CHAPTER TWO

      AFTER nine trips, Jake ought to be accustomed to being sent back equipped with the basic necessities such as a billfold with the proper driver’s license. He should have guessed Michaels would have taken care of the details.

      Jake never would have guessed Michaels had a sense of humor. Sending Jake back to his own place. Jake wondered what Gwen would have said if he’d told her he’d built the stone section of the main house and the little stone house he now slept in. He’d chiseled the stone almost square like his pa taught him. The timbers for the porches across the front of both places were freighted in from the mountains. Long hours of backbreaking work. Work he hadn’t minded because he’d thought nothing more important than having his own ranch. Being his own man.

      Folding his arms behind his head, Jake stared sightlessly at the ceiling. He’d been sixteen when Charlie Goodnight hired him on after the Civil War. Old enough and strong enough to do a man’s work. You had to be a man to trail cows up the Goodnight Trail from Texas. He’d never told Charlie he’d run away from home so he wouldn’t kill Frank the next time he laid into Jake with the bullwhip. Ma had turned a blind eye to his step-pa’s doings. Jake guessed she was scared of living alone. He tried not to think about her much.

      He lay on an old iron bed, a sheet and an old faded quilt pulled up to his waist. The bed pushed up against the rock exterior wall. He’d left open the shutters, and shadows from a nearby scraggly pine flickered across the whitewashed lumber which paneled the other three walls. Someone else had put up the interior walls in what he’d built as the bunkhouse.

      The main house he’d been building like the one Pa built near the banks of the Guadalupe River. If Jake shut his eyes he could see the Guadalupe making its way past gnarled and knotted bald cypress trees, their limbs covered with moss. Green, soft moss. Like the pillow on his mother’s best parlor chair.

      Or his boss lady’s eyes.

      Jake laughed softly. He’d seen the horrified look on her face when Mack’s previous owner talked of Mack being put down and knew instantly the dog had found a new home. Gwen Ashton tried to talk tough, but she was soft.

      A soft heart wasn’t necessarily good. Not if it kept a person from making the tough decisions. Women could feel sorry for the damnedest creatures. He wondered about the old man. And where the little girl had come from if Gwen had never had a husband.

      Never having a husband didn’t mean she’d never partaken of the pleasures of the marital bed. He’d never married, thanks to Marian, but he’d pleasured his share of women in his time.

      Jake wondered if Gwen’s skin was as soft as her hear He moved restlessly in the bed. He shouldn’t be thinking those kinds of thoughts. Michaels didn’t act without a purpose. And one thing Jake was pretty sure about, Michaels hadn’t sent Jake here to sleep with a woman.

      Soon enough Jake would figure out exactly why he’d been sent here. Until then, he had no intention of doing anything to annoy Michaels. Jake’s last trip, Michaels had said. Jake punched down his pillow. No mossy green eyes were going to keep him from finding the peace which had eluded him for over a hundred years.

      Gwen stood on the porch fronting the oldest section of the main house and surveyed her domain. Home. How she’d envied Bert the steadfast pioneer genes running through his blood. No rootless wandering and always pulling up stakes for the Winthrop family. Bless Bert for giving her his home and his family history. She hugged herself. Her own home. A place to raise Crissie, a place where they could put down roots. Dynamite couldn’t blast her from her home.

      From the other side of the screen door behind her she could hear Mrs. Kent, Doris, rattling pans in the kitchen. When Gwen counted her blessings, she put Bert’s housekeeper first. Nothing disturbed the forty-six-year-old widow, and Doris cooked like a dream. Crissie adored her. So did Gwen. Typically, Doris had taken Mack in her stride.

      Down the road some horses grazed in the pasture. The cows were pastured further from the house. Gwen knew less than nothing of cows and horses, but she could learn. Like any other business, the most important thing was to hire good employees.

      Employees like Jakob Stoner.

      Her gaze sharpened as the ranch pickup came into view down the road. Jake. He’d think she was watching for him. She wasn’t. She’d almost forgotten he’d left hours earlier to check fences and stock. She had a lot more on her mind than the cowboy who’d come so fortuitously into her life yesterday.

      He’d told her last night over dinner what he’d planned for today. This morning Doris had found his breakfast dishes rinsed and stacked neatly beside the sink. Jake Stoner started the day early.

      Gwen squinted into the sun. Two people sat in the pickup. Jake had a passenger. Someone to see her?

      Or to see Jake? A friend, maybe. A girlfriend. Gwen narrowed her eyes in speculation. Or a wife. Jake hadn’t volunteered much about himself, and for some reason, she’d hesitated to ask. Hesitated to ask questions she wouldn’t have had a second thought about asking up in Denver. Getting-to-know-you questions. Somehow, here, they seemed prying questions. Or maybe, it wasn’t here. Maybe it was Jake. A self-contained aura surrounded him, making him complete within himself. As if he needed no one. Wanted no one.

      In any case, she wasn’t interested in his personal life. Only in his ranching skills.

      She’d never considered he might have a wife. Or a family. He needed to learn he couldn’t move a wife and a couple of kids onto her place without checking first with her. He seemed to think because he knew more about ranching than she did, he could do whatever he wanted.

      That was her fault. She’d been too polite, wording her orders as requests. Not because he made her nervous or she was afraid or reluctant to give him orders. She’d never been the type to boss people around. Issuing curt orders wasn’t her style. He recognized she was the employer and he the employee.

      That the situation amused him was only conjecture on her part.

      And Lawrence had vouched for him. Well, not exactly for Jake, whom he’d never met. At Gwen’s request Jake had talked to Lawrence on the phone, and later Lawrence had allowed as how Jake seemed to know the cattle business. Lawrence had been Bert’s trusted right-hand man for years, and he ought to know.

      The pickup passed between the huge stone pillars at the far edge of the ranch yard and pulled up by the house. Jake acknowledged Gwen’s presence with a slight smile. Unless he was smiling at the house which amused him so much. No matter what anyone else thought, she liked the way the two additions, one rustic log and one Queen Anne Victorian, reflected the eras and tastes of the builders. The house, like the Winthrops, had grown and settled into the land.

      Jake stepped from the truck. His boots raised slight clouds of dust. “Hi. Where’s my little pardner?”

      “Taking a nap.” He’d shaved. He looked less disreputable, but no less dangerous. Gwen couldn’t rid herself of the notion that Jake Stoner looked exactly as an outlaw from the Old West must have looked. An air of watchfulness about him forcibly reminded her of the way wild animals in documentaries scented the wind for danger. Jake turned, speaking across the pickup to his passenger, and Gwen studied his profile. His jaw was strong, the kind that proclaimed its owner a determined man, a man not to be trifled with.

      Not that she wanted to trifle with him. Idly she wondered if any woman had ever caressed his jaw in an attempt to soften it. Now what put that stupid thought in her head? The answer came to her