Secret Love. Brenda Jackson

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      Diamond placed the mystery novel she had been reading aside. The plot was a good one, and the characters were interesting, but the book could not hold her attention. No matter how hard she tried to get into the story, her mind and thoughts kept drifting.

      She could not get Jacob Madaris out of her mind.

      Standing, she walked across the room to look out of the window. The night was lonely and black, and the smell of the rich, wet earth filled the air. She turned her attention back to the room and looked around. Once again she marveled at how beautiful the cabin was. Jacob had built it, yet he had never stayed in it.

      Returning to the overstuffed leather wing chair, she curled her legs beneath her. What was there about Jacob Madaris that she found so intriguing, so overpowering and so beguiling? Oh, he was a good-looking man, there was no doubt of that, but there was something else about him that pulled at her.

      It would be absolutely, positively foolish to deny she was attracted to him, but then it would be just as equally foolish if she even considered doing anything about it. She thought about all the hell she’d gone through in her short one-year marriage to Samuel. There had been the arguments, the accusations, the bouts of jealous rages and then the betrayal. In the end, a man she had loved, and whom she thought had loved her in return, had shown his true colors. He had shown her just what he was capable of and had ended up being her worst enemy.

      And that had hurt.

      During the days and months following her divorce, she had worked herself into a frenzy, making one movie after another, allowing no rest in between and not allowing time for her pain to heal.

      Sterling, being the good friend that he was, had detected her turmoil. He had known she wasn’t as strong as she had pretended to be. And so, with her doctor’s advice, he had decided to do something about it. He had thought that three weeks in a secluded cabin on the grounds of Whispering Pines would heal all. But what he probably had not counted on was her having such a gripping and profound attraction to his friend.

      Diamond gave a quiet laugh. In his haste to help her, Sterling had unknowingly placed her right smack in the middle of the lion’s den.

      Chapter 3

      As Jake rounded the corner of his barn, he came across a group of his men who were standing together talking.

      “I’m telling you guys the truth. I did see Diamond Swain,” Lowell Brown was saying to the men gathered around him. “I saw her from a distance. She was in the south pasture picking berries.”

      Jake stopped in his tracks and shook his head, frowning. It had been three days since Diamond had arrived and already there had been more Diamond Swain sightings on Whispering Pines than there were Elvis sightings around the country. At least half a dozen of his men claimed to have gotten a glimpse of her at one time or another. He couldn’t help but wonder if any of them had actually seen Diamond or if it was just a figment of their overactive imaginations. He doubted she had even left the cabin since she didn’t have any sort of transportation to do so. She was to call him when she wanted to use one of his horses to go riding. So far, he had not heard from her. Nor had he seen her since the day he had picked her up from the airstrip and taken her to the cabin. He had no idea what she’d been doing the last three days, and frankly, he didn’t want to know. Just like he had originally planned, he was trying his best to ignore the fact that she was there.

      Hearing his men talk about her wasn’t helping matters.

      “Don’t you guys have work to do?”

      Just as he’d known they would, the group of men disbanded immediately. Jake continued inside the barn to saddle his horse. The computerized range monitor had detected that a part of the fencing was down near the south pasture. If that was the case, it needed to be repaired as soon as possible. It wouldn’t do for a bull from another breed to get on his land and mate with his pureblood Longhorns.

      A brisk breeze ruffled the treetops as Jake rode away. One part of his mind was on the business he had to take care of with the fence. The other was on Diamond. He didn’t want to think about her, but he did. And although he kept trying to convince himself that he really didn’t want to know, he couldn’t help wondering what she had been doing the last three days.

      As he trotted his horse up the narrow slit of a trail that led to the south pastures, he knew that before he returned to the ranch he would stop by the cabin and find out.