Читать книгу The One Winter Collection - Rebecca Winters - Страница 43

WHAT had she done?

Amy sank back in her chair, listened to the gruff masculine melody of Ty talking to Jamey down the hallway in the guest bedroom.

She had kissed him. She had kissed Ty Halliday. That’s what she had done. There were excuses of course: the pain of the burn had knocked down her normal quota of reserve. Still, she waited for regret to swim around her like a shark sensing blood. Giving in to the temptation to taste his lips was just more evidence of her stupidity.

But the regret did not come.

How could she regret that? Taking his lips in hers had felt like a conscious decision, entirely empowering. And she could still feel the shiver of pure sensation. She thought she might remember it as long as she lived.

She was leaving, anyway. As soon as the roads were passable, she would be gone. So what did it matter that, when he had put his arms around her, she had felt for the first time in a long, long time as if she had fallen and there had been a net waiting to catch her?

That’s what the kiss had been about.

Pure gratitude.

Instead of agreeing with her that she had indeed been stupid about burning herself, about winding up here when she needed to be somewhere else, his voice had been deep and calm and reassuring.

Hey, it’s going to be okay.

Instead of pointing out to her all the different ways she could have avoided the situation, and all the trouble she had caused, he had just said, simply, I’ll fix it.

If something other than gratitude had shivered to life in that brief second when her lips had touched his and her world had tilted crazily, so what? Again, she was leaving. Whatever else had been there—some primal awareness, some wrenching hunger—would have no opportunity to blossom to life.

Whatever that had been, he had felt it, too. Right down to the toes of his wet cowboy boots. He’d pulled away from her as if he’d got a jolt form a cattle prod.

Amy chided herself. She should have the decency at least to be embarrassed. But she did not feel embarrassed.

She felt, again, oddly and delightfully empowered. That big, self-assured cowboy was just a little bit afraid of what had happened between them. He had built a world where he had absolute control, and it could be nothing but a good thing for that attitude to be challenged now and then!

Ty came back into the kitchen with Jamey. The baby looked ridiculously happy to find himself in Ty’s arms.

There was something terrifyingly beautiful about seeing a tiny child in the arms of such a man.

It was a study in contrasts. The man’s skin etched by sun and wind and a hint of rough, dark whisker, the baby’s skin as tender as the fuzzy inside of a creamy rose petal. The man had easy certainty in his own rugged strength, the baby was like a melting puddle of skin and bone. The man’s eyes held shadows, the baby’s innocence. The man’s mouth was a stern line of cynicism, the baby’s a curve of pure joy.

And of course, the man was totally self-reliant, the baby totally the opposite. And in this moment, Ty had assumed the mantle of responsibility for the baby’s reliance.

It surprised her that, given his reluctance to hold the baby yesterday, Ty looked relatively comfortable with his little charge. He dodged the pudgy finger trying to insert itself in his nose with the ease and grace of a bullfighter who had done it all a thousand times.

Then Amy caught a whiff of her charming offspring. She was amazed that Ty had him in the crook of his arm, nestled against his chest, that Jamey wasn’t being held at arm’s length like a bomb about to go off.

“I don’t expect you to deal with that,” she said.

“Oh, really?” He raised that dark slash of a brow at her. “Who do you expect to deal with it?”

That silenced her. Who did she expect to deal with it? Her hand felt as if it was on fire. It actually hurt so bad that she felt nauseous. She was not sure she could do a one-handed diaper change, even if she could fight through the haze of physical pain. And then there was the question of infection.

Ty set Jamey down on the baby blanket, still spread out on the kitchen floor. “Where’s his stuff? You’ll have to give me step-by-step instructions.”

She directed Ty to the diaper bag, watched him set it down on the floor and get down on his knees between the baby and the bag.

“Prepare yourself,” she said. “This is not going to be pretty.”

Ty leveled a look at her. “Lady, I’ve been up to my knees in all kinds of crap since I was old enough to walk. I’ve watched animals being born, and I’ve watched them die. And I’ve seen plenty of stuff in between that wasn’t anything close to pretty. So if you think there’s anything about what’s about to happen that would faze me, you’re about as wrong as you can get.”

“I’m just saying men aren’t good at this.”

“Look, there are things a man wants to be good at.”

Did his eyes actually linger on her lips as he said that before he turned his attention to the diaper bag?

“In my world,” he informed her, digging through the bag, “a man wants to be good at throwing a rope. He wants to be good at riding anything that has four legs. He wants to be good at turning a green colt into a reliable cow horse.”

His words were drawing rather enticing pictures in her mind.

“He wants to be good at starting a fire with no matches and wet wood. He wants to be good with his fists if he’s backed into a corner and there is no other way out. He wants to be good at tying a fly that will call a trout out of a brook.”

“This—” he gestured at her son, lying down, legs flaying the air and releasing clouds of odor “—is not something any man aspires to be good at. The question is, can he get the job done?”

“I may have stated it wrong. I simply meant it’s not something men do well.”

“Are you going to be grading me on this?”

Suddenly, Amy needed to share it, as if it was a secret burden she had carried alone for too long. She suddenly needed another person’s perspective.

“My late husband, Edwin, changed Jamey’s diaper twice. Twice. Both times it was a production. Clothes peg on the nose, gagging, brown blotches on the walls, the floor, the baby and his Hugo Boss shirt. The diaper was finally on inside out and backward to the declaration of ‘good enough.’”

Edwin’s efforts, she remembered, had always been good enough. Hers, not so much. She had asked him to do less and less. Amy had hoped for something else. In her marriage. And especially with the baby. Shared trials. Magical moments. Much laughter.

The pain of the remembered disappointment felt nearly as bad as the pain in her hand.

Ty glanced at her sharply, as if he was seeing something she had not intended for him to see.

“Twice?” he said. “And the baby was three months old when he died?”

She nodded.

“And he managed to be put out both times?”

She nodded again. “But he was a CEO of a corporation,” she said. “Strictly white collar.”

“I got that at the Hugo Boss part,” he said drily. “And you know what? His perception of his own importance is a damn poor excuse.”

She had wanted this perspective. Needed desperately to know it wasn’t her, expecting too much, being unreasonably demanding.

But now that she had it, she felt a guilty need to defend her husband.

“He was a busy, important man. I’m afraid he had better things to do than change a diaper.”

She remembered asking Edwin to do it. Insisting. Getting that look. All she had wanted was for him to empathize with her life. She had wanted him to be more hands-on with the baby. She had wanted him to appreciate what she did every day. Maybe she wasn’t even sure what she had wanted.

But whatever it was, Edwin’s annoyed look down at his shirt, and his Are you happy now? had not been it.

Ty rocked back on his heels and looked at her hard. She felt as if every lonely night she had spent in her marriage was visible for him to see.

“You know what?” he said, his voice a growl of pure disgust, “I’m beginning to really dislike Edwin.”

Her sense of guilt deepened. Why had she brought this up? “He was not a bad person because he didn’t like changing diapers,” she said. “That would make a huge percentage of the world’s population bad people.”

“It’s not about the diapers,” he said quietly. “It’s about what you said earlier, too. As if you having an accident and burning your hand made you stupid. It’s about him making you feel like you were less than him.”

She was stunned by that. Her relationship with Edwin had never been defined quite so succinctly.

She had been so alone with her feeling of deficiency, questioning herself.

“He’s dead,” she reminded Ty primly, the only defense left that she could think of.

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t automatically elevate him to sainthood.”

She thought of the shrine being built in his parents’ living room. In conversation, the new and improved version of Edwin was what her in-laws insisted on remembering and immortalizing.

And her guilt intensified at how relieved she was that someone—anyone—could see something else.

She changed the subject abruptly, feeling as if she was going to throw herself at him all over again. It was just wrong to be feeling this much kinship over a diaper change, of all things.

He rummaged through the bag, held up a diaper for her inspection. At her nod, he said, “Check.”

He laid out her whole checklist of items in a neat line on the blanket: baby wipes, petroleum jelly, baby powder and the diaper.

“Isn’t that how soldiers take apart weapons?” she asked.

“Precisely,” he said, pleased by the analogy.

“Okay. Now you lay him down and take off his pajamas. They’re Onesies—

“Whatsies?”

“Onesies, one-piece jumpers, so you undo all the snaps down the front and right down his leg and slip him out.”

“Like slipping a banana out of a peel,” he said. “It’s even yellow.”

“Well, yes, kind of—”

“Except bananas don’t leak, uh, brown blotches.” He grimaced, but there was no gagging, no drama.

In one swift movement he had plump limbs out of the pajamas, and had them off. In another move, he slipped off the soiled diaper. He dispensed with both items with nary a flinch.

Jamey kicked wildly, and Ty caught the little feet easily in one hand.

“Hey,” he warned, “cut it out.” But it was a mild warning. He also did not flinch from cleaning Jamey up. He was methodical and thorough, and as he had promised, unfazed by the task. The minefield of petroleum jelly and diaper tabs did not claim him as a victim.

In fact, in short order, the baby was in a new diaper, gurgling happily and kicking his legs.

Ty picked up the messy items and disappeared. The diaper went out the back door, and then she heard him washing his hands in the bathroom.

When he came back, he had a new Onesies and had snitched one of the cookies off the tree. He slipped the baby into the new jammies, and handed the cookie to him.

“That should keep him busy while I look at your hand. I put the banana peel in the sink to soak the brown blotches until we have time to run a load of laundry.”

She wasn’t running a load of laundry. She was leaving. The need to go was feeling increasingly urgent.

Because watching him, and the apparent ease with which he adapted to what life threw at him—a baby and a woman invading his bachelor cave and the woman now nearly completely incapacitated—she felt sudden awareness of the tall self-assured cowboy shiver up her spine.

As he came and sat in the chair opposite her, and then pulled it so close their knees were touching, she was totally aware of Ty Halliday as pure man.

“Let me see your hand again.”

This time she just gave it to him willingly, watched as he took it and steadied it on his own knee. He bent his head over it, and she felt a deep thrill at his physical closeness. His scent filled her world—clean, mysterious, masculine. The overhead kitchen light danced in the rich, pure gold of his hair.

His touch was exquisite.

After inspecting the damage thoroughly, he surrendered her hand back to her and got up. She followed him with her eyes as he reached up above his fridge and retrieved a first-aid kit.

Amy felt as if she was in a lovely altered state of awareness where she could appreciate the broadness of his shoulders, the narrowness of his hips, the slight swell of his rear under the snug fit of his jeans, the impossible length of his legs.

He turned back to her, his expression one of complete calm and utter confidence.

He knew what to do. And he was not the least bit afraid or hesitant to do it.

It struck her, as he moved back toward her, his grace and strength unconscious, that Ty had all the ingredients that had made men men since the beginning of time.

As he sat back down, she saw the intensity of his focus in the amazing sapphire of his eyes. She saw him as a warrior, a hunter, a protector, an explorer, a cowboy and a king.

Obviously, changing diapers and dressing wounds had not been in his plan for the day.

But Ty Halliday had no whine in him. No complaint.

What she saw was a stoic acceptance of what it meant to be a man, an unconscious confidence in his ability to rise to any occasion and do what needed to be done, whether that was putting in long hours doing rugged ranch work, or whether it was nursing something—or someone—injured.

The diaper had not been pretty. Neither was her wound.

And yet he did not shirk from either one. She suspected there was very little he would not face head-on.

She was not sure why, but that simple competence left her almost breathless with awe, tingling with a physical awareness of him, and of the space he was taking up in her world.

On the kitchen table that was beside them he again laid things out with the precision of a solider taking apart a familiar weapon. From the first-aid kit he removed individually packaged disinfectant wipes, antibiotic ointment, gauze pads, gauze wrap, scissors, tiny metal clips.

He surveyed the lineup of materials, remembered something, got up and reached into the cabinet above the fridge again. He came back with one more thing.

Amy gasped when he set it down, her awareness of his considerable masculine charm competing with this latest item. At the very end of his line of first-aid items, he had added a very large needle, attached to an even larger syringe.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“Penicillin. Don’t worry about it.” He picked up her hand, cradled it in his. With his other hand and his teeth, he opened a package and removed an antiseptic wipe from it.

She barely registered that. She was not sure she had ever seen such a large needle. She gulped. “You can’t just give a person a needle, you know.”

He swabbed the burn.

“You can’t?” he asked, unconcerned. She watched him as he tore open a second antiseptic wipe with his teeth and cleaned the whole area again. She glanced back at the needle.

“You have to be a doctor.”

“I didn’t know that.” He tossed aside the used wipes, opened the tube of ointment, squeezed some out onto the palm of her hand.

Gently, he smoothed the ointment over the burn.

At any other time, she might have appreciated the gentle certainty of his touch. But she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off that needle, and its place in the lineup.

“Or at least a nurse.”

“I’ve given thousands of needles.” He inspected her hand, and then satisfied, covered the burn with a gauze pad, item number three. The needle and syringe were item number seven and he was making his way steadily toward them.

“Thousands?” she asked with jittery skepticism.

“Literally. Thousands. To cows and horses, but I’m pretty sure the technique is the same. Or similar.”

He took the roll of gauze, item number four, and began to unwind it firmly around the pad in the palm of her hand.

“It isn’t,” she told him. “It’s not the same technique. It’s not even similar.”

“How do you know? How many horses have you given needles to?” He was making a neat figure eight over her burned palm, around her thumb and up her wrist. He went around and around, his movements smooth, sure, mesmerizing.

“Well, none. I haven’t actually ever given a needle to anything. But it just makes sense that giving one to a person and an animal are totally different things.”

She heard a certain shrill nervousness in her voice.

In contrast, his was low and calm. “Don’t worry, Amy, I’m not going to hurt you.”

“On purpose,” she said. “You might by accident.”

He glanced up at her sharply. She had a woozy sense of not being at all sure they were still talking about the needle.

“I’ll try not to.”

No promises, she noticed.

He picked up the scissors, item number five, cut the gauze wrap. She glanced over at the table. He was nearly done.

He picked up the little metal clips, item number six, pulled the end of the gauze wrap firm on top of her wrist and inserted the teeth of the clips into the thickest place on the gauze. He gave his handiwork a satisfied pat.

“You can’t just give a person penicillin,” she said, staring at what remained in his neat lineup on the table—number seven, the syringe and needle. “You need a prescription for it!”

“Okay.”

She eyed him suspiciously. He seemed to acquiesce just a little too easily. She watched narrowly as he methodically repacked the first aid kit. He picked it up, and almost as an afterthought, picked up the huge needle and syringe. He stowed them all back in the cupboard above the fridge.

“Oh!” she said, and let out a huge breath of relief. “You never planned on using the needle! You scared me on purpose.”

“Dressing a burn hurts like hell. I prefer to think of it as a distraction,” he said, and then he smiled.

His smile was absolutely devastating. It took him from stern and formidable to boyishly charming in a blink.

She looked down at her hand. He had distracted her on purpose, and she honestly didn’t know if she was grateful or annoyed by how gullible she was, but the smile made it impossible to be annoyed with him no matter how annoyed she was at herself.

And she realized the syringe and needle had indeed been a distraction. But that distraction had existed in the background. In the foreground had been the exquisiteness of his touch, his strength so tempered by gentleness, that pleasure and pain had become merged into a third sensation altogether.

And that third sensation scorched through her, more powerfully than the burn.

It was desire.

She wanted to kiss him again. Harder this time. Longer.

She had to get away from here. She was just in the baby stages of getting her life back in order. This was no time for kissing and all the complications that kissing could bring.

She’d known this man less than twenty-four hours. What was she thinking? The truth? She wasn’t thinking at all. She was falling under some kind of spell, an enchantment that had been deepened by tasting him, and then by the drugging sensuality of his easy smile.

He had a tea towel in his hand now. “Sorry. I don’t have a real sling. I’ll improvise with this.”

“I don’t need a sling!” Imagine how close to her he’d have to get to put that on!

“It’ll be better if we immobilize your hand. If we don’t, you’ll be surprised by how often you want to use it. You could just try it for today.”

“But I won’t be able to drive if my arm is in a sling.”

His gaze slid away from her before he turned back, opened his palm and held out two white pills.

“You generally need a prescription for these, too. We’re a long way from an emergency ward here. We take some liberties.”

“I really won’t be able to drive if I take those.” Or, she added to herself, keep my head about me.

“No, you won’t.”

“Then I’d better not.”

“Ah, well, there’s something I have to tell you. The driveway isn’t passable. I’m going to turn on the radio and see what the roads are like, not that it really matters if you can’t get out of the driveway.” He glanced to the window. “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s snowing again.”

Her eyes drifted to the window. Snowing again was an understatement. The window looked as if it had been washed with white paint, the snow beyond it was so thick light could barely penetrate. She felt panic surge in her.

This terrible wave of affection had been building in her since he had changed Jamey. Shamefully, it had grown even more when he’d said he disliked her husband.

That sensation of someone having her back had deepened the emotion she was feeling for him.

And now that he had dressed her hand so gently, with such skill, distracting her from the pain, she felt a terrible danger from the desire that was beating like a steady pulse at the core of her being.

“You can’t possibly mean I can’t get out of here!” She knew she was saying it like it was his fault. She knew it wasn’t.

His silence was answer.

“But for how long?” she asked, her voice shrill with desperation.

“It won’t be long,” he said in a tone one might use trying to divert a small child from having a temper tantrum. She was done with his diversions.

“That isn’t a real answer.”

“I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t have a real answer.”

“If you were going to guess?” she pressed him.

He hesitated. “I’d say tomorrow. If it stops snowing in the next hour or so I can get the driveway plowed by then. I’ll put on the radio and get the weather forecast.”

“I’m trapped,” she whispered.

“Well, not limb-in-leg-hold-trap trapped, but not-going-anywhere-today trapped.” He sounded just a little tongue-in-cheek. He clearly did not understand the gravity of this situation!

Her new life, her new plan for herself was being threatened by him. It was being threatened and she had been here less than twenty-four hours. She’d kissed a man she barely knew and wanted to do it again.

What kind of mess would she be in forty-eight hours from now?

Maybe she would be ripping off his clothes and chasing him around the kitchen. Not that she was that type.

Good heavens, she had never been that type.

But she was well aware that the “type” she had been—pleasing other people in the hope they would play their role in her fantasy of the perfect home and family—had not brought her one iota of happiness. Not one.

That realization left her wide-open to being pulled down the road of temptation.

“But there could be an emergency!” she said, knowing there had to be a way out of here if the stakes were high enough.

“An emergency? What kind of emergency?”

The thought that there might be an emergency of the magnitude that he could not handle seemed to take him totally by surprise.

“Like a medical emergency. Not a little burn, either. What if something happens to Jamey? What if he gets sick and has a temperature of one hundred and three? What if he fell down the steps and broke his neck?”

Ty rocked back on his heels and regarded her with just a trace of exasperation. He held out the white pills. “If you don’t take these, I think I might,” he said, his tone dry.

“You have to think of the possibilities!”

“No, I don’t. There are millions of possibilities. That is way more thinking than I care to do. The phone is working. The power is on. We have heat and food. We could probably get a helicopter in if a real emergency happened. It won’t.”

“How can you know that?” She was slightly mollified that they could get a helicopter in, even as she was aware the real danger she needed to escape was something else entirely.

He shrugged. “I just know.”

And, despite herself, she believed him. He knew his world inside out and backward. He trusted himself in it and that made her, however reluctantly, trust him, too. She was the wild card in all this, not him. Imagine her, Amy Mitchell, being a wild card.

Still, taking the pills seemed like it would threaten her control just a little too completely, so she pushed them aside just as the phone rang.

He got up and got it. He listened for a moment, and then without a word, brought her the receiver. The line of his mouth was turned downward, and he raised an eyebrow at her.

How could it be for her?

Puzzled, she took it.

“Amy, what is going on? Are you with a man?”

Ah. The miracles of modern technology. Yesterday, when her cell phone had not worked, she had called from here. The number must have come up on her mother-in-law, Cynthia’s, caller ID unit.

“Hello, Cynthia. Please calm down, everything is fine.”

“What do you mean everything is fine! And do not tell me to calm down in that snotty tone of voice, young lady. You have my grandson and you are with a man. Who is that man?”

Somehow, everything Amy was running from was in that strident tone. Judgment. Lack of trust. Disapproval.

“He’s—” Amy glanced at him. The explanation seemed complicated. And would confirm every single thing Cynthia already thought. Amy really wasn’t ready to admit she had lost her way yet, especially not to her supercritical, always ready to pounce mother-in-law. If towels not folded correctly could bring that pinched look of pained forbearance, how much worse was this going to be?

Amy took a deep breath and turned away from Ty so she didn’t have to see his reaction to what she was about to say. “I’m having trouble with the laundry. He’s the washer repairman.”

“How come the washer repairman is answering the phone?” Cynthia asked, her voice shrill and full of suspicion.

“Uh, how come he answered the phone? Uh—” And suddenly, Ty was standing in front of her. He held out his hand.

It would be downright cowardly to give him the phone and let him handle her mother-in-law.

She looked into his eyes, saw the man she was trusting with her life and the life of her baby, and surrendered the phone.

He took it and winked at her. Winked!

“This is the washer repairman,” he said, his voice solemn. “We are having an emergency. Brown blotches. It’s not a good time to talk.”

And then he hung up the phone, crossed his arms and gazed at Amy.

“She’s going to phone right back,” Amy warned him.

The phone started to ring.

Ty reached behind Amy’s back and pulled the plug from the wall.

There was so much he could say. But he didn’t. And there was so much she could say, but she didn’t, either.

She giggled. And then giggled again.

He smiled, and then he laughed. His laughter was possibly the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. It was rich and clean and without any kind of mockery in it. No reprimand about lying. No advice about how to handle her pushy mother-in-law.

The laughter flowed out of him, like water tumbling over rocks, and suddenly with absolutely no warning a sweet feeling of absolute freedom filled Amy.

For the first time since she had married Edwin, Amy did not feel trapped at all. She savored the irony of that. She was trapped, really, by all the snow.

“You know what, Amy?” Ty finally said, wiping at his eyes. “I think it’s time to have some fun.”

“No offense,” she said, wiping at her eyes, too, “but you don’t look like you know that much about having fun.”

His eyes went to her lips and locked there. That slow smile played across the sinfully sensuous line of his mouth.

He moved very close to her. His lips were so close to her ear, she could feel the heat of his breath on her skin.

“I guess,” he growled, “that would depend on how you defined fun.”