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What if she used these altered circumstances to make the best of it? What if she made the best of it by giving him an unexpected gift? What if she overcame her own hurt, the unfairness of her own life, and gave this stranger a gift?
A humble gift. A decorated tree.
Wasn’t that really what Christmas was all about? When she had left the safety of her old world behind her this morning, she hadn’t been running away from something, as he had guessed.
No, she hoped she was running toward something. Hadn’t she hoped she was moving toward something she had lost? Some truth about who she really was? Or maybe about who she wanted to be? About the kind of life she wanted to give her baby?
She did not want to be so wrapped up in her own grievances she could not be moved by the absolute aloneness of another human being.
She took a deep breath.
“Okay,” she said, “I guess I could stay. Just for the night.”
He turned and looked at her, one eyebrow lifted, as if amused she thought she had a choice.
“In the morning,” he said with the annoying and quiet confidence of a man who was accustomed to being deferred to, “I’ll see that you get where you’re going.”
I’ll look after you.
Maybe it was the fury of the storm that made that seem attractive. Or maybe, Amy thought, she had an inherent weakness in her character that made her want to be looked after!
“I can clearly see it makes sense to avoid going out in the storm tonight, but no thank you to your offer to show me the way in the morning. I am quite capable of looking after myself.”
The wind gusted so strongly that it rattled the glass of the window, hurled snow against it. Nature, in its unpredictable wrath, was reminding her that some things were going to be out of her control.
But not, she reminded herself, how she handled those things. And so she would be a better person and finish decorating this tree, her gift to a stranger, before she left here tomorrow and never looked back. It would not matter to her if he didn’t show appreciation.
Somewhere in his heart he would feel the warmth of the tree and the gesture, and be moved by it.
She slid him another glance, and saw the man was dead on his feet. And that he was soaked from the top of his dripping cowboy hat to his wet socks. He hadn’t driven up in a vehicle.
“You were out in that,” she said, and was ashamed by how thoroughly she had made it all about her.
He glanced at her and seemed to find her concern amusing. “That’s my world,” he said with a touch of wryness. “Besides, it wasn’t that bad then.”
“You’re starving,” she guessed. “And frozen.”
He said nothing, a man accustomed to discomfort, to pitting his strength against whatever the world brought him, and expecting to win. Ty Halliday was obviously a man entirely used to looking after himself.
So, since she was stuck here anyway, she would make the best of it, and this would become part of her gift to him.
“I’ve got a chicken potpie in the oven. I’ll make a salad while you go shower. Everything should be ready in twenty minutes.”
Her take-charge tone of voice was probably spoiled somewhat by the fire she felt creep up her cheeks after she mentioned the shower.
The very thought of him in the shower, steam rising off a body that she could tell was hard-muscled and powerful, made something hot and sweet and wildly uncomfortable unfold inside of her.
He regarded her for a moment too long. She suspected he wanted to refuse even this tiniest offer to enter his world. But then he sniffed the air like a hungry wolf and surrendered to the fact she was already in his world. He turned away.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “It smells good.”
She could tell it was not easy for him to accept her offer, but obviously, like her, he knew he had to just try and make the best of an awkward situation.
He went by her, and his scent overrode that of the potpie in the oven. He smelled of wet oilskin, wild horses, pure man, and his aroma enveloped her. And then he was gone. Amy waited until she heard a door down the hallway snap shut before she went and sank down on her knees beside her baby. She was aware her knees were trembling.
The wrong house?
Her clothes, her partially unpacked suitcase, were spread out on Ty Halliday’s bed!
It all seemed as if it might be a terrible omen. She had set out on the road this morning to a brand-new life.
She had not listened to the objections of her family or her in-laws.
She was done with the stuffiness of it all. She was done with being stifled. Lectured. Patronized.
This morning, she had felt joy unfurl in her for the first time in a long time. Amy had followed her heart instead of her head.
But where had it led her?
Amy tried to still the trembling of her knees and her heart by picking up Jamey and settling him on her lap.
“Papa?” he asked, a plaintive whisper, his eyes glued to the place where Ty Halliday had disappeared down the hallway.
“No, sweetie, not Papa.” There was no sense telling Jamey, yet again, there was no papa. In all his nearly a year of wisdom, even though his father had been gone for longer than he had been in Jamey’s life, Jamey had become determined to have what his little pals at play school had—a daddy.
“Papa,” Jamey insisted, leaning back into her and putting his thumb in his mouth.
Amy heard the shower turn on in another part of the house and was horrified to feel a heated blush move up her cheeks.
Good grief! She had set out this morning on a mission. To find herself. Her real self. Who she was genuinely meant to be.
She could not let the first obstacle—no matter that he was large and intimidating—make her feel as if she was on the wrong road!
She had to act the part of the confident woman she was determined to become. That woman ran her own business and her own house and was not always flinching from put-downs.
Amy refused to go any further down that road, feeling guilty as always, for acknowledging she might not have been completely satisfied with the life her husband had given her.
Out loud, quietly, she said, “I will not be a schoolgirl who blushes at the thought of a man in the shower.”
But, of course, the man in that shower was not any man.
Could anything prepare a woman for the kind of raw magnetism Ty Halliday radiated?
Could anything prepare a woman for a man who moved with such unconscious grace, as fluid as water, so at home with his own power? Could anything prepare a woman for that kind of pure masculine energy, the kind that felt like a force field around him, sizzling, faintly but alluringly dangerous?
Could anything prepare a woman for the strength that radiated out from under the brim of that soaked hat, from underneath that wet slicker like a palpable force?
The answer was no.
But she reminded herself firmly of her mission.
Tomorrow she would be back on the right road. Tonight she would decorate that tree as her gift to a stranger. She would cook him a hot meal. That was it.
Tomorrow her quest would resume. She was on a journey. She was determined to find out who she really was, and what really mattered. She had lost sight of both things since her marriage.
And Ty Halliday was just an uncomfortable—and brief—detour from that quest. Amy put down her baby and went to rummage through Ty’s ill-equipped kitchen.
Amy made a vow. She resolved not to let his shocking appeal alter her focus. She put Jamey on his blanket surrounded by his toys and checked the chicken potpie she’d put in the oven earlier for their supper.
She frowned. The pie was not cooking properly, and she suspected the oven was not producing the correct heat for the temperature it was set at. She turned it up, and the oven made a protesting noise. The oven seemed decidedly cranky.
“Just like its owner,” she muttered.
“Papa,” Jamey supplied.
“Precisely.” And then she realized she could not start agreeing, even casually, with Jamey labeling Ty as his papa.
“Don’t call him that, sweetie. He’s not your papa.”
“Umpa?”
“No, not your grandpa, either. Call him—” The oven made another noise, and she went and opened the door and peered in. The burner was red-hot and making a hissing sound.
“Oh, damn,” she said, and turned it back down.
“Odam,” Jamey repeated.
“Sure,” she said distractedly, “call him that.”
The oven looked after, and papa renamed something Jamey could pronounce, Amy turned to the salad.
In every place in the world where her family had moved to, Amy, to her career-oriented mother’s bewilderment, had always found sanctuary in the kitchen. She loved to cook.
As she was ripping and washing lettuce, she heard the water shut off in the bathroom and had a renegade thought about naked wet skin and steam.
And then, as if her thoughts were too hot to handle, the smoke alarm started to shriek.
She turned from the sink to see smoke was roiling out of the oven.
Jamey, startled, began to wail along with the smoke alarm.
Amy donned the red oven mitt with the hole burned right through it, and opened the oven door a crack. Just as she had suspected, the potpie had boiled over onto the burner.
She shut the oven off and slammed the door. She opened the kitchen window, and picked up her howling baby.
“Hey. Hey, little man, it’s okay.”
But it wasn’t. Because just then, through the haze of smoke that filled the kitchen, Ty appeared.
Ty scanned the room, every muscle taut. Amy could have sworn he was prepared to lay down his life for her and Jamey, two near strangers. A strange emotion clawed at her throat.
Then, when Ty saw there was no emergency, he stood down. Instantly. He went from ready to relaxed in a second, though a certain level of annoyance marred his altogether too handsome features.
But while Ty relaxed, Amy felt as if her nerve endings were singing with tension. It wasn’t just that he had been prepared to lay down his life for them, either.
No, Ty Halliday was nearly naked, clad only in boxer shorts.
And if the smoke alarm had not been going off before, it certainly would have started now. Because Ty Halliday was nearly naked. Even his feet were sexy!
He was everything she had imagined he would be, only about a hundred times off the scale of where her imagination went to.
His dark slashing eyebrows, the dark shadow of whiskers on his face, had made her think his hair would be dark under the cowboy hat he had worn.
But he was blond, his wet hair the color of antique pieces of gold in a just opened treasure chest.
But the astonishing color of his hair held her attention for only a millisecond. He was lean and strong and his skin was flawless. His arms, corded with muscles of honed steel, were deeply tanned, a color that didn’t go away, apparently, even in these long days of winter. His legs were equally powerful-looking: long, straight, made to curve around a horse, or a bucking bull, or…
She couldn’t go there. Instead, she let her hungry gaze go to his chest, deep and smooth. His shoulders were impossibly broad and his stomach a perfect washboard of rippling, hard muscle. Ty was just way too hot to handle, and as the smoke detector continued to shriek, Amy was aware her own five-alarm fire had started going off deep inside of her.
She dared look at the boxers. Her mouth fell open.
Ty Halliday was wearing bright red boxer shorts, low, snugged over his flat hips and the taut lines of his lower belly. And what were his red boxer shorts covered with?
Santa, his sleigh and twelve reindeer. She presumed twelve reindeer, because she really shouldn’t count.
She didn’t want to appear too interested, but she could not draw her eyes away until she had read the words that were also dancing across the shorts.
Have you been naughty or nice?
For the second time that day, she started to laugh. She laughed so hard the tears squirted from her eyes.
Or maybe that was the smoke.
Ty folded those gorgeous muscled arms over an equally gorgeous muscled chest, planted his long, muscled legs far apart.
If it weren’t for the shorts, he would definitely have the intimidating presence she was fairly certain he was aiming for.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” he yelled over the screaming alarm, the baby howling and her laughter.
“You don’t?” she gasped.
“No, I don’t,” he said sternly.
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