instead of passing her, the truck stopped and the passenger door was pushed open.
Red Davis, one of Cord’s ranch foremen, leaned forward, his wide-brimmed straw hat pulled down over his red hair and blue eyes. He smiled. “It’s too hot to walk a suitcase to Houston. Get in,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”
She chuckled, even as she was touched by an act of kindness she hadn’t expected. She hesitated for just a minute. “Cord didn’t send you, did he?” she asked abruptly. If he had, she wasn’t taking one step into that double-cabbed, six-wheeled truck!
“No, ma’am, he didn’t,” he replied. “He didn’t know you brought the suitcase. And I wouldn’t tell him even if he tortured me,” he swore with a hand over his heart and a twinkle in his eyes.
She laughed. “Okay, then. Thanks!” She slid her suitcase into the backseat and jumped up into the cab beside Davis, closing the door and fastening her seat belt.
He started up the engine again and roared down the driveway. “I guess you didn’t come from town?” he probed.
“Leave it alone, Red,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You brought a suitcase,” he persisted. “Why?”
“You’re a pest, Davis!”
“And I don’t respond to insecticide, either,” he grinned. “Come on, Maggie. Tell Uncle Red why you turned up with that trunk on wheels.”
“All right, I came from Morocco,” she replied finally when he just grinned at her scowl. “Straight from Morocco, at that, despite delays and layovers and flight cancellations. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. I expected to find him blind and helpless.” She laughed. “I should have known better. He laid into me the minute I walked into the house and booted me out the door.” She shook her head. “Just like old times. Nothing ever changes. Just the sight of me rubs him the wrong way.”
“What were you doing in Morocco?” he asked, startled.
“Having a vacation before I took up my new job in Qawi,” she confessed. “My best friend is taking it instead. So here I am with everything I own in a suitcase, no place to live, no job, no nothing.” She shot him a half-amused glance. “If I weren’t such a tough nut, I’d bawl my head off.”
“Cord didn’t offer you a room?” he exclaimed, horrified.
“Cord doesn’t know I came from Morocco,” she said stiffly. “He doesn’t even know I was in Morocco in the first place. I didn’t tell him I was leaving Houston. Not that he would have cared, even if he’d noticed.” She leaned her head back against the leather headrest with a sigh and closed her eyes. “You’d think I’d stop bashing my head against stone walls, wouldn’t you?”
The thinly veiled reference to her feelings for her foster brother wasn’t lost on the man beside her. He wasn’t close to Cord Romero, but he recognized unrequited love when he saw it. He was sorry for this pretty, strong woman who looked as if she was at the end of her rope. He wondered why his boss couldn’t see how much she cared about him. He was supremely indifferent to her, and had been ever since Davis had come to work for him.
“Besides,” she added in a voice that betrayed more than she realized, “he’s got June to take care of him, now, hasn’t he?”
He shot her an odd glance. “Not in the way you’re thinking,” he volunteered.
She was suddenly interested. “Excuse me?”
“June is Darren Travis’s daughter,” he explained. “He’s Cord’s cattle foreman, looks after the purebred Santa Gertrudis herd. June’s taken over the housekeeping and cooking just temporarily, because Cord’s regular woman remarried and left. But June’s sweet on a Houston police officer, and vice versa. She’s scared of Cord. Most people are. He isn’t the easiest boss in the world, and he has moods.”
She was really confused now. “But he said...! I mean—” she lowered her voice “—he insinuated that he and June were involved.”
He chuckled. “She has to be forced to go to him with problems. She usually tells her father and has him relay any requests. She thinks Cord’s a holy terror. She told me once she couldn’t imagine a woman brave enough to take him on. It really amazed her that he’d been married at all.”
“It amazed all of us, at the time,” Maggie recalled reluctantly. His marriage had hurt her terribly. It was a whirlwind courtship at that. Maggie had wanted to die when he walked in the front door with Patricia. Their foster mother, Amy Barton, had been equally shocked. Cord didn’t strike anyone as a marrying man.
“He hasn’t had women around in years,” Davis said thoughtfully. “He goes out occasionally, but he never brings anybody home, and he’s never out late. Funny, that. He’s a good-looking man, only in his thirties, in a dangerous profession and rich. You’d think he’d have pretty women tripping over him. He’s something of a recluse.”
She glanced at him. “That dangerous profession is probably why. He knows every assignment could be his last. I don’t imagine he’d want to wish that on a woman.”
“Danger draws women, though, doesn’t it?”
She laughed. “Not this woman,” she confessed, stifling a yawn and lying through her teeth. “I’d rather marry a guy who worked the drive-in window at a fast-food joint than a professional demolition expert. Not much risk of being blown up handling hamburgers and fries,” she added drolly, and was rewarded by a chuckle.
Maggie had been briefly engaged to Eb Scott just after Cord married Patricia. Now, she could admit that it had only been an engagement of friends, one of so many futile attempts to get over Cord. She and Eb had never been really attracted to each other physically. Cord had assumed that they were sleeping together, which explained his stark horror at Maggie’s innocence years later, on the night Mrs. Barton died. But Maggie had never been able to think of any man except Cord intimately—at least, until they were intimate. Now her older, more frightening memories of things sexual were intermixed with new ones of discomfort and embarrassment. Why, oh, why, couldn’t she get him out of her heart, her mind?
“You’ve known Cord a long time, haven’t you?” Red mused.
“Since I was eight and he was sixteen,” she murmured, getting drowsy, lulled by the soft motion of the truck on the smooth pavement of the highway that led into Houston. “That old saying that brothers and sisters fight like cats and dogs isn’t so far off, you know,” she murmured. “Even foster ones.”
“Really?” he said, almost to himself.
“Really.” She yawned and his next comment fell on deaf ears. She drifted off into a brief oblivion.
* * *
IT WASN’T A long drive, but it felt as if they’d just left the ranch when Maggie was brought awake by a tap from Davis’s hand. She opened her eyes and noticed that they’d already reached the city limits of Houston.
“Sorry to wake you, but we’re in town now. Do you have any idea where you want me to take you?” Davis asked gently.
“To a nice, comfortable, cheap hotel,” she murmured dryly. “I’m living on my savings until I get another
