“We’re almost there,” Zeke called over his shoulder. “We might get wet, but it won’t be too bad.”
“Okay!”
Just as the first light sprinkles began to spatter them—amazing how the speed of the bike made even such light spatters hurt—Zeke turned onto a narrow dirt track. Tire tracks showed where a truck had come through, over and over.
The path bumped and twisted through thick trees; potholes and rocks littered the way. Then, the rain began to fall in earnest.
“Sorry,” Zeke called, fighting his way up the steep path. “I can’t go any faster or we’ll likely go flying.”
“I’m all right,” she returned and leaned closer into him for protection. Her shoulders and arms and back were getting soaked, but it wasn’t an unpleasant experience. The rain released the smell of earth and spice inherent to the forest; it cascaded over the tree trunks and dripped in crystal drops from pine needles. Beautiful.
Also cold. When they pulled into a clearing, Mattie dismounted and ran with Zeke into a small, neat cabin, newly built, by the look of it. Details blurred in the steadfast rain.
“Whew,” Zeke said, shaking himself off, closing the door behind her. “You never know when those storms’ll hit until they’re right up on you.”
Mattie tugged off her helmet, dropped her bags by the door and took the towel he offered. “Brrr. Amazing how cold a summer rain can be! “
“Takes some getting used to, all right.” He rubbed his long hair. “Rain is always cold in Colorado. Most of the time in the summer, there’s so much lightning you don’t want to be out in it anyway.” Looping the towel around his neck, he asked, “You want some coffee?”
“Please.”
He stepped outside for a minute, pot in hand, and Mattie assumed he had to get water from somewhere. She glanced around curiously. The cabin was a single large room with a fireplace at one end and a bed at the other. Between was a modern-looking stove, next to some open shelves, well stocked with supplies. A mishmash of cups, glasses and unmatched plates were neatly stacked on one, the others held pots and pans, canned goods and sturdy tin canisters.
Opposite the stove, below a window, sat a couch and a worn chair. Another floor-to-ceiling block of shelves held books, paperbacks, mostly. A double bed, covered with a sleeping bag, completed the picture.
The room smelled of new wood, and time had not yet darkened the yellow pine planks on the floor. The wooden, multi-paned windows fit the rustic atmosphere, but they were new, no doubt ordered to fit. As Zeke returned, she asked, “Did you build this cabin?”
He lit the fire on the stove with a kitchen match and put the blue-and-white spatterware coffeepot on the fire. “Yeah,” he said and rubbed more dampness from his face as he looked around. “Someday, this is supposed to be the living room, but for now, it’s pretty much everything.”
“Yourself?” she asked, touching the smooth pine wall. “You built it all?”
Zeke grinned and held up his big, lean hands. “All by my little lonesome.”
“Amazing.”
He took a can of coffee from the shelf and measured it into the pot. “My dad was a carpenter,” he said, not looking at her. “He made sure I knew how to do it right.”
The father again. Mattie collected the note to add to the others she held in her mind, but said nothing. Wandering over to admire a hand-carved windowsill, she thought, nice revenge. “Pretty impressive,” she said aloud.
“Well, don’t get too excited until you see the rest of the amenities,” he drawled and gestured toward the back door. It led to a wide, covered porch, comfortable with benches and chairs.
Breathing deeply of the rainy air, Mattie sighed. “It never smells like this in the city.”
He pointed. “On clear days, you can see clear to Montana from here.”
Mattie looked out over the mist-shrouded landscape and saw hints of what he meant. “Are these the other amenities?”
“No.” Nodding toward the left, he said, “They’re over there. I do have the luxury of a crude shower, but it’s open to the elements. That’s a sauna in the bigger building. That one—” he pointed to an unmistakable hut on the other side of the clearing “—is just what it looks like.”
Mattie laughed. “How perfect!”
“Perfect?”
“I love this, Zeke!” She turned to look up at him. “A real cabin in the mountains, with an outhouse and everything!”
A smile touched his sensual mouth, and a curious softness bloomed in his eyes. He lifted his hand, but it hovered between them uncertainly for a minute before landing on her shoulder. “You do have a way of looking at things, Miss Mary,” he said, his voice low and rough.
She simply looked up at him for a moment, taking as deep and passionate a pleasure in the hard male power of his face as she had in the mountain views. For the first time in more than a month, she felt safe. “Thank you, Zeke.”
His gaze shifted, flickered, and his fingers stirred restlessly against her neck. She thought he was going to kiss her, but he dropped his hand and straightened. “You’re more than welcome, honey,” he said gruffly. “Come on. That coffee should be about ready.”
Mattie shot a glance toward the outhouse. It wasn’t that she needed it so much as she just wanted to see what it looked like inside. “Um…do you mind if I go see what it looks like?”
His laugh was as full and natural as any she’d heard from him. “Go right ahead, Miss Mary. Go right ahead.”
*
ZEKE WENT INSIDE to wait, a curious anticipation stirring in his belly. It was an odd emotion for him, and he paused in the middle of the room to try to identify it.
As a child, he’d fallen in love with the night sky, with the possibilities all those winking stars presented. He’d gulped astronomy from books out of the school library, then would check his new facts against the night. Staring up at that vast, unexplored universe, Zeke had found ways to keep going.
Mattie, with her eagerness and pleasure in each small thing she uncovered, made him feel the way that sky had. Made him remember what it was like to feel wonder. He felt the stirring in his belly again. More than wonder. There was hope mixed in there, too. How long since he’d felt either one?
A tiny explosion of warning popped in his brain. Hope was a dangerous emotion. Frowning, he took cups from the shelf and checked to make sure no weevils had infected the powdered cream. It was bad enough that he’d brought her here, breaking yet another of his rules. It would be sheer stupidity to get all gushy about the whole thing. She’d needed some help. Zeke gave it. No more than that.
Whatever it took, he had to keep her at arm’s length.
But it was hard as hell. She sailed in, dewy-faced, her big doe eyes shimmering. “It’s so amazing!” she exclaimed.
“Amazing. That’s the third time you used that word in five minutes.” His pleasure rolled from him on a laugh. “Did you check out the shower? Now, it’s something.”
“No. Sorry, I’ll go back—”
He caught her arm. “I’ll show it to you later. Come on and drink your coffee.”
She shed her light jacket and sprawled out on the couch, mug in hand, looking around with an alert, interested gaze. “How can you have a shower and no toilet?”
“Toilets are more complicated to set up.” He took the chair and kicked off his boots. “The shower is fed from the hot springs—so is the sauna.”
“What’s a hot spring?”
“You really are a city kid, aren’t you?”
She nodded unapologetically, and bands of gray light flashed over the crown of her brown head. “I never even left Kansas City before I stole that car.”
“Never?” Zeke thought of his wanderings. “Why?”
She lifted a shoulder. “There wasn’t really ever money to go anywhere. I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen.”
“No summer camp or vacations?”
“Did you go to summer camp and go on vacations, Zeke?” she asked quietl
y.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Money, I reckon.”
“No poor child does those things.”
He gave her a half smile. “Poor. I haven’t heard anybody use that word in a long time, not in that way.”
A twinkle shone in her eye. “Economically disadvantaged? Blue-collar?”
He laughed. “Poor works just fine.” He drank from his cup, examining her more closely. She’d said she was a foster child, and he supposed that most homes that took such children in were not well-to-do, but she didn’t have that air about her, even in the dowdy clothes she sometimes wore. “You don’t look like that kind of a kid,” he said with a frown.
“Is there a mark you look for?”
He pursed his lips, thinking of the trashy little houses back home, where hopeless women sat on rickety steps while their raggedy children wiped wrists over snotty noses. Wasn’t like that in the city, he knew that, but there were things he noticed, things he’d grown sensitive to over the years. “Not one mark,” he said. “A few of them. The way people talk, their teeth.” He narrowed his eyes. “A certain posture, maybe.”
“Like you?”
“What’s that mean?”
“You don’t have bad teeth, and heaven knows there’s nothing submissive about your posture.”
“My teeth are crooked.”
“Only a little.”
“But if I’d been a rich kid, they’d be straight, now, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose.” Her sultry mouth tipped at the corners in a mischievous expression. “And your grammar could use some work.”
“Hey, now,” he warned, but chuckled in spite of himself.
“I think you’re being narrow-minded.”
He lifted his eyebrows ruefully. “Maybe.”
She stretched comfortably, like a cat, and Zeke admired the generous curve of breasts the pose displayed before she curled up again, her gaze snagging on his books. “You must be a pretty serious reader.”
Zeke shrugged. “No electricity. You learn to keep books around.”
She chuckled, leaning over to read the titles. “I guess you’ve read Black Beauty and King of the Wind in recent months, then, huh?”
“Well, I guess there’s a few there from when I was a kid.” His books had been all he’d taken with him, but he’d spilled enough of his guts to this woman. He was dangerously close to letting down his guard.
“Looks like you were horse-crazy,” she said, and looked up curiously. “Were you?”
Maybe he could admit that much. “Yeah.” His gaze cut involuntarily toward the empty corrals and barn beyond the front window. Fences neat, ground smoothed, hay rotted to nothing in the stalls. Empty.
She followed his gaze and looked back at him, but didn’t say anything. Rare quality in a woman, the ability to realize some things were off limits. She’d done the same thing over his scars—didn’t duck from seeing them, but made a simple acknowledgment of them and what they were without a lot of melodrama or gnashing of teeth. “I always wanted to be a cowboy,” he found himself volunteering. “Wear a bandanna around my neck and a big hat.”
She smiled. “I wanted to be in the symphony.”
“What did you play?”
The grin broadened. “Nothing. I just thought it would be fun to wear black velvet dresses and pearls and have a whole bunch of people in fancy clothes come listen to me.”
Again he laughed, unable to help himself, and the odd wild emotion in his chest swelled again. “I wanted to wear spurs, so when I walked it would make noise.”
“Looks like you got a little closer to your dream than I did mine,” she said, pointing to the corrals.
He should have known it wouldn’t slip by that easily. He stood up to pour another cup of coffee. “You hungry yet?”
“Not really. You don’t have to do everything, you know. I’d be happy to cook. I’m very good at it.” She materialized at his side, holding out her cup for a refill.
Zeke turned and poured, feeling her warmth along the length of his side. They stood in stocking feet, both of them, and she was small enough to tuck up under one arm. Wisps of hair curled around her small ears and the long, pretty neck and he knew an urge to bend close, touch his lips to that white throat. Curve a hand around her breast, another around that not-so-tiny bottom. She was little, but nothing had been spared on the curves. He liked that. “I’ve got a feeling, Miss Mary, that I’m gonna have some trouble keeping myself in line around you.”
She lifted wide brown eyes to his face and he saw the stirring hunger there, the curious and frightened expression he’d first read on her face that day in the café. Her siren lips softened and he watched her gaze flicker over his face, touch on his lips, dart back to his eyes. “Maybe—”
“No way, sweetheart,” he said gruffly, and put the pot on the stove, willing himself to look away from that hunger in her face. She’d fall in love. No way he could bear that—some long-twisted thing in his soul wasn’t capable of accepting it. Just as soon as he thought he could, he’d end up stomping all over her.
“I told you before I’m not your kind of man. You don’t need to get all torn up in addition to everything else that’s going on in your life right now.”
“You’re a big, mean bear, all right,” she said and he heard the amusement in her tone with surprise. “You think you are, Zeke, but you aren’t.”
“I mean it, Mattie,” he said and faced her squarely. Come hell or high water, he found ways to drive women away once they proved themselves fool enough to fall in love with him. He liked Mattie too much as a friend to let that happen.
To emphasize his point, he put his coffee cup aside and settled his hands on her shoulders. Pretty, slim shoulders, fragile beneath his palms. “You’re real vulnerable right now. Your fiancé betrayed you, you almost got killed and now you’ve had a little adventure.”
She waited, her coffee cup between her palms, her eyes as calm as a summer morning. He could smell the faint scent of soap and motel shampoo around her, and felt the heat of her skin against his hands.
“Once you get back to normal life, you’ll wonder what the hell you could have been thinking.”
“Will I?” Her voice held a seductive, whispery note.
Zeke forgot what he meant to say, falling adrift in the seductively gentle liquid of her eyes. In their depths he saw something of himself, but stronger, all the things he might have been if only he’d had one person—
He kissed her before he knew he would do it. Cupped her small head against his hand and bent to touch her lips with his own, lightly tasting that sensuous mouth. He closed his eyes to feel it better—the moist plumpness of unseasoned lips, flavored with coffee and sugar and something that belonged only to her. And like an exhausted man sinking with gratitude into the down of a pillow, he sank into the softness, losing himself as he explored the edges and corners, the sensitive inner edge. He suckled gently and heard her sigh as she inclined her head to take him more fully.
A kiss. It was only a kiss. But he couldn’t seem to surface, couldn’t remember what urgent reason he had for not doing it. When she parted her lips, ever so slightly, he opened his mouth and found her tongue ready to dance with his own.
And it was right, by damn. The taste of her and the easy mesh of their ways, the fit of his lips against hers and the mingling of their tongues. He held her loosely, and kissed her. And kissed her. And once again.
A booming crack of thunder shattered the moment and Zeke jerked away. Her eyes had gone sultry, the hungriness in them a notch higher, a hunger reflected in the labored sound of his breath in his ears. “That wasn’t—”
He swore. It had been a mistake to bring her here. No way on God’s green earth he could resist her for days on end. No way.
He gritted his teeth. “I’ve got rules, Mattie. It’s the only way I can keep things even. One of those rules is that I don’t mess with good girls like you.” He shook his head. “It
just isn’t a good idea for us.”
She nodded, her eyes wide and sad. “I understand.”
“I want you,” he said, and there was relief in putting it into words. “But it would be wrong.”
“Okay.”
He backed away, unable to manage the simple acceptance in her face and what that told him about her. Life had taught her not to want things she couldn’t have.
Hating himself, he grabbed the door handle. “I’ve got some things to take care of outside. Make yourself at home.”
He fled, into the rain.
Chapter 8
*
MATTIE WATCHED HIM go. Left alone in the cabin, she stirred sugar carefully into her cup and sipped the painfully hot coffee, trying to burn away the trembling need he’d awakened in her. Everything shook with an infinitesimal trembling she couldn’t control, didn’t understand. Her spine felt like rubber, her limbs like cooked spaghetti. Elsewhere, in her breasts and low in her belly and in dark places she’d rarely named, he’d awakened a deep ache. Her skin felt too sensitive, irritated by the cloth over it. She pressed a palm against her chest, trying to ease the feeling.
Turning, she saw Zeke through the window, heedlessly striding on those long legs through the rain and lightning, his hair darkening as it got wet, the shoulders of his white shirt soaked and showing the skin beneath. Her only comfort was that he obviously needed to work off the same restless burning that consumed her.
I want you.
As she watched, he picked up a fist-size rock and pitched it hard. It landed on the roof of the stable.
Mattie sighed. It could get a bit tense if this was what they had to face while they were here.
Then again, maybe both of them were just reacting to the intensity of the past twenty-four hours. Now it was raining, which to Mattie always seemed an emotional sort of weather. Once the sun came out, it would be easier.
A little desire was natural under the circumstances. He worried a little too much about her fragility, but if it kept him at arm’s length, maybe that was for the best. The kinds of things he stirred in her were probably better left unexamined.
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