Undercover Groom. Merline Lovelace

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 her. For a moment there, she’d feared... She’d hoped...

      The unmistakable snick of a trigger cocking brought her head snapping around. Across the counter from her, every muscle in the stranger’s body seemed to lock. Taut as a steel cable, he turned and stared down the twin barrels of a .12 gauge shotgun.

      Three

      Her heart hammering, Chloe spun around to face the leathery faced woman who stood with a shotgun cradled under one armpit and a metal crutch propped under the other.

      “Hannah!”

      The store proprietor didn’t take-her eyes from the man at the other end of the gun barrel.

      “Got a problem here, girl?”

      The laconic question shattered the tension that gripped Chloe. More concerned now with the fact that her employer had dragged herself out of bed against her doctor’s vehement orders than with her response to the stranger’s kiss, she shook her head.

      “Nothing I can’t handle.”

      “Funny way of handlin’ things, if you ask me,” the older woman twanged.

      Chloe flushed, but she’d learned that Hannah Crockett’s tart tongue came part and parcel with a heart wider than the blue Dakota sky. She’d wandered into town only a few days after the general store proprietor had tumbled off a ladder and crawled into the street on her belly to get help, dragging her shattered ankle behind her. The cantankerous invalid had hired Chloe on the spot to tend the shop while she was laid up. Hannah had brushed aside such piddling trifles as references and identification. She was good at sizin’ up people, she informed Chloe testily. It didn’t matter a horse’s spit where the girl had come from, or where she was driftin’ to. The job was hers, if she could handle it. A spare bedroom came with it, and any meals she wanted to fix up. Otherwise, she could order for them both from the café in town.

      Chloe had snatched at the offer, assuming that her duties would center primarily on ringing up sales in the old-fashioned brass cash register that dominated the counter. Three weeks and countless hours of stocking shelves, sweeping floors, breaking down boxes and scuttling fifty-pound sacks across the floor had taught her differently. The work was back-breaking and seemingly endless. With the store open from eight in the morning until nine at night, she earned every penny of the salary Hannah paid her in addition to her room and board. She’d also taken on the duties of nurse and companion, despite Hannah’s grumbling that she could take care of herself.

      Worried by the deep white lines grooved on either side of her reluctant patient’s mouth, Chloe hurried around the counter. “We need to get you back to bed. The specialist in Rapid City said you should stay off that ankle until he takes the pins out.”

      “If I listened to him and laid on my backside for six weeks, I’d sprout carbuncles the size of Idaho potatoes.” Keeping СКАЧАТЬ