He could feel himself drifting. He was so tired, he knew he was punch drunk. He had to get some sleep, or die.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. Fifteen minutes, that was all he needed, just fifteen minutes to recharge his batteries. Not sleep, not really, he couldn’t afford to be entirely out of it, but if he could just close his eyes.…
As dreams went, this one sucked. Angie was awake just enough to know that she was dreaming, but was unable to pull herself out of it. No good could come of any dream that wouldn’t let go, that kept pulling her down—
She was facedown in the mud. She was suffocating. Mud was in her eyes, up her nose, and every time she tried to take a breath she choked on the vile stuff. She struggled to breathe, to see, but everything was dark. She didn’t know where she was or how she was going to get out of this. Panic pounded through her like drumbeats, she had to get out, get out, get out.… She fought, clawing, to move forward, to lift her head out of the stinking muck, but no matter how hard she tried she didn’t gain any ground, couldn’t fight free. Cold mud threatened to swallow her whole, to suck her down into the earth
.
Being caught like this made her so
angry.
She wasn’t afraid of drowning; there were worse things than being stuck in the mud, and if she couldn’t get out of here those worse things would be there any minute. A murderer and a bear were coming for her. She couldn’t see them, couldn’t
hear them, but she knew they were close. Behind her. Ahead of her. All around. They were coming for her
.
And then the mud changed. What had been dark, smelly muck changed to something sweet and white. Straining every muscle in her neck, Angie was able to lift her head. Right in front of her was a yellow rose made of cake icing. Breathing hard, she licked her lips, tasted the white stuff that covered her from head to toe. Not mud: icing. Icing from her wedding cake was in her eyes and her nose and her mouth, between her fingers, between her toes. But why was she barefoot? Where were her boots?
She shuddered. The icing was worse than the mud, because it was wrong, it shouldn’t be there. She tried to shake it away, but the stuff clung, coating her. Cold chills rippled down her spine. Moving in this sea of icing was more difficult than it had been to move in the mud
.
She was trapped
.
And behind her, an animal growled
.
Angie wrenched herself out of the dream and into a sitting position, gasping for breath, and of course banging her damn ankle in the process. A sharp cry escaped before she could stop it, as if her sudden movements alone weren’t enough to wake the man with whom she was sleeping.
Sleeping with Dare Callahan
. Now, there were four words she’d never thought she’d string together in a sentence, in any context.
“What’s wrong?” he growled, the sound slow and soothing, unlike the growl in her dream. She needed the calm he offered, she needed the solid warmth of his body close beside her, anchoring her in reality. What a stupid, disturbing dream!
“Just a bad dream.” She tried to shake it off, to forget the images. Gingerly she rubbed at her ankle, trying to soothe the ache.
“What was it about?” He sat up, turned on the lantern.
After almost total darkness, the white light made her squint. Angie eased herself back down. “Nothing much.” She didn’t need to analyze the dream to know what it meant, or why she’d had it. She also didn’t want to explain why she’d had a nightmare about
wedding cake. That was so stupid. The mud, the bear, Chad … that would all make sense to him. Wedding cake? Not so much.
He was quiet for a few seconds, then said, “Maybe it’ll help to talk about it.”
She glanced at him, and—
Oh, holy shit!
He wasn’t wearing a shirt. She could have sworn he’d been wearing one when they’d lain down, but … not now. Some time during the night he must have gotten too warm, and she’d been too out of it to wake up when he’d taken it off. She gaped at him, at the way the light gleamed on the powerful curve of his shoulders, the sinewy, vein-laced muscles in his arms. A dark patch of hair decorated the middle of his chest, spread lightly over his pecs. There was a scar on his right shoulder that ran in a jagged line about three inches long, but it was an old scar, smoothed by time to nothing more than a silver line. It was, nevertheless, a silent reminder that the man next to her was a warrior, a man who had seen battle and been shaped by it. He’d been wounded, he’d faced death, he’d maybe, probably, caused death. He’d know and understand strategy, and he’d go into any situation determined to win.
More rattled than seeing a half-naked man warranted, Angie squirmed, then casually tossed an arm over her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at him, but not because he was too hard on the eyes. Too much the opposite, in fact, so much so that seeing him like that interfered with her thought processes.
“After everything that’s happened, I have enough nightmare fodder to last me a lifetime, including sleeping with you.” She tried to sound insulting, but it didn’t work. Being so close to all that muscle had obviously fried her brain, because she couldn’t stop a teasing smile from quirking her lips.
Teasing?
Oh, God, was she actually trying to flirt with him? She needed to slap herself completely awake, and back to sanity, because otherwise she was just going to make a total fool of herself.
He laughed. Dare
laughed
. Despite the danger of seeing all
that skin, Angie peeked out from under her arm, just enough to see that it was a genuine, natural laugh, the real deal. It was rusty and rough and sounded as if he had a hair ball caught in his throat, but it was a laugh, and she got that melty sensation in her chest again. She’d wanted to make him angry so he’d stop asking questions, but instead she’d undermined herself by smiling and he hadn’t taken her seriously.
When he stopped laughing, he propped on his elbow and looked down at her, leaning over her a little, and abruptly her heart stopped melting and began thumping hard inside her chest. Probably it was the light making his expression look like something it wasn’t, but right there, right then, she thought he was looking at her as if he wanted to eat her up.
Tension made her mouth go dry. She wasn’t the most experienced woman on the planet, but she instinctively knew that expression even if no man had ever before turned it on her. It was a completely male, sexual, predatory, hungry look that both lured her closer and at the same time made her want to run. This kind of sexy look was a trap, because it would make any woman melt from its toe-tingling, butterfly-inducing intensity.
She knew better than to fall for that; Dare wanted sex, but even though he’d saved her life and she owed him big time, she didn’t think she could handle going where he apparently thought this was going. She didn’t think he was thinking about her owing him; he was a man, so more than likely he wasn’t thinking about anything other than just sex. But if she had sex with him while
she
was thinking about owing him, then that put her in the category of prostitute, using her body to pay a debt. Then there was the big letdown that sex always was, the buildup that led to a fizzle. No matter how she looked at it, having sex was a bad idea.
“Don’t even think about it,” she warned.
His eyebrows went up, and he made a derisive sound in his throat. “You’re about two years too late,” he returned.
Two years?
Startled, she gaped at him. “What?”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Tell me about your dream.”
Dream? What dream? Completely distracted, she shook her head, then belatedly realized that her dream might be a good way to distract him, because there was nothing admirable about her wedding.
“Fine.” She dropped her arm and glared at him, squarely meeting his gaze and ignoring the rugged attractiveness of his stubbled face. His expression didn’t change; he didn’t try to hide who he was and what he wanted. “I dreamed about mud and bears and wedding cake icing.”
His eyebrows did that quirking thing again. “Icing?” He blinked, and she could tell he was trying to connect a wedding cake to the bear.
“I was drowning in it. Mud at first, then it turned to icing.” She scowled at him. “You know I got married a few years back, right?” They lived in a small community. Everyone pretty much knew everything about everybody else, at least the pertinent information, though some details were less well known than others. Her dad had been at her wedding, of course, and had comforted and supported her afterward, but he’d never said what he’d told Harlan or anyone else once he got home, and she’d never asked.
“I heard you were supposed to, but something happened.” A cautious note entered his rough voice, as if he thought she’d been ditched at the altar, or something like that.
“I had it annulled.”
Surprise flickered in his eyes. “Annulled, huh?” An annulment wasn’t like a divorce; you could pretty much get a divorce for anything. Even something as simple as liking different colors could be the basis for incompatibility, but an annulment had very specific legal requirements.
“A divorce would have been easier,” she admitted grimly. “Even my lawyer advised me to just get a divorce, and he was right. But I was so … I just wanted it to be erased, as if it had never been, and there was no reasoning with me.”
He snorted. “
You
, unreasonable? Fancy that.” But there was no nastiness in his tone, just dry amusement.
He touched a fingertip to her cheekbone. Surprised, Angie put her hand up, and to her consternation discovered the damp track of a tear. Furiously she wiped it away. Crying over this, even getting just a little teary, would be so stupid. “Don’t pay any attention to that,” she ordered brusquely. “It’s nothing, and I’m not crying.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. And if I did, it would be because I’m so angry at myself, and embarrassed. I was an idiot.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing earth-shattering. That’s what makes it so embarrassing.”
He waited in silence while Angie sorted through all the anger and hurt feelings and sheer irrationality she still felt whenever she thought about the subject. Finally she fixed her gaze on the ceiling and firmed her lips.
“I’ve never been much of a girlie-girl,” she confessed. “I never knew how. You know—the makeup, the fussing with hair, all that stuff. It wasn’t like Dad could teach me any of that, and really, when I was a teenager, I wasn’t all that interested anyway. Even though I did more of it when I lived in Billings, I wasn’t—I’m still not—certain if I was doing it right and looked okay. But for my wedding I wanted to be pretty, I wanted my hair and makeup to be perfect.”
Exposing her uncertainty made her cheeks turn hot. She knew she wasn’t a beauty queen, but she wasn’t unattractive, either. Normally she didn’t give her looks any thought at all, beyond brushing her hair and using moisturizer with sunscreen. Admitting all of that to a man—to Dare Callahan, specifically—was still uncomfortable.
“How come your mom wasn’t around to teach you stuff like that?” he asked bluntly. “I don’t think I ever heard anyone say, not
even Evelyn French, and that woman can talk the ears off a donkey.”
Despite her embarrassment, Angie had to grin. Anyone who ever set foot in the hardware store learned exactly how much Evelyn liked to talk. “Then she must never have got up enough nerve to ask Dad about it, otherwise she’d have told it. It’s no big deal. I don’t remember my mother. She left Dad and me before I was two. She had some sleaze she was cheating on him with, and I guess she liked the sleaze more than she liked being with us. So she left.”
His eyes narrowed. “That sucks.”
“It could have,” she agreed. “I can’t say I haven’t wondered what it would have been like if she’d stayed. But at the same time, Dad was great. He never talked bad about her, and when I asked he told me what had happened, and left it at that.” She paused. “I went through his papers, after he died, and found their divorce decree. She gave him full custody, signed me away, and I guess never looked back, because she never tried to see me or contact me in any way. I’ve returned the favor.”
“Pissed you off, huh?” His full attention was on her face, as if he wanted to catch every nuance of her expression. What? Did he think she was all messed up because her mother had abandoned her?
She started to deny it, then stopped herself. “In a way. I don’t feel traumatized, because I don’t remember her at all, but I think Dad must have been more torn up about it than he ever let on to me. That pisses me off, on his behalf. And, looking back, I wonder if he never dated much because he was so focused on taking care of me. It can’t be easy for a man, for anyone, to suddenly be left with the sole care of an infant.”
“I’d sure as hell panic,” he observed.
“Bull,” she scoffed. She had no doubt he’d handle it. He wasn’t someone who panicked, he was a man who got the job done, regardless of what the job was. “Anyway. She was a quitter,
and I guess you can say it affected me in that I won’t let myself be a quitter. I don’t want to be like her.”
“You aren’t,” he said after a brief pause, his rough voice quiet. “You’re not a quitter.”
For some reason, hearing him say that made her throat feel thick, as if she was about to get teary. Horrified at the thought, she cleared her throat. “That’s enough of that. Do you want to hear about my wedding, or not?” she asked, scowling.
“Yeah, I do. We kind of got sidetracked.”
“You mean you did. I was telling you what happened when you went off on a tangent.”
“I was curious. So shoot me. Back to your makeup and hairdo for the wedding.”
She gave him a warning squint and considered refusing to say anything else, but what the hell, she’d already gotten this far, she might as well finish.
“I hired someone to do my hair and makeup, because I knew I couldn’t manage it. Getting ready took
hours
. But when she was finished, I looked good. I looked even better than I’d hoped, and I was so happy. I thought he’d be—”