The Texan's Diamond Bride (9 page)

Okay, maybe things had been a little crazy since Paige and Blake had hatched their plan for Paige to go diamond hunting in the mine on Travis Foley’s ranch, but…Well, Paige had assumed she was the only one with a big secret. She’d been happy thinking Penny was simply busy with her jewelry designs and to leave it at that.

But what if her sister was actually up to something, too?

She could probably find out…Paige could almost always find out what was happening in her twin’s life. But twin intuition was a two-way street. While she was trying to read Penny, Penny would be trying to read Paige, too, if her twin caught so much as a hint of Paige trying to keep secrets of her own.

Paige wasn’t sure she was ready to risk it. Not just yet.

Maybe when her feelings for Travis Foley weren’t such a mess.

Which meant e-mail only for a while with her twin.

So she e-mailed Penny back, asking the same questions she’d asked the day before and gave the same answers. Fine. Working. What is up with you?

That just left her brother, and Paige feared it would
have to be a phone call today. Otherwise, Blake would likely have someone pinging her satellite phone to triangulate her position, and if that method proved precise enough to show she was sitting in Travis Foley’s ranch house, her brother would have a fit over all the things she hadn’t told him.

That she’d gotten caught by Travis Foley himself.

That she liked the man, wanted the man, that it was all she could do to keep from letting herself fall for him completely.

She’d promised her brother she’d find that diamond. But Travis Foley, who already didn’t trust a woman as far as he could throw her, would think the worst of Paige if she tried to talk him into letting her go back into the mine to find the diamond. She could just imagine trying to explain to her brother that they had to let the diamond go as a favor to Paige, because she was losing her head over a man, a Foley man.

That would go over really well right now in her family. And yet, foolishly, that’s what she wanted to do. To say, just give me this. Let’s forget the diamond. I met a man. A really great man.

Right.
Like she had any chance of selling her brother on that idea.

She picked up the phone in the library, sitting in that spot by the big stone fireplace she liked so much, and dialed. The line crackled, but the call went through.

Her brother answered, practically roaring, “You’re at Travis Foley’s house?”

Paige winced. “What?”

“You’re at his house!”

“How do you know that?”

“A little thing called caller ID. It says Foley Ranch. How did you end up at his house?”

“Oops.” She was so nervous about making the call, she forgot to do it using her own phone. “Blake, I’m sorry, but…he caught me.”

Her brother swore.

“The first afternoon, I’m afraid. I thought I was being careful, but he was watching the mine. He saw me go in and came in after me. I didn’t have fifteen minutes inside to look around before he was there—”

“Wait, he didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“No—”

“Paige? Tell me—”

“No, he didn’t hurt me. He’s been nothing but kind to me. Not happy that we’re snooping around his ranch—”

“It’s not his ranch,” her brother reminded her.

“Believe me, he’s very well aware of that fact. But he’s lived and worked here for the better part of twenty years, Blake, and he feels a strong sense of…well, he knows he doesn’t own it, but…Oh, what’s the point? It doesn’t matter. He caught me. He knows we’re after the diamond, and he’s not really interested in standing by while I go back down in that mine and try to find it.”

“Well, that’s just too damned bad. He has a temporary lease on the land only. We own it, and if we need a lawyer or even a judge to say we also own everything on the land, I have people who’ll do that—”

“Blake?” He was talking to lawyers and lining up sympathetic judges?

What a mess!

“And we never leased him the mineral rights, and my lawyer says if we want to open up the mine, to exploit the mineral rights, we have that right. Travis Foley can’t stop us.”

She could just see Travis’s face when he found out her brother was ready to drag him in front of a judge to force his way onto the ranch and back into the mine.

“Wait,” she said. “You need to be straight with me about what’s going on. If you’re talking to lawyers and looking for a friendly judge…How bad are things, Blake? Because I thought we might be in a tough spot financially. So many companies are these days. But now I’m starting to think it’s more than that.”

“I can handle it,” he insisted.

“Well, I’m the one you’re asking to get back into that mine, and I don’t want to let you or the family down, but…He caught me, Blake. Travis Foley caught me red-handed and the last thing he wants is a big fuss with people traipsing all over this ranch looking for buried treasure that he thinks doesn’t even exist. And he really doesn’t want any of the McCords here.”

“So talk him into it—”

Right, because she could just do that.

Talk him into it.

“Easier said than done. I mean…if we don’t find the diamond, we’re not going to lose the company, are we?”

It was unthinkable. McCords was a jewelry empire, respected worldwide. If you truly cared and you wanted to impress, you showed up with a pretty lavender-colored box of sparkling jewels from McCords. The family had worked for decades to build that reputation.
McCords meant flawless, high-quality stones in beautiful, artistic settings.

“Blake?” she said again, when he said nothing. “Tell me it’s not that bad.”

He sighed, swore once more. “Look, it’s…Dad wasn’t the greatest businessman. He could be impulsive at times, and he made a few bad decisions, costly decisions. When he was in charge, he was in charge. He kept a lot of information to himself, and when I took over—”

“Things were a mess,” she said for him.

“I was sure I could fix it. I was fixing it, and then the whole economy went crazy. Gold and silver prices have soared, and people aren’t spending the way they used to. I just…We have to have this, Paige. We have to have that diamond—”

“But even if we find it, its ownership will likely be in dispute for years, maybe decades. Legend has it that Elwin Foley was on that ship when it went down, that he got off with the diamond, and he’s the one who first owned the ranch and the silver mine. The Foleys will contend that it’s theirs. We’ll say it’s ours, and we’ll be in court for years. And honestly, Blake, if that diamond truly is what legend says it is, the stone is one of a kind, a national treasure. It belongs in a museum.”

“I know,” he admitted. “We don’t need to own the diamond. We just need to be the ones to find it.”

“But all that would buy us is a few news cycles with the McCord name coupled in the press with the discovery of a huge diamond. I mean, I’m sure it would capture people’s interest, but do you really think that would be enough to save the company?”

“I’m not counting on that saving the company, just making news. Big news. Capturing people’s imagination, blowing the market wide open for canary diamonds.”

Canaries.

Vivid yellow diamonds.

Diamonds came in all shapes and colors, but in modern times, the most prized ones were white diamonds, colorless ones actually. More recently, there’d been an increase in interest in colored diamonds, pink ones, blue ones, black diamonds. Still, it wasn’t a huge market.

But the Santa Magdalena Diamond was rumored to be a huge, vivid yellow diamond, rival in size to the Hope Diamond, with a history as colorful. Some ancient legends even said the Santa Magdalena was part of a pair with the Hope Diamond that first came to fame in India, where they served as the eyes of a giant statue of a goddess. The Hope, the blue eye, the Santa Magdalena, the brilliant yellow eye, and that the people who owned them, who cheated to get them or stole them had been cursed for centuries since the diamonds were separated. In her research, Paige had even found a legend that said the curse would be broken only when the two diamonds were finally together again.

It was a fabulous story.

And her brother was right. If the Santa Magdalena, this great treasure lost for so long, was found after being hidden in the Texas Hill Country all this time, it would be a story that likely fascinated people. It was also sure to bring about a surge in interest in canary diamonds, which for a long time had been nothing but a modest part of the diamond market.

A company that skillfully positioned itself to meet that demand…

“You’ve been buying up canaries?” she guessed.

“I have vaults full of them,” he admitted, sounding very pleased with himself.

“Oh, Blake.” It was a huge risk to take, investing all that money at a time when company money was tight. But if he was right, if they found the Santa Magdalena…

“Not just that,” her brother said. “Penny’s been working for a couple of months on designs, Old Spanish-influenced designs, from the time when the Santa Magdalena was lost. Gabby and the PR people have a campaign that’s nearly ready. We can go into production on a whole line using the canary diamonds the instant we find it.”

“That’s…that’s brilliant.”

They would own the market. There would be a huge surge in demand for a product that, in the beginning, only McCords would have.

“It had better be brilliant, because honestly, Paige, I’m afraid it’s the last hope we have left. We have to find that diamond. Or…we could lose everything.”

I
t was sheer torture to be alone with Paige in the house, so Travis went back out riding in the miserable rain, making sure he wasn’t losing expensive livestock to the storm.

He was still in the barn, finishing cooling down Murph and getting him settled for the night, when Cal showed up and said his father was on the phone.

Travis swore.

Cal just laughed. “Could be worse.”

“Yeah? How?”

“You can take the call in the office here in the barn.”

So Travis took the call in the office in the corner of the barn, with Cal laughing at him as he walked in to do it.

“Travis?” his father said. “Glad I finally got through. Everything okay there? The storm looks nasty.”

“Yeah. Just a little water, a little mud. We’re fine, Dad.”

“Good. The flooding on TV looks massive. I’m glad it hasn’t been bad this far north.”

Travis sighed. “It’s big, but we have high ground, too, and we haven’t lost any cattle yet. So far, it’s just cold and wet and damned annoying.”

“I’m sure you’re handling the situation just fine, son,” he said, sounding tired, Travis thought, maybe even troubled.

“Dad, are you okay?”

“I am. I thought…well, I’m not sure if you want to know this, and I realize it’s still a shock. It’s still one to me, too, but…Eleanor’s son…my son…Charlie decided he was ready to meet me.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to rush him. I mean, if I’m fifty-eight and a father three times over already, and I don’t know the half of what I feel about this, how’s he supposed to know at twenty-one? So I promised Eleanor I’d wait until Charlie was ready, and finally, he was.”

Wow
. His father actually sounded shaken, vulnerable.

It was something Travis didn’t think he’d ever heard in his father’s voice or ever would.

“So, you saw him already? How was it?”

“It was—”

His father broke off. Silence came through the line for a moment, and then his voice broke, he sighed painfully.

Was his father in tears?

A man who’d raised three young sons on his own after his wife died? A man Travis had always considered as strong and solid as a rock.

“Dad?”

“Sorry, I…Damn. He’s a great-looking kid,” his father insisted, laughing and, Travis suspected, doing his best to cover up anything else he was feeling. “I mean, he’s my boy. Good-looking, like all my boys, solid as a rock, strong, smart, plays a little football. Great kid. Has no idea what he thinks about me and our whole family, but…just a great kid.”

“That’s good. I’m glad, Dad.”

“Really? You mean that?”

“Yeah, I do. He’s a Foley. He’s one of us, no matter what else he is,” Travis said. Plus, he’d promised Paige he’d smooth the way as best he could for Charlie with the rest of his family, and he was a man who kept his promises.

“Thank you, Travis. It means a lot to me.”

“Sure. And…I want to meet him, whenever he’s ready.” One of the horses started acting up, making a racket, reminding Travis of one thing they could all do together. “Maybe he’d like to come to the ranch one day. You and me, we’ll put him on a horse and see what he can do. How about that?”

“That…that sounds great.”

“So, you want to tell him? Or do you think I should? I’ll do whatever you think is best.”

“Well, I’m not sure. I’ll let you know,” his father said, then hesitated for a moment. “Actually, Travis, what I’ll do is ask Eleanor how she thinks we should handle that.”

Eleanor?

Travis sat up straight in the office chair, not sure if he liked where this conversation was going. “Okay.”

“I’ll ask her tonight, when I see her.”

Oh.

So, was Travis supposed to ask? Did he really want to know? In the end, he decided he did want to know. “You’re seeing her?”

“Yes.”

He swallowed a curse. “Dad, I thought you were furious at her for having your son and keeping it from you all these years?”

Travis was, and he knew damned well his father had been in the beginning.

“I was,” his father admitted. “But I’m not blameless in this situation—”

“Blameless? You didn’t know for twenty-one years that you had a fourth son out there in the world.”

“No, but I knew she was married when we were together, and I knew what we were doing was wrong. But I ignored all that because…well, Eleanor and I…There was a time, a long time ago, when I was just crazy in love with her, and she ended up with Devon McCord. But I never forgot her.”

Jesus,
Travis really didn’t want to know this. None of it. Because it brought up a million questions he really didn’t want answers to, either.

He hardly had any memories of his mother, but from all he’d heard and what little he did remember, he would have sworn she was a kind, loving, happy woman. Travis really didn’t want to hear that his father had never loved her, had spent his whole life in love with Eleanor McCord and wishing he could have her, instead.

What the hell kind of life was that?

“I loved your mother,” his father continued, as if reading Travis’s mind. “I truly did. She was a wonderful woman, a wonderful mother, and she loved you and your brothers dearly. We were happy together, Travis. I couldn’t believe it when I lost her. I felt in some ways I had cheated her, just by having those old feelings for Eleanor, even though I never acted on them while your mother was alive. I promise you that. I hope you believe me. It was only after your mother was gone that…”

“Dad, really, you don’t have to—”

“No, I want you to know. I’m sorry. It was wrong, and I knew it. When Devon left Eleanor, she thought their marriage was over, and I thought we were going to get our chance. Then Devon came back and she had to make a choice.”

“And she chose him?” How could she choose Devon McCord?

“She chose to protect her children, and that meant going on with the marriage. I know it wasn’t easy for her, but…Travis, when you have children, things change. Their needs become more important than yours. You’ll have children of your own one day, and maybe then you’ll understand what she did.”

“And you’re going to just forgive her for that? For having your son and keeping him from you all those years?” Because Travis didn’t understand that at all.

“Not easily, but I’m damned sick and tired of living without her. I can tell you that. She’s here now, and her children are grown and it’s time we got to think about ourselves and not anyone else. I’m sorry if that hurts you, or if you don’t understand. But Eleanor
and I are going to be thinking about ourselves now and what we want.”

“Good God, you’re still in love with her?”

“I never stopped loving her.”

Travis slumped back in the office chair, feeling like the earth had just shifted beneath his feet.

His father was in love with Eleanor McCord? He couldn’t even imagine how the ripples of that relationship were going to move through their world. Not easily. That was for sure.

And no easier for the woman inside his house right now.

Paige calmed herself down, thought things through and then decided that one way or another, she had to talk Travis into letting her search for the diamond. She had to. Her family’s business depended on it.

And she didn’t even think she could tell him that. Which meant…well, she didn’t see how she’d make him understand.

So she paced and went over everything she’d figured out about the diamond and its possible location and about the Eagle Mine, and then she paced some more.

The day passed with excruciating slowness, and if the rain didn’t stop soon, she was going to scream. By the time she heard Travis come in that evening, she was sitting on the big sofa in the living room trying to scrub her face free of tears that had fallen a while back, hoping it wouldn’t show.

He looked surprised to find her where she was, sitting in a dimly lit room, wrapped up in an afghan, seemingly
doing nothing at all. But he was wet and tired and no doubt cold, and off he went to shower and change.

She was still sitting there when he came back, and that time, he walked into the room and stopped talking midsentence as he caught sight of her.

Carefully, he came to sit beside her on the sofa, close but not too close, taking her hand in his.

“Let me guess,” he said finally. “You talked to your mother?”

That brought her head up to face him. “What’s wrong with my mother?”

“Nothing.” He looked confused then.

“No. What did you hear?” God, what else could have gone wrong? Her family’s business was near to going under, and her mother? What had her mother done?

Travis shrugged. “I figured it had to be a family member. Mother, brother, sister. I took a shot. So, which one was it?”

She hung her head miserably, still trying to figure out exactly how much she could tell him, how she could explain and get him to let her back into the mine without hating her.

“Okay, Red, the thing is, it’s hard enough seeing you look this miserable, when I’m just looking for an excuse to touch you. And I’m telling you right now, you start to cry, and that’s it. I won’t be able to just sit here and do nothing.”

“Promise?” she asked.

He nodded.

And she let those tears fall.

He swore softly and scooped her up and onto his lap,
pulling her down against his chest and wrapping her up in those wonderful arms of his.

He didn’t even try to tell her to stop or that everything would be okay or that it couldn’t be that bad, which she appreciated very much. He just held her and let her cry, tears rolling slowly down her cheeks, misery pouring out of her.

His body was big and hard and warm, and he smelled so good, fresh from the shower. She laid her head on his shoulder and eased into that spot where his shoulder met his neck, one hand pressed flat over his beating heart, letting the comfort and the reassurance of him seep into her.

“Do you ever just want to run away from your whole family and all of its problems and go somewhere where no one can find you?” she whispered.

“Not me. I’d find a way to seal the borders of this ranch and cut it off completely from the outside world. No one would get in without my say-so. That’s my idea of paradise when they’re all driving me crazy.”

Paige grinned. “Okay, do it. That would work.”

“Red, the thing is, I just haven’t figured out how. But if I did, I’d keep you inside with me, and I wouldn’t let anybody from your family in, either.”

Which made him her hero.

She let her hand slide up to the side of his face, and snuggled deeper into the curve of his shoulder. How could a man be so comforting and yet so sexy at the same time?

“What do they want you to do, Red?” he asked finally. “Get back into the mine? Is that it? Talk me into it? No matter what it takes?”

She nodded.

“Well, they sure knew the right person to send,” he claimed. “If anybody could talk me into it, it’s you. You could probably talk me into anything.”

“I don’t want to do it,” she tried to explain. “I want you to understand that. To believe it, if you can. I don’t want to do that to you. To use…this thing between us just to get back into that mine.”

He took a breath, a slow, deep steadying one, let one of his hands stroke her hair. “But you will anyway?”

“I have to,” she said.

He eased her away from him just enough that he could look her in the eye. “No, honey, you don’t.”

“I promised I’d do whatever it takes to get back into that mine and find the diamond—”

“Whatever it takes?”

She nodded.

“Fine,” he said. “Tell your family the price of entrance is you in my bed. See how they like that.”

She laughed sarcastically. “I wish it was that easy. You could be the evil Foley man who used me terribly, and I’d be the self-sacrificing heroine of the story who gave up her body to the evil one for the good of her family.”

“You make me sound like a complete cad, Red.”

“Only to my family. To yours, I’d be the scheming woman who was willing to use her body to seduce you into getting what my family and I wanted.”

“Oh, well. In that case…it’s a brilliant plan,” he agreed.

“It is. Both our families would understand.”

He rubbed his cheek, slightly rough with late-day
stubble, against hers. “And we’d get what we want anyway. We’d get each other.”

“And our families would have one more reason to hate each other.”

“Yes, they would,” he said, pulling her closer, his hold one of comfort and admirably restrained desire. “You know, I feel compelled to point out that we don’t ever have to tell anyone what we do on this ranch. No one would ever have to know. Have you thought about that?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“And if no one ever knew, who could it possibly hurt?” he reasoned. “Just you and me. If we…came to care enough about each other, or if just one of us cared enough…”

They could get hurt.

She started crying again. He had a hand on the side of her face, pressing her close, and he felt those tears, swore softly and then he was kissing her, slowly, deeply, hungrily.

Nothing more.

Just kissing her like he wanted to devour her right here on the sofa.

She sank into him, into the pleasure, going boneless in his arms, wanting to be nowhere else but there. Her heart started thudding heavily, her body warm and tingly all over, the pleasure centered on the point where his mouth was joined with hers, as if every sensation, every bit of energy, of life sprang from that union.

Take me,
she wanted to beg him.
Take me so fast I don’t have time to think or to pull away. Just do it, and we’ll worry about the consequences later.

He rolled them in one smooth motion, and she ended
up flat on her back on the sofa with him on top of her, his body all big and hard and ready.

She loved the feel of him there, the weight of him, the heat, the way one of his thighs slipped between hers in an intimate promise of the pleasures in store for them both.

He made short work of the buttons of her shirt, undoing only as many as it took to allow him access to one breast. He pushed her bra aside and there was no teasing this time, just him sucking hard on her nipple, the sensation opening up a line directly to that place between her thighs and setting that spot to throbbing.