Mountain Man Read Free

what he saw. “Winthrop,” Gerald continued quickly, “this is my private secretary, Nicole White.”
    “How do you do, Mr. Christopher,” Nicky said politely and she actually managed to smile, but her knees felt unsteady. This was no welcome at all.
Dislike
was too mild a word for what she read in those eyes. Wounded man, she thought, even while she wished she could run. She understood the meaning of betrayal, because she knew it intimately. For the first few months of her exile, Chase’s handsome face had imposed itself over every letter shetyped, every book she read, every television program she watched.
    Winthrop’s dark eyes narrowed. His thin, chiseled lips pursed thoughtfully, but there was no smile to ease the hardness of that rugged, unshaven face. “Yes, I remember you,” he said curtly. His voice was deep and curt. “You’re young.”
    “I’m twenty-two,” she said.
    “Young.” He turned abruptly, with a care that no physically fit man would have had to take. “I’ve got the pickup. Does your pilot want to come out to the ranch and have something to eat?”
    “No, he’s due back to fly one of the other executives over to New York,” Gerald replied, clapping an affectionate hand on Winthrop’s shoulder. Brave man, to touch that walking inferno, Nicky thought as she fell into step behind them.
    “I’ll get the luggage.” Winthrop started toward the plane, favoring one leg, and Nicky hesitated, her eyes speaking her thoughts. He gave her a look that stopped her from moving or speaking. He could have stopped a brawl with that glance. Her half-formed offer to help was frozen solid on her lips. With a violent flush, she turned away and followed Gerald.
    “Don’t ever offer to help him,” her boss cautioned in a soft, quiet tone. “He’s a little less sensitive about it these days, but soon after it happened, he threw a punch at one of the cowboys just for offering.”
    “I’ll remember.” She felt stung. The older brother was going to be hard going, and her first impulse was to ask if she could go back to Chicago.
    Gerald Christopher seemed to sense her feelings, because he put an affectionately careless arm around her shoulder. “Don’t panic,” he teased. “He doesn’t bite.”
    “Thank God I’ve had all my inoculations.” She sighed, but she smiled back.
    Behind them, the older man was watching that exchange of smiles and the arm around Nicky and putting his own connotation on what was going on between his younger brother and his secretary. The look in his eyes was both threatening and disapproving as he picked up the cases and followed them to the cream-colored pickup truck.
    It was a long ride to the ranch, down a highway dwarfed by the towering, autumn-hued peaks of the Rockies. Soon Winthrop turned off onto some mountainous dirt roads that didn’t actually seem like roads at all. To Nicky, squashed between the two men, it was a cold and unnerving experience. She could feel Winthrop Christopher’s long, powerful leg come in contact with hers every time he pressed on the accelerator, and her body was reacting to the feel of his shoulder against hers in ways she hadn’t expected. He made her tremble with awakening sensation, made her feel alive as she hadn’t felt since her late teens. She didn’t like that, or him, and her face took on the hardness of stoneas the road wound on and on, through fir trees so tall and thick that Nicky stared in fascination at their girth. The forested areas were becoming thick now that they were off the rolling plain that had led to them, down country roads where houses were miles apart and traffic was practically nonexistent. Nicky, who’d read about Montana, hadn’t been prepared for its vastness, or for the glory of orange-tipped aspens with their thin silvery trunks, and cottonwoods fluffy and yellow-hued, and those incredibly big pines. Or for the sheer splendor of the mountains and the crisp, clean coldness of mountain air. She