up and down the stairs with heavy feet. She’s a small woman, but her footfalls are like an elephant in my ears. Isaac and Lars are better, but Lars favors his right leg. I bet he’s had an injury. And Sasha . . . I never hear her. That woman is stealth. It’s more than intuition. It’s knowledge that’s ingrained.”
“Maybe your other senses are heightened since your memory is missing?”
“You really believe that?”
“You have a better theory?”
“No.” She hadn’t thought that long or hard about it. She’d been spending too much time thinking of the facts as they dropped into her head.
She swatted away a mosquito and considered putting the sweater on if only to ward off any bug bites.
They walked in silence for a few yards. “You don’t have to hide them.”
“Hide what?” Leo asked.
“Your guns. They don’t scare me.”
Leo chewed on that for a few steps. “If we all walked around armed to the teeth, and someone from a neighboring property took notice, questions would come up.”
At first, his explanation made sense, but Neil wouldn’t choose a property with neighbors. At least not neighbors who were actually around.
Another mosquito moved in for blood.
Leo reached over, took her sweater from her hand, and held it out for her to step into. “You’re not the only one who’s intuitive. It’s cooling off, the mosquitos are attacking, but it’s hard to get into the sweater without hurting.”
She accepted his help, eased her left arm in first. “Another week and the mosquitos will die off with the shift in the weather.”
“You think so?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He pulled the sweater around her, let his hands linger on her arms. “Better?” he asked.
“Your hands are warm.” So were his eyes. Trusting. Like a net at the end of a fall.
There it was, the rapid rise and fall of his chest, his eyes drifting to her lips. How would they taste? How would he taste? A feeling washed over her with the memory of what a kiss felt like, but not the who on the other end.
Then logic knocked on the back side of her brain. “Getting mixed up with your protectors is just as foolish as with your captors,” she whispered. Not that her words stopped her from her next thought about the day’s growth of beard that gave Leo an edge she liked even more than the clean-shaven look he started with every morning.
How would he feel on her skin?
Did he want to find out about her as much as she desired to learn about him?
Leo snapped his eyes away, dropped his hands to his sides. “We should head back.”
Olivia took that as an agreement.
A few steps toward the house and she confronted him. “Are we going to ignore this?” she asked.
“You called it foolish.”
“Am I wrong?”
“No.”
“Yet you volunteered to escort me on my walks.”
He kept his gaze forward. “That makes me a masochist.”
Why did this feel like a challenge? “Are you afraid I might be married?” she asked him.
“Happily married women aren’t walking around Las Vegas without a wedding ring,” he told her.
She glanced down at her left hand. No evidence of atrophy where a ring had lived, no tan lines. “What about an unhappily married woman? Or maybe I have an awful boyfriend.”
He snuck a glance her way.
She pretended not to notice.
“You don’t strike me as a woman who would stay in any relationship she wasn’t happy with. We can’t even get you to stay inside and put your feet up. I don’t see a man controlling your actions.”
Part of her believed everything he said, and something else told her he was wrong.
“If there is a Mr. to my Mrs. , he might want to show up soon.”
“Oh?”
Olivia looked over at him, waited until he looked back before she spoke. “I’m starting to have some thoughts on how to spend the time around here.” Without thinking, she licked her lips.
Leo blew out a very audible breath and forced his eyes away. “You’re killing me,” he murmured.
She couldn’t say for sure if this was her normal behavior, but she wasn’t going to deny it felt damn good and familiar. “You’re too easy.”
“I’m a man.”
They walked in silence. The house and the valley below came into view.
Leo reached over and gently slid his hand over hers.
Her heartbeat rushed in her head.
The flirting felt familiar.
The handholding . . . not so much.
Not that she wanted to pull away.
“Does she have her memory back?”
Not hello . . . how are you? How’s the weather? It had