Kitabı oku: «Nobody's Child»

Prologue

The night was black and wild. The wind was so fierce that every flower and leaf in Texas had blown off all the trees.

Cutter Lord, who lived life on a dangerous edge, was driving way too fast. He was used to delegating unpleasant errands. Not that he hadn’t tried to delegate the troublesome Miss Rose, but his younger brother’s unsuitable fiancée had bested his top man.

“You’ll have to deal with Miss Rose yourself, or else—” Paul O’Connor, his vice president, had thundered, rubbing his bruised wrists on the steps outside the Dallas city jail after Cutter had bailed him out. Paul was black and smart and tough, and not easy to scare.

“Or else?”

“I quit. The lady snuck up behind me with a vase of the biggest purple pansies you ever saw, hit me with it and locked me in her gardening shed. I nearly froze before she called the cops.”

Cutter was used to chauffeured limousines...to the luxury of his private jet... to other people shouldering all the hassles when he traveled. Which was often. And to far more glamorous places than south Texas.

Not tonight.

As if hurled by the brute force of the worst winter storm to hit Texas in ten years, the hail-dimpled, black Lincoln and its grim driver shot from the mainland onto the narrow causeway that led across the Laguna Madre to the barrier islands.

The radio said the windchill was now minus ninety degrees in Crookston, Minnesota, and that two hundred cars were stranded on Nebraska roads. Tornadoes had ripped off roofs in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. In the panhandle the temperature had dropped forty degrees in two hours. Three people had died in windstorms near El Paso.

The devastating norther that had closed the Dallas airports and grounded Cutter’s jet was roaring into the humid warmth of the state’s southern coast with bands of galeforce winds and icy rain.

Cutter Lord, who preferred to spend his nights in a warm bed with a beautiful woman, was bone-weary from having driven too many miles on ice-slick highways.

One woman was responsible for Cutter’s foolhardiness. One woman had so infuriated him that he had lost all his judgment. Thus, he and the storm raced toward the island together, like two angry giants, determined to trample whatever got in their way.

With his ebony hair, black eyes and strong dark face, Cutter was blessed with the kind of virile good looks most women found exciting. He was six-two, lean, and powerfully built. He had brains, drive and an iron will. His fierce dedication to his family’s business was legendary. His friends attributed his astounding success to his genius and high energy levels. His enemies said he was ruthless. The bottom line was that he usually made money. Lots of it.

Suddenly—ahead—the causeway vanished into a dark, inky froth. Brake lights flashed as cars began to back up.

Hell. The tide was rising and surging inland.

Instead of turning back, Cutter inched forward into the purple waves. He had to hurry, before the authorities closed the causeway—the only road to the barrier islands and, thereby, to Cheyenne Rose.

He’d come this far; he wouldn’t let anything stop him from dealing with Miss Rose.

Every time he remembered her midnight call, his blood ran colder than a shark’s on the trail of blood. She hadn’t liked his calling her a gold digger.

Her husky voice had had the taunting, singsong quality of a nursery rhyme.

Fight, fight, as hard as you can. If I want to marry your baby brother, Mr. Lord, you can’t stop me. I’m the gold digger girl.

She had giggled as she tossed his taunt back at him, “the gold digger girl.”

Then she had laughed again.

At him.

“You know what your problem is, Mr. Lord. You’re spoiled!”

Cutter’s hand had clenched on the receiver, his nostrils flaring even as some part of him had dissolved in her velvet voice.

Then—right before she hung up—she had purred, “Oh, by the way, Mr. Lord, I had your mean, tough Paul O’Connor arrested for peeping into my bathroom window—he’s handcuffed to a metal chair beside a prostitute down at the city jail. Just thought you’d like to know. Also, I’ve left town so I can decide without any more interference from you whether or not I want to marry Martin and become your sister.”

His sister! The hell she’d be his sister!

Cutter had slammed down the phone and demanded to know one thing once Paul verified she had, indeed, left town.

Where the hell was she?

Within an hour his men informed him that Martin had flown her to the beach house on Lord Island, and that she planned to stay there all by herself for a week.

All by herself.

On Cutter’s remote private island off the Texas coast.

Perfect.

Or it would have been except for the storm.

Cutter wasn’t afraid of her. Nor of a mere storm. And her call had only made him all the more determined to stop her.

Only now, he had to do the dirty work himself.

Spoiled?

He wasn’t spoiled!

He just had to win.

The black waves in the Gulf had risen to Goliathan heights. Not that they were that big in the protected marina.

“Boss, you shouldn’t go till morning,” Miguel screamed above the howling wind as Cutter untied a dockline. “Maybe not then.”

“Right. Like I drove all night through sleet and hail so I could sit the storm out in a Port A. bar or a cheap motel.”

The boat, which Martin had named Jolly Girl one sunny summer day, was the only way to reach Lord Island tonight.

Fight, fight as hard as you can—

Damn right, he’d fight her as hard as he could. Cutter would fight because he knew he’d go mad if he had to listen to her singsong voice flit through his brain till morning.

When he jumped from the dock into the bucking sloop, he slipped on the wet fiberglass and almost fell. He opened the hatch and began casting off.

“Loco,” Miguel yelled frantically. “You crazy, boss. You don’t know enough about boats. Your brother Martin—”

Cutter glared at him.

Cutter was a remarkable entrepreneur.

He was a less than remarkable yachtsman.

Not that he could have ever admitted there was anything he couldn’t do better than his playboy brother.

Cutter stubbornly primed the bulb and then pushed in the automatic choke before starting the engine.

Only when Cutter cast off the last line, and the little boat hurtled free of the dock into the purple waves, did Cutter begin to doubt the wisdom of having let anger and arrogance rule him.

But by then it was too late.

Almost immediately, the lights of the shore and Miguel’s alarmed cries were lost in the troughs of black waves and driving rain.

The cold wind tore at his foul weather gear, and rain rushed inside it. Cutter’s teeth began to chatter as he headed toward his island.

An hour later, the little engine coughed and died. It had made almost no headway against the wind and the waves. He heard the crashing surf and knew he was too close to shore. The electricity on the island had gone out, and without lights to guide him, without the motor, he’d never make the channel to the island’s man-made harbor.

He had to restart the motor. But as he leaned over the stern, a large wave slammed into the boat, foaming into the cockpit. When Jolly Girl lurched violently, Cutter lost his footing and slid overboard. As the cold rushing water swallowed him, he fought to reach the surface.

One gurgling breath. Then he gulped water as another wave crashed over him and dragged him under.

He clawed his way through the darkness to the surface again.

This time he didn’t quite make it and gulped salt water instead.

As he sank, he heard the taunt of her husky purr.

Mr. Lord, you can’t stop me. I’m the gold digger girl.

She was laughing at him as he kicked against the undertow that sucked him down, down, ever deeper into a cold, wet hell.

A feeble sun broke through the gray, making the calmer waters glimmer like polished silver.

Waves curled around a man’s bare foot.

Freezing. Hungry. Cold

Freezing. Hungry. Cold.

Again and again like the feeble tattoo of a drum, the words fluttered through Cutter’s tired brain.

Cutter was barely conscious. His skin was pale, his lips blue. His shoes and most of his clothes had been torn off. Grit and sand filled his wet black hair, nostrils and ears. Every time he tried to swallow, his throat burned.

He had lost all sensation in his legs and arms and fingers and toes.

Where the hell was he?

Who cared? He was so cold, he just wanted to sleep.

Forever.

Then he heard a husky cry that was somehow familiar.

“Oh, my God—” A woman’s terrified voice.

With great effort he opened his eyes and saw the upturned hull of Jolly Girl.

But he wasn’t looking at the wreck. A breeze whipped a gauzy, white skirt high up a pair of shapely legs.

A woman.

Cheyenne Rose.

The troublesome witch blurred in a red haze of pain as if she were no more than the figment of a nightmare.

He forced his heavy burning eyes open again.

She wasn’t what he had expected.

She was slim and lovely—as lovely as her voice. She had a sweet face. An enormous, white gardenia bloomed in her hair.

He shivered violently, not wanting to like her.

What the hell was the matter with him? Was he delirious? Dying?

It didn’t mean a damn that she was pretty. Or soft and vulnerable looking.

She was the enemy.

But it did...mean a damn. He felt something deep and hot and eternal grip his heart.

As if she were a child clutching a treasure, she held a bag of shells in one hand as she stretched on tiptoes to examine the wrecked hull.

Her long red hair blew around her face and neck. She was dressed in a white sundress. A silver light came from behind her and lit her hair like spun flame. There was something fragile and otherworldly and enchantingly angelic about her. He noticed that behind her the sand dunes were ablaze with Fiddleleaf morning glories and yellow sunflowers as if it were summer.

What kind of woman came to an island and stayed there through a violent storm and then got up the next morning to hunt seashells?

She had fine, delicate features with high cheekbones and the greenest eyes he’d ever seen. Her breasts and hips were deliciously rounded; her waist small. Her skin was pale gold, and as she stared at the boat and him with wonder and fear, he realized that she was not only smolderingly sensual but irresistibly innocent.

He groaned as a sudden pain convulsed in his chest.

Startled by his cry, she screamed and jumped back. Her wary green eyes studied him. Then her incandescent smile dazzled him.

He shut his eyes.

She hesitated a brief moment before racing toward him.

Conserving the last of his strength, he lay very still.

Until she reached him.

“Hello?” Her husky voice grew more anxious. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

She was an enemy to whom he should show no mercy. In answer to her greeting, his large brown hand snaked around her slender ankle and yanked hard.

Her shells flew, scattering on the sand. With a muffled cry, she toppled onto him.

He gasped with pain from her weight across his chest. Then he rolled over, so that his body crushed her.

His black, gritty hair dripped sand all over her pretty, pale gold face. All over her small, freckled nose.

His intention was to terrify her.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” she said and then she sneezed and dusted sand from her nose. “Sorry...”

He said, “Bless you.”

He noticed how warm she was. It was as if she’d brought summer with her.

He felt dizzy. Then he pitched forward. For a second, before he fainted, he felt the warm cushion of her breasts and the silken touch of her fingers gently stroking his hair.

When the blackness receded, he was wrapped in thick blankets. She had made a fire from driftwood and was bending over him and smiling anxiously. “Do you think you could drink some hot coffee?” she urged. “Then maybe in a minute, if you could try to walk, and I think you can...because I examined you...while you were unconscious, we could get you into the house. I’ve built a fire inside, too, and I’m sure by now it’s warm there.”

He smiled warily, teeth chattering, as she poured the coffee and lifted his head and brought the plastic mug to his trembling lips.

He sipped obediently.

When he was done, she said softly, sweetly, “Oh, good. Please, don’t be afraid. You’re hurt. And I want to help you. We have to get you out of your wet clothes. What’s left of them, anyway...”

Their eyes met again. She blushed shyly, her skin glowing like an angel’s.

He drank more coffee, the whole thermosful, and the warmth of the liquid filled him—or was it just the radiance of her smile that made winter change to summer?

He had never met anybody like her.

She was putting her arms around him and struggling to help him sit up when her sweet face blurred around the edges as once more he dissolved into a dizzying blackness.

His last pleading words to her were, “Don’t leave me.”

Cutter had never spent so much time lying down, being waited on and pampered. He had never wanted to.

For three days he had dwelt in a room scented heavily with gardenias and other summer flowers while Miss Rose had nursed him.

And he had relished every minute.

His enemy.

But, oh, how he had loved her coming to his bedroom to tend him with her gentle hands and her kind voice.

More than loved it. In his weakened state he had longed for it. Pined for the wild gardenia scent of her.

And every time she came into his room smelling of summer flowers, smiling and carrying another steaming tray of delicious, spicy hot food, he felt consumed by an inexplicable tenderness toward her. Did she flavor his meals with some magical ingredient that made it easy for her to charm him?

He had thought his beach house with its far-flung wings and modern lines too remote and boring to ever visit.

He never wanted to leave it now.

The phone was out. He found he liked feeling cut off from the world, his business, and from civilization. From the rigid rules that governed him, from the rules that made Miss Rose a highly unsuitable wife for a Lord.

The house seemed a natural thing atop the fragile dunes. It seemed to blend with the high wavy golden grasses that grew near it as well as with the salt marshes and their pungent, dank-smelling ponds behind the dunes. Each day since the storm had been warmer and more summery than the last. Now the island with its soft humid breezes and white beaches seemed to be weaving a lazy spell on both of them. Flowers bloomed everywhere. She gathered them in baskets and brought them inside.

Wrapped in a blanket, Cutter got out of bed and went to his chaise lounge near the fireplace and the window. He saw Miss Rose lying outside in the sun on his vast deck. Protected from the wind by a wall of sheer glass panels, she wore a skimpy white bikini while she pretended to read one of her grisly spy thrillers.

She had the most abominable literary tastes. She went for genre paperbacks with lurid covers that featured halfnaked people or lethal weapons, lightweight novels that always had happy endings. “Page turners,” she’d called them when he’d criticized. Page turners, hell—He knew that she was only pretending to read. He’d been watching her for an hour—indeed, he couldn’t take his eyes off her any time she was near. She hadn’t turned a single page.

He eyed the clock on the wall impatiently.

Two-thirty. Soon she would get up as she had every other afternoon.

Odd, how eager he was for her sunbath to end. For her to come back inside.

To him.

This avid craving was ridiculous.

They had absolutely nothing in common.

She read trash.

He preferred business journals, news magazines, newspapers and the occasional, really good literary novel.

“Newspapers and literary novels are depressing,” she had said.

“One should stay informed.”

“One should have fun, too.”

“Was that why you dropped out of college?”

“No. I told you. Mother got sick, and I had to help her. I wanted a degree more than anything.”

He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that his finance degrees were from the best eastern schools.

She was a struggling caterer. He hadn’t told her he was a multimillionaire. Nor had he told her his family had been wealthy and socially prominent for generations.

And, of course, he hadn’t told her he was Cutter Lord, her fiancé’s spoiled half brother.

Nor had she confessed she was a small-town bastard from Westville, Texas. That her mother had been called Alligator Girl and Witch Woman, that she, Cheyenne, had hung out in the salt marshes tending to her mother’s gators and strange wild things until she was eighteen. Then there’d been some sort of trouble, and she’d left home forever.

No, his private detectives had told him all that.

She had told him that she loved flowers and all wild things.

He eyed the clock again.

Sometimes when she finished her sunbath, she walked on the beach.

Cutter, who had lain there willing her to come inside for more than an hour, smiled triumphantly when she got up and peered anxiously through the window. He beckoned her inside.

She opened the door, her body flushed from the sun, her smile bright and teasing, her red hair and the dune flowers in it mussed. At the sight of her, a wild rhythm started in his chest.

She met his gaze and looked away. “You have to stop doing that.”

“What?”

Breathlessly, she said, “Looking at me that way.”

“I thought you liked me to.” He got up and moved toward her, trailing his blanket across the bleached pine floor.

“I—I...”

“What’s the matter?”

Frightened, she began backing. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“So—tell.”

“I’m practically engaged to another man.”

“Do you love him?”

The beach morning glories quivered in her hair. The tiny scar beneath her left eye, which was the only blemish on her near-perfect face, whitened. “Of—I’m not sure.”

“So—how do you feel about me?”

Her frantic eyes burned into him the same way her spicy food did.

“I have to know,” Cutter insisted.

“His brother doesn’t want us to marry. He doesn’t think I’m good enough. I—I came here to be alone—To think about Martin and our future together.” Her eyes glistened with unspoken pain as she studied Cutter. “Not for—”

“Not for this.” With one hand Cutter grasped her shoulder. With his other, he caught her red hair and flower petals. His mouth slanted across hers.

Her lips parted hesitantly; he felt her soft, indrawn breath. Next she shocked him by the full heat of her response to his kiss as her tongue slid against his. Consumed by hunger, his arms tightened around her slim waist as she surrendered passionately.

“Cheyenne—”

“No!” She stiffened and drew back. “Please—” She threw the door open and ran.

“Damn,” he muttered, watching her, not following even though he sensed that if he pressed her now, he could win. He was tempted to go after her, to pull her into the sand and seduce her. Then he could tell Martin and advise him that Lords didn’t marry easy women like her.

But three days with her had robbed Cutter of the appetite to destroy her.

She had been so nice to him.

She had saved his life.

Which meant he owed her. Yes. But how much?

Surely not Martin’s future and fortune.

There was a new wrinkle. Cutter now wanted her himself.

Tom, Cutter hesitated—and that wasn’t like him.

Why the hell didn’t he just seduce her?

It was only later that he wondered if he had not sensed the impending danger she would be to his coldly ordered life. To his soul.

But—until he met Cheyenne Rose, Cutter had not known he had a soul.

Until Cheyenne he had glided through life. First as the precocious, brilliant son and dutiful brother. Then as the ruthless businessman who believed that life was about money, not love. He had married; divorced. But ultimately, always—until Cheyenne—he’d been alone, an outcast. Envied and never loved. He had sought admiration. Not love. His loneliness hadn’t mattered—until her.

Arrogant to the core, Cutter was accustomed to the glitter of exotic capitals and the easy pleasures of beautiful women. Long ago, when he had become strong enough to crush his opposition, he had not imagined that anyone, least of all a girl, could ever crush him.

Cutter had lived in many houses and in many foreign lands. He had made many fortunes and had had many women. But nowhere and to no one had he ever belonged, least of all to himself. He spoke many languages, but not one of them was the language of his own soul. He’d had little understanding of those weaker than himself. He had not cared that his younger brother felt jealousy for him instead of love.

And then Cutter had washed up on his island, and she had turned the tables on him by saving his life. His cynical world and all its rules had changed.

Not completely.

Because when she had asked his name, he had lied and said, “Lyon.”

Cheyenne was wearing her bikini and holding her paperback and gauzy cover-up, but she couldn’t work up the nerve to go out on the deck for her daily sunbath.

Because Lyon was somewhere outside.

She couldn’t see him.

Or let him see her.

Lyon had avoided her ever since he’d kissed her yesterday, and she was grateful to him for that.

And yet, somehow, his absence made her think of him even more.

Whenever Lyon came near the house, she kept to Martin’s elegant bedroom with its long windows and dark blue walls and white throw carpets and paintings of the sea.

But she felt miserable and trapped as she stared, with white-knuckled fingers against the shuttered windows, out to the sea and the primroses in the dunes and wondered where Lyon was. She wanted to go out and lie in the sun and listen to the surf and think.

Did she have an hour before he came back?

She wanted to love Martin. Only Martin. Why then did thoughts of Lyon possess her? Why had the dune flowers started to bloom the moment she’d seen Lyon?

This couldn’t be happening.

She couldn’t let it.

All her life Cheyenne had wanted to legitimize herself, to be somebody, to marry someone who was somebody, to have the normal sort of life and family her half sister, Chantal, and so many people were born with and took for granted. To be accepted, valued—

But more than anything, even such a life, Cheyenne now wanted Lyon.

He was a stranger. She knew almost nothing about him.

He was a good listener, but he had revealed very little about himself.

What was he hiding?

He couldn’t hide the fact that he wanted her.

She had felt the hot physical bond almost from the first moment when he’d lain freezing and hurt and helpless on the beach.

Martin must never know.

She shivered in disgust. How could she think like that even for a second?

Because she was illegitimate, everybody in Westville had said she was trash. All her life Cheyenne had tried to live down the taint of her birth. She hadn’t dated because every time she looked at a boy, people said she was as bad and strange as her odd, fast-living mama, Ivory Rose.

As Martin Lord’s wife, everybody would admire her. She could go back to Westville with a grander name than the Wests, her father’s “real family.” Chantal could no longer act so superior. If she, Cheyenne, had her own husband, maybe it would no longer matter that Chantal had married Jack, the young boy whom Chantal’s mother had rescued from the barrio so many years ago. Ever since then, he’d used “West” as his surname.

Before coming to the island Cheyenne had told Martin she hadn’t made up her mind about marrying him. She’d told his odious brother the same thing.

Not that she’d thought there was much to think about. Jack was lost to her forever. Boyish and charming, Martin was the nicest guy she’d met since she’d escaped Westville.

Until Lyon.

A smart girl wouldn’t consider marriage to a stranger who’d washed up on a deserted beach. Even if he had made flowers bloom.

Distracted, she continued to stare outside.

Nothing. Just golden grass and white sand. And endless wildflowers. Yesterday Lyon hadn’t come back all day.

She decided to risk an hour on the deck.

Carefully she tiptoed outside where she took off her gauzy cover-up and swam several laps in the sparkling pool. The water was too cold, so she got out and dried off and lay down on a long white towel.