by Diana Palmer
Emmett put a hand over his mouth, dropped his food, and ran from the room.
“No guts,” Guy said disgustedly, looking after him.
“Disgraceful.” Polk nodded.
“Whatever are we going to do about him?” Amy sighed.
“You did it last time,” Tansy reminded them while Kit sat, dumbfounded. “Bringing that…that ‘not alive’ thing in here on a dustpan to show him.”
“Yeah,” Guy chuckled. “He didn’t even make it to the bathroom that time!”
“You ought to see him at the rodeo if there’s any blood,” Amy piped in. “He goes green and white, all mixed up, and his stomach churns.”
“Except if it’s him that’s bleeding,” Guy pondered. “Weird, ain’t it? Never bothers him if it’s his own blood. And if it’s ours, and an emergency, he’s never sick. But sometimes you can turn him green real easy if you talk about something yucky.”
“What a terrible way to treat your poor father,” Tansy chided them. But her eyes were twinkling.
When Emmett came back, his eyes were glittering with imminent retribution.
“Great barbecue, Dad. We’re going in to watch that new survival show on the educational channel, okay?” Guy blabbered.
He and the others murmured excuses and ran for it.
“Little monsters!” he called after them. “I’ll get you for this!”
“Why do you let them do it to you?” Tansy asked. “You know it’s terminal to show weakness to children.”
“Well, look who started it off,” he said, narrowing his eyes at Tansy.
“Couldn’t resist it,” she sputtered. “You are a case, Emmett.”
He picked up his fork and forced himself to eat a bite of barbecue. Amazingly it stayed down.
Kit listened to the conversation without taking part in it. This man was one of the more interesting people she’d ever met. She wondered what was going to become of him.
Logan Deverell was sitting on the doorstep of the Lassiter Detective Agency the minute it opened the next morning.
“I want to see Kit,” he told Dane.
Dane lifted both eyebrows. “You can’t. She’s out of town running your mother to the ground.”
“Where out of town?”
“San Antonio.”
“Oh, no! Why in God’s name did you let her go there?”
Dane didn’t move. “It’s only your cousin, Logan.”
“No, he isn’t only my cousin, he’s got these three pint-sized assassins and they hate women! They’ll burn her at the stake. And if they don’t, Emmett will have her in front of a minister…. I’ve got to get out there and save her!”
He was gone before the last word hit the air, with a shell-shocked Dane looking after him. Tess came to stand beside him, staring toward the closed door.
“Logan?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Where’d he go?”
“To San Antonio to save Kit from Emmett.”
She turned and looked up at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“It seems that Emmett is in a perpetual state of readiness to marry the first available woman, but he can’t get her past his three kids. Logan’s gone to the rescue.”
“I thought he wanted to find Tansy.”
“We did. She’s staying with Emmett.”
“And so is Kit, because she phoned last night with some story about being hijacked by white Indians and narrowly escaping being burned at the stake.”
He smiled down at her. After a minute, he bent and kissed her with slow, lingering warmth. “I need a very strong cup of black coffee, and then you can tell me that again. Join me?”
She looped her arm through his. “I’d be delighted.”
The thunderous knocking at the front door woke Kit, who’d overslept from sheer exhaustion. She and Tansy and Emmett had been up very late. Emmett had serenaded her. His voice grated like a nail file, but he did play the guitar quite well and she enjoyed listening to him. Then they talked about rodeo—which was the passion of his life—and about his plans for the future. They didn’t talk a lot about the kids, who were carefully concealed behind curtains and under chairs listening. They’d been told three times to go to bed, but they never paid any attention to their father. Anyway, they were bent on finding out everyone’s opinion of them.
The knocking stopped, but it was followed by a familiar bellow.
“Where is she?” Logan demanded.
“What a hell of a nerve, practically breaking into my house at this ungodly hour!” Emmett muttered. “Quiet down or I’ll turn those kids loose on you!”
“Oh, God, not that, anything but that!” Logan groaned.
There were muffled giggles down the hall.
“Anyway, Tansy’s asleep. Or she was, until you tried to knock the house down around our ears.”
“I’m not looking for Tansy. Where’s Kit?”
Kit’s heart leaped in her chest. She couldn’t believe that he’d come all this way for her! Had he seen Tess Lassiter and become concerned when he knew she was out here with the volatile San Antonio Deverells? Had he missed her?
She sat up in bed, just in time for Logan to throw open the door and confront her. She was dressed in the concealing flannel gown Tansy had loaned her.
“So there you are!” he growled.
“My, what a pretty picture.” Emmett sighed as he saw her. “Darlin’, you would look lovely propped up in my bed like that….”
“Out!” Logan shoved his cousin unceremoniously out the door and slammed it. “You lecher! She’s only a child!”
“I’m going to marry her…” came through the door.
“Over my dead and decaying corpse!”
There was a muttering sound, like gagging, and quickly retreating footsteps.
“So much for him,” Logan said with satisfaction. He stared at Kit for a long moment. “You can’t marry him. It isn’t love. He just likes women. There are so few who can get past those kids, he’ll gladly latch onto anyone they like.”
“I’m not blind,” she said primly, folding her slender hands in her lap. “Why are you here? I thought you wanted me to find Tansy. I did.”
“I know that. But you had no business moving in with the Family from Hell.”
“What a way to talk about your own cousins!”
“Everybody knows about them. Nobody will even come near the place for fear of disappearing in the brush! Emmett lets those kids do anything they want to since his wife left. He doesn’t care enough to make the barest attempt at control. He’s too busy riding in rodeos to prove he’s still a man, and getting his body broken to bits in the process! He can’t get over the fact that his ex-wife left him.”
Kit began to see the carefree Emmett in a new light, and he didn’t seem quite so carefree anymore.
“Poor man,” she said quietly.
“Poor man, the devil. He isn’t your problem. Go home!”
Her eyebrows arched defiantly. “I don’t work for you anymore. You can’t tell me to walk to the corner!”
“No? Let me show you what I can get you to do, Miss Morris,” he said, and started toward her.
Chapter Four
Kit froze. She’d never been alone in this kind of intimate setting with Logan, not even when she’d had to accompany him out of the country and they’d stayed in hotel suites together. Then, it had been all business and he’d never noticed her, no matter how she dressed or looked.
But now, the gown she was wearing might have been transparent as his dark eyes slid over the bodice and seemed to see right underneath it. He had a sophistication that was vaguely alarming. A woman’s body was no mystery to him. She’d seen enough women come and go in his life in the past three years to know that he was experienced.
Her fingers grasped the cover and drew it up sharply to cover her breasts. She flushed as he paused by the bed and looked down at her.
Something changed in his face. He lifted one bushy eyebrow and deliberately let his eye
s fall on her softly parted mouth.
He’d never wondered what it would feel like to taste Miss Morris’s pert little mouth. But suddenly, he wanted the knowledge with a longing that corded his powerful body. Betsy was pushed to the back of his mind quite suddenly while he grappled with unbelievable desire for his ex-secretary.
“Will you please get out of here?” she squeaked.
He made an odd, hesitant movement and sat down on the bed beside her. His big hand, half the size of a dinner plate, folded around both of hers and detached them from their death grip on the coverlet.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked.
It was a tone he’d never used with her, a deep, husky pitch that was like warm velvet. She looked into his eyes closer than she’d ever seen them and became lost in their dark brown depths.
She wasn’t breathing quite naturally. Neither was he, if the rise and fall of his broad chest under its charcoal-gray suit and white shirt was any indication. He smelled of some exotic cologne that appealed to her senses, and he was clean-shaven. The elegant Mr. Deverell was never disheveled or less than immaculate. Kit couldn’t imagine him wearing jeans and chambray shirts as Emmett did.
“Answer me, Kit.”
That was new, too—her name on his lips. It was always Morris this, Morris that. She searched his eyes helplessly. “I’m not afraid of you,” she said absently.
Her vulnerability had a devastating effect on him. Their fights had become legend in the office building where he worked. Kit had a fiery temper and a stubborn nature, and he enjoyed the explosions that resulted from his prodding of both.
But she wasn’t fighting now. She was sitting in his grasp like some exotic kitten, her big blue eyes wide and afraid and yet…almost welcoming. She had a beautiful complexion, he thought, and a mouth that looked as if it would feel like warm silk.
His body tautened with longing. He wasn’t even thinking of consequences or other commitments as he captured her face in his big, warm hands and slowly bent to her upturned mouth.
She gasped as she felt his breath, coffee and mint scented, and the tentative brush of his mouth on her parted lips.
He felt her body jerk instinctively. His nose drew against her own. All he could see, think, breathe was the shape of her mouth under his. “I won’t hurt you,” he whispered, moving closer. “I can be gentle, even if I’ve never given you cause to believe it.”
She felt his mouth touching hers, and it was like electricity. So many dreams, and here was the incredible, pulsing reality of his mouth against her own, his body so near that she could feel its heat and strength. She was floating, drowning.
She heard his breath catch, a tiny burst of sound that she knew was going to be a prelude to something volcanic and utterly destructive. And even as she yearned hopelessly for his touch, she knew that she couldn’t give in to this madness. She didn’t dare let him…!
She froze. “What about Betsy?” she said quickly.
His hands tightened on her head and his head lifted. His dazed eyes stared into hers. “What?”
“Don’t forget Betsy!” she managed unsteadily, fighting his pull on her starved senses. “Remember Betsy, Mr. Deverell.”
Mr. Deverell. He was Kit’s boss and Betsy’s would-be lover. He wondered how he could have forgotten that. His heavy brows met as his head lifted and Kit’s pale face suddenly came into stark focus and he regained his lost wits.
Abruptly he let her go and stood up, turning his back while he struggled with unfamiliar feelings. He could feel his heart beating against his ribs, feel the tautness of his body with what he recognized dimly was desire. What was wrong with him? He didn’t want Kit! He’d fired her. Betsy was warm and soft and loving, and her body promised heaven if he could ever maneuver her into bed. Kit was young and untried, very probably she’d never slept with anyone. God! he thought, and his body reacted sharply to the thought.
Kit pulled the covers back over her and averted her face. “I’d like to get dressed, if you don’t mind,” she said hesitantly.
“What? Oh. Certainly.” He went out the door without a protest, and Kit thanked God for small miracles.
She couldn’t quite believe what had almost happened. She had to be very careful from now on. Logan had made his opinion of Betsy quite clear, along with his commitment to the woman. Why he’d tried to kiss her, she couldn’t comprehend. All she knew was that she mustn’t, for her own sake, ever let him get close enough to try again.
Unrequited love was something she’d lived with for three long years. She knew Betsy and she didn’t want Logan to fall victim to the woman, but there had to be another way to stop it. She really couldn’t allow herself to become embroiled in a hopeless affair with him, even to save him from financial ruin. She’d certainly lose him that way. And when he’d had his fill of Kit’s inexperience, probably Betsy’s sophistication would snare him for sure. The thought was depressing, but it had to be faced. She couldn’t let herself dream about him anymore. She had to get used to being without him in her life, in any capacity.
She got dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, and went to the dining room where the rest of the family, Logan included, was sitting down to an enormous breakfast.
“Can he cook, or can’t he?” Tansy enthused over the biscuits. “Emmett, you’ve missed your real vocation. God meant you to be a chef.”
“I’d get dishpan hands.” He chuckled. He glared at Logan. “That was a low blow, what you did in the hall.”
Logan didn’t look up from his scrambled eggs. “Yes, it was. I’ll kill myself if you like.”
Emmett didn’t believe he’d heard that from his staid cousin, so he ignored it.
Kit didn’t. Logan didn’t sound like himself. She stared at him until he lifted his head, and what she saw in his eyes then made her blush furiously and look away.
Logan felt his fingers tremble on his fork. Damn it, what was happening to him? Only this morning, he’d been in complete control of his life. Or had he? He hadn’t phoned Betsy to say he was leaving for San Antonio, or offered to bring her with him. He hadn’t even phoned the office to tell them where he was. Chris would be dragged in to sub for him, which would make his brother furious. And why had he come dashing out here in the first place? To save Kit from Emmett.
That threat, at least, certainly seemed real enough. Emmett stared at her dreamily and kept making veiled references to how well he could provide for a new wife. The kids wanted to take her hunting with them, he added, which was a real honor.
“No, thanks.” She chuckled. “I’d look sad with arrows sticking out all over me.”
“Oh, none of that,” Emmett protested. “They hunt with those electronic spotting guns. Toys, you know. I wouldn’t dream of turning them loose with real bullets!”
“Did you know that if you get close enough with a radio signal you can ignite a dynamite cap?” Polk asked conversationally, which caused his father to choke on his biscuit.
“Out!” Tansy told the three, who had finished eating, while she hit Emmett on the back to dislodge the biscuit.
“I didn’t say we’d ever done it,” Polk muttered defensively. “Anyway, we couldn’t get the man to sell us any dynamite.”
“Oh, my God!” Emmett wailed.
“Wouldn’t you like to enlist them in the Marine Corps?” Logan suggested. “You could lie about their ages.”
“You won’t feel like that when you have kids of your own,” came the droll reply. “Flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood…”
“Speaking of blood, they’re after the cat again,” Tansy remarked.
Emmett muttered something violent and went to yell out the window. When he came back, he looked even older.
“I can’t stand it. Please, for God’s sake, marry me!” he pleaded with Kit, dropping to his knees by her chair and draping one long, muscular arm over her lap. “I’ll reform. I’ll stay home and cook barbecued ribs and breakfast and manage old man Regan’s ranch. Anything. Just save me from th
ose kids!”
Kit doubled over laughing. She just shook her head. “Thank you for the offer, but I really can’t. I have to find missing people.”
He looked up at her thoughtfully, his lips pursed, one eye narrowed. “Find people, do you? Okay. How are you at the reverse? Couldn’t you hide me where those kids can’t find me?”
“Why, you craven coward,” Tansy chided. “Get off your knees and act like a proper father.”
“I did try, Tansy,” he said good-naturedly as he got gracefully to his feet. “But just as I broke the switch, one yelled to distract me, the second one positioned himself behind my knees and the third one knocked me over the second one into the river. I haven’t really tried to hit one of them since.”
“You don’t have to hit them,” Tansy continued, unabashed. “You could discipline them in other ways. Take away their television privileges.”
He stared at her. “We don’t have a television. Those kids threw a bowling ball through it. Thank God we have a good volunteer fire department here.”
“Emmett, you’re not the man I remember,” Logan said, shaking his head.
“I’m not sure I ever was. Things have gone from bad to worse since she left me,” he said, obviously referring to his ex-wife. “Since I got custody, no sane woman will have me. Maybe I could lock the kids up until I got one to the altar. Too late for you, of course,” he said with a wistful smile in Kit’s direction. “It’s got to be a woman who doesn’t know they exist until we’re legally married!”
“Buffaloed by three children,” Logan scoffed. “Imagine that.”
“You try dealing with them,” Emmett dared.
“Not me. I’m on the first plane to Houston this afternoon.”
Emmett put down his coffee cup. “Why not stay until tomorrow?”
“Yes, why not?” Tansy seconded. “You and I get no time together these days, Logan. You’re either too busy making money or traveling around the world or escorting that taffy-brained woman friend of yours around town.”
He glared at her. “Let’s leave Betsy out of this, shall we?”
“Suit yourself,” Tansy replied. “You could fly back tomorrow with me. I can’t stay around much longer. I’m only filling in for the housekeeper.”