Книга - Wed By A Will

Wed By A Will
Cara Colter


I PRAYED FOR YOU TO COME.From the moment the little boy next door whispered those words in her ear, Corrie Parsons knew she was hooked–but good! For she had come to Miracle Harbor to claim the ranch she had inherited, a home to call her own. And it was all hers–for the price of a wedding ring .Too bad the sexy cowboy who came with that little boy wanted her land–not her. But Matt Donahue's heated gaze told another story. About a man who longed for love just as much as Corrie did. About a husband who could make her wedding dreams come true–if only he believed .









A sudden yearning leapt in her at the touch of the cowboy’s hand.


“I’m Matt Donahue,” he said. “Your closest neighbor. I was interested in buying this piece of land.”

“I’m not selling.” Corrie had already decided the place was hers. A place where her heart could be at home.

“You haven’t heard my offer,” he said mildly.

“Nor do I plan to.” She saw no reason to tell him the land wasn’t even really hers to sell, even if she wanted to. And maybe it never would be. How had she managed to overlook the fact that while her heart was saying forever to this little shack in the trees, a legal document said something else?

Husband required.

For a moment, having the h word in her mind at the same time that this big, handsome man with the strong, steady eyes filled her doorwell made her almost helpless with longing.…


Dear Reader,

September is here again, bringing the end of summer—but not the end of relaxing hours spent with a good book. This month Silhouette brings you six new Romance novels that will fill your leisure hours with pleasure. And don’t forget to see how Silhouette Books makes you a star!

First, Myrna Mackenzie continues the popular MAITLAND MATERNITY series with A Very Special Delivery, when Laura Maitland is swept off her feet on the way to the delivery room! Then we’re off to DESTINY, TEXAS, where, in This Kiss, a former plain Jane returns home to teach the class heartthrob a thing or two about chemistry. Don’t miss this second installment of Teresa Southwick’s exciting series. Next, in Cinderella After Midnight, the first of Lilian Darcy’s charming trilogy THE CINDERELLA CONSPIRACY, we go to a ball with “Lady Catrina”—who hasn’t bargained on a handsome millionaire seeing through her disguise.…

Whitney Bloom’s dreams come true in DeAnna Talcott’s Marrying for a Mom, when she marries the man she loves—even if only to keep custody of his daughter. In Wed by a Will, the conclusion of THE WEDDING LEGACY, reader favorite Cara Colter brings together a new family—and reunites us with other members. Then, a prim and proper businesswoman finds she wants a lot more from the carpenter who’s remodeling her house than watertight windows in Gail Martin’s delightful Her Secret Longing.

Be sure to return next month for Stella Bagwell’s conclusion to MAITLAND MATERNITY and the start of a brand-new continuity—HAVING THE BOSS’S BABY! Beloved author Judy Christenberry launches this wonderful series with When the Lights Went Out…Don’t miss any of next month’s wonderful tales.

Happy reading!






Mary-Theresa Hussey

Senior Editor




Wed by a Will

Cara Colter







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




Books by Cara Colter


Silhouette Romance

Dare To Dream #491

Baby in Blue #1161

Husband in Red #1243

The Cowboy, the Baby and the Bride-To-Be #1319

Truly Daddy #1363

A Bride Worth Waiting For #1388

Weddings Do Come True #1406

A Babe in the Woods #1424

A Royal Marriage #1440

First Time, Forever #1464

* (#litres_trial_promo)Husband by Inheritance #1532

* (#litres_trial_promo)The Heiress Takes a Husband #1538

* (#litres_trial_promo)Wed by a Will #1544




CARA COLTER


shares ten acres in the wild Kootenay region of British Columbia with the man of her dreams, three children, two horses, a cat with no tail and a golden retriever who answers best to “bad dog.” She loves reading, writing and the woods in winter (no bears). She says life’s delights include an automatic garage door opener and the skylight over the bed that allows her to see the stars at night.

She also says, “I have not lived a neat and tidy life, and used to envy those who did. Now I see my struggles as having given me a deep appreciation of life, and of love, that I hope I succeed in passing on through the stories that I tell.”




Contents


Prologue (#u87fa4851-9b93-5867-a27d-d19ed07a148c)

Chapter One (#uaab508ef-2028-58f8-987d-ddb76ce8899b)

Chapter Two (#u5712a071-97ae-5f4f-bad2-dbad4ace1687)

Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)




Prologue


February 15…

With a sensation of panic, Corrine Parsons realized how close she was to crying. Glancing at the two women she had never seen before, yet whose identical faces were the same as the one she saw every time she looked in the mirror, she fought the emotions that threatened to capsize her control.

Triplets. She was one of triplets.

It didn’t matter what the precise emotion she felt was, and she couldn’t identify it. Was it gladness or sadness? Shock or just plain fear?

No matter what the emotion, she knew the first rule. She knew it by heart. The first rule was never to cry. Never.

She’d learned that for the first time when she was six, and had gone into her first foster home because her aunt Ella was ill. Terrified and so alone, she had been so happy when she had found the puppy.

She had secretly hidden him under the porch, stealing scraps from the garbage to feed him. And she had loved him, nursed him, played with him.

Then she had been discovered. The rules: No puppies—never, ever no matter how much you cried and pleaded. The tears flowing freely then, as she tried to make her foster parents understand how much it meant to her.

The truth: no one cared.

A truth underscored over the years: as her hand cramped from writing out “Thou shalt not steal” when she had not stolen anything.

When a foster mother’s real daughter wore Corrine’s red jacket, without even asking. That jacket had been the only nice thing she owned. You should be glad to let her wear it, after all we’ve done for you.

From age six to seventeen, she’d been in foster care on and off many times. Seven different foster homes had taken Corrine Parsons’s tears and turned them to ice, cold hard ice that she saw in her eyes every time she looked at her own reflection in a mirror, even today, ten years after she had left her last foster home behind her.

Now, here she sat in a posh law office, with rich furnishings and thick carpets, surrounded by strangers, and the ice felt like the hot blue flame of a blowtorch was being aimed at it. Tears, hot and shaming, pressed behind her eyes. She had the terrifying feeling she might not be able to control whether they fell or not for very much longer.

And all because two of the strangers in this room looked exactly like her.

Were not strangers at all, though she had not met them before, at least not in her memory.

Sisters.

Mirror-image sisters. Triplets.

Back when she had still dreamed, as a lonely child—with her few clothes in a plastic garbage bag at the end of yet another unfamiliar bed, had she not dreamed of such things? Had she not lain awake in the darkness and tried to soothe her own fears with dreams?

There had been detailed dreams of an imaginary family: A Christmas tree with gifts piled high beneath, gifts with her name on them. A bed with no crinkly rubber protecting the mattress. Sheets that felt soft instead of scratchy, and smelled of a mother’s love. A strong, handsome father who threw back his head and laughed and picked up his little girl and swung her in the air. Sisters who shared Barbie dolls and hair ribbons and giggles and secrets.

Dreams…of someone to love her.

Corrie, she told herself firmly, as the tears pushed harder at the back of her eyes, these two women look like you, and they’re your sisters. But that doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean they will love you, or care about you, as if blood could automatically guarantee those things.

Still, when she dared to glance at them, at Abby and Brittany, she could see something in their eyes when they looked back at her. It was as if they hadn’t even noticed she was not dressed appropriately. That she had purposely worn her oldest clothes in defiant answer to the summons that had arrived from the law office on creamy linen paper.

Her sisters’ eyes held tenderness.

Welcome.

She wanted so badly to believe. And was terrified to believe at the same time. Her faded jeans had a hole in the knee, and she worked the frayed threads with her fingers, trying desperately to keep control of her world.

Far away she could hear the lawyer’s voice going on and on. About a stranger giving them gifts. Huge gifts. Abby got a house. Brittany a business. Another man came in and went out again, but she hardly noticed.

She heard her own name. And her gift. Five acres of land. And a cabin. Her sisters looked naively happy, but she could feel herself bracing, waiting for the catch.

There was always a catch.

Sure enough, there it was. There were conditions attached to the gifts. If they wanted to keep them they had to stay here, in this little ocean-bound town she had never seen before, for one year.

And they had to get married within that year.

Married. Yeah, right. She, who had mastered the art of freezing a man where he stood with just one glance from her ice-cold eyes.

But if she came and lived here, even for that year, she could be with them. Her sisters.

See? It was happening already. She was nearly weak with wanting what she saw in their eyes.

What if she came, rearranged her whole life to be with them, and they didn’t like her?

The fear was so intense it was like falling off a cliff, falling and falling and falling.

But suddenly, she wasn’t falling anymore.

Her sister Abby slid her hand across the small space between their chairs, and intertwined their fingers. It was as if she knew the terror Corrie was feeling, and knew, too, how to make it go away.

Abby’s hand was warm and soft and strong. She squeezed, and when Corrie looked up at her, what she saw in her sister’s eyes made her realize she would be moving to Miracle Harbor, no matter how scared she was now. Not right away, of course. Corrie had obligations that had to be looked after first. But as soon as it was possible, she would come.

Frightened and excited at the very same time, Corrine admitted the hardest thing of all. That she was powerless to stay away from these gifts that had been offered to her…the hope and the tenderness she saw shining in her sisters’ eyes.




Chapter One


Three months later…

Hers.

Corrine shoved her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, and rocked back on her heels, studying the cabin. It stood, small and solid, under the spreading wings of a giant red maple.

Hers.

It didn’t matter to her that the porch sagged, that the shingles on the roof had grown a thick layer of moss, that the windows were grimy and needed to be cleaned. It didn’t matter to her that the second step was broken, or that the caulking was crumbling and rocks had fallen away from the top of the stone chimney.

She sighed, and allowed herself to feel a little finger of happiness. Nothing had ever really been hers before.

Of course she had owned clothing, and her beloved, if ancient Jeep that still had patches of its original green color in a few places.

But she had always rented an apartment in Minneapolis, even long after her moderate success with the Brandy picture book, Brandy being a young orphan girl of her creation who took on the world with spunk and fire and who always won.

Why hadn’t she bought a house?

Maybe because it would be tempting fate to believe in good things, to commit to anything at all beyond a deadline.

Even feeling so good about this ramshackle cabin concerned her.

Nothing in her history allowed her to believe good things lasted.

“Well,” she said out loud, and smiled, “according to sister Brit, this place doesn’t qualify as a good thing. Not even close.”

Brit had been appalled by the tiny cabin, the tumbledown barn, the falling-down fences that surrounded pastures gone wild, grass and weeds and wildflowers much higher than the fences.

“You can come live with me and Mitch,” Brit had announced shortly after Corrie had finally arrived.

“You’re newlyweds!” Corrie had said. Her sister had been married for only a week. She and her husband, Mitch, had hardly been able to keep their hands off each other long enough to say their vows. Corrie didn’t want to live with that—evidence, cold hard evidence, that dreams came true, that miracles happened all the time.

Both her sisters were evidence of that, judging by the happiness they had found since coming to Miracle Harbor. The thought made terror claw in Corrie’s throat.

Never cry, had just been the first rule. But the second rule was just as strong: Don’t hold hope. Having hope could be the most dangerous thing of all.

“We’ll come help you clean it up,” Abby had declared bravely, staring at the cobwebs inside the little cabin, her face a ghastly shade of pale.

Corrie had been amazed that her sisters shared her terror of spiders, felt that funny warm spot around her frozen heart threaten to expand.

So, of course, she had refused their offers of help. But not just because she could not stand to owe anyone anything, and not just because she felt vulnerable in the face of her sisters’ enthusiasm for her when they did not know the first thing about her.

Somehow cleaning the caulking was like claiming it. Making it hers in a way no one could take away from her. She took a deep breath, and glanced around.

There was work everywhere. The barn was practically falling down. The yard was nonexistent. Maybe she should start out here—

“Corrie,” she told herself, “get in there. Or else you’ll be sleeping outside tonight.” She debated whether there would be more spiders inside or out.

She took a deep breath, skipped over the broken step, and gave the door a shove. It squeaked open.

The interior of the cabin was simplicity itself. One large room served as both the kitchen and the living room. The kitchen had a single row of cupboards, badly in need of paint, and a countertop badly in need of new Arborite. The rust-stained sink was the old porcelain variety. The fridge and stove, thankfully, looked new and spotless.

A doorway off the kitchen, with no door, led to a bedroom that looked like it had been added to the cabin as an afterthought. The tiny bathroom, too, must have been added later, since the cabin looked to be eighty or ninety years old, and the bathroom was modern, bright and clean.

A black potbellied stove in the center of the large room acted as a divider between the kitchen and living room. On the other side was her living room, empty as yet. She liked its rough-hewn gray log walls, and the window, french-paned and huge. Once the window was cleaned she knew the light would be spectacular in this room. She would unpack her easel first, and put it right here where she could glance out the window at the wild grass and flowers, and the grove of trees and the leaning barn and know that everything she was looking at was hers.

A single beam of sunshine had found its way through the grime in the uncurtained front window, and it danced across the floor.

She went and stood in that sunbeam, scraped a layer of dust from the floor with the toe of her sneaker, and saw that the wood beneath was golden and warm.

Lost in thought, picturing bright yellow-checkered curtains at the windows, throw rugs on the floor, red tulips in a glass jar on the kitchen table, she did not hear him come in.

“Anybody here?”

She whirled around, gasping, some ingrained instinct spurring her to look for a weapon. Something to protect herself. Her mind raced back along the length of the long rutted driveway that led to her door. She was a long way from the nearest neighbor. No one would hear a cry for help.

There was nothing she could use to defend herself, and not even a coffee table to dart behind. A quick exit would do, she thought but then her mind started to kick in and she remembered. The movers. He had to be one of the movers. After all, she had been waiting for the movers to come with her meager scraps of furniture.

The light poured in the door behind him, and for a moment all she saw was his silhouette. She knew immediately he was not a furniture mover, yet her fear stayed at bay, and as she studied him she felt herself relax minutely.

Beige cowboy hat, white T-shirt, narrow-legged jeans on long, long legs, booted feet, broad, broad shoulders. Even without the hat, something would have whispered cowboy.

The confident angle of the chin, the solid plant of his feet, something in the way the muscle danced under the sunlight that glanced off the hair on his arms.

She didn’t know there were cowboys in Oregon. Of course, she didn’t really know very much about Oregon at all, except that the climate promised to be kinder than it was in Minnesota.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t startle me,” she said, cool and defensive. But his voice had already penetrated those defenses. A deep voice, a sure voice. It only penetrated just enough for her to decide she was safe in this cabin, with a stranger who had appeared on soft feet, out of nowhere.

Her eyes adjusted to the light, and the details of him came clear to her. Brown eyes, steady, unwavering, calm and strong. A lot could be told from a man’s eyes. It was a survival skill she had perfected, another remnant from her childhood.

His cheekbones were pronounced, and his nose looked like it might have been straight once. Now the perfection of his looks was marred by the bump where the nose had been broken, but oddly the flaw made his appearance infinitely more appealing than pure perfection might. The crooked nose proclaimed him a man’s man, who lived in a man’s world, and paid the price for it. He probably accepted his lumps with no more than a casual shrug.

He had a beautiful mouth. Her artist’s eyes insisted on seeing that; the sensuous fullness of the lower lip, the firm curve of the upper one.

He took a step toward her, his hand extended, and she backed up.

He lowered his hand slowly, and regarded her, the eyes narrow now, assessing.

Rule Three: Never let them see your fear. It didn’t matter if she didn’t even know why she was scared, why her heart was pumping rabbit-swift, and why everything in her knew the scariest thing she could have done would have been to accept that extended hand.

She knew exactly what it would feel like.

It would be warm, dry, infinitely strong and leathertough. The touch of his hand would invite her to look into a world where people were not alone. Just a tantalizing glimpse, before he released his grip.

A sudden yearning leapt in her that she had to fight. A yearning that made an entirely different kind of fear breathe to life within her.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, her voice ice-cold, not a trace of any sort of emotion in it.

She knew he heard the coldness, though his reaction was barely discernible. A flicker in a muscle along the line of his jaw, a slight narrowing of his eyes that had the unfortunate effect of bringing the thick sooty abundance of his lashes to her attention.

“I’m Matt Donahue,” he said, just the faintest hint of ice adding a raw edge to the warm timber of his voice. “I’m your closest neighbor,” he nodded, “on that side.”

If he expected the welcome-neighbor routine, she hoped to disappoint him. She said nothing, waited, after a moment, folded her arms across her chest.

“I actually was interested in buying this piece of land. I heard someone had bought it before I even realized it had come up on the market.”

So he wasn’t exactly here as part of the welcome-neighbor routine, either. Surprise. Surprise.

“I’m not selling.” See? That was what attachment did. She’d only just got here, and already she had decided the place was hers. A place where her heart could be at home. She felt inordinately angry at him for making her see how fragile places for the heart really were.

“You haven’t even heard my offer,” he said mildly.

“Nor do I plan to.” She saw no reason to tell him she was in no position to sell, even had she wanted to. The land wasn’t even really hers to sell, yet. And maybe it never would be. How had her heart managed to overlook that little detail when she was planning throw rugs and curtains and bright red tulips?

That while her heart was saying forever to this little shack in the trees, the legal document said something else.

Husband required.

For a moment, having the H-word in her mind at the same time that this big, handsome man with the strong, steady eyes filled her doorwell made her almost helpless with longing.

Wishing that she could be a different person than she was. Softer and kinder, like her sister Abby or more outgoing and sexy like her sister Brit.

She felt her lack of warmth should have at least backed him out the door by now, but he stood, feet planted, regarding her thoughtfully, almost lazily. His eyes drifted casually to her bare ring finger, which gave her permission to take a swift, discreet glance at his.

His fingers were long and lean and ringless. Any kind of jewelry on them—even a wedding band—would have looked foolishly out of place in contrast to the masculine power of those hands.

She wished suddenly she was not in her oldest jeans, and a T-shirt with a rip under one armpit. She wished she had not been so quick to tell Brit to leave her hair alone when her sister had tried to style it. Still, she kept her face deliberately expressionless, and hated herself for the weakness of wishing.

His attention, thankfully, wavered from her before her discomfort made her blurt out something she was sure to regret. An overreaction like get the hell off my property.

He cocked his head a little, turned a shoulder, listened. “You expecting company?”

“The movers,” she said, suddenly hearing what he heard, the growl of a big truck coming down her rutted driveway.

“I expect they’re here, then. I’ll leave you to it—” he paused, leaving a blank where she could fill in her name, but she refused. She had no intention of appearing even remotely friendly to the handsome neighbor who had his eye on her land.

And, she realized, her lips.

Stunned by the pure masculine potency that burned briefly in his eyes when they flicked ever so briefly to her lips, she found herself wanting to sway toward him. Thankfully, he had tamed the heat in his gaze when he looked placidly back into her eyes.

She narrowed her eyes and glared at him.

He raised a hand to the brim of his hat, gave it a slow tip, and took a step backward onto the porch, turning away from her. “Your livestock appears to have arrived.”

Her what? She scurried over to the doorway. He was planted on the top step now, his eyes narrowed at the old muffler-free truck that was bouncing down her drive, a stock rack in the back.

“I don’t have any livestock.”

He looked over his shoulder at her. In the full light he was even more compelling than he had been in the dimness of the cabin. The sunlight made him appear bigger and stronger and more real.

Dark brown hair that curled at the tips slipped out from under his cowboy hat and touched the nape of his neck.

She could see his pulse beating in the curve of that strong neck. The white T-shirt molded the firm, hard lines of his chest and the broad sweep of his shoulders. Where the short sleeve of the shirt ended a rock-cut bicep began. The white of the shirt made the copper tone of his skin appear deeper. Her eyes wandered down the length of that arm, to the corded muscle of a powerful forearm, the squareness of a wrist twice the width of her own.

Embarrassed for looking, she forced her gaze back up to his eyes.

She could see they were more than brown; they were dark as new-turned earth, flecked with little spangles of gold.

And in the strong sunlight, she could see those eyes held a pain in them that could compete with any of her own.

The truck pulled up at the bottom of her stairs, a vehicle in a state of disrepair worse than her Jeep.

Her neighbor stepped over her broken step with the ease of a man who was used to putting his feet in all the right places, and went up to the window, which the driver rolled down.

“Corrie Parsons?” The driver looked grizzled, and dirty. There was a look in his eyes that she could recognize at ninety yards. Plain old garden variety meanness.

Donahue looked back at her for confirmation, and she nodded, not even sorry to give up her name to him after all. In fact she was glad suddenly that he was here. She got a familiar uneasy feeling from that man in the truck, with his stained teeth and squinty eyes and stubbled jowls.

With surprise she realized that Matt Donahue had either picked up on her split second of dislike, or harbored some of his own, because there was something almost protective in the way he turned back to the truck, and answered for her.

“This is the Parsons’s place.”

No one had ever protected her before, not even casually, and she did not like the way his small gesture threatened to soften something hard within her.

At that moment, a sound like Corrine had never heard reverberated through the air. It was like amplified fingernails across a blackboard crossed with the shrill howl of a saw blade shrieking through wood.

Matt Donahue didn’t jump back the way she did. Instead, he moved away from the vehicle door, swung himself up on the deck of the truck, and peered through the worn board slats of the stock rack.

“Yup,” the man said, opening his door and sliding out, “I’m Werner Grimes, delivering a prize-winning mammoth jack and he’s all yours.”

Matt Donahue jumped back down, shot a look over his shoulder at her that was distinctly grim.

“I thought you said you didn’t have any livestock,” Donahue said.

“I don’t! I don’t even know what a mammoth jack is. It sounds like something that’s been extinct for several million years crossed with a rabbit.”

“Ha-ha. That’s ’bout as good a description of him as I’ve ever heard,” Grimes said, going around to the back of his truck and lowering a ramp. “Mister, you want to give me a hand with this?”

“She says it’s not hers.”

“And this paper right here says it is, bought and paid for.”

While the men were at the back of the truck, arguing ownership, she crept down the stairs of the cabin and came around to the side of the truck. She couldn’t see anything. She climbed up on the deck, as she’d seen Matt do, only with less grace. She looked through the slats.

The saddest pair of brown eyes she had ever seen looked back at her from under bushy eyebrows. Long scruffy ears were turned toward the men, listening. For a moment it almost seemed like maybe it was some sort of prehistoric creature crossed with a rabbit.

“A donkey,” she whispered. She stuck her fingers through the slats and felt a soft, velvety nose touch her.

“Git your hand out of there!” the man shouted at her, and she jerked back so quickly she nearly fell off the wheel well. “Darned critter is meaner than a rattlesnake. He’ll take off your arm at the elbow.”

She stared at Grimes, aghast, and thought of the soft muzzle that had momentarily touched her fingers.

“Look, there’s obviously been a mistake,” her neighbor said.

“No mistake,” Grimes insisted. “Right name. Right address. Stand back. I’m going to open the gate.”

“She doesn’t want a jack. And neither do I. I’ve got a pasture of full-blooded quarter horse mares right next door, just foaling out, and I’ll be damned if I’m planning a crop of mules next year.”

“You better have a strong fence up then.” The man spat. “He’s hornier than—”

Donahue cut a look to her falling-down fences, and then interrupted Grimes before he had a chance to educate them about exactly how horny her donkey was.

Her donkey.

“How much to take him back wherever he came from?”

Her neighbor was reaching into his back pocket, taking out his wallet, which seemed to her to be a slightly autocratic thing for him to be doing, though it was a little late to decide she wanted control of the situation.

A certain whiney note appeared in the donkeydeliverer’s voice. “Geez. It took me near three hours to load the sum-bit—”

“Just name a price,” Donahue said coldly.

“Two hundred and fifty?”

“Get real.”

“Okay. One fifty then. Not a penny less.”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks to turn that truck around, with the donkey onboard.”

He was a mean donkey, Corrine reminded herself. He’d take her arm off at the elbow if she gave him the opportunity. And apparently he had an immense appetite for things other than grass. A mean, disgusting donkey.

Whose muzzle had felt like velvet against her fingers.

And whose eyes had been so unbearably sad.

“Wait,” she said, when she saw the money about to change hands. “Wait. I want him.”

Something pitiful flashed in the donkey man’s eyes as he saw his chance to make a quick fifty bucks disappearing.

Matt Donahue turned and looked at her. “You want who?”

Since only Donahue, Grimes and the donkey were in her yard, her answer was bound to be insulting. Yet it gave her great pleasure to say, “The donkey.”

He came toward her in long strides, his eyes flashing fire. “Do you have any idea what my brood stock is worth?”

She shook her head, having only the vaguest idea whatever stock he was talking about was probably not registered on the NASDAQ.

“One of my mares is worth more than this whole place. One mare.”

She felt herself stiffen under the slight. She turned to the other man. “Unload my donkey,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said glumly.

“Do you know anything about donkeys?” her neighbor asked her.

“No,” she said proudly. “But I bet they eat grass and I have plenty of that.”

“At the moment you don’t have a fence that could hold that beast.”

She resented her donkey being called a beast in that tone of voice. “Unload my donkey,” she said again, her teeth clenched.

The man gave Matt a look that begged for his help, but he was ignored. Apparently Mr. Donahue’s neighborliness did not extend to unloading unwanted donkeys.

Cautiously Grimes walked up the ramp and inched back the gate of his stock rack.

The donkey made a whuffling noise.

“Easy there,” Grimes said roughly.

She could hear the fear in his voice. What on earth was she doing? She was having a man unload a donkey in her yard that he was afraid of. It was obviously some kind of mistake that the donkey had been delivered here. Why make it worse by having him unloaded?

Was it the grim set of her neighbor’s jaw that kept her, stubbornly, from calling out to Grimes to never mind? To take the donkey and his fifty bucks and leave? Or was it the meanness in Grimes’s eyes that made her reluctant to leave the donkey’s fate up to him? Whatever the reason, she remained silent.

There was a loud scuffle, punctuated with swear words. And then, a shriek of pain, the sound of a heavy body falling, and the unmistakable thunder of hooves across the bed of the truck.

Matt leapt forward as the donkey burst from the truck and hurled himself down the ramp, kicking up his heels at his delighted and unexpected freedom.

It was short-lived. Matt grabbed the trailing rope and was dragged halfway across the yard skidding on his chest before he managed to get his legs back underneath him, and dig in his heels. His every muscle taut, he braced himself and used his entire body to force the donkey, fighting and kicking, around.

They moved in a circle, Donahue at the center of it, the heels of his boots planted in the ground, the muscles in his well-honed body rippling with the effort of trying to control the donkey who tore at the rope in his hands.

And then, just like that, the donkey quit, and stood there, his head sagging, his ribs heaving, his belly oddly huge in light of his pathetically thin body.

Even she, with no knowledge of any kind of livestock, could read a terrible story in that donkey’s condition. His fur was matted. In places, there was no fur, only welts. He looked thin to the point of starvation, his hip bones sticking out. His mane and tail were barely visible for the burrs imbedded in them.

Grimes had pulled himself up from the truck deck. He had a club in his hand, and a look in his eye, and Corrine yelped with wordless dismay as he moved toward the donkey.

Matt turned toward her sound, and saw the man coming toward him.

“You touch this animal,” he said, his voice a low growl like a bear about to charge, “and I’ll take that club to you.”

She shivered at the pure menace Matt managed to exude without even raising his voice.

Grimes stopped, and eyed Donahue warily.

“Look at this poor dumb beast,” Matt said, “He’s been beaten. He’s starving. His feet haven’t been looked after. He’s got worm belly.” There was barely leashed fury in each carefully bitten out word.

Grimes was beating a hasty retreat to his truck. “He weren’t never mine,” he called over his shoulder as he climbed in his truck and slammed the door. “I just got paid to deliver him.”

After two or three desperate grinding tries on the starter, the truck finally sputtered to life. It bounced back down the driveway at least twice as fast as it had come in.

Donahue did not turn and look back at her. “The kindest thing to do,” he said, “would be to put him down.”

The ice edge was gone from his voice, but it didn’t make the message any less brutal.

“Kill him?” she breathed. A shudder went through her at the thought of the donkey being murdered. She didn’t even want to think how one murdered a donkey, let alone the kind of person who could suggest such a thing. “No.”

“He isn’t trained,” His voice was soft, almost gentle, a voice one might use on a stubborn child. “He doesn’t look healthy. He seems to have a mean streak. The kindest thing to do—”

“Somehow kindness and cold-blooded murder don’t go together in my world.”

He sighed. The sigh whispered with the exasperation of a country man facing a city girl, a man used to dealing with the hard cold realities of livestock coming face-to-face with a woman whose unrealistic love of all creatures great and small was probably based on a solid dose of Disney movies.

And even if she knew it was unrealistic, she wasn’t letting him kill her donkey for the flimsy reason that the animal wasn’t perfect.

After a long time, he spoke again. “Don’t you have any idea where he came from? Or why he came to you?”

“No.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her again, and sighed, the sigh even more heartfelt than his first one, if that were possible. “Then where do you want him, Ms. Parsons? And don’t say your pasture until you’ve got your fences fixed, because you’re legally libel for anything that happens to my mares.”

Aha. The real reason he wanted her donkey dead.

“There’s a stall in the barn.”

“I’ll put him in there for now. Tomorrow, I’ll come look after the fences.”

“I can look after my own fences.”

“Humor me.”

The donkey chose that moment to lunge at him, his teeth bared. Donahue sidestepped easily, shook his head and dragged the unwilling donkey toward her barn. She started to follow.

“Don’t get too close behind him. He’d probably kick you as soon as look at you.”

So, she trailed behind at a safe distance, and followed them into the murky barn. “I hope the barn doesn’t fall down on top of him,” she said, watching Donahue struggle with a rusted latch on a stall gate.

He gave her a look that said he hoped it did. He installed the donkey in the pen, stepped back and relatched the gate.

“Do you have any feed for him?”

She contemplated that for a moment. Feed for him. A hint might have been nice. Couldn’t she just go pick some of that grass and throw it in here? Donahue read her mind.

“You don’t even know what he eats, do you?” he asked, the softness of his tone not even beginning to hide his impatience.

“I’ll go to the library and find out,” she said proudly.

“That sounds a lot easier than just asking,” he said sardonically.

She fought with her pride briefly then gave in with ill grace. “Okay. What does he eat?”

“He’ll need hay, until you can get him on the grass. A couple of bales. And if you plan to build him up, he should probably have oats. Though,” he frowned, “that might make him all the more eager to get after my mares.”

“All right. I’ll go get a couple of bales of hay, then, and some oats.”

He glanced at his watch, and sighed. “Well, not today you won’t. Feed store closed at five. You couldn’t get hay there, anyway. You don’t generally buy hay by the bale. You buy it by the ton.”

The donkey let out an outraged bray that made the walls shake and made her worry the barn was going to come down around them.

“He’ll need water right away. Don’t go in there with him, you hear?”

The donkey chose that moment to lunge at the gate, so she decided not to argue with Donahue on the issue of entering the pen, even though she did not like the bossy tone of that you hear? She nodded stiffly.

“I’ll bring by some straw for his bedding and enough hay to get you through a few days until I can have a look at those fences.” He glanced at his watch, and she caught a glimpse of weariness as he tried to figure out where to fit her into his day. “I’ll try to come around by eight or nine.”

She wanted desperately to tell him that wasn’t necessary, that she would look after it herself. But the truth was, it was necessary. Her donkey could not wait on a point of pride. He looked like he might perish if he did not get the right kind of attention soon.

She didn’t know a single soul who would know the first thing about giving a donkey the proper kind of care. Certainly her sisters would not. And their husbands were a lawyer and an ex-cop. Somehow that seemed far removed from donkey land.

“I’ll pay you,” she said proudly.

“Whatever.” He stood regarding her for a moment, and then with a small shake of his head, he strode by her and was gone.

His scent lingered in her nostrils for a long, long time.

She went and put her hand cautiously over the gate to the stall, hoping the donkey would touch her fingers again with his muzzle and prove to her she had done the right thing.

But the donkey rolled his eyes at her, and stayed squished as tight against the back wall of his new home as he could go.

“I know all about that feeling,” she said, and she smiled, knowing she had done just the right thing after all.




Chapter Two


“Mr. Donahue, you’re late. You know we have fines for people who pick up their children late.”

“Yeah, yeah. Put it on my bill. Would you tell my nephew I’m here?”

That irritating woman, Mrs. Beatle, was actually wagging her finger at him. Not as easily intimidated by a certain tone of voice, a set of jaw, as Grimes had been.

He sighed. “Please?”

Townspeople just never got it. Mares foaled. Colts in training went berserk. Donkeys arrived. You couldn’t just drop everything and run to town because it was five-thirty precisely and the day care was closing.

He had days, usually in the spring when mares were foaling and he was operating on two or three hours sleep a night, when he dreamed of a job that quit at five-thirty. Or six-thirty. Or ten-thirty. Or midnight.

On the other hand, a man traded something for a job like that. Freedom. He had never addressed another man as his boss, and he was not sure that he ever could.

“Robbie,” he called. Mrs. Beatle was hellbent on continuing her lecture on punctuality, as if he was a ten-year-old boy and not a man who was tough as nails from wrangling horses for a living.

What was it today? He’d put out a magnet for difficult women?

Not that Mrs. Beatle was in the same category as her. His new neighbor. Not even close. Mrs. Beatle was old and gray and built like a refrigerator.

Where as the new neighbor was young and not gray and not built anything like a refrigerator. It occurred to him it had been a long time since anything had gotten his attention quite as completely as she had.

In his mind’s eye he could see her, startling like a deer, when he’d first walked in the door. A rude thing for him to do, but the door had been open, and it was hard to think of that falling down cabin as belonging to anyone but him. The property had been in his family for several generations.

Until he’d sold it. It still felt like some kind of failure that he’d sold off that parcel of land. Maybe that’s why he wanted it back so badly. As if he could erase a whole bad period of his life by erasing the evidence.

At first glance, in that dimly lit cabin, his new neighbor had looked like a teenager. She’d been wearing jeans that were too small, and a T-shirt that was too large. Her hair had looked like a candle flame, yellow, dancing with light, pulled back into a ponytail like the cheerleaders at Miracle Harbor High used to wear.

Except unlike the cheerleaders, who’d always worn those vaguely irritating wholesome expressions of good cheer, in that first second, before she masked it, Corrine Parsons had looked scared damned near to death.

He’d seen right away the fear wasn’t caused by him, even if he had startled her. It was something she carried deep inside her.

He wondered what put that kind of fear into a person. She had denied the fear, but he knew what he had seen. He worked with fear all the time. Skittish two-year-olds, green colts, horses other people had given up on.

Back when he’d focused more on training than breeding, he used to specialize in horses like that. Maybe he was just irresistibly attracted to frightened things.

Sometimes those horses were just scared because they didn’t know what you expected from them. Sometimes they had nervous natures. But other times, the fear had been put there.

Those were the ones who broke your heart. The ones whose trust had been shattered.

Her mammoth jack being a prime example. The animal wasn’t mean. It was scared out of its wits. Matt felt sick with helpless fury when he remembered the condition that animal had been in. Still, an animal with that kind of fear was the most dangerous kind of all. It always felt it was fighting for its life, and it was a nearly impossible chore to convince it of anything differently.

He felt a strange little fissure of pain when he thought of her fear in that same light. He didn’t think Corrine Parsons was crabby by nature, like Mrs. Beatle here, who was on chapter two of her lecture on being responsible as an example to his nephew. He suspected, somehow and somewhere along the line, that Corrie Parsons had come to believe she was fighting for her life.

There was no meanness in her eyes. Her eyes had been soft and scared and pretty as those Striped Beauty crocuses his sister had planted along his front walk, along with a bunch of other flowers, about a million years ago.

“They’re signs of hope,” Marianne had said firmly, back when they all still had some of that.

Still, if that kind of fear was dangerous in an animal, it would be more so in a woman.

And if an animal could break his heart…

He reminded himself, firmly, that his heart was pretty much already in pieces. He wasn’t taking any more chances with it.

Nope, his complicated, beautiful neighbor would be a good woman to stay away from.

She was a city girl, anyway. It was written all over her—the milky skin on her face, the creamy softness of hands with no rings on them. It had been written all over her even before the donkey showed up.

She might be able to handle that cabin in the spring and summer, but in a few months the cold, wet weather would settle in and icy winds would begin to blow in off the ocean. Her driveway would turn to soup, and she would have to chop wood to keep warm. That would be it for her. Maybe even before that, if he had the good luck to have a skunk cozy up underneath the floorboards of the cabin. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Real estate had a tendency to lose value when strong scents attached themselves to it. He could probably get the land for a song.

Unfortunately, he had already registered the soft curves of a slender body, the plump swell of her lower lip. Unfortunately, he had already felt a little twinge of that something that could do in the strongest of men.

Desire.

It wouldn’t just be a good idea to stay away from her until she called it quits voluntarily. It was imperative.

Imperative, he repeated to a mind that wasn’t all together in agreement with him.

And unfortunately, he’d tangled himself with her for a little bit. He wondered if she’d consider castrating the donkey. It would save him one hell of a pile of work on those fences.

Of course, after her reaction to his perfectly reasonable suggestion they murder her donkey, she’d probably rather castrate Matt Donahue.

He heard Robbie coming before he saw him, small feet flying along tiled floors. And then Robbie rounded a corner and skidded to a halt, and Matt smiled.

His first smile since meeting the new neighbor. And her donkey.

Robbie was five. His nephew. He was as fair as Matt was dark, his blond hair the same color as corn tassels, his blue eyes huge, the exact color of sapphires. He looked so much like his mother had looked at that age, that Matt could rarely see him without feeling the catch in his throat.

His smile faded and he recognized the sadness that felt like it would never go away.

How could a woman of twenty-seven die of breast cancer? A woman who had been the sole parent to her child? His sister, Marianne, had had the laughter and life sucked out of her until she was wasted, so wracked with pain it had been a mercy when she died.

He shook his head, trying to be free of the anger and sadness and bewilderment that mingled in him, and that he saw mirrored in his tiny nephew.

Until he’d put his younger sister in the ground, Matt had had a faith of sorts. Not a church-going kind of faith, but a kind of simple reverence for the miracle of a new foal, an awe at the hardiness of spring flowers, a kind of unstated belief that in the end good generally won.

Now, he felt like a man who had been through a war, not at all certain what he believed about anything anymore.

He went down on his haunches and held open his arms. Robbie catapulted into him, and he pretended to be knocked over. Under Mrs. Beatle’s disapproving eye, he and his nephew wrestled across the floor. He didn’t stop until Robbie was shouting with laughter.

“Are we going to see Robbie tomorrow, Mr. Donahue?” Mrs. Beatle asked tightly, when they had both picked themselves up off the floor.

Robbie’s hand tightened on his, and Matt looked down into those imploring eyes. Everyone said day care was good for his nephew. They said it wasn’t good for him to trail his uncle around the horse operation like a tiny shadow. They said he needed to socialize with kids his own age, that he needed to learn to count, and that did not include measuring horse rations. They said he should be watching Sesame Street, not the stallion on the mares, or the mares having foals. They said Robbie’s life needed to have structure.

So he could learn to pick up his kid promptly at five someday, Matt thought testily.

Besides, how could you inflict Mrs. Beatle on someone you loved two days in a row?

And he loved Robbie. In fact, the boy’s presence in his life had Matt discovering the oddest tender regions in a heart he had always foolishly assumed was as tough as the rest of him. He had never felt anything like the feeling that boy put in his heart. And maybe that was a little something worth believing in, when he could find nothing else.

His sister had told him the love would survive.

He clung to that some days, that one truth.

“Uh, no, Mrs. Beatle, he won’t be coming tomorrow.”

“Ms. Bettle,” Robbie corrected him in a loud whisper, and then beamed at him.

Ms. Bettle—what kind of fool would marry her after all—made a sucking sound with her lips. Ignoring her, Matt hoisted his nephew onto his shoulders, ducked under the doorway and went out into the bright May sunshine.

“Auntie, I’m hungry.”

Auntie. No amount of begging or pleading or ordering or demanding could change it. Robbie’s first attempts at Matt, had come out Auntie, and he stubbornly refused to budge on this issue. His uncle was Auntie, period. In a small town, it was like being a boy named Sue, a cross Matt bore better on some days than others.

The kid was always hungry. Matt tried to think what he had for groceries in that lonely house he and Robbie now shared.

Macaroni and cheese, but they’d had that last night. Wieners and beans, but they’d had that the night before. Taco chips and Cheez Whiz spread, but that didn’t count as real food for some reason. Somewhere in his limited inventory of kid information he knew he was supposed to be feeding Robbie at least some stuff that was green.

“You want to go for a hamburger?” At least that would have Walt’s big, fat homemade pickle on the side. Green.

Robbie nodded happily.

Maybe if Matt ordered a salad, too, even though neither of them would eat it, he wouldn’t feel so bloody guilty about his absolute failure in the nutritional health department.

He wondered if she knew anything about nutritional health, and was annoyed with himself for wondering.

He didn’t have to wonder for long. After he and Robbie had eaten, he went home, fed his own horses, then loaded a few bales, and returned to her place. She was sitting on her front step eating a bag of potato chips. Her furniture, and boxes, were stacked on the porch all around her.

He looked sternly at his nephew. “Stay here. I’ll only be a second.” The astonishing truth was he didn’t want Robbie calling him auntie in front of her. He got out of the truck.

She rose to greet him, slender, innately graceful. She wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans, which he really wished she hadn’t done. How could she be slender and curvy at the same damned time?

“Supper?” he guessed, a lame conversation opener, not that he wanted a conversation, despite the intriguing sight of her behind. He just wanted to dump his bales and go home.

After reading Robbie that book his nephew loved a couple of times, he could go to bed.

She gave him a look that told him her supper was none of his business, then offered grudgingly, “I’m trying to get the inside cleaned up before I put my stuff in.”

Robbie, obedient only when it was convenient, as always, finally managed to get himself out the passenger side of the truck. He came around and stood gazing at her. “I’m Robbie,” he announced, finally.

“Hi, Robbie,” she said, not moving on to any of that sentimental gushing that made Matt just cringe. Robbie wasn’t too fond of it either. “I’m Corrine. You can call me Corrie.”

“My nephew,” Matt said, and then as way of a hint to Robbie, “I’m his uncle.”

She gave him a sour look that said she had figured that out. If she was any pricklier, roses would be growing out of the top of her head.

“How old are you, Corrie?” Robbie asked, missing the prickliness apparently.

“Twenty-seven,” she said, without apology or giggling or even flinching.

Finally, something he liked about her, Matt thought, then realized how bloody tired he was. He’d been up since five-thirty, and suddenly he knew he was not up to this, to standing around making small talk with a woman who seemed to have grown less likable and more gorgeous since this afternoon.

Maybe because some of that honey-gold hair had fallen free from the ponytail. But the evening light had not softened the unfriendliness of her, though he reluctantly noticed she did not look so scared anymore. Just untouchable. And tired, like him.

“I’m five,” Robbie said, a conversation opener that had to be cut off quick.

Matt brought it back to business. “I brought you a couple of bales and a sack of oats for your donkey.”

Leave it at that, an inner voice advised him. Besides, she looked like she’d rather kill him than owe him anything. But he couldn’t. The welfare of the animal came before his desire not to get frost-burn from the ice queen.

“He’ll need to be wormed, and have his feet trimmed soon, too. I don’t think I could do it without throwing him.”

“Donkey?” Robbie breathed.

Half a million dollars of horse flesh at home that he couldn’t persuade his nephew to be even mildly interested in, but the word donkey was said in the same tone usually reserved for The Rock, Robbie’s favorite wrestler.

“Ms. Parsons has a donkey,” Matt offered reluctantly.

“I love donkeys,” Robbie declared firmly.

“Since when?” Matt snapped, then turned back to her before this got out of hand, “Look, since you probably don’t want me to throw your donkey—”

“Even you can’t throw a donkey,” Robbie decided solemnly.

“I don’t know what that means,” she added uneasily, “throwing him.”

“It means roping his feet, yanking them out from under him.” Was he deliberately making himself sound like a barbarian? If so, it was working. His nephew and his neighbor were both looking at him with horror.

“And since you probably don’t want me to do that,” he continued, “and since his feet and his worms are going to have to be looked after, you probably want to get a vet up here. Soon.”

“How soon?” she said. “I mean, I think he’s been traumatized enough for now.”

He contemplated that. A donkey traumatized. A tiny puncture in her armor, and it was for a donkey.

“I’ll give you the name of a good vet. She can come out and do it for you. She’ll give him a sedative if he’s too difficult to work with.” He knew he’d feel guilty if he told her what it would cost, because the bottom of her jeans were worn nearly plum through, and she was driving a jeep that had probably done service in the Second World War.

Still, if she was going to go to the trouble of having the vet all the way out here for that flea-bitten varmint, she might as well kill two birds with one stone. Or two balls with one scalpel, whatever the case might be.

“And while she’s here,” he said, his tone so neutral as to appear casual, “you might want to have her castrate him.”

“Castrate?” He’d been around women just enough to know arms folded over the chest like that were not a good sign.

“It would be the kindest thing.” He said it with the full authority of a man who had spent his entire life around livestock. His tone was as convincing as he could make it.

“Right after murder,” she snapped back, unconvinced.

“It would improve his temperament.” He heard just a little note of irritation in his own voice. He tried to think if he’d ever struck out quite this thoroughly with a woman.

A dangerous little sparkle had appeared in her eyes. “And of course, if he were castrated he wouldn’t be after your mares.”

“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that.” He said this with as much innocence as he could muster, but she wasn’t fooled.

Come to think of it, in order to strike out, he’d have to want to run the bases. Tangling with a porcupine would be about twice the fun as tangling with her. In any sense of the word.

“What’s catrated mean?” Robbie asked innocently.

She looked smug, and he had the uneasy feeling she and Robbie had somehow just become conspirators against him.

“I’ll tell you later.”

“I want to know now.”

“No.”

Robbie looked stunned. Matt had never taken that tone with him, and somehow it felt like it was all her fault that he had now.

“Can I go see the donkey?” Robbie asked in a small voice. “Oh, please, Auntie? Please?”

“Auntie?” she said, incredulous.

Matt sighed. There. At least he didn’t have to worry about his secret name getting out anymore. It was not as if she liked him, anyway. Big surprise that the first hint of a smile from her was at his expense.

It was not as if he cared if she liked him.

“You know what? It’s a long story, and I’m not in the mood for telling it. Could I just dump the hay, introduce my kid to your donkey and go home?”

“Certainly,” she said, as if she couldn’t think of anything she wanted more than for his stay to be a brief one, too.

“Great, hop in the truck.”

She didn’t unfold her arms from her chest.

“You want to know how to feed him, right?”

She glared at Matt for a moment, and then with ill grace hopped on the tailgate of the truck. Not in the cab. He choked back his desire to tell her he hadn’t bitten anyone recently. To his annoyance, Robbie-turn-coat, jumped on the tailgate with her.

In the rearview mirror he saw her tuck some of that wayward hair behind her ears, adjust her T-shirt, and lick her lips. He ordered himself not to wonder if that meant anything.

Did that mean anything?

“I sure as hell hope not,” he said out loud.

He backed his truck up to the barn, and by the time he went around the back, she was trying her darndest to heft one of the bales out of there.

Seventy pounds. She had both hands inserted between the twine and the hay. She lifted. Nothing happened.

He knew damn well what the twine would do to soft hands, but she didn’t quit. With a mighty grunt she picked the hay up three inches, moved forward one, and dropped it.

“I’ll get it.”

He might as well have saved his breath, because she gave him a look of fierce pride, squatted down and shoved the bale with her shoulder. It moved another millimeter or so. It would be fun to cross his arms and watch, but that wasn’t the kind of boy his mama had raised.

He climbed in the truck bed, moved carefully around her, and tossed down the other two bales, which also earned him a glare. Was he supposed to apologize for the fact he was a man? That some things that came hard to her, came easy to him?

He wondered what would happen if he told her she looked like a Sumo wrestler.

That would be the end of hair-tucking and lip-licking.

Still, he didn’t tell her. Because it wasn’t precisely true. The position yes, but the beauty? She looked more breathtaking than ever with her little pink tongue poking out between her teeth, and her face flushed red, and the sweat beginning to pop out on her brow.

Pretending to ignore her, he moved back around her, hopped off the truck, picked up his two bales, one in each hand, and went into the barn.

Now you’re showing off, an annoying little voice inside his head informed him.

Showing off? What for? He’d already decided she was pure poison.

He glanced over his shoulder. She had managed to tumble her bale off the back of the truck. Now she and Robbie were rolling it laboriously toward the barn.

Panting, with a final grunt, she finally managed to get it in the door.

Pretending she didn’t have his full attention, he slipped his pocket knife from his back pocket and cut the twine.

She came and watched.

Her bosom was heaving nicely under her too large shirt.

“See how the hay breaks apart?” he asked. “That’s called a flake.” He explained to her, carefully, how to feed the donkey, the repercussions if it wasn’t done right.

There. He sounded like a reasonable man. A man whose mind was a million miles away from heaving bosoms. Really, it was one of the rotten parts of being a man. Nature noticing whatever the hell it wanted to notice, even when he’d already told his mind, no way, never, forget it.

He turned swiftly away from her and shook the first two flakes out into the hay crib. The donkey thanked him by flattening his floppy ears to his ugly head and charging the fence. Robbie oohed and aahed as if he was seeing an animal that was both lovable and exotic. She was also smiling indulgently at the donkey’s exceedingly bad manners.

Just above the barn smells, the fresh hay, and the donkey, he could smell her. Her shampoo, and her soap and her deodorant, and something else so sweet and soft it near took his breath away. Matt tried to place the scent and couldn’t.

What he could do was never come back here again. Ever.

Of course, if he chose that, he was going to have a crop of little mules running around next year, after that donkey pushed down the fences and bred all his mares. He could change the name of his pure-breed quarter horse ranch from No Quarter Asked, to No Quarter Assed.

“Auntie,” Robbie announced sleepily, tucking his head against Matt’s belly as they headed for home a few minutes later, “I’m coming to see that donkey again real soon.”

Somehow it didn’t even sound like a question, or a request.

His nephew had just told him how it was going to be.

Life was telling him how it was going to be, but he still fought it.

“Don’t you think your own horse is better?” he suggested subtly. “You can ride her. Pet her. Get close to her.”

“I don’t like Cupie Doll,” Robbie announced firmly. “She has real mean eyes.”

Cupie Doll was a prizewinning brood mare that Matt had reluctantly retired. She wouldn’t take anymore. And Robbie, unfortunately was right. Sweet as shortcake when she was pregnant, she seemed miserable when she was not growing fat with a baby.

As a riding horse she was a gem. Gentle. Predictable. A perfect mount for a child. But the sullen expression hadn’t left her face since her last heat had come and gone without her seeing any action.

Maybe Robbie noticed more about the horses than Matt had given him credit for.

“And that thing back there doesn’t have mean eyes?” Matt sputtered.

“Corrie?” Robbie asked, indignant.

Even Matt couldn’t make himself go that far. For all the bristle of her personality, there was no meanness in her eyes. “The donkey,” he said.

“Oh, no. He doesn’t have mean eyes. Can I go back? Please, Auntie?”

It was the first real enthusiasm he’d seen Robbie show for anything in a long, long time. The pair of them had been walking around in a daze since Marianne died.

Six months ago, already.

What was it about that donkey that so appealed to his nephew? Maybe being attracted to frightened things ran in the family.

Whatever it was, he couldn’t put out the light in his nephew’s eyes. Not even for his own self-preservation.

“We’ll go back in a few days.” He figured he’d left her over a week’s supply of grub for the donkey. He had to go look after those fences, anyway.

“Okay,” Robbie agreed with a yawn. “She’s a pretty lady. I like her eyes. Lots of colors.”

“Really.” He did not say this with anything approaching encouragement. He certainly did not let on that he had already committed the offense of comparing her eyes to crocuses.

Lots of colors. He’d have to have another look when he went back over there and tried to set up a fence that would hold a determined donkey back.

The fence that needed to go up, was the one around a mind that rebelliously wanted to recall her heaving bosom and delicate scent.

Matt sighed. This was not the first time life had been wrested from his control. It just seemed that every time it happened, he could count on a bad ending.

Corrine watched his truck pull away. It wasn’t until it was out of her driveway that she allowed herself to breathe again.

What was it about a man’s easy strength that made a woman go weak with longing?

When he’d hefted those bales, one in each hand, she’d been resentful. But right underneath the resentment, something else flickered dangerously to life.

Desire.

“Corrie Parsons,” she informed herself, doing one last check of the donkey, who flattened his ears menacingly when she got too close to his grub, “you will not be ruled by something so base.”

A little voice inside her whined piteously.

She ignored it, throwing herself into finishing cleaning the cabin.

Finally, exhausted, she dragged a mattress in, and flopped on it in the middle of her living room floor.

But her plan, to work herself to exhaustion so she couldn’t think of anything else, had backfired.





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