Christmas with a Billionaire. Кэрол Мортимер
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sweet-tempered.
He led the way up to the house, giving the dog’s leash a snap every time it lunged forward.
The walk gave Harriet an unfortunate view of the back of him. Broad back, a certain angry stiffness in the set of his shoulders, his fanny gorgeous nonetheless in those faded jeans, his legs long and lean and strong. By the time they arrived at the back door, she felt as if she was practically panting, and not entirely because of the length of Ty’s powerful stride.
The dog was walking quietly at his side, sending him upward glances as though longing for his approval.
“I was going to put you in the bunkhouse,” he said, opening the door and standing back from it. “But I can see that won’t work. Cringle said you’d be here a week. Would you say that’s a fair estimate?”
“I don’t mind the bunkhouse,” she said tersely. “A week maximum. If everything goes right.”
Why did she feel so unsure of that, suddenly? Everything on her photo shoots always went right. Because of her news photography background she had become adept at getting wonderful pictures without great lighting, without a huge team, without makeup artists.
She could just imagine what Ty Jordan would have to say about a makeup artist.
“And the guys surely wouldn’t mind you sharing the bunkhouse, either, but you can have my little sister’s room.” This was said with the quiet authority of a man who didn’t expect to be questioned.
She was sorely tempted to insist on the bunkhouse. She could tell him she had bunked with guys before. That war zones had a way of blurring lines and stripping modesty. But something about the tiny chink in his armor when he said “little sister” stopped her.
This was the side of him she wanted to capture on camera. The personal side. And she would have far more chance of doing that if she was camped out under the same roof as him.
He tied the dog to the outside of the door handle before he followed her into the house.
“Bathroom’s through here,” he said, dropping her bag on the floor. “If you want to slip off those things, I’ll get the first-aid kit.”
She said thank-you when what she really wanted to say was “go to hell.” She retrieved her bag, went into the bathroom and closed the door. She took off the ruined pantyhose, looked down at the ragged scrape across her knee.
She’d been a war correspondent for two years with nary a scratch.
She looked in the mirror. Her suit was ruined. Her face was smudged. Her hair was standing on end. She took off the suit and opened her suitcase. The all-important first impression had been made. Hopefully the first thirty seconds of it had more impact than the second thirty, but she doubted it. She put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. If she was taking her power back, she certainly wasn’t going to fix her hair, or refresh her make-up for him.
She did remove the smudge from her face before marching back out of the bathroom.
When she came out he was in the kitchen, rummaging through a white metal box with a red cross on the side of it. He didn’t even glance up at her.
The kitchen was unchanged, she thought looking around. Plain, a utilitarian room that served a function.
But it held memories, too—her and Stacey making a mess creating homemade pizza, him coming in, dirty from work, sexy as sin, and giving them hell. Then he’d softened the blow by saying how good it smelled, and he couldn’t wait to try it. She remembered playing cards at that scarred kitchen table with Stacey. He’d been tired, physical weariness bowing his shoulders, but when Stacey had pleaded, he had joined them, reluctantly, and ended up showing them how to play poker. Losing his reluctance a little later, he’d showed them a game called Blind Baseball.
She could not remember the rules or the point of the game, only that they had held the cards up on their foreheads where the other players could see them but they couldn’t see their own.
She could remember the laughter that had filled that room, that had chased that faint weariness from his face. His laughter had made him seem younger and more human. Incredibly, it had made him even more handsome than he had seemed before, and that had been plenty handsome. The moment had shone with a light almost iridescent, had stolen her breath from her lungs, and the joy of other good moments in her life had paled before the perfection of that one.
“Are you all right?”
He was looking at her closely.
“Yes,” she said. “I told you it was just a scratch.”
But she knew what a scratch could do. Four years ago he had scratched the surface of an uninitiated heart.
And that scratch had festered and grown to a wound.
“Have a seat over here, Miss Snow.”
“Call me Harrie.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Pardon?” She sat down at the chair he’d pulled out for her.
“I just can’t look at you and call you Harry.” He knelt down in front of her, completely unself-conscious, the medical kit on the ground beside him. He rolled up the leg of her jeans, without apparently noticing she had changed outfits. She found herself holding the side of the chair as if she was getting ready for takeoff.
“Fine by me, Mr. Jordan. Do you think you could make that Ms. Snow?”
He shrugged, indifferent, and didn’t invite her to call him Tyler, or Ty, as she had called him last time she was here. Looking at the top of his head, his dark hair shiny as silk, she wondered if there was any of that laughter-filled boy left in him.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, his eyes flicking over the white of her knuckles on the edge of her chair.
“Thank you. I know.” He hadn’t even touched her yet, for God’s sake.
The touch, when it came, was everything she had feared, everything she had braced herself for.
It was strong, infinitely competent, as he carefully cleaned the area around the scrape on her knee. The skin of his palm brushed her lower knee as he swabbed her cut, and it was leather tough, the hand of man who worked outdoors in extreme weather and handled shovels and reins and newborn calves. The hand of a man who drove big trucks and chopped wood and fixed fences.
And yet there was none of that toughness in his touch. He was careful and extremely gentle, a man, she reminded herself, who had looked after scraped knees before. And broken arms.
“There, I think I’ve got the grit out,” he said, inspecting it carefully. His breath whispered across the dampness of the skin surrounding her scrape, and she had to close her eyes against the sensation that tingled through her tummy, the insane desire to lean forward and ask him to kiss it better.
He dabbed iodine on with a cotton swab on a wand that came out of the bottle. Thankfully the application required no direct contact, and allowed her to marshal her defenses.
But then he carefully cut a square of gauze, held that over the scrape, the warmth of his hand encircling her kneecap. With his other hand he juggled the medical tape, cutting off pieces, then pressing them firmly into place, his fingertips trailing liquid fire down skin she had not really been aware was so sensitive until now.
“All done,” he announced, and Harrie wasn’t sure if she was safe or sorry. He rolled her pant leg down and got to his feet.
It was about the sexiest thing that had ever happened to her, which probably summed up her pathetic luck with the opposite sex, including her ex-husband, quite nicely.
“Thank you,” she said, and clambered to her feet, wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. “I’m fine. That was completely unnecessary. Nice. But unnecessary.”
She could feel herself getting red. Why had she said nice? “I meant kind,” she stammered,