by Cara Colter
It struck her, as he moved back toward her, his grace and strength unconscious, that Ty had all the ingredients that had made men men since the beginning of time.
As he sat back down, she saw the intensity of his focus in the amazing sapphire of his eyes. She saw him as a warrior, a hunter, a protector, an explorer, a cowboy and a king.
Obviously, changing diapers and dressing wounds had not been in his plan for the day.
But Ty Halliday had no whine in him. No complaint.
What she saw was a stoic acceptance of what it meant to be a man, an unconscious confidence in his ability to rise to any occasion and do what needed to be done, whether that was putting in long hours doing rugged ranch work, or whether it was nursing something—or someone—injured.
The diaper had not been pretty. Neither was her wound.
And yet he did not shirk from either one. She suspected there was very little he would not face head-on.
She was not sure why, but that simple competence left her almost breathless with awe, tingling with a physical awareness of him, and of the space he was taking up in her world.
On the kitchen table that was beside them he again laid things out with the precision of a solider taking apart a familiar weapon. From the first-aid kit he removed individually packaged disinfectant wipes, antibiotic ointment, gauze pads, gauze wrap, scissors, tiny metal clips.
He surveyed the lineup of materials, remembered something, got up and reached into the cabinet above the fridge again. He came back with one more thing.
Amy gasped when he set it down, her awareness of his considerable masculine charm competing with this latest item. At the very end of his line of first-aid items, he had added a very large needle, attached to an even larger syringe.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“Penicillin. Don’t worry about it.” He picked up her hand, cradled it in his. With his other hand and his teeth, he opened a package and removed an antiseptic wipe from it.
She barely registered that. She was not sure she had ever seen such a large needle. She gulped. “You can’t just give a person a needle, you know.”
He swabbed the burn.
“You can’t?” he asked, unconcerned. She watched him as he tore open a second antiseptic wipe with his teeth and cleaned the whole area again. She glanced back at the needle.
“You have to be a doctor.”
“I didn’t know that.” He tossed aside the used wipes, opened the tube of ointment, squeezed some out onto the palm of her hand.
Gently, he smoothed the ointment over the burn.
At any other time, she might have appreciated the gentle certainty of his touch. But she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off that needle, and its place in the lineup.
“Or at least a nurse.”
“I’ve given thousands of needles.” He inspected her hand, and then satisfied, covered the burn with a gauze pad, item number three. The needle and syringe were item number seven and he was making his way steadily toward them.
“Thousands?” she asked with jittery skepticism.
“Literally. Thousands. To cows and horses, but I’m pretty sure the technique is the same. Or similar.”
He took the roll of gauze, item number four, and began to unwind it firmly around the pad in the palm of her hand.
“It isn’t,” she told him. “It’s not the same technique. It’s not even similar.”
“How do you know? How many horses have you given needles to?” He was making a neat figure eight over her burned palm, around her thumb and up her wrist. He went around and around, his movements smooth, sure, mesmerizing.
“Well, none. I haven’t actually ever given a needle to anything. But it just makes sense that giving one to a person and an animal are totally different things.”
She heard a certain shrill nervousness in her voice.
In contrast, his was low and calm. “Don’t worry, Amy, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“On purpose,” she said. “You might by accident.”
He glanced up at her sharply. She had a woozy sense of not being at all sure they were still talking about the needle.
“I’ll try not to.”
No promises, she noticed.
He picked up the scissors, item number five, cut the gauze wrap. She glanced over at the table. He was nearly done.
He picked up the little metal clips, item number six, pulled the end of the gauze wrap firm on top of her wrist and inserted the teeth of the clips into the thickest place on the gauze. He gave his handiwork a satisfied pat.
“You can’t just give a person penicillin,” she said, staring at what remained in his neat lineup on the table—number seven, the syringe and needle. “You need a prescription for it!”
“Okay.”
She eyed him suspiciously. He seemed to acquiesce just a little too easily. She watched narrowly as he methodically repacked the first aid kit. He picked it up, and almost as an afterthought, picked up the huge needle and syringe. He stowed them all back in the cupboard above the fridge.
“Oh!” she said, and let out a huge breath of relief. “You never planned on using the needle! You scared me on purpose.”
“Dressing a burn hurts like hell. I prefer to think of it as a distraction,” he said, and then he smiled.
His smile was absolutely devastating. It took him from stern and formidable to boyishly charming in a blink.
She looked down at her hand. He had distracted her on purpose, and she honestly didn’t know if she was grateful or annoyed by how gullible she was, but the smile made it impossible to be annoyed with him no matter how annoyed she was at herself.
And she realized the syringe and needle had indeed been a distraction. But that distraction had existed in the background. In the foreground had been the exquisiteness of his touch, his strength so tempered by gentleness, that pleasure and pain had become merged into a third sensation altogether.
And that third sensation scorched through her, more powerfully than the burn.
It was desire.
She wanted to kiss him again. Harder this time. Longer.
She had to get away from here. She was just in the baby stages of getting her life back in order. This was no time for kissing and all the complications that kissing could bring.
She’d known this man less than twenty-four hours. What was she thinking? The truth? She wasn’t thinking at all. She was falling under some kind of spell, an enchantment that had been deepened by tasting him, and then by the drugging sensuality of his easy smile.
He had a tea towel in his hand now. “Sorry. I don’t have a real sling. I’ll improvise with this.”
“I don’t need a sling!” Imagine how close to her he’d have to get to put that on!
“It’ll be better if we immobilize your hand. If we don’t, you’ll be surprised by how often you want to use it. You could just try it for today.”
“But I won’t be able to drive if my arm is in a sling.”
His gaze slid away from her before he turned back, opened his palm and held out two white pills.
“You generally need a prescription for these, too. We’re a long way from an emergency ward here. We take some liberties.”
“I really won’t be able to drive if I take those.” Or, she added to herself, keep my head about me.
“No, you won’t.”
“Then I’d better not.”
“Ah, well, there’s something I have to tell you. The driveway isn’t passable. I’m going to turn on the radio and see what the roads are like, not that it really matters if you can’t get out of the driveway.” He glanced to the window. “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s snowing again.”
Her eyes drifted to the window. Snowing again was an understatement. The window looked as i
f it had been washed with white paint, the snow beyond it was so thick light could barely penetrate. She felt panic surge in her.
This terrible wave of affection had been building in her since he had changed Jamey. Shamefully, it had grown even more when he’d said he disliked her husband.
That sensation of someone having her back had deepened the emotion she was feeling for him.
And now that he had dressed her hand so gently, with such skill, distracting her from the pain, she felt a terrible danger from the desire that was beating like a steady pulse at the core of her being.
“You can’t possibly mean I can’t get out of here!” She knew she was saying it like it was his fault. She knew it wasn’t.
His silence was answer.
“But for how long?” she asked, her voice shrill with desperation.
“It won’t be long,” he said in a tone one might use trying to divert a small child from having a temper tantrum. She was done with his diversions.
“That isn’t a real answer.”
“I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t have a real answer.”
“If you were going to guess?” she pressed him.
He hesitated. “I’d say tomorrow. If it stops snowing in the next hour or so I can get the driveway plowed by then. I’ll put on the radio and get the weather forecast.”
“I’m trapped,” she whispered.
“Well, not limb-in-leg-hold-trap trapped, but not-going-anywhere-today trapped.” He sounded just a little tongue-in-cheek. He clearly did not understand the gravity of this situation!
Her new life, her new plan for herself was being threatened by him. It was being threatened and she had been here less than twenty-four hours. She’d kissed a man she barely knew and wanted to do it again.
What kind of mess would she be in forty-eight hours from now?
Maybe she would be ripping off his clothes and chasing him around the kitchen. Not that she was that type.
Good heavens, she had never been that type.
But she was well aware that the “type” she had been—pleasing other people in the hope they would play their role in her fantasy of the perfect home and family—had not brought her one iota of happiness. Not one.
That realization left her wide-open to being pulled down the road of temptation.
“But there could be an emergency!” she said, knowing there had to be a way out of here if the stakes were high enough.
“An emergency? What kind of emergency?”
The thought that there might be an emergency of the magnitude that he could not handle seemed to take him totally by surprise.
“Like a medical emergency. Not a little burn, either. What if something happens to Jamey? What if he gets sick and has a temperature of one hundred and three? What if he fell down the steps and broke his neck?”
Ty rocked back on his heels and regarded her with just a trace of exasperation. He held out the white pills. “If you don’t take these, I think I might,” he said, his tone dry.
“You have to think of the possibilities!”
“No, I don’t. There are millions of possibilities. That is way more thinking than I care to do. The phone is working. The power is on. We have heat and food. We could probably get a helicopter in if a real emergency happened. It won’t.”
“How can you know that?” She was slightly mollified that they could get a helicopter in, even as she was aware the real danger she needed to escape was something else entirely.
He shrugged. “I just know.”
And, despite herself, she believed him. He knew his world inside out and backward. He trusted himself in it and that made her, however reluctantly, trust him, too. She was the wild card in all this, not him. Imagine her, Amy Mitchell, being a wild card.
Still, taking the pills seemed like it would threaten her control just a little too completely, so she pushed them aside just as the phone rang.
He got up and got it. He listened for a moment, and then without a word, brought her the receiver. The line of his mouth was turned downward, and he raised an eyebrow at her.
How could it be for her?
Puzzled, she took it.
“Amy, what is going on? Are you with a man?”
Ah. The miracles of modern technology. Yesterday, when her cell phone had not worked, she had called from here. The number must have come up on her mother-in-law, Cynthia’s, caller ID unit.
“Hello, Cynthia. Please calm down, everything is fine.”
“What do you mean everything is fine! And do not tell me to calm down in that snotty tone of voice, young lady. You have my grandson and you are with a man. Who is that man?”
Somehow, everything Amy was running from was in that strident tone. Judgment. Lack of trust. Disapproval.
“He’s—” Amy glanced at him. The explanation seemed complicated. And would confirm every single thing Cynthia already thought. Amy really wasn’t ready to admit she had lost her way yet, especially not to her supercritical, always ready to pounce mother-in-law. If towels not folded correctly could bring that pinched look of pained forbearance, how much worse was this going to be?
Amy took a deep breath and turned away from Ty so she didn’t have to see his reaction to what she was about to say. “I’m having trouble with the laundry. He’s the washer repairman.”
“How come the washer repairman is answering the phone?” Cynthia asked, her voice shrill and full of suspicion.
“Uh, how come he answered the phone? Uh—” And suddenly, Ty was standing in front of her. He held out his hand.
It would be downright cowardly to give him the phone and let him handle her mother-in-law.
She looked into his eyes, saw the man she was trusting with her life and the life of her baby, and surrendered the phone.
He took it and winked at her. Winked!
“This is the washer repairman,” he said, his voice solemn. “We are having an emergency. Brown blotches. It’s not a good time to talk.”
And then he hung up the phone, crossed his arms and gazed at Amy.
“She’s going to phone right back,” Amy warned him.
The phone started to ring.
Ty reached behind Amy’s back and pulled the plug from the wall.
There was so much he could say. But he didn’t. And there was so much she could say, but she didn’t, either.
She giggled. And then giggled again.
He smiled, and then he laughed. His laughter was possibly the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. It was rich and clean and without any kind of mockery in it. No reprimand about lying. No advice about how to handle her pushy mother-in-law.
The laughter flowed out of him, like water tumbling over rocks, and suddenly with absolutely no warning a sweet feeling of absolute freedom filled Amy.
For the first time since she had married Edwin, Amy did not feel trapped at all. She savored the irony of that. She was trapped, really, by all the snow.
“You know what, Amy?” Ty finally said, wiping at his eyes. “I think it’s time to have some fun.”
“No offense,” she said, wiping at her eyes, too, “but you don’t look like you know that much about having fun.”
His eyes went to her lips and locked there. That slow smile played across the sinfully sensuous line of his mouth.
He moved very close to her. His lips were so close to her ear, she could feel the heat of his breath on her skin.
“I guess,” he growled, “that would depend on how you defined fun.”
CHAPTER FIVE
AMY was staring at him, and Ty could tell she was actually holding her breath, waiting for him to suggest something really fun, and perhaps a little naughty, like maybe tasting each other’s lips again.
And while that would definite
ly be fun, the repercussions of such foolishness—even allowing the thought into his brain for three or four red-hot seconds—seemed truly dangerous.
Besides, he could tell she was not that kind of girl. But he could also tell it probably wouldn’t take much of a shove to move her in that direction.
She was impossibly uptight, and when a string was pulled that taut, it was the easiest thing in the world to break. Plus, he had sensed something in that kiss that had made him pull back sharply from it.
Hunger. Raw and powerful. Had it been all his? Or had there been plenty of hers, too?
So, no, tempting as it might have been to follow the road that had opened up when she had kissed him, he had something else in mind for fun. He wasn’t taking the low road. For goodness’ sake, she had decorated a Christmas tree for him. Having any kind of naughty fun with her would be like fooling around with one of Santa’s elves.
No, with the baby looking on a PG rating would be the best thing for everyone.
“The most fun a person can ever have on this earth?” he asked her, adding to himself at least in the wholesome category.
“Yes?” she breathed.
“Playing with a horse.”
“Oh.” She definitely looked disappointed. There was a wildcat in her waiting to be unleashed, and Ty wasn’t quite sure if he envied or pitied the man who was going to be the one to unleash that.
“I’m actually, er, terrified of horses.”
“I kind of figured.” He watched her fiddle nervously with the dressing around her hand.
“What?” Her head flew up. “How would you figure that?”
“Hmm, let’s see. You’re scared of your car getting stolen and your house being broken in to. You’re petrified of needles. Being snowed in has opened a whole world of dreadful possibilities that you never even considered before. And you’re terrified of whoever that was on the phone.”
“My mother-in-law.”
He wondered if she was still Amy’s mother-in-law since the husband was dead, but decided now was not the time to debate the technicalities of it.
They were stuck here together.
What if taking the high road meant he could show her one small thing? She had given him that Christmas tree. What if he gave her something in return?