Rich Rancher For Christmas

They worked in silence, assembling the meal. He got down two big bowls and showed her where the tea and the instant coffee were located. He carved the roast and filled their bowls with meat, vegetables and gravy. The kettle whistled and she moved to turn it off.

He was not going to think about how effortlessly she moved around his kitchen. She did not belong here and the fact that he was having to remind himself of this fact approximately once every two-point-four seconds was yet another bad sign. At this point, he wasn’t sure he’d recognize a good sign if it bit him on the butt.

It was only when he settled onto the couch with his feet stretched toward the fire that she spoke again. “This is wonderful,” she said as she gracefully folded herself into a cross-legged posture on the couch—a solid four feet away from where he sat.

He appreciated that she wasn’t starting with another line of questioning—even if she was just trying to soften him up, he was glad there was no full-on assault. That didn’t mean he was going to not ask his own questions, however. “How come you don’t have anyone waiting for you?”

She didn’t answer for a long time—which was understandable, because she was devouring the pot roast. CJ did the same. They ate in silence until she set her bowl to the side. “I could ask the same of you—you’re here all alone and Christmas is coming. You don’t even have any Christmas decorations up.” She looked around his living room. It seemed more barren than normal, with all the pictures gone. “But I won’t ask,” she said quickly before CJ could remind her of the rules.

He didn’t miss the way she avoided answering his question. He glanced up—no ring on her finger. He didn’t think she ever wore one—but it was entirely possible that, if she had a ring, she just didn’t wear it while she was on TV.

She tucked her hands under her legs. “So, what are we supposed to talk about? I’m not allowed to ask you questions about yourself and so far, I haven’t felt comfortable answering any of your questions.”

He shrugged. “We don’t have to talk about anything. I don’t have a problem with silence.”

“Oh.” Her chin dipped and her shoulders rounded. But then she straightened. “Okay.”

He gritted his teeth. At any point, she could stop looking vulnerable and that would be just fine by him. “I don’t want to be your lead story. I would rather not talk than have everything I say be twisted around and rebroadcast for mass consumption.”

She sighed in resignation, but she didn’t drop her gaze this time. “I think it’s pretty safe to say that I’m off the clock. Anything we talk about would be off the record.”

Like he was going to take her word for that. “Patrick Wesley is my father. That’s the end of this discussion. I will not allow my personal life to be monetized for someone else’s gain.”

Besides, outside his parents and apparently Hardwick Beaumont, there was only one other person who knew that Patrick Wesley was not his birth father. CJ had been in love in college—or he thought he had. Really, he had been young and stupid and full of lust and he’d confused all of that with love. But he thought he’d had what his parents had found so he’d told his girlfriend about Hardwick Beaumont being a sperm donor because if he were going to propose to a woman, he wanted her to know the truth about him. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life hiding behind the Wesley name.

He had never forgotten the look on Cindy’s face when he’d told her that actually, he was sort of related to the Beaumonts. Her eyes had gone wide and her cheeks had flushed as he’d sat there, waiting for her to say...something. He hadn’t been sure what he’d wanted her to say—that it didn’t matter, maybe, or that she was sorry his mom was paranoid about the Beaumonts. Something. Hardwick Beaumont had still been alive then, although CJ had been twenty-one and beyond his reach.

Cindy hadn’t done any of that. After a few moments of stunned silence, she had started to talk about how wonderful this was. He was a Beaumont—and the Beaumonts were rich. Why, just think of the wedding that they could have on the Beaumonts’ dime! And after the wedding, they could take their proper place in the Beaumont family—and get their proper cut of the Beaumont fortune and on and on and on.

That was the moment he realized he’d made a mistake. Panicking, he tried to write the whole thing off as a joke. Of course he wasn’t a Beaumont—look at him. The Beaumonts were all sandy and blond—he was brown. It was just... Wishful thinking. Because he’d been bored with being a rancher’s son.

He was never sure if Cindy had believed him or not. She’d been pretty mad at him for “teasing” her with all that money. The breakup that followed had been mutual. She wasn’t going to get her dream wedding with the bill footed by the Beaumonts and he...

Well, he had learned to keep his mouth shut.

Besides, it had always been easy to ignore the two fundamental lies that made up his life—that Pat Wesley was his father and that his parents had married quietly a year before Pat had brought Bell home with him. It’d been an easy lie to tell—Pat had been finishing up a tour of duty in the army and they told everyone that he and Bell had met and married in secret while he was home on leave. That was why he’d shown up with a wife and a six-month-old that no one else had known about. And because Pat Wesley was an honest, upstanding citizen, everyone had gone along with it.

CJ’s mother was brown and Pat Wesley was light. Pat was tall and broad, just like CJ. The fact was, CJ looked like their son. There had never been a question.

The Beaumonts had no bearing on CJ’s life. He would’ve been perfectly happy if he’d never heard the Beaumont name for the rest of his life.

But now he was sitting across from someone who knew—or thought she knew. Which was bad enough. But what made it worse was that she was looking to capitalize on the knowledge.

She was staring at him, this Natalie Baker. “What do you want me to call you?” she asked.

“My name is CJ Wesley. You can call me CJ.”

She held out her hand. “Hi. I’m Natalie.”

He hesitated, but when he touched her, palm to palm, a jolt of something traveled between them. He might’ve thought it was static electricity, but it hit him in all the wrong places. His pulse quickened and warmth—warmth that had nothing to do with the roaring fire only a few feet from them—started at the base of his neck and worked its way down his body.

Oh, no—he knew what this was. Attraction. If he wasn’t careful, it might blow into something even more difficult to contain—lust.

He jerked his hand from hers. “Natalie.” Quickly, he got to his feet and gathered up the dishes. “I’ll get the pie.”

Four (#u4a9cad17-19fe-504e-824b-b7fd5a115351)

Natalie sat on the couch, trying to make sense of what had happened.

It didn’t look like that was a thing that could be done because the longer she stared into the fire, the less she knew about what was going on.

That wasn’t entirely true. Once she had thawed out in the shower, her brain worked just fine. She just didn’t quite grasp how, in the last two hours, she had gone from being Natalie Baker, host of A Good Morning with Natalie Baker, to being a human popsicle, to being...

To being CJ Wesley’s unofficial guest.

She felt naked. That feeling had nothing to do with the three separate layers of clothing she was wearing. It had everything to do with the way that man looked at her, his face no longer hidden in the shadows—with the way he asked her why she didn’t have anyone waiting for her.

Because she didn’t. She could try to lie and say that her producer, Steve, would notice her absence but...it was almost Christmas. They’d been filming segments ahead of schedule and planning to strategically reuse old clips so the crew could have some time off.

She didn’t have a single person who would miss her over the next five days. It wasn’t like that was a shocking revelation. She’d known damn good and well that it would be yet another Christmas spent alone. She didn’t celebrate the holiday. Why would she? The day was nothing but the worst of bad memories.

But somehow, telling CJ that had been... Well, it’d been painful. It had been acknowledging that she was completely alone.

She was more or less completely at CJ’s mercy. And he didn’t even like her.

But he wasn’t taking advantage of the situation. Anyone else would’ve looked at her half-frozen and seen an opportunity—but not him. Instead, he had clothed her and now he was feeding her. He had gone out of his way to make sure she was comfortable.

He was being entirely too decent. She hadn’t realized that people like him existed.

Oh, sure—she knew there were still good humans in the world, the ones who ran soup kitchens and read books during story time at the library. But they didn’t come into her world. No, everyone she dealt with wanted something. She didn’t know how to talk to someone if it wasn’t a negotiation.

And CJ Wesley had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want to negotiate. She didn’t have anything he wanted and he wasn’t interested in giving up anything to her.

They had reached an impasse. In less than two hours.

Awareness prickled over her skin the moment he entered the room, even though he was padding around silently in thick sheepskin-lined moccasins. There was something about the way the air changed around him. For all of his decency and grudging niceness, CJ Wesley was a powerful force to be reckoned with.

“Good,” he said as he crossed in front of her and sat back down on the couch, then handed her a plate overflowing with what looked like the best apple pie she’d ever seen.

She wasn’t sure what he was calling good—the pie or the fact that she hadn’t wandered off to unearth his family secrets.

“Thank you,” she said. “You don’t have to serve me.”

There—the muscle in his jaw twitched just as he said, “It’s no problem. I’m happy to do it.”

She twisted her lips to one side, trying not to smile at him. “You’re lying. But I appreciate it anyway.”

He paused, a forkful of pie halfway to his mouth. “I’m not lying.” The twitch was harder to see this time, because he was sliding his fork into his mouth.