Heart of Winter (2 page)

“You don't mind if I work?” Gerald Christopher asked with a smile, looking up from the papers in front of him.

“Not at all,” she assured him. “I'm not nervous of flying.”

The flight seemed to take a long time, but perhaps that was because Nicole wasn't reading. She stared out at passing clouds, a little anxious about the welcome she was going to get when they got off the plane.

“Mr. Christopher, your brother does know I'm coming?” she asked him when they were over Butte and about to land.

His dark eyebrows arched. “Of course. Don't worry, Nicky, everything's going to be fine.”

Sure it was. She knew that the instant they got off the plane and she got a good look at the expression on Winthrop Christopher's face.

She recognized him at once. He was a big man. Taller than his brother, broad shouldered and lean hipped. He was wearing work clothing—jeans and dusty boots, with a checked shirt under a massive sheepskin jacket. On his head was a battered black Stetson twisted into an arrogant slant over one dark eye. He looked like a desperado. He hadn't shaved, and the white line of a scar curved from one cheek into the stubble on his square chin with its faint dimple. His face was rather square, too, and his features severe. He had a straight, rather imposing nose, and his black eyes gleamed with a cold light. In one lean, dark-skinned hand he held a burning cigarette. And the look he was giving Nicky would have curdled fresh milk.

“Hello, Winthrop,” Gerald said, shaking his brother's hand. He glanced at Nicky with a smile. “In our childhood days, I used to call him Winnie, but I gave it up when he blacked one of my eyes. Despite all that, I know he'd die for me,” he added with a grin, which the older brother didn't return. He was too busy glaring at Nicole, his dark eyes cutting into her oval face, looking for imperfections, making an unpleasant inventory of what he saw. “Winthrop,” Gerald continued quickly, “this is my private secretary, Nicole White.”

“How do you do, Mr. Christopher,” Nicky said politely and she actually managed to smile, but her knees felt unsteady. This was no welcome at all. Dislike was too mild a word for what she read in those eyes. Wounded man, she thought, even while she wished she could run. She understood the meaning of betrayal, because she knew it intimately. For the first few months of her exile, Chase's handsome face had imposed itself over every letter she typed, every book she read, every television program she watched.

Winthrop's dark eyes narrowed. His thin, chiseled lips pursed thoughtfully, but there was no smile to ease the hardness of that rugged, unshaven face. “Yes, I remember you,” he said curtly. His voice was deep and curt. “You're young.”

“I'm twenty-two,” she said.

“Young.” He turned abruptly, with a care that no physically fit man would have had to take. “I've got the pickup. Does your pilot want to come out to the ranch and have something to eat?”

“No, he's due back to fly one of the other executives over to New York,” Gerald replied, clapping an affectionate hand on Winthrop's shoulder. Brave man, to touch that walking inferno, Nicky thought as she fell into step behind them.

“I'll get the luggage.” Winthrop started toward the plane, favoring one leg, and Nicky hesitated, her eyes speaking her thoughts. He gave her a look that stopped her from moving or speaking. He could have stopped a brawl with that glance. Her half-formed offer to help was frozen solid on her lips. With a violent flush, she turned away and followed Gerald.

“Don't ever offer to help him,” her boss cautioned in a soft, quiet tone. “He's a little less sensitive about it these days, but soon after it happened, he threw a punch at one of the cowboys just for offering.”

“I'll remember.” She felt stung. The older brother was going to be hard going, and her first impulse was to ask if she could go back to Chicago.

Gerald Christopher seemed to sense her feelings, because he put an affectionately careless arm around her shoulder. “Don't panic,” he teased. “He doesn't bite.”

“Thank God I've had all my inoculations,” she sighed, but she smiled back.

Behind them, the older man was watching that exchange of smiles and the arm around Nicky and putting his own connotation on what was going on between his younger brother and his secretary. The look in his eyes was both threatening and disapproving as he picked up the cases and followed them to the cream-colored pickup truck.

It was a long ride to the ranch, down a highway dwarfed by the towering, autumn-hued peaks of the Rockies. Soon Winthrop turned off onto some mountainous dirt roads that didn't actually seem like roads at all. To Nicky, squashed between the two men, it was a cold and unnerving experience. She could feel Winthrop Christopher's long, powerful leg come in contact with hers every time he pressed on the accelerator, and her body was reacting to the feel of his shoulder against hers in ways she hadn't expected. He made her tremble with awakening sensation, made her feel alive as she hadn't felt since her late teens. She didn't like that, or him, and her face took on the hardness of stone as the road wound on and on, through fir trees so tall and thick that Nicky stared in fascination at their girth. The forested areas were becoming thick now that they were off the rolling plain that had led to them, down country roads where houses were miles apart and traffic was practically nonexistent. Nicky, who'd read about Montana, hadn't been prepared for its vastness, or for the glory of orange-tipped aspens with their thin silvery trunks, and cottonwoods fluffy and yellow-hued, and those incredibly big pines. Or for the sheer splendor of the mountains and the crisp, clean coldness of mountain air. She watched, rapt, as the mountains shot up in front of them. Winthrop turned onto a tiny dirt road and they started to go up.

“Not what you expected, Miss White?” Winthrop chided as she stiffened on a sudden hair-raising curve as he gunned the truck up what seemed like a mountainside. “Montana isn't all pretty little photographs in coffee-table books.”

“It's very mountainous,” she began.

“That it is.” He wheeled around another curve, and she got a sickening view of the valley below. It was just like the Great Smoky Mountains, only worse. The Smokies were high and rounded with age, but the Rockies were sharp and young and much higher. Nicky, who had no head at all for heights, began to feel sick.

“Are you all right, Nicky?” Gerald asked with concern. “You've gone white.”

“I'm fine.” She swallowed. Not for the world would she let Winthrop see what his careless wheeling was accomplishing. She held onto her purse for dear life and stared straight ahead, her jaw set, her green eyes unblinking.

Winthrop, who saw her stubborn resolve, smiled faintly to himself. Nicky might have been surprised to know how much it took to make him smile these days.

Another few miles, and they began to descend. The valley that opened before them took Nicky's breath away. She forgot her nausea in the sheer joy of appreciation. She leaned forward, with her slender hand on the dash, her eyes wide, her breath whispering out softly.

“Heaven,” she breathed, smiling at maples gone scarlet and gold, at huge fir trees, delicate aspens and fluffy cottonwoods and the wide swath of a river cutting through it all, leading far into the distance like a silver ribbon. “Oh, it's heaven!”

Winthrop's eyebrows levered up another fraction as he slowed the truck to give her a better view. At the end of the road was a house, a huge sprawling two-story house that seemed part of its environs. It was made of redwood, with decks on all sides and an enormous porch that seemed to go all the way around it. It had to have fireplaces, because smoke was coming from two chimneys. Maples were all around it, too ordered not to have been planted deliberately years before, and with the mountains all around, it had a majesty that a castle would have envied.

“Lovely, isn't it?” Gerald sighed. “Every time I leave it, I get homesick. Winthrop hasn't changed a single thing about it, either. It's been this way for forty years or more, since our mother planted those maples around the house when our father built it.”

“I thought they looked as if someone had planted them.” Nicky laughed. “They're in a perfect semicircle around the back of the house.”

“Some city people might think that trees grow in perfect order,” Winthrop mused, glancing coldly at Nicky. “Amazing, that you were able to pick it out so easily.”

“Oh, Nicky grew up on a farm, didn't you, country girl?” Gerald grinned, tweaking her hair. “Way over in Kentucky.”

“Good thing they plant trees in perfect order in Kentucky, and teach native sons and daughters to recognize the difference between a planted tree and a naturally seeded tree,” Winthrop said without looking at her. “I guess there are people who assume God planted them in rows.”

That was a dig, and Nicky wondered what the big man would do if she leaned over and bit him. That amused her and she had to fight to keep from grinning. He was watching her again, his eyes darkly piercing. He disturbed her so much that she dragged her gaze away and felt her cheeks go hot. It was incredible how easily this man got through her defenses. She was going to have to be careful to keep out of his way.

“Did I write you about the Eastern sportsmen I'm expecting week after next?” Winthrop asked Gerald unexpectedly. “I've organized a moose hunt for them, but I'll warn you in plenty of time to keep out of the section I'm planning to hunt.”

“I remember,” Gerald nodded. “I hope they have some savvy about weapons. Remember the solitary hunter who came one winter and shot your prize bull?”

Winthrop glared at him. “That wasn't funny,” he said and glared at his two passengers, who were fighting smiles.

“Damned fool couldn't tell a stud bull from a deer….” Winthrop wheeled the truck up the dirt drive. “These are my Herefords,” he added, nodding toward the red- and white-coated herds grazing across the flat plain toward the river. “They're in winter pasture now. I rent some government land for grazing, but I own most of it. It's been a bumper crop of hay this year. There's enough to spare for a change.”

Nicole, who knew about farming and winter feed, nodded. “The southern states aren't having such luck,” she remarked. “Drought has very nearly ruined a lot of cattlemen and farmers.” She didn't question the way he spoke with possession about the family ranch, since Gerald had already told her that Winthrop had complete control of it.

Winthrop frowned as he glanced at her, but he didn't say anything. Her name, her last name, rang a bell, but he couldn't remember why. No matter, he thought; he'd remember eventually where he'd heard it before.

He parked the truck at the door of the huge house and got out, leaving Gerald to help Nicky to the ground.

A big, elderly woman came ambling out onto the front porch to meet them. She had high cheekbones and a straight nose, and she was very dark.

“That's Mary,” Winthrop said, introducing her. “She's been here since I was a boy. She keeps house and cooks. Her husband, Mack, is my horse wrangler.”

“Nice girl,” Mary muttered, watching Nicole closely as the three newcomers came up onto the porch. “Long legs, good lines. Plain face but honest. Which one of you is going to marry her?” she demanded, looking from Gerald to Winthrop with a mischievous smile.

“I wouldn't have a woman, fried, with catsup,” Winthrop replied without blinking, “but Gerald may have hopes.”

Before Gerald could say anything, Nicky got herself together enough to reply. She did it without looking at Winthrop, because her cheeks were flushed with temper and embarrassment.

“I'm Mr. Christopher's secretary, Nicole White,” Nicky said quickly, and forced a smile as she extended her hand. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm only here to work.”

“And that is a disappointment,” the woman sighed. “Two bachelors, all the time. It weighs heavy on my heart. Come. I will settle you.”

“Mary is Sioux,” Winthrop told Nicole. “And plainspoken. Too plainspoken, at times,” he added, glaring at Mary's broad back.

Mary whirled with amazing speed for such a big woman and made some strange gestures with her hand. Winthrop's eyes gleamed. He made some back. Mary huffed and went up the long, smooth staircase.

“What did you do?” Nicole asked, amazed.

Winthrop looked down at her from his great height, his eyes faintly hostile but temporarily indulgent. “The Plains Indians spoke different languages. They had to have some way to communicate, in the old days, so they did it with signs. This,” he added, drawing his hand, palm down, across his forehead, “for instance, means white man or paleface. The sign refers to this part of a man's forehead that was usually covered by a hat and so didn't get tanned like the rest of him. It was pale. This,” he continued, rubbing two fingers in a long oval on the back of his left hand, “means Indian.”

“Winthrop and Mary used to talk about the rest of us at the table—” Gerald chuckled, tugging affectionately at a short curl beside Nicky's ear “—using sign language. None of us could understand a word.”

“It's fascinating,” Nicky said, and meant it.