by Teresa Hill
And then he had to think of a way to get rid of her somehow.
He had to get her back to her vehicle and get her off this ranch, before he did something he couldn’t take back, something they’d both regret in time.
Chapter Seven
Paige stayed in that tub for a long time, letting the heat settle into her from the outside in and studying the room, all cream-colored and dark gleaming wood. Plain, masculine, yet rich and elegant.
She got out and dried herself off with a giant, fluffy towel and dried her hair as best she could considering there didn’t seem to be a blow-dryer anywhere. So she put her hair in a loose braid and went out into the bedroom.
His bedroom.
Again, she found that same color scheme, cream and dark wood, a big comfy leather chair in the corner, that same clean, masculine decor.
She’d planned on trying to simply ignore the bed, not really wanting to know what it looked like, so she couldn’t picture him in it. But it was on the bed that she found the clothes.
Very expensive-looking suitcases, open on the bed, all full of women’s clothes.
That was interesting.
What kind of man had a house stocked with suitcases of women’s clothes?
She looked over the selection in the first big suitcase.
A young woman’s clothes. Young and shapely, she decided from the style and size of the clothing.
He didn’t have a sister. She knew that much about the family. And none of his brothers were married. Three rich bachelors from an old Texas family did not go unnoticed. She’d have heard if one of them was off the market, although now that she thought about it, hadn’t one of them been married briefly? Was it Travis? Was there some brief marriage in his past?
Paige looked through more of the clothes, many of them obviously new, still boasting their price tags. Cowgirl chic? Or someone’s idea of cowgirl chic? She finally found a fairly ordinary pair of jeans she thought would fit and a white blouse, a bit frilly with its expansive, ruffled boatneck, but it would do, she decided.
She found a light pink bra she thought would fit and then wondered, if she asked, if she could have more boxers for underwear. She really didn’t want to wear another woman’s underwear.
But then there it was, a whole overnight case full of undies, including panties of all sorts of bright colors and varying amounts of…material. Okay, not what she would have chosen for herself, but at least they still had the tags on them, too.
She picked a pair in lavender and told herself to be grateful she wouldn’t have to run around his house without panties.
There was even a makeup case.
This woman even left her makeup behind?
Paige opened it and there, indeed, was a plethora of cosmetics, scented soaps, lotions….
Had someone left in a hurry? And not bothered to come back for her things?
Paige decided to be grateful for simple things, like a good lotion to put on her face, a bit of gloss for her dry lips and—yes!—a blow-dryer. She could have dry hair.
Dressing quickly, she dried her hair and, bracing herself, opened his bedroom door and went exploring.
His was the only bedroom in this wing of the house, but there was a locked door—probably his office, she guessed—and the library with the spare computer he’d mentioned. She’d be back there as soon as she found something to eat.
The living room was huge, a massive stone fireplace dominating the space, the furniture again oversize, all buttery-soft leather and polished wood. A glance outside the big windows lining the back of the room told her it was still miserable outside.
In the kitchen, she found a pot of soup simmering, smelling wonderful, and a note. The housekeeper, Marta, said she’d left the soup for Paige and Mr. Travis. It could simmer all day and would be fine. That Paige should feel free to help herself to anything else she wanted from the kitchen and to make herself at home in the house. There was a number to call if she needed anything from Marta, who lived in a cottage near the main house, although phone service had been spotty since the storm hit.
Paige happily ate a bowl of soup, along with some homemade bread she found and a glass of orange juice, then decided she really couldn’t wait any longer to call her brother, who was likely half out of his mind worrying about her. She only hoped he hadn’t done anything foolish, like send someone after her, or decided to come himself.
She eyed the phone in the kitchen, but then thought if she actually got through to Blake, he’d have a million questions, and she really didn’t have any answers for him and really didn’t want him to know she was sitting in Travis Foley’s ranch house, having gotten caught in the mine by Travis.
So she chickened out and sent him a very brief text message from her satellite phone instead.
Safe. Dry. Waiting out storm. Satellite service iffy. Phone battery low. Will call when I can. Paige.
There. She hit the send button and the message seemed to go through.
Her phone rang not five seconds later.
Blake.
Paige felt bad, but she just couldn’t do it yet, couldn’t tell him she’d gotten caught and that she had no idea if she could salvage anything of their plans to find the Santa Magdalena Diamond, and there was no way she wanted to tell him anything about Travis Foley.
“Sorry,” she whispered, and shut off her phone. He’d obviously gotten her message. He knew she was safe. That would have to be enough for now.
She went into the library to the spare computer, happy to find that the Internet connection, while slow and going in and out with the storm, worked well enough that with some patience she could at least see a few things.
The online weather forecast was grim. The remnants of the hurricane, now mostly just a huge blob of rain, was sitting right on top of them, stalled by a weather system moving in from the west. Massive flooding was possible. No one seemed to be sure when the two big weather fronts would end their standoff over the Texas Hill Country and the rain would move on.
Paige tried not to think about being stuck here for days.
She clicked over to the news. Her cousin Gabby’s marriage to her bodyguard was still making the rounds on the gossip sites. The global market for jewelry was still down, gold prices sky high, diamonds and other gems, too. Nothing new there.
Signing into her e-mail account from online, she found multiple messages from Gabby, which she skimmed quickly.
In love. In love. Life is wonderful. In love. Where are you?
Okay, Gabby was fine, just as Paige had left her.
And then a message Paige read word for word: Where did Penny disappear to? I’m telling you, Paige, something is going on with her, and it just doesn’t feel right. I think she may have finally gotten serious about a man, if you can believe that, and…well, she’s just so darned naive. I’d hate to see her get hurt.
Paige would, too. And she knew her sister was very inexperienced when it came to men. Paige was the adventurous one and by most people’s standards, she wasn’t very experienced herself. But Penny…she was downright innocent.
Paige shook her head. She typed in a quick message to Gabby, promising to try to find out what she could, then sent one to Penny, as well.
There was a short e-mail from her mother, which Paige dreaded opening but did, just to skim.
Hope you’re OK. That work is going well. Miss you. Love you. Please let me try to explain. Mom.
Okay.
More of the same from her mother, trying to explain her affair with Rex Foley.
Paige really wasn’t up to that today.
She had her own Foley man to contend with.
Travis didn’t think he’d ever spent a colder, wetter, more miserable day on the ranch, and mostly because he couldn’t stand the idea of being in his own warm, dry house with a woman. Because he didn’t trust himself there alone with her all day.
The ranch hands could have handled things easily. He knew that. They knew that. And they all knew he’d found a woman out in the stor
m, been stuck with her for an indeterminate amount of time and was, at first, in no hurry to be rescued. And that now she was back at the ranch and he was out here riding around in the cold and the wet with them.
They knew she was young, gorgeous and had fiery red hair, and anything beyond that was pure speculation. But they were all speculating like mad and having a good old time of it. That he was either an idiot or that he and the woman had already had a spectacular falling-out. One or the other.
“We gonna stay out here all day or find enough sense to come in out of the rain, Boss?” Cal finally asked shortly before dark.
“Just want to make sure everything is okay,” he said.
“Everything is just fine. It was fine hours ago.”
Travis didn’t bother challenging that notion. Just said, “I don’t recall asking you to stay out here with me, old man.”
“Nope, you didn’t. Just hate to lose you again. I promised your grandfather I’d take care of you, and I thought I was doing a fine job keeping that promise. But if you don’t even have enough sense to come in out of the rain anymore—”
“Shut up, Cal,” he said.
But he turned his horse in the direction of home, and Cal followed him, not saying another word.
By the time they reached the barn and dealt with the horses, Travis was bone tired. Maybe that would be enough.
He walked into the house through the mudroom, stripped out of all of his wet clothes except his jeans, worked a towel through his wet hair as he walked in barefoot through the kitchen, as he usually did when he came in wet or muddy or both.
He nearly made it to his bedroom before he found her, curled up in a chair in the library in front of a roaring fire, reading a book, an image that was like a kick in the gut, it looked so…inviting.
Coming in from a long, hard day at the ranch and finding her there waiting for him. All clean and fresh and so pretty, so sexy.
She put the book down and stood up, wearing a pair of jeans and one of his ex-wife’s blouses, something he actually found pretty. A creamy white against her flawless, pale skin and all that fiery hair, hanging long and loose around her shoulders. The blouse had big buttons up the front and then stopped in a scooped-out neckline that draped lovingly across the hint of curves at the top of her breasts. Her cheeks glowed from the heat of the fire and her eyes sparkled as she looked up at him like a woman who was glad to see him.
“You must be half-frozen,” she said. “I can’t believe you went back out into the storm today.”
“Ranch work doesn’t stop for anything. I have a million dollars worth of livestock out in that storm. I can’t ignore that. Not for anything.”
Just like he couldn’t let himself ignore who she was.
“I know. I just meant…I’m glad you’re back and safe.”
He nodded. “I’m going to take a hot shower and get dressed.”
“Marta left soup on the stove. It’s delicious. And some bread I could warm up,” she offered.
“Sounds good,” he said, then got the hell out of that room.
Yes, she was incredibly pretty and sexy.
A day’s hard ride in a cold driving rain and a tiredness that bordered on exhaustion couldn’t change that, he’d found.
What was he going to do now?
She warmed up the bread and dished out the soup to him, though he told her he could manage easily himself.
“I haven’t done anything all day except read and send a few e-mails, while you were out working,” she said. It only seemed fair that she help out a little bit. “You don’t have a live-in housekeeper?”
“I don’t need a live-in housekeeper. The house isn’t that big, and it’s just me. It doesn’t get that messy or dirty,” he said, as he poured himself a big glass of orange juice and sat down in the eat-in kitchen. “Why? You don’t think a man is capable of surviving without live-in help?”
“I’m just surprised. That’s all,” she said, sitting down at the table with him. “You seem quite self-sufficient.”
“I’m a rancher—”
“A working rancher. Not some pampered pretend cowboy who lives in a mansion and oversees his property and his livestock from afar.”
He frowned. “What the hell kind of rancher is that?”
She laughed. “The kind I thought you would be.”
“Okay, first, that is not a rancher. That’s a rich wannabe rancher. Real men despise those silly, pampered wannabes.”
“Of course,” she agreed.
“Just like we don’t have much use for spoiled, pampered heiresses—”
“Which I am not!” she insisted.
“No, it doesn’t seem like you are.”
“So, neither one of us is what the other expected,” she said.
“No, we’re not,” he agreed, not looking too happy about it.
He finished his soup, then stood up and took his empty bowl to the sink to rinse it and put it in the dishwasher, then opened up the refrigerator and said, “Now, let’s see what we have for dinner.”
“Dinner? You just ate.”
“That was a snack to us working men, Red.”
Marta had left him a big, thick steak soaking in some kind of marinade, which he grilled himself on the stove in no time, along with a big potato he put in the microwave. When everything was done, he dug into the meal.
She stayed with him, not eating, but enjoying the company, thinking it could get lonely in a place like this, wondering about the woman who’d left all the clothes behind, if it was the isolation of the ranch that had gotten to her.
“So…the clothes? There’s practically a whole wardrobe there, a lot of it things that were never even worn,” she began, wondering what she could get out of him about this subject. “You just keep things around? In case women this size show up, half-drowned and with no clothes of their own?”
“Ex-wife,” he told her. “When she decided she was ready to go, she went.”
“Without even taking her clothes?” Paige wasn’t a clotheshorse by any means, but she couldn’t imagine just walking out on a whole wardrobe, either.
“She had plenty of clothes. The woman thought shopping was a vocation.”
“So, the relationship didn’t end well?” she tried.
He laughed, not all that happily. “No, it did not end well.”
“And you don’t talk about it?” She was altogether curious about the kind of woman he’d marry and the kind who’d walk away from him.
“It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable experience,” he said. “What do you want to know? I met her. She was young, pretty, flirty and dressed to show off all her curves. Maybe I was blinded a bit by that. We got together fast, way too fast. Let’s just say I thought she was something she was not.”
And then he stopped talking.
“Something she was not?” Paige tried, hoping he’d keep talking.
“I thought she could be happy here at the ranch. Or she claimed she could, and I believed her. I live here. I work here. This is my life, and I like it. I thought I made that clear to her, but…I don’t know.” He shrugged. “My family has a lot of money. Women like that—”
“Men, too,” she reminded him.
He arched a brow. “You’re telling me you have to worry about men chasing you for your family’s money?”
She nodded. “I’ve been fooled a couple of times.”
He seemed surprised by that. Did he think women were the only ones who were manipulative enough to come after someone for their money?
“Never married?” he asked.
“No. Thank goodness.”
“Well, be careful out there,” he told her.
“I’m trying.” Right now, she was really trying. “How long were you married?”
“One excruciatingly long year.”
“And the wound is still this raw? How long has it been?”
“Three years since she left. You’re going to ask if I loved her, right?”
Paige nodded. Yes,
she thought she would have had the nerve.
“I think it was more that I loved the idea of her. A woman who could be happy here, share this kind of life with me and be happy. But mostly, I just felt like a damned fool in the end, and I really hate that feeling. That’s the part that still burns me up. I trusted her. I believed her completely, and I’m pretty sure she just wanted a rich husband and thought she could get me to give her everything she wanted. Even if it was a life far away from this ranch.”
“You don’t ever want to leave this place?”
“Not if I had my way.” He shrugged, then frowned and swore under his breath. “The thing is, I don’t own this land, and I doubt I ever will. Your family owns it. The lease runs out in thirty years. If I ever find another woman I can trust enough to marry, to have a family with, I might be able to raise my children on this ranch, but I could never pass it on to them. I won’t even be able to live my whole life here. The lease runs out when I turn sixty.”
“Oh.”
He said it like he’d rather cut off his right arm than leave this place.
She felt awful. She didn’t care a thing about the ranch or that her ancestors and his had been fighting for a hundred and fifty years. But she hadn’t thought much about the fact that the long-term lease her mother had offered as a gesture of goodwill would just give someone like Travis a chance to fall in love with the place even more before they had to give it up someday.
And it was one more reason for him to hate her family and her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, knowing it was totally inadequate, but needing to say it anyway. “Maybe…maybe my family would extend the lease.”
He shrugged, as if he’d absolutely hate even asking for anything from her family.
“Maybe they’d even sell the ranch to your family one day—”
“Don’t say that,” he told her, a hard edge in his voice that had her nearly flinching. “Not as a joke—”
“I wasn’t joking—”
“Not as just an offhand comment—”
“No. I mean…I’ve never talked to anyone about that, never heard anyone in my family talk about it. I just…it’s not like any of us has any interest in working a ranch.”
