by Cindy Gerard
He turned his head and found Mackenzie standing in the doorway. She looked like an untidy elf. She didn’t look like a woman who would accelerate a man’s heartbeat and heat his blood. Yet she did—in spades.
Jaw clenched, he took in her drab, gray sweats, her hair tousled and shaggy, her green eyes full and glistening. The look on her face nearly destroyed him. It held too much. Too much respect. Too much gratitude. Too much hope.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you for setting him straight.”
Then, hugging a towel to her breast, she turned toward the bathroom, walked down the hall and shut the door behind her.
Four
He might have known she’d get the wrong idea. He might have known she’d take the dressing down he’d given the boy as a sign that he cared. Caring had nothing to do with it. Emotions long buried and seldom addressed had nothing to do with it. He hadn’t hurt for the boy, hadn’t speculated at his source of conflict, hadn’t answered a need to set him back on course.
Like hell he hadn’t—but he’d be damned if he’d let her think it made any difference. He scrubbed a hand across his jaw and set his mind to the task. She’d had her rest. And as soon as she had her shower, she was going to get the facts.
When she emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later dressed in tight old jeans and a bulky red sweater, he was ready to lay things out for her without preamble. He could have pulled it off, too, if the look of her hadn’t blown his plans all to hell.
She held him spellbound, speechless and...hungry, he admitted, as she again managed to tap his sexual urges that were out of place and out of time. Hungry for the softness she possessed, which had been missing so long from his life. Hungry for the womanly scents she brought with her—strawberries and cream and spring rain—as the steam from her shower rolled out of the bathroom in her wake. Hungry for what J.D. had with Maggie and he’d been fool enough to think he could have for himself.
He swore under his breath. Damn her for answering the ad. And damn the insufferable storm. It should have blown itself out by now, but it hadn’t let up and didn’t show signs of easing up anytime soon. The wind howled around the cabin like a wolf calling the pack home, deepening the drifts, dumping more snow as it screamed across the lake lands.
He was stuck with her until the front moved on. In the meantime, if he was going to get through this, he was going to have to get a grip. And he was going to make it clear that this foolishness about a mail-order marriage wasn’t going to happen.
“Sit down,” he said stiffly when she shuffled on bare feet into the kitchen.
“Coffee?” he added in a grudging attempt at civility.
Either she didn’t catch the sharp edge to his voice, or she chose, for whatever reasons, to ignore it.
“Coffee would be great.” She smiled and settled cross-legged into a chair at the table, fluffing her damp hair with a towel.
He poured her a cup, working hard at ignoring all the subtle, provocative jiggling that was taking place under her sweater while she did it.
“Black, right?”
“You got it. Black and bitey, just the way you made it last night.”
He set her coffee on the table in front of her, determined to say his peace. But he made a mistake then. He looked at her. He hadn’t intended more than a glance, but his gaze snagged on her eyes as she inhaled the scent of the coffee with an exuberant, almost childlike pleasure.
Then he made another mistake. He let his attention linger and drift from the waifish elegance of her bone structure to the wet tangle of short, dark hair softly wisping around her face and finally to the full, lush ripeness of her lips as she brought the cup to her mouth.
“Umm.” She closed her eyes and exhaled a sumptuous sigh. “Good. I needed this bad.”
He pulled out a chair, his jaw clenched against the picture she made, all comfy and content as a cat and looking sexier than a squirt of a woman like her had a right to. Spinning the chair around backward, he straddled it and crossed his forearms over its back.
“How’s your hand,” he asked gruffly, noticing, not for the first time, the slight swelling of her knuckle, and wrestling with the guilt that he had been the cause of it.
“About as good as your jaw, I suspect.” She grinned sheepishly. “Sorry about that. Sometimes...sometimes I act before I think.”
And he never acted before he thought it out thoroughly. That’s why it caught him completely off guard when he had to stop himself from returning her smile. The word infectious came to mind. She smiled, and it did something to his insides that was totally foreign, undeniably pleasant—and entirely unacceptable.
This chitchat had to stop. It reeked of coziness—and he’d never done cozy in his life.
“Look,” he said, staring at the steam rising from his cup so he wouldn’t be distracted by all that soft feminine warmth nestled across the table from him. “We need to talk about this...”
“Situation?” she suggested, her eyes bright when he paused.
His gaze shot to hers. “Yeah. Situation,” he agreed, marginally miffed that she’d not only finished his sentence for him but pinned down the word he’d been searching for.
“When I placed that ad,” he began again, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, “there were...” Again he let the line trail off, groping for the right word.
“Circumstances?”
He arched a brow. “Yeah,” he said tightly. “There were circumstances. Just like I suspect you might have been experiencing some circumstances of your own when you ran across it.”
He waited a beat. When she said nothing, just met his gaze with that fresh, open, green-eyed expectancy, he cleared his throat and continued. “The truth is, I never figured anyone would actually...”
“Answer it?” she supplied, looking helpful.
He set his cup down. Hard. “Do you always finish other people’s sentences for them?”
“Sorry.” She grinned, looking a little embarrassed but not one bit sorry. “Old habit. Bad habit,” she amended, pulling a contrite face. “I’ll try to control myself.”
He closed his eyes, scratched his jaw and told himself he didn’t find her or her impertinence refreshing, cute or appealing.
“And I’ll try to be direct,” he said with businesslike gruffness. “But do I really have to spell this out for you?”
For the first time since she’d sat down, her composure faltered. She swallowed, then averted her gaze to her coffee. “I guess maybe you do.”
Her sudden vulnerability unsettled him. The last thing he wanted was for her to see how much. Edgy, uncomfortable, he rose, stalked to the counter and snagged the coffeepot.
“This...your coming here...it never should have happened.”
When he turned back to her all the color had drained from her face. “What are you saying?”
He set his jaw and told himself nothing was going to sway him. “I’m saying I never should have placed the ad. And you never should have answered it.”
“But you did,” she pointed out unnecessarily, the tight edge of tension lifting her voice. “And I did answer it,” she reminded him, also unnecessarily, but with a decided implication that she considered it the overriding issue.
He leaned a hip against the counter, then looked away from the startling intensity of her eyes—and the plea he’d seen in them.
“If you didn’t intend to follow through, why did you do it?”
He doubted very much that she’d be mollified if he told her that one night, between a fifth of whiskey that he rarely indulged in and the well-intentioned badgering of J.D. Hazzard, he’d knuckled under to a loneliness that had settled marrow deep. Weakness had never been an option in his life. He hated himself for giving in to it then. He hated admitting to it now, but figured he owed her at least that much.
“Call it a weak moment,” he muttered in disgust. “Call it a mistake. Call it whatever you want, but it never should have gone this far.”
“Bu
t it has.”
Though she was as still as the lake on a windless day, the panic in her tone revived his suspicion that she was on the run. And scared. So scared she was going to fight him on this, when she should be relieved as hell that he was letting her off the hook.
“Doesn’t this entire concept strike you as insane? Doesn’t the idea of answering an ad in a newspaper and agreeing to marry someone you don’t know from Adam reek of desperation?”
She was silent for a moment, then blew him away with her pragmatic reply. “At any given point, at any given time, we’re all desperate. That doesn’t mean we’re crazy. It means we’re in need of an alternative. With alternatives come risks. I accepted that there was a risk in coming here. Just like you accepted a risk when you placed the ad.”
“A risk,” he repeated, grunting, determined to ignore her logic. “Playing the stock market is a risk. Running a red light is a risk. Your coming here goes way beyond risk. Your coming here—”
She cut him off. “We made a bargain,” she said with such soft entreaty that he had to stall the urge to ask her what the devil she was running away from.
“We both made a bargain,” she repeated, as if that and that alone was the deciding factor.
While her emphatic, almost pleading conviction moved him, he pounced on her choice of words.
“You want to talk about bargains? Fine. I advertised for a bride—not a bride and a brat. Even if I had intended to follow through with this, you broke the rules when you brought your brother along.”
“About Mark...” She hesitated, then gave a little shake of her head as the sound of his radio reached them from the loft at the far end of the cabin. “I know. I know you didn’t expect him. But he’s really a good kid. He’s just going through some bad times right now. He’ll settle in. He won’t be any problem.”
“You’re missing the point,” he enunciated in a tone that had made grown men break into a cold sweat.
Mackenzie Kincaid didn’t have the sense to sweat or to cringe or to back down. She just sat there, a study in contrasts: stiff with determination, soft with vulnerability.
“I want to call this off,” he said, angry with her for getting to him, angry with himself for letting her.
He waited for her reaction. When she just blinked, then lowered her gaze to the hands she’d wrapped tightly around her coffee cup, he swore under his breath.
“I’m sorry you came all this way.” Even to his own ears it sounded like cold lip service. She made him feel like he’d just beaten a puppy. “I’m sorry. But there’s not going to be a marriage.”
He waited a beat, bracing for tears. He should have figured out by now that he wasn’t going to get them. Not from her. She may look as fragile as a songbird, but she was as tough as nails.
He exhaled a deep breath and stayed the course. “Just as soon as this storm lifts and it’s safe to make the trip, I’ll drive you to Bordertown and put you and your brother on a bus back to L.A. I’ll cover any costs you incurred getting here...and whatever else you feel you need for your trouble.”
He expected any reaction but silence. He could have dealt with any reaction but silence.
With a frustrated growl, he slammed his mug on the counter. “Don’t you get it? You’re off the hook, green eyes. If you had any sense, you’d be breathing a big sigh of relief about now. I’m not going to make you go through with this farce.”
She said nothing for a long moment. When she finally lifted her head, a new determination fired her eyes. She met his without flinching.
“Are you through?”
“Yeah,” he snarled, her composure as irritating as a blister. “I’m through.”
She rose from her perch on the chair, walked toward him in all her barefoot glory and met him toe-to-toe. “Then it’s my turn to say my piece. Have a seat, Mr. Greene, while I spell a few things out for you.”
When she pointed a finger toward the table, he wondered if she realized she looked like David squaring off against Goliath. If so, it didn’t faze her. She held her ground against him like a miniature marine. And as he trudged belligerently to the table, he had the unsettling thought that before she was through with him, he’d know exactly how Goliath felt.
Mackenzie wished she felt as confident as she sounded. She wished the beautiful and angry man facing her didn’t scare the bejesuz out of her. And she hoped that her conviction to see this through packed enough punch to do the job. If he’d hit her with this last night, she’d have caved in, in a heartbeat. But she was rested now. And she was back in control.
She’d known this was coming. She also knew she would eat her pride—raw, well-done, stir-fried—any way he wanted to serve it to her, before she’d let him badger her into going back to L.A.
It was a cinch she couldn’t outmuscle him. She needed a more powerful weapon than physical force. This morning she’d found it.
In this physically imposing, savagely strong specimen of a man, she’d discovered a major weakness.
The man had a need. A big one that encompassed both physical and emotional elements. His interaction with Mark was proof of the emotional need. He understood Mark. And in that little showdown before she’d taken her shower, he’d proven that he knew just how to handle him.
But the big surprise—and the weapon she suspected would ultimately win the war—was Abel Greene’s physical need and the unbelievable but irrefutable fact that she’d tapped it.
As inconceivable as it seemed, brown-paper-wrapper-plain Mackenzie Jane Kincaid had gotten to him. She’d sensed it last night in the intense way he’d watched her. In the sullen way he stared into space when he thought she wasn’t looking. She’d had lots of theories for what she’d sensed in him then, ranging from shock to impatience to heartburn.
Not until this morning in his office when he’d held her, and she’d felt the slight, but undeniable tremble of his big, strong body, had it occurred to her what was actually going on. She’d read the heat in his eyes, listened to the thunder of his heart as he’d fought for the control to back away—and she’d realized that he’d wanted to do more than just touch her. He’d wanted what men have wanted from women since the dawn of time. And he’d wanted it bad.
She’d tried to laugh herself out of that conclusion. It didn’t seem possible. A man like him did not get in a foaming, fizzing lather about a woman like her. But as she’d stood in the shower, reliving the look on his face, the fire in his eyes, she’d accepted the heady truth. The man was hot for her body. Amazing. Simply amazing.
It wasn’t that she was fooling herself into believing she’d suddenly turned into a siren. All she had to do was look in the mirror to be reminded of that. Hers was not the kind of face that launched ships—a dingy maybe—but never a luxury liner like Abel Greene. No. She knew that his physical response to her had more to do with—to use his word—circumstances.
He’d lived alone for a long time. Five years, if she remembered J. D. Hazzard’s account accurately. Five years was a long time for a man as physical as Abel Greene to be without the comforts of the softer sex.
Mackenzie had never considered herself an opportunist—but she’d live and breathe the part if it meant keeping Mark alive. She may not be the game of choice, but she was the only choice and she was going to play Abel Greene’s five years of solitude to her advantage. Sex was a powerful weapon. She’d never figured on owning the kind of firepower to employ it. Until this morning. And she’d been thinking about it ever since. Was it fair to Greene? No—but she was past the point of caring about fair play. And she wasn’t going to think about what that made her. Too much was at stake. If she had to, she was going to brazenly dangle the golden sexual carrot in front of him until he broke from the pressure. And when she had him on his knees begging for release, she’d deliver the moon—just as soon as he married her.
Before she resorted to sexual warfare, though, she had some facts to lay out for him. A big, hefty guilt trip wasn’t beyond her at this point. Even with he
r limited knowledge of his character, she was hopeful that he would buckle under the weight of it.
“You may feel you have a choice in this matter,” she said, surprised that her voice came out so strong when her knees felt so weak. “But the truth is, I don’t. When I answered your ad, I made a commitment. For me, there is no going back. I don’t have anything to go back to. I quit my job. I sold everything I owned. Paid off every bill I had.”
“Then I bought two one-way bus tickets, spent the last of my change in a crummy little truck stop for our breakfast yesterday morning, and as of right now I’m flat broke.”
She paused to let him digest the facts.
“And why did I quit my job,” she asked, when she was certain she had his full attention, “and deplete my funds? Because of you. Because you advertised for a bride. I answered that ad in good faith. And now I need you to fulfill your obligations.”
She could have told him more. For now, though, she sensed that he didn’t want to know the whole story. In the meantime, whether he knew or not didn’t change anything. The issue was still the same. They couldn’t go back.
Digging deep, she resorted to her big guns. Slowly, deliberately, she walked toward him and prayed the faraway sound of rap music meant Mark was still in the loft with his boom box. Heart pounding, her breath shallow, she stopped by his chair and with the sexiest look she could manage, gazed deep into his eyes. She didn’t wait for his reaction. She didn’t stop to ask herself, Are you crazy?
She attacked.
With calculated, and what she desperately hoped were seductive, movements, she eased onto his lap. He was so taken off guard, he didn’t try to stop her. Instead his hands rose instinctively to her waist to steady her.
Running on the last of her resolve and a rush of breath-stealing adrenaline, she looped her wrists around his neck.
“Just so there’s no question in your mind,” she whispered, the uncertainty in her voice somehow coming out as a seductive rasp, “I want you to know that I intend to keep my part of the bargain. Every part of the bargain,” she murmured, holding his dark, dangerous gaze as she leaned into him, pressing her breasts to his chest in a conscious attempt to increase his physical awareness of her as a woman.