Her Holiday Secret. Jennifer Greene
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the kitchen to remove the lethal weapon from her hand. “I don’t know what you’re worried that ‘something else’ could be. You think you held up the local liquor store earlier that day?”
She had to know he was teasing, but he still couldn’t win that smile back. “Heck. Maybe I did.”
“And maybe cows fly. You’re right that I don’t know you, Maggie. Not well. Not yet, anyway. But offhand, I’d say the community’s safe from your thieving, murderous ways. No offense. But I’d bet the bank you don’t even hit the aspiring criminal ranks near any of the seven deadly sins.”
“Hey, I speed,” she said defensively.
“Well, hell. Let’s cuff you right now and send you up the river.”
“Darn it, Andy. Cut it out. You’re making me feel better.”
“Um...that was kind of the idea. In fact, seems to me if speeding’s enough to give you a guilt attack—whether you can remember the specifics or not—I think you can safely rest your mind that you didn’t rob any banks that day.”
“Okay, okay, I admit I really doubt I did anything like that either,” she said wryly, but then she sighed. “Only I keep waking up from these dreams. Nothing there. No substance. But my heart’s pounding and my hands are sweaty. And the whole feeling just tastes like guilt, like I must have done something really wrong.”
Andy was standing close enough to touch her, but he never intended to. His hand just somehow lifted to her cheek. The thing was, she seemed so troubled about that little twenty-four-hour memory lapse, when everything about her came across as strong and honest. She was a woman who damn near reeked integrity. He just wanted to communicate empathy, reassurance, and words alone didn’t seem to be getting the job done. Possibly, conceivably, there were a few other small factors motivating his need to touch her, too.
Like the little swish in her behind when she walked. And the mischief in her humor. And her naming a deer Horace. And that elusive, evocative scent she wore. And the way being near her had his rusty hormones kicking up an unsettling tizzy, when that hadn’t happened to Andy in a dog’s age. He didn’t lack for female company and he wasn’t particularly wary—hell, every matchmaker in town had been throwing single women at him since the divorce. But leaping for an impulse just wasn’t his way. He was too old to be impressed by a cute tush, and the kind of attraction that mattered took both time and seriously testing the compatibility waters before risking a bunch of grief that wasn’t worth it.
So it was way too soon to even think about touching her.
And way out of line to be thinking about kissing her.
But once his palm touched her cheek, she lifted her face. Something was there. An expression that made him feel heart-punched, a connection in her luminous eyes that made his thumb instinctively stroke the edge of her jaw. She didn’t move. She met his eyes, with all the wariness of a doe edgy with a buck in her territory. But she watched him on that long, long trip when he was bending down. And her lips were parted by the time he’d traveled the distance to hers.
Soft. She tasted soft and warm and tremulous. Both times he’d met her, she’d come across with that I’m-sturdy, I-can-take-care-of-myself routine. He believed it. It was probably why he’d taken to her so damned impossibly fast. But that wasn’t how she kissed.
It’d been so long since he kissed anyone he figured he’d forgotten how. Real quickly he realized that past experience wasn’t going to rescue him from this problem anyway. This wasn’t like any other kiss. She wasn’t like any other woman.
His lips touched down, traced hers, in a testing questing kiss that she seemed to answer in the same language. It was like discovering a field of wildflowers in a snowstorm. Magic where it couldn’t be. A time-out from reality that made no particular sense. He could smell her spaghetti sauce bubbling. Feel her kitchen lights glaring. His life was going fine, he wasn’t all that lonely. Until he kissed her.
Her hand lifted, clutched at the folds of his leather jacket. Not pushing him away, just holding on. And that wooing, whisper-soft kiss kept coming on, like a spell being woven from her textures, her scents, the way her mouth fit his like she belonged to him, like he’d been missing her all this time and hadn’t known.
He didn’t try deepening the kiss. Didn’t want to. But he kept thinking there had to be a catch. He kept waiting for the goofy, crazy feeling of a soul connection to disappear, for some common sense to give him a whack upside the head. Only it didn’t. And she responded with the same wary, winsome, tremulous honesty, as if her sanity had been ransomed by that hushed, soft kiss the same as his had.
He got around to lifting his head. Eventually. She got around to opening her eyes. Eventually. They stared at each other like such a couple of shell-shocked teenagers that he had to smile. Eventually.
“I didn’t come here expecting that,” he said.
“I never thought you did.”
“I just came to make sure you were okay. That’s the truth.”
“I believe you, Andy.”
“Seems to me, chemistry that strong pops up out of nowhere—it’s nothing you can trust, just asking for trouble.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Uh-huh.” He zipped up his jacket, grinned at her. “You can count on it. I’ll be back.”
Three
Maggie whisked the dinner plates into the dishwasher and sponged down the counters, but her gaze kept darting to the kitchen window. Predictably by the first of December, the sun had long fallen even this early in the evening. After two days of howling winds and incessant snow, the drifts swirled and curled in mystical shapes that looked like glazed icing in the moonlight. But her driveway was cleared—and empty, except for her sister’s car. Andy wasn’t due for another hour, so there was no reason on earth for her to start looking for him this early.
She grabbed a dish towel to wipe her hands, half amused, half exasperated to realize how nervous she was. Men never made her nervous. Offhand, she couldn’t think of much in life that had ever intimidated her...outside of the strange, unsettling nightmares prowling her sleep since the accident. But that problem had nothing to do with Andy.
She didn’t normally volunteer a house tour to strangers—much less expose her disastrously messy sleeping loft to a man’s eyes. At the time...well, she hadn’t known he was going to kiss her. Didn’t know that kiss was going to knock her for six. But something had been kindling and simmering the two times she’d been around him. And the mistakes Maggie had made with men in the past all had the same roots.
Most guys claimed to be comfortable around a strong woman, but they really weren’t. Someone looking for a vulnerable, traditional sweetie just wasn’t going to find it in her. She’d been self-reliant and independent too long. These days, if there was even the tiniest hint of potential kindling, Maggie just believed in being frankly blunt about who she was. What you see is what you get. No faking it. Being nice just got in the way—if a guy was going to be scared off by her independence or messiness or anything else, better to know it and move on before either of them had a pile of hurtful emotions invested.
But Andy hadn’t been scared off. At least not by anything she’d shown him so far. And for Maggie, that was downright rattling. Men always had some sweet, macho protective thing to say about a woman alone living in such a remote location. They fretted about her safety.
Safety was a relative term, Maggie mused. Trussed and blindfolded, she could capably cope with a dead furnace in a blizzard or a wounded moose wandering in her backyard. Piece of cake. Danger never had been a common word in her vocabulary—until meeting Andy, anyway. It struck her ironic humor buttons that something in those dark, sexy eyes made her feel distinctly unsafe.
And that was new and rattling, too.
“Maggie, for Pete’s sake, I told you I’d do