Tempted Read Free Page B

felt. He tilted his hat back, revealing blue eyes that matched the sky.
    Steven Baywood.
    She could not hide the happy leap of her heart, the smile that jumped across her face. To her great chagrin, she actually clapped.
    “Steven!” she cried. “You’re here.”
    “Annie.” He smiled as much as he ever did, which meant he really only gave the impression of smiling. “Sorry.” He caught himself. “I forget you prefer Anne now.”
    You can call me anything you want
, she thought like the silly debutante she’d never been. Had no interest in ever being… except around him. Around him she lost all decorum. Any other person who made her feel this way, who filled her with surprised delight—she would hug. But he had a solid fence around his big body.
    She hadn’t touched him since saving his life seven months ago in a clearing a hundred miles from here.
    He’d been gut shot and left to die by her sister’s husband. Anne and her sister Melody saved Steven’s life, at terrible risk to their own. But then Steven’s brother, Cole, showed up and handed Melody the gun she ultimately used to kill her abusive evil husband. An act that tore their lives wide open. Anne had feared her sister would condemn herself for her actions—despite the fact that her husband, quite frankly, needed killing.
    Melody’s guilt had been assuaged by Cole, a man with his own demons from the war.
    In the spring they had all spent the better part of a month living in Steven’s cabin. Melody and Cole fell in love, and Melody chose to stay there. Anne chose to come to Denver.
    Largely because she couldn’t stand being so close to this man.
    Steven had woken up after being gut shot and knocked unconscious, and in the weeks that followed she’d checked his temperature, checked his stitches a hundred times a day. She’d gotten so used to touching him she didn’t even think about it, until one morning he caught her hand and said he was fine.
    Please
, he’d said, pushing her hand away.
Please, don’t touch me again. I cannot bear it.
    But her fingers ached every time she saw him. Right now she would sweep his long blond hair off his face, stroke the hard line of his jaw. Perhaps she’d press her thumb against his dimple, just to see how it fit.
    “Is there… something?” He brushed at his face. Steven was meticulously clean, his clothing pressed and tidy. He was always clean-shaven. In the filthy West, he stood out.
    “No. No, I’m just… thrilled to see you.”
    His smiles were brief. If she blinked she’d miss them, but when she managed to catch one it was like seeing a rainbow after a hard rain—proof that the blue sky could do so much. That this man, stoic and serious, deep as the ocean, could feel something happy.
    Anne did not like to think that at some point she’d fallen in love with Steven during that time in the cabin, because that would be foolish. Unwise. Like putting her hand right into the fire.
    But what she felt for him was a different animal than friendship, and it did not come to heel when called. It ran wild through her.
    If this man had kissed her and asked her to marry him… She turned away, embarrassed by her thoughts. Tired of feeling this way about him. Tired of seeing things in him that she wanted to see, creating a hypothesis about him that had no proof.
    “What are you doing here?” she asked. After clearing the haze that seeing him always created in her, she realized his being here out of the blue might mean trouble. “Melody? Cole?”
    “Fine. They’re fine.” He glanced sideways toward the small garden she had in front of the house. There was one rose left because their summer had been a long warm one. “Happy.”
    He reached into his coat and pulled from an inside pocket a cloth-wrapped bundle. He handed it to her with a smile. “From your sister.”
    She unwrapped the cloth to find a handful of beautiful red raspberries, undoubtedly the last of the season, like gems against the cream cloth.