Free Kit Gardner by Twilight Page B

then darkness encroached, and the creaking of the windmill grew louder, rousing age-old memories.
    Mists parted on a lifetime ago.... The sleeping town of Lawrence, Kansas, all quiet save for the comforting squeak of a windmill outside his open bedroom window and then the gunshots, ripping through the predawn peace...the horrified shouts, cries for help, more gunfire, carnage, and his parents crumpling lifeless beside him as he struggled to take aim, to get off one good shot before the outlaw gang disappeared into the darkness.
    Something touched him. He roared awake, the demon stirring to life within him for the first time in years. A shadow loomed close, yet he didn’t strike out. No, he would grapple with his ghosts, dammit. He lunged upward in the darkness, his fingers meeting flesh, yet he gripped those delicate limbs and with one flex of his arms lifted this insignificant weight entirely against him, flush from chest to hips.
    “M-Mr. Stark.”
    The fog cleared. That warm, lemony woman-scent spilled over him. No ghost. He stared into Jessica Wynne’s wide blue eyes.

Chapter Four
    T he heat of him penetrated muslin, cotton and bone, leaping into her blood like the first roar of a flame. He was all male, potent, savage, and as raw and untamed as an untouched wilderness, his eyes full of frenzied, mysterious fire. A man so different from the few she’d known. It struck her that she felt no fear, even when his fingers squeezed into her upper arms. Something told her she should be afraid. Yet she felt nothing but this slow, deep burning.
    Their breaths came matched, hers shallow, his tortured, a palpable stirring of the sliver of hot night air that dared to pass between them. His scent filled her lungs. Her belly curved into his. Her breasts pushed into his chest, the peaks swelling against fevered bands of muscle—
    Too late she realized she’d shoved a fist into his wounded shoulder. Breath hissed from between his teeth, and he released her to sag once again against the barn wall.
    “Good heavens, I’m sorry!” she blurted.
    Dim lantern light threw his face into deep shadow, yet she recognized the subtle tightening of the lines around his mouth, the downward tilt of his brows over his nose. He shoved a big hand through that unruly mane of blue-black, smoothing the perspiration that dotted his forehead and bathed his torso from neck to waist in a filmy sheen. For one long, unconscionable moment, she allowed her eyes to drift over the breadth of that furred chest and along the ridges of his belly.
    She watched his fingers threading through his hair, as if he were massaging some deep ache there. Perhaps it was some trick of the flickering lamplight, but she thought she could detect the faintest trembling in those fingers.
    Instinctively, as would any mother, she reached a palm toward his forehead. His eyes angled abruptly at her. Her hand dropped to twist into her skirt.
    “You could be feverish, Mr. Stark.”
    His lip barely curled with his words. “More than likely it was all that damned hot soup.”
    She sucked in a breath of indignation. What was it about this man that stirred her so swiftly to anger, despite his wounded state, despite the fact that she needed him? Despite the fact that she wanted to like him. With pursed lips, she watched him shove himself from his hay bale and move past her, deeper into the shadows. He paused to stare into the night from the open barn door, presenting his back to her.
    Jessica pondered that broad expanse, a back not at all unlike a bronzed sculpture she’d once seen at Ledbetter’s General Store, the same sculpture she had yearned to establish with pride upon her mantel...if Frank would ever have allowed such indulgences, of course. Sadie McGlue, upon mere sight of the thing, had all but proclaimed it priceless treasure straight from Boston and had snatched it up. Yet Jessica still remembered the feel of that cool sculpted bronze beneath her fingertips. Stark’s back