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

threatening to tell my mommy?” Tanya said with some sarcasm of her own even though the threat to tell JoBeth carried more weight than the threat to call the police.

      Tate didn’t respond to her flippancy. He merely glanced down at the file again, closing it and laying his hand flat on top of it as if that could seal it away from her.

      Then those eyes pinned her in place again and he said, “I’ll tell you what this family doesn’t need right now—a traitor in our midst.”

      “I’m hardly that,” Tanya countered, chafing under that comment more than anything he’d said yet.

      “So it’s loyalty that brought you in here tonight?”

      There was that facetiousness again.

      “I was just hoping for an inside story. The discovery of that sunken ship that the Santa Magdalena supposedly came from has renewed interest in the diamond and I thought—”

      “That you’d use your mother’s position here as a way to get the scoop.”

      Despite pretending not to take seriously his threat to bring her mother into this before, Tanya was becoming increasingly worried that she’d done damage to the position that her mother had held since Tanya was barely two years old. She definitely didn’t want that.

      “I’m sorry, okay?” she conceded. “I shouldn’t have—”

      “No, you shouldn’t have. But now that you have—”

      “Fine. If you want to have me arrested then do it. But leave my mother out of it. She doesn’t have anything to do with this. She’s sound asleep and doesn’t even know I’m here or that I had any intention of coming over here.”

      He seemed to consider that and Tanya had started to wonder how the robot pants and Flashdance sweatshirt were going to go over in jail when he said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”

      Tanya raised her eyebrows at him and waited.

      “I’ll keep your secret about this little escapade tonight if what you heard and saw here, stays here.”

      Jail in robot pants and a Flashdance sweatshirt was easier to accept.

      “You want me to just sit on the fact that the McCords honestly do believe they have the Santa Magdalena diamond?” she said incredulously. “That you’re so convinced of it that your brother is planning the family’s business future around it?”

      “That’s exactly what I want you to do.”

      “I think that’s unfair of you!” Tanya said with a little heat in her own tone now. “This is something that could make my career and you want me to do nothing with it when we both know it’s going to come out sooner or later, and potentially be a coup for someone else? I’ll grant you that I may have stepped over the line using my mother’s position here, but I don’t think I should be penalized because she works for you.”

      Tate McCord gave her the hard stare. But if he thought she was going to back down because of it, he was mistaken.

      Maybe he saw that in the fact that she didn’t waver in the stare down they were engaged in because he took his hand from the file, stood straight and said, “Okay, how about this—whether or not we do have the diamond and where it might be and if it can be found are all questions that have yet to be answered with any kind of certainty. What you think Blake is planning the business’s future around is really—honestly—a gamble we’re taking. But if—big if—we should end up finding the diamond and everything pans out, I’ll promise you an exclusive.”

      “In other words, you want to buy some time,” she said.

      His eyebrows were well shaped and one of them rose in reply.

      “My price is higher than that,” Tanya said, deciding that if she was in for a penny, she might as well be in for a pound.

      “Your price?” He was obviously astounded by her audacity.

      But Tanya didn’t let that daunt her. “I want the whole story—and I mean the whole story, so that if the diamond ends up being a bust, I’ll still have something to launch me. Like I said before, if the Foleys or the McCords sneeze, it’s news. But there are a lot of details and history and background that even I don’t know. And if I don’t have the complete picture after growing up here, I have to think not many other people do either. So it can give meat to the bigger story of the Santa Magdalena diamond finally, actually, being found. Or it can at least give me a well-rounded, juicy human-interest piece about Dallas’s two most illustrious—and infamous—families. And why they hate each other.”

      “What kind of details, history and background are we talking about?” Tate said in a negotiator’s voice.

      “Inside information on the family—the personal things that haven’t been in press releases. I want to know about the feud with the Foleys—the truth. I want to know all about the McCord jewelry empire—including if it’s hurting. I want the full package, enough to make it interesting even if it turns out that the search for the diamond is nothing but a wild-goose chase.”

      “Meat,” Tate repeated the word she’d used moments before. “You want to treat us like meat.”

      “I just want the truth and not what’s already common knowledge. Think of it this way, you got me a job at an independent news station that isn’t owned by the Foleys so there won’t be any pressure to make you guys look bad. My mom works for you, I grew up here—if anyone will do the story without painting you in a bad light, it’s me.”

      “Or I could just have you arrested and fired and—”

      “And then I could go to one of the Foley-owned stations or newspapers or what have you and do the story from their angle.”

      Once more Tate McCord stared at her long and hard.

      “You know, I like your mother.”

      Meaning he didn’t like her. Tanya had absolutely no idea why that bothered her. But it did.

      Still, she wasn’t about to show him so she merely raised her chin in challenge.

      Then he surprised her and laughed. “And I’m assuming I get to be your source?”

      “You’re the one proposing we make a deal.”

      She wasn’t sure if he liked that answer or if he had something up his sleeve, but he smiled and said, “All right. Deal—you keep quiet for now, I’ll give you the inside story and the exclusive on the diamond if we find it.”

      He held out his hand for her to shake.

      Tanya took it, clasping it firmly to let him know she wasn’t intimidated by him.

      But what she hadn’t anticipated was how aware she would be of the way her hand felt in his. Of the strength emanating from his grip. Of the texture of his skin. Of the tiny goose bumps that skittered up her arm…

      Then the handshake ended and something made her sorry it had.

      But that couldn’t be…

      “For now I guess I’ll just say good-night, then,” Tanya said, thinking that in all that had happened since she’d first heard Tate McCord’s voice this evening, she hadn’t wanted to get out of there as much as she did at that moment, before anything else totally weird came over her. Or overcame her…

      “Good idea,” he confirmed.

      So Tanya stepped from behind the desk, snatched her mother’s sweater from the back of the chair on her way to the French doors and finally went back out into the night air.

      And the entire time she held her head high, knowing that Tate McCord had followed her to the door to watch her go—probably to make sure she did, she thought.

      But it also occurred to her, as she took the path that