Mail Order Bride Mishap (Into the West #3)

Chapter 17

Walk away. Just turn around and walk away. I won’t stop you. Please, just take the decision out of my hands.

As his words echoed around them, Cookie stared down into Fiona’s eyes, so close that even in this half-light from the kitchen he could see the long lashes framing her incredulity, that mouth shaped so much like another’s. Wide and capable of passionate kisses or lightning quick scorn, where laughter or tender admonishments could equally escape. So close he could take those lips, experience first-hand which response he would be awarded. Perhaps recreate that heaven he’d once had, a lifetime ago, as the man he’d once been.

Or free-fall back into the abyss that had been his life for nearly twenty years, as the man he’d fashioned out of what was left.

He raised his eyes to hers, resisted the growing urge to taste her, but not really her, satisfied himself instead with touching her hair. Gently tugged some strands loose from the chignon she’d fashioned it into, smoothed them through his fingers like skeins of finest silk. And maintained their tenuous connection with his pleading gaze.

“Aye, you’ve got the right of it, Cookie,” she whispered in response to his warning. “But I do know what you’re not capable of.” Her eyes held his, like two small hands gripping him as he hung over the yawning maw of his own creation. He clung to that fragile lifeline, sensed rather than saw when she clasped gentle fingers around his larger ones as they sifted her loosened tresses. Stilled his movements with a soothing touch. She turned his hand over, bent and softly kissed the palm. Closed his fingers over it.

Startled at the unexpected caress, his gaze dropped momentarily to that burned flesh before returning to her face. Met her eyes on a caught breath.

“You could no more hurt me, me darlin’,” she whispered in that melodic brogue, “than I could never lose me temper. You know that to be true. We have a connection, you and I. I’ve felt it from the start. So don’t go threatenin’ me with weapons not in yer arsenal, Cookie me dearest.” She attempted the ghost of a smile, but it was the accent that did him in, that one difference that set them miles apart.

Angered to be reminded of that fact, he abruptly flung her hand away, swung around and stalked off perhaps ten feet before pivoting and facing her once more. He knew his expression was full of pain, could hide it no longer. On a hoarse cry of anguish he ordered, “Don’t call me that, for Christ’s sake. That’s not me. My name is Brody. Dr. Broderick Westfield. Say it. Say it, one damn time, so I can remember who I am. Who I was. Who I’m not.” This last seeped out on an escaped sob.

Mortified, he paced farther into the shadows of the dining room, stared unseeingly at the drawn window shade. Inhaled deep, suffocating breaths of the tainted air around him. At last dropped his head to stare at his shoes, where the left-over pieces of his heart lay shattered.

And then two feminine arms slid around his waist, thin but strong as they pulled him bodily against her slim frame. He could feel her heartbeat thrum through him, felt her lay her cheek against his back. Sucked in a steadying breath that only prolonged his self-made prison of a life.

Her small hands moved up to cover his heart, or at least where it had once been, and she said against his back, “Brody. Dr. Broderick Westfield. A fine name, to be sure. But not for the strong man I’ve come to know.” And she placed a soft kiss where her head lay. The shock of it burned straight through him, sent his hands to clasp hers, to hold the sensation within him, when he felt sure it would explode through his very core.

He stared down at their joined hands, willed himself to turn in her embrace, take for himself those wide lips, drown in the depths of those eyes, conceal his memories in the thickness of that red hair—