True Love at Silver Creek Ranch - By Emma Cane Page 0,3
grandma talks about you all the time,” she finally said. Mrs. Palmer spoke of him with glowing pride as he rose through the ranks to staff sergeant, a rarity at his age.
“Hope she doesn’t bore everybody,” he answered, showing sincerity rather than just tossing off something he didn’t mean. “I hear she lives with your grandma. The Widows’ Boardinghouse?”
“The name was their idea. They’re kind of famous now, but those are stories for another day. Come here and let me look at your cheek.” He moved toward her slowly, as if she were a horse needing to be calmed, which amused her.
“I can take care of it,” he said.
“Sit down.”
“I said—”
“Sit down!” She pulled out a kitchen chair and pointed. “I can’t reach your face. I’m tall, but not that tall.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered gruffly.
She pressed her lips together to keep from smiling.
He eased into the chair just a touch slowly, but somehow she knew he didn’t want any more questions about his health. Adam Desantis, she told herself again, shaking her head. He wasn’t a stranger—and he wouldn’t have started the fire, regardless of the trouble he’d once gotten into. She told herself to relax, but her body still tensed with an awareness that surprised her. She was just curious about him, that was all. She cleared her throat and tried to speak lightly. “I imagine you’re used to taking orders.”
“Not for the last six months. I left after my enlistment was up.”
Tearing open an antiseptic towelette, she leaned toward him, feeling almost nervous. Nervous? she thought in surprise. She worked what most would call a man’s job and dealt with men all day. What was her problem? She got a whiff of smoke from his clothes, but his face was scrubbed clean of it. She tilted his head, her fingers touching his whisker-rough square chin, marked with a deep cleft in the center. His eyes studied her, and she was so close she could see golden flecks deep inside the brown. She stared into them, and he stared back, and in that moment, she felt a rush of heat and embarrassment all rolled together. Hoping he hadn’t noticed, she began to dab at his wound, feeling him tense with the sting of the antiseptic.
Damn it all, what was wrong with her? She hadn’t been attracted to him in high school—he’d been an idiot, as far as she was concerned. She’d been focused on her family ranch and barrel racing and was not the kind of girl who would lavish all her attention on a boy, as he seemed to require. Brooke always felt that she had her own life to live and didn’t need a boyfriend as some kind of status symbol.
But ten years later, Adam returned as an ex-Marine who saved her horses, a man with a square-cut face, faint lines fanning out from his eyes as if he’d squinted under desert suns, and she was turning into a schoolgirl all over again.
Adam stared into Brooke Thalberg’s face as she bent over him, not bothering to hide his powerful curiosity. He remembered her, of course—who wouldn’t? She was as tall as many guys and probably as strong, too, from all the hard work on her family ranch.
A brave woman, he admitted, remembering her fearlessness running into the fire, her concern for the horses more than herself. Now her hazel eyes stared at his face intently, their mix of browns and greens vivid and changeable. She turned away to search the med kit, and his gaze lingered on her slim back, covered in a checked Western shirt that was tucked into her belt. Her long braid tumbled down her back, almost to the sway of her jeans-clad hips. It’s not like he hadn’t seen a woman before. And this woman had been a pest through his childhood, too smart for her own good—seeing into his troubled life the things he’d tried to keep hidden—too confident in her own talent. She had a family who believed in her, and that gave a kid a special kind of confidence. He hadn’t had that sort of family, so he recognized it when he saw it.
He wondered if she’d changed at all—he certainly had. After discovering his own confidence, he’d built a place and a name for himself in the Marines. His overconfidence had destroyed that, leaving him in a fog of uncertainty that had been hovering around him for half a year now.