Free The Texan's Diamond Bride by TERESA HILL

means a lot to me. I want that for Charlie, because I love him. And I’m glad there’s at least one bit of family business we agree on. Charlie. That none of this is his fault.”
    “It’s not. I know that,” he told her.
    “So maybe my family isn’t as different from yours as we thought.”
    He scoffed at that.
    Not because he thought it wasn’t true, but because he didn’t need to be sitting here finding common ground with her, finding reasons to like her. It was the last thing he needed to be doing.
    And it didn’t help any that he was sitting on her bed,late at night, the two of them absolutely alone, with him having to keep reminding himself of exactly who she was, to keep from remembering what he’d planned to be doing with her in this cabin, in this bed tonight.
    It didn’t help either that he’d put his hands on her, even in anger, for a moment. And it was even worse now, when it wasn’t anger that was driving him on, but the need to go to her again, this time to make sure she was okay, to comfort her, wishing he could forget everything that stood between them.
    Get up, he told himself sternly. Get up and get out of here, before you make it any worse.
    But he didn’t listen.

Chapter Six
    H e put his hands on her again, same place as before, this time as gentle as he could be, rubbing slowly with his thumbs at the soft flesh of her inner arms. She looked wary, but she let him.
    “I’m truly sorry,” he said. “I don’t treat women that way. It’s just that…ever since I heard about Charlie, I couldn’t help but worry and wonder…what it was like for him, growing up a McCord.”
    She gave him a look that just about had him on his knees. A look that said she understood completely and could forgive, not that he felt he deserved it.
    “No one in my family wants to hurt him,” Travis promised her.
    She hung her head. He saw tears falling down oneperfect, pale cheek and a curtain of red-gold hair shielding the rest of her from view. She shivered a bit.
    He had to remind himself he didn’t get to keep her warm tonight, that the time when he was welcome to do that was long over. “What is it, Red?”
    “I don’t see how Charlie’s ever going to belong anywhere now. Not with the way things are between your family and mine.”
    Honestly, Travis didn’t either.
    Paige shivered, and Travis had to get up or he was going to take her in his arms, despite all the reasons he’d told himself he couldn’t.
    He pulled the covers up around her and eased her back down onto the bed, while she looked up at him, her eyes sad and full of regrets. He let himself touch her in one small way, a hand to her cheek, wiping away those tears, and then she looked even sadder. All sad eyes and tears and that glorious hair spread out on a pillow in a bed in a cabin with him and no one else around for miles.
    He wondered what she’d do if he kissed her right then, if she longed for the way it had been between them the night before. If she wished they hadn’t been careful or cautious. He could have done anything to her that night, and she would have let him. He knew it.
    But it was cold and wet, and the ground was hard, and she was just so soft and feminine, her body yielding completely to his. Not the kind of woman a man had on a bed of solid rock.
    He’d wanted something better for her for their first time together, time, a soft bed, a fire and roof over their heads.
    But mostly…time.
    He’d been sure they’d have it, couldn’t foresee anything that would keep them from having that time.
    What a fool he’d been.
    And now he’d always wonder what it would have been like, despite who she was and who her family was.
    “I’m going to build up the fire. Just go to sleep. One of the ranch hands will likely come for us by midday, and we’ll go to the ranch house and…I don’t know, Paige. I don’t know what we’ll do from there. Get your Jeep for you and…I don’t know.”
    Let her go? Just like that? No. He