“Talking about love with a heartless clod is a waste of time, and I never waste mine.” She balled a hand on her hip. “But we both have an interest in Libby and Cal, so we’ll clear it up.”
“All right.” He tapped the screwdriver on the edge of the table. He didn’t need a computer to tell him what a clod was. It was just one more thing she would have to pay for before this was over. “Clear it up.”
“You automatically assume that my sister, being a woman, lured your brother, being only a man, into marriage. What an incredibly outdated theory.”
His fingers paused in the act of reattaching the toaster’s coil. “Is it?”
“Incredibly outdated, chauvinistic and stupid. The idea that all women want is marriage and a house with a picket fence went out with the poodle skirt.”
Though he wondered who in his right mind would put skirts on poodles, there was something more important to touch on. “Stupid?” he repeated.
“Idiotic.” Legs spread, jaw firm, she baited him. “Only a true idiot would be alive today with that kind of neanderthal attitude. Maybe the last few decades have passed you by, pal, but things have changed.” She was on a roll now, a slender steamroller with right on her side. “Women have choices today, options, alternatives. An enlightened few even figure that, because they do, men benefit from the same expanding horizons. Except, of course, men like you, who are mired in their own self-importance.”
He stood at that, in a slow, deliberate manner that would have tipped her off if she hadn’t been so angry. “I’m not mired in anything.”
“You’re up to your neck in it, Hornblower. From the minute you got here you’ve been trying to find some way to turn your brother’s marriage into a setup created by my sister.” She took one long-legged stride toward him. “I’ve got a flash for you. Only a fool gets tricked into marriage, and Cal doesn’t strike me as a fool. That’s where the family resemblance fades.”
A jerk, a clod, an idiot and now a fool. Yes, he thought, she was going to pay. “Then why did he marry so quickly, without even attempting to come home and see his family first?”
“You’ll just have to ask him,” she shot back. “It could be because he didn’t want to be questioned or hounded or interrogated. In my family we don’t pressure the people we love. And in the real world women get along just fine without setting snares for unwary men. The fact is, Hornblower, we don’t need you.”
This time it was he who took the step. “You don’t?”
“No. Not for winning the bread or chopping the wood, running the country or taking out the garbage. Or—or fixing toasters,” she added, with a wild gesture toward the mess on the table. “We can do everything we need to do just dandy on our own.”
“You left out something.”
Her chin lifted a fraction higher. “What?”
His hand clamped quickly around the back of her neck. Sunny had time for a hiss of surprise before his mouth closed over hers. When a woman was expecting a left to the jaw, she had little defense against a heated embrace.
She murmured something. He felt her lips move beneath his. His name, he thought, as the whisper of sound and movement shuddered into him. He was angry—more than angry—but his hair-trigger temper had never taken him so deep into trouble before.
And she was trouble. He’d known it from the first glimpse.
Recklessly he ignored logic and consequences and dragged her closer. Her hands had shot out of her pockets, and now they were clenched taut as wire on his shoulders, neither resisting nor surrendering. He wanted, craved, one or the other. With an oath he nipped at her full, seductive lower lip until her gasp of pleasure shocked the air.
She’d been right about the high-powered voltage that ran through him. Her system was jolted again and again as he held her closer, tighter, harder. She didn’t struggle. For, while her body was charged with the current that raced from him into her, her mind emptied, thoughts streaming away like colored chalk in the rain.
She felt his muscles tense under her fingers, heard his sharp intake of breath as she pressed herself more fully against him. She could taste the passion, riper, darker, than any she had ever known, but she couldn’t be sure if it was his or her own.
It was as if she had come alive in his arms. He felt her go from rigid shock to molten aggression in the space of a heartbeat. Of all the women he had pleasured, or been pleasured by, he had never known one who matched him so perfectly. Passion to passion, demand to demand.
He ran his hands through her short cap of hair. Warm silk. Down the slender curve of her throat. Hot satin. With his tongue he sampled the potent flavors of her mouth, and then he groaned as she drew him deeper into her.
Never had need spun so quickly out of control, risen so high above the tolerable.
He hurt. And he had never hurt before, not from wanting. He reeled, the way a man might stagger from lack of food or sleep. And he knew fear—a sharp and sudden terror that his own destiny had been removed neatly from his hands.
It was that which had him yanking her away, his fingers biting into her arms as he held her back. His breath came fast and shallow, as if he had raced to the top of a cliff. Indeed, staring at her, he thought he could see the drop, spread below him like a vision of jagged rocks and boiling seas.
She said nothing, just stared with eyes that were huge and dark. In the milky winter light her skin was pale and clear. Like a statue, she stood utterly still, utterly silent. Then she began to tremble.
Jacob snatched his hands away as if he’d been burned.
“I suppose . . .” Because her voice was weak, Sunny took a long, cleansing breath. “I suppose that was your way of proving a point.”
He pushed his hands into his pockets and felt exactly like what she had called him. A fool. “It was a choice between that and a left jab.”
Either way, he’d scored a knockout. Steadier now, she nodded. “If you’re going to stay here for the time being, we’re going to have to establish some rules.”
She recovered quickly, he thought, with a bitterness that surprised him. “Yours, I suppose.”
“Yes.” She wanted to sit down, badly, but forced herself to face him eye-to-eye. “We can argue all you like. In fact, I enjoy a good argument.”
“You’re seductive when you argue.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it again. No one had ever accused her of that. “I guess you’ll just have to learn how to control yourself.”
“It’s not my strong suit.”
“Or take a hike in what’s already over a foot of snow.”
He glanced toward the window. “I’ll work on it.”
“Fair enough.” She took another long breath. “Though it’s obvious we don’t like each other very much, we can try to be civil as long as we’re stuck with each other.”
“Nicely put.” He wanted to trace a finger down her cheek but wisely resisted the temptation. “Can I ask you a question?”
“All right.”
“Do you usually respond so radically to men you don’t like?”
“That’s none of your business.” Temper brought a flattering tinge of color to her cheeks.
“I thought it was a very civil question.” Then he smiled and changed tactics. “But I’ll retract it, because if we argue again so soon we’ll just end up in bed.”
“Of all the—”
“Are you willing to chance it?” he said quietly. He gave a slow, satisfied nod when she subsided. “I thought not. If it makes you feel any better, neither am I.” So saying, he sat and picked up the tools again. “Why don’t we just cross the whole business off as poor judgment.”
“You were the one who—”
“Yes.” He looked up, his gaze carefully neutral. “I was.”
It was pride that had her stalking toward the table when she would have preferred to slink away and nurse her wounds. “And I suppose it’s asking too much to expect an apology.”
“I don’t need one,” he said easily.
