Page 43 of Texas Honor

“Sure I will, if he’ll go home and leave my bull alone,” he returned. “My God, you don’t know how hard I fought to get that critter into my breeding program. I outbid two of the richest Texans in cattle to get him!”

“And now Cousin Bud wants him. What for?” she asked.

“Beats me.” He sighed. “Probably for his advertising agency.”

She sat down on the sofa. “He wants your bull for an ad agency?” she asked dubiously.

His eyebrows rose while his brain began to grasp what she was thinking. “Ad agency...oh, no, hell, no, he isn’t going to use the bull to pose for male underwear commercials! He wants to sell it to finance expanding his advertising agency!”

“Well, don’t glare at me, it sounded like he wanted to make a male model out of it,” she defended herself.

He sighed heavily. “Woman, you’re going to be my undoing,” he said. And probably she would if he let himself think too hard about just why he’d come all this way after her. But missing her was just part of the torturous process. Now he had to prove to himself that he could have her around and not go off his head anymore. He still wanted her for certain, but marriage wouldn’t suit him any more than being his mistress would suit her. So they’d be...friends. Sure. Friends. Lillian would stop starving him. There. He had noble motives. He just had to get them cemented in his mind, that was all.

“Can’t you just tell Cousin Bud to go home?” she asked curiously.

“I have!” he grumbled. “Lillian has, too. But every time we get him to the front door, he calls up my grandmother and she raises hell with Lillian and me for not offering him our hospitality.”

“She must like him a lot,” she mused.

“More than she likes me, I’m afraid,” he returned. He whirled his Stetson in his hands. “I’ll give you one of the kittens if you want it.”

“Bribery,” she said in a stage whisper and actually grinned.

He grinned back. She was pretty that way. “Sure it is,” he said shamelessly. He glanced around her small apartment. “Will they let you keep a cat here?”

“I guess so. I haven’t ever asked.” So he was already planning for her to come back here, she thought miserably.

He shrugged. “You might not want to come back here, though,” he said unexpectedly. He smiled slowly. “You might like working for me. I’m a good boss. You can have every Sunday off, and I’ll only keep you at the computer until nine every night.”

“You old work horse!”

He didn’t laugh as she’d expected him to. He just stared at her. “Am I old to you?” he asked softly as if it really mattered.

Watch it, girl, she warned herself. Take it easy, don’t let the old devil fox you. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t think you’re that old.”

“To a kid like you I guess I seem that way,” he persisted, searching her blue eyes with his darkening green ones.

She didn’t like remembering how much older she felt because of his searching ardor. She dropped her eyes to the floor. “You said the past was over. That we’d forget it.”

He shifted his booted feet. “I guess I did, honey,” he agreed quietly. “Okay. If that’s how you want it.”

She looked up unexpectedly and found a strange, haunting look on his dark face. “It’s an impasse, don’t you think?” she asked him. “You don’t want a wife, and I don’t want an unattached temporary lover. So all that’s really left is friendship.”

He clutched the hat tighter. “You’re making it sound cheap,” he said in a faintly dangerous tone. He didn’t like what she was saying.

“Isn’t it?” she persisted, rising to her feet. He still towered over her, but it gave her a bit of an advantage. “You’d get all the benefits of married life with none of the responsibility. And what would I get, Ward? A little notoriety as the boss’s mistress, and after you got tired of me, I’d be handed some expensive parting gift and left alone with my memories. No respectability, no self-respect, tons of guilt and loneliness. I think that’s a pretty poor bargain.”

“You little prude,” he said curtly. “What do you know about grown-up problems, you with your spotless conscience? It’s so easy, isn’t it, all black and white. You tease a man with your body until he’s crazy for it, you try to trap him into a marriage he doesn’t want, you take whatever you can get and walk out the door. What does the man have out of all that?”

His attitude shocked her. She hadn’t realized just how poisoned he was against the female sex until he made that bitter statement.

“Is that what she did to you?” she asked gently. “Did she tease you beyond endurance and then marry someone else because what you gave her wasn’t enough?”

His face grew harder than she’d ever seen it. He’d never talked about it, but she was forcing his hand.

“Yes,” he said curtly. “That’s precisely what she did. And if I’d been fool enough to marry her, she’d have cut my throat emotionally and financially, and she wouldn’t even have looked back to see if I was bleeding to death on her way to the bank!”

She moved closer to him, hating that hurt in his eyes, that disillusionment that had drawn his face muscles taut. “Shall I tell you what most women really want from marriage? They want the closeness of caring for one man all their lives. Looking after him, caring about him, doing little things for him, loving him...sharing good times and bad. A good marriage doesn’t have a lot to do with money, from what I’ve seen. But mutual trust and caring about each other makes all the difference. Money can’t buy those.”

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