It had kept him closer to the old ways, made it easier for him to keep himself separate from their neighbors.
“I’m sure you must be hungry,” she said, refusing to let her thoughts carry her back when she was trying so hard to move forward. Ice cracked as she poured liquid over it. “I’ll put some antiseptic on those scrapes, then fix you something to eat.”
Soaping up after he’d given the handle a pump, Justin eyed the golden pie sitting on the stove. His breakfast of a large black coffee-to-go and two granola bars had worn off hours ago. “You don’t have to feed me,” he said, marveling at the way she minimized her lack. She couldn’t afford regular plumbing. He wasn’t about to take her food. “And my arm’s fine. It’s just bruised.”
“Your arm is not fine. You were out in that barn with the sore open and unprotected. It needs to be cleaned.
“And you didn’t have to help me, either,” she continued, her voice suddenly quiet. “But you did.” Gratitude shifted in her eyes as she held out a towel. “I know you said no thanks were necessary, but I’ll never be able to thank you enough for what you did for me and Anna today. So let me do what I can.” She lifted the towel a little higher. “Please?”
The thought of the barn and what had been in it already had him hesitating. Her unexpected plea had him hesitating even more.
“You don’t owe me anything.” Whatever he’d done, he’d done on instinct. When he’d dived for that cellar, he’d been protecting himself as much as he had her and her kid. “You gave me shelter. I’d say that makes us even.
“But I’ll take you up on the antiseptic,” he told her, ignoring the disagreement in her eyes as he took the towel she offered. She truly didn’t owe him anything. But he knew what it was like to feel obligated. If she hated the feeling as much as he did, he wouldn’t deny her the satisfaction of evening the score. “Where do you want me?”
Emily looked up at the mountain of male muscle towering over her. She didn’t know why he seemed so much bigger to her now than he had outside. But she didn’t think it wise to stand there watching his glance move over her face while she tried to figure it out. “It would help if you’d sit down,” she murmured and turned to gather supplies from the bathroom.
He’d drained the glass of lemonade she’d left for him on her well-scrubbed pine table and was leaning back in one of its straight-backed chairs when she returned and set everything on the table beside him. He was following her every move. She could feel it. But she didn’t let herself meet his eyes. She focused only on the fabric covering his biceps. She’d noticed the snags before. What she hadn’t noticed was the tear in the seam.
“I’ll fix your shirt for you,” she said, leaning over so she could lift his sleeve and see how far up the scrape went.
“Don’t bother. I have another one in the car. Wait a minute,” he muttered when he felt the sleeve scrape his sore skin. “I’ll just take it off.”
Before she could say a word, he’d bent his dark head and grabbed a handful of fabric between his shoulder blades. Seconds later, he dragged the garment over his head.
Emily swallowed hard as he dropped it to his knee. Until two years ago, Daniel had been the only man she’d seen in any state of undress. He’d worked hard and ate well, but his thin build had not been what one would call impressive. Justin’s…was. His shoulders were broad, every corded muscle in his tapering back and carved arms beautifully defined.
She’d seen pictures of statues depicting such beautifully proportioned men. She’d even seen pictures of men themselves in ads for skimpy underwear, though the first few times she’d encountered them while flipping through magazines at Mrs. Clancy’s and at the grocery store, she’d nearly turned pink with embarrassment.
The image of a half-naked man no longer startled her as it once had. Mary Woldridge, a checker at the market who’d become her friend, even said she was no fun to watch at the magazine rack anymore. The real thing, however, was rather disturbing. So was the four-inch-wide swath of bruised, raw and abraded skin that ran from Justin’s biceps to the top of his shoulder. Little splinters were visible between the streaks of blood that had dried and crusted in places, any one of which could have caught on his sleeve with his movements and caused a fresh jolt of discomfort.
He would have been terribly uncomfortable working with Mr. Clancy. But it was the thought of how he’d been hurting while he’d shielded her and her child that had her reaching to touch the skin below his reddened flesh.
“You’re already bruising,” she murmured. “Does it feel like you chipped bone?”
“I don’t think I did anything like that. It just feels a little sore.”
She met his eyes, sympathy in her own as she straightened. She needed more light.
Justin watched her turn away, the soft fabric of her dress shifting against her slender body as she moved across the room. The dress itself was modest to a fault. Demure, he supposed, though it wasn’t a word he recalled ever having reason to use before. The sleeves nearly reached her elbows and her delicate collarbone was barely exposed. But the memory of how she’d looked with the wind molding that fabric to her body had been burned into his brain. All too easily, he could picture the fullness of her high breasts, the curve of her hips, her long, shapely legs.
Thinking of how exquisitely she was shaped beneath that formless garment had his body responding in ways that were not wise to consider in such an intimate space. So he forced his attention to what she was doing as she turned back to the table and touched the match she struck to the wick of the oil lamp she’d set there. Moments later, a bright glow illuminated her lovely face. That light gleamed in her hair, adding shimmers of platinum to shades of silver and gold as she replaced the glass chimney and positioned the lamp near the jar of vividly colored flowers.
With the scrape of wood over scarred pine flooring, Emily tugged a chair next to his and sat down beside him.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?”
He held up the thumb of his left hand. “Just a couple of slivers. I can get them if you have any tweezers.”
She reached toward a gauze pad. “I have a needle,” she told him, pulling out the one she’d brought and sterilizing it in the wick’s flame. “You have them in your arm, too. Here,” she murmured, replacing the chimney once more. “Let me see.”
His bare chest was terribly distracting. Trying not to think of how incredibly solid it had felt, she took his thick wrist and moved his hand closer to the light. With his hand resting palm-up on her table, she could easily see two fine slivers of wood in the pad of his thumb.
His hands distracted her, too.
They were strong, broad and long-fingered. Good hands. Capable hands. Yet, they were nearly unblemished. There were no calluses, no scars, no healing scratches. Only the fresh-looking scrapes and nicks he’d earned that afternoon.
Fascinated, she started to touch the smooth pad at the base of his fingers, only to pull back as if she’d touched fire the instant she realized what she was doing.
“What’s the matter?”
With a sheepish smile, she ducked her head and went to work on his thumb, deftly slipping out a sliver with the needle and wiping it onto a gauze pad. “Your hands are very smooth. I’ve never seen a man’s hands that weren’t scarred and callused from years of work. Except maybe Dr. Fisher,” she amended, thinking of the kindly old physician in Hancock who’d delivered Anna. The other sliver joined the first. “But I can’t honestly say I paid any attention to them. Yours are the only ones I’ve noticed.”
“Is that good or bad?” He posed the question mildly, absorbed as much by her lack of guile as her brisk efficiency when she dabbed on peroxide with a cotton ball, then blotted at the bubbles. “No calluses, I mean?”
“There are some who would