the one thing she could never have again.
Her family.
She had hit her head harder than she thought! That’s what was causing this. Or was it the look she had glimpsed ever so briefly in his own eyes? The look that had given her the sensation that he was a man bereft?
“You actually don’t look okay,” he decided.
She opened her eyes to see him studying her too intently. Just what every woman—even one newly devoted to independence—wanted to hear from Kiernan McAllister!
“I don’t?”
“You’re not going to faint, are you?”
“No!” Her denial was vehement, given the fact that she had been contemplating that very possibility—heart implosion—only seconds ago.
“You’ve gone quite pale.” He was looking at her too intensely.
“It’s my coloring,” she said. “I always look pale.”
This was, unfortunately, more than true. Though she had the dark brown hair of her father, she had not inherited his olive complexion. Her mother had been a redhead, and she had her ultrapale, sensitive skin and green eyes.
“You are an unusual combination of light and dark.” She squirmed under his gaze, until he tightened his hold.
“Remember Murphy’s Law,” he warned her. “It’s very slippery out here, and those shoes look more suited to a bowling alley than a fresh snowfall.”
A bowling alley? “They’re Kleinbacks,” she insisted on informing him, trying to shore up her quickly disintegrating self-esteem. The shoes, after all proclaimed arrival, not disaster.
“Well, you’ll be lyin’-on-your-backs if you aren’t careful in them. You don’t want to add to your injuries.”
“Injuries?”
Still holding her one arm firmly, he used his other—he seemed to have his cell phone in it—and whipped off the towel he had around his waist!
Still juggling the towel and the phone, he found a dry corner of it, and pressed it, with amazing gentleness, onto the top of her head. “I didn’t see it at first, amongst the chocolate curls—”
Chocolate curls? It was the nicest way her hair had ever been described! Did that mean he was noticing more about her than his sack-of-potatoes hold had indicated?
“—but there’s blood in your hair.”
His voice was perfection, a silk scarf caressing the sensitive area of her neck.
“There is?” She peeked at him around the edges of the towel.
He dabbed at her hair—again, she was taken with the tenderness of his touch, when he radiated such a powerful aura—and then he turned the towel to her, proof.
It looked like an extremely expensive towel, brilliant white, probably Egyptian cotton, and now it had little speckles of red from her blood. Though for some reason, maybe the knock on the head, the sight of all that blood was not nearly as alarming to her as he was.
Since he had removed the towel, Stacy forced herself not to let her gaze stray from his face. Water was sliding out of the dark silk of his hair and down the utterly and devastatingly attractive lines of his features.
“You aren’t naked, are you?” she asked, her voice a squeak of pure dismay.
Something twitched around the sensual line of his mouth as McAllister contemplated Stacy’s question, but she couldn’t really tell if he was amused or annoyed by it.
His mouth opened, then closed, and then, his eyes never leaving her face, he said evenly, “No, I’m not.”
She dared to unglue her eyes from his face. They skittered over the very naked line of his broad shoulders, down the beautiful cut of chest muscles made more beautiful by the snowflakes that melted on them and sent beads of waters sliding down to the ridged muscle of washboard abs. Riding low on his hips...her eyes flew back to the relative safety of his face.
Only that wasn’t really safe, either.
“Underwear?” she squeaked.
He regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. She resisted an urge to squirm, again, under the firm hands at her elbow, and his stripping gaze.
“Kleinbacks,” he said, straight-faced.
She was pretty sure the designer company did not make men’s underwear, and that was confirmed when something very like a smile, however reluctant, played along the hard line of those lips. Stunned, Stacy realized she was being teased by Kiernan McAllister.
But the light that appeared for a moment in his eyes was gone almost instantly, making her aware he had caught himself lightening up, and not liked it. Not liked it one little bit.
“Swim trunks.” His voice was gravelly, amusement stripped from it.
“Oh!” She sagged with relief, then looked, just to make sure. They were really very nice swim trunks, not the scanty kind that triathletes wore. Still, there was quite a bit more of him uncovered than covered, and she felt herself turn scarlet as she watched a another snow drop melt and slide past the taut muscles of his stomach and into the waistband of his shorts.
“It doesn’t really seem like swimming weather,” she offered, her voice strangled.
“I was in the hot tub in the back of the house when I heard the commotion out here.”
“Oh! Of course.” She tried to sound as if she was well acquainted with the kind of people who spent snowy afternoons doing business from their hot tubs—he did have his phone with him, after all—but she was fairly certain she did not pull it off.
Knowing what she did about him, it occurred to her that perhaps, despite the presence of the phone, he wasn’t doing business. One thing she knew from her life interviewing high-powered execs? They were attached to those phones as though they were lifelines!
Kiernan McAllister might be entertaining someone in his hot tub.
“Alone,” he said, as if he had read her thoughts.
She didn’t like the idea that he might be able to read her thoughts. But there was also something about the way he said alone that made her think of icy, windswept mountain peaks and a soul gone cold.
Even though he was the one with no clothes on, in the middle of a snowstorm, it was Stacy who shivered. She tried to tell herself it was from snow melting off her neck and slithering down her back, but she knew that was not the entire truth.
It was pure awareness of the man who stood before her, his complexities both unsettling her and reluctantly intriguing her. His hands resting, warm and strong—dare she consider the thought, protectively—on her. How on earth could he be so completely unselfconscious? And why wasn’t he trembling with cold?
Obviously, his skin was heated from the hot tub, not that he was the kind of man who trembled! He was supremely comfortable with himself,
