Diana Palmer - Date with a Cowboy - Iron Cowboy / In the Arms of the Rancher / At the Texan's Pleasure

She felt him nodding.

“Did she look like you?” she asked.

“She had my coloring. But she had her mother’s hair. She wasn’t pretty, but she made people feel good just being around her. She thought she was ugly. I was always trying to explain to her that beauty isn’t as important as character and personality.”

There was a long, quiet, warm silence.

“Why did you decide to live here?” she asked suddenly.

He hesitated. “It was a business decision,” he replied, withdrawing into himself. “I thought new surroundings might help.”

She pulled back and his arms fell away from her. She felt oddly chilled. “Does it help?”

He searched her eyes quietly. After a minute, the intensity of the look brought a flaming blush to her cheeks and she looked down abruptly.

He laughed softly at her embarrassment. “You’re bashful.”

“I am not. It’s just hot,” she protested, putting a little more distance between them. Her heart was racing and she felt oddly hot. That wouldn’t do at all. She didn’t dare show weakness to the enemy.

“It wasn’t an insult,” he said after a minute. “There’s nothing wrong with being shy.” His eyes narrowed. “Who looks after you, if you get sick? Your boss?”

“Dee’s wonderful, but she’s not responsible for me. I look out for myself.” She glanced at him. “How about you?”

He shrugged. “If it looked like I was dying, Tony the Dancer would probably call somebody if he was around—if he wasn’t on holiday or having days off. My lawyer might send a doctor out, if it was serious and somebody called.”

“But would they take care of you?” she persisted.

“That’s not their job.”

She drew in a long breath. “I know you don’t like me. But maybe we could look out for each other.”

His dark eyebrows lifted. “Be each other’s family, in other words.”

“No ties,” she said at once. “We’d just be there if one of us was sick.”

He seemed to be seriously considering it. “I had flu and almost died last winter,” he said quietly. “It was just after I lost my daughter. If Tony hadn’t come back early from Christmas holidays, I guess I’d have died. It went into pneumonia and I was too sick and weak to get help.”

“Something like that happened to me this year,” she said. “I got sick and I had this horrible pain in my stomach. I stayed in bed for days until I could get up and go back to work. It was probably just the stomach bug that was going around, but I thought, what if it was something serious? I couldn’t even get to the phone.”

He nodded. “I’ve had the same thoughts. Okay. Suppose we do that?”

She smiled. “It’s not such a bad idea, is it?”

“Not bad at all.”

“I would be more amenable to the plan if you’d stop treating me like a bag lady,” she added.

“Stop dressing like one,” he suggested.

She glowered up at him. “I am not dressed like a bag lady.”

“Your socks never match. Your jeans look like they’ve been worn by a grizzly bear. Your T-shirts all have pictures or writing on them.”

“When you’re working, you don’t look all that tidy yourself,” she countered, not comfortable with telling him the truth about her odd apparel, “and I wouldn’t dare ask what you got on your boots to make them smell so bad.”

His eyes began to twinkle. “Want to know? It was,” and he gave her the vernacular for it so wickedly that she blushed.

“You’re a bad man.”

He studied her closely. “If you want to be my family, you have to stop saying unkind things to me. Give a dog a bad name,” he said suggestively.

“I’d have to work on that,” she replied.

He drew in a long breath as he glanced back at the small grave. “Why did you come out here today?”

She smiled sadly. “Today is Father’s Day. I put some new silk flowers on Grandad’s grave. Sometimes the wind blows them away. I wanted to make sure they were still there.”

“I meant to call one of the local florists and get them to come out and put a fresh bouquet on her grave. But I’ve had some business problems lately,” he added without specifying what they were. “I write myself notes about things like that.” He smiled wryly. “Then I misplace the notes.”

“I do that all the time,” she confessed.

He cocked his head, staring at her. “Why can’t you wear things that match?” he asked, noting that she had on mismatched earrings.

She grimaced. It was much too early in their ambiguous relationship to tell him the real reason. She lied instead. “I’m always in a hurry. I just put on whatever comes to hand. Around town, people know I do it and nobody makes fun of me.” She hesitated. “That’s not quite true. When I came here to live with Grandad, some of the local kids made it hard on me.”

“Why?”

“Well, my mother wasn’t exactly pure as the driven snow,” she confessed. “She had affairs with three or four local men, and broke up marriages. The children of those divorces couldn’t get to her, but I was handy.”

She said it matter-of-factly, without blame. He scowled. “You should sound bitter, shouldn’t you?” he queried.

She smiled up at him. “Giving back what you get sounds good, but these days you can end up in jail for fighting at school. I didn’t want to cause Grandad any more pain than Mom already had. You see, he was a college professor, very conservative. What she did embarrassed and humiliated him. One of her lovers was his department head at college. She did it deliberately. She hated Grandad.”

His eyes narrowed. “Can I ask why?”

That was another question she didn’t feel comfortable answering. Her eyes lowered to his tie. “I’m not really sure,” she prevaricated.

He knew she was holding something back. Her body language was blatant. He wondered if she realized it.

Another question presented itself. He frowned. “Just how old are you?”

She looked up, grinning. “I’m not telling.”

He pursed his lips, considering. “You haven’t lost your illusions about life, yet,” he mused, noting the odd flicker of her eyelids when he said it. “I’d say you haven’t hit your mid-twenties yet, but you’re close.”

He’d missed it, but she didn’t let on. “You’re not bad,” she lied.

He stuck his hands in the pockets of his slacks and looked at the sky. “No rain yet. Probably none for another week, the meteorologists say,” he remarked. “We need it badly.”

“I know. We used to have this old guy, Elmer Randall, who worked at the newspaper office helping to run the presses. He was part Comanche. Every time we had a drought, he’d get into his tribal clothes and go out and do ceremonies outside town.”

“Did it work?” he asked with real interest.

She laughed. “One time after he did it, we had a flood. It almost always rained. Nobody could figure it out. He said his grandfather had been a powerful shaman and rode with Quanah Parker.” She shrugged. “People believe what they want to, but I thought he might really have a gift. Certainly, nobody told him to stop.”

“Whatever works,” he agreed. He checked his watch. “I’d better get home. I’m expecting a phone call from Japan.”

“Do you speak the language?”

He laughed. “I try to. But the company I’m merging with has plenty of translators.”

“I’ll bet Japan is an interesting place,” she said with dreamy eyes. “I’ve never been to Asia in my whole life.”

He looked surprised. “I thought everybody traveled these days.”

“We never had the money,” she said simply. “Grandad’s idea of international travel was to buy Fodor’s Guides to the countries that interested him. He spent his spare cash on books, hundreds of books.”