Christmas In Mustang Creek. Linda Miller Lael

that. Finished with the bathroom?”

      She flounced toward her bed. No one ever flounced that she knew of—besides maybe a few select romance-novel heroines who did not do it in kitty-patterned flannel pajamas—but she tried anyway. She waved toward the bathroom door. “Yep. It’s all yours.” With that, she threw back the covers and scrambled beneath them.

      “Thanks.” He disappeared into the bathroom and shut the door, and she finally relaxed a little, settling in and staring up at the ceiling.

      Then she heard the water running.

      He was naked in there, she realized, with sudden, visceral clarity. She imagined water streaming in rivulets over the chiseled landscape of his body, a terrain she knew all too well...

      You’re hopeless, she told herself. Then, with tired resolution, she jerked the blankets up to her chin and once again came to terms with the baffling fact that that was then and this was now. And despite the bizarrely coincidental It Happened One Night situation she found herself in, things would return to normal in the morning. All she had to do now was close her eyes and let sleep take her under, enfold her in blissful oblivion.

      Exhausted as she was, however, her brain remained busy, chewing and fretting, gnawing at a single thought.

      Jaxon Locke was in Mustang Creek.

      While she was in New York and he was in Idaho, she’d managed to ignore his existence. Mostly. She’d gotten on with her life, learned to live, even thrive, without him.

      Mostly.

      Now, all of a sudden, she was sharing a hotel room with him in a tiny Wyoming town.

      Where was the logic?

      And how was she supposed to survive this?

      Simple question.

      But no answers in sight, simple or otherwise.

      She squeezed her eyes shut, determined to lose herself in sleep.

      But she was still awake when Jax emerged from the bathroom long minutes later; through her lashes, she noted that he was naked, except for the towel wrapped around his lean waist. He seemed to know she was awake, although she was pretending she’d already drifted off.

      “Listen to that wind,” he said. “Sounds like a pack of hungry wolves. It’s brutal out there.”

      She gave up on the sleeping-beauty act. He’d always been able to read her energy in some mysterious way, and fooling him was usually too much work. “Nice of you to share the room.” There. She’d said something civil. Even cordial.

      But distant, as well. She certainly didn’t want to send the wrong message.

      No way was she going to sleep with him.

      Not that he seemed to expect it.

      The problem was that a part of her wanted to leap from her bed to his—talk about sending messages—to open her arms to him, brazen as could be, and abandon herself to his lovemaking, to him. To the singular combination of them.

      Even after all this time, and all the deliberate forgetting, her body remembered.

      They’d certainly never had any problems in bed. Their troubles had stemmed from other things, like his old-fashioned attitudes. He hadn’t wanted a professional woman who could go toe-to-toe with some of the most intimidating people in the advertising world. Some of the bitterness flooded back, sobering and hurtful. No, as far as she could tell, Jax had wanted a carpooling, cookie-baking wife and mother for his children, someone who loved small-town life to the exclusion of all else. Or, at any rate, to the exclusion of any other kind of place. Someone who sewed gingham curtains for the kitchen windows and taught Sunday school and fussed over her flower beds.

      All right, maybe he hadn’t mentioned those things specifically, but they went with the territory, didn’t they?

      To Jax’s credit, he’d never pretended to like New York City as much as she did. For him, it was a mere stopping place along the way to someplace else, third base in some metaphoric baseball game. Next stop, home plate.

      Translation: wide-open spaces, pickup trucks, mixed-breed dogs.

      The country.

      Well, at least he’d been honest. That was more than she could say for a lot of the guys she’d dated, before and after him.

      He’d been considerate, polite, intelligent...and sexy.

      Very, very sexy.

      Once again, Charlotte was stricken with quiet astonishment. One moment she’d been firmly planted in a reality she knew and understood. The next...

      Well, the next moment Jax was here. She still didn’t quite believe it.

      “Of course I’d share the room,” he said.

      Charlotte was confused. Share the room?

      Oh, yes. She’d thanked him earlier, and now he was responding.

      Keep up, she chided herself silently.

      It occurred to her then that Jax’s voice had sounded a little too gruff. Maybe he’d picked up on her thoughts. Maybe he was going to drop that towel any second now.

      She flipped over onto her side, facing away from him.

      “Thanks,” she murmured. For some reason, her throat seemed to swell, and her eyes burned.

      “You’re welcome.” He hadn’t moved. She would’ve known it, felt it, if he had. And his voice was still low, still hoarse. “I really want you, by the way.”

      There went that honesty of his, kicking in at exactly the wrong moment.

      Charlotte tensed. “Not gonna happen.” Was she warning him off—or reminding herself not to let yesterday’s memories overwhelm today’s good sense?

      “Your choice, of course,” Jax told her quietly.

      She rolled back to face him again and said the worst thing possible. “It would be a bad idea, you know.”

      Great. She’d just admitted she’d been thinking about how good it would be to lie in Jax’s arms, to let him awaken her body just one more time.

      Jax grinned, and he had the single most appealing boyish smile of any man she’d ever met. “But not out of the realm of possibility?”

      She might as well be honest with him, too. “Unless you happen to have a condom, yes, way out.”

      She was happy—and yet somewhat disappointed—that he seemed dismayed. “Yeah, good point. I don’t.”

      “Then, go to sleep.” Charlotte closed her eyes again.

      She heard the whispery rustle as he pulled on whatever he was going to wear to bed. He must’ve let the towel drop to the carpet... This whole thing was entirely too intimate, too familiar. If she could just fall asleep...

      “Charlie...” Jax’s voice was soft, and she wanted to scream, because she was trying so hard to distance herself. She was, wasn’t she? Despite that dumb remark about the condom. But it wasn’t working at all. “I really have missed you,” he said.

      Now he wasn’t playing fair.

      Charlotte wouldn’t, couldn’t, look at him. “Am I the reason you’re here in Mustang Creek?” The question tumbled right out of her mouth, going straight from her subconscious mind to the tip of her tongue and neatly bypassing her normally competent brain. “I mean, I know you had a job offer, but...” She fumbled to extricate herself.

      Must have been the exhaustion, she reflected, frantic to find an explanation for herself.

      “Could be,” he said.

      Then he sighed, and she heard his mattress give way as he got into his own bed.

      And