Wild in the Moment

“The way you talked to the sheriff, you seemed to know him.” Teague, darn him, sounded wide awake.

“George Webster? I went to school with him.” She hung up the poker and turned around. “He followed me around my whole senior year with his tongue hanging out.”

There, she’d won a grin. His eyes tracked her as she pushed off her shoes and shook out a blanket. “I’ll bet a lot of boys followed you with their tongues hanging out,” he said wryly.

“A few,” she admitted. “What kills me now is realizing how immature I was. I wanted the guys to like me. I wanted a reputation for being wild and fun. And whether that was dumb or not, I had two younger sisters, both of whom looked up to me. I should have been thinking about being a role model for them, and instead…”

“Instead what?”

“Instead…” She curled up in the overstuffed recliner and wrapped the blanket around her. God knew why she was talking. Probably because she was too darn tired to think straight. “Instead there was only one thing in my head in high school. Getting out. I couldn’t wait to grow up and leave White Hills and do something exciting. I was never in real trouble—not like trouble with the police. But someone was always calling my mom on me. My skirt was too short. My makeup was too ‘artsy.’ I’d skip English to hang out in the Art Room. I never did anything big wrong, but I can see now it was all just symbolic little stuff to show how trapped I felt in a small town and how much I wanted to leave.”

“Yet now you’re back.”

“Only for a short time. I just need a few weeks to catch my breath before moving on again.” Even though her eyes were drooping, she could hear the ardent tone in her voice. She so definitely wasn’t staying. A few hours back in White Hills, and already she’d been caught up in a blizzard and a guy problem. It was a sign. She should never have tried coming home. Even for a month. Even knowing she’d been pretty darn desperate.

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you come to be living in the south of France?”

Her eyes popped open—at least temporarily. Maybe tiredness had loosened her tongue, but she couldn’t fathom how he’d known she lived in France.

He explained, “Pretty hard not to know a little about you. You’re one of the exotic citizens of White Hills, after all. Daisy Campbell, the exotic, glamorous, adventurous girl…the one all the other girls wanted to be, who had the guts to leave the country and go play all over France with the rich crowd….”

“Oh, yeah, that’s sure me,” she said wryly, and washed a hand over her face. Sometimes it was funny, how you could say a fact, and it really was a fact—yet it didn’t have a lick of truth to it. She hadn’t been playing in a long time. Anywhere. With anyone. “Anyway…I ended up living in France because I fell in love with an artist. Met him at one of his first American shows, which happened to be in Boston. I can’t even remember why I was visiting there…but I remember falling in love in about two seconds flat. Took off and married him right after high school.”

“I take it he was French?”

“Yeah, he was French. And he wanted to live in Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne had studied with Emile Zola. And then Remy-en-Provence, where Van Gogh hung out for a long time. And then the Côte d’Azur—because the light on the water is so pure there, or that’s what all the artists say, that there’s no place like the French Riviera.”

“Hmm…so you traveled around a lot. Sounds ritzy and exciting.”

“It was,” she said, because that’s what she always told everyone back home. They thought she was gloriously happy. They thought she was living a glamorous, always-exciting dream of a life. No one knew otherwise—except probably her mother, and that was only because Margaux had the embarrassing gift of being able to read her daughters’ minds.

“So…are you still married to this artist?”

“Nope. Pretty complicated getting a divorce for two people of different citizenships, but that’s finally done now. And I don’t know exactly what I’m doing after this, but you can take it to the bank, I’m never living anywhere but my own country again.” She opened her eyes. Somehow, even now, she seemed to feel obligated to say something decent about her ex-husband. “My ex really was and is a fine artist. That part was totally the real thing. He wasn’t one of those artists who have to die to make it. His work’s extraordinary, been recognized all over the world. Jean-Luc Rochard. You might have seen his paintings.”

“Not me. The only original artwork I’ve got are those paint-by-number-kit things. Oh. And a black-velvet rendition of Elvis.”

Darn it. He’d made her chuckle again. “Got a houseful of those, do you?”

“Maybe not a houseful.” She felt his gaze on her face in the firelight. “So…what happened?”

“What happened when?”

“What happened, that you got a divorce. You talk up the guy like he was the cat’s meow, a woman’s romantic dream. And you were living the high life in fantastic places. Yet something obviously had to go wrong, or you’d still be with him.”

“Oh, no. I’ve spilled all I’m going to spill for one night. Your turn next. And if this storm is going to be anywhere near as bad as I’m afraid of, we’ll be marooned here for another day or two—so we’ll have more time to talk than either of us probably wants. For the immediate future—do you need a trip to the library but are too embarrassed to tell me?”

“I’ll deal with a trek to the library after you go to sleep.”

“Well, that’s the problem, Mr. Teague Larson,” she said patiently. “I’m completely dead on my feet. Which means I’m going to conk out in this chair any second now. I’m supposed to call the sheriff every few hours, report how you are. And I’m supposed to wake you up every two hours and look in your eyes, check the size of your pupils. Only, I’m afraid that I’m not going to get either of those things done. I’m losing it, I can tell. So if you need some help getting into the bathroom, you need to tell me now.”

“I don’t need help.”

“Yeah, you do. But I’m not up for bullying you. I’m warning you, this is your last call for free help.” She yawned, as if to punctuate how tired she was. And that was the last thing she remembered.

Three

Teague had to grin. When that woman slept, she slept. She’d been right in the middle of talking when her eyelids suddenly closed and she snugged her cheek in the side of the chair. Two blinks later she was snoring. Not big, noisy, guy snores, but whispery little snores. The kind a woman makes when she was end-of-her-rope tired.

Teague figured it was the perfect time to hightail it into the bathroom—finally. Contrary to what Daisy thought, he wasn’t embarrassed. He was a grown man, for heaven’s sake. But the truth was, the only way he could make it into the bathroom was by crawling on all fours. The bump on his head ached and stung, but that wasn’t the worst problem. As long as he only moved slowly—and didn’t laugh—the head wound wasn’t bugging him too much. His swollen right ankle was giving him fits, though. At least for tonight there was no chance of his walking on it.

Teague had asked for help in his life. He was almost sure of it, even if he couldn’t remember a single occasion specifically. For damn sure, though, he wasn’t asking a woman, as if he were some kind of needy, sickly, dependent type.

So he crawled into the bathroom, at an extremely annoying snail’s pace. Then he had to sit on the blue-tiled floor until his head stopped spinning and he stopped sweating from the exertion. Eventually, though, he took care of nature, brushed his teeth, managed a reasonably efficient sponge bath, and then crawled back into the living room.

The wind howled louder than ever, or maybe the intense darkness made it seem that way. Eerie shrieky sounds seemed to seep through the walls and whistle through the cracks. Teague hesitated at the couch, but rather than climb back up there, he carted the pillow and blanket closer to the fire. The yellow blaze was dancing-hot, but wouldn’t last all night. He figured he could feed it easier through the wee hours if he was already located on the carpet, closer to the hearth.

He used a log from the stack of cut wood to elevate his right leg, and then sank back against the blanket. Just when he thought the setup was perfect and he could doze off, he realized that he couldn’t see Daisy’s face from that angle—her whole body was in shadow. That wouldn’t do, so he had to refix the log and blankets and pillow all over again.

By then he was wasted-tired and getting cranky from the day’s various aches and injuries. But he could see her. If a guy had to be miserable, she was the best diversion he could conceivably imagine.

There were dark shadows under those gorgeous eyes. Didn’t matter. She’d be striking if she were dead-sick with the flu. She had the bones, the style, the attitude. No one was going to miss noticing Daisy Campbell—at least no guy was, not in this life.

She wasn’t, though, even remotely the way she billed herself.

For a woman who complained about being stuck with him—and yelled loudly to the sheriff how desperate she was to get him off her hands—she didn’t act remotely thrown about taking responsibility for an injured stranger. In fact, she was taking no-fanfare, no-fuss, damn good care of him. She also acted sassy and snappy, but those hands of hers were gentle and so was the concern in her eyes.

Every contradiction seemed more interesting than the last. For a woman who looked as if French couture was her raison d’être, she sure made a feast out of an ordinary cup of potato soup. And although she carried herself as if a ton of servants usually trailed after her, she’d shown a ton of practical common sense about storm survival.

He didn’t get it.

He didn’t get her.

Something strange was happening here. Really strange. Teague didn’t like surprises. He didn’t mind being attracted to her—hell, no man had control over that. His you-know-what couldn’t tell whether a woman was potentially catastrophic or not. But his brain did.

She’d given him the message loud and clear that she was a rolling stone.

He’d fallen in love with one of those once before. Had no reason to volunteer to be kicked in the head a second time.

Still. There was no harm in just looking at that spectacularly interesting face. It was one of those favorite guy fantasies, being marooned with a beautiful woman with no one else around. It’s not as if there were any chance of their getting close. Hell, he couldn’t imagine laying a finger on her.

Teague couldn’t have closed his eyes, because that howling wind was itching on his nerves, and he hurt in too many places to really rest.

But suddenly his eyes opened. Any man’s would. Because out of nowhere there seemed to be an extremely warm, mobile, voluptuous woman plastered against him.

More than his eyes popped up, in fact. It occurred to him that the same woman pressing warm, firm, full breasts against his chest and winding a leg around his hip, was precisely the same one he’d just sworn—seconds before—that he’d never lay a finger on.

“You’re awake, Teague? Don’t get shook. It’s just me.”