Undercover Groom. Merline Lovelace
candles. If there was an order to the jumble of products and produce filling the floor-to-ceiling shelves, he couldn’t see it.
Nor did he see anyone resembling Chloe. The tension coiling his body had just torqued up another few degrees when a woman called from a back room.
“I’ll be right there.”
Relief crashed through him. He would recognize his fiancée’s voice in his sleep. Soft and musical, with the rounded Minnesotan vowels that winters in Palm Springs and two years in Paris couldn’t erase, it was as much her signature as her silky blond hair and violet eyes.
Still, Mase had to look twice before he recognized the creature who backed bottom-first into the room a few moments later. Bent double, she fishtailed a fifty-pound sack of rock salt along the wooden floor and added it to the others propped haphazardly against the far wall. Mase watched, stunned, as she straightened with a small grunt. Raising an arm, she swiped it across a forehead streaked with sweat and dust.
The face was the same. Classic Chloe, all high cheekbones, creamy skin and full mouth. Her hair was silvery gold, glinting with warmth even scraped back in a no-nonsense ponytail instead of sweeping to her shoulders in its usual sleek fall. The clothes... Mase blinked, trying to remember the last time he’d seen his fiancée poured into thigh-hugging jeans and a thin yellow T-shirt that displayed a provocative patch of sweat between her firm breasts...or when she’d greeted him with such cool, distant politeness.
“Do you want something?”
He went still, thrown off balance for a moment as much by Chloe’s appearance as by her deliberate remoteness. His every sense alert to possible danger, he searched the store again. Why was she pretending not to know him?
The possibilities he’d forced himself to consider during his long hunt for Chloe leaped instantly to life once again. Was she trying to warn him? Had someone forced her to stay in this remote town? Was she under duress? With a speed that made her start in surprise, Mase rounded the end of the counter and edged through the door behind her.
“Hey, you can’t go in there!”
Ignoring her startled protest, he did a quick visual of the storeroom. It held cardboard cartons stacked almost to the ceiling, several unused display cases and a jumble of seasonal sporting goods, but no imminent threat that Mase could determine. An open door in the opposite side wall led to a long, dim hallway and, presumably, the attached living quarters. Frowning, he spun around to confront a decidedly irate Chloe.
She reached behind him and closed the storeroom door with a snap. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but whatever it is, I’ll find it for you. If I can,” she tacked on in a low mutter.
Slowly, Mase peeled off his sunglasses and stared down at her. If this was an act, it was a damned good one. If not... His gut twisted.
Why would she pretend not to know him? What the hell was going on? He searched her face, her eyes, trying to find a hidden message.
The woman who called herself Chloe Smith lifted her chin and matched the stranger stare for stare. In the almost three weeks she’d lived in Crockett, she’d learned to cope with the kind of looks he was laying on her. As Hannah had dryly pointed out, Chloe was the only nubile young female within fifty miles who didn’t come on the hoof. Word that she’d been hired to work the store while Hannah was laid up with multiple fractures to her left ankle had spread faster than a range fire. Every horny cowboy working the ranches around Crockett suddenly found himself needing new work boots or a supply of chewing tobacco. The vet from over at Custer came by twice as often to check the penicillin supplies Hannah kept in the cooler alongside the milk and soda. Even the transient sportsmen who flocked to the area to hunt deer and elk and to fish the mountain lakes had started joining the regulars who clustered around the potbellied stove in the mornings.
Chloe had grown used to being ogled...but that didn’t mean she liked it. Especially when the ogler raked her with a pair of iron gray eyes that glittered with an unsettling intensity.
“Did you want something?”
Instead of answering, he shot back a question of his own. “What’s going on here?”
Not liking his low growl, she backed up a step. “You tell me.”
He followed, too quick and too close for Chloe’s peace of mind. Like a hammer striking an anvil, her temple started to throb. The bruise that had marked it had long since faded, but she still suffered from occasional headaches. The accident that caused them remained only a blur in her mind. Vaguely she remembered climbing out of a car and stumbling for miles along a dark, deserted stretch of highway. She could recall the trucker who gave her a ride and the doc who X-rayed her. She couldn’t remember who she was, however. Somewhere along that empty stretch of road, she’d lost her identity, her direction and her memory. All she retained were the clothes she was wearing, the sapphire ring that had given her a first name, if not a last, and a vague sense of having run away. From what or from who, she didn’t have a clue.
Maybe... Her heart began to echo the pounding in her skull. Maybe from this man.
She eyed him warily. At first glance he didn’t look like the kind of man a woman would run from. Tall and muscular, with shoulders that strained the seams of his flannel shirt, he had the healthy tan of an outdoorsman without the weathered, sun-creased skin that characterized so many of the locals Chloe had met. His black brows slashed across a strong brow and defined a face stamped with a hardness she sensed came from within as much as from without. His clothes, she noted, marked him as a fisherman or a hunter. A transient. Here only to bag a trophy kill. She didn’t doubt he’d bring down his prey.
Was she his prey? A sudden fear rippled down Chloe’s spine. She disguised the shiver with a facade of sheer bravado.
“Back off, mister.”
Her brusque warning had just the opposite effect from the one Chloe intended. Instead of putting the stranger on notice, it seemed to spark a flame in his slate gray eyes. Deliberately he took another step forward.
“Back off,” she said again.
“Oh, no,” he said with a tight little smile. “I think that’s been my problem all along. I always back off, when what I really want to do...what I should have done...is this.”
Before Chloe could grasp his intent, he wrapped an arm around her waist and hauled her against his chest. She squawked a protest as his mouth came down on hers. Shock held her immobile for a moment or two, just long enough for him to blast through her defensive barriers and shatter her senses.
The searing kiss answered one of the questions whirling around in Chloe’s head. She didn’t know this man. Or more correctly, she’d never kissed him before. Not like this. There was no way she could have forgotten the rough thrill of his mouth on hers. No way she would have run from the heat his touch flushed in her veins. For an absurd moment she felt as though this kiss was what she had been running toward when she’d landed in Crockett.
Then the confusion and wanness that had plagued her for the past few weeks shuddered back. She pushed free of the stranger’s hold and stepped away, as furious now as she’d been frightened a moment before.
“Who are you?”
He didn’t answer for a long time. Too long for Chloe’s thin-stretched nerves. Thoroughly shaken and still seared with anger, she whirled and put the long counter between them.
Her nails dug into the wood. Her voice shook with fury. “Who are you? And what in the blue blazes gives you the right to come on to me like that?”
For a moment the taut planes of his face seemed to shift, become even harder, if that was possible. A frown slashed deep grooves between those coal black brows.
“My name’s Mase,” he said deliberately. “Mason Chandler.”
Chloe tested the name in her mind, willing a spark of recognition. Nothing came. Not even a flicker. Crushing waves of relief and disappointment rolled through