The Texan's Diamond Bride (8 page)

And then he stopped talking.

“Something she was not?” Paige tried, hoping he’d keep talking.

“I thought she could be happy here at the ranch. Or she claimed she could, and I believed her. I live here. I work here. This is my life, and I like it. I thought I made that clear to her, but…I don’t know.” He shrugged. “My family has a lot of money. Women like that—”

“Men, too,” she reminded him.

He arched a brow. “You’re telling me you have to worry about men chasing you for your family’s money?”

She nodded. “I’ve been fooled a couple of times.”

He seemed surprised by that. Did he think women were the only ones who were manipulative enough to come after someone for their money?

“Never married?” he asked.

“No. Thank goodness.”

“Well, be careful out there,” he told her.

“I’m trying.” Right now, she was really trying. “How long were you married?”

“One excruciatingly long year.”

“And the wound is still this raw? How long has it been?”

“Three years since she left. You’re going to ask if I loved her, right?”

Paige nodded. Yes, she thought she would have had the nerve.

“I think it was more that I loved the idea of her. A woman who could be happy here, share this kind of life with me and be happy. But mostly, I just felt like a damned fool in the end, and I really hate that feeling. That’s the part that still burns me up. I trusted her. I believed her completely, and I’m pretty sure she just wanted a rich husband and thought she could get me to give her everything she wanted. Even if it was a life far away from this ranch.”

“You don’t ever want to leave this place?”

“Not if I had my way.” He shrugged, then frowned and swore under his breath. “The thing is, I don’t own this land, and I doubt I ever will. Your family owns it. The lease runs out in thirty years. If I ever find another woman I can trust enough to marry, to have a family with, I might be able to raise my children on this ranch, but I could never pass it on to them. I won’t even be able to live my whole life here. The lease runs out when I turn sixty.”

“Oh.”

He said it like he’d rather cut off his right arm than leave this place.

She felt awful. She didn’t care a thing about the ranch or that her ancestors and his had been fighting for a hundred and fifty years. But she hadn’t thought much about the fact that the long-term lease her mother had offered as a gesture of goodwill would just give someone like Travis a chance to fall in love with the place even more before they had to give it up someday.

And it was one more reason for him to hate her family and her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, knowing it was totally inadequate, but needing to say it anyway. “Maybe…maybe my family would extend the lease.”

He shrugged, as if he’d absolutely hate even asking for anything from her family.

“Maybe they’d even sell the ranch to your family one day—”

“Don’t say that,” he told her, a hard edge in his voice that had her nearly flinching. “Not as a joke—”

“I wasn’t joking—”

“Not as just an offhand comment—”

“No. I mean…I’ve never talked to anyone about that, never heard anyone in my family talk about it. I just…it’s not like any of us has any interest in working a ranch.”

He glared at her, fury in those dark eyes of his. “Just in holding on to this one, if it means keeping me and my family from actually owning it.”

“No. I don’t…I don’t know. I’m just saying…Is this silly feud going to go on forever? Don’t we all have better things to do than keep up this fight? I don’t care
what your grandfather did when he was young. Do you really care what mine did? It’s silly—”

“When it means I can work this ranch for most of my life, but never own it, then, yes, I care. I care very, very much.”

He got up and walked away, and she let him, not knowing what else she could say. If she could even make him believe she was truly sorry about what this stupid family feud had cost him…. Well, what did it even matter? It didn’t change things.

He still loved this ranch and would lose it.

Because of her family.

And she knew, if it weren’t for the Santa Magdalena Diamond, none of them would really give a damn about the ranch. Maybe her grandfather or her great-grandfather had, but she didn’t. Her mother didn’t. Her siblings…had any of them ever even been here? She didn’t even know.

So, if and when she found the diamond, could she talk them into foregoing the lease and just selling Travis the ranch?

They’d think she was crazy, first of all, wanting to help Travis Foley that way. She’d never be able to explain in any way that made sense. As far as they knew, she didn’t even know the man.

What could she say? He’s a nice man. He loves the ranch. He’s lived here practically his whole life. Why keep it from him?

And still, they’d all be incredulous and the key question
would be, Why would she want to go out of her way to help Travis Foley?

Because she wanted him.

Paige was ready to cry.

She was trained not to fall for a man who wanted her for her money, and here she was, thinking to bribe a man into falling for her because she might be able to get him his beloved ranch. That was one road to romance she’d never considered going down before. Trying to buy a man’s love. What a pathetic comment on her life at the moment.

Contemplating trying to buy a man’s love with the gift of a Texas ranch.

S
he decided she just had to get out of the ranch house, even if it was still raining. Thankfully, the horse barn was close.

Finding her boots—cleaned, no doubt by Marta—by the door in the mudroom and a slicker hanging from a hook, she took off through the rain. It had slowed, at least, but showed no signs of actually stopping.

The barn was huge, neat as could be, not ornate by any means but obviously well-appointed and not inexpensive. Travis Foley’s horses lived well.

Happily for her, the place was deserted this time of night, save for the horses. She walked from stall to stall, happy to be able to walk, at least. From time to time, one of the horses got curious and stuck his head over a
stall. She scratched a few long, broad noses and spoke to a few of the animals.

Travis’s horse, Murph, was in the last stall on the right, and he acted as if he remembered her, giving her what for all the world looked like a smile. He tried to slip his nose beneath the hand she laid on the top of the gate to his stall, seemingly begging her to pet him.

“You big, sweet baby,” she told him, obliging him with some attention.

She was still fussing over him a few minutes later when Travis walked in.

Paige took a breath, bracing herself for another confrontation with him, but when he walked over to her and the horse, he said, “I’m sorry. I know none of this is your fault.”

She shrugged. “And I just wasn’t thinking about you having to give up this place one day. I hope it never comes to that, Travis. That our families can come to some agreement, and you don’t ever have to go.”

“Thank you, but I’m a realist. I’m not holding out much hope for that.”

He reached up and stroked the horse, an easy, lazy touch that had her thinking of the way he’d touched her, with a nice, slow hand that seemed to say he would take forever, just touching her. The horse looked as if he’d happily lay down his life for Travis.

She shivered, trying to put the image out of her mind.

“Going stir-crazy?” he asked.

“Just because of the rain and being cooped up inside,” she said. “I’m not your ex-wife, Travis. I love the land. It’s beautiful. I love being outside, riding, exploring, working the land. I wouldn’t go stir-crazy in a place like this.”

She would ride every morning as the sun came up, she decided. She’d explore all the old mines, just to see what they were like and imagine what it had been like to mine for silver at the turn of the century. She would know every inch of the ranch, and…

And…

She was dreaming, Paige realized.

About a life she couldn’t have.

Paige shook her head and turned away from him and the horse and that life. “So, the weather forecast—”

“It’s not good,” Travis said.

She nodded. “I looked. I borrowed your computer and that was the first thing I checked. It could rain like this for days?”

He nodded. “We have big trucks with four-wheel drive, and we could try to get you to Llano. But we might just get stuck again—”

“No,” she said. Being cooped up inside the ranch house was one thing, but she couldn’t get stuck in close quarters with him again, say inside a truck or out at the hunting cabin.

“Okay. So, we’ll just wait it out. That’s fine. You got ahold of your family? They know you’re safe?”

“I e-mailed my cousin Gabby, my sister and my mother. They didn’t know I was coming here. They think I’m on an archaeology dig in New Mexico with a friend from grad school. It’s just my brother, Blake, who knew. I sent him a text message today to let him know I’m safe and out of the storm, but I didn’t tell him I was at your ranch house. He’s going to have a million questions, and—”

She broke off and he gave her a sharp look, one that said he was just waiting for something bad to come out of any dealings with her brother, maybe her whole family.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“Blake. He’s going to want to know what’s going on with the search for the diamond, and I don’t know what to tell him—”

“Right. There it is. You want to stay because you think you can talk me into letting you back into the mine, don’t you?”

“No,” she claimed.

“So, you’re just giving up on the search that easily?”

“No…I just…I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what to say. I didn’t expect to come to your house or even to meet you. I didn’t expect to get trapped with you and have some time to get to know you and now…I don’t know, Travis. This is my family we’re talking about. Our family’s business. I told my brother I could do this, that I could find the diamond—”

“Yeah. Thrill of the discovery and all that. I remember you lying to me about it—”

“It wasn’t a lie!” she cried. “Granted, it certainly wasn’t the whole truth, but it wasn’t a lie. I am a scientist. I like to dig in the dirt. I’m fascinated by the things created by the earth, some of them incredibly beautiful things, some of them incredibly old and still here and marvelous. And it’s not easy to be taken seriously as a scientist, particularly when you’re young and a woman and an heiress to a jewelry fortune. People tend to think you work as some kind of a lark. So, yes, it would be incredible for me to be the one to find this diamond. And yes, that does mean
something to me. This is my life, just like this ranch is yours. How about we agree on this one thing. You don’t insult my dreams, and I don’t insult yours?”

“Fine,” he growled. “But don’t stand here and try to tell me you aren’t trying to figure out how to get me to let you back into that mine, when I know you are.”

“I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know what to do or what to say, either to him or you. It’s all just a big, damned mess, a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the bottom line. I don’t know what to do.”

She was yelling at the end, and the horse whinnied nervously and backed away from the front of the stall, as if the crazy woman was just a little too close, and that’s what she felt like. A crazy woman.

He wasn’t any better, damned stubborn man.

“This isn’t going to go away, just because you caught me and you run me off the ranch. You know that, don’t you?” she tried, once she’d calmed down a bit.

He looked coldly furious. “Believe me, I know I’m never getting the McCords out of my life.”

And that did it. It was just too much. She was too mad to even say anything. She couldn’t even yell at him anymore, and if she stayed there any longer, she was going to start to cry, she feared.

So she turned around and stalked out of the barn. He chased after her.

He caught her just outside in the rain and pulled her back under the slight overhang of the barn roof, barely out of the rain.

“Ah, hell, Red. I’m sorry.”

“Of course, you are.”

“You just…you make me crazy, okay? You and the whole situation make me mad as hell and a little bit crazy.”

“I know.”

“It just doesn’t seem like we’ll ever really solve anything, that even trying is ridiculous, but…I don’t want to hurt you, I swear. You asked me to believe you—that you really don’t know what to do or say about the stupid diamond. And I do. I’ll believe you about that. You believe me about this, okay? I really don’t want to hurt you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, either,” she promised him, looking up at him through the dark with water running off her hair and her face, thinking maybe it would at least keep him from seeing her tears. “And I don’t want anybody to take this ranch away from you, and I don’t want…anything but good things for you. Only good.”

She sniffled and then closed her eyes and shook her head.

“Ah, Red,” he said, swearing as he lowered his mouth to hers and all the breath went out of her, right then and there.

That was what she’d wanted all along. Not to fight with him, but to touch him again, to have him touch her, kiss her, take her.

He gave her one, big, devouring kiss, and the current of sexual desire hummed back and forth between them, as strong as it had been that first night and every moment since in her mind.

It was as if they had their own little power source of heat and longing simmering somewhere inside of them, just waiting to be turned on.

She opened herself to him, wrapped herself around him, simply unable to get close enough to his big, hard body.

Her breasts ached. The spot between her legs throbbed. He got his hands under her rain slicker, took her hips in his hands and scooped her up. She wrapped her legs around him. It was dark and raining and no one was here. He could have her against the side of his horse barn, if he wanted. He was hard and ready. What exactly would be the problem?

Everything.

Oh, damn.

Everything that had been the problem before.

He seemed to figure it out just as she did, because he eased her back down to the ground, and his kisses went from frantic and deep and thrusting to soft and slower and slower and then…as if every touch might be the last, should be the last, and he just couldn’t stand to stop.

He finally pulled his mouth away from hers, but stayed close, his forehead to hers. “You’re killin’ me, Red. Just killin’ me.”

“You’re killing me, too,” she said softly.

They walked back to the house, and there she was, dripping wet once again, a little cold and alone with him.

“This is a bad habit you’ve got,” he said, taking her slicker, having her sit on a stool by the back door and getting her boots off. Then he pulled a towel out of a cabinet for her hair and refused to give it to her.

“Let me,” he said. “It’s one thing I think I can do without losing my head over you.”

And then he started slowly, painstakingly drying off her hair.

Which made her think of being here before and in his bathroom, and him undressing her without looking at her, taking care of her and trying not to do anything else. Showing a patience and a kind of gentle caring that she had never experienced before.

Men did not take care of her. They flirted with her, they showed off for her, they challenged her, and a lot of them wanted her. But they didn’t take kind, tender care of her.

She backed away from him and turned her face to the wall, fresh tears forming in her eyes.

He backed off, too, and handed her a blanket to wrap around her.

“Fire’s still going in the library,” he said. “Go warm up.”

She nodded, then walked through his house thinking she really had to get out of here, that she just didn’t know how much more of this she could take.

Wanting him and not wanting to want him. Resisting him as best she could and not wanting to resist him.

She went to the library, sat down on the raised stone hearth right in front of the fire. He came inside a moment later, poured himself a drink of whiskey and then took a seat in one of the big leather chairs nearby. All she wanted to do was crawl into his lap and kiss him silly.

She wondered for a moment if this was how her mother felt about Rex Foley and how long it had gone on—those feelings—and how long Paige could resist Travis.

Years?

Even when she was another man’s wife with children of her own?

Her mother had risked everything—even her children—for Rex Foley. And Paige wondered if the son was anything like the father, if the father could possibly be as sexy and appealing.

And she owed her mother an apology, Paige realized.

She’d been angry, completely judgmental and cold toward her mother since her mother’s big secret had come out, and her mother had shaken her head sadly and said,
You’ve never really been in love before, Paige. You don’t know what it’s like.

And Paige had been horrified.

Her mother hadn’t just slept with Rex Foley and had his son. She’d actually
loved
Rex Foley?

So what about Paige’s father? Had her mother loved Devon McCord? And if she hadn’t, why had she married him and what had their whole life as a family been about? Just Paige’s father wanting to keep her mother away from Rex?

What kind of life was that for her mother?

A life of misery and longing and denial. Certainly her mother had experienced a lot more pain than Paige could possibly feel right now, after knowing Travis for only a few days.

So she showed some actual restraint, some intelligence. She got to her feet and told him she was tired and needed to go to sleep, and then she got out of that room and away from him before she could do anything even more foolish than she already had.

Paige spent a restless night, either awake and thinking about him or asleep and dreaming of him.

She didn’t know which was worse.

He’d already left the house by the time she got up the next morning, having slept in a beautifully appointed guest room on the opposite side of the house from his. She showered, dressed in more of his ex-wife’s clothes, and found Marta in the kitchen, a hearty breakfast of a spicy Western omelet ready and waiting for her when she appeared.

Marta had been here on the ranch with her husband, Cal, since the Foleys took over the ranch when Travis was ten, and she really didn’t like Travis’s ex-wife.

Oh, she didn’t actually say anything about the woman, but the expression on her face while she avoided Paige’s attempts at conversation said everything Marta wouldn’t put into words.

Paige could not imagine Travis Foley making a fool of himself over a woman or being so wrong about one. He seemed too intelligent, too controlled to ever do that. Of course, maybe what she was seeing was the man he’d become after his marriage.

Paige, thinking she likely had another long, solitary, rainy day in front of her, went back to the library to check her e-mail.

Gabby had written back, mostly with more of the same from before. In love. In love. Gloriously in love. Where are you? And did you hear anything from Penny?

Paige opened an e-mail to reply, then set it aside,
wanting to see if she actually had heard anything from her twin first.

There it was. Penny wrote, Fine. Busy working on new designs for the stores. Where are you exactly?

Hmm.

That was odd.

It felt as if Penny was putting Paige off in much the same way Paige was trying to put Penny off, without really telling her anything of what was going on. And they just didn’t do that with each other.