Cara/Cassidy Colter/Caron - Love's Nine Lives

And Justin didn’t enlighten them. He didn’t tell them she wasn’t old and she wasn’t ugly. He didn’t correct them when they guessed that her panty hose bagged around her ankles and that she bought her dresses in extra-large at Wilson Brothers Tent and Awning.

When the guys painted imaginary pictures of her with granny glasses, pinched face and pursed lips, Justin didn’t say one word about eyes a shade of green that haunted him every night before he slept. Or about copper-colored hair that looked as if it needed to be freed from that bun, needed to have a man’s hands hauled through it.

Justin told himself his failure to join in the funfest being provided by the circulating cat-door contract and prospectus was only out of loyalty to Fred. Who wasn’t actually speaking to him and who had not spoken to him since he had mentioned that his meeting with Bridget Daisy had not gone well.

“Yeer tellin’ me,” Fred had said sourly, “that a big fella like you was sceered of her waving a few pieces of paper at yar? Poor girl. She must have been taken advantage of afore to be workin’ so hard at protectin’ herself.”

Justin had not wanted to think about it in that light. But he had anyway. He’d thought of that every time another contractor sat down at the Roundup and entertained anyone who would listen with a tale of her call about her cat door. They made fun of what they called her “snooty New England accent.” The sow and cow jokes were flying hard and heavy, with new ones created all the time. They conjectured about her looks and put warts on her nose. They wondered about the exact nature of her relationship with the cat, figuring she was probably casting spells at midnight.

Justin alone knew that with those eyes she didn’t have to wait until midnight to cast a spell—or need the cat either.

Justin told himself he hadn’t joined in because he had better things to do than poke fun at the town librarian. It bothered him that he saw men he had worked with and joked with and eaten breakfast with and drunk beer with in a new light—as if they were small and mean-spirited and didn’t have nearly enough to keep them busy.

He felt he could probably attribute this high road of thinking to Fred, but he knew that wasn’t the whole truth.

The whole truth was he hardly knew the woman and already their acquaintance was forcing him to be a better man. Justin hated them laughing at a woman who was misguided but not mean or vicious. She wasn’t even that strange. She just didn’t know anything about their world and how it worked. Was that a crime?

The whole truth was that Justin wished she wasn’t scared of being vulnerable, and after seeing the lunk-heads having such fun at her expense, he understood perfectly well why she was.

And now, staring at his ceiling, he told himself he was going to do the job because of Fred, but he knew in his heart of hearts that wasn’t the entire truth either.

There was just something about Miss Daisy that was driving him crazy.

In that moment of vulnerability, shaken by sleep as he had been by the husky loveliness of her voice, he admitted what it was.

He wanted to see her again.

Ached for it.

“Trouble,” he said out loud. “Justin West, she means trouble.”

He was the wrong kind of man to deal with a woman like her. He was all rough edges, and she was all polished refinement. He had learned almost everything he knew about life—and he figured that was plenty—from the school of hard knocks. She came from an ivory tower. What she knew about the real world he could probably put into a thimble. And what he knew about her world—of books and culture and all that crap—could fit in the same size container.

“Hey, West,” he told himself sternly. “You’re going to build her a cat door. You’re not proposing marriage.”

Oh, yeah, she’d be that kind of woman. The kind who liked commitment and rings and church bells and everything done just so. He could tell by the way she kept her house and treated her cat. She was just dying to get her hands on something worth caring about.

At least he knew for sure that was not him.

He liked putting his feet on the coffee table and eating supper right from the can. He liked fishing and hunting and a game of pool with the guys. He liked satellite TV because he could watch football and baseball and hockey until the cows came home. And he liked women who wore tank tops and low-slung jeans, who drank too much beer and sang rowdy songs in the parking lot after the bar closed.

But if that was true, how come not one of those women’s eyes had ever haunted him long after he’d said goodbye?

He looked at the clock. He should call Bridget back and tell her he’d changed his mind. He’d checked his schedule, he couldn’t do it.

This was already way more complicated than he liked his life, and he hadn’t even started the job yet.

Of course, if he did tell her the deal was off, then he’d have to explain it to Fred.

And the truth was, he missed Fred. They had talked on a more or less daily basis for a whole lot of years. Fred was what he had left of family. The old guy was solid as a rock, loyal and wise.

And Fred liked Bridget Daisy.

“Okay,” Justin bargained with the ceiling. “I’m doing the job. I’ll do most of it while she’s at work. It will be like my good deed for the year. There won’t be any more thoughts of her eyes or her lips or hands in her hair. Not a single one. I will be a perfect gentleman.”

There was only one problem. He wasn’t quite sure how to be a perfect gentleman.

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