A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (2 page)

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 articles from the internet. 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 article called “Sheep Raising for Beginners” under her nose and said, “None
of this ‘literature' 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 not to succumb to the plea he saw there. “I can't teach you to run this ranch. I have a business of my own that needs tending. You can't make it on your own, Harry-et. Sell your land to me.”

“No.”

“I'll give you a fair—a generous—price. Then you can go home where you belong.”

She was out of his grasp and gone before he had time to stop her. She didn't go far, just to the sink, where she stood in front of the stack of dirty dishes and stared out the dirt-clouded window at the ramshackle sheep pens and the derelict barn. “I will succeed. With or without your help.”

She sounded so sure of herself, despite the fact that she was doomed to fail. Nathan refused to admire her. He chose to be furious with her instead. In three angry strides he was beside her. “You're as stubborn as every other hard-nosed, ornery Alistair who ever lived on this land!” He
snorted in disgust. “I can sure as hell see now why Hazards have been feuding with Alistairs for a hundred years.”

She whirled to confront him. “And I can see why Alistairs chose to feud with Hazards,” she retorted. “How dare you pretend to be a friend!” She poked him in the chest with a stiff finger. “How dare you sneak in under my guard and pretend to help—”

“I wasn't pretending,” he said heatedly, grabbing her wrist to keep her from poking him again. “I
did
help. Admit it.”

“Sure. So I'd be grateful. All the time you only wanted to buy my land right out from under me. You are the lowest, meanest—”

He wasn't about to listen to any insults from a greenhorn female. A moment later her arm was twisted up behind her and he had pulled her flush against him. She opened her mouth to lambaste him again and he shut her up the quickest, easiest way he knew. He covered her mouth with his.

Nathan was angry, and he wasn't gentle. That is, until he felt her lips soften under his. It felt like he'd been wanting her for a long time. His mouth moved slowly over hers while his hand cupped her head and kept her still so he could take what he needed. She struggled against his hold, her breasts brushing against his chest, her hips hard against his. That only made him want her more.
It was when he felt her trembling that he came to his senses, mortified at the uncivilized way he'd treated her.

He abruptly released the hand he had twisted behind her back. But instead of coming up to slap him, as he'd expected, her palm reached up to caress his cheek. Her fingertips followed the shape of his cheekbone upward to his temple, where she threaded her fingers into his hair and slowly pulled his head back down.

And she kissed him back.

That was when he realized she was trembling with desire. Not fear. Desire. With both hands free he cupped her buttocks and pulled her hard against him. For every thrust he made, she countered. He was as full and hard as he'd ever been in his life. His tongue ravaged her mouth, and she responded with an ardor that made him hungry for her. He spread urgent kisses across her face and neck, but they didn't satisfy as much as the taste of her, so he sought her mouth again. His tongue found the space between her teeth. And the inside of her lip. And the roof of her mouth. When he mimicked the thrust and parry of lovers, she held his tongue and sucked it until he thought his head was going to explode.

When he slipped his hand over her buttocks and between her legs, she moaned, a sound that came
from deep in her throat and spoke of an agony of unappeased passion.

And the lamb in the corner bleated.

Nathan lifted his head and stared at the woman in his arms. Her brown eyes were half-veiled by her lids, and her pupils were dilated. She was breathing as heavily as he was, her lips parted to gasp air. Her knees had already buckled, and his grasp on her was all that kept them both off the floor.

Are you out of your mind?

He tried to step away, but her hand still clutched his hair. He reached up and drew her hand away. She suddenly seemed to realize he had changed his mind and backed up abruptly. Nathan refused to look at her face. He already felt bad enough. He had come within a lamb's tail of making love to Harry-et Alistair. He had made a narrow escape, for which he knew he would later, when his body wasn't so painfully objecting, be glad for.

“I think it's time you left, Mr. Hazard,” Harry said in a rigidly controlled voice.

He couldn't leave without trying once more to accomplish what he'd come to do. “Are you sure you won't—”

The change in her demeanor was so sudden that it took him by surprise. Her expression was fierce, determined. “I will not sell this land,” she
said through clenched teeth. “Now get out of here before—”

“Goodbye, Harry-et. If you have a change of heart, John Wilkinson at the bank knows how to get in touch with me.”

He settled his hat on his head and pulled it down with a tug. Then he shrugged broad shoulders into his sheepskin-lined coat. Before he was even out the kitchen door Harry Alistair had already started heating a bottle of formula for the lamb she had snuggled in her arms. It was the first time he'd ever envied one of the fleecy orphans.

The last thing Nathan Hazard wanted to do was leave that room. But he turned resolutely and marched out the door. As he gunned the engine of his truck, he admitted his encounter with Harry-et Alistair had been a very close call.

Not the woman for you,
he reminded himself.
Definitely not the woman for you.

O
nce the lamb had been fed and settled back on its pallet, Harry sank into a kitchen chair, put her elbows on the table and let her head drop into her hands. What on earth had she been thinking to let Nathan Hazard kiss her like that! And worse, why had she kissed him back in such a wanton manner? It was perfectly clear now that she hadn't been
thinking
at all; she'd been feeling, and the feelings had been so overwhelming that they hadn't allowed for any kind of rational consideration.

Harry had felt an affinity to the rancher from the instant she'd laid eyes on him. His broad shoulders, his narrow hips, the dusting of fine blond hair on his powerful forearms all appealed to her. His eyes were framed by crow's-feet that gave character to a sharp-boned, perfectly chiseled face. That pair of sapphire-blue eyes, alternately curious and concerned, had stolen her heart.

Harry wasn't surprised that she was attracted to someone more handsome than any man had a right to be. What amazed her was that having known Nathan Hazard for only a matter of hours she would readily have trusted him with her life. That simply wasn't logical. Although, Harry supposed in retrospect, she had probably seen in Nathan Hazard exactly what she wanted to see. She had needed a legendary, bigger-than-life Western hero, someone tall, rugged and handsome to come along and rescue her. And he had obligingly arrived.

And he had been stunning in his splendor, though that had consisted merely of a pair of butter-soft jeans molded to his long legs, Western boots, a dark blue wool shirt topped by a sheepskin-lined denim jacket, and a Stetson he had pulled down so that it left his features shadowed. The shaggy, silver-blond hair that fell a full inch over his collar had made him look untamed, perhaps untamable. Harry remembered wondering what such fine blond hair might feel like. His lower lip was full,
and he had a wide, easy smile that pulled one side of his mouth up a little higher than the other. She had also wondered, she realized with chagrin, what it would be like to kiss that mouth. Unbelievably she had actually indulged her fantasies.

Harry wasn't promiscuous. She wasn't even sexually experienced when it came right down to it. So she had absolutely no explanation for what had just happened between her and the Montana sheepman. She only knew she had felt an urgent, uncontrollable need to touch Nathan Hazard, to kiss him and to have him kiss her back. And she hadn't wanted him to stop there. She had wanted him inside her, mated to her.

Her mother and father, not to mention her brother, Charlie, and her eight uncles and their dignified, decorous wives, would have been appalled to think that any Williamsburg Alistair could have behaved in such a provocative manner with a man she had only just met. Harry was a little appalled herself.

But then nothing in Montana was going the way she had planned.

It had seemed like such a good idea, when she had gotten the letter from John Wilkinson, to come to the Boulder River Valley and learn how to run Great-Uncle Cyrus's sheep ranch. She loved animals and she loved being out-of-doors and she loved the mountains—she had heard
that southwestern Montana had a lot of beautiful mountains. She'd expected opposition to such a move from her family, so she'd carefully chosen the moment to let them know about her decision.

No Alistair ever argued at the dinner table. So, sitting at the elegant antique table that had been handed down from Alistair to Alistair for generations, she had waited patiently for a break in the dinner conversation and calmly announced, “I've decided to take advantage of my inheritance from Great-Uncle Cyrus. I'll be leaving for Montana at the end of the week.”

“But you can't possibly manage a sheep ranch on your own, Harriet,” her mother admonished in a cultured voice. “And since you're bound to fail, darling, I can't understand why you would even want to give it a try. Besides,” she added, “think of the smell!”

Harry—her mother cringed every time she heard the masculine nickname—had turned her compelling brown eyes to her father, looking for an encouraging word.

“Your mother is right, sweetheart,” Terence Waverly Alistair said. “My daughter, a sheep farmer?” His thick white brows lowered until they nearly met at the bridge of his nose. “I'm afraid I can't lend my support to such a move. You haven't succeeded at a single job I've found for you, sweetheart. Not the one as a teller in my
bank, not the one as an executive assistant, nor the the one as a medical receptionist. You've gotten yourself fired for ineptness at every single one. It's foolhardy to go so far—Montana is a long way from Virginia, my dear—merely to fail yet again. Besides,” he added, “think of the cold!”

Harry turned her solemn gaze toward her older brother, Charles. He had been her champion in the past. He had even unbent so far as to call her Harry when their parents weren't around. Now she needed his support. Wanted his support. Begged with her eyes for his support.

“I'm afraid I have to agree with Mom and Dad, Harriet.”

“But, Charles—”

“Let me finish,” he said in a determined voice. Harry met her brother's sympathetic gaze as he continued. “You're only setting yourself up for disappointment. You'll be a lot happier if you learn to accept your limitations.”

“Meaning?” Harry managed to whisper past the ache in her throat.

“Meaning you just aren't clever enough to pull it off, Harriet. Besides,” he added, “think of all that manual labor!”

Harry felt the weight of a lifetime of previous failures in every concerned but discouraging word her family had offered. They didn't believe she could do it. She took a deep breath and let it out.
She could hardly blame them for their opinion of her. To be perfectly honest, she had never given them any reason to think otherwise. So why was she so certain that this time things would be different? Why was she so certain that this time she would succeed? Because she knew something they didn't:
she had done all that failing in the past on purpose.

Harry was paying now for years of deception. It had started innocently enough when she was a child and her mother had wanted her to take ballet lessons. At six Harry had already towered over her friends. Gawky and gangly, she knew she was never going to make a graceful prima ballerina. One look at her mother's face, however, and Harry had known she couldn't say, “No, thank you. I'd rather be playing basketball.”

Instead, she'd simply acquired two left feet. It had worked. Her ballet instructor had quickly labeled her irretrievably clumsy and advised Isabella Alistair that she would only be throwing her money away if Harriet continued in the class. Isabella was forced to admit defeat. Thus, unbeknownst to her parents, Harry had discovered at a very early age a passive way of resisting them.

Over the years Harry had never said no to her parents. It had been easier simply to go along with whatever they had planned. Piano lessons were thwarted with a deaf ear; embroidery had been
abandoned as too bloody; and her brief attempt at tennis had resulted in a broken leg.

As she had gotten older, the stakes had gotten higher. She had only barely avoided a plan to send her away to college at Radcliffe by getting entrance exam scores so low that they had astonished the teachers who had watched her get straight A's through high school. She had been elated when her distraught parents had allowed her to enroll at the same local university her friends from high school were attending.

Harry knew she should have made some overt effort to resist each time her father had gotten her one of those awful jobs after graduation, simply stood up to him and said, “No, I'd rather be pursuing a career that I've chosen for myself.” But old habits were hard to break. It had been easier to prove herself inept at each and every one.

When her parents chose a husband for her, she'd resorted to even more drastic measures. She'd concealed what looks she had, made a point of reciting her flaws to her suitor and resisted his amorous advances like a starched-up prude. She had led the young man to contemplate life with a plain, clumsy, cold-natured, brown-eyed, brown-haired, freckle-faced failure. He had beat a hasty retreat.

Now a lifetime of purposeful failure had come home to roost. She couldn't very well convince her
parents she was ready to let go of the apron strings when she had so carefully convinced them of her inability to succeed at a single thing they had set for her to do. She might have tried to explain to them her failure had only been a childish game that had been carried on too long, but that would mean admitting she'd spent her entire life deceiving them. She couldn't bear to hurt them like that. Anyway, she didn't think they'd believe her if she told them her whole inept life had been a sham.

Now Harry could see, with the clarity of twenty-twenty hindsight, that she'd hurt herself even more than her parents by the choices she'd made. But the method of dealing with her parents' manipulation, which she'd started as a child and continued as a teenager, she'd found impossible to reverse as an adult. Until now. At twenty-six she finally had the perfect opportunity to break the pattern of failure she'd pursued for a lifetime. She only hoped she hadn't waited too long.

Harry was certain she could manage her great-uncle Cyrus's sheep ranch. She was certain she could do anything she set her brilliant mind to do. After all, it had taken brilliance to fail as magnificently, and selectively, as she had all these years. So now, when she was determined to succeed at last, she'd wanted her family's support. It was clear she wasn't going to get it. And she
could hardly blame them for it. She was merely reaping what she had so carefully sowed.

Harry had a momentary qualm when she wondered whether they might be right. Maybe she was biting off more than she could chew. After all, what did she know about sheep or sheep ranching? Then her chin tilted up and she clenched her hands in her lap under the table. They were wrong. She wouldn't fail. She could learn what she didn't know. And she would succeed.

Harriet Elizabeth Alistair was convinced in her heart that she wasn't a failure. Surely, once she made up her mind to stop failing, she could. Once she was doing something she had chosen for herself, she was bound to succeed. She would show them all. She wasn't what they thought her—someone who had to be watched and protected from herself and the cold, cruel world around her. Rather, she was a woman with hopes and dreams, none of which she'd been allowed—or rather, allowed herself—to pursue.

Like a pioneer of old, Harry wanted to go west to build a new life. She was prepared for hard work, for frigid winter mornings and searing summer days. She welcomed the opportunity to build her fortune with the sweat of her brow and the labor of her back. Harry couldn't expect her family to understand why she wanted to try to make it on her own in a cold, smelly, faraway
place where she would have to indulge in manual labor. She had something to prove to herself. This venture was the Boston Tea Party and the Alamo and Custer's Last Stand all rolled into one. In the short run she might lose a few battles, but she was determined to win the war.

At last Harry broke the awesome silence that had descended on the dinner table. “Nothing you've said has changed my mind,” she told her family. “I'll be leaving at the end of the week.”

Nothing her family said the following week, and they'd said quite a lot, had dissuaded Harry from the course she'd set for herself. She'd been delighted to find, when she arrived a week later in Big Timber, the town closest to Great-Uncle Cyrus's ranch, that at least she hadn't been deceived about the beauty of the mountains in southwestern Montana. The Crazy Mountains provided a striking vista to the north, while the majestic, snow-capped Absarokas greeted her to the south each morning. But they were the only redeeming feature in an otherwise daunting locale.

The Boulder River Valley was a desolate place in late February. The cottonwoods that lined the Boulder River, which meandered the length of the valley, were stripped bare of leaves. And the grass, what wasn't covered by patches of drifted snow, was a ghastly straw-yellow. All that might have been bearable if only she hadn't found such utter
decay when she arrived at Great-Uncle Cyrus's ranch.

Her first look at the property she'd inherited had been quite a shock. Harry had been tempted to turn tail and run back to Williamsburg. But something—perhaps the beauty of the mountains, but more likely the thought of facing her family if she gave up without even trying—had kept her from giving John Wilkinson the word to sell. She would never go home until she could do so with her head held high, the owner and manager of a prosperous sheep ranch.

Harry had discovered dozens of reasons to question her decision ever since she'd moved to Montana, not the least of which was the meeting today with her nearest neighbor. Nathan Hazard hadn't exactly fulfilled her expectations of the typical Western hero. A more provoking, irritating, exasperating man she had never known! Whether he admitted it or not, it had been a pretty sneaky thing to do, helping her so generously with the difficult lambing when he knew all along he was only softening her up so that he could make an offer on her land.

Thoughts of the difficult birthing reminded her that she still had to dispose of the dead lamb. Harry knew she ought to bury it, but the ground was frozen. She couldn't imagine burning it. And she couldn't bear the thought of taking the poor
dead lamb somewhere up into the foothills and leaving it among the juniper and jack pine for nature's scavengers to find. None of the articles or books she'd read discussed this particular problem, and she had no internet access to look it up online. Harry knew there must be some procedures the local ranchers followed. Surely they also had deaths at lambing time. But she'd dig a hole in the frozen ground with her fingernails before she asked Nathan Hazard what to do.