of his youth.
Her legs felt a little loose and wobbly. And her pulse jack-rabbited ahead with an abandon she couldn’t control. Dammit, but she wanted him to touch her. Foolish and stupid. He was right. She hadn’t changed at all. “Thanks.” She fought a sudden urge to smile. “I think.” It would be dangerous to let her guard down with him. Even for a split second. While she couldn’t really imagine him working with Shelby—there had never been any love lost between the two—his sudden appearance on the same day Shelby had pulled a no-show was too much of a coincidence to dismiss it out of hand.
“I’m sorry I startled you,” he said. “I didn’t know how else to get in touch.”
“You could have left a note.”
There was that little quirk again, at the corners of his mouth. Better not to look at his mouth. God, she was looking at his mouth.
“I could have done a lot of things.”
Was it her imagination still running wild, or had there been something suggestive in that? She dragged her gaze from his firmly chiseled lips—age had only improved every rugged inch of him—to his eyes. Eyes that had seen too much, more than she’d ever likely know. All that mattered was they probably saw way too much in hers.
“You, uh—” She had to clear her throat. “You staying in town? Maybe we’ll grab a bite at Deenie’s, talk all this out.”
“Deenie’s place is still there, huh?”
She frowned a little. “I thought you said you’d done some research.”
“On you,” he answered directly, apparently having no idea how badly he was unsettling her. Or maybe he did, and just enjoyed it. Lord knew he always had in the past. “I could give a damn about the town.”
“Well, the town has a lot to do with things. Or might. I don’t know.” She sucked in a breath and tried a tight smile. “Tomorrow, then?”
“Tomorrow.”
She glanced at the cabin door, wanting badly to be on the other side of it, with something, anything, between them. She needed to regroup. She needed wine. A lot of wine. “Good night.”
Still, he didn’t shift away, didn’t let her past. But he made no move closer. For the longest moment, he simply held her gaze, trapped it in his own, and kept it there while he studied and probed. He never dropped his gaze below her own, and yet she felt thoroughly…frisked. She wanted to fold her arms over her chest, hide her reaction to him. She didn’t dare move a muscle.
“I can help you,” he said quietly. “You’d be wise to let me.”
“Tomorrow,” she said firmly, if somewhat breathlessly. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“Good night, Kate.”
It wasn’t until he shifted back, putting some semblance of space between them, that she let out the breath she’d been holding. She reached past him for the door, determined to end this little tête-à-tête right now. Before she did something even more reckless than letting him get that close to her. Like inviting him in for a glass of wine.
“Good night.” She opened the door, forcing herself to do it calmly, naturally, when what she wanted to do was dart inside, slam the door shut, and bolt it into place. Like that would keep him out if he really wanted in. She shivered in renewed awareness. She didn’t want Donovan MacLeod back in her life, much less her cabin.
She held the door open for Bagel and flushed when Donovan had to shoo the dog in after her. She could feel him standing behind her, staring at her from the shadows. She made the mistake of glancing back. “Tomorrow.”
He surprised her by grinning. Broadly. With every ounce of black sheep bad boy he still had in him. Which, as it turned out, was quite substantial. “Tomorrow it is. See you then, Kate.”
“Yeah,” she said faintly as she watched him step off the porch and disappear into the darkness. “See you then.”
It wasn’t until much later, when she was wrapped in more layers than the night chill warranted, third glass of wine in hand, that it occurred to her that he’d never told her where he was staying.
And that she’d never heard a car engine start up after he’d disappeared into the night. Nor had there been one parked anywhere around her cabin or on the road in.
She shivered a little, imagining him still out there, somewhere on the camp property. Watching her, maybe?
The shiver wasn’t one of fear…It was one of anticipation.
Donovan MacLeod was back in town.
And Kate Sutherland still wanted him.
Chapter 3
Mac paused next to the stand of pine trees and studied the brush of needles scattered around the base of the trunks. Someone had been through here, and recently judging by the way the needles had been disturbed. There were no clear footprints, unless you knew what to look for. He knew.
He stepped behind the trees and positioned himself in the same place, facing the same direction that the intruder had—the other intruder, he amended. He hadn’t exactly been invited here, either. At least Kate knew he was on the premises. Perhaps not at that very second, but he doubted she knew anything about the other one. Question was, what did the other intruder know about Kate? Anyone who would go to this much trouble, this far out in the middle of nowhere, had one of two motives. They were either after Kate, or something Kate owned.
Or maybe both.
He looked through the trees, along the same sight line as the person who’d stood there before him. From this spot, he could see her cabin, including both sides of the wraparound screened-in porch. He also had a clear line into the cab of her pickup truck. Someone was definitely spying on her.
He crouched down slightly, but the bows of the tree were closer together there, and his sight line was immediately obstructed. He straightened. A man, then. Or an inordinately tall woman. But his gut told him it was a man. In his experience, women ambushed, and they generally preferred trapping their quarry in as public a place as they could manage. Men hunted. And the fewer people around to contest the hunt, the better.
He looked over his shoulder and noted the direct path of cover from where he stood, straight through a short stand of woods, to where several yet-to-be remodeled camp cabins still stood. Beyond them, he knew it was only a short hike through another dense stand of trees, then a quick scramble up a rocky slide to where the main road wrapped around the top of the mountain before dipping down the other side toward town.
He could track it, and would, but he’d seen enough for now. He’d checked the property boundaries on this side of the lake yesterday before parking himself on Kate’s porch with her trusty sidekick. Bagel. Honestly, it was no wonder the dog had defected to his side.
He’d noted the graffiti on several stands of trees and on one of the service sheds, but this was the first evidence of someone actually watching the cabin itself. It was harder to tell if anything had been vandalized in the cabins as most of them were empty and had just been left to suffer the elements for over a decade with no apparent maintenance.
He didn’t know why Louisa had shut the place down, or why she’d left it to simply rot rather than sell the property off while it was still in decent shape. That was on his growing list of things to check out. Just as soon as he decided how to handle Kate.
He looked back at her cabin. The curtains were old, the color long since bleached out from the sun. The screens needed patching in a dozen places, something she’d need to do before the mosquitoes hatched for the season. The steps to the porch sagged in the middle where the cinderblock propping them up had sunk into the ground. The roof needed new shingles. The stovepipe chimney worked, though. A wispy curl of smoke wafted from the top and drifted slowly upward through the trees.
His stomach growled, and he could already feel the back of