Cowboy to the Rescue

by Stella Bagwell

  And she was too vulnerable and weary to resist him, she thought. If he continued to kiss her, she’d soon be willing to let herself believe that an affair with him was better than pining for a love she’d never have.

  Sighing heavily, he curled his hand around her upper arm and turned her toward the door. “All right. Let’s go up to the attic and get this over with.”

  A few minutes later, in the upstairs hallway that led to several bedrooms, Lex pulled down a trapdoor and unfolded a built-in ladder.

  “Better let me climb up first,” he told her. “I know where the light switch is located.”

  “I’ll be right behind you,” she assured him.

  Other than the kitchen, most of the ceilings in the ranch house were very tall. The height forced them to climb several rungs of the ladder. After Lex crawled inside the attic and switched on a light, he reached down and gave Christina a careful hand up.

  “Whew! This place is stifling!” she exclaimed as she stood on her feet and looked around at the piles of furniture and stacks of cardboard boxes.

  “There’s an air conditioner in the window. I’ll turn it on.”

  In a matter of seconds, cool air was blowing across the attic, though it would still be a while before it truly cooled the stuffy space. He walked back over to where Christina stood waiting. When he stopped in front of her, with only an inch or two separating their bodies, she could see his mind was still focused on her instead of on finding his father’s things. And she didn’t know whether to feel flattered or frightened.

  “Is the heat up here doing something to your brain?” she asked. “We’re not finding Paul’s things like this.”

  “Downstairs, you wouldn’t let me finish. And when I told you we’d come up here and get this over with, I didn’t exactly mean finding Dad’s things. I realize you don’t want to talk about us. But I do.”

  His hands closed over her shoulders, and she groaned out loud. “Lex, for God’s sake, now is not the time! I don’t—”

  He interrupted her words with a muttered curse. Then, sliding his hands to the back of her waist, he asked lowly, “What do you want from me, Christina? A declaration of love? Would that make you feel better?”

  Anger sparked her blue eyes. “I don’t want or need empty words, Lex. I’ve had those before.”

  His mouth tightened. “I’m not him, Christina. So don’t try to make a comparison.”

  She swallowed, then cleared her throat. His touch, his nearness, was messing with her mind, mixing up every thought, every word she tried to form on her tongue. “I’m sorry, Lex. I’m not saying you’re the same sort of man as Mike was.” She drew in a painful breath, then slowly released it. “He was a liar, and you’ve been nothing but honest with me. You’ve not promised me rainbows and I’d much rather have that honesty from you than hollow platitudes.”

  As Lex’s gaze swept over Christina’s troubled face, he wondered why everything inside him was pushing and pulling, making him feel as though he were going to split apart. He cared about Christina. More than he ever thought he could care for any woman. But was it love? The only thing his heart was sure about was that he didn’t want to lose her. He wanted their time together to go on and on. He wanted to be close to her and have her want to be close to him. If that was love, then he was a goner.

  A heavy breath rushed past his lips. “If you don’t want promises from me, then what do you want, Christina?”

  Lex could see anguish swimming in the depths of her eyes, and then her lips parted as though she was about to speak. But long, tense moments passed before any words finally passed her lips.

  “I don’t know, Lex. I only know that I lost so much when I hung my hopes on Mike. When those hopes were crushed, my self-esteem crumbled along with them. So did my ability to trust—not just men, but everyone. I guess I need time. I need to see for myself that you’re capable of having a serious relationship.”

  It infuriated Lex to hear her compare him to the sleaze that had dished out so many worthless promises to her. He’d seduced a few women in his time, but he’d never lied or led them to believe he was in love with them just to get them into his bed. And he wasn’t about to start with Christina.

  His hands splayed against her back as he inched closer to the front of her body. “I want you to assure me that you’ll give us a chance, Christina. I’ll court you. I’ll show you—”

  She interrupted his words by placing a gentle finger against his lips. “You’re not the marrying kind, Lex. To even pretend that you are would only make you miserable, and that would make me miserable.”

  Wrapping his hand around hers, he pulled her finger away from his lips. “You couldn’t know that. I don’t even know myself whether I’m marriage material,” he countered. Then, with a weary sigh, he moved away from her and stared, without seeing, at the stack of boxes in front of him. “You may not believe this, Christina, but by the time I became a teenager, I knew I eventually wanted to have a wife and family of my own. I wanted to be just like my father. He was always hugging and kissing my mother, making her laugh and making her happy. He was always there for us kids, guiding us, loving us and punishing us whenever we needed it. He and my mother together made an incredible team, and I wanted that very same thing for myself.”

  “That’s what I meant, Lex, when I told you how blessed you were to have parents like yours.”

  Turning, he looked at her and, for a split second, felt his heart fall and crack, like a dove’s egg spilling from its nest and hitting the ground. Pain splattered through his chest, the sort of pain he’d not felt since the moment he’d heard that he’d lost his father. His parents had been blessed to have shared so much love while they’d been together. The idea that he might be losing his chance at that kind of happiness with Christina pierced him deeply.

  “I was blessed with great parents. But not with love,” he said huskily.

  Clearly perplexed, she walked over to where he stood. “What does that mean?”

  Grimacing, he thrust a hand through his tousled hair. “My mother and father had a special love. And I wanted the same for myself.”

  “Wanted? You no longer want what they had?”

  Groaning, he slid his hands up her back and curled his fingers over her shoulders. “It’s not a matter of wanting, Christina. God knows I’ve tried to find love. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I’ve tried too hard.”

  Her beautiful blue eyes were full of shadows as they studied his face.

  “Are you trying to tell me that a man like you can’t find anyone to love? That’s ridiculous, Lex. You’re a man with everything. Looks, wealth, intelligence. I’m sure women have been throwing themselves at you since your high school days.”

  “Oh, I’ve had more than one woman fall in love with me. And each time it happened, I tried like hell to love her back, to fall in love with her. But trying couldn’t make it happen. I’d end up asking myself if I had the same deep feelings that my father had for my mother. Would I want her by my side for years to come? Would I give up my very life for her? The answers were always no. And then I’d feel even worse about the relationship and about myself. I’d wonder if I was completely heartless, and now—well, I’m not sure I know how to love. Or if I ever will feel that overwhelming emotion Dad felt for Mom.”

  Slowly, tentatively, her palms came to rest against the middle of his chest, and Lex wondered if she could feel his heart throbbing against her fingers. If she realized, even for one second, how much he wanted her.

  “Lex, you can’t make yourself feel something for another human being. Love comes to your heart on its own, without an invitation. Whether you want it or not. Maybe you ought to think about that.”

  Bending his head, he brushed his lips back and forth against her cheek. “I could think about it a lot better if you’d make love to me,” he whispered huskily. “But I’m not going to push the issue with you anymore. A man has honor, too, you know. If we make love again, you’re going to have to do the aski
ng.”

  He released his hold on her shoulders and stepped back. Surprise flickered across her face.

  “Do you really mean that?” she asked

  “I’m not a wolf, Christina.” Forcing a lightness he was hardly feeling into his demeanor, he gestured toward a narrow walking space between a pile of boxes and shrouded furniture. “And we’ve got work to do.”

  Lex turned to start down the walkway, only to have her grab him by the arm. Pausing, he looked at her expectantly, while secretly hoping and praying that she’d changed her mind about making love to him.

  Clearing her throat, she said, “I just wanted to thank you, Lex. For sharing your feelings with me.”

  Sharing? No. He’d never been good at sharing his feelings. Not the deep ones, the ones that made him feel uncomfortable and vulnerable and even afraid. Was that what loving a woman was all about?

  If it was, then Lex had just taken a mighty big fall.

  Chapter Ten

  Trying his best to push away the deflated feeling that had suddenly settled upon him, he said, “C’mon. It’s getting late.”

  He nudged her shoulder, and the two of them began to wind their way through a maze of items, which had seemingly been forgotten. Layers of gray dust covered everything.

  “It doesn’t look as though anyone has been up here for a while,” Christina commented.

  “Mom sends the maid up here every now and then to get rid of some of the dust, but that doesn’t happen very often,” he told her. “They’re always too busy with the regular household chores to deal with this.”

  At the far end of the attic, next to the outer wall of the house, Lex spotted his father’s old work desk, which was covered with a pair of old tacked denim quilts.

  “This was his desk,” Lex told her as he removed the quilts and tossed them to one side. “There’s still stuff in the drawers. And a few things in the boxes beneath it.”

  “I’ll go through the drawers in the desk while you pull out the boxes,” Christina suggested.

  “That’s fine with me.”

  After a few moments, it was clear to Christina that there was a substantial number of notebooks and folders filled with all sorts of work projects pertaining to the Sandbur stored inside the desk drawers.

  “This is going to take a while,” she said. “Do you think we could carry all of this down to my office? It would be much more comfortable going through it there. I have to go through each paper to be sure I didn’t miss anything.”

  “Sure. Let’s put everything in boxes and carry them over to the ladder,” he agreed.

  It took several minutes to get all the boxes safely down the ladder and into her office. Before Lex set the last one down in the corner of the small room, Christina was already sitting cross-legged on the floor, rifling through the paper material. And from the intense look on her face, Lex knew she wasn’t planning on breaking for the night anytime soon.

  “I’ll go make coffee,” he told her.

  Looking up, she gave him a grateful smile. “That would be great, Lex. But you don’t have to stay up and help. This is my job, remember?”

  He slanted her a wry glance. “I assured Mom that it was mine, too. And Paul was my father. I want to help.”

  During the next half hour, Christina and Lex dug for anything that could possibly be connected to the list she’d found earlier this evening. But so far they’d found nothing but Sandbur papers.

  “Here’s a receipt,” Christina said as she ran her gaze over the yellow square of paper. “For seventeen hundred dollars. Looks like it’s from a jewelers in Victoria. In one corner Paul’s written ‘Keep hidden from Geraldine.’”

  “What’s the date?”

  When she read the date, Lex chuckled. “That’s two days before my parents’ wedding anniversary. Dad probably bought her something in silver and turquoise. She loves the stuff, so he gave her a lot of it.”

  “Hmm,” she said thoughtfully. “Everything I’ve discovered about Paul tells me he was a man who liked to make people happy.”

  Funny that she could see his father so clearly from just a piece of paper and yet she couldn’t see how much Lex wanted, needed her. Or maybe she did see and had decided that wanting and needing just weren’t enough to make her happy, he thought miserably.

  “You’re right. Everything he did, he did for others. He was a very unselfish man,” Lex told her. “That’s one of the reasons I never really suspected anyone of killing him. He was good to everyone. He didn’t have any enemies.”

  “Yeah,” she quietly agreed. “Just like I find it difficult to believe that Joel simply walked away from me—his only sibling.”

  The husky note in her voice had Lex glancing over to see her head was bent, and as he studied the crown of her shiny red head, he realized the mystery of her brother was still affecting her, the same way the puzzle of his father’s death was now tearing at him. Christina had been right those few weeks ago when she’d first arrived on the Sandbur. Finding the truth was always important.

  Forcing his attention back on the plastic container jammed between his knees, he continued to rifle through the contents, most of which seemed inconsequential. Until he reached the bottom, where he discovered a flat cardboard tin box.

  “Here’s a box with something rattling inside,” he announced, with a bit of excitement.

  Jumping to her feet, she hurriedly crossed the small room to where he was sitting. “Open it! It’s probably the disk!”

  Lex quickly opened the box, and Christina drew in a sharp gasp at the sight of several computer disks nestled inside the container. “Oh my! Let’s pray that one of these disks will hold some clues, Lex!”

  Lex began to sift through the disks. All of them had paper labels attached to the front, but most of them had either one or two words that meant little or nothing to Lex and Christina.

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find anything important on them.”

  She pulled out the desk chair and slipped into it. While she brought the computer to life, Lex shoved the plastic disk into the slot on the tower. The task forced him to bend close to her shoulder, and it was all he could do to keep from turning his head sideways and kissing her cheek, burying his nose in her fragrant hair. He’d told her he was no longer going to press her to go to bed with him. But he knew the bold promise was going to be hell to keep. Especially whenever he was near her like this.

  Clearing his throat, he said, “These disks are nearly twelve years old. There’s no telling what sort of program they were written on.”

  “True,” Christina agreed. “But we might get lucky.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Christina didn’t feel lucky at all. Instead, she wanted to throw up her hands and scream. None of the five disks they’d discovered in the box would open.

  “The frustrating part of this is that we don’t even know if one of these disks is connected to the list your father made,” she grumbled.

  “That’s true,” Lex said from his perch on the corner of the desk. “That’s why we’ve got to find a way to open and read them.”

  Christina sighed. “It shouldn’t be this difficult to convert the text on a floppy disk,” she said. “Do you have any more suggestions?”

  He chuckled. “Me? Are you kidding? I keep track of my cattle sales on the computer, but that’s the extent of my ability. What we need is a computer whiz.”

  A thoughtful frown crossed Christina’s face. “I know a good one, but he moved away from San Antonio, and I have no idea how to contact him,” she said glumly, then turned a hopeful look on him. “Do you know anyone? Some of your family?”

  He searched his brain for a moment. “Mercedes. She’s a whiz with computers.”

  “She’s also pregnant,” Christina added, “and suffering from horrible bouts of nausea and fatigue. It’s already so late in the evening. She’s probably in bed. Let’s not bother her. Anyone else?”

  Lex raked a hand through his hair as he tried to think. “L
ucita. She uses them at school and at home.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s getting a little late, but she won’t mind if I call her. She and Ripp are probably up with their new baby girl, anyway.”

  Pulling a cell phone from his shirt pocket, he searched until he found his cousin’s number, then punched it in. After a couple of rings, Lucita answered it herself, and Lex quickly explained the problem to her.

  “Do you have any suggestions for us?” he asked.

  “The easiest way to make sure you can open the thing without destroying the contents is to use the same computer it was created on. Do you still happen to have Uncle Paul’s old computer stored away somewhere?”

  Lex glanced at Christina, who was watching him expectantly. “Yes. Mom put it away in a closet. Thanks for the suggestion, Lucita. And before I hang up, how’s little Elizabeth?”

  Lucita’s soft chuckle was full of loving pride. It made Lex feel good to hear his cousin’s happiness. She’d been through so much tragedy, it was time her life had changed for the better.

  “Right now Ripp has rocked his daughter and himself to sleep. So all is quiet.”

  “You’d better get off the phone and enjoy it,” Lex told his cousin. “I’ll let you know tomorrow how we got along with the disks.”

  The two cousins quickly exchanged goodbyes, and as Lex slipped the phone back into his pocket, Christina asked, “How is Elizabeth?”

  Surprised that her first question would be about the baby rather than a solution to the disk, Lex said, “She’s fine.”

  A wistful smile touched her lips. “I’d very much like to see her and Nicci’s daughter before I leave the ranch. Geraldine tells me they’re both perfect little beauties.”

  “Humph. She looks like Ripp. And I don’t see him as a beauty. But I guess Mom knows about babies and how they’ll look when they grow to a more human size. I sure don’t.” He eased up from the desk and walked over to a window where lights from the bunkhouse flickered through the branches of a live oak.