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For the first time since she’d sat at the table, Brady leveled blue-gray eyes on her. “Thinkin’ about it,” he answered simply enough.
Her brothers continued filling him in on the pros and cons of each property and what might or might not be factors in the sale prices as they all ate. But Kate couldn’t seem to swallow so much as a morsel of food from that moment on. She just kept thinking, He could be here to stay. He could be here to stay….
Most of the rest of the evening was pretty much a blur to her after that. She pushed the food around her plate and pretended to be interested in what was being said at the table. She even managed a remark or two when she’d been silent for longer than she should have been.
But the truth was, she heard almost nothing as the idea of Brady ending up as her next-door neighbor tormented her.
And when she could finally excuse herself without raising eyebrows, she stood to do just that.
Only, before she actually got to say her goodnights, Matt said, “By the way, Kate, we’re all tied up tomorrow, so I thought maybe you could show Brady those properties he needs to see.”
“Me?” Kate said, the alarm again in her tone.
“You know your way around well enough now. None of the places are hard to find. It’ll give you somethin’ to do.”
“Who says I need something to do?” Kate said lamely and much too quickly, sounding like a put-upon younger sister who didn’t appreciate her big brother taking liberties with her time.
“What do you have to do?” Matt challenged.
For the life of her, Kate couldn’t think of anything except that she wanted to strangle her brother.
Then Brady piped up. “It’s all right. Just draw me a map. I’m sure I can find the places myself.”
It was clear that Brady had noticed she didn’t want to play tour guide, and Kate not only knew she was being rude again, but she could feel the tension in the room because of it.
Yet Matt still wouldn’t let her off the hook. “Kate doesn’t have anything planned she can’t rearrange. Do you?”
All eyes were on her, and she knew her next words would set the tone for the rest of Brady’s visit. If she refused, everyone would be aware of just how much she didn’t want to be around him. They would all want to know why—especially since she and Brady had seemed to hit it off so well in Las Vegas. And her entire family would be embarrassed by her behavior and feel awkward whenever everyone was together.
But if she didn’t refuse she was going to end up spending the whole next day with Brady. Alone with Brady. And all the unsettling things merely being around him did to her.
Maybe strangling Matt wasn’t harsh enough punishment.
Kate took a breath and opted for keeping the peace and maintaining appearances. “Sure I can rearrange things. No problem. I’d be happy to show you around,” she said without enthusiasm.
“Great,” Brady answered much the same way.
With nothing more to be said, Kate finally told everyone good-night and went to her rooms, thinking of ways to get even with her brother as she did.
That was still what she was thinking about an hour later when a soft tap sounded on her door.
“If this is you, Matt, you’re dead meat,” she muttered to herself.
She’d undressed by then, and before answering the knock she pulled on a navy-blue velvet robe over the supersize T-shirt she was wearing to bed. But she didn’t fasten it, because she assumed her late-night visitor was her brother and he’d seen her in her sleep-wear innumerable times before. He’d probably come to gloat about his victory or chastise her for not being more warm and friendly to Brady, she thought, letting the robe hang open to her ankles and padding in bare feet to fling open her door.
But it wasn’t Matt standing in the hall outside. Or any of her other brothers, either. It was Brady.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, fumbling instantly with the open sides of her bathrobe to pull them around her.
But not before Brady’s gaze dropped enough to take in the Wyoming Women are Wild, Wicked and Willing printed across the front of her shirt—a gag Christmas gift from Matt that caused just the corners of Brady’s mouth to tilt upward.
Kate yanked the tie belt around her waist and tied it to make sure she was wrapped up good and tight.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Brady said in a hushed voice, obviously to keep his impromptu visit clandestine. He raised his chin, pointing in the direction of the room behind her. “Can I come in?”
She wanted to say no and avoid more of what it was doing to her to merely think about having him in her rooms, alone, this late at night, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a bathrobe.
But he had a manila envelope in one hand and enough of an air of formality about him to let her know he was only there on business.
Business she needed to attend to.
So Kate stepped back and motioned him into the sitting room.
He didn’t hesitate to come in, but he did take a quick glance up and down the hall a split second before. And he made sure to close the door behind him as soon as he could. Very quietly.
That spicy scent that had caught her attention at dinner wafted in after him, and Kate had the urge to close her eyes and take a few deep breaths. But she resisted. She also tried not to notice how Brady seemed to fill the room just by his presence in it, tried not to feel the warm rush of something that seemed dangerously like excitement.
But trying and succeeding were two different things.
Brady held up the manila envelope. “Divorce papers. As promised,” he said, as if he’d brought a treasure map they’d both been searching for.
It didn’t feel good to her, though, and Kate didn’t know why.
“I wanted to go over them with you,” he continued. “To make sure you know what’s in them. Not that they’re complicated, but just to make sure we’re clear on everything.”
“Okay,” she said, hearing the clipped tone of her voice and resolving to amend it. The divorce had been at her insistence, she reminded herself. It was what she wanted. It was the logical thing to do.
And the baby? a little voice in the back of her mind asked.
But she didn’t know yet how she was going to handle letting Brady know about the baby, and she certainly wasn’t inclined to blurt out the news to him right then.
“Why don’t you sit down?” she invited primly, nodding toward the sofa, two overstuffed chairs and the coffee table that were positioned to face the fireplace and the French doors on the outside wall.
“Thanks.”
He crossed the room in long strides of massive legs she had no doubt could control a stallion with nothing but their pressure.
But the fact that he went ahead of her to the couch left Kate with a view of his backside, too. A view she couldn’t resist taking in. A view of broad shoulders and a straight back that narrowed to his waist and to a rear end that made her mouth go dry.
She might have been a virgin until two months ago but that didn’t mean she hadn’t done her fair share of looking at men’s physiques—especially their derrieres. And Brady’s was the best she’d ever seen.
Only when he sat down and deprived her of the sight did she realize she’d been ogling him and cut it short to follow him to the sitting area of the room.
He was at one end of the sofa, so she sat in the chair that was at a forty-five-degree angle to it, grateful that she wouldn’t have to sit beside him to see the papers he was setting out on the coffee table. But even from there she caught a whiff of the clean, spicy scent of him, and it went right to her head.
Maybe it was the pregnancy, she told herself. She’d noticed that her sense of smell was heightened, so maybe it wasn’t so much that he really smelled wonderful, but that she merely had some kind of illusion that he did.
Except that it didn’t seem like an illusion. It seemed as if he just plain smelled terrific.
“This is pretty straightforward,” he said then, flipping through the pages as he spoke. “A simple dissolution of marriage. Basically what’s on all these pages amounts to declarations that we have no joint property or assets to split up, no mutual residence for one of us to keep and the other to move out of, no children so no custody or visitation issues.”
Kate’s mouth went dry, and she didn’t hear the rest of what he was saying.
No children so no custody or visitation issues…
Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her that the baby she was carrying should be included in the divorce papers. Custody and visitation? Those were things she hadn’t even thought about.
Of course, she hadn’t really thought about much of anything in terms of Brady and the baby. She hadn’t had time to think about it. In the four days since she’d had her pregnancy confirmed, she hadn’t thought about much of anything except the fact that she actually was pregnant.
It had come as such a shock. The first period she’d missed hadn’t even made her curious. Her cycles had always been irregular and it wasn’t unusual for her to skip a period, so she hadn’t thought a thing about it. It was only when she realized she’d missed a second one that she’d put two and two together.
And in those four days since she’d taken the home pregnancy test and then gone in to see a doctor in Cheyenne to have it verified, she’d mainly been walking around in a daze. About the only thing she’d actually thought through was that she wanted the baby. But beyond that, well, she was still just trying to come to grips with everything.
“Don’t sign anything,” Brady was saying, the first words to penetrate her thoughts since child custody and visitation. But “Don’t sign anything” seemed to come as a reprieve, so maybe that’s why it got through to her.
“Read it all when you have a chance,” he advised, “that way you’ll know what’s there. Then it has to be signed in front of a notary. When we’ve done that, I’ll send it back to the lawyer and he’ll file it with the courts.”
“A notary,” Kate repeated to prove she was listening and to cover up that she hadn’t been before.
“It’s all just a formality, but we have to do it right for it to be legal.”
“But Elk Creek is a small town. If we get a notary here word is bound to leak, and this won’t be only between you and me anymore.”
“We’ll work something out. Maybe we’ll trump up an excuse to fly into the nearest town and do it there in a day or so.”
That seemed like a reasonable solution. And with Matt in matchmaker mode, her brother would likely not question any time she and Brady shared.
“And that’s about it,” Brady concluded, tapping the edges of the pages on the coffee table to make sure they were all even before he laid them on top of the envelope. “I’m sorry it took so long for me to get here with this. But my buddy in Alaska had an accident that put him in the hospital, and if I hadn’t gone up there and flown for him until he was back on his feet, he would have lost his charter company.”
“It’s okay,” Kate assured. “I thought it would take some time.”
The mention of Alaska brought a return of that strange twinge of jealousy she’d felt earlier. And that strange twinge of jealousy compelled her to say, “So Alaska, huh? You talked at dinner about all you did there, but I imagine you met a lot of interesting people, too.”
“Sure. I met a lot of interesting people. It’s an interesting place.”
“Anyone…special?”
She didn’t have the courage to look straight at him when she asked that, so she pretended to restraighten the divorce document before slipping it back into the manila envelope. But out of the corner of her eye she saw Brady smile for the first time since he’d come into the room. A small smile, but a smile she remembered well from Las Vegas. A smile that made a warm rush of something she couldn’t pinpoint run through her.
Unless of course the smile was due to a happy thought about another woman….
“Did I meet anyone special?” he repeated.
“You know, like did you run into Eskimos or fur trappers or bear hunters?” she persisted.
“I met a few of all those.”
“But not many women, I imagine. I read not long ago that there’s still a low ratio of women to men. Is that true?”
“Are you askin’ if we should add adultery as grounds for the divorce?” he joked.
“No,” she said as if the very thought were outlandish.
“Well, you can relax. I was too busy for romance, and what you read is right, I didn’t run into many women. Especially not many available ones. The irreconcilable differences as grounds for the divorce will have to stand.”
“That doesn’t matter to me. I was really only curious about Alaska’s population,” she fibbed. Badly.
“Either way.”
Despite the fact that he seemed to have seen through her, the news that he hadn’t hooked up with another woman in the past two months brightened Kate’s spirits considerably. Although she didn’t want to think about why it should.
Then he changed the subject. “Seems like you’ve managed to keep the whole marriage thing under wraps.”
“Nobody knows anything,” she confirmed. And you don’t know all you think you do.
“That’s good. Then we’ll be able to take care of it without anyone being the wiser.
Oh, if only that were true for the long run….
“And what about you? Are you still mad at me?” he ventured carefully, as if he were afraid he might set off the same reaction he had on New Year’s morning.
Kate was embarrassed at the memory of her behavior and decided this was the opportunity she needed to apologize for it. “I know I went a little wacko the next morning. It’s just that doing what we did… Well, it was so out of character for me. I’m such a straight arrow….” She wished this were coming out more smoothly, but the awkwardness of the situation was making for a bumpy road. “Anyway, I want you to know that in spite of what I said then, I accept that I’m just as responsible as you are for this whole thing.”
“So I’m not the devil incarnate anymore?” Brady asked with a note of wry levity to his voice.
“No. I was out of line that next morning. My memory of New Year’s Eve isn’t clear but it’s clear enough to know that no one twisted my arm. I was all for getting married. And the rest,” she added under her breath.
Brady’s smile stretched into a grin. “Why am I gettin’ the impression that you’re blamin’ yourself now?”
Maybe because she was. Or at least she had been for the past four days, ever since finding out she was pregnant.
Which also happened to be about the same time she’d begun hearing her mother’s voice in her head.
Her mother’s voice from her growing-up years when her mother had done a lot of preaching about the girl in any girl-boy relationship being the guardian of the gate.
It wasn’t something Kate had thought about in years. But suddenly there it had all been again.
The guardian of the gate.
The guardian of the gate, who wouldn’t be in this pickle if only she’d maintained some control, some moderation in the amount of champagne she’d consumed on New Year’s Eve. If she hadn’t given in to her own baser needs, no matter how strong they’d been. If she’d resisted the temptation of sweet, seductive words, the temptation of the handsome cowboy. If she hadn’t allowed herself to be swept away by the desires he’d raised in her….
Maybe Brady read the answer to his question in her expression, because when she didn’t say anything he said, “Things are pretty foggy in my memory, too, but as I recall, getting married was my idea. You just thought it was a good one and went along with it. I think that makes the blame pretty much equal.”
Kate shrugged, still feeling at fault no matter what he said. But what was the use in arguing about it? “I just wanted you to know I don’t bear you the kind of ill will I did that next morning.”
Brady chuckled—a deep, rich sound that rolled from his throat. “That was definitely ill will all right. I was grateful there were no knives in the room or you might have gelded me. You made it clear you thought I was a big bad beast.”
Kate flinched at the reminder. And the truth in it. “I’m sorry. I was out of line. It isn’t what I think of you now.” What she thought of him now was that he was too good-looking and charming and charismatic and sexy for her own good.
