Wild in the Moment

There’d been no one who kissed like her, and Teague sensed, never would be, never could be. Maybe he’d survive without another taste, but he couldn’t swear to it.

The fire sizzled and spit.

Dark shadows danced on the walls.

Blankets tangled and fought. His head, his ankle…both hurt. But not like the ache building deep in his groin. This was champagne he’d never tasted, a high he’d never expected. It pulled at him.

She pulled at him.

He didn’t believe for a second that she intended to respond this way. Wildly. No inhibitions. Just need, hanging as naked between them as secrets. Longings bursting to the surface because no one thought they’d needed a lock to protect them, not this night, not this way.

She’d been through hell. She’d never said that exactly-but it was there, in her eyes, her touch, that kind of urgent take-me-take-me-because-I-want-the-hurt-to-go-away. He knew the words to that song. When you were hurt, you wrapped yourself up tight, so the wounds had a chance to heal. You’d have to be crazy to ask for a fresh hurt before the old scars healed up…yet loneliness was always the worst when you’d been hurt. It took you down. Made you doubt whether anyone’d ever be there for you again. Made you worry what was wrong with you, that someone you’d given your best to hadn’t loved you enough.

Hell. He not only knew that song. He knew the refrain and every verse. But as he increasingly sensed her vulnerability…he was stuck increasingly sensing his own.

He tore his mouth free from her, tried to gulp in some oxygen, when all he really wanted to do was gulp in her. Now. All night. Forever, and then all over again. “Daisy…”

“I know. This is insane.” She was struggling for oxygen just as he was, looking at him with dazed dark eyes. “But damn. I just wasn’t expecting this.”

“Neither was I.”

“Do you always kiss this well, or am I just really fantastic at bringing it out in you?”

“Um, something tells me there’s no way I can answer that question without getting my head smacked.”

Gentle fingers lifted to his cheek. “I wouldn’t hit you in the head, cher. Not when you’re already wounded. I wouldn’t do anything worse than slug you in the stomach, and that’s a promise.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“We’re both getting some common sense back, aren’t we.”

“Yeah,” he said regretfully.

“I’m up for doing impulsive things. For going with the moment. For living. But maybe…this is just a little too impulsive.”

“I know.” But he still couldn’t keep the regret out of his voice. “I never do stupid things.”

“No? Well, heaven knows, I do. I’ve made so many stupid, impulsive mistakes that really, I could give courses in blundering the wrong way through life. I could teach you how.”

“From you,” he said, “I’d like to learn.”

She chuckled, a seductive whisper from her throat. “How about if I promise, Teague, that sometime during this blizzard…”

He waited to hear the end of her comment. And when she said nothing else he tilted his head so he could easily see her face.

The eyes were shut, little breathy snores sneaking from her damp, parted lips again. She’d fallen asleep. Just like that. Leaving him harder than stone and with an unnamed promise.

He hoped to hell that wasn’t an omen.

Daisy vaguely heard the cell phone ringing. Jet lag and exhaustion had taken her down so deep she couldn’t seem to jolt herself awake. It was cold. Her brain got that right away. It was also daylight, because the unfamiliar room was much lighter than the night before.

Slowly more reality managed to bully itself into her mind, forcing her to seriously wake up. She was at the Cunninghams’. She’d kissed the stranger. She was in the middle of a blizzard. Damn, had she ever kissed the stranger. The fire was still going strong, ashes piled deep and glowing, fresh fed fairly recently-by someone who wasn’t her. She’d not only kissed the stranger lying next to her, she’d come on to him like a fresh-freed nun. Her family was all out of town; she was broke as a church mouse; her entire life was in shambles. She seemed to be still wrapped around Teague Larson as if they were glued at the hip and pelvis.

And it was his cell phone ringing, demanding someone get up.

She pushed out of the blankets, had the cold air slap at her skin and decided that a girl only needed so much reality.

“Yeah,” she snapped at the sheriff when she finally grabbed Teague’s cell phone in the kitchen. “I’m well aware the power’s off, George. I’m going to look this morning to see if I can get the Cunninghams’ generator going. If I can’t, then I’ll bring in the wood from their garage. No, I don’t know how my patient’s doing…”

Blah, blah, blah. Twenty-three inches of snow. Still snowing, not as hard, but big winds, some six-and seven- foot drifts. The town was busted except for absolute emergencies for a few days. Like everyone in Vermont couldn’t guess the day’s news report?

She yawned, then waited until she could get a word in. “All right, all right. So we’re not on a level of heart attacks and babies being born. But Teague really was hit hard on the head. And I know his ankle’s hurt. You keep us on the rescue list, you hear? And, yeah, I’ll check in a little later today, so you know how we’re doing.”

As she walked back in the living room, she reminded herself to contact her parents and sisters pretty quickly. They didn’t know she was back home in White Hills. She also hadn’t told them the whole story of her divorce from Jean-Luc, but that was a different issue. The only immediate problem was if they tried to reach her in France and couldn’t, they’d worry.

She raked a hand through her sleep-tumbled hair, her mind still galloping a zillion miles an hour, then stopped dead.

So did Teague.

For some unknown reason he was on his hands and knees, emerging from the back of the couch like a little kid playing hide-and-seek-at least until she spotted him. Or he spotted her. Whichever came first, both of them seemed to freeze in unison.

Daisy didn’t move, but her pulse suddenly lunged-just as it had last night when she’d touched him. When she’d judiciously crawled under the blankets with him to conserve heat. When she’d extremely unjudiciously started running her hands all over the man. It was as if someone had taken over her mind. How else could she explain how this confounding man had her hormones in such a buzz?

“What are we doing?” she asked tactfully, since he didn’t seem to be moving from his crawling position.

“I was looking for something behind the couch.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I dropped something out of my pocket last night. A key. It’s not like I needed it this minute, but when I realized it was missing, I thought I’d better find it before I forgot-”

She cut to the chase. “Your ankle is that bad? You can’t walk on it at all?”

He scowled at her. He had no way of knowing that she’d been lied to by the best. Her ex could lie to the Pope on Easter and look innocent.

“I can walk on it,” Teague said irritably.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “You crawl to the bathroom-in fact, we’ll call that your bathroom for the duration. I’ll use the one upstairs. No more showers or cleaning up for either of us, though, until the power goes back on, okay? But the point is-”

“There’s a point coming?”

“The point is, I’ll try and rig you up some kind of cane. And some ibuprofen. When you get back, you go for the couch, we’ll get your weight off the ankle and ice it.”

“I can do all that.”

He kept singing that refrain all day. Daisy might have become exasperated except that, damn, he kept getting cuter by the hour. Every time she started to do something, he crawled after her, determined to either help or do it himself. After being prey to the most dependent guy in the universe for the past several years, Teague’s