One Heart to Win (24 page)

But she was suddenly reminded that she was going to have extra time on her hands, now that she had a kitchen helper. Aside from an occasional ride, she had thought she might try fishing for the family’s dinner, so she could provide something other than beef and more beef. Cowboys might not expect anything other than that meat since it was what their jobs were all about, but she did. Yet riding and fishing wouldn’t be daily outings.

Impulsively, she offered some of that extra time to this overburdened woman. She couldn’t dust, not when the slightest stirring of it made her sneeze, but how hard would it be to make up some of the beds, straighten up some of the rooms,
even help carry the dirty laundry to the washing shed? She said as much. And left the maid incredulous.

Luella admitted, “Pearl does share half the wash load—when she’s here,” but then she added in disgust, “and when she’s not cleaning her nails instead of getting them dirty.”

A bit of rivalry there? Tiffany wondered. Or had she just been warned to expect some trouble from the downstairs maid when she returned to work?

“For now, I’ll finish the room you were in,” Tiffany offered. “And in the morning, I can make the beds on this side of the stairs.”

Luella gave her a brilliant smile. “Hunter was due fresh sheets. I brought them. I really appreciate this, Miss Fleming.”

Hunter’s room? But Luella had already hurried off before Tiffany could take back her offer. She made a face. Going into
his
bedroom probably wasn’t a good idea. But as long as he wasn’t in it, what harm could come from it?

It was a masculine room. A rack of rifles hung on one wall. The three paintings on the other walls each depicted a Western scene—a herd of cows, a cowboy trying to ride a bull, a group of cowboys sitting around a campfire. An ornately carved wood chest, quite lovely, was at the foot of the large bed. With the clean bedding left on top of it, she guessed it contained more bedding and peeked inside. She was wrong. It was filled with cowboy gear, ropes, chaps, spurs, some extra long-barreled guns, another gun holster much more fancy looking than the plain one Hunter usually wore.

Two wide-brimmed hats were hung on pegs next to a dark-wood wardrobe, one black, one cream colored. She resisted opening the wardrobe. A brown stuffed chair sat with its back to one of the two windows, faded, worn in the seat; it looked
entirely too comfortable. She pictured Hunter sitting in it reading and eventually nodding off. Had he taken naps in it? Had this always been his room? If it was, no evidence of his childhood was left in it.

She recognized the two medium-size crates stacked in a corner as the ones John and Cole had picked up at the train station the day she’d arrived. So it was something Hunter had ordered shipped in? Then why hadn’t he opened the crates yet? But she’d snooped enough, too much. She shouldn’t be so curious about the man.

Luella had already stripped the bed and tucked in the bottom sheet. Tiffany grabbed the folded top sheet. A lovely knitted coverlet in dark browns and blues, thin for summer, was to go on last. She wondered if Mary had made it and decided to ask her when she saw her next.

She was opening the top sheet and letting it flutter across the bed when she heard Hunter remark, “I’d wondered where you’d gone off to. Never expected to find you waiting for me in my room.”

Tiffany jumped. He’d startled her enough that she’d let go of the sheet. It floated across the bed and landed on the floor on the other side. It should have been obvious what she was doing there, so he was just being him with a remark like that. She glanced behind her to tell him that her being there had nothing to do with him. She gasped instead and looked away immediately. He was standing in the doorway wearing nothing but a towel!

“Good God, why aren’t you dressed!?”

“Got knocked on my ass and I was a little too muddy to wait for a bath. That rain came down hard this morning. It will take a few days to dry up.”

She hadn’t been outside to notice—did he get muddy fighting with her brothers? “What happened when you went to the Warrens’ ranch?”

“Don’t know. We ran into Degan coming home from town while we were riding over there. Pa decided to just take the guard dog with him and sent the rest of us back to check on the herd. If the Warrens
are
on the offensive, rustling would be another kind of attack.”

“Are you missing any cattle?”

“Doesn’t look like it. We’ll have to wait until dinnertime to learn what Pa found out today. If you didn’t start that fire, and a Warren didn’t, that just leaves our new neighbors to the east.”

“Once again, we are in complete agreement. I am becoming quite amazed by it.”

“Surprise and sarcasm in the same breath, Red?” He chuckled, but then asked curiously, “When was the first time you agreed with me?”

Why did it sound as if his voice was getting closer to her? Nervously she said, “Never mind that, I’d like to know why you didn’t say that to your father this morning? After everything I’ve heard about the miners, and what I witnessed yesterday for myself, they were certainly my
first
guess, not my second. It’s not just the owner of that mine who would benefit from driving your family off, but every miner who works there. Doesn’t your father know that?”

“He knows, but we got a judge involved who made a ruling. They have to clear out as soon as that lesser vein is gone, which won’t be long now. So while they might be angry enough to start something, they don’t stand to gain from it.”

“Anger was enough to drive your family over to the Warren ranch this morning, wasn’t it?”

He chuckled. “Point made.”

“There are a lot of variables to consider. Which is why you might want to post a watch here at night.”

“Intended to,” he said. “But no need for you to get worried about it.”

After the worry she’d gone through today, that statement just annoyed the heck out of her. “Don’t be obtuse. I work here. So what happens here
does
affect me.”

“But I told you I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. Did you think I didn’t mean it?”

“What I think is you concern yourself too much with me. I’m not yours to protect, Hunter.”

“Do you want to be?”

He said it so softly she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. But she finally remembered why she was keeping her eyes off him and got even more red-faced, mortified that she was still in a room with a half-naked man! She should have bolted out of there immediately. She should have waited until he’d put on some clothes to ask her questions. He must think by now that she didn’t mind his undress.

Belatedly she said, “I’ll only be a few minutes if you can wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“Wait outside for me to finish.”

“You’ve got some really silly notions, Red. It’s my room. I need my clothes.”

She turned to say, “Then I’ll come back later to—”

She didn’t get to finish, couldn’t. He was standing right in front of her now, so close she might have collided if instinct hadn’t made her back up instead. Too quickly. The bed was in the way and her balance deserted her. She fell back.

A slow grin turned his lips. “When you put it like that . . .”

Her hands shot up to keep him from leaning in close, which he started to do. Such a paltry defense and it didn’t stop him. He merely leaned slowly into her hands. When she realized it might appear to him that she was caressing his chest, she yanked her hands back as if burned. That’s when he got really close.

“I know kissing you is a bad idea. I’m probably going to regret it till the day I die, because
I’ll
never forget it. What about you?”

Words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. A gasp did when his lips actually touched hers. She turned her head to the side, she couldn’t let this happen! Across her cheek, his lips followed her. A tingling sensation spread along her neck, down her shoulders. Her heart started to pound.

“Hunter . . .”

“When you whisper my name, it ties me in knots. How do you do that, Jenny?”

His breath was hot on her cheek. He put a hand under her head to guide her mouth back to his. It was such a gentle kiss, yet what it did to her was anything but gentle—more like a maelstrom bursting inside her. She felt it in places that were nowhere near her mouth! She felt urges that were not in her nature! She wanted to put her arms around his neck and pull him in even closer. That’s when she knew she was in trouble.

“I’m going to smack you if you don’t let me up!”

Hunter rolled off her with a sigh. “I thought I left the cold water downstairs.”

She didn’t answer him. Keeping her eyes closed until she was off the bed, she did what she should have done sooner and bolted straight out of the room.

Chapter Thirty

S
HE WAS FURIOUS WHEN
she returned to the kitchen. She banged more than one door, including the oven door when she shoved the bread in for dinner. This might be Hunter’s house, he might be used to walking around in it like that after a bath, but, good grief, she wasn’t! The kitchen was run by a woman now, not Old Ed, who wouldn’t blink an eye over such a display. She was going to have to insist on some house rules. Leaving that bathing room in just a towel had better never happen again. Kissing her better never happen again. Oh, God, that’s what she was really angry about. She’d let him get to her. She hadn’t ended it instantly as she should have. And she knew he would have let her. It was all a game for him, the teasing, the risqué remarks, even the playful kissing.

She was suspicious, too, of his excuse for that scandalous display of bare skin. The man probably wanted to show off his muscles to her. Hadn’t he mentioned wondering where she was at? Because he’d expected her to be in the kitchen to ogle him!
Did he think she’d fly into his arms, unable to resist his amazing physique, if she saw him half-naked?

No mud was on the kitchen floor to support his claim that he’d gotten muddy. She glanced in the bathroom. Very well, the pile of clothes he’d left on the floor looked muddy. No boots though. Was he actually thoughtful enough to take them off outside so he wouldn’t track mud on her floor? She peeked outside, then opened the back door wider. His muddy boots were there. So was the little piglet, who was currently rolling all over the boots and seemed to be in ecstasy. At least someone around here was happy.

Tiffany rolled her eyes and, without really thinking about it, picked up the pig, held it as far away from her as she could, and carried it inside to set it in the sink. It squealed when she pumped water over it, but quieted when she rubbed the mud off him.

“Like petting, do you? We are
not
making a habit of this,” she warned.

She dried it off with a kitchen towel, then set it back outside and pushed his rump in the direction of the pigpen. Once again the little animal had lightened her mood. All the anger was gone—for now. But it would probably return if she clapped eyes on Hunter again today.

It didn’t. And he was already in the room. She didn’t know how long he’d been standing by the other door watching her, but it was long enough for him to have seen her carrying the pig outside.

“Dinner visits us now?” he asked with a chuckle.

“Don’t
even
think it.”

His brow shot up. “Don’t tell me you’ve made friends with a pig?”

The notion was absurd, yet her chin rose defiantly. “Of course not, but what if I did?”

“You’re about as standoffish as it gets, Red, all Eastern prim and proper, so making a pet out of an animal that’s going to get big, really
really
big, more’n six hundred pounds big, it just . . .”

What it did was make him laugh so hard he couldn’t even finish. It was almost contagious, so she couldn’t quite manage to get annoyed over his assessment. The man truly enjoyed life and could find humor in the smallest things. But she’d looked at him too long. The image of his wide, bare chest came back into her mind somehow. She lowered her eyes, remembering it—and what had come after it. Her heart beat a little faster.

She hurried to the stove and picked up a large spoon to start stirring the soup vigorously, so vigorously the soup was sloshing out of the pot. Laughter gone, he was suddenly standing next to her, but just to pour himself a cup of coffee. Yet he didn’t walk away with it after he set the coffeepot back on the stove.

She kept her eyes off him, but could feel his on her. Was he always going to make her this nervous? Was it even nervousness he made her feel? Whatever it was, it was disturbing. Maybe talking would take her mind off the image of his naked chest.

“How did you get so muddy?”

“One of our older hands, Caleb, caught a wild mustang near his place. He wasn’t part of your broom-pushing crew, so you haven’t met him yet. We don’t have many married cowboys working here, but we built a few houses on the north end of the property for the ones that get hitched and still want to stay on with us. Caleb is one of them. He’s expecting his second kid anytime now. Anyway, he brought the mustang in today and I had a go at breaking it in. Could have picked a better day for it.
Knew I’d get tossed off him a few times before he gave up the fight.”