shushed her so it was her turn to talk. “What you fail to understand is that on a temporary basis, you’re okay. But there are a lot of things I don’t like about you.”
“Like what? Name one thing.”
“You talk too much.”
He shrugged it off. “Name two things.”
“Easy. You always have to be in charge.”
“Bet you can’t name a third,” he said, riding roughshod over her very valid issues. “So, out of my many positive attributes, you can only come up with two things you don’t like about me.”
“Oh, I could come up with more, if you’d quit talking circles around me. How can I think when I can’t get a word in edgewise? And on top of it, I’m looking at you. I can’t think when I’m looking at you.”
She realized the error of her admission the moment the words left her mouth.
“You can’t think when you look at me?” He was even handsome when he smirked. “The problem isn’t that you don’t trust me or us. You don’t trust you, Delphi. You’re letting that doctor still screw up your life.”
“How can I trust you? You’ve changed the rules.” Just like DeWitt. “You can’t just arbitrarily decide to rewrite the terms.”
“Okay, then I have a proposal.”
“I will not marry you. You’ve really lost it.”
“Easy, Blondie, I’d have to ask you first.”
Ouch. That was kind of embarrassing—not that she’d wanted him to ask her to marry him. That would be even worse than him saying they were in love. “What do you propose?”
“We scrap it all and start from scratch. Wipe out the last three days. We start fresh with different terms.”
“That’s silly.”
As usual he ignored her. “So, Blondie. I’m here for the next few days. I’m looking for a wife and I’m also all for having some really hot, mind-blowing sex. Falling in love is fully admissible and so is establishing a long-term, ongoing relationship.” See, that’s what she was talking about.
“Look, Marine, that worked with me one time but I’m a quick study. I’m not falling for that bowl-me-over-with-your-charm ruse.”
“Oh, is that what I did? I had no idea you found me charming.”
God, she was so frustrated it was all she could do not to stamp her foot at him. Instead she turned on her heel and marched back through the connecting door. “I should’ve ignored you from the beginning on the plane. I should’ve stood my ground then and I wouldn’t be in this predicament now.”
“And exactly what predicament are you in, Blondie?”
Damn him, she very nearly tripped up and blurted out that she’d fallen in love with him. But she didn’t.
“I’m going for a bike ride.”
“Hmm. You know how I love those shorts on you.”
She didn’t stamp her foot, but she did slam the connecting door...and derived great satisfaction from it.
Unfortunately, she could still hear him. “I’ll pick you up for dinner and a movie around nine.”
She paused in the middle of taking off her scrubs. Dinner and a movie? There was no movie theater here. The man was crazy. And annoying. And altogether charmingly mad.
He’d almost convinced her that for them to have fallen in love in three short days was not only plausible, but probable.
Being wrong about DeWitt had wrecked her career.
Being wrong about Lars would wreck her heart.
He was a most dangerous man.
16
AND SHE THOUGHT he’d been relentless before.... Delphi had no idea what was in store for her. It was terrible when you had to turn a woman against herself in order to straighten her out. Lars just needed the woman to figure out that she loved him, and then trust herself that it was the right thing.
Only she was scared to trust how she felt about him. And he’d be damned if he’d just sit on his ass and wait on her to figure it out. That simply wasn’t his way. Never had been.
He took the last two steps in one leap. Merrilee and her posse were hard at work in the airstrip office. Luckily, Delphi was tied up at work. Not that it would really make any difference, but an element of surprise always made an offensive maneuver more effective.
Alberta; Merrilee; Ruby; Juliette; Tansy’s sister Jenna; Norris, a former newspaper reporter; Nancy, who ran the dry goods store with her husband; and a couple of other women he didn’t recognize had quite the assembly line going.
Even the men had pitched in. Dwight and Jefferson had foregone their chess game to work alongside Bull, Dirk and a tall fellow with a shock