A Cold Creek Secret
RaeAnne Thayne
The soldier and the society princess… Just back from a tour of duty, all Major Brant Western wanted was a hot meal and a warm bed. What he didn’t need was a stunning socialite in disguise who’d just shown up at his family’s ranch. Scandal trailed bad girl Mimi everywhere she went. But once Brant discovered her secret, how could he turn her away?Being stranded in the middle of nowhere in a blizzard was not Mimi’s idea of fun. Until she started to realise that sexy soldier Brant could offer her more than just shelter from the storm.
A man was staring at her.
Not just any man, either. He was tall, perhaps 6'1” or 6'2", with short dark hair and blue eyes, powerful muscles and a square, determined sort of jaw. He was just the sort of man who made her most nervous, the kind who didn’t look as if they could be swayed by a flirty smile and a sidelong look.
He was staring at her as if she had just sprouted horns out of the top of her head. She frowned, uncomfortable with his scrutiny though she couldn’t have said exactly why.
She had no clear memory of arriving here, only a vague sense that something was very wrong, that someone was supposed to help her sort everything out.
She looked at the man again, registering that he was extraordinarily handsome in a clean-cut sort of way.
Had she been looking for him? She blinked, trying to sort through the jumble of her thoughts.
Then suddenly she remembered.
Baby. The baby. Her baby.
About the Author
RAEANNE THAYNE finds inspiration in the beautiful northern Utah mountains, where she lives with her husband and three children. Her books have won numerous honors, including three RITA® Award nominations from Romance Writers of America and a Career Achievement Award from RT Book Reviews magazine. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website at www.raeannethayne.com.
Dear Reader,
From the very first moment I came up with the idea for my latest Cowboys of Cold Creek trilogy, I fell in love with Brant Western and couldn’t wait to write about him. He’s deeply honourable but conflicted, grieving the loss of several people close to him and in dire need of a little peace between deployments. Part of me would have loved to give him that … but what kind of boring story would that have been?
Instead, I decided to shake up his world by sending him the most unlikely of heroines, Mimi Van Hoyt, heiress, celebrity, tabloid princess du jour. Mimi is a complicated woman. Like all of us, she’s made mistakes but she’s finally at a place in her life where she’s ready to learn from them. From the beginning I knew she would be the perfect woman for Brant, that she would teach him to laugh again, to not take himself so seriously, to squeeze every drop of joy he could from life. I loved writing their story and helping these two people find each other!
All my best,
RaeAnne
A COLD CREEK SECRET
RAEANNE THAYNE
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To the wonderful writers of Utah RWA for your support, encouragement and friendship.
Chapter One
No matter what exotic parts of the world he visited, Brant Western hadn’t forgotten how the cold of a February evening in Idaho could clutch at his lungs with icy claws that refused to let go.
In the past hour, the light snow flurries of the afternoon had turned vicious, intense. The active storm front forecasters had been warning about since he arrived for his mid-tour leave two days earlier had finally started its relentless march across this tiny corner of eastern Idaho toward Wyoming.
Icy flakes spit against his unprotected face with all the force of an Al Asad sandstorm. Somehow they found their way to every exposed surface, even sliding beneath the collar of his heavy shearling-lined ranch coat.
This was the sort of Idaho night made for hunkering down by the fire with a good book and a cup of hot cocoa.
The picture had undeniable appeal, one of the many images of home that had sustained him through fierce firefights and long campaigns and endless nights under Afghan and Iraqi stars.
After, he reminded himself. When the few cattle at the Western Sky had been fed and all the horses were safe and snug in the barn, then he could settle in front of the fire with the thriller he’d picked up in the airport.
“Come on,Tag.We’re almost done, then we cans go home.”
His horse, a sturdy buckskin gelding, whinnied as if he completely understood every word and continued plodding along the faint outline of a road still visible under the quickly falling snow.
Brant supposed this was a crazy journey. The hundred head of cows and their calves weren’t even his cattle but belonged to a neighbor of the Western Sky who leased the land while Brant was deployed.
Carson McRaven took good care of his stock. Brant wouldn’t have agreed to the lease if he didn’t. But since the cattle were currently residing on his property, he felt responsibility toward them.
Sometimes that sense of obligation could be a genuine pain in the butt, he acknowledged as he and Tag finished making sure the warmers in the water troughs were functioning and turned back toward the house.
They hadn’t gone more than a dozen yards when he saw headlights slicing weakly through the fusillade of snow, heading toward the ranch far too quickly for these wintry conditions.
He squinted in the murky twilight. Who did he know who would be stupid or crazy enough to venture out in this kind of weather?
Easton was the logical choice but he had just talked to her on the phone a half hour earlier, before he had set out on this fool’s errand to check the ranch, and she had assured him that after the wedding they had both attended the night before, she was going to bed early with a lingering headache.
He worried about her. He couldn’t deny that. Easton hadn’t been the same since her aunt, his foster mother, had died of cancer several months earlier. Even longer, really. She hadn’t been the sweet, funny girl he’d known and loved most of his life maybe since around the time Guff Winder had died.
Maybe Easton wasn’t acting like herself, but he was pretty sure she had the good sense to hunker down at Winder Ranch during a storm like this. If she did venture out, he was pretty sure she was smart enough to slow down when conditions demanded it, especially since he and his foster brothers had drilled that into her head when they taught her to drive.
So if that driver wasn’t Easton, who was barreling toward his ranch on the cusp of a ferocious winter storm?
Somebody lost, no doubt. Sometimes these remote canyon roads were difficult to negotiate and the snow could obscure landmarks and address markings. With a sigh, he spurred Tag toward the road to point the wayward traveler in the right direction.
He was just wishing for a decent pair of optics so he could get a better look at who it might be, when the vehicle suddenly went into a slide. He saw it coming as the driver took a curve too fast and he pushed Tag faster, praying he was wrong. But an instant later the driver overcorrected and as Brant held his breath, the vehicle spun out on the icy road.
It was almost like some grisly slow-motion movie, watching it careen over the edge of the road, heading straight for Cold Creek, at the bottom of a maybe five-foot drop.
The vehicle disappeared from view and Brant smacked the reins and dug his heels into the horse’s sides, racing as fast as he dared toward the slide-out.
When he reached the creek’s edge, he could barely make out in the gathering darkness that the vehicle wasn’t quite submerged in the creek but it was a close thing. The SUV had landed on a large granite boulder in the middle of the creek bed, the front end crumpled and the rear wheels still on the bank.
Though he tried not to swear as a habit, he couldn’t help hissing out a fierce epithet as he scrambled down from the horse. In February, the creek was only a couple feet deep at most and the current wasn’t strong enough to carry off an SUV, but Brant would still have to get wet to get to the vehicle. There was no other way around it.
He heard a faint moan from inside and what sounded, oddly, like a tiny lamb bleating.
“Hang on,” he called. “I’ll get you out of there in a minute.”
Just in the minute or two he had stood surveying the scene and figuring out how to attack the problem, darkness had completely descended and the snow stung at him from every direction. The wind surged around him, taunting and cruel. Even as cold as he was from the storm, he wasn’t prepared for the frigid shock of the water through his boots and his lined Wranglers as he waded up to his knees.
He heard that moan again and this time he isolated the sound he had mistaken for a bleating lamb. It was a dog, a tiny one by the sound of it, yipping like crazy.
“Hang on,” he called. “Won’t take me but a minute and I’ll have you out of there, then we can call for help.”
When he slogged through the water and finally reached the vehicle, he yanked open the door. The driver was female, in her mid-twenties, maybe. He had a quick impression of wisps of dark curls that looked stark in contrast with her pale, delicate features.
With every passing second, her core temperature would be dropping and he knew he needed to extract her from the SUV and out of the water and the elements before he could completely assess her condition, though it went against every basic tenet of medical training each Army Ranger received, about not moving an injury victim until you knew the extent of injuries.
“Cold,” she murmured.
“I know. I’m sorry about that.”
He took it as a good sign that she didn’t moan or cry out when he scooped her out of the vehicle. If she had broken bones, she wouldn’t have been able to hide her discomfort. She didn’t say anything at all, just gripped his jacket tightly, her slight body trembling from both the shock and the cold, he guessed.
She wasn’t heavy, maybe a hundred and ten pounds, he judged, but carrying her through the ice-crusted water still took every bit of his energy. By the time he reached the bank and headed up the slight slope with her in his arms, he was breathing hard and was pretty sure he couldn’t feel his feet anymore.
He’d learned in the early days dealing with combat injuries that the trick to keeping injured men calm was to give as much information as he could about what was going on so they didn’t feel completely out of control about what was happening to them. He figured the same technique would work just as well in accident situations. “I’m going to take you back to my place on the horse, okay?”
She nodded and didn’t protest when he lifted her onto Tag’s back, where she clung tightly to the pommel.
“Hang on now,” he said when he was sure she was secure. “I’m going to climb on behind you and then we can get you warm and dry.”
When he tried to lift his icy, wet boot into the stirrup, it seemed to weigh as much as the woman had. He had to use all his strength just to raise it that two feet. Just as he shoved it in and prepared to swing the other leg onto the horse, she gasped.
“Simone. My Simone. Please, can you get her?”
He closed his eyes. Simone must be the dog. With the wind howling around them, he couldn’t hear the yips anymore and he’d been so focused on the woman that he’d completely forgotten about her dog.
“Are you okay up there for a minute?” he asked, dreading the idea of wading back through that frigid water.
“Yes. Oh, please.”
He had survived worse than a little cold water, he reminded himself. Much, much worse.
Returning to the vehicle took him only a moment. In the backseat, he found at least a half-dozen pieces of luggage and a tiny pink dog carrier. The occupant yipped and growled a big show at him.
“You want to stay here?” Brant growled right back. “Because I’d be just great with that.”
The dog immediately subsided and under other circumstances he might have smiled at the instant submission, if he wasn’t so concerned about getting them all back to the house in one piece. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
As he considered the logistics of things, he realized there was no way he could carry the bulky dog carrier and keep hold of the woman on horseback at the same time, so he unlatched the door of the carrier. A tiny white mound of fur hurtled into his arms.
Not knowing what else to do, he unzipped his coat halfway and shoved the puffball inside then zipped his coat up again, feeling ridiculously grateful none of the men in his company could see him risking hypothermia for six pounds of fuzzy canine.
The woman was still on Tag’s back, he was relieved to see when he made his torturous way back through the water, though she seemed to be slumping a little more.
She was dressed in a woefully inadequate pink parka with a fur-lined hood that looked more suited to some fancy après-ski party in Jackson Hole than braving the bitterness of an Idaho blizzard and Brant knew he needed to get them all back to the ranch house ASAP.
“Is she all right?” the woman asked.
What about him? Brant wondered grumpily. He was the one with frostbitten toes. But in answer, he unzipped his coat, where the furry white head popped out. The woman sighed in relief, her delicate features relaxing slightly, and Brant handed the dog up to her.
He caught a glimpse of the little pooch licking her face that looked oddly familiar as he climbed up behind her, but he didn’t take time to analyze it as he dug his heels into the horse’s side, grateful Tag was one of the strongest, steadiest horses in the small Western Sky stable.
“We’ll get you warmed up. I’ve got a fire in the woodstove at home. Just hang on a few minutes, okay?”
She nodded, slumping back against him, and he curved his arms around her, worried she would slide off.
“Thank you,” she murmured, so low he could hardly hear above the moaning of that bitter wind.
He pulled her as close as he could to block the storm as Tag trudged toward home at a hard walk, as fast as Brant dared push him.
“I’m Brant,” he said after a few moments. “What’s your name?”
She turned her head slightly and he saw dazed confusion in her eyes. “Where are we?” she asked instead of answering him.
He decided not to push her right now. No doubt she was still bemused from the shock of driving her SUV into a creek. “My ranch in eastern Idaho, the Western Sky. The house is just over that hill there.”
She nodded slightly and then he felt her slump bonelessly against him.
“Are you still with me?” he asked with concern. When she didn’t answer, his arms tightened around her. Out of pure instinct, he grabbed for the dog seconds before she would have dropped it as she slipped into unconsciousness—surely a fatal fall for the little animal from this height. He managed to snag the dog and shove it back into his coat and his arms tightened around the woman as he nudged Tag even faster.
It was a surreal journey, cold and tense and nerve-racking. He didn’t see the lights of the ranch house until they had nearly reached it. When he could finally make out the solid shape of the place, Brant was quite certain it was just about the most welcome sight he had ever beheld.
He led the horse to the bottom of the porch steps and dismounted carefully, keeping a hand on the woman so she didn’t teeter to the ground.
“Sorry about this, Tag,” he murmured to the horse as he lifted the woman’s limp form into his arms. “You’ve been great but I need you to hang on a few more minutes out here in the cold while I take care of our guest and then I can get you into the warm barn. You deserve some extra oats after tonight.”
The horse whinnied in response as Brant rushed up the porch steps and into the house. He quickly carried her inside to the family room where, just as he’d promised, the fire he’d built up in the woodstove before he left still sent out plenty of blissful warmth.
She didn’t stir when he laid her on the sofa. As he was bent over to unzip her parka so he could check her injuries, the dog wriggled free of the opening of Brant’s own coat and landed on her motionless mistress and began licking her face again, where a thin line of blood trickled from a cut just above her eye.
A raspy dog’s tongue was apparently enough to jolt her back to at least semiconsciousness. “Simone?” she murmured and her arms slid around the dog, who settled in the crook of her arms happily.
She was soaked through from the snow’s onslaught and Brant knew she wouldn’t truly warm up until he could get her out of her wet clothing. Beyond that, he had to examine her more closely for broken bones.
“I’m going to get you some dry clothes, okay? I’ll be right back.”
She opened her eyes again and nodded and he had the oddest sense again that he knew her. She couldn’t be from around here. He was almost positive of that, but then he hadn’t spent more than a few weeks at a time in Pine Gulch for fifteen years.
The bedroom he stayed in when he was here was one of the two on the main floor and from his duffel he quickly grabbed a sweatshirt and a pair of cutoff sweats that would likely probably drown her, then he returned to the family room.
“I’m going to take off your parka so I can get a better look and make sure you don’t have any broken bones, okay?”
She didn’t answer and he wondered if she was asleep or had slipped away again. He debated calling the Pine Gulch paramedics, but he hated to do that on a vicious night like tonight unless it was absolutely necessary. He had some medic training and could deal with most basic first aid needs. If she required more than that, he would drive her into town himself.
But he needed to assess her injuries first.
He would rather disarm a suicide bomber with his teeth than undress a semiconscious woman, but he didn’t have much choice. He was only doing what had to be done, he reminded himself. Feeling huge and awkward, he pulled off what seemed pretty useless pink fur boots first, then moved the tiny dog from the woman’s side to the floor. The dog easily relinquished her guard dog duties and started sniffing around the room to investigate a whole new world full of smells.
Brant unzipped the woman’s parka, doing his best to ignore the soft swell of curves as he pulled the sleeves free, not an easy task since he hadn’t been with a woman since before his last deployment. He was only a rescue worker here, he reminded himself. Detached and impersonal.
Her shirt had remained mostly dry under her parka, he was relieved to discover, but her jeans were soaked through and would have to come off.
“Ma’am, you’re going to have to get out of your jeans. Do you need my help or can you manage by yourself?”
“Help,” she mumbled.
Naturally. He sighed and reached to unfasten the snap and zipper of her jeans. His hands brushed her waist under her soft, blue silk turtleneck. Whether his fingers were cold or whether she was reacting just to the shock of human contact, he didn’t know, but she blinked a few times and scrambled away with a little cry.
The tiny dog yipped and abandoned her investigations of the room to trot over and stand protectively over her mistress, teeth bared at him as if a few pounds of fluff would do the trick to deter him.
“You need to get into dry clothes, that’s all,” he said, using the same calm tone he did with injured soldiers in the field. “I’m not going to hurt you, I swear. You’re completely safe here.”
She nodded, eyes still not fully open. As he looked at her in the full light, a memory flashed across his brain of her in some barely-there slinky red dress, tossing her dark curls and giving a sultry bedroom look out of half-closed eyes.
Crazy. He had never met the woman before in his life, he could swear to it.
He pulled her jeans off, despising himself for the little stir of interest when he found her wearing pink lacy high-cut panties.
He swallowed hard. “I’m, uh, going to check for broken bones and then I’ve got some sweats here we can put on you, okay?”
She nodded and watched him warily from those half- closed eyes as he ran his hands over her legs, trying to pretend she was just another of his teammates. Trouble was, Rangers didn’t tend to have silky white skin and luscious curves. Or wear high-cut pink panties.
“Nothing broken that I can tell,” he finally said and was relieved when he could pull the faded, voluminous sweats over her legs and hide all that delectable skin.
“Are you a doctor?” she murmured.
“Not even close. I’m in the military, ma’am. Major Brant Western, Company A, 1st Battallion, 75th Ranger Regiment.”
She seemed to barely hear him but she still nodded and closed her eyes again when he tucked a blanket from the edge of the sofa around her.
Without his field experience, he might have been alarmed about her state of semiconsciousness, but he’d seen enough soldiers react just this way to a sudden shock—sort of take a little mental vacation—that he wasn’t overly concerned. If she was still spacey and out of it when he came back from taking care of Tag, he would get on the horn to Jake Dalton, the only physician in Pine Gulch, and see what he recommended.
He threw a blanket over her. “Ma’am.” He spoke loudly and evenly and was rewarded with those eyes opening a little more at him. He was really curious what color they were.
“I need to stable my horse and grab more firewood in case the power goes out. I’ve got a feeling we’re in for a nasty night. Just rest here with your little puffball and work on warming up, okay?”
After a long moment, she nodded and closed her eyes again.
He knew her somehow and it bothered the hell out of him that he couldn’t place how, especially since he usually prided himself on his ironclad memory.
He watched the dog circle around and then settle on her feet again like a little fuzzy slipper. Whoever she was, she had about as much a sense as that little dog to go out on a night like tonight. Someone was probably worrying about her. After he took care of Tag, he would try to figure out if she needed to call someone with her whereabouts.
Shoving on his Stetson again, he drew in his last breath of warm air for a while and then headed into the teeth of the storm.
He rushed through taking care of Tag and loaded up as much firewood as he could carry in a load toward the house. He had a feeling he would be back and forth to the woodpile several times during the night and he was grateful his tenant/caretaker Gwen Bianca had been conscientious about making sure enough wood was stockpiled for the winter.
What was he going to do without her? He frowned as one more niggling worry pressed in on him.
Ever since she told him she was buying a house closer to Jackson Hole where she frequently showed her pottery, he had been trying to figure out his options. He was a little preoccupied fighting the Taliban to spend much time worrying about whether a woodpile thousands of miles away had been replenished.
When he returned to the house, he checked on his unexpected guest first thing and found her still sleeping. She wasn’t shivering anymore and when he touched her forehead, she didn’t seem to be running a fever.
The dog barked a little yippy greeting at him but didn’t move from her spot at the woman’s feet.
He took off his hat and coat and hung them in the mudroom, then returned to the family room. His touching her forehead—or perhaps the dog’s bark—must have awakened her. She was sitting up and this time her eyes were finally wide open.
They were a soft and luscious green, the kind of color he dreamed about during the harsh and desolate Afghan winters, of spring grasses covering the mountains, of hope and growth and life.
She gave him a hesitant smile and his jaw sagged as he finally placed how he knew her.
Holy Mother of God.
The woman on his couch, the one he had dressed in his most disreputable sweats, the woman who had crashed her vehicle into Cold Creek just outside his gates and whose little pink panties he had taken such guilty pleasure in glimpsing, was none other than Mimi frigging Van Hoyt.
A man was staring at her.
Not just any man, either. He was tall, perhaps six-one or two, with short dark hair and blue eyes, powerful muscles and a square, determined sort of jaw. He was just the sort of man who made her most nervous, the kind who didn’t look as if they could be swayed by a flirty smile and a sidelong look.
He was staring at her as if she had just sprouted horns out of the top of her head. She frowned, uncomfortable with his scrutiny though she couldn’t have said exactly why.
Her gaze shifted to her surroundings and she discovered she was on a red plaid sofa in a room she didn’t recognize, with rather outdated beige flowered wallpaper and a jumble of mismatched furnishings.
She had no clear memory of arriving here, only a vague sense that something was very wrong in her life, that someone was supposed to help her sort everything out. And then she was driving, driving, with snow flying, and a sharp moment of fear.
She looked at the man again, registering that he was extraordinarily handsome in a clean-cut, all-American sort of way.
Had she been looking for him? She blinked, trying to sort through the jumble of her thoughts.
“How are you feeling?” he finally asked. “I couldn’t find any broken bones and I think the air bag probably saved you from a nasty bump on the head when you hit the creek.”
Creek. She closed her eyes as a memory returned of her hands gripping a steering wheel and a desperate need to reach someone who could help her.
Baby. The baby.
She clutched her hands over her abdomen and made a low sort of moan.
“Here, take it easy. Do you have a stomachache? That could be from the air bag. It’s not unusual to bruise a rib or two when one of those things deploys. Do you want me to take you into the clinic in town to check things out?”
She didn’t know. She couldn’t think, as if every coherent thought in her head had been squirreled away on a high shelf just out of her reach.
She hugged her arms around herself. She had to trust her instincts, since she didn’t know what else to do. “No clinic. I don’t want to go to the doctor.”
He raised one dark eyebrow at that but then shrugged. “Your call. For now, anyway. If you start babbling and speaking in tongues, I’m calling the doctor in Pine Gulch, no matter what you say.”
“Fair enough.” The baby was fine, she told herself. She wouldn’t accept any other alternative. “Where am I?”
“My ranch. The Western Sky. I told you my name before but I’ll do it again. I’m Brant Western.”
To her surprise, Simone, who usually distrusted everything with a Y chromosome, jumped down from the sofa to sniff at his boots. He picked the dog up and held her, somehow still managing to look ridiculously masculine with a little powder puff in his arms.
Western Sky. Gwen. That’s where she had been running. Gwen would fix everything, she knew it.
No. This problem was too big for even Gwen to fix.
“I’m Maura Howard,” she answered instinctively, using the alias she preferred when she traveled, for security reasons.
“Are you?” he said. An odd question, she thought briefly, but she was more concerned with why she was here and not where she wanted to be.
She had visited Gwen’s cabin once before but she didn’t remember this room. “This isn’t Gwen’s house.”
At once, a certain understanding flashed in blue eyes that reminded her of the ocean near her beach house in Malibu on her favorite stormy afternoons.
“You know Gwen Bianca?”
She nodded. “I need to call her, to let her know I’m here.”
“That’s not going to do you much good. Gwen’s not around.”
That set her back and she frowned. “Do you know where she is?”
“Not at the ranch, I’m afraid. Not even in the country, actually. She’s at a gallery opening in Milan.”
Oh, no. Mimi closed her eyes. How stupid and shortsighted of her, to assume Gwen would be just waiting here to offer help if Mimi ever needed it.
Egocentric, silly, selfish. That was certainly her.
No wonder she preferred being Maura Howard whenever she had the chance.
“Well, Maura.” Was it her imagination, or did he stress her name in an unnatural sort of way? “I’m afraid you’re not going anywhere tonight. It’s too dangerous for you to drive on these snowy roads even if I could manage to go out in the dark and snow to pull your vehicle out of the creek. I’m afraid you’re stuck for now.”
Oh, what a mess. She wanted to sink back onto the pillows of this comfortable sofa, just close her eyes and slide back into blissful oblivion. But she couldn’t very well do that with her host watching her out of those intense blue eyes.
As tough and dangerous as Brant Western looked, she had the strangest assurance that she was safe with him. On the other hand, her instincts hadn’t been all that reliable where men where concerned for the past, oh, twenty-six years.
But Simone liked him and that counted for a great deal in her book.
As if sensing the direction of her gaze, he set the dog down. Simone’s white furry face looked crestfallen for just a moment, then she jumped back up to Mimi’s lap.
“I’m assuming Gwen didn’t know you were coming.”
“No. I should have called her.” Her voice trembled on the words and she fought down the panic and the fear and the whole tangled mess of emotions she’d been fighting since that stark moment in her ob-gyn’s office the day before.
Gwen had been her logical refuge as she faced this latest disaster in her life. Mimi’s favorite of her father’s ex-wives, Gwen had always offered comfort and support through boarding schools and breakups and scandals.
For twenty-four hours, all she had been able to think about was escaping to Gwen, in desperate need of her calm good sense and her unfailing confidence in Mimi. But Gwen wasn’t here. She was in Milan right now, just when Mimi needed her most and she felt, ridiculously, as if all the underpinnings of her world were shaking loose.
First driving her car into a creek and now this. It was all too much. She sniffled and made a valiant effort to fight back the tears, but it was too late. The panic swallowed her whole and she started to cry.
Simone licked at her tears and Mimi held the dog closer, burying her face in her fur.
Through her tears, she thought she saw utter horror in her host’s eyes. He was an officer in the military, she remembered Gwen telling her. A major, if Mimi wasn’t mistaken, in some Special Forces unit.
She had a vague memory of him telling her that. Major Brant Western, Company A, 1st Battallion, 75th Ranger Regiment.
She would have thought a man would have to be a fairly confident, take-charge sort of guy to reach that rank, but Major Western looked completely panicked by her tears. “Hey, come on. Don’t cry, um, Maura. It’s okay. You’ll see. Things will seem better in the morning, I promise. It’s not the end of the world. You’re safe and dry now and I’ve even got a guest room you can stay in tonight. We’ll get that cut on your eye cleaned up and bandaged.”
She swiped at her tears with her sleeve and a moment later he thrust a tissue in her face, which she seized on gratefully. “I can’t stay here,” she said after she’d calmed a little. “I don’t even know you. I passed a guest ranch a few miles back. Hope Springs or something like that. I’ll see if they’ve got availability.”
“How are you going to get there?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Your SUV is toast for now and Pine Gulch isn’t exactly flush with cab companies. Beside that, the way that wind is blowing and drifting, it’s not safe for anybody to be out on the roads. That storm has already piled up seven inches and forecasters are predicting two or three times that before we’re done. I promise, you’re completely safe staying here. The guest room’s even got a lock on the door.”
She had a feeling a locked door wouldn’t stop him if he set his mind to breaking in somewhere. No doubt this man, with his serious blue eyes and solid strength, could work his way through just about anything—whether a locked door or a woman’s good sense.
“Have you eaten?”
“I’m not hungry.”
That was certainly true enough. Just the idea of food made her stomach churn. Ironic that she’d been pregnant for more than ten weeks and hadn’t exhibited a single symptom, not the tiniest sign that might have tipped her off. Then the day after she found out she was pregnant, she started with the morning sickness, along with a bone-deep exhaustion. If she had the chance, she thought she could sleep for a week.
“I can’t impose on you this way.”
He shrugged. “Once you’ve made a guy wade through a frozen creek twice, what’s a little further inconvenience for him? Let me go grab some clean sheets for the bed and we’ll get that cut cleaned up and you settled for the night.”
She wiped at the tears drying on her features. What choice did she have? She had nowhere else to go. After he left the room, she leaned into the sofa, holding Simone close and soaking in the fire’s delicious heat.
Now that she thought of it, this just might be the perfect solution, at least while she tried to wrap her head around the terrifying future.
No one would know where she was. Not her father—as if he’d care. Not Marco, who would care even less. Certainly not the bane of her existence, the paparazzi, who cared only for ratings and circulation numbers.
The world outside that window was a terrifying place. For now she had shelter from that storm out there, and a man who looked more than capable of protecting her from anything that might come along.
She only needed a little breathing space to figure things out and she could find that here as easily as anywhere else.
Only one possible complication occurred to her. She would have to do her best to keep him from calling for a tow when the snow cleared. She knew from experience that people like tow-truck drivers and gas station attendants and restaurant servers were usually the first ones to pick up a phone and call in the tabloids.
She could see the headlines now. Mimi’s Ditchscapade with Sexy Rancher.
She couldn’t afford that right now. She only needed a few days of quiet and rest. Like that blizzard out there, the media storm that was her life and this latest—and worst—potential scandal would hopefully pass without ever seeing the light of day.
She only needed to figure out a way to stay safe and warm until it did.
Chapter Two
When When Brant returned to his living room, he found Maura Howard—aka Mimi Van Hoyt, tabloid princess du jour—gazing into the fire, her features pale and her wide, mobile mouth set into a tense frown.
A few years ago during one of his Iraq deployments, he’d had the misfortune of seeing her one miserable attempt at moviemaking at a showing in the rec hall in Tikrit. He was pretty sure the apparent turmoil she was showing now must be genuine, since her acting skills had been roughly on par with the howler monkey that had enjoyed a bit in the movie.
As long as she didn’t cry again, he could handle things. He was ashamed to admit that he could handle a dozen armed insurgents better than a crying woman.
“Everything will seem better in the morning,” he promised her. “Once the storm passes over, I can call a tow for your car. I’m sure they can fix it right up in town and send you on your way.”
Her hands twisted on her lap and those deep green eyes shifted away from him. In pictures he’d seen of her, he always thought those eyes held a hard, cynical edge, but he could see none of that here.
“I, um, can’t really afford a tow right now.”
If she hadn’t said the words with such a valiant attempt at sincerity in her voice, he would have snorted outright at that blatant whopper. Everybody on the planet who had ever seen a tabloid knew her father was Werner Van Hoyt, real estate mogul, Hollywood producer and megabillionaire. She was a trust fund baby whose sole existence seemed to revolve around attending the hottest parties and being seen with other quasi-celebrities at the hippest clubs until all hours of the day and night.
Did she think he was a complete idiot? The SUV in question was a Mercedes, for heaven’s sake.
But if Mimi wanted to pretend to be someone else, who was he to stop her?
“The rental car company should take care of the details. They would probably even send another vehicle for you. Barring that, I’m sure Wylie down at the garage will take a credit card or work out a payment plan with you. But we can cross that bridge once the snow clears. Let’s get your face cleaned up so you can get to bed.”
She didn’t look as if she appreciated any of those options, at least judging by the frustration tightening her features. He had a pretty strong feeling she probably hadn’t been thwarted much in her life. It would probably do her a world of good not to get her way once in a while.
He had to bite his lip to keep from smiling. Big shocker there. He hadn’t found much of anything amusing since that miserable afternoon three weeks ago in a remote village in Paktika Province.
Longer, come to think of it. His world had felt hollow and dark around the edges since Jo’s death in the fall. But somehow Mimi seemed to remind him that life could sometimes be a real kick in the seat.
He had to give her credit for only flinching a little when he cleansed the small cut over her eye and stuck a bandage on it.
“It’s a pretty small cut and shouldn’t leave a scar.”
“Thank you,” she said in a subdued voice, then gracefully covered a yawn. “I’m sorry. I’ve been traveling for several hours and it’s been a…stressful day.”
“Don’t worry about it. Your room is back here. It’s nothing fancy but it’s comfortable and you’ve got your own bathroom.”
“I hate to ask but, speaking of bathrooms,” she said, “Simone could probably use a trip outside.”
“Yeah, she has been dancing around for the door for the last few minutes. I’ll take her out and try to make sure she doesn’t get swallowed by the snow, then bring her in to you.”
“Thank you for…everything,” she murmured. “Not too many people would take in a complete stranger—and her little dog, too—in the middle of a blizzard.”
“Maybe not where you’re from. But I would guess just about anybody in Cold Creek Canyon would have done the same.”
“Then it must be a lovely place.”
“Except in the middle of a February blizzard,” he answered. She didn’t object when he cupped her elbow to help her down the hall and he tried to store up all the memories. How she smelled of some light citrus-floral, undoubtedly expensive perfume. How her silk turtleneck caressed his fingers. How she was much shorter than he would have guessed, only just reaching his shoulder.
The guys would want to know everything about this surreal interlude and Brant owed it to them to memorize every single detail.
Like the rest of the house, the guest suite was on the shabby side, with aging furniture and peeling wallpaper. But it had a comfortable queen-sized bed, an electric fireplace he’d turned on when he made up the bed and a huge claw-foot tub in the bathroom.
The main house had been mostly empty for the past two years except for his occasional visits between deployments. Since he left Cold Creek a dozen years ago for the military, he had rented the house out sporadically. Gwen Bianca stayed in the small cabin on the property rent-free in exchange for things like keeping the woodpile stocked and the roof from collapsing in.
His last tenants had moved out six months ago and he hadn’t bothered to replace them since the rent mostly covered barebones maintenance and county property taxes on the land anyway and was hardly worth the trouble most of the time.
Now that Gwen had announced she was moving away, he didn’t know what to do with Western Sky.
“It’s not much but you should be warm and comfortable.”
“I’ll be fine. Thank you again for your hospitality.”
“I don’t know if this is a warning or an apology in advance, but I’ll be checking on you occasionally in the night.”
“Do you think I’m going to run off with your plasma TV?”
He fought another smile, wondering where they were all coming from. “You’re welcome to it, if you think you can make a clean getaway on foot in this storm. No. There’s a chance you had a head injury. I don’t think so but you were in and out of consciousness for a while there. I can’t take any chance of missing signs of swelling or unusual behavior.”
She sat on the edge of the bed with a startled sort of work. “I appreciate your…diligence, but I’m sure I don’t have a brain injury. The air bag protected me.”
“I guess you forgot to mention you were a neurologist.”
She frowned. “I’m not.”
“What are you, then?” he asked, curious as to how she would answer. Heiress?Aimless socialite? Lousy actress?
After a long pause, she forced a smile. “I work for a charitable organization in Los Angeles.”
Nice save, he thought. It could very well be true, since she had enough money to rescue half the world.
“Well, unless your charitable organization specializes in self-diagnosing traumatic brain injuries, I’m going to have to err on the side of caution here and stick to the plan of checking on you through the night.”
“Don’t tell me you’re the neurologist now.”
“Nope. Just an Army Ranger who’s been hit over the head a few too many times in my career. I’ll check on you about every hour to make sure your mental status hasn’t changed.”
“How would you even know if my mental status has changed or not? You just met me.”
He laughed out loud at that, a rusty sound that surprised the heck out of him.
“True enough. I guess when you stand on your head and start reciting the Declaration of Independence at four in the morning, I’ll be sure to ask if that’s normal behavior before I call the doctor.”
She almost smiled in return but he sensed she was troubled about more than just her car accident.
None of his concern, he reminded himself. Whatever she was doing in this isolated part of Idaho was her own business.
“I put one of my T-shirts on the bed there for you to sleep in. I’ll bring your little purse pooch back after I let her out. Let me know if you need anything else or if you get hungry. The Western Sky isn’t a four-star resort but I can probably rustle up some tea and toast.”
“Right now I only want to rest.”
“Can’t blame you there,” he answered. “It’s been a strange evening all the way around. Come on, pup.”
The little dog barked, her black eyes glowing with eagerness in her white fur, and followed him into the hallway.
The wind still howled outside but he managed to find a spot of ground somewhat sheltered by the back patio awning for her to delicately take care of business.
To his relief, the dog didn’t seem any more inclined to stay out in the howling storm than he did. She hurried back to where he stood on the steps and he scooped her up and carried her inside, where he dried off her paws with an old towel.
He refused to admit to himself that he was trying to spare Mimi four cold, wet paws against her when the dog jumped up on her bed.
When he softly knocked on the guest room door, she didn’t answer. After a moment, he took the liberty of pushing it open. She was already asleep, her eyes closed, and he set the dog beside her on the bed, thinking she would need the comfort of the familiar if she awoke in a strange place in the middle of the night.
From the dim light in the hallway, he could just make out her high cheekbones and that lush, kissable mouth.
She was even prettier in person, just about the loveliest thing he had ever seen in real life.
She was beautiful and she made him forget the ghosts that haunted him, even if only for a little while. For a guy who only had a week before he had to report back to a war zone, both of those things seemed pretty darn seductive right about now.
Not the most restful sleep she had ever experienced.
At 6:00 a.m., after a night of being awakened several times by the keening wind outside and by her unwilling host insistent on checking her questionable mental status, she awoke to Simone licking her face.
Mimi groaned as her return to consciousness brought with it assorted aches and pains. The sting of the cut on her forehead and the low throb of a headache at the base of her skull were the worst of them. Her shoulder muscles ached, but she had a feeling that was more from the stress of the past two days than from any obvious injury.
She pushed away her assorted complaints to focus on the tiny bichon frise she adored. “Do you need to go outside, sweetie?” she asked.
Instead of leaping from the bed and scampering to the door as she normally would have done, Simone merely yawned, stretched her four paws out, then closed her eyes again.
“I guess not,” Mimi answered with a frown at that bit of unusual behavior. Simone usually jumped to go outside first thing after a full night of holding her bladder. Mimi could only hope she hadn’t decided to relieve herself somewhere in this strange house.
She looked around the bedroom in the pale light of predawn but couldn’t see any obvious signs of a mishap in any corner. What she did find was her entire set of luggage piled up inside the door, all five pieces of it, including Simone’s carrier.
The sight of them all stunned her and sent a funny little sparkle jumping through her. Somehow in the middle of the raging blizzard, Major Western had gone to the trouble of retrieving every one of them for her.
In the night, more vague recollections had come together in her head and she vividly remembered he had been forced to wade through the ice-crusted creek to reach her after the accident. In order to retrieve her luggage from the SUV, he would have had to venture into that water yet again. She could hardly believe he had done that for her, yet the proof was right there before her eyes in the corner.
No. There had to be some catch. He just seemed entirely too good to be real. The cynical part of her that had been burned by men a few dozen too many times couldn’t quite believe anyone would find her worth that much effort.
She pressed a hand to her stomach, to the tiny secret growing there.
“Are you okay in there, kiddo?” she murmured.
She had bought a half-dozen pregnancy books the moment she left the doctor’s office but hadn’t dared read any of them on the plane, afraid to risk that someone would see through her disguise and tip off the tabloids about her reading choices. Instead, she’d had to be content with a pregnancy week-by-week app on her cell phone, and she had devoured every single word behind her sunglasses on the plane.
At barely eleven weeks, Mimi knew she wasn’t far enough along to actually feel the baby move. Maybe in a few more weeks. But that didn’t stop her from imagining the little thing swimming around in there.
Something else that didn’t feel quite real to her, that in a few months she was going to be a mother. She had only had two days to absorb the stunning news that her brief but intense affair with Marco Mendez had resulted in an unexpected complication.
In only a few days, the provider of half her baby’s DNA was marrying another woman. And not just any woman but Jessalyn St. Claire, Hollywood’s current favorite leading lady, sweet and cute and universally adored. Marco and Jessalyn. “Messalyn,” as the tabloids dubbed the pair of them. The two beautiful, talented, successful people were apparently enamored of each other.
It was a match made in heaven—or their respective publicists’ offices. Mimi wasn’t sure which.
She only knew that if word leaked out that she was expecting Marco Mendez’s baby, Jessalyn would flip out, especially since the timing of Mimi’s pregnancy would clearly reveal that they had carried on their affair several months after Marco had proposed to Jessalyn in such a public venue as the Grammy Awards, where he won Best Male Vocalist of the year.
Mimi probed her heart for the devastation she probably should be feeling right about now. For two months, she had been expecting Marco to break off the sham engagement and publicly declare he loved Mimi, as he had privately assured her over and over was his intention.
The declaration never came. She felt like an idiot for ever imagining it would. Worse, when she had gathered up every bit of her courage and whatever vestiges of pride she had left and finally called him to meet her at their secret place after the stunning discovery of her pregnancy, he hadn’t reacted at all like she had stupidly hoped.
Arrogant, egocentric, selfish.
She was all those things and more. She had secretly hoped that when Marco found out she was pregnant, he would pull her into his arms and declare he couldn’t go through with the marriage now, that he loved her and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her and the child they had created.
She was pathetically stupid.
Instead, his sleek, sexy features had turned bone-white and he had asked her if she’d made an appointment yet to take care of the problem.
When she hesitantly told him she was thinking about keeping the baby, he had become enraged. She had never believed Marco capable of violence until he had stood with veins popping out in his neck, practically foaming at the mouth in that exclusive, secluded house in Topanga Canyon he kept for these little trysts.
He had called her every vile name in the book and some she’d never heard of. By the time he was done, she felt like all those things he called her. Skank. Whore. Bitch.
And worse.
In the end, she’d somehow found the strength to tell him emphatically that keeping the baby or not would be her own decision. If she kept the baby, it would be hers alone and he would relinquish any claim to it. She wanted nothing more to do with him.
If he touched her or threatened her again in any way, she would tell her father, a man both of them knew had the power to decimate careers before he’d taken a sip of his morning soy latte.
She pressed a hand to her tiny baby bump.
“I’m sorry I picked such a jerk to be your daddy,” she whispered.
She loved this baby already. The idea of it, innocent and sweet, seemed to wrap around all the empty places in her heart. The only blessing in the whole mess was that she and Marco had, unbelievably, been able to keep their affair a secret thus far.
Oh, maybe a few rumors had been circulating here and there. But she figured if she stayed out of the camera glare at least until the wedding was over and then took an extended trip somewhere quiet, she just might muddle through this whole thing. She had no doubt she could find someone willing to claim paternity for enough money.
Or maybe she would just drop out of sight for the rest of her life, relocate to some isolated place in the world where people had never heard of Mimi Van Hoyt or her more ridiculous antics.
Borneo might be nice. Or she could move in with some friendly indigenous tribe along the Amazon.
Staying with Gwen at least until the wedding was over would have solved her short-term problem, if she hadn’t been too blasted shortsighted to pick up the phone first.
Why couldn’t she still stay here?
The thought was undeniably enticing. Gwen might not be here but, except for her absence, the ranch still offered all the advantages that had led Mimi to fly out on a snowy February afternoon to find her exstepmother. It was isolated and remote, as far from the craziness of a celebrity wedding as Mimi could imagine.
She thought of her host wading through a creek in the middle of a blizzard to retrieve her luggage. He seemed a decent sort of man, with perhaps a bit of a hero complex. Maybe Major Western could be convinced to let her stay just for a few days.
She closed her eyes, daunted by the very idea of asking him. Though she had never had much trouble bending the males of the species to her will—her father being the most glaring exception—she had a feeling Brant Western wouldn’t be such an easy sell.
Later. She would wait until the sun was at least up before she worried about it, she decided with a yawn.
When she awoke again, a muted kind of daylight streamed through the curtains and an entirely too male figure was standing beside her bed.
“Morning.” Her voice came out sultry and low, more a product of sleepiness than any effort to be sexy, but something flared in his eyes for just a moment, then was gone.
Okay, maybe convincing him she should stay wouldn’t be as difficult as she had feared, Mimi thought, hiding a secret smile even as she was a little disappointed he wouldn’t present more of a challenge.
“Good morning.” His voice was a little more tightly wound than she remembered and she thought his eyes looked tired. From monitoring her all night? she wondered. Or from something else?
“Sorry to wake you but I haven’t been in to check on you for a couple of hours. I was just seeing if the dog needed to go out again.”
“Did you take her out in the night?”
He nodded. “She’s not too crazy about snow.”
“Oh, I know. Once in Chamonix she got lost in a snow drift. It was terrifying for both of us.”
She shouldn’t have said that, she realized at once. Maura Howard wasn’t the sort to visit exclusive ski resorts in the Swiss Alps, but Brant didn’t seem to blink an eye.
“I’m on my way to take care of the horses. I’ll put her out again before I leave and I’ll try not to lose her in the snow. How’s your head?”
“Better. The rest of me is a little achy but I’ll survive. Is it still storming?”
He nodded tersely as she sat up in bed and seemed intent on keeping his gaze fixed on some fixed spot in the distance as if he were standing at attention on parade somewhere. “We’ve had more than a foot and it’s still coming down.” He paused. “There’s a good chance you might be stuck here another day or two. It’s going to take at least that long for the plows to clear us out.”
“Oh, no!”
Though secretly relieved, she figured he expected the news to come as a shock, so she tried to employ her glaringly nonexistent acting skills. Then, pouring it on a little thicker, she stretched a little before tucking a wayward curl behind her ear.
She didn’t miss the way his pupils flared just a little, even as he pretended not to pay her any attention.
“I’m so sorry to be even more of an inconvenience to you, Major Western.”
“Around here I’m plain Brant.”
“Brant.” It was a strong, masculine name that somehow fit him perfectly.
“Thank you so much for bringing my luggage in. It was so kind of you.”
“No big deal. I thought you would feel more comfortable if you had your own things, especially since it looks like you’re going to be here another night.”
“I feel so foolish. If I’d only called Gwen before showing up on her doorstep like this, you wouldn’t be stuck with me now.”
“That was a pretty idiotic thing to do,” he agreed flatly. “What would have happened to you if you’d slid off in a spot in the canyon that wasn’t so close to any houses? You might have been stuck in the storm in your car all night and probably would have frozen to death before anybody found you.”
His bluntness grated and she almost glared but at the last minute she remembered she needed his help. Or maybe not. She needed a place to stay, but that didn’t necessarily mean she had to stay with him.
“I hate imposing on you,” she said as another idea suddenly occurred to her, one she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of the night before or this morning when she was mulling over her various options. “What if we called Gwen and asked her if I could stay at her house since she’s gone?”
“Great idea,” he said, with somewhat humiliating alacrity. “There’s only one problem with it. Gwen’s furnace went out the day she left. I’ve got a company coming out to replace it but they can’t make it to the ranch until later in the week. With the blizzard, it might even be next week before they come out. Occupied dwellings have precedence in weather like this so I’m afraid you’re stuck here until the storm clears.”
She tried to look appropriately upset by that news. At least his insistence on that particular point would give her a little breathing room to figure out how she could convince him to let her stay longer.
Four hours later, she was rethinking her entire strategy.
If she had to stay here until Marco’s wedding was over, she was very much afraid she would die of boredom.
She had never been very good with dead time. She liked to fill it with friends and shopping and trips to her favorite day spa. Okay, she had spent twenty-six years wading in shallow waters. She had no problem admitting it. She liked having fun and wasn’t very good at finding ways to entertain herself.
That particular task seemed especially challenging here at Western Sky. Major Western had very few books—most were in storage near his home base in Georgia, he had told her—and the DVD selection was limited. And of course the satellite television wasn’t working because too much snow had collected in the dish, blocking the receiver. Or at least that’s the explanation her host provided.
The house wasn’t wired to the Internet, since he was rarely here and didn’t use it much anyway.
She probably could have dashed off some texts and even an e-mail or two on her Smartphone, but she had made the conscious decision to turn it off. For now, she was Maura Howard. It might be a little tough selling that particular story if she had too much contact with the outside world.
Her host had made himself scarce most of the day, busy looking over ranch accounts or bringing in firewood or knocking ice out of the water troughs for the livestock.
She had a feeling he was avoiding her, though she wasn’t sure why, which left her with Simone for company.
Brant poked his head into the kitchen just after noon to tell her to help herself to whatever she wanted for lunch but that he had a bit of a crisis at Gwen’s cabin with frozen pipes since the furnace wasn’t working.
Mimi had settled on a solitary lunch of canned tomato soup that was actually quite tasty. After she washed and dried her bowl, marveling that there was a house in America which actually didn’t possess a dishwasher, she returned it to the rather dingy cupboard next to the sink and was suddenly hit by a brainstorm.
This was how she could convince Brant to let her stay.
A brilliant idea, if she did say so herself. Not bad for a shallow girl, she thought some time later as she surveyed the contents of every kitchen cupboard, jumbled on all the countertops.
She stood on a stepladder with a bucket of sudsy water in front of her as she scoured years of grease and dust from the top of his knotty pine cabinets.
Here was a little known secret the tabloids had never unearthed about Mimi Van Hoyt. They would probably have a field day if anyone ever discovered she liked to houseclean when she was bored or stressed.
Between boarding school stays, her father’s longterm housekeeper Gert used to give her little chores to do. Cleaning out a closet, organizing a drawer, polishing silver. Her father probably never would have allowed it if he’d known, but she and Gert had both been very good at keeping secrets from Werner Van Hoyt.
She had never understood why she enjoyed it so much and always been a little ashamed of what she considered a secret vice until one of her more insightful therapists had pointed out those hours spent with Gert at some mundane task or other were among the most consistent of her life. Perhaps cleaning her surroundings was her mental way of creating order out of the chaos that was her life amid her father’s multiple marriages and divorces.
Here in Major Western’s house, it was simply something to pass the time, she told herself, digging in a little harder on a particularly tough stain.
“What would you be doing?”
Mimi jerked her head around and found Major Western standing in the kitchen doorway watching her with an expression that seemed a complicated mix—somewhere between astonished and appalled.
Simone—exceptional watchdog that she was—awoke at his voice and jumped up from her spot on a half-circle rug by the sink. She yipped an eager greeting while Mimi flushed to the roots of her hair.
“Sorry. I was…bored.”
He gave her a skeptical look. “Bored. And so, out of the blue, you decided to wash out my kitchen cabinets.”
“Somebody needed to. You wouldn’t believe the grime on them.”
She winced as soon as the words escaped. Okay, that might not be the most tactful thing to mention to a man she was hoping would keep her around for a few days.
“You’ve been busy with your Army career, I’m sure,” she quickly amended. “I can only imagine how difficult it is to keep a place like this clean when you’re not here all the time.”
He looked both rueful and embarrassed as he moved farther into the kitchen and started taking off his winter gear.
“I’ve been renting it out on and off for the last few years and tenants don’t exactly keep the place in the best shape. I’m planning on having a crew come in after I return to Afghanistan to clean it all out and whip it into shape before I put it on the market.”
She paused her scrubbing, struck both that he had been in Afghanistan and that he would put such a wonderful house on the market. “Why would you sell this place? I can’t see much out there except snow right now but I would guess it’s a beautiful view. At least Gwen always raves about what inspiration she finds here for her work.”
He unbuttoned his soaked coat and she tried not to notice the muscles of his chest that moved under his sweater as he worked his arms out of the sleeves.
“It’s long past time.”
He was quiet for several moments. “The reality is, I’m only here a few weeks of the year, if that, and it’s too hard to take care of the place long-distance, even with your friend Gwen keeping an eye on things for me. Anyway, Gwen’s leaving, too. She told me she’s buying a house outside Jackson Hole and that just seemed the final straw. I can’t even contemplate how daunting it would be to find someone to replace her. Not to mention keeping up with general maintenance like painting the barn.”
It was entirely too choice an opportunity to pass up. “This is perfect. I’ll help you.”
Again that eyebrow crept up as he toed off his winter boots. “You want to paint the barn? I’m afraid that might be a little tough, what with the snow and all.”
She frowned. “Not the barn. But this.” She pointed with her soapy towel. “The whole place needs a good scrubbing, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
He stared at her. “Let me get this straight. You’re volunteering to clean my house?”
She set the soapy towel back in the bucket and perched on the top rung of the ladder to face him. “Sure, why not?”
“I can think of a few pretty compelling reasons.”
She flashed him a quick look, wondering what he meant by that, but she couldn’t read anything in his expression.
“The truth is, I need a place to stay for a few days.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long, boring story.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” he murmured, looking fascinated.
“Trust me,” she said firmly. “I need a place to stay for a few days—let’s just leave it at that—and you could use some work done around here to help you ready the place for prospective buyers.”
“And you think you can help me do that?”
The skepticism in his voice stung, for reasons she didn’t want to examine too carefully. “Believe it or not, I’ve actually helped a friend stage houses for sale before and I know a little about it. I can help you, I swear. Why shouldn’t we both get something we need?”
He leaned against the counter next to the refrigerator and crossed his arms over his chest. As he studied her, she thought she saw doubt, lingering shock and an odd sort of speculation in his eyes.
After a moment he shook his head. “I can’t ask you to do that, Ms. Howard.”
“You didn’t ask. I’m offering.”
Five days. That was all she needed to avoid Hollywood’s biggest wedding in years. With a little time and distance, she hoped she could figure out what she was going to do with the mess of her life.
“I really do need a place to stay, Major Western.”
She thought she saw a softening in the implacable set to his jaw, a tiny waver in his eyes, so she whipped out the big guns. The undefeated, never-fail, invincible option.
She beamed at him, her full-throttle, pour-on-the-charm smile that had made babbling fools out of every male she’d ever wielded it on. “I swear, you’ll be so happy with the job I do, you might just decide not to sell.”
Though she saw obvious reluctance in his dark eyes, he finally sighed. “A few days. Why not? As long as you don’t make any major changes. Just clean things out a little and make the rooms look better. That’s all.”
Relief coursed through her. Simone, sensing Mimi’s excitement, barked happily.
“You won’t regret it, I promise.”
He shook his head and reached into the refrigerator for a bottled water. In his open, honest expression, she could see he was already sorry. She didn’t care, she told herself, ignoring that same little sting under her heart. Whether he wanted her here or not, somehow she knew that Major Brant Western was too honorable to kick her out after he’d promised she could stay.
Chapter Three
What kind of game was she playing?
That seemed to be the common refrain echoing through his brain when it came to Mimi Van Hoyt. He still hadn’t come any closer to figuring her out several hours after their stunning conversation, as they sat at the worn kitchen table eating a cobbled-together dinner of canned stew and peaches.
First she was pretending to be someone else—as if anyone in the world with access to a computer or a television could somehow have been lucky enough to miss her many well-publicized antics. The woman couldn’t pick up her newspaper in the morning without a crop of photographers there to chronicle every move and she must think he was either blind or stupid not to figure out who she was.
But that same tabloid darling who apparently didn’t step outside her door without wearing designer clothes had spent the afternoon cleaning every nook and cranny of his kitchen—and doing a pretty good job of it. Not that he was any great judge of cleanliness, having spent most of his adult life on Army bases or in primitive conditions in the field, but he had grown up with Jo Winder as an example and he knew she would have been happy to see the countertops sparkling and the old wood cabinets gleaming with polish.
He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself—Mimi Van Hoyt, lush and elegant, scrubbing the grime away from a worn-out ranch house with no small degree of relish. She seemed as happy with her hands in a bucket of soapy water as he was out on patrol with his M4 in his hands.
She had even sung a little under her breath, for heaven’s sake, and he couldn’t help wondering why she had dabbled in acting instead of singing since her contralto voice didn’t sound half-bad.
That low, throaty voice seemed to slide down his spine like trailing fingers and a few times he’d had to manufacture some obvious excuse to leave the house just to get away from it. He figured he’d hauled enough wood up to the house to last them all week but he couldn’t seem to resist returning to the kitchen to watch her.
The woman completely baffled him. He would have expected her to be whining about the lack of entertainment in the cabin, about the enforced confinement, about the endless snow.
At the very least, he would have thought her fingers would be tapping away at some cell phone as she tweeted or whatever it was called, about being trapped in an isolated Idaho ranch with a taciturn stranger.
Instead, she teased her little dog, she took down his curtains and threw them in the washing machine, she organized every ancient cookbook left in the cupboard.
She seemed relentlessly cheerful while the storm continued to bluster outside.
Somehow he was going to have to figure out a way to snap her picture when she wasn’t looking. Otherwise, his men would never believe he’d spent his mid-tour leave watching Mimi Van Hoyt scrub grease off his stove vent.
But he was pretty sure a photograph wouldn’t show them how lovely she looked, with those huge, deep green eyes and her long inky curls and that bright smile that took over her entire face.
Though he knew it was dangerous, Brant couldn’t seem to stop watching her. Having Mimi Van Hoyt flitting around his kitchen in all her splendor was a little overwhelming for a man who hadn’t been with a woman in longer than he cared to remember—sort of like shoving a starving man in front of one of those all-you-can-eat buffets in Las Vegas and ordering him to dig in.
He’d had an on-again, off-again relationship with a nurse at one of the field support hospitals in Paktika Province, but his constant deployments hadn’t left him much time for anything serious.
Not that he was looking. He would leave that sort of thing to the guys who were good at it, like Quinn seemed to be, though he never would have believed it.
Brant treated the women he dated with great respect but he knew he tended to gravitate toward smart, focused career women who weren’t looking for anything more than a little fun and companionship once in a while.
Mimi was something else entirely. He didn’t know exactly what, but he couldn’t believe he had agreed to let her stay at his ranch for a few days. Hour upon hour of trying to ignore the way her hair just begged to be released from the elastic band holding it back or the way those big green eyes caught the light or how her tight little figure danced around the kitchen as she worked.
He shook his head. Which of the two of them was crazier? Right now, he was willing to say it was a toss-up, though he had a suspicion he just might be edging ahead.
“Would you like more stew?” she asked, as if she were hosting some fancy dinner party instead of dishing up canned Dinty Moore.
“I’m good. Thanks.”
Though he knew she had to be accustomed to much fancier meals, she did a credible job with her own bowl of stew. He supposed all that scrubbing and dusting must have worked up an appetite.
“Have you had the ranch for long?” she asked, breaking what had been a comfortable silence. “I’m sorry, I can’t remember what you told me the name was.”
“The Western Sky. And yeah, it’s been in my family for generations. My great-great-grandfather bought the land and built the house in the late 1800s.”
“So you were raised here?”
He thought of his miserable childhood and the pain and insecurity of it, and then of the Winders, who had rescued him from it and showed him what home could really be.
Explaining all that to her would be entirely too complicated, even if he were willing to discuss it, so he took the easy way out. “For the most part,” he answered, hoping she would leave it at that.
Because he was intensely curious to see how far she would take her alternate identity, he turned the conversation back in her direction. “What about you, Maura? Whereabouts do you call home?”
The vibrant green of her eyes seemed to dim a little and she looked away. “Oh, you know. Here and there. California. For now.”
“Oh? Which part of the state, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Southern. The L.A. area.”
He didn’t really follow entertainment gossip but he thought he read or heard something once about her having two homes not far from each other, one her father’s Bel Air estate and the other a Malibu beachhouse.
“Is that where your parents live?”
Her mouth tightened a little and she moved the remaining chunks of stew around in her bowl. “My mom died when I was three, just after my parents divorced. My dad sort of raised me but he…we… moved around a lot.”
He had to take a quick sip of soda to keep from snorting at that evasive comment—probably Mimi’s way of saying her father had residences across the globe.
“And you said you work for a charitable foundation?”
Her wide, mobile mouth pursed into a frown. “Yes. But you probably wouldn’t have heard of it.”
“And what sort of things do you do there?” He wasn’t sure why he enjoyed baiting her so much but it was the most fun he’d had in a long time.
If nothing else, her presence distracted him from the grim events he had left behind in Afghanistan.
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