by Rebecca York
Amy didn’t know whether to be flattered by his sideways compliment of her teaching skills or frustrated by his stubbornness regarding her care. She sighed, then took one last sip of her coffee. “Give me two minutes,” she said, unwilling to expend any more of her energy on an argument. This was temporary, she told herself as she strode upstairs, and it was Christmas. The supposed season of peace…even if Lucas generated anything but peace.
On the way to Amy’s house, Lucas called the volunteer fire chief so he would know what to expect. As soon as they walked through the front door, he was bombarded with the scent of smoke and the sight of charred Christmas decorations. Sooty packages sat beneath a small scorched Christmas tree, a nativity on the fireplace mantel, and the staircase rail was lined with red ribbon and greenery limp from water sprayed from a firefighter’s hose. The decorations were tasteful, but Lucas still felt the burn of pain beneath his ribs.
Amy stood perfectly still as she took in her flame-ravaged home. He almost reminded her to breathe, but she shook herself and fled past him. “I just want to check on a few things,” she said, rushing up the stairs.
He followed her up the staircase into a bedroom where half the room had been blackened by the blaze. Amy skipped the jewelry box on the dresser, the clothes closet, and fell to her knees beside her bed, digging out two boxes. She opened one and gave a sigh of relief. “Photos survived.” She peeked in the other box, which was dark around the edges and smiled. “All okay.” Snapping the top on the box before he could get a look at what it held, she looked up at him. “If I can get the gifts downstairs, I should be set.”
“What about some clothes or your jewelry?”
“Oh,” she said with a blank expression, as if she’d been so intent on rescuing other items that clothing hadn’t occurred to her. She rose to her feet and turned to the closet. “I should get a suitcase,” she mumbled to herself, pulling out a piece of luggage from inside. She covered her nose. “The smoke smell is so strong.”
Lucas nodded, opening the suitcase for her. “You might want to choose wash-and-wear now. The insurance company will help cover smoke damage for everything. You should probably go ahead and schedule a professional cleaning.”
“I’d love to schedule the cleaning, but I imagine a lot of people are taking off for the holidays,” Amy muttered as she pulled a few pieces of clothing from the hangers, then turned to her dresser. With both hands, she scooped up a couple of nighties and silky underwear and bras.
Lucas felt an odd twist in his gut at the sight of the sensual intimate clothing that she would wear next to her naked skin. A forbidden, unbidden image of her dressed in ivory satin panties and bra slithered across his mind, raising his body temperature.
She dumped the lingerie into the suitcase, then quickly grabbed her photo album and the mystery box. As if she were on autopilot, she reached for the suitcase, but Lucas shook his head. “I’ll carry it.”
He followed her down the stairs and watched as she gathered the charred gifts from beneath the tree. Biting her lip, she tried to stack them to carry them outside and Lucas saw an accident waiting to happen.
“Stop.”
At the sound of his voice, Amy immediately halted and met his gaze. Lucas saw a world of vulnerability in her eyes. “You’ll be okay,” he told her, reading her need for reassurance.
She nodded, but her eyes looked far less certain. “Of course I will. It’s just unsettling to be—” Her voice wavered and she gave a weak smile. “Unsettled.”
Lucas could tell Amy was no wuss. Her back was ramrod straight, but he couldn’t help wondering how much weight her slim shoulders should bear. Her chin was set with determination, but her eyes showed a storm of emotions he suspected she would never confess. The urge to embrace her hit him in the stomach like a knockout punch.
He walked closer and stopped a mere step away from her. “It’s normal to feel unsettled, even a little afraid,” he told her.
Amy took a deep breath, her gaze surveying the damage to her home. “I just want a safe place of my own. My own home. Now it’s such a mess, and I don’t even know if I’ll be able to move back in.” She closed her eyes for a few timeless seconds, then opened them and met his gaze. “But it’s Christmas, and I refuse to whine.”
She whirled around and Lucas felt a rumbling suspicion that he’d just encountered something a hell of a lot stronger than a house fire. That something was the indomitable will of Amy Winslow.
After Lucas dropped Amy off at the ranch, he drove his truck out to check the livestock. Pulling to a stop, he got out and inhaled the cold winter air. Lucas liked the cold at Christmas. It numbed him, and blunted the pain. His marriage to Jennifer hadn’t been perfect, but he’d made promises, and Lucas believed in keeping promises. She hadn’t been happy living on the ranch. Four days before Christmas, she’d left a note telling him she’d made the two-hour drive to St. Louis and would return late that night.
But there’d been an ice storm, and a semi had crushed her car, killing her. He’d buried her on Christmas Eve. He’d also officially buried his interest in celebrating Christmas.
Hearing a car slowly move toward him, he turned his head and spotted his sister’s SUV. His sister, Debra, was the bane of his existence, but he would die for her. After all, she was his youngest sister. She’d bugged the devil out of him when he was a teenager, tagging after him, horning in on phone conversations. Even though Debra was younger, once their parents died, she acted as if it were her place to watch over his social life. After Jennifer died, Debra had relentlessly tried to lure him into enjoying the season when all he wanted was to be left alone.
Debra, six months pregnant with her third child, stopped the car, got out and walked toward him. She had that busybody glint in her eyes, but her face was slightly pale. She didn’t get enough rest for a woman in her condition. When Lucas looked at her, he still saw his little sister in pigtails instead of a grown mother of three.
“So when will you be speaking to me again?” she asked.
“Never,” he said. “You need to get more rest.”
“Yeah,” she said, standing next to him. “Easier said than done. I think I’m suffering from overexposure to my mother-in-law. Two women in the same kitchen is like—”
“Like having two dictators with different strategies make battle plans. War or détente?” he asked, looping his arm around her shoulder.
“Détente if it kills me.”
“I would never wish you pain, but you deserve a truckload of discomfort for sending me Kent’s answer to the unsinkable Molly Brown. You know that all I want for Christmas is to be left alone.”
Debra sighed. “Left alone so you can punish yourself for Jennifer’s death. When are you going to stop blaming yourself?
“She was my wife, my responsibility.”
“She was an adult, too.”
Lucas shrugged and moved away. He couldn’t explain his harsh sense of failure and disappointment in himself to his sister, and he wasn’t going to try.
“Well, your overdeveloped sense of responsibility is one of the reasons you were chosen to house Amy Winslow,” she said. “That, and the fact that everyone knows you’ve turned into a monk.”
Lucas gave her a double take. “What are you talking about?”
Debra crossed her arms over her bulky coat and arched her eyebrows. “You weren’t the only volunteer to have her as a guest.”
Lucas looked toward the heaven for help. “I didn’t volunteer. I was drafted!”
“Well, there were plenty of volunteers. Men, some single, a few, married, wanted to have Amy in their houses for Christmas. Every single one of them was wearing a wolfy gleam in their eyes, champing at the bit to get their paws on her. I could tell what they wanted, and I knew Amy needed to be protected. That’s why I volunteered your house. She’ll be as safe with you as she would be with a monk, since you’ve obviously decided you’re never going to have sex again.”
Chapter Two
; The wreath on his front door was the next sign that Lucas’s home had been invaded. It was a cheerful combination of greenery, holly berries and bells, topped off with a bright-red bow. Lucas frowned.
He would allow the wreath, but drew the line at a tree. No Christmas tree allowed.
Lucas felt the familiar twist in his gut and opened the door to the sound of children’s voices and Christmas music on the stereo. “What the he—” He walked toward the kitchen and entered the doorway.
Five little kids, faces smeared with various colors of frosting and big smiles, crowded around his kitchen table as Amy helped them decorate cookies and his housekeeper removed a pan of cookies from the oven. Lucas’s gaze automatically swung back to Amy. She wore a red apron, and one cheek was smudged with red and green frosting.
A little girl spotted him first. “Who’s he?” she asked.
Flora, his housekeeper, whipped around, and her eyes grew wide with surprise. “You’re early!”
“He’s big,” another little girl said.
“He looks mean,” a little boy said.
Amy winced at the little boy’s words and shot Lucas a wary glance. “He’s not mean, Ryan. He’s just surprised. This is Mr. Bennet’s home,” she said, then turned directly toward Lucas. “Before the fire, I had promised my special readers that if they met the goals we’d set then we would celebrate with a cookie-decorating party. I didn’t want to disappoint them, and Flora said you probably wouldn’t mind.”
She did? Lucas threw Flora a sharp glance, but his housekeeper just busied herself at the kitchen counter.
“Wanna cookie?” a little girl asked, holding up a cookie decorated with a large blob of green frosting.
Every eye in the room gazed at him expectantly. Lucas withheld a sigh. “Sure,” he said, and was rewarded with bright smiles from both the little girl and Amy.
Eating the too-sweet cookie, he felt a tug on his jacket. Ryan, the little boy who had said he looked mean, looked up at him. “Can you draw a reindeer? I wanna put a reindeer on my cookie.”
With that, Lucas washed his hands and got sucked into decorating cookies with Amy’s special readers for the next thirty minutes. Amy helped the little rascals clean up, and sent each of them home with a dozen cookies and a smile on their face.
As soon as they left, she turned to Lucas. “Thank you. I get the impression Flora thought you wouldn’t mind the invasion as long as you didn’t know about it, but you did. The kids loved having you there.”
“It’s no big deal,” he said gruffly, uncomfortable with the gratitude in her eyes.
“Yes, it was,” she insisted. “It takes a real man to be willing to draw reindeers on cookies for first graders.”
The husky sound in her voice did strange things to his stomach. It was probably those damn cookies, he told himself. Although Amy was attractive, Lucas wasn’t open for business. Besides, as his sister pointed out, he was supposed to be protecting her…instead of thinking about licking the tiny smudge of frosting off the corner of her lips or wondering what kind of sounds she made while making love.
Feeling an unwelcome rush of heat, Lucas bit back an oath and shrugged. “I have some numbers to crunch in my office,” he said, and walked away from temptation.
That night Amy dreamed she settled into a new home, only to see it devoured again and again by flames. The dream upset her so much she woke up, her heart pounding and filled with dread. She inhaled several deep breaths before she realized she was in Lucas Bennet’s house and she was safe.
The irrational threat of the dream, however, hung over her, just as it had last night. Glancing at the clock, she made a face at the hour: 2:00 a.m. Wide-awake, she knew she wouldn’t go back to sleep anytime soon, so she tossed back the covers and slid out of bed. Maybe hot chocolate would help. She pushed her arms through her robe and quietly crept downstairs to the kitchen.
She mixed the ingredients to her special recipe into a saucepan, thinking she could stand an extra shot of Kahlúa. As much as she was determined to pretend otherwise, being displaced by the fire dug up painful childhood memories.
Amy found routine and longtime possessions comforting. Unlike many of her friends, she didn’t yearn for the excitement of travel and new experiences. She longed for a home of her own, and six months ago, she had decided to make her home in Kent, Missouri. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t wished for her own family and a safe place.
Her friends and colleagues in Baltimore had thought Amy was nuts to accept a position in nowhere, Missouri, but in the warm, rural community of Kent, Amy had seen the seductive possibility of at least part of the life she’d envisioned for herself.
She hadn’t, however, envisioned a fire destroying her home during the Christmas season. Amy had spent her entire life battling the knot of apprehension in her chest that she shouldn’t count on much of anything. The fire had brought back that familiar knot of apprehension. She absently rubbed her chest and took a deep breath. Pouring the hot chocolate into a mug, she tossed in a few marshmallows and wandered toward the picture window in the large den. The moon gleamed over the frost-covered ground.
Cold outside. Cold inside, Amy thought and shivered.
“It’s either a little early or a little late, isn’t it?” a male voice said from behind her.
Surprised, she turned to see Lucas walking toward her in a pair of jeans and an unbuttoned shirt that revealed his muscular chest, the shadow of chest hair, and his washboard flat abdomen. His brown hair was attractively sleep-mussed and his eyelids lowered in a sexy half-mast. With his thumbs hooked through the loops of weathered jeans, his casual gate belied the masculine power he oozed. A complex, intriguing man, he operated the largest, most successful ranch in the area, pitched into the community by serving as an on-call volunteer fireman, guarded his solitude, yet wouldn’t turn his back on a first grader asking for help. If he weren’t so remote, Amy could be entirely too susceptible to his strength and…Her gaze took in the length of him and felt her heart hammer at his rugged appeal.
Dismayed by her involuntary response, she took a quick sip of her chocolate and immediately singed her tongue. A tiny yelp escaped her throat, and she fanned her tongue.
The corner of his mouth tilted upward. “Too hot?”
Amy’s gaze lingered on the smooth bare skin of his chest that his shirt didn’t cover. He had no idea. “Yes. I forgot to pick up that stainless-steel lining for my mouth and throat in town today. Which store carries it?”
His half grin grew. “There are only five stores within the town limits.”
He moved closer, and Amy felt a flutter of nerves. “I’m sorry I woke you. I tried to be quiet.”
He pushed his hand through his hair. “I think I smelled chocolate.”
“There’s still some left in the pot if you want a mug.”
“Thanks. Maybe in a few minutes,” he said with a shrug of his impressive shoulders. “Why’re you up?”
Amy lifted the mug to her lips and took a tiny, careful sip. “I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.”
“What woke you?”
Amy resisted the urge to squirm beneath his intent gaze. “Nothing important,” she muttered.
“What woke you?” he repeated.
Amy sighed. “It was just a silly dream.”
“But it bothered you enough to keep you awake,” he concluded. “What was it?”
“I dreamed my new home kept catching on fire, again and again. Just as I relaxed and started to think everything was going to be okay, the fire would start again.”
He nodded slowly and gave her a considering glance. A strange silence hung between them for a few seconds. “You wanna go for a walk?”
Amy did a double take. “Excuse me? A walk at this time of night?”
He nodded again and gave her that almost smile. “Might as well. We’re both awake. A walk in the cold will—”
“Wake us up even more,” she interjected.
“Then maybe returni
ng to the warm house will make us sleepy.”
She stared at him, wondering why his suggestion appealed to her. “I’ll need to change,” she said.
“Not on my account,” he drawled. “But you might be more comfortable.”
Amy’s heart tripped over itself and she did another double take. Was he flirting with her? No, she immediately answered herself. Absolutely not. She didn’t think Lucas was capable of flirting, and his sister had insisted that since he wasn’t interested in romance, Amy would be perfectly safe with him. Her gaze encompassing his partly bare chest, she took a careful breath. “I’ll go change.”
Three and a half minutes later, she scurried down the steps as she shoved her arms into her coat sleeves and pulled on a hat. Lucas waited for her at the front door wearing a Stetson, jacket and boots, in addition to his jeans and shirt. He opened the door and dipped his head for her to proceed.
The cold air hit her face like a wall of ice. She breathed in quickly and her lungs felt frozen. Her expression must have revealed her shock.
“A little nippy?” he asked with a sexy edge of humor in his voice that surprised her.
“A little,” she said, then corrected herself. “A lot.”
“You’re just not used to going out in the middle of the night in Missouri,” he said, walking beside her down the steps to the front walkway.
“But you obviously are.”
He nodded. “Because farm animals and ranch problems have their own timetable. It’s not like school. The bell doesn’t really ever ring for recess here.”
“How long has the ranch been in your family?”
“Five generations,” he said, leading her down a pathway along a pasture where the ground glistened with frost.
“Now, that’s cool. Having all that history must feel great.”
“Sometimes,” he said. “It depends if you want to follow the family plan.”