Loe raamatut: «Tall, Dark and Texan»

One

Dan Crenshaw noticed her as soon as she stepped inside the smoke-filled bar. He wasn’t the only one. Provocatively dressed in a bright, tropical print strapless dress with her black hair tumbling around her shoulders and down her back, the woman stuck out like an exotic flower in a patch of weeds.

Although small, there was nothing childlike about her. The dress molded her softly rounded body in a seductive manner that would have any red-blooded male baying at the moon.

Her appearance in the small bar screamed trouble waiting to happen, the last thing Dan wanted.

The seedy bar had passed its prime a good forty years ago. Situated in an old building overlooking the bay, its weathered exterior and faded sign didn’t lure many first-time visitors to the island to pass through its portals. He had a hunch that whoever she was, she wasn’t one of the locals.

Loud music from a local radio station spewed out songs long past their prime, effectively muffling all but the loudest of the conversation at the bar. The place was crowded for a weeknight. Barstools filled with regulars swapping tales of the day crowded around the bar at one end of the room. After everyone looked her over, conversation resumed.

Dan had claimed the back table at the other end of the room for his own since he’d arrived on South Padre Island. He liked coming here because everybody left him alone. Just the way he wanted it.

One morning a few weeks ago, he’d suddenly walked away from his ranch in the Hill Country and his computer business in Austin, as well as his belief in himself, and had headed south. The island was as far south as he could go and stay in Texas and the United States.

Now he sat hunched over his drink, wondering why a woman who looked like that would visit this place. He kept expecting her to discover her mistake and leave. Instead, she leisurely looked around before sauntering toward the group of tables arranged at his end of the room.

The bar area glowed with colored neon lights advertising different brands of beer, leaving the rest of the room in shadows. Hurricane lamps with small candles inside them sat on each of the eight tables, forming small islands of light.

She sat down two tables away from him and placed her purse on the chair beside her. Dan had an excellent view of her profile—a high forehead, patrician nose, pouting mouth, softly rounded chin and long, slender neck.

Laramie, the bartender, tripped all over himself in an effort to get to her and take her order. Dan couldn’t hear her voice because of the loud music and conversation, but he expected to see poor ol’ Laramie start salivating as he leaned closer to hear her drink preference.

Dan finished his Scotch and lifted his glass to Laramie, signaling the bartender to bring him another one. He studied the ice cubes, wondering if a person could read his fortune in ice as well as tea leaves. It would probably be a lot tougher. He’d have to be quick or all the esoteric signs would melt.

When he glanced up again he discovered the woman’s gaze fixed on him. In the smoky, dimly lit room her eyes shone like black jet, the light from the candle reflected in their ebony depths. He lifted his empty glass and sketched a toast in the air.

She eyed him for a moment without changing expression, then looked toward the bar, where Laramie could be seen rushing back to them with a full glass clutched in each hand.

Dan picked up his fresh drink and took a careful sip. He wasn’t in the least surprised to be snubbed by the young woman. He probably looked like some pirate who’d recently been found washed up on the beach.

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, unable to remember the last time he’d shaved, or run a comb through his shaggy, dark hair. None of his employees would recognize him, now. Hell, probably his own sister wouldn’t recognize him.

Mandy. Damn. He’d been working hard to put her out of his mind. She’d really ticked him off earlier in the evening, giving him hell over the phone for refusing to return home.

She didn’t understand how seductive life on the island could be. He slept when he wanted, ate when he wanted, drank when he wanted. This was the first time in years he’d stayed at the condo. He’d picked it up for a song several years ago when the Mexican market had taken a nosedive, causing the economy along the border between south Texas and Mexico to suffer.

His condo was in the tallest building on the island with a commanding view of both the Gulf of Mexico and the bay that separated the island from Port Isabel.

No, he had absolutely no desire to leave the island. As far as he was concerned, he’d found his new home. He mentally toasted the thought and took a long drink from his new order.

* * *

Well, I found him. Now what?

Shannon Doyle took a careful sip of her house wine and controlled her reaction. She had a hunch that this particular bar had few requests for wine.

Just a hunch.

Okay. She’d been rehearsing for this meeting for the past three days. Lights! Camera! Action!

Only she couldn’t seem to remember her lines.

Shannon fought the urge to tug on the bodice of her dress. When she’d found it that afternoon in one of the island boutiques, she’d whimsically thought it would be just the thing for getting Dan’s attention. She hadn’t really given enough thought to the amount of attention she was drawing from everyone else in the place.

All right. Let’s face it. I’m not the femme fatale type. Quite the opposite. Shannon had spent most of her life with her head buried in a book, or glued to a computer screen. She’d never been interested in dressing to attract the attention of the opposite sex.

Good thing, because none of them had ever noticed her, unless they’d needed help with homework when she was in school. Or later—she didn’t want to think about later. She had to chalk up her recent experience with Rick Taylor to her lack of knowledge and understanding of the male animal. Any male animal.

Except for her two brothers, she hadn’t been around all that many. Even her cat was female.

When she’d first planned this, she figured that she’d have to do something startling to get Dan to even notice her. Hence, the new dress.

Well, he’d looked at her, all right. His gaze had caused her pulse to accelerate at least twenty points. But he hadn’t recognized her.

Not that she would expect him to, of course. That was the point of this exercise, after all. Like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, Shannon had decided to create a whole new identity for herself.

Maybe she hadn’t made a great first choice in men by diving into the dating game with Rick those few months, but after talking to Mandy McClain last week, Shannon had decided that she wouldn’t let her disappointment send her running back to her solitary life-style. She intended to follow her heart. Instead of fantasies, she had decided to turn her adolescent dreams into reality.

Dan Crenshaw had been the lover in her dreams since she was thirteen. He’d been a senior in high school then. A football star. Popular and smart and good-looking.

She’d still been struggling with what her mother kindly referred to as baby fat. Baby fat? At thirteen? Well, whatever it was, she’d looked like an aspiring hippo, lumbering along with her friends. The glasses hadn’t helped—their thick lenses giving her an owl-like appearance.

Of course she hadn’t looked like that in years. By the time she’d gone to college she’d slimmed down and gotten used to contact lenses, but those early years left a definite mark on a person’s psyche. There were times when it didn’t matter what she saw in the mirror. She felt overweight and ugly.

The dress was supposed to give her self-confidence. Instead, she was afraid its brash exposure might end up giving her hives.

She heard the scrape of a chair and casually glanced around.

Dan was getting up! Oh, no. Not yet. She hadn’t made her move yet. Then she noticed that he wasn’t headed toward the door. Instead, he ambled over to the bar and spoke to the bartender, who glanced her way and laughed, then proceeded down the hallway toward the rest rooms.

Shannon released the air she’d been hoarding in her lungs with a thankful sigh. She still had time to approach him.

It was a wonder she’d had any air left once she’d gotten a good look at him. She didn’t know what he’d looked like before coming here, but the island had certainly burnished him with a sexy bronze finish.

He wore a sleeveless T-shirt with something written on it and a pair of cutoff jeans that lovingly clung to his taut derriere and showed off strong, muscular thighs. He barely met the minimum dress code by wearing flip-flops for shoes.

Not the usual attire for the head of most companies.

She had to agree with Mandy. Something needed to be done.

Shannon was determined not to flunk out on her newest mission—saving Dan Crenshaw from himself.

* * *

When Dan returned from the rest room, Laramie had another drink waiting for him at the bar. He snagged the glass between his thumb and middle finger before strolling back to his chair.

The woman was still sipping on her first drink. Wine. That figured.

He sat down and leaned the chair back on two legs, resting against the wall. He was in a particularly foul mood tonight and all because he’d made the mistake of picking up the damned phone when it rang earlier.

“What!” he’d yelled into the receiver after listening to the phone ring off and on most of the afternoon.

“Is that any way to answer a phone?” Mandy asked.

“What do you want?”

“You don’t have to be rude.”

“And you don’t have to spend every waking moment of every stinking day calling to make sure I haven’t thrown myself off the balcony.”

There was a silence. Finally, Mandy said, “That’s not funny, Dan...and it just so happens that I haven’t called you in three days.”

“No kidding. Hell, you’ve set a new record. I’ll send you a medal.”

The silence was longer this time. Much longer. Finally, he heard a sigh. “We need to talk,” Mandy said.

“We are talking.”

“About DSC.”

“I told you. I don’t want to talk about the company.”

“Oh, you’ve made yourself quite clear about that, big brother. It was so easy for you to shrug your shoulders, walk away and say, ‘I quit.’ But the world continues on, Dan, even if you decided to step off. You still have contracts to fill, quotas to meet, and there’s no one capable of running the place with both you and James gone. You hired Rafe as head of security. He doesn’t know a blasted thing about running your stupid company for you.”

“Nobody asked him to.”

“Well, somebody has to! A national employment agency has been calling with resumes. They said you’d contacted them and now they want to make appointments for applicants. Nobody knows what to tell them. Rafe isn’t qualified to interview people. Forget the fact that the business is losing potential sales because you aren’t there, but someone needs to be in the plant making certain that the contracts already signed are being met. If they aren’t, you’re going to find yourself inundated with lawsuits. For some reason I can’t see you enjoying being back in court again.”

“Low blow, Mandy.”

“Everything is a low blow to you these days, Dan, and I, for one, am getting sick and tired of tiptoeing around you. Rafe will never tell you this, but somebody needs to. You’ve got to stop thinking about your pain and your agony and your loss and start thinking about somebody else for a change. Do you have any idea the hours that Rafe is putting into that company, trying to save your butt? I hardly see him anymore. He rarely gets home before eleven and he’s gone by seven every morning. That’s no way for anyone to live. I know James hurt you—”

“Hurt me? Hell, Mandy, this isn’t about my hurt feelings. He did his damnedest to pin everything he’d done on me! If it hadn’t been for Rafe finding the evidence to prove his involvement rather than mine, it would be me sitting in the pen these days and not James.”

“Exactly my point! Yes, James was your friend. And, yes, he betrayed you. Cost you money. Almost bankrupted the company. But he wasn’t your only friend. Rafe’s been there for you every step of the way. And you don’t seem to care that we’ve all done everything we could think of to make this easier for you. Someone has to deal with the life you decided to toss aside. None of this is just going to fix itself without you.”

“Why didn’t Rafe call me and tell me this?”

“When would he have the time?”

Dan couldn’t think of a really smart retort to that one. He knew what kind of hours the company demanded. He’d been keeping them for years. And he’d had help back then—from his old college buddy...partner...friend—James Williams. Good ol’ James. The lousy, stinking, lying thief.

He didn’t want the reminders. He didn’t want to be having this conversation. “I’ll talk to Rafe,” he finally muttered.

“When?”

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Damn it, Mandy, quit pushing. I said I’d talk to him. Now back off.”

“Sometimes you can be such a jerk, Dan.”

“I love you, too. Give Angie a hug and a kiss from her Uncle Dan.”

“Do it yourself!” she said, slamming down the phone.

He focused on the noisy conversation and music around him, trying to erase the confrontation with Mandy. He couldn’t remember her ever being that angry with him before, not even when they were growing up together on the ranch. He lifted his drink to his mouth, trying to wash away the memory.

The problem was that he knew Mandy was right. He was being a jerk. Rafe had come through for him once again. He wondered if his friend—and now his brother-in-law—ever got tired of coming to his rescue.

The scrape of a chair against the cement floor drew his attention and he glanced up from his serious contemplation of his drink. The woman in the sexy sarong stood there at his table, looking down at him. When he finally focused on her face, she gave him a very seductive smile.

“You shouldn’t be sitting here all alone, you know,” she said in a husky voice. Without waiting for him to respond, she sat across from him and took a slow sip of her drink, her gaze focused on him.

His chair fell back onto all four legs with a resounding thud, jarring him.

He caught a hint of a floral scent that could almost be part of the tropical flowers on her clinging dress. Dan blinked, wondering if he’d fallen asleep without knowing it.

Up close he could see that her skin almost shimmered with the lustrous glow of a fine porcelain figurine. All right, he must really be dreaming. Granted he hadn’t been involved with a woman for a while. Maybe the booze had helped his fantasy woman appear to him in living color and fully dimensional.

He placed his hands on the table, cupping his drink protectively, and smiled at her.

She looked startled for a split second before she took another sip from her wine glass, then ran her tongue over her bottom lip in an unconscious gesture that caused his attention to focus on that full, pouty protrusion.

“I’ve never seen you in here before,” he finally said, then almost groaned at the banality of the statement. Yes, he was definitely rusty at this.

She leaned toward him, then lifted her hand and laid it against his cheek. He flinched and jerked back from her touch.

“Did you run out of razor blades?” she murmured.

He nodded toward the bar. “You’ll find all the clean shaves you want at the bar, if that’s what you prefer.”

If possible, her voice dropped to a huskier level. “Why would I do that, Danny, when you’re the one I came so far to find.”

All right, so he’d had too much to drink. That was the only explanation he could come up with to account for a beautiful stranger’s apparent interest in him. He had to be imagining this whole thing. But how did this woman know his name?

Peering at her through narrowed eyes, he asked, “Who the hell are you?”

She sat back in her chair and gave him a smile that would tempt a saint. “Why Danny, don’t you recognize me? I am your worst nightmare.”