Heart of Winter Read Online Free PDF

he had some important phone calls to make. I would have stayed, but he said we wouldn’t work today.”
    â€œWant a ride back?” he offered, and then seemed to withdraw, as if he regretted the words even as he was speaking them.
    Some devilish imp made her smile at him. “Suppose I say yes?” she asked, driven to taunt him. “You look as if you’d rather sacrifice the horse than let me on him.” And she grinned, daring him to mock her.
    He felt a burst of light, but he wouldn’t give in to it. “Damn you.”
    She grinned even more. “I won’t accept, if you’d rather not let me aboard. Anyway—” she shuddered with deliberate mockery and more sarcasm than he could know, because she’d practically grown up on horses “—I’d probably fall off. It looks very high.”
    â€œIt is. But I won’t let you fall off. Come on.” He kicked his foot out of the stirrup and held down a long arm, giving in to an impulse he didn’t even understand. He wanted her closer. He wanted to hold her. That should have warned him, but it didn’t.
    He had enormous feet, she noticed, as she put a foot in the stirrup and let him pull her up in front of him. He was amazingly strong, too.
    She hadn’t realized how intimate it was going to be. His hard arm went around her middle and pulled her back against a body that was warm and strong and smelled of leather and spice. She felt her heart run away, and that arm under her breast would feel it, she knew.
    â€œNervous?” he asked at her ear, and laughed softly, without any real humor. “I’m not dangerous. I don’t like women, or haven’t they filled you in yet?” She’s a woman, he was reminding himself. Watch it, watch yourself—she’ll sucker you in and kick you down, just like the other one did.
    â€œYes, I’m nervous,” she said. “Yes, you’re dangerous, and you may not like women, but I’ll bet they chase you like a walking mink.”
    His eyebrows arched. “You’re plainspoken, aren’t you?” he asked, gathering her even closer as he urged the restless stallion into motion, controlling him carefully with lean, powerful hands and legs.
    â€œI try to be,” she said, still uneasy about the double life she’d led since leaving Kentucky. To a man who’d been betrayed once, it might seem as if she were misleading him deliberately. But the past was still painful, and she’d forsaken it. She wanted it to stay in the past, like the bad memories of her own betrayal. Besides, there was no danger of Winthrop becoming involved with her. He was too invulnerable.
    She held on to the pommel, her eyes on his long fingers. “You have beautiful hands, for a man,” she remarked.
    â€œI don’t like flattery.”
    â€œSuit yourself, you ugly old artifact,” she shot right back.
    It had been a long time since anything had made him laugh. But this plain-faced, mysterious woman struck a chord in him that had never sounded. She brought color and light into his own private darkness. He felt the sound bubbling up in his chest, like thunder, and then overflowing. He couldn’t hold it back this time, and the rush of it was incomprehensible to him.
    She felt his chest shaking, heard the deep rumble of sound from inside it. She would have bet that he didn’t laugh genuinely very often at anything. But she seemed to have a knack for dragging it out of him, and that pleased her beyond rational thought.
    The lean arm contracted, and for an instant she felt him in an embrace that made her go hot all over. What would it be like, she wondered wildly, if he turned her and wrapped her up in his embrace and put that hard, cruel mouth over hers….
    She tingled from head to toe, her breath catching in her throat. It shouldn’t have been like this, she shouldn’t still be vulnerable. She had to stop this, or