A Hard-Hearted Man Read online

  It was only through the force of his willpower, well-trained by now, that Ross was able to clamp down on his own sharply rising temper as it flared with an intensity that surprised him.

  He never allowed himself to get angry that way, not with the kind of fiery wrath that was blazing at him from Lilah Evans’s eyes. He couldn’t afford to. Anger like that revealed too much. It consumed you, then left you drained and vulnerable when it passed. He took a slow breath, then exhaled, drumming his fingers evenly on the gear-stick, waiting for the heat inside him to cool.

  From all appearances, Lilah’s temper had already burnt itself out. She slumped back in her seat, folding her hands tightly in her lap and staring down at them as if she suddenly regretted her outburst.

  Ross drove silently, the echo of her words still in his ears. Interesting, he thought. Tempers flaring out of control had a way of wrenching the naked truth out of people, and for that reason he was inclined to believe Lilah Evans when she said she was no looter. She really was still clinging to the hope of changing his mind.

  What was it going to take to convince her that she was wasting her time? Too much was at stake to let anyone upset his plans, and it galled Ross that this woman could sit there self-righteously judging him, assuming that money was his reason for selling the ranch. Money! She had no idea.

  “You don’t know as much about this situation as you think you do,” he said coolly, his anger settling like an icy weight inside him. He had turned the car away from the main road, onto the six-mile track that eventually became a driveway. Before long they were approaching the old ranch house. It sat, wood-sided and sprawling, on the top of a low rise in the land, its tall windows half-covered by a border of shoulder-high aloe plants.

  He parked the car under a thatched overhang and got out, glancing back at Lilah, who was still sitting, frowning slightly, in her seat.

  “Coming?” he said, turning toward the house.

  He heard her door open as he walked away. “Wait a minute,” she called urgently to his back. “What I said about borrowing artifacts to show you... I know it sounds weak, and I probably haven’t given you any reason to believe me, but—”

  He reached for his key and unlocked the wide wooden front door. “Actually, I do believe you.”

  “You do?” She sounded startled. “Really?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes! I mean...wait, would you? I don’t want to come...”

  He stepped inside, missing the end of her protest, and took off his dinner jacket, wincing slightly at the aching stiffness in his neck and shoulders.

  It was the eighth long day he’d spent in the Nairobi office, and his father’s affairs were still far from being in order. The office was overflowing with papers, some boxed and labeled, most still bursting haphazardly out of creaky filing cabinets and shelves. All of it had to go, either into storage or more likely into the trash. The business receipts for heads of cattle bought and sold, the contracts with meat and hide distributors and the rest of the ranching miscellany were bonfire fuel as far as Ross was concerned.

  He dropped his jacket over the back of a chair, and looked around the living room. Ten days ago, he’d set foot in this house again for the first time in fifteen years, and he could still feel the strange mixture of comfort and anxiety that had assaulted him then.

  But for a few minor changes that his father had made over the years, it was all eerily familiar, from the bright African weavings draped over the couches to the dusty leather-bound books lining the walls, to the faint smell of wood smoke and Hugh’s tobacco lingering in the air.

  Ross reached up to rub his forehead. Maybe he should have saved himself this unwelcome rush of emotion, not to mention an hour-long daily commute, by booking himself a room at the Hilton. He could have dealt with all of this from a comfortable distance, and then gotten the hell out of Kenya and back to his life, leaving old hurts and bad memories behind him for good.

  He was pouring himself a glass of red wine when Lilah finally appeared in the doorway, her shoulders squared. The lamplight caught glints of dark gold in her hair, and her face was pallid except for the stain of color burning high on the edges of her cheekbones.

  “Okay,” she said grimly. “We need to talk.”

  Chapter 3

  Lilah was still kicking herself for letting Ross Bradford goad her into blowing up at him. Trading insults was a luxury she couldn’t afford if she wanted to save her excavation. She had followed him toward the house, preparing to plead her case and then stopped outside the door with a sudden case of nerves.

  Being alone with Ross in the low light and soft shadows of his house seemed too far removed from the businesslike presentation she’d planned for the morning, and it made her feel awkward and off balance.

  But she had steeled herself, pulling her arguments around her like chain mail and marched in to seize the only chance she was likely to get.

  Ross had glanced up when she spoke, and his eyes moved over her thoughtfully. Lilah instinctively straightened under his gaze, and forced herself to return the look steadily, ignoring the sudden prickling warmth in her cheeks. She could read nothing on his face, and was startled when one corner of his mouth curved up.

  “Talk?” he said dryly. “You look as if you’re ready to slay a dragon, Professor. Should I be worried?”

  “No. I’m not looking for dragons.”

  “You found one anyway. But my scales are thick, so you might as well come in. What do you drink?”

  Lilah nodded toward the dull red glow of the wine in his glass. “The same, please.”

  She found herself watching his hands as he lifted the bottle. His fingers were strong and golden, and he moved smoothly, with the grace of a man at home in the lean strength of his body.

  In the warm yellow light of the room, Lilah saw that he was wearing the remains of formal evening wear. The white shirt and black pants had wrinkled and wilted by this hour of the night, as if they had worn out in the fight to keep him confined.

  She wasn’t surprised. His clothes were clearly expensive, and cut to fit with a molded elegance, but there was a dark intensity about him that would frighten starched linen and pressed neckties into limp submission.

  Ross silently handed her the stemmed glass.

  “Thank you.” She unexpectedly met his eyes. They were icy silver-gray, and light against his tanned face and dark hair. They appeared—and she suspected that they were—frozen.

  She held the gaze and smiled charmingly.

  “Forget it,” Ross said.

  “What?”

  “Whatever you’re planning. That smile doesn’t go well with the steel in your eyes, Professor. If you’re still hoping to change my mind about selling the ranch, save yourself the trouble. It won’t work. The answer is still no, and that’s the final word.”

  “I don’t believe in final words.”

  “Believe in this one. As I said on the phone, the issue is closed. The ranch is becoming part of the Nairobi Reserve, and it’s not open to discussion.”

  “Have you seen the site?”

  “No, and I don’t care—”

  “You would if you saw it. Drive us down there, tonight. I’ll show you why you should care!”

  She stepped forward impulsively and put a hand on Ross’s arm. He tensed under her touch but didn’t move, and she was suddenly aware of the warm strength of him under the thin linen shirt. The curve of his bicep was tight against her fingers, and her skin prickled as she felt the subtle heat of his body drifting out to surround her with the scent of male skin and faint cologne. His eyes met hers, looking faintly surprised, and Lilah felt a shiver rush through her like liquid fire.

  She jerked her hand back, trying to pull her thoughts together before he noticed that she was shaken.

  “Y-you have to see the site, at least. You can’t make this decision without considering all the facts.”

  “I’ve considered the only important facts,” Ross said. His face was
still unreadable, but his eyes were on her with a disturbing intensity.

  “Hear me out before you decide that,” Lilah said, looking away to keep herself from getting flustered again.

  She focused on the orange glow of the fire coals crackling in the hearth, and took a deep breath. “You can’t—”

  “I can,” Ross said quietly. “Give up, Professor.”

  Lilah bit her lip. His voice was soft, but his tone was cast-iron. She wasn’t so blind that she couldn’t recognize utter defeat when it stomped on her. There really was nothing she could do. It had been naive to think that arguments about science and knowledge could compete with the thrill of quick money. She had been a fool to come here at all.

  “All right,” she said stiffly, trying to pull the shreds of her dignity around her. “If that’s the end of it, I won’t bother you anymore. Will you take me back to the gate now, or do I have to walk?”

  Ross smiled slightly. “Ready to take your chances with the lions to get away from me? I don’t recommend walking. It’s ten miles to the gate from here.”

  Lilah stared at him, her frustration growing. He was watching her thoughtfully, making no move toward the door or the car.

  “I want to go,” she said. “Now.”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. I want to talk to you.”

  “I really don’t think we have anything more to say to each other,” she said icily, still standing. “Please take me back to—”

  “No.” Ross’s voice cut sharply through the quiet of the house, and Lilah looked nervously at him. What was going on? She hadn’t exactly been pleasant company up to this point, so he should be anxious to get rid of her.

  Except for the fact that he’d mentioned something about having her arrested for trespassing. But he hadn’t meant it...had he?

  Ross had paused, frowning as if he had intentionally stopped himself from speaking. He took a slow breath, tapping his fingertip against his wineglass.

  “I gather,” he said finally, “that I’m the bad guy in this drama. If I wasn’t ‘concerned only with my bank balance’ as you put it, your project could have gone as planned, and everything would be wonderful, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Wrong.” He set his glass down on the table with a decisive thump. “And I’ll show you why.”

  He crossed the room to where a set of glass doors opened onto what looked like an outdoor terrace.

  “The other side of this story is out here, Professor. Take a look before you make judgments about what motivates me.”

  Lilah watched, surprised, as he stepped outside, then took another quick sip of her wine and followed him. The night wind met her in the doorway, lifting her hair gently back from her face.

  Walking out onto the darkened terrace, away from the warmth and light of the house, was like casting herself out again into the wild African night. The terrace was bordered by a wooden railing, and beyond that lay a shadowed panorama of land and sky that stretched as far as she could see, from the dark curves of hills on one horizon, to the faint glow of Nairobi on another.

  Ross was standing by the railing, looking out.

  Puzzled, Lilah walked over to join him, shivering slightly in the cool air. The temperature was dropping quickly in the early morning hours, and the wind slipped in through her torn shirt to meet bare skin. She hugged herself, and leaned on the railing next to him.

  He pointed out to the silent, distant lights of Nairobi. “I was born in this house,” he said. “When I was ten, you could look in that direction and see nothing but darkness. Every year since then, the lights have gotten closer and brighter as the city swallows up the land. It’s like a living thing, the way it grows.”

  He turned to Lilah, and his voice was fierce. “Things work very differently here than they do in America, Dr. Evans. The political climate can change without notice, and I consider myself lucky to be able to sell this land at a time when they’ll preserve it as part of the park instead of turning it into an industrial complex. The development pressure is so strong that if I wait, I could lose the option of selling at all. The fact that my family has owned this land for four generations wouldn’t be worth a shilling if the state suddenly decided to reclaim the land and put up a factory. It’s that simple.

  “My great-grandfather came here from England because he saw the chance to live in an open, untamed place that wasn’t being divided up and paved over like his own homeland. Kenya is my homeland, and I’ll do anything in my power to stop that from happening here.”

  Ross’s hands tightened around the railing, and Lilah stared at him, astonished. His cool reserve had dissolved as he spoke, and now passion and determination crackled around him like a fire.

  “Listen,” he said. “What do you hear?”

  Over the soft rustle of the grass she could hear the steady rush of the night wind as it swept over miles of green savanna. It sounded ancient and enduring, and it chilled her with an awareness of how tiny she was in the middle of this vast land.

  “I hear wind,” she said. “Coming from far away.”

  Ross nodded. “What else?”

  “Crickets.” They were trilling gently from the grass, their music light and throbbing in the darkness.

  “What else?”

  Lilah listened hard. There were animal sounds in the night, so faint and foreign that she had to strain to hear them clearly. Tiny high barks and snorts and odd ululating sounds like gurgles of water were barely audible on the wind.

  “I... hear something else,” she said hesitantly. “But I don’t know what it is.”

  “Zebra,” Ross said “Down by the west watering hole. They came in from the park a few days ago. I’ve also seen giraffe and gazelle here since the fence came down. It’s been seventy years since the native animals were last on this land.”

  His mouth curved dryly. “This week has been a longo-verdue homecoming for everyone.”

  Lilah frowned, not understanding.

  “When my great-grandfather took this land for ranching,” Ross said, “he did what every other rancher was doing at the time and cleared it out to make room for his cattle.”

  “He chased out the gazelle and giraffe?”

  “No, he had the ranch workers shoot them. In masses. They wiped out huge herds and left the bodies out for the vultures.”

  “Why?” Lilah said indignantly. “That’s a terrible thing to do.”

  Ross shrugged. “That was the colonial mentality. Imposing proper British law and order on wild Africa. No matter that they were also destroying it.”

  Lilah blinked at him. “This isn’t quite what I would have expected to hear from the heir to a colonial cattle fortune.”

  “You’re not alone,” Ross said dryly.

  “The product of four generations of ranchers...”

  “Three. I’m the fourth.”

  “Okay,” Lilah said. “Three is enough. How did you manage to stray so far from the...er...herd?”

  Surprisingly, his mouth curved. “Pun intended?”

  Lilah grinned encouragingly. “Of course.”

  He shrugged, staring down at his hands on the rail as his face darkened again. “I’d been in American boarding schools since I was ten, which didn’t do much to foster family unity. By the time my father figured that out, it was too late.”

  “For what?”

  “Everything,” he said flatly, and turned around to lean against the rail, his back to the savanna night. “So, Professor, is this clearing up the reason behind my decision to sell the ranch? Or am I still on trial for being a greedy sonafabitch who doesn’t care about anything but my own fat pocket?”

  The sudden coolness in his eyes told Lilah that he regretted letting the conversation take a personal turn. She was beginning to see that Ross Bradford was not a man who shared himself easily or lightly.

  But he was also a man capable of great emotion, at least when it came to his land. Had that same fierce passion ever been directed at another person? How wo
uld it feel to be the one who kindled that slow-burning fire in his eyes?

  She took a deep breath. Stop that, she ordered herself. She was here to save her excavation, and she needed a clear head now more than ever. If love for his land was what motivated Ross Bradford, then maybe she could use that angle to reach him.

  “I can see that you care about protecting Kenya,” she began.

  “I do. And I can see that you’re leading up to something,” he said.

  She flushed, but hurried on. “If this land really does matter to you, how can you justify letting an important part of this country’s past go unexplored? Wait a few months to sell the ranch. There’s no hurry—”

  “But there is,” Ross said. “You don’t know the whole story. There’s no time to waste, and I’m far more concerned with saving something that’s dying than I am with preserving something that’s already dead.”

  “Archaeology isn’t dead,” Lilah said indignantly. “It’s as alive and significant as your land, just in a different way.”

  Ross raised his eyebrows. “I have a hard time seeing how you can equate old pottery pieces with the survival of an endangered species.”

  “It’s not that simple. You can’t just divide everything into ‘now’ or ‘then’ as if the past doesn’t count.”

  “The past counted when it was happening. Now it doesn’t. It’s finished, so it’s not important.”

  “But it is!” Lilah exclaimed. “Ignoring the past is like trying to study a flower but ignoring its roots. Just because you can’t see them, does that mean they aren’t important? They’re part of the whole thing. Cut the flower and it dies.”

  “That’s a nice metaphor, but your point isn’t valid.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because,” Ross said, “flowers eventually die anyway, and the one in question might be glad to be free while it can. Roots have serious drawbacks.”

  Lilah blinked, aware that the discussion had somehow moved beyond the merits of archaeology. From the bitterness in Ross’s voice when he’d spoken of spending his childhood in boarding school, it wasn’t hard to guess that he’d had a less than perfect family life. Was dismissing the past his way of avoiding painful memories?