call me Red.” His wolfish smile rattled her. His smile and his comment on her pajamas.
She should have taken time to put on a robe instead of panicking when she’d found Jamie missing from his bed. Being in nothing but pajamas and bare feet made a woman feel vulnerable. Elizabeth wanted to run, but instinct told her the dumbest thing she could do was let this man know he unnerved her.
Making her way across the kitchen, she took a mug from the rack and filled it with coffee. She desperately needed caffeine to recharge her brain cells and took a deep gulp of coffee. “Yuk.” She spit the mouthful of liquid back into the mug and poured it down the sink. “If I licked tar off the street, it would taste better.”
“Does anything around here suit you?” he asked mildly.
“Jamie suits me.” She looked at her son and did a double take. “What in the world is he wearing?”
“Since Jimbo and I didn’t want to disturb his lazybones of a mom, we had to improvise a little. He was sopping wet.”
Jamie gave her a toothy grin and smeared banana on the man’s undershirt he wore. “I don’t suppose you bothered to change his diapers.” Grudgingly, Elizabeth admitted to herself her son didn’t seem to be suffering.
“He’s wearing a dish-towel diaper with a plastic bag over it, aren’t you, Jimbo?”
That made the third time he’d said it. “His name is Jamie,” she said tersely.
“Well now, Red,” Worth drawled, “Jimbo and I had a little discussion about that, and we decided Jamie is a sissy name. A cowboy needs to have a name like Jimbo.”
“He’s not a cowboy and he’s not going to be a cowboy.”
“That’s not what his Grandpa Russ says.”
“Russ has nothing to say about how I raise my son.”
Worth slowly rose. Sticking his hands in his back pockets he silently contemplated her with narrowed eyes. The food splashed down the front of his T-shirt did nothing to subtract from his masculinity. He should have looked ridiculous. He didn’t. He looked sexy.
Elizabeth shivered. Only because the house was cool.
Jamie banged on the tray of his chair with his drinking cup.
She moved to step around the obstacle in her path. The obstacle blocked the move with his large body. “I need to take care of my son,” Elizabeth said.
“He’s fine.” Worth studied her face with such intensity the hairs on the back of her neck rose in uneasy protest.
She dropped her eyes to stare at a hunk of banana stuck to his T-shirt. Elizabeth’s secrets were her own. She didn’t want him, didn’t want anyone, gaining access to them. “Please move.”
With an exaggerated sweep of his hand, he stepped aside.
Ignoring him, she concentrated on feeding Jamie the last of his cereal, then wet a paper towel and bending down, scrubbed her son’s face.
“I surely do love those green pajamas.” The soft drawl flowed from the kitchen doorway.
Elizabeth straightened up and spun around so fast she made herself dizzy. Worth Lassiter slouched against the doorjamb, masculine approval filling his eyes with a drowsy, sensual heat. Her stomach zoomed to her toes. She wanted to run and hide. She couldn’t move. Her traitorous body reacted as if he were physically touching her. And he knew it.
Elizabeth took a deep breath. “What do you want from me?”
A lazy smile crept across his face. “You know what I want, Red. And I intend to make sure I get it.”
What kind of man tried to seduce a woman he barely knew who was a guest in his home? She picked up Jamie, as much to hide behind him as to give herself time to regain her composure. “When you live in a university town, and your husband dies, someone’s bound to bring you a book on being a widow. As if it’s like learning how to sew or raise puppies. I had nothing better to do, so I read it. The book talked about this.”
“This?”
“How some men will tell a widow they know she must miss sex and offer to, well, comfort her.” Her voice rose nervously, which both annoyed and mortified her. She forced herself to look him directly in the eye. “Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Lassiter. I am not a lonely widow looking for a man to share my bed.”
Surprise flashed deep in his eyes, then he lowered his eyelids to half-mast, concealing any expression. “You know, Red, it’s always enlightening to watch a woman’s mind at work. I compliment your pajamas, and you immediately conclude I want you out of them.”
“If I was wrong, I apologize,” she said stiffly.
“A man would be crazy to have sex with you without a fire truck standing by. I don’t want sex. I want you to forget the reason you came here, because I intend to make sure you don’t get what you want.”
“What could you possibly know about what I want?”
“I know you hope to stop the wedding, and I know I’m not going to let you do anything which makes my mother unhappy.”
He was so far wrong, she would have laughed. If his exasperating, irrational fixation uttered in a patient, long-suffering voice didn’t make her back teeth ache. “I’m not going to stop the wedding,” she shouted.
Jamie started crying and clutched at her.
“Good. You don’t start any trouble, and we’ll all get along just fine.” His eyes darkened and a lopsided smile slowly curved one side of his mouth. “Jimbo, you little devil, you.” He strolled out of the room.
“Don’t cry, sweet pea. It’s okay. The mean ol’ man has gone.” Elizabeth quit grinding her teeth and looked down at her son. And realized Jamie’s frantic clutching had unbuttoned half the buttons on her pajamas leaving the top gaping wide open. The cool morning air had hardened the tip of her bared breast to a tight nub.
He was having so much fun watching the color wash across Elizabeth’s face each time he managed to catch her eye, they were halfway through dinner before Worth realized the tension at the dinner table could be cut with his dinner knife. Russ and Elizabeth were excruciatingly polite to each other. His mother was trying valiantly to bridge the conversational gap between them. With very little success.
Worth couldn’t believe it. He thought they’d reached an agreement this morning that Elizabeth wouldn’t cause trouble. Obviously she’d had no intention of honoring that agreement.
Her mistake. He didn’t care if her anger at Russ was justified. Nobody messed with his family.
“Elizabeth,” Mary said, “your father has told us how much you love to ride. The two of you should check out some of the trails around here.”
Elizabeth’s head shot up. “I didn’t bring clothes for riding.”
Worth’s senses sharpened. There was nothing about his mom’s proposal to cause the hint of panic he picked up in Elizabeth’s voice.
