“No.”
“You like scary rides?”
Yes. A long time ago. She’d lived life on the edge. You didn’t date a hellcat without having a wild streak of your own. Alas, motherhood and loss had cured her of that.
His face fell. “I can see by your face that you’d like me to take it easy.”
“No.” The word shot out of her before she could stop it. Something in his eyes had challenged her, and that should scare the crap out of her. Darren had challenged her, too, and look where that had gotten her.
“No?” he asked, as if sensing her doubts.
“I don’t mind a little excitement.”
She shouldn’t have said the words. The way he glanced at her, quickly, that wink back in his eyes.
“Oh, really?”
She blushed. “I meant I’m not as uptight as I look.” This was going from bad to worse, so she did the only thing she could think of. She changed the subject. “What did your dad want?”
As a buzzkill, the words worked perfectly. He frowned, and somehow she knew what he was thinking. “He was checking up on me.”
“You mean, making sure you were at work.”
He glanced at her quickly. “Something like that.”
“You’re not very happy about being forced into a day job, are you?”
“Excuse me?”
Don’t look at him. Easier to focus that way. “Your...lack of interest in Baron Energies is well-known.”
“See, that’s where everyone’s wrong.” He smoothly merged onto I-35. “It’s not that I’m not interested. I love our family business. I just don’t see the point of devoting my entire life to it like my dad, at least not while I’m young. I have my whole life to do that.”
Must be nice to have that kind of attitude. She’d had to work her entire life to get to where she was. As a woman she’d had to do things better, be smarter, work harder. Lizzie Baron had been the first oil executive to take her seriously and yet here she was with her brother, a man who didn’t want what had been handed to him on a silver platter, and she couldn’t help but feel a small burn of resentment. What would it be like to never have to worry? To have such a huge support group that you knew you’d always be taken care of? She’d left behind her only support, Darren’s parents, and they were aging help at that. Even so, she would miss them—did miss them—terribly. They were the only family she had.
“I don’t have my whole life ahead of me,” she heard herself say. “I only have the here and the now.”
Only after she said the words did she wonder why in the name of heaven she’d made the confession. That’s what happened when the only company you kept were twin girls. Girlfriends? What were those? Any fledgling friendships she might have formed once she’d graduated college were toast now that she’d moved. As she sat there thinking about it, she admitted she’d never felt more alone in her life than in that moment sitting there with Dallas magazine’s bachelor of the year next to her.
He stared at her, she realized. Analyzed her. Tried to determine the look on her face.
Unhinged mother.
She wanted to tell him that’s what he saw. Someone living life on the edge...and about to come unglued.
“You okay?”
No. She was most definitely not okay because following on the tail of her loneliness came an unbidden urge to cry. It made her angry, that urge. She’d never been one for stints of self-pity, yet here she was, suddenly looking out the side window of his sixty-thousand-dollar truck and wondering if she had the strength of will to hold on to her tears.
“Fine.” But even to her own ears her voice sounded high, her nose clearly stuffed with the crud that clogged your nostrils and your throat when you tried so hard not to weep.
He flicked on his directional. It took her a moment to recognize the click-click of his blinkers, and then a moment more before she realized what he was about to do.
“No,” she said. “No, no, no. Do not pull over. I’m fine.”
“You need a tissue.”
“I do not.”
But, damn it, she was crying. Crying. In front of Jet Baron.
He pulled over.
When she glanced through her lashes the world was a blurry mess. She had no idea where they were and so she sucked in a breath, hoping it would help to clear her eyes and her airway, which made her sound like an asthmatic yappy dog, and that only made her want to cry even more.
“You’ve had a rough spell, haven’t you?”
It was too much. The long night. The early morning. The mistakes on her report. Meeting Brock Baron. Seeing the surprise in his eyes. No. It went back further than that. Losing Darren. The new job. The move away from everything she loved.
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
A blurry box formed in front of her eyes. Tissue. She had no idea where he’d pulled it from. Reluctantly, she snatched one and dabbed at her eyes. At least the urge to sob seemed to have faded. Could she be hormonal? Was it close to her time of month? To be honest, she couldn’t recall anything. Time seemed to be an endless blur of get up, take care of the twins, get ready for work, race around the office, go home, cook dinner, bathe the twins, tuck them into bed, fall into her own bed—exhausted—then get up and do it all over again.
“You mind me asking why the father of your twins isn’t doing more?”
Another sucked-in breath, this one hitching in her chest again. “Oh, you know,” she said airily, waving her hand through the air. “He’s a little busy, what with being dead and all.”
Silence.
From the left side of the vehicle came the whoosh of a car passing them. He’d pulled to a stop at the base of an off-ramp—she had no idea where. To their left cars whizzed by on the freeway. Actually, she was kind of glad she’d stunned him into silence. It gave her a moment to catch her breath.
“Wow,” he said at last. “You’ve been handed a rotten deck of cards, haven’t you?”
He had that right.
“When? How?”
She stiffened.
“If you don’t mind me asking.”
He handed her another tissue. This time she took it without hesitating. She’d stained the first one black. Great. She probably looked like a panda bear.
“He was a hellfighter.”
And that said it all. Jet Baron was no fool. He knew what a hellfighter did. Knew the risk involved in trying to put out the flames of a burning oil well. She’d known, too. She’d warned herself away from Darren at least a half a dozen times that first night they’d met, but something about his bright blue eyes and his sparkling smile and the way he’d stared out at the world—as if he’d owned it and so nothing bad would ever happen to him—had drawn her to him like a kitten to catnip. She’d thought him invincible. She’d been dead wrong.
“So I take it he died on the job?”
“Yup. Two months before we were supposed to get married. I found out I was pregnant afterward. Darren never even knew.”
“Damn.” He shook his head. “That’s a tough gig.”
“Eyup.”
She felt better now. At least her lungs didn’t sound like a clogged exhaust pipe. Just a momentary breakdown. No big deal.
Except you broke down in front of the boss’s son.
Who’s