The Loner's Guarded Heart. Michelle Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ only thing that stopped her from crying again. ‘How could Marty and Frank think I’d want to come here, huh?’

      ‘Look, Ms Peterson, I think you ought to calm—’

      ‘Oh, no, you don’t. You asked the question and demanded an answer so you can darn well listen to it.’ She pointed her finger at him as if he was personally responsible for everything that had gone wrong today.

      ‘Not only am I stuck here at the end of the earth but…but I’m stuck in a clothes-line at the end of the earth. And to rub salt into the wound, I got lost trying to find this rotten place and ended up in Timbuktu, where I got a flat tyre. Then your dog chased me up this rotten clothes-line and there’s spider web everywhere!’

      Her voice rose with each word in a way that appalled her, but she couldn’t rein it back the way she normally did. ‘And Mrs Pengilly took a bad turn this morning and I had to call an ambulance and…and I buried my father a fortnight ago and…’

      Her anger ran out. Just like that. She closed her eyes and dropped her head. ‘And I miss him,’ she finished on a whisper so soft she hardly heard it herself.

      Darn it. She reluctantly opened one eye and found him staring at her as if she was a madwoman. She opened the other eye and straightened. Then smoothed down her hair. She wasn’t a madwoman. And despite her outburst she didn’t feel much like apologising either. He didn’t have the kind of face that invited apologies. She pulled in a breath and met his gaze.

      ‘You’re afraid of my dog?’

      She raised an eyebrow. Did he think she sat in clothes-lines for the fun of it? ‘Even at the end of the earth you should put signs up on your gates warning people about vicious dogs.’

      He continued to survey her with that flinty gaze and she felt herself redden beneath it. With a sigh, she lifted her T-shirt. She didn’t need to glance down to see the jagged white scar that ran the length of her right side and across her stomach. She could trace it in her dreams. To do him credit, though, he hardly blinked.

      ‘How old were you?’

      ‘Twelve.’

      ‘And you’re afraid of Molly here?’

      Wasn’t that obvious?

      She glanced at the dog. Molly? The name wasn’t right up there with Killer or Slasher or Crusher, was it? And with Kent Black standing beside her the dog didn’t look anywhere near as formidable as it had a moment ago. Josie gulped. ‘She’s a girl?’

      ‘Yep.’

      The dog that had attacked her had been a big male Dobermann. ‘She growled at me.’

      ‘You frightened her.’

      ‘Me?’ She nearly fell out of the clothes-line.

      ‘If you’d clapped your hands and said boo she’d have run away.’

      Now she really didn’t believe him.

      His lips twisted, but not into a smile. ‘Moll.’ The dog wagged her tail and shuffled across to him. He scratched her behind the ears. ‘Roll over, girl.’

      His voice was low and gentle and it snagged at Josie’s insides. Molly rolled onto her back and a part of Josie didn’t blame her. If he spoke to her like that she’d roll over too.

      Oh, don’t be so ridiculous, she ordered. She focused her attention back on Kent. He parted the fur on the dog’s belly. He had large, weathered hands. Even from her perch in the clothes-line she could see the calluses that lined his fingers.

      ‘Look,’ he ordered.

      She did, and saw a mirror image of her own scar etched in the dog’s flesh. An ugly white raised scar that jagged across Molly’s stomach and ribs.

      ‘A man with a piece of four-by-two studded with nails did that to her.’

      Sympathy and horror pounded through Josie in equal measure. How could someone hurt a defenceless animal like that? It was inhuman.

      She scrambled down out of the clothes-line, dropped to her knees at its base and held out her arms. ‘You poor thing.’

      Molly walked straight into them.

      Kent had never seen anything like it in all his thirty-two years. Molly hid from strangers. When someone surprised her, like Josephine Peterson here obviously had, she’d try and bluff her way out of it by growling and stalking off. Then she’d hide. The one thing she didn’t do was let strangers pet her. She sure as hell didn’t let them hug her.

      For the first time in a long time Kent found himself wanting to smile. Then he remembered Josephine Peterson’s blood-curdling cry for help and he went cold all over again. He didn’t need a woman like her at Eagle Reach.

      A woman who couldn’t look after herself.

      He’d bet each and every one of his grass-fed steers that Josephine Peterson didn’t have a self-sufficient bone in her body. And he’d be blowed if he’d take on the role of her protector.

      His lip curled. She was a mouse. She had mousy brown hair, mousy brown eyes and a mouse-thin body that looked as if it’d bow under the weight of an armload of firewood. Even her smile was all mousiness—timid and tentative. She aimed it at him now, but he refused to return it.

      It trembled right off her lips. Guilt slugged him in the guts. He bit back an oath.

      She rose and cast a fearful glance at the back of the house. ‘Do…do you have any other dogs?’

      ‘No.’ The memory of her scarred abdomen rushed on him again. His hands clenched to fists. When she’d lifted her shirt, shown him her scar, it wasn’t tenderness or desire that had surged through him. He had a feeling, though, that it was something closely related, something partway between the two, something he didn’t have a name for.

      What he did know was he didn’t want Josephine Peterson here on his hill. She didn’t belong here. She was a townie, a city girl. For Pete’s sake, look at her fingernails. Long and perfectly painted in a shimmery pink. They were squared off at the tips with such uniformity he knew they had to be fake. This wasn’t fake-fingernail country.

      It was roughing-it country.

      He hadn’t seen anyone less likely to want to rough it than Josephine Peterson.

      When he glanced at her again she tried another smile. ‘Do you have a wife?’

      Her soft question slammed into him with more force than it had any right to. She needn’t look to him for that either!

      He glanced into her hopeful face and despite his best intentions desire fired along his nerve-endings, quickening his blood, reminding him of everything he’d turned his back on. Now that she stood directly in front of him, rather than perched up in his clothes-line or on her knees with her face buried in Molly’s fur, he could see the gold flecks inside the melt-in-your-mouth chocolate of her iris. That didn’t look too mousy.

      Get a grip! Whatever the colour of her eyes, it didn’t change the fact she wasn’t the СКАЧАТЬ