“Let’s see what we’ve got. Extra flashlight, extra batteries for the flashlights, a couple of power bars, some high-energy granola mix, a small bottle of water, a small notebook and a camera. And I hiked in with a backpack, stashed it under the bushes by the…” Her voice trailed off as she saw that he was already headed in that direction. “You were watching me earlier?”

“Yes, I was,” he admitted, going right to the spot where she’d left her backpack, finding it with no hesitation at all and bringing it back to her.

She wanted to protest, but how could she? She’d done the same thing, spied on him.

She took the pack from him and started pulling things out. A bigger bottle of water, some more granola, some matches, a survival blanket, which he took and looked over appreciatively.

“That will come in handy tonight.”

Then she pulled out her satellite phone.

He shot her a pointed look.

“I’m not stupid. I didn’t go in without telling someone what I was doing. If my brother doesn’t hear from me by 6:00 a.m., he’ll be here soon after that to get me out.” She hesitated with the phone, then looked out into the storm. “Do you think—”

“No way,” he said. “Not in this.”

She tried anyway. “I have to,” she told her cowboy. “My brother will go nuts before this storm is over.”

Of course, he was right.

No signal.

She put the phone away and hoped she could reach her brother by morning, because he would be frantic otherwise and if the flooding kept him from getting here to her…Well, it would not be pretty.

Her brother thought he could move mountains. And he would to get to her if he thought she was in trouble, and then their whole plan to find the diamond would come out. If the Foleys knew what Paige was up to, she’d have to fight to set foot on this land again.

Yeah, she had to reach Blake by first light, if not sooner.

Paige made herself keep going with her unpacking, until she came to a thick, warm sweater and a fitted pair of sweatpants. She unbuttoned her coveralls and slid out of them, pulling on a second layer of clothes over her jeans and tank top, in favor of the coveralls, which were grimy and dusty from the old mine.

She and Travis shared some granola and water, watched the storm for a bit and then he suggested they might as well bed down for the night. It was early, but the sooner they slept, the sooner they’d wake up and could try to get out of here.

Paige looked over their options. “That spot’s the most sheltered, the farthest out of the rain.”

He nodded.

She took her coveralls and spread them out on the cold ground right against the back wall of the overhang and motioned for him to make himself comfortable.

As she suspected, he planned to sit up and watch the storm, settling himself with his back to one wall, facing out toward the gloomy night.

“You’re sure this area isn’t going to flood that quickly?” she asked.

“Reasonably sure, but I’m not taking any chances,” he said. “I’m going to watch and make sure.”

She sat down beside him, thinking to watch the storm herself.

“There’s no reason for both of us to stay up all night,” he said. “Or for both of us to be uncomfortable. Come on, Red. I won’t bite.”

He held out an arm to her and she settled against his side, finding a welcome heat and a body that was hard-muscled, but not as hard as the ground.

He put the survival blanket over her and still had enough left over to cover about half of him, and soon she was toasty warm, her head on his chest, her whole side plastered to his.

She felt his hand at the side of her face, covering her eyes and blocking the lightning, at least a bit.

“Go to sleep,” he said. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

She tried. Really tried.

But the wind slowly and steadily picked up, the fierceness of the storm growing with every moment. Every bolt of lightning had her struggling more and more to cover her fears, to stay still, to keep breathing easily and deeply, when all she wanted to do was get as close to him as possible and beg him to make it all stop.

It was a foolish thing, being afraid of something as simple as a storm, and yet, there it was. Caught in this eerily dark world, she was afraid.

And there was so little in life she truly feared.

She worked her face deeper into the curve between his shoulder and his neck and closed her eyes. “It is the hurricane, isn’t it? The way the winds keep building. It’s…That’s what hurricane winds do.”

“Yeah, it looks like we got the hurricane,” he told her, arms holding her tight.

“So we just sit here and see how much worse it gets?” That seemed completely unreasonable.

“Not much else to do, Red.”

“I mean, we don’t know how much worse it’s going to get or when its going to stop—”

“No, we don’t.”

“Tornadoes spring up from these storms when they’re over land—”

“Sometimes,” he admitted.

“Tornadoes, lightning, flooding. Perfect night—”

She broke off with a gasp as a huge clap of thunder drowned out her words.

He scooped her up and deposited her sideways on his lap, even closer than she had been to him, draped the blanket around her and grinned as he looked down into her eyes.

“You know, I could make you forget,” he said.

“What?”

“The storm. That you’re afraid—”

She sputtered, surprised and furious. “I am not afraid!”

“Red, you flinch every time a bolt of lightning strikes. Not a lot, and I know you’re fighting it, but you do. And that’s fine. I mean, it’s no big deal. We’re all afraid of something, and I’m just saying, I’m here. I’m happy to be of help, to get you through the night. Whatever it takes.”

Paige shook her head, having a hard time thinking, between being on guard about when and where the next bit of lightning might strike and trying to hide her fears and then having this man…this altogether tempting specimen of man make her an offer of…what, exactly?

“Are you saying, you’ll…that you’ll—”

“Whatever you want,” he said smoothly, a hint of amusement and, she thought, sheer wickedness in his tone.

“You think I would be so caught up in you and whatever you were doing to me, that I’d forget all about the storm and being afraid? You think you’re that good?”

“I’m saying I’m willing to try, that I’d certainly give it my best shot. I mean…I managed to distract you for the last few moments, didn’t I?”

“I—I—I can’t believe you—”

“You haven’t flinched over the last two lightning strikes, in case you didn’t notice. So from where I sit, it seems to be working.”

From where he sat!

Well, from where she sat, she was…She was on top of him, all lean muscles and heat and…and…

She had pushed herself upright at one point, wasn’t snuggled against him as she had been at first, but she was still sitting on his lap, her hands pressed against his chest for balance and to keep her from getting any closer.

“I don’t…I just…I don’t do this.”

“Do what? Snuggle? Kiss? Play around a little?”

Play around a little?

“That’s what you’re offering to do?” she asked.

He shrugged easily. “I’m saying I’m open to the possibilities.”

He made it sound so innocent, like nothing of consequence at all. Like passing the time in casual conversation or something.

“Actually,” he said. “Now that I think about it, not absolutely anything. We couldn’t actually have sex. No condoms. I don’t generally ride around the ranch prepared in that particular way.”

“Not an opportunity that normally presents itself during a normal workday at the ranch?” she quipped.

“No, Red. I have to say, it just doesn’t happen. Damned shame, don’t you think? I love working this ranch. Something like that happened every now and then…Well, I’d have to say the job would be just about perfect then.”

“Get lonely out here, Cowboy?”

He nodded.

She shook her head. “I can’t decide what to make of you. If you were half-serious about that or just…just—”

“I was going to kiss you,” he admitted, laughing beautifully, that rich, deep voice of his wrapping around her like a spell in the dark. “Although I am up for just about anything you’d like. I mean…a man needs to take care of a woman. It’s just…what a man does.”

“Make the sacrifice? Since I’m afraid and everything?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is this some cowboy code you live by? You’re honor bound to offer your body to a woman in distress—”

“That’s just what a man does.”

Paige didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or charmed.

Both, probably.

“I don’t know what to say,” she admitted.

“You don’t have to say anything. I was just letting you know you had options.”

“Oh, well. Options. Okay.”

“But really, why don’t you just stay here with me, lean down against me.” He eased her down against his chest. “There you go. And let your head go right here.” Against that warm, inviting curve of his shoulder and his neck. “That’s it. Close your eyes.”

He spread the blanket over her and him. She could feel him breathing deeply and easily, feel the heat of his body, his heartbeat beneath one of her palms.

He put one of his hands over her ear, and with the other ear buried against his chest, it blocked out a lot of the sound, making a little cocoon of safety for her.

It was nice.

Really nice.

“Go to sleep,” he whispered. “You’ll be fine.”

She tried.

She really did.

But the storm kept going. She’d be nearly asleep, then find herself jerked out of that half sleep by lightning, feel his arms tighten around her to let her know she wasn’t alone, feel the glorious heat of his big, hard body, and then find herself thinking of what he’d offered.

It was just a night.

Just a little comfort in the dark on a big, scary night.

She knew lightning wasn’t going to come snaking inside the rock overhang and get her. It wasn’t chasing after her.

But an irrational fear was just that—an irrational fear.

And she’d been battling this one since she was a little girl and had gotten caught in her tree house during a big storm. No one had known she was there, and she’d stayed well hidden inside of it, huddled into a little ball, shaking and crying like she never had in her life. Her mother’s face had gone absolutely white when she realized her daughter had been in a tree during a lightning storm. To Paige, it had seemed like it had gone on forever, like no one would ever come and save her, that the lightning would surely reach out and get her at any moment.

“I was playing outside when I was five or six, and a storm came, and I took shelter at the closest spot, which turned out to be my tree house,” she finally admitted.

“Oooh,” her cowboy sympathized.

“Yeah, not the best place to be during a storm. It was awful, and it seemed like forever before anyone found me.”

He held her tight as she lay draped over him, bracing for the next boom of thunder. His hands moved gently over her shoulders, trying to soothe and work out some of the tension there. She snuggled closer, her face pressed as far into the curve of his neck as she could get it, the reassuring rise and fall of his chest beneath her, the beat of his heart, steady as could be, thumping against one of her ears.

“I could tell you a story,” he whispered.

And she grinned despite her fears. “Thank you, but I’m not five years old anymore. Besides, I never got bedtime stories. I got songs. My mother used to sing us to sleep.”

“Okay, I’m definitely not singing. You don’t want me to sing.”

“Then…I guess there’s not much else you could do,” she said, thinking it came out sounding like an invitation more than anything else.

Oops.

She didn’t mean it that way.

Honestly, she didn’t.

So what if he was here? She was here. The storm was here. And it was going to be a long night.

He took her face in his hand, eased back away from her, just enough that he could look her in the eye and said, “Let’s just try one kiss, Red. Okay? One. And we’ll see how it goes from there.”

Well, if he thought she was going to fight him off…

No, he knew she wasn’t going to do that.

Just let go, she told herself. It’s just one night, just one kiss.

He let his mouth settle over hers, firm and sure, insistent and yet moving like a man who had all the time in the world. She opened herself up to the kiss, to him. To the heat and the pleasure, falling into it.

Some men just knew how to touch a woman, when to linger, when to blaze forward, when to tease and when to take.

He knew.

He devoured her, and she let him, helped him as best she could, with long, hungry kisses and hands that roamed restlessly across his chest, his shoulders, his back, into his hair, trying to get even closer.

She wasn’t altogether sure how she got there, but she ended up straddling his lap, her hips in his hands, her breasts crushed against his chest, wishing she didn’t have a stitch on.

And it all happened as fast as a fire roaring out of control.

“Damn, Red,” he said, lifting his mouth from hers long enough to catch a ragged breath.

“I know.”

Maybe she’d just been alone too long, gotten too caught up with her work and her family and all of its craziness. Had forgotten to make time for Paige, the woman, with all a woman’s needs.

Because this felt very much like need.

He kissed her again, used his hands on her hips to draw her into a rhythm against him that was both arousing and maddening through their clothes.

If he’d laid her down on the hard ground right then and started stripping her clothes off, she didn’t think she could have stopped him. She was so aroused already he might not even have to take her clothes off her. If he just kept doing what he was doing, which now included a hand slipping beneath her sweater and her shirt and that little nothing camisole of a bra to her breast, his mouth on her neck…

Her whole body gave a shudder.

The things he was doing to her neck…

He laid her back against that hard ground, settled himself heavily, but still fully clothed, on top of her, pushed up her clothes and took her nipple into his mouth and sucked hard.

“Trust me, Red,” he muttered. “Just trust me. Everything will be fine.”

Chapter Four

Paige slept like a baby.

Blissfully, heavily, completely unaware of anything, until she woke to the same sound of pounding rain and howling wind of the night before. If anything, it might just be worse.

And she was alone.

She sat up, wiped her hair from her face. It was flying around everywhere this morning, escaping from her braid. Her shirt and her camisole were bunched up under her sweater, and she straightened those, her cheeks filling with heat at just how that had all happened. And her jeans were unbuttoned, unzipped.

And she couldn’t say she was sorry at all.

They hadn’t actually had sex.

Not quite.

But he certainly had taken care of her.

She’d felt like the whole world exploded quite happily inside of her, with nothing but his mouth and his hands, and felt bad that he hadn’t let her do the same for him.

But he’d said he wanted her in a nice, soft, warm bed, in a nice, warm bedroom with all the time in the world to do this right. He didn’t want to be rushed. He didn’t want to be worried about the storm or a flood, and he kind of liked the idea of her owing him.

So there it was.

She owed him.

And planned on happily making good.

Lord, what a man!

Then she remembered the money thing. Paige’s family had serious money. And clout. And history.

Men could get weird about it.

She hoped her cute cowboy didn’t get too weird about it. Ranch hands lived simply, most of them on very little, and usually had a healthy disdain for the world in which Paige’s family lived.

She just wanted to know the man, enjoy the man, think for a while at least that any and all good things were possible with the man.

How long had it been since she’d felt like that?

She was practically singing as she got to her feet and went to look for him.

It was still very early, not quite five her watch told her, the world still filled with a ghostly white gloom, the rain not retreating in the least. Neither was the wind.

She went from one end of the overhang to the other. It was like searching through thick fog, but he wasn’t there.

A moment later he came in out of the rain, a ghostly image, except she could tell he was dripping wet. He stopped when he spotted her and then through the gloom, she could swear she saw his mouth spread into a big smile.

“Sleep well, Red?”

“Yes, I did,” she said. “You?”

“I had really nice dreams and a woman draped all over me. Yeah, I slept just fine.”

So that’s how she’d slept? Draped all over him?

It must be true, because she’d slept on rock-hard ground before, and the body made its protests known the next day. Hers felt just fine this morning.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“I’m not complaining,” he reassured her.

“No, just…You got to sleep on the ground. I definitely got the better end of the deal.”

“Well, you can owe me for that, too, Red.”

And then she laughed like she hadn’t in years.

Yeah, she owed him.

And it felt good to owe him, to think of paying back the favors of last night, leisurely, happily, in a nice warm bed.

“So, where is this nice, warm bed of yours, and how are we going to get to it?”

“My bed is about five miles, as the crow flies. So we’re going to have to make do with the hunting cabin I was telling you about. All we have to do is make it through the rain. I’m glad you’ve got your boots on. And your coveralls are waterproof?”

She nodded.

“Good. You’ll be just fine.”

“And you’ll be soaked,” she said, looking at the shirt plastered to him, his dark hair drenched and slicked back, lying against his head.

“I’ve been wet before. I’ll survive, and we’ll get a nice fire going once we get to the cabin and we can dry each other off. Sound like a plan?”

“Yes, it does,” she agreed.

A glorious plan.

They gathered up their things. She had her small pack, and he took her larger one. She got into her coveralls and then stared out into the storm.

At least the lightning had stopped.

Still, what a mess.

“The wind’s not any worse than it was last night,” she said. “Like…the storm’s stalled?”

“Right on top of us, I’d say.”

Which was not good.

A fast-moving hurricane could drop a lot of rain quickly, but at least it was gone fast, carried along by the forward movement of the storm.

But sometimes a hurricane came ashore and then ran into another front coming the other way, and it was like a standoff in the sky. The two storm systems just sat there, dumping torrential rain carried by the leftovers of the hurricane on the same spot.

The flooding could be devastating, particularly in a place as flat and normally dry as Texas.

“If I thought this was going to get any easier, I’d say we wait it out. But I really don’t think this storm is moving, Red. We need to just trudge through it. We’ll stick to the side of the ridge, so we’ll have high ground. And it probably won’t look like a path, but trust me, it’s there and I know it. I grew up on this ranch. Cabin’s maybe a mile and a half from here. Stick close to me, and if you need help, yell. Okay?”

“Okay,” she nodded, trusting him implicitly.

They set off in the cold, soaking rain, so heavy she could barely see him in front of her. He was right about the path. She didn’t see one, but he seemed to know exactly where he was going.

At times, off to the left, she could see what she thought was a raging river, where a peaceful stream had been the day before.

The one she’d watched him wash off in, when she’d had all those wonderful fantasies about him.

He lived up to them and more, she decided, and as soon as they got in out of the rain, she was going to peel those wet clothes off of him, dry him off and then heat him up.

It could rain for a week, for all she cared.

They trudged on through the storm. The ground was wet and had the consistency of watery oatmeal under her feet. Even with her work boots, she was sliding all over the place.

Rain dripped off her cowboy hat, blew in at times and rolled down her face, her neck and inside the opening of her coveralls, no matter how tightly she clutched them to her. It soaked through her sweater, her shirt, even her socks.

Yuck!

The sky lightened only marginally as they walked and, presumably, the sun came up somewhere above all the clouds and the rain.

She didn’t want to think of what might have happened if he hadn’t caught her in the mine. If she’d been inside the mine shaft alone when the storm hit, not knowing for sure what was going on, it would have been a long journey out of there alone. And an even longer night, either huddled alone against the rocks, scared half to death of the lightning or she might have even headed for the Jeep, might not have found it in the gloom, and then what would have happened to her?

Anything.

They trudged on, miserable, cold, wet.

She wondered if the cabin might have a primitive shower or even an old washtub. A bath was highly unlikely, she knew, but a woman could dream, couldn’t she?

A bath and then a nice warm bed with him.

That was a fantasy!

In the end, it took more than three hours. Three thoroughly miserable hours, but they made it. Paige didn’t see how he found his way, because the world seemed like a wet, foggy, miserable mess to her, but he led them right to a small cabin.

“Come on,” he said, opening the door for her.

She wanted nothing more than to get inside, but dug in her pack for her satellite phone instead. It was nearly six, and her brother had to be going crazy.

She huddled under the narrow overhang of the roof, pressed up against the side of the cabin and held up the phone. “I have to try to make a call before my brother shows up with the National Guard or something like that.”

He nodded. “I’ll start a fire. If you get through, I need to call the ranch, let ‘em know I’m okay and to get us when they can.”

“Fire!” That was what she heard. “Yes, please. A fire.”

He went inside, and she turned on the phone and dialed. There was a ton of static on the line, a couple of seconds when she thought she heard Blake, frantic and calling her name, and then nothing.

Finally, on the fourth try, she could hear him.

“Hey, sorry about that. I got caught in the storm, but I’m fine,” she yelled into the phone.

“What?”

“I’m fine!”

“Paige—”

“Out of the mine, taking shelter in a cabin. I’m fine.”

“Cabin?”

“Yes. I’m in a cabin. We’ll wait out the storm here. I’ll call as soon as I can. Don’t worry. And don’t do anything stupid, like send someone to get me. You’ll give our whole plan away. Blake? Blake—”

But he was gone. There was nothing but static now.

Oh, well. He got the important parts, she thought. She was safe, out of the mine, out of the storm, and he didn’t need to do anything.

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