Millionaire on Her Doorstep Read Online Free Page B

darling, I’m sure she’s not the first woman who’s wanted to kill you.”
    Â 
    Maureen hated motel rooms. In the past nine or ten years, she’d spent many nights in the dreaded places. Some had been luxurious, others cheap. But no matter the price or how many of her personal things she had lying about, it was still a sterile room. Just a place to sleep, shower and dress.
    She snorted inwardly. Since when had her apartment
in Houston ever been more than just a place to hang her clothes and lay her head? And what made her think things would be any different here in New Mexico?
    From the middle of the queen-size bed, Maureen aimed the remote at the television and smashed the Off button. For the past hour and a half, she’d been staring at the flickering screen, yet she didn’t have a clue as to what she’d been watching. Her mind had been on the place she’d left, this place she’d come to. And the man she was going to have to face in the morning.
    Adam Murdock Sanders . Who’d have ever thought she’d run into him again? That morning down in South America, she’d met him quite by chance. He’d been having coffee in the hotel restaurant with a tool pusher who worked for the same company as Maureen. He’d introduced her to Adam, and while the three of them had coffee, she’d learned his rented vehicle had quit and he needed to be at a rig site before noon.
    The town they’d been staying in was too small for a car rental agency or a mechanic who wasn’t already busy. Knowing all this, the tool pusher had urged Maureen into being a Good Samaritan and offering Adam a lift. Everything afterward had gone from bad to worse.
    Adam had refused to wear his seat belt, complained about her fast, reckless driving, then went on to imply she’d be doing the world a much bigger favor if she would stay home to raise her “kids” rather than traipse around with a bunch of foul-mouthed oilmen.
    Well, he’d had the mouth for the business, all right. And she’d wanted to knock his head off his shoulders.
But she’d truly never meant to hurt him. The dog had run into the narrow, graveled road without any warning, and Maureen had instinctively jerked the wheel to miss it. Adam had gone flying out the open door, landing on the shoulder of the road before rolling to the bottom of a steep bar ditch.
    At first, she’d been terrified she’d killed him. But to her amazement he’d managed, with her help, to make it up the embankment and into the Jeep. Maureen had driven him to the nearest hospital more than fifty miles away, then waited until a nurse had come to assure her he was fine and the doctor had already plastered his broken ankle.
    Maureen had asked to see him, but the nurse informed her he’d been sedated and was expected to sleep for several hours. She’d had no choice but to leave. The next day she’d been driving back to the hospital to see him when her boss from Houston had called and ordered her home immediately.
    Back in Texas, she’d reported the accident to her company so Adam’s medical bills would be rightly taken care of by insurance, then she’d tried to put the whole incident out of her mind. But forgetting the young company man hadn’t been that easy. She’d thought about him most every day since. Maybe that was one of the reasons she’d been so shocked this morning when he’d walked into Wyatt Sanders’s office.
    With a troubled sigh, she left the bed, grabbed her keys from the built-in dresser and walked out the door. With no thought to the lateness of the hour, she climbed into her pickup truck and headed toward the main highway. For several minutes, she traveled west,
up into the mountains, before eventually pulling onto a graveled road.
    The real-estate sign at the edge of the highway was already marked Sold. Maureen had only given the agent a verbal “I’ll take