beginning.
MATT STEPPED OVER the threshold of his cousin’s old room and stopped dead in his tracks.
There, spread out over the discarded bedcovers, lay a woman clad only in a T-shirt and bikini panties. One long, shapely leg stretched out across the white sheet. The other, bent at the knee, helped to expose a good portion of her naked bottom.
He crept closer, then moved to the side to allow the moonlight to bathe her supine body. He felt like a voyeur, but he couldn’t help himself. Something about her called out to him, something familiar. When he stood at the foot of the bed, he knew why.
Honey Kingston lay deep in sleep, her hand cupping her cheek, her glorious honey-blond hair splayed over the pillow in loose tangles.
Despite the shock of seeing the one woman he’d hoped to avoid, he had to admit that she still had the power to take his breath away—and to provoke that churning fear that had sent him running from her years earlier.
He could not recall ever seeing a woman who equaled Honey’s beauty, and he’d seen many on his travels. His stomach felt bottomless. His heart threatened to implode. Old emotions rushed forward. Emotions Matt had tried to kill in every way he could for over seven years. Emotions he’d been certain he had dealt with—until now.
As if it were yesterday, memories of her soft flesh sliding over his buffeted him. Almost unconsciously, he moved to the bedside. Something drove him, something he couldn’t seem to control. He touched her cheek with the pad of his thumb and ran it slowly and gently over her creamy skin. She moaned and stirred in her sleep. He pulled back, half from fear of waking her, but more from that old sensual magnetism that spelled trouble and gave life to that gut-wrenching need stirring deep within him.
Despite his fear, emotions he’d thought never to experience again where Honey was concerned ran rampant through him. His groin tightened. He wanted to climb into bed with her and kiss her to wakefulness, hear the little noises she used to make when he made love to her, feel his heartbeat join hers.
He jumped back as if scalded. He had to stop this—now. Damn her! What was there about this woman that stole his common sense, his shield of protection, his pride? Even if he could get past his base inclinations, the fact remained that she’d married his cousin before Matt’s trail dust had had time to settle. Pain sliced through him, as sharp and agonizing as it had when he’d first gotten word of her betrayal.
The clipping that announced the wedding had come in a plain white envelope with no return address. Only a postmark stamped Bristol, NY, and the date. He’d recognized the handwriting as his father’s, the only one who knew where he was. Matt still didn’t know why he’d contacted his father and sent him the post office box address. Maybe he’d hoped the old man would change. Maybe…
He whirled and headed for the door. He shouldn’t have come here. Could those naysayers he’d scoffed at known what they were talking about, after all? Perhaps you couldn’t come home again. Perhaps the ghosts of his childhood were much stronger than any human’s resolve to banish them. Perhaps he hadn’t gotten over Honey Kingston and, God help him, maybe he never would.
Chapter Two
Wide awake, Honey lay staring at the dark bedroom ceiling. Her heart beat a heavy rhythm in her chest. At first, when she’d heard the scuffle of footsteps on the balcony, she had feared an intruder had scaled the rose trellis. But when the shaft of moonlight illuminated Matt Logan’s face, she knew a totally different kind of fear, the kind that made her heart ache with bitter loss, even when she’d declared her heart empty.
Recalling how, when Matt had stood over her a few minutes earlier, she’d managed to remain stone still, she congratulated herself. Then she remembered suppressing a groan of pure passion when he touched her, and the trembling inside returned. Aftershocks, she told herself.
With her skin still tingling where he’d smoothed her cheek, and her insides tangled into knots of dread, it surprised her that she could be flippant. But flippancy helped her contend with the concentrated effort she had to exert to keep from touching the spot his fingers had caressed. Somehow, she felt that if she gave in on this one small urge concerning Matt Logan, she would cave in on the important stuff, too, and she couldn’t afford to.
She rolled to her side and stared into the darkness. Dear heavens, how would she get through the next few weeks and survive? How could she stand being in the same house with him, when she wanted to feed his carcass to the turkey buzzards that populated the woods behind Amanda’s house?
Impelled by her lack of anger at the man, she bolted upright. Had she totally lost her mind? One touch and she’d been charmed again. Why had fate deemed that she should have men in her life that only knew how to hurt? Other women had heroes. So far, all Honey had were the throwaways. Well, she swore for the thousandth time, Danny would not turn out to be one of them.
To reinforce her anger, she rattled off a mental laundry list of all the reasons she had to detest Matt Logan. Because of Matt, she’d had to stand alone against her father’s wrath. Because of Matt, she’d been too heartbroken to fight her father and had ended up enduring six years of hell as Stan Logan’s wife, just so Frank Kingston could hold his head up in town. Because of Matt, Jesse’s rage with their father had forced her half brother to storm from their house, and she’d lost another faux hero. Because of Matt, she’d had to struggle to raise her son as a decent human being, with values and a sense of responsibility. Because of Matt her heart lay dead in her chest.
And as if he hadn’t done enough to make her life miserable, Matt’s return to Bristol had aroused the memories of a self-centered, uncaring father who had run his family with a tyrannical hand.
She sniffed the air experimentally. At times like this, when the pain of what her father had done to her returned, raw and burning, she imagined she could smell cigarette smoke. Since no one in Amanda’s house smoked, Honey knew it wasn’t real, just her pain manifesting itself in her imagination. But even knowing it was not real, fear of opening her eyes and finding herself back in her father’s house and under his rule, seeped through her.
The smell brought with it other things: memories of the night she’d found her father sitting alone in a dark room, smoking, while his wife—her and Emily’s mother—lay in bed waiting. His silent presence had seemed to fill the big house. The red glow on the tip of his cigarette was the only visible sign that he was there in body, if not in mind.
For a long time Honey had stood there, just outside the door, wondering where his thoughts had taken him, willing him to allow her to reach beyond the icy barrier around his heart. When she couldn’t, she’d credited her failure to being less than adequate in his eyes. She’d cried herself to sleep that night and innumerable nights after.
It took years for her to understand that her father’s hell was of his own making. That neither she nor Emily nor their mother had caused it. But they’d all paid for it with his lack of understanding and his angry silences.
She recalled how alone she’d felt back then. When Jesse, her half brother, had come to live with them after his mother’s death, they’d hit it off quite well. They hadn’t been terribly close, just intuitive about each other’s needs. Honey had thought she’d finally found a champion, but she’d soon realized that the sullen child felt about as much at home in the Kingston house as she did. Then Jesse walked out in a rage, and another of her heroes donned the tarnished armor of a fallen knight.
But despite the disappointments she’d suffered in those around her—her father’s iron fist, Jesse’s self-absorption,
