Date with a Cowboy. Diana Palmer

don’t want the police asking any embarrassing questions. I need Tony.”

      “Of course I won’t,” she agreed, but she couldn’t help wondering what all the secrecy was about.

      “I can’t stay long tonight,” he said apologetically. “I’m trying to do business by phone, fax and modem, and it’s damned hard.”

      Her eyes were curious. “Where do you live when you’re not here?”

      He smiled. “That’s need-to-know. You don’t.”

      “Well!” she exclaimed. “What a lot of cloak-and-dagger stuff!”

      “You have no idea,” he replied absently.

      The door opened. Tony came in, flipping his phone shut. “Max needs to talk to you again. It’s going to take a while.”

      “We’ll go home.” He got up, pausing to smile down at Sara. “Get better. I’ll be back in the morning.”

      “Thanks,” she said.

      He shrugged. “We’re family.”

      He went out with Tony and closed the door behind him.

      Max was not happy to learn that Jared was keeping company with some sick girl in the little hick town.

      “You need your head read,” she muttered on the phone. “You’ve got enough problems without adding a penniless, clinging cowgirl to them.”

      “She’s not a cowgirl,” he replied. “She sells books.”

      “An egghead isn’t much better,” she scoffed. “They want you to come back out here and let them give you around-the-clock security.”

      “We’ll never catch the perpetrators if we hide in a fortress,” he said. “And we’ve had this damned argument before!”

      “Somebody’s getting testy,” she purred. “No pillow talk down there, I guess?”

      “What do you want?” he interrupted.

      She hesitated. “I wanted to tell you that they’ve tracked three men as far as San Antonio. We’re not sure if they’re connected to the other, or not, but they’re the right nationality.”

      “What’s their cover?”

      “How should I know?” she muttered.

      “I pay you to know everything,” he countered.

      “Oh, all right, I’ll ask questions. Honestly, Jared, you’re getting to be a grouch. What’s this girl doing to you?”

      “Nothing,” he said tersely. “She’s just a friend.”

      “You’re spending a lot of time at the hospital.”

      “Neither of us has family,” he said absently. “We decided we’d look after each other if we got sick.”

      The pause was heated. “You know I’d take care of you if you got sick! I’d have doctors and nurses all over the place.”

      Of course she would, he thought. She’d hire people to care for him, but she wouldn’t do it herself. Max hated illness.

      “I’m tired and I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

      “I’m flying down there Monday,” she told him. “I’ll bring some contracts for you to look over. Need anything from the big city?”

      “Nothing at all. I’ll talk to you later.”

      “Okay. Sleep well.”

      “Sure.” He hung up. Max was possessive of him. He hadn’t noticed it before, and he didn’t like it. She was sleek, elegant, aggressive and intelligent. But she did nothing for him physically. He did have occasional liaisons, but never with Max. He hoped she wasn’t going to come down to Texas and upset things. He knew that she wasn’t going to like Sara. Not at all.

      Monday morning, Sara was on the mend. Dee had come twice, on Friday night and Sunday afternoon, bearing baskets of flowers and magazines for Sara to read. She absolutely forbade her to come back to work until the end of the next week. That made Sara feel a little better. She knew Dee was shorthanded when she wasn’t there.

      Jared had been back to visit, staying for a few minutes at a time, with Tony always in the background. She wondered why he needed a full-time bodyguard. He changed the subject every time she asked.

      Dr. Coltrain released her after lunch. She was wheeled out to the hospital entrance, where Jared was waiting in the big black pickup truck. He bent and lifted her like a sack of flour, putting her gently into the passenger seat and belting her in.

      She didn’t expect the sudden rush of breath that escaped her lips when he paused in the act of fastening the seat belt and looked straight into her eyes at point-blank range. She felt the world shift ten degrees. His eyes narrowed and dropped to her blouse.

      It didn’t take an expert to realize that he saw her heartbeat shaking the fabric and knew that she was attracted to him.

      “Well, well,” he murmured in a deep, sultry tone. And he smiled.

      Five

      Jared’s green eyes burned into Sara’s, probing and testing. They dropped to her full mouth and lingered there until she caught her breath audibly. He only chuckled. It had a vaguely predatory sound.

      He went around to his own side of the truck, climbed in, fastened his seat belt and started the engine. He was still smiling when he pulled out of the hospital parking lot.

      Sara had liked the White Horse Ranch from her first close-up look at it, the first time she’d delivered Jared’s books to him. She admired the sprawling white ranch house with its hanging baskets of flowers and the white wooden fences that surrounded a well-manicured pasture. Jared ran purebred Santa Gertrudis cattle here, not horses. Sara enjoyed watching the calves. Pastures were full of them in spring, just in time for the lush new grass to pop up. Or, at least, that would have been the case if the drought hadn’t hit this part of Texas so hard.

      “How do you have green grass in a drought?” she asked suddenly.

      He smiled. “I sank wells and filled up tanks in every pasture,” he replied, using the Texas term for small ponds.

      “Not bad,” she remarked. “Do those windmills pump it?” she added, nodding toward two of them—one near the barn and another far out on the horizon.

      He glanced at her amusedly. “Yes. It may be an old-fashioned idea, but it was good enough for the pioneers who settled this country.”

      “Your grandfather, was he born here?”

      He shook his head. “One of his distant cousins inherited a piece of property and left it to him. He ranched for a while, until his health got bad.” His face seemed to harden. “He took a hard fall from a bucking horse and hit his head on a fence. He was never quite right afterward. He put a manager in charge of the ranch and moved up to Houston with his wife. One summer day, he shot my grandmother with a double-barreled shotgun and then turned it on himself.”

      Her gasp was audible.

      He noted her surprise. “My father brought him down here to be buried, although nobody knew how he died. None of the family ever came back here after that,” he said. “I guess we all have something in the past that haunts us. I shouldn’t have been so blunt about it,” he added, when he realized that she was upset. “I forget that you grew up in a small town, sheltered from violence.”

      Obviously he considered her a lightweight, she mused. But it was too soon for some discussions. “It’s all right.”

      He pulled up in front of the house, cut the engine and went around to pick Sara up in his strong arms and carry her up the three wide steps to the front porch. He grinned at her surprise.

      “Coltrain’s