For a moment, having the H-word in her mind at the same time that this big, handsome man with the strong, steady eyes filled her doorwell made her almost helpless with longing.
Wishing that she could be a different person than she was. Softer and kinder, like her sister Abby or more outgoing and sexy like her sister Brit.
She felt her lack of warmth should have at least backed him out the door by now, but he stood, feet planted, regarding her thoughtfully, almost lazily. His eyes drifted casually to her bare ring finger, which gave her permission to take a swift, discreet glance at his.
His fingers were long and lean and ringless. Any kind of jewelry on them—even a wedding band—would have looked foolishly out of place in contrast to the masculine power of those hands.
She wished suddenly she was not in her oldest jeans, and a T-shirt with a rip under one armpit. She wished she had not been so quick to tell Brit to leave her hair alone when her sister had tried to style it. Still, she kept her face deliberately expressionless, and hated herself for the weakness of wishing.
His attention, thankfully, wavered from her before her discomfort made her blurt out something she was sure to regret. An overreaction like get the hell off my property.
He cocked his head a little, turned a shoulder, listened. “You expecting company?”
“The movers,” she said, suddenly hearing what he heard, the growl of a big truck coming down her rutted driveway.
“I expect they’re here, then. I’ll leave you to it—” he paused, leaving a blank where she could fill in her name, but she refused. She had no intention of appearing even remotely friendly to the handsome neighbor who had his eye on her land.
And, she realized, her lips.
Stunned by the pure masculine potency that burned briefly in his eyes when they flicked ever so briefly to her lips, she found herself wanting to sway toward him. Thankfully, he had tamed the heat in his gaze when he looked placidly back into her eyes.
She narrowed her eyes and glared at him.
He raised a hand to the brim of his hat, gave it a slow tip, and took a step backward onto the porch, turning away from her. “Your livestock appears to have arrived.”
Her what? She scurried over to the doorway. He was planted on the top step now, his eyes narrowed at the old muffler-free truck that was bouncing down her drive, a stock rack in the back.
“I don’t have any livestock.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. In the full light he was even more compelling than he had been in the dimness of the cabin. The sunlight made him appear bigger and stronger and more real.
Dark brown hair that curled at the tips slipped out from under his cowboy hat and touched the nape of his neck.
She could see his pulse beating in the curve of that strong neck. The white T-shirt molded the firm, hard lines of his chest and the broad sweep of his shoulders. Where the short sleeve of the shirt ended a rock-cut bicep began. The white of the shirt made the copper tone of his skin appear deeper. Her eyes wandered down the length of that arm, to the corded muscle of a powerful forearm, the squareness of a wrist twice the width of her own.
Embarrassed for looking, she forced her gaze back up to his eyes.
She could see they were more than brown; they were dark as new-turned earth, flecked with little spangles of gold.
And in the strong sunlight, she could see those eyes held a pain in them that could compete with any of her own.
The truck pulled up at the bottom of her stairs, a vehicle in a state of disrepair worse than her Jeep.
Her neighbor stepped over her broken step with the ease of a man who was used to putting his feet in all the right places, and went up to the window, which the driver rolled down.
“Corrie Parsons?” The driver looked grizzled, and dirty. There was a look in his eyes that she could recognize at ninety yards. Plain old garden variety meanness.
Donahue looked back at her for confirmation, and she nodded, not even sorry to give up her name to him after all. In fact she was glad suddenly that he was here. She got a familiar uneasy feeling from that man in the truck, with his stained teeth and squinty eyes and stubbled jowls.
With surprise she realized that Matt Donahue had either picked up on her split second of dislike, or harbored some of his own, because there was something almost protective in the way he turned back to the truck, and answered for her.
“This is the Parsons’s place.”
No one had ever protected her before, not even casually, and she did not like the way his small gesture threatened to soften something hard within her.
At that moment, a sound like Corrine had never heard reverberated through the air. It was like amplified fingernails across a blackboard crossed with the shrill howl of a saw blade shrieking through wood.
Matt Donahue didn’t jump back the way she did. Instead, he moved away from the vehicle door, swung himself up on the deck of the truck, and peered through the worn board slats of the stock rack.
“Yup,” the man said, opening his door and sliding out, “I’m Werner Grimes, delivering a prize-winning mammoth jack and he’s all yours.”
Matt Donahue jumped back down, shot a look over his shoulder at her that was distinctly grim.
“I thought you said you didn’t have any livestock,” Donahue said.
“I don’t! I don’t even know what a mammoth jack is. It sounds like something that’s been extinct for several million years crossed with a rabbit.”
“Ha-ha. That’s ’bout as good a description of him as I’ve ever heard,” Grimes said, going around to the back of his truck and lowering a ramp. “Mister, you want to give me a hand with this?”
“She says it’s not hers.”
“And this paper right here says it is, bought and paid for.”
While the men were at the back of the truck, arguing ownership, she crept down the stairs of the cabin and came around to the side of the truck. She couldn’t see anything. She climbed up on the deck, as she’d seen Matt do, only with less grace. She looked through the slats.
The saddest pair of brown eyes she had ever seen looked back at her from under bushy eyebrows. Long scruffy ears were turned toward the men, listening. For a moment it almost seemed like maybe it was some sort of prehistoric creature crossed with a rabbit.
“A donkey,” she whispered. She stuck her fingers through the slats and felt a soft, velvety nose touch her.
“Git your hand out of there!” the man shouted at her, and she jerked back so quickly she nearly fell off the wheel well. “Darned critter is meaner than a rattlesnake. He’ll take off your arm at the elbow.”
She stared at Grimes, aghast, and thought of the soft muzzle that had momentarily touched her fingers.
“Look, there’s obviously been a mistake,” her neighbor said.
“No mistake,” Grimes insisted. “Right name. Right address. Stand back. I’m going to open the gate.”
“She doesn’t want a jack. And neither do I. I’ve got a pasture of full-blooded quarter horse mares right next door, just foaling out, and I’ll be damned if I’m planning a crop of mules next year.”
“You better have a strong fence up then.” The man spat. “He’s hornier than—”
Donahue cut a look to her falling-down fences, and then interrupted Grimes before he had a chance to educate them about exactly how horny her donkey was.
Her donkey.
“How much to take him back wherever he came from?”
Her neighbor was