Free The Bridal Path: Danielle by Sherryl Woods Page B

she told him with a grin.
    “I can imagine. I doubt I’ll have any trouble with them.”
    “Oh, you’d be surprised what the sight of a few boxes of cast-off belongings will do to otherwise rational people. I ought to know. I nearly trampled a woman to get that old-fashioned cookie cutter I have in the kitchen. Paid top dollar for it, too.”
    Slade chuckled at her triumphant expression. “Nothing stands in your way when you want something, does it?”
    “Nothing,” she confirmed, then grinned at him. “You might want to remember that.”
    He was still trying to puzzle out the meaning of her remark as she dashed across the lawn to nab the card table just before it upended with three pitchers of lemonade.
    “Dad,” Timmy prodded. “Dani said to get the stuff in the garage.”
    “Oh, right,” he said distractedly.
    “Now,” Timmy said emphatically.
    “Okay, okay.” He followed his son to the garage, where a dozen or more cartons were crammed with every conceivable kind of junk. He couldn’t imagine that the combined worth was more than a few dollars. Obviously the avid people in their cars thought otherwise.
    For the next half hour he carried boxes and helped to arrange the items they contained on old blankets and tablecloths that had been spread over the grass until it looked like some sort of country patchwork quilt.
    At precisely eight o’clock Dani surveyed everything, gave a little nod of satisfaction and gestured toward the growing crowd of would-be buyers. They emerged from their cars like racers exiting a starting gate.
    In no time at all the boys were overwhelmed with enthusiastic shoppers. Dani’s hair, which she’d tucked into some sort of a knot on top of her head, was coming loose, tendril by silky tendril. Slade had the most incredible desire to sweep a few curls away from the back of her neck and kiss her on that exposed bare skin.
    She turned just then and, as if she’d guessed his thoughts, blushed prettily. Then almost at once she returned her attention to a customer who was bargaining enthusiastically for some china knickknack that couldn’t have been worth more than a dollar new, but appeared to be selling for 12.50 now that it had a little wear and tear on it.
    Slade decided at that moment, with his sons shouting happily over each sale, with Dani clearly in her element and desire slamming through him like a freight train, that he would forever think of garage sales in an entirely different way. Maybe they could have one every weekend. Surely there was enough stuff crammed into his grandparents’ attic to keep this crowd going for weeks on end.
    “You seem to be enjoying yourself,” Sara Dawson, Dani’s sister, said, surprising him. He hadn’t even known she’d arrived. He recognized her from an occasional glimpse he’d caught of her in town.
    “Actually, I’m a little out of my element,” he confessed.
    “Didn’t look that way to me. I saw the way you were staring at Dani. I recognized the look.”
    He swallowed hard and forced a casual note into his voice. “Oh, and what look would that be?”
    “A hunter about to claim his prey.”
    He chuckled at the comparison. “I expected something a little more romantic.”
    “Hunger is hunger,” she said. “No matter which kind it is.” She eyed him intently. “Just where do things stand between you and my sister?”
    The blunt question didn’t surprise him. The Wildes were obviously a very direct clan. “Isn’t that between your sister and me?”
    “Not if you intend to hurt her,” she said fiercely. “Then it becomes a matter for all of the Wildes and the Dawsons and the Fords.”
    “In other words, the Wilde sisters and their mates stick together.”
    “You bet. And Daddy’s the toughest one of us all.”
    “I’ll remember that.”
    “See that you do.” She grinned then. “In the meantime, you might try to knock her socks off. She deserves to have her world go topsy-turvy for once, instead of being the rock