Cara Colter - Weddings Do Come True

“Mind your manners, Ethan,” Gumpy told him mildly, which earned the older man a look that might have sent a lesser man scuttling for cover. “This is our new nanny.”

“The hell she is.”

Certainly she was glancing around for a place to hide.

But with one more dismissive look to her, Ethan turned to Gumpy. “What have you gone and done?”

“Just what you told me,” Gumpy said, “gone to the airport and picked up the nanny.”

“Fifty-seven. I told you Betty-Anne was fifty-seven years old. Nobody fifty-seven looks like this. This girl isn’t a day over—” cool gray eyes scanned her “—twenty-five.”

“Woman,” she corrected him. “Thirty.”

He glared at her briefly, then shifted his attention away from her again.

“Gumpy, start talking.” The cowboy’s voice was low and lethal. Just like the rest of him, there was barely leashed power in that voice. “Where’s Mrs. Bishop?”

Behind him the children stirred on the couch. She watched them, in their sleep, reach out for and find each other. She felt a stab of tenderness for them.

“This is the only nanny I could find at the airport,” Gumpy said, not intimidated. “And believe you me, I looked.”

“Anybody looking at her can see she’s not a nanny. We need somebody who can cook and clean and look after kids, Gumpy, not an expert in shades of fingernail polish.”

She looked at the fingernails in question, rather than meet the steady, stripping look in his eyes when he glanced back her way. Her nails were quite long, the very same shade as her suit, a fact she had taken some pleasure in this morning.

When she had been a completely different person.

“Doreen and Danny will like her,” Gumpy said.

“I hope you’re not suggesting she stay.”

She looked up from her fingernails to see Gumpy nod, once, with grave dignity.

The cool, angry note in Ethan’s voice as he bit out a single word woke the children. They struggled to sit up, rubbing their eyes, taking her in with only mild curiosity. Then they slipped off the couch and disappeared down the hall.

“Don’t touch my hat,” Ethan called over his shoulder, though he did not turn around.

The children giggled and broke into a run that did not bode well for his hat, though at the moment she could not imagine anyone who valued their lives defying him.

But Gumpy did defy him. “I think she should stay.”

“You crazy old coot! She is not staying. You are putting her back in that truck and taking her back wherever you found her.”

“So,” Gumpy said softly, “now I’m a crazy old coot. But when you want something, it’s Grandfather.”

“You’re his grandfather?” Lacey asked Gumpy with surprise.

“No!” Ethan snapped.

“For the People, Grandfather is a term that denotes respect,” Gumpy said softly, his dark eyes locked on the gray ones of the younger man.

To her immense surprise, Ethan looked down first. A small muscle jerked angrily in his jaw. But when he looked up again at Gumpy, the flash of fury was gone from his eyes, though they were as cool and as unnervingly steady as ever.

“She can’t stay,” he said quietly.

“He’s right,” Lacey said, moving to Gumpy and putting her hand on his sleeve. “Of course I can’t stay. I’ve made a dreadful mistake. I’ll go. Really.”

Gumpy studied her face, saw the resolve in it and sighed.

The little girl danced into the room. “Gumpy, I flushed your keys down the toilet.”

Ethan said that word again, so that Lacey just barely heard it. Not a very nice word at all.

“Don’t you just love flush toilets?” the little girl asked, looking right up at her.

She had the most beautiful blue eyes, Lacey thought, and exquisite bone structure, very like her uncle’s. Short dark hair scattered around a cherubic face. Out of the corner of her eye, Lacey saw Gumpy struggling to suppress his laughter. His thin shoulders were shaking.

“I do,” Lacey said, though she had to admit she had never given the topic a single thought in her entire life. “I like flush toilets very much.”

The other little imp materialized, and looked up at her with eyes amazingly like his uncle’s. “I’m Danny.”

“Hi,” Lacey said.

“And I’m Doreen,” the other one said.

Ethan was not being sidetracked by introductions. “You can take my truck,” he said grimly to Gumpy. “You’ll be back in plenty of time for us to use it to feed cattle.”

Lacey looked at Gumpy with concern. Surely he would not be expected to drive back and forth all night and then feed cattle in the morning?

“Never mind,” Ethan said, evidently reaching the same conclusion. For a moment in his eyes a barrier came down, and she could see his affectionate concern for the old man outweigh his substantial irritation. “I’ll take her.”

He strode out of the room, and it was as if something went with him. Energy. Light. Lacey realized his physical nearness had made her edgy, aware of something beating, pulsing, deep within her.

Danny and Doreen raced around the room and then disappeared down the hallway.

Lacey studied the living room. It was only slightly homier than the kitchen she had come through earlier. The couch looked worn but comfortable. A bright scatter rug was underneath it, no doubt to keep feet warm on icy winter nights. The coffee table, a beautiful old scarred wooden trunk, held a cup of coffee, half-full, and a well-thumbed book that looked like a medical manual on cattle. There were no pictures on the walls.

Keith, she knew, would hate this room. His taste ran to authentic Persian rugs and antique oriental vases. But she found herself drawn to it, to the lack of clutter, to the simplicity.

She glanced, covertly, at the four movies lined up under the televison, wondering what they would tell her of the man who lived here. Toy Story, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dances with Wolves and Chris Irwin, Horse Whispering Demystified. Gumpy shuffled over and sat on the couch, looking peaceful and unperturbed, but she felt driven to apologize anyway.

“I’m sorry, Gumpy,” she said softly, “I never should have let it go this far.”

He just smiled, that wise and knowing smile she had come to like very much.

They heard a drawer slam in the kitchen.

“Where the hell are my keys?”

From a different part of the house, Lacey heard breathless giggles.

Ethan must have heard them, too. Because the silence was suddenly very silent. She could hear the fridge motor.

“Doreen?” he called. “Danny?”

Silence.

“Where are my keys?”

Hushed giggles.

Lacey turned to Gumpy and widened her eyes. She mouthed, “The toilet?”

He nodded and she waited for an explosion, but none came.

Ethan came back into the living room. He sank down on the couch and closed his eyes for a long moment. He looked tired and discouraged, much, she thought, how she must have looked when Gumpy found her at the airport.

“You probably can’t even cook,” he muttered in her direction.

“You haven’t eaten until you’ve had my vegetarian chili,” she told him proudly.

“Vegetarian?” he said with flat dislike.

Even loyal Gumpy was looking at her with distress. “Vegetarian?”

They heard a toilet flush and then flush again, followed by childish laughter.

“My life,” Ethan said, slowly and deliberately, “could not possibly get any worse than it is at this moment.”

She felt it was wise to say nothing. Apparently so did Gumpy.

“Miss?” Ethan said, opening one gray eye and looking at her.

“Ms.,” she corrected him.

His sigh of long suffering said his life had just gotten worse. “You’re on a cattle ranch,” he told her, reclosing his eyes. “As in beef. We promote the edibility of red meat.”

“Oh.”

The phone rang, and for a long time it seemed as if both men planned to ignore it.

“You know who that is, don’t you?” Ethan asked Gumpy.

“Not a clue.”

“It’s a hopping-mad fifty-seven-year-old woman who has successfully raised four children on a diet of meat and potatoes.” Except for the hopping-mad part, he sounded distinctly wistful.

He unfolded himself from the couch and went and got the phone.

Chapter Two

The phone was wall mounted in the hallway. Ethan picked it up and looked back at the pink suit settling herself on his sofa. She crossed one long, slender leg over the other one. That suit really said it all.

This was no nanny.

This was trouble. Capital-T trouble.

He deliberately turned his back on her, but was annoyed that the picture of her did not leave his mind. He tried to concentrate on what Derrick Bishop was telling him.

His mother, Mrs. Bishop, was in the hospital in Ottawa. Something about a bad spill on some ice on the sidewalk outside the airport that had left her with a broken hip.

Knowing he was being a selfish SOB, all Ethan could think was that the cavalry was not coming after alL

Unless you counted her. He hung up the phone and turned back, using the darkness of the hall to study her.

The cavalry she was not.

Cavalries did not come in that particular shade of pink. Her skin was faintly golden, and the suit was lightweight. He figured she did not come from a Northern climate. The suit really was an engineering marvel. It looked businesslike, but it also clung and hinted.

Ethan Black had pictured Betty-Anne Bishop to be the approximate size and shape of a refrigerator. Nothing had prepared him for this.

He deeply resented the flash of heat he felt deep in his belly when his lovely intruder flung a heavy tress of wayward hair over a softly rounded shoulder, even though it confirmed the absolute wisdom of getting rid of her. Fast.

The truth was he’d had lots of experience with beautiful women. Win a few buckles, ride a few bulls, and you were suddenly irresistible. Barbie doll beauty hadn’t impressed him all those years ago, and it didn’t impress him now, or at least not the part of him he listened to.

Now, brains, he thought, that impressed him in a woman.

And he could tell this girl—make that Ms. Woman—was short in the smarts department. Who else would get in a truck with a toothless old man they knew nothing about?

He hoped to God she wasn’t a hooker.

He considered that, watching her with narrowed eyes. The suit was very expensive looking and very proper. If it weren’t for the color—and for the fact he knew she’d taken a ride with a stranger to an unknown destination—he might think high-powered executive type. She smiled at something Gumpy said. The smile was warm and open.

But that didn’t alter the fact she was an impostor. She had lied to Gumpy.

Expensively dressed. Beautiful. Desperate. A woman in trouble.

He did not need any more troubles. Not of his own or anybody else’s, either. Double trouble had arrived here two weeks ago, and Danny and Doreen were his absolute limit. She had to go. He was still the boss around here, not Gumpy.

Of course, there was the little matter of the keys. If he took the toilet apart tonight, a prospect that blackened his already-black mood, Gumpy could take her back to Calgary first thing in the morning. He could feed the cattle on his own. He cursed the early skiff of snow that added four hours of feeding cattle to his daily workload. Six, if Gumpy weren’t here.

What was he going to do with the kids? The thought of taking them with him to feed the cattle was enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck. He thought of sending them with Gumpy, but there wouldn’t be enough seat belts in Gumpy’s truck, not that Gumpy would go for it if there were. Pulling rank only went so far with his old hand. Of course, Gumpy was more than a hand, and he knew it.