Texas Cinderella Read online

“Almost nothing wrong?” Tate took a turn at parroting in the midst of a wry laugh. “Believe me, with the McCord connections, almost can still get you arrested. And how would your mother like to hear that you’re using the trust we have in her to do something like this?”

  “You’re threatening to tell my mommy?” Tanya said with some sarcasm of her own even though the threat to tell JoBeth carried more weight than the threat to call the police.

  Tate didn’t respond to her flippancy. He merely glanced down at the file again, closing it and laying his hand flat on top of it as if that could seal it away from her.

  Then those eyes pinned her in place again and he said, “I’ll tell you what this family doesn’t need right now—a traitor in our midst.”

  “I’m hardly that,” Tanya countered, chafing under that comment more than anything he’d said yet.

  “So it’s loyalty that brought you in here tonight?”

  There was that facetiousness again.

  “I was just hoping for an inside story. The discovery of that sunken ship that the Santa Magdalena supposedly came from has renewed interest in the diamond and I thought—”

  “That you’d use your mother’s position here as a way to get the scoop.”

  Despite pretending not to take seriously his threat to bring her mother into this before, Tanya was becoming increasingly worried that she’d done damage to the position that her mother had held since Tanya was barely two years old. She definitely didn’t want that.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” she conceded. “I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. But now that you have—”

  “Fine. If you want to have me arrested then do it. But leave my mother out of it. She doesn’t have anything to do with this. She’s sound asleep and doesn’t even know I’m here or that I had any intention of coming over here.”

  He seemed to consider that and Tanya had started to wonder how the robot pants and Flashdance sweatshirt were going to go over in jail when he said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”

  Tanya raised her eyebrows at him and waited.

  “I’ll keep your secret about this little escapade tonight if what you heard and saw here, stays here.”

  Jail in robot pants and a Flashdance sweatshirt was easier to accept.

  “You want me to just sit on the fact that the McCords honestly do believe they have the Santa Magdalena diamond?” she said incredulously. “That you’re so convinced of it that your brother is planning the family’s business future around it?”

  “That’s exactly what I want you to do.”

  “I think that’s unfair of you!” Tanya said with a little heat in her own tone now. “This is something that could make my career and you want me to do nothing with it when we both know it’s going to come out sooner or later, and potentially be a coup for someone else? I’ll grant you that I may have stepped over the line using my mother’s position here, but I don’t think I should be penalized because she works for you.”

  Tate McCord gave her the hard stare. But if he thought she was going to back down because of it, he was mistaken.

  Maybe he saw that in the fact that she didn’t waver in the stare down they were engaged in because he took his hand from the file, stood straight and said, “Okay, how about this—whether or not we do have the diamond and where it might be and if it can be found are all questions that have yet to be answered with any kind of certainty. What you think Blake is planning the business’s future around is really—honestly—a gamble we’re taking. But if—big if—we should end up finding the diamond and everything pans out, I’ll promise you an exclusive.”

  “In other words, you want to buy some time,” she said.

  His eyebrows were well shaped and one of them rose in reply.

  “My price is higher than that,” Tanya said, deciding that if she was in for a penny, she might as well be in for a pound.

  “Your price?” He was obviously astounded by her audacity.

  But Tanya didn’t let that daunt her. “I want the whole story—and I mean the whole story, so that if the diamond ends up being a bust, I’ll still have something to launch me. Like I said before, if the Foleys or the McCords sneeze, it’s news. But there are a lot of details and history and background that even I don’t know. And if I don’t have the complete picture after growing up here, I have to think not many other people do either. So it can give meat to the bigger story of the Santa Magdalena diamond finally, actually, being found. Or it can at least give me a well-rounded, juicy human-interest piece about Dallas’s two most illustrious—and infamous—families. And why they hate each other.”

  “What kind of details, history and background are we talking about?” Tate said in a negotiator’s voice.

  “Inside information on the family—the personal things that haven’t been in press releases. I want to know about the feud with the Foleys—the truth. I want to know all about the McCord jewelry empire—including if it’s hurting. I want the full package, enough to make it interesting even if it turns out that the search for the diamond is nothing but a wild-goose chase.”

  “Meat,” Tate repeated the word she’d used moments before. “You want to treat us like meat.”

  “I just want the truth and not what’s already common knowledge. Think of it this way, you got me a job at an independent news station that isn’t owned by the Foleys so there won’t be any pressure to make you guys look bad. My mom works for you, I grew up here—if anyone will do the story without painting you in a bad light, it’s me.”

  “Or I could just have you arrested and fired and—”

  “And then I could go to one of the Foley-owned stations or newspapers or what have you and do the story from their angle.”

  Once more Tate McCord stared at her long and hard.

  “You know, I like your mother.”

  Meaning he didn’t like her. Tanya had absolutely no idea why that bothered her. But it did.

  Still, she wasn’t about to show him so she merely raised her chin in challenge.

  Then he surprised her and laughed. “And I’m assuming I get to be your source?”

  “You’re the one proposing we make a deal.”

  She wasn’t sure if he liked that answer or if he had something up his sleeve, but he smiled and said, “All right. Deal—you keep quiet for now, I’ll give you the inside story and the exclusive on the diamond if we find it.”

  He held out his hand for her to shake.

  Tanya took it, clasping it firmly to let him know she wasn’t intimidated by him.

  But what she hadn’t anticipated was how aware she would be of the way her hand felt in his. Of the strength emanating from his grip. Of the texture of his skin. Of the tiny goose bumps that skittered up her arm…

  Then the handshake ended and something made her sorry it had.

  But that couldn’t be…

  “For now I guess I’ll just say good-night, then,” Tanya said, thinking that in all that had happened since she’d first heard Tate McCord’s voice this evening, she hadn’t wanted to get out of there as much as she did at that moment, before anything else totally weird came over her. Or overcame her…

  “Good idea,” he confirmed.

  So Tanya stepped from behind the desk, snatched her mother’s sweater from the back of the chair on her way to the French doors and finally went back out into the night air.

  And the entire time she held her head high, knowing that Tate McCord had followed her to the door to watch her go—probably to make sure she did, she thought.

  But it also occurred to her, as she took the path that led through the woodsy grounds to the housekeeper’s bungalow she was temporarily sharing with her mother, that she wasn’t sure what her mother and the rest of the staff was talking about when it came to Tate. He didn’t seem dark and brooding and withdrawn and dispirited to her.

  To her, he seemed full of life, full of fire.

  Fire enough to have nearly set her aflame with a simple ha
ndshake…

  Chapter Two

  A good night’s sleep had been hard for Tate to come by in the last year and a half, and Friday night hadn’t broken that pattern. He’d had trouble falling asleep and he was wide awake before the sun was even up on Saturday morning. And once he was awake there was no going back to sleep. Luckily he’d gotten used to functioning on only a few hours rest during internship, residency and surgery fellowship.

  By 6:45 he’d made himself a pot of coffee and he took his first cup out of the guesthouse to sit at one of the poolside tables with the newspaper that Edward—the McCord’s butler—hadn’t failed to leave at his doorstep since he’d returned from the Middle East and opted to live outside of the main house for a while.

  Tate didn’t open the paper, though. He knew there would be articles on the war in Iraq, on situations in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Unlike when Buzz had been over there and Tate had been anxious for any news, since Buzz’s death, since spending the year in Baghdad himself, some days he just didn’t want the reminders. He sure as hell never needed them….

  Don’t make me kick your ass!

  He knew that’s what Buzz would be saying to him if Buzz was around now. If Buzz saw him staring at that newspaper and wanting to toss it into the pool. There was no way Buzz would have stood for this damn black mood he’d been in since his best friend’s death.

  Bentley—Buzz—Adams. Like Katie, Tate’s fiancée, Tate had known Buzz all his life, despite the fact that they’d come from different backgrounds. Politics and the military—that’s where Buzz’s roots were. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been high-ranking army officers who each served as military advisors to presidents. But Buzz’s own father hadn’t wanted his family to live the nomadic military life, so Buzz had been raised at his grandparents’ estate, just down the road.

  Tate and Buzz had gone to private school together. They’d gone to college together. They’d even gone to medical school together and applied for residency at the same hospital. Their paths hadn’t veered until residency was over and Tate had opted for a specialty in surgery while Buzz had followed his family’s tradition and joined the army to serve as a doctor overseas.

  Going to war was the first thing Tate and Buzz hadn’t done together.

  If only Buzz hadn’t broken his tradition with Tate to follow his family’s tradition….

  But he had.

  And everything else was water under the bridge now.

  Everything but this funk Tate couldn’t seem to shake.

  He knew he was one hell of a downer these days, that everyone was wondering where the old Tate was. Most of the time he was wondering it himself. But the old Tate just didn’t seem to be there anymore.

  He also knew his lousy mood was going to factor in when the news about his engagement to Katie came out, and he regretted that. He didn’t want people saying that Katie had bailed because he wasn’t much fun anymore. Katie didn’t deserve that.

  She hadn’t ended their engagement because he couldn’t seem to lighten up. She’d made that clear and he didn’t doubt it. That just wasn’t Katie. In fact, he thought that if he’d put any effort into talking her out of breaking their engagement, the bad mood would have likely kept her around because she would have felt guilty for leaving him at a low point.

  But he hadn’t put any effort into keeping things going with her. Why should he have when she was right? She’d said that she’d been thinking that maybe long-term friendship and family pressure and the general belief that they’d end up together shouldn’t, ultimately, be why they did end up together. That she didn’t think she had the kind of feelings for him that she should have going into marriage. That she didn’t feel passionate about him.

  Maybe that should have been insulting, but it hadn’t been. Instead, he’d understood it. His own feelings for Katie had never been all-consuming or particularly passionate. Which was probably why calling things off just hadn’t mattered a whole lot to him.

  Of course, it also didn’t really matter to him that Katie wanted to keep the breakup a secret until she could see her parents in Florida and explain it to them.

  It didn’t matter to him that Katie wasn’t head over heels for him.

  It didn’t matter to him that they’d broken up.

  It didn’t matter to him that he needed to maintain the pretense that they hadn’t.

  Since Buzz’s death, and even more so in the six months since he’d been back from Baghdad, it had just been tough for things like that—for most of what mattered to the people around him—to have the importance they might have had before….

  He took a drink of his coffee and then replaced the cup on the table, staring into the steaming beverage that still remained.

  He liked his coffee strong and black, and looking into the brew now made him think of Tanya Kimbrough’s eyes. They were the color of Italian espresso—dark, rich, liquid pools of espresso….

  Recalling that made him think of one thing that had mattered to him—last night and finding Tanya Kimbrough in the library. That had definitely mattered.

  When he’d found her there he’d taken a mental inventory of what he and Blake had said because what was going on with the business did matter. He’d recalled that they’d said the jewelry business was in a slump, that they believed they knew where the Santa Magdalena diamond was, that Blake was buying all the canary diamonds to use as a tie-in.

  Then there were the papers Tanya had seen on the desk, too—Blake must have forgotten the file and while there hadn’t been anything in it but preliminaries for the advertising campaign, it was still information they didn’t want released.

  And after cataloging what Tanya Kimbrough could have known, the wheels of Tate’s mind had started to turn, imagining her prematurely revealing that they were looking for the Santa Magdalena diamond. No, he and Blake hadn’t talked about the crucial clue Blake had discovered in the border of the deed to the land and silver mines they’d taken over from the Foleys decades ago. Still, if word leaked that there was a very real reason to suspect the diamond might be found? Any number of treasure hunters could descend on them to complicate the search. And possibly accidentally find the diamond before they did.

  Not good.

  Tate had considered what would happen if word leaked that Blake was cornering the market on canary diamonds and coming out with a new line of Spanish-influenced designs to coincide with the discovery of the Santa Magdalena. Their competitors would launch lines of their own to steal their thunder and undermine their sales and, potentially, leave Blake at a disadvantage in breathing new life into the business.

  Also not good.

  And let the world know that the renowned McCord’s Jewelers was in a decline? That the family fortunes were compromised?

  Certainly not good.

  And since Blake was up to his eyeballs in the family’s problems already and—as usual—trying to bear the burden as much on his own as he could, rotten mood or not, Tate had decided that it was better if he dealt with the housekeeper’s daughter rather than dumping any more on his brother.

  Which was why he’d struck that bargain with her for an insider’s look at the McCords and an exclusive on the diamond if they found it. Left to her own devices, Tanya Kimbrough could cause trouble and he was going to do whatever he had to to prevent that. If that meant sticking to her like glue to keep a close eye on her for the time being, then that’s what he was going to do.

  It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it….

  Tate knew that’s what Buzz would be saying to him if he told his friend he was only taking on Tanya Kimbrough to spare Blake.

  Yeah, okay, it was hardly as dirty a job as studying a dusty deed or digging around in the dirt of a deserted old silver mine. Keeping an eye on a beautiful woman was definitely not drawing the short straw.

  And Tanya was a beautiful woman.

  The scrawny, funny-looking kid had grown into a knockout—there was no question about that.


  Her hair was as dark as her eyes—coffee-nib brown—and so shiny it looked like satin. Coupled with those eyes against a fair, flawless complexion, she’d been the freshest-faced burglar in existence. Fresh-faced and beautiful even without any visible signs of makeup, with that thin nose and those pale pink lips, those high cheekbones and the slightly squarish jawline sweeping up from a chin that looked as if it could be a little sassy.

  Unlike her taller, slightly stocky mother, Tanya was petite—no more than five-four he was guessing. She was thin, but not too thin, and she had curves in all the right places—at least he thought she did even though that chopped-up sweatshirt she’d had on had done more camouflaging than revealing.

  Of course it had revealed one shoulder before she’d yanked the fabric back into place. And the mere sight of that creamy skin had made him suddenly aware of his own heartbeat. And the fact that it had sped up….

  Only slightly.

  But still, that was more than most things had done to him lately. A simple bare shoulder…

  Hell, he was a doctor. He saw naked shoulders—and naked everything else—all the time. Why had a simple glimpse of Tanya Kimbrough’s shoulder done anything at all to him?

  Maybe it had been an adrenaline rush, he reasoned. He’d just had that argument with Blake and then spotted someone he’d initially thought to be a stranger lurking behind the desk. He hadn’t actually been alarmed, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that his subconscious had set off an alert response. After Baghdad, that seemed likely.

  And if it had felt like something other than that?

  He was likely only misinterpreting it.

  He did know one thing, though—he wasn’t hating the idea of keeping an eye on Tanya Kimbrough.

  In fact, if he analyzed it, he’d say he might even be looking forward to it.

  He might say he’d even gotten a small rush out of that back-and-forth with her last night. A small rush that he wouldn’t mind having again…

  But that couldn’t matter, he told himself.

  The charge he’d gotten out of their verbal exchange and the fact that she’d held her own with him, the smooth skin on a shoulder he’d been inclined to mold his hand around, the silky hair he’d wanted to see fall free, the lips he’d had a fleeting thought of tasting, the tight little body hidden behind funny-looking pants and a sweatshirt that someone had taken scissors to—none of that was as important as protecting his family, or as important as his promise to Katie to pretend they were still engaged until she told him otherwise.