His Hired Bride. Susan Fox

      CHAPTER ONE

      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