Wyoming Winter--A Small-Town Christmas Romance

by Diana Palmer

  “Yes.” She was gasping for air, clinging, lifting to him in shivering arcs of involuntary rigor. “It’s...killing me...!”

  “Already?” he chided, bending to brush his lips over her swollen mouth. “Darlin’, we’ve barely started!”

  “Barely...? Oh!”

  He was laughing. She could hear him as she washed up and down on waves of ecstasy that brought unbelievable noises out of her. She died half a dozen times, almost lost consciousness, and still he laughed, deep in his throat, as he went from one side of the bed to the other with her in a tangle of glorious abandon that never seemed to end. Eventually they ended up on the carpet with the sheet trailing behind them as she cried out, sobbing, one last time and heard him groan as he finally shuddered to completion.

  They were both covered with sweat. Her hair was wet. She was trembling and couldn’t stop. Beside her, he lay on his back with one leg bent at the knee. Incredibly, he was still as aroused as he’d been when they started. She sat up gingerly and stared at him, awed.

  He chuckled up at her. “Come down here,” he dared her.

  “I can’t!” She was gasping. “And you can’t... You couldn’t...!”

  “If you weren’t the walking wounded, I sure as hell could,” he said. “I’ve saved it all up for eight years, and I’m still starving for you.”

  She just looked at him, fascinated. “I read a book.”

  “I’m not in it,” he assured her. He tugged her down on top of him and brushed her breasts with his lips. “I guess you’re sore.”

  She blushed. “You guess?”

  He chuckled. “All right. Come here, my new best friend, and we’ll go to sleep, since we can’t do anything else.”

  “We’re on the floor,” she noted.

  “At least we won’t fall off next time.”

  She laughed because he was outrageous. She’d never thought that intimacy would be fun as well as pleasurable. She traced his nose and bent to kiss his lips. “Where are we going to live?”

  “At the ranch.”

  “Only if your brothers live in the barn,” she said. “I’m not having them outside the door every night listening to us.”

  “They won’t have to stand outside the door. Judging from what I just heard, they could hear you with the windows closed if they stood on the town squa... Ouch!”

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” she told him drily, watching him rub the nip she’d given his thigh. “Naked men are vulnerable.”

  “And you aren’t?”

  “Now, Corrigan...!”

  She screeched and he laughed and they fell down again in a tangle, close together, and the laughter gave way to soft conversation. Eventually they even slept.

  When they got back to the ranch, the three brothers were gone and there was a hastily scrawled note on the door.

  “We’re sleeping in the bunkhouse until we can build you a house of your own. Congratulations. Champagne is in the fridge.” It was signed with love, all three brothers—and the name of the fourth was penciled in.

  “On second thought,” she said, with her arm around her husband, “maybe those boys aren’t so bad after all!”

  He tried to stop her from opening the door, but it was too late. The bucket of water left her wavy hair straight and her navy blue coat dripping. She looked at Corrigan with eyes the size of plates, her arms outstretched, her mouth open.

  Corrigan looked around her. On the floor of the hall were two towels and two new bathrobes, and an assortment of unmentionable items.

  He knew that if he laughed, he’d be sleeping in the barn for the next month. But he couldn’t help it. And after a glance at the floor—neither could she.

  * * * * *

  Be sure to check out

  Diana Palmer’s ALL THAT GLITTERS.

  Young fashion designer Ivory Keene brings her talent and passion to the big city, where she’s confronted by her new boss. Wealthy Curry Kells has never met anyone like Ivory, but the secrets of their pasts might hamper their future together...

  Keep reading to get a glimpse of

  ALL THAT GLITTERS.

  All That Glitters

  by Diana Palmer

  PROLOGUE

  THE BRIGHT TEXAS sun was hot on Ivory Keene’s short, wavy blond hair. She’d only just had it cut. Its natural wave gave it golden highlights, adding to the soft radiance of her oval face with its creamy complexion and faintly tormented warm gray eyes.

  Her youth made the woman standing on the porch, watching her, feel her age even more. It added to Marlene’s resentment toward her only child. She took an impatient draw from her cigarette with her too-red lips, wrinkled a little around the edges from years of smoking. She used concealers, but they were cheap and didn’t work. If Ivory had taken the modeling job Marlene had tried to push her into, she would have had money for expensive cosmetics. She’d coaxed and demanded and cried, but for once, she hadn’t been able to move the silly girl. Instead Ivory had managed to get a scholarship to a fashion design school in Houston and now she was determined to go there.

  “You’ve been out of high school for two years. You’ll be older than most of the other students,” Marlene argued from the porch, still hoping to keep Ivory from leaving. “Besides, you don’t even know how to set a proper table or get along in polite society,” she added meanly.

  “I’ll learn those things,” Ivory replied in her quiet drawl. “I’m not stupid.”

  I’ll have to learn everything you never taught me, Ivory thought as she stood in front of the house, watching for the neighbor who was giving her a lift to the bus station. Her mother had never been sober long enough to teach her much except how to fetch glasses and bottles and wait on her boyfriends. She felt a chill, even in the hot sun. Come on, she called silently to her neighbor, please come on, before she finds some way to stop me!

  “You don’t even own a decent dress,” her mother scoffed. She herself was wearing a nice dress, a present from her last boyfriend. Ivory’s was a homemade cotton one, an original design and nicely made, if cheap. The girl could sew, all right, but one needed more than a little talent to become a famous designer. It amused Marlene that Ivory thought she had the brains or the personality for such a career. Now, Marlene knew she could have done it herself when she was younger. Except that she’d never learned to sew, and she didn’t want to spend every waking hour working.

  Ivory’s slender hands clenched the old suitcase. “I’ll get a job. I know how to work,” she added pointedly. Her mother had always made sure that Ivory had had jobs since she had been old enough to be employed.

  The sarcasm didn’t faze Marlene, though. It was early morning, but she had already had her first drink of the day. She was moderately pleasant, for the moment. “Don’t forget to send me some of your salary,” she reminded Ivory. “You wouldn’t want me to tell all the neighbors how you walked out and left me to starve, would you?”

  Ivory wanted to ask her mother if she could possibly do any more damage to her reputation in the community than Marlene had already done, but there was no point in starting an argument now. She was so close to freedom that she could almost taste it!

  “You’ll be back,” Marlene added smugly and took another puff on the cigarette. “Without me, you’ll fall flat on your face.”

  Ivory gritted her teeth. She would not reply. She was twenty. She’d managed to finish high school in spite of having to work and in spite of her alcoholic mother. She’d tried to understand why Marlene was the way she was; she’d tried to encourage her mother to get help with her drinking problem. All her efforts had failed. There had been one or two incidents that would be hard to forgive, much less forget. In the end, she’d taken the advice of the family doctor. You can’t help someone who doesn’t think she has a problem, he told her. Get out, he said, befor
e she destroys you, too. Ivory hadn’t wanted to desert the only relative she had in the world. On the other hand, her mother was more than she could handle. She had to leave while she still could. If she could manage to get through design school, her talent might help her rise above the poverty she’d endured all her life.

  She looked down the road and thought back to her school days, to the children who had laughed at the way she lived, made fun of her clothes and her ramshackle house and her poor, sharecropper father’s illiterate drawl. They had all heard that her mother had been forced to marry Ivory’s father because she’d gotten pregnant when she was just fourteen, and that knowledge had damaged her own reputation in the community. Marlene had boyfriends, too. A little while after Ivory’s father died, her mother had taken up with one of her lovers, the town’s richest citizen, and painted her child as an immoral, ungrateful thief. Marlene had gained some respect because of her lover’s financial power; but even so, little Ivory was never invited to other children’s parties. She was the outsider. Always, it seemed, people here had laughed about her, gossiped about her. But she was young and strong. She had one chance to escape all of it and make a fresh start somewhere she wasn’t known. She was going to take it.

  “You’ll be back,” Marlene said again, with cruel satisfaction, as a car appeared on the horizon.

  Ivory’s heart leaped. Her hands were sweaty on the handle of the suitcase. She looked behind her at the dilapidated old house with its sagging porch and peeling paint, her mother in a fancy dress and high heels with too much makeup on her thin face and black color on her thin hair. Marlene had been pretty once, but now she looked like a caricature of her old self, and her blue eyes were glazed most of the time. Since her lover’s death earlier in the year, she’d started to drink more heavily. The money he’d left her was running out, too. Soon, it would be gone and she’d want someone to support her, namely, her daughter.

  Ivory was going to escape, though. She was going to get away from the smothering dependence of her mother and the contemptuous attitude of her community at last! She was going to make a name for herself. Then, one day, she’d come back here dressed in furs and glittering with diamonds, and then the people who’d made fun of her would see that she wasn’t worthless!

  The late-model Ford stopped at the front gate, raising a cloud of dust on the farm road. Their neighbor, a middle-aged man in a suit, leaned across and pushed the door open.

  “Hop in, girl, I’m late for my flight already,” he said kindly.

  “Hello, Bartley,” Marlene said sweetly, leaning in the window after Ivory had closed the door. “My, don’t you look handsome today!”

  Bartley smiled at her. “Hello, honey. You look pretty good yourself.”

  “Come over for a drink when you have a minute,” she invited. “I’m going to be all alone now that my daughter’s deserting me.”

  “Mother,” Ivory protested miserably.

  “She thinks she wants to be a fashion designer. It doesn’t bother her in the least to leave me out here all alone with nobody to look after me if I get sick,” Marlene said on a sigh.

  “You have the Blakes and the Harrises,” Ivory reminded her, “just up the road. And you’re perfectly healthy.”

  “She likes to think so,” Marlene told Bartley. “Children can be so ungrateful. Now you be sure to write, Ivory, and do try to stay out of trouble, because other people won’t be as understanding as I am about...well, about money disappearing.”

  Ivory went red in the face. She’d never been in trouble, but her mother had most of the local people convinced that her daughter stole from her and attacked her. Ivory had never been able to contradict her successfully, because Marlene had a way of laughing and agreeing with her while her eyes made a lie of everything she said. At least she’d get a chance to start over in Houston.

  “I don’t steal, mother,” Ivory declared tensely.

  Marlene smiled sweetly at Bartley and rolled her eyes. “Of course you don’t, darling!”

  “We’d better go,” Bartley said, uncomfortably restraining himself from checking to make sure his wallet was still in his hip pocket. “See you soon, Marlene.”

  “You do that, Bartley, honey,” she drawled. She patted Ivory’s arm. “Be good, dear.”

  Ivory didn’t say a word. Her mouth was tightly closed as the car pulled away. Her last sight of her mother was bittersweet, as she thought of all the pain and humiliation she’d suffered and how different everything could have been if her mother had wanted a child in the first place.

  Houston might not be perfect, but it would give Ivory a chance at a career and a brighter future. Her mother wouldn’t be there to criticize and demean her. She would assume a life of class and style that would make her forget that she’d ever lived in Harmony, Texas. Once she made her way to the top, she thought, she’d never have to look back again.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE NOVEMBER AIR was brisk and cold. The stark streetlights of the Queens neighborhood wore halos of frosty mist. The young woman, warm in her faded tweed overcoat and a white beret, sat huddled beside a small boy on the narrow steps of an apartment house that had been converted into a shelter for the homeless. She looked past the dingy faces of the buildings and the oil-stained streets. Her soft gray eyes were on the stars she couldn’t see. One day, she promised herself, she was going to reach right up through the hopelessness and grab one for herself. In fact, she was already on the way there. She’d won a national contest during her last month of design school in Houston, and first prize was a job with Kells-Meredith, Incorporated, a big clothing firm in New York City.

  “What you thinking about, Ivory?”

  She glanced down at the small, dark figure sitting at her side. His curly brown hair was barely visible under a moth-eaten gray stocking cap. His jacket was shabbier than her tweed coat and his shoes were stuffed with cardboard to cover the holes in the soles. A tooth was missing where his father had hit him in a drunken rage a year or so before the family had lost their apartment. It was a permanent tooth, and it wouldn’t grow back. But there was no money for cosmetic dentistry. There wasn’t even enough money to fill a cavity.

  “I’m thinking about a nice, warm room, Tim,” she said. She slid an affectionate arm around him and hugged him close for warmth. “Plenty of good food to eat. A car to drive. A new coat...a jacket for you,” she teased, and hugged him closer.

  “Aw, Ivory, I don’t need a coat. This one’s fine!” His black eyes twinkled as he smiled up at her.

  She remembered that smile from her first day as a volunteer at the homeless shelter, because Tim had been the first person she’d seen when she came with her friend Dee, who already worked there. Ivory had not been eager to offer her services at first, because the place brought back memories of the poverty she’d endured as a child in rural Texas. But her prejudice hadn’t lasted long. When she saw the people who were staying at the shelter, her compassion for them overcame her own bitterness.

  Tim had been sitting on these same steps that first day. He and his mother had been staying at the homeless shelter along with his two sisters. It was a cold day and he wore only a torn jersey jacket. Ivory had sat down and talked with him while she waited for Dee. Afterward, when Dee had asked casually if Ivory would like to volunteer a day a week to work there with her, she had agreed. Now, she almost always found Tim waiting for her when she came on Saturdays. Sometimes she brought him candy, sometimes she had a more useful present, such as a pair of mittens or a cap.

  Tim’s mother loved him and did all she could for him; but she also had a toddler and a nursing baby, and her situation, like that of so many, was all but hopeless. She had a low-paying job and the shelter did, at least, provide a home.

  “I would like a room,” Tim mused, interrupting her thoughts. He’d propped his face in his hands and was dreaming. “And a cat. They don’t let u
s have cats at the shelter, you know, Ivory.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I made a new friend today,” he said after a companionable silence had passed.

  “Did you?”

  “He stays at the shelter sometimes. His name’s Jake.” He sighed. “He used to be a bundle boy in a manufacturing company. What’s a bundle boy, Ivory?”

  “Someone who carries bundles of cut cloth to be sewn,” she explained. She worked in the fashion sector. It wasn’t the job she’d dreamed of, but it paid her way.

  “Well, the place he worked closed down and they moved his job to Mexico,” Tim told Ivory. “He can’t get another job on account of he can’t read and write. He shoots up.”

  Her arm around him tightened. “I hope you don’t think that’s cool,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that. My mama says it’s nasty and you can get AIDS from dirty needles.” He glanced at her with a worried look that she didn’t see. “Is that true, Ivory?”

  “Hmm? Oh, AIDS from needles? Well, if you used a dirty needle, maybe. That’s something you shouldn’t have to worry about,” she added firmly, thinking how sad it was that an eight-year-old should know so much of the bad side of life.

  He sighed. “Ivory, this is a real bad time to be poor.”

  She smoothed a wrinkle in his cap and wished for the hundredth time that she could do more for Tim and his family. After paying the rent and utilities for her own apartment and sending money home to Marlene, there wasn’t a lot left. Even though she was comfortable now, she remembered the hopelessness of being poor, with nothing to look forward to except more deprivation.

  “There’s never a good time to be poor, I’m afraid, but, listen, Mrs. Horst down the hall from me gave me a plate full of gingerbread and I brought some today. Would you like a slice of it, and some milk?”

  Tim’s face brightened. “Ivory, that would be nice!”

  Kells-Meredith Incorporated was on Seventh Avenue in the garment district. It was an old business that Curry Kells, the newest mover and shaker in the New York financial world, had bought out and redesigned. Ivory had never seen him in person, but the senior design staff held him in awe. He didn’t have much to do with the day-to-day working of the company, spending most of his day at his corporate office on Wall Street. He looked in occasionally, to see that everything was in working order; but since Ivory had been working for the company, she hadn’t been around during his rare visits.