“You have to do it anyway, right?” Ashley asked as she stood looking at the downed tree he’d made note of when they’d first arrived.
Ty sat on the thick trunk and grinned at her. “I was thinking I’d leave it for my little brother Neil,” he drawled lazily. “So he doesn’t get soft sitting in that office all day, wearing those expensive suits.”
She laughed, because she knew he was anything but lazy. And when looked at in the larger scheme of things, he was working very hard at making this as easy as possible on her. Including trekking out every day because she wanted to learn about this place she’d never been, when it would obviously be easier to do his job if she stayed safely inside the cabin. She studied him for a moment, trying to picture him here as a kid. She wondered if he’d ever had an awkward stage, or if he’d always been...
“What?” he asked at her look.
“Just pondering the sibling thing again,” she said hastily, trying not to betray that she’d been mentally drooling over him. Again. “And what I missed, being an only.”
“Maybe you gained just as much,” he pointed out.
“Did you all compete?”
“Sometimes. Unless someone outside came at one of us.”
“Came at?”
“You know what I mean, when—” He stopped, and his mouth twisted wryly. “No, I guess you don’t.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “When she was thirteen, some older kid started harassing my little sister Bridgette. She’s the girl of the triplets.”
“Older kid?” Possibilities tumbled through her mind, none of them pleasant.
“Yeah.” His lips quirked in that way she was coming to quite like. “He was thirteen and a half.”
She smiled. “What happened?”
“I found her hiding and crying one day, and it seriously pissed me off. So I went after him.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen.” He gave her a sideways look. “And I’d already hit six feet tall. He wasn’t much over five. I picked him up and took him behind a dumpster for a chat.”
Her eyes widened at the image that made. “You must have scared him to death!”
“That was the intention. He made Bridgette cry.”
Ashley felt a wave of something warm and almost wistful. “I... That’s wonderful. You must have been a great big brother.”
He shrugged. It seemed to be his reaction to compliments. “Anyway, that’s what I meant. We might be at odds with each other, but to the outside, it was all for one and all that.”
“Sometimes I do truly wish I hadn’t missed out on that dynamic.”
“It had its moments.” His mouth quirked again. “Looking back, I think he probably had a crush on her, but I didn’t recognize that then.”
Do you now? Recognize crushes?
Her breath jammed up in her throat, and she quickly turned away, masking it as looking toward the sky, which was rather gray today, as if rain were on the way. She was not used to this, not at all, and it was very unsettling. She heard him move, looked back just in time to see him stand, that tall powerful body moving with a grace and ease that made her pulse kick up all over again.
“Are you sure you don’t want to cut this up?” she said quickly.
“Not my job right now.”
No, she was his job right now. Job, not...crush. “What if I stay here with you?” Oh, now that sounded disinterested.
“You’d end up being put to work.”
She was startled at how much that idea appealed. “I’d like that. A lot. I need something physical to do.” She nearly groaned aloud at that. But he didn’t make any suggestive comment. Because it never occurred to him that something physical could mean...something else?
And so an hour later—after he made yet another check of the property—he was armed with a chain saw and an ax and, wearing a pair of goggles, attacking the dead tree. The moment he started trimming the smaller branches, she started gathering them up and piling them a few feet away. He looked over at her, then nodded. And before he went back to work, she thought she saw a trace of a smile.
They continued the process, and she had the silly thought that they worked well together. She guessed she was trying to focus on that rather than notice he’d pulled off his jacket as he worked. He was into the bigger limbs now and cutting them into smaller—fireplace-sized, she realized—lengths. She started stacking those, trying to keep it neat until he shut the chain saw off and spoke.
“They’ll need to be split anyway, so don’t worry about neatness yet.”
She turned around to look at him. And nearly choked as he raised an arm to shove the goggles up to his forehead so he could wipe his face. In the process, his shirt lifted and gave her a full view of what she’d only suspected all along: a perfect set of abs.
She looked away quickly before he lowered his arm and caught her gaping at him. Went back to her stacking before her rattled mind recalled what he’d said to her. She tossed down the logs she’d been about to place neatly on top and turned to go get more. And ran smack into those abs as he brought over more wood.
“Whoa,” he said, twisting to drop the logs to one side rather than have them hit her, then grabbing her as she wobbled forward. The motion pressed her harder against him, and suddenly she couldn’t seem to remember how to move. Nor could she look away. She just stood there, looking up at him, barely capable of breathing, let alone moving.
The only saving grace was that he didn’t move either, for a long silent moment. And when he did, it was to slowly, as if against his will, lower his head. Then his gaze shifted from her eyes to her mouth, and her pulse began to race and her lips parted and he was—
He jerked away. Took a swift step back. Started to speak but stopped, and she saw him swallow. Then, in a voice that had no intonation at all, he said, “Let’s wrap this up. Rain coming in.”
It took them another half hour to get everything he’d cut moved to the pile for splitting. And she spent every minute of it telling herself that he had not been about to kiss her.
Ashley turned a page, listening to the rain that had started last night, just as he’d predicted as they left the half-finished tree yesterday. She was more than a little surprised at herself. And it wasn’t just her unexpected reaction to Ty, although that was surprising enough. It was that she was actually enjoying this.
They’d been here five days now, isolated, in a place with no internet, no connection with the outside world except for seeing the occasional boat going by and that ancient landline phone. There were books to read and movies to watch—on DVDs—but no streaming, online research and no social media. And yet she wasn’t climbing the walls. In fact, she was more relaxed than she could ever remember.
Well, except for the Ty-making-her-pulse-race thing. And that near kiss she kept telling herself hadn’t been that at all.
She’d spent days quietly reading with Simon, but even that was different. Because he had seemed startled whenever he’d looked up and noticed she was there. With Ty, it seemed every time she looked up, he looked at her within seconds, as if he somehow knew when her attention had shifted. As if he was utterly, completely aware of her no matter what he was doing.
That’s his job.
It had become a mantra, repeated to herself time after time as she tried to convince herself it was nothing more, that she was imagining that...something that seemed to flash in his gaze for an instant.
They’d spent the nicer days outside, and he’d seemed okay with letting her simply explore their property however she wanted, as long as he’d checked it first, either personally or with that little surveillance drone he handled with such skill. If she had questions about something she saw out there, be it wildlife or vegetation or terrain, he always had the answer.
She wondered if there was anything he wasn’t good at.
And that gave rise to a flood of heated thoughts that made her consider walking out into that cold November rain just to cool off.
She stole a glance at him, certain she must have mistaken the times before just as she had mistaken what had happened out by the downed tree. He was once more in the chair opposite her favored place by the fire, reading a rather thick tome that he said belonged to his uncle—she presumed the uncle of the tree planting he’d told her about—on naval history. He seemed intent on it, and she was about to look away, convinced now her imagination had just been overactive, when he looked up at her.
“Sorry about the rain. Feeling antsy?” he asked.
Yes, but not because of the rain. “I’m fine.”
“Sorry you can’t talk to your folks.”
He’d explained yesterday morning, with regret she didn’t doubt was real, that while this line was secure, he couldn’t guarantee the other end would be except for Elite, his police detective sister, Jordana, and his criminal attorney brother, Neil, who also had access to secure, monitored lines.
“They know you’re okay,” he had relayed from Mitch, who had spoken to her parents. Then, with a slightly puzzled look, he added, “And they said to tell you to remember Ashworth.”
As it came back to her now, she sighed. She hadn’t wanted to explain then, but it had been nagging at her ever since. She closed her book. “Ashworth,” she said, “is the private school my parents sent me to when I was a kid.”
He didn’t even blink at the abruptness of it or the delay. “I know.”
Of course he did.
He didn’t push or pry, just waited silently, giving her the option to go on or end it. It occurred to her that he did that often, gave her the choice, whether it was where to explore outside, what movie to watch or this. Making up for the choices she didn’t get to make? Interesting thought. But then she found many, many things about Ty Colton interesting.
“I didn’t want to go. But it turned out to be the best thing in the end.”
“Why didn’t you want to go?”
Interesting, she thought, that that was his first question, not about the school or why it had turned out for the best. “I didn’t want to be...different.”
“You’re Ashley Hart. You were always going to be different.”
“I know that now. At aged ten, not so much.” She gave him a curious look. “And you’re a Colton. Everywhere there’s a branch of your family, they’re in the middle of things.” Surely that meant he could understand what it was like? He was connected to the former president, even if it was distantly. “Didn’t you find that difficult sometimes?”
“That’s one thing about us heartland folks. We generally take people at their own worth—or lack of it—not their name.”
She caught herself sighing again. “That sounds...wonderful. Hard to believe, but wonderful.”
“Hard to believe in your world, maybe. That’s one reason I stay right here. So I can just be myself.”
“I envy you that,” she said softly. The longing that filled her at that moment surprised her both by simply existing at all and by its power.
Then, with a rather crooked smile she found oddly endearing, he added, “I’m not saying the name isn’t a factor, but I’ve always looked on it as something to overcome, not trade on.”
And that, she thought, said a great deal about the kind of man he was. “Your parents must be very proud of you.”
He looked a little startled, as if he weren’t quite sure how to take that. “My mother is. My father...not so much.”
She would have smiled at his echoing her own words if what he’d said hadn’t been rather sad. She’d gathered his father irritated him, but how could any father not be proud to have a son like him?
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, meaning it.
He shrugged. She wondered if it was because he didn’t want to talk about it, or because it didn’t really matter to him. She hoped it was the latter. And wondered if his father had any idea what he was missing.