Only You

by Peg Sutherland

  Christine stared at her father. There was no anger or fear in her gaze. Only loneliness. Dillon hugged her again, more fiercely this time. When he released her, his eyes were moist.

  Angie kissed Christine on the forehead, gave her a hug and stood up.

  “Now everybody’s kissed and hugged you goodnight,” Harper said as she tucked Christine into bed. “Time to turn out the light.”

  “Mrs. Stuart wants to know if Angie will be here in the morning,” Christine asked. She included Dillon in her glance.

  Angie smiled. “You can tell Mrs. Stuart we’ll all most definitely be here in the morning.”

  “Now close your eyes and go to sleep,” Harper said. “You have to get lots of rest if you want Angie to help you with your jumps tomorrow.”

  When they were out in the hall, Harper turned to Angie and said, “You seem to know as much about children as you do about horses.”

  “I just did what my mother and stepfather did,” Angie confessed. “It always worked for me.”

  “That’s the first time she and her father have ever kissed good-night.”

  “That’s awful,” Angie said, turning to Dillon.

  “She didn’t want me to kiss her,” Dillon replied gruffly. It irritated him to have to explain his failures to Angie.

  “There are times when you don’t ask, you just do,” Angie said. “I think you already know something about that.”

  Dillon felt his desire for Angie surge to the surface. He wondered if she had any idea just how much he wanted to do.

  Angie smiled. “Now I’m going to bed before you both discover I haven’t the foggiest notion what I’m talking about.”

  ANGIE CLOSED THE DOOR behind her and leaned against it. She didn’t know whether she was trying to lock herself in or keep out the swirling currents of emotion she had encountered since coming to Weddington Farms. She’d been caught up in them, and now she didn’t know what to do about it.

  She’d been surprised by Dillon’s friendliness after dinner and pleased he’d invited her to see the foal. She had assumed he was trying to make amends for being so unfriendly earlier. She hadn’t been averse to sharing a kiss with an attractive man. But what may have started as an act of animal magnetism had ended up as something quite different.

  At least for her. Her feelings for Dillon and Christine had changed from casual curiosity to something emotional. She felt a connection with them that hadn’t been there before. She also had some sense of how her intended purchase of Weddington Farms might affect their lives.

  But she didn’t know whether she was sorry Dillon was losing his farm, sorry for Christine because she had lost her mother or sorry for both of them because they were missing so much love and wanted it so much. There was always the possibility she was interested in Dillon for herself, but she held back from accepting that. It raised too many questions she wasn’t sure she could answer.

  He could be pretending to like her to keep his farm. She knew a dozen men who could fake any emotion if enough money was at stake. She didn’t think Dillon was like that, though. His emotions were too near the surface. At the same time, she wasn’t sure she wanted to become enmeshed in his problematic relationship with his daughter. What did she know about helping other people build a family relationship? If it weren’t for her stepfather, she wouldn’t have any family at all.

  The smartest thing for her to do was put it all out of her mind, go to bed and get a good night’s sleep. Things might look different in the morning. And if they didn’t, at least her head ought to be clear enough for her to deal with them. All this Southern hospitality and warm nights and bare toes in the grass had disoriented her. Nothing like this had ever happened in Pittsburgh.

  HARPER STUDIED the expression on her son’s face as he watched Angie Kilpatrick go to her room. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of his being so fascinated by this woman. She was even less certain about her granddaughter’s instant attachment.

  “That was unexpected.” Harper started downstairs.

  Dillon followed. “Yes.”

  “I can’t handle you or Christine that well, and Angie’s only known you one day.” Did that mean the woman was well versed in manipulating others, she wondered, but didn’t say.

  “She didn’t handle me,” Dillon protested.

  “Maybe not” They paused at the bottom of the stairs. Harper almost smiled at the streak of mule-headedness that showed in her son’s square jaw and the stiff line of his mouth. She loved that face. She hoped to see it happy again soon. And she worried that a woman like Angie Kilpatrick wasn’t the one to bring that about. “Coffee?”

  “Yours or Floretha’s?”

  Harper laughed. “Floretha made it before she went to bed.”

  “Coffee it is.”

  Harper switched on the kitchen light as they invaded Floretha’s domain. The room was exactly as it had been when Harper was growing up—the big, round table with spindly-legged chairs occupying the center, copper pots and iron skillets hanging from the ceiling, a clay planter of fresh herbs in the window over the sink, every surface gleaming from Floretha’s efforts.

  Harper poured two cups of coffee while Dillon rummaged through the refrigerator for a late-night snack. He found the last of the blackberry cobbler Floretha had served for dessert and joined Harper at the table.

  “Do you like her?” he asked.

  Harper wasn’t surprised his thoughts were still on Angie. “Yes.”

  She supposed he heard the hedging in her voice. “But what?”

  Harper sipped her coffee and tried to work out the right reply. How did she tell her son that she understood rich young women far too well? That she knew how easy it was for them to become so self-centered they never thought of anyone else. Who knew what Angie Kilpatrick’s motives were in being so nice to Dillon and Christine?

  She only wished she’d thought to ask that question of herself before she’d invited the woman to stay with them.

  Never mind. She would be gone soon.

  “I just think you should be careful of her. That’s all.”

  Dillon gave her a sharp look and paused with a spoonful of cobbler halfway to his lips. “Why?”

  Harper shook her head and smiled. “I’m sure she’s very nice, Dillon. Maybe she just reminds me too much of myself when I was young.”

  Dillon smiled. “That doesn’t sound too bad to me.

  If he only knew.

  “Just be careful, son.”

  “Believe me, Mom, I’ve made all the mistakes with women I intend to make.”

  Harper wasn’t reassured.

  “YOU MEANING TO RIDE with me today?” Shep asked when Dillon climbed into the cab of the flatbed truck they used to transport hay and straw.

  “I’ve got a little business to conduct with Mr. Bowman.”

  Shep chuckled. “You mean you aren’t going to let him have this hay until you get your money.”

  “In cash,” Dillon said.

  “Did that woman make you an offer for the farm?” Shep asked after they’d pulled onto the main road.

  “It’s Mom’s place,” Dillon answered, his tone discouraging any more questions. “She wouldn’t make any offers to me.”

  Shep was impervious to hints. They came from different ends of the social scale, and Shep was as short, wiry and blond as Dillon was tall, muscled and dark, but their friendship recognized no differences.

  “What are you going to do if she sells?” Shep asked.

  Dillon didn’t want to think about the Angie who’d come to wreck his home. He much preferred the sweet-lipped, warm-bodied woman who wriggled her toes in the grass and kissed him with a heat equal to his own. That Angie had touched something inside him he thought Evelyn had killed.

  He preferred to think about the woman who’d convinced his daughter to hug him. He hadn’t been prepared for the force of his feelings when he’d held Christine in his arms. Nothing like that had happened before. Any contact between them had been tentative and u
ncomfortable.

  But that had changed in the few seconds it took Christine to hug him and for him to hug her back. She was his daughter, his flesh and blood, and he loved her more than he ever thought possible. He had to find a way to convince her that he loved her, to let her know he wanted her to love him.

  To do that, he needed a home, one he could call his own, one no one could sell out from under him. But that wasn’t all. Christine’s response to Angie had showed him something he’d tried to ignore. Christine needed a mother.

  But that was another question altogether, one Dillon didn’t feel ready to face just yet.

  “If she sells, I won’t stay here,” Dillon said. “I know a couple of places in Virginia looking for a good manager right now.” He couldn’t watch his mother waste his heritage on that mill. Neither could he watch his land be taken over by strangers, fields cut up, barns pulled down.

  “Your ma won’t sell if it’ll make you leave.”

  “I don’t know.” Shep didn’t understand how his mother felt about the mill. Hell, for that matter, neither did he. “We both have a lot to think about.”

  “Like the buyer?” Shep said, giving him a dig in the ribs.

  Yeah, like Angie. That was something else he hadn’t figured out. He had headed down the lane with a pretty woman who excited his lust. He’d come back with a woman who’d somehow captured his heart.

  What the hell was he going to do about that! What did he want to do about her? He didn’t know. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. On one hand, he knew exactly what he wanted. His body had been screaming the message loud and clear from the moment he took her in his arms.

  But that wasn’t the part that bothered him. What he’d felt last night was different from the passionfilled nights he’d indulged in since his divorce, different from what he had felt for Evelyn. He felt a strong physical desire for Angie, enough to last for months, maybe even longer.

  But it was the other element that confused him because he couldn’t put a name to it. It couldn’t be love. He knew little about her except that she was rich, had a stepfather, and wanted to buy his mother’s farm. Hardly enough on which to base a permanent relationship.

  Yet that’s exactly what he was thinking. She wasn’t the kind of woman you could roll in the hay one night and forget the next. And if he’d been foolish enough to think so, her handling of Christine would have convinced him otherwise. And therein lay the dilemma. She’d burst into his life in three areas—his home, his livelihood and his family. Each confused rather than clarified the other.

  He was probably reading too much into things. Too much moonlight, too much emotion. Things would probably look very different in a day or two. Besides, Angie might decide not to buy the farm. He didn’t want her to buy it, but he didn’t want her to leave, either. He was startled to realize he liked her right where she was.

  “What do you think of the lady?” Shep asked as he blasted his horn at a truck disputing his right to the center of the road. “She sure looks grade A, number one to me.”

  “None of your business,” Dillon said. “And next time don’t try to take the side off the truck or you’ll have the hay scattered over half the county. We’ll play hell getting any cash out of old man Bowman then.”

  Shep laughed and didn’t slow down one bit

  ANGIE HAD NEVER KNOWN what it was like to be part of a busy household. Even when she was a child, her home had been filled with quiet and solitude. And she’d lived alone since college. So she was immediately knocked off center the next morning by the flurry of activity engendered by eating breakfast as a family and all the preparations for getting Christine and Harper on their way to school and work.

  She’d envisioned enjoying a cup of coffee and the morning paper surrounded by the quiet of the countryside. Instead, Christine had latched on to her and enlisted her help getting dressed. The girl had discarded three outfits before settling on shorts and a T-shirt with a surfer on the front. Then she needed help with her ponytail as Floretha called to them from downstairs.

  Breakfast was not exactly calming, either. Floretha hovered while nagging Harper and Christine to eat slowly. The abundance of hearty Southern cooking almost enabled Angie to forget her disappointment that Dillon had eaten more than an hour earlier.

  Then it was over, and Angie finished her coffee while Floretha cleaned up. Floretha declined Angie’s help.

  “I’ve been cleaning up around here for almost fifty years. I wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t keep on.”

  “After that long, I’d think you’d want to retire,” Angie said, forgetting for a moment that the housekeeping arrangements at Weddington Farms were none of her business.

  “I could have. My daughter wants me to go live with her. She’s got a nice job in Kansas City.” The old woman topped off Angie’s cup of coffee. “I was considering it when Dillon and Christine came home. That child is my third generation of Weddingtons. I couldn’t leave.” She laughed heartily. “Did you know Harper tried to hire a housekeeper to help me? I don’t need somebody else getting in my way. Besides, if I left here for Kansas City, I’d be sitting around that apartment all day waiting for my girl to come home. This way I have family all day long and get paid for it besides. But Dillon better find himself a wife to take over one day. I can’t keep doing this forever.”

  Angie left Floretha to her work and went out in search of Dillon.

  “He took a load of hay and straw to the other side of Camden,” one of the men told her. “They ain’t paid us for the last load. Dillon said he didn’t aim to leave the place until old man Bowman coughed up his lungs or the money.”

  So Angie saddled a horse and spent the morning riding the lanes, estimating the cost of putting in training facilities, determining how many of the present buildings could be adapted to her needs and making projections about future expansion. She was trying to decide whether a drainage ditch could be incorporated into a steeplechase course when Dillon rode up.

  “See everything you wanted to see?” he asked. The hard edge had returned to his voice. Last night she’d been his companion, but this morning she was a threat once more.

  “Pretty much,” she answered.

  His clean jeans and shirt clung to every curve of his well-muscled body. He rode a powerful chestnut gelding she hadn’t seen before.

  “Did you get your money?”

  He looked puzzled.

  “From the man you were going to throttle until he coughed it up?”

  His smile took some of the stiffness out of his expression. She wished he’d smile more often. He was a very handsome man.

  “Yes. He’d just unloaded a van with nine horses from a big stable up north. They had to pay or bed them down on clay. I went straight to his bank and cashed the check.”

  Angie couldn’t hide her surprise. “You mean you carried that much cash all the way back from Camden?”

  “Sure. In my hip pocket. That way I know I’ve got it.”

  Angie was so used to dealing with checks and credit transfers she’d almost forgotten what money looked like. Cash to her was a line of numbers on a computer screen. For reasons she couldn’t quite explain, Dillon’s exchange of money for hay made everything seem much more vivid, the value of that money to the farm easier to understand.

  She should have realized earlier that Dillon was the kind of man who would want the real thing. For him, getting his hands dirty and his muscles sore made the farm something worth working for.

  With the exception of her horses, Angie had always worked at a distance from anything so real. But Dillon was real, and he was right next to her.

  Angie felt a strange quiver in her abdomen. She was suddenly exquisitely aware of his physical presence. She couldn’t imagine what she’d found so attractive about three-piece suits and blow-dried hair. As far as she was concerned, a little bit of dirt and sweat did more for a man than anything that came with a Dry-Clean-Only label.

  “How much land were you looking to buy?�
�

  “Not this much,” she said, jerking her thoughts away from the powerful thigh that nearly brushed against her own. “I’d probably leave all but a few hundred acres under cultivation until I needed it.” She could tell by his narrowed gaze she had caught his attention.

  “What about the house?”

  “I’d need that. I need some kind of headquarters, something to give the place character, a place for me to live and where I can put up important guests.”

  Angie was having difficulty keeping her business and romantic interests separate. That was a new experience for her. She’d never considered the possibility of combining them but Dillon was destroying her preconceived notions as quickly and thoroughly as he was destroying her composure.

  He was also making her wish she could keep him on the farm, though whether for his benefit or hers, she wasn’t entirely sure. The more she found herself thinking this farm was ideal for what she wanted, the more she felt guilty for taking it away from Dillon. She didn’t see why fulfilling her dream should deprive Dillon of his. That would destroy some of her pleasure in her own success.

  An idea occurred to her that was so brilliant in its simplicity she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. “Would you consider being my farm manager? I’ll have my hands full trying to run the business end of things.”

  Dillon gaped at her in surprise. “Your farm manager?”

  Angie couldn’t understand why the idea should be such a shock to Dillon. The more she thought about it, the more she liked it.

  “There’s far more land here than I can use,” Angie explained quickly, hoping he would give her a chance to show him the advantages before he rejected the notion completely. “It makes sense to keep anything not required for training horses under cultivation. There’ll be plenty of acreage left over for cash crops and your horses.”

  She could see his skin pale under his tan. His eyes grew hard. He leaned forward in the saddle, staring at her as if she was a murderer.