His Girl Friday

From New York Times bestseller Diana Palmer comes a reader-favorite story of a woman attempting to do the impossible: tame the roguish man she loves from afar…

There has only ever been one man for young Danetta Marist…but he’s the one she can never have. That’s gruff, handsome boss Cabe Ritter, whose mere glance makes her spine tingle and her heart race. And then there was that heart-stopping kiss in his office. But Danetta believes in marriage and happily-ever-afters. And everyone knows Cabe is a terrible womanizer...

Deep down, Cabe is no playboy. Long ago, he put up a facade to protect himself from any woman—like his alluring secretary—who wanted a commitment from him. Cabe knows that young, fresh and deliciously tempting Danetta has a lot to learn about love. But now that he has held her in his arms once, he decides that he’ll be the man to teach her...for the rest of their lives.

His Girl Friday

Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

Danetta Marist glared at the closed office door with all her might. He could just sit in there until he took root and grew into his expensive gray leather chair for all she cared. He never made mistakes; she did. If something was missing, then she misplaced it.

“It isn’t worth putting up with you just to make car payments,” she informed the closed door. “I’m a great secretary. I could get work anywhere. All I have to do is reply to ads in the paper, and prospective bosses will trample you trying to get me to work for them, Mr. Cabe I-Am-The-Greatest Ritter!”

She tucked a loose strand of curly light brown hair back into its high coiffure and her gray eyes stared daggers at the elegant wood door of his office. She twirled a pen in her slender fingers while she thought about the advantages of typing her resignation and stuffing it up his arrogant nose. Well, she wasn’t apologizing to that bad-tempered ex-drill rigger, not for anything. It wasn’t her fault that he got the calendar dates mixed up and went to a business meeting at the wrong restaurant and lost an important contract. Was she to blame because he couldn’t read?

It was just like him to accuse her of doing it deliberately. He accused her of everything from stealing his pens to drinking his bourbon, and why she stuck with the job, she didn’t know.

The pay was good, of course. And he did let her have the occasional hour off during the week to go shopping. And he wasn’t really all that bad…

On the other hand, the office was forever full of salesmen speaking a strange language that seemed to have no relation whatsoever to English as they talked about various valves and parts of drill rigs and heavy equipment. Danetta knew how oil was removed from the ground, but the technical nature of her job was still Greek. She did know what a geologist’s survey looked like, and that the work the geologists did was top secret when they were looking for new oil fields. She knew that because her cousin Jenny, with whom she roomed, worked for Cabe Ritter’s father.

But despite her halting attempt to say so, Mr. Ritter’s oilman father, Eugene, who seemed to spend his life looking for new ways to upset Cabe, had taken up one of her lunch hours explaining a geologist’s duties, along with many other things she’d never wanted to know about the oil business. Eugene owned an oil company for which Cabe no longer worked. That defection into the oil rig equipment business was the source of most of the friction between the older Ritter and his son. Cabe had been certain that Eugene would go bust during the oil glut, but he hadn’t. The old man had made money because he had super geologists on his payroll who could find things like strategic metals that he could sell to the government. It was all sort of cloak-and-dagger, as she’d learned from her secretive cousin Jenny, but the discovery of the metals made money even when oil didn’t.

Danetta did nothing quite as adventurous and secretive as seeking important geological formations. She wrote up orders, took dictation, typed letters for her impatient boss, made appointments and caught hell on a regular basis. And when friends and family asked what the Ritter Equipment Corporation made and sold she just grinned and pretended to have gone deaf. Once, with a straight face, she actually told an uncle of hers that Cabe Ritter designed and built photon torpedoes. Unfortunately the uncle wasn’t a Star Trek fan, so things had gotten sticky for a few minutes, especially when the uncle happened to meet Cabe and remarked that he sure would like to see one of those planet-busters work.

“Can’t you read, for God’s sake!” Cabe Ritter broke into her thoughts as he muttered over the intercom. “Why didn’t you tell me I had a chamber of commerce meeting at noon? It’s ten minutes until twelve, and the restaurant where we meet is twenty minutes away and I’m the program chairman!”

With a sigh she pushed the appropriate button. “The meeting isn’t today, Mr. Ritter,” she said with forced pleasantness. “That’s tomorrow. You’re looking at the wrong date.” Again, she added under her breath. “This is April the tenth, not the eleventh.”

There was a brief pause. “Who turned the page?” the deep, slow drawl demanded.

“I guess I did,” she mumbled with resignation. “God knows, I turned loose the last hurricane that hit the coast and I’m sure I cause gingivitis and tooth decay—”

“Shut up and come in here.”

She picked up her pad and pen, smoothing her skirt over her full hips and straightening her white midi blouse. She was tall, but she had a perfect figure and long, sexy legs. Her thick light brown hair reached to her waist when she let it down. She looked very pretty with it left long, but she always pulled it up into a chignon while she worked and she was careful not to apply more than a touch of makeup to her face, barely highlighting her soft, pale gray eyes with shadow. Her face was a perfect oval, and its gentleness gave the skin a delicacy beyond words. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was attractive, and most bosses probably would have noticed her even though she didn’t draw attention to her assets.

She downplayed them because her boss was a womanizer, and she didn’t want to risk her heart to him. She knew that she was vulnerable, because he’d given her a long, smoldering look last Christmas when she’d dressed up for a party with some of the other office girls in the building. He’d captured her under the mistletoe just as she was leaving, and her heart had all but beat her to death when he bent his dark head toward hers, with his pale eyes glittering on her soft mouth and no expression at all on his hard face. She knew she’d stopped breathing entirely. But to her surprise, he’d suddenly checked the downward movement of his head, muttered something under his breath and the kiss had been redirected to land on her cheek. He’d walked away with a curt “Merry Christmas.” After that, he’d suddenly started calling her “Dan” instead of “Miss Marist” and treating her like a younger brother. She’d pretended not to notice, but since he’d made it so obvious that he wasn’t going to make another pass at her, she’d never dressed up since. It was safer to be his younger brother.

Her parents in Missouri would have approved of her caution. He seemed to prefer blondes, and very sophisticated ones at that. He was quite openly a playboy, and that turned Danetta off completely. She’d never told him how she felt about his life-style, since it was none of her business, but she’d never want to get serious about such a man.

Anyway, she was only twenty-three to his thirty-six, and he seemed to think of her as a child because in the two years she’d worked for him, he’d never made a single real pass at her. He talked to her as if she were a younger man, about sports and sometimes even about his women. He didn’t seem to notice that his bluntness made her blush; he seemed to be talking more to himself than to her anyway.

Lately he was dating a very elegant and cool blonde named Karol Sartain, and she’d settled him somewhat. He was much less restless than he’d been for the past few months, even if his temper was growing shorter by the day. Just yesterday, Danetta had caught him watching her with the oddest expression she’d ever seen. He’d looked at her as if he suddenly wished her in Siberia, and she didn’t understand why.

Well, it was probably better that he disliked her. A man of his experience was hardly the perfect partner for a repressed maiden who kept a giant lizard for a pet.

She opened his office door and walked in. His sheer physical presence always took her breath away, especially combined as it was with his spectacular good looks. He was tall and muscular, a big man with an aggressive personality. He was a world-beater, and he looked it, with pale blue eyes that could burn holes in steel and thick, wavy dark hair that fell onto a broad forehead. He had thick black eyebrows over his deep-set eyes, and high cheekbones. His nose had been broken at least once, and his chin had a slight cleft and a couple of tiny scars etched into his dark complexion. But despite those slight flaws, he was devastating to look at, and women couldn’t seem to resist him. He had all the charm in the world when he wanted something, and if that didn’t work, he had fists like hams. He was afraid of nothing on earth. Except snakes. Danetta had never told him about her pet. She wondered if his fear ran to lizards.

Muscles rippled when he moved. He was all muscle. He’d worked on drill rigs until he started his equipment company, and he looked like a crew chief. These days he didn’t work on rigs, but when he was in a really foul mood, he went out and worked it off on his father’s ranch outside Tulsa. The elder Ritter had been a semipro baseball player back in the heyday of that sport, and he’d wisely invested his earnings in a small ranch and a string of filling stations in Texas and Oklahoma. With keen business sense, he’d parlayed that start into a successful oil business and his son, Cabe, had helped until he’d decided to get away from his father’s well-meaning dominance and start his own company—which manufactured and sold parts for drill rigs.

He’d been at it for ten years, quite successfully, but his father annoyed him by never mentioning exactly what Cabe did for a living. In fact, by way of revenge, he liked to tell his friends that Cabe was a janitor at a local bar. Danetta hadn’t understood the amazement of new clients at first when they realized whose son Cabe was—because old man Ritter was something of a legend in the oil business, and many of his cohorts bought their parts from Cabe. But now that she was in on the joke, it was alternately amusing and exasperating.

The elder Ritter had never quite approved of his son’s independence. He liked running the whole show, and everyone’s life that was in any way connected to his own. Just as his son did. When Eugene frequently visited Cabe at the office, he was full of helpful suggestions for Danetta. His last had been that she stop calling his son “Mr. Ritter” and concentrate on wearing clothes that emphasized her nice figure.

“You’ll never catch his eye that way, you know,” the old man had muttered, clearly disapproving her neat skirt and blouse.

“Mr. Ritter, I don’t want to catch his eye,” she’d replied. “He’s not my type at all.”

“You’d settle him,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, nodding his silver head as he towered over her, with eyes as pale a blue as Cabe’s. “Keep him away from these party girls he takes around. He’ll die of some god-awful disease, you know,” he whispered conspiratorially. “He doesn’t even know where those girls have been!”

At that point, Danetta had excused herself and made a dash for the rest room, where she collapsed against a wall in tears of hysterical laughter. She’d wanted so badly to tell her boss what his father had said about him, but didn’t know how to bring up the subject.

Cabe’s curious scowl finally caught her attention. “Well, don’t just stand there, Dan, sit down,” he muttered, watching her watching him. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately, but your mind’s just not on your work.”

Her eyebrows lifted sharply. “I beg your pardon?” she faltered, standing beside the chair across from his massive desk.

“Sit!” he said shortly.

She sat. The curt authority in that deep voice had the same effect on his male employees. He was so used to throwing out orders that he didn’t have any inhibitions about doing it at restaurants, other peoples’ parties—just about anywhere. Hostesses were said to sigh with relief when he left.

“No wonder your father doesn’t approve of you,” she muttered. “You’re just like him.”

“Insults are my line, not yours, kid,” he reminded her. He leaned back in the chair and it squeaked alarmingly. He was no lightweight, even if it was all muscle. His pale blue eyes stared a hole through her. “You don’t look very cheerful this morning. What’s wrong?”

“You had two bites out of me before I got in the door, and it wasn’t my fault,” she replied.

“So? I have two bites out of you most mornings, don’t I?” His eyes glittered with faint humor. “It goes with the job description. You cried for the first two days you worked here.”

“I was scared to death of you those first two days,” she recalled.

“Then you threw the desk calendar at me.” He sighed. “It was nice, having a secretary who fought back. You’ve lasted a long time, Dan.”

Maybe too long, she wanted to say. But she didn’t.

“No comment?” He jerked forward in his chair with one of those lightning moves that always threw her off balance. For a big man, he was incredibly fast. “Look here, we’ve got to do something about my father.”

She blinked at the sudden change of subject. “We do?”

He glared at her. “Yes, we. He’s feeding the rumor mill again. His latest favorite bit of gossip is that I’m looking for a wife. My phone rang off the hook last night with offers from the aged eligible of Tulsa.”

She grinned at his irritated expression. She could just see the spinsters getting their arrows out. “You know why, don’t you?” she asked. “You changed the lock on your apartment and now he doesn’t have a key that fits.”

“My God, I had no privacy at all! I had to do it. He was waiting for me at the apartment last Friday night,” he said, his eyes narrowing angrily. “I took Karol home with me after dinner and there he stood, sharpening his knife on a whetstone. He took one hard look at her and invited himself for coffee and a drink. He didn’t go home until after midnight. Meanwhile he treated Karol to a monologue on the fine art of castrating calves, mucking out stables and assorted other disgusting subjects that made her sick. She went home.”

“Oh, I can understand that,” she agreed, trying to convince herself that it didn’t matter about Karol going home with him. It did irritate her, though, that she minded his careless attitude toward his conquests, when she should have been grateful that she wasn’t among them. “I once heard him tell one of your women friends about the treatments you were taking for some contagious condition.”

His eyes widened. “It was Vera, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? My God—” he banged his fist on the desk “—that’s why she left in such a hurry and without saying goodbye! The venomous old snake!” Vera, Danetta recalled, had been his steady date before Karol.

“Is that any way to talk about your father, Mr. Ritter?” she asked gently.

He gave her a tolerant stare. “Dan,” he began, using the appalling nickname that he and he alone had stuck her with, “when he was in here last week, one of the kinder things he said about you was that you dressed as if you had pull at the Salvation Army surplus store.”

She was so insulted that she forgot to protest the destruction of her name. “The venomous old snake!” she exclaimed.

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I thought you said. Any ideas?”

“None that won’t get you arrested,” she replied. “Why is he interfering so much lately?”

He sighed, brushing a huge hand through his thick, wavy hair. “He thinks I need a wife. So he’s going to find me one.”

“Maybe he’s just bored,” she murmured thoughtfully. “You could ask your stepmother to take him on a world cruise.”

His eyes hardened. “I have as little contact with my stepmother as possible,” he said curtly.

“Sorry.” She knew that was a sore spot with him, but she didn’t know why. He was a very private man in some ways.

He shrugged. “I guess your parents are still married?”

She smiled. “Yes, sir, for thirty years last November.”

“Don’t call me sir,” he said harshly. He broke a pencil and got to his feet, moving toward the window like a human steamroller while Danetta caught her breath at the bite in his voice. He pulled open the blinds and looked over the flat landscape of the city. “I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to love anyone.”

She stared at his broad back incomprehensibly.

He fingered the blinds thoughtfully. “You haven’t volunteered any information about Karol to my father, have you?” he asked suddenly, turning toward her.

His height was intimidating when he loomed over her that way. She shifted gracefully in the chair. “No, si—” She cleared her throat. “No, Mr. Ritter. He did all the talking. As usual.”

“What did he say?”

She muffled a giggle. “That you were going to catch some god-awful disease if he didn’t save you from those women.” She leaned forward. “You don’t know where they’ve been, you see.”

He burst out laughing. The sound was deep and rich and pleasant, because he wasn’t usually a laughing man. It took some of the age from his hard face, made his blue eyes sparkle. She smiled at him because he looked wickedly handsome when he was amused.

“So that’s his angle. Maybe I can have a long talk with him about modern life.”

“That will only work if you tie him up and gag him first.”

“He’s confiding in you lately, is that it?” He pursed his lips and studied her with that quiet scrutiny that was becoming more and more frequent. “How old are you now, Dan?”

“Twenty-three.” And if you don’t stop calling me Dan, I’m going to wrap you in cellophane tape and hang you out the window, she added silently.

“You were barely twenty-one when you came here,” he recalled thoughtfully. “Gangly and nervous and painfully shy. In some ways, you’re still shy.”

“How kind of you to notice,” she said, “now about the mail—”

“You don’t date,” he said as if he knew.

She crossed her long legs. “Well, no. Not a lot,” she said with obvious reluctance.

His blue eyes searched hers. “Why?”

She chose her words carefully. She’d never had this kind of personal discussion with him before, and she wondered why he’d brought up the subject. Surely his father hadn’t been trying to play Cupid for her? “I’m not modern enough to suit most men,” she replied finally.

He perched himself on the corner of his desk and looked down at her quietly. “Modern as in sexually liberated?”

She felt her cheeks grow warm. “My parents were middle-aged when I came along, and they were and are very conventional people. I was taught that love should mean something more than sex. But I discovered that to most men, love meant a nice dinner followed by a session in bed. Nobody was willing to spend the time it would take to build a relationship, especially when there were so many women who didn’t want one anyway. So I gave up evenings with unpleasant endings and brought Norman home to live with me.”

He frowned. “Norman?”

“Norman, my iguana,” she explained.

He paled and gave her a frankly horrified look. “Your what?”

“My iguana. He’s a nice pet,” she said defensively. “I got him when he was just a baby—”

“An iguana!” He looked quickly around the office as if he thought she’d put Norman in her purse and brought him to work with her. He actually shuddered. “My God, nobody has an iguana for a pet! It’s a snake with legs, for heaven’s sake!”

She glared at him. “He is not! In fact, he looks like a little Chinese dragon. He’s an iguanid; a descendant of dinosaurs, of ancient Iguanodon. He’s quiet and clean and you should see the effect he has on door-to-door salesmen! He’s three feet long, although he’s still just a baby,” she murmured with a smile. Incredible that she’d never told him about Norman, but then, they hardly ever discussed routine things about their private lives. He didn’t even know that she lived with Cousin Jenny, she supposed. She wondered if he even knew that Cousin Jenny worked for his father, or that two years ago, it was Jenny who had told her about this job so that she could apply for it.

“Why do you keep a reptile for a pet? Are you trying to grow your own prince?”

She sighed angrily. “That only works with frogs. Listen, I just keep Norman for a pet, I don’t kiss him.” She frowned. “Well, I used to when he was a baby—”

“Oh, God!” he burst out, shuddering. He stared at her. “No wonder you can’t get dates! No sane man goes around kissing a woman who kisses iguanas!”

“There’s no danger of that,” she sighed to herself, unperturbed on the surface as she fought down the picture in her mind of Mr. Ritter bending her back over an arm and kissing her senseless. That was what she’d thought he was going to do at that Christmas party for one long, ecstatic second, until he came to his senses.

He got up and moved around his desk and sat down heavily. “I can see it now. One night there’ll be a man in your apartment, and you’ll call a press conference to explain how he got there. First you picked up your iguana and kissed it, and all of a sudden, poof! Prince Charming!” He frowned. “Or would you get a king with something as big as an iguana?”

“You’ll be the first to know if it ever happens,” she promised.

He lit a cigarette, grinning at her scowl. “You bought me that smokeless ashtray last Christmas.”

She pushed it toward him with a loud sigh. “I suppose I did.”

“I try to quit.”

“I wouldn’t call going overnight without cigarettes trying to quit smoking,” she murmured dryly. She pushed the mail toward him, a gentle hint that she had plenty of work to do, even if he didn’t.

He smiled indulgently. “I know, I’m procrastinating again. Did I ever tell you how much I hate answering mail? I’m still getting over last night,” he added on a heavy sigh. “Karol wanted to go to a concert. We sat through four hours of chamber music. I hate damned string quartets. I’d rather have gone to a country and western concert, but she doesn’t think fiddles are cultural.”

She had a giggle.

“Why are you giggling?” he demanded. “Surely you realize that fiddles are a big part of the American folk scene, and that sure as hell is cultural!”

“To you, chili is cultural,” she reminded him.

“Of course it is. It’s the only American food I like. Why in God’s name do you button those blouses up to your chin? Are you afraid I’ll go crazy if I get a glimpse of your naked throat? And you haven’t worn your hair down since Christmas.”

Her eyes widened. That was the most personal thing he’d ever said to her and it shocked her. “The blouse…it’s a jabot collar,” she stammered.