He started to call her back—since she was already in the dress, she might as well show it off now instead of later—but she was gone, heading up the stairs at a full-out run.
The doorbell rang and Justin was startled at the way his pulse kicked up against his will.
He walked out to the entryway and opened the door then forgot to even say hello. She looked sweet and lovely and delicious enough to gobble up in one bite. He was so busy trying to convince himself he wasn’t hungry that he almost missed the wary look in her eyes.
“Hi. I’m early. I’m sorry.”
He was a little rusty as a host but he tried to do his best. “Not at all. Come in. Ruby’s gone to change her clothes and I’m not sure where my aunt has vanished to. I’m sure she’ll be along soon.”
She held out something in a white box wrapped in string. “I brought dessert. I didn’t know what you were serving so I didn’t know what kind of wine would be appropriate. And, anyway, I thought Ruby might enjoy something sweet more.”
“What is it?”
“Raspberry ribbon cheesecake. It’s my mom’s recipe.”
“Ruby will love it. I’ll just put it in the refrigerator. Why don’t you come outside with me while I put the steaks on?”
“You’re cooking?”
He had to smile at the utter disbelief in her voice. “I’m grilling. There’s a world of difference between the two. Throwing a couple steaks on the grill doesn’t exactly take much except a good spice rub recipe and a meat thermometer.”
She still looked flabbergasted as he gestured her ahead of him into the kitchen. She walked past him and again the tantalizing scents of vanilla and almonds—with a hint of raspberry now—teased him.
He closed his eyes, stunned by the overwhelming urge to lean forward and bury his face in her curls and just inhale.
It had been far too long since he had been with a woman. Months. That must be the reason for this sudden fascination with this soft schoolteacher.
One of the downsides of being a responsible single father was the serious crimp it put in any casual encounters. It never seemed right to bring women home for the night with Ruby in the house and lately he had been taking her along on the few trips he took out of town.
He had entertained some vague idea about calling Lexie Walker when he went to Denver on the horse-buying trip next week to see if she might be interested in flying out to meet him, as she had done a few times before. Lexie was a producer he had known in L.A. She was sharp, beautiful and sexy as silk sheets.
Oddly, the idea suddenly didn’t appeal to him at all. He didn’t have to look far to figure out why.
Ten
“THIS IS LOVELY,” Ashley exclaimed when they moved out onto the wide deck overlooking the western slope of the Tetons. With delight evident on her delicate features, she took in the twinkling lights in the trees shading the deck, the swimming pool with its waterfalls and spa, and the outdoor fireplace, where a merry blaze took out the slight chill of the September air.
Beyond the backyard, horses grazed near the whitewashed barn, and in the evening everything looked peaceful and still.
“We live out here when the weather is nice,” he admitted. “And even sometimes when it’s not. With the fireplace, we can enjoy it from March to early December sometimes, until the snow gets too deep on the deck.”
“She must adore it out here! My word, look at that play set. I think it’s more elaborate than the playground equipment we have at school.”
He smiled at her enthusiasm. “We’ll have to have your class out for a party in the springtime when it’s warm enough to swim again. Ruby would love it.”
Her eyes glowed at the idea and she smiled, the first genuine, heartfelt smile she had ever given him.
He couldn’t seem to look away from it, at the curve of her lips, at the way the left side lifted just a little higher than the right, at the dimples he suddenly hungered to taste.
The heated dreams of the night before suddenly rocketed through his brain and in his mind he was once more tangled in all that softness, touching his mouth to hers, tasting that sweetly curved mouth.
He heard a ragged-sounding breath and managed to drag his attention from her mouth—and from his own feverish imagination—to meet her gaze. Her pupils were wide, her color high, and thick, heady awareness suddenly bloomed between them.
He needed to kiss her. He didn’t want to, he knew he shouldn’t, but he had to know if she tasted as delicious as he had imagined. He couldn’t seem to stop himself from leaning forward.
An instant before he reached her, he heard the bang of the screen door and jerked back just as Ruby raced out of the house.
“Here I am! I changed and everything. Hi, Miss Barnes!” She hugged her teacher’s legs and Ashley looked dazed—whether from Ruby’s affection or their almost-kiss, he couldn’t guess.
“Do you want to come see my bedroom? It’s pink and green and my bed is in a real playhouse!”
Ashley cast a furtive look at him, her color high. “I... Of course,” she murmured, looking relieved at any excuse to escape.
“The steaks won’t take long,” he said, calling on all his long-neglected acting skills to keep any trace of embarrassment from his voice.
She nodded and walked out with Ruby’s hand tucked in hers, leaving him alone in the starlight to wonder what the hell had just happened.
Eleven
JUSTIN HARTFORD HAD nearly kissed her. If his daughter hadn’t come bursting out onto the deck, Ashley had no doubt that with a half second more alone with him, she would have been in his arms.
She followed Ruby up a sweeping staircase constructed of hewn half logs, painfully aware of the way her knees trembled and her stomach still felt jittery and weak.
Justin Hartford. Almost. Kissed. Her.
He had wanted to, anyway. She had seen the sudden heat in those heartbreaking eyes of his, the slight parting of his lips, and hadn’t been able to stop her body’s instinctive sway toward him.
What a jerk, she thought, but the familiar imprecation held no heat whatsoever. She had wanted him to kiss her. Another minute or two and she probably would have begged him to.
They reached Ruby’s bedroom and she could only stare. “Wow. This is your room?”
“Yep. It’s cool, huh?”
“Very cool.” It was a dream of a room for a little girl. Everything was pink and flowery and Ruby had told the truth—her bed was built into a massive playhouse built into the center of the large room. It was like a room inside of a room, with a door and windows and a gabled roof that touched the ceiling.
“Daddy and me built the playhouse. I helped hammer the nails and measure the wood and everything.”
“Oh?” It was very hard to dislike a man who could create such a wonderland for his child.
“Yep. My daddy makes really good things. My aunt Liddy says he has always been good with his hands. She said when he was a kid, he was always making stuff from junk wood he found around. And he’s strong, too. When we builded my bed, he carried all the wood in by himself.”
Ruby frowned for a moment, her brow furrowed in concentration, then it cleared and she smiled. “Oh, and he makes up funny stories. My favorite is about the ugly hedgehog. Daddy does all kinds of voices when he tells stories and he always makes me laugh. You should hear him.”
“Oh?” She tried to pretend disinterest, but in truth she was fascinated to hear about Justin’s interactions with his daughter.
“Yeah, and he can swim superfast! You should see him. And he rides horses better than anybody else in the whole wide world. I have my own horse, but my favorite is when I ride with my daddy.”
Why did Ruby suddenly remind her of a used car salesman trying to unload a junker? Ashley wondered uneasily. She really shouldn’t be listening to all these things about Justin. It made him seem too
real, entirely too likable.
Still, she forced herself to smile. “It sounds like you have a lot of fun with your dad.”
“We’re best buds. Me and Daddy and Aunt Liddy are a team. Daddy says so. I love him a ton.”
She suddenly gave Ashley a funny sidelong look she couldn’t quite interpret.
“Except I think maybe he’s lonely.”
Twelve
JUSTIN HARTFORD LONELY?
She couldn’t even imagine it. Still, the conviction in the girl’s voice set off warning bells. “Ruby, is that why you’ve been misbehaving in class? Because you think if you’re naughty enough in school and don’t do your work, you’ll be sent home to the Blue Sage, where you can be with your father?”
Ruby’s big blue eyes opened wide and she looked so genuinely startled at the suggestion that Ashley knew she must be completely off the mark.
The little girl giggled. “No! That’s not why. You’re silly.”
Oh, she certainly was, especially if she thought a gorgeous, compelling man like Justin Hartford could ever be interested in a boring, naive schoolteacher like her.
“Will you tell me the reason?” she pressed. “I don’t think you really hate school, even though you pretend you do.”
“I don’t hate it,” she whispered. She looked down at the thick carpet of her room, digging the toe of her sneakers into the floral pattern.
Ashley paused, totally at sea to figure out what all this was about. “Is it me you don’t like? Perhaps we could switch you to the other kindergarten teacher’s class.”
“Noooo!” Ruby looked horrified by the very idea. “I don’t want another teacher. I have to be in your class. Please, Miss Barnes. Please don’t make me go to another class!”
She was trying to process that impassioned plea when she heard footsteps in the hallway and a moment later, Justin stuck his head in.
He looked incongruous in the girlie room, dark and gorgeous and uber-masculine, and her heart gave a foolish little thump just at the sight of him.
Ruby jumped into his arms. “Hi, Daddy. I’ve been telling Miss Barnes about all the fun things we do and how you’re such a good swimmer and a good horse rider. I bet she’d like to see you sometime.”
He raised an eyebrow and Ashley refrained from commenting that she had seen his particular riding style when he had nearly mowed her over the day before.
“Oh, and Miss Barnes thinks the playhouse you made for me is cool,” Ruby added.
He managed a smile. “Good to know. Uh, dinner is ready. I just checked on Lydia and she said she’s feeling a little under the weather tonight so it’s just the three of us, I guess. I hope you’re hungry.”
“I’m starving!” Ruby said with so much pathos in her voice, Ashley had to assume she had inherited more from her father than midnight-blue eyes and dark hair.
The little girl skipped ahead down the stairs, leaving the two of them alone.
She was intensely aware of Justin as they walked down the stairs. They didn’t say anything, but the thick awareness flowed between them, leaving her jittery and unsettled as they walked out into the moonlit night.
Thirteen
DINNER WOULD LIVE on forever in her memory as one of the most surreal experiences of Ashley’s life. She was having dinner with Justin Hartford—and not just any dinner, but one he prepared with his own hands. The fourteen-year-old girl who—she was ashamed to say—still sometimes popped up in her psyche wanted to swoon.
She found the whole experience disorienting. It was extraordinarily difficult to reconcile her different images of him—sexy, intense big-screen hero, then disinterested father—with the man who cut his daughter’s hot dog and did really lousy impersonations.
Somehow they managed to put aside their discomfort over that awkward scene before dinner as they talked and laughed and listened to Ruby’s apparently endless repertoire of bad knock-knock jokes.
She was charmed by both of them. This Ruby was a far different girl at home than she had been the past three weeks. Here was the girl she had met those first few days at school and Ashley wanted to know why she had disappeared.
And Justin. Every once in a while she would find him watching her with a baffled kind of heat in his eyes and her insides would flutter and sigh.
She was doing her best to ignore it, but she had never been so fiercely aware of a man.
Her heart was in serious danger here. She realized it sometime before they finished eating and he brought out her cheesecake. The man across the table was exactly the kind she dreamed of now, and that scared the heck out of her.
“I’m all done eating,” Ruby said after she had all but licked her dessert plate clean. “Can I go change into my party dress to show Miss Barnes, Daddy? Can I?”
He looked reluctant but he nodded. “Go ahead. Hurry, though.”
Without the buffer of Ruby and her chatter, Ashley’s awareness of him became almost unbearable. She couldn’t shake the disbelief that she was actually sitting on a starlit deck with Justin Hartford, a man she was finding increasingly attractive.
Without thinking, needing only to move suddenly, she stood up and started to clear away the dinner dishes.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said. “We usually don’t make our guests clean up.”
She felt her face heat. “Habit. Sorry. With five kids in my family, we all had to pitch in to help. I don’t mind, though. Really, I don’t. This way you don’t have to clear them yourself later.”
He rose and started helping her, and they worked in a silence that would have been companionable except for the vibes zinging between them like the kids on the zip line at the school playground.
“The sheriff is really your brother?” he asked after a moment.
She nodded. “He’s always been good at telling people what to do. I guess that’s because he’s the oldest.”
“I’ve met him a few times. He’s a good man. Does that mean you grew up around here?”
She searched his rugged features for any clue that he might be patronizing her, but all she saw was genuine interest. “I’ve lived here all my life, except for the years I spent in college in Oregon. I suppose that must seem pretty provincial to someone like you.”
“Not at all.” He gave an almost bittersweet smile. “I envy you.”
Fourteen
SHE BLINKED. “Me? I’m a boring kindergarten teacher. I’ve never done anything exciting in my life.”
Before tonight, anyway, she corrected to herself.
“Climbing over my gates doesn’t count?”
She smiled. “Well, there was that. And the time I drove my dad’s pickup over the mayor’s mailbox.”
His laugh did funny things to her insides. “I’m serious,” he said. “It must be wonderful to have roots in a nice town like Pine Gulch. When I was looking at property to purchase, I knew the moment I stepped into town that this was what I wanted for Ruby.”
“You didn’t? Have roots, I mean?”
He was quiet for a long moment, leaning against the railing of the deck with the stars spilling across the sky behind him. “No. I grew up living out of suitcases and cheap hotels and sometimes even the backseat of my mom’s old Pontiac. She was a wanderer who didn’t like to stay in one place very long. When I was twelve, she dumped me off with Lydia in Chicago and never bothered to come back.”
She heard the old pain in his voice and her heart ached with sympathy.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, leaning against the railing beside him. “But I’m glad you had Lydia. I’ve taught children with no one at all to call their own.”
“You’re right. I was lucky, though I didn’t think so at the time. Lydia tried. But by age twelve I had been basically on my own for a long time and didn’t want much help from her. I equated caring with smothering. I took off when I was seventeen and
headed for sunshine. L.A. I worked odd jobs for a while and ended up doing some stunt work as a favor to a friend and before I knew it, I was in movies.”
She remembered the bones of his story from those early days when she used to scour People and Us Weekly looking for information about him, in the days before the internet would have put all those details at her fingertips. But, of course, she couldn’t tell him that.
“What about you?” he asked. “What led you to teaching?”
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I love children. I always have.” She smiled. “I was the world’s best babysitter because I could have done it all day for free just for the fun of it and everyone knew it. There is something so magical about early childhood, the innocence and the wonder and the sheer delight of it. I love watching them grow and start to test life. Setting them on a path to discover the world of possibilities waiting for them.”
Her voice trailed off and she flushed. “I’m sorry. I’m rambling again.”
“Not at all. I could listen to you all night.”
Her gaze flashed to his and the heat in the midnight depths sent those nerves twirling through her insides again. She swallowed hard and had time only to wonder if this could possibly be real, when his mouth captured hers.
Fifteen
ASHLEY FROZE, the breath caught in her throat and her pulse thundered in her ears.
Oh. Oh, my. His kiss was unbearably soft, almost tender, and she leaned into it, into him. Her hands rested on the hard muscles of his chest and she could feel the jump of his heartbeat beneath her fingertips. His arms slid around her, pulling her close, and she surrendered to the magic and wonder of his kiss.
She could definitely fall hard for this man.
His kiss suddenly deepened, his tongue licking at the corner of her mouth, and she lost any chance at coherent thought for several long, drugging moments.
“Okay, get ready!” she suddenly heard Ruby call from inside the house and the two of them sprang apart, both breathing hard, just as the girl burst through the door in all her finery.
Together for Christmas Page 28
