Now that she thought about it, muddy floors were preferable.
“Ignore that.” Squire took her elbow and led her through the inner door into the warmth of the big kitchen. “Sit and have some coffee with me first.”
“You’re tempting me again,” Jaimie protested halfheartedly. “You know Matthew told me to get that mudroom cleaned up today.”
“Oh, forget Matthew for a few minutes. That mess ain’t going nowhere. Besides, there’s no point in having a pretty girl around, if ya can’t tempt her.” He grinned slyly.
“You are a bad influence,” she accused tartly. A bad influence, a man whose stubbornness was legendary in these parts—or so she’d heard—and in the past several weeks, one of her favorite people. Oh, he was gruff and pretended to be hard-bitten. But she knew better.
He was like a beautifully grilled steak. Singed and crispy on the outside, perhaps. But inside he was as soft and tender as butter. Look at the way he often checked in on Maggie, or the way he tossed Jaimie a droll smile whenever Matthew was taking her to task for some foolish thing or other. Like in the barn just now.
Yes, she was fond of Squire Clay. And bad influence or not, she pushed him toward his favorite chair at the oblong table that occupied the center of the spacious kitchen, then took down two mugs and filled them with the steaming brew from the pot that was always kept full and hot. She handed one of the mugs to Squire, along with a saucer from the cupboard, before sitting down at the table across from him.
She just loved sitting with the man over coffee. Delighted in the way he would pour his hot coffee from the mug into that delicate saucer, then proceed to drink his coffee from it. She understood why he did it. She was still gingerly sipping her own blindingly hot coffee when he’d finished drinking two full mugs’ worth.
“I don’t see how you never spill,” she said as he poured more coffee into the saucer.
Squire got up and retrieved another saucer. He plunked it down beside her. “Try it yourself.”
She looked from her full mug to the saucer. “Don’t you have one that’s not so flat? Where’s the coffee supposed to stay on that thing?”
He chuckled. “Chicken.”
“You don’t fight fair,” Jaimie muttered. She rolled her eyes, then carefully poured a small measure of coffee onto the saucer. She managed to lift it up and place it in her hand, balanced lightly on the tips of her fingers, just the way Squire did it, without spilling. She even managed to gingerly swallow the first sip or two.
Until she noticed the man silently standing in the doorway leading to the dining room, and she spilled the entire saucer down her ivory sweater. “Don’t you laugh,” she warned him, hastily whipping the sweater over her head. She quickly took it to the faucet and stuck it under running water.
Matthew couldn’t have laughed if his life depended on it. Not when his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth at the sight of her smooth curves lovingly outlined by that pink undershirt. He wondered vaguely when long johns started coming in pink with little red hearts on them, then caught the knowing glint in his father’s eyes.
Perfect. Just perfect.
He almost turned around and headed back to his office and those invoices that were giving him fits. It was bad enough that he couldn’t turn around these days without finding her underfoot. But he would be hanged if he would let that redhead run him out of his own kitchen.
He’d come for coffee. And that’s what he would get.
He had to reach past her for a mug, and as he did so, he could smell the lemony scent of the shampoo she used. She slid him a look from those dark green eyes. His “What?” was more of a growl than a question.
She raised an eyebrow. “Grumpy today, aren’t you? Didn’t you eat your prunes for breakfast?”
Sass. That’s what she’d been giving him from the day she stepped onto the Double-C. Sass. “Haven’t had breakfast yet,” he reminded her pointedly. “The cook was crawling around on the barn rafters.”
At least she had the grace to lower those slanting green eyes.
“Well, fine then.” She left the sweater in the sink under a steady trickle of water. “What would you like this morning? Pancakes? Waffles?” Already she was opening cupboards. Her lilting voice dripped with meekness. “Eggs Benedict? Crepes Suzette?”
Sass. “Forget it.” He reached for the coffee and splashed it into his mug. Ignoring the smirk on his father’s face, he headed back to those invoices.
Closed in the sanctuary of his office, Matt leaned back in his chair and scrubbed his hands over his face. She was driving him nuts. Right up the proverbial wall. If it weren’t for the fact that she was here purely to help out Maggie right now, he would tell Jaimie to go. The woman had no business being on a ranch. She was a city girl, and she needed to go back where she belonged. He would pay for the plane ticket himself, as long as she got out of his hair.
But she was here to help her sister-in-law. Maggie was the Double-C’s cook-housekeeper and the wife of Matthew’s foreman, Joe Greene. And Maggie was pregnant and sicker than any person deserved. Nearly seven months along, she’d already been hospitalized three times with complications. So when Maggie was ordered off her feet for the remainder of her pregnancy by her obstetrician, it had seemed natural that Jaimie step in to pick up the slack.
The Double-C needed a housekeeper and a cook, if they weren’t all going to starve to death. Matt could cook enough to keep himself alive, but Squire’s diet was more exacting since his heart attack and surgery last year. He couldn’t live on bacon and eggs. The prospects for hiring someone to temporarily fill Maggie’s duties hovered somewhere between slim and none. Not many folks were willing to move out to their remote corner of the world in the summer, much less the dead of winter.
Which left Matt stuck with Jaimie. She’d quit her job in town, and instead of spending the odd weekend here and there visiting her brother and sister-in-law, she’d left behind the room she’d rented and moved, lock, stock and barrel, to Joe’s house at the Double-C. Until Maggie was able to resume her regular duties, Matt couldn’t see any way of telling Jaimie to go. It was that simple.
And that impossible.
At least she could cook, he thought. He rubbed the crick in his neck and sipped at the hot coffee. Turning in his chair, he looked out the wide, uncurtained window. Sandy padded over from her usual spot behind the desk where she often slept. He absently rubbed the silky head she propped on his knee.
He waited for the sight of the neatly snowplowed road, solidly built outbuildings and snow-covered fields beyond to soothe him as it usually did.
He was a man born and bred to run this place. The Double-C. Oh, he and his four brothers knew that they all shared equally in the ownership, profits and losses included, of the ranch. But they all knew, just as well, that it was Matt’s at heart. He loved it the most. The only one who willingly gave it his life. His love. Just as Squire had, before he’d turned the reins over to him several years ago.
Matthew had known as a child that he never wanted to leave this particular stretch of seemingly endless land. And since the day his father had placed the Double-C in his hands, he hadn’t wanted for another thing. His days were consumed with the 1001 details of running their prosperous holdings. His nights were spent sleeping the sleep of a satisfied man.
Until lately. Until that...redhead...came to stay.
He muttered an oath, not the least bit soothed. Sandy looked up at him with a little bark, and he grimaced. He gave the dog a final scratch, then raked his fingers through his own hair and resolutely turned his attention back to the stack of invoices sitting on his desk. His computer hadn’t been any help at all, and he was doing things the old-fashioned way. He picked up his pencil and started running the totals. Again.
When the soft knock sounded on the door, he was no closer to putting his finger on the gnawing problem than he had been a week ago, when he’d first noticed the discrepancy. “Yeah!” He jabbed the Clear button on the adding machine
and began again.
The door opened and a tray appeared, followed closely by Jaimie. Sandy’s nails clicked softly as she slipped out, but Matthew barely noticed. Surprise held him still as Jaimie nudged aside a stack of newspapers and set the tray on the corner of his wide desk.
He looked at the fluffy omelet accompanied by bacon—brown and crispy just the way he liked—and a mound of country-style hash browns. Not the grated up, sissy kind, but chunks of potatoes, liberally spiced with tomatoes, onions and lots of pepper. There was at least one good thing he could say about Jaimie, he acknowledged. She cooked a heck of a breakfast.
He could’ve done without the heart-shaped paper sticking out of the side of the hash browns. But by now he was almost getting used to it. There had been Christmas tree cutouts over the holidays. Now hearts for Valentine’s Day. No doubt she had a stash of green paper somewhere, just waiting to cut out shamrocks for St. Patrick’s.
Hallmark probably loved her.
“Breakfast,” she announced, looking down her straight little nose at him.
“So I see.” He thought it was mighty nice of him not to mention that the meal was more than a few hours late.
She gave a haughty little sniff and swiveled on her heel. But the effect was ruined when she abruptly lifted her foot, teetering awkwardly for a moment. She shot him a defiant look over her shoulder and straightened, walking across the oak-planked floor with a stiff gait.
Matthew cast a swift, longing glance at the hot food. He tossed down his pencil and caught her before she could sashay out the door. “Hold it, Red. What’s wrong with your foot? A splinter, I’ll bet.” He took one look at her mutinous expression. “But you’d rather eat cow pies than admit it.” He shook his head and steered her toward the desk. “Sit,” he ordered, nudging the newspapers over even further to make room for her. “Sit.”
“I’ll bet you don’t order Maggie around like this,” she said, finally perching on the edge.
Matthew’s laugh was short on humor. “Maggie doesn’t crawl around on barn rafters.” He pulled the white first aid kit off the top of the filing cabinet and flipped it open. “She has more sense.” He pushed through the contents until he found the tweezers. “Okay, let’s have it.”
He saw the way she looked at her foot. And the exact spot on him that she would have liked to plant it. “It’s Valentine’s Day,” he warned softly, then gestured. “Be nice. Now give me your foot.”
Her lips twitched. She sighed, then lifted her foot. “The splinter is in my heel.”
Matthew took her foot in his hand and started pulling off the bright red sock. “This is damp.” He peeled it off and dropped it on the floor. “You’re gonna get sick walking around with wet feet. What were you doing? Finally mopping the floors?” He held on to her heel when she huffed and started pulling it out of his hand. “Well?”
“Well what?”
Lord, give him patience. “Why are your socks wet?”
“Why do you care?” Jaimie flushed and wanted to retract the words, but they were already out there. And she’d earned herself another one of the “looks.”
She braced her weight on her hands and leaned back slightly while he studied the heel of her chilled foot. She closed her eyes, thinking that she wouldn’t mind having Matthew Clay bending her over his sturdy wooden desk, for a reason entirely other than splinter removal. Her eyes flew open as she banished that thought. Lately it seemed like thoughts of that nature had been springing into her mind with far too much ease.
“Hold still,” he murmured.
“I am.”
He merely arched an eyebrow and took a firmer grasp on her wriggling foot.
“That hurts,” she complained.
“Sue me.” Her foot felt ridiculously small and cold, as his hand, usually as steady as steel, hovered over the minuscule edge of the splinter. Her toes curled and he found himself studying the bright red polish on her toenails, vaguely surprised that she hadn’t somehow figured a way to paint hearts on them.
“Can’t you see it?”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“Then what’s taking you so long?”
“Would you quit wiggling?”
She pushed herself up. “Look, it’s somewhere on the heel. Just right th—”
Matthew’s head lifted and she went silent. Six inches, maybe, separated their noses. Fascinated, he watched her wide eyes. They were as green as the moss that grew on the rocks down by the swimming hole in the springtime. The pupils dilated. The tip of her tongue slipped over her lips, and his attention zeroed in on the glisten of her lower lip.
“Matthew?”
He blinked and cleared his throat, staring stupidly at the tweezers in his hand as if he’d never seen them before. “Hold still, I said.” He bent over and quickly worked the splinter from her heel.
He heard her sigh faintly as he turned to flick the splinter into the trash can beside his desk. She muttered her thanks in a begrudging tone that made him want to smile.
“Any more?” He took her hand before she could tuck it in her back pocket. “Jaimie,” he asked, when her fingers curled protectively into her palm. “Let me see.” He nudged her palm flat. Sure enough he found three splinters on the tips of her index and middle fingers. In seconds he had them removed. “The other one?”
He knew she didn’t want to give him her other hand. He could tell by the way she gave that little shake of her head. The one that cleared the bangs from her eyes. She always did that when she didn’t want to do something.
She did that little shake a lot whenever he was around.
He waited patiently, confident that he could outwait her. He waited, and watched how the sunshine filling his office struck her vibrant hair. Finally she grimaced and pulled her hand out of her pocket, holding it up for him to see. A glittering strand of diamonds winked up at him from her wrist. He’d told her more than once that she was going to lose that bracelet, working around the ranch.
“Thought you said your bracelet was your good-luck charm,” he said smoothly. Every time he saw the wink of those diamonds, he wanted to shuffle her back to the city where she so obviously belonged. “Guess that luck doesn’t extend to warding off splinters.”
“I didn’t fall off the rafters though, did I?” She smiled, challenge written clearly in her emerald eyes.
True. When he found himself studying her eyelashes, so thick and brown, he dragged his attention back where it belonged—to the splinter dug into the underside of her thumb. “That’s gotta hurt.” He could see the shard of wood angling beneath the pale skin. It was three times the size of the other splinters.
She shrugged. “I can get it,” she said. “Your breakfast is getting cold.”
“Breakfast’ll keep.” With the tip of the tweezers, he tested the edge of the splinter. “It’s in there good, isn’t it.” He turned around slightly, lifting her palm to the bright light streaming in the window. “Almost...got it...there.” He held the ragged wood splinter up for their inspection. “Nasty.” He wiped it onto the edge of the trash can and tossed the tweezers back into the first aid kit, then swabbed the area with an antiseptic pad and covered it with a bandage strip. “That’ll teach you to rafter walk.”
She abruptly pulled her hand away, smoothing down the bandage herself. “I suppose you’ve never climbed up in the rafters. I climbed up there to get D.C. and I’d do it again.”
She tossed her head back to glare up at him, and her hair, unruly and glorious, fell past her shoulders, almost to the small of her back. It occurred to him that she really was magnificent when annoyed.
“I’d have thought you would care a little more about the cat you named after the Double-C. And I know she’s your cat, “cause Squire told me,” she finished with a “so there” look.
“There’s always been a cat or two around this place.” He wasn’t taking ownership of that animal. “You think I named that flea-bitten mothball after the Double-C?”
She rolled her eyes. “D.C. Do
uble-C. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist.”
His hands were at her throat before he knew what had happened. They wrapped around the smooth creaminess, his thumbs pushing her impudent chin up until she looked him in the face. He liked seeing her green eyes widen between those lush eyelashes. He really liked surprise finally silencing her. He lowered his head toward hers until he could feel her breath, soft and unsteady, on his lips. “Damn cat,” he said softly.
Her hands were on his wrists. “’Scuse me?”
“Damn cat. Not Double-C.”
Her lashes lowered. “Oh.”
He looked at her lips. At the high color of her cheeks. A portion of his mind wondered whether she would taste like the dark, rich coffee she made every morning.
A saner part of his mind demanded to know what the heck he was doing thinking such things.
Jaimie swayed when he dropped his hands suddenly as if she’d grown horns. She watched him round his desk and sit down, pulling the breakfast tray toward him as if nothing at all had just happened. As if the air hadn’t been snapping and sizzling between them.
She huffed and bent to pick up her sock.
“You didn’t tell me why your socks are wet.”
She nodded, marveling. “You know, you’re right.”
“Jaimie—”
“They’re wet because my shoes were wet. Okay?”
“And your shoes are wet because...?”
“Snow does that when it melts.” She flipped the sock and started putting her foot inside. Then decided against it at the cold, clammy feel of it.
His lips tightened. “Didn’t you get boots yet?”
“No.”
“Why not? I told you that you needed to get some boots. This is a ranch. Not some vacation resort in Arizona.”
“And when the great Matthew speaks we jump,” she muttered, bending over to remove the second sock.
The Rancher And The Redhead Page 2