Jake wanted to laugh. Ridiculous, when he was so ticked off. Instead, he folded his arms over his chest.
“How generous,” he growled.
“Addison. Jake. You guys are both—”
“Which is why,” Addison continued, with a withering glace at Caleb, “which is the only reason I came to this—this hail-the-conquering-hero party where I endured being hit on by every dumbass cowboy over the age of twelve, and the way the women looked at me, as if my sole purpose in life was to steal their homely, fat, drooling husbands.”
Travis made a choking sound. Caleb rubbed his forehead. Jake had a hard time keeping from doing the same.
“And I waited, patiently, for the main event.”
“The what?” Jake said.
“The main event, Captain. You. I waited and waited, and you finally showed up, but did your sainted sisters or your magnificent brothers introduce us?”
“Our sisters don’t know anything about this,” Travis said. He looked around. “And could we take this in another room? We really don’t need an aud—”
“I watched the three of you standing there, swilling beer—a disgusting beverage but then, what could anyone expect from Texans?”
Dammit, Jake thought, the McDowell woman was some piece of work. Beautiful. Tough. And flawlessly delivering insult after insult, as if this whole thing wasn’t her fault.
It was, of course, and he disliked her intensely, but he had to admire her for her guts.
“Beer, from the bottle,” she added, with a visible shudder. “And you looked at me. Talked about me.” Addison extended her hand, poked Jake in the chest. He jumped in surprise. “Although actually, Captain, you didn’t look. You stared.”
He felt heat rise in his face. “I did not stare.”
“Oh, please! You stared. And when I got tired of it, tired of cooling my heels and waiting for you to come over, you know, do the polite thing, introduce yourself, shake my hand, I thought, okay, if he doesn’t have any manners, I do. So I gave you a little salute.”
Jake frowned. The raised wineglass?
“I even smiled.”
Yes. Yes, she’d smiled, but—then she’d taken that slow, sexy sip of vino …
“You didn’t so much as blink, so I drank a little wine to give you the chance to start moving in my direction.”
Caleb cleared his throat.
“Addison, if you’d calm down—”
“I am calm,” she said coldly. “Very calm. And, by the way, the two of you are fired.”
“Why fire them? I’m the one you’re ticked off at.”
“Your DNA is their DNA. That’s good enough for me.”
“That’s brilliant.”
“It is, indeed.”
“Well, that’s fine. Because if you’ve dumped my brothers, there’s no need for me to hold back.”
Addison barked out a laugh.
Jake’s mouth thinned.
“That ranch you own? It’s worth exactly what you paid for it.” He smirked. “Unless, of course, you put a higher price on what you gave the poor sucker who left it to you than those services were truly worth—”
Addison slapped his face.
Hard.
The imprint of her hand stood out on his cheek in crimson relief.
“Oh, man,” Travis said, but the words were lost in the sound of a hundred shocked party guests dragging air into their lungs all at the same time.
“No wonder your brothers want to keep you where they can see you,” she said. “You can’t be trusted in polite society.”
His dumbfounded expression told her she’d just scored a perfect shot.
Why hang around and ruin it?
Addison turned her back and faced the crowd.
“Move,” she said, and a path opened like the parting of the Red Sea.
She stomped down that path … and stopped, halfway to the front door. What the hell, she thought, and she turned to face him one last time.
“You’re also a nasty, egotistical, despicable jerk.”
The crowd gasped again, then erupted in a frantic buzz of delighted whispers.
She’d given Wilde’s Crossing enough to talk about for the next decade.
So what?
She was out of here. Not just the Wilde house. She was out of the town, out of the state of Texas.
Back home, at least, she knew the enemy. She wouldn’t be taken in by a pair of brothers who looked like they’d stepped out of an old John Wayne movie, or by a man so tragically beautiful he’d made her heart ache.
Someone stepped out in front of her. A Wilde sister, Emma or Lissa or whatever in hell her name was.
“Miss McDowell. Please—”
“It’s Ms. McDowell. And you have my deepest sympathy.”
Addison stepped around the sister, yanked open the door and stepped into the night.
Travis and Caleb watched her go.
Then they looked at each other, grabbed Jake by the elbows and quick-marched him in the other direction, out the French doors that led to the patio.
“You,” Caleb said, “are an effing idiot.”
“You two are the idiots,” Jake snarled. “Thinking a woman like that could use her wiles to keep me in town—”
“Her wiles,” Travis said to Caleb. “He thinks we set it up so Addison would use her wiles.” His dark blue eyes narrowed. “Nobody’s used their ‘wiles’ since the nineteenth century, Jacob. And even if she had wiles, do you really think we’d ask her to use them?”
“Listen, I understand. You want me to hang around. And she’s a hot piece of—”
“She’s our friend,” Caleb said coldly. “At least, she was, until you got your nose out of joint because you realized she wasn’t coming on to you.”
Jake reddened.
“Why would I want her to come on to me?”
His brothers barked out matching laughs.
“Okay, she’s good-looking. But she was only coming on to me to get me to work for her.”
“Not even you can possibly believe that.”
Jake thought about it. And felt his belly start to knot.
“Okay. Maybe I, ah, maybe I overstated it, but—”
“Here’s how it went down, Jake. You wanted her to come on to you. And when you found out she wasn’t, you were too damned ticked off to admit that was what you wanted, so you decided to accuse her of coming on to you.”
“That,” Jake said coldly, “makes no sense at all.”
“It makes more sense than you do,” Travis said grimly.
“Hey. Just because your plan didn’t work—”
“Goddammit,” Caleb said, “she was right. You’re an egotistical jerk.”
Jake opened his mouth.
And shut it again.
His brothers had tempers. Hell, so did he. They’d chewed each other out before….
But never like this. Never with such intensity …
And maybe never with such honesty.
Were they … Could they be right?
“We owe her an apology,” Travis told Caleb, who nodded.
“That’s if she’ll accept one.”
“Let’s go,” Travis said … and Jake held up his hand.
“Wait, okay?” He cleared his throat. “So, ah, so this wasn’t a setup.”
“Lucky for you that you didn’t make that a question,” Caleb said grimly.
“Okay. Maybe I went … overboard. Maybe I read things into things—”
Travis snorted.
Jake ran his hands through his hair. “Ah, man, she’s right. I am certifiable. It’s just … it’s been a while since—a while since …” He shook his head. “You guys don’t owe her an apology. I do.”
“She won’t talk to you.”
“She will.”
“She won’t. She’s tough.”
Jake eyed his brothers. “Trust me,” he said. “I’m not exactly made of spun sugar.”
“You mean,” Caleb said innocently, “you’re not a
candy ass?”
Jake grinned. “Ten bucks says she’ll not only accept my apology, she’ll agree to have dinner with me tomorrow night.”
“Twenty,” Travis said, “and you’re on.”
The brothers smiled at each other. Jake started off the patio, toward the side of the house, then turned back.
“I left my car near the creek.”
“Why’d you—”
“He just did,” Caleb said.
“Oh. Fine.” Travis dug the keys to his truck from his pocket and tossed them to Jake. “It’s the black Tundra in the driveway.”
“Remember,” Jake said. “Twenty bucks.”
His brothers grinned. “All talk, no action.”
It was one of their old lines. Jake laughed on cue….
But his laughter died by the time he reached Travis’s Tundra.
For a little while there, he’d almost forgotten.
All talk, no action was no longer a punch line. It was the sad truth. His brothers couldn’t know it but he did.
And, yeah, that was the reason he’d gone ballistic. He’d responded to a woman for the first time in almost two years….
Only to find out that she wasn’t interested.
Definitely, he owed her an apology. As for asking her to dinner …
Jake put the truck in gear and his foot on the gas.
Forget it.
He’d pay his brothers the twenty bucks and write the whole thing off as a mistake.
CHAPTER FIVE
CLOUDS HAD swallowed the moon and stars, turning the road into an inky ribbon that stretched toward infinity.
Addison had a head start but Jake drove fast, all but flooring the gas pedal. Every now and then, her taillights glowed crimson-bright ahead of him, but whenever the road curved, those lights disappeared.
She was driving fast, too. Dangerously so. Was she accustomed to dirt roads? Her world was surely one of limousines and taxis.
It surprised him that she could handle a car with such authority but then, everything about her surprised him.
He’d never seen such anger in a woman. Such fire.
And his stupidity had fueled it.
Jake frowned.
Talk about a man making fool of himself …
“Hell,” he muttered.
Apologizing wasn’t going to be easy. How did a man look a woman in the eye and say, “Okay, I’m an ass.” Or, better still, exactly what she’d called him, an arrogant jerk.
What kind of justification could he come up with to explain his behavior?
Not the truth.
Not that that second he’d seen her, he’d wanted her, that he’d reacted to her in a way he’d all but given up thinking he’d ever react to a woman again—
That believing she’d put on an act had all but destroyed him.
There wasn’t a way in the world he could admit any of that to her.
Nothing showed ahead of him but the bright tunnel created by the Tundra’s headlights. He goosed the gas, the truck shot forward and his reward was another quick wink of red taillights.
“Wilde,” he said through his teeth, “she’s right. You’re an idiot.”
Maybe he’d be lucky.
Maybe a simple “I’m sorry, I was wrong,” would be enough.
Right.
And she’d tell him, in explicit terms, precisely what he could do with those words.
Jake flexed his hands on the steering wheel.
This was not going to be fun.
He could imagine how she’d look while he stumbled through an apology.
Her cheeks would be pink with anger, her eyes as bright as molten silver. That I-can-take-on-the-world chin would be lifted to an angle that spelled defiance.
She’d be a veritable portrait of rage.
And sexy as hell.
Just thinking about it made his temperature rise and, hell, that was not what he wanted right now.
He had to concentrate on how to approach her. What to say. He worked on that while the truck ate up the miles, but nothing logical came to him.
He’d have to play it by ear.
And she’d make him jump through hoops.
That was the one certainty.
A muscle knotted in his jaw.
There was a time he’d have looked forward to the challenge. A woman, standing up to him? Except for a couple of tough-as-nails nurses who’d taken him on when he’d tried to refuse meds or therapy, women had always tended to say yes to whatever he wanted.
No surprise there.
If a guy had money, some kind of status, if he had the kind of looks women liked, that was the way things went.
He—for that matter, he and his brothers—had all those things.
For starters, they’d been born to money. Their father’s, sure, but beyond that, their mother had left each of them a hefty trust fund.
Jake had let his sit in the bank. Then he’d wised up and invested it with Travis.
Even now, driving through the night in pursuit of a woman who’d probably love nothing more than to kick him where he lived, remembering how he’d done it made him smile.
He’d cornered his brother the night before he shipped out the first time and handed him a check.
Travis, who’d been just starting up his own financial firm, had looked at the sum, then at Jake. He gave a soft whistle.
“You want me to handle it all?”
“Every dollar.”
“Risk … or no risk?”
Jake’s reply had been a grin. Travis had grinned, too, and the deal was made.
Jake had pretty much forgotten about it after that. When you were busy keeping your ass from getting shot off, money wasn’t much on your mind.
He came home on leave, Travis handed him a statement. That time, Jake was the one who’d whistled.
His seven figures had tripled. God only knew what it had grown to by now, despite the tough economic times.
As for status …
He was the son of a general. That was big, but in Texas, being the son of the man who owned El Sueño was even bigger.
Still, Jake had acquired his own kind of status early on.
At sixteen, he’d been a star high school quarterback. At eighteen, half a dozen top schools had offered him scholarships. At nineteen, pro scouts were already looking at him.
And at twenty, he’d walked away from college and football to enlist in the army, where he’d flown into the heart of battle.
As for his looks …
It was that DNA thing again.
He was tall. Lean. Muscular. His nose had a bump in it, courtesy of a burly defensive lineman, but that didn’t work against him at all.
Women went for the entire package.
His hands tightened on the steering wheel.
He still had the money. The status. The looks …?
He didn’t much care.
He knew his wounds made people uncomfortable. Like tonight. People looked at him, they flinched, they averted their eyes, they showed pity.
Pity was the worst of all.
As for seeing his own face in the mirror every morning—it was still a shock, but not because of vanity. It was a shock because it was a constant reminder of his failure.
“You need to give that up, Captain,” one of the shrinks had told him. “Get a prosthetic eye. Let people—let yourself-—see the real you.”
What reality had to do with popping an artificial eyeball into what was, basically, a hole in his head didn’t make sense even if the shrinks thought it did.
“Have you ever considered that it counteracts the medal you were awarded?” one had said, and Jake had ignored that for the stupid comment it was.
And all of this was pointless to think about, especially—
“Holy hell,” Jake said, and stood on the brakes.
A deer and her yearling stood twenty feet ahead of him, big eyes filled with innocence as they stared at his truck.
He dragged in a breath.
“Go on,” he said. “Get out of the way.”
The animals remained motionless. Then mama flicked her tail and she and the baby ran into the scrub.
Jake started the truck again.
He’d been lucky not to have hit the deer. His fault, entirely. Antelope, deer, coyotes all used the road, especially at night.
His head had been everywhere except where it should have been….
And the glow of Addison McDowell’s taillights was history.
No problem.
She was heading for the Chambers ranch and so was he.
A few minutes later, he bounced over the familiar pothole that signaled the start of Chambers land.
He slowed, took a good look at the gate and saw what he hadn’t seen the first time. It wasn’t locked. Truth was, the thing was barely a gate. Crossbars, posts, a couple of broken hinges. The gate hung open, swaying drunkenly in the breeze, looking more like kindling than anything else.
Jake eased the truck forward, nosed it through the opening, then started up the long gravel drive to the house.
Still no taillights.
If the McDowell woman had already reached the house, what did he do?
Park? Go to the door and knock? Or did he sit in the truck and tap on his horn? He had the feeling turning up, unannounced on her doorstep, might not be the best—
Light blazed through the windshield, blinding him. Jake cursed, flung his arm in front of his face, and for the second time in minutes, stood on the brakes.
The truck came to a hard stop.
What was he looking at? Headlights? The light from a big flashlight? No way could he see past it.
Cautiously, he opened his door.
“Ms. McDowell?”
Nothing. Just the darkness, the silence and the light.
“Addison? Are those your headlights? Turn them off.”
Still nothing. Jake squinted hard. He took a step to the left. The brightest light remained focused on the Tundra but another light followed him.
Headlights and a flashlight. Addison—it had to be her—was using both.
He couldn’t see a thing.
“Hey,” he shouted. “Didn’t you hear me? Turn off those lights.”
Still no response. Jake grunted, moved another few steps from the truck….
The flashlight beam settled on him and held.
The hair on the back of his neck stood up. He’d had enough of being a living target to last him a lifetime.
The Dangerous Jacob Wilde Page 5