Of course, Hunter was waiting right outside, just as she’d known he would.
“There, is that better?” she asked, complete with a mocking pirouette.
“I wasn’t talking about your hair. I was talking about your eyes.”
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep…”
“That’s not it,” he interrupted her. Taking her chin between his fingers, he tilted her face up. “There’s something about the expression in your eyes.”
She closed them. Tight. But that only made the feel of his warm fingers on her skin all the more powerful. In an instant it was as if she were thirteen and in the throes of her ardent crush on him all over again. Her world became centered on the point of contact between them. Heat traveled from his fingertips to her skin, racing to her heart. Her senses were in a turmoil as he practiced his black magic on her with nothing more than the merest brush of his hand.
Disconcerted, she snapped her eyes open and stepped back from. him. “Did Michael send you over here to check up on me?”
“He told me you were coming.”
“I’ll shoot him.”
“Now hold on.”
She wanted to hold on, all right. She wanted to hold on to Hunter’s broad shoulders, wrap her arms around him and never let go. Great. This was not the time for her to remember the stupid crush she’d had on him. This was the time to get rid of him. Before she said or did something foolish.
“I’m fine. You don’t have to waste any more time checking up on your friend’s nuisance sister.”
“You’re not a nuisance.”
“That’s not what you used to say.”
“You were five years old then.”
“Nine,” she corrected him, remembering the very day his family had moved in next door. At first she’d hero-worshipped him.then she’d fallen for him. “What exactly did my brother say when he called you to come check up on me?”
“It wasn’t like that. He was just warning me that someone—you—would be using the cabin for a while. I’ve kind of been looking after the place.”
“You don’t mean you’ve been staying here, do you?” she asked, horrified by the image of sharing the compact cabin with him.
“No, of course not.”
“Good.”
“I’ve got my own place a stone’s throw away.”
“Stone’s throw?”
He nodded. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s just over the ridge there. About a two-minute walk from here.”
“Great.” A two-minute walk from temptation. Wonderful.
“Michael didn’t tell you that we went in together right after our academy days to buy this property and the two cabins on it?”
“No, he didn’t tell me.” The rat.
“So how about you? Are you going to tell me what’s happened?”
“Nothing has happened. Well, that’s not exactly true. Michael and Brett got married yesterday. Actually, it was the second time they got married, it’s kind of a complicated story,” she noted dryly. Made more so by a Gypsy love-charmed box, which was sitting in a cardboard container next to the couch at this very minute.
Too bad Hunter couldn’t have been the first man she’d seen when she’d opened that box. Unlike Michael, who’d been the practical one in the family, Gaylynn liked to think there was some magic in the world.
At least, she always had in the past. Now she wasn’t so sure. About anything.
“Yeah, I know about the wedding,” Hunter was saying. “I was sorry I couldn’t make it, but I was working.”
Gaylynn nodded. She knew he worked as a police officer. In fact, Hunter and Michael had gone to the police academy together. Her brother hadn’t finished the program, preferring to work on his own in the world of corporate security. But Hunter had graduated near the top of his class and been hired as one of Chicago’s finest. He’d looked dashing in his uniform and had been considered the ultimate bachelor, dating a number of women over the next few years. Then he’d up and gotten married the month Gaylynn had started college.
“So how’s your wife doing?” she asked with forced cheerfulness.
“I haven’t got the faintest idea. We were divorced almost five years ago.”
The news took her by complete surprise. “Michael never told me you were divorced.”
Hunter shrugged. The action focused her attention on his broad shoulders. He wore a denim shirt with jeans that were a shade darker. Both had seen their share of washings, making them soft enough to conform to every line of his body—molding his shoulders and narrow hips.
“Down girl,” she muttered to herself under her breath.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. I was just talking to myself.”
“That comes from spending too much time alone.”
“No, you don’t understand. I came up here to do just that. To be alone. It’s what I need right now.”
Hunter watched the nervous slide of her fingers through her straight hair. Gaylynn had never been the fidgety type, even as a kid. She’d been the gutsy type. Fearless. Hell, he still remembered the time she’d invaded the tree house he and Michael had built in the only tree in the Janos’s postage-stamp backyard. Gaylynn had only been nine or so at the time, a mere baby compared to his advanced age of fourteen. But she’d climbed the dangling rope that supplied the only entry to their tree house, this despite the fact that she wasn’t wild about heights. She’d ended up with bloody hands from the rope burn she’d gotten. He knew she still had the scar between her thumb and index finger—her badge of courage, she liked to call it in the old days.
She’d changed from those days. Somehow he’d always pictured her in his mind as she’d been as a coltish teenager. Now he was confronted with a woman, a very attractive albeit untidy woman. He got the strangest feeling when he looked at her.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Gaylynn demanded uneasily.
“I was just thinking about that time you invited yourself to our secret tree house. Do you remember?”
“Yes.” Gaylynn stared down at her hand, the one with the tiny scar, the one with her badge of courage. It was still there, mocking her fear. Now she had another scar, the tiny one at the base of her throat from the knife, as well as the jagged one on her soul.
She’d lost more than the thirteen dollars and twentyone cents she’d had in her wallet that day she’d been attacked. She’d lost her nerve.
It hadn’t happened instantly. At the time, one of her first concerns had been making sure that no one in the police department blabbed to her brother, who still had a few police connections from his academy days. Driving home that night after the attack, she’d resolutely blocked the entire thing out of her mind. At first, she thought she’d succeeded.
Then she’d seen the TV news. The horror had gripped her by the throat and the tears had started. She’d gritted her teeth and gone back to work the next morning only to have the terror creep up on her the moment she’d entered her classroom. She hadn’t been able to speak, hadn’t been able to move. For the first time in her life, Gaylynn had experienced the paralyzing effects of blinding fear.
Unaware of her thoughts, Hunter was saying, “You weren’t afraid of anything in those days.” The approval in his drawl was clear.
She knew he valued courage.