Intimate Surrender. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ so very far from the truth, she thought grimly. In fact, too close for her own comfort.

      With a weary sigh, she quickly brushed her hair and debated touching up her face with some of the makeup tricks Carrie Summers had shown her. In the end she decided against doing anything more than a quick brush of lipstick and a little blush on her cheeks so she didn’t look so ghastly pale.

      She returned to the gathering room to find that Peter had pulled a small table and two chairs near the fireplace and had set out two place settings. She nibbled her lip, fighting the urge to turn back around and hide out in her room for the rest of the night.

      Dinner for two in a dimly lit room in front of a crackling fire looked entirely too romantic, too intimate.

      He stood by one of the chairs waiting for her with a challenging kind of look in his eyes and she knew she couldn’t be cowardly enough to run away. She squared her shoulders and sat down.

      “I hope you don’t mind me moving the furniture around a little,” he said. “I figured this would be more comfortable than eating in a cold dining room.”

      “The dining room is rarely used anyway. When I stay here, I usually eat in the kitchen with the Taylors.”

      “Those are the caretakers?”

      She nodded. “Their daughter is having her first baby. They’ve gone for moral support.”

      “I hope they made it through the storm.”

      “I’m sure they’ll be fine. Clint’s used to driving in this weather.”

      She returned to stirring her stew and the Herculean effort of swallowing the occasional bite.

      “This is quite a place you’ve got here,” Peter said. “Somehow I never would have figured the Crosbys to go for rustic and isolated.”

      The faint note of derision in his voice raised her hackles. She wasn’t sure if it was aimed at her family or at the ranch, both of which she loved dearly. Either way she didn’t like it. A sharp retort formed in her throat but she squashed it. In the interest of peace, she should probably do her best to avoid needless bickering.

      “My father bought it as a retreat several years ago when it seemed like everybody was moving west.”

      Like many of Jack Crosby’s actions, Sweetwater had been purchased to please one of his many girlfriends, then had been forgotten as soon as her father moved on to more nubile pastures. But she decided that was old family business she didn’t particularly need to share with Peter Logan.

      “Does your family spend much time here together?” he asked.

      She tried to remember when the Crosbys had last done anything together.

      “We all came out for Christmas once right after Jack bought it,” she remembered. “Trent and Ivy have been out to ski occasionally. Sweetwater is only about an hour from the Jackson Hole ski resorts.”

      He broke a roll in half and liberally spread some of Margie’s strawberry preserves on it. “Is that why you’re here? To ski?”

      She wasn’t sure quite how to answer that. She certainly couldn’t tell him she had escaped to Sweetwater first because she’d been ill and then because she had been desperately in need of a safe haven, a sanctuary where she could come to terms with her pregnancy and figure out how she was going to map out the rest of her life after this unexpected detour.

      “I’m not much of a skier,” she finally said.

      She would have preferred to leave it at that but he pressed on. “So why are you here?”

      Katie fought the urge to gnash her teeth at what was beginning to feel like an interrogation. “I like it here. Of all my siblings, I probably spend the most time here. This is where I come when I need to relax and recharge. I love the mountains, even in the winter. I like the solitude of it and the slow, easy pace. I guess I just needed a break from the rain.”

      “So you decided howling winds and three feet of snow would be more to your liking?”

      “It doesn’t snow all the time,” she muttered. She frowned suddenly, remembering something that had been puzzling her since he arrived. “How did you know how to find me, anyway? Only a few people knew I was coming.”

      “You know, it’s amazing. The truth can open all kinds of doors. Maybe you ought to try it sometime.”

      Before she could control it, her breath caught as the jab poked under her skin. She deserved it, she acknowledged, especially with the secret she still kept from him, the one she knew she could never tell him. Knowing his contempt was warranted didn’t make it any easier to take.

      “Who told you?”

      “I phoned your office. Once I gave your assistant my name and told her I needed to speak with you on an urgent matter, she was eager to help. She said you were staying at the family ranch and gave me the number here. From there, it was easy to connect the phone number to a location.”

      She should have known. If Peter hadn’t been there, Katie would have groaned and banged her head against the back of her chair a few times. She loved her sixty-year-old assistant dearly but Lila Fitzgerald had a romantic streak as wide as the Columbia Gorge. She read the Weekly faithfully and must have seen the picture of them together at the bachelor auction.

      Katie could just guess at the wild speculation that must have been running amok through Lila’s feverish imagination when Peter had called looking for her.

      What kind of gossip was raging around the water coolers at Crosby Systems about her and Peter Logan because of that blasted picture? There were already some on her team who thought she didn’t have the experience or the know-how to lead the R & D division. What would her co-workers think when they saw a picture of her consorting with the man many considered to be the enemy?

      What would her family think?

      She already knew Sheila would be livid. She could only be grateful her mother was in Europe and wouldn’t be returning for several weeks. What about Trent and Ivy and Danny? They wouldn’t care so much that Peter was a Logan, but they would worry whether he had hurt her. And when she turned up pregnant, she knew they would wonder at the timing. She just had to hope she could brazen it out.

      “I’m still not sure why you went to all the trouble to come out here. If you had the number, why couldn’t we have had this delightful little reunion over the phone?”

      Peter didn’t have a rational answer to that. He only knew that the moment he found out where she was, he’d known he would come after her. He’d used the excuse of finding out what she had learned about the super-router project, but the truth was he’d been consumed with the need to see her again, corporate spy or not.

      He’d be damned before he told her that, though, and he opted to change the subject. “Are you going to eat this delicious stew or just push it around in the bowl?”

      Color crept along her cheekbones but she still looked far too pale for him. “I’m not very hungry.”

      “Still feeling sick?”

      Her СКАЧАТЬ