Wild in the Moment

Four

Okay, okay. Daisy had known for years she was susceptible to magical moments…and magical men. That was precisely how and why she’d turned so cynical. Hard-boiled cynical. More careful around guys than a nun in a chastity belt, in fact.

But Teague didn’t play fair. First of all, he’d been making her laugh. And then out of the total blue, he’d suddenly called her special-when God knows no one had seemed to see her that way in a very long time. And then, when he pulled her in his arms…

She melted like warm ice cream. Like an ice cube in sunlight. Like a damn fool woman who didn’t have the sense of a goose.

His broom-handle crutch thumped on the carpet when he dropped it. Both his arms went around her then, his hands framing her face to tilt her lips toward his, where he could sip at her mouth and then aim for another deeper drink.

She had to wind her arms around his waist or risk falling. Her hand let go of the open drape in the process, which cut off the cold window draft and sealed them into their shadowy, fire-lit nest at the same time. She didn’t know him. He didn’t know her. Yet instead of feeling crazy, a little devil whispered in her heart that this was different. It really was a moment in time that she’d never have, never feel again.

He tasted so…warm. So hungry. In that instant she just desperately didn’t want to lose that feeling. Eleven years of shouldering her private problems alone suddenly eased. She hadn’t suddenly lost her mind. She knew she hadn’t faced her immediate dragons, and that reality was going to smack her in the teeth very, very soon. But so many years had passed. She’d forgotten what it felt like…to just feel good with someone, to feel that excitement with a guy where desire bubbled up between them like a champagne surprise. To feel delight in a man without worrying how much the later cost would be. To feel something that didn’t have unwanted secrets attached.

“Whoa,” Teague whispered. “Lady, when you turn on…you really turn on.”

“I was just going to complain about the same thing with you.”

“Um, just to be straight with you… I wasn’t complaining.”

“Neither was I.” She tilted her head recklessly. “Are we actually going to lose our heads and do this…or are we both going to use some intelligence and slow down?”

“I vote for losing our heads.”

“You really want to be reckless and irresponsible?”

“Yeah. Totally yeah.” He hesitated. “As soon as I get a condom, anyway.”

Something warmed inside her even more than all that hot, combustible sexual heat. It was just…she hadn’t planned on liking a man, really liking one, for at least another millennium. But she loved babies, far too much to risk one, and it was rare to find a guy who put babies first the same way. In fact, she liked him so much at that instant that she had to hesitate. “You don’t think you’re going to regret this? That we’re moving way too fast?”

“Of course we’re going to regret this. Of course we’re moving too fast.” He was still aiming for another kiss, and his voice was thicker than honey. “You know damn well it never works out to have sex too soon. It takes over everything.”

“I know. And I know better.” She found herself staring at his mouth.

“So do I. Believe me, this is your call. Totally. You want to send up a stop sign, we quit, all’s fair. Just try to do it within the next minute, okay?”

“What on earth made you think I was going to put up a stop sign?” she asked. He responded with a quick smile, but that was it; he pounced. His lips claimed hers again in one slow, lazy, breath-stealing sonata of a kiss.

They’d been teasing at the heat thing before, but not like this, nothing like this. This was enough heat to melt all the icicles from the blizzard. There seemed more smoke between them than was zooming up the chimney. Dizzying kisses circled her throat, circled her heart. She was used to passion. She liked passion. Too much. She’d always liked that feeling of recklessness, the taste of danger, of being sucked in by a guy so powerful he gave her heartbeat a kick.

Except, it was only and always the scoundrels who put that zing in her pulse.

She couldn’t take it anymore. She could accept that she had terrible judgment in men, that she never fell for the guys who were right for her. But she just didn’t think she could survive having her heart kicked again. She had to get tougher. She had to stay away from the scoundrels.

Only, something seemed different this time.

The excitement, the danger, the recklessness and urgency-it was all there. Times ten. But this wasn’t the kind of man she knew or had ever known.

“Teague,” she whispered in a hesitant voice, when Daisy knew she’d never had a hesitant bone in her entire body. But that seemed to be the precise problem. Her body. The body that was slowly, mercilessly turning into shambles.

He’d already pulled her sweater over her head, sent it soaring somewhere in the dark shadows. His big, callused hands slipped in the waistband of her pants, then, lingered long enough to cup her fanny, then slid her black slacks down her thighs to her ankles. Then-possibly because he couldn’t keep his weight on his bad ankle any longer-he sank down to the couch. Only he didn’t sit down immediately. His mouth trailed down from her breasts to her ribs to her navel, chasing the same path as his hands did on her derriere.

She was wearing underwear. French underwear. Tap pants, ivory with lace. And that’s where his mouth stopped traveling. He lingered there, first kissing the lace, then the ivory satin…not kissing bare skin, never kissing bare skin. But the whisper of satin was hardly a barrier.

An embarrassed groan whispered from her throat, the last sound she made. She couldn’t seem to keep oxygen going in and out of her lungs. She reached for him, found the muscles in his back bunching and clenching for her touch. His mouth came back to hers, and while his lips clung to hers, held hers intimately, she pushed at his shirt, pushed at his jeans, pushed at his zipper.

At some point they seemed all tangled up, her trying to pull him on top of her on the couch-Teague trying to pull her on top of him. Somehow the couch got abandoned. It was just too hard to find it with her eyes closed and nothing on her mind but touching him and being touched. The scratchy carpet at least cushioned her bare back, and still he kissed her, rubbing his pelvis against her bare tummy now, so she could feel how hard and urgently he wanted her.

The fire suddenly sent a fireworks of sparks up the chimney. A log tumbled to the grate. All this time, they’d been warm enough with the fire, as long as they wore all their clothes, yet now they were both peeled down to near bare flesh-give or take socks-and she was still amply warm.

Hell’s bells, she could have swum in the snow and might still need to do that just to cool off. That funny thought surfaced, but it wouldn’t stick. It should have stuck. Sex was fun. It made life worthwhile. It made a woman feel alive, feel important, feel her own power. But it shouldn’t tear a girl’s soul out, should it?

Daisy was no baby about this. She knew life. She couldn’t be fooled by fairy tales, not anymore. But damn. This yearning seeping through her, eeking through her, aching through her, was scary and troubling and…compelling.

Teague’s eyes suddenly opened, found hers, held hers. “You ready?” he asked her.

“Oh, yes. Ten times yes.”

“If we fall off the world, we do it together.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t give a damn about tomorrow. You’re mine tonight.”

“Yes. And you’re mine.”

“Ah, hell, yes.” And then he thrust inside her, his head thrown back, the pulse in his throat throbbing as hard as hers was. “Yes.” He thrust again, looked at her. “Oh, yes,” he whispered that third time, as if he were finally there, impaled as deeply inside her as any man had been, any man would be or could be.

And then it was just as he said. She tipped off the world. With him. Into him.

She woke up to a nightmare. One instant she’d been burrowed in a cocoon of warmth and safety; the next, there was a frantic thud in her tummy and fear slamming in her pulse.

Her eyes shot wide. Yesterday morning she’d been wakened by a cell phone, and from somewhere in the house the same phone was beeping now. Everything else was a jolt of a surprise, though. Sunlight sneaked through cracks in the curtains. Every light and lamp in the Cunningham house seemed to be turned on. New noises emanated from everywhere-the hum of a refrigerator motor, a radio in another room, the clang of hot water pipes. A man was wrapped around her as if he were the birthday boy and she was his present.

Faster than a blink she realized power had been restored and the blizzard really did seem to be over. But the man spooned around her, protecting her from dragons and darkness and all… There was the nightmare.

Guilt hit her brighter than the daylight. Maybe she’d curled up with Teague that first night, but nothing serious had happened. She could forgive herself a lost moment in time. But last night…

Last night she’d made love with him-a near stranger. She didn’t do that. Ever. She was capable of being very foolish, of making impulsive decisions, of choosing the wrong men. But she’d never been a complete and total idiot before.

“That cell phone,” the low-whiskey baritone said to the curve of her neck, “keeps ringing. Apparently the caller’s not going to give up. You want me to get it?”

“No, I will. You’re just going to hurt your ankle if you try to hustle. And it has to the sheriff.” It was. Unfortunately, she couldn’t discover that for sure until she’d charged out from under the covers naked as a jaybird. The cell phone was in the kitchen, plugged in, but obviously the power hadn’t been on long because the connection was scratchy.

“Daisy Campbell, if you hadn’t answered soon, I was going to have a heart attack. I thought something happened to the two of you!”

“No, we’re both fine, George.” She whirled around, searching frantically for something in the torn-up kitchen to cover herself with. The only thing in sight was a scratchy-looking carpenter’s apron. Useful for covering up the front of her. Marginally. Sort of. “I just couldn’t get to the phone any faster, but we’re both all right.”

“Good. Plows have been out on the road for a good three hours now. We should be getting into your neck of the country within the next hour. That’s the best I can do. You’re high on the list, but we had to clear the highways and town before we could head out for the back roads. I take it your patient survived the night?”

Her patient. The one with the head wound and the sprained ankle. The one who’d made love to her mercilessly and tirelessly for most of the night. “Um, he seems to be less injured than I first thought.”

“Well, that’s good. Still, we should be able to get him checked out at the hospital this morning. Now, as far as you getting to your place-”

“The furnace wasn’t working at my parents’ house. That was why I trekked over to the Cunninghams’ to begin with.”

“All right. When I get off the phone with you, I’ll…”

George said something else. She had no idea what. She had no idea when she stopped talking and hung up, either, but suddenly Teague seemed to be standing in the doorway, wearing jeans almost zipped up, looking her over quietly, thoroughly.

His carpenter apron was draped over certain strategic spots and it wasn’t freezing like before; the furnace had obviously been chugging hot water through the radiators for several hours. Yet feeling Teague’s eyes on her made her feel barer than cold.

Everything about him tracked memories from last night. His tousled hair-she remembered riffling her fingers through that thick, wiry hair, dragging him closer to her, demanding more kisses, deeper kisses, more-intimate kisses. She remembered the taste of that narrow mouth and those smooth, seductive lips. She remembered the exact moment she’d put a love bite on his left shoulder. She even remembered his bare feet…yelping when he’d suddenly touched her with those cold toes, and then laughing, laughing just before he’d pressed her into the blankets and taken her down with another kiss.

By night he’d been her lover…but by daylight he was a stranger. A stranger she’d shared more with-more honesty with-than she had with her husband. She didn’t know what to make of that, except that there wasn’t a man on the planet who unnerved her. Ever. Until now.

To add insult to injury, the son of a gun had looked darn good in the shadows, but man, he looked downright wicked in real light.

Her stomach suddenly skidded down another slippery chasm. Relax, she tried to tell herself. It wasn’t love. She’d been foolhardy to sleep with a stranger, but it’s not as if she were in love with him.

She could handle a mistake. God knew she’d had a lot of experience making those. But she wasn’t sure she could survive falling in love with the wrong man. Not again.

The way he kept standing there, looking at her, she sensed he was thinking about pouncing again. Leaning against the doorjamb, protecting his ankle by leaning on the makeshift cane, he should have looked weak and pitiful, and instead somehow the darn man managed to be making sinful, irresponsible, reprehensible promises with those sleepy eyes.

Worse yet, some idiotic part of her heart loved those promises. Wanted him to pounce. Wanted to be wicked with him all over again. For Pete’s sake, you’d think her mind had taken off for the North Pole and refused to come home. She said firmly, “They’re going to rescue us in less than an hour.”

“Damn.”

She wasn’t going to smile. She was going to stay tough. “You’re going to mind real food? Getting back to your own bed and your own place?”

He stepped forward. “I’m going to mind not being trapped with you tonight. I’d have liked another five or six days with you. Minimum. Trapped together. Just like this.”

A new flutter kicked up in her pulse. Not just a sexual-zing flutter, but a downright dangerous, feather flutter. He was beginning to touch that soft place that she never let anyone near. Pound on a wall, what harm could you do? But pound on that soft spot, and a girl could get hurt really badly.

She knew how to be a wall. For damn sure, she knew how to keep her heart from being broken again. “Naw,” she said lightly. “Adventure’s always fun. But too many days of it, and we’d have run out of condoms-and food-and you’d probably have started to worry that we were getting too attached, developing ‘A Relationship’ or some crazy thing like that.”

“You think I’d worry about that, do you?”

Nothing she said seemed to erase that dangerous gleam in his eye, so she aimed straight for the best defense there was. The truth. “We couldn’t last, Teague. But I’m not going to regret last night, and I hope you don’t.”

“I don’t.”

She hesitated. She wanted-needed-to be careful, but she didn’t want to leave the conversation with him being hurt in any way. She said softly, “Last night, I feel like…we made a memory.”

Those steady, intense eyes never left her face. “I like that phrase. Making a memory. Doesn’t happen to me often. Not like that.”

“Not for me, either. But I’m not going to be in White Hills for long. That’s for positive.” She smiled briskly. “Sheesh, we’ve got to get dressed. Clock’s ticking. We’re going to have people knocking at the door in a matter of minutes.”

Yet when she moved toward the doorway, he didn’t seem inclined to budge. He didn’t touch her. Teague didn’t seem the kind of guy who’d touch a woman who hadn’t specifically invited it. But trying to cover herself with his carpenter’s apron suddenly seemed humorously foolish. She hadn’t minded his seeing her naked last night. She’d wanted him to. She’d wanted to be naked for him, with him. But this morning her fanny felt as if it was hanging naked in the wind in every sense.

“Daisy…you really dislike White Hills that much?”

He’d asked the question seriously, so she answered in kind. “Actually, I always loved it. At least when my family was here-we were always close. But for me, living in a small town…” She shook her head.

“You find it boring?”

“Not…boring. But I always felt as if I were living in a fishbowl. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. If you wore a red dress to a funeral, everyone in a three-county radius would know it. You can’t make a mistake. You can’t want something different. You can’t be…anonymous. You have to fit the mold.”

“What’s the mold?”

“The mold is…behaving like everyone else behaves. Around here, the most excitement on a Saturday night is watching tractors drive by and the high school football game. Women still hang out their wash. Guys wash their cars on Sunday afternoon. People pay their bills, raise their kids, compete for the coolest Christmas decorations.”

“And all that’s bad?”

“Not bad. Not bad in any way for most people.” She struggled to explain. “My mom used to say that I was the only daughter she misnamed. Daisy. The ordinary flower. When I could never seem to do anything ‘ordinary.’ I think I came out of the womb wanting to dance until dawn. And there was no one to do that with. Not here.”

“You really hated growing up here.” He didn’t make it sound like a question. Good thing. Because it wasn’t.

“Not hated. I love my parents, and my sisters and I were always thick as thieves. And honestly, I liked the town. It just didn’t like me,” she said frankly, and then grinned. “You won’t like me, either, when you get to know me better.”

His eyes seemed to pick up a challenging gleam. “You sound very sure of that.”

“Oh, I’m dead sure of it. Neighbors used to say I was as restless as a leaf in a high wind. Mamas used to make their teenage boys go inside when I was driving by, just to protect them from the influence of ‘that wild Daisy Campbell.’”

“Now you’ve got me scared,” he said dryly.

They both chuckled-and then both hustled to get dressed and get the house back in order before the snowplows arrived.

Daisy knew perfectly well that she hadn’t really scared him, but she hoped-from the heart-that she’d gotten through. She wasn’t the kind of woman that a nice guy married. Not a nice guy who was into roots and settling down in a house with 2.2 kids and a basketball hoop over the garage and an SUV. She was the kind of woman who a guy wanted to have an adventure with.

Like they’d had.

Last night.

But good guys didn’t last-not with her. Whether it was her fault or theirs, Daisy didn’t know. Right then it didn’t matter. It just mattered that she’d made sure Teague was warned off before either of them could be hurt-particularly because she was going to be stuck in White Hills for a while.

For his sake, and hers, she intended to stay far away from Teague Larson.