Legend (Legend, Colorado 1)

“Jealous?” he said with hope in his voice.

She ignored the question. “Then where do you live?”

“I have a big place in Connecticut with acres of land and an enormous house.”

“What’s the kitchen like?”

Tarik chuckled. “Horrible. Needs to be remodeled completely. But I can’t find anyone who’d like to do it. Hey! Maybe you know something about kitchens and—”

“Go on,” she said, interrupting his sarcasm. “Tell me about your house and about you. You’ve always known about me, but I know nothing whatever about you.”

As he began to talk, again Kady realized that she identified with him. During their childhoods, there had been great differences between them financially, of course, but the more she heard about his life, the more she thought it was like her own. Money had caused both of them to be raised by strangers.

“The house in Connecticut is where you’re going to live with Leonie?” she asked quietly as he began to braid her hair.

“I’ll live there with our children anyway. She can go wherever she wants, it doesn’t matter to me.”

“That’s horrible!” Kady said, turning to glare at him. “Children need a mother. Just because your mother was always gone and so was mine, that doesn’t mean that children should be raised that way. They should—” She broke off when she saw that he was laughing at her. Again.

“Damn you!” she half shouted. “You’re as bad as Cole! He was always laughing at me and always tricking me.”

“Oh? And how did Cole trick you?”

He had his eyes downcast as he cleaned out the hairbrush, and his voice was innocence personified. So innocent, in fact, that Kady didn’t catch on to what he was doing.

She’d said that she wasn’t going to talk about what happened in Legend, but in the next breath she was telling him all about how Cole had tricked her into marrying him.

“By the time I showed up, he was so sure I’d be dying to marry him that he even had the church decorated,” she said. “Can you imagine? He starved me into marrying him.”

“Sounds as though you asked him to marry you, not the other way around.”

She had been bending over the fire to stir it, and she looked across it at him. “Are you taking his side? Are you saying that he was right to do what he did to me?”

“I’m saying that I don’t blame the man for doing anything he had to to keep from losing you,” he said softly.

Kady turned away at his tone because all of it—the close confines of the little cave, the glow of the firelight, and this man she did and did not know—were tearing at her senses. “I believe I’m rather tired,” she said, then glanced at him nervously, again wondering what the sleeping arrangements would be.

He didn’t so much as make a move toward her, but instead unfastened one sleeping bag from the bottom of the big pack, then pulled another from deep inside it, and Kady gave an audible sigh of relief.

Tarik gave her a one-sided grin. “Is that a sigh of relief or regret?”

“Relief,” she answered quickly, but from the way he laughed, she didn’t think he believed her, and she turned away so he couldn’t read her eyes.

When she turned back, he had spread the two sleeping bags out, one on either side of the fire, and she had to look away again to keep from watching him as he removed his shirt and jeans. When he was wearing only his white briefs, he put on a flannel shirt, leaving his strong, muscular legs exposed, and it was all Kady could do to make herself look away.

As for herself, she had to force her fingers to unbutton her shirt, and for a moment she considered going to bed with all her clothes on. But when she glanced at Tarik, he was already inside his sleeping bag, the one nearest the door, and he was staring up at the ceiling, not so much as looking in her direction.

Pretending that she didn’t have a concern in the world, Kady undressed down to her body-hugging underwear, then slipped into her bag across from him.

For all that there was space and a fire separating them, Kady felt very close to him. And that feeling annoyed her because their relationship was so temporary. “Why do you say such things to me, about being jealous and about the men in my life?” she said without thinking. “What does my life matter to you? We’re strangers to each other.”

“That’s not true, is it? I feel as though I’ve known you forever—and you feel it, too, don’t you?”

“Not in the least,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “You belong to Leonie.”

“And who do you belong to, Kady?”

“To . . . to myself, that’s who,” she said, and even to her own ears that seemed a very lonely statement.