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I stare at the paint mare and she stares back. “Angel, maybe. She looks like an angel standing in the frost, with all the steam coming off the lake.”
He cocks his head, studying me. “By that logic, should I call you Redbird? I saw you walking across my yard, looking like one of the redbirds at the edge of the woods in winter.”
My heart skips and I turn to look at his profile. There’s something personal about the word when he says it like that. It feels more intimate than the brush of his hand against my bare skin. My mind spirals, wondering what it would feel like to be in bed with a man like him. Pinned between his hard body and the sheets.
“You don’t know me like that,” I whisper.
“I could.”
I swallow and drag my eyes back to the mare. My pulse thrums and my head feels light. He’s an enormous presence just standing beside me in his t-shirt with the misty cloud of his breath hanging before his lips in the chilly air. The implications of his contract are unfathomable. If he can make my body reactlike this just standing beside him, he could break it if he had a chance to be alone with me.
Door locked. Sheets on his bed pulled back. Big, heavy body between my thighs and hard mouth on my neck.
Beneath my dress, my body curls with heat. It spills through my chest, up my neck, down my thighs. It centers in my core and I feel the urge to let out a little sigh.
I’m rooted to the frozen ground.
Do I want him?
I can’t trust my taste in men anymore. After all, I picked Clint. He was quick, talkative, and had a temper like a snake striking. I liked how witty and intense he was. Now, I find I like that Gerard is the exact opposite, not the kind of man I ever saw myself wanting. He’s guarded, he moves slowly, as impenetrable as the mountains around us.
He’s been hurt. No one builds walls that thick without good reason.
But he doesn’t strike me as cruel the way Clint was.
“Maybe you’re right,” I say, my throat tight. “Maybe I am a redbird.”
His brow twitches. “Why is that?”
“I feel…fragile. Like every gust of wind blows me in a different direction.”
I hate that I’m being vulnerable with him, but he’s listening. And so is Angel. For the first time in fucking years, I’m being heard. It feels extraordinary.
“My wings aren’t strong,” I whisper.
Clint taught me that. When I lived in the shelter of girlhood, my father told me I was strong, brave, and worth the same as any man. Then came the painful years of growing into a woman and learning that all those words were just a smokescreen to hide a harsh truth.
The world was made for men like Clint, like my father, like Gerard. Not for women like me.
That had become clear to me at age eighteen when I talked back to my husband. He took my hair—the same auburn waves my father had taught me were beautiful and rare—and held me still with a fistful of it. That was the first time he used a part of my body as a weapon to subdue me, but not the last.
“Don’t fucking talk to me like that if you can’t back it up,” he snapped that day.
I wanted to obey him, but the problem was, I wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t the truth. Usually, I was expressing frustration at my crushing workload. Or simply loitering nearby, hoping for some small scrap of attention from him. But he’d push himself into my space until I felt small. Trying to goad me into hitting first.
“I’m not a man,” I begged once. “Stop trying to fight me like one.”
He never hit me, but he liked to tell me that a lot. He was a good man for not beating the daylights out of me and I was the bitch who deserved it. That scared me enough to keep my real thoughts to myself.
“You’re fucking lucky,” he’d hiss. “You’re lucky I’m not the kind of man who puts his hands on his wife.”
I still don’t know what I did to make him hate me with such venom.
I shudder and drag myself out of my memories. This man, standing in his yard with the sun creeping over the mountains, is far more pleasant. I clear my throat and take off his jacket, holding out to him.
“I should go,” I say
His eyes fall on my body and I swear I’m on fire. How does he strip me bare with a single glance?
