Free Wrangling the Redhead by Sherryl Woods Page A

disconcerting looks. “I’m just starting to like the scenery around here.”
     
    After several days Wade was forced to face the fact that he’d misjudged Lauren when he’d assumed she was nothing more than some pampered rich girl who was visiting the ranch on a lark. She had a head on her shoulders and a real knack with horses—all horses. She was like some kind of pied piper with them. Although she hadn’t solved Miss Molly’s problem yet, she was doing well with Midnight. He came to her almost eagerly now, which Wade could readily understand. The horse was male, wasn’t he? And Lauren was every inch a female.
    He was even more impressed by the way she pitched in and did chores in the barn without being asked. Did them like a woman who was familiar with them, too. She didn’t seem to care how messy the chore was. She never complained about the heat, or the broken fingernails, or the straw that tangled in her hair.
    At the end of the first week they’d spent working together, she stood before him, hands on hips, jeans filthy, her blouse damp, her cheeks flushed. “Anything else?” she asked.
    Because he couldn’t resist, because he was a fool, he murmured, “Only this,” and claimed her mouth in a kiss that raised the temperature in the barn to a dangerous level. With all that flammable material around, it was a wonder the whole place didn’t go up in flames.
    Big mistake, he told himself the minute he managed to force himself to release her. Once a man had crossed that kind of line and discovered that the temptation was every bit as spectacular as it had promised to be, he was pretty much doomed to repeat it.
    “What was that for?” Lauren asked eventually.
    She was regarding him with a dazed expression that made him want to kiss her all over again. “I wish I knew,” he muttered and walked off before she could start analyzing the kiss to death.
    He worked himself to the point of exhaustion for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, nothing he did drove out the memory of his lips on hers, of the softness of her curves pressed against him.
    “Fool,” he muttered to himself a thousand times. It wasn’t bad enough that she’d annoyed the daylights outof him—now he’d arranged it that she was going to plague him all the livelong night. A man who’d been celibate for as long as he had had no business kissing any female he didn’t intend to take straight to bed.
    As the night wore on, Wade’s regrets grew. The taste of her was still with him. So was the heat, the restless yearning. He paced from one end of his three-room house to the other, then moved to the porch. When rocking proved no more relaxing, he headed for the main house, determined to catch a glimpse of her. Maybe a five-minute confrontation, the exchange of a few heated words would remind him of just why he’d had no business kissing Lauren in the first place. Since they rarely exchanged more than five civil words in a row, he figured the odds of a good verbal tussle were in his favor.
    He found Lauren sitting on the front steps, wearing jeans and a tank top which should have been outlawed for a body like hers. How was a man supposed to think around a woman dressed like that? How was he supposed to start a halfway decent fight, when the urge to drag her right back into his arms was so powerful it took everything in him to resist it?
    “Grady’s inside,” she said when she saw him.
    “I didn’t come to see Grady.”
    “Oh?”
    Wade shoved his hands in his pockets and stood a careful distance away. “About this morning…”
    The moonlight caught her face just right, and he was pretty sure he saw the beginning of a smile tugging at her lips. “Yes?”
    “I had no right to do what I did.”
    “You mean kissing me?”
    “Of course I mean kissing you,” he snapped. Didhe have to spell everything out for her? “What else would I be apologizing for?”
    There was no mistaking her grin now. “Is that what you were doing?