by Diana Palmer
She shrugged. “I had an accident.”
“What sort of accident?”
She glanced out the window as the plane suddenly took off and shot up into the sky. “Your pilot is very good,” she remarked.
“Yes, he is,” he said. “I usually fly myself, but I’m having some issues with my joints,” he added curtly. “And you’re changing the subject.”
Her china-blue eyes met his and she smiled. “Glad you noticed.”
He chuckled, defeated. “Okay. I get the idea. What sort of seafood do you like best?”
“Fried oysters,” she said at once.
He laughed. “I have to confess, that’s mine, too.”
“My dad used to cook them,” she recalled fondly. “It was one of just a handful of things he could cook, but he was good at it. My mother taught us both how to cook.” Her eyes were sad. “I still miss her.”
“I miss my own mother. Nobody else is ever as proud of your accomplishments.”
“Or loves you as much,” she agreed. She sighed. “If she’d died in her bed, or in a wreck, maybe it would have been easier to handle. But falling overboard on a ship,” she added sadly. “You never really know.”
“I like what you did,” he said. “Putting her favorite things in an urn and setting it on the mantel. It’s a novel solution.”
“I’d forgotten that I told you that.”
He cocked his head. “What did she look like?”
“She was beautiful,” she said, her eyes bright with memory. “She had pale blue eyes and jet-black hair, wavy and long, down to her waist in back. She was always laughing.”
He frowned. “Then where do your china-blue eyes come from?”
“From my dad,” she said, laughing. “He was blond, believe it or not.”
“Genetics are fascinating.”
“I know. I might have had blond children, if...well, if I’d married someone with a recessive gene for light eyes and hair...” Her voice trailed off.
“You wanted kids.”
She nodded, her eyes on the clouds drifting by the window. “A forlorn hope. One man who didn’t want children, and another who was one step short of homicide.” She sighed. “I can sure pick ’em.”
“Everybody makes mistakes,” he remarked.
She glanced at him. “Even you?”
He averted his eyes. One big, beautiful hand smoothed over the fabric of his jeans, where he had one leg crossed over the other. “I was young and rich, and it never occurred to me that some women would do anything for money. I got mixed up with what I thought was a poor but honest girl who was being tormented by a boyfriend.” He laughed shortly. “It turned out that the boyfriend was actually her husband and partner in crime. He took some incriminating photos and tried to blackmail me.”
Her eyes widened. “What did you do?”
“I gave him the mailing address of one of the better tabloids.”
“What?” she burst out and laughed.
He grinned. “He was shell-shocked. I also asked for copies that I could frame for my wall at home. He was very unsettled. So was she.”
“You should have given their names to that show that does the segments about especially dumb criminals.”
“They were both young and stupid,” he said simply. “My mother’s attorney was able to convince them that it would be safer to forget the whole thing and provide them with the negatives. Which they did.”
She was listening, fascinated. “Did money change hands?”
He shook his head. “They were too relieved not to be going to prison to think about demanding money.”
“Good grief,” she exclaimed.
“I had my attorney recommend counseling, and I paid for it. The young man is now a rising attorney in a Houston law firm, and the young woman graduated with honors and is now teaching history at a high school in San Antonio.”
She whistled.
“My mother always looked for the good in people, not the bad,” he said. “The counseling was her idea. She kept in touch with both of them while they were going to the psychologist. I learned a lot from her about how to deal with people.”
“How did she die?” she asked softly.
His eyes were wounded before he averted them. “She had a horse that she loved dearly. She was an expert rider. But it had been raining the day she went out on her favorite mount. The horse missed its footing on a hill and rolled on her.” He winced. “She loved Clydesdales.”
“One of the biggest breeds of horses,” she realized.
“Yes. I wanted to have the horse put down. I was grieving, raging, drunk as a skunk. My foreman hid the horse until I calmed down enough to listen to reason. He was a lay minister in his spare time.” He smiled. “He sat me down and explained life to me. Things happen for a reason. We all die. Nobody gets out alive. We have a purpose. When it’s our time, it’s our time. Things like that.” He shrugged. “I finally listened. He was a good man.”
“Is he still your foreman?”
He shook his head. “He was like me. Patriotic. We enlisted together. I came home. He didn’t.”
She winced. “I’m so sorry.”
“So was I.”
She frowned, watching him. “You enlisted after you lost your mother,” she guessed.
He nodded.
“Didn’t your father object?”
His face hardened. “I don’t speak of my father. Not ever.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He drew in a long breath. “It was all a long time ago. Except for the war wounds that ache when it rains, I’m pretty much over it.”
She smiled sadly. “I wish I could say that.” Her hand went involuntarily to her hip.
He saw that. “Painful?”
She nodded.
“Do you have something to take for it?”
“Ibuprofen,” she replied. “But it makes me drowsy, and I’d prefer not to try to eat while I’m sleeping.”
He chuckled. “Idiot. How can you enjoy food when you’re in pain?”
“I don’t have much appetite as a rule anyway.”
“Do you have the ibuprofen in your purse?”
She made a face.
He reached into a compartment beside him and came out with a soft drink. “Take the pill.”
She sighed. “I would, but I don’t dare take it except with food.”
“I forgot.”
“I’ll take the soft drink, though,” she added with a smile. “I’m thirsty.”
He chuckled. “Me, too.” He handed her the can and got another out for himself.
“You don’t drink beer?” she asked, noting that what he chose for himself wasn’t alcoholic.
“I hate alcohol,” he said, and his eyes reflected it.
She wondered at the violence in his tone as he said it and she wondered if he had an alcoholic parent in his background. It couldn’t be his mother; he’d loved her dearly. It had to be the father that he wouldn’t talk about.
Well, after all, she was reticent about her ex-husband and the way he’d treated her. It was too early in their relationship for buried secrets.
“I’m not fond of it myself,” she said belatedly. “I don’t like the taste and it’s not a good idea to take it when I’m on powerful anti-inflammatories. Like drinking battery acid,” she added with an amused smile.
He smiled back. “I get your point.”
“Do you take anti-inflammatories?” she asked.
He nodded. “Very few, though. My injuries weren’t in joints.”
One side of her pretty mouth pulled down. “Mine were. My hip and my thigh. It messed up my knee, too, but not badly enough to need rebuilding.”
He frowned. “It must have been one hell of an injury.”
She thought back to the fall, to the agony
she’d felt until she’d been found and transported to the hospital. Then the endless hours of tests and surgery and recovery, and then more surgery due to complications following the first surgery.
“It was,” she said flatly.
His pale silver eyes narrowed on her face. She looked as if she’d visited hell and come away with memories that wouldn’t die. He knew how that felt. But it disturbed him that someone had deliberately hurt her. He was fairly certain that it had been her second husband, who was now out of jail and after her.
“Did he hit you with something?” Jake asked her abruptly. “To cause those injuries,” he added.
She met his eyes. “No.”
“Then how...?”
She swallowed, hard. “He picked me up and threw me over the side in a parking garage, onto the ground below,” she said finally.
CHAPTER FIVE
JAKE STARED AT her with absolute horror. “He what?” he burst out, enraged.
She shrugged. “He said I deserved it. We’d been to a party and the hostess’s husband danced with me. He was twenty years my senior. Just a very nice man, nothing out of the way. Bailey was livid. We’d been married less than a week, at the time.”
“Did you have him arrested?”
“Nobody saw it,” she said simply. “He was at the hospital every minute, telling everyone how guilty he felt that I’d accidentally fallen and he couldn’t get to me in time.”
“What a piece of work,” he muttered.
She sighed. “He was very good at lying. He could convince people that black was white. I had no comeback. I’d been so crazy about him that I could hardly believe he’d done it. But the feelings I had for him were already long gone, completely gone. He tortured me, in ways I don’t even like remembering. Then after the fall, when I got out of rehab, I was trying to recuperate from the surgery, but that didn’t save me. So I had to have another surgery, to repair the new damage.” Her eyes closed. “I tried leaving once, but he brought me back and made violent threats about what he’d do if I tried it again. I was terrified of him. I knew he meant it. I was so weak and in so much pain that I didn’t have the strength to try again.” She stared down at her hands. “A few months after we married, I smiled at a man in a restaurant who’d been kind enough to pick up the purse I’d accidentally dropped. When we got into the parking lot, Bailey drew back his fist and knocked me winding. But this time there were witnesses. They had to pull him off me,” she added, shivering. “I thought he was going to kill me. The police came. He was arrested and taken to jail. I refused to bail him out. I called my first husband’s attorneys and they handled the divorce.” Her eyes closed. “I’ve been afraid of men ever since.”
“No damned wonder.” He was outraged. “What sort of weasel does that to a woman?” he asked angrily.
“A coward,” she replied simply. “He was afraid of other men. He wouldn’t say a word to someone who made him mad. He’d come home and take it out on me. At least there was finally proof of what he was doing to me. It was such a relief to be able to go to sleep and not worry if I’d live until morning.”
“They should never have let him out of jail,” he bit off.
“He served his time. They had to let him out.” She looked back out the window. “At least I have people watching out for me on the ranch.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, noting his hard face and glittering eyes. “I’ve ruined our dinner before we even got to it.”
His eyes caught hers. “I’m sorry for what he did to you,” he said quietly. “I’m glad you told me the truth.”
She smiled sadly. “I don’t lie well. I was raised to believe that lies are evil.”
He chuckled. “I was raised that way, too, but there are times when lying is an absolute virtue. I mean, if a woman asks you if a dress makes her look fat, and it really does...”
She burst out laughing. “I guess that would be one of those times when lying is the right choice.”
“Absolutely.” His eyes twinkled. “I like hearing you laugh.”
She flushed. “I don’t do it much anymore.”
“You will when you taste this seafood. We’re coming into the airport at Galveston right now, in fact,” he said, indicating the view in the window as the pilot turned toward the landing strip.
“Fried oysters,” she said, almost dreamily.
“Not to mention the best hush puppies in three states.”
“I can’t wait!”
He chuckled. “Me, too.”
* * *
THE RESTAURANT WAS a tiny little place in a strip mall. A stretch limo had been waiting for them at the landing strip. The driver let them out at the front door and went off to park so he could settle in with a good book until he was paged.
“I love this,” Ida remarked, her eyes on the fishnets and small anchors and other nautical stuff that adorned the walls.
“So do I. It’s one of my favorite restaurants. Not a lot of people know about it, either, so it’s not overcrowded.”
“I like that best of all,” she remarked as the waitress came to lead them to a table in a corner.
She took their order for drinks, which was coffee, and provided menus while she went to get the coffee.
“Decisions, decisions,” she said, shaking her head as she read down the menu.
“Oysters,” he reminded her with a chuckle.
She sighed. “Yes. Oysters. But there’s so much more!”
He watched her enthusing over the menu with pleasure. It was such a simple thing to bring that smile to her lovely face. He liked the woman he was getting to know. He hoped that he wasn’t being taken in by her charm. It was hard for him to trust people. She really knew very little about his own background, although there were still a few people in Catelow who had known his father. His face hardened just at the memory. He’d never forgiven his father for what had happened. He was certain that he never would.
Ida wouldn’t understand how he felt. Her parents had been, apparently, very much in love with each other and happy together. His earliest memories were of violent arguments that became physical. Eventually they became tragically physical. He knew more about domestic abuse than she realized. But he didn’t trust her enough to tell her. Not yet. He kept secrets.
She peered over the menu and saw the anger and hurt in his expression before he could wipe them away.
“Have I said something wrong?” she asked at once, assuming that if he was troubled, she’d caused it.
What a hell of a life she’d had, he thought. “It’s nothing to do with you,” he said gently. “Bad memories.”
“Oh.” She smiled faintly. “I have those, too.”
“Where is he now? Your ex-husband.”
Her face clouded. “He’s in Denver. My attorneys are having him watched. Just in case.”
“You mean, just in case he comes after you,” he guessed.
She sighed. “Something like that.”
“Has he spoken to you?”
“If you can call threats speaking,” she conceded. “He thinks that because I have so much money, he’s entitled to a share of it.”
“After what he did to you?” he asked, startled.
“Oh, in his mind, it was all my fault,” she replied. “I caused him to lose his temper by flirting with other men.” She looked at him evenly. “I never did it deliberately in those days. I was too afraid of Bailey. I only do it now to keep men from coming too close. It usually works.”
“Usually.” He smiled.
“There’s always the rare exception, like that man at the party Pam Simpson had for Mina Michaels, before she married Cort Grier,” she added. She grimaced. “I thought it was safe to flirt with him, because he was married. His poor wife! She was in tears and I felt so miserable about it. I didn’t know what to say to her, how to explai
n what I’d done. I truly could have kicked her husband,” she added coldly.
“You created a reputation for yourself,” he reminded her. “It’s hard for people not to take you at face value.”
“I was afraid,” she said heavily. “So afraid that if I’d find someone else, that I’d be tempted again. There was a journalist, after I divorced Bailey,” she recalled, not noticing the suddenly stiff posture of the man across from her. “He was kind and sweet, but he liked danger. He was drawn to combat zones, and he said he could never settle to a nine-to-five job.” She lowered her eyes. “I ran. I was very attracted to him, but I’d lost the ability to judge character and I couldn’t trust my own feelings.” She looked up. “He was killed in one of the incursions overseas, following a story for his magazine. So maybe it was just as well, the way things worked out.”
He fingered his hot coffee cup without looking at her. He’d felt a skirl of jealousy. He wasn’t happy about it.
“You went around with Cort Grier before he got involved with Mina.”
She laughed. “Yes. He wasn’t what I expected at all. He was nice. He didn’t even make a pass at me. We just sat and talked about life and played chess occasionally.”
Both eyebrows arched.
She saw that. “Yes, I know, I fall into bed with every man who asks, and Cort was a known playboy...”
“I didn’t mean to be insulting,” he said. “Mina’s still a sore spot with me.” He grimaced and sipped coffee. “I kept hoping she wasn’t serious about him. She liked me, but not in the way I wanted her to. She was the most unique woman I’d ever known.”
“She really is unique,” she said, fighting down waves of jealousy. He hadn’t gotten over Mina at all, and she’d better remember it. “I read about some of her exploits. I hope Cort’s going to be able to keep her close to home.”
He chuckled. “The baby’s doing that,” he said. “She really doesn’t want to go crawling through jungles with a child to raise. So her commandos go out on missions and come back and tell her all about them.” He shook his head. “I met them at the christening. They’re a great bunch. Most have families of their own.”