Outlaw Carson (22 page)

She would have hit him for the thoughtless
insult, if she could have hit him at all. Instead, she got to her
feet, angry and awkward in her haste to get away. He just as
quickly pulled her back down, holding her on her knees in front of
him. The bed of the truck was hot through her jeans. His hand was
tight around her upper arm, his gaze piercing.

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation, glaring
at him, her anger unabated.

“Will you leave with me?”

“Yes.” There was nothing to hold her in Rock
Creek except a lifetime of memories, some good, some not so good,
and some downright bad. She was signed up for college in the fall,
but she wouldn’t lose Colt for college. She wouldn’t lose him for
anything.

“Will you make love with me?” His voice grew
more intense, his grip tighter. “Now?”

She stared at him long and hard, then jerked
her arm free. “Is this some kind of test?”

He swore and dropped his chin to his chest.
When she made a move to leave, he grabbed her again, his hand
wrapping around her wrist too tightly for comfort. “No, Sarah. This
isn’t a test.” His lashes slowly lifted, and she saw all his hurt
return. “This is real. I want you. I want to make you mine, because
I’m leaving and I’m going to lose you.”

“You won’t lose me, Colt,” she promised, her
tone softening.

A shuttered look of defeat shadowed his
face. “Can’t have you. Can’t lose you. What in the hell am I
supposed to do?”

She felt helpless. “What’s wrong, Colt?
What’s happened?”

“My mom—” He paused and took a steadying
breath. “My mom has a new boyfriend.”

“Is that so bad?” She didn’t understand. If
anybody deserved a little happiness, it was Amanda Haines.

“He’s married.”

“Oh.”

“And I think she owes him money.” He didn’t
think it, he knew it. The man was the landlord of his mother’s
beauty shop, and there was never enough money to spread over the
bills.

Dammit all
. He worked two jobs
besides running their small herd of stock. She could have his
money, his school fund. All she had to do was ask. Or they could
sell the damn ranch. It wasn’t much of a place to begin with and
once he went to school, they wouldn’t be able to keep any stock on
it at all.

It took Sarah a minute, but she finally
pieced together what he was getting at. The awful truth didn’t
change her reaction, except to make it sadder.

“I’m sorry, Colt.”

His eyes snapped up to hers, flashes of
white burning in the cerulean depths. A sneer curled his lips. “My
mother is a whore and you’re sorry. Thank you.”

She would have slapped him then for calling
his mother a whore, but he was too fast, rising to his feet. She
grabbed his arm instead and stumbled upright to stand in front of
him.

“You’ve got no call to go—”

He silenced her with a quick shake of his
head, but had nothing to say—nothing he could choke out around the
growing lump in his throat.

Sarah saw the change in him and reacted
immediately. “Colt, you’ve got it all wrong. Hell, half this town
is sleeping with the other half, and they’re all married to
somebody else, and it’s not just this town. My aunt who works in a
bank in Cheyenne, she says those folks are fooling around all the
time.”

“It’s different when it’s your mother.” He
spoke the words as damning fact, not opinion.

“Different for you,” she said. “Not
different for your mom. She’s just like everybody else, looking for
some love.”

The look he gave her tore through her with
searing heat. “Just like me, Sarah?” he asked, moving closer.
“Looking for some love from you?” He slid his hands down over her
hips and pulled her tightly against him, claiming her with the
action.

“Colt . . .” Her voice trailed off,
tremulous.

“Marry me tomorrow,” he whispered roughly,
lowering his mouth to hers. “But be my wife today.”

* * * * * *

Continue reading for an excerpt from
The Dragon and the
Dove

It was a shame, really, Jessica Langston
thought, that anyone besides herself had their days held hostage by
her eccentric employer. She cast another surreptitious glance over
her desk at the Oriental woman waiting in the reception area of
Daniels, Ltd. Two hours earlier the woman had given her a card
identifying herself as Dr. Sharon Liu and had said she was there to
see Cooper Daniels. When Jessica politely explained the futility of
such an endeavor, the woman had only smiled and sat down to wait in
the richly appointed office, sinking her elegant form into a
wingback chair and balancing her slippers on the cinnabar-colored
carpet.

Jessica could have told her again that she
was wasting her time, but she had already implied as much twice
since their initial conversation. Her employer did not see people
without an appointment. For that matter, her employer did not see
people with an appointment. Truly, she doubted if her employer saw
people in any capacity. Jessica had worked for Cooper Daniels for
two weeks and he had not seen her.

She hadn’t seen him either—unless she
counted the dusty oil painting stuck up on the wall in the darkest
corner of the office.

Crotchety old man, she thought, giving the
picture a bored glance. The artist certainly hadn’t been paid to
glamorize her employer. Cooper Daniels looked stern, unforgiving,
wrinkled up, dried out, and like he could kick off at any
moment.

Squelching a sigh of irritation, she went
back to flipping through
The Wall Street Journal
. She hadn’t
gone for an MBA on top of an undergraduate degree in accounting and
subjected herself to six weeks of intensive testing and
interviewing by a gray-haired harridan of a headhunter named Mrs.
Crabb to spend her days reading. She was supposed to be Cooper
Daniels’s assistant, not his receptionist.

She shouldn’t complain, Jessica told
herself. She was certainly getting paid as if she were assisting
the owner and founder of Daniels, Ltd. in his Pacific Rim wheeling
and dealing, as if she were tracking high-end real estate
investment opportunities, which she’d been educated to do.

Dr. Liu rose from her chair and walked over
to the large oak-framed windows overlooking Powell Street and the
Bay, drawing Jessica’s attention away from her newspaper. An
olive-colored silk pantsuit with designer origins hugged the
woman’s slender figure; her hair was drawn back in a severe but
regal chignon. Jessica wondered how long she would wait before she
finally gave up and left. The other woman’s patience made her think
Dr. Liu knew something she didn’t, and that unnerved her. Any
normal person would have taken her hints and left an hour ago. But
that was the pot calling the kettle black. Any normal person
wouldn’t have spent the last two weeks working for a man whose very
existence was becoming doubtful. Sometimes she wondered if he’d
died and nobody had remembered to tell her.

“Ms. Langston, Cooper Daniels here. Please
send Dr. Liu in.”

The blue band of light blinking on her
intercom and the accompanying masculine voice catapulted Jessica’s
pulse into overdrive and paralyzed her from the neck down. A
barrage of questions spilled into her mind, adding to the general
confusion: How had he gotten into his office without her seeing
him? How long had he been in his office? What was she supposed to
do?

Respond
, came the answer. Regrouping
quickly, she leaned forward and pressed the response panel on the
intercom.

“Yes, Mr. Daniels. I’ll send her right in.”
She turned to the woman standing at the window. “Dr. Liu? Mr.
Daniels will see you now.”

Jessica waited for Dr. Liu to retrieve her
medical bag, then with as much grace as she could manage,
considering her heart was pounding a mile a minute, she rose and
stepped over to the ornate doors leading to Cooper Daniels’s
private office. Dragons with fangs bared and claws showing, wings
spread and flames rolling, faced each other in frozen flight on the
carved wooden panels. Surprisingly, the doors opened when she
turned the handles. They never had before when she’d tried them,
and she’d tried them many, many times—even going so far as to put
her shoulder to the job and wiggle a bobby pin or two in the
lock.

“Thank you.” The Oriental woman slipped by
her with a small smile that suggested, “I told you so.”

Jessica responded with a tight little smile
of her own, conceding defeat. The woman had known something she
hadn’t known. Dr. Liu had known Cooper Daniels was alive and well
and in residence.

Before closing the doors, Jessica glanced
into the office, intending to give the old man a nod of
acknowledgment. He wasn’t anywhere in sight. The only indication of
his presence was the sound of running water coming from an open
door off to the left, the sound of a lot of running water, as if
someone was taking a shower.

After spending so many days looking at
Cooper Daniels’s portrait, she refused to dwell on the picture her
last thought brought to mind, let alone take the time to imagine
what Dr. Liu was doing there. Instead she made a quick study of the
rest of the office, noting an ancient private elevator against the
south wall—which answered one of her questions—the massive desk
commandeering the north wall, and the elaborate arrangement of
flowers and foliage cascading over a large, low table that anchored
a circle of chairs.

She had turned to leave when a glimmer of
gold caught her eye. She looked down and her next heartbeat caught
for a second, captured by the dragon woven into the carpet. A
hundred shades of bronze, yellow, copper, and brown edged the
scales that began at the tail, where she stood with her feet
perfectly placed in the heart-shaped point. Startled, she moved off
the creature and looked up toward its head. Fierce emerald-green
eyes warmed in the late-afternoon sunshine. Blue smoke curled out
of the winged beast’s nostrils. Flames of red and orange danced
upon its tongue.

Fascinated and strangely wary, she let her
gaze travel up the reptilian profile and down the crested rows of
gilt scales. The animal was the essence of power, a force to be
reckoned with, snaking across the cinnabar carpet and through a
bank of white clouds in all its golden glory. And it was chained,
collared at the neck by a broad iron band.

Dr. Liu discreetly cleared her throat, and
Jessica’s eyes flicked up. She knew she either had to leave or have
a reason to stay. With the other woman moving about the large room
with more familiarity than Jessica could claim, leaving was the
only sensible option. When the shower was turned off in the
adjoining room, leaving became the preferable option.

With one last intrigued look at the dragon,
she closed the doors and walked back to her desk. She felt like
she’d passed a horrendously complicated test of nerves and
composure, something along the lines of “Can a person sit in a room
by herself for two weeks and not have a heart attack when the
intercom suddenly comes to life?”

Her smile returned in triumph. She’d passed
with flying colors. Her “Yes, Mr. Daniels. I’ll send her right in,”
had been delivered with unruffled efficiency, despite sweating
palms and a still-jumping pulse. As soon as Dr. Sharon Liu left,
she and Mr. Daniels were going to have to straighten a few things
out. Outrageous salary or not, she wasn’t going to spend her whole
career waiting to say “Yes, Mr. Daniels” once a month.

An hour later her pulse had slowed to a
near-comatose rate, she’d memorized a full quarter page of stock
prices, and she’d decided she was leaving Daniels, Ltd. no matter
what Cooper Daniels came up with as an explanation for his
unorthodox behavior. She’d earned the right to be more than some
old man’s glorified secretary.

Besides, there wasn’t any irreplaceable
prestige in working for a company and a man no one had ever heard
of, especially if the company was on the skids—which, given her
work load and despite her salary, she was beginning to suspect. If
Daniels was going to go bankrupt, he’d have to do it without her.
She needed her outrageous paycheck, every penny of it.

Her MBA from Stanford University had not
come cheap, emotionally or financially, but it had been the best
chance she’d had of getting off the bottom rung of the corporate
ladder. Stanford had been a chance to pull her life together after
a dismal divorce, a chance to come home to San Francisco with her
children.

Now she owed a bundle to Stanford and the
government, and to her family for all their help. She couldn’t
afford to take a chance with Daniels, Ltd.

Before she left, though, she was going to
ask her employer about the chained dragon. A man didn’t have
something like that splashed all over his carpet without its having
some significance. What that significance might be, she couldn’t
begin to guess. But it meant something, something powerful. She
knew it. She’d felt it.