Heiress (23 page)

"What did you expect them to do?"

"I thought Manny would stay. He's worked here for six years steady."

"He has a family to feed," Ben reminded her with his usual tolerance, but he recognized the signs that indicated her mood was turning argumentative. From the time she was a child, she reacted this way when things went wrong. It was as if she had to pick a fight with someone to release her pent-up anger and frustration.

"Maybe. But it just proves to me that a man's loyalty is bought." At the moment, Abbie didn't care how angry or cynical she sounded.

A pickup drove into the yard, dust swirling around it like an enveloping fog. At first glance, she thought it was Manny's truck, that he'd changed his mind and come back. But that hope came crashing down when she recognized MacCrea Wilder's black pickup even before he stepped out of it.

All too clearly, she remembered the way he'd treated her the last time she'd seen him. She felt her temper rising and didn't even try to control it as she strode across the stable yard to confront him. He paused beside the truck's tailgate to wait for her, letting her come to him—which irritated Abbie even more.

"Afternoon, Miss Lawson." His words were polite, but his look was icy-cool.

"Don't tell me you've reconsidered and decided to apologize for your rudeness—or should I say 'crudeness'—the other day," she chided, sarcasm in her voice as she relished the opportunity to wake him squirm.

"You mentioned the other day you might know some people I could talk to about the computerized test system I've developed. I came by to get their names from you, if you have them."

The man's gall amazed her. "A couple of them did call me back this last week," she informed him, although she had deliberately not mentioned his project to Lane Canfield. "But I'm not about to give their names to someone like you. I don't help someone who has manhandled me. I thought you would have guessed that."

MacCrea breathed in deeply, then released it slowly, eyeing her coolly all the while. "So you still think I owe you an apology? All right. I'm sorry I was even remotely concerned for your safety. As you pointed out, nothing happened. Of course, if the well had blown, you'd be thanking me for saving your life even though you were 'manhandled' in the process."

Abruptly he pivoted and walked back to the cab of his truck, leaving her standing there, struggling to come up with some cutting retort, but she couldn't summon any of her previous venom as he climbed in the cab and slammed the door. As much as she hated to admit it, MacCrea was right. If the outcome had been different, she would have been grateful.

He didn't even glance in her direction as he drove away. Abbie lingered, watching until his truck disappeared down the winding lane. Then, slowly, she walked to the house.

With twilight only a couple of hours away, the shadow racing beside Abbie's Mercedes was long. A sheet of paper with the names and phone numbers of two men who had expressed an interest in MacCrea's invention lay on the passenger seat next to her.

The turnoff to the drill site came quicker than she expected. Abbie braked sharply to make it, the front tires grabbing at the oyster shells as the rear end started to fishtail on the loose surface, but she made the turn.

When she reached the drill site, the activity there appeared normal. She knew, even before MacCrea had told her, that once drilling was started, three separate crews worked round-the-clock shifts until the contracted depth was reached. She parked her car beside MacCrea's pickup in front of his office trailer, picked up the paper from the passenger seat, and stepped out.

Still dressed in her jodhpurs and riding boots, she paused in front of the trailer door and took a deep, steadying breath. She had never found it easy to swallow her pride. Most times she preferred to choke on it. She knocked twice on the metal door, then opened it, doubting that her knock could be heard above the noise from the drilling operation.

As she walked in, she saw MacCrea sitting behind the desk, a bottle of beer in front of him. She hesitated, then pulled the door shut behind her. He rocked back in his chair, staring at her with his dark, impenetrable eyes, his features showing no discernible expression. Then his attention shifted to the bottle of beer as he picked it up.

"What do you want here?"

What had she expected? Abbie wondered. A red carpet rolled out for her? She gripped the paper a little tighter and crossed to his desk.

"I brought you those names you wanted." She managed to inject an air of bravado into her answer as she held out the paper to him.

"Just lay it on the desk." He took a swig of beer and turned the chair sideways, then rolled out of it to walk to the file cabinet, as if dismissing her.

She felt a surge of anger and clamped down on it tightly, reminding herself that she had come to apologize, not to clash with him again. She glanced down at the scatter of papers and reports on his desk.

"Just anywhere?" Abbie challenged.

"Yup. I'll find it." He opened a metal file drawer and started riffling through its folders.

As she started to lay the paper on his desk, she noticed the rough draft of a lease agreement for the mineral rights to a piece of property. She'd seen too many of those forms at her father's law office not to recognize it. She laid her sheet down and picked the document up.

"What's this? Are you planning to drill your own well?" She skimmed the first page, noting that the legal description referred to a piece of property in Ascension Parish in Louisiana.

The trailer shook slightly under the force of the single, long stride MacCrea took to carry him to her side. "My plans are my business," he said curtly, taking the document from her and laying it back down on the desk. "Now if you're through snooping, the door is behind you.”

"I didn't come here just to bring you those names." She touched the edge of his desk, hating the awkwardness she felt. "I could have easily mailed them to you."

"Why didn't you?"

Stiffening at the challenging tone of his voice, Abbie tipped her head back to look at him. No matter how she might try, her pride wouldn't let her appear humbly contrite.

"I came to apologize," she retorted. "I know that this afternoon, and the other day, too, I behaved—"

"—like a horse's ass," MacCrea broke in, his mouth crooking in a humorless smile. "Remember, I told you I knew that end of a horse when I saw it."

Abbie forgot her carefully rehearsed speech as anger rushed in. "Dammit, MacCrea, I'm trying to apologize to you. You're not exactly making it easy."

"No easier than you made things for me."

It didn't help to know that he was right. Somehow she managed to get her temper under control, however grudgingly. "All right, I was an ass today—"

"I'm glad you agree."

Swallowing the angry response that rose in her throat, Abbie glared at him. "For your information, just before you arrived today, I had to lay off all our stable help and most of our servants at the house because we don't have the cash to meet their payroll until my father's estate is settled. Now, maybe that doesn't excuse the way I behaved to you, but I wasn't in the best of moods when you showed up. I know it was probably wrong to take my frustrations out on you, but. . . that's what I did. And I'm sorry," she finished on a slightly more subdued note, not really understanding why she had told him about their financial problems except that he'd provoked her.

"I didn't know."

Uneasy under his contemplative gaze, Abbie stared at the desktop. "How could you? Any more than I could know there was any real danger the other day. You could have explained it a little better. You know, you're not exactly a saint either, MacCrea."

"I never claimed to be," he reminded her.

"Look, I came here to apologize, not to get into another argument with you. I hoped—" What had she hoped? That he'd understand the vagaries of her temper when no one else did, not even herself? That maybe he'd feel sorry for her because financially they were having problems? That maybe they could start fresh without this hostility? "I hoped you'd accept that.”

For an unbearably long second, there was only silence. Then MacCrea offered his hand to her. "Apology accepted, Abbie."

She hesitated a fraction of a second, then fit her hand into the grasp of his and watched as it became lost when his fingers closed around it, leaving only her thumb in view. His skin was brown as leather, a contrast to the tanned, golden color of her own. The callused roughness of his fingers reminded her of the pleasant rasp of a cat's tongue against her skin. She looked up to discover his eyes watching her closely. Something in their depths made her pulse quicken.

"How about a beer to wash the bad taste from your mouth?" A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

Abbie smiled back, discovering that even though the apology had been difficult to get out, it hadn't left any sour aftertaste on her tongue. "I'd like one."

"Make yourself comfortable while I get your beer." He gestured at the tan Naugahyde sofa.

As MacCrea disappeared into the trailer's compact kitchen, Abbie settled onto the sofa, turning to sit sideways on the cushion and hooking a booted toe behind her right knee. When he returned, he held an empty glass and the long necks of two bottles of beer. Unconsciously she studied him as he approached her, taking in the width of his shoulders and the narrowness of his hips. His dark, almost black hair was thick and wavy, a little on the shaggy side, but that seemed to suit him. Yet it was his face, with its hard strength stamped in the sculpted bones of his cheek and the carved slant of his jaw, that she found so compelling. She kept wanting to describe the bluntly chiseled angles and planes of his features as aggressive, arrogant, and impassive, but she was never able to define that quality about them that attracted her.

As he set the glass down on the end table closest to her and poured beer into it, she let her curiosity again direct her gaze to the narrow line of his hips, then glanced up quickly when he straightened and moved to sit on the other side of her.

"There you go," he said, folding his long frame onto the sofa cushion.

"Thanks." Abbie lifted the glass, briefly saluting him with it, then took a sip of the cold beer, conscious of his arm extended along the sofa back, his hand resting inches from her shoulder.

"What will you do now that you don't have any help to take care of the horses?" MacCrea's question touched a wound that was still sore.

"Naturally Ben is still there. He's practically family. Between the two of us, we'll manage." But Abbie didn't know how they would. Ben might look like an ox, but he was an old ox. Even though there was still a lot he could do, much of the heavier work would fall to her, she knew. "I'd rather not discuss it."

"Why?"

"Because. . ." She caught the sharpness in her voice and paused to sigh heavily. "I guess it bothers me that none of the stable help volunteered to stay on. Most of them have worked for us for several years and never once missed a paycheck. You'd think they would trust us to pay them as soon as we got the money from Daddy's estate."

"Maybe they knew their landlords and bill collectors wouldn't trust them. A lot of people around here live from paycheck to paycheck. If you've never lived like that and tried to raise a family, then you can't appreciate what it's like."

"I know," Abbie admitted, recognizing that she'd never had to worry about money her whole life. There had always been plenty of food on the table and clothes in her closet. The material necessities of life she'd known in abundance; it was the emotional needs that she hadn't always had met. But she didn't want to talk about that either.

"Financially, it can be rough after someone dies. Wilder Drilling Company owned five rigs the day my father was killed when a well blew out. The insurance check was sitting on his desk, waiting for his signature. Two other workers were injured in the same accident. I wound up losing everything but one rig. It wasn't easy, but I managed to build the business back up." MacCrea studied the long-necked bottle of beer in his hand, staring at the brown color of its glass as he remembered that he'd only been two short years away from getting his degree in geology when he'd had to quit college, and how he'd struggled through those early years on his own when few companies wanted to hire a young, untried contractor to drill their wells.

"Your father was killed when a well blew?" she repeated, stunned by the news. "No wonder you reacted the way you did with me. If I had known. . . why didn't you tell me?" she demanded.

"You didn't give me much of a chance," he reminded her dryly.

"I guess I didn't." She paused briefly. What happened? Do you know?"

"Yeah, I was there. He'd made me a toolpusher that summer—his man in charge on the site. Of course, he covered himself by putting his top men in my crews. It was my second well. He'd stopped by to see how I was doing. I went to get the company man. He was up there, joking with the driller while the guys were tripping in a length of pipe. I heard somebody yell and turned around just as a ball of flame engulfed the mast." He shook his head, seeing it all again—the human torches leaping off the raised platform of the rig's floor, trying to escape the inferno. One of them had been his father. "He was killed."

He took a swig of beer, then set the bottle down on the side table and rubbed his hand down the top of his thigh to wipe off the bottle's moisture. Abbie observed the action. She wanted to tell him she understood his pain. She'd lost her father, too. Then she noticed his hand as it lay flat on his leg. His little finger rose prominently above the others, bent while the others lay straight. A family trait, he'd said.

"Your finger really is crooked, isn't it?" She leaned forward to examine it more closely. "Won't it lie flat at all?"

"If you hold it down it will. Go ahead. Try it."

Abbie hesitated. "Does it hurt?"

"No."

She reached out and tentatively pushed the first joint down with her forefinger. There was no sense of resistance as she held it down, but the instant she lifted her finger, it popped back up again. "I've never seen anything like that."