That Old Feeling. Cara Colter

he wasn’t supposed to have ache every time she did one more foolhardy or death-defying stunt.

      Had she really conquered that long-ago fear of bugs? He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know one single thing about her.

      Except what her lips tasted like.

      “You must be very tired,” he said, abruptly, damning her silently for how little had changed between them. “You’ve come a long way today.”

      “I’m never tired,” Brandy said.

      Of course not. She was a woman who would have you believe she could handle seven men and a prince and anything else life threw at her, including bugs as big as her fist. Only, looking at her, he saw something flicker in her eyes, and wondered how much of it was all a front. He cut off that line of thought before it made her even more dangerous than she already was—which was plenty dangerous.

      “Did you want me to bring your things from the car?”

      She tossed him the keys, her expectation of being waited on as unconscious to her as breathing. She went up the cottage steps two at a time and burst in. Somehow he didn’t want to see her gushing over the cuteness of the accommodations. Still hefting the soggy Becky on his arm, he went up to the parking area behind the house.

      A Ferrari, no less, and crammed floor to roof with her things as if she were thinking of staying for a long, long while. He counted three full-size suitcases and two overnight bags. There were several dresses hung in bags. There was a tennis racket, a riding helmet and a new blow-up dinghy that hadn’t been taken out of the box.

      He didn’t have a tennis court or horses. There was no place, that he was aware of, within a hundred miles where a woman could wear dresses like that. The lake water wouldn’t be warm enough for weeks yet to risk capsizing her floating device in it.

      Resigned, he set the baby on her padded rear and kept one eye on whether or not she was trying to ingest rocks while he began unloading Brandy’s vehicle.

      “She’ll be bored in ten minutes,” he reassured himself as the pile of her belongings became a small mountain on the ground beside him.

      So, she’d get bored, and then she would leave.

      “She’ll last two days,” he bet himself, and felt his black mood lift slightly. “Three at the outside.”

      “Poo-poo,” the baby commented, but he couldn’t tell if she was agreeing with him, or if she was “pooh-poohing” him. She was a female after all, and even a pint-sized member of the fairer sex was probably blessed with intuition. Perhaps his wee daughter sensed that the thing he was worst at—besides choosing girl clothes for a one-year-old—was predicting how anything was going to go once Brandy King was in the vicinity.