by Linda Howard
“I know,” he said.
He was restless after they had cleaned the dishes, and he prowled around her small apartment. Several times she started to suggest that he go to work, since he was obviously bored, but there was a growing edge to his temper that made her reluctant to suggest anything to him. She had been depressed and listless, and had let her normal chores slide, but her old energy was back, and she had plenty to do in cleaning and catching up on her laundry, so she generally ignored him and let him prowl. When the telephone rang early in the afternoon, and he leaped for it, she suddenly realized that he’d been waiting for the call.
Hurrying to his side, she tried to piece together the conversation from his noncommittal responses, but he was a master at one-word answers. His eyes were flinty, his mouth a hard line as he listened.
“Okay. I’ll be right there,” he said, and hung up.
“What is it?” she asked anxiously, dogging his footsteps as he went into the bedroom and began pulling off his clothes. “Have they found out who did it?”
“Maybe,” he grunted. He was in slacks and a dress shirt before she realized that he wasn’t going to tell her anything else, and as he began capably knotting a tie around his neck, her brows snapped together.
“Oh, no you don’t, Brett Rutland! You’re not leaving me here without telling me anything!” She kicked off her shoes and wiggled out of her jeans. “I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not.” He hooked his jacket over one finger and seized her by the nape of the neck, holding her still while he bent and kissed her roughly. “It could get dirty, and I don’t want you hurt, not any more than you already have been. See you later.”
“Brett!” she yelled furiously at his back, and her voice cracked.
He stopped at the door and looked over his shoulder at her. For the first time, she saw the murderous look in his eyes, and she shivered, suddenly glad that that look wasn’t directed at her. “I’ll be back,” he said evenly.
The apartment was silent and empty without him, and her nerves crawled when she remembered the way he had looked. If that look had been meant for her, she’d have died of fright on the spot. He was always controlled. She couldn’t imagine him in a rage, yet she sensed that he had been holding on to his control by only the narrowest of margins. He knew who had done the embezzling, who had deliberately blamed it on her, but he hadn’t told her. Who could have done it, that he would hesitate to reveal the embezzler’s identity to her? Someone she trusted?
She had been too frightened to really wonder about the identity of the criminal, even though she realized the necessity of discovering who it had been. Whoever it was had to hate her, and again Tessa’s conception of herself was shaken. What had she done to deserve such hatred, such vindictiveness?
Her thoughts tumbled about like a mad squirrel, trying to recall every woman who worked at Carter Engineering, trying desperately to think of something she had done, but nothing came to mind. She hadn’t stolen anyone’s lover, or broken up a relationship. She couldn’t remember doing anything that would earn her an enemy, yet she had.
Tortured by her inability to find a reason for what had happened, she began to cry, soft, soundless sobs that were full of misery. Where was Brett when she needed him? Didn’t he know how painful it was to be so totally in the dark? No, how could he know? Brett had never been in the dark; he was always in control, always on top of the situation. She had reached out to him during the night trying, almost in spite of herself, to mend the rift between them. She loved him; she wanted to trust him with her love, and she wanted to be certain that he loved her in return. Yet he had left her alone with her thoughts, knowing that she must be wild with anxiety and uncertainty. Was that love? Had he walked out to give her the chance to make her decision, taking the chance that, when he returned, she wouldn’t be there?
The afternoon became night, and Tessa’s nerves were so jittery that she jumped and stifled a small cry when a key turned in the lock and Brett entered, his face tired and lined. Sammy was with him, looking as pale and tired as Tessa felt, but his presence barely registered on her consciousness. She stared at the key in Brett’s hand. “You took my house key,” she said numbly.
He looked at the key in his hand and grimaced. “Yeah,” he said, putting the key back into his pocket. Coming over to her, he looked down at her critically, examining every inch of her. “You’ve been crying again, damn it,” he said fiercely.
“Did you…find out anything?”
Instead of answering, Brett asked, “Is there any fresh coffee? I need something to keep me going.”
“No, there isn’t. Brett, answer me!”
“I’ll make a pot.”
She stormed to her feet. “I’m going to throw the pot at you if you don’t answer my question!”
An unwilling grin twisted his mouth and brought a gleam to his eyes. “Hellcat,” he said with tender affection. “Sammy is going to tell you what’s going on.”
Tessa whirled on Sammy, who stood with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. His blue eyes were miserable. “It’s my fault,” he said grimly. He had always seemed so boyish, even though he was older than she, but he looked as if he had aged ten years overnight.
She shook her head. That didn’t make any sense at all. “How could it be your fault? You’re not the embezzler.”
“It’s Hillary. She did it for me.”
It was as if someone had drawn a curtain aside. Tessa stared at him in horrified realization, immediately seeing the whole of it. All of it was there. Poor Hillary, so shy and unsure of herself, and so much in love with Sammy. Sammy had needed money to develop his electronic ideas; Hillary had gotten it for him. She had had all the opportunity she could want: She worked in a bank; she worked with Sammy, and through him had access to the computers at Carter Engineering; and she was smart enough to know how to do it. Even choosing Tessa as the scapegoat made sense, because Sammy so obviously admired Tessa, because Tessa was bright and charming and confident, relaxed with men, while Hillary froze with shyness.
She looked at Sammy, her eyes brimming with sympathetic tears.
“I traced it,” he said hoarsely. “She accessed the computer several times from my apartment. She has a key… . She came and went anytime she wanted. My God, I practically set it up for her! Tessa, I traced it back to my own number!”
He was shaking; she went to him and put her arms around him, and they clung together. “What happened?” she whispered, aching for him.
“We met her when she got off work at the bank, Mr. Rutland and Evan and I. She saw us and just…started crying. She knew.”
“Has he had her arrested yet?” Tessa asked shakily.
“No, I haven’t. I wanted to talk to you first,” Brett interrupted coolly. He had been leaning, unnoticed, in the doorway. Now he straightened and walked over to Tessa. “My first instinct is to lock her away, for what she did to you more than for taking the money. But I don’t want revenge to be my motive for doing anything, so everything’s on hold. Evan is with her now, babysitting and waiting for my call.”
Appalled, Tessa stared at him. He was asking her to decide the fate of another human being. It was up to her whether he prosecuted Hillary, or let her go. Why was he so certain that revenge wouldn’t color her thinking? She was human, too! “Brett, don’t do this to me.”
“I know what I’m asking,” he said flatly, not taking his eyes from her. “But you see, baby, I trust your judgment.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TESSA TREMBLED ALL over as she stood there staring at him, her eyes begging him. She was hurting, he knew; she was acutely sensitive now, reacting to every nuance in the air. This had changed her. Where before she had been effervescent, sparkling like a vintage champagne, now she was quieter, the laughter stilled. He hoped it hadn’t gone forever. The charm of that joyous laughter had been what first lured him, yet he loved her anyway; he loved the woman, and her gift of joyousness had been only a part of the reason why h
e loved her. If she gave him the chance, he intended to devote his life to bringing that sparkle back into her eyes, but first he had to get over the agony of a decision that was only hers to make. Not even Joshua Carter’s interest in this matched Tessa’s because she was the one who had suffered the most.
“Let her go,” she said.
Her voice was faint, but Brett heard her. He went to her and put his hand on her arm, steadying her. “Are you sure?”
Tessa nodded, and Brett eased her down onto the couch. Sammy dropped into a chair as if he’d suddenly gone boneless, and maybe he had.
She clutched at Brett’s hands, holding them as if they were lifelines. “Hillary loves him. She did it because she loves him. I can understand that, because I’d go to any lengths for you—” She broke off, afraid that she was saying too much, but her shaky, tumbling words were all he’d hoped to hear, and more. He had the feeling that Tessa did understand, that she knew more than they did, even though she had been told only the bare bones of it.
Tessa looked desperately at Sammy. “Sammy, she loves you. You know that, don’t you?”
He looked stunned and exhausted. “I can’t take it in. She didn’t have any reason to be jealous of you! If anything, you were always trying to get us together.”
“But she didn’t know that, did she? And that’s only part of it. She believed in you, in what you were doing.”
“Chewing on it won’t do any good,” Brett said quietly, the authority in his voice making both of them fall silent. “And wallowing in guilt won’t do any good, either. I know. I’ve already tried it. What we have to do now is work out a solution that Mr. Carter will accept. He’s due total reimbursement, if nothing else. The money has been spent. What do you suggest?”
Sammy chewed on his lip. “Nelda is marketable. I’ve thought of selling her to a computer company, but if that won’t work…”
“If you say the computer is marketable, I’ll take your word on it. Since you had already planned to sell it anyway, I don’t feel that we’ll be taking anything away from you, except the amount of money that was stolen.”
Relief was plain on Sammy’s face. “Do you mean it? It won’t be any more complicated than that?”
“It’ll be complicated by the time a lawyer gets through with it,” Brett said dryly. “And I can’t promise that Mr. Carter will go for it, though I think he will. It’s the same terms I twisted his arm to get for Tessa, so he shouldn’t kick too much about it.”
“Will it take very long to get it settled?”
“Nelda will have to be sold, and that could take some time, because you’ll want to wait for the best offer, but the legal paperwork won’t take that long.”
Leaving Tessa, he walked Sammy to the door. Tessa was watching them, and she saw the worried frown on Sammy’s face. “I don’t know what to do about Hillary,” he muttered. “I was trying to get up enough nerve to ask her to marry me, but now…”
“Do what I was going to do,” Brett advised sharply. “Put her over your knee and whale the living daylights out of her. That’s the least of what she deserves.”
He closed the door on Sammy and came back to Tessa’s side. He was tenderness itself as he sat down beside her and hugged her against him, his eyes worried. Gently he brushed her hair back from her forehead. “Are you all right? It’s over now, really over.”
She didn’t feel as if finis had been written to the episode; when she looked at him, she knew that there were still problems to be solved, but now didn’t seem to be the time to go into them. “You don’t have to treat me like china,” she said with a faint smile. “It was a shock, but I’m not going to break.”
“I hated to do that to you, but I couldn’t trust myself to make a rational decision. No matter which way I went, I knew I’d always doubt my reasons for doing it.”
“And if I had wanted her prosecuted?”
The hard, flinty expression came back into his eyes. “You would have wanted what I wanted.”
He was a little frightening, a hard man who wouldn’t tolerate any threat against anything or anyone he considered his. The realization, instead of frightening her, made her eyes widen. He felt that way about her. It wasn’t guilt, but an expression of something she had sensed the first time he had made love to her. The act had not been one of casual pleasure, but one of possession, in the most basic way. She had become his, which was why he had lashed out at her when he thought she had betrayed him and his trust. Yet even before he knew her to be innocent, he had begun working for her release. Her innocence or guilt hadn’t mattered; she was his, and he would have handled it. That was why he had given Sammy that rather primitive advice.
“Were you going to beat me?” she asked, giving him a hard look.
He made no apologies. “I was planning on it. I doubt I’d ever have done it, because I couldn’t deliberately hurt you, but thinking about it made me feel better. Now, with Sammy…that girl may get the spanking of her life. When the quiet ones get angry, there’s no stopping them. Do you care? Are you really that forgiving?”
“No, I’m not. I’m far more human than that,” she replied with a flash of spirit. “I’d like to punch her out. But this has gone on long enough, and I want it to end. Let Sammy take care of her. I just want to put it behind me and forget about it. Besides, if you had prosecuted, Sammy would have been hurt, too, and he didn’t deserve it.”
He gave a soft sigh, and removed his arm from around her, leaving her feeling faintly chilled. His expression was grim as he leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “If you’re so generous with a stranger, why can’t you be that generous with me? Why can’t you forgive me and give me a second chance? I’m not asking for time, but for a real second chance.” He drew a deep breath, waiting for her reaction.
Tessa stared at him, stricken by what he had said, because it was nothing less than the truth. She had been more generous with a stranger than she had been with him, and she loved him more than she’d ever thought it was possible to love anyone or anything. But precisely because she did love him so much, his lack of trust had cut her far more deeply than Hillary’s treacherous actions. Hillary didn’t mean anything to her at all, except as someone important to one of her friends.
So this was love, she thought painfully. It wasn’t only forgiving, it was taking a chance that her love was returned. He had lashed out at her only when he thought she’d betrayed him first, and even then, when his first pain had faded, he had moved swiftly to protect her. Even thinking that she was guilty, he had forgiven her and reached out for her.
It was love, and she really didn’t have a choice about trusting him, because she had no life without him.
She had been silent for a long time, and Brett’s mouth had firmed into a grim line. He had one more card to play, one more chance at convincing her that he loved her, that he’d do whatever he had to do to protect her. If she misunderstood his motives now, he didn’t know what he would do, because he was playing his last card. “Tessa, I’ve resigned my job.”
She made a sharp movement, and the color washed out of her face. “But…but you told me that you didn’t have to worry about your job!”
“I don’t. Because I don’t have one. I resigned Monday, effective whenever this was finished. The deal I made with Joshua,” he said carefully, “was that in exchange for you, I would continue to do the occasional consulting job for him. That’s what he called it, anyway. It means I’ll get the easy jobs like negotiating the settlement of a strike, or industrial espionage, things like that. But for the most part, I intend to be on the ranch with you, raising kids and cattle.”
Her heart was doing crazy things in her chest, interfering with her breathing. “Is that a proposal?” she demanded.
“I guess it is. I intend to be the father of your children, and I’d like for it to be legal.” His entire world hinged on her answer, and he couldn’t read her expression at all. He started to sweat. “Do you love me enough to forgive me?”
Something was changing in his face; his navy eyes were lighting, as if fired from the inside. “After you threw hot lemonade on me? Or hit me over the head with something?”
“Or kicked you out of our bed.”
“Whoa, honey, you’re talking nasty now. If there’s one place I’m going to be, it’s in bed with you. But if you forgive me, what was the problem?”
“I was trying to decide if I should take you without being sure you loved me, or wait until I was sure,” she said baldly.
He surged to his feet, towering over her, his shoulders so broad that they blocked out the light. “Would you like a demonstration of what it’s like to be a rancher’s wife?”
Suddenly she was the old Tessa again, her long lashes sweeping down languidly to hide the vibrant sparkle in her green eyes. “Why, I believe I would,” she said in her slowest, most wicked drawl, the one that made Brett’s loins turn to molten lava. With a low growl, he tossed her over his shoulder and carried her off to bed.
* * *
SOME MEN DIDN’T know when they were well off, he thought an hour later. She was turning the charm on him, enticing him and teasing him and generally driving him crazy, and even though he knew he was being managed, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to help himself.
She lay propped above him, her lovely breasts nestled into the hair that covered his chest and doing a good job of distracting him. She was winding one finger through the curls of hair, then she moved it on to his ear, his mouth, his throat, across his shoulder and down his arm, over to his side, down his hip… . What she did with that one finger was amazing. He shifted restlessly, considering tossing her over on her back and finishing what she’d started, but she was still talking.
