The Daddy Survey

by Janis Reams Hudson

  She hadn’t imagined it. It was real, all of it, and it swamped her again. And this, from only his arms touching hers, his breath brushing the back of her neck.

  For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what he’d just said to her.

  “You said you would think about it.” This time the warmth of his breath brushed across her ear.

  She shuddered. In pure delight. There was no use pretending she didn’t know what he was talking about. He’d said he would want to kiss her again, and she’d said she would think about it.

  “Have you?” He ran his hands up her arms to her shoulders and turned her to face him. She was trapped between his broad chest and her horse. “Have you thought about it?”

  Only in her sleep, and every waking moment. The guilt. The thrill. “Yes.”

  “And?” He leaned closer, his face so near it consumed her vision.

  She leaned toward him. “And.”

  He didn’t wait for a verbal invitation. He slid his arms around her and took her mouth with his.

  This wasn’t the gentle brush of lips like the last time. This was a taking. She reveled in it and gave back, measure for measure. With her mouth on his, she ran her hands up his hard, muscled arms, over his broad shoulders, to his neck. She threaded her fingers into his thick, soft hair. Oh, the feel of it against the sensitive skin between her fingers. Who would have thought that simply touching a man’s hair could make her spine tingle this way?

  It had been so long since a man had held her. So incredibly long since she had felt this familiar heat in her blood. Was it wrong to take this pleasure? It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t let it be. She sank into the kiss, into the man, and lost herself to the sheer wonder of it. His tongue was like hot velvet against hers.

  Her hands found their way down his arms again, then up, across his chest. Fascinated, she followed the dips and hollows of hard muscles. She’d never felt such strength in a man before. She wanted to feel his skin. Would it be smooth or rough, hot or cool?

  She caught herself starting to open a snap and jerked back.

  Sloan blinked, shook his head to clear it. “What?” His breath was coming hard. “What’s wrong?”

  She looked up at him with those sky-blue eyes and swallowed. “Nothing.”

  But something was. She had jerked away as if he had suddenly burst into flames. Hell, he damn near had.

  Then he realized where her hands had been, what they’d been doing just before she’d broken off that mind-numbing kiss. He chuckled, if a little breathlessly. “Hey, it’s all right with me if you want to unsnap my shirt.”

  Her face turned the prettiest shade of red he thought he’d ever seen. She sucked in a sharp breath and took a step back. And ran up against the horse.

  Suzie Q snorted and sidestepped away from Emily, leaving Emily with no support, throwing her off balance. Her eyes widened as she started to tumble.

  Sloan snared her by the arms before she could fall and pulled her to his chest. “I’ve got you.”

  Despite her acute embarrassment, Emily laughed. “That was spoken with entirely too much confidence to suit me.”

  “What?” He grinned down at her and ran his hands up and down her back while pressing her against his chest. “That I’ve got you?” He couldn’t get enough of the smell of her, something light and flowery. He could easily become addicted to the feel of her breasts against him. “Maybe it’s wishful thinking.”

  “It’s nice thinking,” she said shyly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes.” She slipped out of his arms and turned to stroke Suzie Q between the eyes. “But it’s pointless, you know.”

  “I like you, you like me. What’s pointless about that?”

  She gave the horse a final pat, then walked toward the pond. Sloan followed her as if he were a puppy on a leash. But what else could a man do, he thought.

  “I’m only here until my car’s fixed,” she reminded him.

  He hadn’t needed the reminder.

  “Judging by the progress Caleb is making, that should only be a couple more days. A few days after that I’ll have earned enough to pay for the repairs, and a couple more days I’ll have enough to pay you for towing my car from New Mexico.”

  “Now, hold on,” he protested. “You’re not paying me for towing your car.”

  “That’s not my point.”

  “I mean it,” he said, stopping next to her at the edge of the reddish-brown water. “Towing your car was like bringing your suitcase along. That’s all. No charge.”

  “My point,” she said, lips pursed, “is that I’ll be gone in a few days.”

  He gave her a wry smile. “You never heard of making hay while the sun shines?”

  She chuckled.

  “Hey, that’s a saying we take seriously around here.”

  “That’s fine,” she told him. “As long as it’s hay you’re talking about.”

  Sloan reached out and took her hand. “You don’t believe in living for the moment? Grabbing for what you can while it’s there?” He tugged her closer, nuzzled the side of her face. “When it’s something you want clear down to your toes?”

  Emily could feel herself melting at his low, seductive tone. Another minute and she would be in his arms again. And would that be so wrong?

  “Just because you leave the ranch doesn’t mean we can’t still see each other, if we want to.”

  “Oh, sure, you’re going to drive to Arkansas to take me out to dinner and a movie.”

  “I don’t have a problem with that. Do you?”

  Emily chuckled. “Is this what they call a one-track mind?”

  “Ah, come on. Give a guy a break.”

  She pulled her hand from his grasp. “Give a guy a break and do what, have sex with him because he wants me to?”

  Sloan raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, I give. I take it all back. If you’d rather, I’ll go back to ignoring you.”

  Emily’s heart sank. “You’re angry.”

  He let out a gust of breath. “That’s an understatement. But at myself, not you. I obviously managed to make this sound, I don’t know, tawdry. That’s not how I meant it at all. And, okay, I’m a little mad at you for taking it all wrong. I thought we might have something going here. I thought it was mutual.”

  Disheartened, disgusted with herself, Emily sat on the grass and hugged her knees. “I’m sorry.” She couldn’t look at him. “I’m no good at this.”

  He lowered himself to the grass beside her. “No good at what?”

  She shrugged and pulled a blade of grass through her fingers. “This man-woman stuff. I’ve never played this game before.”

  “Is that what you think I’m doing? Playing a game?” Sloan was losing her, he knew. He could feel her slipping right through his grasp. Not that she’d ever been his to lose, but he’d had his hopes. Was he simply being perverse? Telling himself he wanted her, while chalking up a list of all the reasons they were wrong for each other?

  Reasons. One, really. She wasn’t suited to life on a ranch. Now he had to figure that she wasn’t suited to life with him.

  Life? God, if she could hear his thoughts. She assumed he wanted a roll in the hay and nothing more, and the word life kept zipping through his mind.

  “I honestly don’t know,” she said in answer to his question. “I only know that I’m here for a matter of days, no more, and you seem to want something from me I don’t think I’m prepared to give.”

  Hope was a funny thing, Sloan thought. It sprang to life at the slightest provocation. He reached toward her, and with the tip of his index finger beneath her chin, turned her face toward his. “I don’t want to take anything from you, Em, I just thought, if you wanted to, we could get together, pass a little mutually satisfying time together, and see where it leads.”

  Her cheeks were as pink as the streaks cast across the sky by the setting sun. “I told you I wasn’t any good at this sort of stuff. I like you, Sloan. I am attracted to you. I just don’t know
what, if anything, I should do about it.”

  “There’s no should to it,” he said gently. “You either feel like getting closer to me, or you don’t. I’m a big boy, Em. I can take rejection. Not well,” he added with a quirk of his lips, “but I can take it. I guess I’ve been rushing you, and I apologize for that. Come on, let’s head back before it gets dark.”

  That night Emily lay awake for hours going over in her head every gesture they’d made, every word they’d spoken at the pond. She’d made such a mess of it, she felt like an inexperienced fool.

  At the thought, she bit back a laugh. She wasn’t ready to admit to the fool part, but, mother of two children or not, she was inexperienced when it came to dealing with men. The only man she’d ever had anything to do with was Michael.

  Wanting Sloan felt like a betrayal of everything she and Michael had shared. The guilt gnawed at her.

  But that was unreasonable. Michael had been gone for two years now, and she’d been alone. He had loved her every bit as much as she had loved him. He would want her to find someone new. Wouldn’t he?

  She tried to think in the reverse—if she had died and left Michael alone. Wouldn’t she want him to be happy? Or was she so petty that she would prefer he spend the rest of his life pining for her?

  Oh, heaven above, she hoped what was inside her was the former. Thinking she might be small and petty didn’t sit well with her. Michael would be ashamed of her for such thoughts.

  Michael is dead.

  Yes, he was dead. Gone. But never forgotten. He was and always would be alive in her heart, and she did her best to keep him alive for his daughters.

  Oh, Michael, what am I going to do?

  Heaven help her, was she actually asking her husband if she should give in to her desire and make love with Sloan?

  Emily, girl, that’s just sick.

  But in the darkness of the room she shared with her daughters, Michael’s daughters, she smiled up at the ceiling. She could see him getting a good belly laugh from the irony of it all.

  Sloan, too, had trouble sleeping that night. He told himself until the wee hours of the morning that he was wasting his time chasing after Emily. She was right. What was the point? She’d be leaving in a few days. And since his suggestion that he could drive to Fort Smith to take her out had been met with a decided lack of enthusiasm—or belief—that, it seemed, would be that. No point in beating his head, or his heart—

  His heart? When had that pathetic organ chimed in on the situation?

  Bleary-eyed, he climbed out of bed the same time he did every morning. He didn’t need an alarm to tell him it was time to get to work. The rooster had been crowing for more than an hour. The sun would be up soon.

  He didn’t know what he expected from Emily when he went downstairs for breakfast after he’d showered and shaved and grunted a time or two at his brothers, but the possibility of a cold shoulder had crossed his mind. He was grateful to beat the rest of the family to the kitchen.

  Emily was alone in the kitchen, working on her second skilletful of bacon, when she heard a sound behind her. Startled, she whirled. Her hand passed over the skillet just as a slice of bacon gave up a drop of moisture and sent grease popping across her palm. She yelped and grabbed her burned hand.

  Sloan rushed to her side. “You hurt yourself.”

  With little sleep the night before, Emily was not in the best of moods. She stepped around him and thrust her hand under a stream of cold water at the sink.

  “No,” she told him. “I didn’t do anything to myself. You snuck up on me, startled me, and grease popped on my hand.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sloan said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “No.” She let out a sigh. The cold water felt good on her palm. “I know you didn’t. I’m sorry. There was no need for me to snap at you.” She turned off the water and reached for a dish towel.

  “Let me see.” Sloan took her hand and cupped it in his palm. Three red spots decorated the center of it. “We’ve got a tube of something for burns.”

  “Yes, I’ll get it later.” His hands, warm against hers, tempted her to linger. She made a move to pull away.

  He held on. “You didn’t get any blisters yesterday from riding, did you?”

  “No, no blisters.”

  His thumb traced lightly across her palm, sending a shiver down her spine.

  “I should have found you a pair of gloves.”

  Her lips quirked. She pulled free of his light grasp and stepped back to the stove. “You should have found me a thick pillow. It’s not my hands that suffered.”

  Sloan chuckled, but the sound was filled with sympathy. “We have a tub of something for that, too.”

  “I’ve already used it,” she confessed with a laugh. With a long turning fork she lifted the final strips of bacon from the skillet and placed them on a paper towel to drain.

  “Em, about yesterday.”

  She wasn’t sure she was ready to talk about yesterday yet. She turned off the flame beneath the skillet and moved it to a cold burner.

  “I only meant to take you for a ride,” he offered.

  She gave him a look from the corner of her eye.

  “Make that, horseback ride,” he corrected. “I didn’t take you out to the pond with the plan to get you into bed. Or the grass, as the case may be.”

  “If I’d thought that’s what you were after, I wouldn’t have gone with you.”

  “I just wanted to, I don’t know, show you around the place a little. I thought you’d enjoy going riding. I wasn’t thinking about getting your clothes off. Well, I mean, I wasn’t planning on it.”

  A bark of laughter escaped her.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Well, I’m trying to be honest here. I haven’t talked so much like this to a woman in, well, ever. I want you to know the truth. I thought maybe we could—do they still use the word neck?”

  Emily laughed again at the red stain creeping up his neck. “That’ll do. And we did, didn’t we? I mean, a little bit.”

  “So, does this mean you’re not mad at me?”

  She gave him a smile and a slice of crisp bacon. “I’m not mad, Sloan.”

  He took the bacon with one hand and stroked her cheek with the other. “You look like you didn’t get much sleep.”

  “Well, now I’m mad,” she said tartly. “No woman likes to hear that.”

  Chapter Eight

  Since Caleb had been doing all the work on Emily’s car in the evenings, Justin figured he’d give the guy a break and change the oil in the tractor himself before it was time to cut hay again. But the oil wasn’t in the tractor shed, it was down in the garage. He strolled along past the corrals and barn and enjoyed the sunshine and the hot south wind.

  A flash of pink at the open garage door alerted him. He slowed, then paused. Whispering. The funny thing about whispering was that the sibilant hiss of it tended to carry farther than normally spoken words. The only reasons to whisper, in Justin’s experience, were when you didn’t want anyone to hear what you were saying to your sweetheart, or when you were saying something you knew you weren’t supposed to say.

  Quietly he walked to the garage door and leaned against it.

  Janie was gathering up nuts and bolts in her small hands. “He’ll need these to put the car back together. If he can’t find them, he can’t finish the car, and we won’t have to leave and go to Fort Smith.”

  “But that’s stealing,” Libby whispered back.

  “It is not. It’s our car, isn’t it? So these things are ours, too. You can’t steal from yourself.”

  Justin bit back a chuckle. Smart little cookie, that Janie. It sounded to him as if she and her sister were in no hurry to continue on their way to Arkansas. He figured maybe they had the right idea.

  “Hiya, girls,” he said. “Whatcha doin’?”

  Both girls jerked and squeaked. Never had guilt been so blatantly stamped on such pretty little faces.

  “Nothing,” they said
in unison.

  “I just came down here to get some oil for the tractor. Would you look at that mess?” He pointed to the oil-stained tarp Caleb had spread out beneath the front end of the car. On it lay all the nuts and bolts and various parts that he had taken from the engine.

  Justin shook his head in mock dismay. “Something’s gonna get lost if Caleb leaves that stuff lying around like that.” He squatted down next to the girls and picked up a bolt. “Of course, it won’t matter much if these nuts and bolts and screws and stuff get lost. We’ve got a zillion of them around here we can use to replace them. But this little thing here,” he added, nudging with his index finger the oil pickup tube Caleb had removed and cleaned last night. “This thing gets kicked around and accidentally lost, why, no telling how long it might take to replace it.”

  Janie blinked up at him, all serious and wide-eyed, her mind running a mile a minute or his name wasn’t Justin Chisholm. “How come?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding? A car this old, nobody keeps a part like that lying around. There’s probably not another one of these little tubes for this particular vehicle for fifty miles. Maybe a hundred. Could take a week or two to track down a replacement and get it shipped in.”

  “It could?” Janie darted a quick look at Libby.

  “It sure could.” He pushed himself to his feet and shook his head. “Caleb needs to be more careful with stuff. I’ll have to tell him to do just that, next time I see him.”

  Janie swallowed and craned her neck to look up at him. “When might that be?”

  “Oh, probably not ’til suppertime tonight. Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I better get that oil and get back down to the tractor. We’ll be wanting to cut hay probably next week, and I don’t want to leave this for the last minute.”

  Whistling as if he didn’t have a care in the world, Justin took the oil he needed from the cabinet in the back, grabbed the spout and funnel and sauntered back out of the garage. “See you girls later.”

  “’Bye, Mr. Justin,” Libby called.