cupboards closed, they sprang open again. And stayed that way. She turned to him, shrugged and let go with another one of her smiles. He stuck his hands deep into his pockets to keep from reaching out to enfold her in his arms.
Not the woman for me, he said to himself.
The walls and floor of the room consisted of unfinished wooden planks. A step down from “rustic,” he thought. More like “primitive.” The refrigerator was so old that the top was rounded instead of square. The gas stove was equally ancient, and she had to light the burner with a match.
“Darned thing doesn’t work from the pilot,” Harry explained as she set a dented metal coffeepot on the burner. “Make yourself at home,” she urged, seating herself at the kitchen table.
Nathan set his Stetson on the table and draped his sheepskin coat over the back of one of the three chrome-legged chairs at the Formica table. Then he flattened the torn plastic seat and sat down. The table was cluttered with brochures. One title leaped out at him—“Sheep Raising for Beginners.” He didn’t have a chance to comment on it before she started talking.
“I’m from Williamsburg, Virginia,” she volunteered. “I didn’t even know my great-uncle Cyrus. It was really a surprise when Mr. Wilkinson from the bank contacted me. At first I couldn’t believe it. Me, inheriting a sheep ranch!
“I suppose the sensible thing would have been to let Mr. Wilkinson sell the place for me. He said there was a buyer anxious to have it. Then I thought about what it would be like to have a place of my very own, far away from—” She jumped up and crossed to the stove to check the coffeepot.
Nathan wanted her to finish that sentence. What, or whom, had she wanted to escape? What, or who, had made her unhappy enough that she had to run all the way to Montana? He fought down the possessive, protective feelings that arose. She didn’t belong to him. Never would.
She was talking in breathless, jerky sentences, which was how he knew she was nervous. It was as though she wasn’t used to entertaining a man in her kitchen. Maybe she wasn’t. He wished he knew for sure.
Not your kind of woman, he repeated to himself.
“Do you have a place around here?” Harry asked.
Nathan cleared his throat and said with a rueful smile, “You could say I have a place that goes all around here.”
He watched her brows lower in confusion at his comment. She filled the two coffee mugs to the very brim and brought them carefully to the table.
“Am I supposed to know what that means?” she asked as she seated herself across from him again.
“My sheep ranch surrounds yours.” When she still looked confused he continued, “Your property sits square in the center of mine. Your access road to the highway runs straight across my land.”
A brilliant smile lit her face, and she cocked her head like a brown sparrow on a budding limb and quipped, “Then we most certainly are neighbors, aren’t we? I’m so glad you came to see me, Nathan—is it all right if I call you Nathan?—so we can get to know each other. I could really use some advice. You see—”
“Wait a minute,” he interrupted.
In the first place it wasn’t all right with him if she called him Nathan. It would be much more difficult to be firm with her if they were on a first-name basis. In the second place he hadn’t come here to be neighborly; he had come to make an offer on her land. And in the third, and most important place, he had absolutely no intention of offering her any advice. And he was going to tell her all those things…just as soon as she stopped smiling so trustingly at him.
“Look, Harry-et,” he said, pausing a second between the two syllables, unable to make himself address her by the male nickname. “You probably should have taken the banker’s advice. If the rest of this cabin looks as bad as the kitchen, it can’t be very comfortable. The buildings and sheds are a disgrace. Your hay fields are fallow. Your access road is a mass of ruts. You’ll be lucky to make ends meet let alone earn enough from this sheep ranch you inherited to enjoy any kind of pleasant life. The best advice I can give you is to sell this place to me and go back to Virginia where you belong.”
He watched her full lips firm into a flat line and her jaw tauten. Her chin came up pugnaciously. “I’m not selling out.”
“Why the hell not?” he retorted in exasperation.
“Because.”
He waited for her to explain. But she was keeping her secrets to herself. He was convinced now that she must be running from something…or someone.
“I’m going to make a go of this place. I can do it. I may not be experienced, but I’m intelligent and hardworking and I have all the literature on raising sheep that I could find.”
Nathan stuck the brochure called “Sheep Raising for Beginners” under her nose and said, “None of these brochures will compensate for practical experience. Look what happened this afternoon. What would you have done if I hadn’t come along?” He had the unpleasant experience of watching her chin drop to her chest and her cheeks flush while her thumb brushed anxiously against the plain pottery mug.
“I would probably have lost both lambs, and the ewe, as well,” she admitted in a low voice. She looked up at him, her brown eyes liquid with tears she was trying to blink away. “I owe you my thanks. I don’t know how I can ever repay you. I know I have a lot to learn. But—” she leaned forward, and her voice became urgent “—I intend to work as hard as I have to, night and day if necessary, until I succeed.”
Nathan was angry and irritated. She wasn’t going to succeed; she was going to fail miserably. And unless he could somehow talk her into selling this place to him, he was going to have to stand by and watch it happen. Because he absolutely, positively, was not going to offer to help. There were no ifs, ands or buts about it. He had been through this before. A small commitment had a way of mushrooming out of control. Start cutting pines and pretty soon you’d created a whole mountain meadow.
“Look, Harry-et,” he said, “the reason I came here today is to offer to buy this place from you.”
“It’s not for sale.”
Nathan sighed. She’d said it as if she’d meant it. He had no choice except to try to convince her to change her mind. “Sheep ranching involves a whole lot more than lambing and shearing, Harry-et.” He was distracted from his train of thought by the way the flush on her cheeks made her freckles show up. He forced his attention back where it belonged and continued. “For instance, do you have any idea what wool pool you’re in?”
She raised a blank face and stared at him.
“Do you even know what a wool pool is?”
She shook her head.
“A wool pool enables small sheepmen like yourself to concentrate small clips of wool into carload lots so that they can get a better price on—” He cut himself off. He was supposed to be proving her ignorance to her, not educating it away. He ignored her increasingly distressed look and asked, “Do you have any idea what’s involved with docking and castrating lambs?”
This time she nodded, but the flush on her face deepened.
“What about keeping records? Do you have any accounting experience?”
“A little,” she admitted in a quiet voice.
He felt like a desperado in a black hat threatening the schoolmarm, but he told himself it was for her own good in the long run and continued, “Can you figure adjusted weaning weight ratios? Measure ram performance? Calculate shearing dates? Compute feed gain ratios?”
By now she was violently shaking her head. A shiny tear streaked one cheek.
He pushed himself up out of his chair. He braced one callused palm on the table and leaned across to cup her jaw in his other hand and lift her chin. He looked into her eyes, and it took every bit of determination he had