A Husband for Christmas: Snow Kisses / Lionhearted

“In a little old spring snowstorm like this?” She laughed. “I could fight my way through blizzards, snowshoe myself to Canada, ski over to the Rockies...”

“...lie like hell, too,” he said, amusement gleaming in the dark eyes that caught hers as they entered the lighted interior. “Come on.”

She followed him into the airy enclosure, wrapping her arms tight. “Still no heat, I see.” She sighed.

“Can’t afford the luxury, honey,” he remarked, waving at a cowboy farther down the aisle.

“Is that why it’s so drafty in here? You poor thing, you,” she chided.

“I would be, if I didn’t keep the air circulating in here,” he agreed. “Don’t you remember how many calves we used to lose to respiratory ailments before the veterinarians advised us to put in that exhaust fan to keep stale air out of these sheds? Those airborne diseases were bankrupting the operation. Now we disinfect the stalls and maintain a rigid vaccination program, and we’ve cut our losses in half.”

“Excuse me,” she apologized. “I’m only an ignorant city dweller.”

He turned in the aisle and looked down at her quietly. “Come home,” he said curtly. “Where you belong.”

Her heart pounded at the intensity of the brief gaze he gave her before turning back to his cow boss.

Charlie Smith stood up, grinning at Cade. “Hi, boss, get tired of television and hungry for some real relaxation? Jed sure would love to have somebody take his place—”

“Just visiting, Charlie,” Cade interrupted. “I brought Abby down to see the newcomers.”

“Good to see you again, Miss Abby,” Charlie said respectfully, tipping his hat. “We’ve got a good crop in here, all right. Have a look.”

Abby peeked into the nearest stall, her face lighting up as she stared down at one of the “black baldies,” a cross between a Hereford and a Black Angus, black all over with a little white face.

“Jed brought that one in an hour ago. Damn...uh, doggone mama just dropped it and walked away from it.” Charlie sneered.

“That’s not his mama, huh?” Abby murmured, noticing the tender licking it was getting from the cow in the stall with it.

“No, ma’am,” Charlie agreed. “We sprayed him with a deodorizing compound to keep her from getting suspicious. Poor thing lost her own calf.”

Abby felt a surge of pity for the cow and calf. It was just a normal episode in ranch life, but she had a hard time trying to separate business from emotion.

Cade moved close behind her, apparently oblivious to the sudden, instinctive stiffening of her slender body, the catch of her breath. Please, she thought silently, please don’t let him touch me!

But he didn’t attempt to. He leaned against the stall and rammed his hands in his pockets, watching the cow and calf over her shoulder. “How many have we lost so far?” Cade asked the cow boss.

“Ten. And it looks like a long night.”

“They’re all long.” Cade sighed. He pushed his hat back over his forehead, and Abby, glancing up, noticed how weary he looked.

“I’d better check on my own charge down the aisle here,” Charlie said, and went off with a wave of his hand as the ominous bleating of the heifer filled the shed.

“Prime beef,” Cade murmured, chuckling at Abby’s indignant expression.

She moved away from him with studied carelessness and smiled. “Heartless wretch,” she teased. “Could you really eat him?”

“Couldn’t you, smothered in onions...?”

“Oh, stop!” she wailed. “You cannibal...!”

“How does it feel to be back?” he asked, walking back the way they came in.

“Nice,” she admitted. She tucked her cold hands into the pockets of her jacket. “I’d forgotten how big this country is, how unspoiled and underpopulated. It’s a wonderful change from a crowded, polluted city, although I do love New York,” she added, trying to convince him she meant it.

“New York,” he reminded her, “is a dangerous place.”

She stiffened again, turning to study his face, but she couldn’t read anything in that bland expression. Cade let nothing show—unless he wanted it to. He’d had years of practice at camouflaging his emotions.

“Most cities are,” she agreed. “The country can be dangerous, too.”

“It depends on your definition of danger,” he returned. He looked down at her with glittering eyes. “You’re safe as long as I’m alive. Nothing and no one will hurt you on this ranch.”

Tears suddenly misted her eyes, burning like fire. She swallowed and looked away. “Do I look as if I need protection?” She tried to laugh.

“Not especially,” he said coolly. “But you seemed threatened for an instant. I just wanted to make the point. I’ll protect you from mountain lions and falling buildings, Abby,” he added with a hint of a smile.

“But who’ll protect me from you, you cannibal?” she asked with a pointed stare, her old sense of humor returning to save her from the embarrassment of tears.

“You’re just as safe with me as you want to be,” he replied.

She looked into his eyes, and for an instant they were four years in the past, when a young girl stood poised at the edge of a swimming pool and offered her heart and her body to a man she worshipped.

Without another word, she turned around and started back out into the snow.

4 (#ulink_20b64dc6-d3aa-5e7f-b5d9-e10648df8d8e)

As she walked toward the truck, huddled against the wind, her mind suddenly went backward in time. And for an instant, it was summer, and she was swimming alone in the pool at Cade’s house one night when her father was in the hospital.

She’d been eighteen, a girl on the verge of becoming a woman. Her father, far too ill during that period of her life to give her much counsel, hadn’t noticed that she was beginning to dress in a way that caught a lot of male attention. But Cade had, and he’d had a talk with her. She’d marched off in a huff, hating his big-brother attitude, and had defiantly gone for a swim that night in his own pool. There was no one around, so she had quickly stripped off her clothes and dived in. That was against the rules, but Abby was good at breaking them. Especially when they were made by Cade McLaren. She wanted him to look at her the way other men did. She wanted more than a condescending lecture from him, but she was too young and far too naive to put her growing infatuation into words.

She’d been in the pool barely five minutes when she’d heard the truck pull up at the back of the house. Before she had time to do any more than scramble out of the pool and pull on her jeans, she heard Cade come around the corner.

She was totally unprepared for what happened next. She turned and Cade’s dark eyes dropped to her high, bare breasts with a wild, reckless look in them that made her breath catch in her throat. He just stood there, frozen, staring at her, and she didn’t make a move to cover herself or turn away. She let him look his fill, feeling her heart trying to tear out of her chest when he finally began to move toward her.

His shirt was open that night, because he’d just come in from the corral, and the mat of thick black hair over the bronzed muscles of his chest was damp with sweat. He stopped a foot in front of her and looked down, and she knew that all the unspoken hunger she’d begun to feel for him was plain in her wide, pale brown eyes.

Without a word, he bent and lifted her. Very, very gently, he brought her body to his and drew her taut breasts against his chest, letting her feel the rough hair against her soft, sensitive skin in a caress that made her moan and cling to him, while her eyes looked straight into his and saw the flash of triumph in them.

He turned and carried her into the house, up the stairs and into his own bedroom, and laid her down on the bed. And then he sat there, with one hand on the bed beside her to support his weight, and looked at her again, letting his dark eyes feast on the soft, pink bareness of her body. She wasn’t even aware of being wet, of her body soaking the coverlet. All she saw, all she knew, was Cade’s hard, dark face and his eyes.

Finally, he moved and his fingers traced a pattern from her shoulder down over her collarbone. She held her breath as they kept going down, and she felt the slow, sweet tracing of them on the curve of her breasts—exploring, tantalizing with the light pressure—until they reached the burgeoning peak and caught it lightly between them.

She gasped, arching at the unexpected surge of pleasure, and his eyes looked straight down into hers.

“Hush,” he whispered then. “You know I won’t hurt you.”

“Yes,” she whispered back, as if the walls could hear them, her eyes wide with unexpected pleasure. “I...I want you...to touch me.”