The Texan′s Contested Claim: The Texan′s Contested Claim / The Greek Tycoon′s Secret Heir
The Texan's Contested Claim: The Texan's Contested Claim / The Greek Tycoon's Secret Heir
Katherine Garbera
Peggy Moreland
The Texan’s Contested Claim Peggy Moreland Billionaire Garret Miller had arrived in Texas under false pretences. He told innkeeper Ali Moran that his stay was strictly business. But the high-powered businessman’s true agenda was to uncover all of Ali’s secrets…and use them to his advantage…The Greek Tycoon’s Secret Heir Katherine Garbera Ava Monroe has always longed for Christos Theakis to propose marriage. But lethally attractive Christos’s demand is not for Ava – he wants custody of her son. A child he believes to be his brother’s. Ava joins the shipping magnate on his lush Greek island home, hoping to prove that she never betrayed him!
The Texan’s Contested Claimby Peggy Moreland
This house had always been Ali’s home, her refuge. Yet now, as she moved from room to room, she felt nothing but emptiness.
She blamed her sadness on being forced to leave. But she knew the true cause of it was the man who had briefly shared the house with her.
The scent of him still hung in her bedroom, a reminder of that first night he’d come to her there. And when she curled up to sleep, she envisioned him braced above her there, in her bed.
She shrugged away the troubling thoughts and went back to packing.
And if she had to wipe away an occasional tear, she blamed it on the dust she was stirring up. It certainly wasn’t because she was missing Garrett Miller.
She told herself she hadn’t fallen in love with him, but she had – and he’d deceived her.
The Greek Tycoon’s Secret Heirby Katherine Garbera
“We need to talk.”
Such arrogance. She used to find it attractive. Oh, who was she kidding, she still did. There was something about a man who knew what he wanted and made no bones about it.
“Yes, we do,” Ava said, trying to project a little arrogance of her own.
Christos arched an eyebrow at her. He said nothing more, and the silence built around them. Ava brushed her hands down the sides of her skirt and told herself she wasn’t still the small-town girl he’d once seduced. But she felt like she was.
She tried to figure out what to say, but all the words running around in her head sounded banal. Best to be blunt.
“So…why are you here?”
“To claim your son, the Theakis heir.”
The Texan’s Contested Claim
PEGGY MORELAND
The Greek Tycoon’s Secret Heir
KATHERINE GARBERA
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
THE TEXAN’S CONTESTED CLAIM
by
Peggy Moreland
Dear Reader,
This story centres on Ali Moran – twin sister of Jase Calhoun, the hero from The Texan’s Secret Past – and Garrett Miller, founder and owner of Future Concepts, a billion-dollar computer company. Their story opens on the first day of January, the perfect time for all new beginnings. Ali and Garrett are the epitome of the odd couple, as she is creative, warm and friendly, and he is…well, he’s a geek. A wealthy and handsome geek, but a geek nonetheless.
January is one of my favourite months – and not because of the weather! I really, really hate being cold! But I do like what January represents. For me, it’s a new beginning, a chance to re-evaluate my life and steer it in the direction I want it to take, making any necessary changes – as well as a few resolutions I may or may not keep.
I hope you enjoy this last book in my series, and I hope you’ll take the time to jot down a few resolutions of your own for the New Year. And make sure the first one is to fill your year with romance!
Happy New Year!
Peggy
PEGGY MORELAND
published her first romance in 1989 and continues to delight readers with stories set in her home state of Texas. Peggy is a winner of a National Readers’ Choice Award, a nominee for Romantic TimesBOOKreviews Reviewer’s Choice Award and a two-time finalist for a prestigious RITA® Award, and her books frequently appear on bestseller lists. When not writing, Peggy can usually be found outside, tending the cattle, goats and other creatures on the ranch she shares with her husband. You may write to Peggy at PO Box 1099, Florence, TX 76527-1099, USA, or e-mail her at peggy@peggymoreland.com.
Without avid readers, where would an
author be? Over the last eighteen-plus years,
I’ve received thousands of letters and e-mails
from readers all over the world, who were kind
enough to take the time to write and tell me how
much they enjoy my books. To each and every
one of you, I dedicate this book.
One
To Garrett Miller, timing was everything, both in business and in life.
And the timing on his trip to Austin, Texas, couldn’t be more perfect.
His number one goal in making the trip was to reunite his stepmother with Ali Moran, the daughter she’d given up for adoption thirty years prior. If that failed, he intended to persuade—or coerce, if necessary—Ali to give him the missing portion of the deed she held, which would enable his stepmother and her new husband to fulfill the requirements to claim a ranch they had been given.
As fate would have it, he also needed to locate property for an expansion he was planning for his company. Since Austin was quickly establishing itself as the Silicon Valley of the Southwest, it seemed the natural choice and gave him the perfect excuse to make the trip.
The kick was, he had to accomplish it all without anyone discovering he was in Austin.
Scowling, he punched in the code for the electronic gate of Vista Bed and Breakfast, given to his secretary when she booked his reservation. If he’d known success would make him so damn popular with the media, he would’ve remained a geek for the rest of his life and never started Future Concepts. Who would’ve thought the public would care about a businessman’s every move?
Or that success would make him a target for some crazy who wanted him dead?
He shoved the disturbing thought from his mind as he drove through the open gates. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, he reminded himself, Garrett Miller was currently attending a technology seminar in Switzerland, a lie his public relations department had fed the media at his request. All Garrett had to do was keep his presence in Austin under wraps, and his stalker would follow the bait to Switzerland and hopefully fall right into the trap being set for him there.
Pulling up in front of the two-story home, he parked the rental car he’d picked up at the airport, then leaned across the seat to peer up at the house. He studied the structure a long moment, thinking of the woman inside, as well as his chances of gaining her cooperation. He’d given himself a month to find a way to convince her to reunite with his stepmother, though he doubted it would take anywhere near that long. Everyone had a price—or a weakness. It was just a matter of discovering Ali’s.
He smiled smugly as he climbed from the car. He didn’t doubt for a minute he’d succeed. Knowledge was power and, thanks to the P.I. he’d hired and the research he’d done on his own, he knew all there was to know about Ali Moran.
And she knew virtually nothing about him.
Perched high on a ladder, Ali stretched to snag the last ornament from the Christmas tree’s uppermost branch. In spite of the cheery fire burning in the fireplace and her favorite Norah Jones CD playing on the stereo, she couldn’t have worked up a smile if she had wanted to. January 1 was usually her favorite day of the year—sleeping late after celebrating the New Year with her friends, eating a huge bowl of black-eyed peas for good luck, making a list of resolutions she wouldn’t keep. Best of all, January 1 marked the first day of her annual four-week vacation.
But there would be no vacation for Ali this year.
Grimacing, she tucked the ornament into the box and started down the ladder. It was her own fault, she told herself. She’d let greed get the best of her.
And who wouldn’t? she asked herself in frustration. When a zillionaire calls you up and offers you four times the going rate to reserve your entire bed-and-breakfast for a month, it’s kind of hard to say no. Cooking and cleaning for one guest, rather than the five her B&B was designed to accommodate, and getting paid four times the money for her trouble? Only a fool would turn down a deal as sweet as that.
“So quit your whining,” she lectured, as she stooped to place the box of ornaments in a storage crate. The money she would earn far outweighed whatever sacrifices were required of her, including giving up her vacation.
Grimacing, she slapped the crate’s flaps into place. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she grumbled under her breath.
The doorbell rang and she straightened with a frown. Who on earth would drop by this early in the morning on New Year’s Day? she wondered. Everyone she knew would still be in bed, after partying all night—which is exactly where she’d be, if she wasn’t expecting a guest to arrive that afternoon.
At the thought of her guest, she caught her lower lip between her teeth. Surely he hadn’t arrived early. She’d specifically told him check-in time wasn’t until three. But who else could it be? Unable to think of a soul who’d be up and about this early on New Year’s Day, she started grabbing decorations and shoving them into boxes, mortified at the thought of inviting anyone into her home with it looking such a mess, much less Garrett Miller.
The bell sounded a second time, setting her teeth on edge. Dropping the evergreen swag she held, she marched for the front door, telling herself he could just deal, since he had chosen to ignore check-in time.
At the door, she paused to drag the elastic band from her hair and stole a peek through the peephole. She blinked, blinked again. If she hadn’t already checked out her guest on the Internet, she might not have recognized the man standing on her porch as the owner of a world-renowned company like Future Concepts. Dressed in faded jeans, a worn leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, he looked too…well, normal.
The bell rang a third time, making her jump. She blew out a breath, then pasted on a cheerful smile and swung open the door.
“Hi,” she said and extended her hand in greeting. “You must be Garrett. I’m Ali, the innkeeper of Vista Bed and Breakfast.”
He stared, the oddest expression coming over his face, but didn’t make a move to take her hand.
She took a closer look at him. “You are Garrett Miller, aren’t you?”
The question seemed to snap him from his trancelike state.
“Sorry,” he said and took her hand. “It’s just that you look very much like…someone I know.”
A tingle of awareness skittered up her arm as his fingers closed around hers. Surprised by the sensation—and not at all sure she liked it—she broke the connection.
“You know what they say,” she said, with a careless shrug. “Everyone has a twin.”
He got that odd look on his face again and she inwardly groaned, thinking it was going to be a very long month.
“Come on in,” she said and opened the door wider. “You’ll have to pardon the mess,” she warned, thinking it best to prepare him for the disaster that awaited them in the den. “You caught me in the middle of clearing away my Christmas decorations.”
He stepped past her, trailing the seductive scent of sandalwood in his wake. “I hope my arriving early isn’t an inconvenience. I had my pilot fly me in earlier than I’d originally planned.”
He had his own pilot? Which probably meant he had his own plane, too. Unable to imagine that kind of wealth or the freedom it offered, she swallowed an envious sigh. “No problem.” She glanced out the door toward the rental car parked in her driveway. “Do you need help with your luggage?”
He pulled off his sunglasses, looking around as he tucked them into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ll get it later, if that’s all right.”
When he met her gaze again, sans the sunglasses, she felt that same tingle of awareness she’d experienced when he’d clasped her hand, only this time he hadn’t touched her.
“Oh, wow,” she breathed, finding it all but impossible to look away.
“Excuse me?”
“Your eyes,” she said. “I didn’t notice until you took off your glasses. They’re brown. That rich, dark, melted chocolate kind of brown. And when the light hits them just right—” she opened and closed the door, varying the amount of light striking his face “—these little gold flecks flash like tiny explosions of light.”
He reached inside his jacket. “I can put them back on, if it bothers you.”
Realizing she was making a fool of herself, she offered him a sheepish smile. “Sorry,” she said, as she closed the door. “I tend to get carried away about lighting. It’s one of the curses of being a photographer. This way,” she said, and motioned for him to follow her. “I’ll give you a quick tour of the downstairs, then take you up to your room.
“Formal living room and dining room,” she said, gesturing left and right as she moved down the hall. “You’re welcome to use both, but most of my guests prefer the coziness of the den and breakfast room at the rear of the house. There’s a beautiful view of Town Lake through the windows there.”
She paused to point to a closed door at the end of a short hall. “That’s the entrance to my private living quarters. It’s the only portion of the house that’s off-limits to guests.”
He stopped beside her. “I noticed on your Web site that you cater to businessmen.” He angled his head to peer at her. “I believe the blurb read something like, ‘the Vista, where all the needs of the corporate traveler are met.’”
The emphasis he placed on “all,” as well as his suggestive tone, put Ali’s back up. “If you’re thinking the Vista is a front for a call girl service,” she informed him tersely, “you’re wrong.”
“I didn’t say it was,” he returned mildly.
“Well, just so you understand, I provide my clients with nothing more than comfortable accommodations, home-cooked meals and workspace should they need it.”
“Which is all I expect,” he assured her. “I was merely curious why a woman who lives alone would prefer men as guests.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I never said I lived alone.”
“You didn’t have to. Your repeated use of ‘my’and ‘I’ made it obvious.”
When she continued to eye him suspiciously, he dropped his hands to his hips, and the corners of his mouth into a frown.
“Look,” he said, clearly irritated with her. “If you’re worried about your safety, don’t be. You’re perfectly safe with me. I’m not interested in you or your body. And just so you understand,” he said, tossing her own words back at her, “if and when I’m in the mood for female companionship, I sure as hell don’t need someone to arrange it for me.”
She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted, but one thing was certain—she’d angered her guest…something a person in her business couldn’t afford to do.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “I’m usually not this defensive.”
“And I’m not usually mistaken for a predator,” he snapped back at her.
She squinched up her nose. “Can we hit Rewind?” she asked hopefully. “It seems we’ve gotten off to a bad start.”
“If it makes you feel better thinking our relationship will improve by starting over—” he tossed up a hand “—then by all means consider the tape rewound.”
To prove her willingness to play nice, she forced a smile. “Thanks. And to answer your question about my preference for business travelers, this is my home, as well as a bed-and-breakfast, and I discovered early on that businessmen are less disruptive to my daily life than tourists. Since they generally book only on weekdays, that’s an advantage, too, as it leaves my weekends free for my other job.”
He lifted a brow. “Other job?”
“Photography. I’m an aspiring photojournalist.”
“A woman of many talents.”
“You might want to withhold judgment until you see my work,” she warned, then smiled again and motioned him to follow her. “Come on, let’s finish the tour.”
She started down the hall again toward the kitchen. “In the mornings, you’ll find juice and coffee on the buffet in the breakfast room. I normally serve breakfast at seven on weekdays and eight on weekends, but since you’re my only guest, you can choose a different time, if you like.”
“Your current schedule is fine.”
“The den is through here,” she said, and led the way through an arched doorway. She stopped, her shoulders sagging at the amount of work awaiting her. “Welcome to the after-Christmas nightmare,” she said wearily.
“Damn,” he murmured, staring, then glanced her way. “Do you decorate every room in the house?”
“Pretty much. My friends accuse me of trying to make up for my dismal childhood Christmases.”
“Dismal?”
“A tabletop Christmas tree and one present dispensed on Christmas Eve just before bedtime.”
“Were your parents poor?”
She choked a laugh. “Hardly. More like boring.” Doubting her guest was interested in hearing about her dysfunctional family, she pointed to the antique armoire, all but concealed by the wreaths stacked high in front. “Believe it or not, there’s a flat screen television hiding behind that pile of greenery. You’re welcome to watch TV here or in your room, whichever you prefer. I have a wireless network, so you can connect to the Internet anywhere inside the house, as well as the patios outside.
“Both the front and back doors have a keyless entry,” she went on to explain. “I change the code every couple of weeks for security purposes. That’s about it downstairs,” she said and gestured toward a set of stairs on the far side of the room. “We’ll take the rear staircase to the second floor.”
When she reached the top landing, she headed for the opposite end of the hall. “You can have your pick of the bedrooms,” she told him, “but since you’re staying a month, I think the suite will better suit your needs. It has a separate sitting room, with a minifridge and bar. Plus, the bathroom is larger than the others, and has a tub perfect for soaking—a bonus, if you enjoy taking long baths.”
She pushed open the door to the suite then stepped back out of the way. “Unless you have any questions, I’ll leave you to settle in.”
“Just one.”
“What?”
“When my secretary made my reservations, she asked that you keep my stay here confidential.”
She held her hand up like a good Girl Scout. “I haven’t told a soul.”
“Good. No one can know I’m here.”
She teased him with a smile. “Why? Are the cops after you?”
He seemed to hesitate a moment, then shook his head. “No. I’m here to check out locations for a future expansion for my company. It’s imperative that my presence, as well as my plans, remain secret until I’m ready to go public.”
She drew an imaginary zipper across her mouth. “Your secret is safe with me. Anything else?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Well, if you think of something, I’ll be in the den dealing with the ghost of Christmas past.”
Garrett shook his head as he crossed to the bathroom to put away his shaving kit, unable to believe how close he’d come to blowing his cover. When Ali had opened the door to greet him, her likeness to his stepmother had momentarily rendered him speechless. The same blond hair and blue eyes, the same delicate features. They even had similar mannerisms, which he found inconceivable, since the two had never met.
He’d almost slipped and told her his reason for staring, and would have if he hadn’t been distracted by the jolt he’d received when he’d taken her hand. He’d seen the surprise that had flared in her eyes, sensed her unease in the quickness with which she had broken the contact, and knew she must have felt it, too.
He thought he’d done a decent job of recovering, then she’d made that comment about everybody having a twin and thrown him for another loop. If she hadn’t appeared so genuinely guileless, he might have thought she was purposely trying to trip him up. As it was, he believed he’d successfully penetrated the enemy’s camp.
Penetrated the enemy’s camp?
Snorting a laugh, he tossed his shaving kit onto the vanity. Hell, he was even beginning to think in the vernacular of a spy.
With a rueful shake of his head, he turned for the bedroom, but stopped when he caught a glimpse of the tub she’d mentioned. Placed on a raised platform of tumbled stone tiles, it resembled an old-fashioned claw-foot in design, but its size and modern fixtures placed it solidly in the twenty-first century.
Remembering her comment about the tub being perfect for soaking, he crossed to examine it more closely. It definitely looked inviting, he noted, with its extra long length and gently sloped ends. He glanced up at the large picture window above it. And the uninterrupted view of lake and sky it offered its occupant wasn’t too shabby, either, he noted. Personally he preferred a shower, but he could see how a person might enjoy taking a long, relaxing bath in a setup like this. Add a woman to the mix and even he might be persuaded to forego a shower for a bath.
He squinted his eyes at the view beyond the window, easily able to imagine the scene at night. Moonlight reflecting off the lake’s surface. A sky full of glittering stars. Toss in some soft piano music and a mountain of scented bubbles and it would provide the perfect setting for a seduction.
He dropped his gaze to the tub again, wondering if the Vista’s innkeeper ever took advantage of the amenities the bath offered when she had the house all to herself. She seemed the bubble-bath type. Feminine. Sensual. In fact, he found it easy to picture her here, her head tipped back against the tub’s rolled rim, her eyes closed, only her knees and head visible above mounds of iridescent bubbles.
Even easier—and a great deal more pleasurable—was to picture her there with him.
Puckering his lips thoughtfully, he dragged a finger along the rim, imagining them in the tub together, her back against his chest, her hips wedged between his thighs, his hands tracing her curves. She was stacked. He’d made that realization within seconds of her opening the door. And she had a mouth made for kissing. Full, moist lips that seemed curved in an ever-present smile.
With one memorable exception.
He chuckled softly, as he recalled her indignation when he’d insinuated the bed-and-breakfast was a front for a call girl service. She’d assumed correctly. He had thought, hoped even, that she was using the bed-and-breakfast as a front for illegal activities.
Too bad he’d been wrong, he thought with regret. If he’d been right, it would have provided him the leverage he needed to force her cooperation.
It also would have given him more reason to dislike Ali Moran.
Not that he needed more cause.
The hurt she’d inflicted on his stepmother was reason enough to wish her in hell.
Two
“Traci!” Ali shot a worried glance up at the ceiling, then lowered her gaze to frown at her laughing friend. “Get a grip, would you? He might hear you.”
Traci winced guiltily. “Sorry. But when you said that about the Vista being a front for a call girl service, I had this mental image of you strutting around in skin-hugging spandex and spike heels. Can you imagine? You, a madam? Or worse, a call girl? What a hoot!”
“I could be a call girl,” Ali said defensively. “Not that I ever would, but I could.”
“Are you kidding me?” Traci said in dismay. “If you had to depend on turning tricks for your support, you’d starve to death within a week.”
Grimacing, Ali yanked open the oven door. “Well, thanks for that vote of confidence,” she groused, as she shoved a basket of sopaipillas inside to keep warm.
Traci managed to snag a pastry before Ali could close the oven door. “I’m not saying you couldn’t attract a man,” she said, as she spooned honey into the pastry’s puffed center. “But there’s more to being a call girl than wearing skimpy clothes and flashing cleavage.”
Ali gave her a bland look. “Oh, and I suppose you’re an expert on the subject.”
“I watch enough cop shows to teach a course. And let me tell you,” she went on, warming to the subject, “the hookers they haul off the streets aren’t particular about who they have sex with. They can’t afford to be. You, on the other hand, would turn up your nose at the slightest physical flaw.”
Ali’s jaw dropped. “Are you saying I’m a sexual snob?”
Traci caught a dribble of honey on the tip of her finger and brought it to her mouth. “Need I remind you of Richard?”
Ali shuddered at the mention of the C.P.A. she’d briefly dated. “Please. Just thinking about his clammy hands and slobbery kisses makes me want to hurl.”
“And you think the men call girls entertain are Brad Pitt lookalikes?”
“Okay, okay,” Ali grumbled. “You made your point.”
Traci smiled smugly. “I so love it when I’m right.”
“Shh,” Ali hissed, and listened, sure that she’d heard footsteps in the hallway above.
“He’s coming,” she whispered, and grabbed Traci by the elbow and hustled her toward the back door.
“Hey,” Traci cried, juggling her sopaipilla to keep from dropping it. “Who said I was leaving? I want to meet your mystery zillionaire guest.”
Ali opened the back door. “He’s not my zillionaire, and you can’t meet him.”
“Why not?”
She gave Traci a nudge over the threshold. “I already told you. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s here.” Before Traci could demand to stay, she shut the door in her face and turned the lock, just in case she tried sneaking back in.
With Traci dealt with, she headed for the breakfast room where she found Garrett standing at the buffet, pouring himself a cup of coffee. He was dressed much as he had been the day before—jeans and a black pullover sweater, a casual look she found extremely sexy.
Too bad his personality kills his appeal, she thought with regret.
Forcing a smile, she crossed to greet him. “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”
He spared her a glance, before returning the carafe to the hot plate. “Not particularly.”
She kept her smile in place, refusing to let his sour disposition infect her. “Well, hopefully you’ll rest better tonight.”
He raised the cup to his lips and met her gaze over its rim. “That remains to be seen.”
Those eyes again, she thought. What was it about them that was so mesmerizing? It certainly wasn’t their color. Brown eyes were as common as house flies in Texas. So why were his so compelling?
Feeling herself being drawn deeper and deeper into their dark depths, she tore her gaze away and made a beeline for the kitchen.
“Have a seat at the table,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll be right back with your breakfast.”
Once out of his sight, she grabbed a plate and gave herself a stern lecture, as she filled it with food. He’s nothing special, she told herself. Good-looking men were a dime a dozen in Austin. And so what if he was rich as sin? She’d never considered money a positive attribute, especially in a man. All the rich guys she’d ever known were pompous jackasses, who used their money to feed their egos and need for power. Cars, boats, homes. The more attention a “thing” drew to him, the greater its appeal.
Nope, she mentally confirmed, as she pulled the basket of sopaipillas from the oven. Garrett Miller was nothing special and definitely not a man she’d want to become involved with.
Adding the basket to the tray, she returned to the breakfast room, feeling much more in control.
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, as she transferred dishes from the tray. “Huevos Rancheros,” she said, identifying each food item as she arranged it in front of him. “Roasted new potatoes, fresh fruit with a light poppyseed dressing and sopaipillas with butter and honey.”
Tucking the tray beneath her arm, she reached for the carafe. “If you need anything,” she said after topping off his coffee, “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She waited until the swinging door closed behind her, then set aside the tray and headed straight for the sink, anxious to put the kitchen back in order. Elbow deep in suds, washing the pans she’d dirtied while cooking, she heard the door open behind her and glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes shot wide when she saw Garrett entering, carrying his plate and cup of coffee.
“Is something wrong with the food?” she asked in alarm.
“No. I thought I’d eat in here with you.”
She blinked in surprise. “But—but guests don’t eat in the kitchen. They take their meals in the breakfast room.”
He set his cup and plate on the island and slid onto a stool. “This one doesn’t,” he said, and opened his napkin over his lap.
She considered insisting he return to the breakfast room, then turned back to the sink with a sigh, deciding the guy had paid for the right to eat wherever he wanted.
Thinking she should try to make conversation with him, she asked, “Do you have plans for the day?”
“Nothing specific. I thought I’d take a drive later and familiarize myself with the city.”
“Have you ever been to Austin before?”
“A couple of times on business, but I was in meetings and saw very little of the city.”
She rinsed the soap from the pan she’d washed and set it on the drainboard. “That’s a shame. There’s a lot to do and see in Austin.”
“Such as…?”
She wrung out the dishcloth and moved to the island to wipe down the surface. “Well, there’s Sixth Street,” she said, “which is a little bit like Bourbon Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter. You’ll find everything there from tattoo parlors to jazz clubs. It gets pretty crazy on weekends. Lots of people on the street, drinking and partying.
“The State Capitol is a must-see,” she went on. “Fabulous architecture and a tremendous view of the city from the top. And if you’re into history, Austin is the home of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, as well as the Bob Bullock Museum.”
“Have you lived here all your life?” he asked.
She chuckled, amused that he would mistake her for a native. “No. I’d think my northern accent would give me away.”
“Northern?” he repeated, then shook his head and speared a plump strawberry with his fork. “Trust me. Whatever accent you had was lost to a Texas twang long ago.”
“Really?” she said, considering that the ultimate compliment.
“Really. Throw in a couple more y’alls and you could pass for Sue Ellen from the Dallas TV series.”
“Wow. That really takes me back. I watched that show when I was a kid. Sue Ellen, J.R., Bobby….” Hiding a smile, she shook her head. “The Ewing family was so dysfunctional, they made mine look like the Waltons.” Reaching the end of the island where the coffeemaker sat, she lifted the carafe. “More coffee?”
“None for me.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin, then set it beside his plate. “You’ve mentioned your family several times and not necessarily in a good light.”
She shrugged. “Just being honest. My parents are strange people.” She carried the carafe to the sink. “If you have any food preferences,” she said, changing the subject, “let me know. I try to accommodate my guests’ tastes whenever I can.”
When he didn’t reply, she glanced over her shoulder and found him frowning at her back. “Is something wrong?”
He shook his head. “No. I…I was just wondering if you’d have time to drive me around today.”
Her stomach clenched at the thought of being trapped in a car with him all day. “If you’re worried about getting lost, I can provide you with plenty of maps.”
“I don’t need a map. It’s your opinion I want, as well as your knowledge of the area. You seem to know the city well and can probably offer me insight on things I wouldn’t think to ask.”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, while trying to think of a plausible excuse to refuse him. “I’ve got a lot to do today. I finished boxing up all the Christmas decorations yesterday, but I still need to carry all the crates to the attic.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “If you’ll act as my tour guide for the day, I’ll help you haul the crates upstairs. And,” he added, as if sensing her reluctance, “I’ll compensate you for your time.”
“You’ll pay me?” she said in surprise.
“Yes.”
He named an amount that made her jaw drop. “That’s more than some people pay for a car!”
“I assure you I can afford it.” He lifted a brow. “So? Do we have a deal?”
“Well, yeah,” she said, then stuck out a hand, fearing he’d try to renege on the deal later. “In Texas, a man’s handshake is as good as his word.”
He took her hand. “Is it the same for a woman?”
The tingle started in the center of her palm and worked its way up her arm. Wondering what it was about him that spawned the sensation, she curled her fingers into a fist against her palm.
“Yeah,” she said, surprised by the breathy quality in her voice. “Same goes.”
If the computer industry ever bottomed-out and Garrett suddenly found himself in need of a job, he thought he might try his luck as a private investigator. He was getting pretty damn good at this clandestine stuff. Asking Ali to chauffeur him around Austin might have been spontaneous, but it was pure genius. Not only had he finessed a large block of time in which to learn more about her, he’d also finagled a way to check out her attic. He hadn’t expected to find the missing deed lying in plain sight up there—and he hadn’t—but he had familiarized himself with the attic’s layout, which would come in handy if Ali refused to relinquish her portion of the deed to him, and he was forced to search for it on his own.
He hoped it didn’t come to that. Lying was one thing. Stealing was quite another.
“Am I driving too fast?”
He glanced Ali’s way. “No. Why?”
“You were frowning.”
“Was I?” He turned his gaze to the roadway again. “Just thinking.”
“You must think all the time.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you’re always frowning.”
“Am I?” He considered the possibility a moment, then shrugged again. “I’ve never noticed.”
“Do you ever have happy thoughts? Things that would make you smile?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A pleasant memory. Maybe a funny movie you’ve seen that makes you laugh when you think about it.”
“I don’t recall the last comedy I saw.”
She glanced his way. “Are you serious?”
“Why would I lie?”
Shaking her head, she turned her gaze back to the road. “So what do you do for grins?”
“I enjoy playing computer games.”
She spun a finger in the air. “Whoopee.”
“What do you do for fun?” he asked, neatly turning the tables on her.
“There’s very little I do that’s not fun. Going out to dinner or to the movies with friends. Working in my garden. Taking pictures.”
“Taking pictures doesn’t count. That’s a job.”
“Just because it’s a job doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”
Realizing that she had unwittingly offered him the opportunity to probe into her life for that weakness he needed, he decided to take advantage of it. “If you enjoy photography so much, why have the bed-and-breakfast? Why not be a full-time photographer?”
“At one time, that was my plan. I was going to travel the world, taking pictures, then publish them as books.”
“An album of your personal travels?” he said, as if doubting there was a market for such a thing.
“It wouldn’t be personal,” she told him. “At least, not in the way you mean. The pictures would be of people, places and things that share a theme or tell a particular story.”
“What do you mean, ‘tell a story’?”
“Well, let’s say I wanted to do a photographic study of an Amish family,” she said. “I’d photograph them at work, at play, in their home, in their community, capturing their lives, as well as their lifestyle on film. The pictures would tell the story.”
“Isn’t that the same as theme?”
“In some ways, yes. But when I think of theme, I think in terms of a single topic. Take poverty for instance,” she said. “If I were to choose that as my theme, I might travel around, photographing examples of poverty in different parts of the country or even the world. Poverty would be obvious in all the pictures, but the people and the settings would be different.”
That she enjoyed photography was obvious in the enthusiasm in her voice, the light in her eyes. “And if you chose families as a theme, you’d photograph different families, not just one.”
“Score!” she cried and held up a hand to give him a high five.
Amused, he slapped her hand. “As interesting as all that is, it doesn’t explain why you’re running a bed-and-breakfast and not focusing on photography.”
“Long and depressing story,” she said, and slanted him a look. “Sure you want to hear it?”
He opened his hands. “I asked, didn’t I?”
“Oh, wait,” she said, straining to look at something up ahead. “There’s Callahan’s. Do you mind if we stop?”
“What’s Callahan’s?”
“A store. I need to pick up a bag of birdseed for my feeders.”
Though disappointed that the stop would interrupt what he hoped would be an enlightening view into her life, he shrugged, thinking he’d pick up on the conversation again later. “Fine with me.”
“Thanks. It’ll save me making a trip later.” She checked the rearview mirror for traffic, then changed lanes and turned into the parking lot. After shutting off the engine, she reached over the back seat for her tote. “Do you want to come in?”
He looked at the storefront, considering, then figured what the hell. There didn’t appear to be many customers. “I believe I do.”
As they entered the store, Ali nudged his arm. “Aren’t you going to take off your sunglasses?” she whispered.
He shook his head. “Someone might recognize me.”
With a roll of her eyes, she went in search of her birdseed. He watched her walk away and his gaze slid unerringly to the sway of her hips. Yeah, she was stacked, all right, he confirmed. He watched until she disappeared from sight, enjoying the view, then turned down an aisle to explore the store’s merchandise on his own.
The place reminded him of the general stores he’d seen in Western movies, carrying everything from horse tack to Western-style clothing. He paused beside a display of cowboy hats and, curious, plucked a black one from the rack. He snugged it over his head and leaned to check out his reflection in the mirror behind the counter.
“Looks good.”
He glanced over and saw Ali had joined him. Feeling foolish, he dragged off the hat. “I don’t wear hats.”
“Really? You should. Especially a cowboy hat. You look sexy in one.”
He gave her a doubtful look.
“Well, you do,” she insisted. “Sort of like a bad-ass gunslinger. You know. The kind who can empty a saloon by simply walking in the door.”
Hiding a smile, he ran a finger along the brim. “Maybe I should buy it and wear it to my next board meeting.”
“Couldn’t hurt.” She took the hat from him and placed it on his head again. She studied him a moment, and he’d swear he heard wheels begin to churn in her head.
“Come on,” she said and grabbed his hand. “If you’re going for the gunslinger look, you’re gonna need jeans and boots.”
He hung back. “I was kidding.”
She gave him an impatient tug. “I wasn’t. Besides, you know what they say. When in Rome…”
Garrett discovered the woman was a whirlwind when on a mission. Within minutes, she had him in a dressing room, trying on jeans, shirts, boots and what she referred to as a “duster,” which was nothing more than a long trench coat with a Western-style yoke and a slit up the back so that a man could sit in a saddle while wearing it.
“Aren’t you dressed yet?” she called impatiently from the other side of the door.
He hooked the silver belt buckle at his waist, then glanced up at his reflection in the mirror. He did a double take, startled by the change the style of clothing made to his appearance. “Yeah,” he said staring. “I’m dressed.”
“Well, come on out. I want to see.”
He plucked the black felt hat from the hook on the wall and snugged it over his head as he stepped out of the dressing room.
A flash went off, and he caught himself just short of diving for cover.
Ali slowly lowered her digital camera to stare. “Wow,” she murmured. “You don’t even look like the same guy.”
He scowled, embarrassed that, for a split second, he’d mistaken the flash of the camera for a gunshot.
“If I didn’t know better,” she went on, “I’d never guess you were Garrett Miller, zillionaire entrepreneur.”
“Zillionaire?” Shaking his head, he turned to study himself in the full-length mirror. “You know,” he said, growing thoughtful. “This getup might be just what I need to keep from being recognized.”
“Like I said,” Ali said, with a shrug, “when in Rome…” She reached to tear the price tag off his shirt.
He yanked his arm back. “What are you doing?”
She spun him around to rip the tag off the rear pocket of the jeans. “Taking off the price tags. Don’t worry,” she assured him as she gathered from the dressing room the clothes he’d worn into the store, as well as the stack of clothing he hadn’t tried on yet, “I’ll give them to the salesclerk, along with these other clothes. That way you can wear your new duds out of the store and not have to change again.”
Ali held the camera before her face with one hand, and directed Garrett with the other. “A little to the left. A little more. Stop! Perfect.” She clicked off a half-dozen or more shots, then dropped the camera to swing from her neck. “Now let’s try a few with you standing with one boot propped on the boulder.”
He dropped his hands to his hips in frustration. “I’m not a damn model, you know.”
“No,” she said patiently. “And I’m not a chauffeur, yet I’ve been driving you around all day like I was.”
“A duty you’re being well paid for,” he reminded her.
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, yeah. Right. Tell you what,” she said. “Pose for a few more shots, and I’ll give you a full set of prints, no charge.”
“‘A few shots’ is all I agreed to when you talked me into this nonsense more than an hour ago.”
“Can I help it if you’re such a handsome model?”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” he said dryly.
“Okay. How about this? You let me take a few more pictures, and I’ll chauffeur you around the whole month you’re in town.”
He frowned a moment, as if considering, then nodded. “All right. You’ve got yourself a deal.”
Grinning, she drew the camera before her face again. “Boot on the boulder,” she instructed. “Forearm braced on the knee. Now look off into the distance and make that face you make when you’re thinking really hard. Great!” she exclaimed, and clicked away. “Man, you should see this. The sun is setting just behind your left shoulder and creating perfect shadows on your face.
“Give me a forlorn look,” she said, continuing to click off shots. “You know. Like you’ve been running from the law for months, and you’re missing that pretty little saloon girl you met up in Dodge City.”
“A saloon girl in Dodge City?” He dropped his head back and laughed. “Damn, Ali, where do you get this stuff?”
The transformation laughter made to his face almost made her drop her camera, but she managed to hold on to it and keep clicking. “Part of the job,” she told him. “Just part of the job.”
Shaking his head, he dragged his foot from the boulder. “You should be a writer, not a photographer.” When he realized she was still taking pictures, he held up a hand to block her view. “Would you stop,” he complained. “You must’ve taken a hundred pictures or more.”
She reluctantly lowered the camera. “I’ll be lucky if a third are worth anything.”
He went stock-still. “You didn’t say anything about selling these pictures.”
“Would you lighten up?” she said, laughing. “I took the pictures for fun, not to sell. Kind of a souvenir for you of your trip to Texas.”
“Oh,” he said in relief. “Which reminds me,” he said, and plopped down on the boulder, stretched out his legs. “You were going to tell me why you’re running a bed-and-breakfast, rather than focusing on a career in photography.”
Gathering up her tote, she crossed to sit beside him. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” she asked, as she pulled her camera over her head. “It’s really boring.”
“I wouldn’t have asked, if I didn’t.”
With a shrug, she tucked the camera into her tote. “It goes back to when I dropped out of college during my junior year and moved to Austin.”
“Why did you drop out?”
“My parents come from a long line of doctors and they expected me to follow in their footsteps. Carry on the family tradition. That kind of thing.”
“And you didn’t want to?”
“Not even a little. I did try,” she said in her defense. “But I hated all the science courses I was required to take and my grades proved it. I tried to talk my parents into letting me change my major, but they wouldn’t listen. They kept saying I wasn’t applying myself. That being a doctor was an honorable occupation, a duty even. We argued about it all during Christmas break, and I finally told them that they couldn’t force me to become a doctor, that I was going to sign up for the courses I wanted to take.”
“And did you?”
She grimaced. “For all the good it did me. When they received the bill from the university for my spring tuition and saw what courses I’d signed up for, they refused to pay it. When that didn’t whip me into line, they closed the checking account they’d set up for me to pay my college expenses, which left me with no money and no way to pay for my housing, food. Nothing.”
“So how did you end up in Texas?”
“Claire Fleming. She and I met our freshman year in college and became best friends. She knew my parents had cut me off and how bummed I was. To cheer me up, she invited me to go to Austin with her to visit her grandmother. I had nothing better to do, so I tagged along.
“To make a long story a little shorter, the Vista belongs to Claire’s grandmother, Margaret Fleming. It was a wedding present from her first husband. Sadly he died after they’d been married only a few years. She remarried several years later to some oil guy and moved to Saudi Arabia, but she held on to the house. Said selling it would be like cutting out her heart.
“She came back to the States several times a year for month-long visits and always stayed at the house. As she got older, it became harder for her to travel and she wasn’t able to come as often. You can imagine what happened to the house. What the vandals didn’t destroy, varmints did. It was a mess. She’d always hoped that Claire would want the house someday, but Claire fell in love with an Aussie and was planning to move to Australia right after graduation, which she did, by the way. So the grandmother decided to make one final trip to Austin before selling the house. Claire was to meet her there and help her pack up what personal belongings she wanted to keep.
“What I didn’t know was that Claire and her grandmother had already discussed my situation, and they’d decided to offer the house to me.” She held up a hand. “And, yes, I know it sounds too good to be true. At the time, I thought so, too. But Mimi—that’s Claire’s grandmother—was dead serious. She really loved the house and didn’t want to sell it, and she definitely didn’t need the money. So she offered it to me. All she asked in return was that I take care of it and love it as much as she did.”
“Sounds like the perfect arrangement.”
“It was a sweet deal, all right, but it only resolved my need for housing. I was still broke and without a job. Mimi, Claire and I brainstormed ways I could earn money to cover my expenses and still have time to go to school, and we came up with the idea of renting out the extra bedrooms to college students. It was the perfect setup for me. Since the house is on Town Lake and relatively close to the university, I never had a problem leasing the rooms, which meant I could be really selective about who I leased to.”
“If it was such a success, why the change to a bed-and-breakfast?”
She lifted a brow and looked down her nose at him. “Have you ever lived with twelve college students?” She shuddered, remembering. “It was bedlam even on the best day. And there was absolutely no privacy. After I graduated, I decided I wanted the house to be more like a home than a dorm, and I came up with the idea of turning the Vista into a bed-and-breakfast.”
“And the grandmother was okay with the change?”
“More than okay. In fact, she gave me the house.”
“Gave it to you?” he repeated.
She nodded. “I think she’d reconciled herself to the fact that Claire was never going to want it, and she definitely didn’t want her son to get his hands on it, so she decided to give it to me.”
“Gave it to you,” he repeated, doubting her story, since his research had indicated the only property Ali owned was her car.
“It’s not official yet,” she was quick to tell him. “She only told me about her decision last summer, then she caught pneumonia and passed away just before Thanksgiving. Her estate was sizable, to say the least, so it’ll probably take a while for her lawyers to get everything prepared for probate and the necessary papers filed to transfer ownership to me.”
She glanced around, and was surprised to see it was getting dark. She hitched the strap to her tote over her shoulder. “I had no idea it was getting so late. We’d better go.”
He stood, and offered her a hand.
When she grasped his hand, she felt that now familiar spark of electricity between their palms and watched his face as he pulled her to her feet, wondering if he felt it, too.
“Did you feel that?” she asked.
“What?”
“That sparkly thing when our hands touched.”
“Sparkly thing?” He shook his head. “No, can’t say that I did.”
“Really?” she said in surprise, then frowned and rubbed thoughtfully at her palm. “That’s weird. I feel it every time we touch.”
Three
Sparkly thing?
Garrett snorted as he climbed into bed. How about a hundred volts of electricity shooting up his arm?
But he sure as hell wasn’t going to admit that to Ali. If he’d learned nothing else during his thirty-six years of living, it was never reveal your weaknesses to your enemy.
Enemy?
Frowning thoughtfully, he folded his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling, unsure if that tag still fit. If the stories Ali had told him today were true, she was looking more like a victim, than the enemy.
Her dropping out of college up north and finishing her education in Texas was true enough. He’d unearthed that nugget about her past while doing his own research prior to making the trip to Austin. But nothing he’d found had indicated her move to Texas was due to her parents cutting her off. He might’ve dismissed her story as exaggeration, if he hadn’t already heard his stepmother describe her adoptive parents as cold and heartless people. But in Garrett’s opinion, what Ali’s parents had done to her was inexcusable. Imagine, a parent who would knowingly leave his child with no money, no job and no prospects…
He shook his head ruefully. Ali was just damn lucky she’d had a fairy godmother waiting in the wings. No telling what would’ve happened to her if Mimi and Claire hadn’t come along, offering her a place to live, as well as the means to support herself.
He frowned, more than a little surprised by the level of compassion he felt building toward Ali. He was going to have to be careful, he told himself. Prior to coming to Austin, he’d had a laundry list of reasons to despise her. He couldn’t allow a hard-luck story blind him to the hurt she’d caused his stepmother or allow it to distract him from his purpose for being in her home.
Her life might resemble Cinderella’s, but he sure as hell was no Prince Charming, prepared to charge onto the scene to rescue her.
If anything, he’d come to destroy her.
To prove it, he reached for his cell phone and punched in the number of his lawyer.
“Hey, Tom. Garrett. Sorry to call you at home and at such a late hour, but I need you to do some research for me. See if you can locate information on a woman by the name of Margaret Fleming. Her last address was in Saudi Arabia, but she owned property in Austin, Texas.
“No,” he replied to Tom’s question. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Future Concepts’ expansion. This is…personal. The woman passed away last November. I want to know who inherited the house she owns in Austin.”
He visited a moment longer, then disconnected the call and settled back on the bed.
Ali may not have realized it, he thought in satisfaction, but there was a strong possibility she’d given him the “price” he needed to win her cooperation. That she loved the house was obvious, and Garrett would bet his controlling shares of stock in Future Concepts that she didn’t own it.
But he would before the month was out.
After chauffeuring Garrett around for three days, Ali had decided two things about her current guest. He had more mood swings than a pregnant woman, and he was the most impatient man she’d ever met in her life.
Most people would just kick back and relax, while riding in a car. Not Garrett. God forbid the man waste a second of his precious time. At the moment, he had his BlackBerry in his hand and was checking his e-mail, a task he had conducted at least four times during the day. It was almost ten o’clock at night, for heaven’s sake! Was his correspondence so important he had to check it even at night?
Noticing the brake lights coming on ahead of her, Ali slowed, adjusting her speed to the long line of cars in front of her.
“Uh-oh.”
Garrett lifted his gaze from his BlackBerry. “Uhoh, what? Why are you stopping?”
She tipped her head at the traffic in front of them. “Construction. I forgot the highway crew closes down all but one lane at night so they can work on the interstate when there is less traffic.”
Scowling, he closed his BlackBerry and began to drum his fingers impatiently on the console.
After sitting for five minutes at a standstill, he swore. “Dammit! This is ridiculous. There’s got to be an alternate route.”
She shook her head. “There’s not. And even if there was,” she added as she looked in the rearview mirror at the long stream of headlights behind her, “there’s no way we can get off the interstate now. We’re trapped between exits.”
His scowl deepened.
The headlights on the cars ahead of her began to blink off, an indication that the drivers had resigned themselves to the delay and had turned off their engines. Ali followed suit, but left the radio playing.
He whipped his head around to peer at her. “Why did you turn off the car?”
She lifted a shoulder and slid down in her seat, making herself more comfortable. “No sense wasting gas. These delays can last up to a half hour or more.”
“A half hour!”
“Would you lighten up?” she said with a laugh. “A little delay isn’t going to kill you.”
He burned her with a look, then turned his gaze back to the windshield to glare through the darkness at the stalled traffic.
Deciding he needed a distraction, she twisted the dial to an oldies’ station and cranked up the radio to an earsplitting level.
He clapped his hands over his ears. “What the hell are you doing?” he cried.
She opened her door. “Creating a diversion,” she replied as she climbed out. Rounding the hood, she opened the passenger door and grabbed his hand. “Come on, Garrett. They’re playing our song.”
“What?” he said in confusion, as she all but dragged him out of the car.
“Music. Dance. Get it?” She dropped her hands to her hips, with a disgusted huff. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how to dance.”
“I know how.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder and stepped in close. “So dance with me.”
Garrett shot an uneasy glance around at the cars behind them, sure that everyone was staring at them and laughing. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered.
“No,” she informed him. “It’s spontaneous. Fun. Something I don’t think you have nearly enough of.”
He probably could’ve resisted, was sure he would have climbed back into the car, if she hadn’t pressed her body against his and begun to sway to the slow beat of the Righteous Brothers’ song pumping from the car’s speakers.
Without conscious thought, he began to sway, too, his body moving in rhythm with hers. A heartbeat later he was guiding her in a slow dance around the car. Later he would be grateful for the darkness, the lack of headlights, would probably curse himself for the chance he had taken in exposing himself to the public eye and the danger he might well have put himself in. But at the moment, all he could think about was how perfectly her body melded to his, how naturally they moved together, how utterly free he felt dancing in the middle of an interstate highway with hundreds of people looking on.
The song ended and he swayed slowly to a stop. Instead of releasing her, he turned his face against her hair, painfully aware of every point where their bodies touched. He felt the quickening of her breath against his neck, the tremble of her fingers within his. One smooth glide of his lips over her hair and his mouth was on hers. The pleasure, the taste of her was like taking a fist in the gut, totally unexpected and hitting low and hard.
Her lips were pillows of satin beneath his, her taste an aphrodisiac that streamed through his bloodstream like fire. A part of him knew he should stop, that kissing her was a mistake, that he was chancing blowing the mission he’d come to Austin to accomplish. But he couldn’t stop. It took the impatient sound of a car horn to force his mouth from hers. Even then he didn’t release her. With his eyes on hers, he searched her gaze, found the same heat in them that fired his veins.
It was Ali who made the first move, taking a step back and hugging her jacket more closely around her. “Uh. Looks like traffic’s starting to move.”
He glanced toward the cars lined in front of them and saw that headlights were blinking on, engines were starting. “Yeah,” he said dully, wondering what had come over him. “Let’s get out of here.”
Ali didn’t know what had happened to Garrett overnight to put him in such a grumpy mood, but if it was because of the kiss they’d shared on the interstate, he could darn well get over it.
She just hoped she could.
She slid a glance his way. Who’d have thought he could kiss like that? Not her, that was for darn sure. In the blink of an eye, he’d turned a spontaneous street dance into a lustfest…and with very little effort on his part.
And she’d thought the tingles she’d felt when they touched were something. Ha! They were nothing compared to the kick she’d received when his lips had touched hers. She released a slow breath, the reminder alone enough to make her want to whip the car over to the shoulder and jump him.
She slanted him another look. So why wasn’t he similarly affected? From the moment he’d appeared for breakfast, he’d done nothing but scowl. And as for conversation… Well, there wasn’t any. They’d been driving all morning, with him giving two-word commands—turn right, turn left, leaving her with no sense of where he wanted to go or exactly what he was looking for.
And as far as the kiss went… Well, he hadn’t said a word about that.
She firmed her lips. Well, if that’s the way he wanted to play it, she could pretend it hadn’t happened, too.
“Maybe if you told me what kind of property you’re interested in,” she said, “I could be of more help.”
He continued to frown at the map displayed on the screen of his portable GPS. “A minimum of ten acres, preferably more.”
“What about accessibility to public transportation?” she asked, hoping to narrow the parameters somewhat. “Wouldn’t that factor into where you’d want to build?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Great,” she muttered under her breath. “Another irresponsible employer adding to Austin’s already burgeoning traffic problems.”
He glanced her way. “I’m not irresponsible.”
“If you build where there’s no access to public transportation, you are,” she informed him. “You’d be adding to traffic and that’s irresponsible in my book.”
Scowling, he turned off the GPS. “For your information, I consider the effect my company has on a city’s traffic, as well as its effect on the environment.”
“How?” she challenged, doubting that he considered anything but profits when he made decisions regarding his company.
“At the current facilities on the East Coast, we offer a shuttle service from specified locations around the city. Employees who take advantage of the shuttle, and those who ride in a carpool with a minimum of two other employees, receive monetary rewards for their efforts. If I build a complex in Austin, I’ll implement the same policy here.”
“If?” she repeated. “I thought building here was a foregone conclusion.”
“Only if I’m able to find a suitable site.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
Having had enough of his sour disposition, she tightened her hands on the wheel. “Why are you in such a bad mood?”
He set the GPS on the floorboard at his feet. “I’m not in a bad mood.”
“Well, you darn sure look like you are.” She held up a hand. “Oh, wait. I forget that expression is normal for you.”
He nailed her with a look. “Are you purposely trying to tick me off? If so, you’re doing a damn good job.”
That’s it, she thought angrily and whipped the car to the side of the road. She’d had all she was going to take of his sour attitude. Ramming the gearshift into Park, she spun on the seat to face him. “Don’t try blaming your bad mood on me,” she warned. “You were grumpy when we started out this morning.”
“Well, maybe if I could get a good night’s sleep, I’d be in a better mood,” he shot back at her.
“And you’re not sleeping is my fault?”
“It is if you’re the one responsible for putting that lousy mattress on the bed.”
Her jaw dropped. “There’s nothing wrong with that mattress! It’s top-of-the-line and almost new.”
“It sags on one side.”
“So sleep on the other! Better yet, sleep in a different bed. You leased the entire house. Pick another one to sleep in.”
“Fine. I want yours.”
She gaped. “You what?”
“I want yours. You said I could have my pick.”
“I didn’t mean mine!”
“Why not? You said I could have my pick.”
“Of the rooms you leased,” she informed him.
“Too late. You already said I could have my pick, and I choose your bed.”
She fought for patience. “If you want to sleep in one of the other rooms upstairs, fine. You certainly paid for the right to sleep wherever you want.”
“I certainly did,” he agreed, “and I choose to sleep in your bed.”
She started to respond, then closed her mouth and narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “You’re just trying to avoid the real issue, aren’t you?”
“And that would be…?”
“Kissing me last night. Well, let me tell you something, buddy,” she went on before he could say anything. “It was no big deal. Okay? As far as I’m concerned it’s forgotten. Over. Done with. Never happened.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, really. I—”
Before she could finish, his mouth was on hers, smothering her words. There was no slow buildup to this kiss. His mouth came down hard on hers, forcing her head back against the seat and her pulse into a gallop. She tasted the anger in him, the heat. A split second later his lips softened, sweeping over hers with a seductive slowness that stole her breath, before he nipped at her lower lip and withdrew. She opened her eyes to find he’d settled in his seat again, his gaze on the windshield.
“Let’s check out the area around Bastrop.”
She stared, wondering if she’d imagined it all. “B-Bastrop?”
“Yeah. From the map I was looking at, it appears to be near Austin, yet far enough away that parcels of land are probably still sold by the acre, rather than by the square inch.”
She straightened and pulled the gearshift into Drive, her hand shaking a bit. “B-Bastrop’s a nice town,” she said, anxious to prove she was as unaffected by the kiss as he seemed to be. “Lots of history and beautiful old homes. I would imagine their tax base is lower than Austin’s, which would be a bonus for your company and whatever employees might choose to live there.”
He pointed to a convenience store up ahead. “Pull over and I’ll buy a paper, so we can check out what’s for sale.”
She turned into the parking lot and pulled up alongside the newspaper rack, her pulse rate almost back to normal. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just call a Realtor?”
“It would,” he agreed, as he climbed from the car, then ducked his head back inside. “Better yet, why don’t I just rent a billboard and announce to the whole world I’m here looking for land?” Muttering under his breath, he slammed the door and strode for the newspaper stand.
Jerk, she thought resentfully as she watched him feed coins into the slot. His paranoia about keeping his presence in Austin a secret was wearing thin. She could see how it made good business-sense for him to play his cards close to his chest. But wasn’t he carrying this a little far? He never took a step out of the house without those stupid sunglasses. And earlier, when she stopped at the window of a fast-food joint to order sodas, he’d slumped down in the seat and kept his face averted, like he was afraid someone was going to recognize him, which was totally nuts. It wasn’t like he was a movie star or something. He was a businessman, for cripes’ sake! Prior to him coming to the Vista, if she had passed him on the street, she wouldn’t have even given him a second look.
Unfortunately he chose that moment to bend over to pull a newspaper from the rack, giving her a full view of his nicely shaped butt, and her mouth went dry as dust. Okay, she admitted, wetting her lips. Maybe she would’ve looked twice. But she doubted she would’ve recognized him. And even if she had, it wouldn’t have occurred to her that he was in Austin to buy property. For all she’d know, he could be on vacation. All this hush-hush, top-secret stuff was ridiculous.
He jumped into the car and slid down in the seat as he slammed the door. “Drive!”
She blinked in surprise. “Excuse me?”
He lifted his head slightly to peer out the rear window, then dropped back down. “I think the guy at the gas pump recognized me.”
“So?”
“So get the hell out of here!” he shouted.
She stomped on the accelerator and careened onto the highway, sending the rearend of the car fishtailing crazily.
“Is he following us?” he asked.
She looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the truck had indeed pulled onto the highway behind them. “I don’t know that he’s following us, but he is behind us.”
“Speed up.”
Though she wasn’t sure the rental she was driving could outrun the truck, she pressed down harder on the accelerator.
“Is he still there?” he asked after a minute.
She glanced in the rearview mirror again. “Yeah. About four car-lengths behind.”
“Faster.”
She shot him a look. “Are you crazy? I’m already going thirty over the speed limit.”
“So go fifty! Just lose him.”
She glanced in the rearview mirror again. “Uh-oh,” she murmured, and lifted her foot off the accelerator.
“What are you doing?” he yelled. “I said speed up, not slow down!”
“I don’t know what whirling red lights mean where you’re from,” she told him, “but in Texas, they mean pull over.”
He sat up and looked out the rear window. “Ah, hell,” he groaned, then turned to scowl at her. “You might have told me the cops around here drive unmarked vehicles.”
“And ruin your fun?” she said sweetly. She hit the button to lower the window and greeted the patrolman approaching the car. “Good morning, Officer.”
He touched a finger to the brim of his hat. “Morning, ma’am. Is there a reason you were driving forty-five miles per hour over the speed limit?”
“Only one,” she replied, and hooked a thumb over her shoulder at Garrett. “Him.”
Garrett hissed a breath between his teeth, then yanked off his sunglasses and leaned around Ali to look up at the policeman. “My fault entirely,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were a police officer.”
“Ah,” the patrolman said, nodding. “So speeding’s all right, so long as the law isn’t around.”
“No, no, no,” Garrett replied in frustration. “That’s not what I meant, at all. I was buying a newspaper and saw you watching me. I thought you’d recognized me, so I told Ali to lose you.”
“Why don’t you dig yourself a little deeper?” Ali said under her breath.
Garrett burned her with a look, then shifted his gaze to the police officer again. “I’m Garrett Miller,” he said, as if that explained everything.
The officer looked at Ali. “What? Is he some kind of rock star or something?”
Ali rolled her lips inward, to keep from laughing. “Uh. No, sir. He owns Future Concepts, a computer company.”
When the officer’s expression remained blank, she looked over at Garrett and shrugged. “Your turn.”
“It’s not funny,” Garrett snapped as he flopped down on the sofa.
“No, it’s not,” Ali agreed, trying her best to hide her smile. “But if you could have seen your face when Officer Wilhelm told you to put your hands on the trunk of the car and spread ’em….” She sputtered a laugh, unable to help herself. “Now that was funny!”
Scowling, he folded his arms across his chest. “Well, I’m glad you found it humorous. Being frisked like a common criminal certainly isn’t my idea of fun.”
“I’d think you’d be relieved,” she said, feigning wide-eyed innocence. “You told him everything about yourself except your favorite color of underwear and he still didn’t have a clue who you were.”
“No, but the dispatcher recognized my name.”
“Which is all that saved you from taking a ride in the backseat of a patrol car,” she reminded him.
“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”
She didn’t even try to hide her smile. “Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“Honestly? Because I think you place way too much importance on yourself.”
He lifted a brow. “Oh, really.”
“Yes, really. You need to lighten up. Forget you’re a zillionaire for a while. Kick up your heels and have some fun for a change.”
He snorted. “You don’t have a clue what it’s like to be me.”
“Other than boring, no.”
“Boring?” He pushed to his feet, his jaw clenched in anger. “Let me tell you what it’s like to be me,” he said, bearing down on her. “Money attracts people, including crazies and crooks. And unlike our friendly police officer this morning, most people recognize my name, if not my face, which causes problems for me. Because of my success, I haven’t been able to fly commercially in years. I can’t go to a movie theater or a restaurant, or anywhere for that matter, without drawing attention. If I do venture out to a highly publicized event, I’m forced to take a bodyguard along, just in case some lunatic decides to try to kidnap me for ransom.
“And as for having fun,” he continued, “unless it can be boxed and delivered for me to enjoy in the privacy of my home, I can forget it. Going out in public is a freedom I lost the day I made my first million.”
By the time he finished his tirade, he was standing nose to nose with Ali, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on her mouth.
“I—I had no idea,” she stammered.
“Most people don’t. They envy my success, even try to emulate it, but they don’t know what success has cost me, what it would cost them if it was theirs.” Hiding a smile, he turned away. “But you’ll get a taste of it soon enough.”
She tensed. “What do you mean?”
“Our good friend Officer Wilhelm gave us his word he wouldn’t tell anyone about seeing me, but I’ll bet you money he tells someone. Or the dispatcher will. And if one of them does tell, you can expect the media to start arriving by morning.”
Her eyes rounded. “Here?”
“Here and anywhere we dare venture. Media hounds are like fleas on a dog. Irritating as hell and all but impossible to get rid of.”
* * *
Ali paced the living room, stealing an occasional peek through the blinds she’d closed. So far, so good, she thought. Not a person or a car in sight.
Confident that Officer Wilhelm had been true to his word—or Garrett had exaggerated his own importance, which is what she felt was more the case—she abandoned her watch and went to the kitchen for something to drink.
“I’m getting a glass of wine,” she called to him in the den. “Do you want one?”
“Yes, please.”
She filled two glasses and carried them to the den. She glanced over her shoulder at the television as she handed Garrett his drink. “What are you watching?”
“Jeopardy.”
Figures, she thought, biting back a smile, as she sank down on the sofa beside him. “Who’s winning?” she asked.
“Guy on the left. They’re about to start Double Jeopardy, though, so that could change things.”
A commercial came on and he lifted the remote to surf through channels.
“Do you have something against commercials?” she asked in frustration.
“Other than being an utter waste of my time?” He shook his head. “Not particularly.”
“You advertise,” she reminded him.
“Some.”
“Hypocrite.”
“Why? Because I refuse to watch a boring commercial?”
She opened a hand. “If the shoe fits…”
“It’s marketing’s responsibility to capture the attention of the consumer. If they fail—” he clicked the remote “—which my company’s commercials seldom do,” he informed her, “I change channels until I find something that does catch my attention. Like that,” he said and set the remote aside.
“The stock market report?” She fanned her face. “Stop. Please. I’m not sure my heart can take the excitement.”
He shot her a scowl. “Why don’t you go spy on the reporters lurking outside some more?”
She tucked her feet beneath her and took a sip of her wine. “There’s nobody out there.”
“There will be by morning.”
“You’re full of bologna. No reporters are coming here.”
“Wanna bet?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said.
“Five hundred says they’ll be here by morning.”
She considered, then shook her head. “Too rich for my blood.”
“Okay, if you don’t want to gamble cash, put up some of your photography of equal value.”
She hesitated a moment, then stood and stuck out her hand. “All right, you’ve got yourself a deal.”
He took her hand, but instead of shaking it, he used it to haul himself to his feet. “I prefer photos of landscape, rather than people.”
She lifted a brow. “Kind of confident you’re going to win, aren’t you?”
He shot her a wink and turned away. “When it’s a sure thing, I can afford to be.”
She frowned at his back. “Where are you going?”
“To bed.”
“Hey, wait a minute!” she cried, hurrying after him. “That’s the way to my room.”
“I know. Remember? I chose your bed to sleep in tonight.”
“You’re not sleeping in my bed!”
He opened the door to her private quarters. “Yes, I am.”
She ran after him, praying she hadn’t left underwear or any other equally embarrassing items lying around. “Garrett, really,” she pleaded. “You can sleep in any bed you want. Just not mine.”
He sank down on the side of her bed and bounced a couple of times, as if testing the mattress. “I prefer this one,” he said, and stood, pulling his sweater over his head.
Ali stared, unable to tear her gaze away from the oh-so-sexy chest he’d exposed. Who’d’ve thought? she thought, as heat crawled up her neck, threatening her air. She’d been pressed against his chest the night before when they’d kissed, but they had both had on jackets, which had done a heck of a job of concealing what proved to be a wonderfully muscled and toned body.
“You win,” she managed to say, and darted for the adjoining bath. “Just let me get my stuff.”
She grabbed her pajamas and toothbrush and hustled back out, careful to keep her gaze fixed straight ahead, fearing he’d stripped completely while she was out of the room. In the doorway, she groped blindly behind her for the knob, to pull the door closed behind her.
“Ali?”
She stopped, but didn’t dare turn around. “What?”
“Since you enjoyed kissing me so much, I thought you’d want to sleep with me, too.”
Setting her jaw, she slapped a hand against the wall switch, turning off the light, and yanked the door closed behind her.
She wasn’t sure, but she’d swear she heard him laughing as she stalked to the den.
Score one for the home team, Garrett thought, chuckling, as he climbed into bed. Judging by Ali’s fast exit following his comment about her sleeping with him, it appeared he’d succeeded in getting even with her for the hard time she’d given him over his run-in with the law and Officer Wilhelm.
He punched up his pillow and lay back, wondering where she would sleep. There were plenty of empty beds to choose from, including the one he’d slept in prior to claiming hers. He’d blamed his inability to sleep on the sagging mattress, which was what had started the whole where-will-Garrett-sleep debate. But Garrett’s sleeplessness wasn’t due to a sagging bed.
It was due to the Vista’s innkeeper.
His smile faded. He hadn’t intended for it to happen, had done everything within his power to prevent it, but it was true.
Ali Moran had gotten under his skin.
It had started with the stories she’d told him of her past and his growing suspicion that she was more victim than enemy, and had quickly escalated to a physical attraction that grew stronger each day he spent with her.
He dragged his pillow over his face to smother a groan. What the hell was he going to do now? he asked himself in frustration. He’d arrived in Austin prepared to despise her, ruin her if necessary, and now all he could think about was sleeping with her? She was his stepmother’s daughter, for God’s sake!
He could handle this, he told himself. It was simply a matter of refocusing his goals, keeping a respectable distance from her.
He drew in a deep breath, telling himself he could do this. He’d maintained his objectivity in tougher situations.
He was immediately proved wrong. That one breath had filled his senses with her scent, evoking images of her. Lying in this very bed. The two of them together. Her nude body wrapped around his like a vine.
Groaning, he rolled to his stomach and buried his face in the pillow.
“Focus,” he told himself sternly. “Just focus on the damn goal.”
He’d call his lawyer tomorrow, he promised himself. Find out if Tom had discovered who owned the Vista yet. Knowledge was power and power was what he needed to keep the scales weighted on his side…and hopefully his mind focused on his goal and not on the Vista’s innkeeper.
Ali tiptoed into her bedroom and cautiously approached the bed. She really didn’t want to wake Garrett—or be in the same room with him after the crack he’d made about her sleeping with him—but she preferred both to calling the police.
At the side of the bed, she leaned to touch his shoulder. The next thing she knew, she was flat on her back on the mattress and Garrett was straddling her, his fist reared back, like he was going to slug her.
“Garrett! It’s me! Ali!”
He blinked, then rolled off her, swearing. “Dammit, Ali! Don’t ever slip up on me like that again.”
Eyeing him warily, she dragged herself up to a sitting position. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”
He twisted around to switch on the bedside lamp, then slumped back against the headboard, scowling. “Sorry,” he muttered, then glanced over at her. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“N-no. Scared me plenty, though.” Realizing the skill and strength required to accomplish a move like the one he’d just performed, she asked, “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Self-defense class.” His scowl deepened. “When your life has been threatened as many times as mine, you take what precautions you can.”
“Threatened?” she repeated.
“Yes, threatened.” He slanted her a look. “Why were you sneaking around in my room, anyway?”
“I’d remind you it’s my room, but we’ve got more pressing matters to worry about.”
“Like what?”
“Like the men outside.”
He shot up from the bed and ran to peer out the window.
The sight of him standing there in nothing but black silk boxer shorts was almost enough to make her forget about the men she’d seen skulking around outside.
Almost.
“You can’t see them from there,” she told him. “They’re out front. On the street side of the rock wall.”
He dove across the bed for the lamp and switched it off, plunging the room into darkness.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
He clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shh,” he whispered. “We don’t want them to know we’re awake.”
She shoved his hand away. “Why not?”
“If they think we’re asleep and unaware of their presence, hopefully they’ll stay where they are and wait for daylight before approaching the house.”
“But I thought you didn’t want them here?” she said in confusion.
“I don’t.” He dropped his elbows to his knees and his head to his hands. “We’ve got to think of a way to get out of here without them seeing us.”
“We? As in you and me?” She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Sorry, buddy. But I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“You have no choice.”
“Oh, I have lots of choices,” she informed him. “The most obvious is staying right here in my own house.”
“You can’t. It’s no longer safe.”
The somberness of his tone turned her blood to ice. “What do you mean, it’s not safe? We’re talking men toting cameras here, not Uzis.”
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said hesitantly. “I wasn’t completely honest with you about why I wanted my presence here kept a secret.”
She dropped her head back with a moan. “I really hate middle of the night confessions.”
“My life’s been threatened.”
She snapped her head back up to stare. “Somebody wants you dead?”
“It appears that way.”
“But…why?”
“If I knew that, I’d probably know who wanted to kill me.”
“And you think whoever that person is, is outside my house right now?”
“No. I’m fairly confident it’s only photographers out there. But once they make my presence here known,” he added, “I can almost promise you the person who threatened me will come here looking for me.”
She stared, trying to make sense of what he was telling her, then held up a hand. “Wait a minute. Just because somebody wants you dead, doesn’t mean I’m in danger.”
“I’m afraid it does. If he comes here and finds me gone, he may take you.”
“Me?” She choked a laugh. “Like anyone would want me,” she said wryly.
“He would, if he thinks you’re important to me.”
Her heart faltered, then kicked hard against her chest. “You mean he might use me as a hostage?”
“It’s possible and it’s a chance I’m not willing to take.”
Vivid images of every movie or news clip she’d seen involving hostages filled her mind. And not a one of them were pretty. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re getting out of here.” He rolled off the bed and snatched up his jeans, tugged them on. “I’m going upstairs to pack my stuff and make some phone calls. You’ll need to pack a bag, too. Enough to hold you for a couple of weeks.”
“A couple of weeks!” she cried. “I can’t be gone a couple of weeks!”
“Hopefully you won’t be,” he told her. “And no lights,” he warned, as he headed for the door. “We don’t want them to suspect we’re up to anything.”
Garrett took the rear stairs two at a time and broke into a run when he reached the second floor. Getting out of Austin was imperative, but where to go was a problem. He couldn’t call for his private jet. It would take too much time for his pilot to fly to Texas. Public transportation was out, as it made him too visible. That meant finding some place close to hide out for a while, somewhere no one would think to look for him.
He knew of only one place that fit his needs: his stepmother’s son’s ranch.
Muttering a curse, he paced his room. He didn’t want to call Jase. Calling him meant explaining where he was, what he was up to, and his stepmother had made them promise they wouldn’t search for Ali, that they would respect her request for privacy and leave her alone.
But he hadn’t promised, he reminded himself. Jase and Eddie, Jase’s father, had promised.
Admonishing himself of any guilt for his actions, he pulled his cell phone from his briefcase and scrolled through the address book until he found Jase’s home number.
Mandy, Jase’s wife, answered on the second ring.
“Hello?” she said sleepily.
“Mandy, it’s Garrett.”
“Well, hey, Garrett,” she said, sounding surprised to hear from him. “What are you doing calling me in the middle of the night?”
“I’m in a jam. Is Jase there?”
“He’s in Washington visiting his mother. Haven’t you seen him?”
“No, and I really need his help.”
“Call him at Barbara’s. I’m sure he’ll do whatever he can to help you out.”
“I can’t call him at Barbara’s,” he said in frustration. “You’ll have to help.”
“You know I’ll do whatever I can, but wouldn’t it make better sense to just call Jase, since he’s in Washington and I’m in Texas?”
“That’s just it. I’m in Texas, too.”
“What!” she cried. “Where?”
“Ali Moran’s house.”
A pregnant pause followed his announcement.
“You’re at Ali’s?” she said.
“Yes. I’ll explain later, but we need a place to hide out for a couple of days. I was hoping we could stay in one of the hunting cabins.”
“Of course you can,” she told him, then asked hesitantly, “Does Ali know you’re Barbara’s stepson?”
“No, and you’ve got to promise me you’ll keep it that way.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked doubtfully. “Barbara made y’all promise you’d leave Ali alone.”
He felt a stab of guilt and quickly shrugged it off. “Jase and Eddie promised. I promised nothing.”
“That’s splitting hairs, don’t you think?”
He drew in a breath. “We can discuss this later, okay? Right now I’ve got to get us out of Austin.”
“Okay. But when Barbara finds out about this, I’m pointing all ten fingers at you, buddy. Understand? I’m not chancing getting on my mother-in-law’s bad side just to save your butt, even if it is a cute one.”
The next call Garrett made was to the head of his company’s security department.
“Joe, it’s Garrett. We’ve got a problem.”
Four
The plan Garrett devised for his and Ali’s escape included every mode of transportation, with the exception of air. He probably would’ve considered that, too, if he or Ali had known how to fly.
Their adventure started on land, with them sneaking down to the pier and climbing aboard the rowboat Ali kept on hand for her guests to use. With moonlight as their only illumination, they’d rowed across the lake and docked near the shoreline of the Hyatt Regency. From there, they’d grabbed a taxi for the airport, where Garrett had insisted Ali rent a vehicle, claiming if he rented it he would be leaving a paper trail that could easily be followed.
After loading their luggage into the rental, they’d left Austin, with Ali behind the wheel. She had thought he would insist on driving, had even suggested it, but he had reminded her she had rented the car and had listed herself as the sole driver, a legality Ali was willing to overlook in exchange for some much needed sleep. Apparently Garrett wasn’t.
Though she’d repeatedly asked him their final destination, the most she had been able to get out of him was that he’d arranged for them to stay in a friend’s hunting cabin.
“I feel like I’m playing connect the dots,” she said wearily, as she made the turn off the highway that carried them beneath an iron arch bearing the brand CCC. “Turn here, turn there. Go straight. At least tell me if we’re getting close.”
“We’re almost there. Keep driving until you see a small wooden arrow on the right that says ‘Hunting Cabins.’”
“Are you sure these people are expecting us?” she asked uneasily. “It’s four o’clock in the morning. I don’t want somebody shooting at me, thinking I’m a trespasser.”
“They know we’re coming.”
“Have you been here before?”
“Once.” He pointed ahead. “There’s the sign.”
Ali made the turn, slowing when her headlights illuminated a road that was little more than a path. “Now I know why you told me to request an SUV from the rental agency.”
“Pointless to hide, if you’re going to make yourself easily accessible.”
“I shouldn’t even be hiding,” she said petulantly. “I should be at home asleep in my bed.”
“If you were home, I guarantee you wouldn’t be sleeping. You’d be listening to your doorbell and phone ring off the wall. And if those guys hanging around outside have figured out a way to scale the rock wall that borders the street-side of your property, you might find yourself staring at a stranger’s face in your window—or worse, the lens of a camera. And when daylight arrives, you can bet at least one helicopter will be hovering over your house, taking aerial shots.” He waved a dismissive hand. “But once those pictures hit the papers, you wouldn’t have time to worry about the cameras any longer. You’d be too busy trying to stay alive.”
“Okay, okay,” she snapped. “I get your point.”
“Good. I really don’t want to have this conversation again.”
She saw a large shadow looming ahead and hit the bright lights. “Is that the cabin?” she asked.
“One of them.”
“How many are there?”
“Six, as I recall. They’ve left the cabin on the far end open for us.”
She’d driven past two, when he said, “It’s the next one”
“But you said there were six,” she said in confusion.
“At least that many. But there are only three on this particular road.”
She pulled to a stop, and glanced in the rearview mirror at the path they’d followed, barely visible in the red glow of her brake lights. “You call that a road?”
He climbed from the vehicle. “Accessibility,” he reminded her.
“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled, as she trudged toward the rear of the SUV to help him with the bags. An eerie howl sounded in the distance and sent her scurrying to Garrett’s side. “Did you hear that?” she asked in a nervous whisper.
“Hear what?”
The howl sounded again. “That,” she said, with a shudder.
He pushed her tote against her chest, forcing her to take it. “Probably a coyote.”
“Probably?” With her gaze fixed on the darkness, she eased closer to his side. “You aren’t sure?”
He pulled out her suitcase and set it on the ground. “You’re the one from Texas. Don’t you know a coyote when you hear one?”
“Sorry,” she said dryly, “but we don’t have many coyotes roaming the streets of downtown Austin.”
He closed the rear hatch and the interior light blinked off, leaving them in inky darkness. He tried to turn, but with Ali on one side and her suitcase on the other, he was trapped.
“If you’ll give me some room,” he said in frustration, “I’ll lead the way to the cabin.”
She grabbed the handle of her suitcase and dragged it out of his path, but remained where she was. “No way, buster. You’re not leaving me to bring up the rear. The last person on the trail is always the one plucked off and never seen again.”
He heaved a sigh. “I’m sure there’s logic in there somewhere, but I’m too damn tired at the moment to reason it out.”
With Ali sticking to him like glue, he made his way to the cabin. Once inside, it didn’t take Ali long to figure out the cabin had only one bed, which she was quick to point out to Garrett.
“So we’ll share,” he replied. “It’s a king. It’s certainly big enough.”
“Both of us in the same bed?”
He shrugged off his jacket and tossed it to a chair. “If you have a problem sharing, you can sleep on the couch.”
She glanced through the doorway at the couch in the other room, thinking about the eerie howling she’d heard, as well as the lunatic who supposedly wanted Garrett dead. Deciding that sleeping on the couch held about as much appeal as being the last person on the trail, she snatched up pillows and began erecting a wall down the center of the bed.
“Line of demarcation,” she warned him.
Ali didn’t expect to sleep a wink. Not with the threat of an assassin on her mind and Garrett on the other side of the bed. To her surprise, within minutes of closing her eyes, she slipped into a deep sleep and didn’t stir until hours later, when sunlight flooding through the bedroom window pricked at her eyelids. In an effort to block the sun, she folded an arm over her head and snuggled deeper into the cocoon of bedding.
Her mind slowly registered a difference in the firmness of the wall of pillows at her back, as well as the heat it was producing. Praying the cause wasn’t what she feared, she cautiously pushed her buttocks against the wall and froze when she met the unmistakable shape and resistance of an erection.
“Don’t panic,” a sleepy voice said from behind her. “Men wake up like this all the time.”
She twisted around to find Garrett directly behind her. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“Only if you considered it a threat.” He lifted a shoulder. “But if you prefer to claim ownership for producing it….”
“Claim ownership?” she repeated, then sputtered a laugh and rolled from the bed, pleased to discover he had a sense of humor. “As if.”
“Where are you going?” he called after her.
“To get dressed.”
“Don’t you want to finish what you started?”
She fluttered a hand, but kept walking. “No, thanks.”
After dressing, Ali went to the kitchen in search of food, and found Garrett sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, working at his laptop. “Have you eaten?” she asked, as she passed him on her way to the refrigerator.
“Nibbled.”
“Well, nibbling’s not going to cut it for me. I’m starving.” She opened the refrigerator and was surprised to find it fully stocked. “Wow. Your friends really know how to make a person feel welcome.”
“Mandy likes to play mother.”
She froze, her hand on a bowl of fruit. Mandy? Forcing the tension from her shoulders, she pulled out the bowl of fruit. “I, uh, assumed your friend was a male.”
“Mandy is Jase’s wife. They’re both friends.”
A pitifully brief explanation, but at least she now knew this Mandy person wasn’t a romantic interest of Garrett’s.
Not that she cared, she told herself.
She dropped down on the chair opposite him and plucked a grape from the bowl. “What are you doing?” she asked curiously.
“Checking my e-mail.”
“You can get Internet access in the boonies?” she asked doubtfully.
He tapped a finger against the side of his laptop. “Thanks to a wireless card from my cell phone provider. Anywhere I can receive cell phone reception, I can access the Internet.”
“Wow!” She popped the grape into her mouth, chewed. “So? Any word on the guy who’s threatened you?”
“No.”
“Have you checked to see if you’ve made the news?”
“No mention, yet.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? It means we’re safe here, right?”
“For the time being.”
Grimacing, she fished a strawberry from the bowl. “You could’ve lied, you know,” she informed him, as she sank her teeth into the strawberry. “I could use some reassurance here.”
“I’m not going to lie just to ease your mind.” He closed the lid of his laptop and met her gaze. “But if it’ll make you feel better, the more time that passes without my whereabouts making the news, the more likely it is the person who’s threatening me will fall into the trap my security team has set for him.”
“You consider that reassuring?” With a woeful shake of her head, she rose. “If that’s the best you can do, I’m pulling a Scarlett O’Hara.”
“What’s a Scarlett O’Hara?”
“Putting off until tomorrow what I don’t want to think about today.”
“What does that resolve?”
“Nothing for you, maybe,” she told him as she moved to the den, “but it works wonders for me.” She stopped before the fireplace to look at the portrait hanging above it. “Who’re they?” she asked curiously.
“Jase’s parents.”
“They look nice,” she said.
“I wouldn’t know. I never met them.”
“Sometimes you can tell a person’s personality just by looking,” she said, studying the couple’s faces. “Look at her smile. It’s not just on her lips, it’s in her eyes. And him,” she said, pointing. “The way he’s holding his arm around her, his stance? He obviously adores her and is very protective of her.”
“That’s quite a lot to assume from a simple photograph.”
“Some things can’t be faked.” She ambled on, smoothing a hand over the supple leather of the sofa’s back, as she looked around. “This is a cool place. Rustic, yet comfy. Much nicer than what I’d expect a hunter’s cabin to look like.”
“This was Jase’s home.”
She glanced back to find Garrett had moved to stand in the doorway between the kitchen and den, and was watching her.
“Why’d he move?” she asked.
“It was Mandy’s idea. After they married, she wanted to live in the family home.”
“Family home?” Her imagination conjured a big rambling house full of kids and laughter. “I guess his brothers and sisters didn’t have a problem with that?”
He seemed to hesitate a moment, then shook his head. “Jase was the Calhouns’ only child. He inherited their entire estate after their deaths.”
“Wow,” she said and crossed to peer out the front window. “He inherited all this?”
“Yes.”
“How big is it?”
“I have no idea. Huge, I would imagine. I know he raises cattle and has a large pecan orchard business, plus he leases hunting rights and cabins to hunters during hunting season. I’d think all that would require a substantial number of acres.”
“Probably.” She turned to him. “Do you think he’d mind if I wandered around and took some pictures?”
“Of what?”
“Nature, silly,” she said, laughing. “There are some gorgeous old trees behind the cabin, and woods are usually full of all kinds of interesting vegetation.”
“I don’t think he’d mind, as long as you didn’t stray too far.”
“Cool!” She started for the bedroom to get her camera, then stopped, remembering the coyote she’d heard howling the night before. “Want to come along?” she asked hopefully.
He pushed away from the wall. “Why not? There’s nothing else to do.”
She beamed a smile. “Great. I’ll get my camera. Won’t take a second.”
When she returned, Garrett was standing before the gun case, studying its contents. Her blood chilled, as she watched him take out a handgun.
“Uh, what are you doing?” she asked uneasily.
He spun the cylinder, checking the chambers for bullets. “Never know what you might run into in the woods.”
“Do you think the guy who’s after you will come here?”
He shrugged. “Best to be prepared.”
She gulped, wishing she hadn’t asked. “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”
He tucked the pistol into the waist of his jeans. “I rescued Zelda.”
“Zelda? The video game?”
At his nod, she choked a laugh. “Just my luck. Of all the men in the world to get marooned with, I get stuck with a computer nerd who thinks he’s embodied with super powers.”
Garrett sat on a log, watching Ali stroll alongside the creek, snapping pictures.
In spite of the danger lurking somewhere beyond the boundaries of the ranch, he felt surprisingly relaxed, calm even. He’d been living with the threat of his would-be assassin long enough to know that his current mood wasn’t normal. He also knew Ali was responsible for the change. She had a way of dealing with adversity that reduced its importance, made the most dire situation seem almost comical.
Pulling a Scarlett O’Hara.
He shook his head in amusement. Leave it to Ali to come up with something like that. But as ridiculous as her method sounded, he couldn’t argue its success. Caught in a similar situation, another woman would be wringing her hands and wailing about her plight. Not Ali. In spite of the danger they might be in, she was seemingly having the time of her life, crawling over rocks and stumps, taking pictures of plants and bugs, and all because she refused to think about their problem.
Some might consider her method of dealing with adversity a form of denial, foolish and nonproductive. A week ago, Garrett would have thought the same damn thing. But after spending time with her and experiencing, if only by association, the benefits of her methodology, he was beginning to believe the whole world would be a better place if more people took Ali’s approach to life.
“Careful,” he called to her, as her foot slipped on a rock. “That water might not be deep, but I’ll bet it’s cold.”
“And icky,” she said, making a face, as she looked through the viewfinder. “Lots of moss and slime. Oh!” she squealed. “There’s a turtle.”
“In the water?”
“Hiding under a rock.” She lowered the camera and motioned for him to join her. “Come look.”
“Thanks, but I’ve seen a turtle before.”
“Not one this big. He’s huge!”
Heaving a sigh, Garrett pulled the pistol from his waistband and set it on the log, before crossing to her.
She lifted the camera strap over her head and dropped it over his. “You can see him better through the zoom lens,” she explained. “Hunker down here,” she said, pointing to the spot where she’d been standing. “He’s on the far side of the creek.”
Garrett squatted down and brought the camera before his face. “I don’t see anything.”
She stooped behind him to peer over his shoulder. “Move the camera a little bit to the left. A little more. Do you see it now?”
He lowered the camera in disgust. “I don’t see anything but rocks and muddy water.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she fussed, and reached over his shoulders to bring the camera before his face again. Placing her cheek next to his, to align their vision, she nudged the camera a fraction to the left. “There. Do you see him now?”
See what? Garrett wasn’t sure he hadn’t been struck blind. He’d heard of sensory overload before, but he had never personally experienced its debilitating powers. With Ali’s breasts hugging the back of his neck like a cushioned collar, her cheek chafing like silk against his, and her strawberry-scented breath teasing his nostrils, all he could think was, with a slight turn of his head, he could taste her strawberry-flavored lips. A quarter turn more, and he could bury his face in the pillowed softness of her breasts.
“Well, do you?” she asked impatiently. She glanced his way, and drew back with a start, when she found him looking at her and not the turtle. Her eyes rounded. “You’re feeling it, aren’t you?” she cried. “That sizzle of sensation?”
He considered lying, but it seemed pointless to continue to deny what must be obvious.
“Makes you want to test it, doesn’t it? See how far we can push it without getting burned.”
“Yeah,” she breathed, and wet her lips.
Without allowing himself time to think of consequences, he turned on the balls of his feet, caught her face between his hands and stood, bringing her mouth to his. He tasted the strawberries that had teased him moments before, found the lingering sweetness of grapes, before her lips parted beneath his on a sigh, inviting him to deepen the kiss. He did so gladly, exploring the secret crevices, teasing her tongue until it danced with his.
“Sizzling yet?” he murmured against her lips.
“Oh, yeah,” she breathed. “How about you?”
He slipped his hands inside her jacket and smoothed his hands up her ribs. “I’m not sure. Describe the sensation to me.”
Her breath caught as his thumbs bumped over the fullness of her breasts. “Can’t,” she said, releasing the breath on a shuddery sigh against his lips. “Brain’s fried.”
He was afraid his was, too. The curves his hands traced were soft and utterly feminine, her body’s response to his touch sensual and arousing. Desire stirred his loins, a none too subtle reminder of how long it had been since he’d been with a woman.
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Katherine Garbera
Peggy Moreland
The Texan’s Contested Claim Peggy Moreland Billionaire Garret Miller had arrived in Texas under false pretences. He told innkeeper Ali Moran that his stay was strictly business. But the high-powered businessman’s true agenda was to uncover all of Ali’s secrets…and use them to his advantage…The Greek Tycoon’s Secret Heir Katherine Garbera Ava Monroe has always longed for Christos Theakis to propose marriage. But lethally attractive Christos’s demand is not for Ava – he wants custody of her son. A child he believes to be his brother’s. Ava joins the shipping magnate on his lush Greek island home, hoping to prove that she never betrayed him!
The Texan’s Contested Claimby Peggy Moreland
This house had always been Ali’s home, her refuge. Yet now, as she moved from room to room, she felt nothing but emptiness.
She blamed her sadness on being forced to leave. But she knew the true cause of it was the man who had briefly shared the house with her.
The scent of him still hung in her bedroom, a reminder of that first night he’d come to her there. And when she curled up to sleep, she envisioned him braced above her there, in her bed.
She shrugged away the troubling thoughts and went back to packing.
And if she had to wipe away an occasional tear, she blamed it on the dust she was stirring up. It certainly wasn’t because she was missing Garrett Miller.
She told herself she hadn’t fallen in love with him, but she had – and he’d deceived her.
The Greek Tycoon’s Secret Heirby Katherine Garbera
“We need to talk.”
Such arrogance. She used to find it attractive. Oh, who was she kidding, she still did. There was something about a man who knew what he wanted and made no bones about it.
“Yes, we do,” Ava said, trying to project a little arrogance of her own.
Christos arched an eyebrow at her. He said nothing more, and the silence built around them. Ava brushed her hands down the sides of her skirt and told herself she wasn’t still the small-town girl he’d once seduced. But she felt like she was.
She tried to figure out what to say, but all the words running around in her head sounded banal. Best to be blunt.
“So…why are you here?”
“To claim your son, the Theakis heir.”
The Texan’s Contested Claim
PEGGY MORELAND
The Greek Tycoon’s Secret Heir
KATHERINE GARBERA
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
THE TEXAN’S CONTESTED CLAIM
by
Peggy Moreland
Dear Reader,
This story centres on Ali Moran – twin sister of Jase Calhoun, the hero from The Texan’s Secret Past – and Garrett Miller, founder and owner of Future Concepts, a billion-dollar computer company. Their story opens on the first day of January, the perfect time for all new beginnings. Ali and Garrett are the epitome of the odd couple, as she is creative, warm and friendly, and he is…well, he’s a geek. A wealthy and handsome geek, but a geek nonetheless.
January is one of my favourite months – and not because of the weather! I really, really hate being cold! But I do like what January represents. For me, it’s a new beginning, a chance to re-evaluate my life and steer it in the direction I want it to take, making any necessary changes – as well as a few resolutions I may or may not keep.
I hope you enjoy this last book in my series, and I hope you’ll take the time to jot down a few resolutions of your own for the New Year. And make sure the first one is to fill your year with romance!
Happy New Year!
Peggy
PEGGY MORELAND
published her first romance in 1989 and continues to delight readers with stories set in her home state of Texas. Peggy is a winner of a National Readers’ Choice Award, a nominee for Romantic TimesBOOKreviews Reviewer’s Choice Award and a two-time finalist for a prestigious RITA® Award, and her books frequently appear on bestseller lists. When not writing, Peggy can usually be found outside, tending the cattle, goats and other creatures on the ranch she shares with her husband. You may write to Peggy at PO Box 1099, Florence, TX 76527-1099, USA, or e-mail her at peggy@peggymoreland.com.
Without avid readers, where would an
author be? Over the last eighteen-plus years,
I’ve received thousands of letters and e-mails
from readers all over the world, who were kind
enough to take the time to write and tell me how
much they enjoy my books. To each and every
one of you, I dedicate this book.
One
To Garrett Miller, timing was everything, both in business and in life.
And the timing on his trip to Austin, Texas, couldn’t be more perfect.
His number one goal in making the trip was to reunite his stepmother with Ali Moran, the daughter she’d given up for adoption thirty years prior. If that failed, he intended to persuade—or coerce, if necessary—Ali to give him the missing portion of the deed she held, which would enable his stepmother and her new husband to fulfill the requirements to claim a ranch they had been given.
As fate would have it, he also needed to locate property for an expansion he was planning for his company. Since Austin was quickly establishing itself as the Silicon Valley of the Southwest, it seemed the natural choice and gave him the perfect excuse to make the trip.
The kick was, he had to accomplish it all without anyone discovering he was in Austin.
Scowling, he punched in the code for the electronic gate of Vista Bed and Breakfast, given to his secretary when she booked his reservation. If he’d known success would make him so damn popular with the media, he would’ve remained a geek for the rest of his life and never started Future Concepts. Who would’ve thought the public would care about a businessman’s every move?
Or that success would make him a target for some crazy who wanted him dead?
He shoved the disturbing thought from his mind as he drove through the open gates. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, he reminded himself, Garrett Miller was currently attending a technology seminar in Switzerland, a lie his public relations department had fed the media at his request. All Garrett had to do was keep his presence in Austin under wraps, and his stalker would follow the bait to Switzerland and hopefully fall right into the trap being set for him there.
Pulling up in front of the two-story home, he parked the rental car he’d picked up at the airport, then leaned across the seat to peer up at the house. He studied the structure a long moment, thinking of the woman inside, as well as his chances of gaining her cooperation. He’d given himself a month to find a way to convince her to reunite with his stepmother, though he doubted it would take anywhere near that long. Everyone had a price—or a weakness. It was just a matter of discovering Ali’s.
He smiled smugly as he climbed from the car. He didn’t doubt for a minute he’d succeed. Knowledge was power and, thanks to the P.I. he’d hired and the research he’d done on his own, he knew all there was to know about Ali Moran.
And she knew virtually nothing about him.
Perched high on a ladder, Ali stretched to snag the last ornament from the Christmas tree’s uppermost branch. In spite of the cheery fire burning in the fireplace and her favorite Norah Jones CD playing on the stereo, she couldn’t have worked up a smile if she had wanted to. January 1 was usually her favorite day of the year—sleeping late after celebrating the New Year with her friends, eating a huge bowl of black-eyed peas for good luck, making a list of resolutions she wouldn’t keep. Best of all, January 1 marked the first day of her annual four-week vacation.
But there would be no vacation for Ali this year.
Grimacing, she tucked the ornament into the box and started down the ladder. It was her own fault, she told herself. She’d let greed get the best of her.
And who wouldn’t? she asked herself in frustration. When a zillionaire calls you up and offers you four times the going rate to reserve your entire bed-and-breakfast for a month, it’s kind of hard to say no. Cooking and cleaning for one guest, rather than the five her B&B was designed to accommodate, and getting paid four times the money for her trouble? Only a fool would turn down a deal as sweet as that.
“So quit your whining,” she lectured, as she stooped to place the box of ornaments in a storage crate. The money she would earn far outweighed whatever sacrifices were required of her, including giving up her vacation.
Grimacing, she slapped the crate’s flaps into place. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she grumbled under her breath.
The doorbell rang and she straightened with a frown. Who on earth would drop by this early in the morning on New Year’s Day? she wondered. Everyone she knew would still be in bed, after partying all night—which is exactly where she’d be, if she wasn’t expecting a guest to arrive that afternoon.
At the thought of her guest, she caught her lower lip between her teeth. Surely he hadn’t arrived early. She’d specifically told him check-in time wasn’t until three. But who else could it be? Unable to think of a soul who’d be up and about this early on New Year’s Day, she started grabbing decorations and shoving them into boxes, mortified at the thought of inviting anyone into her home with it looking such a mess, much less Garrett Miller.
The bell sounded a second time, setting her teeth on edge. Dropping the evergreen swag she held, she marched for the front door, telling herself he could just deal, since he had chosen to ignore check-in time.
At the door, she paused to drag the elastic band from her hair and stole a peek through the peephole. She blinked, blinked again. If she hadn’t already checked out her guest on the Internet, she might not have recognized the man standing on her porch as the owner of a world-renowned company like Future Concepts. Dressed in faded jeans, a worn leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, he looked too…well, normal.
The bell rang a third time, making her jump. She blew out a breath, then pasted on a cheerful smile and swung open the door.
“Hi,” she said and extended her hand in greeting. “You must be Garrett. I’m Ali, the innkeeper of Vista Bed and Breakfast.”
He stared, the oddest expression coming over his face, but didn’t make a move to take her hand.
She took a closer look at him. “You are Garrett Miller, aren’t you?”
The question seemed to snap him from his trancelike state.
“Sorry,” he said and took her hand. “It’s just that you look very much like…someone I know.”
A tingle of awareness skittered up her arm as his fingers closed around hers. Surprised by the sensation—and not at all sure she liked it—she broke the connection.
“You know what they say,” she said, with a careless shrug. “Everyone has a twin.”
He got that odd look on his face again and she inwardly groaned, thinking it was going to be a very long month.
“Come on in,” she said and opened the door wider. “You’ll have to pardon the mess,” she warned, thinking it best to prepare him for the disaster that awaited them in the den. “You caught me in the middle of clearing away my Christmas decorations.”
He stepped past her, trailing the seductive scent of sandalwood in his wake. “I hope my arriving early isn’t an inconvenience. I had my pilot fly me in earlier than I’d originally planned.”
He had his own pilot? Which probably meant he had his own plane, too. Unable to imagine that kind of wealth or the freedom it offered, she swallowed an envious sigh. “No problem.” She glanced out the door toward the rental car parked in her driveway. “Do you need help with your luggage?”
He pulled off his sunglasses, looking around as he tucked them into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ll get it later, if that’s all right.”
When he met her gaze again, sans the sunglasses, she felt that same tingle of awareness she’d experienced when he’d clasped her hand, only this time he hadn’t touched her.
“Oh, wow,” she breathed, finding it all but impossible to look away.
“Excuse me?”
“Your eyes,” she said. “I didn’t notice until you took off your glasses. They’re brown. That rich, dark, melted chocolate kind of brown. And when the light hits them just right—” she opened and closed the door, varying the amount of light striking his face “—these little gold flecks flash like tiny explosions of light.”
He reached inside his jacket. “I can put them back on, if it bothers you.”
Realizing she was making a fool of herself, she offered him a sheepish smile. “Sorry,” she said, as she closed the door. “I tend to get carried away about lighting. It’s one of the curses of being a photographer. This way,” she said, and motioned for him to follow her. “I’ll give you a quick tour of the downstairs, then take you up to your room.
“Formal living room and dining room,” she said, gesturing left and right as she moved down the hall. “You’re welcome to use both, but most of my guests prefer the coziness of the den and breakfast room at the rear of the house. There’s a beautiful view of Town Lake through the windows there.”
She paused to point to a closed door at the end of a short hall. “That’s the entrance to my private living quarters. It’s the only portion of the house that’s off-limits to guests.”
He stopped beside her. “I noticed on your Web site that you cater to businessmen.” He angled his head to peer at her. “I believe the blurb read something like, ‘the Vista, where all the needs of the corporate traveler are met.’”
The emphasis he placed on “all,” as well as his suggestive tone, put Ali’s back up. “If you’re thinking the Vista is a front for a call girl service,” she informed him tersely, “you’re wrong.”
“I didn’t say it was,” he returned mildly.
“Well, just so you understand, I provide my clients with nothing more than comfortable accommodations, home-cooked meals and workspace should they need it.”
“Which is all I expect,” he assured her. “I was merely curious why a woman who lives alone would prefer men as guests.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I never said I lived alone.”
“You didn’t have to. Your repeated use of ‘my’and ‘I’ made it obvious.”
When she continued to eye him suspiciously, he dropped his hands to his hips, and the corners of his mouth into a frown.
“Look,” he said, clearly irritated with her. “If you’re worried about your safety, don’t be. You’re perfectly safe with me. I’m not interested in you or your body. And just so you understand,” he said, tossing her own words back at her, “if and when I’m in the mood for female companionship, I sure as hell don’t need someone to arrange it for me.”
She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted, but one thing was certain—she’d angered her guest…something a person in her business couldn’t afford to do.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “I’m usually not this defensive.”
“And I’m not usually mistaken for a predator,” he snapped back at her.
She squinched up her nose. “Can we hit Rewind?” she asked hopefully. “It seems we’ve gotten off to a bad start.”
“If it makes you feel better thinking our relationship will improve by starting over—” he tossed up a hand “—then by all means consider the tape rewound.”
To prove her willingness to play nice, she forced a smile. “Thanks. And to answer your question about my preference for business travelers, this is my home, as well as a bed-and-breakfast, and I discovered early on that businessmen are less disruptive to my daily life than tourists. Since they generally book only on weekdays, that’s an advantage, too, as it leaves my weekends free for my other job.”
He lifted a brow. “Other job?”
“Photography. I’m an aspiring photojournalist.”
“A woman of many talents.”
“You might want to withhold judgment until you see my work,” she warned, then smiled again and motioned him to follow her. “Come on, let’s finish the tour.”
She started down the hall again toward the kitchen. “In the mornings, you’ll find juice and coffee on the buffet in the breakfast room. I normally serve breakfast at seven on weekdays and eight on weekends, but since you’re my only guest, you can choose a different time, if you like.”
“Your current schedule is fine.”
“The den is through here,” she said, and led the way through an arched doorway. She stopped, her shoulders sagging at the amount of work awaiting her. “Welcome to the after-Christmas nightmare,” she said wearily.
“Damn,” he murmured, staring, then glanced her way. “Do you decorate every room in the house?”
“Pretty much. My friends accuse me of trying to make up for my dismal childhood Christmases.”
“Dismal?”
“A tabletop Christmas tree and one present dispensed on Christmas Eve just before bedtime.”
“Were your parents poor?”
She choked a laugh. “Hardly. More like boring.” Doubting her guest was interested in hearing about her dysfunctional family, she pointed to the antique armoire, all but concealed by the wreaths stacked high in front. “Believe it or not, there’s a flat screen television hiding behind that pile of greenery. You’re welcome to watch TV here or in your room, whichever you prefer. I have a wireless network, so you can connect to the Internet anywhere inside the house, as well as the patios outside.
“Both the front and back doors have a keyless entry,” she went on to explain. “I change the code every couple of weeks for security purposes. That’s about it downstairs,” she said and gestured toward a set of stairs on the far side of the room. “We’ll take the rear staircase to the second floor.”
When she reached the top landing, she headed for the opposite end of the hall. “You can have your pick of the bedrooms,” she told him, “but since you’re staying a month, I think the suite will better suit your needs. It has a separate sitting room, with a minifridge and bar. Plus, the bathroom is larger than the others, and has a tub perfect for soaking—a bonus, if you enjoy taking long baths.”
She pushed open the door to the suite then stepped back out of the way. “Unless you have any questions, I’ll leave you to settle in.”
“Just one.”
“What?”
“When my secretary made my reservations, she asked that you keep my stay here confidential.”
She held her hand up like a good Girl Scout. “I haven’t told a soul.”
“Good. No one can know I’m here.”
She teased him with a smile. “Why? Are the cops after you?”
He seemed to hesitate a moment, then shook his head. “No. I’m here to check out locations for a future expansion for my company. It’s imperative that my presence, as well as my plans, remain secret until I’m ready to go public.”
She drew an imaginary zipper across her mouth. “Your secret is safe with me. Anything else?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Well, if you think of something, I’ll be in the den dealing with the ghost of Christmas past.”
Garrett shook his head as he crossed to the bathroom to put away his shaving kit, unable to believe how close he’d come to blowing his cover. When Ali had opened the door to greet him, her likeness to his stepmother had momentarily rendered him speechless. The same blond hair and blue eyes, the same delicate features. They even had similar mannerisms, which he found inconceivable, since the two had never met.
He’d almost slipped and told her his reason for staring, and would have if he hadn’t been distracted by the jolt he’d received when he’d taken her hand. He’d seen the surprise that had flared in her eyes, sensed her unease in the quickness with which she had broken the contact, and knew she must have felt it, too.
He thought he’d done a decent job of recovering, then she’d made that comment about everybody having a twin and thrown him for another loop. If she hadn’t appeared so genuinely guileless, he might have thought she was purposely trying to trip him up. As it was, he believed he’d successfully penetrated the enemy’s camp.
Penetrated the enemy’s camp?
Snorting a laugh, he tossed his shaving kit onto the vanity. Hell, he was even beginning to think in the vernacular of a spy.
With a rueful shake of his head, he turned for the bedroom, but stopped when he caught a glimpse of the tub she’d mentioned. Placed on a raised platform of tumbled stone tiles, it resembled an old-fashioned claw-foot in design, but its size and modern fixtures placed it solidly in the twenty-first century.
Remembering her comment about the tub being perfect for soaking, he crossed to examine it more closely. It definitely looked inviting, he noted, with its extra long length and gently sloped ends. He glanced up at the large picture window above it. And the uninterrupted view of lake and sky it offered its occupant wasn’t too shabby, either, he noted. Personally he preferred a shower, but he could see how a person might enjoy taking a long, relaxing bath in a setup like this. Add a woman to the mix and even he might be persuaded to forego a shower for a bath.
He squinted his eyes at the view beyond the window, easily able to imagine the scene at night. Moonlight reflecting off the lake’s surface. A sky full of glittering stars. Toss in some soft piano music and a mountain of scented bubbles and it would provide the perfect setting for a seduction.
He dropped his gaze to the tub again, wondering if the Vista’s innkeeper ever took advantage of the amenities the bath offered when she had the house all to herself. She seemed the bubble-bath type. Feminine. Sensual. In fact, he found it easy to picture her here, her head tipped back against the tub’s rolled rim, her eyes closed, only her knees and head visible above mounds of iridescent bubbles.
Even easier—and a great deal more pleasurable—was to picture her there with him.
Puckering his lips thoughtfully, he dragged a finger along the rim, imagining them in the tub together, her back against his chest, her hips wedged between his thighs, his hands tracing her curves. She was stacked. He’d made that realization within seconds of her opening the door. And she had a mouth made for kissing. Full, moist lips that seemed curved in an ever-present smile.
With one memorable exception.
He chuckled softly, as he recalled her indignation when he’d insinuated the bed-and-breakfast was a front for a call girl service. She’d assumed correctly. He had thought, hoped even, that she was using the bed-and-breakfast as a front for illegal activities.
Too bad he’d been wrong, he thought with regret. If he’d been right, it would have provided him the leverage he needed to force her cooperation.
It also would have given him more reason to dislike Ali Moran.
Not that he needed more cause.
The hurt she’d inflicted on his stepmother was reason enough to wish her in hell.
Two
“Traci!” Ali shot a worried glance up at the ceiling, then lowered her gaze to frown at her laughing friend. “Get a grip, would you? He might hear you.”
Traci winced guiltily. “Sorry. But when you said that about the Vista being a front for a call girl service, I had this mental image of you strutting around in skin-hugging spandex and spike heels. Can you imagine? You, a madam? Or worse, a call girl? What a hoot!”
“I could be a call girl,” Ali said defensively. “Not that I ever would, but I could.”
“Are you kidding me?” Traci said in dismay. “If you had to depend on turning tricks for your support, you’d starve to death within a week.”
Grimacing, Ali yanked open the oven door. “Well, thanks for that vote of confidence,” she groused, as she shoved a basket of sopaipillas inside to keep warm.
Traci managed to snag a pastry before Ali could close the oven door. “I’m not saying you couldn’t attract a man,” she said, as she spooned honey into the pastry’s puffed center. “But there’s more to being a call girl than wearing skimpy clothes and flashing cleavage.”
Ali gave her a bland look. “Oh, and I suppose you’re an expert on the subject.”
“I watch enough cop shows to teach a course. And let me tell you,” she went on, warming to the subject, “the hookers they haul off the streets aren’t particular about who they have sex with. They can’t afford to be. You, on the other hand, would turn up your nose at the slightest physical flaw.”
Ali’s jaw dropped. “Are you saying I’m a sexual snob?”
Traci caught a dribble of honey on the tip of her finger and brought it to her mouth. “Need I remind you of Richard?”
Ali shuddered at the mention of the C.P.A. she’d briefly dated. “Please. Just thinking about his clammy hands and slobbery kisses makes me want to hurl.”
“And you think the men call girls entertain are Brad Pitt lookalikes?”
“Okay, okay,” Ali grumbled. “You made your point.”
Traci smiled smugly. “I so love it when I’m right.”
“Shh,” Ali hissed, and listened, sure that she’d heard footsteps in the hallway above.
“He’s coming,” she whispered, and grabbed Traci by the elbow and hustled her toward the back door.
“Hey,” Traci cried, juggling her sopaipilla to keep from dropping it. “Who said I was leaving? I want to meet your mystery zillionaire guest.”
Ali opened the back door. “He’s not my zillionaire, and you can’t meet him.”
“Why not?”
She gave Traci a nudge over the threshold. “I already told you. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s here.” Before Traci could demand to stay, she shut the door in her face and turned the lock, just in case she tried sneaking back in.
With Traci dealt with, she headed for the breakfast room where she found Garrett standing at the buffet, pouring himself a cup of coffee. He was dressed much as he had been the day before—jeans and a black pullover sweater, a casual look she found extremely sexy.
Too bad his personality kills his appeal, she thought with regret.
Forcing a smile, she crossed to greet him. “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”
He spared her a glance, before returning the carafe to the hot plate. “Not particularly.”
She kept her smile in place, refusing to let his sour disposition infect her. “Well, hopefully you’ll rest better tonight.”
He raised the cup to his lips and met her gaze over its rim. “That remains to be seen.”
Those eyes again, she thought. What was it about them that was so mesmerizing? It certainly wasn’t their color. Brown eyes were as common as house flies in Texas. So why were his so compelling?
Feeling herself being drawn deeper and deeper into their dark depths, she tore her gaze away and made a beeline for the kitchen.
“Have a seat at the table,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll be right back with your breakfast.”
Once out of his sight, she grabbed a plate and gave herself a stern lecture, as she filled it with food. He’s nothing special, she told herself. Good-looking men were a dime a dozen in Austin. And so what if he was rich as sin? She’d never considered money a positive attribute, especially in a man. All the rich guys she’d ever known were pompous jackasses, who used their money to feed their egos and need for power. Cars, boats, homes. The more attention a “thing” drew to him, the greater its appeal.
Nope, she mentally confirmed, as she pulled the basket of sopaipillas from the oven. Garrett Miller was nothing special and definitely not a man she’d want to become involved with.
Adding the basket to the tray, she returned to the breakfast room, feeling much more in control.
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, as she transferred dishes from the tray. “Huevos Rancheros,” she said, identifying each food item as she arranged it in front of him. “Roasted new potatoes, fresh fruit with a light poppyseed dressing and sopaipillas with butter and honey.”
Tucking the tray beneath her arm, she reached for the carafe. “If you need anything,” she said after topping off his coffee, “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She waited until the swinging door closed behind her, then set aside the tray and headed straight for the sink, anxious to put the kitchen back in order. Elbow deep in suds, washing the pans she’d dirtied while cooking, she heard the door open behind her and glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes shot wide when she saw Garrett entering, carrying his plate and cup of coffee.
“Is something wrong with the food?” she asked in alarm.
“No. I thought I’d eat in here with you.”
She blinked in surprise. “But—but guests don’t eat in the kitchen. They take their meals in the breakfast room.”
He set his cup and plate on the island and slid onto a stool. “This one doesn’t,” he said, and opened his napkin over his lap.
She considered insisting he return to the breakfast room, then turned back to the sink with a sigh, deciding the guy had paid for the right to eat wherever he wanted.
Thinking she should try to make conversation with him, she asked, “Do you have plans for the day?”
“Nothing specific. I thought I’d take a drive later and familiarize myself with the city.”
“Have you ever been to Austin before?”
“A couple of times on business, but I was in meetings and saw very little of the city.”
She rinsed the soap from the pan she’d washed and set it on the drainboard. “That’s a shame. There’s a lot to do and see in Austin.”
“Such as…?”
She wrung out the dishcloth and moved to the island to wipe down the surface. “Well, there’s Sixth Street,” she said, “which is a little bit like Bourbon Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter. You’ll find everything there from tattoo parlors to jazz clubs. It gets pretty crazy on weekends. Lots of people on the street, drinking and partying.
“The State Capitol is a must-see,” she went on. “Fabulous architecture and a tremendous view of the city from the top. And if you’re into history, Austin is the home of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, as well as the Bob Bullock Museum.”
“Have you lived here all your life?” he asked.
She chuckled, amused that he would mistake her for a native. “No. I’d think my northern accent would give me away.”
“Northern?” he repeated, then shook his head and speared a plump strawberry with his fork. “Trust me. Whatever accent you had was lost to a Texas twang long ago.”
“Really?” she said, considering that the ultimate compliment.
“Really. Throw in a couple more y’alls and you could pass for Sue Ellen from the Dallas TV series.”
“Wow. That really takes me back. I watched that show when I was a kid. Sue Ellen, J.R., Bobby….” Hiding a smile, she shook her head. “The Ewing family was so dysfunctional, they made mine look like the Waltons.” Reaching the end of the island where the coffeemaker sat, she lifted the carafe. “More coffee?”
“None for me.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin, then set it beside his plate. “You’ve mentioned your family several times and not necessarily in a good light.”
She shrugged. “Just being honest. My parents are strange people.” She carried the carafe to the sink. “If you have any food preferences,” she said, changing the subject, “let me know. I try to accommodate my guests’ tastes whenever I can.”
When he didn’t reply, she glanced over her shoulder and found him frowning at her back. “Is something wrong?”
He shook his head. “No. I…I was just wondering if you’d have time to drive me around today.”
Her stomach clenched at the thought of being trapped in a car with him all day. “If you’re worried about getting lost, I can provide you with plenty of maps.”
“I don’t need a map. It’s your opinion I want, as well as your knowledge of the area. You seem to know the city well and can probably offer me insight on things I wouldn’t think to ask.”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, while trying to think of a plausible excuse to refuse him. “I’ve got a lot to do today. I finished boxing up all the Christmas decorations yesterday, but I still need to carry all the crates to the attic.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “If you’ll act as my tour guide for the day, I’ll help you haul the crates upstairs. And,” he added, as if sensing her reluctance, “I’ll compensate you for your time.”
“You’ll pay me?” she said in surprise.
“Yes.”
He named an amount that made her jaw drop. “That’s more than some people pay for a car!”
“I assure you I can afford it.” He lifted a brow. “So? Do we have a deal?”
“Well, yeah,” she said, then stuck out a hand, fearing he’d try to renege on the deal later. “In Texas, a man’s handshake is as good as his word.”
He took her hand. “Is it the same for a woman?”
The tingle started in the center of her palm and worked its way up her arm. Wondering what it was about him that spawned the sensation, she curled her fingers into a fist against her palm.
“Yeah,” she said, surprised by the breathy quality in her voice. “Same goes.”
If the computer industry ever bottomed-out and Garrett suddenly found himself in need of a job, he thought he might try his luck as a private investigator. He was getting pretty damn good at this clandestine stuff. Asking Ali to chauffeur him around Austin might have been spontaneous, but it was pure genius. Not only had he finessed a large block of time in which to learn more about her, he’d also finagled a way to check out her attic. He hadn’t expected to find the missing deed lying in plain sight up there—and he hadn’t—but he had familiarized himself with the attic’s layout, which would come in handy if Ali refused to relinquish her portion of the deed to him, and he was forced to search for it on his own.
He hoped it didn’t come to that. Lying was one thing. Stealing was quite another.
“Am I driving too fast?”
He glanced Ali’s way. “No. Why?”
“You were frowning.”
“Was I?” He turned his gaze to the roadway again. “Just thinking.”
“You must think all the time.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you’re always frowning.”
“Am I?” He considered the possibility a moment, then shrugged again. “I’ve never noticed.”
“Do you ever have happy thoughts? Things that would make you smile?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A pleasant memory. Maybe a funny movie you’ve seen that makes you laugh when you think about it.”
“I don’t recall the last comedy I saw.”
She glanced his way. “Are you serious?”
“Why would I lie?”
Shaking her head, she turned her gaze back to the road. “So what do you do for grins?”
“I enjoy playing computer games.”
She spun a finger in the air. “Whoopee.”
“What do you do for fun?” he asked, neatly turning the tables on her.
“There’s very little I do that’s not fun. Going out to dinner or to the movies with friends. Working in my garden. Taking pictures.”
“Taking pictures doesn’t count. That’s a job.”
“Just because it’s a job doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”
Realizing that she had unwittingly offered him the opportunity to probe into her life for that weakness he needed, he decided to take advantage of it. “If you enjoy photography so much, why have the bed-and-breakfast? Why not be a full-time photographer?”
“At one time, that was my plan. I was going to travel the world, taking pictures, then publish them as books.”
“An album of your personal travels?” he said, as if doubting there was a market for such a thing.
“It wouldn’t be personal,” she told him. “At least, not in the way you mean. The pictures would be of people, places and things that share a theme or tell a particular story.”
“What do you mean, ‘tell a story’?”
“Well, let’s say I wanted to do a photographic study of an Amish family,” she said. “I’d photograph them at work, at play, in their home, in their community, capturing their lives, as well as their lifestyle on film. The pictures would tell the story.”
“Isn’t that the same as theme?”
“In some ways, yes. But when I think of theme, I think in terms of a single topic. Take poverty for instance,” she said. “If I were to choose that as my theme, I might travel around, photographing examples of poverty in different parts of the country or even the world. Poverty would be obvious in all the pictures, but the people and the settings would be different.”
That she enjoyed photography was obvious in the enthusiasm in her voice, the light in her eyes. “And if you chose families as a theme, you’d photograph different families, not just one.”
“Score!” she cried and held up a hand to give him a high five.
Amused, he slapped her hand. “As interesting as all that is, it doesn’t explain why you’re running a bed-and-breakfast and not focusing on photography.”
“Long and depressing story,” she said, and slanted him a look. “Sure you want to hear it?”
He opened his hands. “I asked, didn’t I?”
“Oh, wait,” she said, straining to look at something up ahead. “There’s Callahan’s. Do you mind if we stop?”
“What’s Callahan’s?”
“A store. I need to pick up a bag of birdseed for my feeders.”
Though disappointed that the stop would interrupt what he hoped would be an enlightening view into her life, he shrugged, thinking he’d pick up on the conversation again later. “Fine with me.”
“Thanks. It’ll save me making a trip later.” She checked the rearview mirror for traffic, then changed lanes and turned into the parking lot. After shutting off the engine, she reached over the back seat for her tote. “Do you want to come in?”
He looked at the storefront, considering, then figured what the hell. There didn’t appear to be many customers. “I believe I do.”
As they entered the store, Ali nudged his arm. “Aren’t you going to take off your sunglasses?” she whispered.
He shook his head. “Someone might recognize me.”
With a roll of her eyes, she went in search of her birdseed. He watched her walk away and his gaze slid unerringly to the sway of her hips. Yeah, she was stacked, all right, he confirmed. He watched until she disappeared from sight, enjoying the view, then turned down an aisle to explore the store’s merchandise on his own.
The place reminded him of the general stores he’d seen in Western movies, carrying everything from horse tack to Western-style clothing. He paused beside a display of cowboy hats and, curious, plucked a black one from the rack. He snugged it over his head and leaned to check out his reflection in the mirror behind the counter.
“Looks good.”
He glanced over and saw Ali had joined him. Feeling foolish, he dragged off the hat. “I don’t wear hats.”
“Really? You should. Especially a cowboy hat. You look sexy in one.”
He gave her a doubtful look.
“Well, you do,” she insisted. “Sort of like a bad-ass gunslinger. You know. The kind who can empty a saloon by simply walking in the door.”
Hiding a smile, he ran a finger along the brim. “Maybe I should buy it and wear it to my next board meeting.”
“Couldn’t hurt.” She took the hat from him and placed it on his head again. She studied him a moment, and he’d swear he heard wheels begin to churn in her head.
“Come on,” she said and grabbed his hand. “If you’re going for the gunslinger look, you’re gonna need jeans and boots.”
He hung back. “I was kidding.”
She gave him an impatient tug. “I wasn’t. Besides, you know what they say. When in Rome…”
Garrett discovered the woman was a whirlwind when on a mission. Within minutes, she had him in a dressing room, trying on jeans, shirts, boots and what she referred to as a “duster,” which was nothing more than a long trench coat with a Western-style yoke and a slit up the back so that a man could sit in a saddle while wearing it.
“Aren’t you dressed yet?” she called impatiently from the other side of the door.
He hooked the silver belt buckle at his waist, then glanced up at his reflection in the mirror. He did a double take, startled by the change the style of clothing made to his appearance. “Yeah,” he said staring. “I’m dressed.”
“Well, come on out. I want to see.”
He plucked the black felt hat from the hook on the wall and snugged it over his head as he stepped out of the dressing room.
A flash went off, and he caught himself just short of diving for cover.
Ali slowly lowered her digital camera to stare. “Wow,” she murmured. “You don’t even look like the same guy.”
He scowled, embarrassed that, for a split second, he’d mistaken the flash of the camera for a gunshot.
“If I didn’t know better,” she went on, “I’d never guess you were Garrett Miller, zillionaire entrepreneur.”
“Zillionaire?” Shaking his head, he turned to study himself in the full-length mirror. “You know,” he said, growing thoughtful. “This getup might be just what I need to keep from being recognized.”
“Like I said,” Ali said, with a shrug, “when in Rome…” She reached to tear the price tag off his shirt.
He yanked his arm back. “What are you doing?”
She spun him around to rip the tag off the rear pocket of the jeans. “Taking off the price tags. Don’t worry,” she assured him as she gathered from the dressing room the clothes he’d worn into the store, as well as the stack of clothing he hadn’t tried on yet, “I’ll give them to the salesclerk, along with these other clothes. That way you can wear your new duds out of the store and not have to change again.”
Ali held the camera before her face with one hand, and directed Garrett with the other. “A little to the left. A little more. Stop! Perfect.” She clicked off a half-dozen or more shots, then dropped the camera to swing from her neck. “Now let’s try a few with you standing with one boot propped on the boulder.”
He dropped his hands to his hips in frustration. “I’m not a damn model, you know.”
“No,” she said patiently. “And I’m not a chauffeur, yet I’ve been driving you around all day like I was.”
“A duty you’re being well paid for,” he reminded her.
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, yeah. Right. Tell you what,” she said. “Pose for a few more shots, and I’ll give you a full set of prints, no charge.”
“‘A few shots’ is all I agreed to when you talked me into this nonsense more than an hour ago.”
“Can I help it if you’re such a handsome model?”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” he said dryly.
“Okay. How about this? You let me take a few more pictures, and I’ll chauffeur you around the whole month you’re in town.”
He frowned a moment, as if considering, then nodded. “All right. You’ve got yourself a deal.”
Grinning, she drew the camera before her face again. “Boot on the boulder,” she instructed. “Forearm braced on the knee. Now look off into the distance and make that face you make when you’re thinking really hard. Great!” she exclaimed, and clicked away. “Man, you should see this. The sun is setting just behind your left shoulder and creating perfect shadows on your face.
“Give me a forlorn look,” she said, continuing to click off shots. “You know. Like you’ve been running from the law for months, and you’re missing that pretty little saloon girl you met up in Dodge City.”
“A saloon girl in Dodge City?” He dropped his head back and laughed. “Damn, Ali, where do you get this stuff?”
The transformation laughter made to his face almost made her drop her camera, but she managed to hold on to it and keep clicking. “Part of the job,” she told him. “Just part of the job.”
Shaking his head, he dragged his foot from the boulder. “You should be a writer, not a photographer.” When he realized she was still taking pictures, he held up a hand to block her view. “Would you stop,” he complained. “You must’ve taken a hundred pictures or more.”
She reluctantly lowered the camera. “I’ll be lucky if a third are worth anything.”
He went stock-still. “You didn’t say anything about selling these pictures.”
“Would you lighten up?” she said, laughing. “I took the pictures for fun, not to sell. Kind of a souvenir for you of your trip to Texas.”
“Oh,” he said in relief. “Which reminds me,” he said, and plopped down on the boulder, stretched out his legs. “You were going to tell me why you’re running a bed-and-breakfast, rather than focusing on a career in photography.”
Gathering up her tote, she crossed to sit beside him. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” she asked, as she pulled her camera over her head. “It’s really boring.”
“I wouldn’t have asked, if I didn’t.”
With a shrug, she tucked the camera into her tote. “It goes back to when I dropped out of college during my junior year and moved to Austin.”
“Why did you drop out?”
“My parents come from a long line of doctors and they expected me to follow in their footsteps. Carry on the family tradition. That kind of thing.”
“And you didn’t want to?”
“Not even a little. I did try,” she said in her defense. “But I hated all the science courses I was required to take and my grades proved it. I tried to talk my parents into letting me change my major, but they wouldn’t listen. They kept saying I wasn’t applying myself. That being a doctor was an honorable occupation, a duty even. We argued about it all during Christmas break, and I finally told them that they couldn’t force me to become a doctor, that I was going to sign up for the courses I wanted to take.”
“And did you?”
She grimaced. “For all the good it did me. When they received the bill from the university for my spring tuition and saw what courses I’d signed up for, they refused to pay it. When that didn’t whip me into line, they closed the checking account they’d set up for me to pay my college expenses, which left me with no money and no way to pay for my housing, food. Nothing.”
“So how did you end up in Texas?”
“Claire Fleming. She and I met our freshman year in college and became best friends. She knew my parents had cut me off and how bummed I was. To cheer me up, she invited me to go to Austin with her to visit her grandmother. I had nothing better to do, so I tagged along.
“To make a long story a little shorter, the Vista belongs to Claire’s grandmother, Margaret Fleming. It was a wedding present from her first husband. Sadly he died after they’d been married only a few years. She remarried several years later to some oil guy and moved to Saudi Arabia, but she held on to the house. Said selling it would be like cutting out her heart.
“She came back to the States several times a year for month-long visits and always stayed at the house. As she got older, it became harder for her to travel and she wasn’t able to come as often. You can imagine what happened to the house. What the vandals didn’t destroy, varmints did. It was a mess. She’d always hoped that Claire would want the house someday, but Claire fell in love with an Aussie and was planning to move to Australia right after graduation, which she did, by the way. So the grandmother decided to make one final trip to Austin before selling the house. Claire was to meet her there and help her pack up what personal belongings she wanted to keep.
“What I didn’t know was that Claire and her grandmother had already discussed my situation, and they’d decided to offer the house to me.” She held up a hand. “And, yes, I know it sounds too good to be true. At the time, I thought so, too. But Mimi—that’s Claire’s grandmother—was dead serious. She really loved the house and didn’t want to sell it, and she definitely didn’t need the money. So she offered it to me. All she asked in return was that I take care of it and love it as much as she did.”
“Sounds like the perfect arrangement.”
“It was a sweet deal, all right, but it only resolved my need for housing. I was still broke and without a job. Mimi, Claire and I brainstormed ways I could earn money to cover my expenses and still have time to go to school, and we came up with the idea of renting out the extra bedrooms to college students. It was the perfect setup for me. Since the house is on Town Lake and relatively close to the university, I never had a problem leasing the rooms, which meant I could be really selective about who I leased to.”
“If it was such a success, why the change to a bed-and-breakfast?”
She lifted a brow and looked down her nose at him. “Have you ever lived with twelve college students?” She shuddered, remembering. “It was bedlam even on the best day. And there was absolutely no privacy. After I graduated, I decided I wanted the house to be more like a home than a dorm, and I came up with the idea of turning the Vista into a bed-and-breakfast.”
“And the grandmother was okay with the change?”
“More than okay. In fact, she gave me the house.”
“Gave it to you?” he repeated.
She nodded. “I think she’d reconciled herself to the fact that Claire was never going to want it, and she definitely didn’t want her son to get his hands on it, so she decided to give it to me.”
“Gave it to you,” he repeated, doubting her story, since his research had indicated the only property Ali owned was her car.
“It’s not official yet,” she was quick to tell him. “She only told me about her decision last summer, then she caught pneumonia and passed away just before Thanksgiving. Her estate was sizable, to say the least, so it’ll probably take a while for her lawyers to get everything prepared for probate and the necessary papers filed to transfer ownership to me.”
She glanced around, and was surprised to see it was getting dark. She hitched the strap to her tote over her shoulder. “I had no idea it was getting so late. We’d better go.”
He stood, and offered her a hand.
When she grasped his hand, she felt that now familiar spark of electricity between their palms and watched his face as he pulled her to her feet, wondering if he felt it, too.
“Did you feel that?” she asked.
“What?”
“That sparkly thing when our hands touched.”
“Sparkly thing?” He shook his head. “No, can’t say that I did.”
“Really?” she said in surprise, then frowned and rubbed thoughtfully at her palm. “That’s weird. I feel it every time we touch.”
Three
Sparkly thing?
Garrett snorted as he climbed into bed. How about a hundred volts of electricity shooting up his arm?
But he sure as hell wasn’t going to admit that to Ali. If he’d learned nothing else during his thirty-six years of living, it was never reveal your weaknesses to your enemy.
Enemy?
Frowning thoughtfully, he folded his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling, unsure if that tag still fit. If the stories Ali had told him today were true, she was looking more like a victim, than the enemy.
Her dropping out of college up north and finishing her education in Texas was true enough. He’d unearthed that nugget about her past while doing his own research prior to making the trip to Austin. But nothing he’d found had indicated her move to Texas was due to her parents cutting her off. He might’ve dismissed her story as exaggeration, if he hadn’t already heard his stepmother describe her adoptive parents as cold and heartless people. But in Garrett’s opinion, what Ali’s parents had done to her was inexcusable. Imagine, a parent who would knowingly leave his child with no money, no job and no prospects…
He shook his head ruefully. Ali was just damn lucky she’d had a fairy godmother waiting in the wings. No telling what would’ve happened to her if Mimi and Claire hadn’t come along, offering her a place to live, as well as the means to support herself.
He frowned, more than a little surprised by the level of compassion he felt building toward Ali. He was going to have to be careful, he told himself. Prior to coming to Austin, he’d had a laundry list of reasons to despise her. He couldn’t allow a hard-luck story blind him to the hurt she’d caused his stepmother or allow it to distract him from his purpose for being in her home.
Her life might resemble Cinderella’s, but he sure as hell was no Prince Charming, prepared to charge onto the scene to rescue her.
If anything, he’d come to destroy her.
To prove it, he reached for his cell phone and punched in the number of his lawyer.
“Hey, Tom. Garrett. Sorry to call you at home and at such a late hour, but I need you to do some research for me. See if you can locate information on a woman by the name of Margaret Fleming. Her last address was in Saudi Arabia, but she owned property in Austin, Texas.
“No,” he replied to Tom’s question. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Future Concepts’ expansion. This is…personal. The woman passed away last November. I want to know who inherited the house she owns in Austin.”
He visited a moment longer, then disconnected the call and settled back on the bed.
Ali may not have realized it, he thought in satisfaction, but there was a strong possibility she’d given him the “price” he needed to win her cooperation. That she loved the house was obvious, and Garrett would bet his controlling shares of stock in Future Concepts that she didn’t own it.
But he would before the month was out.
After chauffeuring Garrett around for three days, Ali had decided two things about her current guest. He had more mood swings than a pregnant woman, and he was the most impatient man she’d ever met in her life.
Most people would just kick back and relax, while riding in a car. Not Garrett. God forbid the man waste a second of his precious time. At the moment, he had his BlackBerry in his hand and was checking his e-mail, a task he had conducted at least four times during the day. It was almost ten o’clock at night, for heaven’s sake! Was his correspondence so important he had to check it even at night?
Noticing the brake lights coming on ahead of her, Ali slowed, adjusting her speed to the long line of cars in front of her.
“Uh-oh.”
Garrett lifted his gaze from his BlackBerry. “Uhoh, what? Why are you stopping?”
She tipped her head at the traffic in front of them. “Construction. I forgot the highway crew closes down all but one lane at night so they can work on the interstate when there is less traffic.”
Scowling, he closed his BlackBerry and began to drum his fingers impatiently on the console.
After sitting for five minutes at a standstill, he swore. “Dammit! This is ridiculous. There’s got to be an alternate route.”
She shook her head. “There’s not. And even if there was,” she added as she looked in the rearview mirror at the long stream of headlights behind her, “there’s no way we can get off the interstate now. We’re trapped between exits.”
His scowl deepened.
The headlights on the cars ahead of her began to blink off, an indication that the drivers had resigned themselves to the delay and had turned off their engines. Ali followed suit, but left the radio playing.
He whipped his head around to peer at her. “Why did you turn off the car?”
She lifted a shoulder and slid down in her seat, making herself more comfortable. “No sense wasting gas. These delays can last up to a half hour or more.”
“A half hour!”
“Would you lighten up?” she said with a laugh. “A little delay isn’t going to kill you.”
He burned her with a look, then turned his gaze back to the windshield to glare through the darkness at the stalled traffic.
Deciding he needed a distraction, she twisted the dial to an oldies’ station and cranked up the radio to an earsplitting level.
He clapped his hands over his ears. “What the hell are you doing?” he cried.
She opened her door. “Creating a diversion,” she replied as she climbed out. Rounding the hood, she opened the passenger door and grabbed his hand. “Come on, Garrett. They’re playing our song.”
“What?” he said in confusion, as she all but dragged him out of the car.
“Music. Dance. Get it?” She dropped her hands to her hips, with a disgusted huff. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how to dance.”
“I know how.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder and stepped in close. “So dance with me.”
Garrett shot an uneasy glance around at the cars behind them, sure that everyone was staring at them and laughing. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered.
“No,” she informed him. “It’s spontaneous. Fun. Something I don’t think you have nearly enough of.”
He probably could’ve resisted, was sure he would have climbed back into the car, if she hadn’t pressed her body against his and begun to sway to the slow beat of the Righteous Brothers’ song pumping from the car’s speakers.
Without conscious thought, he began to sway, too, his body moving in rhythm with hers. A heartbeat later he was guiding her in a slow dance around the car. Later he would be grateful for the darkness, the lack of headlights, would probably curse himself for the chance he had taken in exposing himself to the public eye and the danger he might well have put himself in. But at the moment, all he could think about was how perfectly her body melded to his, how naturally they moved together, how utterly free he felt dancing in the middle of an interstate highway with hundreds of people looking on.
The song ended and he swayed slowly to a stop. Instead of releasing her, he turned his face against her hair, painfully aware of every point where their bodies touched. He felt the quickening of her breath against his neck, the tremble of her fingers within his. One smooth glide of his lips over her hair and his mouth was on hers. The pleasure, the taste of her was like taking a fist in the gut, totally unexpected and hitting low and hard.
Her lips were pillows of satin beneath his, her taste an aphrodisiac that streamed through his bloodstream like fire. A part of him knew he should stop, that kissing her was a mistake, that he was chancing blowing the mission he’d come to Austin to accomplish. But he couldn’t stop. It took the impatient sound of a car horn to force his mouth from hers. Even then he didn’t release her. With his eyes on hers, he searched her gaze, found the same heat in them that fired his veins.
It was Ali who made the first move, taking a step back and hugging her jacket more closely around her. “Uh. Looks like traffic’s starting to move.”
He glanced toward the cars lined in front of them and saw that headlights were blinking on, engines were starting. “Yeah,” he said dully, wondering what had come over him. “Let’s get out of here.”
Ali didn’t know what had happened to Garrett overnight to put him in such a grumpy mood, but if it was because of the kiss they’d shared on the interstate, he could darn well get over it.
She just hoped she could.
She slid a glance his way. Who’d have thought he could kiss like that? Not her, that was for darn sure. In the blink of an eye, he’d turned a spontaneous street dance into a lustfest…and with very little effort on his part.
And she’d thought the tingles she’d felt when they touched were something. Ha! They were nothing compared to the kick she’d received when his lips had touched hers. She released a slow breath, the reminder alone enough to make her want to whip the car over to the shoulder and jump him.
She slanted him another look. So why wasn’t he similarly affected? From the moment he’d appeared for breakfast, he’d done nothing but scowl. And as for conversation… Well, there wasn’t any. They’d been driving all morning, with him giving two-word commands—turn right, turn left, leaving her with no sense of where he wanted to go or exactly what he was looking for.
And as far as the kiss went… Well, he hadn’t said a word about that.
She firmed her lips. Well, if that’s the way he wanted to play it, she could pretend it hadn’t happened, too.
“Maybe if you told me what kind of property you’re interested in,” she said, “I could be of more help.”
He continued to frown at the map displayed on the screen of his portable GPS. “A minimum of ten acres, preferably more.”
“What about accessibility to public transportation?” she asked, hoping to narrow the parameters somewhat. “Wouldn’t that factor into where you’d want to build?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Great,” she muttered under her breath. “Another irresponsible employer adding to Austin’s already burgeoning traffic problems.”
He glanced her way. “I’m not irresponsible.”
“If you build where there’s no access to public transportation, you are,” she informed him. “You’d be adding to traffic and that’s irresponsible in my book.”
Scowling, he turned off the GPS. “For your information, I consider the effect my company has on a city’s traffic, as well as its effect on the environment.”
“How?” she challenged, doubting that he considered anything but profits when he made decisions regarding his company.
“At the current facilities on the East Coast, we offer a shuttle service from specified locations around the city. Employees who take advantage of the shuttle, and those who ride in a carpool with a minimum of two other employees, receive monetary rewards for their efforts. If I build a complex in Austin, I’ll implement the same policy here.”
“If?” she repeated. “I thought building here was a foregone conclusion.”
“Only if I’m able to find a suitable site.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
Having had enough of his sour disposition, she tightened her hands on the wheel. “Why are you in such a bad mood?”
He set the GPS on the floorboard at his feet. “I’m not in a bad mood.”
“Well, you darn sure look like you are.” She held up a hand. “Oh, wait. I forget that expression is normal for you.”
He nailed her with a look. “Are you purposely trying to tick me off? If so, you’re doing a damn good job.”
That’s it, she thought angrily and whipped the car to the side of the road. She’d had all she was going to take of his sour attitude. Ramming the gearshift into Park, she spun on the seat to face him. “Don’t try blaming your bad mood on me,” she warned. “You were grumpy when we started out this morning.”
“Well, maybe if I could get a good night’s sleep, I’d be in a better mood,” he shot back at her.
“And you’re not sleeping is my fault?”
“It is if you’re the one responsible for putting that lousy mattress on the bed.”
Her jaw dropped. “There’s nothing wrong with that mattress! It’s top-of-the-line and almost new.”
“It sags on one side.”
“So sleep on the other! Better yet, sleep in a different bed. You leased the entire house. Pick another one to sleep in.”
“Fine. I want yours.”
She gaped. “You what?”
“I want yours. You said I could have my pick.”
“I didn’t mean mine!”
“Why not? You said I could have my pick.”
“Of the rooms you leased,” she informed him.
“Too late. You already said I could have my pick, and I choose your bed.”
She fought for patience. “If you want to sleep in one of the other rooms upstairs, fine. You certainly paid for the right to sleep wherever you want.”
“I certainly did,” he agreed, “and I choose to sleep in your bed.”
She started to respond, then closed her mouth and narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “You’re just trying to avoid the real issue, aren’t you?”
“And that would be…?”
“Kissing me last night. Well, let me tell you something, buddy,” she went on before he could say anything. “It was no big deal. Okay? As far as I’m concerned it’s forgotten. Over. Done with. Never happened.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, really. I—”
Before she could finish, his mouth was on hers, smothering her words. There was no slow buildup to this kiss. His mouth came down hard on hers, forcing her head back against the seat and her pulse into a gallop. She tasted the anger in him, the heat. A split second later his lips softened, sweeping over hers with a seductive slowness that stole her breath, before he nipped at her lower lip and withdrew. She opened her eyes to find he’d settled in his seat again, his gaze on the windshield.
“Let’s check out the area around Bastrop.”
She stared, wondering if she’d imagined it all. “B-Bastrop?”
“Yeah. From the map I was looking at, it appears to be near Austin, yet far enough away that parcels of land are probably still sold by the acre, rather than by the square inch.”
She straightened and pulled the gearshift into Drive, her hand shaking a bit. “B-Bastrop’s a nice town,” she said, anxious to prove she was as unaffected by the kiss as he seemed to be. “Lots of history and beautiful old homes. I would imagine their tax base is lower than Austin’s, which would be a bonus for your company and whatever employees might choose to live there.”
He pointed to a convenience store up ahead. “Pull over and I’ll buy a paper, so we can check out what’s for sale.”
She turned into the parking lot and pulled up alongside the newspaper rack, her pulse rate almost back to normal. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just call a Realtor?”
“It would,” he agreed, as he climbed from the car, then ducked his head back inside. “Better yet, why don’t I just rent a billboard and announce to the whole world I’m here looking for land?” Muttering under his breath, he slammed the door and strode for the newspaper stand.
Jerk, she thought resentfully as she watched him feed coins into the slot. His paranoia about keeping his presence in Austin a secret was wearing thin. She could see how it made good business-sense for him to play his cards close to his chest. But wasn’t he carrying this a little far? He never took a step out of the house without those stupid sunglasses. And earlier, when she stopped at the window of a fast-food joint to order sodas, he’d slumped down in the seat and kept his face averted, like he was afraid someone was going to recognize him, which was totally nuts. It wasn’t like he was a movie star or something. He was a businessman, for cripes’ sake! Prior to him coming to the Vista, if she had passed him on the street, she wouldn’t have even given him a second look.
Unfortunately he chose that moment to bend over to pull a newspaper from the rack, giving her a full view of his nicely shaped butt, and her mouth went dry as dust. Okay, she admitted, wetting her lips. Maybe she would’ve looked twice. But she doubted she would’ve recognized him. And even if she had, it wouldn’t have occurred to her that he was in Austin to buy property. For all she’d know, he could be on vacation. All this hush-hush, top-secret stuff was ridiculous.
He jumped into the car and slid down in the seat as he slammed the door. “Drive!”
She blinked in surprise. “Excuse me?”
He lifted his head slightly to peer out the rear window, then dropped back down. “I think the guy at the gas pump recognized me.”
“So?”
“So get the hell out of here!” he shouted.
She stomped on the accelerator and careened onto the highway, sending the rearend of the car fishtailing crazily.
“Is he following us?” he asked.
She looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the truck had indeed pulled onto the highway behind them. “I don’t know that he’s following us, but he is behind us.”
“Speed up.”
Though she wasn’t sure the rental she was driving could outrun the truck, she pressed down harder on the accelerator.
“Is he still there?” he asked after a minute.
She glanced in the rearview mirror again. “Yeah. About four car-lengths behind.”
“Faster.”
She shot him a look. “Are you crazy? I’m already going thirty over the speed limit.”
“So go fifty! Just lose him.”
She glanced in the rearview mirror again. “Uh-oh,” she murmured, and lifted her foot off the accelerator.
“What are you doing?” he yelled. “I said speed up, not slow down!”
“I don’t know what whirling red lights mean where you’re from,” she told him, “but in Texas, they mean pull over.”
He sat up and looked out the rear window. “Ah, hell,” he groaned, then turned to scowl at her. “You might have told me the cops around here drive unmarked vehicles.”
“And ruin your fun?” she said sweetly. She hit the button to lower the window and greeted the patrolman approaching the car. “Good morning, Officer.”
He touched a finger to the brim of his hat. “Morning, ma’am. Is there a reason you were driving forty-five miles per hour over the speed limit?”
“Only one,” she replied, and hooked a thumb over her shoulder at Garrett. “Him.”
Garrett hissed a breath between his teeth, then yanked off his sunglasses and leaned around Ali to look up at the policeman. “My fault entirely,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were a police officer.”
“Ah,” the patrolman said, nodding. “So speeding’s all right, so long as the law isn’t around.”
“No, no, no,” Garrett replied in frustration. “That’s not what I meant, at all. I was buying a newspaper and saw you watching me. I thought you’d recognized me, so I told Ali to lose you.”
“Why don’t you dig yourself a little deeper?” Ali said under her breath.
Garrett burned her with a look, then shifted his gaze to the police officer again. “I’m Garrett Miller,” he said, as if that explained everything.
The officer looked at Ali. “What? Is he some kind of rock star or something?”
Ali rolled her lips inward, to keep from laughing. “Uh. No, sir. He owns Future Concepts, a computer company.”
When the officer’s expression remained blank, she looked over at Garrett and shrugged. “Your turn.”
“It’s not funny,” Garrett snapped as he flopped down on the sofa.
“No, it’s not,” Ali agreed, trying her best to hide her smile. “But if you could have seen your face when Officer Wilhelm told you to put your hands on the trunk of the car and spread ’em….” She sputtered a laugh, unable to help herself. “Now that was funny!”
Scowling, he folded his arms across his chest. “Well, I’m glad you found it humorous. Being frisked like a common criminal certainly isn’t my idea of fun.”
“I’d think you’d be relieved,” she said, feigning wide-eyed innocence. “You told him everything about yourself except your favorite color of underwear and he still didn’t have a clue who you were.”
“No, but the dispatcher recognized my name.”
“Which is all that saved you from taking a ride in the backseat of a patrol car,” she reminded him.
“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”
She didn’t even try to hide her smile. “Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“Honestly? Because I think you place way too much importance on yourself.”
He lifted a brow. “Oh, really.”
“Yes, really. You need to lighten up. Forget you’re a zillionaire for a while. Kick up your heels and have some fun for a change.”
He snorted. “You don’t have a clue what it’s like to be me.”
“Other than boring, no.”
“Boring?” He pushed to his feet, his jaw clenched in anger. “Let me tell you what it’s like to be me,” he said, bearing down on her. “Money attracts people, including crazies and crooks. And unlike our friendly police officer this morning, most people recognize my name, if not my face, which causes problems for me. Because of my success, I haven’t been able to fly commercially in years. I can’t go to a movie theater or a restaurant, or anywhere for that matter, without drawing attention. If I do venture out to a highly publicized event, I’m forced to take a bodyguard along, just in case some lunatic decides to try to kidnap me for ransom.
“And as for having fun,” he continued, “unless it can be boxed and delivered for me to enjoy in the privacy of my home, I can forget it. Going out in public is a freedom I lost the day I made my first million.”
By the time he finished his tirade, he was standing nose to nose with Ali, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on her mouth.
“I—I had no idea,” she stammered.
“Most people don’t. They envy my success, even try to emulate it, but they don’t know what success has cost me, what it would cost them if it was theirs.” Hiding a smile, he turned away. “But you’ll get a taste of it soon enough.”
She tensed. “What do you mean?”
“Our good friend Officer Wilhelm gave us his word he wouldn’t tell anyone about seeing me, but I’ll bet you money he tells someone. Or the dispatcher will. And if one of them does tell, you can expect the media to start arriving by morning.”
Her eyes rounded. “Here?”
“Here and anywhere we dare venture. Media hounds are like fleas on a dog. Irritating as hell and all but impossible to get rid of.”
* * *
Ali paced the living room, stealing an occasional peek through the blinds she’d closed. So far, so good, she thought. Not a person or a car in sight.
Confident that Officer Wilhelm had been true to his word—or Garrett had exaggerated his own importance, which is what she felt was more the case—she abandoned her watch and went to the kitchen for something to drink.
“I’m getting a glass of wine,” she called to him in the den. “Do you want one?”
“Yes, please.”
She filled two glasses and carried them to the den. She glanced over her shoulder at the television as she handed Garrett his drink. “What are you watching?”
“Jeopardy.”
Figures, she thought, biting back a smile, as she sank down on the sofa beside him. “Who’s winning?” she asked.
“Guy on the left. They’re about to start Double Jeopardy, though, so that could change things.”
A commercial came on and he lifted the remote to surf through channels.
“Do you have something against commercials?” she asked in frustration.
“Other than being an utter waste of my time?” He shook his head. “Not particularly.”
“You advertise,” she reminded him.
“Some.”
“Hypocrite.”
“Why? Because I refuse to watch a boring commercial?”
She opened a hand. “If the shoe fits…”
“It’s marketing’s responsibility to capture the attention of the consumer. If they fail—” he clicked the remote “—which my company’s commercials seldom do,” he informed her, “I change channels until I find something that does catch my attention. Like that,” he said and set the remote aside.
“The stock market report?” She fanned her face. “Stop. Please. I’m not sure my heart can take the excitement.”
He shot her a scowl. “Why don’t you go spy on the reporters lurking outside some more?”
She tucked her feet beneath her and took a sip of her wine. “There’s nobody out there.”
“There will be by morning.”
“You’re full of bologna. No reporters are coming here.”
“Wanna bet?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said.
“Five hundred says they’ll be here by morning.”
She considered, then shook her head. “Too rich for my blood.”
“Okay, if you don’t want to gamble cash, put up some of your photography of equal value.”
She hesitated a moment, then stood and stuck out her hand. “All right, you’ve got yourself a deal.”
He took her hand, but instead of shaking it, he used it to haul himself to his feet. “I prefer photos of landscape, rather than people.”
She lifted a brow. “Kind of confident you’re going to win, aren’t you?”
He shot her a wink and turned away. “When it’s a sure thing, I can afford to be.”
She frowned at his back. “Where are you going?”
“To bed.”
“Hey, wait a minute!” she cried, hurrying after him. “That’s the way to my room.”
“I know. Remember? I chose your bed to sleep in tonight.”
“You’re not sleeping in my bed!”
He opened the door to her private quarters. “Yes, I am.”
She ran after him, praying she hadn’t left underwear or any other equally embarrassing items lying around. “Garrett, really,” she pleaded. “You can sleep in any bed you want. Just not mine.”
He sank down on the side of her bed and bounced a couple of times, as if testing the mattress. “I prefer this one,” he said, and stood, pulling his sweater over his head.
Ali stared, unable to tear her gaze away from the oh-so-sexy chest he’d exposed. Who’d’ve thought? she thought, as heat crawled up her neck, threatening her air. She’d been pressed against his chest the night before when they’d kissed, but they had both had on jackets, which had done a heck of a job of concealing what proved to be a wonderfully muscled and toned body.
“You win,” she managed to say, and darted for the adjoining bath. “Just let me get my stuff.”
She grabbed her pajamas and toothbrush and hustled back out, careful to keep her gaze fixed straight ahead, fearing he’d stripped completely while she was out of the room. In the doorway, she groped blindly behind her for the knob, to pull the door closed behind her.
“Ali?”
She stopped, but didn’t dare turn around. “What?”
“Since you enjoyed kissing me so much, I thought you’d want to sleep with me, too.”
Setting her jaw, she slapped a hand against the wall switch, turning off the light, and yanked the door closed behind her.
She wasn’t sure, but she’d swear she heard him laughing as she stalked to the den.
Score one for the home team, Garrett thought, chuckling, as he climbed into bed. Judging by Ali’s fast exit following his comment about her sleeping with him, it appeared he’d succeeded in getting even with her for the hard time she’d given him over his run-in with the law and Officer Wilhelm.
He punched up his pillow and lay back, wondering where she would sleep. There were plenty of empty beds to choose from, including the one he’d slept in prior to claiming hers. He’d blamed his inability to sleep on the sagging mattress, which was what had started the whole where-will-Garrett-sleep debate. But Garrett’s sleeplessness wasn’t due to a sagging bed.
It was due to the Vista’s innkeeper.
His smile faded. He hadn’t intended for it to happen, had done everything within his power to prevent it, but it was true.
Ali Moran had gotten under his skin.
It had started with the stories she’d told him of her past and his growing suspicion that she was more victim than enemy, and had quickly escalated to a physical attraction that grew stronger each day he spent with her.
He dragged his pillow over his face to smother a groan. What the hell was he going to do now? he asked himself in frustration. He’d arrived in Austin prepared to despise her, ruin her if necessary, and now all he could think about was sleeping with her? She was his stepmother’s daughter, for God’s sake!
He could handle this, he told himself. It was simply a matter of refocusing his goals, keeping a respectable distance from her.
He drew in a deep breath, telling himself he could do this. He’d maintained his objectivity in tougher situations.
He was immediately proved wrong. That one breath had filled his senses with her scent, evoking images of her. Lying in this very bed. The two of them together. Her nude body wrapped around his like a vine.
Groaning, he rolled to his stomach and buried his face in the pillow.
“Focus,” he told himself sternly. “Just focus on the damn goal.”
He’d call his lawyer tomorrow, he promised himself. Find out if Tom had discovered who owned the Vista yet. Knowledge was power and power was what he needed to keep the scales weighted on his side…and hopefully his mind focused on his goal and not on the Vista’s innkeeper.
Ali tiptoed into her bedroom and cautiously approached the bed. She really didn’t want to wake Garrett—or be in the same room with him after the crack he’d made about her sleeping with him—but she preferred both to calling the police.
At the side of the bed, she leaned to touch his shoulder. The next thing she knew, she was flat on her back on the mattress and Garrett was straddling her, his fist reared back, like he was going to slug her.
“Garrett! It’s me! Ali!”
He blinked, then rolled off her, swearing. “Dammit, Ali! Don’t ever slip up on me like that again.”
Eyeing him warily, she dragged herself up to a sitting position. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”
He twisted around to switch on the bedside lamp, then slumped back against the headboard, scowling. “Sorry,” he muttered, then glanced over at her. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“N-no. Scared me plenty, though.” Realizing the skill and strength required to accomplish a move like the one he’d just performed, she asked, “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Self-defense class.” His scowl deepened. “When your life has been threatened as many times as mine, you take what precautions you can.”
“Threatened?” she repeated.
“Yes, threatened.” He slanted her a look. “Why were you sneaking around in my room, anyway?”
“I’d remind you it’s my room, but we’ve got more pressing matters to worry about.”
“Like what?”
“Like the men outside.”
He shot up from the bed and ran to peer out the window.
The sight of him standing there in nothing but black silk boxer shorts was almost enough to make her forget about the men she’d seen skulking around outside.
Almost.
“You can’t see them from there,” she told him. “They’re out front. On the street side of the rock wall.”
He dove across the bed for the lamp and switched it off, plunging the room into darkness.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
He clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shh,” he whispered. “We don’t want them to know we’re awake.”
She shoved his hand away. “Why not?”
“If they think we’re asleep and unaware of their presence, hopefully they’ll stay where they are and wait for daylight before approaching the house.”
“But I thought you didn’t want them here?” she said in confusion.
“I don’t.” He dropped his elbows to his knees and his head to his hands. “We’ve got to think of a way to get out of here without them seeing us.”
“We? As in you and me?” She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Sorry, buddy. But I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“You have no choice.”
“Oh, I have lots of choices,” she informed him. “The most obvious is staying right here in my own house.”
“You can’t. It’s no longer safe.”
The somberness of his tone turned her blood to ice. “What do you mean, it’s not safe? We’re talking men toting cameras here, not Uzis.”
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said hesitantly. “I wasn’t completely honest with you about why I wanted my presence here kept a secret.”
She dropped her head back with a moan. “I really hate middle of the night confessions.”
“My life’s been threatened.”
She snapped her head back up to stare. “Somebody wants you dead?”
“It appears that way.”
“But…why?”
“If I knew that, I’d probably know who wanted to kill me.”
“And you think whoever that person is, is outside my house right now?”
“No. I’m fairly confident it’s only photographers out there. But once they make my presence here known,” he added, “I can almost promise you the person who threatened me will come here looking for me.”
She stared, trying to make sense of what he was telling her, then held up a hand. “Wait a minute. Just because somebody wants you dead, doesn’t mean I’m in danger.”
“I’m afraid it does. If he comes here and finds me gone, he may take you.”
“Me?” She choked a laugh. “Like anyone would want me,” she said wryly.
“He would, if he thinks you’re important to me.”
Her heart faltered, then kicked hard against her chest. “You mean he might use me as a hostage?”
“It’s possible and it’s a chance I’m not willing to take.”
Vivid images of every movie or news clip she’d seen involving hostages filled her mind. And not a one of them were pretty. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re getting out of here.” He rolled off the bed and snatched up his jeans, tugged them on. “I’m going upstairs to pack my stuff and make some phone calls. You’ll need to pack a bag, too. Enough to hold you for a couple of weeks.”
“A couple of weeks!” she cried. “I can’t be gone a couple of weeks!”
“Hopefully you won’t be,” he told her. “And no lights,” he warned, as he headed for the door. “We don’t want them to suspect we’re up to anything.”
Garrett took the rear stairs two at a time and broke into a run when he reached the second floor. Getting out of Austin was imperative, but where to go was a problem. He couldn’t call for his private jet. It would take too much time for his pilot to fly to Texas. Public transportation was out, as it made him too visible. That meant finding some place close to hide out for a while, somewhere no one would think to look for him.
He knew of only one place that fit his needs: his stepmother’s son’s ranch.
Muttering a curse, he paced his room. He didn’t want to call Jase. Calling him meant explaining where he was, what he was up to, and his stepmother had made them promise they wouldn’t search for Ali, that they would respect her request for privacy and leave her alone.
But he hadn’t promised, he reminded himself. Jase and Eddie, Jase’s father, had promised.
Admonishing himself of any guilt for his actions, he pulled his cell phone from his briefcase and scrolled through the address book until he found Jase’s home number.
Mandy, Jase’s wife, answered on the second ring.
“Hello?” she said sleepily.
“Mandy, it’s Garrett.”
“Well, hey, Garrett,” she said, sounding surprised to hear from him. “What are you doing calling me in the middle of the night?”
“I’m in a jam. Is Jase there?”
“He’s in Washington visiting his mother. Haven’t you seen him?”
“No, and I really need his help.”
“Call him at Barbara’s. I’m sure he’ll do whatever he can to help you out.”
“I can’t call him at Barbara’s,” he said in frustration. “You’ll have to help.”
“You know I’ll do whatever I can, but wouldn’t it make better sense to just call Jase, since he’s in Washington and I’m in Texas?”
“That’s just it. I’m in Texas, too.”
“What!” she cried. “Where?”
“Ali Moran’s house.”
A pregnant pause followed his announcement.
“You’re at Ali’s?” she said.
“Yes. I’ll explain later, but we need a place to hide out for a couple of days. I was hoping we could stay in one of the hunting cabins.”
“Of course you can,” she told him, then asked hesitantly, “Does Ali know you’re Barbara’s stepson?”
“No, and you’ve got to promise me you’ll keep it that way.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked doubtfully. “Barbara made y’all promise you’d leave Ali alone.”
He felt a stab of guilt and quickly shrugged it off. “Jase and Eddie promised. I promised nothing.”
“That’s splitting hairs, don’t you think?”
He drew in a breath. “We can discuss this later, okay? Right now I’ve got to get us out of Austin.”
“Okay. But when Barbara finds out about this, I’m pointing all ten fingers at you, buddy. Understand? I’m not chancing getting on my mother-in-law’s bad side just to save your butt, even if it is a cute one.”
The next call Garrett made was to the head of his company’s security department.
“Joe, it’s Garrett. We’ve got a problem.”
Four
The plan Garrett devised for his and Ali’s escape included every mode of transportation, with the exception of air. He probably would’ve considered that, too, if he or Ali had known how to fly.
Their adventure started on land, with them sneaking down to the pier and climbing aboard the rowboat Ali kept on hand for her guests to use. With moonlight as their only illumination, they’d rowed across the lake and docked near the shoreline of the Hyatt Regency. From there, they’d grabbed a taxi for the airport, where Garrett had insisted Ali rent a vehicle, claiming if he rented it he would be leaving a paper trail that could easily be followed.
After loading their luggage into the rental, they’d left Austin, with Ali behind the wheel. She had thought he would insist on driving, had even suggested it, but he had reminded her she had rented the car and had listed herself as the sole driver, a legality Ali was willing to overlook in exchange for some much needed sleep. Apparently Garrett wasn’t.
Though she’d repeatedly asked him their final destination, the most she had been able to get out of him was that he’d arranged for them to stay in a friend’s hunting cabin.
“I feel like I’m playing connect the dots,” she said wearily, as she made the turn off the highway that carried them beneath an iron arch bearing the brand CCC. “Turn here, turn there. Go straight. At least tell me if we’re getting close.”
“We’re almost there. Keep driving until you see a small wooden arrow on the right that says ‘Hunting Cabins.’”
“Are you sure these people are expecting us?” she asked uneasily. “It’s four o’clock in the morning. I don’t want somebody shooting at me, thinking I’m a trespasser.”
“They know we’re coming.”
“Have you been here before?”
“Once.” He pointed ahead. “There’s the sign.”
Ali made the turn, slowing when her headlights illuminated a road that was little more than a path. “Now I know why you told me to request an SUV from the rental agency.”
“Pointless to hide, if you’re going to make yourself easily accessible.”
“I shouldn’t even be hiding,” she said petulantly. “I should be at home asleep in my bed.”
“If you were home, I guarantee you wouldn’t be sleeping. You’d be listening to your doorbell and phone ring off the wall. And if those guys hanging around outside have figured out a way to scale the rock wall that borders the street-side of your property, you might find yourself staring at a stranger’s face in your window—or worse, the lens of a camera. And when daylight arrives, you can bet at least one helicopter will be hovering over your house, taking aerial shots.” He waved a dismissive hand. “But once those pictures hit the papers, you wouldn’t have time to worry about the cameras any longer. You’d be too busy trying to stay alive.”
“Okay, okay,” she snapped. “I get your point.”
“Good. I really don’t want to have this conversation again.”
She saw a large shadow looming ahead and hit the bright lights. “Is that the cabin?” she asked.
“One of them.”
“How many are there?”
“Six, as I recall. They’ve left the cabin on the far end open for us.”
She’d driven past two, when he said, “It’s the next one”
“But you said there were six,” she said in confusion.
“At least that many. But there are only three on this particular road.”
She pulled to a stop, and glanced in the rearview mirror at the path they’d followed, barely visible in the red glow of her brake lights. “You call that a road?”
He climbed from the vehicle. “Accessibility,” he reminded her.
“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled, as she trudged toward the rear of the SUV to help him with the bags. An eerie howl sounded in the distance and sent her scurrying to Garrett’s side. “Did you hear that?” she asked in a nervous whisper.
“Hear what?”
The howl sounded again. “That,” she said, with a shudder.
He pushed her tote against her chest, forcing her to take it. “Probably a coyote.”
“Probably?” With her gaze fixed on the darkness, she eased closer to his side. “You aren’t sure?”
He pulled out her suitcase and set it on the ground. “You’re the one from Texas. Don’t you know a coyote when you hear one?”
“Sorry,” she said dryly, “but we don’t have many coyotes roaming the streets of downtown Austin.”
He closed the rear hatch and the interior light blinked off, leaving them in inky darkness. He tried to turn, but with Ali on one side and her suitcase on the other, he was trapped.
“If you’ll give me some room,” he said in frustration, “I’ll lead the way to the cabin.”
She grabbed the handle of her suitcase and dragged it out of his path, but remained where she was. “No way, buster. You’re not leaving me to bring up the rear. The last person on the trail is always the one plucked off and never seen again.”
He heaved a sigh. “I’m sure there’s logic in there somewhere, but I’m too damn tired at the moment to reason it out.”
With Ali sticking to him like glue, he made his way to the cabin. Once inside, it didn’t take Ali long to figure out the cabin had only one bed, which she was quick to point out to Garrett.
“So we’ll share,” he replied. “It’s a king. It’s certainly big enough.”
“Both of us in the same bed?”
He shrugged off his jacket and tossed it to a chair. “If you have a problem sharing, you can sleep on the couch.”
She glanced through the doorway at the couch in the other room, thinking about the eerie howling she’d heard, as well as the lunatic who supposedly wanted Garrett dead. Deciding that sleeping on the couch held about as much appeal as being the last person on the trail, she snatched up pillows and began erecting a wall down the center of the bed.
“Line of demarcation,” she warned him.
Ali didn’t expect to sleep a wink. Not with the threat of an assassin on her mind and Garrett on the other side of the bed. To her surprise, within minutes of closing her eyes, she slipped into a deep sleep and didn’t stir until hours later, when sunlight flooding through the bedroom window pricked at her eyelids. In an effort to block the sun, she folded an arm over her head and snuggled deeper into the cocoon of bedding.
Her mind slowly registered a difference in the firmness of the wall of pillows at her back, as well as the heat it was producing. Praying the cause wasn’t what she feared, she cautiously pushed her buttocks against the wall and froze when she met the unmistakable shape and resistance of an erection.
“Don’t panic,” a sleepy voice said from behind her. “Men wake up like this all the time.”
She twisted around to find Garrett directly behind her. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“Only if you considered it a threat.” He lifted a shoulder. “But if you prefer to claim ownership for producing it….”
“Claim ownership?” she repeated, then sputtered a laugh and rolled from the bed, pleased to discover he had a sense of humor. “As if.”
“Where are you going?” he called after her.
“To get dressed.”
“Don’t you want to finish what you started?”
She fluttered a hand, but kept walking. “No, thanks.”
After dressing, Ali went to the kitchen in search of food, and found Garrett sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, working at his laptop. “Have you eaten?” she asked, as she passed him on her way to the refrigerator.
“Nibbled.”
“Well, nibbling’s not going to cut it for me. I’m starving.” She opened the refrigerator and was surprised to find it fully stocked. “Wow. Your friends really know how to make a person feel welcome.”
“Mandy likes to play mother.”
She froze, her hand on a bowl of fruit. Mandy? Forcing the tension from her shoulders, she pulled out the bowl of fruit. “I, uh, assumed your friend was a male.”
“Mandy is Jase’s wife. They’re both friends.”
A pitifully brief explanation, but at least she now knew this Mandy person wasn’t a romantic interest of Garrett’s.
Not that she cared, she told herself.
She dropped down on the chair opposite him and plucked a grape from the bowl. “What are you doing?” she asked curiously.
“Checking my e-mail.”
“You can get Internet access in the boonies?” she asked doubtfully.
He tapped a finger against the side of his laptop. “Thanks to a wireless card from my cell phone provider. Anywhere I can receive cell phone reception, I can access the Internet.”
“Wow!” She popped the grape into her mouth, chewed. “So? Any word on the guy who’s threatened you?”
“No.”
“Have you checked to see if you’ve made the news?”
“No mention, yet.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? It means we’re safe here, right?”
“For the time being.”
Grimacing, she fished a strawberry from the bowl. “You could’ve lied, you know,” she informed him, as she sank her teeth into the strawberry. “I could use some reassurance here.”
“I’m not going to lie just to ease your mind.” He closed the lid of his laptop and met her gaze. “But if it’ll make you feel better, the more time that passes without my whereabouts making the news, the more likely it is the person who’s threatening me will fall into the trap my security team has set for him.”
“You consider that reassuring?” With a woeful shake of her head, she rose. “If that’s the best you can do, I’m pulling a Scarlett O’Hara.”
“What’s a Scarlett O’Hara?”
“Putting off until tomorrow what I don’t want to think about today.”
“What does that resolve?”
“Nothing for you, maybe,” she told him as she moved to the den, “but it works wonders for me.” She stopped before the fireplace to look at the portrait hanging above it. “Who’re they?” she asked curiously.
“Jase’s parents.”
“They look nice,” she said.
“I wouldn’t know. I never met them.”
“Sometimes you can tell a person’s personality just by looking,” she said, studying the couple’s faces. “Look at her smile. It’s not just on her lips, it’s in her eyes. And him,” she said, pointing. “The way he’s holding his arm around her, his stance? He obviously adores her and is very protective of her.”
“That’s quite a lot to assume from a simple photograph.”
“Some things can’t be faked.” She ambled on, smoothing a hand over the supple leather of the sofa’s back, as she looked around. “This is a cool place. Rustic, yet comfy. Much nicer than what I’d expect a hunter’s cabin to look like.”
“This was Jase’s home.”
She glanced back to find Garrett had moved to stand in the doorway between the kitchen and den, and was watching her.
“Why’d he move?” she asked.
“It was Mandy’s idea. After they married, she wanted to live in the family home.”
“Family home?” Her imagination conjured a big rambling house full of kids and laughter. “I guess his brothers and sisters didn’t have a problem with that?”
He seemed to hesitate a moment, then shook his head. “Jase was the Calhouns’ only child. He inherited their entire estate after their deaths.”
“Wow,” she said and crossed to peer out the front window. “He inherited all this?”
“Yes.”
“How big is it?”
“I have no idea. Huge, I would imagine. I know he raises cattle and has a large pecan orchard business, plus he leases hunting rights and cabins to hunters during hunting season. I’d think all that would require a substantial number of acres.”
“Probably.” She turned to him. “Do you think he’d mind if I wandered around and took some pictures?”
“Of what?”
“Nature, silly,” she said, laughing. “There are some gorgeous old trees behind the cabin, and woods are usually full of all kinds of interesting vegetation.”
“I don’t think he’d mind, as long as you didn’t stray too far.”
“Cool!” She started for the bedroom to get her camera, then stopped, remembering the coyote she’d heard howling the night before. “Want to come along?” she asked hopefully.
He pushed away from the wall. “Why not? There’s nothing else to do.”
She beamed a smile. “Great. I’ll get my camera. Won’t take a second.”
When she returned, Garrett was standing before the gun case, studying its contents. Her blood chilled, as she watched him take out a handgun.
“Uh, what are you doing?” she asked uneasily.
He spun the cylinder, checking the chambers for bullets. “Never know what you might run into in the woods.”
“Do you think the guy who’s after you will come here?”
He shrugged. “Best to be prepared.”
She gulped, wishing she hadn’t asked. “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”
He tucked the pistol into the waist of his jeans. “I rescued Zelda.”
“Zelda? The video game?”
At his nod, she choked a laugh. “Just my luck. Of all the men in the world to get marooned with, I get stuck with a computer nerd who thinks he’s embodied with super powers.”
Garrett sat on a log, watching Ali stroll alongside the creek, snapping pictures.
In spite of the danger lurking somewhere beyond the boundaries of the ranch, he felt surprisingly relaxed, calm even. He’d been living with the threat of his would-be assassin long enough to know that his current mood wasn’t normal. He also knew Ali was responsible for the change. She had a way of dealing with adversity that reduced its importance, made the most dire situation seem almost comical.
Pulling a Scarlett O’Hara.
He shook his head in amusement. Leave it to Ali to come up with something like that. But as ridiculous as her method sounded, he couldn’t argue its success. Caught in a similar situation, another woman would be wringing her hands and wailing about her plight. Not Ali. In spite of the danger they might be in, she was seemingly having the time of her life, crawling over rocks and stumps, taking pictures of plants and bugs, and all because she refused to think about their problem.
Some might consider her method of dealing with adversity a form of denial, foolish and nonproductive. A week ago, Garrett would have thought the same damn thing. But after spending time with her and experiencing, if only by association, the benefits of her methodology, he was beginning to believe the whole world would be a better place if more people took Ali’s approach to life.
“Careful,” he called to her, as her foot slipped on a rock. “That water might not be deep, but I’ll bet it’s cold.”
“And icky,” she said, making a face, as she looked through the viewfinder. “Lots of moss and slime. Oh!” she squealed. “There’s a turtle.”
“In the water?”
“Hiding under a rock.” She lowered the camera and motioned for him to join her. “Come look.”
“Thanks, but I’ve seen a turtle before.”
“Not one this big. He’s huge!”
Heaving a sigh, Garrett pulled the pistol from his waistband and set it on the log, before crossing to her.
She lifted the camera strap over her head and dropped it over his. “You can see him better through the zoom lens,” she explained. “Hunker down here,” she said, pointing to the spot where she’d been standing. “He’s on the far side of the creek.”
Garrett squatted down and brought the camera before his face. “I don’t see anything.”
She stooped behind him to peer over his shoulder. “Move the camera a little bit to the left. A little more. Do you see it now?”
He lowered the camera in disgust. “I don’t see anything but rocks and muddy water.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she fussed, and reached over his shoulders to bring the camera before his face again. Placing her cheek next to his, to align their vision, she nudged the camera a fraction to the left. “There. Do you see him now?”
See what? Garrett wasn’t sure he hadn’t been struck blind. He’d heard of sensory overload before, but he had never personally experienced its debilitating powers. With Ali’s breasts hugging the back of his neck like a cushioned collar, her cheek chafing like silk against his, and her strawberry-scented breath teasing his nostrils, all he could think was, with a slight turn of his head, he could taste her strawberry-flavored lips. A quarter turn more, and he could bury his face in the pillowed softness of her breasts.
“Well, do you?” she asked impatiently. She glanced his way, and drew back with a start, when she found him looking at her and not the turtle. Her eyes rounded. “You’re feeling it, aren’t you?” she cried. “That sizzle of sensation?”
He considered lying, but it seemed pointless to continue to deny what must be obvious.
“Makes you want to test it, doesn’t it? See how far we can push it without getting burned.”
“Yeah,” she breathed, and wet her lips.
Without allowing himself time to think of consequences, he turned on the balls of his feet, caught her face between his hands and stood, bringing her mouth to his. He tasted the strawberries that had teased him moments before, found the lingering sweetness of grapes, before her lips parted beneath his on a sigh, inviting him to deepen the kiss. He did so gladly, exploring the secret crevices, teasing her tongue until it danced with his.
“Sizzling yet?” he murmured against her lips.
“Oh, yeah,” she breathed. “How about you?”
He slipped his hands inside her jacket and smoothed his hands up her ribs. “I’m not sure. Describe the sensation to me.”
Her breath caught as his thumbs bumped over the fullness of her breasts. “Can’t,” she said, releasing the breath on a shuddery sigh against his lips. “Brain’s fried.”
He was afraid his was, too. The curves his hands traced were soft and utterly feminine, her body’s response to his touch sensual and arousing. Desire stirred his loins, a none too subtle reminder of how long it had been since he’d been with a woman.
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Katherine Garbera и Peggy Moreland
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Texan’s Contested Claim Peggy Moreland Billionaire Garret Miller had arrived in Texas under false pretences. He told innkeeper Ali Moran that his stay was strictly business. But the high-powered businessman’s true agenda was to uncover all of Ali’s secrets…and use them to his advantage…The Greek Tycoon’s Secret Heir Katherine Garbera Ava Monroe has always longed for Christos Theakis to propose marriage. But lethally attractive Christos’s demand is not for Ava – he wants custody of her son. A child he believes to be his brother’s. Ava joins the shipping magnate on his lush Greek island home, hoping to prove that she never betrayed him!