“Isn't this decision a little sudden?” His slate-blue eyes stripped her naked, and Cassie's trim waistline was the focal point of that saber stare. “Don't tell me you're pregnant.”
“You needn't worry, Hoyt. I'm fully aware of what sort of scandal it would cause if the Temple bloodline ever became tainted by the likes of me.” There, she'd finally said it. The poor-white-trash shame had stalked her silently, constantly, for months. Twilight shadows of angry purple deepened in her eyes and her heartbeat quickened when Hoyt failed to reassure her.
“I guess you'll have to get used to the idea that you don't own anything around here but your precious land,” she added flippantly.
“Who put the burr under your saddle?” he demanded. His rumbling voice reminded her of the thunder that had orchestrated their last night of lovemaking.
“I'm positive that you won't have a bit of trouble replacing me, if that's what prompted your visit.” Cassie kissed caution good-bye. Her adrenaline surged as she let him have it with both barrels. “Why, I'd lay odds that there are at least another half-dozen poor young tramps on the Diamond T payroll. Surely you can convince one of them that she'd be saving the old homestead if she hopped into bed with you.”
“Blackmail isn't my game, baby.” Hoyt's brows drew together in a dark scowl. “I didn't drive all the way out here to fight a range war with you, either. But if I remember correctly, nobody dragged you kicking and screaming into that bedroom.”
“I'm sorry, Hoyt.” Her voice softened to a whisper as the fight drained out of her. She knew she wasn't playing fair, but she didn't know how else to handle these crazy feelings. “I know that I should have told you sooner, but I— I didn't— I've got a lot to do before I leave.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Maybe you'd better go.” She turned her back on him and went through the motions of cleaning the countertops.
“You've been under quite a bit of strain lately, what with the funeral and the legal mess.” He reached around her, removed the sponge from her hand, and laid it aside. His warm breath caressed the nape of her neck as he fit his lean length against her curves. “Why don't we relax and try to calm down? Then we'll talk this out. I'm sure we'll find a solution that suits both of our needs.”
“I won't sleep with you, Hoyt.” She squeezed her eyes shut. Every nerve in her body was attuned to that hard male shape. “And there's nothing to discuss, either. My mind's made up and I'm leaving first thing tomorrow morning. You're wasting your time, and your charm.” There was a harsh note in her flat statement.
“What do you want that I can't give you?” Impatience edged his question. She turned in his arms and he waved the letter she'd written under her nose.
“A chance to make it on my own.” Cassie lowered her eyes. She'd never dreamed she could hurt like this.
“Hell, you're as independent now as a hog on ice.”
“I knew you wouldn't understand. And that's exactly why I didn't tell you what my plans were.”
“A lot of people have accused me of having a hard head, but you're the first one who's ever assumed my skull was so thick that it couldn't absorb simple facts.” He tipped her chin up and forced her to look into those twin blue pools. A clean cattleman's crease shaped the summer Stetson shoved back on his wavy brown hair. The late afternoon sun outlined his masculine features, playing grooves and hollows against prominent cheekbones. “Come on, ‘fess up,” he cajoled. “What's behind this Nashville nonsense?”
“It isn't nonsense,” she protested. “If you'd ever really listened when we talked, you'd have known how much this means to me.” She waved her arms in frustration. “Can't you see the differences between us?”
“Well, I can't say that I've had the pleasure of seeing them lately.” His gaze slid possessively over her body and Cassie tingled in spite of herself at the remembrance of his touch. “If I'm not mistaken, though, it's been those very differences between us that have kept me coming around.”
“That's not what I mean, and you know it.” She hated it when he humored her. “Take a good look around you, Hoyt,” she ordered. He glanced lazily at the knife-nicked counters, the rickety table, the peeling wallpaper, and dismissed them as unimportant. “Don't you ever wake up in the middle of the night and wonder how you got mixed up with— with a dirt farmer's daughter?” The pain of what she had to say was etched in her eyes. “It's your turn to face facts, Hoyt. I'm nothing but a common sodbuster who's never going to amount— ”
“Stop it!” He grabbed her shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled. “Who's feeding you these crazy notions?”
“Nobody has said a word, I swear it.” Cassie blinked away the tears. Why did he insist on making this so damned difficult for her? “You're the finest man I've ever known, and I'll go to my grave cherishing the memory of what we had here. But I'm smart enough to know a bottle of champagne from a jug of home brew when I see it. There's only one place we're equal, Hoyt, and that's just not enough for me.”
“Just when you think you've heard them all... ” Hoyt shook his head. “What in hell does that have to do with us?”
“Plenty. Ask yourself what kind of a future is in store for us, Hoyt. Think about it honestly. I have.” Cassie knew what she was talking about. The grim vision had tormented her day and night, nicking away at the remnants of her pride.
“This hasn't been an easy decision for me to make. I... ” Her voice broke and she cleared her throat to regain control. “Money isn't the only thing that makes you a wealthy person, Hoyt. Your life is rich with experiences and freedoms and opportunities that I've only read about in books or heard about secondhand. I'm just a tenant-farmer's daughter who's lived in the shadows of life. Why, I've never even been fifty miles from home!”
“So I wear the blame for an accident of birth?” His gaze narrowed, accusing her in return.
“Of course not!” She met his cynical stare. “Before I ever met you, I had a goal, a dream. And that dream was all I had to cling to when my father died, or when the plow broke down for the umpteenth time, or when the doctor said my mother wouldn't recover.”
She felt the color flood into her cheeks as she realized how inane all of this must seem to him. “I'm going to be a singer, Hoyt. I can finally see that there might be a little sunshine in my future, the freedom to earn my own rewards or make my own mistakes.”
“I suppose the next thing you're going to say is that I'm your first mistake.” His sarcasm was meant to sting, and it did.
“In some ways, yes— and in some ways, no. I shouldn't have slept with you— I know that now. This wouldn't be such a miserable chore if I hadn't.” She'd come this far already and she was going to finish. “But when you turned this farm around, you proved to me there's no such word as ‘impossible.’ You made me believe in myself, in my abilities.”
“Let me continue helping you, then. You'll have everything you think you've missed, and then some.” His voice grew husky with desire. “More important, we'll be together.”
The battering-ram truth of his proposition shattered the composure she'd struggled to maintain.
“We wouldn't be together, Hoyt. I'd be stuck in Coyote Bend, waiting for you to decide when and whether we'd sleep together.” Stubborn pride propelled her on. The canyon-sized crack in her heart threatened to spread to her voice. “For the last time, I won't be your mistress. I won't let you tuck me away all safe and sound in this— this dirt pile, while you come and go as you please. I want more than that out of life— I'm entitled to more than that.”
She wanted to reach out and stroke that rigid jawline, to touch him one more time. But she kept her hands balled into tight fists and pressed them to her sides.
“Whether you're willing to admit it or not, the Diamond T empire is your first love, and I respect the fact that you have obligations to it. But I have obligations, too. And if I don't use my voice and whatever talent I have, something inside me will wither and die. I can't have it all, and that breaks my heart. But I have to go after what's best for me.”
“It's been a long time since a woman has led me around by the nose.” He flashed his white teeth but the smile was humorless.
“I wasn't stringing you along, Hoyt. But if it makes you feel better to believe that, go right ahead and believe it.” Cassie smiled at the idea. If anything, she'd been fooling herself. “We don't have enough in common to sustain the kind of relationship we both deserve. When the fire started dying, we'd be strangers, hating and blaming each other for a dead-end affair, when neither of us was really at fault.” The tears streamed unchecked down her cheeks.
“Well, I guess you won't be using this to put a deposit on a place in town.” His mouth settled into a grim line and he pulled a yellow piece of paper out of the chest pocket of his chamois shirt. “Your severance pay.”
“I don't want it,” she sobbed. “It would be like— like accepting blood money.”
“You ungrateful little bitch!” Hoyt yanked her into the steel trap of his arms. “Measure this on the applause meter sometime.”
Cassie reacted instinctively. She raised her petal-soft lips to meet his demanding ones. The salty taste of her tears mingled with their kiss. The smell and feel of him flooded her senses. She melted against his hard body and his hands found the pearlized snaps on her shirt
Hoyt's mouth traveled a familiar path to her neck, igniting a brushfire that threatened to rage out of control when he nibbled at the sensitive hollow of her throat.
“No, Hoyt, please!” Her strangled protest was barely audible. He ignored her softly whimpered plea and crushed her body against his. Cassie stopped straining against the prison bars of his hold and clasped her arms around his neck. It felt so right, so good...
Hoyt released her abruptly and she stumbled backward.
“I still don't know what you'll search for in Nashville that I can't put at your disposal right here, but I hope to hell you find it.” His face was void of emotion. He tossed the check onto the kitchen table and it floated across the chipped surface. Its Diamond T symbol was a taunting reminder that she was finally free, that she had nothing further to lose.
A careless word, the wrong look— either would have detonated the charged silence as surely as a match dropped into a powder keg.
Hoyt spun on his heel and left Cassie alone in the old house. She picked up the check and shredded it with trembling hands.
Chapter 3
“GLO-ree HAL-lay-LEW-ya, brothers and sisters!”
Cassie punched the radio dial, cutting off the jake-leg preacher in the middle of his sermon. She tuned in a station playing an Eddie Rabbit hit As she drove toward the better days promised in the pulsating song, a glimmer of excitement began to edge out her sadness.
A dusty pink haze had colored the flat Texas horizon this morning when she'd carried the boxes packed with her belongings out of the dilapidated farmhouse. She'd studiously ignored the deep ruts in the front yard where Hoyt had always parked his Jeep. If she didn't notice them, she rationalized, she wouldn't hurt. Her strategy hadn't worked.
The dark blanks of the shuttered windows reminded Cassie of the way Hoyt's eyes had accused her yesterday. She'd closed the door firmly and gone to the car to arrange the bulging cardboard cartons she'd used because she didn't own a suitcase.
Her thick ebony hair was French braided off her face, trailing down her narrow back like an exaggerated exclamation point She'd pulled on a sleeveless cotton shirt in anticipation of the inevitable noon heat. Yellow streamers of sunshine bounced off the hood of her road-spattered automobile when she pulled onto the four-lane asphalt ribbon and headed east. Cassie rolled down her window and rested her arm on the chrome frame. A hot breeze was better than none, and today promised to be another August scorcher.
Miles of arid prairie gave way to rolling green cattle country that told Cassie she was making excellent time. She pulled off the highway shortly after noon to eat at Bad Boy's Diner. Her father had always sworn by truck stops. Judging from the number of eighteen-wheelers circling the squat adobe building, Cassie decided that Bad Boy's probably rivaled the finest restaurants in Texas.
A dozen pairs of curious male eyes sized up the slight, blue-jean-clad figure that slipped into a red vinyl booth near the picture window. Cassie pushed her oversized sunglasses back to rest on her sleek, ink-black hair and took a long sip of the ice water that the waitress set in front of her.
“Hi. My name's Ruthie. Whatcha gonna have today, honey?”
Cassie watched, fascinated, as Ruthie rounded her painted lips and blew a huge pink bubble. The gummy balloon hung in midair, blocking out the pointed chin and upturned nose of the pert woman's face.
“Red beans with cornbread is the specialty today, honey,” Ruthie offered when she noticed Cassie searching the plastic-coated menu. “It's a dollar forty-nine for all you can eat.” Ruthie snapped her gum as she spoke.
A square giant, his mustachioed face topped by a stiff straw hat, lumbered by and slapped the waitress's bottom. “Road Runner, you cut that out!” she squealed in mock offense.
Road Runner tucked a crisp folded bill into the breast pocket of Ruthie's V-necked uniform and planted a fuzzy kiss on her cheek.
“Y'all come back now, hear?” Ruthie batted an awning of false eyelashes and smiled seductively at the trucker. He tipped his hat and pushed the door open.
“Now, what can I get ya, honey?” The waitress turned her attention back to Cassie, keeping her pencil poised over a small pad of lined tickets.
“Red beans and cornbread sounds fine.” Cassie was curious but she didn't try to second-guess the significance of Ruthie's flirtatious behavior. After her experience with Hoyt, she knew that actions didn't always speak louder than words.
Ruthie ran from table to booth to counter, pouring another cup of coffee here, asking after a trucker's twins there, and satisfying everyone's order with an easy speed and snappy stamina that Cassie found amazing.
“I brought you an extra portion, honey,” Ruthie whispered. “A stiff wind would knock you into the next county. Dig in and put a little meat on them bones.” She set a large white bowl of kidney-shaped beans swimming in a rich, steaming gravy on the table.