A Ranching Man
Linda Turner
By day: Glamorous movie star. By Night: terrified woman, in need of protection for herself and her little girl.Rancher Joe Mc Bride knew that the last thing he needed was some big-time movie star invading his home. Yet Angel Wiley and her adorable three year old were looking to him to save them from unnamed danger. Joe could never turn away from a lady in distress–but he soon realized it wasn't just the defenses of his home they were crumbling, but the ice around his heart….
“Access to the barn isn’t included in your agreement.”
Drawing herself up to her full height, Angel somehow managed to look down her nose at him in spite of the fact that he towered over her by a good six inches.
“But that’s not what you’re worried about, is it, Mr. McBride? You think I’m some sort of loose floozy from L.A. looking for a little dancing between the sheets while I’m stuck here in the boondocks, and I’ve set my sights on you. Well, you can relax. It’s not going to happen. And do you know why? Because I’m not interested.
“Which is a good thing for you, big guy,” she taunted softly, thumping him on the chest. “Because if I were, you wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Dear Reader,
As Silhouette Books’ 20
anniversary continues, Intimate Moments continues to bring you six superb titles every month. And certainly this month—when we begin with Suzanne Brockmann’s Get Lucky—is no exception. This latest entry in her TALL, DARK & DANGEROUS miniseries features ladies’ man Lucky O’Donlon, a man who finally meets the woman who is his match—and more.
Linda Turner’s A Ranching Man is the latest of THOSE MARRYING MCBRIDES!, featuring Joe McBride and the damsel in distress who wins his heart. Monica McLean was a favorite with her very first book, and now she’s back with Just a Wedding Away, an enthralling marriage-of-convenience story. Lauren Nichols introduces an Accidental Father who offers the heroine happiness in THE LOVING ARMS OF THE LAW. Saving Grace is the newest from prolific RaeAnne Thayne, who’s rapidly making a name for herself with readers. And finally, welcome new author Wendy Rosnau. After you read The Long Hot Summer, you’ll be eager for her to make a return appearance.
And, of course, we hope to see you next month when, once again, Silhouette Intimate Moments brings you six of the best and most exciting romance novels around.
Enjoy!
Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor
A Ranching Man
Linda Turner
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
LINDA TURNER
began reading romances in high school and began writing them one night when she had nothing else to read. She’s been writing ever since. Single and living in Texas, she travels every chance she gets, scouting locales for her books.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Prologue
Engulfed in darkness, the man sat alone in the privacy of his small den and watched, transfixed, as the opening credits of the movie rolled onto his big screen TV. In the background, street shots of New York City flashed lightning quick, then there she was, just as he’d known she would be, smiling at him from the television. Angel Wiley. His angel. The woman he was born to love.
From the moment he’d seen her in her first movie, she’d lit up the screen with her innocent, virginal beauty. Her part had been a small one that hadn’t consisted of more than ten lines, but he’d hung on her every word. And just that easily, he’d fallen in love.
He was a man who believed strongly in destiny, and there was no question in his mind that it was Fate that had led him to see that particular movie that day. Angel Wiley was meant to be his. Deep in his heart, he knew that, accepted it, looked forward to the day he could claim her as his own.
At first, of course, she hadn’t known he existed, so he’d had to be content to worship her from afar. He dreamed of her, fantasized about her, and even quit his job and moved to Hollywood so he could be near her. He’d long since given up hope of ever meeting her when Fate once again stepped in and he ran into her quite by accident outside a restaurant in Beverly Hills. It was a meeting he would never forget.
Staring at her image on the TV screen, he smiled dreamily in remembrance. They hadn’t had time to speak so much as a word to each other before her friends had swept her away, but no words had been needed. There’d been a spark, a flash of recognition between two souls, and she’d been as aware of it as he had. Nothing had been the same since.
She was all he could think of, but he couldn’t just walk up to her and ask her out, not when she was the brightest new star in the Hollywood sky. She was naturally leery of strangers, and as far as she was concerned, that was all that he was to her. He knew differently, of course, but it would take time to convince her that he was the man of her dreams. So he’d had to content himself with following her home that night to get her address. Then he’d begun to gently woo her with cards and candy and flowers.
Just thinking about how delighted she must have been the first time he surprised her with roses made him smile. Although he’d never spoken to her, he knew his angel was a woman who would love flowers. And romantic gestures. She was sweet and loving and innocent and just looking for her knight to come racing up on his charger and sweep her off to happily-ever-after.
And he was her knight. He’d known it the first time he sat in a darkened theater and gazed up at her angelic face. And soon, she would know it, too. When the time was right.
Chapter 1
The woman who opened the door to Angel Wiley’s soft knock was tall and spare, with a wrinkled face as stern as a ship captain’s. But at the sight of the visitor standing on her front porch, a delighted smile broke across her firm mouth and good humor danced in her sky-blue eyes. “There you are! And looking just as pretty as you do in the movies! Come in, come in, and make yourself at home. We don’t stand on ceremony in this neck of the woods—never have. Most folks are just like family.” And not giving Angel time to object, she pushed open the screen door, pulled her inside and hugged the stuffing out of her.
Surprised, Angel laughed and returned the hug. She’d long since accepted the fact that because people felt like they knew her from her movies, they felt free to treat her like an old friend. “Mrs. Henderson—”
“Myrtle, dear,” the older woman corrected her easily as she released her. “Mrs. Henderson was my mother-in-law, and that woman was meaner than a wet hen. Everybody in the county calls me Myrtle.” Glancing past her through the screen door, she frowned in disappointment at the sight of the Ford Taurus sedan sitting at the curb. “Is that your car? I thought you’d have a limo. Garrett Elliot does. I saw him driving around the square just this afternoon.”
Angle didn’t doubt it. She and her costar had worked together once before, to her regret, and she knew for a fact that Garrett didn’t go anywhere without a limo and entourage. Spoiled and insecure, he thrived on the trappings of stardom and the sense of self-importance it gave him. The more looks he drew, even in a backwater little town like Liberty Hill, Colorado, the happier he was.
She, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. She hadn’t gone into acting for the fame, but for the work itself. She loved it, loved creating a believable character that came alive on the screen. But the work had its drawbacks, and she hated the notoriety that accompanied success and stripped you of your privacy. Unlike Garrett, she didn’t like being stared at, so she kept a low profile whenever possible and tried not to draw attention to herself. Because not everyone who wanted to touch her, hug her, was a harmless fan.
A chill rippled over her at the thought, and it was all she could do not to glance over her shoulder to see if she was being watched from the street through the open front door. This wasn’t a sprawling metropolis like L.A., where danger had stalked her without her even being aware of it, she reminded herself. Liberty Hill was hardly more than a village, lost in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. There were no hotels in town, nowhere for a stranger to hide. The studio had made arrangements for the cast to board with the local ranchers and townspeople, then booked every hotel within a sixty-mile radius for the crew during the filming of Beloved Stranger. An outsider, left with no place to stay, would stick out like a sore thumb.
When she’d learned the studio had arranged for her to stay in a Victorian mansion that was right in the middle of town and only a block from the sheriff’s office, she’d sighed in relief. It had sounded like it was perfect for her.
And at first glance, the old house certainly lived up to its advanced billing. Dripping in gingerbread and charm, it was beautifully preserved and literally right around the corner from the sheriff. A scream would bring him or one of his deputies running to the rescue in a matter of minutes.
But what if she didn’t have time to scream? a voice in her head taunted softly. An intruder could slip up on her in the dark silence of the night and she’d never know it until it was too late. All he’d have to do was break one of the ancient window latches or jimmy the lock on the front door, and he’d be inside in a heartbeat. While Myrtle slept peacefully in her bed, he could do God knows what to Angel and be gone before anyone even thought to note the danger.
Stricken, she paled and knew in that instant that she couldn’t do it. There was too much at stake. As much as she liked Myrtle and hated to disappoint her, she just couldn’t stay there. “Garrett always did like limos. I prefer to drive myself. Mrs. Henderson, about the house—”
“I knew you would love it,” she cut in, beaming. “Everyone does. And it’s Myrtle, dear. There’s no need to stand on ceremony. After all, we’re going to be housemates for the next two months, and I want us to be friends.”
“Thank you…Myrtle. I appreciate that, but—”
“Think nothing of it, dear. I’m delighted you’re here. And you know, of course, that I don’t expect you to hole up in your suite the entire time you’re here. There’s plenty of room for both of us, so please make yourself at home. I heard you like to cook, so I imagine you’d like to look at the kitchen. It’s probably not as fancy as what you’ve got in L.A., but I made sure it was well stocked for you. C’mon. I’ll show you around.”
She would have given her a guided tour, but Angel couldn’t let her, not without feeling like a heel. To let her continue to think she could accept her hospitality would be cruel.
“Myrtle…wait,” she said when the older woman started to turn toward the arched doorway at the far end of the entrance hall. “I hate to do this to you after you’ve gone to so much trouble, but I’m not going to be able to stay with you, after all.”
“But the studio’s already made the arrangements,” she argued, taken aback. “Your rent’s been paid, your rooms are ready. All you have to do is move in and unpack.” Frowning with a sudden thought, she asked worriedly, “Is it the house? Is it because it’s so old? That nice Mr. Douglas from the studio thought you’d be pleased.”
“I am. I mean I would be but—”
“You’re worried I’ll talk your ear off when you try to study your lines at night,” she guessed. “Don’t be. I’m an old lady, dear,” she confided, trying and failing to look feeble. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I have a little antique store next door, and it takes all my energy just to stay on top of things there. By the time I get home in the evening, I’m so bushed, I’m lucky if I can stay awake long enough to eat a bowl of cereal during Entertainment Tonight.”
Fighting a smile, Angel sincerely doubted that. Myrtle might be somewhere in her seventies, but her blue eyes were sharp and full of life, her step lively. She was a long way from being old. “It’s not you,” she assured her. “It’s me. I need to stay in a place that’s more…private.”
It was a weak excuse, but the only one that Angel was willing to give her. She didn’t know Myrtle, didn’t know if she could trust her with the truth. She didn’t seem the malicious type, but Angel already knew she liked to talk, and that could easily get out of hand. If she inadvertently repeated any of their conversation to any of the reporters that would soon be flooding the area, the news would be all over the papers the next day. She could see the headlines now.
Angel Wiley Threatened By Stalker.
The press would have a field day with that. And so would Garrett. She could hear him now, telling everyone on the set that Angel was so desperate for publicity and her fifteen minutes of fame that she’d do anything to get her name in the paper. Just thinking about it made her cringe.
Not taking her seriously, Myrtle laughed. “This is Liberty Hill, dear, not L.A. You don’t have to worry about people peeking in the windows, ogling you. Anyone who goes around sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong is asking for a fat lip, and I’ll be the first one to give it to them. We respect each other’s privacy around here. Or else.”
Angel made no attempt to repress a smile. Myrtle looked so fierce, she could just see her taking on the tabloid reporters who regularly parked across the street from her house in West Hollywood and snapped pictures of anything that moved. If they tried that here, they’d be lucky if they still had their hair, let alone their cameras, by the time Myrtle got through with them.
“I’m sure everyone is normally very nice,” she agreed. “But we’re not talking about neighbors gossiping over the back fence about the county judge and his secretary. Once word gets out that a movie’s being shot in the area, fans’ll start crawling out of the woodwork. Then the trouble starts.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said quickly before Myrtle could misunderstand. “I really do love my fans. Most of them are harmless and wouldn’t dream of doing anything more objectionable than asking for a picture or autograph. Those are the nice ones.”
“And the others? The not so nice ones? What do they want?’
“Anything that touches my skin,” Angel said bluntly. “They’ve been known to crawl through a window just to get their hands on a pair of my underwear.”
Her cheeks slightly flushed, Myrtle swallowed. “I see.”
She didn’t. She couldn’t fully understand what fame and adoration was like for someone who just wanted to do her job and come home at night and be left alone. The abhorrence of getting filthy letters in the mail from strange men. The fear that pressed in on her in the dark of night when the phone rang and she knew it was him—
Shying away from the thought, she stiffened. No! She didn’t need to go there for Myrtle to understand that the arrangements the studio had made for her were, unfortunately, unacceptable. “So you see why I need to stay some place more secluded. Please don’t take this wrong—your house is wonderful—but it’s right on the street. There isn’t even a fence. If I’m going to sleep at all at night, I really need a gated community, some place with a state-of-the-art security system and motion detectors in every room. I’m sure you understand. I guess you could say I’m like Greta Garbo. I just want to be alone.”
It was an outrageous request for the wilds of Colorado, and they both knew it. Liberty Hill didn’t even have a movie theater, let alone a gated neighborhood with the kind of security system she described. It was a ranching community, for God’s sake! People worked hard for their money and didn’t need fancy, high-falutin’ houses in town with walls around them to show what they were worth.
Which was more than could be said for a spoiled movie star from Hollywood who thought she was someone special just because she could play make-believe in front of a camera.
Myrtle didn’t say the words, but they were there in her eyes, nonetheless, along with a look that told Angel all too clearly that she had read the stories about her in the tabloids and was wondering now if they were true. And it was that that Angel hated the most. The speculation about her character, the doubts total strangers had about her before they even had a chance to meet her, let alone get to know her. Had her overnight success gone to her head? Could she possibly be as spoiled and demanding as everyone said? Did she really insist that the studio fly in fresh strawberries from California every morning for her breakfast and Dom Pérignon champagne directly from France whenever the mood struck her?
No! she wanted to cry, but she never got the chance. There was a sudden bold knocking at the front door, and they both turned to face the visitor who had arrived unnoticed while they talked. Standing on the other side of the screen door and silhouetted by the bright sunlight that streamed onto the front porch behind him, he stood like a dark specter, his face bathed in shadows, his broad shoulders filling the doorway.
He didn’t say a word, didn’t make a move that was the least bit threatening, but just that quickly, her heart was pounding with the sick fear that had become all too familiar over the course of the last two months. There was no reason to be afraid, she told herself desperately. This wasn’t the man who was the cause of her nightmares in the dead of night. It couldn’t be. She knew he would eventually follow her from L.A., that it was only a matter of time before he hunted her down in spite of the fact that the studio had been careful to keep under wraps exactly where Beloved Stranger was going to be filmed on location. But even he wasn’t clever enough to find her just minutes after her arrival in Liberty Hill. Was he?
Still unsure and hating herself for it, she was struggling with the need to run when Myrtle broke into a broad smile of recognition and moved forward to push open the unlocked screen door. “Joe! Come in, dear. I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”
After working on the sets of two Westerns, Angel had seen her share of wanna-be cowboys, but there was no question that the man who stepped into Myrtle’s entrance hall was the real thing. Six foot two, if he was an inch, he looked as tough as a weathered fence post. His jeans and denim shirt were designed for work, not show, and both his scarred boots and battered black cowboy hat had seen their share of use and abuse.
But it was the man himself who bore the stamp of hours spent toiling out on the range in all kinds of weather. His square-cut face was hard and chiseled by the wind, his skin baked and tanned from the sun. Fine lines radiated from the corner of his sharp brown eyes, and although Angel guessed he wasn’t much older than his mid-thirties, the temples of his dark brown hair were dusted with gray.
There was, she thought at first, nothing the least bit soft about him. Then Myrtle said, “What are you doing in town in the middle of the day? Oh, I bet you came for Cassie’s bed, didn’t you? How is the little darlin’?”
“Wild as a March hare,” he said with a chuckle. “Zeke swears he’s going to be totally white-headed by the time he’s forty. Yesterday, he found her trying to ride one of the calves in the barn. She wants to be a bronc rider when she grows up.”
A grin broke the stern set of the man’s face, stealing Angel’s breath right out of her lungs. Transfixed, she couldn’t take her eyes off him as Myrtle laughed gaily. “What is she now? Two? Wait ’till she’s ten and wanting to drive that great big Suburban truck of his. The poor boy doesn’t have a clue what he’s in for.”
Suddenly remembering her guest, she exclaimed, “Oh, lordy, I completely forgot about Angel.” Turning, she motioned her to join them. “I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t mean to exclude you. It’s just that sometimes I get rattling and I completely forget my manners. Have you met Joe yet? No, of course you haven’t,” she retorted, answering her own question with a wry grimace. “You just got into town, didn’t you? This is Joe McBride, my godson. Your movie’s being filmed on his family’s ranch.”
“Then you must be the one Garrett’s staying with,” Angel told him. Pitying him that, she smiled and held out her hand. “I’m Angel Wiley. Garrett’s costar.”
Between one heartbeat and the next, the good humor in his eyes turned to ice. His gaze dropped to her extended hand, he hesitated, and for one stunned moment, Angel thought he wasn’t going to shake her hand! Then he gave a curt nod, closed his fingers over hers for a terse shake, and jerked his hand back as if he couldn’t abide the touch of her. Without bothering to say a single word, he turned back to Myrtle. “I hate to interrupt, but I need to load up the bed and get back to the ranch. I’ve got a mare that’s due to foal any day now, and I don’t want to be away from her too long.”
Myrtle shot him a reproving look that would have made a lesser man grovel in apology, but Joe McBride just stared back at her woodenly and didn’t so much as blink.
“Well,” she huffed, scowling in disapproval, “if you want to act as if you were raised in a barn, then I’m sure there’s nothing I can do about it.” And dismissing him as easily as he had Angel, she turned her attention back to her guest. “I’m sorry about this, dear, but it looks like I’m going to have to run next door to my shop and take care of a little business. I hope you don’t mind. It’s only going to take a few minutes. If you’d like, you can go upstairs and check out your suite. You might change your mind about staying here once you see it. It’s the first door on the left at the top of the stairs.”
Taken aback by Joe McBride’s rude dismissal, Angel nodded stiffly. He’d all but cut her dead, she thought in amazement as the cowboy walked out with Myrtle without sparing her so much as a second glance. Her. Angel Wiley! The winner of last year’s People’s Choice Award who was, according to Variety, one of the brightest new stars to come along in Hollywood in years. Not that she read and believed her own press, she quickly amended. But didn’t the man know who she was, for heaven’s sake?
Of course he did, her bruised ego snapped in her head. He just wasn’t impressed.
That wasn’t a reaction she was used to.
She didn’t consider herself a conceited woman, and she certainly didn’t expect male attention as her due. After all, she wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous like Jaclyn Smith, and she didn’t have the pouty, sexy beauty of Marilyn Monroe. She was just average, nothing more, like the girl next door.
Or so she had always thought. But with the release of Heart’s Desire, her first movie, three years ago, men had been making complete fools of themselves over her. She generally only had to smile at one to knock him out of his shoes. And even the more confident ones tended to stumble over their tongues when they got a chance to talk to her.
Joe McBride had done neither.
She should have been relieved. She didn’t want any male attention, fawning or otherwise, and if she had any sense, she’d be thanking her guardian angels for making sure that the oh-so-annoying cowboy wasn’t the least bit interested in her.
Instead, she wanted to throw something at the darn man’s head.
So he wasn’t a fan, she thought irritably. So what? She wasn’t one of those insecure actresses who needed everyone to love her. People had different tastes—she accepted that. But was a little common courtesy too much to ask for?
She told herself to forget him and his rudeness. She had too many other problems to spend her time worrying about a long, tall drink of water like Joe McBride. But instead of going upstairs to check out the suite Myrtle had prepared for her, she stepped into the front parlor and moved to a window that overlooked the antique shop next door.
Joe strode out of Myrtle’s shop just as Angel pulled aside the lace panel that covered the window, and guiltily, she stepped back out of sight. But she needn’t have worried that he’d catch her watching him. He never even looked her way. With Myrtle scurrying along beside him, trying to help, he carried the solid wood antique twin bed and set it in the bed of his pickup as easily as if it weighed no more than a feather. When Myrtle scolded him, he only grinned and gave her a bear hug that completely lifted her off her feet.
Seeing them together, their faces alight with affection, Angel couldn’t get over the change in the man. Which one was the real Joe McBride? The cold, arrogant one who had barely been civil to her? Or the charming cowboy with the slashing dimples who swept an old woman off her feet just to make her laugh?
Watching his truck head west out of town with the antique bed secured in the back, Angel was still asking herself that same question a few minutes later when Myrtle returned. “Oh, there you are,” she said with a pleased smile when she spied Angel in the front parlor. “Did you check out your suite?”
“No, I really didn’t see the point—”
“Don’t say no yet,” she cut in. “Think about it while we have tea.”
Angel didn’t want her to go to any bother, but she was learning that Myrtle was a force to be reckoned with when she was determined to have her way about something. “It’s no trouble,” she assured her and escorted her into the large, old-fashioned kitchen.
“When I was a girl, I was raised to entertain guests in the front parlor,” she confided with twinkling eyes as she expertly prepared the tea. “My mother always said anything else just wasn’t proper. Obviously, I was a sad disappointment to her. I like to break the rules.” Grinning, she joined Angel at the round oak table that looked like it was at least as old as its owner and offered her homemade lemon cookies to go with her tea. “So what did you think of Joe? I hope he didn’t offend you. In spite of his dreadful behavior, he really is a wonderful boy.”
With a weathered face like his and disillusioned eyes that had seen more of life than he wanted, Joe was a long way from being a boy. And from what Angel had seen of him, there was nothing the least bit wonderful about the man. Still, Myrtle seemed to be more than a little fond of him so she wisely kept those thoughts to herself.
“Maybe he was just having a bad day,” she said diplomatically, accepting a cookie. “It happens to the best of us.”
“No, it’s more than that, I’m sorry to say.” Sobering, she stirred cream into her tea. “He and his wife, Belinda, divorced four years ago, and it hit him hard. The poor boy was nuts about her, but she was a city girl, and living on a ranch was downright foreign to her. Can you imagine? She didn’t even know the difference between a bull and a steer when she came here!”
Struggling not to smile, Angel had no intention of admitting her own ignorance. “You don’t encounter many bulls in the city.”
“No, I guess not,” the older woman chuckled. “But it was more than that. She missed her friends and shopping malls and all the noise of Denver.” She shook her head, as if for the life of her, she couldn’t understand the fascination. “Anyway, I thought she was adjusting, and so did a lot of other people. Then six months after their wedding, when Joe was busy with the spring roundup, she packed up her clothes one day, left him a note saying she couldn’t take it anymore, and ran back to Denver. Joe hasn’t had anything good to say about women since.
“Not that that excuses rudeness,” she added quickly in case Angel got the wrong impression. “His mother, Sara, is my best friend and I know for a fact that he was raised better than that. He’s just got some baggage he’s got to deal with. We all do. But I’ll tell you one thing, he’s a good man. He might not sit next to you or any other single woman in church if he could find a way to avoid it, but if you were in trouble, he’d be the first one there to help you. The McBrides are all like that. They’d give you the shirt off their back if you needed it.”
Her teacup lifted halfway to her mouth, Angel slowly set it back down as an idea began to take shape in her head. “They sound like a good family. Just how big is their ranch?”
“Oh, Lord, big enough to get lost in if you don’t know where you’re going. The place is huge. Janey, the oldest daughter, lives with Sara in the old homestead, and that’s three miles from the ranch entrance. The rest of the kids have their own homes scattered about the place, and all of them are miles apart.”
“And Joe? How far is his house from the main entrance?”
Her mouth pursed, Myrtle considered the distance. “Maybe two miles, more or less. Merry has her veterinary office and house near the front gate, then you have to pass Joe’s before you get to the homestead. So yeah, I’d say it’s about two miles. Why?”
“It’s not a gated community, but it sounds like the next best thing,” she said honestly. “It’s miles off the road, so I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone invading my privacy.” Or getting to her without someone on the ranch spying them first. Security would already be increased because the film was being shot there, and anyone who didn’t belong there would never get past the front gate, let alone two miles down a private road to Joe’s house.
“But Garrett Elliot’s staying there,” Myrtle argued with a frown. “And to put it bluntly, dear, I don’t think Joe would be at all pleased to have a woman in his house. If you’re really determined not to stay here, why don’t you let me call Sara and see if she can put you up?” she suggested earnestly. “I know several of the other women cast members were assigned to her place, and of course, Janey’s there, but they might be able to squeeze you in. It’ll be crowded, and you won’t have the privacy you would have here, but you won’t have to worry about any fans peeping in the window at you. If anyone even thinks about approaching the homestead—or any of the kids’ houses, for that matter—you can see them coming from a mile away.”
Touched, Angel knew it couldn’t have been easy for Myrtle to make the offer, especially since she’d so obviously been looking forward to having her stay with her. And if she’d just been worried about a curious fan or two, Sara McBride’s home with its house full of women would have, no doubt, been safe enough, Angel acknowledged silently. But the man who had made the last few months a living nightmare for her was far more dangerous than a curious fan. If she was going to sleep at night, she needed someone hard and tough to protect her, someone who wasn’t the least bit interested in her as a woman.
She needed Joe McBride.
The decision made, she sat back with a sigh of relief. For the first time in weeks, the sick, hollow fear in her stomach eased, and she knew she was doing the right thing. “It’s very kind of you to make the offer, Myrtle, but I really do think it would be best if I stayed with Joe.”
“But what about Garrett? Joe only has three bedrooms, and Garrett reserved two of them so he could use one as an office.”
Not the least bit worried, Angel said confidently, “I’ll take care of Garrett.”
And she’d see that he got no more than he deserved. After all, he was the one who’d gone to the tabloids during the making of Wild Texas Love last year and claimed that her success had gone to her head, that she acted the star and disrupted shooting on the set whenever she didn’t get her way. She hadn’t, of course, but he hadn’t cared about the truth. He’d only wanted to get back at her for refusing to sleep with him.
She’d never pulled rank in her life, but she was going to now. Because she had to. One phone call to Will Douglas, the producer, was all it would take, and she would be in at Joe McBride’s, and Garrett would be out. A vindictive woman would have seen that he was given lodging in some dusty old attic on the other side of the county, but that wasn’t her way. No, she was much nicer than that. She’d make sure he had a comfortable place to stay…right in the middle of town. If he didn’t like little old ladies who had a tendency to speak their minds, then he’d just have to learn a little patience or rumors would soon be flying about him.
Revenge. How sweet it was!
Grinning mischievously, she observed Myrtle with twinkling blue eyes. “How would you like Garrett to stay with you?”
Hot and dirty and out of sorts, Joe headed for home just as the sun was sinking below the sharp ridge of mountains to the west. After checking on his pregnant mare, he’d spent the afternoon clearing brush and decaying logs out of the creek bed in Coyote Canyon, trying to improve the flow of the spring-fed creek for his thirsty cattle. And all he had to show for it was an aching back and a trickle of water that wasn’t going to last the summer if they didn’t get some rain soon.
But that had nothing to do with his foul mood.
Dragging red dust behind his pickup as he raced across the ranch on one of the dozens of gravel roads that crisscrossed the property, he came over a rise and scowled at the eighteen wheelers lined up like ducks in a row under the pines off to his left. There were no logos on the trucks, nothing to signify where they were from, but everyone within a hundred-mile radius knew what was in their trailers. Cameras, lights, sound equipment. Everything needed to make a movie.
Hollywood had come to the ranch, and he didn’t like it.
His mouth compressing into a flat line, he jerked his eyes back to the road and reminded himself that he’d do well not to look a gift horse in the mouth. With cattle prices at an all-time low, the cost of feed up because of a drought that looked like it was going to last into the next century, and money tighter than it had been in decades, the ranch had been in serious financial trouble when Gold Coast Studios literally came knocking at the front door. The studio suits had wanted to use the ranch as the location for the filming of its next big blockbuster, and they’d been willing to pay an obscene amount of money to do it.
Even then, his first instinct had been to tell them no and shut the door in their faces. He wanted nothing to do with the artificial world of movies and the people who made them. He didn’t want strangers poking their noses into every nook and cranny of the ranch like they owned the place, scaring the cattle and making general nuisances of themselves. He didn’t want to be bothered, dammit!
But business was business, and the ranch was a family operation. He couldn’t make a unilateral decision based on his personal feelings. So in a family meeting with his mother, brother and sisters, the matter was presented and discussed. And to no one’s surprise, it was decided that, considering the ranch’s current financial troubles, they really had no choice but to accept the studio’s offer.
The next day, he’d signed a contract giving Gold Coast Studios unlimited access to the ranch for the making of Beloved Stranger. Because of the shortage of available housing in town, he’d also given in to the pressure applied by his mother and sisters and agreed to rent out rooms to several cast members at the homestead and at his house. So for the next two months, the cast and crew could go just about anywhere they liked on the property.
Common sense told him he’d done the right thing, but that didn’t make him like the situation any better. He’d been running the ranch for the last seventeen years, ever since his father died the summer after he’d graduated from high school, and the land was as much a part of him as the color of his eyes. His brother and sisters had all gone on to college and important careers, but he’d given that up without a single regret. Because it was the ranch that he loved—the vastness of its high mountain meadows, the solitude of its canyons, the beauty of a lone hawk soaring on thermals high over land that belonged to his family as far as the eye could see.
And when he drove over ranch roads that he knew like the lines on the back of his hand, it was deer and elk he expected to see when he caught sight of something moving through the trees, not cameramen and set designers getting ready for the first day of shooting on Monday.
He supposed he would, with time, grow used to the sight of strangers on the ranch, but he didn’t think he would ever come to accept the idea of one in his home. Especially one like Garrett Elliot. The man was a jerk, a self-inflated, pompous fool who’d moved in yesterday while he was out, and taken over the house with an arrogance that still infuriated Joe. Elliot had actually had the audacity to claim the master bedroom for himself for the duration of his stay!
Who the hell did the man think he was? Joe fumed. Just because he was a big shot in Hollywood didn’t mean he could waltz into his house and start taking over like he owned the place. As far as Joe was concerned, he was nothing but a boarder. And he’d had no trouble telling him that. He’d then given him two options. He could either take the two smaller rooms, one of which he could use as an office, or find himself a hotel. And the closest hotel with rooms still available was seventy-five miles away. Not a stupid man, Elliot had sulked off to the two smaller rooms and been thankful to have them.
But they’d taken an instant dislike to each other on sight, and Joe didn’t fool himself into thinking that was going to change. He had no use for a man who thought he was entitled to special privileges because of his position in life. The next two months were, he thought grimly, going to be long ones.
He didn’t, at least, have to treat the jerk like a guest. That wasn’t part of the deal. He wasn’t running a motel. Elliot had to pick up after himself and cook his own meals. Joe doubted that he even knew how to turn on the stove, but he wasn’t sticking around to find out. Just as soon as he took a shower and washed off the ranch’s red dirt, he was heading into town to have dinner at Ed’s Diner. Chili sounded good. And chocolate cream pie. Nobody made chocolate cream pie better than Ed.
Already savoring the taste of it, he spied his house in the distance as the last streaks of red left from the setting sun turned to magenta, then darkening shades of violet. Every light in the house was on, not to mention the floodlights that illuminated the front and backyards. It was barely dark, and the place was lit up like a Christmas tree.
Swearing softly, Joe increased his speed. He could see right now that he and Elliot were going to have to have another talk. The studio might have paid a decent sum for him to stay there for the next two months, but that didn’t mean Joe was going to stand by and let him drive up his utility bill just because he missed the bright lights of L.A.
He had a scathing lecture all worked out in his head. Then he braked to a stop behind a red Ford Taurus sedan in his driveway and his mind went blank at the sight of the woman pulling something from the trunk of the car. Angel Wiley. He’d barely spared her a glance at Myrtle’s that afternoon, but he’d still have known her on the dark side of the moon. Just like every other man in America.
Not that he was a fan. He didn’t give a rat’s ass that she was Hollywood’s latest sweetheart. But like it or not, she wasn’t the kind of woman any man with blood in his veins could easily ignore. And for the life of him, Joe didn’t know why. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous. She was too cute, too wholesome with her wavy, sun-streaked blond hair, freckles and sparkling blue eyes. To add insult to injury, her smile was crooked, and she had dimples, for God’s sake. Granted, she was tall and willowy and had legs that went on forever, but she couldn’t, under any circumstances, ever hope to be called voluptuous. Still, there was something about her, an air of innocent sexuality, that was incredibly appealing.
Furious with himself for even noticing, he wondered what the hell she was doing there. Then his gaze shifted from her to the suitcase in her hand, then to his open front door. And it hit him. She was moving in!
Muttering a curse, he slammed out of his pickup and strode toward her, his long legs quickly eating up the distance between them. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Her heart thumping crazily, Angel didn’t so much as flinch. Myrtle had warned her he wouldn’t be happy about the change in plans, but that wasn’t something she could be concerned with at the moment. She needed a safe haven, and like it or not, his house was it. Nothing else mattered.
Still, she wasn’t nearly as cool as she pretended when she looked down her slender nose at him and met his hostile gaze with a delicately arched brow. “I would have thought it was obvious. I’m moving in, of course.”
“The hell you are!” he growled. “Put that damn suitcase back in your car and get out of here. You’re trespassing on private property.”
There’d been a time when that would have been enough to send her packing. Unlike Joe McBride, she didn’t have an ounce of anger in her. She didn’t like confrontations, didn’t like fights. Given the chance, she avoided them at every turn. But this was one she couldn’t back down from. Not when not only her safety, but her daughter’s, was at stake.
Standing her ground, she faced him squarely. “I hate to be the one to disillusion you, Mr. McBride, but I have every right to be here. You signed a contract with the studio—”
“My contract is with an actor,” he cut in coldly. “An actor,” he stressed. “Sharing my house with a woman was never part of the agreement. Especially a spoiled prima donna who thinks she’s God’s gift to the rest of the world.”
Angel felt her cheeks burn and knew she looked guilty as sin. Damn Garrett! Was there anyone who hadn’t heard and believed the lies he’d told about her? “Your contract is for a cast member,” she said stiffly. “If you don’t believe me, you can talk to Will. I’m sure he’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.”
She didn’t give him time to object, but simply punched in a number on her cell phone and handed the phone to Joe. Stony-faced, he was left with no choice but to speak to the producer. “Douglas, we’ve got a problem,” he snarled. “I don’t care what the damn contract says. I’m not sharing my house with a woman!”
Chapter 2
It was a fight he couldn’t win, and he was smart enough to know it. But he didn’t have to like it. Seething, he told Will Douglas what he thought of a contract that gave a man no say in who was or wasn’t allowed in his own home. When he finally turned back to Angel and tossed her the phone, his brown eyes were nearly black with angry promise.
“You win this one, Cinderella. You get to stay, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. But I wouldn’t start celebrating too soon if I were you. You’re not going to like it here. I’ll make sure of it.” And without another word, he brushed past her and stormed into the house, leaving her standing in the driveway.
His mother—and Myrtle—would have chewed his butt out for not at least carrying in her luggage for her, but she wasn’t a guest, dammit! Guests didn’t go behind your back to force their way into your home, then thumb their nose at you when you objected. She’d stepped over the line, and as far as he was concerned, the last thing she was entitled to was hospitality. Let her carry in her own damn bags!
But as much as he wanted to ignore her, he found to his disgust that he couldn’t when she followed him inside dragging a suitcase that had to be as big as a packing crate. It was on rollers, but difficult to maneuver, and must have easily weighed half as much as she did. Still, she didn’t ask for any help. Her chin set at a proud angle—as if she were the injured party! he thought incredulously—she tugged and pulled, straining with every step, and finally got the suitcase over to the bottom of the stairs.
Delicate color singed her cheeks, and try though he might, Joe couldn’t take his eyes off her. Damn her, who the hell did she think she was fooling? There was no way she was going to be able to carry that damn suitcase upstairs and they both knew it. It was too heavy, and she was too slight. The sheer weight of it would drag her back down again. It’d be just his luck that she’d hurt herself, and she was just the type of woman who would revel in that. He could see it now. Laid up in bed like a princess with a sprained toe, she’d expect him to come running every time she crooked her little finger.
The hell he would!
Muttering a curse, he strode over to her, ignored her gasp, and took the suitcase from her as easily as if it weighed no more than a feather pillow. “I’ll take it up for you…this time,” he said coldly. “But don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re going to be waited on around here, sister. This is a working ranch and everyone carries their own weight.” His jaw like granite, he effortlessly carried her bag up the stairs, leaving her to follow or not.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re going to be waited on around here, sister, she mimicked silently, glaring at his ramrod straight back. Irritating man! Myrtle had warned her he wouldn’t make this easy for her—she should have listened. But after everything she’d said about his family, Angel had hoped that he’d at least give her a chance. She should have known better. The ink on his divorce might have dried four years ago, but according to Myrtle, he still avoided women like the plague. The last thing he would want was one living with him.
She could have told him he had nothing to fear from her. She wasn’t staying there because she was interested in him in any way, shape or form. He was too hard, too intense, too full of anger, and any woman who got in his way was going to get blasted. She just needed some place safe and off the beaten track for her and her daughter to stay, and his place qualified on both counts.
Still, his criticism stung. Did he think just because she had a glamorous career that seemed to require nothing more of her than she smile and play make-believe in front of a camera that her life had always been so easy? Her father owned a small café in New Mexico and had never cleared in a year what she made in a week. Her mother had died when she was eight, she’d been busing tables when she was ten, waiting them when she was fourteen. Joe McBride didn’t have to tell her what it was like to work hard—she’d been doing it all her life.
Resentment glittering in her eyes, she followed him upstairs. Besides the bathroom, there were three rooms—the master bedroom and two smaller bedrooms, one of which contained a single bed and a small desk that Garrett would have no doubt had to make do with as an office. The second was obviously the guest room. Simply furnished with a vanity-style dresser and an old-fashioned spool bed that was covered with a white chenille bedspread, it was modest and unadorned but for the lace half panels at the room’s two windows. It was here that Joe set her suitcase.
Stepping over the threshold, Angel took one look at the plain, unpretentious lines of the room and felt the tension that had knotted her nerve endings for the last two months ease. If this was the room Joe had given Garrett, she could just imagine what her costar must have thought when he laid eyes on it. He would have hated it. It was too small, too simple, and didn’t even have a television or phone. She’d done him a favor by having him moved to Myrtle’s.
She, on the other hand, found in its very simplicity a peacefulness that seemed to call to her very soul. Not only would she and Emma be safe here, she realized with a quiet sigh of relief, but she would find a haven from the tiring rat race that her life had become in L.A.
Joe, obviously finding criticism in her silence, snapped, “I warned you this was no fancy hotel. What you see is what you get. Take it or leave it.”
There was no question that he was hoping she’d leave it, but she wasn’t that stupid. “I’ll take it,” she said softly.
A muscle clenched in his jaw. “Then I’ll tell you the same thing I told Elliot. There’s no maid service, room service, or peons to do your laundry. You cook for yourself, pick up after yourself, and do your share of the cleaning. Since there’s only one full bath and we have to share the kitchen, I’ve come up with a schedule so that neither of us inconveniences the other. It’s posted on the refrigerator. I suggest you stick to it.”
Or else. The words weren’t spoken, but Angel heard them nonetheless. If she’d wanted to irritate him, she could have told him that there was nothing about sticking to a schedule in the contract he had with the studio. She could make mincemeat of his schedule and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. But she’d riled him enough for one day. And though he didn’t know it, he was giving her and her daughter a sanctuary that was invaluable. For no other reason than that, she’d do whatever she could to make sure she intruded on his home life as little as possible.
“I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” she assured him quietly. “You won’t even know I’m here.”
He didn’t even bother to dignify that with an answer, but he didn’t have to. His snort of contempt told her exactly what he thought of that.
Joe carefully wiped down the newly sanded twin bed he’d bought for his favorite—and only—niece, Cassie, his brow furrowed with a scowl. So he wouldn’t even know she was there, would he? he fumed, hardly noticing the beauty of the antique wood beneath his hands. Yeah, right! Oh, his unwanted houseguest had kept out of his way, he had to give her that. In the week since she’d moved in, filming had started on Beloved Stranger, and he’d barely seen her except in passing. He should have been happy he wasn’t running into her every time he turned around. But a man didn’t have to trip over a woman for her to nag him to death. Angel Wiley could do it without saying a single word.
With a muttered curse, he wondered if she had a clue just how impossible she was to ignore. Her food was in the refrigerator alongside his, her damp towel hanging on the towel rack next to his in the bathroom, her clothes in the washing machine when he wanted to do laundry. Then there was her scent. Good God, he thought with a groan. Why couldn’t it have been bold and blatantly sexy, just the kind of scent he’d never liked on a woman? Then she would have given him just one more reason to resent her presence in his house.
But the lady didn’t do the expected, dammit! Her fragrance was light and delicate and softly enticing. And like a promise whispered on the wind, it lingered on the air and wrapped around him every time he stepped through the front door. But it was the nights that were the worst, when he was asleep and her perfume drifted past his defenses to invade his dreams. He never remembered what he dreamed and didn’t want to, but he woke up restless and on edge. And it was all her fault.
In self-defense, he avoided her and the house every chance he got. The summer days were long, thankfully, and the ranch overrun with a film crew that had little experience with cattle, so he found plenty to keep him busy. There were downed fences to repair, strays to round up, and the herd to be moved when it was needed for filming.
He couldn’t, however, work around the clock. Eventually, he ran out of daylight and was forced to go home to find the lights on and the infuriating Ms. Wiley already home herself. Normally, he would have cleaned up, then scrounged around in the kitchen for something hot and filling. But not with her in the house. He didn’t want to see her, to talk to her, to have any more to do with her than he had to. So every night, he grabbed a cold sandwich from the kitchen, then retreated to his workshop in the barn.
It was his last sanctuary, his woodworking shop, and the one place of his that his houseguest had yet to invade. Here, working on Cassie’s bed, the smell of sawdust and varnish thick in the air, he didn’t have to think about that damn perfume of hers, didn’t have to think of her. And he intended to keep it that way.
Finishing off the last of his sandwich, he ran his hands over the headboard and found it as smooth as a baby’s bottom. When he’d picked the bed up at Myrtle’s, it had been covered in so many coats of paint that it had been impossible to tell the kind of wood it was made of. It had taken him four days to strip away a lifetime of paint with paint remover, but he was finally down to the bare wood. And it was beautiful.
Elizabeth and Zeke were going to love it. They didn’t know that he’d bought an antique, but he’d wanted to give Cassie something special. She was the first baby born into the McBride family in over three decades and he’d wanted her to have something special that could be handed down for generations to come. It had taken Myrtle a while to find what he was looking for, but this was it. After another light sanding, staining and a coat of varnish, it would be beautiful.
“Excuse me. I don’t mean to intrude, but there’s no hot water—”
Swearing, Joe whirled to find Angel standing at the entrance to his workshop just like she had every right to be there. Too late, he wished he’d locked the door. Because the lady looked too damn good. So much for the rumor mill, he thought sarcastically. Gossip abounded about the ranch now that it had been overrun by the Hollywood crowd, and from what he’d heard, the glamour queen had had a rough day playing the part of a widow trying to break a stallion on the ranch she’d inherited from her deceased husband.
She hadn’t done the actual work, of course, but even then, a certain amount of real physical labor was required in order for her to look like she knew what she was doing. Supposedly, she’d thrown herself into the scene—and gotten more than she bargained for when the horse she was working with got out of hand and pulled her off her feet into the dirt.
He nearly rolled his eyes at that. Yeah, right. The studio’s publicity department might get her adoring fans to swallow that bunch of malarkey, but anyone who’d been jerked around by a stubborn horse knew better. If a soft city slicker like Angel Wiley had really been pulled off her feet, she’d be laid up in bed right now whining about her sore muscles, not standing there in his workshop looking as fresh as a ray of sunshine in a simple yellow cotton blouse and jeans that clung in all the right places.
Irritated that he’d noticed the enticing curve of her hips and thighs, he growled, “What do you want?”
Not surprised by his coldness—he hadn’t said two words to her after their initial confrontation when she’d moved in—Angel didn’t so much as blink. She was just too tired. Every bone in her body ached from her battle on the set earlier that afternoon with the horse from hell, and all she wanted to do was soak in a hot tub, then go to bed. But there was no hot water, and she absolutely refused to go to bed without a bath first.
If she’d known where the hot water heater was, she would have checked the pilot light herself—even if she was too stiff to sink down on her knees to do it—but she didn’t. Which left her with no choice but to beard the lion in his den in the barn. And there was no question that it was his den. He’d hidden out for hours there every night that week, not returning to the house until well after she turned out the light in her room.
More than once, she’d been tempted to follow him just to see what he did out there every night. But she’d already intruded on his privacy more than he liked, and the peacefulness of their coexistence was fragile at best. He still didn’t want her there and didn’t insult her by pretending that he did. And he had no idea how much she respected him for that. He was a rarity in her world, where people played nicey-nice just so they could get close to her. His rudeness could be off-putting at times, but he didn’t play games. She knew where she stood with him, and that was a welcome relief.
“I was going to take a bath, but there’s no hot water,” she began, only to gasp in delight when her glance slid past him to the antique bed he’d obviously been working on. “Is that the bed you bought from Myrtle?” she asked in surprise. “The one for your niece? My God, it’s beautiful!”
If she hadn’t recognized the angels carved into the bed’s headboard, she never would have thought it was the same bed she’d seen Joe carry out of Myrtle’s shop last week. Then, it had been ugly and scarred and nearly black with paint. She wouldn’t even have looked twice at it. But now…it was gorgeous!
Eager to examine it closer, she stepped across the threshold into the workshop, but that was as far as she got. She never saw him move, but suddenly he was right in front of her, blocking her path, and so close she could almost feel the hard wall of his chest against hers. Startled, she looked up and found herself caught in the trap of his narrowed, dark brown eyes. And for no reason at all, her heart began to thump.
“The barn isn’t included in the agreement with the studio.”
She knew that and wouldn’t have had a problem with it—if the glint in his eyes and the low rumble of his voice hadn’t dared her to even think about taking another step. Between one heartbeat and the next, she’d had enough…enough of his hostility when she’d done nothing except have the misfortune to be a single female…enough of his flinty looks and distrust. So he’d been hurt by a woman. She could sympathize with that. But he wasn’t the only one who’d ever had the misfortune to be hurt by love. And she wasn’t the one who’d hurt him!
Drawing herself up to her full five foot seven inches, she somehow managed to look down her nose at him in spite of the fact that he towered over her by a good six or more inches. “I wasn’t going to contaminate the place, just look at the bed. But that’s not what you’re worried about, is it, Mr. McBride? You’re afraid I’m going to trip you and beat you to the ground.
“Oh, don’t bother to deny it,” she said quickly when his brows snapped together in a fierce scowl that would have intimidated a lesser woman. “You think I’m some sort of loose floozy from L.A. looking for a little dancing between the sheets while I’m stuck here in the boondocks, and I’ve set my sights on you. Well, just for the record, you can relax. It’s not going to happen. And do you know why? Because I’m not interested. Which is a good thing for you, big guy,” she taunted softly, thumping him on the chest. “Because if I was, you wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Dismissing him with a toss of her head, she turned and walked out. And never knew that she left him standing there staring after her like a man who had just been hit by a two-by-four.
Tiny’s Pool Hall was the only place in town that came close to passing for a bar, and it was a poor substitute. Granted, there was a jukebox in the corner, and smoke hung like a cloud overhead, rising unrestricted to the bare rafters, but the only alcoholic beverage sold was beer, and that was limited to three per customer. The locals knew the rules and had long since accepted the fact that Tiny was never going to let anyone leave his place drunk, but the Hollywood crowd was something else. Packed shoulder to shoulder in the humble establishment and looking for action, they grumbled and whined about everything from the size of the minuscule dance floor, where couples were packed together like sardines, to the fact that the beer wasn’t imported. But no one left. Because unless someone wanted to check out Ed’s Diner down the street and get something to eat, Tiny’s was the only hot spot in town open after eight o’clock.
Seated alone at a rough-hewn table far in the back, Joe nursed a beer and never noticed the interested looks he was getting from some of the female cast members of Beloved Stranger. Instead, his gaze was focused inward, on the film’s star and the cocky, knowing little smile she’d given him right before she’d lifted that pert nose of hers into the air and sailed out of his workshop like a princess decked out in a tiara.
So she thought he wouldn’t stand a chance if she decided she wanted him, did she? he fumed. That he had no choice in the matter? Like bloody hell! He’d gone after her to tell her he had no intention of dropping at her feet like the rest of the men in the country, but by the time he’d reached the house, she’d already gone upstairs. Just the idea of confronting her in her bedroom had been enough to send him packing. He’d only taken time to relight the pilot light on the hot water heater, then he’d gotten the hell out of there.
He hadn’t been able to go back to the barn, not without envisioning Ms. Tinseltown there, so muttering curses, he’d headed into town to Tiny’s for a beer and a game or two of pool. That should have been enough to push the lady from his mind, but half the population of L.A. seemed to be crammed into the pool hall, and everywhere he looked were reminders of Angel. The blonde on the dance floor wore her hair like Angel’s; the brunette at the bar had her smile. It was enough to drive a man to drink.
He had to admit he’d thought about it—having his three-beer limit at Tiny’s, then stopping at the Quick Stop on the edge of town and picking up a six-pack to take home. Maybe then he’d be able to forget at least for a little while that he not only shared his home with Hollywood’s newest sweetheart, but that he slept right across the hall from her night after night after night. And he didn’t like it, dammit! He didn’t care how much she stayed out of his hair, he didn’t want her there.
He just wanted to be left alone in his own home. To be able to fall into bed at the end of a long, hard day and actually fall asleep instead of lying there half the night, staring at the ceiling and fighting the seductive allure of that damn scent of hers. And when he finally did sleep, to be able to control the hot, erotic dreams he had of the woman. Was that too damn much to ask?
Images from last night’s dream swirled before his mind’s eye, teasing him, tempting him, driving him crazy. Grinding a curse between his clenched teeth, he started to signal Tiny for another beer. But he hadn’t gotten drunk over a woman since Belinda had walked out on him, and he wasn’t about to start now. Throwing down a generous tip on the table, he pushed to his feet and walked out, the hard don’t-mess-with-me glint in his eyes just daring anyone to get in his way. No one did.
When he got back to the ranch and saw that the light in Angel’s bedroom was still on, he didn’t even turn into his driveway, but continued on past it and drove straight to his brother’s. It wasn’t until he braked to a stop in Zeke’s driveway and saw that the house was shrouded in darkness that he glanced at his watch and realized it was nearly twelve. Damn! He should have known Zeke and Elizabeth would be asleep. With a two-year-old in the house, their day started early.
Which left him with nowhere to go but home. And it was a sorry state of affairs when a man didn’t want to go home.
Scowling at the thought, he just sat there with the motor running and never noticed a light flare on in the living room or Zeke step out onto the porch. Dressed in nothing but jeans, he called out teasingly, “Are you going to sit there all night or come inside?”
He swore softly. “I just wanted to talk, but I didn’t realize it was so late. Go on back to bed before Elizabeth wakes up. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
If it had been anyone but his brother sitting in his driveway wanting to visit, Zeke would have sent them packing. But Joe didn’t make a habit of showing up on his doorstep at that hour of the night without a damn good reason. Something was obviously troubling him.
“You’re here,” he retorted. “We might as well talk now. Come on up on the porch while I get us a beer.”
Not giving him a chance to argue, he turned and went back into the house for the beers. When he came back outside, it was to find Joe prowling the length of the porch and back. Arching a brow in surprise, Zeke handed him his beer. It wasn’t like Joe to be restless. The only time Zeke had ever seen him let his emotions get the best of him was when it came to family…or a woman. And since there were no family emergencies that he knew about, it had to be a woman eating at him.
It was about damn time.
Grinning, he sank down into his favorite porch rocker and watched with amusement as Joe set his beer down on the porch railing without even tasting it. “Sorry I couldn’t help you with moving the cattle today, but I couldn’t put off picking up that maimed mamma wolf and her pups north of Denver. The locals were in an uproar and pressuring the sheriff to put them all down, even the pups.”
“Idiots,” Joe growled in disgust. “You get them settled okay?”
Zeke nodded. He and Elizabeth had opened a wildlife refuge for injured animals on the ranch after they were married, and now they got rescue calls from all over the West. “Merry had to amputate the mother’s shattered front leg,” he said regretfully, remembering how she’d agonized over the decision but done the only humane thing she could. “So she’ll spend the rest of her life with us, but Elizabeth’s hoping the pups’ll be able to be released back into the wild eventually.”
“If anyone can pull that off, Elizabeth can.”
Zeke had to agree. A wolf biologist, his Lizzie had pulled off a miracle or two in the past, and she’d do it again. Taking a swig of his beer, he stretched out his legs and asked casually, “Everything going okay around here?”
Joe shrugged. “Well enough. You’ve always got some jackass spooking the cattle, but other than that, I guess things are going as well as can be expected.”
“And your houseguest?” he prodded, his blue eyes twinkling with devilment. “How’s she working out?”
In the time it took to blink, Joe stiffened like a poker and it was all Zeke could do not to laugh. “She’s not a guest, she’s a renter, and she does whatever she damn well pleases,” he snapped. “And don’t get that look in your eye. I know what you’re thinking and you’re barking up the wrong tree. I haven’t looked twice at the woman.”
“Oh, really? So she has nothing to do with this foul mood you’re in?”
“Of course not!”
“You just showed up here at midnight to shoot the breeze? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Pretty much,” he retorted, stung. “And to let you know that Cassie’s bed will be ready the day after tomorrow. I thought Lizzie would want to know.”
That information could have been passed along in a phone call at a more reasonable hour and they both knew it. “Nice try,” Zeke drawled, making no attempt to hold back a grin. “But I’m not buying it, big brother. I know you better than that. And from where I’m sitting, I’d say Miss Angel Wiley has you rattled, and I think it’s great. It’s about time someone shook you up.”
“I’m not shook up, dammit!”
“No? Then why are you acting like an old bear with a sore paw? Something’s needling you, and if it’s not a problem with the ranch, then it’s got to be a woman. Namely the one you’re living with—”
“I’m not living with her! She’s renting a couple of rooms, for God’s sake.”
“Same thing,” Zeke said, dismissing that argument with a wave of his hand. “Bottom line is half the men in the country would kill to be in your shoes. I haven’t met her face-to-face, but I’ve seen her movies, and she’s an incredibly attractive woman. So have you kissed her yet?”
His teeth clenching on an oath, Joe gave serious consideration to killing him. But Elizabeth loved him, though God knew why, and Cassie was entitled to grow up with a father…even if he was as irritating as hell. “I’m not even going to bother to answer that,” he growled. “There’s no reasoning with you tonight. I’m going home.”
Storming past him out to his pickup, he never saw Zeke’s grin of delight. He knew he was letting him push his buttons, but he couldn’t stop himself when his brother called after him, “Tell Angel hi!” Shooting him a rude hand gesture, he drove away in a cloud of dust, cursing all the way.
In the deep silence of the night, a door slowly eased open downstairs, and Angel came awake with a start. Disoriented, she frowned at her shadowy surroundings, trying to get her bearings, when she heard it again. The quiet tread of a footfall somewhere downstairs. Her heart slamming against her ribs, she froze and tried to convince herself it was just Joe.
But in the six days she’d lived in his home, she’d come to recognize the sound of his step, and even in the dead of night, he never moved quite so stealthily. And when she soundlessly slipped from her bed to look out her bedroom window, Joe’s truck wasn’t parked in its customary spot in the front driveway. He’d left soon after they’d spoken in the barn, and he obviously hadn’t returned.
The fear hit her then, low and hard and all the more terrifying because over the last week she had foolishly begun to think she’d found a safe place to bring Emma. Idiot! She should have known better. Every time she’d changed her phone number, hadn’t her stalker discovered the new one within a matter of days? And in spite of a state-of-the-art security system, hadn’t he managed to find a way into her house twice to leave gifts for her? The police had warned her he was exceptionally clever—
A nearly soundless step on the stairs had her thoughts grinding to a halt and her heart jumping into her throat. He was coming for her, just as he’d promised. Dear God, she had to do something!
Panic clawed at her. Every instinct she had urged her to run for her life, but she could hear him on the stairs, climbing steadily, and soon he would be at the top. Her eyes wide, she looked wildly around in the darkness of her room for some kind of weapon, but the room was simply furnished. Then she spied the vase sitting on the dresser. Grabbing it, her heart thundering in her ears, she tiptoed out into the hall to lie in wait for the man who had made the last two months of her life a living nightmare.
From where I’m sitting, I’d say Miss Angel Wiley has you shook up.
Zeke’s words still ringing in his ears, taunting him, Joe swore under his breath and carefully made his way up the stairs in the darkness. Nobody had him shook up, especially Miss Hollywood. If he was restless and on edge, it was just because he didn’t like being forced to share his house with a woman. Any woman. Angel could have been eighty-six and as pious as a nun, and he would have still felt the same way.
Lost in his furious thoughts, he was halfway up the stairs when he suddenly noticed a slight movement in the shadows at the top landing. His step never faltered, but every muscle in his body tensed. He never locked his doors, had never felt the need. The house couldn’t even be seen from the highway, and crime was rare in Liberty Hill. But then again, so were strangers…at least they had been until Hollywood came to town.
Too late, he remembered Angel sleeping upstairs, unaware that someone had broken in. Was she safe? Fury flashed in his eyes at the thought that someone might have harmed her. She might drive him nuts, but by God, no one was going to hurt her while he was around. Braced for a fight, he reached the top of the stairs.
He had no time to think after that, only react. The intruder moved in the shadows off to his left, and suddenly something came flying at him in the dark. Cursing, he dodged it just before it could connect with his head and heard it crash against the wall behind him. Furious, he hit the hall light switch almost at the same instant he launched himself at his attacker. It wasn’t until his arms closed around a struggling, squirming woman that he realized it was Angel.
“What the devil!”
“Joe!”
“You were expecting Jack the Ripper?” he snapped, furious now that he knew she was safe. “Of course it’s me! Dammit, what were you doing hiding in the dark like that? I could have hurt you!”
“Me? You were the one sneaking around like a thief! When I heard someone moving around downstairs and I saw your truck wasn’t here, I thought someone had broken in. Why didn’t you turn on a light, for God’s sake?”
“Because I don’t need a light to see where I’m going in my own home! And I didn’t park out front because my truck is low on gas, so I left it by the gas tank so I could fill it up in the morning.”
Still holding her close, Joe glared at her and only just then noticed that she was wearing nothing but a pale blue nightgown. Made of cotton and designed more for comfort than seduction, it was hardly the type of nightwear you’d expect Hollywood’s latest sweetheart to wear to bed, but there was something about its very simplicity that would have tempted a saint. And God knew, he was no saint.
Stunned, he knew right then he should have released her and gotten the hell away from her. But with a will of their own, his fingers tightened on her arms, drawing her closer, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it. He watched her eyes flare with awareness, and suddenly the air between them was thick with a tension that had nothing to do with anger. His gaze dropped to her mouth, and just like every other man in America who’d sat in a darkened theater and watched her on the big screen, he found himself wondering what she tasted like. Right or wrong, he had to find out.
In the bright glare of the hall light, she read the intention in his eyes and stiffened like a board. “No.”
“Yes,” he growled, and covered her mouth with his.
The second his lips touched hers, he knew it was a mistake. The sweetest things always were. Like an addiction that called to a man’s very soul, her soft, generous mouth trembled under his, innocently teasing, tempting, until the need to taste became a need for more. His head clouded, and with a low groan, he gathered her closer and took the kiss deeper.
Her senses reeling, Angel clung to him and tried to tell herself this couldn’t be happening. Not with Joe McBride. He didn’t like her, had made it clear from the moment he’d laid eyes on her that he didn’t want anything to do with her. And the feeling was mutual. She wasn’t any crazier about him. He was cold and distant and whenever the opportunity presented itself, he went out of his way to make her feel unwelcome. If anyone had told her he was a sensuous man who could turn her knees to butter with just one kiss, she would have called them a liar. She would have been wrong.
And it was that, more than anything, that abruptly brought her to her senses. The last time she’d let herself be taken in by a man’s kisses, she’d been wrong about him, too. She’d been young and naive and so damn trusting that just thinking about it made her wince. She’d actually thought she’d found her prince. Instead, she’d been taken in by a toad. She’d promised herself then that she’d never make that kind of mistake again, and that wasn’t a promise she intended to break.
Furious with herself for letting him tempt her even for a second, she abruptly broke free of his arms and quickly sidestepped him when he instinctively reached for her again. Her blue eyes sparking fire, she snapped, “I don’t know what you think is going on here, cowboy, but somebody read the script wrong, and it’s not me. Back off!”
The taste of her still on his tongue, infuriating him, Joe rasped, “You’re the one who came at me in the dark dressed in nothing but a skimpy gown. I only took you up on your invitation, sweetheart.”
She gasped, outraged. “I already told you I thought you were an intruder! What was I supposed to do? Stop to change while someone was sneaking up the stairs to rape me? I don’t think so!”
She was right, of course. He was being completely unreasonable, and that only angered him more. He’d taken advantage of the situation, of a guest in his home, and he’d never done that in his life. But, dammit, he wasn’t made of stone! What man wouldn’t lose his head when he found Angel Wiley in his arms and dressed for bed?
“Next time, throw on a robe before you leave your room,” he retorted coldly.
“I should have known you’d find a way to make this my fault,” she tossed back. “That’s just like a man. Always blame the woman. Well, for your information, Mr. McBride, this never would have happened if you hadn’t sneaked into the house like a thief in the night!”
“So now it’s my fault for being considerate? I didn’t want to wake you, dammit!”
“Well, you did!”
“Well, excuse me for breathing. Next time, I’ll come stomping in so you’ll be sure to know it’s me. Will that make you happy?”
“As a clam.”
“Fine!”
Seething, they glared at each other like two eight-year-olds facing off in the playground across a line drawn in the dirt. It was a fight neither of them could win. Frustrated, Joe swore and turned to storm into his bedroom. A split second after he slammed his door, he heard the echo of Angel’s across the hall.
Tearing off his clothes, he let them lay where they fell and crawled into bed, determined to forget the entire incident and go right to sleep. But long after the dust settled in the hall and the silence of the night crept back into the house, sleep eluded him. Because every time he closed his eyes, he could see the awareness in Angel’s eyes right before he kissed her, taste the sweetness of her on his tongue, feel the soft, enticing curve of her breasts pressed against his chest as he’d wrapped her close in his arms. Furious with her, he tried to convince himself it had been too long since he’d had a woman, that he would have reacted the same to any female who appeared before him in her nightgown, but his body wasn’t buying it. There was only one woman he ached for tonight, dammit, and like it or not, that was Angel Wiley.
Chapter 3
After kissing Joe McBride, locking lips with Garrett Elliot was like kissing a snake. Angel hated it—and despised him—but there was no getting around it. Garrett played her love interest in the movie, and when the script called for a kissing scene, she had no choice but to step into his arms.
She liked to think she was a professional and a damn good actress. She didn’t so much as cringe when Garrett made one little mistake after another and the director called for the scene to be reshot time and time again. Instead, she prided herself on never breaking out of character. Her face alight with the love her character felt for the man she adored, she lifted her mouth to Garrett’s and melted into his arms. No one but she and Garrett knew that her skin crawled every time he touched her.
It had always been that way between them, from the day they’d met on the set for the first time last year during the making of Wild Texas Love. One of the most sought after leading men in Hollywood, he’d had a reputation for sweeping his leading ladies off to his bed…until he’d worked with her. She’d turned him down flat, and he’d never forgiven her for that.
If she hadn’t been so desperate to get out of L.A. for a while, she never would have agreed to work with him again. He’d made her pay in the past by spreading outrageous lies about her and earning her an unfair reputation, and now he was making her pay again by deliberately blowing one take after another so she would be forced to kiss him again and again until he thought she had suffered enough.
She could have told him that that point had long since come and gone, but she’d be damned if she’d give the worm the satisfaction. So she hid her distaste deep inside, where no one could see, and told herself the man she was kissing wasn’t Garrett, but his character, Sebastian. When she closed her eyes, she almost believed it.
She might not have completely convinced herself, but the director, obviously bought it. “Cut!” Charles yelled. “That’s a take.”
Relieved, Angel jerked out of Garrett’s arms and whirled away, her only thought to get back to her dressing room where she could wash away his touch. She’d barely taken three steps when she found herself face-to-face with Joe.
After the heated words they’d exchanged last night and a kiss that she hadn’t been able to put out of her mind, she’d left the house that morning still feeling like the injured party. She’d promised herself that it would be a cold day in hell before she spoke to him again, but she’d forgotten she would have to spend the morning kissing the devil.
“I didn’t know you were on the set,” she said stiffly. “How long have you been here?”
“Long enough. I’ve been waiting to talk to Charles.”
Behind her, Garrett said something crude to one of the crew and didn’t care who heard. Her face expressionless, she thought she hid her distaste well, but Joe shot a sharp glance at the other man, then brought his gaze back to her and studied her through narrowed eyes that saw far too much. “Are you all right?”
She started to say no, that kissing Garrett always made her feel slimy, only to remember what Myrtle had told her about the McBrides. An old-fashioned family raised on values that had unfortunately gone out of style in today’s world, they were protective of friends and family and anyone in need of help. As much as Joe might dislike the idea of her living in his house, she couldn’t imagine him standing idly by and doing nothing if he suspected Garrett had taken advantage of her or any other woman. He’d confront him. And while she had to admit that she would like nothing more than to see Garrett have to answer to someone who wouldn’t hesitate to knock him on his ass, he was her problem to deal with and she’d handle it—without ending up on the cover of the tabloids again.
Drawing on all her skills as an actress, she laughed gaily. “Are you kidding? I just spent most of the morning kissing the number one heartthrob in America. Why wouldn’t I be all right?”
She would have sworn her smile was carefree and deserving of an Academy Award, her tone right on target, but Joe was shrewder than she’d given him credit for. For what seemed like an eternity, he just stared at her with those razor-sharp brown eyes of his, probing to her very soul. Returning his gaze unblinkingly, she didn’t so much as twitch an eyelash, but whatever he saw in her eyes did nothing to soften the rigid set of his square jaw.
“If he does anything that makes you feel uncomfortable,” he growled, “I want to hear about it. Understood?”
She understood all right—if he and Garrett locked horns, she would be the one who would be blamed! And that left her with no choice but to make excuses for her costar. “Garrett’s a jerk, but he’s not usually as obnoxious as he was this morning. I guess he was paying me back for getting him moved to Myrtle’s. He’ll be fine once he cools down.”
“I don’t care if you had him moved to Mars, that’s no excuse for that kind of behavior. If he doesn’t want a lesson in manners, he’d better toss the attitude and clean up his act.” Shooting Garrett one last warning glare, he strode off to meet with the director.
Staring after him, Angel sighed in relief. Not because a potential fight between the two men had been averted, but because Joe McBride was turning out to be everything she’d thought he would be. If he was willing to take Garrett to task for his juvenile behavior, she could just imagine what he would do to a man who threatened not only her, but her daughter.
“Mommy!” With a shriek of delight, Emma was out of the studio limo and racing up Joe’s front walk toward Angel as fast as her dimpled little legs would carry her.
Tears welling in her eyes, Angel met her halfway and scooped her up into a bear hug, clutching her close. Mine, she thought with a sob. Every time she touched her golden curls, looked into dancing blue eyes that were the image of her own, it still amazed her that God had blessed her with this precious three-year-old bundle of energy and unconditional love.
Lord, she’d missed her! She’d wanted to send for her days ago, right after she’d moved into Joe’s, but she’d had to force herself to be patient, to make sure she was doing the right thing and could really trust Joe McBride before she brought her daughter into his home. Yesterday morning on the set, when he’d told her he wanted to know if Garrett stepped over the line, he’d convinced her that he wasn’t a man who would tolerate anyone abusing the females under his care. She didn’t care what he thought of her—her daughter would be safe with him and that was all that mattered.
From the second she’d found out she was pregnant with her, nothing had ever mattered but her baby. She couldn’t, unfortunately, say the same thing about Kurt Austin, Emma’s father. The director of her first movie, older and much more experienced than she, he’d made it clear right from the beginning that all he wanted from her was a nice, quiet little affair while they were making the movie. But she was in love for the first time in her life and sure that what they had would last a lifetime. She’d been wrong. It ended the day she told him she was pregnant and he coolly suggested she get an abortion.
Alone and pregnant and twenty-one, she’d wanted to go home to New Mexico then, to her father and the security of the home where she’d grown up, to have her baby. But her father was a hard, conservative religious man who’d never understood her love for acting. He’d disowned her when she ran away to Hollywood, and she couldn’t bring herself to turn to him for help when she was in trouble. So she’d retreated to a small town in California where no one knew her and had Emma away from the glitter and glamour and gossip of L.A.
She was hers, no one else’s, and somehow, she’d been able to keep her daughter’s existence a well-guarded secret from most of the world. She knew that couldn’t last—the more famous she became, the more diligently the press dug into her past—but for now, it wasn’t the press she was worried about. It was a single man, a psychopath who stalked her, a crazed fan who thought he was in love with her and threatened to stop at nothing to be with her. He’d already broken into her home, already left notes warning her that when she finally committed herself to him, there would be no place in their life for another man’s child. If Angel couldn’t get rid of her, he could.
It was because of him that she’d agreed to work with Garrett again in spite of the fact that she despised him. It was because of him, this man who seemed to know her every move regardless of the security measures she took to protect herself and her daughter, that she’d jumped at the chance to get out of L.A. He was the reason she’d pulled whatever strings she had to so she and Emma could stay with Joe.
She should have explained the situation to Joe, should have warned him that there was a very good chance that her stalker would follow her to Colorado and cause trouble when he discovered her whereabouts. But Joe had been so set against her, so determined that she wasn’t spending so much as a single night under his roof, that she’d been afraid to chance telling him that two other females would be invading his space once she was sure it would be safe for them to do so. Because that wasn’t part of his contract with the studio. The agreement was that he would rent a bedroom and office to one actor; there’d been no mention of a three-year-old and her nanny tagging along.
He would, no doubt, be livid, she thought as she nuzzled Emma’s neck and made her giggle. But if he was the man she thought he was, he would never direct his anger at an innocent child. If she was wrong, the three of them would be out on the street by nightfall.
“That’s my girl,” she said huskily, tightening her arms around her. “Did you have a good trip? Did Laura pack your teddy and blanky?”
“And Miss Annabelle and my bunny angel, too!” Dimples flashing and her eyes dancing, she pulled back. “They rode all the way with me.” And taking off like a shot, she raced back to the limo to collect her favorite toys.
Laughing, Angel rose to her feet, love squeezing her heart as she watched her daughter struggle to hold a ragged, overgrown teddy bear and a doll that was as big as she was. “God, I’ve missed her. And you, too,” she added, giving Laura an affectionate hug.
Thirty years her senior, Laura Carson had applied for the job of nanny when Emma was barely six months old and Angel’s skyrocketing career had begun to make it impossible for her to continue to care for the baby alone. Inexperienced, filled with guilt at the idea of leaving her child with a stranger, she hadn’t liked any of the women she’d interviewed until she’d met Laura. She was older than the other applicants, wiser and more settled, with a glint of patient humor in her gray eyes that had instantly appealed to Angel. She’d hired her on the spot and never regretted it.
“We’ve missed you, too,” the older woman said as she returned her hug. “Emma was so excited about seeing you that she was practically bouncing off the ceiling last night.”
Her smile fading, she glanced past Angel to the house and the open range that surrounded it for a thousand yards in every direction. There wasn’t another sign of civilization for as far as the eye could see. “When you said this place was secluded, you weren’t kidding. You could see anyone coming from a long way off. You had any visitors?”
Not pretending to misunderstand, Angel said, “No, thank God. It’s been very quiet. How about you? Anyone drop by unexpectedly at the house?”
“No, but the mailman delivered a package the day before yesterday,” she said in a quiet voice that wouldn’t carry to Emma’s sharp ears. “I didn’t open it, but it was postmarked L.A. and addressed the same as before.”
To my darling Angel. All too easily, Angel could see the rough scrawl on the packages that had been delivered to her house time and again over the course of the last two months. The gifts were always the same—revealing lingerie, nightgowns and teddies and intimate apparel that a stranger, a pervert, had not only bought specifically for her, but in his twisted mind, she knew he’d pictured her wearing it. Just thinking about it turned her stomach.
“You sent it to the police?”
Laura nodded. “Unfortunately, it was the same as the others—wiped clean of fingerprints and mailed in a plain cardboard box that looked like a thousand others that go through the post office every day. There’s no way to trace who sent it.”
“When was it mailed?”
“Two days after you left town. From L.A.,” she stressed. “It looks like your plan worked. The sleazeball doesn’t even know you’ve left town.”
Relieved, Angel didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. Thank God, thank God! When she’d decided to accept the role of Grace in Beloved Stranger, her biggest worry had been how she was going to get out of L.A. with Emma and Laura without her stalker following them. She’d known it was only a matter of time before he discovered where she was, but before he did, she intended to have her daughter ensconced somewhere where he couldn’t get to her.
Tricking him hadn’t been easy. He knew where she worked and lived and she couldn’t just walk out her front door with Emma without him following them. So she had her agent circulate the rumor to the press that she was laid up at home with a viral infection. While her stalker thought she was too sick to leave her bed, she’d slipped out of her house in the dark of night and caught a late flight to Tucson. From there, she’d rented a car and driven to Liberty Hill without her tormentor ever knowing she’d left town. Then, just yesterday, she’d notified Laura it was time to make a move.
“You’re sure you weren’t followed?” she asked worriedly. “We started shooting on Monday. He’s bound to have heard by now that I’m here on location. He must have been watching the house all week, waiting for you to leave with Emma so he could follow you.”
“If he did, all he saw was the two of us going to Disneyland in the limo.”
“The driver was able to drop you at the front gate without any problems? What about Tammy?” she asked, referring to Laura’s sister, Tammy, who had worked at the park for years. “Did she have any trouble getting you in?”
All too aware of the terror that Angel had lived in for the past few months, Laura sympathized with her fear of something going wrong. “Everything went like clockwork,” she reassured her. “Tammy was waiting for us and already had our entrance passes. If your stalker was following us, he got held up at the regular ticket booth and had to stand in line just like everybody else. By the time he paid and got in the park, we’d already left through a fire exit in the Fantasyland section, where another limo was waiting for us.”
Her gray eyes lighting on Emma, who had found the porch swing on the front porch and was swinging her menagerie of toys, she laughed softly. “For a minute there, though, I was sure we were toast. I warned Emma we were just going to take a quick walk through the park, that we’d come back another time and stay the whole day. I thought she understood she wasn’t going to get to ride any rides. Boy, was I wrong! When she realized we were leaving, she let out a cry that could have been heard on the other side of the park. I thought security was going to stop me for child abuse.”
“Oh, Laura, she didn’t!”
Chuckling, she said, “Oh, yes, she did. Luckily, we were only two steps from the fire exit when she started pitching a fit. I scooped her up, dropped her into the limo, and we took off for the airport. She finally calmed down when I reminded her that we were going to be staying on a ranch with you and she might get to ride a pony.”
It was a logical promise to make to a child, but one Angel wasn’t sure they could deliver on. “That could be a problem,” she said with a grimace. “I didn’t tell the man we’re staying with—Joe McBride—that you were coming. He’s not going to be happy about it.”
“Oh, Angel, you didn’t! Why?”
“Because he doesn’t even want me here. He’s divorced and has nothing good to say about women. If I’d told him my daughter and her nanny were going to be joining me, he’d have tossed me out on my ear.”
“But he can still do that. Then what are we going to do?”
“He won’t,” Angel assured her, love misting her eyes as they rested on her daughter. “Not after he sees Emma. He may be a hard man, but he’s not cruel. He would never turn his back on a child in trouble.” Not if he was the man she thought he was.
Praying she hadn’t misjudged him, she flashed a confident smile. “It’s all going to work out fine. Let’s get your things out of the car and get you two settled inside. If we’re going to keep the peace with Joe, there’s a schedule you need to know about.”
He hadn’t been able to think of anything but her all day. The feel of her in his arms the other night. The quick, infuriating spurt of jealousy that hit him when he found her locked in Garrett Elliot’s arms on the set. The rage that washed over him when he saw the relief and revulsion she hadn’t quite been able to hide when the director called “Cut!” and she could finally step away from her costar. He’d wanted to flatten Elliot then. And carry Angel off somewhere where no one could ever touch her again.
She had him tied in knots—because of a kiss that never should have happened, dammit!—and he didn’t like it. She was a boarder in his home, nothing more, and had no right to push her way into his thoughts whenever the mood struck her. He didn’t want to care what she did or who she did it with as long as she left him the hell alone. But he couldn’t shake the image of her face when she’d pulled out of Elliot’s arms. What had the bastard done to her?
The question nagged at him long after he left the set to repair a downed fence near the ranch entrance that some drunk had knocked down, and the more he thought about it, the more tempted he was to hunt down Elliot and demand some answers from the jerk. When he saw the crew leaving at the end of the day, he climbed into his pickup and automatically turned toward town…and Myrtle’s, to talk to the jackass.
Suddenly realizing what he was doing, he swore and slammed on his brakes. What the hell was he doing? Angel Wiley didn’t need him to fight her battles. In fact, he’d never seen a woman less in need of protection. If she could stand up to him when he’d threatened to throw her out of his house and try to bash his head in when she thought he was a thief in the night, she could handle Elliot with one hand tied behind her back. She didn’t need him, she didn’t need anyone.
Turning around, he drove home in a foul mood that didn’t lighten much when he saw Zeke’s Suburban in his driveway. He was in no mood for company, but then he saw Elizabeth and his niece, Cassie, in the vehicle, and waved. “What’s up?” he asked his brother as Zeke stepped from his Suburban.
Zeke took one look at the hard line of his jaw and said, “Uh-oh, rough day, huh? We dropped by for Cassie’s bed, but we can get it tomorrow.”
Cassie let out a wail from inside the truck at that, and Joe couldn’t help but grin. One of the few people who could tease him into a smile when he was in a bear of a mood, Cassendra Ann McBride was two years old and dimple cute, not to mention just a tad willful. And he was crazy about her. When she wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a baby soft kiss, he just turned to putty and so did everyone else in the family.
Humor glinting in his eyes, he told Zeke, “You don’t really think you’re going to be able to leave here without it, do you?”
“Pweeze, Uncle Joe,” a pitiful voice called from the back seat. “Can I have my bed?”
Seated in the front passenger seat, Elizabeth laughed. “Don’t let her con you, Joe. She can sleep in her old crib one more night if you don’t want to mess with this now.”
“Mama!”
“And disappoint my favorite niece?” he said, chuckling at Cassie’s indignant tone. “I don’t think so.” Opening the back door, he unbuckled her car seat and held out his hands to her. “How about a piggyback ride to the barn, your highness?” With a squeal of delight, she launched herself into his arms.
Cassie was delighted with her first big girl bed, and Elizabeth was thrilled. “It’s beautiful, Joe. Just perfect. Where in the world did you find it?”
“It belonged to an old friend of Myrtle’s in Gunnison,” he said as he helped Zeke carry the refinished bed out to the Suburban and load it in the back. “Myrtle’s been trying to buy it off of her for years, but she couldn’t bring herself to let it go, then a couple of weeks ago, she suddenly decided it was time to get rid of it. The second Myrtle described it to me, with the angels on it and everything, I knew it was perfect for Cassie.”
“It’s going to take more than a couple of wooden angels to watch over her,” Zeke retorted, grinning broadly. “Last night after I put her to bed, I heard a noise in the hall and found her trying to slide down the banister. If she’d have been a couple of inches taller, she’d have managed it, too! I’m telling you, the kid’s fearless. I don’t know where she gets it from.”
Joe choked on a laugh. “Are you kidding?! If I remember correctly, you were climbing on calves, trying to be a bronc rider, when you were three, and you jumped out of the hayloft when you were five and broke your arm. And Lizzie works with wolves, for God’s sake! Where do you think she gets it from?”
“He’s got a point, sweetheart,” Elizabeth said dryly, her blue eyes sparkling with laughter. “You might as well face it, she’s going to make both of us gray before our time.”
Zeke groaned. “Maybe should lock her in her room until she’s thirty-five,” he began, only to break off as Angel came around the side of the house with an older woman and a little girl who wasn’t much bigger than Cassie. “Looks like your houseguest has company,” he told Joe quietly, glancing past him to the two women.
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