Creed.”
Oh, mercy.
That didn’t do much to steady her heart rate or her breathing.
However, Kylie did lower her gun, and she eased her finger off the trigger. Sheriff Lucas Creed wasn’t exactly the threat her body had prepared itself for.
But he was a threat of a totally different kind.
“I didn’t hear you drive up,” she informed him.
Lucas didn’t answer right away, but she thought she heard him mumble something. A not-so-pleased kind of mumbling. One she understood. Because, after all, her comment probably had seemed like some kind of accusation.
“I parked at the end of the road,” he responded. “You told the dispatcher you thought there might be trespassers on your property. I looked around. Didn’t see anyone.”
That was the good news.
The bad news was that Lucas Creed was standing on her porch.
Kylie eased her gun onto the foyer table and inched closer to the door until her ear was pressed right against it. “I asked the dispatcher to send out a deputy.” She tried to keep her voice level. Failed miserably. She had to clear her throat and repeat it so that it was more than an incoherent squeaky grumble.
Another pause. A long one. “One of my deputies is transferring a prisoner to Houston. He won’t be back till morning. The other’s out sick with the flu. I was the only one on call.”
Ah. So that explained it. Lucas had no choice but to respond to her 911. That meant he wasn’t any happier about this late-night visit than she was. No surprise there.
He despised her.
Worse, he had a reason to despise her.
“You plan to open the door and tell me what this is all about?” Lucas demanded.
That sent her pulse pounding. If she refused to let him in, it would make him suspicious. If she did comply, the same might happen.
And the one thing she didn’t want was Lucas getting suspicious.
“You know the drill,” he continued, sounding even more impatient. “I have to do a visual check to make sure you’re not being held against your will.”
Yes. It was standard procedure. Something Lucas wouldn’t violate. Even if she was absolutely the last person on Earth he wanted to see.
Kylie glanced down at her stomach. The darkness hid a lot of things but not the second trimester tummy bulge. Almost frantically, she loosened the tie of her flannel robe and fluffed up the fabric. It helped. Well, hopefully it did. Just in case, though, she angled her body behind the door when she opened it.
And she came face-to-face with a man who’d sworn never to see her again.
“Lucas,” she said, her throat closing up.
He didn’t acknowledge her greeting and didn’t make eye contact with her. Instead, he kept a firm grip on his lethal-looking Glock and swept an equally lethal-looking gaze around the yard.
“Is your porch light working?” he asked.
He didn’t say it as if it were a request, either. More like procedure. He had to make sure she wasn’t injured. Or that someone wasn’t lurking behind her, threatening her. To do that, he needed light.
Kylie reached over, hesitantly, and flicked the light switch on. If she thought it was tough to cope with Lucas in the dark, it was nothing compared to being able to see him.
He was every bit the rough-and-ready Texas cowboy tonight.
Just over six feet tall. Long and lean. Intense and imposing, with a fierce don’t-mess-with-me demeanor. He was the kind of man who could stop a heart in midbeat. Or send one racing.
He seemed to be doing both to her right now.
The past three years had been hard on him. She could see the stress etched on his rugged, naturally tanned face and in the depths of his eyes. Stress that she was responsible for.
Okay. That made her ache. Made her feel guilty. Worse, it made her want to do something to ease what he was going through. She wanted to reach out to him, to tell him how sorry she was. For everything. But Kylie knew Lucas wouldn’t appreciate the gesture or the words. And while they might make her feel marginally better, gestures and words wouldn’t do anything to help him.
The wind howled, stirring through his slightly-too-long mahogany-brown hair. His firm jaw muscles stirred, too. Moving against each other, as if he were in the middle of a battle about what to say.
Or, more likely, what not to say.
“Don’t make this any harder than it already is,” he mumbled in a rough whisper.
She knew what he meant. He had to come inside, look around. He’d need to put that on the report. Especially this report. Lucas wouldn’t want anyone to question his procedure or accuse him of cutting corners because of the bad blood between them. But he also wanted to do this as quickly as possible so he could get the heck out of there.
Something she totally understood.
Kylie moved back, still using the door as cover. Lucas didn’t say a word. He stepped inside, bringing with him the scents of his well-worn buckskin jacket, the winter frost and the fragrant cedars that he’d no doubt brushed up against to get to her house. His unique scent was there, as well. Something dark and masculine. Something that reminded her that she was a woman.
Oh, no.
That little mental realization shocked her. All right, more than shocked her. It stunned her. Because it had been a long time—years, in fact—since she’d been aware of something like that. This was obviously some by-product of pregnancy hormones. Yes, that had to be it. Because there was no other option. She couldn’t be physically attracted to the one man on the planet who would never be attracted to her.
Stupid pregnancy hormones.
They didn’t have a clue.
“What happened?” Lucas asked, using his cop’s voice to go with the cop’s surveillance of her living room and foyer. “Why the 911?”
Kylie quickly tried to gather her thoughts. And not the ones set off by the hormones, either. Those she pushed aside, and she got down to business.
“Around 11:30, I went to the kitchen to get a drink of water.” Even though she was trying to hurry this along, she stopped when she heard how shaky her voice was and took a deep breath. This wussiness had to stop. “I looked out the window and saw two men dressed in dark clothes in the woods out near that cluster of hack-berries.”
He nodded. “I saw the fresh tracks. Could be hunters.”
“Could be.” And that’s what Kylie desperately wanted to believe. That the men were deer or rabbit hunters who’d accidentally strayed onto her property. Nothing more. “But they weren’t carrying flashlights, or if they were, they didn’t have them turned on.”
Lucas
