“Let me ask him,” Ed volunteered. “Just do your usual job for now.”
“Okay. Thanks, Ed.”
He shrugged. “What are friends for?” he murmured with a smile.
The office was a great place to work. Leslie had a ball watching the other women in the executive offices lie in wait for Matt. His secretary caught him trying to light a cigar out on the balcony, and she let him have it from behind a potted tree with the water pistol. He laid the cigar down on Bessie David’s desk and she “accidentally” dropped it into his half-full coffee cup that he’d set down next to it. He held it up, dripping, with an accusing look at Bessie.
“You told me to do it, sir,” Bessie reminded him.
He dropped the sodden cigar back in the coffee and left it behind. Leslie, having seen the whole thing, ducked into the rest room to laugh. It amazed her that Matt was so easygoing and friendly to his other employees. To Leslie, he was all bristle and venom. She wondered what he’d do if she let loose with a water pistol. She chuckled, imagining herself tearing up Main Street in Jacobsville ahead of a cursing Matt Caldwell. It was such a pity that she’d changed so much. Before tragedy had touched her young life, she would have been very attracted to the tall, lean cattleman.
A few days later, he came into Ed’s office dangling a cigar from his fingers. Leslie, despite her amusement at the antics of the other secretaries, didn’t say a word at the sight of the unlit cigar.
“I want to see the proposal the Cattlemen’s Association drafted about brucellosis testing.”
She stared at him. “Sir?”
He stared back. She was getting easier on his eyes, and he didn’t like his reactions to her. She was repulsed by him. He couldn’t get past that because it destroyed his pride. “Ed told me he had a copy of it,” he elaborated. “It came in the mail yesterday.”
“Okay.” She knew where the mail was kept. Ed tried to ignore it, leaving it in the In box until Leslie dumped it on his desk in front of him and refused to leave until he dealt with it. This usually happened at the end of the week, when it had piled up and over-flowed into the Out box.
She rummaged through the box and produced a thick letter from the Cattlemen’s Association, unopened. She carried it back through and handed it to Matt.
He’d been watching her walk with curious intensity. She was limping. He couldn’t see her legs, because she was wearing loose knit slacks with a tunic that flowed to her thighs as she walked. Very obviously, she wasn’t going to do anything to call attention to her figure.
“You’re limping,” he said. “Did you see a doctor after that fall you took at my ranch?”
“No need to,” she said at once. “It was only a bruise. I’m sore, that’s all.”
He picked up the receiver of the phone on her desk and pressed the intercom button. “Edna,” he said abruptly, “set Miss Murry up with Lou Coltrain as soon as possible. She took a spill from a horse at my place a few days ago and she’s still limping. I want her X-rayed.”
“No!” Leslie protested.
“Let her know when you’ve made the appointment. Thanks,” he told his secretary and hung up. His dark eyes met Leslie’s pale ones squarely. “You’re going,” he said flatly.
She hated doctors. Oh, how she hated them! The doctor at the emergency room in Houston, an older man retired from regular practice, had made her feel cheap and dirty as he examined her and made cold remarks about tramps who got men killed. She’d never gotten over the double trauma of her experience and that harsh lecture, despite the therapists’ attempts to soften the memory.
She clenched her teeth and glared at Matt. “I said I’m not hurt!”
“You work here. I’m the boss. You get examined. Period.”
She wanted to quit. She wished she could. She had no place else to go. Houston was out of the question. She was too afraid that she’d be up to her ears in reporters, despite her physical camouflage, the minute she set foot in the city.
She drew a sharp, angry breath.
Her attitude puzzled him. “Don’t you want to make sure the injury won’t make that limp permanent?” he asked suddenly.
She lifted her chin proudly. “Mr. Caldwell, I had an…accident…when I was seventeen and that leg suffered some bone damage.” She refused to think about how it had happened. “I’ll always have a slight limp, and it’s not from the horse throwing me.”
He didn’t seem to breathe for several seconds. “All the more reason for an examination,” he replied. “You like to live dangerously, I gather. You’ve got no business on a horse.”
“Ed said the horse was gentle. It was my fault I got thrown. I jerked the reins.”
His eyes narrowed. “Yes, I remember. You were trying to get away from me. Apparently you think I have something contagious.”
She could see the pride in his eyes that made him resent her. “It wasn’t that,” she said. She averted her gaze to the wall. “It’s just that I don’t like to be touched.”
“Ed touches you.”
She didn’t know how to tell him without telling him everything. She couldn’t bear having him know about her sordid past. She raised turbulent gray eyes to his dark ones. “I don’t like to be touched by strangers,” she amended quickly. “Ed and I have known each other for years,” she said finally. “It’s…different with him.”
His eyes narrowed. He searched over her thin face. “It must be,” he said flatly.
His mocking smile touched a nerve. “You’re like a steamroller, aren’t you?” she asked abruptly. “You assume that because you’re wealthy and powerful, there isn’t a woman alive who can resist you!”
He didn’t like that assumption. His eyes began to glitter. “You shouldn’t listen to gossip,” he said, his voice deadly quiet. “She was a spoiled little debutante who thought Daddy should be able to buy her any man she wanted. When she discovered that he couldn’t, she came to work for a friend of mine and spent a couple of weeks pursuing me around Jacobsville. I went home one night and found her piled up in my bed wearing a sheet and nothing else. I threw her out, but then she told everyone that I’d assaulted her. She had a field day with me in court until my housekeeper, Tolbert, was called to tell the truth about what happened. The fact that she lost the case should tell you what the jury thought of her accusations.”
“The jury?” she asked huskily. Besides his problems with his mother, she hadn’t known about any incident in his past that might predispose him even further to distrusting women.
His thin lips drew up in a travesty of a smile. “She had me arrested and prosecuted for criminal assault,” he returned. “I became famous locally—the one black mark in an otherwise unremarkable past. She had the misfortune to try the same trick later on an oilman up in Houston. He called me to testify in his behalf. When he won the case, he had her prosecuted for fraud and extortion, and won. She went to jail.”
She felt sick. He’d had his own dealings with the press. She was sorry for him. It must have been a real ordeal after what he’d already suffered in his young life. It also explained why he wasn’t married. Marriage involved trust. She doubted he was capable of it any longer. Certainly it explained the hostility he showed toward Leslie. He might think she was pretending to be repulsed by him because she was playing some deep game for profit, perhaps with some public embarrassment