The Winter Man Read online

  Tony slid the engagement ring onto Millie’s finger and kissed her. “So much for surprising your colleagues,” he mused. “I imagine Ms. Perry Mason there will have tipped off the whole bunch by the time we get back inside.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said shyly.

  He was lost in her smile. “Me, neither,” he said.

  Then he had to kiss her again. But they managed to get back into the library before all the presents were opened, to an unconcealed round of laughter that only the adults in the group truly understood.

  * * *

  They spent Christmas Day together talking about the future in between kisses. Tony offered her a church wedding, but they both decided that it could probably wait until they had more than one friend to ask to attend it. Meanwhile the local probate judge’s office did nicely, with an attorney who was looking for a birth certificate and a judge’s clerk for witnesses.

  It had been Tony who refused to go past some energetic petting before the wedding. He wanted Millie to have things just the way she wanted them, he explained. So they’d wait.

  However, the minute they reached Millie’s apartment, which was closer than his hotel room, they were undressing even as Tony locked her door. They didn’t even make it to the bedroom. Millie had her first intensely intimate experience on the carpeted floor of her apartment, and she never felt the carpet burns until she and Tony were lying in a tangled, sweaty heap under the soft hall-ceiling light.

  “Wow,” he managed.

  “Oh, yes,” she whispered while her heartbeat threatened to pound her into the floor.

  He stretched his tired muscles, laughing when they cramped. “Hell!” he muttered. “I really tried to make it to the bedroom…”

  “I don’t care,” she said in a tone that almost purred with satisfaction. “On a floor, standing up, in the bathroom…I never dreamed it would feel like that!”

  He rolled over, so that he could look down into her soft green eyes. Her glasses and her clothing were strewn around them. “It hurt, at first.”

  “Did it?” she asked, surprised. “I didn’t even notice.”

  “You flinched,” he mused, brushing his warm mouth over her swollen lips. He chuckled softly. “But I knew what to do about that.”

  She blushed as she recalled exactly what he’d done about that.

  His mouth smoothed down over soft, smooth, warm flesh. “I’m still vibrating,” he murmured. “It was like swallowing fireworks!”

  “Yes.” She reached up and pulled him down to her, loving the feel of his muscular, hairy chest over her bare breasts. The contact electrified her. She arched up, catching his legs with hers, curling them around, tugging hopefully.

  “It may hurt,” he whispered.

  “It may not,” she whispered back, touching him shyly, but boldly.

  He groaned. After that, he wasn’t in any condition to protest.

  * * *

  She had to sit down very carefully. He noticed and his pursed lips smiled, reminding her of the restraint he’d tried to exercise.

  “You insisted,” he charged.

  She grimaced. “Yes, but now I know better.” She grinned at him anyway. “It was worth it.”

  He laughed out loud. “Yes, it was. Are you hungry?”

  Her eyebrows arched. “I am.”

  He went into the kitchen and started looking through cabinets and the refrigerator. He laughed. “I can see that you’re not impartial to Italian cooking.”

  “I love it. But you’re not Italian.”

  “Not hardly. I just have that last name, since my mother married the devil.” He frowned. “I should have had it changed, I guess. But that SOB who got her pregnant would never have let her use his name, and I don’t want it, either.” He shrugged. “Nothing wrong with an Italian name. It confuses people who think they know my background.” He glanced at her. “I like confusing people,” he said.

  She got up and went to him, sliding her arms around his middle, pressing her cheek against all that warm strength. “I love you so much,” she whispered. “I thought I’d die of it.”

  His own arms contracted. He kissed her hair. “I didn’t say the words,” he whispered. “But you must know that I feel them, right to my soul. These past few weeks without you have been pure hell!” He bent and kissed her soft mouth with something like anguish. “God, I love you!”

  Tears welled up in her eyes and overflowed. Afterward, he stood just holding her, rocking her in his big arms, while they savored the belonging.

  “It’s a few days too late, now, but I just remembered that I didn’t get you anything for Christmas,” he said suddenly, disturbed.

  “Yes, you did,” she argued. She looked up at him with clear green eyes. “I got you for Christmas.” She kissed his chin and grinned. “You’re the best belated present I ever had! My very own Silent Night Man.” She cuddled close and added impishly, “My very own CIA agent! But I promise not to tell a soul.”

  He laughed wholeheartedly and wrapped her up close with a sigh. “You’re the best present I ever had, too, precious. Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, my darling,” she whispered. She closed her eyes. Under her ear she heard the deep, steady beat of his heart. She remembered the instant she’d looked up into his eyes on Christmas Eve, and the glorious happiness she’d felt. It had only gotten better in the days that followed. This had been, she decided, the best Christmas of her whole life. She was holding her happiness in her arms.

  * * * * *

  SUTTON’S WAY

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  The noise outside the cabin was there again, and Amanda shifted restlessly with the novel in her lap, curled up in a big armchair by the open fireplace in an Indian rug. Until now, the cabin had been paradise. There was three feet of new snow outside, she had all the supplies she needed to get her through the next few wintery weeks of Wyoming weather, and there wasn’t a telephone in the place. Best of all, there wasn’t a neighbor.

  Well, there was, actually. But nobody in their right mind would refer to that man on the mountain as a neighbor. Amanda had only seen him once and once was enough.

  She’d met him, if their head-on encounter could be referred to as a meeting, on a snowy Saturday last week. Quinn Sutton’s majestic ranch house overlooked this cabin nestled against the mountainside. He’d been out in the snow on a horse-drawn sled that contained huge square bales of hay, and he was heaving them like feather pillows to a small herd of red-and-white cattle. The sight had touched Amanda, because it indicated concern. The tall, wiry rancher out in a blizzard feeding his starving cattle. She’d even smiled at the tender picture it made.

  And then she’d stopped her four-wheel-drive vehicle and stuck her blond head out the window to ask directions to the Blalock Durning place, which was the cabin one of her aunt’s friends was loaning her. And the tender picture dissolved into stark hostility.

  The tall rancher turned toward her with the coldest black eyes and the hardest face she’d ever seen in her life. He had a day’s growth of stubble, but the stubble didn’t begin to cover up the frank homeliness of his lean face. He had amazingly high cheekbones, a broad forehead and a jutting chin, and he looked as if someone had taken a straight razor to one side of his face, which had a wide scratch. None of that bothered Amanda because Hank Shoeman and the other three men who made music with her group were even uglier than Quinn Sutton. But at least Hank and the boys could smile. This man looked as if he invented the black scowl.

  “I said,” she’d repeated with growing nervousness, “can you tell me how to get to Blalock Durning’s cabin?”

  Above the sheepskin coat, under the battered gray ranch hat, Qu
inn Sutton’s tanned face didn’t move a muscle. “Follow the road, turn left at the lodgepoles,” he’d said tersely, his voice as deep as a rumble of thunder.

  “Lodgepoles?” she’d faltered. “You mean Indian lodgepoles? What do they look like?”

  “Lady,” he said with exaggerated patience, “a lodgepole is a pine tree. It’s tall and piney, and there are a stand of them at the next fork in the road.”

  “You don’t need to be rude, Mr…?”

  “Sutton,” he said tersely. “Quinn Sutton.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she murmured politely. “I’m Amanda.” She wondered if anyone might accidentally recognize her here in the back of beyond, and on the off chance, she gave her mother’s maiden name instead of her own last name. “Amanda Corrie,” she added untruthfully. “I’m going to stay in the cabin for a few weeks.”

  “This isn’t the tourist season,” he’d said without the slightest pretense at friendliness. His black eyes cut her like swords.

  “Good, because I’m not a tourist,” she said.

  “Don’t look to me for help if you run out of wood or start hearing things in the dark,” he added coldly. “Somebody will tell you eventually that I have no use whatsoever for women.”

  While she was thinking up a reply to that, a young boy of about twelve had come running up behind the sled.

  “Dad!” he called, amazingly enough to Quinn Sutton. “There’s a cow in calf down in the next pasture. I think it’s a breech!”

  “Okay, son, hop on,” he told the boy, and his voice had become fleetingly soft, almost tender. He looked back at Amanda, though, and the softness left him. “Keep your door locked at night,” he’d said. “Unless you’re expecting Durning to join you,” he added with a mocking smile.

  She’d stared at him from eyes as black as his own and started to tell him that she didn’t even know Mr. Durning, who was her aunt’s friend, not hers. But she bit her tongue. It wouldn’t do to give this man an opening. “I’ll do that little thing,” she agreed. She glanced at the boy, who was eyeing her curiously from his perch on the sled. “And it seems that you do have at least one use for women,” she added with a vacant smile. “My condolences to your wife, Mr. Sutton.”

  She’d rolled up the window before he could speak and she’d whipped the four-wheel-drive down the road with little regard for safety, sliding all over the place on the slick and rutted country road.

  She glared into the flames, consigning Quinn Sutton to them with all her angry heart. She hoped and prayed that there wouldn’t ever be an accident or a reason she’d have to seek out his company. She’d rather have asked help from a passing timber wolf. His son hadn’t seemed at all like him, she recalled. Sutton was as dangerous looking as a timber wolf, with a face like the side of a bombed mountain and eyes that were coal-black and cruel. In the sheepskin coat he’d been wearing with that raunchy Stetson that day, he’d looked like one of the old mountain men might have back in Wyoming’s early days. He’d given Amanda some bad moments and she’d hated him after that uncomfortable confrontation. But the boy had been kind. He was redheaded and blue-eyed, nothing like his father, not a bit of resemblance.

  She knew the rancher’s name only because her aunt had mentioned him, and cautioned Amanda about going near the Sutton ranch. The ranch was called Ricochet, and Amanda had immediately thought of a bullet going awry. Probably one of Sutton’s ancestors had thrown some lead now and again. Mr. Sutton looked a lot more like a bandit than he did a rancher, with his face unshaven, that wide, awful scrape on his cheek and his crooked nose. It was an unforgettable face all around, especially those eyes….

  She pulled the Indian rug closer and gave the book in her slender hand a careless glance. She wasn’t really in the mood to read. Memories kept tearing her heart. She leaned her blond head back against the chair and her dark eyes studied the flames with idle appreciation of their beauty.

  The nightmare of the past few weeks had finally caught up with her. She’d stood onstage, with the lights beating down on her long blond hair and outlining the beige leather dress that was her trademark, and her voice had simply refused to cooperate. The shock of being unable to produce a single note had caused her to faint, to the shock and horror of the audience.

  She came to in a hospital, where she’d been given what seemed to be every test known to medical science. But nothing would produce her singing voice, even though she could talk. It was, the doctor told her, purely a psychological problem, caused by the trauma of what had happened. She needed rest.

  So Hank, who was the leader of the group, had called her aunt Bess and convinced her to arrange for Amanda to get away from it all. Her aunt’s rich boyfriend had this holiday cabin in Wyoming’s Grand Teton Mountains and was more than willing to let Amanda recuperate there. Amanda had protested, but Hank and the boys and her aunt had insisted. So here she was, in the middle of winter, in several feet of snow, with no television, no telephone and facilities that barely worked. Roughing it, the big, bearded bandleader had told her, would do her good.

  She smiled when she remembered how caring and kind the guys had been. Her group was called Desperado, and her leather costume was its trademark. The four men who made up the rest of it were fine musicians, but they looked like the Hell’s Angels on stage in denim and leather with thick black beards and mustaches and untrimmed hair. They were really pussycats under that rough exterior, but nobody had ever been game enough to try to find out if they were.

  Hank and Deke and Jack and Johnson had been trying to get work at a Virginia night spot when they’d run into Amanda Corrie Callaway, who was also trying to get work there. The club needed a singer and a band, so it was a match made in heaven, although Amanda with her sheltered upbringing had been a little afraid of her new backup band. They, on the other hand, had been nervous around her because she was such a far cry from the usual singers they’d worked with. The shy, introverted young blonde made them self-conscious about their appearance. But their first performance together had been a phenomenal hit, and they’d been together four years now.

  They were famous, now. Desperado had been on the music videos for two years, they’d done television shows and magazine interviews, and they were recognized everywhere they went. Especially Amanda, who went by the stage name of Mandy Callaway. It wasn’t a bad life, and it was making them rich. But there wasn’t much rest or time for a personal life. None of the group was married except Hank, and he was already getting a divorce. It was hard for a homebound spouse to accept the frequent absences that road tours required.

  She still shivered from the look Quinn Sutton had given her, and now she was worried about her aunt Bess, though the woman was more liberal minded and should know the score. But Sutton had convinced Amanda that she wasn’t the first woman to be at Blalock’s cabin. She should have told that arrogant rancher what her real relationship with Blalock Durning was, but he probably wouldn’t have believed her.

  Of course, she could have put him in touch with Jerry and proved it. Jerry Allen, their road manager, was one of the best in the business. He’d kept them from starving during the beginning, and they had an expert crew of electricians and carpenters who made up the rest of the retinue. It took a huge bus to carry the people and equipment, appropriately called the “Outlaw Express.”

  Amanda had pleaded with Jerry to give them a few weeks’ rest after the tragedy that had cost her her nerve, but he’d refused. Get back on the horse, he’d advised. And she’d tried. But the memories were just too horrible.

  So finally he’d agreed to Hank’s suggestion and she was officially on hiatus, as were the other members of the group, for a month. Maybe in that length of time she could come to grips with it, face it.

  It had been a week and she felt better already. Or she would, if those strange noises outside the cabin would just stop! She had horrible visions of wolves breaking in and eating her.

  “Hello?”

  The small voice startled her. It sounded lik
e a boy’s. She got up, clutching the fire poker in her hand and went to the front door. “Who’s there?” she called out tersely.

  “It’s just me. Elliot,” he said. “Elliot Sutton.”

  She let out a breath between her teeth. Oh, no, she thought miserably, what was he doing here? His father would come looking for him, and she couldn’t bear to have that…that savage anywhere around!

  “What do you want?” she groaned.

  “I brought you something.”

  It would be discourteous to refuse the gift, she guessed, especially since he’d apparently come through several feet of snow to bring it. Which brought to mind a really interesting question: where was his father?

  She opened the door. He grinned at her from under a thick cap that covered his red hair.

  “Hi,” he said. “I thought you might like to have some roasted peanuts. I did them myself. They’re nice on a cold night.”

  Her eyes went past him to a sled hitched to a sturdy draft horse. “Did you come in that?” she asked, recognizing the sled he and his father had been riding the day she’d met them.

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s how we get around in winter, what with the snow and all. We take hay out to the livestock on it. You remember, you saw us. Well, we usually take hay out on it, that is. When Dad’s not laid up,” he added pointedly, and his blue eyes said more than his voice did.

  She knew she was going to regret asking the question before she opened her mouth. She didn’t want to ask. But no young boy came to a stranger’s house in the middle of a snowy night just to deliver a bag of roasted peanuts.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked with resigned perception.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “I said, what’s wrong?” She made her tone gentler. He couldn’t help it that his father was a savage, and he was worried under that false grin. “Come on, you might as well tell me.”

  He bit his lower lip and looked down at his snow-covered boots. “It’s my dad,” he said. “He’s bad sick and he won’t let me get the doctor.”