There were women in Eagle Falls. Just not many. The total local population couldn’t be more than a few hundred—summer cottages and hunting cabins were all boarded up by this time of year, and even the timber industry shut down in the dead of winter. Permanent residents were few. The area attracted wilderness lovers, loners, and for sure some families, but mostly people who chose to march to a different drummer. There were no lone women, for the obvious reason that there was spit little to appeal to a woman alone.
And especially a young woman like her.
She stood out like a rose in a pen of bulls. There wasn’t a line on her face—she couldn’t be thirty—and wearing boots, she stood maybe five foot six. A cap of glossy hair framed her face, mink brown, worn short and smooth. Classic beauty was the wrong label. Cute was more like it. Real cute, honest cute. Her nose had a sassy tip, her chin had a dimple and a slash of dark brows arched over huge, startling blue eyes. Her mouth was small, naked of lipstick, as pink as a petal and shaped like a bow.
Steve rubbed the circulation back into his cold hands, studying the rest of her. Her clothes were straight L.L. Bean, a flapping flannel shirt worn over a black turtleneck sweater and jeans. The clothes looked new, the jeans still stiff, her boots unscuffed. Still, the denim fabric faithfully cupped the curve of a truly delectable fanny, and a man would have to be both blind and brain-dead not to notice how unforgettably she filled out that turtleneck.
He couldn’t imagine what she was doing here.
Samson, the owner of the bar, was getting up in years and was plagued with arthritis. Steve understood why the old codger had hired help, just not how she fit in. Conceivably she’d waited tables and tended bar before, but he doubted it. Frowning, he watched her awkwardly handling a heavy tray. Her clumsy juggling of the beer mugs suggested a total lack of experience at the job.
When her hands were full, Fred Claire took advantage and patted her behind with a wink for the other guys. Brick red color skated up her cheeks. A mug of beer started to tip and spill. The tray clattered to the table.
Steve scratched his chin. He had a sixth sense for trouble. Honing and fine-tuning that instinct was an automatic requirement with his work. In this case, he didn’t smell trouble. Nothing about her attire was deliberately suggestive, but if she thought she could escape the guys’ attention in this place, she had to have a dreamer’s fantasy life. Most of the men were middle-aged, a fair slug of them married—hardly Lothario types, but hell, she was a testosterone-arousing package of new, young, female and good-looking. The boys giving her a rush was as predictable as conflict in the Middle East.
Rowdy laughter echoed from the crowded table by the door. Fred and his cronies had clearly been drinking for several hours now, and they were all making a teasing fuss over the spilled beer. Rafer claimed loudly that there was a wet spot in his lap that he’d sure appreciate her helping him with. The others snickered at his wit. The splotches of color on her cheeks darkened to the hue of a raw burn.
She was still flustered when she glanced up and spotted him. As soon as she escaped that table, she headed over and flipped open her order pad. “I’m sorry you had to wait. What would you like?”
“Coffee. And a couple of steaks if Samson’s still got any in back. Rare.”
She scribbled the order with her head tucked down, paying no attention to him until she suddenly glanced up. “A couple of steaks?” she echoed.
“A couple. As in two,” he affirmed.
She looked at him then. With him sitting down, she had no way of knowing he was six-three, but her gaze flickered over his rangy frame and broad shoulders. She wasn’t the first woman to check him over. It wasn’t Steve’s fault he was a hard man to ignore—he had no vote in his genetic inheritance—but his height and linebacker build made it tricky to hide in a crowd. His jet black hair, blue eyes and ruddy, clear skin added up to striking looks that had an embarrassing habit of attracting female attention. Most women took a second look.
Not her. After that quick shot at his face and shoulder span, her eyes dropped. Fast. She promptly wrote down “two” and underlined it. “I can see it’ll be an uphill job filling you up. I’ll nuke a couple of potatoes. And I think there’s still a piece of apple pie in back—”
“That’d be great.”
“You want your coffee black or with cream?”
“Black’ll do.”
“Okay. I’ll be back as quick as I can.”
She spun around, not once looking at him again—but he’d had more than enough time to do a prowling close-up of her. Once the flush climbed down from her cheeks, her skin was as pale as ivory. Her voice was a velvet Southern drawl, soft, feminine and as vulnerable as everything else about her. The tag on her shirt read “Mary Ellen.” If Mary Ellen was looking for men, she’d positively picked the right place. Winters were long and lonesome in this neck of the woods, and she couldn’t find a higher male-to-female ratio outside of Alaska. Still, the image of man hungry didn’t work at all. Her posture was as stiff as a poker, her expression a mirror of nerves and wariness, and those incredible eyes of hers were as skittish as a newborn colt’s.
He watched her take another order—standing as she had at his booth, careful to keep from pinching and patting distance, not looking any of the boys in the eye—and then she disappeared into the back. A masculine bellow echoed through the room when the Lions fumbled the ball. Samson shot out from the kitchen, his white hair standing in spikes, waving a spatula, to armchair coach with the rest of them.
Steve rolled his shoulders, mentally blocking out the football game and the noise and his curiosity about the waitress, too. She wasn’t his problem. Heaven knew, he had problems of his own. The smoky warmth of the bar was slowly unthawing his frozen bones, and weariness was starting to hit him in waves. If his stomach hadn’t been pit-empty, he’d have driven straight to his trailer and six straight hours in bed. His body was used to being pushed, and this snow squall was no worse than a hundred he’d seen growing up on a Wyoming ranch, but the cold and exhaustion combined had been killers today. Weariness was dogging him as relentlessly as a shadow.
He didn’t know his eyes had closed, yet they must have, because the aroma of fresh coffee suddenly startled him. The steaming mug was sitting in front of him, hotter than the devil’s breath. Mary Ellen had come and gone without his hearing her, but he could see her now, dodging around the room, serving fresh pitchers of foaming beer, ducking under the TV so she didn’t block the view. Someone called out, “Sweetheart? Darlin’, we desperately need you over here.” He saw her jaw clench and that cherry color shoot to her cheeks again.
If there was a woman less suited to working in a bar, he couldn’t imagine one.
Over the next hour, she came to his table three times. She never said a word, never looked at him, but she kept his coffee filled; she served his steaks blood-rare with potatoes and trimmings he’d never asked for, noticed when he’d leveled that, and came back with a fat slice of apple pie heaped with ice cream. She didn’t hover—hell, she didn’t even ask what he wanted—but she took better care of him than a mother hen.
Steve couldn’t help but notice that her quiet competence around him was a direct contrast to her behavior around the other men. He’d always had a gift with wild critters—animals instinctively trusted him. But women were a distinctly different species. The lady didn’t need any great perceptive skills to realize that the other men treated him like a pariah. For most women, that would be a steer-clear clue that he was a man to be avoided, and with his height and size, the last instinct he usually aroused in females was security. Yet she treated him as if she’d instantly labeled him “safe,” no one who was going to cause her trouble. Although that was certainly true, it made her behavior around the other guys downright bewildering.
He wolfed down a bite of pie, watching Fred Claire try to cop another feel. A bowl of peanuts skittered when Mary Ellen jerked back.
Steve