DAMMIT, COLE!" CALVIN EXPLODED AS HE SHOVED HIMSELF out of his chair and stomped across the small living room to the fireplace. "You're wastin' my time trying to talk about proxies and shareholders, when the only thing I'm interested in holding is your baby in my arms! I don't think that's asking too much from you—not when you consider all I've done for you." With ruthless determination and flawless timing, he switched tactics from coercion to guilt, while Cole listened in impassive silence and growing anger to a genuine tirade that far surpassed all previous discussions on this particular subject.

"Why, if it weren't for me, you'd be living out at your pa's place, just like his pa did and his pa before him, trying to eke out a living chasin' steers. Instead of that, you do your chasin' in a Rolls-Royce and a private jet." Jabbing his forefinger into his chest for emphasis, he continued, "I'm the one who always believed in you, Cole. I'm the one who encouraged you to go to college. I'm the one who went to bat for you with your pa, and when he wouldn't listen, I'm the one who gave you all my money from my wells so you could get a good education!" In the midst of his angry monologue, Cal stopped and headed for the kitchen. "It's time for my medicine," he announced, "but I'm not finished. You stay right where you are until I get back."

Cole watched him pick his way around an old overstuffed chair and a lamp table piled with magazines and said nothing. Cole hadn't had a good day, and so far, the evening wasn't an improvement. He'd finished his business on the West Coast several hours earlier than he'd expected, and in the happy expectation of having extra time with his uncle, he'd phoned one of his pilots and instructed him to fuel the plane and be ready to leave for Texas ahead of schedule. From then on, nothing had gone well.

The air was unstable, the flight was incredibly rough, and air traffic control advised them to go around a massive storm front over Arizona. Their new course took them an hour out of the way, which necessitated an unscheduled fuel stop in El Paso, where unusually heavy air traffic resulted in another hour's delay. Two hours behind schedule, Cole's pilots now began their final approach to Ridgewood Field, and Cole tried for the sixth time to reach Cal so that his uncle could pick him up at the airport. For the sixth time, he got a recording that the phone was out of order.

Since phone service in Cal's area was frustratingly undependable, and since Cal frequently struck back at the phone company by deducting one thirtieth of his monthly charges for each day his phone was unreliable, Cole assumed the phone company had retaliated as it usually did—by cutting off his service.

When he got off the plane, the heat and humidity seemed to plaster around him like plastic wrap, and Cole resigned himself to renting a car at the minuscule airport and driving out to the ranch.

Ridgewood was forty-five miles north of Kingdom City, which, in turn, was forty miles east of Cal's ranch. Built thirty years before and situated in the middle of nowhere, Ridgewood Field was primarily used by drilling companies who flew in special equipment for repairing the oil and gas wells that dotted the landscape. Most of the other planes that jolted down its washboard runway belonged to Texan Airlines, which flew in twice weekly with special air freight and an occasional passenger on board.

In addition to one concrete runway that was in bad repair, Ridgewood Field offered air travelers a white metal building that served as a terminal. Inside the terminal, which was not air-conditioned, amenities were limited to two rest rooms, one coffee counter, and one battered metal desk where stranded passengers could attempt to rent one of Ridgewood Field Car Rental's two available cars from a cheerful heavyset woman who was also the waitress and whose name tag identified her as "Roberta."

Roberta wiped her hands on her apron and took a rental agreement out of the desk while she politely inquired as to Cole's choice of rental cars. "Do you want the black one with the bad muffler, or the black one with the bad tires?"

Cole stifled an irate retort and scribbled his name on the rental agreement. "I'll take the one with the bad muffler."

Roberta nodded approvingly. "The air conditioning works in that one, so you won't swelter while you're getting where you're going. Good choice."

It had seemed so to Cole, too, at the time, but not now. When Cal returned to the living room and started pressing his point even harder, Cole began to wish he'd taken the other car and had a nice blowout on the way here to delay him.

"I'll make you a deal," Cal announced as he lowered himself into the chair across from Cole's. "You bring me a wife who's fit and willing to bear your children, and I'll sign those shares over to you on your first wedding anniversary. Otherwise, I'm going to leave all my worldly goods to Travis's kids. That's my deal; take it or leave it."

In stony silence, Cole returned his stare and began to slowly tap a rolled-up magazine he'd been reading on his knee. At thirty-six, he controlled a multinational corporation, 125,000 employees, and an estimated twelve billion dollars. Everything in his business and personal life was under his complete control… everything except this one seventy-five-year-old man, who was now actually threatening to leave half of Cole's company to Travis, who wasn't capable of running a small subsidiary of it without Cole's constant supervision. Cole didn't actually believe that his uncle would betray him by giving away half the corporation that Cole had slaved to build, but he didn't like the sound of his uncle's threat. He had just convinced himself that Cal was bluffing when he belatedly noticed that the fireplace mantel, which had always held a half-dozen framed family photographs, was now filled to overflowing with another dozen photographs—and all of them were of Travis's family.

"Well?" Cal said, abandoning his anger and leaning forward in his eagerness. "What do you think of the terms of my deal?"

"I think," Cole snapped, "that your terms are not only ridiculous, they're crazy."

"Are you saying that marriage is 'crazy'?" Cal demanded, his expression turning ominous again. "Why, the whole damned country is falling apart because of your generation and its lack of respect for good old 'crazy' notions like marriage and children and responsibility!"

When Cole refused to be lured into that debate, Cal gestured toward the large scarred coffee table, which was cluttered, like every other table in the room, with dozens of magazines that Letty, his housekeeper, fought a losing battle to keep orderly. "If you don't believe me, just look at what's in those magazines. Here," he stated, snatching up a copy of Reader's Digest from the pile on the end table beside his chair. Reader's Digest was a particular favorite of his. "Look at this!" He waved the small magazine with its blue cover and bright yellow print toward Cole; then he tipped his head back, in order to read through the lower part of his bifocals, and recited the titles of some of the articles: " 'Cheating in Our Schools—A National Scandal.' According to that article," he said, glaring at Cole as if it were his fault, "eight out often high school students say they cheat. It says in that article that moral standards are so low that many high school children no longer know the difference between right and wrong!"

"I don't see what that has to do with the topic at hand."

"Don't you, now?" Calvin retorted, closing the cover and tipping his head slightly back, peering again at the writing on the cover of the magazine. "Then maybe this article is more to the point. Do you know what it's called?"

The answer being obvious, Cole simply stared at him in resigned expectation.

"The article is called 'What Women Don't Know About Today's Men.'" Tossing the magazine on the table in disgust, he glared at Cole. "What I want to know is what is the matter with you young people that suddenly men don't understand women and women don't understand men, and none of you understand the need to get married and stay married and raise good, god-fearing children?"

Cole continued to tap the magazine on his knee while his anger continued to mount. "As I think I've mentioned to you in the past when you've brought all this up, you are hardly in a position to lecture anyone on the merits of marriage and children, since you've never had a wife or a child!"

"To my everlasting regret," Calvin countered, undeterred as he shoved some magazines aside and pulled out a recent copy of a tabloid. "Now, just look at this," he said, pointing a bony finger at the front page and holding it in front of Cole's face.

Cole glanced at the tabloid, and his expression turned derisive. "The Enquirer?" he said. "You're subscribing to the Enquirer?"

"Letty likes to read it, but that isn't the point. The point is that your generation has lost its collective mind! Just look at the way you young people do things. Look at this beautiful young woman. She's famous and she's a 'Houston socialite,' which means she's rich."

"So what?" Cole said, his angry gaze fastened on his uncle's face and not the newspaper.

"So, her fiancé—this Dan Penworth—just dumped her for an eighteen-year-old Italian girl who's lyin' on a beach with him, half-naked." When Cole continued to ignore the tabloid, Cal let it drop to his side, but he wasn't ready to drop his argument. "He dumped her without telling her, while the poor thing was planning her wedding."

"Is there a point to all this?" Cole demanded.

"You're damned right there is. The point is that Penworth is a Houston boy, born and raised, and so's the girl he jilted. Now, when Texans start mistreating women and stomping all over traditional values, the whole damned country is as good as down the toilet."

Cole reached behind his head and wearily massaged the muscles in the back of his neck. This discussion was going nowhere, and he had a critical business issue to discuss and settle with Cal, if he could only sidetrack him from his absurd obsession with Cole's marital state. In the past, Cole had always managed to accomplish that, but Cal was far more determined today than ever before, and Cole had an uneasy premonition that this time he was going to fail.

It occurred to him then that Cal might actually be getting senile, but he rejected that almost at once. Cal's personality wasn't changing. He'd always been as stubborn and as tenacious as the proverbial bulldog. As Cole had explained to John Nederly earlier in the week, nothing had ever swayed Cal from his course. When oil was first found on his land, he'd announced that money wasn't going to change his life, and, by God, it hadn't—not one bit. He still pinched pennies like a pauper, he still drove a twenty-year-old truck with a stick shift, and he still wore faded jeans and plaid shirts every day of the week except Sunday, when he went to church; he still pored over the Sears Roebuck circulars and still insisted that cable television was an expensive fad that was destined to fail. "Look," Cole said, "I'm not going to argue with you—"

"Good."

"What I mean is, I'm not going to argue with you about the decline of American civilization, the value of marriage, or the desirability of having children—"

"Good!" Cal interrupted, heaving himself out of the threadbare rocker-recliner. "Then get married and get your wife pregnant, so I can give you the other half of your company. Marry that Broadway dancer you brought home two years ago—the one who had red fingernails two inches long—or marry the schoolteacher you liked in the seventh grade, but marry somebody. And you'd better do it quick, because we're both running out of time!"

"What the hell does that mean?"

"It means we've been having this discussion for two years and you're still single, and I'm still without a baby to dandle on my knee, so I'm settin' a time limit. I'll give you three months to get engaged and three more months to get married. If you haven't brought me a wife home by then, I'm going to put my fifty-percent share of your company into an irrevocable trust in the names of young Ted and Donna Jean. I'll name Travis as administrator of the trust, which will make him your unofficial business partner, then when Ted and Donna Jean come of age, they can help you run the company themselves. That's assuming you stillhave a company left after Travis tries to help you run it." Cal tossed the Enquirer on the table and another warning into the charged atmosphere. "I wouldn't take all six months to get the thing done if I were you, Cole. My heart could give out at any time, and I'm changing my will next week so that if I die before you're married, my fifty-percent share of the company goes to Ted and Donna Jean."

Cole was so incensed that he actually considered trying to have the old man declared incompetent. Failing that, he decided he could try to have the will overturned… but that would take years after Cal's death and the outcome wouldn't be certain.

His thoughts were interrupted by Letty, his uncle's cook-housekeeper, who appeared in the kitchen doorway. "Supper's ready," she said.

Both men heard her, but neither acknowledged her presence. Cole had risen to face his uncle, and the two men stood in the center of the room, their gazes clashing—two tall, rugged, unyielding men separated by three feet, one generation, and a decision that one couldn't fight and the other wouldn't retract. "Are you capable of understanding that I may not be able to find a woman and marry her in six months?" Cole said between his teeth.

In reply, Cal jerked his thumb toward the stacks of magazines beside his chair. "According to the surveys in those magazines, you have five of the seven most important qualities that women want in a husband. You're rich," he said, listing the qualities in the order he remembered them, "you're intelligent, you're well-educated, you have a bright future, and Donna Jean says you're a 'hunk,' which I guess qualifies you as handsome."

Satisfied that he'd won the battle, Cal endured Cole's icy silence for a moment, then made an effort to discharge some of the animosity that he'd created. "Aren't you just a little bit curious about the two qualities you lack?"

"No," Cole snapped, so furious that he almost couldn't trust himself to speak.

Cal supplied the information anyway: "You lack a desire for children, and I'm afraid that even I would have trouble describing you as 'tender and understanding.' " When his half-hearted attempt at humor failed to evoke any reaction from his enraged nephew, Cal turned toward the kitchen and his shoulders slumped a little. "Letty has supper on the table," he said quietly.

With a feeling of utter unreality, Cole stared after him, so filled with bitterness and a sense of betrayal that he was actually able to observe his uncle's thinner frame and bent shoulders without feeling the shocked alarm that such a sight would normally have evoked. Cal looked far less frail a minute later when Cole strode into the kitchen, carrying a tablet and a gold fountain pen from his briefcase. Cole sat down across from him and slapped the tablet on the table in front of his uncle. "Write it down," he ordered icily while Letty stood at the stove, looking apprehensively from one to the other, a ladle full of chili forgotten in her hand.

Calvin automatically took the pen that was thrust toward him, but his brow wrinkled in confusion. "Write what down?"

"Write down the terms of the agreement and include any specific 'requirements' you may have for the woman I marry. I don't want any surprises if I bring someone home—no last-minute rejections because she doesn't meet some criterion you're forgetting to mention at the moment."

His uncle looked genuinely hurt. "I'm not tryin' to choose a wife for you, Cole. I'll leave all that to you."

"That's damned big of you."

"I want you to be happy."

"And does it look to you like all this is making me happy?"

"Not now. Not right now, but that's because you're riled."

"I'm not riled," Cole retorted with scathing contempt. "I'm disgusted!"

His uncle winced as the verbal thrust found its mark, but it didn't sway the stubborn old man from the course he'd set. He tried to shove the tablet back to Cole, but Cole slapped his flattened palm on it. "I want it in writing," he stated.

In a desperate attempt to soothe the situation before it erupted again into a battle, Letty rushed to the table with a steaming bowl of chili in each hand and plunked them down in front of the men. "Eat while it is hot!" she urged.

"You want what in writing?" Cal demanded, looking stunned and furious.

"Eat now," Letty interjected. "Write later."

"I want you to write down that you will turn over your fifty percent of the company to me if I bring home a wife within six months."

"Since when isn't my word good enough for you?"

"Since you stooped to extortion."

"Now, see here!" Cal exploded, but he looked a little guilty. "I have the right to decide who gets my fifty-percent share in the company. I have the right to want to know that someday your son will benefit from my money and my holdings."

"A son?" Cole countered in a dangerously low voice. "Is that part of the deal? A new condition? I'll tell you what, why don't I marry a woman who already has a little boy so you won't have to wait and you won't have to worry?"

Calvin glowered at him, then hastily scribbled out what Cole wanted written and shoved the tablet across the table with an indignant grunt. "There it is, in writing. No stipulations."

Cole would have left at that point, but he was held back by lack of knowledge of his pilots' whereabouts and by his own inability to believe Cal would actually betray him by carrying out his threat. Cole's mind easily provided him with dozens of examples of Cal's temperamental intractability that indicated he might indeed do the unforgivable, but Cole's heart rejected them just as swiftly.

They ate in uneasy silence, finishing quickly; then Cole returned to the living room, turned on the television set, and opened his briefcase. Working, he reasoned, was safer and far more rewarding than getting embroiled in another argument, and the television set made the silence between them seem less ominous.

Despite the agreement he'd made his uncle write out, Cole was still far from willing to yield to his uncle's bizarre demands as a way of regaining permanent control of his own damned businesses. At the moment he had no idea what he was going to do. All he knew was that his temper was still simmering and that thus far his options where Cal was concerned ranged from civil court battles to mental competency hearings to a hasty marriage he didn't want to some woman he didn't know. All of them were distasteful in the extreme, not to mention grotesque and even painful.

Across from him, his uncle lowered the newspaper he was reading and regarded Cole over the top of theHouston Chronicle's front page, his expression innocently thoughtful, as if everything were happily settled to both their satisfaction. "According to what I've been reading, a lot of young women are deciding not to have children nowadays. They'd rather raise 'designer pigs' and chase after careers. Be careful you don't pick a woman like that."

Cole pointedly ignored him and continued writing notes.

"And watch out that you don't pick some gold digger who pretends she wants you and only wants your money."

Cole's simmering temper rolled to a full boil. "How the hell do you expect me to find out what a woman's true motives are in six months?"

"I figured you must be an expert on women by now. Wasn't there some sort of princess who traipsed after you all over Europe a couple of years ago?"

Cole stared at him in frigid silence, and Calvin finally shrugged. "You don't have to know a woman inside and out to be sure she's not interested in marrying your money instead of you."

"Really?" Cole drawled with deliberate insolence. "And based on your own vast experience with women and matrimony, how do you propose I find out what motives some future wife may have?"

"If I were you, I guess I'd figure the best way to avoid being trapped by some gold digger is to look for a woman who already has money of her own." Having said that, he raised his brows and waited, as if he honestly expected Cole to applaud his solution, but Cole ignored him and returned his attention to the notepad.

For the next quarter hour the silence in the room was uninterrupted except for the occasional rustling of newspaper pages being turned and folded; then Cal spoke again, on the last subject Cole wanted to discuss. From behind the pages of his newspaper barrier, Cal remarked in a desultory voice, "It says here in Maxine Messenger's column that you're attending the White Orchid Ball on Saturday night, and that you donated the most expensive item to be sold at the auction. Maxine says the ball is 'Houston society's most glittering social event.' You won't have to worry about latching on to a gold digger at a thing like that. Why don't you take a look around, find a woman who appeals to you, and bring her right back here so I can have a look at her, and," he put in slyly, "at the marriage certificate. On your first wedding anniversary, I'll sign over my half of your company to you, just like I said I'd do on that piece of paper."

Cole didn't reply, and a short time later, Calvin yawned. "Guess I'll finish the newspaper in bed," he announced as he stood up. "It's ten o'clock. Are you going to work late?"

Cole was studying a letter of intent that John Nederly had drafted at his request. "I've worked late for the last fourteen years," he said shortly. "That's why you and Travis are as wealthy as you are."

For a moment Cal stood looking at him, but he couldn't argue the truth of that, so he started slowly out of the room.