Dear Reader,

I really can’t express how flattered I am and also how grateful I am to Harlequin Books for releasing this collection of my published works. It came as a great surprise. I never think of myself as writing books that are collectible. In fact, there are days when I forget that writing is work at all. What I do for a living is so much fun that it never seems like a job. And since I reside in a small community, and my daily life is confined to such mundane things as feeding the wild birds and looking after my herb patch in the backyard, I feel rather unconnected from what many would think of as a glamorous profession.

But when I read my email, or when I get letters from readers, or when I go on signing trips to bookstores to meet all of you, I feel truly blessed. Over the past thirty years, I have made lasting friendships with many of you. And quite frankly, most of you are like part of my family. You can’t imagine how much you enrich my life. Thank you so much.

I also need to extend thanks to my family (my husband, James, son, Blayne, daughter-in-law, Christina, and granddaughter, Selena Marie), to my best friend, Ann, to my readers, booksellers and the wonderful people at Harlequin Books—from my editor of many years, Tara, to all the other fine and talented people who make up our publishing house. Thanks to all of you for making this job and my private life so worth living.

Thank you for this tribute, Harlequin, and for putting up with me for thirty long years! Love to all of you.

Diana Palmer

DIANA PALMER

The prolific author of more than one hundred books, Diana Palmer got her start as a newspaper reporter. A multi–New York Times bestselling author and one of the top ten romance writers in America, she has a gift for telling the most sensual tales with charm and humor. Diana lives with her family in Cornelia, Georgia.

Visit her website at www.DianaPalmer.com.

The Case of the Mesmerizing Boss
Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Prologue

RICHARD DANE LASSITER stared down at the city of Houston from his office in the exclusive high-rise building, with eyes that didn’t really see the misting rain in the streetlight-dotted darkness. He was wrestling with a problem that wouldn’t go away.

Any minute now he was going to have to go into the outer office of his detective agency and chew out his secretary. Actually, she was almost a relative. Tess Meriwether was the daughter of the man his mother had been engaged to. Their respective parents had been killed just days shy of their wedding. So Tess wasn’t really related to him, but he’d felt responsible for her for years, anyway. It was why he’d given her this job, why he was so protective of her. There were wounds between them that might never heal, but that didn’t in any way diminish his feelings for her.

It could have been love, if he hadn’t been so determined to send her running from him. He’d had a failed marriage and he’d been shot to pieces in a gun battle while he was still a Texas Ranger. The shooting had changed him as well as his life. He’d had to give up police work, so he’d founded this detective agency and robbed the local police departments to staff it. He had a reputation for being one of the most thorough and discreet private investigators in the business, and he was very successful. But his personal life was a mess. He had no one, really. No one except Tess, and she backed away whenever he came close. He felt guilty about that sometimes. She didn’t know, could never be told, that it hadn’t really been anger that had triggered his physical demands on her. She thought he’d been trying to frighten her away. That was funny. The truth was that on that afternoon so long ago, he’d been out of control for the first time in his life.

He turned away from the window, a tall, lithe man with a graceful way of moving and an arrogant tilt to his head. He looked like he’d had a Spanish ancestor from whom he’d inherited his dark eyes, his black hair and the olive tan of his skin. He was a handsome man, but he was unaware of it. These days, he had little use for women.

His own mother had despised him because he reminded her too much of his father, who’d deserted her when Dane was only a child. He’d wanted to love his mother, but she never had time for him. Her attitude had scarred him deeply. He’d married while he was still one of Houston’s policemen, before he became a Texas Ranger, but his wife had only been attracted to his uniform. His life with Jane had been a rocky one. She’d wanted something he could not give her. It had taken very little time for her to decide that she’d made a terrible mistake. She didn’t want him in bed at all, and very quickly decided that she didn’t want him out of it, either. She just didn’t want him. When he got wounded, she walked out on him while he was still in the hospital. If it hadn’t been for Tess, he wouldn’t have had anyone at all throughout that nightmarish time.

Ironic, he thought, that Tess had been in love with him. She’d been only a teenager, just barely out of school, when they first met. Her father, Wyatt Meriwether, had neglected her, just as Nita Lassiter had ignored Dane. Wyatt had left Tess to be raised by her grandmother while he pursued his promiscuous lifestyle. Tess was innocent and gentle, and she attracted Dane as no other woman ever had. Even now, thinking about how it had been between them during his recuperation could make him ashamed of what he’d inadvertantly done to her.

They’d experienced a tenderness toward each other that was overwhelming in its intensity. He’d fought it at first. He didn’t trust or like women, and Tess was altogether too young. But she got under his skin. He’d never been loved like that, before or since. He’d thrown it all away in a moment’s passion, and had frightened Tess so badly that she still backed away from him.

He ran an angry hand through his hair. He really had to stop looking back. It did no good.

Now Tess wanted to be an operative. He wouldn’t let her. It was dangerous work sometimes. Dane didn’t even like sending Nick and Nick’s sister, Helen, out on assignments, like the stakeout that Tess had inadvertantly interrupted. He was going to have to give her hell for it. She hadn’t blown their cover, but she’d come close. That couldn’t be allowed. Besides, he didn’t want Tess out in the field. He didn’t want her at risk, ever. She kept pestering Helen to teach her things, to show her some martial arts throws, to show her how to use a gun. He usually managed to break up any tutorials, but Tess’s persistence disturbed him. He couldn’t bear the thought of having her in danger. She was relatively safe in the office, being his secretary. Out of it… Well, thank God, he didn’t have to worry about that, now.

As for her interference with the stakeout, that was something he did have to worry about. He remembered the first time he’d met her, at a restaurant where their parents had invited them to get acquainted. Dane had tried to make her think he’d disliked her on sight. Actually, she’d appealed to him instantly. He almost seemed to know her, which was really disturbing, because he was married and had had his reluctant wife with him that night. Jane had been alternately sarcastic and obnoxious until he’d sent her home in a cab. Tess, on the other hand, had been quiet and shy and very curious about him.

His body began to tauten at the memory. He’d wanted Tess then, and the wanting hadn’t stopped during all the years in between. He was resigned to living alone these days. He had a reason for not seeking commitment, for not ever wanting marriage. He couldn’t tell Tess what it was. But it was devastating to his masculinity.

With a grimace he started toward the door that separated his office from the waiting room. Putting off the confrontation was cowardly, something he’d never been. It was just that Tess could look so wounded when he scolded her. He hated giving her more pain. Over the years, God knew, he’d given her more than enough.

But she had to learn that rules were meant to be obeyed. If he overlooked this infraction, he might put her at risk in the future. He couldn’t have that.

Resignedly, he reached out and opened the door.

Chapter One

TESS MERIWETHER SIGHED HUGELY, feeling stiff all over from the tension of waiting for the ax to fall. She glanced ruefully toward Dane’s closed office door. Today had really been one of those days. She’d blown a stakeout and gotten the cold shoulder from Dane all day for it. She hoped she could sneak out at quitting time without being seen. Otherwise, she was going to catch it for sure.

Dane Lassiter was her boss—the owner of the Lassiter Detective Agency—but he was also more. She’d known him for years; their parents had almost gotten married. But a tragic accident had killed them both, and the only one Tess had left in the world was Dane.

She carefully put away her equipment with a quick glance at the clock and reached for her trench coat. The coat was her pride and joy, one of those Sam Spade-looking things that she adored. Working for a detective agency was exciting, even if Dane wouldn’t let her near a case. Someday, she promised herself, she was going to become an operative, in spite of her overprotective boss.

“Going somewhere?” he asked, suddenly appearing in the doorway, a cigarette smoldering between his lean fingers. He looked like the ultimate private investigator in his three-piece suit.

She had to drag her eyes away. Even after what he’d done to her three years ago, she still found him a delight to her eyes.

“Home,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“Immensely.” He motioned her into his office. Once she was inside, he half closed the door and came closer to her, noticing involuntarily how she tensed when he was only a few feet away. Her reaction was predictable, and probably he deserved it, but it stung. He spoke much more angrily than he meant to. “I told you not to go near the stakeout.”

“I didn’t, intentionally,” she said, nervously twisting a long strand of pale blond hair around one finger. “I saw Helen and I waved. I thought the stakeout you mentioned was going to be one of those wee-hours-of-the-morning things. I hardly expected two professional detectives to be skulking around a toy store in the middle of the afternoon! I thought Helen was buying her boyfriend’s nephew a present.” Her gray eyes flashed at him. “After all, you didn’t say what you were staking out. You just told me to keep out of the way. Houston,” she added haughtily, “is a big city. We didn’t all used to be Texas Rangers who carry city street plans around in our heads!”

He didn’t blink. His dark eyes stared her down through a cloud of smoke firing up from the cigarette in his fingers.

She coughed as the smoke approached her face. Loudly.

He smiled at her. Defiantly. Neither moved.

A timid knock on the door startled the tall, rangy, dark-haired man and the slender blonde woman. Helen Reed peeked around the half-opened door.

“Is it all right if I go home?” she asked Dane. “It’s five,” she added with a hopeful smile.

“Take your ear with you,” he said, referring to a piece of essential listening equipment, “and go with your brother. Nick needs some backup while he stakes out our philandering husband.”

“No!” Helen groaned. “No, Dane, not four hours of lewd noises and embarrassing conversation with Nick! I hate Nick! Anyway, I’ve got a date with Harold!”

“You were supposed to tell sweetums here—” he nodded toward a glaring Tess “—where and when the stakeout was going down, so that she wouldn’t trip over it.”

“I apologized,” she wailed.

“Not good enough. You go with Nick, and I’ll reconsider your pink slip.”

“If you fire me,” Helen told him, “I’ll go back to work for the department of motor vehicles and you’ll never get another automobile tag registration off the record for the rest of your life.”

He pursed his lips. “Did I ever mention that I spent two years with the Texas Department of Public Safety before I joined the Texas Rangers?”

Helen sighed. She opened the door the rest of the way and made a huge production of going down on her hose-clad knees, her long black hair dragging the floor as she salaamed, her thin body looking somehow elegant even in the pose. She studied ballet and had all the grace of a dancer.

“Oh, for God’s sake, go home,” Dane said shortly. “And I hope Harold buys you a pizza loaded with anchovies!”

“Thanks, boss! Actually, I love anchovies!” Helen smiled, waved, and then vanished before he had time to change his mind.

He ran a restless hand through his thick black hair, disrupting a straight lock onto his forehead. “Next the skip tracers will be after paid vacations to the Bahamas.”

Tess shook her head. “Jamaica. I asked.”

He turned and tossed an ash into the smokeless ashtray on his desk. The entire staff had pitched in to buy it. They’d also pitched in to send him to a stop-smoking seminar. He’d sent them all on stakeouts to porno theaters. Nobody ever suggested another seminar. Dane did install big air filters, though, in every office.

Dane was a renegade. He went his own way regardless of controversy. Tess might disagree with him, but she had to respect him for standing up for what he believed in.

She watched him move, her eyes lingering on his elegant carriage. He was built like a rodeo cowboy, square shoulders and lean hips and long, powerful legs. When he was tired, he limped a little from the wounds he’d sustained three years ago. He looked tired now.

She watched him, remembering how it had all begun. When he’d opened the detective agency, he’d remorselessly pilfered the local police department of its best people, offering them percentages and shares in the business instead of salaries until the agency started paying off. And it had thrived—in record time. Dane had been a Houston police officer years before he made it to the Texas Rangers. He’d been a good policeman. He had plenty of clout in intelligence circles, and that assured his success.

Being a Texas Ranger hadn’t hurt his credentials, either, because in order to be considered for the rangers, a man had to have eight years of law enforcement experience with the last two as an officer for the Texas Department of Public Safety. Then the top thirty scorers on the written test had to undergo a grueling oral interview. The five leading candidates to pass this test were placed on a one-year waiting list for an opening on the ninety-four-member force. Dane had been one of the lucky ones. He’d worked out of Houston, ranging over several counties to assist local law enforcement. A ranger might not have to fight Indians or Mexican guerrillas, but since Texas had plenty of ranchland left, a ranger had to be a skilled horseman in case he was called upon to track down modern-day rustlers. Dane was one of the best horsemen Tess had ever seen. Despite his injuries, he still was as at home on the back of a horse as he was on the ground or behind the wheel of a car.

She was awed by him after all the years they’d known each other. But she was very careful these days not to let him know how awed. One taste of his violent ardor had been enough to stifle her desire for him as soon as it had begun.

“You never send me out on assignments.” She sighed.

He glanced at her, his expression guarded. He seemed to make a point of never looking too closely, or for too long, as if he found her very existence hard to accept. “You’re a secretary, not an operative.”

“I could be, if you’d let me,” she said quietly. “I can do anything Helen can.”

“Including dressing up like a hooker and parading down the main drag?” he mused.

She shifted restlessly, averting her face. “Well, maybe not that.”

His dark eyes narrowed. “Or listening to intimate conversations in back-alley motel rooms? Taking photographs of explicit situations? Tracing an accused murderer across two states and apprehending him on a bail-bond forfeiture?”

She let out a long breath. “Okay. I get the point. I guess I couldn’t handle that. But I could be a skip tracer, if you’d let me. That’s almost as good as going out on cases.”

He put out his cigarette angrily, a terse but controlled stab of his long fingers that made Tess uneasy. He was a passionate man, despite his cold control. She very rarely allowed herself to remember how he was with a woman. Just thinking about those strong, deft hands on her body made her go hot and shaky, but not with desire. She remembered the touch of Dane Lassiter’s hands with stark fear.

He glanced at her suddenly, his eyes piercing, steady, as if he felt the thought in her mind and reacted to it. She went scarlet.

“Something embarrasses you?” he asked in that slow, lazy drawl that intimidated even ex-policemen.

“I was thinking about having to follow philandering husbands,” she hedged. She clutched her purse. “I’d better go.”

“Heavy date?” he asked with apparent carelessness.

She’d given up on men some time ago. He wouldn’t know that, or know why, so she just shrugged and smiled and left.

The streets were dark and cold. The subdued glow of the streetlights didn’t make much difference, either. It was a foggy winter night, stark and unwelcoming. Tess pulled her trench coat closer around her and walked toward her small foreign car without much enthusiasm. Tonight was like any other night. She’d go home to an empty apartment—an efficiency apartment with a tiny kitchen, a bathroom, a combination living room and bedroom, and a sofa that made into a bed. She’d watch old movies on television until she grew sleepy, and then she’d go to bed. The next day would be a repeat of this one. The only difference would be the movie.

Ordinarily, she might go out to a movie with her friend Kit Morris, who worked nearby. But Kit’s boss was overseas for two months and Kit had had to go with him—even though she’d groaned about the trip. The older girl was a confidential secretary who got a huge salary for doing whatever the job demanded. Tess missed her. The agency did a lot of work for Kit’s boss, hunting down his madcap mother, who spent her life getting into trouble.

With Kit gone, Tess’s free time was really lonely. She had no one to talk to. She liked Helen, and they were friends, but she couldn’t really talk to Helen about the one big heartache of her life—Dane Lassiter.

She looped her shoulder bag over her arm and stuffed her hands into her pockets. Her life, she thought, was like this miserable night. Cold, empty and solitary.

Two expensively dressed men were standing under a streetlight as she appeared in the doorway of the office building. She stared at them curiously as one passed to the other an open briefcase full of packets of some white substance, and received a big wad of bills in return. She nodded to them and smiled absently, unaware of the shock on their faces as she walked toward the deserted parking lot.

“Did she see?” one asked the other.

“My God, of course she saw! Get her!”

Tess hadn’t heard the conversation, but the sound of running feet caught her attention. She turned, conscious of movement, to stand staring blankly at two approaching men. They looked as if they were chasing her. There were angry shouts, freezing her where she stood. She frowned as the gleam of metal in the streetlights caught her attention. Before she realized that it was the reflection of light on a gun barrel, something hot stung her arm and spun her around. Seconds later, a pop rang in her ears and she cried out as she fell to the ground, stunned.

“You killed her!” one man exclaimed. “You fool, now they’ll have us for murder instead of dealing coke!”

“Shut up! Let me think! Maybe she’s not dead—”

“Let’s get out of here! Somebody’s bound to have heard the shots!”

“She came out of that building, where the lights are on in that detective agency,” the other voice groaned.

“Great place you picked for the drop…. Run! That’s a siren!”

Sure enough, it was. A patrol car, alerted by one of the street people, came barreling down the side street where the office was located, its spotlight catching two men bending over a prostrate form in a dark parking lot.

“Oh, God!” one of the men exclaimed. “Run!”

The sound of running feet barely impinged on Tess’s fading consciousness. Funny, she couldn’t lift her face. The pavement was damp and cold under her cheek. Except for that, she felt numb all over.

“They shot somebody!” a different voice called. “Don’t let them get away!”

She heard more pops. Black shoes went past her face, as two policemen went tearing after the well-dressed men.

“Tess!”

She didn’t recognize the voice at first. Dane was always so calm and in command of himself that the harsh urgency of his tone didn’t sound familiar.

He rolled her gently onto her back. She stared up at him blankly, in shock. Her arm was beginning to feel wet and heavy and hot. She tried to speak and was surprised to find that she couldn’t make her tongue work.

He spotted the dark, wet stain on her arm immediately, because the bullet had penetrated the cloth of her coat and blood was pulsing under it. “My God!” he ground out. His expression was as hard as a statue’s, betraying nothing. Only his eyes, glittery with anger, were alive in that dark slate.

One of the policemen was running back toward them. He paused, his pistol in hand, kneeling beside Tess. “Was she hit?” the policeman asked curtly. “I saw one of them fire—”

“She’s hit. Get an ambulance,” Dane said, his black eyes meeting the other man’s for an instant. “Hurry. She’s bleeding badly.”

The policeman ran back down the alley.

Dane didn’t waste time. He eased Tess’s arm out of her coat and grimaced at the gaping tear in her blouse and the vivid flow of blood. He cursed under his breath, whipping out a handkerchief and holding it firmly over the wound, even when she cried out at the pain.

“Be still,” he said quietly. “Be still, little one. I’ll take care of you. You’re going to be all right.”

She shivered. Tears ran down her cheeks. It hadn’t hurt until he started pressing on it. Now the pain was terrible. She cried helplessly while he wound the handkerchief tightly around the wound and tied it. He shucked his topcoat and covered Tess with it. He took her purse and used it to elevate her feet. Then he turned his attention back to the wound. It was still bleeding copiously, and what Tess could see of it wasn’t reassuring. He seemed so capable and controlled that she wasn’t inclined to panic. He’d always had that effect on her, at least, when he wasn’t making her nervous.

“Am I going to bleed to death?” she asked very calmly.

“No.” He glanced over his shoulder as a car approached. He used words she’d never heard him use and abruptly stood as the squad car pulled up. “Help me get her in the car!” he called to the policeman. “She won’t make it until an ambulance gets here at the rate she’s losing blood.”

“I just raised my partner on the walkie-talkie. He’s on his way back with one of the perps,” the officer said as he helped Dane get Tess into the backseat. “If he isn’t here by the time I get the engine going, he’s walking back to the station.”

“I hear you.” Dane cradled Tess’s head in his lap. “Let’s go.”

Just as the officer got in behind the wheel, his partner came into view with a handcuffed man. Dane stiffened.

“M-20’s on his way,” the officer called to his partner. “I’ve got a wounded lady in here. Can you manage?”

“You bet! Get her to the hospital!” the other man called back.

The older man wheeled the squad car around with an expertise that Tess might have admired if she’d been less nauseated and hurt.

Minutes later, they pulled up at the municipal hospital emergency room, but Tess didn’t know it. She was unconscious….

Daylight was streaming through the window when her eyes opened again. She blinked. She was pleasantly dazed. Her upper arm felt swollen and hot. She looked at it, curious about the thick white bandage it was wrapped in. She stirred, only then aware that she was strapped to a tube.

“Don’t pull the IV out,” Dane drawled from the chair beside the bed. “Believe me, you won’t like having to have it put back in again.”

She turned her head toward him. She felt dizzy and disoriented. “It was dark,” she mumbled drowsily. “These men came after me and I think one of them shot me.”

“You were shot, all right,” he said grimly. “They were drug dealers. What happened? Did you get between them and the police, get caught in the crossfire?”

“No,” Tess groaned. “I saw them pass the stuff. They must have panicked, but I didn’t realize what I’d seen until they were after me.”

He stiffened. “You saw it? You witnessed a drug buy?”

She nodded wearily. “I’m afraid so.”

He whistled softly. “If they got a good look at you, and recognized the office building…”

“One got away.”

“The one who shot you,” Dane said flatly. “And they don’t have enough on the one they caught to hold him for long. They’ll charge him, but he’ll probably make bail as soon as he’s arraigned, and you’re the gal who can send him up for dealing.”

“His cohort shot me,” she pointed out. “But the one they arrested was there. Can’t he be arrested as an accessory?”

“Maybe, maybe not. You don’t know how these people think,” he said enigmatically, and he looked worried. Really worried.

“I’ll bet you do,” she murmured sleepily. “All those years, locking people up…”

“I know the criminal mind inside out,” he agreed. “But it’s different when things hit home.” His dark eyes narrowed on her wan face. “It’s very different.”

She must be half-asleep, she decided, because he actually sounded as if he minded that she’d been shot. That was ridiculous. He resented her, disliked her even if he had felt sorry enough for her to give her a job when her father had died. He was her worst enemy, so why would it matter to him if something happened to her?

Dane stretched wearily, his white shirt pulled taut over a broad chest. “How do you feel this morning?”

She touched the bandage. “Not as bad as I did last night. What did the doctors do to me?”

“Took the bullet out.” He pulled it from his shirt pocket and displayed it for her. “A thirty-eight caliber,” he explained. “A souvenir. I thought you might like it mounted and framed.”

She grimaced. “Suppose we frame and mount the man who shot me instead?”

His black eyebrow jerked up. “I’ll pass that thought along to the police,” he said dryly.

“Can I go home?”

“When you’re a little stronger. You lost a lot of blood and they had to put you under to get the bullet out.”

“Helen will be furious when she finds out,” she murmured with a smile. “She’s the private eye, and I got shot.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’ll be livid with jealousy,” he agreed. He paused beside the bed, his dark eyes narrow and intent on her face in its frame of soft, wavy blond hair. He looked at her for a long time.

“I’m all right, if it matters,” she said sleepily. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know why it should. You hate me.”

Her voice trailed off as she gave in to the need for rest. He didn’t answer her. But his eyes were stormy and his mind had already registered how much it would have mattered if her life had seeped out on that cold concrete.

He got up and went to the window, stretching again. He was tired. He hadn’t slept since they’d brought her in. All through the operation, he’d paced and waited for news. It had been the longest night he’d ever spent.

A soft sound from the bed caught his attention. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stood beside her, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest. The unbecoming hospital gown did nothing for her. She was too thin. He scowled as he looked at her, his mind on the coldness he’d shown her over the years, the unrelenting hostility that had, eventually, turned a shy, loving girl into a quiet, insecure woman. Tess had wanted to love him, and he’d slapped her down, hard. It hadn’t been cruelty so much as a raging desire that he’d started to satisfy in the only way he knew to satisfy it—roughly, savagely. But Tess had been a virgin, and he hadn’t known. She’d run from him, in tears, barely in time to save her honor. Afterward, she’d never come near him again. His pride hadn’t allowed him to go after her, to explain that tenderness wasn’t something he was used to showing women. Her frantic departure in tears had shattered him. She didn’t know that.

He’d been antagonistic to hide the hurt the experience had dealt him, so it wasn’t surprising that she thought he hated her. He’d even tried to convince himself he didn’t mind the fact that Tess avoided him like the plague. To save his pride, he’d even made it appear as if his actions had been premeditated, to make her leave him alone.

He thought back to those dark days after he’d been shot. Everyone had deserted him. His mother had always hated him, despite her pretense for the sake of appearances. Even Jane, his wife, had walked out on him and filed for divorce, after being blatantly unfaithful to him. But Tess had been with him every step of the way, making him live, making him fight. Tess had been the light that brought him out of the darkness. And he’d repaid her loving kindness with cruelty. It hurt him to remember that. It hurt him more to realize that she could have died last night.

A faint tap on the door announced the nurse’s entrance. She smiled at Dane and proceeded to check Tess’s vital signs.

“Lucky, wasn’t she?” the woman asked absently, as she waited for the thermometer to register. “Just a few inches to the side and she’d be dead.”

The impact of the idle remark was as sharp as a tack. He blinked, his dark gaze steady on Tess’s closed eyes. If she died, he’d be alone. He’d have no one.

The enormity of the thought drove him out of the room with a murmured excuse. He walked down the long corridor without seeing it, his mind humming all the way to the black Mercedes he’d had Helen drive to the parking lot for him while Tess was in surgery. He still had to call the office and tell them how she was. He checked his watch; it was time they were at work. He’d stop by on the way to his apartment to shower and change his clothes.

He unlocked the car, but he didn’t get in, his hand on the door handle as he stared up at the hospital. Tess wasn’t a relative in any sense at all. Their parents had never married. But they were both only children and their parents were dead.

With a rough sigh, he opened the car door and got in. He didn’t start it immediately. He stared at the blood on his sleeve. Tess’s blood. He’d watched it pulse out of her in the darkness as if it were his own. She could have died in his arms.

Once she’d been such a bright, happy girl, so eager to please him, so obviously in love with him. He closed his eyes. He’d killed that sweet feeling in her. He’d frightened it right out of her with his clumsy headlong rush at her that afternoon, when he’d given in finally to the need that had been tearing him apart. He’d never wanted anyone so much. But he knew nothing of tenderness, and he’d terrified her. It hadn’t been deliberate, but maybe, subconsciously, he’d wanted her to back away, before she became his world. A failed marriage made a man gun-shy, Dane thought bitterly, looking back to the time three years ago when Tess and he had first met….

From the evening that Tess and Dane had first met—so long ago, at a restaurant where their parents had invited them to get acquainted—they saw very little of each other except on holidays. Dane and his wife, Jane, were not getting along. And even his mother, Nita, had mentioned cattily that Jane had been seen with another man. It was almost as if it pleased Nita to know that Dane’s wife was being openly unfaithful to him….

Those days had not been good ones for Dane. Then, on the morning that Wyatt Meriwether and Nita Lassiter announced their engagement, Dane had walked into a shootout with some bank robbers and had wound up in the county emergency room fighting for his life.

Tess had rushed to the hospital as soon as she knew. Her father drove her, but when they discovered that Nita was still at home and that Jane couldn’t be found, he’d left.

But Tess stayed, that night and the next day. Once she convinced a floor nurse that he was going to be her stepbrother, and that he had no one else, they allowed her to see him in intensive care. She held his hand, smoothed his brow and cringed at the damage the bullets had done, because she’d had a look at the torn flesh of his shoulder, spine and leg where the bullets had penetrated.

“Will I walk?” he managed in a pain-laced voice when he regained consciousness.

“Of course,” Tess said with a gentle smile. She touched his lean face and pushed the hair away from his forehead with a possessive feeling.

His eyes closed and he groaned. “Where’s my mother?” he asked harshly. “Where’s Jane?”

She hesitated.

His black eyes opened again, fury in them. “She was sleeping with my partner,” he said harshly. “He told me….”

She grimaced.

He laughed coldly and went back to sleep.

In the weeks that followed, Dane’s life changed. Jane came to see him once, stiffly apologetic, only to inform him that she’d filed for divorce and was remarrying the minute the divorce was final. His mother peered in the door, remarked that he seemed prepared to live after all and went sailing with Wyatt.

Tess, infuriated with the rest of the family, devoted herself to Dane’s recovery.

God knew, he needed someone, she thought. What he’d found out about Jane had very likely distracted him enough to get him shot. Then Jane walked out on him. His own mother had deserted him. Not only that, but he even lost his job, because the surgeons agreed that he might never be fit enough for full-time work again because of the damage to his spine.

When they told him the bad news, he almost gave up, he was so depressed.

“This won’t do,” Tess said gently, recognizing instinctively the lack of life in his lean face. She knelt beside the chair where he was sitting up for a few minutes and took his hand in hers, holding tightly. “You can’t give up, Dane,” she told him. “They only said that you might not be able to work—not that you will. You can’t let them do this to you.”

“Can’t? They already have,” he said tersely, averting his eyes. “Why don’t you get out, too?”

“You’re my almost-big-brother,” she said. “I want you to get well.”

He glared at her. “I don’t need a teenage sister.”

“You’ll get one, all the same, when our parents marry,” she said pleasantly. “Come on, cheer up. You’re tough. You were a ranger, after all.”

His face closed up. “Was is right.”

“So you won’t be in prime condition for a while. So what? Listen, Dane, there are plenty of things you can do with your law-enforcement background. God doesn’t close doors without opening windows. This can be an opportunity, if you’ll just look at it in that light.”

He didn’t speak. But he listened. His dark eyes narrowed as they searched hers. “I don’t like women,” he began.

“I guess not. With all due respect, your life hasn’t been blessed wtih nice ones.”

“I married Jane to spite my mother. Not that I didn’t want her at the time. She was all set to settle down and have children. That was all she wanted.” He averted his face, as if the memory of her desertion was killing him. “Get out, Tess. Go play nurse somewhere else.”

“Can’t.” She shrugged. “Who’ll keep you from wallowing in self-pity?”

“Damn you!” he snapped, his eyes flashing warning signals as they met hers.

She grinned, refusing to be intimidated. That was the first spark of interest she’d seen since they’d told him he couldn’t work. “That’s better,” she said. “How about a cup of coffee?”

He hesitated. But after a minute, he gave in to the irritating need to be fussed over. He nodded and she almost ran in her haste to get to the coffee machine down the hall. He stared after her with helpless need. He’d never been treated like this by a woman, by any woman. It was new and unsettling to have someone care about him, want to do things for him. With his mother, and especially Jane, it had been, “What can you do for me?” Tess was different. Too different. She was getting under his skin, and not just with her warm affection. He looked at her body and felt a kind of desire he hadn’t experienced in years. She aroused him as Jane never had. That, he thought worriedly, could present some problems later on. She was only nineteen, even if she was probably experienced. Most girls were these days. He closed his eyes. Well, he’d cross that bridge later. Not now.

He began to think about what she’d said, about a new profession. His lips pursed thoughtfully and all at once he began to smile as wheels turned in his mind.

As the weeks passed, Tess came with time-clock regularity, sitting with him, talking to him. He accepted her presence and finally began to let his guard down with her. They grew closer, even as he fought his headlong attraction to her.

The attraction slowly began to undermine his efforts to be kind to her. He was overly irritable one Monday morning when she came to his apartment and found him lying listlessly in bed.

“You again? What the hell do you want?” he’d asked coldly.

Used to his flashes of temper by now, she only smiled. “I want you to get well,” she said simply.

He lay back and closed his eyes. “Go away. Aren’t you late for school?”

“I graduated. It’s summer.”

“Then get a job.”

“I’m going to secretarial school at night.”

“And working during the day?”

“Sort of.”

His head turned on the pillow. “Sort of?”

She smiled. “Dad thinks I’m doing enough of a job helping you get back on your feet.” She didn’t add that her father had only agreed absently with her own comment on that score. Nita had been to see her son just that once, and had stayed less than five minutes. But Tess adored him. She’d worked to lose weight, to improve her appearance, so that he might notice her during his long recovery. It hadn’t worked, but she was hopeful that it might one day.

“Are you qualified to practice psychiatry and physical therapy?” he asked with biting sarcasm.

It bounced right off. She knew he was hurting, so she didn’t mind being a target. She put her purse aside and stood up, her ponytail swinging as she leaned over him.

“My father is going to marry your mother. When that happens, you’ll be my big brother. I need to practice looking out for you,” she said.

He glared at her. “I don’t need looking after.”

“Yes, you do,” she replied pleasantly. Her eyes went to the visible scars on his upper arm in its white T-shirt. There were worse ones on his back. She’d seen them, though he didn’t know she had. “It must hurt terribly,” she said, her voice as gentle as the look she gave him. “I’m sorry you got hurt, Richard.”

“Dane,” he corrected. “Nobody calls me Richard.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t need a schoolgirl for a nursemaid.”

“Why doesn’t your mother come to see you more often?” she asked curiously.

He averted his eyes. “Because she hated my father. I look like him.”

“Oh.” She moved a little closer, hesitant but determined. “Wouldn’t you like to be part of a family?” she asked, sounding more plaintive than she realized. “I’ve only ever had my grandmother, really, and she only kept me because she had to. My mother died when I was just little. Dad…” She shrugged. “Dad was never much of a family person. So I’ve really got nobody. And…I’m sorry…but it seems as if now you haven’t got anybody, either.” She clasped her hands tightly at her waist. “We could be each other’s family.”

His face had gone hard, and his eyes glittered at her. “I don’t want a family,” he said deliberately. “Least of all, you!”

“I might grow on you,” she said, and smiled to hide the hurt caused by his words. Of course he didn’t want her. Nobody ever really had.

He hadn’t said anything else. He’d tried ignoring her, but she wouldn’t go away. She came every single day, bringing books for him to read, tapes for him to listen to. She cooked for him and sat with him and talked to him, argued with him and encouraged him, and despite his hostility and lack of encouragement, she very quietly fell in love with him.

She didn’t realize that her love for him was so obvious. It was impossible not to notice how she felt, when her face was radiant with it. Neither had she known that Dane noticed her without wanting to, his dark eyes growing more covetous by the day as his recovery brought her close and kept her there. He became used to her, enjoyed her, wanted her. She was so different from all the women he’d had in his life. Tess was loving and gentle, and there was an odd kind of vulnerability about her. He thrived on her attentions. He began to look forward to her company.

But even so, he eventually grew uneasy when he began to realize how attached he was becoming to her. He was afraid of involvement, terrified of it, after the disaster of his marriage. Even if he’d married Jane to spite his hard-hearted mother, who didn’t approve of her, he’d been attracted to Jane at first, and she’d pretended to be in love with him. Then had come marriage and her distaste of intimacy with him. The crowning touch had been her reckless affair with his old partner on the Houston police force. That had been revenge, he knew, and she’d left him more crippled than the shooting had. Tess was a woman. She could very easily be deceiving him, too, overcome with compassion and what was probably physical infatuation.

His doubts led to a return of his former moodiness, and then to open hostility. He pushed Tess away at every opportunity, but she was stubborn and refused to believe that he really didn’t want her around.

He got back on his feet and grew strong much more quickly than anyone thought he would. With good health came a revived male vitality that responded suddenly, and with devastating results, to Tess’s femininity….

With her blond hair around her shoulders and wearing a white peasant dress with a colorful belt, she danced into his apartment at lunchtime one day carrying a homemade cake. Dane was in jeans and barefoot, his white T-shirt over his muscular chest damp with sweat from the workout he’d been having in his improvised gym. He limped a little because of his wounds, but he could walk. Now he was intent on walking without the limp, getting fit. But Tess was making him vulnerable all over again, draining him of strength.

He wanted her desperately, even if it was totally against his will. He’d been without a woman for a long time, and he needed someone. Tess was tempting him beyond bearing. She looked at him with eyes that wanted him, and the need had smoldered so long that it got away from him.

She hadn’t seen the calculating look he’d given her as she deposited the cake on the counter in the kitchen, or the warning glitter of his black eyes.

“What’s this?” he asked in a sensual tone he’d never used with her before, moving close.

“Just a pound cake,” she said breathlessly, her eyes shyly glancing off his as she registered the devastating impact of his nearness on her pulse rate. Her eyes adored him. “I thought you might have a sweet tooth. How do you feel? You look…much better.” Her eyes had dropped, as if the sight of him delighted her, embarrassed her.

He hadn’t thought about her love life, or lack of it, or it might have prevented what happened next. His only intent at the time had been to ease the ache devouring him, in the quickest possible way.

“I’ve got a sweet tooth, all right,” he’d said softly as he backed her up against the counter and leaned his body into hers. “You must have one, too. You spend half your life devouring me with those sultry eyes. I’d have to be blind not to know what you feel for me. Is this what you want, Tess?” he asked huskily, and moved his hips blatantly against hers, letting her feel the stark evidence of his desire for her. She blushed, but he wasn’t looking. His eyes were on her parted lips. “God knows, I want you beyond bearing!”

Her mind had stopped working, shock mingling with fear. Before she could find the words to protest, his hard, hungry mouth covered hers, his hips pushing her against the counter behind her. His hands lifted her into the stark aroused curve of his body, and his tongue went into her mouth with enough lust to make even a virgin aware of his intent.

Tess had only been kissed once or twice, always by men who knew how sheltered her life was. Now she was being subjected to an embrace that only an experienced woman could have responded to, and it scared her to death.

She stiffened and pushed at his chest frantically, but her actions didn’t penetrate the haze in his mind. One lean hand possessed her breast roughly while his leg suddenly stabbed between hers in an explicit movement that made her panic.

“Dane…no!” she panted, wild-eyed.

He barely heard her. “Yes,” he groaned unsteadily. “Oh, God, yes, yes…!” His powerful arm contracted. “You want me, don’t you, baby?” he’d asked blindly, his body shuddering as his mouth burned over her bare shoulders and throat, only to return, hot and heavy and rough on hers. “Don’t you? Right here.” He groaned harshly, his hands moving under her skirt, holding her bare thighs as he shifted her so that she could feel the blatant need of his body pressing hungrily at the threshold of her innocence.

She gasped, her heart shaking at the sensations the contact aroused. She moaned under his mouth, frightened.

“Here,” he growled. “Right here, baby, standing up,” he said shakily. His hands were on bare skin, touching her as no man ever had, as if his own need was paramount, as if she were simply a vessel for that need, to be used.

Then all at once, still breathing harshly, he let her slide to the floor and his head lifted briefly. His eyes were glazed, his body trembling faintly, like the strong, lean hands that smoothed roughly over her breasts as he crushed her mouth under his and groaned harshly. “This is too much for my back,” he’d whispered. “We’ll have to do it in bed, so that I can lie down….”

She knew it was the only chance she’d have to get away. She ducked and tore out of his arms. Her fear of him was so evident that it managed to penetrate the glaze in his eyes, the raging, headlong helplessness of his need. The threat of intimacy without emotion made her panic. She wept, her sobs loud in the room as she backed away from him, her gray eyes tragic and wide.

“Get away…from me!” she cried as he came toward her, his intentions written in his dark eyes. “Leave me alone!”

It registered, finally, that she was afraid of him. He’d been too drunk on her softness to realize it until he saw the wide, helpless terror in her eyes. He fought to breathe normally. He’d lost control. That was a first.

He stared at her, his expression slowly reverting to its usual impassivity, his eyes startlingly black. “That’s what you’ve been asking for,” he said in a cutting, harsh tone as he fought for sanity.

“No!” It was a cry from the heart.

“You wanted me,” he spat. “Why else do you keep coming here?”

“I love you,” she sobbed, shaken into telling the truth as she stood hugging her arms over her breasts.

“Love!” His eyes glared hotly at her as a visible shudder ran through his powerful body, still aroused and hurting. “All right, if you love me, come here. Prove it, you icy little tease,” he added with a mocking smile that hid overwhelming frustration.

Her heart went cold, like the tears on her face. She looked at him with anguish. “I can’t,” she whispered. “You…you hurt me!”

Her fear infuriated him. It was Jane all over again, hating his lovemaking, taunting him, her sarcasm vicious and unforgiving. “No?” he asked coolly. “Then if you won’t give out, get out,” he added. “All I wanted from you in the first place was sex. My God,” he ground out involuntarily as she shrank from him, “why not me? Surely to God you’ve had others…!”

Her eyes were as big as saucers, her flushed face red, her body shaking. And it dawned on him, too late, that there hadn’t been any others. She couldn’t look like that, even with him, if she were experienced.

He felt a surge of horror. “Tess, are you a virgin?”

She thought she might faint at the expression in his eyes. She couldn’t look at him after that. She grabbed her purse and ran from the apartment. Without a word Dane watched her leave. He didn’t go after her; he didn’t call later to apologize. It was, he told himself, the only out he was likely to get. Let her think he’d done it deliberately. She made him vulnerable. He had nothing to offer her. It would be a kindness, in a way. He turned back into the apartment, his eyes as cold as he felt inside. He’d never trust a woman again as long as he lived. Not even Tess. A virgin. How could he have not known? He hoped he hadn’t left too many scars….

He’d tried to consider it a lucky escape. Eventually, his pretended indifference and hostility had crushed the spontaneity right out of Tess, so that now she was quiet and polite and even a little shy when they were together. After her father died, Dane had offered her a job as a secretary. She had had nobody except him, and he’d wanted to help. It had worked fine, but only when he made her angry did he see any traces of the old Tess. Perhaps, he confessed silently, that was why he kept goading her.

Angrily, he started the car and drove to the office, to be met by the whole staff the minute he walked in the door. It shouldn’t have surprised him that his employees loved Tess. She was forever doing things for them.

“Will she be all right?” Helen got in first, her big dark eyes worried.

“She’s fine,” he assured them. “Still drowsy from the anesthetic, but there won’t be any impairment. She has to heal.”

“When does she come home?” Helen persisted. “She can stay with me. She’ll need looking after.”

“She’ll stay with me,” he said, shocking all of them, including himself. “I’ll take her down to the ranch. José and Beryl can take care of her when I have to be in the office. Did you get a temp for the next week or so?” he asked Helen.

“She’ll be here any minute,” she agreed. “Good typing and dictation speeds and her agency says she’s discreet. No worries about loose lips sinking ships.”

“Good.” His eyes went involuntarily to the desk where Tess worked. It wounded him to see it empty.

“See if you can make any sense out of her appointment book, will you?” he asked irritably, glancing at Helen. “I don’t even know what I have on my calendar today.”

“You’re having lunch with Harvey Barrett,” she reminded him. “That’s on the extortion case. This afternoon you were supposed to see a couple who want you to find their daughter—the Allisons—and a man who wants his wife watched.”

“And this morning?”

She stared at the appointment book and shook her head. “Nothing urgent.”

“Good. I’m going to the apartment to change and then I’ll be at the hospital until lunch.”

Helen frowned. “I thought you said she was okay.”

He moved toward the door without answering. “If there’s anything important, you can reach me in her room.” He gave her the number.

“Okay, boss. Tell her she’s missed.”

He nodded. His mind wasn’t on what was going on around him. It was on Tess.

Chapter Two

TESS MOANED IN HER SLEEP as the pain caught her unawares. She’d been dreaming. Probably about Dane, she thought drowsily. She never dreamed about anyone else. That was almost comical, considering how badly he’d hurt her.

A sound penetrated her semiaware state. She opened her eyes in time to see Dane sitting down in the chair beside the bed.

“What are you doing back?” she asked, her body going rigid. “It’s a workday.”

“I’m working,” he said. “Looking after you.”

The wording brought back unbearable memories of the time that he’d been shot—and what had followed. She closed her eyes on a wave of pain. “Please go away,” she whispered huskily.

He took a slow breath. The anguish in her face made him uneasy. “You don’t have anyone else.”

That was true. Her grandmother had died a year ago.

Her eyes met his, and there was nothing in her face to betray what she really felt. “You’re just my boss, Dane,” she said quietly. “That doesn’t require you to look after me.”

He sat up, his forearms across his knees as he stared at her. “I’ve never asked. Maybe I need to. How much damage did I do that day?”

She flushed and averted her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said stiffly.

“Don’t you?” he asked on a cold laugh. “We’ve waltzed around it for three years. I can’t get near you, even to apologize.”

“Why should you care?” she replied. “You wanted me out of your life. You got it. I wouldn’t come near you now for a handful of diamonds!”

“Me or any other man,” he said out of the blue.

She pulled the sheet closer, her eyes on the window, not on him. “Don’t you have something better to do than bait me?”

“I’m taking you down to the ranch to recuperate.”

She went white. She sat up in bed, her eyes like saucers in a face drained of life.

“Oh, my God, don’t!” he said harshly. “Don’t look like that!”

Her hand trembled on the sheet. “No,” she whispered, choking on the word. “Not in your house, with you. Not ever!”

His eyes closed. He couldn’t bear the way she looked. He got up jerkily and went to the window, lighting a cigarette as he stared out at nothing at all. He drew in a harsh breath of pungent smoke and let it out.

“I didn’t realize you were a virgin,” he said curtly. “Not until it was too late and I’d frightened you half to death. Don’t you think I know why you don’t go out with men?” He turned, pinning her shocked eyes with his. “Don’t you think I care about what I’ve done to you?”

She swallowed, dropping her gaze to her cold, nervous hands on the sheet. “It was a long time ago….”

“It might as well have been yesterday,” he said heavily. “God in heaven, stop pushing me away!”

She flushed. “I haven’t.”

He turned, moving back toward the bed, his face as drawn as her own. He paused beside her. “Tess, I know you’re afraid of me physically. I’d have to be blind not to be aware of it. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want you where you’ll be taken care of until you’re back on your feet again. Beryl will be at the ranch if I’m not.”

“I don’t know Beryl. Helen says I can stay with her….”

“When Helen isn’t at work, she’s at ballet class. If she has any free time at all, she’s eating pizza with her friend Harold. She means well, but you’d be alone most every evening, and all day while she’s at work.”

“I’d be all right by myself.”

He moved closer, hating the way she stiffened. “Listen,” he said through his teeth. “You saw a drug deal go down. You’ll have to testify. The policemen didn’t actually see the drugs being passed, do you understand? You’re the only witness who actually saw them. One man is still loose, and he almost certainly knows who you are by now. Do you get the picture?”

“You can’t mean what I think you do,” she said slowly.

“The hell I can’t! I dealt with this kind of vermin for ten years. I know what lengths they’ll go to. You aren’t going to be safe until they apprehend the second man and bring them both up for trial. I want you where I am, where I can take care of you. When I’m not home, my ranch manager is. He was a ranger back in the forties, and he’s almost as good a shot as I am.”

She put her face in her hands. It was agonizing to have to agree to what he wanted. She’d almost rather have taken her chances with the drug dealers.

“Hate me, if it helps,” he said. “But come with me. Don’t throw your life away.”

She smoothed back her long, disheveled hair. “What kind of a life do I have?” she asked miserably. “Work and television don’t add up to much.”

“You’re twenty-two,” he said. “Years too young to be that cynical.”

“Oh, I learned from an expert,” she said, lifting her face. “You taught me.”

Her expression made him uncomfortable. “I’ve never had anyone of my own,” he said shortly. “My father left when I was a boy. He couldn’t take the pressure of responsibility. I worshiped him, but my mother hated him, hated me because I looked like him. Jane said she loved me when we were first married, but she walked out on me and didn’t look back.” He leaned over her, his eyes black as coals. “You wanted to love me, and I wouldn’t let you. I hurt you, made you afraid of me. Don’t you get it, little girl? I don’t know what love is!”

“You needn’t look at me as if I’m any threat,” she said defiantly. “I gave up on you years ago.”

“Yes. I know.”

She averted her eyes. “I don’t love you. I had an inconvenient fascination for you that you put into perspective for me. You won’t have to fight me off ever again.”

His lean hand went to her face. He touched her cheek lightly, catching her chin when she tried to jerk away. His eyes probed hers relentlessly.

“That goes double for me,” he said. “I won’t ever touch you that way again.”

She watched him, too aware of the warm fingers on her softly rounded chin. “You would have forced me,” she choked out.

His face contorted. He wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t. He’d been out of his mind. “You don’t understand,” he said bitterly.

She stared at him as if she didn’t quite comprehend. He sounded tortured, haunted. “Dane?” she whispered.

He wouldn’t look at her. “You were a virgin,” he said huskily. “But I wasn’t. I’d had women. You were soft and vulnerable and loving, and I wanted you in a way I…couldn’t handle.”

Wheels turned in her mind. Men were vulnerable sometimes; even in her innocence she knew that. She’d avoided the thought for years, but a part of her had realized how desperate he was for her that day, how hungry. “You scared me out of my mind,” she laughed nervously. “Every time I went out with a man, I was afraid he might become like that, and I wouldn’t be able to get away in time.”

“That isn’t surprising,” he replied. “Will you believe that it hasn’t been easy for me, either? You can’t imagine what it does to me when you cringe every time I come close to you.”

Her chest rose and fell slowly. She searched his eyes. “It was a long time ago, wasn’t it? I suppose I blew it up in my mind until it was nightmarish.”

He saw the faint softness in her eyes and hesitated. “Tess, is it only fear that you feel when you’re with me?” he asked. His eyes fell to her mouth, to the helpless parting of her lips under the intent stare. His thumb moved slowly, the nail just lightly tracing the moist inner surface of her lower lip in a movement that made her breath catch. “Or is there something more, in spite of the way I frightened you?”

She pulled back frantically, oblivious to what he’d said at the last in her desperation to get away from that maddening touch. Her eyes widened and her heartbeat became rushed.

He had to drag his eyes back up to hers. His own breathing was uneasy. So it wasn’t all terror. Something inside him thawed a little, even as he watched her futile attempts to hide what he’d aroused in her with that sensuous little brush of his hand. Amazing that in all his thirty-four years, he’d never thought of touching a woman’s mouth exactly like that.

“No,” he said, almost to himself. “It’s a little more complicated than fear, isn’t it?”

“Dane…”

“Your doctor says you can leave in the morning. In the meanwhile, there’s a uniformed officer outside the door. He’s been there since you were brought in, and he’ll be there until I take you home.”

She watched him nervously as he put out his cigarette.

He caught her scrutiny and his dark eyes slid to meet hers. “You make me want to be gentle. That’s a first,” he said quietly. He studied her thoughtfully. “Maybe I could make you want my touch, if I tried.”

Cold chills worked down her spine. “No,” she whispered huskily. “I won’t let you touch me. Not the way…you did that day!”

“I’ve never been with a virgin, little one,” he said, his voice deep and slow. “I’ve never been a gentle man, either, I guess, but I set new records on wildness with you. It made me take a long look at myself. I didn’t like what I saw.”

Her hands linked together and she looked at them, not at him. “I don’t want to talk about it, Dane.”

He had to search for the right words. “Haven’t you realized by now that most men…that a man who loved you would want to be gentle? That it wouldn’t be like that with someone who loved you?”

“How do you know if someone cares?” she asked with bitter cynicism. She looked up at him. “I thought you did,” she said huskily. “I thought you liked me, at least, but you made me afraid of you so that I wouldn’t be a threat to your privacy. My father didn’t want me, either. He landed me with my grandmother because he didn’t want me.” She shivered. “Nobody ever wanted me….” She lay back against the pillows, looking ten years older than she was. “Please go away, Dane. I’m too tired to fight anymore.”

Why hadn’t he known how she felt? After all these years, he still knew next to nothing about her. Of course she’d felt rejected when her father left her with her grandmother; more so because of all his affairs. And then he’d planned to marry Dane’s mother, further isolating her. She’d wanted someone to love, and she’d had the misfortune to pick a man who didn’t even know what it was, who’d known nothing but resentment and dislike all his life, a man with a failed marriage behind him and a crippled body to boot.

He grimaced at the defeated expression on her face. He felt responsible for her anguish, as if he’d caused it. Certainly he’d added to it.

“Do you like horses?” he asked.

“I’m afraid of them.”

“Only because you don’t know much about them. When you’re up to it, I’ll teach you to ride.”

Her eyes met his. “Don’t do this to me,” she said unsteadily. “Please don’t. I don’t need pity.”

He started to speak, but he didn’t know what words to use. He drew in a long breath.

“I’ll see you tomorrow. Try to rest.”

She nodded. Her eyes closed, blocking him out. She wasn’t going to let him get to her again. No matter what she had to do to protect herself, he wasn’t getting a second shot at her!

Chapter Three

THE LASSITER BAR-D was a working cattle ranch. Besides José Dominguez and Hardy, who were horse wrangler and cook, respectively, Dane employed a ranch manager, Beryl’s husband, Dan, and half a dozen cowhands and other assorted personnel necessary to keep the place running. One man did nothing but look after the purebred bulls. Another took care of the tanks used to water the cattle. Still another was a mechanic.

Tess hadn’t really wanted to let Dane spirit her out of the hospital and down to his ranch, but she hadn’t been strong enough to fight him. He’d cleared it with the doctor, had had her bags—packed by Helen—already in the car, and the minute she was released, had headed straight down to Branntville.

Tess was uneasy about the prospect of several days in Dane’s company. He was acting strangely, and she was nervous—much more so than usual.

He’d never been much of a talker unless he had to socialize as part of his job, so the trip down to Branntville was undertaken in silence. Tess stared out the window, buried in her own thoughts and occupied with the twinges of pain she was still feeling from the wound in her arm.

“Is that a ranch?” she asked when they reached the outskirts of Branntville, her eyes on a huge white-fenced property with a black silhouette of a spur for a logo.

“Yes. Cole Everett and the Big Spur are known all over the state. Cole married his stepsister, Heather Shaw. They have three boys, all teenagers now.”

“It’s very big, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Except for the Brannt Ranch, it’s the biggest north of the King Ranch.”

“Brannt Ranch? Is Branntville named for the people who live there?”

He nodded and indicated a ranch house far in the distance. “King Brannt owns the spread now. Talk about a hard case,” he murmured. “King makes up his own rules as he goes along. He married a beautiful young girl, a model named Shelby Kane, daughter of the movie star Maria Kane. Nobody thought he’d ever marry. He says Shelby came up on his blind side.” He smiled mockingly. “He’d do anything for her.”

“Did she take to ranch life?” Tess asked curiously.

“Like a duck to water. She and King have a son and a daughter. The daughter, I understand, is sweet on one of the Everett boys.”

“What a merger that would be,” Tess said.

“They’re young yet. And marriage isn’t always the end of the rainbow,” he added with faint bitterness.

“I guess it has to have common ground, doesn’t it?” Tess asked absently, staring out at the horizon. “Two people need more than physical attraction to make a marriage.”

He glanced at her. “Such as?”

“Respect,” she said. “Shared interests, similar backgrounds—things like that.”

“And no sex?”

She shifted uneasily, her eyes on the windshield. “I guess if they wanted kids…”

His eyes darkened. “Children aren’t always possible.”

“I suppose not.” She glanced at her hands. “Maybe some people don’t mind intimacy.”

“Tess,” he said heavily. “You don’t have a clue, do you?”

She flushed. “Don’t I?”

His dark eyes played over her profile, and the fire in his blood kindled. She knew nothing of men and women. It was his fault that she had such hang-ups. He’d hurt and frightened her. Now he wished he’d been different. If he could learn tenderness, it would be sweet to lie with her, to share the beauty of a man and a woman together with her. His body tautened as pictures danced in his mind. Tess, loving him. He could have groaned out loud. He’d thrown away something precious. Ironic that it should have taken a bullet to bring him to his senses, when it was a bullet that had robbed him of them in the first place.

“Here’s the ranch.”

He turned in between two rows of barbed-wire fences where red-coated cattle grazed. “I share a purebred Santa Gertrudis stud bull with the Big Spur,” he explained. “We’ll have to replace him pretty soon, though. We’ve been using him for two years, and that’s enough inbreeding.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Are you interested in ranching?” he asked suddenly.

“Well, I don’t know much about it,” she faltered, her gray eyes darting up to his. “I guess it’s complicated, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes. But it isn’t as difficult a subject as it sounds. You don’t ride, either.”

“I guess…I could learn,” she said hesitantly.

He smiled to himself as he rounded a curve, and suddenly they were coming up to a sprawling one-story white wooden frame house with beds of flowers all around it and tall trees.

“How beautiful!” she exclaimed.

Dane’s heart swelled at her delight in it. “It belonged to my grandfather,” he told her. “He left it to me when he died.”

“Oh, it’s charming,” she said breathlessly. “And the flower beds! I’ll bet they’re glorious in the spring!”

“They are Beryl’s contribution to beautifying the landscape. There are magnolia trees and azaleas and camellias, all sorts of blooming things. She can tell you, if you’re interested.”

“I love to garden,” she confessed. “I’ve never had anyplace to do it, except in my apartment window, but I used to do all the yard work at my grandmother’s house.”

He pulled up at the steps and turned off the engine, staring at her quietly. “I don’t know you,” he said, his voice soft and deep. “I don’t know a damned thing about you, Tess.”

“Why would you want to?” she asked evasively. “Look, is that Beryl?” A short, white-haired woman had come onto the porch.

“That’s Beryl.”

“It’s about time you got here!” the woman muttered. “Late, as usual. Is this her?” She stopped in front of Tess and looked her over. “Thin and sickly, she is. I’ll take care of that with some good home cooking. How’s that arm, lovey?” she asked gently. “Still hurt?”

Tess smiled, at home already. “It’s much better.”

“If you’re through running your mouth, I’d like to get the walking wounded into the house,” Dane drawled. “She isn’t going to get better standing out here in the cold.”

“It’s not that cold at all,” Beryl scoffed. “Why, in little more than a month there’ll be flowers everywhere!”

Tess could picture that, but she wouldn’t be around to see it, she thought wistfully. She let Dane help her inside, unable to stop herself from stiffening at the feel of his lean arm around her.

“Don’t panic,” he said curtly as Beryl went ahead to lead the way to the guest room. “I won’t hurt you.”

She colored involuntarily. “Dane…”

Her reticence made him irritable. “Relax, can’t you? You’re among friends.”

“You were never that,” she said stiffly.

“I’m thirty-four years old,” he said as they moved down the long hall. “Maybe I’m tired of being alone. You said once that neither of us has anybody else.”

“And you said once that you didn’t need anyone.”

He shrugged. “I’ve spent fourteen years being a cop. It isn’t easy to change perspective.”

The mention of his profession made her uneasy. She didn’t like thinking about the drug dealers she’d seen or what Dane had said about her being the only witness.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I was thinking about the night I got shot,” she confessed. “About those men…”

“You’re safe here,” he said. “Nobody is going to hurt you.”

“Of course not,” she agreed, and forced a smile.

Beryl settled her in while Dane went out to check on some new cattle that arrived shortly after they did. It was several hours before he reappeared, after Beryl and Tess had gotten acquainted. But the man who walked into the bedroom wasn’t the man she thought she knew.

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