Читать книгу A Cold Creek Secret - RaeAnne Thayne - Страница 9

What kind of game was she playing?

That seemed to be the common refrain echoing through his brain when it came to Mimi Van Hoyt. He still hadn’t come any closer to figuring her out several hours after their stunning conversation, as they sat at the worn kitchen table eating a cobbled-together dinner of canned stew and peaches.

First she was pretending to be someone else—as if anyone in the world with access to a computer or a television could somehow have been lucky enough to miss her many well-publicized antics. The woman couldn’t pick up her newspaper in the morning without a crop of photographers there to chronicle every move and she must think he was either blind or stupid not to figure out who she was.

But that same tabloid darling who apparently didn’t step outside her door without wearing designer clothes had spent the afternoon cleaning every nook and cranny of his kitchen—and doing a pretty good job of it. Not that he was any great judge of cleanliness, having spent most of his adult life on Army bases or in primitive conditions in the field, but he had grown up with Jo Winder as an example and he knew she would have been happy to see the countertops sparkling and the old wood cabinets gleaming with polish.

He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself—Mimi Van Hoyt, lush and elegant, scrubbing the grime away from a worn-out ranch house with no small degree of relish. She seemed as happy with her hands in a bucket of soapy water as he was out on patrol with his M4 in his hands.

She had even sung a little under her breath, for heaven’s sake, and he couldn’t help wondering why she had dabbled in acting instead of singing since her contralto voice didn’t sound half-bad.

That low, throaty voice seemed to slide down his spine like trailing fingers and a few times he’d had to manufacture some obvious excuse to leave the house just to get away from it. He figured he’d hauled enough wood up to the house to last them all week but he couldn’t seem to resist returning to the kitchen to watch her.

The woman completely baffled him. He would have expected her to be whining about the lack of entertainment in the cabin, about the enforced confinement, about the endless snow.

At the very least, he would have thought her fingers would be tapping away at some cell phone as she tweeted or whatever it was called, about being trapped in an isolated Idaho ranch with a taciturn stranger.

Instead, she teased her little dog, she took down his curtains and threw them in the washing machine, she organized every ancient cookbook left in the cupboard.

She seemed relentlessly cheerful while the storm continued to bluster outside.

Somehow he was going to have to figure out a way to snap her picture when she wasn’t looking. Otherwise, his men would never believe he’d spent his mid-tour leave watching Mimi Van Hoyt scrub grease off his stove vent.

But he was pretty sure a photograph wouldn’t show them how lovely she looked, with those huge, deep green eyes and her long inky curls and that bright smile that took over her entire face.

Though he knew it was dangerous, Brant couldn’t seem to stop watching her. Having Mimi Van Hoyt flitting around his kitchen in all her splendor was a little overwhelming for a man who hadn’t been with a woman in longer than he cared to remember—sort of like shoving a starving man in front of one of those all-you-can-eat buffets in Las Vegas and ordering him to dig in.

He’d had an on-again, off-again relationship with a nurse at one of the field support hospitals in Paktika Province, but his constant deployments hadn’t left him much time for anything serious.

Not that he was looking. He would leave that sort of thing to the guys who were good at it, like Quinn seemed to be, though he never would have believed it.

Brant treated the women he dated with great respect but he knew he tended to gravitate toward smart, focused career women who weren’t looking for anything more than a little fun and companionship once in a while.

Mimi was something else entirely. He didn’t know exactly what, but he couldn’t believe he had agreed to let her stay at his ranch for a few days. Hour upon hour of trying to ignore the way her hair just begged to be released from the elastic band holding it back or the way those big green eyes caught the light or how her tight little figure danced around the kitchen as she worked.

He shook his head. Which of the two of them was crazier? Right now, he was willing to say it was a toss-up, though he had a suspicion he just might be edging ahead.

“Would you like more stew?” she asked, as if she were hosting some fancy dinner party instead of dishing up canned Dinty Moore.

“I’m good. Thanks.”

Though he knew she had to be accustomed to much fancier meals, she did a credible job with her own bowl of stew. He supposed all that scrubbing and dusting must have worked up an appetite.

“Have you had the ranch for long?” she asked, breaking what had been a comfortable silence. “I’m sorry, I can’t remember what you told me the name was.”

“The Western Sky. And yeah, it’s been in my family for generations. My great-great-grandfather bought the land and built the house in the late 1800s.”

“So you were raised here?”

He thought of his miserable childhood and the pain and insecurity of it, and then of the Winders, who had rescued him from it and showed him what home could really be.

Explaining all that to her would be entirely too complicated, even if he were willing to discuss it, so he took the easy way out. “For the most part,” he answered, hoping she would leave it at that.

Because he was intensely curious to see how far she would take her alternate identity, he turned the conversation back in her direction. “What about you, Maura? Whereabouts do you call home?”

The vibrant green of her eyes seemed to dim a little and she looked away. “Oh, you know. Here and there. California. For now.”

“Oh? Which part of the state, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Southern. The L.A. area.”

He didn’t really follow entertainment gossip but he thought he read or heard something once about her having two homes not far from each other, one her father’s Bel Air estate and the other a Malibu beachhouse.

“Is that where your parents live?”

Her mouth tightened a little and she moved the remaining chunks of stew around in her bowl. “My mom died when I was three, just after my parents divorced. My dad sort of raised me but he…we… moved around a lot.”

He had to take a quick sip of soda to keep from snorting at that evasive comment—probably Mimi’s way of saying her father had residences across the globe.

“And you said you work for a charitable foundation?”

Her wide, mobile mouth pursed into a frown. “Yes. But you probably wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“And what sort of things do you do there?” He wasn’t sure why he enjoyed baiting her so much but it was the most fun he’d had in a long time.

If nothing else, her presence distracted him from the grim events he had left behind in Afghanistan.