The Texan's Diamond Bride (6 page)

“Go ahead,” he urged Miss Paige McCord. “Tell me why I should let you back into that mine.”

“No, it’s not the mine,” she insisted. “I mean…yes, I want back in it, but, no, that’s not what I was talking about a second ago. It was…I wondered if I could talk to you about just one thing without…well, maybe without this whole lifelong family feud getting in the way of it?”

“Considering the fact that everything between your family and mine started there and is colored by that, I don’t see how, Red.”

“Yes. I know. You’re right. I’m just…None of it’s his fault—”

“His fault?”

“Charlie. My little brother…Your…You know about Charlie, right?”

Okay,
that
surprised him.

And
that
particular wound was still raw and festering.

He didn’t really know how he felt about having a twenty-one-year-old half brother he’d known nothing about until a few weeks ago.

While he might disagree with his brothers about a lot of things, how they lived their lives, what was important to them, things like that, they were and always would be brothers. They were tight. They were family, and he’d have walked through fire for any of them anytime they needed it.

So to know that there was a fourth Foley brother out there somewhere, who’d never been one of them….

It was just wrong.

Who’d been a McCord instead.

“Yes,” he admitted. “My father told us about Charlie.”

His father was still reeling from the news himself. His father, steady as a rock, raise-three-boys-alone-after-his-wife-died kind of steady, absolutely reeling.

Travis didn’t think anything in this world could have shaken his father like that particular bit of news.

“It’s just that…Charlie’s special,” Paige said. “He’s great. He’s sweet. He’s kind. He’s happy. Like a puppy, just kind of silly and goofy. Everybody loves him. And he’s so young. I don’t…I can’t stand the idea of him getting hurt in all this.”

Travis got up and came to stand over her, hands on his hips, furious all over again. “And you think my father and my brothers and I are going to hurt him?”

“I don’t know.” She sat up in the bed, covers falling to her waist, her hair tumbling everywhere. “I have no idea how you’re going to treat him or what you think
about him. I can still hardly believe it’s true. That he’s your father’s son and not my father’s.”

Travis frowned.
Okay.
He had to admit what she’d just said was likely true, because he wasn’t completely sure how he felt about the whole thing, either. How could anyone be? It was all too strange, too new.

“If I could just…I know you don’t owe me anything,” she said. “I know I don’t have the right to ask anything of you, but you’re here and we spent some time together before…before anything about our families got in the way, and…Well, I think you can be a nice man, when you want to be. And I’m asking you, please…Charlie wants to meet your father…his father. I assume at some point he’ll want to meet you and your brothers…. Could you just be kind? Please?”

Kind?

What the hell did she think of them? That they were a pack of wolves? That they’d eat him alive?

And yet, he could hear that her concern was genuine and that, for all he could see, she loved her younger brother very much.

“Answer a question for me, Red. How did your father treat him?”

She looked for a minute like…like it had been bad…maybe everything Travis feared. He’d always heard Devon McCord was an ass.

He swore, sat down on the edge of the cot and grabbed her by the arms, holding her there in front of him, not letting her look away. “No. Tell me. He hurt him?” That one question burned a hole in Travis’s gut when he let himself think about it.

She looked confused, surprised, hurt herself. “No.”

“The guy’s always been rumored to have a nasty temper. Ask anybody, and not the people in my family who were taught from birth to hate him. Anybody. They’ll tell you he was a big, tough, mean son of a bitch. So tell me. Tell me right now. Did he hit that kid? Did he hit Charlie?”

“No,” she said.

“Swear it,” he demanded, right up in her face. “Right now. It’s…I need to know, Red. I need to know no one hurt him like that when no one in my family even knew he was a Foley, and none of us were there to protect him. Because he’s family and we don’t leave each other alone to face something like that. It just isn’t right.”

“No, he didn’t hit us.”

“Maybe not you or your sister, but what about your brothers? And if he knew Charlie wasn’t his—”

“He didn’t know,” she said. “I’m almost certain he didn’t. Charlie was just so easy to like. To love. For my father, too. I don’t think there’s any way he knew Charlie wasn’t his.”

“Okay.” Then he realized he’d been manhandling her himself, trying to make her sit there and look him in the eye and tell him the truth.

He still had her by the arms in a hold that wouldn’t allow any kind of escape from him.

And he’d gotten too close to her again.

He let his hands drop and eased back away from her as she scooted back on the bed to sit up against the headboard, looking wary and surprised and not quite sure what to do with herself or to say to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She shrugged off his words, like they didn’t really matter, like none of it did and let her head fall until he saw nothing more than a curtain of red-gold curls and all that made him worry even more.

Travis swore and shook his head in disgust. “Did I hurt you, Red?”

“No. It’s just…grabbing me like that and acting like you’d shake the truth out of me, if you had to? That was something my father did.”

Her father, and now him?

That was perfect.

Just perfect.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

Now he felt like an absolute ass.

“Travis?” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m glad you care enough about Charlie to want to be sure my father didn’t hurt him like that. I’m glad you want to look out for him, the way brothers do. That means a lot to me. I want that for Charlie, because I love him. And I’m glad there’s at least one bit of family business we agree on. Charlie. That none of this is his fault.”

“It’s not. I know that,” he told her.

“So maybe my family isn’t as different from yours as we thought.”

He scoffed at that.

Not because he thought it wasn’t true, but because he didn’t need to be sitting here finding common ground with her, finding reasons to like her. It was the last thing he needed to be doing.

And it didn’t help any that he was sitting on her bed,
late at night, the two of them absolutely alone, with him having to keep reminding himself of exactly who she was, to keep from remembering what he’d planned to be doing with her in this cabin, in this bed tonight.

It didn’t help either that he’d put his hands on her, even in anger, for a moment. And it was even worse now, when it wasn’t anger that was driving him on, but the need to go to her again, this time to make sure she was okay, to comfort her, wishing he could forget everything that stood between them.

Get up,
he told himself sternly.
Get up and get out of here, before you make it any worse.

But he didn’t listen.

H
e put his hands on her again, same place as before, this time as gentle as he could be, rubbing slowly with his thumbs at the soft flesh of her inner arms. She looked wary, but she let him.

“I’m truly sorry,” he said. “I don’t treat women that way. It’s just that…ever since I heard about Charlie, I couldn’t help but worry and wonder…what it was like for him, growing up a McCord.”

She gave him a look that just about had him on his knees. A look that said she understood completely and could forgive, not that he felt he deserved it.

“No one in my family wants to hurt him,” Travis promised her.

She hung her head. He saw tears falling down one
perfect, pale cheek and a curtain of red-gold hair shielding the rest of her from view. She shivered a bit.

He had to remind himself he didn’t get to keep her warm tonight, that the time when he was welcome to do that was long over. “What is it, Red?”

“I don’t see how Charlie’s ever going to belong anywhere now. Not with the way things are between your family and mine.”

Honestly, Travis didn’t either.

Paige shivered, and Travis had to get up or he was going to take her in his arms, despite all the reasons he’d told himself he couldn’t.

He pulled the covers up around her and eased her back down onto the bed, while she looked up at him, her eyes sad and full of regrets. He let himself touch her in one small way, a hand to her cheek, wiping away those tears, and then she looked even sadder. All sad eyes and tears and that glorious hair spread out on a pillow in a bed in a cabin with him and no one else around for miles.

He wondered what she’d do if he kissed her right then, if she longed for the way it had been between them the night before. If she wished they hadn’t been careful or cautious. He could have done anything to her that night, and she would have let him. He knew it.

But it was cold and wet, and the ground was hard, and she was just so soft and feminine, her body yielding completely to his. Not the kind of woman a man had on a bed of solid rock.

He’d wanted something better for her for their first time together, time, a soft bed, a fire and roof over their heads.

But mostly…time.

He’d been sure they’d have it, couldn’t foresee anything that would keep them from having that time.

What a fool he’d been.

And now he’d always wonder what it would have been like, despite who she was and who her family was.

“I’m going to build up the fire. Just go to sleep. One of the ranch hands will likely come for us by midday, and we’ll go to the ranch house and…I don’t know, Paige. I don’t know what we’ll do from there. Get your Jeep for you and…I don’t know.”

Let her go? Just like that? No. He didn’t want to do that. But what choice did he have? Forget about her? He didn’t think he could.

“I just don’t know,” he said again, then turned back to the fire, made himself lie down and stare at it, not at her, until at some point he finally fell asleep.

Someone walked into the cabin at first light.

Travis got up, sore from a night spent on a floor that was just a tad more comfortable than the rock he’d slept on the first night, and there stood Calvin Waters, a man who’d been working the ranch since Travis was a kid.

“Sorry, Boss,” he said. “You said to take care of the animals first, and we did. Just took a little longer than we thought, and then—”

He broke off as Paige rose from the bed on the other side of the room, looking all rumpled and sleepy and gorgeous in the morning light, her hair like pure fire, a curly, sexy mess.

Travis thought he heard Cal swear in utter appreciation and could have done the same himself.

Cal turned to Travis and shot him a look that said,
What the hell are you doing on the floor when you’ve got someone like her in the bed?

Travis shot back his own look that said,
Don’t say a word.

Cal nodded. “I didn’t bring enough horses. Didn’t know you had company.”

“We got caught in the storm together,” Travis said. “Paige, this is Calvin Waters. He knows more about the history of the ranch than anyone, because he’s about a hundred years old and I don’t think he’s lived a day anywhere but here. Cal, this is Paige.”

He deliberately left off the last name, because that would cause a stir throughout the ranch, and he didn’t want to answer any questions about her, especially since he had no answers where she was concerned.

“Hello, Mr. Waters,” Paige said, giving him a polite smile.

“Oh, ma’am, it’s just Cal. Glad to see you two found some shelter. It’s a helluva storm out there. Let up a little this morning, but it’s still miserable.” Then he turned to Travis. “I only have my horse and yours. Want me to go back to the ranch and—”

“No.” He wouldn’t put Cal or the horses through the extra trip. “Paige and I will be fine on Murph.”

He told her to get her things together and put her coveralls on. That would keep some of the rain off of her. He took care of the fire and soon they were outside.

The rain had let up, but had by no means stopped.
They stood under the narrow overhang, and the horse came up to Travis and nudged him in the shoulder.

“I think he missed you,” Paige said.

“No, he’s reminding me that he was smart enough to know that storm was coming and I wasn’t.”

Paige laughed and fussed over the horse, rubbing his nose. “Smart and beautiful, then. Good for you.”

“We’re going to have to ride double, and we’re going to get wet one more time,” Travis told her. “But at the end of this trip is a real bathtub with a huge hot water tank and it won’t matter if we did lose power. We’ve got a generator. So you’ll be warm, and you can have a hot meal, too.”

“Sounds heavenly,” she told him.

No, not quite, he thought, remembering that first night with her. But it was as good as things were going to get, he feared.

He climbed aboard Murph, eased back as far as he could in the saddle and then reached for her, holding out his right hand and a booted foot.

“I assume you know how to ride?”

She gave him a look of mock outrage.

“Just making sure. Put your foot on top of mine, and don’t be afraid to step down hard to lift yourself up. Take my hand with both of yours, and we’ll swing you up into the saddle, sideways in front of me.”

“I can do it,” she said. And ended up making it look easy, or maybe as if she rode double with him all the time.

It meant she was practically in his lap. He eased her against his chest, trying to ignore how that felt, and Cal handed him a blanket from the cabin that he wrapped
around her. They were still going to get wet but hopefully it would offer some protection.

Cal mounted his horse and off they went, making slow but steady progress through the rain, the whole world gray and gloomy, Travis feeling that way himself, save for the fact that he had her in his arms.

It was a sad day when a man was grateful to be riding through a cold, driving rain just because it gave him one more chance to hold a woman in his arms.

But that was the shape he was in.

Grateful, despite the cold and the rain, and annoyed as hell at her whole family and his.

Paige huddled against him inside her blanket, rain finding a way to get inside, running cold down into her clothes and finding flesh. Which only made her try to get even closer to him.

She fought it. She really did.

She told herself all the reasons she couldn’t have anything else to do with him, and that she really didn’t know him and she shouldn’t trust him. She planned that she’d be gone from here soon, and then it would be hard to believe she ever even considered…doing anything with him.

Anything else, she reminded herself. She’d already done more than enough.

It was just that, this close to him, when she closed her eyes against the misery of the cold and the rain, she tended to remember only that she was curled up against him, absorbing the heat of him, taking shelter in his arms. And despite knowing better, eventually her
thoughts kept turning to that first night with him. How kind he’d been, how gentle, and how those big, hot hands of his had moved so slowly, relentlessly over every inch of her.

Teasing and teasing and teasing, until she just went mad in his arms.

Most men were in such a hurry these days. They’d forgotten how to tease and tempt and take a woman to the point where she was insane to have them.

He’d made her nearly insane with it.

The only thing that had made her wait, in the end, was knowing they would be together and that it would be all the sweeter for the wait.

How was she supposed to ignore that when she was this close to him?

He was the only thing warm in the world, his body swaying against hers, beneath hers, from the motion of the horse, his arm holding her fast, his heartbeat thudding beneath her ear. She was cold, and her whole body ached, and she just wanted to forget all of that. The memory that kept playing through her mind was of him kissing, stroking, teasing her.

“Almost there,” he said, his mouth practically pressed against her ear, warm breath leaving her shivering, and not from the cold.

If she reached up and kissed him, took that warm mouth of his with hers, she wondered what he’d do. If he’d push her away or if that would be enough for her to know he was thinking of that night as much as she was, that maybe he had the same regrets, impossible as anything was between them.

She wanted him to have those regrets, she decided, pointless as that was. She just needed to know he felt the same way she did.

It is pointless
, she reminded herself.
Absolutely pointless
.

The ride seemed interminable, impossible, and then finally, finally, they came to a stop.

She lifted her head and realized they were at the door to a house, his house, she suspected. He’d ridden right up to the door.

“Let me get down first, okay? And then I’ll help you.”

She nodded, immediately feeling the cold so much more as he lifted himself up and off the horse.

“Now, just slide down. I’ve got you.”

She did, but her legs were numb from the cold and buckled the moment she hit the ground. The only thing that kept her from landing in a heap in the mud was him.

He caught her hard against him once more, and she couldn’t even manage to help hold herself up by hanging on to him.

“It’s okay, Red,” he said, adjusting his grip and then lifting her into his arms.

He said something to Cal about the horses, and the next thing she knew, she was being carried inside, dripping wet, into a mudroom where a stern-looking older woman, probably his housekeeper, started fussing over her and him.

He put her down in a hard wooden chair, took off her muddy boots and sopping wet socks, took away her big, wet blanket from the cabin, then reached for the zipper on her coveralls.

His housekeeper put a big, fluffy towel into her hands and then helped her dry off her face a bit and get the worst of the moisture from her hair.

Paige’s own hands were trembling so badly, she wasn’t much help at all.

“Marta,” he said. “Why don’t you go run a hot bath in my bathroom. I’ll bring her up in a minute.”

He’d gotten her coveralls unzipped as far as he could with her sitting down, then took a moment to pull off his own boots, wipe the water from his face and the worst of it from his hair.

“Your bathroom?” she asked, even her voice trembling from the cold.

“Biggest bathtub in the house, Red. Looks like a fancy horse trough, but it’s made of cast iron, extra long and deep. Trust me. It holds heat like nothing you’ve ever been in. You’re gonna love it. You’ll never want to get out.”

She gave him a wet, weary smile.

“Come on. Up on your feet.” He took her by the hand and drew her up. Her legs were kind of working again as he stripped her of her coveralls, left the rest of her wet clothes on her and lifted her into his arms again.

It wasn’t necessary, she thought, fairly certain she could walk as far as his bathroom.

Still, it wasn’t like she ever expected to be in his arms again.

She let her head fall to his chest once more, gave herself up to his gentle care. A few moments later, he set her down in a bathroom, big and modern and thoroughly masculine.

“We work hard here, Red,” he said, as if he could read her mind. “Muscles get sore, they ache. Warm water helps.”

She looked from the tub to him. She went to try to unbutton the flannel shirt she wore and mostly just fumbled with it, her hands still cold and clumsy.

He watched her do it, standing still in front of her, his face growing more and more grim with every passing second. Then he groaned and came to her, his hands replacing hers.

“I won’t look,” he said.

He turned her around, putting her back to him, reached around her and unbuttoned those buttons with the same no-nonsense kind of approach he might have used to undo his own shirt buttons.

He left the shirt on her, but reached up under it in back to undo her bra, then found the string tie of her borrowed sweatpants and undid them, too, while she stood there, mute, still shaking, not feeling anything but grateful for his tender, very thorough care.

He slid the borrowed pants and her borrowed boxers down a bit, then put an arm around her waist and lifted her against him and up off the floor, while he worked her pants and boxers off. Before she knew it, she was back standing on the floor in a long, flannel shirt that hung at least halfway down her thighs.

“There you go. I didn’t see a thing,” he said. “Think you can handle it from here?”

She nodded, then turned sideways and said, “Travis?”

He kept his eyes on her face, while she clutched the ends of that shirt together in front of her.

“Thank you.”

“I’d say anytime, Red, but…well…”

“I know,” she said.

“So, I’m going to walk out this door. Right now. Lock it behind me.”

And then he was gone.

She locked the door with a trembling hand, slipped out of her shirt and her bra and into that blissfully warm tub.