by Jillian Hart
How could anyone overcome losing his entire family? With the taste of loss she’d had, she couldn’t truly imagine. Charlie had been her world, but she hadn’t been alone. Her family was overprotective and bossy, it was hard to deny, but they were also loving and caring to a fault.
But Duncan clearly had no one. Or if he had, he’d pushed them away.
So, Duncan, do your worst. He could snarl, hiss, swear and insult her all he wanted. Fine. She was grateful he was alive to do so. And until he was fully recovered, she intended to do all she could for him. If he didn’t like it and if he would rather be alone with his growly self and even if he didn’t want her in his presence, that was simply his burden to endure. He was stuck with her and not only because of the storm.
Because when she stopped to dunk the brush into the soapy water, she could feel a flutter in her deepest being.
Maybe Duncan Hennessey had saved her in a more important way. And he didn’t even know it.
“I don’t care if my floor is filthy. I don’t care if rats think my floor is filthy. Stop doing that.”
“No.” She was nearly done anyway. She attacked the last section of the kitchen floor—of course, there was the rest of the cabin. But she had a plan to clean room by room and to get everything in perfect order for Duncan. So it was simple to say no.
His baritone boomed like a dynamite explosion and made the deafening blizzard’s howl seem tranquil. “Did you tell me no? In my own house?”
“Boy, you are honestly giving extra effort to your beastly manners, aren’t you?” She crawled back through the threshold, dragging the bucket with her. “I know that usually terrifies most people, but I’ve been around you enough not to be perturbed by it.”
“Perturbed?”
“Yes. You know what it means, don’t you?”
Duncan saw red and he let his teeth clench together with a loud clack and hissed out the steam of his rage. “That’s it. Stop your infernal cleaning right this moment. I told you, I don’t care. This isn’t impressing me.”
“I heard you the first time. Besides, I doubt very much if anyone ever could impress you. You seem to have very low expectations.”
His dark brows pulled together as he rose up from the chair where he’d collapsed near the fireplace. And for an instant he resembled the great black bear that had nearly taken his life. The darkness in the room seemed to grab at him and she could see only the piercing hatred of his unfeeling black eyes.
“What have you seen in the world, little miss? What do you know about men? You live safe and protected with your family doting on you. The worst thing that ever happened to you was eating strawberries in a forest in September. You don’t know what cruelty a man is capable of. Or a woman. Especially a woman.”
“Your insults are not going to work. Just so you are aware. I’m headstrong enough to resist words.”
She doesn’t understand, Duncan thought. She was everything he’d ever wanted and never thought he could find. She was beautiful and smart.
In a different world, if he was a different man, the Duncan Hennessey who had his own furniture shop, then maybe. Maybe, when he’d been a man who’d spent his days quietly at the lathe and the blade, gluing and pressing and patiently sanding. The man who went to his mother’s for supper on Sundays when his shop was closed, that innocent young man would have fallen irrevocably in love with Miss Betsy Hunter.
He was no longer that man. And he could not pretend he was. Could not dare admit that the reverberation of emotion sitting dead-center in his chest was love.
No, because a woman like her could never love him. And no amount of her scrubbing his floor was going to change that. He figured her family was going to find out she’d been alone with him, and they would assume the worst. That’s what folks tended to do.
He doubted her family would demand a shotgun wedding to salvage her reputation. Thinking about everything that could happen…that made the old panic overtake him. He fought it until he was as unfeeling as the granite stones that broke from the great faces of the mountains and rolled downward, fracturing apart as they tumbled.
Breaking and breaking again, and there was no outcry, no roar or cursing. After the pieces had finally stopped, there was merely silence. A rock could feel nothing.
Nor could he.
“There. That room is done.”
She plopped the brush into the bucket with a splash. When she stood, her dress shivered around her slender curves, full and soft in all the right places and she moved like a metaphor in a poem, like snow on a calm morning, and his pulse beat with desire. To pull her into his arms, fold her snug against his chest and breathe in the warm scent of her.
Why was he doing this? He was only hurting himself. He tried to will the longing from his blood, but his soul kept throbbing. I want you. I want you so much.
And I cannot have you. He gritted his teeth, ground his jaw and closed his eyes, but he could still see her. The last image of her twisted at the waist, stretching out her back. The extension from side to side emphasizing the curves of her breasts, soft and full and made to fill his hand.
And if that wasn’t enough to drive him out the door and into the blizzard to cool down the tightening thrum of his noticeable erection, her skirt clung to her hips and backside. She had a sassy little fanny to match the rest of her and there was nothing he wanted more than to keep her.
You have to stop thinking like this. It was killing him. He twisted away so she could not see the agony on his face. He could hear her sigh of relief. She must have stopped stretching out her tight muscles, and the clink of the bucket as she hiked it up and, finally the swish and tap of her was a thoroughly feminine sound that made him want to turn and follow her.
To reach for what he wanted more than anything.
She clanged and clattered around in the kitchen, humming a tune he didn’t know, but the alto of her voice lilted above the roaring storm. His skin prickled into little bumps, as if cold, but he wasn’t. His blood had heated up hot enough to melt steel, and he could feel his will buckling, like a horseshoe laid to the smithy’s fires.
You should have never allowed her to step foot in this door. He cursed himself for his own stupidity, raking his hand through his hair and breathing with the effort. He hauled his uncooperative body up from the chair and limped to the door.
She was still humming and making noise in the kitchen. It sounded as if she were pumping water. Good luck, he wanted to tell her, since the temperature was rapidly dropping. If the water froze, what difference would it make to him?
He wanted her to stop cleaning. Stop this effort to show him how well she could clean. No woman had enough integrity to do so much free work without wanting something in return.
Yeah, he knew women, he thought bitterly as he laid a hand on his fur coat. The question was, What did Miss Betsy Hunter want? She emerged from the kitchen, her apron at her waist. She’d apparently found his broom and started sweeping up the month or so’s accumulation of dust, dirt and anything else that had hit the floorboards with the determination of an army general close to victory.
“I cleaned the chamber pot, so you don’t need to go outside.”
“Lady, I wouldn’t piss in a pot that you’d scrubbed. Damn this hell-blasted storm!” He retreated into rage again, stuffed his injured arm into the sleeve and then his good one, moving as fast as he could, working the buttons, remembering she’d taken his boots off.
“Shit!” He did his best to storm across the wide room, but the pain was mounting. He’d been up too much, done too much, and he couldn’t boom through the house like he wanted to. Every time he stomped on his bad leg, agony shot in white-hot streaks along his leg and up through his abdomen all the way to his pounding head.
But he didn’t let that stop him, not when he had a point to make. He didn’t want her. And since his steel will was bending, he was going to make damn sure the pretty little miss wouldn’t want to be in the same room with him. That was the best way to ens
ure, if his good sense failed, that they wouldn’t end up in his bed together.
Because he wanted her with a force that was blinding him. So it was up to her to hate him so much there was no possible way she’d look at him with those big doe eyes and smile with her lush beautiful mouth he wanted to kiss. He had to make sure she’d recoil in disgust because all he wanted to do was to feel her luscious mouth on every inch of him—
Damn it! Stop thinking like that. He had no control, it was completely gone, and it enraged him even more.
In a full temper he bent to grab hold of a boot; he didn’t give a crap about his wounds or the fact that when he bent over to yank on his shoes, pain flashed black across his vision. He dragged in a moan and fought to keep it silent.
“What is the matter with you?”
She was there, all softness and light, her skirt swirling around her lean hips, curved just right, touched by the firelight as she knelt before him, uncurled his fingers from the boot’s heel. It was concern on her face, and he knew she was only worried about her last chance for marriage.
At least, that’s what he told himself as he tried to steal the boot back, but the damnable woman held it out of his reach. “It’s my boot. Give it.”
“What are you going to do, go out in this storm?” She wasn’t in a bad mood at all, she was so hellfire cheerful. The mahogany curls framed her lovely oval face, and the bright sapphire of her eyes made her seem the dearest woman he’d ever come across.
All he had to do was to lean forward two feet—twenty-four inches, that was all—and he could capture her lush mouth with his. Find out if she tasted like dew on a morning’s garden and if her kiss was as luxurious as a rose’s velvety petal.
What was he doing? Stop it, you cannot have her. He reined in his desire, stopped his thoughts and launched forward, bullying the boot from her surprisingly strong grip. The not-so-delicate Betsy Hunter snatched the boot right back and flung it across the room.
“You’re not going out. I’ll go bring in more wood.”
As if he were completely as crazy as a loon and she was the sane one, she shook her head at him in a scolding way, bouncing up, pure fire and charm, and he felt his will liquefy as she swished away.
Leaving him breathless and weak, pulling away every thought from his head. He couldn’t even think to stop her and by the time his mind started working she’d wrapped up and was unlatching the door.
That damnable woman! He was on his feet as the wind caught the door and ripped it from her hands, the blizzard punching in, stealing Betsy from his sight. That woman was going to be the death of him one way or another, that was for damn sure.
Swearing with every step, he raced headlong into the whiteout that blew out the lamp and brought down darkness and ice. There was nothing but wind pushing him back and he fought it, reaching out, finding only darkness and stinging snow, and suddenly there she was, a soft shelter against his chest.
He held her there with his injured arm and caught the edge of the door with his good one and growled, bucking the wild storm that felt strong enough to topple them both.
With every drop of his strength, he wrestled the door closed. Snow fell to the ground. The winds disappeared and there was silence and darkness and only the impotent flare of the fire in the frigid room.
“Oops.” Betsy resembled a snowbank more than a fancy town lady, but the shrug of her slim shoulders sent an avalanche of ice from her face and neck, revealing her delicate bobbin of a chin.
Oops? What kind of an answer was that? “You could have killed yourself!”
“Well, not killed, but perhaps a little frostbite on my nose, anyway!”
She didn’t look the least bit repentant. “Well, that didn’t solve anything. You open the door, if you will, and I’ll go outside—”
“You’re not going outside!” She had no common sense. It only went to show she was just as he figured she’d be—a pampered, sheltered princess—and it made him even madder because he wanted her to be different—and couldn’t face it if she was it.
She needed someone to take care of her; her old crone of a grandmother and her ass of a brother weren’t here to do it, and he hated to be stuck with the job.
He didn’t want a woman. He didn’t want to feel hot and hungry with need every time he was around her. “What are you gonna do? Carry in one stick of wood at a time?”
“No, I mean, why did you say it like that? As if I weren’t perfectly capable of carrying more than that?”
“Because look at you!” He couldn’t stand the way she stood there so serenely, not understanding at all. “You’ll freeze to death, and then I’ll have to explain how I let a little woman like you go out into the blizzard and freeze to death. Believe me, your family isn’t going to be too kind if I let that happen.”
“My family. They can be difficult, but I love ’em.” She sighed, blowing at a spiraling strand of hair that had frozen to her nose…and remained. Ice crackled as she tried to blink her eyelashes.
“Hold still.” He took her by the shoulder and used his sleeve cuffs, as ice-driven as they were, to brush the snow frozen to her lashes and eyebrows. To rub away the layer disguising her face.
It was strange, Betsy thought, to watch him go from yelling barbarian to gentle man. For the moment he was tame, and she watched him through her lashes, not daring to move, feeling the hard, possessive grip on her shoulder—and the answering curl in her heart.
He was lost in the dark, hardly more than a shadow, but she could feel every inch of him as if she saw him. Felt him with the awareness of one soul mate recognizing its other.
How often does a gift like this come along? Her throat closed up tight and she struggled for breath, but he kept stroking the fraying cuff on his sleeve—she’d have to remember to mend that—over the bridge of her nose, rubbing as if to scrape away every particle of snow.
She’d clamped her teeth together to keep them from chattering and a knot of cold cinched round her middle and yet she was warming, melting like ice in the sun, and it was his doing. The air in the cabin was slowly warming, but their breaths rose in foggy clouds.
A powerful heat seemed to flow from his hand on her shoulder straight into her spirit, into the deepest part of her. How was that possible?
She watched in fascination as an entirely new Duncan, one neither beast nor savage nor fierce mountain man, quirked the corner of his mouth into a real smile. “That’s a freckle. I guess that isn’t gonna come off.”
She fell—just like that. Between one breath and the other, between one beat of her heart and the next. A love so strong surged through her, more silent than the blizzard that had blustered through the cabin, but tenfold more powerful. She saw him in the darkness—the real Duncan Hennessey—a tender soul who nudged her to his snowy chest, so wide and strong, and enfolded her against him.
Her cheek lay on his sternum and beneath it the fast pulse of his heart. Too fast for a man not affected. For a man not in love.
She knew, for it matched the rapid flutter of her own.
He looked down at her, meeting her gaze, and it was as if he’d penetrated her, although it made no sense, did it? She felt the connection and it was as if they were lovers, joined in that rare, amazing intimacy, and her heart fell wide open. Oh, why do I love him so much?
He cleared his throat and she could feel the rough edges of his emotions surging through her as he cupped her face in his broad palm. “I don’t want you going out into the storm. Do you understand?”
She heard what he didn’t say, knew it with certainty as if his thoughts had somehow entered her mind, too. What would he do if she became blown off course and lost in the forest?
Pain worse than he’d ever known coursed through him and he felt ten feet tall, ready to tear the world apart if he had to, to keep her safe. He didn’t want her cold or lost or afraid. He didn’t want her struggling against an impossible wind.
He wanted to keep her warm and safe forever.
The
n it happened, the most amazing thing of all. He bent to her, as the inches separating them shrank and her pulse fluttered with his. Her breath caught at the same exact moment. Neither blinked. Neither broke their gazes.
Already as if joined, it was no surprise when his mouth captured hers in a brief, thrilling taste. The caress of his rougher, firmer lips fitting over hers and gently sucked.
On a sigh, she surrendered, parting her lips for a deeper kiss, to give him anything he wanted because she was already his. But he didn’t invade with his tongue and he didn’t take what she was offering.
Instead he kissed her again, tenderly, dragging it out as if he could not stand for it to end. Then he pulled away, kissed the tip of her nose and held her as if she were the most precious thing in the world to him.
Because she was.
Duncan held her until she stopped trembling, from cold or passion, it didn’t matter. The fire was flickering down, the cabin was chilly, and he could not seem to let her go.
In his entire life he’d never felt like this, as if his heart were on the outside of his chest instead of inside. Exposed. Vulnerable. Maybe, for this one moment in the dark, it was all right to taste her kiss one more time.
And to treasure the knowledge that kissing her was sweeter than morning dew on roses, than dawn on the craggy peaks of the Rockies, than any single thing he’d ever known before.
Or ever would again.
Chapter Twelve
Even hours later, the kiss remained an unspoken tension between them. Not mentioned, but felt. An invisible cloud of smoke that seemed to choke the air and make Duncan seem distant, when he was only on the other side of the kitchen stove.
The wood he’d brought in was nearly gone to feed the greedy fire, and the main room had proved impossible to reheat in the rapidly dropping temperatures as evening came. They’d retreated to the kitchen where, with the door closed, the potbellied stove could burn more efficiently, but it didn’t seem to be driving out the cold.