Free Kit Gardner by Twilight Page A

flickering over his bandaged shoulder. “I mean, when it would have mattered.”
    To aim and miss... Memory, dark and dusty, whispered through his mind and was gone. “You don’t want to aim and miss when it matters, ma’am,” he said softly.
    “Perhaps. But in the meantime, I’ve Avram.”
    He couldn’t squelch a snort before he popped three berries into his mouth. He half slouched against the bowed excuse for a barn wall, chewed innocently enough, and gave her his best vague look when she planted her hands on her hips and advanced toward him.
    She stood there, bathed in lamplight and dancing shadows, entirely unaware of herself as a woman and looking far too young and ripe for a man such as he, a man used to taking what he wanted from a woman. Particularly when he’d been so long without one. There, the chin jutted and the nose poked skyward, her lips compressing as though she sought just the perfect combination of words to skewer him with. He could almost hear the toe of her shoe tapping on the floor, could feel her righteous indignation in the heat of her.
    “Whatever are you snickering about, Mr. Stark? If you intend to make humor at my fiancé’s expense—”
    “I’ve never snickered in my life, ma’am.”
    “Oh, but you’ve snickered, all right.” She waved a hand over him, directly at his bare chest. “A man who can calmly eat a meal without his shirt in front of a woman is capable of snickering. I wouldn’t doubt that you can spit, as well.”
    “A nasty habit. I avoid it if I can.”
    “And ill-mannered sorts are notoriously short on book learning—”
    “I read Keats and Byron every night before retiring.”
    “Why, you probably haven’t bathed in over a month—”
    “I make it a daily habit. Bathed just this morning, ma’am. The stream was cold and deep. Perfect for bathing...” He flashed a rare smile, one that seemed to crack his skin. “Naked, of course.”
    This stopped her cold, as he’d known it would. All her puffed-up defending of her beloved Avram fled, swallowed in one noisy gulp. She flushed scarlet. She stared at his bare chest, and lower, at his stomach. The blush reached clear to her hairline. He could almost read her innocent mind, the images taking full, real shape...a man, bathing naked in a cold stream.
    It was hard to imagine that this woman had ever known intimacy with a man.
    For whatever unfathomable reason, he was suddenly overcome with the need to apologize to her for stoking all those defenses, no matter how deserving Halsey might be, no matter how eagerly she had leapt to his defense.
    Rance stood, and she took three steps back, one slender arm outstretched, as though to keep him at a proper distance.
    “In the future,” she said, “I would appreciate you wearing your clothes, sir, particularly your shirt, in my presence.” She looked as though she itched to grow another seven inches taller as she lifted her gaze finally to his. “And that of my boy.”
    Odd, that. Protecting her son from the sight of a man. He wondered if she’d done the same with her own husband.
    He indicated the blood-soaked cloth lying on a nearby pile of hay. “My shirt, ma’am, has a bloody hole in it.”
    She pursed her lips, then snatched his shirt up and stalked from the barn. Silhouetted against a sky ablaze with twilight fire, her shoulders squared, and all those blond curls bounced with each step she took. His gaze immediately narrowed upon the outline of her hips, slim, swaying and womanly. Instinct, that was it. Simply male instinct and habit—both a man like him could tame and manage, both he would feel with any woman, dammit. See, he could take his eyes off her. Easy enough.
    He slouched against the barn wall, feeling weariness like lead weights in his limbs. His lids drooped, and twilight faded with the blossoming sounds of night above the lonely, slowing creak of the windmill. Yet, try as he might, he could not banish that image of Jessica Wynne from his mind, and