by Diana Palmer
She waited for Harry to finish his chores and then went with him to the barn, where the little calves were curled up in their stalls of hay.
“They’re only days old,” Harry said, smiling as he brought the enormous bottles they were fed from. In fact, the nipples were stretched across the top of buckets and filled with warm mash and milk. “But they’ll grow. Sit down, now. You may get a bit dirty…”
“Clothes wash,” Amanda said easily, smiling. But this outfit was all she had. She was going to have to get the elusive Mr. Sutton to take her back to the cabin to get more clothes, or she’d be washing out her things in the sink tonight.
She knelt down in a clean patch of hay and coaxed the calf to take the nipple into its mouth. Once it got a taste of the warm liquid, it wasn’t difficult to get it to drink. Amanda loved the feel of its silky red-and-white coat under her fingers as she stroked it. The animal was a Hereford, and its big eyes were pink rimmed and soulful. The calf watched her while it nursed.
“Poor little thing,” she murmured softly, rubbing between its eyes. “Poor little orphan.”
“They’re tough critters, for all that,” Harry said as he fed the other calf. “Like the boss.”
“How did he lose everything, if you don’t mind me asking?”
He glanced at her and read the sincerity in her expression. “I don’t guess he’d mind if I told you. He was accused of selling contaminated beef.”
“Contaminated…how?”
“It’s a long story. The herd came to us from down in the Southwest. They had measles. Not,” he added when he saw her puzzled expression, “the kind humans get. Cattle don’t break out in spots, but they do develop cysts in the muscle tissue and if it’s bad enough, it means that the carcasses have to be destroyed.” He shrugged. “You can’t spot it, because there are no definite symptoms, and you can’t treat it because there isn’t a drug that cures it. These cattle had it and contaminated the rest of our herd. It was like the end of the world. Quinn had sold the beef cattle to the packing-plant operator. When the meat was ordered destroyed, he came back on Quinn to recover his money, but Quinn had already spent it to buy new cattle. We went to court… Anyway, to make a long story short, they cleared Quinn of any criminal charges and gave him the opportunity to make restitution. In turn, he sued the people who sold him the contaminated herd in the first place.” He smiled ruefully. “We just about broke even, but it meant starting over from scratch. That was last year. Things are still rough, but Quinn’s a tough customer and he’s got a good business head. He’ll get through it. I’d bet on him.”
Amanda pondered that, thinking that Quinn’s recent life had been as difficult as her own. At least he had Elliot. That must have been a comfort to him. She said as much to Harry.
He gave her a strange look. “Well, yes, Elliot’s special to him,” he said, as if there were things she didn’t know. Probably there were.
“Will these little guys make it?” she asked when the calf had finished his bottle.
“I think so,” Harry said. “Here, give me that bottle and I’ll take care of it for you.”
She sighed, petting the calf gently. She liked farms and ranches. They were so real, compared to the artificial life she’d known since she was old enough to leave home. She loved her work and she’d always enjoyed performing, but it seemed sometimes as if she lived in another world. Values were nebulous, if they even existed, in the world where she worked. Old-fashioned ideas like morality, honor, chastity were laughed at or ignored. Amanda kept hers to herself, just as she kept her privacy intact. She didn’t discuss her inner feelings with anyone. Probably her friends and associates would have died laughing if they’d known just how many hang-ups she had, and how distant her outlook on life was from theirs.
“Here’s another one,” Quinn said from the front of the barn.
Amanda turned her head, surprised to see him because he’d ridden out minutes ago. He was carrying another small calf, but this one looked worse than the younger ones did.
“He’s very thin,” she commented.
“He’s got scours.” He laid the calf down next to her. “Harry, fix another bottle.”
“Coming up, boss.”
Amanda touched the wiry little head with its rough hide. “He’s not in good shape,” she murmured quietly.
Quinn saw the concern on her face and was surprised by it. He shouldn’t have been, he reasoned. Why would she have come with Elliot in the middle of the night to nurse a man she didn’t even like, if she wasn’t a kind woman?
“He probably won’t make it,” he agreed, his dark eyes searching hers. “He’d been out there by himself for a long time. It’s a big property, and he’s a very small calf,” he defended when she gave him a meaningful look. “It wouldn’t be the first time we missed one, I’m sorry to say.”
“I know.” She looked up as Harry produced a third bottle, and her hand reached for it just as Quinn’s did. She released it, feeling odd little tingles at the brief contact with his lean, sure hand.
“Here goes,” he murmured curtly. He reached under the calf’s chin and pulled its mouth up to slide the nipple in. The calf could barely nurse, but after a minute it seemed to rally and then it fed hungrily.
“Thank goodness,” Amanda murmured. She smiled at Quinn, and his eyes flashed as they met hers, searching, dark, full of secrets. They narrowed and then abruptly fell to her soft mouth, where they lingered with a kind of questioning irritation, as if he wanted very much to kiss her and hated himself for it. Her heart leaped at the knowledge. She seemed to have a new, built-in insight about this standoffish man, and she didn’t understand either it or her attitude toward him. He was domineering and hardheaded and unpredictable and she should have disliked him. But she sensed a sensitivity in him that touched her heart. She wanted to get to know him.
“I can do this,” he said curtly. “Why don’t you go inside?”
She was getting to him, she thought with fascination. He was interested in her, but he didn’t want to be. She watched the way he avoided looking directly at her again, the angry glance of his eyes.
Well, it certainly wouldn’t do any good to make him furious at her, especially when she was going to be his unwanted houseguest for several more days, from the look of the weather.
“Okay,” she said, giving in. She got to her feet slowly. “I’ll see if I can find something to do.”
“Harry might like some company while he works in the kitchen. Wouldn’t you, Harry?” he added, giving the older man a look that said he’d damned sure better like some company.
“Of course I would, boss,” Harry agreed instantly.
Amanda pushed her hands into her pockets with a last glance at the calves. She smiled down at them. “Can I help feed them while I’m here?” she asked gently.
“If you want to,” Quinn said readily, but without looking up.
“Thanks.” She hesitated, but he made her feel shy and tongue-tied. She turned away nervously and walked back to the house.
Since Harry had the kitchen well in hand, she volunteered to iron some of Quinn’s cotton shirts. Harry had the ironing board set up, but not the iron, so she went into the closet and produced one. It looked old, but maybe it would do, except that it seemed to have a lot of something caked on it.
She’d just started to plug it in when Harry came into the room and gasped.
“Not that one!” he exclaimed, gently taking it away from her. “That’s Quinn’s!”
She opened her mouth to make a remark, when Harry started chuckling.
“It’s for his skis,” he explained patiently.
She nodded. “Right. He irons his skis. I can see that.”
“He does. Don’t you know anything about skiing?”
“Well, you get behind a speedboat with them on…”
“Not waterskiing. Snow skiing,” he emphasized.
She shrugged. “I come from southern Mississippi.” She grinned at him. “We don’t do much bus
iness in snow, you see.”
“Sorry. Well, Quinn was an Olympic contender in giant slalom when he was in his late teens and early twenties. He would have made the team, but he got married and Elliot was on the way, so he gave it up. He still gets in plenty of practice,” he added, shuddering. “On old Ironside peak, too. Nobody, but nobody, skis it except Quinn and a couple of other experts from Larry’s Lodge over in Jackson Hole.”
“I haven’t seen that one on a map…” she began, because she’d done plenty of map reading before she came here.
“Oh, that isn’t its official name, it’s what Quinn calls it.” He grinned. “Anyway, Quinn uses this iron to put wax on the bottom of his skis. Don’t feel bad, I didn’t know any better, either, at first, and I waxed a couple of shirts. Here’s the right iron.”
He handed it to her, and she plugged it in and got started. The elusive Mr. Sutton had hidden qualities, it seemed. She’d watched the winter Olympics every four years on television, and downhill skiing fascinated her. But it seemed to Amanda that giant slalom called for a kind of reckless skill and speed that would require ruthlessness and single-minded determination. Considering that, it wasn’t at all surprising to her that Quinn Sutton had been good at it.
Amanda helped Harry do dishes and start a load of clothes in the washer. But when she took them out of the dryer, she discovered that several of Quinn’s shirts were missing buttons and had loose seams.
Harry produced a needle and some thread, and Amanda set to work mending them. It gave her something to do while she watched a years-old police drama on television.
Quinn came in with Elliot a few hours later.
“Boy, the snow’s bad,” Elliot remarked as he rubbed his hands in front of the fire Harry had lit in the big stone fireplace. “Dad had to bring the sled out to get me, because the bus couldn’t get off the main highway.”
“Speaking of the sled,” Amanda said, glancing at Quinn, “I’ve got to have a few things from the cabin. I’m really sorry, but I’m limited to what I’m wearing….”
“I’ll run you down right now, before I go out again.”
She put the mending aside. “I’ll get my coat.”
“Elliot, you can come, too. Put your coat back on,” Quinn said unexpectedly, ignoring his son’s surprised glance.
Amanda didn’t look at him, but she understood why he wanted Elliot along. She made Quinn nervous. He was attracted to her and he was going to fight it to the bitter end. She wondered why he considered her such a threat.
He paused to pick up the shirt she’d been working on, and his expression got even harder as he glared at her. “You don’t need to do that kind of thing,” he said curtly.
“I’ve got to earn my keep somehow.” She sighed. “I can feed the calves and help with the housework, at least. I’m not used to sitting around doing nothing,” she added. “It makes me nervous.”
He hesitated. An odd look rippled over his face as he studied the neat stitches in his shirtsleeve where the rip had been. He held it for a minute before he laid it gently back on the sofa. He didn’t look at Amanda as he led the way out the door.
It didn’t take her long to get her things together. Elliot wandered around the cabin. “There are knives all over the counter,” he remarked. “Want me to put them in the sink?”
“Go ahead. I was using them for drumsticks,” she called as she closed her suitcase.
“They don’t look like they’d taste very good.” Elliot chuckled.
She came out of the bedroom and gave him an amused glance. “Not that kind of drumsticks, you turkey. Here.” She put down the suitcase and took the blunt stainless-steel knives from him. She glanced around to make sure Quinn hadn’t come into the house and then she broke into an impromptu drum routine that made Elliot grin even more.
“Say, you’re pretty good,” he said.
She bowed. “Just one of my minor talents,” she said. “But I’m better with a keyboard. Ready to go?”
“Whenever you are.”
She started to pick up her suitcase, but Elliot reached down and got it before she could, a big grin on his freckled face. She wondered again why he looked so little like his father. She knew that his mother had been a redhead, too, but it was odd that he didn’t resemble Quinn in any way at all.
Quinn was waiting on the sled, his expression unreadable, impatiently smoking his cigarette. He let them get on and turned the draft horse back toward his own house. It was snowing lightly and the wind was blowing, not fiercely but with a nip in it. Amanda sighed, lifting her face to the snow, not caring that her hood had fallen back to reveal the coiled softness of her blond hair. She felt alive out here as she never had in the city, or even back East. There was something about the wilderness that made her feel at peace with herself for the first time since the tragedy that had sent her retreating here.
“Enjoying yourself?” Quinn asked unexpectedly.
“More than I can tell you,” she replied. “It’s like no other place on earth.”
He nodded. His dark eyes slid over her face, her cheeks flushed with cold and excitement, and they lingered there for one long moment before he forced his gaze back to the trail. Amanda saw that look and it brought a sense of foreboding. He seemed almost angry.
In fact, he was. Before the day was out, it was pretty apparent that he’d withdrawn somewhere inside himself and had no intention of coming out again. He barely said two words to Amanda before bedtime.
“He’s gone broody,” Elliot mused before he and Amanda called it a night. “He doesn’t do it often, and not for a long time, but when he’s got something on his mind, it’s best not to get on his nerves.”
“Oh, I’ll do my best,” Amanda promised, and crossed her heart.
But that apparently didn’t do much good, in her case, because he glared at her over breakfast the next morning and over lunch, and by the time she finished mending a window curtain in the kitchen and helped Harry bake a cake for dessert, she was feeling like a very unwelcome guest.
She went out to feed the calves, the nicest of her daily chores, just before Quinn was due home for supper. Elliot had lessons and he was holed up in his room trying to get them done in time for a science-fiction movie he wanted to watch after supper. Quinn insisted that homework came first.
She fed two of the three calves and Harry volunteered to feed the third, the little one that Quinn had brought home with scours, while she cut the cake and laid the table. She was just finishing the place settings when she heard the sled draw up outside the door.
Her heart quickened at the sound of Quinn’s firm, measured stride on the porch. The door opened and he came in, along with a few snowflakes.
He stopped short at the sight of her in an old white apron with wisps of blond hair hanging around her flushed face, a bowl of whipped potatoes in her hands.
“Don’t you look domestic?” he asked with sudden, bitter sarcasm.
The attack was unexpected, although it shouldn’t have been. He’d been irritable ever since the day before, when he’d noticed her mending his shirt.
“I’m just helping Harry,” she said. “He’s feeding the calves while I do this.”
“So I noticed.”
She put down the potatoes, watching him hang up his hat and coat with eyes that approved his tall, fit physique, the way the red-checked flannel shirt clung to his muscular torso and long back. He was such a lonely man, she thought, watching him. So alone, even with Elliot and Harry here. He turned unexpectedly, catching her staring and his dark eyes glittered.
He went to the sink to wash his hands, almost vibrating with pent-up anger. She sensed it, but it only piqued her curiosity. He was reacting to her. She felt it, knew it, as she picked up a dish towel and went close to him to wrap it gently over his wet hands. Her big black eyes searched his, and she let her fingers linger on his while time seemed to end in the warm kitchen.
His dark eyes narrowed, and he seemed to have stopped breathing. He was aware of so
many sensations. Hunger. Anger. Loneliness. Lust. His head spun with them, and the scent of her was pure, soft woman, drifting up into his nostrils, cocooning him in the smell of cologne and shampoo. His gaze fell helplessly to her soft bow of a mouth and he wondered how it would feel to bend those few inches and take it roughly under his own. It had been so long since he’d kissed a woman, held a woman. Amanda was particularly feminine, and she appealed to everything that was masculine in him. He almost vibrated with the need to reach out to her.
But that way lay disaster, he told himself firmly. She was just another treacherous woman, probably bored with confinement, just keeping her hand in with attracting men. He probably seemed like a pushover, and she was going to use her charms to make a fool of him. He took a deep, slow breath and the glitter in his eyes became even more pronounced as he jerked the towel out of her hands and moved away.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. She felt her cheeks go hot, because there had been a cold kind of violence in the action that warned her his emotions weren’t quite under control. She moved away from him. Violence was the one thing she did expect from men. She’d lived with it for most of her life until she’d run away from home.
She went back to the stove, stirring the sauce she’d made to go with the boiled dumpling.
“Don’t get too comfortable in the kitchen,” he warned her. “This is Harry’s private domain and he doesn’t like trespassers. You’re just passing through.”
“I haven’t forgotten that, Mr. Sutton,” she replied, and her eyes kindled with dark fire as she looked at him. There was no reason to make her feel so unwelcome. “Just as soon as the thaw comes, I’ll be out of your way for good.”
“I can hardly wait,” he said, biting off the words.
Amanda sighed wearily. It wasn’t her idea of the perfect rest spot. She’d come away from the concert stage needing healing, and all she’d found was another battle to fight.
“You make me feel so at home, Mr. Sutton,” she said wistfully. “Like part of the family. Thanks so much for your gracious hospitality, and do you happen to have a jar of rat poison…?”