Merline Lovelace - Undercover Groom

“Back off,” she said again.

“Oh, no,” he said with a tight little smile. “I think that’s been my problem all along. I always back off, when what I really want to do...what I should have done...is this.”

Before Chloe could grasp his intent, he wrapped an arm around her waist and hauled her against his chest. She squawked a protest as his mouth came down on hers. Shock held her immobile for a moment or two, just long enough for him to blast through her defensive barriers and shatter her senses.

The searing kiss answered one of the questions whirling around in Chloe’s head. She didn’t know this man. Or more correctly, she’d never kissed him before. Not like this. There was no way she could have forgotten the rough thrill of his mouth on hers. No way she would have run from the heat his touch flushed in her veins. For an absurd moment she felt as though this kiss was what she had been running toward when she’d landed in Crockett.

Then the confusion and wanness that had plagued her for the past few weeks shuddered back. She pushed free of the stranger’s hold and stepped away, as furious now as she’d been frightened a moment before.

“Who are you?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. Too long for Chloe’s thin-stretched nerves. Thoroughly shaken and still seared with anger, she whirled and put the long counter between them.

Her nails dug into the wood. Her voice shook with fury. “Who are you? And what in the blue blazes gives you the right to come on to me like that?”

For a moment the taut planes of his face seemed to shift, become even harder, if that was possible. A frown slashed deep grooves between those coal black brows.

“My name’s Mase,” he said deliberately. “Mason Chandler.”

Chloe tested the name in her mind, willing a spark of recognition. Nothing came. Not even a flicker. Crushing waves of relief and disappointment rolled through her. For a moment there, she’d feared... She’d hoped...

The unmistakable snick of a trigger cocking brought her head snapping around. Across the counter from her, every muscle in the stranger’s body seemed to lock. Taut as a steel cable, he turned and stared down the twin barrels of a .12 gauge shotgun.

Three

Her heart hammering, Chloe spun around to face the leathery faced woman who stood with a shotgun cradled under one armpit and a metal crutch propped under the other.

“Hannah!”

The store proprietor didn’t take-her eyes from the man at the other end of the gun barrel.

“Got a problem here, girl?”

The laconic question shattered the tension that gripped Chloe. More concerned now with the fact that her employer had dragged herself out of bed against her doctor’s vehement orders than with her response to the stranger’s kiss, she shook her head.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Funny way of handlin’ things, if you ask me,” the older woman twanged.

Chloe flushed, but she’d learned that Hannah Crockett’s tart tongue came part and parcel with a heart wider than the blue Dakota sky. She’d wandered into town only a few days after the general store proprietor had tumbled off a ladder and crawled into the street on her belly to get help, dragging her shattered ankle behind her. The cantankerous invalid had hired Chloe on the spot to tend the shop while she was laid up. Hannah had brushed aside such piddling trifles as references and identification. She was good at sizin’ up people, she informed Chloe testily. It didn’t matter a horse’s spit where the girl had come from, or where she was driftin’ to. The job was hers, if she could handle it. A spare bedroom came with it, and any meals she wanted to fix up. Otherwise, she could order for them both from the café in town.

Chloe had snatched at the offer, assuming that her duties would center primarily on ringing up sales in the old-fashioned brass cash register that dominated the counter. Three weeks and countless hours of stocking shelves, sweeping floors, breaking down boxes and scuttling fifty-pound sacks across the floor had taught her differently. The work was back-breaking and seemingly endless. With the store open from eight in the morning until nine at night, she earned every penny of the salary Hannah paid her in addition to her room and board. She’d also taken on the duties of nurse and companion, despite Hannah’s grumbling that she could take care of herself.

Worried by the deep white lines grooved on either side of her reluctant patient’s mouth, Chloe hurried around the counter. “We need to get you back to bed. The specialist in Rapid City said you should stay off that ankle until he takes the pins out.”

“If I listened to him and laid on my backside for six weeks, I’d sprout carbuncles the size of Idaho potatoes.” Keeping the shotgun level with the ease of one used to its heavy weight, she shifted her stance and gave the stranger another once-over. “What did you say your name was?”

“Chandler, Mason Chandler.”

“Hmmmm. You go around kissin’ up every girl you happen to come across, Chandler, or is there something special ‘bout our Chloe here?”

Mase debated how best to answer that one. He’d already blown any need for a cover by giving Chloe his name...not that his real identity seemed to matter to her. The absurd thought occurred to him that she might be putting him through the hoops for the scene in his office with an elaborate pretense of not recognizing him. He dismissed that thought as soon as it formed. To all intents, it appeared Chloe really didn’t know him.

A trickle of cold sweat formed between Mase’s shoulder blades. His medical training as an undercover operative had consisted of such useful field techniques as packing gunshot wounds, administering antisnakebite serum and treating frostbite. The little he’d read about amnesia made him hesitant about blurting out her identity. He needed expert medical advice, and fast. In the meantime, he owed Hannah an answer.

“There’s definitely something special about Chloe,” he said with perfect truth. “Any man with eyes in his head could see that. But I shouldn’t have come on to her the way I did.”

“Hmm.”

The woman’s watery blue eyes held his for another second or two, then she lowered the shotgun and uncocked the hammer with an agile flick of her thumb.

“Did that sound like an apology to you, Chloe?”

“Close enough,” she bit out, obviously unimpressed. “Come on, Hannah, let’s get you back to bed.”

“In a minute, girl, in a minute.”

The older woman angled a head haloed by short, feathery, white wisps of hair. Her flyaway hair might have given her a pixielike appearance if it hadn’t topped a face toughened by wind and sun and shrewd blue eyes.

“So what brings you to these parts, Chandler?”

“Hunting ”

“Elk season doesn’t start for another two days.”

“I thought I’d get in some fishing first.”

“You did, did you?”

Impatient now to get to a phone, Mase brought the inquisition to an end. “I came in to buy a fishing permit. I’ll come back later, after you get off that ankle.”

“I never turn away a payin’ customer, boy.”

All brisk business now, Hannah laid the shotgun on the counter and hobbled toward a slotted wooden box...or tried to. After only a single step, her crutch hit an uneven patch of floor. Her good leg buckled. She grunted in pain and started to topple backward. Mase caught her just before she hit the hard wooden floor.

With Chloe hurrying ahead to show the way, he carried a muttering, thoroughly disgusted Hannah through the cluttered storeroom and down the hall he’d glimpsed earlier. The hall gave onto a kitchen on one side and a combined living room and office that had been converted into a downstairs bedroom for the invalid. A narrow flight of stairs led, Mase guessed, to the upstairs bedrooms.