The Texan's Diamond Bride: The Texan's Diamond Bride / The Texas Tycoon's Christmas Baby

In love. In love. Life is wonderful. In love. Where are you?

Okay, Gabby was fine, just as Paige had left her.

And then a message Paige read word for word: Where did Penny disappear to? I’m telling you, Paige, something is going on with her, and it just doesn’t feel right. I think she may have finally gotten serious about a man, if you can believe that, and…well, she’s just so darned naive. I’d hate to see her get hurt.

Paige would, too. And she knew her sister was very inexperienced when it came to men. Paige was the adventurous one and by most people’s standards, she wasn’t very experienced herself. But Penny…she was downright innocent.

Paige shook her head. She typed in a quick message to Gabby, promising to try to find out what she could, then sent one to Penny, as well.

There was a short e-mail from her mother, which Paige dreaded opening but did, just to skim.

Hope you’re OK. That work is going well. Miss you. Love you. Please let me try to explain. Mom.

Okay.

More of the same from her mother, trying to explain her affair with Rex Foley.

Paige really wasn’t up to that today.

She had her own Foley man to contend with.

Travis didn’t think he’d ever spent a colder, wetter, more miserable day on the ranch, and mostly because he couldn’t stand the idea of being in his own warm, dry house with a woman. Because he didn’t trust himself there alone with her all day.

The ranch hands could have handled things easily. He knew that. They knew that. And they all knew he’d found a woman out in the storm, been stuck with her for an indeterminate amount of time and was, at first, in no hurry to be rescued. And that now she was back at the ranch and he was out here riding around in the cold and the wet with them.

They knew she was young, gorgeous and had fiery red hair, and anything beyond that was pure speculation. But they were all speculating like mad and having a good old time of it. That he was either an idiot or that he and the woman had already had a spectacular fallingout. One or the other.

“We gonna stay out here all day or find enough sense to come in out of the rain, Boss?” Cal finally asked shortly before dark.

“Just want to make sure everything is okay,” he said.

“Everything is just fine. It was fine hours ago.”

Travis didn’t bother challenging that notion. Just said, “I don’t recall asking you to stay out here with me, old man.”

“Nope, you didn’t. Just hate to lose you again. I promised your grandfather I’d take care of you, and I thought I was doing a fine job keeping that promise. But if you don’t even have enough sense to come in out of the rain anymore—”

“Shut up, Cal,” he said.

But he turned his horse in the direction of home, and Cal followed him, not saying another word.

By the time they reached the barn and dealt with the horses, Travis was bone tired. Maybe that would be enough.

He walked into the house through the mudroom, stripped out of all of his wet clothes except his jeans, worked a towel through his wet hair as he walked in barefoot through the kitchen, as he usually did when he came in wet or muddy or both.

He nearly made it to his bedroom before he found her, curled up in a chair in the library in front of a roaring fire, reading a book, an image that was like a kick in the gut, it looked so…inviting.

Coming in from a long, hard day at the ranch and finding her there waiting for him. All clean and fresh and so pretty, so sexy.

She put the book down and stood up, wearing a pair of jeans and one of his ex-wife’s blouses, something he actually found pretty. A creamy white against her flawless, pale skin and all that fiery hair, hanging long and loose around her shoulders. The blouse had big buttons up the front and then stopped in a scooped-out neckline that draped lovingly across the hint of curves at the top of her breasts. Her cheeks glowed from the heat of the fire and her eyes sparkled as she looked up at him like a woman who was glad to see him.

“You must be half-frozen,” she said. “I can’t believe you went back out into the storm today.”

“Ranch work doesn’t stop for anything. I have a million dollars worth of livestock out in that storm. I can’t ignore that. Not for anything.”

Just like he couldn’t let himself ignore who she was.

“I know. I just meant…I’m glad you’re back and safe.”

He nodded. “I’m going to take a hot shower and get dressed.”

“Marta left soup on the stove. It’s delicious. And some bread I could warm up,” she offered.

“Sounds good,” he said, then got the hell out of that room.

Yes, she was incredibly pretty and sexy.

A day’s hard ride in a cold driving rain and a tiredness that bordered on exhaustion couldn’t change that, he’d found.

What was he going to do now?

She warmed up the bread and dished out the soup to him, though he told her he could manage easily himself.

“I haven’t done anything all day except read and send a few e-mails, while you were out working,” she said. It only seemed fair that she help out a little bit. “You don’t have a live-in housekeeper?”

“I don’t need a live-in housekeeper. The house isn’t that big, and it’s just me. It doesn’t get that messy or dirty,” he said, as he poured himself a big glass of orange juice and sat down in the eat-in kitchen. “Why? You don’t think a man is capable of surviving without live-in help?”

“I’m just surprised. That’s all,” she said, sitting down at the table with him. “You seem quite self-sufficient.”

“I’m a rancher—”

“A working rancher. Not some pampered pretend cowboy who lives in a mansion and oversees his property and his livestock from afar.”

He frowned. “What the hell kind of rancher is that?”