As if Cozie were a project—a quilt or a pottery vase—that had come out unexpectedly well. But when she entered the living room, Frances Vanackern immediately took her by the arm and introduced her to the other guests as if nothing else was going on. Cozie tried to relax and enjoy herself.
Halfway through a simple “country” dinner of New England chicken pot pie, Thad Vanackern brought up the break-in at the Citizen building. “I spoke to the police late this afternoon. They suspect kids.”
“That’s what Aunt Ethel thinks,” Cozie said diplomatically, suspecting that her aunt, now that she’d been filled in on the various goings-on in the lives of her late brother’s children, thought no such thing.
Julia, who’d been unusually quiet, said, “No one’s immune to crime,” and the conversation moved on to a general discussion of crime and violence in America.
When Cozie left, Thad insisted on accompanying her to her Jeep despite a steady, soft rain. “We’ll know you’ve finally accepted your new life when you trade this dinosaur in,” he said good-naturedly. “Thank you for coming tonight, Cozie. Those who hadn’t met you wanted to, and those who had wanted to see you again.”
“That’s kind of you to say.”
“It happens to be true.” He gave her an indulgent, paternal smile. “Your small talk is improving. You managed not to throw a single stick of dynamite into the conversation the entire evening.”
She laughed. “What’s the point? You well-bred types always put out the fuse before it can go off.”
He opened her Jeep door for her and held it while she climbed in. “Good night, Cozie. I’m sure we’ll see you again before we leave.”
“When will that be?”
“Don’t sound so eager.”
“I wasn’t—”
“It’s all right. We plan to stay through next weekend, at least Frances and I do. I’m not sure how long Julia will be staying. She’s got a half dozen irons in the fire, as usual.” He inhaled, suddenly awkward. “Have you had a chance to talk to your brother?”
“Not yet. He’s gone hiking.”
Thad frowned, but his skepticism was plain.
“I suggest,” Cozie said, unable to keep the sharpness out of her voice, “you notify the police about your missing things.”
“Perhaps we will,” he said without emotion, and shut the door firmly as she started the engine.
She gripped the wheel in frustration and set off too fast down the dark, foggy dirt road. She careened around a bend, nearly taking out part of a stone wall, and slowed down. The fog was mercurial, impenetrable on one curve, gone on another, the bright autumn leaves adding an eerie glow to the night. She didn’t look forward to walking into her empty house.
But Daniel’s truck was parked out back as if it belonged there. Cozie was surprised at her relief—and distressed. She had no business, none, getting mixed up with a rich Texan after her brother’s hide. She was exhibiting about as much common sense as Seth had when he’d gotten involved with Julia Vanackern.
She found Daniel stretched out on the couch under a tattered quilt with a fire in the stove and Bullwinkle on television. “Don’t you people believe in remote control?”
“The day I can’t get up to turn off the television or switch the channel—”
“Don’t get started.” He swung off the couch and turned off the television. He’d pulled off his boots, sexy even in his ragg wool socks. He didn’t, however, stray from his stated mission. “Any word from your brother?”
“My brother,” she said, “is guiding tourists through the wilds of Vermont.”
The slate eyes darkened. “That’s a bullshit story and you know it.”
“I’m going to bed. Good night. Thank you for keeping the fire going.” She paused in the doorway. “You can go home now.”
She breezed on into the kitchen. Her stomach was churning. She opened the front door and yelled for Zep, and stood there in the cold, damp draft until he finally came running. He was confused. He never got to use the front door. He tucked his tail between his legs and beelined for the back room as if he’d done something wrong.
“Hello, fella,” Daniel greeted him.
Cozie flounced back down the short hall to the back room. Daniel was patting the big mutt on the head. “You have to leave,” she told him.
Zep darted for the stove. The place was already smelling like wet dog. Daniel dominated the room with its low ceilings and barnboard walls. He looked very tall, very much a man accustomed to doing as he pleased. “I’ll leave only if you come with me.”
“Not a chance.”
“There are no locks on your doors, Cozie. Your dog and your crowbar aren’t enough protection against the caller I heard on your phone today.”
“And you are?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Yep.”
“Damned arrogant of you, isn’t it?”
“Let’s just say I’d hope just having my truck here would keep whoever slipped in this morning from coming back.”
“Okay. Leave your truck and walk back.”
She might as well have saved her breath. “If it didn’t, I reckon you, me, Zep, and your crowbar could handle the situation.” The man wasn’t willing to yield even an inch. He moved toward her. “I’ve put my things in the end room. There’ll be one whole room between us, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“It isn’t.”
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “You said that awful quick, Ms. Cozie.”
She had indeed, but she didn’t care. The prospect of spending an entire night with Daniel Foxworth within yards of her wasn’t something she needed to dwell on. “You just want to stay in case Seth shows up.”
Daniel shrugged, impassive. “Think whatever you want to think. I’m not spending another night in your Jeep.”
“Who asked you—”
“Ms. Cozie, I’ve only known you a short time, but I’ve already figured out you don’t like asking anybody for anything. So I’m not waiting to be asked.”
She threw up her hands and headed for the bathroom. “Fine, do what you want. I suppose I’d rather know where you are than not. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wash up and go to bed. If you need anything, I’m sure you know where to find it.”
“If I don’t,” he said from the back room in his deep, sandpaper drawl, “I know where to find you.”
Right then and there she decided not to tell him that the room he’d picked was where Horace, the bat who’d been eluding her for weeks, liked to hang out. Literally. Let the major find out for himself.
Around midnight Daniel figured he had a goddamned bat in his room. Probably the biggest one he’d ever encountered. Had the wingspan of a damned eagle. It darted around under the low, slanted ceilings, its wings and erratic movements creating shadows right out of Dracula.
He assumed it was looking for a way out—or maybe a juicy neck. Hell, what did he know about Vermont bats?
His landlady, he suspected, knew a lot.
Keeping his head low, he rolled out of bed and made for the door, which he’d been reasonable enough to shut, given Cozie’s reluctance to have him there. As he pushed it open, the bat dove, just missing Daniel’s head. He heard—felt—the flutter of wings at his scalp.
He swore.
The bat streaked into the adjoining bedroom. Daniel could easily have shut his door and gone back to bed and left his housemate to her fate. But he could see that the door into her room was open. The bat, no doubt, was already in there.
Walking away from a fight just wasn’t in him.
He fumbled around in the dark and found the lamp on his bedside table. It gave off only a faint glow, not enough, he presumed, to deter a bat. He pulled on his jeans, his eyes adjusting to the light. No point having Cozie wake up to a bat and a naked man. She’d probably have at them both with her trusty crowbar.
Venturing into the next room, he remained alert to any movement, any fluttering sound, any sharp teeth. He pause
d in Cozie’s doorway. He couldn’t hear the bat, couldn’t see it. Most likely it had lit somewhere.
He glanced over at the bed, prepared to explain his presence.
But Cozie wasn’t in it.
Her voice came from the darkness. “I see you’ve met Horace.”
She was pressed up against the wall to the left of the door, holding a blanket under her chin in the moonlight. Daniel could have smothered her with it. “Horace?”
“The bat.” As if he should have known. “He’s gone into the end room. I think he’s the same one who’s been haunting me all summer. I never can catch him.”
Catch him? Daniel stepped over the threshold. “You could have warned me.”
“That’s an interesting point of etiquette, isn’t it? Should one warn one’s guests a bat might show up or let them sleep, with the hope one doesn’t?” The woman was enjoying herself. “You don’t like bats, Major?”
“Not in my bedroom. Where’s your crowbar?”
“What are you going to do, beat the poor thing to a pulp?”
“That’s the general idea, yes.”
“You don’t need to kill him. Just go on into the next room and flush him out. I’ll take care of him.”
Just go flush him out. Right. “Are you testing my courage?”
“I hope not. I shouldn’t think a big macho Texan like you would be afraid of a little old bat.”
If she’d seen Horace, she knew he was no little old bat.
“You can turn on a light,” she said. “That should do the trick. Bats get disoriented in the light. There’s a switch by the stairs.”
First he’d deal with the bat, he thought, then the woman.
He started onto the landing to the end room. There was a fluttering sound to his right, a movement, and the bat suddenly swooped up the stairs. For a split second they were eyeball to eyeball. Daniel swore and ducked. If he’d had Cozie’s crowbar, that would have been the end of one bat.
The creature darted into the end room.
Cozie charged out of her bedroom with her blanket. Feeling along the wall, Daniel found the switch, and when the light came on, it caught her stalking the flying bat with her blanket at the ready, exactly for what he could only guess.
“Well,” she said, “he certainly is a big one.”
Good of her to notice. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to capture him and throw him out the window.”
“Be easier to knock him on the head.”
The bat lit on the curtain, not a smart move. Cozie eased toward him. Daniel leaned against the wall. He wasn’t going to interfere. Cozie and Horace, so far as he could see, had been through this little routine before.
“Some people,” she said, never taking her eye off the bat, “just use their hands and pluck them out of the air.”
Daniel refrained from comment.
She gave the curtain a good shake. The bat dropped off, spread its wings, and prepared to get the hell out of there. But she tossed her blanket and had him. She let go, and the blanket and the trapped bat dropped to the floor.
“Bravo,” Daniel said.
She cast him a look. “At least he has a chance.”
She was breathing hard, her cheeks were flushed, and her hair was sticking up, a stark reminder that she’d just crawled out of bed. She had on a blue plaid nightshirt that covered her from chin to toe and managed to fire his imagination as to what she looked like—felt like—underneath all that flannel. Probably not the effect she’d intended.
The bat twitched and squeaked under the blanket.
“Now what?” Daniel asked.
“Open the window.”
He obliged, stepping over the blanket and its prey. The old window took some work to open. There was no screen. Behind him, Cozie scooped up blanket and bat and hurried to the window and shook the bat loose.
“Hasn’t one ever flown back into your face?”
“Yep.” She pulled in the blanket and shut the window. “I’m more careful now.”
“I suppose this is what passes for excitement up here in the woods?”
“Are you demeaning my lifestyle?”
“Just asking a question.”
“I’ll take a bat loose in the house for excitement anytime over what I’ve been putting up with the past few weeks.” She started past him, tucking stray hairs back off her face, aware, he suspected, of the wild figure she cut. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Do you have any idea how damned sexy you look?” he asked as he followed her back into her room. At the very least he owed her a tweak after leaving him to Horace.
“What? Aunt Ethel gave me this nightgown. It can’t be…” She wouldn’t say it.
“Well, it is. Sexy as hell, Ms. Cozie.”
In the dark he couldn’t see if she blushed. He doubted it. She crawled under her comforter and drew it up to her neck like the proverbial reluctant virgin.
Daniel looked out her dormer window at the sparkling night sky. “Do you always name your bats?”
She shook her head. “No; seldom, in fact. This one’s just been around so long I figured I might as well name him.”
Her eyes, he noticed, were carefully avoiding lingering on his bare chest. She switched on her bedside lamp. “I’ll probably read for a few minutes. I’m always a little wired after dispensing with a bat.”
“Wired, hell. You’re distracted, same as I am.”
“By a bat?”
He grinned. “By the possibilities of us both being wide awake at midnight with the adrenaline running high and hard.”
Her knuckles were white where she was holding on tight to the comforter. “We could take a walk,” she said.
“Is that what you want?”
She settled back against her pillow. “I don’t know what I want. That’s not like me, you know. Not knowing what I want.”
He sat beside her, feeling the chill of the night air, knowing she was talking about more than whether or not she wanted to make love to him. The life of Cozie Hawthorne of Woodstock, Vermont, was changing so fast she couldn’t keep up.
“That’s one thing we have in common,” he said. “When I went into the air force academy, I knew I wanted to become a fighter pilot. No question. Then that certainty just wasn’t there anymore. It was sort of like making a sand castle, and everything’s perfect, and then the waves come and it slowly washes away, but it’s not any one wave that does it in.”
“Why did you go into fighting oil fires?”
“It was something I got into even when I was in the military. J.D. and I have been friends for a long time—I knew it was his dream to have his own outfit. He couldn’t get the money together.”
“But that’s one thing that’s not a problem for you,” Cozie said.
“I owe J.D.” He sighed heavily, not wanting to imagine his partner and friend suffering in his hospital bed. “All J.D.’s ever wanted was a chance. When that copter dropped out of the sky—hell, his chance could have gone down with it. The business we’re in is unforgiving. It has to be. The stakes are too high: people’s lives, property, millions of barrels of oil, the environment. You can’t risk that on someone who’d let his own helicopter blow out from under him.”
Cozie leaned forward, touching his arm, igniting something within him he’d thought he’d given up on, desires that went beyond a need for mere physical satisfaction. “I’m sorry for J.D.’s loss. For yours. But you can’t blame the wrong person.”
He looked at her. “I won’t.”
She nodded. “I believe you.”
“Cozie…”
His mouth found hers in the shadows. A cool hand brushed his cheek, trailed down his arm. His entire body tensed with the need to hold her, to touch that slim body beneath all that flannel and down. Her hand, warmer now, came around his back, and she sank against her pillows, bringing him with her.
Their kiss deepened. He felt an urgency mounting inside him, threatening to overwhelm him, as her mouth opened
into his and her fingers tangled in his hair. A small voice warned him to be careful, go easy. More than anything, he didn’t want to hurt her.
The comforter had slid down to her waist, allowing him to slip his arms around her, feel the heat of her skin through the flannel, the warmth of her bed.
She ran her palm down his back, and he thought he would die right there. He tugged on her nightgown until he could feel the soft, warm skin of her hip under him. His mouth never left hers. He tasted her, made it crystal clear what he wanted, what he was offering, with the primitive rhythm of his tongue. She moaned beneath him.
“Daniel, I’ve never…this isn’t something I do—”
“I know, honey.” He raised up slightly, locking his eyes with hers. “Are you okay?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
He drew the nightgown up higher, gazing at the milky length of her legs in the starlight, the dark patch between her legs, the firm abdomen. Breathing in at the sight of her, he slid his palms up the warm, smooth skin, raising the nightgown above her breasts. The nipples were dark and hard in the cool night air. He took one in his mouth, tasting it, licking it.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered, passion straining her voice.
“I can’t imagine ever wanting to.”
She moved beneath him, her hand skimming the front of his jeans where his own state of arousal was obvious. There was no hesitation, no embarrassment in her caress. In his mad dash for the bat he’d never snapped his jeans. She caught the zipper, started to slide it down. He imagined his shaft in her cool fingers.
And bolted straight up and out of her bed, nearly banging his damned fool head on the slanted ceiling.
She didn’t pull her nightgown down. She lay before him in the starlight, a temptation like no other he’d known. A beautiful, green-eyed, bat-chasing Yankee.
“I must be crazy,” he muttered darkly.
But she smiled, knowing that what he’d done had nothing to do with rejecting her. “I know. Me, too.”
“We can’t—”
“We can. That’s plainly obvious to us both, I think. But we shouldn’t. We—” She swallowed. “We just shouldn’t.”
She wiggled into a sitting position, a maneuver that almost had him back in bed with her, never mind that he’d come to Vermont to find out if her brother had blown him and J.D. out of the sky.
Finding You Page 17