LITMIR.BIZ

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favorite tune. The bathroom was steamy, despite the wide open window, but he had a theory that steam greatly improved acoustics.

      “Annabel was a cow of unusual bovine beauty…”

      He held the note at the end until it was wrenching, like the song of the coyotes that haunted the shrub and willow-filled gullies west of his place. Sometimes, like now in the early summer, when he finished that final gut-twisting note, drawing out “beauteeeeeee” endlessly, the coyotes even answered him.

      So, he paused now to see if that would be the case.

      Every window in his small house was open, letting the cool early evening air chase out the unusual heat of the day. His engine repair shop and house sat on the edge of town, just far enough out of Dancer, North Dakota, so that only the coyotes could hear him when he got in one of these I-gotta-sing moods.

      But it wasn’t the voices of coyotes he heard in the sudden void left by the absence of his voice. He heard a determined knocking on his front door.

      He frowned, considering this breach of his privacy. He considered not answering the door. No one knew he sang. No one. Except once, a long time ago, in a moment of pure madness, he had sung a love song.

      Don’t go there, he told himself.

      Though he tried to outwait it, the knocking continued on the front door.

      J.D. turned off the shower and grabbed a towel. How could a person go from being so happy, to this in the blink of an eye?

      Whether he was mad about remembering the love song, or mad because he had been caught singing, or mad because his intruder didn’t have the good sense to go away, J.D. was just plain mad as he stomped across his bedroom, towel around his waist, dripping water on his carpets. Who the hell would dare to encroach on his most private moment?

      Probably his pal Stan, the town’s other bachelor and the only other charter member of the Ain’t Gettin’ Married, No Way, Never Club—known by its initials A.G.M.N.W.N.C.—who dropped by in the evenings, sometimes, with a couple of beers. They’d spend the evening out in the shop tinkering on some old car. If it was Stan, it would be all over Dancer by tomorrow afternoon that J. D. Turner sang about cows in the shower.

      Maybe that wouldn’t be big news in most places, but Dancer was a little short on news, big or small. The most inconsequential snippets of private information could tear through the town’s eight-block radius like wildfire.

      J.D. had the lousy feeling he was going to be listening to cow jokes for a long, long time.

      And, of course, if he asked Stan not to say anything, that would only make it worse.

      On the other hand, if it was Stan, he could tell him about the progress he’d made on the Mustang today. Would that be enough to wipe serenades to bovines right out of Stan’s head? Slightly cheered by the possibility he yanked open the door to his bedroom and marched into the hall.

      Expecting Stan, J.D. skidded to a halt in the darkness of his hallway, and stared at the shapely silhouette framed in the last rays from a fading sun that spilled in the round oval screen of his outside front door.

      She had turned away from the door, and was looking over the overgrown lilac hedge toward town, hugging herself against the little nip in the prairie breeze. She was wearing a pencil-line skirt that might have looked businesslike, if it hadn’t been her. On her, that skirt hugged the seductive swell of hip and buttocks, showed off the long, sensuous line of her legs.

      Oh yes. Even though her back was to him, he knew who it was.

      Her blond hair shimmered in the last of the day’s light. It looked like it was in a bun, but some strands had broken free, and the breeze played with them, and they tickled and swayed on the slender column of her neck.

      For a moment his mouth went dry, and he remembered the man he had been once, a long, long time ago, when he had sung a woman a love song.

      He reminded himself, sharply, he was not that man any longer. He knotted the towel firmly around his waist, and strode down the hall.

      Every step increased his fury.

      Five years. Not so much as a goodbye. No letter. No phone call. No explanation at all. And then she just reappears in his life?

      His plan was to slam the door, and lock it. He’d been bewitched by Elana Smith once and that was more than enough.

      And so he was shocked when his fury propelled him past the interior door, right out the screen door, and onto the porch.

      He was appalled when his anger spiked, overriding everything in him that was reasonable. He took the slenderness of her shoulder in his hand, and spun her around, and without fully registering the shock on her face, he pulled her hard into him, and kissed her.

      It was not a hello kind of kiss.

      It was a punishing kiss. Savage. It held the bitter sting of love betrayed, the hurt of five years of asking why. And it held the power of a man who been severely wounded on the battlefield of love, but who had survived, and let those festering wounds make him stronger, harder, colder than he ever had been before.

      She was shoving against him, frantically, trying to escape his hold, his lips. He felt momentary satisfaction that her strength was so puny compared to his.

      But then it registered, somewhere, peripherally, that something was wrong. Elana trying to escape his lips? She would have delighted in the savagery. She would have given back as good as she got. She probably would have drawn blood by now.

      As he was arriving at these conclusions, he felt the woman surrender beneath the punishing onslaught of his lips. The struggle stopped.

      He was contemplating this development, letting the doubt take hold where certainty had been, when she yanked free of him, and belted him up the side of his head with a purse that felt like it had a brick in it.

      He staggered back from her and regarded her with narrowed eyes.

      He felt as if he’d been hit with more than a brick as he studied the exquisite face that looked back at him.

      “How dare you!” she sputtered angrily, glaring at him, and then began wiping away at the front of her blouse, which was wet from his shower-damp skin, as if she could erase his touch from herself.

      Oh, it was Elana’s face, all right. Heart-shaped, exquisitely feminine, vaguely exotic. How well he remembered those lines—the incredible cheekbones, the pert nose, the faintly pointed chin.

      But the how dare you in that clipped, tight tone was not Elana. The woman in front of him simply was not Elana.

      Underneath the sooty sweep of thick lashes, he realized the eyes were a shade different. Elana’s had been blue. These eyes were indigo, like the center of a violet-colored pansy.

      Of course, with contact lenses, anything could happen, and he studied the woman more intently.

      The anger and fear in her lovely eyes were real. And right behind them was softness. The same softness he had felt in those lips.

      Not, on closer study, Elana’s mouth either. Hers had been wide and sensual. This woman’s mouth was small, her lips little bows, puffy from being so thoroughly kissed.

      He swore under his breath. He’d just kissed the living daylights out of a perfect stranger who had the bad luck to show up as he was remembering that he had once sung a love song. He crossed his arms over his naked chest.

      It was obvious to him that she didn’t like that he was only wearing a towel. She didn’t like it one little bit. She was studying her blouse as though she expected daffodils to bloom from the bosom.

      “You’ve ruined my blouse,” she said, finally, her voice stiff with control. “It’s silk.”

      “Yeah. I figured.”

      She gave him a look that said she didn’t think he would know the first thing about silk, so of course he felt prodded to deepen the great first impression

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