“I’m better-looking than Nate?”
“Yes.” Her jaw was still clenched, and she hated that he was enjoying himself so very much.
“What about Tally?”
“Tally has horns and a forked tail.”
“I’d better look.”
“Look at what?” s
he snapped, and made the mistake of glancing at him. He was better-looking than her first sight told her he was. She turned back to the river. “No! Don’t tell me. You mean to look to see if you have a tail. For your information, I’ve seen your bare behind, and it’s completely ordinary.”
“Is it?” There was laughter just under his voice.
“Stop laughing at me!”
“Sorry, lass, but this is the best conversation I’ve ever had in my life. When I was nine and a boy told me how babies were made, I liked that conversation, but this time is better.”
“Well, I don’t like it! I feel like . . . like Eve in the Garden of Eden.”
“You mean you feel naked?”
“No! I mean that I can now see the truth. I thought you were older. I thought maybe you were Uncle T.C.’s age.”
“I’m the son of his friend.”
“I can see that now, but forgive me if I got a little mixed up. What with people shooting at me when I met you, and being near a murderer, my thoughts were a tad bit confused.”
The laughter left Alex’s voice and he moved closer to her, but he didn’t touch her. “Lass, you must have known that I wasn’t old. An old man can’t . . .”
“Can’t what?” She spun around to glare at him and blinked at the sight of his beautiful face. “Forgive me for not having your experience in seeing the naked bodies of so many men that I can compare them. Or your experience with the abilities of old men versus young men as lovers. I—”
“What about Eli?” he asked, his face solemn.
Cay didn’t smile. “I hate you.” She turned away from him, her body still held rigidly.
“Do you?”
“Yes! And stop looking at me like that.”
“Since you won’t look at me, how can you know how I’m looking at you?”
“I can feel it. You’re looking at me in the same way that Ethan looks at girls.”
“I am honored by the comparison.”
“My brother is a good person. You, Alexander Lachlan McDowell, are not.” Without another glance at him, she went back to the campsite.
Twenty-one
When Alex was fourteen, he had lusted after a girl who lived a few miles from them, but she wouldn’t so much as look at him. One day he’d hidden in the bushes and jumped out at her. When she still would have nothing to do with him, he’d asked her why not. She told him that he was too pretty, that he’d never be faithful to a woman, so she wanted nothing to do with him. Despondent and angry at the unfairness of her accusation, Alex had gone home to his father and told him everything. Mac listened in sympathy, then said that women had ways of hurting a man that were worse than anything a sword or a pistol could do. At the time, Alex had thought that was absurd, but in the last three days with Cay, he’d found out what his father had been talking about.
For days now, Cay hadn’t spoken to Alex or touched him. The day that he’d shaved, Alex had been sent away to hunt, so he hadn’t seen Cay until that evening. While he’d been following deer trail through the thick vegetation on the shore, half running the whole way so he’d get to where the boat docked as early as possible, he’d planned what he’d say to her. He imagined conversations, all of them ending with Cay’s falling into his arms and “forgiving” him for being handsome. The thought of what their argument was about always made him smile.
Sometimes his imagined conversations were angry. He thought of telling her how unfair and unjust what she’d said to him was. She would then agree with him and run to him.
Other times he thought of apologizing to her, saying he was sorry for not having revealed to her . . . And that’s where he got stumped. What was he sorry about? When they were in old man Yates’s barn, should he have told her that, by the way, under his mess of itchy hair he wasn’t ugly? Or should he have told her when they were dancing in the store they’d broken into? Or on the night they first made love?