The china was exquisite, the crystal perfect—and so, Cade insisted, was their dress.
He wore the bottom half of a pair of blue cotton pajamas.
Angelica wore the top.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said, with a little laugh.
“Look at you how?” he said, and grinned.
“You know how.”
Cade reached across the little table and tugged gently at a long, coppery curl that lay against her shoulder.
“You look like a little girl,” he said softly.
She smiled. “I’m twenty-seven,” she said. “That’s hardly a little girl.”
“I’ll bet you were the prettiest little girl in all of Texas.”
Angelica made a face. “Not me. I hated the color of my hair, hated my freckles—”
“So you moved East and became the prettiest little girl there,” Cade said, and smiled.
Angelica laughed. “You mean, I became the girl with the red hair, the freckles and the funny accent.”
“Does your mother still live back East?”
“No. She died when I was in my last year of college.”
Cade looked at her. “What about brothers? Or sisters?”
“There’s just me.” She smiled wistfully. “It must be nice, having a big family.”
He shrugged. “Well, it has its moments.”
Angelica propped her chin in her hand. “OK,” she said, “it’s your turn. Tell me about Cade Landon.”
He grinned. “You already know most of it. I’m handsome, intelligent…”
“And modest.” She reached forward and touched her fingertip to his slightly crooked nose. “How’d that happen?”
Cade laughed. “I wish I could tell you something romantic, that I broke it in some waterfront dive in Singapore or something, but the truth is that I got it busted years ago, in a fight on an oil rig.”
“A fight?”
“Yeah. Some bozo decided I looked too green to be giving orders, that the only authority I had came from the Landon name.”
“And you decided to show him otherwise.”
“I never got anything from the Landon name,” Cade said with a tight smile. “Except maybe the desire to disassociate myself from the man who’d passed it along to me.
“You and your father didn’t get along?” Angelica said softly.
Cade laughed. “The understatement of the century, Angel. He was good at giving orders—”
“And you were good at ignoring them?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s just say I didn’t like having somebody make the rules for the way I was supposed to live my life.”
“No.” Angelica looked at him. “Nobody likes that.”
“Uh-oh,” he said softly. “That’s an ominous tone the lady has. Is that what you think, that I’ve been trying to make rules for you to live by?”
She smiled. “Well…”
“Angel, that’s not fair. You’ve been sick. I just—” He smiled. “OK. Maybe I did take over a little, but—”
“But?”
He reached across the table and slowly slipped his hand inside the pajama top.
“But from now on,” he said, his eyes turning to smoke, “I’ll only take over where it counts.”
Seconds later, they were locked in each other’s arms.
* * *
The next morning, Cade sat in a chair opposite the bed. He was dressed in a dark blue suit, a white shirt and a striped tie, and he was sipping a cup of coffee.
But mostly, he was watching Angelica as she slept and thinking that the word “beautiful” didn’t really do her justice.
Getting up an hour ago and leaving her warm, sweetly scented body had been difficult, but there was an important business matter that left him no choice—and before he left, he’d had something important to do.
He thought of the gaily wrapped boxes waiting in the sitting room. He could hardly wait to see her face when she opened them and saw the things he’d bought her, the silky camisoles and teddies, the soft cashmere dress that was the same green as her eyes.
She was too beautiful to hide behind tweeds and dark wools, and she didn’t have to, not anymore. Cade smiled to himself as he sipped his coffee. He had learned a lot about her in the past twenty-four hours, enough to understand why she’d been so determined to prove herself at Gordon Oil.
It wasn’t ambition that drove her. It was pain.
He could almost see her, the little girl with the red hair, at home neither in Texas nor back East, losing first her home and her father, and then her mother.
But now she had him. And he would protect her, and love her, forever.
He knew that now, knew that he’d been kidding himself, trying to pretend she was just another woman.
She wasn’t. She was his.
“Cade?”
He looked up, and he felt a smile curve across his mouth. Angelica was blinking the sleep from her eyes, staring at him across a tangle of blankets, and it was all he could do to keep from hurrying across the room and taking her in his arms.
“Good morning, sugar. Did you sleep well?”
She sat up against the pillows, clutching the blanket to her chin.
“What time is it?” she said. Her gaze swept over him and she frowned. “Have I overslept? Cade, you should have—”
“Easy, Angel.” He rose, walked to the bed, sat down next to her and took her in his arms. “Aren’t you going to kiss me good morning?”
He kissed her slowly and deeply, determinedly ignoring the swift quickening of his body as her mouth opened to his. Finally, she leaned back in his arms and smiled.
“You should have woken me,” she whispered, smiling into his eyes. “Now you’ll have to wait while I get ready for work, too.”
“No work today,” he said lightly.
Angelica’s brow furrowed. “But—”
“Well, a little work, maybe.” He rose from the bed and stepped into the sitting room. When he came back, his arms were loaded with packages. “You’ve got to try on all this stuff and tell me if you like my choices.”
She looked at him blankly. “What is all this?”
Cade dumped the boxes on the bed. “Open one and find out.”
He handed her a small box. She smiled hesitantly, undid the paper—and withdrew a camisole and panties of pale pink silk.
She looked at him, her expression halfway between a smile and a frown.
“Cade, I can’t accept this. I told you—”
“Wrong size?”
“No. But-”
“Wrong color?”
“The color’s perfect, but—”
“See what you think of this.”
“This” proved to be a dress of forest-green cashmere. It was incredibly beautiful—and, Angelica knew, incredibly expensive.
“Cade,” she said sternly, “I cannot—”
“We agreed, you can’t wear the clothing you have at home until your hand is better.”
“It is better. Much. And we didn’t agree. You announced that—”
“I’m not taking over, or making the rules, or whatever it is you thought I did last night.’’
Angelica sighed. “You’re not?”
“Hell, no. I’m just giving my woman a gift.” He bent down, tilted her face to his and kissed her. “There’s no law against that, is there?”
His woman, she thought, his woman…
The words were so simple. But their effect wasn’t simple at all. Part of her thrilled to them—and part recoiled.
“Sugar?” Cade stroked the curls from her cheeks. “If we really have to argue about this, we’ll have to do it later. Right now, I’ve got about half an hour to get clear across town.”
“But I thought—aren’t we going to work today?”
We, he thought, and he smiled.
“No, sugar, we’re not. Well, you’re not, anyway. But I’ve got a meeting with Jim Larrabee. I phoned him and tried to cancel, but—”
>
“Jim Larrabee?”
“From that company that sold you some drilling equipment a few weeks ago, remember? I want to talk to him about a new schedule of payments.”
Payments, Angelica thought, and schedules. How quickly she’d forgotten all about business—and all about Gordon Oil.
“I know who he is, Cade. And I tried to get him to agree to a new schedule, but—”
“He’ll agree to this.”
She felt herself bristling at the smug self-assurance in his tone.
“How nice to be so confident. What kind of schedule is it?”
“There’s no point in my boring you with the details, sugar. Tell you what—you pick a restaurant for lunch. Do you like Tex-Mex food? I know this little place for ribs that—”
Angelica’s mouth firmed. “You can hardly bore me with the details of a deal that affects my company,” she said stiffly.
“Come on, Angel. Isn’t it time we gave that up?”
“Gave what up?” Her voice hardened. “I’m still in charge of Gordon’s, Cade, in case you’d forgotten.”
“No,” he said carefully, “no, I hadn’t forgotten. But—”
But what? Every instinct told him this wasn’t the time for a confrontation. Cade blew out his breath.
“Just what I said, Angel. I didn’t want to bore you with the details.” He smiled. “Not this morning.”
She smiled carefully. “Nothing’s changed,” she said. “I’m still me—and I’m still interested in hearing about any deal you’ve cooked up.”
“Angelica, you’re making more out of this than it’s worth.”
“In that case, take me with you.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Cade shrugged his shoulders.
“Fine,” he said. “Come along, if that’s what you want.”
It was, Angelica was certain, the last thing in the world Cade wanted. But she didn’t hesitate.
“Thank you,” she said with great formality. “I’ll be ready in five minutes.”
She rose from the bed, still clutching the sheet, and looked at the open boxes lying amid the blankets. She frowned, then scooped up the camisole and panties from the gift box—but she took her own black wool dress from the chair as she walked briskly into the bathroom.
Cade stared after her, his mouth tightening. Then he turned away and poured himself another cup of coffee.
* * *
The same Jim Larrabee who’d refused to listen to Angelica’s deferred payment plan fell all over himself in his eagerness to agree to Cade’s.
What was even worse was the way both men ignored her during the meeting.
“You know Miss Gordon, Jim, “ Cade said at its start. Larrabee smiled, shook her hand—and then neither of them looked at her again, not even to ask her opinion before Cade pronounced the deal complete.
That was when Angelica shoved back her chair, got to her feet and stalked from the room.
She was waiting in the car when Cade emerged from the Larrabee offices a few minutes later, staring straight ahead. He opened the door, climbed inside, slammed it shut and threw the car into gear. They went half a dozen blocks in silence, and then he turned to her, glaring.
“Don’t you ever embarrass me that way again!”
“I embarrassed you?” Angelica swung toward him, her face flushed. “You have to be kidding!”
“Look, I don’t know what pissed you off, but—”
“I’ll tell you what pissed me off! How dare you act as if I’m invisible? You sat there, and that man sat there, and I might as well have been in—in Timbuctoo!”
“Going to that meeting was your idea, lady, not mine!”
“You’re damned right. If it had been up to you, I’d never even have known you were planning to meet with Larrabee!”
“Listen, lady—”
“Woman. That’s what you call a grown female, Cade. She’s not a lady, she’s a woman.”
“So you keep reminding me. And I guess you’re right, because God knows a lady would never behave the way you just did.”
“You mean, no flower of Western womanhood would ever behave the way I did!”
A horn blared behind them. Cade shot a furious look into the rearview mirror, then stepped on the gas.
“I don’t appreciate being made to look like a fool,” he said through his teeth.
Angelica sighed dramatically sweetly. “Poor Cade. Was it humiliating to have to explain why I walked out?”
“Not really.” His smile was all teeth. “Jim made a joke about PMS and I said, well, for all I knew, he might just be right. You can never tell about women’s hormones, can you?”
“That’s it! Write this off as something you and the other good ol’ boys can laugh about.” The car pulled to the curb in front of the hotel. The doorman stepped briskly forward, but Angelica threw the door open before he could reach it. “Having to admit the truth, that you couldn’t afford to let me into that discussion because I might just have shown you up, would probably have killed you,” she snapped as Cade stepped out of the car and came toward her.
“You? Show me up?” Cade laughed. “Listen, sugar, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you were in way over your head just sitting there! I can take what you know about this business, stuff it into a thimble and have room left for my finger.”
The electric lobby doors swished open as Angelica approached.
“The only thing that was thimble-size in that office was your brain,” she said coldly.
“Dammit,” Cade snarled. He caught hold of her wrist and swung her toward him. “Don’t you think it’s time you admitted the truth, Ms. Gordon? You don’t know the first thing about oil.”
“What you mean is, I don’t know the first thing about—about going to the bathroom standing up!”
Cade laughed. “Miss Palmer should hear you now, sugar,” he said. “I’ll bet she’d swoon.”
Angelica glared at him. Then she spun on her heel, marched past the reception desk where the clerks were trying their best to pretend nothing out of the ordinary was happening in the posh lobby, and stabbed the call button for the elevator.
“Miss Palmer,” she said coldly when Cade caught up to her, “would tell me that I should have known better than to expect you to treat me with respect.”
The elevator doors slid open. They stepped inside, and Cade pressed the button for the penthouse floor.
“Angelica,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Look, let’s not let this get out of hand. I wasn’t trying to insult you. It’s just that Larrabee and I speak the same language.”
“Give me a break, Cade.” The doors opened and Angelica stepped into the corridor that led to the suite. “I hate being patronized. I hate it almost as much as I hate being treated like a—a second-class citizen.”
Cade unlocked the door to the sitting room. They stepped inside and he slammed the door after them.
“Will you listen to me, dammit?” He clasped her shoulders and turned her to face him. “In the first place, you don’t know a thing about the oil business. That’s not an insult, it’s fact.”
“I’m learning. Besides, I do know about finances, and debt structures, and if you’d only given me a minute or two of your precious time, I could have told you about the plan I’d worked out and offered Mr. Jim Aren’t-WeAll-Good-Old-Boys Larrabee just a little while ago!”
“It couldn’t have been much of a plan, if he turned it down.”
“It was a terrific plan, but the person who made it was a woman!”
“Dammit, all you know is what you’ve read in textbooks, and that’s not what’s happening in the real world!”
Angelica’s fists clenched. “It’s men like you and Jim Larrabee,” she said, her voice trembling, “who won’t give me the chance to find out!”
“Angelica…”
Cade blew out his breath. Dammit, why were they fighting? She’d made him angry as hell, but that was all draining away, especially now that he saw the
telltale glint of tears in her eyes.
OK. Maybe he’d hurt her feelings. But he hadn’t meant to; he’d just gone into the meeting the way he always did, ready for the one-on-one kind of thing he was best at, and within seconds he’d been sure that Larrabee was responding positively to it.
Only a fool would have done something to endanger that.
Besides, if he’d thought about Angelica sitting there at all, it had been a quick flash, an awareness that he was putting on one hell of a show and that he had to be dazzling her with how quickly he’d turned Larrabee around.
Instead, he thought, with a twinge of guilt, instead, he’d managed to put those tears in the eyes of—of…
Cade’s heart kicked against his ribs. He’d put tears in the eyes of the only woman he’d ever loved.
Angelica had turned away from him. Her head was bowed; she looked fragile and vulnerable, and his throat constricted.
“Angel,” he said softly. He reached out and touched her shoulder gently. “Angel, I’m sorry. You’re right.”
She turned and looked at him. “Do you mean it?” she said, and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.
“Yes, of course.” He smiled and drew her toward him. “I don’t ever want us to quarrel again.”
She smiled, too, shakily. He could feel the tension in her body giving way.
“Me neither,” she whispered. “It’s just—the thing is, you made me feel so useless…”
Cade nodded. “I know.”
“There I sat, the head of the Gordon Oil Company, and—”
“Well, sure.” He smiled. “That was part of the problem. We should have straightened all that out before we went into that meeting, but I figured you weren’t quite ready to admit that you weren’t really the head of Gordon Oil, so—”
Angelica pulled back and stared at him. “What do you mean? I never said—”
“Angel. We both know there never was a verbal agreement.”
She swallowed dryly. “Oh?”
“But I can understand that what happens to the company is important to you. Hell, it belonged to your father.” Cade threaded his fingers into her hair and tilted her face to his. “Tell you what. I’ll direct whoever I put in charge to send me special periodic reports on the company’s progress, and—”
An Indecent Proposal Page 15
