The horse was a heavy horse, a draft horse, and Ellie knew from research for one of her books that this horse was a Frisian. From the knee down the horse had long, silky hair called feathering. The massive muscle of the enormous horse matched the muscle and power that came from the man.
She looked up at the profile of his face: a mouth of sculptured lips, full, abundant. He held two horseshoe nails between his lips. His long nose had slightly flared nostrils. His eyes
were lowered as he looked down at the hoof, and their lashes were as thick and as black as butterfly wings. A high forehead, slightly wrinkled in concentration, was beneath short, deep dark black hair.
She stood there paralyzed as she looked at this scene. She could hear nothing else, see nothing else. This man was all her senses could comprehend. She was several feet away from him, but she was so attuned to him that she could smell his skin, warm from the sun, fragrant from the hay, sweaty from his work.
Slowly, oh, so exquisitely slowly, the man turned his head to look at her. He blinked, and since everything in her body seemed to have stopped, she could sense the movement of air that those thick, lush lashes caused.
When he turned and saw her, when his eyes made contact with hers, Ellie drew in her breath and held it. His eyes were as dark as his hair and as intense as an electrical shock.
As he looked at her, time stood still. Her body ceased to function. She didn’t breathe, didn’t think. It was as though those eyes had frozen her where she stood.
Yet she could feel herself moving toward him. It wasn’t as though she were walking. It was as though the man’s eyes had fastened onto her soul, onto what made her who she was, and he was pulling her to him by some magic power, by some unseen, mystical, hypnotic power.
She wasn’t sure how it happened, but she was closer to him. Slowly, as though in a slow-motion film, with the only sound in her ears that of her heart and her blood throbbing through her veins, he stood up, the horse’s hoof sliding down between his thighs. Ellie blinked; she could feel the horse’s foot’s progress as it moved downward between his legs: down his thighs, muscles thick and taunt, past calves rounded and hard, to those heavy boots with their thick, hard soles.
Slowly, his eyes never breaking contact with hers, he removed the nails from between his lips. She was close enough now that she could see those lips, see the tiny lines in them, see the lower lip curved, so round, so succulent, a lip that called to her to touch it with her own.
With his lips parted, he touched the tip of his tongue to the center of his lower lip, and at the sight of that pink, moist tip, Ellie felt her knees weaken.
The man reached out a hand to steady her, and she knew that if his skin touched hers, all would be lost.
But in that next second, the huge, wide back doors of the barn were flung open, and the room suddenly filled with light and noise as men and animals entered what had been such a very private, intimate place.
The spell was broken, and Ellie shook her head to clear it. She was standing inches from a man she’d never seen before in her life, and, judging from the angle of his head, he had been about to kiss her.
Quickly, she turned to the left and saw three men standing there, horses behind them, and they were looking at the two of them in open curiosity.
“Horse,” she said. “He was showing me how to shoe a horse.”
The smirks the men’s faces wore were identical.
Before she could say another word and definitely before she could look at the man again, she turned and ran out of the barn with the speed, if not the grace, of an Italian greyhound. And she only stopped running when she was back in her guesthouse and had shut and locked all the doors, then drawn the curtains to keep out even the daylight.
When she was at last safe, she sat down on a chair, grabbed the notebook and pen that was never far from her side, and like the writer she was, she wrote down everything she’d just felt and seen. Who knew when she could use this scene in a book?
Twenty
By the time Ellie went into the house for dinner, she was vibrating too much to think about anything but The Man. Who was he? What had made her react as she had? For one of her books she’d done some research on the occult, and a couple of the psychics she’d interviewed had blamed most everything on past lives. So had she known this man in a past life?
Was there a story in that?
Ellie’s mind wasn’t on dressing, but she had a lot of new things to wear, so that wasn’t a problem. She put on a cute little navy blue knit pantsuit that had cost more than she’d spent for clothes in the last three years, some tiny gold earrings set with lapis lazuli, and sauntered over to the big house at a few minutes before eight.
For all that she was thinking of little else except Him, she was swept away by Valerie. She was tall, beautiful, and from Texas. Was more needed to describe her?
What was it about Texas that produced women who seemed to have no fears, no doubts, no hesitations? Had a Texas woman ever met a stranger? Were shy women somehow detected at birth and sent to other states?
“There you are,” Valerie said, swooping down from an opentread staircase that must have been twenty-feet tall. She wore black silk trousers over her long, long slim legs. Draped around the top of her was some hand-woven concoction that flowed as she moved. She had reddish blonde hair that fell down her back in big waves. Dazzling green eyes smiled at Ellie from under sooty black lashes. Valerie Woodward was like a light with a two-hundred-watt bulb in its socket.
“Wish I were Madison,” Ellie muttered under her breath as she smiled up at her hostess. Madison was on a level with this beautiful creature, but Ellie felt like slinking out the back door.
But Valerie wasn’t about to let anyone she had her eye on escape. She took Ellie’s arm, tucked it under her own, and led Ellie toward what she assumed was the dining room.
“I couldn’t believe it when Woody said that he’d met Alexandria Farrell. You just don’t know how much I love your books. All my friends read them. I do hope that you don’t mind if I asked a few people to meet you.”
At that announcement, Ellie turned pale. What was “a few people” to someone from Texas?