Ace had no choice but to believe her. Belinda might be more prickly than a cactus, but she didn’t lie. And Elaine loved her grandsons like there was no tomorrow. If she could have been here, she would have been.
Aside from that, Belinda hated his guts. She wouldn’t have come to the ranch—especially not planning to stay the whole summer—if she didn’t have to. “How long is she going to be laid up?”
Belinda’s eyes narrowed to slate-gray slits. “If by that you mean when is she coming to take over from me, forget it, buckaroo. She’s so run-down it will take her weeks if not months to fully recover. You and I are stuck with each other, Wilder. Get used to it.”
“That’ll be the day.” She’d been on the Flying Ace for all of fifteen minutes, and already his jaw ached from grinding his teeth, and his stomach was eating a hole in itself. He would be out of his mind by this time tomorrow. If she was still here next week, one of them would probably end up dead or legally insane. The woman was a menace.
Since Ace couldn’t figure out a way to get her to leave that didn’t involve bloodshed—probably his—he strode over to her little toy car and hauled two suitcases out of the tiny back seat. “Might as well get you settled, since you’re here.”
“Why, thank you for that warm welcome.” Belinda batted her eyes at him, then reached in to her passenger seat.
When she straightened beside him, Ace shook his head. “Two purses?”
“One purse, one computer.”
Ace shuddered. “Your computer, if I recall—and I do—consists of at least four big boxes of equipment, miles of cables, and blown fuses every other hour.”
“That was before they made laptops that weigh less than three pounds.” She swung one of the purses under his nose by one finger. “Your fuses are safe. And so,” she added with a smirk as she remembered his complaints the last time, “is your poor aching back. No boxes to lug.” With a wave of her arm, she motioned toward the house. “Lead the way, cowboy.”
Rolling his eyes and flexing his jaw, he did.
Belinda followed the Sauntering Buckaroo to the back door. As slow as he walked, they’d be at this all night. She wondered irritably if he moved that slowly in bed.
The laugh brought on by that errant thought bordered on the hysterical.
Ace stopped and frowned at her. “Something funny?”
“Everything, Wilder.” She refused to look at him. “Just every little thing.”
“We’ll see how funny you think everything is by the time you get supper on the table tonight.”
“What, you think I can’t cook?”
“Just wondering if you understand that laundry, housecleaning, and cooking are part of the deal. A good, hot meal on the table at six o’clock sharp for a bunch of hungry men and three little boys, and you, if you want to eat with us. Breakfast at 5:00 a.m., and plenty of it, with lunch at noon. Seven days a week.”
“Do you have an ad in the paper yet to find a new housekeeper?”
“Tired of your job already?”
“You wish. I can handle the job, Wilder. Maybe not the way Cathy did, or Mary, but I can handle it.”
He smirked.
She smirked right back at him. “I’ll need to hook my modem to a phone line. I’m not letting my business suffer because you can’t keep a woman in your house.’
Those Wilder blue eyes turned to ice.
Belinda admitted she may have crossed the line with that remark about a woman. Her stomach knotted as her own words echoed cruelly in her mind.
“There’s a phone jack in your bedroom,” he said curtly. “You call long distance, you pay for it.”
Shaking off her discomfort, she refused to dignify his petty comment with a reply. When he held the door open for her, she sailed into the house. She deliberately ignored the bedroom off the kitchen and headed up the stairs to the guest room she normally used when she visited. The downstairs room had been Mary’s. Belinda assumed it would be used by the new housekeeper, but she wasn’t sleeping that close to the kitchen to save her soul. She would see enough of the kitchen as it was. She sure didn’t plan to sleep next to it.
“One more thing,” Ace told her when they went back out to her car for another load.
She arched a brow. “Only one?”
His eyes narrowed to sharp slits. “I know you and I have never had much use for each other—”
“Now there’s an understatement.”
“—but I won’t have my boys exposed to your hostility toward me.”
“My hostility toward you?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, and you’re so fond of me, right?”
“You’re their aunt. I’m their father. For their sake, we don’t hammer at each other in front of them.”
“You think you have to tell me how to act around my own nephews?”
“No,” he said, surprising her. “I just wanted it said, for the record, so we know where we stand with each other.”
“We don’t stand anywhere with each other. I stand with and for my sister’s children. If you think for a minute I’d do anything to hurt them—”
“I wouldn’t have let you out of your car if I did.”
Belinda looked at Ace and smiled. “Are you sure you want me to cook for you? Poison is so easy to disguise.”
Ace glanced down at his watch. “Hmm. Twenty-seven minutes.”
“He can tell time,” she observed, reaching into her car for her portable printer.
“That’s how long it took you to threaten my life.” His lips twitched. “You’re slipping, Slim. You usually get that over with in the first ten minutes.”
“I promised my mother I’d try to be nice to you.”
“So much for keeping your word,” he mumbled.
Pulling her printer out of the car, Belinda tossed her head. “You can question my ability, but not my integrity. I promised to try, and I did try.”
Neither spoke again until the last of her bags was in her room upstairs. Then she told him she’d be downstairs in thirty minutes and shut the door in his face.
She’d done it, Belinda told herself as she leaned her back against the closed door and slid to the floor. She had kept her word to her mother and come to Wyoming as promised, and she’d faced Ace Wilder and lived through the inevitable confrontation. In thirty minutes she would have to do it again.
She had hoped, as she’d pulled up to the house, that when she saw him those old jittery feelings wouldn’t stir to life in her stomach again.
Ridiculous hope. Futile.
All she knew was that somehow, for some reason, she always ended up feeling at a disadvantage around Ace. Vulnerable. Shaky. Threatened?
No, of course not. Men didn’t threaten her. She’d been sired and raised by one, married to another—jerk though he turned out to be—and worked with them her entire adult life. She could hold her own with any man.
Which was why her feeling of vulnerability around Ace irritated her so much. She hated it. Hated him for causing it, hated him more for sensing it. The only way she knew to fight that vulnerability, to prove to him and herself that she was not vulnerable, was to strike out.
It was reflex, pure and simple. Habit, now, after all these years. She wasn’t proud of it, but there it was. In fact, most of the time she had trouble believing some of the things that came out of her mouth when she was around him.
Dammit, there was just something about Ace Wilder that made her nerves twitch and set her teeth on edge. And she’d let her mother talk her into putting herself in his immediate vicinity for who knew how long.
“Mother, you have no idea what you’ve done to me.”
It was going to be a long, hot summer.
Down at the barn Ace reminded himself yet again to unclench his jaw.
“Problem?”
He turned from staring—glaring, he realized—at the bay mare in the corral to find Jack eyeing him critically.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Ace admitte
d. “Elaine came down with pneumonia.”
“That’s rough. She gonna be okay?”
“She’ll be fine. It’s the rest of us you better worry about.”
“How so?”
“She sent Belinda in her place.”
One of Jack’s infrequent grins flashed across his face. “No foolin’?”
Ace groaned.
Jack laughed—an even-less-frequent occurrence than his grin. “The boys’ll be in hog heaven.”
“They already are.”
“How long’s she staying?”
Trey poked his head out of the barn door. “How long is who staying?”
“Ace’s favorite sister-in-law,” Jack answered, still grinning.
“The fox?” The youngest Wilder brother threw his head back and let out a howl.
Ace grunted. “I dare you to call her that to her face.”
“Oh, no.” Trey held his hands out as if to ward off attack. “I’d like to live to see my next birthday.”
“Glad to see you’re not entirely stupid.”
“Of course he’s not stupid,” Jack said. “He’s generally outstanding in his field.”
In charge of the Flying Ace crops, Trey didn’t even bother to groan at the old pun.
They were a sight, the three Wilder brothers. Tall, lean, muscular and, according to the female population of Wyatt County, good-looking as all get-out. Thick, raven-black hair, strong. angular faces, aud eyes as blue as the background for the stars on Old Glory herself.
While their looks were strikingly similar, their personalities were not. Sometimes they clashed, as brothers often did. Ace was the oldest, the ranch operator. When their father, King Wilder, died, he’d left Ace 60 percent of all his worldly goods, and that naturally included the Flying Ace Ranch. King had left the remaining 40 percent to be divided equally among the rest of his children.
There was no jealousy from the other Wilder off spring over that. Jack, Trey, and Rachel were equally grateful not to have been left with the heavy responsibility of running the ranch, making sure it turned enough profit to support them all regardless of falling beef or oil prices, uncooperative weather, and a constant shortage of good help. They all pulled their weight, each having separate responsibilities, but they were satisfied to have Ace hold the position of ranch operator.
Being operator of one of the largest ranches in the state hadn’t ever gone to Ace’s head as it could have, but he never forgot it, the duty, the responsibility, the past generations looking over his shoulder and judging him. No, he never forgot it. Neither did anyone who had to deal with him.
Jack was the quiet one, but steady as a rock. It was no secret that he was King Wilder’s bastard—Ace, Trey, and Rachel’s half brother. But to give the devil his due, when King Wilder had learned he had an illegitimate son, he had moved quickly to adopt the boy and change his name to Wilder. Jack had been twelve the day his aunt had dropped him on King’s doorstep after the boy’s mother had drunk herself to death. There had been more than a few bloody noses among the three brothers in the beginning, but their little sister, Rachel, had calmly and emphatically put a stop to it by declaring that Jack was her brother just as much as Ace and Trey were, and they’d better just stop picking on him. She’d been five at the time, the baby of the family, with every man on the ranch wrapped right around her little-bitty finger. From that moment on, Jack had been accepted.
Trey was the youngest and most outgoing of the three brothers. He’d been twelve when their parents had hit that icy patch that had sent them to their deaths on their way home from Jackson Hole. Ace had been twenty and, in Trey’s opinion at the time, had thrown his weight around. He’d made twelve-year-old Trey stay in school, and if that hadn’t been bad enough, had packed him off to college right after graduation and made him stay there.
Trey had gotten his degree in agribusiness and floored them all by fixing his attention on crops instead of cattle or horses. Since neither Jack nor Ace was overly fond of the farming aspect of the Flying Ace, they’d stepped back and let Trey have it.
“So how long is Belinda staying?” Trey asked when Ace didn’t answer Jack.
Ace grunted. “Until I find a new housekeeper.”
Jack was still grinning. “Won’t be dull around here, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re grinning about,” Ace said irritably. “She’s already threatened to poison me.”
“Yeah, but she likes us,” Trey taunted. “If you don’t have your will made out yet, I want your Winchester.”
“Well now, kid.” Ace knew how to get a rise out of Trey. He hated being called kid. “I tell you what you do. You wish real hard for that Winchester in one hand, and spit in the other, and see which hand gets filled.”
“Stingy.”
“That’s me.”
“I mean, it’s not like you can take it with you.”
“Maybe I wanna be buried with it.”
At the shotgun sound of the back screen door whacking shut, the three brothers turned to look toward the house and the woman marching toward them.
“Looks like you might get your chance sooner than you thought,” Trey said with a snicker.
“What’d you ever do to her, anyway?” Jack asked.
“Near as I can tell,” Ace muttered, “I was born.”
One of these days, Ace thought, he was going to take her down and sit on her until she told him once and for all why she hated his guts. From the night they met, at his and Cathy’s wedding rehearsal, Belinda had been on the attack. Only when Cathy had been within earshot had Belinda ever held her tongue around him. One of these days...
But first, he figured he was going to have to deal with whatever had put this latest look of irritation on her face.
“Hey, darlin’,” Trey called.
“Don’t waste your breath, little brother,” she tossed back. But it was a good-natured toss. The irritation had faded from her face the instant she took her gaze off Ace.
Trey let out an exaggerated sigh and slapped his hand over his heart. “She loves me. You can just tell.”
“Of course I do.” She grabbed him by the ears and planted a quick, smacking kiss on his mouth. “Like a boil on the backside.”
“Welcome back,” Jack told her.
Here, Belinda had always thought, was a kindred spirit, of sorts. Because of an accident of birth, Jack had not always been accepted. Their circumstances were different, his and hers, but she recognized that guarded look in his eyes.
“Thanks, Jack,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Is there a problem?” Ace asked her.
“No problem.” She turned and faced him. “Only that there doesn’t seem to be much food in the house, and you neglected to define the word ‘bunch’ when you told me how many I’d be cooking for.”
Trey thumped his hand against his heart again. “And she cooks, too.”
Belinda squinted up at Ace. “Did he get dropped on his head when he was a baby?”
Ace pursed his lips to keep from smiling. He wasn’t about to let her get a smile out of him. Not that easily. “A time or two,” he answered.
She nodded as though weighing some serious matter. “That would explain it, then. Now, about that bunch.”
“The three of us, plus three hands, the boys, and you.”
“Enough food for ten, then.”
Trey winked at her. “We’re hungry, darlin’. Make it enough for twenty. That ought to hold us till breakfast. Unless you want to hold me till breakfast,” he added with a goofy leer.
“In your dreams, Number Three.”
“Great dreams. Wanna hear about ’em?”
“Not unless you’re aiming at becoming my next ex-husband.”
Jack hooted with laughter.
“Hell, Trey, she just got here,” Ace complained. “Do you have to start hitting on her already?”
“Relax, Ace,” Belinda said with a smirk. “If I ever took him up on it, he’d run for hi
s life. And speaking of running, I guess I’ll have to make a run into town for groceries. I’ll take the boys with me.”
“Sorry.” Ace grimaced. “Just sign your name on the Flying Ace charge card at Biddle’s on Main. I wasn’t expecting you—or rather, Elaine—until the end of the week.”
“You weren’t going to eat?”
“We were making do. Take the Blazer,” he added, pointing toward the barn and the white Chevy Blazer parked beside it with the red-and-black Flying Ace logo on the door. “The keys are in it.”
“And don’t forget,” Trey said with a wink. “We’re hungry.”
Ace eyed her critically. “You do know how to cook, don’t you?”
Belinda pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “As long as you don’t expect me to churn butter or kill and skin my own meat.”
Ace hooked his thumbs in the front pockets of his jeans. “Well, there’s the chickens, but you don’t have to skin ‘em. Just pluck ’em. And I wouldn’t want you to go to all that trouble your first night here.”
She gave him a tight smile. “I’ll fix you a meal you won’t forget for a long, long time.”
“Now that,” Ace muttered as she walked away, “is a scary thought.”
As soon as Belinda got the boys cleaned up from their romp through the chicken house, she took the list she’d made while they had a water fight in the bathroom and marched them out to the Blazer.
You do know how to cook, don’t you?
She’d get him for that. She’d promised him a meal he wouldn’t forget, and that’s exactly what she’d give him.
“Boys?” she asked as the Blazer shot up a rooster tail of dust behind it while eating up the miles to town. “If you could have anything you wanted for supper tonight, what would it be?”
Three young voices clamored to be heard over each other.
Belinda grinned to herself. Her nephews were going to be thrilled, but Ace Wilder had good reason to worry about his supper.
Chapter Two
Ace was more than wary when he and the men went in for supper. And, as it turned out, with good reason.
“Well,” he said, looking over the food on the table. “You didn’t have to skin it.”
Their Other Mother Page 2