Heartbreaker
HEARTBREAKER
By
Linda Howard
Contents
"I won't sleep with you to pay that
debt." Michelle's face was pale as she faced him, her hands twisted
together in a tight knot. "Did you come here tonight expecting to whisk me
straight up to bed?"
He eyed her sharply. "That thought had
crossed my mind. I was willing."
"Well, I'm not!" She tried to
control the outrage that burned in her at the insult. She had to control it;
she couldn't afford to fall apart now.
"I'm glad, because I've changed my
mind." He paused, and the way he was looking at her made her shiver. Then
he spoke again, and the image his rough words provoked shot through her brain
like lightning. "You'll go to bed with me, all right, but it won't be
because of any money you owe me. When the time comes, it will be because you
want me just the way I want you."
"Linda Howard knows what readers want,
and dares to be different."
—
Affaire
de Coeur
Also
available from AURA Books and LINDA HOWARD
SARAH'S
CHILD
TEARS
OF THE RENEGADE
MACKENZIE'S
MOUNTAIN
COME
LIE WITH ME
AN
INDEPENDENT WIFE
LOVING
EVANGELINE
ALL
THAT GLITTERS
DIAMOND
BAY
WHITE
LEES
THE
MACKENZIES
MIDNIGHT
RAINBOW
AGAINST
THE RULES
DUNCAN
'S BRIDE
THE
CUTTING EDGE
Coming
Soon
ALMOST
FOREVER
August
2002
LINDA
HOWARD
Heartbreaker
MIRA
ISBN
1-55166-887-4
HEARTBREAKER
Copyright
© 1987 by Linda Howington.
Visit
us at www.mirabooks.com
Printed
in
U.S.A.
Chapter One
She found the paper while she was sorting
through the personal things in her father's desk. Michelle Cabot unfolded the
single sheet with casual curiosity, just as she had unfolded dozens of others,
but she had read only a paragraph when her spine slowly straightened and a
tremor began in her fingers. Stunned, she began again, her eyes widening with
sick horror at what she read.
Anybody but him. Dear God, anybody but him!
She owed John Rafferty one hundred thousand
dollars.
Plus interest, of course. At what percent?
She couldn't read any further to find out; instead she dropped the paper onto
the littered surface of the desk and sank back in her father's battered old
leather chair, her eyes closing against the nausea caused by shock, dread and
the particularly sickening feeling of dying hope. She had already been on her
knees; this unsuspected debt had smashed her flat.
Why did it have to be John Rafferty? Why not
some impersonal bank? The end result would be the same, of course, but the
humiliation would be absent. The thought of facing him made her shrivel deep
inside, where she protected the tender part of herself. If Rafferty ever even
suspected that that tenderness existed, she was lost. A dead duck…or a
sitting one, if it made any difference. A gone goose. A cooked goose. Whatever
simile she used, it fit.
Her hands were still shaking when she picked
up the paper to read it again and work out the details of the financial
agreement. John Rafferty had made a personal loan of one hundred thousand
dollars to her father, Langley Cabot, at an interest rate two percent lower
than the market rate…and the loan had been due four months ago. She felt
even sicker. She knew it hadn't been repaid, because she'd gone over every
detail of her father's books in an effort to salvage something from the
financial disaster he'd been floundering in when he'd died. She had ruthlessly
liquidated almost everything to pay the outstanding debts, everything except
this ranch, which had been her father's dream and had somehow come to represent
a refuge to her. She hadn't liked
Florida
ten years ago, when her father had sold their home
and moved her from their well-ordered, monied existence in
Connecticut
to the heat and humidity of a cattle ranch in central
Florida
, but that had been a decade ago, and things changed.
People changed, time changed…and time changed people. The ranch didn't
represent love or a dream to her; it was, simply, all she had left. Life had
seemed so complicated once, but it was remarkable how simple things were when
it came down to a matter of survival.
Even now it was hard to just give up and let
the inevitable happen. She had known from the beginning that it would be almost
impossible for her to keep the ranch and put it back on a paying basis, but
she'd been driven to at least
try
. She wouldn't have been able to live
with herself if she'd taken the easy way out and let the ranch go.
Now she would have to sell the ranch after
all, or at least the cattle; there was no other way she could repay that
hundred thousand dollars. The wonder was that Rafferty hadn't already demanded
repayment. But if she sold the cattle, what good was the ranch? She'd been
depending on the cattle sales to keep her going, and without that income she'd
have to sell the ranch anyway.
It was so hard to think of letting the ranch
go; she had almost begun to hope that she might be able to hold on to it. She'd
been afraid to hope, had tried not to, but still, that little glimmer of
optimism had begun growing. Now she'd failed at this, just as she'd failed at
everything else in her life: as daughter, wife, and now rancher. Even if
Rafferty gave her an extension on the loan, something she didn't expect to
happen, she had no real expectation of being able to pay it off when it came
due again. The naked truth was that she had no expectations at all; she was
merely hanging on.
Well, she wouldn't gain anything by putting
it off. She had to talk to Rafferty, so it might as well be now. The clock on
the wall said it wasn't quite nine-thirty; Rafferty would still be up. She
looked up his number and dialed it, and the usual reaction set in. Even before
the first ring sounded, her fingers were locked so tightly around the receiver
that her knuckles were white, and her heart had lurched into a fast, heavy
pounding that made her feel as if she'd been running. Tension knotted her
stomach. Oh, damn! She wouldn't even be able to talk coherently if she didn't
get a grip on herself!
The telephone was answered on the sixth ring,
and by then Michelle had braced herself for the ordeal of talking to him. When
the housekeeper said, ''Rafferty residence," Michelle's voice was
perfectly cool and even when she asked to speak to Rafferty.
"I'm sorry, he isn't in. May I take a
message?"
It was almost like a reprieve, if it hadn't
been for the knowledge that now she'd have to do it all over again.
"Please have him call Michelle Cabot," she said, and gave the
housekeeper her number. Then she asked, "Do you expect him back
soon?"
There was only a slight hesitation before the
housekeeper said, "No, I think he'll be quite late, but I'll give him your
message first thing in the morning."
"Thank you," Michelle murmured, and
hung up. She should have expected him to be out. Rafferty was famous, or
perhaps notorious was a better word, for his sexual appetite and escapades. If
he'd quieted down over the years, it was only in his hell-raising. According to
the gossip she'd heard from time to time, his libido was alive and well; a look
from those hard, dark eyes still made a woman's pulse go wild, and he looked at
a lot of women, but Michelle wasn't one of them. Hostility had exploded between
them at their first meeting, ten years before, and at best their relationship
was an armed standoff. Her father had been a buffer between them, but now he
was dead, and she expected the worst. Rafferty didn't do things by half
measures.
There was nothing she could do about the loan
that night, and she'd lost her taste for sorting through the remainder of her
father's papers, so she decided to turn in. She took a quick shower; her sore
muscles would have liked a longer one, but she was doing everything she could
to keep her electricity bill down, and since she got her water from a well, and
the water was pumped by an electric pump, small luxuries had to go to make way
for the more important ones, like eating.
But as tired as she was, when she was lying
in bed she couldn't go to sleep. The thought of talking to Rafferty filled her
mind again, and once more her heartbeat speeded up. She tried to take deep,
slow breaths. It had always been like this, and it was even worse when she had
to see him face to face. If only he wasn't so big! But he was six feet three
inches and about two hundred pounds of muscled masculinity; he was good at
dwarfing other people. Whenever he was close, Michelle felt threatened in some
basic way, and even thinking of him made her feel suffocated. No other man in
the world made her react the way he did; no one else could make her so angry,
so wary—or so excited in a strange, primitive way.
It had been that way from the beginning, from
the moment she'd met him ten years before. She had been eighteen then, as
spoiled as he'd accused her of being, and as haughty as only a teenager
standing on her dignity could be. His reputation had preceded him, and Michelle
had been determined to show him that
she
couldn't be lumped with all
the women who panted after him. As if he would have been interested in a
teenager! she thought wryly, twisting on the bed in search of comfort. What a
child she'd been! A silly, spoiled, frightened child.
Because John Rafferty
had
frightened
her, even though he'd all but ignored her. Or rather, her own reaction had
frightened her. He'd been twenty-six, a
man
, as opposed to the boys
she was used to, and a man who had already turned a smallish central Florida
cattle ranch into a growing, thriving empire by his own force of will and years
of backbreaking work. Her first sight of him, towering over her father while
the two men talked cattle, had scared her half to death. Even now she could
recall her sudden breathlessness, as if she'd been punched in the stomach.
They'd been standing beside Rafferty's horse,
and he'd had one arm draped across the saddle while his other hand was propped
negligently on his hip. He'd been six feet and three inches of sheer power, all
hard muscle and intensity, dominating even the big animal with his will. She'd
already heard about him; men laughed and called him a "stud" in
admiring tones, and women called him the same thing, but always in excited,
half-fearful whispers. A woman might be given the benefit of the doubt after
going out with him once, but if she went out with him twice it was accepted
that she had been to bed with him. At the time Michelle hadn't even considered
that his reputation was probably exaggerated. Now that she was older, she still
didn't consider it. There was just something about the way Rafferty looked that
made a woman believe all the tales about him.
But even his reputation hadn't prepared her
for the real man, for the force and energy that radiated from him. Life burned
hotter and brighter in some people, and John Rafferty was one of them. He was a
dark fire, dominating his surroundings with his height and powerful build,
dominating people with his forceful, even ruthless, personality.
Michelle had sucked in her breath at the
sight of him, the sun glinting off his coal-black hair, his dark eyes narrowed
under prominent black brows, a neat black mustache shadowing the firm line of
his upper lip. He'd been darkly tanned, as he always was from hours of working
outside in all seasons; even as she'd watched, a trickle of sweat had run down
his temple to curve over his high, bronzed cheekbone before tacking down his
cheek to finally drip off his square jaw. Patches of sweat had darkened his
blue work shirt under his arms and on his chest and back. But even sweat and
dirt couldn't detract from the aura of a powerful, intensely sexual male
animal; perhaps they had even added to it. The hand on his hip had drawn her
gaze downward to his hips and long legs, and the faded tight jeans had outlined
his body so faithfully that her mouth had gone dry. Her heart had stopped
beating for a moment, then lurched into a heavy rhythm that made her entire
body throb. She'd been eighteen, too young to handle what she felt, too young
to handle the man, and her own reaction had frightened her. Because of that,
she'd been at her snooty best when she'd walked up to her father to be
introduced.
They'd gotten off on the wrong foot and had
been there ever since. She was probably the only woman in the world at odds
with Rafferty, and she wasn't certain, even now, that she wanted it to be any
different. Somehow she felt safer knowing that he disliked her; at least he
wouldn't be turning that formidable charm of his on her. In that respect,
hostility brought with it a certain amount of protection.
A shiver ran over her body as she lay in bed
thinking about both him and what she'd admitted only to herself: she was no
more immune to Rafferty than the legion of women who had already succumbed. She
was safe only as long as he didn't realize how vulnerable she was to his potent
masculinity. He would delight in taking advantage of his power over her, making
her pay for all the cutting remarks she'd made to him over the years, and for
all the other things he disliked about her. To protect herself, she had to hold
him at bay with hostility; it was rather ironic that now she needed his
goodwill in order to survive financially…