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Hesitating, she measured him for a moment. “I was just wondering how hard you hit your head.”
“Don’t worry. My ribs and shoulder took the brunt of the fall.”
“And you’re sure nothing’s broken?”
“As sure as I can be at this point. What are you doing?”
A moment later she’d shrugged out of her fire-engine red coat and very carefully slid it underneath his head. Wes couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for the warmth that suddenly wrapped around him. He only knew he wanted to pull Jayne down on top of him and explore this living, breathing thing that had started to come to life the moment she’d set foot inside the Crazy Horse last night.
“Jayne, you’ll freeze.”
She stood up and promptly began to slide down the gradual decline. Slowly making her way back to Wes, she said, “Only if you don’t shut up and help me figure out a way to get you to your feet.”
“There’s a can of ground coffee sitting on the counter.”
“You want me to make coffee? Now?”
He almost grinned. “The coffee’s already made. I was thinking that maybe we could use the coffee in the can for traction.”
“Traction,” she said, a dawning look of realization crossing her features a split second before she rose carefully to her feet. “Of course we need traction. Something for me to stand on to get a foothold, and something for you to use to keep from slipping. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
Since Wes couldn’t move, he did as she said. He watched her until she half slid, half skated beyond his peripheral vision, listening intently to the sound of her footsteps and the string of expletives she muttered when she almost fell. The screen door creaked open, followed by a stretch of silence Wes couldn’t measure. And then she was back, a can of salt in one hand, his brand-new tin of coffee in the other. She sprinkled them both on the ground all around him, taking extra care to grind the concoction into the ice. Seemingly satisfied that neither she nor Wes would slip as long as they were careful, she glided down to her knees.
“Do you think you can move now?” she asked.
Wes gritted his teeth, bent both knees and rolled to his side. Her hands circled his upper arm, flitting to his back and down around his waist as if she didn’t know where to put them. He wouldn’t have minded the opportunity to enjoy this. Unfortunately it required all his concentration to keep from passing out as he pushed himself to his knees. Stars flashed before his eyes. Pain shot through his shoulder, biting, searing, cutting. His ears were ringing by the time he found his feet, and sweat had broken out on his upper lip.
He took a few moments to catch his breath. When the world came back into focus, he held his left arm close to his body and staggered two steps.
“Wes, where are you going?”
He started to slip, jerked, then regained his balance. “Help me get closer to the house.”
She did as he said.
“Okay, now stand back.”
“What are you going to—”
He closed his eyes and slammed his shoulder against the siding. There was a roaring din in his ears and unbearable pain. He heard Jayne swear, but as if from a great distance. Moment by moment, inch by inch, the pain drained out of him, the blood slowly returning to his head. He opened his eyes, tried his shoulder and slanted her a cocky grin. “There. I’m as good as new.”
She seethed.
“Next time you decide to body slam a house, would you give me a little warning?”
“I’m hoping there isn’t going to be a next time.” Being careful not to put all his weight on his bad knee, he tested it. Satisfied that it wouldn’t give out on him, he took a shuddering breath and checked his ribs. Although a couple of them ached, he didn’t think they were broken.
“Well?”
The edge in Jayne’s voice brought his head around and his eyes open. She was looking at him, her chin raised slightly, her lush lips pursed haughtily, despite the way she was shivering.
Aw, she was shivering. Of course she was shivering, he thought, coming to his senses. She wasn’t wearing a coat. She was wearing a high-necked sweater and a skirt in bold colors that nobody in their right mind would put together. And yet on her it looked good. Maybe it was the fit, not the style—he bent over, stiffly scooping his hat off the ground, then proceeded to take a step toward her—or maybe she would look good no matter what she was wearing. Or wasn’t wearing.
Jayne didn’t know what to make of the expression on Wes’s face, but the careful, deliberate way he was walking toward her had masculine intent written all over it. She would have backed up, except her feet seemed to be frozen to the ground. Only her eyes had the ability to move, and they were trained on the man who was advancing with quiet purpose.
“What do you think you’re—”
Without warning, he bent at the waist, snagged her coat from the ground and very carefully placed it on her shoulders. There was warmth in the hand resting lightly on the back of her neck. Another kind of warmth darkened the color of his eyes as he said, “What did you think I was going to do?”
She relaxed her shoulders, but not her guard. Not one to invite trouble, she refrained from telling him that if she were a betting woman, she would have laid ten-to-one odds that he was going to kiss her.
He stared at her through narrowed eyes and slowly eased closer. Make that a-hundred-to-one odds. His face hovered inches from hers, not close enough to kiss her, after all, but close enough to make her slightly uncomfortable and very aware. Of him as a man and of herself as a woman, and of what the two of them could do together. It made her wonder if his chest was really as tanned as it had been in her dreams and if his stomach really had those washboard ripples...
Jayne blinked against the image and told herself to get a grip. What she had to do was get out of there before she did something she would regret. “It’s time I was going. I can’t say this has been fun, but it has been interesting.”
He looked at her long and hard, but he made no reply.
“You are okay, aren’t you?”
He turned without a word, heading for the barn.
Jayne had to force her mouth closed and felt herself bristling all over again. Did the man have no manners?
“Driving on those silly old icy roads was no trouble, really,” she called to his back. “There’s no need to thank me. It was nothing, honest”
He didn’t so much as shrug, although she was sure he looked right at her after he’d unlatched a weathered barn door and had slowly pushed it open far enough to slip through.
The wind was cold at her back, and her feet were freezing inside her thin boots, yet she didn’t make a beeline for her car. Something didn’t add up. She’d been around men all her life. She’d been yelled at by a few and tiptoed around by several, but men rarely ignored her. Wes Stryker had been a perfect gentleman the previous night, with his “evenin’, ma’am” and his slow, easy smile. So what was this silent treatment all about?
She supposed it was curiosity that had her skating toward the barn and slipping inside. “Stryker?” she called, wrinkling her nose at the smell of horses and hay and something she hoped she hadn’t already stepped in. “If I ruin this pair of boots, I’m going to hold you personally responsible. Where are you, anyway?”
“I’m right here.”
She jumped at his sudden appearance in a doorway a few feet away. When he disappeared again, she followed, striding past a row of dark stalls and into an area that was divided into two sections by a wooden fence. “Why is it,” she said as her eyes slowly adjusted to the light spilling through three high windows, “that you only answer half my questions?”
Wes waited to breathe a sigh of relief until after he’d returned the scoop to the barrel of oats. She hadn’t left. Hallelujah, she hadn’t left.
He’d almost kissed her out in the yard. A tiny thread of self-preservation had stopped him at the last minute, because something had warned him that if he kissed her, she would hightail it out of there. And he didn’t want her to leave. He wanted her to stay, and that wanting scared him more than he cared to admit.
Being careful of his left shoulder, he carried the bucket of oats to a far corner and emptied it into the feeder. Three horses immediately started eating. Smoothing his hand over the middle horse’s gray muzzle, he said, “I’ve always been a firm believer in letting actions speak for themselves.”
Jayne strolled a little closer, thinking about Wes’s answer. She didn’t know what to make of him. What, exactly, were his actions saying right now? He was looking at a horse, stroking its muzzle with his right hand. His hand was broad and tanned, his fingers blunt tipped and slightly crooked, as if they’d been broken a time or two. It was a masculine hand, but not a terribly attractive one, and yet there was something very attractive about the way it moved up and down the horse’s head.
“Is he your favorite horse?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“He was my best friend’s favorite horse.”
The current in his voice drew her gaze. “Does he have a name?”
“My friend’s name was Dusty. This is Gray.”
“How long ago did Dusty die?”
Wes’s hand went perfectly still. “How did you know he died?”
She studied him thoughtfully for a moment. He’d done it again, hadn’t answered her question. “I guess bleeding hearts recognize each other.”
She strolled a little closer, drawing a line in the dust on the top board of the stall with a finger. “I spent the first few months after Sherman moved out wondering if I was going crazy. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t concentrate. A friend of mine convinced me to enroll in an art class. Another friend suggested yoga.” Jayne shook her head. “I have no artistic talent, and all that breathing and chanting didn’t relax me. It drove me crazy. I know death and divorce aren’t the same things, but they’re both losses. I won’t say something trite, trying to minimize your pain, but time has helped me.”
She glanced up from the dust on her finger and found him looking at her. She hadn’t realized she’d moved so close to him, and she certainly hadn’t intended to tell him about something as personal as her divorce. It was still a touchy subject, but if her experience eased his sorrow in some tiny way, she wasn’t sorry she’d bared a small corner of her soul.
“Jayne?”
She stared at him, patiently waiting for him to pour a little of his own heart out to her.
“You were married to a man named Sherman?”
Jayne blinked. She’d unearthed her soul, and his only comment pertained to her ex-husband’s name?
Did he have no feelings? Okay, he hadn’t laughed, but there had been incredulity in his voice. What? Hadn’t he ever known anyone named Sherman? There had been plenty of emotion in his voice when he’d mentioned his best friend. In some perverse way, she was glad he hadn’t turned all maudlin on her. Still, it made her curious. Just what was Wes Stryker made of? He was a man—a very private one. She doubted he enjoyed having someone traipse through his thought processes. In that respect he wasn’t so different from the men she’d known in Seattle.
The men back home wore expensive suits for work and designer sportswear for play. Wes was wearing a sheepskin jacket, the collar turned up, jeans that had seen better days and a faded shirt that looked as soft as butter. His skin had acquired a permanent tan, and there was whisker stubble on his cheeks and jaw. She’d never been a fan of facial hair and yet his did nothing to detract from the hollows, planes and angles of his rugged face. For all his face’s interesting contours, she was most interested in the depth and intensity of his eyes.
Crossing her arms, she said, “You’re something else, Stryker, do you know that?”
A smile found its way to his mouth much the way a cloud drifted over the face of the sun. “You’re not so bad yourself.”
Jayne could count on one hand the times in her life she’d been speechless, and yet in the tight space so near him, she couldn’t think of a single thing to do or say. He had no such problem, reaching for her hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world. She’d thought he was going to kiss her earlier. Now she was sure. She knew she should try to fight it, but as he lowered his face, she lifted hers, his features blurring before her eyes, his breath a soft rasp on her cheek, her heartbeat a slow stutter in her chest.
Something streaked past her ankles, fluttering the hem of her skirt. She jerked, shrieked and jumped. Her clamber to the top of the gate might not have been graceful, but it was certainly fast.
A cat hissed. A dog whined. Jayne screamed again.
“It’s all right,” Wes said. “It was just a cat. Marilyn won’t hurt you.”
Jayne turned her head slowly. Holding on to the top board with one hand, she peered over her shoulder where a scruffy-looking, half-grown kitten stood in a corner, back arched, fur on end. A dog that must have weighed at least seven times more seemed to be trying to decide how to get closer to the kitten. The kitten swiped and spat, sending the dog reeling backward.
“Come on, Marilyn. Be nice.”
Jayne loosened her grip on the gate with utmost care. “You have a problem with my ex-husband’s name, and yet you named a kitten Marilyn?”
“I never said I had a problem with your ex-husband’s name. What don’t you like about ‘Marilyn’?”
She used the time it took to get her breathing and heart rate under control to look around. The horses were still eating, Marilyn’s back was still arched, and two other kittens were watching from the hayloft. “You have to admit it’s an unusual name for a cat. What do you call them?”
He looked over his shoulder, but he didn’t turn around.
“The calico one is Carolyn, the butterscotch-colored one is Sherilyn.”
Carolyn, Marilyn and Sherilyn? “They’re all females?”
“I haven’t had the heart to check.”
Another time Jayne might have laughed. As it was, she could only shake her head. Being careful not to get her feet tangled up in the folds of her brightly colored skirt, she climbed down from the gate and put a little distance between her and Wes.
One of the horses nickered, and the one named Gray tossed his head and snorted. Marilyn, the kitten, joined her sisters, if they were indeed all females, the dog watching silently.
“It’s quite a menagerie of pets you have here, Stryker,” she said, pulling up the zipper tab on her coat.
Wes pulled the brim of his cowboy hat lower on his forehead, watching as Jayne prepared to leave. She was putting on a pair of bright green gloves, her lower lip tucked between her teeth. If it hadn’t been for two of those pets she’d mentioned, he would have known how her lips felt and tasted.
He wished...
He didn’t know what he wished anymore. He only knew that this woman had driven out here when he’d needed her, and he didn’t want her to go. Not yet, not until they’d talked a little more and maybe he’d kissed her very thoroughly. Maybe not even then.
“Well,” she was saying, backing up. “I guess I’ll leave you to your assorted pets.”
By the time his gaze made it back to her face, he found her looking at him, waiting for him to say something. During the seventeen years he’d spent on the rodeo circuit he’d made small talk with just about everybody he’d seen, from rodeo clowns to judges to buckle bunnies. And here he was, standing before a woman he wanted to impress, as tonguetied as a teenager with a new pair of boots and his father’s car, trying to work up his courage to talk to the prettiest girl in school.
“You’re right about the animals,” he finally managed to say as he shortened the distance between them. “They’re all misfits in one way or another. By rights, kittens born so late in the year shouldn’t have survived. The dog came limping into the barn a week ago, hungry and half-frozen, no collar, no tags. I asked around, but nobody seems to know who he belongs to.”
Jayne looked at him and then at the dog. “What’s his name?”
Wes shrugged. “I thought I’d wait and see if he decides to stay before I name him.”
He wondered if she would say something negative about the animal. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. The dog was a mongrel, not quite brown, not quite black, ugly by most people’s standards. He had a dull coat, a cropped tail and a slight limp, not at all unlike Wes’s.
Wes wondered which of those features Jayne would comment on. She leaned down and held out the back of her hand, letting the dog sniff. “He has soulful eyes.”
Wes swore the beating rhythm of his heart changed tempo. Nothing about the conversation should have aroused lust, yet his desire for her was strong. The entire time it was wrapping around him, soft-touched thoughts were shaping his smile. “So do you, Jayne. So do you.”
He could tell by the way she shook her head very slowly, very precisely and rose stiffly to her feet that he probably shouldn’t have said it. But hell, it was true. He strolled closer, intent upon convincing her to stay. She shook her head again. “Look,” she said, “just so you don’t get the wrong idea. I didn’t come out here to start something. I meant what I said last night. I’m finished with men. All men.”
“You can’t deny the attraction that’s between us.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Wanna bet?”
He took another step in her direction. He liked the way her chin came up and her shoulders went back. He especially liked the way his blood was heating as it made its way to the very center of him. Ignoring the hand she held up to ward off his advance, he said, “I want you. And I think you want me.”
Her blue eyes narrowed, flashing with insolence. “You must have hit your head earlier.”
“I don’t think so.”
Looking him up and down in a manner that would have made a lesser man crumble, she said, “If you tell me you have an itch and a hankering, I’ll be forced to clobber you.”
He eased closer. “That’s one way to put it.”
“It was the way my ex-husband put it when I confronted him with my suspicions that he was seeing another woman. He said the affair meant nothing, he’d had an itch, that’s all, and a hankering. I told him to scratch the itch and shove the hankering. The same goes for you.”
