JUSTIFIED DECEPTION Read online

  "Come here." Matt took her in his arms and held her against the firm wall of his chest, and she didn't try to break free. She couldn't. If she did, she knew her knees would buckle. It felt so good to be held, to hear the beat of another human heart close to her own, to forget that there existed a universe beyond the microcosm where she now stood. "Is that why you wore shapeless clothes, so you wouldn't attract a man ?" he said against the top of her head, his deep voice seeming to resonate through her.

  Ruth sniffled, inhaling the musky scent of him, of horse and smoke and leather. "You think my clothes were shapeless?" she said, because she couldn't think of anything else, finding his nearness disconcerting.

  His arms tightened protectively around her. "Only the clothes,” he replied, “because what I'm holding is definitely not shapeless. When I first saw you I had no way of knowing you had a small waist and nice hips and other curves that would turn any man's head."

  "I'm not interested in catching a man," she said, bracing her hands against his chest. “Right now, my only goal is to be the best nanny I can be and to win over Annie. And I'm sorry about what just happened. Sometimes I get a little emotional, but it doesn't last long."

  Matt curved a finger beneath her chin and lifted, forcing her to look at him. Regarding her with a directness that was unsettling, he said, "You don't need to be sorry, Ruth, or feel ashamed with me. Not now. Not ever. Trust me. I'm your friend."

  A dolorous pain gathered in the back of her throat, and for several seconds she was aware of nothing around her but the erratic beating of her heart, and the tightness in her chest, and the earnest brown eyes that seemed to be peering into her soul, sincere eyes that asked nothing of her but her trust... Her trust in the man who might have taken Beth. "I can't... I mean...."

  "You can't what? Trust me?"

  "No.... Yes.... That is...." Noises swarmed around her then—wind rustling through leaves, thorns scraping against windows, muffled voices in the bunkhouse....

  Abruptly, she backed out of his arms. "I really have to... get to bed. You see... I'm very tired." She slipped past him and dashed into the house, vowing not to let him touch her again.

  His nearness stripped her mind of all logic and her body of all defenses.

  Trust me. I'm your friend. The words lingered…

  No, she reaffirmed later that night as she peered out the bedroom window at the eerie crisscrossing of fences bathed in moonlight. She would not trust him. Nor would she have silly thoughts of walking into his arms. She would also forget how giddy it made her feel when he winked at her, or how his smile made her heart flutter, or how secure she'd felt in the circle of his arms, the beat of his heart in cadence with her own. She would forget it all. Yes. All of it. In fact, she had done so already.

  CHAPTER THREE

  "...feeling a little melancholy... not interested in catching a man... sometimes get a little emotional... doesn't last long...." Ruth's words kept whispering to Matt in the dusky twilight of the barn, her face coming between him and the tin of saddle soap and the soap-laden rag he was busily daubing at his saddle, not because his saddle needed soaping, but because he was trying to rid himself of restless energy.

  He breathed in the crisp morning air heavy with the musky odor of hay and grain and aged barn boards, and for the umpteenth time, tried to decide what it was about Ruth that shattered his defenses and wrapped itself around his heart. He'd been trying all morning to figure it out, and all morning the elusive thing had evaded him. He'd run the gamut from believing it was innate male helplessness when confronted with irrational female tears, to Ruth's simple acknowledgement that she was crying over a man. Whatever it was that laid his heart bare, it came at him silently and stealthily, like a shadow moving in the night. It happened on the porch, during the eerie silence when Ruth turned and saw him watching. In that spellbound moment he'd heard her unspoken promise, and saw the smile she hadn't smiled, and felt her warm in his embrace. And when her eyes filled with tears and he took her in his arms and heard her soft sobs, and felt the beating of her heart beneath his, the elusive thing closed around his heart and refused to let go.

  Hearing footsteps, he looked up to find Seth, whose eyes shifted between the saddle and the rag in his hand. "Didn't you soap that saddle yesterday?" Seth asked, perplexed.

  "Might have." Putting muscle into the job, Matt continued soaping the saddle, while wishing Seth would leave. Solitude was what he wanted, a time to sort through his feelings and try to make sense of them. All his life he'd prided himself on his ability to take control of things, make order out of chaos, rid his mind of the extraneous and focus on the relevant. But for the first time in hell-and-gone he felt that control slipping.

  Seth leaned a shoulder against the wall and folded his arms. "Keeping a respectable distance from the new nanny?"

  Without looking up, Matt said, "What's it to you?”

  "Nothing," Seth replied, "but when you left her in the corral with Dynamite yesterday, she looked mad enough to spit."

  In his mind"s eye, Matt confronted a pair of angry hazel eyes with dilated pupils, a snug-fitting shirt clinging to every female curve as Ruth's chest rose and fell in agitation, a rapid pulse throbbing in her throat. "She was."

  "What did you do? Proposition her?"

  Matt jammed the cloth against the saddle. "Find something else to do because right now you"re irritating the hell out of me," he said scrubbing with short, choppy movements.

  "Geeze, you're pricklier than a horny toad," Seth said. "Or maybe you're just hot for a lady who sleeps with her legs crossed."

  "Stop being a horse"s ass," Matt said in a dry tone.

  Seth gave him a sidelong glance. "You aren't, are you? Hot for the lady?"

  "If I was, pal, you'd be the last to know." He moved around to the opposite side of the saddle, presenting his back to Seth.

  "She's not exactly like you described," Seth's words came from behind. "Fact is, she comes across as anything but a sexless old maid. You're loosing your touch, boss. You're usually pretty good at sizing up women but this time you were dead wrong."

  Matt couldn't refute it. Ruth had seemed like a sexless old maid at first. But when she walked into the kitchen and took him by surprise, with her flushed face and tight-fitting shirt, and hip-hugging jeans, he couldn't deny, she'd made him more aware of the woman than the priggish nanny he'd thought her to be. He cocked a brow. "She's Annie's nanny, that's all. I feel nothing for her but a hell of a lot of gratitude."

  And affection and tenderness and protection….

  A strange and perplexing conundrum of feelings. What he couldn't figure out was the totally illogical reason why he should feel anything at all for a woman he'd only just met. Or why he couldn't shake her from his mind, no matter how hard he tried.

  "And Annie? How does she like her new nanny?" Seth asked.

  Matt let out a short, ironic laugh. "You know Annie. With her it's always a rocky start. But she'll come around with Ruth. Fact is, I'd bet my last buck Annie's already starting to cozy up to her..."

  ***

  “Annie stop it!" Ruth grabbed the dresser drawer before Annie could dump everything on the floor to join the contents of two other drawers. Annie had been testing her all morning, and Ruth was through cajoling and conceding.

  "It's my room," Annie scoffed, "and I can do whatever I want in it."

  "Oh no, you can't!" Ruth shoved the drawer shut and stood in front of the dresser.

  "Yes I can!" Annie climbed onto the bed and started jumping up and down.

  “Stop it this instant!” Ruth said. “You'll fall." But when she reached for Annie, Annie jumped down and raced to the drawer and yanked it open again.

  Cursing under her breath, Ruth shut the drawer while Annie was pulling clothes out, trapping a shirt. "It took me thirty minutes to put this room together and I'm not going to let you trash it in five! Now pick up those clothes and put them back in the drawer!"

  "No!" Annie braced her hands on her hips. "And
you can't say you'll pull off the Kens' heads either because I hid the Kens where you'll never, ever find them. So there."

  "Annie, I'm not going to put up with this. Now, I'm going to count, and when I get to ten, I'll expect your clothes to be put away. One... two... three... four...."

  In a sing-song voice, Annie said, while springing up and down on the bed, "I'm not going to pick them up and you can't make me, ha ha ha,.. ha ha ha."

  "No, I suppose I can't," Ruth said. "But I don't have to keep picking them up either." She turned, unlatched the window and raised it wide open.

  Annie stopped jumping and eyed her, dubiously. "What are you gonna do?"

  "This." Ruth scooped up an armful of clothes off the floor and heaved them out the window.

  They fell to the yard below. She followed with another armful, and another.

  Annie shrugged. "Daddy"ll be real mad at you for throwing my clothes away."

  "We'll see."

  Annie gave a little sniff of disgust, then went to her toy box, and started tossing out toys.

  "Oh, no you don't!" Ruth cried. "Put those back!"

  Annie ignored her, continuing to launch toys into the air. Ruth positioned herself between Annie and the toy box. Bracing her hands on her hips, she said, "Fine. If that's the way you want it—" She scooped up the toys and tossed them back into the toy box then dragged the box out of the room and into the hallway.

  "Where are you taking my toys?" Annie called after her.

  "Out to the pickup," Ruth yelled back. "Since you don't give a hoot about them, maybe the poor kids in town will. This way, you won't have to pick them up and neither will I." Ruth dragged the toy box along the hallway, bumped it down the stairs, pushed it out the front door, tugged it across the porch and down the front walkway, then dumped the contents into the bed of the pickup truck. She hauled the toy box back up to Annie's room, where she found Annie peering out the window in disbelief.

  Ruth dusted her hands together. "If you decide you want your things back, you may go down and get them and put them where they belong. But if you don't, it makes no difference to me."

  She marched out of Annie's room and into her own room, shutting the door with more force than she'd intended. She stood at the window, peering down at the scattering of clothes below and the pile of toys in the back of the pickup, frustration and anger stinging her eyes. She'd behaved no better than Annie. But Annie was only six. Maybe she should go down and pick it all up...

  Stand firm and don't let her bully you... Matt's own words .

  The whole, stressful episode had been a combination of noncompliance on Annie's part and nerves on hers. You're just tired and edgy... Of course she was tired and edgy. She'd spent half the night reliving her intimate encounter with Matt on the porch. Matt had looked at her with a directness that was as unsettling as it had been provocative, and she knew, as surely as she knew the sun would rise at dawn, that if he'd tried to kiss her out there on the porch, beneath the golden light, while he held her in his arms, she would have let him...

  Her jaws clenched. Stupid, idiotic, fool of a women. She was here in this isolated valley, cut off from the town but for a long, bumpy, dusty road, because the man who'd employed her as nanny might have stolen her child. A man who insisted his daughter be home schooled for reasons that made no sense, unless he was hiding something that Annie might reveal. And she must not lose sight of her objective, which was to figure out a way to get to town to order the DNA testing kits and have them delivered to her at the ranch without anyone knowing. In the meantime, she needed to confirm that Annie was adopted and then find her birth certificate.

  She stopped her restless pacing and stared at the closed door to the hallway. Maybe she could glean information from Edith, while also learning something about handling one unruly little girl. Stepping into the hallway, she peeked in on Annie and found her sitting in the middle of the bed, her face a combination of perplexity and deviousness. Deciding to hold firm about the clothes and toys, she headed downstairs to the kitchen.

  She found Edith standing over a cutting board, a paring knife in her hand. Edith glanced back at her and smiled. "I saw the boys lining the fence yesterday like a rodeo was about to begin, and when I learned you were what they were carrying on about, I had a notion to go out there and whip the lot of them," she said, while slicing a spiral of skin off a potato. "But don't pay them no mind. They're nothing more than a bunch of overgrown boys."

  "You're right about that," Ruth said. "Matt tells me JT and Tanner are your sons."

  Edith's flashed a bright smile. "Yep. They may be too big to smack with a willow stick," she said, shaking the knife, "but they're not too big for a tongue lashing."

  Ruth chuckled. "I'm sorry you didn't do that yesterday. I would have enjoyed it."

  Edith quartered the potato and dumped the chunks into a big enameled pot of water on the stove, then reached for another potato. "When my boys were little," she said, paring out a potato eye, "they were about the sweetest pair I ever laid eyes on. My heart near burst with love. Then they grew and got headstrong and mouthy, and my heart still burst with love, but there were times when I didn't like them." Her hand paused, and she looked up, eyes contemplative. " Funny how that is, a mama loving, but not liking, her boys."

  Edith's words were like an awakening, lifting something weighty from Ruth's mind. Could she possibly love Annie, her own little Beth, and not like her? Could the sweet little toddler who had cuddled in her lap and pressed her tiny hand to her cheek and said, "Wuv voo," have become a mouthy six-year-old with a mind of her own? A child she could love with all her heart, but not always like? It was a curiously gratifying notion, one she desperately wanted to embrace.

  Hearing footsteps, she looked toward the hallway between and saw Annie scurrying past, arms filled with clothes and toys. Ruth bit back a smile. She shouldn't gloat, but it was almost impossible to suppress the mirth that bubbled up inside with her minor victory. However, while Annie was busy retrieving her things, it would be a good time to glean from the Edith a few facts about Annie's past. Trying not to sound as if she were prying, she said, offhandedly, "Annie really seems to adore her father, and there's no doubt she's the light in her daddy's eye."

  Edith looked up and smiled. "She is that, the light in her daddy's eye. As far as he's concerned the sun rises and sets on Annie. They're like two peas in a pod."

  "Does Annie have friends to play with around here?" Ruth asked, wanting to lead into a discussion about home schooling, and Matt's reason to do so.

  "There are one or two kids down the road a ways," Edith replied, "but she doesn't see them very often. Still, she's about the busiest little person I know."

  "Yes, she does seem that way," Ruth said. "If there are children down the road, doesn't the school bus come out this way?"

  "Oh sure. It turns around at the entrance to the Kincaid."

  Ruth pondered that for a few moments before commenting, "Mr. Kincaid mentioned that Annie would be homeschooled. Wouldn't it be better for her to be where there are kids her age to interact with? She's so isolated here."

  Edith's brows gathered as she replied, "I mentioned that to Mr. Kincaid, but he's set on keeping her here, and it's not my place to question his decision. Quite a few folks around here home school, so it's not so unusual in ranch country."

  Ruth made a mental note to pass that on to Bill the first chance she could get word to him.

  But the issue of home schooling was one small piece to the puzzle. After a few moments she asked, "What caused the breakup of the marriage?"

  "Don't rightly know," Edith said. "Mr. Kincaid never talks about it." Giving a little shrug, she added, "I've always thought it had something to do with adopting Annie."

  Ruth stared at Edith unblinking, heart pounding, mind racing. Then in a voice barely audible, she said, "Annie is... adopted?"

  Edith nodded. "Mrs. Kincaid couldn't have children. At least that's what she claimed. But I figured she didn't want any, her
wanting a singing career and all. It wouldn't have surprised me if she was on birth control pills, all the while acting like she was crying over not being able to have a child. Mr. Kincaid was real broken up too, got the notion that adopting would fix the marriage.

  Then one day he just showed up with Annie..."

  Although Edith continued talking, Ruth heard nothing after the words, just showed up with Annie.... Images of Matt snatching Beth whirled in her head. Surely he wouldn't steal a child. But it made no difference in the scheme of things whether Matt took Beth himself, or got her through a black-market agency, he was harboring a child who wasn't his. But, by whatever means he came to have Annie, it was a heady reminder of how powerful the Kincaid family was...

  "You okay?" Edith's words jarred Ruth.

  She looked up, then realized her eyes had been closed and her fingers pressed to her temples. She quickly composed herself. The fact was, there was no proof that Matt was harboring a child that wasn't his, because there was no proof that Annie was Beth. But what was just is troubling was that even though Annie might not be Matt's biological daughter, regardless of the means by which he'd come to have her, he was the father of Annie's heart.

  Aware that Edith was waiting for a response, she said, "Oh... uh... yes. I was just distracted.

  You were saying something about Mr. Kincaid showing up with Annie. Didn"t he and his wife have to go through some sort of adoption process?”

  “I suppose they did," Edith replied, "but I'd been away a couple of months, taking care of my sick mother, so I didn't get in on the details. But Mr. Kincaid was sure excited about having a little one.” She let out a snicker. "Everyone around here was tickled... Mr. Kincaid fusing over a baby like that. But he didn't pay them no mind. He had his little daughter and she had her daddy and the pair of them took to each other like they were true blood kin. But, then, the boys took to her too, like they were all uncles. It was the darndest thing I ever saw, the bunch of them cooing and carrying on like that." Edith smiled at what were obviously fond memories.