"Not much of one! Would I have woken you up if I didn't think it was important?" She sucked in a steadying breath. It didn't help. Her fingers curled around fistfuls of her wrinkled calico skirt. "I'm telling you, I. Heard. A. Noise!"
"And I'm telling you it was the wind."
"What wind?" she demanded. To prove her point, she licked the tip of her index finger. Jake's glare tracked the movement. Amanda tried not to notice the heat that gaze caused to spread up her arm. It was impossible not to notice her reciprocal shiver of reaction. Her tone lost its sting as she held her wet finger up in the air. "There's a breeze, I'll grant you that, but no wind. And even if there was—which there isn't, but if there was—it still wouldn't explain the twigs I heard snapping."
She paused for affect—of which there was little, except the veiled suspicion she saw shimmering in his eyes. "Footsteps, Mr. Chandler. That's what I heard. Footsteps."
"No, Miss Lennox. What you heard was a squirrel. Or a dog. Or a fox. Or... hell, I don't know." His shrug was jerky and strained as he pushed to his feet. "If you were from around these parts you'd know that at this time of morning, sound travels. Things seem louder than they are. Noises get distorted, warped. What you say you heard could have been damn near anything, coming from damn near anywhere."
Amanda gritted her teeth with frustration. There was no reasoning with this man, really there wasn't. "I didn't hear just 'anything,' I heard footsteps. And they were close by."
He glanced away. "So you say, and so I still don't believe. Now, if you'd seen someone that would be different..."
Amanda scrambled to her feet. Hoisting the skirt up so it wouldn't trip her, she dogged his footsteps with a stilted, limping gait of her own. She contained—barely—the urge to smack him good.
Why wouldn't Jake believe her? she wondered, as she stared at a point midway between his shoulder blades. He'd shrugged on a shirt at some point during the night. The faded, forest green cotton stretched over his sinewy shoulders, the color an earthy compliment to his copper skin and jet-black hair. The material left no doubt as to the powerful muscles bunching beneath. Her traitorous heart skipped a beat.
Exactly when her resentment began to fade, Amanda couldn't say. She only knew that it had dulled, and that she didn't like it one little bit. Fury was sensible, safe. This white-hot awareness of all things male—of all things Jake Chandler—well, that wasn't sensible at all. And nothing about it—about him—about her reaction to him—could be misconstrued as safe. Just the opposite; it was hot and dangerous.
She tore her gaze from his back and found herself staring intently at his hips; lean and firm, provocatively molded by tough, clinging denim. Her teeth clamped down on her lower lip. Lord, he was nicely shaped. And had she really thought looking there would be a safe, sensible thing to do? She was wrong. Dead wrong. Glancing at his rock-solid thighs wasn't any better.
Dammit! Wasn't there an inch of his body that was safe to look at? Was there a sliver of him that didn't spark some complex, erotic reaction in her? If so, Amanda couldn't find it.
She raked him head to toe, her gaze momentarily cool and objective. The man had no obvious flaws. Oh, hell! the man had no unobvious flaws, either. From the top of his head to the tips of his bare feet, every inch of him was formed to appeal to the eye—and the soul. Every single inch!
He was heading for the tree trunk he'd sunken his knife into. The progress of his swaggering strides made the air around Amanda shift. Feeling the kiss of it against her cheeks, she slowed her pace and drew in a curious breath.
She froze. Her fists uncurled. The skirt slipped from her slackened grasp, rustling around her ankles in wrinkled calico folds. She might as well have walked face first into a solid brick wall; the scent of him had that great an affect on her.
The morning smelled abruptly of spicy man and freshly milled soap. It was a fatal combination; a flagrantly male, blatantly seductive one.
Jake felt the heat of her gaze on his back, but most of his attention was trained on his knife. The hilt bit into his palm when his fingers curled around it. The muscles in his shoulder and arm strained as he wrenched the blade free. Chunks of bark rained to the ground, nipping at the tops of his bare feet.
He stared at the blade, scowling darkly. An image of what would have happened had his aim been true—which it usually was—flashed through Jake's mind. The vision was brief, wispy, gone as quickly as it had come. His reaction was disturbing; it lasted a hell of a lot longer!
A shiver iced through him. The sensation started where the cool wooden hilt was warming to his palm. Tremors vibrated up his arm in increasingly chilly waves, and...
Dammit! he was shaking again. A cold sweat broke out on his chest and brow. His gut twisted, and his heart felt tight, as though invisible fingers had clamped around it and squeezed it in a death-grip. Unwelcome sensations invaded his body and his mind, humming through the rest of him with alarming speed and accuracy. If Jake didn't know better, he would have sworn he was getting his first real taste of fear.
He took a few needed seconds to compose himself. The grass felt cold and dewy beneath his feet as, tucking the knife into its leather sheath, he turned to look at Amanda.
His heart sank. She wasn't standing where she should be. In fact, she wasn't standing anywhere at all. The clearing was empty.
Miss Abigail Henry owned and ran the best finishing school Boston had to offer. The teachers there had diligently taught Amanda how to make excruciatingly small embroidery stitches, how to master the pianoforte and harp, and how to command a battery of household servants. Roland Lennox had paid a small fortune for his daughter to learn everything she needed to know to become a lady. Amanda had learned it all—grudgingly, true, but she had le
arned it.
Only now did she realize her educators had left out life's most important lesson: how a woman managed to convince a stubborn-as-all-hell male to listen to reason!
That Jake didn't believe she'd heard noises was frustrating. That she couldn't make him believe her was infuriating. Truly, he'd left her no choice. Either she searched the woods to see who'd made the footsteps that she had heard, or they would never know who was out there. Not knowing, always wondering if she was being secretly watched and evaluated, was unendurable.
It had taken Amanda less than a second to decide to search the woods herself. It was the only way to get the job done, since Jake had made it clear he wouldn't do it.
Up ahead another twig snapped. Amanda heard a muffled sound that might have been a voice, but might have been something else—it was too distant to be certain.
She molded her back against a thick tree trunk, and her fingers trembled as she slipped the antique pistol from her pocket. As she'd done before, she prayed that the sight of it would be enough to scare whoever was out there away. And if it wasn't... well, she hoped Jake Chandler could live with her death on his conscience! If he even had a conscience, that is—he'd given her every reason to believe he didn't.
The branches above shifted. Tiny paws scampered through the underbrush. The rustle of grass sounded exceptionally loud. Except for that—and one very shrill bird chirping from a branch high above—the woods were quiet. Too quiet, she thought, as, holding her breath, she slowly peeked around the tree.