The Virgin Beauty. Claire King

doing his job, living his life. And he wasn’t happy about it.

      He’d been waiting for her, brooding about her. When he’d drunk as much coffee as he could hold in the café across the street from the old vet clinic—the new vet clinic, he supposed people would call it now—he’d come back to the truck to brood in the cold spring wind, hoping it’d take the edge off. It hadn’t.

      He levered himself off the bumper and crossed the street without looking for cars. There hardly ever were any. Nobel, Idaho, was not bustling. Half the storefronts that in his childhood had glowed with prosperity and the promise of worldly goods now stood dark; the half that were still hanging on by their fingernails were mostly just wasting electricity. The huge warehouse stores and supply companies and chain groceries in nearby Twin Falls were too much temptation for Nobel’s formerly loyal consumers.

      Not that he was thinking about his town’s faltering economy just now. She’d come back out of the building and was headed for her truck, which was parked on the street. She didn’t notice him there—which gave him a good indication of just how preoccupied she was, settling into what was supposed to have been his life. He was a hard man to miss. She leaned in and grabbed another couple of bulky boxes from the back. Without a word, he took what looked to be the heaviest right out of her hands.

      Lord. The woman was tall, was all Daniel could think as she straightened. Rose, and rose still. She’d looked tall from across the street, but this was…tall.

      He was a good bit over six foot four inches, and was accustomed to being just about the tallest man around. And to looking at the tops of every woman’s head; at uptilted eyes with flirty lashes, at the downslopes of noses, at those darling little whorls of hair every woman had at the top of her head she didn’t know about, as distinguishing as finger-prints. But this girl—

      Woman, he corrected himself. Nothing girlish about this Amazon. She met him almost inch for inch. If she was under six-two he’d eat his cap. His eyes widened at the sheer damned length of her. And the blood rushed into his face almost as fast as it rushed south to his groin. He couldn’t for the life of him explain either reaction.

      Grace felt the package go and gave a little dismayed whimper. Her extra meds were in that box; darn expensive to get and half in glass bottles. She dipped her knees to try to catch it as it fell, but it didn’t fall at all. It swooped into the air instead and landed against the broadest, nicest chest she’d had the pleasure of coming across in years. She straightened slowly, wishing she didn’t have to.

      “Thanks,” Grace said, holding her arm out to receive the box he’d nabbed, “but I can get it.”

      He didn’t answer her so she frowned at him. She was used to those wide-eyed stares, and was, she told herself sternly, resigned to being a freak of nature. But the man was young and handsome in that Western, aw-shucks kind of way, and she was a little embarrassed he’d dropped his jaw the way he had. Embarrassed and exasperated. Surely even this big, dumb cowboy knew it was rude to stare. Apparently not…

      Daniel ignored the frown, knowing enough about women to understand when he was being reprimanded. And why. But he just couldn’t get over it. Over her.

      He knew she wasn’t wearing high heels; he would have noticed that from across the street. He had a definite thing for high heels. He looked down at her feet, anyway. Nope. Boots, low-heeled and clunky.

      Well, something had to explain why this woman looked him straight in the eye. Why she was the first woman he’d come across in all his wide and varied experience whose shoulders wouldn’t graze his belly, whose head couldn’t snuggle up under his chin, whose eyes he’d never see head-on unless she was scooted all the way up onto the pillows of his bed.

      Grace glared at him. Wonderful. Now he was staring at her feet. They were, naturally, not dainty. She would have tipped over every time she walked if they had been, but she was still a little self-conscious about them. If he was so flabbergasted by their size, she thought, drawing her brows together, maybe she should just kick him with one and show him how useful they could be.

      “Excuse me,” she said sharply. He looked up, blinking, his gaze sidetracked briefly in the general vicinity of her chest, as though he somehow expected her face to be there and was surprised when it wasn’t. At least he wasn’t gawking at her feet any longer.

      She meant to raise her eyebrows at him when he finally got all the way up to looking at her. Give him a disdainful stare, she told herself. The one she practiced in the mirror for occasions just such as these, when people—when men—made her feel like some kind of circus curiosity for something genetic and completely beyond her control.

      But she didn’t raise her eyebrows. When she met his eyes, she felt the oddest jolt. They were mossy-green, the color of the lichen on the trees in her native state. And intense. And looking at her not as an oddity of nature, but as someone who might be backed up against the pickup behind her and pressed against. Taken. Right in front of the Nobel County Veterinary Clinic.

      “Uh…” She couldn’t get out another single syllable.

      Daniel just stared at her. He was trying to remember why he wasn’t supposed to like this woman. He’d sulked for days about her coming here, and waited in the cold so he could give her a little trouble. That was reason enough why he shouldn’t squeeze up against that long body to see if it fit his as well as he imagined it might. Wasn’t it?

      For several seconds he couldn’t answer his own question. Until she shook her head, breaking their strange and electrifying eye contact, and made a grab for the box he was holding.

      Daniel recovered, barely, and sidestepped her effort to get her box back. He wanted inside the building, inside the boxes, and this was his chance. Besides, even though he disliked her on principle, that whole long length of her was making him twitch like a teenager, and he was man enough to admit he’d like the feeling to continue awhile.

      “I got it,” he said. He stepped in front of her and through the open door as if he owned the place. He put the box down—it clinked and he knew there was medicine in there; his fingers itched to get at it—and looked around.

      “You just get into town?” he asked as she came in behind him, though he knew perfectly well she had.

      “About five minutes ago,” she said, annoyed and surprised at herself. She was unsettled, and nerves she hadn’t known she had were zinging around inside her like marbles in a centrifuge. This big man had grabbed her box of expensive medicine without warning, gaped at her like a rube, and then short-circuited something important, she was sure, inside her normally very good brain.

      Thankfully, she had enough sense left to know now wasn’t a good time to make a blathering fool of herself in front of this, her first townsperson. The people of Nobel, including this giant, were going to be her lifeblood. Or their animals were, anyway. She stuck out a hand. “Grace McKenna. I’m the new vet.”

      “I know who you are,” he said shortly. It made his blood simmer just thinking about who she was, what she was doing in his town. He took her hand anyway. “Daniel Cash.”

      “Oh, my landlord.” She pumped his hand a couple times, was pleased beyond reckoning to find it was bigger than hers, and tried to pull hers back. He held on. “Uh, excuse me.”

      He let her hand go when she tugged the second time. He couldn’t decide whether he’d kept it in some kind of perverse power play, or because it felt perfectly right in his; not butterfly small and crushable like so many women’s hands had, but strong and long-fingered, like his own.

      “So…the place is going to be great, I think,” Grace said awkwardly. “Smells like you just had it painted. Thanks.”

      He nodded, still taking her in with a pair of depthless, moss-green eyes.

      “Dr. Niebaur said you would. Paint it for me. I bought the practice sight unseen.” And she was dying to see it, if this bruiser with the pretty eyes would get out of her way. “But he assured me you took good care of the building.”

      He