wicked in real light.
Her stomach suddenly skidded down another slippery chasm. Relax, she tried to tell herself. It wasn’t love. She’d been foolhardy to sleep with a stranger, but it’s not as if she were in love with him.
She could handle a mistake. God knew she’d had a lot of experience making those. But she wasn’t sure she could survive falling in love with the wrong man. Not again.
The way he kept standing there, looking at her, she sensed he was thinking about pouncing again. Leaning against the doorjamb, protecting his ankle by leaning on the makeshift cane, he should have looked weak and pitiful, and instead somehow the darn man managed to be making sinful, irresponsible, reprehensible promises with those sleepy eyes.
Worse yet, some idiotic part of her heart loved those promises. Wanted him to pounce. Wanted to be wicked with him all over again. For Pete’s sake, you’d think her mind had taken off for the North Pole and refused to come home. She said firmly, “They’re going to rescue us in less than an hour.”
“Damn.”
She wasn’t going to smile. She was going to stay tough. “You’re going to mind real food? Getting back to your own bed and your own place?”
He stepped forward. “I’m going to mind not being trapped with you tonight. I’d have liked another five or six days with you. Minimum. Trapped together. Just like this.”
A new flutter kicked up in her pulse. Not just a sexual-zing flutter, but a downright dangerous, feather flutter. He was beginning to touch that soft place that she never let anyone near. Pound on a wall, what harm could you do? But pound on that soft spot, and a girl could get hurt really badly.
She knew how to be a wall. For damn sure, she knew how to keep her heart from being broken again. “Naw,” she said lightly. “Adventure’s always fun. But too many days of it, and we’d have run out of condoms-and food-and you’d probably have started to worry that we were getting too attached, developing ‘A Relationship’ or some crazy thing like that.”
“You think I’d worry about that, do you?”
Nothing she said seemed to erase that dangerous gleam in his eye, so she aimed straight for the best defense there was. The truth. “We couldn’t last, Teague. But I’m not going to regret last night, and I hope you don’t.”
“I don’t.”
She hesitated. She wanted-needed-to be careful, but she didn’t want to leave the conversation with him being hurt in any way. She said softly, “Last night, I feel like…we made a memory.”
Those steady, intense eyes never left her face. “I like that phrase. Making a memory. Doesn’t happen to me often. Not like that.”
“Not for me, either. But I’m not going to be in White Hills for long. That’s for positive.” She smiled briskly. “Sheesh, we’ve
Yet when she moved toward the doorway, he didn’t seem inclined to budge. He didn’t touch her. Teague didn’t seem the kind of guy who’d touch a woman who hadn’t specifically invited it. But trying to cover herself with his carpenter’s apron suddenly seemed humorously foolish. She hadn’t minded his seeing her naked last night. She’d wanted him to. She’d wanted to be naked for him, with him. But this morning her fanny felt as if it was hanging naked in the wind in every sense.
“Daisy…you really dislike White Hills that much?”
He’d asked the question seriously, so she answered in kind. “Actually, I always loved it. At least when my family was here-we were always close. But for me, living in a small town…” She shook her head.
“You find it boring?”
“Not…boring. But I always felt as if I were living in a fishbowl. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. If you wore a red dress to a funeral, everyone in a three-county radius would know it. You can’t make a mistake. You can’t want something different. You can’t be…anonymous. You have to fit the mold.”
“What’s the mold?”
“The mold is…behaving like everyone else behaves. Around here, the most excitement on a Saturday night is watching tractors drive by and the high school football game. Women still hang out their wash. Guys wash their cars on Sunday afternoon. People pay their bills, raise their kids, compete for the coolest Christmas decorations.”
“And all that’s bad?”
“Not bad. Not bad in any way for most people.” She struggled to explain. “My mom used to say that I was the only daughter she misnamed. Daisy. The ordinary flower. When I could never seem to do anything ‘ordinary.’ I think I came out of the womb wanting to dance until dawn. And there was no one to do that with. Not here.”
“You really hated growing up here.” He didn’t make it sound like a question. Good thing. Because it wasn’t.
“Not hated. I love my parents, and my sisters and I were always thick as thieves. And honestly, I liked the town. It just didn’t like me,” she said frankly, and then grinned. “You won’t like me, either, when you get to know me better.”
His eyes seemed to pick up a challenging gleam. “You sound very sure of that.”
“Oh, I’m dead sure of it. Neighbors used to say I was as restless as a leaf in a high wind. Mamas used to make their teenage boys go inside when I was driving by, just to protect them from the influence of ‘that wild Daisy Campbell.’”
“Now you’ve got me scared,” he said dryly.
They both chuckled-and then both hustled to get dressed and get the house back in order before the snowplows arrived.
Daisy knew perfectly well that she hadn’t really scared him, but she hoped-from the heart-that she’d gotten through. She wasn’t the kind of woman that a nice guy married. Not a nice guy who was into roots and settling down in a house with 2.2 kids and a basketball hoop over the garage and an SUV. She was the kind of woman who a guy wanted to have an adventure with.
Like they’d had.
Last night.
But good guys didn’t last-not with her. Whether it was her fault or theirs, Daisy didn’t know. Right then it didn’t matter. It just mattered that she’d made sure Teague was warned off before either of them could be hurt- particularly because she was going to be stuck in White Hills for a while.
For his sake, and hers, she intended to stay far away from Teague Larson.
Five
Teague trudged down Main Street. Since the blizzard two weeks ago, there’d been no bad snowstorms, but no temperature melt, either. The sludge and crusty ice were piled so high you could barely find a decent place to park-which is why he’d been stuck walking the last three blocks. Usually he liked winter, but typically by late January, the snow had dirtied up; people were sick of bundling in winter gear; the thrill of Christmas was over and everybody was broke.
Actually, he wasn’t. He was making more money than he had time to spend-a totally unjust state of affairs-but blizzards had a way of soliciting business. When people were stuck in their homes, they tended to look around more, see the cracks, hear the groans. He swore half the town had called him, hoping to get a major rehab project going over the winter. More to the point-for him-was that working nonstop the past two weeks had kept his mind off Daisy Campbell.
Sort of.
Hands in his pockets, he passed by Carcutter’s Books, then Ruby’s Hair Salon. After Ruby’s, he crossed the road, automatically bending down to save little Tommie Willis from falling-that kid was always getting away from his mother, and the pavement was extra slick this afternoon. Still, he barely noticed the child or the storefronts.
She was still in White Hills, because everywhere he went-customers, gas station, hardware, grocery store-
