Passion Flower

As a successful New York interior designer, Jennifer King led a hectic, fast-paced life. So when a sudden illness cost her her job, she jumped at the chance of a working vacation at a Texas ranch.

But life with Everett Culhane, the brooding, dark-eyed owner of the Circle C Ranch, was not easy. According to him, their lives were two worlds apart. But when he took her in his arms and branded her lips with his, Jennifer knew that she must make this headstrong cowboy her own.

Passion Flower

Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter One

JENNIFER KING eyed the closed hotel room door nervously. She hadn’t wanted this assignment, but she hadn’t had much choice, either. Her recent illness had left her savings account bare, and this job was all she had to hold on to. It was a long way from the brilliant career in interior decorating she’d left behind in New York. But it was a living.

She pushed back a loose strand of blond hair and hoped she looked sedate enough for the cattleman behind the door. The kind of clothes she’d favored in New York were too expensive for her budget in Atlanta.

She knocked at the door and waited. It seemed to take forever for the man inside to get there. Finally, without warning, the door swung open.

“Miss King?” he asked, smiling pleasantly.

She smiled back. He was much younger than she’d expected him to be. Tall and fair and pleasant. “Yes,” she said. “You rang for a temporary secretary?”

“Just need a few letters done, actually,” he said, taking the heavy portable typewriter from her hand. “I’m buying some cattle for my brother.”

“Yes, Miss James at the agency told me it had to do with cattle.” She sat down quickly. She was pale and wan, still feeling the after-effects of a terrible bout with pneumonia.

“Say, are you all right?” he asked, frowning.

“Fine, thank you, Mr. Culhane,” she said, remembering his name from Miss James’s description of the job. “I’m just getting over pneumonia, and I’m a little weak.”

He sat down across from her on the sofa, lean and rangy, and smiled. “I guess it does take the whip out of you. I’ve never had it myself, but Everett nearly died on us one year. He smokes too much,” he confided.

“Your brother?” she asked with polite interest as she got her steno pad and pen from her large purse.

“My brother. The senior partner. Everett runs the show.” He sounded just a little jealous. She glanced up. Jennifer was twenty-three, and he couldn’t have been much older. She felt a kinship with him. Until their deaths three years back, her parents had pretty much nudged her into the job they thought she wanted. By the sound of it, Everett Culhane had done the same with this young man.

She dug out her pad and pen and crossed her thin legs. All of her was thin. Back in New York, before the frantic pace threatened her health, she’d been slender and poised and pretty enough to draw any man’s eye. But now she was only a pale wraith, a ghost of the woman she’d been. Her blond hair was brittle and lusterless, her pale green eyes were dull, without their old sparkle. She looked bad, and that fact registered in the young man’s eyes.

“Are you sure you feel up to this?” he asked gently. “You don’t look well.”

“I’m a little frail, that’s all,” she replied proudly. “I’m only just out of the hospital, you see.”

“I guess that’s why,” he muttered. He got up, pacing the room, and found some notes scribbled on lined white paper. “Well, this first letter goes to Everett Culhane, Circle C Ranch, Big Spur, Texas.”

“Texas?” Her pale eyes lit up. “Really?”

His eyebrows lifted, and he grinned. “Really. The town is named after a king-size ranch nearby—the Big Spur. It’s owned by Cole Everett and his wife Heather, and their three sons. Our ranch isn’t a patch on that one, but big brother has high hopes.”

“I’ve always wanted to see a real cattle ranch,” she confided. “My grandfather went cowboying out to Texas as a boy. He used to talk about it all the time, about the places he’d seen, and the history...” She sat up straight, poising her pen over the pad. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to get off the track.”

“That’s all right. Funny, you don’t look like a girl who’d care for the outdoors,” he commented as he sat back down with the sheaf of papers in his hand.

“I love it,” she said quietly. “I lived in a small town until I was ten and my parents moved to Atlanta. I missed it terribly. I still do.”

“Can’t you go back?” he asked.

She shook her head sadly. “It’s too late. I have no family left. My parents are dead. There are a few scattered relatives, but none close enough to visit.”

“That’s rough. Kind of like me and Everett,” he added. “We got raised by our aunt and uncle. At least, I did. Everett wasn’t so lucky. Our dad was still alive while he was a boy.” His face clouded, as if with an unpleasant memory. He cleared his throat. “Well, anyway, back to the letter...”

He began to dictate, and she kept up with him easily. He thought out the sentences before he gave them to her, so there were few mistakes or changes. She wondered why he didn’t just call his brother, but she didn’t ask the question. She took down several pages of description about bulls and pedigrees and bloodlines. There was a second letter, to a bank executive in Big Spur, detailing the method the Culhane brothers had devised to pay back a sizeable loan. The third letter was to a breeder in Carrollton, outlining transport for a bull the man had evidently purchased from the Culhanes.

“Confused?” he murmured dryly when he stopped.

“It’s not my business...” she began gently.

“We’re selling off one of our best bulls,” he said, “to give us enough down payment on another top breeding bull. Everett is trying for a purebred Hereford herd. But we don’t have the cash, so I’ve come down here to do some fancy trading. I sold the bull we had. Now I’m trying to get a potential seller to come down on his price.”

“Wouldn’t a phone call to your brother be quicker?” she asked.

“Sure. And Everett would skin my head. I came out here on a bus, for God’s sake, instead of a plane. We’re just about mortgaged to the hilt, you see. Everett says we can’t afford not to pinch pennies.” His eyes twinkled. “We’ve got Highland Scots in our ancestry, you see.”

She smiled. “Yes, I suppose so. I can see his point. Phone calls are expensive.”

“Especially the kind it would take to relay this much information,” he agreed, nodding toward what he’d dictated. “If I get it off today, he’ll have it in a day or two. Then, if he thinks it’s worth giving what the man wants, he can call me and just say a word or two. In the meantime, I’ve got other business to attend to.”

“Shrewd idea,” she murmured.

“Just a couple more,” he continued. He leaned back and studied a magazine. “Okay, this one goes to...” He gave her a name and address in north Georgia, and dictated a letter asking if the breeder could give him a call at the hotel on Friday at 1:00 p.m. Then he dictated a second letter to a breeder in south Georgia, making the same request for 2:00 p.m. He grinned at her faint smile.

“Saving money,” he assured her. “Although why Everett wants to do it the hard way is beyond me. There’s a geologist who swears we’ve got one hell of a lot of oil on our western boundary, but Everett dug in his heels and refused to sell off the drilling rights. Even for a percentage. Can you beat that? We could be millionaires, and here I sit writing letters asking people to call me, just to save money.”

“Why won’t he sell?” she asked, curious.

“Because he’s a purist,” he grumbled. “He doesn’t want to spoil the land. He’d rather struggle to make the cattle pay. Fat chance. The way things have been going, we’re going to wind up eating those damned purebreds, paper and all.”

She laughed helplessly at his phrasing and hid her face in her hand. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I didn’t mean to laugh.”

“It is kind of funny,” he confessed. “But not when you’re cutting corners like we are.”

She got up and started to lift the typewriter onto the desk by the window, struggling with it.

“Here, let me do that,” he said, and put it onto the flat surface for her. “You’re pretty weak, little lady.”

“I’m getting back on my feet,” she assured him. “Just a little wobbly, that’s all.”

“Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’m going down to get a sandwich. Can I bring you something?”

She’d have loved a sandwich, but she wasn’t going to put any further drain on his resources. “No, thank you,” she said, politely and with a smile. “I just had lunch before I came over here.”

“Okay, then. See you in a half hour or so.”

He jammed a straw cowboy hat on his head and went out the door, closing it softly behind him.

Jennifer typed the letters quickly and efficiently, even down to the cattle’s pedigrees. It was a good thing she’d taken that typing course when she was going through the school of interior design in New York, she thought. It had come in handy when the pressure of competition laid her out. She wasn’t ready to handle that competitive rat race again yet. She needed to rest, and by comparison typing letters for out-of-town businessmen was a piece of cake.

She felt oddly sorry for this businessman, and faintly sympathetic with his brother, who’d rather go spare than sell out on his principles. She wondered if he looked like his younger brother.

Her eyes fell on the name she was typing at the bottom of the letter. Robert G. Culhane. That must be the man who’d dictated them. He seemed to know cattle, from his meticulous description of them. Her eyes wandered over what looked like a production record for a herd sire, and she sighed. Texas and cattle. She wondered what the Circle C Ranch was like and while she finished up the letters, lost herself in dreams of riding horseback over flat plains. Pipe dreams, she thought, smiling as she stacked the neat letters with their accompanying envelopes. She’d never see Texas.

Just as she rose from the typewriter, the door opened, and Robert Culhane was back. He smiled at her.

“Taking a break?” he asked as he swept off his hat and whirled it onto a table.

“No, I’m finished,” she said, astounding him.

“Already?” He grabbed up the letters and bent over the desk, proofreading them one by one and shaking his head. “Damn, you’re fast.”

“I do around a hundred words a minute,” she replied. “It’s one of my few talents.”

“You’d be a godsend at the ranch,” he sighed. “It takes Everett an hour to type one letter. He cusses a blue streak when he has to write anything on that infernal old machine. And there are all the production records we have to keep, and the tax records, and the payroll...” His head lifted and he frowned. “I don’t suppose you’d like a job?”

She caught her breath. “In Texas?”

“You make it sound like a religious experience,” he murmured on a laugh.

“You can’t imagine how much I hate the city,” she replied, brushing back a strand of dull hair. “I still cough all the time because of the pollution, and the apartment where I live has no space at all. I’d almost work for free just to be out in the country.”

He cocked his head at her and pursed his boyish lips. “It wouldn’t be easy, working for Everett,” he said. “And you’d have to manage your own fare to Big Spur. You see, I’ll need a little time to convince him. You’d barely get minimum wage. And knowing Everett, you’d wind up doing a lot of things besides typing. We don’t have a housekeeper...”

Her face lit up. “I can make curtains and cook.”

“Do you have a telephone?”

She sighed. “No.”

“Kind of in the same boat we are in, aren’t you?” he said with a sympathetic smile. “I’m Robert Culhane, by the way.”

“Jennifer King,” she said for the second time that day, and extended her hand.

“Nice to meet you, Jenny. How can I reach you?”

“The agency will take a message for me,” she said.

“Fine. I’ll be in town for several more days. I’ll be in touch with you before I go back to Texas. Okay?”

She beamed. “You’re really serious?”

“I’m really serious. And this is great work,” he added, gesturing toward the letters. “Jenny, it won’t be an easy life on the Circle C. It’s nothing like those fancy ranches you see on the television.”

“I’m not expecting it to be,” she said honestly, and was picturing a ramshackle house that needed paint and curtains and overhauling, and two lonely men living in it. She smiled. “I’m just expecting to be needed.”

“You’ll be that,” he sighed, staring at her critically. “But are you up to hard work?”

“I’ll manage,” she promised. “Being out in the open, in fresh air, will make me strong. Besides, it’ll be dry air out there, and it’s summer.”

“You’ll burn up in the heat,” he promised.

“I burn up in the heat here,” she said. “Atlanta is a southern city. We get hundred-degree temperatures here.”

“Just like home,” he murmured with a smile.

“I’d like to come,” she said as she got her purse and closed up the typewriter. “But I don’t want to get you into any trouble with your brother.”

“Everett and I hardly ever have anything except trouble,” he said easily. “Don’t worry about me. You’d be doing us a big favor. I’ll talk Everett into it.”

“Should I write you another letter?” She hesitated.

He shook his head. “I’ll have it out with him when I get home,” he said. “No sweat. Thanks for doing my letters. I’ll send the agency a check, you tell them.”

“I will. And thank you!”

She hardly felt the weight of the typewriter on her way back to the agency. She was floating on a cloud.

Miss James gave her a hard look when she came back in. “You’re late,” she said. “We had to refuse a call.”

“I’m sorry. There were several letters...” she began.

“You’ve another assignment. Here’s the address. A politician. Wants several copies of a speech he’s giving, to hand out to the press. You’re to type the speech and get it photostatted for him.”

She took the outstretched address and sighed. “The typewriter...?”

“He has his own, an electric one. Leave that one here, if you please.” Miss James buried her silver head in paperwork. “You may go home when you finish. I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

“Good night,” Jennifer said quietly, sighing as she went out onto the street. It would be well after quitting time when she finished, and Miss James knew it. But perhaps the politician would be generous enough to tip her. If only the Texas job worked out! Jennifer was a scrapper when she was at her peak, but she was weary and sick and dragged out. It wasn’t a good time to get into an argument with the only employer she’d been able to find. All the other agencies were overstaffed with out-of-work people begging for any kind of job.

The politician was a city councilman, in a good mood and very generous. Jennifer treated herself to three hamburgers and two cups of coffee on the way back to her small apartment. It was in a private home, and dirt cheap. The landlady wasn’t overly friendly, but it was a roof over her head and the price was right.

She slept fitfully, dreaming about the life she’d left behind in New York. It all seemed like something out of a fantasy. The competition for the plum jobs, the cocktail parties to make contacts, the deadlines, the endless fighting to land the best accounts, the agonizing perfecting of color schemes and coordinating pieces to fit fussy tastes... Her nerves had given out, and then her body.

It hadn’t been her choice to go to New York. She’d have been happy in Atlanta. But the best schools were up north, and her parents had insisted. They wanted her to have the finest training available, so she let herself be gently pushed. Two years after she graduated, they were dead. She’d never truly gotten over their deaths in the plane crash. They’d been on their way to a party on Christmas Eve. The plane went down in the dark, in a lake, and it had been hours before they were missed.

In the two years since her graduation, Jennifer had landed a job at one of the top interior-decoration businesses in the city. She’d pushed herself over the limit to get clients, going to impossible lengths to please them. The outcome had been inevitable. Pneumonia landed her in the hospital for several days in March, and she was too drained to go back to work immediately after. An up-and-coming young designer had stepped neatly into her place, and she had found herself suddenly without work.

Everything had to go, of course. The luxury apartment, the furs, the designer clothes. She’d sold them all and headed south. Only to find that the job market was overloaded and she couldn’t find a job that wouldn’t finish killing her. Except at a temporary agency, where she could put her typing skills to work. She started working for Miss James, and trying to recover. But so far she’d failed miserably. And now the only bright spot in her future was Texas.

She prayed as she never had before, struggling from one assignment to the next and hoping beyond hope that the phone call would come. Late one Friday afternoon, it did. And she happened to be in the office when it came.

“Miss King?” Robert Culhane asked on a laugh. “Still want to go to Texas?”

“Oh, yes!” she said fervently, holding tightly to the telephone cord.

“Then pack a bag and be at the ranch bright and early a week from Monday morning. Got a pencil? Okay, here’s how to get there.”

She was so excited she could barely scribble. She got down the directions. “I can’t believe it, it’s like a dream!” she said enthusiastically. “I’ll do a good job, really I will. I won’t be any trouble, and the pay doesn’t matter!”

“I’ll tell Everett,” he chuckled. “Don’t forget. You needn’t call. Just come on out to the ranch. I’ll be there to smooth things over with old Everett, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you!”

“Thank you, Miss King,” he said. “See you a week from Monday.”

“Yes, sir!” She hung up, her face bright with hope. She was actually going to Texas!

“Miss King?” Miss James asked suspiciously.

“Oh! I won’t be back in after today, Miss James,” she said politely. “Thank you for letting me work with you. I’ve enjoyed it very much.”

Miss James looked angry. “You can’t just walk out like this,” she said.

“But I can,” Jennifer said, with some of her old spirit. She picked up her purse. “I didn’t sign a contract, Miss James. And if you were to push the point, I’d tell you that I worked a great deal of overtime for which I wasn’t paid,” she added with a pointed stare. “How would you explain that to the people down at the state labor department?”

Miss James stiffened. “You’re ungrateful.”

“No, I’m not. I’m very grateful. But I’m leaving, all the same. Good day.” She nodded politely just before she went out, and closed the door firmly behind her.

Chapter Two

IT WAS blazing hot for a spring day in Texas. Jennifer stopped in the middle of the ranch road to rest for a minute and set her burdens down on the dusty, graveled ground. She wished for the tenth time in as many minutes that she’d let the cab driver take her all the way to the Culhanes’ front door. But she’d wanted to walk. It hadn’t seemed a long way from the main road. And it was so beautiful, with the wildflowers strewn across the endless meadows toward the flat horizon. Bluebonnets, which she’d only read about until then, and Mexican hat and Indian paintbrush. Even the names of the flowers were poetic. But her enthusiasm had outweighed her common sense. And her strength.

She’d tried to call the ranch from town—apparently Everett and Robert Culhane did have the luxury of a telephone. But it rang and rang with no answer. Well, it was Monday, and she’d been promised a job. She hefted her portable typewriter and her suitcase and started out again.

Her pale eyes lifted to the house in the distance. It was a two-story white frame building, with badly peeling paint and a long front porch. Towering live oaks protected it from the sun, trees bigger than anything Jennifer had seen in Georgia. And the feathery green trees with the crooked trunks had to be mesquite. She’d never seen it, but she’d done her share of reading about it.

On either side of the long, graveled driveway were fences, gray with weathering and strung with rusting barbed wire. Red-coated cattle grazed behind the fences, and her eyes lingered on the wide horizon. She’d always thought Georgia was big—until now. Texas was just unreal. In a separate pasture, a mare and her colt frolicked in the hot sun.

Jennifer pushed back a strand of dull blond hair that had escaped from her bun. In a white shirtwaist dress and high heels, she was a strange sight to be walking up the driveway of a cattle ranch. But she’d wanted to make a good impression.

Her eyes glanced down ruefully at the red dust on the hem of her dress, and the scuff marks on her last good pair of white sling pumps. She could have cried. One of her stockings had run, and she was sweating. She could hardly have looked worse if she’d planned it.

She couldn’t help being a little nervous about the older brother. She had Everett Culhane pictured as a staid old rancher with a mean temper. She’d met businessmen like that before, and dealt with them. She wasn’t afraid of him. But she hoped that he’d be glad of her help. It would make things easier all around.

Her footsteps echoed along the porch as she walked up the worn steps. She would have looked around more carefully weeks ago, but now she was tired and run-down and just too exhausted to care what her new surroundings looked like.

She paused at the screen door, and her slender fingers brushed the dust from her dress. She put the suitcase and the typewriter down, took a steadying breath, and knocked.

There was no sound from inside the house. The wooden door was standing open, and she thought she heard the whir of a fan. She knocked again. Maybe it would be the nice young man she’d met in Atlanta who would answer the door. She only hoped she was welcome.

The sound of quick, hard footsteps made her heart quicken. Someone was home, at least. Maybe she could sit down. She was feeling a little faint.

“Who the hell are you?” came a harsh masculine voice from behind the screen door, and Jennifer looked up into the hardest face and the coldest dark eyes she’d ever seen.

She couldn’t even find her voice. Her immediate reaction was to turn around and run for it. But she’d come too far, and she was too tired.

“I’m Jennifer King,” she said as professionally as she could. “Is Robert Culhane home, please?”

She was aware of the sudden tautening of his big body, a harsh intake of breath, before she looked up and saw the fury in his dark eyes.

“What the hell kind of game are you playing, lady?” he demanded.

She stared at him. It had been a long walk, and now it looked as if she might have made a mistake and come to the wrong ranch. Her usual confidence faltered. “Is this the Circle C Ranch?” she asked.

“Yes, it is.”

He wasn’t forthcoming, and she wondered if he might be one of the hired hands. “Is this where Robert Culhane lives?” she persisted, trying to peek past him—there was a lot of him, all hard muscle and blue denim.

“Bobby was killed in a bus wreck a week ago,” he said harshly.