Talking things out had helped her finally break the vicious cycle between what she ate and how she felt. It had worked with Dr. Sikes and maybe it would help her now.
Though she felt a little silly, she found herself now spilling the whole story of Peter and the charity gala to Susan, who listened with wide, compassionate eyes and only gave the occasional snort in response.
Ten minutes later she felt much better. She wiped at her eyes with the heavy sleeve of her coveralls, grateful beyond measure that Peter was tending to the cattle and hadn’t caught her.
Though she knew it wasn’t healthy to suppress her emotions completely, she also knew she couldn’t afford to give in to them right now. Not with Peter here at Sweetwater, watching her every move. She couldn’t give him any hint that she was pregnant. If he found out, he would be livid.
She had to be strong, as stoic as Clint, until Peter left for Portland and she could figure out how to go on from here.
There was no question she was keeping her child. She loved her already, the tiny little life growing inside her. She didn’t know how she could so fiercely love someone she hadn’t known existed a week ago but she did know she was going to work hard to be a good mother.
Her own childhood had been terribly unhealthy, between Sheila’s complete self-absorption and Jack’s workaholic disinterest. But Katie was going to do everything in her power to give her own daughter a wonderful future, where her baby knew every moment of her life that she was loved.
That happy picture certainly didn’t include Peter Logan. It couldn’t possibly.
* * *
The wind still shrieked and howled when Peter finished with the cattle and returned to the barn. The two low-slung dogs led the way, leaping through snow drifts about as high as they were.
His muscles ached from the exertion of forking hay bales and fighting the storm, but he didn’t mind. It was a pleasant kind of burn, the ache of knowing he had worked hard and earned each twinge.
He wasn’t out of shape; he believed a tight, well-functioning body helped his mind work harder. He swam several dozen laps and ruthlessly lifted weights each morning. This was a different ache, though, one of knowing he had accomplished something more worthwhile than making it to the end of the pool in record time.
He caught the direction of his thoughts and gave a rueful laugh. If he wasn’t careful, he might find himself tempted to buy a ranch and move west. No, thanks. He would stick with his weights and his lap pool. His usual workout might lack this noble sense of purpose, but at least when he was done he could usually feel his toes and his eyelashes didn’t freeze together.
Just in the hour or so since he’d left, more snow had piled up in front of the barn door and he had to shovel it away to swing the door open. The dogs were as eager as he for the warmth of the barn. They sidled through and immediately found their cozy spot.
He found Katherine nose to nose with one of the horses. She was still wearing her insulated coveralls but had removed her hat and her hair stuck out in little spikes.
“How did it go with the cattle?” she asked.
“Good. Your foreman runs a tight ship. Everything was right where he said it would be. I only had to fork the bales over the fence and the cattle came running.”
“What about water?”
“There were a few spots of ice in the middle of the tank but the cattle seemed to be able to get enough water around the edges.”
She frowned. “You said you saw some patches of ice? That’s not right. The warmer should keep the water above freezing so there isn’t any ice. Clint said he was a little concerned with that unit. I wonder if it’s malfunctioning.”
“They were still able to get to the water.”
“Keeping a good water supply is vital to the cattle all year long but especially in winter. We’ll have to keep an eye on it. It’s solar powered but has a battery backup that should keep it juiced up even during the cloudiest of days.”
She stepped away from the horse and he had his first full-on look at her since he had returned to the barn. Her eyes looked puffy and her nose was red.
“Is everything all right in here?”
She tilted her chin, a belligerent look in her eyes. “Just fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”
He couldn’t just come out and say she looked as if she’d been crying. In his experience, women didn’t always appreciate that kind of information.
Besides, if she had been crying—something he found hard to reconcile with the sneaky manipulator he had decided she must be—he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. It made her too human, too vulnerable.
Had he come on too strong before, bossing her around as he had? Too bad, he thought. He meant every word and would have had no compunction about locking her in the tack room while he cared for the stock.
If she was crying, it was probably because she hated being beholden to a Logan. Rather than go down that dangerous road—or any road that involved a woman’s tears—he opted to change the subject.
“Nice horse. Is she yours?”
Katie gave him an odd look but seemed willing enough to travel the conversational side route. “Yes. Her name is Susan.”
“And does Susan ever answer during your conversations?”
She flushed so brightly he had to wonder what she had been talking to the horse about. “No. That’s why she’s such a perfect conversationalist. Unlike some people,” she added pointedly, “Susan doesn’t pick at me or make unfounded accusations or call me names. All she does is snort once in a while.”
“What’s the fun of that?”
If he didn’t know better, he would have thought there was a smile lurking in her eyes, but she didn’t allow it anywhere near her mouth. “Does your family have horses?”
“No. I’ve ridden a few times but I would probably fall into the tenderfoot category. I suppose you grew up riding.”
Her laugh was brief and humorless. “No. Sheila hates horses, unless she’s watching them on the racetrack. She dislikes animals of all kinds. We weren’t allowed any pets.”
That didn’t surprise him at all. He knew the grim history between their families well enough to hold Sheila Crosby responsible for much of the pain his parents had endured at the loss of their oldest son. Robbie supposedly had been under her supervision at the time of his kidnapping. Even after she realized he had disappeared, she had been too busy covering her own rear end to help the investigation.
He despised the matriarch of the Crosby clan. In his opinion she was selfish and amoral, interested only in herself.
“But you ride now?” he asked Sheila’s daughter.
“I didn’t learn until I was sent to Switzerland and boarding school. All the other girls seemed to have been born in the saddle. They couldn’t understand how anybody could be as graceless and uncoordinated as I was at it. I was terrified of the horses and was forever falling off.”
Girls could be cruel to each other—especially spoiled rich girls at Swiss boarding schools, he imagined.
“You must have stuck with it or you wouldn’t be here talking to Susan, the great conversationalist.”
She smiled suddenly and Peter was startled at how just that small change in her expression could make her look so young.
“The first year I was away from home I spent every afternoon at the riding stables until I was able to overcome my fear of the horses. The riding master and the grooms were just about the only friends I had for a long time. I’m sure they were sick of me, but they were very patient.”
He didn’t like the image that had suddenly formed in his mind, of a younger version of this woman haunting the stables at her school until she could overcome her fear.
“How old were you when you went to boarding school?”
“Eleven.”
What had her parents been thinking to send her away at such a tender age? His dislike for Sheila Crosby intensified. Everything he’d seen about the woman showed him she treated her children with casual disinterest, excep
t when she wanted something from them.
“Tough age,” he murmured.
“I survived. The horses helped.”
How much pain and loneliness did those mild words conceal? he wondered.
Being away at such a formative time in a young girl’s life must have been terribly lonely, especially if she hadn’t fit in at her boarding school.
He thought of his own sisters, Bridget and Jillian. His mother never would have let them leave the house so young. She would have shriveled up and died without them. But Sheila Crosby was a far different woman than Leslie Logan.
On the other hand, with Sheila for a mother, maybe boarding school hadn’t been such a bad thing.
He didn’t like the compassion flickering through him. Why should he care if she had a lonely childhood? That didn’t excuse the kind of woman she had become, one who could lie about her name and sleep with a business rival to pry out company secrets.
He didn’t care, he told himself. He only wanted to find out more about her. Know thine enemy and all that.
“How long were you at boarding school?”
“Five years. I was admitted early to Stanford when I was sixteen and graduated with my masters at twenty-one. I’ve been at Crosby ever since.”
“I understand your sister, Ivy, worked there, too, until her marriage to that Lantanyan royal.”
“Yes. I talked her into coming to Crosby after the dot-com she worked for went bust. That’s how she met Max,” Katie went on. “She was in Lantanya managing the installation of one of our high-speed computer systems to link all their schools.”
Her eyes lit up when she talked about her siblings, Peter thought. He wondered if she knew it.
She talked about her siblings with the same pride he talked about Eric and David and Jillian and Bridget.
He didn’t like thinking they had this in common. It was far easier to dislike the whole Crosby clan when he viewed them as a bed of vipers, each willing to strike out at the other.
“Trent must have hated to lose another potential spy in his little network,” he said, then instantly regretted the comment. It was petty and mean and all but extinguished that light in her eyes.
“Right. Technically, Ivy’s staying on at Crosby to oversee the Lantanya project. But since she’s busy with a new husband, her royal responsibilities and a baby on the way, she probably won’t have time for much corporate espionage. I guess that means Trent is stuck with only me to do his dirty work.”
“Well, you’re good at what you do.”
“If I need references for my next assignment, I’ll be sure to come to you,” she snapped.
He opened his mouth to snap back a retort, but before he could, the horse whinnied and shoved her nose into Katie’s back, almost as if she didn’t like her suddenly sharp tone.
Katie stumbled a little and would have fallen, but Peter instinctively stepped forward and caught her against him.
She was curvy and warm in his arms, a perfect fit, and like a match set to dry tinder, his body immediately reacted to her nearness just as it had done the night of the gala, as if three months and a world of bitterness didn’t exist between them.
He would have released her as soon as she found her footing again but then she looked at him. An odd expression flitted across those huge, gorgeous brown eyes. He couldn’t sort out all the emotions there, but if he didn’t know better, he might have believed he saw longing and regret there.
He still wanted her. He didn’t like it, but his body still yearned for her, still ached to touch her skin and kiss her mouth and fill his senses with her. Knowing she shared his hunger didn’t make things any easier.
He had to kiss her. Just one kiss to see if the fire and intensity between them that night had been a fluke. He leaned forward, but just before his mouth met hers, he saw something else flare in her eyes, something that almost looked like fear.
What was she afraid of? Him? Impossible! Okay, maybe he’d groused and yelled a little since he showed up at Sweetwater. He might have come on a bit overbearing with that whole locking her in the tack room bit but she had to know he would never hurt a woman, even a Crosby.
Despite what she had done to him, the irreparable harm she may have caused to his family and his position as CEO, he hated the idea that she might be afraid of him.
“Katie—”
He wasn’t sure what he was going to say but she didn’t give him a chance to finish the sentence. She jerked out of his arms and backed away until she almost hit the stall’s wooden railing.
“Since the animals are fed and watered, there’s no reason to hang around here. I’m going back to the house.”
Before he could argue, she rushed out of the barn, leaving him with the odd feeling that something significant had just happened between them—if he could only figure out what.
CHAPTER SIX
“Will this damn storm ever stop?”
Katie glanced up from the mystery novel she had been pretending to read toward the spot where Peter stood at the wide picture window of the room, his fingers curled around the windowsill as he glowered out at the unrelenting snow.
“It can’t snow forever,” she murmured. “Spring eventually comes, even here in Wyoming.”
“Very funny. I don’t particularly care to be trapped here until the vernal equinox, thanks very much.”
Every inch of him radiated tension, from the stiff set of his shoulders to the taut muscles of his jawline, and she regretted baiting him.
Peter Logan was obviously a man unused to inactivity. Since they had returned to the house from caring for the animals, he had been restless and edgy.
Of course, she hadn’t been exactly serene, she admitted. After that scene in the barn when they had bickered and he had nearly kissed her, she had rushed back to the house, barely noticing the snowdrifts she struggled through. She hadn’t even minded the relentless wind that whipped icy air and snow in a vicious mix. At least the cold helped cool her cheeks and her overheated senses.
How could she be foolish enough to crave his touch after everything between them? He despised her. She knew he did and yet she still hungered for him.
What a disaster it would have been if he had kissed her. She had been so afraid he would, terrified that she would respond to him as she had the night of the benefit and that his kiss would lead to more.
If she slept with him again, she wouldn’t be able to keep the truth about the baby to herself. She would have told him everything, which would have been an unmitigated disaster.
Nothing happened, though. He had stopped just before he would have kissed her. She was glad, she told herself. That ache in her heart had only been the exertion of fighting the storm.
By the time she reached the house, she had her emotions firmly in control. He followed her a few moments later and she forced herself to pretend that scene in the barn never happened.
He seemed just as eager to forget it. While she reheated stew for their lunch, Peter took out a laptop from the luggage he’d retrieved out of his rental Jeep the night before and began working feverishly on it, his brow furrowed with concentration.
She had thought about retreating to her bedroom but it seemed foolish and wasteful to keep two fires going just because of her own cowardice. The great room was large enough that they surely could both inhabit it without gnawing at each other’s throats, so she had forced herself to curl up on a couch and pretend to read.
She should enjoy the chance to put her feet up for a few moments while she was temporarily nausea-free, she tried to tell herself.
After a few hours of activity at the computer during which he had picked up the phone at least a half-dozen times looking for a dial tone, only to slam it down with disgust when he remembered the phone was out, Peter must have finished as much as he could. He snapped the laptop shut and stalked to the window, where he had spent the last fifteen minutes glaring out at the storm beyond.
She was the hostess here, despite the fact that the role h
ad been thrust on her against her will. She should at least try to alleviate his boredom.
“I’m sure the generator’s got enough power that you could watch something on TV,” she offered. “There’s quite an extensive DVD collection. Everything from comedies to action-adventure to Westerns.”
“I’m not much for movies or television. I like to watch a little basketball but that’s about it.”
“The ranch has a satellite system. You might have to sweep the snow out of the dish but you could probably find a game on.”
“No, thanks.”
“We could play a board game or something. Chess, cards, Monopoly. You probably love that one.”
That idea obviously didn’t appeal to him, either, judging by the surly look he sent her, so Katie figuratively threw up her hands. “Or you can keep pacing around the room like a caged grizzly. It’s all the same to me. Stirring up all those molecules in the air must be helping the room stay a little warmer, at any rate.”
Perversely, her annoyance seemed to cheer him up. He smiled and returned to the couch. “Getting on your nerves, am I?”
“You’re not the most restful of companions.” In more ways than one, she wanted to add, but swallowed the words.
“Sorry. My brother, Eric, in his more lyrical moments used to complain that I’ve got more energy than a one-armed monkey at a flea festival.”
She laughed at the image. “My brother, Trent, is the same way. He always has to be busy doing something. I suppose it must be part of the whole CEO package.”
He didn’t look thrilled at the comparison to her brother, but Katie refused to feel guilty for bringing up what was obviously a touchy subject. She loved her brother dearly and wouldn’t allow Peter’s irrational dislike to prevent her from even bringing up Trent’s name.
She waited for some kind of snide comment from him about Trent but he let the subject drop. Maybe he wanted a ceasefire as much as she did. She studied him, wondering about this complex, perplexing man who would give their child half its DNA.
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