Cara Colter - Meet Me Under the Mistletoe

“A renegade?” he asked again now. Sam raised a dark brow at her. She could not really tell if he was amused or annoyed.

“A renegade,” she said with prim firmness, a voice very well suited to Most Likely to Become a Nun, a voice that would never give away the fact she had found the wild version of him to be unreasonably sexy and that she had given in to the pull of remembering him with a nary a protest.

From the brief touch of his hand on hers just moments ago, he still had that mystical something that just made some men sexy and almost unbearably so.

He was dangerous to her, part of Hanna shouted. Danger, danger, danger. He was the kind of man who made a woman who had given up on love—after all, she had been jilted by her fiancé while she was still raw from the death of her mother—long for the very things she had sworn to harden herself against.

It made an eminently reasonable woman such as herself, who had vowed to dodge the wounding arrows of love by burying herself in her work, think unwanted thoughts of looks so heated they could scorch through to the soul, and breath coming in ragged, wanton gasps, and the silken caress of forbidden kisses...

It was because she had once tasted the nectar of his kiss, she warned herself, that she was being drawn back into the wild and dangerous enchantment of him.

Embarrassed by her weakness, Hanna remembered all too clearly how she had been caught in this particular spell once before.

“What made you arrive at that conclusion?” he asked.

“Which one?” she stammered, thinking remembered kisses must be showing in her face.

“That I was a renegade?” he reminded her.

“Oh, really!” she said annoyed. “Of course you were one. Anybody with a motorcycle in a place where tractors—and ponies for that matter—are more common, would be seen as a renegade headed straight for a life of debauchery.”

He actually laughed at that, and Hanna had to inwardly kick herself for liking his laughter.

And liking, too, the look of unguarded fondness that now crept across his handsome features. “Ah, my motorcycle, that old Harley-Davidson Panhead. Did you know I rescued it from a dump? And restored it myself? As much as I could, anyway. I seem to remember being stranded by the side of the road a lot. And none of those guys driving those tractors that you mentioned would stop and give me a hand, either.”

“The leather jacket sent out danger signals—clearly you were seen as a threat to the wholesome, country image of the town of Smith, poster child for an all-American town.”

Again that look of tenderness softened the features of Sam’s face. “I remember when I saw that jacket in a store window, saving up money to buy it that could have been better used for...”

His voice drifted away, and the look of fondness faded abruptly. In fact, he looked suddenly annoyed with himself. “I’m sure I was not the rebel you recall.”

“But you were. Sam Chisholm, you were the town of Smith’s answer to James Dean.”

“I suppose,” he said, his tone dry, “it must have appeared like that to you, the town of Smith’s answer to wholesome all-American girl.”

He would not have seen the high school annual that proclaimed her Most Likely to Become a Nun , but seeing her as the proverbial, sheltered, wholesome girl next door was just about the same thing.

But of course, he did not know the truth about her. Everyone had thought that she was so good and pure and could do no wrong. And she had let everyone down.

Of course, most just believed she had gone away after graduation, called, as so many rural young people were, by the bright lights and lure of the big city. The truth remained one of her most closely guarded secrets.

The truth that had left her father clutching at his heart on the pathway to his beloved Christmas Workshop.

“There was plenty of evidence you were wild,” Hanna told Sam, suddenly most anxious to stay focused on his past rather than her own, “It wasn’t just my perception, a girl looking at you through the eyes of complete innocence.”

Innocence that would soon enough be lost in the incident that had destroyed her family and had kept her from ever coming back here.

“Evidence?” he said, his tone mocking. “You need a little more than a motorcycle and a leather jacket to be a rebel.”

“You were always being kicked out of school. For smoking—”

“I’d forgotten that,” he said with a half smile. “I still sneak the occasional smoke, but rarely. Only when I’m stressed.”

Why did she care? Unbidden came a memory of that one time, when she, the good girl, had done the most unexpected thing of all. She had boldly tasted his lips. She did not remember anything about smoke, just something delicious and forbidden unfurling within her.

“And fighting,” she continued, hearing that prudish note deepen in her voice, a defense against the power of that memory of their lips joining, that sense of the universe shifting and aligning, of all being right in her world, when it had been such a wrong thing to do.

And if she recalled, and she did, he had been very quick to point that out to her, too. What had he said?

Don’t start fires you can’t put out.

Hanna could actually feel her cheeks burning at the memory, but Sam’s mind, thankfully, was apparently not on stolen kisses. Far from it, evidently.

“Ah,” he said reminiscently. “I did enjoy a good fight. But only if I won.”

“I recall you always winning.”

He lifted a lazy eyebrow at her, and she knew she had probably revealed more than she wanted to about her girlish days of dreaming about him.

“And drinking,” she said swiftly, inserting the stern note back into her voice.

“You’re mistaken there. I did not drink then, nor do I drink now.” His voice had gone taut.

“So,” Hanna said, her own tone deliberately light, “just now, you nearly killed the pony and me stone-cold sober?”

He laughed, reluctantly. “Guilty.”

“And for skipping school,” she finished, triumphantly. “You were always being suspended because you skipped classes.”

The laughter left him instantly. “I did do a lot of that,” he admitted.

“Why?” Her curiosity felt like a form of weakness, but it really did seem, around him, that she had always suffered one form of weakness or another.

He considered her carefully for a moment, and she was aware his gaze was suddenly shuttered. “It’s really not important anymore,” he said.

And he was so right. It was not important anymore. Hanna was not the same person she had been back then—far from it—and neither was he.

He would probably be shocked by the direction her life had taken after he had left Smith, how the girl he had called “Goody Two-shoes” had managed to be such a tragic disappointment.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he said, and stepped toward her. He looked down into her face and concern furrowed his brow. “Your hand still hurts, doesn’t it?”

Though it had been nearly nine years since she had laid eyes on Sam, looking into the quiet strength of his face, she felt a sense of familiarity, of knowing him.

“Yes,” she said, “it does.”

He took her arm, having seen all along which one she was favoring. He slid her glove off her hand, and turned it over in his own.

“That looks nasty,” he said, and Hanna glanced down to see her hand was already swollen and discolored. The pony rope must have caught in between her fingers and her thumb and scraped the skin away.

But the pain seemed numbed by the warmth of his thumb making a circle in the cold palm of her hand.

It felt as if her whole world dissolved into a forbidden sense of longing, the present melting into the past as Hanna experienced the same feverish awareness that Sam had always created in her.