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  “Son of a bitch,” Cole said aloud, but the curse was one of resignation not defiance. He was going to have to marry someone, and marriage in a community-property state like Texas brought with it a whole new set of financial risks for him. Whoever the “lucky” woman was, Cole decided sarcastically, a sense of humor and docile disposition were at the top of his list of requirements for her. Otherwise, he could envision a somewhat heated scene when she realized she was going to be required to sign a prenuptial agreement.

  He considered hiring an actress to play the part, but his uncle was too clever and too suspicious to fall for that. No doubt, that had been why he was insisting on seeing the marriage certificate. Luckily, the old man wasn’t also insisting on the birth of a boy child before he turned over his share of a company that was rightfully Cole’s in the first place. The fact that he hadn’t made that a stipulation, too, was proof he wasn’t as sharp as he used to be.

  He wasn’t as well as he used to be, either.

  Swearing under his breath, Cole straightened and reached for the mug of now cold chocolate, intending to take it into the kitchen. His gaze fell on the folded newspaper on the top of the pile. Diana Foster’s face smiled back at him. She’d had all the promise of beauty to come when she was sixteen, but the longer he looked at her stunning features and confident smile, the harder it became for him to reconcile this glamorous businesswoman or the one he’d watched on CNN with the endearingly prim and quietly poised teenager he remembered. In his mind, Cole envisioned the loyal, intelligent, entrancing adolescent who’d perched on a bale of hay, either watching him in silence or chatting with him about everything, from puppies to politics.

  Tonight, when his uncle first commented on the fact that a woman from Houston had been “dumped” by her fiancé, Cole hadn’t realized who she was. After he’d read the story in the tabloid, the reality of Diana’s embarrassing plight registered on him. Now he again felt a pang of sympathy and indignation for the girl he had known. With her looks and wealth, her kindness and intelligence, he had assumed that she’d enjoy all the best life had to offer. She’d deserved that. She had not deserved to be made a national laughingstock by Dan Penworth.

  With a weary sigh, Cole dismissed that subject from his mind and stood up, no longer able to suppress his own concerns by concentrating on the fortunes of a beguiling teenager with unforgettable green eyes who’d become the head of a major company and the subject of an embarrassing scandal instead of the pampered fairy-tale princess he’d hoped she’d become.

  Life, as Cole well knew, rarely turned out the way one wanted it to or hoped it would. Not his life, or Diana Foster’s . . . or his uncle’s.

  He picked up the mug of cold chocolate and carried it into the kitchen; then he carefully poured out the remnants and rinsed the mug so that Letty wouldn’t discover how he felt about hot chocolate and be hurt by the truth.

  The truth was that he hated hot chocolate.

  He also hated marshmallows.

  He particularly hated illness and doctors who diagnosed problems without offering a cure.

  For that matter, he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about a sham marriage that was doomed to failure before it began.

  It had occurred to Cole that the most likely, and most agreeable, candidate for his wife was not the “princess” whom his uncle had referred to earlier that night, but Michelle. Besides genuinely caring for Cole, she had no problem with his hectic work and travel schedule. In fact, she’d been very eager to adapt to it—and that was going to be far more important to Cole in this “marriage.” Considering his circumstances, his pressing need, and the haste required of him, Cole decided he was damned lucky to have such a viable candidate.

  He didn’t feel lucky, though, as he headed down the hall to the bedroom he’d used since he was a boy whenever he spent the night at his uncle’s. He felt depressed. He was so depressed, he actually felt sorry for Michelle, because he knew damned well she’d agree to the bargain. He knew it just as he knew that she’d be making a mistake, because she’d be settling for what little of himself he had to offer, and that wasn’t very much.

  His last relationship, with Vicky Kellogg, had failed for exactly that reason, and he hadn’t changed since then, nor did he intend to. He was still married to his business, just as Vicky had accused him of being. He was still contemptuous of the aimless thrill-seeking that Vicky and her friends had enjoyed. He still traveled a great deal, which had annoyed her, and he was still incapable of prolonged periods of unbroken laziness. No doubt, he was still the “cold, callous, unfeeling son of a bitch” she’d called him when she moved out. The point that she hadn’t understood was that Cole was directly or indirectly responsible for the job security and investment security of more than a hundred thousand of Unified Industries’ employees.

  The bed beneath him felt lumpy and narrow as he shoved the old chenille bedspread aside and stretched out between fresh white sheets that smelled of sunlight and summer breezes. Against his bare skin, the thin cloth felt weightless and baby soft from Letty’s countless washings.

  Linking his hands behind his head, Cole stared at the ceiling fan revolving slowly above him. Slowly, his depression began to recede, along with all thoughts of marrying Michelle or anyone else. The idea wasn’t just obscene; it was absurd. So was the notion that his uncle might not live until the end of the year.

  Cole had been working eighteen hours a day for months; he’d taken a rare day off today to fly down here from Los Angeles only to have weather problems. The stress and weariness from all that, combined with the discovery of his uncle’s worsening health, had all combined to warp his thinking, Cole decided, as his eyes drifted closed and an odd sense of confidence and well-being began to assert itself.

  Cal was going to live for another ten years, at least. True, he hadn’t looked robust tonight, but as Cole tried to assess the individual changes that age and illness had wrought by comparing the Cal he remembered to the man he was now, the changes weren’t nearly so alarming as they’d seemed at first. He thought back to bygone days when he’d watched Cal mending fences in the blazing sun or cantering into the corral behind dusty steers he’d rounded up and driven in from the pasture. With his Stetson and boots adding inches to his height, he’d seemed like a giant to Cole when he was little, but when Cole reached his full height of six foot two, he’d been at least three inches taller than Cal.

  The reality was that Cal had never been a big man with a powerful physique like Cole’s; he’d been lanky and lean, with a wiry strength and endurance that served as well as bulky muscle for the heavy work around the ranch. He hadn’t shrunk six inches and wasted away to a skeleton, as it sometimes seemed to Cole that he had. When his arthritis bothered him, as it obviously had tonight, he shifted his shoulders forward, which distorted his posture and cost him an inch or so from his natural height.

  His hair hadn’t suddenly turned white; it had been white for as long as Cole could remember—thick and white with close-cropped sideburns that framed a tanned, narrow face with a square chin and pale blue eyes that seemed to look out at the world from a different perspective; sharp eyes that gleamed with intelligence, humor, and hard resolve. His face had lost its tan, and his eyes looked out from behind bifocals now, but they weren’t faded and dull, and they missed nothing.

  True, his body had lost some of its strength from age and lack of exercise, but his real power had always come from his mind. And as Cole had discovered tonight, his mind was as sharp and fit as ever.

  In the next few days, Cole would find solutions that would suit his uncle and himself and solve everything. In the morning he would start a vigorous search for some sort of new or updated treatment for his uncle’s condition. New medical treatments were being discovered every day, and old, effective ones that had been discarded were being rediscovered. If he’d known sooner that his uncle’s heart condition wasn’t staying the same or even improving, he’d have been looking hard for solutions already.