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He didn’t say that, but she heard it all the same. Heard it echo in her soul.
Across her whole body.
He turned to face her fully and her heart leapt into her throat. His body was sculpted and tattooed, hair covering his chest, as dark as the hair on his head.
And then....
She sucked in a sharp breath. And again, she ran.
And ran and ran.
Not from Zane. From herself.
HE STOOD THERE in the clearing for a long moment. He’d been down at the river having a bath, which was his custom here, and he hadn’t expected to have a visitor, let alone that one. And damn, his body had responded.
She’d been looking, that was for certain, and she hadn’t done a great job of disguising that. Not that she’d tried.
She’d stared openly, but not frankly in the way most women in his experience did. She’d looked shocked.
And then she’d run.
Well, nice to know his naked ass was that scary.
He charged into the house and grabbed his clothes, which he’d laundered down in the creek yesterday and had set out to dry. It was a mission keeping clean out here, but he did it. He couldn’t stand to live in squalor. The house might be rustic, but he’d made it clean and functional. There was no running water but he’d made a clean space with gravity-flow facilities, and he liked to bathe in the creek, so it all worked for him.
He had a clean, neat bedroom and a nice new bed he’d bought and had brought in. He had electricity running on solar panels and on a backup solar generator. Things worked pretty well, in his estimation, and he didn’t plan on being here come winter.
He had some work to do today, so he didn’t have time to think about Little Red and her hungry, wide eyes.
He had to get a move on.
CHAPTER THREE
SHE HAD ANOTHER dream about him that night. Now she could fully imagine his body. His muscles.
She had a very vivid imagination because it was far too easy for her to feel what it would be like to have him touch her. What his rough hands might be like against her soft skin.
He would have rough hands. She knew it.
She baked bread. All day. And she did her best not to think of him, and she tried to remind herself that her dream was just a dream, and it wasn’t him. It was a fake man her subconscious had created.
He wasn’t the real Zane Fox and he had nothing to do with the real Zane Fox, and she needed to remember that.
She baked a batch of cookies and she packed the bread and cookies away. Then she got into her car and drove to the widow Martin’s house, one loaf of bread and a few cookies for her. She delivered three loaves to elderly congregants and when she had done so, felt like perhaps her good deeds had washed her clean of her transgressions. Of her fantasies.
But she could still see them too vividly. And she found herself with half a dozen cookies and two loaves left over, and then found herself at the trailhead again.
She was wearing a dress. And her shoes weren’t practical to walk up there, not now.
And yet, she got out of the car and found herself carrying a basket and wandering down that familiar trail in her red floral dress.
She stumbled on the rocks and kept on going, gritting her teeth. This was insanity, and yet here she was.
It was late in the day, so he wouldn’t be naked.
Maybe.
Maybe he wouldn’t even be there, which wouldn’t help her retrieve her backpack, but she could leave the bread as a peace offering.
