Undeniably Yours (3 page)

“Eat something, dear,” Sadie Jo coaxed. “You must be hungry.” Since toddlerhood, there'd been nothing Sadie Jo liked better than to see Meg stuff herself.

“Have you decided which bedroom you'll be moving into?” Lynn asked her. “There's the master suite.”

“No thanks.” Meg couldn't even contemplate moving into her father's room.

“Your old room, then?”

She'd stayed there last night, but she had no desire to move into it again permanently. It was full of kid memories. “I don't think so.”

“There are a total of ten bedrooms to choose from,” Mr. Son pointed out.

“Actually, I've decided that I'm going to use the guesthouse while I'm here.”

Every face at the table regarded her with arrested surprise.

All self-respecting tycoons had free-standing guesthouses adjacent to their mansions. A person could reach the guesthouse at Whispering Creek via a short walk from the big house across the garden and along the length of the pool. “I'm going to have the furniture that's in there now moved out and my own furniture moved in.”

They all continued to stare at her.

Welcome to the Reign of Meg
, she thought.
All of you know good and well that I'm an oddball of an heiress
. “Would that be all right, Lynn?”

“You can do anything you'd like, hon,” Lynn answered. “You own the place.”

Two days later Bo was walking along the central first floor hallway of the mansion when Megan Cole rounded a corner ahead of him, bringing them face to face.

After thinking of little but her and his farm, his farm and her since their first meeting, the reality of seeing her again came as a shock. All his senses sharpened in a rush.

“Hello.” She looked slightly confused.

“Hi.”

“Is there something I can do for you?” she asked. “Something you need?”

He realized that she didn't know what he was doing in her house. “No, I . . . my office is just over there. I stopped in to do some paper work, and now I'm on my way to the farm.”

“Oh, I didn't realize you had an office in the house.”

“Right next to Lynn's and Mr. Son's.”

“I see.”

The little black glasses had disappeared, but she'd dressed in another expensive-looking suit and still smelled like roses. Even in high heels, she stood a good five inches shorter than him.
Man
, she was pretty. He hadn't forgotten, but as he looked into her light brown eyes, the power of it hit him afresh. “Do you have time to come out and visit the horse farm today, ma'am?”

“You can call me Meg.”

“Thanks. You can call me Bo.”

“All right.”

He watched her closely.

“I'm afraid I can't make it out to the farm today.” He could tell by her face that she regretted that she'd agreed to visit at all. “I'm headed to the office downtown. Maybe—sorry, I'm just trying to remember my schedule—maybe Friday?”

“Sure. What time?”

“Late afternoon? 4:30?”

“That'd be good.”

“I'll have someone call you if I have to reschedule.”

“Okay.”

They said their good-byes, and she moved past him. He forbid himself to glance back.

For the entire rest of the day, hour after hour, he could not get her out of his mind. It was a reaction way out of proportion, and one that concerned him. He liked most people and usually felt the same level of lazy interest in everyone who came across his path, even the nice-looking ones.

But her.

Her
. Something about her had taken hold of something inside him. And try as he might, he couldn't shake it loose.

It was only Thursday of Meg's first week at Cole Oil, and she already wanted to fling herself out a window.

She'd woken this morning to formless, inexplicable fear. It had been percolating inside her all day, constricting her lungs with an imaginary iron belt that kept notching tighter, tighter, tighter.
Go away, stress
, she thought frantically.
Please. Let me breathe, eat something, relax, sleep. Function.

“You're doing fine, Meg.” Her uncle regarded her from behind
his desk. He'd just spent thirty minutes explaining an oil and gas exploration deal that Cole Oil was in the middle of negotiating.

“I'm trying.”

Uncle Michael, her father's younger brother, strongly resembled her father. He had a head full of impeccably cut gray hair, a lean build, a closet filled with dark gray power suits, and a squirm-inducing stare. Meg had read articles by reporters who'd used words like
powerful
,
brutally smart
, and
distinguished
to describe the Cole brothers. All accurate.

“I know it's difficult for you to take all this on.” His eyes missed little. “I'd spare you from it if I could.”

“I know.”

“But we're all bound by the way Cole Oil is structured. We all have our roles. I've had more practice at mine than you have, that's all.”

She nodded.

His cell phone vibrated, and he glanced at it. “Excuse me for a second?”

“Sure.”

He went to work typing a text message. Behind him, through a long bank of windows, the skyscrapers of downtown Dallas shimmered in the afternoon light.

When her great-great-grandfather, Jedediah Cole, had been thirty-five years old, he'd struck oil in East Texas. Endless barrels of black gold, untold riches, and ceaseless hard work had flowed from that original lucky hit.

Jedediah had been determined that his legacy, the Cole Oil empire, would withstand the test of time. He'd not wanted the decision-making power that would drive Cole Oil forward to be fractured more and more with every subsequent generation as one man's shares were passed down and split among that man's
children. So he'd decreed that 51 percent of his company would always be passed down intact to the oldest child. The one who held that 51 percent also served as chairman of the board and president. The other 49 percent of the company belonged to the remaining shareholders, who were still to this day Cole family members.

Since every previous generation of Cole men from Jedediah on down had had oil-loving oldest sons, the responsibilities had passed along in happy fashion.

Until now.

Thankfully, they weren't about to appoint her as either chairman of the board or president. But her uncle and her other relatives certainly
did
expect her to spend the next twenty or thirty years working to earn the right to attain those positions.

Meg caught herself nervously twirling her earring back and returned her hand to her lap. She glanced at her uncle's profile. Clicking sounds filled the silence as he continued to tap out letters on his phone.

Michael had followed a parallel path to her father's. Both had gone to the University of Texas, both had been trained up in the ways of the company, both understood the innermost cogs of the oil business. They'd spent their lives working in this towering building side by side. But because Michael had been born second, he and his two sons had always known that while they would be important men, indescribably wealthy, well respected—they would never inherit the controlling share of Cole Oil.

That fact had always blanketed Meg with guilt, more so since Michael had brought her here to Dallas. She could believe that he'd made his peace with her father as the head of Cole Oil. But she knew it must be difficult for him to have to accept her—a woman far his junior in years, knowledge, and experience—as the company's majority shareholder.

What a joke! She didn't even accept herself as the majority shareholder. She'd done nothing to earn that kind of power.

Her uncle set aside his phone and returned his attention to her.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that I'd give all this to you if I were able.”

“Not going to happen. You're my only brother's only child, Meg.” Determination marked his tone and expression. “I'll help you. I'm going to look out for you and your best interests, no matter what.”

She didn't have anything to say to that. In the whole of her life, she'd never had anything to say in the face of her uncle's will.

“It's quite a birthright. You'll see that soon enough. I only wish you'd come to work with us years ago, so that this process could have gone more smoothly.”

“My father and I had a deal.” That she'd had to fight very hard for. “He agreed that for the first ten years after college I could choose my own career—”

“And when those ten years were up, then you'd come to work here.”

“Yes.” She'd always suffered from a lack of interest in Cole Oil, a sense that she was meant for something more and different, and a longing to live her own life. Meg could see now that she'd been impractical and selfish to bargain with her father for the right to follow her heart. Following her heart had only ever led her down steep and icy pathways that she bitterly regretted later. “The . . . the ten years still aren't up.”

“The deal no longer stands, Meg. He died, and because he died, we need you here now.”

“I know.”

He flicked his fingers. “I never liked that deal.” She could see a twinge of condemnation in his eyes.

The iron around her chest drew tighter, and her pulse picked up speed. She needed to escape. Quickly, she made her excuses and let herself out, her uncle's attention pursuing her.

As she approached her father's office, her two executive assistants rose to their feet. They watched her with the intensity of well-trained dogs waiting for a treat, clearly hungry for her to give them something to do. They were extremely qualified, organized, and fabulous in every way.

Meg was having difficulty liking them.

“I need some time alone,” she murmured, then slipped inside before they could begin firing questions.

Within her father's office, Panic—capital
P
—swooped down and seized her from head to toe. She released the buttons on the front of her suit jacket and kicked off her shoes. She went to the desk, rummaging through it with shaking hands in search of her sudoku.

She couldn't do this. How did they, any of them, think that in her inexperience and ignorance she could do her father's job? She didn't deserve the money she'd inherited or the position here. She'd been born, as simple as that. And her birth had sealed her fate. Her heartbeat thundered.
I don't know what I'm doing. I can't pretend—

Quit it, Meg! Think about something else before you lose it
.

She shuffled to her current puzzle and forced herself to sit quietly and concentrate. “God, come. Help me. Please, come.”

For long minutes, she tried very hard to do nothing but take deep breaths and think about numbers and squares. It helped a little, but not enough. Her breathing grew shallow, and she started to feel like she couldn't get enough air. Pins and needles pricked the ends of her fingers, and her whole body began to quake as if she had chills.

Stubbornly, she wrestled against the anxiety. She kept working the puzzle and making her muscles soften until eventually, her symptoms began to relax their grip on her.

As soon as she'd reached a rudimentary level of calm, she pulled her little book of Bible verses out of her purse. The verses were grouped together based on theme. She'd not had a lot of cause for the chapters on marriage or parenting, but she'd just about memorized the section on worry.

She read through several of the familiar verses, some of them over and over, letting them sink into her mind. Then she went into the adjoining private bathroom and dangled her wrists and hands under a stream of cold water. Feet planted on hard tile, she stared at herself in the mirror.

Her face looked white and bleak.

With sudden, aching intensity, she missed her father.

Gripping the edge of the sink, she started to cry. Sobs wracked her body and tears streamed down her face, falling off her chin into the basin. Her relationship with her father had always been distant and difficult. He'd been an infrequent visitor to her childhood, and when they had been together they'd mixed like oil and water—the bullheaded man obsessed with his career and his quiet, sensitive daughter. She'd last seen him over Christmas, and even then they'd stuck to their roles: him, unable to stop himself from bossing her around; her, simmering in resentment and feeling like she'd disappointed him because she wasn't (and never wanted to be) the person he'd hoped for.