grief! She had set out this morning on a mission. To find herself. Her real self. Who she was genuinely meant to be.
She could not let the first obstacle—no matter that he was large and intimidating—make her feel as if she was on the wrong road!
She had to act the part of the confident woman she was determined to become. That woman ran her own business and her own house and was not always flinching from put-downs.
Amy refused to go any further down that road, feeling guilty as always, for acknowledging she might not have been completely satisfied with the life her husband had given her.
Out loud, quietly, she said, “I will not be a schoolgirl who blushes at the thought of a man in the shower.”
But, of course, the man in that shower was not any man.
Could anything prepare a woman for the kind of raw magnetism Ty Halliday radiated?
Could anything prepare a woman for a man who moved with such unconscious grace, as fluid as water, so at home with his own power? Could anything prepare a woman for that kind of pure masculine energy, the kind that felt like a force field around him, sizzling, faintly but alluringly dangerous?
Could anything prepare a woman for the strength that radiated out from under the brim of that soaked hat, from underneath that wet slicker like a palpable force?
The answer was no.
But she reminded herself firmly of her mission.
Tomorrow she would be back on the right road. Tonight she would decorate that tree as her gift to a stranger. She would cook him a hot meal. That was it.
Tomorrow her quest would resume. She was on a journey. She was determined to find out who she really was, and what really mattered. She had lost sight of both things since her marriage.
And Ty Halliday was just an uncomfortable—and brief—detour from that quest. Amy put down her baby and went to rummage through Ty’s ill-equipped kitchen.
Amy made a vow. She resolved not to let his shocking appeal alter her focus. She put Jamey on his blanket surrounded by his toys and checked the chicken potpie she’d put in the oven earlier for their supper.
She frowned. The pie was not cooking properly, and she suspected the oven was not producing the correct heat for the temperature it was set at. She turned it up, and the oven made a protesting noise. The oven seemed decidedly cranky.
“Just like its owner,” she muttered.
“Papa,” Jamey supplied.
“Precisely.” And then she realized she could not start agreeing, even casually, with Jamey labeling Ty as his papa.
“Don’t call him that, sweetie. He’s not your papa.”
“Umpa?”
“No, not your grandpa, either. Call him—” The oven made another noise, and she went and opened the door and peered in. The burner was red-hot and making a hissing sound.
“Oh, damn,” she said, and turned it back down.
“Odam,” Jamey repeated.
“Sure,” she said distractedly, “call him that.”
The oven looked after, and papa renamed something Jamey could pronounce, Amy turned to the salad.
In every place in the world where her family had moved to, Amy, to her career-oriented mother’s bewilderment, had always found sanctuary in the kitchen. She loved to cook.
As she was ripping and washing lettuce, she heard the water shut off in the bathroom and had a renegade thought about naked wet skin and steam.
And then, as if her thoughts were too hot to handle, the smoke alarm started to shriek.
She turned from the sink to see smoke was roiling out of the oven.
Jamey, startled, began to wail along with the smoke alarm.
Amy donned the red oven mitt with the hole burned right through it, and opened the oven door a crack. Just as she had suspected, the potpie had boiled over onto the burner.
She shut the oven off and slammed the door. She opened the kitchen window, and picked up her howling baby.
“Hey. Hey, little man, it’s okay.”
But it wasn’t. Because just then, through the haze of smoke that filled the kitchen, Ty appeared.
Ty scanned the room, every muscle taut. Amy could have sworn he was prepared to lay down his life for her and Jamey, two near strangers. A strange emotion clawed at her throat.
Then, when Ty saw there was no emergency, he stood down. Instantly. He went from ready to relaxed in a second, though a certain level of annoyance marred his altogether too handsome features.
But while Ty relaxed, Amy felt as if her nerve endings were singing with tension. It wasn’t just that he had been prepared to lay down his life for them, either.
No, Ty Halliday was nearly naked, clad only in boxer shorts.
And if the smoke alarm had not been going off before, it certainly would have started now. Because Ty Halliday was nearly naked. Even his feet were sexy!
He was everything she had imagined he would be, only about a hundred times off the scale of where her imagination went to.
His dark slashing eyebrows, the dark shadow of whiskers on his face, had made her think his hair would be dark under the cowboy hat he had worn.
But he was blond, his wet hair the color of antique pieces of gold in a just opened treasure chest.
But the astonishing color of his hair held her attention for only a millisecond. He was lean and strong and his skin was flawless. His arms, corded with muscles of honed steel, were deeply tanned, a color that didn’t go away, apparently, even in these long days of winter. His legs were equally powerful-looking: long, straight, made to curve around a horse, or a bucking bull, or…
She couldn’t go there. Instead, she let her hungry gaze go to his chest, deep and smooth. His shoulders were impossibly broad and his stomach a perfect washboard of rippling, hard muscle. Ty was just way too hot to handle, and as the smoke detector continued to shriek, Amy was aware her own five-alarm fire had started going off deep inside of her.
She dared look at the boxers. Her mouth fell open.
Ty Halliday was wearing bright red boxer shorts, low, snugged over his flat hips and the taut lines of his lower belly. And what were his red boxer shorts covered with?
Santa, his sleigh and twelve reindeer. She presumed twelve reindeer, because she really shouldn’t count.
She didn’t want to appear too interested, but she could not draw her eyes away until she had read the words that were also dancing across the shorts.
Have you been naughty or nice?
For the second time that day, she started to laugh. She laughed so hard the tears squirted from her eyes.
Or maybe that was the smoke.
Ty folded those gorgeous muscled arms over an equally gorgeous muscled chest, planted his long, muscled legs far apart.
If it weren’t for the shorts, he would definitely have the intimidating presence she was fairly certain he was aiming for.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” he yelled over the screaming alarm, the baby howling and her laughter.
“You don’t?” she gasped.
“No, I don’t,” he said sternly.
“Ty Halliday, you have some Christmas spirit, after all.” She pointed. “You just keep it well hidden.”