by Arlene James
"Yes, mere is. I'm in4ove with you, and I think you have feelings for—"
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He cut her off with a chopping motion of his hand. "Don't even go there! Any feelings I have for you are strictly carnal!"
Caroline drew herself up tightly. "I don't believe that."
"What you believe isn't my concern."
Sighing, she tried another argument. "Jesse, you can't live the rest of your life alone."
He turned on her then. "I'm not alone!"
"Yes, you are, and you know it. All these years since Kay died and not even your parents know what you've been feeling. If that's not alone, I don't know what is."
He looked as though she'd hit him. "You don't know anything about it."
"You've been beating yourself up all these years because you didn't feel for her what you do feel for me," she said doggedly.
He shouted at her. "Don't you dare tell me what I'm feeling!"
"Then you tell me!" she shouted back.
"Right now I could strangle you with my bare hands," he gritted out.
Caroline sighed. She wasn't the least frightened of him, and what had to be said had to be said. "Jesse, I've been thinking about it a lot, and you said it yourself. You didn't love Kay like a woman. That doesn't mean you feel the same way about me or that you will."
"Damn it, Caroline, I don't feel any way about you except frustrated! You're driving me crazy! Why can't you just let it alone?"
Caroline took a moment to gather her thoughts and square her shoulders so he would know that what she was going to say was not a knee-jerk reaction to his repudiation.' 'I won't leave it alone, Jesse," she finally said, "because I don't want to waste the next ten years of my life wishing I'd done or said something more to make you understand. I won't live with the kind of regret that has eaten you alive, Jesse Wagner. I know what kind of man I want and what kind of life I want."
"And how would you know that?" he retorted smartly. "You have no experience at—"
"I have plenty of experience, I'll have you know!"
"Oh, please. At your age?"
"Yes, at my age!"
Suddenly he was right in her face, his nose practically bumping hers. "And just how many men have you known, pray tell?"
"Enough!"
"How many?"
"Dozens!"
He reeled backward, arms flailing before settling once more at his waist "Well, you sure had me fooled."
She was puzzled by the color draining from his face, by the way he rubbed a hand over his eyes as if trying to get his bearings in a room gone topsy-turvy. She threw out her arms. "I've never made any secret of what my life's been like! It's been a parade of men, one after the other, every kind of male imaginable."
"I don't want to hear any more of this," he muttered, backing away.
"How do you think I felt?" she demanded, pacing him. "Every time I turned around she was dragging some pool shark or short-order cook home with her. There was a new one every week, some of them so low on the evolutionary track that I thought once or twice she'd found the missing link!"
He came to a stop, his hands grasping her elbows and bringing her to a stop with him. "She?"
Caroline nodded, warming to the subject now.tShe'd never spoken of it before; it had seemed disloyal to her mother, but it had always been there, the sheer stupidity of her mother's life-style. Caroline shook her head, thinking about it. "She didn't want to be tied down. I never could figure it out I mean, what she saw in some of them just escaped me. Not the physical, mind you. She always went for the lookers. It didn't matter what kind of -jerk he was, if he looked the part, he could hang around—for a time. But God forbid he should get serious! One really kind word, one really thoughtful gesture, and he was history. Then here she'd come with another, gushing and laughing and hanging all over him—till the next one. Well, not me! No way!"
Jesse put a hand over his mouth, and she realized he was laughing. Frowning, she poked him in the ribs with a forefinger. "Stop it It isn't funny."
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"You're right," he said, sobering. "I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you."
"What then?"
He shook his head, sobering. "Doesn't matter. I just... Well, I'm glad you feel that way, that you don't want to repeat your mother's mistakes, but you just set your sights on the wrong man this time, honey. That's all."
"I have not," she insisted, folding her arms.
"Caroline, you need a man who'll treasure you and give you a family."
"You can do that!"
"No, I can't. The treasuring part aside, I'm too old to think about starting a family now."
"That's absurd! I know women having first babies at your age!"
He made an exasperated sound. "Caroline, I'm just not a good risk."
"Baloney. You're no risk at all. You're exactly what I want, exactly who I want, and you need me, Jesse. I know you do."
He put both hands in his hair and pulled. "Why don't you just conk me over the head with a mallet? It would be less painful."
"Don't give me any ideas," she muttered.
Throwing up his hands, he turned away again. "I'm not having this conversation with you."
"Just give me a chance, Jesse!"
He rounded on her, whipping out an arm to point at her. "I'm not giving you anything!"
Caroline sighed. "Not even a good-night kiss?"
He jumped back in alarm. "Especially not a good-night kiss!"
"Coward!"
He roared, literally, but then he marched forward, grasped her by the upper arms, yanked her forward, and planted a kiss right in the center of her forehead. "There! Good night!"
Caroline made a face. He spun around and headed for the hall. "You call that a kiss?" she yelled.
"Good night, Caroline!"
"What about all this popcorn? Aren't you going to help me clean up the popcorn?"
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''Good night, Caroline!" he bellowed, pounding up the stairs.
She screeched and kicked at a little pile of fluffy white kernels. The television was hissing again. She threw a pillow at it, then pushed her hair out of her face. She had to do something. She jfidn't know what yet, but something, anything. And she would. As soon as she thought of it.
He did his best to stay away from her. One night he even drove into town for dinner and a movie, alone. It was a stupid move. He let Caroline think that he was meeting someone, even though everyone he'd phoned said the roads were too bad to be out and about He put the snow chains on the truck and drove in, anyway, ignoring the guilt that gnawed at him because he'd left her out at the ranch on her own. Then, after an indifferent meal, he got to the movie theater only to find it closed due to the inclement weather. He didn't know what was inclement about it. Winters were always cold and snowy in Colorado, just more so this year, la fact, so much so mat he had to virtually creep back to the ranch to keep from driving off the road in the thick, swirling snowfall. Once he got there Caroline's obvious relief at having him home safe doubled the guilt he was already feeling.
After that, he stayed home. With the TV in the shop, it was somehow easier to concentrate on solitary pursuits like reading and paperwork, but then there wasn't much sense in doing paperwork by pen when a perfectly good computer sat boxed in the corner of the office. He'd already made one attempt at translating the computereze in the manual and had decided to leave it until he could attend a class. Later, out of sheer boredom, he figured he might as well give it another try and spent two full evenings reading and rereading what was obviously someone's idea of a bad joke before tossing the book aside and striking out on his own. Several'hours of trial and error finally resulted in a functioning system, but try as he might he couldn't seem to get the software loaded. He was turning the air blue with his opinion of computer nerds who couldn't communicate in plain English when the office door opened and Caroline came inside to lean against the corner of the desk.
>'Need some help?"
>
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He snorted at that. "Yeah, I need a computer genius. Know one?"
She shrugged. "Might. But maybe I can help."
"Yeah, right," he snapped sarcastically. "You're a good little housekeeper, Blondie, but this is the latest setup and it needs—"
She'd walked over to the desk while he was talking and bent to take a look at the screen. He jerked back out of her way, avoiding physical contact at all costs. She tapped a fingernail against her chin, then said, "You've opened the wrong driver." Quickly she began working the mouse and typing on the keyboard. "Let's just get out of this, and double click this and..." She checked the disk in the A drive, reinserted it and typed in a command at the prompt. The drive began to whir, and a graph appeared in a small box, numbers clicking by at incredible speed. It only took Jesse a moment to realize that it was loading.
Damn. Was there nothing this youngster couldn't do? He took a good look at her from the back, the sleek torso tapering to an unbelievably narrow waist, the taut roundness of hips and buttocks, the slender length of legs that could wrap around a man with such agile grace. All right, so she wasn't exactly a child. Hell, she was a fetching, electrifying bundle of woman. He swiv-eled the chair so he wouldn't have to look at her, but the state of semiarousal that he'd been living in lately had already blossomed into painful fullness.
Caroline was replacing the disk and answering prompts again. The little graph popped up once more and went to flicking numbers. He tried to focus on that. After a moment the second disk was loaded and the prompt requested a third. As she reached for it, he rolled his chair forward once more and elbowed her aside. "Show me what you're doing here."
She sat down on the corner of the desk, propped her feet against the edge of his chair and leaned forward. In terse, simple terms, she explained the process and then went on to fully explain the various icons of the basic software already installed by the manufacturer. Suddenly it was beginning to make a warped kind of sense.
"How'd you learn all this?" he asked, impressed despite himself.
"I went to college, remember? You don't get through high school these days without a few basic computer courses, and you don't get through your first week of college without enough literacy to figure out the Internet and whatnot. Shoot, half the assignments these days have to be filed via E-mail." '- He shook his head, sighing. "I went to college, too, and I typed up my papers on a word processor, but that was a far cry from mis."
"True. It's called progress."
-. •. He looked her square in the eye. ' 'Just goes to show how things change over the"years."
She laughed. "With computers things change moment to moment, and you know it. Now, do you want to learn how to set up your accounts or not?"
He wanted to tell her that he could take it from there without her help, but they both knew that was a crock. He sucked in a deep breath. "Okay, whiz kid, lay it on me."
She folded her arms, glaring down at him with blatant censure. "I'm going to ignore that so-obvious ploy, because I'm more mature than you want to give me credit for."
A grin quirked at his mouth. "Touche. Now let's get some work done...if you don't mind."
"I don't mind," she told him, the silkiness of her voice lifting the hair on the back of his neck, but the next moment she got down to business.
The following hours passed with amazing speed and equanimity. At one point he realized that he was actually enjoying himself, and he had to hand it to her: she knew her stuff, particularly when it came to accounting. He only got about half of what she was telling him, but he still felt that he was getting enough of it to eventually figure it all out. It was actually pretty exciting, and it was only when he couldn't stifle the yawns anymore that he realized how late the hour had grown.
"I gotta get some sleep," he said, stretching.
Caroline nodded and pushed back the chair he had carried around the desk for her sometime earlier. "We can finish setting up the accounts and start updating them tomorrow, if you want."
"We'll see." It had been a surprisingly comfortable, easy eve-
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ning, but he wasn't willing to push his luck. "I might just take some time to read all these manuals again. Maybe I'll actually understand some of them now."
She shrugged and got up. "Whatever you want. I spoke to your mother today, by the way."
He was surprised by mat—and a little,hurt. "Oh? She called specifically to talk to you?"
"That's right. Girl-talk stuff. She wanted to know if I thought she could get away with wearing olive green."
He couldn't help smiling at that. He'd never known his mother to express such coacern over her appearance. "What'd you tell her?"
"I told her deep olive, not drab olive."
"Ah."
Caroline gathered her long, silky hair into one hand and pulled it across her shoulder. "She, um, didn't exactly say it, but I gather that your father is not being completely cooperative."
Jesse rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah, he's complained to me a time or two about this counseling stuff."
"I don't know what his problem is," Caroline said. "All the doctors want to do is make sure that he knows what they're dealing with."
"I guess he just doesn't like being told what to do and think."
Caroline rolled her eyes. "Is that what you think it's all about?"
Jesse rocked forward onto the balls of his feet. "No. But that seems to be what he thinks it's all about."
"Well, I don't understand it," Caroline said. "If you ask me, he just doesn't want to face the severity of your mother's problem."
"Of course he doesn't. He loves her, and he hates the idea that she's in constant pain."
"But ignoring the problem is not going to make it go away."
"I don't think you can say he's ignoring the problem. He's in Denver, isn't he?"
"Yes, but is he doing what he should be doing there?"
Jesse threw up his hands. "I don't know, Caroline! I'm not sure it's really any of my business. I know it's none of yours."
-Caroline caught her breath, obviously injured. "I'm sorry. iVou're right. But I can't help worrying about them."
- Jesse groaned and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eye SBckets. "I know, I know. I'm just tired, okay?"
She bit her lip, but she nodded. Still, she looked awfully small standing there with one arm wrapped almost protectively around her middle as if she needed a hug. He ruthlessly stifled the impulse to supply it.
- ' "Listen, thanks. You've been a great help here tonight, and you didn't have to be. I appreciate it. Now get some rest, okay?"
She nodded again, straightening a little. "I'll be glad to help .update the accounts if you want."
"We'll see. Can't work you all the time." • "Oh, I don't mind," she said. "I'm just glad I've found a way to use what I've learned without having to depend on it to earn a living. It's one thing to sit here with you talking over all this stuff and another to do nothing else but enter numbers and tally columns all day long."
He chuckled at that. "Yeah, I know what you mean. I'd never be able to keep myself fed with any kind of full-time office job. I wouldn't even want to try."
"Well, thankfully you don't have to," Caroline said. "Neither of us does."
""But then that means that we both have real jobs to do tomorrow."
"True."
"Good night, Caroline. Thanks again."
He saw the look in her eye, the one that said she craved a parting kiss from him, but he kept himself in check, and she finally went on her way. He couldn't help congratulating himself. Maybe he was getting a handle on this thing, after all.
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Chapter Twelve
Ohe couldn't possibly do it, but she had to. Somehow. He was the most stubborn man in the world, and he had found a way to hold her at arm's length indefinitely, unless she pushed. But it had to be a big push. Jesse Wagner was a lot of man, and he'd c
onvinced himself that he was saving her from a fate worse than death by denying his feelings for her. Those feelings were there. Somehow she knew it. Now she had to help them break through ten years of convincing himself that he was incapable of them. She would do it. She had to do it.
