Chapter 5
He couldn’t stay away from her. Jake had spent the last week working himself into unconsciousness, blistering his hands on the fences and his feet on the floor of his house. He’d spent all night helping foal two colts and then spent all day in the saddle working the horses.
And still he stood at his window watching the moon spill out over the valley and thinking that Amanda Marlow slept no more than two miles away.
Damn her and her soft, sweet hair, her inquisitive, knowing eyes and her gentle grace. Damn the way she laughed when she learned something new on a horse and the way she made the men stop and take notice when she walked or talked or rode. Damn him for taking notice, too.
He ached for her. He dreamed of her. He taunted her, knowing full well that he was the one walking away burning. She was everything he could dream of in a woman, gentle and bright and compassionate. She was tougher than he’d given her credit for, suffering his tongue with amazing humor and doggedly climbing back up on Sweet William the last four days to master the basic art of horsemanship.
He’d stood just inside the barn door this afternoon, surreptitiously watching her like a lovesick teenager sneaking a look into the girls’ locker room. She’d been up on the gelding cantering around the outside ring with an ease that was well beyond most people, no matter how long they had ridden. The little dun had taken right to her, until Jake couldn’t imagine himself on its back anymore.
Jake could still see the way her hair had rippled in the sunlight, a rich banner in the breeze. The way her whole face lit up with discovery. He could almost hear the music of her laughter.
He wanted to get to know her. He wanted to have her in his hands. He wanted to hear her stories and share some of his own, and then sink into the darkness together.
He couldn’t. If he let her too close, she’d find out. And he couldn’t do that. He’d hidden his whole life, and no beautiful, sassy woman with college degrees and a house back East was going to change it.
It was too late. It had been too late for a long time.
But it didn’t stop him from aching.
She couldn’t seem to get his attention. Amanda had done everything but handstands on that horse trying to get some kind of reaction out of Jake Kendall, and all she’d managed since that first foray into double entendre was the grudging admission that she wasn’t embarrassing herself in the saddle.
It was driving her crazy. She should have been catching up on her sleep. She should have been poring over the texts of western lore she’d brought with her that were even now spread out over the bright yellow down comforter that covered the old brass bed behind her. She could have at least spent some time practicing on the dulcimer that rested on the battered wooden table.
She should have been sensible.
Instead, she was fascinated. She was driven. She was—God help her—she was fantasizing. She’d shown up on the Diamond K hoping to find a quiet corner where she could pry open the past on a grizzled veteran or two, maybe roam over the landscape to get a feel of its scope, its demand and reward.
Taste a small town again and reacquaint herself with its rhythms and characters. And all she’d been able to concentrate on had been one character. One silent, hard, enigmatic character with the most intriguing smile she’d ever seen short of the Mona Lisa and a diamond-hard pride as compelling as the West itself.
She should have been concentrating on the work at hand. Instead she stood at the window that overlooked the wide meadow, the mountain stream, the black press of mountains, and thought of what Jake Kendall would look like in the moonlight that silvered the tumbling stream and glimmered over the undulating grasses. She, who had given up romantic notions right after her brief and disastrous engagement, was thinking what a waste all this moonlight was when Jake Kendall was asleep no more than two miles away.
Amanda sighed and turned away, her flannel nightgown brushing her bare feet. She surveyed the tiny cabin where so much struggle, pain and joy still whispered from the walls, and thought of how long it had been since she’d had such company. Since she’d stood on land a man had fought to hand down and was still cherished as deeply by the inheritors.
It had been that way with her Uncle Mick’s place, the original Sullivan homestead. But his son hadn’t kept faith with the land, such as it was, and had sold it for the money to get to Houston. Now Amanda had no home, not the one her parents had sweated to provide and lost to the mines, not the one her Uncle Mick had grafted her to. Certainly not the one she inhabited back in Boston, so impersonal it should have listed “occupant” on the mailbox.
Jake Kendall had the Diamond K. And it was obvious in every callus on his hands, every crease in his weather-beaten face, every scar on his face and hands, that he knew what he had. He’d fought just as hard as every one of his ancestors just to hold on to it, and that was something that drew Amanda like a moth to an open flame. A dangerous flame. Because no matter what she wanted, Jake Kendall wanted nothing to do with her.
“What do you have against me?”
Amanda saw her presence impact on Jake as surely as if she’d struck him. Bent over an old tractor, the engine in several pieces in his hands, his own shirt off in the unusually warm afternoon, he stiffened. Still he went on working.
“Don’t you have anything better to do than bother somebody who’s busy?”
Amanda walked around to get a better view and wished suddenly she hadn’t. His hat was off and his face was grimy. She wanted to wipe at it with the handkerchief that trailed out of his back jeans pocket. His chest was bare and glistening with sweat. She wanted to...well, it didn’t bear to think what she wanted to do. She’d lain awake all the night before watching the moon pour into her window and thinking about what she’d like to do to Jake Kendall.
He was simply too potent. Too overwhelmingly male. And it had been a very long time since Amanda Marlow had enjoyed the pleasure of someone with those attributes. The fact that he was an enigma only added to the frustration. The fact that he was, for some reason, by turns irritated and aroused by her, made her want to take a handful of hair and... she was wandering again.
“I have plenty to do,” she assured him. “But I’ve spent the last week at this ranch and managed to get about three sentences out of you without pulling teeth. It’s beginning to annoy me.”
Finally, Jake straightened. Amanda restrained herself from stepping back. His eyes glinted with an odd, flat light. His upright chest was inches from her nose.
If only he’d had a smooth chest. She could concentrate on the matter at hand, because she’d never cared for smooth chests. But that sweat was glistening like dew on the dark gold hair that curled over some pretty impressive pectorals and an absolutely riveting abdominal wall.
She wondered what it would feel like against her palm, would taste like on her tongue. She lifted her eyes to his, blushing furiously at getting caught and hoping he didn’t notice her rubbing her hands along her pants legs.
She seemed to be in luck.
