Wyoming True - Diana Palmer Page 0,38
He felt the long-fingered hand flat on his broad, muscular chest with disturbing sensitivity. He felt her sigh. He didn’t need to look at her face to know that she trusted him. It must be very hard, he decided, for a woman with her past to even let a man hold her. It touched him, in unexpected ways.
“Have you had lunch?” he asked abruptly.
“No,” she said. “I was going to make a sandwich...”
He lifted his head and tilted her chin up. “Still up for some fried oysters?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, her blue eyes wide and curious as they looked into his silver ones.
He pursed his sensual lips. “I know a great little place in St. Augustine.”
Both her eyebrows arched. “Florida? St. Augustine, Florida?”
He shrugged. “The jet makes good time. It’s comfortable. There’s even a bed, if you need to lie down.”
Her lips parted on a soft breath. “It would be a lot of trouble.”
He smiled.
She smiled back, enchanted.
He got up and gently set her back on her feet. “Then grab your purse and a sweater and we’ll go.”
She hesitated. She was wearing jeans and clogs and a blue-and-white buttoned blouse. “I should change...”
He chuckled. “It’s just lunch. You might notice that I’m not wearing a suit.”
He wasn’t. He had on jeans and boots and a nice chambray shirt that had been soft under her fingers.
She grinned. “Okay.”
* * *
HE WAITED WHILE she told Laredo she was going to be gone for the afternoon. He wished her a pleasant day, nodded at Jake and went back to work.
Jake put her beside him in the back of the limo and instructed his driver to take them to the airport. He punched numbers into his cell phone and called his pilot, having him meet them at the airport.
Ida was in awe of him. Even her first husband, who owned a business, hadn’t been so efficient at getting things done so simply. She mentioned it.
“I grew up being regimented. My father was career military,” he said a little stiffly. “He retired as a captain in the army and came back here to manage the ranch when his father died. It wasn’t much of a ranch, deeply in debt, and my father only had his military pension to keep the wolf from the door. He didn’t like working cattle. Got his hands dirty, you see.” He smiled sardonically. “My mother’s father had the money. She became an oil heiress when he died. I inherited from her.”
She was fascinated. “Was she kind?”
He nodded. “Kind and gentle, the sort of woman who kissed bruises and baked cookies.” His face hardened. “My father resented her family’s wealth.”
She could feel the pain that she saw in his tanned face. “And made her pay for it,” she said without thinking.
He stared at her blankly for a minute. “Physics, huh? Are you sure you didn’t study fortune-telling?” he probed, but he was smiling.
She laughed softly. “Sorry.”
“Yes, he made her pay for it, over and over, until I was old enough and mean enough to make him stop.” His face hardened. “There’s nothing in the world I hate more than a woman beater.”
“You and the sheriff, from what I hear,” she said.
“His mother was the victim of an alcoholic father,” he replied. “Cody had an older brother who was sensitive and kind. He loved his mother, but he was afraid of his father, who hit him, as well. He tried to interfere with his father just once, when he was hitting his mother, and he was beaten bloody for it. Two days afterward Cody’s brother took his own life. Cody said his father didn’t even go to the funeral.”
“Oh, the poor man!” she exclaimed, and her sympathy was obvious and not pretended. “And he’s so kind!”
“Yes, he is,” Jake replied. He was trying to cope with a bad memory of his own, of a brother he’d had and lost to tragedy. He understood how Cody had felt.
“What happened to his father?”
“Died of a heart attack when Cody graduated from high school and joined the army.”
“Just as well. His mother?”
“She was always frail. One winter she caught pneumonia, viral pneumonia. She was alone in the house because Cody was overseas, and by a quirk of fate, the distant cousin by marriage who was supposed to be staying with her didn’t show up. His mother died.”
Ida just shook her head.
“As you might imagine, he and the cousin never speak. I understand that she tried to explain, but he wouldn’t listen. She was only sixteen