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“Nothing to do?” purred a soft, deep voice from behind Ed. The piercing dark eyes didn’t match the bantering tone.
“Sorry, Matt,” Ed said immediately. “I was just passing the time of day with Leslie. Can I do anything for you?”
“I need an update on that lot of cattle we placed with Ballenger,” he said. He stared at Leslie with narrowed eyes. “Your job, I believe?”
She swallowed and nodded, jerking her fingers on the keyboard so that she opened the wrong file and had to push the right buttons to close it again. Normally she wasn’t a nervous person, but he made her ill at ease, standing over her without speaking. Ed seemed to be a little twitchy, himself, because he moved back to his own office the minute the phone rang, placing himself out of the line of fire with an apologetic look that Leslie didn’t see.
“I thought you were experienced with computers,” Matt drawled mockingly as he paused beside her to look over her shoulder.
The feel of his powerful body so close behind her made every muscle tense. Her fingers froze on the keyboard, and she was barely breathing.
With a murmured curse, Matt stepped back to the side of the desk, fighting the most intense emotions he’d ever felt. He stuck his hands deep into the pockets of his slacks and glared at her.
She relaxed, but only enough to be able to pull up the file he wanted and print it for him.
He took it out of the printer tray when it was finished and gave it a slow perusal. He muttered something, and tossed the first page down on Leslie’s desk.
“Half these words are misspelled,” he said curtly.
She looked at it on the computer screen and nodded. “Yes, they are, Mr. Caldwell. I’m sorry, but I didn’t type it.”
Of course she hadn’t typed it, it was ten years old, but something inside him wanted to hold her accountable for it.
He moved away from the desk as he read the rest of the pages. “You can do this file—and the others—over,” he murmured as he skimmed. “The whole damned thing’s illiterate.”
She knew that there were hundreds of records in this particular batch of files, and that it would take days, not minutes or hours, to complete the work. But he owned the place, so he could set the rules. She pursed her lips and glanced at him speculatively. Now that he was physically out of range, she felt safe again. “Your wish is my command, boss,” she murmured dryly, surprising a quick glance from him. “Shall I just put aside all of Ed’s typing and devote the next few months to this?”
Her change of attitude from nervous kid to sassy woman caught him off guard. “I didn’t put a time limit on it,” Matt said curtly. “I only said, do it!”
“Oh, yes, sir,” she agreed at once, and smiled vacantly.
He drew in a short breath and glared down at her. “You’re remarkably eager to please, Miss Murry. Or is it just because I’m the boss?”
“I always try to do what I’m asked to do, Mr. Caldwell,” she assured him. “Well, almost always,” she amended. “Within reason.”
He moved back toward the desk. As he leaned over to put down the papers she’d printed for him, he saw her visibly tense. She was the most confounding woman he’d ever known, a total mystery.
“What would you define as ‘within reason’?” he drawled, holding her eyes.
She looked hunted. Amazing, that she’d been jovial and uninhibited just seconds before. Her stiff expression made him feel oddly guilty. He turned away. “Ed! Have you got my Angus file?” he called to his cousin through the open door to Ed’s private office.
Ed was off the phone and he had a file folder in his hands. “Yes, sorry. I wanted to check the latest growth figures and projected weight gain ratios. I meant to put it back on your desk and I got busy.”
Matt studied the figures quietly and then nodded. “That’s acceptable. The Ballenger brothers do a good job.”
“They’re expanding, did you know?” Ed chuckled. “Nice to see them prospering.”
“Yes, it is. They’ve worked hard enough in their lives to warrant a little prosperity.”
While he spoke, Leslie was watching him covertly. She thought about the six-year-old boy whose mother had given him away, and it wrung her heart. Her own childhood had been no picnic, but Matt’s upbringing had been so much worse.
He felt those soft gray eyes on his face, and his own gaze jerked down to meet them. She flushed and looked away.
He wondered what she’d been thinking to produce such a reaction. She couldn’t have possibly made it plainer that she felt no physical attraction to him, so why the wide-eyed stare? It puzzled him. So many things about her puzzled him. She was neat and attractively dressed, but those clothes would have suited a dowager far better than a young woman. While he didn’t encourage short skirts and low-cut blouses, Leslie was covered from head to toe; long dress, long sleeves, high neck buttoned right up to her throat.
“Need anything else?” Ed asked abruptly, hoping to ward off more trouble.
Matt’s powerful shoulders shrugged. “Not for the moment.” He glanced once more at Leslie. “Don’t forget those files I want updated.”
After he walked out, Ed stared after him for a minute, frowning. “What files?”
She explained it to him.
“But those are outdated,” Ed murmured thoughtfully. “And he never looks at them. I don’t understand why he has to have them corrected at all.”
She leaned forward. “Because it will irritate me and make me work harder!” she said in a stage whisper. “God forbid that I should have time to twiddle my thumbs.”
His eyebrows arched. “He isn’t vindictive.”
“That’s what you think.” She picked up the file Matt had left and grimaced as she put it back in the filing cabinet. “I’ll start on those when I’ve finished answering your mail. Do you suppose he wants me to stay over after work to do them? He’d have to pay me overtime.” She grinned impishly, a reminder of the woman she’d once been. “Wouldn’t that make his day?”
“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 in mind. He might even think she was setting him up for another assault charge.
“Maybe you think that I’m like that,” she said after a minute, studying him quietly. “But I’m not.”
“Then why act like I’m going to attack you whenever I come within five feet of you?” he asked coldly.
She studied her fingers on the desk before her, their short fingernails neatly trimmed, with a coat of colorless sheen. Nothing flashy, she thought, and that was true of her life lately. She didn’t have an answer for him.
“Is Ed your lover?” he persisted coldly.
She didn’t flinch. “Ask him.”
He rolled the unlit cigar in his long fingers as he watched her. “You are one enormous puzzle,” he mused.
“Not really. I’m very ordinary.” She looked up. “I don’t like doctors, especially male ones…”
“Lou’s a woman,” he replied. “She and her husband are both physicians. They have a little boy.”
“Oh.” A woman. That would make things easier. But she didn’t want to be examined. They could probably tell from X rays how breaks occurred, and she didn’t know if she could trust a local doctor not to talk about it.
“It isn’t up to you,” he said suddenly. “You work for me. You had an accident on my ranch.” He smiled mirthlessly. “I have to cover my bets. You might decide later on to file suit for medical benefits.”
She searched his eyes. She couldn’t really blame him for feeling like that. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll let her examine me.”
“No comment?”
She shrugged. “Mr. Caldwell, I work hard for my paycheck. I always have. You don’t know me, so I don’t blame you for expecting the worst. But I don’t want a free ride through life.”
One of his eyebrows jerked. “I’ve heard that one before.”
She smiled sadly. “I suppose you have.” She touched her keyboard absently. “This Dr. Coltrain, is she the company doctor?”
“Yes.”
She gnawed on her lower lip. “What she finds out, it is confidential, isn’t it?” she added worriedly, looking up at him.
He didn’t reply for a minute. The hand dangling the cigar twirled it around. “Yes,” he said. “It’s confidential. You’re making me curious, Miss Murry. Do you have secrets?”
“We all have secrets,” she said solemnly. “Some are darker than others.”
He flicked a thumbnail against the cigar. “What’s yours? Did you shoot your lover?”
She didn’t dare show a reaction to that. Her face felt as if it would crack if she moved.
He stuck the cigar in his pocket. “Edna will let you know when you’re to go see Lou,” he said abruptly, with a glance at his watch. He held up the letter. “Tell Ed I’ve got this. I’ll talk to him about it later.”
“Yes, sir.”
He resisted the impulse to look back at her. The more he discovered about his newest employee, the more intrigued he became. She made him restless. He wished he knew why.
There was no way to get out of the doctor’s appointment. Leslie spoke briefly with Dr. Coltrain before she was sent to the hospital for a set of X rays. An hour later, she was back in Lou’s office, watching the older woman pore somberly over the films against a lighted board on the wall.
Lou looked worried when she examined the X ray of the leg. “There’s no damage from the fall, except for some bruising,” she concluded. Her dark eyes met Leslie’s squarely. “These old breaks aren’t consistent with a fall, however.”
Leslie ground her teeth together. She didn’t say anything.
