Christmas With A Stranger. Catherine Spencer

      “Praise the Lord! Because, escaped con on the loose or not as the case may be, this ain’t no place for a woman like that, Morgan, any more than you’re the marryin’ kind. Too wrapped up in your work, too short on patience and too damned opinionated is what you are. Women don’t like that in a man.”

      “You ought to know,” Morgan said, laughing despite the anxiety and irritation fraying the edges of his pleasure at being back at the ranch for the holidays. “Agnes took on all three when she married you, and spent half her life trying to cure you of them.”

      Clancy pulled his worn old stetson down over his brow and came to stand next to Morgan in the doorway. “Had a little chat with her this mornin’,” he murmured, nodding to the enclosure atop a small rise beyond the near meadow, where the ashes of his wife of forty-eight years lay scattered. “Told her I’d put up a Christmas tree in the main house, just like always. Remember all the bakin’ she used to do, Morgan, and the knittin’ she tried to hide, and all that business of hanging up a row of socks, as if we was still kids believin’ in Santa Claus?”

      “Of course I remember.” Morgan slung an arm over his shoulder, a gesture of affection which the hired hand suffered reluctantly. “On Christmas Eve we’ll light the fire in the living room, raise a glass to her, and you’ll play the organ. She’d like to know we’re keeping to the traditions that meant so much to her.”

      “Always assumin’ we ain’t been murdered in our beds by then,” Clancy said gloomily. “I’m tellin’ you, Morgan, Gabriel Parrish is gonna come lookin’ for you. I feel it in my bones. And he ain’t gonna knock at the front door and announce himself all nice and polite.”

      

      Jessica heard the phone ring as she was toweling dry her hair. Heard, too, the muffled sound of Morgan Kincaid answering, although his exact words weren’t clear.

      When she came down the stairs a few moments later, she found him seated behind a heavy oak desk in a room which clearly served as some sort of office-cum-library, judging by the bookshelves lining the walls.

      “The mechanic from the garage in Sentinel Pass just called,” he said, bathing her in a glower. “Not only is your car radiator frozen solid, you’ve also got a cracked block.”

      There was no need to ask if he considered that to be bad news; his face said it all. “I gather it won’t be fixed today, then.”

      “Not a chance,” he said. “The earliest you’ll be on your way is tomorrow—if you’re lucky.”

      In Jessica’s view, it was about time her luck changed for the better, but it didn’t sound as if it was going to happen soon enough to please either of them. “And if I’m not? How long then?”

      “It depends when they can get around to working on your car and how difficult it is to access the trouble If they have to take out the engine....” His shrug sent a not unpleasant whiff of mountain air and stables wafting toward her. “You could be facing another day’s delay.”

      “But that takes us right up to Christmas Eve! I can’t possibly impose on you and your wife’s hospitality for that length of time. No woman wants a stranger thrust on her at such a busy time of year. And my sister needs me.”

      “Your sister’s going to have to get along without you a while longer,” he declared, rolling the chair away from the desk and pacing moodily to the window. “And I don’t have a wife.”

      “But you said....”

      “I said I didn’t live alone.” He spun around to face her, his face a study in disgruntlement. “I did not say I was married.”

      “All the more reason for me to find some other place to stay, then,” she blurted out, horrified to find her thoughts straying from the very pertinent facts of her dilemma with the car to the vague realization that she was afraid to be alone with this man.

      He spelled danger, though why that particular word came to mind she couldn’t precisely say. It had something to do with his sense of presence that went beyond mere good looks. Whatever it was, it had expressed itself in the middle of the night before and she knew it was only a matter of time before it would do so again. He exuded a complex and undeniable masculinity that she found... sexy.

      An uncomfortable heat spread within her at the audacity of the admission. She did not deal with sexy; it had no relevance in her life. “I’m afraid,” she said, “that you’ll just have to drive me to Wintercreek yourself.”

      “Forget it,” he said flatly. “Even if it didn’t involve a three- or four-hour round trip for me, what good will it do you to be in one place when your car’s in another, eighty miles away?”

      Once again, he was so irrefutably right that, illogically, Jessica wanted to kick him. Curbing any such urge, she said, “In that case, I’ll endeavor not to cause you any more trouble than I already have.”

      “You can do better than that,” he said, and jerked his head toward a door at the far end of the main hall. “You can make yourself useful in the kitchen back there and set the table. There’s a pot of chili heating on the woodstove which should be ready to serve by the time I get cleaned up. Maybe a hot meal will leave us both more charitably inclined toward the other.”

      Confident that she’d obey without a qualm, he loped off, long legs moving with effortless rhythm up the stairs. Refusing to gaze after him like some star-struck ninth-grade student, Jessica made her way to the kitchen, which would have been hard to miss in a house twice as large.

      Big and square, with copper pots hanging from the beamed ceiling and the woodstove he’d mentioned sending out blasts of heat, it could easily have accommodated a family of ten around the rectangular table in the middle of the floor, yet Morgan Kincaid clearly had the house pretty much to himself.

      There’d been only one toothbrush in the bathroom, only one set of towels hanging on the rail, and an unmistakable air of emptiness in the row of closed doors lining the upper hall. Did he perhaps have a housekeeper who occupied the rooms above the stables? Was that what he’d meant when he’d said he didn’t live alone?

      If so, Jessica decided, taking down blue willow bowls and plates from a glass-fronted cabinet, she’d prefer spending the night with her, even if it meant sleeping on the floor. The favor of Morgan Kincaid’s reluctant hospitality was no favor at all.

      She was stirring the pot of chili set on a hot plate hinged to the top of the woodstove when a man of about seventy, accompanied by a pair of golden retrievers, came into the kitchen from a mud room off the enclosed porch at the back of the house.

      Short, stocky and unshaven, his appearance was what one could most kindly call weathered. “You must be the woman,” he observed from the doorway, unwinding a long, knitted scarf from around his neck and opening the buttons on a sheepskin-lined jacket.

      Not quite sure how to respond to that, Jessica murmured noncommittally, replaced the lid on the chili pot, and bent to stroke the head of the smaller dog, who came to greet her before curling up in one of the two cushioned rocking chairs near the woodstove. The other animal remained beside his master and it was hard to tell which of the two looked more suspicious.

      “You made any coffee?” the man inquired, in the same semi-hostile tone.

      “Yes. May I pour you a cup?”

      “Cup?” His gaze raked from her to the table and came to rest in outrage on the hand-sewn linen place mats and napkins she’d found in a drawer. “What the hell—? Who gave you the right to help yourself to Agnes’s Sunday-best dishes and stuff?”

      Compared to the acerbic dwarf confronting her now, Morgan Kincaid’s personality suddenly struck Jessica as amazingly agreeable. She made no attempt to hide her relief when he, too, appeared and stood surveying the scene taking place, although she could have done without his smirk of amusement.

      “Lookee, Morgan,” the old buzzard with the dog spluttered furiously, “we got ourselves