Teresa Medeiros Read Online Free PDF Page B

date showered and shaved twice a day. She’d never before smelled the sweat of honest toil, tempered with the mingled musk of horse, woodsmoke, and leather. She found the combination earthy, yet as undeniably beguiling as the prickle of the stranger’s unshaven jaw against her cheek. She half expected him to murmur some husky endearment.
    He groaned. Tabitha’s eyes flew open. The poor man probably wouldn’t be inclined to whisper sweet nothings in her ear while bleeding to death. As much as she wanted to believe he was just some flunky hired by her parents to woo her, the blood soaking the front of her pajama shirt felt alarmingly real.
    She tugged one hand free and shoved at his shoulder. “Mr. Ruggles?” she hissed. “George?”
    He groaned again and settled his body more firmly against hers. Tabitha squirmed at the increasing intimacy, but that only made things worse.
    This was frustrating. And it was her own fault. When he’d fixed her with that puppy-dog stare and started to tumble off the horse, she’d had every opportunity to hop out of harm’s way. Instead, she’d given in to the inexplicable urge to break his fall. All she’d gotten for her heroic effort was to be pinned under his weight. She was afraid he’d crush her, but it was as if he’d deliberately landed so as to do her the least harm. Even the glasses in her shirt pocket seemed to have survived the impact.
    She turned her head, looking around for help. The horse stood a few feet away, placidly munching on a patch of clover as if he hadn’t threatened to trample her to death only minutes before. Lucy had draped her small, furry body over a sun-drenched hillock and was blissfully napping.
    A butterfly perched briefly on Tabitha’s nose, making her eyes cross, then fluttered away with blithe abandon. She sighed, wondering if she was destined to spend eternity trapped beneath this ill-tempered stranger.
    When she turned back, he was gazing down at her, his golden eyes more quizzical than threatening. Tabitha’s breath stalled in her throat. He looked like a sleepy tiger trying to decide if he should eat his prey or simply toy with it.
    Tabitha did not need her glasses to see him clearly. She was nearsighted and he was very near indeed. She could feel the pounding of his heart as if it were her own.
    His face loomed in her vision—angry slashes of eyebrowsover deep-set eyes; a strong, blunt nose; a mouth that had lost its smile, but not its winsome quirk; a stubborn jaw armored with dark stubble. The faint bags beneath his eyes hinted at exhaustion, but did not detract from the dangerous appeal of his thick, stubby lashes.
    Tabitha blinked. She’d never been the sort of woman to fall for a pair of bedroom eyes. His gruff words reminded her why.
    “Whose woman are you?”
    Her dismay erupted in outrage. “Why, of all the arrogant, politically incorrect, blatantly chauvinistic—”
    He behaved exactly as she would have expected an arrogant, politically incorrect, blatantly chauvinistic male to behave. He clapped a gauntleted hand over her mouth, stifling her words. She glared at him, tasting leather against her lips.
    “I asked you a simple question, lass. Do you belong to any man?”
    She shook her head furiously, but it wasn’t until his gaze softened, becoming both tender and predatory, that she remembered she had practically invited him to ravish her before he’d come tumbling into her arms.
    She was being ridiculous. Surely no man who’d lost that much blood could—
    A faint shift of his hips brought a warm and fulsome weight to bear against the softness of her belly. Apparently, he hadn’t lost
that
much blood.
    She gazed at him, the two of them suddenly reduced to something more elemental than the sum of their parts. Man. Woman. Power. Vulnerability. She felt a flicker of doubt. Her mother might bemoan the fact that Tabitha spent most of her Saturday nights at home watching reruns of
The X-Files
on the Sci-Fi network,but she