“All his, I guess,” Ellie said as she reached the bottom step.
“Every thousand acre,” Lew answered, obviously enjoying Ellie’s sense of awe.
“How far to the house?”
“About forty-five minutes. Valerie doesn’t like the planes landing near the house and disturbing Mark.”
“Let me guess,” Ellie said. “Marcellus Woodward the Second, nicknamed Mark.”
Lew cocked his head at her. “You’re smart, aren’t you?”
“Guilty,” Ellie said, laughing. “But I don’t think you’re just the guy who flies the plane, now are you?”
“Harvard Business School, first in my class,” he said, smiling at her. “Piloting is a hobby, and Woody lets me fly this thing but not the jet.”
He’s flirting with me! Ellie thought, then realized that she was flirting back. How long had it been since any man had looked at her in that way? How long had it been since she’d wanted a man to notice her?
As she followed Lew to the waiting Jeep, she thought, Maybe I should write a story about a billionaire who has an assistant who—
She thought about the story all the way to the house.
It was nearly six-thirty by the time they got to the house, and Lew drove past it. It was a long, low house made of logs, and it had been designed to look like a cabin out of the Old West, but it would never fool anyone. For one thing, it had to be the size of a football stadium.
“Wonder which forest was sacrificed for that?” Ellie couldn’t prevent herself from muttering.
“One that Woody owns,” Lew answered. “And he found oil under the trees, a little gold, and there might be some uranium there too.”
“Right,” Ellie said, nodding. “Figures.”
Lew drove for a few minutes more, turned a corner around a stand of cottonwood trees, and they came into view of a perfect little house. It was small, set under mature trees, and it had the look that only age could give it.
“The original farmhouse?” Ellie asked.
Lew smiled at her perception. “That it is,” he said. “But Valerie calls it the summerhouse.”
At that Ellie smiled as she thought of Leslie’s summerhouse, and she wondered how the other two women were getting along with their job of changing their lives. If Madison would only hang up on Roger, then her life—
“I’m sorry, I was daydreaming,” Ellie said when she realized that Lew had said something to her.
“Hazard of being a writer, I’d guess,” he said as he opened his door.
She got out of the car and looked around as Lew began to pull her suitcases out of the back. She thought she should help him unload, but she wanted to see the inside of the house, wanted to explore the ranch; she wanted to . . .
That’s it, isn’t it? she thought. For the first time in years she wanted to do things. With a guilty glance back at Lew as he started pulling the second layer of suitcases out of the car, she stepped onto the porch of the summerhouse. It was wonderful! The porch had to be twenty feet deep, and the furniture on it was big and deep and covered with cushions of red-and-white check. She opened the screen door and went inside.
It was obvious that an interior decorator had done the inside, but it was a person with taste, as the inside had been kept simple and plain. The curtains were plain gingham, and the chairs were overstuffed and comfortable-looking.
“You like it?” Lew said from behind her.
When she turned to look at him, she could see that he was concerned that she would like the place. She had to look away to hide her smile. It had been a long time since a man had cared whether she liked anything or not.
“I love it,” she said honestly.
He grinned. “Some people don’t like it. They think that with Woody’s money he should have a guesthouse more befitting his status.”
“Marble Jacuzzis, that sort of thing?” Ellie asked.
“Exactly. One guy was disgusted that the faucets weren’t gold.”
“I like this. Did Valerie decorate it?”
This time Lew’s grin lit up his face. “Actually, my wife did. She’d like to be a decorator, so Valerie gave her this to do.”
“Nice,” Ellie said as again she looked away. Damn, damn, and double damn! she thought. Wife. “For my taste I think she has a career.”
“She’s trying for it, but there aren’t too many houses to decorate up here.”
He was standing in the midst of a sea of suitcases and he seemed to be waiting for something. It couldn’t be a tip, could it? she wondered. Then she knew that he wanted permission to leave.
“I’ll take care of these,” she said. “Go home.”
He smiled his thanks. “Dinner’s in the house at eight. If you get hungry, the fridge is stocked. And feel free to wander.”
“Will I see you at dinner?” she asked as he reached the door.
“No, that’s just family and guests. But I’ll be around in the morning.”
After he left, Ellie looked around and felt a bit lonely. She’d never before done anything as daring as this, accepting an invitation from a stranger, boarding a private plane and flying to an unknown destination.
“New experiences,” she said aloud to herself. That’s what she’d wanted and that’s what she was getting.
She spent a few minutes exploring the rest of the summerhouse. There was only one bedroom, with an adjoining bath, a little kitchen with a refrigerator stocked as though to feed a family of four for a couple of weeks. She went back through the living room, then out to the porch again, for that’s what she really liked. The porch went around all four sides of the house, and she walked all the way around it, looking at the mountains, breathing deeply of the clean air.
From the back of the house she could see a barn, so she went back inside, put on a new pair of jeans, a fresh, crisp denim shirt, and new hiking boots—no cowboy boots for her! She also draped an antique concho belt about her hips and slipped on a couple of old silver bracelets.
It was amazing what new clothes could do for a person, she thought as she left the cabin and started for the barn. Of course it didn’t hurt to have a “new” body to go with it.
As she reached the barn, her sense of loneliness left her and she thought of what she was doing as an adventure. Whom would she meet? What would she see?
She could hear horses inside the barn but no people. And there didn’t seem to be anyone outside either. But then it was nearly seven and she doubted if cowboys waited until eight to have their dinner.
A man was in the barn, bent over a horse’s hoof that he held between his thighs, and as the sun filtered through a high window, spotlighting him, Ellie knew that the man and the horse were the most erotic sight she’d ever seen.
He wasn’t a tall man, not over about five feet ten, but then she liked shorter men. He was wearing blue jeans and heavy, scuffed boots—not cowboy boots with their pointed toes, but square-toed boots with thick soles. He wore no shirt, and from the golden color of his skin, shirtless was his normal attire. A leather apron, the kind worn by blacksmiths in days of old, covered the front of him.
He was in profile to her, and she started at his feet and looked up: The thick boots led up to strong calves, then to heavy thighs encased in worn, faded denim, the seams straining against the man’s muscle. His tight, round buttocks curved up into the small of his back, his waist cinched by a wide black leather belt.
His back was one long muscle that flared out toward arms that were straining against the horse’s hoof he was holding between his thighs.
The horse was a heavy horse, a draft horse, and Ellie knew from research for one of her books that this horse was a Frisian. From the knee down the horse had long, silky hair called feathering. The massive muscle of the enormous horse matched the muscle and power that came from the man.
She looked up at the profile of his face: a mouth of sculptured lips, full, abundant. He held two horseshoe nails between his lips. His long nose had slightly flared nostrils. His eyes
were lowered as he looked down at the hoof, and their lashes were as thick and as black as butterfly wings. A high forehead, slightly wrinkled in concentration, was beneath short, deep dark black hair.
She stood there paralyzed as she looked at this scene. She could hear nothing else, see nothing else. This man was all her senses could comprehend. She was several feet away from him, but she was so attuned to him that she could smell his skin, warm from the sun, fragrant from the hay, sweaty from his work.
Slowly, oh, so exquisitely slowly, the man turned his head to look at her. He blinked, and since everything in her body seemed to have stopped, she could sense the movement of air that those thick, lush lashes caused.
When he turned and saw her, when his eyes made contact with hers, Ellie drew in her breath and held it. His eyes were as dark as his hair and as intense as an electrical shock.
As he looked at her, time stood still. Her body ceased to function. She didn’t breathe, didn’t think. It was as though those eyes had frozen her where she stood.
Yet she could feel herself moving toward him. It wasn’t as though she were walking. It was as though the man’s eyes had fastened onto her soul, onto what made her who she was, and he was pulling her to him by some magic power, by some unseen, mystical, hypnotic power.
She wasn’t sure how it happened, but she was closer to him. Slowly, as though in a slow-motion film, with the only sound in her ears that of her heart and her blood throbbing through her veins, he stood up, the horse’s hoof sliding down between his thighs. Ellie blinked; she could feel the horse’s foot’s progress as it moved downward between his legs: down his thighs, muscles thick and taunt, past calves rounded and hard, to those heavy boots with their thick, hard soles.
Slowly, his eyes never breaking contact with hers, he removed the nails from between his lips. She was close enough now that she could see those lips, see the tiny lines in them, see the lower lip curved, so round, so succulent, a lip that called to her to touch it with her own.
With his lips parted, he touched the tip of his tongue to the center of his lower lip, and at the sight of that pink, moist tip, Ellie felt her knees weaken.
The man reached out a hand to steady her, and she knew that if his skin touched hers, all would be lost.
But in that next second, the huge, wide back doors of the barn were flung open, and the room suddenly filled with light and noise as men and animals entered what had been such a very private, intimate place.
The spell was broken, and Ellie shook her head to clear it. She was standing inches from a man she’d never seen before in her life, and, judging from the angle of his head, he had been about to kiss her.
Quickly, she turned to the left and saw three men standing there, horses behind them, and they were looking at the two of them in open curiosity.
“Horse,” she said. “He was showing me how to shoe a horse.”
The smirks the men’s faces wore were identical.
Before she could say another word and definitely before she could look at the man again, she turned and ran out of the barn with the speed, if not the grace, of an Italian greyhound. And she only stopped running when she was back in her guesthouse and had shut and locked all the doors, then drawn the curtains to keep out even the daylight.
When she was at last safe, she sat down on a chair, grabbed the notebook and pen that was never far from her side, and like the writer she was, she wrote down everything she’d just felt and seen. Who knew when she could use this scene in a book?
Twenty
By the time Ellie went into the house for dinner, she was vibrating too much to think about anything but The Man. Who was he? What had made her react as she had? For one of her books she’d done some research on the occult, and a couple of the psychics she’d interviewed had blamed most everything on past lives. So had she known this man in a past life?
Was there a story in that?
Ellie’s mind wasn’t on dressing, but she had a lot of new things to wear, so that wasn’t a problem. She put on a cute little navy blue knit pantsuit that had cost more than she’d spent for clothes in the last three years, some tiny gold earrings set with lapis lazuli, and sauntered over to the big house at a few minutes before eight.
For all that she was thinking of little else except Him, she was swept away by Valerie. She was tall, beautiful, and from Texas. Was more needed to describe her?
What was it about Texas that produced women who seemed to have no fears, no doubts, no hesitations? Had a Texas woman ever met a stranger? Were shy women somehow detected at birth and sent to other states?
“There you are,” Valerie said, swooping down from an opentread staircase that must have been twenty-feet tall. She wore black silk trousers over her long, long slim legs. Draped around the top of her was some hand-woven concoction that flowed as she moved. She had reddish blonde hair that fell down her back in big waves. Dazzling green eyes smiled at Ellie from under sooty black lashes. Valerie Woodward was like a light with a two-hundred-watt bulb in its socket.
“Wish I were Madison,” Ellie muttered under her breath as she smiled up at her hostess. Madison was on a level with this beautiful creature, but Ellie felt like slinking out the back door.
But Valerie wasn’t about to let anyone she had her eye on escape. She took Ellie’s arm, tucked it under her own, and led Ellie toward what she assumed was the dining room.
“I couldn’t believe it when Woody said that he’d met Alexandria Farrell. You just don’t know how much I love your books. All my friends read them. I do hope that you don’t mind if I asked a few people to meet you.”
At that announcement, Ellie turned pale. What was “a few people” to someone from Texas?
As Valerie walked her toward the door, it opened as though by magic, and Ellie saw a room with a table that could seat at least fifty people. And to Ellie’s eye, most of northern California was inside the room. While Ellie’d been shopping all day, Valerie had been putting together a little impromptu party the size of a state banquet.
Once Ellie put her foot over the threshold, her life was no longer her own. Instantly, she was surrounded by women holding out books to be autographed and telling her how much they loved her stories. She didn’t get to eat much at dinner because, one by one, every person at the table asked her THE question: Where do you get your ideas? It was what she was always asked wherever she went, and she tried to be as honest as she could be.
But of course she held back the truth. She couldn’t very well say that today she’d walked into a barn and seen some ranch hand in a leather apron, with nails sticking out of his mouth, and she’d almost torn his clothes off. And even if she never saw the man again, she was sure that this scene, which she had recorded on paper in its entirety, would someday be in one of her books.
Since she was the guest of honor, the people seated on either side of her changed with each new course of food that was served. Ellie had to hand it to Valerie, she might live in the middle of nowhere on a ranch, surrounded mostly by cows, but she did know how to live. The plates were French, the glassware Italian, the silver was English. But the food was American and plentiful.
Not that Ellie got to eat much before the next person sat down and said, “I’ve always wanted to ask a writer, Where do you get your ideas?”
While Ellie was answering this question for the fourth time, she glanced down the long, narrow dining table toward Valerie. Woody was sitting at the head, Valerie to his right. She hadn’t put herself at the opposite end of the table but beside her husband.
While Ellie answered, she kept her eyes on Valerie and Woody, as Ellie loved trying to size up people to see what was really going on with them. She’s mad about him, was the conclusion Ellie drew by the time she was on her sixth telling of where she got her ideas. When she’d first seen that Valerie was much younger than Woody, she’d assumed that he’d been married for his money. And Lew’s crack about Valerie’s shopping had solidified the idea in Ellie’s head. But now she could s
ee that it wasn’t true. Unless Valerie was the world’s greatest actress, she was madly in love with her husband.
Somehow, the sight of the two of them together, Valerie constantly touching Woody’s hand and the way Woody kept his head turned toward his wife’s, made Ellie feel very lonely. It wasn’t fair that a man could become a mega-success and still find someone to love him. But if a woman became successful . . .
Ellie didn’t want to think of what had happened in her own marriage. She didn’t want to yet again go over everything and ask herself what she could have done to make it up to Martin for her success. How could she have kept him from being jealous?
The dinner seemed to take hours, and Ellie had to stop herself from looking at her watch (new, set with turquoise) every ten minutes.
Finally, at nine-thirty, it was over and everyone was invited to go outside for drinks and moonlight swimming in a heated pool.
“I do hope you brought a suit,” Valerie said as she came up behind Ellie. “Lew said that you did some shopping.”
“Yes,” Ellie said, smiling. “And I brought some gifts for your son.”
At the mention of the child, Valerie’s face melted into a look of love that Ellie knew couldn’t be faked.
Valerie leaned closer and said softly, “Tomorrow you and I’ll get together and talk. I had to invite all these people or they never would have forgiven me. But tomorrow it’ll just be family and you can play with my son.”
Valerie said this last sentence as though she were bestowing the greatest honor in the world on Ellie.
It was Ellie’s turn to melt, because Valerie was talking about family, that thing that everyone wanted: a warm, loving group of people to be with, to live with, to share with. “I’d love that,” Ellie said sincerely.
“Good!” Valerie said; then she greeted four people who had drinks and little platters of munchies in their hands. “Yes, I’m just coming,” she called to someone else. “Leave any time you want,” she whispered to Ellie. “Your performance is over.” Then Valerie went toward the big French doors that Ellie assumed led to the pool, leaving Ellie alone with her reprieve.