Heart of Winter Read online

  She could imagine this country in the years of the Lewis and Clark expedition. She’d read a copy of their actual journal, enjoying its rather anecdotal style, seeing the country through their eyes in the days before supersonic jets and superhighways. Trappers would have come through here, she mused, kneeling beside the river with her eyes on the distant peaks. They’d have trapped beaver and fox and they’d have hunted.

  Kentucky had its own mountain country, and Nicole had been in it a few times in her life. It had been a different setting then. Elegance. Parties. Sophisticated people. Wealth. She sat down on a huge rock beside the river and tore at a twig, listening to the watery bubble of the river working its way downstream. She much preferred this kind of wealth. Trees and cattle and land. Yes.

  “Daydreaming?”

  She turned to find Winthrop Christopher sitting astride a big black stallion, watching her.

  “I like the river,” she explained. “We have one in Chicago, of course, but it’s not the same. We have concrete and steel instead of trees.”

  “I know. I’ve been to Chicago. Even to the office, in fact.” His eyes narrowed. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  She did. Even that brief glance had stamped him onto her memory, but it wouldn’t do to let him know that. She avoided a direct answer. “It’s always hectic. I don’t pay a lot of attention to visitors, I’m afraid.”

  “The morning I came, you were sitting at that computer with a stack of steno pads at your elbow and a telephone in your hand. You barely looked up when I went into Gerald’s office.” He smiled mockingly. “I was wearing a suit. Maybe I looked different.”

  “I can’t quite imagine you in a suit, Mr. Christopher,” she said, thinking, top that, cattle king.

  “Winthrop,” he corrected. “I’m not that much older than you. Eleven years or so. I’m thirty-four.”

  “How old is your brother?” she asked, curious.

  He lifted his chin. “Thirty.”

  “Sometimes he seems older,” she mused. “When they call the stockholders’ meetings, for instance.”

  He glanced into the distance. “No doubt. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with those damned things. That’s Gerald’s sole province now. I just run my ranch, and the only stockholder I have to please is myself. Gerald doesn’t own enough shares to squabble over the decisions I make.”

  “You inherited the ranch, didn’t you?”

  He stared at her for a minute, and she swallowed hard, sure that he was going to give her some sarcastic financial rundown and chide her for asking. But, surprisingly, he didn’t. He just nodded. “That was the way my father wanted it. He knew I’d hold it as long as I lived, no matter what. You’ll find that Gerald isn’t terribly sentimental. He’d just as soon have a photograph as the object itself.”

  She pursed her full lips and studied him. “I’ll bet you saved bobby pins and bits of ribbon when you were a teenager,” she said daringly, just to see what he’d say.

  He blinked, then laughed, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “I had my weak moments when I was younger,” he agreed. His eyes darkened. “Not anymore, though, Kentucky girl. I’m steel right through.”

  She wouldn’t have touched that line. She turned, glancing at the distant ribbon the river made running into those towering, majestic peaks. “I was thinking about Lewis and Clark,” she murmured, glancing toward the horizon, so that she didn’t catch the look on his face. “A man died during the expedition. What they described sounded just like food poisoning. They wouldn’t have known, of course. How much we’ve learned in over a hundred years. How far we’ve come. And yet,” she said softly, “how much we’ve lost in the process.”

  “The expedition went down the Missouri and Jefferson rivers,” he said slowly. “We’re on a tributary of the Jefferson, so they may have camped in this valley.” He looked away. “They used to call it Buffalo Flats. The buffalo are gone, though. Like the way of life that existed here long ago.” He shifted restlessly. “Where’s Gerald?”

  “Back at the house, I suppose,” she said, bothered by the curtness of his tone. “He said he had some important phone calls to make. I would have stayed, but he said we wouldn’t work today.”

  “Want a ride back?” he offered, and then seemed to withdraw, as if he regretted the words even as he was speaking them.

  Some devilish imp made her smile at him. “Suppose I say yes?” she asked, driven to taunt him. “You look as if you’d rather sacrifice the horse than let me on him.” And she grinned, daring him to mock her.

  He felt a burst of light, but he wouldn’t give in to it. “Damn you.”

  She grinned even more. “I won’t accept, if you’d rather not let me aboard. Anyway—” she shuddered with deliberate mockery and more sarcasm than he could know, because she’d practically grown up on horses “—I’d probably fall off. It looks very high.”

  “It is. But I won’t let you fall off. Come on.” He kicked his foot out of the stirrup and held down a long arm, giving in to an impulse he didn’t even understand. He wanted her closer. He wanted to hold her. That should have warned him, but it didn’t.

  He had enormous feet, she noticed, as she put a foot in the stirrup and let him pull her up in front of him. He was amazingly strong, too.

  She hadn’t realized how intimate it was going to be. His hard arm went around her middle and pulled her back against a body that was warm and strong and smelled of leather and spice. She felt her heart run away, and that arm under her breast would feel it, she knew.

  “Nervous?” he asked at her ear, and laughed softly, without any real humor. “I’m not dangerous. I don’t like women, or haven’t they filled you in yet?” She’s a woman, he was reminding himself. Watch it, watch yourself—she’ll sucker you in and kick you down, just like the other one did.

  “Yes, I’m nervous,” she said. “Yes, you’re dangerous, and you may not like women, but I’ll bet they chase you like a walking mink.”

  His eyebrows arched. “You’re plainspoken, aren’t you?” he asked, gathering her even closer as he urged the restless stallion into motion, controlling him carefully with lean, powerful hands and legs.

  “I try to be,” she said, still uneasy about the double life she’d led since leaving Kentucky. To a man who’d been betrayed once, it might seem as if she were misleading him deliberately. But the past was still painful, and she’d forsaken it. She wanted it to stay in the past, like the bad memories of her own betrayal. Besides, there was no danger of Winthrop becoming involved with her. He was too invulnerable.

  She held on to the pommel, her eyes on his long fingers. “You have beautiful hands, for a man,” she remarked.

  “I don’t like flattery.”

  “Suit yourself, you ugly old artifact,” she shot right back.

  It had been a long time since anything had made him laugh. But this plain-faced, mysterious woman struck a chord in him that had never sounded. She brought color and light into his own private darkness. He felt the sound bubbling up in his chest, like thunder, and then overflowing. He couldn’t hold it back this time, and the rush of it was incomprehensible to him.

  She felt his chest shaking, heard the deep rumble of sound from inside it. She would have bet that he didn’t laugh genuinely very often at anything. But she seemed to have a knack for dragging it out of him, and that pleased her beyond rational thought.

  The lean arm contracted, and for an instant she felt him in an embrace that made her go hot all over. What would it be like, she wondered wildly, if he turned her and wrapped her up in his embrace and put that hard, cruel mouth over hers….

  She tingled from head to toe, her breath catching in her throat. It shouldn’t have been like this, she shouldn’t still be vulnerable. She had to stop this, or it was going to be an unendurable month.

  “Watch out, Miss White,” he said at her ear, his voice deep and soft and dangerous. “Save the heavy flirting for Gerald. You’ll be safer that way.”

  He let
her down at the porch, holding her so that she slid down to the ground. For an instant his dark face was very close, so close that she saw his dark eyes at point-blank range and something shot through her like lightning. She pulled back slowly, her eyes still linked to his. What had he said? Something about flirting with Gerald. But why should she want to flirt with her boss?

  “See you.” He wheeled his stallion and rode off, and she watched him with mingled emotions.

  Supper was an unexpectedly quiet affair. Winthrop was out when she and Gerald sat down to eat, along with the ranch foreman, Michael Slade, a burly man of thirty who seemed perfectly capable of handling anything.

  “Boss said he wouldn’t get back in time for chow,” Michael told Gerald with a grin. “Had to go into Butte for some supplies he needed. I offered, but he said he had some other things to do as well.”

  “Odd that he didn’t do it before he met us at the airport.” Gerald sighed as he took his medicine and glared at his plate. The doctor had told him that they didn’t treat ulcers with bland diets anymore, but Mary hadn’t believed him. Amazing, how disgusting green pea soup looked in a bowl, and he did hate applesauce. He glanced at Mary, sighed and then gave in to her, as he had done even as a child. He picked up his spoon and began to sip the soup. “Oh, well, that’s Winthrop. Unpredictable. How’s it going, Mike?”

  The foreman launched into grand detail about seeing to the winter pasture, fixing fences, storing hay, culling cows, doing embryo transplants for the spring calving and organizing other facets of ranch life that he’d expected would go right over Nicole’s head.

  “One of my family was into embryo transplants when it was barely theory,” Nicole interrupted. “They had some great successes. Now there’s a new system underway, implanting computer chips just under the skin to keep track of herds….”

  “Say, I’ve read about that,” Mike agreed, and Gerald sat and stared while the two of them discussed cattle.

  “Mr. Christopher must be feeling pretty proud of himself to have someone like you on the payroll,” Nicole told the foreman when they reached a stopping point. “You know your business.”

  “Forgive me, ma’am, but so do you,” Mike grinned, his ruddy face almost handsome with his blue eyes flashing. “I never knew a woman who could talk cattle before.”

  “I never knew a man who talked it as well,” she grinned back.

  “I thought you were from Chicago,” Gerald sighed, shaking his head, when Mike had gone and they were sipping coffee in the living room. “Until you admitted that you were a Kentuckian, at least,” he added. His gaze was warm and faintly questioning. “Amazing, that we worked together for two years and knew nothing about each other.”

  She smiled at him. “I guess most bosses and secretaries are like that, really,” she agreed. “You’re very nice to work for, though. You don’t yell, like some of your vice presidents do.”

  He laughed. “I try not to. Winthrop, now,” he said, watching her face as he spoke, “never yells. But it’s worse that way, somehow. He has a voice like an icy wind when he loses his temper, which isn’t often. I’ve seen him look at men who were about to start fights and back them down. One of our ancestors was a French fur trader up in Canada. Our grandmother used to say Winthrop takes after him.”

  “He has expressive eyes,” she agreed, glancing at Gerald warily. “He doesn’t want me here, you know.”

  His shoulders rose and fell. “He’s buried himself up here for three solid years,” he said irritably, staring into his coffee. “No company, except these hunting parties that he tolerates because it gives some variety to his life. No women. No dating. He’s avoided women like the plague since Deanne left him. He uses that limp like a stick, have you noticed?” he asked, lifting troubled eyes to hers. “It isn’t all that bad, and he could walk well enough if he cared to try, but it’s as if he needs it to remind him that women are treacherous.”

  “I’d heard that he was something of a playboy in his younger days,” she probed, curious about Winthrop in new and exciting ways.

  “He was,” Gerald agreed with a faint, musing smile. “He broke hearts right and left. But Deanne liked him because he was a new experience. I don’t think she really meant to hurt him. She was young and he spoiled her, and she liked it. But when he got hurt, she had visions of being tied to a cripple for life, and she ran. Winthrop was shattered by the experience. His black pride couldn’t deal with the humiliation of being lamed and deserted, all at once.”

  “Poor man,” she said gently, and meant it.

  “Don’t make that mistake, either,” he cautioned quietly. “Don’t ever pity him. He’s steel clean through, and if you give him half an opening, he’ll make a scapegoat of you. Don’t let him hurt you, Nicky.”

  She colored delicately. “You think he might?”

  “I think you attract him,” he said bluntly. “And I have a feeling that you aren’t immune to him, either. He doesn’t like being vulnerable, so look out.”

  Hours later, when she went up to bed, she was still turning that threat over in her mind. She could picture Winthrop behind her closed eyes, and the image made her sigh with mingled emotions. She’d never felt so empty before, so alone. She wanted him in ways that she’d never dreamed she could want a man. She wanted to be with him, to share with him, to ease his hurt and make him whole again. She didn’t quite know how to cope with the new and frightening sensations. Nicky had her own scars and she didn’t want involvement any more than Winthrop did. But there was something between them. Something that was new and a little frightening, and like an avalanche, she couldn’t stop it.

  She was almost asleep when she heard slow steps coming past her door. She knew from the sound that it was Winthrop, and her heart beat faster as he passed her room. Odd, how deeply she could be touched just by his step. She wondered if he was as curious about her as she was about him, despite his understandably deep distrust of women. He was like her, in so many ways, hiding from a world that had been cruel to him. They had more in common than he seemed to realize. Or perhaps he did realize it, and was drawing back because he didn’t trust her. She closed her eyes as she heard a door close down the hall. In no time at all, she was asleep, secure because the master of the house was back, and she was safe.

  Chapter Three

  Winthrop’s horses attracted Nicole immediately, even though he’d given her a terse warning at breakfast about going too close to them. One of the happiest memories of her childhood was watching old Ernie at her home in Kentucky as he worked the thoroughbreds when they were ready to be trained.

  Besides his saddle horses, mostly quarter horses, Winthrop had at least two thoroughbreds with unmistakably Arabian ancestry, judging by their small heads. All American thoroughbreds, she remembered, were able to trace their ancestry to one of three Arabian horses imported into England in the late 1600s and early 1700s: Byerley Turk, Godolphin Barb and Queen Anne.

  Winthrop’s horses had the exquisite conformation and sleek lines that denoted thoroughbreds, too. She’d watched them during her brief stroll around the stables and corral. One was a mare about to foal, the other a full stallion, both with sleek chestnut coats and exquisite conformation. She’d wanted to ask Winthrop about them over scrambled eggs and steak that morning, but he’d been unapproachable. Frozen over, in fact, and she knew why without even being told. He didn’t want her too close, so he was freezing her out.

  She’d finished her two hours in the study, taking dictation from Gerald, and now cozy and warm in tailored gray slacks and a white pullover sweater, she was lazing around the corral looking for the horses. The stallion was there, but she didn’t see the mare anywhere.

  A noise from inside the big barn caught her attention. She couldn’t see inside, but it sounded like a horse’s whinny of pain. It was followed by a particularly virulent curse from a voice she recognized immediately.

  She darted into the dim warmth of the big barn, down the neat corridor between the stalls that was co
vered with pine shavings.

  “Winthrop?” she called quickly.

  “In here.”

  She followed his voice to the end stall. The mare was down on her side, making snuffling sounds, and Winthrop was bending over her, his sleeves rolled up, bareheaded, scowling.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said, glancing at him.

  “Brilliant observation,” he muttered, probing at the mare’s distended belly with tender, sure hands. “This is her first foal and it’s a breech, damn the luck! Go get Johnny Blake and tell him I said to come here, I can’t do this alone. He’ll be—”

  “The mare will be dead by the time I find him,” she said matter-of-factly. She eased into the stall, ignoring Winthrop as she gently approached the mare, talking softly to her with every step. While Winthrop watched, scowling, she slid down to her knees beside the beautiful, intelligent creature, watching the silky brown eyes all the while. She sat down then, reaching out to stroke the mare. And slowly, she eased under the proud head and slowly coaxed it onto her knees. She drew her fingers gently over the velvety muzzle, talking softly to the mare, gentling her.

  “She’ll let you help her now,” she told Winthrop softly, never taking her eyes from the mare’s.

  “Yes,” he said, watching her curiously for a few seconds before he bent to his task. “I believe she might. You’ll ruin that fancy sweater,” he murmured as he went to work.

  “Better it than lose the foal,” she said, and smiled at the mare, talking gently to her all along, smoothing the long mane, cuddling the shuddering head, as Winthrop slowly worked to help the colt in its dark cradle. She knew instinctively that the mare would realize that she was trying to help, and not hurt her.