Passion Flower. Diana Palmer

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      Chapter Two

      IT WAS blazing hot for a spring day in Texas. Jennifer stopped in the middle of the ranch road to rest for a minute and set her burdens down on the dusty, graveled ground. She wished for the tenth time in as many minutes that she’d let the cab driver take her all the way to the Culhanes’ front door. But she’d wanted to walk. It hadn’t seemed a long way from the main road. And it was so beautiful, with the wildflowers strewn across the endless meadows toward the flat horizon. Bluebonnets, which she’d only read about until then, and Mexican hat and Indian paintbrush. Even the names of the flowers were poetic. But her enthusiasm had outweighed her common sense. And her strength.

      She’d tried to call the ranch from town—apparently Everett and Robert Culhane did have the luxury of a telephone. But it rang and rang with no answer. Well, it was Monday, and she’d been promised a job. She hefted her portable typewriter and her suitcase and started out again.

      Her pale eyes lifted to the house in the distance. It was a two-story white frame building, with badly peeling paint and a long front porch. Towering live oaks protected it from the sun, trees bigger than anything Jennifer had seen in Georgia. And the feathery green trees with the crooked trunks had to be mesquite. She’d never seen it, but she’d done her share of reading about it.

      On either side of the long, graveled driveway were fences, gray with weathering and strung with rusting barbed wire. Red-coated cattle grazed behind the fences, and her eyes lingered on the wide horizon. She’d always thought Georgia was big—until now. Texas was just unreal. In a separate pasture, a mare and her colt frolicked in the hot sun.

      Jennifer pushed back a strand of dull blond hair that had escaped from her bun. In a white shirtwaist dress and high heels, she was a strange sight to be walking up the driveway of a cattle ranch. But she’d wanted to make a good impression.

      Her eyes glanced down ruefully at the red dust on the hem of her dress, and the scuff marks on her last good pair of white sling pumps. She could have cried. One of her stockings had run, and she was sweating. She could hardly have looked worse if she’d planned it.

      She couldn’t help being a little nervous about the older brother. She had Everett Culhane pictured as a staid old rancher with a mean temper. She’d met businessmen like that before, and dealt with them. She wasn’t afraid of him. But she hoped that he’d be glad of her help. It would make things easier all around.

      Her footsteps echoed along the porch as she walked up the worn steps. She would have looked around more carefully weeks ago, but now she was tired and run-down and just too exhausted to care what her new surroundings looked like.

      She paused at the screen door, and her slender fingers brushed the dust from her dress. She put the suitcase and the typewriter down, took a steadying breath, and knocked.

      There was no sound from inside the house. The wooden door was standing open, and she thought she heard the whir of a fan. She knocked again. Maybe it would be the nice young man she’d met in Atlanta who would answer the door. She only hoped she was welcome.

      The sound of quick, hard footsteps made her heart quicken. Someone was home, at least. Maybe she could sit down. She was feeling a little faint.

      “Who the hell are you?” came a harsh masculine voice from behind the screen door, and Jennifer looked up into the hardest face and the coldest dark eyes she’d ever seen.

      She couldn’t even find her voice. Her immediate reaction was to turn around and run for it. But she’d come too far, and she was too tired.

      “I’m Jennifer King,” she said as professionally as she could. “Is Robert Culhane home, please?”

      She was aware of the sudden tautening of his big body, a harsh intake of breath, before she looked up and saw the fury in his dark eyes.

      “What the hell kind of game are you playing, lady?” he demanded.

      She stared at him. It had been a long walk, and now it looked as if she might have made a mistake and come to the wrong ranch. Her usual confidence faltered. “Is this the Circle C Ranch?” she asked.

      “Yes, it is.”

      He wasn’t forthcoming, and she wondered if he might be one of the hired hands. “Is this where Robert Culhane lives?” she persisted, trying to peek past him—there was a lot of him, all hard muscle and blue denim.

      “Bobby was killed in a bus wreck a week ago,” he said harshly.

      Jennifer was aware of a numb feeling in her legs. The long trip on the bus, the heavy suitcase, the effects of her recent illness—all of it added up to exhaustion. And those cold words were the final blow. With a pitiful little sound, she sank down onto the porch, her head whirling, nausea running up into her throat like warm water.

      The screen door flew open and a pair of hard, impatient arms reached down to lift her. She felt herself effortlessly carried, like a sack of flour, into the cool house. She was unceremoniously dumped down onto a worn brocade sofa and left there while booted feet stomped off into another room. There were muttered words that she was glad she couldn’t understand, and clinking sounds. Then, a minute later, a glass of dark amber liquid was held to her numb lips and a hard hand raised her head.

      She sipped at the cold, sweet iced tea like a runner on the desert when confronted with wet salvation. She struggled to catch her breath and sat up, gently nudging the dark, lean hand holding the glass to one side. She breathed in deeply, trying to get her whirling mind to slow down. She was still trying to take it all in. She’d been promised a job, she’d come hundreds of miles at her own expense to work for minimum wage, and now the man who’d offered it to her was dead. That was the worst part, imagining such a nice young man dead.

      “You look like a bleached handkerchief,” the deep, harsh voice observed.

      She sighed. “You ought to write for television. You sure do have a gift for prose.”

      His dark eyes narrowed. “Walking in this heat without a hat. My God, how many stupid city women are there in the world? And what landed you on my doorstep?”

      She lifted her eyes then, to look at him properly. He was darkly tanned, and there were deep lines in his face, from the hatchet nose down to the wide, chiseled mouth. His eyes were deep-set, unblinking under heavy dark brows and a wide forehead. His hair was jet-black, straight and thick and a little shaggy. He was wearing what had to be work clothes: faded denim jeans that emphasized long, powerfully muscled legs, and a matching shirt whose open neck revealed a brown chest thick with short, curling hair. He had the look of a man who was all business, all the time. All at once she realized that this man wasn’t the hired hand she’d mistaken him for.

      “You’re СКАЧАТЬ