by Gina Wilkins
He rang the doorbell twice before the door was opened by a short, rather bowlegged man in a plaid Western-style shirt and faded jeans that sagged beneath a drooping stomach. “What can I do for you?” the man asked.
Judging the guy to be in his mid-to late-forties, Case wondered who he was. A caretaker? The housekeeper’s husband, perhaps? “I’m here to see Maddie,” he explained.
“Maddie?” The man cocked his head and gave Case the now-familiar once-over. “She’s not in.”
Case frowned, suspecting that Maddie had given instructions for him to be told that she was gone. Since the elderly woman had already told him she was here, he had no intention of meekly leaving. “I was told that she is in,” he insisted.
“And I’m telling you she ain’t.”
Case was beginning to get annoyed. His acquaintances could have warned this guy that it wasn’t a good idea to annoy Case Brannigan. “Just who are you?” he asked bluntly.
“I’m Frank,” the man answered, then added casually, “the housekeeper.”
“The, uh, housekeeper’s husband?” Case asked, thinking he must have misunderstood.
Frank shook his head. “The housekeeper,” he corrected. “You got a problem with that?”
Case was beginning to get a headache. He took a deep breath. “My only problem right now is that I need to talk to Maddie,” he said through clenched teeth. “If you’d just tell me where she is, I would really appreciate it.”
“You the guy who’s telling everyone you’re her fiancé?”
Case’s eyebrows shot up. “How did you know that?”
Frank shrugged. “Word gets around fast here.”
It had been less than an hour since Case had appeared at the restaurant. “One hell of an efficient grapevine,” he muttered.
Frank chuckled. “Yeah. So, you are the guy?”
“I’m the guy who’s going to marry Maddie Carmichael,” Case agreed determinedly.
Frank’s grin widened. “Are you, now? Well, from what I hear, you’ve got to convince Maddie first.”
“That’s exactly what I intend to do—as soon as I get a chance to talk to her.”
“You might try down by the creek,” Frank said, seeming to come to some sort of decision. “Follow that path around the end of my house over there and keep going back to the woods. Then just stay on it until you get to the creek. Maddie walks down there sometimes when she wants to do some thinking.”
“Thanks,” Case said, already moving toward the steps.
“Don’t mention it,” the unusual housekeeper replied. “I’ve gotta get back to the kitchen. I’ve got a cake in the oven that has to come out. Good luck.”
“Uh—thanks,” Case said again just as Frank closed the door.
“Weird,” Case muttered, limping down the path Frank had pointed out. He hoped the creek wasn’t very far into the woods. Though he’d recovered most of his former mobility, he wasn’t sure he was up to a strenuous hike.
Things weren’t going at all as he’d planned when he’d arrived in Mitchell’s Fork to claim his woman.
* * *
A LATE-MAY BREEZE rippled the surface of the creek, making the water splash against the shiny gray rocks of the creek bed. Overhead, the new spring leaves rustled in that same breeze, casting dancing shadows on the ground below. Sitting on a thick mat of grass, Maddie rested her back against the trunk of a tree, her eyes closed as she listened to the singing of half a dozen varieties of birds and the distant chatter of two playful squirrels.
She usually found peace in these woods. Nature’s sedative for overstressed nerves. But she was finding it extremely difficult to relax today. Not even Nature could soothe the anxiety of knowing that Case Brannigan had suddenly reappeared in her life.
“Maddie.”
It was without surprise that she heard his voice behind her. She sighed, knowing it had only been a matter of time. She didn’t look around when she said, “Please go away.”
“No.”
Well, it had been worth a shot. She turned her head and looked up at him. He was rather overdressed for a stroll in the woods, dressed as he was in a dark suit, white shirt and tie. He was thinner than she remembered, and there were hollows beneath his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Unfortunately, she still found him one of the most ruggedly attractive men she’d ever seen. Not that it mattered anymore, she assured herself hastily.
He took another step toward her and she noticed that he was limping rather badly. What had he done to himself? But, even more important, why was he here?
When she didn’t say anything, Case cleared his throat. “You look different,” he said.
“So do you.”
“I spent a couple of months in a hospital.”
She sensed that he expected her to cry out in sympathy and concern. She kept to herself any emotions she might have felt. “Did you?”
He was frowning when he nodded. “Yeah.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
His frown deepened. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“Not really.”
Case made a sound of frustration and shoved a hand through his hair.
She remembered that he did that often, which was the reason it usually lay tumbled over his forehead, as it was now. She didn’t want to remember how endearing she’d found that boyish forelock before; she told herself it didn’t particularly appeal to her now.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Maddie?” Case demanded in utterly male exasperation. “Why are you acting like this? Why are you so angry with me? It’s not as though I took off without even leaving you a note.”
Oh, he’d left a note, all right. Go home, and wait for me.
She could still see the scrawled words very clearly in her mind. Just as she could imagine the beautiful redhead with whom she’d been told Case had left the resort. And the look of sympathy in Carmelita’s dark eyes when she’d told Maddie about that mysterious other woman.
“I’m not angry with you, Case,” she said as coolly as she could manage. “I’m rather grateful to you, actually. You saved us both from an embarrassing scene.”
“An embarrassing scene?” he repeated, propping one hand against the trunk of the tree she sat beneath. “You mean, like the one you caused at your restaurant?”
She flushed, but didn’t look away from him. “No. That was, um...you caught me by surprise. I was talking about Cancú. Your note saved me the trouble of telling you myself that I’d changed my mind about marrying you.”
Case’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “What do you mean, you’d changed your mind? You expect me to believe that you wouldn’t have married me even if I hadn’t been called away?”
Called away—what an interesting way of looking at it. She pushed the lingering bitterness to the back of her mind, determined that he wouldn’t hear it in her voice. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I realized that morning that I was making a mistake, letting myself get carried away by...well, by a lot of things. But when it came right down to it, I knew I couldn’t impulsively marry a stranger.”
A thin white line had appeared around Case’s mouth. Maddie focused on it intently. It was easier to look there than to meet his smoldering dark eyes.
“You’re saying this to save face, aren’t you?” he accused her. “You want me to believe you were the one who called it off.”
“Think what you like,” she said with a shrug. “It doesn’t really matter. The important thing is, we didn’t go through with it. Whatever it was...it’s over.”
“The hell it is.”
He spoke with a controlled vehemence that made her instinctively tighten her arms around her upraised knees. She was determined that he wouldn’t see any sign that he intimidated her. The new Maddie Carmichael wasn’t a meek little mouse like the old one had been. But it was hard not to appear intimidated when she was sitting on the ground and he was looming over her, she decided.
She pushed herself to her feet and faced him
squarely. “It’s over,” she repeated. “Face it, Case, there was never anything all that serious between us. It was a vacation romance, for heaven’s sake. An impulsive fling. We never...er...we didn’t even—you know.”
“Go to bed together? You’re right. I can see now that was a mistake.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“If we’d become lovers in Cancú, we wouldn’t be having this argument now. You’d know you belonged to me.”
His airily confident statement made her gasp in outrage. Of all the unmitigated nerve!
What an idiot she’d been in Cancú, not to see the arrogance behind this man’s charm. She’d been so swept away by the sheer romance of the whole situation, so flattered by his single-minded attentions, so besotted with his rugged good looks and overwhelming masculinity that she’d completely ignored the warnings of her better judgment.
She’d actually agreed to marry him! Of course, she’d done so during a hand-in-hand walk on a moonlit beach after an evening of dinner and dancing and subtle seduction. And he’d proposed to her after kissing her until her ears buzzed and her mind was too clouded by desire to conjure even a modicum of common sense. He’d told her he wanted her. Told her he needed her. That he’d been looking for her for a very long time.
She’d been on a plane back to Mississippi, her pride shredded and her eyes red from crying, before it had occurred to her that he’d never once said he loved her.
Those painful memories made her lift her chin and face him without flinching. “I don’t belong to you, Case Brannigan. I don’t belong to anyone.”
He only quirked one dark eyebrow in an expression that made her long to hit him. The old Maddie would never even have considered such a violent, unladylike impulse. The new one was terribly tempted.
She took a deep, steadying breath, determined to settle this maturely and rationally. “Look, Case, I don’t know what you’re doing here, I don’t know what you want from me, but the fact is, you and I are not engaged. We’re practically strangers, for Pete’s sake. What happened between us last year was an...an aberration. Too much moonlight, too many slow dances, too much champagne. We both came to our senses the next morning, and I, for one, would like to keep it that way.”
“I didn’t change my mind the next morning,” Case argued. “I was called away. On business.”
She didn’t quite snort. She thought about it, though.
“As for the rest of what you said, that’s pure bull. And I can prove it,” he added, his hands falling onto her shoulders.
She stiffened and eyed him suspiciously, much too aware of the warmth of his hands through her T-shirt. “I don’t think you—”
“There’s no moonlight now,” he broke in, jerking his chin to indicate the bright afternoon sun. “I haven’t slow-danced in six months, and neither of us has had any champagne.”
“I don’t know what—”
“Just wanted to make that clear before I did this,” he murmured. And then he crushed her mouth beneath his.
Maddie tried to push him away. But somehow, her fingers tangled in his jacket, where they stubbornly remained. She parted her lips to tell him to stop. His tongue swept between them, effectively smothering the words.
And she was lost.
No one had ever kissed her the way Case did. No other man had made her hands tremble, her knees go weak, her mind spin, her skin burn. Until Case had first kissed her six months ago, she’d thought those reactions existed only in fiction. With Case, she’d found the fireworks she’d only ever dreamed of.
She knew without doubt that this was only a mild imitation of the way he would make her feel if they ever progressed beyond kissing.
His hands swept her body, as though reacquainting themselves with her curves, seeking out the changes a strict diet-and-exercise program had wrought. She couldn’t help noticing how thin he felt against her.
She tried to ignore the automatic wave of concern that swept through her. She didn’t want to know what had happened to him, didn’t want to care about how badly he might have suffered. She didn’t want to be standing here, kissing him with the hunger of someone who’d been deprived of nourishment for six long months.
She ripped her mouth away from his and lowered her head, gasping for breath and trying desperately to regain her composure.
“No moonlight,” Case murmured, his voice rough. “No champagne.”
Sometime during the kiss, her bravado had vanished. She closed her eyes and whispered weakly, “Don’t do this, Case.”
She wasn’t sure she could go through this again.
“It’s too late, Maddie. You’re mine. You have been since I bought you that first drink in Cancú. You’d save us both a lot of trouble if you’d just admit it now.”
“I—I...” In a surge of panic, she broke away from him and raced blindly away, toward the safety and the privacy of her home.
She heard Case call her name, heard him curse as he stumbled on the rough path, but she didn’t slow down. She had to put a safe distance between them, had to recover from the effects of that kiss before the next confrontation.
She just couldn’t seem to think when Case kissed her.
* * *
CASE TOOK only two running steps after Maddie before he realized that he wasn’t going to catch her. This time. He stopped with a muttered curse, jerking impatiently at the knot of his tie. Damn it, nothing was going the way he’d planned!
He forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down. Think logically. Okay, so maybe he’d been rather arrogant to assume that Maddie would welcome him with open arms, and that they’d take up exactly where they’d left off six months ago. Truth was, he’d never even questioned that she would wait for him.
It had come as an ugly shock to him to hear that she had been dating someone else. But whoever the guy was, whatever she’d done, she had still responded to Case’s kiss with the same hunger she’d shown in Cancú. Just as he’d felt that same jolt of incredible rightness. A soul-deep recognition that this was the woman he wanted beside him for the rest of his life, no matter how hard she was trying to convince him that she had changed.
Maddie seemed to believe that he’d left Cancú because he’d changed his mind about marrying her. If only there had been time for him to see her, talk to her. She said she’d gotten his note—but obviously, his hastily scrawled message hadn’t been sufficient. He hadn’t been able to contact her during the past six months—first because he’d been too far out in the wilds of Colombia to contact anyone and then because he’d been hospitalized in a foreign country, out of commission and not entirely sure he’d recover enough to marry anyone.
By the time he’d been reassured that he wouldn’t be an invalid, known he needn’t hesitate to find Maddie again, he’d been so impatient to see her that he couldn’t wait for an invitation. He’d tried calling, a week ago. He’d called all the Carmichaels in the area until he’d finally reached someone who’d said yes, Maddie lived there—but she wasn’t home. Case hadn’t wanted to leave a message. He’d decided he would rather surprise her.
He’d done so, it seemed. And received a few nasty surprises, himself.
He could explain everything—if he could ever get her to sit still long enough to listen, damn it.
He told himself that it was really a good sign that Maddie was so angry. Had she been cool and composed, he might have worried. But he’d seen the tumultuous emotions in her eyes, felt them in her kiss. He knew she was no more indifferent to him now than she had been in Cancú.
He would win, simply because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing. Case Brannigan wanted a home, a family. A life.
He fully intended to have those things with Maddie.
* * *
MADDIE WAS CURLED on her window seat, staring blindly at her bare feet, when a brisk knock rattled her bedroom door. “Dinner’s ready,” Aunt Nettie announced, opening the door without waiting for an invitation. “Look at you, girl. Hair all a mess, sti
ll wearing your shorts, no shoes. I want you to put on something decent and brush that hair before you come downstairs, you hear? Hurry up now, everyone’s waiting for you.”
Maddie opened her mouth to say she wasn’t hungry. And then she closed it with a swallowed sigh, remembering the occasion. Unfortunately, there was no way she could graciously get out of the family meal this evening. “All right, Aunt Nettie, I’m coming.”
“And don’t come down looking like a sulled-up possum, either,” her great-aunt replied firmly, in exactly the same tone she’d used when Maddie was a toddler. “Frank spent hours cleaning that mess of greens and basting that ham for your grandpa’s birthday dinner. He’s even made a chocolate cake for dessert. I want you to show him you appreciate his trouble.”
“I will, Aunt Nettie,” Maddie murmured obediently—exactly as she had when she was a toddler.
Nettie nodded in curt satisfaction and closed the door, but not without urging Maddie one last time to “get a move on.”
Maddie changed quickly into a loose-fitting, red knit dress and ran a brush through her hair. She slid her bare feet into comfortable black flats, hoping Nettie wouldn’t notice that she wasn’t wearing stockings. Nettie Bragg, Mike Carmichael’s eighty-year-old paternal aunt, was bossy, opinionated, tactless and impatient. But Maddie loved her dearly.
She paused to pull a brightly wrapped present out of her closet before heading downstairs. Today was Grampa Carmichael’s eighty-ninth birthday and the evening would be a festive one. Maddie had no intention of allowing Case Brannigan to ruin that for her. She would simply put him out of her mind, she told herself as she marched downstairs toward the sounds of chattering voices drifting from the dining room. She wouldn’t even think about Case Brannigan for the rest of the...
And then she saw him. Case was standing in the dining room, surrounded by her obviously avidly curious family. He met her eyes and smiled, looking as though he planned to stay right where he was for the rest of the evening.
So much for putting him out of her mind, she thought with a mental groan.