Unwrap Me Daddy_A Holiday Romance

by Natasha Spencer

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” The irritation won out, as evidenced by the muscle moving along his jawline as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. “What exactly has put a burr under your saddle?”

  Caroline was already halfway to the door. “The fact that you don’t know tells me all I need. Good day, Mr. Taggart. Be sure to send me—”

  “Stop.” Just that quickly he was beside her, one hand clamped around her wrist to prevent further movement. “Look, obviously you’re upset. And, I agree, this isn’t a good sign when we’ve only started to talk. But you have to tell me what’s wrong.”

  Tipping her head back to meet his glare straight on, she dug deep for the bravado she needed to face him down. It had to be done, immediately, cleanly, or he would ride rough-shod over every aspect of her personality from here on.

  “You made an assumption that may or may not be correct, Mr. Taggart. And then you usurped my own wishes. Whether you like my hair style, I will be the one deciding when and how much to get it cut. Do we understand each other?”

  For a full minute, while a noisy flock of birds frolicked in the oak branches outside the window, Ben Taggart simply stared at her in astonishment. Then he began to laugh: first a slow gurgle of good humor, then a ripple that emanated upward and outward from his belly.

  “May I be released now?” she asked primly, reminding him of his clasp.

  “Okay. Okay.” Still chuckling, he obeyed. “Will you rejoin me, so we can make a fresh start at this whole thing?”

  “Of course, Ben.” Having won what she considered a major point, Caroline returned to her seat. “Please tell me about your ranch, and about Sophie.”

  “Be glad to, Carrie.” At her uplifted brow, he paused, questioning, with a hesitation that she guessed he rarely employed. The sense of command, of power, hung around him like an actual tangible scent. “What, no nickname, either?”

  “I’m just not used to it, I admit. However, you may feel free to follow your preference.”

  “Good God. You really were a teacher, weren’t you?”

  Ben Taggart took a minute or two, leaning back once again in the luxurious office chair, to gather his thoughts, then went on to relate family history. The Ten Buck had acquired its title, he explained, shortly after the claim for 10,000 acres was staked out by grandfather William Travis Taggart, back in 1925, at the peak of the Roaring Twenties. While exploring his newfound kingdom, he had come across a herd of whitetail deer and various antlered stags, meandering their way across one of the grassy draws.

  Ten Buck the ranch became, forever and ever, amen.

  By 1975, the year of Ben’s birth, his father, Jefferson Davis Taggart, had augmented the holdings to double its original size and added more cattle and quarter horses and a number of buildings. He had also incorporated as a business.

  Ben’s contribution had increased all of the above, plus adding a few dozen or so oil wells. Neither as much nor as fancy as his forbears, he admitted now, modestly, but then he was a late bloomer. Had some years to go yet, to catch up.

  Listening to all this, Caroline involuntarily sighed. She’d known most of these facts already, of course; ancestry had been included in the extensive dossier which he had provided for her. And it was wrong. All so wrong.

  Everything that this man represented, everything that he had accomplished, stood as such total antithesis to her own system of values and beliefs.

  How to reconcile the two?

  We all of us are forced to make choices in life. This career path or that? This partner or that one? This set of standards or that?

  Without putting a pretty face on it, Caroline’s choice had come down to survival or extinction.

  “Your turn,” he said suddenly.

  Once again the sound of his voice had startled her out of what she called “the blue crazies.” She wasn’t used to having another person in the room, especially one so commanding. And probably demanding, as well.

  “My turn? You already know all there is to know.” Because she, too, had been required to provide a dossier. Complete. Intrusive. And, she had felt, somewhat demeaning.

  Leaning back far enough to prop both boots on the immaculate surface of his desk, absolutely at his ease, Ben laced his fingers together across his flat midriff and waited. “Have you completely recovered?”

  “Your secretary asked me the same thing,” Caroline retorted, a tad crossly.

  “Ah. You see how concerned everybody is about you. Well?”

  “Yes. I have.”

  Three months of hospital care and rehab work and physical therapy had returned her broken body almost to its normal condition. A few aches and pains now and then, an occasional stumble, the rare blinding headache—those, her physician had kindly told her, were to be expected. With more time, the healing would be complete, and the few remaining scars would gradually fade.

  As to the psychological damage caused by killing her own father…that was another thing entirely. And nothing that she intended to discuss with Benjamin Taggart.

  “The Taggarts go for historical names in a big way, don’t they?” she asked, to effect a change in subject.

  “I reckon we do. Gramps was called after a hero from the Alamo—fitting, don’t you think? And Pop, of course, was honored with the President of the Confederate States. Benjamin Milam, now, he was a leader in the Texas Revolution.” Smiling, he re-crossed one ankle over the other, as if prepared to stay chatting for hours. “We like larger-than-life champions in our family. How about you?”

  “I’m sure I would, as well. Can you tell me more about your daughter?”

  “Sophie? Sure.” Again, he paused, considering, and the look in those intense blue eyes became tender. “Seem to remember what Shakespeare wrote in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’—Though she be but little, she is fierce. Well, that about describes my gal right down to the soles of her expensive little size two sandals. She’s cute as the devil and twice as smart, and I love her to pieces. Trouble is, I don’t have time for her.”

  “Oh, I hardly think—”

  “I’m a busy man, Carrie, as I’ve mentioned a few dozen times. Got too much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it in.” Without warning, he slid both feet to the floor and rose in one lithe but elegant movement—a man used to taking command, whether from the saddle of his horse or from the office chair of his desk. “That’s where you come in.”

  “Well, yes, so I understood. But we really must—”

  “Yep. We really must.” Even as he rounded the desk, he was settling the collar of his jacket and gathering up various folders. “But not now. I’ve already taken too much time with this meeting, and I’m running late for another one. Gotta get going now.”

  Feeling suddenly overwhelmed, Caroline surged upright in a vain attempt to halt him in his path toward the door. “But—wait a minute. Didn’t you say Sophie would be home soon? Didn’t you say she’d be here for supper? You can’t mean to just—to throw us together, without any sort of introduction, or chance to get used to one another, or—or—”

  “Sure I can. Told you, Carrie, that’s where you come in.” He did stop, then, only a few inches away, with his height and breadth providing once more the sense of intimidation that shook her to the marrow. “You’re here. You’ve agreed to this arrangement, and so have I.”

  “To a point,” she reminded him icily. “I haven’t quite—”

  “From here on, you live at the Ten Buck on my sufferance, for two purposes only: one is to look after my daughter, and give her the care I can’t.”

  “And the other?” Her chin was up, her back stiff and straight, her eyes shooting sea-green fire.

  “The other?”

  Grinning, he took hold of her chin with one hand, leaned down, and, before she could protest or pull away, planted a hard, rough kiss squarely upon her astonished mouth.

  “The other,” he finished up, long legs and booted heels having already taken him to the threshold, “is that I want sex convenient
and available. So I expect you to welcome me into your bed, whenever I feel the need, just as soon as I plunk that wedding ring onto your finger.”

  Chapter Five

  “And your field trip today took you to a children’s theatre production?” Caroline asked with interest, as she dipped into the bowl of vichyssoise (in Hill Country parlance, cold creamy potato-leek soup) she had been served. A more sophisticated dish—especially for only two people, and one of those a child—than might have been expected. “That sounds like fun.”

  “Uh-huh.” Halfway down the length of this oak table that would, at a guess, hold at least twenty well-fed diners, young Miss Sophie Taggart was toying with her spoon and crumbling her cornbread. “We got to see Willy Wonka, and it was such fun. The oompa loompas had green hair!”

  She was indeed a charmer, this little girl with flaxen curls and big brown eyes that melted the heart. And quite self-possessed for her age, despite an initial shyness. There, at least at the beginning, the school mom—Sophie’s volunteer transportation—had helped.

  Mrs. Lila Sampson had driven Sophie, her own daughter Becca, and several other precocious little girls to the outing in Marigold. Now, having returned Sophie safely to the nest and walked her conscientiously inside, she seemed neither surprised nor upset by Ben Taggart’s absence.

  “Oh, he does that all the time,” she glowered, out of Sophie’s hearing. “Keeps sayin’ how busy he is, but, I tell you, honey, he does neglect this child shamefully. Why, if not for the other mothers of kids in Sophie’s class, she wouldn’t have hardly any maternal care a’tall. We’ve all told him so, and nagged him like mad, but—” a disdainful shrug, “—you know men.”

  No, Caroline didn’t really know men. But clearly Mrs. Sampson did. And she was willing to expound upon that knowledge, to the detriment of Ben Taggart’s reputation. Tall and tanned and fair, she was dressed, not in exotic diamonds and some low-cut ensemble, but a comfortable paisley blouse and short denim skirt. She had introduced herself, asked a few casual questions as to Caroline’s appearance at the ranch (without ascertaining any real facts), and left possible gossip alone. Before she left, with a friendly wave, Lila invited her new acquaintance to stop by anytime for some girls’ chit-chat; she just lived a few miles down the road.

  “A few miles down the road,” Caroline would discover, meant thirty miles away, in the neighboring county.

  Sophie was starving, and supper was ready, so here they were in the dining room. Just the two of them, parked at this monster table. Surely Ben wouldn’t usually leave this child all alone, unsupervised but for the occasional overseeing of servants! Or would he?

  Caroline was doing her best to make conversation with a six-year-old. Since her expertise lay with the more rambunctious middle school students, she was finding it hard going.

  “I somehow feel you don’t really like the soup,” she commented now.

  “It doesn’t taste very good,” Sophie admitted.

  Unsure of what other courses had been planned for this grown-up meal, Caroline drew in a deep breath to ask, “What kind of foods do you like to eat?”

  “Um—p’tato chips. And cheese sticks, sometimes. And Hershey bars.” Her smile was wide enough to reveal the gap of one lower front tooth. A charming, gamine’s smile.

  “I like those, too. How about PBJ’s?”

  “Uh-huh. ML lets me go make my own. If I ask her real nice.”

  “Well, then.” Caroline lowered her voice to a conspiratorial tone. “How about if you and I go into the kitchen and make our own right now?”

  The little girl giggled. “Can we, really?”

  “We can, really.”

  Having been dropped into this vast ocean of unknown territory, with neither help nor support from its master, Caroline had yet to meet any of the household staff, and she had been given no handbook of rules to follow. Very well. Then she would make up her own.

  Since she would be flailing away, like a swimmer provided no vest against drowning, she would begin immediately to run things as she saw fit. And to hell with His Majesty, whatever he might prefer!

  It was at the kitchen table, a homely spot in a homely corner of the room, while the two of them were devouring messy sandwiches, a bag of chips, and three bananas, that Sophie asked, quite clearly, “Are you gonna be my new mom?”

  Caroline nearly choked on a swallow of milk. “Why—why would you ask that, Sophie?”

  She was too intent on peeling away part of the crust to notice any show of surprise. “Well, I don’t have one. And the other kids at school do. And Daddy promised he would get me a mom, some day.”

  Ben Taggart had just conveniently forgotten—or, his usual excuse, been too busy—to explain what was being arranged to his very perceptive daughter. He had given the child no more information than he had given the woman who had just arrived. Both of them were floundering.

  The miserable bastard.

  As an extremely wealthy, powerful man, he simply made whatever arrangements he liked concerning the lives of others, and expected them to accept and obey, without question.

  Clearly, females held little standing in his world. Probably just slightly higher up the ladder of his imperatives than the precious quarter horses that roamed around Ten Buck pastures. And quite a lot lower than the oil wells that were pumping money into his pockets and waste into the air.

  Caroline was seeing red as the fires of injustice began to burn in her veins. Since Ben Taggart’s education was sadly lacking in too many fundamentals, it was about time he put aside his business concerns long enough to learn the ways of a more personal, familial world. As the saying back home went, he had another think coming.

  “Do you want a mother?” Caroline asked carefully.

  “Well, sure.” She paused to lick grape jelly from one finger. “It’d be fun to do things with a mother. Y’ know, help me buy clothes, and paint my nails, and play games with.”

  “I’m sorry, Sophie. Have you missed out on doing those things?”

  “Sometimes Marilou does stuff with me. Or, when she’s too busy, I get handed over to Tom. But it’s not the same,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’d be nicer with a mom.”

  This little girl was so adorable, so trusting, so sweetly earnest, in her rainbow-colored top and brief lime-green skirt and miniscule silver ballet flats, that Caroline, never demonstrative by nature, wanted to wrap her into an embrace that would shelter and protect Miss Sophie from all the hurt that might be inflicted.

  And that included the neglect of her own father.

  “Well, I don’t know about you, Sophie, but I’ve been hankering to find someone I can play My Little Pony with. What do you think? Do you like ponies?”

  Sophie’s eyes lit up. “Uh-huh. And Barbie. Could we play Barbie?”

  “Absolutely. How about you take a quick bath and get into your pj’s, and then we can explore your toy box. Will that be okay?”

  “Uh-huh.” She wiped off a milk mustache with the back of one hand and then scrambled down from her chair. “C’mon, I’ll show you. Uh.” She paused. “Caroline? Do I call you Caroline?”

  Caroline stood, smiling down at this interesting little human discarded so casually to her charge. “That’s quite a mouthful. How about Carrie, instead?”

  “Carrie,” repeated the child comfortably. “Okay. I’ve got special colored bath stuff, you wanna see?”

  “I sure do. Lead the way, Sophie Tucker.”

  Giggling, she looked back over her shoulder. “That isn’t my name.”

  “I know. But it’s a pet name, just between you and me, because I like you so much. Is that all right?”

  “Uh-huh.” Her favorite non-word. “And I’ll call you—uh—Carrie Cutie Pie!” she brought that out with a flourish. Then, laughing outright, she tugged at Caroline’s free hand. “C’mon, Carrie, let’s go!”

  Several hours later, an exhausted and frazzled Caroline emerged from the delightful bedroom upstairs to make her way back to the first le
vel. She’d forgotten how much energy was required to keep up with an excitable first-grader.

  After the bath, which Sophie had insisted she was a big enough girl to do all on her own, she had proudly dragged out all her treasures to show off, with an explanation about every one. Caroline, sitting in awe upon an upholstered rocker that looked as if it had never been used, exclaimed over this or that, providing the audience that the child’s lonely heart craved.

  A fantastic Christmas music box, all in white, decorated with mirrors and glitter and tiny lights. What looked to be a few thousand miniature plastic things called Shopkins. A three story Barbie house, complete with fireplace and bathroom and working elevator. Numerous dolls—baby, Cabbage Patch, American Girl—each with its own set of clothing and accessories. Cupcake games and Princess games, Candyland and Hello Kitty. Crafts galore, from beading kits to candle-making to painted flower pots. A bookshelf, crammed full on every level.

  When they were finally finished, and Sophie, whose eyelids were beginning to droop, had brushed her teeth and crawled under the pretty pastel comforter of her canopy bed, Caroline was feeling overwhelmed by the sight of so many possessions. It required very few brain cells to realize that Ben was trying to make reparations for his prolonged avoidance of this precious little girl by simply filling her life with meaningless things. Much easier to spend cash than time.

  “Carrie, will you read me a story?”

  “Of course, Sophie. Any one in particular?”

  “Uh-uh. Whatever you decide.”

  Drawing a footstool closer to the bed, Caroline worked her way through a couple of Dr. Seuss books, and The Giving Tree. Before the last sentence was read, about eight o’clock, Sophie was yawning. “Don’t forget to—turn on—the night light,” she mumbled.

  Of course Caroline, who could sympathize with wanting something other than complete darkness around her, complied, after which she pulled the ruffled and rippled spread up over the little girl’s shoulders. Then, giving in to temptation, she bent forward to press a light kiss to Sophie’s smooth warm cheek. “Good night, sleep tight,” she whispered.