Page 16 of Wyoming True

The doorbell rang. She slid into her long black leather coat with its epaulets and leather belt and opened the door.

She was at a loss for words. Pam had sent a rather disgruntled Jake McGuire to pick her up. He was glaring when she opened the door, but the horrified look on Ida’s face, and the beauty of her face and her slender figure in that dress, left him momentarily speechless.

“I didn’t ask Pam to send you,” she stammered. “I don’t even know who else she invited. She said she invited me just to make the numbers fit. I didn’t want to come!”

Her embarrassment touched something deep inside him that had been frozen since Mina Michaels married Cort Grier. He reached out a big, lean hand and touched his fingers to her soft mouth to stop the words.

“It’s all right,” he said gently.

Tears, visible, stung her eyes and she averted them. “Thanks,” she almost choked.

He was entranced. Her reputation would put any decent man off, but when he was alone with her, she was nothing like that reputation. She was a puzzle.

“We’d better go,” he said gently. “Careful. There’s snow on the ground.”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind snow. Ice scares me.”

“No ice. Yet.”

She locked her doors and hesitated at the steps. She had on heels that were barely an inch high and stacked, the only sort she could bear with her old injury. The snow would come up over them.

Jake suddenly swung her up in his arms and started down the steps to his car, parked right in front of the house.

Ida was like a board in his arms, frightened and too shy to tell him why.

He turned his head and looked down at her when he reached the passenger side of the big Mercedes. He stared straight into her frightened blue eyes, his own silver ones narrow and assessing while the snow fell on his wide-brimmed hat and was funneled away from her face.

She just stared up at him, vulnerable, fragile, uncertain.

“You little fraud,” he said in the softest tone she’d ever heard from him.

“Wh-what?”

He just chuckled. He put her down, opened the door and eased her inside. He didn’t elaborate on what he’d said, but he was getting some interesting information about the wild divorcée without a word being spoken. She didn’t act like any promiscuous woman he’d ever known, and there had been a few in his youth. She was far more like an actress playing a role in public to keep people from seeing the woman behind it. She was damaged somehow. He wondered who’d made her so afraid of men. Cindy had said something about Ida’s second husband. Ida had intimated that the man had been responsible for her injuries. It angered him, remembering that.

He got in beside her, glancing sideways to make sure her seat belt was fastened before he put his on.

“Is there a big crowd there?” she asked, to make conversation.

“Five couples,” he said. “We’ll make six.”

“Pam didn’t say she’d invited you,” she said after a minute.

His chiseled lips pursed. “Same here.”

She drew in a long breath.

“She and Cindy, from the café, are friends,” he mused as he pulled out onto the highway.

Which made things very clear. Cindy had told Pam about Jake taking Ida home and coming back to get her car. The two women sensed a romance and Pam was acting to help things along.

“Oh, dear,” Ida said worriedly, and her long-fingered hands with their red fingernails crushed her small purse.

“Gossip only works if you let it,” he said.

“So they say.”

He glanced at her as they stopped at a traffic light. He could see the faint flush in her cheeks. It amused him, but he didn’t let her see it.

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