Texas Cinderella / The Texas CEO's Secret: Texas Cinderella / The Texas CEO's Secret. Victoria Pade

California—your mother actually wrote one of my letters of recommendation and helped me get a scholarship.”

      “I didn’t know,” he admitted. “What’s your degree in?”

      “Broadcast journalism.”

      He took more vegetables to slice. “Putting your energy into a degree like that is kind of risky, isn’t it? What do you do with it if—”

      “If someone does something underhanded and gets me taken off air?” she challenged.

      He had the good grace to smile with some contrition. “Let’s say, what if you grow a huge, unsightly, unremovable wart on the side of your nose and no news station on the planet will put your face on camera—what do you do with a broadcast journalism degree then?”

      “There are jobs behind the camera that I could still do, but it’s on-air time I’m after,” she said, emphasizing each word to bring home her point.

      He apparently decided to ignore her second jab because rather than respond to it, he said, “Why did you decide to come back here to work? Dallas is a big market for everything, but I’d think it would be flashier and more impressive to do the news in L.A. or New York or Washington.”

      “I interned in L.A. and worked there after I graduated. But the flashier, more impressive markets are also harder to break into and I didn’t feel like I was on the fast track. Plus Mom never liked my living out of state or that far away from her, but she wouldn’t move to where I was, so I finally decided to come back here. There’s still the potential for climbing the ladder from a local independent station to a local network affiliate to one of the bigger markets, and maybe if that happens I’ll be able to persuade her to come with me then. But the potential isn’t there at all when…I’m…banned…from…even…the…local…independent…station,” she said, speaking with even more exaggeration.

      “I get the idea—I’m a low-down, dirty dog for sabotaging your big chance here. But let’s not forget that what prompted my actions were your actions.”

      “All right, we’ll call it a draw,” she said as if she were being the bigger person.

      It made him smile again as he finished with the vegetables and brought a plate of already-sliced beef from the refrigerator.

      He tossed everything into the preheated wok where the sound of sizzling was loud enough to make it difficult to talk. Tanya didn’t try and merely enjoyed the sight of Tate cooking.

      He was as adept with that as he’d been with everything she’d seen him do at the clinic, and as she watched him it occurred to her that all the way around today she was getting a glimpse of him as not just someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

      When he judged their meal ready he urged her to the small table nearby where two places were set. There was also a rice cooker and a plate that displayed three small bowls of what appeared to be sauces.

      “Sweet, hot and spicy, not so hot,” he described the sauces, aiming a long middle finger at each one and for some inexplicable reason, causing Tanya’s focus to be on that finger rather than on the sauces. Or that finger and the thought of how even that was somehow sexy…

      Then he retrieved the bottle of wine from where she’d left it after pouring her glass, and as they both sat down to eat Tanya determinedly reined in her mental wanderings.

      “Did you wait tables or work in a fast-food place or a diner—or what—through college?” he asked after they’d tasted the food and Tanya had complimented his culinary skills.

      She was a little surprised that he’d listened closely enough to what she’d said to recall her comment about having worked in the restaurant industry.

      “We’re supposed to be talking McCords and the jewelry business and the diamond, remember?” she reminded him before she got carried away thinking the fact that he was paying attention to what she said was anything special.

      “The whole day was stuff you can use—the clinic is funded by my mother’s charities and donations from McCord’s Jewelers. I work there and oversee the rest of the staff to make sure the quality of care is the best that it can be. Now work is over for both of us,” he decreed.

      Tanya supposed she could concede to that. His small talk was staying within the bounds of propriety—it was only her own thoughts that had strayed. And while she would have liked to go on gathering material, she’d seen the day he’d put in and she had the sense that he needed a plain, ordinary, small talk-filled dinner, so she let him have it his way.

      “Okay,” she said, after another bite of the Asian-influenced cuisine. “Yes, I worked in a fast-food place—I was the bagel butterer on an assembly line at a sandwich shop. I also waited tables at one of those places that only serve breakfast—but I don’t think you could call it a diner. And there was an upscale, fancy restaurant where I did some hostessing.”

      “So basically, you worked your way through college completely in the food industry.”

      “Basically, but not entirely. I also worked as a motel maid before I did any of that. But only for three days—”

      “Three days?”

      “That was all I could take. You can’t imagine what kind of mess some people will leave in a motel room and the morning I found a dead guy was the day I quit—”

      “You found a dead guy?” he asked, trying not to be amused.

      “He’d died in his sleep, of a heart attack. But that was it for me—that was when I went with the restaurant work. Then, as soon as I could get on with a news station even just running errands, I grabbed it.”

      “I take it the scholarship wasn’t all that great?” he said apologetically.

      “No, it was,” she assured him, not wanting to sound ungrateful. “I wasn’t complaining. The scholarship paid my full tuition. But I had to earn money for books and fees and living expenses.”

      “I know you weren’t complaining. I think I was just feeling guilty because I partied and played my way through college.”

      “You partied and played your way through middle school and high school, too,” she reminded him.

      He smiled sheepishly. “That I did. In fact, I was thinking about you last night—about what I remembered of you growing up—”

      “Not much, I’ll bet,” Tanya said, pushing away her plate because she’d eaten all she could.

      His smile widened as he sat back, apparently finished eating as well. “Actually, I remembered that you were the you-shouldn’t-do-that kid.”

      “You’ve lost me,” she said, not sure what he was talking about.

      “My most vivid memories of you are of looking up from something Buzz and I were about to do and seeing this big-eyed kid who had appeared out of nowhere to stand on the sidelines, very stoically shaking her head at me, and saying, you shouldn’t do that…”

      Tanya laughed. “I don’t remember that.”

      “Oh, yeah. I remember because you were usually right. Of course I just thought you were some annoying little kid sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong. But you were still right. The day Buzz and I tried out our dirt bikes on the front lawn—we were thirteen so you had to be—”

      “Six.”

      “And you said, you shouldn’t do that, the gardener will get mad…”

      “And you did it anyway.”

      “And tore up the lawn. And the gardener did get mad, and so did my parents. I was grounded for two weeks. Then there was the time when we set up a ramp at the edge of the pool. We had new scooters and we were sure that with enough height we could jump the shallow end. There you were, doing your you-shouldn’t-do-that thing again. I’m pretty sure