To Wear His Ring: Circle of Gold / Trophy Wives / Dakota Bride

Chapter Three

Without thinking, Gil reached down and shook Kasie’s shoulder. “Wake up, Kasie!” he said firmly.

Her eyes opened on a rush of breath. There was horror in them for a few seconds until she came awake and realized that her boss was standing over her. She blinked away the sleepiness and pulled herself up on an elbow. Her beautiful thick chestnut hair swirled around her shoulders below the high neck of the gown as she stared at him.

“You were having a nightmare,” he said curtly. “Who’s Kantor?”

She hesitated for a few seconds. “My brother,” she said finally. “My twin.” She noticed that he was wearing a long robe and apparently nothing under it. Thick dark blond hair was visible in the deep vee of the neckline. She averted her eyes almost in panic. It embarrassed her to have him see her in her nightgown; almost as much as to see him in a robe.

“Why do you have nightmares about him?” he asked gently.

“We had an argument,” she said. She pushed back her hair. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

His eyes narrowed. Apparently it was a painful subject. He let it drop. His eyes went to the girls and not without misgiving. “Why are they in here with you?”

“The storm woke them up. They got scared and came to me,” she said defensively. “I didn’t go get them.”

He was studying them quietly. His expression was hard, grave, wounded.

“I’m sure they went to look for you first,” she began defensively.

His eyes glittered down into hers. “We’ve had this conversation before. Miss Parsons is supposed to be their governness,” he emphasized.

“Miss Parsons is probably snoring her head off,” she said curtly. “She sleeps like the dead. Bess had a fever week before last, and she didn’t even get up when I woke her and told her about it. She said that a fever never hurt anybody!”

“That was when she had strep and I took her to the doctor,” he recalled. “Miss Parsons said she was sick. I assumed that she’d been up in the night with her.”

“Dream on.”

He glared at her. “I’ll excuse it this time,” he said, ignoring the reference he didn’t like to Miss Parsons and her treatment of Bess. He’d have something to say to the woman about that. “Next time, come and find me if you can’t wake Miss Parsons.”

She just stared back, silent.

“Did you hear me, Kasie?” he demanded softly.

“All right.” She glanced from one side of her to the other. “Do you want to wake them up and carry them back to their own beds?”

He looked furious. “If I do, we’ll all be awake the rest of the night. We had cattle get out, and we got soaked trying to get them back in. I’m worn-out. I want to go to sleep.”

“Nobody here is stopping you,” she murmured.

His pale eyes narrowed. “I should have let you go when you offered to resign,” he said caustically.

“There’s still time,” she pointed out, growing more angry by the minute.

He cursed under his breath, glared at her again and walked out.

The next morning, Kasie woke to soft pummeling little hands and laughing voices.

“Get up, Kasie, get up! Daddy’s taking us to the movies today!”

She yawned and curled up. “Not me,” she murmured sleepily. “Go get breakfast, babies. Mrs. Charters will feed you.”

“You got to come, too!” Bess said.

“I want to sleep,” she murmured.

“Daddy, she won’t get up!” Bess wailed.

“Oh, yes, she will.”

Kasie barely had time to register the deep voice before the covers were torn away and she was lifted bodily out of the bed in a pair of very strong arms.

Shocked, she stared straight into pale blue eyes and felt as if she’d been electrified.

“I’ll wake her up,” Gil told the girls. “Go down and eat your breakfast.”

“Okay, Daddy!”

The girls left gleefully, laughing as they went to the staircase.

“You look like a nun in that gown,” Gil remarked as he studied his light burden, aware of her sudden stillness. Her face was very close. He searched it quietly. “And you’ve got freckles, Kasie, just across the bridge of your nose.”

“Put…put me down,” she said, unnerved by the proximity. She didn’t like the sensations it caused to feel his chest right against her bare breasts.

“Why?” he asked. He gazed into her eyes. “You hardly weigh anything.” His eyes narrowed as he studied her face thoroughly. “You have big eyes,” he murmured. “With little flecks of blue in them. Your face looks more round than oval, especially with your hair down. Your mouth is—” he searched for a word, more touched than he wanted to be by its vulnerability “—full and soft. Half-asleep you don’t come across as a fighter. But you are, aren’t you?”

Her hands were resting lightly around his neck and she stared at him disconcertedly while she wondered what John or Miss Parsons would say if they walked in unexpectedly to find them in this position.

“You should put me down,” she said huskily.

“Don’t you like being carried?” he murmured absently.

She shivered as she remembered the last time she’d been carried, by an orderly in the hospital…

She pushed at him. “Please.”

He set her back down, scowling curiously at the odd pastiness of her complexion. “You’re mysterious, Kasie.”

“Not really. I’m just sleepy.” She folded her arms over her breasts and flushed. “Could you leave, please, and let me get dressed?”

He watched her curiously. “Why don’t you date? And don’t hand me any bull about stinking cowboys.”

She was reluctant to tell him anything about herself. She was a private person. Her aunt, Mama Luke, always said that people shouldn’t worry others with their personal problems. She didn’t.

“I don’t want to get married, ever.”

He really scowled then. “Why?”

She thought of her parents and then of Kantor, and her eyes closed on the pain. “Love hurts too much.”

He didn’t speak. For an instant, he felt the pain that seemed to rack her delicate features, and he understood it, all too well.

“You loved someone who died,” he recalled.

She nodded and her eyes met his. “And so did you.”

For an instant, his hard face was completely unguarded. He was vulnerable, mortal, wounded. “Yes.”

“It doesn’t pass away, like they say, does it?” she asked softly.

“Not for a long time.”

He moved a step closer, and this time she didn’t back up. Her eyes lifted to his. He slid his big, lean hand into the thick waves of her chestnut hair and enjoyed its silkiness. “Why don’t you wear your hair down, like this?”

“It’s sinful,” she whispered.

“What?”

“When you dress and wear your hair in a way that’s meant to tempt men, to try to seduce them, it’s sinful,” she repeated.

His lips fell open. He didn’t know how to answer that. He’d never had a woman, especially a modern woman, say such a thing to him.

“Do you think sex is a sin?” he asked.

“Outside of marriage, it is,” she replied simply.

“You don’t move with the times, do you?” he asked on an expulsion of breath.

“No,” she replied.

He started smiling and couldn’t stop. “Oh, boy.”

“The girls will be waiting. Are you really taking them to a movie?” she asked.

“Yes.” One eye narrowed. “I need to take you to one, too. Something X-rated.”

She flushed. “Get out of here and stop trying to corrupt me.”

“You’re overdue.”

“Stop or I’ll have Mama Luke come over and lecture you.”

He frowned. “Mama Luke?”

“My aunt.”

“What an odd name.”

She shrugged. “Our whole family runs to odd names.”

“I noticed.”

She made a face. “I work for you. My private life is my own business.”

“You don’t have a private life,” he said, and smiled tenderly.

“I’m a great reader. I love Plutarch and Tacitus and Arrian.”

“Good God!”

“There’s nothing wrong with ancient history. Things were just as bad then as they are now. All the ancient writers said that the younger generation was headed straight to purgatory and the world was corrupt.”

“Arrian didn’t.”

“Arrian wrote about Alexander the Great,” she reminded him. “Alexander’s world was in fairly good shape, apparently.”

“Arrian wrote about Alexander in the distant past, not his own present.” His eyes became soft with affection as he looked at her. “Why don’t I like you? There isn’t a person in my circle of acquaintances who would even know who Arrian was, much less what he wrote about.”

“I don’t like you much, either,” she shot right back. “But I guess I can stand it if you can.”

“I’ll have to,” he mused. “If I let you walk out, the girls will push me down the staircase and call you back to support them at my funeral.”

She shivered abruptly and wrapped her arms around herself. Funeral. Funeral…

“Kasie!”

Her somber eyes came up. She was barely breathing. “Don’t…joke about things like that.”

“Kasie, I didn’t mean it that way,” he began.

She forced a smile. “Of course not. I have to get dressed.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You might as well come as you are. I haven’t seen a gown like that since I stayed with my grandmother as a child.” He shook his head. “You’d set a lingerie shop back decades if that style caught on.”

“It’s a perfectly functional gown.”

“Functional. Yes. It’s definitely functional. And about as seductive as chain mail,” he added.

“Good!”

He burst out laughing. “All right, I’m leaving.”

He went out, sparing her a last, amused glance before he closed the door.

Kasie dressed in jeans and a dark T-shirt. She put her long hair in a braid and pulled on sneakers. She felt a twinge of guilt because she’d missed so many Sunday sermons in past months. But she couldn’t reconcile her pain. It needed more time.

The whole family was at the table when she joined them for breakfast. John gave her a warm smile.

“I hear you had visitors last night,” he told Kasie with a mischievous glance at the two little girls, who were wolfing down cereal.

“Yes, I did,” Kasie replied with a worried glance that encompassed both Gil and Miss Parsons.

“You should have called me, Miss Mayfield,” Miss Penny Parsons said curtly and glanced at Kasie with cold dark eyes. “I take care of the children.”

Kasie could have argued that point, but she didn’t dare. “Yes, Miss Parsons,” she said demurely.

Gil finished his scrambled eggs and lifted his coffee cup to his firm lips. He was wearing slacks and a neat yellow sports shirt that emphasized his muscular arms. He looked elegant even in casual wear, Kasie thought, and remembered suddenly the feel of those strong arms around her. She flushed.

He noticed her sudden color and caught her gaze. She couldn’t seem to look away, and he didn’t even try to. For a space of seconds, they were fused in some sort of bond, prisoners of a sensual connection that made Kasie’s full lips part abruptly. His gaze fell to them and lingered with unexpected hunger.

Kasie dropped her fork onto her plate and jumped at the noise. “Sorry!” she said huskily as she fumbled with the fork.

“Didn’t get much sleep last night, did you?” John asked with a smile. “Neither did any of us. About midnight, I thought seriously about giving up cattle ranching and becoming a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.”

“I felt the same way,” Gil confessed. “We’re going to have to put a small line cabin out at the holding pens and keep a man there on stormy nights.”

“As long as I’m not on your list of candidates,” John told his brother.

“I’ll keep that in mind. Bess, don’t play with your food, please,” he added to the little girl, who was finished with her cereal and was now smearing eggs around the rim of her plate.

“I don’t like eggs, Daddy,” she muttered. “Do I gotta eat ‘em?”

“Of course you do, young lady!” Miss Parsons said curtly. “Every last morsel.”

Bess looked tortured.

“Miss Parsons, could you ask Mrs. Charters to see me before she plans the supper menu, please?” Gil asked.

Miss Parsons got up. “I will. Eat those eggs, Bess.”

She left. Gil gave his oldest daughter a sign by placing his forefinger across his mouth. He lifted Bess’s plate, scraped the eggs onto his, and finished them off before Miss Parsons returned.

“Very good,” she said, nodding approvingly at Bess’s plate. “I told you that you’d grow accustomed to a balanced breakfast. We must keep our bodies healthy. Come on, now, girls. We’ll have a nice nap until your father’s ready to go to the movies.”

Bess grimaced, but she didn’t protest. She got up with Jenny and was shepherded out by the governess.

“Marshmallow,” John chided the older man, poking the air with his fork. “You should have made her eat them herself.”

“When you start eating liver and onions voluntarily, I’ll make Bess eat eggs,” Gil promised. “Want to come with us to the movies?” He named the picture they were going to see.

“Not me,” John said pleasantly. “I’m going to Billings to see a man about some more acreage.” He glanced at Kasie speculatively. “Want to tag along, Kasie?”

The question surprised her. While she was trying to think of a polite way to say she didn’t, Gil answered for her.

“Kasie’s going with us to the movies,” he replied, and his pale eyes dared her to argue. “The girls will have conniptions if we leave her behind. Besides, she likes cartoons. Don’t you, Kasie?”

“I’m just crazy about them, Mr. Callister,” she agreed with a tight smile, angry because he’d more or less forced her into agreeing to go.

“Mr. Callister was our father,” Gil said firmly. “Don’t use it with us.”

She grimaced. “I work for you. It doesn’t seem right.”

John was gaping at her. “You’re kidding.”

“No, she isn’t,” Gil assured him. “When you have a free minute, get her to tell you why she braids her hair. It’s a hoot.”

She glared at Gil. “You cut that out.”

He wiped his mouth with a white linen napkin and got to his feet. “I’ve got some phone calls to make before we go. We’ll leave at one, Kasie.”

“Phone calls on Sunday?” she asked John when his brother had left them alone.

“It’s yesterday in some parts of the world, and tomorrow in some other parts,” he reminded her. “You know how he is about business.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“What amazes me,” he mused, watching her, “is how much he grumbles about you. He loves women, as a rule. He’s always doing little things to make the job easier for Mrs. Charters. He lets Pauline get away with only working three days of the week, when he needs a full-time secretary worse than I do. But he’s hard on you.”

“He doesn’t like me,” she said quietly. “He can’t help it.”

“You don’t like him, either.”

She smiled sheepishly. “I can’t help it, either.” She picked up on something he’d said earlier. “How can Pauline make ends meet with only a part-time job?” she asked curiously.

“She’s independently wealthy,” John told her. “She doesn’t need a job at all, but she caught Gil at a weak moment. He doesn’t have many of them, believe me. I think she attracted him at first. Now things have cooled and he’s stuck with her. She’s tenacious.”

“Why would she need to work?” she wondered aloud.

“Because Gil needed a secretary, of course. She hasn’t had any business training, and I don’t doubt that the files are in a hellacious mess.”

“Couldn’t he get somebody else?”

“He tried to. Pauline cried all over him and he gave up.”

“He doesn’t look like a man who’d even notice tears,” she said absently.

“Appearances are deceptive. You saw how he was when the dog threatened the girls,” he reminded her. “He’s not immune to tears.”

“I’d need convincing,” she said and grinned wickedly.

He leaned back in his chair with his coffee cup in his hand and studied her. “You’re good with the kids,” he said. “You must have spent a lot of time around children.”

She lowered her eyes to her empty plate. “I did. I’m not formally taught or anything, but I do know a few things.”

“It shows. I’ve never seen Bess respond to any of her various governesses. She liked you on sight.”

“How many governesses has she had?” she asked curiously.

“Four. This year,” he amended.

Her eyebrows arched. “Why so many?”

“Are you afraid of spiders, garter snakes, or frogs?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Why?”

“Well, the others were. They got downright twitchy about opening drawers or pulling down bedcovers,” he recalled with a chuckle. “Bess likes garter snakes. She shared them with the governesses.”

“Oh, dear,” Kasie said.

“You see the point. That’s why Miss Parsons was hired. She’s the next best thing to a Marine DI, as you may have noticed.”

Her face lightened. “So that’s why he hired her. I did wonder.”

John sighed. “I wish he’d hired her to do the tax work on the payroll instead. She’s a natural, and since she’s a retired accountant that experience would make her an asset. We have a firm of C.P.A.’s to do yearly stuff, but our bookkeeper who did payroll got married and moved to L.A. just before we hired you.”

“And Miss Parsons got hired to look after the girls. She really dislikes children,” she added.

“I know. But Gil refuses to believe it. He’s been lax about work at the ranch for a while. He stayed on the road more and more, avoiding the memories after Darlene died. I felt bad for him, but things were going to pot here. I have to travel to show the bulls,” he added, “because the more competitions we win, the higher the prices we can charge for stud fees or young bulls. The ranch can’t run without anybody overseeing it.” He pursed his lips as he studied her. “I gather that you said something to him about neglecting the girls. I thought so,” he mused when she shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve told him, too, but he didn’t listen to me. Apparently he listens to you.”

“He’s already tried to fire me once,” she pointed out.

“You’re still here,” he replied.

“Yes. But I can’t help but wonder for how much longer,” she murmured, voicing her one real fear. “I could go back and live with my aunt, but it isn’t fair to her. I have to work and support myself. This was the only full-time job that I was qualified for. Jobs are thin on the ground, regardless of the reports coming out about how great the economy is.”

“How did you end up in Medicine Ridge in the first place?” he wondered.

“I was living with my aunt in Billings when I saw the ad for this job in the local paper. I’d already been all over Billings hoping for a full-time job and couldn’t find one. This one seemed tailor-made for me.”

“I’m glad you applied for it,” he said. “There were a lot of candidates, but we ruled out most of them in less than five minutes each. You were the only woman out there who could even type.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. They thought I wanted beauty instead of brains. I didn’t.” He smiled. “Not that you’re bad on the eyes, Kasie. But I wasn’t running a pageant.”

“I was surprised that your brother hired me,” she confessed. “He seemed to dislike me on sight. But when he found out how fast I could type, he was a lot less antagonistic.”

He wasn’t going to mention what Gil had said to him after he hired Kasie. It had been against Gil’s better judgment, and he’d picked her appearance and her pert manner to pieces. It was interesting that Gil was antagonistic toward her. Very interesting.

“You’re a whiz at the computer,” John said. “A real asset. I didn’t realize what you could do with a spreadsheet program until you modified ours. You’re gifted.”

“I love computers,” she said with a smile. “Pauline is going to enjoy them, too, when she learns just a little more. Once she discovers the Internet, she’ll be even more efficient. There are all sorts of Web sites dedicated to the cattle industry. It would be great for comparisons—even for buying and selling bulls. You could have your own Web site.”

John let out a low whistle. “Funny, I hadn’t even considered that. Kasie, it might revolutionize the way we do business, not to mention cutting down on the amount of travel we have to do every year.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” she said, smiling at him.

“Mention it to Gil when you go to the movies,” he coaxed. “Let’s see what he thinks.”

“He might like the idea better if it came from you,” she said.

“I think he’ll like it, period. I already do. Can you make a Web site?”

She grimaced. “No, I can’t. But I know a woman who can,” she added. “She works out of Billings. I met her when we were going to secretarial school. She’s really good, and she doesn’t charge an arm and a leg. I can get in touch with her, if you like.”

“Go ahead. We do a lot of communication by e-mail, but neither of us even thought about putting cattle on our own site. It’s a terrific idea!”