“Don’t bother to help. Really. I’ve got it,” she snarled as she rolled the monstrosity of a suitcase down the wood-floored hallway. The noise she made was loud enough to wake the dead. Rill leaned against the counter, silently fuming as she opened door after door in the downstairs hallway, knowing full well the only other bed in the house was upstairs. When she’d opened up the last door, and he heard the suitcase clacking down the length of the hallway, he cursed under his breath and charged after her.
She said nothing when he grabbed the suitcase and stomped up the stairs. It was hot and sticky in the dormer bedroom, so he flipped on the window-unit air conditioner before he tossed Katie’s suitcase onto the bed. It bounced up six inches before it settled.
“The shower up here doesn’t work. You’ll have to use the downstairs bathroom.”
He’d been hyperaware of the sounds of her moving around the house since that moment of rude welcome. Her presence there bothered him more than Everett’s visit several months ago, and he’d been perturbed enough by Everett being in Vulture’s Canyon.
For some reason, he kept matching up the image of Katie in his mind to the sounds in the house. He saw the bounce of her long, lush curls when he heard her quick step on the stairs; he imagined the scowl on her face when she walked into the bathroom and noticed the state of it.
In the silence that followed, he clearly pictured her unbuttoning her jeans and peeling off tight denim to expose the juicy, succulent flesh of her hips and ass.
When he’d realized the direction of his thoughts—when he recognized he’d trained an ear down the hallway, eager for more cues of what she was doing in the privacy of the bathroom—Rill grabbed a bottle of cold water from the fridge and stomped out the back door.
He really was turning into a degenerate.
An hour later, he felt more than a twinge of guilt when he recalled how pale her face had been when she’d followed him upstairs to that hot dormer bedroom. It was Katie, for Christ’s sake; sweet, generous, brave Katie, whose inner flame had always drawn him. She may have been completely misguided by thinking she should come to Vulture’s Canyon to save him, but her heart was in the right place.
Katie’s heart was always in the right place.
He ran down the hill to the market in Vulture’s Canyon while she napped. They didn’t have much at the Dyer Creek Trading Company, but there was enough to get by in a pinch. He figured he should at least feed the girl after she’d rested and before he politely sent her on her way.
While he was placing pasta, pasta sauce, rice, fresh-baked bread and cereal in the pantry, he noticed his whiskey supply was gone.
His regret over the way he’d treated Katie earlier dissipated in an instant.
He’d thundered halfway up the stairs, ready to haul Katie’s butt out of bed and give her a piece of his mind, when it suddenly struck him what he was doing. He pulled up short and plunged back down the stairs. His shirt fell to the kitchen floor. He shucked off his socks and hiking boots at the foot of the back stairs. His jeans were left in the grass about halfway through the backyard.
The water in Dyer Creek was probably at its warmest temperature of the year, but it was still cold enough to make him grit his teeth when it came up around his balls and then his belly.
His head went in next, and damn if it just wasn’t what he needed. He kept his head underwater until the incendiary fantasy of strangling a good friend because she’d gate-crashed his solitude and bogarted his whiskey slowly receded. When he pulled his head out of the cold, clear water, he heard a loud shriek and a choking noise.
“What the hell’aw you doing?” he bawled.
Katie paused, thigh deep in the water, and spit a tendril of hair out of her mouth, her green eyes wide in disbelief at his question. “What does it look like I’m doing?” she yelled at the same time she winced and yanked up a foot, nearly losing her balance. The rocks may well be smooth in the creek bottom, but they were plentiful. “I’m trying to save a crazy man from drowning himself! Rill?” she asked, staring at him like he truly was the lunatic she’d accused him of being.
Rill blinked, realizing too late he’d been gawking at her breasts through the thin fabric of the tank top she wore.
He wouldn’t have been a guy if he hadn’t noticed before that Katie possessed beautiful breasts, large in relation to her compact body, but high and firm. It’d never shamed him before to consider Katie attractive, because he knew admiration was as far as his attentions wo
uld ever go. He knew that because he’d set a firm limit on himself, and when it came to sex, Rill was steadfast in his selfimposed limitations.
It was one of his only true virtues.
First, Katie’d been Everett’s little sister, and decent guys were careful about respecting that sacred domain. Then she’d been Eden’s best friend.
Besides, Katie wasn’t his type. She was a force of nature: a whirlwind, a golden beach that stretched for an eternity, a gypsyspirit in designer jeans.
She looked downright indecent standing there in all her splendor, a majority of that pale gold skin exposed to the sunlight, her hair falling in wild curls. His hands prickled with a need to grasp that glorious mess, to tangle his fingers in it. Her breasts heaved, her nipples clearly outlined against nearly nonexistent fabric.
Rill experienced a potent surge of lust followed by a pang of shame. The shame wasn’t enough to block out a desire to pick Katie up, lay her on the banks of the creek, strip her bare and consume her with the hunger of a wolf who hadn’t fed in months.
His lurching cock tugged at his conscience. God. He’d thought he’d successfully quieted the animal inside him, but apparently all he’d done was strengthen it with his abstinence. Lust tore through his veins like a potent drug.
“Go inside, Katie.”
She blinked. Even to his own ears, his low command had sounded ominous. She opened her mouth, just like he knew she would. Katie couldn’t keep her mouth shut if a torpedo streaked straight toward her head. He stepped toward her.
“Inside.”