One Night with Her Brooding Bodyguard Page 14

  “How are you planning on helping me with that?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her.

  It had a “Me Tarzan, you Jane” feel to it.

  Of course, she could not split wood that size. But she had grown up dealing with firewood and there was always a job for everyone and for every level of strength. She went to the heap of wood, rolled the first one down, placed it on its end, so that it was standing up, ready for him to split. And then she did another, and another.

  He realized what she was doing, and followed the trail of standing logs she was leaving him as if it was a challenge, as if he needed to keep up to her.

  * * *

  Thunk.

  Logically, Sophie knew it was the sound of the ax, swinging into those enormous rounds of wood, breaking them cleanly in two, but when she turned to look at him, her mouth went dry.

  Connal Lancaster was the pure poetry of sheer masculinity as he pitted his strength against the timber. She wondered if there was a sight more incredible than watching a strong man, who knew what he was doing, splitting wood.

  She watched him set up: legs apart, his whole body stretching upward as he lifted the ax over his head. Then, swinging, the bunching and rippling of arm and torso muscles as the blade took on the momentum of his strength, and followed its own weight down to cleave those huge rounds of wood in two as if they were matchsticks.

  The makeshift kilt left most of his upper body unclothed, and so Sophie could really see the play of muscles, the fine sheen of sweat that began to make them look oiled.

  Thunk.

  She was pretty sure that was the sound of her own heart falling. Again. And again. And again, as he moved like a machine through that wood, splitting it cleanly and with seemingly no effort.

  “I’m catching up to you,” he warned her.

  She was pretty sure he was as intensely aware of her watching as she was aware of him working. She turned from him, and upended more wood, but awareness tingled through her entire being.

  The ancient dance was taking place between them. Is that why she had washed his clothes? Is that why he seemed to be delighting in showing her his enormous strength?

  The world was supposed to be beyond all these primitive demonstrations of masculine and feminine roles.

  So why did it feel so right? And so good?

  She contemplated that thunk. Had she fallen in love with him? Possibly she had never fallen out of love with him, so more in love with him? What had Troy really been to her? A cheap substitute for this man? No wonder it had ended in bitter disappointment.

  Contemplating loving Lancaster was too frightening. Maybe, Sophie told herself, she was just in love, for the first time in a long, long time, with every single sensation involved in the process of being alive.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “I THINK WE have enough wood,” Sophie said. Lancaster split one more piece and leaned on the ax. He didn’t want to appear as grateful for her calling a stop as he was. He’d been trying to keep up with her, competition leaping up between them as naturally as breathing.

  He noticed a fine sheen of sweat had appeared over her upper lip, and in the hollow of her chest where the blouse pulled open, despite the belt, drawing his gaze. He looked quickly away to where she had been stacking that wood against the side of the cabin as fast as he could split it.

  The competition had gotten away from him. There was enough wood there for a year’s use, not two days. Somehow, he had just been enjoying it. Being together. Friendly competition, even as they worked as a team.

  All right. Enjoying her lithe, sure movements. Lancaster admired her willingness to do hard work, her laughter, her little quips, her pausing to brush the hair, falling from her braid, back from her face.

  And in those pauses, she would look at him, and he knew what he enjoyed the most: her awareness of him, the hungry way her gaze rested on his sweat-slicked muscles.

  “I like to leave things better than I found them,” he said, setting down the ax. He felt as if he had just finished a really hard workout. He felt as if he needed a shower. He felt as if he had better not say that in front of her at the moment, because she would probably figure out a way for him to clean up and it would probably involve nudity.

  “I’ll get us something to drink,” she said. “Look. There’s a swing on the porch. We can pretend we’re old.”

  The sun had come out, and it was pleasantly warm despite the fact it was fall. He sat down on the porch swing. The ice was melted from the glade, and the moment felt full and peaceful. He imagined growing old with someone at his side.

  Sophie came out balancing two glasses of water, and a box. She handed him his water, and sat beside him. The swing was small, barely built for two. Maybe for one and a half. Her leg and shoulder were touching his leg and shoulder.

  She turned her head and sniffed him. “You smell good.”

  “In what way?” he asked. How could he smell good? He needed a shower.

  She blushed ever so slightly. “You smell like a man.”

  Now that she mentioned it, she smelled good, too, the remains of some shampoo scent clinging to her hair, a sweet scent that seemed impossibly lovely after what he had just witnessed her doing.

  She smelled like a woman.

  “What is this?” she said, prying open the lid of the wooden box.

  “It’s a game that’s popular here.”

  “Are all the parts there? Can you show me how to play?”

  He tried to think when the last time he had played a game was. Maybe a boring night in the barracks, years ago?

  She was looking at him hopefully.

  Why not just play? There was nothing else that needed doing. Why not give himself over to an afternoon of frivolity?

  He remembered when Maddie had taught Edward to play cards. They still played together. Lancaster came in on them sometimes in the middle of a poker hand. Maddie cheated and Edward loved it.

  Lancaster suddenly felt a strange longing to have, even for one afternoon, what he had seen between the prince and the princess.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll show you. Let’s go in and set it up on the table.”

  As it turned out, Sophie was very quick to pick up the rules and the purpose of the game. She was also animated. And competitive. The day drifted into afternoon to the music of her laughter.

  He checked his clothes partway through the afternoon, found them dry and put them on.

  “Did you wash these?” he asked.

  She actually blushed.

  He didn’t have the heart to tell her that she hadn’t rinsed them well enough. He’d been cursed with the supersensitive skin of a redhead, and he would be breaking out in blotches in no time.

  They ate tinned haggis as the day died. Or he ate it. She nibbled tentatively, making faces.

  Without discussing it, with light fading, they did the dishes together after dinner. And then, stoking the fire with the wood they had cut together, they sat side by side on the couch.

  The conversation was so easy between them. They talked first of mutual interests. She entertained him with a few tales of Prince Ryan. He told her about his first meeting with Edward.

  “His grandfather sometimes fished with my grandfather. Not often, but sometimes. I think he longed to leave the formality of his life behind him, and liked to escape his entourage. He would show up, from time to time, unannounced. As far as I know, besides me, he is the only one my grandfather ever revealed his secret spots to.

  “I was invited one day, because the king had a lad with him. I was quite young, maybe eight or nine? And the lad was younger. I think I was aware that the king was important, but maybe not aware of how important.

  “Anyway, in my young mind whatever his importance was, it did not extend to his grandson, who was a bit too cheeky for my liking. I was doing my best to ignore him, when I
saw that he had grown bored, opened the fishing kit and was throwing the flies my grandfather had made in the drink. Now, when I think about it, it was without malice, but at the time, seeing this well-dressed young upstart entertaining himself by carelessly throwing the flies my grandfather had worked so hard on in the water, I just saw red.

  “I tackled him, and somehow we tumbled off the bank into the water. He likes to say, now, it was that day we both learned how to dive, and also the day I was introduced to my destiny. Even though it was my fault that he was in there, I managed to pull him back out before he drowned.

  “My grandfather was appalled. It’s the only time he ever cuffed my ears, but Edward’s grandfather told him to stop, and laughed. He said Edward deserved it. And then he, the king, used his net and rescued all those flies from the water, treated them with such reverence. My grandfather gave them to him and he, that man who had everything, acted as though he had been given a treasure worth more than gold.”

  “Is it your destiny, Connal? Do you think you will protect Edward and his family forever, or do you have other ambitions?”

  He glanced at her. The cabin was full dark, save for the flickering light of the fire. Sophie looked gorgeous. And she wanted to know him. And without warning, he wanted her to know him. He wanted her to know that he was a humble man, who lived simply, and whose definition of ambition would probably not match her own.

  “I know service is not a popular term in a world driven by raw ambition, but in my world, I could ask for no greater honor than to serve that family and protect them. I feel it is what I was born to do. This is my ambition—to do what has been given to me with every bit of heart that I have.”

  Rather than seeing his ambition as humble, Sophie nodded as though he had confirmed something she already knew of him. He got the feeling she did not disapprove. She asked questions that led him into telling her about his extensive training and what was involved in being a close protection specialist and head of the palace security team.

  He felt he had talked enough of himself. He was not accustomed to it and was shocked by how easy she was to talk to and how much he had revealed.

  “Tell me of your ambitions, then, lass.”

  She looked tentative. “I’ve already enjoyed enormous success, certainly beyond anything I had expected. I mean I’ve traveled the world, I’ve met celebrities, I’ve had a great job and made enormous amounts of money.”

  “I hear a but in there.”

  “Well, I’m currently unemployed.”

  “You could have a job like that again in a second if you wanted it.”

  “I think you’re probably right, so I wonder why I’m so hesitant to put my name back out there. I guess I’ve had what everyone dreams of—the big salary, the traveling, meeting so-called important people. And, I think really, that’s the question I’ve been avoiding. I had it. Why don’t I want it again?”

  The silence stretched, until finally he had to know.

  “Why don’t you, Sophie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But he knew she did know. “Tell me.”

  She cast him a look, then took a deep breath, trusted him with it. “I chaffed at the limitations of Mountain Bend when I lived there, but sometimes I long for the simplicity of that life.”

  “And yet, within a week of arriving here you told me you were bored,” he reminded her.

  “Bored was probably the wrong term. But lonely seemed too pathetic.”

  “Tell me why you don’t want to go back to work in marketing.”

  “All the glitz and glamour were fun, don’t get me wrong, but I felt emptier and emptier. My fiancé seemed to twig to that. He said to me, more than once, ‘Your heart isn’t in this thing.’ When I think about it now, maybe my heart not being in it was what made him look elsewhere.”

  “Whatever the problems in your relationship,” Connal said sternly, “there is no excuse for him handling them without honor.”

  “Thank you,” she said simply. “When Troy said my heart wasn’t in this thing, I guess I thought he meant us, but in retrospect, it was all of it. That lifestyle is a race. You run and run and run. There’s no finish line. It doesn’t leave any space for—”

  She stopped.

  “For what?” he prodded her.

  “For this. For connection.”

  “Ah. Tell me about why you said yes to that man, lass.” Was he ready to hear? He thought he was.

  “He reminded me of someone,” she whispered. “That I couldn’t have.”

  He went very still.

  “But he was different enough that the intensity was missing. And that intensity—the racing heart and the sweating palms, the thinking about a person night and day—it felt as if I couldn’t survive that again. I didn’t want to experience that kind of intensity again. The feeling of loss when it didn’t work out was like grief that didn’t go away.”

  He stayed very still.

  She was talking about him, the way she had felt about him.

  She was telling him he had broken her heart.

  “I felt you nursed illusions about me,” he said gruffly, in his own defense.

  “I’ve told myself that over and over,” she said softly. “That I was immature. That I was hopelessly infatuated. That night at the christening I told myself that I had had too much to drink.”

  “You had,” he agreed roughly.

  “It only unleashed what was already there. My heart has always recognized you, Connal.”

  He gulped.

  “None of my words, none of my rationalizing, none of my explaining it to myself have made it go away,” she confessed softly.

  “You know I have nothing to give you,” he said. Except maybe that: his absolute honesty. “I’m broken. There is no future with me, lass.”

  “What if,” she whispered softly, “we didn’t worry about the future? Or the past? What if we just took what life has given us now? And gave it every bit of heart that we have?”

  His own words were coming back to bite him.

  She was leaning toward him. And he could not resist. Not this time. With a groan of pure surrender, he tangled his hands in her hair. He pulled what remained of the braid out of her silky locks and combed it with his fingers until it hissed and curled around her head and tumbled over the roundness of her shoulders to the curve of her breast.

  There was still time to pull back. If he could just—

  Her lips found his.

  The kiss reflected everything that Sophie was. It held delicacy and strength, fragility and resilience. They had not eaten strawberries today. Nor had they had wine. And yet, to him, that was what her lips tasted of.

  Strawberries. And wine.

  And dangerously, and tantalizingly, of the one thing he refused himself.

  Hope.

  Her lips meeting his held hope.

  He reared back from it. And from her. He untangled his hands from her hair, but she caught one, and grazed her lips across it, held it to her cheek.

  “I don’t think—” he started to say, his voice a growl of pure need, but she never let him finish.

  Her finger touched his lips.

  “Perfect,” she said huskily. “Don’t think. Don’t think at all.”

  And just like that the things he was going to say, the things he should have said—I don’t think this is a good idea... I don’t think we should do this—were erased from his mind as though she were an enchantress who had waved her wand.

  His chance to pull away was gone as his heart rose toward that thing—that most dangerous thing—that it had waited silently for all these years.

  Hope. The opportunity to be alive again. The opportunity for a second chance to get right what he had gotten so very, very wrong his first time around.

  He scooped her up in his arms and took her to the bed.<
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  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IT WAS THIS and only this that she had lived her entire life for, Sophie thought, as Lancaster carried her through the dark cabin, illuminated only by the flickering fire, to the bed. He laid her down across it, tenderly and savagely at the same time. It seemed impossible those two things could exist together, but they did, and their harmony was perfect, shocking, like two flavors that are not supposed to mingle, but did, with amazing results.

  He lowered himself over her, holding some of his weight off her with a knee and an elbow. Even then, she could feel the crush of him, the lean hardness of his chest and thigh.

  He gazed at her face, and she drank in the strength of his beloved, familiar features. Then with a groan of that same savagery and tenderness, he took her lips.

  The tenderness came first, the soft exquisite exploration, the gentle invitation to open her mouth to his.

  And then came the savagery, the plundering of her mouth, the bruising of her lips, the demand that she answer him.

  And she did. She answered him with a fury of violent softness, asking, giving, demanding, taking.

  This was what she had longed to feel. This was what her heart had known the minute the plane had landed and she had set sight on him again.

  That he and he alone could make her feel this way.

  Helpless and powerful.

  Strong and weak.

  She traced the ridges of those braced muscles of his forearms with her fingertips. She felt giddy with the possession of him. Somehow, she managed to get her trembling hands free of the crush of his body, somehow she managed to squeeze her hands between them and find the buttons of his shirt.

  She put her hands on both sides, and tore it open with a strength that was shocking and fabulous.

  She flattened the palms of her hands against his chest, as he plundered her mouth. Her ears. Her eyelids. Her neck. Her mouth again.

  “I need...” she whispered, then lost her voice, not knowing how to express the enormity of the need.