should go home and behave myself.”
He’d had some crazy idea at the time that he was doing her a favor, keeping her from doing something she wouldn’t be happy about later. But with Willa, no good deed of his ever went unpunished. And was she going to start crying? He hated it when a woman started crying.
She sniffled in her blankets, a small, lost little sound. “I still can’t believe I did that—made a pass at you. I mean, you never liked me and I never cared much for you and we both know that.” That wasn’t true—not on his part anyway. Far from it. But he wasn’t in the mood to dispute the point at the moment. He only wanted her not to start crying—and he thought maybe he was getting his wish when she squirmed in her blankets and grumbled, “Everyone knows how you are. You’ll sleep with anyone—except me, apparently.”
Mad. Now she was getting mad. As far as he was concerned, mad was good. Mad was great. Anything but weepy worked for him.
She huffed, “I just don’t know what got into me that night.”
He couldn’t resist. “Well, Willa, we both know it wasn’t me.”
She made another huffing sound. “Oh, you think you’re so funny. And you’re not. You’re very annoying and you always have been.”
“Always?” he taunted.
“Always,” she humphed.
He scoffed at her. “How would you know a thing about me the last four years? Since that night at the Ace, all I see is the backside of you. I come in a room—and you turn tail and run.”
“And why shouldn’t I? You are a complete tool and you never cared about anything or anyone in your whole life but yourself.”
“Which is girl talk for ‘You didn’t sleep with me,’“ he said in his slowest, laziest, most insolent tone.
“You are not the least bit clever, you know that?”
“You don’t think so, huh?”
“No, I do not. And it just so happens that I’m glad we never hooked up that night. You’re the last person in the world I should ever be sleeping with.”
He tried not to grin. “No argument there. Because I’m not having sex with you no matter how hard you beg me.”
“Oh, please. I mean just, simply, please.” She sat up straight then. Dragging her blankets along with her, she scooted to the edge of the hay bales, as far from him as she could get without swinging her bare feet to the floor. Once there, she snapped, “You do not have worry. I want nothing to do with you.”
He freed a hand from his blankets and made a show of wiping his brow—even though she wasn’t looking at him. “Whew.”
“In case you didn’t know, it just so happens that I have a fiancé, thank you very much.”
“A fiancé?” That was news to Collin. The information bothered him. A lot—and that it bothered him bugged him to no end.
“Yes,” she said. “Well. Sort of.”
“Willa, get real. You do or you don’t.”
“His name is Dane Everhart and he’s an assistant coach at the University of Colorado. We met at UI. We’ve been dating on and off for three years. Dane loves me and knows I’m the one for him and wants only to marry me and, er, give me the world.”
“Hold on just a minute. Answer the question. You’re saying you’re engaged?”
She fiddled with her blankets and refused to turn around and look at him. “Well, no. Not exactly. But I could be. I promised to give Dane an answer by the end of the summer.”
He stared at the back of her head. Her hair was a tangle of wild, muddy curls from her dip in the floodwaters. It should have looked like crap. But it didn’t. It looked like she’d been having crazy good sex with someone—and then fallen asleep all loose and soft and satisfied.
And why the hell was he thinking about sex right now? Was he losing his mind? Probably. A few hours trapped in a barn with Willa Christensen could do that to a man, could drive him clean out of his head.
He sat up, too, then, and sneered, “You’re in love with this guy, and you’re not going to see him until September?”
“So? What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, I mean, if you’re in love with him, how can you stand to be apart from him? How can he stand to be away from you?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Are you in love with him, Willa?”
She squared her slim shoulders. “I just told you that you wouldn’t understand.”
“That’s right. I wouldn’t. If I loved a woman, I’d want her with me. Where I could touch her and be with her and hold her all night long.”
Willa gasped. She tried to hide the small, sharp sound, but he heard it. “Oh, please. As if you know anything about being in love, Collin Traub.”
“I said if I was in love.”
“Well. Humph. As it happens, Dane has gone to Australia until the end of the month. He gets only a short summer break before practice begins again. And do you know how he’s spending his limited free time? I will tell you how he’s spending it. At a special sports camp. He’s helping Australian children learn about American football. Because he’s a good man, a man who cares about other people. That’s how he is. That’s who he is …”
There was more. Lots more.
Collin let her heated words wash over him. The point, as far as he saw it, was that she hadn’t answered the main question. She hadn’t come out and said, “Yes. I’m in love with Dane Everhart.”
He felt absurdly satisfied with what she hadn’t said. She could rant all night about the wonderfulness of this Dane character while talking trash about him. At least she was acting like the Willa he’d always known. At least she was full of fire and vinegar and not shaking with cold, shock and fear anymore.
Collin smiled to himself, settled back against the wall and closed his eyes.
Willa felt Collin’s presence behind her acutely.
But she didn’t turn to him. She sat on the edge of the pushed-together hay bales and stared resolutely out the tack room’s one window as waves of never-ending rain flowed down the glass.
She finished what she had to say about Dane. “It just so happens that Dane would have liked to have taken me with him. But he was going to be very busy with the Australian children and I had things I could be doing here at home. We have summer school at Rust Creek Falls Elementary, in case you didn’t know and I …” Her voice trailed off.
Collin hadn’t said a word for a couple of minutes, maybe more. Had he fallen asleep, for heaven’s sake?
She wouldn’t put it past him. He was such an exasperating, impossible man. Always had been. And no doubt always would be.
So why am I starting to feel ashamed of myself?
Willa’s cheeks were flaming. She tucked her chin down into the scratchy saddle blanket he’d wrapped around her. At least he couldn’t see her embarrassment at her own behavior—not as long as she didn’t turn and face him.
Which she was not going to do right now, thank you very much.
Stretched out on the floor by the hay bales, Buster huffed out a long sigh. Willa bent down and scratched