A Husband For Christmas

The nice thing about Cade, she thought dreamily, was that he had such a love for the land and its protection. He was constantly investigating new ways of improving his own range, working closely with the Soil Conservation Service to protect the natural resources of his state.

Her eyes turned toward the gate as she heard a horse’s hooves, and she found Cade riding up the ridge toward her on his big black gelding. He sat a horse so beautifully, reminding her of a Western movie hero. He was all muscle and grace, and she respected him more than any man she’d ever known.

He reined in when he reached her and swung one long leg around the pommel, a smoking cigarette in his lean, dark hands as he watched her from under the wide brim of his gray Stetson.

“Slumming, miss model?” he teased with a faint smile.

“This is the place for it,” she said, leaning back against the tree to smile up at him. Her long, pale hair caught the breeze and curved around her flushed cheeks. “Isn’t it peaceful here?” she asked. “No wonder the Indians fought so very hard to keep it.”

His eyes darkened, narrowed. “A man does fight to keep the things he wants most,” he said enigmatically, studying her. “Why do you wear those damned baggy things?” he demanded, nodding toward her bulky shirt and loose jeans.

She shrugged, avoiding that piercing gaze. “They’re comfortable,” she said inadequately.

“They look like hell. I’d rather see you in transparent blouses,” he added coldly.

Her eyebrows arched. “You lecherous old thing,” she accused.

He chuckled softly, deeply, a sound she hadn’t heard in a long time. It made him seem younger. “Only with you, honey,” he said softly. “I’m the soul of chivalry around most women.”

Her eyes searched his. “You could have any woman you want these days,” she murmured absently.

“Then isn’t it a hell of a shame that I have such a fussy appetite?” he asked. He took a draw from the cigarette and studied her quietly. “I’m a busy man.”

“You look it,” she agreed, studying the dusty jeans that encased his hard, powerful legs, and his scuffed brown boots and sweat-stained denim shirt. There was a black mat of hair under that shirt, and a muscular chest that she remembered desperately wanting to touch.

“It’s spring,” he reminded her. “Cattle to doctor, calves to separate and brand and herds to move up to summer pasture as soon as we finish roundup. Hay to plant, machinery to repair and replace, temporary hands to hire for roundup, supplies to get in... If it isn’t one damned thing, it’s another.”

“And you love every minute of it,” she accused. “You’d die anywhere else.”

“Amen.” He finished the cigarette and tossed it down. “Crush that out for me, will you, honey?”

“It’s not dry enough for it to cause a grass fire,” she reminded him, but she got up and did it all the same.

“Back in the old days, Indians and white men would stop fighting to battle grass fires together,” he told her with a grin. “They’re still hard to stop, even today.”

She looked up at him, tracing his shadowed face with eyes that ached for what might have been. “You look so at home in the saddle,” she remarked.

“I grew up in it.” He reached down an arm. “Step on my boot and come up here. I’ll give you a ride home.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t ride a horse the way you drive,” she observed.

“That’s not a good way to get reacquainted,” he said shortly.

“It’s only the truth. Donavan wouldn’t even get in a truck with you,” she reminded him. “Although I have to admit that you’re a pretty good driver on the highway.”

“Thanks for nothing. Are you coming or not?”

She wanted and dreaded the closeness. He was so very strong. What if she panicked again, what if he demanded an answer to her sudden nervousness?

“Abby,” he said suddenly, his voice as full of authority as if he were tossing orders at his cowboys. “Come on.”

She reacted to that automatically and took his hand, tingling as it slid up her arm to hold her. She stepped deftly onto the toe of his boot in the stirrup and swung up in front of him.

He drew her back against him with a steely arm, and she felt the powerful muscles of his chest at her shoulder blades.

“Comfortable?” he asked shortly.

“I’m fine,” she replied in a voice that was unusually high-pitched.

He eased the horse into a canter. “You’ll be more comfortable if you’ll relax, little one,” he murmured. “I’m no threat.”

That was what he thought, she told herself, reacting wildly to the feel of his body against her back. He smelled of leather and cow and tobacco, and his breath sighed over her head, into her loosened hair.

If only she could relax instead of sitting like a fire poker in his light embrace. But he made her nervous, just as he always had; he made her feel vulnerable and soft and hungry. Despite the bad experience in New York, he appealed to her senses in ways that unnerved her.

He chuckled softly and she stiffened more. “What’s so funny?” she muttered above the sound of the horse’s hooves striking hard ground.

“You are. Should I be flattered that you’re afraid to let me hold you on a horse? My God, I didn’t realize I was so devastating at close range. Or,” he added musingly, “is it that I smell like a man who’s been working with cattle?”

Laughter bubbled up inside her. It had been years since she and Cade had spent any time alone, and she’d forgotten his dry sense of humor.

“Sorry.” She sighed. “I’ve been away longer than I realized.”

His big arm tightened for an instant and relaxed, and she let him hold her without a struggle. His strength was less intimidating now than it had been the last time, as if the nightmare experience were truly fading away in the scope and bigness of this country where she had grown up. She felt safe. Safer than she’d felt in years.

“Four years,” he murmured behind her head. “Except for a few days here and there, when you could tear yourself away from New York.”

She went taut with indignation. “Are you going to start that again?”

“I never stopped it. You just stopped listening.” His arm contracted impatiently for an instant, and his warm breath was on her ear. “When are you going to grow up, Abby? Glitter isn’t enough for a lifetime. In the end, it’s not going to satisfy you as a woman!”

“What is?” she asked curtly. “Living with some man and raising children?”

He seemed to freeze, as if she’d thrown cold water in his face, and she was sorry she’d said that. She hadn’t meant it—she was just getting back at him.

“It’s more than enough for women out here,” he said shortly.

She stared across at the horizon, loving the familiar contours of the land, the shape of the tall trees, the blueness of the sky. “Your grandmother had ten children, didn’t she, Cade?” she asked, remembering the photos in the McLaren family album.

“Yes.” He laughed shortly. “There wasn’t much choice in those days, honey. Women didn’t have a lot of control over their bodies, like they do now.”

“And it took big families to run ranches and farms,” she agreed. She leaned back against him, feeling his muscles ripple with the motion of the horse. Her eyes closed as she drank in the sensation of being close.

“It was more than that,” he remarked as they approached the house. “People in love want children.”

She laughed aloud at that. “I can’t imagine you in love,” she said. “It’s completely out of character. What was it you always said about never letting a woman put a ring through your nose?”

He didn’t laugh. If anything, he seemed to grow cold. “You don’t know me at all, Abby. You never have.”

“Who could get close enough?” she asked coolly. “You’ve got a wall ten feet thick around yourself, just like Donavan had. It must be a McLaren trait.”

“When people come close, they can hurt,” he said shortly. “I’ve had my fill of being cut to the quick.”

“I can’t imagine anyone brave enough to try that,” she told him.

“Can’t you?” He sounded goaded, and the arm that was holding her tautened.

She got a glimpse of his face as he leaned down to open the gate between them and the house, and its hardness unsettled her. He looked hurt somehow, and she couldn’t understand why.

“Cade?” she murmured before he straightened again.

His eyes looked straight into hers, and she trembled at the intensity of the glare, its suppressed violence.

“One day, you’ll push too hard,” he said quietly. “I’m not made of stone, despite the fact that you seem to believe I am. I let you get away with murder when you were younger. But you’re not a child anymore, Abby, and the kid gloves are off. Do you understand me?”

How could she help it? Her heart shuddered with mingled fear and excitement. Involuntarily, her eyes went to his hard mouth and she remembered vividly the touch and taste and expertness of it.

“Don’t worry, Cade, I won’t seduce you,” she promised, trying to sound as if she were teasing him in a sophisticated way.

He caught her chin and forced her eyes back up to his, and she jumped at the ferocity in his dark gaze. “I could have had you that night at the swimming pool, Abigail Jennifer Shane,” he reminded her with merciless bluntness. “We’re both four years older, but don’t think you’re immune to me. If you start playing games, you could goad me into doing something we’d both regret.”

She tried to breathe normally and failed miserably. She forced her eyes down to the harsh rise and fall of his chest, and then closed them.

“Just because I had a huge crush on you once, don’t get conceited and think I’m still stupid enough to moon over you, Cade,” she bit off.

As if the words set him off, his eyes flashed and all at once he had her across the saddle, over his knees, with her head imprisoned in the crook of his arm.

She struggled, frightened by his strength as she’d been afraid from the beginning that she would be. “No,” she whispered, pushing frantically at his chest.

“Let’s see how conceited I am, Abby,” he ground out, bending his head to hers.

One glance into those blazing eyes was enough to tell her that he wasn’t teasing. She groaned helplessly as his hard mouth crushed down onto hers in cold, angry possession.

It might have been so different if he’d been careful, if he hadn’t given in to his temper. But she was too frightened to think rationally. It was New York all over again, and a man’s strength was holding her helpless while a merciless mouth ground against her own. Through the fear, she thought she felt Cade tremble, but she couldn’t be sure. Her mind was focused only on the hard pressure of his mouth, the painful tightening of his arms. Suddenly she began to fight. She hit him with her fists, anywhere she could, and when the shock of it made him lift his head, she screamed.

An indescribable expression washed over his features, and he seemed to go pale.

Abby hung back against his arm, her pale brown eyes full of terror, her lips bloodless as she stared up at him, her breasts rising and falling with her strangled breaths.

“My God, what’s happened to you?” he asked in a shocked undertone.

She swallowed nervously, her lips trembling with reaction, her body frozen in its arch. “Please...don’t handle me...roughly,” she pleaded, her voice strange and high.

His eyes narrowed, glittering. His face went rock-hard as he searched her features. “What made you come here, Abby?” he demanded. “What drove you out of the city?”

Her eyes closed and she shuddered. “I told you, I was tired,” she choked out. “Tired!”

He said something terrible under his breath and straightened, moving her away from him with a smooth motion. “It’s all right,” he said when her eyes flew open at the movement. “I’m only going to let you sit up.”

She avoided his piercing scrutiny, sitting quickly erect with her back to him.

He spurred the horse toward the house. “If you can’t bear to be touched, there has to be a reason,” he said shortly. “You’ve been hurt some way, or frightened. I asked you if you’d been knocked around by a man, and you denied it. But you lied to me, didn’t you, Abby?”

Her jaw set firmly. “All this fuss because you kissed me against my will and I fought you!” she burst out. “Are you so conceited that you think I can’t wait to fall into your arms, Cade?”

He didn’t say a word. He rode right up to the front steps and abruptly set her down on the ground.

She stood by the horse for a long moment before she looked up. “Thanks for the ride,” she ventured.

He’d lit a cigarette and was smoking it quietly, his face grim as he looked down at her. “You’re going to tell me what happened sooner or later.”

“Nothing happened,” she lied, raising her voice.

“I didn’t wind up with three ranches and a corporation because I was an idiot,” he informed her. “You didn’t come rushing down here a month early just to help Melly get ready for her wedding. And it damned sure wasn’t because you were dying for the sight of me.”

He was hitting too close to the truth. She turned away. “Believe what you like, Great White Rancher.”

“Abby!”

She whirled, eyes blazing, as gloriously beautiful in anger as a sunburst, with her pale hair making a frame for her delicate face and wide brown eyes. “What?”

His eyes went over her reverently, from toes to head, while the cigarette smoked away in his tanned fingers. “Don’t fight me.”

It was like having the breath knocked out of her. She looked up at him and felt the anger drain away. He was so gorgeously masculine, so handsome. Her eyes softened helplessly.

“Then don’t hurt me,” she said quietly.

He laughed mirthlessly. “That works both ways.”

“Pull the other one,” she muttered. “I’d have to use dynamite. You’re hard, Cade.”

“This is hard country. I don’t have time for the limp-wristed courtesies you city women swear by in men.”

“Sophistication doesn’t make a man peculiar,” she returned. “I like a polished man.”

His dark eyes glittered. “Not always,” he replied. “There was a time when I could look at you and make you blush.”

“That old crush?” she said. “I thought the sun rose and set on you, all right. But you made a career of pushing me away, didn’t you?”

“You were eighteen, damn it!” he shot at her. “Eighteen, to my thirty-two! I felt like a damned fool when I left you that night. I should never have touched you!”

The one beautiful memory in her life, and he was sorry it had happened. If she’d ever wondered how he really felt inside his shell, she knew now.

She lowered her eyes and turned away. She walked to the house without another word, without a backward glance. As she went up the steps, she imagined she heard him swear, but when she looked back, he was riding away.

* * *

Abby brooded about the confrontation for the rest of the day, and at the supper table it was patently obvious to Melly and Jerry that something was wrong. Even Calla, walking back and forth to serve up the delicious beef the ranch was famous for, with the accompanying dishes, commented that the weather sure had gotten cold quick.

Cade finished his meal before the rest of them and lit a cigarette over his second cup of coffee.

“I’ve got those reports printed out whenever you want them, Cade,” Melly ventured.

He nodded. “I’ll look them over now. Jerry, come on in when you finish,” he added, rising. “We’ll have to make a decision pretty quick about those cows we’re going to sell off. Jake White wants a few dozen head for embryo transplants.”

“Wants them cheap, too.” Jerry laughed. “I reckon he thinks our culls will be the very thing to carry his purebred Angus.”

Melly grinned at them, aware of Abby sitting rigidly at her side. “Oh, the advances in cattle breeding. Herefords throwing Angus calves, without even the joys of natural conception.”

Cade gave her a hard glare and walked out of the room.

“Shame on you,” Jerry muttered as he started to join the boss. “Embarrassing him that way.”

“I’m just helping him lose some of his inhibitions, darling,” Melly whispered back, blowing him a kiss before he winked and left the room.

“He’ll get even,” Abby said solemnly, picking at her food. “He always does.”

“You could help him with those inhibitions, too,” her sister said, tongue in cheek.

“Not me, sis,” came the instant reply. She glared toward the doorway. “He can keep his hang-ups for all I care.”

Melly stared at her hard. “Why don’t you and Cade start kissing and stop fighting?”

“Ask him,” she grumbled, getting up. “It’s one and the same thing with Cade, if you want to know. I’ve got a frightful headache, Melly. Say good-night to the others for me, will you?” And she rushed upstairs without another word before Melly could ask the questions that were forming on her lips.

Abby hadn’t had a nightmare since she arrived at the ranch, but after the confrontation with Cade, it was almost inevitable that it would recur. And sure enough, it did.

She woke up in the early hours of the morning, screaming. Even as the sounds were dying away, her door burst open and Cade came storming into her room, flashing on the overhead light, with Melly at his heels.

6

Abby sat there in the plain cotton gown that concealed every inch of her body, her hair wild, her eyes raining tears down her pale cheeks, and gaped at them on the tail of terror.

Cade was in his pajama trousers and nothing else. They rode low on his lean hips, and the sheer masculinity of his big body with its generous black curling hair and bronzed muscle was enough to frighten her even more.

“How about making some coffee?” Cade asked Melly, although his tone made it an order, not a request.

“But...” Melly began, nervously looking from her sister to her employer.

“You heard me.”

Melly hesitated for just an instant before she left them alone, her footsteps dying away down the hall.

Cade put his hands on his hips and stared down at Abby. With his hair tousled and his face hard, he looked as threatening as any storm.

“Get up and put on a robe,” he said after a minute, turning away, “while I get dressed.”

“You don’t have to,” she managed weakly.

He half turned, his eyes glittering. “Don’t I?” he growled. “You’re looking at me as if I were a rapist.”

Her face blanched and he nodded. “That’s how you feel, too, isn’t it, baby? Put on a robe and come into the living room. And stop looking at me like that. I’m not going to touch you. But you’re going to tell me the truth, one way or the other.”

He left her sitting there, his back as stiff as a poker.

Melly brought the coffee in just as Abby came out of her room, wrapped to the throat in a heavy navy terry-cloth robe.

Cade was dressed, barely, in jeans and an open-throated blue shirt that he hadn’t tucked in. He was barefoot, sitting forward in an armchair, worrying his hair with his hands. He looked up as Abby came in.

“Sit down,” he said quietly. “Melly, thank you for the coffee. Good night.”

“Cade...” Melly began.

“Good night,” he repeated.

The younger woman sighed as she looked over at Abby, her whole expression one of regret and apology.

“It’s all right,” Abby said gently. “You and I both know that Cade would never hurt me.”

Cade looked faintly shocked by the words, but he busied himself with lighting a cigarette while Melly said good-night and left them alone.

“Fix me a cup, will you, honey?” he asked.

Abby automatically poured cream in it and handed it to him.

He took it, cup and saucer balanced on his big palm, and smiled at her. “You remembered, didn’t you?”

She flushed. Yes, she had, just the way he liked it. She remembered almost everything she’d learned over the years—that he didn’t take sugar, that he hated rhubarb, that he loved a thick steak and cottage potatoes to go with it, that he could go for forty-eight hours without sleep but not one hour without a cigarette....

“Tit for tat?” he murmured, and reached out to put two sugars and cream in the second cup and hand it to her, smiling when she raised astonished eyes to his.

She took it, sitting back on the sofa to study the creamy liquid, turning the cup nervously back and forth in its saucer.

“Little things,” she murmured, finally lifting her eyes to his. “Isn’t it amazing how we remember them after so many years?”

“I remember a lot about you,” he said quietly, studying her. “Especially,” he added on a rueful sigh, “how you look without clothes.”

She flushed, dropping her eyes. “It was a long time ago.”

“Four years,” he agreed. “But it doesn’t seem that long to me.” He took a gulp of his coffee, ignoring the fact that it was hot enough to blister a normal throat, stubbed out his cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “Tell me what happened, Abby.”

She felt the cup tremble in her hand and only just righted it in time. “I can’t, Cade.”

He took another sip of coffee and leaned forward suddenly, resting his hands on his knees. “Look up. That’s right, look at me. Do you remember when you ran over your father’s dog with my old jeep?”

She swallowed and nodded.

“You couldn’t face him, but you came running to me bawling your heart out, and I held you while you cried.” He shifted his hands, studying her drawn face. “When Vennie Walden called you a tomboy and said you looked like a stick with bumps, you came crying to me then.”

She nodded again, managing a smile for him. “I always cried on you, didn’t I?”

“Always. Why not now?” He reached out a big hand and waited, patiently, until she could put her own, hesitantly, into it and feel its warmth and strength. “From now on, it’s going to be just like this. I won’t touch you unless you want me to. Now tell me what happened. Did you find out he was married?”

“He?” she asked, studying him blankly.

“The man you had an affair with,” he said quietly. “The one you wake up screaming over in the middle of the night.”

She swallowed down the urge to get up and run. How in the world was she going to be able to tell him the truth. How?

“Come on, Abby, tell me,” he coaxed with a faint smile. “I’m not going to sit in judgment on you.”

“You’ve got it wrong, Cade,” she said after a minute. “It...wasn’t an affair.”

His heavy brows came together. He searched her face. “No? I understood Melly to say there was a man....”

“There was.” Her eyes opened and closed, and the pain of admission was in them suddenly. She tried to speak, and her mouth trembled on the words.

He was beginning to sense something. His face seemed to darken, his eyes glittered. His hand, on hers, tightened promptingly. “Abby, tell me!” he ground out, his patience exhausted.

Her eyes closed, because she couldn’t bear to see what would be in his when she told him. “I was assaulted, Cade.”

The silence seemed to go on forever. Forever! The hand around her own stilled, and withdrew. Somewhere a clock was ticking with comical loudness; she could hear it above the tortured pounding of her own heart....

At first, she wondered if he’d heard her. Until she looked up and saw his lean hands, tough from years of ranch work, contract slowly around the cup until it shattered and coffee went in a half-dozen directions onto the deep gray pile carpet.

Her eyes shot up to his face, reading the aching compassion and murderous rage that passed across it in wild succession.

“Who?” he asked, the word dangerously soft.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly.

“Surely to God there was a suspect!” he burst out, oblivious to the shards of pottery and the coffee that was staining his jeans, the carpet.

“Not yet,” she told him. “Cade, the carpet...look, you’ve cut your hand!” she exclaimed, seeing blood.

“Oh, to hell with that,” he growled. He glanced at his hand and tugged a handkerchief from his jeans pocket to wind haphazardly around it. “What do you mean, not yet?”