Confessions of a Small-Town Girl

He was feeling an uncomfortable dose of concern himself as he sat at his usual spot at the counter.

“I didn’t know if we’d be seein’ you or not this mornin’.” Sounding as friendly as always, Dora automatically filled a mug with coffee and set it in front of him. “Charlie stopped by on the way back from your place and said you might be coming down with a cold. You should get extra vitamin C,” she insisted. “How about some orange juice?”

“The juice would be great, but I’m feeling fine. Honest.” So much for preempting that little rumor. “I’m just late this morning,” he explained, sticking closer to the truth than he had earlier. “There’s nothing wrong with me that food won’t cure.”

“In that case, I’ll go start your breakfast myself.” Holding her injured arm protectively at her waist, she glanced over her shoulder into the kitchen, then back at him. “Kelsey’s on an important call. She might be a while.”

As usual, she asked if he wanted buttermilk pancakes or blueberry with his bacon and eggs, then disappeared through the swinging door before she reappeared again inside walking past the service window.

His focus, however, was on Kelsey. He could see her at the back of the kitchen, pacing as far as the six-foot phone cord would allow.

She’d been the last thing on his mind last night, and the first that morning.

He couldn’t begin to deny how it intrigued him to know that she had once fantasized about him. With the memory of her scent and the feel of her long, taut body fused into his brain, he couldn’t deny the temptation to invent a few fantasies about her of his own, either. But entertaining such thoughts, interesting as they were, would have to wait. He had slammed her pretty hard against that stud.

He had never in his career come as close as he had last night to harming an innocent person. And she was an innocent. Despite the way she’d been sneaking around, she was definitely not the hard-core type he’d grown so accustomed to dealing with.

He picked up his coffee, watching her over its rim. He’d come to make sure she was all right, but his initial assessment was that she was not. She rubbed the back of her head as if it might be sore. From what he could see of her profile, she also seemed to be struggling over something, or someone, as she hung up the phone.

She stood with her hand on the receiver, clearly lost in thought, in the moments before her mom noticed she was no longer occupied.

“Grab the eggs for me, will you?” he heard Dora call to her.

Without a word, Kelsey turned to the refrigerator beside her, yanked open the door and pulled out a large gray cardboard flat.

“Sam’s here,” Dora continued, her tone utterly conversational. “He wants his usual. That means four. Best bring more bacon, too.”

Kelsey’s preoccupation fled. Sam watched, fascinated, as she jerked her head toward where he observed her through the window. As she did, her eyes met his, her arm bumped into the door and the eggs hit the floor.

“Oh, Kelsey, no.” Dora practically moaned the words. “That’s the last of the eggs till Edna delivers more tomorrow. Are there any that didn’t break?”

Kelsey sank to her knees. “One,” she murmured, as fifteen others oozed from their shells.

“Why didn’t you just take out what we needed?”

She hadn’t taken out what they’d needed because the instant she’d heard Sam’s name her thoughts had scrambled. She was not, however, about to admit that to her mother. “I’ll run up to the store and get more.”

“I’ll do it. You clean that up.” Already working her apron loose with one hand, her mom headed for the back door. “There’s nobody else out front except Claire and her cousin from Montpelier. I just refilled their coffee so they’ll be fine until I get back. Sam has a fresh cup.”

Flustered, hating it because it made her feel so out of control, Kelsey grabbed a roll of paper towels and was back on her knees as the screen door banged shut. The sound coincided roughly with the ominous beat of rather large work boots coming through the swinging door.

Sam’s knees creaked as he crouched in front of her and reached for the towels himself.

Her glance made it from the denim stretched over his powerful thighs to the scar on the underside of his chin before it fell back to the mess on the beige linoleum. “You don’t need to help.”

“I’m the reason you dropped part of my breakfast. The least I can do is help you clean it up.”

Feeling flustered was bad enough. Knowing he knew he was the reason for that circumstance magnified her discomfort level by ten. She hadn’t behaved like her normally calm and collected self since yesterday when she’d first heard his name.

With their heads nearly bumping, she picked up a paper towel full of the slippery mess, shells and all, and dumped it on the cardboard flat between them.

Paper ripped as he separated a towel from the roll. “I wanted to talk to you anyway.”

A hint of the raw tension she’d felt in him last night surrounded her once more. Even banked as it was, there was no mistaking that quiet intensity, that edge of complete and utter control. It surrounded him like a force field, invisible, invincible and emitting a kind of restive energy that taunted every nerve in her body.

She now understood completely why that edge was there. She’d had no idea that a man his size could move so quietly or so fast. But she didn’t care to imagine what he’d dealt with that had honed his skills to such a degree, and instilled such lethal instincts. What she had encountered last night told her all she cared to know. The man did not do his work from behind a desk.

That edge lurked beneath his quiet perusal even now.

“I could have hurt you last night.” He hesitated, his deep voice dropping as he ducked his head to catch her eyes. “Are you okay?”

There was no mistaking his concern, or the guilt that tightened his jaw. Caught off guard by both, she quietly murmured, “I’m fine.”

“Then why were you rubbing the back of your head?”

“It’s just a little bump,” she conceded, taking the towel he held to take another swipe at the floor. “It’s nothing.”

“That’s what you said about the diary.”

She didn’t get a chance to tell him she wished he’d never laid eyes on the blasted thing. With her head bent, she could only see his spread knees, but she caught the motion of his hands an instant before she felt them on the sides of her head.

“Let me see,” he insisted, and skimmed his fingers toward the back of her hair.

Sam was accustomed to relying on his own assessments, making his own judgments. Thinking she might be minimizing to get him to go away, he wanted to determine the size of the bump for himself.