Texas Cinderella / The Texas CEO's Secret

“So, how far back would you like to go?” Tate asked with a nod toward the albums.

Good, he is getting right down to business, Tanya told herself to ward off a ridiculous sense of disappointment that he wasn’t bothering with small talk tonight.

“I did some background research today and thought about how I’d like to do this,” she said, trying to sound purely professional. “I’d like a clear picture of the McCords and your family history first. Once that’s accomplished, I can get into the story of the diamond and the treasure and of the feud with the Foleys, and the land and silver mines that changed hands, too. But for tonight, how about starting with just the family stuff?”

“Whatever you want.”

“And since it looks as though the feud between the Foleys and the McCords began with Gavin Foley and Harry McCord—”

“My grandfather.”

“—that seems like the furthest we need to go in McCord family history.”

“Okay, Harry McCord it is,” Tate said, sitting up and reaching for the albums. He discarded two of the more ragged ones before settling on one that displayed old, poor-quality black-and-white photographs of a man who bore a clear resemblance to him. “These are of my grandfather in front of the silver mines that launched the McCord fortune and, ultimately, McCord’s Jewelers,” he informed her.

Tanya flipped through page after page, noting that there were five mines, all of them with a large stone at their entrance, each with a petroglyph carved into it to name it. The Turtle mine. The Eagle mine. The Lizard. The Tree. The Bow.

“Can I have a few of these pictures to use? I’ll make sure they’re returned,” Tanya said when she’d reached the end of that album.

“I don’t see why not,” Tate agreed, taking them out and giving them to her.

“So, was your father Harry McCord’s only child?” Tanya asked then.

“No. My father was the oldest son. The younger—my Uncle Joseph—lives in Italy. You must know Gabby? My cousin?”

Gabriella McCord was a famous model and it was nearly impossible to pick up any magazine, newspaper or tabloid and not find her face on the cover. So Tanya felt a little stupid for not having considered from where on the family tree Gabby McCord had sprouted. She didn’t admit it, though.

“I know of her,” Tanya said. “The whole world knows of her. But it isn’t as if she was ever introduced to the housekeeper’s daughter on one of her visits, and I had no idea how she fit into the family—I guess I’d never really thought about it.”

“Well, Gabby’s father is Joseph. Joseph married an Italian actress descended from royalty over there. They made their home in Italy, and Joseph oversees and manages the European branches of McCord’s Jewelers. My grandmother died in childbirth with Joseph.” Tate found a picture of his grandmother and a few of Joseph growing up and as an adult, showing them to Tanya.

“So Harry McCord raised Devon—your father—and your uncle on his own?”

“That’s the story. My father said one of his earliest memories was of going out to the mines with my grandfather, and that was where he and Joseph spent most of their time growing up—if they weren’t in school, they were working alongside my grandfather.”

Tate moved on to the next album, flipping through more shots of the brothers Devon and Joseph until he reached one of them with Harry McCord, standing outside of McCord’s Jewelers.

“That was the first store,” Tate said.

Tanya took a close look at the nondescript glass storefront that could hardly compare to the current McCord’s Jewelers. Now they were known for their marble entrances, their plush lavender and gray carpeting, their mirrored cases and velvet displays, their leather club chairs for shopping in comfort. And their new customer-pampering campaign had only increased the level of luxury that was a world of difference from that initial jewelry shop.

“You’ve come a long way,” she observed.

“That was my father’s doing. And Blake’s. I take no credit for what goes on with the jewelry business.”

“I’d like to use this picture of the original store.”

“Go ahead.”

Tanya took it to put with the others she was collecting.

Then they moved on to the next album. It contained pictures of Devon McCord’s wedding to Tate’s mother, the beautiful, blond Eleanor Holden.

“Huh,” Tanya said as she glanced through them.

“What?”

“Your mother is the most somber-looking bride I think I’ve ever seen, and your father looks more victorious than smitten.”

“That seems about right,” Tate said, leaning in for a closer look and giving Tanya a better whiff of his cologne that was more heady than the wine she was slowly sipping.

“Why does that seem about right?” she asked.

“That my father looked victorious? That was always how he was when it came to my mother.”

Devon McCord had only died a year ago but while Tanya remembered the man, she had never paid any attention to his relationship with his wife, so this was news to her.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Some of it goes back to the problems with the Foleys—my mother dated both my father and Rex Foley, you know?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Tanya said, her interest sparked.

“I don’t really know much about it except that she did. The only thing I know is that my father would say—Rex Foley wanted her but I got her. Only he didn’t say it as if it made him a lucky man—which was how I always thought he should have said it. He’d say it as if she were the spoils of war. Just one more thing he’d won out over the Foleys, as if it wasn’t my mother who mattered as much as his victory over Rex Foley.”

“And now your dad is gone and you find out that Rex Foley is Charlie’s father…”

Tanya knew her mother would be furious with her if JoBeth found out she was taking such a liberty with a McCord. The McCords probably didn’t even realize that the staff was aware of what was going on within the family, and certainly no employee—or employee’s daughter—was at liberty to inquire about it.

But at that moment Tanya wasn’t there as the housekeeper’s daughter. She was there as an investigative reporter. And that meant asking even the probing, off-limits questions.

Tate didn’t answer it readily. He sat back, he took a drink of his wine, he raised a single eyebrow at her. “Hard to keep a secret from the staff,” he said.

Tanya raised both of her eyebrows back at him, committing blame to no one.

“It’s a private matter,” he said then in a tone that warned her not to pursue the subject. “We’re all still trying to come to grips with it. We definitely don’t want it announced in a news report. But then, that seems to fall more into the category of gossip than what you said you want to do.”

Tanya had to smile at his attempt to manipulate her. “I don’t know—two of Dallas’s preeminent families who have been in a long-standing feud, now connected by blood because the head of one of the families had an affair with the head of the other? That makes for a thin line between gossip and news. Especially in a piece like this.”

“Affair?” Tate repeated as if she were overstating.

“It wasn’t an affair?”

Tate’s sky-blue eyes bored into her for a moment as if he were sizing her up. Or judging just how much of a problem she could be for him. Gone was the openness she’d seen more of recently, replaced by a cool aloofness and the much harder edge she’d seen in him on Friday night in the library.

Then he sighed again and said, “I’m going to be straight with you—I don’t really know what went on between my mother and Rex Foley. I know—have always known—that she dated Rex Foley when they were teenagers. I don’t think there was anything between them once she married my father, and how they got together again is a mystery to me. I know—hell, you might even remember—that my parents’ marriage hit a rough patch and they separated. Charlie was conceived during that separation so obviously my mother turned to Rex Foley then, but I have no idea how that came about. Has she been involved with Rex Foley since then? I don’t know and to tell you the truth, I don’t want to know. Whatever happened is my mother’s business.”

There was no question in Tanya’s mind that she’d just poured salt into an open wound. And what that had done was reawaken the new—and not necessarily improved—Tate, just when she’d been getting a little more of the old.

Tanya had to admit that the new Tate was far more daunting. But it was her job to be undaunted.

“How is the fact that your mother had—or has—a relationship with Rex Foley affecting your family?”

“Right now, I’d say that we’re all just a little dumbfounded. Who knows what will happen in the future?”

“Have feelings changed toward Charlie?”

“No. Charlie is what he’s always been—our brother.”

“Now he’s also brother to the Foleys…”

Tate didn’t like this direction. He frowned at her. “We all have our flaws,” he said in a clipped voice she’d never heard him use before.

“Being half Foley is a flaw?” she ventured anyway.

“Are you going to make me sorry I agreed to do this?” Tate demanded suddenly.

“Probably.”

There was a moment of silence during which Tate gave her the hardest stare she’d ever had. Tanya actually thought he might get up, walk away and let her suffer the consequences of snooping through the library on Friday night. She thought it was a very real possibility that he might just have her fired from the studio, fire her mother as housekeeper and generally wreak havoc on her life rather than continue this.

But then his handsome face eased into an unexpected smile again and he shook his head. “I don’t know if being half Foley is a flaw or not,” he finally answered. “Right now it’s confusing for us all—especially for Charlie—and I think we just have to wait and see how it plays out.”

He said that with enough finality to let her know he wasn’t going to say any more on this topic.

So Tanya switched gears.

“I suppose McCord’s Jewelers’ financial woes are more of a priority than Charlie’s parentage at this point, anyway,” she said.

“Strike two! You really are aiming to tick me off tonight, aren’t you?” Tate said, though with a hint of humor infusing his words.

“Just doing my job. There are rumors that the family business is floundering and from what I overheard Friday night, the rumors have some foundation in truth—that makes it part of the story,” she insisted.

“The jewelry business is Blake’s bailiwick and the only thing I’ll say, the only thing I know to report, is that he’s working to increase sales the way any number of businesses do—with new advertising or new packaging or new whatever. That doesn’t mean anything is floundering.”

“I’ve seen the ads—A Once In A Lifetime Experience,” Tanya said. “Coffee and pastries for morning shoppers. Champagne and hors d’oeuvres later in the day. One-on-one customer service—”

“And Gabby—don’t forget Gabby is available by e-mail for personal shopping advice for certain clients who want to know what a high-profile trendsetter would buy.”

“That sounds like you’re putting in a plug for Blake’s new public relations campaign.”

Tate merely smiled as if that was exactly what he was doing and was pleased to be able to again control the information that would go into her story.

But she couldn’t let him get too comfortable. “And I heard you and Blake talk about him stockpiling canary diamonds to use as a tie-in with the Santa Magdalena diamond when he finds it.”

Tate sobered and sighed again. “You’re just digging around all over the place, aren’t you?”

Tanya gave him the that’s-my-job shrug.

“Let’s just say,” Tate said, “that it wouldn’t do any harm to have the Santa Magdalena diamond appear. And I hope that that happens and the focus of your report leans more in that direction—in a direction that can help rather than hurt.”

“In other words, you’d like it if my report could be more in the way of free advertisement than anything really revealing.”

He just grinned.

“So you’re using me? Is that why your fiancée isn’t putting the kibosh on your spending so much time with me?”

“My fiancée…” He took a drink of his wine, looked at the glass as he set it back on the table then said, “No more fiancée. No more engagement.”

“Oh…” she said, not impressed by the announcement.

He cocked his head at her. “You don’t believe me?”

“Oh, sure,” she said flimsily.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Believe you, don’t believe you—it isn’t really a matter of that. If the engagement was on yesterday and off today, it’ll just be on again tomorrow.”

“Even the staff—and the staff’s family—has been keeping track of that?”

“Hard not to. One day you’re an item, the next you aren’t.”

He shook his head. “Well, I hate to switch things up, but it’s not the same this time. The engagement is definitely off.”

Something about the way he said that gave Tanya a strange moment of elation that she tempered in a hurry. Then she shook her head at him, denying her own response and his claim all at once.

“You still don’t believe me?” Tate interpreted that part of the head shake.

“It doesn’t matter. This is how things go with you two. It stands to reason that you wouldn’t make it to the altar the first time around. There will probably be a couple of engagements and breakups before that will happen. But do I think it will eventually happen? Sure.”

Tate rolled his eyes. “This is tonight’s dinner all over again.”

So the subject that had made his family meal rough hadn’t been the Charlie issue, it had been Tate’s broken engagement…

“Your family didn’t take it seriously either?” Tanya asked.

“Only seriously enough to be annoyed. But I am serious—Katie and I are—”

“I know, broken up.”

“Once and for all.”

Why was there that part of her that wanted so much to buy the finality he was selling? To think that it was even a possibility that Tate McCord and Katie Whitcomb-Salgar could be no more for real? It shouldn’t have any impact on her at all, one way or another.

And yet it did. It raised a hope in her that was completely out of place. That shouldn’t have been there. That she didn’t want there. It made her feel as if she were walking a tightrope and had just discovered she didn’t have a safety net. It shook her.

And she suddenly felt the need to get out of there. To get some distance in which to gather her wits and regain some balance. Some distance that would take her where Tate wasn’t right there beside her, smelling so good, looking so good, and now not engaged…

“I think we’ve done enough here tonight,” she said, getting to her feet. “We’ve laid the groundwork. We can probably call it quits.”

She knew that had come out of the blue and the hastiness of it had obviously confused Tate. “We haven’t even talked about the present-day McCords—with the exception of Gabby,” he pointed out.

“I know about the present-day McCords,” Tanya said as she closed her notebook, clipped her pen to it and began to make a pile of the photographs she was taking. “Your mother looks after the household and family and does charity work. Blake is the CEO of McCord’s Jewelers. You’re a surgeon. There’s the twins, Penny and Paige—Penny is a jewelry designer, Paige is a geologist and gemologist. And there’s Charlie, who’s a student at Southern Methodist University and who we’ve also talked about tonight. Did I leave anyone out?”

“No, that’s the lot of us,” Tate confirmed, his tone still perplexed.

He stood then, too. And while Tanya hoped it was just a polite acknowledgment that she was about to leave, instead he said, “I’ll walk you back to your mother’s place.”

“That’s okay, you don’t have to,” she said, wishing it hadn’t sounded so panicky.

“I want to,” he assured her.

“Whatever,” Tanya said, trying for aloofness and failing as she picked up everything and held it in front of her like a schoolgirl carrying books. Carrying books close and tight and protectively.

“Did I tick you off somehow?” Tate asked as they headed for the path that wound away from the pool.

“No. I don’t know why you would think that.”

“Maybe because you’re acting as if I just grew fangs or something. Is my not being engaged scary to you?”

Terrifying. Although she wasn’t exactly sure why, except possibly that she was terrified that she might give in to that wave of elation that had washed through her when he’d told her his engagement was off and let down her guard with him.

But if she let down her guard, then what? She could end up just another person he occupied his time with while he was on one of his innumerable breaks from Katie Whitcomb-Salgar. And all Tanya could think was, Oh, no, not me.

She just wasn’t sure she could stick to it.

Although there was still the issue of her mother and her mother’s job, and the fact that Tate was her mother’s employer…

Reminding herself of that helped. It actually allowed her to begin to relax again.

Even if Tate wasn’t engaged any longer, there was still a good—a very good—reason why she absolutely couldn’t and wouldn’t let anything happen with him. Anything even like last night when she’d thought he might be on the verge of kissing her.

Then something else that seemed completely unlikely occurred to her and compelled her to say, “When did this particular breakup come about? I didn’t think Katie was even in Dallas.”

“We broke up about a week ago but she wanted to tell her parents before word got out and I agreed to that. She is in Florida with them. She called this morning to let me know our private gag order was lifted and I could tell whoever I wanted.”

So the engagement had been axed before Tate had found Tanya in the library on Friday night. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that he might be entertaining some notion of diddling the help’s daughter.

Tanya was relieved that that hadn’t been the case. That she hadn’t had anything to do with this particular breakup. She was also glad that she hadn’t said anything along those lines that would have embarrassed her. She was a little embarrassed anyway that she’d even had such a thought. Which was probably—like her thoughts of him kissing her—nothing but some kind of flight of fancy that she wasn’t even sure why she was having.

And she should just stop it, she told herself. Stop the flights of fancy, stop thinking anything was going on between them. And while she was at it, stop thinking about him every minute of the day and night, the way she had been!

They’d reached her front door when Tate said, “We haven’t talked about tomorrow.”

“No, we haven’t,” Tanya answered glibly, slowly settling down and coming to grips with herself and his news.

“I have to make my rounds in the morning, but I’m free in the afternoon. I thought I’d give you a tour of the McCord contributions to the city and end with an evening under the stars.”

Tanya glanced up to the sky and then dropped her gaze to blue eyes that were watching her intently. “Isn’t that what we just had? An evening under the stars?”

“I have something a little bit different in mind. What do you say?”

“Is it all for my report?” she asked to make it clear that that was the only thing she would agree to.

“Every bit of it,” he assured without hesitation.

“Then okay.”

“You still haven’t answered my question about if my being un-engaged is somehow scary, though,” he said then, smiling slightly.

“No, you’re being un-engaged is not scary,” she said as if the question itself was silly.

“You honestly did just decide on the spur of the moment that it was time to stop working tonight?”

“Yes. Why would I care if you’re engaged or not?”

Okay, she’d been doing so well and then she’d gone and taken it too far by sounding defensive.

“I care,” he said quietly, pointedly, continuing to gaze into her eyes.

And then she felt rotten. If he had been anyone else and this had been any other situation, she wouldn’t have reacted the way she had to the revelation that he and the woman he’d intended to marry had ended things. She would have been more caring, more compassionate. She wouldn’t have thought about herself.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I guess I was kind of callous. Even if you have had a lot of ups and downs in your relationship, that doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t be upset—”

“I’m not upset,” he said. “And I don’t mean to sound callous either, and maybe sometime I’ll tell you why this didn’t upset me, but what I do care about is that now I don’t have to pretend that I’m committed to something—or someone—I’m not committed to.”

“Because you’re a bad secret-keeper?”

“Because I wanted to do this and I couldn’t,” he said, surprising her by coming in for the briefest, lightest, faintest of kisses.

A kiss Tanya didn’t even have time to close her eyes for or respond to. And yet, a kiss that still managed to leave her lips tingling and her pulse racing.

But in spite of that, when it was over she shook her head at him. “Engaged or not, you can’t do that,” she said firmly.

“Why not?” he asked, smiling as if it was him who wasn’t taking her seriously now.

“My mother works for you.”

“I know that doesn’t make for the most ideal situation, but—”

“But nothing,” Tanya managed to sound so much stronger in her convictions than she felt. Especially since she was willing him with every ounce of her being to kiss her again…

Tate’s smile went crooked—and almost too sexy and endearing to resist—before he said, “I do love a challenge.”

“I’m not a challenge, I’m the housekeeper’s daughter.”

He nodded but she wasn’t convinced that their very different social positions meant as much to him as it needed to.

Then, rather than address it again, he merely said, “I’ll call you when I finish with rounds tomorrow. Plan on all afternoon and evening.”

“To compile data for my report and that’s it?” she said with a warning note in her voice.

“Nose to the grindstone all the way,” he assured her.

“Okay,” Tanya agreed a second time.

“See you then,” he said.

Tanya nodded and watched him go, trying not to drink in every detail of his backside, of the confident swagger to his walk. Trying not to wish he was still standing in front of her instead, kissing her again. Kissing her more thoroughly than he had. His arms around her. Hers around him. Her hands slipping down to that very, very fine derriere she watched disappear into the shadows of the trees.

He’s not engaged anymore…

The thought ran through her head like a wood nymph, taunting her. Tantalizing her.

But she chased it away.

Engaged, not engaged, it was all the same to her. She had more reasons than that not to give in to the attraction that kept sneaking in and taking over.

But it did keep sneaking in.

And taking over.

And the only way she had to combat it at that moment was to also remind herself that the odds of his not-engaged status lasting were slim to none.

And there was no way she was going to let herself be his hiatus-honey.

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