She’d looked a hair too soon. He’d been pulling on a long-sleeved knit shirt, and she’d gotten a blast of his bare chest and abs. If that was what ranch work did to a man, they should tear down most of the gyms in the world and replace them with memberships at a working ranch.

The only thing that saved her from complete humiliation was that he hadn’t yet pulled the shirt down over his head when she’d gotten that eyeful. So he didn’t know she’d quite literally gaped at him.

Kind of like I did the first time I met him.

She’d never denied that she’d been fiercely attracted back then. That had made what happened even harder to take. In a strange way it was another layer of grief, that he hadn’t been what she’d thought he was, what her father had thought he was.

But now she knew he had been exactly that, all along. It was she who had been wrong. Completely wrong.

And she didn’t know how you made up for a mistake that big.

Chapter 23

“You don’t have to cook for me,” Adam said, his voice still a bit husky with sleep.

It had taken him a while to get there, mentally working his way past being in this house, and then past her bedroom being just down the hall. But he’d been beyond weary after days of little sleep, with what he did get restless while trying to jam his too-tall frame into the small crew seat of his truck, so the lure of an actual bed with warm blankets had finally won.

Amanda was staring at him rather oddly. Then she looked quickly back at the skillet she was standing over.

“I... I’m fixing them for Quinn and myself, too,” she said.

“Oh.” He glanced around, looking downward, looking for Cutter before he asked, “Where is the Foxworth contingent?”

“Outside. At least I assume that’s why Cutter wanted back out when he’d just been.”

He nodded, hesitated as he studied her for a moment, then asked, “How are you feeling this morning?”

“I... All right.”

Why did she sound so tentative this morning? “I’ll bet you’ve got some sore spots. You fought hard.”

She glanced at him then, and gave him a little smile he found oddly warming. “I tried to remember what Dad taught me. About elbows and feet and knees, fighting someone bigger.”

“He was that,” Adam said sourly.

“If you hadn’t come running when you did, and scared him off—”

“That was Cutter. He looked and sounded like he wanted to rip the guy’s throat out. No man in his right mind would stand his ground with a dog intent on mayhem, and big enough to inflict it, coming at him full tilt.”