To Wear His Ring: Circle of Gold / Trophy Wives / Dakota Bride. Wendy Warren

about that. “Next time, come and find me if you can’t wake Miss Parsons.”

      She just stared back, silent.

      “Did you hear me, Kasie?” he demanded softly.

      “All right.” She glanced from one side of her to the other. “Do you want to wake them up and carry them back to their own beds?”

      He looked furious. “If I do, we’ll all be awake the rest of the night. We had cattle get out, and we got soaked trying to get them back in. I’m worn-out. I want to go to sleep.”

      “Nobody here is stopping you,” she murmured.

      His pale eyes narrowed. “I should have let you go when you offered to resign,” he said caustically.

      “There’s still time,” she pointed out, growing more angry by the minute.

      He cursed under his breath, glared at her again and walked out.

      The next morning, Kasie woke to soft pummeling little hands and laughing voices.

      “Get up, Kasie, get up! Daddy’s taking us to the movies today!”

      She yawned and curled up. “Not me,” she murmured sleepily. “Go get breakfast, babies. Mrs. Charters will feed you.”

      “You got to come, too!” Bess said.

      “I want to sleep,” she murmured.

      “Daddy, she won’t get up!” Bess wailed.

      “Oh, yes, she will.”

      Kasie barely had time to register the deep voice before the covers were torn away and she was lifted bodily out of the bed in a pair of very strong arms.

      Shocked, she stared straight into pale blue eyes and felt as if she’d been electrified.

      “I’ll wake her up,” Gil told the girls. “Go down and eat your breakfast.”

      “Okay, Daddy!”

      The girls left gleefully, laughing as they went to the staircase.

      “You look like a nun in that gown,” Gil remarked as he studied his light burden, aware of her sudden stillness. Her face was very close. He searched it quietly. “And you’ve got freckles, Kasie, just across the bridge of your nose.”

      “Put…put me down,” she said, unnerved by the proximity. She didn’t like the sensations it caused to feel his chest right against her bare breasts.

      “Why?” he asked. He gazed into her eyes. “You hardly weigh anything.” His eyes narrowed as he studied her face thoroughly. “You have big eyes,” he murmured. “With little flecks of blue in them. Your face looks more round than oval, especially with your hair down. Your mouth is—” he searched for a word, more touched than he wanted to be by its vulnerability “—full and soft. Half-asleep you don’t come across as a fighter. But you are, aren’t you?”

      Her hands were resting lightly around his neck and she stared at him disconcertedly while she wondered what John or Miss Parsons would say if they walked in unexpectedly to find them in this position.

      “You should put me down,” she said huskily.

      “Don’t you like being carried?” he murmured absently.

      She shivered as she remembered the last time she’d been carried, by an orderly in the hospital…

      She pushed at him. “Please.”

      He set her back down, scowling curiously at the odd pastiness of her complexion. “You’re mysterious, Kasie.”

      “Not really. I’m just sleepy.” She folded her arms over her breasts and flushed. “Could you leave, please, and let me get dressed?”

      He watched her curiously. “Why don’t you date? And don’t hand me any bull about stinking cowboys.”

      She was reluctant to tell him anything about herself. She was a private person. Her aunt, Mama Luke, always said that people shouldn’t worry others with their personal problems. She didn’t.

      “I don’t want to get married, ever.”

      He really scowled then. “Why?”

      She thought of her parents and then of Kantor, and her eyes closed on the pain. “Love hurts too much.”

      He didn’t speak. For an instant, he felt the pain that seemed to rack her delicate features, and he understood it, all too well.

      “You loved someone who died,” he recalled.

      She nodded and her eyes met his. “And so did you.”

      For an instant, his hard face was completely unguarded. He was vulnerable, mortal, wounded. “Yes.”

      “It doesn’t pass away, like they say, does it?” she asked softly.

      “Not for a long time.”

      He moved a step closer, and this time she didn’t back up. Her eyes lifted to his. He slid his big, lean hand into the thick waves of her chestnut hair and enjoyed its silkiness. “Why don’t you wear your hair down, like this?”

      “It’s sinful,” she whispered.

      “What?”

      “When you dress and wear your hair in a way that’s meant to tempt men, to try to seduce them, it’s sinful,” she repeated.

      His lips fell open. He didn’t know how to answer that. He’d never had a woman, especially a modern woman, say such a thing to him.

      “Do you think sex is a sin?” he asked.

      “Outside of marriage, it is,” she replied simply.

      “You don’t move with the times, do you?” he asked on an expulsion of breath.

      “No,” she replied.

      He started smiling and couldn’t stop. “Oh, boy.”

      “The girls will be waiting. Are you really taking them to a movie?” she asked.

      “Yes.” One eye narrowed. “I need to take you to one, too. Something X-rated.”

      She flushed. “Get out of here and stop trying to corrupt me.”

      “You’re overdue.”

      “Stop or I’ll have Mama Luke come over and lecture you.”

      He frowned. “Mama Luke?”

      “My aunt.”

      “What an odd name.”

      She shrugged. “Our whole family runs to odd names.”

      “I noticed.”

      She made a face. “I work for you. My private life is my own business.”

      “You don’t have a private life,” he said, and smiled tenderly.

      “I’m a great reader. I love Plutarch and Tacitus and Arrian.”

      “Good God!”

      “There’s nothing wrong with ancient history. Things were just as bad then as they are now. All the ancient writers said that the younger generation was headed straight to purgatory and the world was corrupt.”

      “Arrian didn’t.”

      “Arrian wrote about Alexander the Great,” she reminded him. “Alexander’s world was in fairly good shape, apparently.”

      “Arrian wrote about Alexander in the distant past, not his own present.” His eyes became soft with affection as he looked at her. “Why don’t I like you? There isn’t a person in my circle of acquaintances who would even know who Arrian was, much less what he wrote about.”

      “I don’t like you much, either,” she shot