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The china was exquisite, the crystal perfect—and so, Cade insisted, was their dress.
He wore the bottom half of a pair of blue cotton pajamas.
Angelica wore the top.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said, with a little laugh.
“Look at you how?” he said, and grinned.
“You know how.”
Cade reached across the little table and tugged gently at a long, coppery curl that lay against her shoulder.
“You look like a little girl,” he said softly.
She smiled. “I’m twenty-seven,” she said. “That’s hardly a little girl.”
“I’ll bet you were the prettiest little girl in all of Texas.”
Angelica made a face. “Not me. I hated the color of my hair, hated my freckles—”
“So you moved East and became the prettiest little girl there,” Cade said, and smiled.
Angelica laughed. “You mean, I became the girl with the red hair, the freckles and the funny accent.”
“Does your mother still live back East?”
“No. She died when I was in my last year of college.”
Cade looked at her. “What about brothers? Or sisters?”
“There’s just me.” She smiled wistfully. “It must be nice, having a big family.”
He shrugged. “Well, it has its moments.”
Angelica propped her chin in her hand. “OK,” she said, “it’s your turn. Tell me about Cade Landon.”
He grinned. “You already know most of it. I’m handsome, intelligent…”
“And modest.” She reached forward and touched her fingertip to his slightly crooked nose. “How’d that happen?”
Cade laughed. “I wish I could tell you something romantic, that I broke it in some waterfront dive in Singapore or something, but the truth is that I got it busted years ago, in a fight on an oil rig.”
“A fight?”
“Yeah. Some bozo decided I looked too green to be giving orders, that the only authority I had came from the Landon name.”
“And you decided to show him otherwise.”
“I never got anything from the Landon name,” Cade said with a tight smile. “Except maybe the desire to disassociate myself from the man who’d passed it along to me.
“You and your father didn’t get along?” Angelica said softly.
Cade laughed. “The understatement of the century, Angel. He was good at giving orders—”
“And you were good at ignoring them?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s just say I didn’t like having somebody make the rules for the way I was supposed to live my life.”
“No.” Angelica looked at him. “Nobody likes that.”
“Uh-oh,” he said softly. “That’s an ominous tone the lady has. Is that what you think, that I’ve been trying to make rules for you to live by?”
She smiled. “Well…”
“Angel, that’s not fair. You’ve been sick. I just—” He smiled. “OK. Maybe I did take over a little, but—”
“But?”
He reached across the table and slowly slipped his hand inside the pajama top.
“But from now on,” he said, his eyes turning to smoke, “I’ll only take over where it counts.”
Seconds later, they were locked in each other’s arms.
* * *
The next morning, Cade sat in a chair opposite the bed. He was dressed in a dark blue suit, a white shirt and a striped tie, and he was sipping a cup of coffee.
But mostly, he was watching Angelica as she slept and thinking that the word “beautiful” didn’t really do her justice.
Getting up an hour ago and leaving her warm, sweetly scented body had been difficult, but there was an important business matter that left him no choice—and before he left, he’d had something important to do.
He thought of the gaily wrapped boxes waiting in the sitting room. He could hardly wait to see her face when she opened them and saw the things he’d bought her, the silky camisoles and teddies, the soft cashmere dress that was the same green as her eyes.
She was too beautiful to hide behind tweeds and dark wools, and she didn’t have to, not anymore. Cade smiled to himself as he sipped his coffee. He had learned a lot about her in the past twenty-four hours, enough to understand why she’d been so determined to prove herself at Gordon Oil.
It wasn’t ambition that drove her. It was pain.
He could almost see her, the little girl with the red hair, at home neither in Texas nor back East, losing first her home and her father, and then her mother.
But now she had him. And he would protect her, and love her, forever.
He knew that now, knew that he’d been kidding himself, trying to pretend she was just another woman.
She wasn’t. She was his.
“Cade?”
He looked up, and he felt a smile curve across his mouth. Angelica was blinking the sleep from her eyes, staring at him across a tangle of blankets, and it was all he could do to keep from hurrying across the room and taking her in his arms.
“Good morning, sugar. Did you sleep well?”
She sat up against the pillows, clutching the blanket to her chin.
“What time is it?” she said. Her gaze swept over him and she frowned. “Have I overslept? Cade, you should have—”
“Easy, Angel.” He rose, walked to the bed, sat down next to her and took her in his arms. “Aren’t you going to kiss me good morning?”
He kissed her slowly and deeply, determinedly ignoring the swift quickening of his body as her mouth opened to his. Finally, she leaned back in his arms and smiled.
“You should have woken me,” she whispered, smiling into his eyes. “Now you’ll have to wait while I get ready for work, too.”
“No work today,” he said lightly.
Angelica’s brow furrowed. “But—”
“Well, a little work, maybe.” He rose from the bed and stepped into the sitting room. When he came back, his arms were loaded with packages. “You’ve got to try on all this stuff and tell me if you like my choices.”
She looked at him blankly. “What is all this?”
Cade dumped the boxes on the bed. “Open one and find out.”
He handed her a small box. She smiled hesitantly, undid the paper—and withdrew a camisole and panties of pale pink silk.
She looked at him, her expression halfway between a smile and a frown.
“Cade, I can’t accept this. I told you—”
“Wrong size?”
“No. But-”
“Wrong color?”
“The color’s perfect, but—”
“See what you think of this.”
“This” proved to be a dress of forest-green cashmere. It was incredibly beautiful—and, Angelica knew, incredibly expensive.
“Cade,” she said sternly, “I cannot—”
“We agreed, you can’t wear the clothing you have at home until your hand is better.”
“It is better. Much. And we didn’t agree. You announced that—”
“I’m not taking over, or making the rules, or whatever it is you thought I did last night.’’
Angelica sighed. “You’re not?”
“Hell, no. I’m just giving my woman a gift.” He bent down, tilted her face to his and kissed her. “There’s no law against that, is there?”
His woman, she thought, his woman…
The words were so simple. But their effect wasn’t simple at all. Part of her thrilled to them—and part recoiled.
“Sugar?” Cade stroked the curls from her cheeks. “If we really have to argue about this, we’ll have to do it later. Right now, I’ve got about half an hour to get clear across town.”
“But I thought—aren’t we going to work today?”
We, he thought, and he smiled.
“No, sugar, we’re not. Well, you’re not, anyway. But I’ve got a meeting with Jim Larrabee. I phoned him and tried to cancel, but—”
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