Darling Enemy. Diana Palmer

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      Chapter Three

      Teddi’s room overlooked the Rockies. It was done in blue and white, with lacy eyelet curtains at the windows and a canopied bed. This was where she always slept when she came to Gray Stag—her own little corner of the old château.

      She wondered who had occupied the matching room in the original home in Burgundy. One of King’s ancestors had copied the design of his wife’s family home to keep that grieving lady from getting attacks of homesickness when they’d settled in Calgary. The original château dated to the eighteenth century. This one was barely a hundred years old, but it had a charm all its own.

      She opened the window and breathed the flower-scented air. Everything seemed so much cleaner in Canada, so much bigger. Despite King’s hostility, it was nice to be here again. Mary and Jenna more than made up for King.

      Her eyes went to the soft bed. King. She remembered a night she’d spent at Gray Stag when she was seventeen, during summer vacation.

      She’d been fairly terrified of King back then, nervous and uncertain when he came near with his cruel taunts. She’d never understood his dislike—she’d done nothing to him to provoke it.

      But that night there was a thunderstorm, violent as only mountain thunderstorms can be. Teddi’s parents had gone down in a commercial airliner on a night like this, and in her young mind she still connected disaster with violent storms. She was crying, soft little whimpers that shouldn’t have been audible above the raging thunder.

      But King had suddenly opened the door and come in, still fully dressed from helping work cattle in the flash flooding. His shirt was damp, carelessly unbuttoned to reveal a mat of hair and bronzed muscle that had drawn Teddi’s eyes like a magnet.

      He eased down onto the bed and took the frightened, weeping girl into his big arms. He murmured soft, comforting words that she didn’t understand while he cradled her against his warm, damp body, his heart beating heavily under the cheek that lay on his broad chest. He held her until the tears and the thunder passed, and then he laid her back down on the pillows with a strangely tender smile.

      “Okay, now?” he asked softly.

      “Yes, thank you,” she replied uneasily.

      He stood there, looking down at her with strange dark eyes while she stared back, her eyes fixed on the sight he made, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist...it was the first time she’d been alone with a man in her bedroom at that hour of the night, and her fear must have shown. Because he suddenly turned away with a muffled curse and was gone. After that night, he was even colder, and she worked even harder at avoiding him. Something had happened while they stared at each other so intensely. She still wasn’t sure what it had been, but she remembered vividly the sensations she felt when his eyes had dropped to the uncovered bodice of her gown and traced deliberately every soft line of her young breasts under the half-transparent material. The memory was like a drawn sword between them, along with all King’s imagined grievances against her.

      There was a sharp knock at the door and Jenna peeked her head around it. “Come down and have something to eat,” she said. “Mother’s carving up a ham.”

      “Isn’t Miss Peake here anymore?” Teddi asked as she joined her friend, remembering warmly Miss Peake’s little kindnesses over the years.

      “Our saintly housekeeper is visiting her sister for a few days.” Jenna grinned. “She’d just die if she was here to see the size of the slices mother’s getting off that ham. Mother eats like a bird, you know. Poor King!”

      Teddi smiled involuntarily. “There’s a lot of him to feed,” she agreed.

      “He gets even,” Jenna assured her. “When mother’s back is turned, he’ll go in the kitchen and make himself a sandwich or two. He doesn’t starve.”

      “Miss Peake was forever carrying him trays of food when he worked in the study,” Teddi recalled, remembering how she’d strained for glimpses of him through that door at night.

      “And he was forever complaining that there wasn’t enough of it,” Jenna added. “My brother has a tremendous appetite. For food, at least. Mother wants to see him married so badly, but he hardly ever takes anyone out. You’d think he doesn’t know what to do with a woman, the way he avoids them.”

      Oh, Jenna, if you only knew, Teddi thought silently, as she remembered her own voice pleading for the touch of King’s poised, taunting mouth. He knew far too much about women for a monk. Even Teddi, as inexperienced as she was, realized that.

      But she didn’t try to tell Jenna. It might lead to some embarrassing questions.

      Teddi felt her pulse jump as they started into the spacious dining room, but if she’d hoped to find King there, she was doomed to disappointment. Only Mary was at the table, with cups of steaming coffee already poured and three places set.

      “There you are.” She smiled as the two girls joined her. “Isn’t it a delightfully lazy day? I hope you’re hungry, I’ve put on ham and bread and a nice salad for us.”

      Teddi had to muffle a giggle. There were enough pieces of bread for one sandwich apiece, and hardly enough ham to go around. And the nice salad would provide each of them with about two tablespoons. From her earliest acquaintance with Jenna, Teddi had been amused by Mary’s eating habits. The fragile little woman had an appetite to match her stature, much to the chagrin of the rest of the family, and there was a good deal of moaning out of Mary’s earshot. None of them would ever have said anything to hurt her feelings, but they couldn’t resist a little good-natured joking among themselves.

      “Don’t tell me King’s gone again?” Jenna asked as she and Teddi sat down, one on either side of Mary.

      “Yes,” Mary sighed. “To see about some kind of audit on that corporation of his in Montana. The board of directors retained an auditing firm from New York to do it.”

      Teddi didn’t like to hear auditors mentioned. Some of her most unpleasant memories were due to one of her aunt’s lovers, who was a very well-paid member of an illustrious New York firm.

      “Is he going to be gone long?” Jenna wondered.

      Mary СКАЧАТЬ