by Linda Howard
When he stopped laughing, he propped on his elbow and looked down at her, leaning over her a little, and abruptly her heart stopped melting and began thumping hard inside her chest. Probably it was the light making his expression look like something it wasn’t, but right there, right then, she thought he was looking at her as if he wanted to eat her up.
Tension made her mouth go dry. She wasn’t the most experienced woman on the planet, but she instinctively knew that expression even if no man had ever before turned it on her. It was a completely male, sexual, predatory, hungry look that both lured her closer and at the same time made her want to run. This kind of sexy look was a trap, because it would make any woman melt from its toe-tingling, butterfly-inducing intensity.
She knew better than to fall for that; Dare wanted sex, but even though he’d saved her life and she owed him big time, she didn’t think she could handle going where he apparently thought this was going. She didn’t think he was thinking about her owing him; he was a man, so more than likely he wasn’t thinking about anything other than just sex. But if she had sex with him while she was thinking about owing him, then that put her in the category of prostitute, using her body to pay a debt. Then there was the big letdown that sex always was, the buildup that led to a fizzle. No matter how she looked at it, having sex was a bad idea.
“Don’t even think about it,” she warned.
His eyebrows went up, and he made a derisive sound in his throat. “You’re about two years too late,” he returned.
Two years? Startled, she gaped at him. “What?”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Tell me about your dream.”
Dream? What dream? Completely distracted, she shook her head, then belatedly realized that her dream might be a good way to distract him, because there was nothing admirable about her wedding.
“Fine.” She dropped her arm and glared at him, squarely meeting his gaze and ignoring the rugged attractiveness of his stubbled face. His expression didn’t change; he didn’t try to hide who he was and what he wanted. “I dreamed about mud and bears and wedding cake icing.”
His eyebrows did that quirking thing again. “Icing?” He blinked, and she could tell he was trying to connect a wedding cake to the bear.
“I was drowning in it. Mud at first, then it turned to icing.” She scowled at him. “You know I got married a few years back, right?” They lived in a small community. Everyone pretty much knew everything about everybody else, at least the pertinent information, though some details were less well known than others. Her dad had been at her wedding, of course, and had comforted and supported her afterward, but he’d never said what he’d told Harlan or anyone else once he got home, and she’d never asked.
“I heard you were supposed to, but something happened.” A cautious note entered his rough voice, as if he thought she’d been ditched at the altar, or something like that.
“I had it annulled.”
Surprise flickered in his eyes. “Annulled, huh?” An annulment wasn’t like a divorce; you could pretty much get a divorce for anything. Even something as simple as liking different colors could be the basis for incompatibility, but an annulment had very specific legal requirements.
“A divorce would have been easier,” she admitted grimly. “Even my lawyer advised me to just get a divorce, and he was right. But I was so … I just wanted it to be erased, as if it had never been, and there was no reasoning with me.”
He snorted. “You, unreasonable? Fancy that.” But there was no nastiness in his tone, just dry amusement.
He touched a fingertip to her cheekbone. Surprised, Angie put her hand up, and to her consternation discovered the damp track of a tear. Furiously she wiped it away. Crying over this, even getting just a little teary, would be so stupid. “Don’t pay any attention to that,” she ordered brusquely. “It’s nothing, and I’m not crying.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. And if I did, it would be because I’m so angry at myself, and embarrassed. I was an idiot.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing earth-shattering. That’s what makes it so embarrassing.”
He waited in silence while Angie sorted through all the anger and hurt feelings and sheer irrationality she still felt whenever she thought about the subject. Finally she fixed her gaze on the ceiling and firmed her lips.
“I’ve never been much of a girlie-girl,” she confessed. “I never knew how. You know—the makeup, the fussing with hair, all that stuff. It wasn’t like Dad could teach me any of that, and really, when I was a teenager, I wasn’t all that interested anyway. Even though I did more of it when I lived in Billings, I wasn’t—I’m still not—certain if I was doing it right and looked okay. But for my wedding I wanted to be pretty, I wanted my hair and makeup to be perfect.”
Exposing her uncertainty made her cheeks turn hot. She knew she wasn’t a beauty queen, but she wasn’t unattractive, either. Normally she didn’t give her looks any thought at all, beyond brushing her hair and using moisturizer with sunscreen. Admitting all of that to a man—to Dare Callahan, specifically—was still uncomfortable.
“How come your mom wasn’t around to teach you stuff like that?” he asked bluntly. “I don’t think I ever heard anyone say, not even Evelyn French, and that woman can talk the ears off a donkey.”
Despite her embarrassment, Angie had to grin. Anyone who ever set foot in the hardware store learned exactly how much Evelyn liked to talk. “Then she must never have got up enough nerve to ask Dad about it, otherwise she’d have told it. It’s no big deal. I don’t remember my mother. She left Dad and me before I was two. She had some sleaze she was cheating on him with, and I guess she liked the sleaze more than she liked being with us. So she left.”
His eyes narrowed. “That sucks.”
“It could have,” she agreed. “I can’t say I haven’t wondered what it would have been like if she’d stayed. But at the same time, Dad was great. He never talked bad about her, and when I asked he told me what had happened, and left it at that.” She paused. “I went through his papers, after he died, and found their divorce decree. She gave him full custody, signed me away, and I guess never looked back, because she never tried to see me or contact me in any way. I’ve returned the favor.”
“Pissed you off, huh?” His full attention was on her face, as if he wanted to catch every nuance of her expression. What? Did he think she was all messed up because her mother had abandoned her?
She started to deny it, then stopped herself. “In a way. I don’t feel traumatized, because I don’t remember her at all, but I think Dad must have been more torn up about it than he ever let on to me. That pisses me off, on his behalf. And, looking back, I wonder if he never dated much because he was so focused on taking care of me. It can’t be easy for a man, for anyone, to suddenly be left with the sole care of an infant.”
“I’d sure as hell panic,” he observed.
“Bull,” she scoffed. She had no doubt he’d handle it. He wasn’t someone who panicked, he was a man who got the job done, regardless of what the job was. “Anyway. She was a quitter, and I guess you can say it affected me in that I won’t let myself be a quitter. I don’t want to be like her.”
“You aren’t,” he said after a brief pause, his rough voice quiet. “You’re not a quitter.”
For some reason, hearing him say that made her throat feel thick, as if she was about to get teary. Horrified at the thought, she cleared her throat. “That’s enough of that. Do you want to hear about my wedding, or not?” she asked, scowling.
“Yeah, I do. We kind of got sidetracked.”
“You mean you did. I was telling you what happened when you went off on a tangent.”
“I was curious. So shoot me. Back to your makeup and hairdo for the wedding.”
She gave him a warning squint and considered refusing to say anything else, but what the hell, she’d already gotten this far, she might as well finish.
“I hired someone to
do my hair and makeup, because I knew I couldn’t manage it. Getting ready took hours. But when she was finished, I looked good. I looked even better than I’d hoped, and I was so happy. I thought he’d be—”
“He, who?” Dare interrupted. “Does the asshole have a name?”
“Todd,” she said, then stopped, struck by the fact that Dare had automatically assumed the man she’d married was an asshole. “Todd Vincent. He wasn’t … I mean, he kind of was, but I completely overreacted.”
“Overreacted to what?”
She sighed and resumed her inspection of the ceiling. “He pushed cake in my face. Not a small piece, either, but a huge chunk that was covered in thick icing. It went up my nose, it was in my eyes … and he laughed when he did it.” Everyone had laughed, but she didn’t feel it was necessary to elaborate on that detail.
“The bastard,” Dare said blandly.
He was going to make light of it, like everyone else had. He was going to tell her that she’d definitely overreacted. The bad part was that she knew she’d been unreasonable, and as a result she’d broken up with and ended her marriage to someone who was essentially a good man, someone she’d loved—all because of her wounded ego. But Dare didn’t say anything else, and after a minute she continued.
“We’d discussed it beforehand. I don’t like the cake-in-the-face thing anyway, I don’t think it’s funny, and I especially didn’t want my hair and makeup to be ruined. I asked one thing of him on our wedding day, which was don’t smack me in the face with wedding cake. He agreed. He promised. Was that too much to ask?” Angie heard her voice rising and didn’t even attempt to rein in her indignation. “Apparently it was, because instead of sticking with the agreement he shoved that piece of cake in my face and ground it in, and I started crying and yelling at him, and then I ran out. He followed and tried to apologize, but I wouldn’t listen. Dad tried to comfort me, but I asked him to just please get me out of there, so he did. The next day I filed for an annulment.
“Todd tried to talk me out of it. He apologized over and over. All of my friends tried to tell me to settle down, that he didn’t mean anything by it, but I wouldn’t listen, and pushed my lawyer to get the annulment done in record time.” She took a deep breath. “And then I realized what a fool I’d made of myself over something so minor. I’d hurt a good man, humiliated him and myself, thrown away my marriage—”
“Bullshit,” said Dare.
Taken aback, Angie stared at him. “What?”
“He broke his word.”
“Yes, but—”
“That isn’t minor. And you didn’t love him.”
“I did,” she said, but surprised herself with the uncertainty in her tone that even she could hear.
Dare snorted. “No you didn’t. If you’d loved him you’d have explained away his bad judgment, wiped the cake off your face, and gone on with the party. If he’d loved you, he wouldn’t have broken the agreement in the first place. All in all you’re better off that it ended then, because from where I sit it seems pretty clear that it would’ve ended eventually no matter how hard you tried to make it work. You deserve better.”
“I could have handled it so much better—”
He gave an impatient shake of his head. “You weren’t wrong. You did what you knew was right, so forget it and move on.”
“Thank you, Dr. Phil,” she said sharply, but without anger, because she was too startled by his assessment. Even more startling was that he didn’t think she’d gone off the deep end when, hell, even she thought she had. And he’d said that Todd had poor judgment. She was so taken aback that she couldn’t even think about it right now; she’d save that for later. Much later.
A wry smile turned up one corner of his mouth. “I do have my talents. So, what else?”
“What else?” Wasn’t that enough? She’d just told him the most embarrassing episode of her life and he wanted more?
“The dream, sweetheart. What else happened in the dream.” He made a rough sound, deep in his throat. “I’ve heard all about your wedding that I care to, and cake wasn’t all you dreamed about. You mentioned mud and the bear.”
Reorienting herself took a minute. She had to mentally pull herself away from her wedding and back to the hellish scene when the storm broke. “Yeah, cake, and mud, and that freakin’ bear.”
“Where was I?”
“Nowhere in my dream,” she retorted. Not this time, anyway.
“Too bad.”
“There’s nothing much to tell. Like I said before, I was drowning in the mud, and then it turned into icing. I was caught in it, couldn’t get free, and the bear was coming … enough said about that.”
He heaved himself up, stretched out a long arm to snag two bottles of water from the floor. Twisting one open, he handed it to her, then opened the other for himself. Angie pushed herself to a sitting position and drank. She hadn’t thought about being thirsty, but the water was unbelievably good. Maybe she’d put too much salt and hot sauce in her bowl of stew.
“What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “Close to midnight. We’ve slept about five hours.”
She hoped they weren’t caught up on sleep, because there were some long hours between now and daylight, and she didn’t want to lie awake all that time in the dark with a half-naked Dare right beside her. Sleep was better, less risky.
Tilting her head, she listened to the rain. It didn’t seem to be quite as heavy as before, but it was still steady, and until it stopped and the flash floods had subsided, she and Dare would inevitably be having more of these too-intimate conversations. There was something about being enclosed in this small space, safe and dry, that freed her tongue. On the other hand, she couldn’t really regret any of the personal things she’d told him.
He couldn’t know what it meant to her that he understood what she’d done—and she would never, ever tell him.
She capped the bottle of water and set it aside, then to her surprise was overtaken by a huge, jaw-popping yawn. She covered it with her hand, then blinked at him. “Sorry. You’d think I’d have caught up on my sleep by now.”
“Takes a lot to make up for something like what you went through. I could use another few hours myself.” He capped his own bottle, then reached down to turn off the lantern. Plunged into total darkness, Angie stretched out again and snuggled under the sleeping bag. A warm, muscled arm circled her waist, tugged her back until she nestled snugly against a very hard chest. He nuzzled her hair aside, lightly kissed the back of her neck, and murmured “Sweet dreams” in a voice that already sounded a little drowsy to her.
Her eyes popped open, straining wide against the darkness. After kissing her like that, he expected her to go to sleep? She could still feel the slightly moist heat of his breath, the barely there pressure of his firm mouth, as intensely as if he’d branded her instead of kissing her.
Abruptly her breasts were aching, and she caught herself pressing her thighs together to contain and relieve the tightening she could feel deep inside. No. Oh, no. She wasn’t going there. No matter how he kissed her she wasn’t going to let her own body sabotage her resolve.
She tried to find some anger she could use to bolster herself, but there simply wasn’t any. Instead, she had to admit that sleeping beside him was sweeter and more seductive than anything she’d ever done.
She was in deep, deep trouble.
Chapter Twenty-three
It was still raining. Angie pondered that awful fact for a moment, then pushed it away, because there was nothing she could do about it. She sat up, yawned, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and said to Dare, “If you don’t have coffee, I may have to kill you.”
He opened one vivid blue eye, surveyed her in silence for a moment, then muttered, “Hell, I believe you.”
“So?”
“So I guess I’ll get up and make you some coffee.”
“Good deal.” She’d been pretty sure he would have coffee; he had a percolator, didn’t he? Bu
t there had been the chance he’d kept the percolator up here only for his clients, and that he was some kind of unnatural creature who drank only water.
He stretched his long body, his arms banging against the partition wall and the sleeping bag sliding to the side. She had to swallow a sudden rush of moisture in her mouth; he looked both disreputable and delicious, with a beard that was about forty-eight hours past being a five o’clock shadow, and sleep-mussed dark hair. Angie deliberately looked away from the play of muscle, instead focusing on the more mundane, such as the tiresome need to take care of physical matters.
Maybe she could put some weight on her ankle today, which would make the trip outside so much easier. She eased her right foot from under the sleeping bag and surveyed it. Her toes still looked a little swollen, but not much. Very carefully she wiggled them, just to see if she could. That felt okay, so she wiggled them some more. “If my ankle was broken, would wiggling my toes hurt?”
“I don’t know. I’ve broken my arm, three ribs, a collarbone, my nose, and cracked my kneecap, but I’ve never broken an ankle.”
She turned to look at him, frowning. “Are you accident prone?”
“I prefer to think of it as adventurous. I broke my nose when I was eight, trying to jump my bicycle over a ramp.”
“It doesn’t look as if it’s been broken.” And it didn’t. The bridge was perfectly straight.
“Kids heal better than adults. The ribs were broken when a horse kicked me when I was fourteen. The cracked kneecap was a football game. The broken arm and collarbone were a training accident.”
“What happened?”
“It was a climb. The guy above me lost his grip and fell, and took me and another guy with him.”
