The Cowboy Takes A Bride

“Good point. You and Caitlin can have sodas instead.” Without waiting to hear any argument, he put an arm affectionately around his daughter’s shoulders and directed her toward the trailer. To the delight of the crew, he called out over his shoulder, “Take a break, boys!”

Trailing miserably behind them, Grant couldn’t help recalling that old adage about blood being thicker than water. It fit like a fist in his throat.

He tried not to focus on the tight fit of those designer jeans across her trim backside as she sashayed through the sagebrush in front of him. Grant knew he shouldn’t resent Paddy focusing all his attention on the daughter he’d seen so infrequently over the years, but knowing and feeling were two completely different things. Jealousy reared its ugly head. With the return of the prodigal child, Grant expected Paddy to ask him to kill the fatted calf any minute now.

“Don’t worry,” he heard Caitlin reassure Paddy. “Before you know it, my cooking will replace that petroleum in your veins with healthy red and white blood cells.”

“More’n likely you mean blue blood,” Grant mumbled stepping around them to open the door. Despite his personal feelings toward this hellcat, he was bound to give courtesy its due.

“Such a gentleman,” Caitlin quipped with a deprecating little moue.

Certain that one good kiss would be all it would take to wipe that smirk off those pouty lips, Grant imagined bending her swanlike neck back, pressing his lips against hers, and taming that fiery temper with a single mind-numbing kiss. A mere taste of his potency was sure to leave this pretty little princess limp and willing in his arms. After hanging around with college boys, Grant very much doubted whether Caitlin could handle a real man.

As if trying to shut out such disturbing thoughts, Grant slammed the door behind him. He blamed lack of sleep for the wayward turn his thoughts had taken. Lack of sleep and a decided lack of female companionship. The next time he got to town, Grant vowed to remedy that situation. Even if he liked Caitlin Flynn, which he decidedly did not, he valued his relationship with Paddy far too much to screw things up by even thinking of becoming involved with his precious daughter. Not that Caitlin would risk a nosebleed to look down from her pedestal upon mere oil field trash such as himself.

Stepping in from the intense sunlight outside, Caitlin needed a moment to adjust to the relative dimness of the trailer. Dust motes danced before her eyes. She was surprised to see that the trailer was relatively tidy, though hardly luxurious. Dishes were washed and drying in the wire rack over the sink, clothes were picked up, magazines were stacked neatly beside a sturdy couch of blotchy tweed blends, and an afghan she had lovingly made for her father for Christmas several years ago was draped neatly over the back of a black vinyl recliner. Considering the gritty conditions of the location, Caitlin was impressed. Her father had never struck her as being a particularly fastidious housekeeper.

“Have a seat, darlin’,” Paddy said, pointing to a small kitchenette table and two chairs.

Caitlin obliged, and Grant took an extra folding chair from the closet and set it up directly across the table from her. They exchanged cold glances while Paddy drew an old metal tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator and unceremoniously cracked it on the counter. A minute later he set two glasses of pop and a bottle of ice-cold beer on a table so flimsy that it wobbled beneath the elbows he propped there an instant later.

“There now,” he exclaimed, joining them. “Isn’t this cozy?”

Too cozy, Caitlin thought, drawing herself up primly in her chair so that her knees wouldn’t brush against Grant’s. Those long legs of his could no more be contained beneath the tiny circumference of that table than his ego could be contained within the band of the hard hat he placed between them like some symbolic barrier.

Paddy raised his beer in a salute and took a deep, satisfying draught.

“What’dya say we start over? Caitlin, I’d like you to meet Grant Davis.”

Davis. Davis. Davis… The name sounded oddly familiar. Caitlin searched her memory but couldn’t place it. She seriously doubted whether he was related to any of the San Antonio Davises that her mother set such store by.

“And, Grant, this is my daughter, Caitlin.”

When this introduction was met with nothing but loud, hostile silence, Paddy’s good humor exploded. “Just what exactly is the problem here? I can’t imagine why a friendly visit from my favorite daughter would inspire such animosity in you, Grant, or how—”

Grant turned to Caitlin in disbelief. “Then this is just a social visit? You led me to believe that… Well, in that case, I’m sorry that I acted like such a—”

Interrupting his apology with an angry wave of her hand, Caitlin focused her response upon her father. “No, it isn’t just a visit. I’m here to go to work for you, Dad. I hope you didn’t spend a fortune to send me off to college just to pat me on the head and send me off like some cute little puppy. You didn’t, did you?”

“Of course not,” Paddy sputtered. “It’s just that I don’t think we’re looking for a geologist, honey.”

“We’re not,” Grant confirmed tersely.

“Yes, you are,” Caitlin countered. Eyeing her father’s beer disapprovingly, she crossed her fingers behind her back and blurted out a plausible, abbreviated version of the truth. “I ran into your old one down the road a ways. He said to tell you that his services had suddenly become indispensable to another company that was paying better. I took the liberty of telling him that you already had a replacement—me!”

“What?” bellowed Grant, jumping to his feet.

He had been wondering where Doug was. The fellow prided himself on his punctuality, if not actual ability. Finding it hard to believe that a rival company had poached him, Grant’s eyes narrowed. There really was no polite way of suggesting that Paddy’s daughter was a liar.

Shaking his head solemnly, Paddy scolded, “You really shouldn’t have done that, honey.”

“Yes, I should’ve.” Caitlin placed her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in her hands, and leaned forward intently. She looked her father square in the eye. “Look, there’s no reason for you to pay somebody to do what I’m willing to do for free. It’s the least I can do for all you’ve done for me. Besides, I want to. Badly. Not to mention that I have a vested interest in our business myself. And it is the perfect opportunity for us to spend some time together.”

“Caitlin, darlin’,” Paddy replied with a note of pleading in his voice. “A rig’s no place for a beautiful girl such as yourself. I wanted you to go to college so you’d never have to do hard physical labor like me. Like your grandmother, God rest her soul, a poor charwoman working her fingers to the bone, saving all her hard-earned pennies to send her sons to America for a better life. That’s what I sent you to college for, a better life.”

Taking her manicured hands into his own, he cradled them gently. “Hands such as these are meant for a laboratory, for diamond rings, for holding my grandbabies some day. Not for grubbing in the dirt with a bunch of lewd men out in the middle of nowhere.”

The tenderness her father’s words inspired disappeared at the implication that she couldn’t take care of herself. It seemed to Caitlin that she had spent her entire life trying to convince others just how capable she was. Foolishly she had hoped a degree would eliminate the need for this very conversation. However, she understood that lashing out at her father in feminist rage would get her nowhere fast. Instead she took an altogether different route to getting her way.

“I appreciate your concern, but what I really need is a job, not kid-glove protection. The market isn’t exactly booming for inexperienced college graduates. What with downsizing, companies are hiring experienced geologists for about the same pay as entry-level workers. If I ever hope to get a better job than flipping burgers at some fast-food chain, I’ll have to get some experience first. The way I figure it, the best way for me to get experience is to work with the best. And that’s why I came to you.”

Grant saw something soften in Paddy’s eyes. He had to hand it to her. Caitlin had a real knack for winding her old man as tightly around her little finger as the chain around the rig’s rotary table.

Paddy ran his hand through his still thick shock of graying hair. “Well, since you put it that way…”

“Don’t forget about the financial benefit to the company. They don’t come any cheaper than me.” The smile Caitlin flashed her father was warm enough to completely melt the last of the ice in Grant’s soda. He knew he had to intervene fast.

“And don’t you forget,” he interrupted in a burst of disgust, “that I’m the one who does the hiring around here. And at the present time I’m not inclined to hire a slip of a girl for any position.”

“Now, now,” Paddy said, taking another draught of his beer. “Let’s not be so hasty, son.”

Son!

The word ricocheted through Caitlin’s brain like a sniper’s bullet. How dare her father use that word with this arrogant jerk! Deep down she suspected that Paddy secretly had always wanted a son. A son to work with side by side. A son to turn the business over to when it became too much for him. A son he could be proud of. All her life Caitlin had tried to make up for her sex by being the best she could at everything she undertook. She couldn’t help wondering whether Paddy would have been so willing to grant full custody to her mother had she been a son instead of a daughter. “How dare you try to tell my father how to run his business?” she snapped at Grant. “If I were him, I’d run you off on the spot for such impudence.”

Still standing, Grant leaned his considerable height over her and answered in a laconic tone, “I dare because I’m not just some lackey you can push around at will. Like it or not, I’m your daddy’s right-hand man, and I have as much at stake here as he does.”

Three

Determined to look Grant eye to eye when she confronted him, Caitlin leapt to her feet. Her chair clattered to the floor behind her.

“Is right-hand man your official title, or is that just a fancy way of saying you’ve wormed your way into a heart too kind for its own good?” She attempted to lessen the difference in their heights by standing on tiptoe and anchoring her hands to her hips for ballast. “Do you expect me to believe that my father simply turned the running of his business over to you because you graciously volunteered to be the son he never had? Let me assure you, mister. I’m not about to stand by and watch you destroy what it’s taken my father an entire lifetime to build.”

“Caitlin, stop it!” Paddy’s voice cut through the air like the crack of a bullwhip. “Stop it right now before you make a bigger fool out of yourself than you already have.”

Tears stung her eyes. Caitlin could count on one hand the times that her father had raised his voice to her. To be thus admonished in front of this outsider was almost more than she could bear.

Accusation laced her voice as she demanded an answer. “How can you just sit there and let your employee treat me with such contempt? The next thing I know he’ll be telling me that you want to make him a full-fledged partner.”

Paddy flinched from the betrayal glistening in his daughter’s eyes.

Grant railed against it.

Was it so unimaginable that he could have procured his boss’s high regard by any but underhanded means? Paddy had promised the entire crew a bonus if they could make this hole pay out before the deadline. He had, in fact, intimated that there would be an extra special something awaiting the man who worked the hardest to prove himself as he went through the ranks. Though no one knew exactly what the prize was, Grant hoped it involved enough money to secure that ranch that he’d been dreaming of for so very long.

Caitlin’s overly emotional reaction to the idea that her father might share the burdens of the business by offering his second in command a chance at a partnership only served to underscore Grant’s opinion of women. Any man unfortunate enough to ever forget that the “fairer” sex was only out for personal gain was destined to be very sorry indeed. All that hype about Caitlin’s coming here just to be close to her daddy was nothing more than a convenient cover to check up on her assets.

The inheritance factor was just one more thing for Grant to hold against her. But then, what could he expect a little princess from the suburbs to understand of earning one’s keep by the sweat of your brow? Of the pride that comes of making something of yourself out of the ashes of defeat? Of loving a man like Paddy Flynn not for the width of the financial security net he could weave beneath you, but instead for his honesty and decency?