LITMIR.BIZ

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her aside and then to steady her, he noticed the tears flooding her eyes. He also noticed that she wasn’t rubbing her behind but was sucking her thumb.

      “Hey, what’s the matter?”

      She slid the thumb from her mouth, and Nick felt the most unexpected rush of heat. Unexpected and unwarranted, given the circumstances. It was those lips, that damn pout.

      “Here, let me see.” Gently he took her hand and inspected the blood oozing from the base of her thumb. The sharp end of an unclinched nail had obviously dug in. “Do you have first-aid supplies?”

      “It’s only a scratch.”

      He silenced her with a look. “Sit down and don’t move.”

      His authority didn’t come from a raised voice but a certain don’t-argue timbre. It had worked on Ug the previous night, and it worked on T.C. now. She sat on the drum. She didn’t move. And when she looked up to find him standing, feet spread, hands on hips, glaring down at her, she told him where to find the first-aid kit.

      “It’s in the lunchroom—in the cupboard next to the fridge.” She indicated the general direction with her good hand. He nodded grimly, pivoted, then stopped short when confronted by the ugly end of Monte. T.C. watched in amazement as he smacked the gelding’s rump to turn him around, gathered up the lead and retethered it to the hitching rail before striding off.

      Like he did it every day.

      She didn’t want to admire the man’s competence—she had spent the last half hour deliberately not admiring anything about him—so she turned her attention to her thumb. Gingerly she wiggled it back and forth, reminding herself that the pain was all his fault.

      If he hadn’t disturbed her sleep, she wouldn’t be so fuzzy-headed. If he hadn’t forced her to touch him, her senses wouldn’t be chock-full of memories of his hands on her. If he hadn’t distracted her with his questions, she would have noticed Monte was loose.

      So let him play Mr. Competence if he wanted. Maybe then he would go off and do something else—like leave her in peace.

      Unfortunately his idea of playing Mr. Competence involved hunkering down in front of her and steadying himself with a hand on each of her knees. She could feel every degree of his body heat radiating through his long fingers, through her jeans and her skin, all the way into her flesh. For a man who moved with such lithe grace, he seemed to take an inordinate length of time to regain his balance and remove his hands.

      Not that T.C. gained much respite. She had scarcely recovered her equilibrium before he picked up her hand, placed it palm-up in one of his and bent over to inspect her injury.

      She stared at her hand lying in his. How small and soft it looked compared with his—exactly as he had described it in the early hours of the morning. She disliked that thought as much as she disliked the hitch in her breath as his thumb stroked across the center of her palm, tracing her lifeline. Or was that her heart line?

      She closed her eyes and dragged in a breath, but instead of badly needed oxygen, her lungs filled with his soft musky scent. Dimly she thought about leaning forward and burying her nose in his neck…but then something akin to liquid fire hit her thumb, and she rose clean off the drum.

      Nick steadied her with a hand on her elbow. “Sting a little?” he asked as he reapplied the antiseptic-soaked swab.

      “Try a lot,” she muttered shakily.

      He leaned closer, so close that when he looked up, she could make out tiny flecks of gold in the blue of his irises. Then he smiled that brilliant world-tilting smile, and she couldn’t help but return it.

      “Good girl,” he murmured, and for some dumb reason the admiration intermingled with concern in his eyes brought a thick lump to her throat. Tears welled in her eyes. To her chagrin, one spilled over and rolled down her cheek. She scrubbed at it with the back of her free hand, bit her lip, chanced a glance from beneath her lashes.

      The hand on her elbow tightened for a second; then he bent over the first-aid kit at his feet. “We need to get this covered up.”

      He took longer than necessary to fix a plaster to her wound, as if he knew she needed time to collect herself and that she would find her tears humiliating. The thought of such insightfulness threatened her composure all over again. She shut her eyes and tried to concentrate on the pain—except there didn’t seem to be much of that anymore.

      “All right now?” His thumb gently stroked the inside of her wrist.

      T.C. nodded, although she wasn’t all right. For a start, there was that thumb stroking fire across her oversensitive skin. She knew his intent was solicitous rather than sensuous, but her senses weren’t listening to reason. He moved, or she moved, or maybe the air around them moved, for she caught another heady whiff of his scent.

      Burying her nose in his neck suddenly seemed like the only thing to do. With eyes still closed, she must have actually leaned in his direction, because the drum tipped forward and she would have toppled right into his lap but for a last second reflex that saw both her hands curl around his upper arms, her injury forgotten.

      “Hey, no need to throw yourself at me.”

      His quip should have defused the awkwardness. T.C. did try to smile back, but her lips wouldn’t cooperate. The sensation of taut muscles beneath her hands had turned her mouth desert-dry. She tried another smile, considered removing her hands, but couldn’t manage either simple task.

      And when she moistened her lips, his gaze followed the movement. His smile faded. There was a moment of intense gravity as they studied each other, and T.C. felt as if she was suspended in time and motion. As if her senses were too packed full of everything-Nick to allow anything else in.

      Nearby a horse snorted, breaking the spell, and one corner of Nick’s mouth kicked up. She could have escaped then, if she had wanted to. She didn’t. She sat still, completely enmeshed in the slow-motion sequence. His hand reached toward her. His fingers combed a slow path through her hair, to her nape. He drew her face to his, gradually and surely, until their lips finally met.

      His were warm, their touch soft and restrained, as if he were savoring that first contact as much as she. It was no more than lips meeting, touching, retreating, returning, yet it was the most exquisitely sensual indulgence of her life.

      She whimpered low in her throat. His hand tightened on her neck, drew her mouth closer, while he slowly—oh so slowly—tasted his way around her lips, enticing them open, inviting her response, causing a cascade of delight to ripple through her body. He was leisurely, almost lazy, but he was very, very thorough. Around the edges of her hearing something jangled vaguely, but she shut it out, focusing all her senses on the complexities of a kiss she had never known existed.

      Until he pulled away from her clinging lips.

      Then she recognized the metallic strike of shod hooves on concrete, heard a low tuneless whistle, the clink of a steel bit. Jason returning from the track.

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