The Cowboy Takes A Bride (The Bridal Bid #2)

by Cathleen Galitz

  “There now,” he exclaimed, joining them. “Isn’t this cozy?”

  Too cozy, Caitlin thought, drawing herself up primly in her chair so that her knees wouldn’t brush against Grant’s. Those long legs of his could no more be contained beneath the tiny circumference of that table than his ego could be contained within the band of the hard hat he placed between them like some symbolic barrier.

  Paddy raised his beer in a salute and took a deep, satisfying draught.

  “What’dya say we start over? Caitlin, I’d like you to meet Grant Davis.”

  Davis. Davis. Davis… The name sounded oddly familiar. Caitlin searched her memory but couldn’t place it. She seriously doubted whether he was related to any of the San Antonio Davises that her mother set such store by.

  “And, Grant, this is my daughter, Caitlin.”

  When this introduction was met with nothing but loud, hostile silence, Paddy’s good humor exploded. “Just what exactly is the problem here? I can’t imagine why a friendly visit from my favorite daughter would inspire such animosity in you, Grant, or how—”

  Grant turned to Caitlin in disbelief. “Then this is just a social visit? You led me to believe that… Well, in that case, I’m sorry that I acted like such a—”

  Interrupting his apology with an angry wave of her hand, Caitlin focused her response upon her father. “No, it isn’t just a visit. I’m here to go to work for you, Dad. I hope you didn’t spend a fortune to send me off to college just to pat me on the head and send me off like some cute little puppy. You didn’t, did you?”

  “Of course not,” Paddy sputtered. “It’s just that I don’t think we’re looking for a geologist, honey.”

  “We’re not,” Grant confirmed tersely.

  “Yes, you are,” Caitlin countered. Eyeing her father’s beer disapprovingly, she crossed her fingers behind her back and blurted out a plausible, abbreviated version of the truth. “I ran into your old one down the road a ways. He said to tell you that his services had suddenly become indispensable to another company that was paying better. I took the liberty of telling him that you already had a replacement—me!”

  “What?” bellowed Grant, jumping to his feet.

  He had been wondering where Doug was. The fellow prided himself on his punctuality, if not actual ability. Finding it hard to believe that a rival company had poached him, Grant’s eyes narrowed. There really was no polite way of suggesting that Paddy’s daughter was a liar.

  Shaking his head solemnly, Paddy scolded, “You really shouldn’t have done that, honey.”

  “Yes, I should’ve.” Caitlin placed her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in her hands, and leaned forward intently. She looked her father square in the eye. “Look, there’s no reason for you to pay somebody to do what I’m willing to do for free. It’s the least I can do for all you’ve done for me. Besides, I want to. Badly. Not to mention that I have a vested interest in our business myself. And it is the perfect opportunity for us to spend some time together.”

  “Caitlin, darlin’,” Paddy replied with a note of pleading in his voice. “A rig’s no place for a beautiful girl such as yourself. I wanted you to go to college so you’d never have to do hard physical labor like me. Like your grandmother, God rest her soul, a poor charwoman working her fingers to the bone, saving all her hard-earned pennies to send her sons to America for a better life. That’s what I sent you to college for, a better life.”

  Taking her manicured hands into his own, he cradled them gently. “Hands such as these are meant for a laboratory, for diamond rings, for holding my grandbabies some day. Not for grubbing in the dirt with a bunch of lewd men out in the middle of nowhere.”

  The tenderness her father’s words inspired disappeared at the implication that she couldn’t take care of herself. It seemed to Caitlin that she had spent her entire life trying to convince others just how capable she was. Foolishly she had hoped a degree would eliminate the need for this very conversation. However, she understood that lashing out at her father in feminist rage would get her nowhere fast. Instead she took an altogether different route to getting her way.

  “I appreciate your concern, but what I really need is a job, not kid-glove protection. The market isn’t exactly booming for inexperienced college graduates. What with downsizing, companies are hiring experienced geologists for about the same pay as entry-level workers. If I ever hope to get a better job than flipping burgers at some fast-food chain, I’ll have to get some experience first. The way I figure it, the best way for me to get experience is to work with the best. And that’s why I came to you.”

  Grant saw something soften in Paddy’s eyes. He had to hand it to her. Caitlin had a real knack for winding her old man as tightly around her little finger as the chain around the rig’s rotary table.

  Paddy ran his hand through his still thick shock of graying hair. “Well, since you put it that way…”

  “Don’t forget about the financial benefit to the company. They don’t come any cheaper than me.” The smile Caitlin flashed her father was warm enough to completely melt the last of the ice in Grant’s soda. He knew he had to intervene fast.

  “And don’t you forget,” he interrupted in a burst of disgust, “that I’m the one who does the hiring around here. And at the present time I’m not inclined to hire a slip of a girl for any position.”

  “Now, now,” Paddy said, taking another draught of his beer. “Let’s not be so hasty, son.”

  Son!

  The word ricocheted through Caitlin’s brain like a sniper’s bullet. How dare her father use that word with this arrogant jerk! Deep down she suspected that Paddy secretly had always wanted a son. A son to work with side by side. A son to turn the business over to when it became too much for him. A son he could be proud of. All her life Caitlin had tried to make up for her sex by being the best she could at everything she undertook. She couldn’t help wondering whether Paddy would have been so willing to grant full custody to her mother had she been a son instead of a daughter. “How dare you try to tell my father how to run his business?” she snapped at Grant. “If I were him, I’d run you off on the spot for such impudence.”

  Still standing, Grant leaned his considerable height over her and answered in a laconic tone, “I dare because I’m not just some lackey you can push around at will. Like it or not, I’m your daddy’s right-hand man, and I have as much at stake here as he does.”

  Three

  Determined to look Grant eye to eye when she confronted him, Caitlin leapt to her feet. Her chair clattered to the floor behind her.

  “Is right-hand man your official title, or is that just a fancy way of saying you’ve wormed your way into a heart too kind for its own good?” She attempted to lessen the difference in their heights by standing on tiptoe and anchoring her hands to her hips for ballast. “Do you expect me to believe that my father simply turned the running of his business over to you because you graciously volunteered to be the son he never had? Let me assure you, mister. I’m not about to stand by and watch you destroy what it’s taken my father an entire lifetime to build.”

  “Caitlin, stop it!” Paddy’s voice cut through the air like the crack of a bullwhip. “Stop it right now before you make a bigger fool out of yourself than you already have.”

  Tears stung her eyes. Caitlin could count on one hand the times that her father had raised his voice to her. To be thus admonished in front of this outsider was almost more than she could bear.

  Accusation laced her voice as she demanded an answer. “How can you just sit there and let your employee treat me with such contempt? The next thing I know he’ll be telling me that you want to make him a full-fledged partner.”

  Paddy flinched from the betrayal glistening in his daughter’s eyes.

  Grant railed against it.

  Was it so unimaginable that he could have procured his boss’s high regard by any but underhanded means? Paddy had promised the entire crew a bonus if they could make this hole pay out
before the deadline. He had, in fact, intimated that there would be an extra special something awaiting the man who worked the hardest to prove himself as he went through the ranks. Though no one knew exactly what the prize was, Grant hoped it involved enough money to secure that ranch that he’d been dreaming of for so very long.

  Caitlin’s overly emotional reaction to the idea that her father might share the burdens of the business by offering his second in command a chance at a partnership only served to underscore Grant’s opinion of women. Any man unfortunate enough to ever forget that the “fairer” sex was only out for personal gain was destined to be very sorry indeed. All that hype about Caitlin’s coming here just to be close to her daddy was nothing more than a convenient cover to check up on her assets.

  The inheritance factor was just one more thing for Grant to hold against her. But then, what could he expect a little princess from the suburbs to understand of earning one’s keep by the sweat of your brow? Of the pride that comes of making something of yourself out of the ashes of defeat? Of loving a man like Paddy Flynn not for the width of the financial security net he could weave beneath you, but instead for his honesty and decency?

  “I thought they were supposed to teach you in college to find out the facts before jumping to conclusions,” Grant commented dryly.

  A muscle along his jawline throbbed out his frustration as he took full measure of the pretty little thing who’d just called him a con man. Any man with the audacity to make such an accusation would have found himself cheek to cheek with the nearest wall.

  Arms up in the air, Paddy jumped into the middle of the fracas. His complexion was even ruddier than usual as he attempted arbitration. “Caitlin, surely you remember my speaking of Keith Davis, my partner from years ago. Grant’s his son.”

  A frown creased Caitlin’s brow. Recognition glimmered beneath the surface of her memory like a dark fish rising from the depths.

  “Keith Davis… Wasn’t he the man who…”

  “The man,” Grant supplied, “who was killed in the explosion that nearly bankrupted this company years ago. The explosion that left second-degree burns over fifty percent of your father’s body.”

  Caitlin turned her attention upon her father. “The one that caused you and Mother to—”

  Words failed her as she searched Paddy’s stricken eyes for an answer to the question that had obsessed her for years. Growing up, the subject of her parents’ separation had been expressly taboo. When she was younger, Caitlin had found a photograph in her mother’s album of a strange mummy-like creature staring back at her from a hospital bed. Laura Leigh had curtly explained that it was Paddy, shortly before she made up her mind to leave him.

  When with typical adolescent candor Caitlin expressed the opinion that it was unbelievably cold of her mother to abandon her father in such a state, Laura Leigh had replied cryptically, “We were both burned in that fire, Caitlin. Someday when you’re older, maybe I’ll try explaining it to you.”

  For some reason that day never came. Caitlin hoped that with the passage of time, the truth would finally come out. Unfortunately, Paddy had no more intention of pillaging the past than her mother.

  “Let’s leave old times well enough alone except to say that Grant’s father was the best friend I ever had. In fact I never met a better man—until the day his son showed up at one of my rigs. Despite the fact he held me personally responsible for his father’s death, he said he was willing to learn the business from the bottom up. The only thing he asked of me was a paycheck. Promised to earn his keep, and, by God, girl, he has more than done that.”

  It was impossible to miss the effect these words had upon Grant. He stood perceptibly taller, and the moisture clouding his eyes was clearly an embarrassment to him.

  Coming from a man not easily given to compliments, Caitlin was aware how rare such praise was. What she would have given to hear her father speak so highly of her! Unbidden, a seed of jealousy sprouted in her heart for the man who had somehow managed to usurp her hitherto unshakable position as the apple of her father’s eye.

  “Am I to take it then that you somehow feel duty bound to Keith’s son?” Caitlin asked. Unloosed from a throat tight with emotion, her voice sounded high and strained.

  “Contractually I’m not obligated to anyone. But when you consider that Grant came here on his own to bust his butt for a company on the brink of bankruptcy, yes, I think it’s fair to say that I feel an obligation to him,” Paddy responded shortly.

  Caitlin flinched against the reproof in her father’s voice. Then hardened herself against it. However nicely Paddy gilded it, something didn’t sound quite right in his abbreviated explanation. Until proven otherwise, Grant would remain suspect in her mind. The thought intensified her desire to stick around and see what exactly this man was up to.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said, gesturing toward her father with graceful, long fingers. “You blame yourself for an act of God, then spend time teaching this bleeding heart everything he wants to know about the oil business out of sheer pity, and you can’t so much as give your own daughter a solitary chance to earn her keep around here?”

  Paddy was not a man accustomed to having his judgment questioned. “It wasn’t pity,” he snapped. “Grant’s proven himself many times over.”

  Despite the anger Caitlin’s question aroused in him, Grant nonetheless considered it fair. In fact looking back on it, he couldn’t think of anyone presenting a more pitiful image than he had that day he’d arrived with his hat in hand, humbly asking to be taught the tools of the very trade that had claimed his father’s life. Having targeted Paddy in his mind for years as the cause of that fatal accident, it had been all he could do to keep from throttling his father’s partner. The last thing he’d expected was to ever like the old codger who managed somehow to take him in without compromising his dignity by offering him not a hand out, but a hand up.

  Grateful that Paddy had glossed over years of heartache with one broad, sweeping stroke, Grant nevertheless could not forget that there was far more to the story of how their partnership came about than Paddy was telling. It was just like Paddy to leave the telling of that to him when and if he ever decided to share it.

  “If you’re trying to put a price tag on what was owed me,” Grant growled, “you’ll have to tell me the going rate to replace a father.”

  Caitlin drew her breath in sharply as her heart cried out the answer to Grant’s inquiry. No amount of money in the world! As difficult as it had been growing up in a broken home, Caitlin loved both her parents dearly and couldn’t imagine life without either one.

  For the first time since meeting this man, she felt an inkling of sympathy for him. He may look as impervious as a Roman gladiator now, but she mentally calculated his age and figured that he must have still been in high school when tragedy befell his family. Her throat closed around the image of a beautiful, dark-haired teenager acting as his father’s pallbearer. And of a tearful, bereft mother leaning on him for support. It was Caitlin’s understanding that the mere thought of losing Paddy in such a hellish manner had been enough to compel her mother to abandon the one true love of her life. Maintaining that she was too young to be a widow, like poor Cissy Davis, Laura Leigh had shortly thereafter packed her bags and headed back to the security of her parents’ home in San Antonio.

  Caitlin bit the inside of her mouth in a nervous habit that survived her childhood. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that. It’s just that I feel obligated to look after my father’s interests. It is awfully strange that he hasn’t mentioned you to me before.”

  “As much as I appreciate your concern,” Paddy interjected with a crooked smile. “I’m a grown man accustomed to making my own decisions. Maybe I didn’t feel the need to explain myself to you. Then—or now.”

  With that, he ran his hands through his silver hair. “This conversation is over. The only thing left to decide is what to do with you, young lady.”

  Fighting the te
ars that welled up in her eyes, Caitlin set her jaw in the same determined way that her father had of leading with his chin whenever things looked their bleakest. She was not about to come all this way just to be brushed off. There was far more at stake here than just a job.

  Her self-worth was quivering on the line.

  “I’ll tell you what you can do with me,” she countered, each word an articulated bullet. “You can back off and let me do my job!”

  Grant had to admire the lady’s grit. Having expected her to employ the age-old female tools of alternately crying and pouting, he was struck by Caitlin’s fortitude in standing up to Paddy Flynn, the terror of drillers and corporate giants alike. It aroused in him a grudging respect.

  Suppressing a smile, he imagined her reaction to the strictly male observation that she was indeed very beautiful when she was mad. He was mesmerized by the attention she paid the gold locket nestled in the hollow of her throat. The way she was stroking it so lovingly made Grant wonder if it was some kind of a magic talisman. Maybe a religious medal. Perhaps a lucky charm to protect her from catastrophes, assorted imaginary ills, and hard-hatted villains.

  Neither Caitlin’s voice nor her resolve quavered as she continued the fight to get her way. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll offer my services totally free of charge for one month. If I can’t prove my worth to you in that time, I’ll accept your decision to replace me. No questions asked. No hard feelings.”

  “No way!” Grant exploded. Alarm bells were sounding in his head. One only had to watch the way Paddy was thoughtfully scratching his chin to see all hope of banishing this woman from the premises go up in a magician’s poof of smoke. “I don’t have time to be baby-sitting some college kid whose knowledge of an oil field is limited to what some dried-up old professor asked on a midterm.”