Chapter One
“Daddy! Daddy!” Five-year-old Stevie came running into the kitchen from the back of the house. “Goldilocks is sleeping in your bed! And she brought her mother with her!”
Clifford Swain cupped the back of his son’s head. He’d had a long day rounding up cattle on the Double S and branding this year’s crop of calves on the ranch he and his twin brother jointly owned. He wasn’t at all sure he had the energy to deal with another of his son’s flights of fancy.
Still, a stranger in the house would explain the silver-gray BMW parked out front. No one in the small Montana town of Reilly’s Gulch drove a car like that, certainly not one that was five years old and looked brand-new. Pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles were the favored mode of transportation in this rugged, northwestern part of Montana.
Except for Chester O’Reilly. He’d gotten it into his ninety-year-old head to buy a Mazda Miata from Cliff’s sister-in-law, Ella, and then started a taxi service with it.
“Come on, bucko,” Cliff said to his son. The crime rate in Reilly’s Gulch was so low, he didn’t imagine whomever Stevie had spotted—real or pretend—would pose much of a danger. He should know. When he wasn’t punching cattle, he was a Reed County deputy sheriff and had filed the papers to run for election as county sheriff. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”
“Do you think they ate up all our porridge?”
Cliff grinned at the boy, whose blue eyes sparkled with excitement. “Don’t think you’re going to get out of eating your oatmeal for breakfast if they have. I’ll just buy some more.”
“Aw, gee…” He did a little skip-hop to catch up with Cliff. “Sweet rolls are better.”
“That gooey stuff’ll kill you, kid.” As well as give the boy a sugar high that he didn’t need. Where Stevie was concerned, energy was rarely in short supply.
The sprawling ranch-style house had large rooms and wide hallways. He and his wife had wanted a big family and plenty of space to spread out. But Yvonne had died nearly three years ago. They’d never built the second story, which had been in the original plans.
They’d never had any more kids, either, and that still hurt almost as much as having lost his high school sweetheart.
Cliff peered into the guest room. Actually he’d been sleeping there since Yvonne died. At first there were too many ghosts, too many memories in the master bedroom. Then it simply became a habit to sleep across the hall.
“See, what’d I tell you,” Stevie whispered.
Yep, definitely Goldilocks and her mom, both of them sound asleep on top of the covers, a paperback novel open on the night table. The girl’s hair was tousled with blond ringlets, her face like an angel, but it was the woman who drew Cliff’s attention. Her hair spilled over the pillow like a waterfall made of white gold. At rest, she looked vulnerable. Approachable. Tempting as hell.
Thick coils of heat whipped through Cliff, and he had to fight an instinctive urge to flee…or to join the woman lying on his bed.
A grown-up Goldilocks far more alluring than a younger version. He must have made a sound because the woman stretched, arching as lazily as a sleek cat. Her eyes blinked open. Blue as a Montana sky. A slow smile curved lips specifically made with kissing in mind. She gave him an assessing look, then her gaze slid to his son.
“Hi. You must be Stevie.” A low, seductive voice, husky with sleep.
The boy nodded. “You’re sleeping in my dad’s bed.”
“I am?” She eyed Cliff again with a warm, blue-velvet gaze.
“Did you break any of our chairs?” Stevie asked.
A fascinating little inverted V appeared between her nicely shaped eyebrows. “Chairs?” Effortlessly, she rose to a sitting position, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Her skirt swirled into position, settling like silk across her lap, draping the quick flash of leg that he’d glimpsed. With easy grace, she picked up a silver hair clip from the nightstand, twisted her long hair a couple of times and piled it on top of her head, snaring it in place in a sexy, casual do.
“He thinks you’re Goldilocks’s mother,” Cliff explained, his throat strangely tight and his voice as husky as hers had been.
She glanced at her sleeping daughter, and her smile blossomed into something radiant. Madonna and child with a measure of laughter mixed in. “More like an overtired minx, I’m afraid. We’ve been driving for days and then I got lost.”
From the looks of her long fingernails painted a raspberry red, to her perfectly oval face and her flawless complexion, not only was this woman lost, she’d wound up about two thousand miles off target. Hollywood should have been her destination.
She slipped her bare feet into a pair of leather sandals on the floor beside the bed, her toenails the same bright shade of raspberry as her fingernails. When she stood, she extended her hand to Cliff. “I’m Tasha Reynolds, your new housekeeper. Temporarily, of course.”
Cliff’s jaw dropped to somewhere near his knees. His housekeeper? No way was this the sort of woman he’d expected to fill in for Sylvia Torres while his regular housekeeper was helping her daughter following the birth of Sylvia’s third grandchild. But he’d asked his sister-in-law if she knew anyone….
“Are you Ella’s sister?” he asked, belatedly noting a vague family resemblance to his brother’s new wife. But while Ella Papadakis-Swain was attractive, Tasha was…striking. Tall and willowy, she moved with a dramatic grace that only a man who could meet and beat her height could fully appreciate. A man like Cliff.
“Guilty as charged.” She slipped past him as smoothly as warm butter on toast, taking Stevie’s hand in the process. “Why don’t we let Melissa sleep a little while longer? Four days of travel were hard on her.”
He watched her walk down the hallway—no, she floated down the hallway, Cliff mentally corrected himself, noting the sway of her skirt. She left the scent of the tropics behind her, hot and sultry. No way could he let Tasha Reynolds stay around as his housekeeper. No way, unless she’d allow him to spend twenty-four hours a day in bed with her.
Given he had an impressionable five-year-old son—and she had a young daughter—that wasn’t a viable plan. The only other choice was to ask her to leave. Because no way could he be under the same roof with her for any extended length of time without bedding her.
He wasn’t going to do that.
Especially not when his reputation was likely to be under scrutiny because of his election campaign for county sheriff.
TASHA RELEASED Stevie’s hand when they reached the spacious living room, decorated in Western style with bright colors accenting the earth tones of wood and the native stone fireplace. “Your Aunt Ella tells me you’re five years old.”
“I’m almost six.” The youngster looked like a small replica of his father—close-cropped, sandy-blond hair that on the boy had gone slightly shaggy and was in need of a haircut; baby-blue eyes that on his father held a glint of mischief; a particularly strong jaw and lips that naturally curved upward in an invitation to return his smile.
“My Melissa’s almost seven. She’s looking forward to playing with you.”
“She