the donkey rolled his eyes at her, and stayed squished as tight against the back wall of his new home as he could go.
“I know all about that feeling,” she said, and she smiled, knowing she had done just the right thing after all.
Chapter Two
“Mr. Donahue, you’re late. You know we have fines for people who pick up their children late.”
“Yeah, yeah. Put it on my bill. Would you tell my nephew I’m here?”
That irritating woman, Mrs. Beatle, was actually wagging her finger at him. Not as easily intimidated by a certain tone of voice, a set of jaw, as Grimes had been.
He sighed. “Please?”
Townspeople just never got it. Mares foaled. Colts in training went berserk. Donkeys arrived. You couldn’t just drop everything and run to town because it was five-thirty precisely and the day care was closing.
He had days, usually in the spring when mares were foaling and he was operating on two or three hours sleep a night, when he dreamed of a job that quit at five-thirty. Or six-thirty. Or ten-thirty. Or midnight.
On the other hand, a man traded something for a job like that. Freedom. He had never addressed another man as his boss, and he was not sure that he ever could.
“Robbie,” he called. Mrs. Beatle was hellbent on continuing her lecture on punctuality, as if he was a ten-year-old boy and not a man who was tough as nails from wrangling horses for a living.
What was it today? He’d put out a magnet for difficult women?
Not that Mrs. Beatle was in the same category as her. His new neighbor. Not even close. Mrs. Beatle was old and gray and built like a refrigerator.
Where as the new neighbor was young and not gray and not built anything like a refrigerator. It occurred to him it had been a long time since anything had gotten his attention quite as completely as she had.
In his mind’s eye he could see her, startling like a deer, when he’d first walked in the door. A rude thing for him to do, but the door had been open, and it was hard to think of that falling down cabin as belonging to anyone but him. The property had been in his family for several generations.
Until he’d sold it. It still felt like some kind of failure that he’d sold off that parcel of land. Maybe that’s why he wanted it back so badly. As if he could erase a whole bad period of his life by erasing the evidence.
At first glance, in that dimly lit cabin, his new neighbor had looked like a teenager. She’d been wearing jeans that were too small, and a T-shirt that was too large. Her hair had looked like a candle flame, yellow, dancing with light, pulled back into a ponytail like the cheerleaders at Miracle Harbor High used to wear.
Except unlike the cheerleaders, who’d always worn those vaguely irritating wholesome expressions of good cheer, in that first second, before she masked it, Corrine Parsons had looked scared damned near to death.
He’d seen right away the fear wasn’t caused by him, even if he had startled her. It was something she carried deep inside her.
He wondered what put that kind of fear into a person. She had denied the fear, but he knew what he had seen. He worked with fear all the time. Skittish two-year-olds, green colts, horses other people had given up on.
Back when he’d focused more on training than breeding, he used to specialize in horses like that. Maybe he was just irresistibly attracted to frightened things.
Sometimes those horses were just scared because they didn’t know what you expected from them. Sometimes they had nervous natures. But other times, the fear had been put there.
Those were the ones who broke your heart. The ones whose trust had been shattered.
Her mammoth jack being a prime example. The animal wasn’t mean. It was scared out of its wits. Matt felt sick with helpless fury when he remembered the condition that animal had been in. Still, an animal with that kind of fear was the most dangerous kind of all. It always felt it was fighting for its life, and it was a nearly impossible chore to convince it of anything differently.
He felt a strange little fissure of pain when he thought of her fear in that same light. He didn’t think Corrine Parsons was crabby by nature, like Mrs. Beatle here, who was on chapter two of her lecture on being responsible as an example to his nephew. He suspected, somehow and somewhere along the line, that Corrie Parsons had come to believe she was fighting for her life.
There was no meanness in her eyes. Her eyes had been soft and scared and pretty as those Striped Beauty crocuses his sister had planted along his front walk, along with a bunch of other flowers, about a million years ago.
“They’re signs of hope,” Marianne had said firmly, back when they all still had some of that.
Still, if that kind of fear was dangerous in an animal, it would be more so in a woman.
And if an animal could break his heart…
He reminded himself, firmly, that his heart was pretty much already in pieces. He wasn’t taking any more chances with it.
Nope, his complicated, beautiful neighbor would be a good woman to stay away from.
She was a city girl, anyway. It was written all over her—the milky skin on her face, the creamy softness of hands with no rings on them. It had been written all over her even before the donkey showed up.
She might be able to handle that cabin in the spring and summer, but in a few months the cold, wet weather would settle in and icy winds would begin to blow in off the ocean. Her driveway would turn to soup, and she would have to chop wood to keep warm. That would be it for her. Maybe even before that, if he had the good luck to have a skunk cozy up underneath the floorboards of the cabin. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Real estate had a tendency to lose value when strong scents attached themselves to it. He could probably get the land for a song.
Unfortunately, he had already registered the soft curves of a slender body, the plump swell of her lower lip. Unfortunately, he had already felt a little twinge of that something that could do in the strongest of men.
Desire.
It wouldn’t just be a good idea to stay away from her until she called it quits voluntarily. It was imperative.
Imperative, he repeated to a mind that wasn’t all together in agreement with him.
And unfortunately, he’d tangled himself with her for a little bit. He wondered if she’d consider castrating the donkey. It would save him one hell of a pile of work on those fences.
Of course, after her reaction to his perfectly reasonable suggestion they murder her donkey, she’d probably rather castrate Matt Donahue.
He heard Robbie coming before he saw him, small feet flying along tiled floors. And then Robbie rounded a corner and skidded to a halt, and Matt smiled.
His first smile since meeting the new neighbor. And her donkey.
Robbie was five. His nephew. He was as fair
