by Diana Palmer
“I know you don’t like him, but she won’t believe it. If there was anybody else I could ask, I wouldn’t bother you. I just don’t like the idea of leaving her alone with him, even if she does have pneumonia.”
“I don’t mind. Honest. You be careful.”
“The plane wouldn’t dare crash,” he chuckled. “I’ve got too much work to do.”
“Keep that in mind. I’ll see you when you get back.”
“You be careful, too,” he said. “And wear your raincoat. It’s already sprinkling outside.”
“I’ll wear mine if you wear yours.”
He chuckled again. “Okay. You win. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
She said goodbye and hung up, rushing to get her bag packed so that she could get over to the ranch.
* * *
She walked into Viv’s bedroom with a bag of medicine, a cold soft drink that she knew her friend liked and some cough drops.
Viv looked washed out and sick, but she managed a wan smile as Natalie approached the bed. Whit was sprawled in an armchair by the bed, looking out of sorts until he saw Natalie. His eyes ran over her trim figure in jeans and a button-up gray knit sweater with a jaunty gray and green scarf.
“Don’t you look cute,” he said with a smile.
Viv glared at him. So did Natalie.
“Why don’t you make some coffee, Whit?” Viv asked angrily. “I could do with a cup.”
He got out of the chair. “My pleasure. What do you take in yours, Nat?” he asked smoothly.
She turned and looked him right in the eye. “Nobody calls me Nat except Mack,” she pointed out. “It isn’t a nickname I tolerate from anyone else.”
His cheekbones colored briefly. “Sorry,” he said with a nervous laugh. “I’ll just make that coffee. Be back as soon as I can.”
Viv watched him go and then turned cold eyes on her friend. “You don’t have to snap at him,” she said curtly. “He was only being polite.”
Natalie’s eyebrows went up. “Was he?”
“Mack shouldn’t have called you,” she said tersely. “I’d have been just fine here with Whit.”
Natalie felt uncomfortable and unwelcome. “He thought you needed nursing.”
“He thought I needed a chaperone, you mean,” she said angrily. “And I don’t! Whit would manage just fine.”
“All right, then,” Natalie said with a forced smile. “I’ll go home. There’s your medicine and some cough drops. I guess Whit can pick up anything else you need. Sorry I bothered you.”
She turned and walked to the door, almost in tears.
“Oh, Nat, don’t go,” Viv said miserably. “I’m sorry. You came all this way and even brought my medicine and I’m being horrible. Please come back.”
Natalie had the door open. “You’ve got Whit....”
“Come back,” Viv pleaded.
Natalie closed the door and went to the armchair by the bed, but her eyes were wounded and faintly accusing as she sat.
“Listen, Whit doesn’t like me,” Natalie told Viv. “He’s only flirting with me to make you jealous. Why can’t you see that? What in the world could he see in me? I’m not pretty and I don’t have any money.”
“In other words, he wouldn’t like me if I didn’t have a wealthy background?” Viv asked pointedly.
“I said you were pretty, too,” she replied. “I know you feel bad, Viv, but you’re being unreasonable. We’ve been friends for a long time. I don’t know you lately, you’re so different.”
Viv shifted against her pillows. “He talks about you, too, even when you aren’t here.”
“It isn’t what you think,” Natalie said, exasperated. “He’s never said or done a thing out of line.”
“He’s very good-looking,” Viv persisted.
“So are you,” Natalie said. “But right now you’re sick and you don’t need to upset yourself like this. Mack asked me to take care of you, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
Viv studied her through fever-bright eyes. “Did you know that Glenna was going with him to Dallas?” she asked with undeniable venom.
Natalie forced herself not to react. “Why?” she asked carelessly.
“Beats me. I suppose she had something to do there, too. Anyway, I don’t think he’ll come back tonight. Do you?”
Natalie glared at her. “You really are a horror,” she said through her teeth.
Viv flushed. “Yes, I guess I am,” she agreed after a minute. “Mack said he wouldn’t wish the boys and me on a wife. He said it wouldn’t be fair to expect anyone to have to take us on, as well as him. I know Glenna wouldn’t. She hates me.”
“Your brother loves all three of you very much,” Natalie said, disquieted by what Viv had said.
“Well, he’s not my father. Bob and Charles are in their last two years of high school and then Bob wants to go into the Army. Charles wants to study law at Harvard. That will get them out of the way, and if I marry Whit, which I want to do, Mack will have the house to himself.” Her voice was terse and cool. She didn’t quite meet Natalie’s eyes. “Would you marry him, if he asked you?”
“That won’t happen,” Natalie said quietly.
“Are you sure of that?”
“Yes,” came the soft reply. “I’m sure. Mack’s self-sufficient and he doesn’t want to be tied down. He’s said often enough that marriage wasn’t for him. Probably he and Glenna will go on together for years,” she added, aching inside but not letting it show, “since they both like being uncommitted.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Viv studied her friend curiously. “But he’s very protective of you.”
Natalie averted her eyes. “Why shouldn’t he be? I’m like a second sister to him.”
Vivian frowned. She didn’t say anything. After a few seconds, she started coughing violently. Natalie handed her some tissues and helped her sit up with a pillow held to her chest to keep the pain at bay.
“Does that help?” Natalie asked gently when the spasm passed.
“Yes. Where did you learn that?” she asked.
“At the orphanage. One of the matrons had pneumonia frequently. She taught me.”
Viv dropped her eyes. Occasionally in her jealousy, she forgot how deprived Natalie’s life had been until the Killains had come along. She knew how Nat felt about Mack, and she didn’t understand her sudden need to hurt a woman who’d been nothing but kind to her ever since their friendship began. She was fiercely jealous that Whit seemed to prefer Natalie, which didn’t help her burgeoning resentment toward her best friend. She was confused and envious and so miserable that she could hardly stand herself. She didn’t know what she was going to do if Whit made a serious pass at Natalie. She was sure that she’d do something desperate, and that it would be the end of her long friendship with the other woman.
* * *
The hours dragged after that tense exchange. Natalie kept out of Vivian’s bedroom as much as she could, busying herself with tidying up around the living room. Whit paused to flirt with her from time to time, but she managed to keep him away by reminding him of Viv’s condition. He was getting on her nerves, and Viv was getting more unbearable by the minute.
When eight o’clock rolled around, it was all Natalie could do to keep from running for her life. Whit was still around, and for the past fifteen minutes, he’d been coming on to Natalie. She was on the verge of assault when Mack walked in unexpectedly.
He gave Natalie and Whit a speaking glance. They were standing close together and Whit was leaning over her. It looked as if he’d just broken up something, and his eye flashed angrily.
“Why don’t you make another pot of coffee, Whit?” she asked quickly.
“As soon as I get back,” he promised. “I need to run to the convenience store and get some cigarettes. I’m dying for a smoke.”
&nb
sp; “Okay,” Natalie said.
Mack didn’t say a word. With bridled fury, he watched the other man go. But when he shook off his raincoat, he smiled at Natalie as she took it and hung it on the rack for him.
“Did it rain all the way home?” she asked.
“Just about. How’s Viv?”
“She’s doing fine.”
“Good.” He caught her hand, pulled her into the study with him and closed the door. “You can sit with me while I get these papers sorted. Then we’ll go up and see Viv.”
“Whit won’t know where we are when he comes back.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “It’s my house.”
“Point taken.” She sat in the chair across from his big desk and watched him sort through a briefcase before he sat down with several stacks of papers and began putting them into files.
As she watched his hands, she thought back to the night Carl had been killed in the wreck...
* * *
It was a stormy night, with lightning flashes illuminating everything inside and outside the house where Natalie was living with her aunt, old Mrs. Barnes. It was her seventeenth birthday, and she was spending it alone, in tears, mourning the death of the only boy she’d ever loved. His death that night in a wreck, driving home from an out-of-town weekend fishing and camping trip with a cousin was announced on the late news. The cousin lived. Carl had died instantly, because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The official cause of the one-car accident was driving too fast for conditions in a blinding rain. The car had veered off the highway at a high speed and crashed down a hill. One of her friends from school had called, almost distraught with grief, to tell Natalie before she had to find out from the news.
Carl Barkley had been the star quarterback of their high school football team. Natalie had been his date, and the envy of the girls in the senior class, for the Christmas dance. She was to be his date for the senior prom, as well. Handsome, blond, blue-eyed Carl, who was president of the Key Club, vice president of the student council, an honor student with a facility for physics that had gained him a place at MIT after graduation. Carl, dead at eighteen. Natalie couldn’t stop crying.
At times like these, she ached for a family to console her. Old Mrs. Barnes, who’d given her a home during her junior year of high school and with whom she would live while she attended the local community college, was away for the weekend. She wasn’t due back until the next morning. There was Vivian Killain, of course, her best friend. But Vivian had also been a friend of Carl, and she was too upset to drive. The only fight Natalie and Vivian had ever had was over Carl, because Vivian had started dating him first. Carl had only gone out with her once before he and Natalie ended up in English class together. It had been love at first sight for both of them, but Vivian only saw it as Natalie tempting her boyfriend away. It wasn’t like that at all.
The thunder shook the whole house, and it wasn’t until the rumble died down that Natalie heard someone knocking on the front door. Slipping a matching robe over a thin pink satin nightgown with spaghetti straps, she went to see who it was.
A tall, lean man in a raincoat and broad-brimmed Stetson stared at her.
“Vivian said your aunt was out of town and you were alone,” Mack Killain said quietly, surveying her pale, drenched face. “I’m sorry about your boyfriend.”
Natalie didn’t say a word. She simply lifted her arms. He picked her up with a rough sound and kicked the door shut behind him. With her wet face buried in his throat, he carried her easily down the hall to the open door that was obviously her bedroom. He kicked that door shut, too, and sat her gently on the armchair beside the bed.
He took off his raincoat, draping it over the straight chair by the window, and placed his hat over it. He was wearing work clothes, she saw through her tears. He hadn’t even stopped long enough to change out of his chaps and boots and spurs. His blue-checked long-sleeve shirt was open halfway down his chest, disclosing a feathery pattern of thick, black curling hair. His broad forehead showed the hat mark. A lock of raven-black straight hair fell over the thin black elastic of the eye patch over his left eye.
He stared at Natalie for a few seconds, taking in her swollen eyes and flushed cheeks, the paleness of the rest of her oval face.
“I didn’t even get to say goodbye, Mack,” she managed huskily.
“Who does?” he replied. He bent and lifted her so that he could drop down into the armchair with her in his lap. He curled her into his strong, warm body and held her while she struggled through a new round of tears. She clung to him, grateful for his presence.
She’d always been a little afraid of him, although she was careful not to let it show. She’d been the one who nursed him, over the objections of the orphanage, when he was gored in the face by one of his own bulls. His sister, Vivian, was no good at all with anyone who was hurt or sick—she simply went to pieces. And his brothers, Bob and Charles, were terrified of their big brother. Natalie had known that he stood to lose his sight in both eyes instead of just one, and she’d held him tight and told him over and over again that he mustn’t give up. She’d stayed out of classes for a whole week while the doctors fought to save that one eye, and she hadn’t left him day or night until he was able to go home.
Even then, she’d stopped by every day to check on him, having presumed that he’d have his family standing on its ear trying to keep him in bed for the prescribed amount of time. Sure enough, the boys had walked wide around him and Vivian just left him alone. Natalie had made sure that he did what the doctor told him to. It amused and amazed his siblings that he’d let her boss him around. Killain gave orders. He didn’t take them from anybody—well, except from Natalie, when it suited him.
“We were going to the senior prom together,” she said huskily, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “This morning, I was deciding what sort of dress to wear and how I was going to fix my hair...and he’s dead.”
“People die, Nat,” he said, his voice deep and quiet and comforting at her ear. “But I’m sorry he did.”
“You didn’t know him, did you?”
“I’d spoken to him a time or two,” he said with deliberate carelessness.
“He was so handsome,” she said with a ragged sigh. “He was smart and brave and everybody loved him.”
“Of course.”
She shifted into a more comfortable position on his lap, and as she did, her hand accidentally slid under the fabric of his cotton shirt, to lie half buried in thick hair. Odd, how his powerful body tensed when it happened, she thought with confusion. She was aware of other things, too. He smelled of horses and soap and leather. His breath pulsed out just above her nose, and she could smell coffee on it. Her robe was open, and the tiny straps that held her gown up had slipped in her relaxed position. One of her breasts was pressed against Mack’s chest, and she could feel warm muscle and prickly hair against it just above the nipple. Her body felt funny. She wanted to pull the gown away and press herself closer, so that his skin and hers would touch. She frowned, shocked by the longing she felt to be held hungrily by him.
She tensed a little. “You’re still wearing your work clothes,” she said. Her voice sounded as odd as she felt. “Why?”
“We had a fence down and we didn’t know it until the sheriff called and said we had cattle strung up and down the highway,” he told her. “It’s taken two hours to get them back in and fix the fence. That’s why it took me so long to get here. Vivian had been calling me on my cell phone since dark, but I was out of the truck.”
“Don’t you have a flip phone as well as the one installed in your truck?” she wondered aloud.
He chuckled. “Sure. It’s at home recharging.”
She smiled drowsily. “Thank you for coming over. I’m sure you didn’t feel like it after all that.”
His broad shoulders lifted and fell. “I couldn’t leave you here alone,”
he said simply. “And Vivian was in no sort of shape to come.” His lean hand smoothed her wavy dark hair. “She thinks you cut her out with Carl, but that’s just the way she is.”
“I know.” She sighed. “She’s so pretty that she takes it for granted that the boys all want her. Most of them do, too.”
“She’s spoiled,” he replied. “I was hard on Bob and Charles, but I’ve made a lot of allowances for Viv, simply because she was the only girl in the family. Maybe that was a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake to care for people,” she pointed out.
“So they say.” His fingers tangled in her soft hair. “Want something to drink?”
“No, thanks,” she replied. Her fingers spread involuntarily in the thick hair over his breastbone, and his intake of breath was sharp and audible.
His body tensed again. She and Carl had kissed, but she’d been careful not to let things go very far. In fact, she hadn’t felt any sort of strong physical attraction to the football star, which was strange, considering how much he meant to her. With Mack, she experienced sensations she’d never felt before. She felt hot and swollen in the most unusual places, and it puzzled her. The sudden tension she noticed in the man holding her puzzled her, as well. Mack didn’t say a word, but she could feel his heartbeat increase, hear the rough sound of his breathing.
She let her face slide down his muscular arm, and her curious eyes met his good one. It was narrow and unblinking and vaguely intimidating. Even as she watched, his gaze went to where her robe was open and one of her breasts in its lace-trimmed satin lay soft and warm against his chest.
Involuntarily, she followed his intense scrutiny and saw what she hadn’t realized before—the gown had slipped so far down that her nipple, hard and tight, was visibly pressing into the thick hair over his chest.
He looked into her stunned eyes, and the hand in her hair tightened. “Didn’t you do this with your boyfriend?” he asked bluntly.
“No,” she said shakily.
“Why not, if you loved him?” he persisted.