Читать книгу Necessary Action - Julie Miller - Страница 12

Chapter Four

“You liked...?” Melanie caught her breath when the back of Tom Maynard’s knuckles brushed across her breast as he played with the braid of her hair. The caress tingled over her skin, tightening the tip into a tender pearl. Was that an accident? Or had that touch been intentional? She cringed at the sound of denim rasping against denim. She was nestled between his thighs and she wasn’t making any effort to move away from the warmth surrounding her.

“Are you hitting on me?” With an awkward push and a nearly stifling amount of embarrassed heat creeping up to her cheeks, she stepped around his knee. A half-sewn suture linking her hands to his shoulder kept her from bolting across the room. “You’ll make me mess up this stitch.”

She’d been stripped down to wet undies that were transparent to the skin an hour or so ago and hadn’t felt as exposed as she did fully dressed with Tom Maynard. Of course, no one had touched her, accidentally or otherwise, when she’d been swimming in her skivvies. And this man seemed to keep finding reasons to touch her. Where was that sharp tongue she’d used to tell off Silas and her uncle? Was she really so starved for some tender attention from a man that she’d forget her vow to steer clear of any entanglements on the farm?

She stopped herself from reaching inside her pocket again to touch her father’s watch. It was a superstitious habit, really, thinking that holding on to the busted watch could bring back either of her parents. The scratched-up piece of gold couldn’t really channel her father’s spirit and give her clarity and reassurance when she needed it. She had to be smart enough to remember all the life lessons her widowed father had taught her right up until the night he’d died.

Except that she’d been a girl of eleven when Leroy Fiske had drowned. And, somehow, the lessons she’d learned as a little girl never included how she was supposed to react to a man who stirred things inside her. Even when he didn’t mean to. Or did he? She’d been secretly cheering for Tom Maynard when he’d stood up to Henry and Silas’s authority. They’d had to gang up on Tom and pull a weapon to turn the tide of power back in their favor. For a few moments, she thought she’d found her hero—the perfect ally—a way out of the nightmare unfolding around her these past few months. No wonder she’d been so eager to defy her uncle’s authority and step into the middle of a fight.

Then she realized he was going to be like the other men here—overlooking her uncle’s lies and accepting his questionable dictates in exchange for a share of the farm’s profits—or whatever a man like Tom needed.

But the promise of a hero must have lingered inside her because she’d been ogling Tom’s imposing chest and the T-shaped dusting of brown hair that tapered into a line that disappeared beneath his belt buckle, imagining being held close to all that muscle and heat again. Did her reaction to his touch mean she liked Tom? Had catching her admiring the muscular landscape sent her patient the message that she wanted to be touched? If so, how did she change that message? Because it really wasn’t in her plans right now to...to what? Make a friend? Have an affair? Completely embarrass herself by revealing that she’d reached the age of twenty-five with more experience fishing than kissing?

“Hey, Doc, you okay?” His voice rumbled in a drowsy timbre. “You got quiet on me.”

She hated how her skin telegraphed every emotion, putting her at a disadvantage when she couldn’t read whatever Tom was thinking or feeling. “I did?” She cleared her throat to mask the embarrassingly breathless quality of her own voice. “I’m sorry. What were we talking about?”

“Why you tamed all that hair into a braid like this. You’ve sure got a lot of it.” Was that supposed to be a compliment? Or a remark about how the Missouri humidity could wreak havoc on too much naturally curly hair? And, goodness, was he still twirling the tail end of her braid between his fingers?

She couldn’t summon her father’s spirit to guide her, but she could muster up a little common sense. Melanie pulled the braid from his fingers and swung it behind her back. “It’s not practical to have it flying all over the place when I have to do work like this. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to cut it all off.”

“Now that would be a shame. It’s like earthy fire.”