“I just need a couple of minutes,” Grady said. “Where’s your microwave?”

She grinned at him. “I don’t have one. You’re going to have to pull this off the old-fashioned way.”

His gaze narrowed at her amusement. “You don’t think I can do it?”

“It will be interesting to see, won’t it?” she challenged him.

He shook his head with exaggerated pity. “You’ve forgotten already about the bare-bones lifestyle my grandfather lives. I’m used to roughing it,” he said as he reached for a covered pan. He set it on the stove, turned on the heat, then dumped the contents of the bag into the pan and covered it. “Piece of cake. You’ll see.”

Grady’s gaze clashed with hers and held. She didn’t seem to be impressed yet.

Her gaze never wavered. Time fell away as he listened to the beating of his heart, and watched the flicker of some unreadable emotion in her eyes.

“Smells like it’s burning,” she said cheerfully, breaking the mood and the eye contact after several minutes.

He tore his gaze away, saw smoke billowing from the pan, and muttered a soft curse. He grabbed the pan off the stove and dumped it into the sink. He could hear the few last kernels popping even as he scowled at the offending pot. He’d been oblivious when they started to pop, oblivious to everything but Karen.

Her low chuckle drew his gaze. He studied her for a second, and saw the twinkling satisfaction in her eyes.

“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” he accused.

“What?” she asked, all innocence.

“Distracted me.”

“Did I? How?”

“You kept my attention so I wouldn’t notice what was happening on the stove.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To prove a point.”

She grinned broadly. “Well, you have to admit, you were awfully sure of yourself.”

“And you were willing to sacrifice the popcorn just to take me down a peg or two?”

“It seemed like a fair trade to me,” she said without the least bit of remorse.

Grady sighed. “I really, really like popcorn when I watch a movie.”

“We don’t have to watch it,” she said. “The power could go any minute, anyway, and the generator doesn’t keep anything going except the furnace and the hot water heater.”

He deliberately locked gazes with her, just as she’d done with him. “If we don’t watch the movie, what did you have in mind?”

“We could go to bed,” she said with a perfectly straight face.

A smile tugged at his lips. “Somehow I don’t think you mean the same thing by that as I would.”

Her gaze faltered then. She swallowed hard. “No, I imagine I don’t.”

“Then let’s watch the movie. It’s the safest thing that comes to mind at the moment.”

They took their hot chocolate into the living room. Grady turned on the TV, popped the video into the player, then deliberately sat right smack in the middle of the sofa opposite it. Karen regarded him with narrowed eyes for a heartbeat, then sat next to him, albeit a careful few inches away. He barely hid a grin.

He pressed the start button on the remote, and Lauren’s gorgeous face filled the screen. She was a beautiful woman, but she had nothing on the woman beside him, Grady reflected. As the images on the screen flickered, it wasn’t the story, or even Lauren, that captured his attention. It was Karen.

She was totally absorbed in the romantic comedy, her eyes alternately shining with pleasure or misty with unshed tears. From time to time her lips curved into a smile.

When the movie ended, Grady couldn’t have said what it was about, but he knew every nuance that had registered on Karen’s face.

“That was wonderful,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

“Yes, it was,” Grady said, though he was talking about something else entirely. Watching her when her guard was down had been a revelation. The laughter had been close to the surface, completely uncensored. The flow of tears had been uninhibited.

He lifted his hand and touched her cheek, then brushed away the last traces of happy tears. She trembled, but she didn’t move away.

Once again, it was up to him to stop, up to him to be rational. The tests were getting harder and harder…the results more and more uncertain.

“I still can’t believe that glamorous woman on the screen is my friend,” she said, her voice a shaky whisper. “She used to steal the Twinkies out of my lunchbox.”

“Did she ever steal your boyfriends? That would be a far more serious crime.”

“Never,” she said fiercely. “Despite her reputation for having romances with her leading men, despite the two well-publicized marriages and divorces, the Lauren I knew was a shy girl. Most of the dates she had in high school were ones we set up for her. But even if she’d been some junior femme fatale, she would never have stolen our boyfriends. It would have gone against everything she believed about friendship.”

She looked at him. “What about you? Were you a love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy?”

“Nope,” he said, responding to the question as solemnly as she’d asked it. “Only one girl ever stole my heart, and then she broke it. I haven’t been anxious to repeat the experience. Haven’t had time, either, for that matter.”

“You seem to have a lot of time on your hands now,” she pointed out lightly. “Or do you justify all your time here as work? Part of your self-declared mission in life?”

He bit back his irritation that they were once again on the subject of her distrust of him and his motives.

“I’m here because I want to be,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “You need some help, and I can provide it.”

“And?” she prodded.

“That’s it,” he insisted, getting to his feet and heading upstairs before he did something to prove just how badly he wanted to stick around.

“Grady?”

He stilled, commanding himself not to turn back, fearful of what might happen if he did.

“There are towels in the bathroom, the blue ones,” she said. “And your room’s at the top of the stairs on the left.”

“And yours?” he asked, unable to stop the question.

“Down the hall,” she said

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said quietly.

And in the meantime, he’d say a little prayer that it was a very long hall.

Chapter Six

Karen snapped awake in the morning to the scent of coffee brewing.

Caleb, she thought for a heartbeat, before she remembered and her mood shattered.

No, not her husband, but his worst enemy, she realized, sinking back against the pillows and drawing the covers up. The gesture was partly because it was cold, but also a halfhearted attempt to hide, to pretend that just outside her door nothing was different. Burrowing under the covers had been her way of trying to escape notice since childhood, when she hadn’t wanted to leave the warmth and safety of home to go to school.

Of course, that had all changed once she had had the Calamity Janes in her life. From then on there had been no hiding. She had been anxious to get to school each morning to see what adventure Cassie had dreamed up overnight, or what treat Gina had baked in her ongoing experiments with recipes.

But that was then. Things were a whole lot more complicated in her life now. She had plenty of reasons to hide, and the most disturbing one was currently in her kitchen.

She snuggled under the quilt her mother had made for her as a wedding present and tried to imagine what it must be like outside this morning. The sun was already up, its brilliance pouring through the windows, casting fingers of warmth and light across the room. The wind had died down. In fact, it was perfectly still, as if the snow were absorbing sound.

When the scent of coffee was joined by that of bacon sizzling, Karen could no longer resist. She couldn’t think of the last time someone had had breakfast on the table for her. That had always been her task, while Caleb was out tending to the animals. This time of year she had made oatmeal with raisins and warm milk to go along with the eggs and bacon Caleb had insisted on.