Cathy Thacker - From Texas, With Love

Flushing from the close quarters, Samantha knelt beside him to check beneath the sink. Too late, she remembered how scantily dressed she was. “Actually, both.” She wondered if it would be too obvious if she went and put on a robe. Then again, he had already seen her in her nightshirt and hard-soled hiking boots.

He stepped slightly to one side and looked down at her, clearly oblivious to the reason behind her indecision. “Get ‘em out,” he told her gently. “And I’ll do it for you.”

Trying not to think about his denim-covered thighs, Samantha stood. There was no reason solid male muscle should be such a turn-on. She swallowed to ease the parched feeling in her throat. “You’re awfully nice.” She handed over the items he requested.

He lifted a brow, bemused. “And that’s a surprise because?” His voice dropped another notch.

Feeling her cheeks heat all the more, she pulled a spackling tool from a drawer. Their fingers collided as she handed it over, his warm hand brushing hers. “You’re an associate of my brother’s.”

Will looked at her but made no comment. Inexplicably, Samantha was flooded with guilt. She pushed it away, prepared to stand her ground. “But just because I appreciate your assistance,” she continued frankly, “does not mean I’m going to Laramie with you. Because I’m not.”

He gazed at her another long moment.

She could have sworn he was disappointed.

“Suit yourself,” he said finally.

Samantha sighed, hating the guilt flowing through her once again. She had no reason to feel beholden to her brother after the way Howard had treated her. And yet… “You think I’m being unreasonable, don’t you?” she asked.

Will’s broad shoulders lifted and fell. Holding her eyes deliberately, he replied, “Let’s just say I know when a lady is doing herself in—repeatedly.”

Anger knotted her gut. “You don’t know our history.”

He scanned the baseboard until he found a place that needed patching. “Sure I do.” He knelt down in front of it and pried open the can of spackle. “You and Howard were both orphaned when you were kids.” Will removed the lid, set it aside, then stuck the putty knife in the compound. “He couldn’t take care of you and you ended up in foster care. You’ve never forgiven him.”

Samantha sighed. So many people thought that. So many people were wrong. “Howard could have taken care of me,” she fumed, as the old bitterness came back to haunt her. Deciding she needed more cover, anyway, she walked into the bathroom and snatched her plaid flannel robe off the hook on the door. Struggling into it, she walked back out. “He was eighteen.”

Will cast her a censoring look before he pressed steel wool into the small hole, then covered it with caulking compound. “And you were eight, Samantha.”

His calmness in the face of her pain sent her temper soaring. Samantha stomped nearer, her heavy boots slapping against the scarred wood floor. “So? He could have gotten a job!” She pushed the words through clenched teeth. “Found us an apartment or something.” Had Howard wanted to do so, she amended silently. To her heartbreak, her brother hadn’t.

Will sat back on his haunches and looked at her with sympathy. “Howard was little more than a kid himself,” he pointed out.

“And that gave him the right to join the navy? To go off for months and months and months at a time?” Her voice choked at the memory. “I cried my eyes out, missing him.”

Will rose to his feet, every inch of him lithe and masculine. “And you still are, from the looks of it,” he noted softly. Finding another mousehole, he began patching that, too.

Agitated to even be having this conversation, never mind with someone as handsome and commanding as Will McCabe, Samantha paced back and forth. She pressed her lips together mutinously. “I gave up crying over my big brother years ago.”

“Then why is the idea of going back to Texas to see him so threatening?” Will challenged.

She clenched her fists, watching as he located and filled yet another gap in the baseboard. “It’s not,” she declared, telling herself it was her tension causing her heart to pound and her mouth to go dry, and not his nearness.

Will looked at her as if she had either lost her mind or was a disaster waiting to happen. He smirked. “Then prove it.”

“I don’t have to prove anything to you.”

“True.” He rose slowly and squared off with her. “But you’ve got a heck of a lot to prove to yourself.”

She lifted her chin. “I do not.”

He flashed a goading half smile, then headed back to the kitchen to put the patching compound and steel wool in the cupboard beneath the sink. As he bent over, she was treated to the sight of his denim-covered backside. Then he straightened and pivoted toward her. “You’re just afraid that if you give yourself a chance, you’re going to end up loving your brother as much as everybody else who knows him.”

Samantha wished Will McCabe didn’t look so darn sexy, with the faint shadow of an evening beard covering his face. She told him smugly, “Not very likely.”

“If you say so.”

Their eyes met. A sizzling attraction flowed between them. “Are you about done?” Samantha asked hotly.

“With sealing up the place?” He deliberately misunderstood the question—just to annoy her, she was fairly sure. “Yep, but not,” he qualified, his gaze trailing over her hair, face and lips with disturbing thoroughness before returning to her eyes, “with talking sense into you.”

SAMANTHA ARCHED A BROW. “You are not going to get me to change my mind.”

Determined to have his way on this whether she liked it or not, Will suggested, “How about we make a deal then? I’ll take Mickey Mouse here out of this apartment and set him free in a park on the way to the airport if you come to Texas with me.”

“That’s not a bargain,” she declared with a tight smile, getting another trash bag out from under the sink.

“Could have fooled me,” Will quipped.

She opened the bag up and began throwing away cereal boxes with the bottoms eaten out of them. “That’s blackmail.”

Will had never failed to complete a mission. He wasn’t going to do it now, even if she had forgotten how to trust. Seeing a pretzel bag that had been munched on, too, he added it to the trash. “So you admit you’re afraid of mice.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “I like to keep my distance from anything that skulks around where it has no business being.”

Meaning him, Will thought with a smile. He shrugged. “Okay. See ya.” He picked up his jacket and headed for the door.

She rushed after him. “Wait.” Her fingertips brushed his arm.

He turned, inhaling the faint scent of lavender again.

As he had hoped, practicality overrode pride. “I’m not going to be able to talk a cab driver into letting me into his vehicle with a live mouse in a trash can. It’s just not going to happen. Not in New York City. Not tonight.”

Will draped his jacket over his shoulder, then stroked the corner of his mouth with his thumb, prepared to make this either as difficult or as easy as she wanted it to be. “Not a problem for me,” he told her carelessly. “I’ve got a limo idling at the curb.”

Her lips pursed in a pretty scowl. “I hope Howard is paying for that.”

No doubt about it, she wanted retribution. “He is. And,” Will added, “he’s prepared to do a lot more by way of penance. All you have to do is come to Texas with me and see him.”

She shook her head. “Like I said, not an option.”

“Then we’re at a standstill, aren’t we?”

She paused as if to consider her options, then finally laid on the charm. “Are you sure you can’t just…take care of this for me?” she asked sweetly, flipping back her lustrous hair.