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“Well, I like peace, but I can do without—” Bree huffed a breath and looked around the room, feeling a little stupid for her slip of the tongue. Just because she wasn’t interested in love and marriage and all that nonsense, didn’t mean she had to announce it.
“You’re probably wondering what I was doing hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere,” she said quickly, switching topics. “I, uh, missed my ride from the stock show and a really nice truck driver said he’d give us a lift to Nederland so I said okay but I didn’t want to be dropped off in the middle of a town, so I told him just to leave us off on the side of the road. Figured we’d get a lift somehow to Chugwater, but nobody was stopping, so I jumped out in front of your stopped van…” She sucked in a breath, hoping the story sounded relatively sane and plausible, and it should considering she’d left out the parts about the gangsters and guns.
As he stared at her sorta stunned like, she realized this was the first moment she’d had a chance to really see him in the light. His hair was thick, blond. And he was solidly good-looking. Put him in a double-breasted suit and a gray felt hat, he could star as one of those hunky, hard-boiled detectives in one of Grams’s gangster flicks.
But she doubted this guy even owned a suit. He looked extremely comfortable in his faded jeans and blue-and-gray flannel shirt. Hard to fit his down-home look with that fancy van, though. The two didn’t mix.
He finally broke the silence. “Well, you’re safe now. That’s what matters.”
She hoped that was true. Thanks to this guy, she was, for the time being. Tomorrow, she’d figure out how to get back home, clean up this “alleged theft” confusion, and get back to leading a normal life.
“What’s your name?” asked Bree. She’d hovered next to the door as he’d filled out the registration stuff in the lodge lobby, so she hadn’t overheard any information, such as his name or where he lived.
“Kirk Dunmore. Yours?”
“Bree Brown.” She eyed the TV, knowing in her gut that the story of a Brahman bull trotting out of the Denver Stock Show would be on the news. Escapee livestock was big news. Last year when those llamas had bolted free and run down the I-25, it’d been on all the stations.
She’d check the TV later, when she was alone.
Then she thought, with a sickening realization, that chances were Grams, who watched the news religiously every evening, would have seen a story about Bree and Valentine riding out of the coliseum and be worried sick.
Bree looked around the room for a phone. “I need to call home.”
“Yeah, I need to phone my fiancée, too.” Fiancée?
Bree pushed her hand through her curly hair, unsure why her stomach felt as though it had just flipped upside down. Couldn’t be because of Kirk’s remark. Like she cared. She eyed the sandwiches Kirk had purchased. My insides are flip-flopping because I’m hungry. After she’d eaten something solid, she’d feel lots better.
But when she looked at Kirk, her stomach did another somersault.
The way he stood—legs spread, arms crossed solidly over his chest—he looked like a rough and rugged explorer, the kind of guy who fearlessly tackled anything in the world.
What did he say he had in the back of the van? Pickaxes. Shovels. Oh yeah, this man treated life like an adventure. Only a man like that would understand Bree’s own yearning to strike out on her own and discover the world.
She dipped her head, rubbing her chin against the slick rayon of the jacket he’d loaned her. She caught a whiff of scent—his scent. Male. Musky. Inside her, the curl of heat ignited, spreading through her like a small fire.
Kirk scraped his hand across the stubble on his chin. “I’ll go check my room now, call Alicia, then come back for that sandwich.”
Alicia? Had to be the fiancée. Bree nodded absently, slipping off the jacket so she didn’t accidentally sniff any more of his lethal male muskiness.
He left, the room door clicking shut behind him. She’d do the same with her reactions. Shut them down. Tight. After all, he was just a nice guy who’d helped her out of a jam. By this time tomorrow, they’d both be back in their separate worlds, never to see each other again.
3
BREE RAN BAREFOOT through a jungle, crowded with vibrant green leaves, birds, hanging vines. Her feet slapped hard against cold, damp earth. Pounding footsteps followed, tracking her. She glanced over her shoulder. Dense foliage blocked her assailant’s face. Her gaze dipped. He wore turquoise boots.
Bang-bang-bang.
Bree jolted awake. Cold perspiration slicked her body. She blinked into the dark, her gaze following a stream of moonlight from the window next to her bed.
Outside stood a massive, dark shadow close to the tree line.
Valentine.
She released a shaky breath. I’m in the lodge. We’re safe.
Bang-bang-bang!
Swiping a shaky hand across her brow, she glanced at the digital clock next to the bed—3:00 a.m. Who would be knocking on her door at this time of the morning?
The thugs?
Her stomach curdled. Could they have traced me to this lodge in the middle of the mountains? Maybe not such a far-fetched idea considering they were determined to get Val, which meant big money for them, bigger money for whatever breeding outfit illegally sold Val’s sperm. And for that kind of money, the thugs would go through anything, do anything, to get the prize.
Even take my life.
Hairs stiffened along her arms. Don’t start spooking yourself.
Hell, if they’re that smart, all they’d have to do is look behind the lodge and see Val plain and clear in the moonlight. No need to knock on any doors and alert people that they’re stealing a bull!
Anyway, it was probably just some happy drunk, home from one of those rowdy Nederland bars, knocking at the wrong door. If the knocking continued, she’d call the front desk. Let them know some poor drunkard was knocking at random rooms.
She swung her feet over the side of the bed and edged through the dark across the thick rug, trying to remember where she’d put that phone after calling Grams earlier and leaving the message.
“Bree?” Bang-bang-bang. “It’s me, Kirk.”
She stopped in her tracks. “Kirk,” she whispered. With a burst of pent-up energy, she ran to the door and threw it open.
A blast of frigid night air assaulted her. Shivering, she hadn’t thought about how she was dressed, or wasn’t dressed. All that stood between her and the freezing mountain night air was a spaghetti-strap pink T-shirt and matching undies.
Wrapping her arms around herself, she scooted back as Kirk stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
“A-anything wr-wrong?” she asked through chattering teeth.
“Don’t you hear them?”
“Th-them?”
In the distance, a bottle crashed, followed by raucous laughter.
“It’s that damn Harley party,” Kirk huffed. “Those bikers have been going full steam ever since I went to bed. Haven’t slept a wink.”
Despite the cold, she smiled. With three wild teenage boy cousins living next door, she was used to all kinds of racket, day and night. If she could sleep through beer keg parties, band practices and a bunch of teenage boys screaming and whooping it up, it was nothin’ to sleep through some drunken biker party.
“Where’s the light?” Kirk asked.
She fumbled along the wall behind the door and flipped a switch.
The overhead light flickered on, casting the room in a warm, yellowish glow. Fortunately, the room heater was quickly warming things up, erasing the night chill.
Kirk, disheveled in a pair of worn jeans and a partially buttoned flannel shirt over a dark blue T-shirt, blinked and looked around. It hit Bree that he looked kinda cute all sleepy and disoriented. He speared one of his tan, roughened hands through his rumpled hair…
And froze in that position as his gaze swerved to Bree. “Oh, sorry,” he murmured thickly, staring at her underwear. He quickly turned away, his hand still stuck on his head.
Having grown up in the country, Bree wasn’t hung up on what showed or didn’t show. Besides, any essential “body stuff” wasn’t showing at all. And even it if was, big deal. Ever since she was a kid, she and her buddies—girls and boys—had often skinny-dipped at the Connors pond.
“I’m covered,” she said.
“Barely,” he muttered.
“How long you gonna keep your hand on your head?” she asked.
He dropped it, holding it stiffly at his side.
She laughed. “I’m wearing more than a bathing suit, for gosh sake!”
Kirk wanted to say something, after all, his verbal acumen covered the gambit from lectures to theoretical discussions, but he had the gut sense that if he opened his mouth right now, the only thing that would emerge would be a garbled string of incoherent sounds.
And Kirk Dunmore, always articulate, with an IQ topping 170, was at this very moment reduced to a brain-damaged, blithering idiot. And not just once in one night, but twice.
Okay, okay, even Einstein’s brain might have turned to mush if he’d been faced with a Brahman bull.
But would Einstein have turned to brain mush face-to-face with a striking, partially clad woman of Amazonian proportions? Hell no. Rumor had it Einstein turned into a damn playboy when he crossed paths with the likes of Marilyn Monroe.
While all these thoughts collided in his head, Kirk realized he’d been staring openmouthed at Bree over his shoulder.
Look away. Be a gentleman.
But his eyes were behaving as though they’d been penned up for a lifetime and now were rarin’ to roam free.
And roam they did. All over Bree’s long, lean, strong body as though the most exquisite sights of nature had been molded into one mighty fine package.
The sheen of her tan reminded him of the warm, golden sands on New Guinea beaches. The curve of her breasts mimicked the lush, rolling hills of the Argentine pampas. And those red glints in her dark curls were like the fiery, predawn rays of the sun as it rose over the Himalayas.
But when his gaze dropped to her legs, no geographical reference could do them justice. Those achingly long, sensuous legs reminded him of the libido-searing Rod Stewart song “Hot Legs.”
Was that a tattoo on her ankle?
At first he thought it was a flower unfolding, then realized it was a chocolate being unwrapped. A chocolate kiss. He licked his lips, aching for just a drop of that chocolate to whet his parched soul.
“Are you all right?” asked Bree.
“No,” he croaked.
“If you’d feel better,” Bree said softly, “I’ll slip back into bed, get under the covers.”
Better? He doubted he could feel any better except…if…
Whoa, boy, put a lock on it. You’re getting married in two days. Forty-eight hours. Two thousand, eight hundred and eighty minutes.
This had to be the result of the week-long dig he’d just finished. All that time alone, with nothing but prairie dogs and lizards for company, a man was bound to go whacko for a little chocolate drawing on an ankle.
In the silence, Kirk heard her tread softly across the carpet. Then the squeak of the bed as she settled in. And he tried to keep his mind trained on the lodge’s wooden walls, upon which crookedly hung a framed print of a bear pawing a stream for salmon.
But no matter what he tried to focus on, his just-turned-bad-boy mind kept returning to the image of those long, tan legs and chocolate-tattooed ankle, stretching and twisting in the warm dark under those seductively soft covers.
Why had he been born a paleobotanist? Oh what he’d give for a moment as a plain ol’ blanket conforming to the shape and warmth of Bree.
Breeeeee. The sound of her name was like the wind. Bree. Breeezy. With a soulful lilt, like in that Beatles song “Let It Be.” Let it Bree. Let me lick that little chocolate on your ankle for the rest of my life…
Bree tucked the blanket under her chin and peered at Kirk. He seemed oddly off balance, as though he might topple over any moment.
“Kirk, you look a little unsteady. Need some water?”
“Chocolate.”
“What?”
He coughed. “Uh, water. Right. Need water.”
“Okay, I’ll go grab a glass in the bathroom, get you—”
“No!”
He still stood with his back to her. “I’ll get it. Stay put. And cover up.”
He returned a moment later, downing a glass of water like a parched man, staring at her with wide blue eyes. He was so flustered, so red-faced, she suddenly got it.
“Don’t tell me you’re nervous about seeing me in my undies. We’ve already been through this.”
“Not nervous. Not anymore.”
Maybe he said he wasn’t nervous, but he looked positively mortified. “Aren’t you used to seeing naked women?” She almost said, aren’t you used to seeing your fiancée naked? but figured that was getting into overly personal terrain.
“You weren’t naked—just nearly naked.”
Maybe Kirk was a throwback to another century where men were polite, discreet, and the wedding night was the first time they…
Wow. She didn’t know men like that existed in today’s world. And to think she, small-town girl from even smaller-town Chugwater, possibly knew more about the birds and the bees than Mr. Big City!
“Well, I’m all covered now, so it’s a moot point,” she announced.
Kirk put the glass aside, shot her a feeble smile, then backed up to the couch and fell into a sitting position. Avoiding looking at her face, he scraped his hand across his stubbled chin as though he’d just finished an incredibly long and exhausting journey.
“Wish I had a glass of warm milk,” he rasped. He looked at her, his eyes burning as though he were running a fever.
“Maybe that café’s still open?”
“At 3:00 a.m.?”
