“Because the next time a stranger walks onto your property, you might have good reason to kill him.”
“You’re the first such fellow to do so in twenty-one years. Perhaps in the next twenty or so, until the next outlaw wanders through Twilight, I shall teach myself to shoot properly.”
“In the meantime, you could aim and miss.”
“I’ll have you know I’ve never aimed and missed—” She caught herself, her eyes flickering over his bandaged shoulder. “I mean, when it would have mattered.”
To aim and miss... Memory, dark and dusty, whispered through his mind and was gone. “You don’t want to aim and miss when it matters, ma’am,” he said softly.
“Perhaps. But in the meantime, I’ve Avram.”
He couldn’t squelch a snort before he popped three berries into his mouth. He half slouched against the bowed excuse for a barn wall, chewed innocently enough, and gave her his best vague look when she planted her hands on her hips and advanced toward him.
She stood there, bathed in lamplight and dancing shadows, entirely unaware of herself as a woman and looking far too young and ripe for a man such as he, a man used to taking what he wanted from a woman. Particularly when he’d been so long without one. There, the chin jutted and the nose poked skyward, her lips compressing as though she sought just the perfect combination of words to skewer him with. He could almost hear the toe of her shoe tapping on the floor, could feel her righteous indignation in the heat of her.
“Whatever are you snickering about, Mr. Stark? If you intend to make humor at my fiancé’s expense—”
“I’ve never snickered in my life, ma’am.”
“Oh, but you’ve snickered, all right.” She waved a hand over him, directly at his bare chest. “A man who can calmly eat a meal without his shirt in front of a woman is capable of snickering. I wouldn’t doubt that you can spit, as well.”
“A nasty habit. I avoid it if I can.”
“And ill-mannered sorts are notoriously short on book learning—”
“I read Keats and Byron every night before retiring.”
“Why, you probably haven’t bathed in over a month—”
“I make it a daily habit. Bathed just this morning, ma’am. The stream was cold and deep. Perfect for bathing...” He flashed a rare smile, one that seemed to crack his skin. “Naked, of course.”
This stopped her cold, as he’d known it would. All her puffed-up defending of her beloved Avram fled, swallowed in one noisy gulp. She flushed scarlet. She stared at his bare chest, and lower, at his stomach. The blush reached clear to her hairline. He could almost read her innocent mind, the images taking full, real shape...a man, bathing naked in a cold stream.
It was hard to imagine that this woman had ever known intimacy with a man.
For whatever unfathomable reason, he was suddenly overcome with the need to apologize to her for stoking all those defenses, no matter how deserving Halsey might be, no matter how eagerly she had leapt to his defense.
Rance stood, and she took three steps back, one slender arm outstretched, as though to keep him at a proper distance.
“In the future,” she said, “I would appreciate you wearing your clothes, sir, particularly your shirt, in my presence.” She looked as though she itched to grow another seven inches taller as she lifted her gaze finally to his. “And that of my boy.”
Odd, that. Protecting her son from the sight of a man. He wondered if she’d done the same with her own husband.
He indicated the blood-soaked cloth lying on a nearby pile of hay. “My shirt, ma’am, has a bloody hole in it.”
She pursed her lips, then snatched his shirt up and stalked from the barn. Silhouetted against a sky ablaze with twilight fire, her shoulders squared, and all those blond curls bounced with each step she took. His gaze immediately narrowed upon the outline of her hips, slim, swaying and womanly. Instinct, that was it. Simply male instinct and habit—both a man like him could tame and manage, both he would feel with any woman, dammit. See, he could take his eyes off her. Easy enough.
He slouched against the barn wall, feeling weariness like lead weights in his limbs. His lids drooped, and twilight faded with the blossoming sounds of night above the lonely, slowing creak of the windmill. Yet, try as he might, he could not banish that image of Jessica Wynne from his mind, and then darkness encroached, and the creaking of the windmill grew louder, rousing age-old memories.
Mists parted on a lifetime ago.... The sleeping town of Lawrence, Kansas, all quiet save for the comforting squeak of a windmill outside his open bedroom window and then the gunshots, ripping through the predawn peace...the horrified shouts, cries for help, more gunfire, carnage, and his parents crumpling lifeless beside him as he struggled to take aim, to get off one good shot before the outlaw gang disappeared into the darkness.
Something touched him. He roared awake, the demon stirring to life within him for the first time in years. A shadow loomed close, yet he didn’t strike out. No, he would grapple with his ghosts, dammit. He lunged upward in the darkness, his fingers meeting flesh, yet he gripped those delicate limbs and with one flex of his arms lifted this insignificant weight entirely against him, flush from chest to hips.
“M-Mr. Stark.”
The fog cleared. That warm, lemony woman-scent spilled over him. No ghost. He stared into Jessica Wynne’s wide blue eyes.
Chapter Four
The heat of him penetrated muslin, cotton and bone, leaping into her blood like the first roar of a flame. He was all male, potent, savage, and as raw and untamed as an untouched wilderness, his eyes full of frenzied, mysterious fire. A man so different from the few she’d known. It struck her that she felt no fear, even when his fingers squeezed into her upper arms. Something told her she should be afraid. Yet she felt nothing but this slow, deep burning.
Their breaths came matched, hers shallow, his tortured, a palpable stirring of the sliver of hot night air that dared to pass between them. His scent filled her lungs. Her belly curved into his. Her breasts pushed into his chest, the peaks swelling against fevered bands of muscle—
Too late she realized she’d shoved a fist into his wounded shoulder. Breath hissed from between his teeth, and he released her to sag once again against the barn wall.
“Good heavens, I’m sorry!” she blurted.
Dim lantern light threw his face into deep shadow, yet she recognized the subtle tightening of the lines around his mouth, the downward tilt of his brows over his nose. He shoved a big hand through that unruly mane of blue-black, smoothing the perspiration that dotted his forehead and bathed his torso from neck to waist in a filmy sheen. For one long, unconscionable moment, she allowed her eyes to drift over the breadth of that furred chest and along the ridges of his belly.
She watched his fingers threading through his hair, as if he were massaging some deep ache there. Perhaps it was some trick of the flickering lamplight, but she thought she could detect the faintest trembling in those fingers.
Instinctively, as would any mother, she reached a palm toward his forehead. His eyes angled abruptly at her. Her hand dropped to twist into her skirt.
“You could be feverish, Mr. Stark.”
His lip barely curled with his words. “More than likely it was all that damned hot soup.”
She sucked in a breath of indignation. What was it about this man that stirred her so swiftly to anger, despite his wounded state, despite the fact that she needed him? Despite the fact that she wanted to like him. With pursed lips, she watched him shove himself from his hay bale and move past her, deeper into the shadows. He paused to