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He was a man about to turn forty and he’d spent the past eleven years raising two kids on his own, and he might not be a perfect father or a perfect man but he tried his best. He did. And while he appreciated his new housekeeper’s concern, he didn’t have time to be babied, and he certainly wasn’t about to explain himself. Not to his brothers, his dad, and especially not to a staggeringly pretty woman from California who was now living in his house, under his roof, bending and leaning and doing all sorts of things with her incredibly appealing body, all the while humming as she went about her work as if she were Snow White or Mary Poppins.
Most annoying to have a beautiful housekeeper. He would never have hired her if he’d realized she was so damn pretty. He didn?
?t want pretty in his house. He didn’t want to be tempted. He had a ranch to manage and two children who would be home from boarding school for their holidays in another week and he couldn’t afford to get distracted by a pretty face or a shapely body.
His gaze narrowed as it swept Harley Diekerhoff’s long, lean legs and gently rounded hips before skimming her small waist, then lifting to her face. “Always careful,” he repeated, and stalked out through the kitchen door to the back porch.
Harley Diekerhoff might be a perfect cook and housekeeper, but she was also a temptation, and that was a problem he didn’t need.
CHAPTER TWO
Harley rang the bell at six o’clock to let the ranch hands know dinner was ready. Brock had trained his hands to come to the main kitchen to help carry their dinner to the bunkhouse. One by one she handed off the various dishes—the platter of sliced flank steak, a substantial casserole of cheesy potato gratin, two loaves of warm buttered French bread, a bowl of green beans with almonds and bacon, a hefty green salad, and an enormous chocolate sheet cake with a gallon of milk for dessert.
Bundled in her winter coat and mittens, she followed the parade of ranch hands through the swirling snow, careful not to drop the oversized sheet cake with its thick chocolate icing. Brock said the hands didn’t need dessert every night. She disagreed. A man always needed something sweet before bed. Made a man feel cared for.
At least that’s how she’d been raised.
Young Lewis Dilford, one of the newer hands, held the bunk house’s front door open for her. She stomped her fleece-lined all-weather boots on the mat, knocking off snow before stepping into the bunkhouse. A fire burned hotly in the cast iron stove in the corner.
The bunk house was actually the original log cabin on the property, and on her first day at Copper Mountain Ranch, JB, Brock’s ranch foreman, gave Harley a tour of the outbuildings, including a walk through the bunk house.
JB told her that when Brock had bought the ranch thirteen years ago his plan had been to tear the old log cabin down and salvage the logs for a future project, but when he discovered that the walls and flooring were still sound, and all the cabin really needed was a new roof and some modernizing, he gutted the one-bedroom cabin, adding electricity and plumbing, a small indoor bathroom, and a working kitchen.
With the exception of some of the electrical work, Brock had done all the remodeling himself. It’d taken him a year to complete the bunk house, but he liked being busy, and it gave him something to do during the summers with the longer days of sunlight.
She glanced around the main room which was both sitting room and dining room. Chairs were pushed back against the wall and the pine dining table was already set.
“It looks nice,” she said, complimenting their efforts to make the table look nice with the tablecloth she’d given them.
Her first two nights here they’d ignored the table cloth she’d brought them. Apparently Maxine didn’t care if they used a tablecloth or placemats.
Some of the men weren’t sure they needed to use fancy stuff like table cloths, either. But Harley said it just might make dinner a little nicer, and while she couldn’t make them use a table cloth, it was their dinner, after all, and they ought to enjoy themselves. Feel good about themselves.
The next night she entered the bunkhouse and found the table covered with the cloth and five place settings of silverware and plates.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. They were watching her face and her quick surprised smile told them everything they needed to know. Since then they used the table cloth every night, and lately, they all washed up and combed their hair, too.
The lost boys of Copper Mountain, she thought, smiling a little as she looked at them now.
“I hope you are hungry,” she said, placing the cake and the milk on the table next to all the other dishes filling the center of the table. Maxine used to leave all the food on the buffet, but Harley put everything on the table so the men could stay seated and serve themselves family style. “I think I made too much.”
Lewis smiled shyly as he took a seat on one of the benches. “Can never have too much, Miss Harley.”
She smiled back, aware that he was the youngest in a family of seven, and from what she’d gathered, there hadn’t always been enough to eat by the time it was his turn. “Don’t worry about bringing the dishes back tonight. Leave them in your sink and I’ll get them in the morning.”
“That’s not the deal, Miss Harley, and you know it,” thin, dark bearded Al Mancetti said, boots thudding as he sat down opposite Lewis. He’d been here on the ranch for about five years now and tended to be on the quiet side, but apparently he was one of the hardest workers. “We’ll bring everything back. You done enough. And we’re grateful. You take care of us real well.”
“It’s my pleasure,” she answered with a smile. She liked these men. She enjoyed taking care of them. They appreciated her and that felt good, too. Normally she left after they had everything but tonight she lingered, mustering the courage to bring up her concerns about their boss. “It’s bad outside,” she said after a moment.
“Yes, ma’am,” JB answered, from his spot at the head of the table. “Biggest storm of the year so far. Four feet in the last couple hours alone.”
That wasn’t reassuring at all, she thought. “Mr. Sheenan’s out there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” JB agreed.
She glanced out the window at the dark night with the luminous snow reflecting ghostly white beyond the window. “He shouldn’t have gone alone.”
“He shouldn’t have gone at all,” JB agreed, “but you don’t tell him that.”
Her brows knit. “Shouldn’t someone go look for him?”
JB grimaced. “He’d have our heads for that, and I like my head where it is, on my shoulders.”
A guffaw of masculine laughter sounded around the table, and even Harley smiled faintly before her smile faded. “He could be in trouble,” she said hesitantly.
“Sheenan can take of himself,” Paul, the youngest hand said. He was close friends with Lewis and when they weren’t on the ranch, they competed on the rodeo circuit, traveling together whenever possible. Neither of them made good money on the circuit though, so they needed their jobs here on Copper Mountain Ranch to pay bills. “Nobody would mess with him. At least nobody in his right mind.”
Heads nodded and Harley glanced at the faces of the ranch hands.
“What about bears?” she asked.
“What about them?” Paul retorted, leaning across the table to stab his fork into the sliced steak. “It’s winter. They’re hibernating.”
“And wolves?”
“Sheenan has a gun.”
Harley’s lips pursed, even more alarmed.
Paul and Lewis laughed.
“Don’t you worry, Miss Harley,” JB said, using the nickname the hands had given her as Miss Diekerhoff was apparently too much of a mouthful, requiring too much effort. “The boss grew up in this part of Montana. He knows what he’s doing, and he’ll be back before bedtime. Nine or ten and he’ll be safe in his bed. Mark my words.”
Harley returned to the house and ate her dinner at the oversized island counter that filled the center of the kitchen, the fire warming her back, somewhat soothed by JB’s assurance that their boss would be back by nine or ten.
But nine came and went, with no sign of Brock.
And then ten came, and still no sign of him.
Harley dimmed the downstairs lights before heading up to her room, which would be a third floor room if there was a real floor. Instead it was a room carved out from beneath the massive wood beams of the steeply sloping roof. The walls were all lined with planks of weathered, recycled wood—boards taken from old Montana barns—and her bed sat between two low antique chests with matching antique brass lamps. The bed linens were a neutral taupe on cream stripe, which added the rustic feel. The only real color was the deep crimson wool carpet on the hardwood floor. The pop of red
made Harley smile, but tonight as she climbed into bed, she didn’t feel much like smiling.
It was hard to relax and fall asleep with knots in her stomach. She knew too well that accidents happened, and even smart, strong people could be overly confident of their skills. How could she sleep, picturing Brock lying buried in the snow, slowly freezing to death?
As her bedside clock showed eleven, Harley wondered if she should call the police, or maybe someone in Brock’s family.
His father wasn’t that far, another ranch twenty minutes south in Paradise Valley, and he had four brothers, although none lived in the area at the moment. But surely one of them would want to know that Brock was missing.
Surely something should be done.
She left bed to pace her room, a long black oversized cashmere sweater around her shoulders for warmth, with the antique wool carpet soft beneath her bare feet.
She was still pacing when she heard an engine outside. A truck was approaching the house. As she headed for the window, bright headlight beams pierced the crack in her curtains, sending an arc of white light across her dark bedroom.
Someone was here.
She pushed aside the curtain, and peered down. A big four-by-four truck with snow tires pulled into the circular drive in front of the house. The truck parked, headlights turned off.
She watched as the driver’s door opened, and then the passenger door, too. A man with fair hair wearing a heavy sheepskin coat stepped down from the driver’s side of the truck and two children climbed more slowly from the passenger side. All three tramped through the thick snow that had piled up since she shoveled the walkway late in the afternoon.
It was after eleven at night. Who would be arriving now? And with kids?
Harley was at the top of the second floor landing when the doorbell rang.
Downstairs, she opened the door, and blinked at the bite of cold wind. It’d stopped snowing hours ago but tiny flakes swirled and trembled around them as the frigid gust of air sent the powdery snow tumbling from the trees to the ground.
