“What?” he challenged as if he could read her thoughts. “You don’t think I could be a lawyer or a corporate muckety-muck?”
“I’m just surprised that either of those occupations ever appealed to you,” she said to cover her tracks.
“I was under the influence.”
“Of what?”
“The other two guys who worked my shift. They were both two years ahead of me, so while I finished my bachelor’s degree, one of them went on to an MBA program, while the other went to law school.”
“And they nearly convinced you to follow in their footsteps?”
“I don’t know how nearly it was, but I admit that they had me thinkin’. The law student was sure he’d end up on the Supreme Court, and the business major was determined to wow Wall Street. That made coming back here to work the ranch pale by comparison.”
“And you were an impressionable eighteen-to twenty-two-year-old.”
“I was,” he said with an irresistible half grin.
“So what happened to pull you back to the ranch?” Terese asked, trying not to go limp at the sight of that sexy, charming smile he flashed at her.
“A couple of things. Family things, partly. My grandfather died. That wasn’t unexpected since his health had been failing pretty consistently for the last year or more of his life. But when he died that left my dad with only my brother to help around here and then there was some stuff with my brother…”
Apparently the stuff with his brother wasn’t good because Hunter’s brow furrowed at just the mention of it.
But he didn’t seem inclined to explain because after a moment’s pause, he went past it. “Anyway, about the time I was ready to graduate, my dad really needed me back here and to tell you the truth I’d sort of mentally tried on the lawyer bit and the businessman bit, and I knew they weren’t right for me. I was itching to get outside again.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?”
“Ever since.”
“Without any regrets or secret wishes that maybe you had become a lawyer or a businessman?”
That made him chuckle. “Absolutely no secret wishes or regrets. Once I got my hands dirty again, I knew there was nothin’ else for me. It’s like getting away for a while, even considering doing something else, made me appreciate this all the more. Just remembering that I ever thought about those other things seems crazy now. Ranchin’ really is my niche, as you put it. I love everything about it.”
“Which is why you want to improve your herd and keep things going,” Terese concluded. “And why it’s good that you decided to go on your trip.”
He nodded, but he did it so slowly she could tell he still had reservations.
Whether it was those reservations or the fact that they’d been talking a long while and the hour had gotten late, they seemed to have reached a lull. A lull that Terese thought she should act on before she overstayed her welcome.
So she stood and said, “I’ll bet missing most of today’s work means you have that much more to do tomorrow so I should let you get some rest.”
Hunter didn’t refute that. In fact, he confirmed it by standing, too.
“Speaking of tomorrow,” he said as Terese led the way to the kitchen, “Willy and I have some fences to fix at the far end of the place. Mendin’ fences is Johnny’s least favorite of my jobs. He gets bored out on the range without much to do. So I was wondering if you might want to stay around here with him? He’s been pestering me to let him draw faces on a bunch of the pumpkins he’ll get me to carve for him, and he has a Halloween video I haven’t had time to let him watch. You could keep him occupied doing some of that, if you wouldn’t mind….”
“Mending fences does sound a little on the boring side,” Terese acknowledged. “But I’d love to do pumpkins and watch the Halloween video. Halloween wasn’t a holiday we did much with in boarding school. The headmaster said it was a low-class, heathen holiday. This will give me a chance to experience it.”
“No camping and no Halloween? What kind of a childhood did you have, anyway?”
Terese laughed. “A very stuffy one,” she admitted.
They’d gone through the kitchen to the mudroom by then and Hunter reached around in front of her to open the door. But once she’d gone through it, he followed her outside. Apparently walking her to the cabin was becoming enough of a habit for him to do it without announcing that he was going to the way he had on the previous nights.
But Terese certainly wasn’t going to complain. She appreciated the gentlemanly courtesy. As well as the few more minutes it gave her with him.
“I hope you didn’t feel pressured into making that doctor’s appointment today,” Hunter said as they strolled through the balmy October air in the quiet of the yard.
During Johnny’s visit, the hematologist had aggressively suggested that since hemophilia was passed from mother to son, Terese should be tested to determine if, like her twin, she carried the gene.
Terese hadn’t been enthusiastic about it, even though it only required a blood test, but Johnny’s doctor had been so insistent that she’d finally conceded and made an appointment for herself for early the following week.
“He was probably right,” she told Hunter in answer to his concern that she’d felt pressured. “It’s information I should have, even if it doesn’t ever become relevant.”
They’d reached the cabin and she opened the door and turned on the overhead light, stepping just inside and turning to find him leaning one broad shoulder against the jamb the same way he had the night before, his hands hidden in the pockets of his low-slung jeans.
“Why wouldn’t it become relevant?” he asked. “Don’t you want kids of your own?”
“I’d love to have kids of my own. But I doubt I’ll ever have the chance.”
Hunter frowned in confusion. “Why not?”
That wasn’t a subject she wanted to get into right then so she merely shrugged. “It’s complicated. But I just don’t think marriage and family are in the cards for me.”
“This isn’t more of that ‘lesser twin’ thing, is it?”
Terese repeated the shrug. “And some prior experience,” she said more to herself than to him.
Hunter was studying her again and he shook his head. “I don’t know where this is all coming from but you’re so damn wrong…”
His eyes were delving deeply into hers and for no reason Terese understood she felt mesmerized by their gold-streaked intensity. So mesmerized that words escaped her and the only thing she could think about was the same thing she’d thought about at the end of the last two evenings—what it might be like to have him kiss her.
But theirs wasn’t that kind of relationship, she told herself.
Still, she was looking up into that ruggedly beautiful male face, into those topaz-colored eyes that seemed to be bathing her in a warm glow, and she couldn’t escape the sense that him kissing her was what should be happening at that moment.
And then, suddenly, it was.
Suddenly he was leaning forward. She was tilting her chin up. And their mouths just somehow met as her eyes drifted shut.
He was kissing her.
His lips were over hers, parted just slightly, sweet and sexy at the same time.
And she was kissing him back.
She was letting her own lips relax and open just slightly. She was letting her head move just a little in answer to his movements.
Even as her mind spun with the pure amazement that this was happening, her senses were registering the feel of that kiss, the smell of his aftershave, the heat of his breath against her skin….
Oh, what a kiss it was!
A great kiss. A kiss that she willed to last and last.
To last long enough for him to put his arms around her. Long enough for him to pull her against him. Long enough for him to press his hands to her back and give her the excuse to press hers to the muscles of his. To have her breasts against the hard wall of his chest and the rest of her
body running the length of his…
But the kiss didn’t last long enough for any of that.
Instead, Hunter eased into ending it, slowly straightening up again and returning to just peering down into her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said then. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Yes, you should have,” she blurted out before she realized she was going to say anything at all.
She could feel her face suffuse with color again, but the comment and the blush only made Hunter smile.
“I should have?” he asked.
“I just meant it was okay,” she said, making a desperate effort to regroup.
His smile grew even bigger. “Only okay?” he teased as if she’d given him a rating.
“Well, maybe a little better than okay,” she allowed, finally getting hold of herself enough to play along.
Hunter chuckled, maintaining his search of her eyes for a moment longer as a number of emotions seemed to war in his expression, leaving Terese thinking that he’d surprised himself as much as he’d surprised her with that kiss.
Then, as if those warring emotions had settled or resigned themselves, he said, “Tomorrow night I have the PAN meeting.”
“I remember.”
“It’s at seven and shouldn’t take longer than an hour or so. Willy and Carla are baby-sitting Johnny—”
“And you want me to, instead?”
That made him smile slightly. “No, they’ve promised him an evening of making caramel apples and anybody who gets in the way of that is in for trouble. Actually, I was going to ask you if you’d like to go with me to the meeting—not that you’d be interested in it, but you could read a magazine or something while it goes on—and then, when it’s over, maybe we could have dinner? The meeting is in one of the conference rooms at the hospital and there’s a pretty good seafood restaurant nearby. Do you eat seafood?”
“I do,” she confirmed as her mind spun wildly in response to this turn of events.
“After last night’s dinner of hot dogs and marshmallows dropped in the dirt, and pizza with pineapple on it for lunch today, I think I owe you a nice meal,” he went on to say.
“You don’t. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I’d just like to make it up to you, then.”
Or was he simply occupying her time since both he and Johnny already had plans?
“Don’t feel as if you have to entertain me if there are other things going on for you and Johnny. I—”
“I was just thinking that it might be nice to have dinner. Together. I’d like to, anyway.”
“So would I,” Terese was quick to assure him when it became evident he thought she was dragging her feet. Then, with more control of herself, she said, “It sounds good. The fish and having dinner together.”
He smiled at her once more, again studying her face, probing her eyes for a moment before he broke it off and stepped back out of the doorway. “Then we’re on,” he confirmed.
“Okay.”
“See you in the morning,” he said, taking one hand out of his pocket to wave as he turned to go.
“See you in the morning,” Terese answered, forcing herself to retreat far enough inside the cabin to close the door rather than standing there watching him the way she was inclined to do.
But even when Hunter was out of her sight he still wasn’t out of her mind.
And neither was that kiss he’d just given her.
Or the fact that he’d asked her to dinner the next night.
And while the last few minutes of that evening had left her confused, they’d also left her smiling so big it almost hurt.
Five
“Hey, good news about Johnny yesterday, huh?”
It was one of the first things Willy said to Hunter on Wednesday morning. They’d loaded Hunter’s truck and were headed for the fences that needed repair.
“It’d be better news if they said he didn’t have hemophilia at all, but given that that’s not going to happen, yeah, it was good news that he came through last week’s scare without any more problems,” Hunter allowed.
“At least now you know what’s goin’ on with him and where to get blood in an emergency,” Hunter’s longtime friend said.
“True. And Terese would never turn him down.”
“No, she seems pretty fond of him. Pretty fond of you, too, maybe…”
Willy had added that last part under his breath, but Hunter heard it, anyway. He took his eyes off the deserted country road he was driving and glanced at his passenger. “What?” he said as if the suggestion were ridiculous.
“Carla thinks she can feel vibes when the two of you are together—you and Terese. Whatever vibes means.”
Hunter didn’t tell his friend that he had some understanding of what Carla meant. Or that Carla might be right. Or that the fact that there might be vibes between himself and Terese had thrown him all off-kilter. He just said, “What’d Carla say?”
“Only the vibes thing.” It was Willy’s turn to look over at Hunter. “Is she right?”
Hunter didn’t answer. He only shrugged.
“So there is something goin’ on?” Willy asked, sounding surprised.
“There’s not really anything going on…” Hunter hedged, thinking about the kiss he and Terese had shared the night before. The kiss that had almost happened the night before that. The kiss that he’d been itching for and still should probably not have let happen at all.
“You like her,” Willy said as if he were seeing it for the first time.
“Sure, well enough,” Hunter said noncommittally. “Terese is a nice person. A world different than her sister.”
“Her sister who is also Johnny’s birth mother.”
Was there a criticism in Willy pointing that out? Or was it just that that fact bothered Hunter so much that he was overly sensitive to it?
Hunter couldn’t be sure. So he didn’t take issue with it; he only confirmed it. “Right, Terese is a world different than her sister, who is also Johnny’s birth mother.”
“But they’re still sisters,” Willy persisted.
“Yeah.”
“And you’ve got a little thing for the nice sister?” Willy asked.
“I don’t know,” Hunter answered, opting to be honest when he could easily have denied it and put his friend off the track. “But I know that it isn’t what you’d call the most ideal situation.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Willy observed.
Silence reigned for a moment before Willy spoke again, this time treading somewhat more carefully. “This is the first time this has happened since Margee. You maybe being attracted to a woman.”
“Yeah,” Hunter agreed equally as tentatively.
Regardless of how tentative it was, it still seemed to solidify the possibility for his friend. “So it is happening?” Willy asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe something is.”
“Something like what?”
“I don’t know,” Hunter repeated once more. “I just…I don’t know. I guess I’m sort of enjoying having her around.”
“Her in particular or just having a woman around the house again?”
Hunter hadn’t considered that, and he did now, hoping that maybe his friend had hit on an easier answer to whatever it was that was happening with him when Terese was around. Hoping that it wasn’t Terese herself, that it was just having a woman around again that was appealing to him.
But no matter how he looked at it, he came to the same conclusion. “It’s Terese in particular,” he confessed.
“Oh,” Willy said. “How so?”
Hunter thought about that, too, wanting to figure it all out. Wanting to know what the hell was happening to him.
Then, despite realizing that he was beginning to sound like a broken record, he once more began with, “I don’t know. She’s just not what I expected. Even after she came with me to the hospital last week, and I could tell she was nicer than her sister, I still thoug
ht she’d be… Well, stuck-up or stiff or so snobby and straitlaced that she’d get on my nerves.”
“But she isn’t stuck-up or stiff or snobby or straitlaced,” Willy said, as if he’d realized that, too.
“No, she isn’t any of that. There’s no doubt that she didn’t grow up the way we did, that she’s from a whole different world, but she’s still down-to-earth and open to things she hasn’t done or experienced before. She doesn’t turn her nose up at anything. Or look down it at anyone, either. She’s interested in things other than herself. She’s open to learning what she doesn’t know. She listens—to me and to Johnny even when he’s talking her ear off. She’s honest—she’ll answer any question either of us asks her. She’s pleasant and funny and Johnny and I both have a great time with her and—”
Hunter knew he was going on and on, and he cut himself off, shrugging and saying yet again, “I don’t know, it’s just been…I’ve just liked having her around.”
And he was missing having her with them right at that moment, but he didn’t tell his friend that. In fact, he could hardly believe it himself.
“So you’ve got a little thing for her,” Willy concluded. “And Carla thinks Terese has a little thing for you.”
Hunter cast his ranch hand a glance out of the corner of his eye. “I thought you said Carla didn’t say anything except the vibe thing?”
“That was part of the vibe thing. That Terese steals a lot of looks at you when you don’t notice it, and brightens up when you come into the room, and gets real interested whenever you’re talking or anyone else is talking about you. Stuff that made Carla think Terese has a little thing for you.”
A little thing that had caused her to kiss him back the night before…
But Hunter didn’t say that. He just rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Terese is a nice person, maybe Carla is taking that for more than it really is.”
“What if Carla isn’t taking it for more than it really is? What if Terese does have a little thing for you and you have a little thing for her? Would you let it go anywhere?”
He’d already let it go to kissing. That was letting it go somewhere. And as much as he’d liked it, as much as he’d wanted it to last longer than he’d allowed it to, as much as he hadn’t been able to think about too many other things since it had happened, he still knew he probably shouldn’t have done it at all.
For Love and Family Page 8
