through with her decision to stop acting? She moved into the dark hallway and felt for the banister at the foot of the stairs. People would say she was crazy, and maybe she was, but her desire for normalcy, privacy, for a life in which she was just another face in the crowd, outweighed anything else. Everything, perhaps, except her need to keep busy. To keep from thinking. Because if she had too much time on her hands, regrets about Emmie would consume her—
A large solid object barreled squarely into her, nearly bowling her over backward. She gasped and managed to bite back the scream that nearly escaped. Reflexively, she clutched at the object to keep herself from falling. Soft fabric. Hard muscle. Her palm scraped across a stubbled cheek. A man. Fear instantly closed her throat.
“What the hell...?”
Reason reasserted itself at the plainly bewildered tone in the masculine voice, a voice she recognized. Get a grip, girl, you’re safe here.
A small light pierced the darkness as the man who’d bumped into her snapped on a tiny lamp standing on a table against the wall. Angel blinked in its sudden glow, assessing Day Kincaid as her eyes adjusted. She’d been too unnerved by his unexpected antipathy earlier to really look at the man. But in the lamplight she realized that he was...quite something to behold.
As she’d noted before, he was several inches taller than her model’s height. His face was rugged, craggy handsome beneath a thatch of dark hair quirking out in defiant waves all over his head despite a severe cut that revealed his ears. Handsome in a hard, weathered way that the picture-perfect actors she worked with could never achieve. High cheekbones cast deep shadows over the dimples in his lean cheeks. His mouth was partially concealed by a thick mustache, but she could tell that he wasn’t smiling. She was equally aware of his scent—a fresh masculine soap mingling with the unmistakable smell of healthy male vigor.
“What are you doing running around the house in the middle of the night?” His voice was deep and gruff and not particularly friendly.
She braced herself mentally. “I couldn’t sleep. I made myself a cup of tea.” She was annoyed at the timorous quality of her voice, but darn it, he’d scared her. Belatedly she realized she was still holding his forearm. She let go and stepped back a pace, straightening her robe.
Silver eyes the color of new coins watched her fingers pull together the gaping edges of her robe, then trailed down over the rest of her body before leisurely coming back to her face. She hadn’t noticed the unusual color of his eyes earlier today. They were striking eyes on a man or a woman. On this man... She became aware that they were inspecting her with a thoroughness that made her very conscious of her own lack of attire.
Angel held the silky fabric closed with one hand and summoned her poise. “If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Kincaid...”
“No.” He didn’t move.
She lifted her head, fixing him with a haughty stare, one eyebrow raised. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry if I hurt you today,” he said.
His tone was so grudging that she nearly laughed aloud as her momentary sense of alarm passed. “Dulcie made you promise to apologize,” she guessed, and was rewarded when he shifted his gaze to the floor.
“I really am sorry,” he repeated. “I’m not in the habit of treating strangers, especially women, like that, but I thought...it looked to me as if you were trying to kidnap Beth Ann.”
“I understand your concern,” she said. And she did. If she had thought someone was luring her child away, she’d have reacted in much the same manner.
“I doubt you do.” His voice was cool, yet she heard a thread of what sounded like desperation in it. “My ex-wife is Jada Barrington.”
Jada Barrington! Even in Hollywood, the woman’s reputation for excess and self-indulgence was legendary.
“I see you know her.”
“I know of her,” she stressed. “Believe me, we don’t frequent the same circles.”
He continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “She didn’t have the time or the patience to deal with an infant, but now she thinks I’m just going to hand over my child to her so she can play the role of devoted mother whenever she isn’t too busy.”
The bitterness and anger came through clearly, and she began to see why he was so abrupt with her. Jada Barrington was an actress who worked in television. While her current series was excellent and she had a large following, she was widely known to be a difficult actress to work with as well as a wild woman in her time offscreen. Angel had made her name in movies but Day probably equated them as the same brand of trouble. Perhaps he even thought Jada had sent her!
“You don’t—”
But he cut off her response. “I’m not telling you this to elicit sympathy. I’m telling you because now that you’re here, you’re as responsible as everyone else for Beth Ann’s safety. If you see anyone who doesn’t belong on this ranch at any time, you let me know immediately.”
So he didn’t suspect her of being in league with his ex-wife. In fact, he hadn’t mentioned her career at all. Which was just the way she wanted it. Dulcie must have given him his orders. She nodded. “I’ll only be here for two weeks,” she reminded him.
Then the concern that she’d felt since she’d seen the child’s pinched white face after the scene in the yard came back. “You know, Mr. Kincaid, behaving as you did in front of Beth Ann this afternoon can’t be good for her. You don’t want to make her terrified of strangers. Surely there’s some middle ground. Perhaps you could even stage some ‘safe’ experiences with strange people so that she doesn’t grow up fearing every face in the crowd.”
Day’s expression would have been amusing if she hadn’t been the target of the ire apparent on his face. “If I need advice, I’ll ask for it, Miss Vandervere. Right now I suggest that you return to your room and get some sleep. We rise early and work hard around here. If you’re planning on spending any time with Dulcie, you’ll have to do the same.”
* * *
Late in the morning, Day parked his big pickup truck in front of the drugstore in Deming. He’d already been by the feed store, the grocery and the vet’s office on his round of errands. The faster he got back to the ranch, the happier he’d be. He wanted to ride out and check the fence in the northwest pasture before supper.
Supper. Last night, Dulcie’s guest had been seated across the table from him, and later he’d bumped into her in the hallway—literally. He might not be thrilled about the idea of having a guest on the ranch, especially while he was so worried about the custody suit Jada kept threatening, but he had to admit that Angel Vandervere was easy on the eyes. And when she’d come up against him fully in the dark house, he’d had a momentary fantasy of getting to know those lush curves intimately. She wasn’t really his type, but after seeing her, he wasn’t sure he could say what his type might be these days.
She was tall, taller than he normally liked his women, and she was a blonde. When he’d grabbed her yesterday, he’d been expecting blue eyes, but hers were brown...big and soft and intelligent-looking. Funny that he didn’t remember her at all. But he figured the timing had been wrong when she’d lived in Deming before. Dulcie had told him that Angel had moved there in the seventh grade. That would have been his first year of college, and he had to admit that on the rare occasions he’d
