the tall weeds, though. Maybe she’d avoided the ticks and chiggers this way, but the number of potholes made the trip a different challenge. Thanks to yesterday’s flooding, every one of them was brimming with muddy water. Apparently the county road department didn’t like him, either.
By the time she reached his porch, her once pristine jogging shoes and leggings were splattered with East Texas red clay. Disgusted, she pounded on the screen door.
“Don’t you dare ignore me!” She glared up at the unblinking eye targeted on her. “Open up or this goes to the press.”
She held up the sheet of paper to the camera. Several long seconds later she heard the inside latch give. Telling herself that she had to ignore the responding lurch from her stomach, Willa stormed inside.
He sat where she’d found him yesterday, at the top of the stairs, looking like an exiled dictator of some ragtag country who was in a particularly bad mood. She eyed him with disdain. Whatever the man spent his money on, it certainly wasn’t clothes and razor blades.
Intent on giving him a taste of his own medicine and making him as agitated as he’d made her, she quickly started up the stairs. She knew better than to dwell on the wisdom of the move—or rather, the lack thereof. This had to do with principle.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Although his dark, almost wild gaze had the sharpness of a spear lancing through her, she shot back, “I’ll do the talking this time.”
“Not if I decide to call the police and have you arrested for harassment and trespassing.”
“Good idea. Call them! I can’t wait to hear you explain away this.”
“Let me see that!”
With impressive control and speed, he leaned forward and, before she could stop him, he snatched the paper out of her grasp. Afraid he meant to shred it, Willa considered trying to get it back, but she didn’t want to risk destroying it herself. Checking her impulse, she attempted to ignore her sudden disadvantage by studying her strange neighbor from this closer vantage point.
At least he looked somewhat less unkempt this morning, although he still hadn’t shaved, and his eyes were as bloodshot as ever. Finding that they were gray surprised her. She’d expected the same opaque brown of his hair and beard, a shade that in certain light people was often mistaken for black. Then again, the gray was opaque and nearly black, too. And so was his mood, she noted as he shot her a brief, sharp glare.
What a big, fierce man. He looked perfectly capable of launching himself out of that wheelchair and strangling the life out of her; in fact, his hands weren’t anything close to what she’d pictured for a writer. No long, elegant piano fingers here. Zachary Denton’s hands were closer to paws: huge, thick-fingered and callused like a laborer’s. She knew the latter was from wheeling his chair, but it reminded her of what A.J. used to say about Denton’s work. He writes like a man’s man.
What a crazy thing to remember. She’d never quite understood what A.J. had meant, either. In fact she’d argued to him how silly the comment was, insisting that no woman had ever declared a member of her sex, “a woman’s woman.”
However, as she watched the broken, but still-powerful man before her sweep a hand through his thick wavy mane, her increasingly rebellious imagination kicked into gear and suddenly she understood the macho thing. She could visualize how Zachary Denton’s hands would look caressing a woman’s body…how they would feel.
No, not just any female body. Hers.
She gripped the railing more tightly and looked away as an irrepressible quiver centered deep inside her.
“I warned you,” he said, his tone never more grim.
She glanced back in time to see him suck in a deep breath, his broad chest swelling, until it seemed almost too much for the seams of the cleaner, but ancient, black T-shirt. No surprise when even his pale but well-developed biceps were at least twice the size of hers. “Wh-what?”
“You heard me. If you’d listened, this would never have happened.”
Willa was glad for the subtle insult; it served to get her mind back on business all the faster. “Nice try but no Oscar, Mr. Denton. I know this is your doing.”
“Are you nuts?”
“No. But you are if you think you’re going to get away with it.”
“Lady,” he ground out, his glare all but impaling her, “in case you haven’t noticed, this is a wheelchair.”
“Which proves nothing.”
For an instant he looked genuinely dumbfounded, but the rage quickly returned, stronger and more explosive than before. “Excuse me all to hell, but this thing doesn’t come with a certificate qualifying me to be in it. You’ll just have to take my word that when you crash-land a single-engine plane, flipping it twice, there’s a good reason to believe the doctors when they tell you you’re in this thing for the rest of your stinking life!”
No one had ever yelled at her before, at least not quite like this. Between her shock and the sickly feeling that came as he described his living nightmare, she reached for the last shreds of her patience. “With all due respect, Mr. Denton—”
“Let’s get something straight, Mrs. Whitney, you have no more respect for me than I have for you.”
Unfortunately, that was proving true, but the remark still stung. “Fine. Then let’s get down to the bottom line, shall we? I’m here and plan to stay, and I’d better not find anything like this in my mailbox again.” She snatched back the paper.
Sun-dried rawhide couldn’t have stretched any tighter than the muscles on his square-jawed face. “Did you see any mud trail from my house to yours? Any on the porch ramp?”
“No,” she admitted reluctantly. What’s more, it had stopped raining early in the evening.
“And there isn’t any mud on my tires now, is there? So what makes you all-fired certain I did that?”
He had to ask that? After yesterday? “There’s no one else,” she replied, struggling to keep from letting him spook her again.
“Really.” Once again his gaze swept over her, lingering on her breasts. “I think you’re forgetting one crucial point.”
She couldn’t understand how someone in his condition could turn a simple comment into such an insult. Barely able to stay put, Willa replied, “What?”
“Some nut case is out there stalking local women.”
Willa wouldn’t buy it. “I think you’d like me to believe this is connected with that. But I find it more than slightly suspicious that after living in Vilary for nearly six years, operating a successful shop in a busy mall and having my photograph in the local paper any number of times, it’s only when I move in next to you that this happens.”
“Maybe the stalker does know about you and your sexy lingerie business,” Zachary Denton countered with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Maybe he’s just been saving you for something special.”
