Undaunted

Both her hands pressed against his broad chest, feeling the hard, warm muscle under his shirt. “Please,” she faltered.

He let her go. He didn’t seem to be angry anymore. He looked more puzzled than anything else.

She almost ran out of the room. But she didn’t. She stood her ground. And went back to her desk.

Three (#u6535a16f-f914-584e-b298-dd3d4a43b81f)

Emma took dictation on a letter he was writing to his attorney. She was barely aware of what she was writing down. It had upset her, that blatant, unbridled anger. But what had followed it had upset her even more.

She was vulnerable with him. It was surprising, because he was so much older than she was, almost a generation. But when he touched her, the years fell away. She felt far different with him than she’d ever felt with Steven, and it scared her.

She tried to tell herself that he was just very experienced with women. That was what it was. But there had to be an attraction in the first place. He’d been amused by her reactions, but then he’d gone silent. He was still silent, in between dictation. He was frowning, as if he was worrying a puzzle in his mind.

“Read that back,” he said when he finished dictating.

She read the letter to him.

He drew in an irritated breath and ran a restless hand through his thick, wavy hair. “I hate not being able to read my own damned letters,” he muttered.

“It will get easier as you go along,” she said quietly.

His head lifted and turned, as if he was trying to see where she was. “Do you think so?” he asked with a rough laugh. “I very much doubt it.”

“We all have trials in life,” she said simply. “We get through them. Everything passes away—grief, anger, hope, joy, all of it. It’s both a blessing and a curse.”

“What have you gotten through? Are you even old enough to have had trials at all?”

She started to tell him about her father, then quickly bit her tongue. There were going to be pitfalls, working for him. Here was one of the biggest. She remembered telling him, when he was sighted, about Dolores, and her father, and the boy who’d broken their engagement when he found out her father ran beef cattle.

“We all have trials,” she replied.

“How old are you?” he asked suddenly.

She knew she’d never told him that. She doubted that Mamie had, or that he would have bothered to ask. “I’m twenty-three,” she said softly.

“Twenty-three.” His face was impassive. His eyes were narrow. His lips compressed. “Twenty-three.”

She couldn’t see into his mind or she might have been surprised at why he reacted that way to her age. He was seeing doors closing. She was twenty-three. He was thirty-eight. Her life was beginning. He was approaching the middle of his. Even if he’d been interested—and he was—her age put him off.

He leaned back in his chair and drew in a long breath. “My brother died on this lake,” he said abruptly.

“Your brother?”

“He and his wife were on a houseboat. There was a party. It was late on a Friday night. A couple of teenagers in a motorboat came flying around one of the coves and hit it broadside. My brother and his wife drowned in the time it took rescue people to get here and start looking for them.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said as she understood, too well, too late, his overreaction to her speeding in Mamie’s boat.

“He was the last living relative I had,” he replied. “We were close.” He glanced her way. “Do you have family, Emma?”

She hesitated. “Yes. My father lives on a small farm in North Carolina.” There was no reason for him to check that out, after all.

“Are you close?”

“Not so much. He’s very independent. But my mother and I were. She was very sweet and gentle.”

“How did she die?”

She swallowed. “She died in childbirth.”

A shadow passed over his broad face. “Unusual, isn’t it, in this day and age? Any decent obstetrician should be able to call in specialists if there are problems.”

“She was in labor for a long time and she had a hidden heart condition. She died of a heart attack.”

“I see. And the child?”

“A little girl. She was stillborn. They said she’d been dead for several days. They couldn’t save her.” That wasn’t the whole truth. She wasn’t telling him that her father had let her mother lie in childbirth for two horrible days, or that she’d died, ironically, while he was delivering a calf out in the pasture several miles from the house. By the time he finally got home to a sobbing Emma and a still, cold wife, it was too late to save her.

Emma’s father had delivered Emma at home, and he’d planned to do the same with his second child. Apparently it had never occurred to him that he should have taken his wife to the hospital when she started complaining of chest pain. She’d had an undiagnosed heart condition that the stress of prolonged childbirth had caused to go critical. She’d died of a massive coronary.

It had hurt, so badly, to lose her mother, especially at such a young age. Emma had watched her die, helpless to do anything. She had managed to live at home until graduation, but the minute she had a job, she moved to town and never looked back. Emma had nothing to do with her father at all these days. She wasn’t certain that she’d even be willing to ask him for help in a dire emergency. Or that he’d give her any. He was rarely sober enough to care about anything, anyway. He did manage to go out to work on the ranch, enough to keep it going, but his drinking was such a problem that he now had a huge turnover in cowboys.

Emma was ashamed of the way he behaved. Although his ranch was in Comanche Wells, everybody knew about him in nearby Jacobsville, where Emma had worked at the local café. At least she hadn’t told Connor about the drinking when he was sighted. She’d been too ashamed to admit it, even to a stranger.

“Emma?”

“Oh. Sorry. I was...lost in the past,” she confessed.

“You were with her when she died, weren’t you?” he asked suddenly, as if he knew.

She hesitated. “Yes.”

He crossed his long legs. “My sister-in-law was pregnant when she died.” His eyes glittered. “She didn’t want the baby. She said so, often.”

“Then why...?”

“My brother would never have married her if there hadn’t been a child on the way. She bragged about it, about how she’d snared him with the child, and that he’d have to support it, and her, until it came of age. She’d have everything she wanted, she’d said, and she laughed at him.” His eyes closed. “He was a sweet man. I tried to tell him what she was like, but he was naive. He’d never been in love before, and she was a good actress. He only found her out when it was too late.”

“That’s a shame, for a woman to do that to a man,” she said quietly. “We had a sweet old fellow in our church who’d been married to the same woman for fifty years. When she died, a widow down the road sweet-talked him into marriage. Then she took him for everything he had, even sold the house out from under him. He went to live with his son, and she called him every night to laugh at how gullible he’d been.” She sighed. “He killed himself.”

“Why?” he asked, shocked.

“He loved her,” she said.

“Love,” he scoffed. “I fell in love when I was a teenager. I soon learned that it’s just a euphemism for sex. That’s all it is, a chemical reaction.”

She sighed. “You’re probably right,” she said. “But I’d like to keep my illusions until I grow as crotchety as you are.”

His eyebrows arched. “Excuse me?”