Ann Major - Silhouette Christmas Stories

"We?" he demanded. Grant gazed at her for a long moment. "I thought you lived alone."

Norie's breath caught in her throat. "I-I do. What I meant to say is that I spend most of my time there." She flushed under his hard scrutiny. "I don't like to heat up the whole house." She lowered her gaze to avoid his unfaltering one.

He hadn't practiced law for fifteen years without developing an almost uncanny sense about people. She was lying-covering something up. But what? Scanning the room again, he found no trace that a man might share it with her.

He shrugged. The best way to find out was to leave it alone-for now.

The stairs were difficult. His knee hurt so badly he could barely climb the steps, and he felt weak again when he had struggled to the top. He followed her from the dark hallway into a charming bedroom with frilly curtains and yellow flowered paper. The room was as icy as the rest of the house.

She knelt on the faded carpet and lit a fire in the space heater, then rose and went to the bed to find the cord and controls to the electric blanket. He crossed the room to help her.

Together they located the switch, pulled the covers back, and plumped the pillows. It seemed an intimate activity suddenly, unmaking the bed, and he stopped before she was through. For a moment he stood without moving, watching her, enjoying the simple beauty of her doing this simple thing for him.

"There," she said softly, smoothing the blanket. "The bathroom is right next door. I'll put out fresh towels. If you're still the same size you were, there are some boxes of Larry's clothes under the bed." Her eyes darkened. "I-I never got rid of them."

"I haven't put on an ounce."

He felt the heat of her eyes move swiftly over his body, mutely confirming his statement. And then she smiled in her unutterably charming way and blushed rosy pink before she glanced down at the carpet in front of his toes.

"I'll leave you to settle in, but I'll be back… with something hot to eat." Her tone was light and a little breathless. "You're probably starving."

"Oh, I am." His own voice when he answered was oddly hoarse. He gave her a look that told her it wasn't only food he was hungry for.

She backed away, stumbled against the doorjamb, blushed again, and was gone.

Damn. She was afraid of him.

The jeans Grant found in the box under the bed fit his muscled body like a snug second skin. The black turtleneck sweater molded every hard muscle in his torso, shoulders, and biceps. Well, maybe he'd put on an ounce. Or maybe as he'd gotten older he'd gotten into the habit of wearing looser-fitting clothes. Comforting thought.

As soon as he finished dressing he climbed into the bed to get warm. He lay beneath the toasty electric blanket, listening to the sounds of Norie bustling about in the kitchen beneath him. Outside, the wind was swishing around the corners of the house and whistling under the eaves. But his pillow was soft, the electric blanket warm. The room was beginning to seem almost cozy. He felt a baffling contentment, to be here, alone with Norie, so far from his own exciting but hectic life.

It was odd, Norie choosing this ice-cold house on a remote farm outside of a dying town, as opposed to the life she could have had.

Why?

He had never understood her.

Not from the first.

Maybe that was why he'd made so many mistakes.

His thoughts drifted back in time. Back to the first night when his mother had sent him to Austin to save his little brother from a scheming older woman.

"Noreen Black is a penniless little nobody. Some sort of Bohemian-an intellectual! An orphan who was raised in north Texas on a dirt farm. She's twenty-seven to Larry's twenty-three. I'm sure she's out to catch him," Georgia Hale had shrieked before Grant left for Austin. "Do you want the same thing to happen to your little brother that happened to you?"

Grant had been making vast monthly payments on a settlement to the beautiful young woman who'd deliberately married him so she could take him to the cleaners. Remembering the bitter consequences of his own mistake, he'd driven off to Austin determined to pay off Noreen Black before she had Larry completely in her clutches.

When Grant had knocked on the door of Miss Black's little apartment a couple of blocks west of the UT campus, a soft welcoming voice had answered. "Larry?"

"Larry's brother."

She'd thrown open the door. "Grant! Larry's told me all about you."

The "scheming older woman" was a slim girl with enormous dark eyes. Her cloud of dark hair was tied back with a green scarf, and huge silver loops danced at her ears. She didn't look twenty, much less twenty-seven. There were books scattered untidily on the dilapidated couch, red plastic dinette chairs and table. She had a pencil tucked behind one ear and had padded barefoot to the door in a pink and black leotard and tights. Tendrils of damp curls clung to her forehead. Her smile was the sweetest he'd ever seen.

His gaze roved the length of her body, passing downward over a flawless neck and shoulders, gently rounded breasts, a narrow waist, and long, shapely legs.

"Lovely," he said in a low voice.

Unconsciously Norie drew back, crossing her hands over her breasts.

"I-I was studying, but I stopped to exercise. To get the oxygen flowing again. I-I wasn't expecting company… " She trailed off uncertainly.

He couldn't tear his gaze away from the curve of her thighs, and Norie's color deepened.

"Are you looking for Larry?"

"No, I came to see you."

"I don't want to be rude, but I do have a big test tomorrow."

She was giving him, Grant Hale, the brush-off. Anger coiled in him as tight as a spring. Of course she was. She was after Larry. Somehow Grant managed to keep his voice calm. "Surely you have time for a quick dinner. I drove all this way just to meet you."

"I-I'm on a very limited budget."

"I'm buying."

That seemed to settle it.

"Well… since you drove all this way… "

She smiled so disarmingly that a shiver of unwanted male excitement darted through him. She was good, really good, at working a man with her charm, he thought cynically. He could see why Larry had fallen for her.

"It'll only take me a minute to dress. Make yourself at home. There's soda in the refrigerator."

While he waited for her, he rummaged about in the kitchen. There was, as she'd said, one soda in her tiny refrigerator. He saw milk, eggs, hamburger meat, canned goods, a few plastic dishes. A tight budget, she'd said.

Not for long, not after she caught Larry.

She returned wearing a red embroidered Mexican smock, red painted earrings, and silver jewelry. Grant complimented her on the outfit and drove her to an elegant restaurant on Town Lake.

She ordered the least expensive thing on the menu.

A trick, Grant thought.

To his amazement, he began to enjoy himself. In the candlelight, with her shining eyes and her pretty, sweet smile that seemed to be for him alone, she was beautiful. Larry was forgotten.

Grant began to drink, rather too much. He never got around to offering her money to leave Larry alone. Instead he talked about himself, about his secret dreams. He told her about Susan, their divorce, the hurt of it all. He told her things he'd never told anyone else. How as a child he'd secretly wished to know his own father. How he'd wanted love, how he'd grown up without it, how it was something he no longer believed in.

Then she'd told him about herself, about her loving parents, about their wonderful life together on their small farm until her parents had died in a car accident.

"I want all that again," she whispered. "You see, I do believe in love. More than anything, I want a home, children. I even know what I'll name them."

"What?"