She licked her lips. He liked that, too.
“We’re moving out of here today,” he decided suddenly.
She blinked.
“There’s a ranch house on my property. The people who sold me the land left nearly everything there.” He and Beth could be alone there. Apart.
“But your grandfather—the staff—”
“They’ll think it’s nothing special if we want to move out by ourselves. More convincing even.” Nothing special.
A blush rose from the neck, of the white flannel nightgown. It rimmed the edges of her ears with an irresistible pink.
Michael fisted his hands. He couldn’t sleep with her again if he wanted to keep her safe from pain. Move to the ranch, he mentally urged. There, he could keep his distance.
In the bedroom she’d chosen for herself and Mischa, Beth unpacked the last of the baby clothes into the newly cleaned dresser. Her shopping bag luggage had come in handy quicker than even she’d suspected.
She and Michael had brought their few things over in the early morning. Evelyn had protested their leaving the Wentworth house, but then had smiled her understanding and done some of the packing herself.
The housekeeper had wanted to send along one of the maids to help with the cleaning of the longdeserted ranch house. Beth had said no. She’d accepted a load of cleaning supplies, though, and had spent the midmorning hours completely cleaning the small one-story, two-bedroom house. All the while really hoping to wash away her embarrassment.
It was obvious Michael had moved them to the ranch property to avoid another night with her in his bed.
It was all her fault.
For a woman who’d never spent an entire night with a man, she’d experienced the most restful sleep of her life. Michael’s presence—Michael’s arms— had brought her comfort and peace. No wonder the poor man had run scared—and with no choice but to tow her along—to the ranch.
Did he think she was getting too comfortable with him? First, she’d tried to probe into his emotions toward his brother’s death, and then she’d tried to worm her way into his embrace.
Please God, make him not see it that way.
But Michael was always so calm and controlled, so ready with answers, that his sudden defection to the ranch surprised her. She knew he hadn’t been considering it. She knew it had been an impulsive reaction to her night in his bed.
In his crib, Mischa protested her lack of attention. Gladly, she picked him up and rubbed her cheek against his downy head. The sweet smell and feel of him always soothed any aches in her heart.
It didn’t now.
Her love for the baby rose as fiercely as ever, of course, but she still felt something—a void—that centered around Michael. Embarrassment. Guilt that she’d forced him out of his own home.
Yes, that was it.
“How are we going to make it up to him?” she asked Mischa aloud.
He stared at her solemnly.
“What if we do a little something to this house?” Though now clean, the small ranch home had the utilitarian and impersonal feel of a barracks. Maybe she wasn’t truly Michael’s wife, but she could expend a true effort to make the place a home for him.
It wasn’t Michael’s fault he’d never really seen her as a woman—except for that teasing moment in the breakfast room when he’d said things could be good between them—and she couldn’t blame him for that. Obviously, she wasn’t his type and she’d made him uncomfortable by cuddling close.
She’d make it up to him by adding a little comfort to the house. With a little polish and a little luck, perhaps he’d forget all about her hours in his arms.
Beth had taken her checkbook into town with her, but apparently the Freemont Springs stores had been alerted to her new status. The groceries and then the housewares she picked up at the variety store were automatically charged to the Wentworth account.
By 6:00 p.m. she had a casserole bubbling in the oven and a salad and cold beer in the fridge. Maybe it wasn’t the fare of the Wentworth cook, but it was what Beth knew how to prepare. Peering in at the fragrant noodles and cheese, Beth smiled in satisfaction. She just knew he would appreciate her effort.
She’d done a little something to the small den attached to the kitchen, too. The couch there was of cracked vinyl, and she’d warmed it with a homemade quilt she’d found at the local arts and crafts consignment shop.
At the thrift store she’d found a couple of framed prints and a faded, but pretty needlepoint sampler, also framed. Hung on the walls, they added color to the mostly neutral room.
A bowl of shiny red-and-green apples served as a centerpiece on the wobbly kitchen table. Her old black-and-white TV sat in a corner of the den on a packing crate covered by a scarf. Beth smiled again. The place looked really nice.
Well, maybe a Beth Masterson kind of nice, not a Michael Wentworth kind of nice, but still, he couldn’t fail to notice the effort she’d made to clean and decorate the place.
She ran her hands down her shirt, tucking it neatly into her jeans. She’d worked on herself a bit, too. Just so that Michael wouldn’t think she was a total nothing. Finger-tousling gave her hair a little lift, and her face seemed brighter with the sparing use of some mascara, blush, and a light wash of lipstick.
Mischa, newly bathed too, seemed content to view the room from his infant seat on one of the kitchen counters.
The sound of gravel spray caught his attention and caught Beth’s, too. Michael was home.
And not in a good mood. He took one long look at her, then grunted some sort of monosyllable to her cheerful, California-casual, “Howzitgoing?”
He didn’t look at the room. He didn’t sniff the smell of dinner appreciatively. He did spare a chuck under the chin for Mischa, but then disappeared down the short hallway to his bedroom.
Beth heard the shower start. She turned off the oven and set the table. He wandered back in, took another one of those long looks at her then a glance at the table set for two, and disappeared again. After grabbing a beer from the refrigerator.
Still nothing about the spit-shined house or the hot meal.
She fixed her own plate and talked to Mischa while she ate her dinner. Halfway through, Michael came in the kitchen for another beer. This time he disappeared through the front door with the rest of the six-pack.
Beth looked at Mischa. He stared back.
She heard the sound of the truck’s door open and close, and the engine start up, but Michael didn’t drive away.
“What could he possibly be doing?” she asked aloud.
Apparently Mischa didn’t have any ideas, either.
She rinsed her plate, put the salad back in the refrigerator and the casserole back in the still-warm oven. Then, she took stock of her day and what had happened so far this evening.
“Michael,” she told Mischa, who was beginning to drowse, “isn’t going to sit in that truck alone.”
6
Michael thought of calling Elijah. His best buddy had been a state champion placekicker in high school, and Michael needed somebody to boot his butt across town.
Beth didn’t deserve marriage to a boor. Or boar. Even bore might suffice as description. He’d returned to the ranch house after a double-duty day—half spent at the Oil Works, half spent at Elijah’s ranch— thinking he’d be tired enough not to respond to Beth.
Duh.
One look at her sparkling eyes and tempting mouth and he’d had to take himself and his hardening body to a cold shower. Two beers hadn’t dulled the edge.
Nursing the third to the roar of the truck’s heater and the twang of old George Strait wasn’t doing a thing for him, either. Except remind him of how the marriage had been his idea and it was she who appeared to be paying the price of his lousy moods and uncontrollable lusting.
Because that was what it was, lust. Good, ol’fashioned lust that made his skin itchy and his muscles—all his muscles—clench at the sight or scent of her. Damn, but she didn’t deserve that from him.
> “I’m a heel,” he told the mournfully crooning George. He drained the third beer and twisted the top off the next bottle, closing his eyes. “You hear me, George? I’m a rotten, out-and-out dog of a man.”
He didn’t know if George heard him, but George’s drummer did. He started an agreeing rat-ta-tat-tat that seemed to thrum right against the passenger side window.
Rat-ta-tat-tat.
George’s song ended but George’s drummer didn’t. Rat-ta-tat-tat.
Michael opened one eye. Oops. The drummer wasn’t George, but Beth, knocking on the window.
Michael straightened from his slouch, flipped the lock and pushed open the passenger side door. She hopped in, wearing her Michelin Man parka.
He instantly resolved to buy her a new coat at the earliest opportunity. But then he breathed in Bethscent and knew that first, foremost, he had to get her warm and tempting body back to the house.
Unsure of what he was facing, he reached up to switch on the cab’s overhead light. Red splashed her cheeks—from the cold, he presumed—and she was breathing hard.
He quickly offed the overhead and tried to think of something else—the single-digit temperature, the organizational chart of the Oil Works—to get his mind off her full mouth.
Looking determinedly away and out the window into the night’s blackness, he inhaled and prepared a vague apology. Words to get her out of the truck. Words to get her clear away from his lusting thoughts and hungry clutches.
Maybe he’d say work was bothering him. Juggling the two jobs a headache. Anything besides the truth to explain away his rudeness and send her back to the house.
But she spoke first. “Well, I’m sorry you can’t even look at me,” she said.
He was so startled, that he did. “What?”
“I’m trying my best, you know.”
He blinked. “Of course.”
“Maybe you expected a more beautiful, polished wife—whatever. But you have me.”
Did she think he was ashamed of her? “Beth. I didn’t move you out here because I wished you were someone else.”
The dash lights edged her profile in eerie green. “Why did you move me out here?”
He should have seen that coming. Blame it on the beers and George Strait. The rat-ta-tat-tat that continued echoing in his brain. “Huh?” he said to stall.
“Oh, I won’t even make you say it.” Disgust filled her voice. “I plastered myself against you last night. Stucco by Beth.”
“Stucco by Beth?” he echoed stupidly.
“I know you don’t see me that way. I’ve known it from the beginning. I’ve been a means for you, not a woman, and I understand that.” She paused. “But you could have eaten the casserole!”
His stomach rumbled and he accepted it as one of his punishments. “But what, uh, is this ‘way’ that I don’t see you?”
A little grunting noise started up from her vicinity. Suddenly he understood the overstuffed quality of her jacket. She unzipped the garment to expose the blanket-bundled and now-fussing Mischa.
Then she performed an amazing balancing and twisting motion that he couldn’t decipher in the neardarkness of the truck’s interior. There was a smacking noise and then Mischa went suddenly quiet.
Michael had a bad feeling about what was happening. “Um.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t you want some privacy?” he asked.
She wriggled in the passenger seat and propped the elbow cradling Misha’s head against her crossed knee. “What does it matter?”
“Isn’t feeding, uh—” he coughed, “—nursing a baby something you’d prefer to do alone?”
“It will only take a few minutes. He’s just about to nod off for his first big sleep of the night. It can’t possibly bother you.”
Michael didn’t know what to say to that. It wasn’t bothering him exactly. But she was bare-breasted— she had to be, right?—just inches from him and it was…bothering him a hell of a lot.
“Maybe I should go back into the house,” he said.
“Not before I get my say.” Beth made a quick movement and switched Mischa’s direction.
Was that a glimpse of breast? Michael tried not thinking about it. January. Freezes.
“…sorry,” she finished.
He swallowed quickly. “Excuse me, I didn’t catch that. What?”
She let loose a long sigh. “I was mumbling. I’m not too good at this, okay?”
“Spit it out, Beth.” Had she found him out? Did she want to light into him for his inconvenient hots for her?
“I’m sorry about last night,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry that I, uh, kinda liked sharing a bed with you. And I know I’m not your type at all. I absolutely know it. So don’t worry that I’ll come on to you or anything. I’ll keep everything as friendly—only friendly—as possible. You don’t have to worry about me in any other way.”
The barrage of words took a few moments to sink in. “You’re not my type?”
“I know it,” she said. “You’ve made it abundantly clear that you don’t see me…well, see me as a woman.”
The truck’s cab was overheating. If shock hadn’t paralyzed him, Michael would have turned off the heater. Instead he just looked at Beth, who made another little twist and wriggle. In the dimness he could see that Mischa was now…unattached and asleep.
Michael replayed her words and realized she had placed his salvation squarely in his lap. Somehow he’d given the impression that he was uninterested in her. No denial from him, and she’d do all the distancing by herself.
She’d go back into the house, leaving him the truck, the beer, and good ol’ George.
They’d continue with a polite and distant marriage and some time from now he’d simply shrug off all ties to Wentworth Oil and to her. It was everything he could have thought to ask for.
Beth lifted the sleeping baby against her shoulder. Her palm rubbed little circles against his back.
Michael pinched the bridge of his nose, where his headaches always started. If he kept silent, any minute now she’d walk back into the house, and not many months from now, straight out of his life. Simply. Without complications. In a nothing-special kind of way.
Breaking the tense silence, Mischa belched like a pool player after a sixer of ale.
Beth giggled.
And that did it for Michael.
“Ah, honey,” he said. The tender mother-to-baby touch, the beery-sounding belch, the girlish laugh. “You’ve got it all wrong, wrong, wrong.” He couldn’t let Beth think she wasn’t a woman in his eyes.
She stilled. Laughter evaporated. “What do I have wrong?” she whispered.
“I’ve been wanting you since—God, I don’t know. But I brought you out here so I wouldn’t touch you. Another night alone in my bed and things would have gotten out of hand. At least on my part.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t want you to. I didn’t want you to see what you do to me, okay?” He was explaining it to himself, too.
“I don’t—bother you?”
He laughed. “Oh, yeah, you bother me, Beth. Your eyes. Your laugh. Your sexy mouth that I want to lick every time I look at it. I want to touch you, honey, and smell you, and rub myself against you until we’re both so hot that January in Oklahoma feels like August in Acapulco.”
He didn’t know what she’d say to that.
She said nothing. With a quick, muffled exclamation, she tucked Mischa back into her coat and jumped from the truck. Out so fast that he didn’t even have the chance to catch her expression in the brief flash of the overhead light.
Michael listened to a tune from Randy Travis and one from Reba before he let himself out of the truck and into the house. As he walked inside, he. added another couple of lines to his list of sins.
Lousy, lusting moods aimed at his bride-of-convenience.
Frightening bride-of-convenience with the aforementioned lousy, lusting moods.
He’d find her—probably under lock an
d key in her bedroom—then apologize to her, which he should have done in the first place and been silent about everything else, and finally lock himself in his bedroom for the duration of the marriage.
Beth was a dim shape on the couch in the darkness of the den.
Michael froze, trying to gauge what he’d done to her. Apparently she wasn’t frightened enough to take refuge in her bedroom. But was she crying? Damn, he’d hate that.
Apologize, Wentworth. Apologize and then leave her alone.
“Beth?”
She drew her knees up onto the couch and he could make out that she hugged them against her chest.
“I want to—”
“Don’t say any more,” she whispered.
“I owe it to you,” he insisted, stepping into the room. “I owe you—”
“Do you think I’m a bad mother?”
“What?” The crazy question drew him two steps closer to the couch. “You’re a great mother.”
She rested her forehead against her knees. “I don’t think a mother should feel like this.” Her voice was muffled, confused.
Michael sat on the arm of the couch. “Like what, Beth?” He wanted to touch her so bad, to comfort her. He fisted his hand against his thigh. “This is about something I’ve done. I need to—”
“No.” She shook her head and a little wave of her scent drifted up to him. He drank it in.
Apologize, Wentworth. Apologize and then lock yourself in your room.
“I don’t think a mother should…” she said, before he could form the words.
Should want to maim the man she’s married to? he thought with a grimace. “Wanting you,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I should apol—”
“I want you, too,” she whispered.
His heart slammed into his gut. “What?”
“Maybe a mother shouldn’t,” she said softly. “You’d think I would be focused on Mischa. But I look at you, and…”
She’s got it wrong, Wentworth. She’s vulnerable right now. “I know you said you like sharing a bed with me, Beth. But that’s just about another warm body. I think you’re lone—”
“Don’t say it,” she said vehemently. “That’s not it at all.”
The Millionaire and the Pregnant Pauper Page 7