by Cara Colter
“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “It smells good.”
She could tell it was not easy for him to accept her offer, but obviously, like her, he knew he had to just try and make the best of an awkward situation.
He went by her, and his scent overrode that of the potpie in the oven. He smelled of wet oilskin, wild horses, pure man, and his aroma enveloped her. And then he was gone. Amy waited until she heard a door down the hallway snap shut before she went and sank down on her knees beside her baby. She was aware her knees were trembling.
The wrong house?
Her clothes, her partially unpacked suitcase, were spread out on Ty Halliday’s bed!
It all seemed as if it might be a terrible omen. She had set out on the road this morning to a brand-new life.
She had not listened to the objections of her family or her in-laws.
She was done with the stuffiness of it all. She was done with being stifled. Lectured. Patronized.
This morning, she had felt joy unfurl in her for the first time in a long time. Amy had followed her heart instead of her head.
But where had it led her?
Amy tried to still the trembling of her knees and her heart by picking up Jamey and settling him on her lap.
“Papa?” he asked, a plaintive whisper, his eyes glued to the place where Ty Halliday had disappeared down the hallway.
“No, sweetie, not Papa.” There was no sense telling Jamey, yet again, there was no papa. In all his nearly a year of wisdom, even though his father had been gone for longer than he had been in Jamey’s life, Jamey had become determined to have what his little pals at play school had—a daddy.
“Papa,” Jamey insisted, leaning back into her and putting his thumb in his mouth.
Amy heard the shower turn on in another part of the house and was horrified to feel a heated blush move up her cheeks.
Good grief! She had set out this morning on a mission. To find herself. Her real self. Who she was genuinely meant to be.
She could not let the first obstacle—no matter that he was large and intimidating—make her feel as if she was on the wrong road!
She had to act the part of the confident woman she was determined to become. That woman ran her own business and her own house and was not always flinching from put-downs.
Amy refused to go any further down that road, feeling guilty as always, for acknowledging she might not have been completely satisfied with the life her husband had given her.
Out loud, quietly, she said, “I will not be a schoolgirl who blushes at the thought of a man in the shower.”
But, of course, the man in that shower was not any man.
Could anything prepare a woman for the kind of raw magnetism Ty Halliday radiated?
Could anything prepare a woman for a man who moved with such unconscious grace, as fluid as water, so at home with his own power? Could anything prepare a woman for that kind of pure masculine energy, the kind that felt like a force field around him, sizzling, faintly but alluringly dangerous?
Could anything prepare a woman for the strength that radiated out from under the brim of that soaked hat, from underneath that wet slicker like a palpable force?
The answer was no.
But she reminded herself firmly of her mission.
Tomorrow she would be back on the right road. Tonight she would decorate that tree as her gift to a stranger. She would cook him a hot meal. That was it.
Tomorrow her quest would resume. She was on a journey. She was determined to find out who she really was, and what really mattered. She had lost sight of both things since her marriage.
And Ty Halliday was just an uncomfortable—and brief—detour from that quest. Amy put down her baby and went to rummage through Ty’s ill-equipped kitchen.
Amy made a vow. She resolved not to let his shocking appeal alter her focus. She put Jamey on his blanket surrounded by his toys and checked the chicken potpie she’d put in the oven earlier for their supper.
She frowned. The pie was not cooking properly, and she suspected the oven was not producing the correct heat for the temperature it was set at. She turned it up, and the oven made a protesting noise. The oven seemed decidedly cranky.
“Just like its owner,” she muttered.
“Papa,” Jamey supplied.
“Precisely.” And then she realized she could not start agreeing, even casually, with Jamey labeling Ty as his papa.
“Don’t call him that, sweetie. He’s not your papa.”
“Umpa?”
“No, not your grandpa, either. Call him—” The oven made another noise, and she went and opened the door and peered in. The burner was red-hot and making a hissing sound.
“Oh, damn,” she said, and turned it back down.
“Odam,” Jamey repeated.
“Sure,” she said distractedly, “call him that.”
The oven looked after, and papa renamed something Jamey could pronounce, Amy turned to the salad.
In every place in the world where her family had moved to, Amy, to her career-oriented mother’s bewilderment, had always found sanctuary in the kitchen. She loved to cook.
As she was ripping and washing lettuce, she heard the water shut off in the bathroom and had a renegade thought about naked wet skin and steam.
And then, as if her thoughts were too hot to handle, the smoke alarm started to shriek.
She turned from the sink to see smoke was roiling out of the oven.
Jamey, startled, began to wail along with the smoke alarm.
Amy donned the red oven mitt with the hole burned right through it, and opened the oven door a crack. Just as she had suspected, the potpie had boiled over onto the burner.
She shut the oven off and slammed the door. She opened the kitchen window, and picked up her howling baby.
“Hey. Hey, little man, it’s okay.”
But it wasn’t. Because just then, through the haze of smoke that filled the kitchen, Ty appeared.
Ty scanned the room, every muscle taut. Amy could have sworn he was prepared to lay down his life for her and Jamey, two near strangers. A strange emotion clawed at her throat.
Then, when Ty saw there was no emergency, he stood down. Instantly. He went from ready to relaxed in a second, though a certain level of annoyance marred his altogether too handsome features.
But while Ty relaxed, Amy felt as if her nerve endings were singing with tension. It wasn’t just that he had been prepared to lay down his life for them, either.
No, Ty Halliday was nearly naked, clad only in boxer shorts.
And if the smoke alarm had not been going off before, it certainly would have started now. Because Ty Halliday was nearly naked. Even his feet were sexy!
He was everything she had imagined he would be, only about a hundred times off the scale of where her imagination went to.
His dark slashing eyebrows, the dark shadow of whiskers on his face, had made her think his hair would be dark under the cowboy hat he had worn.
But he was blond, his wet hair the color of antique pieces of gold in a just opened treasure chest.
But the astonishing color of his hair held her attention for only a millisecond. He was lean and strong and his skin was flawless. His arms, corded with muscles of honed steel, were deeply tanned, a color that didn’t go away, apparently, even in these long days of winter. His legs were equally powerful-looking: long, straight, made to curve around a horse, or a bucking bull, or...
She couldn’t go there. Instead, she let her hungry gaze go to his chest, deep and smooth. His shoulders were impossibly broad and his stomach a perfect washboard of rippling, hard muscle. Ty was just way too hot to handle, and as the smoke detector continued to shriek, Amy was aware her own five-alarm fire had started going off deep inside of her.
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br /> She dared look at the boxers. Her mouth fell open.
Ty Halliday was wearing bright red boxer shorts, low, snugged over his flat hips and the taut lines of his lower belly. And what were his red boxer shorts covered with?
Santa, his sleigh and twelve reindeer. She presumed twelve reindeer, because she really shouldn’t count.
She didn’t want to appear too interested, but she could not draw her eyes away until she had read the words that were also dancing across the shorts.
Have you been naughty or nice?
For the second time that day, she started to laugh. She laughed so hard the tears squirted from her eyes.
Or maybe that was the smoke.
Ty folded those gorgeous muscled arms over an equally gorgeous muscled chest, planted his long, muscled legs far apart.
If it weren’t for the shorts, he would definitely have the intimidating presence she was fairly certain he was aiming for.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” he yelled over the screaming alarm, the baby howling and her laughter.
“You don’t?” she gasped.
“No, I don’t,” he said sternly.
“Ty Halliday, you have some Christmas spirit, after all.” She pointed. “You just keep it well hidden.”
CHAPTER THREE
TY followed her pointing finger, unfolded his arms and looked down at himself.
He said three words in a row that made the baby stop yelling for a moment, and stare at him with wide-eyed wariness.
He would have appreciated a little wide-eyed wariness from Amy, but she was smirking mirthfully.
“Oh, my,” she said silkily. “Are you blushing?”
“No.” He folded his arms again, leveled a warning look at her, which she ignored.
“Yes, you are.”
“You’re bluffing. There’s no way you can tell through all this smoke what color my face is. But you can take my word for it, Amy, I haven’t blushed since I was ten or eleven years old.”
Amy. He contemplated that. How had Mrs. Mitchell become Amy so quickly?
Marching by her with as much dignity as he could muster, Ty grabbed a towel from the drawer he had described to her earlier. He went and stood under the smoke detector and flailed at it until the rush of air created by the tea towel infused it with enough fresh air to shut off.
Still laughing, she went across the kitchen, scooped up the baby and covered his tearstained face with kisses. He hiccupped several times, and then stopped crying, abruptly, as if someone had pulled a switch.
The silence was blessed.
“Don’t believe him,” she told the baby. “Nobody stops blushing when they’re eleven. That’s when they start.”
Ty ordered himself not to show the slightest curiosity. But, despite the order, he heard himself saying skeptically, “You remember what made you blush at eleven?”
“Of course.”
He ordered himself not to pursue it. He heard himself say, “And?”
“The cruelty of boys, of course. First bra. The back strap being snapped.”
He did not want to be thinking about her with her first bra. Or any bra at all. But once a man’s mind went to those places it was tougher than wrestling an ornery steer to bring it back in line.
Black and slinky? Red and sexy? White and sporty? He hardened his features as she squinted at him.
“You’re right,” she decided. “I don’t think you are blushing. So, what made you stop blushing at the tender age of eleven?”
He was standing in his kitchen in his underwear, being encouraged to exchange confidences with a perfect stranger. He ordered himself to go get dressed.
Instead, he said, “I was raised by a man, around a family of men, a couple of old ranch hands who were as tough and as hard as two buckets of old nails. The hands seemed to consider it part of their job to educate me, no matter how embarrassing the information they imparted was.
“I was toughened up on incessant teasing, prank-pulling and roughhousing. Those guys considered it their sacred and sworn duty to ferret out any form of weakness in me and snuff it out before it blossomed. Believe me, by the time I was ten or eleven, I’d learned absolute control over my reactions to everything.”
He’d said way too much. She looked horrified and fascinated, as if she had met a man raised by wolves.
Which, of course, was probably not that far off the mark.
So, no, he knew he was not blushing. Though if ever a situation called for embarrassment it was this one!
Ty had just stepped out of the shower when he’d heard the smoke detector going off. He’d gone into rescue mode, some deep instinct he didn’t know he had kicking in. There was a baby and a woman in his house, and if the place was on fire, he had to get them out.
But even in hero mode, he wasn’t running out there naked.
And so he’d opened his bottom drawer—he was into the stuff he never wore because he hadn’t gotten at the laundry for a while—and randomly picked something to shove on.
Now, his adrenaline still pumping, even though it was obvious his house was not on fire and no one needed him to be a hero, he looked down at his choice of attire again.
He said the three words again. Jamey commenced howling.
Amy and Jamey gave him identical looks of accusation, though hers was tempered by that tiny smile that wouldn’t quit, and that kept drawing Ty’s eyes back to the full, luscious curve of her plump bottom lip.
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “You swear instead of blush. Very manly.”
She was being sarcastic!
“There, there,” she said, patting the baby’s plump shoulder. It seemed it would be ineffectual against the tears and hollering, but both subsided almost instantly, and Jamey burrowed deep into his mother’s shoulder.
Then he peered at Ty with yet more accusation, put his thumb in his mouth and took a long pull on it.
“Odam,” he said through his thumb, and then slurped contentedly.
“See?” Ty said approvingly. “It’s what men do. They swear. Your baby just said ‘damn.’”
“He did not swear!” she said indignantly.
“Mild, but still a cuss. Good boy.”
“Stop it. He wasn’t cursing. I think he may be calling on the Viking god.”
“Ha! You’re telling me your baby is versed in Viking mythology?” Ty realized he was enjoying this little interchange.
She shrugged as if it was a possibility. That damned smile was still tickling along the luscious lines of her lips.
“I mean, I’m all for embracing Viking ways,” he said. “No Christmas.”
“Tell your shorts you don’t like Christmas.” She looked as though she was going to start laughing again. Her laughter was one of the nicest sounds he had ever heard. He felt it could be like a drug, making him weak when he needed to be strong.
But even so, a man had to defend himself. “Just to set the record straight, for your information, I didn’t buy these for myself. We do a gift exchange with the neighbors. It’s mostly gag gifts.”
“All right,” she said soothingly, “I get it. Christmas spirit only by accident in the Halliday household.”
He nodded his confirmation. “And just while I’m setting the record straight, his name is Odin.”
She looked baffled.
“The Norse god, worshipped by the Vikings. Odin. Not Odam.”
Her mouth fell open.
He knew he had said quite enough, but he didn’t even bother ordering himself to stop, because he felt as if he couldn’t.
“Also, while we’re setting the record straight, I’m not just some dumb cowboy who fell off the hay wagon yesterday.”
Why was he saying this? She didn’t need to know this!
“I read,” he said, “I read all the time. I read everything I can get my hands on.”
“Have you really read Jane Eyre?”
He wasn’t going to stand here in his underwear making confessions about his reading material. He felt annoyed enough with himself that he had told her something so integral to who he was.
There it was again, his childhood, rising like a ghost. A lonely little boy longing for his mother, reading his pain away despite the fact that he had been teased unmercifully for it. It had never stopped him, though, maybe even driven him deeper into his passion for books.
When he said nothing, her eyes went round. “You have!”
He said nothing, turned on his heel, went into his room and got dressed. If he chose more carefully than normal, he wasn’t admitting that to anyone, least of all not himself.
Dinner was delicious, ambrosia to a man who ate out of a can and a freezer, unless one of the neighbors took pity on him and delivered a casserole. Ty had ordered himself not to say one more revealing thing to Amy, but he needn’t have worried. She didn’t bring up the subject of his reading material.
She had her hands full with the baby. Ty did not have a great deal of experience being around babies, eating, or otherwise.
Ty had no high chair in his house, so the squirming Jamey was on his mother’s lap, seemingly doing his best to dodge the spoon his mother held for him and eat with his hands.
Between food being thrown on the floor to exuberant shouts of “oops” and food being smashed to a chant of “Odam,” the baby kept his mother hopping and Ty thoroughly entertained.
“Wow,” Ty said, when the baby’s bowl was finally empty. “I don’t know if any of that got in his mouth. There’s goo in his ears, eyes and nose, and between his toes, and all over you, but as far as I could see not a single crumb made it to his mouth. Not that he looks undernourished.”
She brushed crumbs off her blouse and shook them out of her hair, then rose, baby on her hip, and began to clear plates.