Snowbound in Sweetwater Ranch
Page 13
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“No spotting at all and no cramping since yesterday afternoon, then?”
“Nothing,” Katie answered Laura the next day when she stopped at the ranch before heading to the clinic. “I’m a little queasy but other than that, I feel great.”
She had been too nauseated to even finish the French toast Peter prepared for her, though the few mouthfuls she’d been able to swallow had indeed tasted delicious, crispy and sweet and covered in cinnamon sugar.
“Most pregnant mothers have a hard time accepting it, but believe it or not, queasy can be a good sign,” the doctor said. “Still, I’d like to hook up the Doppler here and listen to the baby’s heartbeat.”
“Can you do that this early?” Peter asked from where he stood by the window. The day before he had escaped to the barn while Laura was here but today he seemed reluctant to leave during her exam.
“We should be able to find it. You’re thirteen weeks along, right?”
Katie nodded.
“Let’s see what we’ve got, then.”
Upon the doctor’s instructions, Katie bared her midriff, chagrined at herself for feeling exposed with Peter in the room. The man had seen far more of her than her belly, she reminded herself. Still, that had been under far different circumstances. She couldn’t help being a little uncomfortable in this intimate situation.
She forgot about her unease when Laura rubbed a small device over her abdomen. Immediately a loud pulsing filled the room.
“That’s your heartbeat there,” the doctor said, then passed the sensor across her skin again, pressing a little harder this time. After a moment the beats accelerated noticeably and Laura smiled widely. “And that’s your baby’s. You can tell because it’s much faster than yours. It’s a beautiful sound, isn’t it?”
To Katie’s deep embarrassment, tears began to glide down her cheeks. “Wonderful.”
She was stunned when Peter crossed the room and sat beside her on the bed with an odd, stunned expression on his face. He placed his hand over hers and squeezed her fingers.
“Is the baby all right?” he asked Laura.
“I can’t really tell without an ultrasound, but the heartbeat is strong and healthy, just the way I like them. You’re not out of the woods yet, Katie my girl, but if you can make it to the second trimester—generally considered to be around fourteen weeks—the chance of miscarriage drops quite a bit. That’s only another week for you.”
“Is it safe for her to travel? Can I fly her home to Portland?”
Laura looked pensively at Katie. “That’s a tricky one. Ordinarily I’d recommend at least a few days bed rest to give your body time to heal. That was a nasty fall and even if you weren’t pregnant, I’d suggest taking it easy for a while. With that bum ankle, you could fall again, which wouldn’t be good for you or the baby.”
She put her equipment away in her bag. “When you’re so close to the magic number of fourteen weeks, I guess I would err on the side of caution and suggest you lay low until then.” She shrugged. “On the other hand, if it came down to a choice between staying out here by yourself or flying back to Portland, I’d have to go with Door Number Two.”
Peter spoke up. “She’s not by herself. I’ll stay with her.”
Katie swiped her eyes with the tissue the doctor handed her and stared at Peter, certain she must have misheard. “You can’t take an entire week away from Logan to baby-sit me!”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re—you’re the CEO. Don’t you have work? Mergers, meetings, that kind of thing?”
“I’m surrounded by excellent people. They can run things for a while without me, I’m sure. Don’t worry, Crosby. The company won’t fall apart in a week.”
She couldn’t believe he would consent to stay. He had already been stuck here for four days and she knew how restless he was to return to work. She wanted to tell him to go, to assure him she would be fine for a few days, even though she was so tempted to lean against him for a while.
“I can’t ask you to do that,” she said finally.
“You didn’t. I’m offering. No, not offering, insisting.”
Laura stood. “I’m going to wisely stay out of this and head over to the Bar S to check on Darwin’s broken leg. Let me know how it all shakes out, though my money’s on Mr. Logan here.”
Katie thanked her friend for coming out to the ranch and bid her goodbye. She waited until Laura left before she turned on Peter. “You can’t possibly stay another week.”
“You would rather take on the world and come out swinging than admit when you’re backed against a wall, wouldn’t you? I’m staying, Katie. Deal with it. Anyway, with the phones back up, I can find plenty of work to do from here. Don’t worry about me.”
She didn’t worry about him, she admitted. She worried about herself. Her emotions were already so vulnerable. She wanted desperately to lean on him for a while and she hated herself for it.
She was a strong, capable woman who could handle pregnancy on her own. But as he had said the night before, she was also smart enough to know when she was all out of choices.
CHAPTER TEN
For a woman who had never been wooed before, resisting Peter Logan was proving an impossible task.
Like her brother Trent, Peter was a man used to getting what he wanted. Right now he seemed to want her—or at least the baby she carried. With the same single-minded purpose and determination that made him a formidable business opponent, the blasted man was doing everything he could to attain his goal.
He was charming, he was sweet, he was attentive. He brought her meals in bed and played games and watched old movies with her. Without a single murmur of complaint, he cared for the animals and made sure they had a steady supply of firewood.
He told her stories about growing up with the Logans—about family vacations and campouts in the backyard and playing basketball in the driveway.
Even more seductive, he listened to her. Genuinely listened.
As if a cork had been yanked from her mouth, she found herself telling him far more than she intended.
She told him about how shy and awkward she’d been as a girl, how Trent had basically raised her because Sheila had been too busy with her social life and Jack had been too busy with his business. She told him about her fascination with computers and how she had turned to books out of her loneliness at boarding school.
She even found herself telling him about Steve. Not the whole ugly story, but enough that he knew she had been bitterly hurt and betrayed and had broken off her engagement.
He was the perfect listener, he didn’t comment in all the wrong places or try to give unwanted advice. He simply made her feel as if nothing else mattered to him at that moment in time except the words spilling out of her mouth.
The right-brain, intellectual side recognized his attention as a carefully calculated, even cynical, attempt to sway her to his way of thinking. For some ridiculous reason, he seemed to think they needed to get married for their baby’s sake and he was doing everything he could to convince her they could make it work.
The left-brain, emotional side had to confess it was working.
Three days after she fell off her horse, nearly a week after both he and the storm blew into Sweetwater, Katie sat curled up on the couch in the great room with a book on her lap while Peter worked on a report on his laptop computer.
As she listened to the click of keys under his strong, elegant hands and watched the fire flicker over those masculine features, she wondered how she could ever return to life without him.
She loved him.
Because he had come to her rescue so many years ago, she had always considered him a kind man. But during these last few days of nearly constant togetherness, she had come to see him as a decent and honorable one, a man who tried fiercely to please his family and who treated his responsibilities with solemn care.
How pathetic was that? Chubby, shy Katie Crosby, in love with the gorgeous an
d dynamic Peter Logan. Wouldn’t her mother just about screech the house down if she ever found out? And not just because he was a Logan, either, although Sheila would certainly have a fit about that.
How could you ever think you had a chance with a man like him? She could almost hear her mother’s derision echoing in her head. You would have to be out of your mind to think Peter Logan would even look twice at you.
And yet he seemed serious about them marrying. He hadn’t let a day go by without renewing his proposal. She hated herself but she could feel her resolve weaken, despite her best efforts to shore it up.
The idea of sharing a future with him was just so tantalizing. These three days alone with him here had been wonderful, the best of her life. She caught herself a dozen times trying to store a memory in her mind. The smell of him just after a shower: soap and aftershave and sexy maleness. The feel of his strong fingers tucking a fleece blanket over her knees. The sight of him through the window as he threw a stick into the snow for Luke and Millie to chase.
She couldn’t bear knowing she would have very few more of those memories. But this wasn’t real life. They were suspended in a cheerful little bubble here, away from her family and his, away from the pressures of life in Portland. She couldn’t pretend that just because they’d been able to live together well here at Sweetwater they could enjoy a happy marriage.
How could they, when he would be marrying her only out of that damn sense of responsibility he took so seriously? He didn’t love her. A marriage in which only one person loved the other would be a nightmare of unimaginable pain.
No, she had to be strong and withstand his insidious assault on her willpower. The happily-ever-after she might secretly long for would never happen. She needed to accept that and prepare her heart for its inevitable fracture.
“What put that grim look on your face all of a sudden?” he asked. “Are you having a pain?”
She blinked away her depressing thoughts to find him watching her with concern in his dark eyes. “No. The baby is fine. I haven’t had any pains since the day I fell.”
“The ankle bugging you?”
“No. It’s almost back to normal. I barely even notice when I put weight on it now.”
“Then what is it?”
For a moment she debated how to answer him. When she couldn’t come up with a plausible lie, she plunged ahead with the truth. “I’ve enjoyed these few days. I’m going to be sorry to see them end.”
Oh, she shouldn’t have admitted that, she thought when Peter raised an eyebrow, as if her confession surprised him as much as it did her.
“It doesn’t have to end,” he said. “Not if you marry me.”
She shook her head in exasperation, though she could feel her heart splinter a little more around the edges. “I can’t figure out if you’re relentless or simply ruthless.”
He grinned. “I’m both. You’ve played poker with me. Haven’t you figured that out? You owe me something like eight hundred matchsticks by now, don’t you?”
“Only because you cheat!”
“I prefer to think I’m innovative and think outside the box.”
She laughed and tossed a pillow at him, grateful for the diversion from her melancholy. “I prefer to think you’re a dirty rotten cheat who makes up his own rules.”
“You’re just sore because you never knew a pair of sixes automatically trumps every other possible hand. I’m telling you, it’s the Holy Grail of five-card stud. Ask anyone.”
“I can’t believe you tried to pull that one. Or that you thought I was stupid enough to fall for it.”
“Hey, a guy’s got to try.”
When he looked at her with that smile in his eyes, she almost thought maybe they could make a marriage work.
“How’s the work going?” she asked.
“Surprisingly well. I’d forgotten what a little change in scenery can do for the creative juices. I’ve been able to accomplish more in just a couple hours a day here than I do putting in eighty-hour work weeks.”
Despite his protestations that the company could run fine in his absence, she had to wonder what the other top brass at Logan thought about their CEO taking off to the wilds of Wyoming for a week.
She hadn’t dared to ask him—or to ask if his family knew what he was doing here.
He hadn’t been exactly inaccessible. Since the phones had been restored, she knew he e-mailed his staff regularly and had at least one lengthy phone conversation with his assistant each day. That interaction was minimal compared to what she knew her father would have been doing in the same situation.
Jack would have been a basket case. She remembered once he and Sheila had come to Switzerland for a parents’ weekend at her boarding school—the only such event she could ever remember them attending—and her father had barely taken the phone away from his ear long enough to eat.
Peter was not her father. If she had learned anything these last few days it was that clear fact. She knew his work was important to him but it didn’t seem to consume him.
He didn’t seem to mind the interruption. After closing his laptop, he joined her on the couch and reached for her hand. That was another thing she had learned about Peter Logan during this time alone with him. He was more physically affectionate than she ever would have expected. He seemed to enjoy touching her, caressing her fingers, rubbing her shoulders, even kissing her casually on the cheek.
She wasn’t used to it and didn’t know quite how to respond but she had to admit she found it both sweet and disarming.
“Speaking of innovation and outside-the-box ideas,” he said, holding firm to her fingers, “I’ve been thinking about something.”
She eyed him warily. “What?”
“Our families have wasted years and untold resources competing with each other. How much more successful would we both be if we could channel some of that negative energy into cooperating on certain projects?”
She stared at him, unable to believe the words were actually coming from him. The Crosbys and the Logans working together without the business world jerking to a complete standstill? Was it even possible?
“What kind of projects?” she asked.
“This super-router, for example. With your NPIC software system and the NPIR hardware we’re developing, between Crosby and Logan we could create the fastest networking system the world has ever known. Both those components could of course be purchased separately but how much more effective would they be if we packaged them together? Made them one-hundred-percent compatible?”
“The industry wouldn’t know what hit it.” Her mind raced, imagining the possibilities. Trent had long talked about coming up with their own super-router hardware to complement the software they had put much of their design efforts into, but any project they started would be years behind Logan in development.
“You’re not talking about a merger, right?”
“No. Just a cooperative agreement on this project. And maybe if it was successful, we could look into working together on other projects down the line.”
“It has potential,” she admitted.
“I think it’s brilliant.”
She smiled at his arrogance, then sobered when she thought of all the ramifications to be considered, especially the single overriding concern. “Our families would never agree to work together. Not with all that’s gone on between us.”
“They might be more willing if we can find a way to bridge the gap between the Logans and the Crosbys. What better way to do that than if we married and gave them all a shared grandchild?” His thumb caressed her knuckle. “Marry me, Katie.”
She stared at him, tempted beyond words. Oh, how she wanted to say yes. She closed her eyes, trying to draw courage from somewhere deep inside her to turn him down, even though she desperately wanted to agree.
“Peter, I—”
She didn’t know exactly how she would have answered him. Whatever words hovered on her tongue were interrupted by the phone ringing.
“Hello?”
After a moment his features froze into an expression of acute dislike. “Yes. She’s here. One moment, please.”
He handed the cordless phone to Katie. She frowned, not sure what had put that icy look on his face, that chill in his voice.
With some degree of trepidation, she took it from him. The moment she said hello, she understood. Her stomach dropped to her toes as her mother’s smoky voice filled her ear.
“You have a man there? Why, Katie, you sly thing. Who is it? One of those boring computer nerds from work?”
With Sheila’s animosity toward all things Logan, she certainly couldn’t tell her mother Peter Logan was sitting on the couch with her. “No one,” she murmured. “Um, just a friend.”
“What friend? Anyone I know?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
She had enough experience dealing with her mother to know she had to quickly deflect Sheila’s attention to something else.
“Where are you? I thought you were staying in Tuscany until the end of the month.”
To her relief, Sheila allowed herself to be sidetracked. “That was the plan but I was bored out of my mind after two days. The place was horrible! Absolutely ghastly. All anyone wanted to talk about was their food and their wine and how beautiful the countryside was.”
Which meant that no one wanted to focus on Sheila’s favorite topic—herself.
“If you ask me, one vineyard looks the same as the next. I mean, what’s the big deal? It’s a pile of dirt and straggly twigs. Clue in!”
Though she wanted to hang up, she knew the part she was expected to play to appease Sheila’s narcissism.
“Did your friend return early with you?” Katie asked.
“Who? Gianni? He was as disappointing as Tuscany. I must tell you, he sadly misrepresented himself as some kind of rich Italian stallion. I guess one out of three wasn’t bad; at least he was Italian. He just wanted to sponge off my money. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I left him in Milan and caught the first flight back.”