Rich Rancher For Christmas

God, what a mess. He went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water. “Make sure you stay in there until you’ve returned to a normal temperature.”

The other alternative to get her body temperature back up was to strip them both down and crawl under the covers with her.

He looked at her legs again. Long and, when not borderline frostbitten, probably tanned. The kind of legs that would wrap around him and—

Whoa.

He slammed the brakes on that line of thought something quick. There would be no nudity, no cuddling and absolutely no sex. What he had to do right now, as steam curled out of the bathroom and she shrugged out of her fuchsia coat to reveal a thin silk blouse that was soaked at the cuffs and collar, was remember that every single thing he said and did from this point on was as good as public. He wouldn’t touch her and, what’s more, he wouldn’t allow her to touch him. End of discussion.

“I’ll bring in some better clothes for you,” he said as he headed out of the room. Because if he had a look at her walking around in that tight skirt and that sheer blouse for the next three or four days...

He was a strong man. But even he wasn’t sure he was that strong. Not if she was going to look all soft and vulnerable as well as sexy.

“Thank you,” she said again in that delicate voice.

No, he wasn’t going to think of her as vulnerable. Or delicate. It was probably just an act designed to get him to open up to her.

He hurried to his parents’ room and dug out some appropriate clothing—long underwear, jeans, shirts and sweaters and socks. His mom was a little shorter and a lot curvier than Natalie Baker, but her things should fit. Better than anything of his, anyway. She’d swim in one of his sweaters.

He knocked on the guest room door and, when no one replied, he cracked it open. Good. The bathroom door was closed and he heard splashing. She was in the shower, then. Standing nude under the hot water, maybe even running the soap over her body, her bare breasts, her...

He hoped she’d locked that damn door. He laid the clothes out on the bed and almost scooped up her things to take them down to the laundry room to dry. But then he caught sight of the lacy bra and matching panties—pale pink, like a confection that she’d worn on her body—and he drew back his hand as if he’d been burned. Okay, so now he was going to not think about her body wearing those things. And he also had to not think about her not wearing those things.

Oh, God. This was a disaster in the making.

He forced his thoughts away from the woman steaming up the shower. He had practical things that he needed to get done. It was obvious she had no idea how to ride out a blizzard, which meant it was up to him to keep them both from freezing to death.

He made sure that every other door on the second floor was shut, then he hurried downstairs, pausing to snag the family photos off the wall. He shoved those into the coat closet. Luckily, he’d laid a fire in the fireplace before he’d gone to town this morning, so all he had to do was light it. Once it was going, he went to the kitchen. He had a roast in a slow cooker, but he turned on the gas oven anyway, just to build up the heat in the house. Once the power went, the wind would sap any warmth from this room in a matter of minutes. And if he just left it on, he wouldn’t have to worry about lighting it with a match later.

He scrubbed a couple of potatoes and put them in the oven and then, after a moment of internal debate, dug an apple pie out of the freezer and put it in the oven, too.

Every fall, his mom went into a frenzy of cooking and baking. CJ had long ago figured out that it was her way of coping with the guilt of leaving her only son alone during the holidays. He had an entire deep freeze full of casseroles and cobblers and meals in bags that all he had to do was heat up in the oven or the slow cooker. Pretty much the only thing she didn’t leave him was pizza and beer, which was why he’d headed to the store this morning after sending his hired hands home for the storm and cutting his chores short. If he was going to be snowed in for Christmas, he wanted a couple of pizzas to round out the menu.

Then he did another sweep of the downstairs. He pulled more photos from the wall and the mantel over the fireplace. These he carried back to the office—that had a door he could lock. If he could, he’d put the entire house in that room and bolt the door shut.

The parlor was where most of the photo albums were—it had a door, but not a lock. Well, he’d just have to keep her out of it. Much as he didn’t like it, he would have to stick to Natalie Baker like glue.

Finally, with dinner underway and as much of his life hidden as he could hide, he headed back up the stairs. Just as he reached the top, she opened her door and stepped out into the hall.

CJ’s breath caught in his throat. Gone was the too-polished, too-perfect celebrity. And in her place...

She’d pulled her hair into a low tail at the side. Her face was free of makeup, but somehow she looked even prettier. Softer, definitely.

That softness was dangerous. So was any question he was asking himself right now about whether or not she’d put the lacy pink panties back on.

So he did his best to focus on anything but that. “Better?” he asked in a gruff voice, but he didn’t need to ask because he could tell. The color had come back into her cheeks—a natural blush instead of an artfully applied one. Her hair was fair—more blond than it looked on-screen. Without the heavy layer of eye makeup, her eyes seemed wider, more crystal blue.

Bad. This was bad.

“Yes, thank you.” Even her voice sounded different now. True, she was no longer shivering with cold, but when she was on television, talking to the camera and interviewing stars, her voice had a certain cadence to it, low and husky. That was gone now.

CJ realized with a start that he might be looking at the real Natalie Baker. And he couldn’t do that. If he started thinking of her as a real person instead of a talking head, then he might get lost in those blue eyes.

Luckily, the storm saved him from himself. With a pop, all the lights went out. Natalie didn’t scream, but he heard her gasp in alarm.

“It’s all right,” he said, coming the rest of the way to get her. The hall was darker than normal because he’d shut the doors. “It’s okay. I’m right here.” He reached out to touch her—just to give her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. But when he did so, she latched onto his forearm with a tight, fearful grip.

He sucked in air and fought the sudden urge to wrap his arms around her and keep her safe. Dammit, she was getting to him.

“Sorry,” she said, loosening her grip—but not letting him go. “I guess I’m a little jumpy. I’m not normally this poorly prepared.”

CJ didn’t think he could believe she’d gotten stranded by accident. But whether or not her presence here had been planned didn’t change things, at least not for the next few days.

Suddenly, he was aware that they were standing in a mostly dark hallway, touching. He withdrew his hand. “We should grab the pillows and things.”

She jerked her head up in surprise. “What?”

“I’ve got a fire going downstairs in the living room. Once the snow stops, I’ll go outside and get the generator started, but until then we should stay in front of the fire.” He didn’t tell her that he had a fireplace in his room and that there was another one in his parents’ room. This wasn’t his first blizzard.

He wasn’t letting her sleep in his parents’ bed—or his. Absolutely no sharing of beds.

He felt her exhale, the warmth of her breath around him. Almost without being aware of it, he started to lean toward her. “Is that so you can keep an eye on me?”

There wasn’t any point in lying. Besides, lying did not come naturally to him. Perhaps Hardwick Beaumont had been good at it, but Patrick Wesley was honest to a fault. The only thing he had ever lied about was CJ’s mother and CJ. In fact, CJ was sure that Pat had told the lie so many times about marrying Bell on leave and having CJ arrive before he’d been honorably discharged that both his parents believed it, heart and soul.

CJ wanted to believe it, too—because Pat was his father. CJ resented the fact that the ghost of Hardwick Beaumont hung over him—always had, always would.

And he resented this woman for bringing Hardwick Beaumont’s ghost with her. Yes, the anger felt good. He was going to hold on to that anger for as long as he could. She might be prettier in real life, and that softness about her might call to him, but he was furious at her and that was that.

He walked back into the guest room and stripped the blankets and pillows off the bed. “Here,” he said, shoving them at her. Then he went to his own room and did the same. There. Now they didn’t have a reason to come back upstairs for the next several days.

Wordlessly, he led the way back downstairs to the living room. The fire had taken and the room was bathed in a warm, crackling glow.

He dropped his bedding on the couch and went to work rearranging the room. The coffee table went to the far side under the windows, where it would be darkest and coldest. He pulled the couch forward so it faced the fire and then dragged the recliners over so they boxed in the heat on each side. He laid a blanket over the coffee table so that drafts wouldn’t come in underneath it. And then he made a pallet on the floor. “You can take the couch.”

Her eyes widened and CJ knew she understood him perfectly. He would sleep on the floor, directly in front of her, to keep her from sneaking off in the night and snooping.

She hesitated. “You’ve done this before.”

He wasn’t sure how he was going to talk to her without revealing things. Well, the trick was to reveal as little as possible. “I have. This is not my first blizzard. But I’m gathering that it’s your first time.” The moment the words left his mouth, he winced. That was an unfortunate double entendre.

But, gracefully, she ignored his poor choice of words. She fluffed her pillows and shot him a sheepish grin. “I suppose that was obvious. It’s different in Denver.” She folded her blankets, making a sort of sleeping bag on top of the couch. Then she straightened, her hands on her hips. He got the feeling she was judging her work—and finding it lacking. “I didn’t plan this,” she said softly. “I’m not... I’m not always a good person. But I want you to know that I didn’t come out here with the intent of making you rescue me.” She didn’t look at him as she said this. Instead, she kept her head down.

If that were the truth—and that was a big if—he wondered how much the admission cost her. “Might as well make the best of it. I prefer not to spend the next few days being miserable. It’s the Christmas season—good will toward all men and women.”

She glanced at him, but quickly dropped her eyes again. Her mouth curved down in a way that CJ recognized—it was the kind of smile his mother made when she was trying not to cry.

He didn’t want Natalie Baker to cry. She hadn’t cried when she’d been half-frozen. Why would she do so now? Finally, after several painful seconds, she whispered, “Peace on earth?”

That was the truce. “Can’t promise you a silent night, though—that wind’s not going to stop.” Her smile was more real this time and somehow it made him feel better. What was wrong with him? It was enough that he had saved her from freezing to death. It was not his responsibility to make her happy. End of discussion.

However, that didn’t stop him from adding “Dinner should be ready. We can fill our plates and sit in front of the fire.”

She followed him into the kitchen. The house had always had a gas stove and this was exactly the reason why. CJ got a burner lit and put the kettle on.

“We have some instant coffee and a lot of tea.” He left out the part about how his mom vastly preferred tea to anything else. Those were the kinds of details he had to keep to himself. He went on, “There’s a roast in the slow cooker and potatoes and apple pie in the oven.” He lifted the lid and the smell of pot roast filled the air.

“Oh, my God—that smells heavenly,” Natalie said. She stepped up next to him and inhaled the fragrant steam.

They worked in silence, assembling the meal. He got down two big bowls and showed her where the tea and the instant coffee were located. He carved the roast and filled their bowls with meat, vegetables and gravy. The kettle whistled and she moved to turn it off.

He was not going to think about how effortlessly she moved around his kitchen. She did not belong here and the fact that he was having to remind himself of this fact approximately once every two-point-four seconds was yet another bad sign. At this point, he wasn’t sure he’d recognize a good sign if it bit him on the butt.

It was only when he settled onto the couch with his feet stretched toward the fire that she spoke again. “This is wonderful,” she said as she gracefully folded herself into a cross-legged posture on the couch—a solid four feet away from where he sat.

He appreciated that she wasn’t starting with another line of questioning—even if she was just trying to soften him up, he was glad there was no full-on assault. That didn’t mean he was going to not ask his own questions, however. “How come you don’t have anyone waiting for you?”

She didn’t answer for a long time—which was understandable, because she was devouring the pot roast. CJ did the same. They ate in silence until she set her bowl to the side. “I could ask the same of you—you’re here all alone and Christmas is coming. You don’t even have any Christmas decorations up.” She looked around his living room. It seemed more barren than normal, with all the pictures gone. “But I won’t ask,” she said quickly before CJ could remind her of the rules.

He didn’t miss the way she avoided answering his question. He glanced up—no ring on her finger. He didn’t think she ever wore one—but it was entirely possible that, if she had a ring, she just didn’t wear it while she was on TV.

She tucked her hands under her legs. “So, what are we supposed to talk about? I’m not allowed to ask you questions about yourself and so far, I haven’t felt comfortable answering any of your questions.”

He shrugged. “We don’t have to talk about anything. I don’t have a problem with silence.”

“Oh.” Her chin dipped and her shoulders rounded. But then she straightened. “Okay.”

He gritted his teeth. At any point, she could stop looking vulnerable and that would be just fine by him. “I don’t want to be your lead story. I would rather not talk than have everything I say be twisted around and rebroadcast for mass consumption.”

She sighed in resignation, but she didn’t drop her gaze this time. “I think it’s pretty safe to say that I’m off the clock. Anything we talk about would be off the record.”

Like he was going to take her word for that. “Patrick Wesley is my father. That’s the end of this discussion. I will not allow my personal life to be monetized for someone else’s gain.”

Besides, outside his parents and apparently Hardwick Beaumont, there was only one other person who knew that Patrick Wesley was not his birth father. CJ had been in love in college—or he thought he had. Really, he had been young and stupid and full of lust and he’d confused all of that with love. But he thought he’d had what his parents had found so he’d told his girlfriend about Hardwick Beaumont being a sperm donor because if he were going to propose to a woman, he wanted her to know the truth about him. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life hiding behind the Wesley name.

He had never forgotten the look on Cindy’s face when he’d told her that actually, he was sort of related to the Beaumonts. Her eyes had gone wide and her cheeks had flushed as he’d sat there, waiting for her to say...something. He hadn’t been sure what he’d wanted her to say—that it didn’t matter, maybe, or that she was sorry his mom was paranoid about the Beaumonts. Something. Hardwick Beaumont had still been alive then, although CJ had been twenty-one and beyond his reach.

Cindy hadn’t done any of that. After a few moments of stunned silence, she had started to talk about how wonderful this was. He was a Beaumont—and the Beaumonts were rich. Why, just think of the wedding that they could have on the Beaumonts’ dime! And after the wedding, they could take their proper place in the Beaumont family—and get their proper cut of the Beaumont fortune and on and on and on.

That was the moment he realized he’d made a mistake. Panicking, he tried to write the whole thing off as a joke. Of course he wasn’t a Beaumont—look at him. The Beaumonts were all sandy and blond—he was brown. It was just... Wishful thinking. Because he’d been bored with being a rancher’s son.

He was never sure if Cindy had believed him or not. She’d been pretty mad at him for “teasing” her with all that money. The breakup that followed had been mutual. She wasn’t going to get her dream wedding with the bill footed by the Beaumonts and he...

Well, he had learned to keep his mouth shut.

Besides, it had always been easy to ignore the two fundamental lies that made up his life—that Pat Wesley was his father and that his parents had married quietly a year before Pat had brought Bell home with him. It’d been an easy lie to tell—Pat had been finishing up a tour of duty in the army and they told everyone that he and Bell had met and married in secret while he was home on leave. That was why he’d shown up with a wife and a six-month-old that no one else had known about. And because Pat Wesley was an honest, upstanding citizen, everyone had gone along with it.

CJ’s mother was brown and Pat Wesley was light. Pat was tall and broad, just like CJ. The fact was, CJ looked like their son. There had never been a question.

The Beaumonts had no bearing on CJ’s life. He would’ve been perfectly happy if he’d never heard the Beaumont name for the rest of his life.

But now he was sitting across from someone who knew—or thought she knew. Which was bad enough. But what made it worse was that she was looking to capitalize on the knowledge.

She was staring at him, this Natalie Baker. “What do you want me to call you?” she asked.

“My name is CJ Wesley. You can call me CJ.”

She held out her hand. “Hi. I’m Natalie.”

He hesitated, but when he touched her, palm to palm, a jolt of something traveled between them. He might’ve thought it was static electricity, but it hit him in all the wrong places. His pulse quickened and warmth—warmth that had nothing to do with the roaring fire only a few feet from them—started at the base of his neck and worked its way down his body.

Oh, no—he knew what this was. Attraction. If he wasn’t careful, it might blow into something even more difficult to contain—lust.

He jerked his hand from hers. “Natalie.” Quickly, he got to his feet and gathered up the dishes. “I’ll get the pie.”

Four

Natalie sat on the couch, trying to make sense of what had happened.

It didn’t look like that was a thing that could be done because the longer she stared into the fire, the less she knew about what was going on.

That wasn’t entirely true. Once she had thawed out in the shower, her brain worked just fine. She just didn’t quite grasp how, in the last two hours, she had gone from being Natalie Baker, host of A Good Morning with Natalie Baker, to being a human popsicle, to being...

To being CJ Wesley’s unofficial guest.

She felt naked. That feeling had nothing to do with the three separate layers of clothing she was wearing. It had everything to do with the way that man looked at her, his face no longer hidden in the shadows—with the way he asked her why she didn’t have anyone waiting for her.

Because she didn’t. She could try to lie and say that her producer, Steve, would notice her absence but...it was almost Christmas. They’d been filming segments ahead of schedule and planning to strategically reuse old clips so the crew could have some time off.

She didn’t have a single person who would miss her over the next five days. It wasn’t like that was a shocking revelation. She’d known damn good and well that it would be yet another Christmas spent alone. She didn’t celebrate the holiday. Why would she? The day was nothing but the worst of bad memories.

But somehow, telling CJ that had been... Well, it’d been painful. It had been acknowledging that she was completely alone.

She was more or less completely at CJ’s mercy. And he didn’t even like her.

But he wasn’t taking advantage of the situation. Anyone else would’ve looked at her half-frozen and seen an opportunity—but not him. Instead, he had clothed her and now he was feeding her. He had gone out of his way to make sure she was comfortable.

He was being entirely too decent. She hadn’t realized that people like him existed.

Oh, sure—she knew there were still good humans in the world, the ones who ran soup kitchens and read books during story time at the library. But they didn’t come into her world. No, everyone she dealt with wanted something. She didn’t know how to talk to someone if it wasn’t a negotiation.

And CJ Wesley had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want to negotiate. She didn’t have anything he wanted and he wasn’t interested in giving up anything to her.

They had reached an impasse. In less than two hours.

Awareness prickled over her skin the moment he entered the room, even though he was padding around silently in thick sheepskin-lined moccasins. There was something about the way the air changed around him. For all of his decency and grudging niceness, CJ Wesley was a powerful force to be reckoned with.

“Good,” he said as he crossed in front of her and sat back down on the couch, then handed her a plate overflowing with what looked like the best apple pie she’d ever seen.

She wasn’t sure what he was calling good—the pie or the fact that she hadn’t wandered off to unearth his family secrets.

“Thank you,” she said. “You don’t have to serve me.”

There—the muscle in his jaw twitched just as he said, “It’s no problem. I’m happy to do it.”

She twisted her lips to one side, trying not to smile at him. “You’re lying. But I appreciate it anyway.”

He paused, a forkful of pie halfway to his mouth. “I’m not lying.” The twitch was harder to see this time, because he was sliding his fork into his mouth.

But she saw it anyway.

“You have a tell. Did you know that?”

He avoided answering her for several long minutes, so she dug in to the pie. Sweet merciful heavens, it was even better than it smelled. Homemade and warm, the apples perfectly spiced and the crust flaky. The roast had been excellent—but this?

Maybe she had died in the snow. She’d frozen to death and this was actually heaven. Curled up on the couch with a sexy, grouchy cowboy and the best apple pie in the world.

“This is fabulous,” she all but moaned around her third forkful.

“Thanks, my—” He bit off the word. “Thanks,” he said again.

She surreptitiously glanced at his hand—no ring, no tan line, either. Aside from the clothes she was wearing—which were baggy and not exactly in the height of fashion—there were no other signs of women in this house. At least not since she’d taken her shower. She was pretty sure there had been pictures on the wall and now there weren’t. But she had been too cold to study them when she’d originally walked through the house.

No, CJ didn’t have a wife. Which meant that this pie had probably been made by his mom. The very woman that Natalie had been stalking through court records for months.

It was equally obvious that he was absolutely not going to acknowledge his mother’s existence.

Natalie Baker, morning television host, would have pressed for details. But the pie was too good and the fire was too warm and she just didn’t want to. If CJ were right, she would have several days to work on him. But not right now. Her stomach was full and she was feeling warm and drowsy—well, parts of her were. Other parts of her were way too attuned to the man sitting three feet away from her.