The Winter Man

by Diana Palmer

  “He loves you very much,” she said with a smile. “He talks about you all the time.”

  “He’s a good boy.” He moved a little closer, noticing how she tensed when he came close. He liked that reaction a lot. It told him that she was aware of him, but shy and reticent. “You don’t have men,” he said softly. “Well, I don’t have women.”

  “Not for…a few months?” she stammered, because she couldn’t imagine that he was telling the truth.

  He shrugged his powerful shoulders. “Well, not for a bit longer than that. Not much opportunity up here. And I can’t go off and leave Elliot while I tomcat around town. It’s been a bit longer than thirteen years.”

  “A bit?”

  He looked down at her with a curious, mocking smile. “When I was a boy, I didn’t know how to get girls. I was big and clumsy and shy, so it was the other boys who scored.” He took another draw, a slightly jerky one, from his cigarette. “I still have the same problem around most women. It’s not so much hatred as a lack of ability, and shyness. I don’t know how to come on to a woman,” he confessed with a faint smile.

  Amanda felt as if the sun had just come out. She smiled back. “Don’t you, really?” she asked softly. “I thought it was just that you found me lacking, or that I wasn’t woman enough to interest you.”

  He could have laughed out loud at that assumption. “Is that why you called me Goody Two-Shoes?” he asked pleasantly.

  She laughed softly. “Well, that was sort of sour grapes.” She lowered her eyes to his chest. “It hurt my feelings that you thought I didn’t have any morals, when I’d never made one single move toward any other man in my whole life.”

  He felt warm all over from that shy confession. It took down the final brick in his wall of reserve. She wasn’t like any woman he’d ever known. “I’m glad to know that. But you and I have more in common than a lack of technique,” he said, hesitating.

  “We do?” she asked. Her soft eyes held his. “What do you mean?”

  He turned and deliberately put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table beside them. He straightened and looked down at her speculatively for a few seconds before he went for broke. “Well, what I mean, Amanda,” he replied finally, “is that you aren’t the only virgin on the place.”

  “I didn’t hear that,” Amanda said, because she knew she hadn’t. Quinn Sutton couldn’t have told her that he was a virgin.

  “Yes, you did,” he replied. “And it’s not all that far-fetched. Old McNaber down the hill’s never had a woman, and he’s in his seventies. There are all sorts of reasons why men don’t get experience. Morals, scruples, isolation, or even plain shyness. Just like women,” he added with a meaningful look at Amanda. “I couldn’t go to bed with somebody just to say I’d had sex. I’d have to care about her, want her, and I’d want her to care about me. There are idealistic people all over the world who never find that particular combination, so they stay celibate. And really, I think that people who sleep around indiscriminately are in the minority even in these liberated times. Only a fool takes that sort of risk with the health dangers what they are.”

  “Yes, I know.” She watched him with fascinated eyes. “Haven’t you ever…wanted to?” she asked.

  “Well, that’s the problem, you see,” he replied, his dark eyes steady on her face.

  “What is?”

  “I have…wanted to. With you.”

  She leaned back against the counter, just to make sure she didn’t fall down. “With me?”

  “That first night you came here, when I was so sick, and your hair drifted down over my naked chest. I shivered, and you thought it was with fever,” he mused. “It was a fever, all right, but it didn’t have anything to do with the virus.”

  Her fingers clenched the counter. She’d wondered about his violent reaction at the time, but it seemed so unlikely that a cold man like Quinn Sutton would feel that way about a woman. He was human, she thought absently, watching him.

  “That’s why I’ve given you such a hard time,” he confessed with narrowed, quiet eyes. “I don’t know how to handle desire. I can’t throw you over my shoulder and carry you upstairs, not with Elliot and Harry around, even if you were the kind of woman I thought at first you were. The fact that you’re as innocent as I am only makes it more complicated.”

  She looked at him with new understanding, as fascinated by him as he seemed to be by her. He wasn’t that bad looking, she mused. And he was terribly strong, and sexy in an earthy kind of way. She especially liked his eyes. They were much more expressive than that poker face.

  “Fortunately for you, I’m kind of shy, too,” she murmured.

  “Except when you’re asking men to take their clothes off,” Quinn said, nodding.

  Harry froze in the doorway with one foot lifted while Amanda gaped at him and turned red.

  “Put your foot down and get busy,” Quinn muttered irritably. “Why were you standing there?”

  “I was getting educated.” Harry chuckled. “I didn’t know Amanda asked people to take their clothes off!”

  “Only me,” Quinn said, defending her. “And just my shirt. She’s not a bad girl.”

  “Will you stop!” Amanda buried her face in her hands. “Go away!”

  “I can’t. I live here,” Quinn pointed out. “Did I smell brandy on your breath?” he asked suddenly.

  Harry grimaced even as Amanda’s eyes widened. “Well, yes you do,” he confessed. “She was upset and crying and all…”

  “How much did you give her?” Quinn persisted. “Only a few drops,” Harry promised. “In her coffee, to calm her.”

  “Harry, how could you!” Amanda laughed. The coffee had tasted funny, but she’d been too upset to wonder why.

  “Sorry,” Harry murmured dryly. “But it seemed the thing to do.”

  “It backfired,” Quinn murmured and actually smiled.

  “You stop that!” Amanda told him. She sat down at the table. “I’m not tipsy. Harry, I’ll peel those apples for the pie if I can have a knife.”

  “Let me get out of the room first, if you please,” Quinn said, glancing at her dryly. “I saw her measuring my back for a place to put it.”

  “I almost never stab men with knives,” she promised impishly.

  He chuckled. He reached for his hat and slanted it over his brow, buttoning his old shepherd’s coat because it was snowing outside again.

  Amanda looked past him, the reason for all the upset coming back now as she calmed down. Her expression became sad.

  “If you stay busy, you won’t think about it so much,” Quinn said quietly. “It’s part of life, you know.”

  “I know.” She managed a smile. “I’m fine. Despite Harry,” she added with a chuckle, watching Harry squirm before he grinned back.

  Quinn’s dark eyes met hers warmly for longer than he meant, so that she blushed. He tore his eyes away finally, and went outside.

  Harry didn’t say anything, but his smile was speculative.

  Elliot came home from school and persuaded Amanda to get out the keyboard and give him some more pointers. He admitted that he’d been bragging about her to his classmates and that she was a professional musician.

  “Where do you play, Amanda?” Elliot asked curiously, and he stared at her with open puzzlement. “You look so familiar somehow.”

  She sat very still on the sofa and tried to stay calm. Elliot had already told her that he liked rock music and she knew Quinn had hidden his tapes. If there was a tape in his collection by Desperado, it would have her picture on the cover along with that of her group.

  “Do I really look familiar?” she asked with a smile. “Maybe I just have that kind of face.”

  “Have you played with orchestras?” he persisted.

  “No. Just by myself, sort of. In nightclubs,” she improvised. Well, she had once sung in a nightclub, to fill in for a friend. “Mostly I do backup. You know, I play with groups for people who make tapes and records.”


  “Wow!” he exclaimed. “I guess you know a lot of famous singers and musicians?”

  “A few,” she agreed.

  “Where do you work?”

  “In New York City, in Nashville,” she told him. “All over. Wherever I can find work.”

  He ran his fingers up and down the keyboard. “How did you ever wind up here?”

  “I needed a rest,” she said. “My aunt is…a friend of Mr. Durning. She asked him if I could borrow the cabin, and he said it was all right. I had to get away from work for a while.”

  “This doesn’t bother you, does it? Teaching me to play, I mean?” he asked and looked concerned.

  “No, Elliot, it doesn’t bother me. I’m enjoying it.” She ran a scale and taught it to him, then showed him the cadences of the chords that went with it.

  “It’s so complicated,” he moaned.

  “Of course it is. Music is an art form, and it’s complex. But once you learn these basics, you can do anything with a chord. For instance…”

  She played a tonic chord, then made an impromptu song from its subdominant and seventh chords and the second inversion of them. Elliot watched, fascinated.

  “I guess you’ve studied for years,” he said with a sigh.

  “Yes, I have, and I’m still learning,” she said. “But I love it more than anything. Music has been my whole life.”

  “No wonder you’re so good at it.”

  She smiled. “Thanks, Elliot.”

  “Well, I’d better get my chores done before supper,” he said, sighing. He handed Amanda the keyboard. “See you later.”

  She nodded. He went out. Harry was feeding the two calves that were still alive, so presumably he’d tell Elliot about the one that had died. Amanda hadn’t had the heart to talk about it.

  Her fingers ran over the keyboard lovingly and she began to play a song that her group had recorded two years back, a sad, dreamy ballad about hopeless love that had won them a Grammy. She sang it softly, her pure, sweet voice haunting in the silence of the room as she tried to sing for the first time in weeks.

  “Elliot, for Pete’s sake, turn that radio down, I’m on the telephone!” came a pleading voice from the back of the house.

  She stopped immediately, flushing. She hadn’t realized that Harry had come back inside. Thank God he hadn’t seen her, or he might have asked some pertinent questions. She put the keyboard down and went to the kitchen, relieved that her singing voice was back to normal again. Elliot was morose at the supper table. He’d heard about the calf and he’d been as depressed as Amanda had. Quinn didn’t look all that happy himself. They all picked at the delicious chili Harry had whipped up; nobody had much of an appetite.

  After they finished, Elliot did his homework while Amanda put the last stitches into a chair cover she was making for the living room. Quinn had gone off to do his paperwork and Harry was making bread for the next day.

  It was a long, lazy night. Elliot went to bed at eight-thirty and not much later Harry went to his room.

  Amanda wanted to wait for Quinn to come back, but something in her was afraid of the new way he looked at her. He was much more a threat now than he had been before, because she was looking at him with new and interested eyes. She was drawn to him more than ever. But he didn’t know who she really was, and she couldn’t tell him. If she were persuaded into any kind of close relationship with him, it could lead to disaster.

  So when Elliot went to bed, so did Amanda. She sat at the dresser and let down her long hair, brushing it with slow, lazy strokes, when there was a knock at the door.

  She was afraid that it might be Quinn, and she hesitated. But surely he wouldn’t make any advances toward her unless she showed that she wanted them. Of course he wouldn’t.

  She opened the door, but it wasn’t Quinn. It was Elliot. And as he stared at her, wheels moved and gears clicked in his young mind. She was wearing a long granny gown in a deep beige, a shade that was too much like the color of the leather dress she wore onstage. With her hair loose and the color of the gown, Elliot made the connection he hadn’t made the first time he saw her hair down.

  “Yes?” she prompted, puzzled by the way he was looking at her. “Is something wrong, Elliot?”

  “Uh, no,” he stammered. “Uh, I forgot to say goodnight. Good night!” He grinned.

  He turned, red-faced, and beat a hasty retreat, but not to his own room. He went to his father’s and searched quickly through the hidden tapes until he found the one he wanted. He held it up, staring blankly at the cover. There were four men who looked like vicious bikers surrounding a beautiful woman in buckskin with long, elegant, blond hair. The group was one of his favorites—Desperado. And the woman was Mandy. Amanda. His Amanda. He caught his breath. Boy, would she be in for it if his dad found out who she was! He put the tape into his pocket, feeling guilty for taking it when Quinn had told him not to. But these were desperate circumstances. He had to protect Amanda until he could figure out how to tell her that he knew the truth. Meanwhile, having her in the same house with him was sheer undiluted heaven! Imagine, a singing star that famous in his house. If only he could tell the guys! But that was too risky, because it might get back to Dad. He sighed. Just his luck, to find a rare jewel and have to hide it to keep someone from stealing it. He closed the door to Quinn’s bedroom and went quickly back to his own.

  Amanda slept soundly, almost missing breakfast. Outside, the sky looked blue for the first time in days, and she noticed that the snow had stopped.

  “Chinook’s coming,” Harry said with a grin. “I knew it would.”

  Quinn’s dark eyes studied Amanda’s face. “Well, it will be a few days before they get the power lines back up again,” he muttered. “So don’t get in an uproar about it.”

  “I’m not in an uproar,” Harry returned with a frown. “I just thought it was nice that we’ll be able to get off the mountain and lay in some more supplies. I’m getting tired of beef. I want a chicken.”

  “So do I!” Elliot said fervently. “Or bear, or beaver or moose, anything but beef!”

  Quinn glared at both of them. “Beef pays the bills around here,” he reminded them.

  They looked so guilty that Amanda almost laughed out loud.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” Elliot sighed. “I’ll tell my stomach to shut up about it.”

  Quinn’s hard face relaxed. “It’s all right. I wouldn’t mind a chicken stew, myself.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Elliot said. “What are we going to do today? It’s Saturday,” he pointed out. “No school.”

  “You could go out with me and help me feed cattle,” Quinn said.

  “I’ll stay here and help Harry,” Amanda said, too quickly.

  Quinn’s dark eyes searched hers. “Harry can manage by himself. You can come with me and Elliot.”

  “You’ll enjoy it,” Elliot assured her. “It’s a lot of fun. The cattle see us and come running. Well, as well as they can run in several feet of snow,” he amended.

  It was fun, too. Amanda sat on the back of the sled with Elliot and helped push the bales of hay off. Quinn cut the strings so the cattle could get to the hay. They did come running, reminding Amanda so vividly of women at a sale that she laughed helplessly until the others had to be told why she was laughing.

  They came back from the outing in a new kind of harmony, and for the first time, Amanda understood what it felt like to be part of a family. She looked at Quinn and wondered how it would be if she never had to leave here, if she could stay with him and Elliot and Harry forever.

  But she couldn’t, she told herself firmly. She had to remember that this was a vacation, with the real world just outside the door.

  Elliot was allowed to stay up later on Saturday night, so they watched a science-fiction movie together while Quinn grumbled over paperwork. The next morning they went to church on the sled, Amanda in the one skirt and blouse she’d packed, trying not to look too conspicuous as Quinn’s few neighbors carefully scrutinized h
er.

  When they got back home, she was all but shaking. She felt uncomfortable living with him, as if she really was a fallen woman now. He cornered her in the kitchen while she was washing dishes to find out why she was so quiet.

  “I didn’t think about the way people would react if you went with us this morning,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t have subjected you to that if I’d just thought.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, touched by his concern. “Really. It was just a little uncomfortable.”

  He sighed, searching her face with narrowed eyes. “Most people around here know how I feel about women,” he said bluntly. “That was why you attracted so much attention. People get funny ideas about woman haters who take in beautiful blondes.”

  “I’m not beautiful,” she stammered shyly.

  He stepped toward her, towering over her in his dress slacks and good white shirt and sedate gray tie. He looked handsome and strong and very masculine. She liked the spicy cologne he wore. “You’re beautiful, all right,” he murmured. His big hand touched her cheek, sliding down it slowly, his thumb brushing with soft abrasion over her full mouth.

  Her breath caught as she looked up into his dark, soft eyes. “Quinn?” she whispered.

  He drew her hands out of the warm, soapy water, still holding her gaze, and dried them on a dishcloth. Then he guided them, first one, then the other, up to his shoulders.

  “Hold me,” he whispered as his hands smoothed over her waist and brought her gently to him. “I want to kiss you.”

  She shivered from the sensuality in that soft whisper, lifting her face willingly.

  He bent, brushing his mouth lazily over hers. “Isn’t this how we did it before?” he breathed, parting his lips as they touched hers. “I like the way it feels to kiss you like this. My spine tingles.”

  “So…does mine.” She slid her hands hesitantly into the thick, cool strands of hair at his nape and she went on tiptoe to give him better access to her mouth.