Confessions of a Small-Town Girl. Christine Flynn
rush of her own. Her knees were shaking. Locking them, her chin edged up another notch and she focused through the fading spots. “You were the one who snuck up on me.”
“You were breaking and entering—”
“I didn’t break anything! The window wasn’t locked.”
“It’s a term.” He growled the words as he jammed his hands onto his hips, his stance now even more imposing as the he glared down at her. “You’re trespassing on private property in the middle of night. You climbed through a second-story window to get in here. That’s called breaking and entering,” he informed her, clearly familiar with the technicalities. “What you haven’t said is why.”
She would rather avoid that.
Ignoring the sore place on the back of her head where it had bumped the stud now supporting her, she dropped her glance to the cleft in his chin. The night-time stubble shadowing his face made the carved angles look as inflexible as granite. His voice sounded as hard as tempered steel. “I was just looking for something that I’d left here.”
“This afternoon?”
“Before that.”
In the dim glow of the flashlight, he abruptly turned away. A few frantic heartbeats later, she saw him flip on the overhead light—a single bulb waiting for a new cover—and head back to where she remained rooted in the sawdust.
He had been easier to take without the harsher light. Then, he’d been a huge, menacing shadow with eyes that seemed to penetrate the dark. As he walked toward her now, she could clearly see the rugged, unyielding lines of his face, his broad—and naked—shoulders and chest, and the silver-white scar that slashed at an angle from his collarbone to the rippled muscles six inches below one flat male nipple.
Her glance slid down, only to dart back up when it reached the patch of dark hair that arrowed below the band of his unsnapped jeans. A quarter-size circle of puckered flesh showed faintly pink above his left biceps. The sight of all that cut, carved and scarred muscle was disturbing enough. The glimpse she’d caught of the handgun he tucked into his waistband below the small of his back was even more so. It was only then that she realized he’d had it drawn.
She jerked her glance from the six-pack of muscle forming his abdomen to the disconcerting light in his eyes. It was clear he no longer regarded her as any sort of a threat. It seemed equally obvious that he was in the process of calming himself down. His fury had subsided to something more like controlled irritation, aggravation or whatever it was that had his jaw working as he jammed his hands back onto his hips.
“What is it?”
Shaken beyond belief, she shook her head. “What is…what?”
“What you left here.”
The nature of her distress abruptly changed quality. “It’s just something that’s…mine.”
“If it’s yours, what is it doing here?”
“It wasn’t always here,” she explained, the faint ache at the back of her head making her rub there, anyway. “I’d kept it at the gristmill until I heard that some of the boys from school had started hanging out there, too. I was afraid they’d find it, so Michelle let me put it in the hiding place in her room.”
She let her hand fall, brushing back her hair on the way, and crossed her arms protectively around herself. “I’d only meant to leave it there for a while. But it fell past the ledge she’d said was in there and we couldn’t get it back out.”
For a moment, Sam said nothing. He just stood with his eyes narrowed on her decidedly pale features. The knot of hair she’d wound near the top of her head had loosened when he ripped off the cap laying on the floor. Strands of that flaxen silk fell against her cheeks. One lock tumbled over her shoulder.
Not trusting himself to touch her to push it back, not sure if he wanted to ease the disquiet in her eyes or shake her, he stepped back instead. He couldn’t believe the trouble she’d gone to to retrieve something she could have simply asked him for.
Feeling as if he’d wound up in Oz, he moved to where he’d left the book he’d found that afternoon. The thing had been between the walls dividing the rooms, along with a tube of dried up lipstick and a pile of candy bar wrappers. The only reason he hadn’t tossed it along with everything else was because of the name on its pale pink cover. Kelsey had been written out in hot pink glitter. Much of the glitter was gone, but the looping outline of the name remained visible enough.
More concerned at the time with how he was going to reroute the electrical wiring in the wall, he hadn’t considered much about his little discovery. The only thought he’d given it was to mention it to the Kelsey, who’d brought him the pie that was now nearly gone, in case it belonged to her, since she’d known the Bakers, or some relative of theirs who shared her name.
“Is this what you’re looking for?”
Kelsey’s eyes widened on what he held.
“That’s it,” she confirmed, and was halfway to him when she lifted her arm to grab it from his hand.
“Not so fast.” Remaining by a pile of panels he’d salvaged, he held the diary up out of her reach. “I want to know what’s so important about this that you’d do what you did to get it.”
The nightmare Kelsey had felt coming on began to materialize.
“It’s just a diary I kept in high school,” she insisted, minimizing drastically as she tried again to reach for it.
He held it higher.
She was inches from his bare chest. Looking past the hair shadowing his armpit and the sculpted muscles along the underside of his arm, she breathed in the scents of soap and something warm, vaguely spicy and totally, undeniably disturbing. He’d showered before he’d gone to bed.
Not sure if the heat she felt radiated from him or from a purely primitive female awareness of his big body, she swallowed hard and backed away.
“It’s nothing. Really. It’s just…sentimental stuff.”
“A lie detector would be wasted on you.”
Kelsey opened her mouth, only to close it because she couldn’t decide if she should beg or just try again to snatch for what he’d just lowered. He had an easy six inches on her, and a decidedly longer reach. Even if he hadn’t been so much taller, and bigger, the thought of getting up close and personal with the rock wall of his chest definitely gave her pause. It also added a new element to the anxiety clawing at her when he stepped back, took a small piece of wire from the toolbox and deftly popped the lock guarding the pages between their faux-leather covers.
A new form of panic surged. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t believe it’s ‘nothing,’” he said simply. “There’s something in here. Since you just took ten years off my life breaking in to get it, I want to know what it is.”
“No!”
A sense of impending humiliation made her grab for the book again. He promptly stuck it back in the air. Already in motion, she raised on tiptoe, stretching her arm the length of his, getting far closer than she would have intended had she felt she had any choice. With her breasts pressed to his chest, she reached over him, her stomach flattening against abdomen and his zipper as he edged the book farther back.
Catching her glance, one dark eyebrow slowly arched. Something dark glittered in his quicksilver eyes.
Her breath went thin. Their bodies were molded from chest to thigh. Something liquid gathered low in her belly. Totally disconcerted by the way his heat moved into her, she lowered her heels and jerked back.
Looking totally unfazed by their contact, and her desperation, he stepped back himself to move beneath the lightbulb. Opening the paperback-size book, he flipped through the pages of small, looping script.
When Sam had found the