His concern for the baby’s well-being was somewhat reassuring. Storm held the baby at arms’ length. He. His lashes were thick and sooty as a chimney brush. He waved his chubby arms and legs at her and gurgled. He was wearing plain blue terry-cloth pajamas with feet in them. He seemed content, like a baby who could wait while she saw to a man bleeding all over her furnishings, humble as they might be. She considered where to set him. The counter or tabletop seemed like a good idea, but given his roly-poly build he might roll off like a live beach ball. Instead she plopped him down on his padded fanny on the floor.
He flopped forward at the waist and grabbed at a dust mote.
“Does he crawl?” she asked dubiously.
The man gave the baby a measuring look. “No.”
But Storm felt he was guessing. He didn’t know if the baby crawled. She had the awful feeling he didn’t know much more about that baby than she did.
Well, maybe a little more. He knew the baby was male.
The baby captured the dust mote and after trying to put it in his ear and his eye, he finally managed to cram his prize into his mouth.
Storm leaped forward and dug it out. The baby chomped happily on her fingers with his toothless gums. It should have been utterly disgusting, but for some reason it wasn’t so bad. Casting one more look at the man at the table, she went and scooped her bedroll off one of the bunks, unrolled it and put the baby on it. She hoped his diaper wouldn’t spring a leak on her only bedding.
The baby flopped over even further, until his nose was practically touching the sleeping bag, and then with a mighty grunt, pushed his legs out behind him, so now he was lying on his stomach. He flailed away, grunting with exertion.
Storm watched for a moment, fascinated, then turned to the man at her kitchen table.
“Take off your shirt.”
“I hardly know you.” That hint of a smile again.
She wondered if he used that smile to disarm people, because there was no answering warmth in his gray eyes, only watchfulness, appraisal. He was measuring her every move.
I’m in trouble, she thought, but kept her voice steady. “And that’s how it’s going to stay,” she said firmly. “Take off your shirt.”
He pulled his shirt tails out of the waistband of his pants, flinching when the fabric pulled at the clotted blood at his side. He unbuttoned, revealing to her slowly the broad swell of his chest, the rock-hard cut of pectoral muscles. He slid the shirt off, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from gasping at the absolute male perfection of him. His skin was bronze and silky over sinewy muscles. Hair curled, thick and springy, over the broad, hard plain of his chest. The hair narrowed down to a taut stomach, then disappeared inside the waistband of his jeans.
She turned abruptly. What was wrong with her? This man had arrived on her mountain and at her cabin with an attitude that aroused all her suspicions. She needed to keep her mind crystal clear so that she knew how to deal with this troubling situation. Patch him up and send him on his way, or patch him up and be on her way? What was not going to happen, what was not even a possibility, was sharing her cabin with him for a few days.
Not that he had to know that just yet.
On the top shelf of one of her open cupboards was a first-aid kit, and she took it down and sorted carefully through the bandages, painkillers and swabs.
When she turned back to him, she saw that he had straddled the chair so she could get a better look at his wound. His broad and naked back was enough to cloud anyone’s thinking! Again, she was taken by the color of his skin. Bronze. It made it look warm and silky, skin that invited touching.
She bent quickly and looked at where the blood blossomed like an obscene crimson flower slightly above and to the side of his hip. When she cleaned away the blood, it really did look like a scratch, a mean scratch though, deep, wide and ragged.
“How did you do this?”
“I was trying to chop my way through a mess of brush. The ax swung back and clipped me.”
She studied the wound, thinking it was at least possible, though the wound seemed to be in an odd place and the edges of it not clean enough to have been caused by an ax. She continued to suspect the wound was the result of a gunshot, though if it was a gunshot it was superficial, a graze. Her brothers would say she read too many suspense novels.
“Which way did you come in from?” she asked, striving to sound casual.
He hesitated. “From the east.”
“That’s a tough way to come in.” She didn’t say a weird way. He had come cross-country, from a little-known logging road. It explained why she had seen no sign of him on her trail.
Doing her best not to hurt him more, she finished cleaning around the wound. His skin felt exactly the way she had known it would feel—like warm silk wrapped over steel.
She continued to probe, trying to keep her questions conversational and casual. “What would make you come here? With a baby?”
“We’re on vacation.”
“A vacation?” Too late, she tried to snatch back the skepticism out of her tone.
He shrugged, and she glanced up from her swabbing of that cut, to see his eyes on her, hooded, measuring.
She turned hastily from him to her humble kitchen counter and mixed up Jake’s favorite old family formula to put on the injury.
“This place doesn’t seem like it would be first choice for someone with a baby to take a holiday,” she ventured, glancing back at him.
“Really?” he said evenly. “Fresh air. Great fishing. What is that?”
“Turpentine and brown sugar. It kills infection.”
“No kidding?” he growled.
“Kerosene oil works, too, but you have to be careful with it. It’ll blister the skin.”
“Really?”
“And a bit of chimney soot and lard will work, but it’s messy.” She offered these folksy little gems to him partly to take his mind off the pain, partly to make him think she was just a naive mountain girl, not sophisticated enough to be even contemplating the possibility he might have kidnapped that baby.
“My brother Jake would have put a spiderweb on to stop the bleeding, but I’ll just use one of these regular bandages.”
“Shortage of spiderwebs?”
“I think the baby is eating them.”
He chuckled at that, a reluctant and dry sound deep in his throat.
She unrolled medical gauze around his entire lower body, back to belly, to hold the bandage in place and keep pressure on it. It was amazingly hard not to touch a man while doing that, so she simply surrendered to the circumstances.
A mistake. Every time her hands grazed his skin, his muscles, physical sensation rocked through her. She had never been struck by lightning, thank God, but she was pretty sure it would feel just about like this. She felt a need so naked and demanding it set her teeth on edge. Where had it come from? This sudden need that felt greater than a need for food or water. To be kissed hard and held soft.
Not by this man!
A stranger, with a suspicious wound, and a baby she did not think was his.
The air around him practically tingled with danger, mystery and an aura of exotic worlds she knew nothing about.
She had a lot of questions to ask and she ordered them in her mind as she bent to the task at hand, knowing, even before she asked, that his answers would not satisfy her curiosity, nor lessen the sense of danger vibrating off him in waves that were unmistakably sensuous.
“You’re trussing me up like