Darling Enemy by Diana Palmer Read Free Book Online

her own gaze and tried unsuccessfully to calm her wildly beating heart. Involuntarily, her mind caught and held the image of King’s hard mouth taking hers, and a shimmer of pure pleasure washed over her.
    “Well, the hero got the girl. As usual.” Mary got up with a sigh and turned off the television. “I hate to leave good company, but that shopping spree left me dragging. Good night, my dears,” she said with a motherly smile, bending to kiss Jenna’s cheek as she went out the door.
    “Do you still type?” King asked Teddi unexpectedly.
    “Uh...yes,” she stammered.
    He got up from the chair with the folder in one big hand. “Come help me make a list, then.”
    “Aren’t you going to have something to eat?” Jenna asked him, glancing curiously from King’s set face to Teddi’s flushed one.
    “Later, honey,” he said, ruffling her hair as he went out the door.
    Jenna winked at Teddi, her whole face beaming with mischief as her friend followed him.
    Teddi perched herself at one side of the big oak desk in King’s pine-paneled study and tapped out the cattle names and lineage and herd numbers and pasture locations while he leaned back in his big chair and dictated them, ending each notation with the cow’s production record. She began to realize that the names he was giving her—or rather, the numbers that seemed to pass for names for most of them—were those of cows that didn’t produce calves that were up to his exacting standards.
    “Animal slavery,” she mumbled as he finished, and she paused to make a correction.
    He raised both heavy blond eyebrows and glanced at her. “I beg your pardon?”
    “Selling off cows,” she explained, a tiny mischievous light in her wide brown eyes. “Poor things, what if that Mr. Harmone beats them or doesn’t feed them properly?”
    “Mr. Harmone,” he informed her, “is going to use them as hosts for embryo transplants. They’re Herefords, but they’ll throw purebred black Angus calves.”
    She stared at him. “Sure they will,” she agreed. “Shouldn’t you eat something? Lack of food...”
    He grimaced, getting up to toss the records on his desk. “My God, don’t you know anything about cattle breeding?”
    She nodded. “First you take a boy cow...”
    He chuckled deeply, watching the lights play in her short, thick hair, almost blue-black in its darkness. “It’s not quite that simple, darling. Suffice it to say that this new technique has a large following and Mr. Harmone is part of it. You take purebred embryos and transplant them into host cattle—like these Herefords. The result is a well-cared-for purebred calf with superior bloodlines out of a less expensive cow.”
    “Improving on nature?” she asked with lifted eyebrows.
    “Don’t women do it all the time?” he fired back, looming over her. “Lipstick, eye shadow, curlers... none of which applies to you right now, however,” he conceded, studying her impossibly clear, creamy complexion, and the wide, black-lashed eyes that stared up at him.
    “I don’t use makeup when I’m not working,” she murmured. Her eyes were as busy as his, seeking out the hard angles of his face, his imposing nose, his deep-set gray eyes, his chiseled mouth and square chin. He was so good to look at. Her first sight of him, all those years ago, had made him like a narcotic to her. She could scarcely exist without the picture of him in her mind, her heart. Her eyes fed on him.
    The mention of her modeling had been enough to break the fragile peace between them. King’s face had gone hard; his eyes glittered like sun on a rifle barrel.
    “I saw one of those televised fashion shows you were in,” he remarked curtly. “They ran it on the cable station.”
    Her eyes avoided his probing stare. “I can imagine what you thought of it.”
    “Can you? I’ve seen bikinis that showed less. One of the blouses you wore was quite transparent, and you wore nothing under it!”
    Her face flamed. He was right, a