Texas Millionaire. Dixie Browning
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drapes and walnut louvered blinds folded back to display a row of African violets.
There were two wing chairs upholstered in a dainty chintz print, but instead of stopping there, Manie crossed to the massive walnut door a few feet beyond and rapped sharply. Without waiting for a response, she opened the door and waved Callie into the lion’s den.
“Here she is, here’s my Callie. Honey, meet Hank Langley. He’s just as sweet as he can be, so don’t let that scowl of his fool you.”
It was a good thing she was wearing panty hose. That was the only thing that kept her knees from buckling as the big, dark, unsmiling man rose from another of the massive leather-covered chairs. How many cows had been sacrificed for this man’s comfort?
More to the point, how many secretaries had been sacrificed on the altar of his personal convenience?
“Say hello to your new employer,” her aunt urged. Callie must have made a sound of some sort, because the scowl disappeared.
“Miss Riley.” Her new employer nodded gravely.
“M-Mr. Langley,” she said, trying to sound as if she weren’t sweating like a horse under her neat cotton blouse and tan poplin skirt. This was Hank Langley? Her aunt’s sweet, sensitive boy? The man who wouldn’t swat a fly if he could open a window and let it out?
No way. This man was a…
Well, she didn’t know what he was, but he was no sweet, harmless little boy. She’d heard all about Texas men. According to those songs her mother played on the kitchen radio and sang along with, they rode harder, drank more, made love better and broke more hearts than any other twolegged creature in the known world. The songs didn’t even begin to do justice to the real thing.
Oh, my…
“Does she need anything? A glass of water?” His voice was just like the rest of him. Deep, dark and dangerously masculine.
“It’s all that driving,” her great-aunt replied. “I reckon her poor body’s still stuck on Eastern Standard Time.”
They were talking over her head as if she weren’t even there. Callie took a deep breath and said, “If you think I can do the job, Mr. Langley, I’m perfectly willing to give it my best effort. If not—”
“No problem, Miss, uh—Riley. Your aunt vouches for you.”
He was a full head taller than she was, but then, so was almost everyone else. His hair was thick and so dark it absorbed the light, except for a few glints of silver scattered evenly throughout. His eyes were blue. So were hers, only where his were the color of one of those deep blue mineral oil bottles, hers were more the color of a sun-faded denim shirt.
They talked some more, at least Mr. Langley and her aunt did. Callie was having trouble trying to sift through so many new impressions and get her brain back in working order. Evidently it had gotten scrambled during the trip, because the thoughts that were racing through her mind like a pair of courting squirrels spiraling round and round a poplar tree were the last thing she needed at this point in her life.
“—sent word to the committee head about the meeting next week—”
“—cancel the tickets and call—”
“—deliver tomorrow. Callie can sign for it, I told them all about her.”
Told who what? Callie wondered. That she was here in body, but her brain was suffering jet lag?
Well, car lag. Four days of driving, living on fast food and diet colas, her mind busy framing arguments that would convince her aunt to forget Texas, move back home to Carolina and let Callie take care of her, produced more or less the same results.
“I’m sure you’ll do just fine, Miss, uh—Callie. Manie won’t have a thing to worry about, will she?”
Wordlessly she nodded, then shook her head. “No, sir.”
He looked as if he might be suffering from acute dyspepsia. She’d never had that particular effect on a man before. The truth was, she’d never had much effect at all, not being the type of woman men went wild over. Wholesome was about the nicest thing that had ever been said about her looks. This man, like all the others, had glanced at her once, shaken her hand, and two minutes after she left he’d have forgotten both her name and her face.
She stood outside his door a few minutes later, waiting for her aunt to finish her conversation, and thought, The Invisible Woman Meets the Invincible Man. It sounded like one of those high-tech movies, full of sound and fury and special effects.
She was hallucinating. She told herself it had to be something in the water. Because for one split second when she’d gazed up at the man she was going to be working for for more than a week, she’d felt as if someone had struck a note that resonated on her inner tuning fork, the one her mother the musician swore all women had. Sort of like meeting someone for the first time and feeling as if you’d met them somewhere before. None of which made a speck of sense.
“We’d better get you something to eat before you pass out,” her aunt said, emerging from the inner sanctum a moment later. “You didn’t eat enough breakfast to keep a grasshopper alive.”
Hank tilted his favorite chair, lifted his feet to the windowsill and stared out at the colorless sky, visualizing dark gray clouds rolling in from the northwest. He imagined himself in the cockpit of one of the old MH-60 Blackhawks, his field of vision transformed by night-vision goggles. For some crazy reason he was feeling the same familiar rush, the heady mixture of determination and invincibility, he used to feel when he first headed out on a mission.
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