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      Circle of Gold

      By

      DIANA PALMER has a gift for telling the most sensual tales with charm and humour. With over forty million copies of her books in print, she is one of North America’s most loved authors and considered one of the top ten romance authors in America.

      Diana’s hobbies include gardening, archaeology, anthropology, iguanas, astronomy and music. She has been married to James Kyle for over twenty-five years and they have one son.

       Look for a new novel from Diana Palmer, The Maverick, in December 2010 in Desire™.

      Chapter One

      Kasie Mayfield was excited. Her gray eyes were brimming with delight as she sat in the sprawling living room at the Double C Ranch in Medicine Ridge, Montana. There was a secretarial position available on the mammoth Double C, and she had the necessary qualifications. She was only twenty-two, but she had a certificate from secretarial school and plenty of initiative. Besides all that, the position was secretary to John Callister, the second son of the well-known family that headed not only a publishing empire in New York City, but a cattle empire out West.

      There was a very interesting story about the ranch in a magazine that Kasie was reading while she waited her turn to be interviewed. The elder Callisters lived in New York, where they published, among others, a famous sports magazine. When they weren’t in the city, they lived in Jamaica on an ancestral estate. The Callister who had founded the American branch of the family had been a British duke. He bought an obscure little magazine in New York City in 1897 and turned it into a publishing conglomerate. One of his sons had emigrated to Montana and founded the ranch. It eventually passed to Douglas Callister, who had raised the boys, Gilbert and John. Nobody talked about why the uncle had been given custody of both boys and left them the ranch when he died. Presumably it was some dark family secret. Apparently there wasn’t a lot of contact between the boys and their parents.

      Gilbert, the eldest at thirty-two, had been widowed three years ago. He had two young daughters, Bess, who was five, and Jenny, who was four. John had never married. He was a rodeo champion and did most of the traveling that accompanied showing the ranch’s prizewinning pedigree black Angus bulls. Gil was the power in the empire. He was something of a marketing genius, and he dealt with the export business and sat on the boards of two multinational corporations. But mostly he ran the ranch, all thirty thousand acres of it.

      There was a photograph of him in the magazine, but she didn’t need it to know what he looked like. Kasie had gotten a glimpse of him on her way into the house to wait for her turn to be interviewed. One glimpse had been enough. It shocked her that a man who didn’t even know her should glare at her so intently.

      A more conceited woman might have taken it for masculine interest. But Kasie had no ego. No, that tall, lanky blond man hadn’t liked her, and made no secret of it. His pale blue eyes under that heavy brow had pierced her skin. She wouldn’t get the job. He’d make sure of it.

      She glanced at the woman next to her, a glorious blonde with big brown eyes and beautiful legs crossed under a thigh-high skirt. Then she looked at her own ankle-length blue jumper with a simple gray blouse that matched her big eyes. Her chestnut hair was in a long braid down her back. She wore only a little lipstick on her full, soft mouth, and no rouge at all on her cheeks. She had a rather ordinary oval face and a small, rounded chin, and she wore contact lenses. She wasn’t at all pretty. She had a nice figure, but she was shy and didn’t make the most of it. It was just as well that she had good office skills, she supposed, because it was highly unlikely that anybody would ever want to actually marry her. She thought of her parents and her brother and had to fight down tears. It was so soon. Too soon, probably. But the job might keep her from thinking of what had happened…

      “Miss Mayfield!”

      She jumped as her name was called in a deep, authoritative tone. “Yes?”

      “Come in, please.”

      She put a smile on her face as she clutched her small purse in her hands and walked into the paneled office, where plaques and photos of bulls lined the walls and burgundy leather furniture surrounded the big mahogany desk. A man was sitting there, with his pale eyes piercing and intent. A blond man with broad shoulders and a hard, lean face that seemed to be all rocky edges. It was not John Callister.

      She stopped in front of the desk with her heart pounding and didn’t bother to sit down. Gil Callister was obviously doing the interviews, and now she was sure she wouldn’t get the job. She knew John Callister from the drugstore where she’d worked briefly as a stock clerk putting herself through secretarial courses. John had talked to her, teased her and even told her about the secretarial job. He’d have given her a chance. Gil would just shoot her out the door. It was obvious that he didn’t like anything about her.

      He tossed a pen onto the desk and nodded toward the chair facing it. “Sit down.”

      She felt vulnerable. The door was closed. Here she was with a hungry tiger, and no way out. But she sat anyway. Never let it be said that she lacked courage. They could throw her into the arena and she would die like a true Roman…She shook herself. She really had to stop reading the Plinys and Tacitus. This was the new millennium, not the first century A.D.

      “Why do you want this job?” Gil asked bluntly.

      Her thin eyebrows lifted. She hadn’t expected the question. “Because John is a dish?” she ventured dryly.

      The answer seemed to surprise him. “Is he?”

      “When I worked at the drugstore, he was always kind to me,” she said evasively. “He told me about the job, because he knew I was just finishing my secretarial certificate at the vocational-technical school. I got high grades, too.”

      Gil pursed his lips. He still didn’t smile. He looked down at the résumé she’d handed him and read it carefully, as if he was looking for a deficiency he could use to deny her the job. His mouth made a thin line. “Very high grades,” he conceded with obvious reluctance. “This is accurate? You really can type 110 words a minute?”

      She nodded. “I can type faster than I can take dictation, actually.”

      He pushed the résumé aside and leaned back. “Boyfriends?”

      She was nonplussed. Her fingers tightened on her purse. “Sir?”

      “I want to know if you have any entanglements that might cause you to give up the job in the near future,” he persisted, and seemed oddly intent on the reply.

      She shifted restlessly. “I’ve only ever had one real boyfriend, although he was more like a brother. He married my best friend two months ago. That was just before I moved to Billings,” she added, mentioning the nearby city, “to live with my aunt. So, I don’t date much.”

      She was so uncomfortable that she almost squirmed. He didn’t know about her background, of course, or he wouldn’t need to ask such questions. Modern women