by Cait London
“No,” she returned firmly. Jillian tugged her now-warmed feet from his keeping. Somehow Adam understood that too much concentration led to dry, gritty eyes and slowed the creative process. In her first attempts at finishing contracts in lightning-quick time, she’d discovered it was much better to take refreshing breaks than to run herself dry. “I can’t see any creative conversation happening between us.”
She couldn’t have predicted that gentle kiss, either. She didn’t like uncertainty and Adam managed to hand it to her at every turn.
“Well, then. I guess our business is finished, for now,” Adam said. “It’s a long way to the ground, Jillian. I can help you, or you can stay perched up there all day until someone notices you. Or you can be a nice, sensible girl, and let me carry you across the field and tuck you in your car.”
He glanced at a big ram watching them. “That old boy over there isn’t a pleasant sort. We’re not the best of friends yet, but I intend to get to him. For now he’s leaving me alone, but you’re a different matter. It’s only a short distance, Jillian. You’ll be safe with me.”
While Jillian hovered between safety and pride, Adam reached up his arms to her. It was for her to decide to trust him or not. Once she hadn’t hesitated, leaping from the football field bleachers into his arms, trusting him. “Are you certain that ram is dangerous?”
“I’ve got a bruise on my backside that says he is.”
She studied the tilt of his head and the angle of that hard jaw. Her bargaining position wasn’t good. “You’d really leave me here, wouldn’t you?”
He shrugged and the wind caught his hair and his arrogance. In Jillian’s mind, she could imagine his ancestor, Tallchief, standing just like that while he forced his captive bride to do as he bid. According to Tallchief legends, Una hadn’t liked the taming a bit and did a little of her own. But then, Tallchief had stayed in one place with the brood he and Una raised. He’d loved her as deeply as she loved him and both fought for their marriage and home. In those times, their marriage must have had many trials. He made cradles to provide for them, and Una had sold her dowry.
But Adam wasn’t likely to settle in one place for long—
“Fine,” Jillian said dully.
He chuckled at that. “Ask me nicely, Jilly-dear.”
She sighed heavily. Not really asking the question, she plodded through the words as if doomed. “Will…you…please…help…me.”
“Adam,” he insisted softly.
She sighed again and repeated, “‘Adam.”’
She wasn’t certain what she saw in his eyes, just that steely spark, the look of a hunter hitting his mark. “Am I going to owe you for this?”
“I’m certain the fee won’t be too high for a successful businesswoman such as yourself.”
She had a degree in business, but it wasn’t in her heart. She preferred textures and colors and images. “I’m a freelancer now, Adam.”
“Could that be because you don’t want to be tethered to anyone? Maybe we’re alike in that. Maybe there is fear in us, the fear of loving. It can be a dangerous thing, if mishandled.”
She didn’t want to discuss anything with him; his thoughts were too deep, probing at hers. “I wouldn’t call drifting all over the world a freelance occupation.”
She resented reaching out to him, bracing her hands on his shoulders as he lifted her into his arms. “Maybe I’ve had my fill of drifting. Maybe not. I’ve learned to take life as it comes, to flow with it. Put your arm around my shoulder, Jillian,” he ordered gently. “Even through the coat, your shoulder is sharp against my chest.”
Jillian closed her eyes, inhaled, and forced her arm to lift and circle his shoulders. He was so big, too masculine, and uncertainty speared her once more. Adam hadn’t moved as he watched her. Their eyes met and Jillian looked away, afraid that he would see too much.
Adam walked slowly, carefully, across the field. Wrapped in his arms, wearing his coat and surrounded by his scents, it wasn’t a journey she would forget soon. She could feel his warmth and strength. When she glanced at him, Adam’s expression was grim, and on impulse she reached to push her fingers through his wind-blown hair, tethering it from his face.
His warm scalp, the crisp feel of his shaggy hair between her fingers shocked her. She hadn’t expected to want to smooth it, to lock her fingers in it. She slid her hand away, returning it to his shoulder. “So that you can see better. It wouldn’t do for you to misstep and we’d both go down in the mud. You could use a haircut.”
He hesitated in his stride, but didn’t look at her. “I could use a kiss.”
“That’s the price, is it? There always is. But we’re not teenagers any longer, Adam—don’t even think about a higher price.”
Adam’s scowl seared her, as though anger had leaped within him. Then he pushed it into a milder expression. “Sex, you mean? You and I? I’d have to think about that, but if it’s not freely given, with caring and the heart involved, then it means little. One small friendly kiss I might take for a trade, but not a woman’s body.”
The past caught and lingered in the bright morning sunlight. At their first meeting, Adam had accused her of marrying Kevin for his family’s money. The nagging questions leaped at her again. Had she given herself to her husband and her marriage? Or had she been traded? Kevin had taken her as his right and had promptly fallen asleep—
“I’m certain you’ve had plenty of kisses, and women, in your life.” She wished she hadn’t lobbed the words at him, trying to nudge information from him. Why should she care how many women Adam had known, or loved?
“I’ve had kisses, and a woman—one I thought I’d marry. We were friends more than anything. Along the way, she fell in love with someone else, and I had to wonder then if we had ever loved. The pain should have been deeper, but it wasn’t.”
“How do you know that?” She’d felt only relief when Kevin had forsaken their marriage bed. It wouldn’t do for divorce papers to state that his wife was frigid—in Kevin’s mind, that would reflect upon his skill as a lover and damage the macho picture he sought as a young politician.
“I’d had something to compare it with. A girl, a long time ago. She broke my heart. I wonder, at times, if it ever mended enough to let another woman into it.” He nodded and continued to the barbed-wire fence. He placed her on the other side and watched her remove his coat. He didn’t answer her goodbye as she handed it to him. She headed in the direction of the Petrovnas’, and looked in the rearview mirror. Adam stood, legs braced wide, holding the coat and looking as if he’d wait forever.
Jillian rubbed her chest lightly and knew that the ache in her heart was caused by memories that Adam had evoked of a time when they were teenagers. She also noted that he hadn’t pressed his request for a kiss, that the decision had been left to her.
She smoothed her fingertips over the steering wheel and remembered how his hair had felt, crisp and straight, gleaming in the sunlight. A shorter cut, a neat trim wouldn’t suit him, she decided. The shaggy, thick style matched his untamed disposition; he traveled as he wished, and spoke without sparing her. But then, he considered her family to have caused his aunt’s untimely death, didn’t he? It was only logical that he would pose questions to her that might nag and hurt.
She’d wanted to marry Kevin. She’d wanted the dreams that her friends were snatching at the time. She understood him, his motives, how he needed to please his family. It was a desperate need, matching her own. She liked and respected him, and since she’d been raised in a family without love, she hadn’t expected that favor. Had she really sold herself for her family? When Kevin proposed, was she in love with love and not the man? Or did she want to get away from her parents and he was only the opportunity?
Jillian pushed away the ugly thought. She had a great career opportunity and she was on her way to tell her friend.
Adam had nothing to do with her unrest, the questions that kept circling her. “Sex, you mean?” he’d asked. “If it’
s not freely given, with caring and the heart involved, then it means little. One small friendly kiss I might take for trade, but not a woman’s body…. A girl, a long time ago. She broke my heart. I wonder, at times, if it ever mended enough to let another woman into it.”
Who was that woman? What woman could hold Adam’s heart?
The woodstove took the chill off his cabin that night, yet after a hard day’s work repairing fence with Duncan Tallchief, Adam could not rest.
Jillian had cursed his coat and his life, Adam brooded darkly as he brought the coat to his face for the fiftieth time since she had worn it. He picked through the scents to the delicate one that was hers, like a rosebud just waiting to bloom. The scent had curled around him when he was a boy and her amber eyes had filled with him as he had carried her. He could have carried her forever with those eyes looking up at him, wary with a feminine curiosity. Why should he feel such tenderness for her? Why did she feel so precious in his arms?
Why should he want her still? Why did he hang on every word about her? Where was his pride? His anger and his revenge?
He looked at the small, white canvas shoes he’d soaked and cleaned as well as he could. They’d have to be returned in good time, but first he had work to do. Adam flipped open his laptop, prepared the electronic mail that sketched his ideas for Jillian, and signed the message “Sam.”
He was known as “Sam” to boys and girls throughout the world who wrote to him. They had been his family until now, children happy with the toys and stories he created. Now he had Liam, Michelle, J.T. and the rest of the Tallchiefs.
He sat back in the chair, collected one of Jillian’s shoes in his hand and waited as the electronic mail sailed over the telephone lines. Her reply was immediate. “Hi, Sam,” it read. “Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.”
She continued, assuring him that she’d love to meet him and was excited over the toys that she knew delighted children—and some adults, she’d added, causing Adam to smile. She understood his concepts perfectly and he would have rough ideas from her soon.
Adam tapped a return message. “I hope we can get better acquainted through our messages. I’d like to know you better. Sam the Truck is really a very close family with long-term relationships. Please send all ideas to Steve. Our marketing and sales department will consider them with me.”
He tapped her shoe against his palm. Jillian didn’t want any doors opened between Adam and herself, but perhaps she might respond to Sam. Deceptive? Yes. Was he unable to resist? Yes.
Adam located the electronic image Steve had sent him of Jillian’s cabbage rose ad; she had submitted it as a sample of her work quality. Adam traced the layers of the screen roses and shook his head. What was he doing? Asking for more pain? She didn’t believe him about her brother’s crimes or her family’s persuasion of the town to turn against Sarah and himself.
On his feet now, Adam remembered how her light touch on his hair had caused his heart to leap and his senses want to take. Wrapped in his thoughts, he placed his fingers on the prototype of the new Nancy the Flatbed Hauler, rolling the model toy gently back and forth on the table.
Jillian’s fear of men was obvious, and trust wasn’t a commodity they shared for each other. What was he doing? he wondered furiously as he decided to go make friends with the ram. It was safer than thinking about what tangled in the sunlight air earlier between Jillian and himself.
March slid into April, and with the Sam the Truck first contract dollars tucked into her bank account, Jillian finished Silver’s ad. Half frightened that she would fail, she hurried to create new ones for Sam’s approval; Nancy the Flatbed Hauler was set to launch in November, hitting the Christmas buyers just right.
Jillian listened to the early morning birds chirp and wished she could sleep. She tossed in the old bed, comforted by the creaks beneath her. The company had sent her all the previous marketing campaigns with models of the toys. Ideas for the designs kept plaguing her—and then Adam would stroll through them, tall, dark and not at all civilized.
Whatever had made her shove her hands through his hair like that? What was that wild impulse to match him on the most primitive level?
He hadn’t left Amen Flats; in fact, he seemed to be settling in. A visitor at J.T.’s preschool, Adam told impressive stories of the world. According to grocery-store rumor, he made a fine bartender at Maddy’s Hot Spot; he could toss glasses behind his back and catch them in the other hand which already held a bottle ready for pouring. One Ladies Only Night, he’d joined Patty Jo Black, a farm wife, in a sexy duet. There had been more than one feminine heart palpitating as he’d sung an Irish love song.
He wasn’t taking up female invitations, though, and the women wondered how such a virile-looking, charming man could hold his sexual drive in control. Stories flew over the rooftops and through the beauty parlors and zoomed down the grocery store aisles. He was a catch, they said, a good-looking, single Tallchief male on the loose. They wondered what cruel witch had taken his heart and scarred it.
Jillian had never been in a country tavern, and she certainly wasn’t trying Ladies Only Night while Adam was helping the bartender there. She’d heard that lemonade was served and the painting of the nude woman was draped in a sheet during the special night. No stories of intelligent children or husbands were told that night, and demerits were given for those who broke those rules.
She worked until her mind and her eyes were dry, trying to forget how carefully Adam had carried her that day.
She should have given him that kiss, just to prove that he meant nothing to her.
If he meant nothing to her, why did he stalk her restless dreams? She dreamed of the boy’s face, replaced it with the man’s furious one as he had been that first day. Then she replaced it once more with an expression she didn’t understand.
Her parents had told her that Adam had lied. She couldn’t defend him, not with her brother dead because of him. “Because of Adam…because of that boy…” The intense bitter litany had continued as her parents’ drinking worsened.
They’d died after her marriage, and maybe, just maybe, one of the reasons she’d married was to escape them….
Lying in bed, she watched morning filter through the curtains and thought of Sam, how nice he was; how he seemed lonely and sensitive.
The slam of a vehicle door close to the house brought her upright. She pushed away the curtain to see Adam lifting a ladder from the back of his borrowed pickup truck. Jillian blinked as he carried it to her house.
She lost sight of him, leaped out of bed and walked to the door, tearing it open. Careless of the men’s flannel pajamas she wore, Jillian held out her hand in a halt gesture. “You’re up rather early in the morning for a bartender, aren’t you? Stop right there.”
Adam, dressed in a sweatshirt and bib overalls, ignored her and walked back to the pickup, unloaded paint cans and carried them to the house. “’Morning, Jillian. Did I wake you up?”
She rubbed her eyes and tried to leap from dozing in the quiet serenity of her home, feeling that her life was cruising the happy lane…to Adam Tallchief. “Why are you here?”
He walked up the porch steps and considered her as he removed a white canvas shoe from each of his pockets and handed them to her. “Liam and Michelle are busy with their new house plans. This place needs some fix-up.”
The shoes reminded her of how gently he’d carried her, as if he could carry her forever, and how safe she’d felt in his arms. She’d almost snuggled down in that safe—almost. But she wasn’t a snuggler and Adam wasn’t safe.
Jillian tossed the shoes to a chair, just as she hoped to discard that haunting moment. “Thanks. Adam, you need a regular job with benefits. Surely the house doesn’t need painting now.”
“I’ve got a free day and the yard needs work, too.”
She tried for patience and failed. “I can do it, Adam. I just haven’t had much time to spend on—”
He bent to gently kiss her lips, stunn
ing her once more. “You’re working too hard, Jillian. You’ve got shadows under your eyes and you’re pale. Tell that slave driver to back off and give you time to rest.”
“Sam is a very nice man. I’m thrilled to be working for him.”
Adam snorted, dismissing her opinion. “You think highly of a man you don’t know.”
Jillian pushed her mussed hair back from her face and locked herself into defending Sam. “I know him. We’re communicating all the time. And not about business, either. He’s become a good friend.”
“Uh-huh. That technique makes employees work better.”
“Just what would you know about that?” she fired at him, and wished she hadn’t. Adam had a way that caused her to respond recklessly. She much preferred the control that had served her for a lifetime.
He smiled at that, a boyish grin she hadn’t expected. “Are you always a grump in the morning, Jilly-dear? Or are you just overjoyed to see me? By the way, you look warm and cuddly and rosy, quite the inviting picture.”
At the sound of a small dog yapping, Jillian leaned to one side of Adam’s broad shoulders. She found Mrs. Hawkins on her early morning jog, peering at her visitor. She would have seen Jillian in her pajamas, just bidding Adam goodbye with a kiss—the image wasn’t good, it spoke of an all-night visit and a good-morning-see-you-later-honey.
“Adam, get in here,” Jillian ordered as she grabbed the front of his sweatshirt. His eyes narrowed and he didn’t move for a heartbeat, as if choosing to stand or to obey. Then he allowed her to tug him inside, shutting the door behind him. She rubbed her forehead, trying to sort out a late night, a too early morning and Adam’s sultry, dark look as it roamed down her body.
