Mr. Dawson?”
“It’ll do, thank you.”
Willa was startled when Gabe stepped in front of the maître d’ to hold her chair for her. She sank into the upholstered Queen Anne chair with a murmur of thanks. Gabe sat down across from her, and suddenly, she was vividly aware of just how frighteningly alone she was with this big, masculine man.
“Would you mind if I were completely frank with you for a moment, Willa?”
“By all means. I always prefer honesty.”
“You look a little apprehensive, as if I’m about to leap across the table and devour you.” He added wryly, “And if we’re being honest, I feel obliged to add that, contrary to your father’s opinion of me, I’m not a raving lunatic.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she replied tartly, embarrassed that her trepidation showed.
“Hey, I’m the good guy. I rescued you from the press, remember?”
“You’re the guy who abandoned my father’s oil company and rubbed salt in my family’s wounds when he died.” She was a little shocked she’d said that. But they were being honest with each other.
Gabe planted both elbows on the table and glared at her. Immediately, fear spiked inside her. Why had she provoked a big, strong man like him? In a similar situation, her father would have started drinking. The old, frozen terror rolled through her. When Daddy was drinking, it was best to hide in her room and not come out. Not get in his way. Not even cross his path.
Who’d have guessed James Ward would turn out to be the very same way? Except now that she thought about it, she didn’t remember him drinking that night. What had set him off, then? Had she done something?
She watched with intense relief as Gabe visibly corralled his irritation. Maybe he wasn’t like James Ward, after all. James had lost control and never reined himself back in. And she’d been the one to pay the price.
When Gabe finally spoke, his voice was surprisingly calm. “Let’s address those accusations one at a time. First, I didn’t abandon your father. He fired me from Merris Oil. I showed him what I believed to be an entirely new method of discovering oil, and he declined to invest in my theory.”
“I’ve heard it all before. Believe me.” She’d lost count of how many times her father had ranted about Gabe’s disloyalty in taking his theories to someone else to profit from.
Gabe shrugged. “I lined up my own investors and proved my theory correct. Your father could’ve been in on it, but he made a bad business decision. That doesn’t make me the villain.”
She’d wondered that very thing in private over the years, but in her family’s household, nobody would dream of contradicting the word of John Merris. If her father had declared Gabe Dawson a disloyal bastard who’d ripped him off of hundreds of millions of dollars, so it was.
He continued, “And since we’re being brutally honest tonight, let me just say your father was not a nice man. His business practices routinely skirted the edge of outright illegality, and he didn’t hesitate to crush his competition not only professionally, but personally. He routinely used his political office for his personal advantage and for the good of his private oil business.”
“Those are serious allegations.”
“Admit it. You know they’re not just allegations. They’re the truth.”
Part of her agreed with Gabe. But loyalty to family and never giving a negative sound bite to anyone had been pounded into her for so long she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. “I stayed out of my father’s business and political affairs. I couldn’t comment on his ethics or lack thereof.”
Gabe snorted. “Take my word for it. Your old man had the ethics of a junkyard dog.”
She sighed and took a sip of ice water. “My father is dead. It no longer matters if he was good or bad, right or wrong.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, Willa.”
She looked up sharply at the smooth timbre of his voice. He wasn’t mocking her, was he? His gaze was dark and direct and didn’t waver as she met it with her own startled stare. Nope. Not mocking. It looked like seduction, if anything.
Whoa. Gabe Dawson was putting the moves on her? There must be snowballs flying every which way in Hell at this very moment.
A frisson of delight rippled through her before memory caught up with it. Memory of fear and weakness and helplessness at the hands of a man not so very different from this one. A rich, privileged, handsome man whom women fawned over and society adored.
She stared down at her fingers, twined so tightly in her lap, they ached. A waiter came in to take their orders, but she hadn’t even seen a menu. Gabe murmured that they would have whatever was being served at the chef’s table tonight.
The waiter left and Gabe sighed. “Will you please talk to me? What are you thinking? I can’t read you.”
“I was thinking about how society loves you.”
That earned her a disbelieving grunt. “Hardly. I have committed not one, but two, unforgivable sins according to your people.”
Her people? Hah! They were her mother and father’s people, but not hers. She’d tried to break away from high society. To be a normal person. A kindergarten teacher, for goodness’ sake. But her father kept forcing her to come back. Insisting on political appearances. And dates with the sons of Dallas’s richest and most influential families. It had been nothing short of mortifying.
Gabe continued grimly, “Not only did I have the gall to get rich and not stay on my own side of the social tracks, but then I’ve repeatedly declined to marry some vacuous, shallow bitch and make her one of the richest women in Dallas.”
Amused in spite of herself, Willa tsked. “Scandalous, Mr. Dawson.”
He grinned and all but knocked her off her chair with that megawatt smile. His sex appeal had only magnified over the years, and it had been off the charts a decade ago. If only she were more experienced. More savvy about men. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel so out of her league around him. It wasn’t that their twelve-year age difference was so great, but she’d lived a sheltered, awkward social life. And he… Well, he hadn’t.
The waiter brought their first course, and she looked over it at Gabe. “So what have you been up to with your life besides getting filthy rich and shunning the good ladies of Vengeance, Texas?”
“Work, mostly. Exploring for oil has taken me to every corner of the planet. For some reason, oil always seems to come from boiling-hot or freezing-cold places.”
“Favorite place you’ve visited?”
“While looking for oil? Malaysia. While just traveling? Gotta go with Paris.”
“Paris, huh? I didn’t peg you for a romantic.”
That earned her a cynical look. “My ex-wife stripped out what little romance there was in my soul a long time ago.”
“Is there any news about her? A ransom note from kidnappers or
