patted Buttercup’s smooth golden neck and pulled out one of the brushes she’d brought from inside. It was hardly a grooming brush, but nothing else was available.
She brushed the old mare’s knotted mane and spoke to her in low whispers for a while. Then she and Justin broke open another bale of hay.
“Watch out,” he warned when they were spreading it around a little. “It’s damned amazing how much manure one horse can produce in a sixteen-hour period.”
“It is at that.”
“Just don’t step backward without looking behind you first.”
She found a shovel in the corner and took it to him. “Get to work.”
“Shoveling horse manure?”
“That’s right.”
“But where am I going to put it?” The gleam in his eyes said he already had a pretty good idea.
“Just shovel it up, carry it out those open main doors there and toss it as far as you can into the snow.”
“That snow’s piling up pretty high out there. This could be dangerous.”
“So pay attention when you throw it. Wouldn’t want it to come flying right back at you.”
He pretended to grumble, but he started right in. She looked around and found another shovel. With both of them scooping and tossing, they had the mess cleared away in no time at all.
As they went to put the shovels up, Justin remarked that if the snow got much higher, swamping out the shed was going to be a real challenge.
“We’ll manage,” she told him. “Somehow…” She set her shovel against the wall and turned so fast, she almost ran into him.
“Watch it.” He laughed down low in his throat, the sound emerging on a cloud of mist.
She laughed, too.
And then, all at once, she wasn’t laughing and neither was he. They were just looking at each other—staring, really. And the cold air seemed to shimmer between them.
Oh, my goodness. Those lips of his…
Too full, for a man’s lips. Really. Too full and yet…
Exactly perfect.
If only she didn’t already know how delicious those lips felt pressed against her own. Maybe, if she didn’t know what a great kisser he was, she wouldn’t be standing here, sighing out a big breath of misty air and lifting her mouth to him.
He said her name, on a fog of breath. “Katie…”
She was so busy imagining what it was going to feel like when his lips met hers, that she didn’t register how close Buttercup was behind him—not until the mare let out a low whinny and head-butted Justin a good one.
“Hey!” He surged forward, right into Katie. She went over backward and down they went into the newly spread hay. He ended up on top of her.
Katie blinked up at him and he looked down at her and there was a lovely, strange, breath-held kind of moment. He was so…warm and solid, pressed all along the length of her—and heavy, too, but in a good way. He looked deep in her eyes and he said her name again and she held up her lips to welcome his kiss.
But Buttercup wasn’t finished. She bent her head and started nipping the back of Justin’s baggy old coat.
He rolled away from Katie to glare up at the mare. “Knock it off.”
Buttercup whinnied again and clopped off toward the double doors. A moment later, she was outside beneath the overhang, lipping up snow.
Justin canted up on an elbow and looked down at Katie. “That animal has it in for me.”
Katie was thinking that she really ought to sit up. Her hat had come off when Justin landed on top of her. She knew she had hay in her hair. But she felt kind of…lax. Lax and lazy and oh-so-comfortable, lying there in the hay on the frozen dirt floor.
“Hmm,” she said, and the sound was every bit as low and lazy as she was feeling. “Maybe Buttercup thinks you’re up to no good.”
He leaned in closer. She gazed up at his thick black lashes and his red nose and that wonderful, soft, oh-so-kissable mouth. “I’m perfectly harmless.”
“Perfect?” she heard herself answer, her tone as husky and intimate as his. “Maybe. Harmless? Oh, I don’t think so…”
There was a silence, a quiet so intense she could hear the soft sound of the snow falling outside and the faint rustling noises Buttercup made beyond the shed doors. Slowly, his mouth curved into a smile. And his eyes…
Oh, it was just like right before he kissed her, in front of everyone, back in the hall. His eyes kind of sucked on her. They drew her down.
“I don’t think that mare wants me to kiss you.”
And she probably shouldn’t kiss him. “Well, Justin. Okay, then. Let me up and we’ll—”
He cut her off by placing a gloved finger against her lips. “Not yet.” She probably should have protested, told him firmly to let her up.
But she didn’t. She watched, entranced, as he lifted his hand, took the tip of the glove’s finger between his white teeth and pulled it off. He dropped the glove beside her and then he touched her lips again—skin to skin this time. That brush of a caress made her mouth tingle, made her whole body yearn.
He let his hand drift over until it lay against the side of her face. “Soft,” he whispered. “So pretty and soft…” He lowered his mouth.
She expected a hot, soul-shattering kiss. But he only brushed his lips sweetly, one time, across hers—and then he lifted away again and she was looking in those haunting eyes once more. “What’s another kiss? Between a man and his wife.”
Now she felt truly torn. She longed to kiss him—yet she knew it was probably a bad idea. “We shouldn’t…get anything started, you know? We hardly know each other and—”
“But that’s just it. I want to know you better. What about you, Katie? Do you want to know me?”
She did! And that seemed…dangerous, somehow. That seemed foolish and scary and simply not right. “I—I don’t really want to start anything casual, you know?” She found her throat had gone desert-dry. She paused to swallow and then rushed to continue before he could do anything that would make her thoughts scatter and fly away. “I know it’s probably every guy’s fantasy to get stranded with a woman who, uh, knows what she wants and knows how to get it—not that I don’t know what I want. It’s just, well, I don’t want…that.”
He only smiled. “That, huh?”
“Yes.”
“That…what?”
Oh, this wasn’t going well. “Look. I just
