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And then this wonderful old man had been standing in front of her, in faded jeans and a denim jacket. He was Native American, his skin warm and wrinkled copper, his eyes black as coal, his hair long and free and wispy as white smoke.
She had liked his eyes, because despite the nervous twisting of his hat in his hands, his eyes had been utterly calm, peaceful. In his eyes had been a deep knowing.
About everything. The secrets of life and the universe. Her secrets.
“Are you the nanny?” he’d asked shyly, revealing a gap where his two front teeth should have been.
She’d contemplated that for a moment. What she was, was a lawyer, one who had never had an impulsive moment before today. Today when, instead of driving to her law firm’s office in downtown Los Angeles after a particularly brutal session with a difficult client, she had taken the off-ramp to the airport, surveyed the flights out and chosen Calgary.
For no reason at all, really.
Unless you counted the fact that once, as a little girl, she had wanted very badly to go there for their world-famous rodeo, the Calgary Stampede.
And then some complete stranger with lovable eyes had asked her if she was a nanny, and some deep warmth had spread within her. Of course, she would have said no if he hadn’t spoken again.
“If you’re not the nanny, I guess I’m in a heap of trouble,” the old man had said sadly.
But his eyes had said no such thing. They twinkled at her as if they were about to share a wonderful joke. They invited her to say yes to the adventure. He knew she was not a nanny.
It felt as though Lacey was in a “heap of trouble” herself. Still, her utterly responsible voice ordered her indignantly not to do anything crazy. Anything else crazy. She shushed it.
The truth was she wanted, for once in her very ordinary life, to be crazy. She wanted to be impetuous and spontaneous. She wanted life to at least have the possibility of something wonderful and unpredictable happening.
And after she’d had that, her small taste of life on the wild side, a breath or two of pure freedom, she would probably be perfectly content to go home and marry Keith. Perfectly.
“I am a nanny,” she told her unlikely angel, holding out her hand to him.
He took it, and any doubt she had was gone instantly. His grip was strong and warm and reassuring. “I lost the paper with your name on it, miss.”
She hesitated, knowing when she said her name he was going to realize his error. And the adventure would be over just like that. She’d get on the next plane and go home.
She had been aware of holding her breath as she said, “Lacey. My name’s Lacey McCade.”
But his smile had nearly swallowed his face. “Nelson,” he’d told her, “Nelson Go-Up-the-Mountain.” When she told him she had never heard such a beautiful name, he had ducked his head with endearing shyness. “Shucks, just call me Gumpy.”
Lacey had never heard anyone say “Shucks” before. She wanted to ask him all about the children, but remembered she was likely supposed to know.
“Your luggage?” he’d asked her.
“Lost.” She felt guilty lying to him, but really that one word could mean just about anything. And it suddenly occurred to her that the turnoff to the airport earlier had been very much about things lost. Some part of herself was lost.
“We’ll find it,” he’d said reassuringly.
And looking at him, she’d believed it. And knew he was not talking about luggage any more than she was.
Now, facing the man in front of her, her choice seemed silly rather than adventurous.
Even sleeping, with those two adorable children nestled trustingly into him, there had been nothing vulnerable about this man. He had looked rugged and 100 percent pure male.
“Mind your manners, Ethan,” Gumpy told him mildly, which earned the older man a look that might have sent a lesser man scuttling for cover. “This is our new nanny.”
“The hell she is.”
Certainly she was glancing around for a place to hide.
But with one more dismissive look to her, Ethan turned to Gumpy. “What have you gone and done?”
“Just what you told me,” Gumpy said, “gone to the airport and picked up the nanny.”
“Fifty-seven. I told you Betty-Anne was fifty-seven years old. Nobody fifty-seven looks like this. This girl isn’t a day over—” cool gray eyes scanned her “—twenty-five.”
“Woman,” she corrected him. “Thirty.”
He glared at her briefly, then shifted his attention away from her again.
“Gumpy, start talking.” The cowboy’s voice was low and lethal. Just like the rest of him, there was barely leashed power in that voice. “Where’s Mrs. Bishop?”
Behind him the children stirred on the couch. She watched them, in their sleep, reach out for and find each other. She felt a stab of tenderness for them.
“This is the only nanny I could find at the airport,” Gumpy said, not intimidated. “And believe you me, I looked.”
“Anybody looking at her can see she’s not a nanny. We need somebody who can cook and clean and look after kids, Gumpy, not an expert in shades of fingernail polish.”
She looked at the fingernails in question, rather than meet the steady, stripping look in his eyes when he glanced back her way. Her nails were quite long, the very same shade as her suit, a fact she had taken some pleasure in this morning.
When she had been a completely different person.
“Doreen and Danny will like her,” Gumpy said.
“I hope you’re not suggesting she stay.”
She looked up from her fingernails to see Gumpy nod, once, with grave dignity.
The cool, angry note in Ethan’s voice as he bit out a single word woke the children. They struggled to sit up, rubbing their eyes, taking her in with only mild curiosity. Then they slipped off the couch and disappeared down the hall.
“Don’t touch my hat,” Ethan called over his shoulder, though he did not turn around.
The children giggled and broke into a run that did not bode well for his hat, though at the moment she could not imagine anyone who valued their lives defying him.
But Gumpy did defy him. “I think she should stay.”
“You crazy old coot! She is not staying. You are putting her back in that truck and taking her back wherever you found her.”
“So,” Gumpy said softly, “now I’m a crazy old coot. But when you want something, it’s Grandfather.”
“You’re his grandfather?” Lacey asked Gumpy with surprise.
“No!” Ethan snapped.
“For the People, Grandfather is a term that denotes respect,” Gumpy said softly, his dark eyes locked on the gray ones of the younger man.
To her immense surprise, Ethan looked down first. A small muscle jerked angrily in his jaw. But when he looked up again at Gumpy, the flash of fury was gone from his eyes, though they were as cool and as unnervingly steady as ever.
“She can’t stay,” he said quietly.
“He’s right,” Lacey said, moving to Gumpy and putting her hand on his sleeve. “Of course I can’t stay. I’ve made a dreadful mistake. I’ll go. Really.”
Gumpy studied her face, saw the resolve in it and sighed.
The little girl danced into the room. “Gumpy, I flushed your keys down the toilet.”
Ethan said that word again, so that Lacey just barely heard it. Not a very nice word at all.
“Don’t you just love flush toilets?” the little girl asked, looking right up at her.
She had the most beautiful blue eyes, Lacey thought, and exquisite bone structure, very like her uncle’s. Short dark hair scattered around a cherubic face. Out of the corner of her eye, Lacey saw Gumpy struggling to suppress his laughter. His thin shoulders were shaking.
“I do,” Lacey said, though she had to admit she had never given the topic a single thought in her entire life. “I like flush toilets very much.”
The other little imp materialized, and looked up at her with eyes amazingly like his uncle’s. “I’m Danny.”
“Hi,” Lacey said.
“And I’m Doreen,” the other one said.
Ethan was not being sidetracked by introductions. “You can take my truck,” he said grimly to Gumpy. “You’ll be back in plenty of time for us to use it to feed cattle.”
Lacey looked at Gumpy with concern. Surely he would not be expected to drive back and forth all night and then feed cattle in the morning?
“Never mind,” Ethan said, evidently reaching the same conclusion. For a moment in his eyes a barrier came down, and she could see his affectionate concern for the old man outweigh his substantial irritation. “I’ll take her.”
He strode out of the room, and it was as if something went with him. Energy. Light. Lacey realized his physical nearness had made her edgy, aware of something beating, pulsing, deep within her.
Danny and Doreen raced around the room and then disappeared down the hallway.
Lacey studied the living room. It was only slightly homier than the kitchen she had come through earlier. The couch looked worn but comfortable. A bright scatter rug was underneath it, no doubt to keep feet warm on icy winter nights. The coffee table, a beautiful old scarred wooden trunk, held a cup of coffee, half-full, and a well-thumbed book that looked like a medical manual on cattle. There were no pictures on the walls.
Keith, she knew, would hate this room. His taste ran to authentic Persian rugs and antique oriental vases. But she found herself drawn to it, to the lack of clutter, to the simplicity.
She glanced, covertly, at the four movies lined up under the televison, wondering what they would tell her of the man who lived here. Toy Story, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dances with Wolves and Chris Irwin, Horse Whispering Demystified. Gumpy shuffled over and sat on the couch, looking peaceful and unperturbed, but she felt driven to apologize anyway.
“I’m sorry, Gumpy,” she said softly, “I never should have let it go this far.”
He just smiled, that wise and knowing smile she had come to like very much.
They heard a drawer slam in the kitchen.
“Where the hell are my keys?”
From a different part of the house, Lacey heard breathless giggles.
Ethan must have heard them, too. Because the silence was suddenly very silent. She could hear the fridge motor.
“Doreen?” he called. “Danny?”
Silence.
“Where are my keys?”
Hushed giggles.
Lacey turned to Gumpy and widened her eyes. She mouthed, “The toilet?”
He nodded and she waited for an explosion, but none came.
Ethan came back into the living room. He sank down on the couch and closed his eyes for a long moment. He looked tired and discouraged, much, she thought, how she must have looked when Gumpy found her at the airport.
“You probably can’t even cook,” he muttered in her direction.
“You haven’t eaten until you’ve had my vegetarian chili,” she told him proudly.
“Vegetarian?” he said with flat dislike.
Even loyal Gumpy was looking at her with distress. “Vegetarian?”
They heard a toilet flush and then flush again, followed by childish laughter.
“My life,” Ethan said, slowly and deliberately, “could not possibly get any worse than it is at this moment.”
She felt it was wise to say nothing. Apparently so did Gumpy.
“Miss?” Ethan said, opening one gray eye and looking at her.
“Ms.,” she corrected him.
His sigh of long suffering said his life had just gotten worse. “You’re on a cattle ranch,” he told her, reclosing his eyes. “As in beef. We promote the edibility of red meat.”
“Oh.”
The phone rang, and for a long time it seemed as if both men planned to ignore it.
“You know who that is, don’t you?” Ethan asked Gumpy.
“Not a clue.”
“It’s a hopping-mad fifty-seven-year-old woman who has successfully raised four children on a diet of meat and potatoes.” Except for the hopping-mad part, he sounded distinctly wistful.
He unfolded himself from the couch and went and got the phone.
