The Black Sheep’s Baby

touch her hair before coming back to snare hers.

“‘And what will the robin do then, poor thing?’”

It occurred to her suddenly, irrelevantly, that he had beautiful eyes. Warm and golden-brown, like brandy.

“‘Sit in the barn,’” he prompted, answering his own riddle. “‘Keep herself warm…’” He stopped there, watching her, his head slightly canted, eyes quizzical and searching.

She shook her head, still at a loss for the answer he seemed to expect. Heat and the scent of his body enveloped her. “I don’t-I’m sorry-”

“It’s a nursery rhyme.” His voice was curiously gentle. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard it.”

“Oh, well.” She felt the vestiges of her panic drain away, and defensive disdain take its place. “I’m afraid I’m not very familiar with nursery rhymes.” She looked away, holding herself rigid and aloof. She hated him for making her feel at such a disadvantage, especially when she didn’t know why she should. She didn’t have children, why would she know nursery rhymes? Chin lifted, she prepared to defend what seemed to her a perfectly understandable ignorance.

When she found his eyes on her, curious, and curiously intent, the words faded to a whisper and died on her tongue.

Softly, he said, “Didn’t your parents read you nursery rhymes when you were a little kid? You know-‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’…stuff like that?”

Devon shifted, once more fighting down anger. She was trying her best to establish some kind of rapport with this man, and he wasn’t making it easy. Dammit, she wasn’t used to being the one under fire. She was the one who was supposed to do the cross-examining, not the other way around.

“I’m sure they did,” she said in her coldest voice. “That was a long time ago.”

She pushed off from the gate and turned away from him. She didn’t want to be angry with the man any more than she wanted to be attracted to him; both were equally unprofessional-and unproductive. For the first time he’d been talking to her-actually talking. She wanted it to continue. She couldn’t let her personal feelings get in the way of finding out all she could about him. The enemy.

Know thine enemy.

She moved a few steps away from him and paused to take deep breaths, gulping in air that was cool and smelled only of damp hay and animal waste, with no unsettling traces of a hardworking and unnervingly attractive man. She said brightly, “I can see why you-and the birds-like it in here. It’s cozy. It’s not even that cold.”

Unaccountably, inside the borrowed parka she was sweating herself, now, and she could feel a heat flush in her fair, redhead’s skin. She unzipped her coat and was fanning the two halves to cool herself when Eric pushed open the stall gate. She felt vulnerable without the fence between them, like a lion tamer without the chair.

“I see you helped yourself to my closet,” he said in what she thought seemed a conversational, even mildly friendly tone.

She looked down at herself, at a faded gray sweatshirt imprinted with a dark blue bucking horse and the word BRONCOS in block letters arranged in an arch above it. “Your mom’s closet,” she defended herself. “She told me to help myself-I didn’t exactly come prepared for this.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the howling storm beyond the barn walls, then looked up at him curiously. “Why, is this yours?”

“Was. When I was in high school.” He gave a grunt of surprise. “Can’t believe Mom kept it all these years.”

“Well, I personally am rather glad she did,” Devon said dryly. “I hope you don’t mind if I borrowed it?”

He looked slightly affronted. “Good Lord, why would I? Probably wouldn’t fit me now, even if I wanted it.”

Devon plucked the sweatshirt away from her chest so she could look at it again, and a wash of cold air swept under it and peppered her sweat-damp stomach with goose bumps. She felt her breasts grow hard and tight. “Broncos…” she said, fighting down shivers. “I suppose that’s your team mascot?”

“Yeah.” He smiled that reluctant, lopsided smile. “Used to be the Indians, back when Mom was in school, but a few years before I got there somebody evidently decided that was politically incorrect, so they changed it to Broncos.”

Devon smiled back. It came easier, this time. “I can understand that, I guess. ‘Native American’ doesn’t have quite the same punch to it.”

“Hard to make a good cheer out of it.” As if he’d realized he was openly smiling at her and feeling guilty about it, Eric’s brows suddenly knitted in a frown. “So, what was yours?”

“What?” She’d been gazing at his chest again, thinking how incredibly smooth it was, except for those hard- pebbled nipples, noticing that his skin was dusky but thinking it was more with the flush of exercise than suntanned. Caught, she felt her heart thud against her ribs and her breath grew sticky. “What was my…I’m sorry?”

“Your high school mascot.” His eyes watched her, intent and amused, with that particular masculine awareness that said he knew very well what she’d been looking at and what she was thinking. “Where’d you go to school- L.A.?”

“Canoga Park, actually.” She frowned and touched her forehead. “Our school mascot? Oh, God, I don’t know- some sort of animal, I think. I really don’t remember.” Desperately, she blurted out, “Aren’t you freezing?” Grasping at anything, just to change the subject. “Without a shirt? Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch cold?”

“You just said it wasn’t cold.” Oh, definitely amused.

“I said it wasn’t that cold,” she said tartly. “That’s a relative observation.”

“Ah,” said Eric, his smile tilting.

Suddenly, irrationally, she wanted to hit him. “Don’t put words in my mouth,” she snapped. “I’m a lawyer, remember?”

“Oh, I’m not apt to forget that.” When had he moved closer to her, with his arms folded across his chest and his hands tucked in his armpits? And he was no longer smiling at all. Just that quickly, it seemed, the cease-fire was over. His voice rumbled in his chest like distant artillery fire. “Look-let’s cut the crap, okay?”

“What?” She held her ground. She was proud of that, when what she really wanted to do was turn tail and run. This isn’t supposed to happen, she thought again.

“You must have had a reason for coming all the way out here in a blizzard to find me.” His voice was soft, but there was a dangerous light in his eyes. He came closer still, leaned toward her. “What the hell is it you want?”

It took all her willpower not to step back, leaving her no reserves with which to control the tremor in her voice. “I told you. I wanted a chance to talk to you. I thought we should at least try to understand each other. As I said, we’re going to-” She stopped, belatedly remembering that he wasn’t the father of Susan’s baby, and that they wouldn’t be family after all. Lamely, she finished, “I thought we might get to know one another, that’s all.”

There was a long pause while he studied her, and she tried-utterly without success-to decipher the emotions that flickered behind his whiskey-brown eyes. The only thing she could be certain of was that there was no longer any anger in them. And why she found that more unnerving she had no idea.

He’d rejected her overtures before, bluntly and even cruelly. She expected him to do so again. And once again he surprised her.

“We could do that,” he said softly. She stifled a tiny, gasp as his hand came from nowhere to touch her jaw, lightly brushing the place where it curved into her neck.

She couldn’t stop a shiver. And instantly, as if he’d felt it, he lifted his head and looked intently into her eyes. “You had some straw,” he said, and then… “Are you afraid of me or something?”

“Afraid?” It came out sharp and angry, not at all convincing. “Of what? Why would I be? I’m a-”

“A lawyer…I know.” His voice was dry, his eyes amused; she could see at their corners the beginnings of the laugh lines he’d have when he grew older.

“I was going to say, a grown-up,” Devon coldly replied. “Childish games don’t impress me.”

Something flared again in his eyes, so close to hers. And again, she knew with utter certainty it wasn’t anger. “Then why,” he said in a silken whisper, “is your pulse so fast?”

She realized then that his fingers were still curved around the side of her neck, and that his thumb was stroking up and down, up and down over her throat, measuring the ripple of her swallows. His hand was warm, and far from