Read Online The Texan's Diamond Bride by TERESA HILL - Free Book Online Page A

Foley or her brother, but the money part. She’d been willing to head into an old, long-abandoned mine alone to do it. She wasn’t stupid. She’d known the risks and been willing to take it for the sake of her family.
    And she’d failed.
    So, the stores were in some trouble, her mother had a thing for Rex Foley, and Charlie…
    Poor Charlie.
    She feared she’d just made things worse for him.
     
    Travis stretched out in front of the fire and listened to her toss and turn and sigh for as long as he could stand it, then finally turned toward her and barked out, “What is it?”
    She gave a start, reminding him of the way she’d done that at each big bolt of lightning.
    “Sorry,” she said. “I…there’s just so much, I don’t even know where to start.”
    “You want back in the mine?” he guessed, because he knew eventually she’d get around to trying to talk him into that.
    Even now, caught red-handed, she thought she could somehow charm her way back inside, thinking to steal one more thing from his family?
    Unbelievable!
    Women!
    A man just couldn’t trust them.
    Just this past summer, Travis’s own brother, Zane, had gone nuts over his little girl Olivia’s nanny, and Travis had known right away that woman was hiding something. It hadn’t taken more than a couple of phone calls to find out Melanie Grandy hadn’t always been a nanny. She’d worked as a Las Vegas showgirl. Travis didn’t know if Zane knew about that or not, and in the end, he’d decided to leave it alone, thinking they’d work it out. It wasn’t like the woman had been a stripper or a call girl.
    But now, being reminded himself of just how manipulative women could be, Travis was wondering if he’d done the right thing. He could probably use someone like Zane right now to remind him not to get stupid over a pretty, scheming woman.
    “Go ahead,” he urged Miss Paige McCord. “Tell me why I should let you back into that mine.”
    “No, it’s not the mine,” she insisted. “I mean…yes, I want back in it, but, no, that’s not what I was talking about a second ago. It was…I wondered if I could talk to you about just one thing without…well, maybe without this whole lifelong family feud getting in the way of it?”
    “Considering the fact that everything between your family and mine started there and is colored by that, I don’t see how, Red.”
    “Yes. I know. You’re right. I’m just…None of it’s his fault—”
    “His fault?”
    “Charlie. My little brother…Your…You know about Charlie, right?”
    Okay, that surprised him.
    And that particular wound was still raw and festering.
    He didn’t really know how he felt about having a twenty-one-year-old half brother he’d known nothing about until a few weeks ago.
    While he might disagree with his brothers about a lot of things, how they lived their lives, what was important to them, things like that, they were and always would be brothers. They were tight. They were family, and he’d have walked through fire for any of them anytime they needed it.
    So to know that there was a fourth Foley brother out there somewhere, who’d never been one of them….
    It was just wrong.
    Who’d been a McCord instead.
    “Yes,” he admitted. “My father told us about Charlie.”
    His father was still reeling from the news himself. His father, steady as a rock, raise-three-boys-alone-after-his-wife-died kind of steady, absolutely reeling.
    Travis didn’t think anything in this world could have shaken his father like that particular bit of news.
    “It’s just that…Charlie’s special,” Paige said. “He’s great. He’s sweet. He’s kind. He’s happy. Like a puppy, just kind of silly and goofy. Everybody loves him. And he’s so young. I don’t…I can’t stand the idea of him getting hurt in all this.”
    Travis got up and came to stand over her, hands on his hips, furious all over again. “And you think my father and my brothers and I are going to hurt