The Barons of Texas: Tess

by Fayrene Preston

Not even a sun god whose kiss contained fire.

  Two

  Tess stumbled out to the terrace clutching a bottle of aspirin in one hand and sunglasses in the other. As soon as the daylight hit her eyes, she groaned and carefully eased on her sunglasses.

  “Coffee, ma’am?” Guadalupe asked. Guadalupe was one of four people who worked in and around the house and whose salary was included in the price of the lease.

  She started to nod, then immediately realized her mistake as pain jolted through her head. “Yes, please,” she whispered.

  Gratefully she sank into a chair in front of the table, where breakfast had already been laid out. She took a searing gulp of coffee, downed four aspirin, then slumped back against the chair. Damn gulls. They sounded fiendishly cheerful. And…loud. Lord help her, were they that loud every morning?

  She’d never had a hangover before, and if she lived through this one, she swore she’d never have one again.

  “Is there anything else you’d like, ma’am?”

  She almost jumped. She’d forgotten Guadalupe’s presence. Warily she eyed the table. Orange juice, fruit, sausage, eggs and an assortment of rolls, jellies and breads-enough to feed your basic small army.

  “This will do for now, thank you.”

  The thing was, her intake of alcohol had always been limited to the occasional beer or a glass of wine with dinner. Even in college, when most kids were celebrating their freedom from their parents with copious amounts of drinking, she’d spent her time sating her appetite for learning about business and oil. Succeeding had always been the most important thing for her, and it still was. She was convinced she could overcome this hangover just as she overcame all obstacles—by sheer determination. If she stayed really still…

  Tess. Nick paused at the bottom of the terrace steps. She was already at the table, though it didn’t look as if she’d eaten anything yet. Her head was resting on the back of the chair, with her loose blond hair hanging down behind it and blowing lightly in the breeze. The hemline of her short, simple blue dress cut across her upper thighs. The morning sun gilded the skin of her bare arms and legs.

  How in the hell was he supposed to keep his mind on business when she looked like that?

  It was the same problem he’d had last night. Due to his research, he’d thought he was fully prepared for her. But all it had taken was one look and he’d known he wasn’t prepared for her.

  He hadn’t known that one look at her would transfix him. He hadn’t anticipated that each time she talked to a friend, her face would light up so entrancingly that it would take his breath away, nor how a fleeting, anxious expression would make him want to be by her side to ward off whatever or whoever was responsible for the look. He hadn’t known that when he took her into his arms he would feel a powerful punch in the gut and, lower, a hardening that made him want her to the point of pain.

  He’d definitely been thrown off his stride.

  Still, he never should have strung her along as he had. He should have told her right up front who he was and what he wanted.

  But…her blue eyes had sparkled with such a delightful curiosity as she’d sparred with him that he hadn’t been able to resist. And as they’d danced, she’d moved against him with a beguiling, unconscious fluidity that had made him crave her with a strength that had been nearly impossible to ignore.

  And her soft, full lips… They’d beckoned him to taste. Honey. They’d tasted like honey and whiskey—potent and unforgettable. Still, he never should have kissed her, because with one kiss, he’d known it wouldn’t be enough.

  Except it had to be.

  What he wanted from her was far too important for him to let his sexual urges get the best of him. No matter what happened this morning, he had to remember that.

  He climbed the steps to the terrace.

  “Good morning.”

  She started at the quiet, deeply masculine voice. Slowly she pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and squinted up at Nick Trejo. Sunlight radiated around him like a brilliant nimbus. She pulled her sunglasses down to cover her eyes. “Good morning.” She straightened.

  After last night, she should have known better than to arrange a meeting with him this early and outside. She should have known the sun would be more intense wherever he was. But, unwilling to dredge up the memories of why she hadn’t been thinking straight last night, she decided there was nothing to be done about her decision now. He was here, and she was just going to have to deal with it. With him. “Have a seat.”

  He smiled at her, and she shut her eyes. She’d planned to look not only presentable for their meeting this morning but businesslike. Unfortunately, she’d barely managed to slip on a short cotton shift and sandals. And her hair… Normally she wore it up or secured in some way, but with some heavy metal rock band’s percussion section currently booming its merry way through her head, she’d barely been able to run a comb through it.

  Opening her eyes and watching as Nick settled himself into the chair across from her, she considered whether or not she could blame him for her hangover. No, she decided. To be fair, she couldn’t.

  After all, it wasn’t his fault that her reaction to him had unnerved her to the point that she’d ordered the bartender to keep her glass filled all night. Besides, she seemed to remember having a really great time.

  “Help yourself to anything you like.”

  “I’ll just have coffee.” He reached for the carafe, poured himself a cup, then glanced over the terrace and lawn. “You must have had a terrific cleanup crew. If I hadn’t been here last night, I wouldn’t have known there’d been a party.”

  “Really?” She didn’t bother to conduct her own survey. The movement would have hurt. As he had the night before, Nick was holding all her attention. He was casually dressed in jeans, boots and a rosy beige open-necked shirt beneath a medium brown sport jacket. And his amber eyes were even more vivid in his tanned face than they had been last night.

  It didn’t matter if it was night or day, she reflected ruefully. It didn’t matter if he was dressed up or down. His virile masculinity was enough to stop the heart of a healthy woman. Fortunately for her, she wasn’t at all well this morning. She reached for her cup and downed more coffee.

  He studied her for several moments. “I gather your party lasted well into the night?”

  “I must look even worse than I think I do,” she murmured, then watched as his lips curved ever so slightly upward into a half smile.

  The sight of his lips brought back the weak, heated way she’d felt when he’d kissed her. Funny. She would have thought the impact of his smile and the sight of his lips would affect her less this morning. After all, everything in her body was hurting, right down to her toenails. Plus she was wearing sunglasses with the added precaution of ultraviolet protection. But…

  “Actually, you look quite beautiful. And I like your hair loose.”

  …he affected her more.

  A flush rushed to her face, and self-consciously she raised a hand to her hair. Then she realized what she was doing and dropped her hand. “Thank you.” The sooner she got this meeting over with, the better. “Are you sure you don’t want anything other than coffee?”

  Food. That reminded her. If the way her stomach felt was a color, it would be green. For all she knew, she was green. Maybe she would feel better if she tried to eat something. One thing was for sure, it couldn’t make her feel any worse. At least, she hoped it couldn’t.

  “I’ve already had breakfast. The coffee is all I want.”

  “Okay.” She glanced at her watch. A mistake. She couldn’t get the numbers to focus. Then again, he didn’t need to know that. “You have fifteen minutes before the world figures out that I’m awake and starts calling and or party stragglers come down in search of breakfast.” Cautiously she eyed a wheat roll, then tore a small part of the roll off and carefully ate it. If it stayed down, she would consider herself ahead of the game.

  “I realize what an important
woman you are, and believe me, I’m very grateful to you for working me into your packed schedule.”

  He’d said it with a straight face, but a light in his eyes told her that he was mocking her. At any other time she would have called him on it, but not this morning. It would take more effort than she was willing to exert right now. Besides, in the next moment, his expression turned serious.

  He leaned back in his chair and fixed his intense amber gaze on her. “There are two things you need to know about me. One, I’m a professor of archaeology at the University of Texas, though currently I’m on sabbatical.”

  “Archaeology?” Clever cover for a sun god, she thought, and might have laughed at herself if she hadn’t been so convinced it would jar loose something in her throbbing head.

  She had to get past that sun god analogy, that amazing kiss they’d shared last night and those amber eyes of his that even now were heating her skin. She had to consider him as she would any other business person who was coming to her with a request.

  Simple.

  She just wished she knew how to do it.

  “The other thing you need to know is that in the 1880’s my great-grandfather discovered a rich vein of gold in the Sierra Madre mountains in Northern Mexico. It was an enormous find. He literally mined a fortune out of those mountains, and he had great dreams for that gold.” Nick’s voice was strong, and his gaze never once left her face. “He turned it into bullion and loaded it aboard a ship, the Águila, at the port of Tampico. The ship’s destination was here.” His index finger pointed to the table, indicating Corpus Christi. “That fortune was to be the start of a new life for him here in Texas. His plan was to buy a vast amount of land, found a great ranch and build an empire.”

  The aspirin seemed to be working a little. It had muffled the acute pounding in her head to a dull pounding. She risked another bite of the roll and washed it down with more coffee. “That’s very interesting, but what does your family’s history have to do with me and my current drilling site?”

  “Just listen. Please.”

  In many different and unusual ways, the man defined the word power, but he’d said please to her with a sincerity and a supplication she wouldn’t have thought him capable of. In that moment she knew she would sit there and listen until he finished his story. “All right.”

  “The Águila had almost reached its destination when it met a hurricane. It was a killer. At a certain point, it turned away from the land and headed back out to sea. It caught the ship up and blew it farther out into the Gulf. The waves were too high, the ship took on too much water, and it sank.”

  She rubbed her aching forehead and wondered how long hangovers lasted. “What a shame, and after he’d worked so hard.”

  “The loss of the gold all but killed him. He had what I suppose today we would call a nervous breakdown, but somehow he managed to go back to the Sierra Madre one last time. However, in his absence, other prospectors had descended on the mine, and his heart wasn’t in it anymore. He managed to extract only a meager amount before he left the mountain for good. Back in Texas, he bought a relatively small amount of land outside Uvalde and ran cattle on it until he died.”

  “It must have been very hard for him,” she said, for want of anything better to say. Nick was a compelling man who could affect her with a mere look or touch, and his story was a sad one that moved her. Yet she had a mountain of her own problems waiting for her as soon as she stepped into the house and sat down at her desk, plus she had this damn hangover to deal with.

  As if he could sense her mind wandering, Nick eyed her consideringly. “I don’t think you can imagine the full extent of how hard it was for him, because even I can’t. I only know that he was a man of great pride and felt humiliated by his failure. To build his self-esteem, he talked incessantly to the people he came to know in and around Uvalde, telling them about the great fortune that he’d wrested from the mountains, then lost. Unfortunately, none of them believed his story of how close he’d come to founding an empire, and they scorned him. He died brokenhearted.”

  Through the windows of the house, she could see Ron already handling calls, but she’d committed to hearing Nick out and that was just what she planned to do. “Your family certainly has an interesting history.”

  She’d managed half of the wheat roll, and despite the color and uncertainty of her stomach, she was pleased the roll was staying down. She still didn’t have a clue what Nick’s story had to do with her, but because of his please, she waited.

  “History, yes. History that has worked its way down through the generations. I grew up on that history. My grandfather inherited the bill of lading for the gold that had been boarded on that ship.”

  “Your great-grandfather had the bill of lading? Then why didn’t he simply show it to his neighbors?”

  “He did. They thought it was a forgery, but his son, my grandfather, never thought it was, and neither did I.”

  Over his shoulder, she saw Ron answering another phone call, and she prayed it wasn’t Jimmy Vega with yet another problem. Jimmy was the best tool pusher in the business, and she’d chosen him to supervise the entire operation. In turn, he had put together the best crew of roughnecks there was. Still, everything about this particular operation had been hard so far. They hadn’t even been drilling a week, yet time and again, the axiom that what can go wrong will go wrong had been proven true. “Again, Nick, it’s all very interesting, but—”

  “I’ve found the shipwreck and the gold.”

  Ron came striding onto the terrace, carrying the portable phone, mouthing Jimmy Vega’s name. Damn. She really did need to talk with Jimmy. But there was Nick, sitting across from her, and there was no way she would be able to focus on Jimmy as long as Nick’s amber eyes were trained so intently on her. She motioned Ron away. A look of surprise crossed his face, but he turned back to the house. “I’m sorry, Nick. What were you saying?”

  “I said I’ve found the gold and I’m ready to start excavating it.”

  “Well, congratulations.” She tried to infuse as much enthusiasm as possible into her congratulations, but she couldn’t say it with any strength or volume. Even though the percussion section in her head had quieted, the rest of the band was still playing.

  “Congratulations aren’t in order yet. I’ve got a serious problem.”

  She exhaled a long breath. “Look, Nick, I could match you problem for problem and more than likely have a stack of problems left over. I’ve listened to your story, as I said I would, but now I need to get back to work.”

  “I’m not through.”

  “I’m sorry, but you are. At least with me.” At any other time, she would gladly have lingered over her coffee and listened to Nick. He had the ability to touch and affect her in a way no other man ever had. But there was nothing normal or right about her current circumstances, and there wouldn’t be for months to come. She started to push her chair away from the table.

  “The Águila and the gold are not far from your drilling site, which is why I’m here.”

  She stilled.

  “It’s perched atop a scarp. You’re drilling in a highly overpressurized zone. It will take only one catastrophe to send the Águila sliding off that salt ridge and into the abyss, where it will be buried so deep, it will more than likely be lost forever. Hell, even a series of minor catastrophes would do it.”

  There was only one thing she could say. “You’re right.”

  He nodded, apparently satisfied that she understood. “I need time to shore up the ship, to brace it in such a way that it will be protected from whatever happens on your rig.”

  She rubbed her aching forehead, trying to focus. “I don’t see how you can really do that.”

  “It’ll be hard, but I can try to make sure it will be safeguarded as much as possible, and then I can pray like hell. Besides, with the crew you’ve got, plus modern technology, the possibility of a full catastrophe such as a blowout is considerably lessened. But there are other t
hings. There are fault lines down there that would easily channel vibrations of any sort from your rig over to the Águila.” Pausing, he looked at her in an assessing way. “That’s why I’m here to ask you to stop drilling for at least three months.”

  “At least?” If she hadn’t been sitting, she might have fallen. As it was, the percussion section of the band in her head returned. He had no idea what he was asking of her. “Nick, there’s no way I could stop for even a week’s time.”

  His body tensed. She didn’t see it; she felt it in the air between them.

  “What’s the matter, Ms. Baron? Aren’t you rich enough yet?”

  The question hit her like a slap. “No, as a matter of fact I’m not, Mr. Trejo.”

  Nick didn’t move, not a muscle, not an eyelash. “Funny, you didn’t strike me as the greedy type.”

  “Do you honestly think you have the right to call me greedy? You’re asking me to give up three valuable months of an operation that will bring in millions so that you can have three months to ensure you can safely harvest a crop of gold worth millions.”

  Cold amber eyes stared at her.

  Ron walked out again, the phone in his hand, an anxious expression on his face. “Vega insists on talking to you.”

  She reached for the phone just as Nick rose. “Hang on a minute, Jimmy.” She covered the mouthpiece and looked at Nick.

  “I won’t take up any more of your time this morning.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll pick you up this evening at seven.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He was already walking away from her. “Seven,” he called as he disappeared from the terrace.

  Seven? Had he just asked her for a date? A date? It was hard for her to imagine Nick doing something as mundane as asking a woman for a date. He must want more time to try to change her mind, and there was no rule that said she had to go. Still…

  “Tess? Tess?”

  She glanced at the phone, then lifted it to her ear. “Sorry, Jimmy. What’s happened now?”