I’m glad you want to look out for him, the way brothers do. That means a lot to me. I want that for Charlie, because I love him. And I’m glad there’s at least one bit of family business we agree on. Charlie. That none of this is his fault.”

“It’s not. I know that,” he told her.

“So maybe my family isn’t as different from yours as we thought.”

He scoffed at that.

Not because he thought it wasn’t true, but because he didn’t need to be sitting here finding common ground with her, finding reasons to like her. It was the last thing he needed to be doing.

And it didn’t help any that he was sitting on her bed, late at night, the two of them absolutely alone, with him having to keep reminding himself of exactly who she was, to keep from remembering what he’d planned to be doing with her in this cabin, in this bed tonight.

It didn’t help either that he’d put his hands on her, even in anger, for a moment. And it was even worse now, when it wasn’t anger that was driving him on, but the need to go to her again, this time to make sure she was okay, to comfort her, wishing he could forget everything that stood between them.

Get up, he told himself sternly. Get up and get out of here, before you make it any worse.

But he didn’t listen.