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“It makes a difference what the housekeeper’s daughter thinks of you?” Tanya asked.

“It makes a difference what you think about me,” Tate said, staring deeply into her eyes.

Then he leaned forward and it was obvious he wanted to kiss her. But rather than doing it, he waited, poised, giving her the chance not to let it happen. And she knew she shouldn’t let it happen. But there he was, the man who, in the past few days, had let her see past the charm, into the vulnerable part of him. There he was, his starkly chiseled face only inches above hers, wanting to kiss her. And she wanted him to.

So she didn’t say no.

Texas Cinderella

By

Victoria Pade
The Texas CEO’s Secret

By

Nicole Foster

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Texas Cinderella

By

Victoria Pade

VICTORIA PADE is a native of Colorado, where she continues to live and work. Her passion—besides writing—is chocolate, which she indulges in frequently and in every form.

She loves romance novels and romantic movies—the more lighthearted the better—but she likes a good, juicy mystery now and then, too.

Dear Reader,

Tanya Kimbrough is not as trusting as Cinderella when Prince Charming presents himself in the form of Dr. Tate McCord. Tanya knows the score—she’s merely the daughter of the McCords’ housekeeper.

And this particular McCord heir is earmarked for Katie Whitcomb-Salgar, longtime friend of the family and Tate’s on-again, off-again girlfriend since they were both teenagers. Tate and Katie may be off-again at the moment, but Tanya is convinced that that has more to do with the rough patch Tate has been going through since the death of his best friend in Iraq than with any permanent breakup. And there’s no way she’s willing to be nothing more than Tate’s interim distraction. Even if he can put her on a slow simmer with just one glance. Will she be able to hold out? Or will she risk crossing social barriers to be with a McCord? Turn a few pages and find out…Here’s hoping you’ll all have happily-ever-afters.

Victoria Pade

Chapter One

“Sometimes I don’t understand you, Blake. You open up enough to let me know the business is in a slump, that you think we really can find the Santa Magdalena diamond and use it to pull us out of the fire. But you bite off my head for asking how things are going.”

Tanya Kimbrough froze.

It was nearly eleven o’clock on Friday night and she had no business doing what she was doing in the library of the Dallas mansion of the family her mother worked for. But her mother had gone to bed and Tanya had known the McCords were all at a charity symphony that should have kept them out much later than this. And she’d gotten nosy.

But now here she was, overhearing the raised voice of Tate McCord as he and his older brother came into the formal living room that was just beyond the library. The library where she’d turned on the overhead lights because she’d thought she would be in and out long before any of the McCords got home…

Make a run for it the way you came in, she advised herself.

She certainly couldn’t turn off the library lights without drawing attention since the doors to the living room were ajar. But maybe Tate and Blake McCord would only think someone had forgotten to turn them off before they’d left the house tonight. And if she went out the way she’d come in, no one would guess that she’d used her mother’s keys to let herself in through the French doors that opened to the rear grounds of the sprawling estate. If she just left right now…

But then Blake McCord answered his brother and she stayed where she was. What she was listening to suited her purposes so much better than what she’d already found on the library desk.

“Finding the Santa Magdalena and buying up canary diamonds for a related jewelry line are in the works,” Blake was saying. “And we’ve launched the initial Once In A Lifetime promotional campaign in the stores to pamper customers and bring in more business. That’s all you have to know since you—and everyone else—are on a need-to-know-only basis. Your time and interest might be better spent paying some attention to your fiancée, wouldn’t you say?”

“What I’d say is that that isn’t any of your business,” Tate answered in a tone that surprised Tanya.

The sharp edge coming from Tate didn’t sound anything like him. The brothers generally got along well, and Tate had always been the easygoing brother. Tanya’s mother had said that Tate had changed since spending a year working in the Middle East and suddenly Tanya didn’t doubt it.

“It may not be my business, but I’m telling you anyway because someone has to,” Blake persisted. “You take Katie for granted, you neglect her, you don’t pay her nearly enough attention. You may think you have her all sewed up with that engagement ring on her finger, but if you don’t start giving her some indication that you know she’s alive, she could end up throwing it in your face. And nobody would blame her if she did.”

Katie was Katerina Whitcomb-Salgar, the daughter of the McCord family’s longtime friends and the woman everyone had always assumed would end up as Mrs. Tate McCord long before their formal engagement was announced.

“You’re going to lose Katie,” Blake shouted, some heat in his voice now. “And if you do, it’ll serve you right.”

“Or it might be for the best,” Tate countered, enough under his breath that Tanya barely made out what he’d said. Then more loudly again, he added, “Just keep your eye on finding that diamond and getting McCord’s Jewelers and the family coffers healthy again. Since you want to carry all the weight for that yourself, you shouldn’t have a lot of spare time to worry about my love life, too. But if I want your advice, I’ll be sure to ask for it.”

“You need someone’s advice or you’re going to blow the best thing that ever happened to you.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Tate said facetiously.

And then there were footsteps.

But only some of them moved away from the library.

The others were coming closer…

Too late to run.

Tanya ducked for cover, hoping that since she was behind the desk whoever was headed her way wouldn’t be able to see her when he reached in and turned off the lights.

“Tate hasn’t even been staying in the house since he got back. He’s living in the guest cottage…”

Tanya’s mother’s words flashed through her mind just then and it struck her that merely having the lights turned off might not be what was about to happen. That Tate might use the library route to go to the guesthouse that was also out back…

Tanya’s heart had begun to race the minute she’d heard the McCords’ voices. Now it was pounding. Because while she might have been able to explain her presence in the library at this time of night, how would she ever explain crouching behind the desk?

Or holding the papers she’d been looking through—because until that minute she hadn’t even realized she’d taken them with her when she’d ducked.

Please don’t come in here…

“What the hell?”

Oh, no…

Tanya had tried to turn herself into a small ball but when Tate McCord’s voice boomed from nearby, she raised her head to find him leaning over the front of the desk, clearly able to see her.

This was much, much worse than when she was six and had been caught with her fingers in the icing of his twin sisters’ birthday cake. His mother Eleanor had been kind and understanding. But there was nothing kind or understanding in Tate McCord’s face at that moment.

Summoning what little dignity she could—and with the papers still in hand—Tanya stood.

It was the first time she and Tate McCord had set eyes on each other in the seven years since Tanya had left for college. And even before that—when Tate had come home from his own university and medical school training for vacations or visits while Tanya still lived on the property with her mother—there weren’t many occasions when the McCord heir had crossed paths with the housekeeper’s daughter. Plus, Tanya had been very well aware of the fact that, more often than not, when any of the McCords had seen her, they’d looked through her rather than at her.

So she wasn’t sure Tate McCord recognized her and, as if it would make this better, she said, “You probably don’t remember me—”

“You’re JoBeth’s daughter—Tanya,” he said bluntly. “What the hell are you doing in here at this hour and—”

He glanced down at the papers and held out his hand in a silent demand for her to give them to him.

She did and he looked over what—before she’d been interrupted—she’d discovered to be some sort of mock-ups for ads for a suggested line of jewelry using canary diamonds set in old Spanish designs.

Tanya had taken the papers from a file that was still open on the desk in front of her. After Tate McCord’s initial look at them, he pulled the entire file toward him to see what else she might have gotten into.

While he sifted through what she already knew were similar pages, Tanya was wishing she wasn’t dressed in a shabby, oversize, cut-up old sweatshirt and a pair of drawstring black pajama pants with cartoon robots printed on them. She also wished she wasn’t completely makeupless and that her shoulder-length espresso-colored hair wasn’t pulled up into a lopsided ponytail at the top of her head. Looking as if she were ready for bed made her feel all the more at a disadvantage. When she realized that the wide neck of the sweatshirt had fallen from her shoulder, she tugged it back into place.

It was something Tate McCord saw because just as she did it, he raised his gaze from the file and eyes that were bluer than she remembered drifted momentarily in that direction.

Noticing did not, however, change his attitude toward her—his expression remained stern and angry.

“So, I repeat—JoBeth’s-daughter-Tanya, what the hell are you doing in here, at this hour, going through things that you have no right to go through?” Tate McCord finished by tossing the papers he’d taken from Tanya back in the open file.

“I know this can’t look good,” she said.

But he definitely did look good! Better even than she remembered him.

Unlike her in-for-the-night apparel, he was dressed in a dark suit that accentuated the fact that he was tall and lean, with broad shoulders and a more toned, muscular physique than he’d had in his earlier years. His face had matured into sharply defined angles that gave him a decisive chin and high cheekbones. His mouth at that moment was a stern line beneath a strong, thin nose and his penetrating, clear blue eyes seemed to have taken a bead on her, which should have kept her from thinking that she liked his dark blond hair slightly longish, the way he was wearing it now…

But it was the expression that said he was waiting for an explanation that she knew she really had to address.

“My mother dropped her sweater when she came through here today after she finished work—” Tanya pointed to the plain white cardigan that had been her excuse for this foray. She’d picked it up from the floor where it had fallen and tossed it across the back of a chair before beginning her snooping. “Mom likes to wear it when she walks over from the bungalow in the mornings. She was just going to leave it and get it tomorrow, but I thought I’d come back for it tonight so she’d have it.”

All true, but feeble at this point. Very feeble.

“And while you were here, you thought you’d take a look around, at things that you shouldn’t look at, and then hide under the desk so you didn’t get caught eavesdropping on what Blake and I were saying in the other room? Or are you going to pretend you didn’t hear anything?”

There was that facetious tone again. It could be harsh. And it didn’t help that his assumptions of what she’d done were right.

Maybe offense was the best form of defense…

“I heard enough to know that there’s a whole lot going on. That all the suspicions about McCord’s Jewelers’ business being way down have some foundation. That the rumors that the McCords came into possession of the Santa Magdalena diamond when you all got the Foley’s land and silver mines could also be the truth. I heard enough to know that your family does think the diamond can be found.”

“So you heard plenty.”

“And I’ll admit,” she continued, “that when I came for Mom’s sweater and saw the file, I got curious, and since it was open I looked at those pages—” That was a lie, not only had she opened the file herself, but she’d come to get the sweater hoping that there might be something of interest to her in the library where business was sometimes conducted. “But now that I know things are popping here, it seems to me that there’s a story in it that I could use.”

“You’re going to make me sorry I did what your mother asked and send your résumé over to my friend at WDGN, aren’t you?”

WDGN was one of the local independent news stations.

“I didn’t know which of you got me the interview, but thanks for it,” she said as if that mattered at this point.

“Oh, believe me, you’re welcome,” he said snidely.

“But here’s the thing—” she went on, ignoring his disapproval “—I’ve been making my living in the world of broadcast journalism for a while now and this is how it works—at least for me because I haven’t made any kind of big splash yet—a new position means I start at the bottom. The bottom is filling in for other reporters or doing whatever the seasoned reporters have moved on from or refuse to do—”

“Was I supposed to see if I could have you hired at the top?”

“That’s not what I’m getting at. What I’m getting at is that between the story of the diamond—whatever it might be and especially if you do actually find it—and the story of the McCords’ feud with the Foleys, well, let’s face it, if the McCords or the Foleys sneeze it makes the news so stuff like this could get me an anchor chair.” Not to mention the other tidbit the staff was whispering about that wasn’t public knowledge—that Tate’s mother Eleanor had an affair with Rex Foley and that the youngest brother, Charlie, was Rex Foley’s son…

If Tate’s sky-blue eyes had had a bead on her before, it was nothing compared to the way they were boring into her now and it made Tanya’s tension level rise another notch. Especially when she began to wonder if she’d gone too far. The McCords were her mother’s employers after all…

Then Tate McCord said, “Or how about a story where the housekeeper’s daughter gets arrested for breaking and entering, for trespassing, for who knows what else should something turn up missing…”

Tanya took issue with that last part. She might be willing to do a little nosing around for a story, but she wasn’t a thief!

“Should something turn up missing?” she repeated. “Go ahead, look around. Take inventory. I haven’t so much as touched anything but my mother’s sweater and the papers in that file. I have done almost nothing wrong!”

“Almost nothing wrong?” Tate took a turn at parroting in the midst of a wry laugh. “Believe me, with the McCord connections, almost can still get you arrested. And how would your mother like to hear that you’re using the trust we have in her to do something like this?”

“You’re threatening to tell my mommy?” Tanya said with some sarcasm of her own even though the threat to tell JoBeth carried more weight than the threat to call the police.

Tate didn’t respond to her flippancy. He merely glanced down at the file again, closing it and laying his hand flat on top of it as if that could seal it away from her.

Then those eyes pinned her in place again and he said, “I’ll tell you what this family doesn’t need right now—a traitor in our midst.”

“I’m hardly that,” Tanya countered, chafing under that comment more than anything he’d said yet.

“So it’s loyalty that brought you in here tonight?”

There was that facetiousness again.

“I was just hoping for an inside story. The discovery of that sunken ship that the Santa Magdalena supposedly came from has renewed interest in the diamond and I thought—”

“That you’d use your mother’s position here as a way to get the scoop.”

Despite pretending not to take seriously his threat to bring her mother into this before, Tanya was becoming increasingly worried that she’d done damage to the position that her mother had held since Tanya was barely two years old. She definitely didn’t want that.

“I’m sorry, okay?” she conceded. “I shouldn’t have—”

“No, you shouldn’t have. But now that you have—”

“Fine. If you want to have me arrested then do it. But leave my mother out of it. She doesn’t have anything to do with this. She’s sound asleep and doesn’t even know I’m here or that I had any intention of coming over here.”

He seemed to consider that and Tanya had started to wonder how the robot pants and Flashdance sweatshirt were going to go over in jail when he said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”

Tanya raised her eyebrows at him and waited.

“I’ll keep your secret about this little escapade tonight if what you heard and saw here, stays here.”

Jail in robot pants and a Flashdance sweatshirt was easier to accept.

“You want me to just sit on the fact that the McCords honestly do believe they have the Santa Magdalena diamond?” she said incredulously. “That you’re so convinced of it that your brother is planning the family’s business future around it?”

“That’s exactly what I want you to do.”

“I think that’s unfair of you!” Tanya said with a little heat in her own tone now. “This is something that could make my career and you want me to do nothing with it when we both know it’s going to come out sooner or later, and potentially be a coup for someone else? I’ll grant you that I may have stepped over the line using my mother’s position here, but I don’t think I should be penalized because she works for you.”

Tate McCord gave her the hard stare. But if he thought she was going to back down because of it, he was mistaken.

Maybe he saw that in the fact that she didn’t waver in the stare down they were engaged in because he took his hand from the file, stood straight and said, “Okay, how about this—whether or not we do have the diamond and where it might be and if it can be found are all questions that have yet to be answered with any kind of certainty. What you think Blake is planning the business’s future around is really—honestly—a gamble we’re taking. But if—big if—we should end up finding the diamond and everything pans out, I’ll promise you an exclusive.”

“In other words, you want to buy some time,” she said.

His eyebrows were well shaped and one of them rose in reply.

“My price is higher than that,” Tanya said, deciding that if she was in for a penny, she might as well be in for a pound.

“Your price?” He was obviously astounded by her audacity.

But Tanya didn’t let that daunt her. “I want the whole story—and I mean the whole story, so that if the diamond ends up being a bust, I’ll still have something to launch me. Like I said before, if the Foleys or the McCords sneeze, it’s news. But there are a lot of details and history and background that even I don’t know. And if I don’t have the complete picture after growing up here, I have to think not many other people do either. So it can give meat to the bigger story of the Santa Magdalena diamond finally, actually, being found. Or it can at least give me a well-rounded, juicy human-interest piece about Dallas’s two most illustrious—and infamous—families. And why they hate each other.”

“What kind of details, history and background are we talking about?” Tate said in a negotiator’s voice.

“Inside information on the family—the personal things that haven’t been in press releases. I want to know about the feud with the Foleys—the truth. I want to know all about the McCord jewelry empire—including if it’s hurting. I want the full package, enough to make it interesting even if it turns out that the search for the diamond is nothing but a wild-goose chase.”

“Meat,” Tate repeated the word she’d used moments before. “You want to treat us like meat.”

“I just want the truth and not what’s already common knowledge. Think of it this way, you got me a job at an independent news station that isn’t owned by the Foleys so there won’t be any pressure to make you guys look bad. My mom works for you, I grew up here—if anyone will do the story without painting you in a bad light, it’s me.”

“Or I could just have you arrested and fired and—”

“And then I could go to one of the Foley-owned stations or newspapers or what have you and do the story from their angle.”

Once more Tate McCord stared at her long and hard.

“You know, I like your mother.”

Meaning he didn’t like her. Tanya had absolutely no idea why that bothered her. But it did.

Still, she wasn’t about to show him so she merely raised her chin in challenge.

Then he surprised her and laughed. “And I’m assuming I get to be your source?”

“You’re the one proposing we make a deal.”

She wasn’t sure if he liked that answer or if he had something up his sleeve, but he smiled and said, “All right. Deal—you keep quiet for now, I’ll give you the inside story and the exclusive on the diamond if we find it.”

He held out his hand for her to shake.

Tanya took it, clasping it firmly to let him know she wasn’t intimidated by him.

But what she hadn’t anticipated was how aware she would be of the way her hand felt in his. Of the strength emanating from his grip. Of the texture of his skin. Of the tiny goose bumps that skittered up her arm…

Then the handshake ended and something made her sorry it had.

But that couldn’t be…

“For now I guess I’ll just say good-night, then,” Tanya said, thinking that in all that had happened since she’d first heard Tate McCord’s voice this evening, she hadn’t wanted to get out of there as much as she did at that moment, before anything else totally weird came over her. Or overcame her…

“Good idea,” he confirmed.

So Tanya stepped from behind the desk, snatched her mother’s sweater from the back of the chair on her way to the French doors and finally went back out into the night air.

And the entire time she held her head high, knowing that Tate McCord had followed her to the door to watch her go—probably to make sure she did, she thought.

But it also occurred to her, as she took the path that led through the woodsy grounds to the housekeeper’s bungalow she was temporarily sharing with her mother, that she wasn’t sure what her mother and the rest of the staff was talking about when it came to Tate. He didn’t seem dark and brooding and withdrawn and dispirited to her.

To her, he seemed full of life, full of fire.

Fire enough to have nearly set her aflame with a simple handshake…

Chapter Two

A good night’s sleep had been hard for Tate to come by in the last year and a half, and Friday night hadn’t broken that pattern. He’d had trouble falling asleep and he was wide awake before the sun was even up on Saturday morning. And once he was awake there was no going back to sleep. Luckily he’d gotten used to functioning on only a few hours rest during internship, residency and surgery fellowship.

By 6:45 he’d made himself a pot of coffee and he took his first cup out of the guesthouse to sit at one of the poolside tables with the newspaper that Edward—the McCord’s butler—hadn’t failed to leave at his doorstep since he’d returned from the Middle East and opted to live outside of the main house for a while.

Tate didn’t open the paper, though. He knew there would be articles on the war in Iraq, on situations in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Unlike when Buzz had been over there and Tate had been anxious for any news, since Buzz’s death, since spending the year in Baghdad himself, some days he just didn’t want the reminders. He sure as hell never needed them…

Don’t make me kick your ass!

He knew that’s what Buzz would be saying to him if Buzz was around now. If Buzz saw him staring at that newspaper and wanting to toss it into the pool. There was no way Buzz would have stood for this damn black mood he’d been in since his best friend’s death.

Bentley—Buzz—Adams. Like Katie, Tate’s fiancée, Tate had known Buzz all his life, despite the fact that they’d come from different backgrounds. Politics and the military—that’s where Buzz’s roots were. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been high-ranking army officers who each served as military advisors to presidents. But Buzz’s own father hadn’t wanted his family to live the nomadic military life, so Buzz had been raised at his grandparents’ estate, just down the road.

Tate and Buzz had gone to private school together. They’d gone to college together. They’d even gone to medical school together and applied for residency at the same hospital. Their paths hadn’t veered until residency was over and Tate had opted for a specialty in surgery while Buzz had followed his family’s tradition and joined the army to serve as a doctor overseas.

Going to war was the first thing Tate and Buzz hadn’t done together.

If only Buzz hadn’t broken his tradition with Tate to follow his family’s tradition…

But he had.

And everything else was water under the bridge now.

Everything but this funk Tate couldn’t seem to shake.

He knew he was one hell of a downer these days, that everyone was wondering where the old Tate was. Most of the time he was wondering it himself. But the old Tate just didn’t seem to be there anymore.

He also knew his lousy mood was going to factor in when the news about his engagement to Katie came out, and he regretted that. He didn’t want people saying that Katie had bailed because he wasn’t much fun anymore. Katie didn’t deserve that.

She hadn’t ended their engagement because he couldn’t seem to lighten up. She’d made that clear and he didn’t doubt it. That just wasn’t Katie. In fact, he thought that if he’d put any effort into talking her out of breaking their engagement, the bad mood would have likely kept her around because she would have felt guilty for leaving him at a low point.

But he hadn’t put any effort into keeping things going with her. Why should he have when she was right? She’d said that she’d been thinking that maybe long-term friendship and family pressure and the general belief that they’d end up together shouldn’t, ultimately, be why they did end up together. That she didn’t think she had the kind of feelings for him that she should have going into marriage. That she didn’t feel passionate about him.

Maybe that should have been insulting, but it hadn’t been. Instead, he’d understood it. His own feelings for Katie had never been all-consuming or particularly passionate. Which was probably why calling things off just hadn’t mattered a whole lot to him.

Of course, it also didn’t really matter to him that Katie wanted to keep the breakup a secret until she could see her parents in Florida and explain it to them.

It didn’t matter to him that Katie wasn’t head over heels for him.

It didn’t matter to him that they’d broken up.

It didn’t matter to him that he needed to maintain the pretense that they hadn’t.

Since Buzz’s death, and even more so in the six months since he’d been back from Baghdad, it had just been tough for things like that—for most of what mattered to the people around him—to have the importance they might have had before…

He took a drink of his coffee and then replaced the cup on the table, staring into the steaming beverage that still remained.

He liked his coffee strong and black, and looking into the brew now made him think of Tanya Kimbrough’s eyes. They were the color of Italian espresso—dark, rich, liquid pools of espresso…

Recalling that made him think of one thing that had mattered to him—last night and finding Tanya Kimbrough in the library. That had definitely mattered.

When he’d found her there he’d taken a mental inventory of what he and Blake had said because what was going on with the business did matter. He’d recalled that they’d said the jewelry business was in a slump, that they believed they knew where the Santa Magdalena diamond was, that Blake was buying all the canary diamonds to use as a tie-in.

Then there were the papers Tanya had seen on the desk, too—Blake must have forgotten the file and while there hadn’t been anything in it but preliminaries for the advertising campaign, it was still information they didn’t want released.

And after cataloging what Tanya Kimbrough could have known, the wheels of Tate’s mind had started to turn, imagining her prematurely revealing that they were looking for the Santa Magdalena diamond. No, he and Blake hadn’t talked about the crucial clue Blake had discovered in the border of the deed to the land and silver mines they’d taken over from the Foleys decades ago. Still, if word leaked that there was a very real reason to suspect the diamond might be found? Any number of treasure hunters could descend on them to complicate the search. And possibly accidentally find the diamond before they did.

Not good.

Tate had considered what would happen if word leaked that Blake was cornering the market on canary diamonds and coming out with a new line of Spanish-influenced designs to coincide with the discovery of the Santa Magdalena. Their competitors would launch lines of their own to steal their thunder and undermine their sales and, potentially, leave Blake at a disadvantage in breathing new life into the business.

Also not good.

And let the world know that the renowned McCord’s Jewelers was in a decline? That the family fortunes were compromised?

Certainly not good.

And since Blake was up to his eyeballs in the family’s problems already and—as usual—trying to bear the burden as much on his own as he could, rotten mood or not, Tate had decided that it was better if he dealt with the housekeeper’s daughter rather than dumping any more on his brother.

Which was why he’d struck that bargain with her for an insider’s look at the McCords and an exclusive on the diamond if they found it. Left to her own devices, Tanya Kimbrough could cause trouble and he was going to do whatever he had to to prevent that. If that meant sticking to her like glue to keep a close eye on her for the time being, then that’s what he was going to do.

It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it…

Tate knew that’s what Buzz would be saying to him if he told his friend he was only taking on Tanya Kimbrough to spare Blake.

Yeah, okay, it was hardly as dirty a job as studying a dusty deed or digging around in the dirt of a deserted old silver mine. Keeping an eye on a beautiful woman was definitely not drawing the short straw.

And Tanya was a beautiful woman.

The scrawny, funny-looking kid had grown into a knockout—there was no question about that.

Her hair was as dark as her eyes—coffee-nib brown—and so shiny it looked like satin. Coupled with those eyes against a fair, flawless complexion, she’d been the freshest-faced burglar in existence. Fresh-faced and beautiful even without any visible signs of makeup, with that thin nose and those pale pink lips, those high cheekbones and the slightly squarish jawline sweeping up from a chin that looked as if it could be a little sassy.

Unlike her taller, slightly stocky mother, Tanya was petite—no more than five-four he was guessing. She was thin, but not too thin, and she had curves in all the right places—at least he thought she did even though that chopped-up sweatshirt she’d had on had done more camouflaging than revealing.

Of course it had revealed one shoulder before she’d yanked the fabric back into place. And the mere sight of that creamy skin had made him suddenly aware of his own heartbeat. And the fact that it had sped up…

Only slightly.

But still, that was more than most things had done to him lately. A simple bare shoulder…

Hell, he was a doctor. He saw naked shoulders—and naked everything else—all the time. Why had a simple glimpse of Tanya Kimbrough’s shoulder done anything at all to him?

Maybe it had been an adrenaline rush, he reasoned. He’d just had that argument with Blake and then spotted someone he’d initially thought to be a stranger lurking behind the desk. He hadn’t actually been alarmed, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that his subconscious had set off an alert response. After Baghdad, that seemed likely.

And if it had felt like something other than that?

He was likely only misinterpreting it.

He did know one thing, though—he wasn’t hating the idea of keeping an eye on Tanya Kimbrough.

In fact, if he analyzed it, he’d say he might even be looking forward to it.

He might say he’d even gotten a small rush out of that back-and-forth with her last night. A small rush that he wouldn’t mind having again…

But that couldn’t matter, he told himself.

The charge he’d gotten out of their verbal exchange and the fact that she’d held her own with him, the smooth skin on a shoulder he’d been inclined to mold his hand around, the silky hair he’d wanted to see fall free, the lips he’d had a fleeting thought of tasting, the tight little body hidden behind funny-looking pants and a sweatshirt that someone had taken scissors to—none of that was as important as protecting his family, or as important as his promise to Katie to pretend they were still engaged until she told him otherwise.

But still…

He was looking forward to seeing the housekeeper’s daughter again.

And continuing to see much more of her for a while to keep her contained?

That didn’t feel like a hardship either…

“What are you doing here?”

Tanya could see that Tate was surprised to find her waiting for him when he left the operating suite of Meridian General Hospital at eight o’clock Saturday night.

“I told you you were going to talk to me whether you liked it or not,” she countered heatedly.

“When did you tell me that?”

“At the end of the sixteenth voice mail I left you today.”

“I got called in for an emergency surgery early this morning. I’ve been standing at an operating table for the last—” he glanced at a clock on the wall “—eleven hours and twenty minutes. Not a lot of message checking goes on when I’m up to my elbows in a man’s gut.”

“Gross,” Tanya said reflexively.

Tate merely raised an eyebrow at that, giving her the impression that that was the response he’d been going for.

But if he thought disgusting her was going to make her back down, he needed to think again.

“Eleven hours and twenty minutes of surgery or not, we’re going to talk,” she insisted.

“If I’ve inspired sixteen voice mails I guess we’ll have to,” he said sardonically but sounding weary nonetheless. “First I have to let the family know how my patient is—” he nodded in the direction of a group of people she hadn’t noticed before but now realized were also waiting for him “—then I have to write orders to get this guy into recovery. After that my plan is for a quick bite to eat at the deli across the street before I have to operate on the other passenger from this car accident. So if you’re determined that we talk right now, you can either wait for me here and go over to the deli with me, or go ahead of me to the deli—but one way or another there’s only going to be a small window before my next patient is prepped and ready to be opened up.”

It irked Tanya all the more to have him dictate to her, but she wouldn’t let that stop her.

“Fine, I’ll wait here,” she said cuttingly.

Now that she’d finally found him, she had no intention of letting him slip away from her. After calling his cell phone all day, she’d questioned almost the entire house staff before finding someone who knew Tate was at the hospital. When she’d called the hospital she’d been told she couldn’t speak to him because he was in surgery. That had prompted her to come here to ambush him as soon as he got out. But she’d been lying in wait for nearly two hours and was not willing to go ahead of him to the deli and risk him not showing up.

So she perched on the edge of the same seat she’d occupied for the last two hours and watched him intently.

When he was finished talking to his patient’s family, they headed for the elevators and Tate moved to the nurses’ station. He said something to the nurse there and while she went to do his bidding, Tanya continued to keep him in her sights.

As she did, it occurred to her that while, over the years, she’d seen Tate McCord in tennis whites, in tuxedos, in suits and ties and casual clothes of all kinds, she’d never seen him in scrubs. And that he looked too sexy to believe in the loose-fitting, teal blue cotton garments that resembled pajamas more than street clothing.

Then, adding to that sexiness he seemed unconscious of, he rolled his shoulders, arched his spine and raised his elbows to shoulder height to pull his arms back until even Tanya heard something crack—obviously working out the kinks that hours of surgery had left.

But regardless of the fact that she was overly aware of every little thing about him, she refused to let any of it influence her. She was steaming mad and she was going to let him know it. Nothing—including being one of the best-looking, sexiest men she’d ever seen—gave him license to mess with her career! Not even if she had overstepped her bounds the previous night.

The nurse brought him a metal clipboard then, and when he was done writing the orders for his patient, he handed the chart back to the nurse and finally turned to Tanya.

“Ready?”

“You don’t need to change clothes?” she asked, hoping he would and that different clothes might help lessen the effect he was having on her in scrubs.

But he shook his head. “Hadn’t planned on it. Like I said, I have another surgery scheduled tonight and the deli doesn’t have a dress code. Unless it offends you in some way…”

“I couldn’t care less what you’re wearing,” she lied.

“Then let’s go get something to eat before I pass out from hunger.”

The trip through the hospital and across the street was filled with Tate greeting and exchanging quips with nurses, attendants, volunteers, other doctors and even the janitor. Then they reached the deli and he was right—there were more customers dressed the way he was than in anything that resembled the slacks and shirt Tanya was wearing.

Not that she felt out of place, but it did occur to her as she peered at the other men in scrubs that she didn’t find any of them particularly attractive…

Still, she did everything she could to overlook Tate’s appeal as he ordered his “usual.” She rejected his offer of food and accepted only a lemonade before they went to one of the booths that lined the walls of the small restaurant.

Despite what he’d said, Tate seemed more tired than hungry. After setting his pastrami sandwich and iced tea on the table, he left them untouched while he sat lengthwise on his side of the booth to put his feet up. He also rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes—probably to wind down and relax the way he’d intended to do without her company.

But Tanya wasn’t going to be ignored.

“So how did you have time to ruin my life if you were up to your elbows in someone’s insides all day and most of tonight?” she demanded before she’d even sipped her lemonade.

Rather than add to Tate’s stress, that actually brought an indication of amusement in a slight upward curl of the corners of his mouth even before he opened his eyes to look at her. “How did I ruin your life?”

“I got a call at nine o’clock this morning from the owner of WDGN—not the station manager who hired me, but the station owner—”

“Chad Burton.”

“Your friend,” Tanya said derisively.

“We’re more acquaintances than close friends. I went through school with his son, Chad Junior. I helped Junior pass chemistry and physics, although he ended up an interior decorator, not a doctor the way Chad Senior had hoped. But Chad Senior has always been grateful. Chad Senior and I have also been on a lot of committees together, we play golf now and then—”

“You’re friends enough to have called him sometime between last night and nine o’clock this morning to persuade him to put me on a leave of absence—”

“With pay,” Tate pointed out, not bothering to pretend he hadn’t been behind today’s turn of events.

“With or without pay, from today forward—indefinitely—I’m on special assignment to work the McCord story. That means no on-air time, no other duties, no other stories, no other assignments, no chance to prove myself in any other way or gain any other ground after just two weeks of working there. I was told I’m not to show my face at the station until I have the whole McCord thing ready to be put together.”

“But you’re still on the payroll, so—”

“This isn’t about money!” Tanya said, ferociously whispering to keep from shouting. “If I don’t go back with something good—like the discovery of the Santa Magdalena diamond itself—I’ll be lucky to be doing the agriculture reports on the predawn weekend newscasts. Plus they’ll probably hire someone else to do my job in the meantime and that someone else could just replace me if the McCords don’t come up with the diamond and all I have is a human-interest piece. You may have put in a good word for me to get this job, but my credentials and abilities actually got it for me, and you don’t have the right to pull it out from under me just to suit your purposes!”

He sat up straight in the booth, putting his feet on the floor and finally unwrapping his sandwich to take a bite. Not until he’d chewed, swallowed and washed it down with a drink of his iced tea, did he say, “I had to make sure you didn’t have the opportunity to go back on your word to keep quiet.”

“I could still do that—I could go to a Foley-owned station.”

He remained unruffled by her threat. “You could,” he said. “But that talk about loyalty last night got me to thinking—your mom has worked for us for twenty-two years. She oversees the whole staff. She’s my mom’s right hand around the house. I’m not going to say we’re all family, but there’s a connection that you sure as hell don’t have with our archrivals. You must feel some amount of loyalty.”

“How much loyalty did you feel when you called Chad Burton?”

“Today or when I called him to say I was sending over your résumé?”

Tanya glared at him. “That was something my mother did without telling me until after it was done because she wanted me to move back here. The résumé you sent over wasn’t even a recent one. It was the first one I did out of college—my mother found it in an old file. I faxed them the real, current résumé, which is what got me the interview.”

Tate ignored all of that and merely went on to answer her question about his loyalty.

“I wasn’t being disloyal. I was only playing it safe. And Chad was thrilled with the idea of getting an insider’s view of the McCords. Plus, even though I didn’t do anything but allude to the diamond, I let him know that there was the potential for big news to come along with the human-interest stuff, and he was nearly drooling over the chance for WDGN to be the one to break that big news. This really could put you on the map.”

“I lose ground not being there, not having my face in front of a camera every chance I can get,” she insisted. “There’s no reason I couldn’t still be doing my job there and compiling the McCord information.”

“But now you don’t have to do anything but focus on the McCords.”

“Who are not the center of the universe, just in case you were wondering!” Tanya said, her voice raised enough to garner a glance from the couple at the nearest table.

“It’s just a precaution,” Tate said calmly.

“You’re trying to control me,” Tanya accused.

“Yes, I am. But only in this and only for the sake of the greater good.”

“As if that makes it all right.”

“Was it all right that you broke into my family’s home last night to spy on us and try to get information to expose things that could hurt us if they got out at the wrong time?” he reasoned.

“So you’re exacting revenge?”

“Nooo, not at all. You still have your job and your paycheck. You have the chance to do an exclusive story on the McCords and be the reporter who tells the world if we find the Santa Magdalena diamond. You just won’t be doing anything but that for now.”

Tanya narrowed her eyes at him. “You’d better give me a good story,” she warned.

“And you’d better put all your energy into me and getting a good story,” he countered.

“Into you? Why would I put my energy into you?”

He smiled. A slow, lazy, sexy smile. “I guess because I’m the teller-of-the-tale, and the happier I am, the better the tale-telling?”

“And what does that mean? That not only do I have to climb the mountain to get the answers from The Great One, but that I have to bring enticements, too?” she asked facetiously.

His smile stretched into a grin and he didn’t at all look like the sad, somber, lackluster shadow of his former self that her mother and the rest of the staff described him as.

“Enticements?” he repeated as if he hadn’t been thinking that until she suggested it. “I like the sound of that.”

“Well, get over it,” she advised bluntly, knowing he was merely having some fun at her expense. “There’s no way I’m bringing enticements to get you to tell me about your family.”

“Too bad,” he pretended to lament.

“I’m serious, Tate,” she said, using his name for the first time as an adult.

“Yes, you are, Tanya,” he agreed, barely suppressing a smile. “You are very serious.”

“I mean it—you’d better give me something good enough to make this sabbatical worth my while.”

He seemed to take that in a different—and lascivious—vein than how she’d intended it because his smile appeared full force again and it was laced with wicked amusement.

But before he said anything else, the pager clipped to the bottom of his shirt went off, drawing his attention.

He glanced down at it. “I have to get back,” he announced, grabbing another quick bite of his only half-eaten sandwich and then rewrapping the rest to take with him.

As he did, he returned to what they’d been talking about. “All I meant when I said that you should put your energy into me was into spending time with me to get your story—as part of the job you really are still doing.”

He stood, guzzled most of his iced tea and, after replacing the glass on the table, added, “And to that end, why don’t we start with a real dinner tomorrow night? My treat and we can both eat.”

“Since it’s now my job, I guess so,” Tanya conceded.

“Eight o’clock? I’ll meet you at the pool and we’ll go somewhere from there?”

Tanya nodded and that was all it took to send him rushing out of the deli.

As she watched him go her anger at him began to waver. Maybe it was the sight of him from behind in those scrubs that loosely covered his broad shoulders and barely grazed a derriere to die for.

But instead of thinking about the influence he’d used to keep her under his thumb, she was thinking more about the fact that her job now was essentially spending time with Tate McCord.

And how, as much as she should be resenting that, she was actually a little excited by the prospect…