Unlikely Lover

by Diana Palmer

  When a long shadow fell across her desk just before lunchtime, she didn’t even look up.

  “I’ll be with you in just a minute,” she said with a forced smile as she finished listing a new account. And then she looked up and her body froze.

  Ward stared down at her like a blind artist who could suddenly see again. His green eyes found every shadow, every line, every curve of her face in the stark, helpless silence that followed. Around them was the buzz of distant voices, the tap of fingers on keyboards, the ringing of telephones. And closer there was the rasp of Mari’s hurried breathing, the thump of her heart shaking the silky pink blouse she was wearing with her gray skirt.

  Ward was wearing a suit—a very elegant three-piece beige one that made him look even taller than he actually was. He had a creamy dress Stetson in one big hand, and his face looked thinner and drawn. His green eyes were as bloodshot as hers, as if he hadn’t slept well. She thought as she studied him that he was the handsomest man she’d ever seen. If only he wasn’t such a coldblooded snake.

  She stiffened defensively, remembering their last meeting. “Yes, sir?” she said with cold politeness. “May I help you?”

  “Cut that out,” he muttered. “I’ve had a long flight and no breakfast, and I feel like hell.”

  “I would like to point out that I work here,” she informed him. “I have no time to socialize with old acquaintances. If you want to open an account, I’ll be delighted to assist you. That’s what I do here. I open accounts.”

  “I don’t want to open an account,” he said through his teeth.

  “Then what do you want?” she asked.

  “I came to take you home—where you belong.” He searched her puzzled eyes. “Your boss will be sorry you have to leave, but he’ll understand. You can come with me right now.”

  She blinked. Somewhere along the line she was sure that she’d missed something.

  “I can what?” she asked.

  “Come with me right now,” he repeated. He turned the Stetson in his hands. “Don’t you remember my condition? I’m dying, remember. I have something vaguely terminal, although medical science will triumph in plenty of time to save me.”

  “Huh?” she said blankly. None of this was getting through to her. She just stared at him.

  “You’re going to help me write my memoirs, remember?” he persisted.

  “You aren’t dying!” she burst out, coming to her senses at last.

  “Shhhhh!” he said curtly, glancing stealthily around. “Somebody might hear you!”

  “I can’t quit! I just started working here the week before last!”

  “You have to quit,” he insisted. “If I go home without you, Lillian is going to starve me to death. She’s getting her revenge in the kitchen. Small portions. Desserts without sugar. Diet foods.” He shuddered. “I’m a shadow of my former self.”

  She glared at him. “Poor old thing,” she said with poisonous sweetness.

  He glared back. “I am not old. I’m just hitting my prime.”

  “That’s nothing to do with me,” she assured him. “I hope you didn’t come all the way to Atlanta just to make this little scene!”

  “I came to take you back with me,” he replied. His eyes took on a determined hardness. “And, by God, I’m taking you back. If I have to pick you up bodily and carry you out of here in a fireman’s lift.”

  Her heart jumped, but she didn’t let him see how he was disturbing her. “I’ll scream my head off,” she said shortly.

  “Good. Then everyone will think you’re in pain, and I’ll tell them I’m taking you to the hospital for emergency treatment.” He glared at her. “Well?”

  He had a stubborn streak that even outmatched her own. She weighed the possibilities. If he carried her out by force, she’d lose all credibility with her colleagues. If she fought him in front of everyone, Ward would get all the sympathy, and Mari would look like a heartless shrew. He had her over a barrel.

  “Why?” she asked, her voice quiet and defeated. “Why not just let me stay here?”

  He searched her eyes. “Your aunt misses you,” he said gruffly.

  “She could call me collect and talk to me,” she replied. “There’s no reason at all for me to go back to Texas and complicate my life and yours.”

  “My life is pretty boring right now, if you want to know the truth.” He sighed, watching her. “I don’t even enjoy foreclosing on people anymore. Besides all that, my cousin Bud’s come to stay, and he’s driving me out of my mind.”

  Cousin Bud was a familiar name. He was the one Ward’s fiancée had wound up marrying for a brief time. She couldn’t imagine Ward actually welcoming the man as a guest.

  “I’m surprised that you let him,” she confessed.

  He stared at her. “So you know all about that, too?”

  She flushed, dropping her eyes to the desk. “Aunt Lillian mentioned it.”

  He sighed heavily. “Well, he’s family. My grandmother worships him. I couldn’t say no without having her jump all over me—and maybe even rush home to defend him. She’s having a good time at Belinda’s. No reason to disturb her.”

  She knew about old Mrs. Jessup as well, and she almost smiled at his lack of enthusiasm for his grandmother’s company.

  “If you’ve already got one houseguest, you surely don’t need another one.”

  He shrugged. “There’s plenty of room. My secretary quit,” he added, studying his hat. “I sure could use some help in the office. You could almost name your own salary.”

  “You forced me to leave Texas in the first place,” she shot back, glaring up at him. “You did everything but put me on the bus! You propositioned me!”

  His cheeks had a sudden flush, and he looked away. “You can’t actually like this job,” he said shortly. “You said you hated working with numbers.”

  “I like eating,” she replied. “It’s hard to eat when you aren’t making money.”

  “You could come home with me and make money,” he said. “You could live with your aunt and help me keep Cousin Bud from selling off cattle under my nose.”

  “Selling off cattle?”

  His powerful shoulders rose and fell. “He owns ten percent of the ranch. I had a weak moment when he was eighteen and made him a graduation present of it. The thing is, I never know which ten percent he happens to be claiming at the moment. It seems to change quarterly.” He brushed at a speck of dust on his hat. “Right now, he’s sneaking around getting statistics on my purebred Santa Gertrudis bull.”

  “What could I do about Cousin Bud—if I went with you?” she asked reasonably.

  “You could help me distract him,” he said. “With you in the office, he couldn’t very well get to any statistics. He couldn’t find out where I keep that bull unless he found it on the computer. And you’d be watching the computer.”

  It was just an excuse, and she knew it. For reasons of his own it suited him to have her at the ranch. She didn’t flatter herself that it was out of any abiding love. He probably did still want her, but perhaps it was more a case of wanting to appease Lillian. She frowned, thinking.

  “Is my aunt all right?” she asked.

  He nodded. “She’s fine. I wouldn’t lie to you about that. But she’s lonesome. She hasn’t been the same since you left.” Neither had he, he thought, but he couldn’t tell her. Not yet. She didn’t trust him at all, and he couldn’t really blame her.

  She fiddled with a pencil, considering Ward’s offer. She could tell him to go away and he would. And she’d never see him again. She could go on alone and take up the threads of her life. What a life it would be. What a long, lonely life.

  “Come with me, Mari,” he said softly. “This is no place for you.”

  She didn’t look up. “I meant what I said before I left. If I come back, I don’t…I don’t want you to…to…”

  He sighed gently. “I know, I know. You don’t have to worry,” he told her. “I won’t proposition you. You have my word
on that.”

  She shifted. “Then I’ll go.”

  He forced back a smile. “Come on, then. I’ve got the tickets already.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Were you that confident?”

  “Not confident at all,” he replied. “But I figured I could always put my Stetson in one of the seats if you refused.”

  She did smile faintly at that. “I always heard that a real Texan puts his hat on the floor and his boots on the hat rack.”

  He lifted a tooled leather boot and studied it. “Yep,” he said. “I guess I’d put my boots in the extra seat, at that. But I’d rather have you in it.”

  She got to her feet and put her work aside. “I need to see Mr. Blake, my boss.”

  “I’ll wait.” He wasn’t budging.

  After Mari had apologetically informed her boss of her departure, she picked up her purse, waved at her new friends and went quietly out the door with Ward. It felt odd, and she knew it was foolhardy. But she was too vulnerable still to refuse him. She only hoped that she could keep him from knowing just how vulnerable she was.

  He drove her back to her apartment and then wandered around the living room while she packed.

  His fingers brushed the spines of the thick volumes in her small bookcase. “The Tudors of England,” he murmured, “ancient Greece, Herodotus, Thucydides—quite a collection of history.”

  “I like history,” she commented. “It’s interesting reading about how other people lived in other times.”

  “Yes, I think so, too,” he agreed. “I prefer Western history myself. I have a good collection of information on the Comanche and the cowboy period in south Texas, from the Civil War up to the 1880s.”

  She took her bag into the living room, watching the way he filled the room. He was so big. So masculine. He seemed to dwarf everything.

  “We don’t really know a lot about each other, do we?” he asked as she joined him. He turned, hands in his pockets, spreading the fabric of his trousers close against the powerful muscles of his legs.

  “Getting to know women isn’t one of your particular interests, from what I’ve heard,” she returned quietly. “At least, not in any intellectual way.”

  “I explained why,” he reminded her, and his green eyes searched her blue ones. “It isn’t easy learning to trust people.”

  She nodded. “I suppose not.” She wanted to ask him why he seemed to be so interested in where she lived, but she was too shy. “I’m packed.”

  He glanced toward her suitcase. “Enough for a little while?”

  “Enough for a week or so,” she said. “You didn’t say how long I was to stay.”

  He sighed heavily. “That’s something we’ll leave for later. Right now I just want to go home.” He looked around him. “It’s like you,” he said finally. “Bright. Cheerful, Very homey.”

  She hadn’t felt bright and cheerful and homey in recent weeks. She’d felt depressed and miserable. But it fascinated her that her apartment told him so much.

  “It doesn’t have an indoor stream,” she commented.

  He smiled slowly. “No, it doesn’t. Good thing. With my batting average so far, I guess I’d be in it by now, wouldn’t I?”

  She cleared her throat, feeling embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to push you in the river.”

  “Didn’t you? It seemed like it at the time.” He searched her eyes quietly. “I meant what I said, Marianne. I won’t make any more insulting propositions.”

  “I appreciate that. I’m just sorry that I gave you such a poor opinion of me,” she added, admitting her own guilt. “I shouldn’t have let things go on the way they did.”

  He moved closer, lifting his hands to her shoulders, lightly holding her in front of him. “What we did together was pretty special,” he said hesitantly. “I couldn’t have stopped it any more than you could. Let’s try not to look back. That part of our relationship is over.”

  He sounded final, and she felt oddly hurt. She stared at his vest, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest.

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  He looked down at her silky dark hair, smelled the soft floral scent that clung to her, and his heart began to throb. It had been so long since he’d held her, kissed her. He wanted to, desperately, but he’d just tied his own hands by promising not to start anything.

  “Do you like kittens?” he asked unexpectedly.

  Her eyes came up, brightly blue and interested. “Yes. Why?”

  “We’ve got some,” he said with a grin. “Lillian found an old mama cat squalling at the back door in a driving rain and couldn’t help herself. The very next morning we had four little white kittens with eyes as blue as—” he searched hers with a disturbing intensity “—as yours.”

  “You let her keep the kittens?” she asked softly.

  He shifted restlessly. “Well, it was raining,” he muttered. “The poor little things would have drowned if I’d put them outside.”

  She wasn’t buying that. Odd, how well she’d come to know him in the little time she’d spent on his ranch. “And…?” she prodded with raised eyebrows.

  He almost smiled at the knowing look on her face. She knew him, warts and all, all right. “Cousin Bud’s got one hell of an allergy to little kitties.”

  He was incorrigible. She burst out laughing. “Oh, you black-hearted fiend, you!” she groaned.

  “I like little kitties,” he said with mock indignation. “If he doesn’t, he can leave, can’t he? I mean, I don’t lock him in at night or anything.”

  If love was knowing all about someone—the good things and the bad—and loving them just the same, then it sure did apply here, she mused silently. “Ward Jessup,” she said, sighing, “you just won’t leave Bud alone, will you?”

  “Sure I will, if he’ll go home and leave my bull alone,” he returned. “My God, you don’t know how hard I fought to get that critter into my breeding program. I outbid two of the richest Texans in cattle to get him!”

  “And now Cousin Bud wants him. What for?” she asked.

  “Beats me.” He sighed. “Probably for his advertising agency.”

  She sat down on the sofa. “He wants your bull for an ad agency?” she asked dubiously.

  His eyebrows rose while his brain began to grasp what she was thinking. “Ad agency…oh, no, hell, no, he isn’t going to use the bull to pose for male underwear commercials! He wants to sell it to finance expanding his advertising agency!”

  “Well, don’t glare at me, it sounded like he wanted to make a male model out of it,” she defended herself.

  He sighed heavily. “Woman, you’re going to be my undoing,” he said. And probably she would if he let himself think too hard about just why he’d come all this way after her. But missing her was just part of the torturous process. Now he had to prove to himself that he could have her around and not go off his head anymore. He still wanted her for certain, but marriage wouldn’t suit him any more than being his mistress would suit her. So they’d be…friends. Sure. Friends. Lillian would stop starving him. There. He had noble motives. He just had to get them cemented in his mind, that was all.

  “Can’t you just tell Cousin Bud to go home?” she asked curiously.

  “I have!” he grumbled. “Lillian has, too. But every time we get him to the front door, he calls up my grandmother and she raises hell with Lillian and me for not offering him our hospitality.”

  “She must like him a lot,” she mused.

  “More than she likes me, I’m afraid,” he returned. He whirled his Stetson in his hands. “I’ll give you one of the kittens if you want it.”

  “Bribery,” she said in a stage whisper and actually grinned.

  He grinned back. She was pretty that way. “Sure it is,” he said shamelessly. He glanced around her small apartment. “Will they let you keep a cat here?”

  “I guess so. I haven’t ever asked.” So he was already planning for her to come back here, she thought miserably.

  He shrugg
ed. “You might not want to come back here, though,” he said unexpectedly. He smiled slowly. “You might like working for me. I’m a good boss. You can have every Sunday off, and I’ll only keep you at the computer until nine every night.”

  “You old slave driver!”

  He didn’t laugh as she’d expected him to. He just stared at her. “Am I old to you?” he asked softly as if it really mattered.

  Watch it, girl, she warned herself. Take it easy, don’t let the old devil fox you. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t think you’re that old.”

  “To a kid like you I guess I seem that way,” he persisted, searching her blue eyes with his darkening green ones.

  She didn’t like remembering how much older she felt because of his searching ardor. She dropped her eyes to the floor. “You said the past was over. That we’d forget it.”

  He shifted his booted feet. “I guess I did, honey,” he agreed quietly. “Okay. If that’s how you want it.”

  She looked up unexpectedly and found a strange, haunting look on his dark face. “It’s an impasse, don’t you think?” she asked him. “You don’t want a wife, and I don’t want an unattached temporary lover. So all that’s really left is friendship.”

  He clutched the hat tighter. “You’re making it sound cheap,” he said in a faintly dangerous tone. He didn’t like what she was saying.

  “Isn’t it?” she persisted, rising to her feet. He still towered over her, but it gave her a bit of an advantage. “You’d get all the benefits of married life with none of the responsibility. And what would I get, Ward? A little notoriety as the boss’s mistress, and after you got tired of me, I’d be handed some expensive parting gift and left alone with my memories. No respectability, no self-respect, tons of guilt and loneliness. I think that’s a pretty poor bargain.”

  “You little prude,” he said curtly. “What do you know about grown-up problems, you with your spotless conscience? It’s so easy, isn’t it, all black and white. You tease a man with your body until he’s crazy for it, you try to trap him into a marriage he doesn’t want, you take whatever you can get and walk out the door. What does the man have out of all that?”

  His attitude shocked her. She hadn’t realized just how poisoned he was against the female sex until he made that bitter statement.