Christmas With A Stranger_Forbidden Page 10
Something about the place—the hushed tranquillity perhaps, or the far window, stained now with the deep blue of the midwinter afternoon and shot with rose from the dying sun—reminded her of a church. To call out and shatter the peace was unthinkable.
Hesitantly, she moved forward, toward the sound of voices, aware all the time of the horses. Some looked up from their feeding troughs, mildly curious, then dismissed her for the ignorant intruder she undoubtedly was. Others whickered softly and watched her with large, beautiful eyes as she made her way down the center aisle.
She had almost reached the last stall when a low growl issued from an old blanket atop a pile of straw and Ben the retriever rose up to confront her.
“Stop that,” she scolded softly, coming to a halt a respectful distance away—not that she was afraid of him exactly, but nor was she fool enough to challenge him on his own turf. “I’m the one who fed you venison stew for the last two days, you ungrateful wretch.”
He growled again, loudly enough this time for the men to hear him. There was a moment of complete silence that positively hummed with unspoken threat and then, suddenly, they were there, practically on top of her, Clancy picking up a wicked-looking pitchfork hanging on the end wall and brandishing it fiercely, and Morgan swinging a hammer.
When they saw her, they stopped their headlong rush and froze in their tracks. “Oh,” Morgan said, looking somewhat embarrassed, “it’s you.”
“It’s a bit too early for Santa Claus,” she said lightly, “so who else could it be but me?”
The men exchanged furtive glances. “Well...” Morgan began.
“Horse thieves,” Clancy said, his pitchfork still held at the ready.
“It pays to be careful,” Morgan said.
“I’m sure.” Jessica nodded her understanding, although in truth she thought their reaction rather extreme, particularly since they both continued to regard her as if she’d sprouted horns.
Morgan took off his hat and drew the back of his hand across his brow. “Is everything all right at the house, Jessica?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Then what you doin’ wanderin’ around in here, woman?” Clancy demanded.
“Looking for something to cut the holly with,” she said. “And I’m sorry if I’m trespassing, but I thought you might be able to give me something that would do the job.”
“Oh,” Morgan said again. “Sure. Of course. And you’re not trespassing. Not at all. Put the pitchfork away, Clancy, before someone gets hurt.”
“You might call off Ben, too,” Jessica said.
Signaling the dog to heel, Morgan said, “A better idea would be for the two of you to become friends, then he could keep you company at the house while we’re out here.”
“I haven’t exactly had time to get lonely, Morgan, but if you think a little company would be good for me Shadow seems much more inclined to be friendly and is perfectly happy to spend the day with me. She’s asleep in the rocking chair even as we speak.”
Again, that silent exchange took place between the men. “Yeah,” Clancy muttered, “but Ben’s more....”
“Territorial,” Morgan supplied.
Jessica regarded them quizzically. “In the event that horse thieves should invade the kitchen in the middle of the day, of course.”
“You’re right, we’re making a fuss about nothing. I guess having you show up so quietly surprised us, that’s all.” Morgan shrugged and relaxed his grip on the hammer. “I’m about done for today anyway, so why don’t I walk back to the house with you?”
“What about cutting the holly?”
“I’ll do it. You shouldn’t be outside dressed like—” He stopped and seemed to notice what she was wearing for the first time. “Where did you get the clothes, for Pete’s sake?”
“From me. They’re some of Agnes’s things that I’d kept,” Clancy said. “Reckon I’ll poultice the mare’s ankle before I quit for the day, Morgan, ’less you got something else you want me to do?”
Morgan shook his head. “I think we’ve covered everything.”
“What’s wrong with the mare?” Jessica asked in a low voice, glancing back over her shoulder as Clancy disappeared into the end stall again.
“Sprained ankle.” Morgan took her by the elbow and pointed her back the way she’d come. “Nothing too serious.”
“I thought leg injuries to horses were always serious.”
“Not necessarily. Come on, let’s get you back to the house. This isn’t exactly your sort of place, I’m sure.”
“Perhaps not, but I can see why Clancy prefers to spend his time here. There’s something very comforting about your stable. And the animals....” She turned to him and smiled. “He was right, you know—Clancy, I mean. I barely know the back end of a horse from the front, but even I can see they’re beautiful. What do you do with them?”
A grin twitched the corners of his mouth. “Well, I don’t eat them if that’s what’s worrying you. You won’t find horse-meat steaks in the freezer.”
She slapped at his arm with her gloved hand. “The thought never even occurred to me! What I meant was, are they racehorses, or do you keep them just for the pleasure of watching them run about the property?”
“Mostly the latter, I guess.” He stopped and stroked the long, soft nose of a horse hanging its head over the half-door of its stall. “They’re quarter horses and I do a bit of breeding. And a lot of riding when I can spare the time. But this is a small operation compared to what it was in my grandfather’s day, and that’s how I like it. With the part-time help he gets from Ted, Clancy’s able to manage the place single-handed if I’m not around, although we do employ some of the local kids during the summer.”
The horse nudged at his chest and sort of snuffled, a move that had Jessica springing back in alarm. “Good grief, is he going to bite?”
It seemed a reasonable enough question to her, but Morgan just about split his sides laughing. “No, sweetheart, he’s looking for something to eat. Do you want to feed him?”
“Not if he’s that hungry,” she retorted, too fired up with pleasure at the endearment to resent his teasing. “I might lose my hand.”
Looping one arm around her shoulder, Morgan reached into his pocket with his other hand and withdrew a carrot. “No chance of that,” he assured her. “Not if you do it right. Here, take off your glove and lay this flat on the palm of your hand.”
“Can’t I keep my glove on?”
“No. You lose half the pleasure.”
Taking courage from that casually uttered “sweetheart” and the arm around her shoulder, she removed her glove.
“Now offer him the carrot. Go on,” Morgan urged, when she hesitated. The horse had lost all interest in his owner and was eyeing her with alarming enthusiasm.
“Morgan,” she said, “that animal and I haven’t been properly introduced and considering how Ben responds to me I’m not sure I’m willing to trust anything quite this big even if he is the most handsome shade of brown I’ve ever seen.”
“He’s a chestnut,” Morgan corrected her. “His name’s Jasper, he’s nearly sixteen years old and he’s never hurt a fly in all that time. And you’re offending him by suggesting he would.”
Conscious of the big brown eyes watching her so patiently, and even more vividly aware of the brilliant blue gaze of the man at her side, Jessica raised her arm.
The great head dipped in a bow to her outstretched palm. She felt a touch, gentle as a kiss, the feathery brush of whiskers, and the carrot was gone.
“Well? How was it?”
Her smile completely got away from her, spreading past its normal reserved boundaries with a keen pleasure she rarely experienced. “Piece of cake,” she boasted, and suddenly she was leaning against him and they were both laughing.
“I’ll make a horsewoman out of you yet,” he promised, sliding the stable door shut behind them and hurrying her across the snow-packed path to the house.
“Easily,” she said, and idled the rest of the afternoon away doing little, inconsequential things. She studded mandarin oranges with whole cloves, piled them in a pewter bowl with pine cones, and set them on the hearth where the warmth from the fire would draw out the scent. She ironed the ribbons she’d found among the decorations and wove them in graceful swirls through the sprigs of holly and sprays of cedar gracing the dining table and fringing the mantelpiece.
She felt it was the sort of thing Agnes would have wanted her to do: to bring the added dimension of a woman’s touch to the house and turn it again into a home. And the house responded, seeming to expand at the seams and let loose ghosts from a happier time.
As darkness closed in outside, she basted the potatoes roasting around the leg of pork in the oven, set plates to warm, opened preserved peaches and, in preparation for the ice cream dessert she had planned, left them to marinate drunkenly in a sauce made of brown sugar, raisins and dark rum.
When she came downstairs later, all bathed and perfumed and wearing one of only two dresses she’d stuffed in her suitcase, she found Clancy pumping away on the old organ and filling the room with the wheezing strains of “Silent Night”.
In the corner, the lights on the tree winked softly. Beyond the beveled glass doors, candles flickered in the dining room. On the coffee table before the fire sat a fine old silver punch bowl with three matching cups. And best of all there was Morgan, gorgeous in black cords and a white shirt.
She paused a moment on the threshold, wondering a little at the sensation suddenly engulfing her. Airy, translucent and thoroughly unfamiliar, it flooded through her and she realized, with a sense of shock, what it was she was experiencing.
Not satisfaction for a job well done. Not contented gratitude for a pleasant, secure life. But happiness that surged and flowed through her veins with all the verve and delight of champagne sparkling on the tongue.
There were no smartly wrapped packages under the tree, no uniformed staff hired for the evening. No stream of fashionably clad guests streaming through the front door as they had in her aunt and uncle’s house, airkissing each other’s cheeks at the same time that they took covert stock of who was wearing what and designed by whom.
Just Christmas the way it was meant to be: warm, unpretentious, real.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MORGAN ladled out hot rum punch but before he could propose a toast Clancy upstaged him. Shuffling around on the organ stool, he clutched the delicate punch cup in his big hands.
“Never thought I’d feel like this again,” he began, scanning the room at large. “Never thought it would feel like a home again.” He focused his attention on Jessica. “For sure never thought a bit of a woman’d just walk in the door and make the place over in three days.”
His expression was almost bewildered and it struck Morgan that his stable hand had aged over the last few months and now looked all of his sixty-eight years.
“’Specially not a woman like you, Jessica Simms,” Clancy continued. “Wouldn’t have thought you had it in you to pull off something like this.” He raised his cup. “Best of the season to you. My Agnes would have approved of you.”
“I know I would have liked her, too.” Emotion clogged Jessica’s voice, undershot her smile, and left her gray eyes sparkling with the hint of tears.
Morgan would have preferred not to notice any of those revealing little details but the more time he spent in her company, the more acute his powers of observation became. And the lovelier she grew.
He continued to observe her over dinner, noticing the thoroughbred elegance of her, her warmth, her patience with Clancy. She’d grown younger somehow, as if she’d shed the weight of countless years of disappointment and unhappiness. Or, more accurately, as if, since knowing him, she’d discovered joy.
How would it have been between them, he wondered, if he’d met her before? Before a failed marriage had taught him there were some things you couldn’t ask a woman to do, such as live with a man who made enemies of creeps like Gabriel Parrish?
He tried to picture her in that world now, and failed. It had proved to be too much for Daphne and, in the end, it would be too much for Jessica, too. She wasn’t hard-edged enough.
No. If ever there’d been a time for them, it was ten years ago, before they had each laid out their lives along different paths.
“You’ve made a conquest,” he told her later, slouching comfortably beside her on the couch. Dinner was over and Clancy had retired to his own quarters a short while before, again leaving the two of them alone to finish the last of the wine they’d drunk with the meal. “I don’t recall Clancy ever waxing quite so lyrical before.”
“My cooking mellows him.” Jessica smiled, a shade wistfully, he thought. As if the only possible route she’d find to a man’s heart lay through his stomach.
If he could limit his susceptibility to her to such an innocuous portion of his anatomy, Morgan decided, leaning forward and cradling his wine glass in both hands, he’d feel a lot more relaxed about the situation in which he now found himself.
“So I’ve noticed,” he said. “Come to that, I’ve noticed a lot of things in the last couple of days that escaped me when we first met.”
“Such as?” She crossed one knee over the other and swung a graceful ankle. The fabric of her full-skirted dress, something thick and silky printed with dark green ferns on a cream background, flowed onto his section of the couch, begging to be touched.
Fixing his attention on the cedar garland festooned along the mantel, he said, “Initially, I had you pegged as being a bit hare-brained, a bit irresponsible.”
“And now you know I’m just a staid old schoolmarm you think differently?”
“It’s not your job that changed my mind.”
She shifted to a more comfortable position, sliding lower against the cushions and sending a faint whiff of perfumed body talc drifting his way. “What, then?”
The fact that the scent of you drives me mad, he could have told her. That when you stretch out your foot like that, letting your heel slip free of its shoe, I have an insane urge to kneel down and kiss that high, aristocratic instep. That you have beautiful legs, slender, shapely and endless, and I’d like to explore them at erotic leisure. That there’s a sliver of French lace showing beneath the hem of your dress and it brings to mind the nightgown you were wearing the other night, and has me wondering what you’re wearing next to your skin now—all of which speculation has left me seriously aroused.
“Search me!” he said.
And wouldn’t that be embarrassing!
Leaping to his feet, he threw another log on the fire with rather more energy than the task demanded. “Your unselfishness, perhaps. You’d never have ended up stranded in a blizzard if you hadn’t set out in the middle of one of the worst winters on record to be with your sister. And if we hadn’t roped you into housekeeping for a couple of bachelors whose idea of celebrating Christmas runs to propping up a tree in a corner and forgetting to water it, Clancy and I would probably be staring at the bottom of an empty brandy bottle about now, bemoaning our sad and lonely lot in life.”
“I can relate to that.”
He flung a skeptical glance at her over his shoulder. “What, getting hammered on brandy?”
The way she leaned against the arm of the couch and tilted one shoulder in an unwittingly sensuous shrug of denial that brought her arm into brief and intimate contact with her breast sent a tongue of fire curling through his gut.
“No,” she said. “Being sad and lonely. It’s just something that comes of being the sort of person I am, I guess.”
If she’d evidenced even a shred of self-pity with that remark, he could have dismissed her claim, ignored it, laughed at it. Responded in
any number of ways, in fact, but the way he did, which was to ignore his better judgement and submit instead to the urge that had gnawed at him incessantly for the last twenty-four hours or more.
Taking her hands, he drew her to her feet and held her close. “Not tonight it isn’t,” he murmured into her hair.
She came to him as naturally as if she’d found shelter in his arms a thousand times before. Her head rested below his chin, the scent of her which, across the width of the couch, had spelled faint temptation intensified to vibrant invitation. And the rest of her, every fine-boned, delicately sculpted inch of limb and torso, imprinted itself against him.
It was more than he’d anticipated or planned, yet it left him craving for more. The belief which had served him so long and so well that love was, at best, a transient visitor and not worth the upheaval it created threatened to topple into a great yawning abyss of need.
Love? How the hell had that word slipped through his defenses? He wasn’t a good candidate for love and, even if he were, Jessica deserved better. Her life was bound by purer standards than he could afford, her definitions of right and wrong too clearly spelled out in black and white.
How could she understand the many shadings of gray that governed him? How accept the necessity of his sometimes rubbing shoulders with the underworld of crime in order to bring a felon to justice?
She would not. And yet he found himself increasingly enthralled by her. Found himself waiting to hear her laugh; to see amusement shimmer over her face and fill her eyes with light; to enjoy her intelligence and her sometimes acerbic wit. These aroused in him a yearning that would not find ease in sex.
He wanted more. He wanted to take her out in public, show her off to his friends and associates, and to strangers, too, come to that. He wanted to wine and dine her, and proclaim to the world that she belonged to him. The knowledge hit him like a brick wall.
Even as his mind scrambled to absorb the realization, his body again advertised itself with blatant effrontery. Hers swayed in response. She sighed dreamily, lifted her face to his, and any scruples he might have brought to bear on the situation fled.