Cara Colter - Wed By A Will

Lost in thought, picturing bright yellow-checkered curtains at the windows, throw rugs on the floor, red tulips in a glass jar on the kitchen table, she did not hear him come in.

“Anybody here?”

She whirled around, gasping, some ingrained instinct spurring her to look for a weapon. Something to protect herself. Her mind raced back along the length of the long rutted driveway that led to her door. She was a long way from the nearest neighbor. No one would hear a cry for help.

There was nothing she could use to defend herself, and not even a coffee table to dart behind. A quick exit would do, she thought but then her mind started to kick in and she remembered. The movers. He had to be one of the movers. After all, she had been waiting for the movers to come with her meager scraps of furniture.

The light poured in the door behind him, and for a moment all she saw was his silhouette. She knew immediately he was not a furniture mover, yet her fear stayed at bay, and as she studied him she felt herself relax minutely.

Beige cowboy hat, white T-shirt, narrow-legged jeans on long, long legs, booted feet, broad, broad shoulders. Even without the hat, something would have whispered cowboy.

The confident angle of the chin, the solid plant of his feet, something in the way the muscle danced under the sunlight that glanced off the hair on his arms.

She didn’t know there were cowboys in Oregon. Of course, she didn’t really know very much about Oregon at all, except that the climate promised to be kinder than it was in Minnesota.

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

“You didn’t startle me,” she said, cool and defensive. But his voice had already penetrated those defenses. A deep voice, a sure voice. It only penetrated just enough for her to decide she was safe in this cabin, with a stranger who had appeared on soft feet, out of nowhere.

Her eyes adjusted to the light, and the details of him came clear to her. Brown eyes, steady, unwavering, calm and strong. A lot could be told from a man’s eyes. It was a survival skill she had perfected, another remnant from her childhood.

His cheekbones were pronounced, and his nose looked like it might have been straight once. Now the perfection of his looks was marred by the bump where the nose had been broken, but oddly the flaw made his appearance infinitely more appealing than pure perfection might. The crooked nose proclaimed him a man’s man, who lived in a man’s world, and paid the price for it. He probably accepted his lumps with no more than a casual shrug.

He had a beautiful mouth. Her artist’s eyes insisted on seeing that; the sensuous fullness of the lower lip, the firm curve of the upper one.

He took a step toward her, his hand extended, and she backed up.

He lowered his hand slowly, and regarded her, the eyes narrow now, assessing.

Rule Three: Never let them see your fear. It didn’t matter if she didn’t even know why she was scared, why her heart was pumping rabbit-swift, and why everything in her knew the scariest thing she could have done would have been to accept that extended hand.

She knew exactly what it would feel like.

It would be warm, dry, infinitely strong and leathertough. The touch of his hand would invite her to look into a world where people were not alone. Just a tantalizing glimpse, before he released his grip.

A sudden yearning leapt in her that she had to fight. A yearning that made an entirely different kind of fear breathe to life within her.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, her voice ice-cold, not a trace of any sort of emotion in it.

She knew he heard the coldness, though his reaction was barely discernible. A flicker in a muscle along the line of his jaw, a slight narrowing of his eyes that had the unfortunate effect of bringing the thick sooty abundance of his lashes to her attention.

“I’m Matt Donahue,” he said, just the faintest hint of ice adding a raw edge to the warm timber of his voice. “I’m your closest neighbor,” he nodded, “on that side.”

If he expected the welcome-neighbor routine, she hoped to disappoint him. She said nothing, waited, after a moment, folded her arms across her chest.

“I actually was interested in buying this piece of land. I heard someone had bought it before I even realized it had come up on the market.”

So he wasn’t exactly here as part of the welcome-neighbor routine, either. Surprise. Surprise.

“I’m not selling.” See? That was what attachment did. She’d only just got here, and already she had decided the place was hers. A place where her heart could be at home. She felt inordinately angry at him for making her see how fragile places for the heart really were.

“You haven’t even heard my offer,” he said mildly.

“Nor do I plan to.” She saw no reason to tell him she was in no position to sell, even had she wanted to. The land wasn’t even really hers to sell, yet. And maybe it never would be. How had her heart managed to overlook that little detail when she was planning throw rugs and curtains and bright red tulips?

That while her heart was saying forever to this little shack in the trees, the legal document said something else.

Husband required.

For a moment, having the H-word in her mind at the same time that this big, handsome man with the strong, steady eyes filled her doorwell made her almost helpless with longing.

Wishing that she could be a different person than she was. Softer and kinder, like her sister Abby or more outgoing and sexy like her sister Brit.

She felt her lack of warmth should have at least backed him out the door by now, but he stood, feet planted, regarding her thoughtfully, almost lazily. His eyes drifted casually to her bare ring finger, which gave her permission to take a swift, discreet glance at his.

His fingers were long and lean and ringless. Any kind of jewelry on them—even a wedding band—would have looked foolishly out of place in contrast to the masculine power of those hands.

She wished suddenly she was not in her oldest jeans, and a T-shirt with a rip under one armpit. She wished she had not been so quick to tell Brit to leave her hair alone when her sister had tried to style it. Still, she kept her face deliberately expressionless, and hated herself for the weakness of wishing.

His attention, thankfully, wavered from her before her discomfort made her blurt out something she was sure to regret. An overreaction like get the hell off my property.

He cocked his head a little, turned a shoulder, listened. “You expecting company?”

“The movers,” she said, suddenly hearing what he heard, the growl of a big truck coming down her rutted driveway.

“I expect they’re here, then. I’ll leave you to it—” he paused, leaving a blank where she could fill in her name, but she refused. She had no intention of appearing even remotely friendly to the handsome neighbor who had his eye on her land.

And, she realized, her lips.

Stunned by the pure masculine potency that burned briefly in his eyes when they flicked ever so briefly to her lips, she found herself wanting to sway toward him. Thankfully, he had tamed the heat in his gaze when he looked placidly back into her eyes.

She narrowed her eyes and glared at him.

He raised a hand to the brim of his hat, gave it a slow tip, and took a step backward onto the porch, turning away from her. “Your livestock appears to have arrived.”

Her what? She scurried over to the doorway. He was planted on the top step now, his eyes narrowed at the old muffler-free truck that was bouncing down her drive, a stock rack in the back.

“I don’t have any livestock.”

He looked over his shoulder at her. In the full light he was even more compelling than he had been in the dimness of the cabin. The sunlight made him appear bigger and stronger and more real.