style="font-size:15px;"> She couldn’t say now why she had found his face so disconcerting. It was…unusual, she thought. There was a hint of gray in the brown hair and weathered skin stretched over strong bones, with a small fan of white lines around his eyes. Eye, she amended.
Maybe that was what she had found shocking. Jenny realized she had never known anyone who wore an eye patch. Those were for cover models on pirate romances, she thought, almost smiling at that sudden image, superimposed over the six-foot-four hunk of male reality standing before her. He probably would have made a damn fine pirate, she thought.
But of course, the patch hadn’t been all she’d reacted to, she realized, her eyes still fastened—fascinated, somehow—on his face. The texture of his skin was different, too. Slightly rough and maybe even…scarred? The light in the hallway was so poor that she couldn’t really be sure about that. She found a smile for him, trying to soften her rudeness if he had noticed the effect he had just had.
For some reason it wasn’t the forced, automatic smile she had been giving to strangers all afternoon as she tried to help Trent see to it that Anne and Rio’s wedding went smoothly. That wasn’t her responsibility, or really any of her business, she admitted; but at some time during the hurried preparations for this wedding, she had begun to feel like the mother of the bride. Or maybe the mother of the groom, she thought, her lips tilting upward a little more when she remembered that Rio still called her “ma’am.”
“Birdseed?” the man questioned, his gaze reacting to the upward tilt of her mouth. The brown eye was suddenly touched with amusement. As was his voice.
Even that was unusual. Deep, but…strained? Jenny wasn’t accustomed to having to search for words, but she was finding it hard to think right now, and she suspected it might have something to do with the intensity of the look this man was directing downward at her. He was taller than Trent. Taller even than Chase, she thought.
“Instead of rice,” she offered.
The left corner of his mouth moved, slowly lifting, and Jenny’s stomach reacted, tilting just as slowly. She couldn’t even decide whether that sensation was pleasant or not.
“No cleanup,” she explained. The words were a little breathless, and she broke contact with that disconcerting dark gaze by looking down into her basket.
She picked up one of the ribbon-tied bundles with her left hand and realized that her fingers were trembling. Recognizing that she didn’t have another option, she held the packet of seeds out to him, willing her normally competent and cooperative hands to stillness.
“The birds eat the seed, and then no one has to worry about sweeping up.”
“Cheap labor,” he said.
“Exactly,” Jenny agreed, smiling at him again, relieved that he’d grasped the idea from her muddled explanation.
He hadn’t reached out to take the little bundle from her fingers, and she realized belatedly that they were still vibrating. Obviously vibrating. She took a breath, striving for control.
What in the world was the matter with her? He wasn’t even handsome—not in Trent’s league by any stretch of the imagination. Her reaction was childish and ridiculous, she chided herself.
“Of course, throwing rice at the newlyweds is considered to bring good luck.” She offered the conversational gambit with the best intentions, just to keep talking until she grew up.
However, her voice was barely above a whisper and she thought he was bound to notice. Despite the crowd, they were almost alone here. Most of the guests had moved down the steps and onto the sidewalk where the car was awaiting Rio and Anne.
“I thought it had something to do with fertility,” he said.
“I…” She hesitated. Fertility? She didn’t think she had ever heard that before, but then she wasn’t thinking too straight right now, and she still couldn’t imagine why.
“Did they throw rice at your wedding, Mrs….?” His voice rose slightly at the end of the question, waiting for her to fill in the blank he’d deliberately left.
“McCullar,” she supplied obediently.
His left hand caught hers, which was still holding out the tulle-covered packet of seed. The smallness of hers was almost lost in the grasp of his long, tanned fingers. He turned her hand over, and they both looked down on the plain gold wedding band she still wore.
She had worn it for almost ten years, since the day Mac had slipped it on her finger. She had never thought about taking it off, not even when she had begun to give serious consideration to accepting Trent’s proposal.
“Mrs. McCullar?” he said.
Her eyes moved slowly up to his face. Its features were less strange now. Less off-putting. As a matter of fact, she found herself wondering what she had found so disconcerting before.
His lips moved, only the left corner inching up. “Did they throw rice at your wedding?” he asked again.
Suddenly there was a thickness in her throat, and her eyes stung. Ridiculous, she thought again. She was about to say yes to planning her second wedding, and an offhand question from a stranger had made her want to cry about her first.
“I don’t remember,” she lied. “That was a very long time ago.”
She pulled her fingers from his. At their first movement, he released her. But his hand didn’t drop to his side. Instead, it opened in front of her, palm up.
For the birdseed, she realized. She placed the tiny package on his outstretched hand.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to manage the ribbons,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind doing that for me?”
Because his fingers are too big? she wondered. The narrow satin streamers she and Samantha had tied did look absurdly small in comparison to his hand. And absurdly feminine against its hard masculinity. Without comment, she pulled on one end of the bow and slipped the ribbon from around the gathered neck of the tulle, which fell open.
“Unless you think the newlyweds would like to be showered with the net as well as the seed, you might want to remove that, too,” he suggested.
She lifted her eyes to his, questioning. Whatever hint of amusement had been in his face and in his voice was gone, wiped out and replaced by an emotion she couldn’t read. She shook her head, her eyes still questioning.
“My right hand doesn’t work too well. Certainly not well enough to pick up something that small. That demands a kind of coordination my fingers no longer have.”
Again she was forced to fight the revelation of her feelings. There was a hollowness in the pit of her stomach when she heard those words, created not by the words themselves, but by whatever had been in his eyes when he’d said them. She fought to keep her gaze on his face, and not to let it drop to his other hand.
He would hate that, she knew instinctively. It was obvious that he wasn’t comfortable even talking about whatever was wrong with his hand. Jenny was sensitive enough to realize that that quiet confession hadn’t been lightly made.
“Of course,” she said. She lifted one corner of the tulle and slid the small
