her friend instead of her guard.
Although Angie probably wouldn’t note the difference. He could hear what was coming already.
* * *
The ranch was beautiful, Hope thought. As they at last turned into what she supposed must be his driveway, she took in the wide-open space with its backdrop of high mountains. They were turning purple as the afternoon sun sank toward them.
There weren’t a whole lot of cattle in sight but she still saw clusters of them scattered like a natural blessing in the open fields. They looked fat and happy.
The house itself rose two stories amid a stand of tall trees. White clapboard gleamed in the sunlight and a wide porch covered the entire front side. Wooden chairs dotted the porch and to one side hung a wooden bench swing.
Inviting. More inviting than the perfect showplace in which she had grown up with its manicured lawns and tall pillars, as if it were trying to imitate an antebellum plantation.
This house looked as if it belonged, and apart from it, the fences provided the only sign that man was here.
She pulled up on the gravel beside Cash’s truck and climbed out. No sound greeted her except the soft sigh of the breeze. It was chillier here than at home, but she found it invigorating.
Cash approached her. “Welcome,” he said. “Let’s go inside and get you settled. You have bags, I presume?”
“I’ll get them.”
“I’ll help.”
Hope opened her trunk, revealing her set of matched Louis Vuitton bags. She thought she saw his eyebrows lift, but it was hard to be sure under that battered cowboy hat.
She’d never thought about that luggage before, but she thought about it now. Those bags shrieked status and money as they were intended to do. She actually felt embarrassed by them. Boy, her worldview was undergoing some radical shifts.
She followed him willingly up the steps, across the porch and in through the front door. She tugged her rolling carry-on and hung her personal care bag over her shoulder. Cash hefted the two larger ones as if they weighed nothing at all.
Inside she was surprised by a large foyer with heavily polished wood floors and a wide wood staircase leading upstairs. Clearly this ranch had known some good times. Either that or someone was very much into carpentry. He led her up the stairs.
“My housekeeper comes three times a week so I’m not asking you to clean or cook.”
Hope was glad to hear it because she’d never seriously cleaned or cooked in her life. Yeah, she’d done bits of both, especially when she wanted to try out her baking skills in high school, but mostly all of that had been taken care of. Something else she was going to need to learn. She wondered if the housekeeper would help her.
At the top of the stairs, they turned right and he showed her into a spacious but simply furnished room. There was a bed, a rocking chair, a bureau with mirror. Small rugs scattered the floor with color, while everything else was fairly plain, even the curtains.
“This is yours,” he said, putting her bags down. “Take your time. The bathroom is that way down the hall, and Angie is right across from you. I’m at the other end.”
He glanced at his watch. “She’ll be home in an hour.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“She won’t be.” Then he flashed a crooked smile and vanished, closing the door behind him.
She sank onto the edge of the bed, looking around herself, thinking about how rapidly life could change. The rape, her escape and flight, and now her first real job. Until this moment, the majority of her thoughts had been focused on getting away and trying not to think about the horror Scott had inflicted on her. Now, in a strange room in a strange place, she realized her challenges had only just begun.
Relief at having this chance to prove herself gave way to determination to succeed. Somehow, some way, she was going to do this job right.
In the meantime, she decided to scrub the makeup from her face, put her hair in a ponytail and don one of her few pairs of jeans. The rest of her clothes would be useless here, utterly out of place. Regardless, pretty soon nothing would fit. It was getting hard to button her jeans. She’d have to do something about that.
It was time to make the rest of her transformation.
* * *
Downstairs, Cash went into his office and started his computer. He closed his financial files and began to search the internet for Hope. If any of her story was true, he’d find the important pieces here.
It didn’t take him long. Hope Conroy was a well-known name in the Dallas newspaper. Her engagement photo with a handsome man only a few years older than she was blazed across nearly the entire top of one page. Beneath was a detailed and saccharine description of her, her fiancé—definitely touted as a man with a bright future in politics—and their families. In one swoop he picked up enough information to get a pretty clear picture that she wasn’t exaggerating about scandal. These folks wouldn’t put up with it.
She was mentioned surprisingly often, appearing at charity balls, participating in various volunteer activities, none of which had much to do with the underside of life except for one large homeless charity where she sat on a board.
There was more, raising his eyebrows with each revelation. Money, more money than he could imagine, colored every word. He knew girls who wanted to be barrel riders, not girls who participated in dressage. But Hope had, for a while.
He nearly put his head in his hands when he finished reading.
He had hired a twenty-four-carat, hot damn, for real Texas princess.
Just about the time the school bus would drop Angie at the end of the driveway, Cash emerged from his office. He discovered Hope standing nervously in the foyer, dressed in clothes that looked better in these parts even if the designer label on her jeans didn’t. No makeup, which to his way of thinking made her prettier, and the ponytail at least softened the too-perfect hair.
A damned Texas princess. The thought was still rolling around in his head, and he was wrestling with the possibility that he had just made a big mistake. He’d picked up that she’d come from money, he just hadn’t guessed what kind of money. If she started filling Angie’s head with stories of trips to ski in the Alps and parties on private yachts, he didn’t know what he was going to do. His daughter already owned enough discontent to fill half the Pacific Ocean.
Unfortunately for Angie, she was a rancher’s daughter, not the daughter of a billionaire. She had to make peace with that somehow, at least until she could leave for college. Of course, it would be a state college, not some place like Radcliffe or Vassar, but it would give her a leg up if she didn’t want to stay here. He suspected she wouldn’t, and that was okay. But he had to keep her expectations and dreams on enough of a leash to at least get through high school in one piece.
He seriously doubted that Hope would be the one to do it.
As she turned to him, he spoke without
