LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

grew gentle and he patted the space beside him on the leather couch. She crossed the room and sat down, then tucked her head against his shoulder.

      “I know, but I worry.” The den was one of her favorite rooms in the house—and the oldest. She loved the old leather furniture and her mother-in-law’s braided rug; she had even grown fond of the elk antlers that graced the wall above the fireplace mantel. The fieldstone fireplace had kept generations of ranchers warm at night and was the place where the boys always hung their Christmas stockings, even though the tree stood in a corner of the much grander living room across the hall. She’d intended to get the tree after Will returned, so her sons would humor her and help decorate it.

      “And I miss George.” She’d loved that man since her thirteenth birthday when he delivered the collie pup her parents had gotten for her from the Stone ranch. He’d been gone eight years and sometimes it felt like forever.

      “Yep. G.W. was a good man.” He’d been “G.W.,” short for George William, to a generation of older men who’d known Jenna’s father-in-law as George and called his son by his initials to avoid confusion.

      “He’d know what to do. Will would have told him all about this girl.” She felt the beginning of a headache coming on.

      “If there was something to tell,” her uncle reminded her.

      “I just wish I knew what was going on. I called Will but there was no answer. I got his damn voice mail again.”

      “He’ll call back.”

      “He’d better do it soon. It’s getting late and I wanted to warn him about the storm.”

      “As if you have to tell a cattleman about the weather.”

      She chuckled. “I have a few more things to talk about than the weather. Such as, is he serious about Melanie and where is the father of that baby?”

      “She’s a pretty little thing, that baby is. Doesn’t cry much.”

      “I thought she was my granddaughter when they walked in the door tonight. Part of me still wishes she was.”

      “Nothing wrong with wishful thinking,” the old man declared. “But there isn’t a Stone man—dead or alive—who wouldn’t have married the mother of his child. Your Will’s cut from the same cloth.

      “Jared, too.” Uncle Joe nodded his agreement. Jenna lifted her head to look at him. “You saw his face tonight, didn’t you?”

      “He passed her the potatoes.”

      Jenna sighed and lifted herself off the couch. She crossed the room and added another log to the fire. Her temples began to throb in earnest. “I think I’m going to take some aspirin and go to bed.”

      “You do that, hon. I think I’ll wait for Jared to finish up in the barn and see if I can get him to play a hand of rummy. Where’s our houseguest? In bed for the night?”

      “Settled in with the baby upstairs.” She stepped over to the window and pulled the drape back. The lights were still on in the large barn, meaning Jared was taking his sweet time doing chores. “Damn snow.”

      Joe picked up his newspaper. “Go to bed and quit your worryin’.”

      Good advice, of course, but easier said than done. She crossed the foyer and, careful to keep from making too much noise, headed up the stairs. Tomorrow she would decorate the banister with pine boughs and big red bows. Maybe Melanie would like to help. She seemed like the kind of young woman who enjoyed being useful, but her presence here could be a problem.

      She couldn’t explain it to Joe. Not this. Jared had looked at Melanie just like his father had looked at her that night when she was sixteen and had been alone in the horse barn with him. George had kissed her—really kissed her—for the first time. The secret love of her life finally looked at her as if he’d never seen anyone so beautiful. And she was not a raving beauty, not then and not ever. But George—all grown up at the ripe old age of twenty-three—thought she was. And looked at her as if he wanted to do all those things men did with women in the romance books she’d loved reading. On her eighteenth birthday, two weeks after she’d graduated from high school, they spent a honeymoon weekend in Great Falls and she’d discovered that books couldn’t compare with the real thing.

      Jenna paused at the top of the stairs. The upper level was shaped like a T, with her wing on the left, the boys’ rooms on the right and the long corridor lined with guest rooms. She used to joke that she could open a bed-and-breakfast and make extra money, if all else failed. A hundred years or so ago the Stones used all this space, but now it seemed wasteful to let them go empty. She heard the radio behind Bitty’s closed door, but it wasn’t likely to disturb the others, since Bitty’s was the first room off the stairs. Uncle Joe and Melanie were opposite each other four doors down, with Melanie using the guest room that had its own bathroom.

      The baby was fussing. Jenna paused and wondered if she should knock and offer to help, but decided that the young mother could no doubt use some privacy. It wasn’t as if little Beth was her own granddaughter, after all.

      And it wasn’t as if the pretty dark-haired woman was Jared’s “special” guest. Her oldest son, far more serious and quiet than Will, didn’t lose his heart easily. In fact, she wondered if he ever had.

      Jenna entered her bedroom, recently redecorated in shades of white and cream, and prayed neither one of her boys would get hurt.

      EVEN WHEN SHE LAY SNUGGLED under the covers, Melanie still felt as if she was on the train. Not that she’d been horizontal under a pink-and-purple flannel comforter on the train, of course, but when she closed her eyes she could almost feel the rumble of the tracks under the bed.

      Beth fussed in her cradle, so Melanie stretched her arm down to rock the little pine bed. Jared, strong and silent and oh-so-capable, had carried it down from the attic, wiped it clean and proceeded to fold blankets to create a soft mattress.

      He’d said one word. “There.”

      She’d thanked him and he’d stridden out of her bedroom and shut the door behind him as if he wished she’d stayed put, behind a closed door, until it was time for her to go home. Obviously he thought she was here to claim his brother and he didn’t approve. And yet he’d been kind to her. Once again she’d had the strangest urge to throw herself into his arms and lean on that wide chest and hang on for dear life.

      Hormones, of course, were her major problem. Not feelings of attraction for Will’s older brother. She blamed everything else on hormones, why not this?

      Mel eyed the small brass clock on the nightstand. After midnight, which meant she’d been asleep for almost two hours. Beth’s fussing meant she would want to nurse again soon and Melanie felt the familiar heaviness in her breasts that came every four hours or so.

      Sure enough, Beth let out a screech that wouldn’t be appeased by the rocking of her bed, and Mel scooped her up into the soft double bed, plumped the pillows against the oak headboard and fed her while snow pelted the windows on the far side of the room.

      She had made the right decision by coming here. No one here felt sorry for her—if she didn’t count understandable sympathy about traveling by train with an infant. No one in this self-sufficient family felt guilty about celebrating Christmas while Melanie mourned a fiancé who died nine months ago when a plane crashed into a Kansas cornfield. No concerned relative with worried eyes had whispered, “But what are you going to do now?”

      And while she loved her aunt and uncle and their daughter, Dylan, who was most likely furious with her, she didn’t intend to ruin their Christmas.

      She didn’t intend to ruin anyone’s Christmas.

      FOR ONE SPINE-CHILLING SECOND Jared thought the house was haunted. The soundless moving of the rocking chair, the light-colored gown, the glare of snow coming in through the living room windows and a sudden keening cry all added up to a good reason for his heart to end up in his throat.

      Just

Скачать книгу