LITMIR.BIZ

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look, without even a touch, she was chained again, shackled to him with a wanting she couldn’t conquer or deny. It had nothing to do with his looks, though he was so beautiful to look at he almost blinded her. Tall and strong, with deep, fathomless chocolate eyes, dark-olive skin and careless black curls. Though Mitch knew none of his forefathers, they must have been a big, bronzed race. He was so tall he dwarfed most men, big built and tightly muscled. From the first moment she’d seen him working their neighbor’s farm seventeen years before, he’d robbed her of breath with his stormy male beauty. From the moment they’d met, he’d haunted her with the shadows of unspoken secrets in his eyes, half-shuttered windows to a turbulent soul.

      Boy to girl, man to woman, nothing changed. Even now, after half a lifetime apart, he still took her breath away, still made her hunger for more. Always haunting her, even long after he was gone: invisible whispers to her soul by day, her restless warrior walking with her by night in the dark grace of sensual dreams unending and unfulfilled.

      And now he was here. Achingly familiar yet so long gone. Almost within reach, yet so far away; too much and never enough. And still she ached for him.

      He spoke again, his voice warm with laughter. “You can’t be that shocked to see me. You knew I’d come. Don’t you have any words of welcome for me?”

      She gulped a second time and forced her frozen vocal cords to work. “Yeah—you took your sweet time getting home, McCluskey. That must’ve been some mission the Air Force gave you to keep you away twelve years.” She pushed her hat back, squinting up at him in the heat of the late-summer sun. He was smiling down at her. The affection in his eyes warmed and yet hurt her somewhere deep inside, for he was still closed off from her, by just being Mitch. Mitch, the dark, dreaming rebel, whom she’d always known would have so much more to his life than this sleepy little west-of-the-mountains backwater had to give…far more than a plain farmer’s daughter had inside her to give. But, oh, it never stopped her dreams….

      She’d dreamed of seeing him again, hungered for him through the long, burning years of a loneliness born of never being alone—the internal isolation that so many people filled with the faces of strangers. She’d never been able to do it, aching for one face only; yet now that he was here at last, she wanted him to go. Go and leave her in peace, without the tumultuous upheaval in her heart and soul caused by just knowing he stood near her.

      “Sorry, Liss—the brass sent me out again right after East Timor. I gave notice as soon as I could. I’m on three months’ leave at the moment until I set myself up in a business. I figured Matt and Luke would need me full-time for a while.”

      Just his voice, lush like rumpled dark silk, filled her with daydreams of sensuous hot nights in satin sheets—dreams she could never fulfil in real life. Which was why she always let the kids answer the phone Sunday nights when he would call from East Timor to talk to them. And when he asked to speak to her, she’d keep it to a minimum. Just talking brought to life desires and needs she’d fought long and hard to banish.

      He held out a hand to her. She allowed him to lift her to her feet, feeling somehow small and feminine in her dirty paint-marked shorts and tank top. Even through her gardening glove she could feel the heat burning inside him that he always kept guarded from her. Just one touch and she trembled. Her pulse pounded so hard she could feel her throat quiver…and for the first time in twelve years she remembered she was a woman. “I see you’ve still got your patch of earth to till, Farmer Annie.”

      She grinned at him from beneath the shade of her hat, trying for normality. “Can you imagine me without it?”

      “Nope. Never. Through the years, when I’ve imagined meeting you again, it was always out here. It was where we always got together—your land or Old Man Taggart’s, didn’t matter. It was our place, and it was us.” The gentle smile softened his strong, masculine face, sending warm shivers down her spine. “It’s been a long time, Lissa. Too long.”

      “Twelve years.”

      “You barely look any older. And the farm…” He looked around the Miller family’s side of the fence, its drenched greenness dreaming in the soft silver haze of a warm February sun. “It’s like time froze here. It’s all the same. Serene and beautiful.”

      “Changes happen everywhere, Mitch.” She pulled off her dirt-encrusted gardening gloves, checking her hands to make sure they weren’t shaking. “Even in sleepy little towns like Breckerville it happens—like under a microscope, beneath the surface where you can’t see it…”

      Stop babbling, Lissa.

      He smiled at her in tender reassurance, as if sensing her internal monologue. “Some things have changed if Lissa Miller doesn’t give a friend a hug.”

      “It’s Carroll now, remember?” she whispered, knowing he didn’t need the reminder but needing to give it. Needing to recall the reasons why she shouldn’t touch him, start up the old merry-go-round of anguished yearnings and unrequited love.

      “You’ll always be Lissa Miller to me.” With a small, tilted smile and darkened eyes, he opened his arms to her. “Come here.”

      Aching, terrified—unable to resist, or deny him—she walked into his arms.

      He held her close, just as he did years ago, in the days of their innocence, resting his chin on her hair. “It’s been so long since I held you. Too long. I never stopped missing you, Lissa.”

      She held him close against her, filled with warmth and beauty and long-forbidden desire, just from his holding her. Loving it and hating it. Needing to push him away, yet never wanting to let go. Wanting more. Always wanting more when it came to Mitch. Loving him too much, wanting him too much, knowing it had never been that way for him. Dreams and fantasies of pushing her hands beneath his shirt, finding that glorious summer-heated maleness beneath— “You could have come to visit,” she whispered.

      “You know why I didn’t.”

      The scene at her wedding.

      She suppressed a shudder. Tim Carroll, her brand-new husband, in the grip of the sudden and shocking aggression that comes from being roaring drunk for the first time. Throwing Mitch, his best man and longtime closest friend, out of the reception hall and out of their lives. Okay, so Mitch had been a little drunk, too. More than a little. So he’d watched her every move that night, in a tense, brooding stance that made her shiver…but not with fear. And so what if he’d chosen to speak about the beautiful bride instead of the bridesmaids, and how much he loved her? It was no secret how close Mitch was to the girl next door who’d married his best friend. It was anyone’s guess why Tim suddenly got to his feet in the middle of the speech and threw Mitch out.

      Everyone knew Mitch’s story: the bounced foster kid taken in by a dour, old, widowed farmer, who only tolerated him for manual labor. Mitch never had any family of his own, no one to love him or care for him until he’d come to Breckerville. Which was why Tim’s act, in the middle of his own wedding, in front of all their friends, seemed so cruel and inexplicable. The mystery of Mitch McCluskey’s dramatic and permanent exit from town was still an occasional topic for speculation and gossip.

      As was Tim’s less flamboyant exit from town. Less visual, but no less dramatic.

      Lissa wished she didn’t know the reason for Tim’s lashing out at his best friend. And she’d never tell Mitch—not about the wedding nor about why Tim left her. How could she tell him that Tim, her husband— No, it was impossible.

      Just as anything but friendship between them was impossible, now and forever. If she’d ever worked up the courage to tell him how she’d felt before she married Tim…but marriage to Tim had changed everything—her innocence, her belief in love…her belief in herself. It was all gone.

      “How are the boys?” Mitch asked now, as if he knew she wanted the subject changed.

      She relaxed against him, then pulled away. Don’t think. Don’t feel. “They’re wonderful. They turned nine a month ago.”

      “I wish I’d been here.”

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