Amy Mitchell was turning a shade of red that matched some of the lights on the tree. Was that a smile tickling around the edges of his mouth? He tried to remember the last time he had smiled.
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town had made him smile, he decided. He’d reread that a week or so ago.
No doubt his current good cheer was because his visitor was so intent on leaving. There was no need to tell her to pack her baby and get the hell out of his house. She was doing it all on her own.
“It will take me a minute to gather my things,” she said, all business and flurrying activity. “I’ll leave the groceries.”
“Groceries?”
“Oh, I stocked the fridge. I thought I was going to be living here, after all.”
“You’re not leaving the groceries,” he said.
“Oh, no, really. You didn’t have a thing in your fridge. That’s part of why I thought I was in the right place. Nothing in the fridge, no tree up, no socks on the floor.”
She had been in his bedroom.
“Really, I didn’t think anyone had lived here recently.” She shot him a look that was faintly accusing and faintly sympathetic. “It certainly didn’t look as though anyone lived here.”
“I don’t need your groceries,” he said a bit more tightly than he intended. He was so hungry, and whatever she had in the fridge would be better than the tin of stew he had planned on opening. But to admit that might invite more sympathy, and he definitely didn’t need her sympathy.
So his place looked unlived in. So it wasn’t going to be the featured house on Cozy Country Homes. So what? It was a place to hang his hat and lay his head. He didn’t need more than that.
Or at least he hadn’t felt as if he had for a long, long time. But there it was again, unwanted, uninvited emotion whispering along his spine.
Yearning. A wish he had managed to bury deep to have something that he did not have.
“I started to unpack. I’ve got some things in the bedroom,” she explained as she scurried around the room, the remnants of her embarrassment making her awkward. She dropped a baby puzzle on the floor, and the wooden pieces scattered.
He just knew she had been in there, in his bedroom. And he knew, suddenly, why it bothered him, too. That could move yearning in a whole other direction if he let it, which he wasn’t going to.
He hadn’t allowed himself feelings for a long, long time. It must be the Christmas tree, the baby, the scents, the astonishing discovery of a woman in his house, his own exhaustion, making him oddly vulnerable, making him aware of a hole a mile deep where his soul should be.
He watched Amy Mitchell, on her hands and knees, picking up the pieces of the puzzle, stuffing them into a box. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the baby roll off his rear end onto all fours.
With startling speed and unsettling determination, he crawled across the floor, making a beeline for Ty.
Ty stepped out of his way. The baby followed like a heat-seeking missile locked on target.
“Papa!” he yelled.
“Where is his papa?” he asked, deftly sidestepping the baby one more time.
CHAPTER TWO
“SO, that’s what they call the Texas two-step,” Amy said, rocking back on her heels to watch, after something in Ty’s tone had made her look up from where she was gathering the puzzle pieces.
“It’s not funny. Tell him to stop it.”
But it was funny, watching the big cowboy trying, not without desperation, to evade the determined baby. She giggled.
The cowboy glanced at her, glared, shifted away from the baby. “Don’t laugh,” he warned her.
“I’m sorry. It just looks as if you’d be completely unfazed by almost anything life threw at you. And you’re running from a baby!”
“I am not running,” he said tersely. “Call him off.”
She did laugh then. Ty glared at her, stepped away from the baby. He had waltzed around half the living room.
“Just stop and pick him up,” Amy managed to advise between snorts of laughter. “He thinks it’s a game.”
Oh, it felt good to laugh. She knew it was partly reaction to the situation she found herself in, a release from the fear she had felt when she had been startled by the big cowboy appearing in a home she’d already been busy making hers. But life had been such a serious affair for far too long.
The tall cowboy glaring at her warningly only seemed to make it more impossible to control her rising mirth.
“Now you want me to pick him up? Before you were going to hit me with a lamp if I even looked at him.”
“That was when I thought you were the intruder,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “Now I know it’s me who is the intruder. If you pick him up and cuddle him for a few seconds, he’ll lose interest.”
“Cuddle?”
“You mustn’t say that as if I’m asking you to get friendly with a rattlesnake!”
“It was the word cuddle that I took offense to!”
“A threat to your masculinity, is it?”
“I’m wet. I’m dirty.”
“You’re scared.”
He looked at her darkly, and then heaved a sigh.
“Terrified,” he admitted, and the laughter, recently tamed, burst free again. It still felt good to release the tension that had been building in her since Ty Halliday had set her world upside down by coming in the back door of the house she had been assuming was going to be all hers for the next six months.
The tiniest smile tugged at the edges of that hard mouth, and her laughter died. Nothing in her entire existence—she’d lived all over the world, gone to university, married into a well-to-do society family—had prepared her for a man like Ty Halliday.
In a world filled with illusions, the man was absolutely, one hundred per cent real. He had physical power and presence. He was as big as an oak tree, and just as solid. He had seemed to fill the room, to charge the air in it with a subtle hiss of dark sensuality. There was something about him standing there, all cowboy, that was equal parts menace and romance.
There was toughness in the chiseled angles of his dark whisker-shadowed face, something uncompromising about the set of his chin, the muscle that jerked along his jawline, the hard lack of humor around the line of his lips.
He was handsome—Amy was not sure she had ever seen eyes that color, a flinty blue sapphire—almost beyond words, but his good looks were of the untouchable variety. He wore solitude,
