But somehow, here in his house that smelled like him—pine and sunlight—she didn’t want to hear the sort of cutting remark her cousins liked to make when she said things like that.She didn’t really care when they did it.Or when her sister Rosie, who had moved in with her Carey husband and was awash in two sets of twins, rolled her eyes and shook her head with a smile.That was fine.Usually it made her laugh.
Yet she really didn’t think she could take it tonight.Not from this man.Not from Tennessee.
So she kept talking.“Or, alternatively, I was at work.Do you really think that I’m likely to go out on the town in my scrubs?”
She did not find it exactly flattering that he frowned deeper at that, and then—and only then, she’d been watching him—allowed his gaze to move over her body.
It was worse than she’d thought, she could admit that.It wasn’t just that he hadn’t taken the time to notice.He didn’twantto notice her.If she had to guess, she would probably say that Tennessee was deliberately unaware that she was a fully grown woman.
Much like her brother Jack.
But, of course, Tennessee was not her brother.
Though she was sure that there was something about the way his gaze dragged over her.Something thatalmostmade her left hand pull at the collar of her crewneck shirt like it had suddenly become revealing.As if that little swathe of skin at her neck was too daring for a moment this intimate.
And she was kicking herself for her completely unhelpful and over-the-top imagination, but his eyes lifted and met hers again.
They were still just as blue.But they were different now.There was something gleaming there that felt the same as the heat from the fire against the side of her face.
She found, suddenly, that she couldn’t breathe.
“You shouldn’t be driving up the side of Copper Mountain in the middle of the night in February,” he said, his tone completely devoid of inflection or emotion of any kind.“You know better than that.”
But his tone suggested to Matilda that he was hiding something.Not only because shewantedhim to be hiding something, but because she had seen him speak in exactly this same tone to his family members when she knew that he was mad at them.
Such were the enduring benefits of growing up in a tiny little community like theirs.She knew entirely too much about this man.She knew how he treated people.She knew what sort of grudges he held over time—he was a Lisle, after all, and therefore was never going to allow himself to like the Carey family, no matter that his sister had married one of them.And she knew that he was always there for his brother, Dallas, who’d come back from the military a whole lot quieter and darker.She knew that he took care of his mother, the way he’d been doing since his father disappeared for good when Tennessee was still a teenager.
Matilda knew he was a good man, and that had nothing to do with her feelings about him.He just was.Grumpy and entirely too gruff, sure.But fundamentally good.
She also knew what he normally sounded like.So the fact that this was differentmeant something.
It was just that she didn’t know what.
So she focused on the protective overreach instead.“What do you think I ought to do when I get off work late and would like to come home?”she asked him, keeping her gaze steady on his.“There’s only one road to Cowboy Point, Tennessee.”
“Why don’t you have somewhere to stay in Marietta?”
She kept her face blank.“Doyouhave a second home in Marietta?”
“It’s not safe,” he gritted out.“Especially in that death trap you call a truck.”
“Her name is Clementine,” she told him.
He stared back at her, wearing that confounded expression once again.Scowly and confounded.“What?”
“My truck.Her name is Clementine.”Matilda sniffed.“Obviously.She’s perfectly safe.I see to her maintenance myself.”
“That does not exactly inspire confidence, Matilda.”
The puppies were squirming a little bit more now, and she figured they were getting warm enough and feeling safe enough to remember that they were starving.She estimated them to be about twelve weeks of age, which was great.It meant they hadn’t been nursing and wouldn’t need that kind of infant care.
She shifted to put the puppies she was holding on the floor, then crawled over so she could grab her coat and pull it to her, and only realized when she was doing it that she was possibly giving a little too much of a show under the circumstances.Or just making a spectacle of herself in this man’s living room that he had not invited her into.
But she couldn’t really focus on that.
She pulled out a couple of the cans she always kept on hand in her big, heavy winter jacket, and then came back to the fire and cracked two of them open.
Tennessee wasn’t even pretending not to stare at her.“You just… carry dog food around?In your coat?”
