The Cowgirl's Little Secret

“Is he mine?” He was pleased his voice remained calm and sounded reasonable. Inside he was a seething cauldron of anger.

CJ stopped squirming, as if he sensed something momentous about to happen. His eyes jittered between his mum and Cord.

“I …” Jolie looked away. “Cord … you don’t understand.”

“No. I guess I don’t. Since you didn’t give me a chance. Or explain. But you didn’t answer my question. He is mine, isn’t he?”

Anger swirled, cramping his gut. His eyes stayed fixed on Jolie, and even though they burned, he didn’t blink. How could she do this to him? Did she hate him that damned much?

When he’d caught her crying over him in the hospital, he’d hoped for a second chance, but she’d obviously wiped the slate clean and eradicated him completely. His heart turned to granite when he realized what Jolie had done—and had done deliberately. If he said a word, his face would crack, shattering just like his heart was doing. But he had to know.

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

* * *

The Cowgirl’s Little Secret

is part of the Red Dirt Royalty series:

These Oklahoma millionaires work hard and play harder.

The Cowgirl’s Little Secret

Silver James

SILVER JAMES likes walks on the wild side, and coffee. Okay. She loves coffee. Warning: her muse, Iffy, runs with scissors. A cowgirl at heart, she’s also been an army officer’s wife and mum and has worked in the legal field, fire service and law enforcement. Now retired from the real world, she lives in Oklahoma and spends her days writing with the assistance of her two Newfoundland dogs, the cat who rules them all and the myriad characters living in her imagination. She loves interacting with readers on her blog, Twitter and Facebook. Find her at www.silverjames.com.

To my family and friends for not laughing when I talk out loud to the characters living in my head. To my readers, who bring joy and enthusiasm into my world and keep me at the keyboard day in and day out. To the fantastic Harlequin folks who give great edits, support and covers. All y’all are the best!

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

One

Cordell Barron was always in control—of his life, Barron Oil and Gas Exploration, everything that made up his world. Except for now. At the moment, Cord’s world was crashing down around his ears and his life seemed to be spinning out of control.

He stared at his hands, curled so tightly around the steering wheel that his knuckles were white. Jolie is home. Stay away from her. The words, spoken just over a month ago by her father, were seared into Cord’s memory. Like the woman.

Jolene Davis. Juliet to his Romeo—right down to their feuding families. Cord had walked away from her, not once but twice, if their hookup for “old time’s sake” five years ago counted. Technically, she’d walked away the second time—before he could. Turnabout was fair play and all that crap. That was what he’d told himself at the time. He hadn’t wanted to admit how much it hurt—waking up hungover to find her gone, the sheets still smelling of her sweet mimosa scent. Even now, all these years later, he hated spring when the mimosa trees bloomed.

Jerking his thoughts back to the present, he stared out the windshield of his crew-cab pickup. His fingers drummed a nervous tattoo on the console. He should call his brother Cash. Technically, they were half brothers, but Cord was head of Barron Security. He could find out everything about Jolie in an hour. Her phone number. Where she lived. Worked. Boyfriend’s name. His heart thudded at the thought she might have one—or worse, a husband. He pounded the heel of his fist on the console, making his phone jump onto the passenger seat. Cord had no right to dictate anything about Jolie’s life, but the thought of her in another man’s arms, accepting his kisses, sharing his bed...

What was wrong with him? He was supposedly the easygoing Barron, the good ole boy comedian. He didn’t get angry. He didn’t slam his fist into inanimate objects—especially when it would hurt like hell. Except when Jolie was around. He was always off balance where she was concerned, like a pinball game with lights flashing and bells clanging as a huge TILT strobed in front of his eyes. Yeah, that definitely summed up their relationship. They’d been headed for a big, fat game over from the moment he first laid eyes on her.

The tune of “Take This Job and Shove It” rang out from his phone, sending him scrambling to retrieve it. He unclenched his fist and answered with a terse “What?”

“Hey, cuz, catch you at a bad time?”

Cord clamped down on his emotions, shifting into business mode to talk to his cousin Cooper Tate, operations manager of BarEx, the Barrons’ energy company. “Funny, Coop.”

“Just as I suspected, we lost the drill bit down the hole.” Annoyance and something akin to chagrin colored Cooper’s voice. “The crew has to fish it out. You gonna get outta the truck and come up or what?”

Glaring through the windshield at the group of men standing around on the floor of the drilling rig, Cord replied, “Or what, smart-ass?”

“Will you just get your butt up here? We need to talk.”

A wicked dust devil of red dirt kicked up and spun across the bare expanse of the well site. Rather than cooling the air, the wind seared everything in its path like a blast from a furnace. The block and tackle attached to the crown of the derrick creaked and swung in a desultory arc, and a length of drilling pipe gripped in the hoist tongs swayed with a gust.

Inured to the hot August weather, Cord shoved his phone into the hip pocket of his jeans, snagged his hard hat from the passenger seat and climbed out of the white truck bearing the BarEx emblem on its doors. The metal steps leading from the ground to the drilling floor rang beneath Cord’s boots. Heat waves shimmering around him, Cord gripped the steel handrail during a quick flash of vertigo. His hand felt scorched as he released the rail and climbed again.

On the rig floor, Cooper introduced him to the tool pusher. “Cord, Tom Bradley, best damn rig manager we have.”

Cord shook hands with the older man, who then turned to spit tobacco juice before saying, “Damn rig sure seems to be jinxed, boss. Y’all think there’s somethin’ to the problems we’ve been having?”

Taking off his hard hat for a moment to brush fingers through his hair, Cooper finally spoke. “I... Maybe. Too many injuries. Too many delays. We should be down to oil sand by now but we aren’t even close. Seems as if something happens every other day.”

His cousin took a long, controlled breath. Coop was rock solid, and if he was nervous about the situation, then something was definitely wrong. Cord waited for the other man to continue.

“Remember how much trouble we had acquiring the rights to drill this one?”

“Yeah.” Cord didn’t like where Cooper was probably headed.

“We had a helluva bidding war with Davis Petroleum.” Coop inhaled again. “Do you think they might be behind our troubles?”

His gut cramped. Coop had gone right where Cord suspected. J. Rand Davis was a rabid competitor. The man had a habit of interfering in Barron family business. Not to mention he was Jolie’s father.

“No,” Cord replied after some consideration. “I don’t think so. Ah, hell, Cooper. I have no frickin’ idea if the man would stoop that low or not.” He swallowed the flood of saliva in his mouth and jerked his cousin a few steps away. Lowering his voice, he said, “Jolie’s back.”

Not everyone in the family knew about the fiasco that had been Cord and Jolie in college. That drunken night when, as a senior at the University of Oklahoma, Cord had run into her at a fraternity party and the bright-eyed freshman, well on her way to a massive hangover, had fallen into his lap, kissed him and cussed him out for never asking her out in high school. Learning she’d wanted him like he’d wanted her had felt like a kick in the gut from a twelve-hundred-pound Brahman bull.

But Cooper was Cord’s age, a fraternity brother and friend. He’d covered for them when Cord couldn’t stay away from the daughter of his father’s biggest rival. And Coop had been the one to act as designated driver the night Cord had broken up with Jolie because his father, Cyrus Barron, had dictated that his second son walk away from the one girl he’d ever loved. Coward that he was, Cord had done as his father decreed and then proceeded to get and stay drunk for a week.

“Ah, hell, cuz. That sucks.”

And didn’t that just sum it up in a nutshell. “Yeah. It does.”

Coop turned back to the tool pusher. Tuning out the continuing discussion, Cord studied the rig with a practiced eye. The workers stood around in groups, hands shoved into jeans’ pockets, hard hats pushed back on their heads, clothes covered in drilling mud and grease while they waited for orders. The derrick hand was camped out on the monkey board—the platform at the top of the derrick. His job at the moment was to trip pipe—adding or subtracting lengths during the drilling process. Cord recognized the guy and waved, getting a yell in response.

“Yo, big boss! Let’s get the damn bit fished out so we can get back to work.”

The man had a point. More talk wouldn’t get the rig back to drilling for oil. Cord turned to the knot of men still arguing outside the doghouse.

“Billy’s right. We have to get that bit out before we can do anything.”

At Cord’s order, the crew snapped to work. The heavy, burned-oil smell of diesel mixed with the chemical tang of drilling mud. Cord grinned. He felt alive out here on the rig. These guys were real. Hard men in a hard industry. He’d started as a roughneck, back in college, learning the business literally from the ground up. If things had been different, he could have happily worked the oil patch and not missed the Barron lifestyle.

Maybe.

He returned to the mind space he alternately avoided and spent way too much time in lately—thoughts of Jolie. Back when they were younger, he’d been short of options. Stay with her and fight to work in his chosen profession or say goodbye and have his career guaranteed and filled with perks. His father had threatened that Cord would never work in the oil business if he disobeyed him. And as kids, the Barron boys knew their old man didn’t make empty threats. No rival company would hire him, according to his father, and he’d believed it. In hindsight, things might have been different, but he’d been too immature and spoiled at the time to test his father’s decree.

With the workers settling into a well-rehearsed routine, Cord turned to enter the doghouse. A panicked shout halted him in his tracks.

He spun around and swore time warped into slow motion.

A chain snapped from the stand of pipe just above the drilling hole. One end whipped out, catching one of the roughnecks across his chest. The man fell to the deck as his coworkers ducked. A section of pipe swung wildly from the tongs at the top of the derrick. Up on the monkey board, Billy scrambled to control the block and tackle. Men scattered amid the grinding clash of steel on iron and the wet smack of metal meeting flesh.

Cord tracked the arcs of both the chain and the falling pipe. Cooper stood squarely in the path of both. Acting completely on instinct, Cord lunged toward his cousin. Shoulder lowered like a linebacker, he caught Coop in the middle of the back, toppling the other man off the edge of the drilling floor. Arms flailing, Cooper hit the dirt twenty feet below. Cord had no time for regrets or to worry about how bad Cooper was hurt. The loose pipe crashed into his back, driving him to his knees, where the end of the flailing chain clipped him around the top of his rib cage. As his head smacked the steel flooring, he had time for one thought before succumbing to darkness.

Damn. This is gonna hurt when I wake up.

* * *

Jolie Davis stared at the empty whiteboard filling an entire wall of the intake section of University Hospital’s Trauma One. She was bored out of her skull. And she was pulling a double shift.

When she moved back to Oklahoma City, she’d planned to get out of the ER, but then University had offered her a big salary and a humongous sign-on bonus. She’d jumped at the opportunity to prove to her dad she could take care of herself. And CJ. It was bad enough her father had bought her a house and hired a nanny. He’d take over her entire life if she didn’t fight him every inch of the way. That was his modus operandi. The man was a type A personality and she was his only child, which made CJ his only grandson. To say J. Rand Davis was a little overprotective was like calling the Grand Canyon a ditch.

Midweek was a slow time for the ER. Usually. But this was Oklahoma. A late-season thunderstorm could blow up and wreak havoc. Or there could be a big wreck on one of the major interstates crisscrossing the Oklahoma City metroplex. Tinker Air Force Base and Will Rogers World Airport meant airplanes. Lots of them. They could... Not that she really wished ill on anyone, but when things were slow, she had way too much time to think.

Every time the front doors slithered open, she could see the monolithic Barron Tower arrowing up into the hot blue Oklahoma sky. Cord’s office was there. No. She would not think about him. That part of her life was over. She was better off without him.

The thought squeezed her chest as tight as Scarlett O’Hara’s corset. Jolie remembered to inhale when white dots sparkled in her vision. Thoughts of Cord always did this to her. Everyone told her to live her life. How sad was it she only wanted to live that life with him? Despite everything. Because of everything. But there was a zero percent chance of that happening. The imaginary corset cinched even tighter as guilt washed over her. He’d never forgive her for what she’d done.

Jolie rolled her head from shoulder to shoulder, and then stretched. Maybe she’d go wash the empty whiteboard. Again. Whirling the desk chair around, her legs collided with a smiling man. Dr. Perry, attending surgeon on duty and head of Trauma One. She squeaked, her heart pounding. “Dang! Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

Absently rubbing his knee where she’d banged the chair into him, Dr. Perry chuckled. “I didn’t think I was. I’m headed to the cafeteria. Want me to bring you something back? You know what it’s like in the ER. We eat when we—” The doctor tilted his head as if listening to something she couldn’t hear.

Sirens. So much for a quiet afternoon. She did her best to hide her elation at being busy.

After a couple hours, things had settled back down. A med tech had his hip propped on Jolie’s desk and was teasing her while she sipped the mocha frappuccino he’d brought to bribe her to go out with him.

“Do you like kids?” She knew how to nip his interest in the bud.

“They’re cute in the petting zoo.”

Jolie rolled her eyes. “I’m not talking about baby goats.”

“Neither am I.” His eyes twinkled, though he managed to keep a straight face. The theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean filled the air and he dug his cell phone out of his scrubs. With a wave and a wink, he disappeared around the corner.

Leaning back in her chair, Jolie exhaled. So far, they’d dealt with a suspect bitten by a police dog, a teenage girl who’d twisted her ankle during a fast-pitch softball game and a guy who’d tried to amputate his thumb with a chain saw. The cops had flirted with her, the softball player’s parents had been upset the girl might miss the rest of the tournament and Chain Saw Guy’s wife had yelled at him for being stupid. Jolie sort of had to agree with that assessment.

Just then, the statewide emergency network radio squawked. Dr. Perry appeared out of nowhere and snagged the microphone before she could. He acknowledged the call and put it on loudspeaker without missing a beat. Jolie took triage notes while he questioned the EMT on the other end.

An accident on a drilling rig. Three patients. The most critical would be arriving by the MedFlight helicopter currently being dispatched. Jolie activated a second chopper to bring in the second patient, a man who’d fallen twenty feet.

Trauma One looked like an anthill that had been kicked. Scurrying people appeared from nowhere, everyone intent on preparing the ER. Jolie kept track of the trauma clock—the indefinable golden hour providing the best odds for full recovery.

The electronic exit doors whooshed open and closed but she heard it—the whap-whap-whap of helicopter blades. The radio crackled. She breathed—and it seemed as if Trauma One breathed with her as the pilot’s voice ghosted from the speaker.

“MedFlight One to base.”

She cleared her throat before keying the microphone. “This is base. Go ahead, Med One.” Jolie wrote on the whiteboard as the flight nurse gave her the rundown on the patient’s life-threatening injuries while the chopper landed.

“Roger that, Med One.”

Medical personnel scrambled to the helipad, returning quickly with the first victim. As Jolie fell into step beside the gurney, she glanced over and saw the patient’s face. Then faltered and tripped. One of the interns bumped into her, but kept her from going down with a steadying hand under her elbow. She murmured apologies and trotted to catch up.

This wasn’t happening. That was not Cordell Barron on that gurney. Oh, God, it couldn’t be.

Two

Instinct kept her making notes as her conscious brain froze. One word kept screaming through her mind. No. No, no, no, no, no turned into a litany. This was so wrong. Things weren’t supposed to end this way.

The flight nurse passed Cord’s driver’s license to her and Jolie accepted it with numb fingers. “Patient’s ID says his name is Cordell Barron. Thirty-three years old. Wonder if he’s one of the Barrons?”

Jolie nodded mutely. Oh, yeah. Cord was definitely one of them. Her fingers shook as she tried to type in information on the computer pad.

The gurney was wheeled into the trauma bay but she stopped at the edge of the curtain. She had to call his next of kin. It was her job. That would be his father. Cyrus Barron. The man who’d ruined her life. She couldn’t do it, couldn’t speak to that man for her life. Or Cord’s.

The steady beeping of the monitors switched to a sharp alarm. He was crashing. Jolie forgot everything but saving the life of the only man she’d ever loved. Reflexes honed by five years working trauma kicked in. She passed off the pad to another nurse, pulled on latex gloves and waded into the mix.

Thirty nerve-wracking minutes later, Dr. Perry and the trauma surgical team finally stabilized Cord and whisked him off to the operating room. Jolie watched the elevator doors close behind the gurney before she turned back to the ER bay where they’d worked so feverishly to save his life. Her knees wobbled, and she had to lean against the wall to stay upright. Her night wasn’t over yet. Cooper Tate was still being worked on by the orthopedic team, his compound fractures serious though not life threatening. He’d be following Cord into surgery shortly.

Trauma One looked as if a tornado had torn through it. Jolie went through the robotic motions of cleaning up and resetting the bay for the third patient coming in by ambulance from the well site. She should be back at the admitting desk filling out the paperwork on Cord and Cooper. Should be notifying their families. The clothes Cord had been wearing, along with his personal effects, had been shoved into a plastic bin for safekeeping. She tucked the tub under her arm and shuffled back to the intake desk as the janitorial staff moved in to mop and sanitize.

Sinking into her chair, Jolie felt as if she’d just run a marathon—her arms and legs were leaden, her brain still in shock. Shivering uncontrollably, she wrapped her arms across her chest and hung on, breathing deeply until the worst of the reaction passed. There wasn’t time to collapse. Not yet. She had to make notifications. No matter what. It was her job as admitting nurse. She couldn’t pass it off—no matter how much she wanted to do so. Bad enough she’d all but abandoned her post to work on Cord.

The bin with Cord’s belongings sat at her feet. She bent over and dug through the ripped and bloody clothes. She flipped open his wallet. Credit cards. A couple of receipts. No list of contact phone numbers. Jolie tucked the wallet and his driver’s license into a plastic baggy. She did not stare at his photo. She didn’t sigh over those sculpted cheekbones and that strong jaw, the golden-brown eyes. She didn’t rub her thumb across the plastic pretending it was his face and she could feel his skin. Well, just once. Or twice.

Something dinged. Startled, Jolie dropped the ID and grabbed her cell phone. Its face remained dark. The strains of something country and western played from deep in the bin. She found Cord’s phone in the hip pocket of his jeans. The caller ID read Cash.

Knowing she should answer, Jolie let it roll to voice mail. Cash didn’t like her. Truth be told, none of Cord’s brothers liked her. Well, except maybe for Chance. While he might not like her, he didn’t hate her like the rest of the family. Chance and Cooper. They’d been the only ones to ever give her the time of day when she’d dated Cord.

Cord’s phone was password protected. Of course it was, because nothing could be easy tonight. She stared off into the distance, thinking. She tried his birth date. Nope. On a whim, she tried her own. That had been his default password for everything when they dated in college. When the screen opened, she almost dropped the phone. Jolie scrolled through his contact list, making note of pertinent numbers for the hospital’s records. She had to stop dithering and make at least one call. Chance’s number was at the top of the list. She dialed it on her desk phone but remembered Chance was on his honeymoon, so she hung up.

Jolie remembered the big dust up from early in the summer as she had been moving home. Seemed as if Cyrus Barron was still screwing up his sons’ lives—Chance’s this time. The woman he’d fallen for had led an old-fashioned cattle drive from her ranch to the stockyards to get her steers to market so she could pay off the mortgage lien Cyrus held on the place. She knew how Mr. Barron reacted to his sons thinking for themselves. He wouldn’t like it one little bit, especially if Chance went against his father’s dictates, siding with a woman Cyrus had declared an enemy. Jolie had heard all about that day because her dad had been waiting on Cassie Morgan to arrive so he could buy the herd. Yeah, her dad liked screwing with the Barron family.

Worrying her bottom lip with her teeth, Jolie stared at the phone numbers on her list. Chance and Cord were close, with Cooper their third musketeer. As soon as Chance heard the news, he’d be on the next plane home anyway—honeymoon or not. Decision made, Jolie used Cord’s phone to call.