The Salt Maiden by Colleen Thompson Page A

the man he’d once been, he had damned near forced himself on an unwilling woman.

Chapter Seven
    A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.
    —Helen Rowland
    Dana’s shudder had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the realization that Jay Eversole wanted her here and now.
    He saw her as desirable. He saw her as a woman, regardless of the way Alex had felt about her since her surgery.
    And she wanted him as well. She’d grown hot and damp at his touch. But that didn’t mean acting on desire was a good idea.
    “I can’t do this,” she said, then cleared her throat, embarrassed by the huskiness in her voice. “I’m sorry if I…if you thought I…I never should have…”
    Defeated by the tangle of words inside her, she sighed and wished she were the sort of woman who could let him take her healing body for a test drive. Or that she had ever been the type for a casual affair.
    Jay picked up his hat, which their embrace had knocked free. As he brushed the dirt from it he asked, “You all right?”
    She shook her head, her resolve nearly undone by his concern. “I’m an idiot.”
    He winced. “Not exactly the reaction I was hoping for. I’ll grant you I’m a little out of practice, but still—”
    “It wasn’t anything you did.”
    With a pained look he asked, “This isn’t going to be one of those, ’It’s not you, it’s me’ talks, is it? I might’ve been out of circulation for a while, but I’m pretty sure I remember that one.”
    She smiled. “How about, ’It’s not you or me, it’s Angie’? Would that make you feel better?”
    “Not at all. But I suppose you’re right.” He gave her a look of such intensity her mouth went chalk dry. “Because if I get started on you, Dana, I’m not going to want to come up for air, much less bother with an investigation. And I told you I’d find your sister.”
    At the carnal promise in his voice, Dana’s brain misfired, wiping out the knowledge that she was standing on the half-collapsed porch of a grimy old adobe in the middle of a godforsaken desert. For a moment she couldn’t even remember her own name.
    “Dana?” He frowned at her. “You all right?”
    Dana. That was it. She nodded, wondering if the heat had melted her common sense. But another glance at Jay’s expression assured her that he and not the temperature was the culprit.
    “This isn’t a good time for me. I’m worried sick about my sister and her little girl.” The words tumbled out too quickly, but she couldn’t seem to slow down. “And the jerk who left me cut out three weeks before our wedding. I still have about three hundred stupid notes to write, and everyone’s embarrassed for me, and…”
    She felt her control slipping out from under her, felt the first bubble of panic break the surface. She wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t let fear and isolation and Alex’s rejection start her babbling.
    Shaking his head, he said, “You don’t have to—”
    She couldn’t seem to stop. “And I’m still recovering from surgery, and—”
    “You don’t have to make excuses, Dana.”
    “Sorry.” Her face flamed. “Sorry I unloaded on you. You didn’t ask for the life story.”
    He shrugged. “Sounds like you’ve been through a lot. Sometimes that kind of stuff swells up inside until you just bust open with it.”
    When his blue eyes took on a faraway look, she wondered what sadness he was seeing. She remembered that he had recently come back from a war zone, that he must have witnessed suffering on a far grander scale than the ordinary dramas that loomed so large in her life.
    His reverie vanished in a blink, and he refocused his attention on her. “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s dirty, hot—the snakebite’s bad enough, but if you’re getting over some kind of operation—”
    “It’s no big deal,” she told him, just as if it weren’t. She swallowed hard, steeling