Desperado. Diana Palmer

she’d refused to answer the doorbell, even after he’d spent five minutes ringing it. She wouldn’t answer her damned telephone, either. He didn’t want to admit that he’d missed her, or that it hurt like hell that she’d waited four days to come and see about him.

      Their lives had been entwined since he was sixteen and she was eight when they’d been taken in by Mrs. Amy Barton, a socialite whose sister was an employee at the juvenile detention center. Cord’s parents had died in a fire while they were all visiting Houston on a rare vacation. Maggie had been abandoned by her family about the same time, and both were held at the juvenile center. Mrs. Barton, childless and lonely, had impulsively decided to be a foster parent to the two children. Eventually she’d adopted Maggie.

      Cord had been in trouble with the law at eighteen, and Maggie had been his mainstay. At the age of ten, she was so mature with her advice and loyalty for him that Mrs. Barton had laughed even through her agony at his predicament. Maggie was fiercely protective of her older foster brother. He remembered her holding his hand so tightly when his case was called before the judge, her whispered assurances that everything would be all right. Maggie had always taken care of him. When his wife, Patricia, had killed herself, Maggie had stayed right with him through the inquest and the funeral. When Mrs. Barton had died, Maggie had given him loving comfort, and he’d repaid her with pain...

      He couldn’t bear to think about that night. It was one of the worst memories of his life. He stared blankly out the window at the pasture where his big bull Hijito roamed, and grimaced as he recalled Maggie’s face only minutes before. Her life had been no bed of roses, either. He knew nothing of her childhood, or why she’d been taken away from her stepfather. Mrs. Barton had refused to discuss it, and Maggie had avoided the question ever since he’d known her.

      Maggie had inexplicably married, less than a month after Mrs. Barton’s death, and to a man she’d only known briefly. It hadn’t been a happy relationship. The man she married, a wealthy banker, was twenty years older than she was and divorced. Cord recalled hearing that she’d had some sort of accident at home, and that her husband had been killed in a car crash while she was still in the hospital.

      Cord had come home from Africa when he’d heard, just to see about her. She’d been at home when he came, too sick even to go to her husband’s funeral for reasons nobody told him. She hadn’t wanted Cord there. She’d refused to talk to him, even to look at him. It had hurt, because he knew why. The night Mrs. Barton had died, he’d taken Maggie to bed. He’d been drinking, one of only two times in his life he’d ever had too much to drink, and he’d hurt her. Incredibly she’d been a virgin. He didn’t remember much of what had happened, only her tears and harsh sobs, and his shocked realization that she wasn’t the experienced woman he’d imagined her. His anger at himself had translated itself into harsh accusations at her for what had happened. Even through the haze of time, he could still see her anguished tears, her shivering body wrapped in a sheet, her eyes avoiding the sight of his powerful body without clothing as he stood over her and raged.

      They’d seen each other very few times since then, and Maggie’s discomfort in his presence had been obvious. After she was widowed, she’d taken back her maiden name, thrown herself into her work as vice president of an investment firm and avoided Cord totally. It should have pleased him. He’d avoided her for years before Amy Barton’s death. She didn’t know that he’d married Patricia in a vain effort to head off his inexplicable obsession with Maggie. He’d spent so many years trying not to let her get close to him. He’d loved his pretty little American mother, worshipped his Spanish father. Their tragic deaths, in a fire that had spared him, had warped his emotions at an early age. He knew the danger of loving that led to the agony of loss. Patricia’s suicide had compounded his misery. When Mrs. Barton died, it was the last straw. Everything he loved, everyone he loved, was taken from him. It was easier, much easier, to stop feeling deeply.

      His stint in the Houston Police Department, interrupted by service with the army in Operation Desert Storm, had given him a taste for danger that had led him into the FBI. After Patricia’s suicide, for which he felt guilt because of reasons he’d never shared with another living soul, he’d gone into work as a professional mercenary. His specialty was demolition, and he was good at it. Or he had been, until he’d let himself be lured into a trap by an old adversary in Miami. His instincts had saved him from certain death, only to learn that the whole thing had been a setup. Maggie didn’t know that, and he had no reason to tell her. She was obviously unconcerned with his health, showing up so late after the fact. He knew that his adversary was going to come after him again. But he wasn’t going to let himself be surprised a second time.

      He turned away from the window with a sigh and regretted, deeply, his treatment of Maggie. He was responsible for her distaste for him, for the indifference that had brought her to his side four days after the accident instead of hours afterward. If she’d still cared for him at all, she wouldn’t have waited. She’d have been frantic to see him. He laughed at his own idiocy. He’d hurt her, been icy cold to her, pushed her out of his life at every turn for years, and now he was resentful because she didn’t care very much that he’d been injured. He was only reaping the harvest of his abuse. It wasn’t Maggie’s fault.

      For one vulnerable moment, he’d called her name and tried to find the words for an apology. But his pride had stopped him from following her when she ignored him. She’d go away and probably never come back. And he deserved it.

      * * *

      MAGGIE WAS HALFWAY down the long, paved driveway between neat white fences when the sound of a pickup truck coming up fast from behind made her step off the pavement.

      But instead of passing her, the truck stopped and the passenger door was pushed open.

      Red Davis, one of Cord’s ranch foremen, leaned forward, his wide-brimmed straw hat pulled down over his red hair and blue eyes. He smiled. “It’s too hot to walk a suitcase to Houston. Get in,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

      She chuckled, even as she was touched by an act of kindness she hadn’t expected. She hesitated for just a minute. “Cord didn’t send you, did he?” she asked abruptly. If he had, she wasn’t taking one step into that double-cabbed, six-wheeled truck!

      “No, ma’am, he didn’t,” he replied. “He didn’t know you brought the suitcase. And I wouldn’t tell him even if he tortured me,” he swore with a hand over his heart and a twinkle in his eyes.

      She laughed. “Okay, then. Thanks!” She slid her suitcase into the backseat and jumped up into the cab beside Davis, closing the door and fastening her seat belt.

      He started up the engine again and roared down the driveway. “I guess you didn’t come from town?” he probed.

      “Leave it alone, Red,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

      “You brought a suitcase,” he persisted. “Why?”

      “You’re a pest, Davis!”

      “And I don’t respond to insecticide, either,” he grinned. “Come on, Maggie. Tell Uncle Red why you turned up with that trunk on wheels.”

      “All right, I came from Morocco,” she replied finally when he just grinned at her scowl. “Straight from Morocco, at that, despite delays and layovers and flight cancellations. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. I expected to find him blind and helpless.” She laughed. “I should have known better. He laid into me the minute I walked into the house and booted me out the door.” She shook her head. “Just like old times. Nothing ever changes. Just the sight of me rubs him the wrong way.”

      “What were you doing in Morocco?” he asked, startled.

      “Having a vacation before I took up my new job in Qawi,” she confessed. “My best friend is taking it instead. So here I am with everything I own in a suitcase, no place to live, no job, no nothing.” She shot him a half-amused glance. “If I weren’t such a tough nut, I’d bawl my head off.”

      “Cord didn’t offer you a room?” he exclaimed, horrified.

      “Cord