To Wear His Ring: Circle of Gold / Trophy Wives / Dakota Bride

Her late parents had lived long enough to see the irony of the second name they’d given her. Her middle name was Grace, but she wasn’t graceful. She was all long legs and arms. She wasn’t pretty, but she had a lovely body, and the thin white dress she was wearing became transparent in the water. It was easily noticed that she was wearing only the flimsiest of briefs and a bra that barely covered her pert breasts. Just the thing, she thought miserably, to wear in front of the Callisters’ business partners who were here for a pool party on the big ranch. Feline blond Pauline Raines was laughing her head off at Kasie’s desperate treading of water. Just you wait, lady, she fumed. Next time I’ll give Bess a soccer ball to bean you with and I won’t step in the way…!

Her head went under as her arms gave out. She took a huge breath as powerful arms encircled and lifted her clear of the deep water. It would have to be Gil who rescued her, she thought miserably. John wasn’t even looking their way. He’d have dived in after her in a minute, she knew, if he’d seen her fall. But while he was nice, and kind, he wasn’t Gil, who was beginning to have a frightening effect on Kasie’s heart. She glanced at Pauline as she spluttered. Kasie wished that she was beautiful like Pauline. She looked the very image of an efficient secretary. Kasie had great typing speed, dictation skills and organizational expertise, but she was only ordinary-looking. Besides, she was a social disaster, and she’d just proved it to Gil and all the guests.

Gil had been unexpectedly kind to her at the theater when he’d taken her with the girls to see the movie. She still tingled, remembering his hand holding hers. This, however, was much worse. Her breasts were almost bare in the thin blouse, and she felt the hard muscular wall of his chest with wonder and pleasure and a little fear, because she’d never felt such heady sensations in her body before. She wondered if he’d fire her for making a scene at this pool party, to which a lot of very wealthy and prominent cattlemen and their wives had been invited.

To give him credit, she hadn’t exactly inspired confidence on the job in the past few weeks. Two weeks earlier, she tripped on the front steps and landed in a rosebush at the very feet of a visiting cattleman from Texas who’d almost turned purple trying not to laugh. Then there had been the ice-cream incident last week, which still embarrassed her. Bess had threatened Kasie with a big glop of chocolate ice cream. While Kasie was backing away, laughing helplessly, Gil had come into the house in dirty chaps and boots and shirt with his hat jerked low over one blue eye and his mouth a thin line, with blood streaming from a cut on his forehead. Bess had thrown the ice cream at Kasie, who ducked, just in time for it to hit Gil right in the forehead. While he was wiping it off, Kasie grabbed the spoon from Bess and waited for the explosion as her boss wiped the ice cream away and looked at her. Those blue eyes could cut like diamonds. They actually glittered. But he hadn’t said a word. He’d just looked at her, before he turned and continued down the hall to the staircase that led up to his room.

Now, here she was half-drowned from a swimming pool accident, having made a spectacle of herself yet again.

“I wonder if I could get work in Hollywood?” she sputtered as she hung on for dear life. “There must be a market for terminal clumsiness somewhere!”

Gil raised an eyebrow and gave her a slow, speaking glance before he pulled her close against his chest and turned toward the concrete steps at the far end. He walked up out of the pool, streaming water, and started toward the house. “Don’t struggle, Kasie,” he said at her temple, and his voice sounded odd.

“Sorry,” she coughed. “You can put me down, now. I’m okay. I can walk.”

“If I put you down, you’re going to become the entertainment,” he said enigmatically at her ear. He looked over his shoulder. “John, look after the girls until I get back!” he called.

“Oh, I’ll watch them, Gil!” Pauline interrupted lazily. “Come over here, girls!” she called, without even looking in their direction.

“John will watch them,” Gil said emphatically and didn’t move until his lean, lanky brother jumped up and went toward his nieces, grinning.

Gil went up the staircase with Kasie held close to his chest. “Why can’t you swim?” he asked.

His deep, slow voice made her feel funny. So did the close, almost intimate contact with him. She nibbled on her lower lip, feeling soggy and disheveled and embarrassed. “I’m afraid of the water.”

“Why?” he persisted.

She wouldn’t answer him. It would do no good, and she didn’t want to remember. Probably he’d never seen anyone drown. “Sorry I messed up the pool party,” she murmured.

He shook her gently as they passed the landing and paused at her bedroom door. “Stop apologizing every second word,” he said curtly as he put her down. He held her there with two big, lean hands on her upper arms and studied her intently in the dim light of the wall sconces.

The feel of all that warm strength against her made her giddy. She’d never been so close to him before. He was ten years older than Kasie, and he had an authority and maturity that must have been apparent even when he’d been her age. She had tried to think of him as Bess and Jenny’s daddy, but after their closeness at the movie theater, it was almost impossible to think of him as anything but a mature, sexy man.

“I can’t seem to make you understand that the girls are Miss Parsons’ responsibility, not yours!” He saw her faint flush and scowled down at her. “Speaking of Miss Parsons, where in hell is she?”

She cleared her throat and pushed back a soggy strand of dark hair. “She’s in the office.”

“Doing what?”

She shifted, but he didn’t let go of her arms. That unblinking, ferocious blue stare robbed her of a smart retort. “All right,” she said heavily. “She’s doing the withholding on John’s tax readout.” He didn’t speak. She looked up and grimaced. “Well, I’m not up on tax law, and she is.”

“So you traded duties without permission, is that it?”

She hesitated. “Yes. I’m sorry. But it’s just for today! You already know that she doesn’t…well, she doesn’t like children very much, really, and I hate taxes…”

“I know.”

“I shouldn’t have given them the beach ball. I thought they were going into the shallow part of the pool with it. And then Bess threw it…”

“Right at Pauline’s expensive new coiffure,” Gil finished for her. He pursed his sensuous lips and searched her face. “You won’t tell on them, of course. You took the blame for the ice cream, too. And when one of Jenny’s toys tripped you on the front steps and you went into the rosebush, you blamed that on clumsiness.”

“You knew?” she asked, surprised.

“I’ve been a father for five years,” he mused. “I know all sorts of things.” His pale blue eyes slid very slowly down Kasie’s wet dress and narrowed on what was showing. She had the most delicious body. Every line and curve of it was on view where the thin dress was plastered to her body. Her breasts were perfectly shaped and the nipples were dusky. The feel of her against his chest, even through her wet blouse and his cotton shirt, had almost knocked the breath out of him. It upset him that he was noticing these things about her. He was beginning to react to them, too. He had to get out of here. She was so young…

He cursed under his breath. “You’d better change,” he said curtly. He turned on his heel and went toward the staircase.

“About Miss Parsons…!” she called after him, in one last attempt to ward off retribution.

“You might as well consider the girls your job from now on,” he said angrily. “I can see that it’s a losing battle to keep you away from them. I’ll give Miss Parsons to John. He won’t enjoy the view as much, but keeping out of prison because we can’t figure out tax forms might sweeten the deal,” he said, without breaking stride. “When you have some spare time, you can continue giving Pauline computer lessons. That includes Monday morning. Mrs. Charters can watch the girls while you work with Pauline.”

“But I’m not a trained governess. I’m a secretary!” she insisted.

“Great. You can let Bess dictate letters to you for her dolls.”

“But…!”

It was too late. He never argued. He just kept walking. She threw up her hands and went back into her room. She started toward the bathroom to change out of her wet things when she got a look at herself in the mirror. The whole outfit was transparent. She remembered Gil’s intent stare and blushed all the way to her toes. No wonder he’d been looking at her. Everything she had was on view! She wondered how she’d ever be able to look him in the eye again.

She changed and went back to the pool party, dejected and miserable. It was hard to believe that she’d not even had a mild crush on John when she first went to work for the Callisters. He was handsome, and very sexy, but she just didn’t feel that way about him. Fortunately he’d never felt that way about her, either. John had some secret woman in his past, and now he didn’t get serious about anyone. Kasie had heard that from Mrs. Charters, who was a veritable storehouse of information about it. John didn’t look to Kasie like a man with a broken heart. But maybe he played the field to camouflage it.

Kasie had never really been in love. She’d had crushes on TV celebrities and movie stars, and on boys at school—and one summer she’d had a real case on a boy who lived near Mama Luke, her aunt, in Billings. But those had all been very innocent, limited to kisses and light caresses and not much desire.

All that had changed when Gil Callister held her hand at the movies. And when Gil had carried her up the staircase this morning, she was on fire with pleasure. She was still shivery with new sensations, which she didn’t understand at all. Gil was her boss and he disliked her. She’d been spending more time with the girls than the grown-ups because John didn’t like to do paperwork and he was always dodging dictation. He could usually be found out with the men on the ranch, helping with whatever routine task was going on at the time. Gil did that, too, of course, but not because he didn’t like paperwork. Gil rarely ever sat still.

Mrs. Charters said it was because he’d loved his wife and had never gotten over her unexpected death from a freak horseback-riding accident. She was only twenty-six years old.

That had been only three years ago. Since then, Gil had hired a succession of nurses, at first, and then motherly governesses to watch over the girls. Old Mrs. Harris had retired and then Gil had hired Miss Parsons in desperation, over a virtual flood of young marriageable women who had their eye on either Gil or John. Kasie remembered Gil saying that he had no interest in marriage ever again. At that time, she couldn’t have imagined feeling attracted to a widowed man with two children who had the personality of a spitting cobra.

For her first few weeks on the job, he’d watched Kasie. He hadn’t wanted his children around Kasie, and made it plain. Amazing, how much that had hurt.

They were such darling little girls.

At least, she thought, now she could spend time with them and not have to sneak around doing it. Gil might not like her, but he couldn’t deny that his daughters did. Probably he felt that he didn’t have a choice.

Kasie was going to miss the secretarial work, and she wondered how Gil would manage with Pauline, who absolutely hated clerical duties. The woman only did it to be near Gil, but he didn’t seem to realize it. Or if he did, he didn’t care.

She tried to picture Gil married to Pauline and it wounded her. Pauline was shallow and selfish. She didn’t really like the girls, and she’d probably find some way to get them out of her hair when she and Gil married, if they did. Kasie hated the very idea of such a marriage, but she was a little nobody in the world and Gil Callister was a millionaire. She couldn’t even tease him or flirt with him, because he might think she was after him for his wealth. It made her self-conscious, so she became uneasy around him and tongue-tied to boot.

That made him even more irritable. Sunday afternoon there was another storm and he and the men had to go out and work the cattle. He came in just after dark, drenched, unfastening his shirt on the way into the office. His hair was plastered to his scalp and his spurs jingled as he walked, his leather bat-wing chaps making flapping noises with every stride of his long, powerful jean-clad legs. His boots were soaked, too, and caked with mud.

“Mrs. Charters will be after you,” Kasie remarked as she lifted her eyes from the badly scribbled notes John had left, which Miss Parsons had asked her to help decipher. Miss Parsons had already gone up to bed, anticipating a very early start on work the next morning.

“It’s my damned house,” he shot at her irritably, running a hand through his drenched hair to get it off his forehead. “I can drip wherever I please!”

“Suit yourself,” Kasie replied. “But red mud won’t come out of Persian wool carpets.”

He gave her a hard glare, but he sat down in a chair and pulled off the mud-caked boots, tossing them onto the wide brick hearth of the fireplace, where they wouldn’t soil anything delicate. His white socks were soaked as well, but he didn’t take them off. He sat down behind his desk, picked up the telephone and made a call.