by Diana Palmer
“If you’ll just be quiet for a minute, Mr. Callister, I’ll find it!” she exclaimed finally, driven to insubordination.
He gave her a glare, but he shut up. She rustled through the folders on her desk with cold, nervous hands. But she did find the file. She extended it, sheepishly, grimacing at the look in his eyes.
“Sorry,” she added hopefully.
It didn’t do any good. His expression was somber and half-angry. His eyes glittered down at her. She thought absently that he looked very nice in a gray vested suit. It suited his fair hair and light eyes and his nice tan. It also emphasized the excellent fitness of his tall, muscular body. Kasie thought idly that he must have women practically stalking him when he went to dinner meetings. He was striking just to look at, in addition to that very masculine aura that clung to him like his expensive cologne.
“Where’s John?” he asked.
“He had a date,” she said. “I’m trying to cope with the new tax format.”
His eyes narrowed. “Surely they taught tax compilation at your school?”
She grimaced. “Well, actually, they didn’t. It’s a rather specialized skill.”
“Buy what you need from the bookstore or the computer store and have them send me the bill,” he said shortly. “If you can’t cope, tell me that, too.”
She didn’t dare. She wouldn’t have a job, and she had to support herself. She couldn’t expect Mama Luke to do it. “I can cope, sir,” she assured him.
His eyes narrowed as he stared down at her. “One thing more,” he added curtly. “My girls are Miss Parsons’ responsibility, not yours.”
“I only read them a story,” she began, blushing guiltily.
His eyebrows arched. “I was referring to the way you braided Bess’s hair,” he said. “I thought it was an isolated incident.”
She swallowed. Hardly isolated. The girls were always somewhere close by when Kasie stopped for lunch or her breaks. She shared her desserts with the children and frequently read to them or took them on walks to point out the various sorts of flowers and trees around the ranch house. Gil didn’t know that and she’d hoped the girls hadn’t said anything. Miss Parsons was curt and bullying with the children, whom she obviously disliked. It was inevitable that they’d turn to Kasie, who adored them.
“Only one story,” she lied.
He seethed. “In case you didn’t get the message the first time, Kasie, I am not in the market for a wife or a mother for my daughters.”
The insult made her furious. She glared up at him, forgetting all her early teachings about turning cheeks and humility. “I came to work here because I need a job,” she said icily. “I’m only twenty-two, Mr. Callister,” she added. “And I don’t have any interest in a man almost old enough to be my father, with a ready-made family to boot!”
His reaction was unexpected. He didn’t fire back. He grew very quiet. He turned and went out of the room without another word. A minute later, she heard the front door close and, soon, an engine fire up.
“So there,” she added to herself.
Gil came home from his trip even quieter than when he’d left. There was tension between him and Kasie, because she hadn’t forgotten the insulting remark he’d made to her before he left. As if she’d come to work here just so she could chase him. Really! But there was another complication now, as well. Kasie was a nervous wreck trying to keep him from seeing how much time she actually spent with his little girls. She didn’t need to worry when he was off on his frequent business trips, but they suddenly stopped. He started sending Brad Dalton, his manager, to seminars and conferences. He stayed home on the pretext of overseeing massive improvements on the property.
It was just after roundup, when the cattle business was taking up a little less of his time. But there were new bunkhouses being built, as well as new wells being dug in the pastures and new equipment brought in for tagging and vaccinations of new calves. The trucks were being overhauled, along with the other farm machinery such as tractors and combines that harvested the grain crops. The barns were repaired, a new silo erected. It was a busy time.
Kasie found herself involved unexpectedly with Gil when John went out of state to show two new bulls at a pedigree competition and Gil’s secretary, Pauline Raines, conveniently sprained her thumb and couldn’t type.
“I need these yesterday,” he said without preamble, laying a thick sheaf of papers beside Kasie’s neat little hand on the desk. “Pauline can’t do them. She missed the tennis ball and hit her thumb with the tennis racket.”
She managed not to make a disparaging comment—barely. She didn’t like Pauline any more than Gil’s daughters did. The woman was lazy and seductive, and always hanging on Gil like a tie. What little work she actually did was of poor quality and she was pitifully slow as well. She worked at the ranch office near the front of the house three days a week, and Kasie had already inherited a good deal of her work. Pauline spent her time by the pool when Gil wasn’t watching. Now, Kasie thought miserably, she was going to end up doing not only John’s paperwork, including the unbelievably complex taxes that she was still struggling to understand, but Gil’s as well.
“I don’t guess she could type with her toes?” she murmured absently.
There was an odd sound, but when she looked up, Gil’s hard face was impassive. “How long will it take?” he persisted.
She looked at the pages. They weren’t data, as she’d first thought, but letters to various stock producers. They all had different headings, but the same basic body. “Is this all?” she asked with cool politeness.
He glowered at her. “There are fifty of them. They’ll have to be done individually…”
“No, they won’t,” she said gently. “All you have to do—” she opened a new file, selected the option she needed and began typing “—is type the body of the letter once and then just type the various addresses and combine them. An hour’s work.”
He looked as if he’d been slapped. “Excuse me?”
“This word processor does all that for you,” she explained. “It’s very simple, really.”
He looked angry. “I thought you had to type all fifty individually.”
“Only if you’re using a prehistoric typewriter and carbon system,” she pointed out.
He was really angry now. “An hour?” he repeated.
She nodded. “Maybe less. I’ll get right on it,” she added quickly, hoping to appease him. Heaven only knew what had set him off, but she recognized that glitter in his eyes.
He left her and went to make some phone calls. When he came back, Kasie was printing the letters out, having just finished the mailing labels. There was a folding machine that made short work of folding the letters. Then all she had to do was stuff, lick, stamp and mail the envelopes.
Gil put on the stamps for her. He watched her curiously. Once, when she looked up into his eyes, it was like an electric shock. Surprised, she dropped her gaze and blushed. Really, she thought, he had a strange effect on her.
“How do you like your job so far?” he asked.
“Very much,” she said. “Except for the taxes.”
“You’ll get used to doing them,” he assured her.
“I suppose so.”
“Can you manage John’s load and mine as well, or do you want me to get a temporary to help you?”
“There isn’t a lot,” she pointed out. “If I get overwhelmed, I’ll say so.”
He finished stamping the envelopes and stacked them neatly to one side. “You’re very honest. It’s unusual in most people.” He touched a stamp with a floral motif. “My wife was like that.” He smiled. “She said that lies were a waste of time, since they got found out anyway.” His eyes were far away. “We were in grammar school together. We always knew that we’d marry one day.” The smile faded into misery. “She was a wonderful rider. She rode in the rodeo when she was younger. But a gentle horse ran away with her and a low-lying limb ended her life. Jenny was only a year old wh
en Darlene died. Bess was two. I thought my life was over, too.”
Kasie didn’t know what to say. It shocked her that a man like Gil would even discuss something so personal with a stranger. Of course, a lot of people discussed even more personal things with Kasie. Maybe she had that sort of face that attracted confidences.
“Do the girls look like her?” she asked daringly.
“Bess does. She was blond and blue-eyed. She wasn’t beautiful, but her smile was.” His eyes narrowed in painful memory. “They had to sedate me to make me let go of her. I wouldn’t believe them, even when they swore to me that no means on earth could save her…” His fingers clenched on top of the envelope and he moved his hand away at once and stood up. “Thanks, Kasie,” he said curtly, turning away, as if it embarrassed him to have spoken of his wife at all.
“Mr. Callister,” she said softly, waiting until he turned to continue. “I lost…some people three months ago. I understand grief.”
He hesitated. “How did they die?”
Her face closed up. “It was…an accident. They were only in their twenties. I thought they had years left.”
“Life is unpredictable,” he told her. “Sometimes unbearable. But everything passes. Even bad times.”
“Yes, that’s what everyone says,” she agreed.
They shared a long, quiet, puzzling exchange of sorrow before he shrugged and turned away, leaving her to her work.
Chapter Two
Kasie was almost tearing her hair out by the next afternoon. John’s mail was straightforward, mostly about show dates and cancellations, transportation for the animals and personal correspondence. Gil’s was something else.
Gil not only ran the ranch, but he dealt with the majority of the support companies that were its satellites. He knew all the managers by first names, he often spoke with state and federal officials, including well-known senators, on legislation affecting beef production. Besides that, he was involved in the scientific study of new grasses and earth-friendly pesticides and fertilizers. He worked with resource and conservation groups, even an animal rights group; since he didn’t run slaughter cattle and was rabidly proconservation, at least one group was happy to have his name on its board of directors. He was a powerhouse of energy, working from dawn until well after dark. The problem was, every single task he undertook was accompanied by a ton of paperwork. And his part-time secretary, Pauline Raines, was the most disorganized human being Kasie had ever encountered.
John came home late on Friday evening, and was surprised to find Kasie still at work in the study.
He scowled as he tossed his Stetson onto a rack. “What are you doing in here? It’s almost ten o’clock! Does Gil know you’re working this much overtime?”
She glanced up from the second page of ten that she was trying to type into the computer. None of Pauline’s paperwork had ever been keyed in.
She held up the sheaf of paperwork in six files with a sigh. “I think of it as job security,” she offered.
He moved around beside the desk and looked over what she was doing. “Good God, he’s not sane!” he muttered. “No one secretary could handle this load in a week! Is he trying to kill you?”
“Pauline hurt her thumb,” she said miserably. “I get to do her work, too, except that she never put any of the records into the computer. It’s got to be done. I don’t see how your brother ever found anything in here!”
“He didn’t,” John said dryly, his pale eyes twinkling. “Pauline made sure of it. She’s indispensable, I hear.”
Kasie’s eyes narrowed. “She won’t be for long, when I get this stuff keyed in,” she assured him.
“Don’t tell her that unless you pay up your life insurance first. Pauline is a girl who carries grudges, and she’s stuck on Gil.”
“I noticed.”
“Not that he cares,” John added slowly. “He never got over losing his wife. I’m not sure that he’ll ever remarry.”
“He told me.”
He glanced down at her. “Excuse me?”
“He told me specifically that he didn’t want a mother for the girls or a new wife, and not to get my hopes up.” She chuckled. “Good Lord, he must be all of thirty-two. I’m barely twenty-two. I don’t want a man I’ll have to push around in a wheelchair one day!”
“And I don’t rob cradles,” came a harsh, angry voice from the doorway.
They both jumped as they looked up to see Gil just coming in from the barn. He was still in work clothes, chaps and boots and a sweaty shirt, with a disreputable old black Stetson cocked over one eye.
“Are you trying to make Kasie quit, by any chance?” John challenged. “Good God, man, it’ll take her a week just to get a fraction of the information in these spreadsheets into the computer!”
Gil frowned. He pulled off his hat and ran a hand through his sweaty blond hair. “I didn’t actually look at it,” he confessed. “I’ve been too busy with the new bulls.”
“Well, you’d better look,” John said curtly.
Gil moved to the desk, aware of Kasie’s hostile glare. He peered over her shoulder and cursed sharply. “Where did all this come from?” he asked.
“Pauline brought it to me and said you wanted it converted to disk,” she replied flatly.
His eyes began to glitter. “I never told her to land you with all this!”
“It needs doing,” she confessed. “There’s no way you can do an accurate spreadsheet without the comparisons you could use in a computer program. I’ve reworked this spreadsheet program,” she said, indicating the screen, “and made an application that will work for cattle weight gain ratios and daily weighing, as well as diet and health and so forth.”
“I’m impressed,” Gil said honestly.
“It’s what I’m used to doing. Taxes aren’t,” she added sheepishly.
“Don’t look at me,” John said. “I hate taxes. I’m not learning them, either,” he added belligerently. “Half this ranch is mine, and on my half, we don’t do tax work.” He nodded curtly and walked out.
“Come back here, you coward!” Gil muttered. “How the hell am I supposed to cope with taxes and all the other routine headaches that you don’t have, because you’re off somewhere showing cattle!”
John just waved his hand and kept walking.
“Miss Parsons knows taxes inside out,” Kasie ventured. “She told me she used to be an accountant.”
He glared at her. “Miss Parsons was hired to take care of my daughters.” He kept looking at Kasie, and not in any friendly way. It was almost as if he knew…
She flushed. “They couldn’t get the little paper ship to float on the fish pond,” she murmured uneasily, not looking at him. “I only helped.”
“And fell in the pond.”
She grimaced. “I tripped. Anybody can trip!” she added in a challenging tone, her gray eyes flashing at him.
“Over their own feet?” he mused.
Actually it had been over Bess’s stuffed gorilla. The thing was almost her size and Kasie hadn’t realized it was there. The girls had laughed and then wailed, thinking she’d be angry at them. Miss Parsons had fussed for hours when Bess got dirt on her pretty yellow dress. But Kasie didn’t scold. She laughed, and the girls were so relieved, she could have cried. They really didn’t like Miss Parsons.
He put both hands on his lean hips and studied her with reluctant interest. “The girls tell me everything, Kasie,” he said finally. He didn’t add that the girls worshiped this quiet, studious young woman who didn’t even flirt with John, much less the cowboys who worked for the family. “I thought I’d made it perfectly clear that I didn’t want you around them.”
She took her hands off the keyboard and looked up at him with wounded eyes. “Why?”
The question surprised him. He scowled, trying to think up a fair answer. Nothing came to mind, which made him even madder.
“I don’t have any ulterior motives,” she said simply. “I like the girls very much, and they like m
e. I don’t understand why you don’t want me to associate with them. I don’t have a bad character. I’ve never been in trouble in my life.”
“I didn’t think you had,” he said angrily.
“Then why can’t I play with them?” she persisted. “Miss Parsons is turning them into little robots. She won’t let them play because they get dirty, and she won’t play with them because it isn’t dignified. They’re miserable.”
“Discipline is a necessary part of childhood,” he said curtly. “You spoil them.”
“For heaven’s sake, somebody needs to! You’re never here,” she added shortly.
“Stop right there, while you still have a job,” he interrupted, and his eyes made threats. “Nobody tells me how to raise my kids. Especially not some frumpy little backwoods secretary!”
Frumpy? Backwoods? Her eyes widened. She stood up. She was probably already fired, so he could just get it from the hip. “I may be frumpy,” she admitted, “and I may be from the backwoods, but I know a lot about little kids! You don’t stick them in a closet until they’re legal age. They need to be challenged, made curious about the world around them. They need nurturing. Miss Parsons isn’t going to nurture them, and Mrs. Charters doesn’t have time to. And you aren’t ever here at bedtime, even if you’re not away on business,” she repeated bluntly. “Whole weeks go by when you barely have time to tell them good-night. They need to be read to, so they will learn to love books. They need constructive supervision. What they’ve got is barbed wire and silence.”
His fists clenched by his side, and his expression darkened. She lifted her chin, daring him to do anything.
“You’re an expert on children, I guess?” he chided.
“I took care of one,” she said, her eyes darkening. “For several months.”
“Why did you quit?”
He was assuming that she’d meant a job. She didn’t. The answer to his question was a nightmare. She couldn’t bear to remember it. “I wasn’t suited to the task,” she said primly. “But I won’t corrupt your little girls by speaking to them.”
