Sugar And Spice (20 page)

They walked back toward the house in silence, taking it slow and easy. Mack’s leg ached like hell. What had possessed him to go walking in the snow? Oh yes—their jaunt into the woods around his cabin had been Katie’s idea. Something to keep them busy so they wouldn’t think about sex. Yeah, right.

When they reached the cabin, Destry came leaping past them up the steps to the porch. Panting, he sat on his hind legs and waited for them.

“I believe he’s ready to go back inside,” Katie said.

“Me too.” Mack grabbed hold of the railing and boosted himself up the steps. “It’s about lunchtime, isn’t it?”

She checked her wristwatch. “Yipes. It’s after one. I thought I’d take a couple of cans of tuna and make tuna salad. How does that sound?”

Mack opened the back door and stood aside to let Katie enter first. “Sounds fine to me.”

Once inside, divested of their coats, caps, and gloves, their damp shoes placed by the fireplace, Katie went to work preparing lunch.

“I’ll set the table,” Mack told her.

“Thank you.” She offered him a big smile. “See how pleasant things can be between us, if we both try?”

“And pleasant is preferable to passionate, right?”

When her sweet smile vanished and her smooth brow wrinkled, Mack knew he should have kept his big mouth shut. But playing house with a woman as if they were a couple of ten-year-olds wasn’t Mack’s idea of a good time.

“You promised.” Her pink lips puckered slightly into a little pout as she spoke with just a hint of a whine in her voice.

Mack grimaced. “All right, all right.”

She sighed heavily, then offered him a fragile smile. “Why don’t you see if you can get an update on the weather radio?”

“I doubt anything’s changed since earlier,” he told her. “And the news I got off the regular radio said that road crews have already begun clearing the streets in Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and downtown Gatlinburg.”

“How long do you think it will take them to get up here?”

“I’m not sure. This is just my second winter here, and we didn’t get anything half this bad last winter.”

“Then I might be here for Christmas.”

“You might be.”

She sighed again. “If that happens, may I use your cell phone to call my family on Christmas Day?”

“Sure.”

After giving him another smile, she used the manual can opener to remove the lids from the tuna cans, then dumped the contents into a large bowl and took several items from the refrigerator.

An hour later, lunch eaten and dishes hand-washed, dried, and put away, Katie suggested they play checkers.

“I noticed a checkerboard in that bookcase, along with a deck of cards and several games,” Katie said.

“They were here when I moved in,” he replied. “I’d meant to throw them out but never got around to doing it.”

“Come on, let’s play checkers. It’ll be fun.”

Fun? He doubted it. Then a devious thought hit him. “Okay, we’ll play checkers, but we need to decide on the stakes.”

She eyed him quizzically. “You mean play for pennies or matchsticks or—”

“Or each of us names what we want if we win.”

After being hesitant at first, her mind obviously mulling over the idea, Katie nodded. “Okay, just as long as sex is not involved.”

Mack chuckled, then using his forefinger marked an X across his chest. “I swear.”

They set up the board on the kitchen table. He took black; she took red. She won the first game. Hell, she was a lot better at this than he was. He hadn’t actually played checkers since he was a kid.

“Okay, what do you want for winning the first game?” he asked.

“I want to know if you’ve ever been married, engaged, or in love.”

She studied his face as he glared at her. “Yeah, I see how it’s going to be. You’ll use this game to worm all sorts of information out of me.”

“It works both ways,” she told him. “If you win, you can ask me anything you’d like.”

“Hmm…What if that’s not what I want when I win?”

“Aren’t you the least bit interested in finding out more about me?”

He knew a trick question when he heard one. “Okay, I know when to give in and play the game by your rules.”

Mack got up and walked over to the small pantry. After he opened the door, he reached inside and pulled out a bag of Katie’s homemade cookies. “No, I’ve never been married or engaged. As for being in love…maybe once or twice, when I was younger.”

“Remind me again, just how old are you?” she asked teasingly.

“That’s another question.”

“That one should be free,” she said. “I’m thirty.”

“Thirty-six.” He held out the bag to her as he sat back down. “Cookies?”

She shook her head and set the board up for their second game. When she won for the second time, she seemed quite proud of herself.

“Where were you born and raised?” she asked.

“I was born in Valdosta, Georgia, but after my mother died when I was nine, my dad moved us around a lot, going from job to job. I pretty much grew up all over the South and Southwest.”

“I was born and raised in Cleveland, Tennessee, not two hours from here. I’ve never lived anywhere else, except when I went off to college. Darrell was from Cleveland, too, so naturally we stayed there after we got married.”

“So, when you ask me a question and I answer it, you’re then going to give me the same information about you?”

She nodded. “That’s called conversation, getting to know each other.”

Mack grunted.

“You grunt a lot, you know that, don’t you?”

He chuckled.

“Ready for another game?”

“Set ’em up.”

When he won the third game, but just barely, he made a big show of being excited about winning. Katie laughed at his antics.

God, he loved her laughter.

“For my prize, I want to know something personal about you,” Mack said.

She sat up straight and placed her hands in her lap. “Ask away.”

“What color are your panties?”

“Mack!” Widening her eyes, she forced a shocked expression, but she couldn’t keep from giggling.

Hadn’t he seen her panties drying in his bathroom that first morning? Surely he had.

“White? Red? Black?”

“You’re not supposed to ask about anything that has to do with sex,” she reminded him. “Sex is taboo.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask to see your panties,” he said. “I just asked what color they are.”

“Pink.”

“Hmm. And your bra too?”

“Stop that.”

“Ah, come on. Tell me.”

“It’s pink, too, as you darn well know. You saw them.”

“Good girls don’t wear black or red underwear, huh? And as for seeing your underwear—I didn’t see them on you.”

“You asked your questions and they’ve been answered.” She reset the board, then reached over and stuck her hand in the open cookie bag. “I’m going to make some hot chocolate to go with these cookies.

Do you want some?”

He wanted some all right, but not hot chocolate. “Yeah, thanks. I’ll help you. You get the cocoa mix and I’ll get the milk.”

She offered him another of her sweet smiles, and for some stupid reason he felt as if he’d been poleaxed. What the hell was it about Katie Hadley that made him want her so damn much?

After eight games of checkers, with Katie winning five of the eight, they put the board away and Mack went outside with Destry. She had won the answers to a great many questions that gave her some insight into who Mack MacKinnon was. Giggling to herself, she thought about one question in particular.

“Is Mack your real name or just a nickname, short for MacKinnon?”

He’d stammered a few times, then admitted that his name was Cletis Hobart MacKinnon and he’d been named for both of his grandfathers.

“No wonder you want to be called Mack.”

She’d also found out that he’d joined the army straight out of high school, that he had no siblings, and his father had died ten years ago. He had no close family ties. Mack was a loner. He claimed he preferred the solitary life here in his mountain cabin. She wondered, given the choice, whether he might not choose having a family over the isolated bachelor life he’d been living.

They had prepared supper together, cleaned up afterward together, and talked the whole time. At least Katie had talked. He had listened, replying whenever necessary. The lady was an open book—about everything except her husband. Saint Darrell, who’d been dead for four years. How many women mourned a man for four years?

Katie should be remarried and having babies. She was the type who wanted and needed domestic bliss.

So why hadn’t she found her second Mr. Right by now?

What worried Mack was the fact that he didn’t like the idea of Katie with another man. In forty-eight hours, she’d gotten under his skin. He knew it wasn’t anything to worry about, that his jealous thoughts were all tied up with the fact that he wanted to screw Katie. If he could just work her out of his system, he’d be fine.

“You need to bring in more firewood,” Katie said. “I’ll go with you and see if I can find some twigs.”

“What?” Had she said twigs?

“You weren’t listening to me, were you? My dad does that to my mother all the time. She’s always saying, ‘David, you’re not listening to me.’ Why are all men—”

“Tell me again, honey, and I promise I’ll listen.”

“We’ll need twigs to stick the marshmallows on.”

What was she talking about?

Katie explained. “I told you that we should roast marshmallows while we listen to the radio and swap stories about our childhoods.”

Mack groaned.

Katie frowned at him.

“You stay here,” he said. “I’ll find you some twigs.”

Grumbling to himself the entire time he was scouring near the porch for twigs, Mack asked himself why, if he knew for certain that he wasn’t getting in Katie Hadley’s pink panties, he was jumping through hoops to try to please her.

An hour later, sitting in front of the roaring fire, their bellies filled with marshmallows, the sticky twigs burning in the fire, Mack leaned his back against the nearby chair. When Katie scooted closer, he maneuvered her around so that she sat between his spread thighs and eased closer and closer until her back pressed against his chest.

Once she was cozily situated, he released his hold on her upper arms and allowed her to simply lay against him on her own. What he wanted was to put his arms around her and hold her.

“This probably isn’t a good idea,” she told him.

“I’m not touching you,” he said. “We’re just a couple of people getting acquainted, sitting back and enjoying the fire and the music on the radio.”

“Mack?”

“Huh?”

“Thank you for today. You’ve been wonderful.”

“You’re pretty wonderful yourself.”

She glanced over her shoulder and up into his face. “I like you a lot, you know.”

“I like you a lot too.”

“Maybe when I go home, back to Cleveland, you could drive down and visit me sometime.”

“Maybe.”

“We could have a real date. Go out to dinner, go to the movies. That sort of thing.”

“We could.”

“And after we’ve dated for a while, we could discuss our relationship becoming more”—she swallowed—“intimate.”

“Katie?”

“Hmm…?”

“I’m going to kiss you. Just kiss you. Nothing else. All right?”

“All right.”

He lifted her onto his lap, turned her toward him, and then cupped her face between his open palms.

Her eyelids fluttered, then closed. He took her mouth in a tender kiss.

God, she tasted good.

He kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. She sighed, parting her lips, inviting him in. With her full cooperation, he devoured her mouth, his body tightening, demanding more.

Katie responded, returning the kiss with equal passion.

When they were both breathless and came up for air, they stared at each other for one endless moment. Then Mack released his hold on her face and slipped her off his lap and onto the floor.

“I think I’d better take Destry out and then go on up to bed,” Mack said.

Gazing at him with a dazed expression, she didn’t reply, simply nodded.

He had to get away from her. Now. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to walk away from the temptation to claim her completely. His body ached with wanting her.

Damn, it was going to be another long, restless night.

Katie had dreamed about Mack again, the two of them making love with wild abandon in various positions and odd places. She’d never in her entire life climaxed in a dream, not until she’d dreamed about Mack MacKinnon. What was it about him that appealed to her so much? Why him and not the dozens of other nice, attractive men she’d met in the four years since Darrell died?

Because he’s the one, an intuitive inner voice said.

Had Fate sent her to the mountains, up that specific road, on that specific day, for a reason? Had the worst winter storm to hit the area in decades been sent from above just for Mack and her?

As Katie cleared away their breakfast dishes while Mack was outside with Destry, she considered her options. She could keep things safe between Mack and her or she could give in to temptation and they would become lovers. Either way, the end results would be the same. As soon as the roads cleared, possibly by tomorrow, the next day at the very latest, she would leave and go home to Cleveland in time for Christmas with her family. And Mack would stay here, alone and isolated from the world. He didn’t want a long-term relationship with her or any other woman, and she couldn’t give him or any man all of herself, all of her love, not when a part of her still belonged to Darrell and always would.

The back door flew open and Destry bounded into the kitchen, with Mack right behind him. As he bent to clean the dog’s paws, Mack glanced up at Katie and smiled.

“It’s already getting warmer,” he said. “The icicles hanging from the roof are melting. If the weather forecasters are right, it’ll get up to thirty-six degrees today.”

“Do you think the roads will be clear by tomorrow?”

“Maybe.” He rose to his full six-three height. “Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve. You want to go home, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.” Her gaze locked with his. “I thought I wanted to get away from my family, that I couldn’t bear to spend one more merry, merry Christmas with them. Not when all Christmas means to me is memories of Darrell and how happy we once were. But I was wrong. I need my family.”