by Diana Palmer
Kasie had never really been in love. She’d had crushes on TV celebrities and movie stars, and on boys at school—and one summer she’d had a real case on a boy who lived near Mama Luke, her aunt, in Billings. But those had all been very innocent, limited to kisses and light caresses and not much desire.
All that had changed when Gil Callister held her hand at the movies. And when Gil had carried her up the staircase this morning, she was on fire with pleasure. She was still shivery with new sensations, which she didn’t understand at all. Gil was her boss and he disliked her. She’d been spending more time with the girls than the grown-ups because John didn’t like to do paperwork and he was always dodging dictation. He could usually be found out with the men on the ranch, helping with whatever routine task was going on at the time. Gil did that, too, of course, but not because he didn’t like paperwork. Gil rarely ever sat still.
Mrs. Charters said it was because he’d loved his wife and had never gotten over her unexpected death from a freak horseback-riding accident. She was only twenty-six years old.
That had been only three years ago. Since then, Gil had hired a succession of nurses, at first, and then motherly governesses to watch over the girls. Old Mrs. Harris had retired and then Gil had hired Miss Parsons in desperation, over a virtual flood of young marriageable women who had their eye on either Gil or John. Kasie remembered Gil saying that he had no interest in marriage ever again. At that time, she couldn’t have imagined feeling attracted to a widowed man with two children who had the personality of a spitting cobra.
For her first few weeks on the job, he’d watched Kasie. He hadn’t wanted his children around Kasie, and made it plain. Amazing, how much that had hurt.
They were such darling little girls.
At least, she thought, now she could spend time with them and not have to sneak around doing it. Gil might not like her, but he couldn’t deny that his daughters did. Probably he felt that he didn’t have a choice.
Kasie was going to miss the secretarial work, and she wondered how Gil would manage with Pauline, who absolutely hated clerical duties. The woman only did it to be near Gil, but he didn’t seem to realize it. Or if he did, he didn’t care.
She tried to picture Gil married to Pauline and it wounded her. Pauline was shallow and selfish. She didn’t really like the girls, and she’d probably find some way to get them out of her hair when she and Gil married, if they did. Kasie hated the very idea of such a marriage, but she was a little nobody in the world and Gil Callister was a millionaire. She couldn’t even tease him or flirt with him, because he might think she was after him for his wealth. It made her self-conscious, so she became uneasy around him and tongue-tied to boot.
That made him even more irritable. Sunday afternoon there was another storm and he and the men had to go out and work the cattle. He came in just after dark, drenched, unfastening his shirt on the way into the office. His hair was plastered to his scalp and his spurs jingled as he walked, his leather bat-wing chaps making flapping noises with every stride of his long, powerful jean-clad legs. His boots were soaked, too, and caked with mud.
“Mrs. Charters will be after you,” Kasie remarked as she lifted her eyes from the badly scribbled notes John had left, which Miss Parsons had asked her to help decipher. Miss Parsons had already gone up to bed, anticipating a very early start on work the next morning.
“It’s my damned house,” he shot at her irritably, running a hand through his drenched hair to get it off his forehead. “I can drip wherever I please!”
“Suit yourself,” Kasie replied. “But red mud won’t come out of Persian wool carpets.”
He gave her a hard glare, but he sat down in a chair and pulled off the mud-caked boots, tossing them onto the wide brick hearth of the fireplace, where they wouldn’t soil anything delicate. His white socks were soaked as well, but he didn’t take them off. He sat down behind his desk, picked up the telephone and made a call.
“Where are the girls?” he asked while he waited for the call to be answered.
“Watching the new Pokémon movie up in their room,” Kasie said. “Miss Parsons can’t read John’s handwriting, so I’m deciphering this for her so she can start early tomorrow morning on the payroll and the quarterly estimated taxes that are due in June. If that’s all right,” she added politely.
He just glared at her. “Hello, Lonnie?” he said suddenly into the telephone receiver he was holding. “Can you give me the name of that mechanic who worked on Harris’s truck last month? Yes, the one who doesn’t need a damned computer to tell him what’s wrong with the engine. Got his number? Just a minute.” He fished in the drawer for a pen, grabbed an envelope and wrote a number on it. “Sure thing. Thanks.” He hung up and dialed again.
While he spoke to the mechanic, Kasie finished transcribing John’s terrible handwriting neatly for Miss Parsons.
Gil hung up and got to his feet, retrieving his boots. “If you’ve got a few minutes free, I need you to take some dictation for me,” he told Kasie.
“I’ll be glad to.”
He gave her a narrow appraisal. “I’ve got a man coming over to look at my cattle truck,” he added. “If he gets here while I’m in the shower, show him into the living room and don’t let him leave. He can listen to an engine and tell you what’s wrong with it.”
“But it’s Sunday,” she began.
“I need the truck to haul cattle tomorrow. I’m sure he went to church this morning, so it’s all right,” he assured her dryly. “Besides…”
The ringing of the phone interrupted him. He jerked up the receiver. “Callister,” he said.
There was a pause, during which his face became harder than Kasie had ever seen it. “Yes,” he replied to a question. “I’ll talk to John when he gets back in, but I can tell you what the answer will be.” He smiled coldly. “I’m sure that if you use your imagination, you can figure that out without too much difficulty. No, I don’t. I don’t give a damn. Do what you please with them.” There was a longer pause and Kasie thought she’d never seen such coldness in a man’s eyes. “I don’t need a thing, thanks. Yes. You do that.”
He hung up. “My parents,” he said harshly. “With an invitation to come and bring the girls to their estate on Long Island next week.”
“Are you going?”
He looked briefly sardonic. “They’re hosting a party for some people who are interested in seeing what a real cattleman looks like,” he said surprisingly. “They’re trying to sell them on an advertising contract for their sports magazine and they think John and I might be useful.” He sounded bitter and angry. “They try this occasionally, but John and I don’t go. They can make money on their own. I’ll be upstairs if the mechanic comes. Tell him the truck’s in the barn with one of my men. He can go right on out.”
“Okay.”
He walked out and Kasie stared after him. The conversation with his parents hadn’t been pleasant for him. He seemed to dislike them intensely. She knew that they were never mentioned around the girls, and John never spoke of them, either. She wondered what they’d done to make their sons so hostile. Then she remembered what Gil had said, about their being used by their parents only to make money, and it all began to make sense. Perhaps they didn’t really want children at all. What a pity, that their sons were nothing more than sales incentives to them.
The mechanic did come while Gil was upstairs. Kasie went with him onto the long porch and showed him where the barn was, so that he could drive on down there and park his truck. The rain had stopped, though, so he didn’t have to worry about getting wet. There was a pleasant dripping sound off the eaves of the house, and the delicious smell of wet flowers in the darkness.
Kasie sat down in the porch swing and rocked it into motion. It was a perfect night, now that the storm had abated. She could hear crickets, or maybe frogs, chirping all around the flowering shrubs that surrounded the front porch. It reminded her, for some reason, of Africa. She vaguely remembered sitting in
a porch swing with her mother and Kantor when their father was away working. There were the delicious smells of cooking from the house, and the spicy smells drifting from the harbor nearby, as well as the familiar sound of African workers singing and humming as they worked around the settlement. It was a long time ago, when she still had a family. Now, except for Mama Luke, she was completely alone. It was a cold, empty feeling.
The screen door suddenly opened and Gil came out onto the porch. His blond hair was still damp, faintly unruly at the edges and tending to curl. He was wearing a blue checked Western shirt with clean jeans and nice boots. He looked just the way a working cowboy should when he was cleaned up, she thought, trying to imagine him a century earlier.
“Is the mechanic here?” he asked abruptly when he spotted Kasie in the swing.
“Yes, I sent him on down to the barn.”
He went down the steps gracefully and stalked to the barn. He was gone about five minutes and when he came out of the barn, so did the mechanic. They shook hands and the mechanic drove off.
“A fuse,” he murmured, shaking his head as he came up the steps and dropped into the swing at Kasie’s side. “A damned fuse, and the whole panel went down. Imagine that.”
“Sometimes it’s the little things that give the most trouble,” she murmured, shy with him.
He put an arm behind her and rocked the swing into motion. “I like the way you smell, Kasie,” he said lazily. “You always remind me of roses.”
“I’m allergic to perfume,” she confided. “The florals are the only ones I can wear without sneezing my head off.”
“Where are my babies?” he asked.
“Mrs. Charters is baking cookies with them in the kitchen,” she said, smiling. “They love to cook. So do I. We’ve all learned a lot from Mrs. Charters.”
He looked down at her in the darkness. One lean hand went to the braid at the back of her head, and he tugged on it gently. “You’re mysterious,” he murmured. “I don’t really know anything about you.”
“There’s not much to tell,” she told him. “I’m just ordinary.”
He shifted, and she felt his powerful thigh against her leg. Her body came alive with fleeting little stabs of pleasure. She could feel her breath catching in her throat as she breathed. He was too close.
She started to move, but it was too late. His arm curled her into his body, and the warm, hard pressure of his mouth pushed her head back against the swing while he fed hungrily on her lips.
Part of her wanted to resist, but a stronger part was completely powerless. She reached up and put her arms around his neck and opened her lips for him. She felt him stiffen, hesitate, catch his breath. Then his mouth became rough and demanding, and he dragged her across his legs, folding her close while he kissed her until her mouth was swollen and tender.
He nibbled her upper lip, fighting to breathe normally. “Don’t let me do this,” he warned.
“You’re bigger than I am,” she murmured breathlessly.
“That’s no excuse at all.”
Her fingers trailed over his hard mouth and down to his chest where they rested. She stared at the wide curve of his mouth with a kind of wonder that a man like this, good-looking and charming and wealthy, would look twice at a chestnut mouse like Kasie. Perhaps he needed glasses.
He touched her oval face, tracing its soft lines in a warm, damp darkness that was suddenly like an exotic, faraway place. Kasie felt as if she’d come home. Impulsively, she let her head slide down his arm until it rested in the crook of his elbow. She watched his expression harden, heard his breathing change. His lean fingers moved down her chin and throat until they were at the top button of her shirtwaist dress. They hesitated there.
She lay looking up at him patiently, curiously, ablaze with unfamiliar longings and delight.
“Kasie,” he whispered, and his long fingers began to sensually move the top button out of its buttonhole. As it came free, he heard her soft gasp, felt the jerk of her body, and knew that this was new territory for her.
His hand started to slide gently into the opening he’d made. He watched Kasie, lying so sweetly in his embrace, giving him free license with her innocence, and he shivered with desire.
But even as he felt the soft warmth of the skin at her collarbone, laughing young voices came drifting out onto the porch as the front door opened.
Gil moved Kasie back into her own seat abruptly and stood up.
“Daddy’s home!” Bess cried, and she and Jenny ran to him, to be scooped up and kissed heartily.
“I’ll, uh, just go and get my pad so that you can dictate that letter you mentioned,” Kasie said as she got up, too.
“You will not,” Gil said, his voice still a little husky. “Go to bed, Kasie. It can wait. In the morning, you can tutor Pauline on the computer, so that she can take over inputting the cattle records. John won’t be in until late tonight, and he leaves early tomorrow for the cattle show in San Antonio. There’s nothing in the office that can’t wait.”
She was both disappointed and relieved. It was getting harder to deny Gil anything he wanted. She couldn’t have imagined that she was such a wanton person only a few weeks ago. She didn’t know what to do.
“Okay, I’ll call it a night,” she said, trying to disguise her nervousness. “Good night, babies,” she told Bess and Jenny with a smile. “Sleep tight.”
“Will you tell us a story, Kasie?” Bess began.
“I’ll tell you a story tonight. Kasie needs her rest. All right?” he asked the girls.
“All right, Daddy,” Jenny murmured, laying her sleepy head on his shoulder.
They all went upstairs together. Kasie didn’t quite meet his eyes as she went down the hall to her own room. She didn’t sleep very much, either.
Chapter Six
Pauline Raines was half an hour late Monday morning. Gil had already gone out to check on some cattle that was being shipped off. John had left before daylight to fly to San Antonio, where the cattle trailer was taking his champion bull, Ebony King, for the cattle show. While the girls took their nap, Kasie helped Miss Parsons with John’s correspondence and fielded the telephone. Now that it was just past roundup, things weren’t quite as hectic, but sales reports were coming in on the culled cattle being shipped, and they weren’t even all on the computer yet. Neither were most of the new calf crop.
Miss Parsons had gone to the post office when Pauline arrived wearing a neat black suit with a fetching blue scarf. She glared at Kasie as she threw her purse down on the chair.
“Here I am,” she said irritably. “I don’t usually come in before ten, but Gil said I had to be early, to work on this stupid computer. I don’t see why I need to learn it.”
“Because you’ll have to put in all the information we’re getting about the new calves and replacement heifers,” Kasie explained patiently. “It’s backing up.”
“You can do that,” Pauline said haughtily. “You’re John’s secretary.”
“Not anymore,” she replied calmly. “I’m going to take care of the girls while Miss Parsons takes my place in John’s office. She’s going to handle all the tax work.”
That piece of information didn’t please Pauline. “You’re a secretary,” she pointed out.
“That’s what I told Mr. Callister, but it didn’t change his mind,” Kasie replied tersely.
“So now I’ll have to do all your work while Miss Parsons does taxes? I won’t! Surely you’ll have enough free time to put these records on the computer! Two little girls don’t require much watching. Just put them in front of the television!”
Kasie almost bit her tongue right through keeping back a hot reply. “It isn’t going to be hard to use the computer. It will save you hours of paperwork.”
Pauline gave her a glare. “Debbie always put these things on the computer.”
“Debbie quit because she couldn’t do two jobs at once,” Kasie said, and was vindicated for the jibe when she saw Pauline’s discomfort. �
�You really will enjoy the time the computer saves you, once you understand how it works.”
“I don’t need this job, didn’t anyone tell you?” the older woman asked. “I’m wealthy. I only do it to be near Gil. It gives us more time together, while we’re seeing how compatible we are. Which reminds me, don’t think you’re onto a cushy job looking after those children,” she added haughtily. “Gil and I are going to be looking for a boarding school very soon.”
“Boarding school?” Kasie exclaimed, horrified.
“I’ve already checked out several,” Pauline said. “It isn’t good for little girls to become too attached to their fathers. It interferes with Gil’s social life.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Pauline frowned. “What do you mean, you hadn’t noticed?”
“Well, Mr. Callister is almost a generation older than I am,” she said deliberately.
“Oh.” Pauline smiled secretively. “I see.”
“He’s a very kind man,” Kasie emphasized, “but I don’t think of him in that way,” she added, lying through her teeth.
Pauline for once seemed speechless.
“Here, let’s get started,” Kasie said as she turned on the computer, trying to head off trouble. She hoped that comment would keep her out of trouble with Pauline, who obviously considered Gil Callister her personal property. Kasie had enough problems without adding a jealous secretary to them. Even if she did privately think Gil was the sexiest man she’d ever known.
Pauline seemed determined to make every second of work as hard as humanly possible for Kasie. She insisted on three coffee breaks before noon, and the pressing nature of the information coming in by fax kept Kasie working long after Pauline called it a day at three in the afternoon and went home. If Mrs. Charters hadn’t helped out by letting Bess and Jenny make cookies, Kasie wouldn’t have been able to do as much as she did.
She’d only just finished the new computer entries when Gil came in, dusty and sweaty and half out of humor. He didn’t say a word. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a scotch and water, and he drank half of it before he even looked at Kasie.