Desperado

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 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 seconds later.

* * *

BACK AT THE ranch, Cord was sipping coffee and going over ledgers on his computer. He’d spent a lot of time away in recent months, and it was tough catching up on business.

He wondered sometimes why he didn’t just sell the ranch and move into an apartment. He was all on his own, and he never planned to marry again. Life would be less complicated if he lived out of a suitcase, as he’d done most of his adult life except during his brief marriage. But he loved his cattle, and the pair of Andalusian horses he’d purchased on his last visit to his cousin in Andalusia, in the south of Spain not too long a drive from the Rock of Gibraltar.

He leaned back and stared blankly at the black type on the computer screen. He couldn’t get Maggie’s eyes out of his thoughts. When she’d first seen him, before he spoke, those green eyes had been alive with concern, with pleasure, with tentative affection, with joy. So soon, they’d faded to dullness and the joy in them had eclipsed into a sadness that was painful to recall, although she’d quickly hidden it.

It didn’t take good eyesight to recognize her unrequited love for him. At some level, he’d known about it for years. He simply ignored it. She’d grown up, become engaged to his best friend, but married someone else, been widowed—her life had been more of thorns than roses. He’d offered her pain in return for those years of fierce loyalty and affection.

When she’d gone out of his life, he’d expected to have peace, finally. But the loneliness had worn him down until he became careless. In the past, it would have taken far more than a simple electronic bomb to damage him.

In past weeks, for reasons he didn’t really understand, she’d avoided him completely. That had hurt. He’d taken a case in Florida, wounded because Maggie didn’t want to see him. He’d let down his guard and had almost been killed, by an old enemy whose livelihood had been threatened by Cord’s investigation of an employment agency with which he was somehow connected. He’d planted a bomb and Cord had walked into a trap because his mind had been on Maggie instead of the job.

At least she’d finally come to see about him! He’d known that Eb was going to get in touch with her. But he’d stopped just short of telling the man to ask her to come and see about him. He’d expected—no, he’d hoped—that she cared enough to come running the minute he got home. But she hadn’t. It had shaken him.

He’d become accustomed to Maggie on the fringes of his life, always laughing, making him laugh, making him feel safe. She was always there, always waiting for him to...

He cursed under his breath and ran an angry hand through his thick, dark hair. Maggie had finally given up on him. She’d decided that he was never going to turn to her with anything more than sarcasm or indifference. She’d removed herself from the periphery of his life and cut him out of hers. That was what had hurt the most. Having her wait days to acknowledge his injury had only added fuel to the fire.

Well, he’d chased her away for the last time and he wasn’t going to sit around counting his regrets. He couldn’t blame her for not caring, when her place in his life had always been a reluctant one, a remote one, barely tolerated, and totally unappreciated. He couldn’t remember a single time when he’d admitted how much it mattered that she was concerned for him. He’d never told her the comfort it gave him when Patricia died, when he was wounded, when he was in trouble, to have her hold his big hand in her small one so tightly and never let go.

She was a rock in hard times. He hadn’t realized how much he counted on her presence for comfort, for security. Now that comfort was removed, perhaps forever, and her absence was like a hole inside him that nothing could ever fill again. He forced his attention back to the computer screen, grateful that he still had his vision, even if he lost everything else. Not that he was going to advertise his recovery. Not yet.

Impulsively he closed down the spreadsheet and logged on to the Internet. He wanted to know where his nemesis was and what illegal activities might have prompted the attack on Cord in Miami. With a smile of pure arrogance, he walked into the back door of a government agency and right into the protected files on one Raoul Gruber, who had connections in the Cote d’Ivoire of Africa, in Madrid, and in Amsterdam....

CHAPTER TWO

AFTER A MOSTLY sleepless night, Cord sat down to breakfast. He’d gone over the latest herd records with June’s father the day before, and he was satisfied with the breeding program and the sales figures. He’d called down to the bunkhouse for Red Davis last night to discuss a problem with some irrigation equipment, since Red had charge of ranch equipment and supplies, but the cowboy who answered the phone said Davis was off on a date, as usual. Cord wondered how a man with such a cocky attitude and such a big mouth could draw so many women. His own social life was stagnant by comparison. But that suited him, he told himself. He had no time for women.

The back door opened just as he finished his last bite of egg and biscuit, and Davis walked in yawning. His hat was pushed far back over his red hair and he was neat as a pin, in blue jeans and a short-sleeved checked shirt. He was twenty-seven, years younger than Cord, but he seemed even younger at times. Cord mused that he’d lived through more than Davis probably ever would. It wasn’t the age, didn’t they say, but the mileage that made people old. If he were a used car, he thought, he’d be in a junkyard.

“I heard you were looking for me last night, boss,” Davis said at once, pulling out a chair to straddle. “Sorry, I had a date.”

“You always have a date,” Cord muttered, sipping coffee.

Davis grinned wickedly. “Have to make hay while the sun shines. One day, I’ll be ancient and decrepit like you.”

Cord’s mouth drew down sardonically. “And I’d just decided to give you a raise!”

“I’d rather have girls hanging out of my truck,” Davis said, but he grinned again.

“Never mind. We’ve got problems with that irrigation system again,” he added. “I want you to get that serviceman out there and tell him I want it fixed this time, repaired with new parts, not held together with duct tape and baling wire.”

“I told him that last time.”

“Then call the customer service people and tell them to send somebody else. The equipment’s still under warranty,” he added. “If they can’t fix it, they shouldn’t sell it. I want it up and running by tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay, boss, I’ll give it my best. But you probably should have a lawyer talk to them about their customer service department. I think they employ robots.”

Cord stifled a grin. “You took computer courses. Reprogram them.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Davis said, chuckling. But he didn’t get up. He stared at his boss, hesitating.

“Something bothering you?” Cord asked bluntly.

Davis traced a pattern on the back of the wooden chair he was straddling. “Yeah. Something. I promised I wouldn’t tell, but I think you should know.”

“Know what?” Cord asked absently as he finished his coffee.

“Miss Barton had a suitcase with her,” he said, noting the sudden attention the older man gave him. “She came straight here from the airport. She was in Morocco. She said it took her three days just to get home. She was dead on her feet.”

Remembering his cold treatment of her, Cord was shocked. “She was in Morocco? What in hell for?” he burst out.

“She said she’d just taken a job overseas. She was having a holiday with a girlfriend on the way. She came rushing back to see about you.” The younger man’s eyes became accusing. “She was walking back to Houston with her suitcase when I drove up beside her. I drove her to town.”

Cord felt the sickness in the pit of his stomach like acid. The expression that washed over his handsome features knocked the outrage right out of Davis’s eyes.

“Where did you take her?” Cord asked in a subdued tone and without meeting the other man’s gaze.

“The Lone Star Hotel downtown,” he replied.

Cord made an awkward movement. “Thanks, Davis,” he said curtly.

“You bet. I’ll get on that irrigation system,” Davis added as he rose.

“Do that.” Cord didn’t even see him go. He was reliving that painful few minutes with Maggie. He hadn’t told her that he was hurt because he’d thought she’d waited to come and see about him. He’d assumed that she’d been in town and reluctant to come around him. But she’d come halfway around the world as fast as she could, just to take care of him. He’d misread the whole situation and sent her packing. Now she’d be wounded and angry, and she’d go away again; maybe somewhere that he couldn’t even find her. That hurt.

He put his head in his hands with a groan. The most painful realization was that she’d taken a job far away. He remembered calling her and going by her apartment without getting an answer in the past two weeks. Now he knew why. She’d left the country. She’d given up trying to get his attention, and he hadn’t even noticed her departure. That must have hurt her. Maggie was proud. She wouldn’t beg for his interest. After all the years of being pushed away by him, she’d decided to cut her losses. If he hadn’t been injured, and Eb Scott hadn’t tracked her down in Morocco and told her about it, he wouldn’t even have known where she was. She’d have been gone for good.

Now that he knew the truth, it didn’t solve the problem. It only complicated things. He wondered if it wouldn’t be kinder to just let her go, let her think he didn’t care about her, let her think that he was involved with June. But he was oddly reluctant to do that. It made him ashamed to think how much she cared, to come all that way, to sacrifice so much, because she was concerned for him.

There was only one thing to do. He had to go and find her, and tell her how badly he’d misjudged her. Then, if she left, at least they wouldn’t part with a sword between them.

* * *

HE HAD ONE of his ranch hands drive him into town, wearing dark glasses to maintain the fiction about his lack of sight. He got Maggie’s room number from the hotel desk, on the pretext of phoning her later. Then he ducked into the elevator, went up to her room, and easily let himself in with skills learned in a dozen covert operations around the world.

She was asleep in a huge double bed, moving restlessly. It was warm in the room, but she was huddled under the covers as if it were winter. He’d never known her to sleep with the sheet off, even in the hottest summer night when the air-conditioning in Mrs. Barton’s house was on the blink. Odd, that he’d never noticed that before...

She looked younger when she slept. He remembered the first time he’d ever seen her, when she was eight. She was clutching a ragged toy bear and she looked as if she’d seen hell and lived to tell about it. She didn’t smile. She hid behind Mrs. Barton’s ample girth and looked at Cord as if he were responsible for the seven deadly sins.