White Christmas: Woman Hater / The Humbug Man

“Yes, sir,” she promised.

He went inside, and she lounged in the swing until Mary called her to have a sandwich. She sat in the spacious kitchen, enjoying a huge ham sandwich and a glass of iced tea while Mary prepared what promised to be the world’s largest moose stew. They talked about the ranch and the country and the weather, and then Nicole went out the back door and wandered down to the river, just to look around.

She could imagine this country in the years of the Lewis and Clark expedition. She’d read a copy of their actual journal, enjoying its rather anecdotal style, seeing the country through their eyes in the days before supersonic jets and superhighways. Trappers would have come through here, she mused, kneeling beside the river with her eyes on the distant peaks. They’d have trapped beaver and fox and they’d have hunted.

Kentucky had its own mountain country, and Nicole had been in it a few times in her life. It had been a different setting then. Elegance. Parties. Sophisticated people. Wealth. She sat down on a huge rock beside the river and tore at a twig, listening to the watery bubble of the river working its way downstream. She much preferred this kind of wealth. Trees and cattle and land. Yes.

“Daydreaming?”

She turned to find Winthrop Christopher sitting astride a big black stallion, watching her.

“I like the river,” she explained. “We have one in Chicago, of course, but it’s not the same. We have concrete and steel instead of trees.”

“I know. I’ve been to Chicago. Even to the office, in fact.” His eyes narrowed. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

She did. Even that brief glance had stamped him onto her memory, but it wouldn’t do to let him know that. She avoided a direct answer. “It’s always hectic. I don’t pay a lot of attention to visitors, I’m afraid.”

“The morning I came, you were sitting at that computer with a stack of steno pads at your elbow and a telephone in your hand. You barely looked up when I went into Gerald’s office.” He smiled mockingly. “I was wearing a suit. Maybe I looked different.”

“I can’t quite imagine you in a suit, Mr. Christopher,” she said, thinking, top that, cattle king.

“Winthrop,” he corrected. “I’m not that much older than you. Eleven years or so. I’m thirty-four.”

“How old is your brother?” she asked, curious.

He lifted his chin. “Thirty.”

“Sometimes he seems older,” she mused. “When they call the stockholders’ meetings, for instance.”

He glanced into the distance. “No doubt. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with those damned things. That’s Gerald’s sole province now. I just run my ranch, and the only stockholder I have to please is myself. Gerald doesn’t own enough shares to squabble over the decisions I make.”

“You inherited the ranch, didn’t you?”

He stared at her for a minute, and she swallowed hard, sure that he was going to give her some sarcastic financial rundown and chide her for asking. But, surprisingly, he didn’t. He just nodded. “That was the way my father wanted it. He knew I’d hold it as long as I lived, no matter what. You’ll find that Gerald isn’t terribly sentimental. He’d just as soon have a photograph as the object itself.”

She pursed her full lips and studied him. “I’ll bet you saved bobby pins and bits of ribbon when you were a teenager,” she said daringly, just to see what he’d say.

He blinked, then laughed, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “I had my weak moments when I was younger,” he agreed. His eyes darkened. “Not anymore, though, Kentucky girl. I’m steel right through.”

She wouldn’t have touched that line. She turned, glancing at the distant ribbon the river made running into those towering, majestic peaks. “I was thinking about Lewis and Clark,” she murmured, glancing toward the horizon, so that she didn’t catch the look on his face. “A man died during the expedition. What they described sounded just like food poisoning. They wouldn’t have known, of course. How much we’ve learned in over a hundred years. How far we’ve come. And yet,” she said softly, “how much we’ve lost in the process.”

“The expedition went down the Missouri and Jefferson rivers,” he said slowly. “We’re on a tributary of the Jefferson, so they may have camped in this valley.” He looked away. “They used to call it Buffalo Flats. The buffalo are gone, though. Like the way of life that existed here long ago.” He shifted restlessly. “Where’s Gerald?”

“Back at the house, I suppose,” she said, bothered by the curtness of his tone. “He said he had some important phone calls to make. I would have stayed, but he said we wouldn’t work today.”

“Want a ride back?” he offered, and then seemed to withdraw, as if he regretted the words even as he was speaking them.

Some devilish imp made her smile at him. “Suppose I say yes?” she asked, driven to taunt him. “You look as if you’d rather sacrifice the horse than let me on him.” And she grinned, daring him to mock her.

He felt a burst of light, but he wouldn’t give in to it. “Damn you.”

She grinned even more. “I won’t accept, if you’d rather not let me aboard. Anyway—” she shuddered with deliberate mockery and more sarcasm than he could know, because she’d practically grown up on horses “—I’d probably fall off. It looks very high.”

“It is. But I won’t let you fall off. Come on.” He kicked his foot out of the stirrup and held down a long arm, giving in to an impulse he didn’t even understand. He wanted her closer. He wanted to hold her. That should have warned him, but it didn’t.

He had enormous feet, she noticed, as she put a foot in the stirrup and let him pull her up in front of him. He was amazingly strong, too.

She hadn’t realized how intimate it was going to be. His hard arm went around her middle and pulled her back against a body that was warm and strong and smelled of leather and spice. She felt her heart run away, and that arm under her breast would feel it, she knew.

“Nervous?” he asked at her ear, and laughed softly, without any real humor. “I’m not dangerous. I don’t like women, or haven’t they filled you in yet?” She’s a woman, he was reminding himself. Watch it, watch yourself—she’ll sucker you in and kick you down, just like the other one did.

“Yes, I’m nervous,” she said. “Yes, you’re dangerous, and you may not like women, but I’ll bet they chase you like a walking mink.”

His eyebrows arched. “You’re plainspoken, aren’t you?” he asked, gathering her even closer as he urged the restless stallion into motion, controlling him carefully with lean, powerful hands and legs.

“I try to be,” she said, still uneasy about the double life she’d led since leaving Kentucky. To a man who’d been betrayed once, it might seem as if she were misleading him deliberately. But the past was still painful, and she’d forsaken it. She wanted it to stay in the past, like the bad memories of her own betrayal. Besides, there was no danger of Winthrop becoming involved with her. He was too invulnerable.

She held on to the pommel, her eyes on his long fingers. “You have beautiful hands, for a man,” she remarked.

“I don’t like flattery.”

“Suit yourself, you ugly old artifact,” she shot right back.

It had been a long time since anything had made him laugh. But this plain-faced, mysterious woman struck a chord in him that had never sounded. She brought color and light into his own private darkness. He felt the sound bubbling up in his chest, like thunder, and then overflowing. He couldn’t hold it back this time, and the rush of it was incomprehensible to him.

She felt his chest shaking, heard the deep rumble of sound from inside it. She would have bet that he didn’t laugh genuinely very often at anything. But she seemed to have a knack for dragging it out of him, and that pleased her beyond rational thought.

The lean arm contracted, and for an instant she felt him in an embrace that made her go hot all over. What would it be like, she wondered wildly, if he turned her and wrapped her up in his embrace and put that hard, cruel mouth over hers….

She tingled from head to toe, her breath catching in her throat. It shouldn’t have been like this, she shouldn’t still be vulnerable. She had to stop this, or it was going to be an unendurable month.

“Watch out, Miss White,” he said at her ear, his voice deep and soft and dangerous. “Save the heavy flirting for Gerald. You’ll be safer that way.”

He let her down at the porch, holding her so that she slid down to the ground. For an instant his dark face was very close, so close that she saw his dark eyes at point-blank range and something shot through her like lightning. She pulled back slowly, her eyes still linked to his. What had he said? Something about flirting with Gerald. But why should she want to flirt with her boss?

“See you.” He wheeled his stallion and rode off, and she watched him with mingled emotions.

Supper was an unexpectedly quiet affair. Winthrop was out when she and Gerald sat down to eat, along with the ranch foreman, Michael Slade, a burly man of thirty who seemed perfectly capable of handling anything.

“Boss said he wouldn’t get back in time for chow,” Michael told Gerald with a grin. “Had to go into Butte for some supplies he needed. I offered, but he said he had some other things to do as well.”

“Odd that he didn’t do it before he met us at the airport.” Gerald sighed as he took his medicine and glared at his plate. The doctor had told him that they didn’t treat ulcers with bland diets anymore, but Mary hadn’t believed him. Amazing, how disgusting green pea soup looked in a bowl, and he did hate applesauce. He glanced at Mary, sighed and then gave in to her, as he had done even as a child. He picked up his spoon and began to sip the soup. “Oh, well, that’s Winthrop. Unpredictable. How’s it going, Mike?”

The foreman launched into grand detail about seeing to the winter pasture, fixing fences, storing hay, culling cows, doing embryo transplants for the spring calving and organizing other facets of ranch life that he’d expected would go right over Nicole’s head.

“One of my family was into embryo transplants when it was barely theory,” Nicole interrupted. “They had some great successes. Now there’s a new system underway, implanting computer chips just under the skin to keep track of herds….”

“Say, I’ve read about that,” Mike agreed, and Gerald sat and stared while the two of them discussed cattle.