True Love at Silver Creek Ranch(4)

Tearing open an antiseptic towelette, she leaned toward him, feeling almost nervous. Nervous? she thought in surprise. She worked what most would call a man’s job and dealt with men all day. What was her problem? She got a whiff of smoke from his clothes, but his face was scrubbed clean of it. She tilted his head, her fingers touching his whisker-rough square chin, marked with a deep cleft in the center. His eyes studied her, and she was so close she could see golden flecks deep inside the brown. She stared into them, and he stared back, and in that moment, she felt a rush of heat and embarrassment all rolled together. Hoping he hadn’t noticed, she began to dab at his wound, feeling him tense with the sting of the antiseptic.

Damn it all, what was wrong with her? She hadn’t been attracted to him in high school—he’d been an idiot, as far as she was concerned. She’d been focused on her family ranch and barrel racing and was not the kind of girl who would lavish all her attention on a boy, as he seemed to require. Brooke always felt that she had her own life to live and didn’t need a boyfriend as some kind of status symbol.

But ten years later, Adam returned as an ex-Marine who saved her horses, a man with a square-cut face, faint lines fanning out from his eyes as if he’d squinted under desert suns, and she was turning into a schoolgirl all over again.

Adam stared into Brooke Thalberg’s face as she bent over him, not bothering to hide his powerful curiosity. He remembered her, of course—who wouldn’t? She was as tall as many guys and probably as strong, too, from all the hard work on her family ranch.

A brave woman, he admitted, remembering her fearlessness running into the fire, her concern for the horses more than herself. Now her hazel eyes stared at his face intently, their mix of browns and greens vivid and changeable. She turned away to search the med kit, and his gaze lingered on her slim back, covered in a checked Western shirt that was tucked into her belt. Her long braid tumbled down her back, almost to the sway of her jeans-clad hips. It’s not like he hadn’t seen a woman before. And this woman had been a pest through his childhood, too smart for her own good—seeing into his troubled life the things he’d tried to keep hidden—too confident in her own talent. She had a family who believed in her, and that gave a kid a special kind of confidence. He hadn’t had that sort of family, so he recognized it when he saw it.

He wondered if she’d changed at all—he certainly had. After discovering his own confidence, he’d built a place and a name for himself in the Marines. His overconfidence had destroyed that, leaving him in a fog of uncertainty that had been hovering around him for half a year now.

Kind of like being in a barn fire, he guessed, feeling your way around, wondering if you were ever going to get out again. He still didn’t know.

After using butterfly bandages to keep the wound closed, Brooke taped a small square of gauze to his face, then straightened, hands on her hips, to judge her handiwork. “You might need stitches if you want to avoid a scar.”

He shrugged. “Got enough of those. One more won’t hurt.”

He rose slowly to his feet, feeling the stiffness in his leg that never quite went away. The docs had got most of the shrapnel out, but not quite all of it. The exertion of the fire had irritated the old wound, but that would ease with time. He was used to it by now, and the reminder that he was alive was more than he deserved, when there were so many men beneath the ground.

After closing the kit, Brooke turned back to face him, tilting her head to look up. They stared at each other a moment, too close, almost too intimate alone there. Drops of water still sparkled in her dark lashes, and her skin was fresh-scrubbed and free of makeup. She looked prettier than he remembered, a woman instead of the skinny girl.

Adam was surprised at the sensations her nearness inspired in him, this awareness of her as a woman, when back in high school she’d barely registered as that to him. He’d dated party girls and cheerleaders—including her best friend, Monica Shaw—not cowgirls. Now she held herself so tall and easily, with a confidence born of hard work and years of testing her body to the limits.

She cleared her throat, and her gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth, then his shirtfront. “You have a limp,” she said. “Did one of the horses kick you?”

“Had the limp on and off for a while. Nothing new.”

She nodded, then stepped past him to return the med kit to the bathroom. When she came back out, she was wearing a fixed, polite smile, which, to his surprise, amused him. Not much amused him anymore.

“I’m glad you’re not hurt bad,” she said. “You did me—us—a big favor, and I can’t thank you enough for helping rescue the horses. How’d you see the fire?”