Long, Tall Texans Collection Volume 7
Autorzy
Diana Palmer
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15,2K
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73
CHAPTER ONE
The man on the hill sat on his horse with elegance and grace, and the young woman found herself staring at him. He was obviously overseeing the roundup, which the man at her side had brought her to view. This ranch was small by Texas standards, but around Jacobsville, it was big enough to put its owner in the top ten in size.
“Dusty, isn’t it?” Ed Caldwell asked with a chuckle, oblivious to the distant mounted rider, who was behind him and out of his line of sight. “I’m glad I work for the corporation and not here. I like my air cool and unpolluted.”
Leslie Murry smiled. She wasn’t pretty. She had a plain, rather ordinary sort of face with blond hair that had a natural wave, and gray eyes. Her one good feature besides her slender figure was a pretty bow mouth. She had a quiet, almost reclusive demeanor these days. But she hadn’t always been like that. In her early teens, Leslie had been flamboyant and outgoing, a live wire of a girl whose friends had laughed at her exploits. Now, at twenty-three, she was as sedate as a matron. The change in her was shocking to people who’d once known her. She knew Ed Caldwell from college in Houston. He’d graduated in her sophomore year, and she’d quit the following semester to go to work as a paralegal for his father’s law firm in Houston. Things had gotten too complicated there, and Ed had come to the rescue once again. In fact, Ed was the reason she’d just been hired as an executive assistant by the mammoth Caldwell firm. His cousin owned it.
She’d never met Mather Gilbert Caldwell, or Matt as he was known locally. People said he was a nice, easygoing man who loved an underdog. In fact, Ed said it frequently himself. They were down here for roundup so that Ed could introduce Leslie to the head of the corporation. But so far, all they’d seen was dust and cattle and hardworking cowboys.
“Wait here,” Ed said. “I’m going to ride over and find Matt. Be right back.” He urged his horse into a trot and held on for dear life. Leslie had to bite her lip to conceal a smile at the way he rode. It was painfully obvious that he was much more at home behind the wheel of a car. But she wouldn’t have been so rude as to have mentioned it, because Ed was the only friend she had these days. He was, in fact, the only person around who knew about her past.
While she was watching him, the man on horseback on the hill behind them was watching her. She sat on a horse with style, and she had a figure that would have attracted a connoisseur of women—which the man on horseback was. Impulsively he spurred his horse into a gallop and came down the rise behind her. She didn’t hear him until he reined in and the harsh sound of the horse snorting had her whirling in the saddle.
The man was wearing working clothes, like the other cowboys, but all comparisons ended there. He wasn’t ragged or missing a tooth or unshaven. He was oddly intimidating, even in the way he sat the horse, with one hand on the reins and the other on his powerful denim-clad thigh.
Matt Caldwell met her gray eyes with his dark ones and noted that she wasn’t the beauty he’d expected, despite her elegance of carriage and that perfect figure. “Ed brought you, I gather,” he said curtly.
She’d almost guessed from his appearance that his voice would be deep and gravelly, but not that it would cut like a knife. Her hands tightened on the reins. “I…yes, he…he brought me.”
The stammer was unexpected. Ed’s usual sort of girl was brash and brassy, much more sophisticated than this shrinking violet here. He liked to show off Matt’s ranch and impress the girls. Usually it didn’t bother Matt, but he’d had a frustrating day and he was out of humor. He scowled. “Interested in cattle ranching, are you?” he drawled with ice dripping from every syllable. “We could always get you a rope and let you try your hand, if you’d like.”
She felt as if every muscle in her body had gone taut. “I…came to meet Ed’s cousin,” she managed. “He’s rich.” The man’s dark eyes flashed and she flushed. She couldn’t believe she’d made such a remark to a stranger. “I mean,” she corrected, “he owns the company where Ed works. Where I work,” she added. She could have bitten her tongue for her artless mangling of a straightforward subject, but the man rattled her.
Something kindled in the man’s dark eyes under the jutting brow; something not very nice at all. He leaned forward and his eyes narrowed. “Why are you really out here with Ed?” he asked.
She swallowed. He had her hypnotized, like a cobra with a rabbit. Those eyes…those very dark, unyielding eyes…!
“It’s not your business, is it?” she asked finally, furious at her lack of cohesive thought and this man’s assumption that he had the right to interrogate her.
He didn’t say a word. Instead, he just looked at her.
“Please,” she bit off, hunching her shoulders uncomfortably. “You’re making me nervous!”
“You came to meet the boss, didn’t you?” he asked in a velvety smooth tone. “Didn’t anyone tell you that he’s no marshmallow?”
She swallowed. “They say he’s a very nice, pleasant man,” she returned a little belligerently. “Something I’ll bet nobody in his right mind would dream of saying about you!” she added with her first burst of spirit in years.
His eyebrows lifted. “How do you know I’m not nice and pleasant?” he asked, chuckling suddenly.
“You’re like a cobra,” she said uneasily.
He studied her for a few seconds before he nudged his horse in the side with a huge dusty boot and eased so close to her that she actually shivered. He hadn’t been impressed with the young woman who stammered and stuttered with nerves, but a spirited woman was a totally new proposition. He liked a woman who wasn’t intimidated by his bad mood.
His hand went across her hip to catch the back of her saddle and he looked into her eyes from an unnervingly close distance. “If I’m a cobra, then what does that make you, cupcake?” he drawled with deliberate sensuality, so close that she caught the faint smoky scent of his breath, the hint of spicy cologne that clung to his lean, tanned face. “A soft, furry little bunny?”
She was so shaken by the proximity of him that she tried desperately to get away, pulling so hard on the reins that her mount unexpectedly reared and she went down on the ground, hard, hitting her injured left hip and her shoulder as she fell into the thick grass.
A shocked sound came from the man, who vaulted out of the saddle and was beside her as she tried to sit up. He reached for her a little roughly, shaken by her panic. Women didn’t usually try to back away from him; especially ordinary ones like this. She fell far short of his usual companions.
She fought his hands, her eyes huge and overly bright, panic in the very air around her. “No…!” she cried out helplessly.
He froze in place, withdrawing his lean hand from her arm, and stared at her with scowling curiosity.
“Leslie!” came a shout from a few yards away. Ed bounced up as quickly as he could manage it without being unseated. He fumbled his way off the horse and knelt beside her, holding out his arm so that she could catch it and pull herself up.
“I’m sorry,” she said, refusing to look at the man who was responsible for her tumble. “I jerked the reins. I didn’t mean to.”
“Are you all right?” Ed asked, concerned.
She nodded. “Sure.” But she was shaking, and both men could see it.
Ed glanced over her head at the taller, darker, leaner man who stood with his horse’s reins in his hand, staring at the girl.
“Uh, have you two introduced yourselves?” he asked awkwardly.
Matt was torn by conflicting emotions, the strongest of which was bridled fury at the woman’s panicky attitude. She acted as if he had plans to assault her, when he’d only been trying to help her up. He was angry and it cost him his temper. “The next time you bring a certifiable lunatic to my ranch, give me some advance warning,” the tall man sniped at Ed. He moved as curtly as he spoke, swinging abruptly into the saddle to glare down at them. “You’d better take her home,” he told Ed. “She’s a damned walking liability around animals.”
“But she rides very well, usually,” Ed protested. “Okay, then,” he added when the other man glowered at him. He forced a smile. “I’ll see you later.”
The tall man jerked his hat down over his eyes, wheeled the horse without another word and rode back up on the rise where he’d been sitting earlier.
“Whew!” Ed laughed, sweeping back his light brown hair uneasily. “I haven’t seen him in a mood like that for years. I can’t imagine what set him off. He’s usually the soul of courtesy, especially when someone’s hurt.”
Leslie brushed off her jeans and looked up at her friend morosely. “He rode right up to me,” she said unsteadily, “and leaned across me to talk with a hand on the saddle. I just…panicked. I’m sorry. I guess he’s some sort of foreman here. I hope you don’t get in trouble with your cousin because of it.”
“That was my cousin, Leslie,” he said heavily.
She stared at him vacantly. “That was Matt Caldwell?”
He nodded.
She let out a long breath. “Oh, boy. What a nice way to start a new job, by alienating the man at the head of the whole food chain.”
“He doesn’t know about you,” he began.
Her eyes flashed. “And you’re not to tell him,” she returned firmly. “I mean it! I will not have my past paraded out again. I came down here to get away from reporters and movie producers, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’ve had my hair cut, bought new clothes, gotten contact lenses. I’ve done everything I can think of so I won’t be recognized. I’m not going to have it all dragged up again. It’s been six years,” she added miserably. “Why can’t people just leave it alone?”
“The newsman was just following a lead,” he said gently. “One of the men who attacked you was arrested for drunk driving and someone connected the name to your mother’s case. His father is some high city official in Houston. It was inevitable that the press would dig up his son’s involvement in your mother’s case in an election year.”
“Yes, I know, and that’s what prompted the producer to think it would make a great TV movie of the week.” She ground her teeth together. “That’s just what we all need. And I thought it was all over. How silly of me,” she said in a defeated tone. “I wish I were rich and famous,” she added. “Then maybe I could buy myself some peace and privacy.” She glanced up where the tall man sat silently watching the herding below. “I made some stupid remarks to your cousin, too, not knowing who he really was. I guess he’ll be down in personnel first thing Monday to have me fired.”
“Over my dead body,” he said. “I may be only a lowly cousin, but I do own stock in the corporation. If he fires you, I’ll fight for you.”
“Would you really, for me?” she asked solemnly.
He ruffled her short blond hair. “You’re my pal,” he said. “I’ve had a pretty bad blow of my own. I don’t want to get serious about anybody ever again. But I like having you around.”
She smiled sadly. “I’m glad you can act that way about me. I can’t really bear to be…” She swallowed. “I don’t like men close to me, in any physical way. The therapist said I might be able to change that someday, with the right man. I don’t know. It’s been so long…”
“Don’t sit and worry,” he said. “Come on. I’ll take you back to town and buy you a nice vanilla ice-cream cone. How’s that?”
She smiled at him. “Thanks, Ed.”
He shrugged. “Just another example of my sterling character.” He glanced up toward the rise and away again. “He’s just not himself today,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Matt Caldwell watched his visitors bounce away on their respective horses with a resentment and fury he hadn’t experienced in years. The little blond icicle had made him feel like a lecher. As if she could have appealed to him, a man who had movie stars chasing after him! He let out a rough sigh and pulled a much-used cigar from his pocket and stuck it in his teeth. He didn’t light it. He was trying to give up the bad habit, but it was slow going. This cigar had been just recently the target of his secretary’s newest weapon in her campaign to save him from nicotine. The end was still damp, in fact, despite the fact that he’d only arrived here from his office in town about an hour ago. He took it out of his mouth with a sigh, eyed it sadly and put it away. He’d threatened to fire her and she’d threatened to quit. She was a nice woman, married with two cute little kids. He couldn’t let her leave him. Better the cigar than good help, he decided.
He let his eyes turn again toward the couple growing smaller in the distance. What an odd girlfriend Ed had latched onto this time. Of course, she’d let Ed touch her. She’d flinched away from Matt as if he was contagious. The more he thought about it, the madder he got. He turned his horse toward the bawling cattle in the distance. Working might take the edge off his temper.
* * *
Ed took Leslie to her small apartment at a local boardinghouse and left her at the front door with an apology.
“You don’t think he’ll fire me?” she asked in a plaintive tone.
He shook his head. “No,” he assured her. “I’ve already told you that I won’t let him. Now stop worrying. Okay?”
She managed a smile. “Thanks again, Ed.”
He shrugged. “No problem. See you Monday.”
She watched him get into his sports car and roar away before she went inside to her lonely room at the top corner of the house, facing the street. She’d made an enemy today, without meaning to. She hoped it wasn’t going to adversely affect her life. There was no going back now.
* * *
Monday morning, Leslie was at her desk five minutes early in an attempt to make a good impression. She liked Connie and Jackie, the other two women who shared administrative duties for the vice president of marketing and research. Leslie’s job was more routine. She kept up with the various shipments of cattle from one location to another, and maintained the herd records. It was exacting, but she had a head for figures and she enjoyed it.
Her immediate boss was Ed, so it was really a peachy job. They had an entire building in downtown Jacobsville, a beautiful old Victorian mansion, which Matt had painstakingly renovated to use as his corporation’s headquarters. There were two floors of offices, and a canteen for coffee breaks where the kitchen and dining room once had been.
Matt wasn’t in his office much of the time. He did a lot of traveling, because aside from his business interests, he sat on boards of directors of other businesses and even on the board of trustees of at least one college. He had business meetings in all sorts of places. Once he’d even gone to South America to see about investing in a growing cattle market there, but he’d come home angry and disillusioned when he saw the slash and burn method of pasture creation that had already killed a substantial portion of rain forest. He wanted no part of that, so he turned to Australia instead and bought another huge ranching tract in the Northern Territory there.
Ed told her about these fascinating exploits, and Leslie listened with her eyes wide. It was a world she’d never known. She and her mother, at the best of times, had been poor before the tragedy that separated them. Now, even with Leslie’s job and the good salary she made, it still meant budgeting to the bone so that she could afford even a taxi to work and pay rent on the small apartment where she lived. There wasn’t much left over for travel. She envied Matt being able to get on a plane—his own private jet, in fact—and go anywhere in the world he liked. It was a glimpse inside a world she’d never know.
“I guess he goes out a lot,” she murmured once when Ed had told her that his cousin was away in New York for a cattlemen’s banquet.
“With women?” Ed chuckled. “He beats them off with a stick. Matt’s one of the most hunted bachelors in south Texas, but he never seems to get serious about any one woman. They’re just accessories to him, pretty things to take on the town. You know,” he added with a faint smile, “I don’t think he really likes women very much. He was kind to a couple of local girls who needed a shoulder to cry on, but that was as far as it went, and they weren’t the sort of women to chase him. He’s like this because he had a rough time as a child.”
“How?” she asked.
“His mother gave him away when he was six.”
Her intake of breath was audible. “Why?”
“She had a new boyfriend who didn’t like kids,” he said bluntly. “He wouldn’t take Matt, so she gave him to my dad. He was raised with me. That’s why we’re so close.”
“What about his father?” she asked.
“We…don’t talk about his father.”
“Ed!”
He grimaced. “This can’t go any further,” he said.
“Okay.”
“We don’t think his mother knew who his father was,” he confided. “There were so many men in her life around that time.”
“But her husband…”
“What husband?” he asked.
She averted her eyes. “Sorry. I assumed that she was married.”
“Not Beth,” he mused. “She didn’t want ties. She didn’t want Matt, but her parents had a screaming fit when she mentioned an abortion. They wanted him terribly, planned for him, made room for him in their house, took Beth and him in the minute he was born.”
“But you said your father raised him.”
“Matt has had a pretty bad break all around. Our grandparents were killed in a car wreck, and then just a few months later, their house burned down,” he added. “There was some gossip that it was intentional to collect on insurance, but nothing was ever proven. Matt was outside with Beth, in the yard, early that morning when it happened. She’d taken him out to see the roses, a pretty strange and unusual thing for her. Lucky for Matt, though, because he’d have been in the house, and would have died. The insurance settlement was enough for Beth to treat herself to some new clothes and a car. She left Matt with my dad and took off with the first man who came along.” His eyes were full of remembered outrage on Matt’s behalf. “Grandfather left a few shares of stock in a ranch to him, along with a small trust that couldn’t be touched until Matt was twenty-one. That’s the only thing that kept Beth from getting her hands on it. When he inherited it, he seemed to have an instinct for making money. He never looked back.”
“What happened to his mother?” she asked.
“We heard that she died a few years ago. Matt never speaks of her.”
“Poor little boy,” she said aloud.
“Don’t make that mistake,” he said at once. “Matt doesn’t need pity.”
“I guess not. But it’s a shame that he had to grow up so alone.”
“You’d know about that.”
She smiled sadly. “I guess so. My dad died years ago. Mama supported us the best way she could. She wasn’t very intelligent, but she was pretty. She used what she had.” Her eyes were briefly haunted. “I haven’t gotten over what she did. Isn’t it horrible, that in a few seconds you can destroy your own life and several other peoples’ like that? And what was it all for? Jealousy, when there wasn’t even a reason for it. He didn’t care about me—he just wanted to have a good time with an innocent girl, him and his drunk friends.” She shivered at the memory. “Mama thought she loved him. But that jealous rage didn’t get him back. He died.”
“I agree that she shouldn’t have shot him, but it’s hard to defend what he and his friends were doing to you at the time, Leslie.”
She nodded. “I know,” she said simply. “Sometimes kids get the short end of the stick, and it’s up to them to do better with their future.”
All the same, she wished that she’d had a normal upbringing, like so many other kids had.
After their conversation, she felt sorry for Matt Caldwell and wished that they’d started off better. She shouldn’t have overreacted. But it was curious that he’d been so offensive to her, when Ed said that he was the soul of courtesy around women. Perhaps he’d just had a bad day.
* * *
Later in the week, Matt was back, and Leslie began to realize how much trouble she’d landed herself in from their first encounter.
He walked into Ed’s office while Ed was out at a meeting, and the ice in his eyes didn’t begin to melt as he watched Leslie typing away at the computer. She hadn’t seen him, and he studied her with profound, if prejudiced, curiosity. She was thin and not much above average height, with short blond hair that curled toward her face. Nice skin, but she was much too pale. He remembered her eyes most of all, wide and full of distaste as he came close. It amazed him that there was a woman on the planet who could find his money repulsive, even if he didn’t appeal to her himself. It was new and unpleasant to discover a woman who didn’t want him. He’d never been repulsed by a woman in his life. It left him feeling inadequate. Worse, it brought back memories of the woman who’d rejected him, who’d given him away at the age of six because she didn’t want him.
She felt his eyes on her and lifted her head. Gray eyes widened and stared as her hands remained suspended just over the black keyboard.
He was wearing a vested gray suit. It looked very expensive, and his eyes were dark and cutting. He had a cigar in his hand, but it wasn’t lit. She hoped he wasn’t going to try to smoke it in the confined space, because she was allergic to tobacco smoke.
“So you’re Ed’s,” he murmured in that deep, cutting tone.
“Ed’s assistant,” she agreed. “Mr. Caldwell…”
“What did you do to land the job?” he continued with a faintly mocking smile. “And how often?”
She wasn’t getting what he implied. She blinked, still staring. “I beg your pardon?”
“Why did Ed bring you in here above ten other more qualified applicants?” he persisted.
“Oh, that.” She hesitated. She couldn’t tell him the real reason, so she told him enough of the truth to distract him. “I have the equivalent of an associate in arts degree in business and I worked as a paralegal for his father for four years in a law office,” she said. “I might not have the bachelor’s degree that was preferred, but I have experience. Or so Ed assured me,” she added, looking worried.
“Why didn’t you finish college?” he persisted.
She swallowed. “I had…some personal problems at the time.”
“You still have some personal problems, Miss Murry,” he replied lazily, but his eyes were cold and alert in a lean, hard face. “You can put me at the top of the list. I had other plans for the position you’re holding. So you’d better be as good as Ed says you are.”
“I’ll give value for money, Mr. Caldwell,” she assured him. “I work for my living. I don’t expect free rides.”
“Don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
He lifted the cigar to his mouth, looked at the wet tip, sighed and slipped it back down to dangle, unlit in his fingers.
“Do you smoke?” she asked, having noted the action.
“I try to,” he murmured.
Just as he spoke, a handsome woman in her forties with blond hair in a neat bun and wearing a navy-and-white suit, walked down the hall toward him.
He glared at her as she paused in the open door of Ed’s office. “I need you to sign these, Mr. Caldwell. And Mr. Bailey is waiting in your office to speak to you about that committee you want him on.”
“Thanks, Edna.”
Edna Jones smiled. “Good day, Miss Murry. Keeping busy, are you?”
“Yes, ma’am, thank you,” Leslie replied with a genuine smile.
“Don’t let him light that thing,” Edna continued, gesturing toward the cigar dangling in Matt’s fingers. “If you need one of these—” she held up a small water pistol “—I’ll see that you get one.” She smiled at a fuming Matt. “You’ll be glad to know that I’ve already passed them out to the girls in the other executive offices, Mr. Caldwell. You can count on all of us to help you quit smoking.”
Matt glared at her. She chuckled like a woman twenty years younger, waved to Leslie, and stalked off back to the office. Matt actually started to make a comical lunge after her, but caught himself in time. It wouldn’t do to show weakness to the enemy.
He gave Leslie a cool glance, ignoring the faint amusement in her gray eyes. With a curt nod, he followed Edna down the hall, the damp, expensive cigar still dangling from his lean fingers.
