Justified Deception (Prequel: Dancing Moon Ranch Series) Page 5

  Matt, standing in a pool of ochre light beneath the porch fixture, watched her solemnly. The directness of his gaze was like an intimate touch, the awareness of his physical presence making her feel disarmed and vulnerable and desirable. For a moment, she basked in the notion that life could again be fulfilling. She imagined how it might have been in another time and another place when she'd still clung to a young girl's dreams—the stranger across a room, a discreet glance, an engaging smile, an unspoken promise of love, and she'd walk into his open arms...

  Warm tears filled her eyes, tears of longing for something she dared not wish, for fanciful notions and impossible dreams and wanting a man she could not love. But when Beth was taken from her, it was as if all capacity to love had died. There were no words to describe the shock, the anger, the terrible emptiness that would not go away...

  A tear slipped down her cheek, and another, and before she could react, Matt closed the gap between them. Peering down at her, he cradled her face in his palms and brushed the tears away with the pads of his thumbs. "What is it, Ruth? What are you holding inside?"

  Her throat felt scratchy and raw, and she had to swallow before words could come. "It's nothing," she said. "I was just feeling a little melancholy... homesick, I suppose."

  "What I saw goes deeper. Was it a man?"

  Ruth nodded. A small lie. But there was no way she could tell Matt the truth. Everything about her life at the moment was a lie, her name, her contrived background, her reason for being there. The only truth was that someone had stolen Beth and that someone could be Matt.

  Another tear rolled down her cheek... and another...

  "Come here." Matt took her in his arms and held her against the firm wall of his chest, and she didn't try to break free. She couldn't. If she did, she knew her knees would buckle. It felt good to be held, to hear the beat of another human heart close to her own, to forget there existed a world beyond where she was. "Is that why you wore shapeless clothes, so you wouldn't attract a man?" he said against the top of her head, his deep voice seeming to resonate through her.

  Ruth sniffled, inhaling the musky scent of him, of horse and earth and leather. "You thought my clothes were shapeless?" she said, because she couldn't think of anything else, finding his nearness disconcerting.

  His arms tightened protectively around her. "Only the clothes," Matt replied, "because what I'm holding is definitely not shapeless. When I first saw you I had no way of knowing you had a small waist and nice hips and other curves that would turn a man's head."

  "I'm not interested in catching a man," she said, bracing her hands against his chest. "Right now my only goal is to be the best nanny I can be and win over Annie. And I'm sorry about what just happened. Sometimes I get a little emotional, but it doesn't last long."

  Matt curved a finger beneath her chin and lifted, forcing her to look at him. Regarding her with a directness that was unsettling, he said, "You don't need to be sorry, Ruth, or feel ashamed with me. Not now. Not ever. Trust me. I'm your friend."

  For several seconds she was aware of nothing around her but the erratic beating of her heart, and the tightness in her chest, and the earnest eyes that seemed to be peering into her soul, sincere eyes that asked nothing of her but her trust...

  Her trust in the man who might have taken Beth.

  "I can't... I mean...."

  "You can't what? Trust me?"

  "No.... Yes.... That is...." Noises swarmed around her then—wind rustling through leaves, thorns scraping against windows, muffled voices in the bunkhouse...

  Abruptly, she backed out of his arms. "I really have to... get to bed. You see... I'm very tired." She slipped past him and dashed into the house, vowing not to let him touch her again.

  …Trust me. I'm your friend...

  The words lingered…

  No, she reaffirmed later that night as she peered out the bedroom window at the eerie crisscrossing of fences bathed in moonlight. She would not trust him. Nor would she have silly thoughts of walking into his arms. She would also forget how giddy it made her feel when he winked at her, or how his smile made her heart flutter, or how secure she'd felt in the circle of his arms, the beat of his heart in cadence with her own. She would forget it all. She had to. His nearness stripped her mind of all logic and her body of all defenses, and she must not lose sight of her goal.

  CHAPTER 4

  ...feeling a little melancholy... not interested in catching a man... sometimes get a little emotional... doesn't last long....

  Ruth's words kept whispering to Matt in the dusky interior of the stable, her face coming between him and the tin of saddle soap and the rag he was busily daubing at his saddle, not because his saddle needed soaping, but because he was trying to rid himself of restless energy.

  He breathed in crisp morning air heavy with the heady odor of hay and grain and aged barn boards, and for the umpteenth time, tried to decide what it was about Ruth that shattered his defenses and wrapped itself around his heart. He'd been trying all morning to figure it out, and all morning the elusive thing evaded him. He'd run the gamut from believing it was innate male helplessness when confronted with irrational female tears, to Ruth's simple acknowledgement that she was crying over a man. Whatever it was that laid his heart bare, it came at him silently and stealthily, like a shadow moving in the night. It happened on the porch, during the eerie silence when Ruth turned and saw him watching. In that spellbound moment he'd heard her unspoken promise and saw the smile she hadn't smiled. And when her eyes filled with tears and he took her in his arms and heard her soft sobs, and felt the beating of her heart beneath his, the elusive thing closed around his heart and refused to let go.

  Hearing footsteps, he looked up to find Seth, whose eyes shifted between the saddle and the rag in his hand. "Didn't you soap that saddle yesterday?" Seth asked, perplexed.

  "Might have." Putting muscle into the job, Matt continued soaping the saddle, while wishing Seth would leave. Solitude was what he wanted, a time to sort through his feelings and try to make sense of them. All his life he'd prided himself on his ability to take control of things, make order out of chaos, rid his mind of the extraneous and focus on the relevant. But for the first time in hell-and-gone, he felt that control slipping.

  Seth leaned a shoulder against the wall and folded his arms. "Keeping a respectable distance from the new nanny?"

  Without looking up, Matt said, "What's it to you?"

  "Nothing," Seth replied, "but when you left her in the corral with Dynamite yesterday, she looked mad enough to spit."

  In his mind’s eye, Matt confronted a pair of incensed brown eyes, a mouth pressed into a slash, a snug-fitting shirt clinging to every female curve as Ruth's chest rose and fell in agitation, "She was."

  "What did you do? Proposition her?"

  Matt jammed the cloth against the saddle. "Find something else to do because right now you’re irritating the hell out of me," he said scrubbing with short, choppy movements.

  "You're pricklier than a horny toad," Seth said. "Or maybe you're just hot for a lady who sleeps with her legs crossed."

  "Stop being a horse’s ass," Matt said in a dry tone.

  Seth gave him a sidelong glance. "You aren't, are you? Hot for the lady?"

  "If I was, pal, you'd be the last to know." Matt moved around to the opposite side of the saddle, presenting his back to Seth.

  "She's not exactly like you described," Seth's words came from behind. "Fact is, she comes across as anything but a sexless old maid. You're losing your touch, boss. You're usually pretty good at sizing up women but this time you were dead wrong."

  Matt couldn't refute it. Ruth had seemed like a sexless old maid at first. But when she walked into the kitchen and took him by surprise, with her flushed face and tight-fitting shirt, and hip-hugging jeans, he couldn't deny, she'd made him more aware of the woman than the prim nanny he'd thought her to be. "She's Annie's nanny, that's all," he said. "I feel nothing for her but a hell of a lot of grati
tude."

  And affection and tenderness and protection.

  A strange and perplexing combination of feelings. What he couldn't figure out was the totally illogical reason why he should feel anything at all for a woman he'd only just met. Or why he couldn't shake her from his mind, no matter how hard he tried.

  "And Annie? How does she like her new nanny?" Seth asked.

  Matt let out a short, ironic laugh. "You know Annie. With her it's always a rocky start. But she'll come around with Ruth. Fact is, I'd bet my last buck Annie's already starting to cozy up..."

  ***

  "Annie, stop it!" Ruth grabbed the dresser drawer before Annie could dump everything on the floor to join the contents of two other drawers. Annie had been testing her all morning, and Ruth was through cajoling and conceding.

  "It's my room," Annie scoffed. "I can do whatever I want in it."

  "Oh no, you can't!" Ruth shoved the drawer shut and stood in front of the dresser.

  "Yes I can!" Annie climbed onto the bed and started jumping up and down.

  "Stop it this instant!" Ruth cried. "You'll fall." But when she reached for Annie, Annie jumped down and raced to the drawer and yanked it open again.

  Cursing under her breath, Ruth shut the drawer while Annie was pulling clothes out, trapping a shirt. "It took me thirty minutes to put this room together and I'm not going to let you trash it in five! Now pick up those clothes and put them back in the drawer!"

  "No!" Annie braced her hands on her hips. "And you can't say you'll pull off the Kens' heads either because I hid the Kens where you'll never, ever find them. So there."

  "Annie, I'm not going to put up with this. Now, I'm going to count, and when I get to ten, I'll expect your clothes to be put away. One... two... three... four...."

  In a sing-song voice, Annie said, while springing up and down on the bed, "I'm not going to pick them up and you can't make me, ha ha ha,.. ha ha ha."

  "No, I suppose I can't," Ruth said. "But I don't have to keep picking them up either." She turned and unlatched the window and raised it wide open.

  Annie stopped jumping and eyed her, dubiously. "What are you gonna do?"

  "This." Ruth scooped up an armful of clothes off the floor and heaved them out the window. They fell to the yard below. She followed with another armful, and another.

  Annie shrugged. "Daddy’ll be real mad at you for throwing my clothes away."

  "We'll see."

  Annie gave a little sniff of disgust, went to her toy box, and started tossing out toys.

  "Oh, no you don't!" Ruth cried. "Put those back!"

  Annie ignored her, continuing to launch toys into the air.

  Ruth positioned herself between Annie and the toy box. "Fine. If that's the way you want it—" She scooped up the toys and tossed them back into the toy box then dragged the box out of the room and into the hallway.

  "Where are you taking my toys?" Annie called after her.

  "Out to the pickup," Ruth yelled back. "Since you don't care anything about them, maybe the poor kids in town will. This way, you won't have to pick them up and neither will I." She dragged the toy box along the hallway, bumped it down the stairs, pushed it out the front door, tugged it across the porch and down the front walkway, then dumped the contents into the bed of Matt's pickup truck. She hauled the toy box back up to Annie's room, where she found Annie peering out the window in disbelief.

  Ruth dusted her hands together. "If you decide you want your things back, you may go down and get them and put them where they belong. But if you don't, it makes no difference to me because they'll go to the kids in town and I won't have to pick them up." She marched out of Annie's room and into her own room, shutting the door with more force than she'd intended. Standing at the window, she peered down at the scattering of clothes below and the pile of toys in the back of the pickup, frustration and anger stinging her eyes. She'd behaved no better than Annie. But Annie was only six. Maybe she should go down and pick it all up...

  Stand firm… don't let her bully you...

  The whole, stressful episode had been a combination of noncompliance on Annie's part and nerves on hers...

  You're just tired and edgy...

  Of course she was tired and edgy. She'd spent half the night reliving her intimate encounter with Matt on the porch. Matt looked at her with a directness that was as unsettling as it had been provocative, and she knew, as surely as she knew the sun would rise at dawn, that if he'd tried to kiss her out there on the porch, beneath the golden light, while he held her in his arms, she would have let him...

  Her jaws clenched. Stupid, idiotic, fool of a women. She was at an isolated ranch, cut off from the nearest town by miles of long, dusty road, because the man who'd employed her might have also stolen her child—a man who insisted his daughter be homeschooled for reasons that made no sense, unless he was hiding something that Annie might reveal. And she mustn't lose sight of her objective, which was to figure out a way to get to town to order DNA testing kits and have them delivered to her at the ranch without anyone knowing. In the meantime, she needed to confirm that Annie was adopted and find her birth certificate.

  She stopped her restless pacing and stared at the closed door to the bedroom. Maybe she could glean information from Edith, while also learning something about handling one unruly little girl. Stepping into the hallway, she peeked in on Annie and found her sitting in the middle of the bed, her face a combination of perplexity and deviousness. Deciding to hold firm about the clothes and toys, she headed downstairs to the kitchen.

  She found Edith standing over a cutting board, a paring knife in her hand. Edith glanced back at her. "I saw the boys lining the fence yesterday like a rodeo was about to begin, and when I learned what they were up to, I had a notion to go out there and whip the lot of them," she said, while slicing a spiral of skin off a potato. "But don't pay them no mind. They're nothing more than a bunch of overgrown boys."

  "You're right about that," Ruth said. "Matt tells me JT and Tanner are your sons."

  Edith's flashed a bright smile. "Yep. They may be too big to smack," she said, shaking the knife, "but they're not too big for a good tongue lashing."

  Ruth chuckled. "I'm sorry you didn't do that yesterday. I would have enjoyed it."

  Edith quartered the potato and dumped the chunks into a big enameled pot of water on the stove, then reached for another potato. "When my boys were little," she said, paring out a potato eye, "they were about the sweetest pair I ever laid eyes on. My heart near burst with love. Then they grew and got headstrong and mouthy, and although I still loved them, there were times when I didn't like them." Her hand paused, and she looked up, eyes contemplative. "Funny how that is, a momma loving, but not liking, her boys."

  Edith's words were like an awakening, lifting something weighty from Ruth's mind. Could she possibly love Annie, her own little Beth, and not like her? Could the sweet little toddler who'd cuddled in her lap and pressed her little hand to her cheek and said, 'Wuv voo,' have become a mouthy six-year-old with a mind of her own? A child she could love with all her heart, but not always like? It was a curiously gratifying notion, one she desperately wanted to embrace.

  Hearing footsteps, she looked toward the hallway and saw Annie scurrying past, arms filled with clothes and toys. Ruth bit back a smile. She shouldn't gloat, but it was almost impossible to keep from feeling smug about her minor victory. However, while Annie was busy retrieving her things, it would give her a chance to learn a few facts about Annie's past from Edith.

  Trying not to sound as if she were prying, she said, offhandedly, "Annie seems to really adore her father, and there's no doubt she's the light in her daddy's eye."

  Edith looked up and smiled. "She is that. As far as he's concerned the sun rises and sets on Annie. They're like two peas in a pod."

  "Does Annie have friends to play with around here?" Ruth asked, wanting to lead into a discussion about homeschooling, and Matt's reason to do so.

  "There are
one or two kids down the road a ways," Edith replied, "but she doesn't see them very often. Still, she's about the busiest little person I know."

  "Yes, she does seem that way," Ruth said. "Since there are children down the road, doesn't the school bus come out this way?"

  "Oh sure. It picks up the kids down the road and turns around at the entrance gate to the Kincaid," Edith said.

  Ruth pondered that for a few moments before commenting, "Matt said Annie would be homeschooled. Wouldn't it be better for her to be where there were kids her age to interact with? She's so isolated here."

  Edith's brows gathered as she replied, "Matt's set on keeping her here and it's not my place to question. Homeschooling's not so unusual in ranch country. And the only high school's a boarding school a hundred miles away."

  Ruth could understand some justification in homeschooling if the school bus didn't come, but since it did, that made even less sense. After mulling that over some, she said, "What caused the breakup of the marriage?"

  "Don't really know," Edith replied. "Matt never talks about it." Giving a little shrug, she added, "I've always thought it had something to do with adopting Annie."

  Ruth stared at Edith unblinking, heart pounding. Then in a voice barely audible, she said, "Annie's... adopted?"

  Edith nodded. "Matt's wife couldn't have children. At least that's what she claimed. But I figured she didn't want any, her wanting a singing career and all. It wouldn't have surprised me if she was on birth control pills, all the while acting like she was crying over not being able to have a child. Matt was broken up too, got the notion that adopting would fix the marriage. Then one day he just showed up with Annie..."

  Although Edith continued talking, Ruth heard nothing after the words, just showed up with Annie. Images of Matt snatching Beth whirled in her head. Surely he wouldn't steal a child. But it made no difference in the scheme of things whether Matt took Beth himself, or got her through a black-market agency, he was harboring a child who wasn't his. But, by whatever means he came to have Annie, it was a heady reminder of how powerful the Kincaid family was...