Merciful heavens, Callie felt as if she’d run head-on into a Texas tornado, which couldn’t be much worse than the Carolina variety, only after a four-day drive, she wasn’t in any condition to put up much of a fight. “Yes, but—”
“I can’t tell you how much it means to know I can go off with a clear conscience, I’ve been putting it off for so long.”
“But, Aunt Manie—”
“This way, I can rest easy about my plants. Every third day for those in the east window, every day for the south side. I’ve left instructions in the kitchen.”
“Yes, but—” Callie tried again. Manie had hit her with this thing before she’d even opened her suitcase. “Shouldn’t I go with you? To the clinic, I mean? I could stay with you—even working in Doc Teeter’s office, I learned how to—”
“Pshaw. No point in turnin’ a real nurse out of her job. With you looking after things here, I can rest easy in my mind. You’ll be a darn sight more good to me here than you will in Midland. Besides, I’ve got plenty of friends there.”
They went back a forth a few more times, but youth and determination were no match for age, experience and a conniving turn of mind. Callie knew when to give in. Her own plans would just have to wait. “All right, I’ll do my best, but don’t blame me if your Mr. Langley sends me packing. I know a lot about men, and—”
Manie snorted again.
“—and one thing for sure, they don’t like any changes in their routine. Doc Teeter is the sweetest man alive, but just let me slip up and send in the first patient before he finishes his second cup of coffee, and he’ll growl all day.”
“You won’t have to worry about that with Hank. He’ll bend over backward not to cause you a speck of trouble. Like I said, he’s the sweetest boy in the world.”
Callie, shoulders slumping, eyelids at half-mast, had her doubts about that, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. The arrangements had already been made. Her aunt needed her, if only to water her precious plants and set her mind at ease so she could heal properly.
And after this, she thought smugly, Manie was going to owe her. “All right then, if your sweet boy agrees, I’ll do my best.”
Manie beamed. Face flushed with pleasure and two glasses of blackberry wine, she looked far younger than the sixty-nine years she admitted to. “I’m just as sorry as I can be the way things worked out, but when I scheduled my operation, I wasn’t sure you’d actually come to visit.”
“Yes, well…I guess it worked out for the best. Just remember, once the operation’s done, we’re going to have a serious talk about the future. I’ve had a wonderful idea, and I can’t wait to tell you all about it.”
The elderly woman nodded, and then nodded again. Leaning over, Callie peered up into her face and saw that she was dozing.
Well. She was pretty tired, herself, after driving practically nonstop all the way across the country. A few hours of sleep in a series of cheap motels hardly counted as rest.
Hank stared morosely at the blinking red light on his answering machine, tempted to ignore it. Discipline took over. Besides, it might be Manie. He still wasn’t convinced she hadn’t made light of her illness just to keep him from worrying.
The first message was from Pansy. She wanted him to call her the minute he got back to town. The next two were from headquarters, about some drilling rights that were coming up for renewal. Another one was from a candidate in the upcoming election, wanting money. He happened to know the man was the biggest crook in six counties, not that that meant he wouldn’t be an effective politician, but all the same, he’d pass on this one.
The last message was from Manie. “Hank, I’ll be bringing Callie by in the morning to show her around and introduce her to the staff. She’s tired, so we might not be in before ten, but I want you to promise me you’ll be nice to her.” As if he’d be anything else to one of Manie’s relatives. “She’s a hard worker and real good with people. Give her a day or two and she’ll do just fine. I’ll be bringing you a slice of my sweet potato pie, too, so save room for it.”
Sighing, Hank dropped into his chair, raked his fingers through his hair and wondered, not for the first time, if he was too old and beat-up to get back into the service.
Three
How could anyone perspire with a ceiling fan going full blast? Callie wiped the sweat from her eyes and plopped her aunt’s iron back on the stove to cool. She hung her white camp shirt over a chair, folded away the ironing board, and called down the hall to where Manie was watching the morning news on TV.
“I’ll be ready in ten minutes, all right?”
“Take your time, I told Hank we’d be late.”
Callie didn’t want to take her time, she wanted to get it over with. Manie’s Hank might be a paragon of all virtues, but no man liked having his routine disrupted. Bringing someone new on the job with little or no notice was the sort of thing Doc Teeter had always hated. Even Grandpop, the sweetest man in the world, used to grumble when she happened to call during a Lawrence Welk rerun or his nightly bowl of ice cream and the Channel 8 news. Women were adaptable because they had to be, but men were creatures of habit.
She did the best she could with what she had to work with. Blond hair. At least, in the summer it was blond. At least the top layer was blond. Underneath, and in the wintertime, it was more the color of tree bark. She’d had it cut really short just before she’d come west, because it was too thick and too curly to manage otherwise. Her eyes were too big, too pale, but fortunately, her glasses hid the faint shadows that always seemed to show up just when she wanted to look her best.
As for her clothes, they were neat, clean and serviceable. She’d been told more than a few times that she had absolutely no sense of style, but as it was her mother who’d told her, she’d taken it with a grain of salt. Any fifty-twoyear-old woman who wore fringed miniskirts, cowboy boots, satin blouses and half a pound of silver dangling from each ear the way her mother did these days didn’t have a whole lot of room to criticize.
Her father was just as bad. The day he’d turned in his resignation he’d given his suits to Goodwill and held a ceremonial necktie-burning. Since then all he wore were torn blue jeans, waffle-stomping boots and risqué T-shirts. On really dressy occasions, he added beads and an earring.
Callie would be the first to admit she was dull as ditchwater. It was a good thing somebody in her family was, or else who would take care of them all when they were too old to run wild any longer?
By the time they entered the Texas Cattleman’s Club, Callie had gnawed off a thumbnail. Why couldn’t Manie have worked for a nice, respectable family doctor in a small suburban clinic instead of a high-powered millionaire in a fancy gentleman’s club in a plush little oasis in the middle of a desert that bristled with windmills and oil derricks? Callie felt as if she’d wandered onto a movie set. She wasn’t at all sure she could cope.
Well, of course she could cope. She always had, hadn’t she?
All the same, she stopped dead in her tracks, her sensible beige pumps sinking into a richly colored rug, and stared at the vast, high-ceilinged, dark-paneled room filled with heavy leather furniture, a massive fireplace and decorated with rows and rows of huge oil paintings, animal heads and antique gun displays.
She forgot to breathe, and then breathed too deeply, inhaling lemon oil, floor wax and the essence of roughly a hundred years’ of cigar smoke and brandy.
“Come along, honey, the stairs are right over here. I reckon we could’ve taken the elevator, but nobody ever does.”
Callie swallowed hard. Her blouse was stuck to her back. The place was chilled down to goose bump territory, but her palms were wet and her mouth was dry, and she knew, she just knew, that Mr. Langley was going to take one look at her and realize that she was scared silly and way, way out of her element.
You can do this, Caledonia Riley. You survived your parents’ midlife crisis, Doc’s retirement and Grandpop’s passing. You can do anything you set your mind
to, and besides, Aunt Manie’s old and sick, and she’s counting on you.
Callie knew her role in life. She was a caretaker. A looker-after. She might not have a college degree, but she was real good with people. She lived by the Golden Rule. The one about doing unto others, etc. If she could do it without hurting feelings, she always spoke her mind to avoid misunderstandings.
Only this time she hadn’t…not completely. At least, she’d told her aunt she wanted to take her back home for a nice, long visit. Which was more of an understatement than an outright lie.
Manie’s office was a cul-de-sac near the head of the stairs, consisting of a rosewood desk, an oak filing cabinet and a French provincial library table holding a stack of books, a copier, a fax machine, a telephone and an old manual typewriter. Across the way was a tall window bracketed by heavy linen drapes and walnut louvered blinds folded back to display a row of African violets.
There were two wing chairs upholstered in a dainty chintz print, but instead of stopping there, Manie crossed to the massive walnut door a few feet beyond and rapped sharply. Without waiting for a response, she opened the door and waved Callie into the lion’s den.
“Here she is, here’s my Callie. Honey, meet Hank Langley. He’s just as sweet as he can be, so don’t let that scowl of his fool you.”
It was a good thing she was wearing panty hose. That was the only thing that kept her knees from buckling as the big, dark, unsmiling man rose from another of the massive leather-covered chairs. How many cows had been sacrificed for this man’s comfort?
More to the point, how many secretaries had been sacrificed on the altar of his personal convenience?
“Say hello to your new employer,” her aunt urged. Callie must have made a sound of some sort, because the scowl disappeared.
“Miss Riley.” Her new employer nodded gravely.
“M-Mr. Langley,” she said, trying to sound as if she weren’t sweating like a horse under her neat cotton blouse and tan poplin skirt. This was Hank Langley? Her aunt’s sweet, sensitive boy? The man who wouldn’t swat a fly if he could open a window and let it out?
No way. This man was a…
Well, she didn’t know what he was, but he was no sweet, harmless little boy. She’d heard all about Texas men. According to those songs her mother played on the kitchen radio and sang along with, they rode harder, drank more, made love better and broke more hearts than any other twolegged creature in the known world. The songs didn’t even begin to do justice to the real thing.
Oh, my…
“Does she need anything? A glass of water?” His voice was just like the rest of him. Deep, dark and dangerously masculine.
“It’s all that driving,” her great-aunt replied. “I reckon her poor body’s still stuck on Eastern Standard Time.”
They were talking over her head as if she weren’t even there. Callie took a deep breath and said, “If you think I can do the job, Mr. Langley, I’m perfectly willing to give it my best effort. If not—”
“No problem, Miss, uh—Riley. Your aunt vouches for you.”
He was a full head taller than she was, but then, so was almost everyone else. His hair was thick and so dark it absorbed the light, except for a few glints of silver scattered evenly throughout. His eyes were blue. So were hers, only where his were the color of one of those deep blue mineral oil bottles, hers were more the color of a sun-faded denim shirt.
They talked some more, at least Mr. Langley and her aunt did. Callie was having trouble trying to sift through so many new impressions and get her brain back in working order. Evidently it had gotten scrambled during the trip, because the thoughts that were racing through her mind like a pair of courting squirrels spiraling round and round a poplar tree were the last thing she needed at this point in her life.
“—sent word to the committee head about the meeting next week—”
“—cancel the tickets and call—”
“—deliver tomorrow. Callie can sign for it, I told them all about her.”
Told who what? Callie wondered. That she was here in body, but her brain was suffering jet lag?
Well, car lag. Four days of driving, living on fast food and diet colas, her mind busy framing arguments that would convince her aunt to forget Texas, move back home to Carolina and let Callie take care of her, produced more or less the same results.
“I’m sure you’ll do just fine, Miss, uh—Callie. Manie won’t have a thing to worry about, will she?”
Wordlessly she nodded, then shook her head. “No, sir.”
He looked as if he might be suffering from acute dyspepsia. She’d never had that particular effect on a man before. The truth was, she’d never had much effect at all, not being the type of woman men went wild over. Wholesome was about the nicest thing that had ever been said about her looks. This man, like all the others, had glanced at her once, shaken her hand, and two minutes after she left he’d have forgotten both her name and her face.
She stood outside his door a few minutes later, waiting for her aunt to finish her conversation, and thought, The Invisible Woman Meets the Invincible Man. It sounded like one of those high-tech movies, full of sound and fury and special effects.
She was hallucinating. She told herself it had to be something in the water. Because for one split second when she’d gazed up at the man she was going to be working for for more than a week, she’d felt as if someone had struck a note that resonated on her inner tuning fork, the one her mother the musician swore all women had. Sort of like meeting someone for the first time and feeling as if you’d met them somewhere before. None of which made a speck of sense.
“We’d better get you something to eat before you pass out,” her aunt said, emerging from the inner sanctum a moment later. “You didn’t eat enough breakfast to keep a grasshopper alive.”
Hank tilted his favorite chair, lifted his feet to the windowsill and stared out at the colorless sky, visualizing dark gray clouds rolling in from the northwest. He imagined himself in the cockpit of one of the old MH-60 Blackhawks, his field of vision transformed by night-vision goggles. For some crazy reason he was feeling the same familiar rush, the heady mixture of determination and invincibility, he used to feel when he first headed out on a mission.
If anyone here had a mission, it was Manie. She’d insisted it was no big deal, but he’d had his people check things out, just to be sure. He’d talked with both her primary care physician and the surgeon. Dr. Schwartz had explained the simple procedure over the phone, assuring Hank that it was routine, and that Miss Riley, who had the constitution of a woman half her age, would breeze through it. He rarely pulled rank—rarely had to. In this case, however, he wanted the entire medical community to know that Romania Riley had friends in high places.
That done, all he had to do now was put up with Little Miss Muffet for the duration, without hurting her feelings. She looked as if a misplaced sneeze would do the trick, in which case Miss Manie would carve out his liver and feed it to the crows. She’d always been a tiger when it came to protecting those she considered her own, Hank included. A great-niece, even one with all the spunk of a day-old lamb, would probably come under the same heading.
The rest of the day went surprisingly well, possibly because Carrie, or Callie, or whatever her name was, had Miss Manie hovering over her shoulder, checking out every move. Hank was almost afraid to step outside the door.
Even with his door shut, he could hear the constant murmur of voices. The phone rang incessantly with last-minute adjustments in the plans for the annual ball.
She looked about twelve years old. Had to be older than that, though, because Manie said she’d worked as a secretary for the past six years.
Carrie. Callie? What the hell was her name, anyway? One of those crazy names like Romania?
Carolina? That would make it Carrie.
“Carrie,” he called on the intercom, “would you step in here a minute, please?”
Colorless. Drab was another way of putting
it, Hank thought as he watched her come in. She’d make a great bank robber. Two minutes after the getaway, not a single witness would be able to describe her.
Her voice was something else. Soft, husky, but surprisingly firm. “Yes, sir, how may I help you?”
“Listen, you’re not a salesclerk, and you’re not a waitress.”
“No, sir.”
“Is that how you addressed your former employer?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Then you can address me the same way.”
She tilted her head, ever so slightly. “You want me to call you Doc Teeter?”
“Oh, hell.” Hank could have sworn he saw a gleam behind those hideous glasses of hers. “Call me Hank. Out here in Texas, we’re not so formal as you folks in the highand-mighty East.”
He was right. It had been a gleam. What’s more, the corner of her lips were twitching under a thin layer of lipstick so pale it hardly rated as color. Nice mouth, though. Generous, with a slight upward tilt and a full lower lip. It was the real thing, too. No silicon. No woman who dressed the way this one did would go for a silicon job. Waste of money.
“Did you buzz me earlier, sir? Hank? I’m not quite sure which light is which yet, they’re not labeled. Aunt Manie went downstairs to talk to the kitchen people before she leaves, so she might be the one who buzzed me. Do you think she wants me to go downstairs?”
“Tell me, Carrie, do I look like a mind reader to you?”
“Not at all, you look like a—That is, no, sir. Hank. And it’s Callie, not Carrie, but you could always call me Miss Riley.”
Texas Millionaire Page 4