Desperado. Diana Palmer
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in investments. I’ll find something. Preferably,” she added teasingly, “in a multinational corporation, so that I can work overseas and never get in your hair again.”
“Why do you want to leave the country?” he asked irritably.
“What is there for me here?” she countered simply. “I’m twenty-six, Cord. If I don’t do something, I’ll dry up and blow away. I don’t want to spend the best years of my life commuting to downtown Houston to play with numbers. I’m not a baby anymore. If I have to work, at least I can choose something in an exotic location. Preferably something adventurous, and exciting,” she said as an afterthought.
He frowned. “Why do you have to work?” he asked suddenly. “Amy left us both a little money. Besides, Bart Evans had an extensive stock portfolio and you were his widow.”
Her face hardened. “I didn’t take one penny of his money. Not property, not stocks, not savings. Nothing!”
That was surprising. “Why not?”
She lowered her eyes to the coverlet and closed them briefly under a wave of pain she didn’t want him to see. “He cost me the most precious thing in my life,” she said in a husky, throbbing tone.
That was an enigmatic statement. He didn’t understand it. “Nobody forced you to marry him,” he pointed out, and with more bitterness than he realized.
That’s what you think, she thought to herself, but she didn’t say it aloud. She crumpled the coverlet under her bright pink fingernails and looked up at him bravely. “I had his estate divided between his two ex-wives.”
He laughed shortly in surprise. “You did what?”
“You heard me,” she remarked with a shrug. She let go of her grip on the bedspread. “I thought they deserved the money more than I did. They lived with him longer than I did. He had no living relatives.”
His dark eyes narrowed. He’d been curious about her marriage for a long time. He’d never mentioned it to her, because she closed up like a clam when her husband’s name came up. She never discussed it. But it had left scars on her emotions that were obvious to anyone with a grain of sensitivity.
“Not a happy marriage, Maggie?” he asked quietly.
“No.” She met his eyes evenly. “And that’s the only thing I’ll ever say about it,” she added firmly. “Digging up the past solves nothing.”
He studied her wan face. “I used to think that way, too. But the past shapes the future. I never got over Patricia’s death.”
“I know.”
She said it in an odd sort of way. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“You aren’t exactly Don Juan these days,” she pointed out.
He bristled with stung pride. It was true that he didn’t have affairs, or spend a lot of time living the life of a playboy, but he didn’t like her knowing it. His dark eyes flashed. “You know nothing about that side of my life,” he said coldly. “And you never will.”
There was a brief, incredulous look on her face, and he could have bitten his tongue. They’d slept together, once, even if it wasn’t a memory she liked. She knew him in a way few women ever had. It was a thoughtless remark.
“On second thought,” he began abruptly.
She held up a hand. “You said it yourself, digging up the past doesn’t solve anything.”
He drew in a long, slow breath. “I hurt you.”
Her face flamed. She wasn’t going to get trapped into that conversation. “Let it go, Cord. It all happened a long time ago. Now I have to get up and start job-hunting. If you don’t mind going out of here so I can get dressed...?”
But he wouldn’t leave it alone. “You’re twenty-six and a widow,” he said shortly, irritated by her embarrassment. “And I know every inch of you. So stop acting coy.”
Her teeth clenched so hard she thought she might chip them. Her eyes were furious. “You have no idea how much I hate the memory of that night,” she said spitefully.
The words stung, as she meant them to. He got to his feet abruptly and noticed how she dragged the covers up to her chin, as if she couldn’t bear him to look at her body at all.
“You must have noticed that I was drunk,” he said curtly. “If I hadn’t been, I’d never have touched you!”
“I drank too much myself,” she shot back. “Or I’d never have let you touch me!”
“Having made ourselves clear on that point,” he added, turning away from her. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
He sounded as if he was about to choke on the words. She noticed that his face was clenched as tightly as her fingers.
“Two apologies in one day,” she said with mock surprise. “Do you have something fatal and you’re trying to win points with God while there’s still time?”
He laughed faintly. “You could be forgiven for thinking so, I suppose.” He turned and looked at her for a long time, as if he needed to reconcile his memory of her with the reality. “You were eight when we came to live with Mrs. Barton. That means you’ve been part of my life for eighteen years.” His eyes grew contemplative. “I’ve given you nothing but hostility, all that time. But the minute I get in trouble or get hurt, you come running. Why?”
“Habit,” she said at once. “And a monstrous appetite for verbal abuse,” she added with a faintly wicked smile.
He burst out laughing, and this time it was genuine. It changed him. It made his eyes sparkle, his face so handsome that it hurt her to see it. He’d been this way with Patricia, his wife, she supposed. Maybe he’d been happy with other women, too, over the years. But he only smiled at Maggie if she teased him. So, through the years, she’d tried to do that. It was one way of getting attention from him, even if the only way.
“You didn’t need to come here and apologize,” she added. “I’m used to having you snarl at me.”
He frowned as he considered that. She spoke as if she expected nothing else. There was so much about her past that he didn’t know, couldn’t know. She volunteered nothing. It was a reminder that she knew far more about him than he knew about her.
“You can come and stay out at the ranch while you look for work,” he said out of the blue.
Her heart skipped, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “No, thanks. I like it where I am.”
He hadn’t expected the refusal. “What’s the matter, scared I’ll lose my temper and throw you out in your nightgown one rainy night?”
She sighed. “It would be in character,” she said with resignation. “You’d make sure it was on a main street, too.”
He grimaced. “I was kidding!”
She looked up. “I wasn’t.”
His jaw clenched. “You don’t know me, Maggie.”
She laughed shortly. She sat up, pushing back the thick waves of her long hair before she leaned forward with her head in her hands, her elbows resting on her drawn-up knees. “My head hurts. I’m not used to traveling so far at one time.”
“You’re jet-lagged,” he said. He knew a lot about overseas travel. He’d done more than his share. “You probably went to sleep the minute you got here. You should have tried to wait until bedtime.”
She gave him a speaking glance. “I had a trying day.”
He sighed and stuck his hands in the pockets of his khaki slacks. “So you did.”
Her eyes lifted to his face, tracing the new cuts and stitches. “It’s a miracle that you didn’t lose your sight,” she said softly.