The Men of Medicine Ridge - Diana Palmer [94]
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Pauline frowned. “What do you mean, you hadn’t noticed?”
“Well, Mr. Callister is almost a generation older than I am,” she said deliberately.
“Oh.” Pauline smiled secretively. “I see.”
“He’s a very kind man,” Kasie emphasized, “but I don’t think of him in that way,” she added, lying through her teeth.
Pauline for once seemed speechless.
“Here, let’s get started,” Kasie said as she turned on the computer, trying to head off trouble. She hoped that comment would keep her out of trouble with Pauline, who obviously considered Gil Callister her personal property. Kasie had enough problems without adding a jealous secretary to them. Even if she did privately think Gil was the sexiest man she’d ever known.
Pauline seemed determined to make every second of work as hard as humanly possible for Kasie. She insisted on three coffee breaks before noon, and the pressing nature of the information coming in by fax kept Kasie working long after Pauline called it a day at three in the afternoon and went home. If Mrs. Charters hadn’t helped out by letting Bess and Jenny make cookies, Kasie wouldn’t have been able to do as much as she did.
She’d only just finished the new computer entries when Gil came in, dusty and sweaty and half out of humor. He didn’t say a word. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a scotch and water, and he drank half of it before he even looked at Kasie.
It took her a minute to realize that he was openly glaring at her.
“Is something wrong?” she asked uneasily.
“Pauline called me on the cell phone a few minutes ago. She said you’re making it impossible for her to do her job,” he replied finally.
Her heart skipped. So that was how the other woman was going to make points—telling lies.
“I’ve been showing her how to key in this data, and that’s all I’ve done,” Kasie told him quietly. “She hates the computer.”
“Odd that she’s done so well with it up until now,” he said suspiciously.
“Debbie did well with it,” Kasie replied bluntly, flushing a little at his angry tenseness. “She was apparently having to put her own work as well as Pauline’s into the computer.”
He took another sip of the drink. He didn’t look convinced. “That isn’t what Pauline says,” he told her. “And I want to know why you suddenly want my girls in a boarding school, after you’ve spent weeks behind my back and against instructions winning them over, so they’re attached to you.” He added angrily, “I meant it when I said I have no plans to marry. So if that changes your mind about wanting to take care of them, say so and I’ll give you a reference and two weeks severance pay!”
He really did look ferocious. Kasie’s head was spinning from the accusations. “Excuse me?”
He finished the drink and put the glass down firmly on the counter below the liquor cabinet. His pale eyes were glittery. “John and I spent six of the worst years of our lives at boarding school,” he added unexpectedly. “I’m not putting my babies in any boarding school.”
Kasie felt as if she were being attacked by invisible hands. She stood up, her mind reeling from the charges. Pauline had been busy!
“I haven’t said anything about boarding school,” she defended herself. “Pauline said…”
He held up a hand. “I know Pauline,” he told her. “I’ve known her most of my life. She doesn’t tell lies.”
Boy, was he in for a shock a little further on down the road, she thought, but she didn’t say anything else. She was already in too much trouble, and none of it of her own making.
She didn’t say a word. She just looked at him with big, gray, wounded eyes.
He moved closer, his mind reeling from Pauline’s comments about Kasie. He didn’t want to believe that Kasie was so two-faced that she’d play up to the girls to get in Gil’s good graces and then want to see them sent off to boarding school. But what did he really know about her, after all? She had no family except an aunt in Billings, or so she said, and except for the information on her application that mentioned secretarial