Wyoming True - Diana Palmer Page 0,52
and I was already traumatized from losing my mother, not to mention what had come before it. I went wild. I bought a small jet, purchased a couple of mining companies, invested in growth stocks with an eye to the long haul, not short-term profits, and I got even richer.” He laughed. “Women, some women,” he qualified, “go nuts over rich men. I guess I found my share of them. Beautiful, cultured, talented—brains the size of a pea,” he added with a grin. “But you know what? After a while, they—”
“All look alike,” she finished for him. “That’s what Cort said. He got tired of being wanted for what he had, not what he was.”
“That’s me, too,” he confided. “I’m tired of being a wallet with legs. I’m thirty-seven,” he added quietly. “I’ve got everything. Except somebody to come home to. I thought Mina might fill that spot in my life.” He grimaced. “But the Texas cattle baron beat me out.”
“She loves him,” Ida said gently. “It’s not like you lost a competition. She fell in love.”
“Were you ever in love?”
“I thought I was,” she said after a few seconds. “But what I felt for Charles was gratitude, and what I felt for Bailey, at first, was just physical and mental infatuation.” She looked up at him. “I don’t know what love is. And I don’t want to know. Not ever again.”
His face was quiet and sad. “Neither do I.”
“Two lost souls, drowning our sorrow in coffee,” she mused, and her blue eyes twinkled. “What a pair we make!”
He chuckled. “Both of us alone and rich as pirates and nobody to talk to at midnight when the walls start closing in.”
She nodded sadly. “I know just how that feels. Walls. Nightmares.” She closed her eyes. “I used to think it would get better, that I’d get over it.” She sighed. “You never get over trauma like that.”
His eyes had a faraway look. “That’s how I felt, when I came home from the army. I thought, I’m a grown man, I’m tough, I’ll cope.” One side of his chiseled mouth turned down. “I haven’t coped. I’ve just gotten older.” He looked around him. “All this,” he said, indicating the wealth of antiques around him, “hundreds of thousands of acres of land on two continents, purebred cattle, more money than I could spend in two lifetimes. And I’m all alone in the dark.”
“So am I,” she said, her face stark with pain and bad memories.
He cocked his head and stared at her. “I don’t want to fall in love again. Neither do you. Both of us are rich and alone. But we get along pretty well.”
“We do,” she said, sipping more coffee.
He took a deep breath. He’d had an insane thought. He didn’t even know where it came from, but it felt right. “How would you feel about getting married?” he asked abruptly.
She blinked. She stared at him. “You mean, marrying somebody one day...”
“I mean, marrying me.”
At first she thought it was a bad joke, except he wasn’t smiling, and his silver eyes were flashing with feeling of some sort, narrow and piercing on her face.
Her lips parted on a shaky breath. She just stared at him, and her face tautened as she recalled how she’d been drawn to Bailey and what had come after.
“A marriage of friends, Ida,” he said quietly. “Just that. We can explore the world together, in between raising cattle and looking after horses. I’ve had more than enough of women who want me for my bank account. You’ve had more than enough of men, period.”
“Yes, but you’re a man,” she pointed out.
“God, I hope so,” he said, and then laughed.
She laughed, too, but her blue eyes were somber seconds later. “It’s just that, well, the physical thing...”
“We can leave the physical thing out of it,” he interrupted. “I haven’t felt much interest in sex since I lost Mina, not that we were ever even close to being intimate. She didn’t feel that way about me. What I’m proposing is a platonic sort of marriage. Later on, if we both agree, we might consider altering the terms of the agreement. But for the time being, you’ll have a separate bedroom and I won’t make any sort of demands on you.”
“That would be fine for me,” she confessed. “I’m afraid of men, that way. But you...?”
“I’m feeling my age,” he said heavily.
“Thirty-seven isn’t old, Jake,” she said softly.
He smiled. “You’re good for my ego.” He sighed. “Some men get