Never cry, had just been the first rule. But the second rule was just as strong: Don’t hold hope. Having hope could be the most dangerous thing of all.
“We’ll come help you clean it up,” Abby had declared bravely, staring at the cobwebs inside the little cabin, her face a ghastly shade of pale.
Corrie had been amazed that her sisters shared her terror of spiders, felt that funny warm spot around her frozen heart threaten to expand.
So, of course, she had refused their offers of help. But not just because she could not stand to owe anyone anything, and not just because she felt vulnerable in the face of her sisters’ enthusiasm for her when they did not know the first thing about her.
Somehow cleaning the caulking was like claiming it. Making it hers in a way no one could take away from her. She took a deep breath, and glanced around.
There was work everywhere. The barn was practically falling down. The yard was nonexistent. Maybe she should start out here—
“Corrie,” she told herself, “get in there. Or else you’ll be sleeping outside tonight.” She debated whether there would be more spiders inside or out.
She took a deep breath, skipped over the broken step, and gave the door a shove. It squeaked open.
The interior of the cabin was simplicity itself. One large room served as both the kitchen and the living room. The kitchen had a single row of cupboards, badly in need of paint, and a countertop badly in need of new Arborite. The rust-stained sink was the old porcelain variety. The fridge and stove, thankfully, looked new and spotless.
A doorway off the kitchen, with no door, led to a bedroom that looked like it had been added to the cabin as an afterthought. The tiny bathroom, too, must have been added later, since the cabin looked to be eighty or ninety years old, and the bathroom was modern, bright and clean.
A black potbellied stove in the center of the large room acted as a divider between the kitchen and living room. On the other side was her living room, empty as yet. She liked its rough-hewn gray log walls, and the window, french-paned and huge. Once the window was cleaned she knew the light would be spectacular in this room. She would unpack her easel first, and put it right here where she could glance out the window at the wild grass and flowers, and the grove of trees and the leaning barn and know that everything she was looking at was hers.
A single beam of sunshine had found its way through the grime in the uncurtained front window, and it danced across the floor.
She went and stood in that sunbeam, scraped a layer of dust from the floor with the toe of her sneaker, and saw that the wood beneath was golden and warm.
Lost in thought, picturing bright yellow-checkered curtains at the windows, throw rugs on the floor, red tulips in a glass jar on the kitchen table, she did not hear him come in.
“Anybody here?”
She whirled around, gasping, some ingrained instinct spurring her to look for a weapon. Something to protect herself. Her mind raced back along the length of the long rutted driveway that led to her door. She was a long way from the nearest neighbor. No one would hear a cry for help.
There was nothing she could use to defend herself, and not even a coffee table to dart behind. A quick exit would do, she thought but then her mind started to kick in and she remembered. The movers. He had to be one of the movers. After all, she had been waiting for the movers to come with her meager scraps of furniture.
The light poured in the door behind him, and for a moment all she saw was his silhouette. She knew immediately he was not a furniture mover, yet her fear stayed at bay, and as she studied him she felt herself relax minutely.
Beige cowboy hat, white T-shirt, narrow-legged jeans on long, long legs, booted feet, broad, broad shoulders. Even without the hat, something would have whispered cowboy.
The confident angle of the chin, the solid plant of his feet, something in the way the muscle danced under the sunlight that glanced off the hair on his arms.
She didn’t know there were cowboys in Oregon. Of course, she didn’t really know very much about Oregon at all, except that the climate promised to be kinder than it was in Minnesota.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t startle me,” she said, cool and defensive. But his voice had already penetrated those defenses. A deep voice, a sure voice. It only penetrated just enough for her to decide she was safe in this cabin, with a stranger who had appeared on soft feet, out of nowhere.
Her eyes adjusted to the light, and the details of him came clear to her. Brown eyes, steady, unwavering, calm and strong. A lot could be told from a man’s eyes. It was a survival skill she had perfected, another remnant from her childhood.
His cheekbones were pronounced, and his nose looked like it might have been straight once. Now the perfection of his looks was marred by the bump where the nose had been broken, but oddly the flaw made his appearance infinitely more appealing than pure perfection might. The crooked nose proclaimed him a man’s man, who lived in a man’s world, and paid the price for it. He probably accepted his lumps with no more than a casual shrug.
He had a beautiful mouth. Her artist’s eyes insisted on seeing that; the sensuous fullness of the lower lip, the firm curve of the upper one.
He took a step toward her, his hand extended, and she backed up.
He lowered his hand slowly, and regarded her, the eyes narrow now, assessing.
Rule Three: Never let them see your fear. It didn’t matter if she didn’t even know why she was scared, why her heart was pumping rabbit-swift, and why everything in her knew the scariest thing she could have done would have been to accept that extended hand.
She knew exactly what it would feel like.
It would be warm, dry, infinitely strong and leathertough. The touch of his hand would invite her to look into a world where people were not alone. Just a tantalizing glimpse, before he released his grip.
A sudden yearning leapt in her that she had to fight. A yearning that made an entirely different kind of fear breathe to life within her.
“What can I do for you?” she asked, her voice ice-cold, not a trace of any sort of emotion in it.
She knew he heard the coldness, though his reaction was barely discernible. A flicker in a muscle along the line of his jaw, a slight narrowing of his eyes that had the unfortunate effect of bringing the thick sooty abundance of his lashes to her attention.
“I’m Matt Donahue,” he said, just the faintest hint of ice adding a raw edge to the warm timber of his voice. “I’m your closest neighbor,” he nodded, “on that side.”
If he expected the welcome-neighbor routine, she hoped to disappoint him. She said nothing, waited, after a moment, folded her arms across her chest.
“I actually was interested in buying this piece of land. I heard someone had bought it before I even realized it had come up on the market.”
So he wasn’t exactly here as part of the welcome-neighbor routine, either. Surprise. Surprise.
“I’m not selling.” See? That was what attachment did. She’d only just got here, and already she had decided the place was hers. A place where her heart could be at home. She felt inordinately angry at him for making her see how fragile places for the heart really were.
“You haven’t even heard my offer,” he said mildly.
“Nor do I plan to.” She saw no reason to tell him she was in no position to sell, even had she wanted to. The land wasn’t even really hers to sell, yet. And maybe it never would be. How had her heart managed to overlook that little detail when she was planning throw rugs and curtains and bright red tulips?
That while her heart was