Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,63
hair.
He stood there, feet slightly apart, and hooked the leather gloves into the waistband of jeans that were fitted enough to reveal the taut musculature of his powerful thighs and give Erin a hot flush. The black T-shirt he wore beneath his unbuttoned shirt was also snug enough to draw attention to his washboard-flat belly.
Her attention was riveted!
Erin knew she was staring but she couldn’t stop. She wanted to move, but her body seemed strangely disconnected from her brain. Her limbs seemed not to belong to her, and inside her chest her heart crashed against her ribcage, almost drowning out the sound of his boots on the cobbles as he walked towards her.
CHAPTER TWO
ERIN swallowed, knowing that this was one of those scenes that would be etched into her mind for ever.
He stopped a few feet away from her but close enough for her to see the dust ingrained in the fine lines radiating from his eyes, extraordinary eyes, incredibly dark and fringed with equally dark curling lashes.
His expression was inscrutable though the groove above his aquiline nose deepened as he looked down at her. Erin felt a shudder chase its way down her spine. There was something almost cruel about the curve of his sensually moulded lips.
He fired a question at her in a deep voice that had an almost tactile quality.
Erin swallowed and lifted her shoulders helplessly to indicate she had no idea what he was talking about.
She saw something that could have been irritation flicker in his dark eyes as he dragged a hand through his hair, which was pitch-black and sheared off at collar level. It was riverstraight and she imagined that under the dust it was silky.
Erin could feel her fingertips literally tingling, a disturbing sensation, as she imagined touching … smoothing those dusky strands.
Appalled by the direction of her out-of-control imagination, she concluded that she must have been out in the sun too long. She was probably suffering from dehydration, too, having drained her water bottle an hour earlier.
Rubbing a finger across the bridge of her nose, she was relieved to find evidence to back up her theory. Despite the factor thirty she had plastered on earlier, her skin felt tight and tingly.
Well, it stood to reason that it had to be something like that. She was simply not the sort of woman who went around fantasising about running her fingers through strange men’s hair.
Sucking in a deep breath, she adopted an expression that suggested—hopefully—that she was totally immune to tall, romantic-looking figures riding black horses.
‘Do you speak English?’
He wasn’t the sort of man she would have turned to for help, but she was in no position to be picky.
Actually he was the sort of man that any women with half a brain would cross the street to avoid, though they probably wouldn’t, she conceded, recognising the weakness of her own sex when it came to men like this one.
‘Eng-lish?’ she said, enunciating each syllable slowly in the vain hope of seeing some spark of recognition in his spectacular eyes.
There was none; he just stood there looking as though he’d stepped out of a western.
‘I’m lost,’ she said, stabbing a finger at her chest. His eyes followed the action.
‘Do you … I need to get to … I’m looking for … damn.!’ she muttered, dropping down on her knees and removing the stones she had used to pin the map to the cobbles while she studied it. Anchoring a hank of wayward hair off her face with one arm, she stood up wielding the creased map in the other.
‘Map …’ she said, waving it at him.
When he looked back at her and shrugged all Erin’s frustration bubbled to the surface. The stress of the last few hours manifested itself in tears that spilled down her cheeks. With an angry curse of self-disgust she brushed them away with the back of her hand.
She took a deep breath and told herself to calm down; if this man couldn’t help her he might be able to direct her to someone who could.
She smiled encouragingly, then tapped a spot she had ringed in red on the map. ‘I need.’ she began, lifting her voice to a bellow.
Then she saw the total lack of comprehension in his face and sighed. ‘I don’t know why I’m shouting. You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?’
He looked from her face to the map in her hands and back again, then gave another magnificent shrug.