The Humbug Man (7 page)

“I never gain weight,” she confessed as she reached for a piece of toast to go with her slice of bacon. She watched as he dumped eggs on her plate. “That’s too much,” she told him.

“If you’re going to live on a ranch, you have to keep up your strength. Blake will tell you that.” He was through his eggs already and working on homemade jam and toast.

“I won’t be out pitching hay and fixing fences and checking on cattle,” she reminded him.

“What did you plan to do?” he asked curiously.

“I thought I’d clean the house, if you don’t mind—not that it needs it, but the beds will have to be made.” She dropped her gaze. The sight of his bare chest at close range was making her weak in the knees. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with your cleaning lady, of course.”

“You won’t interfere. Do whatever you like. Within reason, of course. I get funny about lace on my undershirts.”

“Do you wear one?” she blurted out, and blushed as she realized how intimate the question sounded.

He was watching the way her eyes glanced off his chest, and she couldn’t know how much a man her shy appreciation made him feel. His dark eyes narrowed on her face. “No, I don’t,” he answered the question. He finished his toast and swallowed the rest of his coffee. “Want a second cup?”

“Yes. I’ll get it.” She got up, but as she went past him, his lean hand shot out and caught her wrist.

“No, you won’t,” he murmured dryly, and jerked.

She fell across his lap, gasping, one slender hand coming into sudden, shocking contact with all that bare chest. She couldn’t even protest. Her gaze fell to where her hand was half-buried. She didn’t want him to see how vulnerable she was, but it took too much work to try and hide her blatant interest.

He pressed her hand flat against him, looking at the small ovals of her nails without polish. She had nice hands, very slender and graceful. “Stop hiding from me.” He tilted her face to his so that he could see all the doubts and nervousness. His black eyes were kind for all the darkness growing in them. “This is as new for me as it is for you, so don’t think I’m going to make fun of the way you’re looking at me. I’d be staring just as hard at you if your shirt was off.”

Her lips parted. “Really?”

“Really.” He moved her hand against the thick hair and hard, warm muscle beneath it, watching the movement, feeling its instant effect on him. He laughed, the sound deep and low and pleasant in the early morning stillness. He looked up to see an arrested fascination in her eyes. “I thought I was immune. Feel.” He put her hand over his heart and let her feel its hard, heavy beat.

“I guess none of us are…immune, that is,” she whispered.

“Is yours beating that hard?” he asked softly and, still holding her gaze, his lean hand pressed just under the soft breast. But his other arm came up at the same time, arching her, and he eased her down into the crook of it while his long fingers spread. The tips of them just touched the soft underswell of her breast, bare under the jersey, and she couldn’t breathe. She began to tremble and her eyes darkened to old silver, staring up into his black ones.

“Tate,” she whispered huskily, her breath catching.

“I suppose there are rules about this sort of thing,” he said tautly, holding her eyes as his fingertips traced the swell of her breast. “Back in the Dark Ages when I was a boy, nice girls would slap a man for what I’m trying to do to you.”

“I’m a widow, not a girl,” she breathed shakily. “And I…like…what you’re doing to me.”

“You aren’t supposed to tell me that, Maggie,” he whispered as his head bent toward her. He brushed his lips over hers once, twice, and then they settled on her mouth. His hand searched for the hem of the jersey, found it and went up until it found a warm, soft mound with a hard tip that arched into his palm even as she shuddered with rapt sensation.

She moaned under his mouth. He tasted her, felt her hunger, drowned in her yielding softness.

When she tensed again, without taking his mouth from hers, he pushed the jersey out of the way and pulled her against his bare chest. She tensed, gasping as her breasts melted into the thick hair and warm muscle of him. His head lifted, because he wanted to see her face.

His dark eyes narrowed. She looked…wild. Abandoned. Her lips were swollen, her eyes half-closed, misty and faintly savage all at once. She was flushed and her body arched toward his.

His eyes went down to her breasts, and he looked at the contrasts between what he could see of her pink and mauve flesh and his hair-matted darkly tanned chest. His arm tightened, but he lifted a little away, because it had been years since he’d seen a woman without clothes, and he wanted to look at Maggie’s soft breasts.

She saw him visibly start at his first real sight of her that way. His face hardened, his eyes began to glitter. He frowned slightly, looking intently at her body. As if fascinated, one lean, dark-fingered hand came up to touch the round contour with its blatant hardness, and she gasped at that tender tracing because the excitement she was feeling was so intense.

His black eyes moved back up to hers. “You fascinate me,” he whispered tautly. “All of you. Your body, your heart, your mind. I’ve always thought of women in physical terms until now. But, I touch you and I wonder…”

“Wonder what?” she asked in a soft whisper, because it was almost reverent with him.

“I wonder how it would be if I gave you a child,” he whispered, his tone full of awe.

She stopped breathing. His words held that kind of impact. Her eyes searched his face, and she lifted her hand to touch his mouth, to trace the thick mustache, the hard cheek, the thick brows. His eyes closed and he sat quietly and a little tensely while her soft hand went over him, learning the contours of his face.

She arched then and touched her mouth with aching tenderness to his. Her fingers found his, pressing them down over the softly mounded flesh, holding his palm there while her mouth made slow, sweet love to his.

“You’re killing me,” he whispered on a tortured laugh.

“You aren’t doing my metabolism much good, either,” she whispered at his lips. She was sitting up on his lap, with both hands on his chest, and her eyes were full of emotion. Their color was soft, like gray doves.

He took a deep breath and forced himself to pull her jersey down, smoothing it around her waist. “I’ve got to go to work,” he groaned. “My God, I hope I can pitch hay bent over double.”

He was laughing, though, and her eyes blazed with triumph, with delighted knowledge on her part in his downfall. She smiled at him, and her hands smoothed back his thick dark hair, lingering at his temples.

“What would you like for lunch?” she asked.

“Anything,” he replied. “As long as I get to look at you while I eat it.”

“Oh, Tate.” She put her mouth over his and clung to him, feeling him move, feeling his lean hand gather her hips suddenly against his.

He felt her tauten. His head lifted and he looked into her wide, frightened gray eyes. “I won’t hurt you, Maggie,” he whispered. “I just want you to know how much a man I am with you. It isn’t a threat. It’s…” He paused. “I don’t know. Pride, I think,” he decided finally, and it was in his eyes, in his whole look.

She met his level gaze and the fear was gone, all at once. She relaxed into him, forcing her taut muscles to give, forcing her body to trust him. “It’s difficult,” she said softly. “I’ve spent years holding back.”

“I understand.” He kissed her closed eyelids and then he let her go, helping her back onto her feet as he rose and towered over her. “I didn’t bring you here to seduce you,” he added, framing her face in his warm, strong hands. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“But I am afraid,” she whispered, frowning as she looked up at him. “Tate, I… We mustn’t…”

He put a long finger against her soft lips. “I have to go.” He brushed his hard mouth over her forehead, and the mustache tickled. “Let’s live one day at a time. OK?”

She forced herself not to panic. “OK,” she agreed.

He smiled. He seemed to do a lot of that lately, she thought, watching him go down the hall to his bedroom. But, then, so did she.

* * *

The days that followed were magic. Tate didn’t touch her again, although she could see the banked-down fire in his eyes when he looked at her; she could read the hunger there. He spent time with Blake at night when he wasn’t working, talking cattle and marketing, things that went right over Maggie’s head, but that Blake seemed to understand and really enjoy. And when Tate loaned him his
Stockman’s Handbook
to study, the boy was over the moon.

“It’s got a whole section on feedlot management,” Blake said enthusiastically.

“We could use a feedlot around here. I just never seem to get time to look into the possibilities,” Tate said, leaning back on the sofa with a cup of black coffee and smoking a cigarette. “But it’s interesting all the same to see how they’re operated. There’s more to it than just grouping numbers of cattle together and feeding them twice a day.”

“This is interesting, about the danger of explosive gases,” Blake murmured.

Maggie looked up from her
Ranch
magazine, where she was going over a recipe for a beef casserole. “Gases?”

Blake went into a long and nauseating explanation of how the unvented waste from livestock could create explosive and toxic gases, while Tate watched, faintly amused at her wide-eyed disgust.

“Son, I don’t think your mother’s in raptures over the gory details,” he murmured. “She might find some tips on range management a little easier to take.”

“Right,” Blake agreed readily, flushed because his idol had actually called him “son.” He looked at Tate with more emotion than he realized, so hungry for a father of his own that he was as open as a book.

Tate, watching that expression unfold, felt a wild stirring inside himself. A protective stirring, just as he had the morning he’d shot at the wolf when it threatened Blake. The boy and the woman were getting to him, growing on him, taking him over. Once, he’d have drawn back in anger from that kind of affection. But now…

He looked at Maggie, his eyes quiet and tender on her down-bent dark head as she read her magazine. She and Blake were already part of his life; it was as natural as breathing. He looked forward to coming home at lunch, at night. He looked forward to every new day. That was when it dawned on him that Christmas was five days away and they’d be going back to Arizona soon afterwards. He felt sick all over.

To ward off thought of the future without them, he got to his feet. “What are we going to do about a tree?” he asked suddenly.

They both stared at him.

“Well, we have to have a tree,” he explained. “It’s going to be Christmas in five days.”

Maggie felt the same sickness he’d just experienced at the thought of what came after the holiday, but she forced herself to smile. “What are we going to put on it?” she asked. “Do you have any decorations?”

“We could put one of my hats on top, I guess,” he mused, “and whip a rope around it for a garland.”

“We could put it in one of your boots,” Blake chuckled and got a black glare for his pains.

“Suppose we make decorations?” Maggie pondered. “I can bake cookies in different shapes to go around it, and do you have some popcorn and thread?” Tate nodded and she grinned. “We can make garlands of popcorn. But what about Christmas dinner? Tate, can you get a ham and a turkey?”

“There are three hams in the deep freeze,” Tate replied. “But a turkey…” He frowned. “I guess I could get one from Jane Clyde, over the mountain.”

“Is it far?” Maggie asked.

“Just an hour’s drive or so.”

She thought of him on that winding road, of how dangerous it was in snow and ice. “We don’t need a turkey,” she said. “Really, I hate turkey. And so does Blake,” she added, daring her son to argue.

But he was quick, was Blake. He’d already followed her reasoning and was agreeing with enthusiasm that turkeys were the curse of civilization.

Tate didn’t say anything else about going over the mountain to get a bird. But he smiled to himself when he left the room. They weren’t fooling anybody—he saw right through them.

For the next few days, Maggie and Blake worked on decorations and made presents. Since the nearest store was down the mountain, they decided to make do with what they’d brought with them from Tucson. Maggie had Tate run her back to the cabin to check on everything, and she dug out the shopping bags full of things she’d brought with her from the city for Christmas.

“More decorations,” she murmured, tossing out tinsel and gently laying a box of colored balls on the sofa. “And this is what Blake especially wanted for Christmas.” She showed him a computer game, one of the very expensive ones with graphics and three diskettes.

He pursed his lips. “Very nice. I have a PC compatible, but I hadn’t realized that Blake had an interest in computers.”

“You have a computer?” she asked with vivid curiosity because she was thinking up a present for Tate, since he was the one person she hadn’t foreseen a need to buy one for.

“Sure. Over 600 kilobytes of storage space, double disk drive, with a modem and a daisy wheel printer.” He smiled at her fascination. “I keep my herd records on computer these days. It beats the hell out of having to handwrite every entry.”

“Do you have a spreadsheet program?” she fished.

“I do, indeed,” he said and named it. It was one of the more expensive ones, so that program was out.

“What I don’t have,” he sighed, studying Blake’s disk, “is a good word processing program. I could use one of those to write letters with.” He glanced at her, noticing her rapt expression, and he grinned again. He had two word processors, but he wasn’t about to tell her. He’d rush home and hide those disks, fast!

“My, my, they do come in handy, don’t they?” she mused and quickly hid the one she’d bought for Blake. Blake could wait another Christmas for a word processing program; he wasn’t getting this one.

They loaded her packages in the car after she’d taken time to wrap them. “Tate, I never thought,” she said as they got into the jeep, “is there anyone you spend Christmas with? Your family?”