One Night with a Red-Hot Rancher: Tough to Tame / Carrying the Rancher's Heir / One Dance with the Cowboy

“Learning…diplomacy.” He said it through gritted teeth. “They say my attitude needs work.”

Dead-Eye opened his mouth to speak.

Cappie beat him to it. “And you think I need an attitude adjustment?” she exclaimed.

The other man shifted restlessly. “We should get to the hospital.”

Cappie just smiled. So did Dead-Eye.

When they got to the hospital cafeteria, it was already full. One of the tables was occupied by a somber Dr. Rydel, moving eggs around on a plate as if he couldn’t decide between eating them or throwing them.

Cappie’s traitorous heart jumped at the sight of him, but she didn’t let her pleasure show. She was still fuming about his assumption of her guilt, without any proof except the word of a man who was a stranger.

He looked up and saw her and grimaced.

“Want me to frisk him for you?” Dead-Eye asked pleasantly. “I can do it discreetly.”

“Yeah, like you discreetly frisked that guy at the airport,” the dark-eyed man muttered. “Isn’t he suing?”

“I apologized,” Dead-Eye retorted.

“Before or after airport security showed up?”

“Well, after, but he said he understood how I might have mistaken him for an international terrorist.”

“He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops!”

“The best disguise on earth for a spy, and I ought to know. I used to live in Fiji.”

“Did you, really?” Cappie asked, fascinated. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Have you?” Dead-Eye looked past her to Bentley, who had gotten up from the table and was moving toward them. “Now might not be a bad time,” he advised.

Bentley had dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep. But he was just as arrogant as ever. He stopped in front of Cappie.

“I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

She didn’t want to talk to him, and almost repeated her words of the night before. But she was tired and worried and a little afraid of Frank. It didn’t matter now, anyway. Her life in Jacobsville was already over. She and Kell would start over again, here in San Antonio, once the threat was over.

“All right,” she said wearily. “I’ll only be a minute, guys,” she told Dead-Eye and his partner. “You can get coffee.”

“Finally,” Dead-Eye groaned. “I’m having caffeine withdrawal.”

“Is that why you look so ugly?” the other man taunted.

They moved off, still fencing verbally.

“Who are they?” Bentley asked as he seated her at his table.

“Bodyguards,” she said. “Eb Scott loaned them to me.”

“Want coffee?”

“Please.”

He went to the counter, got coffee and a sweet roll and put them in front of her. “You have to eat,” he said when she started to argue. “I know you like those. You bring them to work in the morning sometimes when you have to eat on the run.”

She shrugged. “Thanks.”

He pushed sugar and cream to her side of the table.

“I phoned the nurses’ desk on the way here, on my cell phone,” she said wearily. “They said Kell’s having his bath and then breakfast, so I’d have time to eat before I went up to see him.”

“I talked to him briefly last night,” he said.

She lifted her eyebrows. “It’s family only. They posted it on the door!”

“Oh, that. I told them I was his brother-in-law.”

She glared at him over her coffee as she added cream.

“Well, they let me in,” he said.

She lifted the cup and sipped the hot coffee, with an expression of absolute delight on her face.

“He was about as friendly as you are,” he sighed. “I screwed up.”

She nodded. “With a vengeance,” she added, still glaring.

He pushed his plate of cold scrambled eggs to one side. His pale blue eyes were intent on her gray ones. “After what happened to me, I was down on women for a long time. When I finally got to the stage where I thought I might be able to trust one again, I found out that she was a lot more interested in what I could give her than what I was.” His face tautened. “You get gun-shy, after a while. And I didn’t know you, Cappie. We had supper a few times, and I took you to a carnival, but that didn’t mean we were close.”

She stared at the roll and took a bite of it. It was delicious. She chewed and swallowed and sipped coffee, all without answering. She’d thought they were getting to be close. How dumb could she be?

He drew in a long breath and sipped his own coffee. “Maybe we were getting close,” he admitted. “But trust comes hard to me.”

She put down the cup and met his eyes evenly. “How hard do you think it comes to me?” she asked baldly. “Frank beat me up. He broke my arm. I spent three days in the hospital. Then at the trial, his defense attorney tried his best to make it look as if I deliberately provoked poor Frank by refusing to go to bed with him! Apparently that was enough to justify the assault, in his mind.”

He scowled. “You didn’t sleep with him?”

The glare took on sparks. “No. I think people should get married first.”

He looked stunned.

She flushed and averted her eyes. “So I live in the past,” she muttered. “Kell and I had deeply religious parents. I don’t think he took any of it to heart, but I did.”

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me,” he said quietly. “My mother was like you.”

“I’m not trying to justify myself. I’m saying that I have an idealistic attitude toward marriage. Frank thought I owed him sex for a nice meal and got furious when I wouldn’t cooperate. And for the record, I didn’t even really provoke him. He beat me up because I suggested that he needed to drink a little less beer. That was all it took. Kell barely got to me in time.”