by Susan Fox
To her horror the phone was answered, not by a recorded message but by a female voice. The sharp leap of her heart told her instantly that it was Doris who’d picked up the telephone.
“Hello?”
Several sickening moments went by as Lorna desperately tried to speak.
“Hello?”
“Please e-excuse me for phoning so late, but I was wondering if I might leave a message for Mr. Ellery?” Lorna cringed at the timid tremor in her voice, and heartily wished she’d just hung up the phone without speaking.
The long, long silence that followed her question confirmed the notion that it was indeed Doris who’d picked up the phone. And just as Lorna had somehow recognized the soft sound of her mother’s cultured voice, she sensed instantly that Doris had recognized hers.
“With whom am I speaking?”
The imperious question made her shaking knees go weak and Lorna sank down on the sofa to answer. She tried to inject a firmness into her voice that she hoped telegraphed some sort of poise and confidence.
“This is Ms. Farrell. I’d very much appreciate if you’d have Mr. Ellery phone me in the morning before he leaves for San Antonio. He won’t need to worry about calling me early because I need to cancel our plans for tomorrow.”
Lorna pressed her fist against her lips, mortified that the words had come out in a shaky, breathless rush. So much for pretending to be unaffected.
The silence on the line then went even longer, and Lorna felt every excruciating second. At last the woman spoke, and left Lorna no doubt that it was indeed Doris.
“I hope you won’t do that.”
Doris’s stern tone made Lorna feel like a child who’d misbehaved. Or one that was being warned. White-hot anger boiled up from old heartaches and she began to shake. It was a new struggle to keep her voice even. “Would you please give him the message?”
Again the long silence that made her heart pound until she could stand it no longer. Her soft, “Thank you,” before she quietly hung up the phone was the only polite way she could think of to deal with it. Somehow she’d managed not to give in to the anger she felt. It alarmed her to realize how much she wanted to strike at Doris and rile her.
Lorna went to bed then, heartsick. Everything she thought she’d dealt with and overcome now seemed to be nothing more than self-delusion. She still felt raw inside and ached to the point of tears, but she refused to cry. She’d made herself stop crying over Doris a long time ago.
But then the focus of that raw ache shifted to Mitch, and she again tried to convince herself that her feelings for him weren’t really what they seemed to be. She laid in the dark a long time doing that. It was a miracle she fell asleep at all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THERE was no early phone call from Mitch. Lorna realized then that she shouldn’t have expected one. Mitch was dogged on the subject of her visit to his ranch, and it was entirely possible that Doris hadn’t passed on her message.
Mellie’s words kept coming back to her. You don’t think Doris is curious about you? The question thumped at her heart and got her out of bed by 6:00 a.m.
Grimly she dressed for the day and struggled with Mellie’s question. She’d given up on Doris years ago, and it upset her to realize there was even a whisper of hope left. Doris couldn’t possibly be curious about her now, not in any good way. The only curiosity she might have at this late date would be a curiosity about any weaknesses or flaws Lorna might have. Ones that could be used against her.
By seven, Lorna decided to take Melanie’s suggestion to leave her apartment for the day. She’d just got her few essentials transferred from her beaded handbag into the one she normally carried when she heard the knock at her door.
She knew instantly from the brisk, masculine sound that it was Mitch. Somehow he’d gotten into her building without using the call box outside the front lobby.
Just the thought of seeing him again sent a shaft of anxiety through her. And excitement. Quick, sweeping and intense, it shot her heart into a wild rhythm. She couldn’t possibly spend the day with Mitch and yet the only thing she wanted suddenly was one more day with him.
Oh God, she was such a fool. She was crazy about a man she had no business even speaking to. The crushing knowledge—that she couldn’t bear to refuse any opportunity to see Mitch or be with him again—gave her heart another wild jolt. She had to fight this.
Lorna shakily set her handbag on the small table in the entryway and stood staring at her apartment door holding her breath. The knock came a second time and she made herself turn away.
I doubt a man like him needs anyone’s permission to either choose the woman he wants to date…or to marry her…
Whether Melanie’s estimation of Mitch’s forceful personality was accurate or not, it was excruciatingly unhelpful to remember it now when he was standing outside her door waiting for her to let him in.
Even forcing herself to remember her friend’s other words, Then don’t go near him again, was enough to squelch her craving, particularly since this time she’d have a whole day. A long day at his ranch that she already knew would fly by like a span of minutes just because she was with him.
Lorna gripped her hands together in silent agony as she counted the seconds. The silence outside her door weighed heavily on her heart. Would he give up? She strained to hear the sound of his retreating boot steps, but there was nothing.
Until she heard a soft papery scrape and glanced over her shoulder in time to see the edge of a business card peep out from under her door.
The urge to pick it up was unbearable in the waiting silence, but she stayed where she was. Perhaps he’d concluded that she’d stood him up and had slipped his business card under the door to let her know he’d been here. Perhaps he’d leave now.
But he knocked a third time, only it was softer and slower. In her foolishness she imagined it sounded like a last, sad entreaty because he knew she was standing near the door.
Her barely audible, “Oh, damn,” was thick with self-disgust. She moved quietly toward the door to at least look at the small bit of paper. Once she’d given in that far, it was even harder to stop. Just enough of the card showed for her to read a large Pr, and she was lost. She leaned down to pull it from beneath the door and straightened to read the rest.
Pretty please, Lorna Dean.
The almost childlike plea was diabolical. Emotion from some old, sweet time that she’d put out of her mind years ago surged up to tease fond memories of her adoptive parents.
Lorna Dean? Where’s my girl?
Lorna Dean. The special endearment her daddy called out when he’d come in from ranch work at the end of each day. Sweaty and cheerful and loud, her father would boom out, Ermalene? Where’s my woman? Then he’d go right on with, Lorna Dean? Where’s my girl?
Ermalene and Lorna Dean. Her mother’s name had been Erma, but her daddy had added lene to her name to make it a silly double-rhyme with Lorna’s. The sharp memory of her bighearted, exuberant daddy and his artless poetry struck her heart hard.
No one had ever called her Lorna Dean but him, and the fact that Mitch had called her by that same name more than once and had now written it in his curt scrawl affected her profoundly. Feelings of home and terrible loss and deep hunger welled up and she felt her eyes sting.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and fought to stop the memories and force the tears back. She hesitated a moment more to slip the card into the small shallow drawer of the entry table like a stolen treasure she was compelled to hoard.
As if she was no longer in control of herself, she reached for the doorknob. She hesitated again as a last bit of sanity tried to stir. That was the moment she accepted that she wasn’t strong enough to deny herself this one last day of craziness. Not even the doom she felt about how things with Mitch would have to end was enough to make her give up this last chance, not until she had to. And not when it was already too late. Resigned, she opened the door.
Mitch had casually le
aned his shoulder against the door frame, but now he straightened to tower in front of her. He held a glorious bouquet of flowers in a beautiful crystal vase that she knew at a glance was far more costly than the functional ones sold in most flower shops. No two flowers or colors of the bouquet were the same, and the heady scent of so many blooms seemed to engulf them both in heavy sweetness.
The somber look in Mitch’s dark eyes pierced deep. “It seemed more efficient to tag along when someone came in downstairs.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she said shakily. “You just didn’t trust me to answer the buzzer.”
“And I was right,” he said as he pressed the bouquet toward her.
Flustered by the sharp pleasure of his presence, Lorna reached to take the flowers. Her soft, “Thank you, they’re…beautiful,” was self-conscious.
“Do I get to come in?”
Heat flashed into her face and she stepped aside in a wordless invitation for him to enter. “I need to put these somewhere.”
She turned away to rush into the living room, terribly aware that Mitch followed at a calm pace. He tossed his black Stetson to a chair then stood watching as she set the vase in the middle of the coffee table.
Lorna lingered over the flowers to toy with a delicate bloom or two as she delayed looking at him. “You’re early,” she managed to say.
“I was hoping to get you to reconsider coming home with me today.”
“Because Doris wanted you to,” she concluded hoarsely.
“I would have been here anyway, whatever Doris wanted.”
Lorna looked at him then, searching his stern expression for the truth. He was so big and rugged looking. He wore a blue striped shirt that emphasized his wide shoulders and strong arms, and jeans that were just old enough to have learned to be faithful to the muscular lines of his long, powerful legs. His big boots carried a muted shine. There was not so much as a flicker of insincerity about him and she couldn’t maintain contact with the grave look in his dark eyes.
She wanted to order him to not speak to her like that, as if this was something much more personal for him than part of an act for Kendra’s benefit. But saying something to discourage those kinds of remarks was tantamount to confessing that she was vulnerable to them.
Besides, since she hadn’t spoken to him since last night, she still had to tell him about her idea to revise the dating scheme, even though she’d already lost the battle with herself. In spite of that, if she could make a case for the idea, surely he’d change his mind and his cancellation would stop her headlong rush to disaster. She made herself come right out with it.
“I called you because I thought it best to cancel today. I’d hoped to spare you the long drive in.” She saw resistance in the hard line of his mouth, but rushed on anyway. “You could tell Kendra that I wasn’t interested in your ranch—”
“You don’t trust yourself with me for a whole day, do you?”
The blunt question made her heart jump and she fumbled for believable comeback. Mitch went on before she could.
“You’re afraid you won’t be able to keep your hands off me for eight, maybe ten hours.” The conceited grin he gave her then was male arrogance at it’s most potent. “And because that must be the case, then the answer is no, I won’t cancel today. I’d be crazy to.”
The chagrin she felt sent a telling heat to her cheeks but she struggled to think of a way to deny it. In truth, her heart had revved with excitement because he was teasing her, almost chiding her for trying to hide her attraction to him, when it was clear that he welcomed it. And possibly felt the same about her.
“Perhaps it would let a little of the hot air out of your conceit if I came along today and proved just how easy it is to keep my hands to myself.”
His dark eyes glittered and she realized with dismay that her smart comeback had as much as issued a dare. “Oh, yes, ma’am, you do that. Put me in my place and teach me a lesson overdue. Yes, ma’am.”
His conceited grin eased away and she felt the lightning stroke of his masculine intensity pierce her like an expertly aimed arrow. There was a harsh tension in the air that was like the heavy silence before a clap of thunder. The attraction between them was unmistakable and it suddenly seemed far more powerful than either of them.
She could see the edginess in his eyes and realized that in spite of what he’d just said about refusing to cancel the plan, he was waiting for her to officially relent. That was as tantalizing as it was reassuring.
“I’ll have to change into something for the ranch.”
Now a smile angled his mouth. “If you don’t have boots or a hat—”
“I’ve got both.”
“Good.”
Lorna turned away to walk to her bedroom, closing the door silently behind her before she leaned back against it and tried to get her breath. This was such a wrong, wrong thing to do. It was stupid and careless and self-destructive.
And so infernally exciting that she practically ran to her closet to change.
It surprised Lorna that they’d flown to the ranch in the small Cessna Mitch owned. “So we don’t burn up so much time on the road,” he’d told her on the way to the small airport they’d taken off from.
The view of Ellery Ranch from the air was thrilling. Mitch pointed out landmarks and boundaries before he banked the plane to head to the airstrip and hangar that was situated a mile east of the ranch headquarters.
The view of his home from the ground was even more impressive than from the air. The house was a rambling two-and-a-half story Victorian with a veranda to encircle it and a massive patio in back with a jewel-bright pool that was overhung by shady trees.
The tour he gave her indoors wasn’t at all necessary, but he ignored her tactful attempt to decline. The last stop was his office in the large den on the main floor where he invited her to take a glass of tea from the serving tray the housekeeper had left for them. While she did, he glanced through some papers that had stacked up in the tray beneath his fax machine.
A phone call interrupted so Lorna took her tea through the sliding glass door to the back veranda and patio to give Mitch privacy.
She’d no more than found a shady place to sit and put her tea on a side table, when she heard the light clatter of puppy paws on the other side of the patio.
Mitch hung up the phone and watched as more pages scrolled out of the fax machine. He picked them up and began to read, a heaviness in his gut. His investigator had found out more about Lorna and as he read through the report, the heaviness he felt rose into his chest and began to burn.
The sound of laughter from outside made him glance through the sliding door to see that Lorna had attracted the attention of the Kelpie pups who’d wandered up from the barns. He paused a minute to watch as they jumped around her legs while she tried to give each one attention.
In seconds, she was sitting on the paving stones and the excited pups were all over her. Her attempt to get them to calm down was a complete failure as the pups jumped and licked and yipped around her.
Her childlike glee over the pups had banished her reserve. The sad lights that seemed to glow persistently in her eyes were gone as she giggled delightedly and struggled to corral all four puppies in her arms at once while trying to prevent them from licking her face. She almost succeeded but none of the squirming pups would settle down.
Somehow she got to her feet and walked back to the bench where she could sit above the fray. The puppies’ wiggly bodies made for slow progress, but she made it at last and Mitch continued to watch as the stark details of the report whirled in his thoughts and he grappled with their impact.
Apparently neither the Farrells or the Deans had considered Lorna a full member of either family, and the shocking truth of that had been exposed by the sudden deaths of Robert and Erma Farrell. From the look of it, there’d been enough brothers and sisters between the two families, so one of them could have taken Lorna in and raised her. No one had.
Because Lorna hadn’
t been blood kin, none of them had felt an obligation to her. According to the investigator, it couldn’t have been because she was a troublesome child. And even if she had been, how troublesome could an eight-year-old have been?
The burning heaviness in his chest churned into anger and he yanked open a desk drawer to shove the fax pages inside and snap it closed before he locked it.
Maybe the real question was, how heartless did you have to be to send away a grief-stricken, orphaned child and condemn her young life to years of government foster care?
The investigator was digging for more, but Mitch wasn’t certain how much more he needed to know, since he’d already found out enough basics to be satisfied that Lorna wasn’t a threat. He knew instinctively that it would hurt Lorna’s pride if she caught any hint that he’d found out about the Farrells and the Deans, so it was better to get his anger under control before she could detect it. She was already on guard with him because she wasn’t sure what to expect today, and she was too perceptive to miss much.
Amazingly she’d gotten the puppies to calm down and they crowded adoringly around her feet as she lavished each one with attention. She was so gentle and open with them and so comfortable and patient with their antics. Her reserve, her wariness and the way she’d tried to keep a stiff distance with him in spite of her attraction, was a bleak contrast that took on a deeper meaning now that he had an explanation for it.
Lorna could have been bitter, she could have been an insatiable victim who thought the world owed her or been full of self-pity, but she’d obviously not fallen prey to those things. She’d worked hard to make an independent life for herself. It shamed him now to have thought for a second that her nice apartment and the obvious good care she’d taken of it was anything less honorable than the grateful behavior of a woman with neat habits and high standards. It was clear that if she had a lust for more of anything, it would never be possessions.
Lorna had a refinement he doubted she’d learned while being shuttled from foster home to foster home. She was a lady, even under the gentle assault of a small hoard of rambunctious pups. But her reserve with him, her refusal to come face-to-face with Doris, and the melancholy he’d sensed when she was quiet, were the only lingering evidence of the abandonment and rejection she’d suffered.