sorry,” Hanna said hastily. “No insult was intended.”
“None was taken,” he said, but his voice remained the pure raw silk of a gunslinger just as prepared to draw as to smile.
“I can see you’ve changed,” she said, but the brightness in her voice felt forced. In truth she felt a certain unfathomable loss at the change in him. “You are certainly not the renegade boy I remember, though I must say you don’t strike me as any kind of a farmer.”
The sense of him having changed in some fundamental way was underscored by the deep confidence in his voice. And by the way he was dressed, which backed up what she had just said about him not being a farmer.
She had a sense of being very aware of him, as if she was tingling all over, maybe because of the jolt she had felt when he had taken her hand.
Likely just static, she told herself firmly. Or the chill of the night penetrating her clothing.
Or maybe not. The lights from the headlamps of his car had illuminated them in an orb of pure gold. His breath was making puffs in the crisp air.
Hanna had the oddest and most delicious sense of breathing him in.
SAM DID CUT a breathtaking picture, standing here in the crisp chill of a winter evening, his hands deep in his coat pockets. His coat was undone, and his look underneath it was casual, but not casual in the way that was interpreted around here, certainly not farmer-casual.
No, around here, in the rural community that surrounded the upstate New York village of Smith, casual was plaid shirts and faded jeans, work boots and ball caps.
Sam’s casual was more in keeping with Hanna’s life in the city, a look that could have taken him for drinks at an upscale club after work or to the theatre or to dinner at any of New York’s finest restaurants.
He was wearing a long-sleeved, creamy shirt, which looked to her like fine linen. With its thin blue pinstripe, the perfectly pressed shirt looked casually expensive. It was open at the strong column of his throat, and tucked into knife-creased, belted, dark slacks that definitely did not look as if they had come off the rack at a chain store.
“Renegade?” he asked, lifting a dark slash of an eyebrow at her.
Was there a nice way to say he looked very respectable now? Back then, respectability was what she—or anyone else—would have least predicted for him.
They had done a silly thing in the Smith High School Annual every year: under each photo of a graduating student, it had said Most likely to...sometimes flattering, but mostly not.
Most likely to become president, most likely to make a million, most likely to rob a bank.
She recalled Sam’s had said Most likely to sail the seven seas.
Just a silly thing, and yet, those few words had captured something of him: a restlessness, a need for adventure, a call to the unknown.
Of course her own, in her senior year, before she had left Smith forever, had said Most likely to become a nun and how ridiculously inaccurate had that proven?
Sam had been older than her by a year, the heartthrob of every single girl in Smith Senior High School, so he had graduated and gone before her own senior picture had appeared in the annual.
“You aren’t going to deny that, are you? That you were, uh, something of a renegade?” It occurred to her it might have been better to pretend she could barely remember him at all, but she simply wasn’t that good at pretending.
Sam had been a force unto himself then, and she suspected he still was. Even though he had just hit a pony with his car, he looked entirely unflustered, radiating a kind of self-certainty that was immensely attractive rather than off-putting.
“Something of a renegade” was an understatement. Sam Chisholm had been an absolute renegade, which of course, had only added to his lethal charm.
It looked to Hanna as if he was still dangerously and lethally charming, even if he claimed to have left a part of himself behind.
The thing was, she was not sure you could leave something like the person he used to be behind. The essence of it was still clinging to him, and it was like a nectar of wild enchantment that called to her and that could not be resisted.
She of all people should resist its pull, and frantically. But she could not. Hanna reluctantly gave herself over to remembering Sam.
Even back then, a senior in high school, Sam Chisholm hadn’t been in sync with the town of Smith’s sense of style.
He had favored faded jeans so worn that nothing was left but white threads over the large muscles in his thighs, and below the back pocket of his butt.
He had sported the world’s sexiest leather jacket, the leather distressed by real age and wear. He had worn that jacket through all seasons, even when it was far too cold for it. He had arrived at school in a rumble of noise, and often blue smoke, on an old motorbike.
He’d never ever worn a helmet, his too-long deep brown, silky hair always raked by the fingers of the wind, his features always made even more attractive by the fact they were kissed by sun and the elements.
“A renegade?” he asked again now. Sam raised a dark brow at her. She could not really tell if he was amused or annoyed.
“A renegade,” she said with prim firmness, a voice very well suited to Most Likely to Become a Nun, a voice that would never give away the fact she had found the wild version of him to be unreasonably sexy and that she had given in to the pull of remembering him with a nary a protest.
From the brief touch of his hand on hers just moments ago, he still had that mystical something that just made some men sexy and almost unbearably so.
He was dangerous to her, part of Hanna shouted. Danger, danger, danger. He was the kind of man who made a woman who had given up on love—after all, she had been jilted by her fiancé while she was still raw from the death of her mother—long for the very things she had sworn to harden herself against.
It made an eminently reasonable woman such as herself, who had vowed to dodge the wounding arrows of love by burying herself in her work, think unwanted thoughts of looks so heated they could scorch through to the soul, and breath coming in ragged, wanton gasps, and the silken caress of forbidden kisses...
It was because she had once tasted the nectar of his kiss, she warned herself, that she was being drawn back into the wild and dangerous enchantment of him.
Embarrassed by her weakness, Hanna remembered all too clearly how she had been caught in this particular spell once before.
“What made you arrive at that conclusion?” he asked.
“Which one?” she stammered, thinking remembered kisses must be showing in her face.
“That I was a renegade?” he reminded her.
“Oh, really!” she said annoyed.
