Shamus passed Patrick his hat, which wasn’t exactly hat-shaped anymore. “They’re getting careless.”
Patrick snatched the hat and swatted Shamus with it. “Do I need to finish what we started here, Shamus Logan?”
That was the old Patrick talking, the middle brother who could walk into any confrontation and settle everybody down.
“For crap’s sake, back off. I don’t care who Luke falls in love with as long as he picks a consenting adult, but he and Willy think they’re being discreet.”
“Screw discretion. He’s our brother.”
“And it’s his business.”
“His and Willy’s.”
Willy was the foreman, the guy who turned decisions into action, who kept peace in the bunkhouse and knew everybody in the valley. He’d started off as a ranch hand, picked up a degree in ag economics somewhere along the way, and was gradually adding an MBA to it.
Willy and Judith had been partners in crime where the horses were concerned, and Luke probably hadn’t sold the mares in part because Willy insisted that horses were profitable.
“I spend all winter wishing spring would get here,” Shamus said, “then I wish to hell spring would leave us in peace. Don’t suppose we can add you to the rotation when the foals start coming?”
Mares were notorious for dropping foals not only in the dead of night, but during the five minutes in the dead of night when the guy on foal watch stepped out for a quick visit to the bushes. If anything went wrong in the birthing process, though, immediate, knowledgeable intervention was the only hope of a positive outcome.
“I have taken my shifts on foal watch every year since I turned twelve,” Patrick said. “Why should this year be any different?”
“Because this has been the year from hell,” Shamus said, grabbing his hat from the rack by the door.
“We’re still in business, and it looks to me like Bridget might have found a little bit of heaven—or Scotland. What do you make of Cromarty?”
Shamus shrugged into his sheepskin jacket. The snow was melting, but the breeze could still cut like knives.
“Cromarty isn’t stupid. I don’t trust him.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I gave him Bridget’s profit and loss for the past three years, and the year-to-date general ledger. He’ll know exactly what he’s looking at.”
Patrick crossed the room to right an overturned gooseneck lamp. “He better know how to wrangle a spreadsheet, if he’s buying the distillery.”
“I haven’t been watching Bridget’s books that closely, and when I took a more careful look, I found some nasty surprises.”
Patrick kicked a flipped-up corner of the carpet flat. “I purely hate nasty surprises. Is the distillery about to go belly-up?”
“Yes and no. She took a loan to shareholder last year and told me she was paying off a law school loan with it.” Shamus tossed a pillow back onto a recliner, and the room looked just about put to rights.
“Nothing wrong with paying down debt,” Patrick said. “It’s her debt and her distillery.”
“No, Patrick. It’s her debt and her land. It’s our distillery. She runs it and draws a small salary, but all four of us own it, and the business rents the land it sits on from her. I did some checking.”
“Snooping, you mean?”
“Checking. The balances on her student loans haven’t come down by nearly as much as they should.”
Patrick ran a hand over scruffy cheeks. “She’s stealing from us?”
“Or hedging her bets. I can’t find the money anywhere. Not on her books, not on the ranch books, not anywhere.”
Patrick wasn’t a businessman, but his mind naturally grasped cause and effect and how parts worked together. He tossed Shamus a scarf.
“You didn’t look at the law practice books, because you can’t. Maybe Bridget had to buy her way out of that business. Ever think of that? Nate Sturbridge is a greedy sumbitch, and that rock Georgie
Truman is wearing on her finger didn’t come from the five-and-dime.”
“I hadn’t noticed Georgie’s ring, but I’ve considered a few other factors, all of which I should have seen a year ago, but didn’t bother looking for.”
“Come out to the shop with me,” Patrick said. “Guilt will drive you straight to the liquor cabinet, and I cannot be trusted to talk you out of going there.”
Shamus held the door. “What do we have to do out in the shop?”
“Keep an eye on the front door of the guesthouse, for one thing. What do you suppose Bridget and that damned Scot are getting up to?”
“No good.”
“We live in hope.”
Why am I about to have a relapse of foolishness with Magnus Cromarty?
The question came not from Bridget’s conscience—Magnus was a consenting adult, after all—but from the part of her that had spent the last year standing back, coping, strategizing, and troubleshooting.
I’m doing this because I damned well want to. Need to.
Magnus scooted to the edge of the sofa, scooped Bridget up, quilt and all, and carried her to the back of the house. The air grew colder the farther they got from the woodstove.
“Hasn’t anybody shown you how to work the heat?” Bridget asked.
“I’m conserving resources, saving them for a true necessity.” Magnus laid her on the bed and closed the door. The bedroom was good-sized, with an unlit pellet stove in a corner fireplace. The four-poster bed dominated the space, and the high-beamed ceiling contributed to the lack of warmth.
He rummaged in a rucksack and tossed a pair of condoms on the night table, then pulled the curtains closed over the sliding glass doors and disappeared into the adjacent bathroom.
No time like the present. Bridget shucked out of her jeans and flannel shirt, laying them on the rocker beside the fireplace. The bed would be freezing—at first. She spread the quilt loosely over the blankets and dove under the sheets naked.
“For the love of baby bunnies, Magnus, get in here and help me warm up this bed.”
He emerged from the bathroom naked from the waist up. “I’ll do more than that, unless you’ve changed your mind.”
Caution tried to rear its inconvenient head. “If you bought my business, would you keep me on as distiller?”
He paused, his jeans halfway unzipped. “You don’t want to sell to me, and you’re barely turning a profit because of all the debt you’ve taken on.”
“I’m a lawyer, or I was. Indulge me in a hypothetical.”
Magnus got the rest of his clothes off and turned his back to fold them on the dresser. Bridget had the uncomfortable sense he was deciding how honest to be. Again.
“I am more interested in your abilities as a distiller than in the business you run.”
He wasn’t flirting, wasn’t flattering. “What do you mean?”
Magnus turned to face the bed. “Might we discuss that later?”
Holy prairie dogs, Batman. He was more than ready for a change of subject. “Later today.”
“If you insist.”
“Right now, I insist you get under these covers and wrap your big old Scottish self around me before I freeze.”
He obliged, but apparently wasn’t in the mood to chat. While the sheets gradually warmed, Magnus draped himself over Bridget and treated her to an excruciatingly lazy orgy of kissing—her shoulders, her neck, her brow and lips and jaw and everywhere a lady ever desired to be kissed.
Impatience joined desire. “Magnus, I don’t need convincing.”
“You need loving.”
He would not be hurried, and after pulling his hair, wiggling, and trying to inspire him with a few other tactics, Bridget surrendered to the deliberate pleasure he offered. The cost of capitulating was to admit emotion into an exchange that she’d intended to limit to physical pleasure.
Magnus breathed her in and brushed her hair back from her brow. His fingers were warm, his caresses sweet, and his thumb tracing a
long her eyebrow caused an empty ache in her belly.
I’m lonely. I’m so damned lonely, and so tired of being lonely. Tired of everything—the Logan Bar ranch, grief, family feuding, responsibility.
Tired of keeping a stupid promise to a grandfather long gone.
The price of slowing down to take in Magnus’s tenderness was that Bridget’s emotions caught up with her.
The collision hurt like getting bucked off at a dead gallop and landing on rocky ground. Beneath the loneliness lay a fear that went back to the barely remembered time when she’d had two parents, and reached forward to the day when what family she had would be nothing but a liability. And beneath the fear, a worse ache still:
I have nobody of my own.
Magnus hitched up, cradling the back of Bridget’s head in his palm and tucking her face against his shoulder. “Stay with me, Bridget.”
I wish I could. “I’m here.” Though here had become a difficult place, more intimate than Bridget had intended. She tried to re-establish some detachment, a mental perch from which to watch herself having a damned fine time with a damned fine lover.
Magnus palmed her breast and gave her an easy pressure on her nipple.
“Again,” Bridget whispered. “Please.”
He was relentless and inventive. When Bridget drew her knees up, the better to wrap her legs around him, Magnus caught her foot in a warm grasp. He knew exactly where to press on her sole, exactly the angle to brace her leg, exactly when to let go.
When he took an intermission to deal with protection, Bridget lay panting on her back, desire and an insistent despair bludgeoning her from within.
Lighten up, cowgirl, it’s only a roll in the hay battled against a more desperate sentiment: Why can’t this be real?
Magnus had raised the stakes—this wasn’t a mere roll in the hay—and Bridget hadn’t called his bet. He’d learned what nobody else knew about her, and instead of heading for the Highlands, he’d accepted Bridget’s challenge to another round of intimacy.
Another level of intimacy.
He repositioned himself over her, his mouth near her ear. “Now, we let go, lass.”
“I don’t know if—”
Then he was inside her, all the languor and restraint, the delicate caresses and patient exploration gone in an explosion of passion.
Bridget gave up trying to mentally weigh risks and regrets and poured everything—rage, grief, determination, exhaustion, everything—into loving Magnus back. The bed rocked, and when the pleasure came, the satisfaction burned so bright and deep it nearly hurt.
And that felt wonderful.
Bridget lay beneath Magnus, breathing like a spent horse. Another loving like that might kill her, but even as she had that thought, she corrected herself.
Living without another loving like that would finish her off before the year was up. And who would have guessed—Magnus had needed loving too.
Chapter 9
“You’ll have bruises on your butt,” Bridget said, smoothing her hand over the relevant part of Magnus’s anatomy.
She had such a lovely touch. “I’ll wear them with pride. You’ll be sore.”
He’d never made love to a woman as he just had with Bridget. Or maybe, no woman had ever made love with him like that? Certainly not his former wife, who’d liked her bedsport fairly tame and not too protracted. Magnus had told himself that married sex was supposed to be friendly like that and special in its own way.
What a load of shite. He’d wallowed in learning Bridget’s every hollow and contour, in pushing her and himself past restraint to a place uniquely theirs, both uncharted and utterly safe.
So now what, laddie? Magnus rose up on knees and elbows, easing his body from Bridget’s. Whatever came next, they’d go forward by negotiation and mutual consent.
Bridget shivered and gripped him by the back of the neck. “Don’t be gone long.”
“You all right, then?” Magnus wasn’t all right, but he was righter than he’d been half an hour ago.
“I’m undone, Magnus. I’m absolutely undone. I wasn’t planning on that.”
“The best-laid schemes sometimes benefit from rethinking.” He kissed her cheek, offered a silent apology to Mr. Burns, and got out of bed to deal with the practicalities. The bathroom was blessedly warm, and Magnus made short work of washing up.
The bed was warmer, and if Bridget was about to fall asleep, he wanted her falling asleep in his arms.
When he rejoined her under the covers, she straddled him and curled down onto his chest.
Lovely woman. Touching her soothed him as even the best whisky never had, and Magnus would not have said he was a man in need of soothing.
“Talk to me,” Bridget said.
That might be the most frightening demand a woman could make of her lover. Why hadn’t Magnus’s ex ever wanted to prolong the intimacies with conversation?
“My whisky is in trouble.”
She kissed his shoulder. “And?”
And do that again. “And if my whisky is in trouble, my family is in trouble. The elders depend on their directors’ stipends. The entire crew is family even if they’re not related to me. Their people worked with my people a century ago, and by virtue of my warehousing arrangements, I’m extending credit to a few other small operations. The whisky has to come right.”
“It’s not finishing well?”
“Five years ago, my premier batch was maturing splendidly. I’d finally brought everything together, from the water supply to the choice of barley, the malting, drying, everything. I had a legend maturing in my warehouse and made sure everybody knew about it. The culmination of two hundred years of hard work and wisdom would have my name on it at the bicentennial celebrations.”
“Idiot.”
“Bridget, you didn’t sample what was in those casks. Compared to the wee nip you had today, my whisky was the nectar of the gods.”
She kissed his forehead next. “And goddesses.”
“And accountants. What’s in my flask has gone for a thousand dollars a bottle at auction. My bicentennial would have opened for that much.”
“Because drinking makes people drunk, but whisky can make them crazy. I’m sorry for your loss. What does this have to do with Logan Bar?”
As passionate as Magnus was about his whisky, as sexually satisfied as he’d been five minutes ago, when Bridget casually grazed his nipple with her fingernail, one thought gained Magnus’s full attention:
A second condom sat three feet away on the night table.
“I need two assets from the Logan Bar distillery.” Need was an admission, an act of trust.
“One of them had better not be cash.”
“One of them will drive me daft if she kisses me even one more time.”
Bridget left off using her tongue on Magnus’s other nipple. “You want to hire me?”
“I want to kidnap you, among other things.”
She kissed him on the mouth, thoroughly, even recklessly. “You’re not kidnapping me unless I get to kidnap you too. Tell me about the other things.”
An afternoon in the office was convincing Nate of the value of holy matrimony. He’d known Georgie Truman was a good choice—pragmatic, as gals born and bred in Montana tended to be, lively in bed, wealthy, and well-connected—but month by month she was becoming a necessity rather than a strategic move.
The phone hadn’t rung the whole time Nate had been at his desk researching his latest prostitution case.
One of the ironies of the legal business was that people tended to go lawyer shopping when lawyers weren’t likely to be in. Friday afternoons, holidays, during snowstorms… As if leaving a message appeased an anxiety for the client that actually hiring a lawyer would only exacerbate.
Bridget had been happy to roost in the office on the odd days—the Friday after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Super Bowl Monday, New Year’s Eve, most Friday afternoons. Invariably, her vigilance had resulted in new cases.
She�
�d had the one skill Nate couldn’t pretend to claim—the ability to listen to the clients. Nate managed a close approximation of listening when picking up a casual partner for a mattress rodeo. When it came to poor schmucks crying in their beer about a seven-year itch costing them their marriage, or the inconvenience of spending a weekend in jail after their first DUI, Nate had no patience.
Nobody warned a guy that patience was a requirement for the successful practice of law.
The damned phone wasn’t going to ring, and Nate’s ass was tired of sitting in his damned ergonomically engineered office chair. He put his computer to sleep, rose, shut off the lights, and headed for the door. The admin hadn’t come in, because it was a well-established fact that Sue Etta Grainger’s four-wheel-drive worked only if she had to get to the grocery store.
“Damned women,” Nate muttered, jamming his hat onto his head.
And damned weather, because as it happened, he was out of groceries himself, and Sunday supper with the Trumans was a long way off. He was still lamenting that fact when he snatched up a silly-ass red plastic shopping basket and headed for the snack aisle twenty minutes later.
“Watch where you’re going, Sturbridge.”
Martina Matlock had her own red plastic shopping basket, into which she’d stashed organic celery, organic baby spinach, and other horrors too healthy to contemplate.
“If it isn’t one of my favorite ex-cops. There’s a reason my clients call this the singles’ supermarket.”
“And that reason is not you, Nathan.” Martina breezed past him, her down vest barely brushing the sleeve of his jacket.
She stopped a few yards farther up the aisle before a selection of soups. Why in the hell had the good Lord made such a contrary female so danged pretty that she could look sexy even handling cans of clam chowder?
“Which is your favorite?” Nate asked, surveying the offerings.
“If you’re coming for dinner, I look for the brand with a little rat poison in it.”
Big Sky Ever After: a Montana Romance Duet Page 35
