He lifted his head, rubbed his lips over hers and realized her eyes were closed. She looked so innocent in his arms. He remembered that he was a man who’d never learned how to handle the softer things in life. Having a lover was one thing, but this could never go beyond the physical.
As he traced the line of her face with her hair hanging free, he realized how delicate she was. “Should I apologize for that kiss?”
She opened her eyes and looked dazed for a moment but then she recovered. “Do you want to?”
“Not at all. I want to do it again but I don’t think the office is the place for it.”
“I agree.”
His line rang, and Kate smiled at him as she reached over to answer it. “Brody Oil and Gas, Kate speaking.”
Her smile faded. “Please hold.”
“Who is it?”
“Your fiancée. You probably want to take that in your office.”
Lance nodded. He didn’t like that Lexi had interrupted his moment with Kate but he couldn’t ignore her again.
“We’re not done talking,” Lance said.
“Of course not. We have the next two weeks to get through,” Kate said, pulling out her chair and sitting down.
“When I’m done I want to see you in my office,” he said. He wasn’t going to pretend there wasn’t a fierce attraction between them, but he didn’t know how to deal with this new Kate who argued with him and didn’t just do everything the way he wanted her to.
“Sure thing. You better go, you don’t want to keep your fiancée waiting.”
He pivoted on his heel and walked away from her. He went to his desk, sprawling in his leather chair. He reached for the phone and picked up the line where Lexi was holding.
“Hi, there, Lexi.”
“Hi, Lance. I know you must be busy this morning but I wanted to thank you for the invitation to come to your Fourth of July party. I wanted to know what you need from me as your hostess.”
Lance hadn’t thought about Lexi acting as hostess. “My secretary has taken care of all the details.”
“I’ll give her a call and see if I can help with anything. I think if we are going to make our marriage work, I should be involved with Brody Oil and Gas.”
“Why?” Lance asked.
“Because that’s where you spend all of your time,” she said. “I know what it takes to be a good wife. You need a partner who can understand where you are coming from.”
Lance knew that was the truth. But he didn’t want Lexi here. He realized with a shock that when he thought of a partner—a female partner—at Brody Oil and Gas, he thought of Kate.
Why hadn’t he realized that he wanted her before this? It was too late to change the past but he wanted to make things different between them going forward. But Kate didn’t want any part of the company anymore and he was engaged to Lexi. He needed to sort this mess out. Was he going to try to make the match with Lexi work? And where did that leave Kate?
Mitch and Lance had determined that the connection to Cavanaugh was needed. And Lance had always put Brody Oil and Gas before everything else. He knew exactly what he needed to do, and how he needed to act. This was his chance to prove he wasn’t the bastard his father had been.
He needed to be a better man. A man who wouldn’t kiss Kate unless he could make a commitment to her. A man who would honor his commitment to Lexi. A man who was proud of who he was.
“You don’t need to do anything for the picnic, but we can talk when you get here. Kate—my secretary—has given her two-weeks notice. If you are serious about wanting to be more involved, the picnic would be a great time for you to talk to her about the details of our events.”
“I am serious, Lance. I want to make our marriage work.”
There was a sincerity in Lexi’s words that shamed him. He’d asked her to marry him and it was time to step up and honor that.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Lance said.
“I’m looking forward to it. Mitch has raved about the Brody Oil and Gas Fourth of July party.”
“It’s the one time of year when we pull out all the stops for our workers. When we were rebuilding the business we decided that if we were going to be successful, we had to make everyone who worked for us feel like they were a part of the Brody Oil and Gas family.”
“If your success is any indication, I’d say you’ve achieved that.”
But at what cost? Mitch was determined and a workaholic just like Lance was. And this marriage wasn’t real—it was purely business. Lexi was just another step in their plan to be successful. Was that any way to go through life, especially when he had a woman like Kate on his hands? What was he doing?
Kate couldn’t believe she’d lost her head and let Lance kiss her. It was wonderful…incredible, really, but so stupid. She was here to get over him. She was supposed to be using these two weeks to put him in her past.
She wanted to go out looking her best and she supposed she could count herself successful on that item. Lance hadn’t even recognized her.
The sad part about that was she hadn’t done anything except wear clothes that fit her. What a difference new clothes made. She would never have believed it. Mainly because her mother had been the one to say clothes made the man, and that woman had been wrong about so many things.
She glanced down at the phone and saw that Lance was still on the line with Lexi Cavanaugh. She knew next to nothing about the woman. But at the end of the day, Kate felt she’d owe Lexi a word of thanks.
If it hadn’t been for that woman’s engagement to Lance, Kate might have stayed stuck in her frumpy rut until she died an old lady spinster.
A wolf-whistle brought her head up as Marcus Wall walked into the office. He was one of the petroleum geologists who worked for them, one of the men who helped decide where Brody Oil and Gas drilled and he was an expert at picking the right location for their wells. “Dang, Kate, you look good today.”
She smiled at him. “Thanks.”
“I never noticed how big your eyes were before,” he said, coming into her office and leaning on her desk. He must have come into the office at least a hundred times before and he’d never sat close or really even talked to her.
She wanted to be flattered but instead she was uncomfortable. She didn’t want a lot of male attention. She had wanted one male’s attention, and now that she had it she didn’t want to let it go.
That was her problem. Lance had moved forward and she was supposed to be, too, but if her reaction to Marcus’s friendly flirting was any indication, her plan was a failure. She only had eyes for Lance.
“Kate?”
“Hmm?”
He shook his head. “Is there a man behind this change?”
“How’d you guess?”
He shrugged. “I know women.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, three sisters. I was raised by wolves.”
“I don’t think women like to be called wolves.”
“True enough, but I know that when a girl—I don’t mean any offense calling you a girl—gets dolled up like you are, there’s a reason for it.”
“Maybe I just want a change,” she said, surprised that Marcus was actually helping her to understand herself. There was something hollow about the changes she’d made.
When Lance had kissed her and held her in his arms she’d felt like a queen. But now she was back to just feeling like Old Kate, the same way she’d felt for the last few years as Lance treated her like some kind of favored pet.
“Well, this change looks very good on you. Is the big man in?”
Kate glanced down at the phone. Lance was off of his line. And it was probably way past time for Marcus to leave her office. She hoped that she didn’t have guys talking to her all day. “Yes, he is.”
“I’ll announce myself,” Marcus said.
She nodded. Marcus usually did just that. “Thanks, Marcus.”
“For what?”
“For being you,” she said.
; “I can be so much more if you let me,” Marcus said.
“For a few weeks, right?” she asked, knowing that Marcus would be the right man for a fling but nothing more. Even if she was leaving the company, she didn’t want to have an affair with someone who worked with Lance.
This plan—which had been concocted when she’d had two glasses of wine—now seemed…silly. She needed to just keep doing her job, find a replacement for herself and get out of Brody Oil and Gas before she hurt herself any further.
“Definitely. I’m not a forever kind of man.”
“Marcus, are you here to see me?”
“Sure thing, boss man. I’ve got good news on the new mineral rights we purchased.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Lance said. “Go on in my office. I need a word with Kate.”
Marcus winked at her and then left. Lance reached over and closed the door leading to his office.
“What do you need?” she asked. She was trying to come off cool and sophisticated, but it was really hard when she felt like she was twelve. Why had she given this man so much power over her?
“I wanted to apologize for my behavior earlier.”
“I think we already covered that,” Kate said. The last thing she wanted to do was rehash that kiss. For her, it had been incredible and the answer to many long fantasies about this man.
She turned away from him, but he put his hand on her chair and turned her back to face him. “I don’t know why this is happening to us, Kate, but I am not going to be able to ignore it. You are—”
“Don’t say anything else. You have a fiancée and I’m leaving this job.”
“Why are you leaving?”
Kate looked up at him and thought about blasting him with the truth. But somehow she didn’t think he’d react well if she said she was leaving because she loved him and watching him get married would be about the same as ripping her heart out of her body.
“I’m leaving because I can’t work for you anymore.”
That was as close to the truth as she could get. Lucky for her he seemed to accept that answer.
She spent the rest of the day doing her job and realizing that all of the men in the office were starting to notice her as a woman. It should have given her hope that she’d find another man and fall in love, but instead it just made her sad because the one man she’d changed for still seemed to be oblivious—even after he’d finally kissed her.
The Fourth of July barbecue was held at Lance’s home in Somerset. He lived on acreage and had set up the party out near the lake on his property. There was an area for beach volleyball, which Lance had started playing when he was in college. Later on they would play the annual management-versus-workers match.
The caterers had been cooking since before dawn and mouthwatering smells filled the air. There was a deejay playing music under a tent near the caterers and everything had been decorated in red, white and blue.
He spotted Kate first thing as he approached the party area. “Happy Fourth of July.”
“You, too. Where do you need me?”
“Well, Mitch is running late, so if you want to work here with me handing out name tags and welcoming everyone, that’d be great.”
The first year they’d held the barbecue they’d started the tradition of personally welcoming everyone to the event. He, Mitch and Kate. It had been the first function where they’d really needed her.
“I can’t believe this is your last year doing this,” he said.
He’d given up on trying to convince her not to quit. She’d made it clear that she wasn’t going to change her mind, and given that he was trying to make a go at being a decent fiancé to Lexi, he thought he should probably stop trying to convince the woman who he was having nightly fantasies about to stay on.
“Me, neither. I’m going to miss it a lot. But you’ll have a new hostess for this next year.”
“Yes, we will. I think Lexi is anxious to talk to you about the planning of this event so she will know what’s involved.”
Kate bit her lower lip but nodded. “I’ll invite her to the postmortem meeting with our party-planning team. It will give her a chance to get know everyone, as well.”
“Thanks. Are you staying in Somerset tonight?”
“I don’t know. My folks went up to Frisco to visit my brother and his family.”
“You don’t see your parents much, do you?”
“We’re not close,” she said. “I mean, they are busy with their lives and I am busy working. But if I needed more time with them, they’d be here.”
Lance had learned from his own parents that the family he could count on was the one he’d made for himself. He counted his brother and Darius as his family, and the other men who were being inducted into the Texas Cattleman’s Club with him.
He’d been in touch with Darius the day before to ask him about the fire, but so far there had been little news of what was going on there.
“Have you heard from Mitch? When I talked to him yesterday he said he might be running late. But we are going to need him for the annual prize announcements.”
“Yes, we will,” Lance said. “Feel up to playing volleyball on my team this year?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Every year you say you will next year. But this is your last year….”
“What good will come from me playing?” she asked. “I’m not very athletic.”
“It’s all for fun. Come on, Kate.” He wanted to spend as much of the day with her as he could. At least until Lexi got here. He realized he had to force himself to think about Lexi. All he could think about was Kate.
“Okay, I’ll play, but only if Mitch gets here so one of us can man the welcome table.”
“He will be here,” Lance said. “What’s in the goody bag this year?”
“The T-shirt and some other company goodies. We have water guns for the kids.”
“Why just the kids?” Lance asked with a grin.
“Because of last year when you and Mitch didn’t know when to stop.”
“Are you still upset about being caught in the cross fire?”
“Of course not,” she said.
He remembered how Kate had looked with her baggy T-shirt soaking wet and clinging to her breasts. To be fair, that was when he’d noticed that there was more to his secretary than met the eye, but she’d looked so distressed by the entire thing that he’d taken his shirt off and offered it to her. She’d taken it and then left a few minutes later.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“About the way you looked in that wet T-shirt last year.”
She flushed. “Well, don’t. You’re not supposed to think things like that. Remember, you said you didn’t want any more temptation.”
“I’m thinking that wasn’t my wisest decision, Kate.”
“Why not?”
He glanced around the yard quickly. It was still early so there wasn’t anyone here yet except for the party crew who was setting up. He touched her face and looked down into her big brown eyes.
“I can’t ignore the way you make me feel.”
She bit her lower lip. “Please don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t want you?”
She pulled back. “Don’t say things like that. Because I will believe them and do something silly like kiss you. Then you will change your mind and I’ll feel stupid again.”
“Don’t feel stupid,” Lance said. He leaned down and kissed her. He’d been wanting to for the last two days since he’d seen Marcus leaning against her desk and talking to her.
He wanted to make sure she knew that he was the only man she needed to kiss.
Her lips felt so right against his and he realized he’d been more than hungry for her. Lexi or no Lexi, was tired of denying himself Kate.
Five
Mitch arrived at the picnic looking every inch the successful lobbyist. There was a part of Lance that envied his younger brother. But with Kate at his side and no
w his younger brother, too, Lance felt pretty good.
“You two seem happy,” Mitch said. “Did Lance finally talk you into staying on as his secretary?
Kate shook her head, and Lance realized there was still a lot of work for him to do before he had his Katie-girl back for good.
“Let’s go to my office at the house and call Darius,” Lance said.
“Right now?”
“Yes. I haven’t had a chance to check back in with him today and the press is calling, looking for an update.”
“Senator Cavanaugh is waiting for answers, as well. And until he gets them, I’m afraid that no matter what your relationship is with Lexi, he won’t back the bill we need him to,” Mitch said.
Lance was impressed with his younger brother. He looked nothing like their father and yet he had the old man’s drive. And Mitch was savvy when it came to dealing with politicians. Lance himself was only good with gas and oil people.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Mitch asked.
“Just wondering where you get this polish you have.”
Mitch shrugged. “Mom, I guess.”
“Probably. I always forget about her,” Lance said. Alicia Brody had done the best she could. And when she’d walked away from their old man, Lance knew it was because she’d had enough of the roughness of her life. He’d learned a long time ago to just bury his feelings of abandonment.
“You know, I get why she left me behind,” Lance said as they entered his house. “I’m the spitting image of him. But I never understood why she left you.”
Mitch rubbed the back of his neck as he headed for the bar in the living room. “I think she didn’t want either of us to be alone. I’ve always imagined she knew that if I didn’t stay she’d lose you, too.”
Lance didn’t like the sound of that. He’d always thought of himself as the protector, the one who’d kept Mitch safe. “Really?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I’m not a woman and to be fair, I don’t understand them,” Mitch said.
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