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  “Jesus. I take it back. You are dangerous.”

  Delighted, she laughed. “Thanks.”

  With just the whisper of a touch, he rubbed the ball of her shoulder with his thumb. “So, you gonna complete my humiliation and finally tell me how the hell you got me inside after the accident?”

  “Gosh, I don’t know. I’m not sure it would be wise to give away all of my secrets—”

  Without warning, he twisted effortlessly so that he was above her, her body caged by his arms. His gaze drilled into her. “Talk.”

  She bit her lip to prevent a smile, and then unable to help herself, reached up and cupped the side of his face, enjoying the prickle of his beard against her palm. “Isn’t it obvious? I carried you.”

  “Uh-huh. You and what army?”

  “Oh, all right. If you must know—” she did her best to sound put-out, which wasn’t easy when he caught the pad of her thumb between his lips and sucked, making the breath jam in her throat “—you brought yourself in. You were only unconscious for a few minutes—”

  “Long enough for you to find the key to the handcuffs and get loose,” he murmured, eyes suddenly gleaming dangerously.

  “—before you came around enough that I could get you to slide across the seat so I could back the truck up to the cabin. You were pretty out of it, so it took some work to keep you upright and pointed in the right direction, but the end result is that you walked in under your own power.”

  “And let you put my own handcuffs on me, like a lamb to the slaughter.”

  “Yes.”

  He was silent a moment. “Where’d you get the chain?”

  “It was in the bed of the truck.”

  “Lucky for you.”

  “No, lucky for you,” she countered matter-of-factly. “Without it you’d be on a much shorter leash.”

  Only inches apart, they stared at each other, the seconds slowly ticking past until, to her shock, the corners of his mouth quirked an entire eighth of an inch while the skin around his eyes crinkled a similar fraction. “Pretty damn pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

  Not by the wildest reach of imagination could he be said to be smiling. Still, there was something in his look that made the heat rush into her cheeks—as well as a few other places—and set her stomach to tap-dancing. She swallowed, fighting the urge to throw her dignity to the wind and just grab him. “Yes. I suppose I am.”

  “Yeah, well…” He lowered his head and trailed his lips from her temple to her cheek to the edge of her mouth, watching her all the while “…maybe you deserve to be.”

  Pleasure made her heart thump in her chest. Then he slowly flexed his hips and sank his flesh into her welcoming wetness and her already tenuous restraint vanished like dust in the wind.

  Wrapping him in her arms, she claimed his mouth and eagerly gave herself up to the melting pleasure she’d only ever known with him.

  Sweet holy hell, Taggart thought, as he and Genevieve lay tangled together a full two hours later, flesh damp and lungs winded, muscles quivering and bodies spent.

  He didn’t know what was worse. The fact that without any apparent effort she seemed able to separate his mouth from his brain and turn him into a frigging babbling brook.

  Or that he couldn’t keep his hands off her.

  Always before he’d viewed sex like food: just another essential one needed to get by. A man got hungry, a man ate and then he pushed back from the table and walked away. Maybe every once in a while he got an unexpected taste of dessert, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t live without.

  But with Genevieve…Nothing was the same. He wasn’t the same. His desire for her felt more like the inescapable need he had to breathe than a lesser, more controllable urge.

  The thought sent a shiver of uneasiness shooting down his spine. Or would have, he thought caustically, if he had a nerve left to carry it.

  “John?” The cause of his alarm skimmed a fingertip over the nape of his neck.

  “Hmm?”

  “How many brothers do you have?”

  He raised his head from where it rested against the crook of her neck. “What?”

  “You said you and your brothers are partners. How many of them are there?”

  He hesitated, but he couldn’t see the harm in answering. As topics went, in fact, it was a hell of a lot safer than the one his mind had been zeroing in on. “There are nine of us all together.”

  “Nine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just…I’m trying to imagine eight more of you and it’s making me a little dizzy.”

  Damned if her slightly horrified admission didn’t handily dislodge the last of his disquiet and leave a kind of fuzzy-edged tenderness for her that was completely unlike him in its place. “I guess we do all sort of look alike: tall, dark hair.”

  Telling himself the feeling would pass, that it was the consequence of great sex, nothing else, he rolled more completely onto his side. He flexed his tired muscles, before settling back down so their eyes were on a level.

  Genevieve stared at him expectantly.

  “What?”

  “Gosh, I don’t know. Maybe you could tell me a little more?”

  His brows knit. “Like what?”

  Something flickered across her face that was either despair or amusement or a mixture of both. “Let’s see. You said Gabe’s the oldest. What are you? The youngest?”

  “No. That’d be Jake.”

  “While you are…?”

  “Ten months younger than Gabe. Then comes Dominic, Cooper and Deke.”

  “Okay.” She worried her full bottom lip. “That’s six. What about the other three?”

  He supposed he might as well just lay it out and be done with it. “Look, we’re a military family. I told you about Gabe. I was an Army Ranger, Dom, Deke and Coop were all SEALs—get the picture? Right now there are five of us in the business, while Josh, Eli and Jordan are all currently on active duty overseas. Then there’s Jake. He’s in his last year of college.”

  She blinked, trying to take it in. “Wow. Your parents must be proud. Exhausted, but proud.”

  He gave a little shrug. “The old man’s in Florida, retired from the army, doing his own thing the way he always has. My mom passed away a long time back, when we were all still kids.”

  “Oh, John, I’m sorry. How terrible. That must’ve been hard.”

  There was no doubting the genuine sympathy in her voice. Still, he was shocked to hear himself agree. “Yeah. It sucked.”

  She reached out, stroked his upper arm as if to try and soothe away that long-ago hurt. “I’m so sorry,” she said again.

  Maybe because she didn’t press, he found himself wanting to tell her about it. “She was in a car accident, just a minor fender bender in a parking lot, except she wasn’t wearing a seat belt and she hit the steering wheel. It was the day before my birthday, and she had things to do, so she just blew the accident off. And then…something inside her was torn and…that was it. She was standing in the kitchen, icing the cake and then she was just gone.”

  Genevieve remained quiet, simply touching him in an age-old gesture of comfort, but her eyes were indelibly sad for him.

  “I didn’t handle it very well. Gabe took care of things, the way he always does, but I got angry. Skipped school. Got into fights. Broke windows and busted up fences and didn’t come home at night. Eventually I got caught boosting a car. Not even Gabe could fix that, so I got shipped off to Blackhurst, a military school. It saved me.” For all the good it did—

  “I slugged a social worker once.”

  “What?” Genevieve’s quiet statement jerked him back from the abyss. He gave a faint snort. “Yeah, right.”

  “I did. It was after my grandpa died. This woman told me that Seth and I might not be able to stay together in the same foster home and I punched her.”

  “Jesus, Gen, what are you talking about?” Exc
ept for the information that she had no known living family except her brother, and the notation that she sometimes acted as an emergency foster mother, there hadn’t been a hint, either in the file he’d been given on her or among her friends, of anything like this. “How old were you?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Where were your folks?”

  “We never knew our father—or fathers. And our mom had dumped us on Gramps a year or so earlier and disappeared for good. Responsibility—” her voice took on an unfamiliar, caustic note “—was never her thing.”

  “And you wound up in foster care?”

  “That, and group homes. It wasn’t too bad, once they realized I wouldn’t tolerate our being separated. We got to spend some of our vacations with Gramps’s brothers and sisters, until they were gone, too. I got emancipated at seventeen, got a job, my own place and custody of Seth and that was the end of it. When my uncle Ben died, he left me this cabin and enough money to make a down payment on the bookstore.”

  He didn’t know what to say. But Genevieve being Genevieve, he didn’t have to worry about filling the silence for too long.

  “I’ve always thought it would be sort of nice to be part of a big family,” she ventured unexpectedly. “To have other people around who know your history, who know you. People who care what happens to you.”

  The hint of wistfulness in her voice, which he doubted she even realized was there, made him want to go out, track down her long-lost loser parents and give them exactly what they deserved. Yet as he knew all too well, there was no going back, no fixing the past.

  There was only the here and now. “Big families do have some benefits,” he told her. “But trust me, there are drawbacks, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well…” Inexplicably determined to banish the last trace of melancholy from her eyes, he considered. “I don’t think I ever slept in a room alone or made a phone call without somebody listening in until I scraped together enough money to rent a hotel room when I was eighteen.

  “Nothing else is sacred, either. Food, shoes, your toothbrush—you name it and it’s open season. And you can forget the whole idea of “your” clothes. In a big family, if they’re clean, they’re fair game. Blackhurst was the first place I didn’t have to hide my damn underwear against marauders.”

  She chuckled. “Listen to us. If we wrote a book, we’d have to call it Poor Pitiful Childhoods.” The chuckle got swallowed by a yawn, but when it was over, the soft smile he was starting to crave was back on her face. “God, we’re a pair.”

  For an instant Taggart found himself thinking she was right. Then he gave himself a sharp jerk back.

  No. No way would they ever be a pair, a couple, a twosome.

  Because she still didn’t know the truth about him. And it would be a cold day in hell before he’d allow that to change.

  Nine

  G enevieve jiggled from foot to foot as she rummaged through her duffel bag, searching for the bottom half of her long johns.

  She was dressed in nothing but socks, panties and bra, shivering in the room that had yet to warm from the fire she’d built up first thing after climbing out of bed. The cold, as brisk as it was, wasn’t the main cause of her inability to stand still, however.

  That had just strolled out of the bathroom and was standing a dozen feet away, one broad shoulder propped against the doorjamb, one jeans-clad hip cocked, both muscular arms crossed over his naked chest.

  She could feel Taggart’s gaze like a velvet touch, making every nerve ending in her body jump.

  Rationally, she knew her reaction was beyond foolish. They’d made love a dozen different ways the previous night; there wasn’t any part of her body that those big hands hadn’t touched, that hard mouth hadn’t tasted, those always hard-to-read green eyes hadn’t seen.

  She was nevertheless very much aware that their intimacies had all taken place in the soft, shadowy cocoon of darkness lit by only the gentle glow of a single lantern’s light.

  Now she was standing, exposed, in dawn’s unforgiving glare.

  Yet it wasn’t mere modesty alone that was making her jittery, she conceded. No, it was that Taggart’s opinion of the view he was currently taking in mattered to her. Far more than she could have imagined just days ago. Definitely more than was prudent or wise.

  Swallowing, she pawed through her belongings, triumphantly closing her fingers around the object of her search just as she heard Taggart make an odd sound, one that was neither sigh nor curse but a mixture of both.

  Snatching the long johns to her chest, she swiveled to face him straight on. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said instantly, his voice the slightest bit hoarse. His gaze skated over her. “I just—it never occurred to me Pollyanna would have a taste for killer underwear.”

  She glanced down at her cherry-red bra and panties, frilly lingerie being one of her few indulgences, then back at him. She frowned. “Pollyanna?”

  It took a second for her question to penetrate his fascination with the embroidered roses twined strategically across various bits of sheer, transparent fabric. When it did, his gaze shot to her face. “Forget it,” he said hastily. “You look…good.”

  Pleasure washed through her—until she remembered what had sent her scurrying for her clothes in the first place. She watched, her pulse tripping irregularly, as he pushed away from the wall and strode a few feet closer, the chain gripped in his hand to prevent the trailing links from rapping him in the ankles.

  Conflicting desires froze her in place. Her heart urged her to cross the space that separated them, step into his arms, run her hands across the taut skin of his chest and abdomen and watch the glint in his eyes turn to fire.

  Her head preached caution, warning her that for both their sakes, the best thing she could do was stay out of his reach, at least until she figured out for sure if—

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I—” Darned if she didn’t start to take a step toward him, only to be brought up short when the warmth suddenly vanished from his face as he looked past her.

  His eyes watchful, he gestured toward the fleece shirt and thermal vest she’d laid out in addition to her usual jeans, winter silks and pair of sweaters. “Looks like you’re getting geared up to go someplace.”

  She wondered what it would take to win his trust. Or if it were even possible, given the reason they were together in the first place.

  The one thing she didn’t question was that it mattered—that he mattered—since the question of how much was precisely what was fueling her urgent need for some space. Even if it came at the cost of a potential case of frostbite.

  “It occurred to me that I may have paid a few years back to replace Uncle Ben’s old generator,” she said. “I thought I’d make a trip to the shed to see if I’m right, and if I am, to see if I can get the thing running.”

  He glanced out the window, contemplating the sullen gray sky and the snow that could now be measured in feet rather than inches. Thanks to the ever-present wind, huge drifts of white, some of them taller than she was, dominated the frigid landscape.

  “Forget it,” he said flatly, that pale, enigmatic gaze coming back to her. “We can live without power a while longer.”

  Thinking that she knew what was worrying him, she dredged up a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. I’m coming back. Even I know I wouldn’t get far in the truck with this much snow on the ground.”

  His mouth tightened, but he was silent as she pulled on her silk bottoms, long johns and then her one pair of flannel-lined jeans. “That’s not the problem.”

  “Oh? Then what is?”

  “Get real, Genevieve. It’s probably ten below out there if you factor in the wind chill.” He stooped down and slid his own shirts up the chain, then impatiently began the process of putting them on, dragging the black cotton knit over his head, then untwisting the arms of his big flannel shirt and shrugging into it. “If anything goes wrong, if a branch comes d
own or you stumble into a drift that’s over your head…Hell, it’s not worth taking the chance for a generator that may not exist. God knows—” his voice darkened as he gave the chain a disgusted rattle “—I won’t be any help.”

  So he did care. At least a little. Her heart swelled, much the way it had when she’d been perched on the edge of the bed a little while ago, mooning over him as he stood at the bathroom sink scraping the beard off his cheeks and she’d found herself thinking—

  No. Don’t go there. Not here in front of him.

  “I’ll be fine.” Her own multiple layers of clothing in place, she zipped up her vest, stepped into her boots, then bent down to tie them, glad for the excuse to hide her face. “I really want to check it out. I mean, I can live without heat or lights but not hot water,” she said, injecting a false cheerfulness into her voice. “And I’d rather not have to cook outside on the barbecue if I don’t have to—”

  “Okay, fine.” His voice was brutally clipped. “If it means so damn much to you, then undo this frigging handcuff and let me take care of it. If there is a generator out there, I’ll at least be able to get it to run.”

  Straightening, she hesitated, unexpectedly tempted to do what he asked. To go ahead, roll the dice, turn him loose and see what happened next.

  And what about Seth?

  The thought of her brother had her taking a step back. If it was just her, she’d take the chance. But to take such a huge risk with Seth’s future as collateral…

  “All right. I’ll give you the key.” She braced for his reaction. “Just as soon as you promise me that when the weather improves you’ll let me walk out of here, free and clear.”

  “Goddamn it, Genevieve, that’s not fair—”

  “None of this is,” she cut him off sharply, zipping up her coat and slinging her scarf around her throat. Not waiting for his reply, since the last thing she wanted was for him to see the foolish tears suddenly stinging her eyes, she turned and walked toward the door. “Like I said, I’ll be back.”

  She pulled open the door and stepped outside, welcoming the cold that immediately slashed into her like a razor-edged knife. Flipping up her collar, she struggled to get her breath as the sub-zero air burned her lungs.