by Diana Palmer
“It might be a handy skill for a man—dodging things, I mean, if you’re the sort of woman who likes to throw pots and pans at men.”
“I have never thrown a pot at a man,” she said emphatically. “However, if you’d like to step into our kitchen, I could make an exception for you!”
He grinned. He could have bet that she didn’t talk like that to the soldier boy. She had spirit and she didn’t take guff from anyone, but it took a lot to get under her skin. It delighted him that he could make her mad.
“What sort of pot did you have in mind throwing at me?” he taunted.
“Something made of cast iron,” she muttered. “Although I expect you’d dent it.”
“My head is not that hard,” he retorted.
He stepped in, close to her, and watched her reaction with detached amusement. He made her nervous. It showed.
He put his hat back on, and pushed it to the back of his head. One long arm went around Sassy’s waist and drew her to him. A big, lean hand spread on her cheek, coaxing it back to his shoulder.
“You’ve got grit,” he murmured deeply as his gaze fell to her soft mouth. “You don’t back away from trouble, or responsibility. I like that.”
“You…shouldn’t hold me like this,” she protested weakly.
“Why not? You’re soft and sweet and I like the way you smell.” His head began to bend. “I think I’ll like the way you taste, too,” he breathed.
He didn’t need a program to know how innocent she was. He loved the way her hands gripped him, almost in fear, as his firm mouth smoothed over the parted, shocked warmth of her lips.
“Nothing heavy,” he whispered as his mouth played with hers. “It’s far too soon for that. Relax. Just relax, Sassy. It’s like dancing, slow and sweet…”
His mouth covered hers gently, brushing her lips apart, teasing them to permit the slow invasion. Her hands relaxed their death-grip on his arms as the slow rhythm began to increase her heartbeat and make her breathing sound jerky and rough. He was very good at this, she thought dizzily. He knew exactly how to make her shiver with anticipation as he drew out the intimate torture of his mouth on her lips. He teased them, playing with her lower lip, nibbling and rubbing, until she went on tiptoe with a frustrated moan, seeking something far rougher and more passionate than this exquisite whisper of motion.
He nipped her lower lip. “You want more, don’t you, honey?” he whispered roughly. “So do I. Hold tight.”
Her hands slid up to his broad shoulders as his mouth began to burrow hungrily into hers. She let her lips open with a shiver, closing her eyes and reaching up to be swallowed whole by his arms.
It was so sweet that she moaned with the ardent passion he aroused in her. She’d never felt her body swell and shudder like this when a man held her. She’d never been kissed so thoroughly, so expertly. Her arms tightened convulsively around his neck as he riveted her to the length of his powerful body, as if he, too, had lost control of himself.
A minute later, he came to his senses. She was just nineteen. She worked for him, even though she didn’t know it. They were worlds apart in every way. What the hell was he doing?
He pulled away from her abruptly, his blue eyes shimmering with emotion, his grasp a little bruising as he tried to get his breath back under control. His jealousy of the soldier had pushed him right into a situation he’d left town to avoid. Now, here he was, faced with the consequences.
She hung there, watching him with clouded, dreamy eyes in a face flushed with pleasure from the hungry exchange.
“That was a mistake,” he said curtly, putting her firmly at arm’s length and letting her go.
“Are you sure?” she asked, dazed.
“Yes, I’m sure,” he said, his voice sharp with anger.
“Then why did you do it?” she asked reasonably.
He had to think about a suitable answer, and his brain wasn’t working very well. He’d pushed her away at their last meeting and felt guilt. Now he’d compounded the error and he couldn’t think of a good way to get out of it.
“God knows,” he said heavily. “Maybe it’s the full moon.”
She gave him a wry look. “It’s not a full moon. It’s a crescent moon.”
“A moon is a moon,” he said doggedly.
“That’s your story and you’re sticking to it,” she agreed.
He stared down at her with conflict eating him alive. “You’re nineteen, Sassy,” he said finally. “I’m thirty-one.”
She blinked. “Is that supposed to mean something?”
“It means you’re years too young for me. And not only in age.”
She raised her eyebrows. “It isn’t exactly easy to get experience when you’re living in a tiny town and supporting a family.”
He ground his teeth. “That isn’t the point…”
She held up a hand. “You had too much coffee today and the caffeine caused you to leap on unsuspecting women.”
He glowered. “I did not drink too much coffee.”
“Then it must be either my exceptional beauty or my overwhelming charm,” she decided. She waited, arms folded, for him to come up with an alternate theory.
He pulled his hat low over his eyes. “It’s been a long, dry spell.”
“Well, if that isn’t the nicest compliment I ever had,” she muttered. “You were lonely and I was the only eligible woman handy!”
“You were,” he shot back.
“A likely story! There’s Mrs. Harmon, who lives a mile down the road.”
“Mrs. Harmon?”
“Yes. Her husband has been dead fifteen years. She’s fifty, but she wears tight skirts and a lot of makeup and in dim light, she isn’t half bad.”
He glowered even more. “I am not that desperate.”
“You just said you were.”
“I did not!”
“Making passes at nineteen-year-old girls,” she scoffed. “I never!”
He threw up his hands. “It wasn’t a pass!”
She pursed her lips and gave him a sarcastic look.
He shrugged. “Maybe it was a small pass.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I have a conscience. You’d wear on it.”
So that was why he’d pushed her away in the store, before he left town. Her heart lifted. He didn’t find her unattractive. He just thought she was too young.
“I’ll be twenty next month,” she told him.
It didn’t help. “I’ll be thirty-two in two months.”
“Well, for a month we’ll be almost the same age,” she said pertly.
He laughed shortly. “Twelve years is a lot, at your age.”
“In the great scheme of things, it isn’t,” she pointed out.
He didn’t answer her.
“Thanks for stopping by to check on my mother,” she said. “It was kind.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I wanted to see if the soldier was hot for you.”
“Excuse me?!”
“He didn’t even kiss you good night,” he said.
“That’s because he’s in love with his best friend’s girl.”
His expression brightened. “He is?”
“I’m somebody to talk about her with,” she told him. “Which is why I don’t get out much, unless a man wants to tell me about his love life and ask for advice.” She studied him. “I don’t guess you’ve got relationship problems?”
“In fact, I do. I’m trying not to have one with an inappropriate woman,” he said, tongue-in-cheek.
That took a minute to register. She laughed. “Oh. I see.”
He moved closer and toyed with a strand of her short hair. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to take you out once in a while. Nothing serious,” he added firmly. “I am not in the market for a mistress.”
“Good thing,” she returned, “because I have no intention of becoming one.”
He grinned. “Now, that’s encouraging. I’m glad to know that you have enough willpower to keep us on the straight and narrow.”
“I have my mother,” she replied, “who would shoot you in the foot with a rusty gun if she even thought you were leading me into a life of sin. She’s very religious. She raised me to be that way.”
“In her condition,” he said solemnly, “I’m not surprised that she’s religious. She’s a courageous soul.”
“I love her a lot,” she confessed. “I wish I could do more to help her.”
“Loving her is probably what helps her the most,” he said. He bent and brushed a soft kiss against her mouth. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She smiled. “Okay.”
He started to walk down the steps, paused, and turned back to her. “You’re sure it’s not serious with the soldier?”
She smiled more broadly. “Very sure.”
He cocked his hat at a jaunty angle and grinned at her. “Okay.”
She watched him walk out to his vehicle, climb in, and drive away. She waved, but she noticed that he didn’t look back. For some reason, that bothered her.
John spent a rough night remembering how sweet Sassy was to kiss. He’d been fighting the attraction for weeks now, and he was losing. She was too young for him. He knew it. But on the other hand, she was independent. She was strong. She was used to responsibility. She’d had years of being the head of her family, the breadwinner. She might be young, but she was more mature than most women her age.
He could see how much care she took for her mother and her mother’s little ward. She never shirked her duties, and she worked hard for her paycheck.
The bottom line was that he was far too attracted to her to walk away. He was taking a chance. But he’d taken chances before in his life, with women who were much inferior to this little firecracker. It wouldn’t hurt to go slow and see where the path led. After all, he could walk away whenever he liked, he told himself.
The big problem was going to be the distance between them socially. Sassy didn’t know that he came from great wealth, that his parents were related to most of the royal houses of Europe, that he and his brother had built a world-famous ranch that bred equally famous breeding bulls. He was used to five-star hotels and restaurants, stretch limousines in every city he visited. He traveled first-class. He was worldly and sophisticated. Sassy was much more used to small town life. She wouldn’t understand his world. Probably, she wouldn’t be able to adjust to it.
But he was creating hurdles that didn’t exist yet. It wasn’t as if he was in love with her and aching to rush her to the altar, he told himself. He was going to take her out a few times. Maybe kiss her once in a while. It was nothing he couldn’t handle. She’d just be companionship while he was getting this new ranching enterprise off the ground. When he had to leave, he’d tell her the truth.
It sounded simple. It was simple, he assured himself. She was just another girl, another casual relationship. He was going to enjoy it while it lasted.
He went to sleep, finally, having resolved all the problems in his mind.
The next day, he went back to the feed store with another list, this one of household goods that he was going to need. He was looking forward to seeing Sassy again. The memory of that kiss had prompted some unusually spicy dreams about her.
But when he got there, he found Buck Mannheim handling the counter and looking worried.
He waited while the older man finished a sale. The customer left and John approached the counter.
“Where’s Sassy?” he asked.
Buck looked concerned. “She phoned me at home. Her mother had a bad turn. They had to send an ambulance for her and take her up to Billings to the nearest hospital. Sassy was crying…”
He was talking to thin air. John was already out the door.
He found Sassy and little Selene in the emergency waiting room, huddled together and upset.
He walked into the room and they both ran to him, to be scooped up and held close, comforted.
He felt odd. It was the first time he could remember being important to anyone outside his own family circle. He felt needed.
His arms contracted around them. “Tell me what happened,” he asked at Sassy’s ear.
She drew away a little, wiping at her eyes with the hem of her blouse. It was obvious that she hadn’t slept. “She knocked over her water carafe, or I wouldn’t even have known anything was wrong. I ran in to see what had happened and I found her gasping for breath. It was so bad that I just ran to the phone and called Dr. Bates. He sent for the ambulance and called the oncologist on staff here. They’ve been with her for two hours. Nobody’s told me anything.”
He eased them down into chairs. “Stay here,” he said softly. “I’ll find out what’s going on.”
She was doubtful that a cowboy, even a foreman, would be able to elicit more information than the patient’s own family, but she smiled. “Thanks.”
He turned and walked down the hall.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JOHN had money and power, and he knew how to use both. Within two minutes, he’d been ushered into the office of the hospital administrator. He explained who he was, why he was there, and asked for information. Even in Billings, the Callister empire was known. Five minutes later, he was speaking to the physician in charge of Sassy’s mother’s case. He accepted responsibility for the bill and asked if anything more could be done than was being done.
“Sadly, yes,” the physician said curtly. “We’re bound by the family’s financial constraints. Mrs. Peale does have insurance, but she told us that they simply could not afford anything other than symptomatic relief for her. If she would consent, Mrs. Peale could have surgery to remove the cancerous lung and then radiation and chemotherapy to insure her recovery. In fact, she’d have a very good prognosis…”
“If money’s all that’s holding things up, I’ll gladly be responsible for the bill. I don’t care how much it is. So what are you waiting for?” John asked.
The physician smiled. “You’ll speak to the financial officer?”
“Immediately,” he replied.
“Then I’ll speak to the patient.”
“They don’t know who I am,” John told him. “That’s the only condition, that you don’t tell them. They think I’m the foreman of a ranch.”
The older man frowned. “Is there a reason?”
“Originally, it was to insure that costs didn’t escalate locally because the name was known,” he said. “But by then, it was too late to change things. They’re my friends,” he added. “I don’t want them to look at me differently.”
“You think they would?”
“People see fame and money and power. They don’t see people. Not at first.”
The other man nodded. “I think I understand. I’ll get the process underway. It’s a very kind thing you’re doing,” he added. “Mrs. Peale would have died. Very soon, too.”
“I know that. She’s a good person.”
“And very important to her little family, from what I’ve seen.”
“Yes.”
He clapped John on the shoulder. “We’ll do everything possible.”
“Thanks.”
When he wrapped up things in the financial office, he strolled back down to the emergency room. Sassy was pacing the floor. Selene had curled up into a chair with her cheek pillowed on her arm. She was sound asleep.
Sassy met him, her eyes wide and fascinated. “What did you do?” she exclaimed. “They’re going to operate on Mama! The doctor says they can save her life, that she can have radiation and chemotherapy, that there’s a grant for poor people…she can live!”
Her voice broke into tears. John pulled her close and rocked her in his strong, warm arms, his mouth against her temple. “It’s all right, honey,” he said softly. “Don’t cry.”
“I’m just so happy,” she choked at his chest. “So happy! I never knew there were such things as grants for this sort of thing, or I’d have done anything to find one! I thought…I thought we’d have to watch her die…”
“Never while
there was a breath in my body,” he whispered. His arms contracted. A wave of feeling rippled through him. He’d helped people in various ways all his life, but it was the first time he’d been able to make this sort of difference for someone he cared about. He’d grown fond of Mrs. Peale. But he’d thought that her case was hopeless. He thanked God that the emergency had forced Sassy to bring her mother here. What a wonderful near-tragedy. A link in a chain that would lead to a better life for all three of them.
She drew back, wiping her eyes again and laughing. “Sorry. I seem to spend my life crying. I’m just so grateful. What did you do?” she asked again.
He grinned. “I just asked wasn’t there something they could figure out to do to help her. The doctor said he’d check, and he came up with the grant.”
She shook her head. “It happened so fast. They’ve got some crackerjack surgeon who’s teaching new techniques in cancer intervention here, and he’s the one they’re getting to operate on Mama. What’s more, they’re going to do it tomorrow. They already asked her, and she just almost jumped out of the bed she was so excited.” She wiped away more tears. “We brought her up here to die,” she explained. “And it was the most wonderful, scary experience we ever had. She’s going to live, maybe long enough to see Selene graduate from college!”
He smiled down at her. “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that’s not the case. Feel better?”
She nodded. Her eyes adored him. “Thank you.”
He chuckled. “Glad I could help.” He glanced down at Selene, who was radiant. “Hear that? You’ll have to go to college.”
She grinned. “I want to be a doctor, now.”
“There are scholarships that will help that dream come true, at the right time,” he assured her.
Sassy pulled the young girl close. “We’ll find lots,” she promised.
“Thank you for helping save our mama,” Selene told John solemnly. “We love her very much.”
“She loves you very much,” John replied. “That must be pretty nice, at your age.”
He was saying something without saying it.
Sassy sent Selene to the vending machines for apple juice. While she was gone, Sassy turned to John. “What was your mother like when you were little?”
