Kit Gardner Read Online Free PDF Page A

then shoved the back door open. “Hold this, Christian.”
    “But I want to hold his feet.”
    Her teeth ground in her ears as she again hooked her arms beneath Stark’s shoulders. A sharp pain sliced through her lower back. Breathing was a labor in itself. “Christian, do as I say.”
    He blinked at her, thrust out his lower lip, and didn’t move. “But I’m not helping, then.”
    “Hold the door,” she snapped into billowing dust, feeling the burn of hot tears at the backs of her eyes. No, she would not lose control. Not now, not ever. She couldn’t. A woman alone, raising a headstrong child, trying her best...
    “You don’t have to yell at me,” Christian grumbled, flattening himself against the door.
    “Listen to Mama and I won’t yell at you.” She hauled Stark through the open doorway and into her immaculate kitchen, with its spotless, lye-scrubbed pine floor that she was immensely proud of. She didn’t pause, even when she crashed into a high-backed wooden chair, even when Christian let the door slam on Stark’s leg.
    “You didn’t take off your shoes, Mama. Look, you’re getting the floor all dirty. You’re mad, aren’t you, Mama? See, he’s bleeding all over.”
    She ignored all this, the burning in her arms, the pounding in her head, the lurking sense of doubt in the wisdom of her actions. Through a short hall and into her room she dragged him, finally dropping him beside the mahogany four-poster on the cherished hooked rug she’d beaten for hours not three days past. She didn’t even glance at the bed. No sense in attempting that. She wondered if four burly men could heave Stark from the floor.
    “Take the bucket and get Mama water from the well,” she called toward the door, where she knew Christian lingered.
    “He’s bleeding on your rug, Mama.”
    “I know.” She bit her lip, stared at Stark, then stuffed a feather pillow beneath his head.
    “You’re mad, aren’t you, Mama?”
    She dropped to her knees and set her fingers to fumbling over the buttons of Stark’s shirt. “Get the bucket, Christian.”
    She listened to the sound of shuffling little feet, then to the rush of her own releasing breath. Her throat seemed to close up as her fingers ventured farther down the row of buttons. A rather intimate task, it suddenly seemed, this unbuttoning of a man’s shirt while he lay in a deep sleep on the floor beside her bed. She hesitated. His hand lay upon his stomach, blocking her path, and she found herself staring at those long, thick brown fingers, at the breadth of his palm and the length of his forearm. So disturbingly masculine a forearm, corded with muscle and rope like veins beneath its furred and bronzed veneer. Fleetingly she wondered at the profound disquiet all this aroused in her, a disquiet having nothing to do with the rifle shot she’d seen fit to deliver him. Gingerly she wrapped her fingers about his and lifted his hand aside. With a peculiar hesitancy, she slipped her palms inside the cotton, against warm flesh, and spread the shirt wide.
    For some reason Jessica couldn’t have explained, her breath compressed in her lungs at the sight of him. Not that she’d never seen a man’s chest before, though that had been in the dusky privacy of her bedroom, with all shades drawn. Yet she remembered her husband Frank’s chest as smooth and flat and hairless, not jutting, bulging even, and densely covered with smooth black hair that reached clear to his beard-stubbled throat. He was a beast, this man, and this had to be fear, unparalleled fear that quivered deep in her belly and weakened her limbs. And concern, yes, that was it, nothing but concern for the man who had saved her life, now bade her to press a quavery palm against his chest to seek the rapid beating of his heart.
    Her lips parted. His skin radiated heat that leapt into her hand and seeped up her arm, through her torso, pooling in her belly and in the tightening peaks of her breasts.
    Her fingers curled