LITMIR.BIZ

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had ever spoken about that awful night since or even vaguely referred to it, Eadie felt the bittersweet burden of obligation to him.

      Perhaps one of the reasons she felt so little sympathy for his upset of late was that the gentle man—the supremely kind man—he’d been that night five years ago, had been appearing less and less frequently these days. There’d been times this past year when she’d found his sour moods increasingly obnoxious, and she often wondered if she’d dreamed what he’d done for her way back then.

      What no one would ever know and what Hoyt Donovan would never suspect, was that she’d fallen in love with him that night five years ago. Completely and irrevocably. Because she had, and because she was the very last woman on earth that beauty-obsessed Hoyt Donovan would ever consider a romantic possibility, Eadie was fully aware that the biggest reason she took such a harsh view of his love life was that she couldn’t seem to get past the jealousy she felt, so it gave her more than a little satisfaction to know he’d gotten a taste of his own medicine. She wondered if the beautiful Celeste had sent him a “parting gift.”

      It frustrated her that Hoyt couldn’t see that his beauties were too in love with themselves to ever truly love him. Hoyt wasn’t a stupid man, and she’d always been wary of his insights, but he was as dense as a brick on some subjects.

      Five years of loving him in secret was a long time. Long enough to prove, even to her, that Hoyt Donovan’s tastes would never change. It hadn’t taken five minutes for Eadie to realize he’d never be interested in a plain woman like her, though it had taken her far less than five minutes that awful night to realize she was doomed to love him—almost unconditionally—for the rest of her life.

      Eadie forced herself to ignore the depressing sense of hopelessness she felt as she finished tidying up Hoyt’s desk. She’d typed his letters and caught up on his bookwork, saving it all to files before obsessively backing them up. Donovan Ranch was a monstrous headache to keep track of. Her three afternoons a week made a respectable dent in the paperwork, but Hoyt took care of the rest himself.

      He’d paid her well for the tasks he’d hired her to do, and the money came in handy on her own small ranch, though the extra income evaporated by the time she got done paying bills. If things at home continued going downhill, by next year she might have to sell out.

      The notion dragged her spirits lower. The idea of having to move to town and take an office job was traumatic. Aside from losing touch with the ranch life she’d loved and had grown up with, she’d no longer have either a reason or the opportunity to see Hoyt, though that was probably for the best. At twenty-six, the only thing more pitiful than being doomed to achieve “old maid” status in another few years or less, was to hang around a man she could never have.

      The sound of Hoyt’s heavy bootsteps pounding steadily through the big ranch house startled her and she automatically glanced at the clock. The fact that Hoyt had apparently come back to the house early today wasn’t a good sign, not when he was still so riled and cranky. Because his bad mood had grown worse this past week, Eadie had taken greater pains to stay out of his way. She’d hoped to make her escape before he came back to the house, but his sudden arrival thwarted her plan.

      From the bedroom end of the house opposite the wing the office was located in, she heard him thunder, “Eadie? I need you in here! Now!”

      The order was as angry as she’d ever heard, and Eadie hurriedly finished stacking the handful of letters with their envelopes on his desk blotter to rush out of the room. Hoyt never leveled his bullish temper on her, though he often treated her to a blustery verbal account of the reason for his choler. She suspected he did that because she always listened calmly, and her very calmness seemed to cool him off by the time he was done letting off steam.

      And of course, once he finished, he usually saw reason and quickly got over his aggravation. That was one of the things that made her forgive those times when his temper rose high: when he cooled off, Hoyt was truly mellow, and he didn’t hold grudges.

      The problem in the aftermath of his breakup with the beautiful Celeste was that he’d fumed around for weeks now, and as far as she knew, he’d not spoken more than a handful of choice words on the subject. Most of what she knew had come from gossip. Which was why she’d guessed that his male pride had somehow been soundly assaulted. And why he wasn’t showing signs of letting go of a bit of his anger over it anytime soon.

      She’d barely made it down the hall and halfway across the big living room before he bellowed out another, “Eadie—get in here!”

      She sprinted the rest of the way across the living room to the hall, suddenly shaky because she sensed something new about his anger this time.

      As she slowed to rush into what had to be the master bedroom, her shaking increased. She’d never been in the private areas of Hoyt’s home, and his bedroom was the most private. And intimate. She had only a moment to note the dark luster of the wide headboard of his massive bed before she reached the open door of the master bath and rounded the corner.

      The moment she saw him, Eadie realized that for the rest of her life, she’d always feel this same wild excitement and rush of happiness at the mere sight of the man.

      Hoyt was so big and broad-shouldered, his powerful, work-hardened body the very zenith of masculinity. His larger-than-life presence made the large bathroom feel about a foot wide. Beneath the black Stetson he still wore, his hair was dark and overlong, and his face was almost too rugged and harsh to be considered handsome, though it was.

      And she adored him. Truly and simply, Eadie adored everything about Hoyt Donovan, though she’d never in a million years confess that to him or to anyone else. She’d taken brutal pains to make sure she never showed it.

      The glittering black gaze that missed so little when it wasn’t dazzled blind by female beauty, arrowed straight to her heat-flushed face and impacted her startled blue gaze with enough force to make her eyelashes give an involuntary spasm.

      “It’s about time,” he growled. “I coulda bled to death in here.”

      Alarmed, Eadie’s wide gaze dropped to the side of his ripped and bloodied chambray shirt as he turned, then pulled the shirttail out of his jeans and held it up to display the oozing slice in the hard flesh beneath.

      Eadie’s gasp was overridden by his clipped, “Hurts like a son-of-a-gun.”

      His remark was far less profane than it might have been if he’d been talking to one of his men, but Eadie barely noticed as she stepped close for a better look.

      “You need to see a doctor.”

      “Medical stuff’s in the cabinet right there.” He nodded toward a panel of the wide mirror that spanned the long counter. “Clean me up an’ slap on a patch.”

      Hoyt’s voice was loud in the crowded space. His frustration was in the terse order, but the volume of his voice was anger. None of it made much of an impression on Eadie because she knew instantly that his frustration was with the injury and his anger was at himself for being injured in the first place.

      “It needs stitches,” she said as she quickly washed her hands, hastily dried them, then rummaged briefly in the cabinet he’d indicated to find antiseptic and sterile gauze pads.

      “You too squeamish to do it?”

      The demand was a bit more crabby than angry, and they both knew she was anything but squeamish. Eadie opened the peroxide, then tore open a few of the sterile pad packs to dampen them. She turned toward him to brush the pads gently around the gash to clear away the blood, and answered.

      “There’s a big difference between cowhide and your hide.”

      “Stitches are stitches. If you can sew up a cow, you can sew me up.”

      Eadie let herself smile faintly to acknowledge how ridiculous that was. “Not the same thing,” she murmured as she continued to work.

      “How come?” Now his big voice had gentled a bit more as if his temper was already cooling.

      Eadie

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