Page 25 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
‘Brat, you’re always saying something.’
Hmm. She eyed him as she moved to Buttercup’s head. Whatever she’d said, he didn’t want to talk about it. And who better than her to understand that?
The horse’s eyes were clear, her gums and palate a good colour. ‘Your horse is fine, Tom. Calm and happy. Maybe there was too much going on up at the big stable and she couldn’t relax.’ Ironbark Station’s big stable held upward of forty stockhorses at any given time. Bruno Krauss’s reputation as a breeder and trainer—and the legendary skills of his long-term staff—meant the stalls were never empty.
She dug around in her pockets until she found another sugar lump. ‘Don’t tell Skipjack about this, Buttercup,’ she said, as the mare slurped it up from the palm of her hand. ‘He thinks he’s the only horse in my life.’
Tom had moved away from the wall and came up behind her to rest a hand on Buttercup’s neck. ‘And is he?’
Jeepers. He was close—way too close—she could smell man and sunshine and soap over the ever-present smells of the stable. And why were the prickles on her neck telling her he was no longer talking about horses?
She took a step to the side, needing the sanity that a few inches of distance might provide, but the horse shifted, and oops, there she was, suddenly even closer to six-foot-something of muscle-bound male.
Her breath whooshed out.
She looked up into his face, then wished she hadn’t. When had his eyes turned into the blue of the lake on a summer afternoon? And why hadn’t she noticed his eyelashes before? Darker than his blond hair, tawny, almost the colour of the stable’s old tabby cat snoozing in dappled sunlight—
Woah. These were cutesy man-woman thoughts. And Hannah Cody didn’t do cutesy thoughts. Or man-woman thoughts. Not ever.
His mouth quirked, a quarter smile that started on his lips but ended somewhere in her rib cage where that dratted thrum had gone into overdrive. ‘Not ever what?’
Crap. Had she said that out loud? She cleared her throat. ‘You’re crowding me, Krauss.’
‘A little. Want me to step back?’
She swallowed. He plucked something from her hair. A blade of straw? A horse hair? Her last sane thought?
She tried her voice, which for some reason had forgotten how to make actual sounds and came out in a whisper. ‘Um …’
He dipped his head, the brim of his scruffy old hat close enough to nudge at her hair. ‘Is it so bad?’
His voice was working just fine. Better than fine. It rumbled the way thunder rumbled through the peaks of the Snowy Mountains and then got all deep and breathy in a way that sent a shiver up her spine.
‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Just … unexpected.’
This was Tom, for heaven’s sake. She’d put snails in his bed and dobbed on him for not letting her join in hide and seek and seen him naked in the bath … admittedly, not for more than twenty years. And sure, he’d been out of town for fifteen of those years, gallivanting around doing whatever officers with law degrees did for the Royal Australian Navy when they graduated from Creswell … but still. He was firmly slotted into the brother’s-best-friend category in her head.
Only here, in the stable, with his eyes sending out all sorts of searing messages, and his face so close to hers she could see a scar across the bridge of his nose, and his mouth just so, well,close… all that shared childhood history seemed like something she’d read in a book a long, long time ago that happened between two totally different people.
She gasped as his hand slid from the horse to her waist and grabbed a fistful of her old (and probably grubby) blue scrubs, and then—whaaat!—that firm mouth was on hers.
Oh, god. She’d forgotten what a kiss felt like.
And then he moved, just a fraction, but that fraction made her wonder if she’d ever known what a kiss was truly like, because this one seemed to be made of something a whole lot sweeter than anything she’d experienced.
A sigh escaped her and she forgot about her grubby scrubs as his lips moved to the corner of her mouth, to her cheek, to the curve of skin beneath her ear, before landing like a brand right back on her mouth again.
He tasted like everything she might once have wanted, before—
‘Stop it.’ She slid her hands to his chest and shoved as the first sob broke through.
‘Hannah?’
His face moved from flirty to stricken in the space of a heartbeat. ‘Are they—are youcrying?’
She shook her head. If her voice had been shy before, now it had packed up and got the hell out of Hanrahan. She couldn’t speak. She needed to be alone. She needed to be anywhere but here, with two horrified eyes gazing down at her like she was an object of pity.
Pity sucked.
