Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author

DIANA PALMER

“Palmer’s talent for character development and ability to fuse heartwarming romance with nail-biting suspense shine in Outsider.”

—Booklist

“A gentle escape mixed with real-life menace for fans of Palmer’s more than 100 novels.”

—Publishers Weekly on Night Fever

“The ever popular and prolific Palmer has penned another sure hit.”

—Booklist on Before Sunrise

“Nobody does it better.”

—New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard

“Palmer knows how to make the sparks fly…heartwarming.”

—Publishers Weekly on Renegade

“Sensual and suspenseful.”

—Booklist on Lawless

“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“Nobody tops Diana Palmer when it comes to delivering pure, undiluted romance. I love her stories.”

—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz

Heartless
Diana Palmer

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To the Art Department:

your beautiful covers help sell my work.

I value your creativity and dedication so much.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart…

Diana Palmer

Chapter One

GRACIE MARSH’S CELL PHONE exploded with the theme to the newest science fiction motion picture. She jumped, and dirt from the ground where she was busily cleaning out her flower beds splattered her spotless yellow sweatshirt.

“Oh, darn,” she muttered, wiping her hands on her old jeans before she dived into a pocket for the very loud instrument.

“Where’s that music coming from?” Mrs. Harcourt, the housekeeper, called from the front porch, where she was setting out pansies in a massive planter.

“It’s just my phone, Mrs. Harcourt,” Gracie assured her. “It’s probably Jason…hello?” she gasped.

There was an amused pause. “Don’t tell me,” came a deep, drawling, masculine voice. “You’re up to your neck in dirt and now your pocket and your cell phone are smeared with it.”

She laughed in spite of her frustration. Her stepbrother knew her better than anyone else on earth. “Yes,” she admitted.

“I’d be cussing.”

“I did say ‘darn,’” she replied.

He sighed. “I’ll have to take you in hand, Gracie. Sometimes the situation calls for something more elegant and descriptive than ‘darn.’”

“You’d know,” she retorted, recalling that he cursed eloquently in two languages, “especially when one of your cowboys does something you don’t like.” She frowned. “Where are you?”

“At the ranch,” he said.

The ranch was his property in Comanche Wells, where he ran purebred Santa Gertrudis cattle and a new equally purebred Japanese breed that was the basis for the famous Kobe beef. Jason Pendleton had millions, but he rarely stayed in the family mansion in San Antonio, where Gracie spent most of her time. Jason was only here when business required it, but his heart was on his huge Santa Gertrudis ranch. He lived there most of the year. He could wheel and deal with the international business set, chair board meetings, run huge corporations and throw incredible parties, with Gracie’s help as a hostess. But he was most at home in jeans and boots and chaps, working cattle.

“Why are you calling me?” she asked. “Do you need somebody to come help you brand cattle?” she teased, because he’d taught her to do that—and many other things—over the years. She was as much at home on the ranch as he was.

“Wrong season,” he replied. “We drop calves in the spring. It’s late August. Almost autumn.”

She frowned. “Then what are you doing?”

“Rounding up bulls, mostly. But right now I’m getting ready to come up to the auction barn in San Antonio for a sale,” he said. “They’ve got some open Santa Gert heifers I want,” he added, referring to the purebred native Texas Santa Gertrudis breed that was founded on the world famous King Ranch near the Texas coast. “Replacement heifers to breed so they’ll drop calves next spring.”

“Oh.” She tried to remember what that meant.

He sighed loudly. “Open heifers are young cows that haven’t been bred for the first time,” he explained again. “They’re replacements for cows I’ve had to cull from the herd and sell off because they didn’t produce calves this year.”

“Sorry,” she murmured, not wanting to emphasize her memory problems. She forgot things, she plunged down steps, she lost her balance in the most unexpected places. There was a physical reason for those lapses, one which she’d never shared with Jason, not since she and her mother had moved in with him and his father almost twelve years ago. Her mother had been frantic about keeping the past secret, swearing Gracie to silence. Cynthia Marsh had even told everyone that Graciela was her stepdaughter, not her real daughter, to make sure any background checks on Graciela didn’t turn up information on her daughter, herself and her late husband that would damage Graciela’s place in the Pendleton family. Graciela’s father, a widower with a young daughter, had died in the Gulf War, Cynthia emphasized again and again. He was a war hero. It wasn’t the truth, of course. The truth was more traumatic.

“One day you’ll get the hang of it,” he said easily. He was patient with her, as some people in her life hadn’t been.

“Why are you calling me, if you don’t need an extra ranch hand?” she asked merrily.

“I thought you might like to go to the sale with me,” he said comfortably. “I’ll buy you lunch after we’re through.”

She grinned. “I’d love to,” she said.

Not only did she enjoy his company, but she loved the atmosphere of the sale barn. It was always crowded, always fun. She liked hearing the auctioneer’s incredibly rapid spiel as he prompted buyers to go higher and higher on prices for the various lots of cattle. She liked the other cattlemen who turned up there, many of them from Comanche Wells, as well as Jacobsville, which was only a few miles from Comanche Wells. There was a select group of environmentally staunch ranchers to which Jason belonged. They raised old grasses that were earth-friendly, they improved the land and provided habitat for wild animals, they used modern methods of feed production that were kind to the ecology, and they were fanatics about the good treatment of their purebred cattle. These cattlemen never used growth hormone and they only used the necessary antibiotics, most particularly those that prevented bovine pulmonary disorder. They didn’t use dangerous chemicals to control weeds or pests. Cy Parks had introduced the idea of using predator insects to control many pests. The lack of poisonous substances on plants helped grow more colonies of honey bees, which were essential to pollination of grain and feed crops.

None of the environmental group of Jacobs County ranchers ran beef cattle; they were all producers of herd sires and champion young bulls, cows and heifers, which they sold for herd improvement. It got them into trouble sometimes with beef producers who wanted a quicker profit. There had been some notable fistfights at cattle conferences in the past. Jason had been involved in one of them. Gracie had gone to bail him out of jail, bursting into laughter when she saw him, disheveled and bloody and grinning like a Cheshire cat as they led him out of the detention cell. He loved a good fight.

“I said I’ll pick you up in about twenty minutes,” he repeated, because she hadn’t answered him.

“Okay. What should I wear?”

“Jeans and a T-shirt,” he said. “If we walk in wearing designer clothes, the price will jump twenty dollars a head before I sit down. I don’t want to be recognized.”

“Fat chance if we show up in your Jaguar,” she drawled.

“I’m driving one of the ranch pickups and wearing working clothes,” he drawled back.

“All right. I’ll finish cleaning out my flower beds later.”

“As if we haven’t already got enough damned bulbs poking up in the front yard. You’re getting soil ready to put out more this fall, aren’t you?” he muttered. “And I’ll bet you’ve got Harcourt refilling those planters on the porch.”

He knew her too well. “It’s just pansies—they’ll last until late autumn. I won’t plant bulbs until October. But bulbs are beautiful in the spring, Jason,” she defended herself.

“Why do I pay a yard man to do outdoor work?” he grumbled.

“Because he does the heavy work that Harcourt and I can’t,” she replied saucily. “I’m hanging up now.”

“Don’t keep me waiting,” he said. “We’ll barely make it there in time, as it is. I got held up with an accident.”

“You weren’t hurt?” she exclaimed quickly.

There was a slight pause. “No,” he said softly. “Not me. One of my cowboys got stepped on by a bull. Broke his foot, but he’ll be all right.”

She let out the breath she’d been holding. Jason was her life. He didn’t know how she felt about him. It was impossible anyway. She could never do those things with men that most modern women did. She remembered her mother coming out of the bedroom, the blood staining her nightgown…

She grimaced. “I thought you just hired a new man to go to local sales representing the ranch to buy cattle for you.”

“I did. But I’ve heard some things about him I don’t like. He’s supposed to be at this auction. I can see for myself.”

“He’ll recognize you.”

“In my working clothes? Fat chance! Besides, he’s only seen me once, behind a desk.”

“Suit yourself. I’ll be ready.”

“Better be, or I’ll dress you myself,” he warned.

“Jason!”

But he’d already hung up.

She got up, putting aside her trowel. “Mrs. Harcourt, we need to tell Manuel to finish clearing these beds for me,” she said as she mounted the steps. “Jason’s taking me to a sale.”

“All right, darlin’,” the graying old woman said with a smile. She was tall and amply padded, with black eyes and a lovely smile. She’d come to work for the family before Jason was born and was considered part of it. She and the maid, Dilly, and the chauffeur, John, were all part of the family. There was other staff that worked part-time, but the old retainers were full-time.

Gracie loved living here on the big estate in San Antonio. The staff did go down to the ranch in Comanche Wells occasionally for a few weeks, especially when Jason had company down there. If he did, though, it wasn’t the same local society crowd he invited to the San Antonio mansion. It was often world leaders who needed a break from the backbreaking pressure of their daily lives, high government politicians running from scandals, even an occasional billionaire who wanted privacy even for a few days. Jason chose his friends by their character, not their wealth. It was one of many things Gracie loved about him. He had a big heart and he was a soft touch for people down on their luck. He gave heavily to charities. But he didn’t seem the sort of man who could be approached.

He was an introvert. It was hard for him to connect to people. Consequently he was intimidating to a lot of guests, who found him hard going in private conversations. Only with Gracie could he relax and be himself. It was, she considered, a matter of trust. He felt safe with her, as she did with him.

What a pity, said her friend Barbara, who ran a café in Jacobsville, that Jason and Gracie were brother and sister, when they had so much in common. Gracie had reminded her that there was no blood relationship there. Jason’s father had married Gracie’s mother, who was killed only a couple of weeks after the wedding in an automobile accident. Myron Pendleton had kept Gracie, who had no other living relatives, and soon gave her another stepsister, Gloryanne Barnes—now Mrs. Rodrigo Ramirez—when he married Glory’s mother, Beverly, months later. Glory and Gracie had more in common than anyone else knew. They were best friends. It was the two of them against the world when they were in school, because both had scars from their childhoods and neither was comfortable with boys. They rarely dated. They were targets of some vicious bullying, which Jason had quietly and efficiently nipped in the bud. Even today, Glory was still the closest thing to a sister Gracie had ever had.

She showered and dried her hair, dressing in jeans with a vine of pink roses embroidered down one leg, with a pink T-shirt. Impulsively she brushed out her long, pale blond hair and braided it into pigtails. She grinned at herself with twinkling gray eyes. She had a soft complexion with radiant smoothness. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was pretty, in her shy way. She frowned, wondering if it was appropriate to wear pigtails at her age. Sometimes she did things that seemed odd to other people. That little glitch in her brain did a lot of damage to her ego, from time to time.

Well, it was too late to worry about it now. She put on her fanny pack and pulled on her boots over thick socks. A horn was blowing outside the front door. Jason, impatient as always.

She ran down the staircase, almost stumbling head over heels, remembered that she’d left her cell phone in her room. She hesitated. What the heck, Jason had his. She continued down the stairs and out the front door.

“I’ll be out for lunch!” she yelled.

“All right, dear,” Mrs. Harcourt called back.

Jason was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He glowered as she quickly descended the front steps of the elegant brick mansion and hurried down the paved walkway to the circular driveway where his big black ranch truck was waiting with the door open.

She tumbled in beside him and slammed the door.

“I know, I know, I’m late, but I had to have a shower,” she rationalized as she fumbled with her seat belt. “I couldn’t go out with dirt on my hair!”

He glanced at her from under the wide brim of his creamy Stetson. He didn’t smile, but his black eyes did.

He was wearing jeans, too, with wide leather batwing chaps, old disreputable brown boots with turned-up toes from too many soakings and stains everywhere. His shirt was chambray and faded. Despite the immaculate cleanness of his beautiful, tanned hands, he looked like a poor, working cowboy.

Heavens, he was sexy, she thought as she gave him a covert appraisal. Tall and broad-shouldered, with that physique rarely seen outside a Hollywood Western film, jet-black hair in a conventional short cut, and a light olive complexion that was a legacy, like his black eyes, from a Spanish grandfather. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, but he had a very masculine face, lean and square-jawed, with deep-set eyes and high cheekbones and a mouth that was so sensuous it made Gracie squirm. He’d never kissed her. Well, not in the way a man would kiss a woman, anyway. They didn’t have that sort of relationship. Nor was he a womanizer. He had women, certainly, she was sure. But he never brought them home.

“Deep thoughts, tidbit?” he teased, grinning at her with perfect white teeth.

“I was thinking how handsome you are,” she blurted out and then flushed and laughed nervously. “Sorry. My mouth and my brain are disconnected.”

He didn’t smile. His black eyes slid over her face and back to the road. “You aren’t bad yourself, kid.”

She toyed with her seat belt. “Are any of the Jacobsville crowd coming up for this sale?”

“Cy Parks, J. D. Langley and Leo Hart,” he said. “The Harts are after another one of those Japanese bulls grown for Kobe beef. They’re moving into new breeding programs.”

“Don’t tell me Leo’s gone off Salers bulls?” she exclaimed.

He laughed. “Not completely. But when you consider how well Japanese beef sells, it’s no surprise. It’s tender and lean and appeals to shoppers. We’re in a consumer-driven market war, grubbing for new methods of production and new marketing techniques to overcome the slump in sales.”

“Don’t you still chair a committee on marketing with the cattlemen’s association?”

“I did. Had to give it up. This damned German business is wearing me ragged.”

She recalled that he was haggling for another computer company with a concern in Berlin that produced a new brand of microchip. Negotiations for a merger were going into their third week while the bosses hemmed and hawed about whether or not they wanted to sell for the price Jason was offering. Eventually he was going to have to spend some time overseas working personally on the takeover, because the man he’d delegated that authority to was quitting. His wife was English and he wanted to move to London. Jason would have to replace him, but there was no time for that now. It was too sensitive a negotiation to bring in a new outsider. Jason would have to do the job himself.

“You could send Grange to Germany and let him deal with them for you,” she murmured with a mischievous grin, naming his new livestock foreman. Grange had worked for the Ballenger feedlot, but Jason liked him and had hired him on at the ranch for a bigger salary. Grange had proved to be an asset. His military background had made him the perfect foreman. The former army major had no trouble throwing out orders.

He made a face at her. “Grange negotiates like a military man. You know they won’t let men fly overseas with guns.”

“Grange is big enough to intimidate those businessmen without guns.”

He gave her a cool appraisal. He didn’t like it when she talked about Grange. He didn’t like Grange’s interest in her. Not that he made an issue of it. He just made sure Grange was otherwise occupied when Gracie visited the ranch. His black eyes slid over her slender body in the tight jeans and T-shirt. His hand on the steering wheel contracted violently. Gracie didn’t notice. She was smiling out the window at a group of children playing in the dirt yard of an old, ragged house beside the road.

THE SALE BARN WAS FULL. Gracie walked behind Jason, pausing when he did to speak to cattlemen they knew along the way. The auctioneer spotted Jason the moment he walked in and they nodded at each other. She didn’t see the Jacobsville cattlemen, but there was a huge crowd. They might be on the other side of the arena. The only seats left were against a wall, but he didn’t mind that.

He politely addressed a strange cattleman wearing a designer suit and highly polished new boots. The man looked him over with faint distaste, noting the working-cowboy gear, complete with spurred boots, batwing chaps and old chambray shirt.

“Nice day for a sale,” Jason said cordially.

The man smirked. “For those of us who can afford to buy something, sure it is. You work for a local ranch?” he added, giving Jason a demeaning look. “They sure must not pay very well.” He turned away again.

Gracie noted the exchange and grinned up at Jason, but he didn’t return the smile. His black eyes were fiery. They sat down and waited for the noise to subside so that the auction could begin.

She leaned up to Jason’s ear. “Who is he?” she whispered, indicating the man a row in front of them.

He didn’t answer. Instead he gestured toward the auctioneer at the podium tapping the microphone.

He welcomed the cattlemen, summarized the contents of the sale and began with a lot of purebred Black Angus calves. Jason leaned back, just watching, as bidding opened.

Gracie loved going to these auctions with him. It was one of the more pleasant memories of her early teens, tagging along after him through sale barns and learning the cattle business. It had irritated him at first, and then amused him. Finally he understood that it wasn’t the business that attracted her, but the novelty of his company. She was standoffish, even cold, with boys her own age and men of any age, but she adored Jason and it showed. As the years passed, she acquired a nickname—Jason’s shadow. He didn’t seem to mind. Glory had never cared much for cattle, but Gracie had always been fascinated by them. Even now, he rarely asked anyone except Gracie along when he went to auctions or to look at new equipment or even just for a drive over his property. A loner most of the time, he was supremely comfortable with her.

She studied her program and tapped his hand. He glanced where she was pointing at the program and nodded.

It was the next lot, a consignment of purebred Santa Gertrudis open heifers. Jason kept replacement heifers, as any cattleman did, against necessary culls after breeding season. But these young females were exceptional. They were from a division of the King Ranch, with exquisite bloodlines. Jason wanted to improve his seed stock. This was a bargain at the price.

The auctioneer named the consignment and opened bidding. The fancy rancher in front of them raised his hand to accept the price. There was an increase on the base price of ten dollars a head. Jason scratched his ear. The price jumped by twenty dollars a head.

“I told you they knew I was coming,” the cattleman in the row ahead of them said smugly. “Didn’t I tell you prices would jump when I started the bidding?”

Jason didn’t say a word. But his eyes were coldly amused. The cattleman ahead of him jumped the ante by ten dollars, Jason doubled that bid. The price went up a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, two thousand.

“Who the hell’s bidding against me?” the cattleman in front muttered in a whisper to his companion, looking around. “Nobody here looks like they could afford to buy a cattle trailer, much less purebred Santa Gerts!”

“Bid higher,” his companion suggested.

“Are you nuts?” the man grumbled. “I’m at my limit. I wish I could get in touch with my boss, but he’s not in his office. He won’t be happy that I let someone outbid me for these heifers. He was keen to have them.”

The bid came again. The cattleman in front sat mute, fuming. Jason scratched his ear.

The bid was called once, twice, three times, and the auctioneer banged his gavel and shouted “Sold!”

He didn’t name the buyer, as Jason had already agreed before the sale began. He had Jason’s blank check and he knew where to send the consignment, and how. Jason and Gracie got up and walked out of the auction barn into the sunshine. The cattleman who’d been in front of them walked out, too, punching in numbers on his cell phone. He ran into Jason and bumped him.

“Watch the hell where you’re walking, will you?” the man snapped at Jason and kept walking.

Jason stared after the man with retribution in his dark gaze. But after a minute he stretched comfortably and glanced down at Gracie. “Hungry?”

“I could eat a cow,” she murmured with twinkling eyes. “Even a Santa Gert!”

“Barbarian,” he chuckled. “Come on.”

He was driving one of his standard ranch pickup trucks. They were nice, but not top-of-the-line. He cut costs where he could. The grumbling cattleman and his companion climbed into a luxury car and roared off. It was a nice car. But it wasn’t in the same league as Jason’s big Jaguar.

“I hope we don’t run into that fancy rancher who was in front of us,” she muttered. “He’s got a major attitude problem.”

“He’ll get it fixed soon enough,” Jason said easily.

“Nice of him to come over here and show us how real cattlemen dress for a sale,” Gracie remarked as she climbed up into the pickup and belted herself in. She gave him a speaking glance. “You’re disgracing us, dressing like that for a fancy auction!”

“Speak for yourself,” he shot back as he put the truck in gear. “You’re not exactly the belle of the ball.”

“I’m comfortable,” she said. “You said not to dress up.”

His dark eyes cut around to hers and he gave her a look that made her feel warm all over. “You’d look good in a flour sack, honey,” he told her solemnly. “But I like the pigtails.”

She laughed nervously, tugging at one. “They’re too young for me, I guess, but I couldn’t get my hair up this morning.”

“I like it.”

He pulled out onto the road and drove to a nearby steak restaurant that he favored, parking on the side. He and Gracie walked up onto the porch just as the luxury car pulled into the front parking lot.

Jason gave her an amused grin. “Well, he does have good taste in food.”

“I’ll bet somebody had to tell him it was a nice place to eat,” she shot back.

The waitress showed them to a table about the time the cattleman and his companion got to the line.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Cy Parks drawled as Jason and Gracie were seated at a booth across from his table.

“Look who’s talking, Parks,” Jason shot back.

“How’s Lisa?” Gracie asked.

Cy’s eyebrows levered up and down. “Pregnant,” he said with an ear-to-ear grin. “We’re over the moon.”

“Wow,” Gracie said softly. “Congratulations.”

“Our son needs a playmate,” he explained. He looked up as J. D. Langley and Harley Fowler, who was Cy’s foreman, and Leo Hart came walking back to his table with full salad plates. He gave them a snarly look. “Salad! Good God, I never thought I’d see the day when ranchers would sit down to plates of rabbit food!”

“We’re joining the green lobby,” Leo chuckled. “Hi, Jason. Gracie. Been to the sale?”

“Yes,” Jason replied. “We didn’t see you there.”

“We were on the other side of the barn,” J.D. muttered, glancing toward where the grumbly cattleman and his companion were just about to be seated. “Avoiding the plague in designer suits.”

“Who is he?” Gracie asked.

Harley Fowler grinned at her. “You ought to know.”

“Me?” she exclaimed, fuddled. “I know him?”

“Well, Mr. Pendleton ought to know him, anyway,” Harley added.

Jason gave Harley a scowl. “Mr. Pendleton was my father.”

Harley flushed a little. “Sorry.”

“He’s not big on ceremony,” Gracie told the younger man, smiling. “We don’t play that sort of game.”

“The hell we don’t,” Jason said, and his eyes kindled as the visiting cattleman came toward them. His big body tensed.

“Jason,” Gracie warned softly. She didn’t fancy a brawl in here, and Jason had a low boiling point. That designer rancher had already made him mad.

“If it isn’t the Jacobsville lobby,” the visitor said with a sarcastic smile. “The cattle-petting cattlemen, in person.”

Jason leaned back in the booth, stretching out his long legs. “Nothing wrong with treating cattle decently,” he said deliberately.

The man gave him a faintly contemptuous look. “Excuse me, but I don’t remember asking for your opinion. You may work cattle, son, but I’m sure you don’t own any. Now why don’t you mind your own business and let cattlemen talk cattle?”

Black eyes bored into his face with an expression under them that would have made an impression on a man less thick-skinned.

“You didn’t get that lot of Santa Gertrudis heifers you came after, did you?” Cy Parks mused.

The man made a face. “Rub it in. I know you were the high bidder.”

“Nope. It wasn’t me. I was there for the lot of Santa Gert calves. I got those.” Cy’s green eyes narrowed. “Your boss sent you there to get those heifers, I hear.”

The man’s lip pulled up. “Sent me there with half the amount I needed to bid for them,” he said angrily. “And told me not to go higher. Hell of a boss. I’ll bet he wouldn’t know a heifer from a bull, sitting up there in his office telling real cattlemen how to buy cattle!”

Cy studied him coldly. “That attitude won’t get you far in the Pendleton organization.”

“Not my fault if the boss doesn’t know how to bid for cattle. I’ll have to educate him.”

There was a collective intake of breath at the table. Beside it, Jason’s brow quirked. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

“Do you know who trumped my bid for those heifers?” the man asked curiously.

Everybody at Cy Parks’s table pointed to Jason Pendleton. Gracie did, too.

The visiting cattleman turned to the man he’d been putting down for most of the day. Jason took off his Stetson and cold black eyes bored into the man’s shocked face.

“You bought those heifers? With what?” the arrogant rancher exclaimed. He glanced at Gracie. “You don’t look like a man who could afford a sick calf, and your girlfriend there sure hasn’t got money. So who do you work for?”

Jason didn’t like the crack about Gracie. His amusement morphed into pure dislike. “I could ask you the same question,” he said icily.

“I work for the Pendleton organization,” the man said.

Jason glowered at him. “Not anymore.”

“And who do you think you are, to tell me that?” the man demanded.

Jason’s black eyes glittered at him. “Jason Pendleton.”

The fancy rancher stared at the ragged cowboy with patent disbelief. But then, in his mind, he recalled the painting in the Pendleton Corporation CEO’s office downtown, over the fireplace. The man in the portrait was a match for the man glaring at him from the booth. “You’re Mr.…Mr. Pendleton?” he stammered, flushing purple. “I didn’t recognize you!”

Jason was toying with his coffee cup. His eyes held the other man’s. “Pity,” he murmured.

The other rancher seemed to lose his dignity and his arrogant attitude all at once.

“I didn’t know…” he stammered.

“Obviously,” Jason replied curtly. “I wanted to see how you operated before I turned you loose as my representative. Good thing. You like to put people down, don’t you? Well, you won’t be doing it on my payroll. Collect your last paycheck at the office. Do I need to say the words?”

The rancher’s jaw set. “You can’t do this to me! Hell, nobody fires a man for losing a bid…!” he began belligerently.

Jason stood up. He was a head taller than the man and he looked dangerous. The ranchers at the nearby table tensed.

“I said,” Jason began in a slow, menacing tone, “collect your last paycheck.” His big hands began to curve into fists at his side.

The rancher’s companion noticed that and grabbed his friend’s arm, almost dragging him away. He knew things about Jason Pendleton’s temper that the other rancher obviously didn’t.

Gracie tugged at Jason’s hand gently. He looked at her and calmed a little as he sat back down again. But he was openly glaring at the man’s retreating back. The fancy rancher’s companion was talking feverishly and nodding toward Jason Pendleton. The rancher glanced back toward the Jacobsville cattlemen and grimaced. But he wasn’t going to a table—he was actually leaving the restaurant.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“He is, rather he was,” Jason replied with magnificent disdain, “the man I hired recently to go to sales for me. Barker. The one I told you about, who was throwing his weight around. Good thing I checked him out. He’d have cost us business, with that attitude. I don’t like men who judge people on appearances. Wealth is no measure of character.”

“So that’s why you were bidding so high against him.”

Jason nodded. “I had to push him to see how he’d react. The auctioneer knew what I was doing, so I won’t have to pay the higher price. I worked out a fair deal before the auction.”

Gracie pursed her lips and whistled through them. “Oh, boy.”

“I’ll bet that’s not what Barker’s saying right now,” Harley Fowler said gleefully. “And that’s what you get for taking people at face value. Nothing wrong with wearing comfortable clothes.” He gave Jason a grin and turned his attention to Gracie. “I don’t guess you go out with ranch managers, Miss Gracie, but if you did, I’d love to take you over to Shea’s and show you how nicely I can waltz…”

He stopped because Jason was now glaring at him, and with eyes even colder than he’d shown to the pompous cattleman.

“Uh, sorry, I’d better finish my lunch and get back to work,” Harley said with a sheepish grin, averting his attention to his plate.

Gracie was gaping at Jason, only diverted by the arrival of the waitress with their own salads and drinks.

“What was that about?” she asked hesitantly when they were back in the truck.

“Barker?” he asked absently.

“No. Harley.”

His jaw tautened. “Harley’s a boy.”

She was disconcerted. “He’s a nice boy,” she protested.

He didn’t say a word.

She shifted in her seat, frowning. Jason was very strange lately. She didn’t understand why there was so much anger smoldering inside him. He was probably still angry with that Barker man, she decided, and left him to his thoughts.

Jason was unusually uncommunicative during the ride home, keeping the radio between them while he drove. His attitude toward Harley puzzled her. It wasn’t like him to snap at underlings, especially cowboys, and he’d already made it obvious that he disliked men who put poor people down. He didn’t know Harley well, but he’d seemed to like the younger man. Or at least, he had until today. It was almost as if he were jealous of Harley’s interest in Gracie. That was silly, of course. He was affectionate toward her, but there was nothing out of the ordinary in his demeanor. It was just wishful thinking. She grimaced, thinking about how she might react if Jason ever really pursued her as a lover would. Love was one thing. Sex…well, that was terrifying. She wasn’t sure she could function in that respect. Not even with Jason, and he’d been the only man in her life and her heart for years.

Chapter Two

TWO DAYS LATER, GRACIE WAS back in her flower beds. This time she’d pruned back some aggressive wandering vines that had exploded with growth after the passage of Hurricane Fay when it made landfall. The rains had been torrential. Now everything was overgrown because of the bountiful rain. After months of drought, it was wonderful to see green things again.

It was Friday and she was hosting an important party for Jason this evening. It was business. He hated parties, but he was wheeling and dealing again, hoping to add a new and imaginative software company from California to his roster of acquisitions. The two owners were in their twenties and crazy about soccer, so Jason had invited members of the Brazilian and American soccer teams to this gathering. It was like him to know the deepest desires of his prey and cater to them, when he wanted something.

She wondered absently if he was single-minded and determined like that with women he wanted. It hurt to think about that.

She didn’t dare think of Jason in any sexual way. It would only lead to heartache. Her mother had warned her about it, and she herself had seen the result from the time she was very little. Her father could only achieve satisfaction by hurting his wife, savaging her. The blood on her nightclothes testified again and again to the brutality of ardent men. Gracie’s entire childhood had been a nightmare of fear for her mother, and for herself. As a child, she’d prayed that her mother wouldn’t die, leaving her at her father’s mercy. God alone knew what the man might do to Gracie, although he’d never molested her. It was his temper she feared, especially when he drank. He drank a lot. He was violent when he drank.

She shivered, hearing her mother’s sobs as the memories washed over her. She remembered comforting the older woman just before her father’s death, helping to bathe away the blood and treat the cuts and bruises. Men would be sweet and attentive and tender until they got you into bed, her mother lectured. Then, behind closed doors, the truth was revealed. What was in movies and on television and in books was all lies. This was the reality—blood and tears. Graciela must remember and never allow herself to be lured into marriage. She must remain chaste and safe.

Gracie heard a car screech its tires on the road nearby and she grimaced as her mind returned to the present. Some poor driver had almost wrecked. She knew how that felt. She wasn’t the best driver in the world, either. Jason worried when she got behind the wheel of a car because she’d had so many mishaps. It wasn’t really that she was a poor driver. Physical trauma from years ago had caused minor glitches in her brain. She would compensate for the injury, a doctor had assured her gently, because she was highly intelligent. But that wasn’t much comfort, when most of the world saw her as a flighty, clumsy airhead. Poor Gracie Pendleton, one woman had commented to a friend, was the dodo bird of local society.

She laughed bitterly, recalling the remark she’d overheard at an afternoon tea only a couple of weeks ago. The comment had obviously been made by someone who didn’t know her. She knew that if Jason had been privy to that cruel remark he would have made that woman sorry she’d ever opened her mouth. He was fiercely protective of the people he cared about. Her earliest glimpse into his chivalry occurred shortly after Gracie’s mother died. Her strangely ungrieving stepfather, Myron, had rushed into marriage to Beverly Barnes, a woman who had a young daughter in foster care. Jason had rescued Gloryanne Barnes from a dangerous situation, taking a young Gracie along to comfort the other girl, who was four months younger. If it hadn’t been for Jason’s involvement, she and Gloryanne probably wouldn’t have bonded so effortlessly.

Jason, she thought as she struggled to cut back the thick vines, was an enigma. She’d lived with him for twelve years and she still felt as if she knew nothing about him. Myron Pendleton had died the year after Beverly Barnes, his third wife, passed away from a stroke. By then, Gracie and Glory were sixteen. Jason had assumed responsibility for both girls, and took great care of them while they finished high school. In fact, he’d spoiled them rotten. He was still doing it. Gloryanne’s Christmas present the year before had been a racing-green Jaguar XK. Gracie’s had been a meteorite, a fabulously expensive one sold at public auction from an estate. Gracie was crazy about fossils and meteorites. She had quite a collection. She had no great affection for jewels, and she hated furs. But she loved rocks. Jason indulged her.

He even indulged her mania for Christmas decorations, which she started putting out even before Thanksgiving. Jason had never asked why she was so obsessed with Christmas. She hoped he never would.

Thanksgiving was three months away, but Gracie already had garlands of holly and fir ordered, along with three new Christmas trees and a box of new ornaments. She looked forward to the times when Jason left his beloved ranch and came to San Antonio on business. That was when he lived up to the image of a Fortune 500 tycoon and had Gracie hostess society parties for him, to which they invited Hollywood A-listers and sports stars with whom Jason’s prospective colleagues could mingle. It often gave him the advantage, his association with the fabled few. Any number of people in the arts and sports were flattered by Jason’s friendship. Not only was he dynamic, but he was rich beyond the dreams of avarice and he wasn’t stingy with his wealth. Single women mobbed him.

When he wasn’t rubbing elbows with the other Fortune 500, he was wearing jeans and boots, chaps and a big Stetson hat, working cattle with his cowboys. Even there he was generous, looking out for his men if they needed help.

Since he was an introvert who didn’t mix well with others, he didn’t seem the sort of man who had a big heart or even a kind disposition. But there was much more to this man than anyone imagined. He had a business degree from Harvard, but he didn’t advertise it. His annual income could have funded the annual budget for two or three small impoverished nations. He didn’t live like a multimillionaire. He left the socializing to Gracie, but she had as little love for it as he did. She spent her time doing charity work and finding projects to help people. Jason didn’t know it, but she had a good reason for providing funding for women’s shelters and soup kitchens and community charities.

People wondered why a sister and brother spent all their time together, she knew. But she and Jason weren’t married, and apparently neither of them would ever be. Gracie wanted nothing to do with any physical relationship. Jason had girlfriends, but he was never serious enough to consider marriage. He didn’t bring women home. But then, he was considerate about what he called Gracie’s medieval attitude toward modern relationships. She didn’t sleep around. She didn’t like men—or women—who did. Jason bowed to her prejudices. But she knew that didn’t stop him from doing what he liked out of her sphere of influence. He was a man, after all.

She grimaced as she noted a new spot of dirt on her spotless but aging white embroidered sweatshirt. She was wearing disreputable jeans with it, relics from a weekend she’d spent on the ranch with Jason while he taught a foreign dignitary how to ride. Gracie was deputized to teach his wife. He was amused at her patience and her skill on a horse. She also knew he appreciated her lack of vanity. She wore her long, pale blond hair in a perpetual bun or pigtails. Her soft gray eyes dominated her oval face with its exquisite complexion that never needed makeup to enhance it. Her lips were a full, soft bow, naturally pink. She didn’t even bother with lipstick unless she and Jason were going to some really posh bash, like the opera or symphony or ballet. They had similar tastes in music and theater, and they agreed even on politics and religion. They had enough in common to make an uncommon match. But she and Jason were like brother and sister, she reminded herself firmly, even if they weren’t related.

The rosebush she was pruning looked lopsided, and it dredged on feelings of her own inadequacy. She wondered sometimes why her mother had gone to such pains to make sure Gracie’s personal history was kept secret even from her new stepfather and stepbrother. But she hadn’t questioned Cynthia’s resolve. Perhaps her mother had been afraid of Myron Pendleton’s attitude if he knew the truth about the beautiful woman he’d met behind the counter at the men’s suit warehouse. It was easier—and safer—to lie and tell him that her husband had died in a forward infantry unit in Operation Desert Storm, and that Graciela Marsh was her stepchild, not her real daughter. This elaborate ruse had been concocted to ensure that Cynthia and her daughter could escape from the grinding poverty in which they lived. But the pretense hadn’t carried over to the bedroom. Cynthia had sobbed in Gracie’s arms the morning of the day she died, confessing that she hadn’t been able to let Myron touch her since their marriage. Myron had been furious and hurt, but Cynthia couldn’t get past her own history with marriage. She said she couldn’t go on living a lie. And later that day, she’d died in an apparent car accident. Gracie knew it wasn’t an accident. But she couldn’t say so without explaining why. That wasn’t possible.

Gracie swept back a loose strand of blond hair with the back of her hand and only then noticed that it was covered with dirt. She laughed softly as she imagined what she must look like by now.

“For God’s sake, don’t tell me you’re clearing even more ground to plant more flowers?” came a deep, amused voice from behind her. “I thought you finished this job the day we went to the sale barn.”

She turned, looking up into dark eyes under a jutting brow. He wasn’t smiling; he rarely did. But his eyes smiled in that lean, tanned, rugged face.

“That was making room to plant bulbs this fall. I’m pruning back these rose bushes right now,” she replied jovially.

He looked at the bushes that overlapped in the small space and grimaced. “You planted roses on top of roses, honey. You need to transplant some of them.”

She sighed. “Well, I ran out of room and I had leftover bushes this spring. It all sort of grew together and the rain made it worse. I guess I could dig up another plot,” she murmured to herself, looking around for new unbroken ground.

“Gracie,” he said patiently, “our guests start arriving in two hours.”

“Two hours?” She stared at him blankly. “Oh. Right! I hadn’t forgotten,” she lied.

He sat down on the wide stone balustrade that led down from the front steps. He was wearing dress slacks and boots with a white turtleneck sweater and a blue blazer. He looked expensive and elegant, a far cry from the ragged-looking working cowboy he’d appeared at the cattle auction two days before.

“Yes, you had forgotten,” he corrected, shaking his head. He drew in a breath and looked around at the lush, formal landscape. “I hate this place,” he muttered.

“You always did,” she replied. “It’s not the ranch.”

“What can I say?” He shrugged. “I like cattle. I hate high society.”

“Too bad you were born in the lap of it,” she laughed.

He studied her covertly. She was pretty, in a shy sort of way. Gracie wasn’t really outgoing, any more than he was. But she could organize a party better than anyone he knew. She was a gracious hostess, a tireless worker for her charities, and she dressed up beautifully. In an emergency, there wasn’t anybody with a cooler head. He admired her. And not only for her social skills. His black eyes lingered just a few seconds too long on the swell of her firm breasts under the sweatshirt before he averted them.

“We’ve had a politically incorrect observation from the state attorney general.”

“Simon Hart?” she asked. “What sort?”

“My cousin thinks we spend too much time together,” he replied easily. “He says one or the other of us should get married and start producing children.”

She stared at him quietly. “I don’t want to get married.”

He frowned. “Why don’t you want to marry?”

She averted her eyes. “I just don’t.”

“Simon’s happily married,” he pointed out. “He and Tira have two sons.”

Her voice tautened. “More power to them. I just don’t want to get married.”

“You’re twenty-six,” he remarked quietly. “You don’t date anyone. I can’t remember the last time you had a boyfriend. At that, you only had one steady one, for the four years you were in college in Jacobsville getting your history degree. And he turned out to be gay.” There was an odd edge to his comment.

Gracie recalled that Jason had been actively hostile to the young man. That was surprising, because he was the most tolerant man she knew on controversial social issues. He was a churchgoer, like Gracie, and he said that the founder of their religion wouldn’t have turned his back on anyone, regardless of their social classification. He couldn’t be jealous…?

“Billy was comfortable to be with,” she replied after a minute.

“Yes, but I assume he wasn’t given to torrid make-out sessions on our couch.”

She flushed and glared up at him. “I don’t have torrid make-out sessions with anyone.”

“I noticed,” he said curtly. “Simon noticed, too.”

“It’s none of Simon’s business how we live,” she said defensively. She hesitated. “Is it?”

“Of course not,” he snapped. “But he does have a point, Gracie. Neither of us is getting any younger.”

“Especially not you,” she teased. “You’ll be thirty-five your next birthday.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“You just get better-looking, Jason,” she said affectionately. “You’ll never be old to me.”

He held her eyes for a few seconds and smiled. “Thanks.”

She cocked her head at him. “Maybe you should get married,” she said, wondering why it hurt to say it. “I mean, who’ll inherit all this when you die?”

He drew in a long breath and looked out over the yard. “I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

Her heart skipped a beat. “Have you…thought about anyone? Any prospective brides?” she asked, sitting back on her heels.

He shook his head.

“There was that lawyer you dated, that friend of Glory’s,” she said.

“She wanted a doctorate in law and I could get her a grant,” he said with barely disguised contempt.

“Then there was the politician that Simon introduced you to.”

“She wants to run for the senate and I have money,” he scoffed.

“Jason, not every woman wants something financial from you,” she pointed out. “You’re not bad-looking and you have a big heart. It’s just that you scare people.”

“I don’t scare you,” he said.

She laughed. “You used to.”

“Yes, when you first moved in with us,” he recalled affectionately. “I lured you out of your room with Lindt chocolates, one at a time. It took months. You always looked at me as if you expected horns and a tail to start growing out of me.”

“It wasn’t personal,” she chided. “Besides,” she added with a wicked grin, “after I got to know you, I got used to the horns.”

He made a face at her. But his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “You didn’t go out with a boy at all until I made an issue of it in your senior year of high school. You were asked to the prom, but you didn’t want to go. I insisted. I thought you were unnecessarily shy.”

“So I went with the first boy who asked me,” she reminded him venomously.

He grimaced. “Well, he seemed nice.”

“Did he, really?”

His dark eyes glittered. “I understand that his new front teeth look almost natural.”

She shivered even with the memory. Violence still upset her. But the boy had been drunk and insistent. He’d left bruises all over her in a futile attempt to disrobe her. Gracie had to call Jason on her cell phone. She’d locked herself in the boy’s car and he’d been crashing rocks into the passenger window trying to force her to open the door. Before he could break in, Jason skidded to a stop in front of the car and got out. Even now, so many years later, Gracie could still see the sudden fear on the boy’s face when he saw the furious tall man approaching him. Jason was elegant, and usually even-tempered, but he could move like a striking cobra when he was angry. The boy had been tall, too, and muscular—a football star. But he hadn’t lasted ten seconds with Jason. Those big fists had put him down in a heartbeat. The confrontation had made Gracie sick. Jason had saved her, though. And it wasn’t the only time he’d stepped between Gracie and trouble. There was a saying on the Rocking Spur ranch, that any cowboy who wanted a quick trip to the emergency room only had to say something unsavory about or to Gracie in front of Jason.

After he’d rescued her, that long-ago night, he’d driven her home in a tense silence. But when they got home and he realized how frightened she was, even of him, he calmed down at once and became her affectionate stepbrother.

Now, he was as familiar to her as the flower garden she was working in. But there was still that distance between them. Especially since he’d been spending even less time at the San Antonio mansion. He had a way of looking at her lately that was disturbing. He went broody sometimes, too, as if his life was disappointing him.

While she was thinking, she nipped the last overlapping limb of a rosebush away from the fall chrysanthemums, which were just starting to branch out. She smoothed over them with her hand, smiling, considering how beautiful they would be in a few months, all gold and bright as the cold weather moved in. Her bulbs would need to be dug and separated, but that could wait for cooler weather. She’d planted some new bulbs at the ranch, too, last autumn, but Jason’s big German shepherd had dug them up and eaten them. Fuming mad, she’d told Jason that the animal was a squirrel. No self-respecting dog would eat a helpless bulb. He’d almost bent over double laughing at her outrage. But he’d replaced the bulbs and even reluctantly loaned her one of his cowboys to help her replant them; one of his oldest and ugliest cowboys, at that. He went to great lengths to put distance between her and his ranch foreman, Grange.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

She laughed self-consciously. “About Baker eating my bulbs last fall.”

He grinned. “He’s developed a taste for them. I had to put a fence around your flower bed.”

“A fence?” she wailed.

“A white picket fence,” he assured her. “Something aesthetic.”

She relaxed. “You’re nice.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “I am?”

She put down the trowel and stood up, brushing at the dirt on her sweatshirt. It only smeared. “Darn,” she muttered. “It will never come out.”

“Harcourt can get anything out. She has chemicals hidden in the pantry.”

She glanced at him and laughed delightedly. “Yes, but Dilly does the laundry.”

“Dilly has chemicals, too.”

She looked down at her feet. Her sneakers were caked in mud. “I’ll never get through the house in these,” she moaned. She slipped out of them, standing in her stained socks. “Oh, darn!”

“I need to teach you how to cuss,” he mused.

“You do it well enough for both of us, and in two languages,” she pointed out. His Spanish was elegant and fluent.

He chuckled. “So I do.”

“The ground is cold,” she said absently.

He stood, moved close and suddenly swung her up into his powerful arms as if she weighed nothing at all.

She gasped at the strength in those powerful arms and clung to his neck, fearful of being dropped. She’d never liked being carried, although it was agonizingly stimulating when Jason did it. She felt shaky all over, being so close to him. This time, her body betrayed its fascination with him. She felt the whisper of his coffee-scented breath on her face as he shifted her. He smelled of faint, expensive cologne and soap, and muscles rippled in his chest. The ache that had begun to consume her became almost painful. Her mind filled with unfamiliar, dangerous thoughts. She should be still, she should pull back. She was thinking it even as she suddenly nestled closer to his warm strength and buried her face in his throat. She thought he shuddered, but that was doubtful. She’d never known a man in better control of himself.

“I know, you don’t like being picked up,” he said in a husky tone. He laughed softly. “But you can’t walk on the white carpet shoeless with dirty socks, pet,” he added. He curled her even closer, so that her small, firm breasts were crushed against warm, hard muscle. “Just lie still and think of England.”

She frowned as he carried her up the steps and into the house, shifting her weight for an instant to open the front door. He kicked it shut behind them and started for the stairs that led to the second floor of the huge mansion.

“England?” she asked, diverted.

He carried her up the staircase, smiling. “Think about it.”

“England.” She’d never been to England. Had she?

He stopped at the door to her room. His black eyes pierced into hers. He was much too close. She could feel his clean breath on her face. The feel of his arms under her, his warm strength so close to her, made her feel exhilarated and breathless. She didn’t want to move. She wanted him to hold her even closer.

“Those old movies, where women sacrifice themselves for the good of their country?” he prompted, still smiling. But his eyes were taunting, wise, hinting at things that Gracie knew nothing about.

“What old movies?” she asked absently. Her mind was on how fast her heart was beating.

“Never mind,” he said heavily. He put her down abruptly, looking frustrated.

“I don’t watch old movies, Jason,” she said, trying to placate him. “We don’t have any.”

“I’ll buy some old ones,” he muttered. “Maybe some documentary ones, too.”

“Documentaries? About what?” she asked blankly.

He started to speak, thought better of it and made a thin line of his lips. “Never mind. Don’t be too long.”

“I won’t.” She hesitated. “What shall I wear?” she added, wanting to soothe him because he liked it when she asked for his advice, and he seemed angry with her for some reason.

He paused. His eyes swept down her body with a strange slowness. “Wear the gold gown I brought you from Paris,” he said softly. “It suits you.”

“Isn’t it too dressy for a cocktail party?” she wondered.

He moved back to her. He was so tall, she thought, that her head only came up to his nose. He looked down into her puzzled eyes. “No,” he replied. He touched her damaged coiffure. “And let your hair down for once. Wear it long. For me.”

He made her feel warm and jittery. That was new. His voice was deep and slow, as soft as velvet. Her lips parted in anticipation as she stared into his eyes.

He lifted her chin with his thumb and forefinger. His thumb moved suddenly, dragging across her mouth in a rough caress that made her breath catch.

His large, black eyes suddenly narrowed, and his jaw clenched as he looked down into Gracie’s stunned gray eyes. “Yes,” he said quietly, as if she’d said something aloud. He let go of her, very slowly, and went down the staircase.

She watched him go, fascinated. Her fingers lifted to her sensitized mouth and touched it lightly. Her heart was beating so fast that she thought it might try to fly out of her chest. She couldn’t quite get her breath. Jason had touched her in a new way, a different way than he’d ever touched her before. She didn’t dare think about it too deeply. Not now. She turned quickly and went into her room.

THERE WERE A LOT OF people here tonight, she thought as she came down the long, curving staircase and surveyed the throng of well-dressed guests. It didn’t take much imagination to spot the computer company partners; they were wearing suits that didn’t quite fit and they looked out of place and uncomfortable.

Gracie, a veteran of social gatherings, understood their confusion. It had taken her a long time to adjust to luxury cars and designer clothing and parties like this. In many ways, she was more comfortable with Jason’s cowboys than this elegant mix of professionals and big money. But she was fairly certain that she looked presentable, in the clingy gold gown that covered all of one arm and left the opposite arm and shoulder enticingly bare. It fell to her ankles, but the back drooped in a flow of silky fabric to lie just over the base of her spine, leaving the honeysmooth skin bare. Her pale blond hair swung around her shoulders in soft profusion. With the gown she wore a gold necklace of interlocking rings, with matching earrings. She looked pretty, and much younger than her real age.

She walked up to the skinny, freckle-faced redhead who seemed the dominant partner and smiled. “Do you have everything you need?” she asked him gently.

He looked down at her and flushed. “I, uh, well, I…that is…” he stammered.

His round-faced, dark-skinned partner cleared his throat. “We’re sort of out of place here,” he began.

Gracie put her arms through theirs and drew them along with her into the ballroom, where a small live band was playing, and guided them to the bar. “Nobody stands on ceremony here,” she explained pleasantly. “We’re just plain people, like everybody else.”

“Plain people with private jets and world-class soccer stars for friends,” the redheaded one murmured, looking around.

“Yes, but you’ll be in that same society one day yourselves,” she replied, smiling. “Jason says you’re both geniuses, that you’ve designed software that revolutionizes the gaming industry.”

They both stared at her. “You’re his sister,” the shorter one guessed.

“Well, his stepsister,” she said. “I’m Gracie Marsh.”

“I’m Fred Turnbill,” the round-faced one said. “He’s Jeremy Carswell. We’re Shadow Software.”

She shook hands with each of them in turn. “I’m very glad to meet you.”

“Your…stepbrother,” Fred said, nodding toward the tall, elegant man with a champagne flute in one hand, talking to a famous actor. “He’s very aggressive. We weren’t even interested in being acquired, but he just kept coming. He’s offered us creative control and executive positions and even stock bonuses.” He laughed nervously. “It’s hard to turn down a man like that.”

“I know what you mean,” she said.

“He seems very much at home here,” Fred sighed. “I guess he is, considering his financial status.”

She handed them flutes of champagne. “Listen,” she said confidentially, “he does what business requires of him. But you might have a different picture of him if you could see him throwing calves during roundup. And especially if you could see him ride.” Her gray eyes grew dreamy. “I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life than Jason on a running horse.”

They were both looking at her with curious expressions. “On a horse?” Fred murmured.

“Throwing calves?” Jeremy added.

She smiled, still staring at Jason. “He owns a Santa Gertrudis ranch down in Comanche Wells. When he isn’t managing acquisitions, he’s busy working cattle right alongside his men.”

“Well!” Fred exclaimed. “So he’s not just some greedy businessman trying to own the world.”

“Not on your life,” Gracie said softly. “He goes to extremes to be environmentally responsible. He won’t even use pesticides on the place.”

At that moment, Jason seemed to feel her gaze, because his head turned and black eyes lanced into hers across the width of the ballroom. Even at the distance, Gracie’s knees went weak and she seemed to stop breathing. It was the first time he’d ever looked at her like that. As if, she thought absently, he could eat her alive.

She dragged her eyes away from his with a small, nervous laugh. “He isn’t what he seems.”

Fred pursed his lips and exchanged glances with Jeremy. “That sort of puts a different complexion on things,” he said. “A man who gets out and works with his people isn’t the image we had of Mr. Pendleton. I guess we’re all victims of assumption.”

“You never assume anything with Jason,” she told them. “When God made him, He broke the mold. There isn’t another one like him in the world. When Jason gives his word, he keeps it, and he’s the most honest man I’ve ever known.”

Jeremy smiled down at her. “Well, you’ve sold us. I guess we’re about to join the corporation.”

“You’re about to join the family,” she corrected. “Jason believes in holiday bonuses and good benefit packages, and he looks out for his people.”

Jeremy lifted his glass. So did Fred. “Here’s to a prosperous future.”

Gracie raised hers, as well, and toasted them. “I’ll drink to that.”

She excused herself to go the rounds of the other guests. She noticed a few minutes later that Jason was talking to the two software executives and smiling. She chuckled. It wasn’t the first time she’d nudged a deal into completion. She was getting good at it.

Around midnight, she and Jason ended up together at the drinks table. Couples were out on the floor dancing to a lazy, romantic melody.

“Care to dance?” she asked with a grin.

He shook his head.

She wasn’t really surprised. He’d danced with several other women during the evening, including an elderly woman who came to the party alone. But he never danced with Gracie these days, no matter how hard she worked at convincing him to.

She frowned. “You dance with other people.”

He glanced down at her. “I’m not dancing with you.”

She felt unsettled by the refusal. She didn’t understand why he was this way. She might be clumsy, but she did all right on the dance floor. She picked up a champagne flute and filled it.

“Don’t get your feelings hurt,” he said curtly. “I have reasons. Good ones. I just can’t discuss them.”

She moved her shoulder. “No problem,” she said, putting on her party smile.

He turned to face her, his jaw taut. His black eyes were oddly glittery as they met her wounded gray ones. “You look, but you don’t see, Gracie,” he said curtly.

She stared up at him miserably. “I don’t understand.”

He sighed. “That’s an understatement,” he said under his breath.

She sipped champagne. One of his lean, beautiful hands came up and took the flute from her fingers. He lifted it to his mouth, sipping the sparkling amber liquid from the exact spot her lips had touched, and he looked straight into her eyes while he did it.

The act was deliberate, sensual, provocative. Gracie’s lips parted on a rush of breath while he held her eyes in a bond she couldn’t break. She felt an explosion of sensation so intense that it left her speechless.

“Shocked, Gracie?” he wondered as he handed the flute back to her.

“I…don’t know.”

His fingers came up and traced a line from her flushed cheek to the corner of her lips. He stared at them intently. “You closed the account.”

“What…account?”

“The computer account. They’re in, thanks to you. I didn’t even have to introduce them to the soccer players.” His fingers trailed over her soft mouth. “Amazing, that gift you have for putting people at ease, making them feel as if they belong.”

“A gift,” she whispered, not really hearing him. What he was doing to her mouth was very erotic. She moved closer.

His head bent, so that what he was saying couldn’t be overheard. Her response to him was electrifying. He was on fire.

“Gracie,” he whispered, bending closer, “I can hear your heart beating.”

“Can…you?” Her eyes were on his firm, sensual mouth.

His lips parted as they hovered just above her own. His tall body corded at the enticement she presented, her hands going to his shirtfront and pressing there. His heart began to race. “What are you going to do if I bend an inch more, and put my mouth right over your lips?” he asked in a rough, sensual tone.

She wasn’t hearing him. She couldn’t hear anything. She could only see his mouth, filling her mind with images so sensual and sweet that her legs began to wobble under her. Her fingers contracted on his shirt. She felt thick hair and muscle under the crisp, clean fabric.

“I could bend you back over my arm and hold you so close that you couldn’t breathe unless I did,” he whispered gruffly. “Kiss you so hard that your mouth would be swollen from the intensity of it!”

She was on tiptoe, feeling the muscles clench even through the fine cloth of his dinner jacket as her small breasts pressed hard into his chest. Her mouth was lifted, pleading. She felt tight, hot, achy all over. She was trembling. She knew that he could see, and it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except that she wanted him to come closer, to kiss her until she felt on fire, until the sharp ache he was arousing was satisfied, until the backbreaking tension stopped racking her slender body…

“Jason,” she choked, tightening her grip on his shoulders.

“Hey, Jason,” came an exuberant voice from behind him, “could you explain to Ted here how that new computer software works? He wants to get in on our deal with those California techies you’re trying to assimilate.”

Jason stood erect, looking as if he’d been shot. He had to work, to control himself before he turned abruptly away from Gracie, to the businessman standing behind him, nursing a whiskey highball.

“Let’s find the inventors and get them to tell him,” Jason said, forcing a smile. “Come on.”

He didn’t look at Gracie. The businessman did, frowning at her odd expression, but he was feeling the liquor and passed off the little tête-à-tête he’d just witnessed as an aberration brought on by whiskey. Jason wasn’t likely to be kissing his stepsister in public, after all!

Chapter Three

JASON SEEMED AS RELIEVED as Gracie that they weren’t thrown together again. He didn’t seek her out or even look her way for the rest of the evening. He did say goodnight to her after the guests left, but in a curt and perfunctory way, as if the interlude earlier had embarrassed him. It had seemed like a deliberate attempt at seduction earlier, but it was beginning to feel more like an unwanted loss of control. He’d spoken to her in a way that changed their relationship. Perhaps he’d had one highball too many and was now counting his regrets, she thought.

But Jason never drank whiskey. He drank white wines or champagne, and precious little even of that. When he’d been close to her, she didn’t recall smelling any liquor on his breath at all. So Gracie didn’t know what to think. She was mortified that she’d given away her helpless attraction to him, something she’d never wanted him to see. It would be like making promises she couldn’t keep. But it was Jason’s behavior that unsettled her.

She went up to her bedroom and actually locked the door. She was still reeling from the shock Jason had given her before they were interrupted; not from his actions, but from her own response to them.

She had…wanted him. Actually wanted him. It was the first time in her adult life that she’d felt physical desire. She’d thought for a long time that she was simply undersexed, that she didn’t feel desire at all. Now her body was awake and she was in anguish at the things she’d just learned about herself. She wasn’t impervious to men. Not anymore. She was vulnerable. And Jason knew it.

Her mother’s warnings echoed in her tired mind as she put on a long cotton gown and climbed into her canopied bed, huddling under the spotless white covers and hand-embroidered sheets. She stared at the canopy fabric over her head in the light of her bedside lamp, trembling from the impact of Jason’s soft teasing. She knew that she’d never be able to forget that hunger in his eyes, in his touch. He was a stranger in this respect, a man she didn’t know at all. Had he meant to go that far? Or had he really lost control of himself? It wasn’t like him to be so forward with any woman in public, least of all Gracie.

It was becoming clear why beautiful women hung around him like satellites. It wasn’t his money at all. It was the man, the sensuous, tender man, who drew their attention. Gracie was curious about his changed attitude to her. She was also curious about why he’d refused to dance with her. It hadn’t been the first time. For over two years, now, he’d avoided any close physical contact with her. What had happened to change that, in the space of a day?

No, she thought. No, it wasn’t just today. He’d been different when they went to the cattle auction, too. It was the way he looked at her. It was almost predatory. He was like a big cat straining at the leash. If he broke it, what would he be like? A small part of her ached to find out. But the bigger part was afraid, even of Jason, in that way.

She tossed and turned all night, longing to see Jason again and dreading it at the same time. How could she ever be herself with him again after what had happened?

SHE DRAGGED HERSELF DOWNSTAIRS the next morning without makeup, with her hair in a ponytail, wearing old jeans and a long cotton shirt and sneakers. She wanted to look as little like a siren as possible. Just in case Jason was still prowling.

But it was a wasted camouflage because he wasn’t at the breakfast table when she went in and sat down. She noticed as she unfolded her napkin and went to pour coffee in her china cup from the carafe that only one place was set.

Mrs. Harcourt came in with a small platter of meats and eggs.

“Isn’t Jason here?” she asked the housekeeper.

“No, dear, he took off like a hurricane this morning, before I got the biscuits in the oven,” she said, frowning. “Tense as a pulled rope he was, and out of sorts. Took off in that big car like a posse was on his tail.” She whistled. “No wonder they call them Jaguars. It sounded like a wounded wildcat when he went down the driveway.”

Translated, that meant he was angry. He tended to take his temper out on the highway, a flaw that had resulted in a good number of traffic citations. He didn’t drive recklessly, but he drove too fast.

She ladled eggs onto her plate slowly. She didn’t know which was stronger—relief or disappointment. It was really only postponing the reckoning. Certainly they couldn’t go back to their old relationship after what had happened between them.

“You’re very glum this morning,” Mrs. Harcourt said gently, her dark eyes smiling as she moved dishes of food closer to Gracie. “Bad party?”

“What? Oh, no, not really,” she replied, sighing. “It was just long and loud.” She smiled. “I’m not really a party person.”

“Neither is Jason,” Mrs. Harcourt said quietly. “He’d rather live on his ranch and just be a cowboy.”

“How did he come into that ranch?” Gracie asked suddenly.

Mrs. Harcourt looked oddly unsettled, but her face quickly lost its confused expression. “He bought it from my family,” she said surprisingly. “It was my grandfather’s place. Not that it was in very good shape,” she added. “I was afraid it would go for subdivisions or a shopping mall.” She smiled. “I’m so glad it didn’t.”

Gracie was thoughtful as she sipped coffee. “He bought it the year before his father died,” she recalled.

“Yes.” Mrs. Harcourt’s soft voice had a sudden edge.

“Mr. Pendleton didn’t move with the times, did he?” she asked as she put down her coffee cup. “He hated the ranch and Jason working on it. He said it was beneath a Pendleton to do manual labor.”

“Oh, he was a stickler for class and position,” the older woman said bitterly. “He refused to let Jason’s first ranch foreman in the front door. He told him that servants went to the back.”

“How ridiculous,” Gracie huffed.

“He and Jason had a terrible row about it later. Jason won.” The older woman chuckled. “Whatever his faults, and he doesn’t have that many, Jason is no snob.”

“Did he love his father?” Gracie laughed self-consciously. “What a silly question. Of course he did. The day we went to the reading of his father’s will is one I’ll never forget. There were grants to Glory and me, but the lawyer went behind closed doors to discuss the rest with Jason. Afterward, he got drunk, remember?” she sighed. “In all the time I’ve known Jason, I’ve never even seen him tipsy. He never cried at the old man’s funeral, but he went wild after he saw the will. I guess it took a few days to hit him. The loss, I mean. With his mother long dead, his last parent was gone forever…Mrs. Harcourt! Are you all right?”

The elderly woman had toppled the coffeepot, right on her hand. Gracie jumped up, all but dragging the woman into the kitchen to the sink. “You hold that right there,” she instructed, putting the burned hand under running cold water. She went to the bathroom and rifled through the medicine cabinet to get what she needed. She walked briskly back to the kitchen and put the supplies down by the sink.

“Miss Gracie, I can do that,” she fussed. “It isn’t right, you waiting on me.”

“Don’t you start,” Gracie muttered. “We don’t do the master-and-servant thing in this house. You and Dilly and John are family,” she said firmly. “We all look out for each other.”

Tears misted the older woman’s eyes. Gracie couldn’t tell if emotion or pain caused it, but she smiled gently as she treated the burn. “Honestly, I don’t know what in the world we’d do without you.”

“That’s so kind of you, Miss Gracie.”

“Gracie,” she corrected. “You don’t call Jason ‘Mr. Jason,’” she pointed out.

“I do when he’s around,” the housekeeper corrected.

“And you get fussed at. He doesn’t like it when you treat him like the boss.” She hesitated as she fastened the bandage in place. “He’s…very strange lately,” she said softly. “I don’t understand him.”

Mrs. Harcourt looked as if she’d smother trying not to speak. Finally she said, “He just has a lot on his mind. There’s that computer company in Germany that’s bothering him because it competes with his own new line. It could hurt him in the market. He said he hopes he won’t have to go over there, but the owners are dragging their feet about selling.”

“God help them if he does go over there.” Gracie chuckled. “Jason is like a bulldozer when he wants something.”

“He is,” Mrs. Harcourt agreed. “Thanks for patching me up.”

“Oh, I have an ulterior motive,” Gracie told her. “I need your help to smuggle in some more Christmas decorations. You have to help me get the boxes into the attic so Jason won’t see them if he’s around when they arrive.”

The older woman hesitated, clearly disturbed.

“He just grumbles,” Gracie reminded her. “He doesn’t say I can’t put up trees and wreaths and holly garlands.” She frowned. “Why does he hate Christmas?” she wondered, and not for the first time. But she’d never asked Mrs. Harcourt about it before.

Mrs. Harcourt grimaced. “His father didn’t mind a tree, but he never bought presents. He said the holiday was nothing more than an excuse for commerce. He was never here at Christmas, anyway, not once during Jason’s whole life,” she added bitterly. “I bought little gifts for him, or knitted him caps and scarves or made afghans for his bed,” she said softly. “Dilly and John and I tried to make it up to him. He was a lonely child.”

“How terrible,” Gracie murmured.

“Why do you love it so much?” the older woman asked.

“I was never allowed to celebrate Christmas,” she blurted out. “Not even with a tree.” Her face flamed. She hadn’t meant to give that away.

The older woman was clearly shocked. “But you go to church with Jason. And you decorate everything—even Baker, once, with fake antlers…!”

“My father was…an atheist,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t let us go to church or celebrate Christmas.”

“Oh, my dear.” Mrs. Harcourt hugged her close and held her. Gracie sobbed. Except for this warm, matronly woman, Gracie hadn’t known real affection since her mother’s death. Myron Pendleton had been kind, in an impersonal way, but he wasn’t the hugging sort. Really, neither was Jason.

“You won’t tell him?” Gracie asked, finally moving away, to dab at her eyes with a tissue Mrs. Harcourt pressed into her hand.

“No. I’m good at keeping secrets,” she added with a smile that looked oddly cynical. “But why don’t you want him to know?”

“My mother taught me never to talk about my childhood. Especially after we came here.”

Mrs. Harcourt sensed that there was a lot this young woman had never shared with anyone. “Come on and finish your breakfast,” she coaxed. “I’ll make you a lovely chocolate cake later.”

Gracie laughed self-consciously. “You spoil me, Mrs. Harcourt. Me and Glory, too. You always did.”

“I missed having girls of my own,” she said. “My husband was sterile.”

“I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry.”

She smiled sadly. “I loved him, but he was a hard man to live with. He broke horses for Jason. He was kicked in the head by a mustang and died right there in the corral. I had no place else to go, no family, so I stayed here.”

“I’m glad you did,” Gracie said. “You made this place a home. You still do.”

Mrs. Harcourt beamed. “For that, you can have a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting.”

“My favorite!”

The older woman chuckled. “I know. Now that I’m patched up, I’ll get started on that cake. You finish your breakfast.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Gracie went back to the table. Life was hard on everybody. Poor Mrs. Harcourt, a widow without even a child to comfort her in her old age.

IT WAS A SLOW LUNCH day for Barbara’s Café. The owner sat at a booth with Gracie, nibbling on a salad. She was twelve years older than Gracie, with thick blond hair and pretty eyes. Everybody knew her locally and loved her. She’d been a widow for a long time, but she did have family. She’d adopted Rick Marquez, the San Antonio homicide detective, when he was in his teens. Now he was the joy of her life.

“Why don’t you set your sights on Rick?” Barbara teased. “He’s young and single and incredibly handsome, even if I do say so.”

“He carries a gun around,” Gracie pointed out.

“So does your stepbrother,” the older woman replied.

“Yes, when he’s on the ranch, but Jason doesn’t spend his life around dead bodies,” she added.

“Having seen a couple of his cowboys from the Rocking Spur eating lunch over here last week, I could debate that. They said they’d just come in from pulling cattle out of mud, and they looked like death warmed over.”

“So does Jason, when he’s helping with roundup or rescuing mired cattle,” Gracie said.

“A multimillionaire, out working cattle,” the older woman sighed, shaking her head.

“It’s where he’d rather be all the time, if he could.”

Barbara smiled. “I remember when he took over that ranch. He looked as if he’d won the lottery.”

“I’ll bet he had to pay a lot for it,” Gracie mused. “It’s huge.”

“Actually I heard that he inherited it,” Barbara said.

Gracie laughed. “Not likely. It belonged to some of Mrs. Harcourt’s family. They sold it to him.”

Barbara shrugged. “I must have misunderstood. Speaking of the devil, how is Jason?”

Gracie shifted in her chair. “I don’t know.”

Something in the tone of her voice made Barbara tense. “Why don’t you know?”

“I haven’t seen him for days, or even heard from him,” she said. “I planned a dinner party for two of our friends who are getting married. He hasn’t said if he’s coming over for it or not.”

Barbara was surprised. “Have you quarreled? But you and Jason never argue, even about those hundreds of Christmas decorations you stick everywhere starting at Thanksgiving that drive him nuts…”

“We just had a misunderstanding.” Gracie couldn’t bear to talk about what had really happened. “He left without a goodbye when he came down here.”

Barbara slid a hand over the other woman’s where it rested on the table. “You should go over to the ranch and talk to him,” she said. “He’s awkward with people sometimes, like most loners are. Maybe he wants to make up and just doesn’t know how.”

Gracie brightened a little. “You’re perceptive,” she said. “Yes, he is awkward with people. He doesn’t ever come right out and apologize, but he works it around so that you understand what he means. He holds things inside.” She sighed. “My stepsister, Glory, used to say that Jason got his feelings hurt more often than any of us realized, but he never showed it. She said he thought of it as a kind of weakness.”

“That was his father’s doing,” Barbara said coolly. “The old man loved women, plural, but he was never much good at commitment. He only married women he couldn’t get into bed any other way—out of desire, never love. He never loved any of them. He taught Jason that love was a weakness. He said women used sex as a weapon to extort money from men.”

“Good Lord!” Gracie exclaimed. “How do you know that?”

“One of my cousins used to work for Myron Pendleton. He overheard him talking to Jason about women one day. He was absolutely disgusted. In fact, he quit the job. He said he wasn’t working for a man who had no respect for his womenfolk.”

Gracie shook her head. “I’ve lived with him all these years and I didn’t know that.”

“You’ve lived under his protection, honey, not under his roof,” Barbara said drily. “You and Glory were away at school, but when you came home, Jason lived down here and left the two of you up in San Antonio with Harcourt and the others. Didn’t you notice?”

Gracie hadn’t. It was only just dawning on her that Jason, while spoiling and protecting them, had kept them apart from him at the same time.

“Don’t you really know what’s wrong with Jason?” Barbara asked in a peculiar tone.

Gracie gave her a blank look. “What do you mean?”

Barbara let go of her hand and avoided her eyes. “Nothing. I was just thinking out loud. It’s probably something to do with business that’s got him grumpy, don’t you imagine?”

Gracie relaxed. “Yes. I imagine it is.” She sipped coffee. “You know, I think I will stop by the ranch on my way home. He can’t miss this party.”

“That’s the spirit.” Barbara glanced out the window and winced. “Bad weather coming again. Probably that tropical storm headed our way. Look at those dark clouds!”

“I’d better get moving,” Gracie replied. “It’s getting dark, too.”

“You don’t want to be on the roads at night when it’s raining,” Barbara said worriedly. “The road up to the ranch isn’t paved. You’ll go into the ditch for sure. It’s not safe. There have been some kidnappers around here lately, and you would be a good catch for those horrible criminals.”

“I drive a VW,” Gracie said with easy confidence. “I’m not sliding into any ditches! As for kidnappers—this is Jacobsville. Nothing happens around here.”

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, sitting on the side of the road in the dark with rain pounding on the roof and the car at a drunken angle in a ditch, she ate those words. She called the ranch on her cell phone. Grange, Jason’s foreman, answered.

“Grange, can you tell Jason I’m stuck in the ditch on the side road from the ranch?” she asked plaintively. “I lost control of the car.”

“Sure I can. Want me to come out with the truck and get you?” he asked.

She hesitated. Once she would have said yes. Now, with Jason acting so strangely, she didn’t want to put Grange in any awkward situations. “Better call Jason this time, I guess,” she replied.

“No problem,” he said gently. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll get him. He’s out with the boys checking for mired cattle, so it may be a few minutes. Sit tight.”

“Sure thing. Thanks.” She ended the call. Oh, boy. If Jason was in the middle of something, she was going to catch hell. She’d only wanted to make up with him. Now, things were worse.

Time seemed to drag while she clutched her purse in her lap and tried not to slide into the passenger window of the little car, sitting at an odd angle in the ditch. It had been an impulsive decision to drive out here. She should have waited.

Gracie looked out the windshield at the rushing water that came up to the hood of her little car and hoped that Jason would hurry. Then she felt guilty that he was going to have to come out and rescue her again. She was such a klutz, she moaned silently. Nothing she did ever ended well. She was disaster on two legs. If only she wasn’t such a scatterbrain. If only…

She heard the roar of a pickup truck and looked ahead to see one of the big, double-cabbed black ranch trucks speeding toward her. He always drove too fast. The dirt road was muddy and flooded, too, and she had visions of disaster if he braked too hard. She could feel his temper in the way he swung the truck to the side of the road and stopped it. He didn’t slide. He was always so much in control of himself, even when he was raging mad.

She drew in a shaky sigh. She would be all right. Jason was always there to save her from herself. Even if he didn’t like having to do it.

Another truck, a wrecker, pulled up behind his truck. He slammed out of the driver’s seat and spoke to the driver of the wrecker. Then he came toward Gracie with long, angry strides, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes, his yellow slicker raincoat flapping over his boots.

The car was lying at an angle. Gracie was sitting at a forty-five-degree angle, sideways. Jason jerked the door open and glared down at her with compressed lips.

“Come on,” he said gruffly, holding out both hands.

She hesitated. He couldn’t possibly know why she resisted being lifted in a man’s arms, even if he was used to her idiosyncracies.

“Come on,” he said again, gentler this time. “Gracie, I know you don’t like being carried, but there’s no other way unless you want us to pull the car out of the ditch with you in it. The damned thing could roll.”

She bit her lower lip. That was even more terrifying. “O…okay.”

She lifted both her arms, clenching her jaw. Jason caught them and pulled her up, effortlessly, until he could pick her up. He swung her free of the car. She wasn’t wearing a raincoat—another stupid oversight—and she was quickly soaked as he carried her toward his truck.

He stuck her in the passenger seat, after sludging through an inch or more of thick red mud. “Fasten your seat belt,” he said curtly and slammed her door.

He spoke to the wrecker man and pointed down the road, toward the highway, not the ranch. Obviously he was showing the man that he wanted her car taken to the house in San Antonio. He didn’t want Gracie at the ranch. That hurt.

He got back in beside her, still wet, still mad, still uncommunicative. He fastened his own seat belt, made sure she’d done the same, started the engine and gunned the truck as he pulled back onto the highway and started toward San Antonio.

“The ranch is that way,” she said in a small voice, pointing behind them.

“I’m taking you home to San Antonio,” he said shortly. “You’re not staying down here overnight.”

She didn’t dare ask why. She averted her eyes to the road and wished things were the way they had been, before he’d said things neither of them would ever forget.

“What the hell were you doing on the ranch road in the rain?” he asked shortly.

She moved her purse in her hands. “Hoping we could make up.”

“Oh.”

She glanced at his taut profile. He wasn’t giving away anything with that expression. He was simply unresponsive. “Okay, I know,” she said with a long, wistful sigh. “I screwed up again. I should have waited for a sunny day. Maybe there’s a market for women who can’t do one single thing right. I might go into theater.”

He made a rough, amused sound deep in his throat. “I remember your one time on the stage.”

She grimaced. Yes. In tenth grade. She was in a play, with a minor role. She’d tripped walking to her mark, bounded into another actor and they’d ended up in a tangle on the stage floor. The audience had roared. Sadly the play had been a tragedy, and she had a monologue—left unspoken—about death. She’d left the stage in tears, without speaking her lines, and had been kicked out of the play the same night by a furious director. Jason had gone to see the man, who put Gracie right back in the play and even apologized. She never had the nerve to ask why.

She looked down at her lap. “Maybe I could get work as a mannequin,” she suggested. “You know—stand upright in a boutique and wear different things every day.”

He glanced at her. “Maybe you could take karate lessons.”

“Karate? Me?”

“They teach self-confidence.” He smiled faintly. “You could use a little.”

“I’d aim a karate chop at somebody, hit a vital spot and end up in federal prison for murder.” She sighed.

He glanced at her, but without answering. He turned on the radio. “I want to listen to the market report. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.” She did, but she couldn’t force him to talk if he didn’t want to. So they listened to stock prices until he turned into the driveway of the mansion in San Antonio and pulled up at the steps. He cut off the engine, went around the truck and opened her door. The rain had followed them. It was pouring down, and the driveway was almost underwater.

“I can walk,” she said quickly.

He raised an eyebrow and glanced pointedly at the several inches of water pooled on the driveway.

She was wet, but she didn’t want to ruin her new shoes. She bit her lip hard.

He gave her a quizzical look. “Some women are aroused by being carried,” he said in a worldly way. “You act as if I’m carting you off to a guillotine every time I have to do it.”

She swallowed uncomfortably. “It’s just…it reminds me of something bad. Most especially when it storms.”

“What?”

Her face tightened. “Just…something. A long time ago.”

He studied her, while rain bounced off his hat and raincoat, and he realized that he knew absolutely nothing about Gracie’s life before her mother married his father. He remembered having to lure Gracie out of her room with chocolates, because she’d been so frightened of him at the age of fourteen. It had taken him months to win her trust. He scowled. His father had never discussed her with Jason, except to tell the young man that Gracie would always need someone to look out for her, to protect her. That hadn’t really made much sense at the time.

“You keep secrets, Graciela,” he said deeply, using her full name, as he rarely did.

The sound of her name on his lips was sexy. Sweet. It made her hum with sensations she didn’t want to feel. She had nothing to give, and he didn’t know it. She could never let anything…romantic…develop between them. Never. Even if she wanted to. And she did. Desperately. Especially since he’d whispered those exciting, sensually charged remarks to her at the party.

She managed a smile. “Don’t you keep secrets, too?”

He shrugged. “Only about my breeding program,” he said drily, mentioning the genetic witchery and technological skills he practiced to produce better and leaner purebred herd bulls.

About women, too, she was about to say, but she didn’t dare trespass into his private life.

“Some secrets are better kept,” she said.

“Suit yourself.” His eyes twinkled. “You work for the CIA, do you?”

It was the first olive branch he’d extended. She laughed with pure delight. “Sure. I have a trenchcoat, a blindfold, a cyanide pill and the telephone number of a Russian KGB agent in my purse.” She gasped. “Jason, my car!”

“The wrecker will be right behind us. It’s going slower than we were. I told him to tow it up here and bill the ranch. Come on, baby. I’ve got more work to do before I can call it a night.” He sighed. “I was out looking for mired cattle, supervising two new cowboys who don’t know a bull from a steer, when a fence went down under a wash in the rain, and cattle scattered to hell and gone. I’ve got a full crew out trying to round them all back up. But the new hands need watching.”

“You hire men to work cattle and then you get out and do it yourself.”

He shrugged. “I’m not a desk sort of man.”

“I noticed.”

He reached in and slid his arms under her knees and her back and swung her out of the truck as if she was light as a feather. “You’re such a cat, Gracie,” he mused. “All sleek lines and light weight. You don’t eat enough.”

“I’m never hungry.”

“You run it all off.” He turned toward the house.

A huge flash of jagged lightning split the rainy, dark sky, startling Gracie, who suddenly clung to him and hid her face in his throat, shivering. “Oh, I hate lightning!” she moaned as the thunder rolled and rumbled around them. Her face moved again, just as his head turned, and her mouth brushed over his with the action. It was so perfectly synchronized that it seemed as if she’d timed the turning of her own head, to produce that sweet little caress to tempt him.

Jason’s tall, fit body contracted violently and he stopped in his tracks. He didn’t say a word, but Gracie could feel his breathing quicken. The soft contact had flamed through her young body. She wondered if it affected him the same way.

It became quickly apparent that it had. In the light of the wide porch, he looked down at her with pure heat in his black eyes. They narrowed as they fell to her mouth.

The lightning came again, and the thunder, but Gracie didn’t see it. She only saw Jason’s face as he stared at her with growing intensity. She could feel his broad chest against her breasts, moving roughly, as if he had trouble keeping his breath steady. Her heart ran away. The silken touch of her mouth on his had acted as a spark to dry wood.

“Jason?” she whispered, disconcerted by the harsh look on his face. He seemed angry out of all proportion to what had happened. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to…”

“Didn’t you?” he asked through his teeth as he stared right into her eyes.

His arms, steely and warm, contracted fiercely around her body. His teeth clenched as his gaze fell to her soft mouth. He hesitated, as if he were fighting a battle with his own instincts. But he lost it. Gracie saw with dawning shock the aching hunger in the black eyes that began to narrow and glitter as the storm broke around them.

“What the hell,” he muttered as he suddenly bent his head. “I’m already damned, anyway!” His mouth suddenly ground down into hers, parting her lips, as urgent as the lightning, as frightening as the storm as he gave in to a surge of desire so hot that he couldn’t breathe through it. His arms contracted hungrily, grinding Gracie’s slight breasts into the firm, muscular wall of his chest. He groaned against her lips and crushed her even closer, his brows drawn together in an agony of visible need as his mouth moved insistently on her lips, parting them.

She couldn’t believe it was happening. She loved Jason. She’d always loved him. But this was a side of him that she’d never seen before. The passion and expertise of the kiss were worlds away from her mother’s frightening lectures about how it was between men and women. Involuntarily her body reacted to the feel of him; her mouth warmed to the furious need in his kisses. She felt a shock of pleasure beyond anything she’d ever known as his mouth grew more demanding.

But she fought it. This was only how it began, her mother had told her, with fierce need that blinded a woman to the reality of a man’s desires. It began like this, but it ended in pain and humiliation and, ultimately, tragedy. Tragedy. Gunshots and the metallic taste of blood…

And then, quite suddenly, Jason’s hard, warm mouth slid down her neck and right onto the fullness of her breast, pressing so hungrily that she panicked.

Memories from the past surged up in her mind, frightened her. His mouth was insistent on her breast, twisting. In a few seconds, she knew, his teeth would bite into her, and she would look like her mother had, bleeding…!

She pushed at Jason’s broad chest, fighting the images in her mind as certainly as she fought this unexpected loss of control in a man whose place in her life had been tempered with iron control. She didn’t know Jason like this. His arms were contracting, and his mouth was opening, as she knew it would…! She pushed harder.

Jason realized, belatedly, what he was doing and he lifted his head. A shudder ran through him as he felt her body move frantically against him. But she wasn’t trying to get closer. She was fighting to get away from him.

“Jason, no! Put…me down! Please!” she cried, panic in her face, in her choked voice. She pushed harder. “Let me go! Let me go!”

“Damn you! You started it,” he ground out, as shocked by his own feverish lack of control as by her rejection of him as a man.

“I know. But I…I didn’t mean to! I didn’t want…that! I’m sorry!” she sobbed.

He put her back on her feet abruptly and let her go. She looked up at him with shocked, anguished eyes. He stepped back, his jaw clenched. He looked down at her with smoldering black eyes in a face harder than rock. There was violence and barely leashed passion in his expression. He looked at her as if he hated her. A harsh sob burst from her lips. She had started it, even if accidentally, and now he was angry again. It was her fault. He hated her for tempting him…!

Before he could speak, she was gone, into the house, running like a madwoman for the staircase. He stared after her with turbulent emotions, his eyes blazing, his body tense and aching. Desire evaporated slowly out of him, to be replaced with embarrassment at his lapse, with Gracie of all people. He was furious with himself. Then he was furious with her, for the teasing that aroused him and the deliberate touch of her mouth on his that had kindled his passion and made him cross the line. She’d permitted the intimacy at first, and then, when he turned up the heat just a little, she’d pushed him away as if she found him utterly repulsive. He replayed the episode in his mind, and anger grew from the embarrassment, along with rejection and humiliation and wounded pride. He’d betrayed his desire for her, and she’d been…disgusted. He’d seen it in her face.

The pain hit him like a flood. At first he was hurt. And then he was enraged. Damn her! Why tempt him into indiscretion and then behave as if he was totally responsible for it?

He turned on his heel and stalked back out to the truck. At that moment, he didn’t care if he ever saw her again as long as he lived. He cursed her every mile of the way back to Comanche Wells, so unsettled that he didn’t even see the wrecker pass him on its way to San Antonio. He’d never had anything hurt so much. Gracie didn’t want him. She was afraid of him now, running scared. He would never be able to erase this painful episode from both their minds. In a heartbeat, they had become enemies.

He stepped down hard on the accelerator. He didn’t care if he got a speeding ticket. Nothing mattered anymore. Not now.

UP IN HER ROOM, Gracie stood in the darkness, shivering. Hateful memories flooded her mind. Screams from the bedroom. Tears. Bruises and fear and blood, staining the bodice of her mother’s nightgown. Her mother, crying. Her father scathing, brutal, accusing. Other memories; of the boy who’d brought Gracie home, far too late because of a flat tire. Her father, snatching her up in his arms and throwing her at the wall with all his might. She’d fallen, dazed, bruised and terrified, only to have him come at her with a doubled-up belt. He’d snapped it on the way to her. The sound, loud even above the thunder of the storm outside; the horror of the blows, the blood…

She turned on the light and went to look in her mirror. Her face, like her mother’s had been, was covered with tears, flushed, anguished. The boy had never come back. Gracie had been bundled out of the house, bloody and sobbing, by her mother. Her father’s threats had followed them as they ran next door for help. Her mother got away. Gracie didn’t. She wasn’t quick enough to escape her father’s pursuing rage. She was lifted, carried forcibly back to her own home while her mother screamed and begged from the yard next door.

Blue lights flashing. Sirens. Men in a van, dressed like soldiers, but all in black. Big guns. Gracie trapped in her father’s arms, being dragged to the door, the pistol held at her head, her father laughing. Her mother might leave him, but Gracie would die, and she’d have to live with it. Taunting, refusing to speak with a negotiator. He wanted the news media to know it was the fault of Gracie’s faithless, whoring mother. Gracie would die now, in time for the six o’clock news! He yelled it to the policemen who were standing with their weapons drawn in the street. And he started to pull the trigger.

A shot. One shot. A crack like thunder. Wetness on Gracie’s face, in her mouth, metallic and thick; a searing pain in her head as she and her father both fell to the wet ground…

She jerked her mind back to the present. Jason had kissed her. His mouth had pressed down hard on her breast. Had he meant to grind his teeth into her flesh, the way her father had done to her poor mother? She’d told Gracie never to marry, that a man lured a woman in, and then he beat her and tortured her in the bedroom, because it was the only way he felt any pleasure or release. Gracie understood. Sex was only for a man’s pleasure, and a woman paid for it with pain. Blood and screams and pain…

Gracie gripped the edge of her dresser and felt sick. She’d run from Jason. He must think she found him disgusting. She wished she could apologize, but that would involve admitting the truth about her father and mother, and she couldn’t do that. If she did, Jason would probably throw her out of the house. It would be a terrible scandal if anyone ever found out about Gracie’s past. But it had been a long time ago, and people had short memories these days. Nobody would connect the newspaper article about the bloody little girl crying in a policeman’s arms beside her father’s body outside the dilapidated little house, with the grown woman who lived in a mansion. Especially when her own mother had told everyone that Gracie was only her stepchild. Nobody knew that her last name had been legally changed in the days just after her father’s death, to Marsh—her mother’s maiden name. She was safe.

She dabbed at her eyes as she stared at the puffy-eyed woman in the mirror. Her mother had been beautiful. Gracie favored her father, whose face had been ordinary. She had a nice mouth and her figure was well-proportioned, if a little small-breasted. Her long hair, twisted into a tight bun, would have been her best feature if she’d let it stay loose. But it was like Gracie, tied up tightly so that it couldn’t ever escape. Inside, Gracie was tied up in horrible memories.

Jason would hate her now. Maybe that was best. He wouldn’t be tempted to touch her again, to make her so weak that she wanted to do anything he liked. She felt a sense of profound loss. She would have loved being a normal woman. Jason was a kind, gentle, very masculine sort of man, for whom women held no mystery. He would make a wonderful husband and father.

But Gracie was certain that she could never submit her body to a man’s physical dominance. She had men friends—mostly gay ones—but she’d never had what they called a “hot date.” Word got around early in the circles she frequented that Gracie was ice-cold. It suited her that people thought that. It saved her the humiliation of refusing any man who saw her as dessert after a nice dinner. It protected her from amorous advances. Especially now. Jason would think she was frigid, that she didn’t want him to touch her. It hurt to let him think that. But it was the only way she could escape her mother’s fate. Even Jason, in passion, would be the same as her father. Hadn’t she felt his mouth grinding into her soft breast? He hadn’t used his teeth—but then, she’d pushed him away just in time. Just in time. She turned away from the mirror. She felt dead inside.

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