Free Rexanne Becnel by When Lightning Strikes

seen on proper women. Then there was her hair. No matter how hard she tried to maintain a prim appearance, that hair was her undoing. It fairly cried out to be touched, and Tanner wanted to answer that cry in the worst way. Part lady, part Indian maiden, and part wanton, she appeared at the moment. The best of all three, he realized.
    “Thank you,” she murmured when the silence began awkwardly to stretch out.
    He nodded his head curtly and with only the lightest move turned his horse. He didn’t have to go. He’d saved her piece of meat to deliver last. But now he knew it had been a foolish idea. He had only one reason to linger around Abby Morgan, and that was to determine if she was Hogan’s granddaughter. While he heartily hoped she wasn’t, he knew that in either case it really didn’t matter. If she was the girl he searched for, he’d take her back to Chicago then leave her there, never to see her again. If she wasn’t his quarry, he’d still never see her again. She was heading to Oregon, and anyway she was the wrong kind of woman for him to be worrying about right now. Maybe one day, but not right now. She belonged with someone like that preacher.
    “Wait. Don’t go.”
    Tanner drew up at her soft call. He stared at her, conscious of the dust motes swirling red-gold between them in the afternoon sun. She pushed her hair behind her shoulders and took a deep breath, as if searching for courage. But what Tanner saw most was the fullness straining behind her bodice. She was not so slim as her narrow waist had indicated, at least not everywhere. His fingers tightened on the reins even to remember how she’d felt beneath his hands. Within his arms. On his lap.
    “Will you stay to dinner with us? Please?” she added when he didn’t immediately respond.
    Tanner hesitated. A home-cooked meal and from the hands of a woman like her. Only a fool would turn down such an offer. And yet he could not bring himself to accept right away.
    “What about your father?”
    A slow flush crept into her cheeks. “He … ah … I’ll speak to him. He’ll … he’ll agree.”
    “He doesn’t like me,” he persisted. “Doesn’t approve of the likes of me. There’s no use pretending otherwise, Abby.” He smiled knowingly at the familiar use of her name, then perversely let his eyes slip over her in a way calculated to unsettle her even more. “He won’t want to give me the chance to get to know his little girl.”
    “I’m not a little girl,” she countered, despite the pretty blush that indicated otherwise. She might be a fully grown woman, he knew, but she was as innocent as any little girl.
    Tanner pushed his hat back on his head and studied her a moment. What was he doing anyway? Why was he toying with so unsuitable a woman? “No, you’re no little girl. But I doubt your father sees it that way. Thanks for the invitation, Miss Morgan, but it would be better for you if I didn’t accept.”
    Once more he moved as if to go, and once again she halted him.
    “He’s not as stiff-necked as you think.” When Tanner only raised one brow and waited, she continued. “When I told him you read the classics, well, he softened a bit.”
    The classics. Tanner repressed any show of amusement. His references to Venus usually impressed only the ladies. How ironic that her father should be swayed by his handy line about Venus. Then his thoughts quickened. Did that mean the man had read the classics himself—that he could be the schoolteacher Bliss?
    “He enjoys them also?” he asked with a careful show of nonchalance.
    “Oh, yes,” Abby replied. “Especially Homer. The Iliad and The Odyssey are great favorites of his. He’s even read them in Greek.”
    Tanner knew he was onto something, though a part of him would have preferred otherwise. “I like the myths myself,” he drawled. “Zeus. Venus.”
    She swallowed at his deliberate reference to the goddess of beauty and took an unsteady breath that tightened her bodice