And so Cole ignored the instinct to reach up and brush back a wayward lock of shiny dark hair from her soft cheek, and he squelched the temptation to tell her that she was a long way from being just “any” woman to him or that she was as close to his ideal of femininity as any female could be.
He was not, however, morally opposed to diluting her resistance with as much alcohol as he could pour down her. “Finish your champagne, and then I’ll explain.”
Diana almost started to argue but decided to compromise and took a sip, instead.
“My problem,” he explained calmly, “is an old man named Calvin Downing, who is my mother’s uncle. When I wanted to leave the ranch and go to college, it was Calvin who tried to convince my father I wasn’t thumbing my nose at him and everything he represented. When my father couldn’t be persuaded to see things that way, it was Cal who loaned me the money for tuition. Just before my senior year of college, a drilling company ran a test well on Cal’s ranch and it came in. It wasn’t a gusher, but it made him about twenty-six thousand dollars a month. And when I graduated and went to Cal with a wild scheme for making money that no banker would agree to finance for me, it was Cal who handed over all his savings to help me get started. From the time I was a kid, Cal believed in me. When I started dreaming of making it really big and getting rich—it was Cal who listened to my dreams and believed in them.”
Fascinated by his candor and unable to see how such a kind and caring old man could now be the source of Cole’s unnamed “problem,” Diana sipped her champagne waiting for him to continue, but he seemed content to watch her instead. “Go on,” she urged. “So far he sounds like the last man in the world to cause a ‘problem’ for you.”
“He thinks he’s solving a problem, not creating one.”
“I don’t understand. Even if I hadn’t had so much wine and champagne tonight, I don’t think I’d understand.”
“You don’t understand because I haven’t told you that part, which is this: After I graduated, my uncle gave me all his savings from the well on his land, and then he borrowed another two hundred thousand dollars against it, so that I could start my own company. Naturally, I insisted on signing a legal note for the money and on making him a full partner in the business.”
To the best of her recollection, the article in Time magazine about Cole Harrison’s spectacular business successes placed his net worth at over five billion dollars. “I assume you repaid the loan?” she prompted.
He nodded. “I repaid it—along with interest calculated at the rate in effect at the time, as agreed in the note.” A wry smile softened his granite features. “Among my uncle’s eccentricities is a streak of stinginess a mile wide, which made his willingness to hand over all his money to finance my business plan even more meaningful. To illustrate my point, despite Cal’s wealth, he still clips coupons from the newspaper, he still fights with all the utility companies about his bills, and he still buys his clothes at Montgomery Ward. He is so bad that if his phone service goes out for a few hours, which happens several times a year, Cal deducts one day’s charges from his bill.”
“I didn’t know you could do that,” Diana said, impressed.
“You can,” Cole said dryly. “But they’ll turn your phone off until you pay up.”
Diana smiled at the colorful description he’d provided of a stubborn, elderly man with a big heart and a tight fist. “I still don’t understand how your problem is connected with him.”
“The connection is that Cal was a full partner in my original business, and I—who owe my current success to his past moral and financial support—could never bring myself to hurt or offend him by asking him to sign papers dissolving the partnership, not even after I repaid his loan with full interest. Besides, I would have trusted him with my life, and so it never occurred to me that he would balk at turning over his stock when I asked him to do it, let alone consider signing it over to someone else.”
Diana was astute enough as a businesswoman to immediately grasp the devastating impact of such an action, but she couldn’t quite believe that the man Cole had described would be capable of such treachery. “Have you formally asked him to sign over his shares to you?”
“I have.”
“And?”
A grim smile twisted Cole’s lips. “And he’s perfectly willing to do that, except for one small problem that he feels I’m obliged to solve for him before he can justify giving my company’s stock back to me.”
He paused and Diana, who was helplessly enthralled, said, “What problem?”
“Immortality.”
She gaped at him, caught between laughter and confusion. “Immortality?”
“Exactly. It seems that in the last six or seven years, about the time he turned seventy and his health began to fail badly, Uncle Calvin acquired a strong desire to immortalize himself by leaving behind a brood of descendants. The problem is that besides me, he has only one other blood relative, my cousin. Travis is married to a woman named Elaine and they are both very nice but far from brilliant, and they have two children who are neither nice nor brilliant, and Cal can’t stand either one of them. Because of that, Cal now wants to see me married so that I can produce clever babies to carry on the family line.”
Still unable to believe she understood what he was trying to tell her, Diana said, “And if you don’t do that, then what?”
“Then he will leave his share of my corporation to Elaine and Travis’s children, Donna Jean and Ted, who are both in college.” He paused to take a swallow of his drink as if he wanted to wash away the bad taste of the words. “In that event, Elaine and Travis would become my business partners with enough shares between them to control the company on behalf of their children until Donna Jean and Ted come of age. Travis already works for me, as the head of Unified’s research and development division. He’s loyal and he does his best, but he doesn’t have the brains or imagination to run Unified, even if I were willing to hand it over to him, which I assuredly am not! His kids lack his loyalty and their mother’s common sense and kindness. In fact, they’re greedy, egotistical schemers who are already planning how to spend my money when they get their hands on it.”
Diana bit back a helpless grin at his plight: Cole Harrison, the invincible wheeler-dealer, the lion of Wall Street, was being held over the proverbial barrel by a frail, elderly uncle—an uncle who was probably getting senile. “Poor Cal,” she said on a smothered laugh. “What a dilemma. One great-nephew has no business acumen, but he has a wife and children. The other great-nephew is a brilliant entrepreneur, without a wife or children—”
“And without the slightest desire to ever have either,” Cole added, summarizing his own attitude. Satisfied that she’d grasped the full situation, he lifted his glass in a sardonic toast to her insight.
His unequivocal wish to remain not only single but childless was obscured for the moment by Diana’s helpless amusement at his disgruntled tone. “You do seem to be in a remarkable fix,” she said with a wayward smile.
“Which, I gather you find entertaining?”
“Well, you have to admit it is just a little . . . er . . . gothic,” Diana managed unsteadily.
“At the very least,” he agreed grimly.
“Although,” she continued with an irrepressible grin, “in gothic romances, it’s the heroine who gets coerced into a marriage she doesn’t want. I’ve never heard of a hero who got himself into such a position.”
“If your intention is to cheer me up, you’re not succeeding,” he said bitterly.
In fact, he looked so chagrined by her description of his “unhero-like” predicament that Diana had to look away to hide her laughter. She was so amused that it took several moments before she realized how presumptuous and offensive his proposed solution actually was. “And so,” she concluded, trying to sound as calm and detached as he had earlier, “when you saw me tonight, you remembered I’d been jilted, and decided I’d be eager to marry you and help solve your problem—part
icularly if you bought me a necklace to help me save face.”
“I’m not that selfish—or that vain, Diana. I know damned well you’d throw my proposition in my face, except for one thing.”
“And that is?”
“By marrying you, I’d be offering myself as a solution to your problems.”
“I see,” Diana said, though she didn’t see at all. “Do you mind explaining how?”
“Simple logic. Even though you’ve been publicly jilted, you can save your pride if you marry me immediately. Tomorrow, the newspapers will be filled with pictures of us kissing on the balcony tonight and the story of my buying you this necklace. If our marriage is announced the next day, people are going to assume that we’ve had something going all along and that you probably did the jilting, not Penworth.”
Diana shrugged to hide the sharp stab of anger and hurt she felt at his callous summation of her own predicament. “I don’t have that much pride to save, not if it requires anything as outrageous and rash as what you’re suggesting.”
“No, but you do have a business to save. The shield of being engaged for the last two years was already wearing thin. Now that that is gone,” Cole finished, “your competitors will double their attacks and the media will collaborate in publicizing all the furor and hype for their own benefit.”
Anguish and anger turned her green eyes stormy an instant before her long lashes swept down, concealing her emotions from Cole’s view—but not in time to prevent him from noting that her reaction to the mention of Penworth’s defection wasn’t nearly as violent as her reaction to this very viable threat to her company.
Despite her delicate features and fragile, feminine beauty, Diana Foster was apparently a woman who put business first. If nothing else, Cole decided as he watched the breeze ruffle her dark auburn hair, they certainly had that in common.
While he gave Diana time to consider what he’d said, he tried to put together what little he knew about the business that meant so much to her, but there wasn’t much. Based on the bits and pieces he’d read or seen on the news this week, all he knew was that the company was founded by the Foster family.
The business had apparently begun as a Houston catering service for the very rich—one that specialized in “natural” foods presented in lavish ways, but using only handmade or homegrown ornamentation. Somewhere along the way, that practice had been dubbed the Foster Ideal, and it had ultimately resulted in a magazine called Foster’s Beautiful Living. He’d seen a copy at the airport magazine stand earlier that week, shortly after he’d seen Diana on CNN, and he’d leafed through it. Amid all the glossy photographs of brightly painted furniture, stenciled walls, and tables covered with hand-decorated linens and laden with gorgeous food and stunning homemade centerpieces, the philosophy of the magazine—and the basis for the Foster Ideal—seemed to be that by returning to basics, a woman could and would achieve personal satisfaction, a sense of vast accomplishment, and domestic tranquillity. Beyond that, all he noticed was that the photography had been superb, and that Corey Foster Addison was responsible for it.
That hadn’t surprised him, since his every recollection of Corey as a young girl included a camera. He had, however, felt a certain amused irony over the fact that the founder and publisher of that homey, back-to-basics magazine was, in reality, a pampered Houston debutante—one who had once admitted to him, while seated on a bale of hay and grimacing at a smudge on her hand, that she’d never been a tomboy because she didn’t like getting dirty.
He glanced sideways at her moonlit profile, and he marveled at the stupidity that had prompted Penworth to prefer an eighteen-year-old Italian model over Diana Foster. Even when she was a teenager, Diana had sparkled and glowed with wit, intelligence, and gentleness. As a woman, her vivid coloring, lovely figure, and innate poise made her stand out like a queen among peasants.
Cole had been with enough models to know that they were boringly obsessive about every molecule of their skin and hair, and that the bodies that looked so beautiful in designer clothes and magazine centerfolds felt like skin stretched over a skeleton in a man’s bed.
Penworth was a fool, and he had blown his chance.
Cole Harrison was not a fool, and he was not going to blow his.
Chapter 27
DECIDING THAT DIANA HAD NOW had ample time to face reality as he’d portrayed it, Cole said quietly, “I wasn’t trying to hurt or embarrass you, I was only trying to describe your situation as it actually exists.”
She swallowed audibly and looked down at her hands; one held her champagne glass but the fingers of the other one were clutching the railing so tightly that her knuckles were white, and when she realized Cole had noticed that, she automatically loosened her grip. She didn’t like having her emotions exposed to anyone’s eyes, even his, Cole realized. That was something else they had in common, and it pleased him because what he wanted from her was a completely impersonal partnership, a businesslike arrangement with no emotions to deal with while it existed, or while it was being dissolved.
On the other hand, her continued silence was not what he wanted, and he deliberately forced her out of it. “Diana, if you’re blaming me for something, then blame me for being blunt, but not for creating your unhappiness.”
She drew a deep, steadying breath, but there were angry tears in her voice. “Why should I blame you for stating the problem in all its ugly reality?”
“I didn’t merely state the problem,” Cole pointed out gently. “I also offered you a perfect solution. Me.”
“Yes, you did, and I do appreciate the offer—honestly I do . . .”
She trailed off, and Cole realized that although his solution still struck her as bizarre and impossible, she was being careful not to hurt his feelings. The knowledge made her seem very sweet in his estimation, and very naive, because his feelings were not involved in this bargain. He preferred to live his life in a permanent state of unemotional objectivity.
“The problem is,” she began again in that same soft, gentle voice, “I can’t quite see the logic in exchanging a fiancé I loved but who didn’t love me for a husband I don’t love and who doesn’t love me either.”
“That’s what makes it so perfect!” Cole said, putting his hand on her arm as he pressed his point. “Our marriage won’t be complicated by messy emotions.”
She put down her glass and wrapped her arms around herself as if she were chilled by his attitude, dislodging his hand in the process. “Are you really as cold and unfeeling as you sound?”
Gazing into her beautiful, upturned face with her breasts only inches from him, Cole felt anything but cold. For the first time since he’d conceived his hasty plan tonight, it occurred to him that sexual desire for her could actually become a complication. He circumvented the obstacle by silently vowing to avoid all serious intimacy with her. “I’m not cold,” he said aloud. “I’m being practical. I have a pressing problem that acquiring a spouse would solve for me, and you’re in exactly the same predicament. Our marriage won’t be complicated by messy emotions; it will be a friendly business arrangement, terminated at the end of a year by a quiet, congenial divorce. We’re the perfect solution for each other. If you were superstitious, you could say this was fate.”
“I don’t trust fate. I used to believe Dan and I were fated for each other.”
“There’s a major difference between Penworth and me,” Cole said with a bite in his voice. “I don’t break my word when I give it.”
It was at that moment, with his steely eyes boring into hers and his deep voice resounding with conviction, that Diana truly accepted that he was in absolute, dead earnest about all this. She was still reeling from the shock of that when he took her chin between his thumb and forefinger; he forced her to meet his compelling gaze. “During the year we’re married,” he stated, “I give you my word that I will conduct myself publicly as if I were the most devoted and faithful of husbands. I will not knowingly do anything to cause you even a moment of the hu
miliation or anger that Penworth has brought you. In fact, I will do everything in my power to ensure you never regret our bargain in any way,” he finished and then set down his champagne glass.
There is no bargain, Diana’s mind warned her in a whisper, but the silent argument was being overturned by the effect of a somber handsome face, a deep, hypnotic voice, and a powerful male body that loomed before her, tall and strong—a man who was offering to shield her from the world with a pair of broad shoulders that looked as if they could shoulder all her burdens. The combination of all that was becoming dangerously, sweetly appealing, particularly because he wasn’t talking about love or even affection.
“In the eyes of everyone,” he continued, his low voice gaining force, “you will appear to be my cherished wife, and during the year we’re married, you will be that.”
Cherished . . . An antiquated word . . . sensitive and sentimental . . . unlike anything Dan had ever said to her. And totally unlike anything she’d have expected Cole to say.
His hands slid up her arms then down, velvet manacles pulling her closer to him, deeper into the sensual spell he was weaving with the help of a great deal of French champagne and wine laced with romantic Texas moonlight. “Naturally,” he continued with gentle firmness, “I will expect the same promises from you. Is that agreeable?”
Diana couldn’t believe she was seriously considering going through with this, not even when she felt herself nod slightly.
“I haven’t agreed to the whole plan,” she warned shakily, “only to the conditions.”
His right hand left her arm and came to rest lightly against the side of her face, tipping it up to his. “Yes, Diana,” he said with a knowing smile, his fingers spreading over her cheek, “you have. You just haven’t said the words yet.” His eyes and his voice were casting a spell. “By tomorrow, all your worries and all of mine can be over. All you have to do is say you agree, and I’ll have my plane ready to take off for Nevada in an hour.”