it startled him when he wanted to extend a hand to her.
“Sarah McDougall?” he asked, and at her wide-eyed nod, “I’m Sullivan.”
The aggrieved look faded from her face. She actually looked thrilled! He was glad he had shoved his hand in his pocket instead of holding it out to her.
“Mr. Sullivan,” she said, and scrambled to her feet. “I’m so glad you came. May I call you Oliver?”
“No, you may not. No one calls me Oliver. And it’s not Mister,” he said, his voice deliberately cold. “It’s Officer.”
A touch of wariness tinged her gaze. Hadn’t she been able to tell from her unanswered pleas that he was a man who deserved her wariness?
“No one calls you Oliver?”
What was she asking that question for? Hadn’t he made it eminently clear there was going to be nothing personal between them, not even an invitation to use first names?
“No.” His voice had a bit of a snap to it.
Which she clearly did not recognize, or she would have had the sense to back away from the subject.
“Not even your mother?” She raised a skeptical eyebrow. Her looking skeptical was faintly comical, like a budgie bird trying to look aggressive.
“Dead,” he snapped. He could see sympathy crowding her eyes, and there was no way he was allowing all that softness to spill out and touch him. His mother had died when he was seventeen years old.
And his father.
Seventeen years ago was a place he did not revisit.
There was no sense her misconstruing his reasons for being here, and there was only one way to approach a person like this.
Brutal bluntness.
“Don’t call me anymore,” he said, holding her gaze, his voice deliberately low and flat. “I’m not helping you. Not if you call six million times. I’m not any kind of hero. I don’t want to be your friend. I don’t want to save your town. And don’t call my boss again, either. Because you don’t want me to be your enemy.”
Sullivan saw, astonished at his failure, that his legendary people-reading skills were slightly off-kilter. Because he had thought she would be easily intimidated, that he could make her back down, just like that.
Instead he saw that cute little mouth reset itself in a line that was unmistakably stubborn and that could mean only one thing for him.
Trouble.
Sarah stared up at her unexpected visitor, caught off balance, not just by her tug-of-war with her rhubarb, but also by the fact she’d had a witness to it!
Add to that his unexpected sharpness of tone, his appearance in her yard, his appearance, period, and her feeling of being unbalanced grew.
She’d been totally engrossed in wresting the rhubarb from the ground. Which was what she needed from her house, her yard, her garden and her work.
There was always something that needed to be done, the hard work unending. But her total focus on what she’d been doing had left her vulnerable. Though Sarah suspected that even if you had been expecting this man, had laid out tea things and put on a presentable dress, the feeling you would have when you experienced the rawness of his presence would be one of vulnerability.
The grainy video she had seen—along with millions of other people—had not really prepared her for the reality of him. Though she had already figured out from her unanswered calls that he was not exactly going to be the kind of guy the heroic rescue of a drowning puppy had her wanting him to be.
From thirty seconds of film, from him ripping off his shirt and jumping into the icy water just past where the Kettle River ran under the bridge in downtown Kettle Bend, to lying on the bank after, the pup snuggled into the pebbled flesh of his naked chest, she had jumped to conclusions.
He was courageous. That much was in his eyes. A man afraid of nothing.
But she had thought—a man willing to risk his life for a dog, after all—that he would be gentle and warm.
If his message on his voice mail had been a touch abrupt, she had managed to dismiss that as part of his professional demeanor. But then the fact that he had not returned her increasingly desperate calls?
And now he had been downright rude to her.
Plus, there was nothing warm in those dark eyes. They were cool, assessing. There was a wall so high in them it would be easier to scale Everest.
Sarah felt a quiver of doubt. The reality of Oliver Sullivan versus the fantasy she had been nursing since she had first seen the clip of him did not bode well for her plan, unless he could be tamed, and from looking at him that seemed highly unlikely!
Sullivan was dressed casually, dark denims, a forest-green T-shirt that molded the fullness of his chest, the hard mounds of firm biceps. A hundred other guys in Kettle Bend were wearing the same thing today, but she bet none of them radiated the raw potency that practically shivered in the spring sunshine around him.
He looked like a warrior wearing the disguise of a more civilized man.
He was one of those men who radiated a subtle confidence in his own strength, in his ability to handle whatever came up. It was as if he was ready and waiting for all hell to break loose.
Which was so utterly at odds with the atmosphere in her garden that it might have made her smile, except there was something about the stripping intensity of his expression that made her gulp instead.
Despite astonishing good looks, he had the expression of a man unutterably world-weary, a man who expected the absolute worst from people, and was rarely disappointed.
Still, he was unnervingly good-looking. If she could talk him into doing some TV interviews, the camera would love his dark, chocolate hair, short and neat, slashing brows over eyes so dark brown they could have been mistaken for black. He had a strong nose, good cheekbones, wide sensual lips and a devilish little cleft in his chin.
She could not allow herself the luxury of being intimidated by him.
She just couldn’t.
Kettle Bend needed him.
Not that she wanted to be thinking of him in the same sentence as the word need.
Because he was the kind of man who made a woman aware of things—needs—she was sure she had laid to rest.
He was the kind of man whose masculinity was so potent it could make a woman ache for things she had once had, and had no longer. Fevered kisses. Strong arms. Laughter in the night.
He was the kind of man who could almost make a woman entirely forget the terrible price, the pain that you could invite by looking for those things.
Sarah McDougall didn’t need anyone looking out for her, thank you very much! It was one of the things she prided herself on.
Fierce independence.
