Christmas Cowboy: Will of Steel / Winter Roses. Diana Palmer

different, nothing like Uncle John’s hired man who had turned nasty.

      He’d talked to her on the phone several times and persuaded her to go out with him. Infatuated, she sneaked out when Uncle John went to bed. But she landed herself in very hot water when the man got overly amorous. She’d managed to get her cell phone out and punched in 911. The result had been … unforgettable.

      “They did get the door fixed, I believe.?” she said, letting her voice trail off.

      He glared at her. “It was locked.”

      “There’s such a thing as keys,” she pointed out.

      “While I was finding one, you’d have been …”

      She flushed again. She moved uncomfortably. “Yes, well, I did thank you. At the time.”

      “And a traveling mathematician learned the dangers of trying to seduce teenagers in my town.”

      She couldn’t really argue. She’d been sixteen at the time, and Theodore’s quick reaction had saved her honor. The auditor hadn’t known her real age. She knew he’d never have asked her out if he had any idea she was under legal age. He’d been the only man she had a real interest in, for her whole life. He’d quit the firm he worked for, so he never had to come back to Hollister.

      She felt bad about it. The whole fiasco was her own fault.

      The sad thing was that it wasn’t her first scary episode with an older man. The first, at fifteen, had scarred her. She’d thought that she could trust a man again because she was crazy about the auditor. But the auditor became the icing on the cake of her withdrawal from the world of dating for good. She’d really liked him, trusted him, had been infatuated with him. He wasn’t even a bad man, not like that other one.

      “The judge did let him go with a severe reprimand about making sure of a girl’s age and not trying to persuade her into an illegal act. But he could have gone to prison, and it would have been my fault,” she recalled. She didn’t mention the man who had gone to prison for assaulting her. Ted didn’t know about that and she wasn’t going to tell him.

      “Don’t look to me to have any sympathy for him,” he said tersely. “Even if you’d been of legal age, he had no right to try to coerce you.”

      “Point taken.”

      “Your uncle should have let you get out more,” he said reluctantly.

      “I never understood why he kept me so close to home,” she replied thoughtfully. She knew it wasn’t all because of her bad experience.

      His black eyes twinkled. “Oh, that’s easy. He was saving you for me.”

      She gaped at him.

      He chuckled. “He didn’t actually say so, but you must have realized from his will that he’d planned a future for us for some time.”

      A lot of things were just becoming clear. She was speechless, for once.

      He grinned. “He grew you in a hothouse just for me, little orchid,” he teased.

      “Obviously your uncle never did the same for me,” she said scathingly.

      He shrugged, and his eyes twinkled even more. “One of us has to know what to do when the time comes,” he pointed out.

      She flushed. “I think we could work it out without diagrams.”

      He leaned closer. “Want me to look it up and see if I can find some for you?”

      “I’m not marrying you!” she yelled.

      He shrugged. “Suit yourself. Maybe you can put up some curtains and lay a few rugs and the cave will be more comfortable.” He glanced out the window. “Poor Sammy,” he added sadly. “His future is less, shall we say, palatable.”

      “For the last time, Sammy is not a bull, he’s a cow. She’s a cow,” she faltered.

      “Sammy is a bull’s name.”

      “She looked like a Sammy,” she said stubbornly. “When she’s grown, she’ll give milk.”

      “Only when she’s calving.”

      “Like you know,” she shot back.

      “I belong to the cattleman’s association,” he reminded her. “They tell us stuff like that.”

      “I belong to it, too, and no, they don’t, you learn it from raising cattle!”

      He tugged his wide-brimmed hat over his eyes. “It’s useless, arguing with a blond fence post. I’m going back to work.”

      “Don’t shoot anybody.”

      “I’ve never shot anybody.”

      “Ha!” she burst out. “What about that bank robber?”

      “Oh. Him. Well, he shot at me first.”

      “Stupid of him.”

      He grinned. “That’s just what he said, when I visited him in the hospital. He missed. I didn’t. And he got sentenced for assault on a police officer as well as the bank heist.”

      She frowned. “He swore he’d make you pay for that. What if he gets out?”

      “Ten to twenty, and he’s got priors,” he told her. “I’ll be in a nursing home for real by the time he gets out.”

      She glowered up at him. “People are always getting out of jail on technicalities. All he needs is a good lawyer.”

      “Good luck to him getting one on what he earns making license plates.”

      “The state provides attorneys for people who can’t pay.”

      He gasped. “Thank you for telling me! I didn’t know!”

      “Why don’t you go to work?” she asked, irritated.

      “I’ve been trying to, but you won’t stop flirting with me.”

      She gasped, but for real. “I am not flirting with you!”

      He grinned. His black eyes were warm and sensuous as they met hers. “Yes, you are.” He moved a step closer. “We could do an experiment. To see if we were chemically suited to each other.”

      She looked at him, puzzled, for a few seconds, until it dawned on her what he was suggesting. She moved back two steps, deliberately, and her high cheekbones flushed again. “I don’t want to do any experiments with you!”

      He sighed. “Okay. But it’s going to be a very lonely marriage if you keep thinking that way, Jake.”

      “Don’t call me Jake! My name is Jillian.”

      He shrugged. “You’re a Jake.” He gave her a long look, taking in her ragged jeans and bulky gray sweatshirt and boots with curled-up toes from use. Her long blond hair was pinned up firmly into a topknot, and she wore no makeup. “Tomboy,” he added accusingly.

      She averted her eyes. There were reasons she didn’t accentuate her feminine attributes, and she didn’t want to discuss the past with him. It wasn’t the sort of thing she felt comfortable talking about with anyone. It made Uncle John look bad, and he was dead. He’d cried about his lack of judgment in hiring Davy Harris. But it was too late by then.

      Ted was getting some sort of vibrations from her. She was keeping something from him. He didn’t know what, but he was almost certain of it.

      His teasing manner went into eclipse. He became a policeman again. “Is there something you want to talk to me about, Jake?” he asked in the soft tone he used with children.

      She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “It wouldn’t help.”

      “It might.”

      She grimaced. “I don’t know you well enough to tell you some things.”