Susan Fox - His Hired Bride

Hoyt sat back in his chair to stare at her. He looked stunned. Well, so was she. And maybe insulted. If this was a joke, it was a rotten one she never would have expected from him.

“Your ring is beautiful,” she said casually. “But who’s it for…?”

Susan Fox lives in Des Moines, Iowa. A lifelong fan of Westerns, cowboys and love stories with guaranteed happy endings, she tends to think of romantic heroes in terms of Stetsons and boots.

Fans may visit her Web site at www.susanfox.org

Books by Susan Fox

HARLEQUIN ROMANCE®

3777—THE MARRIAGE COMMAND

3788—BRIDE OF CONVENIENCE

3796—A MARRIAGE WORTH WAITING FOR

3828—THE BRIDE PRIZE

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

THESE days, Eadie Webb was almost the only person in their part of Texas who got along well with rancher Hoyt Donovan.

Eadie managed that by either staying out of his way or by treating him with relentless good grace. She ignored his surly expressions, bore it patiently when he was terse or blustery, and pleasantly accommodated his every dictate.

She knew precisely why he was out of sorts lately, and it tickled her sense of justice, though she’d never confess that to him in so many words. Partly because she was too polite to do so; partly because she didn’t want to take the chance that she might somehow hurt his feelings.

Men like Hoyt never owned up to having feelings anyway, at least not the kind that could be hurt, so any truthful remarks she might make about his situation would only enrage him further and increase the misery of everyone who happened to cross his path.

Hoyt Donovan was the most god-awful male chauvinist in Texas, and though he deserved to suffer some sort of consequences for his actions, no one else deserved to suffer with him. Not that Eadie believed he was truly suffering like normal mortals would, but he’d probably had his pride dented. And pride—particularly male pride—was all important to men like Hoyt.

But then, he’d come by that pride naturally. His blunt, stony looks gave him a rough handsomeness to go with his earthy sensuality, which was patently unfair for females like her who were too lackluster to ever enjoy anything more of them than the view.

Because of his rugged good looks, Hoyt Donovan had been the target of every marriage-minded female in their part of Texas, and women flocked to him like butterflies. If he wasn’t in the mood to have his male vanity catered to at that moment, he was arrogant enough to send them scattering with a cranky look or some other, more subtle indication of disinterest.

He could be bad about that, but it didn’t seem to make a lasting difference to the butterflies. More taken by surprise than offended or hurt, they recovered quickly and came fluttering back for another chance. He seemed somewhat more attracted to the mercenary ones, and they were usually the ones he put up with the longest, as if he enjoyed an occasional challenge to his unrelenting date ’em and drop ’em style. He deserved something for that, but his dating habits were more a by-product of his biggest flaw.

He didn’t treat his women badly, and none had ever complained that she’d heard about. He periodically sent them flowers between one expensive date and the next, and he almost always sent them a decent piece of jewelry or some interesting trinket after he stopped calling them. Eadie’s only problem with his generosity was that Hoyt regularly assigned those chores to her, and she’d been put in charge of the actual selections.

It wasn’t that he didn’t show his women a good time, because he did. He knew how to treat a woman like a queen, and he had a diabolical knack for catering to a lady’s interests, whether those interests were his or not.

But his ability to dictate the emotional parameters of the relationship, yet remain remote and unmarried, was becoming the stuff of legends. He’d left a prodigious number of broken hearts along his trail, so if he was surly now over finally getting jilted by the one woman he’d actually taken seriously, he deserved it.

But the biggest reason Eadie Webb hoped Hoyt Donovan would suffer a bit longer, was that his male tastes ran—no, galloped—to beautiful women, and always the most beautiful ones. He liked leggy blondes with haystack hair and puffy lips, exotic brunettes with lush curves, and fiery, green-eyed redheads who wore their costly designer clothes two sizes too small.

He didn’t seem to notice that most of his beauties were more self-involved and shallow than he was. Until he’d finally met the one who’d done him dirt.

Eadie felt ashamed of herself suddenly. She not only owed Hoyt her gratitude for hiring her to work for him a few afternoons a week, she also owed him her complete loyalty and deference because of a discreet act of kindness he’d once done for her. Though neither of them had ever spoken about that awful night since or even vaguely referred to it, Eadie felt the bittersweet burden of obligation to him.

Perhaps one of the reasons she felt so little sympathy for his upset of late was that the gentle man—the supremely kind man—he’d been that night five years ago, had been appearing less and less frequently these days. There’d been times this past year when she’d found his sour moods increasingly obnoxious, and she often wondered if she’d dreamed what he’d done for her way back then.

What no one would ever know and what Hoyt Donovan would never suspect, was that she’d fallen in love with him that night five years ago. Completely and irrevocably. Because she had, and because she was the very last woman on earth that beauty-obsessed Hoyt Donovan would ever consider a romantic possibility, Eadie was fully aware that the biggest reason she took such a harsh view of his love life was that she couldn’t seem to get past the jealousy she felt, so it gave her more than a little satisfaction to know he’d gotten a taste of his own medicine. She wondered if the beautiful Celeste had sent him a “parting gift.”

It frustrated her that Hoyt couldn’t see that his beauties were too in love with themselves to ever truly love him. Hoyt wasn’t a stupid man, and she’d always been wary of his insights, but he was as dense as a brick on some subjects.

Five years of loving him in secret was a long time. Long enough to prove, even to her, that Hoyt Donovan’s tastes would never change. It hadn’t taken five minutes for Eadie to realize he’d never be interested in a plain woman like her, though it had taken her far less than five minutes that awful night to realize she was doomed to love him—almost unconditionally—for the rest of her life.

Eadie forced herself to ignore the depressing sense of hopelessness she felt as she finished tidying up Hoyt’s desk. She’d typed his letters and caught up on his bookwork, saving it all to files before obsessively backing them up. Donovan Ranch was a monstrous headache to keep track of. Her three afternoons a week made a respectable dent in the paperwork, but Hoyt took care of the rest himself.

He’d paid her well for the tasks he’d hired her to do, and the money came in handy on her own small ranch, though the extra income evaporated by the time she got done paying bills. If things at home continued going downhill, by next year she might have to sell out.

The notion dragged her spirits lower. The idea of having to move to town and take an office job was traumatic. Aside from losing touch with the ranch life she’d loved and had grown up with, she’d no longer have either a reason or the opportunity to see Hoyt, though that was probably for the best. At twenty-six, the only thing more pitiful than being doomed to achieve “old maid” status in another few years or less, was to hang around a man she could never have.

The sound of Hoyt’s heavy bootsteps pounding steadily through the big ranch house startled her and she automatically glanced at the clock. The fact that Hoyt had apparently come back to the house early today wasn’t a good sign, not when he was still so riled and cranky. Because his bad mood had grown worse this past week, Eadie had taken greater pains to stay out of his way. She’d hoped to make her escape before he came back to the house, but his sudden arrival thwarted her plan.

From the bedroom end of the house opposite the wing the office was located in, she heard him thunder, “Eadie? I need you in here! Now!”

The order was as angry as she’d ever heard, and Eadie hurriedly finished stacking the handful of letters with their envelopes on his desk blotter to rush out of the room. Hoyt never leveled his bullish temper on her, though he often treated her to a blustery verbal account of the reason for his choler. She suspected he did that because she always listened calmly, and her very calmness seemed to cool him off by the time he was done letting off steam.

And of course, once he finished, he usually saw reason and quickly got over his aggravation. That was one of the things that made her forgive those times when his temper rose high: when he cooled off, Hoyt was truly mellow, and he didn’t hold grudges.

The problem in the aftermath of his breakup with the beautiful Celeste was that he’d fumed around for weeks now, and as far as she knew, he’d not spoken more than a handful of choice words on the subject. Most of what she knew had come from gossip. Which was why she’d guessed that his male pride had somehow been soundly assaulted. And why he wasn’t showing signs of letting go of a bit of his anger over it anytime soon.

She’d barely made it down the hall and halfway across the big living room before he bellowed out another, “Eadie—get in here!”

She sprinted the rest of the way across the living room to the hall, suddenly shaky because she sensed something new about his anger this time.

As she slowed to rush into what had to be the master bedroom, her shaking increased. She’d never been in the private areas of Hoyt’s home, and his bedroom was the most private. And intimate. She had only a moment to note the dark luster of the wide headboard of his massive bed before she reached the open door of the master bath and rounded the corner.

The moment she saw him, Eadie realized that for the rest of her life, she’d always feel this same wild excitement and rush of happiness at the mere sight of the man.

Hoyt was so big and broad-shouldered, his powerful, work-hardened body the very zenith of masculinity. His larger-than-life presence made the large bathroom feel about a foot wide. Beneath the black Stetson he still wore, his hair was dark and overlong, and his face was almost too rugged and harsh to be considered handsome, though it was.

And she adored him. Truly and simply, Eadie adored everything about Hoyt Donovan, though she’d never in a million years confess that to him or to anyone else. She’d taken brutal pains to make sure she never showed it.