"What kind of damn fool walks away from a woman as beautiful as you, who can make beef barley soup that tastes like heaven?"
She stared at him, heat soaking through her at his words. She didn't want to think about the first part so she focused on the second. "I thought you hated the soup. You barely tasted it."
He raised an eyebrow. "Are you kidding? I wanted to stick my face in the bowl and just inhale the whole thing, but I figured that would probably be bad manners in front of the girls. After they're in bed, though, I might just have to dish up another bowl."
Nate Cavazos was a complicated man, she decided. Not as easily pegged as Jason or any of the other men she had known.
"That's beside the point. The question is, why the divorce?"
None of your damn business, she wanted to say. It was nothing less than the truth and was exactly what she should have said and what she intended to say when she opened her mouth. But somehow completely different words came out.
"Turns out, if a man cheats on you when you're college sweethearts, he's probably not going to change after you're married."
It had only been that one time, Jason had claimed. He had been drinking, she had been a sorority girl who came onto him. That had been the only time she had known about in college. She had stupidly taken him at his word when he said it was a one-time fling and meant nothing. If she had listened to her gut, she could have avoided so much pain later.
"He must be an idiot, then," Nate said now. "But at least you didn't have to drag any children through the mess of a divorce."
Her throat closed and she fought the instinct to cover her abdomen. Nate didn't need to know everything.
"Lucky, wasn't it?" she said, then cleared her throat, hoping he didn't hear the slightly ragged note in her voice. "Anyway, that's all in the past. I've completely moved on. Jason had nothing to do with my decision to come to Hope Springs for the holidays."
"Then why are you here?"
None of your damn business, she almost said again, but refrained. "Work. My mother died in September. She was…the only family I had left and I didn't want to face the holidays without her in the midst of all my friends and familiar surroundings. I needed a change."
"I guess you found that. Idaho blizzards are certainly out of the norm."
"True enough. I didn't expect quite the adventure I've discovered so far, but it hasn't been all bad."
"Well, thanks again for everything you did today. I should have decorated the tree weeks ago, not left it this late."
"The girls and I enjoyed ourselves."
"I could tell. A little too much, maybe." He made a rueful face. "I'm going to be taking down decorations until Valentine's Day."
"Take everything down now, if you hate it so much," she retorted sharply.
He looked baffled by her sudden attack, as well he should be, she thought. It had been unprovoked and unnecessary. Just say good-night and push him out the door, she thought.
"Did I say I hated any of it?"
"Not in so many words, maybe. But it's obvious you're not happy with how the girls and I spent our day."
He looked at her as if she were crazy. She felt a little crazy, and tired and out of sorts. She should have just kept her big mouth shut.
"Why do you think I don't like the decorations? I said thank-you, didn't I? I'm pretty sure I did."
Just go, she thought. "You did. I'm sorry. I'm just tired and cranky. It's been a long day following an…unsettled night."
There it was. The reason she was upset. She hadn't slept much, too stirred up by that moment when he had nearly kissed her—when she had desperately wanted him to, something she hadn't admitted until right this moment.
Suddenly the tension in the cabin ratcheted up a notch and when she finally looked up, she was afraid he could read her thoughts. He was staring at her mouth, his eyes intense, half-closed in a sexy sort of way.
"Well, good night," she finally said, about five blasted minutes too late, but even to her own ears, her voice sounded thready, smoky, even, and an instant later—before she could even think to take a breath—he stepped forward in one smooth, determined motion and captured her mouth.
She froze in shock. He smelled of the cold, like pine trees drooping with snow, but the heat of his mouth on hers made an arousing contrast. He tasted of coffee and her soup and the sweet aftertaste of the girls' sugar cookies.
And something else, something male and sexy and indefinably Nate.
She didn't intend to kiss him back. She slid her hands to his chest, fully intending to push him away. Instead, she suddenly found her fingers curled into the soft weave of his shirt beneath his unzipped coat. She could feel the enticing heat of him and she wanted to sink into it, into him.
With a soft little sound, she opened her mouth to his, all the curiosity and disappointment of the night before forgotten in a moment as that heat curled through her and wrapped around them both.
She didn't know how long they stood inside her cabin, their mouths tangled and the world outside her door forgotten. She only knew it had been entirely too long since she had felt this clutch of desire, this churn of her blood, the heat and wonder from a kiss that completely stole her breath and her reason in one fell swoop.
He was the one to break the connection. One moment he was there, hard and muscled and male, then next he was taking a step away from her and cold rushed in to take the place of all that heat.
They gazed at each other for a long moment, the only sound in the cabin their ragged breathing and the whir of the electric fireplace.
Finally he shook his head just a little, as if he couldn't quite believe what had just happened.
"Don't say anything," she said, her voice low as her cheeks flamed with embarrassment and lingering desire. She had never responded to a man with such instantaneous heat. "That should never have happened."
"No?"
"No! We're…You don't even like me."
"I wouldn't say that, exactly," he drawled.
What would he say, exactly? She didn't want to know, she told herself. "It was a mistake. We're both tired and the day has been…eventful. Let's both just pretend it didn't happen and move on."
"Right." His tone was skeptical, but he reached for the doorknob.
Emery thought of her mother, always scrupulously polite and well-mannered, the perfect hostess and law firm partner's wife. She tried to adopt the tone Catherine had perfected. "Thank you for walking me back. Good night."
He still looked somewhat dazed and she was almost certain his gaze dipped to her mouth again, but he only turned the knob.
"You can pretend all you want, I suppose," he finally said. "Good luck with that. But I have to tell you, I'm a pretty basic kind of guy. I'm afraid my powers of imagination won't stretch quite that far. I don't think I'll be forgetting it anytime soon."
He left before she could offer any sort of reply to that and she closed the door after him, wondering how one man could be so full of complications.
She pressed two trembling fingers to her mouth, to the heat and taste of him that still lingered there.
Good heavens, the man could kiss. For a brash, abrupt soldier, he had seduced her lips with consummate skill.
She hadn't been this attracted to a man in…well, ever. Yes, it had been a while since she had been involved with a man. She hadn't dated since her divorce, too busy first grieving the loss of the cloud castles she had created for her life and then coping with her mother's cancer diagnosis and her fight against the disease that eventually claimed her.
Perhaps that was the reason she wanted to melt in Nate Cavazos's arms like an ice cube tossed onto a sizzling hot engine.
She let out a breath. She wanted to believe her past two years of abstinence were responsible for her reaction to him, but she couldn't quite make herself buy that explanation.
Nate was the most powerfully physical man she had ever known. Men in her world wore designer suits and comfortably talked about the differenc
e between twill and chambray.
Nate was all soldier, rough and dangerous and irresistible.
Some instinctively feminine part of her responded to all that energy, all that heat, and she just wanted to soak it all in. She sighed. It didn't matter the explanation for the unwilling attraction. She simply had to ignore it. In a week, she would be back in her real life and this would all be just a memory.
Mistake or not, she knew their kiss would linger in her mind for a long, long time.
Chapter Seven
He couldn't stop thinking about Emery Kendall and that kiss that had curled his toes.
Twenty-four hours later, Nate stood by the Christmas tree she had decorated in front of the big window, looking at the lights of her little cabin twinkle in the darkness.
Every once in a while, a shape moved past the curtain and he caught his breath, feeling like some kind of a damned voyeur.
That kiss. It had haunted his dreams through the cold night and then seemed to follow him around all day as he had hurried the girls off to school, spent the day at chores and doing a proper job on the hay shed roof, and then hurried into town after school for the parent-teacher conferences he would have blown off if not for a fortuitous call from the school secretary.
He couldn't forget the taste of Emery's mouth, lush and inviting and far more sensually responsive than he might have expected from her.
His insides still clutched with hunger when he remembered that moment when she had curled her hands into his shirt and pulled him closer.
He shook his head at his own ridiculous reaction. He was in serious danger of making a fool out of himself over her. Polished society-type women didn't have the time of day for rough soldiers with the sand of the Middle East still stuck under their fingernails and an entire footlocker overflowing with problems and responsibilities.
He gazed at the reflection of the Christmas tree she had decorated flickering in the window.
He wasn't sure how she had done it, but in a few hours the day before, she had changed the whole mood of the house, brightened it somehow.
She hadn't made any huge changes. No long-forgotten antiques had been dragged out of the attics or anything. But a few little touches lent a warmth and homeyness to the place and seemed to push back the darkness a little.
He hoped the girls sensed it. He wanted to think they had been a little happier, especially Claire. Maybe it was the impending holiday or thinking about Christmas vacation that started in a few days, but he thought she had lost some of that pinched, uptight look around her mouth. After school when he was meeting with her teacher, she had smiled a little more than he was used to and had even laughed a few times on the drive home.
That laugh had stuck in his memory, mostly because he personally hadn't found much of anything amusing after his conversation with Jenny Dalton, the principal of the elementary school and Seth Dalton's wife.
There was another woman who apparently thought he was doing a lousy job taking care of the girls. Oh, she had been kind enough when she gently asked if he needed any help Christmas shopping for the girls.
What, did she think he was going to leave their stockings empty, for crying out loud?
And then she had just as gently asked him if he would mind if she and her daughter Morgan, one of Claire's friends, took her shopping for new clothes during the Christmas vacation.
He looked out at the ranch, his face burning all over again. Apparently, Claire had hit a growth spurt and he had been too busy trying to survive all the changes in his world that he hadn't even noticed. Her parka was a couple inches too short at the wrists and the jeans she told him she and her mother had bought only that summer for back-to-school now looked like floods on her.
While he wasn't paying attention, she was growing tall and slender, just like Suzi had been.
He should have noticed. Instead, someone else had been forced to point out the obvious. A Dalton, no less, even if Jenny was only a Dalton by marriage.
For one dicey moment, he had wanted to tell her to go to hell. But as he watched his oldest niece talking with Morgan and with Tallie, he had been forced to admit she was right. Claire looked like a raggedy urchin and Tallie wasn't much better.
He could afford entirely new wardrobes. Money wasn't the issue, since he had saved virtually all his combat pay the past dozen years and had built a healthy nest egg.
But what he knew about girls' clothing could just about fit inside that dust speck on the inside of the glass.
Under the best of circumstances, shopping wasn't his favorite activity. He had done most of the girls' Christmas shopping online and had found other gifts their parents had left them hidden in the back of the master bedroom closet.
Just the idea of an hour or two at the mall made him break out in a cold sweat.
He didn't miss the irony. He had spent more than a dozen years parachuting into hot spots around the world, packing around seventy pounds of gear as he faced down enemy combatants, constantly aware that he was only a mistake away from going home in a body bag.
But the idea of browsing the shelves of a department store for girly stuff made his palms itch and the hair on the back of his neck prickle.
He needed help. That was the hard, nasty truth, and was most of the reason he stood here gazing out at Emery's cabin and trying to gather his nerves.
Some things a man just wasn't qualified to handle on his own. If Joanie hadn't taken off, he would have dragged her into this. And if Jenny Dalton wasn't married to Seth, he probably would have taken her up on her offer.
But Joanie wasn't here and Jenny wasn't a viable option. He knew what he had to do. His gaze flicked again to the light coming from the window of the cabin, casting its tiny, warm glow against the December night.
He just needed to suck it up, he supposed, and get to it.
Emery Kendall was the most put-together woman he had ever met. From her tasteful earrings to her endless scarves to the tailored cut of her shirts, it was obvious she knew clothes and accessories. Even after she had spent the other night sleeping on his couch and then had chased two girls around the house decorating and making cookies and soup and otherwise spreading holiday cheer, she had looked composed and beautiful.
She would know just the things Claire needed, and Tallie, as well.
If he could think of anyone else to ask for help, he would do it, rather than have to face Emery again after that stunning kiss.
But he was drawing a complete blank here and didn't know what the hell else to do. Since the only other option was to wing it on his own and spend a day making a complete disaster of things in the girls section of Nordstrom's, he supposed swallowing his pride was a small price to pay.
With a strange mix of resignation and dread, he checked on Tallie and Claire to make sure they were soundly sleeping then shrugged into his coat and headed out into the night.
* * *
How was it possible for one woman to create such chaos in only a few hours?
Emery looked around the cabin and frowned at the mess. Scraps of fabric covered every surface, she had knocked over a box of ribbon spools and had been too busy to pick them up again, crumpled sketchbook pages had been discarded everywhere and the various shears she was forever losing peeked out from the oddest places.
When her creative muse was upon her, she completely lost track of time and space. She always intended to be so methodical, so careful. But then her mind would race with ideas and before she knew it, her workroom ended up in this complete shambles.
The process of decorating the ranch house with Tallie and Claire the day before seemed to have turned on the spigot of her creative juices. Now she couldn't manage to shut them off.
First thing that morning, as soon as she heard the squeal of brakes on the school bus and realized the canyon had been plowed, she had driven into Idaho Falls. The fabric store options were rather limited there, but between what she found and what she had already brought along of her own designs, she had made huge
strides in her plans for the Spencer Hotels project.
She had more than enough for her meeting after Christmas with Eben Spencer and the designer working on his Montana property.
Once she was on a roll, she couldn't seem to stop. She had sewn up a dozen charming ornaments for the rather scraggly little tree she had purchased in town. She had made two tree skirts, one for her little tree and a much larger one for the ranch house, then she had stitched several stockings and now she was throwing together a couple of cloches for the girls.
And she had another idea, one she would have to talk to Nate about. If he agreed, she could give the girls something truly memorable for Christmas. It would take hours of work, just about every available moment she had between now and Christmas, but she was almost positive she could pull it off in the few remaining days.
If he agreed, anyway.
She shouldn't get involved any more than she already was. She knew it perfectly well, but somehow the girls had wormed their way into her heart and she couldn't help wanting to do whatever she could to ease their pain, even just a little.
Ideas and patterns danced across her mind as she went through the comforting, mechanical motions of working the sewing machine, something that had brought her peace since the first little Singer she'd begged for when she was Tallie's age, sewing her own Barbie clothes.
Finally, the ideas were flying at her so quickly she had to move away from the sewing machine and pick up her sketchbook. She had just begun to make a few rough lines on the paper when the doorbell suddenly rang.
Drat. And double drat.
She thought about ignoring it, about returning to this idea that suddenly seemed so ripe with possibilities. But that wasn't really an option, she supposed. Who else would be stopping at her cabin door but Nate or one of the girls? Since Tallie and Claire ought to be in bed this late on a school night, she could only guess it was Nate.
Her breathing seemed to quicken and she couldn't stop thinking about the taste of him and the hard strength of his arms around her, that kiss that had haunted her memory for the past twenty-four hours.
A Cold Creek Holiday Page 8
