was handsome, and very sexy, but she just didn’t feel that way about him. Fortunately he’d never felt that way about her, either. John had some secret woman in his past, and now he didn’t get serious about anyone. Kasie had heard that from Mrs. Charters, who was a veritable storehouse of information about it. John didn’t look to Kasie like a man with a broken heart. But maybe he played the field to camouflage it.
Kasie had never really been in love. She’d had crushes on TV celebrities and movie stars, and on boys at school—and one summer she’d had a real case on a boy who lived near Mama Luke, her aunt, in Billings. But those had all been very innocent, limited to kisses and light caresses and not much desire.
All that had changed when Gil Callister held her hand at the movies. And when Gil had carried her up the staircase this morning, she was on fire with pleasure. She was still shivery with new sensations, which she didn’t understand at all. Gil was her boss and he disliked her. She’d been spending more time with the girls than the grown-ups because John didn’t like to do paperwork and he was always dodging dictation. He could usually be found out with the men on the ranch, helping with whatever routine task was going on at the time. Gil did that, too, of course, but not because he didn’t like paperwork. Gil rarely ever sat still.
Mrs. Charters said it was because he’d loved his wife and had never gotten over her unexpected death from a freak horseback-riding accident. She was only twenty-six years old.
That had been only three years ago. Since then, Gil had hired a succession of nurses, at first, and then motherly governesses to watch over the girls. Old Mrs. Harris had retired and then Gil had hired Miss Parsons in desperation, over a virtual flood of young marriageable women who had their eye on either Gil or John. Kasie remembered Gil saying that he had no interest in marriage ever again. At that time, she couldn’t have imagined feeling attracted to a widowed man with two children who had the personality of a spitting cobra.
For her first few weeks on the job, he’d watched Kasie. He hadn’t wanted his children around Kasie, and made it plain. Amazing, how much that had hurt.
They were such darling little girls.
At least, she thought, now she could spend time with them and not have to sneak around doing it. Gil might not like her, but he couldn’t deny that his daughters did. Probably he felt that he didn’t have a choice.
Kasie was going to miss the secretarial work, and she wondered how Gil would manage with Pauline, who absolutely hated clerical duties. The woman only did it to be near Gil, but he didn’t seem to realize it. Or if he did, he didn’t care.
She tried to picture Gil married to Pauline and it wounded her. Pauline was shallow and selfish. She didn’t really like the girls, and she’d probably find some way to get them out of her hair when she and Gil married, if they did. Kasie hated the very idea of such a marriage, but she was a little nobody in the world and Gil Callister was a millionaire. She couldn’t even tease him or flirt with him, because he might think she was after him for his wealth. It made her self-conscious, so she became uneasy around him and tongue-tied to boot.
That made him even more irritable. Sunday afternoon there was another storm and he and the men had to go out and work the cattle. He came in just after dark, drenched, unfastening his shirt on the way into the office. His hair was plastered to his scalp and his spurs jingled as he walked, his leather bat-wing chaps making flapping noises with every stride of his long, powerful jean-clad legs. His boots were soaked, too, and caked with mud.
“Mrs. Charters will be after you,” Kasie remarked as she lifted her eyes from the badly scribbled notes John had left, which Miss Parsons had asked her to help decipher. Miss Parsons had already gone up to bed, anticipating a very early start on work the next morning.
“It’s my damned house,” he shot at her irritably, running a hand through his drenched hair to get it off his forehead. “I can drip wherever I please!”
“Suit yourself,” Kasie replied. “But red mud won’t come out of Persian wool carpets.”
He gave her a hard glare, but he sat down in a chair and pulled off the mud-caked boots, tossing them onto the wide brick hearth of the fireplace, where they wouldn’t soil anything delicate. His white socks were soaked as well, but he didn’t take them off. He sat down behind his desk, picked up the telephone and made a call.
“Where are the girls?” he asked while he waited for the call to be answered.
“Watching the new Pokémon movie up in their room,” Kasie said. “Miss Parsons can’t read John’s handwriting, so I’m deciphering this for her so she can start early tomorrow morning on the payroll and the quarterly estimated taxes that are due in June. If that’s all right,” she added politely.
He just glared at her. “Hello, Lonnie?” he said suddenly into the telephone receiver he was holding. “Can you give me the name of that mechanic who worked on Harris’s truck last month? Yes, the one who doesn’t need a damned computer to tell him what’s wrong with the engine. Got his number? Just a minute.” He fished in the drawer for a pen, grabbed an envelope and wrote a number on it. “Sure thing. Thanks.” He hung up and dialed again.
While he spoke to the mechanic, Kasie finished transcribing John’s terrible handwriting neatly for Miss Parsons.
Gil hung up and got to his feet, retrieving his boots. “If you’ve got a few minutes free, I need you to take some dictation for me,” he told Kasie.
“I’ll be glad to.”
He gave her a narrow appraisal. “I’ve got a man coming over to look at my cattle truck,” he added. “If he gets here while I’m in the shower, show him into the living room and don’t let him leave. He can listen to an engine and tell you what’s wrong with it.”
“But it’s Sunday,” she began.
“I need the truck to haul cattle tomorrow. I’m sure he went to church this morning, so it’s all right,” he assured her dryly. “Besides…”
The ringing of the phone interrupted him. He jerked up the receiver. “Callister,” he said.
There was a pause, during which his face became harder than Kasie had ever seen it. “Yes,” he replied to a question. “I’ll talk to John when he gets back in, but I can tell you what the answer will be.” He smiled coldly. “I’m sure that if you use your imagination, you can figure that out without too much difficulty. No, I don’t. I don’t give a damn. Do what you please with them.” There was a longer pause and Kasie thought she’d never seen such coldness in a man’s eyes. “I don’t need a thing, thanks. Yes. You do that.”
He hung up. “My parents,” he said harshly. “With an invitation to come and bring the girls to their estate on Long Island next week.”
“Are you going?”
He looked briefly sardonic. “They’re hosting a party for some people who are interested in seeing what a real cattleman looks like,” he said surprisingly. “They’re trying to sell them on an advertising contract for their sports magazine and they think John and I might be useful.” He sounded bitter and angry. “They try this occasionally, but John and I don’t go. They can make money on their own. I’ll be upstairs if the mechanic comes. Tell him the truck’s in the barn with one of my men. He can go right on out.”
“Okay.”
He walked out and Kasie stared after him. The conversation with
