The most interesting thing was that her hair wasn’t in braids tonight.It was loose, and it coiled all around and past her shoulders like a cloud of strawberry blonde, gleaming in the light of her living room.
He thought it looked like some kind of halo, and while he’d accepted over the past few weeks that he for some reason found Matilda Stark confusing, and oddly compelling, he was forced yet again to face the truth.
The old men had called her pretty, but they were wrong.She was beautiful.
She had all that strawberry-blonde hair that looked like a very warm, rose gold.He wanted to bury his hands in it.Those eyes of hers seemed to change color at will.She had freckles across her nose.And Tennessee found himself wondering if she had deliberately spent her life dressing like a batty old woman with the express purpose of making sure that no one would ever realize just how beautiful she really was.
Because if all people ever focused on were her eccentricities, that meant she could wander around the town without a whole lot of commentary.And Tennessee knew from watching his remarkably pretty sister navigate Cowboy Point that a little anonymity was a good thing—that or a pair of overprotective brothers.
Matilda’s sister had turned up pregnant, and then with twins, and that despite all her ornery cousins.Not to mention Jack Stark, who a wise man knew better than to cross.It was lucky for Ryder Carey that he’d had no idea what was going on with Rosie while he was away, or someone might have taken it upon themselves to teach him some lessons.Tennessee understood the urge.
And yet somehow, all along, Matilda Stark had also been walking around this pretty.How had he never noticed?
Yet as she buzzed around the living room—talking a mile a minute about the books on the shelves that she said were her sister’s, ignoring the piles of things everywhere that she didn’t excuse or even seem to notice, even the way she pushed her hair back from her face as if she spent most of her time alone with it loose like this—Tennessee had to ask himself if it was true that he’d never noticed.
Because he had always found Matilda… unsettling.
He always seemed to notice when she was around.Maybe his subconscious had been telling him to pay attention all along.
Well.He was sure paying attention now.
Tennessee followed her through the house, back into a kitchen that looked cluttered and lived in—but again, clean.By the back door, she stamped her feet into a pair of rubber boots and waved for him to follow her.The dogs stayed in the house.And he thought he saw a tuxedo cat peering at him from the top of the refrigerator, but he followed her outside as she tramped across the frozen yard into the outbuilding out back.
He followed her inside to a door on the side, where they were immediately greeted by a wall of sound.
“I set it up kind of like a shelter,” she told him, seeming not to notice the din.“But I hate shelters, so when it’s possible, I try to create pack experiences for the dogs.Some of them can’t handle that, but the ones who can get a little companionship.”
It looked at first glance like more chaos.But Tennessee was learning.He looked closer.
And he could see then that there was an infrastructure here.She had kennels set up along the far wall with larger runs in between, but the bulk of the space was where thepack experience, as she’d called it, was set up.It was all fenced in.Inside, there were about seven or eight dogs—one of them a magnificent creature who had to be part husky, with eyes that blue.He stood apart from the pack and stared at Tennessee, like he was sizing up the intruder and implementing a plan of action.Tennessee liked him immediately.
But there was more.Here inside the small building, it was warm and clean.He saw cats in some of the kennels in back and what looked like a fox in one of the runs, though it only peered at him suspiciously and stayed mostly hidden.
“I think you came to me under false pretenses,” he drawled.And he could swear she jumped a little, and her eyes were a bit too wide when she looked his way, but she didn’t say anything.He nodded at her operation.“Seems like you already have a rescue.”
She grinned at him, and now that he was no longer blind to how pretty she was—willfully blind, he had to think—that grin packed a serious punch.
“I need more space.”She said that matter-of-factly.Like it was obvious.“Ideally, I’d like to have separate dog and cat spaces, not to mention a wildlife rehabilitation area.And, of course, an adoption space where folks can come and play with their new best friends before they take them home.And I might be a crazy animal person, or whatever they like to call me around Paradise Valley, but even I know I should probably separate that kind of enterprise from my house.”
She started pointing out things she thought should be upgraded if there was more space available, but he couldn’t track it.Tennessee felt as if something seismic had ripped him in half, maybe into quarters, and then slammed him back together in the next breath.
It was like every blinder he’d had in place had been torn away.Like he had suddenly seen every possible timeline and they all led here.To this moment.
He hadn’t meant to come here at all.Or maybe he’d been plotting excuses to come up the hill since she’d left his house that night with her cleaning supplies and that patchwork blanket he’d half hoped she’d leave behind.
So she’d have an excuse to show up again and he wouldn’t have to do something like this.
Something he shouldn’t have wanted to do in the first place.
He felt that earthquake rumble inside of him again, no matter how he tried to resist it.Because he had to resist it.Because he should have known better than to come find her like this.
Because he understood that there were consequences to what he was doing here.
Even if he managed to convince himself that finding her this pretty all of a sudden was an anomaly, and even if he woke up tomorrow blind to her all over again, he’d involved himself in this passion of hers.And he knew that Matilda was stubborn.She was the woman who had somehow convinced him to lose a night’s sleep taking care of a few puppies, when he’d never allowed a pet in his house in all the years he’d lived there as an adult.
But he knew himself.And he knew full well that if he didn’t turn back the clock on his awareness of her, that meant other things.Things he wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with at all.
Things he should have thought about before he’d climbed in his truck tonight and headed up this way.
