“You can’t leave him here. You either have to stay or take him with you when you go. He strikes me as a tough little tyke, but his Mom’s gone, and I think he’d be scared to death if you dropped him here with a complete stranger.”
The depth of his caring for the little boy took him slightly aback.
“I think you’re right,” she said, apparently as surprised by his sensitivity as he himself was.
“Are you rushing back to a job or a boyfriend or something?”
“Not really. I can do my job anywhere.”
“What job is that?” No mention of a boyfriend? Why did that make his stupid heart skip a beat?
“I write songs for a children’s show.”
“That explains it. The songs you pull out of the air.” For some reason her offbeat job made her seem appealing.
Then again after three years without so much as a kiss, he’d probably see appeal in just about anyone, up to and including Ma Baker who ran a pretty good café in Jordan—and was two hundred and thirteen pounds, and damn proud of every one of them.
And now he’d gone and encouraged her to stay. Sleep in his bed. Take a shower. She’d get out all rosy and smelling of sweetness and soap—
And he’d work himself into the ground until well after dark, come in, hit the sack and fall into a deep, dreamless and exhausted sleep. He could manage that for a day or two. Actually it wouldn’t be that different from his regular routine.
He watched her go into the house, and he pulled on his newly cleaned boots.
He noticed the door to her car was still open and went to give it a shove before her battery died.
Her suitcase was still in the back seat.
He hesitated. He’d told her she’d have the place to herself, but all her clean clothes were out here. It wouldn’t hurt him to do the gentlemanly thing before he vamoosed down to the corral for a session with that hell-horse.
The one he wasn’t getting paid to work with, he reminded himself with a wry shake of his head.
He picked her suitcase out of the back seat.
It was old and battered, not like those Gucci bags of Celia’s.
He took the steps two at a time and went into the house. He was crossing the living room, when without warning the top flap flew open and her possessions scattered across his living room floor.
He said a word he generally didn’t say within hearing distance of women and children.
Who generally weren’t within hearing distance of him.
He bent and began to cram things back into the suitcase. He was trying hard not to look, but there wasn’t a scrap of lace or silk in the whole works.
Plain old white cotton.
What he felt for her at this moment was the oddest thing. A pretty little woman like that without one pretty little thing. He felt strangely sad for her.
Right from the start he’d known she was the kind of woman who should have silk and lace. He was pretty sure there was passion there, right below that calm surface—
“Oh!”
She had come down the hallway, and was standing there looking at him shoving her personal stuff back into her bag.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “The catch—”
“I know,” she said. “Broken.”
He glanced up at her. She was blushing. Well, unless he was mistaken, so was he.
She came quickly toward him. “Here. That’s all right. Let me.”
She squatted beside him. Her hand touched his in a frantic effort to get to a white unmentionable before he did.
Her skin was as soft as that silk he’d just been thinking of, and a jolt went through him like he’d been hit full-strength with a cattle prod.
He scrambled to his feet. “I’ve got horses to see to.”
“Would you like me to make dinner?”
Dinner. Dinner. “Sure. When you’re hungry. Help yourself.”
“I meant for you.”
“Dinner for me?” He gawked at her.
“I don’t mind. I certainly don’t expect you to cook for Nicky and me.”
“You won’t find anything much to make it with. I think I’ve got some tins of stew and wieners and beans. Frozen dinners in the freezer.”
She smiled. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Now he wasn’t going to be able to hide in the barn until all the lights went off in the house. He was going to have to sit across from her and have dinner and think of things to say.
It had been a long time.
And suddenly he was looking forward to it.
In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. “You’ll find some red candles over there in that drawer.”
He turned abruptly on his heel and left her there neatly folding things back into her suitcase.
Lordy, he was in big trouble. Thank God he had horses waiting—one waiting to kill him.
And with any luck it would do precisely that before he ever found out how big the trouble really was that he was in.
Chapter Three
She was staying. In the home of a complete stranger. A dangerously attractive complete stranger. For one night and maybe two.
It was absurd. Crazy.
Why was she so happy about it?
Because her heart liked him. Her head didn’t. Her head was full of her mother’s voice telling her to beware. Reminding her Turner might be Nicky’s father, not his uncle.
But her heart held tight to the warmth she had seen in his gaze when he first looked at Nicky, to his lack of concern over the condition of his boots after Nicky’s unfortunate accident on them, and to his very real concern for a sick child.
That alone, she told herself, had earned him the pizza she was making him for supper.
His cupboards were quite well supplied with dry goods, though most of the good stuff was way at the back, behind the rows of canned stew, spaghetti and ravioli. She found tomato sauce and tiny tinned sausages and biscuit mix.
His fridge contained a six-pack of soda pop, a twenty-pound bag of apples, a ten-pound bag of carrots, some strange blue-green substance busily growing fur and two small blocks of cheese.
Not an onion or green pepper to be seen.
When everything was ready she set it on top of the oven. She’d wait until he came in.
She checked on Nicky, relieved that he was now cool and breathing easily.
She smiled at the spartan, tidy little room.
His world, Turner’s world, was obviously not within the confines of these four walls. His world was out there—the rough and rugged world she had first seem him in, standing in the center of a dusty corral as some half-wild horse lunged around him.
She lugged her traitorous suitcase down the hall and took a shower, berating herself for not having had the latch fixed and wishing she owned some frothy underwear.
It had been awful seeing his big tanned hands cramming her most personal things back into that suitcase.
Especially since her