“Don’t thank me. You’ll just—”
“Please.”
His lips tightened into a flat line, and Abby could see him wanting to back out, eyeing her hand like it was poison. But handshakes sealed deals.Shake on it, people said, and she liked the official quality of it. Liked that it put her on a level with the men out here. Men and women, doing the same thing. Equals.
No way would she admit how much she’d thought about the feel of those hands on hers the day before.
You’re doing it again, warned the gleeful voice in her head.Pushing too far.
But the voice was wrong, which just went to show…something. Grape Man grabbed her hand, pumped it twice. He still looked mean and harsh—only this time, something had changed. The touch itself was just as shocking as the day before. On a purely visceral level, being touched by a man who wasn’t her husband? It was… She didn’t have the words for how wrong it felt. And how could the man’s skin be so hot out here in the frigid January air? She stumbled at the warm connection.
Good Lord, she couldn’t remember touching anyone besides Sammy or Hamish or Mama since…since she’d been branded a Chosen One and received her first mark. Isaiah had done that. And Hamish’s touches, well, they’d been purely utilitarian.
The shiver slid through her again, from her toes out to the fingertips he’d just clasped.Definitely the wind.
He must have felt it, too. She saw it in the softening of his mouth, the way his eyes met hers. There was humanity there. And Lord, she’d been lying when she’d told herself he wasn’t nice to look at.
That strong nose, freckled by too many hours in the sun. Wide, sharp cheekbones, kissed crimson by the wind. That dimple—or was it a scar?—on his cheek that looked more like punctuation than anything else. Most of all, the eyes: slate blue, clearer than a cloudless winter sky, and fringed with heavy lashes. When he met her gaze, it was almost painfully direct under thick brows and tempestuous, dark hair—which was too long by Church standards, but a perfectly poetic counterpoint to the blunt features beneath.
“I’m really—”Grateful, she was going to say, but he didn’t let her.
Instead he interrupted, that gruff, accented voice sending shivers up her spine. “Enough. You’ll be of no use to me if you freeze to death.” He loosened his fingers and waited for her to do the same before turning away.
Her hand, pressed into a fist at her side as she walked, still held the hot imprint of his—a callused palm, fingers both coarse and gentle, and the space where that missing finger should have been.
After a brief hesitation, Abby followed the man, eyes glued to the tall, straight form that she’d watched as a small figure in the distance. She’d been so sure she knew who he was.
An image came to her—one laced with shame. She’d walked to the fence late last summer, when it had first become her official duty. The vines—these poor, wizened creatures—had burst out, big and green and so alive across the mountainside, their bunches of grapes dangling like jewelry much too heavy for their thin stalks. Amidst that fertile explosion, surrounded by a few men she couldn’t picture if she tried, had stood this man. Smaller than the mountain, of course, tiny compared to the boulders and the vista beyond, but huge compared to the others. Alive. Elemental. More a part of this mountain than anything she could imagine.
There’d been other things that morning—her body, for one, had ached in a way she associated with physical need. She’d had it with Benji and experienced shadows of it at theideaof a man, but never, ever at the real thing. That nameless need she’d felt had been echoed by the creatures around her—the fecundity of nature, ripe and lush and begging to be plucked. Like those grapes. Like her.
He’d been bare-chested. He was the only man she’d seen so naked in her life, and though it had been too far to catch details, the things she’d seen had made her body prick up uncomfortably. Closer, she’d known, there’d be skin and hair. Sweat beading in places she could only imagine.
Wide shoulders; long, thick arms; slender waist; everything sheathed in muscle. The muscles a man would need to work several acres of vineyards on his own.
Trudging ahead of her through the mud, he looked efficient. No wasted movement. Like his words—just enough to get by. His body would have been tall and lanky without the muscles—bare bones. His was a strength born of necessity.
And despite how unpleasant he’d been, something about that appealed to her.
You wanna taste me?
Her words came back to her on a wash of heat. Oh Lord, had she said that? Where on earth had those words come from? If she didn’t know better, she’d think someone else had controlled her tongue.
It occurred to her in that moment that he might very well choose to take her up on the offer. And she could choose to let him.
Sinner, hissed a familiar voice, knowing what she didn’t care to admit: the idea didn’t bother her nearly as much as it should.
He opened the thick wood door of the cabin—elevated and much bigger than the ones next door—and removed mud-crusted boots just inside, leaving his feet clothed in socks that had seen better days.I could darn those, Abby thought.
It wasn’t until she’d toed off her shoes that it occurred to her:I’m alone here, with a stranger.
He had felt familiar, after watching him from afar for so long. But close up…she didn’t know a thing about him. And he hadn’t been particularly kind.
Halfway across the cabin’s main room, he turned to look at her, heavy brows raised.
“I…” She hesitated, taking in the sparsely furnished room in search of some way to make sure this wasn’t a mistake. “It just occurred to me that you could be a bad person.”
That seemed to shock him. His features flattened, pulling those thick brows back down into their natural, taciturn configuration.
