your offer to show me the way in the morning. I am quite capable of looking after myself.”
The wind gusted so strongly that it rattled the glass of the window, hurled snow against it. Nature, in its unpredictable wrath, was reminding her that some things were going to be out of her control.
But not, she reminded herself, how she handled those things. And so she would be a better person and finish decorating this tree, her gift to a stranger, before she left here tomorrow and never looked back. It would not matter to her if he didn’t show appreciation.
Somewhere in his heart he would feel the warmth of the tree and the gesture, and be moved by it.
She slid him another glance, and saw the man was dead on his feet. And that he was soaked from the top of his dripping cowboy hat to his wet socks. He hadn’t driven up in a vehicle.
“You were out in that,” she said, and was ashamed by how thoroughly she had made it all about her.
He glanced at her and seemed to find her concern amusing. “That’s my world,” he said with a touch of wryness. “Besides, it wasn’t that bad then.”
“You’re starving,” she guessed. “And frozen.”
He said nothing, a man accustomed to discomfort, to pitting his strength against whatever the world brought him, and expecting to win. Ty Halliday was obviously a man entirely used to looking after himself.
So, since she was stuck here anyway, she would make the best of it, and this would become part of her gift to him.
“I’ve got a chicken potpie in the oven. I’ll make a salad while you go shower. Everything should be ready in twenty minutes.”
Her take-charge tone of voice was probably spoiled somewhat by the fire she felt creep up her cheeks after she mentioned the shower.
The very thought of him in the shower, steam rising off a body that she could tell was hard-muscled and powerful, made something hot and sweet and wildly uncomfortable unfold inside of her.
He regarded her for a moment too long. She suspected he wanted to refuse even this tiniest offer to enter his world. But then he sniffed the air like a hungry wolf and surrendered to the fact she was already in his world. He turned away.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “It smells good.”
She could tell it was not easy for him to accept her offer, but obviously, like her, he knew he had to just try and make the best of an awkward situation.
He went by her, and his scent overrode that of the potpie in the oven. He smelled of wet oilskin, wild horses, pure man, and his aroma enveloped her. And then he was gone. Amy waited until she heard a door down the hallway snap shut before she went and sank down on her knees beside her baby. She was aware her knees were trembling.
The wrong house?
Her clothes, her partially unpacked suitcase, were spread out on Ty Halliday’s bed!
It all seemed as if it might be a terrible omen. She had set out on the road this morning to a brand-new life.
She had not listened to the objections of her family or her in-laws.
She was done with the stuffiness of it all. She was done with being stifled. Lectured. Patronized.
This morning, she had felt joy unfurl in her for the first time in a long time. Amy had followed her heart instead of her head.
But where had it led her?
Amy tried to still the trembling of her knees and her heart by picking up Jamey and settling him on her lap.
“Papa?” he asked, a plaintive whisper, his eyes glued to the place where Ty Halliday had disappeared down the hallway.
“No, sweetie, not Papa.” There was no sense telling Jamey, yet again, there was no papa. In all his nearly a year of wisdom, even though his father had been gone for longer than he had been in Jamey’s life, Jamey had become determined to have what his little pals at play school had—a daddy.
“Papa,” Jamey insisted, leaning back into her and putting his thumb in his mouth.
Amy heard the shower turn on in another part of the house and was horrified to feel a heated blush move up her cheeks.
Good grief! She had set out this morning on a mission. To find herself. Her real self. Who she was genuinely meant to be.
She could not let the first obstacle—no matter that he was large and intimidating—make her feel as if she was on the wrong road!
She had to act the part of the confident woman she was determined to become. That woman ran her own business and her own house and was not always flinching from put-downs.
Amy refused to go any further down that road, feeling guilty as always, for acknowledging she might not have been completely satisfied with the life her husband had given her.
Out loud, quietly, she said, “I will not be a schoolgirl who blushes at the thought of a man in the shower.”
But, of course, the man in that shower was not any man.
Could anything prepare a woman for the kind of raw magnetism Ty Halliday radiated?
Could anything prepare a woman for a man who moved with such unconscious grace, as fluid as water, so at home with his own power? Could anything prepare a woman for that kind of pure masculine energy, the kind that felt like a force field around him, sizzling, faintly but alluringly dangerous?
Could anything prepare a woman for the strength that radiated out from under the brim of that soaked hat, from underneath that wet slicker like a palpable force?
The answer was no.
But she reminded herself firmly of her mission.
Tomorrow she would be back on the right road. Tonight she would decorate that tree as her gift to a stranger. She would cook him a hot meal. That was it.
Tomorrow her quest would resume. She was on a journey. She was determined to find out who she really was, and what really mattered. She had lost sight of both things since her marriage.
And Ty Halliday was just an uncomfortable—and brief—detour from that quest. Amy put down her baby and went to rummage through Ty’s ill-equipped kitchen.
Amy made a vow. She resolved not to let his shocking appeal alter her focus. She put Jamey on his blanket surrounded by his toys and checked the chicken potpie she’d put in the oven earlier for their supper.
She frowned. The pie was not cooking properly, and she suspected the oven was not producing the correct heat for the temperature it was set at. She turned it up, and the oven made a protesting noise. The oven seemed decidedly cranky.
“Just like its owner,” she muttered.
“Papa,” Jamey supplied.
“Precisely.” And then she realized she could not start agreeing, even casually, with Jamey labeling Ty as his papa.
“Don’t
