The Rawhide Man - Diana Palmer Mills & Boon M&B

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almost laughed. The situation was unbelievable. She sat down and poured out the coffee, handing him his black without realizing what that little slip gave away.

      “Should I be flattered that you remember how I take my coffee?” he asked, leaning back to study her insolently, running his eyes over every curve outlined by the simple gray jersey dress she was wearing.

      “Don’t put on your cowboy drawl for me, mister,” she replied quietly, lifting her cup to her lips. “I know you.”

      “You think you do,” he agreed, his green eyes narrowing.

      “How’s Katy?” she asked.

      He shrugged. “Growing up fast.” His gaze focused on her. “She asked about you when the family got together this summer.”

      “I’m sorry I missed it,” she said. “I couldn’t leave Mother.”

      He flexed his broad shoulders and leaned forward. The action stretched the fabric of his pants over his powerful thighs and Bess had to look away.

      “That’s enough small talk,” he said suddenly, piercing her eyes with his. “You’re coming back to San Antonio with me.”

      She hardly had time to catch her breath. “I’m what?”

      “You heard me.” He set down his cup. “The only way I can control that stock is by marrying you. So that’s how we’ll do it.”

      Her body jerked as if he’d hit her, and she stared at him uncomprehendingly. She might have thought of this before—it was so like Jude to take the direct approach.

      “No,” she said shortly.

      “Yes,” he replied. “I’ve waited years to get my hands on those shares, and I’m having them. If you come along with the deal, I’ll just have to make the best of it.”

      She went red in the face and sat up straight. “What makes you think you’re any prize?” she asked in her coldest tone. “You’re cold and hard and you don’t care about anybody in the world except Katy!”

      “That’s absolutely gospel,” he agreed, staring at her unblinkingly. “But you’ll go to the altar with me if I have to tie you up and gag you, except for the part where you say, ‘I do.’”

      “I do not,” she corrected. “You can’t force me to marry you.”

      “Think not?” He stood up, his green eyes glittering with cold humor, his face confident and frighteningly hard.

      He left the room, and Bess stood up, staring helplessly around. What in the world was he doing!

      Minutes later he was back, with her coat in one hand and her purse dangling from his fingers. He slung them at her. “I’ve undone the fuse box. You can call a real estate agent from San Antonio and put the house on the auction block. Any little things you want can be shipped out. Now put on that coat.”

      She couldn’t believe this was happening. It must be a hallucination brought on by the strain, she told herself. But a minute later, always impatient, he was stuffing her into the coat. He jerked the hood up and thrust the purse into her hands.

      “I won’t go!” she cried out.

      “Like hell you won’t go.” He bent and swung her up into his arms like a sack of feathers and carried her out into the rain.

       Chapter Two

      This isn’t happening, Bess told herself an hour later as she sat beside Jude in the cockpit of his big Cessna. It simply isn’t happening!

      But the sound of the engine was very real, and so was Jude’s set, humorless face as he concentrated on flying the plane.

      Characteristically, he wasn’t trusting his life to another pilot. He liked having total control—in everything. That was why he was flying himself and that was why he wanted the block of shares that Bess now owned. It was also, Bess suspected, why no woman had ever managed to get him to the altar in a conventional way. Falling in love would be giving a measure of control to someone else, too.

      She leaned back in the seat, staring blankly at the clouds ahead, and wondered how she was going to get herself out of this predicament. Surely some other way could be found to give him the stock, if he reimbursed her. She brightened. Until she remembered the exact wording of the will. She muttered under her breath. Carla had taken care of that angle, too. The only way Jude could possibly get the stock was to marry Bess. And that, Carla had smugly thought, he’d never do. He disliked Bess. Everyone knew it, too. They fought like cats and dogs, and people moved out of the way at Langston family get-togethers when they were both present.

      The reunion two summers ago was the reason Bess had stayed away from the most recent gathering. She and Jude had gotten into a horrible fight about Katy. She could still blush at the language he’d used; the fact that there had been bystanders present hadn’t slowed him down one iota.

      Katy had told Bess about a fight she’d been in at school, stating proudly that she’d done just like Daddy, she’d pounded the hell out of a boy twice her size, and wasn’t that super? “Super” had been Katy’s latest word; it described everything from her dog, Pal, to the calf Jude had given her to raise for 4-H.

      Bess hadn’t thought it was super now that Katy was eight. She’d thought it was terrible, and she’d told Jude so later as they were sitting together having dinner with some of the other family members at a restaurant on the Paseo del Rio. Traditionally, they always concluded the annual picnic and rodeo at the restaurant, which Jude would book for an arm and a leg and the family would fill.

      “What’s wrong with Katy sticking up for herself?” he’d demanded. “The damned boy hit her first.”

      “She’s a girl,” Bess had burst out, exasperated with him. “For heaven’s sake, she already dresses and talks like a boy. What are you trying to do to her?”

      “Teach her to stand up for herself,” he’d replied coolly, and had gone back to sipping his whiskey, raising his hand as another male member of the family entered the restaurant.

      “Teaching her to be a freak,” Bess had said under her breath.

      That had set him off. She could still see him rising, as slowly as a rattlesnake coiling, his eyes glittering and dangerous, his face taut.

      “Katy is my daughter,” he’d said with a cold smile. “I decide what’s good or bad for her, and I don’t need help from some dainty little society lady who couldn’t fight her way out of an eclair! Who the hell do you think you are to tell me how to raise my daughter? What qualifies you to be anybody’s mother?” His voice was raised just enough to carry to the other tables, and there was a sudden hush, broken only by the sound of the river and the muffled voices of strolling passersby on the river walk. Bess had wanted to cringe.

      “People are staring,” Bess had said under her breath.

      “Well, my God, let them stare!” he’d boomed, scowling down at her. “If you’re so free with your damned advice on child raising, let’s tell everybody. Go ahead, Miss White, do advise me on the behavior of my child!”

      Her face was white with embarrassment and humiliation, but she held her head up and stared back at him. “I don’t think I need to repeat it,” she said very calmly.

      It made him even angrier that he couldn’t make her lose her composure entirely. That was when he’d started cursing. “You damned little prig,” he’d tacked on at the end, and by that time her face was as red as it had been white earlier. “Why don’t you get married and have kids of your own? Can’t you find a man good enough?” He’d laughed coldly and looked over her body with contempt. “Or can’t you find a man?”

      And he’d turned and walked away, leaving her sitting there with tears stinging her eyes. The family had lost interest then and gone on to other topics. Bess had gone

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