Montana Secrets Page 6

  “It’s good you learned. Dad will enjoy showing you the ranch on horseback,” she said over her shoulder to Trace, who followed close in her wake. “You’ll need jeans—Wranglers for riding—and some decent boots.”

  Blinking against the sting of dye gases from the dry goods that assaulted her nose and eyes, Cat approached George Hayes, the fiftyish proprietor, who was stacking flannel shirts in clear plastic wrappers beneath a Sale sign on the front counter. “Brought you a customer, Mr. Hayes.”

  The tall, skinny salesman, tape measure fluttering around his scrawny neck, turned and considered her from behind thick-rimmed glasses. “Howdy, Catherine. What can I do for you this afternoon?”

  She jerked her thumb toward Trace. “Mr. Gallagher is visiting from out of town. He needs appropriate clothes for the ranch.”

  “Jeans, shirts, boots and a hat,” Trace said. “And a jacket.”

  As if assessing sizes, Hayes gave Trace a head-to-toe appraisal. When Cat found herself engaging in the same activity and enjoying it, she diverted her eyes.

  “You’re in good hands with Mr. Hayes,” she told Trace. “I’ll do my shopping and meet you at the car.”

  She pivoted quickly and left the store.

  What was the matter with her?

  She’d assured herself earlier that she wasn’t a hormone-driven teenager, but that’s exactly how she’d felt, feasting on Trace’s muscular good looks as if he were a teen idol. She hurried into the air-conditioned chill of the market and welcomed the aromas of everything from cantaloupes to coffee beans that drove his provocative scent away.

  Hettie Merkle, who’d worked as a cashier as long as Cat could remember, lifted her head from a Soap Opera Digest at Cat’s entry.

  “Saw you pull up earlier.” Hettie moved her chewing gum to her cheek to speak. “Got a new boyfriend?”

  Athens was a small town where everyone knew everyone else’s business, and Hettie Merkle’s main goal in life was to keep the lines of communication flowing.

  “He’s an old friend of Marc’s in town for a visit,” Cat explained. “I’m taking him out to see Dad.”

  “Glad to hear it, honey.” Hettie set her magazine aside and swiped at her henna-colored bangs with red-tipped nails. “Wouldn’t want to make Todd Brewster jealous now, would you?”

  “Why should he be jealous?” Cat asked with pretended innocence, although she was well aware half the town expected her to marry the high school principal.

  “My sentiments, exactly,” Hettie replied, missing the point.

  Shaking her head at the woman’s density, Cat headed for the produce section. She hadn’t planned on company for dinner, and, not knowing Trace’s taste in food, she decided to fix spaghetti with a tossed salad and garlic bread. She couldn’t think of anyone who didn’t like spaghetti. It was always Megan’s first choice. For dessert, she’d make a raspberry-rhubarb pie.

  Ryan’s favorite.

  The thought skewered her like a serrated blade, and she wondered if she’d ever reach a time in her life when unexpected memories of Ryan would stop hurting and become only pleasing recollections.

  Janet Livingston, mother of the senior class valedictorian, cornered Cat while she was picking through tomatoes, and Cat had to endure a detailed preview of a planned after-graduation party before she could escape to the checkout line.

  When Cat stepped out of the grocery store, a tall, lean cowboy was leaning on the front fender of her SUV, boots crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest and a Stetson pulled low, hiding his face. Handsome and mysterious was the description that leaped to her mind. She took a moment to realize she was looking at Trace Gallagher, transformed from preppy to Western by George Hayes’s sartorial magic.

  “You look like one of the locals,” she greeted him.

  He shoved back the brim of his hat with an index finger and caught her head-on with those hazel eyes. “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “Absolutely. Nothing worse than a dude who sticks out like a sore thumb.”

  His lips curved in a smile that almost dimpled his cheeks, and his eyes—Ryan’s eyes—flickered with good humor. “So I’m no dude?”

  “Not in the greenhorn sense, no. But my students in their mangled slang version of the English language might call you dude and mean something else entirely.” She was babbling again, but she couldn’t help it. If anything, Trace Gallagher looked even more appealing in his Western duds than he had when she first met him.

  “The new jeans are a bit stiff,” he noted, “the shirt’s creased where it was folded, and the boots need some breaking in, but overall I think I could get used to dressing this way.”

  “What did you wear when you worked for the prince?” He helped her stow the groceries in the back of the car, and she headed for the driver’s side. “Flowing robes and headdresses?”

  “Armani suits.” Trace slid into the passenger seat next to her. “The prince had an image to uphold, so he provided his bodyguards with very generous clothing allowances.”

  She started the engine and backed onto the street. “Living in a palace must have been a heady experience, surrounded by all that luxury.”

  “I’d trade luxury for home any day.” The longing in his voice was unmistakable.

  She felt a pang of sympathy for him. He’d lost both his parents. At least she still had Gabriel and Megan. Her sympathy dissolved quickly into happiness. She was approaching the best part of her day—picking up her daughter from the baby-sitter’s.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, “but I have one last stop to make before we head to the ranch.”

  “Mind?” He shook his head. “It’s your car and your schedule. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “It won’t take long,” she promised.

  She turned onto a street lined with cottonwoods and pulled to the curb in front of a small white house with green shutters and a picket fence. She barely had time to turn off the ignition before the front door flew open.

  Cat’s spirits soared as Megan came flying down the walkway, her legs—still pudgy with baby fat in spite of her four years—pumping hard, her golden-blond curls bouncing, her hazel eyes shining. “Mommy, Mommy, you’re late!”

  “Who’s that?” Trace asked in a strangled tone.

  “That’s Megan.” Cat’s heart swelled with maternal pride. “My little girl.”

  “I didn’t know,” he said in the same strange voice.

  Her joy at the sight of her baby was tempered with sadness. “One of my biggest regrets is that Ryan never knew he had a daughter.”

  Chapter Four

  He had a daughter!

  He couldn’t remember the bomb that had almost killed him, but he doubted its impact had been greater than the news he’d just assimilated.

  He was a father.

  Catherine Erickson had borne his child.

  Stunned by the knowledge, overwhelmed by myriad emotions—joy, surprise, pride—he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. He was glad Cat had rushed from the car to greet the little girl. Her departure had given him a moment to pull himself together. But he was going to need more than a moment to recover from this shock.

  You have to think like Trace Gallagher, damn you, or you’ll ruin everything!

  Breathing deeply in an attempt to settle his shattered equilibrium, he concentrated on his other persona. What would Trace’s reaction be to Cat’s bombshell? Mild interest? A touch of sadness for Ryan’s loss? He gripped the knees of his jeans with white-knuckled fingers.

  Trace’s hands wouldn’t be shaking like leaves in an autumn breeze, that was certain.

  Unaware of the chaos she’d introduced into his life, Cat released Megan and was walking toward the house with her daughter.

  His daughter.

  Damn, he couldn’t keep the tears from his eyes.

  Hot anger flooded him suddenly and seared the tears away, and he cursed the fate that kept him from acknowledging his identity to the woman he loved more
than life and the daughter he hadn’t known existed. Unfortunately, keeping his identity secret was more important than ever. If he told the Ericksons he was really Ryan, not only Cat and her father would be in mortal danger, but Megan, too.

  His family was safe only so long as everyone, Cat and terrorists alike, believed Ryan Christopher was dead.

  Pulling himself together, he watched Cat and the little girl—his little girl—approach. Cat had Megan by one hand, and in the other was a shopping bag overflowing with a small faded quilt, a well-worn teddy bear and an assortment of toys and other items.

  Excitement evident in every step and an animated look on her face, the little girl bounced when she walked, keeping up a steady stream of chatter that he couldn’t make out through the closed windows of the car.

  Unable to take his eyes off his daughter, he burned her image in his mind. Wearing overalls, a long-sleeved pink T-shirt embroidered with bunny rabbits and edged with lace and sporting matching pink sneakers, she smiled at her mother, her round cheeks flushed with color.

  Megan had his eyes, he realized with a start, and the same dimple that had once graced his chin. Even her hair was the same shade and texture his had been in childhood.

  A dangerous lump formed in his throat. How the hell was he supposed to act as naturally as a stranger would have when the first sight of his daughter choked him up so badly he couldn’t speak?

  Cat circled the car, tossed the shopping bag on the back seat and lifted Megan in her arms by Trace’s door. He rolled down the window. Having his own eyes stare back at him from a child’s face was disconcerting.

  “Megan, this is Mr. Gallagher.”

  The girl hid her face in her mother’s neck, then peeked shyly at him with one eye. With a heart-shaped face evident beneath her baby fat, proof that she’d inherited her mother’s delicate bone structure, Megan was even more adorable close up than from a distance. His arms ached to hold her.

  He struggled to swallow against the boulder in his windpipe. “Hi, Megan.”

  “Can you say hello?” Cat prodded. “Mr. Gallagher’s coming home with us tonight.”

  Megan turned her head just enough to expose her other eye. “Are you a teacher like Mommy?” she asked.

  “No.” Trace chuckled. The little minx was batting her eyelids, flirting with him!

  “What are you?” Megan demanded.

  I’m your daddy. “I’m a Marine.”

  She lifted her head and gazed at him with new interest. “Like my daddy and Uncle Marc?”

  Cat, a wistful smile playing across her remarkable face, watched their exchange.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Uh-uh.” Megan shook her head vigorously. “Wrong clothes.”

  “She’s used to the pictures of Ryan and Marc in uniform,” Cat explained.

  “I have a uniform, but these aren’t my working clothes,” Trace said. “These are my play clothes.”

  “Big people don’t play,” Megan insisted.

  “Sure they do.” The longer he talked with her and watched the mischief dancing in her eyes, the more he could feel himself melting into a blob of Silly Putty that she could wrap around her pudgy little fingers. “I’m taking a vacation. That’s why I came to Montana.”

  “You’re going to come play at our house?”

  “That’s enough questions, young lady.” Cat opened the back door, hoisted Megan into her carrier and fastened her seat belt. “You want your teddy?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Trace could hear Cat rummaging in the shopping bag. Then the back door slammed, and she circled the car and climbed behind the wheel. He had to steel his muscles to keep from swiveling in his seat to stare at his daughter.

  “Megan usually takes a nap on the way home.”

  “Is it far?” He knew the answer. He could follow the route blindfolded.

  “Forty miles,” Cat said, “but that’s not considered much by Montana standards.”

  She turned west onto the highway, passed the district ranger station, then turned north on a secondary road that hugged the sides of steep mountains as the road climbed through thick forests of ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. Tall thistles and bushes heavy with black caps grew wild along the shoulders.

  Remembering his reactions the first time he’d traveled this road, he decided he should play tourist, as a true stranger would. “You really have a ranch up here? It’s nothing but mountains and ravines.”

  “For now.”

  Cat flashed him a smile. That look, mixed with the scent of her light honeysuckle fragrance, made his insides quiver with want and remembered passion. He’d known being close to her without being able to touch her would be difficult, but he hadn’t imagined the brutal toll it would take on him. He felt as if he’d been squashed flat by an M-60 tank, then trampled by a platoon of raw recruits in combat boots.

  “Soon,” she added, “we’ll reach an alpine valley that runs for miles, even across the Canadian border.”

  “Hence the name High Valley Ranch?”

  “You got it.”

  He rode in silence for the next several miles, admiring the scenery, wishing his homecoming could have been more honest. The soft breathing of Megan in the seat behind him intruded on his thoughts and formed a thousand questions in his mind. Foremost was why Catherine had never told him she was expecting a child.

  “Ryan never knew you were expecting?” he asked, at the risk of seeming nosy. He needed to know why she’d kept her pregnancy secret.

  Without taking her eyes from the road, Cat shook her head. “I didn’t know myself until a few days before the embassy bombing.”

  With an almost surreal vividness, he recalled their lovemaking the day before he’d left for Tabari. He and Cat had taken a picnic into the woods above the high meadow. In a secluded forest glade, throughout the long afternoon, they’d made love on a blanket spread over boughs of thick ferns and evergreens. With unforgettable recall, he could almost feel the silkiness of her skin beneath his fingers, her slight weight against the length of him. Hear the beating of her heart beneath his cheek and the soft, sweet intake of her breath when she gasped with pleasure….

  He’d used protection. He’d always insisted on it until they were married, but the fact, drilled into him with a vengeance by his foster mother, Margaret Sweeney, when he was still a teenager, that only abstinence was one hundred percent effective, came back to haunt him.

  “I was composing a letter,” she said softly, “to share the news with Ryan when we got word of his death.”

  The heartache in her voice made him long to reach for her, and he cursed the circumstances that prevented him from telling her the truth and ending her pain.

  “That must have been a really tough time.” The steadiness in his voice, reflecting none of the turmoil within him, amazed him.

  Her face soft with love, she glanced at Megan in the rearview mirror. “Knowing I was pregnant with Ryan’s child kept me going. At least I had some part of him left. Megan was born three months before Marc died. She saved Dad’s life, too. He took Marc’s death hard, but having a granddaughter helped ease the blow.”

  “She’s a beautiful child.” He hoped she’d mistake the pride in his words for simple admiration. “Seems smart, too.”

  “Luckily, she takes after her father in looks and brains.”

  “From what Ryan told me, you’re no slouch in the brains department yourself, and Megan has your bone structure.” His light, bantering tone revealed nothing of the tangle of emotions knotted inside him.

  “Ryan talked about me?” Cat seemed pleased.

  “Not much.”

  “Oh.” Her voice rang with disappointment.

  Trace hurried to correct her misconception. “He didn’t like how some of the guys blabbed about their girls. The way they talked about their sex lives was degrading to the women they’d been with. When Ryan spoke of you, it was always with the greatest respect.”

  The blush he remembered s
o vividly reddened her cheeks. “What did he say?”

  “That he was lucky to be engaged to the prettiest, smartest, most fun-to-be-with woman he’d ever met.” Trace welcomed the normal huskiness in his voice, a remnant of the embassy attack. Otherwise, Cat might have sensed the heartfelt tenderness in his tone.

  Her eyes misted with tears. “I was the lucky one. Until the bombing.”

  He pulled his gaze from her face in time to spot a battered pickup barreling around a curve and crossing the center line toward them. “Look out!”

  Cat swerved toward the right. The tires of the SUV clung precariously to the shoulder of the road. Trace glanced out the window and saw a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. A river wound like a silver thread on the ravine floor below.

  The oncoming truck barreled by in a vortex of wind and dust, and Cat barely managed to jerk her vehicle onto the highway.

  “That idiot!” Cat exploded. “What the hell is he doing up here?”

  “Who?”

  She glanced in the rearview mirror at Megan, who apparently had slept through the entire hair-raising incident, and shook her head.

  “Just some guy from town,” she said between clenched teeth in a quieter voice.

  Recognizing that she didn’t want to talk in front of her daughter, Trace changed the subject. “You okay? That was a close call.”

  She nodded. But her breath came in shallow gasps, and her knuckles on the steering wheel were blanched from the fierceness of her grip.

  “Your reflexes are quick,” he said with admiration. “Otherwise we’d be swimming in that river down there.”

  Obviously shaken, she kept her eyes on the road ahead and didn’t comment.

  The silence gave him time to contemplate his upcoming meeting with Gabriel. He loved the taciturn old rancher who had served as a surrogate father to him, the only one he’d ever known. With regret, he reminded himself that, as with Cat, he’d have to treat the man like a stranger.

  Gabe’s still waters ran deep, though, and Trace would have to take special care not to give himself away. The old man’s sharp blue eyes didn’t miss much, and he had an uncanny habit of reading between the lines of what was said—and what was left unspoken.