by Diana Palmer
It had hurt, so badly, to lose her mother, especially at such a young age. Emma had watched her die, helpless to do anything. She had managed to live at home until graduation, but the minute she had a job, she moved to town and never looked back. Emma had nothing to do with her father at all these days. She wasn’t certain that she’d even be willing to ask him for help in a dire emergency. Or that he’d give her any. He was rarely sober enough to care about anything, anyway. He did manage to go out to work on the ranch, enough to keep it going, but his drinking was such a problem that he now had a huge turnover in cowboys.
Emma was ashamed of the way he behaved. Although his ranch was in Comanche Wells, everybody knew about him in nearby Jacobsville, where Emma had worked at the local café. At least she hadn’t told Connor about the drinking when he was sighted. She’d been too ashamed to admit it, even to a stranger.
“Emma?”
“Oh. Sorry. I was...lost in the past,” she confessed.
“You were with her when she died, weren’t you?” he asked suddenly, as if he knew.
She hesitated. “Yes.”
He crossed his long legs. “My sister-in-law was pregnant when she died.” His eyes glittered. “She didn’t want the baby. She said so, often.”
“Then why...?”
“My brother would never have married her if there hadn’t been a child on the way. She bragged about it, about how she’d snared him with the child, and that he’d have to support it, and her, until it came of age. She’d have everything she wanted, she’d said, and she laughed at him.” His eyes closed. “He was a sweet man. I tried to tell him what she was like, but he was naive. He’d never been in love before, and she was a good actress. He only found her out when it was too late.”
“That’s a shame, for a woman to do that to a man,” she said quietly. “We had a sweet old fellow in our church who’d been married to the same woman for fifty years. When she died, a widow down the road sweet-talked him into marriage. Then she took him for everything he had, even sold the house out from under him. He went to live with his son, and she called him every night to laugh at how gullible he’d been.” She sighed. “He killed himself.”
“Why?” he asked, shocked.
“He loved her,” she said.
“Love,” he scoffed. “I fell in love when I was a teenager. I soon learned that it’s just a euphemism for sex. That’s all it is, a chemical reaction.”
She sighed. “You’re probably right,” she said. “But I’d like to keep my illusions until I grow as crotchety as you are.”
His eyebrows arched. “Excuse me?”
“Crotchety. That’s what you are,” she explained patiently. “You’re rude and overbearing and your temper could curdle milk.”
He chuckled softly. “Feeling brave, are you?”
“I can type.”
“That’s an excuse?”
“A woman who can type can always get work,” she explained. “So if you fire me, I’ll just go right out and look for another job.”
He stretched lazily, still smiling. “Always the optimist. Doesn’t anything get you down, young Emma?”
“Worms.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Worms. You put them on a hook and drown them in an attempt to catch fish that you also have to kill in order to eat them. It’s so depressing. Imagine how the worm feels,” she teased.
He burst out laughing.
“You look nice when you laugh,” she said softly.
“I don’t, often,” he said a minute later. “Perhaps you’re corrupting me.”
“That’s my evil influence, all right. I’ll have to look up my pitchfork.”
“Back to work, my girl,” he said. “Read me the next letter in the stack.”
“Email doesn’t have stacks.”
“Sure they do. Get busy.”
She grinned. “Okay.”
* * *
That night, something woke her. She couldn’t think what. She sat up in bed, frowning, and looked around. The house seemed quiet. There was nothing going on outside, either. She got out of bed in her flowing cotton nightgown with its puffed sleeves and slipped on her matching housecoat, tossing her hair in a pigtail over the back of it. She crept to her door and opened it.
Maybe it was her imagination...no! There it was again. A moan. A harsh moan.
She walked down the hall, frowning. The sound grew louder. She stopped at a door and knocked.
“What the hell do you want?” came a rough, angry voice from behind the door.
She opened the door a crack. “Mr. Sinclair?” she called softly.
“Oh. Emma. Come here, honey, will you?”
She hesitated. “Do you...wear pajamas?”
He laughed even through the pain. “Bottoms, yes. Come in.”
She opened the door and walked in, leaving it open behind her.
He was sitting on the side of a huge, king-size bed. A brown paisley duvet was thrown back from brown sheets. Pillows were scattered everywhere. His head was in his hands, propped up on his broad thighs.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“No. I hurt like hell. Go into the bathroom and look in the medicine cabinet. There’s a bottle with blue-and-white capsules in it, for migraines. Bring me one, and a bottle of water out of the minibar in the corner.”
“Mini what?”
“Minibar.” He lifted his head. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was drawn with pain. “Like a small fridge,” he explained kindly.
“Sorry. I’ve never seen one.”
“They have them in most hotels,” he pointed out.
“Well, I’ve never stayed in a hotel. Or a motel.” Which was true. Mamie traveled, but Emma stayed home and took care of the house and typed drafts for Mamie’s new books. She walked into the bathroom, unaware of his raised eyebrows.
She found the bottle, read the directions, popped one out into her palm and closed the lid. She put the bottle back, then went to find the water.
“Open up,” she coaxed. He opened his mouth and she put the capsule on his tongue. It was intimate. It was also sexy, to feel his mouth that way. She tried not to react as she opened the bottle of water and put it carefully into his hand.
“It’s open,” she said.
He then lifted the water to his chiseled lips and took a long swallow. The feel of Emma’s fingers near his mouth affected him, even through the pain. He winced. “Do you have migraine headaches, Emma?”
“No.”
“Anyone in your family have them?”
“No.” She was going to mention that her employer, Mamie, did until she realized that she wasn’t supposed to know Mamie. “I had a friend who had them,” she managed. “They were pretty awful.”
“Awful is a good word to describe them. They make you sick as hell, and then they give you a headache that makes you want to bounce your head against a wall.”
“I never get headaches,” she said.
“Mine weren’t this bad until I was blinded,” he said.
She winced. She hadn’t realized how it was going to feel, watching him suffer and knowing that she’d caused it. She’d blinded him. It was very hard, trying to live with that. She wanted to tell him the truth, but every day she waited made it more impossible.
“Sit down,” he said. “There’s a chair by the bed. Stay with me for a minute, until it eases.”
“Of course.”
He hadn’t moved much. She noticed the faint olive tan that covered him from the waist up, the muscles in his big arms. He was gorgeous without his shirt. A thick mat of hair ran from his chest down to the waist of his burgundy pajama bottoms, and probably past it. She flushed. She’d never seen a man in pajamas before, except on television or in movies. He was ve
ry sexy. And he didn’t look his age at all.
“You don’t talk a lot, do you?” he asked after a minute.
“I figured that talking wouldn’t really help the headache.”
“Good point.”
“Have you had them all your life?”
He nodded and winced, because the movement hurt. “My mother had them. Terrible headaches. We had to drive her to the emergency room a lot, because they got so bad.”
“Wouldn’t a doctor come to the house for you? I mean, you’re very rich...”
He smiled. “I wasn’t always.”
“Really?”
“I inherited a small private air service from my father. I studied business management and parlayed it into a bigger private air service. I absorbed a company that made baby jets, and added a regional air taxi service that had gone bankrupt. It took a long time, but when I hit it big, I hit it big.”
“Empire builders.”
“What was that?”
“You’re an empire builder,” she said simply. “I read about them when I was in school. Men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Sinclair. Men who started with nothing but had good brains and strong backs and earned fortunes.”
“It was a little easier in their day.” He chuckled. “No income tax back then, you see.”
She cocked her head. “You own one of the biggest airplane manufacturing corporations in the world,” she recalled. “One article said you test-flew the planes yourself.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
His eyebrows arched.
“I mean, you’re rich. It’s risky, right, testing planes?”
“Very risky.”
She was silent. She didn’t push. She just waited.
He drew in a long breath. He didn’t usually discuss personal things with staff, not even with Barnes or Marie. But she was different somehow.
“I got married when I was eighteen,” he said after a minute. “She was beautiful, inside and out. She had black hair and blue eyes, and I loved her beyond measure. At that age, I thought I was invincible. I thought she was, too. We went on this vacation. It was before cell phones were popular, when you usually had to have a landline to talk to people. We were on an island with no outside communications except a line to the mainland, to be used in emergencies. It was a quiet place just for honeymooners. The boat ran once a week. We had the time of our lives, lying on the beach, cooking for ourselves. She was five months pregnant with our child.”
Her lips fell apart. She stared at him.
“She’d been healthy, perfectly healthy. The doctors said it was risky, to go off like that, but we were young and stupid. Something went wrong. She was in agony and I didn’t know what to do. I tried to call for help, but there was a storm and the lines were down to the mainland. I couldn’t even manage to build a fire and signal, because of the rain.” He lowered his head. The memory was still painful. “She died in my arms. The baby died with her. At least, I suppose it did, because I had no idea how to save it. It would have been too soon in any case. When the boat came to bring supplies, I was half-mad. They took me off the island, put me in the hospital and sedated me. My father and mother, and her mother, came to make the arrangements for her and to bring me home.” His face hardened. “I never wanted a child after that. I hated the whole idea of a baby, because a baby cost me Winona.”
She grimaced. What a tragic life he’d had. Now she understood his attitude about love. He’d had one great love, and now he’d convinced himself that love and sex were the same thing. It was a shame. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. “I can’t even imagine how that would feel.”
He hesitated a minute before he spoke again. “I’ve had brief affairs, but I never let a woman get close again. And I make sure there will never be another child. I thought about having a vasectomy, but my doctor talked me out of it.” He shrugged, then clenched his jaw. “Every woman who came along wanted a child. I told them that if they got pregnant, I’d insist on a termination.”
The words chilled. He was the sort of man who would love a child if he had one. But he was obviously determined never to let that happen. To Emma, who loved children, it was a blow. She caught herself. Why should it bother her? She was just his assistant. She sat up straighter. “It’s sad, to blame a baby for something that wasn’t its fault,” she said very quietly.
“The baby killed Winona,” he said harshly.
She felt his sorrow, his rage. “You know, we think we’re in control. That we can decide what happens to us by the actions we take. But life isn’t like that. We’re like leaves, floating down a river. We can’t even steer. We have the illusion of control. That’s all.”
He sat up. “And now we can talk about God and how He loves people and takes care of us,” he scoffed.
“No. We can talk about how there’s a plan to every life, and that what happens to us is part of it. If she’d been meant to live, she would have.”
His eyes began to glitter. “Twenty-three, and already a philosopher,” he said sarcastically.
“I’m not bitter, the way you are,” she said. “I haven’t had bad things happen to me.” That was a lie, but she couldn’t tell him the truth. “So I see things from a different perspective.”
“Pollyanna.”
She smiled. “I guess I am. Optimism isn’t expensive. In fact, it’s cheap. You just have to take life one day at a time and do the best you can with it.”
“Life is a series of tragedies that ends in death.”
“Oh, that’s optimistic, all right.”
A half smile touched his hard mouth. “Happiness is an illusion.”
“Sure it is, if you think that way. You’re living in the past, with your heartache. You don’t trust people, you don’t want a family, you don’t have faith in anything, and all you live for is to make more money.”
“Smart girl.”
“Now you’re all sarcastic,” she said. “But what I’m trying to say is that you don’t expect any more from life than a struggle and more heartbreak.”
“That’s what I get.”
“And are you happy?”
He scowled.
“It’s an easy question,” she persisted. “Are you happy?”
“No.” His jaw tautened. “Nobody is happy.”
“I am,” she said.
“What makes you happy?”
“Birds calling to each other in the trees. Leaves rustling when they turn orange and gold and there’s just the faintest nip in the breeze. White sails on the lake just after dawn. Crickets singing on a summer night. Things like that.”
“How about nights on the town? Dancing in a nightclub? Going to a rock concert? Watching the Grand Prix in Le Mans?” he mused.
“Martians playing in dust storms? Because I’m just as likely to see the latter as the former. Not my world.”
“I’ll take my dancing in a nightclub before your crickets on a summer night,” he said sardonically.
“Glitter. That’s what you have. Glitter. It’s an illusion.”
“So are crickets. I’m sure they only exist in cartoon form and star in Disney movies.”
“I give up.”
“You might as well. You’ll never change my perspective any more than I’ll change yours.” He chuckled.
“How’s your head feeling?”
He blinked. The question surprised him. “Better.”
“Probably all the talk about crickets and rustling leaves,” she said pertly.
“More than likely the hilarity over your concept of happiness.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” she told him. She stood up. “If you’re better, I’ll go back to bed.”
“You could stay,” he pointed out. “We could lie down and discuss sailboats.”
“Have you ever been in love, Emma?” he asked, curious.
She drew in a breath. “I thought I was once,” she said. “We got engaged. But it didn’t work out.”
He didn’t like that. It surprised him, that he was jealous, when she was far too young for him and an employee to boot. She’d been engaged. Even religious people had sex when they were committed. It changed the way he thought of her.
“Why didn’t it?” he asked.
She didn’t dare tell him the truth, because she’d told him about her ex-fiancé before he was blinded. “We discovered that we didn’t think alike in the areas where it mattered,” she said finally. “He wasn’t at all religious...”
“And that matters?” he chided.
“It did to me,” she said stiffly.
He cocked his head and looked toward the direction of her voice. “You’re a conundrum.”
“Thanks.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“Now you’re getting nasty. I’m going.”
“How about bringing me another bottle of water before you leave me here, all alone and in pain, in the dark, by myself?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’re a grown man! You’re always by yourself in the dark,” she muttered as she opened the minibar and pulled out another bottle of water.
“Not always,” he said in a deep voice that positively purred.
She blushed, and she was glad he couldn’t see it.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m putting it right here on the night table... Oh!”
While she was talking, he’d reached out and caught her around the waist, pulling her across him and down onto the bed with him.
He was very strong, and she felt the warmth of his body as he made a cage of his big arms and trapped her gently under the light pressure of his broad, muscular chest.
“Mr. Sinclair,” she began nervously.