She shook her head. “Reseph, you can’t go running off into the woods like that. Especially not without shoes.”
“Shoes are overrated.” He headed into the barn, ignoring her curses. If she wanted to get serious about letting the four-letter words fly, she really needed to work on her vocabulary. “Whatcha got in here?”
“Reseph.” Behind him, Jillian huffed with annoyance. “I’m serious.”
“So am I. I want to know what you keep in the barn.” It was warm—relatively. Two single lightbulbs lit the six-stall building, and as he strode through the clean straw, he inhaled the familiar scent of horse. For some reason, his tattoo itched. Was he allergic to horses? Ahead, from the last stall, a big sorrel and white draft horse looked over the divider at him.
“Obviously, I have a horse. I also have goats.” Jillian sounded all irritable, which was kind of cute. “They’re in the first two stalls.”
Sure enough, he peeked inside at the four goats in one, and three in the other. “Milk or meat?”
“Milk. I sell the kids to a local farmer. They also keep my property cleared of brush.”
“And the pigs?” He peered over the rails of the third and fourth stalls. One of the black-and-white sows oinked at him.
“Same thing. Well, without the milk.”
Reseph eyed Jillian, noting that her hair was still adorably tousled. Damn, she was attractive. He was pretty sure he hadn’t ever been drawn to women who didn’t wear makeup and who dressed in farm clothes, but something about Jillian’s fresh, natural beauty had him wanting to go organic.
Speaking of which… “Do you eat any of these things?”
“Some of the chickens,” she said with a shrug, “but they’re mostly for eggs.”
“And the horse?”
“I would never eat a horse.” Her voice was laced with a teasing false indignation.
He thought about the tattoo on his arm and shot her a wink. “Do you lick them?”
“Lick?” Confusion put a soft frown on her face for half a heartbeat, and then she rolled her eyes. “No, I don’t lick horses or tattoos.” She gestured to her gelding. “Sammy helps me with heavy hauling and riding the fence line.”
Sammy? And Doodle? She was determined to make all of her animals run away, wasn’t she? A horse needed a majestic name, like Conquest or Battle. “How much property do you have?”
“Two hundred acres.” Jillian scooped some grain out of a storage bin. “We used to have more, but my parents sold three hundred just before they were killed.”
He closed the lid on the grain bin as she walked to Sammy’s stall. “By demons?”
“No, thank God.” She dumped the food into the horse’s hanging grain bucket. “My dad was a pilot. He and my mom were flying their plane around the mountain when he had a heart attack. The plane crashed about twenty miles from here.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been hard.”
“It was.” She glanced down at his feet. “You really need to get back to the house. I didn’t save you so you could get frostbite by walking around barefoot in the middle of winter.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll help you with the animals. Then you’ll be done sooner, and I can get back into the house faster.”
She slammed the grain scoop into its holder with a little more force than required, and he could practically smell her frustration. “No.”
“Come on,” he cajoled.
“No means no.” Bending, she gave him a nice view as she picked up the rifle she’d propped against the wall.
He swallowed hard, and every drop of blood in his body went south in a hot rush. How long had it been since he’d had loud, sweaty, mind-blowing sex? Hell, when was the last time he’d had any kind of sex? Felt like forever, as if sex was more than a good time for him. This deep-seated primal urge was something that went to his very core. Sounded insane, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that sex was a necessity, maybe to his very survival.
He took a slow step toward her, his libido tugging at him as if he was on a leash and Jillian was holding the handle. But at the second step, she stiffened. He halted, though every instinct was screaming at him to keep moving toward her.
“Do I scare you?” he asked roughly.
There was the slightest hesitation as she hung the weapon in a bracket near the first stall. “If you did, I’d have had the police here by now.”
She was lying. The police couldn’t make it up the mountain through this snow. She’d said as much when she mentioned getting to the nearest town.
An owl hooted somewhere in the night, and Jillian’s gaze darted to the darkness outside. For a split second, shadows of fear flitted across her expression, and then, as if she was giving herself a pep talk, she threw back her shoulders and opened a bin of what he thought might be goat food.
“I won’t hurt you, Jillian.” Sensing she needed a moment to chill—and hell, so did he—he strode toward the door, the straw crunching under his feet. “I promise you.”
She said nothing as he stepped out into the snow and headed toward the cabin. Man, he wished she had beer. He could use one right now. Or a margarita. Or a piña colada, or—
He came to a stop so fast that he slipped and nearly landed on his ass.
Something was watching him. Again. This time, though, the feeling of being watched was accompanied by a disturbing internal stirring, as if an inky, oily cloud was billowing up from out of his soul.
Pivoting, he tracked the external sensation, and there, deep in the shadows, red eyes stared at him from out of the trees. It wasn’t the marten—these eyes were level with his.
They stared, unblinking, for another second, and then they were gone, taking with them the weird darkness inside him. What the hell? And why the f**k was the skin on his forearm rippling? Startled, he looked down at the horse tattoo peeking out from under his rolled-up sleeve. He’d sworn only one of the front legs had been straight, the other lifted in a stationary prance. Now, both legs were straight, as if the horse had stomped its hoof.
First the thing in the woods and now the horse. Was he losing his mind?
“Reseph?”
He didn’t turn to Jillian. What if the crazy he was feeling showed in his face? “Yeah?”
“Why did you really take off into the woods?”
He shrugged. “I thought I heard a growl. I must have been hearing things.”
“No, I heard it, too.”
“You did?” Thank God and Oh shit collided. He wasn’t going crazy, but there really might be a malevolent presence lurking nearby. “Go inside. There’s something dangerous out here.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
Finally, he swung around to her. “Why not?”
There was a moment of silence, and then Jillian said something that chilled him to the bone. “Because it was you, Reseph. The growl came from you.”
Five
By the time Jillian got back inside the house, she was only a little freaked by what had happened outside. Just as she’d started to think that Reseph was the kind of guy who didn’t take much seriously, he’d sensed something in the forest and morphed into what she could only describe as a predator. The scary thing was that the shift had been more than behavioral; it had been physical. From the set of his jaw and the flare of his nostrils to the baring of his teeth and what she swore was a glow in his eyes, he’d become something she’d never want to meet in a dark alley.
Hell, she’d avoid him in a sunlit alley.
And that growl. Dear God, the bloodcurdling sound he’d made had lifted every hair on the back of her neck.
And yet, when he’d sauntered into the barn just moments later, all traces of the man who had snarled like a beast, run into the forest, and come back with blood on his hands was gone.
She stared at Reseph’s broad back as he stood in front of the wood stove, head bowed. He’d stripped off the sweatshirt, leaving it in a messy pile in the corner. She could hardly be annoyed though, not when being shirtless meant she got a view of the most perfectly sculpted male body she’d ever seen. Before his amnesia episode, he must have spent a lot of time in the gym.
Like, a lot.
“Hey.” She hung up her coat and stepped out of her boots. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” For being okay, Reseph’s voice was off, permeated by an underlying scrape of gravel. “Did I scare you?”
“Maybe a little.” His shoulders slumped, and his head sank lower. She felt like she’d just kicked a puppy. “Reseph, I wasn’t afraid you’d hurt me,” she said, realizing it was true. He’d frightened her, but not because she was afraid for herself. She was afraid for anyone who crossed him.
She didn’t plan to cross him.
She padded across the hardwood floor, stopping a few inches away. Without thinking, she placed her hand gently on his lower back. Beneath her palm, hard muscles twitched. “What’s wrong?”
The fire crackled for a long time before he finally said, “I scared myself.”
He turned around, catching her hand before she could drop it. His warm hand engulfed hers. He was so much bigger than she was, and she supposed that under normal circumstances she might feel intimidated, but this was not a normal situation, and Reseph was far from a normal man.
“Were you afraid you’d hurt me?” she asked.
Reseph stared down at her hand, his thumb making slow sweeps over her fingers. “Not… intentionally.” He raised his gaze, his eyes burning into hers. “And that’s what scares me. I acted without thinking. I don’t know myself. I don’t know anything and I think I might be crazy.”
Once, while Jillian had been getting ready to come on shift at the air traffic control tower, she’d watched a small private jet crash on the runway and burst into flames. In sickeningly slow motion, she’d seen movement inside the craft as the passengers tried frantically to get out. The helplessness Jillian had felt still haunted her today, and now a similar feeling was squeezing her heart. She had no idea what to say or do to make things right.