The One Winter Collection. Rebecca Winters

on the stove, turned off, half-cooked bacon in it.

      “What happened?”

      Mutely, she held one hand toward him, the fingers of her other hand circling a wrist that was as tiny, her bones as fragile as a sparrow’s.

      “I—I—I never used that kind of pan before. I didn’t realize the handle would get so hot.”

      “What the—” he glanced at the hundred-year-old cast-iron frying pan, and then looked at her hand.

      Across the palm was a welt, angry-looking and puckered, the imprint of the pan handle scorched into her skin like a brand.

      He went on his knees in front of her, but when he reached out to take her hand, to get a better look, she yanked it away.

      “I might have to go to the hospital,” she said, her effort at bravery diminished somewhat by the fact her whole body was trembling.

      “Let me look.”

      She didn’t want to trust him. Smart girl. But there was no one else, and so he captured her hand, held it firm, studied the burn. Bad, but not hospital bad, which given the condition of the roads was a good thing.

      “Stupid of me,” she said in a wooden voice.

      He looked up from her hand.

      “Just like coming here by accident. Dumb. It’s what they all expect, and they’re all right.”

      It occurred to him it wasn’t because she hadn’t trusted him that she hadn’t wanted to show him her hand.

      It was because she was afraid of being judged. Found stupid.

      For a guy who didn’t have a heart, he was surprised by where he felt that.

      “Who?” he said quietly.

      And then she was crying, big fat tears slithering down her cheeks.

      “Everybody. My husband, his parents, my parents. Everybody treats me like I can’t ever do anything right. Can’t be trusted to make good decisions.”

      Considering how he had dreaded the thought of her crying when it had almost happened yesterday, considering he had a fully formulated plan that had heartless bastard at its core, Ty surprised himself by not bolting for the door.

      Instead, inwardly, calmly, he acknowledged it would take a stronger man than he was to be indifferent to her.

      Her palm still lay across his hand. He lifted it to his lips and blew gently on the burn. She went very still, and he looked up at her.

      “Hey,” he said, “it’s going to be okay.”

      “It hurts so bad.”

      He wasn’t quite sure if she meant the burn, or everyone’s low expectations of her. He remembered seeing something in her face when she had said she was a widow, a torment of some kind. He’d thought it was because of her loss. Now he wondered if it wasn’t a loss of a different sort instead.

      “I’ll fix it.”

      And he wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, either. The burn, or the wounded place in her that was so much deeper than the burn.

      The burn would be easy.

      And surely Ty had enough self-knowledge to know he could not be trusted with the other?

      And then, even though his jacket was cold and wet with melting flakes of snow, she put her arms around his neck.

      He felt her uninjured hand, warm and soft, trace the coldness of the exposed skin on the back of his neck. The other she held away from him. She leaned forward and put her forehead against his, drew in a deep trembling breath. He stiffened.

      For a moment he froze, uncertain what to do with all this pain and all this trust.

      And then the certainty came. As naturally as breathing, he put his arms around her and pulled her close into him, so close that he could feel her heart beating against the oilskin of the jacket. So close that her tears slithered down his neck along with melting snow.

      And he held her, and then, something in him surrendered. He did what he realized he had wanted to do since the moment he had first seen her peeking at him from behind his tree.

      He ran his fingers through her hair, and felt the tangles dissolve under his touch. She pulled back from him slightly, looked him in the face, and then leaned forward and kissed him lightly on his lips.

      “Thank you,” she said huskily.

      For what? All he’d managed to do, so far, was break his vow to himself to keep his distance, to keep them all safe from the treachery of attachment.

      He reeled back from her, scrambled to his feet. She looked as though she was going to cry even harder, of course. She was probably realizing she’d just done something really dumb.

      He resisted the urge to wipe his lips. It wouldn’t do what he wanted anyway. It wouldn’t remove the sweet, clean taste of her.

      That was branded on his mind as surely as the frying pan had left a mark on her delicate skin.

      In the guest bedroom, the baby started to cry. If someone had told him yesterday he would welcome a baby crying, Ty would have scoffed.

      But now it was just the diversion from all this intensity that he needed.

      “I’ll get him,” he said.

      “No, I can—”

      “No, you can’t.” He sounded really stern and cold, which was a good thing. Rebuilding his fences. “I don’t want you to touch anything until I’ve got a dressing on the burn. When you are in a remote location like this, the wound generally isn’t the problem. It’s infection. Think of Lonesome Dove.”

      Yeah, he ordered himself, think of Lonesome Dove. Not her lips.

       “Lonesome Dove?”

      “On my top twenty list of good books.” Why had he said that? She did not need to know he had a top twenty list. She did not need to know one more thing about him! He was pretty sure that’s how attachments were formed, these little bits of information knitting together into a chain.

      Kissing didn’t help, either.

      “I only have the vaguest notion what you are talking about.” Was she staring at his lips? With longing?

      Buck up, cowboy.

      “It’s not the arrow that finishes the main character, it’s infection. I’ll get the baby.”

      “Yesterday, you didn’t even want to pick him up!” she reminded him. “You could barely give him a pat on the head.”

      “Well, yesterday I didn’t have to. Today, I do.”

      Ty left her, shrugged off his coat and boots in the porch, and then went to the bedroom door and looked in at the baby.

      Jamey had hauled himself up on the rails of the playpen, and was jumping up and down, howling his outrage at being imprisoned.

      “Hey, that’s enough out of you.”

      Jamey stopped jumping up and down and stopped howling. He smiled, and made a little goo-goo sound, instantly charming.

      “Papa Odam,” he declared. His arms shot out. “Up.”

      Ty went in. This was how old he had been when his mother had walked out the door and scarcely looked back. Or at least that was what he had believed. Until the letters.

      Is this what his father had felt that day?

      Terrified? As if he’d been left in charge of something breakable and didn’t have a clue what to do?

      “Up.” It wasn’t a request, the charm dissolving. It was a command.

      “Are you always