Long, Tall Texans--Quinn--A Single Dad Western Romance

by Diana Palmer

  “I would have done that for you,” Emma protested.

  “Of course you would, but I had some time.” She put the envelopes in a neat stack. “You can stamp them and put the address labels on. Here’s the thing, sweetie, I’m going to be away for about two or three months. A sheikh has invited me to stay at his palace and see the sights in Qawi with his family. We’ll watch horse races, attend cultural events all over the Middle East, even spend some time on the Riviera in Monaco and Nice on the way home. Do you want to stay here or go home to your dad?”

  Emma swallowed. “Well…”

  “You’re welcome to stay here,” she said gently, because she knew how Emma’s father treated her. Emma had often lived with another family in Texas, but she’d said that she didn’t want to impose on them. “I know how much you hate to travel. It’s why I’ve never taken you overseas. But you’d be doing me a favor actually, because I wouldn’t have to close up the lake house. What do you think?”

  “I’d love that!”

  Mamie smiled. “I thought you might. Okay. You know what to do. You can drive the speedboat, too, but no speeding,” she added firmly. “You don’t want to make Connor angry. Really, you don’t.”

  Emma frowned at her employer. There was something odd about the way she’d said it.

  Mamie sat down and folded her hands in her lap. “I wasn’t always a famous author,” she began. “I started out as a newspaper reporter on a small weekly paper. From there I moved to entertainment magazines, doing feature stories on famous people.” She grimaced. “One of them was Connor Sinclair. His best friend—who turned out to only be a distant acquaintance—had assured me that he had Connor’s permission to tell me things about his private life. So I quoted the man as my source and ran the story.”

  “This sounds as though it ended unhappily,” Emma said when her companion was very quiet.

  “It did. The man who gave me the quotes was a business rival who hated Connor and saw an opportunity to get even for a business account he lost. Most of what he told me was true, but Connor’s fanatical about his privacy. I didn’t know that until it was too late. Long story short, the magazine fired me to keep him from suing.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “It was a bad time,” Mamie recalled quietly. “I was just divorced, with no money of my own. I depended on that job to keep my bills paid and a roof over my head. I landed another job, with a rival magazine, a couple of weeks later. Luckily for me, that publisher didn’t like Connor and wasn’t going to be forced into putting me on the street for what another magazine printed.”

  “He tried to have you fired from that job, too?” Emma asked, aghast at the man’s taste for vengeance.

  “Yes, he did. So when I tell you to be careful about dealing with him, I’m not kidding,” Mamie concluded. “I would never fire you, no matter what he threatened. But I still work for publishers who can be threatened.”

  “I see your point,” she said quietly. “I won’t make an enemy of him. I’ll make sure I stay out of his way from now on.”

  “Good girl,” Mamie said gently. “You’re very special, Emma. I trust you, which is more than I can say about most people I know. I wanted children, but my husband didn’t.” She smiled sadly. “It’s just as well, the way things turned out.”

  “Why is Mr. Sinclair so bitter?” Emma asked suddenly. “I mean, he never smiles and he’s always upset about something or someone. It just seems odd to me.”

  “He lost his brother, his only sibling, in an accident on this lake. A drunk driver in a boat hit him and his wife in their houseboat and left the scene. They both died.” She swallowed. “Connor spent a fortune, they say, searching for the man’s location for the police. He was prosecuted and sent to prison. He’s still there.”

  “Did the drunk man have family?”

  Mamie nodded. “A wife and a little girl. They lost their home, their income… The child had to go to social services. The mother ended up dead of a drug overdose. It was a tragic story, all the way around.”

  “Life is so hard for children,” Emma murmured, thinking of the poor little girl. Connor Sinclair was vindictive.

  “It is.” Mamie looked around. “Well, I’d better be on my way. Come help me pack, Emma. I have a couple of evening dresses I want to give you. They’re too small for me, and they’ll suit you very well.”

  “I never go anywhere to wear evening dresses.” Emma laughed. “But thank you very much for the thought.”

  Mamie glanced at her. “You should be dating, meeting men, thinking about starting a family.”

  “I haven’t met anyone I felt that way about, except Steven.” She shuddered. “I thought he was the perfect man. Now I’m not sure I’ll trust my judgment about a man ever again.”

  “You’ll get over it in time, honey,” Mamie said, a gentle smile on her face. “There are plenty of handsome, eligible men in the world, and you have a kind heart. You don’t think so right now, but men are going to want you, Emma. That nurturing nature is something most men can’t resist. They don’t care as much for physical beauty as they do for someone who’s willing to sit up with them when they’re sick and feed them cough syrup.” She grinned.

  Emma laughed, as she was meant to. “Well, one day. Maybe.”

  Mamie left in a whirlwind of activity, met by a stretch limousine with a stately driver in a suit and tie. She gave Emma a handful of last-minute chores, a research assignment to complete for her next book and an admonition to be careful about going out after dark. Her parting shot was to stay off the lake in the speedboat until Connor went to his home in the south of France as he did most years just before Christmas.

  Emma promised to be careful, but no more. The speedboat had become her solace. When she was out on the lake, with the wind blowing through her long hair and the spray of the water on her face, she felt alive as she’d never felt before.

  She hadn’t told Mamie, but she was still wounded by Steven’s rejection several years later. She’d been too wounded to ever trust another man. She’d felt close to Steven, felt a sense of belonging to someone for the first time in her young life. His rejection had been painful. She’d always been shy, lacked self-confidence. Now she distrusted her own judgment about people. Steven had seemed so perfect. But he had prejudices she hadn’t known about. Ideals were worthwhile, certainly, but it had been her father’s choice of vocations that had alienated him. He hadn’t considered that she might not feel as her father did. He simply walked away, without a backward glance.

  For several weeks, she hoped that he might call or write, that he might apologize for making assumptions about her. But he hadn’t. In desperation, she’d written to a former girlfriend in San Antonio, where Steven had moved to, a mutual friend from high school. The friend told her that Steven was involved with a new organization—a radical animal rights group, much larger than the one he’d belonged to when Emma knew him. He and his friend were apparently still living together, too. Neither of them dated anybody. Steven said that he was never going back to Jacobsville, though. That was when Emma finally gave up. She wasn’t going to have that happy ending so beloved by tellers of fairy tales. Not with Steven, anyway. She walked idly through the woods, a stick held loosely in her hand. She touched it to the tops of autumn weeds as she walked, lost in thought.

  She almost walked straight into the big man before she saw him. She jumped back as though he’d struck out at her. Her heart was beating a mad rhythm. She felt breathless, frightened, heartsick. All those emotions vied for supremacy in her wide brown eyes.

  She bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry,” she said at once, almost cringing at the sudden fierce anger in his broad face.

  His hands were jammed deep in his trouser pockets. He was wearing a beige shirt with tan slacks, and he looked, as usual, out of sorts.

  He glared at her from pale glittering gray eyes, assessing her, finding her wanting. His opinion of her long brown checked cotton dress with its white T-shirt underneath was less t
han f lattering.

  “Well, we can’t all afford Saks,” she said defensively.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Some of us can’t even afford a decent thrift shop, either, judging by appearances,” he returned.

  She stood on the narrow path through the woods that led to the lake. “I wasn’t trespassing,” she blurted out, reddening. “Mamie owns up to that colored ribbon on the stake, there.” She pointed to the property line.

  He cocked his head and stared at her. He hated her youth, her freshness, her lack of artifice. He hated her very innocence, because it was so obvious that it was unmistakable. His whole life had been one endless parade of perfumed, perfectly coifed women endlessly trying to get whatever they could out of him. Here was a stiff, upright little Puritan with a raised fist.

  “You’re always alone,” he said absently.

  “So are you,” she blurted out, and then bit her tongue at her own forwardness.

  Broad shoulders lifted and fell. “I got tired of bouncing soufflés, so I sent her home,” he said coolly.

  She frowned, searching his face. He showed his age in a way that many older men didn’t. He pushed himself too hard. She knew without asking that he never took vacations, never celebrated holidays, that he carried work home every night and stayed on the phone until he was finally weary enough to sleep. Business was his whole life. He might have women in his life, but their inf luence ended at the bedroom door. And nobody got close, ever.

  “Can you cook?” he asked suddenly.

  “Of course.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “My father has a little cattle ranch in Texas,” she said hesitantly. “My mother died when I was only eight. I had to learn to cook.”

  “At the age of eight?” he asked, surprised.

  She nodded. Suddenly she felt cold and wrapped her arms around her body. “I was taught that hard work drives out frivolous thoughts.”

  He scowled. “Any brothers, sisters?”

  She shook her head.

  “Just you and the rancher.”

  She nodded. “He wanted a boy,” she blurted out. “He said girls were useless.”

  His hands, stuffed in his pockets, clenched. He was getting a picture he didn’t like of her life. He didn’t want to know anything about her. He found her distasteful, irritating. He should turn around and go back to his lake house.

  “You had a little girl with you a few days ago,” he said, startling her. “She was lost.”

  She smiled slowly, and it changed her. Those soft brown eyes almost glowed. “She belongs to a friend of Mamie’s, a young woman from Provence who’s over here with her husband on a business trip. They’re staying at a friend’s cabin. The little girl wandered over here, looking for Mamie.”

  “Provence? France?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you speak French, cowgirl?” he asked.

  “Je ne parle pas très bien, mais, oui,” she replied.

  He cocked his head, and for a few seconds, his pale eyes were less hostile. “You studied it in high school, I suppose?”

  “Yes. We had to take a foreign language. I already spoke Spanish, so French was something new.”

  “Spanish?”

  “My father had several cowboys who were from Mexico. Immigrants,” he began, planning to mention that his grandfather was one.

  “Their families were here before the first settlers made it to Texas,” she said, absently defending them.

  His pale eyes narrowed. “I didn’t mean it that way. I was going to say that my grandfather was an immigrant.” He cocked his head. “You don’t like even the intimation of prejudice, do you?”

  She shifted on her feet. “They were like family to me,” she said. “My father was hard as nails. He wouldn’t even give a man time off to go to a funeral.” She shifted again. “He said work came first, family second.”

  “Charming,” he said and it was pure sarcasm.

  “So all the affection I ever had was from people who worked for him.” She smiled, reminiscing. “Dolores cooked for the bunkhouse crew. She taught me to cook and sew, and she bought me the first dress I ever owned.” Her face hardened. “My father threw it away. He said it was trashy, like Dolores. I said she was the least trashy person I knew and he…” She swallowed. “The next day, she was gone. Just like that.”

  He moved a step closer. “You hesitated. What did your father do?”

  She bit her lower lip. “He said I deserved it…”

  “What did he do?”

  “He drew back his fist and knocked me down,” she said, lowering her face in shame. “Dolores’s husband saw it through the window. He came in to protect me. He knocked my father down. So my father fired Dolores and him. Because of me.”

  He didn’t move closer, but she felt the anger emanating from him. “He would have found another reason for doing

  it,” he said after a minute.

  “He didn’t like them being friendly to me.” She sighed. “I felt so bad. They had kids who were in school with me, and the kids had to go to another school where Pablo found work. Dolores tried to write to me, but my father tore up the letter and burned it, so I couldn’t even see the return address.”

  “You should have gone with them,” he said f latly.

  She smiled sadly. “I tried to. He locked me in my room.” She looked up with soft, sad eyes. “Mamie reminds me of Dolores. She has a kind heart, too.”

  There was an odd vibrating sound. She frowned, looking around.

  He held up the cell phone he’d kept in his pocket. He glared at it, turned the vibrate function off and put it back in his pocket. “If I answer it, there’s a crisis I have to solve. If I don’t answer it, there will be two crises that cost me a small fortune because I didn’t answer it.”

  “I don’t even own a cell phone,” she said absently. It was true—Mamie paid for hers.

  How would she pay for one, he almost said out loud. But he didn’t want to hurt her. Life had done a good job of that, from what he’d heard.

  He nodded toward the sky. “It will be dark soon,” he said. “You shouldn’t be out alone at night.”

  She managed a smile. “That’s what Mamie says. I’m going in.”

  She turned, a little reluctantly, because he wasn’t quite the ogre she thought he was.

  All the way down the path, she felt his eyes on her. But he didn’t say another word.

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  ISBN-13: 9781488032882

  Long, Tall Texans: Quinn

  First published as Sutton’s Way by Silhouette Romance in 1989

  This edition published in 2017

  Copyright © 1989 by Diana Palmer.

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