Sandra Steffen - Nick's Long-Awaited Honeymoon

Brittany removed her hands from her pockets and looked around. They had entered the alley that ran behind the stores on the east side of Main Street. Today was Sunday, and all the businesses were closed. Even the diner shut down one day a week, which meant that nobody was out and about. Except her and Nick.

Her heels clicked on the uneven, packed ground. Beside her, Nick’s footsteps were silent. The wind couldn’t reach them here in the alley. Without it the sun felt blessedly warm. It melted snow off rooftops, droplets of water clinging to the pointy tips of icicles before plopping into puddles like the first music of spring.

“Well?” Nick asked, their steps slowing, then stopping completely near the diner’s back door.

She wished she could blame the excitement inching through her veins on spring fever. But Nick wasn’t the only one who never lied. Unfortunately, there was more to the sighing of her heart than a change of seasons.

How would she describe him? she thought, staring up at him. This close he was very intimidating. And very handsome. He could torture her from now until eternity, but she’d never admit that out loud.

He moved without making a sound, his voice a husky baritone as he said, “What are you thinking?”

“I...never mind.”

He leaned toward her, his face inches from hers. “I think you’re thinking the same thing I’m thinking. That a kiss would be heaven and a warm bed even better.”

“That isn’t what I was thinking. At least not exactly,” she whispered, her eyes on his as he drew closer.

“Then what, exactly?”

His mouth brushed the corner of her lips, his breath warm on her skin. Her eyes fluttered closed when his lips moved over half an inch. “You’re a bully,” she whispered.

He kissed the indentation above her upper lip. “And?”

“And you’re too good-looking for your own good.”

“Is that anything like being adorable?”

His mouth covered hers like it had countless times before. His breathing became ragged, his kiss insistent. He slipped his arms around her back and pulled her tight to him, letting her know how much he wanted her.

In the darkest recesses of her mind, Brittany knew this wasn’t what she’d come here to do. But it had been so long since she’d felt this way, so long since she’d been giddy with anticipation and excitement, drunk on dreams and on desire. She tried to remind herself of the problems they’d had during their six-and-a-half-year marriage, but it wasn’t easy to remember her quiet hopelessness when Nick was kissing her and touching her, when he felt so good and smelled so good.

Nick heard Brittany’s sigh, saw her smile, felt her shudder. Sweet heaven. That’s what she was, what she’d always been. She was slender and soft as only a woman could be, pliant and aggressive in a way that was uniquely her own. It was a potent combination, and had him needing, seeking...more.

He opened his eyes for but an instant, just long enough to catch a movement at the very edge of his peripheral vision. He swung around, all his senses on red alert.

Brittany gasped for air and staggered. She hadn’t heard any sound, but before she could blink there was a scuffle and a grunt as Nick pinned a man against the building in the alley.

The man groaned. “What the—”

“All right,” Nick ground out, his mouth mere inches from the other man’s ear. “Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?”

Chapter Three

“Oh, my goodness! What are you doing? Let him go!”

Nick felt a series of tugs on his arm. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a woman with long, wavy brown hair and eyes gone huge with fear. “You know this man?”

She nodded, a blush creeping up her face. In a glance Nick noted that she was wearing a long bathrobe, its pale blue color in stark contrast to the embarrassment tingeing her neck. Beneath the blush he could see the marks a man’s whisker stubble had left on her sensitive skin.

The man he had pinned against the building had plenty of whisker stubble. Brown whisker stubble. Now that Nick took the time to notice, the color of the man’s hair was brown, too. Brown, not gray. Certainly not silver.

Damn. He’d overreacted.

He released the other man and instantly took a backward step. Adrenaline still pumped through his veins, frustration close on its heels. Since anger was the quickest way to vent it, Nick squeezed his hands into fists at his sides and sputtered, “Who are you? And what the hell are you doing here?”

The man pushed himself away from the building, his own hands curling into fists. “My name’s Burke Kincaid. I ran out of gas just outside of town last night, so I hiked in. Nobody was around except L—er, Miss Graham, so she helped me. Now who the hell are you?”

Everything had happened so fast Brittany was having difficulty taking it all in. One moment Nick had been kissing her, and the next thing she knew he had a man pressed up against a building. Although she’d never seen him before, she could tell from the integrity in his eyes that Burke Kincaid was an innocent man. He was also an angry man. Rightly so.

She happened to glance at Louetta Graham. An instant later Louetta met her gaze. Brittany had never seen Louetta with her hair down, and certainly never in slippers and a robe and not much else. Suddenly, everything she’d heard about Louetta flashed through her mind. The other woman was painfully shy, and very kind. Several months ago she’d gone to work for Melody Carson in the town’s only diner. With Melody due to have a baby soon, Louetta practically ran the place single-handedly. She still blushed every time one of the local boys made a pass at her, but the few times Brittany had heard Louetta laugh, she’d stopped and stared, because hers wasn’t the laughter a person would associate with a woman who’d been voted “The girl most likely not to” by her graduating class.

Evidently Louetta’s graduating class had been wrong.

Her hair was mussed, and her mouth had obviously been very thoroughly kissed recently. Brittany wet her own lips, thinking the same could be said for her. Which brought Brittany’s gaze back to Nick. She recognized the anger in his features and in the way he squeezed his fingers into fists at his sides. She also recognized the fear beneath the anger. That, she didn’t understand.

“I’m Nick Colter. Brittany’s husband.” He scooped the man’s cowboy hat off the ground and handed it over. “Sorry. I thought you were somebody else.”

The other man accepted the hat but not the apology. “It seems to me your hello could use a little work.”

Nick nodded, the small gesture an acknowledgment of fault and an admission to an error in judgment. He would have said more, but it was pretty difficult to make amends with a man who was wearing paint chips on one side of his face.

Burke Kincaid couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Nick, but something about the steadiness of his gaze reminded Nick of his father. “Now, Nicholas,” Joe Colter used to say. “Your mother and I aren’t raising any hotheads. Wild animals get mad. People get angry. If you’re angry, take it out on that stack of wood out back.”

Nick had split a lot of wood in his day.

Sometimes his mother had brought him out something cool to drink. More often than not she’d stuck around, stacking the wood he’d split, her hands work-roughened and chapped, her face bearing far too many lines for a woman her age.

“Everyone’s born with gifts,” Clarice would say, staring at the house with its peeling paint and sagging roof. “Money doesn’t happen to be one of ours. But pride is one of your greatest strengths, Nicholas, and so is brawn, neither of which amounts to a hill of beans unless you have the brains to back them up.”