Page 8 of The Woman By the Lake

With grave emphasis on he.

Sweat slicked body, covered only by a pair of cutoff jean shorts, and running shoes on his feet (sans socks—I mean, who ran in jean shorts and shoes with no socks?).

His dark hair was too long. Not long-long, like lumbersexual long, but the wet curls not only hugged the sides of his face, but also all around his neck. His all-over-tanned body was fit and buff—ankles to neck lean, defined muscle. He sported chest hair, fuller between his bulging pecs, a smattering from collarbone down to everywhere, a dense line leading down the center of his six-pack and into his shorts.

And he had a masculine face hewn by a loving hand. Strong nose. Hollowed cheeks. Prominent brow. Square jaw covered in dark scruff.

Gazing at him, I felt a stirring, the power of which I hadn’t felt in seven years.

In fact, considering it had been seven years, that stirring felt more powerful than any I’d ever had before in my life.

His head turned to me as he ran into the clearing. He stopped, put his hands on his hips, that gorgeous chest rising and falling with his quickened breaths. He started walking toward me, and he smiled.

A slash of perfect, white teeth made a normally extraordinary visage deliciously criminal.

“Hey,” he called.

The sound of his deep voice shook me out of my stupor, and I replied, “You’re in my yard.”

He stopped walking and his head swiveled slightly on his neck, shifting a bit to the side, his ear dipping toward his perfectly muscled shoulder.

“Sorry?” he asked.

“You’re in my yard,” I repeated.

He looked down at his beat-up running shoes, then again to me.

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Run through it every morning a few times when I’m home.”

The when I’m home bit was intriguing.

I refused to be intrigued.

“Well, I live here now and”—I swung my coffee cup out—“as you can see, I’ll be taking my coffee on the back veranda in the mornings. So from here on in, if you’d refrain.”

His lips were quirking as he asked, “The veranda?”

I swung my coffee cup again. “The back porch.”

“I know what a veranda is,” he shared. “Just don’t know anyone who’d call it that when it’s attached to a shack in the woods.”

I was offended, not only on my behalf, since I now lived there, but on Dave and Brenda’s. They clearly put a lot of work into this place and kept it in tip-top shape.

“This isn’t a shack,” I refuted with some heat. “It’s a cabin.”

“Same thing.”

“Hardly.”

He pointed toward the south but didn’t take his eyes off me when he proclaimed, “It takes me five seconds to run through your yard.”

His inflection on yard was not at all missed.

Sure, it wasn’t a yard, per se, but instead, a big patch of dirt with a healthy scattering of trees that ended in a lake.

It was still my yard.

“I’m Doc,” he introduced himself, taking another step forward, clearly not of Dave’s bent to keep his distance so I, a woman alone in the wilderness, would feel safe. He was now only maybe ten feet away.

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