Broken Road

Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

Soon both devil and Lilla were settled into the ranch house and to avoid Mr. Canter devil had taken up any job she could do. She did laundry, the cooking, playing with Lilla and bringing ice tea too the ranch hands when it was too hot.

   Three days passed before she finally ran into Mr. Canter. Well ‘run into’ wasn’t how Devil would have put it. He had to have planned it for when she woke up at five to check on Lilla he came out of his room and the same time and knocked heads. That’s how she also found out that he had switched to the room across the hall from her’s.

   Winthrop grabbed her by the shoulders to steady her, but the warmth of her skin was a shock against his cold palms and his hands tightened in an unforgiving grip.

   “Ouch,” Devil said pointedly.

   Devil waited for his hands to loosen their grip yet they only tightened. She looked up into his face and saw a confused frustration there. So she waited for what he had to say. And waited, and waited.

   “What?” she finally snapped.

   It was cold in the house and she was in shorts and a tank top and freezing her ass off in the old hallway.

   Mr. Canter’s jaw tightened in a clench. “You bother me.”

   Devil mouth fell open in surprise.

   That was it? That was all he had to say to her? That she bothered him?

   Why of all the-!

“You get under my skin and I don’t like it one bit, but you little silence game is driving me nuts! Speak woman!”

   “That’s it?” Devil asked him.

   Winthrop raised his eyebrows at her question.

   “That’s it? Is that all you have to ask me, all you have to say? You avoid me like the plague for three days and that’s it?” he asked in astonishment.

   Devil was uncomfortable with him being so close and she herself was close to blurting out what she had been thinking over those last three days. But she couldn’t for it would be like stabbing her sister in the back.

   But somehow that evil little bit of evil inside her forced her to say something and it was that something that made her want to shoot herself. But she couldn’t stop the words that fell form her bowed lips.

   “You bother me too, you giant jerk. You’ve been the only thing on my mind since I got here. Do you even know how much you bug me? All I’ve been thinking about is kissing you and it’s all your fault!”

   Devil’s hands were too late to cover her mouth and stop the words from coming out. 

   Suddenly it was as if all the air was sucked out from between them and the world disappeared.

          Winthrop found it hard to swallow pass his suddenly dry throat and even harder not to fall over on his backside stunned.

   Had the kid just said what he thought she just said? By the look on her face it told him she had and he wasn’t just hearing things.

   A million things raced through his mind. This girl was only eighteen, he was thirty. She was still a kid who had a kid. She was his brother’s.

   And he didn’t give a damn about any of it because she wanted to kiss him. Without much further ado he crushed his lips down on her’s in a feverish haze of need and took her up in his arms, crushing her small body against his own. Winthrop threaded his fingers in the thick long hair at the bottom of her neck and angled her head so he could deepen the kiss.