Desperado. Diana Palmer

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 doesn’t know I came from Morocco,” she said stiffly. “He doesn’t even know I was in Morocco in the first place. I didn’t tell him I was leaving Houston. Not that he would have cared, even if he’d noticed.” She leaned her head back against the leather headrest with a sigh and closed her eyes. “You’d think I’d stop bashing my head against stone walls, wouldn’t you?”

      The thinly veiled reference to her feelings for her foster brother wasn’t lost on the man beside her. He wasn’t close to Cord Romero, but he recognized unrequited love when he saw it. He was sorry for this pretty, strong woman who looked as if she was at the end of her rope. He wondered why his boss couldn’t see how much she cared about him. He was supremely indifferent to her, and had been ever since Davis had come to work for him.

      “Besides,” she added in a voice that betrayed more than she realized, “he’s got June to take care of him, now, hasn’t he?”

      He shot her an odd glance. “Not in the way you’re thinking,” he volunteered.

      She was suddenly interested. “Excuse me?”

      “June is Darren Travis’s daughter,” he explained. “He’s Cord’s cattle foreman, looks after the purebred Santa Gertrudis herd. June’s taken over the housekeeping and cooking just temporarily, because Cord’s regular woman remarried and left. But June’s sweet on a Houston police officer, and vice versa. She’s scared of Cord. Most people are. He isn’t the easiest boss in the world, and he has moods.”

      She was really confused now. “But he said...! I mean—” she lowered her voice “—he insinuated that he and June were involved.”

      He chuckled. “She has to be forced to go to him with problems. She usually tells her father and has him relay any requests. She thinks Cord’s a holy terror. She told me once she couldn’t imagine a woman brave enough to take him on. It really amazed her that he’d been married at all.”

      “It amazed all of us, at the time,” Maggie recalled reluctantly. His marriage had hurt her terribly. It was a whirlwind courtship at that. Maggie had wanted to die when he walked in the front door with Patricia. Their foster mother, Amy Barton, had been equally shocked. Cord didn’t strike anyone as a marrying man.

      “He hasn’t had women around in years,” Davis said thoughtfully. “He goes out occasionally, but he never brings anybody home, and he’s never out late. Funny, that. He’s a good-looking man, only in his thirties, in a dangerous profession and rich. You’d think he’d have pretty women tripping over him. He’s something of a recluse.”

      She glanced at him. “That dangerous profession is probably why. He knows every assignment could be his last. I don’t imagine he’d want to wish that on a woman.”

      “Danger draws women, though, doesn’t it?”

      She laughed. “Not this woman,” she confessed, stifling a yawn and lying through her teeth. “I’d rather marry a guy who worked the drive-in window at a fast-food joint than a professional demolition expert. Not much risk of being blown up handling hamburgers and fries,” she added drolly, and was rewarded by a chuckle.

      Maggie had been briefly engaged to Eb Scott just after Cord married Patricia. Now, she could admit that it had only been an engagement of friends, one of so many futile attempts to get over Cord. She and Eb had never been really attracted to each other physically. Cord had assumed that they were sleeping together, which explained his stark horror at Maggie’s innocence years later, on the night Mrs. Barton died. But Maggie had never been able to think of any man except Cord intimately—at least, until they were intimate. Now her older, more frightening memories of things sexual were intermixed with new ones of discomfort and embarrassment. Why, oh, why, couldn’t she get him out of her heart, her mind?

      “You’ve known Cord a long time, haven’t you?” Red mused.

      “Since I was eight and he was sixteen,” she murmured, getting drowsy, lulled by the soft motion of the truck on the smooth pavement of the highway that led into Houston. “That old saying that brothers and sisters fight like cats and dogs isn’t so far off, you know,” she murmured. “Even foster ones.”

      “Really?” he said, almost to himself.

      “Really.” She yawned and his next comment fell on deaf ears. She drifted off into a brief oblivion.

      * * *

      IT WASN’T A long drive, but it felt as if they’d just left the ranch when Maggie was brought awake by a tap from Davis’s hand. She opened her eyes and noticed that they’d already reached the city limits of Houston.

      “Sorry to wake you, but we’re in town now. Do you have any idea where you want me to take you?” Davis asked gently.

      “To a nice, comfortable, cheap hotel,” she murmured dryly. “I’m living on my savings until I get another job, and they don’t amount to much.”

      He grimaced. “You should have told him.”

      “Oh, no!” she disagreed. She smoothed her pink-tipped fingernails over her white purse. “I’m not his responsibility. I only wanted to take care of him. Funny, isn’t it? He doesn’t need anybody. He never has.” She turned her eyes out the window. She wasn’t a weepy sort of person. She was strong and spirited and independent. The hard knocks of her life had made her strong. But she was tired and sleepy and she felt Cord’s cold rejection deeply. She was momentarily weak and she didn’t want Davis to see it.

      Davis mumbled something under his breath. It sounded like “damned idiot,” but Maggie wasn’t rising to the bait.

      “It isn’t right,” he said angrily. “Letting you out the door without even knowing if you had a way back to town.”

      “Don’t you dare tell him about the suitcase or the trip,” she said impatiently when she saw the look on his face. “Don’t you dare, Red!”

      “I won’t tell him about the suitcase,” he agreed, mentally crossing his fingers. “There’s a good hotel downtown, not expensive, where my mother stays when she comes to see me,” he added quickly. “You’ll like it.”

      She nodded. “Okay. That’ll do. I think I could sleep for a week.”

      “I don’t doubt it.”

      “Tomorrow, I’ll get a newspaper and find a job.” She yawned again. “Things will look bright tomorrow.”

      “I’m sorry you had such a rough day,” he told her as he pulled up in front of a nice, but nondescript hotel downtown.

      “They’re all rough days, lately,” she murmured with a smile. “Life is trial by fire, didn’t you know? It’s an obstacle course. If you survive it, you get to wear wings and float around feeling sorry for the living!”

      “Think so?” he teased.

      “Of course, when I think about Cord, I want to come back as a stump and trip him twice a day,” she commented drily. She turned toward him. “Thanks for the ride, Red. Thanks a lot. It would have been a long walk.”

      “No problem.”

      He went around and got her suitcase out for her. She walked into the hotel dragging it behind her. Davis thought he’d never seen such poise, and the thought “grace under fire” came unwillingly to his mind. And Cord Romero could turn his back on a woman like that! The man had to be nuts.

      Maggie checked in, went up to her room, locked the door, took off her pantsuit and fell into the bed. She put Cord’s handsome face out of her mind firmly and closed her eyes. She was asleep