When Night Falls (7 page)

Mitchell was watching her reactions closely and she looked away to his hand, wide and open near her head. “You probably got that temper from your mother’s Irish blood. She fought, too, though in a gentler way. Those thorns in your hands really should be removed.”

He blinked and frowned and considered his hand, turning it palm upright to reveal the rose thorns embedded there. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Let me take them out.”

“I can manage, and my mother has nothing to do with me. She gave up that right.”

“Is everything going to be a fight with you? Can’t one neighbor help another?” she asked, half-teasing, half-serious.

“What do you know, and what do you want?” he returned softly, easing a tendril back from her face. His finger lifted her chin, those dark eyes prowling on her face, too close and seeing too much.

What did she want? Peace and safety and harmony, and none of them were in his eyes
.

In the kitchen, while Mitchell was retrieving the antiseptic and cotton, she felt Lauren calling to her, that warm brush of air, almost like a hug. Uma leaned against the counter and
noted the expensive black leather briefcase, the letters opened beside it. At a glance, one letterhead stood out—“Mr. Mitchell Warren, Vice President of Sales, Corporate Office, Rogers Building and Supply.”

She recognized the company name—Rogers Building and Supply was a major national warehouse chain, where customers could find everything from building needs to gardening supplies.

A printout beside it said “Position terminated amiably by employee” and showed that Mitchell had transferred stock and funds from his company retirement fund into personal investments. The total took Uma’s breath away, and yet he appeared to have little, other than his pickup and the family property he had purchased.

When Mitchell returned, wearing a shirt, he glanced at the briefcase and shoved the letters aside. His silence said he suspected she’d seen the correspondence.

She felt Mitchell watching her as she bent her head to tend those big broad torn hands, easing out the thorns with a needle, dabbing antiseptic on the scratches. His breath was warm upon her cheek and she sensed his study of her. “You really should wear leather gloves and be more careful. But then, you know that, don’t you? You were in a mood this morning and taking it out on poor Lauren’s garden, just ripping and tearing because you felt like it.”

He snorted at that, dismissing her.

Finished, she studied the hard craggy face, the bloody scratch on his cheekbone and dabbed the cotton ball with antiseptic on it. He rared back, glaring a “don’t touch me” at her, and without thinking, Uma reached for that rich shaggy hair and held it tight in her fingers.

His eyes narrowed, flashing at her, yet he let her hold him as she continued to cleanse the scratches. “You like that, don’t you? Having your way? Running things?” he asked darkly.

She screwed the lid back onto the tube, forming her words
carefully. “Maybe I do, when someone like you doesn’t know what’s good for him. These could get infected.”

“That’s my business.”

“You always were difficult and bull-headed.”

Without pausing, Mitchell shot an edgy taunt at her. “And you like things nice and easy, don’t you?”

She didn’t understand the shifting emotions, and frowned up at him. Mitchell pushed away from the counter and turned on the faucets full force. He bent his head beneath the running water and scrubbed his face.

“What’s with you?” she asked, trying to understand how she’d upset him.

When he straightened and deliberately wiped his face while looking at her, she knew he was washing her touch from him. “You,” he said as he ran the towel roughly over his hair, leaving it in shaggy peaks.

Mitchell wasn’t in a mood for gentleness or understanding as he hurled the kitchen towel into the sink and issued his challenge: “Coming?”

Uma’s reply surprised her. She wondered if his bristling mood was contagious as she lifted her chin, staring at him boldly. If he wanted an argument, she could give him one. “Only if you ask nice.”

Mitchell considered her face, the way her body tensed as his look raked down and up. “Terms?”

“You could call them that. I don’t like feeling like a tagalong. Either you invite me, or you don’t.”

She didn’t trust the way his mouth curved slowly, or the low husky intimate tone, “Well, Ms. Thornton, would you mind accompanying me this morning?”

“That’s better. Yes, I would love to, Mr. Warren,” she said very properly and wondered why she had agreed. Why Mitchell fascinated her. Why she wanted to reach out and shake him.

At the ranch, or what was left of it, Mitchell tossed the brush onto a pile and glanced at Uma; she didn’t deserve the backlash of his dark mood. With a bad, restless night behind him, he’d battled the garden for physical relief.

And found that he liked it.

All those years when he’d worked his way up the corporate ladder, he actually liked the physical movement, the tending of trees and plants. Just one more thing he didn’t know about himself, that he enjoyed the simplicity of working with his hands.

The truth of the matter was that he didn’t know how to react to those soft, caring looks, that light sweet touch of her fingers upon his skin.

He should apologize, but he—Mitchell hurled a limb onto the pile.
He never apologized. Never
. The morning was cool, with just enough warmth to foretell the day’s baking heat, and he remembered that his father had never apologized.
People take apologizes as a sign of weakness…

Mitchell frowned and studied his hands locked to the pickup’s side panels. The pickup jolted and he looked up to see Uma standing on the bed, taking the old broom in the back and sweeping out the leaf and twig clutter. “I can do that,” he said, nettled that she would be helping him, working with him.

And he wondered why.

There, moving tall and leggy, silhouetted in front of the bright morning sun, capable and lithe and all slender curves, Uma looked like any other woman, not the cool artist-type who preferred her shadowy office and her quiet. Or was she?

Mitchell could almost feel his fingers locking into those hips, smoothing those long, slender legs. In his mind, an erotic flash of skin against skin, of those long legs circling his hips as he drove into her, just sex and heat and woman making him forget everything—

When she put down the broom and made to leap from the back of the pickup bed, Mitchell stood in front of her. He wondered what she would do—

“Move,” she ordered and he took pleasure in that tight tone.

“Or?” He wondered how far he could push her before—

She placed her hands on her waist and looked down at him. “Mitchell Warren, you are as perverse as you were as a boy. Just every bit as ornery. Now, step back.”

With his hand sweeping low in front of him in a bow, Mitchell stepped aside and Uma leaped to the ground. “You just love doing that, don’t you? Challenging me? Why?”

“Because you’re here and I like getting to you. You sizzle, just a nice smothered sort of anger, all very ladylike—and I wonder what it would take to get you really riled. Call it entertainment.”

Uma’s gray eyes narrowed, then she lifted her head and walked away from him to the overgrown rubble of the house. He rarely entered other people’s lives, but Uma seemed so complete and strong and yet feminine.

He wondered how any man could let her go and why she didn’t want remarriage to a man as gentle and upstanding as Everett; why she didn’t want a home of her own and a family when she suited the role.

He wondered why that lurch of possession shot through him, to hold her, to have her. He came to stand behind her and heard himself ask, “Do you like being single?”

“I do. I like my life.” She pushed an old board with her foot as the old windmill slowly whirred nearby. “Tell me about that night.”

“No.”

Those gray eyes turned to look up at him, searching his shadows. “Afraid?”

“Of telling you? No.” She was pushing, trying to understand something he couldn’t. To give himself thinking room,
removing himself from the passion inside, he said, “The Warren homestead was originally 640 acres. Now it’s only forty.”

She knew everything, but still those gray eyes studied him and the night of the fire pushed out of him, something he’d never shared with anyone else. There, in that cool summer morning, amid the old burned house, that bitter night slashed out of him as fresh as when it had happened—the living terror of seeing the barn blaze.

“Roman and I saw the fire first. Dad was drinking and we couldn’t rouse him. The horses went wild, the smoke so thick you couldn’t see, and you could only hear those awful sounds. The barn doors had been nailed shut. By the time we found a crowbar to pry the plank free and get the horses out, the house was on fire and Dad was screaming. The doors to the house had been nailed shut while Roman and I fought the fire. It was arson…payback for something I’d done, or didn’t do.”

The smoke of that night choked him, the fear wrapping around him as he turned away. “There’s not much after that. Dad died on the way to town.”

Tell Grace that I’ve always loved her
, his father had whispered amid his pain.
Everything was my fault. Take Roman and go to her…

But he hadn’t; he needed Roman perhaps more than his younger brother needed him. He couldn’t bear the thought of Roman going to a mother who had left her sons and husband. Mitchell looked down to where Uma’s slender pale fingers held his own, and then up to the softness of her eyes. He tore his hand away, rubbing it against the other and studying the two fingers webbed by fire.

“You still feel guilty, don’t you?” Uma asked quietly at his side. “You think that you could have done something to save him, that you failed in some way.”

“I should have seen it coming. At nineteen, I had some idea about what a woman could do. Tessa was a woman who always got what she wanted. I didn’t want her.”

“Tessa Greenfield?” Uma’s sharply indrawn breath said she understood immediately.

“Her husband was dead of a heart attack by the time I put the pieces together and got Roman under control. When I walked out, Tessa was still screaming, cursing at me.”

A slight breeze riffled through the tops of the old elms, broken by fierce Oklahoma storms, and Mitchell heard his father whisper,
Tell Grace that I’ve always loved her. Everything was my fault. Take Roman and go to her—

“Tessa just lives across the county line, not eighty miles from here. She sold the ranch and moved when Max died, so she could have more of a social life than on the ranch. You came that close to Madrid and never came back in all that time?”

When he shook his head, Uma looked off into the distance. “And that’s when you decided money meant everything, that and power. I saw the letters on your kitchen cabinet. Money and prestige weren’t enough, were they? You can’t get over this. You’re still wearing that guilt—that you were the reason he died and your family lost what was left of the old homestead.”

“I think about it sometimes,” Mitchell said, unwilling to give her everything. “I imagine your father had a lot to say about—”

“His feud is his own. But in a way, you both are alike, carrying dirty old laundry with you, when there’s nothing to be done about it. How does Roman feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean, you don’t talk about it, right? You just locked it up and—”

“Lay off.”

The slow rise of color in her cheeks told him that she didn’t like his attitude. “Don’t forget you’re in my town now, Mitchell Warren, Vice President of Sales. I know the people
here. I love them, and I won’t have you storming around, brooding, tossing off all sorts of porcupine needles—”

“‘Porcupine needles?’” Mitchell stared at the woman pacing back and forth in the sunlight. He could have picked her up and carried her into the truck and used her passion in a way that would satisfy them both—or could he? He wasn’t exactly certain what would satisfy Uma.

“Well, invisible barbs when someone comes too close.”

In his adult lifetime, few people had lectured Mitchell. He didn’t like it; in his youth he had taken enough orders from Fred. “Anything else while you’re at it? Just what’s bothering you about me?”

“Just don’t forget that you’re in
my
town. If you’ve got any big ideas about tearing everything apart—forget it.”

He leaned back against the pickup and crossed his arms. “My, my, my. How you do talk. And by the way, it’d suit me if you’d keep my private life private.”

She waved her hands again and shook her head. “As if I’m a pipeline to the world. I know what is private and what isn’t. Don’t fight me on this, Mitchell. You’ll lose.”

After her morning with Mitchell, an afternoon with Everett was soothing. Uma hadn’t expected Mitchell to be able to rile her, but he had. He’d stood there, tall and powerful against that black beast of a pickup and his expression said he was amused.

Amused. She amused him
.

Uma trembled slightly. Unless she was mistaken, Mitchell’s look at her was purely sexual—raw, vibrating through the bright sunshine and locking within her. The ride home had been silent, and he’d driven right to her home—something that was certain to irritate her father. Mitchell had reached across her and opened the door, his arm brushing her breast.

In that frozen moment when neither moved, Uma’s heart
stopped, her senses too aware of the currents between them. “Better go inside,” Mitchell had said softly, tauntingly. “Where it’s safe.”

She shivered again as she realized Everett was speaking to her—“Uma, we could still have a good life together. I love you. You know that.”

Uma wiped the counter in the kitchen that had once been hers to tend. Designing Everett’s travel and advertising brochures often led her back here, to the home she still loved, because it was a part of her—the old dreams that she didn’t want now. It was a good time and a good house, she thought fondly.

His office in the home they had once shared had been designed by her. She’d also shared his office on Main Street, her graphics computer set up across from his desk. They’d been high school sweethearts, their courtship gentle and secure, encouraged by their families. They’d gone to college together and had returned to be married. How exciting that time was—just married, working together and planning a home, building it. Life had been so perfect—once.