She sat her plate to the side and leaned forward. When she lifted her hand toward his face, he tensed. “Easy,” she told him as his eyes widened—and darkened. “I’m just going to show you this.” She laid the tips of her fingers against the muscle of his jaw. “Call this an...experiment, if you will.”
The edge of his beard pricked the pads of her fingers and the question that she had been going to ask—are you Hardwick Beaumont’s son?—died on her lips. She knew what would happen. He would shut down on her or tell her to stop talking or get off the couch. She didn’t want that to happen.
So her mind spun for a question that he wouldn’t want to answer truthfully but wouldn’t be the end of the conversation, either. “Did your mom make the pie?”
The muscle under her fingertips moved. “No.”
“Did you feel that?” She gave his cheek a gentle pat. “Right here. Every time you tell a lie, a muscle twitches.”
“I don’t believe you.” But he hadn’t pushed her hand away. Instead, he sat still as a stone—a boulder. But not the angry, immovable boulder he’d been earlier. There was something cautious about him now.
She pulled her fingers away—but only to pick up his hand and push his palm against the side of his face. “Pay attention,” she told him and was more than amused when he sat up straighter. She didn’t pull her palm away as she held his hand to his face. “Do you watch my show?”
“Yes. Sometimes.” Then he said, “I didn’t feel anything.”
“Were you being honest?” Because suddenly, that seemed very important. Obviously, she knew that he knew who she was. He had known from the very first.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she told him. “So you can see that nothing happened when you told the truth.” She tilted her head to one side and his eyes widened. What? She hadn’t done anything. She needed another question. A safe question. “Did you lie to me in the feed store about who Pat Wesley was?”
“No,” he answered quickly. Then his eyes widened. “Crap.”
Reluctantly, she let her hand drop. “See? That’s your tell.”
He was rubbing the side of his face. “I would deny everything, but I get the feeling you would know immediately.”
She laughed. Not a coquettish giggle, but an honest laugh. “I bet you were a Boy Scout and everything, weren’t you?”
“I don’t have to answer that.” But instead of sounding irritated, one corner of his mouth curved up into a small, blink-and-you-miss-it smile. All she could do was stare at him as the firelight played over his face. He was so handsome it was almost unfair. It certainly overruled every one of her self-preservation instincts.
She did not normally go for rough-and-tumble men. Mostly because they had very little to offer her, beyond occasionally great sex.
But CJ Wesley was something else entirely. Rough and grouchy, but with a core of human decency that was more surprising than anything else—and all wrapped up in muscles. Suddenly, she knew that if he turned that smile on full power and aimed it directly at her, she wasn’t going to make it.
This was terrible, she realized with a start. She was actually starting to like him. Sexual attraction was one thing, but this? This was something else entirely.
Quickly, she reminded herself of the stakes. He was just being nice to her because... Because it was better to keep your enemies closer than your friends and there was no mistaking the fact that she was his enemy. If she made the mistake of confusing niceness with affection, then she really was stupid.
Besides, he was not interested. But the moment that thought occurred to her, she wished she’d asked “Are you attracted to me?” instead of the question about the pie. Because what would he have said?
His gaze slid toward her. “I’m not the only one with a tell, you know.”
She highly doubted that. She was experienced in bending the truth—which was a nice way of saying she had learned to lie through her teeth. “Nice try, but I don’t think that’s going to work.”
He turned his entire body to her, propping up one of his legs on the couch. The distance between them got smaller. “You don’t think so?”
She arranged her face into a mask of casualness. “I know so. Don’t forget who I am.”
He stared at her for a long moment. The back of Natalie’s neck began to prickle and she was terribly afraid she was about to blush.
“I haven’t forgotten,” he said and he sounded so serious about it.
“I’m very important,” she reminded him because that was the sort of thing she had to say.
His eyes widened. “There.”
“What?”
“The way you swallowed. That’s your tell.”
It was suddenly a little more difficult to breathe, but she couldn’t let him know that. Instead, she looked at him doubtfully. “First off, you didn’t even ask me a question—ergo, how can you tell if I was lying? And second off, how do you know I didn’t just have a bit of apple pie stuck in my throat?”
He notched an eyebrow at her and angled his body toward hers. In all reality, there probably was still a solid two and a half feet between them. But that’s not what it felt like. The air seemed to crackle. Or it could have been the fire. “All right, I’ll ask a question. Are you seeing anyone?”
She considered lying, but she didn’t. “No.”
He tilted his head to one side as he appraised her. “Why won’t anyone miss you?”
Somehow, she wasn’t surprised that was the question he went with. She was pulling her punches because it seemed like the polite thing for a semi-involuntary guest to do—but he had no such social obligations.
“People will miss me,” she told him. “Trust me, people pay attention to me.”
He smirked. It was not a reassuring gesture. “You don’t even know you did it, do you? You swallowed. You pause and then you swallow and then you tell a bold-faced lie.” With that, he turned back to the fire.
She should let it go. He was getting uncomfortably close to some basic truths about her and she didn’t want him to. But she couldn’t help it. “People do pay attention to me, you know? I’m something of a celebrity.”
To her horror, he hitched up a hip and pulled her phone out of his pocket. He didn’t have her password—there was no way in hell she was going to give it to him—but the Twitter notifications were rolling over the screen. “Yes, I see that. What did you tweet to get—” He paused, his eyes popping wide. “Do you know what these people are saying?”
She couldn’t watch him read all the horrible, terrible things people were saying about her, so she closed her eyes. “Probably. But they pay attention to me.”
He looked at her like she was absolutely nuts. And here, in the warm safety of the Wesley family home, it did seem a bit crazy. “You can’t seriously want them to say—Good Lord, is that even legal?” He glanced at her, looking more worried by the second. “This isn’t right. People shouldn’t say—Oh, that’s just disgusting.”
The embarrassment was too much. She lunged at him, trying to grab her phone. He easily held it out of reach, damn his long arms. Instead, all she accomplished was lurching into the side of his shoulder.
“Put it away,” she said, her cheeks burning. “Just...put it away.”
He glanced at the screen one more time before he pushed the button at the top. The phone powered down until it was blissfully, safely black. “You should save your battery, anyway.” But he didn’t give her the phone. Instead, he slid it back into his pocket. “Do I want to know what you said that garnered such evil replies?” His face hardened. “Was it about me?”
“No.”
He looked at her for a long time. “Was it about a Beaumont?”
This time, she noticed it. She swallowed just before she opened her mouth. So she shut her mouth a second time. He was studying her way too closely—like he could see beneath her TV personality, beneath the aura of untouchability that she cultivated. He could see into her and she was suddenly terrified he wo
uld realize there was nothing really there.
“So, that’s a yes, then.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. If he could hide behind silence, so could she.
The moments stretched into minutes and the minutes kept right on stretching as they sat there, a few feet separating them, both watching the fire. She didn’t know what time it was. It was near total darkness outside. The shadows played over the corners of the room and once again, she felt small.
The longer she sat there, the more she realized something—aside from her father, who accused her of lying with every other breath, no one had ever noticed that she had a tell before. She was creative with reality on a daily basis and aside from the people on social media, no one ever called her on it. Certainly not to her face. No one had ever pressed her for the truth before. Not even her father, who never believed a single word she said.
Why was that? She was afraid to look too closely for the answer.
Unexpectedly, CJ asked, “Why?”
He didn’t expand on that. He didn’t have to.
“It’s my job. It’s how the game is played.” People like Matthew Beaumont understood that. People like CJ Wesley? They didn’t understand it at all.
“It’s a lousy game, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Almost against her will, she smiled. There was something so...gentlemanly about him. She wasn’t sure she’d ever met a man she could call a gentleman. “It’s not all bad,” she said, willing herself to believe that was the truth.
The moment stretched again and then he stood up so abruptly that she jolted in her seat. “I’ll bring in more wood from the mudroom. Don’t move.”
“I won’t.” She owed him that much. She had made a promise and, for once in her life, she was going to keep it. As long as she was a guest in his house, she would not pry.
She felt the air shift and a cold draft blew through the living room before CJ walked back in, his arms overflowing with logs. He carried them as if they weighed nothing at all and when he crouched down in front of the fire, she got a good look at his ass. As he messed around with the fire, she studied his body. Lord, he was built. Okay, so maybe she was starting to like him. A gruff cowboy who was also a gentleman? A man with rough hands who liked apple pie?
They were stuck here for several days. She knew one way to pass the time.
He stood and dusted off his hands before turning back to her. Her breath caught in her throat as he looked down at her, backlit by the fire. Strong—that was the word that bubbled up through the building lust in her mind. He was strong and safe and confident. What would he be like? Was he the kind of gentleman who would put her first or was he like all the other guys—quick, selfish. Lousy. God, she was so tired of having lousy sex and then feeling nothing but...hollow after.
Maybe it would be different with him. She wanted it to be—more than that, she wanted him to be different. A thought flitted through her mind—maybe she could be different with him.
She pushed herself off the couch and stepped onto his pallet.
His hands dropped to his sides and he straightened. “What are you doing?”
She stepped into him and touched his cheek, right where his muscles would twitch. He was warm and solid and Natalie knew he could pick her up and carry her anywhere he wanted to. “Thanking you,” she said, wrapping her other arm around his waist and molding herself to his body.
Just the contact of her breasts to his chest—never mind how many layers of clothes were in the way—was enough to make her knees weaken. Her nipples tightened and she exhaled in anticipation. She could be someone else while she was stranded with him. Someone better. Someone who got what she wanted. He was hot and hard and she wanted to rip the shirt off of him and test each and every single muscle. What other parts of him twitched?
She lifted herself on her tiptoes, close enough for her cheek to brush over his beard before he put his hands on her hips and forcibly pushed her away. “Don’t,” he said, his voice thick with strain.
His hands were still on her hips—but now there was a solid foot of space between them. She blinked up at him. “Why not? You’re being wonderful and I—”
“For God’s sake, Natalie—don’t.” Now he sounded angry at her. “You don’t owe me anything and I don’t owe you anything and...and...” He let go of her and instead of sinking to the floor, he pushed her back. She stood there for a moment, confused.
He wanted her, she realized. He didn’t like her, but he wanted her.
She could work with that. “CJ,” she began in what she thought was a sultry voice.
His eyes snapped up and he glared at her.
She faltered. “Don’t you...don’t you want me?”
He jerked his head to the side and quickly stepped around her. “This is not happening.” She blinked at him as he kicked off his moccasins, his back to her. “Go to sleep, Natalie. And don’t try that again.”
“Why not? Am I that—”
“There is absolutely nothing that’s going to happen between us. You know it. I know it. I’m not having any part of my life made public and there’s no guarantee that anything I say or do with you won’t wind up on television.” He finally turned to face her, his eyes narrow and his shoulders bunched up under his sweater. “It’s bedtime. Go to sleep.” There was a hard edge to his voice that made her chest tight.
“Oh. Okay. I...” She swallowed. “All right.”
She stepped around him, careful not to touch him, and laid down on the couch. But sleep didn’t come.
Instead, she stared into the fire and replayed all the ways she’d made a complete and total fool of herself in the last twelve hours. In the last lifetime.
Just as she finally started to drift, she realized something—when she’d asked him if he wanted her, he’d turned away.
He’d hidden his tell.
Five
He was going to regret this.
That was nothing new. CJ already regretted the moment Natalie Baker had walked off his television screen and into his life. But, as he stared down at her sleeping form, he knew he was going to regret what he was about to do more than anything else.
Even more than he regretted pushing her away last night.
To be honest, only parts of him regretted that. He knew that keeping a hard wall between him and the woman out to expose him as one of the lost Beaumont bastards was the only thing to do.
But try telling that to his erection.
So what he needed to do now—which he was going to regret, also—was keep them both busy. Idle hands were the devil’s workshop, after all. He couldn’t take any more sitting around and talking to her and he especially couldn’t give her another chance to press her body against his and look up into his eyes and...
A very hard wall. “Natalie.”
She was dead asleep. The vulnerability that called to him yesterday? It was magnified a hundred times right now. In sleep, she didn’t just look soft and vulnerable—she looked innocent. Without the calculating shift to her eyes and the hardened jaw tight and ready for battle, she was a completely different woman. Sweet, even.
“Natalie. Wake up.”
Her brow creased, so he knew she heard him. But still, her eyes didn’t open.
He sat on his heels in front of her and held a cup of coffee directly under her nose. But he didn’t touch her. He didn’t dare brush the strands of hair that had come loose from her ponytail away from her cheek and he didn’t dare stroke his thumb over her cheek to coax her awake. If he touched her, he might be lost.
“Wake up,” he repeated and he blew on the coffee so the steam hit her in the face.
“What time is it?” she asked without opening her eyes.
“Six thirty.” Then he waited for her reaction to this. He wasn’t quite sure what he expected.
She stretched like a cat in a sunbeam and pushed herself into a sitting position. “That late?” She blinked at him, tilting her head from side to side. “Wow.”
>
He stared at her and offered up the coffee. “Is that a joke?”
She took the cup in her hand. “I normally get up at four thirty every morning. I’m at the studio by five thirty for hair and makeup and to prepare for the show.” She took a sip and CJ forced himself to look somewhere else—anywhere else, except for where her lips were touching the edge of the cup.
Those lips had almost touched his last night. All he’d had to do was turn his head ever so slightly and...
“I get up at four in the summer,” he told her for no reason at all—except because he was trying not to stare at her. “I don’t meet too many people who get up that early who aren’t ranchers.”
She cupped the coffee in her hands and sighed with what sounded like happiness. When she lifted her gaze to his, it took everything he had not to lean forward and kiss the taste of coffee off her lips. “Are you saying that we might actually have something in common?”
He stood, putting some distance between them. No kissing. End of discussion. “We have things to do today. We need to get moving.”
She stared up at him as if he had suddenly started speaking French. Of course, someone like her probably did speak French. He was fluent in Spanish—not that he was going to tell her that. “We...do?” She looked around, her head moving slowly. She was not fully awake yet. “Did the snowstorm end?”
“No. It’s still going. I think the wind has died down a bit, but there’s probably about eighteen inches outside. We’ll have over two feet before it’s done.”
Something in her face shifted. Was it fear? Resignation? She’d tried to seduce him last night. Was the thought of being trapped here for another few days that unpleasant to her? “What are we going to do?”
He stepped back and threw another log on the fire. “I was thinking about it. Last night you asked me what we were going to talk about and I made a decision.” Flames licked along the new wood and then caught. “We’re not going to talk about the past and there’s no point in talking about the future. So what we’re going to do is focus on the now.” He peeked back over his shoulder to see that she was looking at him, utter confusion written all over her face. “It’s Christmas, Natalie. And I think we need a little Christmas.”
Rich Rancher for Christmas Page 5