To Wear His Ring: Circle of Gold / Trophy Wives / Dakota Bride

Predictably, she overreached, lost her footing and made an enormous splash as she landed, fully clothed, in the deep end. And, of course, she couldn’t swim…

Gil looked up from the prospectus he’d been reading when he heard the splash. He connected Kasie’s fall, the beach ball, and his two little blond giggling daughters at once. He shook his head and grimaced. He put aside the prospectus and dived in to save Kasie, Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirt and all.

Her late parents had lived long enough to see the irony of the second name they’d given her. Her middle name was Grace, but she wasn’t graceful. She was all long legs and arms. She wasn’t pretty, but she had a lovely body, and the thin white dress she was wearing became transparent in the water. It was easily noticed that she was wearing only the flimsiest of briefs and a bra that barely covered her pert breasts. Just the thing, she thought miserably, to wear in front of the Callisters’ business partners who were here for a pool party on the big ranch. Feline blond Pauline Raines was laughing her head off at Kasie’s desperate treading of water. Just you wait, lady, she fumed. Next time I’ll give Bess a soccer ball to bean you with and I won’t step in the way…!

Her head went under as her arms gave out. She took a huge breath as powerful arms encircled and lifted her clear of the deep water. It would have to be Gil who rescued her, she thought miserably. John wasn’t even looking their way. He’d have dived in after her in a minute, she knew, if he’d seen her fall. But while he was nice, and kind, he wasn’t Gil, who was beginning to have a frightening effect on Kasie’s heart. She glanced at Pauline as she spluttered. Kasie wished that she was beautiful like Pauline. She looked the very image of an efficient secretary. Kasie had great typing speed, dictation skills and organizational expertise, but she was only ordinary-looking. Besides, she was a social disaster, and she’d just proved it to Gil and all the guests.

Gil had been unexpectedly kind to her at the theater when he’d taken her with the girls to see the movie. She still tingled, remembering his hand holding hers. This, however, was much worse. Her breasts were almost bare in the thin blouse, and she felt the hard muscular wall of his chest with wonder and pleasure and a little fear, because she’d never felt such heady sensations in her body before. She wondered if he’d fire her for making a scene at this pool party, to which a lot of very wealthy and prominent cattlemen and their wives had been invited.

To give him credit, she hadn’t exactly inspired confidence on the job in the past few weeks. Two weeks earlier, she tripped on the front steps and landed in a rosebush at the very feet of a visiting cattleman from Texas who’d almost turned purple trying not to laugh. Then there had been the ice-cream incident last week, which still embarrassed her. Bess had threatened Kasie with a big glop of chocolate ice cream. While Kasie was backing away, laughing helplessly, Gil had come into the house in dirty chaps and boots and shirt with his hat jerked low over one blue eye and his mouth a thin line, with blood streaming from a cut on his forehead. Bess had thrown the ice cream at Kasie, who ducked, just in time for it to hit Gil right in the forehead. While he was wiping it off, Kasie grabbed the spoon from Bess and waited for the explosion as her boss wiped the ice cream away and looked at her. Those blue eyes could cut like diamonds. They actually glittered. But he hadn’t said a word. He’d just looked at her, before he turned and continued down the hall to the staircase that led up to his room.

Now, here she was half-drowned from a swimming pool accident, having made a spectacle of herself yet again.

“I wonder if I could get work in Hollywood?” she sputtered as she hung on for dear life. “There must be a market for terminal clumsiness somewhere!”

Gil raised an eyebrow and gave her a slow, speaking glance before he pulled her close against his chest and turned toward the concrete steps at the far end. He walked up out of the pool, streaming water, and started toward the house. “Don’t struggle, Kasie,” he said at her temple, and his voice sounded odd.

“Sorry,” she coughed. “You can put me down, now. I’m okay. I can walk.”

“If I put you down, you’re going to become the entertainment,” he said enigmatically at her ear. He looked over his shoulder. “John, look after the girls until I get back!” he called.

“Oh, I’ll watch them, Gil!” Pauline interrupted lazily. “Come over here, girls!” she called, without even looking in their direction.

“John will watch them,” Gil said emphatically and didn’t move until his lean, lanky brother jumped up and went toward his nieces, grinning.

Gil went up the staircase with Kasie held close to his chest. “Why can’t you swim?” he asked.

His deep, slow voice made her feel funny. So did the close, almost intimate contact with him. She nibbled on her lower lip, feeling soggy and disheveled and embarrassed. “I’m afraid of the water.”

“Why?” he persisted.

She wouldn’t answer him. It would do no good, and she didn’t want to remember. Probably he’d never seen anyone drown. “Sorry I messed up the pool party,” she murmured.

He shook her gently as they passed the landing and paused at her bedroom door. “Stop apologizing every second word,” he said curtly as he put her down. He held her there with two big, lean hands on her upper arms and studied her intently in the dim light of the wall sconces.

The feel of all that warm strength against her made her giddy. She’d never been so close to him before. He was ten years older than Kasie, and he had an authority and maturity that must have been apparent even when he’d been her age. She had tried to think of him as Bess and Jenny’s daddy, but after their closeness at the movie theater, it was almost impossible to think of him as anything but a mature, sexy man.

“I can’t seem to make you understand that the girls are Miss Parsons’ responsibility, not yours!” He saw her faint flush and scowled down at her. “Speaking of Miss Parsons, where in hell is she?”

She cleared her throat and pushed back a soggy strand of dark hair. “She’s in the office.”

“Doing what?”

She shifted, but he didn’t let go of her arms. That unblinking, ferocious blue stare robbed her of a smart retort. “All right,” she said heavily. “She’s doing the withholding on John’s tax readout.” He didn’t speak. She looked up and grimaced. “Well, I’m not up on tax law, and she is.”

“So you traded duties without permission, is that it?”

She hesitated. “Yes. I’m sorry. But it’s just for today! You already know that she doesn’t…well, she doesn’t like children very much, really, and I hate taxes…”

“I know.”

“I shouldn’t have given them the beach ball. I thought they were going into the shallow part of the pool with it. And then Bess threw it…”

“Right at Pauline’s expensive new coiffure,” Gil finished for her. He pursed his sensuous lips and searched her face. “You won’t tell on them, of course. You took the blame for the ice cream, too. And when one of Jenny’s toys tripped you on the front steps and you went into the rosebush, you blamed that on clumsiness.”

“You knew?” she asked, surprised.

“I’ve been a father for five years,” he mused. “I know all sorts of things.” His pale blue eyes slid very slowly down Kasie’s wet dress and narrowed on what was showing. She had the most delicious body. Every line and curve of it was on view where the thin dress was plastered to her body. Her breasts were perfectly shaped and the nipples were dusky. The feel of her against his chest, even through her wet blouse and his cotton shirt, had almost knocked the breath out of him. It upset him that he was noticing these things about her. He was beginning to react to them, too. He had to get out of here. She was so young…

He cursed under his breath. “You’d better change,” he said curtly. He turned on his heel and went toward the staircase.

“About Miss Parsons…!” she called after him, in one last attempt to ward off retribution.

“You might as well consider the girls your job from now on,” he said angrily. “I can see that it’s a losing battle to keep you away from them. I’ll give Miss Parsons to John. He won’t enjoy the view as much, but keeping out of prison because we can’t figure out tax forms might sweeten the deal,” he said, without breaking stride. “When you have some spare time, you can continue giving Pauline computer lessons. That includes Monday morning. Mrs. Charters can watch the girls while you work with Pauline.”

“But I’m not a trained governess. I’m a secretary!” she insisted.

“Great. You can let Bess dictate letters to you for her dolls.”

“But…!”

It was too late. He never argued. He just kept walking. She threw up her hands and went back into her room. She started toward the bathroom to change out of her wet things when she got a look at herself in the mirror. The whole outfit was transparent. She remembered Gil’s intent stare and blushed all the way to her toes. No wonder he’d been looking at her. Everything she had was on view! She wondered how she’d ever be able to look him in the eye again.

She changed and went back to the pool party, dejected and miserable. It was hard to believe that she’d not even had a mild crush on John when she first went to work for the Callisters. He 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 his parents hadn’t been pleasant for him. He seemed to dislike them intensely. She knew that they were never mentioned around the girls, and John never spoke of them, either. She wondered what they’d done to make their sons so hostile. Then she remembered what Gil had said, about their being used by their parents only to make money, and it all began to make sense. Perhaps they didn’t really want children at all. What a pity, that their sons were nothing more than sales incentives to them.

The mechanic did come while Gil was upstairs. Kasie went with him onto the long porch and showed him where the barn was, so that he could drive on down there and park his truck. The rain had stopped, though, so he didn’t have to worry about getting wet. There was a pleasant dripping sound off the eaves of the house, and the delicious smell of wet flowers in the darkness.

Kasie sat down in the porch swing and rocked it into motion. It was a perfect night, now that the storm had abated. She could hear crickets, or maybe frogs, chirping all around the flowering shrubs that surrounded the front porch. It reminded her, for some reason, of Africa. She vaguely remembered sitting in a porch swing with her mother and Kantor when their father was away working. There were the delicious smells of cooking from the house, and the spicy smells drifting from the harbor nearby, as well as the familiar sound of African workers singing and humming as they worked around the settlement. It was a long time ago, when she still had a family. Now, except for Mama Luke, she was completely alone. It was a cold, empty feeling.

The screen door suddenly opened and Gil came out onto the porch. His blond hair was still damp, faintly unruly at the edges and tending to curl. He was wearing a blue checked Western shirt with clean jeans and nice boots. He looked just the way a working cowboy should when he was cleaned up, she thought, trying to imagine him a century earlier.

“Is the mechanic here?” he asked abruptly when he spotted Kasie in the swing.

“Yes, I sent him on down to the barn.”

He went down the steps gracefully and stalked to the barn. He was gone about five minutes and when he came out of the barn, so did the mechanic. They shook hands and the mechanic drove off.

“A fuse,” he murmured, shaking his head as he came up the steps and dropped into the swing at Kasie’s side. “A damned fuse, and the whole panel went down. Imagine that.”

“Sometimes it’s the little things that give the most trouble,” she murmured, shy with him.

He put an arm behind her and rocked the swing into motion. “I like the way you smell, Kasie,” he said lazily. “You always remind me of roses.”

“I’m allergic to perfume,” she confided. “The florals are the only ones I can wear without sneezing my head off.”

“Where are my babies?” he asked.

“Mrs. Charters is baking cookies with them in the kitchen,” she said, smiling. “They love to cook. So do I. We’ve all learned a lot from Mrs. Charters.”

He looked down at her in the darkness. One lean hand went to the braid at the back of her head, and he tugged on it gently. “You’re mysterious,” he murmured. “I don’t really know anything about you.”

“There’s not much to tell,” she told him. “I’m just ordinary.”

He shifted, and she felt his powerful thigh against her leg. Her body came alive with fleeting little stabs of pleasure. She could feel her breath catching in her throat as she breathed. He was too close.

She started to move, but it was too late. His arm curled her into his body, and the warm, hard pressure of his mouth pushed her head back against the swing while he fed hungrily on her lips.

Part of her wanted to resist, but a stronger part was completely powerless. She reached up and put her arms around his neck and opened her lips for him. She felt him stiffen, hesitate, catch his breath. Then his mouth became rough and demanding, and he dragged her across his legs, folding her close while he kissed her until her mouth was swollen and tender.

He nibbled her upper lip, fighting to breathe normally. “Don’t let me do this,” he warned.

“You’re bigger than I am,” she murmured breathlessly.

“That’s no excuse at all.”

Her fingers trailed over his hard mouth and down to his chest where they rested. She stared at the wide curve of his mouth with a kind of wonder that a man like this, good-looking and charming and wealthy, would look twice at a chestnut mouse like Kasie. Perhaps he needed glasses.

He touched her oval face, tracing its soft lines in a warm, damp darkness that was suddenly like an exotic, faraway place. Kasie felt as if she’d come home. Impulsively, she let her head slide down his arm until it rested in the crook of his elbow. She watched his expression harden, heard his breathing change. His lean fingers moved down her chin and throat until they were at the top button of her shirtwaist dress. They hesitated there.

She lay looking up at him patiently, curiously, ablaze with unfamiliar longings and delight.

“Kasie,” he whispered, and his long fingers began to sensually move the top button out of its buttonhole. As it came free, he heard her soft gasp, felt the jerk of her body, and knew that this was new territory for her.

His hand started to slide gently into the opening he’d made. He watched Kasie, lying so sweetly in his embrace, giving him free license with her innocence, and he shivered with desire.

But even as he felt the soft warmth of the skin at her collarbone, laughing young voices came drifting out onto the porch as the front door opened.

Gil moved Kasie back into her own seat abruptly and stood up.

“Daddy’s home!” Bess cried, and she and Jenny ran to him, to be scooped up and kissed heartily.

“I’ll, uh, just go and get my pad so that you can dictate that letter you mentioned,” Kasie said as she got up, too.

“You will not,” Gil said, his voice still a little husky. “Go to bed, Kasie. It can wait. In the morning, you can tutor Pauline on the computer, so that she can take over inputting the cattle records. John won’t be in until late tonight, and he leaves early tomorrow for the cattle show in San Antonio. There’s nothing in the office that can’t wait.”

She was both disappointed and relieved. It was getting harder to deny Gil anything he wanted. She couldn’t have imagined that she was such a wanton person only a few weeks ago. She didn’t know what to do.

“Okay, I’ll call it a night,” she said, trying to disguise her nervousness. “Good night, babies,” she told Bess and Jenny with a smile. “Sleep tight.”

“Will you tell us a story, Kasie?” Bess began.

“I’ll tell you a story tonight. Kasie needs her rest. All right?” he asked the girls.

“All right, Daddy,” Jenny murmured, laying her sleepy head on his shoulder.

They all went upstairs together. Kasie didn’t quite meet his eyes as she went down the hall to her own room. She didn’t sleep very much, either.

Chapter Six

Pauline Raines was half an hour late Monday morning. Gil had already gone out to check on some cattle that was being shipped off. John had left before daylight to fly to San Antonio, where the cattle trailer was taking his champion bull, Ebony King, for the cattle show. While the girls took their nap, Kasie helped Miss Parsons with John’s correspondence and fielded the telephone. Now that it was just past roundup, things weren’t quite as hectic, but sales reports were coming in on the culled cattle being shipped, and they weren’t even all on the computer yet. Neither were most of the new calf crop.