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Matt Caldwell: Texas Tycoon
Diana Palmer


He was rich, powerful and every woman's fantasy. Although many had tried to lasso Jacobsville's sought-after bachelor, none had managed to catch Matt Caldwell's eye.However, mysterious Leslie Murry was about to change all that. For the cynical Texas tycoon's spirited new employee roused his temper like no one ever had before. And despite his fierce denials, her soft vulnerability also brought out his every protective instinct. After sampling her soul-searing kisses, Matt was sorely tempted to possess the enticing innocent who clearly ached for a man's tender touch. Still, this Long, Tall Texan wasn't about to let down HIS guard until he sweet-talked Leslie into surrendering HER heart!Long Tall Texans: Rugged heroes from Jacobsville, Texas.







Dear Reader,

It is a great pleasure for me to congratulate Silhouette Books on its 20th anniversary. I signed my first book contract with Silhouette in 1980. We go back quite a long way together, and it has been a wonderful association. All of us at Silhouette—authors, editors, artists, copy editors, salespeople, publicists and management—are a team. We work together to produce the books which our readers have so loyally purchased all these years.

Before I started writing for Silhouette Books, I was holding down a full-time job as a newspaper reporter, on call twenty-four hours a day. I did feature material for two other newspapers, as well. At night I wrote books and hoped that someday, someone would want to publish them. Sure enough, in 1980, Silhouette Books decided that I just might suit them. We entered into a partnership. Since they took me on trust, I worked very hard to earn my place as one of their authors.

Each year meant a new book, often many more than one. I can go through the titles of my books, and remember the birth of our son, Blayne, the death of both my parents, the purchase of our first and only home, my husband James’s two open-heart surgeries, our son’s school days and graduation, the wonderful years of my marriage and the trips to faraway places which I used to dream of seeing when I was a little girl growing up on a sharecropper’s farm in southwest Georgia. I can see my life through the pages of the books I wrote during those years, and revisit warm and sweet memories of people now dead who meant so much to me when I was young and bright with ambition and dreams of publication.

I have had a wonderful career and a wonderful life. God has blessed me with a loving family, many great friends (Especially you, Ann!), the best editors on earth and a way to contribute something to the world which has given me so much. I hope that my books have helped some of you through bad times in your own lives, just as the authors I collect and love have comforted me during the storms of my own life. I wish you continued success, Silhouette Books, and I hope to remain a part of your family until I die or you get tired of me—whichever comes first. Thank you for giving me a chance to do what I love best in all the world. God bless you.

Love to Silhouette and to my very special readers,







Dear Reader,

It’s going to be a wonderful year! After all, we’re celebrating Silhouette’s 20th anniversary of bringing you compelling, emotional, contemporary romances month after month.

January’s fabulous lineup starts with beloved author Diana Palmer, who returns to Special Edition with Matt Caldwell: Texas Tycoon. In the latest installment of her wildly popular LONG, TALL TEXANS series, temperatures rise and the stakes are high when a rugged tycoon meets his match in an innocent beauty—who is also his feisty employee.

Bestselling author Susan Mallery continues the next round of the series PRESCRIPTION: MARRIAGE with Their Little Princess. In this heart-tugging story, baby doctor Kelly Hall gives a suddenly single dad lessons in parenting—and learns all about romance!

Reader favorite Pamela Toth launches Special Edition’s newest series, SO MANY BABIES—in which babies and romance abound in the Buttonwood Baby Clinic. In The Baby Legacy, a sperm-bank mix-up brings two unlikely parents together temporarily—or perhaps forever….

In Peggy Webb’s passionate story, Summer Hawk, two Native Americans put aside their differences when they unite to battle a medical crisis and find that love cures all. Rounding off the month is veteran author Pat Warren’s poignant, must-read secret baby story, Daddy by Surprise, and Jean Brashear’s Lonesome No More, in which a reclusive hero finds healing for his heart when he offers a single mom and her young son a haven from harm.

I hope you enjoy these six unforgettable romances and help us celebrate Silhouette’s 20th anniversary all year long!

Best,

Karen Taylor Richman

Senior Editor




Matt Caldwell: Texas Tycoon

Diana Palmer







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


To Eldarador and W.G. with love


Diana Palmer is legendary for her unforgettable tales about those lovable Long, Tall Texans…

The Long, Tall Texans series

Silhouette Romance

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Justin #592

Tyler #604

Sutton’s Way #670

Ethan #694

Connal #741

Harden #783

Evan #819

Donavan #843

Emmett #910

Regan’s Pride #1000

Coltrain’s Proposal #1103

The Princess Bride #1282

Callaghan’s Bride #1355

Silhouette Desire

The Case of the Missing Secretary #733

That Burke Man #913

Beloved #1189

Silhouette Special Edition

Matt Caldwell: Texas Tycoon #1297

Silhouette Books

Abduction and Seduction 1995

“Redbird”

Lone Star Christmas 1997

“Christmas Cowboy”

A Long, Tall Texan Summer 1997

Love with a Long, Tall Texan 1999

Harlequin Books

Husbands on Horseback 1996

“Paper Husband”


DIANA PALMER got her start in writing as a newspaper reporter and published her first romance novel for Silhouette Books in 1982. In 1993, she celebrated the publication of her fiftieth novel for Silhouette Books. Affaire de Coeur lists her as one of the top ten romance authors in the country. Beloved by fans worldwide, Diana Palmer is the winner of numerous national Waldenbooks Romance Bestseller awards and national B. Dalton Books Bestseller awards.




Contents


Chapter One (#u9de3ae4c-9c9e-5075-8997-47baa3f8a232)

Chapter Two (#u9caa720c-b2e8-5f06-972a-98fcac6d9c43)

Chapter Three (#ua624407f-0ff0-5d37-8663-3526b4a1f71f)

Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)




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.




Chapter Two


From her first day on the job, Leslie was aware of Matt’s dislike and disapproval of her. He piled the work on Ed, so that it would inevitably drift down to Leslie. A lot of it was really unnecessary, like having her type up old herd records from ten years ago, which had never been converted to computer files. He said it was so that he could check progress on the progeny of his earlier herd sires, but even Ed muttered when Leslie showed him what she was expected to do.

“We have secretaries to do this sort of thing,” Ed grumbled as he stared at the yellowed pages on her desk. “I need you for other projects.”

“Tell him,” Leslie suggested.

He shook his head. “Not in the mood he’s been in lately,” he said with a rueful smile. “He isn’t himself.”

“Did you know that his secretary is armed?” she asked suddenly. “She carries a water pistol around with her.”

Ed chuckled. “Matt asked her to help him stop smoking cigars. Not that he usually did it inside the building,” he was quick to add. “But Mrs. Jones feels that if you can’t light a cigar, you can’t smoke it. She bought a water pistol for herself and armed the other secretaries, too. If Matt even lifts a cigar to his mouth in the executive offices, they shoot him.”

“Dangerous ladies,” she commented.

“You bet. I’ve seen…”

“Nothing to do?” purred a soft, deep voice from behind Ed. The piercing dark eyes didn’t match the bantering tone.

“Sorry, Matt,” Ed said immediately. “I was just passing the time of day with Leslie. Can I do anything for you?”

“I need an update on that lot of cattle we placed with Ballenger,” he said. He stared at Leslie with narrowed eyes. “Your job, I believe?”

She swallowed and nodded, jerking her fingers on the keyboard so that she opened the wrong file and had to push the right buttons to close it again. Normally she wasn’t a nervous person, but he made her ill at ease, standing over her without speaking. Ed seemed to be a little twitchy, himself, because he moved back to his own office the minute the phone rang, placing himself out of the line of fire with an apologetic look that Leslie didn’t see.

“I thought you were experienced with computers,” Matt drawled mockingly as he paused beside her to look over her shoulder.

The feel of his powerful body so close behind her made every muscle tense. Her fingers froze on the keyboard, and she was barely breathing.

With a murmured curse, Matt stepped back to the side of the desk, fighting the most intense emotions he’d ever felt. He stuck his hands deep into the pockets of his slacks and glared at her.

She relaxed, but only enough to be able to pull up the file he wanted and print it for him.

He took it out of the printer tray when it was finished and gave it a slow perusal. He muttered something, and tossed the first page down on Leslie’s desk.

“Half these words are misspelled,” he said curtly.

She looked at it on the computer screen and nodded. “Yes, they are, Mr. Caldwell. I’m sorry, but I didn’t type it.”

Of course she hadn’t typed it, it was ten years old, but something inside him wanted to hold her accountable for it.

He moved away from the desk as he read the rest of the pages. “You can do this file—and the others—over,” he murmured as he skimmed. “The whole damned thing’s illiterate.”

She knew that there were hundreds of records in this particular batch of files, and that it would take days, not minutes or hours, to complete the work. But he owned the place, so he could set the rules. She pursed her lips and glanced at him speculatively. Now that he was physically out of range, she felt safe again. “Your wish is my command, boss,” she murmured dryly, surprising a quick glance from him. “Shall I just put aside all of Ed’s typing and devote the next few months to this?”

Her change of attitude from nervous kid to sassy woman caught him off guard. “I didn’t put a time limit on it,” Matt said curtly. “I only said, do it!”

“Oh, yes, sir,” she agreed at once, and smiled vacantly.

He drew in a short breath and glared down at her. “You’re remarkably eager to please, Miss Murry. Or is it just because I’m the boss?”

“I always try to do what I’m asked to do, Mr. Caldwell,” she assured him. “Well, almost always,” she amended. “Within reason.”

He moved back toward the desk. As he leaned over to put down the papers she’d printed for him, he saw her visibly tense. She was the most confounding woman he’d ever known, a total mystery.

“What would you define as ‘within reason’?” he drawled, holding her eyes.

She looked hunted. Amazing, that she’d been jovial and uninhibited just seconds before. Her stiff expression made him feel oddly guilty. He turned away. “Ed! Have you got my Angus file?” he called to his cousin through the open door to Ed’s private office.

Ed was off the phone and he had a file folder in his hands. “Yes, sorry. I wanted to check the latest growth figures and projected weight gain ratios. I meant to put it back on your desk and I got busy.”

Matt studied the figures quietly and then nodded. “That’s acceptable. The Ballenger brothers do a good job.”

“They’re expanding, did you know?” Ed chuckled. “Nice to see them prospering.”

“Yes, it is. They’ve worked hard enough in their lives to warrant a little prosperity.”

While he spoke, Leslie was watching him covertly. She thought about the six-year-old boy whose mother had given him away, and it wrung her heart. Her own childhood had been no picnic, but Matt’s upbringing had been so much worse.

He felt those soft gray eyes on his face, and his own gaze jerked down to meet them. She flushed and looked away.

He wondered what she’d been thinking to produce such a reaction. She couldn’t have possibly made it plainer that she felt no physical attraction to him, so why the wide-eyed stare? It puzzled him. So many things about her puzzled him. She was neat and attractively dressed, but those clothes would have suited a dowager far better than a young woman. While he didn’t encourage short skirts and low-cut blouses, Leslie was covered from head to toe; long dress, long sleeves, high neck buttoned right up to her throat.

“Need anything else?” Ed asked abruptly, hoping to ward off more trouble.

Matt’s powerful shoulders shrugged. “Not for the moment.” He glanced once more at Leslie. “Don’t forget those files I want updated.”

After he walked out, Ed stared after him for a minute, frowning. “What files?”

She explained it to him.

“But those are outdated,” Ed murmured thoughtfully. “And he never looks at them. I don’t understand why he has to have them corrected at all.”

She leaned forward. “Because it will irritate me and make me work harder!” she said in a stage whisper. “God forbid that I should have time to twiddle my thumbs.”

His eyebrows arched. “He isn’t vindictive.”

“That’s what you think.” She picked up the file Matt had left and grimaced as she put it back in the filing cabinet. “I’ll start on those when I’ve finished answering your mail. Do you suppose he wants me to stay over after work to do them? He’d have to pay me overtime.” She grinned impishly, a reminder of the woman she’d once been. “Wouldn’t that make his day?”

“Let me ask him,” Ed volunteered. “Just do your usual job for now.”

“Okay. Thanks, Ed.”

He shrugged. “What are friends for?” he murmured with a smile.

The office was a great place to work. Leslie had a ball watching the other women in the executive offices lie in wait for Matt. His secretary caught him trying to light a cigar out on the balcony, and she let him have it from behind a potted tree with the water pistol. He laid the cigar down on Bessie David’s desk and she “accidentally” dropped it into his half-full coffee cup that he’d set down next to it. He held it up, dripping, with an accusing look at Bessie.

“You told me to do it, sir,” Bessie reminded him.

He dropped the sodden cigar back in the coffee and left it behind. Leslie, having seen the whole thing, ducked into the rest room to laugh. It amazed her that Matt was so easygoing and friendly to his other employees. To Leslie, he was all bristle and venom. She wondered what he’d do if she let loose with a water pistol. She chuckled, imagining herself tearing up Main Street in Jacobsville ahead of a cursing Matt Caldwell. It was such a pity that she’d changed so much. Before tragedy had touched her young life, she would have been very attracted to the tall, lean cattleman.

A few days later, he came into Ed’s office dangling a cigar from his fingers. Leslie, despite her amusement at the antics of the other secretaries, didn’t say a word at the sight of the unlit cigar.

“I want to see the proposal the Cattlemen’s Association drafted about brucellosis testing.”

She stared at him. “Sir?”

He stared back. She was getting easier on his eyes, and he didn’t like his reactions to her. She was repulsed by him. He couldn’t get past that because it destroyed his pride. “Ed told me he had a copy of it,” he elaborated. “It came in the mail yesterday.”

“Okay.” She knew where the mail was kept. Ed tried to ignore it, leaving it in the In box until Leslie dumped it on his desk in front of him and refused to leave until he dealt with it. This usually happened at the end of the week, when it had piled up and over-flowed into the Out box.

She rummaged through the box and produced a thick letter from the Cattlemen’s Association, unopened. She carried it back through and handed it to Matt.

He’d been watching her walk with curious intensity. She was limping. He couldn’t see her legs, because she was wearing loose knit slacks with a tunic that flowed to her thighs as she walked. Very obviously, she wasn’t going to do anything to call attention to her figure.

“You’re limping,” he said. “Did you see a doctor after that fall you took at my ranch?”

“No need to,” she said at once. “It was only a bruise. I’m sore, that’s all.”

He picked up the receiver of the phone on her desk and pressed the intercom button. “Edna,” he said abruptly, “set Miss Murry up with Lou Coltrain as soon as possible. She took a spill from a horse at my place a few days ago and she’s still limping. I want her X-rayed.”

“No!” Leslie protested.

“Let her know when you’ve made the appointment. Thanks,” he told his secretary and hung up. His dark eyes met Leslie’s pale ones squarely. “You’re going,” he said flatly.

She hated doctors. Oh, how she hated them! The doctor at the emergency room in Houston, an older man retired from regular practice, had made her feel cheap and dirty as he examined her and made cold remarks about tramps who got men killed. She’d never gotten over the double trauma of her experience and that harsh lecture, despite the therapists’ attempts to soften the memory.

She clenched her teeth and glared at Matt. “I said I’m not hurt!”

“You work here. I’m the boss. You get examined. Period.”

She wanted to quit. She wished she could. She had no place else to go. Houston was out of the question. She was too afraid that she’d be up to her ears in reporters, despite her physical camouflage, the minute she set foot in the city.

She drew a sharp, angry breath.

Her attitude puzzled him. “Don’t you want to make sure the injury won’t make that limp permanent?” he asked suddenly.

She lifted her chin proudly. “Mr. Caldwell, I had an…accident…when I was seventeen and that leg suffered some bone damage.” She refused to think about how it had happened. “I’ll always have a slight limp, and it’s not from the horse throwing me.”

He didn’t seem to breathe for several seconds. “All the more reason for an examination,” he replied. “You like to live dangerously, I gather. You’ve got no business on a horse.”

“Ed said the horse was gentle. It was my fault I got thrown. I jerked the reins.”

His eyes narrowed. “Yes, I remember. You were trying to get away from me. Apparently you think I have something contagious.”

She could see the pride in his eyes that made him resent her. “It wasn’t that,” she said. She averted her gaze to the wall. “It’s just that I don’t like to be touched.”

“Ed touches you.”

She didn’t know how to tell him without telling him everything. She couldn’t bear having him know about her sordid past. She raised turbulent gray eyes to his dark ones. “I don’t like to be touched by strangers,” she amended quickly. “Ed and I have known each other for years,” she said finally. “It’s…different with him.”

His eyes narrowed. He searched over her thin face. “It must be,” he said flatly.

His mocking smile touched a nerve. “You’re like a steamroller, aren’t you?” she asked abruptly. “You assume that because you’re wealthy and powerful, there isn’t a woman alive who can resist you!”

He didn’t like that assumption. His eyes began to glitter. “You shouldn’t listen to gossip,” he said, his voice deadly quiet. “She was a spoiled little debutante who thought Daddy should be able to buy her any man she wanted. When she discovered that he couldn’t, she came to work for a friend of mine and spent a couple of weeks pursuing me around Jacobsville. I went home one night and found her piled up in my bed wearing a sheet and nothing else. I threw her out, but then she told everyone that I’d assaulted her. She had a field day with me in court until my housekeeper, Tolbert, was called to tell the truth about what happened. The fact that she lost the case should tell you what the jury thought of her accusations.”

“The jury?” she asked huskily. Besides his problems with his mother, she hadn’t known about any incident in his past that might predispose him even further to distrusting women.

His thin lips drew up in a travesty of a smile. “She had me arrested and prosecuted for criminal assault,” he returned. “I became famous locally—the one black mark in an otherwise unremarkable past. She had the misfortune to try the same trick later on an oilman up in Houston. He called me to testify in his behalf. When he won the case, he had her prosecuted for fraud and extortion, and won. She went to jail.”

She felt sick. He’d had his own dealings with the press. She was sorry for him. It must have been a real ordeal after what he’d already suffered in his young life. It also explained why he wasn’t married. Marriage involved trust. She doubted he was capable of it any longer. Certainly it explained the hostility he showed toward Leslie. He might think she was pretending to be repulsed by him because she was playing some deep game for profit, perhaps with some public embarrassment in mind. He might even think she was setting him up for another assault charge.

“Maybe you think that I’m like that,” she said after a minute, studying him quietly. “But I’m not.”

“Then why act like I’m going to attack you whenever I come within five feet of you?” he asked coldly.

She studied her fingers on the desk before her, their short fingernails neatly trimmed, with a coat of colorless sheen. Nothing flashy, she thought, and that was true of her life lately. She didn’t have an answer for him.

“Is Ed your lover?” he persisted coldly.

She didn’t flinch. “Ask him.”

He rolled the unlit cigar in his long fingers as he watched her. “You are one enormous puzzle,” he mused.

“Not really. I’m very ordinary.” She looked up. “I don’t like doctors, especially male ones…”

“Lou’s a woman,” he replied. “She and her husband are both physicians. They have a little boy.”

“Oh.” A woman. That would make things easier. But she didn’t want to be examined. They could probably tell from X rays how breaks occurred, and she didn’t know if she could trust a local doctor not to talk about it.

“It isn’t up to you,” he said suddenly. “You work for me. You had an accident on my ranch.” He smiled mirthlessly. “I have to cover my bets. You might decide later on to file suit for medical benefits.”

She searched his eyes. She couldn’t really blame him for feeling like that. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll let her examine me.”

“No comment?”

She shrugged. “Mr. Caldwell, I work hard for my paycheck. I always have. You don’t know me, so I don’t blame you for expecting the worst. But I don’t want a free ride through life.”

One of his eyebrows jerked. “I’ve heard that one before.”

She smiled sadly. “I suppose you have.” She touched her keyboard absently. “This Dr. Coltrain, is she the company doctor?”

“Yes.”

She gnawed on her lower lip. “What she finds out, it is confidential, isn’t it?” she added worriedly, looking up at him.

He didn’t reply for a minute. The hand dangling the cigar twirled it around. “Yes,” he said. “It’s confidential. You’re making me curious, Miss Murry. Do you have secrets?”

“We all have secrets,” she said solemnly. “Some are darker than others.”

He flicked a thumbnail against the cigar. “What’s yours? Did you shoot your lover?”

She didn’t dare show a reaction to that. Her face felt as if it would crack if she moved.

He stuck the cigar in his pocket. “Edna will let you know when you’re to go see Lou,” he said abruptly, with a glance at his watch. He held up the letter. “Tell Ed I’ve got this. I’ll talk to him about it later.”

“Yes, sir.”

He resisted the impulse to look back at her. The more he discovered about his newest employee, the more intrigued he became. She made him restless. He wished he knew why.

There was no way to get out of the doctor’s appointment. Leslie spoke briefly with Dr. Coltrain before she was sent to the hospital for a set of X rays. An hour later, she was back in Lou’s office, watching the older woman pore somberly over the films against a lighted board on the wall.

Lou looked worried when she examined the X ray of the leg. “There’s no damage from the fall, except for some bruising,” she concluded. Her dark eyes met Leslie’s squarely. “These old breaks aren’t consistent with a fall, however.”

Leslie ground her teeth together. She didn’t say anything.

Lou moved back around her desk and sat down, indicating that Leslie should sit in the chair in front of the desk after she got off the examining table.

“You don’t want to talk about it,” Lou said gently. “I won’t press you. You do know that the bones weren’t properly set at the time, don’t you? The improper alignment is unfortunate, because that limp isn’t going to go away. I really should send you to an orthopedic surgeon.”

“You can send me,” Leslie replied, “but I won’t go.”

Lou rested her folded hands on her desk over the calendar blotter with its scribbled surface. “You don’t know me well enough to confide in me. You’ll learn, after you’ve been in Jacobsville a while, that I can be trusted. I don’t talk about my patients to anyone, not even my husband. Matt won’t hear anything from me.”

Leslie remained silent. It was impossible to go over it again with a stranger. It had been hard enough to elaborate on her past to the therapist, who’d been shocked, to put it mildly.

The older woman sighed. “All right, I won’t pressure you. But if you ever need anyone to talk to, I’ll be here.”

Leslie looked up. “Thank you,” she said sincerely.

“You’re not Matt’s favorite person, are you?” Lou asked abruptly.

Leslie laughed without mirth. “No, I’m not. I think he’ll find a way to fire me eventually. He doesn’t like women much.”

“Matt likes everybody as a rule,” Lou said. “And he’s always being pursued by women. They love him. He’s kind to people he likes. He offered to marry Kitty Carson when she quit working for Dr. Drew Morris. She didn’t do it, of course, she was crazy for Drew and vice versa. They’re happily married now.” She hesitated, but Leslie didn’t speak. “He’s a dish—rich, handsome, sexy, and usually the easiest man on earth to get along with.”

“He’s a bulldozer,” Leslie said flatly. “He can’t seem to talk to people unless he’s standing on them.” She folded her arms over her chest and looked uncomfortable.

So that’s it, Lou thought, wondering if the young woman realized what her body language was giving away. Lou knew instantly that someone had caused those breaks in the younger woman’s leg; very probably a man. She had reason to know.

“You don’t like people to touch you,” Lou said.

Leslie shifted in the chair. “No.”

Lou’s perceptive eyes went over the concealing garments Leslie wore, but she didn’t say another word. She stood up, smiling gently. “There’s no damage from the recent fall,” she said gently. “But come back if the pain gets any worse.”

Leslie frowned. “How did you know I was in pain?”

“Matt said you winced every time you got out of your chair.”

Leslie’s heart skipped. “I didn’t realize he noticed.”

“He’s perceptive.”

Lou prescribed an over-the-counter medication to take for the pain and advised her to come back if she didn’t improve. Leslie agreed and went out of the office in an absentminded stupor, wondering what else Matt Caldwell had learned from her just by observation. It was a little unnerving.

When she went back to the office, it wasn’t ten minutes before Matt was standing in the doorway.

“Well?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she assured him. “Just a few bruises. And believe me, I have no intention of suing you.”

He didn’t react visibly. “Plenty have.” He was irritated. Lou wouldn’t tell him anything, except that his new employee was as closemouthed as a clam. He knew that already.

“Tell Ed I’ll be out of the office for a couple of days,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

He gave her a last look, turned and walked back out. It wasn’t until Matt was out of sight that Leslie began to relax.




Chapter Three


The nightmares came back that night. Leslie had even expected them, because of the visit to Dr. Lou Coltrain and the hospital’s X-ray department. Having to wear high heeled shoes to work hadn’t done her damaged leg any good, either. Along with the nightmare that left her sweating and panting, her leg was killing her. She went to the bathroom and downed two aspirin, hoping they were going to do the trick. She decided that she was going to have to give up fashion and wear flats again.

Matt noticed, of course, when he returned to the office three days later. His eyes narrowed as he watched her walk across the floor of her small office.

“Lou could give you something to take for the pain,” he said abruptly.

She glanced at him as she pulled a file out of the metal cabinet. “Yes, she could, Mr. Caldwell, but do you really want a comatose secretary in Ed’s office? Painkillers put me to sleep.”

“Pain makes for inefficiency.”

She nodded. “I know that. I have a bottle of aspirin in my purse,” she assured him. “And the pain isn’t so bad that I can’t remember how to spell. It’s just a few bruises. They’ll heal. Dr. Coltrain said so.”

He stared at her through narrowed, cold eyes. “You shouldn’t be limping after a week. I want you to see Lou again…”

“I’ve limped for six years, Mr. Caldwell,” she said serenely. Her eyes kindled. “If you don’t like the limp, perhaps you shouldn’t stand and watch me walk.”

His eyebrows arched. “Can’t the doctors do anything to correct it?”

She glared at him. “I hate doctors!”

The vehemence of her statement took him aback. She meant it, too. Her face flushed, her eyes sparkled with temper. It was such a difference from her usual expression that he found himself captivated. When she was animated, she was pretty.

“They’re not all bad,” he replied finally.

“There’s only so much you can do with a shattered bone,” she said and then bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to tell him that.

The question was in his eyes, on his lips, but it never made it past them. Just as he started to ask, Ed came out of his office and spotted him.

“Matt! Welcome back,” he said, extending a hand. “I just had a call from Bill Payton. He wanted to know if you were coming to the banquet Saturday night. They’ve got a live band scheduled.”

“Sure,” Matt said absently. “Tell him to reserve two tickets for me. Are you going?”

“I thought I would. I’ll bring Leslie along.” He smiled at her. “It’s the annual Jacobsville Cattle-men’s Association banquet. We have speeches, but if you survive them, and the rubber chicken, you get to dance.”

“Her leg isn’t going to let her do much dancing,” Matt said solemnly.

Ed’s eyebrows lifted. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “She loves Latin dances.” He grinned at Leslie. “So does Matt here. You wouldn’t believe what he can do with a mambo or a rhumba, to say nothing of the tango. He dated a dance instructor for several months, and he’s a natural anyway.”

Matt didn’t reply. He was watching the play of expressions on Leslie’s face and wondering about that leg. Maybe Ed knew the truth of it, and he could worm it out of him.

“You can ride in with us,” Matt said absently. “I’ll hire Jack Bailey’s stretch limo and give your secretary a thrill.”

“It’ll give me a thrill, too,” Ed assured him. “Thanks, Matt. I hate trying to find a parking space at the country club when there’s a party.”

“That makes two of us.”

One of the secretaries motioned to Matt that he had a phone call. He left and Ed departed right behind him for a meeting. Leslie wondered how she was going to endure an evening of dancing without ending up close to Matt Caldwell, who already resented her standoffish attitude. It would be an ordeal, she supposed, and wondered if she could develop a convenient headache on Saturday afternoon.

Leslie only had one really nice dress that was appropriate to wear to the function at the country club. The gown was a long sheath of shimmery silver fabric, suspended from her creamy shoulders by two little spaghetti straps. With it, she wore a silver-andrhinestone clip in her short blond hair and neat little silver slippers with only a hint of a heel.

Ed sighed at the picture she made when the limousine pulled up in front of the boardinghouse where she was staying. She met him on the porch, a small purse clenched in damp hands, all aflutter at the thought of her first evening out since she was seventeen. She was terribly nervous.

“Is the dress okay?” she asked at once.

Ed smiled, taking in her soft oval face with its faint blush of lipstick and rouge, which was the only makeup she ever wore. Her gray eyes had naturally thick black lashes, which never needed mascara.

“You look fine,” he assured her.

“You’re not bad in a tux yourself,” she murmured with a grin.

“Don’t let Matt see how nervous you are,” he said as they approached the car. “Somebody phoned and set him off just as we left my house. Carolyn was almost in tears.”

“Carolyn?” she asked.

“His latest trophy girlfriend,” he murmured. “She’s from one of the best families in Houston, staying with her aunt so she’d be on hand for tonight’s festivities. She’s been relentlessly pursuing Matt for months. Some of us think she’s gaining ground.”

“She’s beautiful, I guess?” she asked.

“Absolutely. In a way, she reminds me of Franny.”

Franny had been Ed’s fiancеe, shot to death in a foiled bank robbery about the time Leslie had been catapulted into sordid fame. It had given them something in common that drew them together as friends.

“That must be rough,” Leslie said sympathetically.

He glanced at her curiously as they approached the car. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

She shrugged, tugging the small faux fur cape closer around her shoulders. “I was a late bloomer.” She swallowed hard. “What happened to me turned me right off men.”

“I’m not surprised.”

He waited while the chauffeur, also wearing a tuxedo, opened the door of the black super-stretch limousine for them. Leslie climbed in, followed by Ed, and the door closed them in with Matt and the most beautiful blond woman Leslie had ever seen. The other woman was wearing a simple black sheath dress with a short skirt and enough diamonds to open a jewelry store. No point in asking if they were real, Leslie thought, considering the look of that dress and the very real sable coat wrapped around it.

“You remember my cousin, Ed,” Matt drawled, lounging back in the leather seat across from Ed and Leslie. Small yellow lights made it possible for them to see each other in the incredibly spacious interior. “This is his secretary, Miss Murry. Carolyn Engles,” he added, nodding toward the woman at his side.

Murmured acknowledgments followed his introduction. Leslie’s fascinated eyes went from the bar to the phones to the individual controls on the air-conditioning and heating systems. It was like a luxury apartment on wheels, she thought, and tried not to let her amusement show.

“Haven’t you ever been in a limousine before?” Matt asked with a mocking smile.

“Actually, no,” she replied with deliberate courtesy. “It’s quite a treat. Thank you.”

He seemed disconcerted by her reply. He averted his head and studied Ed. His next words showed he’d forgotten her. “Tomorrow morning, first thing, I want you to pull back every penny of support we’re giving Marcus Boles. Nobody, and I mean nobody, involves me in a shady land deal like that!”

“It amazes me that we didn’t see through him from the start,” Ed agreed. “The whole campaign was just a diversion, to give the real candidate someone to shoot down. He’ll look like a hero, and Boles will take the fall manfully. I understand he’s being handsomely paid for his disgrace. Presumably the cash is worth his reputation and social standing.”

“He’s got land in South America. I hear he’s going over there to live. Just as well,” Matt added coldly. “If he’s lucky, he might make it to the airport tomorrow before I catch up with him.”

The threat of violence lay over him like an invisible mantle. Leslie shivered. Of the four people in that car, she knew firsthand how vicious and brutal physical violence could be. Her memories were hazy, confused, but in the nightmares she had constantly, they were all too vivid.

“Do calm down, darling,” Carolyn told Matt gently. “You’re upsetting Ms. Marley.”

“Murry,” Ed corrected before Leslie could. “Strange, Carolyn, I don’t remember your memory being so poor.”

Carolyn cleared her throat. “It’s a lovely night, at least,” she said, changing the subject. “No rain and a beautiful moon.”

“So it is,” Ed drawled.

Matt gave him a cool look, which Ed met with a vacant smile. Leslie was amused by the way Ed could look so innocent. She knew him far too well to be fooled.

Matt, meanwhile, was drinking in the sight of Leslie in that formfitting dress that just matched her eyes. She had skin like marble, and he wondered if it was as soft to the touch as it seemed. She wasn’t conventionally pretty, but there was a quality about her that made him weak in the knees. He was driven to protect her, without knowing why he felt that way about a stranger. It irritated him as much as the phone call he’d fielded earlier.

“Where are you from, Ms. Murbery?” Carolyn asked.

“Miss Murry,” Leslie corrected, beating Ed to the punch. “I’m from a little town north of Houston.”

“A true Texan,” Ed agreed with a grin in her direction.

“What town?” Matt asked.

“I’m sure you won’t have heard of it,” Leslie said confidently. “Our only claim to fame was a radio station in a building shaped like a ten-gallon hat. Very much off the beaten path.”

“Did your parents own a ranch?” he persisted.

She shook her head. “My father was a crop duster.”

“A what?” Carolyn asked with a blank face.

“A pilot who sprays pesticides from the air in a small airplane,” Leslie replied. “He was killed…on the job.”

“Pesticides,” Matt muttered darkly. “Just what the groundwater table needs to—”

“Matt, can we forget politics for just one night?” Ed asked. “I’d like to enjoy my evening.”

Matt gave him a measured glare with one eye narrowed menacingly. But he relaxed all at once and leaned back in his seat, to put a lazy arm around Carolyn and let her snuggle close to him. His dark eyes seemed to mock Leslie as if comparing her revulsion to Carolyn’s frank delight in his physical presence.

She let him win this round with an amused smile. Once, she might have enjoyed his presence just as much as his date was reveling in now. But she had more reason than most to fear men.

The country club, in its sprawling clubhouse on a man-made lake, was a beautiful building with graceful arches and fountains. It did Jacobsville proud. But, as Ed had intimated, there wasn’t a single parking spot available. Matt had the pager number of the driver and could summon the limousine whenever it was needed. He herded his charges out of the car and into the building, where the reception committee made them welcome.

There was a live band, a very good one, playing assorted tunes, most of which resembled bossa nova rhythms. The only time that Leslie really felt alive was when she could close her eyes and listen to music; any sort of music—classical, opera, country-western or gospel. Music had been her escape as a child from a world too bitter sometimes to stomach. She couldn’t play an instrument, but she could dance. That was the one thing she and her mother had shared, a love of dancing. In fact, Marie had taught her every dance step she knew, and she knew a lot. Marie had taught dancing for a year or so and had shared her expertise with her daughter. How ironic it was that Leslie’s love of dance had been stifled forever by the events of her seventeenth year.

“Fill a plate,” Ed coaxed, motioning her to the small china dishes on the buffet table. “You could use a little more meat on those bird bones.”

She grinned at him. “I’m not skinny.”

“Yes, you are,” he replied, and he wasn’t kidding. “Come on, forget your troubles and enjoy yourself. Tonight, there is no tomorrow. Eat, drink and be merry.”

For tomorrow, you die, came the finish to that admonishing verse, she recalled darkly. But she didn’t say it. She put some cheese straws and finger sandwiches on a plate and opted for soda water instead of a drink.

Ed found them two chairs on the rim of the dance floor, where they could hear the band and watch the dancing.

The band had a lovely dark-haired singer with a hauntingly beautiful voice. She was playing a guitar and singing songs from the sixties, with a rhythm that made Leslie’s heart jump. The smile on her face, the sparkle in her gray eyes as she listened to the talented performer, made her come alive.

From across the room, Matt noted the abrupt change in Leslie. She loved music. She loved dancing, too, he could tell. His strong fingers contracted around his own plate.

“Shall we sit with the Devores, darling?” Carolyn asked, indicating a well-dressed couple on the opposite side of the ballroom.

“I thought we’d stick with my cousin,” he said carelessly. “He’s not used to this sort of thing.”

“He seems very much at home,” Carolyn corrected, reluctantly following in Matt’s wake. “It’s his date who looks out of place. Good heavens, she’s tapping her toe! How gauche!”

“Weren’t you ever twenty-three?” he asked with a bite in his voice. “Or were you born so damned sophisticated that nothing touched you?”

She actually gasped. Matt had never spoken to her that way.

“Excuse me,” he said gruffly, having realized his mistake. “I’m still upset by Boles.”

“So…so I noticed,” she stammered, and almost dropped her plate. This was a Matt Caldwell she’d never seen before. His usual smile and easygoing attitude were conspicuous for their absence tonight. Boles must really have upset him!

Matt sat down on the other side of Leslie, his eyes darkening as he saw the life abruptly drain out of her. Her body tensed. Her fingers on her plate went white.

“Here, Carolyn, trade places with me,” Matt said suddenly, and with a forced smile. “This chair’s too low for me.”

“I don’t think mine’s much higher, darling, but I’ll do it,” Carolyn said in a docile tone.

Leslie relaxed. She smiled shyly at the other woman and then turned her attention back to the woman on the stage.

“Isn’t she marvelous?” Carolyn asked. “She’s from the Yucatаn.”

“Not only talented, but pretty as well,” Ed agreed. “I love that beat.”

“Oh, so do I,” Leslie said breathlessly, nibbling a finger sandwich but with her whole attention on the band and the singer.

Matt found himself watching her, amused and touched by her uninhibited joy in the music. It had occurred to him that not much affected her in the office. Here, she was unsure of herself and nervous. Perhaps she even felt out of place. But when the band was playing and the vocalist was singing, she was a different person. He got a glimpse of the way she had been, perhaps, before whatever blows of fate had made her so uneasy around him. He was intrigued by her, and not solely because she wounded his ego. She was a complex person.

Ed noticed Matt’s steady gaze on Leslie, and he wanted to drag his cousin aside and tell him the whole miserable story. Matt was curious about Leslie, and he was a bulldozer when he wanted something. He’d run roughshod right over her to get his answers, and Leslie would retreat into the shell her experiences had built around her. She was just coming into the sunlight, and here was Matt driving her back into shadow. Why couldn’t Matt be content with Carolyn’s adoration? Most women flocked around him; Leslie didn’t. He was sure that was the main attraction she held for his cousin. But Matt, pursuing her interest, could set her back years. He had no idea what sort of damage he could do to her fragile emotions.

The singer finished her song, and the audience applauded. She introduced the members of the band and the next number, a beautiful, rhythmic feast called “Brazil.” It was Leslie’s very favorite piece of music, and she could dance to it, despite her leg. She longed, ached, for someone to take her on the dance floor and let her show those stiff, inhibited people how to fly to that poignant rhythm!

Watching her, Matt saw the hunger in her eyes. Ed couldn’t do those steps, but he could. Without a word, he handed Carolyn his empty plate and got to his feet.

Before Leslie had a chance to hesitate or refuse outright, he pulled her gently out of her seat and onto the dance floor.

His dark eyes met her shocked pale ones as he caught her waist in one lean, strong hand and took her left hand quite reverently into his right one.

“I won’t make any sudden turns,” he assured her. He nodded once, curtly, to mark the rhythm.

And then he did something remarkable.

Leslie caught her breath as she recognized his ability. She forgot to be afraid of him. She forgot that she was nervous to be held by a man. She was caught up in the rhythm and the delight of having a partner who knew how to dance to perfection the intricate steps that accompanied the Latin beat.

“You’re good,” Matt mused, smiling with genuine pleasure as they measured their quick steps to the rhythm.

“So are you.” She smiled back.

“If your leg gives you trouble, let me know and I’ll get you off the floor. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Then let’s go!”

He moved her across the floor with the skill of a professional dancer and she followed him with such perfection that other dancers stopped and got out of the way, moving to the sidelines to watch what had become pure entertainment.

Matt and Leslie, enjoying the music and their own interpretation of it, were blind to the other guests, to the smiling members of the band, to everything except the glittering excitement of the dance. They moved as if they were bound by invisible strings, each to the other, with perfectly matching steps.

As the music finally wound down, Matt drew her in close against his lean frame and tilted her down in an elegant, but painful, finish.

The applause was thunderous. Matt drew Leslie upright again and noticed how pale and drawn her face was.

“Too much too soon,” he murmured. “Come on. Off you go.”

He didn’t move closer. Instead, he held out his arm and let her come to him, let her catch hold of it where the muscle was thickest. She clung with both hands, hating herself for doing something so incredibly stupid. But, oh, it had been fun! It was worth the pain.

She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Matt eased her down into her chair again.

“Do you have any aspirin in that tiny thing?” Matt asked, indicating the small string purse on her arm.

She grimaced.

“Of course not.” He turned, scanning the audience. “Back in a jiffy.”

He moved off in the general direction of the punch bowl while Ed caught Leslie’s hand in his. “That was great,” he enthused. “Just great! I didn’t know you could dance like that.”

“Neither did I,” she murmured shyly.

“Quite an exhibition,” Carolyn agreed coolly. “But silly to do something so obviously painful. Now Matt will spend the rest of the night blaming himself and trying to find aspirin, I suppose.” She got up and marched off with her barely touched plate and Matt’s empty one.

“Well, she’s in a snit,” Ed observed. “She can’t dance like that.”

“I shouldn’t have done it,” Leslie murmured. “But it was so much fun, Ed! I felt alive, really alive!”

“You looked it. Nice to see your eyes light up again.”

She made a face at him. “I’ve spoiled Carolyn’s evening.”

“Fair trade,” he murmured dryly, “she spoiled mine the minute she got into the limousine and complained that I smelled like a sweets shop.”

“You smell very nice,” she replied.

He smiled. “Thanks.”

Matt was suddenly coming back toward them, with Lou Coltrain by the arm. It looked as if she were being forcibly escorted across the floor and Ed had to hide the grin he couldn’t help.

“Well,” Lou huffed, staring at Matt before she lowered her gaze to Leslie. “I thought you were dying, considering the way he appropriated me and dragged me over here!”

“I don’t have any aspirin,” Leslie said uneasily. “I’m sorry…”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Lou said instantly. She patted Leslie’s hand gently. “But you’ve had some pretty bad bruising and this isn’t the sort of exercise I’d recommend. Shattered bones are never as strong, even when they’re set properly—and yours were not.”

Embarrassed, Leslie bit her lower lip.

“You’ll be okay,” Lou promised with a gentle smile. “In fact, exercise is good for the muscles that support that bone—it makes it stronger. But don’t do this again for a couple of weeks, at least. Here. I always carry aspirin!”

She handed Leslie a small metal container of aspirin and Matt produced another cup of soda water and stood over her, unsmiling, while she took two of the aspirins and swallowed them.





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