The Dangerous Jacob Wilde

She smiled, too. It was his first mention of a shared future.

Old man Chambers had owned a decrepit truck. Jake filled it with gasoline, fiddled with the engine, started it up.

They spent a couple of hours, driving and looking around.

Addison glowed.

She loved the view of the distant blue hills. The antelopes that watched them, ears and tails twitching. The blush of early spring wildflowers. The creek that tumbled over a pile of copper-colored rocks.

Jake took mental note of all that needed doing. Fences required repair. Roads needed grading. Acreage where crops should have been growing needed tilling.

But if he shut his eyes, he could see what could be done here.

The land had all kinds of promise.

If a man knew what he was doing …

A man like him …

It was a foolish thought. He wasn’t staying in Wilde’s Crossing. It just—hell, it just felt so right, being here, being with his Adoré….

Jake stopped the old truck, made a U-turn and headed for the house.

“We’re going back so soon?” Addison said.

He nodded.

“I need you,” he said simply, and her heart seemed to dance because she needed him, too.

F

orever.

They made love.

And showered.

Addison dried her hair. When she came back to the bedroom, Jake was dressed in his new jeans and one of his new shirts.

“Ta da,” he said, turning toward her….

He’d left off his eye patch.

He had not been without it, even once. Not in bed or in the shower or while she slept in his arms.

It was so much a part of him that she’d forgotten it existed.

Evidently, so had he—until that moment, when he caught a glimpse of himself in the dresser mirror.

“Crap,” he said, and he clapped his hand over the empty socket.

Addison flew across the room, grabbed his wrist with a strength that shocked him.

“Don’t … you … dare,” she said through her teeth. “Do you hear me, Jacob? Don’t you dare apologize or cover your eye or do anything other than look at me and listen when I say it doesn’t matter. Your eye. Your wounds.” She dragged his hand from his face, kissed it, then held it tightly in both of hers. “Nothing matters but you. That you lived. That you came home. That I—that I—”

She was weeping. It took Jake a little while to realize that he was weeping, too.

CHAPTER ELEVEN