The Texan's Contested Claim. Katherine Garbera

her tote, she crossed to sit beside him. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” she asked, as she pulled her camera over her head. “It’s really boring.”

      “I wouldn’t have asked, if I didn’t.”

      With a shrug, she tucked the camera into her tote. “It goes back to when I dropped out of college during my junior year and moved to Austin.”

      “Why did you drop out?”

      “My parents come from a long line of doctors and they expected me to follow in their footsteps. Carry on the family tradition. That kind of thing.”

      “And you didn’t want to?”

      “Not even a little. I did try,” she said in her defense. “But I hated all the science courses I was required to take and my grades proved it. I tried to talk my parents into letting me change my major, but they wouldn’t listen. They kept saying I wasn’t applying myself. That being a doctor was an honorable occupation, a duty even. We argued about it all during Christmas break, and I finally told them that they couldn’t force me to become a doctor, that I was going to sign up for the courses I wanted to take.”

      “And did you?”

      She grimaced. “For all the good it did me. When they received the bill from the university for my spring tuition and saw what courses I’d signed up for, they refused to pay it. When that didn’t whip me into line, they closed the checking account they’d set up for me to pay my college expenses, which left me with no money and no way to pay for my housing, food. Nothing.”

      “So how did you end up in Texas?”

      “Claire Fleming. She and I met our freshman year in college and became best friends. She knew my parents had cut me off and how bummed I was. To cheer me up, she invited me to go to Austin with her to visit her grandmother. I had nothing better to do, so I tagged along.

      “To make a long story a little shorter, the Vista belongs to Claire’s grandmother, Margaret Fleming. It was a wedding present from her first husband. Sadly he died after they’d been married only a few years. She remarried several years later to some oil guy and moved to Saudi Arabia, but she held on to the house. Said selling it would be like cutting out her heart.

      “She came back to the States several times a year for month-long visits and always stayed at the house. As she got older, it became harder for her to travel and she wasn’t able to come as often. You can imagine what happened to the house. What the vandals didn’t destroy, varmints did. It was a mess. She’d always hoped that Claire would want the house someday, but Claire fell in love with an Aussie and was planning to move to Australia right after graduation, which she did, by the way. So the grandmother decided to make one final trip to Austin before selling the house. Claire was to meet her there and help her pack up what personal belongings she wanted to keep.

      “What I didn’t know was that Claire and her grandmother had already discussed my situation, and they’d decided to offer the house to me.” She held up a hand. “And, yes, I know it sounds too good to be true. At the time, I thought so, too. But Mimi—that’s Claire’s grandmother—was dead serious. She really loved the house and didn’t want to sell it, and she definitely didn’t need the money. So she offered it to me. All she asked in return was that I take care of it and love it as much as she did.”

      “Sounds like the perfect arrangement.”

      “It was a sweet deal, all right, but it only resolved my need for housing. I was still broke and without a job. Mimi, Claire and I brainstormed ways I could earn money to cover my expenses and still have time to go to school, and we came up with the idea of renting out the extra bedrooms to college students. It was the perfect setup for me. Since the house is on Town Lake and relatively close to the university, I never had a problem leasing the rooms, which meant I could be really selective about who I leased to.”

      “If it was such a success, why the change to a bed-and-breakfast?”

      She lifted a brow and looked down her nose at him. “Have you ever lived with twelve college students?” She shuddered, remembering. “It was bedlam even on the best day. And there was absolutely no privacy. After I graduated, I decided I wanted the house to be more like a home than a dorm, and I came up with the idea of turning the Vista into a bed-and-breakfast.”

      “And the grandmother was okay with the change?”

      “More than okay. In fact, she gave me the house.”

      “Gave it to you?” he repeated.

      She nodded. “I think she’d reconciled herself to the fact that Claire was never going to want it, and she definitely didn’t want her son to get his hands on it, so she decided to give it to me.”

      “Gave it to you,” he repeated, doubting her story, since his research had indicated the only property Ali owned was her car.

      “It’s not official yet,” she was quick to tell him. “She only told me about her decision last summer, then she caught pneumonia and passed away just before Thanksgiving. Her estate was sizable, to say the least, so it’ll probably take a while for her lawyers to get everything prepared for probate and the necessary papers filed to transfer ownership to me.”

      She glanced around, and was surprised to see it was getting dark. She hitched the strap to her tote over her shoulder. “I had no idea it was getting so late. We’d better go.”

      He stood, and offered her a hand.

      When she grasped his hand, she felt that now familiar spark of electricity between their palms and watched his face as he pulled her to her feet, wondering if he felt it, too.

      “Did you feel that?” she asked.

      “What?”

      “That sparkly thing when our hands touched.”

      “Sparkly thing?” He shook his head. “No, can’t say that I did.”

      “Really?” she said in surprise, then frowned and rubbed thoughtfully at her palm. “That’s weird. I feel it every time we touch.”

      Three

      Sparkly thing?

      Garrett snorted as he climbed into bed. How about a hundred volts of electricity shooting up his arm?

      But he sure as hell wasn’t going to admit that to Ali. If he’d learned nothing else during his thirty-six years of living, it was never reveal your weaknesses to your enemy.

       Enemy?

      Frowning thoughtfully, he folded his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling, unsure if that tag still fit. If the stories Ali had told him today were true, she was looking more like a victim, than the enemy.

      Her dropping out of college up north and finishing her education in Texas was true enough. He’d unearthed that nugget about her past while doing his own research prior to making the trip to Austin. But nothing he’d found had indicated her move to Texas was due to her parents cutting her off. He might’ve dismissed her story as exaggeration, if he hadn’t already heard his stepmother describe her adoptive parents as cold and heartless people. But in Garrett’s opinion, what Ali’s parents had done to her was inexcusable. Imagine, a parent who would knowingly leave his child with no money, no job and no prospects…

      He shook his head ruefully. Ali was just damn lucky she’d had a fairy godmother waiting in the wings. No telling what would’ve happened to her if Mimi and Claire hadn’t come along, offering her a place to live, as well as the means to support herself.

      He frowned, more than a little surprised by the level of compassion he felt building toward Ali. He was going to have to be careful, he told himself. Prior to coming to Austin, he’d had a laundry list of reasons to despise her. He couldn’t allow a hard-luck story blind him to the hurt she’d caused his stepmother or allow it to distract him from his purpose for being in her home.

      Her life might resemble Cinderella’s, but he sure