Books By Diana Palmer

by Palmer, Diana

  "I'll see you tomorrow. Try to rest."

  She nodded. Her eyes closed, blocking him out. She wasn't going to let him get to her again. No matter what she had to do to protect herself, he wasn't getting a second shot at her!

  Chapter Three

  The Lassiter Bar-D was a working cattle ranch. Besides Jose Dom-inguez and Hardy, who were horse wrangler and cook, respectively, Dane employed a ranch manager, Beryl's husband Dan, and half a dozen cowhands and other assorted personnel necessary to keep the place running. One man did nothing but look after the purebred bulls. Another took care of the tanks used to water the cattle. Still another was a mechanic.

  Tess hadn't really wanted to let Dane spirit her out of the hospital and down to his ranch, but she hadn't been strong enough to fight him. He'd cleared it with the doctor, had had her bags—packed by Helen—already in the car, and the minute she was released, had headed straight down to Branntville.

  Tess was uneasy about the prospect of several days in Dane's company. He was acting strangely, and she was nervous—much more so than usual.

  He'd never been much of a talker unless he had to socialize as part of his job, so the trip down to Branntville was undertaken in silence. Tess stared out the window, buried in her own thoughts and occupied with the twinges of pain she was still feeling from the wound in her arm.

  "Is that a ranch?" she asked when they reached the outskirts of Branntville, her eyes on a huge white-fenced property with a black silhouette of a spur for a logo.

  “Yes. Cole Everett and the Big Spur are known all over the state.

  Cole married his stepsister, Heather Shaw. They have three boys, all teenagers now."

  “It's very big, isn't it?" she asked.

  "Except for the Brannt Ranch, it's the biggest north of the King Ranch."

  "Brannt Ranch? Is Branntville named for the people who live there?"

  He nodded and indicated a ranch house far in the distance. "King Brannt owns the spread now. Talk about a hard case," he murmured. "King makes up his own rules as he goes along. He married a beautiful young girl, a model named Shelby Kane, daughter of the movie star Maria Kane. Nobody thought he'd ever marry. He says Shelby came up on his blind side." He smiled mockingly. "He'd do anything for her."

  "Did she take to ranch life?" Tess asked curiously.

  “Like a duck to water. She and King have a son and a daughter. The daughter, I understand, is sweet on one of the Everett boys."

  "What a merger that would be," Tess said.

  "They're young yet. And marriage isn't always the end of the rainbow," he added with faint bitterness.

  "I guess it has to have common ground, doesn't it?" Tess asked absently, staring out at the horizon. "Two people need more than physical attraction to make a marriage."

  He glanced at her. "Such as?"

  "Respect," she said. "Shared interests, similar backgrounds— things like that."

  "And no sex?"

  She shifted uneasily, her eyes on the windshield. "I guess if they wanted kids..."

  His eyes darkened. "Children aren't always possible."

  "I suppose not." She glanced at her hands. "Maybe some people don't mind intimacy."

  "Tess," he said heavily. "You don't have a clue, do you?"

  She flushed. "Don't I?"

  His dark eyes played over her profile, and the fire in his blood kindled. She knew nothing of men and women. It was his fault that she had such hang-ups. He'd hurt and frightened her. Now he wished he'd been different. If he could learn tenderness, it would be sweet to lie with her, to share the beauty of a man and a woman together with her. His body tautened as pictures danced in his mind. Tess, loving him. He could have groaned out loud. He'd thrown away something precious. Ironic that it should have taken a bullet to bring him to his senses, when it was a bullet that had robbed him of them in the first place.

  "Here's the ranch."

  He turned in between two rows of barbed-wire fences where red-coated cattle grazed. "I share a purebred Santa Gertrudis stud bull with the Big Spur," he explained. "We'll have to replace him pretty soon, though. We've been using him for two years, and that's enough inbreeding."

  "I don't understand."

  "Are you interested in ranching?" he asked suddenly.

  "Well, I don't know much about it," she faltered, her gray eyes darting up to his. "I guess it's complicated, isn't it?"

  "Sometimes. But it isn't as difficult a subject as it sounds. You don't ride, either."

  "I guess...I could learn," she said hesitantly.

  He smiled to himself as he rounded a curve, and suddenly they were coming up to a sprawling one-story white wooden frame house with beds of flowers all around it and tall trees.

  “How beautiful!" she exclaimed.

  Dane's heart swelled at her delight in it. "It belonged to my grandfather," he told her. "He left it to me when he died."

  "Oh, it's charming," she said breathlessly. "And the flower beds! I'll bet they're glorious in the spring!"

  “They are Beryl's contribution to beautifying the landscape. There are magnolia trees and azaleas and camellias, all sorts of blooming things. She can tell you, if you're interested."

  "I love to garden," she confessed. "I've never had anyplace to do it, except in my apartment window, but I used to do all the yard work at my grandmother's house."

  He pulled up at the steps and turned off the engine, staring at her quietly. "I don't know you," he said, his voice soft and deep. "I don't know a damned thing about you, Tess."

  "Why would you want to?" she asked evasively. "Look, is that Beryl?" A short, white-haired woman had come onto the porch.

  “That's Beryl."

  "It's about time you got here!" the woman muttered. "Late, as usual. Is this her?" She stopped in front of Tess and looked her over. "Thin and sickly, she is. I'll take care of that with some good home cooking. How's that arm, lovey?" she asked gently. "Still hurt?"

  Tess smiled, at home already. "It's much better."

  "If you're through running your mouth, I'd like to get the walking wounded into the house," Dane drawled. "She isn't going to get better standing out here in the cold."

  "It's not that cold at all," Beryl scoffed. "Why, in little more than a month there'll be flowers everywhere!"

  Tess could picture that, but she wouldn't be around to see it, she thought wistfully. She let Dane help her inside, unable to stop herself from stiffening at the feel of his lean arm around her.

  "Don't panic," he said curtly as Beryl went ahead to lead the way to the guest room. "I won't hurt you."

  She colored involuntarily. "Dane..."

  Her reticence made him irritable. "Relax, can't you? You're among friends."

  "You were never that," she said stiffly.

  "I'm thirty-four years old," he said as they moved down the long hall. "Maybe I'm tired of being alone. You said once that neither of us has anybody else."

  "And you said once that you didn't need anyone."

  He shrugged. "I've spent fourteen years being a cop. It isn't easy to change perspective."

  The mention of his profession made her uneasy. She didn't like thinking about the drug dealers she'd seen or what Dane had said about her being the only witness.

  "What's wrong?" he asked.

  "I was thinking about the night I got shot," she confessed. "About those men..."

  "You're safe here," he said. "Nobody is going to hurt you."

  "Of course not," she agreed, and forced a smile.

  Beryl settled her in while Dane went out to check on some new cattle that arrived shortly after they did. It was several hours before he reappeared, after Beryl and Tess had gotten acquainted. But the man who walked into the bedroom wasn't the man she thought she knew.

  Dane was wearing the garb of a working cowboy. He was in a striped blue western-cut shirt, long-sleeved with pearl snaps, and worn blue jeans under equally worn batwing chaps held up by a wide, silver-buckled belt. He wore black boots with spu
rs and a battered black Stetson pulled low over one eye. Tess stared curiously. She'd never seen him dressed like that.

  "You look like you've been dragged through a brush thicket," Beryl grimaced.

  "Not far wrong," he said, nodding. "We had to flush some cows out of the draws. No job for tenderfeet, that's a fact. Are you settling in?" he asked Tess.

  She nodded.

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. "Well, why the wide-eyed stare?"

  "You look...different," she said, searching for a word to describe the change in him.

  "I don't have to keep up a businesslike and impeccable image down here," he said with a faint twist of his lips. "This is home."

  Her eyes slid away. Home. She had an apartment, but she couldn't remember ever having a home where she felt comfortable. Her grandmother's house had been elegant but untouchable. Her memories of the time when her mother was alive were very dim and stark.

  "What are we eating?" he asked Beryl, uncomfortably aware of Tess's apparent indifference to him.

  "Beef," she replied. "And potatoes. What else is there?" she added with a grin.

  "For me, nothing. I'll get cleaned up."

  Tess watched him go. Her eyes were more expressive than she realized as she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and almost shivered, remembering the day he'd cured her of hero worship. She'd wanted so desperately to love him, but he wouldn't let her.

  Now he seemed to want to mend fences. Didn't he realize that it was years too late?

  Beryl was giving Tess a curious stare after he left. "You're afraid of him," she said unexpectedly, her expression incredulous. "Honey, he wouldn't hurt a fly!"

  Probably not, she thought, but he had hurt her in ways she could never confess to Beryl. "He never liked my father very much," Tess said evasively. "Or me. He's been kind to me since I got shot, but I still feel safer across town from him."

  "He isn't like that." The older woman tried again. "Sharp, yes, even hot-tempered, but he isn't vengeful. I've known him all his life. He was a sweet child until his father left. His mother took his father's desertion out on him. I spared him as much as I could, but she was never much of a parent."

  "Neither was my father," Tess confessed.

  "See, you've got something in common."

  "Right. We're both human beings."

  Once she got used to the new routine, Tess found the ranch fascinating and the pace relaxing. She insisted on helping Beryl as much as she could. Her arm was sore, but as she told Beryl, the doctor had said it wouldn't hurt to exercise it, to prevent it from becoming stiff. She set the table at mealtime and did what she could to lessen the strain of her presence, and she enjoyed the warmth of the other people who lived on the ranch.

  But she carefully kept her distance from Dane, to his dismay. There was always some reason why she had to leave a room once he entered it, why she had to be unavailable if he was in the living room after dinner, instead of in his study working.

  In the office, their relationship was strictly professional. She took dictation, answered the phone and kept things running smoothly. But here, where he was in his element, he was a different man. She had trouble adjusting to him on a personal level. Even when he'd been shot, he'd been the professional lawman, except for that once. And it had happened at the apartment he kept in town, not here at the ranch. If he had an inner sanctum, this was it. This was the first time she'd seen it; he'd made sure of that.

  Here, away from the world, he was relaxed and not so severely on his guard. He limped a little because of the primarily physical work he did on the ranch, and his temper was more noticeable thanat the office, but he was also less driven and stoic. That fact was what made Tess so nervous. She was vulnerable here, away from prying eyes. Beryl never intruded. Neither did any of the ranch hands. It made her uneasy to be totally at Dane's mercy.

  He noticed that she avoided him and became impatient with it. And finally, three days later, he confronted her while she was helping feed a stray calf in the barn.

  He was angry. The set of his jaw and the glitter in his eyes would have told her, even without the taut stance of his body.

  ''Stop avoiding me," he said without preamble, his very tone intimidating.

  She looked up at him nervously. She was wearing jeans and a denim coat over her blue blouse, with her hair plaited at her nape. She looked very pretty, even without makeup, something Dane noticed.

  "I'm feeding the calf...." she said hesitantly, indicating the bottle she was holding to the calf's mouth as she balanced its small head on her knee.

  "That isn't what I mean, and you know it." He whipped off his Stetson, the quick action unnerving, and knelt beside her. He was in working garb, too. His jeans and boots were much more disreputable-looking than hers, his batwing chaps stained and worn. The cuffs of his long-sleeved chambray shirt were speckled with mud and blood, like the sleeves of his open shepherd's coat. He looked up, catching her eyes in a look she couldn't break. "I've tried to tell you that I regret what I did that day," he said roughly.

  She flushed. Her heart was beating her to death. She didn't want to analyze why.

  “I thought you were more experienced than you turned out to be, or I wouldn't have taken it that far, that fast."

  "You said so before," she faltered.

  "You didn't listen before." He ran his hand through his thick, damp hair. "You go out with men occasionally. You must know by now, at your age, that intimacy can be rough."

  She looked down at the calf. She didn't answer him.

  "Right?" He caught her softly rounded chin in his lean fingers and tilted her face up to his. "Tell me."

  "There hasn't been...anybody," she said unsteadily. "Not...that way."

  His face changed all at once. He frowned slightly, his eyes falling to her parted lips and then back up to her eyes. "How deep are the scars I gave you?" he asked quietly.

  Her thin shoulders moved restlessly. "Pretty deep," she said with a humorless laugh. "Dane, I have to finish this."

  He withdrew his hand, draping it across his knee as he watched her. Her reaction to him was damning. He made her nervous. He could see her hands shaking, and he hated that part of the past that was responsible for her helpless fear.

  "You kept coming, no matter how hard I tried to push you away. You got closer than anyone else ever had," he said without meeting her eyes, his fingers tracing a streak of mud on the knee of his jeans as the involuntary confession escaped him. "I got in over my head before I knew it. I didn't really want a woman in my life."

  "But you were married once, before you got shot," she said.

  His eyes met hers and he smiled with pure mockery. "I started dating Jane because my mother didn't like her. Then I married her because she wouldn't sleep with me any other way. But she only suffered me in bed for one reason," he said, without elaborating on the reason. His face hardened. "Eventually she went looking for a man who could give her everything she needed. I assume she found him when we were divorced. She's remarried and has a child."

  "Oh." She frowned, her eyes searching his curiously as she tried to get up enough courage to ask a question that was gnawing at her.

  "You want to know why she didn't like sleeping with me," he said, nodding. "Do you really need to ask?"

  He was like a bulldozer, in every way. Perhaps the ardor he'd shown her that long-ago day was how he made love naturally. She hadn't considered that likelihood.

  It opened her mind to new possibilities. She lifted her face. "Was it...were you that way with her? Like you were with me that day?"

  His jaw tautened. "I've never liked a woman enough to care whether or not she enjoyed me in bed," he said bluntly. "I wanted Jane. I thought if she loved me, preliminaries wouldn't matter."

  Her breath escaped in a sigh. She was innocent on certain subjects, but she seemed to know more about than he did.

  "But...but you can't just...just..." She colored. "Dane, women aren't like men," she said helplessly. "A woman has to have
time, tenderness."

  "How would you know?" he asked insolently. "Didn't you just practically admit to me that you're still a virgin?"

  The blush got worse. She glared at him. "Being innocent doesn't make me stupid. I watch movies and read books, you know. I do have some idea of what a woman is supposed to feel with a man she loves."

  "You loved me," he said darkly. "And you felt nothing except fear."

  "I was infatuated with you," she corrected, shivering inside at the knowledge that she'd been so transparent. At nineteen, she'd known nothing about how to keep her heart hidden. "You hurt me, and not just emotionally."

  "That wasn't deliberate. I was...hungry for you," he said hesitantly. He sounded almost vulnerable. "You were sweet and loving, and I thought..." He cursed under his breath. "What does it matter?" His eyes darted up and slammed into hers. "You didn't want me."

  "You were so violent," she whispered weakly.

  His fist clenched on his knee. "I don't know any other way with a woman!" he said stiffly. His eyes narrowed as they met hers. "I was a late bloomer. My mother was the only woman I'd been around much and she hated men with a vengeance. In fact, she hated me, too. I got my first taste of women when I was a rookie cop. The kind of women you meet out on the streets in police work are every bit as tough as the men, because they have to be. The only encounters I ever had were rushed and unemotional." His eyes were unconsciously intent on her face. "The way I was with you that day... is the only way I know."

  "Dane," she whispered, her voice soft with unwilling compassion. "I'm so sorry!"

  His dark eyes met hers. "What?" he asked absently.

  She wondered if he realized what he'd told her, how much of himself he'd revealed. She reached up, for the first time voluntarily touching his lean cheek. Her fingers were cold.

  He jerked back from her, his eyes glittery, and closed up like a clam. "I don't need pity, honey," he said mockingly. "I don't need a damned woman, either."

  He got up and stomped off down the aisle, leaving a shocked, puzzled Tess behind.

  For the next two days, it was Dane who avoided her, almost as if his confession had embarrassed him. Tess found herself less nervous as she considered how his attitude toward women had stifled his ability to feel tenderness.