Who Do You Trust? Read Free Page A

a turbulent soul.
    Boy to girl, man to woman, nothing changed. Even now, after half a lifetime apart, he still took her breath away, still made her hunger for more. Always haunting her, even long after he was gone: invisible whispers to her soul by day, her restless warrior walking with her by night in the dark grace of sensual dreams unending and unfulfilled.
    And now he was here. Achingly familiar yet so long gone. Almost within reach, yet so far away; too much and never enough. And still she ached for him.
    He spoke again, his voice warm with laughter. “You can’t be that shocked to see me. You knew I’d come. Don’t you have any words of welcome for me?”
    She gulped a second time and forced her frozen vocal cords to work. “Yeah—you took your sweet time getting home, McCluskey. That must’ve been some mission the Air Force gave you to keep you away twelve years.” She pushed her hat back, squinting up at him in the heat of the late-summer sun. He was smiling down at her. The affection in his eyes warmed and yet hurt her somewhere deep inside, for he was still closed off from her, by just being Mitch. Mitch, the dark, dreaming rebel, whom she’d always known would have so much more to his life than this sleepy little west-of-the-mountains backwater had to give…far more than a plain farmer’s daughter had inside her to give. But, oh, it never stopped her dreams….
    She’d dreamed of seeing him again, hungered for him through the long, burning years of a loneliness born of never being alone—the internal isolation that so many people filled with the faces of strangers. She’d never been able to do it, aching for one face only; yet now that he was here at last, she wanted him to go. Go and leave her in peace, without the tumultuous upheaval in her heart and soul caused by just knowing he stood near her.
    “Sorry, Liss—the brass sent me out again right after East Timor. I gave notice as soon as I could. I’m on three months’ leave at the moment until I set myself up in a business. I figured Matt and Luke would need me full-time for a while.”
    Just his voice, lush like rumpled dark silk, filled her with daydreams of sensuous hot nights in satin sheets—dreams she could never fulfil in real life. Which was why she always let the kids answer the phone Sunday nights when he would call from East Timor to talk to them. And when he asked to speak to her, she’d keep it to a minimum. Just talking brought to life desires and needs she’d fought long and hard to banish.
    He held out a hand to her. She allowed him to lift her to her feet, feeling somehow small and feminine in her dirty paint-marked shorts and tank top. Even through her gardening glove she could feel the heat burning inside him that he always kept guarded from her. Just one touch and she trembled. Her pulse pounded so hard she could feel her throat quiver…and for the first time in twelve years she remembered she was a woman. “I see you’ve still got your patch of earth to till, Farmer Annie.”
    She grinned at him from beneath the shade of her hat, trying for normality. “ imagine me without it?”
    “Nope. Never. Through the years, when I’ve imagined meeting you again, it was always out here. It was where we always got together—your land or Old Man Taggart’s, didn’t matter. It was our place, and it was us.” The gentle smile softened his strong, masculine face, sending warm shivers down her spine. “It’s been a long time, Lissa. Too long.”
    “Twelve years.”
    “You barely look any older. And the farm…” He looked around the Miller family’s side of the fence, its drenched greenness dreaming in the soft silver haze of a warm February sun. “It’s like time froze here. It’s all the same. Serene and beautiful.”
    “Changes happen everywhere, Mitch.” She pulled off her dirt-encrusted gardening gloves, checking her hands to make sure they weren’t shaking. “Even in sleepy little towns like Breckerville it