Nick's Long-Awaited Honeymoon. Sandra Steffen

marks a man’s whisker stubble had left on her sensitive skin.

      The man he had pinned against the building had plenty of whisker stubble. Brown whisker stubble. Now that Nick took the time to notice, the color of the man’s hair was brown, too. Brown, not gray. Certainly not silver.

      Damn. He’d overreacted.

      He released the other man and instantly took a backward step. Adrenaline still pumped through his veins, frustration close on its heels. Since anger was the quickest way to vent it, Nick squeezed his hands into fists at his sides and sputtered, “Who are you? And what the hell are you doing here?”

      The man pushed himself away from the building, his own hands curling into fists. “My name’s Burke Kincaid. I ran out of gas just outside of town last night, so I hiked in. Nobody was around except L—er, Miss Graham, so she helped me. Now who the hell are you?”

      Everything had happened so fast Brittany was having difficulty taking it all in. One moment Nick had been kissing her, and the next thing she knew he had a man pressed up against a building. Although she’d never seen him before, she could tell from the integrity in his eyes that Burke Kincaid was an innocent man. He was also an angry man. Rightly so.

      She happened to glance at Louetta Graham. An instant later Louetta met her gaze. Brittany had never seen Louetta with her hair down, and certainly never in slippers and a robe and not much else. Suddenly, everything she’d heard about Louetta flashed through her mind. The other woman was painfully shy, and very kind. Several months ago she’d gone to work for Melody Carson in the town’s only diner. With Melody due to have a baby soon, Louetta practically ran the place single-handedly. She still blushed every time one of the local boys made a pass at her, but the few times Brittany had heard Louetta laugh, she’d stopped and stared, because hers wasn’t the laughter a person would associate with a woman who’d been voted “The girl most likely not to” by her graduating class.

      Evidently Louetta’s graduating class had been wrong.

      Her hair was mussed, and her mouth had obviously been very thoroughly kissed recently. Brittany wet her own lips, thinking the same could be said for her. Which brought Brittany’s gaze back to Nick. She recognized the anger in his features and in the way he squeezed his fingers into fists at his sides. She also recognized the fear beneath the anger. That, she didn’t understand.

      “I’m Nick Colter. Brittany’s husband.” He scooped the man’s cowboy hat off the ground and handed it over. “Sorry. I thought you were somebody else.”

      The other man accepted the hat but not the apology. “It seems to me your hello could use a little work.”

      Nick nodded, the small gesture an acknowledgment of fault and an admission to an error in judgment. He would have said more, but it was pretty difficult to make amends with a man who was wearing paint chips on one side of his face.

      Burke Kincaid couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Nick, but something about the steadiness of his gaze reminded Nick of his father. “Now, Nicholas,” Joe Colter used to say. “Your mother and I aren’t raising any hotheads. Wild animals get mad. People get angry. If you’re angry, take it out on that stack of wood out back.”

      Nick had split a lot of wood in his day.

      Sometimes his mother had brought him out something cool to drink. More often than not she’d stuck around, stacking the wood he’d split, her hands work-roughened and chapped, her face bearing far too many lines for a woman her age.

      “Everyone’s born with gifts,” Clarice would say, staring at the house with its peeling paint and sagging roof. “Money doesn’t happen to be one of ours. But pride is one of your greatest strengths, Nicholas, and so is brawn, neither of which amounts to a hill of beans unless you have the brains to back them up.”

      Nick shook his head at the memory. Watching as Burke strode in the direction of the town’s only gas station and Louetta disappeared inside the door that led to the apartment over the diner, he wondered how many times he’d allowed anger to get in the way of his brain.

      Patting the revolver underneath his coat, he took a deep breath, released it and took another before turning to face Brittany. Her arms were crossed, her shoulders set, her eyes wary. His rough handling hadn’t done any lasting damage to Burke Kincaid, but it had raised Brittany’s suspicion.

      She stared at him, unblinking, the only sound that of droplets of water plopping into puddles on the ground. Finally she said, “Why did you come here, Nick?”

      Brittany saw Nick take a step toward her, only to stop abruptly as if he’d thought better of coming any closer. His chest expanded with the deep breath he took, his fingers raking through his hair. “Everything I’ve told you is true. I want you and Savannah to move back to Chicago with me. If you won’t do that, I’d like you both to stay with my parents in Florida for a while.”

      She took a moment to digest the information he’d given her. The man standing before her wasn’t an awkward cowboy wearing scuffed boots and a bolo tie. He was an intimidating man in jeans and a worn bomber jacket. He was five foot eleven and three-quarter inches tall. The lack of that last quarter inch had always rankled him. Some men would have considered it close enough and called themselves an even six feet. But not Nick.

      Nicholas Colter was a lot of things. Egotistical, overbearing and stubborn to name a few. But he never lied. That didn’t mean he always told the complete truth. At least not until he had to.

      Glancing at the footsteps Burke Kincaid had left in the snow when Nick had hauled him up against the building without warning, she said, “Why, Nick?”

      He narrowed his eyes as if waiting for her to be a little more specific. That expression could raise her hackles faster than anything else. Today she wasn’t giving in to it, not until she had some answers.