style="font-size:15px;"> She lifted one shoulder beneath her gown in a half shrug. “For a very long list of reasons,” she murmured evasively as he spun her around.
“Shorten it,” he whispered against her hair.
Urges began to grow, to multiply within her.
No, not this time, Savannah warned silently, trying hard to steel herself. She couldn’t allow herself to give in again.
No matter what she wanted, she had to maintain a barrier. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to stay here. And the Double Crown was her last hope. She’d been “released” from Pierce Academy after the principal had discovered she was pregnant. Out of sympathy and kindness, Vanessa had offered her a job and a place to stay at the ranch for as long as she wanted it.
Savannah had no other options. She absolutely refused to turn to either of her parents. They had already done enough for her by getting married in the first place to give her a name. For that, they’d each paid dearly and continually suffered one another’s company in a union that should never have been allowed to take place. She’d left home as soon as she was old enough, unable to stand the guilt of knowing she’d inadvertently ruined two people’s lives just by drawing breath.
It was a fate she was determined that she was never going to bequeath to her child.
Putting on her most carefree face, Savannah turned it up to him. “Is it your sworn duty to seduce every woman under the age of fifty?”
He saw the smile playing on her lips and realized she was teasing rather than being coy. With Savannah, there was a difference.
“Only the beautiful ones.”
“Oh, I see.” Beautiful. It was a word she’d never heard applied to herself, and she didn’t cleave to it now. “Then you’re just practicing on me.”
“Practicing?” For a second, Cruz didn’t understand, then he realized that perhaps she was being coy after all. “Querida, I don’t need practice. And you are the prize.”
She laughed shortly. She’d been an ugly duckling as a child, a fact that only added to her parents’ misery. Neither could believe that they had created such a plain child between them, when they were both regarded as extremely good-looking in their circles.
“I’m hardly that.”
He cocked his head, looking at her. “You don’t think you’re beautiful?”
The subject made her uncomfortable. She’d heard enough taunts as a child to instinctively brace herself for a punch line at her expense. “I don’t think about the way I look at all.”
“It’s a lie.” Cruz called her on it, looking amused. “Every woman thinks about how she looks—if she is exciting, if she makes a man’s head turn, his mouth water, his—”
Savannah was afraid to let him go any further. “I don’t.”
His eyes narrowed. “Then you are even more unique than I thought.”
He doesn’t think I’m unique—it’s a line, she told herself.
A line she wished with all her heart she could believe.
Becoming defensive, Savannah raised her chin ever so slightly.
“I’m not unique, I’m stable. Sensible.” She ticked off terms that she’d heard applied to herself over the course of her life.
Cruz made a face at the last word. “Sensible is for shoes.”
He made it sound as if it were a bad thing. She didn’t think so. Maybe it wasn’t a very exciting quality, but she was proud of being sensible—even though what she had done that night in the stable was as far from sensible as the earth was from the moon.
“Not if you work for a living.”
Savannah had struck a chord. Cruz looked at her thoughtfully for a long moment as they whirled around on the floor.
“Maybe you are at that. Sensible,” he added in case she’d lost the thread. “But you are still beautiful,” he insisted.
“It’s the dress.”
“You can put a beautiful gown on a warthog,” he pointed out. “But in the long run, you still have a very ugly animal in a dress.”
She laughed. “You’re very colorful.”
If the compliment pleased him, he gave no indication. “I read.”
The admission caught her interest, appealing to the teacher within her. “A lot?”
He shrugged, perhaps uncomfortable at the confession. “Whenever I get the chance.”
It wasn’t something he often admitted, but he read everything he could get his hands on, determined not to just work with his hands, but with his mind as well. He couldn’t afford to go to college, the way Ryan Fortune’s children had, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t continue learning.
He looked around at the others dancing around them. “I want to know as much as these hidalgos do. More.” That was the whole point of it. They took their education for granted, something that was handed to them. To him, knowledge was a special thing, even if he didn’t readily talk about it.
“Hidalgos?”
“It means—”
“I know what it means,” she interrupted, wanting to get at the heart of his feelings before he changed the subject. “Do you see them that way? The Fortunes?”
He began to laugh off his words, then stopped abruptly. Maybe the role of the smiling, easygoing cowboy was getting to him. God knows he was tired of it, of its confining web.
“There is no other way to see them. Some are kinder than others, to be sure, but all of them see themselves as above the people who work for them.” Chunks of memories crowd his mind. Memories that weren’t always pleasant. Memories that would probably surprise someone like Savannah Clark with her education and her upper crust private school. “When I was growing up, my mother took care of the Fortune children, and my sisters and I played with them. But their father made sure that none of us would ever forget that there was a line between us.” Bitterness infused his smile. “Master and servant.”
“But Vanessa’s not like that,” Savannah protested. She couldn’t picture Vanessa ever putting anyone in their so-called place. Especially not because of the whimsy of fate and financial circumstances. And Vanessa’s brother Dallas wasn’t like that, either. She knew that for a fact.
“No,” Cruz agreed. “She is not. But she is different from them.” He looked pointedly at Savannah. “And different from me.” After a small pause, a smile teased his mouth. “Come, this is far too serious a topic for a wedding, and you are here to have fun.”
But her eyes held his. “That doesn’t mean I can’t learn something.”
“Maybe we can both learn something,” he remarked playfully as he whirled her around the floor once more.
