LITMIR.BIZ

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his head back, he levered himself into a sitting position. She sat up beside him and smacked him on the arm with her gloved fist. There were tears of rage in her eyes.

      “What were you doing hiding behind that oak? You’re supposed to protect me, not ambush me.”

      Mitch was angry himself, not just with her but with himself for being susceptible to that sweet body. “How was I supposed to know it was you under all that shrubbery? Why did you run like that?”

      “Why wouldn’t I run, when every time I turn around somebody points a gun at me?”

      “I might have shot you, you little fool, and all for the sake of a— What were you doing with that fir, anyway?”

      “Taking it back to the house, of course. And don’t yell at me.”

      Mitch suddenly understood. “A Christmas tree! You were bringing in a damn Christmas tree! Probably planning this since yesterday. That’s why you disobeyed Neil and left the car. You wanted to get a better look at the evergreens up here. Where did you find the ax? In one of the sheds, I suppose.”

      She wanted a Christmas tree. It was a sentiment that didn’t jibe with the kind of woman he knew she was.

      “What’s wrong with that?” she said, getting defiantly to her feet and brushing bits of leaves and grass off her coat and jeans. “And it wasn’t planned. It was an impulse.”

      Mitch surged to his feet. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. You made me a promise last night not to leave the house without me.”

      “No,” she corrected him. “I made a promise not to leave the house without telling you.”

      “Which you didn’t.”

      “Which I did. I left a note for you on the table.”

      “Which I didn’t see, since I happened to be a little too busy going out of my mind with worry to notice it. Why didn’t you just tell me in person what you wanted?”

      “I meant to, but you were so sound asleep I…well, I didn’t like to disturb you.”

      She couldn’t have known that, Mitch thought, unless she had opened his bedroom door to check on him. And since he happened to be in the habit of sleeping in the nude, and sometimes in the night kicked off his covers, there was the possibility that she had—

      He looked at her sharply. She lowered her gaze, flushing.

      So she had gotten an eyeful of him. Interesting. Of course, he ought to be annoyed that she had caught him in the buff. Instead, the image of Madeline Raeburn standing there in his doorway gazing at him filled him with a sudden heat that made him think of a steamy night in July, not a frigid morning in December.

      “Anyway,” she mumbled, “I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss. We’re in the boonies, and no one knows I’m out here but you and Neil, so how could I be in any danger?”

      “That’s what you thought about that safe house and— Where are you going?” She had started up the hill.

      “To get the tree.”

      “You don’t need the tree. Forget it.”

      “I do need the tree,” she insisted stubbornly.

      All this trouble, and she still wanted that blasted fir. “Fine,” he grumbled, “we’ll get the tree, but I don’t know what you think you’re going to decorate it with. I don’t have any lights or ornaments.”

      “You’ll see.”

      If I manage to survive her, Neil, I’m not going to let you forget this. You’re gonna owe me forever.

      They trudged up the hill, rescued the evergreen and the ax, then dragged both of them back down the hill. Once they reached the farm, Mitch was prepared to turn his back on the whole project—which made him wonder how he ended up in the barn a few minutes later, searching through an accumulation of junk for a tree stand. Miraculously, he actually found one. Rusted and battered though it was, it managed—after a frustrating effort on his part, all of which involved mutters, groans and considerable exertion—to support the fir.

      To his relief, Madeline assumed responsibility for the tree once it had been placed to her satisfaction in front of the parlor’s bay window. She had turned up a supply of construction paper in one of the cupboards, which wasn’t surprising since the wife of the couple from whom Mitch was renting the farm was a kindergarten teacher.

      Madeline settled herself at the kitchen table with the paper and a pair of sharp scissors she had extracted from the depths of the canvas satchel she’d fetched from her bedroom. Mitch continued to wonder about that mysterious satchel. Once the scissors had been removed, she snapped the bag shut and kept it close to her side. Why was she so careful about it? What was so precious about the contents?

      Mitch, fixing a late breakfast for them, tried to ask her about it with a casual, “I’m all out of cornflakes. You got any to spare in there?”

      She responded with an unrelated query of her own. “Is there any glue in the house?”

      “Try the drawer over there.”

      She was either so absorbed in her project that his curiosity hadn’t registered, or else she didn’t want him to know what the satchel contained. Probably the latter. He let it go. For now.

      Madeline was interested in nothing but coffee. As he ate his own breakfast, he watched her work and was impressed by the ornaments she fashioned out of the simple stack of paper. A series of intricately designed snowflakes, whimsical angels, loops of paper chain. The pile grew. She was creative. He’d give her that.

      Mitch would have been all right if he’d been able to keep his fascination focused strictly on her efforts and not on the woman who produced them. He couldn’t. Gazing at her across the table as she frowned with concentration behind a pair of reading glasses, he watched her lips making quirky little movements that he assumed were silent directions to herself. He kept remembering their encounter on the hillside and how that same sultry mouth had been so close under his that it seemed to beg him to take it.

      When he abruptly shoved himself back from the table, she looked up from her work. “Where are you going?”

      “To split some wood for the fireplace.”

      He hadn’t used the parlor’s fireplace since coming to the farm, didn’t even know if it worked. But he needed an excuse to leave the house, to get away from her and what she was doing to him.

      He spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon in one of the sheds, attacking logs they didn’t need, in an effort to rid himself of his mounting tension. When he returned to the house, she had the Christmas tree all decked out with her paper ornaments. Even without lights, the result was impressive.

      He admired the tree, and she thanked him. Neither of them referred to the sparks they had been rubbing off of each other since her arrival yesterday. They got through the rest of the day politely pretending that the unbearable strain between them didn’t exist.

      Their truce lasted until the next morning, when Mitch, emerging from his room, passed her door and noticed that it was ajar. He figured she was in the shower. He heard the water running behind the closed door of her bathroom. An empty glass on the bedside table told him she must have been down to the kitchen to get herself some orange juice and hadn’t bothered latching her bedroom door when she returned.

      There was something else he could see through the gap. The canvas satchel was there beside the bed. It was an invitation he was unable to resist.

      Spreading the door wide, Mitch entered the room and crossed to the bed. He hesitated before reaching for the satchel, knowing that what he was about to do amounted to snooping. But, hell, he was a PI, wasn’t he? He was supposed to investigate, especially when it was a woman with a history like Madeline Raeburn’s.

      Burying his guilt, telling himself he was entitled to know

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