“Nicholas is working with you? But I thought Tucker—”
“Oh, Tucker’s got him sawing and hammering and gluing, all right, Noel. But that don’t mean when Tucker sits in his unit talking to the sheriff about business stuff that I can’t grab Baranov for a while.”
“There’s been sheriff stuff?”
Doc Mallory suddenly put too much concentration on removing his soiled leather gloves, not answering for a moment. Then his voice dropped like a sad note. “A bunch of the Pattersons’ cows are losing their calves. I was over at their place a few hours this morning. They’ve lost six premature ones so far.”
Noel sat forward with an uneasy start. “But you said the state lab determined that the Duncans’ cattle didn’t have brucellosis.”
“Not sure, but these new fancy computers could’ve made a mistake. I sent some more blood samples in for duplicate testing. Tucker had a car run them in for me.”
“Doc, you don’t really think—”
“No, Noel, I don’t really think it’s brucellosis, more because of what these old eyes and hands tell me than any of those fancy tests. But I’m stumped at what else could be a causin’ it.”
“What about the water?” Lucy asked.
“I’ve taken some samples of the well water in both spots. Had Tucker send it off to be tested, too, just in case. I also told Tucker that until we know everything there is to know, the people in this here valley better start drinking bottled water. Ginny and Seth have called in for a truck to bring in a big supply.”
“Hell, that means we better start melting snow for the livestock to drink,” Lucy said, a frown creasing her forehead as she sprang from her chair. “Noel, I really should get on over to the ranch to help—”
“Lucy, gal, it’s okay. Your folks already know and they’re attending to business. Plus, all your neighbors are pitching in. So you just sit down there and let Noel finish you.”
“Yes, Lucy. Please. I just need another few minutes.”
Lucy sat, albeit a bit reluctantly.
“I’ll send Noel’s man out to help on your spread, too, just as soon as we finish up with these lights.”
“Naw. I don’t want to—”
“He’s already volunteered, insisted, actually, in that polite way of his, just as neighborly as you please. You’d be a fool to turn him down. He’s strong as a grizzly and sits a horse as good as the best of them cowboys riding our range. Hell, most times, I forget he ain’t a real Montana man.”
“Well, then, on those recommendations, guess I can’t afford to turn him down. Thanks, Doc.”
“He’ll be the one you’ll be thanking when you see how much he can accomplish. Which reminds me of the real reason I came in here in the first place.”
“Which is?” Noel asked, trying not to be too affected by all this praise for her husband.
“We’ve run out of lights. Don’t understand how we can be using the same lights every year, and every year we add to them and still the next year we find ourselves short. Noel, can you bring yourself to donating any more?”
“Of course, Doc. I ordered extra this year in preparation. I’m just about finished with Lucy here. Give me a minute or two for the final touches and I’ll go into the back room and get them.”
“I’ll send your hubby by to collect them after he and I grab a cool one.”
Noel looked up from her work. “A cool one?”
“Not at the Heel, Noel. The Mercantile. Baranov ain’t no more a day drinker than I am. Although I do think I’m getting him addicted to Coca Cola. He can knock three of those back without even breathin’ in between.”
* * *
NICHOLAS HAD JUST started on his third ice-cold Coke, when he turned to the plump, fiftyish man with the prematurely gray hair and weather-beaten face sitting on the stool next to him. He waited until an unusually quiet Ginny Carson moved out of hearing distance.
“I notice that this news of the Patterson livestock puts a scared look on village faces,” he said.
Doc Mallory’s white eyebrows rose. “Scared? You see this cut on my wrist, son? Got it an hour ago and it didn’t bleed a drop. Way I figure it, my old heart hasn’t really started going again since I was out on the Patterson spread this morning.”
Nicholas smiled at the exaggeration. These Montana stories could be as colorful as Russian ones. But the smile did not stay long on his face. “Ginny tells me the Pattersons are on the other side of the valley from the Duncans.”
Doc nodded as he took a sip of his Coke.
Nicholas leaned slightly closer. “Do you not find it strange that this affliction is found in animals that use water supplies on the opposite ends of the valley?”
“Not strange, Baranov. Plum frightening. It makes me think that something has gotten into the underground water supply and will soon be showing up everywhere. Hell, I hate to contemplate what we find ourselves up against. If all the water supply is tainted...”
“Yes?”
Doc’s frown increased with his sigh. “That will do it for the valley, no two ways about it.”
“The ranchers would have to sell out?”
“Without accessible water for their livestock, they’d have no choice.”
“These two ranches affected—the Duncans and the Pattersons—they have not yet sold out to CMC?”
“Nope. Couple of the staunchest holdouts we’ve had. Particularly the Duncans. Swore they’d never give in. Now...”
Doc’s voice faded away into a deep frown. Nicholas finished the last of his Coke thoughtfully, too.
“This other ranching family, the Pattersons, they are the family of Cade Patterson?”
“Yep.”
“I would ask something else, Doc Mallory, something that does not relate to these problems. If you do not mind.”
“Shoot, son.”
“What does it means when an American man says he cannot fulfill the responsibilities of a husband?”
“Well, that sort of depends on the man. You talkin’ about anybody in particular?”
“Cade Patterson.”
Doc leaned back on his stool, tucking his thumbs into the belt of his padded middle, chewing on his bottom lip.
“A Montana man, even when he’s still a boy, knows that the stock get fed and the chores get done before he cleans himself up for supper. I don’t care where Cade was born, he ain’t no Montana man. So when it came to committing himself to taking care of a woman’s needs, well, he just wasn’t man enough to do it.”
“A woman’s needs?”
“Physical loving is all well and good, but a woman needs a man she can count on to be beside her when she faces the hard times on this hard land. A real man takes care of his woman, especially during the hard times.”
“The hard times. The possible problem with the water. Where...everything could be lost.”
“Yep. I’d say these are them hard times all right.”
Nicholas stared at the empty can of Coke in his hand, running his thumb across the condensation on its sides, silent for a long moment. He felt Doc Mallory’s eyes.
“Can’t imagine husband requirements being all that different in the country you come from. Are they, Baranov?”
Nicholas crushed the can within his palm, until it was as thin as paper. “No, Doc Mallory. In the country I come from, they are no different.”
* * *
NOEL WALKED into her living room, flipped on the switch to the overhead light and groaned.
“Oh, great. The electricity’s off. The one night I get home early enough to make a hot dinner and now there’s no power to cook it with. Oh, well, at least it’s still in the thirties, Mistletoe. If I can get a fire going, we won’t freeze.”
Noel shut the door, trying to keep some of the lingering heat inside the house. She walked over to the stone fireplace, bent down and opened the heavy glass door of the wood-stove insert, preparing to build a fire. She was surprised to find the kindling for one already laid.
Nic
holas.
A sigh full of longing and regret emptied from her lungs. She had hardly seen him these last couple of days. Since the evening he had told her of his dead fiancée, she had purposely avoided him. But at night he appeared to her in dreams that always ended when the beautiful Dotnara came to waltz him away.
“I need Lucy’s dream hoop,” she told Mistletoe. “I need to get that man out of my head.”
Yet it wasn’t her head that told her when the house emptied of his presence and then filled again when he entered. He made no sound as he left on those early-morning runs in the snow. But something she couldn’t explain—a change or disturbance in the magnetic forces of this house—told her when he wasn’t a part of it. It was that same sense that assured her the moment she stepped inside tonight that he was not here.
Her home was empty. Very, very empty. Like a part of her now felt. A part she never knew existed before Nicholas Baranov.
She shivered in the dark house that was getting colder by the second. She had better get this fire started.
She reached for a match, lit the kindling and watched as it quickly caught. The light from the fire and its licks of immediate heat felt good. She watched the burning for a few moments. The amber heart of the larch snapped and crackled, giving off a luscious heat. Nothing warmed better than burning larch.
Mistletoe nudged her knee. She patted his head and raised herself. “I’ve got candles in the hall closet. But I’m going to need a flashlight to find them. The one in the truck has fresh batteries. Let’s go get it.”
Outside, a faint silent twilight persisted, like that thick purple glow she had noticed on that night ten days before when she had answered her grandfather’s summons.
A week and a half? Was that all it had been? It seemed impossible to think that she had only known this man she thought about all day, and tossed and turned over all night, such a short time.
Noel made her way to the truck to fetch the flashlight as Mistletoe barked and tore out across the pond after a large, beautiful buck that he hadn’t a prayer of catching and wouldn’t have known what to do with if he did.
She shook her head in amusement as she turned away from her dog. Then, something caught the corner of her eye. She raised her head and suddenly found herself looking at the object of all her recent musings.
He was riding toward her on the wings of that strange purple twilight, a powerful centaur, the man-half of enormous bare shoulders and flying black hair, the horse-half a row of chest muscles rippling with steam, his hooves pounding the last of the powdery snow.
Noel stood stock-still and stared, mesmerized by the mythical imagery filling her senses. Her breath labored through her lungs as her heart hammered against her rib cage. He was just so much man, so much magnificent man. She could not tear her eyes away.
Until she heard the ominous crack of the ice over the pond.
Noel instantly swung toward the pond, her heart squeezing through her ribs. The beautiful buck leapt across the far bank with effortless ease and speed. Noel’s eyes searched frantically for the little white dog that had been so happily scooting across the pond’s surface on the buck’s heels only a second before.
But the once-smooth ice surface of the pond was now only a dark zigzag of ugly cracks, and the little white dog was gone.
The cry wrenched from out of her soul. “Mistletoe!”
Suddenly, Nicholas dismounted and was bounding onto the pond in great leaps, jumping into the freezing icy water. Disappearing instantly beneath its surface.
Noel froze, her breath, her body, her brain. For years after her parents’ deaths, she had had nightmares of seeing them skating on the thin ice to the waltz her father had loved so much, hearing the awful crack, watching them disappear into the icy waters beneath, just as she had this very second watched Nicholas disappear.
When she had been lucky, her scream had awakened her from these nightmares. When she had been lucky.
The scream that ripped through her lungs now was not a lucky one. It did not awake her from this nightmare.
Chapter Twelve
An eternity passed as Noel stood staring out at the white, jagged, broken ice, an eternity in which she remained frozen in position, an eternity in which she lost all sense of time and all hope. The purple darkness turned black and hung over her and the broken pond like a shroud.
Until suddenly, a dark head appeared above the break in the ice. And then a neck and the top of two shoulders. And arms. And wrapped in those arms the body of a shaking, very wet little dog. Noel could barely believe her eyes.
Life flowed back into her limbs; joy leapt into her heart. She ran forward madly.
“Stop, Noel! Stay on the edge where the ice is still firm.”
Noel stopped instantly at the command in that voice and the quivering of the ice beneath her feet. Quickly, she backed up to the edge and dropped to her knees.
“I will send Mistletoe to you,” Nicholas called.
He laid Mistletoe’s drenched, shaking little body carefully on the closest flat piece of intact ice. Nicholas gently gave him a shove that sent the dog skimming across the surface toward where Noel waited on the edge. Noel was ready to grab him, scoop him up into her arms. She hugged his wet body to her as she crooned to him and quickly shed her coat to wrap it around him.
By the time he was nestled securely inside it, she looked up to see Nicholas at her side. She dropped her head against one wet, stalwart, bare shoulder, icy cold from the water and the chilling air. She hardly dared believe yet that he was all right.
“When you went under, I thought... You never should have done it. I still don’t know how you did. You should be dead. Both of you should be dead. Nobody could survive that icy water. Nobody could pull themselves out of it.”
She was crying, big hot tears that fell against her cheeks and onto his shoulder.
His arms came around her, and he drew her to his side and kissed the top of her head. There was warmth beneath the surface chill of his skin. A wonderful warmth. “It is all right, Noel.”
Mistletoe whimpered in her arms, his body still shaking from cold and fear.
“Quickly, now,” Nicholas said. “We must get him inside.”
Nicholas kept one arm around Noel as he urged her forward toward the house. He closed the door behind them and Noel carried Mistletoe to the fireplace and laid him in front of the blazing fire, rubbing the warm fleece lining of her coat against his skin and fur.
By the time Nicholas knelt beside her with fresh towels from his bathroom, her tears had stopped. Noel gently rubbed her little dog dry, crooning to him softly.
Gradually, Mistletoe’s shaking began to subside. When he finally licked the back of her hand and even managed a small, rallying bark, she sat back on her heels and breathed a sigh of relief.
“He’s going to be all right.”
“You’ll want to keep him by the fire tonight, Noel, to make sure he remains warm.”
Noel looked up then to see that Nicholas was standing just behind her. He was wearing only a towel tied around his waist, his drenched clothes discarded in a pile. His hair was wet and sleek. But he didn’t look cold. On the contrary, his black eyes were warm on her. The naked muscles in his magnificent chest and arms and legs flashed like liquid bronze in the firelight.
Noel slowly got to her feet. She stood in front of him, feeling all that magnificent male heat, and looked into those eyes, far hotter than the larch burning at her back.
“Why, Nicholas? Why did you risk your life to save Mistletoe?”
He stared into her eyes for a long moment and then he slowly bent down until his lips brushed hers in a soft, swift caress of tongue and breath.
Sharp, sweet heat shot through her so fast and so full that a tremulous gasp of surprised pleasure tore from her lips. She wrapped her arms around the tight muscles of his waist and leaned full against him, her face still tilted up to those diamond-black eyes.
His arms came around her then, crushing her t
o him. She felt him, every muscled, hungry inch of him. He held her tightly against his hard, full arousal, watching her eyes. And then he lowered his mouth to hers again like a sensitive probe, caressing and tender, dipping in to sample her softness, taste her heat.
The contrasting hardness of his body and tender probe of his tongue whirled through Noel in streamers of fluttering sensation from her belly to her breasts. A soft moan vibrated at the back of her throat. Her hands grasped the firm swell of muscle ridges riding up his back as she went deeper into the kiss, eager for more of the hot pleasures of his lips.
And he gave her more. Several delicious, dizzying seconds more of sizzling sensations. But then, suddenly, he drew back from her mouth, from her kiss.
His breath came in quick, labored gasps near her ear. His steel fingers clutched her shoulders, neither pushing her body away nor drawing it closer, rather holding on, as though he were hanging onto a slipping lifeline.
“Noel... Please... I must stop now. My pledge to you—”
“Nicholas, don’t stop. I’m not holding you to that pledge. I don’t want you to keep it. I want—”
Noel did not get a chance to say what she wanted. Nicholas was already giving it to her with his lips and with the steel hands that had snatched her to him. Only this time, he had not come for just a taste. This time, he had come to satisfy a hungry man’s roaring appetite.
His mouth was hot and deep, his fingers burned into her as he stroked her back and ran them over her scalp in firm, incendiary sweeps that aroused the nerve endings clear down to her insteps. Noel, too, found herself ravenous at this long-awaited banquet. She opened her lips to his, shaking with each exquisite stroke of his tongue, her nipples growing to peaks against his chest. His hot, potent taste stirred an aching need that swirled deep in her stomach and rose in soft cries breaking through her throat.
He felt every one, answering in deep rumbling groans that vibrated through her every cell. His mellow, smoky, bark scent lit fires in her sinuses, fogged every coherent thought in her brain. When he finally released her lips, his mouth laid hot, firm kisses against the base of her throat and then circled to the back of her neck, concentrating on the very top of her vertebrae.
The Gift-Wrapped Groom Page 19
