LITMIR.BIZ

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huge in her pale face and her mouth had a pinched, sickly look to it.

      No wonder Peter looked at her like he couldn’t quite believe Katie Crosby and the glamorous Celeste could be the same person.

      She could scarcely believe it herself. She had been playing a part that night, a thrilling masquerade. Stuck alone here with her, Peter would see the real her. The boring, sensible Kate who wore long underwear and read dry technical manuals and who would never dream of going home with a handsome man and making love all night long.

      Well, okay, she dreamed about it, she admitted to herself with a long, honest look in the mirror. She dreamed about it every night and remembered in exquisitely painful detail how she had come alive for the first time in her life that night.

      Perhaps it was best that he see her for the person she really was. Not glamorous, not glitzy. Just Katie. That night she had been Cinderella at the ball, dressed up in borrowed finery. It had been wonderful and magical dancing the night away with Prince Charming, but midnight had come and gone. There would be no glass slipper for her—but she had been left with a magical, wondrous gift.

      She touched her abdomen. Could she keep the baby a secret from him in such close quarters? It was only for one night and then he would be gone again. She was only thirteen weeks along and wasn’t really showing unless someone knew her well enough to recognize that the tiny swelling at her stomach hadn’t been there a few weeks ago.

      She would just have to make sure she stayed in baggy clothes so he wouldn’t have that close a look.

      The pesky morning sickness could be explained away by a lingering stomach bug, she hoped.

      It would be a little tricky to pull it off, but what other choice did she have? She couldn’t tell him. This was her baby. He might have unwittingly donated the sperm but that didn’t make him a father. Bad enough that she deceived him by not telling him her name—she couldn’t bind him forever to a Crosby because of a quirk of fate.

      Besides, Peter Logan was not the father she wanted for her baby. He was far too much like her own father—completely consumed by his work. She knew what it was like to wait in vain for a few crumbs her busy, important father might scatter her way. She wouldn’t do that to her own child. Better for her baby never to know a father than to suffer from inattention and indifference.

      She could carry off the deception for one night, then they would go their separate ways and Peter would never have to know about the baby. She would invent an imaginary lover for the inevitable questions from her family and friends about her child’s paternity—a man she had fallen hard for but who had been unattainable.

      Not so very far from the truth, she thought grimly. In fact, too close for her own comfort.

      With a weary sigh, she quickly brushed her hair and debated touching up her face with some of the makeup tricks Carrie Summers had shown her. In the end she decided against doing anything more than a quick brush of lipstick and a little blush on her cheeks so she didn’t look so ghastly pale.

      She returned to the gathering room to find that Peter had pulled a small table and two chairs near the fireplace and had set out two place settings. She nibbled her lip, fighting the urge to turn back around and hide out in her room for the rest of the night.

      Dinner for two in a dimly lit room in front of a crackling fire looked entirely too romantic, too intimate.

      He stood by one of the chairs waiting for her with a challenging kind of look in his eyes and she knew she couldn’t be cowardly enough to run away. She squared her shoulders and sat down.

      “I hope you don’t mind me moving the furniture around a little,” he said. “I figured this would be more comfortable than eating in a cold dining room.”

      “The dining room is rarely used anyway. When I stay here, I usually eat in the kitchen with the Taylors.”

      “Those are the caretakers?”

      She nodded. “Their daughter is having her first baby. They’ve gone for moral support.”

      “I hope they made it through the storm.”

      “I’m sure they’ll be fine. Clint’s used to driving in this weather.”

      She returned to stirring her stew and the Herculean effort of swallowing the occasional bite.

      “This is quite a place you’ve got here,” Peter said. “Somehow I never would have figured the Crosbys to go for rustic and isolated.”

      The faint note of derision in his voice raised her hackles. She wasn’t sure if it was aimed at her family or at the ranch, both of which she loved dearly. Either way she didn’t like it. A sharp retort formed in her throat but she squashed it. In the interest of peace, she should probably do her best to avoid needless bickering.

      “My father bought it as a retreat several years ago when it seemed like everybody was moving west.”

      Like many of Jack Crosby’s actions, Sweetwater had been purchased to please one of his many girlfriends, then had been forgotten as soon as her father moved on to more nubile pastures. But she decided that was old family business she didn’t particularly need to share with Peter Logan.

      “Does your family spend much time here together?” he asked.

      She tried to remember when the Crosbys had last done anything together.

      “We all came out for Christmas once right after Jack bought it,” she remembered. “Trent and Ivy have been out to ski occasionally. Sweetwater is only about an hour from the Jackson Hole ski resorts.”

      He broke a roll in half and liberally spread some of Margie’s strawberry preserves on it. “Is that why you’re here? To ski?”

      She wasn’t sure quite how to answer that. She certainly couldn’t tell him she had escaped to Sweetwater first because she’d been ill and then because she had been desperately in need of a safe haven, a sanctuary where she could come to terms with her pregnancy and figure out how she was going to map out the rest of her life after this unexpected detour.

      “I’m not much of a skier,” she finally said.

      She would have preferred to leave it at that but he pressed on. “So why are you here?”

      Katie fought the urge to gnash her teeth at what was beginning to feel like an interrogation. “I like it here. Of all my siblings, I probably spend the most time here. This is where I come when I need to relax and recharge. I love the mountains, even in the winter. I like the solitude of it and the slow, easy pace. I guess I just needed a break from the rain.”

      “So you decided howling winds and three feet of snow would be more to your liking?”

      “It doesn’t snow all the time,” she muttered. She frowned suddenly, remembering something that had been puzzling her since he arrived. “How did you know how to find me, anyway? Only a few people knew I was coming.”

      “You know, it’s amazing. The truth can open all kinds of doors. Maybe you ought to try it sometime.”

      Before she could control it, her breath caught as the jab poked under her skin. She deserved it, she acknowledged, especially with the secret she still kept from him, the one she knew she could never tell him. Knowing his contempt was warranted didn’t make it any easier to take.

      “Who told you?”

      “I phoned your office. Once I gave your assistant my name and told her I needed to speak with you on an urgent matter, she was eager to help. She said you were staying at the family ranch and gave me the number here. From there, it was easy to connect the phone number to a location.”

      She should have known. If Peter hadn’t been there, Katie would have groaned and banged her head against the back of her chair a few times. She loved her sixty-year-old assistant dearly but Lila Fitzgerald had a romantic streak as wide as the Columbia Gorge. She read the Weekly faithfully and must have seen the picture of them together at the bachelor auction.

      Katie

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