A Cattleman's Honor

by Diana Palmer

  She lived frugally, and she’d managed all by herself. The money was almost gone now, but she’d made good grades and she had the promise of a teaching position at the local elementary school when she graduated. Life at the age of twenty-two looked much better than life at age six, when a grieving child had been taken from her family home and placed in the orphanage after a fire had killed both her parents. Like Mack, she’d had her share of tragedy and grief.

  But teaching was wonderful. She loved first graders, so open and loving and curious. That was going to be her future. She and Dave Markham, a sixth-grade teacher at the school, had been dating for several weeks. No one knew that they were more friends than a romantic couple. Dave was sweet on the clerk at the local insurance agency, who was mooning over one of the men she worked with. Natalie wasn’t interested in marriage anytime soon. Her only taste of love had been a crush on an older teenager when she was in her senior year. He’d just started noticing her when he was killed in a wreck while driving home from an out-of-town weekend fishing trip with his cousin. Losing her parents, then the one love of her short life, had taught her the danger of loving. She wanted to be safe. She wanted to be alone.

  Besides that, she was far too fastidious for the impulsive leap-into-bed relationships that seemed the goal of many modern young women. She had no interest in falling in love, or in a purely physical affair. So until Dave came along, she hadn’t dated at all. Well, that wasn’t quite true, she conceded.

  There was the dance she’d coaxed Mack into taking her to, but he’d been far older than the boys at the local community college who had attended. Nevertheless, he’d made Natalie the belle of the ball just by escorting her. Mack was a dish, by anybody’s standards, even if he did lack social graces. By the time they left, he’d put more backs up than a debating team. She hadn’t asked him to take her anywhere else, though. He seemed to dislike everybody these days. Especially Natalie.

  Natalie hadn’t really minded his abrasive company. She admired his penchant for telling the truth even when it wasn’t welcome, and for saying what he thought, not what was socially acceptable. She tended to speak her own mind, too. She’d learned that from Mack. He’d forced her to fight back soon after she became friends with his sister. He put her back up and kept it up, refusing to let her rush off and cry. He taught her to stand her ground, to have the courage of her convictions. He made her strong enough to bear up under almost anything.

  She remembered that they had an argument the night she’d coaxed him to the dance. He’d left her at her front door with one poisonous remark too many, his black eye narrow and no smile to ease the hard, lean contours of his face. There was too much between them to let a disagreement keep them apart, though.

  Mack looked much older than twenty-eight. He’d had so much responsibility on his broad shoulders that he’d been robbed of a real childhood. His mother had died young, and his father had succumbed to drink, and then became abusive to the kids. Mack had stood up to him, many times taking blows meant for the other three. In the end, their father had suffered a stroke and been placed in a nursing home while Mack kept the younger Killains together and supported them by working as a mechanic in town. When Mack was twenty-one, his father had died, leaving Mack with three teenagers to raise.

  Meanwhile, he’d invested carefully, bought good stock and started breeding his own strain of Red Angus. He was successful at everything he touched. His only run of real bad luck had been when he’d been thrown from his horse in the pasture with a big Angus bull. When the bull had charged him and he’d tried to catch it by the horns to save himself, he’d been gored in the face. He’d lost his sight, but fortunately only in one eye. The rest of him was still pure, splendid male, and women found him very appealing physically. He was every woman’s secret desire, until he opened his mouth. His lack of diplomacy kept him single.

  Natalie left Vivian crying in the living room and went to find Mack. He was on one knee in a stall on the cobblestones of the spacious, clean barn, ruffling the fur of one of his border collies. He was a kind man, for the most part, and he did love animals. Every stray in Baker County made a beeline for the Killain place, and there were always furry friends around to pet. The border collies were working dogs, of course, and used to help herd cattle on the vast plains. But Mack adored them, and it was mutual.

  Natalie leaned against the doorway of the barn with her arms folded and smiled at the picture he made with the pup.

  As if he sensed her presence, his head rose. She couldn’t see his eyes under the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat, but she knew he was probably glaring at her. He didn’t like letting people see how very human he was.

  “Slumming, Miss Educator?” he drawled, rising gracefully to his feet.

  She only smiled, used to his remarks. “Seeing how the other half lives, Mr. Cattle Rancher,” she shot back. “Vivian says you won’t let the love of her life through the front door.”

  “So what are you, a virgin sacrifice to appease me?” he asked, approaching her with that quick, menacing stride that made her heart jump.

  “You aren’t supposed to know that I’m a virgin,” she pointed out when he stopped just an arm’s length away.

  He let out a nasty word and smiled mockingly, waiting to see what she’d say.

  She ignored the bad language, refusing to rise to the bait. She grinned at him instead.

  That disconcerted him, apparently. He pushed his hat over his jet black hair and stared at her. He had Lakota blood two generations back. He could speak that language as fluently as French and German. He took classes from far-flung colleges on the internet. He was a great student; everything fascinated him.

  His bold gaze roamed down her slender body in the neat, fairly loose jeans and soft yellow V-neck sweater she wore. She had short dark hair, very wavy, and emerald green eyes. She wasn’t pretty, but her eyes and her soft bow mouth were. Her figure drew far more attention than she was comfortable with, especially from Mack.

  “Viv’s would-be boyfriend got the Henry girl pregnant last year,” he said abruptly.

  Her gasp made his eye narrow.

  “You didn’t have a clue, did you?” he mused. “You and Viv are just alike.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Pitiful taste in men,” he added.

  She gave him a look of mock indignation. “And I was just going to say how very sexy you were!”

  “Pull the other one,” he said with amazing coldness.

  Her eyebrows arched. “My, we’re touchy today!”

  He glared at her. “What do you want? If it’s an invitation to supper for Viv’s heartthrob, he can’t come unless you do.”

  That surprised her. He usually couldn’t wait to shoo her off the place. “Three’s a crowd?” she murmured dryly.

  “Four. I live here,” he pointed out. He frowned. “More than four,” he continued. “Vivian, Bob and Charles and me. You and the would-be Romeo make six.”

  “That’s splitting hairs,” she pointed out. “You’re suggesting that I come over to make the numbers even, of course,” she chided.

  His face didn’t betray any emotion at all. “Wear a dress.”

  That really surprised her. “Listen, you aren’t planning any pagan sacrificial rites at a volcano?” she asked, rubbing in the virgin sacrifice notion.

  “Nothing low-cut,” he persisted, his gaze narrow and faintly sensual on her pert breasts under the sweater.

  “Stop staring at my breasts!” she burst out indignantly, crossing her arms over them.

  “Wear a bra,” he returned imperturbably.

  Her face flamed. “I am wearing a bra!”

  His black eye twinkled. “Wear a thicker bra.”

  She glared at him. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you!”

  He lifted an eyebrow and his eye slid down her body appraisingly. “Lust,” he said matter
-of-factly. “I haven’t had sex for so long, I’m not even sure I remember how.”

  She couldn’t handle a remark like that. They shared such intimate memories for two old sparring partners. She couldn’t fence with him verbally when he let his voice drop like that, an octave lower than normal. It was so sensuous that it made her knees weak. So was the memory of that one unforgettable night they’d shared. Warning signals shot to her brain.

  He sighed theatrically when her cheeks turned pink. “So much for all that sophistication you pretend to have,” he mused.

  She cleared her throat. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that to me,” she said worriedly.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t,” he conceded. His hand went out and pushed a strand of hair behind her small ear. She jerked at his touch, and he moved a step closer. “I’d never hurt you, Natalie,” he said quietly.

  She managed a nervous smile. “I’d like that in writing,” she said, trying to move away without making it look as if she was intimidated, even though she was.

  The barn door was at her back, though, and there was no way to escape. He knew that. She could see it on his face as he slid one long arm beside her head and rested his hand by her ear.

  Her heart jumped into her throat. She looked at him with all her darkest fears reflecting in her emerald eyes.

  He searched them without speaking for a long moment. “Carl would never have made you happy,” he said suddenly. “His people had money. They wouldn’t have let him marry an orphan with no assets.”

  Her eyes darkened with pain. “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that,” he returned sharply. “They said as much at the funeral, when someone mentioned how devastated you were. You couldn’t even go to the funeral.”

  She remembered that. She remembered, too, that Mack had come looking for her in her aunt’s home the night Carl had died. Her aunt was out of town shopping over the weekend, and she’d been all alone. Mack found her in a very sexy pink satin gown and robe, crying her eyes out. He’d picked her up, carried her to the old easy chair by the bed, and he’d held her in his lap until she couldn’t cry anymore. After a close call that still made her knees weak, even in memory, he’d stayed with her that whole long, anguished night, sitting in the chair beside the bed, watching her sleep. It was a mark of the respect he commanded in the community that even Natalie’s aunt hadn’t said a word about his presence there when she found out about it on her return. Natalie inspired defense in the strangest quarters. Her tenderness made even the toughest people oddly vulnerable around her.

  “You held me,” she recalled softly.

  “Yes.” His face seemed to tauten as he looked at her. “I held you.”

  She felt him so close that it was like being lifted and carried away. Little twinges of pleasure shot through her when she met his searching gaze. The sensation was so intense as they looked at each other, she could almost feel his bare chest against hers. Five years had passed since that night, but it seemed like yesterday. It was like stepping into space.

  “And when I lost my sight,” he continued, “you held me.”

  She bit her lower lip hard to stop it from trembling. “I wasn’t the only one who tried to nurse you,” she recalled.

  “Vivian cried when I snapped at her, and the boys hid under their beds. You didn’t. You snapped right back. You made me want to go on living.”

  She lowered her eyes to his chest. He had the build of a rodeo cowboy, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped. His checked shirt was open at the neck, and she saw the thick, curling hair that covered him from his chest to his belt. He wasn’t a hairy man, but he was devastating without a shirt. She’d seen him like that more often than she was comfortable remembering. He was beautiful under his clothing, like a sculpture she’d seen in pictures of museum exhibits. She even knew how he felt, there where the hair was thick over his breastbone....

  “You were kind to me when Carl died,” she returned.

  There was a new tension between them after she spoke. She sensed a steely anger in him.

  “Since we’re on the subject of your poor taste in men, what do you see in that Markham man?” he asked curtly. “He’s as prissy as someone’s maiden aunt, and in a stand-up fight, he’d go out in seconds.”

  She lifted her face. “Dave’s my friend,” she said shortly. “And certainly he’s no worse than that refugee from the witch trials that you go around with!”

  His firm lips pursed. “Glenna’s not a witch.”

  “She’s not a saint, either,” she assured him. “And if you’re going without sex, I can guarantee it’s not her fault!” she added without thinking. But once the words left her stupid mouth, and she saw the unholy light in the eye that wasn’t covered by the black eye patch, she could have bitten her tongue in two.

  “Will you two keep your voices down?” young Bob Killain groaned, as he peered around the barn door to stare at them. “If Sadie Marshall hears you all the way in the kitchen, she’ll tell everybody in her Sunday school class that you two are living in sin out here!” he exclaimed, naming the Killain housekeeper.

  Natalie looked at him indignantly, both hands on her slender hips. “It’s Glenna you’d better worry about, if he gets involved with her!” she assured Mack’s youngest brother, a redhead. “Her name is written in so many phone booths, she could qualify as a tourist attraction!”

  Mack tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t help himself. He pulled his hat across his eyes at a slant and turned into the barn. “Oh, hell, I’m going to work. Haven’t you got something to do?” he asked his brother.

  Bob cleared his throat and tried desperately not to laugh, either. “I’m just going over to Mary Burns’s house to help her with her trigonometry.”

  “Carry protection,” Mack’s droll voice came back to him.

  Bob turned as red as his hair. “Well, we don’t all stand around talking about sex all day!” he muttered.

  “No,” Natalie agreed facetiously. She looked at Mack deliberately. “Some of us go looking for names in phone booths and call them up for dates!”

  “Can it, Nat,” Mack said as he opened a stall and led a horse out. He proceeded to saddle it, ignoring Natalie and Bob.

  “I’ll be back by midnight!” Bob called, seeing an opportunity to escape.

  “You heard what I said,” Mack called after him.

  Bob made an indignant sound and stomped out of the barn.

  “He’s just sixteen, Mack,” she said, regaining her composure enough to join him as he fastened the cinch tight.

  He glanced at her. “You were just seventeen when you were dating the football hero,” he reminded her.

  She stared at him curiously. “Yes, but except for a few very chaste kisses, there wasn’t much going on.”

  He gave her an amused glance before he went back to his chore. He tested the cinch, found it properly tight and adjusted the stirrups.

  “What does that look mean?” Natalie asked curiously.

  “I had a long talk with him when I found out you’d accepted a date for the Christmas dance from him.”

  Her lips fell open. “You what?”

  He slid a booted foot into the stirrup and vaulted into the saddle with easy grace. He leaned over the pommel and looked at Natalie. “I told him that if he seduced you, he’d have me to contend with. I told his parents the same thing.”

  She was horrified. She could hardly breathe. “Of all the interfering, presumptuous—”

  “You were raised in an orphanage by spinster women, and then you lived with your aunt, who couldn’t even talk about kissing without going into a swoon,” he said, and he didn’t smile. “You knew nothing about men or sex or hormones. Someone had to protect you, and there wasn’t anybody else to do it.”

  “You had no right!”

  His dark eye slid over her with something like posses
sion. “I had more right than I’ll ever tell you,” he said quietly. “And that’s all I’ll say on the subject.”

  He turned the horse, deaf to her fury.

  “Mack!” she raged.

  He paused and looked at her. “Tell Viv she can have her friend over for supper Saturday night, on the condition that you come, too.”

  “I don’t want to come!”

  He hesitated for a minute, then turned the horse and came back to her. “You and I will always disagree on some things,” he said. “But we’re closer than you realize. I know you,” he added in a tone that made her knees wobble. “And you know me.”

  She couldn’t fight the emotions that made her more confused, more stirred, than she’d ever been before. She looked at him with eyes that betrayed her longing for him.

  He drew in a long, slow breath, and his face seemed to lose its rigor. “I won’t apologize for looking out for you.”

  “I’m not part of your family, Mack,” she said huskily. “You can tell Viv and Bob and Charles what to do, but you can’t tell me!”

  He studied her angry face and smiled gently, in a way that he rarely smiled at anyone. “Oh, I’m not telling, baby,” he replied softly.

  “And don’t call me baby, either!”

  “All that fire and fury,” he mused, watching her. “What a waste.”

  She was so confused that she could hardly think. “I don’t understand you at all today!”

  “No,” he agreed, the smile fading. He looked straight into her eyes, unblinking. “You work hard at it, too.”