2
Gratefully, Miranda got off the horse and went into the cabin. In the last few days, things had happened so quickly that she’d had no time to think about them. Yesterday afternoon a man had come to the hospital and asked if she’d please accept a private, live-in nursing job for his client. It was to start the next morning and would last for two weeks. At first she started to say no, that she couldn’t ask the hospital to let her off. But it seemed that her absence had already been cleared with the chief of staff—a man Miranda had never seen, much less met.
She then told the man she couldn’t go because she had a son to take care of and she couldn’t leave him. As though the whole thing were timed, Miranda was called to the phone to be asked—begged, actually—by Eli to be allowed to go with Chelsea’s family on an extremely educational yacht trip. Maybe she should have protested that he’d miss too much school, but she knew that Eli could make up any work within a blink of an eye, and he so wanted to go that she couldn’t say no.
When she put down the phone, the man was still standing there, waiting for her answer about accepting the job.
“Two weeks only,” she said, “then I have to be back.”
Only after she agreed was she told that her new patient was staying in a remote cabin high in the Rockies and the only way to get there was by helicopter or horse—but there was no place for the ’copter to land. Since the idea of being lowered on a rope from a helicopter didn’t appeal to her, she said she’d take the horse.
Early the next morning, she hugged and kissed Eli as though she were going to be away from him for a year or more, then got into a car that drove her thirty miles into the mountains. An old man named Sandy was waiting to take her up to the cabin. He had two saddled horses and three mules loaded with goods.
They rode all day and Miranda knew she’d be sore from the horse, but the air was heavenly, thin and crisp as they went higher and higher. It was early autumn, but she could almost smell the snow that would eventually blanket the mountains.
When they reached the cabin, a beautiful structure of logs and stone, she thought they must be in the most isolated place on earth. There were no wires to the cabin, no roads, no sign that it had touch with the outside world.
“Remote, isn’t it?”
Sandy looked up from the mule he was unloading. “Frank made sure the place has all the comforts of home. Underground electricity and its own sewage system.”
“What’s he like?” she asked. Because of the narrow trail, they hadn’t been able to talk much on the long ride up. All she knew of her patient was that he’d broken his right arm, was in a cast, and that it was difficult for him to perform everyday tasks.
Sandy took a while to answer. “Frank’s not like anybody else. He’s his own man. Set in his ways, sort of.”
“I’m used to old and weird,” she said with a smile. “Does he live here all the time?”
Sandy chuckled. “There’s twelve feet of snow up here in the winter. Frank lives wherever he wants to. He just came here to . . . well, maybe to lick his wounds. Frank doesn’t talk much. Why don’t you go inside and sit down? I’ll get this lot unloaded. If I know Frank, he’s out fishing and won’t be back for hours.”
With a smile of gratitude, Miranda did as he bid. Without so much as a glance at the interior of the cabin, she went inside, sat down, and immediately fell asleep. When she awoke with a start, it was about an hour later, and she saw that Sandy and the animals were gone. Only a huge pile of boxes and sacks on the floor showed that he had been there.
At first she was a bit disconcerted to find herself alone there, but she shrugged and began to look about her.
The cabin looked as though it had been designed by a computer, or at least a human who had no feelings. It was perfectly functional, an open-plan L-shape, one end with a huge stone fireplace, a couch, and two chairs. It could have been charming, but the three perfectly matched pieces were covered with heavy, serviceable, dark gray fabric that looked as though it had been chosen solely for durability. There were no rugs on the floor, no pictures on the walls, and only one table had a plain gray ceramic lamp on it. The kitchen was in the corner of the L, and it had also been designed for service: cabinets built for use alone, not decorative in any way. At the end of the kitchen were two beds, precisely covered in hard-wearing brown canvas. Through a door was a bathroom with a shower, white ceramic toilet, and washbasin. Everything was utterly basic. All clean and tidy. And with no sign of human habitation.
Miranda panicked for a moment when she thought that perhaps her patient had packed up and left, that maybe she was here alone, with no way down the mountain except for a two-day walk. But then she noticed a set of doors beside one of the beds, one on each side, perfectly symmetrical. Behind one, arranged in military precision, were some pieces of men’s clothing: heavy canvas trousers, boots without a bit of mud on them.
“My, my, we are neat, aren’t we?” she murmured, smiling, then frowned at the twin bed so near his. No more than three feet separated the beds. She did hope this old man wasn’t the type to make childish passes at her. She’d had enough of those in school. “Just give me a little kiss, honey,” toothless men had said to her as their aged hands reached for her body.
Laughing at the silliness of her fantasy, Miranda went to the kitchen and looked inside. Six pots and pans. Perfectly arranged, spotlessly clean. The drawers contained a matched set of stainless steel cooking utensils that looked as though they’d never been used. “Not much of a cook, are you, Mr. Taggert?” she murmured as she kept exploring. Other cabinets and drawers were filled with full jars of spices and herbs, their seals unbroken.
“What in the world does this man eat?” she wondered aloud. When she came to the last cabinet, she found the answer. Hidden inside was a microwave, and behind the tall door in the corner was a freezer. It had about a dozen TV dinners in it, and after a moment’s consternation, Miranda laughed. It looked as though she’d been hired to cook for the missing Mr. Taggert as much as anything else.
“Poor man. He must be starving,” she said, and she cheered up at the thought. The beds so close together had worried her, but the empty freezer was reassuring. “So, Miranda, my girl, you weren’t brought here for a sex orgy but to cook for some lonely old man with a broken arm. Poor dear, I wonder where he is now.”
She didn’t waste time speculating but set to work hauling in supplies. She had no idea what Sandy had brought on those two mules but she soon found out. Packed in dry ice, in insulated containers, was nearly a whole side of prime beef and a couple dozen chickens. There were bags of flour, packets of yeast, some canned goods, and bags of fresh fruit and vegetables. With every item she unpacked, she felt more sure of what her true purpose here was, and thinking of someone who needed her made her begin to forget how easily Eli had said he didn’t need her for the next two weeks. He’d told her in detail how very much he wanted to travel with Chelsea and her parents to the south of France, then on to Greece aboard some Italian prince’s yacht.
“All in just two weeks?”
“It’s a really fast boat,” Eli said, then disappeared into his room.
With a sigh, Miranda put a frozen chicken in the microwave to thaw. She would not let herself think how Eli needed her less every day. “My baby is growing up,” she said to herself as she removed the chicken and began to prepare a stuffing of bread cubes, sage, and onion.
“Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself,” she said. “You’re not dead yet. You could meet a man, fall madly in love, and have three more kids.” Even as she said it, she laughed. She wasn’t a heroine in a romance novel. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous with a figure that made men’s hands itch with lust. She was a perfectly ordinary woman. She was pretty in a dimpled sort of way—an old-fashioned prettiness, not the gaunt-cheeked style that was all the rage now. And she was—well, face it, about thirty pounds overweight. Sometimes s
he consoled herself that if she’d lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, men would have used her as a model for a painting of Venus, the goddess of love. But that didn’t help today when the most popular models weighed little more than ninety pounds.
As Miranda settled down to prepare a meal for her absent patient, she tried to forget the loneliness of her life, to forget that her precious son would soon be leaving her to go to school and she would be left with no one.
Two hours later she had a lovely fire going in the big stone fireplace, a stuffed chicken roasting in the never-before-used oven, and some vegetables simmering. She’d filled a bowl full of wildflowers from the side of the cabin and put a dry pinecone on a windowsill. Her unpacked duffel bags were by the bed the man didn’t appear to use. She’d draped her sweater across the back of a chair and put an interesting rock on one end of the stone mantel. The place was beginning to look like home.
When the cabin door was flung open and a man burst in, Miranda almost dropped the teakettle. He was not old. There was some gray at the temples of his thick black hair and lines running down the sides of his tight-lipped mouth, but his virility was intact. He was a very good-looking man.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded.
She swallowed. Something about him was intimidating. She could see that he was a man who was used to giving orders and being obeyed. “I’m your nurse,” she said brightly, nodding toward his arm, which was in a cast nearly to his shoulder. It must have been a bad break for such a cast, and he must have great difficulty doing even the smallest tasks.
Smiling, she walked around the counter, refusing to be intimidated by his face. “Miranda Stowe,” she said, laughing nervously. “But you already know that, don’t you? Sandy said you had the medical reports with you, so maybe if I saw them, I’d know more about your condition.” When he didn’t say a word, she frowned a bit. “Come and sit down, supper’s almost ready and—here, let me help you off with those boots.”
He was still staring at her, speechless, so she
gently tugged on his uninjured arm and got him to sit in a chair by the dining table. Kneeling before him, she started to unlace his boots while thinking that sharing a cabin was going to be a lonely experience if he never spoke.
When he started to laugh, she looked up at him, smiling, wanting to share whatever was amusing him.
“This is the best one yet,” he said.
“What is?” she asked, thinking he was remembering a joke.
“You are.” Still smiling, he cocked one eyebrow at her. “I must say you don’t look the part of—what was it you called yourself? A nurse?”
Miranda lost her smile. “I am a nurse.”
“Sure you are, honey. And I’m a newborn babe.”
Miranda quit unlacing his boots and stood up, looking down at him. “Exactly what do you think I am?” she asked quietly.
“With those”—he nodded toward her ample
bosom—“you could be only one thing.”
Miranda was a softhearted woman. Wounded butterflies made her weep, but this tall, good-looking man, nodding toward her breasts in that way, was more than she could take. She was strong from years of making beds and turning patients, so when he reached out as though to touch her, she put her hand on his shoulder and pushed. It was harder than she meant to. As he went flying backward in the chair, he reached for the table to keep from falling. But his right arm, encased in plaster, unbalanced him so he went sprawling to the floor.
Miranda knew she should see if he was all right, but she didn’t. She turned on her heel and started for the cabin door.
“Why you—” he said, then grabbed her ankle before she could take another step.
“Let go of me!” She kicked out at him, but he pulled harder, until she landed on top of him and hit his injured arm. She knew the impact must have hurt him, but he didn’t so much as show his pain by a flicker of an eye.
With one roll, he pinned her body to the floor. “Who are you and how much do you want?”
Genuinely puzzled, she looked up at him. He was about forty years old, give or take a few years, and his body felt as though it was in perfect condition. “For this job I receive about four hundred dollars a week.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “For nursing.”
“Nursing,” he said in a derogatory way. “Is that what you call it?”
She pushed against him angrily but couldn’t budge him.
“So how did you find me? Simpson? No, he doesn’t know anything. Who sent you? The Japanese?”
Miranda stopped struggling. “The Japanese?” Was the man’s injury only in his arm?
“Yeah, they weren’t too happy when I won on that last deal. But microchips are a dead item. I’m going for—”
“Mr. Taggert!” she interrupted, as he seemed to have forgotten he was lying full length on top of her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Would you please let me up?”
When he looked down at her, the color of his dark eyes seemed to change. “You’re not like the women I usually have, but I guess you’ll do.” He gave her a lascivious, one-sided smirk. “The softness of you might make for a nice change from bony models and starlets.”
At that remark, made as though he were in a butcher’s shop poking chickens for tenderness, she brought her knee up sharply between his legs. He rolled off her in pain. “Now, Mr. Taggert,” she said as she stood up and bent over him, “just what is this all about?”
He was holding himself with one hand, and as he rolled to one side, his injured shoulder hit the table leg. Miranda’s heart almost went out to him.
“I’m a . . .”
“A what?” she demanded.
“A billionaire.”
“You’re a—?” She didn’t know whether to laugh or kick him in the ribs. She couldn’t conceive of the amount of money he was talking about. “You’re rich, so you think I came up here to . . . to get your money?”
He was beginning to recover as he pulled himself up to sit heavily on a chair. “Why else would you be here?”
“Because you asked for a nurse,” she shot at him. “You hired me.”
“I’ve heard that story before.”
She stood looking down at him, glaring, more angry than she’d ever before been. “Mr. Taggert, you may have a great deal of money, but when it comes to being a human being, you are penniless.”
She didn’t think about what she was doing, that she was in the Rocky Mountains and had no idea how to get back to civilization. She just grabbed her sweater from the back of the couch and walked out of the cabin.
Still raging in anger, she followed a bit of a trail, but she didn’t look where she was going.
Not even Leslie had ever made her as angry as this man just had. Leslie lied to her and manipulated her at every chance, but he’d never accused her of being indecent.
She went uphill and down, unaware of the growing dark. One minute it seemed to be sunny and warm, and the next moment it was pitch-dark and freezing. Putting on her sweater didn’t help at all.
“Are you ready to return?”
When the man spoke, she nearly jumped out of her skin. Whirling about, she could barely see him standing hidden amid the trees.
“I don’t think I will return to the cabin,” she said. “I’m going back to Denver.”
“Yes, of course. But Denver is that way.” He pointed in the direction opposite to the way she was walking.
She wanted to keep some of her pride. “I wanted to . . . to get my suitcase.” She looked from one side to the other for a moment, then charged straight ahead.
“Ahem,” he said, then pointed over his right shoulder.
“All right, Mr. Taggert,” she said, “you’ve won. I haven’t a clue where I am or where I’m going.”
He took two steps around her and parted some bushes
with his hand, and there, about a hundred yards in front of her, was the cabin. Light glowed softly and warmly from the windows. She could almost feel the warmth of the fire.
But she turned away, toward the path leading to Denver, and started walking.
“And where do you think you’re going?”
“Home,” she said, just as she stumbled over a tree root in the trail. But she caught herself and didn’t fall. With her back straight, she kept walking.
He was beside her in moments. “You’ll freeze to death out here. If a bear doesn’t get you first, that is.”
She kept walking.
“I am ordering you to—”
Halting, she glared up at him. “You have no right to order me to do anything. No right at all. Now, would you please leave me alone? I want to go home.” To her horror, her voice sounded full of tears. She’d never been able to sustain anger for very long. No matter what Leslie did to her, she couldn’t stay angry for more than a short time.
Straightening her shoulders, she again started walking.
“Could I hire you as my cook-housekeeper?” he said from behind her.
“You couldn’t pay me enough to work for you,” she answered.
“Really?” he asked, and he was right behind her. “If you’re poor—”
“I am not poor. I just have very little money. You, Mr. Taggert, are very poor. You think everyone has a price tag.”
“They do, and so do you. So do I, for that matter.”
“If you think that, you must be a very lonely man.”
“I’ve never had enough time alone to consider what loneliness is. Now, what can I offer you to make you cook for me?”
“Is that what you want? My pot roast?” At this thought there came a little spring to her step. Maybe she did have something to offer. And maybe she wouldn’t have to spend the night running down a mountain being chased by a bear.
“Five hundred dollars a week,” he said.
“Ha!”