The Texan’s Diamond Bride

BY

Teresa Hill
The Texas Tycoon’s Christmas Baby

BY

Brenda Harlen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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The Texan’s Diamond Bride

BY

Teresa Hill

Dear Reader,

Special thanks to a man named Tom who—despite the fact that no one should ever do this because you can get killed—explains his love of exploring old mines and talks about how to do it. (Please don’t ever try this!)

Also, to Lauren in New York with an eBay store called Diamonds By Lauren, who loves coloured diamonds, especially canaries. I’ve admired many beautiful stones and rings on her site. Wouldn’t you know it, it finally paid off. (Hours spent browsing the internet isn’t a waste of time to writers. It’s about ideas. Really.) Finally, there is a stone that’s found only in the area of Texas around Llano. It’s commonly known as Llanite and described on one website as “a form of granite with some gemmy-looking blue quartz inclusions in it.”

No, it’s not red. But for this story, it is, and my heroine discovered it and named it something else.

Happy reading,

Teresa Hill

About the Author

TERESA HILL lives within sight of the mountains in upstate South Carolina with one husband, very understanding and supportive; one daughter, who’s taken up drumming (Earplugs really don’t work that well. Neither do sound-muffling drum pads. Don’t believe anyone who says they do.); and one son, who’s studying the completely incomprehensible subject of chemical engineering (Flow rates, Mom. It’s all about flow rates.).

In search of company while she writes away her days in her office, she has so far accumulated two beautiful, spoiled dogs and three cats (the black panther/champion hunter, the giant powder puff and the tiny tiger stripe), all of whom take turns being stretched out, belly-up on the floor beside her, begging for attention as she sits at her computer.

With special thanks to my mother, Rachel Mcintosh, who accompanied me to Texas by plane and then on a lovely road trip from Dallas through the Texas Hill Country to San Antonio and Austin. We found San Antonio lush, green and beautiful, ate in a cafe in Austin with a huge rattlesnake skin on display above our booth and discovered that, for some reason, there are no acceleration lanes on Texas highways! (Really. There aren’t. Why? Acceleration lanes are a very good thing.)

Chapter One

Paige McCord lay stretched out on a hilltop about a mile away from Travis Foley’s Texas ranch, peering through a pair of high-powered binoculars for the third day in a row of her little surveillance mission.

It was early November, the temperatures warm for that time of year but not oppressively so for this sort of outdoor activity, the fall foliage of the Texas Hill Country at its stunning peak.

But Paige hadn’t come to check out the sights or enjoy the weather.

Although there was one particular sight she had to admit she was enjoying.

And there he was.

Paige checked her watch. Nearly three-thirty.

“A tad late today, aren’t you?” she asked him, adjusting the binoculars to pick up his image as he headed up the dirt trail toward the old mine entrance.

Paige was twenty-six, born and raised in Texas. She was not the kind of girl to have her head turned easily by some cowboy just because he spent his whole life working outdoors, obviously doing very physical work. Which she admitted tended to make a man lean as could be, and yet beautifully muscled, his skin pleasantly browned by the sun.

There was a certain walk cowboys did, an easy, loose-hipped swagger, in jeans that tended to be worn thin over the years, faithfully following every dip and swell of a man’s body.

The look was completed by an expensive pair of boots, scuffed up by hard work over the years and a cowboy hat—not one that was for show—and a little late-afternoon stubble on his face, because he would have gotten up before the sun, and the days were long.

This man had all that, but she’d seen all that before.

And she had things to do, she reminded herself, things that were much more important than admiring a good-looking man.

Everything in her life seemed to be changing, changing too much and too quickly, and it had thrown her harder than any horse that had ever managed to unseat her.

Paige’s two older brothers had just gotten engaged, and Paige hoped they knew what they were doing, but wasn’t so sure. It had all happened so fast.

Tate, her second-oldest brother, had come home from two tours of duty as an Army surgeon in the Middle East and never been the same. She’d been worried about him for a while. Then he’d dumped his fiancée, Katie, whom Paige really liked, and in no time flat, was engaged to the McCord family’s longtime housekeeper’s daughter, Tanya. Paige liked Tanya. She did. She’d just always thought Tate would end up with Katie, that Katie would take good care of Tate and finally be a McCord.

Then Blake, her oldest brother, had suddenly decided he wanted Katie for himself, and Katie had just agreed to marry him!

Paige still didn’t know exactly how all that had happened, she just hoped neither of her brothers had been hurt, and she didn’t want them fighting with each other. The family had enough to worry about without her two older brothers feuding.

Her cousin Gabby, who was practically Italian royalty and the spokesperson for the McCord family’s jewelry empire, hadn’t settled for just an engagement. Gabby had run off with her bodyguard and married him!

It was enough to make Paige’s head spin.

Then, there was her twin sister, Penny, who’d been acting weird all summer, always sneaking off somewhere, keeping all sorts of secrets, and normally Paige and Penny never kept secrets from each other. The last time Paige had talked to Gabby, Gabby had asked all sorts of questions about Penny that Paige couldn’t answer. Gabby was sure something was wrong.

Not that any of the McCords were acting like themselves lately and not just because of the flurry of romances.

It was their mother.

And their youngest brother.

And their father, dead for five years now.

None of them were what they seemed to be. Her family wasn’t at all what Paige had always believed it to be.

She was still so mad—and so shocked—she hardly let herself think about it, but her mother, Eleanor, had confessed this summer to the entire family that she’d long ago been involved with Rex Foley, the patriarch of a family that had been feuding with the McCords since Civil War days.

Not only been involved with him before she’d ever married Paige’s father, but had a child with Rex years later! Paige’s adorable youngest brother, Charlie, born after Paige’s parents had separated briefly when Paige was a little girl, was actually Rex Foley’s son!

Paige remembered, barely, a time when their family’s Dallas mansion had been filled with tension. She and her sister, Penny, had hidden together in corners all over the house, trying to avoid the angry voices and all the tears their mother cried, their father gone, supposedly just on a long business trip.

In fact, it was the last time Penny remembered the whole family being so tense until this awful summer.

Back then, her father had eventually come home. Her mother finally stopped crying all the time, and then Charlie was born. Adorable, silly, happy Charlie.

Paige and her sister had been five when he was born, and they thought he was the best present they’d ever received, playing with him as if he was one of their dolls come to life.

She’d thought everything was fine then, and it had seemed that way for so long.

But it had all been a lie.

It was still hard to even comprehend how many lies had been told or what would happen to them all from this point on. It was hard for her to even think about it for too long. She had tried to keep busy and then, thankfully, had found a job to do for her family.

A very important job.

She was happy to have a reason to be out of Dallas right now and away from all the tension at the McCord mansion.

Happy to be lying in the grass on a gorgeous November day, staring through her binoculars at a man who was every bit as gorgeous and distracting.

He climbed off of his chestnut-colored horse, let the horse take a nice, long drink from the stream nearby, then—looked like it was going to be Paige’s lucky day—started unbuttoning his chambray shirt.

Oh, my.

He pulled a bandana from his back pocket, then he bent over and dipped the bandana in the stream and turned around to face her.

Paige jerked the binoculars away from her face, as if he had a hope of seeing her from this far away. She’d just been so surprised, looking him in the face, even at a distance.

Although to be honest, she couldn’t see his face that well from this distance. Still, it looked like he’d winced at something.

She got the binoculars again, found him and saw him cooling off in the stream, washing off some of the grit from working outside all day.

Looked like he’d landed in the dirt at some point.

Not that she objected.

He lifted his face to the sun and let the water from the bandana run down his face, his neck, run in a line down what looked like a perfectly sculpted set of muscles in his chest and rock-hard abs.

Oh, my.

That water had to be cold, she thought. The days tended to be warm right now in the hill country, but the nights were cooler, dipping into the forties the past few nights.

She knew because she was camping out in the national park that lucky for her was just a few miles west of Travis Foley’s ranch. Because there certainly wasn’t much of a town anywhere nearby, and a stranger staying in a little town like Llano would be noticed.

And Paige couldn’t afford to have anyone—particularly Travis Foley—know she was here.

She went back to watching her cowboy, who’d ridden by this particular spot for the last two days in a row, working hard. She thought he was probably doing grunt work, rounding up strays, checking fences and watching for trespassers, while the boss, Travis Foley, likely sat in his air-conditioned mansion somewhere on the edge of the property, counting all his family’s oil money or checking on investments or something cushy like that.

She couldn’t imagine a Foley working his ranch day-to-day.

He had men like the one she was watching for that.

He finished cleaning up, put the bandana down and buttoned up his shirt. Then he leaned back against that big rock and lifted his face to the sky, like a man admiring the fall sunshine or the still-warm afternoon breeze.

Or maybe like a man worn-out, whether by his work or his own problems, she didn’t know.

Or a man who just really needed to get away from it all, to relax here in the peace and quiet of this empty corner of Travis Foley’s ranch.

If Paige had time, she might like to enjoy some peace and quiet with him, maybe even a little time in the dark.

It wasn’t the kind of thing Paige did, pick up a stranger for the night.

But the summer had been just awful, and sometimes she got to the point where all the problems, all the changes kept racing around in her head, one after another, piling up in there, the pressure building until she just wanted to scream.

This man, this cowboy…surely he could make her forget.

Even if it was just for a night. Not that she had time for that, either. But a woman could dream, couldn’t she?

In the meantime, she had work to do.

Once he left, she’d have a full twenty-four hours before he was back again, if the pattern of the last three days held. She had all her equipment with her in her backpack and was a little uneasy about going into the old silver mine alone—anyone who knew anything about old mines would be—but she’d taken every precaution she could.

And she was determined to do this. Her family needed her. She’d promised her brother, Blake, who was CEO of the family’s jewelry empire.

Paige stopped thinking about her cowboy. If she did her job right, she’d never even meet him. What a shame.

She put down her binoculars and pulled out her satellite phone. Regular cell coverage was lousy out here in the middle of nowhere.

Blake answered on the second ring, sounding anxious. “Well?” he asked.

“I’m set. I’m going in,” she told him. “You know what to do?”

“If I don’t hear from you by dawn, I call your friend in the mining department at the university and we come find you,” he promised. “Paige, are you sure this is safe? I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”

“The mine’s been there for a hundred years. Travis Foley let a group of archaeologists in there last year to document the petroglyphs on the walls. I got a copy of their report. The place is stable as can be—”

“Still, isn’t it dangerous to go in there alone?”

They’d been through this. They’d agreed. No one else could know. Too much was at stake.

Blake merely claimed things were difficult right now financially for the jewelry stores, but that he was handling it. Which is likely what Paige’s proud, stubborn, determined oldest brother would say if the world was about to come to an end. He’d be sure he could save it all on his own.

And she was just as determined to help him.

She didn’t think the world was coming to an end, just that the problem with the stores was a serious one, and one problem to do with her family that she could actually solve. And she was determined to do just that. Solve it.

“Blake, I’m working on my PhD in geology. I know what I’m doing. Besides, I was in that mine myself weeks ago, just to make sure the reports were right and to make sure I had the equipment I’d need. Trust me. Everything will be fine.”

Actually, if her cowboy was the one who caught her, Paige didn’t think she’d mind all that much. She was confident she could talk her way out of trouble, if she had to, and she’d be long gone before the news ever got back to Travis Foley that anyone was here.

“I heard the Foleys are having some big family meeting this weekend, which means Travis Foley should be on a plane headed for Dallas by now. So you shouldn’t have to worry about him.”

“Good.” He was one person Paige really didn’t want to run into.

“But what about the weather?” Blake asked. “There are some nasty storms predicted from that hurricane in the gulf—”

“Storms that aren’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow in the area north of here. I checked the weather radar myself this morning. I’m going in now, and I’ll be out before the storm hits tomorrow,” Paige told her brother. “You worry too much. I’ll be in touch by morning.”

Travis Foley got back on his horse and headed up the rise to the rock overhang that hid the entrance to the old mine at the far corner of the 6,500-acre ranch he called home.

It had been his grandfather’s before him, his absolute favorite place to be as a child. Out here where he could breathe, where in the quiet he could think and find some peace and do an honest day’s work.

The rest of his family, the Foleys, just didn’t understand him, and honestly, Travis didn’t understand them.

They were oilmen and politicians, big shots out in what they thought was the real world.

This world, to Travis, was real.

It was all the life he wanted, right here.

He wished they’d all just leave him the hell alone and let him enjoy it.

But ever since that old Spanish shipwreck had been found in the Gulf of Mexico, people had gone nuts looking for the Santa Magdalena Diamond, a rock that was supposed to rival the Hope Diamond in size and value.

One of Travis’s ancestors, Elwin Foley, had been on that ship when it sank in the 1800s, supposedly along with the diamond and a treasure chest full of old Spanish silver coins.

No one was sure exactly what happened after that. Either the diamond went down with the ship or one of the survivors got away with it. The stone had never been found.

Travis’s ancestor survived, bought the ranch on which Travis now lived and started mining for silver. Elwin Foley certainly hadn’t lived the life of a man who possessed a fortune in diamonds, working hard on the ranch until he lost his life in a mining accident before ever finding any silver.

His son, Gavin, had even worse luck—raised by his mother alone, barely getting by on the ranch and as a man, developing a gambling problem that led to him losing the ranch and the deed to the old silver mines in the late 1890s in a card game to a man named Harry McCord.

Travis was disgusted just thinking about it and how much the old feud was still alive today between his family and the McCords.

His ancestor, Gavin, had always claimed the poker game was fixed, that Harry McCord was a card cheat. And the McCords had the nerve to strike it rich on the silver mines not long after supposedly winning the deed to the ranch and the mines.

Travis really didn’t give a damn. His family had gotten rich in the oil business a few years later. None of them were hurting for money. He didn’t begrudge the McCords the fortune they’d built in the jewelry business over the years, a fortune that started with the discovery of silver in the mines.

But he sure begrudged the loss of the ranch.

Because while he lived on the ranch now, as his grandfather had before him, worked it, sweat over it, bled over it, made this place his life, he could never own it.

The McCords did, thanks to a bad hand of poker more than a hundred years ago or a card cheat, depending on which version of the legend a man believed.

Twenty years ago, in an effort to end the bitter feud, Eleanor McCord had offered a long-term lease of the land to the Foleys, which Travis’s grandfather had accepted, then come here to make the ranch his own.

Travis had spent the best days of his childhood here and had taken over the ranch when his grandfather died ten years ago. But it wasn’t the same as owning the land, and that still had the power to burn a hole in Travis Foley’s gut when he let himself think about it too long.

Which was hard not to do when all the hoopla over the stupid diamond and the feud had sprung up again.

Explorers had found the sunken Spanish ship, along with a cache of old Spanish diamonds.

But not the Santa Magdalena.

Which fueled speculation all over again that someone who survived the shipwreck had gotten away with the diamond, and it had long been rumored that person was Elwin Foley, who’d founded the ranch and lived out the rest of his life there.

Which had even more people thinking that the most likely place to find that diamond was right here on Travis’s ranch.

Now treasure hunters, gem collectors and even jewel thieves were just showing up here, looking for that cursed diamond. Didn’t the damned fools know everyone who’d ever owned it had come to a bad end? Not that it had kept people from looking.

As if Travis didn’t have enough to do on a 6,500-acre ranch in November besides keep people from hurting themselves, spooking his cattle, cutting his fences or getting bitten by snakes or something like that.

They’d already kicked five people off the property since the shipwreck was found.

Even worse, Travis’s family was convinced the McCords were up to something, something to do with the diamond. Like sending someone to look for it on Travis’s ranch.

Had Gavin Foley found it, after he’d supposedly lost the ranch? And hidden it here for one of his ancestors to find later, when one day they might have a hope of owning it free and clear? Finders, keepers?

And had the McCords, after all these years, stumbled upon some clue as to where the diamond might now be?

Travis was highly skeptical of that notion, although his family was not.

He’d finally told them to do what they wanted to figure out what the McCords were up to, that he wanted no part of it. His only concession was agreeing to have someone check each of the mines daily for signs of trouble.

Not just from the McCords but from those damned fool diamond hunters.

Travis had found footprints leading into and away from the Eagle Mine a few weeks ago, had crawled down inside about ten feet and checked things out, but hadn’t found anything else.

Still, someone had been there, and it hadn’t been him or any of the ranch hands.

So he checked the place himself every afternoon.

Today, everything seemed quiet.

He got off his horse, walked along the long, deep rock overhang, twenty feet wide and at least twenty feet deep, the ceiling sloping downward in the back and at its deepest recess, neatly obscuring the entrance to this particular mine in its dark shadows.

All quiet.

No footprints except his own, which he brushed away with a rake he’d hidden in the brush outside the entrance.

But as he went back outside and stood there, taking a long, cool drink of water from his canteen, he had the oddest feeling.

That someone was out there.

That someone was watching him.

He’d felt the same way at the stream, trying to rinse the dirt off the nasty scratch he’d gotten earlier that day tangling with a barbed wire fence someone had cut.

No one should be out here watching him. From here, it was ranch property for as far as the eye could see, except for that corner of the property that butted up to the national park.

But if someone was watching him, Travis was going to find ‘em.

Chapter Two

Paige had to admit, she loved exploring and she didn’t get to do as much of it as she liked these days. Too many hours spent at her desk in front of her computer, working on her dissertation.

So she was thrilled in a way to have an excuse to go traipsing through this old mine.

As a highly trained scientist—chief gemologist to her family’s worldwide jewelry company, with a master’s in geology and hopefully soon a PhD—the idea of discovering a gemstone believed to rival the Hope Diamond was thrilling in a way that had nothing to do with saving the family fortune.

It was the kind of discovery anyone who traveled the world exploring and truly loved the various, extraordinary substances the earth, over time, could yield would have dreamed their entire life about making.

Few scientists ever got to experience the thrill of such a find.

Paige wanted it so bad she could taste it.

Her heart was thrumming so fast it was like a roar in her ears as she stood at the entrance to the mine once her adorable cowboy was gone.

She put down her big backpack, then took out her helmet with her LED light and turned it on, leaving it on the ground to provide some light in the recesses of the overhang that guarded the mine’s entrance. From her pack, she pulled out an old pair of coveralls—because exploring was a messy, often cold business. She’d worn her hiking boots in, put one small, spare light around her neck on a cord and another in the smaller pack she’d carry in, along with a small length of rope, spare batteries, power bars and granola, some water, a small notebook and a camera.

Her hair was already in a long braid, which she tucked inside her coveralls. Then she put her helmet on with her LED light wrapped around it. Making sure the light was on, she was ready.

Paige took a breath, let it out slow and off she went into the dark, cool quiet of the old mine.

Travis couldn’t believe she went into that mine alone!

He’d hung back, waiting once he’d gotten over the ridge, and there she’d come, a hat tilted low obscuring his view of her face as she hiked over from the ranch’s boundary nearest the park.

Looking very efficient, he might add, once he’d crept back close enough and gotten down nearly to ground level so he could watch. She snapped on her light in the deep recesses of the overhang. She suited up, checked her equipment—she’d come prepared, at least—and then seemed to disappear.

He’d been sure there had to be someone else with her, that she wouldn’t go inside the mine alone. He’d wanted to catch her companion, too, so he’d waited.

He’d been here when a bunch of archaeologists had explored the mine last year, photographing and documenting the ancient drawings and carvings on the walls called petroglyphs. He had gone inside with them a few times to see what all the fuss was about.

None of the archaeologists had ever gone into that mine alone!

And yet today, there she went!

“Damned, stupid woman!” he growled. His horse gave him an odd look. Travis shook his head. “Not you, Murph,” he told the horse.

He climbed into the saddle and headed for the mine, thinking he just might have her arrested for trespassing. Maybe it would make anybody else think twice before trying what she just did.

He needed to put a stop to this nonsense before anyone got hurt.

At the overhang, he tethered Murphy to a small tree and fished in his saddlebags for an oversize flashlight so he’d at least be able to see a bit in front of him, took off his hat, shook his head and swore some more about lost diamonds, family feuds, treasure hunters and women.

He got to the mouth of the mine and headed after her. The entrance was nearly tall enough that he could stand up without hitting his head.

Nearly.

Apparently the miners weren’t quite six feet two inches.

If he hunched over a bit, he could stand and walk. The entrance sloped down, but only slightly, nothing too taxing or too dangerous here.

He had the flashlight on but pointed at his feet, not wanting to warn his little trespasser she was about to get caught.

About fifteen feet in, he came to a vertical shaft that went down twenty feet to the next level and another horizontal shaft.

He’d gone this far before, just not alone. The makeshift ladder attached to the mine wall was metal and had been checked and reinforced just last year, had held his weight just fine then.

Travis hoped to hell he caught her somewhere on the horizontal shaft at the twenty-foot level.

He sure didn’t want to have to go any farther and allowed himself to mutter some more about stupid legends, ancient curses and women.

He climbed down the shaft, then stood on the horizontal shaft as it opened up both left and right.

Did she know she wasn’t alone by now? Had she heard him? She didn’t have that much of a head start, and he would hope she was being more careful and moving more slowly than he was, since she hadn’t been here before.

At least, he didn’t think she’d been here.

Travis stood there, listening, finally hearing a clank and then a muffled curse in the shaft to the left. He hoped she was at least as frustrated as he was and liked the idea that he might scare her half to death, coming upon her this way in an abandoned mine.

If he did, maybe she wouldn’t do anything this stupid again.

He crept along, the light out now, going by the feel of the cool, rock wall against his right hand. He caught a glimpse of light, then of what she was studying.

One of the petroglyphs.

An eagle.

He could see it in the light from her helmet, but had only a vague impression of her, sturdy boots, baggy coveralls and a helmet, her nose practically pressed against the rock onto which someone maybe as long as five thousand years ago had carved an eagle.

He was sure she’d come after the diamond.

So why was she studying the drawings?

Travis backed out of the shaft quietly, slowly, wanting to know what she’d do next.

Finally, she started making her way back to the center of the twenty-foot level. From there, it was either explore the passage to the right or descend again.

This time to a hundred feet.

He thought it was downright creepy being that far underground under solid rock.

Surely she wasn’t going to do that.

He waited just down the right-hand passageway, peered around the edge of the wall and there she was, checking out the vertical shaft that descended to the next level.

“God almighty!” he muttered, then walked over there and grabbed her around her waist and picked her up as she knelt on the ground peering into a hole, seemingly comfortable as could be, with an eighty-foot drop beneath her.

She screamed so loud he thought she might bring the walls down around them, and he lifted her up in the air and held her there, her body curled up in a ball, mad as hell. She kicked out with her feet and got some leverage against the opposite wall, sent him tumbling back and hitting the wall behind him none too gently.

He held on, one arm around her waist and one managing to get a grip that flattened both arms against her body.

When she finally stopped screaming, he muttered into her ear, “Hush. There’s no place to run, and I’m sure as hell not letting you climb down any farther into this mine.”

She stopped struggling, finally. She had lost her helmet at some point and its light was now shining down the passageway to the right, so he couldn’t see her and she couldn’t see him.

He could feel her breathing hard, and didn’t feel in the least bit guilty about manhandling her this way, at least not until she calmed down. He wasn’t going to let her flounder around and hurt herself or get lost, or God forbid, fall down the eighty-foot vertical shaft in the dark.

“You scared me half to death!” she told him finally, still breathing hard and spitting mad.

Travis eased back just enough to turn her around in his arms, her back against the opposite wall of the mine, then held her there with his own body pressed hard against hers.

“Yeah?” he said, his face so close to hers he could feel the breath coming out of her body. “And you scared me. Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to come into a place like this alone?”

“I know what I’m doing. I’m a grad student in geology at the university,” she claimed.

“Do you also know you’re trespassing on private property?” he tried, looming over her in the dark, determined to have his say.

“Well…yes,” she conceded, finally.

He eased back, still holding her there with his body, but not up in her face, the way he had been.

She was a tiny thing, he’d realized when he’d had her plastered against him just now, slender as could be. Young, too, if she really was a student, like she said.

He didn’t think she was going to try to get away any longer, so staying that close to her was more of a distraction than a help at the moment. And he was quickly discovering she had all the necessary attributes to be very distracting to a man.

Travis fought to put those kind of thoughts completely out of his head as he backed away just enough so that he wasn’t touching her anymore but could still grab hold of her quickly if he needed to.

“You know if I haul you out of here and call the sheriff, he’d treat you to at least a night in jail,” he said.

She sighed. “You don’t really want to do that. Do you?”

“If it kept you from trying some damned fool stunt like this again, yeah, I do.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I just—”

“Have to find that stupid diamond? Yeah. I’ve heard it before—”

“Do you have any idea what kind of an opportunity this is?”

“Oh, yeah. Millions of dollars at stake, and you think all you have to do is find it.”

“No. Not the money,” she claimed. “Finding it. If the Santa Magdalena Diamond is really somewhere on this ranch, it’s the find of a lifetime. Scientists spend their whole lives studying and searching, and most of them will never discover anything like this. It’s amazing! How could anyone who’s serious about a career in science pass up that opportunity?”

Travis frowned, hearing the honest enthusiasm in her voice. Same as with those archaeology students and their supervisors who were on the ranch last summer studying the petroglyphs.

He didn’t really understand getting that excited or being so fascinated with those drawings, but he’d seen that kind of enthusiasm and pure joy of discovery before in them.

So she took stupid risks, but that yearning to explore, to discover, he at least understood better than those fools out to make millions by simply getting lucky and stumbling upon a treasure. He believed in hard work much more than luck, so he could understand a bit of what drove her and wasn’t quite as annoyed as he was before.

And maybe he even envied her that kind of excitement and yearning. Travis, at thirty, was a man content with his life most days. But every now and then, it felt a little too settled, too predictable.

A little empty.

He didn’t remember the last time he was as excited about anything as she was about the chance of discovering the old diamond. A feeling he certainly wasn’t going to stand in this old mine and try to analyze.

“Come on,” he said, finding her helmet and putting it back on her head, wincing as the light hit him square in the face and quickly turning away. “You’re done exploring. We’re going up top.”

She sighed once again. “Couldn’t you just let me look around? I mean, we’re already here. What’s it going to hurt?”

“The next level is a hundred feet below the surface,” he told her.

“I know.”

She sounded like the idea thrilled her.

Then he realized something. “You know? What do you mean, you know?”

“From the maps,” she said.

“You have maps of this mine?”

“Of course. The people who originally worked the mine kept maps. Not as precise as what we’d make today, but you can find those historical documents if you know where to look. And scientists who’ve explored the mines over the years kept maps, too. I told you, I’m serious about this. It’s not a crazy pipe dream to me. I’m a scientist. And you could help me.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

She shrugged. He was close enough that he could feel the movement. “For the money?” she tried. “There’s supposed to be a jeweled chest full of old Spanish coins, too. Silver coins. I mean, even a cowboy could appreciate the chance to have that kind of money. This could be the kind of fortune that would let you buy your own ranch someday, if you wanted. And…you wouldn’t really even have to help me, if you didn’t want to. You could just…not tell anybody I was here? Maybe not tell anyone if I came back and searched some more? I’d pay you, if you wanted, just to…not tell anybody what I was doing.”

“You’d go back in here by yourself?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes. And you could stay topside, just to be there in case I did get in trouble. All you’d have to do is call for help. I have friends who’d know what to do to get me out.”

Travis swore under his breath. “I think you’re nuts to take that kind of risk.”

“And I think some people spend their whole lives without ever taking a risk at all, which to me is even worse.”

He shook his head. “Well, I think this is a ridiculous conversation to be having while buried under tons of rock. Start climbing.”

She hadn’t climbed more than two steps on the ladder when a howling, whistling sound swept through the mine.

And then, as the howling died down for a moment, there was a tapping sound, far away and not that loud. Like the beating of a drum. Solid objects hitting other solid objects. And then more howling.

“What the hell is that?” he asked, as they both froze for a moment.

He told himself if it was what he feared—falling rocks—he’d have been hit by something already. Unless it was father down inside the mine or up near the entrance and just hadn’t made it to them.

Not yet, anyway.

“Wind,” she said.

Okay. Yeah. He felt it, now that he wasn’t thinking obsessively of being pelted by rocks. Still, that wasn’t all.

“Wind and what else?” he demanded.

“I’m not sure,” his gutsy explorer said, not sounding nearly as confident as she had been a moment ago.

He swore, feeling every bit of that distance between him and the surface. “Let’s get out of here. Now.”

She took off for the top, seeming to know her way in the dark a heck of a lot better than Travis did. He went scrambling after her. When he made it to the horizontal shaft near the surface, she found his hand, grabbed it and pulled him along behind her.

The eerie howling got louder with every step they took and at every moment, Travis still expected to have rocks come hurling down on him, but they never did.

He bashed his head a couple of times on the way out, not able to see that well in the tunnel and moving faster than a man of his size should in a shaft of that size.

Near the entrance, she was sure she smelled rain. But there was no way rain would account for the other sound she heard.

The space around them opened up, but it was still oddly dark, and then Travis realized they’d made it out of the mine, to the long, deep rock overhang that created a covered area sheltered from the elements.

Good thing, too, because outside the sky was nearly black, the world around them a gloomy gray. Out in the open, he saw what looked like miniature, eerily white golf balls bouncing off the ground.

Hail.

It was coming down something fierce, pounding into the ground and then bouncing around until it settled for good. The wind sounded absolutely furious, his horse long gone, no doubt realizing weather was coming long before Travis did and taking off for home.

Travis and the woman backed up against the rock wall as far under the overhang as they could get and still stand up. He was breathing hard, bleeding a bit from the gash he’d just gotten on his head, adrenaline still zinging through his whole body.

Looking at her through the grayish light, he felt a little bit foolish for coming near panic back there, a little bit mad at her for putting them both in that situation and very, very grateful to be out of it and safe.

They weren’t buried under tons of rocks.

They weren’t dying or already dead.

Just in the middle of a nasty storm. Hail or not, it was just a storm.

He shook his head, trying to clear it, then chuckled, then started laughing.

Maybe because it was the last thing he’d expected to be a part of his day. Descending into an old abandoned silver mine shaft chasing a determined, passionate, half-crazy woman, and then seeing his life flash before his eyes for a moment, only to see a moment later that he wasn’t in any danger at all.

He wished he could really see her face. The gloom that had descended was like looking through a thick fog, and she’d clicked off her helmet light, which hadn’t shown them anything but rain, and nearly blinded him every time she turned in his direction. He had more of an impression of her than anything else, but he knew she was grinning, too.

A moment later, she was laughing. “It’s easy to get spooked down there,” she admitted.

“I think I was way past spooked,” Travis admitted. “And at the speed you climbed out of that hellhole, I’d say you were, too.”

“Well,” she shrugged. “Yeah. I guess…I mean, I’m really glad I wasn’t down there alone when the storm hit.”

“Me, too,” he said, thinking, scared or not, it was the most excitement he’d had in his life in months, which was surely a sad commentary on his life right now.

So he couldn’t really say he was sorry to have found her sneaking into his mine today, and he wasn’t sorry he’d gone in after her, either.

Or even that there was a helluva storm raging around them, lightning crackling loud enough that it seemed like it could split the ground wide open in front of them at any moment.

Storms came big in Texas. He used to love storms on the ranch when he was a kid, so wild and loud, like coming over the top of the biggest hill on a roller coaster and then feeling like he was going to come flying out of his seat at any moment.

Feeling like anything could happen in the next instant, and that no one was really safe.

A man needed to feel like that every now and then, no matter how much he loved the solitude and serenity of his land.

He stared at her, again wishing he could really see her, that he had more than those fleeting moments when he’d watched her climb down the rise and disappear into the mine. Unfortunately, then he’d been concentrating on figuring out what she was up to, not what she looked like. He just remembered noticing a tall, slender body and a dark reddish-brown braid of hair hanging down her back. And he wasn’t going to ask her to turn on her helmet light just so he could see her better. They needed to save the batteries, anyway.

She went still, then backed up a bit, and he had to catch her before she went too far.

“You’re gonna bump your head if you take another step backward,” he said, holding her by the arms, and then putting a hand at the back of her head, between her and the rock overhang. “Right there.”

She touched his right temple, her fingers cool and soft against his skin. “You already bumped yours. It’s bleeding.”

He kept hold of her head and leaned into her touch, too, gentle as could be.

She had on a pair of coveralls that hid every bit of her body. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face and tucked inside the coveralls, her face turned up to his, his body shielding hers from the worst of the wind.

“Do you think it’s the hurricane?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Because it’s not supposed to be here. It’s supposed to stay well north of here—”

“You want to try telling the storm that?” he asked her.

“And it wasn’t supposed to get this far inland until tomorrow. I checked.”

“Yeah. I did, too. But the weather out here isn’t always as predictable as we’d like.”

She pouted a bit, and he tried to ignore how cute that little pout looked to him. “I’m just saying…I was careful about everything, and I was watching the weather to make sure it would be okay, and now…well, I guess we’re not going anywhere fast in this.”

“No, we’re not.”

He couldn’t say he actually regretted that, either.

Chapter Three

Travis tried not to look too eager at the likely prospect of being trapped here all night with her, because he didn’t want to scare her, and a woman caught alone for the night with a man she didn’t know would have to be a little scared.

So he backed up until the rain blowing in on the wind hit his back in a fine spray, then moved to the side, giving her some space to think things through.

A man who spent his life working the land, often long distances from the ranch house, got caught out in the elements. It was just something that happened. If she’d spent any time in the field as a geologist, she’d probably been caught out in storms, too.

No big deal.

They had shelter from the rain and could likely wait out the storm here just fine, at least until morning light.

He gave up studying her as best as he could through the gloom—it wasn’t getting any easier to see—and went with his impressions of her, what he felt she was like. Calm, practical and then…something else.

“You look like you’re up to something,” he said.

She shrugged. “I’m just thinking that…I’m glad we’re out of the rain,” she tried.

“Yes.” He nodded. “And?”

“And…that…I’ve been caught in worse weather than this.”

“Me, too,” he agreed. But that wasn’t it, either.

“My Jeep is just over the ridge, maybe a mile away, just across the boundary into the park. I don’t suppose—”

Lightning crackled across the sky, then landed with a giant boom.

He could swear he saw her flinch as it hit.

Little Ms. No-Fear was actually afraid of lightning? At least a little bit?

“You really don’t want to take a chance on getting hit by lightning,” he said.

“I know,” she said, like a woman who really knew what a lightning strike could do. “I just thought…the Jeep isn’t that far—”

“Even if we didn’t have the lightning to contend with, in a downpour like this, the soil out here turns to the consistency of warm mush.”

She sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

It happened in Texas with its fine, silty soil not accustomed to this kind of rain. It was like trying to walk through quicksand when it suddenly got wet.

“Hey, what happened to your horse?” she asked.

“Long gone. He doesn’t like lightning, either, wouldn’t leave me for anything but that. Wasn’t much around here to tether him to that could actually hold him, if he decided to run, just some scrawny bushes. He would have uprooted the thing by turning his head.”

“Oh, okay… So, for us…What about in the morning? Surely the lightning will have stopped, and we can make it to the Jeep then, can’t we?” she said.

“Maybe, although it’s still not easy getting any real traction for a while after this kind of storm passes through. Not off-road. You are off-road there, aren’t you?”

“By a couple of miles,” she admitted.

“Don’t worry. If we can’t get to your car, there’s an old hunting cabin a mile or so from here and high ground between us and it. We’ll go at first light, as long as the lightning’s through, and hold up there. The ranch hands will be out, checking to make sure everything’s okay. Someone from the ranch will find us before long.”

“And this spot where we are? It won’t flood?”

“Not overnight. If it’s still raining like this tomorrow during the day, tomorrow night it might. But don’t worry. I’ve lived on this ranch for the better part of twenty years, know every inch of the place. I know how to keep you safe here, Red, and I’ll do it, too.”

“Red?”

He grinned. “It is red, isn’t it? I can’t be sure in this light, but I thought when I watched you walk down to the mine entrance—”

“Yes, my hair is red,” she admitted.

“Thought so.” He didn’t say she had the fiery temperament to go along with it. “So, is this a problem? Spending the night here? Because there really isn’t anything else to do—”

“I know. I believe you,” she claimed. “So, I guess we should probably…get comfortable. Since we’ll be here for the night. Right?”

He nodded. “Are you afraid of me, Red?”

“No.” She vehemently denied it.

“Because there’s no reason for you to be. I’m not gonna hurt you. Or do anything to you. We’re just in this together now, and really, it’s a little bit of nothing. One slightly uncomfortable night. That’s all. Might as well make the best of it.”

He was right. Paige knew he was. No way she could argue the point.

It was just…well, the lightning, for one thing. She hated lightning.

And spending the night with him.

She’d been daydreaming about that very thing when she watched him with his horse by the stream earlier, and she’d felt perfectly safe doing that. Fantasizing about being the kind of woman to just let herself go for a night with a perfect stranger.

She’d never been the kind of woman to let herself do that. A girl growing up with money in a very public way…Well, her father had warned her and her sister early on that there would be boys who wanted her for her money, and she, of course, hadn’t listened. It was one lesson she’d learned the hard way, and it had hurt. She’d always been a bit cautious around men since then, a bit distrustful of their motives when they claimed to want her, and she just couldn’t be sure they didn’t really want a rich woman.

Still, it was a little disconcerting, the way she’d been thinking of him, and to now find herself about to get one night alone with him.

Almost like the world had heard her longing for a man—this man—and delivered him to her.

Paige didn’t think the world worked that way.

At least, it never had for her.

She shook her head to clear it of such foolish thoughts, and then started emptying her pockets, taking inventory as she went.

“Let’s see what we’ve got. Extra flashlight, extra batteries for the flashlights, a couple of power bars, some high-energy granola mix, a small bottle of water, a small notebook and a camera. And I hiked in with a backpack, stashed it under the bushes by the…” Her voice trailed off as she saw that he was already headed in that direction. “You were watching me earlier?”

“Yes, I was,” he admitted, going right to the spot where she’d left her backpack, finding it with no hesitation at all and bringing it back to her.

She wanted to protest, but how could she? She’d done the same thing, spied on him.

She took the pack from him and started pulling things out. A bigger bottle of water, some more granola, some matches, a survival blanket, which he took and looked over appreciatively.

“That will come in handy tonight.”

Then she pulled out her satellite phone.

He shot her a pointed look.

“I’m not stupid. I didn’t go in without telling someone what I was doing. If my brother doesn’t hear from me by 6:00 a.m., he’ll be here soon after that to get me out.” She hesitated with the phone, then looked out into the storm. “Do you think—”

“No way,” he said. “Not in this.”

She tried anyway. “I have to,” she told her cowboy. “My brother will go nuts before this storm is over.”

Of course, he was right.

No signal.

She put the phone away and hoped she could reach her brother by morning, because he would be frantic otherwise and if the flooding kept him from getting here to her…Well, it would not be pretty.

Her brother thought he could move mountains. And he would to get to her if he thought she was in trouble, and then their whole plan to find the diamond would come out. If the Foleys knew what Paige was up to, she’d have to fight to set foot on this land again.

Yeah, she had to reach Blake by first light, if not sooner.

Paige made herself keep going with her unpacking, until she came to a thick, warm sweater and a fitted pair of sweatpants. She unbuttoned her coveralls and slid out of them, pulling on a second layer of clothes over her jeans and tank top, in favor of the coveralls, which were grimy and dusty from the old mine.

She and Travis shared some granola and water, watched the storm for a bit and then he suggested they might as well bed down for the night. It was early, but the sooner they slept, the sooner they’d wake up and could try to get out of here.

Paige looked over their options. “That spot’s the most sheltered, the farthest out of the rain.”

He nodded.

She took her coveralls and spread them out on the cold ground right against the back wall of the overhang and motioned for him to make himself comfortable.

As she suspected, he planned to sit up and watch the storm, settling himself with his back to one wall, facing out toward the gloomy night.

“You’re sure this area isn’t going to flood that quickly?” she asked.

“Reasonably sure, but I’m not taking any chances,” he said. “I’m going to watch and make sure.”

She sat down beside him, thinking to watch the storm herself.

“There’s no reason for both of us to stay up all night,” he said. “Or for both of us to be uncomfortable. Come on, Red. I won’t bite.”

He held out an arm to her and she settled against his side, finding a welcome heat and a body that was hard-muscled, but not as hard as the ground.

He put the survival blanket over her and still had enough left over to cover about half of him, and soon she was toasty warm, her head on his chest, her whole side plastered to his.

She felt his hand at the side of her face, covering her eyes and blocking the lightning, at least a bit.

“Go to sleep,” he said. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

She tried. Really tried.

But the wind slowly and steadily picked up, the fierceness of the storm growing with every moment. Every bolt of lightning had her struggling more and more to cover her fears, to stay still, to keep breathing easily and deeply, when all she wanted to do was get as close to him as possible and beg him to make it all stop.

It was a foolish thing, being afraid of something as simple as a storm, and yet, there it was. Caught in this eerily dark world, she was afraid.

And there was so little in life she truly feared.

She worked her face deeper into the curve between his shoulder and his neck and closed her eyes. “It is the hurricane, isn’t it? The way the winds keep building. It’s…That’s what hurricane winds do.”

“Yeah, it looks like we got the hurricane,” he told her, arms holding her tight.

“So we just sit here and see how much worse it gets?” That seemed completely unreasonable.

“Not much else to do, Red.”

“I mean, we don’t know how much worse it’s going to get or when its going to stop—”

“No, we don’t.”

“Tornadoes spring up from these storms when they’re over land—”

“Sometimes,” he admitted.

“Tornadoes, lightning, flooding. Perfect night—”

She broke off with a gasp as a huge clap of thunder drowned out her words.

He scooped her up and deposited her sideways on his lap, even closer than she had been to him, draped the blanket around her and grinned as he looked down into her eyes.

“You know, I could make you forget,” he said.

“What?”

“The storm. That you’re afraid—”

She sputtered, surprised and furious. “I am not afraid!”

“Red, you flinch every time a bolt of lightning strikes. Not a lot, and I know you’re fighting it, but you do. And that’s fine. I mean, it’s no big deal. We’re all afraid of something, and I’m just saying, I’m here. I’m happy to be of help, to get you through the night. Whatever it takes.”

Paige shook her head, having a hard time thinking, between being on guard about when and where the next bit of lightning might strike and trying to hide her fears and then having this man…this altogether tempting specimen of man make her an offer of…what, exactly?

“Are you saying, you’ll…that you’ll—”

“Whatever you want,” he said smoothly, a hint of amusement and, she thought, sheer wickedness in his tone.

“You think I would be so caught up in you and whatever you were doing to me, that I’d forget all about the storm and being afraid? You think you’re that good?”

“I’m saying I’m willing to try, that I’d certainly give it my best shot. I mean…I managed to distract you for the last few moments, didn’t I?”

“I—I—I can’t believe you—”

“You haven’t flinched over the last two lightning strikes, in case you didn’t notice. So from where I sit, it seems to be working.”

From where he sat!

Well, from where she sat, she was…She was on top of him, all lean muscles and heat and…and…

She had pushed herself upright at one point, wasn’t snuggled against him as she had been at first, but she was still sitting on his lap, her hands pressed against his chest for balance and to keep her from getting any closer.

“I don’t…I just…I don’t do this.”

“Do what? Snuggle? Kiss? Play around a little?”

Play around a little?

“That’s what you’re offering to do?” she asked.

He shrugged easily. “I’m saying I’m open to the possibilities.”

He made it sound so innocent, like nothing of consequence at all. Like passing the time in casual conversation or something.

“Actually,” he said. “Now that I think about it, not absolutely anything. We couldn’t actually have sex. No condoms. I don’t generally ride around the ranch prepared in that particular way.”

“Not an opportunity that normally presents itself during a normal workday at the ranch?” she quipped.

“No, Red. I have to say, it just doesn’t happen. Damned shame, don’t you think? I love working this ranch. Something like that happened every now and then…Well, I’d have to say the job would be just about perfect then.”

“Get lonely out here, Cowboy?”

He nodded.

She shook her head. “I can’t decide what to make of you. If you were half-serious about that or just…just—”

“I was going to kiss you,” he admitted, laughing beautifully, that rich, deep voice of his wrapping around her like a spell in the dark. “Although I am up for just about anything you’d like. I mean…a man needs to take care of a woman. It’s just…what a man does.”

“Make the sacrifice? Since I’m afraid and everything?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is this some cowboy code you live by? You’re honor bound to offer your body to a woman in distress—”

“That’s just what a man does.”

Paige didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or charmed.

Both, probably.

“I don’t know what to say,” she admitted.

“You don’t have to say anything. I was just letting you know you had options.”

“Oh, well. Options. Okay.”

“But really, why don’t you just stay here with me, lean down against me.” He eased her down against his chest. “There you go. And let your head go right here.” Against that warm, inviting curve of his shoulder and his neck. “That’s it. Close your eyes.”

He spread the blanket over her and him. She could feel him breathing deeply and easily, feel the heat of his body, his heartbeat beneath one of her palms.

He put one of his hands over her ear, and with the other ear buried against his chest, it blocked out a lot of the sound, making a little cocoon of safety for her.

It was nice.

Really nice.

“Go to sleep,” he whispered. “You’ll be fine.”

She tried.

She really did.

But the storm kept going. She’d be nearly asleep, then find herself jerked out of that half sleep by lightning, feel his arms tighten around her to let her know she wasn’t alone, feel the glorious heat of his big, hard body, and then find herself thinking of what he’d offered.

It was just a night.

Just a little comfort in the dark on a big, scary night.

She knew lightning wasn’t going to come snaking inside the rock overhang and get her. It wasn’t chasing after her.

But an irrational fear was just that—an irrational fear.

And she’d been battling this one since she was a little girl and had gotten caught in her tree house during a big storm. No one had known she was there, and she’d stayed well hidden inside of it, huddled into a little ball, shaking and crying like she never had in her life. Her mother’s face had gone absolutely white when she realized her daughter had been in a tree during a lightning storm. To Paige, it had seemed like it had gone on forever, like no one would ever come and save her, that the lightning would surely reach out and get her at any moment.

“I was playing outside when I was five or six, and a storm came, and I took shelter at the closest spot, which turned out to be my tree house,” she finally admitted.

“Oooh,” her cowboy sympathized.

“Yeah, not the best place to be during a storm. It was awful, and it seemed like forever before anyone found me.”

He held her tight as she lay draped over him, bracing for the next boom of thunder. His hands moved gently over her shoulders, trying to soothe and work out some of the tension there. She snuggled closer, her face pressed as far into the curve of his neck as she could get it, the reassuring rise and fall of his chest beneath her, the beat of his heart, steady as could be, thumping against one of her ears.

“I could tell you a story,” he whispered.

And she grinned despite her fears. “Thank you, but I’m not five years old anymore. Besides, I never got bedtime stories. I got songs. My mother used to sing us to sleep.”

“Okay, I’m definitely not singing. You don’t want me to sing.”

“Then…I guess there’s not much else you could do,” she said, thinking it came out sounding like an invitation more than anything else.

Oops.

She didn’t mean it that way.

Honestly, she didn’t.

So what if he was here? She was here. The storm was here. And it was going to be a long night.

He took her face in his hand, eased back away from her, just enough that he could look her in the eye and said, “Let’s just try one kiss, Red. Okay? One. And we’ll see how it goes from there.”

Well, if he thought she was going to fight him off…

No, he knew she wasn’t going to do that.

Just let go, she told herself. It’s just one night, just one kiss.

He let his mouth settle over hers, firm and sure, insistent and yet moving like a man who had all the time in the world. She opened herself up to the kiss, to him. To the heat and the pleasure, falling into it.

Some men just knew how to touch a woman, when to linger, when to blaze forward, when to tease and when to take.

He knew.

He devoured her, and she let him, helped him as best she could, with long, hungry kisses and hands that roamed restlessly across his chest, his shoulders, his back, into his hair, trying to get even closer.

She wasn’t altogether sure how she got there, but she ended up straddling his lap, her hips in his hands, her breasts crushed against his chest, wishing she didn’t have a stitch on.

And it all happened as fast as a fire roaring out of control.

“Damn, Red,” he said, lifting his mouth from hers long enough to catch a ragged breath.

“I know.”

Maybe she’d just been alone too long, gotten too caught up with her work and her family and all of its craziness. Had forgotten to make time for Paige, the woman, with all a woman’s needs.

Because this felt very much like need.

He kissed her again, used his hands on her hips to draw her into a rhythm against him that was both arousing and maddening through their clothes.

If he’d laid her down on the hard ground right then and started stripping her clothes off, she didn’t think she could have stopped him. She was so aroused already he might not even have to take her clothes off her. If he just kept doing what he was doing, which now included a hand slipping beneath her sweater and her shirt and that little nothing camisole of a bra to her breast, his mouth on her neck…

Her whole body gave a shudder.

The things he was doing to her neck…

He laid her back against that hard ground, settled himself heavily, but still fully clothed, on top of her, pushed up her clothes and took her nipple into his mouth and sucked hard.

“Trust me, Red,” he muttered. “Just trust me. Everything will be fine.”

Chapter Four

Paige slept like a baby.

Blissfully, heavily, completely unaware of anything, until she woke to the same sound of pounding rain and howling wind of the night before. If anything, it might just be worse.

And she was alone.

She sat up, wiped her hair from her face. It was flying around everywhere this morning, escaping from her braid. Her shirt and her camisole were bunched up under her sweater, and she straightened those, her cheeks filling with heat at just how that had all happened. And her jeans were unbuttoned, unzipped.

And she couldn’t say she was sorry at all.

They hadn’t actually had sex.

Not quite.

But he certainly had taken care of her.

She’d felt like the whole world exploded quite happily inside of her, with nothing but his mouth and his hands, and felt bad that he hadn’t let her do the same for him.

But he’d said he wanted her in a nice, soft, warm bed, in a nice, warm bedroom with all the time in the world to do this right. He didn’t want to be rushed. He didn’t want to be worried about the storm or a flood, and he kind of liked the idea of her owing him.

So there it was.

She owed him.

And planned on happily making good.

Lord, what a man!

Then she remembered the money thing. Paige’s family had serious money. And clout. And history.

Men could get weird about it.

She hoped her cute cowboy didn’t get too weird about it. Ranch hands lived simply, most of them on very little, and usually had a healthy disdain for the world in which Paige’s family lived.

She just wanted to know the man, enjoy the man, think for a while at least that any and all good things were possible with the man.

How long had it been since she’d felt like that?

She was practically singing as she got to her feet and went to look for him.

It was still very early, not quite five her watch told her, the world still filled with a ghostly white gloom, the rain not retreating in the least. Neither was the wind.

She went from one end of the overhang to the other. It was like searching through thick fog, but he wasn’t there.

A moment later he came in out of the rain, a ghostly image, except she could tell he was dripping wet. He stopped when he spotted her and then through the gloom, she could swear she saw his mouth spread into a big smile.

“Sleep well, Red?”

“Yes, I did,” she said. “You?”

“I had really nice dreams and a woman draped all over me. Yeah, I slept just fine.”

So that’s how she’d slept? Draped all over him?

It must be true, because she’d slept on rock-hard ground before, and the body made its protests known the next day. Hers felt just fine this morning.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“I’m not complaining,” he reassured her.

“No, just…You got to sleep on the ground. I definitely got the better end of the deal.”

“Well, you can owe me for that, too, Red.”

And then she laughed like she hadn’t in years.

Yeah, she owed him.

And it felt good to owe him, to think of paying back the favors of last night, leisurely, happily, in a nice warm bed.

“So, where is this nice, warm bed of yours, and how are we going to get to it?”

“My bed is about five miles, as the crow flies. So we’re going to have to make do with the hunting cabin I was telling you about. All we have to do is make it through the rain. I’m glad you’ve got your boots on. And your coveralls are waterproof?”

She nodded.

“Good. You’ll be just fine.”

“And you’ll be soaked,” she said, looking at the shirt plastered to him, his dark hair drenched and slicked back, lying against his head.

“I’ve been wet before. I’ll survive, and we’ll get a nice fire going once we get to the cabin and we can dry each other off. Sound like a plan?”

“Yes, it does,” she agreed.

A glorious plan.

They gathered up their things. She had her small pack, and he took her larger one. She got into her coveralls and then stared out into the storm.

At least the lightning had stopped.

Still, what a mess.

“The wind’s not any worse than it was last night,” she said. “Like…the storm’s stalled?”

“Right on top of us, I’d say.”

Which was not good.

A fast-moving hurricane could drop a lot of rain quickly, but at least it was gone fast, carried along by the forward movement of the storm.

But sometimes a hurricane came ashore and then ran into another front coming the other way, and it was like a standoff in the sky. The two storm systems just sat there, dumping torrential rain carried by the leftovers of the hurricane on the same spot.

The flooding could be devastating, particularly in a place as flat and normally dry as Texas.

“If I thought this was going to get any easier, I’d say we wait it out. But I really don’t think this storm is moving, Red. We need to just trudge through it. We’ll stick to the side of the ridge, so we’ll have high ground. And it probably won’t look like a path, but trust me, it’s there and I know it. I grew up on this ranch. Cabin’s maybe a mile and a half from here. Stick close to me, and if you need help, yell. Okay?”

“Okay,” she nodded, trusting him implicitly.

They set off in the cold, soaking rain, so heavy she could barely see him in front of her. He was right about the path. She didn’t see one, but he seemed to know exactly where he was going.

At times, off to the left, she could see what she thought was a raging river, where a peaceful stream had been the day before.

The one she’d watched him wash off in, when she’d had all those wonderful fantasies about him.

He lived up to them and more, she decided, and as soon as they got in out of the rain, she was going to peel those wet clothes off of him, dry him off and then heat him up.

It could rain for a week, for all she cared.

They trudged on through the storm. The ground was wet and had the consistency of watery oatmeal under her feet. Even with her work boots, she was sliding all over the place.

Rain dripped off her cowboy hat, blew in at times and rolled down her face, her neck and inside the opening of her coveralls, no matter how tightly she clutched them to her. It soaked through her sweater, her shirt, even her socks.

Yuck!

The sky lightened only marginally as they walked and, presumably, the sun came up somewhere above all the clouds and the rain.

She didn’t want to think of what might have happened if he hadn’t caught her in the mine. If she’d been inside the mine shaft alone when the storm hit, not knowing for sure what was going on, it would have been a long journey out of there alone. And an even longer night, either huddled alone against the rocks, scared half to death of the lightning or she might have even headed for the Jeep, might not have found it in the gloom, and then what would have happened to her?

Anything.

They trudged on, miserable, cold, wet.

She wondered if the cabin might have a primitive shower or even an old washtub. A bath was highly unlikely, she knew, but a woman could dream, couldn’t she?

A bath and then a nice warm bed with him.

That was a fantasy!

In the end, it took more than three hours. Three thoroughly miserable hours, but they made it. Paige didn’t see how he found his way, because the world seemed like a wet, foggy, miserable mess to her, but he led them right to a small cabin.

“Come on,” he said, opening the door for her.

She wanted nothing more than to get inside, but dug in her pack for her satellite phone instead. It was nearly six, and her brother had to be going crazy.

She huddled under the narrow overhang of the roof, pressed up against the side of the cabin and held up the phone. “I have to try to make a call before my brother shows up with the National Guard or something like that.”

He nodded. “I’ll start a fire. If you get through, I need to call the ranch, let ‘em know I’m okay and to get us when they can.”

“Fire!” That was what she heard. “Yes, please. A fire.”

He went inside, and she turned on the phone and dialed. There was a ton of static on the line, a couple of seconds when she thought she heard Blake, frantic and calling her name, and then nothing.

Finally, on the fourth try, she could hear him.

“Hey, sorry about that. I got caught in the storm, but I’m fine,” she yelled into the phone.

“What?”

“I’m fine!”

“Paige—”

“Out of the mine, taking shelter in a cabin. I’m fine.”

“Cabin?”

“Yes. I’m in a cabin. We’ll wait out the storm here. I’ll call as soon as I can. Don’t worry. And don’t do anything stupid, like send someone to get me. You’ll give our whole plan away. Blake? Blake—”

But he was gone. There was nothing but static now.

Oh, well. He got the important parts, she thought. She was safe, out of the mine, out of the storm, and he didn’t need to do anything.

Which would be incredibly hard for her big brother, but Paige had to hope that he’d sit tight.

She clicked off the phone and opened the door to the cabin to find no real light, just what she had from her own helmet lamp. Slowly panning the room, she saw a roughly made wooden bed in one corner, a giant fireplace, two chairs, shelves with dry stores of food, a sink and what she really, really hoped was a bathroom behind a door in a corner.

She was still standing on the threshold, literally dripping wet, when the door opened and out came her cowboy, already out of his wet clothes and into a pair of dry jeans, pulling on a dry flannel shirt.

“I’m afraid there’s no electricity, and I was making too much of a mess to do the fire first,” he said. “Stay where you are. I’ll bring dry clothes to you. Believe me, it’s going to be easier this way.”

She didn’t argue, feeling like a drowned rat and looking away, not wanting anyone, especially him, to see her looking this bad and grateful that there wasn’t much light in the cabin yet.

He came back a moment later with a pair of sweatpants and another flannel shirt, even a pair of men’s boxers.

“Best I have to offer,” he said. “Now, my advice to you would be to get naked right here at the door and drop your clothes where they are. Because there’s only one dry towel left, and I imagine you’d rather have it for yourself and not bring all the water and mud into the cabin.”

“Did you strip at the door?” she asked.

“No, I just wish I had.”

Paige laughed and motioned for him to turn around so she could start stripping. She’d do anything right then to be warm and dry.

He turned to the side and held up the towel between them. She didn’t think she’d ever taken her clothes off that quickly. Not that it was easy, since everything was heavy with water and her fingers were practically numb.

But she got them off, leaving them in a sopping pile on the floor in the doorway, then took the towel and wrapped it around herself.

He just grinned and handed her the dry clothes.

“Is that a real bathroom over there?” she asked.

“There’s no hot water, if that’s what you’re asking. But there is running water. Rainwater collection system on the roof, so there’s no shortage of water now. Some semblance of a shower, if you could stand the cold. But there is a toilet that flushes and everything.”

“That’s it. I’m in love with this place,” she said, heading across the room for the bathroom. “If there were dry socks somewhere, I’d be in heaven.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised.

“And a fire? Dry socks and a fire? You are my hero!”

“Simple girl, are you? Easy to please?”

“Today I am,” she promised, shutting herself into the tiny bathroom.

He’d found a candle in the bathroom and left it burning. The room was tiny, primitive, but clean. She rubbed herself down briskly, dismissed completely the idea of a cold shower right now. Maybe once he got a big fire going, she’d try it. For the moment, she hurried into the boxers, the sweatpants and the flannel shirt.

They felt fabulous. Better than any designer gown she’d ever tried on.

Then she went to work trying to squeeze what water she could out of her hair.

Finally, she wrapped it in the towel and went into the main room.

He had a fire just starting to burn in the giant stone fireplace and she knew they’d soon be warm, given how small the cabin was, once the fire really got going.

She sat down on the raised stone hearth, and her hero presented her with luxuriously thick, warm socks.

“Ahhh!” She moaned in pure ecstasy, then exclaimed, “That’s it. It’s official. I would do absolutely anything for you!”

“Red, I haven’t even made you a cup of hot coffee yet, but I’m about to. What is that gonna get me?”

“I don’t know. What do you want?”

“Well, if that fire was going and this place was even halfway warm, I’d have dried you off myself and not given you any clothes to wear. I’d have taken you straight to bed. But I was planning on being gentlemanly about it and warming the place up first, maybe getting some food in you, and then getting you naked. That was my plan.”

“That sounds like an absolutely glorious plan.”

Okay, just like that.

They had a plan.

A highly satisfying plan.

Travis figured there was only one other thing he absolutely had to do before hauling her off to bed, and that was to try to get hold of someone at the ranch house, just so they’d know he was okay and not waste time trying to find him.

He was sure they had better things to do right now, to make sure everything else on the ranch was okay. He could wait. He might be very happy waiting here with her, letting someone else take care of things for a change.

After all, how many times did he find himself stranded with a gorgeous, willing woman?

It was definitely a first for him. Years of good clean living and hard work were being rewarded right here, he decided. He deserved it and he intended to enjoy it. She would, too. He’d make sure of it.

But first, he took her satellite phone and dialed the ranch. Nothing but static greeted him, despite repeated attempts.

“Try it outside,” she suggested, warming herself by the fire, just starting to catch well and throw off some heat and light. “There’s just enough of an overhang on the roof to keep you dry, and point the antenna toward the mine. That’s where I finally found a signal.”

“Okay. Be right back, Red.”

He got outside. Lord, it was a miserable day out there, but he was smiling, whistling, even.

He did as she suggested and pointed the antenna toward the mine, and sure enough, there was something of a signal. His housekeeper, a fierce-looking, no-nonsense woman named Marta, answered.

At least, he thought it was her.

The line crackled with static.

“Marta, it’s Travis. I’m holed up in the hunting cabin near the Eagle Mine. I’m fine. Tell the men to see to the animals and not to worry about coming to get me until they can.”

She said something. He thought she got it. Then asked, “Everything okay there, Marta? Look, tell Jack that the creek near the mine is a roaring river right now, not to be in a hurry to try to cross it to get to me. I’m fine.”

He hoped she got that, because the static only got worse. He clicked off the phone and let it be.

He realized he hadn’t said anything about his pretty trespasser, but then, what was the point? Nobody there really needed to know, he reasoned.

It was his ranch, and he’d decide for himself what to do with her once they were out of here.

Travis sighed and looked out into the mess of the storm.

He intended to enjoy himself in what time they had here. They’d figure out the rest later.

She sat on the hearth and used the towel to dry her hair as best she could, then finger-combed it to get out the tangles and separate the strands in hopes it might dry faster.

The fire was soon roaring. With that and the light from the half-dozen candles that she found scattered around the room, she could finally see, after hours in the dark and the ghostly gloom. When she had a mug of hot coffee in her hand, her life was nearly complete.

Paige was so busy thinking about what was to come between them that it was only after he’d gone outside and then come back in that she remembered something she should have already discussed with him.

He really had her completely distracted, thinking only of how much she wanted to be curled up in that bed with him naked in his arms.

She looked up as he came back into the cabin, her thoughts warring between him and what she wanted from him, versus her own family and what she’d come here to do.

And she hated asking this of him, bringing this into it, but she had to. She looked up at him and said, “You didn’t tell anyone at the ranch what I was doing, did you?”

“No,” he said.

But he’d gone still by the doorway, staring at her.

When he stepped closer, into the fall of light from the roaring fire and the candles, she could finally really see him. Not like that glimpse she had through the binoculars when she’d quickly, guiltily looked away. No rain falling between them now, no fog, no storm and no darkness.

He was tall, his body lean and beautifully muscled, hair dark, eyes dark and unfathomable at the moment.

She felt a hint of uneasiness first, a sense that she was missing something, something important that was right in front of her.

“What is it?” she asked, thinking there was something familiar about him. “What’s wrong?”

He came close, taking a long strand of her hair in his hand and holding it out in front of the fire.

“It looked so much darker before. But in this light, it’s almost like gold,” he said. “A golden red.”

“Yes.” Again, she felt uneasy, and again, she wasn’t sure why.

Did he know who she was?

Was that why he was suddenly so wary? Maybe even angry?

Paige’s family was Texas’s version of royalty, wealthy and often in the spotlight. She and her sister had been in the society pages of the Dallas Morning News and all the bigger papers in the state since birth.

And the hair was often what gave her and her sister away.

Not many women had this combination of reddish-gold hair.

“We never got around to introducing ourselves last night, Red,” he said.

“No, we didn’t.” She hadn’t wanted to. Hadn’t wanted to lie to him and hadn’t wanted to tell him her name, just in case it meant something to him. And she’d been happy to think of him simply as her cowboy, a man she’d admired and met by chance. Nothing else. Finally, she found the courage to ask, “You know who I am?”

“Now that I see that hair clearly, oh, yeah,” he said. “I’m afraid I know.”

Well, if he’d lived on this ranch his whole life, she couldn’t be that surprised. The feud was the stuff of Texas legends. Any long-standing family war over good cattle land was enough to make a story last. Throw in priceless jewels and a high-stakes poker game and you got…a good old tall Texas tale.

“One of the twins is a jewelry designer. I’m guessing she wouldn’t hold up as well down in a mine. So you must be the scientist,” he concluded.

She nodded, really hoping he wouldn’t be too mad. “I’m Paige McCord.”

She held out her hand.

He didn’t.

“That’s great. Just great.” He swore, shook his head in disgust or maybe fury and finally said, “I’m Travis Foley.”

Chapter Five

She laughed despite herself, and said, “No, you’re not!”

He nodded, looking like a man not in the mood to be patient with her while she worked this out in her own head.

“You…you were riding around like some ranch hand, checking the fences, checking the livestock. I saw you.”

“You were watching me?” he asked incredulously.

“Of course I was. Did you think I’d just show up one day and head down into the mine? With no idea of whether anyone ever came that way? Whether I’d get caught? I watched you for the last three days. Doing the work of a regular ranch hand.”

“I’m a rancher. It’s what I do. I work the land.” He looked furious.

“You’re supposed to be in Dallas at some big family meeting,” she remembered.

“I didn’t feel like going to Dallas for another family meeting,” he said bitingly. “And you? You’re spying on me? And my ranch?”

“It’s not your ranch,” she reminded him.

And, oh, wow.

That was clearly the wrong thing to say.

He looked like he might strangle her right there where she sat. He was breathing hard, towering over her, looking like he might grab her by her hair and throw her out right then and there.

But he didn’t.

He just glowered at her.

“No, it’s not my ranch. Believe me, your family would never let mine forget that. You probably wouldn’t understand this, but the thing is, a man works a piece of land every day, sweats over it, bleeds over it, takes care of it like it was his, he starts to get ideas he shouldn’t have—”

“That’s not what I meant,” she claimed. “I mean…I know you must…care about the place—”

“Care about it?” He laughed, still furious. “I care about what I have for dinner some nights, whether the Cowboys win a football game, whether it’s going to rain or be sunny. What I feel for this ranch is a helluva lot more than care.”

“Yes. Okay.” She got to her feet, tired of him towering over her, though in truth, he still did even when she was standing. “I’m sorry—”

“So for you to just waltz in here like your family owns the place, which I suppose you think you do, and head down into that mine, like you think you own that, too, to try to find that stupid diamond—”

“Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry—”

“To give me that I’m-just-a-grad-student routine? That it’s-the-chance-of-a-lifetime routine?” He took her chin in his hand, getting right up in her face and holding her there, glaring at her. “You lie really well, Red.”

She shoved him away hard, and then nearly tripped over the stone hearth of the fireplace as she backed away from him.

He swore, reached out to grab her to keep her from falling.

“You really didn’t know it was me?” he demanded, his grip on her nearly tight enough to hurt.

“No. Of course not. I told you. I thought you were just a ranch hand. I thought—”

“What?” he demanded.

“Nothing—” She was blushing, just thinking of what she thought. That he was a beautiful man. A beautiful, ordinary man. And of what she’d wanted from him, what she’d let him do.

Oh, Lord, what she’d let him do…

What she’d planned for them to do once they got here…

She swallowed hard, thinking for a moment of all she’d lost in this instant. Glad it hadn’t gone any further between them, and yet…

She couldn’t believe he was one of the Foleys.

Paige had been introduced to him, of course. A girl didn’t move in the upper echelon of Texas society for her whole life without being introduced to the Foleys, even if her family had been feuding with them since the Civil War.

So they’d no doubt exchanged icily polite, icily brief handshakes at various social functions over the years, charity balls, the governor’s mansion, that sort of thing.

There were three brothers, something of a mixed set, all young, wealthy, arrogant and good-looking. In her mind, she could see them standing in a row in black tuxedoes and starched white shirts, looking for all the world like they owned everything they surveyed.

She’d never really been that interested in the feud, in perpetuating it or ending it, had just grown up on tales of how terribly his family had treated hers and been happy to keep her distance from him and the entire clan.

So she’d shook his hand a time or two when forced to do so in the name of good manners and not having any interest in causing a scene.

She really hadn’t paid that much attention to the whole brood until her mother’s terrible secret had come out this summer.

That her mother had once loved his father, Rex Foley. Her curiosity had driven her to the Internet and the photos she could find. She’d skipped right over the brothers and zeroed in on the father instead.

His father had slept with her mother and fathered a child with her. Paige’s little brother, Charlie.

How could that be?

She still couldn’t quite believe it, couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t…

And all that time she’d been glaring at pictures of Rex Foley, trying to understand, trying to see something of her little brother in him and wondering how it was that they’d managed to keep that secret all these years, how no one had known…

All that time, she should have been looking at the Foley brothers, arming herself, protecting herself against what was to come.

Then she might have known, she might have recognized him from the first. It was just that every time in the past when she’d met him he’d been in a tuxedo, all polished manners and cool, sophisticated charm, dismissive as could be of anyone in her family and disapproving, as well. And while that arrogance might work for some women, Paige had grown up with men like that.

It was old hat to her, a nice-looking man in a tuxedo who acted like he owned the world.

Men like that really didn’t do a thing for her.

They just didn’t seem real.

That man working the ranch, checking the mine, catching her there…He’d seemed interesting and very real.

So different from any version of Travis Foley she’d ever seen.

Sweaty, a little dirty, in worn jeans and well-worn boots.

A working man.

Real.

Right now he was also furious.

“What?” she asked, lost in her thoughts.

“Before, you said you thought I was a ranch hand, that I was…What? What were you going to say?”

That it would be nice to have someone who looked like you walk right into my life. That I was lonely. That I hadn’t had anyone special in my life for a long time and…And…

Oh, God. What did it matter now?

It could never be.

He was Travis Foley.

“I thought you looked like a nice guy,” she told him, laughing with as much disgust as she could muster. “How ridiculous is that?”

That seemed to satisfy him for the moment. They retreated to opposite corners of the small room, him leaving her by the fire to get warm while he brooded in the corner by the bed.

A single bed, maybe a single and a half, if there was such a thing.

Paige looked away. She had to forget what happened between them the night before, just completely erase it from her mind. It didn’t mean anything, and really, it was nothing. A little flirtation, a little…more than flirting.

Cuddling, kissing, his big, warm body rocking erotically against hers, and all those promises of so much more to come.

Her face burned at the memory.

And then she had a terrible thought.

She got up and glared at him. “You really didn’t know?”

“Know what?” he said, his tone biting.

“That it was me? That I was a McCord?”

“No.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him, although when she thought about it, she honestly wasn’t sure how it would have benefited him to lie about it, to pretend. To flirt with her the way he had, and to get her pants off of her and yet still not take it all the way.

Why be a nice guy at that point? If he was looking to just…mess with her head or her body or…

No, it didn’t make any sense.

“Red, if I’d wanted you last night, I could have had you a half a dozen times by now, and you know it. So don’t go playing the outraged, violated woman with me. It won’t fly.”

Okay. He could have. And they both knew it.

“Then, I don’t understand,” she said.

“Understand what?”

Who he was?

Who that man last night had been?

He stared at her from across the room, still angry, but looking more than a little confused now, uneasy, suspicious and maybe even a little vulnerable.

“Nothing. Forget it. I…It doesn’t matter now,” she said.

He was a Foley. His father had been involved with her mother years ago, fathered a child with her and then walked away. What kind of man was he? What kind of man was the son?

She’d gotten her heart and her ego bruised more than once, and then she’d developed a healthy distrust for men in general, which she’d totally ignored with this man.

What a time to let down that sense of caution.

From outside, the wind came up in a gust that sounded more like a roar. The cabin walls literally shook from the force of it, and the rain kept pounding down.

They ignored each other as best they could for most of the day. He built the fire up until it was roaring. She emptied a few cans of beef stew into a heavy metal pot that hung from a hook over the fire and cooked until it smelled heavenly.

Something about cooking over an open fire and being hungry made it even taste that good.

He was coldly polite, thanking her for the meal, making sure she knew how to hang the pot over the fire and get it off without burning herself, and then keeping to himself on the side of the room farthest from the fire.

Every now and then he went outside, pacing along the side of the cabin under the tiny overhang and staring at the storm.

By nightfall, she’d cleaned the whole place, for lack of anything better to do, fixed another meal of canned ravioli and finished one of only three books she’d found in nooks and crannies in the cabin. A paperback mystery about a wealthy woman whose husband stole every dime she had and ran off, very nearly never to be found again.

It was perfect for her mood right now, when she was thinking you really could never trust a man.

And then she decided she might as well get ready for bed, something she’d been dreading, because there was only one.

She hesitated, not sure what he intended.

From behind her, she heard him say, “Go ahead. Take the bed. I’ll sleep by the fire.”

“On the floor?”

“We slept on the ground last night, Red, and did just fine.”

Yes, they had. Still, she didn’t want him to be nice or gentlemanly or anything like that. “You’ll get cold,” she said.

“Won’t be the first time, won’t be the last. And tonight we’ve got a fire.”

She nodded, not turning around, not wanting to look at him or to think of what she’d expected this night to be. It was ridiculous, anyway. To think she’d waltz onto the ranch and find this man who did nothing but work the land, an ordinary, hardworking man who wouldn’t know about her family’s money and power and even if he did, wouldn’t care.

Just a man who would get all tangled up in her, practically on sight.

And it was absolutely the last thing she needed to be thinking about right now, with her family absolutely going crazy and their jewelry store empire in some serious financial difficulties, her trapped here with the enemy, caught red-handed trying to steal a priceless diamond right out from under his nose.

Oh, her family would claim ownership if she found it, but it would be a legal fight that could last years, and she’d be painted as a thief by his family. But in the end, she thought her family would prevail, and his would say the diamond was one more thing stolen from the Foleys by the McCords.

All that between them, plus her mother’s affair with his father, the child it had produced…

Don’t be stupid, Paige. Forget about the man. You have to.

Because he didn’t exist anywhere except inside her fantasies anyway.

She climbed into the bed. It was cold but quite comfortable. Either that or she was exhausted, if not from the previous day and night, from the emotions of this whole ordeal.

He knew who she was, and he knew what she’d come here for. Which meant she’d failed in a mission to help her family through a difficult time financially.

It was one problem her family had right now that she’d thought she could actually solve. Not the thing with her mother or Rex Foley or her brother, but the money part. She’d been willing to head into an old, long-abandoned mine alone to do it. She wasn’t stupid. She’d known the risks and been willing to take it for the sake of her family.

And she’d failed.

So, the stores were in some trouble, her mother had a thing for Rex Foley, and Charlie…

Poor Charlie.

She feared she’d just made things worse for him.

Travis stretched out in front of the fire and listened to her toss and turn and sigh for as long as he could stand it, then finally turned toward her and barked out, “What is it?”

She gave a start, reminding him of the way she’d done that at each big bolt of lightning.

“Sorry,” she said. “I…there’s just so much, I don’t even know where to start.”

“You want back in the mine?” he guessed, because he knew eventually she’d get around to trying to talk him into that.

Even now, caught red-handed, she thought she could somehow charm her way back inside, thinking to steal one more thing from his family?

Unbelievable!

Women!

A man just couldn’t trust them.

Just this past summer, Travis’s own brother, Zane, had gone nuts over his little girl Olivia’s nanny, and Travis had known right away that woman was hiding something. It hadn’t taken more than a couple of phone calls to find out Melanie Grandy hadn’t always been a nanny. She’d worked as a Las Vegas showgirl. Travis didn’t know if Zane knew about that or not, and in the end, he’d decided to leave it alone, thinking they’d work it out. It wasn’t like the woman had been a stripper or a call girl.

But now, being reminded himself of just how manipulative women could be, Travis was wondering if he’d done the right thing. He could probably use someone like Zane right now to remind him not to get stupid over a pretty, scheming woman.

“Go ahead,” he urged Miss Paige McCord. “Tell me why I should let you back into that mine.”

“No, it’s not the mine,” she insisted. “I mean…yes, I want back in it, but, no, that’s not what I was talking about a second ago. It was…I wondered if I could talk to you about just one thing without…well, maybe without this whole lifelong family feud getting in the way of it?”

“Considering the fact that everything between your family and mine started there and is colored by that, I don’t see how, Red.”

“Yes. I know. You’re right. I’m just…None of it’s his fault—”

“His fault?”

“Charlie. My little brother…Your…You know about Charlie, right?”

Okay, that surprised him.

And that particular wound was still raw and festering.

He didn’t really know how he felt about having a twenty-one-year-old half brother he’d known nothing about until a few weeks ago.

While he might disagree with his brothers about a lot of things, how they lived their lives, what was important to them, things like that, they were and always would be brothers. They were tight. They were family, and he’d have walked through fire for any of them anytime they needed it.

So to know that there was a fourth Foley brother out there somewhere, who’d never been one of them…

It was just wrong.

Who’d been a McCord instead.

“Yes,” he admitted. “My father told us about Charlie.”

His father was still reeling from the news himself. His father, steady as a rock, raise-three-boys-alone-after-his-wife-died kind of steady, absolutely reeling.

Travis didn’t think anything in this world could have shaken his father like that particular bit of news.

“It’s just that…Charlie’s special,” Paige said. “He’s great. He’s sweet. He’s kind. He’s happy. Like a puppy, just kind of silly and goofy. Everybody loves him. And he’s so young. I don’t…I can’t stand the idea of him getting hurt in all this.”

Travis got up and came to stand over her, hands on his hips, furious all over again. “And you think my father and my brothers and I are going to hurt him?”

“I don’t know.” She sat up in the bed, covers falling to her waist, her hair tumbling everywhere. “I have no idea how you’re going to treat him or what you think about him. I can still hardly believe it’s true. That he’s your father’s son and not my father’s.”

Travis frowned. Okay. He had to admit what she’d just said was likely true, because he wasn’t completely sure how he felt about the whole thing, either. How could anyone be? It was all too strange, too new.

“If I could just…I know you don’t owe me anything,” she said. “I know I don’t have the right to ask anything of you, but you’re here and we spent some time together before…before anything about our families got in the way, and…Well, I think you can be a nice man, when you want to be. And I’m asking you, please…Charlie wants to meet your father…his father. I assume at some point he’ll want to meet you and your brothers… Could you just be kind? Please?”

Kind?

What the hell did she think of them? That they were a pack of wolves? That they’d eat him alive?

And yet, he could hear that her concern was genuine and that, for all he could see, she loved her younger brother very much.

“Answer a question for me, Red. How did your father treat him?”

She looked for a minute like…like it had been bad…maybe everything Travis feared. He’d always heard Devon McCord was an ass.

He swore, sat down on the edge of the cot and grabbed her by the arms, holding her there in front of him, not letting her look away. “No. Tell me. He hurt him?” That one question burned a hole in Travis’s gut when he let himself think about it.

She looked confused, surprised, hurt herself. “No.”

“The guy’s always been rumored to have a nasty temper. Ask anybody, and not the people in my family who were taught from birth to hate him. Anybody. They’ll tell you he was a big, tough, mean son of a bitch. So tell me. Tell me right now. Did he hit that kid? Did he hit Charlie?”

“No,” she said.

“Swear it,” he demanded, right up in her face. “Right now. It’s…I need to know, Red. I need to know no one hurt him like that when no one in my family even knew he was a Foley, and none of us were there to protect him. Because he’s family and we don’t leave each other alone to face something like that. It just isn’t right.”

“No, he didn’t hit us.”

“Maybe not you or your sister, but what about your brothers? And if he knew Charlie wasn’t his—”

“He didn’t know,” she said. “I’m almost certain he didn’t. Charlie was just so easy to like. To love. For my father, too. I don’t think there’s any way he knew Charlie wasn’t his.”

“Okay.” Then he realized he’d been manhandling her himself, trying to make her sit there and look him in the eye and tell him the truth.

He still had her by the arms in a hold that wouldn’t allow any kind of escape from him.

And he’d gotten too close to her again.

He let his hands drop and eased back away from her as she scooted back on the bed to sit up against the headboard, looking wary and surprised and not quite sure what to do with herself or to say to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She shrugged off his words, like they didn’t really matter, like none of it did and let her head fall until he saw nothing more than a curtain of red-gold curls and all that made him worry even more.

Travis swore and shook his head in disgust. “Did I hurt you, Red?”

“No. It’s just…grabbing me like that and acting like you’d shake the truth out of me, if you had to? That was something my father did.”

Her father, and now him?

That was perfect.

Just perfect.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

Now he felt like an absolute ass.

“Travis?” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m glad you care enough about Charlie to want to be sure my father didn’t hurt him like that. I’m glad you want to look out for him, the way brothers do. That means a lot to me. I want that for Charlie, because I love him. And I’m glad there’s at least one bit of family business we agree on. Charlie. That none of this is his fault.”

“It’s not. I know that,” he told her.

“So maybe my family isn’t as different from yours as we thought.”

He scoffed at that.

Not because he thought it wasn’t true, but because he didn’t need to be sitting here finding common ground with her, finding reasons to like her. It was the last thing he needed to be doing.

And it didn’t help any that he was sitting on her bed, late at night, the two of them absolutely alone, with him having to keep reminding himself of exactly who she was, to keep from remembering what he’d planned to be doing with her in this cabin, in this bed tonight.

It didn’t help either that he’d put his hands on her, even in anger, for a moment. And it was even worse now, when it wasn’t anger that was driving him on, but the need to go to her again, this time to make sure she was okay, to comfort her, wishing he could forget everything that stood between them.

Get up, he told himself sternly. Get up and get out of here, before you make it any worse.

But he didn’t listen.

Chapter Six

He put his hands on her again, same place as before, this time as gentle as he could be, rubbing slowly with his thumbs at the soft flesh of her inner arms. She looked wary, but she let him.

“I’m truly sorry,” he said. “I don’t treat women that way. It’s just that…ever since I heard about Charlie, I couldn’t help but worry and wonder…what it was like for him, growing up a McCord.”

She gave him a look that just about had him on his knees. A look that said she understood completely and could forgive, not that he felt he deserved it.

“No one in my family wants to hurt him,” Travis promised her.

She hung her head. He saw tears falling down one perfect, pale cheek and a curtain of red-gold hair shielding the rest of her from view. She shivered a bit.

He had to remind himself he didn’t get to keep her warm tonight, that the time when he was welcome to do that was long over. “What is it, Red?”

“I don’t see how Charlie’s ever going to belong anywhere now. Not with the way things are between your family and mine.”

Honestly, Travis didn’t either.

Paige shivered, and Travis had to get up or he was going to take her in his arms, despite all the reasons he’d told himself he couldn’t.

He pulled the covers up around her and eased her back down onto the bed, while she looked up at him, her eyes sad and full of regrets. He let himself touch her in one small way, a hand to her cheek, wiping away those tears, and then she looked even sadder. All sad eyes and tears and that glorious hair spread out on a pillow in a bed in a cabin with him and no one else around for miles.

He wondered what she’d do if he kissed her right then, if she longed for the way it had been between them the night before. If she wished they hadn’t been careful or cautious. He could have done anything to her that night, and she would have let him. He knew it.

But it was cold and wet, and the ground was hard, and she was just so soft and feminine, her body yielding completely to his. Not the kind of woman a man had on a bed of solid rock.

He’d wanted something better for her for their first time together, time, a soft bed, a fire and roof over their heads.

But mostly…time.

He’d been sure they’d have it, couldn’t foresee anything that would keep them from having that time.

What a fool he’d been.

And now he’d always wonder what it would have been like, despite who she was and who her family was.

“I’m going to build up the fire. Just go to sleep. One of the ranch hands will likely come for us by midday, and we’ll go to the ranch house and…I don’t know, Paige. I don’t know what we’ll do from there. Get your Jeep for you and…I don’t know.”

Let her go? Just like that? No. He didn’t want to do that. But what choice did he have? Forget about her? He didn’t think he could.

“I just don’t know,” he said again, then turned back to the fire, made himself lie down and stare at it, not at her, until at some point he finally fell asleep.

Someone walked into the cabin at first light.

Travis got up, sore from a night spent on a floor that was just a tad more comfortable than the rock he’d slept on the first night, and there stood Calvin Waters, a man who’d been working the ranch since Travis was a kid.

“Sorry, Boss,” he said. “You said to take care of the animals first, and we did. Just took a little longer than we thought, and then—”

He broke off as Paige rose from the bed on the other side of the room, looking all rumpled and sleepy and gorgeous in the morning light, her hair like pure fire, a curly, sexy mess.

Travis thought he heard Cal swear in utter appreciation and could have done the same himself.

Cal turned to Travis and shot him a look that said, What the hell are you doing on the floor when you’ve got someone like her in the bed?

Travis shot back his own look that said, Don’t say a word.

Cal nodded. “I didn’t bring enough horses. Didn’t know you had company.”

“We got caught in the storm together,” Travis said. “Paige, this is Calvin Waters. He knows more about the history of the ranch than anyone, because he’s about a hundred years old and I don’t think he’s lived a day anywhere but here. Cal, this is Paige.”

He deliberately left off the last name, because that would cause a stir throughout the ranch, and he didn’t want to answer any questions about her, especially since he had no answers where she was concerned.

“Hello, Mr. Waters,” Paige said, giving him a polite smile.

“Oh, ma’am, it’s just Cal. Glad to see you two found some shelter. It’s a helluva storm out there. Let up a little this morning, but it’s still miserable.” Then he turned to Travis. “I only have my horse and yours. Want me to go back to the ranch and—”

“No.” He wouldn’t put Cal or the horses through the extra trip. “Paige and I will be fine on Murph.”

He told her to get her things together and put her coveralls on. That would keep some of the rain off of her. He took care of the fire and soon they were outside.

The rain had let up, but had by no means stopped. They stood under the narrow overhang, and the horse came up to Travis and nudged him in the shoulder.

“I think he missed you,” Paige said.

“No, he’s reminding me that he was smart enough to know that storm was coming and I wasn’t.”

Paige laughed and fussed over the horse, rubbing his nose. “Smart and beautiful, then. Good for you.”

“We’re going to have to ride double, and we’re going to get wet one more time,” Travis told her. “But at the end of this trip is a real bathtub with a huge hot water tank and it won’t matter if we did lose power. We’ve got a generator. So you’ll be warm, and you can have a hot meal, too.”

“Sounds heavenly,” she told him.

No, not quite, he thought, remembering that first night with her. But it was as good as things were going to get, he feared.

He climbed aboard Murph, eased back as far as he could in the saddle and then reached for her, holding out his right hand and a booted foot.

“I assume you know how to ride?”

She gave him a look of mock outrage.

“Just making sure. Put your foot on top of mine, and don’t be afraid to step down hard to lift yourself up. Take my hand with both of yours, and we’ll swing you up into the saddle, sideways in front of me.”

“I can do it,” she said. And ended up making it look easy, or maybe as if she rode double with him all the time.

It meant she was practically in his lap. He eased her against his chest, trying to ignore how that felt, and Cal handed him a blanket from the cabin that he wrapped around her. They were still going to get wet but hopefully it would offer some protection.

Cal mounted his horse and off they went, making slow but steady progress through the rain, the whole world gray and gloomy, Travis feeling that way himself, save for the fact that he had her in his arms.

It was a sad day when a man was grateful to be riding through a cold, driving rain just because it gave him one more chance to hold a woman in his arms.

But that was the shape he was in.

Grateful, despite the cold and the rain, and annoyed as hell at her whole family and his.

Paige huddled against him inside her blanket, rain finding a way to get inside, running cold down into her clothes and finding flesh. Which only made her try to get even closer to him.

She fought it. She really did.

She told herself all the reasons she couldn’t have anything else to do with him, and that she really didn’t know him and she shouldn’t trust him. She planned that she’d be gone from here soon, and then it would be hard to believe she ever even considered…doing anything with him.

Anything else, she reminded herself. She’d already done more than enough.

It was just that, this close to him, when she closed her eyes against the misery of the cold and the rain, she tended to remember only that she was curled up against him, absorbing the heat of him, taking shelter in his arms. And despite knowing better, eventually her thoughts kept turning to that first night with him. How kind he’d been, how gentle, and how those big, hot hands of his had moved so slowly, relentlessly over every inch of her.

Teasing and teasing and teasing, until she just went mad in his arms.

Most men were in such a hurry these days. They’d forgotten how to tease and tempt and take a woman to the point where she was insane to have them.

He’d made her nearly insane with it.

The only thing that had made her wait, in the end, was knowing they would be together and that it would be all the sweeter for the wait.

How was she supposed to ignore that when she was this close to him?

He was the only thing warm in the world, his body swaying against hers, beneath hers, from the motion of the horse, his arm holding her fast, his heartbeat thudding beneath her ear. She was cold, and her whole body ached, and she just wanted to forget all of that. The memory that kept playing through her mind was of him kissing, stroking, teasing her.

“Almost there,” he said, his mouth practically pressed against her ear, warm breath leaving her shivering, and not from the cold.

If she reached up and kissed him, took that warm mouth of his with hers, she wondered what he’d do. If he’d push her away or if that would be enough for her to know he was thinking of that night as much as she was, that maybe he had the same regrets, impossible as anything was between them.

She wanted him to have those regrets, she decided, pointless as that was. She just needed to know he felt the same way she did.

It is pointless, she reminded herself. Absolutely pointless.

The ride seemed interminable, impossible, and then finally, finally, they came to a stop.

She lifted her head and realized they were at the door to a house, his house, she suspected. He’d ridden right up to the door.

“Let me get down first, okay? And then I’ll help you.”

She nodded, immediately feeling the cold so much more as he lifted himself up and off the horse.

“Now, just slide down. I’ve got you.”

She did, but her legs were numb from the cold and buckled the moment she hit the ground. The only thing that kept her from landing in a heap in the mud was him.

He caught her hard against him once more, and she couldn’t even manage to help hold herself up by hanging on to him.

“It’s okay, Red,” he said, adjusting his grip and then lifting her into his arms.

He said something to Cal about the horses, and the next thing she knew, she was being carried inside, dripping wet, into a mudroom where a stern-looking older woman, probably his housekeeper, started fussing over her and him.

He put her down in a hard wooden chair, took off her muddy boots and sopping wet socks, took away her big, wet blanket from the cabin, then reached for the zipper on her coveralls.

His housekeeper put a big, fluffy towel into her hands and then helped her dry off her face a bit and get the worst of the moisture from her hair.

Paige’s own hands were trembling so badly, she wasn’t much help at all.

“Marta,” he said. “Why don’t you go run a hot bath in my bathroom. I’ll bring her up in a minute.”

He’d gotten her coveralls unzipped as far as he could with her sitting down, then took a moment to pull off his own boots, wipe the water from his face and the worst of it from his hair.

“Your bathroom?” she asked, even her voice trembling from the cold.

“Biggest bathtub in the house, Red. Looks like a fancy horse trough, but it’s made of cast iron, extra long and deep. Trust me. It holds heat like nothing you’ve ever been in. You’re gonna love it. You’ll never want to get out.”

She gave him a wet, weary smile.

“Come on. Up on your feet.” He took her by the hand and drew her up. Her legs were kind of working again as he stripped her of her coveralls, left the rest of her wet clothes on her and lifted her into his arms again.

It wasn’t necessary, she thought, fairly certain she could walk as far as his bathroom.

Still, it wasn’t like she ever expected to be in his arms again.

She let her head fall to his chest once more, gave herself up to his gentle care. A few moments later, he set her down in a bathroom, big and modern and thoroughly masculine.

“We work hard here, Red,” he said, as if he could read her mind. “Muscles get sore, they ache. Warm water helps.”

She looked from the tub to him. She went to try to unbutton the flannel shirt she wore and mostly just fumbled with it, her hands still cold and clumsy.

He watched her do it, standing still in front of her, his face growing more and more grim with every passing second. Then he groaned and came to her, his hands replacing hers.

“I won’t look,” he said.

He turned her around, putting her back to him, reached around her and unbuttoned those buttons with the same no-nonsense kind of approach he might have used to undo his own shirt buttons.

He left the shirt on her, but reached up under it in back to undo her bra, then found the string tie of her borrowed sweatpants and undid them, too, while she stood there, mute, still shaking, not feeling anything but grateful for his tender, very thorough care.

He slid the borrowed pants and her borrowed boxers down a bit, then put an arm around her waist and lifted her against him and up off the floor, while he worked her pants and boxers off. Before she knew it, she was back standing on the floor in a long, flannel shirt that hung at least halfway down her thighs.

“There you go. I didn’t see a thing,” he said. “Think you can handle it from here?”

She nodded, then turned sideways and said, “Travis?”

He kept his eyes on her face, while she clutched the ends of that shirt together in front of her.

“Thank you.”

“I’d say anytime, Red, but…well…”

“I know,” she said.

“So, I’m going to walk out this door. Right now. Lock it behind me.”

And then he was gone.

She locked the door with a trembling hand, slipped out of her shirt and her bra and into that blissfully warm tub.

Warmth slowly seeped into her cold body—life, heat finally.

She let her head fall back against the tub, her whole body immersed in blessed warmth.

He was right. This was a fabulous tub, about two feet deep and more than long enough for her to stretch out in. She let the tub fill almost to the brim, then cut off the water, rolled up a towel and put it over the rim to cushion her neck. She leaned back in absolute bliss and decided this was the best bath she’d ever had in her life.

She could have thoroughly enjoyed it if she had been able to think of anything but him. How kind he was mostly, how tenderly and gently he’d taken care of her, like she was the most precious thing in the world to him.

Which she wasn’t. She knew it.

So that kindness, the tenderness, the care…That was just…Who he was? A part of him?

Travis Foley?

No one would ever believe her if she tried to tell anyone that. At least, no one she knew.

Yet she couldn’t imagine anyone taking better care of her.

Paige let her eyes drift closed as her muscles went slack and soft from the heat. The bathroom smelled faintly of him, a hint of spices and some indefinable thing she’d smelled when she had had her face pressed against his skin.

It was blissfully warm, the first time she’d truly been warm in days.

Her body was slowly coming back to life, her mind was filled with lazy, sensual thoughts of him. Him somewhere in this house, stripping off his wet clothes. He’d be impatient, methodical, almost mechanical, and she thought under the circumstances he’d opt for a quick, hot shower.

She groaned, imagining what he’d look like stepping into a shower, the sight of the water running down his sun-browned skin, all those lovely muscles and that dark hair on his head and his chest.

She could see his hands, lathered with soap, running impatiently up and down his body, and then see him stepping out of the shower, unselfconsciously, gloriously naked.

She wished she could be there to dry him off, taking her time, being as careful with him as he’d been with her and then pressing her body to his.

He’d kiss her hungrily, as he had that night on the ground near the mine with the storm raging, and there wouldn’t be any reason to hold back.

They were safe and warm in his house, behind a locked door, and they could shut out the world if they wanted to.

She groaned, her body remembering everything.

How was she going to forget?

Travis was just outside the door, having taken a quick shower, dressed and come back with some clothes Marta had found that might fit Paige.

He’d been getting ready to knock when he heard a soft, sexy groan from inside that stopped him cold.

“Ah, God,” he muttered, leaning his forehead against the closed door, thinking he could happily beat his head against the wall right now to stop thinking the things he was thinking, wanting the things he wanted.

All that subtle sexual tension of the ride here, carrying her inside, undressing without trying to do anything but simply undress her and get her into that tub so she could warm up. Honestly, he’d tried so hard to do nothing but that, to not make her feel uncomfortable in any way. And the whole time, he’d kept fighting the feeling that she was every bit as aware of him as he was of her. He’d thought that, but he hadn’t done anything about it.

And now, this one, small, sexy sound from her, and he knew he was right. She felt just the same.

It had been sweet torture, having her in his arms today, having her here in his house now, in his room, in his bathtub.

He’d never be able to use the room again without thinking of her there.

“I brought you some clothes,” he said. “I’ll leave them in the bedroom.”

“Okay,” she said softly.

Then he made himself go on. “There’s still a lot of work to be done around the ranch, to make sure the cattle are safe. I’m going out with some of the ranch hands. I’ll probably be gone all day.”

Yes, he’d just run away.

It had to be better than being here with her.

“All right,” she said, like she didn’t want him to leave her.

Damn.

“Just make yourself at home. There’s a library off the den, all kinds of books, a spare computer that Marta uses sometimes hooked up to the Internet by satellite, if it’s working right now. There’s music, a TV, movies…Whatever you want. I’ll see you tonight.”

“You’re going to trust me, here in your house? After you caught me trespassing on your property?” she asked.

“I don’t see that I have a choice. It’s not like I can call the sheriff to come get you. He couldn’t get here anyway, and I’m sure he has more important problems to deal with right now.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“And I’m more worried about the cattle and the ranch than anything you might find in this house. There really isn’t anything to find that I think would help your family against mine. Much as you like to think the entire Foley clan is out to get you and your family, always hatching some new plot against you, we’re not always doing that. I don’t have the time, even if I wanted to. I work a cattle ranch, Red. So I’ll see you tonight.”

And then he had to think of a way to get rid of her somehow.

He had to get her back to her vehicle and get her off this ranch, before he did something he couldn’t take back, something they’d both regret in time.

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