Running Wild by Denise Eagan Page B

didn’t and damned if it didn’t touch his fool
pride. And stir the embers of lust—“It was a pretty easy shot,” he said, and
ruthlessly buried those thoughts, once and for all. “Not like the animal was
hiding or moving fast. Mostly a mercy killing.”
    “Oh no, you’re being far too modest, sir. I understand that
rabid animals are quite unpredictable.”
    “Yeah, like women,” he said with a smirk.
    She burst into laughter, vanquishing that little-girl-lost
expression. “Game, set, match,” she said. “You are the most terrifying man,
Nicholas McGraw! Swear to me, sir, that you never shoot women merely for being
unpredictable, for upon my honor, I am all a twitter at the notion!”
    He grinned and shook his head as he took the pot off the
coals. He poured the last dregs into the snow. “Well you can set your mind—and
your twitterin’—to rest. They hang ya for killing women, even if sometimes
that’d be a mercy killin’, too. Mercy for the man, that is.”
    She lifted her eyebrows, over large, laughing eyes. “Now,
Nicholas, you must know that as a women’s rights advocate, I am all but required to object to that statement. As women are legally and socially at men’s whims,
how much misery can one woman cause?”
    He squinted at her. “You serious? You never saw a woman
cause a man misery?”
    For a moment she appeared to try to school her face into
solemnity. She lost the battle and broke into a smile. “All right, I confess
that some women are shrews. Many men are horrible, as well, however. You must admit that.”
    “Yes, ma’am, I do,” he said standing and smiling down at
her. “There are a few men I’d like to shoot, too. Now, if you drink that coffee
on down, we’d better head on back. I don’t like the look of that sky. Could be
snow, and we don’t want to get caught up here in a storm.”
    ***
    They rode for half an hour with little comment, as Nicholas
carefully guided them down a steep, single-file path. Star focused her body on
the movements of the horse while her brain traveled an entirely different path,
one of marvel over the rabid animal and the wonder of Nicholas’s kiss. By and
by, however, it settled upon Nicholas’s ultimate disregard of that kiss. After
shooting the mountain lion, he’d said nothing at all about the kiss, behaving
as if it had not occurred. Had she been too brash? She was no fool; she knew
she was not every man’s style: too tall, too mannish, too aggressive and, oh, a
hundred different things a man might dislike in a woman. Doubtless, a strong woman
would not intimidate a man with Nicholas’s strength and confidence, but that
didn’t mean he wanted one. Possibly he was the sort who was attracted to
opposites. Quite possibly, she thought, her spirits sinking, he, like most men,
preferred women who were quiet and demure.
    She couldn’t even feign that.
    She had, however, feigned other characteristics for her many
fiancés, which had led to some rather stimulating encounters. Like Leander
Cushing who, believing her wide-eyed sexual naiveté, had, in the frenzy of
introducing her to passion, come close to taking her innocence . . . right
before demanding marriage. And Ambrose Thompson, who’d been fervently attracted
to her little-girl-lost magic, determined to protect her from the big bad
world, and in the process of “comforting” her, had brought her to her first
climax. To be fair to Ambrose, though, the little-girl-lost façade hadn’t been
all pretense. He’d started pursuing right after Minnie’s death, when she had
been lost.
    She swallowed and shook off that memory.
    At any rate, it was too late for pretense with Nicholas.
From the moment they’d met, she’d shown him her true self, which, she must now
accept, repelled him. True, he had responded to her kiss, but that must
be merely an instinctual male reaction or he would have followed through
afterward. She’d been deluding herself, drat it all, in believing that he felt
this