Free 100% Pure Cowboy by Cathleen Galitz Page A

crossed over her breasts. She made herself resist that temptation. She was not a child, nor was she ashamed of her body. Though it was, in her opinion, far from flawless, she was still slim and in reasonably good shape. She was not about to give Cody Walker the satisfaction of knowing how completely unnerved he had made her.
    Haughtily tilting her chin up, Danielle advanced out of the water. Moonlight illuminated her every step. White shoulders, breasts, hips, and legs emerged from dark waters. With businesslike speed, she dried herself off and donned her clothes.
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    The ribald comment Danielle was undoubtedly expecting never came.
    Cody was enjoying the show too much to utter a single word. He stared shamelessly. Who would have thought that beneath that long gingham dress was a body to die for? Full, luscious breasts, a bottom that was purely a piece of art, shapely legs that went on forever...
    Belatedly Cody remembered to snap his mouth shut. He hoped Danielle hadn’t caught him drooling.
    Filled with an almost painful influx of desire, he made himself face the facts. No doubt about it, he wanted this woman. Right here and right now. He wanted to put his hands all over that luscious body, to feel her warm, full lips against his, to couple beside these placid waters the way God intended men and women to do since the dawn of time.
    Groaning with the desire that swept through him, Cody wondered what was it about this particular woman that reached so deeply inside him when so many others had tried and failed? Was it merely the fact that, unlike the others, this spunky lady neither fawned over his celebrity nor tried hustling him from the bed to the altar, but rather regarded him warily behind those utterly astonishing eyes as if he were a tiger on the prowl?
    Right now, however, it seemed that Danielle was as immune to his presence as a marble statue, cold and ever so beautiful. Had he not already felt this prim den mother ignite beneath his kiss, Cody could have believed that the blood in her veins was as cold as the water feeding this mountain pool.
    He deeply regretted that impetuous kiss that had stirred in him feelings he had so long ago buried with his deceased wife. Unfortunately he could no more erase the memory of that kiss from his mind than he could dismiss the desire to repeat it, to lengthen it, to let it lead him straight down the path to perdition.
    Surely the woman knew that all she had to do was crook her little finger in his direction and he’d be bounding from that water faster than a Garth Brooks’s ballad hitting the top of the charts. Danielle gave no indication that she would like him to put on a similar exhibition for her benefit. She merely stepped out of that pool with as much grace as a professional dancer and, without so much as a backward glance, disappeared into the high country night, leaving him up to his neck in icy water and red-hot fantasies.
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    Shivering, Danielle slipped back into camp and into her sleeping bag. Determined to block out the image of the most alluring naked male body she had ever seen, she pulled the down-filled bedroll up to her chin and squeezed her eyes shut. Cursing the man for making her feel as unworldly as her thirteen-year-old daughter, Danielle wondered whether it was simply silly feminine pride that had kept her from turning around and studying a buck-naked Cody Walker at her leisure. She certainly wasn’t so literally bound to her principles that she thought she would have turned into a pillar of salt like Lot’s inquisitive wife or been blinded like the unfortunate sot who snuck a peek at Lady Godiva.
    Chastising herself first for her wantonness, then for her prudery, she regretted the fact that whatever of that delicious male body had remained concealed beneath the surface of the water couldn’t have possibly been any more arousing than what she had imagined.
    When she at last fell into a semiconscious, torpid state of sleep, it was