Annoyed, Celie gave them short clipped answers, then said, "I have to do some billing." She was not sorry for the excuse.
Naturally, they turned to Jace. They liked him better, anyway. He was clearly a cowboy, a bit of local color.
And Jace, naturally, made the most of it. He flirted with them. He joked and chatted with them and regaled them with Sloan Gallagher stories.
"Sure, I went to school with him. Sat behind him in algebra… He was a hardheaded kid. Chip on his shoulder. Figured I oughta knock it off for him."
The women were fascinated. Every group that came in hung on Jace's tales of his boyhood fist fight with Sloan. They ogled the scar on his jaw that he said Sloan had given him, and they gasped in amazement when he claimed at least five times to be responsible for the bump on Sloan's beautiful nose.
Celie sat with her back to them and worked on the bills and answered the phone whenever it rang. She tried not to listen. She might as well have tried not to breathe.
Finally, when Noah Tanner called with an urgent order, she turned and pushed a paper across the desk at Jace. "Noah needs this now."
"Right." But he kept right on talking to the groupies while they made fools of themselves, oohing and aahing and giggling and laughing and wanting to touch Jace's scar. One of them even offered to kiss it and make it better!
Celie stabbed the pen right through the page she was billing. She spun around.
"Do you mind?" she said, frost dripping. "This is a business! We have work to do. Those boxes in the back need to be broken down," she told Jace, "and Noah Tanner will be looking for that lumber."
"I'll get right to it," Jace promised. But even as he spoke he was edging closer to the woman who was puckering her lips.
"Right here, sweetheart," he said, pointing to a spot on his jaw. "Every once in a while I still get a twinge right here."
Celie stomped away. She was getting the lumber herself when he finally came out to join her.
"You call that settling down?" she demanded, yanking out boards and laying them on a rack.
He slanted her a glance. "I'm workin' on it."
She snorted. "Have someone in mind, do you?"
"Actually, yes."
That rocked her. Jace Tucker was serious? He was looking to settle down? And he had a woman in mind?
"Who's the lucky lady?" Celie asked with an edge of sarcasm.
Jace just looked at her. "That's my business."
Daisy thought she was going to Fort Worth to get a cutting horse.
Lizzie thought she was going to get a part in a Broadway Play.
Jack thought he had an inside track on becoming a millionaire because he had discovered that there were a ridiculous number of people who would buy an honest-to-goodness, 100 percent guaranteed authentic, Elmer Christmas Pageant bunny for fifty dollars.
"Fifty dollars? You didn't!" Polly exclaimed when he waved a stack of bills in front of her face.
"You been sayin' we need to find homes for 'em." Jack gave her a broad grin and tucked his loot into his Colorado Rockies minilocker bank.
"I didn't say to sell them!"
"But you didn't say not to, either. And they promised to take good care of 'em."
What was she going to do?
Tomorrow it would start all over again. The streets would be crawling with reporters. Their house would have had its own resident reporter if she hadn't refused to let Sara invite Flynn Murray to stay with them.
"I don't mean to be rude," Polly had said to him, "but you must understand that we can't play favorites."
"Mom!" Sara objected.
But on that Polly had held firm. She needed a reporter-free zone somewhere. Her house was going to be it.
"Sure an' you're right about that," Flynn had said, grinning amiably. "I'll be seein' you tomorrow perhaps, Sara? Will you be havin' lunch with me?"
Sara didn't even check her day planner. She just said, "Yes."
I should lock them all up, Polly thought as she sat in front of the fireplace that night and waited for her mother to get home.
It was after midnight, it had been snowing for hours, and Joyce was late. She'd probably stopped to see Artie, and that was why she was late. Polly wouldn't let herself contemplate any other reason.
She was exhausted and she should just go on to bed. But she wouldn't sleep as long as her mother was out in this weather. She got up and made herself a cup of tea. She scratched Sid's furry head and ruffled the dogs' fur. They were her great comfort most evenings when she sat alone in the living room after the kids were in bed. Now she barely had time for them.
"Sorry, guys," she said and got a purr and a tail thump for her trouble. "Two more days and we'll be on our own again."
She heard the door open and moments later her mother came into the kitchen.
"Brutal out there. Wind coming right down out of the north. Took me almost an hour." Joyce said as she unwound herself from her scarf and shook the snow from her hat into the sink.
"Did you see Artie?" Polly felt guilty that she hadn't even been down to see him since he'd had the heart attack.
Her mother took off her jacket. "Yes. So far, so good. He grumbles a lot. Won't do what the nurses tell him. Stubborn cuss. Only one he'd ever listen to was Maudie."
"They were a pair, all right." Polly poured her mother a cup of tea, too, then padded back into the living room and sat in front of the fire. "You'd almost think he'd want to be with her. They were together a long time."
"Fifty-nine years." Joyce smiled a little wistfully. She took her cup and sat on the sofa. "At least he had a whole lifetime with her."
"Yes." She and Lew had barely had fourteen. They had been great years. They'd packed a lot into them, and Polly knew she would never trade those fourteen years for fifty with someone she loved less. But Lew had been gone six years now. She was only thirty-seven.
If she lived to be as old as Artie—or even her own mother—that was a long long time to live alone.
"We had good men," Joyce said at last. "A couple of the best. You can't ask for more." Their gazes met.
Polly reached out and patted her mother's hand. "I know."
Joyce's fingers bent around hers for just a moment, giving a gentle squeeze. Then she stood up. "I think I'll just take this cup of tea and go on up to bed. You should go on to sleep now, too."
"Yes," Polly said. But after Joyce disappeared up the stairs, she didn't move. The fire snapped and crackled. And Polly sat rocking, watching it. Life seemed almost normal right now. Calm. Sane.
"Two more days," Polly murmured. Two more days and it would be calm and sane again. The auction would be over. Sloan Gallagher would have come—and gone.
It was odd that he hadn't called last night or tonight.
Was that why she hadn't gone to bed when she was so exhausted? She'd told herself she was waiting for her mother to get home from work. But had she really been waiting for Sloan's phone call?
"Of course not," she assured herself. She set her teacup down and curled into the rocking chair.
Her eyes closed.
She slept.
A knock on the door woke her.
She jerked upright, cursing because she had a crick in her neck and the room was freezing because she'd let the fire burn down, and it was, what? One-thirty in the morning?
Who on earth would be banging on her door at one-thirty in the morning?
Some idiot in search of a story, no doubt! It was the last straw. Polly scrambled up, stalked to the door and jerked it open.
Sloan Gallagher stood smiling on her doorstep.
* * *
Chapter 11
« ^ »
"Good God!"
"Not even close." The famous Gallagher grin flashed briefly, and Polly's heart kicked over in her chest.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded.
"If you don't know that, sweetheart, you're not living on this planet." He glanced over his shoulder. "Can I come in? I don't think anyone has
seen me yet."
Even as he said the words, Polly realized there was a good chance someone might. And if they did, a full-blown stampede might result. She reached out, grabbed him by the hand, hauled him in and slammed the door as if to shield him from a horde of invaders—and realized as she did so that she was the one who might well need shielding—from him!
Or from her reaction to him.
She knew all about animal magnetism. She'd experienced it in spades with Lew. But while she had acknowledged countless times, at Celie's insistence, that yes, Sloan Gallagher was handsome, that he had gorgeous eyes and a smile to die for, the acknowledgment had been purely academic. She personally had never felt its impact.
Until now.
Now, face-to-face with Sloan Gallagher, she felt serious oxygen depletion. She stood there with her mouth open and couldn't seem to get her breath.
He had an impact on space, too, she thought. He shrank rooms. The entry hall, normally quite large, now felt no bigger than a phone booth.
He seemed much more substantial than he did on the screen. It probably had something to do with his three dimensions. He might be twelve feet high on a screen, but there was so much more to him in the flesh. Snowflakes glistened on his tousled dark hair. And even in the dim light of the entry hall he looked tan and fit and gorgeous in his blue jeans and black down jacket.
He looked roguish and dangerous—like a movie star. Imagine that.
Polly had never thought of charisma as having a physical presence before. But she could actually feel it emanating from him. He was looking at her exactly the way she remembered him looking at the female lead in his films—right before he took her off to the bedroom and they scorched the sheets.
The surge of heat that shot through her unsuspecting body was so sudden, so unexpected and so intense that it could have been her first hot flash. Then she realized that it had been the exact opposite—not the death knell of her hormonal impulse, but the first rush of sexual awareness that she'd felt since Lew had died.
"Hell," she muttered. "Oh, bloody hell."
"What?" Sloan said.
"Nothing!" Of all the inappropriate reactions! she thought, disgusted. She was as bad as Celie. Worse! Agitated, she stepped around him and hurried into the living room where, she hoped, his effect on the dimensions of the room would not be so daunting.
Sloan started to follow her, then stopped and took off his boots.
Polly almost told him not to bother, that he wouldn't be staying long enough. But for all her sudden sexual awakening, she was still Polly. She was still practical. And in the clear light of the living room he not only looked roguish and dangerous and charismatic.
He looked tired.
He looked positively shot.
He yawned even as he worked his boots off. And as he straightened up and shed his jacket to uncover a chamois cloth shirt the very same blue color as his eyes, she thought he might topple right over.
And she would have to catch him.
Oh, yeah, right, she thought. Better she should let him fall on his attractively broken nose.
Trust Sloan Gallagher to look exhausted in a most world-weary, mind-shatteringly handsome way.
There was no doubt that he would bring in plenty of money for Maddie's auction. If everyone's reactions to Sloan in person were as strong as hers, Polly thought that by the end of the bidding Maddie might own the ranch free and clear!
"The auction is Sunday," she reminded him now, just in case he'd got his days mixed up.
"Someone mentioned that." He sounded amused as he padded into the room, still smiling, looking around, taking things in curiously.
"I just meant I was surprised to see you so early."
"I told you I was going to help."
He'd said something about "taking care of things," but she hadn't paid much attention. If she'd thought about it at all, she'd imagined him riding in on a white charger and slaying reporters right and left.
"This is help?"
"It was meant to be." He yawned again, so fiercely this time that his jaw cracked. "Sorry. God, I'm tired." He glanced at his watch, blinked, then shrugged and shook his head. "Whatever time it is, I know it's not almost seven." He squinted again at the watch face. "I wonder if that's morning or evening."
"Where were you? Where did you come from?"
She realized that in all the times she'd spoken to him on the phone she'd never known where he was. She'd never called him. He'd always called her. And somehow she'd always imagined him in his California bachelor pad, toes tickled by the waters of the Pacific, as they talked.
"Tierra del Fuego."
She stared. "You're kidding."
"I'm not, actually." He yawned again and kneaded the muscles at the back of his neck. "We had one last sequence to shoot. They wanted barren, windswept cliffs above the ocean. Uninhabited. Rugged. Lots of hours of daylight so they could shoot and shoot." He shrugged. "Tierra del Fuego."
"You came all the way from…?" Polly's voice died out. "Today?"
"Started yesterday sometime. Flew to Buenos Aires. Caught a plane to Newark. Snowing in Newark, too," he told her, through another yawn. "Waited seven hours for them to get a flight going this way. Flew to Salt Lake. Then to Butte."
"Butte? Bozeman would have been closer."
"There would have been press in Bozeman." And he'd had the good sense to avoid it even when it meant going out of his way.
"But why did you drive all the way? Why didn't you stay…?"
"Someone would have noticed."
That was true, too. "But if you rented a car, someone must have seen…"
"I called Davy, my foreman, from Salt Lake. Told him to get a couple of the hands to take his truck to Butte and leave it." He tipped his head toward the door. "I picked it up. Drove here. Hell of a time going over the pass." Polly could imagine. "I parked up behind the Dew Drop."
By Alice Benn's. She hoped there were no insomniacs among the news crew that was staying with Alice. "But why? If you plan to be unnoticed, why come here early?"
"To get you. Thought we could go to my place."
She stared at him. "What? Who?"
"You. Me."
"You and me?" Polly thought he'd lost his mind.
"Your kids, too," he said helpfully. "You said they were bein' distracted. Reporters buggin' 'em. Figured they'd like the ranch. If they like horses and—"
"No," Polly interrupted him, refusing to even entertain the possibility. "Thank you, but no."
"It's just up by Sand Gap. Couple a hours. Well, maybe more in the snow. Thought if I got here tonight we could drive on up an' hide out there." He gave her a sleepy conspiratorial grin. "Give 'em the slip." There was a faint twinkle in his eye before the grin morphed into another jaw-splitting yawn. He swayed and blinked, struggling to keep his eyes open. The twinkle vanished. He sighed and rubbed a hand through his tousled hair. "It sounded like a good idea yesterday."
"It might have been," Polly said, giving him the benefit of the doubt, "if your flights had all connected."
"Yeah."
"And it wasn't snowing."
A shadow of the Gallagher grin flickered hazily. "That, too."
"And those nosey reporters wouldn't suddenly realize that all the McMasters were missing? They might wonder. They might come looking."
"They dunno where my place is," he insisted.
"Well, since we're not going, it doesn't matter."
"Mmm…" He continued to sway. His eyes closed.
She thought he was lucky he hadn't fallen asleep at the wheel driving all the way from Butte after that many hours flying halfway around the world. "You need to go to bed."
His eyes flicked open. The haziness became an almost slumbrous laziness as they suddenly seemed to focus directly on her. Dark brows lifted. "Now there's an idea," he drawled.
"By yourself," Polly said firmly. "And not here."
"Why not?"
"Because." It was enough of an answer for children. It didn
't work on Sloan.
"Because why?" he persisted.
"Because there's no room."
He looked around the living room. His gaze lit on the sofa. Polly followed his gaze. "Absolutely not." But, like a zombie, he started toward it. "Looks comfortable enough."
"You are not sleeping on my sofa!" She could just imagine Celie coming downstairs in the morning and finding Sloan Gallagher asleep on the couch. "No! Go to Gus's."
"Can't. Drove past Gus's already. Press."
"What?"
"There's a TV van parked out there," he enunciated slowly. "Right by the gate."
"Oh, for God's sake."
His mouth quirked. "Not God's sake," he corrected her dryly. "Ratings."
Polly racked her brain, trying to think of someplace in town where she could put him. There wasn't anywhere. Even Artie's place, now taken over by Jace, was full of Sloan groupies, according to Celie. There was only one real solution.
She sighed. "Come on." She turned toward the stairs.
"Taking me to see your etchings?" A grin quirked one corner of his mouth.
"I'm going to stick a sock in your mouth if you don't shut up," she hissed. "I've got a houseful of sleeping people. I don't need you waking them up."
"I'll be very quiet. Will you?"
"Hush." Polly, cheeks burning, gave him her back and marched up the stairs. Fortunately he followed silently. The last thing she wanted was anyone hearing a strange—or worse, familiar—male voice in the hallway to stumble out and discover her leading Sloan Gallagher into her bedroom.
Because, like it or not, it was the only place she could think to put him.
There were six bedrooms—her mother's, Celie's, Sara's, the one that Lizzie and Daisy shared, Jack's and, at the very end of the hall, her own. It wasn't large, and the minute they were both inside, her room shrank the way the entry hall had. Sloan looked around interestedly, his eyes lighting on the one big bed.
"I'm sleeping on the sofa," she said.
"Don't be stupid."
"I'm being sensible." She started to strip off the covers, to put clean sheets on the bed.
"Just leave 'em." He crossed the room and pulled the quilt out of her hands. He was so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek.
The Great Montana Cowboy Auction Page 14