Millionaire M.D.
Riley was laughing. “Aw, none of the story is true. Or maybe it is. The truth is that none of us seem to care. The town loves the legend, so we’ve been passing it on for years.”
“So tell me more about these jewels,” Klimt requested.
“Well, to start with, each of the jewels refers to the motto on the Texas Cattleman’s Club sign, see? Each of the gems is really unusual, partly because they’re so rare as to be priceless. You couldn’t buy one for love or money, not then and not now. Which made it all the more interesting and mysterious, why this Texas soldier was carrying them—but we’ll never know that answer. The point is that he had them. And one stone was a red diamond—”
“I never heard that diamonds came in a red color.”
“They don’t, they don’t,” Riley said. “Except once in a real rare while. And you study some gem lore, now, and you find red diamonds were the stones of kings, because they were that rare. So you look up in our motto sign, and that’s what the first word—leadership—is about. That’s what the red diamond is a symbol for. Right, Dr. Webb?”
“Right, Riley.” The orchestra had switched tunes to an old-fashioned waltz. Aaron Black glided past with a tall, plain young woman in his arms. Justin thought he recognized her. Pamela something? A teacher? Very shy, very proper—and how typical of Aaron to pick out a wallflower and make sure she wasn’t pining on the sidelines.
Even better that he wasn’t dancing with Win. Justin searched the crowd again. He saw Aaron, he saw Matt, he saw… Finally, he caught a glimpse of her again. This time she was partnered by a man with coal-black hair and striking gray eyes, teeth shining stark white in a face that so rarely smiled—the Sheikh. Ben. And another Texas Cattleman’s Club member, thank God, so it wasn’t like Justin had to worry she wasn’t in a gentleman’s hands.
Exactly.
He trusted Ben the same way he trusted Aaron and Matt. With his life. But trusting them with a single, attractive woman was a different story—particularly when the men had no idea how much he cared about her.
Nor would they.
“Dr. Webb, Mr. Klimt was asking about the other stones….” Riley prompted him.
“Yeah? Well, the legend has it that there’s the red diamond…and then a black harlequin opal…and then an emerald.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Riley agreed, and settled on his elbows on the bar to keep spinning the tale for his willing listener. “See, technically the opal’s the least valuable of the three stones. But a black harlequin opal—she’s a rare mother. And those who get into the magic of gems tend to see the harlequin opal as both having healing power and as somehow having the inner light and power to bring justice—so that’s where the second word in the Club motto comes from. Justice. As an ideal, you know?”
“Yes, Mr. Monroe, I believe I know what an ideal is,” Klimt said impatiently. “And the third stone, the emerald?”
“I’m coming to that one. Around the world, for centuries, emeralds were always considered the stone of peacemakers, and this particular emerald was said to be one giant stone besides. So peace was naturally the third word they put in the Club motto.”
“Leadership, justice, peace,” Klimt echoed. “That’s quite a story. But it seems such an elaborate legend if the stones never really existed.”
“And there’s more to it than that,” Riley said happily. “Our guy brought the stones back to Royal after the war with Mexico. He was gonna be rich, you know, sell ’em, buy a big spread, put up a fancy house and all? And he meant to, only he got home, and oil was found on his homestead. He had black gold coming out of his ears, so he never did need to sell those stones to have his fortune made.”
“So what happened to them?”
Riley peered over Justin’s glass, then Klimt’s, then ducked down to bring up bottles again. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. The Texas Cattleman’s Club…well, there were some men formed this group, back even before Club founder Tex Langley’s time. Some say they first got together to guard the jewels. Some say they were just the leading citizens of Royal, who passed on responsibility for the town’s security from generation to generation. Some say they just used the legend of the jewels to create that motto, because, well, it was a good motto. Those are our values around here. Leadership. Justice. Pea—”
“You think the jewels exist?”
Riley fingered his chest. “Me? Oh, you bet. I think they existed for real, back then, and they exist somewhere now.”
“So what do you think happened to them?”
“Well, everybody’s got a theory….”
Someone cut in on her with the Sheikh. Dakota Lewis. Justin’s eyes tracked the two of them on the dance floor, and he almost had to smile. Dakota wasn’t much on dancing. Win’d be lucky if she left the floor without broken toes if she stuck with him long. Dakota looked what he was—no uniform, but the retired military status was obvious from his unyielding posture and scalped haircut. On the surface he looked tough and hard—and truth to tell he was—but Justin couldn’t worry about Winona with Dakota. Since his divorce, Dakota had shown no interest in any women.
“Well, if the jewels did exist, where is your best guess they’d be hidden?” Klimt asked Riley.
Again Justin turned his head to the other two men. Klimt could only seem to march to one drummer. The town loved its legend. Actually, outsiders seemed to love it just as much; tourists consistently ate it up. But Klimt was pushing it beyond anyone’s normal interest. “If the jewels really existed, they’d be under heavy lock and key,” he said mildly. “We only encourage the legend because it’s good fun for everyone. And who’d want to be the one to break hearts by confessing that Santa Claus didn’t exist? I sure plan to believe until I’m ll0.”
Riley chortled appreciatively. “You saying you believe in Santa or the jewels, Dr. Webb?”
“In Santa, of course. You can have the jewels. I’ll take the loot Santa carries around any day.”
Riley laughed again. Klimt even threw him a sour smile, and, temporarily, Riley seemed to be off the hook for entertaining Mr. Banty Rooster. Klimt, carrying a fresh schnapps, wandered off into the crowd.
And Justin was about to do that, too…until Winona caught his attention again. She was still on the dance floor, but dancing with a stranger this time.
A non-Texan. One of the Asterlanders that Justin didn’t know. He watched the dude’s big hand sift down to her fanny.
She smiled at the guy. And then reached back and removed his hand.
Justin shifted on his feet. Something kicked in his pulse. Not just jealousy—God knew he knew all the shades of green there were in that particularly annoying emotion. But Winona was clearly handling the guy—no matter how protective Justin felt, the truth was, he’d never seen a man that Winona couldn’t handle with both hands tied.
That was, in fact, why she so often got conned into attending these kinds of shindigs. Regular cops were always around for security, but it wasn’t the same. The few serious crimes in Royal tended to be robbery. Sure, there was a crime of passion now and then, a fight at the Royal Diner occasionally, domestic dispute problems and that sort of thing. But basically this just wasn’t a high-crime community. This was oil country. Those who’d made it, made it big. And those who hadn’t made it were paid well, simply because there was ample to go around. The school systems were top-drawer, the whole area supported with fine services. The only “risk” prevalent in a small, ultrarich town like Royal was its being a draw for thieves.
Which was exactly why and how Winona was irreplaceable at these galas. She always showed up in the same evil black dress, the same sassy high heels. It wasn’t that she showed off anything—ever—but there just didn’t seem to be a man born who wouldn’t talk to her. On top of that, she sensed things. She had an intuition when someone or something wasn’t right.
And Justin frowned again suddenly. No guy was eyeing her at that specific moment—and her dance partner had quit trying to put the make on her. But her gaze was roving the room. She tripped in her partner’s arms—which wasn’t that much of a shock, because unless a man let her lead, she couldn’t dance worth a Texas jumping bean. But it was the way she suddenly moved—stiffly, warily—that had Justin suddenly alert and pushing through bodies to get to the other side of the room.
Maybe she didn’t know he was in love with her.
Maybe she’d never think of him as anything more than the old friend she’d grown up with.
For damn sure, maybe she’d never realize that his offers to marry her were sincere.
But if Winona were in trouble, Justin was going to be there for her—whether she wanted him there or not.
Two
Winona was in such trouble.
She’d slept with the same dream two nights running, replaying the evening of the Texas Cattleman’s Club gala. She knew it was just another dream, because the same details kept getting embellished. In the dream, she was breathtakingly gorgeous—which was a lot of fun, but not remotely realistic. She’d been whirling and swirling on the dance floor, not tripping, being graceful—which was another reason she knew it was a dream. And she kept dancing with different men—man after man after man, all of them adorable, all of them charmed by every word that came out of her mouth, fighting to have another spin with her around the floor….
Okay, okay, so these were pretty ridiculous dreams. But they were her dreams, and she was having a great time with them.
Only in this particular night’s version, Justin pulled her into his arms. For “The Tennessee Waltz”—which had to be one of the schmaltziest songs of all time, a song doomed to bring out romantic feelings in even the toughest of women—such as herself—and suddenly she was naked. Whirling around the floor. Waltzing. Without a stitch on. Only being naked was okay, because there wasn’t a soul in the room who realized that she was naked. Except for herself.
And Justin.
Alarm bells started clanging in her ears, but Winona determinedly ignored them. Obviously this wasn’t real, and since this happened to be her personal, wicked dream, she didn’t want to let go of it until she had to.
Justin couldn’t take his eyes off her. She whacked him upside the head—which was such a real, logical thing for her to do that for a second, Winona freaked that this wasn’t a dream—but he didn’t seem to mind, and the whack didn’t seem to stop him from looking, either…a long, slow look that began with her naked toes, dawdled past long slender legs (this was a dream, for sure), past hips without a single spare ounce of fat on them (and a damn good dream), up, his gaze a caress that took in waist and proud, trembling breasts and white throat, then up to her vulnerable, naked eyes.
Yeah, she wanted him.
She’d always wanted him.
Another alarm bell clanged in her mind—but for Pete’s sake, in the privacy of a dream, a girl should be able to be honest with herself. Justin looked like a young Sam Elliot. Tall. Lanky. With a slow, lazy drawl and a lot for a girl to worry about in those sexy eyes. Cover those broad shoulders in a tux and a woman just wanted to sip him in—correction—sip him in and lap him up both.
A vague memory surfaced in her dream. She’d been twelve. Until she’d been fostered with the Gerard family, she’d never had a bike, and she was new to the family, still waiting for someone to hit her, someone to scold her. It’d happen. She just didn’t know when yet, but she was wary this time, prepared to protect herself. She didn’t need anybody to watch out for her…it was just the bike. Oh man, oh man, she wanted to ride a bike so badly, and everybody assumed she knew how, at her age. But she didn’t. And the first time she took it out, it was almost dusk, because no one was on the street then, no strangers to see her.
And Justin had been there when she’d crashed into a tree. Helped her up. Righted the bike. A gorgeous heartthrob of a seventeen-year-old—with a chivalrous streak—enough to make her tough, hard, mean, cold heart go hoboyhoboyhoboy. He’d touched her cheek. Made her laugh. Then she’d had to punch him for helping her, of course. What else could a twelve-year-old do?
More alarm bells clanged in her mind. The same, annoying, insistent alarm bells.
Winona’s eyes popped open on a pitch-black bedroom. She wasn’t twelve and falling into a sinking-deep, mortifying crush with Justin Webb. She wasn’t dancing naked with Justin at the Texas Cattleman’s Club, either. It was just her bedroom, and the telephone was ringing off the hook, at seven in the morning—according to the insane neon dials on the bedside clock.
The instant she read the time, though, she snapped awake fast. There was only one reason for a telephone call at this crazy hour. Trouble. And although technically she was a nine-to-five cop, working with at-risk teens, reality was that kids never got in trouble at nice, convenient hours.
She fumbled for the lamp switch, then hit the ground running, shagging a hand through her tousled hair as she grabbed the receiver.
“Winona?”
Not a kid. An adult’s voice. Her boss, from the precinct. “You know it’s me. What’s wrong, Wayne?”
“You know the jet that was supposed to take off last night for Asterland? The hotsy totsy flight with all the royalty and dignitaries and all?”
“Yes, of course.” So did the whole town.
“Well, something went wrong. She lifted off, barely got in the air before they were radioing in some garbled, panicked message about a problem. Next thing, they’re making an emergency landing about fifteen miles out of town, middle of nowhere, flat as a pancake. Fire broke out—”
She got the gist. The details didn’t matter. “Holy cow. How can I help?”
“Truthfully, I don’t know.” Winona could well imagine Wayne squinting and rubbing the back of his head. He didn’t like trouble in his town. The way Wayne saw it, Royal belonged to him. Anyone took the crease out of those jeans ticked him off. “I’m calling from the scene. Everything’s a mess. This all just happened less than a half hour ago. First thing was getting everybody off the plane safely. Only a couple seem badly injured, the rest are just shaken. But what the hell happened, I don’t know. And I don’t want every Tom, Dick and curious Harry messing with my crime scene. It’s still dark. Only so much I can get done until daylight—”
He was talking more to himself than to her. Winona knew how her boss’s mind worked. “So where could I be the most help? At the hospital? The plane site? The office?”
“Here,” Wayne said bluntly. “You gonna kick me straight to Austin if I admit I just want a woman here?”
“Probably.” Holding the phone clamped to her ear with one hand, she reached for the deodorant on the dresser and thumbed open the lid. Applying deodorant one-handed was tricky, but she’d done it before.
“Well, then, you’re just going to have to kick me. To be honest, everything’s being handled that needs to be. It’s just, that ain’t good enough. Not for this. Dad blame it, we seem to have the makings of a major international incident. First, we have a plane that I’m told is top of the line, perfect, nothing can go wrong—but it still crash-landed. Then we have embassies calling. We have Washington calling. We’ve got fire trucks from Midland to Odessa joining in to help us. Then half the town—naturally—is starting to show up as the sun comes up, it’s like trying to stop an avalanche. Next thing the women’ll be bringing casseroles. It’s a madhouse. We got to find out what caused this plane crash and to do that, we have to get everybody out of here and get some kind of order. I just want my whole team here, that’s all. Even if—”
“Wayne?”
“What?”
“Stop talking. Give me directions.” He did. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” She hung up and started moving. Plucked white panties from the drawer, pulled them on, then hopped into low-rise, boot-cut jeans. She stood up, head scrambled. Not by Wayne’s call in itself. Maybe she was hired to work only with juveniles, but this wasn’t some big eastern city. This was Texas. People pitched in whenever there was a crisis, and no one gave a rat’s toenail over whether helping fit a job description.
But a plane crash-landing was big news—and troubling. She knew every single face that had been on that flight—they’d all been at the Texas Cattleman’s Club gala two nights ago—and a few of them were personal friends of hers besides. Pamela Miles had been flying to Asterland to be an exchange teacher. Lady Helena had made herself known around town because she was the kind to involve herself in caring causes. On top of that…well, the whole world was troubling these days, but not Royal. Things just didn’t happen here. Sure, there were some thefts and squabbles and people who lost their screws now and then, but nothing unusual. Nothing happened there that would ever draw attention from outsiders.
Suddenly she heard a sound—a sound odd and unexpected enough to make her quit jogging down the hall and stop for a second. The sound had seemed like a mewling baby’s cry—but of course, that was ridiculous. When she heard nothing again, she picked up her pace.
In the peach-and-cream kitchen, she flicked on the light, started her espresso machine, then peeled back toward her bedroom, mentally cataloguing what she still had to do. She needed coffee, her hair brushed, an apple for the road, and yeah, something to wear above the waist. She never wore a uniform—if you were going to dress for success with kids, you wore jeans and no symbols or labels to put them off—but that wasn’t to say she could arrive at a crash site topless. There were times she fantasized about giving Wayne an attack of apoplexy—God knew her boss was a hard-core chauvinist—but not today.
She pulled a sports bra over her head, burrowed in a drawer for an old black sweater…then jerked her head up again.
Damn. Somewhere there was a sound. An off-kilter, didn’t-belong-in-her-house sound. A puppy crying? A cat lost in the neighborhood somewhere nearby?
Silently, still listening, she straightened the sweater, pulled on socks, shoved her feet into boots, grabbed a brush. Her hair looked like a squirrel’s nest, but then that’s how it looked when it was freshly styled, too. A glance at her face in the bathroom mirror somehow, inexplicably, made her think of Justin again…and that dream in which his gaze had been all over her naked body.
She scowled in the mirror. First, strange dreams, then strange sounds—she’d seemed to wake up in la la land today, and on a morning when she needed to be her sharpest.
Swiftly she thumbed off the light and started hustling for real. In the kitchen, she poured coffee, then backtracked to the hall closet for her jacket, scooping up the stuff she needed: car keys, an apple, a lid for her espresso, some money for lunch. Almost the minute she finished collecting her debris, her feet seemed to be instinctively making a detour. One minute. That’s all she needed to check all the rooms and make absolutely positive that nothing was making that odd sound from inside the house. It wasn’t as if she lived in a mighty mansion that would take hours to check out. Her ranch-style house was downright miniscule—but it was hers. Hers and the bank’s, anyway.
She’d put a chunky down payment on it last year. She was twenty-eight, time to stop renting. Time to start making sure she had a place and security and in a neighborhood with a lot of kids and a good school system. Her bedroom was cobalt-blue and white, and, since decorating choices scared her, she’d just used the same colors in the bathroom. A second bedroom she used as a den, where she stashed her TV and computer—and anything she didn’t have time to put away. The third bedroom was the biggest, and stood starkly empty—Winona wasn’t admitting the room was intended for a baby, not to anyone, at least not yet. But it was.
The kitchen was a non-cook’s dream, practical, with lots of make-easy machines and tools, the counters and walls covered with warm peach tiles that led down into the living room. A cocoa couch viewed the backyard, bird feeders all over the place, lots of windows…damn. There, she heard the sound again. The mewling cry.
Either that or she was going out of her mind, which, of course, was always a possibility. But she unlatched the front door and yanked it open.
Her jaw surely dropped ten feet. Her ranch house was white adobe, with redbrick arches in the doorways. And there, in the doorway shadow, was a wicker laundry basket. The basket appeared to be stuffed with someone’s old, clean laundry, rags and sheets…but damned if that wasn’t where the crying sound emanated from.
The car keys slipped from her fingers and clattered to the cold steps. The apple slipped from her other hand and rolled down the drive, forgotten. She hunched down, quickly parting the folds and creases of fabric.
When she saw the baby, her heart stopped.
Abandoned. The baby had actually been abandoned.
“Ssh, ssh, it’s all right, don’t cry….” So carefully, so gingerly, she lifted out the little one. The morning was icy at the edges, the light still a predawn-gray. The baby was too swathed in torn-up blankets and rags to clearly make out its features or anything else.
“Ssh, ssh,” Winona kept crooning, but her heart was slamming, slamming. Feelings seeped through her nerves, through her heart from a thousand long-locked doors, bubbled up to the pain of naked air. She’d been abandoned as a child. She knew what an abandoned child felt like…and would feel like, her whole life.
A crinkle of paper slipped out of the basket. It only took Winona a few seconds to read the printed message.
Dear Winona Raye,
I have no way to take care of my Angel. You are the only one I could ask. Please love her.
Winona’s cop experience immediately registered several things—that there’d be no way to track the generic paper and ordinary print, that the writing was simple but not uneducated, and that somehow the mother of the baby knew her specifically—well enough to identify her name, and well enough to believe she was someone who would care for a baby.
Which, God knows, she would.
As swiftly as Winona read the note, she put it aside. There was no time for that now. The baby was wet beneath the blankets, the morning biting at the January-freezing temperatures. She scooped up the little one and hustled inside the warm house, rocking, crooning, whispering reassurances…all past the gulp in her throat that had to be bigger than the state of Texas.
God knew what she was going to do. But right now nothing mattered but the obvious. Taking care of the child. Making sure the little one was warm, dry, fed, healthy. Then Winona would try to figure out why anyone would have left the baby on her doorstep specifically…and all the other issues about what the child’s circumstances might be.
That fast, that instantaneously, Win felt a bond with the baby that wrapped around her heart tighter than a vise. The thing was, as little as she knew—she already knew too much.
She was already positive that the child was going to get thrown in the foster-care system, because that’s what happened when a child was deserted. Even if a parent immediately showed up, the court would still place the child in the care of Social Services—at least temporarily—because whatever motivated the parent to abandon the child could mean it wasn’t safe in their care. A change of heart wasn’t enough. An investigation needed to be conducted to establish what the child’s circumstances were.
Winona knew all those legal procedures—both from her job and from her life. And although she knew her feelings were irrational—and annoyingly emotional—it didn’t stop the instinct of bonding. The fierceness of caring. The instantaneous heart surge—even panic—to protect this baby better than she’d been protected. To save this baby the way she almost hadn’t been saved. To love this baby the way—to be honest—Winona never had been and never expected to be loved.
There were several coffee machines spread through Royal Memorial Hospital, but only one that counted. After he’d switched from trauma medicine to plastic surgery, Justin had generally tried to avoid the Emergency Room, but by ten that morning, he was desperate. Groggy-eyed, he pushed the coins into the machine, punched his choice of Straight Black, kicked the base—he knew this coffee machine intimately—and then waited.