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“Jim Larrabee?”
“From that company that sold you some drilling equipment a few weeks ago, remember? I want to talk to him about a new schedule of payments.”
Payments, Angelica thought, and schedules. How quickly she’d forgotten all about business—and all about Gordon Oil.
“I know who he is, Cade. And I tried to get him to agree to a new schedule, but—”
“He’ll agree to this.”
She felt herself bristling at the smug self-assurance in his tone.
“How nice to be so confident. What kind of schedule is it?”
“There’s no point in my boring you with the details, sugar. Tell you what—you pick a restaurant for lunch. Do you like Tex-Mex food? I know this little place for ribs that—”
Angelica’s mouth firmed. “You can hardly bore me with the details of a deal that affects my company,” she said stiffly.
“Come on, Angel. Isn’t it time we gave that up?”
“Gave what up?” Her voice hardened. “I’m still in charge of Gordon’s, Cade, in case you’d forgotten.”
“No,” he said carefully, “no, I hadn’t forgotten. But—”
But what? Every instinct told him this wasn’t the time for a confrontation. Cade blew out his breath.
“Just what I said, Angel. I didn’t want to bore you with the details.” He smiled. “Not this morning.”
She smiled carefully. “Nothing’s changed,” she said. “I’m still me—and I’m still interested in hearing about any deal you’ve cooked up.”
“Angelica, you’re making more out of this than it’s worth.”
“In that case, take me with you.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Cade shrugged his shoulders.
“Fine,” he said. “Come along, if that’s what you want.”
It was, Angelica was certain, the last thing in the world Cade wanted. But she didn’t hesitate.
“Thank you,” she said with great formality. “I’ll be ready in five minutes.”
She rose from the bed, still clutching the sheet, and looked at the open boxes lying amid the blankets. She frowned, then scooped up the camisole and panties from the gift box—but she took her own black wool dress from the chair as she walked briskly into the bathroom.
Cade stared after her, his mouth tightening. Then he turned away and poured himself another cup of coffee.
* * *
The same Jim Larrabee who’d refused to listen to Angelica’s deferred payment plan fell all over himself in his eagerness to agree to Cade’s.
What was even worse was the way both men ignored her during the meeting.
“You know Miss Gordon, Jim, “ Cade said at its start. Larrabee smiled, shook her hand—and then neither of them looked at her again, not even to ask her opinion before Cade pronounced the deal complete.
That was when Angelica shoved back her chair, got to her feet and stalked from the room.
She was waiting in the car when Cade emerged from the Larrabee offices a few minutes later, staring straight ahead. He opened the door, climbed inside, slammed it shut and threw the car into gear. They went half a dozen blocks in silence, and then he turned to her, glaring.
“Don’t you ever embarrass me that way again!”
“I embarrassed you?” Angelica swung toward him, her face flushed. “You have to be kidding!”
“Look, I don’t know what pissed you off, but—”
“I’ll tell you what pissed me off! How dare you act as if I’m invisible? You sat there, and that man sat there, and I might as well have been in—in Timbuctoo!”
“Going to that meeting was your idea, lady, not mine!”
“You’re damned right. If it had been up to you, I’d never even have known you were planning to meet with Larrabee!”
“Listen, lady—”
“Woman. That’s what you call a grown female, Cade. She’s not a lady, she’s a woman.”
“So you keep reminding me. And I guess you’re right, because God knows a lady would never behave the way you just did.”
“You mean, no flower of Western womanhood would ever behave the way I did!”
A horn blared behind them. Cade shot a furious look into the rearview mirror, then stepped on the gas.
“I don’t appreciate being made to look like a fool,” he said through his teeth.
Angelica sighed dramatically sweetly. “Poor Cade. Was it humiliating to have to explain why I walked out?”
“Not really.” His smile was all teeth. “Jim made a joke about PMS and I said, well, for all I knew, he might just be right. You can never tell about women’s hormones, can you?”
“That’s it! Write this off as something you and the other good ol’ boys can laugh about.” The car pulled to the curb in front of the hotel. The doorman stepped briskly forward, but Angelica threw the door open before he could reach it. “Having to admit the truth, that you couldn’t afford to let me into that discussion because I might just have shown you up, would probably have killed you,” she snapped as Cade stepped out of the car and came toward her.
“You? Show me up?” Cade laughed. “Listen, sugar, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you were in way over your head just sitting there! I can take what you know about this business, stuff it into a thimble and have room left for my finger.”
The electric lobby doors swished open as Angelica approached.
“The only thing that was thimble-size in that office was your brain,” she said coldly.
“Dammit,” Cade snarled. He caught hold of her wrist and swung her toward him. “Don’t you think it’s time you admitted the truth, Ms. Gordon? You don’t know the first thing about oil.”
“What you mean is, I don’t know the first thing about—about going to the bathroom standing up!”
Cade laughed. “Miss Palmer should hear you now, sugar,” he said. “I’ll bet she’d swoon.”
Angelica glared at him. Then she spun on her heel, marched past the reception desk where the clerks were trying their best to pretend nothing out of the ordinary was happening in the posh lobby, and stabbed the call button for the elevator.
“Miss Palmer,” she said coldly when Cade caught up to her, “would tell me that I should have known better than to expect you to treat me with respect.”
The elevator doors slid open. They stepped inside, and Cade pressed the button for the penthouse floor.
“Angelica,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Look, let’s not let this get out of hand. I wasn’t trying to insult you. It’s just that Larrabee and I speak the same language.”
“Give me a break, Cade.” The doors opened and Angelica stepped into the corridor that led to the suite. “I hate being patronized. I hate it almost as much as I hate being treated like a—a second-class citizen.”
Cade unlocked the door to the sitting room. They stepped inside and he slammed the door after them.
“Will you listen to me, dammit?” He clasped her shoulders and turned her to face him. “In the first place, you don’t know a thing about the oil business. That’s not an insult, it’s fact.”
“I’m learning. Besides, I do know about finances, and debt structures, and if you’d only given me a minute or two of your precious time, I could have told you about the plan I’d worked out and offered Mr. Jim Aren’t-WeAll-Good-Old-Boys Larrabee just a little while ago!”
“It couldn’t have been much of a plan, if he turned it down.”
“It was a terrific plan, but the person who made it was a woman!”
“Dammit, all you know is what you’ve read in textbooks, and that’s not what’s happening in the real world!”
Angelica’s fists clenched. “It’s men like you and Jim Larrabee,” she said, her voice trembling, “who won’t give me the chance to find out!”
“Angelica…”
Cade blew out his breath. Dammit, why were they fighting? She’d made him angry as hell, but that was all draining away, especially now that he saw the
telltale glint of tears in her eyes.
OK. Maybe he’d hurt her feelings. But he hadn’t meant to; he’d just gone into the meeting the way he always did, ready for the one-on-one kind of thing he was best at, and within seconds he’d been sure that Larrabee was responding positively to it.
Only a fool would have done something to endanger that.
Besides, if he’d thought about Angelica sitting there at all, it had been a quick flash, an awareness that he was putting on one hell of a show and that he had to be dazzling her with how quickly he’d turned Larrabee around.
Instead, he thought, with a twinge of guilt, instead, he’d managed to put those tears in the eyes of—of…
Cade’s heart kicked against his ribs. He’d put tears in the eyes of the only woman he’d ever loved.
Angelica had turned away from him. Her head was bowed; she looked fragile and vulnerable, and his throat constricted.
“Angel,” he said softly. He reached out and touched her shoulder gently. “Angel, I’m sorry. You’re right.”
She turned and looked at him. “Do you mean it?” she said, and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.
“Yes, of course.” He smiled and drew her toward him. “I don’t ever want us to quarrel again.”
She smiled, too, shakily. He could feel the tension in her body giving way.
“Me neither,” she whispered. “It’s just—the thing is, you made me feel so useless…”
Cade nodded. “I know.”
“There I sat, the head of the Gordon Oil Company, and—”
“Well, sure.” He smiled. “That was part of the problem. We should have straightened all that out before we went into that meeting, but I figured you weren’t quite ready to admit that you weren’t really the head of Gordon Oil, so—”
Angelica pulled back and stared at him. “What do you mean? I never said—”
“Angel. We both know there never was a verbal agreement.”
She swallowed dryly. “Oh?”
“But I can understand that what happens to the company is important to you. Hell, it belonged to your father.” Cade threaded his fingers into her hair and tilted her face to his. “Tell you what. I’ll direct whoever I put in charge to send me special periodic reports on the company’s progress, and—”
