Rancher's Wife - Anne Marie Winston

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over his head despite a severe cut that revealed his ears. Handsome in a hard, weathered way that the picture-perfect actors she worked with could never achieve. High cheekbones cast deep shadows over the dimples in his lean cheeks. His mouth was partially concealed by a thick mustache, but she could tell that he wasn’t smiling. She was equally aware of his scent—a fresh masculine soap mingling with the unmistakable smell of healthy male vigor.

      “What are you doing running around the house in the middle of the night?” His voice was deep and gruff and not particularly friendly.

      She braced herself mentally. “I couldn’t sleep. I made myself a cup of tea.” She was annoyed at the timorous quality of her voice, but darn it, he’d scared her. Belatedly she realized she was still holding his forearm. She let go and stepped back a pace, straightening her robe.

      Silver eyes the color of new coins watched her fingers pull together the gaping edges of her robe, then trailed down over the rest of her body before leisurely coming back to her face. She hadn’t noticed the unusual color of his eyes earlier today. They were striking eyes on a man or a woman. On this man... She became aware that they were inspecting her with a thoroughness that made her very conscious of her own lack of attire.

      Angel held the silky fabric closed with one hand and summoned her poise. “If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Kincaid...”

      “No.” He didn’t move.

      She lifted her head, fixing him with a haughty stare, one eyebrow raised. “I beg your pardon?”

      “I’m sorry if I hurt you today,” he said.

      His tone was so grudging that she nearly laughed aloud as her momentary sense of alarm passed. “Dulcie made you promise to apologize,” she guessed, and was rewarded when he shifted his gaze to the floor.

      “I really am sorry,” he repeated. “I’m not in the habit of treating strangers, especially women, like that, but I thought...it looked to me as if you were trying to kidnap Beth Ann.”

      “I understand your concern,” she said. And she did. If she had thought someone was luring her child away, she’d have reacted in much the same manner.

      “I doubt you do.” His voice was cool, yet she heard a thread of what sounded like desperation in it. “My ex-wife is Jada Barrington.”

      Jada Barrington! Even in Hollywood, the woman’s reputation for excess and self-indulgence was legendary.

      “I see you know her.”

      “I know of her,” she stressed. “Believe me, we don’t frequent the same circles.”

      He continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “She didn’t have the time or the patience to deal with an infant, but now she thinks I’m just going to hand over my child to her so she can play the role of devoted mother whenever she isn’t too busy.”

      The bitterness and anger came through clearly, and she began to see why he was so abrupt with her. Jada Barrington was an actress who worked in television. While her current series was excellent and she had a large following, she was widely known to be a difficult actress to work with as well as a wild woman in her time offscreen. Angel had made her name in movies but Day probably equated them as the same brand of trouble. Perhaps he even thought Jada had sent her!

      “You don’t—”

      But he cut off her response. “I’m not telling you this to elicit sympathy. I’m telling you because now that you’re here, you’re as responsible as everyone else for Beth Ann’s safety. If you see anyone who doesn’t belong on this ranch at any time, you let me know immediately.”

      So he didn’t suspect her of being in league with his ex-wife. In fact, he hadn’t mentioned her career at all. Which was just the way she wanted it. Dulcie must have given him his orders. She nodded. “I’ll only be here for two weeks,” she reminded him.

      Then the concern that she’d felt since she’d seen the child’s pinched white face after the scene in the yard came back. “You know, Mr. Kincaid, behaving as you did in front of Beth Ann this afternoon can’t be good for her. You don’t want to make her terrified of strangers. Surely there’s some middle ground. Perhaps you could even stage some ‘safe’ experiences with strange people so that she doesn’t grow up fearing every face in the crowd.”

      Day’s expression would have been amusing if she hadn’t been the target of the ire apparent on his face. “If I need advice, I’ll ask for it, Miss Vandervere. Right now I suggest that you return to your room and get some sleep. We rise early and work hard around here. If you’re planning on spending any time with Dulcie, you’ll have to do the same.”

      * * *

      Late in the morning, Day parked his big pickup truck in front of the drugstore in Deming. He’d already been by the feed store, the grocery and the vet’s office on his round of errands. The faster he got back to the ranch, the happier he’d be. He wanted to ride out and check the fence in the northwest pasture before supper.

      Supper. Last night, Dulcie’s guest had been seated across the table from him, and later he’d bumped into her in the hallway—literally. He might not be thrilled about the idea of having a guest on the ranch, especially while he was so worried about the custody suit Jada kept threatening, but he had to admit that Angel Vandervere was easy on the eyes. And when she’d come up against him fully in the dark house, he’d had a momentary fantasy of getting to know those lush curves intimately. She wasn’t really his type, but after seeing her, he wasn’t sure he could say what his type might be these days.

      She was tall, taller than he normally liked his women, and she was a blonde. When he’d grabbed her yesterday, he’d been expecting blue eyes, but hers were brown...big and soft and intelligent-looking. Funny that he didn’t remember her at all. But he figured the timing had been wrong when she’d lived in Deming before. Dulcie had told him that Angel had moved there in the seventh grade. That would have been his first year of college, and he had to admit that on the rare occasions he’d been home, he’d been a lot more preoccupied with trying to get Corinne Cantler horizontal in his pick-up than he had been with checking on his younger sister and her giggly adolescent friends.

      He shook his head, amused by the memory. Corinne was a waitress in a local restaurant now, and even though she’d been married to Buddy Alderson for nearly fifteen years, she still liked to flirt. In a better humor than he’d been since yesterday, when he’d seen a total stranger baiting his child with candy, he strode into the pharmacy and made his purchases. He had to wait for an antibiotic prescription that one of the hands needed for an infected cut on his finger. While he waited, he idly scanned the racks of magazines and newspapers near the front counter.

      He always got a hoot out of the headlines in the tabloids. One rag proclaimed that a three-headed baby had been born to a couple in Pakistan. Another chronicled the life of a professional football player who was suspected of hiring an assassin to kill a fellow athlete. A third speculated on the whereabouts of some actress who had dropped out of the L.A. scene without a word. He glanced again at the grainy photo of the heavily made-up actress in a skintight black sequined gown that plunged far beyond decency, taken the night of the Academy Awards. Angelique Sumner had a truly incredible figure—

      The salesclerk called to him that his prescription was ready, and he started to move away from the magazines. Then, drawn by some instinct that raised the hairs on the back of his neck in inevitable dread, he looked at the tabloid photo of the Sumner actress again.

      Angelique...Angel. A sick feeling rose in the back of his throat as he realized that the world might not know where Angelique Sumner was, but he did. He’d left her sitting in his kitchen reading to his daughter. Through narrowed eyes, he compared the picture with his mental image of Angel. The woman he’d met hadn’t been bent on improving her looks, and if he hadn’t felt and seen her curves revealed beneath that clingy robe last night, he’d never have noticed her figure beneath the loose clothing she’d worn during the day. She’d had on no makeup that he’d noticed and her hair had been confined in a careless

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