The Humbug Man Read Free Page A

disbelieving eyes. “I beg your pardon?”
    “Sorry. It slipped out.” She leaned against the wall, holding the light steady.
    But he wasn’t moving. His dark eyes were fixed on her face. “I said: I beg your pardon, lady.”
    How in the world could a man make an insult of the word lady, she wondered absently. She shifted. “Blake likes you.”
    “Well, I’m not much on boys,” he returned shortly. “Or city women. Or even neighbors. I live alone and I like my privacy. I don’t intend having it invaded by your son.”
    “That’s plain enough,” she returned, feeling her temper start to rise. “Now let me tell you something. I don’t like men in general and you in particular, and what I think of your type of man would fill a book! As for my son, he’s only nine years old and he never knew his father. His grandfather is the only male besides you that he’s ever spent any time around. And Papa Jeffries was kind and gentle and loving—the exact opposite of you. Blake doesn’t know what a man is, so you’ll have to forgive his attachment to you!”
    His left eye had narrowed and his jaw was clenched. “You are playing one dangerous game, lady,” he said shortly.
    “I’m so sorry if I’ve offended you, Mr. Hollister,” she replied coolly. “And I promise you Blake won’t be allowed within a mile of you for the entire two weeks we’re in residence.”
    “You won’t last two weeks if you don’t get this outfit into shape,” he said shortly as he looped a wire and stayed it with a screw. “There. Let’s try it now.”
    He replaced the cover and started the generator. Maggie had to concede that Hollister was good with his hands. He was lucky, she thought venomously, that he had something to make up for his lack of looks.
    Hollister slid his gloves back on and didn’t glance at her. She brought back painful memories, she and her son. It had been six years, but he still grieved for his own family. He didn’t want or need complications, but this woman could get under his skin. And that irritated him. She opened his wounds and made them bleed. The boy rubbed salt in them.
    Blake opened the door and let them back in. “The heater’s running!” He grinned up at the big, unsmiling man. “Thanks, Mr. Hollister. We’d have frozen to death but for you.”
    Hollister’s black eyes went over that boyish face with something less than affection. The boy looked like a boy—all uncombed hair and eyes that sparkled with mischief. Just like his mother. The pair of them were going to give him problems. He could feel it in his bones. He missed the old man, because Jeffries had never bothered him. But Blake had, at every opportunity. When he’d come to visit Jeffries for the summer, Tate couldn’t walk for bumping into him. It had been irritating at first, and then frankly painful. He’d been glad when the boy left at the end of summer and went back to school. Now here he was back again, and Hollister was feeling the same old stabs of memory, only they were worse. Because now she was here, too, and he’d been a hell of a long time without a woman. She aroused sensations that he’d forgotten he could feel, and he hated them. Damn it, he hated the world…!
    Maggie glanced at him, surprised by his cold reaction to Blake’s gratitude. He was a cold man, though, she thought as she got out of her cap and jacket and boots. Thank God he wasn’t going to be around very much.
    “Yes, thank you for fixing the generator,” Maggie agreed. “I suppose you need to get home, so I won’t offer to make coffee….”
    She didn’t want to, she meant. Oddly enough, that irritated Hollister. He didn’t like the way she reacted to him. He knew he wasn’t pretty, for God’s sake, but did she have to make it so obvious that she found him ugly?
    “Those cattle have got to be moved. I’ll find your men and set them to it.”
    “Thank you,” she said, deciding against arguing because it would only keep him here longer,