City Girl (2 page)

Liss didn’t even think. She simply recognized the first of those figures as a deadly enemy and reacted, sweeping up the entire suitcase and flinging it at the intruders with a scream of pure terror.

“Back! Back!” she cried frantically. “Sit! Lie down! Outside! Go home!” She snatched up a chair and held it threateningly before her as she edged around the table, putting more and more obstacles between herself and the slightly abashed looking dog with a lacy pink bra hanging out of his mouth and a pair of panties over his high, curving tail.

Kirk walked toward Liss slowly, trying to look unthreatening, took the chair from her and set it on the floor. “Hello, Liss,” he said, and groaned silently. At close quarters, her scent affected him exactly as it had the first day he’d met her. He told himself it shouldn’t, that he couldn’t let it. In spite of himself, he drew in a deep breath of it and extended his hand.

His words seemed to whip her into action. She slapped his hand aside and glared at him. “‘Hello’?” she shouted. “‘Hello’? Is that all you can say after leaving a vicious animal chained between the driveway and the door when you’re expecting someone to arrive? What kind of monster are you, not to be here when that person and her two innocent little children show up in the middle of a blizzard, and can’t get inside the house because there’s nobody around to call off the animal? And now you come waltzing in here after a nice, cozy evening out with one of your women while I’ve been out there on your stupid treacherous country roads, driving through the dark and the snow without another car in sight for miles and miles, and not even a motel or a town or anything, and then coming in and finding this pigsty waiting for me and you have the gall to say ‘hello’?” She gasped for breath and flung an arm in a wide sweep around the kitchen.

Kirk winced. It was a pigsty. He had to admit it. But it had been one hell of a week, and he hadn’t had time to do much more than work and catch an hour or two of sleep before going back out to work some more, which was what he had to do if he was going to keep this ranch, especially now it had to support not only him and his dog, but two women and two kids.

He gaped at this invader in his kitchen, slid his gaze over suitcases and boxes, then slowly peeled off his thick leather gloves and unbuttoned his sheepskin jacket. She’d seemed so . . . even-tempered the first time he’d met her. Bending, he lifted the panties from their perch on his dog’s bushy tail and dangled them from one finger. Liss Tremayne, her face as white as the underwear he held, still held a chair in front of her as if she would fling it as she had the suitcase. She’d backed around the table as she’d shouted conflicting orders at his perfectly harmless and undoubtedly confused dog.

She was dressed in jeans and a thick red sweater. Her nearly black hair tumbled loose around her shoulders, and her almond-shaped eyes were huge with terror, pinned on the dog. When she came up against the counter, she stopped of necessity and stared at Kirk as if only then becoming aware of his presence.

“Call him off,” she begged, her voice shaking. “Please send him away. Oh, lord, he’s eating my bra!”

Kirk took the bra from Marsh’s slack jaws and dangled it from the same finger as the panties. “Sit, Marsh.” Obediently, the dog, a cross between a husky and a shepherd, lowered himself onto his haunches, tongue lolling, ears pricked up, head cocked. “Stay,” Kirk added, and bent to pick up the       spilled suitcase, stuffing items of feminine apparel back in it willy-nilly. He set it on the table, put his       snow-damp Stetson on top of the fridge, and slid out of his shearling coat.

“Send that horrible beast outside!” she demanded.

“The hell I will. This is Marsh’s home, too, you know.”

“Yes, sure, and as far as you’re concerned, he takes precedence over me and my children and you want us to leave,” she went on, her voice growing more shrill. “Is that what you expected to accomplish by leaving this mess? Or did you figure you could live like a slob for weeks and weeks simply because I was coming to clean it all up? I didn’t come to be a servant to you, Kirk Allbright! I didn’t come to have my children threatened by a man-eating beast! Even your damned cat clawed at Ryan and . . . and . . . I must have been out of my mind to think this would be a safe place to raise my children, but don’t think your snow or your mean animals or your squalor is going to drive me away! Move!” she added, pushing him hard as her voice cracked and tears spurted from her dark eyes. “Get out of my way! I’m going to bed!”

Her tears undid his tight control. Dammit, he was tired, and hungry, and cold, and he didn’t need a woman screaming at him the minute he got home from a long and exhausting day. He’d been racing the weather for the past three days, and every one of them had been hell. And now this! The nerve of her, berating him about going out with women, as if it were any of her affair what he did. This was exactly what he’d been afraid of when he’d learned he was to have her and the old bat dumped on him! Mrs. Healey’s behavior since her arrival the previous week had been enough to deal with, and now here came this one, pulling that one female trick geared to turn a man inside out. Well, he’d had enough of women this past week. Hell, the past year!

He blocked her way. “Now, you just wait one damn minute here, lady. How the hell was I supposed to know you were coming today when you didn’t tell me? I’m not a mind reader!”

She dashed the tears from her eyes. “I wrote to tell you I was coming today.”

“Yeah? When?”

Liss had to think about it. The past weeks had been a whirl of activity, of getting packed, of saying good-bye to friends, of one last, horrendous battle with Johnny’s folks. She felt tears well up again and held them back with a conscious effort of will. “On—on Monday, I think.” Or had it been Tuesday before the letter got mailed?

Kirk stared at her. Her chin trembled! It honest-to-God trembled. How many hours had she spent practicing that little trick in front of a mirror?

“Oh, for the love of Mike!” he roared. “Where the hell do you think you are, city girl? Letters don’t arrive in an hour or two out here as if they were sent by a courier on a bike! A letter mailed in the city on Monday won’t show up here before Friday at the earliest, and Tuesday was the last day I had time to drive into town to pick up mail. What do you think I’m running here, a nine-to-five operation? I’ve been beating myself into the ground trying to get feed out to my cows before this storm hit. And why the hell were you driving in these conditions anyway? You should have holed up in a motel at the first warning!”

Hands on her hips, she yelled right back at him, “What warning?”

“On the radio, of course. Doesn’t that fancy Blazer you and Lester Brown picked out have a radio in it?”

Liss blinked rapidly, stung by the acidity of his tone. “Are you objecting to the car we chose? Lester said you specifically stipulated a four-wheel-drive vehicle, so that’s what we got. And it’s not all that fancy! It’s used, after all. Besides, it’s not mine any more than it’s yours. It belongs to the ranch, so what’s your problem?”

“My ‘problem,’ as you so sweetly put it, is that you risked your and your children’s lives by failing to exercise common sense. The weather advisory has frequent updates. What I want to know is why weren’t you listening?”

She stared up into his furious gray eyes. And to think she’d once thought he was attractive! To think that during the half-hour drive to the lawyer’s office, before any of them knew they were going to have to live together, he’d made her stomach quiver with nothing more than a smile. Now, as during the reading of the will, he was glaring at her as if everything were her fault. Instead of making her stomach quiver, he was making it churn.

“I was playing my CDs,” she said through clenched teeth. “I hadn’t heard any of them for ages because I had to sell my CD player months ago, and I was enjoying them. Why would I want to listen to some yackety-yacking deejay when I don’t have to?”

He rolled his eyes and shook his head in disgust. “Because that deejay might have told you to get the hell off the road if you didn’t have a damned good reason to be there. So, I’m telling you, city girl, from her on you listen to the radio at least once every hour while winter lasts. Failing that, open your eyes and pay attention to the warnings all around you. The minute it started snowing, you should have started looking for a motel. “

“Look for a motel because of a few snowflakes? Would you?”

“Damn right I would, if I was driving into unknown territory and unused to the conditions.”

“How could I know how bad it was going to get? And it was pretty at first. Then—then all of a sudden the road disappeared.” She paused to draw in a deep breath, trying to steady her voice. “And so did all the towns and lights, and all I could do was keep coming until I saw the ranch sign and when I got here there was nothing but that horrible animal out there w-with his teeth bared to keep me away and . . .” She felt a choking sensation in her throat and turned her head away. “And I thought you’d be here.” It was hardly more than a whisper.

Kirk nearly groaned aloud. Having her hide her tears was worse than letting him see them. Worse, and sneakier, and far more manipulative. He steeled himself. “I have a ranch to run. I couldn’t sit around waiting for you to show up so I could say welcome, especially when you’re not.”

She looked at him then, and there were no tears, no quivering chin, just a deep, abiding weariness and an ineffable sadness in her face. “I know I’m not,” she said. “But I couldn’t let that matter, you see. I had to come anyway. For the kids.”

Before he could stop her, she slipped around him and snatched up the suitcase she’d thrown at the dog. Hugging it across her chest with both arms, she left the room without looking back.

Oh, hell, what had made him say she wasn’t welcome? he wondered as he looked through the doorway toward the stairs, listening to her ascend. It was a filthy thing to say to a woman whose only fault was that, because she resembled a long-dead relation she probably didn’t even remember, she’d been left part of his ranch. She’d likely had as long and exhausting a day as he’d had, and was as tired as he was, maybe even as hungry.

Hungry? It was then that he smelled scorching food and looked at the stove. A congealed mess that had once been scrambled eggs now smoked in a pan, turning brown around the edges.

With a growl of disgust, Kirk lifted the pan and shoved it, eggs and all, into the overloaded sink, then sat down at the table and pulled off his boots, leaving them lying where they fell. He was too damned tired to do anything else. Except, not only was he tired, he was also hungry, breakfast having been a long, long time ago and lunch non-existent. Hell, Liss Tremayne was probably tired, too, and hungry. It was clear she hadn’t taken so much as a bite of those eggs she’d left burning on the stove.

He dumped out the crusty mess, scrubbed the pan, then whipped up half a dozen more eggs. He put some ham on to fry, the slowly poured the eggs into a larger pan, letting them cook slowly with a lid on. After a few minutes, he lifted the edge of the congealing eggs, let the liquid top run into the bottom of the pan, then added shredded cheese. He flipped the thick slices of ham and turned the oven onto warm. When the eggs were ready, he folded the omelet over the cheese, divided it more or less equally onto two plates, added the ham set it in the oven. He dropped four slices of bread into the toaster and forced his  weary body up the stairs.

Liss lay on her bed, tears slowly leaking from her        eyes. She was feeling sorry, not for herself, of course, but for poor Uncle Ambrose, a cold, hard man who’d been embittered by his young bride’s death. At least that’s what Liss’s father had told her, and she figured he should know. His sister had been Ambrose’s wife. How sad, Liss thought that her aunt had died in childbirth, along with the infant, leaving Ambrose with this huge, empty house.

She groaned softly when someone knocked on her door. “Go away,” she said, rubbing hastily at her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater.      

He didn’t. The door opened and he stepped in, still wearing the same damp jeans, but minus his boots and jacket. The three-day growth of beard remained. His eyes were dark and tired, and so oddly compassionate that she had to look away lest the kindness undo her completely and start the tears again.

When he reached out and touched her shoulder, he felt her flinch then become so rigid, he thought her muscles might snap.

“Hey, come here,” he said quietly, urging her to turn around and face him.

She rolled off the bed and slipped away to the window, standing with her back to the room.

“Come on, Liss,” he said, his voice quiet and deep. “I’m sorry I said you weren’t welcome. Believe me, you’re a whole lot more welcome than our third partner in this venture. I was . . . I guess I was responding in kind to the way you greeted me, but I shouldn’t have. I know you were badly scared and had a lot of adrenaline to use up, and that’s what all the shouting and crying was about. I shouldn’t have said what I did and hurt your feelings.”

“Please, go away,” she repeated.       

Kirk knew he should do as she asked, but something about the stiff set of her slim shoulders, the guarded quality in her posture, held him there. Walking away from her right then would be like turning his back on a child in pain.

Stocking feet silent on the carpeted floor, he approached. He drew in a deep, unsteady breath. “Please, don’t cry anymore.”

“I’m not crying,” she said huskily.

         The wool of her soft red sweater caught on the rough skin of his hands, making him achingly aware of her fragile femininity and his own masculinity. It was not a difference he wanted to be reminded of. All he’d come for was to apologize for saying something he shouldn’t have said, something that wasn’t true. She wasn’t exactly unwelcome. It was just that he’d need time to get used to having someone like her around. Someone who cried. A woman. Soft. Delicate. Someone who smelled good.

He felt her struggle to move away from him, but he grasped her other shoulder and held her firmly, turning her into his embrace.