A Dolphin's Gift (29 page)

For a moment,
Ruth couldn't breathe, or speak. All she could do was look up at him, while a
silent voice in her head said,
don’t do
this to me. Don't smile your crooked smile and look at me with eyes that make
my heart flutter...

Wariness
settled inside her. Something insidious was stealing into her existence,
directing her mind to oppose her will. Whatever it was, she didn't like it.

Matt lifted his
hand from hers and stroked her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. "So
serious. Give me a smile. Show me those dimples you keep hidden beneath a
frown."

Ruth offered a
smile, but it quivered and flattened. And the pleasure she’d felt was replaced
by the terrible awareness that she was becoming attracted to the man who might
have kidnapped her daughter. She'd heard it could happen, a victim drawn into a
kind of perverse bond with her perpetrator. She'd guard against that. Matt was
merely a means to an end. Nothing more.

***

That evening,
while Matt and Annie were occupied with their bedtime story-telling
shenanigans, as Matt laughingly referred to it, Ruth stood on the porch,
contemplating her day. It had not gone as she'd planned. She'd intended to
endear the child and dislike the man, but that's not the way it turned out. As
untouchable as Annie had been, Matt had been the opposite. After their
encounter in the barn, he'd shown her around the place, and during that time he
frequently touched her—his palm at the small of her back or beneath her elbow
as they walked, his finger pushing a wisp of hair from her forehead or brushing
a smidgeon of dust from her cheek, his hand grasping her arm to pull her out of
the way of a frolicking dog. He'd treated her as if she were special, someone
who, in some way she could not hope to understand, made a difference in his
life. She wanted to think the worst of him, but couldn't.

An unfamiliar
sensation began to well in the area of her solar plexus, a mixture of
uncertainty and anticipation and elation. She breathed
deeply,
inhaling the scent of horses and warm earth and night blossoms, and the feeling
began to subside. Maybe it had only been a touch of fatigue. It had been a long
day.

A small,
insistent voice inside her said,
No,
Ruth, it's not fatigue, nor has it been a long day, and you know it
. But
she dismissed the voice and concentrated instead on the bright moon peeking
from behind gauzy clouds while weaving a gossamer web of ethereal light and
shadows on everything it touched. The night was filled with a chorus of
sounds—the hooty, hoot of an owl, the winsome flute-song of a night bird, the
ceaseless drone of frogs at the pond, the cacophony blending with the whirring
of crickets and the far-off laughter of men in the bunkhouse. But gradually,
all the sounds seemed to grow faint, until not a leaf moved, not an insect
stirred. The air seemed to hang motionless. But while the sounds around her
faded, the sensation of being watched grew, until it was so strong, tiny hairs
on the back of her neck began to tingle. Nervously she turned. And stilled.

Matt, standing
in a pool of ochre light beneath the porch fixture, watched her solemnly. The
directness of his gaze was like an intimate touch, the awareness of his
physical presence making her feel disarmed and vulnerable and desirable. For a
moment, she basked in the notion that life could again be fulfilling. She
imagined how it might have been in another time and another place when she'd
still clung to a young girl's dreams—the stranger across a room, a discreet
glance, an engaging smile, an unspoken promise of love, and she'd walk into his
open arms...

Warm tears
filled her eyes, tears of longing for something she dared not wish, for
fanciful notions and impossible dreams and wanting a man she could not love.
But when Beth was taken from her, it was as if all capacity to love had died.
There were no words to describe the shock, the anger, the terrible emptiness
that would not go away...

A tear slipped
down her cheek, and another, and before she could react, Matt closed the gap
between them. Peering down at her, he cradled her face in his palms and brushed
the tears away with the pads of his thumbs. "What is it, Ruth? What are
you holding inside?"

Her throat felt
scratchy and raw, and she had to swallow before words could come. "It's
nothing," she said. "I was just feeling a little melancholy... homesick,
I suppose."

"What I
saw goes deeper. Was it a man?"

Ruth nodded. A
small lie. But there was no way she could tell Matt the truth. Everything about
her life at the moment was a lie, her name, her contrived background, her
reason for being there. The only truth was that someone had stolen Beth and
that someone could be Matt.

Another tear
rolled down her cheek... and another...

"Come
here." Matt took her in his arms and held her against the firm wall of his
chest, and she didn't try to break free. She couldn't. If she did, she knew her
knees would buckle. It felt good to be held, to hear the beat of another human
heart close to her own, to forget there existed a world beyond where she was.
"Is that why you wore shapeless clothes, so you wouldn't attract a
man?" he said against the top of her head, his deep voice seeming to
resonate through her.

Ruth sniffled,
inhaling the musky scent of him, of horse and smoke and leather. "You
think my clothes were shapeless?" she said, because she couldn't think of
anything else, finding his nearness disconcerting.

His arms
tightened protectively around her. "Only the clothes," Matt replied,
"because what I'm holding is definitely not shapeless. When I first saw
you I had no way of knowing you had a small waist and nice hips and other
curves that would turn a man's head."

"I'm not
interested in catching a man," she said, bracing her hands against his
chest. "Right now, my only goal is to be the best nanny I can be and win
over Annie. And I'm sorry about what happened. Sometimes I get a little
emotional, but it doesn't last long."

Matt curved a
finger beneath her chin and lifted, forcing her to look at him. Regarding her
with a directness that was unsettling, he said, "You don't need to be
sorry, Ruth, or feel ashamed with me. Not now. Not ever. Trust me. I'm your
friend."

For several
seconds she was aware of nothing around her but the erratic beating of her
heart, and the tightness in her chest, and the earnest eyes that seemed to be
peering into her soul, sincere eyes that asked nothing of her but her trust...

Her trust in the man who might have taken
Beth.

"I
can't... I mean...."

"You can't
what? Trust me?"

"No....
Yes.... That is...." Noises swarmed around her then—wind rustling through
leaves, thorns scraping against windows, muffled voices in the bunkhouse...

Abruptly, she
backed out of his arms. "I really have to... get to bed. You see... I'm
very tired." She slipped past him and dashed into the house, vowing not to
let him touch her again.

…Trust me. I'm your friend..
.

The words
lingered…

No, she
reaffirmed later that night as she peered out the bedroom window at the eerie
crisscrossing of fences bathed in moonlight. She would not trust him. Nor would
she have silly thoughts of walking into his arms. She would also forget how
giddy it made her feel when he winked at her, or how his smile made her heart
flutter, or how secure she'd felt in the circle of his arms, the beat of his
heart in cadence with her own. She would forget it all. She had to. His
nearness stripped her mind of all logic and her body of all defenses, and she
must not lose sight of her goal.

CHAPTER
3

...feeling a little melancholy... not
interested in catching a man... sometimes get a little emotional... doesn't
last long....

Ruth's words
kept whispering to Matt in the dusky twilight of the barn, her face coming
between him and the tin of saddle soap and the rag he was busily daubing at his
saddle, not because his saddle needed soaping, but because he was trying to rid
himself of restless energy.

He breathed in
the crisp morning air heavy with the musky odor of hay and grain and aged barn
boards, and for the umpteenth time, tried to decide what it was about Ruth that
shattered his defenses and wrapped itself around his heart. He'd been trying
all morning to figure it out, and all morning the elusive thing evaded him.
He'd run the gamut from believing it was innate male helplessness when
confronted with irrational female tears, to Ruth's simple acknowledgement that
she was crying over a man. Whatever it was that laid his heart bare, it came at
him silently and stealthily, like a shadow moving in the night. It happened on
the porch, during the eerie silence when Ruth turned and saw him watching. In
that spellbound moment he'd heard her unspoken promise and saw the smile she
hadn't smiled. And when her eyes filled with tears and he took her in his arms
and heard her soft sobs, and felt the beating of her heart beneath his, the
elusive thing closed around his heart and refused to let go.

Hearing
footsteps, he looked up to find Seth, whose eyes shifted between the saddle and
the rag in his hand. "Didn't you soap that saddle yesterday?" Seth
asked, perplexed.

"Might
have." Putting muscle into the job, Matt continued soaping the saddle,
while wishing Seth would leave. Solitude was what he wanted, a time to sort
through his feelings and try to make sense of them. All his life he'd prided
himself on his ability to take control of things, make order out of chaos, rid
his mind of the extraneous and focus on the relevant. But for the first time in
hell-and-gone, he felt that control slipping.

Seth leaned a
shoulder against the wall and folded his arms. "Keeping a respectable
distance from the new nanny?"

Without looking
up, Matt said, "What's it to you?"

"Nothing,"
Seth replied, "but when you left her in the corral with Dynamite
yesterday, she looked mad enough to spit."

In his mind’s
eye, Matt confronted a pair of angry brown eyes with dilated pupils, a
snug-fitting shirt clinging to every female curve as Ruth's chest rose and fell
in agitation, a rapid pulse throbbing in her throat. "She was."

"What did
you do? Proposition her?"

Matt jammed the
cloth against the saddle. "Find something else to do because right now
you’re irritating the hell out of me," he said scrubbing with short,
choppy movements.

"You're
pricklier than a horny toad," Seth said. "Or maybe you're just hot
for a lady who sleeps with her legs crossed."

"Stop
being a horse’s ass," Matt said in a dry tone.

Seth gave him a
sidelong glance. "You aren't, are you? Hot for the lady?"

"If I was,
pal, you'd be the last to know." Matt moved around to the opposite side of
the saddle, presenting his back to Seth.

"She's not
exactly like you described," Seth's words came from behind. "Fact is
,
she comes across as anything but a sexless old maid.
You're losing your touch, boss. You're usually pretty good at sizing up women
but this time you were dead wrong."

Matt couldn't
refute it. Ruth had seemed like a sexless old maid at first. But when she
walked into the kitchen and took him by surprise, with her flushed face and
tight-fitting shirt, and hip-hugging jeans, he couldn't deny, she'd made him
more aware of the woman than the prudish nanny he'd thought her to be.
"She's Annie's nanny, that's all," he said. "I feel nothing for
her but a hell of a lot of gratitude."

And affection and tenderness and protection.

A strange and
perplexing combination of feelings. What he couldn't figure out was the totally
illogical reason why he should feel anything at all for a woman he'd only just
met. Or why he couldn't shake her from his mind, no matter how hard he tried.

"And
Annie? How does she like her new nanny?" Seth asked.

Matt let out a
short, ironic laugh. "You know Annie. With her it's always a rocky start.
But she'll come around with Ruth. Fact is, I'd bet my last buck Annie's already
starting to cozy up..."

***

"Annie, stop it!"
Ruth grabbed
the dresser drawer before Annie could dump everything on the floor to join the
contents of two other drawers. Annie had been testing her all morning, and Ruth
was through cajoling and conceding.

"It's my
room," Annie scoffed. "I can do whatever I want in it."

"Oh no,
you can't!" Ruth shoved the drawer shut and stood in front of the dresser.

"Yes I
can!" Annie climbed onto the bed and started jumping up and down.

"Stop it
this instant!" Ruth cried. "You'll fall." But when she reached
for Annie, Annie jumped down and raced to the drawer and yanked it open again.

Cursing under
her breath, Ruth shut the drawer while Annie was pulling clothes out, trapping
a shirt. "It took me thirty minutes to put this room together and I'm not
going to let you trash it in five! Now pick up those clothes and put them back
in the drawer!"

"No!"
Annie braced her hands on her hips. "And you can't say you'll pull off the
Kens' heads either because I hid the Kens where you'll never, ever find them.
So there."

"Annie,
I'm not going to put up with this. Now, I'm going to count, and when I get to
ten, I'll expect your clothes to be put away. One... two... three...
four...."

In a sing-song
voice, Annie said, while springing up and down on the bed, "I'm not going
to pick them up and you can't make me, ha
ha
ha
,..
ha
ha
ha
."

"No, I
suppose I can't," Ruth said. "But I don't have to keep picking them
up either." She turned and unlatched the window and raised it wide open.

Annie stopped
jumping and eyed her, dubiously. "What are you gonna do?"

"This."
Ruth scooped up an armful of clothes off the floor and heaved them out the
window. They fell to the yard below. She followed with another armful, and
another.

Annie shrugged.
"Daddy’ll be real mad at you for throwing my clothes away."

"We'll
see."

Annie gave a
little sniff of disgust, then went to her toy box, and started tossing out
toys.

"Oh, no
you don't!" Ruth cried. "Put those back!"

Annie ignored
her, continuing to launch toys into the air. Ruth positioned herself between
Annie and the toy box. Bracing her hands on her hips, she said, "Fine. If
that's the way you want it—" She scooped up the toys and tossed them back
into the toy box then dragged the box out of the room and into the hallway.

"Where are
you taking my toys?" Annie called after her.

"Out to
the pickup," Ruth yelled back. "Since you don't care anything about
them, maybe the poor kids in town will. This way, you won't have to pick them
up and neither will I." She dragged the toy box along the hallway, bumped
it down the stairs, pushed it out the front door, tugged it across the porch
and down the front walkway,
then
dumped the contents
into the bed of Matt's pickup truck. She hauled the toy box back up to Annie's
room, where she found Annie peering out the window in disbelief.

Ruth dusted her
hands together. "If you decide you want your things back, you may go down
and get them and put them where they belong. But if you don't, it makes no
difference to me." She marched out of Annie's room and into her own room,
shutting the door with more force than she'd intended. Standing at the window,
she peered down at the scattering of clothes below and the pile of toys in the
back of the pickup, frustration and anger stinging her eyes. She'd behaved no
better than Annie. But Annie was only six. Maybe she should go down and pick it
all up...

Stand firm and don't let her bully you...

The whole,
stressful episode had been a combination of noncompliance on Annie's part and
nerves on hers...

You're just tired and edgy...

Of course she
was tired and edgy. She'd spent half the night reliving her intimate encounter
with Matt on the porch. Matt looked at her with a directness that was as
unsettling as it had been provocative, and she knew, as surely as she knew the
sun would rise at dawn, if he'd tried to kiss her out there on the porch,
beneath the golden light, while he held her in his arms, she would have let
him...

Her jaws
clenched. Stupid, idiotic, fool of a women. She was at an isolated ranch, cut
off from the nearest town but for twenty miles of long, bumpy, dusty road
because the man who'd employed her might have also stolen her child. A man who
insisted his daughter be home schooled for reasons that made no sense, unless
he was hiding something that Annie might reveal. And she mustn't lose sight of
her objective, which was to figure out a way to get to town to order DNA
testing kits and have them delivered to her at the ranch without anyone
knowing. In the meantime, she needed to confirm that Annie was adopted and find
her birth certificate.

She stopped her
restless pacing and stared at the closed door to the bedroom. Maybe she could
glean information from Edith, while also learning something about handling one
unruly little girl. Stepping into the hallway, she peeked in on Annie and found
her sitting in the middle of the bed, her face a combination of perplexity and
deviousness. Deciding to hold firm about the clothes and toys, she headed downstairs
to the kitchen.

She found Edith
standing over a cutting board, a paring knife in her hand. Edith glanced back
at her and smiled. "I saw the boys lining the fence yesterday like a rodeo
was about to begin, and when I learned what they were up to, I had a notion to
go out there and whip the lot of them," she said, while slicing a spiral
of skin off a potato. "But don't pay them no mind. They're nothing more
than a bunch of overgrown boys."

"You're
right about that," Ruth said. "Matt tells me JT and Tanner are your
sons."

Edith's flashed
a bright smile. "Yep. They may be too big to smack," she said,
shaking the knife, "but they're not too big for a good tongue
lashing."

Ruth chuckled.
"I'm sorry you didn't do that yesterday. I would have enjoyed it."

Edith quartered
the potato and dumped the chunks into a big enameled pot of water on the stove,
then reached for another potato. "When my boys were little," she
said, paring out a potato eye, "they were about the sweetest pair I ever
laid eyes on. My heart near burst with love. Then they grew and got headstrong
and mouthy, and although I still loved them, but there were times when I didn't
like them." Her hand paused, and she looked up, eyes contemplative.
"Funny how that is, a momma loving, but not liking, her boys."

Edith's words
were like an awakening, lifting something weighty from Ruth's mind. Could she
possibly love Annie, her own little Beth, and not like her? Could the sweet
little toddler who'd cuddled in her lap and pressed her little hand to her cheek
and said, "
Wuv
voo
,"
have become a mouthy six-year-old with a mind of her own? A child she could
love with all her heart, but not always like? It was a curiously gratifying
notion, one she desperately wanted to embrace.

Hearing
footsteps, she looked toward the hallway and saw Annie scurrying past, arms
filled with clothes and toys. Ruth bit back a smile. She shouldn't gloat, but
it was almost impossible to keep from feeling smug about her minor victory.
However, while Annie was busy retrieving her things, it would give her a chance
to glean from Edith a few facts about Annie's past.

Trying not to
sound as if she were prying, she said, offhandedly, "Annie seems to really
adore her father, and there's no doubt she's the light in her daddy's
eye."

Edith looked up
and smiled. "She is that. As far as he's concerned the sun rises and sets
on Annie. They're like two peas in a pod."

"Does
Annie have friends to play with around here?" Ruth asked, wanting to lead
into a discussion about home schooling, and Matt's reason to do so.

"There are
one or two kids down the road a ways," Edith replied, "but she
doesn't see them very often. Still, she's about the busiest little person I
know."

"Yes, she
does seem that way," Ruth said. "Since there are children down the
road, doesn't the school bus come out this way?"

"Oh sure.
It turns around at the entrance to the Kincaid," Edith said.

Ruth pondered
that for a few moments before commenting, "Mr. Kincaid said Annie would be
homeschooled. Wouldn't it be better for her to be where there were kids her age
to interact with? She's so isolated here."

Edith's brows
gathered as she replied, "Mr. Kincaid's set on keeping Annie here and it's
not my place to question. Quite a few families around these parts home school.
It's not so unusual in ranch country."

After a few
moments Ruth said, "What caused the breakup of the marriage?"

"Don't
really know," Edith replied. "Mr. Kincaid never talks about it."
Giving a little shrug, she added, "I've always thought it had something to
do with adopting Annie."

Ruth stared at
Edith unblinking, heart pounding. Then in a voice barely audible, she said,
"Annie's... adopted?"

Edith nodded.
"Mrs. Kincaid couldn't have children. At least that's what she claimed.
But I figured she didn't want any, her wanting a singing career and all. It
wouldn't have surprised me if she was on birth control pills, all the while
acting like she was crying over not being able to have a child. Mr. Kincaid was
broken up too, got the notion that adopting would fix the marriage. Then one
day he just showed up with Annie..."