Heart of Winter (11 page)

Nicky had to bite her tongue to keep from asking if the girl knew that in these parts, a mink set consisted of a trap and a skinning knife.

But to Nicky's irritation and her father's frank anger, Winthrop seemed to enjoy Carol's company.

“Maybe she forgot who she came with,” Nicky muttered to Mary late that day as she helped the older woman set the long dining table.

“Not likely,” Mary said. She glanced at Nicky. “Winthrop looks through you today. Why?”

Nicky hesitated before she put down the last plate. “He thinks I lied to him because I didn't tell him about my background. I let him think I came from a poor family. But it's true in a way,” she added, her face open and sad. “I was poor in love, at least.”

“And your father?”

Nicole pursed her lips. “You tell me. What kind of man is he?” she asked, because she'd learned how perceptive the Sioux woman really was.

“He is a sad man,” Mary said surprisingly. “He draws attention to himself out of loneliness and pain. He has not learned to admit fault, only to find it in others. I pity him. As you should. In your youth, you have twice his wisdom.”

Mary left and went into the kitchen, leaving the younger woman thoughtful and quiet.

If Nicole thought the day had been bad, she soon found that the evening meal was an even worse ordeal. Winthrop sat at the head of the table with the hateful Carol on one side and Gerald on the other and completely ignored Nicky and her glum father. The Harris brothers ate and sipped their coffee merrily, exchanging pleasantries and hunting experiences with Nicky, but she hardly heard them. She was watching Winthrop's dark eyes light up as he spoke to the nubile redhead, and hating the other woman for arousing the tender side of the man she could no longer reach.

“You wear your heart on your sleeve,” Dominic said coolly. He stared over his coffee cup at his daughter. “Never let it show.”

“Never cry. Never show emotion.” She laughed shortly. “A page right out of your book. You're frozen clean through. I suppose I'll be just like you when I'm your age. What a lovely future to look forward to.”

“It beats having your emotions lacerated twice a day,” he said nonchalantly. He stared hard at the redhead. “She's barely your age,” he mused. “And your host is a hell of a man, limp and bad temper and all. I won't like losing her to him. I'm not a good loser.”

“Winthrop doesn't want a society girl,” she replied. “He's had enough misfortune because of one.”

“I remember reading about the wreck,” her father said surprisingly. “Deanne something-or-other, that ski heiress. I had a fling with her myself. She was a real honey. The kind who'd stroke your fevered brow while stealing your wallet.”

It hurt, knowing that her own father was that kind of man. An aging playboy with no real emotion underneath his elegant facade. “You ought to compare notes with Winthrop. I'm sure he'd be interested,” she said sweetly.

“Stop sniping at me, Nicky,” he said coolly, and his green eyes met hers. “All your regrets and all mine won't change the past. Neither will giving up your rightful legacy. Brianna wouldn't have wanted that. She had high hopes for you.”

“Did she? I don't remember her being sober enough to discuss them in the past.”

“I thought you'd become wiser with time, but you still see the past with blinders on,” he remarked. “Grow up, honey. Life isn't all black and white. Your mother was neurotic. She couldn't handle responsibility. In fact, neither could I. We were two kids playing at life, and when you came along, the dream fell apart. Neither of us could cope and you got caught in the middle. I'm sorry, but I can't remake the past.”

“If neither of you wanted me, why did you bother to have me?” she asked, wounded by the confession. “Or was I just an accident?”

She read the answer in his face before he could even try to disguise it. And suddenly, her whole childhood made more sense. The endless fights, the indifference of her parents to each other's lifestyles, the drinking and womanizing…

“So,” she let out the word as a sigh. “So that's why.” She smiled ruefully. “Thank you. At least now I know why you both hated me so much.”

“Oh, Nicky,” he said, “that's not so. We never hated you.”

“You never had time for me, either of you.”

“That's true,” he admitted. His green eyes searched hers and he smiled wearily. “We were just kids when you came along, Nicky. Both of us. Kids playing house. And then there we were with a real live baby, but we couldn't put you back on the shelf. We had to be responsible for you. That wasn't an easy task for two people who'd never known what it was to be responsible.”

She stared at him as if she'd been slammed in the head with a pole. She'd never thought of her parents as people, only as parents. This new perspective was enlightening, but disturbing.

“You don't understand, do you?” her father asked quietly. “You thought because we were your parents, we had to be perfect. But it doesn't work that way. Parents make mistakes. They aren't perfect.”

She shifted restlessly. “Mother drank herself to death because of your womanizing,” she said accusingly.

“Your mother drank herself to death because she was unhappy,” he replied, without heat. He leaned back, and despite the trendy shirt and the gold chains he wore, he looked old and tired. “So was I. I ran after women looking for my rainbow, and she climbed into a bottle looking for hers. Neither of us ever found it.” He pursed his lips and studied her. “Have you found yours, Nicky? Does anybody ever really get the brass ring in life?”

“There are better ways to try for it,” she began.

“Sure there are,” he agreed. “But when you've got all the money in the world, why look past your wallet?”

“I can think of some very good answers to that question,” she told him. “I've watched you buy people all your life. I hate the ugliness that money can bring out in people.”

“You can't bribe an honest man, honey,” he said sagely. “Can you?”

“But everyone has a price. Some prices are less materialistic than others—a promotion, a holiday for a hard-working parent, a hospital bill for a sick child. Those are less obvious prices, but they still mean people can be bought.”

He nodded. “So you begin to see.”

“What you and mother had wasn't a marriage,” she accused him, all the hurt of the past coming back.

“We didn't love each other enough,” he said simply. “In the beginning, maybe we did. But we had families that lived in each other's pockets and constant interference. We were never let alone, not even when you came along. You were the last straw, Nicky. You were the knot that we couldn't untie. Divorce, in our day, was scandalous. Our families had never had a divorce.”

“Better a divorce than unending war,” Nicky shot back.

“My sentiments, exactly. And your mother's. If we'd divorced, she'd have married one of her old beaux and I'd have married—probably several more times,” he acknowledged with a wicked grin. “And we'd both have been very happy. As it was, we sought our separate remedies and your mother's was fatal. Nobody's fault,” he tacked on, watching her. “Nobody's fault at all. But you can't accept that, can you?”

“Somebody has to be at fault,” she said doggedly, glaring at him.

“Why?”

The question threw her off balance. She stared at him. “What?”

“Why does somebody have to be at fault?” He fingered his chains. “Your mother and I were nice people, separately. We just weren't compatible. Who do you blame for that?”

She felt herself losing ground. He always had been like a trial lawyer, able to twist things around to suit himself. If only he didn't make so much sense. She'd blamed him for two years for her mother's untimely death, just as she'd blamed herself. But what if neither of them were responsible?

She shifted a little and finally got to her feet, looking down at him. He always seemed laid back, very relaxed. Nothing seemed to bother him.

“I'm a black sheep, Nicky,” he said. “I always have been. I like women and I'm rich enough to indulge that habit, and I try to come out ahead in business. But I never hated you, honey. I never could.”

She tried to smile. “No? It seemed like it when you got here.”

“That was dirty pool, all right.” He glanced down and then up again. “I missed you,” he said curtly, as if he hated even saying the words. “I missed Brianna. Everybody left me at one time. Damn it, how do you think I felt?”

He got up and stormed out of the room without even a backward glance. Nicky stared after him with confused emotions. He'd sounded, and looked, hurt. Perhaps he had cared about her mother in his fashion. Maybe even about Nicky, too. But the wounds were still raw and she couldn't cope with this new facet of her father just yet.

She turned, oblivious to the others in the room, and went upstairs. Her father was only forty-one, she realized with a start; he wasn't even old. And there was no reason he shouldn't have women friends. It was just…she'd wanted him to love her mother. She'd wanted her mother to love him. She'd wanted a warm family life…and she'd never had it.

She changed back into her jeans and the yellow sweater, hating the gray dress. She wished she had something as slinky and svelte as Miss Kansas City downstairs, so that she could tempt the antagonism out of Winthrop's dark face. But she'd probably lost her chance with him. He hadn't come near her since her father's arrival, he hadn't spoken to her or acknowledged her. He'd even avoided looking at her.

It was amazing how deeply his turning on her had hurt. She sat down at her vanity and ran a comb through her hair, dreading the return trip downstairs. She'd never felt quite so lost and alone, not even as a child. She missed her mother suddenly and wished that they could have talked. There had been a few precious times when her mother had been sober, when she'd actually listened to her daughter's rambling.

The door opened, cutting into her thoughts, and the comb paused in midair over her short, dark hair as Winthrop walked into the room and slammed the door behind him.

He'd unbuttoned his long-sleeved chambray shirt at the throat. His dark hair caught the light and gleamed, like his unblinking dark eyes under that jutting brow. He stared down his straight nose at her and bad temper mingled with pure male arrogance in the way he watched her.

“Go ahead,” she sighed, putting down the comb to sit with her hands folded in her lap. “Get it out of your system. Shall I start it for you? I betrayed you, lied to you—”

“You could have told me,” he replied. His eyes narrowed on her face. “I even asked you point-blank if you were related to Dominic White and you sidestepped the question.”

“Guilty as charged,” she confessed. “I should have told you the truth. And if I had,” she continued, turning to face him, “you'd have shot me off the ranch like a bullet.”

“Trust comes hard to me,” he said unexpectedly. “I won't be able to forget that you didn't level with me.”

Even though she had expected it, the words hurt. She tilted her chin up and looked at him, drinking in the sight of his face, adoring it with her soft green eyes. “I'm not a bored heiress. I've lived in Chicago for two years—”

“Patiently,” he agreed with a smile that would have been pleasant any other time. “Waiting for your chance. Gerald was first choice, I realize that, but I was the second-string, wasn't I?”

She blinked. “I don't follow you.”

“You set your sights on Gerald, honey,” he replied. “He was going to be your meal ticket. You played him for two years—”

“I what?” She got to her feet.

“I'm no fool,” he ground out. “You've been hanging on him ever since you got here! I overheard what you said to him, about no other man ever being able to take you away from him. I heard it all. And you even held back last night, because you were afraid of what he might say if he saw us together.”

“I did? Amazing, how much restraint I showed in the kitchen, wasn't it?” she taunted.

His jaw tautened angrily. “I'm no innocent boy. I've had my share of adventures with women. And this morning, I got a good look at the real Nicole White. No, honey, you won't pull the wool over my eyes again. I'm on to you now. And there's no way I'm going to be your meal ticket. Neither is Gerald. I'll see to that.”

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. All the growing tenderness between them, everything he'd said last night…After all of that, he could believe her father's lies, could he? How could he believe that she was just a gold digger?

“Gerald's in love with Sadie,” she said, almost in a daze.

“Is he? Too bad. I guess you're brokenhearted. So that's why you turned to me, was it?” he laughed coldly. “And if your father hadn't arrived, I might still be deluding myself. What a lucky break. One cheap adventuress in a lifetime is damned enough.”