The Men of Medicine Ridge - Diana Palmer [64]
That evening, they sat on the balcony after a light supper, drinking cola and watching the moon rise over the Gulf of Mexico. They sat side by side, holding hands and glancing at each other every few seconds to make sure that it was all real.
“In all my dreams, it was never like this,” she confessed softly.
“Not in mine, either,” he replied gently. “I don’t like to leave you even long enough to take a shower.” His gaze went hungrily to her face. “I never thought it could be like this, Natalie,” he breathed. “Not so that I feel as if we’re sewn together by invisible threads.”
She drew the back of his big hand to her lips. “This is what they say marriage should be,” she said dreamily. “But it’s more than I hoped for.”
His fingers curled into hers. “I know.” He glanced at her hungrily. “You’ll never know how I felt when Vivian confessed that she’d lied. I couldn’t bear the thought that I’d almost lost you.”
“It’s all in the past,” she said tenderly. “Speaking of your sister, Vivian phoned while you were showering,” she said suddenly. “She said that Bob and Charles have gone hunting with that Marlowe man and she was going to spend the weekend cramming for her first test.”
“I told the boys not to go off and leave her alone,” he said grimly.
“Stop that,” she chided. “Vivian’s grown, and the boys practically are. You have to stop dictating every move they make.”
He glared at her. “Wait until we have kids that age, and tell me that then!” he chided.
She sighed over him, her eyes full of wonderful dreams. “I’d like one of each,” she mused. “A boy to look like you, and a girl who’ll spend time with me when I’m working in the kitchen or the garden, or who’ll be old enough for school when I go back to teaching.”
“Planning to?” he asked comfortably.
“Not until the children are old enough to go, too,” she said. “We can afford for me to stay home with them while they’re small, and I will. When they’re old enough to go to school, I’ll go back to work.”
He brought her hand to his mouth and smiled. “Sensible,” he agreed. “And I’ll change diapers and give bottles and teach them how to ride.”
She studied his handsome face and thought back over all the long years they’d known each other, and the trials they’d faced together. “It’s the bad times that bring us close,” she commented softly.
“Yes,” he said. “Like fire tempering steel. We’ve seen the best and worst of each other, and we have enough in common that even if we didn’t have the best sex on two continents, we’d still make a good marriage.”
She pursed her lips. “As it is,” she said, “we’ll make an extraordinary one.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” He lifted his can of soda and she lifted hers, and they made a toast.
Out on the bay, a cruise ship was just coming into port, its lights making a fiesta of the darkness, a jeweled portrait in the night. Natalie felt like that inside, like a holiday ship making its way to a safe harbor. The orphan finally had a home where she belonged. She clasped her husband’s hand tight in her own and sighed with pure joy.
CIRCLE OF GOLD
Chapter 1
Kasie Mayfield was excited. Her gray eyes were brimming with delight as she sat in the sprawling living room at the Double C Ranch in Medicine Ridge, Montana. There was a secretarial position available on the mammoth Double C, and she had the necessary qualifications. She was only twenty-two, but she had a certificate from secretarial school and plenty of initiative. Besides all that, the position was secretary to John Callister, the second son of the well-known family that headed not only a publishing empire in New York City, but a cattle empire out West.
There was a very interesting story about the ranch in a magazine that Kasie was reading while she waited her turn to be interviewed. The elder Callisters lived in New York, where they published, among others, a famous sports magazine. When they weren’t in the city, they lived in Jamaica on an ancestral estate. The Callister who had founded the