sudden yearning leapt in her that she had to fight. A yearning that made an entirely different kind of fear breathe to life within her.
“What can I do for you?” she asked, her voice ice-cold, not a trace of any sort of emotion in it.
She knew he heard the coldness, though his reaction was barely discernible. A flicker in a muscle along the line of his jaw, a slight narrowing of his eyes that had the unfortunate effect of bringing the thick sooty abundance of his lashes to her attention.
“I’m Matt Donahue,” he said, just the faintest hint of ice adding a raw edge to the warm timber of his voice. “I’m your closest neighbor,” he nodded, “on that side.”
If he expected the welcome-neighbor routine, she hoped to disappoint him. She said nothing, waited, after a moment, folded her arms across her chest.
“I actually was interested in buying this piece of land. I heard someone had bought it before I even realized it had come up on the market.”
So he wasn’t exactly here as part of the welcome-neighbor routine, either. Surprise. Surprise.
“I’m not selling.” See? That was what attachment did. She’d only just got here, and already she had decided the place was hers. A place where her heart could be at home. She felt inordinately angry at him for making her see how fragile places for the heart really were.
“You haven’t even heard my offer,” he said mildly.
“Nor do I plan to.” She saw no reason to tell him she was in no position to sell, even had she wanted to. The land wasn’t even really hers to sell, yet. And maybe it never would be. How had her heart managed to overlook that little detail when she was planning throw rugs and curtains and bright red tulips?
That while her heart was saying forever to this little shack in the trees, the legal document said something else.
Husband required.
For a moment, having the H-word in her mind at the same time that this big, handsome man with the strong, steady eyes filled her doorwell made her almost helpless with longing.
Wishing that she could be a different person than she was. Softer and kinder, like her sister Abby or more outgoing and sexy like her sister Brit.
She felt her lack of warmth should have at least backed him out the door by now, but he stood, feet planted, regarding her thoughtfully, almost lazily. His eyes drifted casually to her bare ring finger, which gave her permission to take a swift, discreet glance at his.
His fingers were long and lean and ringless. Any kind of jewelry on them—even a wedding band—would have looked foolishly out of place in contrast to the masculine power of those hands.
She wished suddenly she was not in her oldest jeans, and a T-shirt with a rip under one armpit. She wished she had not been so quick to tell Brit to leave her hair alone when her sister had tried to style it. Still, she kept her face deliberately expressionless, and hated herself for the weakness of wishing.
His attention, thankfully, wavered from her before her discomfort made her blurt out something she was sure to regret. An overreaction like get the hell off my property.
He cocked his head a little, turned a shoulder, listened. “You expecting company?”
“The movers,” she said, suddenly hearing what he heard, the growl of a big truck coming down her rutted driveway.
“I expect they’re here, then. I’ll leave you to it—” he paused, leaving a blank where she could fill in her name, but she refused. She had no intention of appearing even remotely friendly to the handsome neighbor who had his eye on her land.
And, she realized, her lips.
Stunned by the pure masculine potency that burned briefly in his eyes when they flicked ever so briefly to her lips, she found herself wanting to sway toward him. Thankfully, he had tamed the heat in his gaze when he looked placidly back into her eyes.
She narrowed her eyes and glared at him.
He raised a hand to the brim of his hat, gave it a slow tip, and took a step backward onto the porch, turning away from her. “Your livestock appears to have arrived.”
Her what? She scurried over to the doorway. He was planted on the top step now, his eyes narrowed at the old muffler-free truck that was bouncing down her drive, a stock rack in the back.
“I don’t have any livestock.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. In the full light he was even more compelling than he had been in the dimness of the cabin. The sunlight made him appear bigger and stronger and more real.
Dark brown hair that curled at the tips slipped out from under his cowboy hat and touched the nape of his neck.
She could see his pulse beating in the curve of that strong neck. The white T-shirt molded the firm, hard lines of his chest and the broad sweep of his shoulders. Where the short sleeve of the shirt ended a rock-cut bicep began. The white of the shirt made the copper tone of his skin appear deeper. Her eyes wandered down the length of that arm, to the corded muscle of a powerful forearm, the squareness of a wrist twice the width of her own.
Embarrassed for looking, she forced her gaze back up to his eyes.
She could see they were more than brown; they were dark as new-turned earth, flecked with little spangles of gold.
And in the strong sunlight, she could see those eyes held a pain in them that could compete with any of her own.
The truck pulled up at the bottom of her stairs, a vehicle in a state of disrepair worse than her Jeep.
Her neighbor stepped over her broken step with the ease of a man who was used to putting his feet in all the right places, and went up to the window, which the driver rolled down.
“Corrie Parsons?” The driver looked grizzled, and dirty. There was a look in his eyes that she could recognize at ninety yards. Plain old garden variety meanness.
Donahue looked back at her for confirmation, and she nodded, not even sorry to give up her name to him after all. In fact she was glad suddenly that he was here. She got a familiar uneasy feeling from that man in the truck, with his stained teeth and squinty eyes and stubbled jowls.
With surprise she realized that Matt Donahue had either picked up on her split second of dislike, or harbored some of his own, because there was something almost protective in the way he turned back to the truck, and answered for her.
“This is the Parsons’s place.”
No one had ever protected her before, not even casually, and she did not like the way his small gesture threatened to soften something hard within her.
At that moment, a sound like Corrine had never heard reverberated through the air. It was like amplified fingernails across a blackboard crossed with the shrill howl of a saw blade shrieking through wood.
Matt Donahue didn’t jump back the way she did. Instead, he moved away from the vehicle door, swung himself up on the deck of the truck, and peered through the worn board slats of the stock rack.
“Yup,”
